One of the first grammer lessons that I remember to have learnt was to write GOD with a G i.e. capital. Next in line were rules that told 'his, him,he' when refferred to God should always start with capitals.
Capital, bold letters figuratively meant more respect, more deference to the almighty. I was told in the early years of my life to always bow before the God, always to praise Him, sing hymns in repect for Him, never to ridicule Him. And I did all that.....without questioning.
So I experienced all of the above, rather faced it with no other option left, and so did many of my contemperories. We, if born in the Hindu society are always told things the same way.slowly, but steadily we become Hindu,we start reciting Hanuman Chalisa, Gayatri Mantra, we make it a habit to visit the temple on tuesdays and saturdays, it becomes a rule to avoid the non vegetarian food on Tuesdays. Gradually, the pride of bieng a Hindu turns into an arrogance, we ridicule the neighbouring Muslim, make him a Mullla,make fun of his beard and scorn on his baking the chapatis on the other side of the pan. And then......PERIOD. no we dont start a riot,we are now saturated of our thoughts,and now we start to live life in a normal way...to put it as cliche ......life goes on.
The above paragraph's a general trend followed by most of Indian Hindus, we feel good in discussing it because we know everybody feels the same way and its somtimes good to be 'just another guy'.
But come what may there's always and as I see it, in each of our lifes, a second and contradictory phase. We begin ..... no we don't begin, we question the Divinity. It never is a logically taken step, it is an urge. We doubt the Saturdays and the Tuesdays. We fail to recognize the Chalisas and the Mantras,we compare the Metaphysics and the Physics of the Dharma. The conflict goes on and on, there's a fight going on in the inside...we think we have sinned and our religion wins the battle not for the love of it, but because of the fear of it.
Let's give this FEAR part a little bit rest.
Atheism , a word I started hearing quite often since 2006,when I started my college life. I found three kinds, rather categories of guys in my ambience. There were these kind of guys as mentiond in the last pararaph...those who feared.second in the list were those ,lets say them Atheist -1 who defied God just to be in the scene "ARRE YAAR HAMEIN IN SABSE FARK NAHI PADTAA " types. they are the ones who question divinity so that prople can see them questioning divinity. They to , in a way fear God , they too, in a way long for a support, a divine support ....when exams get screwed up , when life gets screwed up, but then "HUMEIN FARK NAHI PADTA"
And then the third kind...guys i have found out more recently, ATHEIST-2.People who put forward their disbelief quite openly and question the ethics quite confidently. They doubt the existence of the ultimate but marvel the spirituality of the Kashi Vishwanaath. he is one of those guys who want to find logic in his answers but then he thinks that his queries are not satisfied by his own DHARMA,,,and thus he drifts apart.
As a Hindu and as a 23 year old, I have come across these three breeds of Hindus. there are people who think HINDUISM is a religion, followed by following some special principals some specific activities, and they will be ridiculed, they will be abused or land up in hell, if they question it, so FEAR and for the fear they follow the rituals, or in their language, HINDUISM.
Secondly 'humein kyaa farak padataa hai?' , these guys are helpless, they are helpless in exploring faith, of feeling the joy of following a particular DHARMA, the joy of bieng pure..,.no furthur comments on them.....and then the third kind, who have the questions but they fail to get the answers, or dont want to get the answers, they abstain from the religion, without really knowing the religion, they want to find the answers, but then , they don't want to LEARN how to find those answers.....in my opinion 'a confused lot'
But for india...for me...for all of us....they are all Hindus...reciting HANUMAN CHALISA, not eating non. veg. on tuesdays etc etc...but then they do not follow hinduism, they do not follow the religion the ARYANS have given to us. Just because, this thing cant be followed , it has to be imbibed, Hinduism is way of living and leading a life.
Etymologically, a HINDU is a guy living east of Indus river, implying the whole of INDIA (with parts of PAKISTAN )is a flood of Hindus. Well abstractly, my definition ,kind of matches the geographical definition given above. For me Hinduism is a synonym of freedon, a freedom to live life on our own terms, a life where we can question the illogical, defy the contradictions, and thus believe what is implicit. It doesen't ask us to join our hands , recite the mantra 5:00 AM sharp but it expects us to enjoy the beauty of this place, the justified symmetrey of this mother earth, the mathematics of this universe. We dont have to fear God to live a life of a Hindu, we have to live life of peaceful accord to be a Hindu, we dont have to modify to a specific culture to become one Hindu, instead Hinduism is the name of a force that binds our culture together as culture is too pure be modified.
Its just that somewhere, we go wrong, when we become one staunch Hindu by sacrificing a sheep in a KAALI mandir, but defy the religion, in eating the same sheep on a Tuesday.It might be the perception of ours, perhaps, that God has made this a religion of 84 lac divine biengs, of scriptures, of rules. but then this religion is like the divinity itslef, shapless, formless, guileless. Of course, those 84 lac divine biengs,our very own RAMA ,KRISHNA, and the scriptures, they become fallacy if the growing beard of Mussalman, and the baking of the roti on the other side of the pan becomes a ridicule for us, because those Muslims , if they follow a path of principle,a path of peace, combining both which becomes a path of culture, then they are also the purest of hindu. As Hinduism is nothing but a way , of living a life and a process, .....a process of exploring truth, of exploring wisdom,
10 years back, the topic of my first speech was FEAR OF GOD IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM. i won the first prize in it. Much to my ill-fate, its not the fear , but the process of questioning God, asking God, about the path of real truth that brings in real wisdom to lead a peaceful life.
* The above title is basically the title of Arun Shourie's book.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
LETTER TO AN ACTOR
To,
Mr Shah Rukh Khan,
Prominent actor (Bollywood),
Address- A lavish bunglow,somewhere along the sea side in Mumbai,
sub : A plea to empower India
Sir,
With due respect I beg to state my thoughts that I wanted to confide in you for so long.
First of all,I am one of your biggest fans.From Deewana to My Name is Khan , each of your flicks have been watched by me, felt by me. I have cried , laughed ,faught in real each time you did the same on reel.
You are a guy who made himself into a man on his own terms, never compromising on values, and never making adjustments in family life. You did things every Indian does, and achieved things the same Indian craves for.You revered the Gita, respected the Quran. You played Raj in DDLJ and the whole India fell in love,you enacted Mohun Bhargava in Swadesh, and the whole nation went back to the villages.This time , on behalf of the whole of India, I want you to play the role of an Indian.
Indian culture,the oldest thriving lifestyle after the Egyptians, a jewel which reflects the shine of valour, affluence, penance and honour. Indian Culture, a candle which is toward its end, of which most of the sons and daughters have forgotten about.
These days we watch 300, we admire the reflexes of the spartans, but somewhere we forget the courage and strength of Rana Pratap and Co. We watch without the blink of an eye the classics of World War-2 when the solidarity of the Azad Hind Fauz of Subhash chandra Bose, somewhere gets lost amongst us, when thw world remembers the jews and the Holocaust through Schindler's List , no body here cares to reminisce that sanguinity of Partition. We watch a 3 hour motion of Alexander, but then we forget the grit of Porus, who moved the former, the Great one.
How do we bring back that past to the knowledge of every Indian, sir? Through History books? Whose boredom has made these unforgettable incidents into Forgettable chronicles.Through leaders, politicians? who change the whole course of our past , just for a 5 year reign.
They are your films , which , apart from cricket have influenced every Indian.Films, that for the last 80 odd years have been giving a 3 hour fantasy life to a common man.
Perhaps.....no..... for sure...... ,a common India needs a 3 hour acting from your side to underatand the realities , stories , glories and of course the atrocities of India. The nation at the edge of becoming a super power cannot be one if it remains blind folded to its glorius past.
Rana Pratap, Samudra Gupta, Shivaji, Bose, they need to be endorsed by you, enacted by you, so that India can come to know how great India is.Ashoka needs something more than his love life to be shown by who, so that the world , let alone India can Understand the meaning of Greatness.
The patriot of India needs you to awaken Indians from the deep slumber they are in .
I have chosen a letter to interact with you in this e- generation of Twitters and Facebooks 'coz letters have made revolutions, haven't they ? Marx compiled Marxism through them, Gandhi became Mahatma through a pen. Be it the World Wars, or the Papal Conferences, be it the Nazis, or the red cross, they ran the world in thier own ways through letters.
