Alone in the dusk and the damp and the cold

Can you feel your heart sink, feel it drop below your stomach and out your ass? Thumping violently behind your ribs, trying to break out of it's cage. It feels like a ton of tough sinewy muscle, that pounds at your chest, your lungs compress for lack of space, your breath shortens, your arms tremble and fingers have a life of their own, hitting every key on the keyboard except the one you were aiming for.
Your thoughts rush by your consciousness like speeding cars and you, standing hopelessly in the middle of a highway trying to make sense of it all the moment you see one and the moment it registers is the moment it's gone, whoosh, there goes another back into the darkness from which it emerged. Not enough time for it to register, so you strain your eyes and scan the darkness in front of you hoping that if you are attentive enough, you'll catch the next one before it disappears into oblivion.
And there you are your heart has abandoned you, your eyes are failing you, your head does not know what to make of it and and most of all you are along.
Those memories that you clung so tight to your chest squeezing them to you like your very life depended on having them next to you, they have wriggled and twisted and shot out of your grasp and you are left holding yourself against the damp and the dusk and the cold.
Then in the night you hear the sway of a hip and the brush of warmth and the smell of cloth against skin and the pulse of blood against vein. You look up again and the clouds part and the moon shoots through acned against the jet blackblue of the night sky and the stars twinkle as if just for you and you know it's okay. You know you'll survive the night.
But then what of the memories what of the scent embedded under your skin, you scratch and you tear and it won't leave, it's embedded itself in your glands and pours out with your sweat and tour tears. You toil and are reminded, you cry and can't forget.
You are cursed with the memories that don't want you they lie to you, they flit up you your ears and whisper sweet nothings to you then poke you eyes out when you look their way.
Evil fairies with their black feathery wings and little black stilettos and goth make up. They buzz around your head, they show you visions, they mock you and then wipe your tears, they prick you with needles and brand your flesh. They seduce you and then laugh when you step towards them. Laugh and take flight and laugh some more as you stumble towards them blinded and deafened and dumb.

False Colours

And it switches from a brow tinted, sepia filtered photograph to a multi-hued 3-D hologram, but only if you think happy thoughts and stare at it for half an hour, unless you do that, it's pretty much a frickin' photgraph. It's a still and lifeless reproduction of a living breathing, moving, wanking, horny, wishing-it-was paid just a little more chameleon.
You walk into a joint, there's little thing sitting there, smoking a menthol, you catch her eye and you walk on, you nonchalantly light up, a deep breath and it sets you free, filter the situation across your alveoli as the tar deposits and nicotine diffuses.
Then the haze lifts and clouds part, the city lights up under clear sky, where you're at, it's still overcast but it's like looking out of the tinted windows at work, everything looks cool outside, and you feel cool standing under the vents of the aircon. What fucking wonderful weather you think to yourself, you step out and fry.
Later, once the sun goes down on your life and the street lights flicker on and you tread into gear and you roar through the streets, the lights the sound the madness and all you see around you are the remnants of a decaying past, something that you try to scrub yourself clean of every morning, but it just settles back on you as the day passes, a gray soot that clings to your body, clogs your pores, in your nose so you can't smell, in you ears so you don't hear and on your tongue so you can't taste no more.
It robs you of all sensation,the stimuli that separate being from living. It's all about experience, knowing doesn't really matter, it's about being, feeling and connecting. A photo would never take you there.
I can't smell the hospital ward,the disinfectant, the disease, the beeping instruments, the nurses shuffling around efficiently in their soft shoes, the sympathy, the feeling in the air, I can't get it at all and all I can do is look and then look some more.
Then the bass kicks in and the backing orchestra floods the purple-pink sky with a haunting note, one that promises, there's so much more for you. You want to scream out loud, you want to bleed, too feel the life that you carry around with you throbbing and pulsing and coursing, spill, drip and pool.
It's forty degrees in the sun and I'm lying comatose on the roof, my mouth dries, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, my limbs are leaden, irresistibly weighted down to the roof, the water tank overflows and water trickles my way, I'm transported to a forest, a metal light tower in the trees, reaching into a faded blue photo-shopped sky, desaturated, edge-sharpened. I sit up and a satyr dances on my skull playing his pipes in my ear and there's little I can do to resist his invitation.
It's bittersweet bliss, limb aching, skull numbing agony, you're stretched out on a rack, stretched so your skin pulls, your joints groan and still she turns the screw, oh it hurts her and through the tears and the pain and the screams and the blood she stands over you, looks lovingly down at your tortured form and draws a nail across your taut skin.
You wake up on the floor alone and afraid, your phone lies beside you, singing songs of love, it's loose panels buzzing audibly, Wake up you silly bugger.

