Lying awake in search of sunrises

Prologue:

4:00 AM: Too much to drink but not drunk enough.
4:30 AM: Too much to drink but not drunk enough. Have a smoke lying down. Can’t Sleep.
4:35 AM: Too much to drink but not drunk enough. Can’t Sleep. Strange buzzing in my ears. My roommates’ snoring sound like the rumblings of the Two Towers of Baradur and Isengaard and it definitely doesn’t lessen my misery!
4:45 AM: Can’t Sleep. Nusrat Fateh and Massive Attack on the Dum Mast Kalander track aren’t helping the cause either.
4:50 AM: Pushing the Goddamn envelope. Sleep dimension breaks into the real world.
4:55 AM: The melodies of progressive trance merge with the first rays of the sunlight. I decide to go see the sunrise. Sleeping can take a hike with me.

* * *

Sunrises are beautiful, and a sunrise in Mussoorie is as beautiful as any. Trapped between the stunted Shivaliks, the mist that extends from your hands all the way to the Doon valley below is surreal. The upper layers refract the sunlight, giving a strange rainbow effect. Well, the only difference is that there are no clouds with silver linings here, and neither the hope of a treasure at the end of a rainbow. It is just the chilly wind and the silent mist that constantly whispers to you in your solitude.
There are people awake and working at this unearthly hour. There’s a maid washing dishes in the cottage below. There are two different men carrying cups of tea to different people, people waking up from different dreams and perhaps different nightmares.
I wonder if tea has different flavours (I realize it does!), and does a particular flavour have a different effect on your waking up and the way the rest of your day goes? If anyone has the answer let me know. I am not a tea drinker. Sorry Tea Board of India!
There’s a dog down there too, a mother, playing with her pups and occasionally chasing a flight of pigeons away (Three sunrises later I was to realize that it was almost a morning ritual). I see a monkey who walks past on the railings I am leaning against. He picks up one of my lit-out Benson and Hedges Lights cigarette butts, has a sniff and a lick, looks at me, (I thought gave me a “My favourite brand too!” look) and then walks away to spend the rest of his day.
I realize I am here searching for sunrise. I suddenly wonder if monkeys search for sunrises too? I wonder. I like to believe they do. And since we are their descendents, maybe that’s why we look for sunrises too.
My Discman is playing Dj Tiesto’s In search of Sunrise 3. The album has built up beautifully, and it reaches its peak, which comes at Solar Stone’s Solar Coaster track. The beats come; then the melody and I close my eyes.
“How can you see the sunrise if you shut your eyes?” a part of my brain asks.
“Shut Up!” says another part, “what’s the point in looking at the sunrise when you can feel it!”
The booze the nicotine, the visions, the music; they all form a concoction and make their way to my consciousness in the rush of blood, through my veins to my head. I stretch my arms out and touch the receding mist; I imagine I can feel the rays too. I stay in that ephemeral moment, try to hold on to it. Then it vanishes into the bright sky above, the valley below, the fading beats in my ears and into the visions trapped in my memory.

* * *


Epilogue

Why do we search for sunrises? That is a question I wish to ask Mr. Tiesto if I ever have the pleasure of meeting him. He has made five albums in his ‘In Search of Sunrise’ series, each one as good as the other. Maybe he would know all about it…
It is symbolic I guess, and it still confounds me. Why is a sunrise (or a sunset) romanticized so much? Is it not the same thing over and over again? Doesn’t it get boring after a point? And if that is the case then every human being should catch only one Sunrise and one Sunset per lifetime to save the human race for eternal boredom.

But, I got my answer there in Mussoorie. It is because each one is different. It is about searching for the perfect sunrise, the ominous fulfilling moment.
I hadn’t found my perfect sunrise yet. Hell, I hadn’t even been In search of a sunrise till that day…damn!
I had a minor epiphany then:
“Waking up is the best when you weren’t asleep in the first place.”

