inimitable wodehouse

how is it that u can read a wodehouse again and again and never tire of it!

on second thoughts, if u need a reference here, u probably shouln't be reading this.

its not the depth of his contents. i mean wooster's or emsworth's negligible mental assets would be enough to ensure a certain amount of shallowness in any perceivable thoughts. may be its got something to do with the numerous twists he manages to add to a seemingly simple, nay plain boring plot. and its definitely got to do with his ability to maneavour the english language. what is otherwise a structured and informative language, in his hand turns into something undulating through whatever it is that good stuff undulate through :-)

anybody who's read more than three of his works dont need to be told this, but scenes like gussie finknottle's speech simply leaves one wondering whether they can be bettered upon.

ps - all this was because i am reading one for the 6th time.

excelsior

the shades of night were falling fast
and yet i am at my seat coding.
this stupid er and the winding bug q
oh is there no off-loading!
stealing time
to write this rhyme,
i feel like exploding ;-)
excelsior!

the loony strikes back

my loony friend called me up and ticked me off proper for having disclosed his looniness. apparently some philanthrope had, in a moment of misguided generosity, called him up to enquire after his mental health! and instead of being appalled at how plausible people around him feel his going off his rockers is, he lets off the steam on me. and this on a day when i am trying to recover from the effects of watching a horror movie. now don't be misguided by the adjective "horror". its not the genre that i am referring to. the horror about the movie is its very existence. the mere notion that somebody was able to conceive something so trite and somebody dished out the dough to make it sends chills down my spine. actually, its fascinating what the director thinks is scary to the thinking public, well if not the "thinking" at least public who are more mentally astute than a retarded jellyfish.

and as i said, i was recovering from this merciless assault on my mind when the loony chap gets his act together. he lays the ground work by glaring threateningly at me in the cafeteria during lunch and follows it up with an intimidating call promising dire consequences and an impending "visit" to my desk. and here i sit waiting for the fate thats worse than death...

he's mad... so what!

if u sustain a raving mad act for a long enough time, do u actually go mad? no this is not about me. its about this poor act who seems to be going progressively loony as the days go by. when i first met him he was pretty stable in the sense that his madness had a method. he was putting on the act to probably justify the otherwise startling things he had to say. but if he was building castles in the air then, now he's started living in them. laughter, i guess, is a very strong weapon. teach a person to laugh at everything and u have taken away the concept of reverence from him. thus there is nothing left thats sacred to him.

well i do think i have done a bit of an overkill. i mean just because he calls me up in the office and mews over the phone, doesn't mean that i have to go around advocating a straight jacket and padded cell for him. after all, what are friends for if not to overlook such things...

does size matter?

to truly appreciate anything it must be taken away from you. if u dont have it, u might covet it. u might pine for it. but u really dont know what u r pining for. if u have it u might use it, abuse it, misuse it without realizing how beautiful it is. and all this realization came to me thanks to a flat tyre. i was coasting along a curve, if one can actually coast along one when the great tragedy happened. a small puny nail stood up against the thundering surge of my machine and thrust itself with all that it could muster into the thick hide of my rear-wheel. funny how something so small could cause so much misery and anxiety! guess its a lesson for our generation fed on "size does matter" :-)

blocked and lovin it

a week into blogging and am already facing a blogger's block! what do u log? what has happened in ur bally life that is interesting and justifies the bytes of space blogger.com is allotting you. i guess there are other ways of looking at it: any and every thing happening in my life is jolly interesting because its happening to me and it will happen to me only this once. it is as much a part of me as the food i eat, hell its more a part of me. besides why should i put interesting things in this space? and interesting to whom? i started off to write for the sake of doing it. it was not a means to anything but the end in itself. so why bother what i put in so long as i want to keep at it. sorta reminds me of the gita. what do i care if i am just spewing out garbled mess so long as i am the one doing it and i am doing it for myself. maybe u need to get it out of the system for it to make sense. maybe its just shit anyway...

pride in prejudice

i have never given much consideration to the concept of a person's "life's work". i mean, even though i have always admired great works, i never quite got around to thinking of what they must have meant to their creator. and then i saw the movie (for want of a better word) - bride and prejudice. i didnt have great expectations from the flick in the first place but, optimist that i am, i had hoped for something a bit more from the director. now i begin to wonder whether she had secretly hired someone else to make bend it like beckham.

the good thing is that i started pondering abt the stuff i had mentioned earlier abt the creator's perspective. i found myself being glad that jane austen didnt live to see her work being raped to death and then a bit more by an overfed pompous lard-ass. the mere thought of a pea-brained actress attempting to re-interpret elizabeth bennett gives one the creeps.

i wonder why people like me spend good money watching crap? but in a sense it is good as the obscene amounts that these mindless flicks reap in would mislead people into thinking that this is the junta's choice, and probably prevent others from producing any great works for such low-lives like chadha to rip to bits.

ps. liked the young sis in the movie... too bad she didnt get laid.

