11.11.11

What a curious way for a day with a curiously symmetrical date to start! Pulling into the office parking lot, it was easy to tell that it was one of those days, already blessed with the effervescence that comes out of being a Friday, a day where it feels perfect to let your mind saunter off into casual half-remembered reveries despite knowing fully well that at least 8 hours of time critical work lie ahead.

-

We all don't need that kind of a day, don't we? When the air is crisp and cold and just a lil' cruel, and the forgotten leaves of fall race each other in 3 dimensional race tracks around your feet. When the morning light from the cloud covered sky is subdued but not gloomy, if anything, adding to the splendor of the last bright orange, red and yellow leaves that gamely cling on to their respective trees before winter takes them away in her snowy embrace. It's no use feeling sad for them, 'cause at the back of the mind, you know and they know that they'll be back.

-

The walk to the glass door of the building from the car is only a short one but one can only be amazed at the speed and quantity of thoughts that can pass through a head in that brief a time period. Thoughts not only of misunderstandings and mistakes but also of happy accidents. Beginnings ground to dust, dust moulded to beginnings. Moments of unbearable doubtfulness and moments of eternal surety. On days like today you can't help but acknowledge how beautiful a shade is grey and that there is real joy to be found in accepting the unpredictability of the future. By the time I swipe my ID card, I am smiling an internal inner peace smile. After all, what is life, if not an adventure?

-

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/111111.html]

Waiting...

Tuesday, 01-Nov-2011

-

"At first flash of Eden, we race down to the sea.

Standing there on Freedom's Shore.

Waiting for the Sun (3x)

Can you feel it now that spring has come.

And it's time to live in the scattered sun.

Waiting for the Sun (3x, pause, again slower)

Waiting.... Waiting.... Waiting.... Waiting.... (2x)

Waiting for you to - come along

Waiting for you to - hear my song

Waiting for you to - come along

Waiting for you to - tell me what went wrong."

-

You may think that I have completely lost it but it's just that I spent an entire weekend at home listening to The Doors on my laptop in preparation for the real deal tomorrow evening. Robbie Krieger & his guitar are 65 years old and Ray Manzarek with his meandering keyboards is at a doddering 72. Morrison is on a never-ending vacation away from earth since 1971 and John Densmore has given up drumming due to hearing problems. Maybe I need to do a reality check and tone down my psychotic levels of excitement...

-

Going by setlists at their previous venues on this tour, they'll be skipping my personal favourites like "Hello, I love you" or "People are strange" or even the above mentioned "Waiting for the sun". Maybe they'll fall asleep on the stage. Maybe Jim Morrison's stand-in would such an eye-sore that I'll have to march out mid-concert. Maybe a drugged out hippie from their golden age would burn the Lupos Heartbreak Hotel in Providence down to the ground before the show even begins. I don't know! All I know is that I'll be there to watch it happen. Live. In person. Sakshaat. THE DOORS.

-

There are classic rock bands and there is THE classic rock band. There are great lyricists and then there is THE American poet. There is beautiful music and there is HAUNTINGLY beautiful music. Creative inspiration unparalleled this band and their songs have been to me over the years. I hope this night to be, I pray it to be, I will it to be... of significant and everlasting impact.

-

As time swims by, we all will learn,

Surely someday, all leaves must turn,

Shadows flit past, chase and run 

Live their life, waiting for the sun... 

-

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/waiting.html]

Jim's song

This is the one occasion in my life where I can justify screaming in excitement like a teenage girl. On November 2nd 2011, on what would otherwise have been a very ordinary Wednesday, I will go to watch the two of the three surviving members of The Doors, Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek perform live at the Lupos Heartbreak Hotel in Providence. Yes, THE DOORS.

-

For most, Jim Morrison was The Doors and The Doors was Jim Morrison, and I agree with that to a certain extent. But without Manzarek's trippy keyboards, Krieger's catchy guitar loops and John Densmore's perfectly timed drum rolls to flow into spaces left by Jim's spoken poetry marathons, there would have been no defining sound that draws in fans (like yours truly) decades after the group ceased performing.

-

With Morrison's infamous 1971 death by ODing in Paris at the age of 27, the Doors were a closed chapter in rock history but beautiful enough for music enthusiasts to keep flipping back to those pages and reading them over and over again. In an appropriate tribute to their uber charismatic lead singer, Robbie and Ray despite it having been 30 years now (since Morrison's death) playing the Doors' songs around the world refuse to play "The End" at any of their concerts. The reason they give is simple. "The End" was Jim's song. He owns it.

-

Who was Jim Morrison then? Rockstar with a voice inestimably addictive. Poet and philosopher of seemingly infinite genius. The only guy who could walk up to a woman, say "Hello... I love you... won't you tell me your name?" and actually pull it off...

-

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/10/jims-song.html]

Nomad soul feed

I know it's just another ad for another commercial product and it's foolish to so enamoured by it. But come on, it's a car after all and sometimes you feel that an ad has been tapped right out of your nomad soul. So without much further ado, here's the transcript from an ad I saw and was simply blown away.

-

"People don't make a list of websites they wanna see before they die...

They don't fill photo albums with pictures from an online search...

'Like being there' is not like 'being there'...

It's OK... the Internet will be just fine without you...

That's why we built the Dodge Journey...

Your search engine for the World Wide World."

-

PS: Not the exact same ad that I saw on the sportsgoods store's TV but almost the same till about 0:45 into the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESc8V1-OTGo

-

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/09/nomad-soul-feed.html]

Guarantee

Wonderful job, NASA! So you send this 6.5 ton satellite up into the sky, let it hang around in the atmosphere for 20 odd years and then just let it drop back onto the earth but can't say exactly where? Then to calm our nerves they say that a satellite of this size crashes onto earth at least once a year so it is really no big deal. 

