There is a God of Gorgeous Butts

A few days ago, I had posted a comment on A's blog on the characteristics of The Great Indian Queue where I had bemoaned... ok, let me paste it in so you can see for yourself.

- there will never, ever be a young woman with a gorgeous butt in front of you. Ever. If you have a sex change and enter the miss universe contest, the person in front of you will still be someone who's done the same.

Within 24 hours of posting this, I was in a queue. The window was closed (gone for lunch) and immediately in front of me - right in front - was the best denim-clad butt I had had the previlige of seeing for the last month.
The timing of this is... frightening.

But it definitely makes a lot of sense for me to do what I'm about to do... I think I'm on a good thing.

The next biggest problem with India is that nobody comes to you in the street and for no reason hands you large amounts of cash.

Ok, God Of Give Ashish Pots Of Cash, do your stuff!

Return of the Living Dead

Under any other circumstance, I'd have found this freaky. Over the last ten days, my dead past has been crawling out of the woodwork in the form of orkut contacts. People I haven't met, spoken to, mailed, IM'd, thought about, fantasized about, or even had featuring in nightmares suddenly appear in their new avatars of networking pages, coming first in ones and twos and then by the dozen.

Coincidentally, the last ten days have also seen a massive surge in zombie movies. Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead... I finally aquired the Constantine divx and the new Omen, Underworld 2, and Final Destination III released in theatres... not to mention Hellboy tonight.

Diabolic Conspiracy or Divine Communique? The frequency of calls coming from the US for one highly work-intensive client also went sharply up, so I mapped the correlations between horror on TV versus horror on call.

It was .76.

Not funny. Not funny, man.

That is - I don't consider my clients in any way to be associated with the Downstairs, or possess any form of demonic powers or influence. They may have, but someone will need to actually banish one with holy incantations before I'll accept it.

But that's the beauty of networking sites - they network. Simple fact of life but comes across as pretty creepy when you see it in action - one person signs up, starts getting in touch, and suddeny long-lost friends and enemies turn up everywhere... and they're all mailing, messaging, scrapping, smsing. A cloud of cacophonous virtual pigeons around my head. And unlike real pigeons, I can't even catch and eat 'em.

Go to hell!

Except that this time round, I know exactly where that is.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!

You approach Satan's wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell.

Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Very Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Extreme
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Very High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Extreme
Level 7 (Violent)	Very High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very High

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

Somehow I never really imagined heresy to be the biggest sin I'll be committing in my life. Lust, gluttony, avarice, gloom, treachery, even violence... but heresy? Or is the fact I can't recognize it proof of the fact?
Or is it just the Net's way of telling me I don't agree with anyone?

lassitude

All I want is everything

or at least, 49% of it. I want 49% of admissions into kindergarten, 49% of college seats, 49% of jobs in every sector, government and private, I want it all. But that's what I'm not ever going to have.As of today, a little under half of all jobs, educational oppotunites, choice of careers... is gone. I just need to fight for what's left.

Every morning, when the train comes in, there is enough space for around 100 people to sit, and a thousand to stand. Every morning, five thousand people actually occupy this space. Every morning, around fifty people abandon trying to get into the compartment becasue it's too crowded / difficult / dangerous. Every morning, three or four people fall off and get maimed or die.

Every morning, I am able to get a sitting place in the same compartment, under a fan, and go to to work reading or listening to music. I can do this because I taught myself how to use the timings, the spacing, how to swing around the bar while the train's still doing 20 kmph and use that angular velocity to curve into the seat I want before it's too late. I've taught myself to break bagstraps, knock off specs, and twist elbows while making it look completely accidental to get in. It's nothing personal. It's just the way the system works. I broke a guy's nose once, and nearly lost my fingertips another time. I do it because I need to.

Every morning, I know that two years from now, I will not be doing this anymore, because I will have moved beyond Bombay, I will have upgraded myself to the point where the daily commute like this is not needed.
It's nothing personal. It's just the way my career works. I start low, try out combinations, fight to get to a level and go beyond it. I don't care about the train. It has it's moments, good, bad, exhilarating, nightmarish. It also has its lifecycle. I'll use it for as long as I have to.

Every morning, I know that five years from now, fighting for 51%, or 25%, or 10%, or one job in a hundred, or less, will not be an issue. I will have moved on. Whether India adopts a reservation system or not; whether human beings fight like animals for basic necessities or not; it won't matter. I - or my family, my kids - won't be part of it. They'll have their own battles to fight, of course, but this is one that will have been already won.

