contests galore(again?!?)...crap!

hey i think i've mentioned it somewhere that our college has an arts fest and there's this whole short story and essay writing competition and stuff. well, guess what! it happened again. i don't think i've felt this restricted while writing since my english papers of old where we didn't have any choices when it came to topics. ok so let me detail out what i wrote, just in case even i forget...

in the short story thingy, the topic was 'the breeze in the morning'. as usual, i let myself run wild on the topic - this happened in my english papers too, in case i haven't mentioned. my main character was a werewolf. its a full moon night and he's out because its cloudy and he doesn't expect the moon to come out and transform him. he's thinkin about how he became a werewolf (gore galore, needless to say, lolz). then the moon comes out and he loses it and kills everyone in the city and everything is just covered in blood and guts when 'the breeze in the morning' blows by and the shreds of fabric that were his clothes rippled about in it. oh, he died while jumping off one roof and onto another - impaled himself on a spike. sigh, such a happy story, na?

essay writing was a wee bit different, with the topic being an argument on smart cities. after a perfectly nonsensical exordium, i wrote a whole bunch of ambiguous stuff which even i couldn't understand properly and ended up using a whole bunch of complicated words, not making any sense at all, and nullifying the topic...

i'm so proud of me! : )

more nonsensical ravings

this past sunday, my cousin got married, and so i had to make a little sojourn to a sleepy little village in palakkad. we started off on friday night and reached there early in the morning. need i say i didn't get much sleep in the bus? o well, i think i just did, anyways. after the trip it was a whirlwind of ceremonies, none of which i can accurately remember save the one where my cousin had to be lifted up - all 80+ kilos of him - by my dad, his uncle. it took four of us to hold him up and keep him in position, and it was only afterwards that we realised that we lifted him a little bit too late.

let me come to the point. the marraige was an arranged one, but i think those two will have the most wonderful time with each other because it somehow seems to fit, and i just can't explain how. i think a lot of it had to do with the fact that my cousin is never here - he's out at sea, and he had been in touch with her for a long time after the marraige was fixed and it actually took place.

i still haven't changed my ideas about arranged marraiges though. its just that a little 'conversation' i had with my mom about marraiges never ended and i kind of guessed it would end with something actually happening to prove one side right, at least that once. i haven't changed my mind because one example to prove the contrary of what a hell of a lot of others have proved isn't worth a penny.

i did learn that my mom is a pretty good debater though. she gave me one very insightful idea...in an arranged marraige, you don't know what to expect from the person you're about to marry and hence you keep your expectations low. in the other case, people can always pretend to be someone else and ultimately some kind of issue breaks out. i think its safe to say the only constant here is me, because mom admitted to being influenced by our culture...

Four things

ah, yes, this is in response to another tag from shilpa...

four jobs i've had:

1. couch potato
2. runner boy
3. event manager, block and tangles, la fest 2k4
4. counsellor

four movies i could watch over & over:

1. the lord of the rings
2. the matrix
3. the godfather
4. bruce almighty

movie i've seen the most number of times is terminator 2 - judgement day. over 20 times lolz.

Four places I’ve lived:

1. coimbatore
2. mumbai
3. trivandrum
4. another place in trivandrum


Four places you've been on vacation:

1. bangalore
2. goa
3. mysore
4. ooty

four websites i visit daily

1. www.gmail.com
2. mail.yahoo.com
3. www.fastmail.fm
4. www.espnstar.com

four things i say quite often:

1. whatever
2. bloody
3. ente aliyo
4. freakin

four random facts about me

1. i am an atheist
2. i am quite cynical about love
3. i don't make friends easily
4. i hate caps

four things i love most

1. family
2. friends
3. books
4. pepsi

four things that scare me most

1. girls
2. the thought that fiction would be banned one day
3. spiders
4. k l chugh

yet another bloody monday

like the title says, yet another bloody monday...even as a kid i used to hate mondays, used to dread them rather, because it inevitably led to going to school. well, i guess everyone knows that feeling. then the bad stuff started - yea, mondays turned out to be actually terrible. most of the bad things that happened to me happened on mondays. then i came to the simple conclusion - 'i hate mondays!'. it was a couple of weeks after i came to that conclusion that i discovered garfield comics, and needless to say, i got hooked...

