Guns, Germs and Steel was a great read, and so is Collapse that I am about to finish. Frikking sensible books. Have a read. I found both of them to be firmly in the category of  ‘world-view enhancing/changing material’. I’m a fan.

gloomy thursday, why are you so?
there’s a coolness to the breeze, gentleness in the sun,
yet something inside me is sucking out the fun.

I can’t help but feel a rush of excitement as I walk in. I immediately get comfortable ..  my body seems to relax and I can no longer feel the weight of my backpack. I start walking slowly, gliding almost, as I cast my eyes around, drinking in the soothing sights and sounds of that quaint little corner of the airport.

I take a whiff of the air and that familiar heady mix overwhelms me .. I could feel myself smiling involuntarily, as if an invisible force were pulling at my cheeks.  My eyes dance around taking in as much as possible as I stand there for a moment or two .. and the world seems suddenly muted and slow.  The people become blurry shapes, outlines, and all the sounds one is accustomed to – the general chatter of people mixed with the whirring and grunting of machines – are barely audible now. blissful.

I feel invigorated. I wander around a little, feeling peaceful .. and time begins to fly.  Now I’m here, curiously flipping through the latest autobiographies and other non-fiction books .. and barely have I managed to glance at a couple of them before I give in to the irresistible lure of the Classics. Several  minutes spent  bewitched by the masters of the art is followed by surreptitiously finishing off the new Asterix in the store itself, before dearly hoping  for a yet-to-be-read Christie. Then there’s science fiction, fiction, fantasy, comics, science, romance, history ..

Every section has its own charm and familiar sights, smells and sounds.  There’s the sizeable group crowded around the Bestseller section, poring over the latest Jeffrey Archer or ‘The Secret’.  There’s the tall, adventurer-foreigner looking at the coffee-table books about India and its wildlife while flashing a smile at anyone who passes by; the regular self-help readers helping themselves at the self-help section ; the young guy looking a little awkward and self-conscious while having a look at the assorted books in ‘Business’; the group of forty-something fashionably dressed women, with gaudy make-up, discussing Arundhati Roy and the paucity of good recent Indian writing while not really trying to keep their voices down and  the young men trying to steal a read/look of the adult reading shelf – while trying their most not to appear to be doing so. There’s the chic/trendy teen crowd splashing the place with color and shrill voices, and the voracious reader in a hurry – who you see entering and leaving within no time with a whole bundle of books.

The hushed sounds coming from all the people, the gentle soft music, the low irregular whirring of the printer making receipts at the cash counter .. combine to provide a serene yet constantly-changing layer in the background as I happily flip through the innumerable books in front of me. The musty smell of paper transports me back to my childhood, reading Enid Blyton wide-eyed in the night with a flashlight under my bedsheets. Some books smell old .. their pages seem to be steeped in time and you can’t help but handle them as if their precious pages might crumble anytime. There are others that smell new and fresh and constantly snatch at your attention. There are books that smell like coffee and some smell like the beach. There are  books I haven’t heard of that are making a sudden entrance into my life .. filled with new ideas and themes. Books I’ve always wanted to read arouse my interest once again, making me resolve to soon set the situation right. Then there’s the books I’ve read and loved .. taking me back to times and places hidden away in memory, teasing me to read them again to see how I have changed.

I grimaced when I saw my watch – it was time for my flight.  After giving a few final backward glances at some sections, I smile at the assistant at the cash counter and leave. As I step out, I feel a chilly wave pass through me – and  I’m back outside to where everything looks grey and uninspiring, where the people look either dour or positively unpleasant. The blanket in my mind that had softened and tempered all the sounds around me was suddenly lifted – and a tumultuous rush of sounds and smells greeted my senses as I made my way through the people to an empty seat. My mind seems to be descending from some elevated plane of bliss to settle down in routine details and considerations of myself and the people around me. The cold-everyday world glares at me, and I stare back dispassionately.

I board the flight and take my seat by the window. I take ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ carefully out from my bag – and I feel a shiver of anticipation as I can’t wait to immerse myself in the next chapter – about the history of writing.

And everything else vanished.

Edit : not just old friends .. true friends.

He could have done anything, gone anywhere.. there was literally nothing beyond him. Others have gone on to lead lives of exquisite adventure, fame, success, riches … he too dreamt of doing the same.

I woke up and he died.

Did I feel bad for him? No. Why not? Well, I didn’t have the time. I had to rush to work, see, else I could have forgotten about that promotion.

And they all die in the end anyway.

And what do you tell the children you give birth to in prison?

That it’s not a prison at all.

its 4 56 in the evening. im in bed, lying down. the fan rotates ever so slowly. it’s much better than having no fan, but much worse  than it can be. just like life. so confusing, like it always has been, this life.

i breathe and think about stuff. not thinking because i want to think, but thinking because i have nothing else to do. before you tell me i can sleep, i just got up. you could take a picture of me now and call it the modern day “thinking man”. just that people wouldnt think too much of it.

all kinds of work i have to do stare at me. notes lying around to study for the test tomorrow, blah blah blah. but i lie down and procrastinate.

its apt that procrastinate is such a long word, putting off the end of the sentence, putting off the the utterance of the next word. it puts it off by too small an amount, you say? how long is it really when i procrastinate for 3 hours in my life?

i muse about something. i muse about nothing. i muse about musing. bad jokes fly in my head. a thinking dog = a-musing dog

yawn, i stretch. i just killed another 15 minutes. just like pain-killers, there should be time-killers. you know – time killers that allow you to skip time without aging. now, that would be awesome.