I did ok. I might have done better if I'd gone to the engineering college here someone ten percentage points lower and with a different surname unfortunately got that last seat, but I did ok anyway. I guess it's how you look at life. You can cry over it and say you've been robbed of something that should have been yours by right, or you can accept that the only things that are yours by right are what you've worked for, fought for, and got. Nobody owes you anything. Not your ancestry, not your country, not your government. Only you owe yourself a life. You work for it, you get it, and you move on.

What happens to the train, the college, the government, the country... it doesn't matter. They don't owe you, you don't owe them.

It's nothing personal.

Update - May 26th

Another poster reads: "I am leaving for the US. I was disowned by my own country."

have a bad day

This is very clearly getting perverse now. Not only does the Person Upstairs not like me, but he seems to be deriving vicious enjoyment in making me suffer, the way I used spend hours of enjoyment with large ants, some string and a GoodNight.
Not only am I working my butt off the last 2 weeks and returning home at midnight each night every night, I finally get a heaven-sent opportunity to be home early. A meeting ends, barely a 20-min drive from home... at exactly the tipping point, where it makes as much sense returning to office as it does going home... and as usual, I froze.

Office? Home? Work? Sleep? Presentation? Blog? Client call? Kill Bill?

flip, flop, flip, and so on until 2 cigs and a chai later I took the plunge and went home, screw everything, will deal with it early tomorrow. Happily and relaxedly reached home and took out keys to open front door to discover said keys were not said keys, said keys were actually in office desk drawer.

There is nothing more frustrating than standing at that door, knowing that half an inch away is cold beer in the bridge, a soft mattress, DVDs, and best of all 4 hours of uninterrupted me-time. Half an inch, but it might as well be in Kathmandu.

Oh, well. Take the bike and go to some friend's place? Good idea, if helmet wasn't locked inside house and bike papers still incomplete.
Call roommate? Produce cell, find battery dead.
Grind teeth.

Recall number from memory and dial fromPCO. Get an old man. Of course, it helps that my roomie's name is also an impolite slang for 'old man' if pronounced that way. Get abused by said old man.

Take extra key from broker? Excellent. Broker gone to gaon. Even more excellent.
Grind teeth again.

Recall from memory with more concentration, get roomie. Tell him to get ass here.
Wander shop to shop begging for nokia charger. Sun went down hours back but temperature still sauna, only more humid. Take refuge in cybercafe. Realize I'm paying by the minute for a service that I get better, faster, and way way cheaper on the other side of that half inch thick door. No new mails. Nobody online. Pay credit card bill and stare aimlessly at screen. Force owner to charge phone and chainsmoke while chatting up people I've not spoken to in years for the next 2 hours.

Find I have booked myself to catch up with people I don't want to ever see again for 3 lunches, 5 dinners, a party and 12 drinks in 2 days. Not including what I already had planned. This is going to be an interesting weekend.

nobody likes me

Especially whatever god that may exist of technology... he's stopping short of casting e-thunderbolts upon my greying careworn head but that's about it. After the entire cable internet episode, which I would still consider the crowning glory, here's what else he's done -

• blocked the oil feed to my engine when I was about to take out one of the hottest girls I know
• gave me a job in the Internet industry and then had my IT department firewall me
• got my MP3 player stolen
• made all my interfaces produce perversely wrong reports, the kind that look oh-so-innocent until a question is asked, whereupon the entire structure of your conclusions collapses like a House of Usher and clients screech like the undead
• turned my cell to a screaming demon that I can no longer use; every call is additional stress
• made me IM-deaf&dumb by disallowing the Y!M network proxies
• when I bypass that with meebo, the net itself gets cut off

I seem to have seriously pissed him off at some point.

How do you appease a vengeful modern god? Can't be animal sacrifices or that would've worked by now. Should I sacrifice my roommate? Can't imagine why any god might find him appetizing, and I might lose some more brownie points. Maybe his Dell.

Who am I?

Came across one interesting little online test - it's a quick Myers-Briggs personality type test. Normally I dismiss most of these as conmplete crap, but this struck me for two reasons.
1. It matched with 2 others that were linked in as part of the same community discussion.
2. It matched with a full formal personality-assessment done four years ago by our MBA institute director, who also happens to have specialized in this field for several years.