-

No big deal indeed that even after burning up most of its bulk, the largest piece of the debris might still weigh 155 kilograms. 155 kilograms! Of flaming hot metal at a blazing speed with a 1 in 3200 chance of hitting a human!

-

So much for planning life out. Plan your studies, plan your career, plan your savings, plan your future and then one random day a man made piece of junk from the depths of space might reduce all that planning to zilch or at least 160 pounds of human barbecue.

-

No, this is not a call to abandon all focus in life on realizing that at the end of the day it is so spectacularly random. This is only a reminder that there is never a guarantee on how things will turn out. All we need to do is hang on for the ride, as long as it may last.

-

Source:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/19/us-space-debris-nasa-idUSTRE78I5GE20110919

-

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/09/guarantee.html]

Not so dumbo jumbo

If you have ever been a regular visitor to zoos, you would always find a lot of people from ages 8 to 80 pulling funny faces and making jeering sounds to make the caged animals like monkeys, lions and tigers 'come alive'. Also there is always this one guy who keeps telling the children "Kids! Don't do that. Animals don't like it." even if their indulgent parents wouldn't. That guy would be me.

-

So naturally when I saw a baby elephant roaming around the Nandankanan Zoo in Bhubaneshwar with his mahout in tow collecting donations for tourists, I was a little concerned. A baby (that was almost my height at the shoulders) walking through crowds of insensitive face makers who come to zoos not to appreciate the animals but to tease them would definitely not enjoy the experience.

-

But being outside the enclosure seemed to have an appropriate effect on the misbehaving crowds. They looked on in wonder at the spiky haired creature roaming amidst them, its dextrous trunk collecting the notes and coins that were offered to them. No one seemed to want to mess with it, baby though it was.

-

I fished out of my wallet a Rs. 5 coin, the small heavy coin and was considering my other options when the elephant spotted the coin in my hand and headed towards me. It was my turn to be enamoured by the cute creature but a strange irrational fear gripped me.

-

The trunk that was waving in front of my hand then seemed too huge to hold on to the little coin. I really thought that if I dropped it, the coin would fall right into his trunk and cause great discomfort to him as all animal lovers know that an elephant's nose is his trunk. Imagine someone dropping a 5 Rupee coin down your nose! So everytime the damp little trunk headed towards the coin in my hand, I just couldn't let it go out of my hand.

-

The pantomime continued for nearly a minute with the baby elephant curling his trunk towards my hand, touching it but me clutching tight onto the coin. The mahout kept telling me "Koi baat nahin. Chhod do sikka. [Don't worry. Let the coin go]" but I kept ignoring his advice.

-

The baby jumbo had by now decided that I was teasing him. The next time his trunk came near my hand, it gave my hand a real quick smack and before I realized it the coin was out of my hands. Not just out of my hands but neatly pinched by the baby's trunk. Handing it over to the mahout, he gave a long elaborate salute with his trunk as he had been trained to but I am pretty sure that his actions preceding that were out of sheer natural exasperation at my over cautiousness.

-

"Leave this to the jumbo, dumbo." 

-

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/not-so-dumbo-jumbo.html]

Headshot

"Craaaaaaaackkkkkk"

-

When I first heard that sound loud and clear, I asked myself "That cannot be the sound of the ball smacking my head, can it? It just cannot be..." The wild spinning of my head and the stars I was seeing at 5:00 on a summer evening as I went down on my knees replied "Yes, it was your head, dummy! Concussion. Concussion. Concussion. Man down!" The sport is called softball [in most ways similar to baseball] but I can tell you from personal experience that there was nothing soft about that ball. 

-

I should've seen this in my future, taking into account my overconfident demeanour about fielding on a softball game. Given a chance, I would tell everyone how easy it was to stop a shot in softball with those huge gloves that the fielders use. "We don't need gloves in cricket", I'd say. After all, if there was anything in cricket I was good at, it was fielding at close in positions. So on that sunny Wednesday evening as the batter clubbed the ball in a flat long trajectory towards me situated in the left field [a sort of deep mid-off], I was relaxed and ready with my glove in "Come to Daddy" mode. Only to find the ball magically evade the more-than-ample glove webbing in front and smack down flush on Daddy's head.

-

I was the star of the team now... in all the wrong ways. Team members rallied around me, "Look at my eyes", "Follow my fingers with your eyes without moving your head", "Stay on your knees", "It's going to be OK" and all those things you say to people who don't have too long left. The batter on the opposing team looked like he had just murdered a man and to be honest from the crunching sound that the ball made with my knucklehead of a head, I wouldn't have counted on myself to get back to the team enclosure.

-

Ice pack to my head and still surprised at my being able to walk unaided, I went back to the benches and popped a couple of painkillers a helping hand had offered. This was going to hurt real bad in the night, I already knew, but an even bigger bruise was from the blow to my ego. A lifetime of above average cricket fielding laid to waste, in that single moment of idiocy. Now that I seemed OK, the jokes were already doing the rounds. "You thought you were playing soccer, huh?" and "We take two extra runs for that accurate hit!" are only two which come to mind.

-

I took the field again after a couple of innings and on getting back home the rest of the evening was spent Googling 'concussion' to check if there were any warning signs to watch out for. Thankfully I had none but it was a timely reminder for people of my abysmal physical abilities not to get cocky about anything, even catching a flat long hit ball. On the positive side, my concentration levels out in the field for subsequent games have improved ten-fold. Unfortunately I have also earned a tag, a tag of dubious distinction, as the guy who took a headshot.

-
[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/headshot.html]