Uncool ninjas

There is a lot of effort required to make mysterious assasins, trained in the most lethal of martial arts look boring but anime the wildly popular Japanese style of animation manages to do just that. I wouldn't have had so much of a beef with anime and we would have stayed away from each other in mutual agreement had it not invaded my personal space for nearly an entire year. I had borrowed my friend Subbu's PC for almost the whole length of my final year of engineering and had had to patiently put up with the incredible stupidity and blind devotion of Naruto lovers.

I have always loved comics and animation and still do but somehow the Japanese style of doing things always manages to get my goat. The weirdly coloured hair, the boringly repetitive facial expressions and the unnecessary iterations of the camera panning away to reveal two opponents squaring off in yet another yawn inducing ninja battle were asking for too much if they were asking for my attention. Japanese voices sometimes too coarse and others too squeaky talking gibberish like the "chidori" (Thousand bird power), the triple seal curse or yelling "Sasuke Kan" had started to appear in my dreams. My room was always packed with Naruto fans who seemed to love even his retarded "ramen" weakness & giggled like teenage girls and the series ran in 24 hour cycles within the closed confines of my room. The show was astoundingly popular and I was frequently given incredulous looks by anime devotees for not having liked even the tiniest portion of it. Being in the same room as this shabby work of art was a pain but it was still my room so I had to manfully withstand this assault on my good taste. My stand was crystal clear: ninjas cool, anime totally uncool.

Shadowed by an angel

I was driving down to Braintree on Route 24-N, a dark mood weighing down my mind. My very first car, a used green 1997 Honda Civic which I had purchased with so much enthusiasm and a sense of achievement had turned out to be a heartbreaker. Within 2 weeks of taking possession of this car, I was on my way to return it to the used car dealer who had sold it to me and claim a full refund of the purchase cost. The Civic had seemed perfect on the outside and for a while ran like a dream. But very soon, there began significant clatters in the car and a Massachusetts Vehicle Inspection revealed that she had serious problems in her heart, the engine. What had seemed like the killer deal was now revealing many a skeleton in the closet.

So I rolled the windows down and turned the radio up old listening to my favourite station 94 HJY, trying to drown my disappointment in the pumped up guitars as I drove my first love for the the final time. After a few minutes on the highway, I looked up into the rearview mirror and found myself looking at a white Rolls Royce Phantom. It was a cloudy Saturday but to me it was as if the sun had come out. She continued to trail behind me, this phantom in white floating as it were on the same road that lesser vehicles like mine noisily grated their tyres on. There was no sense in holding up this divine creature so I slowed down to let her drift by. But she persisted in her chase slowing down too, to continue soothing me by her exquisite presence. Right upto when I took the exit 20-A for Randolph/Braintree, she continued to tail me, a constant presence at the forefront of my mind despite physically being behind me.

I was sad no longer. The heavens had given me a clear sign that in life there is always something better to come!

The longest day

So today was the longest day of the year and Father's Day at the same time. I did talk to my Dad at morning time India but didn't quite wish him a Happy Father's Day. Like most other dads, he's not really a fan of such moments of overt sentimentality. I am quite sure that even though both Mother's Day and Father's Day are marketing gimmicks by greeting card companies, Mother's Day is much bigger business for Hallmark than Father's. Moms are much more likely to be thrilled at being the focus of such sappy emotions. The few Father's Day cards that do sell must be daughters buying cards for their Daddy dearests. Fathers and sons share a very covert form of male bonding not to be embarassingly proclaimed by lovey dovey cards or flowers. Instead I went ahead and did something which my father was likely to do. On the most prolonged evening of the year, I went for a walk in the rain.

21st June also marks the official beginning of summer in the US but there were no indicators of that here in Massachusetts. It was a damp 17 degree centigrade all day long with the accompaniment of the lightest of light drizzles, more spray than rain. I decided to wish the sun goodbye on his most stretched out work-day for this entire year and he lingered around till nearly 9:10 PM before finally turning out his lights on this part of the world. The rain came down silently, the notes of water rushing through the drains and dripping off leaves dominating the soundscape. The occasional car grabbed the spotlight for a few seconds splashing noisily through the puddles before the subtler noises returned to claim what was theirs to begin with.

People don't walk in this town and anyone who does gets the most curious glances as he were some crack dealer. I used to notice the attention being showered on me, the lone walker but have thankfully have developed a healthy apathy to it. Lights were coming on in the streets and the little pools of water in the potholes of the road sparkled with life, the only life it seemed there was in these parts. Back home in India, a rainy evening would mean the noisiest of frog choruses and the chiming of temple bells or the muezzin singing the 'azaan'. Here, it meant even more of a deathly calm than a normal day if such a thing were possible. Nonetheless, I walked through the silence deliberately crunching my shoes on the gravel of the sidewalks in a futile attempt to remind myself that I was in a street lined on both sides with wonderfully kept houses. No activity at all on those impeccable porches or the neatly mown lawns, no life, no none at all. Even the pet dogs, those normally noisy protectors of their home turf let trespassers like me jaunt by. Folks in the USA apparently don't like the rain and neither do their dogs.