(I was an INFJ, by the way)
Quietly forceful, original, and sensitive. Tend to stick to things until they are done. Extremely intuitive about people, and concerned for their feelings. Well-developed value systems which they strictly adhere to. Well-respected for their perserverence in doing the right thing. Likely to be individualistic, rather than leading or following.

Pretty interesting reading. Good timepass if you're into this kind of stuff... although this seemed to be painting me as this seriously intense background person, someone watching and evaluating, and if necessary, steamrolling over everyone else to get what he wants... and it doesn't help the other test describes the personality test as a 'Mastermind'. I keep remembering Police Academy VI and silhouttes of mysterious masked figures in fedoras and hearing maniacal laughter.
And I don't want to keep a large white furry cat.

Take the test here, if interested.

no more messenger either

Y! Messenger at office has stopped working, and I'm distraught. Never realized how important it had become... it's like losing a sensory organ. It's like going deaf, or something.
It's such a cut off feeling.

We communicate in so many ways. Mails. Phones. SMS. Blogs. Communities. Offliners. IMs.
Oh yes, face-to-face interactions. Almost forgot that one.

Don't you feel the way we stay in touch has gone through a complete paradigm shift? Five years ago, we would have groups like school friends, college friends, school friends, neighbours, family... now, it's all of the above. People that aren't online... you just don't stay in touch with them. Earlier, we used to write letters, call up people when visiting, catch up; now, everyone is either always-there or completely-gone.

no more sex

I don't remember where this discussion came from, but it turned into a fascinating one... We already have nuclear fission techniques (I'm talking biology, not physics - the entire take-a-cell-and-zap-it-till-it-splits thingy, the Roslin Technique) which they used to clone. If we can come up with something similar for fusion - where you can get 2 cells to mix their DNA - and use 23-chromosome cells only, then that's it. We will have made a new human being, made life. Not a clone, but a genuine new person. At the genetic level.

Cadaver Aspirin thinks you can't fuse anything except 2 egg cells - i.e. and XX+XX only. An XX+XY... there's more economical (and fun) ways of fusing those. XY+XY will still need a donor egg cell to continue beyond nuclear fusion.
Which means a world without men (and with continued evolution, not the genetic dead end of simple cloning) is possible but not one without women. We could of course use non-human egg donors but that's just too Omen (and he will be born of a jackal)

The cadaver finds that a ghastly idea, and I agree... besides, the tendency so far seems to have been towards an increase rather than a decrease. F'rinstance, there's already three sexes in Bombay needed to create and raise children - men, women, and bais. It's just not possible otherwise.

But on the serious note - cloning will very definitely be as common as GSM tech in the next fifteen years. You already got Lifecell with simple tissue-level regeneration; the next step will be a Michael Marshall Smith's Spares scenario.

Andre feels cloning is a doorway to immortality, but I disagree. Cloning is still all bout biology and genetics. Moving memory - and feelings, and conciousness, and identity - Soul Transference - is still a long way off. When the clone wakes up, will it be me? Or just someone a lot like me who wakes up with readymade memory but his own identity, who'll watch his memory donor still die a separate person?
I thought of having a second body grown (heck, I'm not that fussy, I'll take any that's available) and having my brain transferred when this one wore out, but the brain is also ultimately the same flesh; it'll degrade. Besides, the brain may not even be the answer. The Romans believed the soul resided in the liver. You can remove 90% of a mouse's brain matter and it will still remember the fastest way through the maze. The brain's just hardware, where do the memories actually exist? And I'm not even thinking about self-consciousness yet.
Man, this is fascinating. Can you even transfer souls? Gibson's ROM-construct characters - That's immortality, but immortality for the individual means death of the species. It's Catch-22.
and besides, sex is fun.

generic snarling

Seriously pissed off. For the 6th day in a row, I've had to sit in office until a time that makes going for a run the next morning an extremely unpleasant if not impossible experience. My cardiovascular system is degrading, the BMR spike I'd managed to get over the last 2 weeks has flattened out like my client's alphawave patterns, and the headaches are back.
Too much coming together. Rejection in 4 separate lives in the space of as many hours is not a pleasant feeling.

Don't know when I suddenly became an ops servicer. This is very definitely not what I saw myself doing, 15 months ago.
Waiting for June now. If that works out... let's see. The more things change, the more they stay the same...

