there is a band called saliva!

and i am listening to them now. not very good. but i feel too lazy to change the song.

the hostel mess serves sambar rice tuesday nights. after all the times i went hungry in delhi because i was too lazy to cook, and too broke to eat out, i can put up with everything the mess throws at me — from onion-filled uttappams to oil-soaked bature. everything, that is, except sambar rice. “horrible macha, horrible,” i tell people.

i forgot my sister’s brithday again. got an sms from mummy around 10 in the morning, “have you wished your sister?” i get the same message from my sister on my mother’s birthday. and from both on appa’s birthday. i sometimes get the feeling that a nice PDA would be a big help.

i have stopped telling people about my course. when someone asks, i just tell them i am doing my PG in economics and let them form their own conclusions. not my problem if they assume i am doing my masters in the subject. that condescending look, the one that i have seen so often in life, is something i can do without.

bookless

i decided to give Art, the play by Evam, the miss. maybe it was the title — not very exciting, not as much as butter and mashed bananas — or maybe it was the fact that it was by evam, which doesn’t sounds as exciting as Harami Theatre.

however much i try to leave the subject of balls behind, “not happening dude,” screams this voice in my head. this is what happened in my risk models class the other day. “ok, now you have a bag with two black balls and you have another one with two red balls and two black balls,” said Dr lalitha, lolita to us. “i choose a bag at random and take out two balls which turn out to be black. what is the probability that…jack, why are you giggling?”

you need to be a regular church-goer or someone with a very mild imagination not to smile at all those balls.

i just realised that i haven’t read a book in months. months, jack the compulsive reader hasn’t touched a book in months. bleady heresy, shout all the librarians i have troubled in my life, including the one from the trivandrum public library who fined me Rs 1200 for keeping a book for an year and a half. but it is true, i am sorry i let you down, i tell them. i don’t know why, but i have been having trouble finding a book that interests me. fiction has lost its charm, i was never into biographies anyway and good non-fiction is…no idea, never tried to find out how they are. but take any survey of the 100 best works of fiction and i would have read at least 20 of them. that’s more than most of you combined. most of you readers still stuck with grisham and sheldon. boring!

i made the mistake of attending our course coordinator’s lecture today who was kind enough to admit in class that he was teaching the subject — financial economics — because he wanted to get a feel of the subject. i knew the faculty wasn’t really interested in our course since it is just a PG Dip, but this is hilarious. wanted to tell him that we wanted the same thing but is it ok if we got the feel studying by ourselves? i don’t intend to attend his lectures anymore.

i have been contemplating guitar classes for sometime now. friend varghese even agreed to bring me a guitar from shornoor, his sister’s, which has been lyng unused at home since she got married and pushed off to the gelf. but he called yesterday to say that his madras plan has been cancelled since his father was not very keen on him studying here again (he was coming for an interview). Sunny B, my pop star friend, suggested i buy a pluto, a japanese guitar which come for as less as Rs 2500. quite reasonable and pretty decent guitars too, according to him.

i have my french DELF exam on the 18th. don’t know how i will study for that considering my internals are starting on the 19th.

i was waiting at the signal when the traffic cop accosted me. “where do you study,” he asked gruffly. “Anna university, sar,” i gave him my cheeky smile. ever since i have been cutting my hair real short, cops, i have noticed, always gave me the glare treatment as they passed me. i suppose i would be in hawalat, getting the 3rd degree now, if i had dared to wear a skull cap. anyway, this guy realised that i was from out of town and proceeded to enquire about where i was from. satisfied that i was not from kashmir and just from malluland, his line of enquiry became even more funny. “so did you get into the university with some minister’s quota?” only when i assured him that i got in on merit did he let go of me, stopping some oncoming cars and waving me to cross. nice guy after all. wonder if he would have fined me if i had told him i paid capitation fees or something like that.

Pretty Sunny

it is that time of the day again.

i ran into my old friend, the pop star Sunny B, at the bank the other day. actually he can wait. let me tell you the story of Pretty Sunny (that’s her name, honest), a batchmate of mine in college and what happened to her economics notebook. pretty was a very good student, the class topper if i remember right, teacher’s pet and quite cute too. she was also knanaya, the endogamous jewish-christians mostly settled in central travancore. but unlike most of her community, pretty was a free spirit, and madly in love with jebin, a fellow non-knanaya christian mallu from tiruvalla. Jebin also happened to be one of the biggest stoners on campus. all big-time stoners of his time, and even their mentors, were unanimous in acknowledging that no one could roll a joint longer and better than jebin. how jebin managed to ensnare the princess of martin, the women’s hall of residence, is a mystery.

