Arcade of Thoughts

I am not a voracious reader or anything, but I do read book once in a while. Off late I have been visiting a few book stores in Bangalore, now that I have a lot of time at my hand. While I don’t read much, I do want to score brownie points in my friends’ good books. It works this way. Every time anyone asks me about having read any book, I casually reply, “it’s by this guy right, Vikram Seth? I haven’t read it, but I want to.” It’s like saying, “I know about it.” It is important to show off at occasions. All of us at some point of time do like to associate ourselves with someone famous or learned, and be in sync with their conversation. We all want to be famous, some of us do get that fifteen minutes of fame. At other times, we strive to move with famous people. For instance, at any wedding in South India, people crowd around the bride and the groom to be at the helm of the proceeding. It is not that they are needed or something, it is just the hurried running and gulping of headache relief pills that some folks seem to enjoy. And listless old men, who what don’t want to miss out on the action, too chip in with advise on performing rituals.

Ever wondered why once in every 6 months, a while after she died, new characters kept emerging from nowhere saying they slept with Princess Diana? It’s the ‘I-want-to-be-with-famous’ syndrome. No one can confirm or deny it, they might as well make something out of it. It could have happened. Diana’s sure gone. She can’t speak.

Do you remember high school cricket? Good old days where only one of us got to be “the best” player, and rest of us cling to him in all games and always wanna be in his team. Yup, its the same syndrome at play. It should be noted that such a system promotes the hero-sidekick relationship among the students. I have observed such relationships on couple of occasions outside the television. Its fun to ‘watch’ such things in life actually :). With new rules (link) in schools operating, with boys and girls no being allowed touch the people of opposite sex, I see no reason why the hero-sidekick culture won’t present itself as a norm. After all, it is the duty of the hero to show the right way. This reality also mimics television. Among dozen others, Batman and Robin stand out clearly as a leading Hero-Sidekick example. As it turns out, both are … well … gay. Arguably at least. Hence, the likelihood of fears among conservatives that it promotes homosexuality is not that unfounded (link).

Also, I believe, there is a difference in you being someone’s sidekick and you idolizing someone. In the former case, you blindly follow what the other person does. In the latter, though you agree with the principle at a bigger scale, you change the rules to your needs. If you are thinking about most common example for hero-sidekick relation, you need not look further. The most famous entity is God himself. He (Capital H) is the Hero, fundamentalists are sidekicks. Associations with ‘famous’ God is the “thing” in claim to fame! Like George Carlin says, “up on the mountain, when no one was around, God gave us Ten Commandments.” (link), every religion sets out rules formulated thousands of years ago. The sidekicks follow them blindly. Brilliant, isn’t it? In fact, people said to be closest to God, that is priests, are in the highest strata of the society. This hero-sidekick relationship is not exclusive in most of the cases. In a certain case, there are hundreds of Gods and equal number of sidekicks, there is no problem of ‘promiscuity’ there.

God is famous. We all know that. Lets come down to earth. Did you know that Scientology boasts of 10 million memberships by the end of 2006. It surprising that a religion (?) arising out of a science fiction novel can attract so many people? With its foundations lying in alien invasions, volcanic eruption, hydrogen bombs and soul clusterization (link), how the hell did people even find it acceptable? With John Travolta and Tom Cruise following it, isn’t it hardly surprising?

Comments on blasphemy, religion and related issues won’t be answered. The questions, if need be, can be directed to Richard Dawkins. Yes, he is very famous, and I am with famous.

My previous attempts at Humour
But, not so seriously
What your status today
Peg’s law

* . Jokes(?) apart, it has been two years and surely I qualify to be called a veteran blogger. Coincidentally, it is my fiftieth post too. Do check out two of my favorite posts in last year (here and here). People loved this post as well.For a light post after a long time, I present some of the quotable quotes by me in the last year.

Quotable Quotes:

Pride:
(On being asked about certain position of responsibility in my hostel)
“I am in fourth year, I dont have to work”
(I wasn’t that lucky)

Envy:
(No reference to context required)
“Even he gets chicks!”
(No comments)

Gluttony:
(Chat transcript that repeated over 30 times in the 7th Semester)
Maro: Ascendas
Shankar: How can I say no to that?
Maro: Peace, leaving in 5 mins
(Ascendas is a food court that is open (used to) 24 hours…. my visit is usually between 1 am and 2 am)

Sloth:
(On being a Quality Management System Co-ordinator (QMS Coord) in Saarang without having to do any work)
“In 4th year, all I care is Grub (food) coupons and free entry into pro. shows (professional shows)”
(I was successful )

Lust:
(Near Monkey Falls…. looking at all dressed up women)
“What is it with Indian women, its like …. they are born with cloths”
(I know thats sexist and cruel, but one is surely gonna a laugh at it. I am not really that bad a person. trust me!)

