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.”

How to write a Short Story.

Hi there! Recent happenings have been, as usual, giving me food for thought. With all these food for thought, you must think i have a burgeoning brain, but truth is, most of it is lays and Kurkure. Anyway, back to topic. Saarang 2010, the cultural extravaganza at my college, IIT Madras, had a short story writing competition. I toyed with the idea of turning up for it, but I let I dare not wait upon I dare as, Shakespeare tells me, cats do in adages and finally spent time "sight seeing". This whole exercise made me think how I would write a short story and led me into the researching the typical and characteristic Basil James short stories. Here are my findings.

1.Teenage boy in minority group who does not know what is going on around him, but takes on the world with a shrug. An example:

"Imtiaz strutted about the street, absent mindedly kicking an empty can of coke. In his T-shirt, three fourths, sneakers and baseball cap he looked the quintessential teenager in those parts. But of late he had realised that he was subtly yet irrationally different from the rest of the people of his age around him. The TVs and newspapers did not have good news to tell him. Events in far off lands startled him, but he did not know what he feared..."

I guess every one knows how that story pans out.

2. I'm stoned beyond description. After a blurry sequence of events, at one in the morning, I find myself in a room with some random thing in an LBD. This type of short story describes the hallucinations of yours truly while under weed coupled with sexual activity in colour purple.

"I put my hands up the fringe of her dress, onto her buttocks. Her hot breath descended on my chest. The lobsters were redder than ever and were making red faces at the white clouds. My helicopter zoomed into their line of vision and it was my turn to make faces. She shed her outer coverings and curved down like a supine snake. A gang of gangsters plants dynamite in a bank's locker to blast the lock. Come on bitch, I'm about to explode.."

I have no idea how that is gonna end. Whew!

3. The single father and three kids living in a suburban house story.

"Its Saturday. The smell and fumes of my still un-perfect art of making breakfast eased into the living room. My elder son, Arun, was reclining on a chair, gazing into the computer screen probably on facebook. I wandered into the room and was met by the raised eyebrows of Arun. 'You are still on the computer? Go do your chemistry homework', I said. 'I don't wanna do it, Dad. Chemistry is stupid'. What could I say, I agreed with him. 'Then go clean your room'. 'I have given Binny 20 bucks to do it'. 'Binny!!! He is only three'. 'So what? He knows how much 20 bucks is worth'.

4. If you think it is bad enough, wait until you see the fourth type of short story. This 'genre' is directly related to the profound 21st century prose poetry of Ron Silliman, Anne Carson and Sheila Murphy. Though the creative impetus behind this is usually expressed as novels, short stories of this type do appear. I shall not give an example of one because I am in a happy mood, a frail one, easily dispelled by contemplating the short story I refuse to contemplate.

5. And finally....
This short story is an amalgamation of various styles of various people I have read- from my friends to acclaimed authors. This type of short story has a bad habit of never getting completed as the author often runs out of ideas or is hit by a particularly heavy writer's block. But some stories of this type have managed to be born, albeit half-baked. It usually goes like this....

" S is fast asleep on his fluffy bed ignorant of the chatter of crows, cuckoos, mynahs, swallows and others of the ilk outside. The Asystasia, Grey Mangrove, Philippine Violet, Barleria, Mayurpankh etc smiled brightly in the morning sun. A ray of sunshine rushed into the room and played about on the well cut face of our protagonist, S."

The story goes on like that for another ten pages and even I don't want to read it.

There are many other varieties of writings which arise from my chicken brain, but those are the types which you shall find on this blog and so I shall not go into the details. I see 'junta' charging upon me like the Assyrian, who came like a wolf upon the fold. I had better rush. Cya. Happy Valentines...

The Nostalgia Battle

Well, well...I don't know if its only me, but I notice war cries, broken chariots and the lot around the place today, all indicative of some sort of skirmish around these parts. So, I decided to look deeper in and found an intricate and intriguing battle being fought out.

The turf was the crown prince of social networking-Facebook. The gladiators, two of my friends, "Sami" and "Gandhi". The topic of nostalgia is quite naturally our old school, Loyola. While it certainly is one of the best things an ex-Loyolite can be nostalgic about, the out of the blue nature of the posts coming up on my home page is what makes me curious. As another of my friends insists on, events in chronological order goes like this.

