HS106

I am basking in the Chennai sunshine that filters in through the trees and through the windows into HSB 352. Yawning away even before a dry monotone proceeds towards my ears, I can watch the cosmopolitan crowd passing all around me.

Just in front of me is Sajad a.k.a Sajjubhai, head and hands on the table, indulging in what Garfield refers to as the perfect exercise. A man for all seasons, I smile faintly at the hunched back of the person who taught me to sleep in every position and location.

Ah! Shabba has just entered. The svelte dancer with a ready smile, who used to make suspectible Tam-brahms shut their large mouths- how long ago?

Behind her is the handsome young Jerry, an actor from B'lore, and PP, a thin athlete from the same land, who once strangled a French cook for lack of expertise in Blanquette du veau, Bouillabaisse and the Tarte Tatin.

'In class and all, eh?'
Surely, I know that voix.
Assurement! It is 'Sid', the wicked writer with a semblance of reason, who can rip apart anything and everything as long as it exists somewhere or the other.

We greet each other.
'Tiens, mon vieux'
'Et vous?'
'Pas mal'

At a corner table, languishes Chenji, his mane brushed back neatly up to the neck. He has a newspaper in his hands, held the wrong way and his jeans are patched with brown material resembling his own skin. No, it is his skin. He is a wild young man, this tiger, and drops eggs on passerbys from the department terrace.

'Aniyaa'
Startled, I look up.
A long grin from a crooked head greets me.
Its ABO, the die-hard philosopher-cum-commie, who makes ardent speeches at every opportunity. Popular opinion, however flawed, holds they are bullshit. They say he once orated from the top of a chair with just three words- 'Freud', 'Marx' and 'Why?'.

Ah, now for a real beauty- Baas, who sashays into the room with a mild doped expression and a smile that betrays nothing. Seems like green is her new favourite.

Couples, despos and poets walk in. A particular individual of the latter species always captures my attention for the wrong reasons. She was brought up by a loving family, but ran away to a publishing house when she was sixteen (the modern equivalent of running away to the sea) and managed to get a collection of poems published. It failed, and she did no more work.

Behind me I am amazed to find Booby. General rumour iss that he is engaged to his lappie and will soon be getting married. Well, I guess an occasional seperation is good for all couples. They say he is breaking into the college swimming team next year. All I can do is wish him luck and destroy his fiance.

The prof walks in. My eye-lids droop and consciousness makes for the exit from my brain.

Ah, HS 106!

Till the clock strikes an hour later: lots to sleep before I go, lots to sleep before I go.

I am bored. Fuck you.

I know this is my second post this week, a seriously rare thing, but that just shows you how jobless I currently am. Plus the last one was absolute crap.

Its Friday night. Should have been party time and checking out every girl in sight. But here I am stuck in my department, pretending to work on a shitty presentation that was due three days ago. All I have to do, or rather, can do, is stare at my computer screen. People around me tap away at their keyboards, presumably at work.

Right now I am shouting "Die motherfucker, die", with a gun down the throat of an entity called time.

So what do I do?

FB games? Strictly no-no.
Chat with somebody? Might do it, but not feeling like it.
Study? Yes, right. :P

As I stare with an empty gaze at my screen, thoughts of a past few minutes rush back to fill the vacuum in my mind. Yea, I had been reading random jokes from different parts of the internet. Like, Sarah Palin thinks that the Berlin Wall separated Kanye West and Kanye East. Or like, Bendtner scored the first hat-trick of his career. Ok, that really happened.

People around me leave, back to fruitful activities. New people arrive, to their work turn they. I am so bored, boredom should redefine itself for me. I shall not wish such a Friday night even upon my enemies.

Come to think of it, I do have work. My presentation, which got postponed twice, still lacks perfection. Why don't I do it? Its Friday night and I have two more 24 hour periods to do it in. I have a other presentations and papers coming up. Why don't I do it. Face the truth I have faced before- I am abso-fucking-lutely lazy.

There is IPL on YouTube. Goddamitt! I can't get the goddamn thing to work. I impatiently wait for the Arsenal game tomorrow.

More than ever, I crave for bimbos and booze. Right now, right here, I crave like a fish craves for water. The past eighteen brain, rusty for lack of much use, has forgotten its old ways. It no longer produces sparks of good natured creativity. It releases the rust within, to cover me from head to toe in a light brown haze of drowsiness.