Just Because It So

Kartik will be out office starting on 10/3/09 till 12/3/09, I will respond to your E-mails when I return. Somebody please remind me to put up my out-of-office tomorrow and send out that Dear So-and-so, to that special someone.
I'm stressed beyond belief, I could probably do with a bad case of worms now, anything for an excuse to get out of office for a day.
I hate getting the feeling that I'm in over my head. I hate being ask detailed questions about issues that I have no clue about. I like knowing my studies inside out. When someone asks me a question, I should be able to respond with detailed examples, with two lines of code I should be able to pull up detailed reports, take a screenshot and fire off a mail with a "please find my response in red".
Today I had three meetings overlap and the only reason I didn't notice was that I had forgotten to add one to my calendar, it was only when I got the agenda and dial-in-details half an hour before the start that I realised I was going to have to miss it and then I had the painful job of writing to my Trial Stat explaining why I missed her meeting because I forgot all about it.
I'm listening to the new GnR album right now, Chinese Democracy, 20 years in the making and so absolutely mediocre it's painful to listen to.
Even worse, over the last few weeks, all I've done is sit at my desk, eat, smoke and sleep. Now, almost everyone I know has told me I've put on a bit of weight, I mean it's almost reached the point where random strangers stop me and comment on it. Are you crazy people? Do you have no idea what NOT to say to an anorexic? Even worse are the middle aged pot-bellied colleagues patting me on my stomach. Well I'll show them, if I don't eat for a week, I'll be back to my normal half-starved-crazed-glint-in-my-eye look that has served me so well in the past.
To positively top it off, I have these intermittent pains in my stomach and no they're not pangs of hunger, knowing my luck it's probably a 6 foot Ascaris, I tried to poison it with alcohol over the weekend, but having grown up in the broken home that's my stomach, the bastard was probably sexually abused by it's parent when it was still a innocent little egg and subsequently grew up to become a substance abusing, self-loathing little roundworm. Now in his late twenties (in Nematode-years of-course), he has a million or so illegitimate little baby lumbrocoides swarming around him fathered and mothered by him/her, attaching themselves to my intestinal wall, sucking whatever little nutrients I pass their way. My stomach has to be the ghetto of all guts everywhere, I can so imagine it, mugging, rape and armed robbery every-where. Food is hard to come by, but liquor is plentiful, the cops never come around, occasionally a nitroimidazole drops by decimating the populace.
I'm sure there are even a few genetically modified, fluorescent E. coli flagellating themselves around in my GI tract (I never washed my hands after lab). Oh the pain, oh the trauma, oh the beauty.
No I'm not drunk, just severely disturbed.