ok, getting back to the thing i was saying...today was really terrible, starting off from the morning itself ( i woke up really really late, later than usual, and my usual is really late ). then i had to rush around to get ready in time, which i somehow managed to do. sat through college, sat through two hours of physics ( boooooooooooringgggggggggg, the way they teach it here ). my mind started wandering then...and i got dragged into memories of school. most things inevitably lead to that nowadays, and it leaves me quite spent. today it was about physics class and joy sir. i really had fun in those days. even though i was the troublemaker, sir always gave me a bit more freedom than he gave some others, though i still haven't figured out why. i say this because he has caught me at stuff more often than anyone else, and he said nothing half of the time. then it became a ritual that praveen ( my partner, co-conspirator, bro, best frnd ) and i were asked to sit in the front bench. yea, we caused trouble even there : )

one thing led to another and soon i had tears in my eyes. i guess i never knew how school was when i was in it. i mean i always liked it there but still, i never knew what it was going to be like when i did leave. i did think about it and i never thought it was going to be this hard. its not just college, its this dull boring dreary life that's doing this. i don't know, maybe i'm feeling the way i do because i had such a wonderful school. people keep saying its a part of growing up and it can't be helped. they keep saying those days are over and its best to forget them. there are some who actually like college, though i do not see why or how. if this is part of growing up then i don't want to grow up. call me a self-centred bastard if you want, i just couldn't give a fuck right now.

ze day

my, what a day! i think it would be better if i described it in detail. well, stuff happened as usual in the morning. i reached college at around 9.05 and was doing my early morning routine of goin to classes, sayin hi to evy1 i know. while i was at it, i saw someone who was red in the face - and by red i do mean red, not the red as in the red cheeks part or even the red as in a drunk guy's nose, but red as in, well, red, you know, like a ummm...er...apple, yea that was it. damn its amazing how we forget stuff we learned long ago :) okay so i saw this red guy and was wondering 'what the hell?' when another person passed by, green in the face - by green i do not mean the green that appears when ppl are sick or have just barfed but like a green apple. there we go, i'm getting better at this already. by now i was wondering 'what the bloody hell? the world cup isn't until three months from now is it?' when another person who was not red, not green, but a mixture of so many colours i didn't even bother tryin to find them all. this feels incomplete without another daft analogy so - let me see - he looked like someone had ingested each and every colour tablet in a child's water colour set and coughed it up into his face. yea, now we're talkin. ok, so now i was thinking 'what the bloody freakin hell?' when someone comes up to me, says 'happy holi' and proceeds to rub some paint on my face as well. i must say i did not realise this initially because i'm kind of not used to people i don't remotely know coming up to me and touching my cheek. then it struck me 'holi? but in trivandrum? what the *expletive deleted* hell?'

a few minutes later, everyone, even our classrooms and the corridors were covered in a thin layer of paint. well, i did skip the hour of class that happened in between. but that's no fun, right? ok, so then our sir walks in and says 'all right, everyone who's coloured leave the class and don't come back till you're not coloured'. talk about racist behaviour!!! but i did go to the wash and take a mini-bath. appearing presentable, i went to class where he immediately asked me why my shirt was coloured. but he let me in anyhow. two hours of graphics entailed the incident. then, finally, lunch break hit us in the face - me in the head coz i was kinda laying my head down on the desk and sleepin, as usual. i went out to a hotel and had lunch, all without incident. then i came back and it was the same story all over again, starting with a senior who saw me walk into the block after lunch. he looked at me and said 'how come you aren't coloured?'. at the end of it all, i had green hair with blue and red glitter, a pink mark on my forehead, a red moustache and multicoloured everything else, including tee-shirt. i was so damn multicoloured that people were actually borowing colour from my face in order to colour other people. five minutes before classes were scheduled to start i thought of washing my face and makin meself a bit more presentable. i went to the wash but there was no water there. then i went to an open tap where, along with a bunch of multicoloured people, i was washing my face, and everything multicoloured. that's when we were pelted with buckets of coloured water, and it became all the more colourful - chilly as well.

after this fiasco had taken place and i had cleaned myself best as i could wrung my tee-shirt to the least semblance of dryness, i walked into class. one hour of sitting under the fan left me kind of chilly - well, it actually left me shivering. that led to three of us bunking class for the rest of the day. i reached home - one of the 'bunkers', so to speak, dropped me home (really chilly journey, or did you know that already?). grandma was shocked to see me home so early. hm, come to think of it it could be because i was multicoloured. that's it! that explains all the stares i got as i walked home. and i thought something was terribly wrong. phew, that's a relief. at long last, i took a bath. green coloured water flowed out of my right ear and red coloured water out of my right. well, the white tiles in my bathroom aren't exactly white any more. vibgyor would describe them better i think. my soap as well, for that matter.

after all the fuss was over, i thought over the whole thing. i came to the realisation that its going to be like this for the next three years as well - that's how long i have left in college. i also concluded that i'm going to look this day up next year. finally, what do i have to say about it? next year, its gonna be my revenge...let's just leave it at that.

yours colourfully
g-man

bring home the bookworm

ummm, this is in response to a tag i've been given. dunno how this thing's sposed to work, so pardon me if i make a mistake, lolz. k gotta say something first...always been into books. by 'into' i mean hugely tremendously into them. 'avid reader' is the least thing you could say.

my total no of books (ones i actually own) is very few. me luv borrowin stuff from da lib which may/may not be a friend. evything else i got as e-books :)

last book i bought was 'boy's life' by robert r mccammon. absolutely awesome book.

last book i read was 'i moved your cheese' (again)

currently reading 'wizard's first rule' by tracy goodkind (pretty darn good so far)

5 books that mean a lot to me

1. the fountainhead (ayn rand) - need i even say anything?

