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?

Top Ten Lists

A quick list of my top tens, not in any particular order, just my ten favourites for this year, they are not necessarily things that happened this year. This list is based on how I felt about them this year.
Songs
1. Death of Love (Cradle of Filth – Godspeed on the Devils Thunder)
2. Asator (Amon Amarth – With Oden on our Side)
3. Machtkampf (Arch enemy – Doomsday Machine)
4. Set it Off (Audioslave – Audioslave)
5. Love to You (The Beatles - Revolver)
6. I’ve Just Seen A Face (The Beatles - Help)
7. Lai Lai Hei (Ensiferum – Iron)
8. Selling The Drama (Live – Awake)
9. Symphony of Destruction (Megadeth – Symphony of Destruction)
10. For My Lover (Tracy Chapman – Tracy Chapman)
Albums
1. Doomsday Machine (Arch Enemy)
2. Whatever People Say, That’s What I’m Not (Arctic Monkeys)
3. Help! (The Beatles)
4. Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)
5. Victory Songs (Ensiferum)
6. United Abominations (Megadeth)
7. Dark Passion Play (Nightwish)
8. Master Of Puppets (Metallica)
9. Stadium Arcadium (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
10. Ten (Perl Jam)
Books
1. A Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
2. For Whom The Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemmingway)
3. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
4. Tortilla Flat (John Steinbeck)
5. Scoop (Evelyn Waugh)
6. The Song of Troy (Coleen McCullough)
7. Papillon (Henri Charriere)
8. Our Ancestors (Italo Calvino)
9. The Girl On the Boat (P.G. Wodehouse)
10. Adrian Mole The Cappuccino Years (Sue Townsend)
Brands
1. Puma (My favourite sneakers ever)
2. Budweiser (Guess)
3. Old Monk (Indian dark rum)
4. Hewlett Packard (My Laptop)
5. Bajaj (My Bike)
6. Ratnadeep (The Supermarket that’s opened right in front of my place)
7. Novartis (Guess again)
8. ITC (The Indian Tobacco Company)
9. Google (Who can live without it in one way or another?)
10. Spencers (Some really good, some godawful bread)
Stuff In General
1. Water (I’ve had all sorts of problems with this stuff this year, been through a lot to get some)
2. Broadband internet
3. Newly Laid Road
4. Love
5. Work
6. BitTorrent
7. Wikipedia
8. Food
9. My iPod
10. Electricity

The Dancer and Creation

In the beginning there was sky, no clouds, no wind, no stars and no planets, just an endless stretch of the great blue beyond. Then appeared the dancer, from where, no one knows for sure, maybe she came from the halls of the immortals that lay to the east or maybe she came from the plains of the undead to the west of the sky, no one knows for sure but the important thing is that she appeared. Clad in nothing but a wisp of condensation, her own cloud cover, she proceeded to dance across the sky. A boom from the heavens and thunder and lightning and celestial music sounded across the blue.
A bow to the north, to the south and then the east and the west, then arms raised upwards, her head bowed, hair damp and covering her face, she stood. Stood, slowly raising herself on to her toes, pivoting, she turned, a slow circle. Now with the rising sun behind her, she proceeded, slow, sinuous to the music, a crouch, leap and pirouette. Ripples formed where her toes touched the sky, they spread and merged, peaks and troughs, light glittering over the irregularities in the normally smooth surface of the empty blue.
Dancing faster, now, beads of sweat appeared on her brow, a flick of her head and a quick twist, the beads, travelled down the length of her hair and flew. Where they hit the sky, they created ripples of their own, these suspended drops hung in nothing then began to grow, they grew into vast bodies of salty water and so were born the oceans. Now the sky was divided, the blue on top and a great expanse of ocean reflecting the calm of the skies above.
Still she continued to dance, skipping lightly off the water and the sky, suspended in between, the sun now overhead, illuminated her in a halo of yellow and red and green. A leap backwards, she flew, circumscribing an arc around the ocean, the colours followed forming a trail in her wake and so she was the first rainbow.
Faster than ever now, spinning and writhing, the could that covered her now turned an ominous black and as they clashed and crashed, they began to rain, they started off with a drizzle then proceeded to pour over the surface of the ocean. A storm whipped across the surface of the water, the wind raged and howled, as she danced. Angry now, her brow furrowed as she looked across time into the future into the time of man, when her creation would wage war against itself.
She saw the blood and the tears, she felt the pain and she heard the cries for help, she continued dancing. But she wept, tears streaming across her face, falling through the sky to the surface of her ocean.
She could feel the smoke and soot of the fires clinging to her skin, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, she had to break out of it. Running a hand across her face, across her body, she collected the soot that had accumulated on her into the palm of her hand. Still dancing, she opened her palm and blew. The soot carried through the sky and landed on the surface of the ocean where it sprouted land.
She still felt unclean and impure, the actions of her creations had sunk under her skin, so again, she ran her hand over her skin, this time collecting the soft hair that grew on her skin, she sprinkled this on the land where it gave rise to the trees and herbs and shrub and the creepers that would wind their way through the forests. It was still there, she couldn’t rid herself of it.
Again, she ran her hand over her body, this time, she peeled off her skin and flung that on the land and into the sea where it gave birth to animals and fish that would inhabit them. She continued to dance across the skies, the sun travelled over her head and the earth and the oceans passed under her, she danced, all muscle and bone and life.
It wouldn’t leave her, the agony and the hate still haunted her, so of what was left, she scattered herself over the surface of the earth again. From her bones rose man, from her muscle, he fashioned his environment and of her blood, he nourished himself, of her organs he built his tools and of her brain he taught himself to survive.
And thus was the world created and thus we were born of the remains of the cosmic dancer, our mother and our first meal. She died of our sins and she died so we could be born. She died from acts we did not commit but now are bound to.
And this is my story of creation.

I'm Drunk

I'm drunk, no, I'm smashed, I don't know why I'm typing this into my browser, but I want to post,I have a crazy need to post. I'm hitting keys but not necessarily the ones I want to hit.
I'm depressed so I'm listening to Gwen Stefani but I'm thinking to myself this is all crap.
I'm going to switch to the Beatles now. For someone I love McCartney, anything he's sung, anything he's credited with. My best friend, my bosom buddy G likes Lennon stuff but because he died, I don't think that's a valid excuse. I think Lennon was hyped beyond his coke bottle frames were worth.
I started listening to the Beatles when I was a kid, my mom had a bunh of LP's, the Beatles, The Stones, Janis Joplin, The Seekers, Billy Joel, Joan Baez, Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich. I loved it, grew up to Help, Revolver and A Hard Days Night. Now I'm hooked.

Just remembered Dave Dee et al., got on to youtube and listened to 'Hold tight' a song I so loved when I was a kid, haven't heard it in maybe fifteen years, god that's a long time.

Talking about years,just turned twenty four, god it feels so fuck-all, I'm OLD, OLD so damn old and everyone I know (that's elder than me) telling me these are these best years of my life. The best years? I feel so cheated, no, hell no, not possible.
It can't get worse, me, an impotent Lochnivar, I'm dead so dead so drunk and now it's only eight, so long to go to tomorrow.

I'm going to hit publish post now, before I pass out, buh-by good-night