Summer of '15

THIS IS A DRAFT AND NOT COMPLETE YET


As the tradition dictates, it is time to write about my (mis)doings of summer of '15. Looking back it seems to be the most peaceful and enlightening one, perhaps the best of all. It is true that every summer I went to place or two, enjoyed delicacies, did some math, met new people, and read a lot of novels, and these were the things that brought joy, which did not happen this summer, which cannot be blamed entirely on me (if one counts people not selecting you). This summer was different, it was a grown up summer, one spent leisurely, without traveling, without many novels, without good food and without much math although I would have to qualify each of these assertions. Going back to the start, I was supposed to go to AFS 2 which was being held in IISER TVM but could/did not owing to the objection of Steven. Thence I started reading bits and pieces of esoteric subjects like algebraic geometry, galois cohomology and logic, although I would not dare say I learnt much or even a reasonable amount. Summer was characterized by long sleeping hours and trying, without much success, to follow a schedule. I must say that I watched a lot of movies, on crime, on science fiction, on absolutely nothing and on many other things. My friends and me decided to organise a logic seminar to collectively learn some logic and we pretty much did nicely which was one productive thing this summer. The peaceful summer days filled with hot air and long hours of sunlight were simply amazing in that there was no one to bother me and I had trained my mind to ride guilt free. I happened to read Kafka on the shore by Murakami and it, filled with magical realism, captured imagination and provided an escape to fantasyland, which was a nice thing to happen.

Victory is hard

It was almost an hour into the ordeal, mildly salty sweat could be tasted from the corner of the mouth and all the souls in the vicinity were fed up of me. It is at this moment that I was thinking of getting up and running away, from all this travesty, somewhere far where I would not be judged, I would not have to prove my competence every single time. Every soul who has claimed fame by means of hard work and perseverance would know that it is at this very moment when things seem to go against you, everyone wants you to give up, and that includes the body itself, that you must not. These will be the deciding factors which will, colloquially speaking, "make you or break you". Keeping all this in mind, I decided to take one more slice of the cheese pizza even though i was full up to the throat.
There was no one in the college who loved pizza more than me. I would never shy away from a chance to have pizza at any time or place. There have been incidents when my whole circle of friends had to eat pizza(of various flavours) only because I thought it was a good idea to do so. I was deep into pizza, hell I even had pizza printed on my pajamas. Kush was really annoyed by my habit of choosing pizza in any new place we went to and it was, mind you, not him who challenged me to eat 4 pizzas in a row, it was his girlfriend, who I suspect wanted to get rid of me. What could I do?
Back to Melisa's , after I had the first slice of the 4th pizza, I was not in a very friendly mood. It is, what I realised, the situation many great people have been and they are great only because they did not listen to pain inside their mind and body, they persevered through the hard times. Well, midway into the slice of the 4th pizza, I noticed some mild distant rumbling, seemed like the sound of a volcano about to erupt, a earthquake, a tsunami or some deep imminent danger about to unfold. The tables were starting to shake and I was almost relieved that the earthquake would save my day, with my nose. Everything was shaking and I couldn't control the my movements, like when you are fighting in air. It wasn't long before I fainted, which could be due to some splinter falling on my body or shock or any of those things which are supposed to happen when you are exposed to something horrific.
Actually, when I woke up I could see my friends forming a circle around me. They told me this bullshit story that I had puked all over the pizza place and I had fainted. Unfortunately, Shailza had taken a video shoot of the whole episode and it seemed these people were true. I was thinking of all sort of argument to make so as to justify my glorification of pizza even though I had failed it as a person.
Since that day, I eat pizza alone and Melisa's had prohibited my entry. Even Lenin was exiled from Russia and should we allow ourselves to forget the travesty of Nelson Mandela when he did everything for love of his freedom.

V for Verbiage

It has been a long time since I posted something worthwhile. As it happens that I am preparing for GRE general test and have to amass a vocabulary of excessive magnitude to be able to serve the purpose well. It is a consequence of this that I came across a flush of words of which I had only heard of and never bothered to decipher them. It was, thus, incumbent on me to imbibe their meanings and contexts in which they appear. To facilitate this agenda, I took a step to collect all previously unheard words and decode them which I happen to come-by in movies, videos, novels and blogs. I could vaguely recall a movie with tons of verbiage and upon googling realised that it was none other than everyone's favourite "V for Vendetta". I am alluding to a dialogue between V and Evey. Lets have a look at the dialogue and its interpretation in light of my knowledge.

V: [Evey pulls out her mace] I can assure you I mean you no harm.

Evey Hammond: Who are you?

V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask.

