Ode to the Baby Boomers

The generation that produced hippies, made pot sound cool and gave the world Pink Floyd...oh, the world was a different place in the 60's! Baby Boomers rock!!
(Note: These are the musings of a post-Liberalisation Indian who chose a diet of Joseph Heller and Cold War literature over Cable-fed Micheal Jackson in the 90's. Any notion of the author as being a white American male in his 30's is quite understandable)

Gods Apprentice (Or How A Superhero Was Not Born)

Late 1982 or early 1983 (Converting Earth years to the Celestial Calendar is not an exact science)

Being an apprentice doesn’t work out all that great for the ego but he was not complaining. He had a neat package waiting for him; a God given job, a Heavenly salary and a Hell of a stock option. He just had to get this one little thing right.

bip…bip…bip…bip…BLEEEP…damn busy signal…the multi-dimensional network thingy was starting to get on his nerves.

The rumour was out that he would be put in charge of the whole western spiral end of the Milkyway galaxy…the area he has worked on the most. A bit down market but it was a good start. It came with some troubles though.
The one populated planet in the area was so far down the drain that the Boss was thinking of burning it up and claiming insurance… the Apocalypse strategy. Boss had always been pissed with the place after His effort in the previous quarter to resurrect the place by sending in his best Man didn’t show the results he had hoped for.

“System ready… please load programme,” said the tinny voice out of nowhere…finally… he hit the buttons.

Oh well, he was also partly to blame for the fiasco. He had thought that the Pillar of cloud by day - Ball of fire by night was a neat thing to do, and that too on his first job. How was he to know that his final coordinates for the Chosen Ones were over the one place in the Middle East with no oil? There was a hell to pay. The whole balance of power thingy was affected and there was an immediate take over bid from the Devil. Then somebody had to sit up through the millennia and come up with the Renaissance plan with that brilliant Capitalism spin off. A whole new continent had to be put in place and a strategic relocation initiated but it was serious fun.

“Programme loaded… please specify deliver parameters,” he checked the calendar and typed in the date and time of delivery.

Things were going fine till the Finance Guys screwed up and went ahead with that George Bush Jr. project. They said it had something to do with the Accumulated Wisdom of the Ages having to be balanced with an equal amount of stupidity or something like that. It was very complicated. The Future Affairs cell immediately reported a failure in the system. They suggested Total Recall, but the Finance guys said it was too late for a Miracle. That was when God got serious about that Apocalypse strategy of His.

God…! He suddenly remembered that’s what he forgot… the Divine Intervention!! It was too late to use the Angel service… The only way out was the Emergency Prayer Hotline, but God just didn’t get along well with that after all those prank calls started coming over the direct line from Vatican…Damn!!

Oh, what the hell…this one was clean…after all this was not the first time he is handling the delivery of a Genius to Save Humanity package. He had handled Einstein… he even got an award for that. This was supposed to be bigger though, the first one in the newly created Pre-Apocalypse World Saviours series. It was pretty much the same as the old Knights series, but with a jacked-up Brain – Brawn configuration. “This is my last attempt on that miserable place,” God had said, “If this one doesn’t work I am withdrawing the budget and going in for Apocalypse.”

He rechecked the checklist; all seemed fine. “Alright, here goes nothing,” he pressed the delivery button. The green loading bar appeared on the screen. With the heavy configuration, this one was going to take some time, even over broadband. He leaned back and relaxed. The manual for the series was lying on the table; he glanced over it.

SHIT!! ABORT!! ABORT!!

“Package Delivered…System ready to reboot…” said the tinny voice.
DAMN… Those buggers in Design had changed the whole things around…!! The jacked-up Brain-Brawn configuration was a separate file. It had to be cut and paste to the original programme before sending. The only thing inbuilt in the programme was the Super Inflated Ego code…!! A whole lot of good that’s gonna do…!!
He had managed to bungle it up. He lifted the Hotline set and dialled extension 42.