My college, the madras college of cannabis, is one steeped in tradition. and one of those is THE award. there are three actually, one each for the three men’s halls — St. Thomas’s, Selaiyur and Heber. the awards, called the Heavenly Thomasian, Heavenly Selaiyurian and Heavenly Heberian were given to the biggest stoners of the batch residing in the three halls. Instances of the award-winner actually collecting the award have been rare… to get to the point, Jebin was the heavenly selaiyurian of my batch.

two days before their economic test, pretty lent, or rather forced jebin, to take her notebook and get some studying done, for she was loath to show him her paper during the test. he took the book from her and did intend to do some serious studying, just to prove his love, or so he said. but it was not to be. for that very day, his senior, devaiah, the former terror of selaiyur, also landed in selaiyur to get some studying done for his arrear exam. and you know how it is when old friends meet. we usually open a bottle, they usually roll a few joints. time passed quickly, people came and left, Jebin’s balcony slowly swung to the music of floyd and the notebook was all but forgotten.

jebin woke up with the sun slowly peeking over the neem tree beside his balcony. his balcony was a mess, burnt paper and cigarette buds all over the place, deviah on the floor spread-eagled and mouth wide open. burnt paper? now where did that come from? realisation dawned on him as he lifted the shrivelled spine of what was formerly an economics notebook.

i met jebin a week after the incident; pretty was rumoured to be seeing a day scholar already. i did not want to bring up the topic of the book, but the story came out as we sat on my verandah, slowly sipping 8 PM and coke.

“i don’ know dude, i got up in the morning and it was Pretty Sunny….”

Sunny D gave me a blank look as i pinched him in the stomach. “Dude, i am not talking to you. you don’t visit us any more now that nitesh has left,” he said accusingly. it was true, i didn’t feel like going to their place now that my good friend nitesh had taken up the animator’s job in a Delhi-based news channel. but Sunny was a pop star and i couldn’t exactly hurt his feelings. giving him my most disarming smile, i told him that i was actually on my way to his place after i was done banking. “but you can’t come now, i am off to rehman sir’s studio for a recording,” he said. rehman sir = a r rehman, no kidding. “how about tomorrow afternoon then,” i asked. “no macha, not tomorrow, i have my hindustani music class tomorrow. i just joined last week and i can’t be missing classes so early. Masterji will question my dedication.”

“ok macha, then i will give you a call later this week. tell me if you are free then. gotta go now, i already bunked a class for comng to the bank. bye,” i hastily exited the building.

more balls

some 30 years from now, when my mid-life crisis occurs, i would look back and think about the things that i have done and the things i haven’t. will i be happy with with what i see and will the crisis turn out to be a simple case of nerves?

i suppose it will depend on how i measure success in life. right now, my views are kind of idealistic and i am hoping to keep it that way till something pricks the balloon. i would like to think that this idealism is because the child that i was is still alive in me, somewhere and as long as he lives, i would see success in terms of the number of people i have made happy, even in a small way. and the surest barometer of happiness is a smile, or better, a good hearty laugh (funny how i rarely use that word these days. hearty went out of fashion along with the hardy boys for me).

my great ambition in life was to be a comedian. but when joke after joke was labelled PJ, i realised something that has stuck with me all this while.  there is nothing called a poor joke. people will either laugh at your joke or at you, but they will laugh neverthless if you try. of course, if people don’t laugh, it doesn’t qualify as a joke. so what if i couldn’t be a comedian, i could still be a joker.

coming back to balls, i found my neighbour (in the hostel) he other day rubbing and squeezing his crotch (no, he was not naked then). “What happened macha,” asked my roommate. “i got cramps man, ” he replied, “when i tried getting on to the bike.”

“you are rubbing the wrong place then, ” i said, assuming he had the cramps in his thighs. the reply left us stunned, bewildered and in the presence of superman.

“no you idiot, i have the cramps in my balls.”

he had to be superman to have muscles in his balls. or so i thought till i came across the cremaster muscle in wikipedia. till my friend had cramps in his balls, i had assumed that the testicles were just made up of tissue, just like the penis. nope, the cremaster muscle has been there all along, covering the testes. and its function is to raise and lower the scrotum in order to regulate the temperature of the testis and promote spermatogenesis (whatever).

but still, cramps in the balls?  

new day two

i do have some plans of making this my diary.

my roommate aravind joined the gym yesterday. he has been complaining of cramps in his abdomen all day. after doing forty crunches and almost the same number of don’t-know-what-you-call-it curls, it should be quite natural. i remember the last time i had cramps in my stomach, when i ran, cycled and rafted (after we built the raft from bamboo sticks and tyres) nearly 15 km at the corporate challenge in Kochi. kinda loosens your bowels.

i took to crunches kinda slowly, so the pain was modest. but instructor assumed that i was in for some serious body building. so he got me started with weights almost as soon as i signed up. swinging weights this way and that, pulling and lifting and what not. the arms were sore for two whole days and i could barely lift the pen in class. i somehow conveyed to him in broken tamil that what i wanted was to build some stamina and increase flexibility (you never know when you get the opportunity to try out those 64 positions of the Kamasutra). So he harasses my roommate these days while i happily run amok on the treadmill followed by some intense table tennis matches.

