Where are the aliens when you need them?

When things are getting too tough on a particular day or when there are so many chores to complete on a weekend that I actually wish it were a working day, I pray for an event that would render all these activities irrelevant. Of course it never happens. Stuff that Hollywood regularly churns up like a gigantic dinosaur looking at me through the window while I brush my teeth, or a spaceship hovering just above our office parking lot would be such a life-saver. I definitely wouldn't give a thought to mundane requirements like keeping a job or doing laundry when my very existence or even my planet's was at stake.

I can't imagine my boss giving me an earful for not submitting that report in time when he looks out at the hovering orbs and sees little green things take their first curious steps on earth. Or that someone would really notice that my clothes were stinky when the hot breath of a T-rex comes steaming in through the window. Besides with all that raw meat that those things eat, it's hard to expect any delectable smells coming from those rows of terrible teeth. Life is definitely in need of more excitement. As Calvin succinctly put it "Reality continues to ruin my life!". 

Fleeting hope

This Monday on my way to work, I was seated in the passenger seat up front in the cab. It's been nearly a year in the US for me and the first place that is telling is on my face. My face has assumed a rotundity it had never seen since it was a baby. All the comforts of a first world lifestyle and the the lack of enthusiasm for the fitness craze around me had to tell somehow. For the past couple of weeks though, I have finally realized the need to take things under control and so have worked on a rag-tag fitness regime to bring agility back into my life.

So I look into the right hand rear-mirror on my side this fine Monday morning and am pleasantly surprised by the rapid results of my pro-activeness. I see in the mirror a small and decidedly leaner face looking back at me. "There you go", I think to myself "That wasn't too hard!". Then I read in almost invisible letters at the bottom of this pleasant reflection of mine 'Objects in mirror are closer than they appear'. Darn them, stupid convex mirrors!

Some Tigers worthy of extinction

In an interesting side-note while all the eyeballs are glued to the results of the Indian elections, another historic event of a much greater magnitude is not getting sufficient attention. After a long and bitter struggle for nearly 20-30 years, the blood thirsty terror machine of the LTTE has been brought to a grinding halt. The Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam have finally accepted defeat thereby bringing to a closure (hopefully) to their horrifying history of violence. As the first terrorist outfit to come up with the terribly "efficient" technique of suicide bombings (later borrowed by the Palestinian/Islamic terror groups), they are assured of a gold framed portrait in the Terrorist Hall of Fame. 

Any claims of theirs to be "freedom fighters" are firmly negated by their use of child soldiers, women and children suicide bombers, and their blatant assasination of all Lankan Tamil politicians/groups which were trying to make peace or even leaders of their fellow Tamil revolutionary groups whose cadre they then absorbed into their hordes. Tamil rights may be a real issue in Sri Lanka but the LTTE were definitely not helping to turn world opinion in the favour of Sri Lankan Tamils by rampant acts of terror, drug & gun-running, and terror training to insurgents around the world. It was high time that people saw past their false promises of fighting for the Tamils when all they did was engage in mindless and purposeless murder. The Tamils of the world are so much better with the tarnish of the LTTE off their community. Now the international community can have no reason to grudge them their rights with the bloody spectre of the Tigers put out of the way.

The LTTE even had a squad of suicide attack specialists known as the Black Tigers whose CVs (if you want to call them that) were vetted by their supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran himself. Being a man who gladly sent hundreds of naive young men and women to their death & wrecked thousands of innocent lives more while living a life of luxury and providing the same to his own children, he has a lot to answer to. Sources say that he might have already fled from the little strip of land where the Sri Lankan army has the last vestiges of his cadre surrounded. His cadre through years of brainwashing will gladly bite the cyanide capsule that they are required to wear around their necks when the time comes. The question is will their chief, the man who coaxed them into such reprehensible activities and unprecedented carnage through his fiery propaganda and misguided zeal find the guts to do so, when he is face to face with his moment of truth?

Nice guys do win

So the results of the Lok Sabha polls are out. The incumbent government has retained its power and that too without most of the rabble-rousing allies who had given it a rough time. It's hard to be jubilant knowing the true nature of every government that comes to power - the typical occurence of maybe two diamonds in two tons of sludge. However there is one thing that makes me happy.

