Homage to Nice Guys

Couldn't resist posting this.. 

This rant was written for the Wharton Undergraduate Journal.



This is a tribute to the nice guys. The nice guys that finish last, that never become more than friends, that endure hours of whining and bitching about what assholes guys are, while disproving the very point. This is dedicated to those guys who always provide a shoulder to lean on but restrain themselves to tentative hugs, those guys who hold open doors and give reassuring pats on the back and sit patiently outside the changing room at department stores. This is in honor of the guys that obligingly reiterate how cute/beautiful/smart/funny/sexy their female friends are at the appropriate moment, because they know most girls need that litany of support. This is in honor of the guys with open minds, with laid-back attitudes, with honest concern. This is in honor of the guys who respect a girl’s every facet, from her privacy to her theology to her clothing style.



This is for the guys who escort their drunk, bewildered female friends back from parties and never take advantage once they’re at her door, for the guys who accompany girls to bars as buffers against the rest of the creepy male population, for the guys who know a girl is fishing for compliments but give them out anyway, for the guys who always play by the rules in a game where the rules favor cheaters, for the guys who are accredited as boyfriend material but somehow don’t end up being boyfriends, for all the nice guys who are overlooked, underestimated, and unappreciated, for all the nice guys who are manipulated, misled, and unjustly abandoned, this is for you.This is for that time she left 40 urgent messages on your cell phone, and when you called her back, she spent three hours painstakingly dissecting two sentences her boyfriend said to her over dinner. And even though you thought her boyfriend was a chump and a jerk, you assured her that it was all ok and she shouldn’t worry about it.



This is for that time she interrupted the best killing spree you’d ever orchestrated in GTA3 to rant about a rumor that romantically linked her and the guy she thinks is the most repulsive person in the world. And even though you thought it was immature and you had nothing against the guy, you paused the game for two hours and helped her concoct a counter-rumor to spread around the floor. This is also for that time she didn’t have a date, so after numerous vows that there was nothing “serious” between the two of you, she dragged you to a party where you knew nobody, the beer was awful, and she flirted shamelessly with you, justifying each fit of reckless teasing by announcing to everyone: “oh, but we’re just friends!” And even though you were invited purely as a symbolic warm body for her ego, you went anyways. Because you’re nice like that.The nice guys don’t often get credit where credit is due. And perhaps more disturbing, the nice guys don’t seem to get laid as often as they should. And I wish I could logically explain this trend, but I can’t. From what I have observed on campus and what I have learned from talking to friends at other schools and in the workplace, the only conclusion I can form is that many girls are just illogical, manipulative bitches. Many of them claim they just want to date a nice guy, but when presented with such a specimen, they say irrational, confusing things such as “oh, he’s too nice to date” or “he would be a good boyfriend but he’s not for me” or “he already puts up with so much from me, I couldn’t possibly ask him out!” or the most frustrating of all: “no, it would ruin our friendship.” Yet, they continue to lament the lack of datable men in the world, and they expect their too-nice-to-date male friends to sympathize and apologize for the men that are jerks.



Sorry, guys, girls like that are beyond my ability to fathom. I can’t figure out why the connection breaks down between what they say (I want a nice guy!) and what they do (I’m going to sleep with this complete ass now!). But one thing I can do is say that the nice-guy-finishes-last phenomenon doesn’t last forever. There are definitely many girls who grow out of that train of thought and realize they should be dating the nice guys, not taking them for granted. The tricky part is finding those girls, and even trickier, finding the ones that are single.So, until those girls are found, I propose a toast to all the nice guys. You know who you are, and I know you’re sick of hearing yourself described as ubiquitously nice. But the truth of the matter is, the world needs your patience in the department store, your holding open of doors, your party escorting services, and your propensity to be a sucker for a pretty smile. For all the crazy, insane, absurd things you tolerate, for all the situations where you are the faceless, nameless hero, my accolades, my acknowledgement, and my gratitude go out to you. You do have credibility in this society, and your well deserved vindication is coming...

On Pornography in General

[This topic has been written in a moment of epiphany by the author as he struggles with porn-starved existence for the past fortnight. It’s always the ubiquitous stuff; we miss and need the most.]

A man is the sum of his experiences. A woman must also be, but I am deliberately being sexist as the topic might be slightly misogynist. Well there is one experience which I am curious of the role it has to play in the building up of character and psyche of every man. It has a ubiquitous presence in most of our lives but I wish to delve a bit deeper and strip some of the outer layers which have been socially and morally conditioned and get into the visceral raw selves. I am talking about pornography.