Evey Hammond: Well I can see that.

V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

Evey Hammond: Oh. Right.

V: But on this most auspicious of nights, permit me then, in lieu of the more commonplace sobriquet, to suggest the character of this dramatis persona.

V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
[[ Although I might appear as a comical man dictating swords, by the circumstances in which I happen to be, I am cast both as a villain and a victim. The mask, as it may look like, is not a display of my arrogance but is a symbol of the now vanished democracy. I have resolved to eliminate all of these corrupt men leading lives of evil, who abuse their freedom and commit immoral and detestable actions]]

[carves "V" into poster on wall]

V: The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.

[[The only verdict is vengeance; an action to relieve these corrupt men, not just for the sake of it, but for the value and honesty of those oppressed by the system who have done no wrong]].

V: [giggles]

V: Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.
[[Indeed, this soup of unnecessarily complicated words deters even the learned ones but nevertheless it's my ... call me V]]

Evey Hammond: Are you, like, a crazy person?

V: I am quite sure they will say so. But to whom, might I ask, am I speaking?

Evey Hammond: I'm Evey.

Time of my life-1

I believe there was a time in all of our lives when we discovered books, novels mostly and we were voracious readers. We read whatever was in our houses, local library, kabadi wala dukan and other places. This happened to me when i was in my 10 th class and a little before that. I father was in Army then and we had a nice library maintained by the Artillery Centre. This was my paradise. Earlier in my 8th and 9th I used to read mostly general knowledge books and Ripley's Believe it or not, its not that I did not know about novels but I always that 'who in the world will have time to read so big stories. I had read short stories, a little long stories which were sometimes boring and then I considered novels as exteneded versions of long stories. That was why i avoided them and chose to read Guinness Records and stuff like that. But then some radical transformation happened with my first novel. I guess it was the Alchemist. Read it in one single night straight. Mostly because the english was simple to understand and the story seemed nice. And also due to the fact that I was religious at that time ,or was it that I became religious after reading Alchemist. Anyways, it was beautifully written novel which was totally unreal ending and which made me laugh with happiness like Santiago was already doing. A possible that I was hooked to it was also that it was set in a charismatic location with the winds and oasis and pyramids and scimitars and a loose boy which did not give a fuck about the world, just wanted to graze some cattles. That novel also gave me the idea to become a farmer in life, which i still am attached to. That was probably my first real novel,if you don;t count Roald Dahl a little long stories which always excited me. He was one fine writer who managed to take the suspense till the end and make it romantically tragic. One which i remember is the story in which they make an automatic grammatizer which writes stories and all. there was this other one in which they catch a lot of roosters by sedating them only to discover them waking up before the owner. These were fun stories and Matilda too. I sort of related to Matilda. Once the first novel was read, all others were like coconut water to me. Kept of reading. Afterthought compels me to mention non-real novels I read before Alchemist like Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven. God, those were something. It being a big library, there were lot of Famous Five stories there, possibly all and there was not a single one that I hadn't read. I guess it gave the sense of adventure which every teenager craved for in their lives and it had lot of food mentioned in it like lemonade and cookies in tin cans and stuff which got me to idea of reading enid blyton with something to drink, mostly lemonade or some chocobar to eat. I used to go to this night school for some random stuff and it was far from home, 5 maybe 7 kilometers and I used to cycle back and forth everyday to that place. I always used to go there early and read Enid Blyton in empty classrooms alongside the window with rains pouring. Those were some nice days. But then came lot of Paulo Coelho, this was after Alchemist and each of his novels became shittier than the one before. He talked about random stuff. But there was one good novel which he wrote, called Eleven Minutes. It was about this prostitute in France or Switzerland, who wrote about her life. It was an erotic novel which was a good reason to liking it but it had some really nice stories in it. And it was almost poetic to me. Then the other novel i liked of his was Devil and Miss Prymm. Then I read Dan Brown and most of his novels and came up this brilliant idea that an author pretty much writes the same stuff over and over again. This idea was mainly influenced by Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown and some other people. Then there was this other novel I was hooked to called 'A series of unfortunate events', it was 13 or 16 book collection of short hardbound books which were all there in our army library and don't I remember waiting to issue one book after another after every week. You see we were allowed to issue 3 books per week. Count Olaf I started to hate and I was scared of him, I mean he was such an artist that you would see him appearing until he decided to reveal himself but then Violet and Sunny and other dude were clever and all. I was seriously scared of Count Olaf, the way he killed Montgomery,the herpetologist and the way he deceived people. I really loved Lemony Snickett's collection of books. Strangely i had this idea that i was never able to chech taht he was in jail when he wrote these books. Then came 10th standard and people pressuring to study and what to do with life and all other crap which comes with it. I was so much full of people telling me to get good marks in 10th saying that it was the start of life and what not. The person who came to help me at that point was Osho. He had this awesome collection of books on various topics like Joy, Intuition and other subject which made me really philosophical and religious which is mostly also the tendency when we want to escape our present situation. Osho was a way out. He told everything that contradicted what my parents said and it was nice because i thought that i was not the only person who thought my parents uttered bullshit. Then came the 10th boards, the finals. Did I mention that I got hooked to Harry potter somewhere in my s starting of 10th and was on Deathly Harrows ,don't even know if this title is correct, before my math final exam. and god i so much i enjoyed reading about Hogwarts and the war and Voldemort and his visions and others. That was some great times and those are not over. I have these nice feelings every now and then.Like last semester, I was reading Murakami's, Norwegian Woods before some exam. It was cold winter night and Murakami made a perfectly depressing night. This was all a nice experience. I hope my curiosity to know stories does not die down. I keep on reading. And perhaps contribute some day too.

