Come as you are. Leave as you want to be.

People are defined by the cars they drive. It is part of the American identity. It is have your own car and the car will set you free. It is the extension of the horse in the myth of the exploration of the west and what-not.

But when you try and take public transport to ferry yourself around, there is this whole lifestyle of philosophical components to it. If you are hoping to cultivate things like detachment and understand a Buddhist notion like impermanence I would highly recommend it. You develop a strong sense of self. You get to know who you are fundamentally in the absence of any other external trappings or anything that socially people recognize, or frame our identities like - I was there; I will be there; It is 4 o clock now, I should be there in an hour. When you are publicly transported, you do nothing. You sit at a station. You listen to radio stations. You sit at a stop. You watch the young boy being yanked along by the bored mommy. You sit in a train. You read a book. You hop off. You pat yourself down searching for the ear muffs. You sit in a bench. And I guess I did grow in that regard too. I really became comfortable with myself beyond whatever society might have thought I was or what I was supposed to be doing or where I was from. I was the guy that sat there.

So in an effort to not just sit there and uh.. get around - I decided I am going to buy a car. So you do the usual haunts - reply to messages on social boards, walk in to coffee shops to look at notice boards, walk in to foreclosure sections in banks maybe (?). But yeah, the word was out on the street. This man was on a mission. He wasn't going to be content with life. He refused to just uh.. sit there. He was going to get himself some wheels. A sweet set even.

Then the time comes when you start visiting up on people that you have called in advance to make appointments to see their cars. Its this place where civic order and rules cease to apply. People tend to leave a sense of perspective and style that they believe has rubbed off on the vehicle that they have guarded for many years; sometimes many, many years. My first reaction to seeing trustafarians get out of a 80,000$ vehicle that gets 8 miles to the gallon to sell me a car that is older than me is - I hate you. But I am not going to do anything because I am going to deal with my hatred . . . . positively. By umm... grinding my teeth into nubs. The midlife crisis guys - they were the second worst in line after the sorority-sister-frat-boy types. The ones that are adamant that they need to find a good home for Old Betty and ask you embarrassing questions about your personal goals and financial plans. I hated them. For gods sake, I was going to pay in cash. In full. And I will never see you again. And you do not get visiting rights for the car. The most extreme example of people's sense of entitlement and fundamental laziness is the lack of engagement with the living. All of a sudden it is unfair to expect that the photo that you had on the ad is the picture of the car you are trying to pawn off and not something you found on the internet. For god's sake if this is how your car actually looked I wouldn't have made it 40 miles across town. And then I'd really feel sorry for the lonely looking grad guy who lives in a booth kind of structure that Jesus might have collected parking fees from, who needs to sell his car to pay for tuition or drugs or something. But student cars are really terrible. As a rule, it is like they have been told never to service it as long as they own it.

People would bring a certain assumptions to play in their interactions with dealers that to them seem perfectly rational and may seem rational and reinforced elsewhere in consumer culture. You know, the notion that the customer is always right. The notion that if you have the money, you have the right to get whatever the money can I buy you. These are the kinds of things that are if not taken for granted are pretty often the case. But if you are buying your first car, they are simply not true. There's registration and then titles and deeds. Then there are plates, temporary, special, vanity. And then the license. And don't get me started on insurance. And all of these have these are viciously cyclic too.... You need a combination of a couple or more to get each of these. And for someone like me, who doesn't have any, this can be a trying experience.

It makes you seriously consider the existential implications of your quest. What does this actually mean. Where does this fit in. Which is of course the problem of being unnecessarily over-educated at a fairly uncomplicated service sector job. You plenty of time to think about it.

If it all goes well, tomorrow evening I won't just be sitting. I'd be victorious after my battle with humanity. I'd be driving. Something that would say "I'm just sexy enough for you to notice me (wink wink), but I'm elegantly understated and well-groomed. Without being high maintenance. I'm quality. I'm sporty on the weekends. You can introduce me to your parents."




Saddle. Up. Baby.
.

Grey Wolves, Red Blood, Black Clothes, White Bones

The fever that threatened to ruin me yesterday hit me hard this morning. I am spending my money on comfort food and Halls. But it's raining. It's why I'm shivering, huddled outside the office trying to decide where to go to kill my time. Curious Hedonist is away working at a different office by now and our timetables don't match quite so well now. I have a page of a story that I'd planned to finish yesterday but I doodled characters from One-Piece instead but that's ok. I haven't written much lately. I have quite a few things rolling around my head but no drive to write them. I have been reading instead. Devouring pages of text on my little screen. There are so many books waiting to be read and I don't have enough time or money to get through them all.

