Flight of a Mallu Butterfly.

Flight of a Mallu Butterfly.

 

I was walking down linkin road in Bandra, Mumbai the other day and realized a certain anomaly of nature. The cutest (C’mon I’m just being reticent here, guys you know by cute I mean HOT) girls all seemed to be with the ugliest guys. No I’m not kidding they seem to have put genuine effort to pick out the ugliest guy they could get their hands on. But then again reaching those levels of hideousness is beyond god’s handiwork so the person seemed to have gone to great extends in getting to those heights. I mean it’s not easy suffering all that perspiration from not taking baths for weeks on end. Or suffering the taunts of your buddies when you were trying to grow that hair long and were going through that phase when it’s not short enough to look normal or long enough to tie it into a pony, ala this guy in “Rock On” (Not the one with the frog in his throat). And oh the pain as the quack, who might as well have been a roadside cobbler in his previous life drilled holes for piercings on his ears, eyebrows, lips and any other protruding part of his body.

 

And if anybody was starting to scorn me for having called a fellow human being “ugly”, well I assure you those of this breed would only take it as a precious compliment. These were guys who put in genuine effort to look the way they were, much like the way we did going through our engineering or medicine degrees. C’mon guys admit it, the final prize that you had in mind wasn’t that medical degree or that IT job was it. It was the babes that you would finally land in life that you had in mind. Well somebody should have just told us of this sure shot method - just do your best looking ugly.

 

Maybe it’s just Bandra. I’ve heard this is where all fashion originates in India. High Fashion Designers, who dream about making it big in Milan, Paris and New York, walk this street discreetly glancing at the latest stuff when they run out of ideas for their next big show. If you want to put a mirror to the face of Mumbai this is the place. I once saw two girls fighting over who saw a fake Prada handbag first. One of them could pass for a supermodel, the other too a supermodel but more like that pic of Gitanjali Nagpal that splashed across the newspaper front pages a few years back. The irony of the situation was that neither of them knew that Prada was a designer brand, nor did the guy who was selling it. And for me Prada just seemed nice as it was that damn sexy SUV from the Toyota stable.

 

I belong to a generation of pure bred mallu males, who seem to have gone through the transformative college days without knowing what was going around in the world of fashion. Not that we didn’t tune in dedicatedly to FTV (that’s Fashion TV for the uninitiated if there are any) mind you. But for some reason we failed to spot the fashion in what was shown. Trapped in a cocoon of Coconuts and Communism, we were led to believe that fashion meant a mop of hair, shiny and dripping with oodles of coconut oil or long and messy much like Karl Marx’s was what fashion made.

 

And as butterflies when we did get out into the wide messy world around, but outside the time warp that is Kerala we were caught unaware. Some caught up with the fervor of a sailor who was out at sea for years. Or lets mallu-ize it – of a gulf returnee after months on an isolated oilfield coming back to his wife in Kerala. That wide majority who missed the bus found themselves suddenly caught out and unable to catch up. They were left wondering when was it exactly that they got left behind. A little clue: Think of the buses stoned during hartals, or the days lost in hangovers from the previous nights binge.

 

Me, lucky that I am, during my days in Bangalore was in a position to closely observe one such journey of a mallu brother in his attempts to reach the pinnacles of ugliness that I was talking about, transform from a curly haired, cute as Kunjacko, mallu idol to a straight haired Chinese looking whacko, whom no god fearing, rosary reciting mallu housewife would wish for her daughter.

 

But it’s a strange world isn’t it. It so turned out that what so many housewives from across this blessed country wanted for their daughters was sadly not what their daughters themselves wanted. This mallu converted to Chinese butterfly took the first flight out of fashion anachronism, to land in the laps of so many such daughters. J

Stuck in the middle…

I want to talk about two people I know of; one a very close friend and another a rather distant one. What’s common between the two is that they both got married at quiet an early age. Both managed to trap the woman of their choice in their nuptial webs and seems extremely happy today.

But there perhaps ends the similarity.

This close friend let’s just call him ‘A’, used to be my roommate a few years back in Bangalore. And the other buddy, well now that ‘A’ is already taken, let’s call him ‘B’, I met him during my stay in Delhi some years back.