And then, a man, called Jawahahar Lal Nehru, above all the comeplexities of power politics , away from all the intricacies of diplomacy, very innocently taught his daughter about Indian Culture through letters. With such powerful proofs of the power of letter from the annals of history , I have tried to write to you what I feel is to be done at the moment.
I will be grateful if you will act in the affirmative.
Yours Sincerely,
a common man( of INDIA)
Mr Shah Rukh Khan,
Prominent actor (Bollywood),
Address- A lavish bunglow,somewhere along the sea side in Mumbai,
sub : A plea to empower India
Sir,
With due respect I beg to state my thoughts that I wanted to confide in you for so long.
First of all,I am one of your biggest fans.From Deewana to My Name is Khan , each of your flicks have been watched by me, felt by me. I have cried , laughed ,faught in real each time you did the same on reel.
You are a guy who made himself into a man on his own terms, never compromising on values, and never making adjustments in family life. You did things every Indian does, and achieved things the same Indian craves for.You revered the Gita, respected the Quran. You played Raj in DDLJ and the whole India fell in love,you enacted Mohun Bhargava in Swadesh, and the whole nation went back to the villages.This time , on behalf of the whole of India, I want you to play the role of an Indian.
Indian culture,the oldest thriving lifestyle after the Egyptians, a jewel which reflects the shine of valour, affluence, penance and honour. Indian Culture, a candle which is toward its end, of which most of the sons and daughters have forgotten about.
These days we watch 300, we admire the reflexes of the spartans, but somewhere we forget the courage and strength of Rana Pratap and Co. We watch without the blink of an eye the classics of World War-2 when the solidarity of the Azad Hind Fauz of Subhash chandra Bose, somewhere gets lost amongst us, when thw world remembers the jews and the Holocaust through Schindler's List , no body here cares to reminisce that sanguinity of Partition. We watch a 3 hour motion of Alexander, but then we forget the grit of Porus, who moved the former, the Great one.
How do we bring back that past to the knowledge of every Indian, sir? Through History books? Whose boredom has made these unforgettable incidents into Forgettable chronicles.Through leaders, politicians? who change the whole course of our past , just for a 5 year reign.
They are your films , which , apart from cricket have influenced every Indian.Films, that for the last 80 odd years have been giving a 3 hour fantasy life to a common man.
Perhaps.....no..... for sure...... ,a common India needs a 3 hour acting from your side to underatand the realities , stories , glories and of course the atrocities of India. The nation at the edge of becoming a super power cannot be one if it remains blind folded to its glorius past.
Rana Pratap, Samudra Gupta, Shivaji, Bose, they need to be endorsed by you, enacted by you, so that India can come to know how great India is.Ashoka needs something more than his love life to be shown by who, so that the world , let alone India can Understand the meaning of Greatness.
The patriot of India needs you to awaken Indians from the deep slumber they are in .
I have chosen a letter to interact with you in this e- generation of Twitters and Facebooks 'coz letters have made revolutions, haven't they ? Marx compiled Marxism through them, Gandhi became Mahatma through a pen. Be it the World Wars, or the Papal Conferences, be it the Nazis, or the red cross, they ran the world in thier own ways through letters.
And then, a man, called Jawahahar Lal Nehru, above all the comeplexities of power politics , away from all the intricacies of diplomacy, very innocently taught his daughter about Indian Culture through letters. With such powerful proofs of the power of letter from the annals of history , I have tried to write to you what I feel is to be done at the moment.
I will be grateful if you will act in the affirmative.
Yours Sincerely,
a common man( of INDIA)
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
BAREILLY.........
These dots, yes, those right after Y,circles filled with black ink,representing nothingness,representing void,a riddle, where you know you’ve got something to offer, to explore everything,yet nothing is achieved. These dots for me are bareiily, unclear, unimaginable,underestimated yet so unruffled, So unfettered .
In the first go, I hate bareilly, I vomit at the mere thought of abhaipur. Those memories of “Band Samosa” of Aslam (my MBIC canteenman) bring tears to my eyes when Kaushal’s daal-parantha meets the retina. I feel impugnant when after every 30 minutes there is a long jam covering all what’s there in Kodesia.”Kyun koi rehna chahega is shahar me” vikas Singh shouts in the midst of the jam. Me responding, “haan yaar, kahe koi rahega”. There are no parks,no malls,name any chicken dish and you’ve got the same taste. Road minus bumps equals nothing, cut the crap..its hideous.
Second round of thoughts , and I go down memory lane. I get wet with the colours of holi we play with ,every time at station. There are those tasety nights ,filled with chicken bhuja,roasted chicken and the uncle at Anand shouting ,”aaj aap log bahut dino k baad aaye”. One cannot loose those BP Mondays , guys clipped with accessories , smothered with perfume, and full of murmurs.” Abe aaj wo bhi aaegi!!”. My mind also comes across quiet moments of syndicate book house, only to get a book of choice, ending in failiure everytime.
Brain ,now turns creative, no, calculative, ‘coz now it counts the first timers, those maiden ones, the first time I started living alone, the first bunk,the first Monday,the first time I liked a girl,the first time I had a full plate butter chicken with only 1 leg piece(trust me , it happened),first time short attendance, the first curfew.
And here’s when the road takes a sharp turn, we’re at the by-pass, Raja and me in the college bus, 11 march, 2010 going to post our admission forms. The ride to junction(as station is called ) is always full of excitement ,as mostly it’s a trip down home, but this time I witnessed peace, no, quieteness.
There were no tempowallahs shouting “CB Ganja a jaao”…CB Ganj was hit with riots. The by-pass was looking like a dumb guy, shops all closed, everything deserted ,as a few days back, it had turned dumb to a mockery of humanity, shops all burnt ,everything destroyed. We are now on our way to fly-over and except for the choti li ne train,nothing at all. Tilak Inter College, the epitome of education in Bareilly was looking like a symbol of apocalypse.the ground opposite to that..no kids, no cricket..just mud with patches of dust.
We move a little further—a truck full of people shouting slogans. The driver stops the music. One faculty sitting looks around carefuly, sighs and says,”Truck bhar k jaa rhe hain, aaj fir bawaal hoga”. The bus moves through a different route this time. I didn’t see Syndicate , BP, Selection Point. Places, I was just imagining ,where I had searched for my definition for 4 years, how were they in riots, in plunder, the book house, the chicken hotel, those model shops, the ‘outlaw’ showroom. Heartbeat was getting faster, eyes were getting closed.
My fourth round of thoughts were ending, we were reaching junction, I was missing bareilly I hated. we were moving through a place where on one side there were green flags fluttering , in stiff competion with the orange ones on the other. Somewhere in the middle there was a Gandhi Ashram shop still carryin a tri-colour..Jai Hind written all over it.
P.S.
B.P. Butler Plaza
Anand Anand Chickem Shop.
In the first go, I hate bareilly, I vomit at the mere thought of abhaipur. Those memories of “Band Samosa” of Aslam (my MBIC canteenman) bring tears to my eyes when Kaushal’s daal-parantha meets the retina. I feel impugnant when after every 30 minutes there is a long jam covering all what’s there in Kodesia.”Kyun koi rehna chahega is shahar me” vikas Singh shouts in the midst of the jam. Me responding, “haan yaar, kahe koi rahega”. There are no parks,no malls,name any chicken dish and you’ve got the same taste. Road minus bumps equals nothing, cut the crap..its hideous.
Second round of thoughts , and I go down memory lane. I get wet with the colours of holi we play with ,every time at station. There are those tasety nights ,filled with chicken bhuja,roasted chicken and the uncle at Anand shouting ,”aaj aap log bahut dino k baad aaye”. One cannot loose those BP Mondays , guys clipped with accessories , smothered with perfume, and full of murmurs.” Abe aaj wo bhi aaegi!!”. My mind also comes across quiet moments of syndicate book house, only to get a book of choice, ending in failiure everytime.
Brain ,now turns creative, no, calculative, ‘coz now it counts the first timers, those maiden ones, the first time I started living alone, the first bunk,the first Monday,the first time I liked a girl,the first time I had a full plate butter chicken with only 1 leg piece(trust me , it happened),first time short attendance, the first curfew.
And here’s when the road takes a sharp turn, we’re at the by-pass, Raja and me in the college bus, 11 march, 2010 going to post our admission forms. The ride to junction(as station is called ) is always full of excitement ,as mostly it’s a trip down home, but this time I witnessed peace, no, quieteness.
