'Uber' wale ki maya

There are moments in life that makes you question the very ideology you were holding with utmost conviction all your life. I was never really impressed with Gita and neither with its twisted and ridiculous 'interpretations'. But while waiting for a ride in the remote outskirts of Kochi on a dark and rainy night, the chapter 4 & verse 7 of Gita revealed before me with all its glory !


After the 10th auto driver also failed to perform his dharma and remorselessly denied two helpless & tired people a ride, (s)he incarnated before us just after a single click.. Often in human history god was given different names based on when and where they are needed .. I guess right now in Kochi it goes by the name 'Uber'!!

On the flip side, the kind of divine services we are getting now might well be a temporary 'maya' .. but then who gives a damn !

Feeling the fall ..

When was the last time you felt a waterfall ?

No, I am not talking about being there or even about seeing one. I am talking about feeling it

Standing in front of the fall, absorbed in the marvelous exhibition forged by the marriage of water and gravity, I asked myself the same question and sadly the answer was 'never'. I recalled that in almost every other visits all I cared was about capturing the fall in a perfect frame or trying to make it a mere background behind my lovely portrait .. I was simply following the herd, not able to visualize the kind of life the 'fall' is bringing to otherwise still and calm 'water'. Can any camera possibly capture that life with all its emotions?

However this time around I stood there, with mobile kept inside my pocket and eyes hooked on the fall. After a while it started to grow beyond just water, rock and fall. I could imagine a mind heavy with feelings, finally bursting out, thumping down one after the other to the hard rock of reality, expressing its fury in a wide canvas and then spreading its energy all around through those tiny droplets filling the air .  After the show it was slowly attaining a state of nirvana, resuming its journey steadily forward vaguely resembling the relief of an artist after completing a masterpiece or that lazy, relaxed nap of a couple after one real wild round in bed ...

I stand there feeling it for minutes, could have stayed for hours if not for the others waiting for me. On my way back I saw people rushing in to fill the space we left, holding tightly to their cameras, mobiles and tabs. I could only wish that in between their frantic attempt to preserve those moments they could at least take some time to live a few of it as well ..

So, when was the last time you felt a waterfall ??

Overcoming stupidness - A self help strategy

Every one does stupid things once in a while and I am not an exception. But do you know what's the worst part of doing something stupid? Its the feeling which immediately follows, the silent but strong realization that you are stupid enough to do something really stupid. Its a hit on your pride and its a feeling that slowly eats up your morale and eventually brings you down. To overcome its repercussion you need a way, an escape plan to get yourself out from that thought process. Let me tell you how I get this done

 "How do you make a line smaller without even touching it?". My strategy lies in the solution of this puzzle. I simply draw a bigger line right next to it. In other words you can feel yourself less stupid, by looking at some one stupider than you. However its easier said than done. It might sound simple enough but the fact is - 'its impossible to find some one completely stupid'. So instead of finding stupid people I started looking for 'stupidness'. I needed some thing categorically stupid, relatively common and at the same time something that passed the test of time - of course I was not interested in spot-stupidness. 

But let me tell you, it was a challenge to find cases that met all criteria. Since humans are constantly evolving species its tough to find people who remains genuinely stupid on one aspect for a long time. But then I found this one set of people who fits the bill perfectly. They spent their time, money, effort and literally bet their ass on a fictitious ideology which any one with a fraction of common sense will throw in dust bin. Their stupidness is so stable that nothing in earth and definitely nothing above the sky could unsettle it. And talking about their availability around us, they are so easy to find that if a bird can poop while flying then 8 out of 10 times it will be shitting on them

You might want to know more about these folks and probably use them too. But for obvious reasons I cannot name them. May be I can help you with some pointers. Here goes some of their golden rules, hope you can figure them out using it ..

1) Your whole life is a pre-written drama which is determined purely based on the time at which you were taken out of your mother's womb. However this 'exact' time is decided presumably by the doctor based on various factors from your and your mother's health to the availability of labor room

2) This drama is scripted using a cryptic language which can only be interpreted using the view of celestial bodies(millions of kms away) from the exact location in earth where you happen to be born at that exact time when your head made its way out

3) Normally you cannot change the script. However you have the option to manipulate once you manage to decrypt it. To elaborate it further, imagine life as an online exam with a series of multiple choice questions. It gives you choices ranging from who should be your life partner to which direction your toilet closet should point to. In a normal scenario you trust your logic and instinct and select a choice which makes sense (which however will end up to be exactly same as what was already written in script) and you either get lucky or get screwed up. But then, there is an alternate way of doing it. You can also do cheating by looking at source code of the web page(or full script here), understand which should be the correct option and then choose it to guarantee success

Feel free to use my strategy whenever needed, unless of course ... you know what I mean, don't you?  :)

Tailpiece : I talked about the drama and an obvious question could be about who scripted it. Well I rather not dig in to it now. Its opens up a bigger can of worms and way more absurd ideologies which could be hard to digest in one go

NOTE : Edited on 9th Aug 2015

Image source : http://all-free-download.com

From Deepa till Alfred - The fun in watching the world burn !

Hope you remember Deepa!
Yes, the same Deepa who followed Akash like a fly around lighted candle and eventually got burned by its flames. Finally it took some consoling words from Sid to bring her back to reality !