Winter of '14

I guess its finally time to write about Almora. Now that its been a while since i was there, i have had time to digest and regurgitate the ideas in my mind. So it was the starting of December that i went for a kind of pilgrimage to up in the north close to nice mountains in the small town of Almora. In the train the journey was quite comfortable,although i have a thing for upper berths and i always choose them while i am reserving tickets so as far as i can remember i have been travelling in upper births and sometimes side upper(when i am travelling in sleeper) and i always have this fear of missing my station coz i have no goddamn clue about where i am and I refrain to ask. So this time it was not bad since mine was the last station and i read 'gone girl' in train and it was quite gripping so i did not feel the time passing and i was having these nice revelations all through the book that it was hard to keep down. So I completed it in train and got down in delhi to find normal cold weather,unlike what i had expected. The thing that disgusts and at the same time comforts me is the rudeness of almost everyone there,especially bus drivers. They can be pretty dangerous. But then i took a taxi to Anand vihar and took the state bus from there to Kathgodam. the bus was a big one and there were four of us there. So i had the bus to myself. I sat in different seats and read 'palace of illusions' ,it was nice but not that gripping. i heard lot of new music on the way, particularly i listened a lot to Brahms, the symphonies are quite amazing and i guess perfect when you are travelling through small curvy roads of mountains watching Kosi river flowing by your side. So Almora i reached at around 10 in night and god was it chilly. I ate like a mammoth in the kitchen of Holiday Home, where we were staying. And surprisingly we had a TV in our room in which we watched mostly Discovery channel, or NCIS on AXN. It was so chilly, that i had a blanket for my bed sheet and a blanket and a quilt for covering meself. But there were two heaters in the room which kinda were like comforting hands of god himself. There were lectures during the day till 5 pm and then night arrived and i loved it. The food was nice and the part of the meal i liked most was breakfast. I had a bread with omlette every morning with lot of tea and sometimes parathas too. The breakfast was something i looked forward to. The shitty thing about the room was that in the lavatory there was no faucet so i had to use tissues and they got over pretty fast, not because i shit a lot, but the thing they kept there was very small. So it was always a big problem to go out in the shivering morning at 8 in my night clothes(which were embarrassing) to ask the hotel keepers to get tissue roll to the room. And even if there was a gushing faucet there, i can only imagine the pain of having five degree Celsius water hitting my ass. I had a nice view of mountains from my room, i could see a lot of them, nanda devi too which comes about a kilometre short from being the tallest mountain on earth. I met a lot of people from mostly north india there, most were funny. there was vandana, rachit, vishvesh, pradeep and more. we had to walk about half a kilometre from the hotel to the CEMS ,where the lectures used to be held. Sometimes or most, maybe most, of the times lectures were boring and other times i did not care. The tea there was awesome. It is kinda like a lifeline there to me. Most of the times , i was drinking tea. And when the days were grimmer, the day it snowed, there was no power, no hot water, no heat,no lecture(bcoz roads were blocked),no roommate, it was as if i lived in my mind and the chill made me double the quilts and refrain from moving out of my cozy shelter. Snow was nice,beautiful but it brought pain with it. There was no power for many days, i missed the heat and needed it badly. People who were teetotatalers resorted to whisky to get body heat. You see, the body is kept heated from only food and hot beverage other times we are always losing heat. When it snowed,there was no heat going inside the body. Whisky was a boon. Maybe it was the romantic atmosphere there or the cold itself, i read a lot there. I read Moll flanders, great gatsby, palace of illusions, lolita, some short stories by saki, tried reading last of the mohicans, its english is very complicated and i can never get the setting correct in my head. For that matter, i discontinued lolita too because of his flamboyant english which i had difficulty comprehending. When there was power, i read at night using my bedside lamp and when there was no power, i read under light of 6 candles or maybe more. of course with lots of tea. It was kinda amazing how one could see all those snow clad mountains and feel that they were so close(well they were) that one could start on a hike and come back the same day. I bout different types of tea like Chamomile tea, Lemongrass tea and some special flavour of Uttarakhand and stuff like that. I bought a cap popularly known for being wore by people of Himachal. I went for long strolls and bought peanuts on roadside stands, which were not cheap as i thought they would be. I saw great sunsets and hope i could say ,great sunrises but i never woke up before eight and the sun rose at 6 ish. It was nice experience there, i met new faculties,some very young. it was a time of life. it really was an enlightening experience and it made me realise that travelling is something that is worth living for. When i arrived back in delhi, it was cold to death, and there was so much fog that visibility was zero. I stayed in IIT delhi hostel with one of my friends for the night and boarded the train for pune the next day. I read 'the body of a woman' on train or something like that, it was by khushwant singh. I liked it. and here i am writing this, almost a month after my journey.