My head's been in the clouds lately. I have not been thinking anything through. I think I prefer life that way. I enjoy trundling along and hoping for a surprise. I no longer want to make the first move, don't want to make any decision. I care, don't get me wrong. I always care. It's been a long, long time since I gave up caring and I like to think I've grown up a little. I can deal with things better. I am still floored when people see through me. When they say something, usually offhand, and it niggles away and makes me think far too much. I'm happy to an extent. I know what I'm lacking. I want somebody to curl up sleepy and cosy with and talk about anything and it doesn't matter. I want to fall asleep in somebody's arms and feel safe for once. There's only been a handful of times when I could make that claim.

But whether I want a relationship is debatable. I love being somebody's guy. I love that thrill when you tell somebody you're off to meet your girlfriend. I love the butterflies in my stomach when I walk down the road to meet her and I wonder what the day will be like. But I've been on my own for a while now (which was mostly self-inflicted so I can't complain too much) and sometimes I wonder if I can go through it all again. I need control. Maybe I'm just tired of declaring love. I mean at twenty seven what is love exactly? When you can't stop thinking about her, and she intrudes on all your thoughts and you just have to be near her? When you lie awake at nights and wonder what she's doing and if she's thinking of you and is it too late to call her? Why is that the women who consume me are always the ones I can't have? I try not to dwell on them but they fascinate me more than the girls who insist on interrupting my life.

I feel awful. It's not the alcohol because God knows I didn't drink enough of that even if I was less than steady on my feet. My face aches from the cold that I hope goes away soon. My feet buzz from walking too far around today. I'm rambling again. This is merely an extension of my mind and sometimes I forget this is public and people who know me read it. And when they mention things I've written in conversations I freak. I remember feeling I'd written something profound and insightful but then I always think that until I look at it a week later and laugh at my pretentiousness.

Nevermind. No doubt time will catch up me unawares and deadlines will scream in my ears and I'll be too flustered to give a damn about anything real.

~ You must forgive the title. I hope this makes up for it.

Drops of Jupiter

I have worked out why this blog is prosaic. It is because I do not write things down as they happen, or even any thing close to near when they actually happen. I let time dull my memories and thus the words chronicling them, making it seem less than what they were.

My mind has been wandering a lot recently, partly due to learning some news that puts many things in the harsh light of objectivity. The news itself being the death of a cousin. Calling him a close friend would be stretching, but he was still someone we all liked to look up to.

Mortality always makes me have a good think about morality, it being something I am keenly interested in. Generally after its too late to put into effect.

Climbing up a Bloody Great Hill

So although Bhutan is tucked away into the isolated Himalayas between India and Tibet, it seems out of place to discover an affluent way of life that has only newly begun to be exposed to contemporary mindsets and Western culture.

There are plentiful dzongs (temple fortresses) that should be seen on a Bhutan travel tour, but Taksang (Tiger's Nest) Monastery is undeniably the most famous. The name is enthused after the story of Padmasambhava (from India), the monk who brought Buddhism to Bhutan, who in fact flew to Taksang on the back of a tigress to defeat five demons.

They are this intensely spiritual country, who seem to love their royalty and is domicile to some of the most striking temples. As a country that it dumbfounds you with its splendor and fascinates your imagination with its prehistoric culture and beliefs.

Until the 1960s Bhutan had no roads, no electricity, and no telephones. Goods traded with Tibet went by yak, over high windswept passes. But the Chinese invasion of Tibet put an end to that, as Bhutan closed its northern border. Now trade is solely with India, a few hours' drive to the south.

In little over 40 years, a father- and-son team of kings have, with help from India, lifted the country out of isolationist poverty. Bhutan has adopted many of the benefits of the modern world, such as hydro-electricity, schools and clinics, while hanging onto the culture it treasures most, and without destroying the environment. It was the younger of the two kings, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who coined the phrase "Gross National Happiness". In 2008, in a move that puzzled many of his subjects, he voluntarily abdicated his throne and formed the country's first democratic government. The elections were, according to UN observers, "serene".