As puberty strikes in and suddenly your eyes are not the same anymore, one begins to be a bit more enterprising and inquisitive about our physical and mental needs. I wish I could accurately pin-point the day when I was acutely aware that girls had developed breasts and then go back in time and experience the joy that nubile discovery. I think that was the most decisive moment of our life-The discovery of one’s sexuality. Now you can be all sacrosanct and high-brow now, but the truth remains that almost half of the adult conversations we have had have dealt with girls, sex and porn.

The role of pornography in our lives is undeniably made even more indispensable with the sexually repressed society that we live in. This is a society where we have grown up with the image of sex as two flowers touching each other, the lights going off or bees humming and the rest of that crap. For a long time I believed that if you tear of the arms of a woman’s blouse it is termed as rape. With this pedigree, the discovery of porn in my early teens was like serendipity, as I assume it must have been for the rest of you. People, who disagree, and I have the misfortune of knowing some please consult your doctors.

But the illicit pleasure of watching porn in its various titillating forms brings a warm glow to my heart. Who can forget those days of criminally high priced internet parlors, the drooling over desibaba, worldsex and hundreds of other sites? Things that seem onerous and obsolete now, like sex stories or browsing for porn used to be like drops of nectar in those halcyon days. Our travails continued in the same fashion till we entered engineering. Till then porn or BP was associated with sneakiness, a forbidden private pleasure with generous dollops of adolescent shame and guilt.

With engineering or better still with the advent of LAN came the new age of porn. Because the primitive days of LAN-less Hall-3 if you guys can remember used to thrive on miniscule mobile videos, stashes of cheap, bawdy sex magazines and a host of filthy porn on some scattered PCs. Then came LAN and changed the playing rules. With the inhibition of discussing the role of porn and jacking off having disappeared due to shared living space, the definition of porn had been altered forever.

With Naughty America, Vivid Entertainment to the fore, we were suddenly exposed to a completely new world of entertainment. While some broadcasted their love of this new phenomenon by indiscriminately stocking their PCs with whatever they could find, there were also the diffident folk who resorted to hiding their stockpile in some remote corner of their PCs. But while the earlier elusiveness of porn had made its worth its weight in gold, with the passage in time, porn got mundane with people honing their tastes and specializing in stuff such as MMS clips, BDSM, Hentai, Inter-racial, 2X et al. The hunger for porn was best demonstrated after a spate of long holidays when a majority of the populace, including some of the porn kings had to empty their closets before donning their veneers for home.

While most of us have crossed the threshold into a more civilized way of life, and wouldn’t admit to our inglorious past selves, I certainly hope that we give pornography the due place it deserves in our hearts and more importantly our loins. Two Parthian shots before I make a disgraceful exit;

1. Does porn hold the same place in the hearts of committed folk as it does in the case of the single junta?

2. Is the stand of this post correct with regards to women-as in porn is extensively limited to the depraved males. If any free thinking female out there desists, you are more than welcome to express your opinion. (Private opinions would be given preference.)

A Week at the Anti-Christ's

I hate kids. I hate them emphatically. Not to sound cool or to make any kind of statement. I just hate them. I am ready to go to arms against the people who melt into raptures when they see kids. I don’t care if they are cute, are innocent or say stupid things in a cho chweet voice. I hate being pestered by their questions, I hate laughing at every mundane thing they do and I hate being told that the kids these days are smarter than us. Anyways let me come back to my topic and tell you about the Devil Reincarnate that I have been living with.

He is my youngest cousin, four years old and unfortunately I share my birthday with him. He is Satan’s emissary. Five minutes with him and you would prefer hell to earth. After my arrival at my uncle’s house, it took him minutes to realize that his latest victim was in his presence. A mere second later I had been pinned down by this pint sized person who was sitting on my neck and all the while I had to smile and remark how strong he was. Then I watched the travails of my aunt as she tried to follow him all over the house trying to force food into his mouth. She finally succeeded after two hours when he found out that the inside of the washing machine is a good substitute for the dining table.

He likes waking me up in the morning by jumping on me, blowing in my ears or pulling the pillow from under my head, whichever catches his fancy. By the time I sit down with the newspaper, and he has succeeded in making my aunt and granny run a marathon for his breakfast, he comes over to make my morning miserable. He takes a devious delight in shredding the sports column to shreds right when I am in raptures over Sachin or the Commonwealth Games. He scribbles nonsense over the Crossword and Sudoku just when I am stuck in a tricky position. Shooting darts at my face is his latest contravention.