Wondering what made me remember her after all these years ?? 
Something that happened today made me recall her or rather one of the dialogue she told in the pub that day 
"Akash lets go dance and make other couple jealous"

Today afternoon while gazing through some of the old photos I posted in Face book and once shared in Orkut, a thought or rather a question cropped up inside me. What was the true inspiration behind sharing these photos ? Beyond the various obvious reasons like "keeping friends and well wishers informed", "joy of sharing" etc, I some how felt there was a much stronger motivation behind it. I did an honest introspection and even applied  '5 Why' principle to reach the bottom of it. Finally I reached that hard and painful conclusion. It was exactly what Deepa told Akash that day - "To make others jealous" 

Now you might think what's so wrong with it. Well, when Deepa told it that day, me (or Akash) made fun of her along with the Sid and Sameer. We jeered at the trivial idea of doing something with a sole purpose of making others jealous. Now a decade later I am doing the exact same thing with out a shade of guilt. Height of hypocrisy isn't it ! 

The idea planted by Deepa that day seems to have grown inside me. Now I am able to comprehend more with Deepa. I could even imagine myself as a fly around the candle, but here its my own virtual alter ego that I am orbiting around. Each of those photos I shared was nothing but an attempt to bolster the image of my counterpart and secretly imagine the world flaring up with jealousy. May be one day, just like Deepa I might also get hit by the flame. May be that day a Sid will wake up inside me and bring me back to reality !

However it might all take a while... in the mean time let me share couple of rocking selfies from last night's party and then sit back, relax and count the 'likes'.


Going in the lines of Alfred Pennyworth

"Some men just want to watch the world burn .... in this case with jealousy though" !

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NOTE : After reading the whole post if you are still trying to figure out who the hell is this Deepa, I would suggest you go and buy a CD of the 2001 Bollywood movie "Dil Chahta Hai"

Side effects of watching too much "Master Chef"*

* Master Chef is a U.S. competitive cooking reality show, open to amateur and home chefs. Click here for more details

What those blue eyes told !

Some one said long ago, that life is more like a long long night ride.  There are times when you drive smoothly along the familiar highways in a comfortable speed avoiding all those unknown roads. But once in a while life throws you a surprise lightning whose white shining light opens your eyes to those alternate unknown roads, making you rethink about the direction and pace of your road trip. Here is a short first hand experience of how such a lightning struck me couple of days back

There is a famous quote from the Turkish author Adnan Oktar a.k.a Harun Yahya which goes like "I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question."
Katty (not exactly her real name) is some one who seems to have asked this question to herself long back during one of those chilly winter mornings in Switzerland and then decided to pack her bag and fly out of her nest looking for more warmer lands. I met her in a bus during one of those journeys where the cramped over-head luggage rack was not accepting her heavy back pack. I helped her out with my expert knowledge about the presence of a trunk at the side of bus where she can keep her bag and this allowed me to have a short chat with her, who was much thankful for making her seating more comfortable. 

Katty is more like one of those migratory birds where the seasonal movement is triggered by the chilling winter back home. She travels all alone with her back pack, her 'punk'ish nose rings and her special 'Bob Marley'ish hairstyle. Its her second visit to 'Gods own Country', previous one was 5 years back. She already traveled along length and breath of India from Rajasthan deserts to inner villages of Bihar to beaches in the west coast and her favorite Fort Kochi where she was heading this time once again. Sometimes you wonder what makes her do all this lonely seasonal migration, is it just about seeing places, or escaping winter or is it some thing more. To take her own words "What I liked about Kerala, apart from the climate is the pleasant welcoming smile I get here every time". There is a shine in her blue eyes which seems to reflect all those smiles she collected around the world 

That day I saw in the lightning, a Swiss bird who flew away from her nest and her familiar tree, to the unknown sky only to collect smiles around the world. Then I stretched and looked at my reflection in the rear view mirror all I saw was a bird still flying around the comfort shadow of his tree. But now when I look up I could see the wide blue sky with a pleasant smile, welcoming me to take that unknown path .. 

Memoirs of a 'Shoppingophobiac'

I’ve been to a lot of super markets and malls around the ‘globe’ and no matter where it is, every time I enter one of those dress shops my eyes eagerly starts searching for something and the search more often ends in disappointment .. no it’s not the rest room, you can find that much easily. What I am looking for is rather a resting place, a sofa or a chair or anything on which I can rest my butt with some dignity

It might sound silly to some of you out there, but for the people like me suffering from (or may be gifted with) a condition called ‘Shoppingophobia’ every step taken in the shop floor is nothing short of torture. But who cares about ‘us’,  in this bourgeois capitalistic system customer is the king and they will be given a polished floor and pleasant lighting so that they can walk, stare and finally end up ‘consuming’.. and ‘we’ … we will be sidelined as a some lost souls forced to keep standing and walking like one of those zombies you see in Hollywood movies, trying to find the meaning of our existence in between the jungle of garments

But alas, finally my prayers (?) are heard.. today as I walked in to Lulu at my hometown in my typical melancholy mood resembling one of those poor helpless goats led by the butcher to the cutting stool, I almost left out a yell of joy. There it is….. my key to freedom from the long hours of pain I was getting prepared to. Dressed in Blue, three of them greeted me with a welcome smile. With relief I slowly alighted to the middle one of those chilling steel couches and slowly started to scribble my ecstasy so that at least some of my ailing brothers know it..

Yes, it’s true comrades ... there is still some hope left in this world for us and today when I looked in to the tunnel there was surely a light … a blue, cold light !