Changes that have happened to the country are all so very sublime... The country seems to have come to terms with land cruisers parked within bamboo fences, high tension cables across rolling fields, traditional attires in nightclubs, chopsuey in cream sauce, vintage rock on the radio peppered with the Bhutanese jockeying.

The Bhutanese down 12.5 million litres of alcohol a year and a staggering 54 percent of the country’s total 56 percent youth population below 24 years are the main consumers. It is little wonder that Bhutanese youth make up the main consumers. Visit any bar along the streets of the main Thimphu town, where there’s almost one for every ten metres of sidewalk, and the customers are fresh graduates, school students or dropouts. Save for hardware shops, almost every shop in Thimphu town, be it a grocery or a general store, sells liquor.

And who was I kidding. I wasn't in any shape to trek. Sangyang - Taktshang - Wangchang - Rinpung Dzong. I had to wheeze my way through to the top. My head throbbed because we were at an altitude of more than 13,000ft, higher than I have ever trekked in before. Below us eagles soars, etched against the clouds way below, clouds that seem so solid. It was all unnaturally quiet, the air thick with the muffled silence of the fog rolling in.

We were in yak territory now – around 4,000m. Shiny black beasts with lustrous tails and delicate feet, they roamed the high hills with their young. The cry of a young boy carried across the valley from one settlement to another. Here babies are born and bodies cremated under an open sky, a world away from the fast-developing superpowers to the north and south.

At the highest point were tangled strings of coloured prayer flags, sending prayers to the heavens. As the sun hung low in the sky that afternoon, we rested a while on a ridge with a view as beautiful as I've ever seen: hill interlaced behind hill in soft cinnamon fading to golds; and atop a smaller hill, a dzong. From a distance the dzong appeared as two cube-shaped buildings, one a little lower and to the right, mirroring the lie of the land. A camera could never do it; I felt a need to paint, to capture this exquisite marriage of nature and the subtle touch of man.

Of course there is a flip-side to this rural idyll: On one of the isolated dzongs, we got chatting with a couple of monks. They stayed three hours away from water, fresh food and electricity and yet seemed moderately content with their lives.... On a little more prodding they started on their individual stories.... It is kind of shocking to know that they were pushed in to the clergy when they were 7 years old, made to drop out of school, start on a life of religious rigour all against their wishes... So I am not likening it to prostitution but it still doesn't feel right. Being deprived of basic education has ensured that there is no possible exit from the lives they lead.

Whatever happened to "I am going the right way, following the path of the Buddh. I think about enlightenment. I don't want to be attached to the wheel of life."

Horny ladies

I have no idea, but I wonder if the punchline is actually as funny as I think it is.

"If females must compete, evolution will furnish them with weapons to do so"

Mar 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHEN a species evolves traits that seem to have little to do with individual survival—bright colours, say, or oversize horns, it is typically the male alone who sports these excesses. Observing this, Charles Darwin proposed the idea of “selection in relation to sex” as a follow-up to his theory of natural selection. He defined it as the struggle between members of one sex, “generally male”, to possess the other. The plumage of peacocks attracts peahens. The stag’s antlers are there to fight off other stags. And so on.

But females, it turns out, have some tricks of their own. Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia have published a paper this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society about Onthophagus sagittarius, a species of dung beetle in which not only do both sexes sport horns, but those of the females are larger than those of the males. They set out to discover whether female competition accounted for these impressive armaments, and whether there was a trade-off between horns and fecundity.

There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives around faeces. In the case of O. sagittarius, each female constructs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards the entrance, fighting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other females may break in to their neighbours’ underground, to try to steal dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in conflict with other females, which is why they need horns.

In their laboratory in Perth, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons divided their female beetles into three groups, according to body size. Some of each group were allowed to mate with fertile male beetles. The others mated with beetles rendered sterile by irradiation. This ensured that all female beetles would become pregnant, but those who mated with irradiated males were impregnated by damaged sperm, and would not lay viable eggs. The researchers could thus put three females into a burrow and allow them to compete yet, by ensuring that only one of those females had mated with a fertile male, they could be sure that all the grubs in a burrow were hers.

By comparing all possible combinations of females in this way (mating two of the three sizes with sterile males), and also looking at the success of females who were able to lay their eggs without competition, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons showed that the bigger a female is, the more reproductively successful she is. No surprises there.