It is still possible for the people to have faith in a well-educated, excessively soft spoken man at the helm of the country. I didn't vote in the election due to my absence from the country but I have my doubts whether I would have voted for anything that would cause Manmohan Singh to remain Prime Minister. Our Prime Minister is a brilliant man and economist but he just doesn't strike me as a dynamic leader that a nation like India deserves. It is quite obvious that the nation thinks otherwise even though we do not vote directly for our Prime Ministerial candidate. It is a resounding victory for Congress and its UPA allies as the BJP and the Left got creamed. I think the people to whom the policies and the effectiveness of the government at their local level really affect have spoken and silenced nay-sayers for a significant while.

My only beef with Dr. Manmohan Singh as our Prime Minister was that he seemed too reserved a person to represent the virility of a nation that is supposed to rule this century along with our totalitarian neighbour. I presumed (in retrospective, rather foolishly) that a man of such extreme civility was not the right man to navigate the murky waters of Indian politics. But his opponents were really taking him to task for all the wrong reasons. The man who called him the "weakest Prime Minister I've ever seen" has just seen his own hopes of becoming the Prime Minister of India drown. The Left parties that made such a big hue and cry over him allegedly cozying up to the USA now find themselves completely out of public favour even in their long time bastion of West Bengal. Those who persist in their belief that he is a frontman for Sonia Gandhi and a doorman for lineage dependent Rahul Gandhi's bid for eventual Prime Ministership must bear in mind that this is the guy who had the b**ls (An expression that is so much in contrast with his gentle way of speaking but strangely appropriate) to open up our economy at a crucial juncture before we collapsed into chaos like other socialistic tending economies. We as a nation took a giant leap under the guidance of this man back then. This man is anything but a push-over. Like a tight slap to my pessimistic, couch-potato face, this is solid proof that there is always a way to success and appreciation for the 'talk less, do more' variety of good men yet even in the cut-throat Indian political arena.

A little bit of ourselves

The academic calendar was hardly of any interest to us. It was just a schedule interspersed with internals, vivas and assignment submissions before the menace of semester exams re-surfaced. However what we did look forward to if there was anything that could be put under that head would be the college fests. They were of little consequence to anyone not involved in them, and might not have even been impressive to the unbiased observer but for those who organized them, they'd be the centre of the universe for at least a month in time.

For me, it'd be the Mechanchie society's Magnum Opus, and the two biggies of the year for the entire college in the form of the tech-fest Literati and the cultural Confluence. Life was tough as far as getting sponsorships for the fests was concerned. Kurukshetra wasn't quite a name which would spring out of the pages when a senior executive of a company thought of killer brand placement. Consequently, getting the sponsors to shell out more than a pittance and then live up to their expectation to buy the moon for a dime was a near impossibility. But we tried.

"Prof Night", a standard feature of all IIT and big city college fests where a professional musical artist/group performed, remained a spectre through the fog during our 4 years in engineering school thanks to administrative red-tape. The attendance from neighbouring colleges and big cities remained sparse despite our best efforts to portray our inter-college fests as the best there was going to be. Sometimes it seemed that the only ones who believed the event to be a success were we the organizers ourselves. Everyone else was either turning their noses up at the "fun" to come or worser still, running away to avoid the boredom.

We were oblivious to all these shortcomings, us who were in the thick of these things. We'd continue to slave away over the posters that would build up to the events, engage in passionate debates over what actions would draw the 'crowds', spent late nights and long phone calls over supplies & fresh ideas that could pump more life and encourage more participation than last year or the year before last. The unbelievable efforts that we put into what would at the end of it all be just another tacky college fest defied belief. The grandiose nature of these events may only have been a illusion but it was a very useful one for us nonetheless. 

We had invested a little bit of ourselves & the zest of our youthful spirits on each of those tossed away pamphlets that were now being blown around the grounds, into the giant backdrop of the stage, on the furniture that we lugged onto the truck, the giant speakers that would screech in electromagnetic indignation and the million other activities that stitched together this attempt at college fest greatness. If spirit counted for anything at all in these cases, then we were at par with any of the hallowed institutions of the world stigmatized though might we be by being located in a little pocket of rural Haryana.