There were no tempowallahs shouting “CB Ganja a jaao”…CB Ganj was hit with riots. The by-pass was looking like a dumb guy, shops all closed, everything deserted ,as a few days back, it had turned dumb to a mockery of humanity, shops all burnt ,everything destroyed. We are now on our way to fly-over and except for the choti li ne train,nothing at all. Tilak Inter College, the epitome of education in Bareilly was looking like a symbol of apocalypse.the ground opposite to that..no kids, no cricket..just mud with patches of dust.
We move a little further—a truck full of people shouting slogans. The driver stops the music. One faculty sitting looks around carefuly, sighs and says,”Truck bhar k jaa rhe hain, aaj fir bawaal hoga”. The bus moves through a different route this time. I didn’t see Syndicate , BP, Selection Point. Places, I was just imagining ,where I had searched for my definition for 4 years, how were they in riots, in plunder, the book house, the chicken hotel, those model shops, the ‘outlaw’ showroom. Heartbeat was getting faster, eyes were getting closed.
My fourth round of thoughts were ending, we were reaching junction, I was missing bareilly I hated. we were moving through a place where on one side there were green flags fluttering , in stiff competion with the orange ones on the other. Somewhere in the middle there was a Gandhi Ashram shop still carryin a tri-colour..Jai Hind written all over it.
P.S.
B.P. Butler Plaza
Anand Anand Chickem Shop.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
RDB+FPS+3IDIOTS= VARUN PANT??
I have seen 3 Idiots….
I have seen it first day, first show…..
I have seen it 4 days before my end-sems…
And here I am, at last …..writing something about it….but first…
MARCH ’06 WAVE CINEMAS, RDB
It was , like a month before the JEE, I knew I was not made for it, but still was craving for it. On top of that I found it hard to choose – the knowledge that I was not made for it , or that craving. So to calm my nerves down, I went, for the first time in a multiplex, to a movie where aamir khan has till date the sexiest haircut. I sat down, looked at it, cried during the end credits, chose it the best movie I ever saw, but during that rickshaw ride back home I discovered, that I was a part of the youth RDB focused on. Suddenly a spirit was born , and an agility to change the things took form. The ‘craving’ won the battle as I waited to become successful, to be distinct, the environs around me were roaring…
stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….
SEPT’06 …UNIVERSAL BOOKSTORES
I read FPS* when I entered into this chapel of technical knowhow, I had started doing engineering with a crash landing of rank 6914, and it was not long after I started having shivers of ED classes that I got through this book. Two reasons that I chose to read the book
1. The book was by an IITian and about the IIT.
2. I was studying in UPTU**
I started reading because I had the curiosity of what these temples of modern india were like, what an IITian, was like, wanted to experience the life of a person my parents dreamt me of becoming, a person I knew I was not made to be..but still…..
I read the book, didn’t get that IITian, but….got to meet a person who lived a life that I had started to live, I got to know a hosteller, I got to know an engineer, I got to know friendship. Bieng the only son, being the ‘most protected one’ who learnt cycling at the age of 14, I never liked hostels, I never liked late night studies, midnight smokes, and random whiskies, but FPS, kind of, told me spot on…
stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….
DEC ’09……NATRAJ HALL
3 idiots was my 3rd movie after becoming a day scholar, a day scholar who still thought the hostel time of room no. 67,10 and 38 as the best time of his life, a day scholar who went to the college in the day all right but SCHOLAR …. I doubt..and so I went to see a dashing aamir khan , a 0-figured kareena, and a possible steamy scene, but then I got that was something more than a steamy scene.
I got to understand passion, apart from all the glitz ,and the zoobi-dooni’ness, it told about passion, or something more than that -following that passion, or even something more,-capturing and living ur life with it. Madhavan’s academic dump seemed to be the story behind my 65% aggregate. I realized perhaps that designing websites in ASP.NET cannot be my forte. And his later adventure in Brazillian rainforest as a photographer told met to follow your dreams , let loose of yourself, accept your heartbeat, and follow its words..that said..
stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….
P.S. …I don’t know which of the phase was right..or wrong, but cut these three phases and I find Varun Pant aka me difficult to imagine.
*FPS= five point someone
** UPTU- a rare univ where you get the rarest species of engineers-CRAMineers.
I have seen it first day, first show…..
I have seen it 4 days before my end-sems…
And here I am, at last …..writing something about it….but first…
MARCH ’06 WAVE CINEMAS, RDB
It was , like a month before the JEE, I knew I was not made for it, but still was craving for it. On top of that I found it hard to choose – the knowledge that I was not made for it , or that craving. So to calm my nerves down, I went, for the first time in a multiplex, to a movie where aamir khan has till date the sexiest haircut. I sat down, looked at it, cried during the end credits, chose it the best movie I ever saw, but during that rickshaw ride back home I discovered, that I was a part of the youth RDB focused on. Suddenly a spirit was born , and an agility to change the things took form. The ‘craving’ won the battle as I waited to become successful, to be distinct, the environs around me were roaring…
stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….
SEPT’06 …UNIVERSAL BOOKSTORES
I read FPS* when I entered into this chapel of technical knowhow, I had started doing engineering with a crash landing of rank 6914, and it was not long after I started having shivers of ED classes that I got through this book. Two reasons that I chose to read the book
1. The book was by an IITian and about the IIT.
2. I was studying in UPTU**
I started reading because I had the curiosity of what these temples of modern india were like, what an IITian, was like, wanted to experience the life of a person my parents dreamt me of becoming, a person I knew I was not made to be..but still…..
I read the book, didn’t get that IITian, but….got to meet a person who lived a life that I had started to live, I got to know a hosteller, I got to know an engineer, I got to know friendship. Bieng the only son, being the ‘most protected one’ who learnt cycling at the age of 14, I never liked hostels, I never liked late night studies, midnight smokes, and random whiskies, but FPS, kind of, told me spot on…
stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….
DEC ’09……NATRAJ HALL
3 idiots was my 3rd movie after becoming a day scholar, a day scholar who still thought the hostel time of room no. 67,10 and 38 as the best time of his life, a day scholar who went to the college in the day all right but SCHOLAR …. I doubt..and so I went to see a dashing aamir khan , a 0-figured kareena, and a possible steamy scene, but then I got that was something more than a steamy scene.
I got to understand passion, apart from all the glitz ,and the zoobi-dooni’ness, it told about passion, or something more than that -following that passion, or even something more,-capturing and living ur life with it. Madhavan’s academic dump seemed to be the story behind my 65% aggregate. I realized perhaps that designing websites in ASP.NET cannot be my forte. And his later adventure in Brazillian rainforest as a photographer told met to follow your dreams , let loose of yourself, accept your heartbeat, and follow its words..that said..
stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….
P.S. …I don’t know which of the phase was right..or wrong, but cut these three phases and I find Varun Pant aka me difficult to imagine.
*FPS= five point someone
** UPTU- a rare univ where you get the rarest species of engineers-CRAMineers.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
FACEBOOK...naam hii kaafi hai.....
There are times which are not just times. They cant be reduced to hours reduced to minutes, seconds…etc.These moments revolve around an axis, they revolve around a persona,that defines that moment , that rationalizes that time. Some great person , some great object carries the baton of that time with him and then that interval cant be defined in dates, it becomes much more than that,it surmounts to an ERA.
Eras, there have been many,that which came like a lightening with chengiz khan, or that which was came like an ordeal of peace with Ashoka. Sometimes it proved apocalyptic, when carried by guys like Hitler, Mussolini, and sometimes a tyrant like Mao, reconstructed the whole era. But, if I have taken even the minimum amounts of pain,in developing those nuero cells in my brain,I may not be wrong in saying that perhaps for the maiden time in the history of civilization, any era is in progress to be made out of questions like “WHAT TYPE OF KISSER ARE YOU”, out of quizzes like “WHAT WOULD YOU MOST LIKELY GET ARRESTED FOR “. Such an era is constructed by cyberscenic and worked out by biz-frieks ,only to be played by “PEOPLE”,and the sovereign, socialist , republic of this mother earth calls it….F A C E B O O K.
FACEBOOK, nothing extraordinary , when I saw the web page for the first time, just a subtle combo of white and blue, and yes there was something I used to admire a lot in it,and that was SIMPLICITY. Little did I knew that those sober pages were made to control the psychology of the most intelligent animal on the earth, ’the human being’. Facebook started to counter with our lives when I was still a hosteller, the craze of G-Talk, was still above the limits, with status messages getting longer and longer, and now that orkut was banned by the firewall, facebook sneaked in from somewhere.