This particular post is about two different paths these two men took towards a common goal and ended up achieving it.

At different points, at different places, completely unaware of each other, their common link in this mortal world being little old me, these two men, fell in love with two different women. Both claim it to have been love at first sight. Both are today married to those women.

It was winter in Delhi. Rain hung in the air and the streets behind the University were particularly dark that evening. B had his CAT (Common Admission Test to the IIMs) in another week. I had my b school placements starting in a few days. Christine was my classmate and it was through her that I met B around a year back. I took to him, his flair, his comedies, his style of living. Mostly it was his simplicity that I liked. He didn’t know what it meant to hold his tongue. If anything was on his mind it was on his tongue too.

Every time we felt like we needed a break from the sheer pseudo professionalism and pretences of the b school campus, me and Christine would rush to B’s place. The Delhi University area is a virtual beehive. It’s buzzing with activity. The crowds at the food stands, the book shops, the bus stand, the metro station all merge to form one spirited cacophony, and the biting cold of Delhi never quite able to shut it down.

In Delhi during the winters the sugarcane stands give way to chai shops, jalebi walas, omelette and momo stands. B had the habit of having six glasses of chai in a day on an average. That day the atmosphere practically yelled out asking for you to have some piping hot masala chai. And when B stood up from his bed and stretched his arms, Christine and I almost simultaneously suggested that we go out and have some chai and pakodas.

The three of us were sharing pakodas from a single plate when I noticed at the next pani puri stand stood a group of girls. Not wanting to attract Christine’s attention I motioned to B with a quick lifting of my eyebrows and a fleeting of the eyes in the particular direction, that something over there merited his attention. And he did get what I was pointing at. But B wasn’t ever the one to be discreet about anything. Least of all girls. He immediately poured out his contribution that those girls were from ‘Miranda House’ and that one girl in the group goes to his coaching class and swore that she had a crush on him for sure and went on about how he was the star of his coaching class. Well something really ticked Christine off and she started confronting him, saying that he’s just a ‘fattoo’ who should  actually go up to the girl and ask her out, instead of cooking up stupid imaginary stories. The sher-e-Punjab that B was could never back out from this challenge.

The happenings from then on, is something I remember very clearly as these discrete actions and reactions.

B walked up to this particular girl in the group and started talking something to her ….

….

She gives B a queer look, much like those deserved for crazy retards and stray dogs…

….

He takes out his wallet and shows something to the girl….

…

The girls starts shaking her head…

…

He turns around and points his left arm towards me and Christine….

…

The girl’s again shaking her head in disapproval…..

(At this point we were sure that he was going to earn a nice tight slap in his face.

And then to our extreme surprise…)

….

The girl starts laughing her heart out.

 

B just stood smiling his cute smile, one hand on his head, the other on his hip and then turned and came back running to us.

Christine pounded B with a barrage of questions, her voice raised to an extreme high shrill and barely understandable as about a hundred questions were shot in a space of few seconds.

Me, I was struggling to keep my eyeballs from popping out of their sockets.

He wouldn’t say a word about what he talked to the girl until we were back in the room and then he opened up. He had walked up to the girl and immediately opened up his wallet and showed the picture of a small boy and asked her if she had seen him anywhere. Then said that the boy was mine and Christine’s child and had gone missing. At which point the girl was shaking her head to say that she had never seen him. That’s when B came to his elements and said that, “Dekhegi kaise, yeh to meri bachpan ki photo hai, cute hoon na mein”. Which roughly translates as “How in the world would you see him, this is my photo as a child, ain’t I cute?”. I roared with laughter but Christine just stood glaring at him for some time, before she too burst out laughing.

 “A” was with me in Bangalore. We joined Infosys Bangalore in the July training batch. Fresh out of college, first time away from home, dreams were many, hopes were high. No wonder the summer heat which to me felt worse than what I was used to in Kerala, didn’t even seem to bother A as we were sitting on the park bench at 12 in the noon. Whosoever said that Bangalore is cool year round must have been binge drinking in one of its pubs the previous night, I thought. In half an hour we needed to be inside the computer lab in time for the afternoon attendance. I was in no mood to skip my lunch having already skipped the breakfast because I was late reaching the campus in the morning.