The Incredible Mr. Sen

Mr. Sen is an ordinary man, an ordinary Bengali man to be precise. Slightly strange he definitely is, but it’s not evident to the naked eye. It is not his hairstyle, held in a constant off-centre parting with the aid of Olive and Keo Karpin oil, neither is it his ‘fashion’ sense. He is pretty much as Bengali as Bengali can be.
His prejudice against Jon Bon Jovi may seem strange to some, but that is not that grand enough on the scale of all things strange. He has a knack of inventing a new concept of utopia every week over a cup of tea (with a hint of ginger for his mild sinusitis). He is teacher of History and Political Science by day and by evening he dons the avatar of the mild-manner Kartik Sen, tutor of ‘Pol. Sci.’ (and history, English, Bengali etc.) to the hopeless youth of his colony. That too is done at a very nominal rate of Rs. 60 per hour, per child.
Well, the above description would make him border towards the banal, but it is in his life beyond 7 p.m. that the strangeness lies. Coming straight to the point Mr. Sen is a distinguished ‘fish reader’. He has a talent for reading the thoughts of people who have come in certain proximity of the dead fishes, or touched them. This does not imply that he has the useful power of foretelling the future or anything; he can just download the thoughts of people into his brain via fishes.
He does this fish-reading on a daily basis, during his daily jog at 8:30 p.m. He first runs from his house to the Kali Mandir and then to the local fish market. On reaching the fish market around 9:00 when it is mostly emptying out, he does his reading at his own leisure. He feels the fishes, dead, kept constantly wet to maintain their freshness. He runs his hands over the scales, prods them and at times (to gain access to some very deep thoughts) he put his hands under the flap where the gills are meant to be. He then makes his way back home.
On further analysis it would be evident that Mr. Sen.’s field of expertise will be restricted to Bengalis as it not often that you find any other species of humanity buying fish in a Bengali fish market. That does not bother Mr. Sen much though, not as much as the fact that the ability to read fishes (or human thoughts downloaded onto fishes) has to be weirdest talent on face of this earth.
And what does Mr. Sen do with this talent? Nothing, really. He jogs back home, en route he analyses all the thoughts of other people in his brain and separates them from his own. He then finds out the ones that are funny and has a laugh. By the time this process is over he is already home and then he forgets all of it with a glass off Royal Stag (with Coke or neat). He then muses over the pace, the imagination, the diversity, the convoluted nature and the depravity of the human thought process for 10 minutes and then has his dinner.
That is just another day in the life of the strangely talented Mr. Sen. He deems himself and ordinary Bengali man, which automatically implies that inaction is his birthright. For it has been that many times during his readings, that he has come across people who fall in the wrong end of the moral spectrum and has done nothing about them. Well what if he manages to stop one wife beater? That is not a big enough dent considering that the population of India is 1 billion, and a very optimistic assumption that only 1 out of every 10000 is a wife-beater. He’d rather discuss faults of Marxism in class when he is supposed to be teaching about the rise of the Mughal Empire.
One day, all that was to change. Mr. Sen on his general fish-reading trip came in contact with another strange man from the far side of the moral spectrum. Well, this one wasn’t a wife beater, but that was because he wanted to do away with his wife altogether. This somehow managed to arouse the latent emotion of standing up for what is right in Mr. Sen’s heart. He decided to stop this man.
So, he was going to follow this man and luckily he had got his Maruti 800 (1992 model, no AC, in desperate need of servicing) to the market. He got behind the wheel and started pursuing the man’s car (Chevrolet Optra LSI).
The man drove and drove and drove…evidently aimlessly. A usually very Mr. Sen was about to get bored and give up the chase when the Optra pulled over. The man came out and started to fiddle around with something he had taken out of his jacket. It seemed on Mr. Sen’s immediate analysis to be a gun (or a knife, or a hammer or a very old and big cell phone). The man fiddled around with it for some time and then got back in the car and started driving again. Mr. Sen followed suit.
“Suoererbaccha! He’s going to do it!” thought Mr. Sen.
“I have to jump that red light,” thought the man.
“I will have to stop him,” Mr. Sen said to himself.
“Maybe I won’t, that truck’s not slowing down,” the man thought.
The Optra halted ahead of the Stop sign at the red light. The truck was still speeding and coming from the other side.
“Shit! My brake doesn’t work!” Mr. Sen cursed.
The Maruti 800 didn’t stop and hit the rear end of the Optra. The front of the Maruti collapsed inwards (1992 model, insurance not renewed either), the rear of the Optra got a dent. But that wasn’t it; the impact made the Optra inch a little forward, so much so that it hit the side of the speeding truck, ricocheted off it and hid the side pavement hard. The man inside had just taken off his seatbelt, so he had no chance. Gone in 60 seconds.
The police came and after a thorough (yeah, right!) investigation deemed it what it actually was; an accident. There was nothing fishy about it. Mr. Sen’s Maruti sold for scrap value.
Mr. Sen later felt triumphant, some good had finally come of his fish reading skills. He had been the hand of God, of divine justice. He felt like a superhero. Well, he was no Batman, Superman or Hellboy, but he sure had the weirdest superpower on the planet. The mild mannered Kartik Sen by day and the ‘shorts’-wearing fish-reader by night he was.
“Good must always triumph over evil,” he would tell his students.
“Sir, what does that have to do with Sir Roger Dollar?” and impatient student would ask.
“It’s Siraj-Ud –Daullah son, you are not British mind you. And I ask the questions here not you,” he would reply with a sense of authority.