The next stage, though, was to do the same experiment, but match females who were the same size except for their horns, in order to see if a bigger horn results in more offspring. The reason to ponder that it might not—and the presumed reason why females of most species do not go in for sexually selected accoutrements—is that such things are costly to grow and maintain. The resources a female spends doing so are therefore unavailable for turning into eggs.

In fact, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons found, horn size was even more important than body size for determining reproductive success. Fending off females who have designs on your dung-ball is evidently more important than laying extra eggs.

If the evolutionary circumstances demand it, then, females can be just as aggressive as males. But they are being aggressive to a different end. This is no struggle to possess the opposite sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?

That is a matter of definition, but it does go to the heart of the difference between the sexes. Males compete because the more females they inseminate, the more genes they will leave behind. Females mainly let the males get on with this, and pick the winners. They increase their genetic contribution not by promiscuity but by nurturing. If that requires violence, so be it. As to whether there are any human parallels, Ms Watson herself would not be drawn. She did, however, observe that “somebody suggested stilettos.”

Shaken and slightly stirred

I do not know why I have dreamt about this so many times over, in spite of knowing in the back of my head that I could never actually do it, because this remarkable value of responsibility instilled in me by my parents pulses through me too prominently.

This pulse bugs me.

I have always wanted to be one of those people. One of those that would drop everything for art and love and beauty. One that would take risks in the name of creation. The one that you would find crouched on the floor over scraps of paper, with hair that was long and messy, or maybe short and messy, surrounded by abstract models and word doodles, with my two best friends on either side talking about our next great idea just as dawn gave way to blazing skies.

I emblazoned this image on to the back of my eyelids, labeling it "desire,". But I still couldn't stop with my normal, responsible adult life. But even this credit-worthy side of me can not make me stop wanting it.

And once I want something, that's usually just it. I just don't forget things I desperately want. I don't even think I can.

Sitting upon a barren webpage, meting out unjust rules

I like public admission of misdeeds. That’s why I write. And tell personal stuff when I do.

I fancied myself as a Bolshevik. Then I went to business school. I became more analytical, less skilled, abandoned the labor theory of value, lost my commitment, and became someone who no longer identified with either political economy. I can’t say that I’m reformed now. But this morning I was reading "Toward a Rational Society" and began to think along those lines again.

During a recent chat the flatmate said to me, “I think what we need is class warfare.” I can’t say I vehemently disagreed. We have been close to this before.

I've seen loiterers and beggars picked up off the streets of Poes Garden for simply wandering in there. The sweepers do a better job in the newer parts of the city than the old. Roads being laid, people being evicted to create space for a mall, restaurants with separate dining areas for the nannies of little children, traffic tickers being waived for cars with fancy number plates. The oligopoly is definitely in control. If it's not, then it's well on it's way becoming the new normal, not necessarily the greatest good for the greatest number.

Now I’m not saying I am done with my list of places to bring my handy box of matches to (I’d have to through my office pretty early on in the revolution). But I have gotten down to writing about it. And, that's a start.

That’s what the economy has done to me. What’s it done to you?

So... They call you the bard.

**** Adapted up from random blogs ****

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. This is what they'd have me do.

"Look at the list and bold those you have read.

Mark in blue those you intend to read.

Mark in RED the books you LOVE.

Reprint this list in your own blog.

Having seen the movie/cartoon/TV series is not the same as having read the book.

This is my list."

** My own categories

Green - books started, never finished.

Amber - book names that I was better off not converting to Bold

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman

4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling

6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne

8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis

10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks

14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger

16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres

20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling

23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling

24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling

25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien

26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

27. Middlemarch, George Eliot

28. Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving

29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck

30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson

32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett

34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

37. Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute

38. Persuasion, Jane Austen

39. Dune, Frank Herbert

40. Emma, Jane Austen

41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery

42. Watership Down, Richard Adams

43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

46. Animal Farm, George Orwell

47. Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian

50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck

53. The Stand, Stephen King

54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

55. Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth

56. The BFG, Roald Dahl

57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome

58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell

59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer

60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman

62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden

63. Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough

65. Mort, Terry Pratchett

66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton

67. The Magus, John Fowles

68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett

70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding

71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind

72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell

73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

74. Matilda, Roald Dahl

75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding

76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt

77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins

78. Ulysses, James Joyce

79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens

80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson

81. The Twits, Roald Dahl

82. Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith

83. Holes, Louis Sachar

84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson

87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons

89. Magician, Raymond E Feist

90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac

91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo

92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel

93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett

94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

95. Katherine, Anya Seton

96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer

97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson

99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot

100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Yeah, I suck big time. But I'm better than the average adult..... That's new.