Pushing me down to the park bench A started talking hesitantly. “Err, Vinu, you are friends with Anjali aren’t you?”. I said “not really, she sits a couple of seats next to me in the lab. Do you know where you get mallu food in the campus?”. A’s face seemed to drop for a moment but again lit up. “Vinu, my man do me a favour will you. Err I was thinking of what to speak to Anjali. I think I’m in love with her. No no not the kind of that you talked about yesterday night when you were drinking. I think this is of the other kind. Pure”. I was ready to throw up, but good thing my stomach was empty. He continued, “Vinu, I have written down a couple of topics that I am going to speak to Anjali and there are two jokes I downloaded from the internet yesterday too. You’re a funny man aren’t you, please help me with the delivery of these jokes”. I couldn’t believe what he was talking. Actually preparing for a conversation with a girl and practicing lines for that, how can people be so stupid? But really on a bit of paper was something which looked like a script of a small play, word by word dialogues of what A was planning to speak to Anjali that day. He was the butt of our jokes during several drinking sessions during the Infosys training days. But then at the end of the four month training Anjali was to the utmost amazement of me and my booze buddies, going steady with A.

B was a natural, while A worked at it. Both got to their goals. But this goes out to the vast majority of men who are stuck in the middle, calling out to get their acts together.

Thought Express…unleashed.

Its tough being a teenager I know, but its tougher being a teenager trapped inside a full grown adult. All my advocacies about remaining a child inside and so on seem to have taken a toll on me. On retrospection I was struck by the strange fact that I don’t seem to have grown, err I mean mentally in the last six years, which has recently lighted a strange fear in me - would I stay so for many more years to come. And this fear was stoked by a recent visit to a movie hall.

[Movies, babes and pure gawking]……It was a hot day’s afternoon and I was left with nothing much to do after having completed the work for the day. Summer training was really living up to its name. The only training I seemed to be getting was in handling the north Indian summer. I and my project partner, more like partner in crime I should say, decided to hit PVR Saket, which for the information of non Delhiites is an up market hangout place in south Delhi, and more precisely a babe haven. Well a visit to the worth is always worth the money spent on the auto for a teenager or pseudo teenagers who seems to be pathetically hanging on to those lost days even after so many years. In fact it is this breed of human beings that seemed to be hanging out there a lot than pure bred teenagers. Maybe an effort to hang on to those lost days. But then again the Indian definition of teenage should extent well past nineteen I say, at least twenty five. But I, even for that definition, am tragically almost over the line. But that we shall come to later. This is for all you guys out there. Have you ever had that Santoor ad happen to you. You are almost sure that you are ready to pluck out your heart and hand it over to a lady and then all of a sudden a child runs up to her calling her with a “mummmyyyy” call? I had that happen to me. But not one child, this lady was there with atleast six of them. She looked European maybe even Brazilian. I don’t know, recently I seem to assume that all perfect girls that I spot on the streets must be Brazilian, until I overhear a typically Hinglish conversation or that overemphasized “yaaaaarrr”. But it’s the girls who are doing this. They do invent strange styles and are always too eager to show off that new way of speaking a word that they just learned after watching “friends” which every middle class Indian girl worth her salt just has to have on her list of favorite shows. Why are we such a nation of wannabees?

