Traffic Jam- The common deity to all.

We have a lot of festivals in India, all of which celebrate our myriad gods and goddesses.
Except Halloween, which celebrates the fact that you went to an IB school and then went abroad to study, only to return more annoying than ever before.
We have Navratri (or as they call it in Bengal, ‘Kahaani’) which celebrates the goddess Durga. 

We have Dussera, which celebrates the end of Raavana, and we have Diwali, which marks the time that Lord Rama ended his exile and returned to Vijay Sales for BEST EVER OFFER ON LCD TV (PLUS FREE DVD PLAYER THAT WILL EXPLODE WHEN YOU TURN IT ON FREE).

But in the end, all these festivals celebrate deities that lead back to one true god. Which got me wondering, who is this one true god? Surely, it would have to be an entity that represents something that all these festivals have in common. This has, in logical fashion, led me to believe that India’s one true god is the Traffic Jam.

It’s pretty charitable to call what we have “traffic”. Because the term Traffic implies that you have an orderly, but slightly large collection of cars that make travel slower than it should be. Ours is a bit more… apocalyptic. What we have is an unending sea of metal, gasoline fumes and lifestyle diseases. I can’t even describe our traffic as Brownian motion, because that would imply movement. The reason we don’t have an Indian version of 24 is because season one would just be hours of footage of Jack Bauer honking at people at Milan Subway.


Traffic Therapy: We spend so much time in traffic that it’s facilitated an entire retail industry of people who walk past selling you things, because they know you have the time

When I was a kid, nothing gave me greater joy than the evenings on which my parents said the five magic words “let’s go for a drive”. Drives meant ice-cream, cold-drinks, and cruising down Juhu ad Marine Drive with the windows down at the death-defying top-speed of 50 kmph that our Santro (and my mother’s blood-pressure) could handle. But that was then. Today, by the time traffic clears out enough to make driving a pleasure, (in South Mumbai, that’s 11 pm, in Marol, it’s 3987 A.D, when the sun goes nova and destroys Earth) it’s way past most children’s bed-time. If a child asked me to take him for a drive in 2012, I’d just knock him out and sell him on eBay. The only difference between peak and non-peak hours is that one has the word “non” in it.

Mumbai has an even odder problem. Do we have too many cars? Yes. Do people drive badly? Yes. But our roads make things worse. Mumbai’s roads look like somebody had an epileptic fit while playing with LEGO. Everybody in this city has at least once in their life crawled through traffic for hours, only to find that it’s been caused by nothing but a giant scar in the road that everyone had to slow down to cross. We spend so much time in traffic that it’s facilitated an entire retail industry of people who walk past selling you things, because they know you have the time to buy them. There’s a reason they sell you books, peanuts and cellphone chargers at signals; the three things form a survival kit. You know why Hindus invented re-incarnation? It’s because they know you’ll need two of your nine lives just to make it past Saki Naka.

If we had better roads, we’d spend less time in traffic. Not more roads, not new roads, just better-laid existing roads. Except we won’t get better roads, because these things are decided by politicians, people who don’t actually ever spend any time in traffic. This is why corruption annoys me; as a politician, you already get to travel in zero-traffic. You’re not allowed any more perks. You should have to worship at the altar of traffic, for it is our one true god. It exhibits all the properties of a good god; it is unmerciful, ever-lasting, and the number one cause of pointless violence. I want to move to the mountains and be an atheist now. I’m going to stop now. Because I think we may finally be moving. If I play my cards right, I may even get home today.

BORED!!!

Boredom is the most happening thing on this planet... And I'm sure it is not restricted to humankind alone. Seen birds and animals doing nothing but trying to be still? Exactly! That's what I'm talking about.

As far as I know there are 24 hours in a day and out of these 24 hours, about one-third is spent on sleeping in its various forms. And that leaves less than 16 hours to "live".

So the real question is how much time is actually "lived" and not "bored". Now don't get into etiological pogrom and insist that even being bored is part of the grand scheme called living process.

Trust me, it's not.

Living is to be alive, not zombified. In fact, we shouldn't worry much about nuclear proliferation when boredom proliferation is a bigger and more immediate threat to our existence. That sounds like exaggeration, isn't it? No, not really.

Roughly put, boredom is like being in a quicksand; the only difference is you don't sink.
You are not aware when it strikes you but once you feel it, you want to escape it. Unless of course if you are working in an environment (read: Engineering) where there is no such thing as an Escape button.

And worse, if you are staying up completing your assignments during graveyard shifts where your eyelids are put to test almost every single night and very thin line is left between being bored and being asleep.
And then when you're caught napping on the desk, you exploit philosophy by saying "Eyelids are not meant to carry such burden of boredom!" and then you're promptly made to leave your classroom. Happens.

I love talking about my college, and all the vagaries attached that pass of as occupational shite.
But still, if given a choice, boredom is anytime a favourite against workdom. Not many come to college to study,
Most of them are here for Gals, Smoke, Booze, Beg, Steal, Break Stuff.. and if givenl an opportunity, they'll do All Of It, but Study. Any given day.
You don't have to be a communist to know this. There are millions of us who would rather be bored to death than studied to death. So you see, now people are ready to get bored given they don't have to be productive at the same time.