It is generally perceived that the great that give new directions to our society and it is the mediocre masses who push the train in that direction. Mr. Sen might have been one of them, the mediocre people, but now he felt that he was meant for greatness. A secret desire to break out had risen in him, one that had long been thwarted.
So Mr. Sen is now devising ways change the world with his fish reading skills. May God grant him the favour of all the fishes in the world.

The Boxer Rebellion 2: the apocalypse by maina pyaarkiya

It is generally believed in the civilized world that the men of any nations would rather wear briefs as compared to boxers; but this very essence of human culture and existence seems threatened with the Boxer Rebellion 2.

The roots of this global threat can be traced to the American invasion of Iraq. Inside sources like Jay Leno and Letterman had reported that America had indeed found WMDs concealed in the form of Saddam Hussein’s boxer shorts. The army and the government had quickly underplayed the incident. But fate it seems has caught up with the erring superpowers of the world.

Analysts have aptly decided to name this new wave the Boxer(s) rebellion 2; as the perpetrators of this movement have decided to outlaw all briefs and similar underwear and make Boxer shorts a worldwide phenomenon. Professor Jocky Khanna form the OOGABOOGA University, an expert in this field, says “Boxer shorts can indeed be deadly weapons of mass chaos. They are known to cause hernia, carry rashes and if modified and engineered in the right manner can bring about impotency and other viral diseases. The usage of suicide bombers may further aggravate the problem and expose the female species to the risks as well.”

At the not so recently concluded UN Insecurity Council summit, President Bush had this to say

“We as nations cannot afford to be threatened by Boxer shorts in the new millennium. We cannot have a nation suffering from hernia. So my message to all those nations supporting those involved in the boxer rebellion is: In this war against global underwear terror, you are either with us or against us. Either you wear briefs or you don’t wear anything at all”

President’s comments were received internationally with much accolade, except for Scotland and Africa. Scottish ambassador John Rivolta said that his country does not know how to respond to Bush’s speech as they didn’t wear anything under their Kilts in any case. As for some of the Africans, well, they are not sure if skirts made of leaves count as briefs or boxers.

Back home India’s position in this movement is generally seen as having a pro-US incline. However, the PM received a lot of flak when he supposedly told Bush in a private meeting that even though the country’s foreign policy is generally unanimous, he still didn’t understand why the opposition has decided to stick to wearing ‘chaddis’

The opposition raised a storm in the media and vehemently denied the allegations. They said that chaddis are made of khaki and are in not even remotely similar to boxers. They say that internal matters of the nation should be kept internal and not made public internationally. A prominent opposition leader even said:

“PM saab…Ab aap kahenge…ki…..Shri Raamji ne…dhoti nahin…sarong peheni thi!”

India has thus decided to play a key role in removing boxers from Asia, which will help in reviving its stagnating textile sector. The global council against underwear terrorism has taken key initiatives against fighting this menace. The five-fold program is:

a.) Coerce countries with sweat shops from where these boxer rebels mass-produce to get rid of them or hand their management and control to Nike, Reebok or Adidas, failing which such countries will be wiped off the face of the planet.

b.) Create a global intelligence network to infiltrate the boxer distribution systems around the Globe.

c.) The US along with UK and France has established an elite military task force by the name of G.I. Jockeys. They will also be getting their own reality TV series soon.

d.) Introduce more comfortable, cost effective and luxurious forms of Briefs in the industries

e.) Mass produce briefs in China and outsource the rest of the work to India.



The future of the world and our way of life definitely seems unstable. Even as I speak numerous ‘suicide boxer-wearers’ are being trained all across Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Africa, South America, Antarctica etc. etc….