[Wannabees !!!]……A south Indian wanting to be a north Indian, a north Indian swearing proudly that he is so fair that some people think that he is Spanish, a Punjabi who swears that lassi is too fattening, a mallu who swears by aloo parantha, a Delhi girl showing off her newly practiced and perfected American accent. I’ve seen a lot of such things in my three years out of Kerala. Mallu’s, odd exceptions aside are generally a contented lot. So in all my years in Kerala I didn’t see such discontent in people over their current status. In fact the predominant behavior was to be proud, often excessively, and show off all they had. You know the housewife showing off the new sari, the Roman/Syrian Catholic so proud of his two thousand year old heritage and the neighbor who would keep his new car in front of the house just so that everyone can take a good look. My experiences of the people in the northern part of the country, (I have almost started hating this north Indian and south Indian usages as it is never used for anything good) is that they are much more ambitious. This discontent with their current state of existence is, I believe the primary reason for this. Well whatever be the reason ambition is not bad. But what is bad is when it spills over to lead to an urge for blind copying of anything and everything that comes with a higher state of social existence. And this ladder of social hierarchy is also well defined. Created over centuries of division and quarrels, this ladder now extents beyond national boundaries. Above the highest Indian order would be the Europeans and Americans and god knows who else. Its not a regional phenomenon at all as I found out on keen observation. For example, there is a small breed of mallus who swear by this.

[The mallu evolution]…. The English medium educated teenage/pseudo teenage girl. You can spot her easily by the casually slipped in English phrase in between a nice conversation on simple, good old Malayalam. We guys, proud as we are off our malayali roots still let it go and stick to the beautiful language. Then again she’ll drop in a few phrases here and there. Listen to this conversation that I had with someone.

Girl: Hey da, what are you doing these days?

Me: aye onnum illa..inganeyokke.

Girl: kore naalayallo, many many years alle..hahahaha(vashyamanoharamaazha kolachiri)

Me: athe oru naalanju varsham. Iyaalu evide okke aayirunnu??

Girl: oh you know, paris, London, Singapore.

Me (manasil): podi avidunnu nee koiylandikkapparam polum poyittillennu enikkariyille. Maximum gulfil poyi kaanum. (gulf or the middle east as non mallus would call it, as far as mallus are concerned is like the fifteenth district somewhere within Kerala)

Now this language is a new development, not more than six or seven years since its birth. And of these I have been out of the state for most of the time and had very little chances of interaction with mallu girls, who are the protagonists of this language. So maybe I haven’t evolved into this yet. But the guys who were constantly exposed to this abuse have developed their own adaptations. For example the use of “dear” “darling” which till a few years ago would have been a sure short way to get a slap on your cheek is freely used now by the evolved mallu male. Now call me conventional. But whenever I see an uncalled use of these words I feel like holding my mouth shut with my hands and running to the toilet, or I might puke there.

[Yaaaar…I swear!!!]….Now this is not an isolated phenomenon in malluland. Its spread all over the country. The metro society is the worst affected. The worst off being Delhi and Bangalore. Thankfully I haven’t seen it so much in Calcutta. Calcuttans are really good with their English. The middle class educated girl more often than not speaks beautiful unpretentious English and rarely any Hinglish and never would you see that overemphasized effort for Americanization of each and every word. You still can’t escape the ubiquitous “Yaaar” in any part of the country, not even in hindi hating Chennai.

[Chennai blues]….Chennai..I love Chennai…yea, as much as I love Cochin or Kochi or Ernakulam. Why would they have three names for the same stinky place? So far in my life I haven’t found a non tamilian say that Chennai is any good. Believe me I don’t have anything against tamilians, but they are really myopic in their views. I have two good friends who are tamilians. If you dare say anything good about any other city, they would jump in with their bit of information by which Chennai is by far better in that aspect too. You know, like when somebody said that Delhi’s roads are damn good, chennaite1 would say that’s nothing they are building India’s best flyover in Chennai or when someone said that Bangalore has all the superb IT companies, chennaite2 would say “Chennai has the largest technopark or that its growing faster than any other”. So this one day we were discussing about prostitutes in Calcutta. Pat came a comment from my Chennai friend – “hmm..that is nothing, you should see the prostitutes in Chennai”. Well, errr no thank you.

[Sex and mobiles]…Talking about prostitution, you know what they should really do? Legalize prostitution in India. India probably has the largest number of sex workers, and showing a blind eye to this fact would just accelerate the spread of diseases like AIDS. Our attitude has given such a dirty hue to sex that Indians have a sense of guilt which goes together with sex. But you know who is making the most out of the current state of affairs. Our over obsession with it has worked in favor of mobile companies. What with the huge number of ‘mms’es floating around the telecom spectrum. At around five rupees an mms the telcos are raking in the moolah.

