hey

Another awesome day, eat drink, drink some more and be merry.

joy thought we had to do something on easter and woke me and my roommate around lunchtime. his roommate — in his Rs 2500-ManU jersey — was also supposed to come along but was finally convinced, using some reverse psychology, not to. hate that idiot. ok, not hate, dislike.

auto to bessie.

we got down in front of the wineshop, but i flatly refused to drink anything on an empty stomach. so off we went in search fo food, finally settling for mallu food in tharavadu. but they didnt have veg biriyani, so i didnt order anything. just sat there staring hungrily at joy and aravind eating naadan parotta with chicken curry. did eat one parotta and some gravy though.

went to gallopin’ gooseerrys after that. didnt know they had a branch in bessie. had heard a lot about the gream’s road one when i was in college, so thought i should try it out. the veg barbeQ burger was just ok, not really as good as the ones in eatalica and more expensive too.

next fruit shop where aravind had something with tang in its name and ginger in the juice while i had the orange juice. they have opened a shop in dubai too it seems.

walked to pirates, a resto bar in adyar, with a stop in between at fashion folks where joy and aravind checked out but didnt buy t-shirts. they had a huge tv showing highlights of yesterday’s EPL matches. anyway, pirates turned out to be more expensive than what we had heard it would be. and black pearl was just a short walk. but there was hardly any shade in adyar and we were glad to be inside in the end. one foren uncle and aunty peeped in as soon as we had settled down, said something in german and scooted. but the bar is one heack of a place. at night, you can usually find some well-dressed middle-aged uncles discussing politics and cricket there. other than that, black pearl is one shady place.

mirlang was leaving chennai for good and goodbyes were in order. they, mirlang, the jamshedpur gang, mickey, his colleague christopher, the pop star sunny B and his brother were on one heck of a trip at the thiruvanmayur house. dont remember when we got there and when we left. just remember that we stopped at adyar for packign some food and got back to hostel around 21:30.

up there

a 100-bucker from saidapet,

doesn’t leave you deep in debt.

you may think this isn’t chic,

but you finally understand psychedelic.

what matters is before your eyes,

making patterns of earth and skies.

every sound is a gentle gong,

especially after you try the bong.

quite hungry you will be,

and thirsty like a honeybee.

vada, cutlet, bread and butter,

things you hate will be so much better.

the water froths, the bottle turns white,

the smoke curls up shining bright.

head swirls, foot does a twirl,

you dig deep searching for the pearl.

wisdom is close, you can feel it there,

it feels good but then you hardly care. 

actuary

An actuary is someone who finds oppurtunity in risk. From your ordinary bank accounts to your stock market portfolio to the property you own, virtually all investments have some inherent risk. it is the job of the actuary to mitigate that. Acturaies are also the guys who design your insurance policies, decide how much premium you pay and find the right balance between offering the policyholder a fair price and making sure, at the same time, that the company makes a decent profit. Yes, actuaries need not be guys alone. they can be women too.  

I just mentioned the women part because of this mail i got recently from my yahoo school group. this old classmate started the mail with “Dear GAGs” and went on to tell us that it has been a long time since our last reunion and blah blah blah. but what the fuck is gags? after subtle enquiries with equally perplexed classmates, I finally asked the author himself for an explanation. “Oh that, that is GUYS AND GALS dude,” was his reply.  These engineers are really smart, you have to admit.

i was a member of our batch community on orkut. was because i am not in orkut anymore. this is one of the threads there:

school v/s colg

how many of u think that u wud miss colg more that school .. (those who miss colg more may as well get the hell out of this community).

I really hadn’t thought about it till then. but the answer was obvious. my school life wasn’t all that great and all i wanted when i was there was to leave the place as soon as i could. maybe it wasn’t the school that i disliked. i hate trivandrum. i hate its people. and i will always hate them for making the best years of my life miserable. so, compared to those years, anything that came after was like manna from heaven.

I am an actuary now. you just need to clear one paper of any actuarial society to be called that. you need to clear all (12 to 15, depending on the actuarial society) to be a fellow of the society and around 6 to 9 to be an associate. it is a big deal, being in one of the best-paying jobs in the world definitely is. but every few days, i realise the amount and years of work that i would have to put in and the mental picture of me in my mind quails. kinda shrinks like it was a plastic mannequin which has been deflated.

my classmate here was analysing my character from my handwriting yesterday. his uncle, who was with the delhi cops, had taught him, he said. didn’t know cops knew all this. anyway, his appraisal:

Your actions and thoughts are extreme. (his exact words were, “you are extremist in your thoughts and actions,” but i am assuming this is what he was trying to say). you have a tendency to leave things half done (i was reasonably sure he said that because i left my french course at the alliance francaise midway). but whatever you do take up in earnest and finish, you do very well.

i do like hearing good things about myself. even that half-done bit sounded quite cool. i am a dood, macha.

in the company of james

my mother is very scared of dogs. this fear, along with her forehead, are two of the things i have inherited. appa is okay with pets though; they come to him easily, nuzzle him as he pets them. but they can smell my fear a mile away and i am always greeted with a menacing growl.

“you never know where they have been. they might have been lolling aound in shit all day. you can never say what all diseases they are carrying,” mummy would tell sister and me. you have to be in the league of baba amte to not quail at the prospect of don’t-know-what diseases. so all these years, i wouldn’t step into a house untill the dog was locked up or kept on a tight leash. the owner would try to lure me in by saying, “they are completely harmless,” but i wouldn’t budge. and when i did, the dog came and smelled my feet, then lifted its forelegs to climb the jack mountain. i nearly fainted; and when i got home, washed my feet with dettol.

life has been tough the last couple of months. “it’s going to be tough, the next couple of months,” i told myself when i was moving back to madras. i was just thinking about the massive amounts of coursework then. but the period saw me withdrawing more and more into a shell, a shell i had almost come out of my two years in delhi. two years when my closest friends were three to 20 years older than me and that is suppose, made a ot of difference. all my life, all i had ever wanted was to be understood. my parents never did. my sister was too young to. in school, i did my best to be different, making sure that i was not a part of any clique. and i slept through college. i had to travel all the way to the capital to meet people who finally understood me, just a bit, but that made me the happiest person, just knowing that such people existed.

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.

my favourite spot on campus is the spot, a narrow parapet next to the college building. the wind is always up there, and you can sit in the building’s shade all day. james came up to me at the spot one afternoon as i was opening a pack of tiger biscuits. as he looked longingly at the packet, something in me finally attained closure, the fear of dogs left me and i kept the open packet in front him. after finishing the food, the dog came and stood next to me, slowly smelling my pockets to see if there was any more. i gingerly placed my hand on his head, with all of mummy’s words about unhygienic dogs racing through my head. james turned around and licked my hand and i almost pulled my hand back in shock, afraid he was going to bite. after making sure there were no hidden biscuits, james proceeded with his afternoon siesta, right beside me.

over the weeks, i made it a point to get some tiger biscuits for james every day. the dog became the friend i craved for. and i have finally started understanding why people keep pets.