He also has a special antipathy to any other channel other than Pogo or Nickelodeon. I swear I will have those two channels cut out when I have my own place. The imp can raise the dead with his screams and cries and he holds the whole family at ransom due to his impressive bawling capacity. When I had just made myself comfortable with my copy of I, Claudius, he promptly tore off the cover page causing me to stop reading there and then, which even my parents haven’t been able to in the last two decades. His favorite way of baiting me is to turn off the power when I am on my lappy, or pressing all the keys at once or spitting on the keyboard. When he is doing none of this he is hanging from my shoulder, or pulling my hair or pulling down my trousers. He can give Macaulay Culkin of Home Alone fame a run for his money any day, I swear.

And trust me I am trying. I spent three agonizing hours building a house from Lego bricks which he smashed into bits because he wanted another design. I have lost in mock alphabet and letter writing contests to him. I have got bitten and spit upon and been made a Bull’s eye for his shooting prowess. I just can’t wait till his school reopens on Monday and I will be rid of him for at least six hours a day. And now I must stop cause he has lost interest in the fire-truck I got him and is making faces at me, which I am sure does not bode good news.

The Illusion of Memories

Memory is a chimerical device. It takes a devious pleasure enticing and torturing the mind. I often think of memories as glimpses of the outside world seen from a speeding train. It leaves behind a plethora of half formed images, poignant in imagery but when reminisced, they seem as if from a spectral world of our self-conjured dreams. They are there but when you look closely, trying to dissect through their innards they vanish in a puff of smoke leaving behind an odor, that tantalizes you and at the same time forming a self-castigation for the futility of the entire effort. The more I start to peer behind those swirling clouds of confusing thoughts, the more pressed I become to question my own sanity. Every day forward erases the past by a bit. It’s as if all the laws of entropy have been vanquished by the forces ruling my mind and the perfect painting is peeling itself of those wonderful colors that once ensnared my mind, leaving behind a sketch that is a travesty of my memories. The pellucid waters are now a mire of confusion bereaving in the loss of their tranquility. The quintessential sense of the balance that my mind used to possess has become hoary and does not allow me to relax in its erstwhile comforting bosom. Reality has become an illusion and vice-versa. Sometimes I feel like I am floating outside my own self gloating in the chaos that preside the reality. Bewitching images from an illegible past mingled with grandiose visions of the future seem incongruous with the stark austerity of the present. I seem to be standing at the cross-roads where time has stuck and I can browse through past, present and future with equanimity and yet wonder when I am going to wake up. It seems that my spirit has detached itself from the travails besetting my beleaguered body and is reveling in this new formless and timeless existence that is beyond the scope of its own comprehension.

A Tryst with Reality

Today we finally embarked on the task that I have been the most apprehensive of- interviews with the parents. The data that we had collected pointed to the fact that an overwhelming, if not a hundred percent majority of the parents were involved in professions that would barely provide for a hand to mouth existence. While the kids had taken to us with an ease that surprised us, I for one had misgivings about what would happen when we would step into their lives after school.
For privileged people like us, who have never had to worry about anything concerned with financial affairs, it was a sort of conundrum. Which questions to ask and how delicately could we put it through to them that we just wanted to know the environment surrounding the education of the child without sounding too nosy or obnoxious at the same time. But six hours after we met with the parents of Monalisa Nag of Class 6 of R.E.C Govt School, I have trouble shaking of the image of that small asbestos roofed house entrenched deeply in poverty and the parents who hope against hope to see their daughters making a place for themselves in society.
Popular culture and media have often fostered the general perception that somehow uneducated parents somehow do not care enough for their child’s education. Think again. The silent despair that we were faced with when we put forward the question to Monalisa’s mother, Devaki, a housemaid, almost abashed us. While she wants to be a part of her daughter’s education, it’s almost gut-wrenching to see the helpless inability to do so. The enthusiasm of the father, Chandrasekhar who earns only 3000-4000 per month as a driver at the thought of his daughter becoming computer literate is infectious. It is not the aspirations that they have of their children that separate them our parents. It is the impotency of poverty and illiteracy that prevents them from doing so.
It is not charity that they want. While economic emancipation for everyone is an utterly utopian idea, the least the Govt can do is spruce up the levels of education in the hundreds of thousands of primary schools. Just making schools and giving free mid-day meals is not enough. The education that they are getting should of the quality that it makes a change in their lives. The society that debates all these topics sitting in the comforts of their homes is even more at fault. Of which I have been an integral part of all my life. I write this with the hope that twenty years from now, if I perchance happen to read it again I would not be smothered by the guilt and shame that engulfs me now.