Rolla' coasta'

Back in the sad old days when I was ignorant enough to tolerate boy-bands and their sentimental rubbish, I had heard a song by Ronan Keating which went "Life is a roller coaster, so just start a-riding..." What nonsense! I so wish that life were like a roller coaster but it is so not.

As the coaster rolls up to the point of no return, the mind goes "Shit! Shit! Shit! Crap! Crap! Crap!" in an infectious rhythm and when the cars cascade down the precipice there is a primeval "Yaaahhh" sound that arises instinctively out of the rows of open mouths. The twists and the turns and the upside down, cork screwy motions of the ride are welcome because there is no other option but to submit to them. If there is one place where a man is completely helpless against the powers of fate, it is on a roller-coaster. Absolving it's riders of all responsibility and ferrying adrenalin-charged participants to a scream-fest, the coaster is a creation for everyone to literally ride their luck. They know that the feeling of danger is real but the danger is probably not. It's like watching dinosaurs on a giant movie screen instead of being pursued by them down the street. 

Life on the other hand is full of observations, schedules and picking between myriad choices each of which have completely different consequences. If only it were as simple as strapping onto a mass of carriages designed to subject the body to G-forces that it wasn't designed to handle nor wanted to, and then wear a silly smile all the way through the self-imposed, self-indulgent freak ride from start to finish.

Exhuming the past

Memory is a funny thing. It tends to build upon the past in such a way that the very earliest ones are buried deep beneath the foundation of consciousness. Total recall is an expectation to laugh at and the contents are so hazy that most of the times I wonder whether these qualify as memory or just a concoction of my brain painting an inaccurate vision of the past.

My memory takes me back only as far as when I was 3-4 years old. The preceding years that I spent in Calcutta find their manifestation only in family photo albums and that is the only reason why I can somewhat agree to the notion that they really happened.

Coming back to what I actually remember, I remember the vast housing colony of Roopnagar in the middle of nowhere (also known as Valia somewhere in south Gujarat, to be more specific) for the GNAL factory where my dad had been hired. I remember the ground-floor flat with the two verandahs- the front and the back where Kelo and Bhuto, two mongrel puppies would show up everyday for food scraps doled out by us delighted children. I have almost a hallucinogenic image of the grounds that lay behind our building. The lawns seemed to be without end as I would run on the neatly mowed grass and do an occasional roll to soak up the refreshing moisture that remained stowed away in those tiny blades. On a sunny day with friends whose names I will never know, I'd be out on these lawns with nary a care in the world and for the most part, high on happiness and the freedom afforded by ignorance.

I distinctly remember Dad coming back from office and puffing away at his harmonica every evening. It was Dad's time-out after a long day at work so I'd sit unintrusively in the living room listening to the tunes being brought to life out in the front verandah. I never really found out what tunes they were because by the time I had reached an age of cognitive memory Dad had stopped playing the harmonica for reasons known only to himself. I am reminded of my Dad whenever I listen to "Hai apnaa dil to awaraa" but not exactly because my dad was as debonair as Dev Anand in this song. It's more because of the carefree attitude exuded by the song and it's harmonica segment. The song seems to resonate with my Dad's throw-worry-to-the-winds approach to life perfectly.

I also recall with chilling clarity, the laugh of the hyenas that lived beyond the boundary walls of our colony in the dead of night. This was still a really wild place a few steps outside the periphery of this enclave of man-made shelters and late at night the hyenas ensured that no one ever forgot this fact. With the numerous stories of hyenas making off with children being told to us to rein in the wayward behaviour of us kids, there were nights spent soaked in cold sweat and unspoken terror of what lurked a stone's throw away from the protective circle of our colony. I am not sure that my parents intended to scare me that much but boy, were they over-achievers in this respect!

As I dig up these old memories, it's hard to believe that it is my own life that I am talking about. I suppose any event when sufficiently in the past ceases to be a reality, ending up as a pile of fine stardust filtered through the multiple sieves of time, only to be scattered further by the wind.