i tried my hand at basketball when i was in school, but stopped when i realised that no one was passing the ball to me even  when they were desperate. i managed to get into the House football team because i was the house prefect, but the captain substituted me 10 minutes into our first match. i got my certificate though since we won the school tournament and i have no qualms about mentioning it on my CV. Cricket was something i have detested since……i don’t know, a long time. then there is tennis, which i first played in college on our hall’s ground. though i never learned to serve very well, i can confidently say i was one of the better players in the hall, most of the others also playing the sport for the first time. and of course there is TT, the sport i play best. the number of hours that i have played the game with the indoor games minister of my hall, who also happened to be my neighbour in our final year, is beyond count. we played on the eve of exams so that we could stay awake and conviniently forgot about the paper. that was how absorbing it was.

which brings me to the moot question. why i am better at playing with smaller balls? thesis topic, anybody?

poetry?

a bit mellow, quite a clown,
trying to fit in, in a new town.
look inside, that’s all i do,
finding life’s errors to undo.
a big bright world out there,
wish i could give it a care,
meanwhile, i live in my head,
till the time i am dead.

a new day

today is the first day of the rest of my life. sounds good.

i just deleted my orkut account. it was something i decided yesterday. less time in front of the computer and more in the big bright world out there. blogging is different. it means i write more — songs, poetry and that novel which has been in the works for so long — and i may even start sketching, guitar classes, salsa, the list is endless.

not that i spent too much time orkutting anyway and deleting the account was more symbolic, if anything at all. but i consider it the first step towards being a more social being. i intend to start the transformation from the shy introvert to the life-of-the-party dude as soon as i have arranged my thoughts.

what happened today?

warden came back from bangalore where he was doing some research work at the IIM. And was he pissed at seeing the number of ciggy butts on the ground in front of the hostel! it led to his taking a quick tour of the hostel. he never came to our wing though. looks like he has forgotten that the guest rooms on the second floor, where we stay, is also a part of the men’s hostel. good for us; though we were careful enough to hide the bottles under the clothes in the almirah.

Talked to Kurt Bengali today. he is off ot goa, finally, with Koshy mon and some other MBA friends of his. we had planned many a trip to goa which never quite materialised since all three of us had different schedules, vacation timings and monetary considerations then. i was working, Bengali was doing his MBA while Koshy mon was in JNU doing his MA in IR. Now, the scene is just the opposite. i am studying while the two of them are working, Koshymon in bombay and Bengali in Delhi. I did look for tickets of the railway kind but there is a big waiting list for that weekend. and flying is no more an option. i am not an earning man, as Bengali would put it.

Bengali, Koshy mon and Pillai were among my batchmates who landed in Delhi along with me after graduation. though the initial camraderie was quite robust, it didn’t last as we found new friends where we worked and studied. but we did manage to meet up almost every month — usually at my place since i was the only one who had my own place — for some booze and nostalgia. pillai turned up once in two months and there were others too, but the scening — a term koshy mon cined – was usually enancted by the three of us.

pillai was on a trip of his own the whole while. he was in north campus while most of us used to stay in south delhi. so getting to nostalgia avenue meant a lot of travel for him. he even complained to me about no one ever going to north campus to visit him. which easily spurred me to make a trip there the very next week. it may have been because i was easily the most jobless of the lot. no one else turned up, but that kept pillai in good humour for a few days, i suppose. 

Pillai is still there in delhi, working his ass off for the civils. it would be nice to have an IAS in our batch, someone we can call to cut the ribbon when the college has a function. i would be proud to say that the ribbon-cutter was from my batch. Anyway, pillai still complains that no one ever comes to see him, though he puts it in a much nicer way now. “Everyone is so busy nowadays,” he says and it is actually true too. 

Since i moved back to Chennai, despite all resloutions to put my best foot forward and be more outgoing, i failed to connect to most of the crowd here entirely. Though there are people i hang out with, it is just not the same as college or even Delhi anymore.

Recently, my friend Lal passed away after a battle with blood cancer. everyone knew that he was at an advanced stage — the cancer was diagoned quite late — but I never expected the end to come so soon. Lal was one of the most happy-go-lucky characters i had encountered; his laugh was loud and he was quick to it but it was his accent that left us in splits in many a general body meeting of the hall of residence. His demise set me thinking about a whole lot of things. or maybe it just brought to the fore what was always there at the back of my mind. that death could come knocking any time. if that is the case, shouldn’t i be living every day, every second as if it is my last. my senior died last year, just collapsed while brushing his teeth in the morning, without any warning. why can’t that happen to me?