And I guess what is pissing me of most is that something this trivial is succeeding in pissing me off. This is nothing. Why's it becoming so important?
I know what I need to be doing... it's just a question of time. Time to get back on track, shove everything back where it belongs... is that even possible? Can one make life a series of discrete, demarcated events, or is it one continuous intertwined mess that maliciously tangles itself up faster than my headphone cables?

I guess this is what rabies feels like. Loud, bright, dry, restless, and an overwhelming compulsion to bite.
mmmm... that would be nice...
bite till your jaws ache so so much you can't open em anymore and the freshblood smell, the metal taste the slickness the gristle wetripping off bone

Stop

I'm going to need professional help very soon like this

I'm caught between too smart for the simple happiness of tunnel vision and not smart enough to get beyond looking at the walls. I just hope it's a progression or I'm royally fucked for life.

resurrected roaches

There is a new companion in my life.

Two days ago, I stepped on a cockroach in my bathroom. She gave a flat kind of crack and yellow-green paste came out of the sides of her abdomen. After a few minutes, she started twitching feebly, so I left her and got on with my life.
The next day, in the morning, she was gone. I though nothing of it until I found her in the corner, on her back, legs curled up. She sensed me looking at her, and twitched her legs and waved her antennae. I ignored her again.
Tonight, she was still on her back... but, now on the other side of the room. When I switched on the light, there were some smaller 'roaches around her, and they scurried off. What did you think... they were giving her get-well-soon cards? The intestinal loops and solidifying paste she had been dragging around the last 48 hours were gone. They had been eating her alive, in the dark.

A cockroach lives 2 years, a human seventy. A human will die without water in three days. This is around 0.0117% of his life. By that logic, a cockroach should die in 2.06 hours without water. This one has been twitching happily for close to 72 hours now.

Great. The assorted ecology of my apartment can now be expanded to include an undead cockroach.

I shall call her Mallika.

scents and sensibility

it's incredible what a vivid - and emotionally powerful - trigger, a smell is.
Every time my roommate lights a cigarette, it's not that first sting just in your nose that goes up into your sinuses in a warm rush... it reminds me so much of being a child.
Summer evenings in a dark verandah in a series of huge, rambling colonial bungalows all over UP. Purple sky, stars just coming out. Breeze. Peace. Security. No worries.
These used to be the times when my dad would usually be back and be sitting outside with the evening chai... and usually this would be the first time in the day I'd smell it. This was before the job, before hostels, before college, before tutions, before even a bicycle-equipped friend circle. Most of the time between when I was old enough to walk and old enough to be allowed out of the house on my own - this was a defining smell, a scent that said my dad's home... later we'd sit and chat. And I'm always going to remember this smell with him, and my wanting to be like him.
I don't get this memory when I actually take the first drag, or even when I light up myself - that has a whole other set of associations. Teens. Adventure and guilt. Breaking rules. It happens only when someone else around me lights up - especially with a wood match.

I can quit smoking. I can't quit wanting to smoke. Right uptil when I actually do.

camo

I stood up today and as usual, someone tried to cut my head off.
What is it about being good at something that automatically makes people assume you're trying to be better and go after you with a chainsaw? Yaar, I'm being me. I'm not interested in being faster / smarter / stronger than you. I don't give a rat's ass about you. But somehow not being treated to rodent posteriors makes people all excitable and competitive.
These days, I tend to zone out at work... I don't know if it's the result of my vascular system finally getting back on line, or the awla snacks, or the weather, or incipient nervous breakdowns, or what; Life has become a videogame again, and I'm on a winning streak. Have started losing all sense of time... it's nice. Last I felt like this was during my 12th boards, when tunnel vision made life so much less complicated.
As long as I know where I'm going, that is.
2 days ago, I crossed a break point. I just stood back and thought, there really isn't much point struggling with this; I'm going to get jacked by something out of my list of 127 things to do before 9 PM, so might as well let it be #1. Since then, I've been surfing along the catastrophe curve and nothing's happening. Unless I stick my neck out, like today morning. Nah. It's more fun this way.

I

quitting

I'm on another health trip again. It's been close to 60 hours now, and I've slipped back only once.

Everything they say is true. The world is sharper. Louder. Brighter. Tastes better, smells... more, this being Bombay. But I have this undercurrent of restless manic jittery energy all the time... any more and it'll be twitchy.