“Heaven…We have a problem.”

10 months later

The English professor looked down at the bundle that lay on the hospital bed in an unfashionable area on the doomed planet on the western spiral end of the Milkyway galaxy. “God… I could do without this one,” he said in an almost Hamletian soliloquy. “Alright,” he said, turning to his wife and the three kids hanging around her bed, “I know just what to call this one…”

THE END

The Idiots Guide to Travelling Postures On Trains

1. The Intelligent Type – This is a slightly expensive stance to adopt because it means purchasing at least a magazine (Frontline is overkill, Outlook is good enough) or at the bare-minimum level, a newspaper (The Hindu puts you in a ridiculous minority but the appearance is what we are going for). It also means funds for a regular flow of watery Railway coffee to keep you from nodding off over the magazine/paper and totally blowing your cover.
2. The Poetic Type – This is a very physically demanding position since it calls for maintaining a silly smile on your face and craning out of the window for the entire length of the journey. You should be passably good at acting to appear sufficiently moved by the cow shitting on the grass.
3. The Business Type – Must keep constantly fiddling with your mobile phone. Send random messages and make imaginary phone calls. Make agonised expressions while scanning through official looking papers. Wear leather shoes and stiff shirt even if it is 35° C outside.
4. Fast Asleep – This is unquestionably the safest and the most desirable position to adopt. Whether it be lavishly spread out on the top berth of a sleeper compartment, or in a semi-foetal position on a seat in a passenger, or the simple yet effective open mouthed-upright-ass based stance near the bathroom door in un-reserved, the Fast Asleep stance gives you immunity from all unwanted interferences from over-social elements and the Aunty-Uncle phenomena. It does — particularly the open-mouthed stance — put you in the lower strata of the intelligence quotient in the compartment, but the advantages definitely outweigh the temporary lowering of your Mensa status.
   

South Indian Idle and Sombre

The side-effects of an idle life..

1. Starts to believe that the answer to life the universe and everything is indeed 42
2. Is revered by the secret society of intelligent mobile phones for being the only human to be crowned grandmaster in their ritualistic cyber-world chess matches.
3. Is known as Taksjangka (‘The big evil squashing hand’ in insect speak) in the ant kingdom and has currently replaced Yavalkaqwa (‘Crushing black rubber boot’) as the greatest natural disaster to befall the ant community of Room No. 28.
4. Becomes reigning international champion in blindfolded television remote operation, which was subsequently banned by the IOC for being a blood sport.
5. Gets invited by the CIA for being the only known human immune to the smell of burnt mosquito coil concentrated with tobacco smoke, which precedes most of their WMDs on the toxic scale.

Chip of the old block

It came as quite a surprise when I found that I had to look seven years into my past to find someone who is of some influence in my life. In the event of such an exercise one expects to find some larger than life image from the past looming over your present with every intention of being there in your future. But the face I came up with was that of my father, a person to whom I hadn’t given much thought recently.
He was a hard man (I am letting the past tense deal with matters of life, death and timelines), with the remnants of a harder father ingrained in him. He drove a hard bargain with life by bringing up four children when he couldn’t afford one. He pushed his children in positively draconian ways which left deep scars in the form of ‘Dr’ tags and voracious reading habits.
He was born in a small village near kottayam in kerala called Aymanam (The life and times of which better minds than me have described). From there the family of eight migrated to the coastal town of Alappuzha where I believe the Conrad in him was born. His father was boiler engineer in a British coir factory who came home with the remaining steam and vented it on three teenage boys. One ran away and joined the navy, one joined the Naxal movement and one started reading T.S.Eliot.
Ironically he was also a professor of English. I say ironic because hardness doesn’t fit in with the traditional notions of an English Professor. But here was a man who was both, with either of these characters appearing at various times and in various shades with no sense of occasion. He literature was orthodox, that is to say he was a modern in a post-modern age. He used to read out to me poems he wrote which had me thinking of inconsequentialities before I learnt to spell that word. It was only after I read Wasteland that I began to see definite parallels.
I remember one instance when he took his youngest, a boy of thirteen, to see his first James Bond movie. The combination of Walther PPK’s and semi naked white women sent the first drops of testosterone coursing through the adolescent veins and on the late night walk back home anything was possible, all the villains of this world could be thrashed and all the beautiful women won. He said something to that effect to his father and the English professor with a very existential tone asked “so?.” I have been very critical of Mr. Bond ever since and went on to take an MA in English Literature.