2. the lord of the rings (jrr tolkien) - hubba hubba hubba

3. the talisman (stephen king and peter straub) - i'm fed up of hearing ppl say stephen king is yet another horror writer. i think this is gonna silence them if they would ever read it that is.

4. to kill a mockingbird (harper lee) - simply extraordinary

5. one hundred years of solitude (gabriel garcia marquez) - like i said, this is gonna change your opinion abt fiction as a whole

other books
the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (douglas adams)
atlas shrugged (ayn rand)
airport (arthur hailey)
the day of the jackal (frederick forsyth)
black house (stephen king and peter straub)
the dark tower series (stephen king)
carrie (stephen king)
in the night room (peter straub)
dragonlance (margaret weis and tracy hickman)
the wheel of time (robert jordan)
bertrand russel!!!
the godfather (mario puzo)
afterwards (jaishree mishra)
the namesake (jhumpa lahiri)
wodehouse!!!
any damn thing by david eddings (except stag hunt)
kane and abel (jeffrey archer)
boy's life (robert r mccammon)
james herriot!!!
actually i got so many of them i don't remember a lot of them and even if i did i wouldn't have enough space to write em all. so i think i'll stop at this.


my fave characters
howard roark (ayn rand, the fountainhead)
samwise gamgee (tolkien, the lord of the rings)
the gunslinger (stephen king, the dark tower)
ford prefect (douglas adams, the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy)
kate blackwell (sidney sheldon, master of the game)
rand al'thor (robert jordan, the wheel of time)

all hype, no substance
who moved my cheese. ew what a perfectly nonsensical yucky book!

howzat?

fragmented thoughts on belief

i think we are born to be disappointed. i mean, everyone has this picture of what they want to be in their minds. nobody ever attains it, do they? i feel this is where the whole picture of god comes in. it is just that – a picture. you do need something to aspire towards and people attribute this, the so-called pinnacle of perfection, with god. but that’s just me. spoken like a true atheist, huh? well that’s what i am. it’s something i have thought it over for a hell of a long time, and this is the conclusion i reached. it is so incredibly easy to look around, see how intricate everything that happens and everything that is is, and say someone created it. i would like to attribute it to man’s infatuation with creating something – playing god, rather. he would rather believe that someone created the universe ex nihilo than that it has been there from the start, because there has to be a cause. you see where i’m going with this, don’t you? the old first cause argument, i.e. who created god? if someone can say god has been there from the start, it would be logical to think that it is the possibility that there is no god and it is in fact the macrocosm that has been there from the beginning that is true, wouldn’t it? it is, after all, the very same logic that is being used here. but people never tend to think that way simply because they are brought up believing in god, and most of them never question this belief, and attribute every good thing that happens to them to, who else, god. hardly anyone ever questions god, and this prompts me to ask ‘how in blazes can anyone call themselves believers when they haven’t questioned the basis of belief?’

i grew up in a family of, well, not religious fanatics, but extremely religious people. this is especially true in the case of my mom. naturally, i was brought up to believe in god. there wasn’t even the question of questioning god’s existence, and i was made to move along with the crowd. i didn’t even think of questioning because it was so reassuring to know that someone was up there watching out for you. you can imagine what that feels like to a kid. but as i grew up, i was disinclined to think the same way. it would be pretty foolish to stop believing because god never showed up once – where the hell did this stupid statement come from? i think it was at the time when we were studying the period of the renaissance. i read that people started questioning things that were previously considered axiomatic, and now discoveries were made. then it struck me how come i, who was naturally inquisitive, did not ever question some of my beliefs. god was one of the last topics i encountered in my quiz session with myself. it took by far the longest time as well. then i read a little book called ‘why i am not a christian’ by bertrand russell. what can i say? i became a fan.

i know someone might rub into my face the fact that nothing would ever exist if minuscule details like the mass of an elementary particle and not so minuscule ones like the gravitational constant were the slightest bit different. i stick to what i say despite that, because who’s to know if there was a whole macrocosm of universes in which the ones where such stuff were different simply fell out of existence? it would be logical to come to the conclusion that we simply do not know, and take the path of agnosticism, but i went one step further and discarded belief as a whole.

despite my beliefs, there is one thing i must say. fate, to me, is something quite different. though i do not believe that one's destiny has already been decided, i do, however, think that the stars influence what we do, in some bizarre way.