Jazz is Gay

Overheard at last week's party. I was waiting in line for refilling my drink, clutching neon coloured cups, and discussing setting one up of our friends up with someone else. And the following conversation ensued.

Slightly drunk guy: Why don't we set him up with Jazz?

Pretty-but-smashed Girl: JAZZ IS GAY!

SDG: Oh right

Irate Guy Who Just Heard the Tail End of Conversation: How dare you say that? Everyone can appreciate jazz. Not just gay people and for you to say that jazz is gay is so small minded. What is your problem.

PBSUG: We meant our friend NAMED Jazz is gay.

IGWJHTTEOC: Oh.....

In any case while Jazz is gay, our friend's sexuality remains to be seen though.

Currently Listening to - Black Sabbath - N.I.B. (Hence all the acronyming)

Packing things away, Life should go on - Pt i

Narrator: The man with all the pretty words is Bourbon, known throughout the civilized world for his charm and quick wit. A smile is ready on his lips and lady fortune seems to smile back, along with countless other ladies. In the uncivilized, he is only known for the ladies.

Thankfully we all know that’s not true.

Hopefully by now we also all know that he posts ridiculous things on his blog - because it’s the Internet, and it’s not real. Everything sounds worse on the Internet. Times New Roman has always been a terrible way to communicate.

His blog however seems to have a lot of drafts. His blog is quite a drafty place. Here they are.

September 24, 2008

Here’s what happens when left to my Own Mechanised Devices

The days;

Read all my bookmarked google reader pages

Read all my comics

Watch tv for a bit

Contemplate watching a dvd

Read all my bookmarked google reader pages

Read all my comics

Read the blogs of those comic artists

Surf Wikipedia

Maybe make something to eat

But just maybe (omelette toast sandwich x1, yesterday's roti & subji x1 - if supplies grant it)

Smoke with my mp3 player on

Smoke with my mp3 player off

Do a sniff test

Maybe shower

Go to work

The nights;

Turn the geyser on

Forget that it’s on

Take out my list of things to do

Not be bothered to do anything on the list

Read all my bookmarked google reader pages

Read all my comics

Heat food

Wonder where I spent all my money

Tv surf

Read all my bookmarked google reader pages

Take laptop outside and experiment with music tastes

Smoke the rest (cigarettes 2 and 3 go over the lawn wall)

Try to blog

Maybe

Open notepad and write but get too bored

Watch songs on 9XM. Sometimes just so that I listen to "We are the Beaatle Nuts.... Meaning Paan Supaari"

Contemplate watching one of Roger's dvds

Don’t go to bed until i cant stand to stay awake

Brush teeth

Rinse face

Look in mirror

Read a few pages of a book before becoming bored

Sleep

Dream

Maybe

Sep 11, 2008

Weariness Kills

And cripples and hurts and maims. But mainly it kills. It kills a lot of good people.

It’s worse than alcohol really. Alcohol is not too good, I know, but it’s not as bad as being tired. Atleast being drunk lets you be loud and obnoxious and you do things you wouldn’t usually do, but when you’re tired your mind shuts down. Completely. The biggest regrets I can list in my life are things I’ve said or done when I’m tired.

But let me throw light on this weariness. It isn’t the eyes-burning-sluggish-red weary. It’s a whole different weariness altogether. It’s a weariness that takes hold when you’re about to fall asleep, or when you’ve just fallen asleep, and someone disturbs you. You say and do so many things because you are so bone-tired.

You can’t think. Images blur in lust.

August 30, 2008

Untitled

I have a new bus now. It’s better than the old one, in that it’s ten minutes faster and doesn’t go through those areas that makes me ashamed to be human.

The part I like the most about this new bus route though would be the walk I get when I step off it. My old bus deposited me in the centre of Noida, right beside a little shop that sold my brand and an ATM machine if I was low on change. And a bakery. Man, how I miss the bakeries from the South. That was nice too I guess.