One score and seven days of the first month of the new decade, "Sami" makes a random post about how he would love to sit in our former math teacher's class, back in school. Ok...random post..understandable. Boy, I never thought it would set off this chain reaction!!!

Some info on "Gandhi", just so that you have a sort of heads up. He was a prominent figure in school and has been told quite a few number of times that his topics of conversation to random people is often excessively limited to the school. Having been a well known personality might excuse some of his over blown-at-times feelings, but sometimes he crosses that fine line.


Back to "Sami". His post receives a few likes, one of whom is "Gandhi". "Sami" made his post at some unholy hour which is kind of typical of him, but Gandhi probably sees it amidst his daily chore of reading about certain deceased Chief Ministers. Anyway, after a morning class, "Gandhi" posts about a funny incident that happened in the same teacher's class in a senior batch. Maybe it was the trend catching on, but he got seventeen comments and a couple of likes. The comments represented a variety of Loyolites from seniors who passed out long ago to his batch mates. The comments ranges from the appreciative to the disdainful, but "Gandhi" certainly got noticed.

Sami had evidently recognised that the best way to continue keeping his account active and visited was to dish out similar stuff, so he comes up with another post. This is like a general rumination on how great and wonderful life in school was etc etc. with lots of sentimental stuff and good memories thrown in for spice. His post is commented on by six of our batch mates, all adding to the already long post.


I know "Gandhi" to be a persevering and determined chap and his skill at writing has been recognised at various levels. He knows, like all authors, how to tug at the heart strings. He comes up with a rather lame joke cracked by a teacher which was funny for its lameness. The junta chose to give "Gandhi" the brusheroo this time and restricted themselves to just a couple of likes. "Gandhi" did not reach the heights he has reached by giving up at the first instance. He rallied around with another incident involving the same teacher, a lengthy one to tell the junta that he has no intention of being fazed by a few people's attitudes. His endeavors are rewarded and his post garners thirteen likes and four comments. "Sami" had by this time realised the futility of competing with "Gandhi" or the lame nature of the proceedings, or both. He gave up, leaving "Gandhi" the clear victor of the battle.

Thus ends the glorious history of The Nostalgia Battle.

First Sem...:)

It is not very difficult to write about my first semester at IIT Madras. In fact, I can do it in one word- AWESOME!!!

The first sem gave a lot of memories to store in that deep vault in my mind, finding a commendable space among many sweet memories in 18 years. The first of those started a day before the sem officially began, when I started playing football in the hostel quadrangle. In an attempt to demonstrate my goal-keeping skills to my seniors, I banged my head on the goal post, ridding myself of a significant portion of skin on my forehead. To make matters even more interesting, i did not realise I had sustained an "injury" until some fifteen minutes later, when I accidently happened to brush my brow. I was quite startled to find a deep red coloured hand returning back from the forehead trip. In the end, I had to have a stitch, and my misadventure proclaimed to my classmates. On the bright side, a significant number of people got to know that I am pretty enthu about football.

The sem progressed into the second month. Freshie schroeter passed, and I got to represent the hostel in the football team. Unfortunately, our team, though talented, could make it only to the quarter finals. One of the incidents in my life which time shall find hard to efface happened during the freshie schroeter. A match against Godav did not produce much of a cheering squad from my hostel Tapti. The result was that all the people around the ground were godav supporters, and not too many voices to shout "Go Tapti". We were playing rather well on that day, which meant that the ball was in the other half for most of the time, and I was rather lonely at the goal post. Sensing this, a huge army of Godav supporters decided to rid me of my boredoom, though not in the way I would have desired. They gathered around my goal post and started shouting against Tapti and me in particular. I had to endure some twenty minutes of fifty people hurling abuses at me, right in my ear. They started in Hindi and English, until a couple of guys from my hostel tricked them into believing that I was from Andhra Pradesh. Then they started in Telugu, until a few people finally discovered I was Mallu (I have no idea how). They were massively overridden by the gult crowd though, so I ended up adding a few words to my now-stagnated Telugu vocabulary.