“abe is par America se bhi dost ban jaate hai”, “abe ye bahut zyaada secure hai”,”mast hai be”, were the reasons I used to get when I asked them “why facebook”. Actually the problem was , I was in love with ORKUT. I loved its insecurity, the way it used to rip apart our privacy. I never can forget those days when I used sneak in any profile just grabbing some acute personal info about that guy, or as happened in most cases ,that girl. So I took a vow,not to use it, but sadly the others didn’t. and the classic blue of orkut, the colour of the sea where we used to float our heart out transformed to the gentle white of facebook, the color of sky where guys used to soar along, higher and higher.
“ha ha ha, abe karra comment tha ,”,”abe wo waali quiz mast thi be” , these were the general sounds that I started hearing as I became a day-scholar, at first I thought there might be some weekend program organized by hostel athaurities. But quizzes are not what they call a hosteller’s forte, so what was that. Slowly and steadily I got the answers, not through any explanations, but thorough a vivid observation. When I saw the PCs of our labs where we we were to make c programs turn white and blue. Classrooms became quiz centres and the would be engineers were the future quizmasters. The server of facebook turned to a sorcerer, which told you about your best friends, expalined you about the car you resembled,and as I have said prophesized the kiss that I would take in the near future.
I was going mad now, I was the only one who was there with orkut, blabbering about orkut, its themes ,its quizzes, but as it turned out orkut was now the thing of the past. And then there came a day, I created a facebook account and commented “F**K OFF facebook,orkut rules” and signed off,.then again signed in and saw that comment was counter-commented by many,I felt good, again scribbles something,signed in again, and this scribbling with comments continued until I played the quiz,” what personality are you”, and after sporting a string a question I got yhe answer “DOMINATING”, - now for a guy like me who failed to even become the monitor of his class, who loved that last bench of his in schools and colleges, loved the word ‘dominating’ and so I endeavoured into a new world of quizzes and comments, and a subsequent divorce to orkut was given.
Its been 3 months I have been following quizzes in facebook, and in these months have tried to understand me and my friends; madness for it, what I have got is as given below
There is nothing big in the magnificient come magnanimous craze of this F thing,its just contains 2 logistics:-
1. Applying a 3 tier Client Server Architecture.
2. Knowing the art of reading the minds of people.
The first one is developed by geeks, constantly jabbering around servers, redundantly manipulating the I-Protocols. The second logistic , is done by common men, who got no degrees, they might have been college dropouts, but knew what the other person wants in the crowed. They knew it well that “MAN IS A SOCIAL ANIMAL”, and there, too, stressed on more on the ANIMAL instincts of man. they will give you what you want from it and thus it'll end up being the thing you will crave for.
p.s.- last night after 3 months I opened orkut, I felt like it was crying, as why I had cheated upon her, why I moved on to facebook. I couldn’t say a word, just logged off, and then aftera few minutes, started playing a quiz..”WHAT TYPE OF A CHEATER ARE YOU”.
Eras, there have been many,that which came like a lightening with chengiz khan, or that which was came like an ordeal of peace with Ashoka. Sometimes it proved apocalyptic, when carried by guys like Hitler, Mussolini, and sometimes a tyrant like Mao, reconstructed the whole era. But, if I have taken even the minimum amounts of pain,in developing those nuero cells in my brain,I may not be wrong in saying that perhaps for the maiden time in the history of civilization, any era is in progress to be made out of questions like “WHAT TYPE OF KISSER ARE YOU”, out of quizzes like “WHAT WOULD YOU MOST LIKELY GET ARRESTED FOR “. Such an era is constructed by cyberscenic and worked out by biz-frieks ,only to be played by “PEOPLE”,and the sovereign, socialist , republic of this mother earth calls it….F A C E B O O K.
FACEBOOK, nothing extraordinary , when I saw the web page for the first time, just a subtle combo of white and blue, and yes there was something I used to admire a lot in it,and that was SIMPLICITY. Little did I knew that those sober pages were made to control the psychology of the most intelligent animal on the earth, ’the human being’. Facebook started to counter with our lives when I was still a hosteller, the craze of G-Talk, was still above the limits, with status messages getting longer and longer, and now that orkut was banned by the firewall, facebook sneaked in from somewhere.
“abe is par America se bhi dost ban jaate hai”, “abe ye bahut zyaada secure hai”,”mast hai be”, were the reasons I used to get when I asked them “why facebook”. Actually the problem was , I was in love with ORKUT. I loved its insecurity, the way it used to rip apart our privacy. I never can forget those days when I used sneak in any profile just grabbing some acute personal info about that guy, or as happened in most cases ,that girl. So I took a vow,not to use it, but sadly the others didn’t. and the classic blue of orkut, the colour of the sea where we used to float our heart out transformed to the gentle white of facebook, the color of sky where guys used to soar along, higher and higher.
“ha ha ha, abe karra comment tha ,”,”abe wo waali quiz mast thi be” , these were the general sounds that I started hearing as I became a day-scholar, at first I thought there might be some weekend program organized by hostel athaurities. But quizzes are not what they call a hosteller’s forte, so what was that. Slowly and steadily I got the answers, not through any explanations, but thorough a vivid observation. When I saw the PCs of our labs where we we were to make c programs turn white and blue. Classrooms became quiz centres and the would be engineers were the future quizmasters. The server of facebook turned to a sorcerer, which told you about your best friends, expalined you about the car you resembled,and as I have said prophesized the kiss that I would take in the near future.
I was going mad now, I was the only one who was there with orkut, blabbering about orkut, its themes ,its quizzes, but as it turned out orkut was now the thing of the past. And then there came a day, I created a facebook account and commented “F**K OFF facebook,orkut rules” and signed off,.then again signed in and saw that comment was counter-commented by many,I felt good, again scribbles something,signed in again, and this scribbling with comments continued until I played the quiz,” what personality are you”, and after sporting a string a question I got yhe answer “DOMINATING”, - now for a guy like me who failed to even become the monitor of his class, who loved that last bench of his in schools and colleges, loved the word ‘dominating’ and so I endeavoured into a new world of quizzes and comments, and a subsequent divorce to orkut was given.
Its been 3 months I have been following quizzes in facebook, and in these months have tried to understand me and my friends; madness for it, what I have got is as given below
There is nothing big in the magnificient come magnanimous craze of this F thing,its just contains 2 logistics:-
1. Applying a 3 tier Client Server Architecture.
2. Knowing the art of reading the minds of people.
The first one is developed by geeks, constantly jabbering around servers, redundantly manipulating the I-Protocols. The second logistic , is done by common men, who got no degrees, they might have been college dropouts, but knew what the other person wants in the crowed. They knew it well that “MAN IS A SOCIAL ANIMAL”, and there, too, stressed on more on the ANIMAL instincts of man. they will give you what you want from it and thus it'll end up being the thing you will crave for.
p.s.- last night after 3 months I opened orkut, I felt like it was crying, as why I had cheated upon her, why I moved on to facebook. I couldn’t say a word, just logged off, and then aftera few minutes, started playing a quiz..”WHAT TYPE OF A CHEATER ARE YOU”.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
AS THEY SAY 'DREAM COME TRUE','LIFETIME WOW'...blah blah
As per records, I am doing engineering ;well according to my Orkut profile’s Professional page its ‘forget it..just ‘cram’eneering. Anything ,in these 4 years…differential equations, tower of Hanoi, PDA ,Codd’s rules…..etc etc….have not been able to influence me (or I am not able to…who knows). Its always my ACCENT,my DEBATES, my “ANGREZI” that has given me respect, sometimes given me internals and one time , I guess, I got a GP of 49 marks. But to tell you the truth, I am not comfortable in it, I seriously love hindi, the language in which I scored distinction in class 10th, the language in which I learnt to talk with my parents, the lang in which I learnt friendship, and also how to abuse friends. But still for all that it has given me,I must respect the LINGUA FRANCA of this world and so….lets visit in cloak of this respected language, the “dream come true” and “life time wow” of this ‘cram’eneering session..TOUR de MANALI come ROHTANG come CHANDIGARH.