But this new bus deposits me a good five minutes away from my old stop, right next to this quaint little momo shop.

Score.

For a long, long time . . . .

I was enraptured by books. I’d be lost in the lines and find myself in a place that even the writer couldn’t have imagined. Characters half formed creating universes in the sleepy shadows of my mind and sceneries melting into landscapes of watercolours in my eyes.

But then I started reading for sport. I’d read a page as fast as I could and test myself on its content. (Due to this I have the innate ability to see only a mere flash of a road sign and know every which direction it was pointing to, but let me not digress.)

(Back in school, I read the entirety of Lord of the rings (The Hobbit in toe) in under one week and received full marks on a quiz a good friend (Bala). I even picked up the names of sub-characters that were only restricted to a few paragraphs of text and the underlying prejudices and borderline Celtic references.)

But now it’s not quite the same. A lot different actually. I read solely for pleasure. I see a good book or I hear about a good book, and I read it. But I’m so utterly selective in my readings that coming across a truly unique book is a rare occurrence. I’m extremely judgmental about what I read, damning it to the three categories of Worthwhile, Easy, and I-should-finish-them-laters.

Whenever I see a book displayed in the window of a bookstore, I automatically assume that it is generic, available, ordinary, simple… Shit. It’s mainstream and I don’t do mainstream. This may eventually be one of my greatest downfalls as a wannabe-writer/hack/human being, but I don’t do mainstream. Sure, I’ll listen to a popular band, I’ll watch the latest block-buster, but you most definitely will not find a chick-lit or serial crime thriller on my bookshelf. The books I like are obscure, random, maybe even hard to find, possibly no longer in print; anything but mainstream.

And yeah the classic pieces of literature, cult-mainstream, and books studied at schools do not count as mainstream.

The whole idea of mainstream annoys me. Sure, there’s the chance of picking up a book that says things that no other mainstream book has touched on, that says something different compared to the endless lines of racism, sexism, terrorism, love, relationships or historically accurate characters. Maybe there’s a gem somewhere out there in the front row along with all the other colourfully decorated front covers where the name of the author is bigger than the title itself.

And it’s not just because of my self-serving, pompous attitude when I regale you with the stories of an obscure Canadian/African/Russian/Czech author, there’s a wholly deeper level to this altogether. You see, when it comes to reading books, I have a nasty habit of becoming the book. The florid writing and intriguing characters are absorbed into my mind and ebb out through my skin as the story unfolds. This is why when I read a depressing book, I feel depressed. Or when I read an anarchistic book, I want to create anarchy. Some of it passes, true, and I return to normal, but some of it stays with me and lingers in the cavity of my chest where it very well becomes a part of me.

And, as such, I don’t want some middle aged woman polluting what may very well be my soul with musings over boyfriends. I don’t want some little story that works itself out in the end with charming, happy little coincidences. I want tragedy. I want epiphanies. I want intriguing characters that develop in my mind and become me as much as I become them. I want to feel the world from under my covers. I’m too cowardly to have these feelings for myself, so I read books to grasp every nurturing drop of emotion that inflames my senses to a feeling I never knew I could experience.

So please, I beg you, if you recommend a book for God’s sake make it memorable. Otherwise there is a very good chance that I will move myself away from you for your poor taste in life.

(Also, on a completely separate note, when the hell will I write a post that goes on to say what the title does?)

A Lifetime measured in units of Alcohol

The old man walked down the street at night. He felt cold. Part of being old seemed to be feeling cold. There was, after all only one letter separating them. And being old and feeling cold meant being and feeling tired. This would explain to a silent observer why his progress down the Sector 11 Street was painfully slow to behold, though the only other set of eyes that did so were the bright dark ones of an urban cat, staring from the shadows. Pain was another part of age as well. The young felt pain in great flares that could tear them apart. But there were also great intervals between this pain, to the point where they couldn't remember what it was like until it happened again. His pain was a slow dull burning kind, constant to the point where he himself had forgotten what its absence felt like. Still, that’s what happened when you didn’t have successful children to take care of you he guesssed.

After progressing in this painfully slow fashion for some 20 minutes, he finally reached his destination, a late night liquor shop. It was lit up like a fluorescent island in the dull street lamp lit darkness. He pushed the heavy door open, wheezing with effort. The twine attached to it jangled and the man behind the counter looked up from his paper.

