Beer mujahideen

To say that today was a life-altering one for me that I'll someday look back upon with extreme joy or utter dismay would be an understatement. Without venturing into the details of the travel forum I attended, let me jump to an anecdote told to the participants by Tony Wheeler, the founder of the Lonely Planet publishing house, one of the anointed travel luminaries at the event. True, I too didn't know his name before this morning but learning of his adventurous life as the pioneer of millions of backpackers who followed in his trail, I am a fan. After all, watching the Lonely Planet TV series hosted by Ian Wright on Discovery was the sole reason I was bitten by the travel bug. Here's one of the many hilariously interesting incidents that he shared.

On a recent trip to Iran, he had a chance to get so sloshed with beer that he woke up with a bad bad hangover. He asked the youngsters who he had shared a drink with about how they managed to sneak the 'haraam' beer into the strictly Islamic republic of Iran. Funnily enough, it seems that the Mujahideen convince the Ayatollah's men that they are importing weapons for the Jehad against the 'kafirs'. Inside the crates of weapons though are bottles and cans of much appreciated Turkish beer which they sell for a neat profit to needy, fun-loving youngsters. Now at long last, here's a kind of corruption I don't have any objection to!

Poetry

When leisure is short yet idle thoughts are not,

In haste must a solution be sought;

A complicated age, won't fit in a page,

The invincible must still be fought.

The blade of rhyme flashes again, slicing great adversaries,

A pocket size edition it is, of the most exotic menageries;

Of love, of hate, of inexplicable melancholy, a poet must sing,

Cramped for space, choked for time, yet all emotions must ring.

This is the end

When I first saw her, I was hardly impressed. At that point in my life, I was bruised and sore from the heartbreak I had suffered from the first of her kind in my life. I had decided to settle for the average, embittered by my failure to find my dream candidate. She was green like her predecessor but her design was distinctly ordinary. Yet now that the time to dispose of her has come, there is nothing that causes a deeper sadness.

My little green Toyota Corolla rolled out onto the roads on New York City in 1997, when I was 13 years old and trundled into my life when I reached 25 after going through 3 different owners. 142000 miles old when I got hold of her, she carried her age rather well. The AC worked, the engine purred and the sound system was quite good for something her age. I know that Toyotas run forever but it still is surprising when you come across something that'll run forever. She has been to her hometown of NYC twice since she landed on my driveway, besides innumerable trips to Boston and thereabouts. The first month of being with me saw her trudge up 3000 miles, no ordinary achievement that! Since then, I've been a little easy on her old bones but I am sure she is not the complaining type. Her engine note has a very un-Corolla like aggressive tone to it, a fact that I appreciate every time I put my foot to the pedal.

She's got a major dent on her right rear door, a marker from a bad hair day in her past and I have managed to crack one of her wheel caps in that monstrous daily assignment called parallel parking. Her rear door power windows squeak like crazy at being used and so do her brakes early in the morning. The heater does take its own sweet time to get toasty, bombarding me with ice cold air for a few minutes before that. All her tiny flaws fade away though when I acknowledge her for what she really is, a hassle free commute with no airs about herself. It is too easy not to appreciate the simpler gifts of life and 4 odd months with this car has taught me that valuable lesson. Unfortunately the power of this 'spiritual' lesson must be sacrificed to the cause of dry economics.

Life has brought me in the past and will bring in the future many new friends, mostly people, with their flaws and gifts and for many people it's difficult to place an inanimate object at the same stature. But whether seated in her carpety old cabin negotiating Manhattan's honk-happy, rule bending traffic while a Hindi CD track blared from its sound system or just sprinting through an empty section of Route 44 after a long day at work, I find it impossible not to acknowledge this bond. I will sincerely miss you, my 4 wheeled friend!

Do I have to? Really?

I'll be honest. I hate work and refuse to believe anyone who says otherwise. When some activity takes away at least 10 hours a day from your life for at least 5 days a week, it cannot be fun even if your job is to keep Catherine Zeta Jones company on a deserted tropical island. For those of us who aren't Michael Douglas, we don't even have a task which might seem attractive at least on the surface. As Calvin put it "It's only work when someone makes you do it" and I have a whole planet of someones whose sole objective in their professional life is to make me do work (or so it seems to me).

Yet every weekday morning, I drag myself out of bed, pour myself in yesterday's set of clothes and wearily trudge into work. The reason behind this kind of self-inflicted torture is another fact of life. It's the only kind of work within my capability however dreary it may be for which folks are willing to shell out some kind of money. There are so many things that I love to do like writing, travelling, dozing (Now get me started on that one) but hell, no one's going to loan me a paisa for these passions of mine. Money is all I need to foot my travel bills, to tank up on gas for my car or my motorcycle and to ensure that I have a roof over my head to return to. These may be simple targets to aspire to but they still cost me bucket loads of cash. Of course I could use more money but what I really dread now is having to adjust with less.

