Five Snaps and a Four Year Tale

We live in the past, nonetheless we vehemently protest the same. Yet there is always a fluttering of the heart, a breathless anticipation and waves of mirth rollicking inside us, when we peruse through the past. A simple device, yet the camera unleashes the real person inside us and strips one of the veneer shrouding our drab and dreary lives. Well without further ado, I present the five snaps that evoke uncounted memories and a wish to relive the moments.

1. Awesomeness descends on Koilighughur.

The journey took a shade over five hours, deep into the Maoist ridden forests of Western Orissa. The unsettling and unspoken apprehensions turned into squeals of joy,at the discovery of a pristine waterfall snuggled in the midst of a verdant and virgin forest. Four hours later, in the freezing waters, the seven people in my branch, who made the drudgery of going to class everyday a bit less tiring. Guys, the best picnic ever.

2. Gung-ho at Goa.

It took me just about a minute to decide to leave for Goa, three hours before the train would leave for Mumbai. Bankrupt, ticket-less and without making my parents any more knowledgeable, I departed for Goa to experience the best weekend of my life. Four days, crates and crates of beer, uncounted cigarettes and a healthy dose of weed later, we discovered a simple motto for life. Let the circumstances go fuck themselves, just enjoy what is on hand. Aptly summarized by our Goa tag "fir bhi chalo".

3. E_Clan-We live to game.

I will always take pride that one of the greatest gaming clans ever at NIT Rourkela was christened by by name, albeit as a joke. But E_Clan was not just another gaming clan, it was a way of life where you needed to belong rather than prove your gaming prowess. We never won a tournament, yet we left an indelible impression on the gaming legacy of NIT Rourkela. AOE will never be the same after us. I just have one regret. We could never get the fourteen of us on a single snap.

4. B-Top-Perfection has another synonym.

Was there a more complete wing. I know C-Mid will be after my blood when they see this. But then, when was there competition among friends. The artistry of Amit, the financial genius of Kp, the understated brilliance of Debi, the 200+ IQ of Chirag, the stolid Bhuyan, the hacker-monster-leecher-gamer Zhenga, the simply himself Nuka, the King of good times Gyana, the Mr. Organiser Nk, the pre-evolutionary Pran, the impish Susi and the gentle giant Abhinab. We showed the rest how to have a weekend, didnt we guys.

5. EE-2010.

Period.

On the Wrong Scent

In the yesteryears, there were poachers and there were hounds that sniffed them out. These were the days before technology put paid to the romance associated with tramps and their vagaries. These were the days of Huck Finn and the various unnamed vagabonds. And these were the days when brain triumphed over smell. The tramps used an innocuous yet ingenuous way to ward the hounds off their scent, using smoked herrings to cover their tracks. And hence arrived the term " A Red Herring".

And I loved the concept. I always have found the concept of playing to the part and putting people on the wrong scent perversely pleasurable. And hence the name A Red Herring.

Hey Me...Its Me Again!!

Disclaimer: I write this and hopefully the next thirty posts at the behest or should I say, mortal threats from two of my best friends. Whatever inference may be drawn out of this is to be kept strictly confidential. As for my own vacillating nature, I believe the following fifteen lines are the closest that I can get to permanency.

1. I am a quintessential Libran, as per astrology. I can argue both the faces of a Mobius strip and still find myself in an indecisive morass.

2. Although I am considered an irredeemable optimist, I see pitfalls everywhere. Its a combination of exceptional bad luck and faith in others that I often see myself in those pitfalls.

3. I like talking to myself more than anyone else. And I am generally surprised by the multitude of contradictory voices battling it out inside me.

4. My aim in life is to become literate. In the age of super specialization I prefer to be a Jack-of-all-Trades. I would like to know everything about everything.

5. I love the English language, but regret to see its modern connotations in India. An affected accent and improper grammar hold people in greater stead than proper usage of the language.

6. I believe half the people in the world are blind, and the rest cannot see the truth even if it danced naked in front of them, so wrapped are they in their own perceptions.

7. My anger is imperceptible and often goes unnoticed under the veil of cynicism.

8. For a person who is used to living in a dump, I can be fastidious till the point of ad nauseam.

9. I find the concept of machoism and the associated tenets pre-evolutionary and a flashback from the days of the cave men, where the man with the biggest club was the leader of the pack.

10. Chandler Bing, Andy Dufresne and Cal Trask are my most three favorite characters, respectively drawn from soaps, movies and books.

11. I have a remarkable memory, although I make blatant excuses for a bad memory.

12. I take a perverse pleasure in making myself misunderstood and playing to the part expected out of me.

13. The ideals of politeness and traditional chivalry are endearing to me, while the aura of affected coolness enveloping plain boorishness, equally distasteful.

14. I love smoking and in spite of all the statutory warnings, will continue smoking.

15. Finally, before signing off, Isha and Nick both of you, are a credit to girls all over. Pity that you form a tiny speck of your species. :P

As per popular requests, here I am uploading my latest nondescript self :P

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.)