I and my friend were talking about ways in which we can buy at least a Honda accord in two years time. Even an optimistic assumption of the salary that I might get after I pass out of IIFT would barely let me splurge twenty lacks like that. And with the trade tariffs all coming down with liberalization there’s not much future in the smuggling business either. With the god given talent of the gab and a never before seen bullshitting capacity the best thing I could do would be consultancy. What better way to lie and still be called a prophet. It will be like having a reattach able hymen.
Now that’s a million dollar idea. With all the news about premarital, adolescent etc etc sex and the Indian male’s obsessiveness with marrying a virgin (now that’s some topic on which you can write pages about isn’t it?) a stick on hymen would be a huge hit.

Well thoughts are a plenty, but work beckons. So long.

i proposed but why did u have to dispose??

As i was drying my hair after getting back to my hostel room...all drenched ...looking pretty much like a wet hen...i opened up my mouth to check out the colour of my tongue. no not black, but still it does the job.
yesterday i closed my blog with a mock rhetorical question asking what are the chances of getting a rain today. Rain in may, in delhi? yea anybody would stand by me if i say thats wishful thinking.
Well thats what happend today...and it poured..bucketfuls came thrashing down.
But i guess theres something amazingly refreshing about a summer rain. It starts with the smell of earth and sight of people running caught out without umbrellas and just the relief from the scorching heat. Summer rains are pretty common down in Kerala. Before the monsoons hit by late may and just at teh peak of the heat in april it would rain. And very often since i used to spend my summer holidays in Bharananganam with my grandparents these rains also meant good times at the river. The pretty much dried up and muddy mirky Meenachil river will bulge with green fast flowing water from the hills. Me and my cousin would go running to the river and spend hours at a strech in those afternoons. And teh best place for cover when it rains - of course under the water of the river. :) The unconcerned mind worked that ways. As kids you never worried about getting drenched when it rained. My mother used to warn me to get out of teh seasons first rain as it often brought diseases. Old wives tale or not. it never mattered.
But today as i made my way towards a shelter when the clouds burst over Delhi the memories of those rains in Bharananganam never came to my mind. The mind of the half manager was preoccupied with keeping my new shoes out of the puddles that were developing and of not getting mud drops on my trousers. Sometimes i feel the greatest gift a man could ever ask from god is a boon to stay a kid for life.

Soul Sapping !!

Well this is not quite what i imagined a managers life to be like. Plush chairs, sexy secretaries at my call, chic mobiles and flashy cars.
Reality: i was running around the maze that they have created in the centre of Delhi called CP-connaught place, at a scorching 42 degrees celsius.
climbing foot wide staircases of buildings long past their deserved lifetimes taking care not to brush against teh walls stained red every inch through decades of careful aiming by teh pan shooting pedestrians, was in itelf a ennerving experience. imagine my sheer excitement at seeing the fifth floor office closed as it was labour day.
Well not all were closed coz if that had been my day would have been so easy. It never happens that way does it. Destiny creates such innovative games to keep us all occupied. now thats real talent.
After going around by foot around the three kilometer or so curcumference of the outercircle of CP i realised that centuries ago when some smart gentleman decided to name the blocks of CP he had a funny idea to have teh F block next to the A block and the E block half a mile across from the F block. And the dumbwitted moron yours truly needed a couple of tours around to realise certain harsh realities. housenumbers, naming of blocks, so on and so forth. cant ever be straightforward. if you are in front of house number 39 and you need to go to 40 dont be surpried if the ones on your either side are 354 and 12. i saw it in salt lake, calcutta, so A behind G is still reasonable.
Pretty babes the unchanging wallpaper of CP was as exciting as ever. but today i decided to give that endeavor, of analysing the crowd a skip today. maybe the scorching sun had got to me or somehitng coz that is pretty odd.
anyways five straight hours in the sun wihtout a thing to eat or drink, five open and three closed offices later i was ready to shoot out of that place for the day. But the ordeal is not over. its still CP for tomorrow. what do you think the chances are that it might rain tomorrow? :-)

the magic of a rail journey.