mind ur language

the follies of misusing a language which others dont understand has finally caught up with me. i speak the language malayalam and of all the languages i know, it is arguably the most vulgar. the secret of it being head and shoulders above the others (or is it below) is that it is not an exceptionally good language for swearing but if u want to bring in as much obscenity as possible into "publicly acceptable" speech, this is the one u pick up. i have always wondered how it manages to infuse a wealth of scorn and revulsion into simple words like grass, water, etc. a friend of mine (been growing up with his guy. should have been more on my guard. sigh...) and me were talking in the office pantry (in malayalam. somebody should ban this) of, among other things, the girls who had just left with their coffees when this guy dropped a warning to be careful for one of them is a mallu. this was new to me. "which one? miss.x?" "i dont know her name. the fatso." "oh... the fatso..." and imagine my surprise for as i reached the "..." part in that last bit i was looking at her face. one of the other guys had helpfully held the door open (if only curses could kill. got to learn this abracadabra thing.) for we had started moving out of the pantry and the girls for some unfathomable reason had decided that they want to drink their bally coffee right outside the door. this is probably the worst part. i mean, u either drink ur coffee in the pantry or u take it to ur place. u dont... u do not drink it right outside the pantry!!! if u have ever walked down a garden feeling that all was right with the world only to step on a rake and have the handle come up and hit u on the tip of the nose, u would probably understand how i felt. and the worst part is that she wasnt fat by the greatest stretch of imagination. just that of the two she was better fed. and considering that this came from me who could have killed her by sitting on her ;-)

the da vinci cloud

my roomie's been reading the da vinci code and he was so enthralled by it that he went on till 3 yesterday morning and had to re-read some of the stuff for he hadnt quite read them; or something like that. the book, i must agree, is quite good but i wonder whether its the fast pace alone thats grabbed his interest. to be honest i was quite impressed by the amount of church-bashing dan brown (and his publishers) was willing to dish out in a book, thats after all meant to sell and make money. but they seem to have pulled it off quite nicely. what exactly is it about the church, as an institute, that makes people wanna bash it? they are arguably the most successful religious business and probably the largest organized charity. maybe the anti-church thing is similar to the anti-microsoft thing in the sense that what they offer is not "open" to all. back to the book. well there's nothing much to be told about the book either except that everybody loves a conspiracy. somehow we never get tired of the david-goliath thing, whatever form its presented in. i wonder why people dont write books about how goliath wipes out david and sticks his head up in a pike with a graland made of his entrails as a warning to others who might wanna try ;-). now that would be interesting. but again it wouldnt be a story i guess...

they killed my mockingbird

i had been reading "to kill a mockingbird" (for the third time, or was it the fourth) these last few days. its been a few years now since i last read it and to my surprise the bally book has changed. the first time i read it i thought that it was pretty good, the second time i realized it was pretty good. but this time around it didnt strike the same chords. scout didnt move me, atticus didnt impress me. its probably diminishing utility at work but i wonder if its more than that. have i become more cynical...

i wonder whether it is better to feel or not to - as in when u see someone moved to tears by one of those popcorn patriotism movies and u think to yourself, "god! how can they fall for that!". well isnt it better to feel something than not to feel at all? are we turning ourselves into voids that let stuff just pass through and stand by as objective analysts judging each thing by its merit; rather than wallowing in them and thoroughly enjoying ourselves by absorbing the little things in life? have we killed our mockingbird? anywayz, the book would still be up there in my list of "best books i've read". one can never forget stuff like "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." and then there is the big question of whether miss maudie had a thing for atticus ;-) and check out the image. learnt the image hosting thing from vaishalee (dunno who), and all in all its pretty neat. boy! read the second para again... what crap!!! :-)

endangered matrimony

the other day one of my friends, tendulkar* - his friends call him bhikari (beggar), send me an invitation to his brother's marriage. this guy works in a software company which claims to be powered by intellect though its an indefatigable mystery as to why that intellect never realizes how it is being conned into working it's ass off for the pay it gets. but that is neither here nor there. so this guy is a regular nice guy with a prediliction for talking to his girlfriend on the mobile and since those ruthless, capitalist service providers insist on mercilessly billing every single call, he is in a perennial state of bankruptcy which earned him the above-mentioned epithet. also, he is very attached (dont go for the obvious meaning. he's more like hank rearden's brother) to his brother and stays with him in bangalore and helps him out with house-hold chores like eating the food he, the brother, cooked and stuff... back to the invitation. the brother in question works in an ad company and had let loose his imagination by announcing his match in the form of a matchbox-label, a pretty neat job all things considered. so i called him up (the chap, not the brother) to convey my best wishes and also to convey my sympathies about him having to move out and all... and for all his experience with talking on the phone, the guy doesn't get half of what i said. "move out! what r u talking abt?" "u dude... abt u moving out. now that ur bro is getting married." "who ever talked of me moving out. i pay half the rent dammit." "dude, he's getting married. there really is the minutest chance that he may not want u hanging around the house talking on ur cell in the early stages of his marriage. i mean, it would be like starting him off at a major disadvantage..." "he's absolutely cool about it. so is my bhabhi." "when did u ever talk about it?" so there u go. my heart bleeds for the brother who, in exchange for a meagre rs.1500 a month (that's tendulkar's share of the rent which he'll probably negotiate as there will now be 3 people staying in the house), will have to watch on as his initial marital bliss is blown to bits by the presence of a disgruntled, horny software engineer hanging around the thin-walled apartment, eating up all the supplies and talking, nay shouting on the cell (poor connectivity) while he, the brother tries to whisper sweet nothings in his new bride's ears. such is the misery we inflict on the ones we love... * name changed to protect his privacy though he doesnt really care about other people's

virgin blogger upturned

what does one post in his first blog? for a guy who never had difficulty dishing out crap, it is ironical that i am stuck with what to put in here. so i'll start with why i am cluttering this page with mediocre efforts at breaking the ice. i decided to give blogging a shot when this nincompoop friend of mine suggested, "why don't you start blogging?" as one would say "why dont you take up yoga?" or "why dont we go for a movie?", and i thought "why the hell not!". the obvious reason for not doing this would, of course, have been that i suffer from this chronic malady of a general disinclination to work. However I overcame that with considerable effort and an immaculate display of moral fibre, though i say it myself ;-), and this here is the result. come to think of it, for a guy who had started off with claiming to suffer a writer's block, i have managed to bring out some pretty passable tripe...