On How To Make Three Weeks Seem Oh So Long

It's been a while since I posted last and in between, I've shuttled between projects, molecules and everything in between. The only typing I've been doing is on office chat and my code editor, and a few e-mails here and there. On all three, it's easy to get something down, you generally have and agenda and try to get your point across in the least amount of words possible. Here, faced with this blank document, I'm lost.
It's a weekend finally, decided to scrap work and get home before it was time to sleep. Right now I'm envying those lucky bastards that have official office timings in sync with US timings. Our office still officially sticks to the 9 to 5 but when you report to someone in the states and someone in Basel, you have to be prepared to wait late, really late, unless you're prepared to wait till the next day for e-mail replies.
Finally home, got my hands on my laptop after a week, shooed my roomates away, it must be about 30 degrees in my room right now, but I've got a freezing Bud and I don't care.
I bought myself a camera last Sunday, a nice shiny one with tons of dials, buttons and shit to play with, nice and expensive too. But who cares right, as long as you can swipe for it, it's affordable.
The only fuck-up is that I haven't gotten out of office before the sun goes down, so I haven't actually got around to playing with my new toy yet.
So apparently everyone in office thinks I'm a big boozer, today when I picked up my bag at eight, I walked out to a twenty one thumb-to-open-mouth salute. Sure! Well, yeah I do drink but I have cut down the last three weeks or rather weekends after one particular weekend when I got shitfaced and did a number of very stupid things.
Last weekend, I finally headed down to Charminar (see photo), Hyderabad's answer to Delhi's Qutub/Red fort/Chandini chowk/Mehrauli Fort/Humayun's tomb, well you get the picture. I loved the area, crowded and messy, full of shops-and-shit. Hyderabad is the perl-processing capital of the country, and this area is jammed with shops selling perls, so while in Rome, I bought mommy and grannie dearest some perl stuff, but they'll have to wait till the end of the month to lay their hands on it (with all the buying, you'd guess I have no clue there's a recession going on).
Speaking of the recession, well pharama is doing well so far and there's a standard joke that you hear on the floor, it goes something like this "well with people losing their jobs and the recession, people get tense and when they get tense and have to take XXXXXXXX (add peals of laughter to taste) (XXXXXX being one of our hypertension drugs)". Honestly dear reader this never fails to make me cringe. Stress and hypertension are two separate things, oh lord when will these statisticians ever learn.

The Time When My Nose Flowed and I Didn’t Care

Oh it flowed copious amounts of I-don’t-know-what, it started suddenly and I didn’t care, I spewed great big globules of blood and snot on everyone around me but I didn’t care and neither did they. My neck hurt but I went on, I just had to, I had to break through the barrier, the pain would go, the hormones would kick in sooner or later and it would be worth it.
Ten minutes later, a body comes slamming into me, I turn around and push back, then seeing a back turned at me, I hurl my body at the back, in mid-air, another body intersects me and we both fall in a heap on the concrete ground. Pick myself up just in time to take the wall charging at me standing, I duck, dig a heel into the ground and bend my knees, slam, the impact takes me off my feet again. I land on someone, who flings me back into the mass of bodies where I land on another. Grabbing him by the elbow, I direct him at a wall rushing past and we launch ourselves at it. Hitting it at right angles, we throw them off-balance, break their momentum.
Ten minutes later I’m on somebody’s shoulders, my fists in the air, I smile and lean back all the way, a dozen pairs of hands help me off and I float off into the crowd, limbs extended, a part idiotic, part ecstatic grin on my face, till someone brings me down, holding me tight to his chest till I struggle free like a kitten being held against its will and immerse myself into the throng.
Ten minutes later and it’s a sound-check and I take the opportunity to head to the grass where couples sit in dignified silence, the music just a background score to the more important business at hand. I lie down, I’m far enough out of the city to be able to see a few stars. Lying on my back, I blow smoke at the orange moon, blotting out the sky with my soot laden breath.
Ten minutes later and I’m back in the fray, in the midst of a few hundred bodies bouncing off our feet, jumping in time to the double pedalled bass, exhausted, delirious, sharing our breath, space and for a moment our souls. Plugged into a common line, we feel the same emotions, we are driven by the same force, we boo together, we head-bang together, we sweat, drool and collapse together.
Four hours of this and I’m over, I detach myself from the communal needle and my brain kicks into independent-thought-mode once more. I’m exhausted beyond belief, my nostrils are encrusted with who knows what, my clothes are soaked with the sweat of the hundred or so bodies that I’ve collided with, my mascara’s run and I look like a racoon, my jeans have foot-prints on them, my back is bruised and my neck will move about ten degrees in either direction. On the whole an evening well spent.

By Somewhat Popular Demand

Well two people is popular demand enough for me even if as we say in the North "voh meri gaand leh rahen the" or to put it more politely and in English, "they were having a laugh at my expense". So, well for those who didn't believe me, here's the pierced lip. Whaddya wanna see next, the tattooed shin (I'm such a bloody show off!)