Do You Remember

Do you remember the look of the hills flush with the green of the summer rains when we first set foot here. The roads were wet, everything was green and verdant. We were green. The anticipation of treading into a new and completely unfamiliar way of life, at the end of which we were expected to become men from boys. I guess anticipation and a mute terror of responsibility lay heavy on every heart on that fateful day in June 06 when we decided to be students at NIT Rourkela. It would mark the beginning of the greatest epoch in our lives.

During the counselling time, the auditoriom did not look so swanky as it does now, with wooden tables and chairs and the blackboard dusty with chalk. The AV Hall had those awful,spindly chairs where we first met people with whom we would be inexorably attached for the next four years. Most of us must have shuddered inwardly when we had our first glimpse of the erstwhile Hall-3. Dark, gloomy and forbidding, it was dusty with neglect and the absence of denizens and cobwebbed with countless memories.
Do you remember the first day at hostel, our first glimpse of the warden KRP, and meeting our room mates. The nervous anticipation of our first day at college. I think bathrooms at NITRkl never witnessed a longer line for the next four years. The memory of us in formals, clean shaved, cropped hair being herded into a line for the entertainment of seniors. We were divided into zones , which paradoxically had a more unifying factor than a divisive one.

Do you remember the subsequent weeks. The crowding into autos to go to the station to buy necessary daily stuff, including cheap porn magazines. The mind numbingly boring classes of DG Sahu, the gradual gravitation towards the last benches, the realization sinking in that we were not going to see girls for the next four years, the ragging that was slowly getting mundane.

Do you remember us getting friends. The nite-outs, the apprehensive visits to JAM to sneak in a dinner without getting unwarranted attention from seniors, the GPL where my room was wrecked by the group slams. The sessions of khatti where we discussed everything from our sordid love stories, from girls to music, from our interests to general banal talk. We grew together in these sessions. Do you remember that antiquated PC of Chinu which became the hub of everything, from group porn watching to interminable sessions of playing Zatacka.

Do you remember those first exams. The first bonechilling winters of Rourkela, the tension of getting through with at least an eight pointer. And in the midst of that when everyone decided that Sushen should have his first bath in a month and it developed into the entire hostel bathing together in the corridors. Makes one laugh when you think about it now. Then second semester started and for the first time during the holidays we felt the absence of friends. It was the first time we realized what a second family means.

Do you remember when Beeshmoy and me tricked a hundred people into believing Peter speaks and the ensuing GPL that we received. My sides still hurt from laughter when I think of Anda and Sutta's reactions. By then most of us had got ourselves PCs and thus started the phenomenon of gaming that our batch will be remembered for. One chuckles when one remembers Mudu going from room to room to install CS. The afternoons of CS and AOE, the cacophony Zhenga created when we managed to beat Bibek at AOE are so hauntingly familiar. It was the beginning of the famous DZ and E_Clan and the rival Spartans and DRG Clans. Do you remember that Holi of first year, of Hadi clad in only leaves. Holi has never been so boisterous, so underclad ever since.
Second year began with the hoop-la of us being the seniors now with the impunity associated with ragging. That miserable first week when we had to sleep in half finished rooms, without electricity and running water in the B- block of Hall 7. Can anyone forget the day when 300 of us marched to protest against the unfair ruling in the ragging case against Bangu zone.

While the first year was about making new friends, second year was about developing a solidarity that transcended zones and languages and cultures. It was about getting initiated into branches. And what a branch Electrical Engg. has been.

Do you remember those long long chats in the room of Dipu. The outbreak of Herpes which mutilated the faces, bodies and in some notable cases the private parts of so many boarders in Hall 7. I remember being awarded the title of Herpes King by Dipu, something I wont treasure.I still remember that grand DSU Party where I was initiated to the pleasures of Whiskey. The herpes outbreak . I was taught the art of smoking by Nishank and Pranaya. I had become an engineer now I guess.

Fourth semester started with the panic of grade backs. I was not the one to miss out on that getting a back in Jack's paper. The engineering transformation was complete now. It was also the culmination of our writing skills with us transforming the institute magazine Renaissance from a lifeless tabloid whose sole purpose was to line the dustbins into Degree 361, which I for the first time saw being read by people. We had managed to turn it around by than 360 degrees.