One can only hope that this menace is quickly dealt with before the threads of the boxer rebellion spread all over the globe and our planet becomes just another pair of Boxer shorts floating in space.

Greek Gods and The Bubbly Grind

Smoke rises and thunder bellows at the gates of Hades. His quest has finally reached an end. A warrior of the Gods he was, tricked into insanity and bloodlust. The fumes come out from under the gate, rendered white in a pixilated hue. He grips his swords tighter. A drop of sweat falls of from his palm and disappears onto the floor. He is a Demi-God standing on the edges of the underworld seeking retribution, seeking answers. At the Gate of the Underworld he seeks his end.
A distance voice seems to beckon him. Voice of a lover, a companion but he pays no heed to it. He wields weapons worthy of the Gods, and to be distracted by such worldly affairs would be like accepting defeat. His quest is much more important, so he steels himself against the coming danger, the last challenge he would have face. He steels himself against death.
His clenches his hands, tightens his grip around his sword and shield. That distance voice calls for him again. “Bugger off!” he tells that voice, “half-mad Demi-Gods do not yield to worldly things.
His nemesis arrives right on time, Ares, a God personified as a monster, the Guardian of the gates of Hades, one that would intimidate mortals and immortals alike. But nay, not him, unfazed he marches on swinging his swords and then lashing out at him from all sides, dodging the monster blows, piercing its side. Mountains are hurled at him, he dodges them. And he rises once again, pierce Ares’ side. But victory is never easy is it, Ares lashes out and gets him right across the forehead, his helmet falls off. The monster swings it sword again and connects sweetly across his chest. Not only does his armour wear off but also for the first time his blood spills. He moves away tries to gather strength and sanity. It is then that he realizes that he just has one blow left to finish the monster and the monster needs one blow to finish him. The monster charges, his palms are sweating now, any second now it would all be over. He lifts his sword, the monster leaps in the air to attack.

“Hey! Bubbly! Oh Yeah Bubbly! Be my lover Bubbly!” The cellphone rings. Its her, its always her.
He lies there blood spilling profusely from his guts.
“Restart game from the last checkpoint. Yes/ No.”
The joystick is hurled to the floor. He gets up from the couch, picks up the phone and screams, “You bitch!” into it and hurls it at the window. The recently purchased K-700I splits into two in mid-air. The battery hits the window pane and shatters the glass. The rest of the cellphone goes flying out the window and into a world of lesser mortals and scavenging mongrels.

X3 and the last stand against Bollywoodisation of Hollywood

I saw the posters for this movie in august last year and since then i have had this strange itchy feeling in between my knuckles...the same itchy feeling to grow adamantium claws i have had since the first X men movie had me hooked onto this comic and movie series...Given the mind blowing teasers, trailers and promotions for the movie I was convinced that this was the best way to start the movie season this summer...Watching it on front row seat i was quite enjoying the adventure that unfolded onscreen....gloating over the fact that my predictions of Cyclops' and Xavier's deaths were coming true...and perhaps i was a psyhic mutant myself...Well starting with the positives the CGI is top-notch, the effects are cool, the wide variety of characters even better...everyhing was going fine well until...globalisation and outsourcing happened...oh yeah believe it...I believe Brett Ratner had a surreptitious meeting with Dharma Productions and had decided to outsource some parts of the script (the filler pages that make a movie 2 hours long) to bollywood. Luckily someone turned down their ludicrous request to cast Shah Rukh as Wolverine as they were catering to a 'white' crowd. I guess outsourcing has its problems...like 'white' people not understanding Indian accents... and thank god for it!Wolverine giving a 'senti pep-talk'. Oh please!!...wat were u thinkin 'bub'?! That is reserved for Storm...ur the guy who kicks ass...the guy who cuts up stuff...breaks the rules...and bones...no questions asked...no speeches given!juggernaut...u loser...kitty pryde defeated u...kitty pryde!!..how lame are u?jean and wolverines oscillating love angle...oh please Dharma Productions all the way...But i guess i am being very unfair to the movie now...it is epic...it is good...but i really wanted it to be great...top a masterpiece like batman begins i guess...but in the words of Kurt cobain, "Well Whatever, Nevermind!As of now I'll wait for X4...if it comes...to get my admantium transplants...till then i am happy driving my batmobile...