Wet

You walk out, you get wet.
You drive out, you get wet.
You go to college, you get wet.
You eat an apple you get wet, you say ‘Hallelujah’, you get wet.

These days, anything and everything you do gets you wet. It just rains all day in Bangalore. The traffic on roads is horrible. The roads are horrible.

Enough of being optimistic, let me get pessimistic. The weather just rocks. There’s a nice, cool wind blowing all the time. Its cold and chilly. Walks in the mornings are just a treat.

Here is Bangalore's answer to Ooty and to the world. Why go to a hill station? Stay in Bangalore, join my college and enjoy the benefits of retirement at 18.

Today was the most phenomenal day in my illustrious career at College. Ay, today was the first, yes, the absolute first day I sat outside in the college quadrangle bunking a period. It was really nice.

Of course it was raining outside.

And we had to meet an old pal at a horrible, gut wrenching, life sucking, Azkaban like place called BASE. That made us bunk three periods in a row. Why we could sit in the quadrangle and not might as well have attended class, I don’t know. I guess it takes joining a college like mine to understand these paradoxes of life.

And then, we had a walk in a park called Bugle rock park. There were no Bugle players, only innocuous couples coochie-cooing under the rocks making slurpy, Bugle like noises. We ran for our lives.

And we got wet on our way to Halli Tindi, which fancies itself by serving village food of all kinds. We waited there for Satya, the pal at BASE, and a ‘visitor’ of Amar’s.

Satya ditched us, and we got wet again tracking our way down to Azkaban. It sure got chilly, it sure got dark, it sure got gloomy, peering into the mysterious labyrinths of BASE.

Then, we went to Papdiwala to eat. Poor Azkaban break out’s, it really does gets up to their heads. Satya wanted ice in his Lime Juice in this weather! He might as well have kept his glass outside and the cold weather would make it ice-cold anyway.
Huh! When would these people get Madu brains??

And, I, the person, that I am, forced the ‘visitor’ of Amar, to eat just one Sandwich. Now, that would have been very filling for me, but well, it apparently wasn’t enough for her. Too bad.

I forgot I eat just as much as a Koala does[ How much does it, by the way?]

Ah, I love the rain. Off I am to get wet again.

Have It? Sell It!

Punch in “Neurotic” in Google and a small teenie-weenie advertisement at the side says:-

Neurotic
Looking for Neurotic?
Find exactly what you want today
www.eBay.com

Now, that’s damn weird. Sure, there are people who would bother selling their souls or entire villages on Ebay. But selling Neurotics, well, that’s crazy!

I have a spare cycle with one tyre [ no, not a unicycle] and no brakes and a body more full of rust than metal. Wonder if it will sell. And I wonder if could sell my College there. I should try.

There are also a few worthless things I could try to sell. One; my brand new IIT books. Two; my brand new, unused, brain. Three, the bus stop outside my house. Four, my neighbour’s dog. The list could just go on and on.

Also, I should try selling a few potholes of Bangalore, relics in themselves; they should fetch a million at least. And no one would even notice or bother if I go out with a drill to dig out the road to get the coveted potholes. Off I am to buy a drill.

And my hairs grown back, begging for a cut.
Off I am to that rascal of a barber again, soon.

(Hopefully I can sell my hair too!)

P.S.: This is how the alphabets would have looked like without the Q and R. Wow!

Its the final Coundown.

Imagine a countdown to your death.
Imagine it go - Tick Tock , Tick Tock.
Imagine it staring at you from the edge of your computer screen.

And before you realize you hardly have 70 minutes left, or rather in my case, 70 megabytes, my life being my broadband meter and me having 70 megabytes left in my download limit.

Its like the apex of the roller coaster, a never ending, bone-jarring fall is all that remains.
Before I know it, Poof! 70 megabytes gone. How data flies when your having fun, and I haven’t even started the Satya stuff yet!

Can’t someone contribute and get me an unlimited connection?? I guess I will have to rely on my Dad to answer that question.

And my face goes blue when I think of that loafer Amar getting speeds of 20 KBps on his bloody 64 kbps connection. How he does it, I don’t know. Sure he is geeky computer nerd who knows his FAT32’s from his NTFS’ and his Kernel 32’s to his Page files. But how he makes a 64kbps give him 20 KBps, I don’t know, and I hate him for that.

They say a Brahmin’s curse never fails, Siddharth, do something. Curse that fellow.

May he be kissed by a thousand Devika’s, may his DVD collection burn, or worse, may his Internet Connection crash.