The night that brought us from the 6th to the 7th of September was not an easy one. Apart from the excitement and observance of the excited status messages of pals,it was the night when I had seen a hint of reality, of professionalism, which had confirmed me pf the fact that this mother earth is not perfectly spherical but a little deshaped and that’s what makes all the difference. So 7th started with an alarming call by Niteesh, the shrillness of the ring tone signified the height of exhaustion(and enjoyment) that we were going to face, and thus at about 6:30 ,the sun about to rise,the weather (at last) devoid of the clouds, we started our march towards the bus,towards a dream ,towards ecstasy.
My first impression about our TITANIC, the bus, was of coziness, which gradually changed to congested. The first voices heard inside the bus was a song..”aaya rey”..i liked it..started tapping my feet, until I realized the technical faults of the tape and thus the tapping and the liking slowly vanished.
And now, at last we were off, for me it was still a dream, which, a day back I was convinced would be a nightmare. All 40+ of us, girls, boys, girls with boys, digicams, everything was bustling…like boiling milk*. I don’t remember much about the first hour, as the 3 musketeers of A-6 , Shastri nagar(raja ,me and vikky) choose dozing rather than singing Love Aajkal’s ‘aise kaise ho gayi re’ which was an instant hit for the last 4 rows of the bus.
The bus moved on……
BREAKFAST TIME…and my dreamy, dozing self found some heavy breakfast. “Yes !!! it was true…the tour is really on..yipee” I was thinking until Ramandeep singh announced…”HOD was angry in the project lab, have to report him next week.” All my dreams, of playing in the snow,dancing in the bon-fire,immediately changed to nightmares of cut short internals,deducted GPs, Year Backs etc. I tried to bring the nightmare down for the next 7 days as Muradabad was the next target, both for the bus, and us. Basically our target was Pankaj Singh, Muradabad was just a buffer for that, came Muradabad and guys were charged up as if we had reached the ultimate, songs were instantly made,poems were immediately created with finesse, just to watch the glow(or not-so-glow) of Pankaj Singh’s face. “kisi din banoongi main RAJA kii RANI” was echoing in that enthralled atmosphere until my dancing,enjoying persona drowned again in a grand siesta.
The bus moved on…
I missed the chance of watching rest of the Uttar Pradesh. i discovered twilight when I woke up, and instantly I was told that we are somewhere near the Haryana-Uttar Pradesh Border.”wow we are entering in a new state, so finally a new state visited!!!”, again repercussions of “yes the tour is on” were in full throttle. In came the night and on came the Jat’s land, I realized that there were some expert information that was coming about the state, I soon confirmed that “saali beer keval 40 rupaye kii hai”..was all that was being announced. To add to those “just 40 rupees” I realized that road turned quite smooth and yes,I needed some more sleep. Well that was last of my sound sleeps.
The bus moved on…
Dinner time..was a normal one and here we got out first taste of Haryanvi-Punjabi culture as ‘maa ki daal’ was served to us. 10:00 PM and back to the bus and..sleeping was not allowed and thus started a session full of songs, full of shayari, the college life that I dreamt of during my struggling days at TRIVAAG was coming true on that midnight. All the fines that we had given, all the fights that we had done, all the cold wars that we were engaged in were just being washed away,until we discovered by the topsy-turvying of the bus that the mountains had arrived.
The bus moved on….
That night was quiet. Everybody was rich with sleep except me as the last seat of the bus did two things to me….draining me of sleep and allowing me to admire the mountains, the divine conic sections which made me felt proud of being a kumaoni. The prudence increased as morning came and Manali was welcomed. It was the second time that I was seeing snow-clad mountains..and least to say..i was glad. Manali was much like my Uttarakhand, scenic, confirming that greenery was still alive somewhere also confirming the presence of endangered yak. My 3 years in hostel have filled me with one piece of information that a girl looks most beautiful on her wedding night. Although it was day time but Manali was gorgeous like a newly wed bride. One felt like kissing them as one saw those greenish hills.
About those temples we visited: they had nothing in them ….still acquainted with something..they weren’t the worship domes of Creators, they were the cottages of the creators , the builders, the magicians of the universe. Everything was quite, serene seemed as God was having a date with us.
The night was firy. …seriously it was.. there was fire and we were dancing around it. Again the dance was different. Chacha’s b’day was the first occasion when I first danced my heart out, and then there were many, where we flaunted our joints,but this one had some chicks,had some fire, and then there were we, ever so desperate to bring the Elvis out of us, also there was the IT branch which was dancing along, probably reminiscing the 3.5 years long journey that started from 17th aug 2006 and were dealt with repercussions, reverberations,which today were adding more to the music of the DJ. Night came and the guys still jumping with that unity circle* thing , ate and slept to discover another mesmerizing ‘snowy’ day.
The night carried along……
After a long time we were in a room with a television + a bathroom+ a western toilet. The cozy quilts made our journey to Rohtang late by an hour.a hurried breakfast and a short stream of photo sessions was all that was needed to pull up our socks and head on to see the snow in all its feast and fervor. So at last ,we were there in a Qualis and I finally was heading towards seeing snow for the first time. Rohtang was the icing of that tour, the reason why half of the people of our tour were with us, it was a dream we were dreaming from academic blocks and canteen, we all had fancied and fantasized different faces of Rohtang and now we were about to unveil the prized veil of that gorgeous lady ‘always’ in white. There were some halts…
1. When our normal ‘tourist self’ was converted to an abnormal ‘eskimo self’, courtesy” that protective suit and
2. When we realized that that goggles that was worth ‘rs 100..bargained to.. rs 40’ suited us and we had an avalanche of photo sessions only to discover that battery was discharged. But still….
Our quails moved on…
And so…seeing a live demonstration of dealing with a land slide, and experiencing a mile long jam we finally were with the snow we were anticipating. It was like those fantasies where we are locked in the room with the girl we stare from our balcony. “why called rohtang pass??” ,was the question still disturbing me but those frozen water falls, and foamy snow were degrading that disturbance. And so finally the end point was reached, we discovered that we were there in that Leh-Laddakh Road and finally I understood the meaning of Rohtang Pass , its relationship to the silk route and admired myself to have reached there.
That snowy hill and the 9 of us…
That snow was shining up the mountain and we were dying to kiss it. We discarded those donkeys besides us, and we chose the hard way, we believed in our feet and for sure what a belief it was!!!! We started marching, there were , at that time just two differences between us and Bhagat singh, one we were not going to the gallows and two we didn’t know ‘mera rang de basanti chola’. So we continued and slowly but STEADILY the Bhagat Singh inside started fading away and breathlessness showed its colours, we took a rest, we were 22, felt like 82 but had that temptation to go up still like a 22, so we moved on…we stopped for a tea, which acted like a bisleri in the Sahara and incidentally I got my best ever snap (as Harry told) clicked there. The vegetation seemed lesser, the snow seemed nearer the legs seemed weaker, the excitement seemed tougher, at last God was felt closer and Bingo!!!! I had reached it,I was there in the snow, playing, caressing, admiring, except writing somebody’s name on that snow,,perhaps I had to wait for another destination for that. That snow point was where, I guess I was kissing snow and making love with success, I was discovering it, there was this sweet taste I was tasting which I got by overpowering the breathlessness, the exhaustion, it was beautiful and I was enjoying it.
Coming down I had just started celebrating our trek until I found out that I had lost my purse, with that my right to drive a vehicle( DL) and my ‘cash in palstic’(ATM). But then again, all was fair in love, war and rohtang. Back in the hotel the sorrow of purse was gulped down with the tea and so from that tops-turvying we were heading towards the ACHTECTURAL AJOOBA….the land of goddess …CHANDIGARH. And 10 PM sharp our journey to witness the modern wonder of India started.
The bus moved on….(this time a little quickly)..
This time I got a little sleep in the bus, as I was exhausted singing those medival times songs and screaming more than singing. we got no deluxe rooms we got dorms with no TV ,no western toilet , but with smoke detectors, that were not there in that deluxe room. Buzzes of ‘daaru yahaan bhii sastii hai’ were still buzzing around . Some sleep some paraanthaas and we were there in the INFY campus , on our way, watching, for the first time, more surds than normal shaven guys.