I ventured onto Main Street and watched as a cop car blazed by siren blaring followed closely by a fire engine lights flashing. This rainy evening certainly wasn't turning out to be a good one for someone out there. The shops were already all closed, today being a Sunday with the well dressed mannequins inside the glass displays still patiently putting up with the permanent spotlights cast on them. Taunton is an old town (Established 1639) and though the shops in downtown don't look even a quarter of how old they should look, there is a languid old timer feel to it. Portuguese names abound in the names of the displayed shops as the town has a large number of Portuguese immigrants. Law firms, rental agencies, barber shops: all shuttered waiting for another busy (hopefully) week to begin. There were no lights inside the musical instruments shop but with the aid of the last few rays of the sun and the insufficient streetlights I could make out the outlines of guitars and violins, some beaten old wrecks and some flashily new, all equally capable of inspiring joy or feeding despair. As the light faded for the last time this year, before the days become shorter again starting tomorrow peaking into a brutal and bare winter, I ran my fingers through my rain dampened hair and walked on nursing aggravatingly conflicting opinions on the necessity of change.

Dream debut

Everyone has had that dream and there is no way anyone would deny it. Anyone who has ever played a sport even at the street level knows what I am talking about. It doesn't really matter if their sporting experience was only plastic ball cricket in the narrow confines of a lane or 3 a side soccer inside what would constitute just the D of a full size soccer ground. The television switches on and the best in the business take the stage with thousand of crazed fans hollering their deities' names. With every cracking shot of Tendulkar's or with every sublime pass of Zidane's, the casual player dreams. Dreams of walking out to the centre of the roaring stadium for the first time, an unknown name and playing a magic record breaking innings or scoring the most sensational goal of all time. The stadium going berserk and the halo of adulation shining bright behind his head, a legend being born, a name forever etched in glowing letters on the wall of fame.

And there is someone who has actually lived that impossible dream of every sportsman or wanna-be sportsman in the world. 16 year old Shahid Afridi, a little known name finds his place in the Pakistani cricket team purely as a leg spinner. 4th October, 1996: Pakistan v/s Sri Lanka and it is Afridi's 3rd international match but it is the first time he has had a chance to bat. He is sent in as a pinch hitter to hit 30-40 quickfire runs.

So what does he do? He goes on to smash the fastest century of all time (37 balls) ON DEBUT! Against the likes of wily stalwarts like Muralitharan, Jayasuriya (co-incidentally the guy whose record he broke) and Dharmasena. Afridi's cricket career has slid downwards from that day on but boy, could he or for that matter anyone who has ever held a cricket bat in his hands have asked for an entry more glorious.

Take that

I had spent my childhood in a small town in Gujarat and my engineering from an even smaller town in Haryana. Big city pollution was always a tough ask for me to handle and so Calcutta's grime and dust atmosphere had me gasping for a breath of fresh air. Being Calcutta there was no such whiff coming so I had to launch a desperate search for any cures I could find to the chronic sniffles that had become part of my daily existence.

My road to a sniffle free existence lay in the wonder and ancient history of Dabur Chyawanprash. I don't know what they put in there but it sure as hell does the job! A lot of people always give me a hard time for having such a feeble immune system and hide bound weirdo habits like having two spoons of Chyawanprash a day which are more suited to doddering 80 year olds wrapped in mufflers and sustained by heavy sweaters. However Chyawanprash works for me and you can call me what you will.

I carried on with my Chyawanprash fixes in the US too as there ain't no shortage of Indians around thereby of Indian products. Only today did I notice the most interesting thing about the jar it is contained in. Beneath the image of the flowing white bearded Hindu sage and on the jar of what is an essential component of our 'Hindu' greatness, the ancient science of Ayurveda, the packing address reads "Dubai, U.A.E". Eat that Sangh Parivar maniacs and the Indian Mujahideen crackpots.

Unwarranted malice

What kind of a disgruntled person would spend precious hours of his life creating a computer virus? It would definitely take a geek to delve into the intricacies of coding and come up with something which plays havoc with what the everyday user requires of his computer. But wouldn't a geek rather play the next revolutionary computer game, discuss his favourite comic book character's second wife on forums or gawk at pictures of beautiful women on the Internet than spend energy and efffort to design something which he cannot even claim openly to be his handiwork. Hacking to some extent makes sense because there are monetary benefits to consider and also there is the challenge and thrill of sneaking past the security a-la the classy art thieves as glamourised by movies like "Entrapment" and the Ocean's series.

The first virus (from what I've read) was written by a Pakistani guy and was titled "BRAIN". All it did was change the infected computer's C drive name to "BRAIN". Not the most brainiest of ideas it must be said but it was only the first step to much more potent descendants.

Another funny one was the "Happy Birthday Joshi" virus (this again is from the days of MS-DOS) which would seize the computer and would relent only after the victim typed "Happy Birthday Joshi"! Viruses are the psychopaths of the virtual world, their life's mission is random destruction. Sometimes though all they need is for someone to wish them a happy birthday. Is that too much to ask of this selfish world?

A fog of thoughts

I would be in a tough spot if asked to name a single book as my favourite book of all time, but I certainly would have no qualms about naming my favourite first chapter. The first chapter of James Joyce's "The portrait of the artist as a young man" continues to make me draw a sharp breath everytime I read it.

A lot of utter gibberish is often peddled under the "stream of consciousness" tag but here's a case where someone has actually been able to successfully describe the whimsical nature of human thought. The central character Stephen Dedalus is in the middle of a school football match, and the nature of his thoughts are the focus of the entire first chapter. He thinks about his childhood, his home and his classes at his boarding school which are about to be dismissed for the holidays all at the same time flitting effortlessly between the three worlds that his mind occupies.

It speaks volumes of why Joyce is considered by many as the greatest English writer of modern times, that one single chapter. It is about those moments when through the fields of neatly arranged plans and routine actions comes rolling a fog of thoughts enveloping everything in its shadowy wake.