The tiny voive speaks..

For all who have had their ingrained servility to social institutions shaken by the below entry..It is a view on relegion not on Faith..on Church not on Jesus..on church doctrines not on the teachings of Christ..I am a guy who is learning the ropes of faith..but who has this little thing against established relegion

The Church & Associates Ltd™

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen..
Let me welcome u all to a presentation on the largest business conglomerate in the world, a corporation that has been successfully trading in the established religion business since 544 AD.. A production chain that has brought into the market such successful products as Jesus Christ© and The Bible©.. An institution that has a higher gross turnover than most mid-sized nations in the world.. Ladies and Gentlemen.. I give you.. The Church & Associates Ltd™..!!
Many of you may not know the role played by the great founder of this enterprise, Sir Constantine, in laying the solid foundations on which this great institution still stands.. It was he and his team of brilliant market analysts, campaign managers and marketing experts who turned the life of a simple carpenter,and that too of Jewish descent,into such a marketable product.. a product that the market at that time was waiting for.. It was literally..A saviour..!!
From then on there has been no turning back.. It was a wave that was to create ripples in the farthest islands of the Pacific.. A storm that would shake the leaves in the deepest jungles of Africa..The blessing that would shower upon the parched lands of the Indian subcontinent. It acquired a brand equity that is unparalleled and a brand loyalty unto death.
The company continued undeterred even when faced with stiff competition in the Middle East market from Islam™ and when the Marketing dept split in the 1500’s owing to a difference in opinion on strategy. It currently runs numerous divisions and formulates specific products to reach specific age groups, time periods and mindsets. It is this versatility that has guaranteed its survival over the centuries.. An ability to spin out newer versions and yet retain the market value of the old..
And it is to this sheer grit and power of survival that we shall all now all raise our chalices and say Amen..

Scribe in the making

How the world will react to the poison that’s to flow from the tips of this cynics fingers remains to be seen..but as of now this unsuspecting world has chosen to take the risk and has sent this demented mind to be trained for the profession of men who are either cynical, perverted or stoned, and of women who are inevitably hyperventilating activists.
Cold calculating ambition notwithstanding (Technicolor dreams of Reuters and 30K) I think I am going to fit right in..

My role model

Picture Perfect

All hail the Gods of Olympus(TM)..!! (Photography..the latest craze..or rather heights of joblessness)

Closet case

Sitting in a room filled with designer shit pots is a scary ordeal..and that’s exactly the situation in which I found myself today as I went shopping for a bathroom makeover. To be outnumbered by shitpots that cost more than your gross self worth is rather stressful for the ego. It gives one the feeling of being stuck in the Freudian anal phase and retaining more than one can hold.
To turn the spot-light on to the protagonists themselves, there were all sorts of them, Desis, Phirangis, Upper class, Middle class, Lower class.. literally a gold mine for the postcolonial Marxist thinker. The colonial hangover is what struck me the most. The European avatar of the critical object seem to have the clear upper hand in the market, with its Indian counterpart relegated to the dark recesses of the shop. It is brought out shamefully when the cringing NRI son, building in bricks that desert induced nightmare of his, whispers the order as a result of his ageing mothers last stand against progress; the sovereignty of her bum.