Phew!
Now that felt better.

Hero Of The Day

Yes, my College Principal is my Hero.

He is the Jack - Of - All - Trades as I see him, which I do pretty often.

Mornings, he is at the gate standing just as a watchman would do, watching us all pass by furtively. If he could only give a smart salute and shout “Salaaam Shaubji”, I would have got him a job at a better place.

Later on in the day, the old bloke sits on the visiting chairs outside his own room. He must be suffering from amnesia, poor fellow.

Otherwise, he goes around to each of the 50-60 classes reading out the examination rules individually. Why would someone be so jobless, I do not understand.

At other times, as in during my admission, he was the one who actually totaled up my marks and filled up half of my application form. And today, the fellow went to the extent of checking out all my attendance registers and asking me as to why I had not attended each class. Sure, I don’t suffer from amnesia, but still, how am I supposed to remember why I bunked which class on what date.

The master of alibis that I am, I gave him the most stupendous, no, totally outrageous alibis as to why I was not in class. Although I joined college a month late, that fellow just couldn’t understand that. I thought of making some equations and proving mathematically using some self-conjured hypothesis’ as to how the probability of me attending classes depended directly on my curiosity in finding out the colour of the hair of my pals at college that day, which seems to change every day.

But that bloke seemed to think that I was enjoying outside bunking classes. If bunking college and getting up at 12.00 pm, playing on the PS2 and going for a movie seems enjoyment to him, he definitely needs a break. Those are the bare necessities and how are you supposed to get by a day performing them. But no, I have to attend classes.

Sigh .

No one understands my problem.

And tomorrow if he does not give my registration form, I will belt out “Hodimaga, hodimaga, hodimaga” at the top of my voice to convince him that I am a member of Upendra Fan Cult too, just like him. He will have no option then, will he??

Yes, a watchman, a peon, a attendance clerk, and ofcourse , a principal.
My hero.

The Calls of Nature and Exams!

I tried, I failed.

I tried to stay calm for my B.Com exam. Well, I apparently couldn’t.

I have plucked out all my hair and the Nescafe jars’ are all empty.

Well, as I am the optimist always, now I can finally pose a challenge to my barber. Let’s see what he does with my hair now, now that I have none. None to colour, none to comb, all sacrificed over a bloody B.Com trial exam.

Since I am so well prepared, I plan to wear long stockings tomorrow for the exam with my legs knee deep in ‘Chits’, an imported Motorola walkie-talkie set to chat with my close buddies Gaurav Kothari and Vikram during the exam, try to fudge and get those elusive twosome to elicit some answers which I can jot down in my paper.

Well, apparently, it seems like I have failed in my preparations again.

What happened was this. Just before I was conjuring my ‘Chits’ this morning, I went in for a walk on the terrace. Staring at the Ursa Major and the Centaurus , I figured out an important fact of my life, one of the few unsolved mysteries of our times, it being that I have an exact chance of 0.65% of passing my exam.

And before I could know what was happening;
Plottt!

Yes, heaven had answered. Heaven had finally answered.

Heaven had answered in the form of a pigeon who had to choose no other place to answer the call of nature but the empty space above my shoulders [with no obvious reference to my brain]. My jazzy shirt spoilt, I decided to renounce everything.

So, I plan to go off to Ananda Spa in the Himalayas for a week free from worldly pleasures like examination to attain salvation there, rather than in my examination hall.

And I just hope someone can call my mom and convince her that I found my true calling and to let me go off to the Himalayas.

The Art Of Living!

Try typing in B.Com in Microsoft Word and use the auto correct function, it will say ‘Be Calm’ and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

I really don’t understand how ‘the Hire Purchaser not getting the legal rights to the Asset’ is going to affect me anyway, and earlier I couldn’t understand how ‘the reaction of 2,4,6 Trinitrophenol with methyl alcohol’ would affect my bloody future.

Thus, I plan to switch over to ARTS, yes, arts. Science to Commerce to Arts to god know what, yes, that’s what life is, other than chewing paan and spitting on stair case corners.

Psychology, the art of studying a psycho would find me having a perfect case study in me. And if doing Journalism finds me , just as Aaj Tak’s and Zee News’ do, investigating why my neighbourhood aunty has a grudge against the vegetable seller next road or why George Bush refused to shave with Gillette and preferred to use Brut, well, then I am game for it. And arts being arts, I naturally love drawing, and unlike a familiar Bramante I know of, my drawings, as my Value Added book would prove, border on the abstract and the grotesque, both of which would easily pass of as ‘The Mordernest of Modern Arts’.