The old man walked up to the muslim man behind the counter. In fairness he had no way of knowing whether he was muslim or not. It didn't really matter. Old men seemed to be given a little more leeway than most when it came to political correctness.
He ordered his bottle of not so cheap whiskey in clipped perfect english.

“640” the possible mohammedan replied.

He fumbled in his pocket for the money. His hands seemed to be working better today, and it was with a shameful pride that he took out the right amount and handed it over without dropping any.

“Thank you sir. Goodnight. And a goodnight to you too.”

"Darwaza band karna."

“ummm.. 'night.” I replied.

He hefted the heavy door open and slowly walked home, his progress charted by the tiny glow of a lit cigarette held in his mouth.

With Bated Breath

Anybody with even half an ear to the ground in the musty backwaters of spurned comic novels and little known super heroes, will no doubt be aware of the feverish anticipation which is being generated by every droplet of information which appears in relation to the movie version of Alan Moore and Davie Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel Watchmen. To the uninitiated this excitement may seem odd – comic book adaptations are in abundance these days, from the already well established (Batman, Spiderman, Hulk, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and so forth) to the obscure (Ghost Rider, Hellboy, BPRD).

But Watchmen really is different; an incredibly emotionally and politically complex work, which refuses to paint its world in terms of crude morality, but rather keeps a studied distance from the world it portrays, never shirking from the consequences of its characters’ belief systems, adored, rightly, by those who’ve read it, and regarded in some quarters as one of the peaks of late twentieth century literature. This is a complicated, multi-tiered mystery set in an alternate 1985 America where costumed crime fighters are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” - which charts the American tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former c is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion–a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers–Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but then he realizes that nobody has watched over the Watchmen?



I can't help but be pretty excited and also slightly terrified that they will muck up the genius of the book. Because the book's straight-up apocalyptic darkness is what makes it a work of genius. And a beauty of a novel like V for Vendetta (again from Alan Moore) had to be hollywoodized with a hair-brained romance thrown in, which results in the mindless waif like Natalie Portman turning in to a strong, proud Vivien-Leighish heroine. The entire sequence ends up creating more holes than it deems to accomplish. Then there are the hurdles of intricate plot layering and the fluidity of time and space to conquer. Let's just say that I will be disappointed to the point of rage if it comes out all Fantastic Four-y.

It should be interesting to see where Zack Snyder (of directing 300 fame) translates the testosterone into superhero adrenaline rush for the Watchmen. Until then, we’ll have to pray every night that, coming out of the cinema, we’ll be glancing to each other, and saying, with relieved smiles, ‘Well, it could have been worse’.

Of Marxist equalisers and bingeing

The room was still spinning when I woke up, and I couldn't find that third saridon tablet I'd thought to lay out...you know...just in case. I drank last night. Much more than I needed.... Ok it was worth it, in the end I had a good time with good people. Today would have been perfect if I could have stayed on the couch all day, but now it's time to mentally gear up for going back to work. And the breakfast I just ate really sucked.

Am I an alcoholic you might ask? No, absolutely not. Alcoholics go to meetings. I, my friend, am a drunk. But then who doesn't like to go out after work and blow off some steam over a few cocktails after The Man has spent the last 10 hours of the day winding up. Apparently there are a lot I've come to learn.

However, alcohol is not a Machiavellian end unto itself sans the means, it's just the Utopian end. It's what the proletariat use to stop remembering how deplorable their lives are and what the bourgeoisie use to remind themselves about the greatness of theirs. It's a social conduit that unites people from all walks of life and reminds us that "hey, we're all in this together, let's get bombed and enjoy each other. "

In other news I'm thinking about breaking free from the chains of compulsive eating. My entire life, I've eaten compulsively; I either overeat compulsively, or under eat compulsively. My relationship with food has been built upon a foundation of obsession, compulsion, fear, loathing, and co-dependence. It is not a healthy one. In fact, I'd guess that it fits in somewhere with the types of mangled, hideous relationships that HBO plays thursday nights. I am constantly thinking about what I will eat next. I'm amazed by how much I've accomplished in my life, considering how much of my brain power is dedicated to thinking about food...eating it...not eating...why I can't eat it...why I want to eat it...where was I, again?

Damn, I'm an hour overdue for work.