Eye-opener INFY
It was here that we were confirmed of the fact that not only we know nothing,but we also do not have a goal, we might have played with snow, bought beer at half rate, had travelled 4 states but PRO-ness was what we were devoid of. One thing we did there with confidence…eat that good quality lunch..though the custard was a bit like a Pain killer, but, perhaps we deserved it. ‘INFY.we will be back’ with this in mind and a snap clicked with its counselors we moved in to Rock Gardens. Rock garden was a gem,that’s it, nothing more, ……OK ..something more, it showed the perseverance of a single man, the creativity of a single self, that ‘life is not to waste but to cherish it’ was all that was written over it. We were having snaps clicked like anything but it was a place to be snapped in mind as that garden was telling the colours of life, all sewn to one, be it love , hatred, lust, everything being a subset of creativity….again Kudos.
The evening was spent admiring the BROOOOOOOOOOOAD roads of sector 17, 2 snaps (one infront of woodland) and an hour’s search for a food joint which ended with one chicken burger. You see,if manali was beautiful, rohtang was majestic, Chandigarh was ambitious, it showed realism,modernity. If manali was worth admiring, rohtang worth worshipping, then Chandigarh was worth experiencing,learning and imbibing, and so taking a rickshaw, studying the architectural intricacies of the city and with my maiden snap in the rickshaw we reached back to the dorm
‘Wake up SID’ was in the store …again just 2 statements for it
1. As vikky said…’it ended where it should have started’ and
2. Mota’s b’day coincided with that of Konkana in the movie
The day was over , the tour was over, the dream that we were dreaming was coming to an end , but we all were determined to cherish it forever. Next day, the journey back was filled with dumb-charades, songs, dahi-parantha ,a jam near Rampur and in the end I was woken up at Izzat Nagar, I wondered why,until I realized that I had become a Day-Scholar and life was somewhere in the city. Next day ,I woke up at 12:00, and …………
At last ‘life moves on and on and on……’
* Sorry for that bad similie
* a memorable moment where were not individuals , but IT-06 and also proud of it
P.S. – dedicated to Birju and Shashi Kant Sir..no need to tell why.
The night that brought us from the 6th to the 7th of September was not an easy one. Apart from the excitement and observance of the excited status messages of pals,it was the night when I had seen a hint of reality, of professionalism, which had confirmed me pf the fact that this mother earth is not perfectly spherical but a little deshaped and that’s what makes all the difference. So 7th started with an alarming call by Niteesh, the shrillness of the ring tone signified the height of exhaustion(and enjoyment) that we were going to face, and thus at about 6:30 ,the sun about to rise,the weather (at last) devoid of the clouds, we started our march towards the bus,towards a dream ,towards ecstasy.
My first impression about our TITANIC, the bus, was of coziness, which gradually changed to congested. The first voices heard inside the bus was a song..”aaya rey”..i liked it..started tapping my feet, until I realized the technical faults of the tape and thus the tapping and the liking slowly vanished.
And now, at last we were off, for me it was still a dream, which, a day back I was convinced would be a nightmare. All 40+ of us, girls, boys, girls with boys, digicams, everything was bustling…like boiling milk*. I don’t remember much about the first hour, as the 3 musketeers of A-6 , Shastri nagar(raja ,me and vikky) choose dozing rather than singing Love Aajkal’s ‘aise kaise ho gayi re’ which was an instant hit for the last 4 rows of the bus.
The bus moved on……
BREAKFAST TIME…and my dreamy, dozing self found some heavy breakfast. “Yes !!! it was true…the tour is really on..yipee” I was thinking until Ramandeep singh announced…”HOD was angry in the project lab, have to report him next week.” All my dreams, of playing in the snow,dancing in the bon-fire,immediately changed to nightmares of cut short internals,deducted GPs, Year Backs etc. I tried to bring the nightmare down for the next 7 days as Muradabad was the next target, both for the bus, and us. Basically our target was Pankaj Singh, Muradabad was just a buffer for that, came Muradabad and guys were charged up as if we had reached the ultimate, songs were instantly made,poems were immediately created with finesse, just to watch the glow(or not-so-glow) of Pankaj Singh’s face. “kisi din banoongi main RAJA kii RANI” was echoing in that enthralled atmosphere until my dancing,enjoying persona drowned again in a grand siesta.
The bus moved on…
I missed the chance of watching rest of the Uttar Pradesh. i discovered twilight when I woke up, and instantly I was told that we are somewhere near the Haryana-Uttar Pradesh Border.”wow we are entering in a new state, so finally a new state visited!!!”, again repercussions of “yes the tour is on” were in full throttle. In came the night and on came the Jat’s land, I realized that there were some expert information that was coming about the state, I soon confirmed that “saali beer keval 40 rupaye kii hai”..was all that was being announced. To add to those “just 40 rupees” I realized that road turned quite smooth and yes,I needed some more sleep. Well that was last of my sound sleeps.
The bus moved on…
Dinner time..was a normal one and here we got out first taste of Haryanvi-Punjabi culture as ‘maa ki daal’ was served to us. 10:00 PM and back to the bus and..sleeping was not allowed and thus started a session full of songs, full of shayari, the college life that I dreamt of during my struggling days at TRIVAAG was coming true on that midnight. All the fines that we had given, all the fights that we had done, all the cold wars that we were engaged in were just being washed away,until we discovered by the topsy-turvying of the bus that the mountains had arrived.
The bus moved on….
That night was quiet. Everybody was rich with sleep except me as the last seat of the bus did two things to me….draining me of sleep and allowing me to admire the mountains, the divine conic sections which made me felt proud of being a kumaoni. The prudence increased as morning came and Manali was welcomed. It was the second time that I was seeing snow-clad mountains..and least to say..i was glad. Manali was much like my Uttarakhand, scenic, confirming that greenery was still alive somewhere also confirming the presence of endangered yak. My 3 years in hostel have filled me with one piece of information that a girl looks most beautiful on her wedding night. Although it was day time but Manali was gorgeous like a newly wed bride. One felt like kissing them as one saw those greenish hills.
About those temples we visited: they had nothing in them ….still acquainted with something..they weren’t the worship domes of Creators, they were the cottages of the creators , the builders, the magicians of the universe. Everything was quite, serene seemed as God was having a date with us.
The night was firy. …seriously it was.. there was fire and we were dancing around it. Again the dance was different. Chacha’s b’day was the first occasion when I first danced my heart out, and then there were many, where we flaunted our joints,but this one had some chicks,had some fire, and then there were we, ever so desperate to bring the Elvis out of us, also there was the IT branch which was dancing along, probably reminiscing the 3.5 years long journey that started from 17th aug 2006 and were dealt with repercussions, reverberations,which today were adding more to the music of the DJ. Night came and the guys still jumping with that unity circle* thing , ate and slept to discover another mesmerizing ‘snowy’ day.
The night carried along……
After a long time we were in a room with a television + a bathroom+ a western toilet. The cozy quilts made our journey to Rohtang late by an hour.a hurried breakfast and a short stream of photo sessions was all that was needed to pull up our socks and head on to see the snow in all its feast and fervor. So at last ,we were there in a Qualis and I finally was heading towards seeing snow for the first time. Rohtang was the icing of that tour, the reason why half of the people of our tour were with us, it was a dream we were dreaming from academic blocks and canteen, we all had fancied and fantasized different faces of Rohtang and now we were about to unveil the prized veil of that gorgeous lady ‘always’ in white. There were some halts…
1. When our normal ‘tourist self’ was converted to an abnormal ‘eskimo self’, courtesy” that protective suit and
2. When we realized that that goggles that was worth ‘rs 100..bargained to.. rs 40’ suited us and we had an avalanche of photo sessions only to discover that battery was discharged. But still….
Our quails moved on…
And so…seeing a live demonstration of dealing with a land slide, and experiencing a mile long jam we finally were with the snow we were anticipating. It was like those fantasies where we are locked in the room with the girl we stare from our balcony. “why called rohtang pass??” ,was the question still disturbing me but those frozen water falls, and foamy snow were degrading that disturbance. And so finally the end point was reached, we discovered that we were there in that Leh-Laddakh Road and finally I understood the meaning of Rohtang Pass , its relationship to the silk route and admired myself to have reached there.