The Rainman

(Forgive me for waxing romantic a bit here... it’s inevitable.. even the KTDC is waxing romantic, they have pics of semi nudes bathing in the falling rain all over the place.. that’s beaurocratic romance in Kerala).

Cold..Dark...The incessant sound of the unseen rain pattering patterns on the roof. Nostalgia sprouts on a mind left wet by memories of a distant childhood shower..and the heart finds peace knowing its home..

Fate & Me

Fate it seems is not without a sense of irony.. I mean why is it that the inherent sense of irony and that ‘ I have seen it all and I don’t care’ attitude comes to the one guy in the family who cant afford it?.. it was not as if our father in heaven didn’t have a choice.. Our father here (god rest his soul) in all his wisdom (sense of humour rather) gave the almighty plenty of choice, Why not the big brother? He is the real McCoy, The man with the brains and the bank account.. Nope, He had to be the hallelujah guy…why? ‘Cos his tithe itself could buy heaven in all its glory? Cant blame the almighty though.. Its boom town and everyone’s looking for a profit.. But the bro would rather be the prophet.. Why not the sisters? With the Dr’s attached to their respective names they could pretty much afford it.. Nope, the medical Dr cant afford to have it... how apt is it going to be if she were to feel that bloated liver and give that ironic smirk that affects me in similar situations or look at that scalpel and say I have seen it all (a tendency to which I am so given) we have to give it to our man in heaven for keeping it from her.. Nor can the agri Dr be it.. There has to be the other extreme in somebody right, helps keep the gene thingys from biting their own tails.. So she had to be the one with the ‘I care a lot and I do give a damn’ attitude.. So it had to be me.. The one to be the lonely bearer of the family cross.. Cant say god didn’t equip me though.. With an MA in English I am the master of rhetoric.. Not that it lessens the load but it lets me in inflict it a bit on others.. A sort of sadistic relief .

The Simple Sadistic Pleasures of Life

I don’t have anything in particular against spiders..or against ants or against any of those creepy crawlies that inevitably find their way into my domain as the rain spreads its watery wings outside..but still I kill’em..every one of ‘em. Maybe its the mere orgasmic pleasure of getting ones gun off (in this case a sleek black bottle of ‘Hit’).. But I would like to believe that it’s just one of them simple sadistic pleasures in life.. The mere cold enjoyment of spraying a lethal dose of toxic vapours on an unsuspecting spider and watching it slowly squirm and die..No..i did not have a disturbed childhood..Nor do I have suppressed desires and fetishes..Am a very very normal guy… Maybe I do have a slight suicidal tendency knowing how much that stuff is getting me too and this killing spree is just an excuse to take as many with me as I go down with guns(eh..aereosol..) blazing..or maybe its just a simple sadistic pleasure in life..

not procrastinating..

i know i know..no postings..no write ups..what a dull guy..i just want to let all ye people know that i aint missing in action..just too caught up with the affairs of the world..presently singing..or rather preparing to sing gloria to celebrate the birthday of a dude born 2000 years ago..strange occupation for a post modern cynic i know..but what to do..strange are the ways of this world..and stranger the people..reading Fyodor Dostoyveskys Karamazov Brothers now(again..) for anyone who is interested to know..will update on thwe critical opinion soon

terminal effect

Dont be taken in completely by the "cynic" tag.. you got a bit of a roimantic here too..for starters Iwas watching this movie Terminal the other day..one of the most touching movies i have seen. Tom Hanks at his hysterical best and Spielberg in his most sensitive avatar (for those of you who thought he could put feelinng only into lost aliens a giant t rex's here is one movie to watch)..you get to see this side of him in Schindlers List but there the context generates most of the sentiment but here it is the camera that speaks...!! i mean to put so much philosophy (yup there is a lot of that if you didnt realize..) into the single idea of a man waiting. and Tom Hanks..all hail..!! a single man holding on to a can of jazz in a mad rush airport.. a picture of contrasts.. a study of priorities..his single statement "i wait" speaks volumes