“Three most wanted Ws - wine, weed and women….hmmm…. wine and weed can be brought with money. Women …… that too!”
(Really, it’s just a joke)

Averice:
(On being asked to share food coupons I got from being a QMS Coord)
“I don’t want to part with my hard-earned money”
(Eventually, I had to )

Wrath:
(on being ridiculed for celebrating blog birthday last year)
“Get lost!!! People do celebrate blog birthdays. ”
(I may have used more provocative phrase other than ‘get lost’)

It has been two years since I started the blog. It’s been great. Over the last year I have been less geekier then the year before, wasted a little less time, a bit more studious, a lot more serious owing to app, have had funnier status messages, blogged on both serious and fun issues and also, unfortunatly, chickless.

Past few months have been excellent. Been to Hampi, Goa, Coimbatore, Pondycherry and Delhi already. And I am looking forward eagerly to Tokyo in Mid-March. Hoping for a fun filled semester ahead. This blog will keep you informed.

In case you were still wondering, Peg’s Law is a mnemonic for the seven deadly sins.

*Update:
I respect Sri Sri Ravi Shankar as a person who has influenced many lives in a positive way. The status message did not intend to offend anyone and should be taken in jest. No offense meant.

A couple of weeks back, one of my friends was cribbing how screwed up or worthless his life was. I told him that I have a song for him. Out of nowhere he comes up with, ‘is it a love song??????’ He reasoned that i had said, ‘i had a song for him’. Thing were settled after about 2 minutes. If you are curious, the song was ‘always look on the bright side of life’ by monty python. I would love to dedicate this song to him on MTV. (No offence to Channel [V] or anything, but mtv fits, ask sting and dire striats why.)

It’s so lame to just dedicate a song to sombody! You can simply dedicate anything to anybody, Industries to nation, roads to a person, songs to a string of people, the list is endless. I lived in a place called Kudremukh for the first sixteen years of my life. A person who designed the place must have been an absolute moron. There is a bus-stand right inbetween a school and the playgroung, there is sewage plant in fornt of a jain temple, practically no foot path, church, mosque and a temple are way on top of three different hill making in inaccesible, the administration building and the iron ore mines are on two opposite sides of the town etc etc.Way back in ‘99, a dam (named ‘lakya’) was dedicated to the nation. Lavish party was organised for the iron and steel minister in this pretext. The irony is that, only slurry out of the mines are dumped into it. Come on, our nation deserves much more than that! Right now the industry in middle of a major issue of pollution and being located on a national park. It is in the verge of getting closed. I guess mother India did teach the mines a lesson.

Request shows on radio or tv for every one is like ‘been there, seen that’. The most painful part of the shows are with the dedications. They range from grand mothers to girl friends. It is hilarious when the RJ or VJ himself doesn’t know the song he is playing and people go about dedicating the songs. Even if it’s right with most of us, you can’t dedicate ‘everything about you’ to your mother, or even better… to your girlfriend. ( the song is actually ‘…i hate everything about you…’ by ugly kid joe). I love it when an RJ stops taking dedication and even then the guy on phone is persistent on dedications. I pity the guy, he is being denied what can be done without anybody’s consent and more importantly, for free.

From what I observe, dedications on a book are usually given to dead people and for a song, the limelight on a living person. To add a twist, some book are dedicated to just the memory of the dead guy, but not the guy himself. And for something as arbitrary as a dam, it is dedicated to something as arbitrary as a nation. For some reason dedication on a book is strictly restricted to author’s family while a song could go to the prime minister. For something as massive as oscars or the grammys dedication go only to the parents. It can easily be inherited back, you know. Fans do get their part sometimes. The exact share of dedication to the fans is always unknown.

Some do believe the dedications help you to tell a person that you care. Yes, things are so easy when someone else does them for you. Plus, dedications are easy way to get out a situation when you owe somebody something. All you lose is a phone call. Dedications do go to the special someone. That is the easiest way to get out of all your debts!

Alas, habits die hard, we will continue to be stupid. But thats what makes this world a livelier place to live in. By the way this blog is dedicated to all its readers and the dedicated bloggers.

What occupies a small, but significant, part in an IIT-M ians life is making graffiti on the notices on the notice board. In an effort to be different, we call the notices IPs, standing for internal publicity. The fact remains that hardly anything we do deserves publicity, except acads of course.

IPs fall into a set of categories like lost, lost and/but found, literary or sports events, extramural lectures and misc. As I was saying, ‘lost’ IPs usually involves losing cell phones, wallets or cycles. I am sure you would agree here that these don’t deserve publicity. IPs of ‘Lost and found’ category are rarely seen, but come with strings attached: ‘Treat expected’ Yet again, does out greed need publicity? If anything quality needs publicity, it’s honesty. That’s exactly the reason why politicians, though shameless, are popular.