After I get bored with Arts too, which I know I eventually will do, I would just open a small Paan-Beedi-Gutka shop next to my College, become a millionaire in no time and will get an opportunity to spit my own paans. Then, I would get all the young newbie’s addicted to my paans and beedis.

Ha! HA! Me, a sadist. Ha! HA!

So, off I am searching for a partner [ in losses only] for my new business.

Till then, please, please, ‘Be Calm’.

Sadism is Good!

I love Call Center Executives.

They are frustrated, workaholics, irritated and generally always stoic, just my type.

So, throughout last year, through my late night rituals of very late sleeping, I used to call up one of the numerous customer cares [Toll free, mind you] and bug the hell out of them.

So, I have tried to order pizzas using the Spice Customer Care, listed out to the Jet Airways people why Air Sahara was way better than them, giving them more than 50 reasons relentlessly, argued with the Hutch Care people that the owner of Hutch was not a tycoon in South Korea but some freaky king in Brunei.

My other exploits included try to persuading the Hewlett Packard people to send me a free Ink Cartridges as I was the CEO of a multi-billion company and wanted to test out its products. But the best of my adventures materialized in me trying to get an ICICI Bank credit card by telling them that I am get a salary of Re.45 and that I was the next Steve Jobs or Larry Page[ who also get a salary of $1] and that I was going to inherit Bill Gates’ empire as he was impressed my skills at C++ when he came to school, the frustrated kind lady simply slammed the phone down, thank you very much.

I once acted as thought I was the CEO of Spice and berated them about the importance of speaking politely to ‘our’ customers, the poor fellow almost believed me until I reminded him that which fool of a CEO stays awake at 2 a.m. and that I was just kiddin’ and kindly told him to get back to sleep.

Me, the sadist that I am, used to call up customer care center right in the dead of the night and asked them if the Call Center was up 24 hours or only at night. The Poor people would have cursed me like mad.
Damn! I am going to hell!
Boo Hoo!
Lucifer Here I Come!

These Call Center people are always very stoic, always.

What came as a pleasant surprise were the people from Nokia Customer Care.
Well, they log the name and phone number of each person for easier future reference. After having giving them the required details a previous time, when I called up the next time, a very pleasant voice in a wonderfully accented English said , “Am I speaking to Mr. Gaurav …. And is your number 2…….”. Well, since I was in a particularly nasty mood that day, I told that it wasn’t Gaurav but his “evil - twin brother” speaking.

And to my astonishment, the lady burst out laughing hysterically and continued to do so for quite some time until she shifted back to the Call-Center-Executives-have-to-be-stoic mode. It’s almost like Mr.Wemmick’s post box smile.
Sigh!

And nearly every Customer Care number has a different name by which they refer to their Executives.

Some call them ‘Customer Care Executives’, some simply ‘Agents’, some ‘Customer Care Representatives’, ‘Customer Relation Officer’ and everything under the moon except of course frustrated-irritated-person-who-would-wants-to-kick-ur-butt.

Man , Call Centers rule, unless ofcourse you work in one!

Broadband

Broadband.

It’s amazing how a small 9 letter word can cause euphoria, ecstasy, delight, elation and bliss in a self confessed geek like me.

Being the optimist that I am, my dial up days went past with me having time to read my entire B.Com Additional English book or to make a trip to Shimla and back while a simple page like www.gamespot.com loaded or while an mp3 could be downloaded.
Ahh, those days are gone.

Now downloading an mp3 takes as much time as it would take a Grandmaster to beat me at chess or as soon as I get bored with studying, which is in the limits of a few seconds.

Also, today was another one of those non-significant days at college.

As usual, I bunked the first two classes. Also, Amar, today, wore a really nice T-Shirt, and the ‘SMARTY’, as he is being called nowadays, is the ‘hottie’ in class among the girls[and a few not so straight boys too!].

I have also declared myself to be terminally ill with the “Cotton’s Syndrome”, the symptoms of which is the desire to cut my hair exceptionally short because of Ajay Kumar’s hallucinations, the desire use a Hydrogen Sulphide flavoured deodorant with every occurrence of Pa’s phantom, the desire to laugh out hysterically at the sight of Mercy’s spirit and of course to scream out ‘Jaaaaaahhhhn’ loudly and in one breath every time Neelam Patil’s apparition appears which is right now hovering above my computer.