Twitter updates, blogger updates, e-mail updates et al. remind me of life outside myself. I love them and hate them for the very same thing.

Yawning every thirty seconds, still waiting for a genie to pop out of the screen sits I. Not an interesting thing to do, not a fresh female face to look at (dammitt!!!), only a huge black steamy cloud of restlessness.

May God (if there is one) save my soul.

Psychology of a Dictator.

Disclaimer: This is outright shitty, boring and disgraceful. Proceed at your own risk.

This is a piece I wrote for a creative writing event for my hostel. Its rather shitty, but take a look.

There we were in a dimly lit room, straight out of a dark comedy meets drama style setting from Hollywood. Opposite me, sitting on a worn out sofa is a man past four score and seven years. His presence would not command the respect of a gully dog, but his reputation precedes him. As the aging lion who still roars proceeds to exercise his vocal chords, yours truly, the scribe for the occasion begins to scratch his notepad with a stub of a pencil.

“My name is K and I am a dictator. I don’t have a sad excuse for a moustache on my face. I don’t command a huge army in any part of the world and I don’t have dollars cheated out of subjects stashed in myriad banks. I don’t mind the newspapers spewing damaging stuff about me from time to time.

My name is K and I am, still, a dictator…..

Those were the days when you could rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove and get away with it, even when the glove was absent. Not that it was much to get away with in the first place. But the feeling of not having to answer to anyone in the neighbourhood was surely an exhilarating feeling.

I mean look at the guys (and gals) today. One guy can’t get his garden cultivated according to his likes and dislikes because his head gardener wanted roses of a different colour. The way I see it, if your head gardener does not like your choice of colours, you take a battle axe and divide him into four head gardeners and no questions asked.

I’ll tell you one thing and put it down in your diary if you have one. You know how I began? As a youth of twenty, I started running Riot in The City. That was a good 60 odd years ago. In case you don’t know, Riot was a night club, frequented by the who’s who of the political class of the age. There I learned that winny-wannies who called themselves leaders were just a bunch of pushovers. And push them over I did. It was there that I learned to accept Chaos as better than Order and I grew to love the proposition, especially when I propogated the chaos.

You know what is wrong with the world today? I’ll tell you man. Its just that people have fallen into a rut, of endless mechanical life where they accept the Order as a part of the scheme of things, aiming for a static perfection that is never to be. As Barney said, ‘What’s the first syllable in routine?

My name is K and I am a dictator.

You know why I am still the main guy here? Not because the people love me. Its because nobody cares. The way I see it, you leave the people alone, and they leave you alone. I mind my own business and don’t keep up a face. The people mind their own business and have probably forgotten that I exist. I still get all I want, I live like the king I am. And nobody gives a shit.

My name is K and I am a dictator.

Of course, there is a reason why I am a dictator. Apart from being the occasional creator of chaos in chief, I have my own secret recipe to keep the power all to myself. I host lavish dinners from time to time and I waste no opportunity to show them who the boss is. While dining with the others, I allow the conversation to linger on general topics, but after a couple of hours I inevitably begin one of my many monologues. These speeches are flawless from start to finish because I rehearse them any time I get a moment. My favorite topics include: ‘When I was a soldier’, ‘When I was in The City’, ‘When I was in prison’ and "When I was the leader in the early days of the party’. You can’t say that I am not putting in an effort. Its no child’s play, being a dictator. It comes with practice.

I don’t generally try to construct any sort of image in front of my subjects, but from time to time I let a few of my staff see me in certain modes, who then rapidly spread the word. And let me tell you, they are not clichés, they are classics. A cliché is a cliché for a reason. I pace frequently inside rooms, always to the same tune that I whistle to myself and always diagonally across the room, from corner to corner. My handwriting is impeccable. When the famous psychologist Carl Jung saw my handwriting, he remarked: ‘Behind this handwriting I recognize the typical characteristics of a man with essentially feminine instinct’.

My name is K and I am a dictator.

It is little wonder that I am still a dictator. I am a dedicated student of the art and I strive for excellence. I got to secretly try and suppress a few hot-blooded youth from The City. A good dictator never allows for a repeat of history. That shall be all.”