Do you remember how we invalidated the concept of single rooms with me, Ari and Zhenga in the same room during the dying days of second year. It continued into third year with Zhenga and me still sharing rooms in Hall-2. I remember fifth semester for my whiskey heydays and our first entrepreneurial venture yaareyaare. It did not work out but was the precursor of the downloading spree that was to mark this year. This was also the glorious year of the most famous scooty we will ever encounter in our lives, the eponymous scooty of Hota, Chirag Hota. I hope in earnest that the scooty is preserved in Smithsonian for all generations to marvel at. I spent the best Puja Holidays of my life courtesy Ari and Navin in the North-East.

Sixth semester came and went in a flurry before we even realised it. It was the semester where I discovered the joy of beer and sharing. Sharing because there happen to be guys like KP and Debi around, who donot even mind sharing L'oreal stuff with impoverished people like us. Movies, Series, Dota, Beer binges and suddenly we found ourselves to be Final Years.

Do you remember the hope and optimism surrounding the campus when everyone was sure of landing themselves plum jobs. And it eroded as the companies decided to give us a short shrift. Desperation clouded the eyes with one unsuccessful interviews after the other. By the end of seventh semester it was a rush for any any job that came our way. Somehow or the other this semester has found most of us with some kind of a job. For my part, I celebrated minor successes and major failures at an unbelievable weekend at Goa with friends. Debi ran the naked mile after getting a call from IIM-A. We are still waiting for a treat from Bibek for XLRI and FMS. Farewell season has started with people starting to make guest lists and wondering about debt to be incurred.

I guess change is a constancy of life. The hills are barren now, bereft of any verdant vegetation. The auditorium and the AV Hall stand refurbished. The institute is a maze of construction and reconstruction. One doesn't see first years walking ina single file on the first day. In fact ragging is almost non-existent. People have lappies in the first year. They don't buy cheap porn magazines these days. Celebrity Nite is not held during the Spring Fest. Chirag's scooty is the verge of an honorable death. Saha spends more time with a girl rather than sleeping.

And the batch of 2006-10 is about to graduate in 40 days.

Remedis Amoris

So far so I have seen lots of kinds of love. Also the miserable endings. Love at first sight, which continues until one of the pair discovers true sight. Blind love where the saga continues till both the protagonists are blind to everything else. True love which continues until either of the pair discovers a truer love. One-sided love which is always doomed to die a lonely death. Unrequited love where your better half doesnt give a rat's fart about your feelings.

But coming back to what I was saying, the past few months have been a heart-break season here. People have been breaking up left, right and centre. In fact it has been so prevalent that I guess Cupid's agents must be playing hookey. Otherwise there should be no logical reason that at NIT Rkl, the place which sees more anomalous pairs than anywhere else, there should be so many break-ups.

Suddenly there are more morose faces, a greater quantity of alcohol consumed than the regular, people watching more chick flicks than the usual, more unbearable love-lorns songs wafting across the corridors. I have been assured that these are popular cures for love-Remedis Amoris.

I did some investgating into it and found some incredible facts.In Tallinn, Estonia, The  Raeapteek drug store has been preparing and dispensing a concoction of marzipan to ‘relieve the pain of love’ since 1422. There must be some modicum of truth to it for otherwise it would have been drummed out of business since long.

Picking up a few chunks of potent marzipan may literally be easier to swallow (and safer) than some of the other cures that the store stocks like the grease of dirty sheep’s wool, pieces of ancient mummies, burned bees and the like. In fact, most ancient remedies tend to concentrate on weird exotica, from bulls’ testicles (famed as an aphrodisiac in Spain) to lizards soaked in urine, periwinkles mixed with powdered earthworms to the Spanish fly.

Even Nietzsche’s remedium amoris — “The cure for love is still in most cases that ancient radical medicine: love in return” — doesn’t hold good in these fickle days. Who knows you may land in a deeper pit than you were in before.

My prescription for this malady-heaps and heaps of self love. One kind of love where you donot have to suffer from any insecurity, rejections, no costly dates to keep your girlfriend happy, no use of recharge offers. All you need is to bask in narcisstic glory. Besides, why take the risk of falling in love once again when statistics suggest that for achieving one successful relation you need to experience 5 unsuccessful ones. 