Julia

I have never wanted many things in my life and i was content with having less. When kids my age demanded random costly stuff from their parents, i never did.Maybe it was because i saw the futility of the exercise but then most people had the What's-the-harm-in-trying attitude.I did not. And this was how i grew up. So it was reasonable for me to not to expect much from life and from others too. But i couldn't keep much of my healthy disdainful spirit that day.It was scorching month of May and there were bulbous fans and thick-glassed professors churning heat on us.As the clock hit the missionary position, we got out of ours.I was happy to be out of college and was moving fast to be out of the gates early so that the viscous crowd wouldn't get to take my spirit away,along with my speed. Safely out,i took to the lighter mood and opened my new cigarette packet, removed a cig carefully and tapped it on my wrist and took a deep one. Was it the best moment of life, i sometimes wonder. That day while i was strolling back to the dorm from college,when my eyes accidently sifted through the window panes of the newly opened garment store close to college. It was a sort of a headgear.Looked like a navy cap gone wrong.It would great skills to do that sort of a horrible job.Evil perhaps. It was a shade of red,the red which is of revengeful blood and which oozes through the lustful lips of a Janelia when she is angry and with tiny meshes and ever tiny design, i knew it was the one. and god,strike me dead if i did not had the true desire to want it.Since i have been working part-time as pizza boy and janitor too,i had my share of freedom and bit of money too. So i decided to go in and get it. I was hoping it would not make me work overtime. I had to put out my cigarette,some crazy store policy.Normally, that was too much of an offense to me but that day i was not the consumer.more like the moths flying towards the fire. Upon checking with Julia, who was also working part-time there and since we had once something going on between us,she offered me 10% discount on the price of the hat or whatever it was and i was finally going to have it. and life would go on as always. Precisely when this feeling had passed me,the store manager came in from his cabin and moved towards the mannequins when to the horror of my life he removed the hat from the plastic man and took to his cabin with my booty. I was dumbstruck for a while and gaining my sanity i interjected his path to enquire about the hat. 'Hello sir, but i would like to buy that hat you are holding',i asked in panicking hysteria. 'Oh,no.This is not for sale, it a birthday gift for my son'replied the jovial unsuspecting man in his mid-forties. 'but i already bought it, check with Julia there'. 'Julia, would you kindly return the money of gentleman here and if he pleases,show him other hats we have got in stock' 'Do you have one exactly like the one you are holding' 'Well, you know,we have lots of other brands and ...' 'Do you have one exactly like that' 'Ah...no.' It was a very stressful period for me as i could not think of what to do in this situation. i had never wanted something so badly in life and when i wouldn't get it and i did not know how to respond to such a contingent situation. I was confused.I must have been really out of my mind, when i realised that i was running towards home with the cap tucked in my armpits. I know not how the past deformed to the present but i was really glad that i had it . But Julia,my childhood friend,did recall the story for me. Our parents were bussiness partners back in golden town. 'oh,hey what are you doing' 'somebody stop him' After some moment, 'Julia,you were talking to him, you must know him.if you can get me to his home, i will make someone happy and someone very sad.' 'Julia,are you even here' 'Are you listening' 'Juliaaaa...' 'Oh yes,sir,no,i mean no, i don't know him.How could I?I have been here in this town but only a few weeks.And i am not really social' 'That so.Anyways,let's file a theft and see what the police can do.'