That snowy hill and the 9 of us…
That snow was shining up the mountain and we were dying to kiss it. We discarded those donkeys besides us, and we chose the hard way, we believed in our feet and for sure what a belief it was!!!! We started marching, there were , at that time just two differences between us and Bhagat singh, one we were not going to the gallows and two we didn’t know ‘mera rang de basanti chola’. So we continued and slowly but STEADILY the Bhagat Singh inside started fading away and breathlessness showed its colours, we took a rest, we were 22, felt like 82 but had that temptation to go up still like a 22, so we moved on…we stopped for a tea, which acted like a bisleri in the Sahara and incidentally I got my best ever snap (as Harry told) clicked there. The vegetation seemed lesser, the snow seemed nearer the legs seemed weaker, the excitement seemed tougher, at last God was felt closer and Bingo!!!! I had reached it,I was there in the snow, playing, caressing, admiring, except writing somebody’s name on that snow,,perhaps I had to wait for another destination for that. That snow point was where, I guess I was kissing snow and making love with success, I was discovering it, there was this sweet taste I was tasting which I got by overpowering the breathlessness, the exhaustion, it was beautiful and I was enjoying it.
Coming down I had just started celebrating our trek until I found out that I had lost my purse, with that my right to drive a vehicle( DL) and my ‘cash in palstic’(ATM). But then again, all was fair in love, war and rohtang. Back in the hotel the sorrow of purse was gulped down with the tea and so from that tops-turvying we were heading towards the ACHTECTURAL AJOOBA….the land of goddess …CHANDIGARH. And 10 PM sharp our journey to witness the modern wonder of India started.
The bus moved on….(this time a little quickly)..
This time I got a little sleep in the bus, as I was exhausted singing those medival times songs and screaming more than singing. we got no deluxe rooms we got dorms with no TV ,no western toilet , but with smoke detectors, that were not there in that deluxe room. Buzzes of ‘daaru yahaan bhii sastii hai’ were still buzzing around . Some sleep some paraanthaas and we were there in the INFY campus , on our way, watching, for the first time, more surds than normal shaven guys.
Eye-opener INFY
It was here that we were confirmed of the fact that not only we know nothing,but we also do not have a goal, we might have played with snow, bought beer at half rate, had travelled 4 states but PRO-ness was what we were devoid of. One thing we did there with confidence…eat that good quality lunch..though the custard was a bit like a Pain killer, but, perhaps we deserved it. ‘INFY.we will be back’ with this in mind and a snap clicked with its counselors we moved in to Rock Gardens. Rock garden was a gem,that’s it, nothing more, ……OK ..something more, it showed the perseverance of a single man, the creativity of a single self, that ‘life is not to waste but to cherish it’ was all that was written over it. We were having snaps clicked like anything but it was a place to be snapped in mind as that garden was telling the colours of life, all sewn to one, be it love , hatred, lust, everything being a subset of creativity….again Kudos.
The evening was spent admiring the BROOOOOOOOOOOAD roads of sector 17, 2 snaps (one infront of woodland) and an hour’s search for a food joint which ended with one chicken burger. You see,if manali was beautiful, rohtang was majestic, Chandigarh was ambitious, it showed realism,modernity. If manali was worth admiring, rohtang worth worshipping, then Chandigarh was worth experiencing,learning and imbibing, and so taking a rickshaw, studying the architectural intricacies of the city and with my maiden snap in the rickshaw we reached back to the dorm
‘Wake up SID’ was in the store …again just 2 statements for it
1. As vikky said…’it ended where it should have started’ and
2. Mota’s b’day coincided with that of Konkana in the movie
The day was over , the tour was over, the dream that we were dreaming was coming to an end , but we all were determined to cherish it forever. Next day, the journey back was filled with dumb-charades, songs, dahi-parantha ,a jam near Rampur and in the end I was woken up at Izzat Nagar, I wondered why,until I realized that I had become a Day-Scholar and life was somewhere in the city. Next day ,I woke up at 12:00, and …………
At last ‘life moves on and on and on……’
* Sorry for that bad similie
* a memorable moment where were not individuals , but IT-06 and also proud of it
P.S. – dedicated to Birju and Shashi Kant Sir..no need to tell why.
Friday, October 23, 2009
NAZAR K SAAMNE.....and now JIGAR K PAAS
I'll be true to you...i write blogs to learn something, to master this art of wasting ink and also for some respect like.."arre waah yeh to BLOG likhta hai"
And so i respect the criticisms, if there are any...but for this post...i dont give a fuck to any criricism...as this is my heart in front of you...this is dedicated to ME....(sorry for that 4 letter word..couldn't help it.)
So today , was yet another goofed up bunk….’GOOFED UP’.. I use this word because I find it interesting, count it among those words of which you don’t know anything but use them because they sound interesting, make even a piece of crap look like something serious. So coming back…another bunk…added with the news of my current attendance score as 70% made the whole day a little creepy. 70 % is not that bad a call, but when you have to deal with a fine of 400 per % below 75 that call becomes a scream , a LAMENT rather. So with dreams of mastering LINUX still struggling to prosper, Bill Gates’ “The road ahead” suffocating somewhere below the pillow and attendance drooping to an all time low..i thought of blogging…thought of penning something great , something …..something as luscious as those seekh kebabs, something tasty as that ‘late’ coffee at that ‘late’ Nescafe ..something as steamy as that por…oops!!....but something about that time ….when we made a trip…a trip down memory lane…a trip down holy lane….where probably half a century ago….my father was born…..implying technicaly…that on some unlucky (depends)day ,I was born too…
So back to 18th oct 2009……an ‘EVENING WITH A DIFFERENCE’…….
The evening had started…. Rather jostled to start…some friends had visited my place…as they said, to‘wish Diwali’..and as I took it,…’to burn fire crackers out of me’. With a whole lot of witty bombs and great no.of NON VEG. ROCKETS.(code for obscene talks)……shooting up to the sky…I was easily shown dust in that war of wits. I was being made fun of ..i was joked about, I was being done at everything that I used to do to people before, but this time I was just looking ,partly at the clock to chao my friends off….and partly looking at the door just in case anybody might here those largely on the air NON VEG. The clock ticked 9, friends were off and in came a news. Babba (father) had won bucks at a cards party, he did lost some playing blind, but thankfully the deal came out positive and thus destiny decided upon a memorable evening for us.
So the party started with a cousin added, and within a white Honda City we(uncle aunt,amma, babba, cousin, me) started off… babba was exploring Lucknow to my cousin…..you see …I am thought of as a home-alone kind of a guy…who knows nothing about lko except that he also lives there. But things have started to change…I also had started exploring the city and this was the time I wanted to tell it all. Who does not want to impress upon a cousin landed straight from Mumbai and that too…from an aeroplane?. Unluckily I never got a chance….and I too…saw..the university..colvin etc etc much like a tourist….the urge to speak that ‘I know too’ grew irresistible…and luckily one voice from behind came ….”whats that” and I yelled …vomited(more accurate)..”that’s saadat ali’s tomb…under control of ASI”…a bit hush hush from behind and I thought I had won the war…I was elated…until I realized that it was time to dine…more than that it was time to show my culinary knowledge as since 2 years I had been WIKIing lucknow’s taste laboriously. Well, it’s a dream of every lucnowi to sit in a famous non veg joint with his guest and tell him/her about the cuisines, not important whether he likes the dish or not, not important whether he fills his tummy…he should like one’s knowledge, he should fill his mind. And I saw such a moment coming before me .
Again unluckily I didn’t get a chance… I proposed ‘shakhawat’ for dinner…plea rejected and here again pops had won,ordering dishes that I had never even heard of..let alone telling facts about it. I silently ate it all cursing Tim Berners-Lee (founder of world wide web) and Wikipedia.
So the day was coming to an end …after being the subject of friend’s pranks and then with a broken dream of exploring lucknow to everybody we were heading to have paan ..of which I seriously had no idea.
The paan shop was not found and instantly it was decided to visit Nazarbagh. ‘NAZARBAGH’….this is the word that easily would be the most heard word for me….heard sometimes from my mother ….with twinkling eyes…sometimes from my father..with a nostalagic throat….this word was always there for me….it was a place which was my first home after the maternity ward of Lady Dufferin’s..but still I never had any sentiment to it…nazarbagh for me was just a place and 69, Nazarbagh( a mansion built by my great grandfather a century ago) was just a house where by chance my father got born and by his choice I also had the chance of calling it my first home…but as you see I never seriously and sincerely honoured this fact.
So with chitters and chatters the ‘white Honda City’ moved on….it kept on moving ….until it stopped and with that stopped the race that the people in that car (except me) were running to survive in life..for the 4 people in that car (amma, babba, uncle, aunt), the race converted to a walk down the isles of the rosy past whose petals had nurtured them to become the strong individuals that they were. We had reached Nazarbagh and now we were in a place that had ,to me, stories to tell. All of them were looking at those buildings , those landmarks, where they had played cricket, where probably they had their first smoke, got drunk for the maiden time, and perhaps had fallen in love umpteenth times.