I'm walking everywhere, and it doesn't matter how hot it gets. I arrive in office every morning dripping sweat. I arrive home every evening bathed in it. I'm sleeping earlier. The dreams haven't started yet, but it's a matter of time. In a couple of days my bodyclock will readjust and I can throw away the alarm clock.

Although I say this every time, this might actually be it. I've found something stronger. 12 years' conditioning for responding to feelings of satiety, stress, pleasure, relaxation, boredom, intoxication with a cigarette is being beat.

And sorry, I'm not saying what it is... you have to find your angels yourself.

The post-food periods are the worst, though. I actaully progress to twitchiness for a quarter-hour around then.

is an extramarital affair a sin?

One of you, dear readers, will have already read this... please excuse

virtue.
abstinence.
self-denial to oneself the pleasures of life, whether food, or mood-altering substances, or the pleasures of the flesh.

equatable?
how do you define virtue?
something you do for the good of all society around you, that develops into a set of societal norms. Cleanliness was a virtue because your fleas couldn't spread the Black Death. Fidelity is a virtue because you can't spread HIV.
But substance abuse? A virtue because you don't rob and murder to finance your habit? A slight stretch... so many other things that you can do the same to finance... but playing the stockmarket isn't a sin. Nor is choosing Gleddenfich over Mera No. 1.
Or having an affair. Whether you hurt others (or even just one person) is not a given. But do you by extension, by example, hurt society? Only according to the accepted norms... and how relevant are they? If you encourage by example everyone to sleep around, are you also indirectly leading to the demise of the human race via STD epidemics?

telelaughs

Telecaller: Sir aap postpaid use karte ho ya prepaid?
Me: Madam aap postpaid hain ya prepaid?
Telecaller: Sir aap jo chaho ge... agar aap chaho prepaid to hum prepaid bhi hain, aur agar postpaid chahte hain to postpaid bhi hain.
Me: hmmm...

wonder what she was selling...

Dalhi

So here I am in Dalhi. chaos reigns.

What am doing in Dalhi, you ask? You may well do so. And in the immortal words of Archana, if I find out, I will definitely let you know.
Friday night I was happily playing dumb charades with A___'s CEO and VP and my own GM.
Then I was 10 drinks down and changing a car tyre at 3 AM.
Then I was 16 drinks down and at the airport, but my body refuses to move. Does alcohol metamorphose into a muscular neurotoxin when it crosses 1,000 ml in the human body?
Then I was in the Starcom conference room, being trained in Starcom Processes (kinky!)
Then I was in Andheri, packing.

Night passed.

Then I was in Dalhi introducing Gaurav T to the Joy of Oracle. The thrills of the MAFs and the highs of the SOWs. The deep serenity of the SOLAR and the outright hilarity of the ARS. topped up with with the near-orgasmic levels of pleasure of the Global Flowchart.
Then I was roaming Centerstage in tow of my hosts in search of large bright paper flowers.
Then I was gorging on the best mutton curry I have had since I last visited my grandparents, nearly ten years ago.
Then I was back in Okhla with Oracle.

Now I blog. So whassup, doc?

bonguly

Calling all Bongs!

The best of Cricket, Politics, and Ganguly. Download and split your sides laughing now! And if you find this offensive, screw you!

The One... The Only... Bonguly

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what's the weather like up there?

You Are Lightning

Beautiful yet dangerous. People will stop and watch you when you appear. Even though you're capable of random violence, you're best known for your power. Your dominant state: performing

What Type of Weather Are You?

Lightning

Obviously. What else were you expecting?

It's getting dark, and there's an electric feeling in the air. Something is readying itself, and you don't know where, or what, you can sense it coming.
A wind rises, a wall of hot, dry dust sweeping with it like a desert god's arm clearing his arena of the debris of the fun and games past.

A moment of silence.

Then ten gigawatts of raw energy leaps from heaven to earth, flickering through kilometers of air, foliage, and creatures between.
Air boils, flashes to plasma and slams outwards in terror.
The ground blackens, melts, sand fuses to glass before it understands what happened.
The wavefront rolls across the plain in a tsunamic crackle that fades to a deeper bass that you feel in your bones miles away.

And there's silence again, shocked, hushed.

The moment passes. And then the rain comes.

Cool.

Don't panic, people... I was just trying out some image-rich writing. The results were highly pretentious and wannabe; will be using imagery only when quietly slipped in the middle of other cynical sarcasm like an oyster in a shell. (Like so!)