To be frank, the lit activities do set high standards here. Those standards are set by not more than ten individuals. Lit skills of an average IITMian don’t deserve publicity either. Next in the line are extramural lectures. Is it something that WE do? Obviously not.

Misc category is better not talked about. Those are something that an average IITMian maggu doesn’t care about. Before concluding this, I must tell you that a misc IP is not ignored when the reference to grade cards is seen. IPs from NSS are keenly read by all the freshers. An innocent outsider would definitely find that the social service minded people are just the freshers, who are sure to turn anti-social in following years.

Talking about graffiti, as a fresher, the unknown destroyer was elevated to the standards much higher than any writer known. Little did we know that it gets predictable after some time, annoying after some more, chocking after a little more and inexpressible as it stand now.

IPs that are stylish are the first targets of this destroyer. In an older blog, I had talked about how easy it is to find fault with others. This quality in all of us is easily reflected on our notice boards. Not coincidently, this is not a quality that requires special publicity. All that is done is rhyme what is written with certain anatomical parts which aren’t uttered by her majesty, the queen. I am not so sure about the king.

All said and done, it is these IPs which brings the whole student community together. This includes (the minority) hard workers too. The jobless ones are always united. That’s the first thing we read in the morning before reading newspapers and last thing we read before dinner. A new IP is like a boring magazine, but one that is eagerly looked forward to. The destroyers continue to prey, the others continue to crib. This crib of having to read the graffiti somehow goes under publicized, while this is the only thing that requires publicity.

Review on 20-20cricket: it is for those who find short stories too long. Hey, this is 21^st century, except for me and some of the other jobless,……..sorry did I say ‘other’, …..some of the jobless people around me and of course, the person reading the blog, the universe has no time to waste. With the entropy probably reaching its maximal limit, and every law of physic being broken by yet another physicist, I can’t help but wonder, ‘are we ever going to look back’?

I am just back from watching a Stanley Kupric movie, killing kiss. Trust me, that was awfully slow. It was just an hour long, yet I couldn’t wait to get out of the hall. A year ago, hostel was so much fun. After LAN and Internet arrived, time seems scares.

Let’s assume that the damn 4^th dimension didn’t exits. It would be awkward, wouldn’t it? There would have been no time, and that’s why we would still strive hard to finish thing ‘in’ time. Time or no time, mathematicians would have ‘assumed’ its existence anyway. That’s the beauty of mathematics; it can make a fool out of anybody!

I know quite a lot of friends who are up all night, trying to set the balance right between academics and 24 hrs. Some smoothen the edges out through periodic night outs, some others have already burnt out. Quite frankly, ‘fun’ part in lost in the wilderness of time or the lack of it.

My day began at 10:30 am, up half the night thinking on what to blog the next day. Alarm rang at about 7:30, and surprise!!! I had time. When I woke up I realized it was a bit too less to crash for 3 more hrs. Anyway, I ran to the bathroom with a brush in one had and tooth paste in the other. I found monkeys had all the ‘time’ in the world to ravage my washed cloths…again, the same set of cloths which I had washed second time. As my mind wandered around thinking of strangling the monkeys, I realized I had no time even to think of that, let alone chocking them.

Then, in my humanities class, a video was shown on Indian govt., which in the name of conservation is snatching the very livelihood of tribes in northern Karnataka. The video was 52 min long, all of us were restless to get back to hostel even as the clock was striking 11:50, the scheduled lunch break. Would it hurt any one of us to stay back for 5 minutes?

The Byrds sang, ‘a time for this, a time for that….. n things…’. Are they kidding? A time for everything would mean a segmentation fault.
Tip: Those who do not know about the segmentation fault, google for it.
Whoever named it ‘the time magazine’ is a genius? Obviously, when we don’t have any, why not buy the magazine, serves as moral support anyway.

Then came my ‘Dynamics of machinery’ class. I would say he is the only prof in the institute who would say that he has enough time to cover the syllabus. What an eternal optimist! He left us in about 30 mins, 20 mins ahead of actual finish. I was working on my previous blog when my neighbour, Boxer, knocked, asking for an hour on my computer to do an assignment. I asked him to come back after 2 hrs as it wasn’t extremely important. Half an hour later when I offered him the computer, he said he had already completed the work in Animesh’s comp. Reason: he did not have time to wait.

Why do we have time zones? Probably cause its so precious. It is allocated to every country. Einstein claimed time was relative. Get real, it’s absolute, nobody has any of it. Finally I thank my readers for the time they spent on this blog. Please don’t ask yourself, “was it worth it?” or “was it worth the time?”