Distance leads to enchantment

We were having our lunch on one of those mundane routine office days. Actually we here refers to Loudmouth and Recursive Sindhanai. Happily enjoying the lunch, which we felt tasted all the same it did yesterday and the day before yesterday and those innumerable days before all those yesterdays, we drooled (well actually we did) over a new trainee who had joined. In fact she was sitting few tables ahead of us actually 6. Well 6 isn’t that great a distance when you feel so close to that anonymous face. We talked how good she looked, her smile, the dimples and what not. But then sometimes she looked all too flat , igniting no feeling either of want or denial. Slowly we drifted to more intellectual Posh Bullshit. Don’t ask me what it means because then you’ll have to endure what we lived through those six months when we had "company", of a person to whom we were the Hawkiest people alive on the face of earth! Believe me it’s a real pain and you know where.

Having finished our lunch we moved on to have a short walk before we settled in our seats; well actually that’s a euphemism for me smoking after lunch and Recursive eagerly watching how much of it is left to burn, both the cigarette and me. (!) Then. There. We saw that trainee again. Walking a slow paced walk with her friends, talking something we couldn’t hear or understand, though we did want to. She crossed us.

Yuck. Goodness gracious. What a look! What a face! What a smile! What teeth!

True very true. Distance leads to enchantment.

Good from far;

Far from Good.

Dementor. The guard of …

Silently he comes near, without your notice he’ll do so much harm that no creature in your worst nightmares can do to you.

Dementor.

I have seen the dementor, a real life dementor. He is as horrific as those seen in the movie Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaaban. But unlike the dementors in the movie, who suck every last bit of happy memory every good feeling, this dementor of mine sucks every ounce of confidence, every bit of belief you have in yourself that you can achieve what you aim for. The faith that makes you do all that effort you do to reach where you wanted. Imagine you are all geared up to take that first small step of your long journey and then he comes to say that’s not all possible. “You can not do it this way. That way it can be done but then there are lot more problems. Why not do it the easiest way though it’s not all that elegant (?). In fact the idea has some inherent contradictions that make it far from being worth called an idea. You can never make it.”

He wears spectacles and is composed of bones and only bones. In fact its bones only covered with skin. You can actually call him a moving alive hangar on which somebody has hung some clothes. So thin and light that if you sneeze he would be blown off. In fact we tried a lot many times to do that. Still no success. Someday we will.

He calls himself Ash. I don’t know why! Maybe he’s a great fan of Aishwarya Rai that he calls himself with her pet name “Ash”. Or is he motivated by the mythological bird phoenix which rises from its own ashes. Why phoenix? Because when people try to reduce him to ashes by turning a blind eye to him, ignoring him he comes back again and again and again; and with all the more force.

He’s one guy to be dreaded most of times but many a times he’s a good pal for all the jokes he cracks. But alas they too …

Paap(Sins) and Punya/Anti Sins

This weekend I was thinking about Paap and Punya which is Sins and anti-Sins(?). I wondered why people devote so much of their life in praying to God, doing all that penance, starving themselves, indulging in all that self-denial. The thought of me being too loud an example of a soul having gone awry in this physical material world weighed too heavy on me. I started feeling too low of myself, so I began to study. And here is my final conclusion:
King Bhaageerath, the great King in Hindu mythology who prayed to God Bramha to get Goddess or 'Ma' Ganga on earth so that his forefathers could get the final peace, salvation.
So he did tapasya, penance, for half of his life. He denied himself food and water and stood on one leg all the time until God Bramha appeared. So his highness King Bhaageerath asked O Lord! I prayed for you for half of my life why did it take you so long to appear? God replied O my Son! All this time until now you have done tapasya with unwavering dedication. But listen. Your ancestors were great Kings. They did rule and many ruled without any mercy for the common man. Many did atrocities on the people. So they gathered Paap (sins). Till this time all the penance that you and your forefathers had done, all the Punya (brownie points, anti sins(!) ) that you all gathered were spent in counter balancing those sins. The day your Punya got more than sins by one unit of atomic measurement I appeared. King Bhaagerath understood so did I.

Since I do not have any balance sheet of how much punya or paap (sins) have been done before me, could be either way, but I don’t know. So if I now start doing tapasya (penance) then it could very well be the case that I do it for my rest of the life and none of the punya, brownie points that I earn actually help me get salvation. They all go to compensate for whatever paap was done by my forefathers, unless they were all saints (Oh! How hard I wish they would have been). So I grind my ass all my life denying myself all the worldly pleasure (read UFO) (read the second comment), all that masti, all that bindaas life ishtyle (what the fuck that ever means) and get nothing for myself. Gone are the days when Menakas danced around a hermit else even then,without all those punya's in my pocket, it would have been a better scenario, we could have killed as many birds with just one half of a stone!