Seven Sins, Revisited

Its amazing how life forces you to change your outlook, how it manages to rein you in when you seem to be getting ahead of yourself and how it makes itself come to a grinding halt altogether. It is not yet one year since I had written about my own Seven Sins. And I marvel how I have been made to eat my own words after one year. I have been made to eat the humble pie. Now I am not flying with eagle wings, soaring above the nondescript multitude. I now cannot afford the magnanimousity I had taken to be granted of myself. Never before have I had to look forward at such a bleak and uncertain future. It is with a radical change in perceptions that I now rewrite my thoughts on my sins. 

Pride- I used to be proud. It did not matter to me whether it was for my benefit or for my loss. I thought myself sheltered from people or things because of a monumental ego. It made me wax with pride to believe that I could revel in mediocrity while being above it and being aware of it. But what of it now, that I have rendered myself mediocre in all eyes-be it that of others or mine. Where does that leave me now? When self-doubt gnaws at my pride, eating at the remnants of self confidence and making my knees go weak. I think I never missed being proud as I do of this moment.

Envy- It is human to be envious, I concede now and not the lament of the weak-willed. The nonchalance that precedes the apathy at the success of your competition, always leads to failure in the long run. It is envy that makes you hungry, doesnot let you sleep in peace, harangues you until you decide to either rise up to the occasion or slink away unnoticed into pall of failure where it consumes you. But that is life. It is as fair as you decide it to be.

Wrath- I am wrathful. The anger that turns inwards burns my whole soul, arresting my whole being in paroxysms of self-hatred. It does not leave me in peace for a second. It does not let the bygones to be bygones. It twists the fabric of me and wishes that it had the tremendous power to wrench the part of me that has brought this day upon me.

Sloth- This is the sin that describes me best. This is the part of me that decided that I should be the grasshopper and not the ant. It has a faithful sidekick too-Procrastination. Amazingly I used to be proud of this pair not long ago. Its only when you taste the bitter fruit of failure that you have to rethink of everything. And yet knowing all this, I tremble to think of Sloth's overbearing influence on me.

Greed- Nowadays I am not just greedy about the small things in life, I am also greedy about the larger things and if I do admit, especially so. I am materialistic since now I know it is easiest to be non-materialistic when everything is within your grasp. Love and companionship, the things I used to be greedy about are intangible, not a blue-chip investment for one's greed. Greed is best served when it is meant for objects that can be attained and not pipe dreams.

Gluttony-When you have remained hungry for the better part of four years, one knows how to value food. And this reminds me of beer, something that I believe can sustain me now. This one sin is not going to change hopefully under any circumstances.

Lust-I dont believe myself when I re-read what I wrote last year. What positive frame of mind possessed me to see that vision in red, I do not know but I now assure myself I am well cured of it. My lust is common and ordinary now, hopefully to my satisfaction.

Tagged..Useless Facts

I havent had either the good or the bad fortune to be tagged much be it Orkut or Facebook or Picassa...And its a first to be tagged in Blogging. Thank you Amrita(http://theeshadowgirl.blogspot.com) for being the first to avail me of the opportunity :D

Some Useless Facts About Me:

• What is your current obsession?

Misanthropy. I am oxymoronic when it comes to socializing, being a popular antisocial but right now I am leaning towards hatred for myself and others.

• What are you wearing today?

Duh...Black as usual...A Dreamtheater T-shirt and shorts...Nothing fashionable for me

• What's for dinner today?

Some inedible shit..I am so sick of mess food that the thought of it makes me want to puke..

• What's the last thing you bought?

Swimming trunks..After 3 years of interminable wait the swimming pool has been finally opened for us miserable souls...And boy its such a welcome relief from the baking heat.

• What are you listening to right now?

Pearl Jam...Alive and Black from the album Ten.

• What do you think about the person who tagged you?

Amrita is probably the coolest girl I have met. Its not everyday you meet a girl with beauty and brains and a superb sense of humour to match. And it helps when we share the same tastes and birthdays to boot :P

• If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished anywhere in the world, where would you like it to be?

I am lost for options...but I would go for a thatched shack somewhere in the South Sea Islands :)

• What are your must-have pieces for summer?

Hmm...nothin would be as good as any answer.. In the burning heat of NITRkl hostels one cant sleep in anything but shorts or good old underwears.

• If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go?

Lots of picks once more :( But I think I would choose Karnak, Thebes and The Valley of Kings)..

• Which language do you want to learn?

French, Italian and Spanish...French first so that I can watch Audrey Tatou movies without subtitles..

• What’s your favourite quote?

Currently this one from Shantaram.