Dazed and Confused

(yes the title's stolen from Led Zeppelin)
I’m a creature of habit. One little change in my surroundings is enough to ruin my day. So today, the left rear-view mirror of my bike snapped (a parking accident (yes there is such a thing)), it’s the less used one but nonetheless essential. I can’t ride with a single mirror as it throws off the visual balance of my bike. Today’s a Sunday and tomorrow, republic day, so the earliest I can get a replacement is on Tuesday. Like I said, I’m a creature of habit. This effectively means I can’t ride into the city till I get a replacement. Apart from the minor inconvenience of not being able to spot Audi's and Porsche's as they zoom past me, my bike sans the two mirrors just seems odd, the whole thing seems smaller, more compact, somehow a shadow of its former self. I can wave my hand around in the area formerly occupied by the suspended bits of glass and quite frankly it freaks me out. I feel like I’ve been castrated, like some leather-mask-wearing, chainsaw-wielding horror-movie-freak just popped out of my screen and lobotomized me, like I’ve been gutted with a blunt machete (you get the idea).
I’m disoriented confused and my life is seriously out-of-whack, I spent the day, the whole day, the entire-fucking-day browsing a single site and when I got out on my bike, I thumbed the starter at oncoming traffic (right thumb = starter, left thumb=horn). I can’t remember whether I dropped my bike today in the morning or if it was yesterday. If it was yesterday, then why did I take so long to notice the Picasso-angled rear-view, and if it was today, how on earth did I drop it before I left home?
The only lesson I can learn from this whole affair is that maybe it’s time I laid off the ethanol and stuck to artificially flavoured, artificially coloured, sweetened, tetrapacked 100% natural fruit juice instead. Oh yes.
It gets worse, I rode past an accident today, one of the riders that Terra mentioned in a recent post , rode into a bus and then bounced his skull on the road till his brains (apparently he had some to spare) were plastered to the road, like butter spread on a hot toast (yum –anyone like bheja fry? (no, not the movie(actual bheja fry(bheja=brain)))).
I forgot my debit/card at my supermarket (ratnadeep), luckily I have one of these setups that sends you a message on your cell every-time you spend on it, so I knew it was in responsible hands. I got it back of course, the girls at the checkout counters know me, I don’t have a fridge and am forced to buy my hybrid tomatoes there twice or thrice a week and oh yes, I have a metal stud going through my lip.
(There’s a two hour break between the last paragraph and the next one - I have a heated argument with my room-mate about how bikes transfer power from their engine to the rear wheel, he’s the engineering student , I’m the biologist and the one talking about clutch baskets and pressure plates and gear ratios).
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. An argument about ripping your bike in first gear vs. fourth gear, too detailed and too heated to get into in a post. Good fun and hugs all around once it was over.
I’m not going to apologise about this but my favourite word is “how”. Till now, I’ve studied with people who had been trained with answers from the finest textbooks, from molecular biology to genetics. Their answers were standard and sure to get them full marks in the half yearly’s, now I’m with folks who are convinced that menstruating women can spoil pickle and doing it doggy-style can ensure male progeny and I’ve found the most effective response to any assertion is “how”.
I’ve referred to programming as part of my work and for those who’ve been following my blog for some time (Aunty, Terra, Scissor), you know I have dabbled in a bit of biology, so what puts me into a tax bracket? Clinical trials. I work for ‘big pharma’ (find out who for, by skipping back a few posts). I program those reports that go to the FDA and the EMEA, I do safety reporting, I report everything that the authorities need to know about the safety profiles of our drugs.
Conversation with a close friend about the navy now, he lives ten feet from me, he’s polished off a couple of pegs at my place, but we still talk over Gtalk. His father is in the air-force and my grandfather was an admiral in the navy, we’re comparing ships we’ve been on. He’s been on the Talwar class frigates, I’ve been on a Rajput class destroyer and a Foxtrot class sub. HA!
Naaa naaaa naaa nananaaa nananaaa Hey jude!
I have twelve revenue stamps on my table, intended to use them for rent receipts for my tax returns, turns out, as the someone very close revealed. I’ve paid more taxes this year than I needed to, I’ll get a refund in maybe a year or two. I like the sound of that, I’ve heard horror stories of people who didn’t get paid for two months for tax deductions. I’ve been spared. The government owes me money. HA again!
Tuesday afternoon is never-ending , Wednesday morning papers didn’t come...
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Each day just goes so fast, I turn around its passed.
And she keeps calling me back again.