Seeing a mixed bag of emotions I too asked my mother “apnaa waala ghar kaun saa hai ….wo to dikhaao”…..and amma with 4 years of residential experience but with 40 years of storytelling guided me through a ‘little more’ broader lane and there stood a daunting white building…recently whitewashed…and on the backdrop was my mothers commentary….”yahaan babba money-plant lagaate the..yahaan khidkiyon pe grill nahi lagi thi….i didn’t know why, I didn’t know why…but I also was swimming in the pool of Nazarbagh….i started imagining myself as a child…how I used to cry? how I would have started to learn walking on foot…i tried to capture that 100 year old monument but the 2 megapixcel glitter didnt prove enough.
Meanwhile babba’s nostalagia was overflowing ….as I could hear…Laal Makaan and Pista Niwas was same as ever…those roads were not a complex organic compound of carbon, but had been a mirror where my uncle and babba were on a past expedition. I used to think that living out of home,in a hostel and now independently, I have enjoyed and will have memories that my father would always be devoid of. I got to know that day ..how wrong I was… as my father, too had an exubherent past which was having a showdown for me that night right after diwali.
With the heart and eyes longing for more , but brain longing for some sleep, we moved to our homes..having a hard time to accept that nazarbagh is not ours now..we finally accepted the fact that ‘property 50-60 saalo se zyaada nahi rehti’…
So the day ended . I ,who wanted to impress upon my cousin had to be content with her e mail id. And then at the doorsteps, babba finally admitted that today he had grown sentimental…somewhere there my heart also clicked, not because father was growing senti…perhaps I had started growing senti for nazarbagh…I , from now on had started honouring the fact that 69, Nazarbagh was my first abode after the cesarean in the maternity ward at Lady Dufferins’
And so i respect the criticisms, if there are any...but for this post...i dont give a fuck to any criricism...as this is my heart in front of you...this is dedicated to ME....(sorry for that 4 letter word..couldn't help it.)
So today , was yet another goofed up bunk….’GOOFED UP’.. I use this word because I find it interesting, count it among those words of which you don’t know anything but use them because they sound interesting, make even a piece of crap look like something serious. So coming back…another bunk…added with the news of my current attendance score as 70% made the whole day a little creepy. 70 % is not that bad a call, but when you have to deal with a fine of 400 per % below 75 that call becomes a scream , a LAMENT rather. So with dreams of mastering LINUX still struggling to prosper, Bill Gates’ “The road ahead” suffocating somewhere below the pillow and attendance drooping to an all time low..i thought of blogging…thought of penning something great , something …..something as luscious as those seekh kebabs, something tasty as that ‘late’ coffee at that ‘late’ Nescafe ..something as steamy as that por…oops!!....but something about that time ….when we made a trip…a trip down memory lane…a trip down holy lane….where probably half a century ago….my father was born…..implying technicaly…that on some unlucky (depends)day ,I was born too…
So back to 18th oct 2009……an ‘EVENING WITH A DIFFERENCE’…….
The evening had started…. Rather jostled to start…some friends had visited my place…as they said, to‘wish Diwali’..and as I took it,…’to burn fire crackers out of me’. With a whole lot of witty bombs and great no.of NON VEG. ROCKETS.(code for obscene talks)……shooting up to the sky…I was easily shown dust in that war of wits. I was being made fun of ..i was joked about, I was being done at everything that I used to do to people before, but this time I was just looking ,partly at the clock to chao my friends off….and partly looking at the door just in case anybody might here those largely on the air NON VEG. The clock ticked 9, friends were off and in came a news. Babba (father) had won bucks at a cards party, he did lost some playing blind, but thankfully the deal came out positive and thus destiny decided upon a memorable evening for us.
So the party started with a cousin added, and within a white Honda City we(uncle aunt,amma, babba, cousin, me) started off… babba was exploring Lucknow to my cousin…..you see …I am thought of as a home-alone kind of a guy…who knows nothing about lko except that he also lives there. But things have started to change…I also had started exploring the city and this was the time I wanted to tell it all. Who does not want to impress upon a cousin landed straight from Mumbai and that too…from an aeroplane?. Unluckily I never got a chance….and I too…saw..the university..colvin etc etc much like a tourist….the urge to speak that ‘I know too’ grew irresistible…and luckily one voice from behind came ….”whats that” and I yelled …vomited(more accurate)..”that’s saadat ali’s tomb…under control of ASI”…a bit hush hush from behind and I thought I had won the war…I was elated…until I realized that it was time to dine…more than that it was time to show my culinary knowledge as since 2 years I had been WIKIing lucknow’s taste laboriously. Well, it’s a dream of every lucnowi to sit in a famous non veg joint with his guest and tell him/her about the cuisines, not important whether he likes the dish or not, not important whether he fills his tummy…he should like one’s knowledge, he should fill his mind. And I saw such a moment coming before me .
Again unluckily I didn’t get a chance… I proposed ‘shakhawat’ for dinner…plea rejected and here again pops had won,ordering dishes that I had never even heard of..let alone telling facts about it. I silently ate it all cursing Tim Berners-Lee (founder of world wide web) and Wikipedia.
So the day was coming to an end …after being the subject of friend’s pranks and then with a broken dream of exploring lucknow to everybody we were heading to have paan ..of which I seriously had no idea.
The paan shop was not found and instantly it was decided to visit Nazarbagh. ‘NAZARBAGH’….this is the word that easily would be the most heard word for me….heard sometimes from my mother ….with twinkling eyes…sometimes from my father..with a nostalagic throat….this word was always there for me….it was a place which was my first home after the maternity ward of Lady Dufferin’s..but still I never had any sentiment to it…nazarbagh for me was just a place and 69, Nazarbagh( a mansion built by my great grandfather a century ago) was just a house where by chance my father got born and by his choice I also had the chance of calling it my first home…but as you see I never seriously and sincerely honoured this fact.
So with chitters and chatters the ‘white Honda City’ moved on….it kept on moving ….until it stopped and with that stopped the race that the people in that car (except me) were running to survive in life..for the 4 people in that car (amma, babba, uncle, aunt), the race converted to a walk down the isles of the rosy past whose petals had nurtured them to become the strong individuals that they were. We had reached Nazarbagh and now we were in a place that had ,to me, stories to tell. All of them were looking at those buildings , those landmarks, where they had played cricket, where probably they had their first smoke, got drunk for the maiden time, and perhaps had fallen in love umpteenth times.
Seeing a mixed bag of emotions I too asked my mother “apnaa waala ghar kaun saa hai ….wo to dikhaao”…..and amma with 4 years of residential experience but with 40 years of storytelling guided me through a ‘little more’ broader lane and there stood a daunting white building…recently whitewashed…and on the backdrop was my mothers commentary….”yahaan babba money-plant lagaate the..yahaan khidkiyon pe grill nahi lagi thi….i didn’t know why, I didn’t know why…but I also was swimming in the pool of Nazarbagh….i started imagining myself as a child…how I used to cry? how I would have started to learn walking on foot…i tried to capture that 100 year old monument but the 2 megapixcel glitter didnt prove enough.
Meanwhile babba’s nostalagia was overflowing ….as I could hear…Laal Makaan and Pista Niwas was same as ever…those roads were not a complex organic compound of carbon, but had been a mirror where my uncle and babba were on a past expedition. I used to think that living out of home,in a hostel and now independently, I have enjoyed and will have memories that my father would always be devoid of. I got to know that day ..how wrong I was… as my father, too had an exubherent past which was having a showdown for me that night right after diwali.
With the heart and eyes longing for more , but brain longing for some sleep, we moved to our homes..having a hard time to accept that nazarbagh is not ours now..we finally accepted the fact that ‘property 50-60 saalo se zyaada nahi rehti’…
So the day ended . I ,who wanted to impress upon my cousin had to be content with her e mail id. And then at the doorsteps, babba finally admitted that today he had grown sentimental…somewhere there my heart also clicked, not because father was growing senti…perhaps I had started growing senti for nazarbagh…I , from now on had started honouring the fact that 69, Nazarbagh was my first abode after the cesarean in the maternity ward at Lady Dufferins’
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