Shaastra, the tech festival of IIT Madras descended pleasantly upon the insti. It showcased a variety of innovative tech in a variety of fields. It facilitated a good number of lectures for the science and technology buffs by leading figures from the industry as well as the field of research. I was a hospitality volunteer and gained a lot of work experiences during the five days of Shaastra '09. Hospitality was mainly concermned with providing accommodation and help during the events to the participants. I still recall carrying dusty mattresses four and five floors to make rooms habitable for participants from across the country.


The sem progressed into a deluge of quizzes, assignments and presentations. I have never considered academics to be any sort of a stronghold for myself and won't be in the near future. The trend was aptly reflected in all my papers as I crawled past with below average marks. Others whizzed past me with varying degrees of super grades, while I was left with an usual sense of-no, not disappointment-ordinariness, because that is what happens in my everyday life.

In retrospect, all I did for a majority of the first semester was play football, read a few novels and sleep.


I briefly and frequently toyed with the idea of checking out the much touted great leveler called alcohol but I never got to tasting a drop of it for I don't know why. Time flew by, carrying me along, till we came to the end of November and the end semester exams loomed up like a bleak grey mountain. Serious and desperate last minute studying ensued, with nights and days merging into each other in a sleep deprived haze. I wrote exams the way I have done all my life-hoping for the best, though not quite prepared for the worst. In the end I managed three of Bs, a C and a D, resulting in a GPA of 7.47, what I like to call the Boeing GPA.

Back home for the winter hols, and looking forward to seeing insti again. :)

Yet Another Disappointment

Yet another disappointment for this young gooner, who saw yet another gunners side flatter to decieve in a clash with one of the "Big Four". Having lost to United and the newly empowered City, Arsenal needed to hold its own against the mighty Chelsea. But what happened at the Emirates stadium on that Sunday evening was one of the worst performances from Arsenal in a few seasons. Arsenal was clearly overwhelmed by the significance of the match as well as the quality (and quantity) in the blue jerseys. It was quite simply a case of men against boys, a fact that Arsene Wenger denied. Arsenal lost spectacularly 3-0 to the current table toppers, to remain in third. The defeat, coming after a 1-0 lss to unfancied Sunderland, clearly shows that Arsenal is not quite up there with Chelsea and United.

The November Curse struck Arsenal yet again two weeks before the match, depriving the gunners of the serivces of ace striker Robin van Persie. The absence of the Dutchman was clearly felt against the Black Cats and was sure to be felt against the Blues. The man replacing van Persie, Eduardo, carried a lot of expectation on his shoulders and......turned out to be the worst player on the pitch. Eduardo, was fed admirably upfront in the first half, getting the ball just outside the box. Eduardo conveyed to everyone his lack of ideas on the day, shuffling arond,waiting for God knows who fiddling around, till Terry or Carvalho was kind enough to relieve him of the ball. Eduardo seriously needed to move the ball around and get himself moving around the pitch. Once the game progressed and Chelsea started to dominate, Eduardo became just an exhibit at one end of the park.



It was not like one department in the Arsenal team failed to function properly. Clearly Chelsea were the better side and they trampled the Gunners out of existence. Nobody was particularly at fault for any of the Chelsea goals. Les Blues emerged triumphant out of a no-contest to go eight points clear of the gunners.

The usually creative Fabregas was effectively subdued while Arshavin was given no ball or space to make an impact.In fact Arshavin got so frustrated that he resorted to blocking Cech from taking a goal kick late in the match. Bacary Sagna could not pepper the box with crosses as he usually does, and when he did manage to put a few through, there were no forwards to meet them. Nasri had an off-day, and kept losing the ball, as did Fabregas with astonishingly loose passes.

Arsenal were clearly put down and jumped upon with hob nailed boots by a superior Chelsea. The result was as much of a tactical victory for Carlo Ancelotti as the excellent display of football by Chelsea.

Arsenal went on to lose 3-0 to City in the League Cup as well, making it three defeats in a row. When will the Gunners start firing on all cylinders again?