every once in a while when my parents used to take me to my grandfathers place in Kottayam we used to take the early morning Venad express from Trivandrum. Venad express is a grand train. Was always there for most parts remaining unchanged except for the time when it got extended from to Shornur.
A journey aboard Venad express is a peek into urban middle class Kerala. The middle aged man travelling to his office in Cochin with a lunch box in hand and the travails of his life etched in the forms of wrinkled lines on his forehead is a ubiquitous sight. So is the group of men in their thirties chattering away in loud voices, or debating over the latest happenings in teh corridors of the state secretariat. I have never seen a society in all of India who is so interested in knowing and discussing about the happenings in the political arena yet so disinclined to actually be a part of it. Mallus are quaint beings, happy in their current state of being, low on ambition, just across a line beyond which you can be called 'not sad' though not quite happy, resigned to the state of things as they are. Then there is at every odd half an hour or so the high pitched wail of a beggar.
For me this train journey would start well in advance. The excitement would start building up days in advance and by the time I was in the train just waiting for it to start moving i would be in a certain state of excitement that I very often would start pushing the train in the direction it was to go. And when it did start moving revel in a certain self of satisfaction inside me borne of the faint belief that my push just might have did that little bit necessary to get the train moving.
Every thing about the route was also familiar to me. i knew each and every station on the way - the ones where we stopped and the ones where we didn’t. And i would get impatient in such cases where the train stopped in stations it wasn’t supposed to. And at times when it stopped in stations i even knew which train was going to pass by on the adjacent track in the opposite direction, as in those days we didn’t have two tracks in the route. And mind you I wasn’t more than 8 years old then.
I would never sleep on a train journey despite the excitement having kept me awake the whole of the previous night and I would pull at my dads sleeves every time a vendor passed by with froootty(frooty) or bedomlait(bread omlet) or cutlayts (cutlets). And it was always coffee the preferred beverage. And unless it had that special taste (which now I realize was a result of adding too much water to the milk) I wouldn’t be quite satisfied with it. And to think that my mom used to call that drainage water.
But then the pinnacle of the excitement is reached at around the mid way between Kayamkulam and mavelikara. As soon as the train rolls into Mavelikara the sense of the journey winding to its end starts welling up inside. The boy who was running around in the compartment would slowly get back to his seat. Soon words become few, and a faint drowsiness would start appearing in the eyes. Then again the energy meter rises up as the train pulls into Kottayam station and we get to pass through the twin dark tunnels. Every child of my age would start yelling out as per a certain unspoken unwritten agreement. But that was it, it peaks there and then it ends.
The journey is almost magical. I still feel the excitement whenever I start out on a train journey out of Trivandrum Central. I don’t remember the stations now, neither do I remember the trains, but when the train gives a jerk and starts out on its journey my heart pounds a bit faster.

Ulysees....me..you.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
- Ulysees, Tennyson

The whole world seems like a big unblotted sheet of canvas. Thats what i heard somebody say describing his feeling on his graduation day. Armed with paintbrushes and sure as he can ever be of his talent when teh young renegade tries to whoosh that brush across the canvas a voice looks over his head and asks - "You really wanna do that son?? "
the surety is still there..of course ...cant you see that whoosh is gonna be the beginning of something wonderful.
the voice : "sure? what if its not?...you cant erase anything you know."
well you dont really care...i'll just get a new canvas the voice inside nudges you ahead.
and again as you bring that brush confidently down, the voice behind takes out his burly hand and just lightly holds the brush and says " well lets just wait a second and ponder over what we are gonna do"
the mind is trying to figure out since when did "we" start to do something. i thought i was going to draw the picture here.
Im getting such whiffs in my summer project these days. what promised out as an amazing oppurtunity to dirty my hands in the suave sleek world of corporate marketing is each day threatening to turn into a little bit more than the assignment that i did on customer behavior in the third trimester.
You dont get to do anything until youve proven yourself and by the time you have proven yourself you are a generation too old and you dont really see the present. it really is an orwellian animal farm out there.