So Baap bindaas jeene ka. Bhaad main gaya punya aur jahanuum main gaye paap!
Matlab To hell with paap and punya (brownie points).

As MunnaBhai MBBS said Aish kara nu, Majja nu life

Laugh.

So I had been on a long vacation to my home. After 1 year. Had a lot of good experiences. Changed a lot. Witnessed many humorous incidents where I laughed and rolled over the floor like anything.

I. This is about the son, about a year old, of lady who was doing Ph.D under my mother. So a caretaker mostly looked after this little kid, both the parents had to go to the office. Poor Kid. So this caretaker used to say Accha hai (It's good) and this is what the kid learnt and this is what this kid always said. So one fine day the kid’s aunt, father's sister, was eating mangoes while this kid was sleeping. Just as the aunt was about gulp down the first bite the kid woke up and said Accha hai. Poor aunt she was so embarrassed, and I who witnessed the whole episode was head over heels lauffin.

II. I was enjoying the evening tea, looking over the balcony thinking how much my colony had changed. while doing so I realized that there was this Honda Activa oscillating between the ends of the main road of the colony. Putting my specs where they are usually supposed to be I saw a fair, beautiful girl probably in her twelfth grade riding her bike up and down the poles (!). To enjoy this show were a bunch of guys sitting on every place which could accommodate their bum(-py) base of at least six. I too started to enjoy the free show, then suddenly. SCREEEEEcH. There was a twist in the fairytale. The Honda slipped and the princess fell flat on the road. The onlookers lauffed, so did I, and left. The poor princes, I can never understand how can a princess be poor(?), brushed her dress and riding slowly left the road. I didn't see her again for next couple of days.

III. If you have traveled on Indian rail-network you would have certainly found these. You can actually sense them by that peculiar clapping sound. For a second you are compared to every other hero in the Bollywood and you pay a heavy price for it. So this was when I was returning back from home. This guy was sitting in the next coupe. When this troupe approached him Oye Hritik, Salman la de de this guy very irritatingly said I have been giving money since last day and have almost given Rs. 150. The troupe very calmly said Those would have been from U.P, M.P and Maharashtra. We are from Andhra Pradesh.

IV. This guy in flashy clothes, humming some English chart buster and trying his ring tones every now then. The one I'm so modern and different from others kind. I couldn't understand why he behaved so cos I didn't find any good-looking females in the compartment. Anywayz, so this guy for some reason to show brave he his goes to the door of the bogie and sits at the door with his legs on the footboard.See I'm so cool kind. After some time he came back red face holding his leg. A big branch of a tree had hit him on his toes. The show had a big scratch mark on it and his foot had gone pale blue with swelling. Fracture for sure. Good for shoe that it was there to save his foot from any more damage. I had a nice time laughing for all that he did.

V. To endure a 3-day train journey in summers and that too when you are going towards the oven, read north, its pain in You know where. The pain was assuaged by the presence of lot many kids below 1 year of age. Though their crying was sometimes irritating but they were good pastime during the day. Felt like watching the Kid Videos on Discovery Channel.

One more for accusations...

Ok so now it seems that controversies and accusations have a natural liking for me. Male Chauvinist Pig. Interesting. By the way I couldn't understand that why anything despicable is always compared to pig? In fact I would be honored to be compared to a pig. Do you know how much it helps the cities? It cleans all the garbage! Do you know how much it helps the 'farmers' in France or Italy somewhere there, to find that much-valued underground mushroom. For all that help the pig gives to us we are always there to make it a benchmark for lowliness in everything, character, behavior...!

So coming back to MCP (Male Chauvinist Pig).

When I could understand the dynamics of the society we live in and the complex networks of dependencies amongst individuals, how families are structured, what roles different people have to play in it, etc. I would stare at them in amazement. How complex yet so simple. I was trying to understand the role of females in the society, how they affect it. The newspaper and the TV were all too informative. Conclusions: The females are an oppressed lot, denied opportunities, education and almost everything. So I became a supporter of women liberation, equal rights and everything the NGOs find to come to limelight.

But then something happened. Tip of an iceberg so to say??

Job. Equal rights for men and women for job opportunities. A man gets a job and a family of 4 has at least one bread earner; mostly its two, the man of the house and the woman. So far so good.

All earning men do not mind marrying a non-earning woman. So a family always has at least one bread earner, the man. If both man and woman have a job, that increases the purchasing power of the family to live a modestly luxurious life. Right. But see it the other way round.

Will a woman be willing to marry a non-earning man?? Maybe, but I haven't seen it. See the matrimonials, you'll find it there. NRI, Earning 6 digit salary, good company, MNC blah blah blah.

So that job that goes to the woman if had been given to a man would have one more family have a person earning! Right.

Do all these rhetoric about women rights commensurate with the complex nature of our society?

You may say I'm wrong.