i can see the next block lying on my bed, through my balcony semi-french windows. it’s like a bloody prison. hall-block-wing-room number-id. fuck, they even take a mugshot of you when you get in. no, dont laugh. its not a physical jail. it’s the prison of the mind that i talk about. think about it.

anyway, through the window. the mirror crack’d from side to side. through the glass darkly. both apt for just now. and it’s a depressing sight. no life in what i see.

i look at my watch, half an hour gone. another inconsequential half an hour, spent by an inconsequential organism in a utterly absurd-fucking universe.

ok, im hungry. will go have lunch.

http://crypticxwords.wordpress.com

It explains in pretty simple language what cryptic crosswords are all about.  Check it out and leave your comments

I don’t know about you – but the first part of that statement is for me, as shocking as the second. Ever since I saw this guy, brown dyed  hair, has for me been the worst sin you can perpetrate on your fellow people. I swear it completely fucks me up when some stupid girl (i like to call em’ dick-chicks, cos they’re actually really dicks, and only dicks call them chicks), who, not satisfied with wearing tight clothes showing off ugly lumps of fat, has to on top, streak her black  hair a nauseating shade of bright brown and twirl it around now and then. I call them stupid because no-one with a three-digit-IQ would look into the mirror and think that is ‘hot’. And those clean-shaven guys, with brown dyed hair topped with gel, who look plain weird, but think it’s macho-cute or something. Oh  god, just imagine me with brown hair. I’m passing out at the graphic imagery.

Anyway, I went to the barber, to have him mow my head into submission, and evict the various species of organisms that have been camping in my beard for a month. What happened is pretty simple really. Guy spoke Telugu and didn’t know anything else, and my knowledge of Telugu is limited to counting up to two and knowing it’s called the Italian of the East. If I ever write a cook-book, I’d pencil this in as my recipe for disaster. I had closed my eyes, and once he was done shaving, I opened my eyes, and horror of horror of horrors, he was standing beside me with a brush recently dipped in brown muck, inches away from my hair. I let out a cry of pure unadulterated fear and quickly checked my hair to see if it had been polluted as yet. Thankfully, it was not. I gesticulated wildly that I did not want a dye. He tried convincing me, saying in very broken Hindi, that I would look real good, that all the girls will go for me, that I would look like a film star. The word film-star made me imagine Robert Pattinson and Abhishek Bacchan at the same time, and spasms of terror passed through my body, followed by waves of relief at having escaped.  I paid him and left, and my heart was still beating fast as I went out. Phew, that’s the closest shave I’ll have at any barber shop.

As an aside,don’t let anyone kid you into believing those guys whose eyes go yellow or who sprout wicked teeth are the most dangerous vampires in that stupid movie, when it’s actually that lip-biting female. ( Urban Dictionary lends us a helping hand. Vamp : short for vampire, this character is a woman who, while not necessarily attractive, has a certain allure (usually this striking, exotic, overtly sexy glamour), and is usually a heartless, man-eating seductress; a woman who uses her sexual attractiveness for the seduction and manipulation of others).

Will post the rapist story soon. Till then, beware of barbers.

Well?

I find that in such times, the most apt and best of solutions is to take it all out on an auto driver. I’m sure you can recall a particularly offensive specimen from your memory. Now, try imagining telling him to get the fuck out of your face. Feel that awesome glow of awesomeness inside of you as you dispatch him summarily. Awesome, right?

Anyway, to cut an unbearable blog post to a merely uninteresting one, I was taking an auto to my place. I am new to Hyderabad, and the only landmarks I knew were Hyderabad University and the town, Lingampally. My house is bang in the middle. The centre. Between these two places. Uh. The guys doesnt seem to know the place at first, but then suddenly seems to remember, says theek hai, we’ll go, asks for 250 rupees. I bristle and say nothing more than 50, and we settle for 80.

Ten metres on, he asks me how far from Lingampally it is. I say 10-15 minutes. He says 10-15 minutes == 10-15 kilometers and looks at me feigning shock! I had misled him! I should pay more! My blood, already warm due to the searing temperature outside, had found a new heat source.

I calmly tell him that 10-15 minutes is not that far off, and I hadn’t said anything different, all I said it was in the middle of those two places, and he had said he knows the place. He tells me to get out of the auto. Just like that. My blood was slowly ascending the temperature curve like in those shitty temperature monitor experiments you do in labs.

I promptly got out, wanting no more to do with this idiot. He gets and says minimum charge is Rs 15! I tell him no way. I was still staying calm here, this guy was nothing new, I just wanted to get an auto and get home.

But then, he puts a hand on my luggage, suggesting he’s not going to let me go without paying him. He calls a chum of his from across the street, who joins him in saying that Rs. 15 is the minimum charge. He flings words at me like liar, cheat etc. The two of them start making aggressive gestures. Menacing movements and all that. Strutting, biting lips, rolling up the sleeves, the whole works.

That was it. It was like, you know, if a blight came and wiped out the entire vegetation of the entire fucking planet, and there was one straw left, this was it. In one sweeping movement, I dropped my bags to the side, undid a few shirt buttons, and squared up to him, asking why the fuck should I pay him anything. He was shocked, dropped the tough guy act immediately and started trying to be the wise guy, arguing why it’s his right to be paid. I used impeccable logic and pulverized him. He muttered some obscenities and left. That’s brains and brawn working in tandem for you. Ha. Ownage.

I left with a warm glow. Adrenaline pumping and feeling like a bad-ass. The frustrations of a semester had been removed in one outpouring of the most primitive nature. Enough to get me up and pumping and write a new blog post after an age.

There, if anybody wants a great tan, you are welcome to come to Hyderabad and bask in the warm glow of my awesomeness. Just make sure you don’t get cheated by any auto-drivers on the way.