And as I always say;
proc sql noprint
create table _BS as
select * from roomies
where upcase(logic) in ( 'FALLACY' 'PREPOSTEROUS')
and rationality != 'TRUE'
;
quit;

#You programmers should get this one, simple code, even if the syntax is SAS;
#Wildcards as in Unix, everything else is simple SQL, think ORACLE, think mySLQ;
#I hate people who don't indent code but the editor on firefox/blogger doesn't support indenting or " " the HTML code for spaces, so my code starts at the first column. Sorry about that!

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Tucked away between two IT parks and surrounded by massive boulders, in a recess, just off a newly constructed road, there are four rickety wooden tables. Behind one stand a short, dark, thick lipped lady and her tall, lean husband. On their table, there are half full cigarette packets, loose cigarettes, shiny, colourful packets of chewing tobacco and two thermos flasks full of hot insipid tea. In the morning, they’ll have two buckets with vegetable curry and coconut chutney and a metal tray with pale , crisp, flaky puris. Behind them is a large wok (that’s the closest i can get to describing it in English) on a gingerly balanced metal framed-soot covered stove. Their helper, a short, fat, dark North-Indian with henna dyed hair alternates between their metal cart where he rolls out the puris and the fire where he deep fries them. What I love about the guy is his hair, henna has a wonderful characteristic, where it first blackens then turns white hair a bright orange. His wild unkempt hair is black at the tips, then orange and finally has a good four inches of white. I’m not sure which cart he actually works at because I’ve seen him working at a number of them. He had a tea and cigarette table of his own, once, but that was before the workers blasted the rock and earth away to construct the new road. He had two kids working for him, crowding around the table attending to the customers, I’m guessing they were his sons from his paternal air as he sat back on the rocks, smoked a beedi and cursed them in a hybrid tongue.
The road earlier ran across a kilometre stretch of IT parks before it made a sharp left down to the lake, in front of the building I work, on its way down to the lake. But it was a narrow road unsuited to the large volumes of traffic that pour in and out of the parks, so the municipal corporation decided to widen it, splitting lanes around my building, standing a serene concrete, steel and glass wedge between the opposing lanes. The tables once stood closer, but the construction forced them back on to the rocks, occasional corporation drives left their carts smashed and their gas cylinders confiscated, but they always returned. Now they have burrowed a hole from themselves, a fortress, surrounded by ten feet and twenty tons of rock.
In this hole there are three other tables, the one to the extreme left is (wo)manned by ‘Aunty’, a barefoot goliath in a plastic chair. She sits in a plastic chair, next to her stove where she fries her own puris, rolled out and handed to her by one of the old man’s sons. From her chair, she oversees the son rolling while his father curses him across carts, the skinny girl in jeans with flowers embroidered on them and simultaneously converses with the customers. She’s the celebrity there, everyone from the construction workers to the security guards to the software engineers wants to talk to her, they enquire after her health, they make small talk anything to get a minute of her time. She’s my favourite, I love watching her while I sip my tea and she in return seldom fails to entertain. Her favourites are the old man and the other puri seller. She fights with the woman and arbitrates on behalf of the sons when the old guy shouts at them for spending too much or getting into trouble with the cops. She sits her moulded plastic throne, her bare and swollen feet stretched before her, thick silver anklets digging into flesh. When there’s no frying to be done, she’ll pick up a plate, load it with food and tuck in, chatting happily in between mouthfuls of food.
The food there in that grotty little alcove is cheap, greasy, filthy and tastes fantastic, if you can stomach it that is. There’s a fixed menu of puris and bondas (fried lumps of flour) in the morning and rotis in the afternoon. In the evening though the place comes alive, when the road crowds with people leaving office, waiting to catch their cabs and buses . The crowd around the stalls is a good two hundred strong and they’re all sipping tea and everything is deep fried and hot and salty and did I mention filty?