psychic breeds

Have you ever felt looking into the eyes of a dog that he can really see inside you. Whether it be the fear that you have when face to face with a stray or the affection to the house pet. Dogs can do that i tell you. If there is fear in your eyes be assured the stray dog is gonna come after you. and you dog at home really seems to understand your every word and it responds with the slight sway of its head, or an affectionate lick. dogs are amazing creatures, yes they are.
But i didnt start this to write about dogs.
What about people...?
many a boons did god gave man but not the one to read another's mind.
Times are plenty when you feel even those closest to you dont really seem to understand you. Or worse when you dont understand why you do certain things in life. but then again im deviating. im not gonna write about the vanity of life or living or mundane living or anything on those lines. ahh mundanity theres nothing like that ..but thats another days topic.
Then there are this type of people a rare breed who looks into you and you just know that these people read you like an open book. you cant lie you dont even dare do that.
it doesnt necessarily come with time spend or association but its got to do with a certain way in which they latch on to your brain waves and dissect it and really just take out the true essence out of it.
i dont know how much of sense this makes to anybody whos reading it. but then i guess it has to be felt. much like what you talk about dejavu. an absurd concept but we've all had it havent we.

whats it about a new place..?

You love a new place when you are there just as a visitor and the picture just swivels around on its hinge when you are tehre for a longer stay..that is not quite on a vacation. You like it at first, then you hate it and then if you can just bring yourself to love it again then theres something special about teh city.
Delhi has to be undoubtedly teh city to which i have got used to the fastest. Till a few months ago my memories of this grand capital city was a weeks visit in which we cramped in memories of all the famous monuments this city had to offer and nothing more. But this time ive so far given a skip to the monuments, well apart from teh qutub minar which is just about a stones throw away from where i stay.
This time it was more about people, shopping, commotion, the metro, work, college and what else. everything except a vacation i guess.
in sharp contrast to what i had got used to calcutta, delhi never seems to sleep. even if at two in teh night you wake up hearing a grumble in your tummy you know there is more than a chance you would find a tea shop open somehwere. Whereas in calcutta i would have got myself a drink of water and tried to knock myself unconcious or something.
Even in Bangalore which had all nonsensical rhetoric of compulsory shutting down of restaurants after 11 a couple of years back, i knew of several places where i could easily grab an early morning/late night bite.
but more than such triflings the things that more than anything affect your inclination towards a place is the people there, teh people around you and to a lesser extent the weather too if you really want to come up with a third factor.
There is somehitng about a human being, that overbearing instinct to be social. even the most introvert of us at some moments desires company. Human beings are strange animals. Potent enough to kill you, charming enough to make you fall in love with, loud enough to make you feel like tearing your ears, soothing enough to listen to a voice for hours at stretch.
What i am trying to convey here is that its the people that make the place. i got robbed twice, yelled at thrice, was denied service by shopkeepers because he didnt feel like getting up from his comfortable little stool, how do you expect me to post anything good about teh charm of calcutta. i jsut dotn see it over the mistreating, lethargic swarm of people that cloud my eyes.

On planning a life, knowledge and courage!!!

Twenty four years are past without one day of it being planned out. I, Vinu Mani Jose have seen as much of the world, perhaps a little more than the average twenty four year would have. Now what waits down the line for me, good or bad, the only ammunition that I have earned over the period of my lifetime is an undaunted belief in self to face anything and triumph over anything that destiny throws at me. Also a belief in god almighty that whatever he does, he does for the best.

Wise men say that knowledge is wealth. But then what good is wealth if it doesn’t buys you happiness and peace of mind. Does it even take you near your final goal in any way. Richness, fame, authority and power are mere intermediate goals that human beings set on their path to that final destination which no man is ever sure of. It’s just a belief that, that particular goal is somewhere a little beyond say being the richest man in the world or the most powerful.

It’s not easy being lazy. Because lazy means being unprepared for the perils that you need to tread over tomorrow. Every day in life is an adventure. And the natural human instinct asks of him by a tool called fear to do everything on his physical might possible to make himself ready, body and soul for facing that adventure.