What gets my goat is when some optimistic son-of-a-gun insists that I must "love" my job to bring out the "best" in me. I usually do my work with an expression akin to a bulldog afflicted with piles. As far I am concerned, any decree to love my job brings out the worst in me if anything. I am no work-shirker and do my best to fulfill my duties. Isn't it enough that I invest significant portions of what otherwise could've been an eventful life into the larger objective of my employer over which I have little or no control. Now do I have to forgo my right to crib too?

The daily grind

Back to the wall, spikes through the brain

Work's to be done, no crew, no crane;

Deadlines trample by, crushing out life

The little that's left in these grey cubicles of gripe.

Mounds of papers await the train

The train of enthusiasm, of voluntary pain;

The screen goes off at this moment of strife

Just post-lunch trauma and slothful vice.

A walk to the cooler, is hard to restrain

The only possible cure for this mental sprain;

Then on the way a pretty face smiles,

Shoos out the rains, brings back the rhymes.

Dumbo

The rot had set in by the time of my first semester exams in engineering. As gloriously unprepared as my study partners, I'd clamber to their rooms books and xeroxed notes in hand a day before the exam. Then as they pulled up their socks for a fight to the finish, maybe a night-out to ensure a decent figure on their report cards or at least pass marks, I'd feel sleepy... tremendously sleepy as if certain death awaited me if I did not give in to this emergency request from my body. And I'd fall asleep too, oblivious to the terrible fate that was sure to befall me at the examination hall next day. Virtuous friends (the few that I had) tried to instill in me a terror over my assuredly dark future but I was too far gone. This was the beginning of the end of my relationship with formal education. As the semesters came and went, I found the capacity of my brain to absorb new information dwindle down exponentially. When final year came around, everyone had a well defined plan for where their next educational step would be! Everyone that is, except me.

Anyone and everyone that I know within my age group has either wrapped a degree after graduation or is in the process of getting one whereas I dread the possibility of having to do one. It's impossible to conceptualize me doing a whole new degree as even 15 minutes of reading the most interesting novel today makes me killer drowsy, let alone the dry insipid stuff that would be part of any curriculum. The mere thought of having to pick up a course book again makes me all sweaty and sleepy at the same time, however that combination works. I wish I could put it down to laziness alone but I know of lazier people than me who have had the common sense to pursue what is turning to be an essential requirement for any kind of a career nowadays apart from the fact that it also means at least two more years of the fun life as a student. The really aggravating part for me is that they seem to having a great time doing it too. I secretly wish that they'd complain all the time about how tough the curriculum is or how bad the mess food is but all I get to see is glowing happy pictures on Facebook and Orkut as I burn to ashes on the inside. Even a few pointed questions pitched to them on chat sessions do not help and their answers seem to indicate that they have absolutely nothing to be unhappy about! How in the world can that be, I wonder? Classes, labs, subjects, exams - haven't they had enough of that already? Apparently, I am the only true dumbo who has fallen off this wonderful student life bandwagon and now am cursing it from the outside!

Maid of the Mist

The legend of the Maid of the Mist probably is completely baseless junk designed to give the millions of tourists visiting the Niagara Falls something to tell their grandchildren but it is an engaging story nonetheless. Like any other mythological story of note, the central subject of the story is an incredibly beautiful woman, in this case an American Indian one. Disillusioned at being forced to marry an old ugly man, she takes the ultimate step and canoes off into the raging waters of the Falls. She being the heroine of the tale does not perish like any normal being would have but instead is adopted by the king of the powerful Thunder Beings that live beneath the Falls. And they say that whenever you see a rainbow in the spray of the falls, it is her watchful spirit that is keeping an eye out for you.

It's actually really tough NOT to see the beautiful seven coloured apparitions that dance around the falls lending credence to my manufactured-for-tourists'-pleasure hypothesis on the origins of the story. This wild, exotic beauty is supposedly the Maid, the so-called Maid of the Mist - also the name adopted by the boats which venture to the base of the falls to help mortals come within inches of Nature's insane powers. The boat lurches in the wake of the millions of litres of blue water plunging into the Niagara Gorge from high up above and the thunderous sound is overwhelming to the point of being intimidating. A marketing man's tale it all may be, but the first impression of the Great Waters (as the native Iroquai used to call them) is still so gasp inspiring that the line between natural and supernatural goes very blurry for a while. It's a rare case where the final product easily outshines its advertising pitch.