"Loves are like that. You heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and independence. After a while, you started throwing people out - your friends and everyone you used to know. And it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it's going to take down with it. That's why I'm sick of Love."

• Who do you want to meet right now?

No one.

• What is your favourite colour?

Black and Black

• Give us 3 styling tips that work for you.

This question is not meant for me...Just making my hair manageable is too onerous a task for me:P

• What is your dream job?

This is easy...Teaching English at University level. Maybe they call it a dream job coz its destined to remain a dream.

• What’s your favorite magazine?

Reader's Digest...although I love the RD's of yore more than the contemporary ones..of the 70s and 80s.

• If you had $100 now, what would you spend it on?

Books..They are my best friends, through thick and thin they have been there always. So its befitting that this amount be spent on them. And if some amount is left I would have 2 beers:P

• What do you consider a fashion faux pas?

Err....No idea..( but kudos to you Amrita for thinking of your faux-pas :D)

• Who according to you is the most over-rated style icon?

Paris Hilton....Till date I have no idea why such a definitive dumb blonde is always in the news...

• What kind of haircut do you prefer?

Any haircut that stops my hair from doing stuff on its own.

• What are you going to do after this?

Indulge in soliloquy..One of my favorite past times.

• What are your favorite movies?

So many of them...The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Amelie, Schindler's List, The Dark Knight, 12Angry Men, American Beauty, Casablanca, LOTR, Fight Club, Dr. Strangelove, Taxi Driver, Notting Hill....well its too long to list.

• What inspires you?

Nothingness mostly....the fact that everything finally comes to a naught keeps me sustained.

• What do your friends call you most commonly?

Something I dont want to tell...Its my blog and I have exclusive rights to state what I deem fit.

• Would you prefer coffee or tea?

Dont Care..Whatever is available and whatever is necessary to keep me awake.

• What do you do when you are feeling low or terribly depressed?

Dive into books. The best thing about books is that they can help you turn into whatever you want. Suddenly you find the real world dissolving away and find yourself enmeshed in a world where everything revolves around you.

• What makes you go wild?

The crashing waves of the oceans and the imposing mountains. They release the spirit trapped inside me at first sight. Of course I discovered 8 beers can have the same effect too.

• Which other blogs do you love visiting?

Not many..me not an avid blogger...Jus visiting mine is so much of an ordeal.

• Favorite Dessert/Sweet?

Dark Chocolate....Anything for its sinful delights :)

• How many tabs are turned on in ur browser right now?

Three...It generally stays this way.. I am not much of a browsing addict.

• Favorite Season?

Winters...Preferrably in d seaside.

• If I come to your house now, what would u cook for me?

I dont even know how light the gas cooker so in your dreams.

• What is the right way to avoid people who purposefully hurt you?

By dont giving a fuck..

• What are you afraid of the most?

Myself

• When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought?

Urghhh....another niteout, drooping eyelids, hair sticking up..in short Mirror Cracking material.

• What brings a smile on your face instantly?

Lots of stuff..Food, Beer, Chocolates, Books, and among people Ari and Chirag of course :P

• A word that you say a lot?

Fuck. Its the most complete word in English Literature. To my amazement I found out that it can be used in all the 9 parts of speech. So this single word can help express a whole gamut of feelings without being verbose.

• When was the last time you did something nice?

Can't remember honestly...If giving alms counts then I do it often on train journeys but nothing other than that.

• What would you do if you were made President of India for one day?

Enjoy each and every single comfort of the Rashtrapati Bhawan and create a record for sleeping in the maximum no of bedrooms in a single day.

• Do you Know who Master SHIFU is?

Wasnt that impressed with KUNG-FU PANDA...Some weird kind of raccoon most probably.

So now to do the rituals I shall tag some of my friends and/or blog-friends. If you despise tags and them as a farce, then you are excused. If not then I insist that you complete this tag and share with the world all the useless facts about you. Cheers.

This chain had to end somewhere and it is ME. The friends whom I want to tag dont blog and the friends who blog are not worth tagging.

On Feb 14

I was well into my early teens when I first heard of the Saint and the eponymously named festival held on Feb 14. I was yet untouched by Cupid’s arrows which had struck down so many of my friends leaving them bleeding their hearts out on the altar of love. I don’t know if love was in the air but change was certainly in the air. 

