New Year resolutions …. Snigger not you foul creature.

Do not scorn me, point at me and laugh (well you can do that and I won’t care two pence because I am used to it.)I will make New Year resolutions and vow to keep them. The knight riders may actually win a match, Suhel Seth and Mamata Banerjee might have a passionate, amorous affair and Amitabh Bachan might go into a late retirement but my resolutions will not be broken.
1. I will not have fries, not in Scoop or Mac or Tasty Hotty ( a tiny yet true its name snacks store near our place) . Every time fries lure me with their smell and crispy warm touch I will try to visualize the ocan of oil they have been soaked in.
2. I will not warn random people in our college that our canteen’s chowmein renders men impotent. I will especially not say this because my only proof is a crazy dog who might have been purposefully made impotent so that our canteen owner could direct all his (I mean the dog’s) sexual frustration towards the ones who play cards in the canteen.
3. I will not go on random shopping expedition and be induced to buy clothes I will never wear just because they are cheaper than dirt (really Rs. 10 near park street metro station). I will not be lead by beautiful girls who do the similar task, but actually wear these clothes and look a million dollars in them; they would even in a sack.
I WILL study, even if it’s an hour a day, I WILL STUDY. Very soon my books would be singing “Zara zara touch me touch me touch me”
Ps: I got this joke from someone yesterday.
PPS: if I read these kinds of jokes ever again I swear I will not update them in my blog.
4. I WILL NOT fantasize about a certain professor; I will not sit the first bench of his class and ponder if he looks better in stripes or checks, purple or blue. It is vile, blasphemous, profane… but oh he is so … SORRY.
5. I will try to remember the names of all my friends’ boyfriends even if they change on a weekly or monthly basis. I will not mess up social gatherings by calling someone’s present partner by their previous’s name. If a certain friend has more than one partner I will select the right name from the list and assign the correct name to the face. If two of best friends share one guy, not platonically, I will try and admire their generosity. Boyfriends telling their girls choose between drinks, cigarette and me…girls choosing the later with pride, charvachauth mangalsutra style…I will not mock these situations anymore.
6. I will pray to the crow ‘mata’ or ‘pita’…. (Do the crows follow a matriarchal or patriarchal society? I guess patriarchal they are quite similar to us) so that the united crows of Kolkata stop shitting on me. It is amazing how united they can be, Indians should learn from them. From Jaya to Priya, from College Street to Gariahat wherever I go crows bless me from above. It is not restricted to crows now a days, a tiny baby wet on me the other day… I know I have a shitty appearance and personality but does that usher in something similar? And it’s contagious; people who are generally around me have become a victim even when I’m not around.

There a million things that I need to do… like lose weight, write blogs of substance, read good books like Camus, Kafka and quote them in the right places and get through life without falling into ruts in every second step. So heres to the end of a decade, a year and to the beginning of another crappy new year!

Of national concern

I had almost stopped blogging probably would have done so if something of national concern wasn’t pressing me. Few days ago I settled down with a piping hot plate of biriyani and mutton tikiya and a smoking hot girl in front of me to share the food with. We took our first spoonful when this friend of mine pricked up her ears and said “isn’t the song familiar?” I strained my ears expecting to hear ‘tunir ma’ but what came to ears was something sounded faintly like the national anthem. Imagine, an evening of 15 degree Celsius and you have just paid one fifth of your pocket money for a plate of biriyani when you are forcefully pulled away by your sense of patriotism and you have to stand with a spoon in your hand and a mind full of swear words.
I think we have a great deal of hullaballoo made over patriotism and things related to it. All those rich nations… say U.K, U.S.A. and Australia (I mentioned these three because I kind of get confused regarding their flags) make money out of spreading their patriotism even to other nations. Go to any local market you’ll find handkerchiefs of these nations and every Raj or Rahul wearing them to Mohan Bagan or East Bengal matches, if not a India versus Australia match. There are thongs being made out of American flags the least we can do is have our own handkerchiefs. I mean what skewered sense of patriotism makes a government declare a dry day on the Independence Day? Make liquor legal, available and earn more revenue. This weird sense of nationality plays the national anthem in the movie theatres, it doesn’t matter that the movie you are watching later is an Emran Hashmi movie.
Besides our national anthem is not even appropriate any more, already three states are not mentioned in the anthem and there are more to come. I wonder who would write your next national anthem. If I could assign a lyricist I think it would be the composer of tunir ma or Phoebe.

There are hammers singing in my head.

Mad angles … Bingo

In the traffic police box, right in the centre of our four point crossing, there stands a mad man. Somehow a mad man or a crazy person does not have the vibrancy of the word ‘paagaol’. Lunatic? It comes close… but people have saturated the word dipping it too often in Pink Floydish connotations.
The crossing, bound with morose looking zebra crossing at its four sides suddenly blooms with a burst of colours in the middle. A traffic controlling madman takes the centrifugal attention. The green, yellow, red lights do not really obey his gleeful gestures. But the orange patched pajama wearing madman suddenly reminds the people trapped behind the black and white bars of the road, of the colours of life. For a moment the ‘9-o-clocks’ are forgotten and the briefcases turn into magic kits.
I have often found madmen taking up the role of a traffic sergeant, at crossings, pointing us to the right directions , we refuse to accept.

PS: I ruin it with the title don't I?

oldie

I am very bad at being young. There is something intrinsically old and grey about me. Phuchkas never appeal to me; I don’t understand the hype and enthusiasm about getting high; instead I swallow a galleon of tea all day along dipping Marie biscuits in time from time to time , a food item that even street dogs refuse to have now a days. I do not comprehend why people go to discotheques to pay and dance, for that matter I do not even understand the purpose of gyrating at all. And I am sure had I ever been young I still would not have understood the work of a disc jockey… why does he scratch? I mean the disc.

...

There’s always that sense of not-being at play. Amidst the chirps of friends, amongst the pile of collected notes on the desk. This not being feeling hangs around, like smells of stale wine and smoke clouds. You clear your desk, paint your room, but the sense lingers on, revealing itself at times like a cobweb in the sun. When you are lost in your storybook pages, you are drowsy, your glasses hanging to the edge, your tea growing cold, the music you are playing seems distant this feeling of not-being springs from nowhere.
It is there in the smoky moments of bliss and in the crunching autumn leaved walks. It is just there. It makes the full moon a loner in the sky, the November trees barer and You further.

Sour oranges.

Winter tinted afternoons are very deceptive, like everything else. They conspire to give impressions that the orange scented afternoons would last forever and the moment you snuggle in and settle with your yellowed library books that cyan coloured, damp and stale dusk sets in. never get used to anything, even for a moment. It just dampens your mood for a good read.