Girls became a sub-species under Homo Sapiens. Precious pocket money was spent on Archie’s cards rather than on Centerfresh cards. People who couldn’t string two sensible words together were waxing love lyrics. The Rose, a flower which I have always felt is a bit overhyped, assumed much more important connotations. Love-lorn expressions ruled the day instead of heated discussions on last evening’s WWE matches. People with the heart of a chicken were vowing to slit their wrists and seal their love in blood. The whole day was fraught with nervous tension, shaky legs, brittle laughter, some elated hearts and many broken ones. And as for me, I was nonplussed and amazed at the inanity surrounding the whole charade. It was something out of a Coen Brothers’ movie: funny but macabre at the same time.

The years have rolled on and the only things that has changed is the size of the dent made in your pocket. Globalization and the Commercialization of the arrows’ of Cupid have ensured that a mere card of the past isnt sufficient enough. V-Day is something to be planned to perfection right from the message in the card down to the tint of the roses. 

Now, lacking my previous asperity and the insolent candour of an armchair critic, I think I have gained a sliver of knowledge into the Valentine psyche.The social hypocrisy that enmeshes us so tightly in its grasp has ensured that love is in the movies, in all forms of music, in literature, in the air we breathe. It surrounds us everywhere, except that we never feel an iota of it. True Love is like an urban myth. Countless have heard of it, barely anyone has experienced it.

So if one day out of the other mundane 365 days is reserved entirely for the celebration of love, I don’t think its asking for too much. Never mind that next Valentine, you will be whispering sweet nothings into the ear of someone other than the special person of this year. Never mind that you are among the millions of souls whose love is unrequited this year. Never mind that this year you have no one special to celebrate it with. 

Cupid’s arrow will strike true some Valentine or the other. Then you wont belong to the class of people mentioned above. Then you will realize love need not a reason nor occasion to celebrate, neither doth it need to wait for Valentine’s Day to manifest itself.

A Paean to Friendship

As another epoch in my life draws to a close in a matter of months, I feel in my heart an unfamiliar tug of emotions and a rush of bittersweet memories. The rites of passage from an institution isn't a novel experience for me, they have been the bookmarks in a largely sordid and insipid book. Also I am not inclined towards the hysterics and melodrama that ensues at the time of bidding farewell to an institution.

Being endowed with a deeply cynical outlook towards life and all that comes with it, I have rarely paused to ponder about such stuff. Such thoughts are generally relegated to the locked attic in my brain which I rarely pay a visit, and if so its a perfunctory one, whose sole purpose is to reaffirm my own humanity.

I have always maintained the belief that in the journey of life there is never a co passenger for life. People accompany us in our journey to some milestone and then depart for their own destinations with their own preordained companions. Hence I have never been overtly sentimental about friendships and relations. People come and go. Some leave indelible impressions, etching their presence permanently, others are like the morning dew, beautiful while it lasts and leaving just a whiff of their fragrance in our lives.

But my nihilist stand has been shaken in these four years of glorious existence. As I took a break from the mad rat-race, I realized that only a gift of the gab and a self deprecating humor had made me an affable companion. That inadvertently I was seeking solitude in the midst of company. That I had not visited my locked attic in a long time.

Four years have passed since then. I no longer recall the milestones that had marked my participation in the race. I no longer despair much at my silly failures and nor do I rejoice alone in my not-so-big achievements. I no longer lock my attic.

I have realized the magnanimosity of my friends of yore, who have conveniently looked beyond my shortcomings of nature. I have realized that some people can accompany you in your journey of life, only if you don't push them away because of your fatalistic nature. I have realized that you can gain new insight into and be pleasantly surprised by the friends you have known since you were three feet tall.

As for my present life, I have made a lot of discoveries. I now know I can share rooms with the most slovenly person I have known. I also know now that its possible for a group of people to share everything except their tooth-brushes and underwear. That Communism maybe wasn't that a bad idea, equitable distribution of money leads to everyone having an equal share of the beers on the table. That it is possible for guys to think about their friends while sharing some food. That it is possible to take care of a whole wing when everyone else is broke. That it is possible to miss a friend whose sole purpose in the company is to eat every other person's brain with his wisecracks. That it is possible that a person can share designer stuff among his more uncouth friends who don't value the finer tastes of life. And that someone can a take a fall for you.

And some friendships cannot be defined. They bring a glow into your whole being that makes the whole existence beatified. Their absence makes you fret with anxiety and their presence worth the wait. You feel the urge to invite them into that private attic of yours from where the both of you can peek into that thing intrinsic of you, your soul. I am a skeptic of the idea of soul mates, but maybe this is the thing closest to that.