There are students(Like Moi) who hardly grind but stream videos online and spent time on social networking and Porno sites as if it will make our Score graph kiss the face of sky.

You should be studyin in my college(Lokmanya Tilak College Of Engineering) to know what different levels of boredom can do to your brain (or lack of it). Very few things may pique your interest when you're at the top of Mount Boredom.

But it's a good thing. Sometimes. Like you come up with stupid lines that you decide to tweet thinking, "Lo! There I break the code of this universe!" and then get back to fighting deadline. Under its spell, your mind is not completely dead and is gifted with the power of imagination. You think of better things in life than toiling for bread and butter – both of which you don't eat ANYMORE! But that's how it is. Everything gets boring after a while.

Pessimism seeps into your soul and wait for the day your stupid heart will get bored of creating its beautiful beat music.

People have this very pathetic habit of taking credit for things they have nothing to do with. They all go ballistic when they are bored as if they invented boredom. Take a break. Breathe. It was always here. We are just passing through.

P.S. Since you are reading this crap, I owe you something. The tripe above doesn't make sense. I know. I wrote it as I was bored and so thought of boring you too. Anyway, do you hear that? That's boredom talking in a deeper voice.

Digi Ramayan

Characters

Ram - Calm, composed guy. Teetotaler(Except when he tasted Vodka once out of peer pressure). One woman man.

Laxman - Hyper enthu guy. Too much respect for his brother. Wannabe hip-hop guy. His Facebook account reads his first name as “Laky” and last name as “Back with a bang”. However “Back with a bang” is definitely not his father’s name.

—————Forest cottage in Ayodhya , evening time

A livid Ram walks about the corridor of his forest cottage.

Ram: Man, How did this even happen? You said you had installed a firewall. What happened, did some windows update screw up something?

Laky : I’m not sure. Let me check the log. Well, she seems to have clicked some kind of malicious link.

Ram: What kind of link?

Laky : 3D deer screensavers. The firewall got broken and the door got opened. Somebody must have abducted her then.

Ram: 3d deer…I mean, how old is she, 8? Who clicks on spam these days?

Laky: Hey, thats the bhabhi you are talking about. Keep it chill bro.

Ram: Any leads on who could have done this?

Laky : I’m not sure bro.

Ram keeps thinking and walking about. He sits back and looks at his MAC running AyodhyaOS. He browses through Sita’s Facebook profile. Somebody had recently tagged her on their Friendship calendar. She had also liked a page “I hate those who don’t hate the I hate Ram” page.

No significant progress seemed to happen as hours seemed to progress. Laky was reinstalling windows on his other laptop as there was an issue with the boot sector. Suddenly the beep of an SMS emanated from Ram’s blackberry. It was from ICICAyodhya bank. It read “A credit card purchase of 24,276 has been made from your card. Offer, now housing loan limit increased for salary account holders”.

Ram: Hey, Looks like my credit card is with Sita and there has been a transaction made.

Laky : Let me check the statement. Hold on. It says the debit was made from Lanka jewelers.

Ram: where is that? Must be at Ranganathan street.

Laky : No. Its in Sri Lanka actually.

Ram: Oh. Must be the notorious Raavan who abducted her. Google Raavan right-away.

Laky: Yes.

*Lakshman googles Raavan

Laky: This is his twitter profile.

—————-

Raavan
Sri LankaRuler|Veena player|Veda reader|Blogger|DSLR Photographer|Private jet owner|I steal hearts and other people’s wives

Tweets

@juniorbachchan Daiiiiiiiiiiiii.

Load more tweets…

——————-

Ram: Hmmm. This must be the guy. The unscrupulous rat. Let’s kick-off some action from our end. Where is the monkey? Why don’t we send the monkey across to Lanka for negotation?

Laky: hey bro. That’s racist.

Ram: What’s racist?

Laky: Calling anybody a monkey is racist. I have seen it bro. They might ban you for like 4 test matches bro. (makes weird hand gesture showing the number 4)

Ram: That is racist?

Laky: Totally bro. Yeah. You can’t call anybody a donkey too. Thats racist too.

Ram: Can I call a donkey a donkey?

Laky: No no. That’s racist too.

Ram: Anyway, let us head-off to Lanka. Quick. Get the travel arrangements done.

Laky: How about we go down the road to the southern tip and construct a bridge from there? Huh, wont that be cool? Like an awesome roadtrip.

Ram(in a growling tone) : What is wrong with you? Just go to makemytrip.

Laky: Yeah. sure sure. Calm down(mumbles “Nobody wants to do the cool stuff”)

Ram: By the way, have you seen my adidas sneakers?

Laky: Yeah. forgot to tell you about that. Bharath wanted it as a souvenir in remembrance of you. But I just guess he was just stingy to buy his own gym shoes.

****At the International terminal

Laky: I wonder what his full name is. Must be something like UDRS.Raavan or DPDMP.Raavan.

Ram(gestures Laky to stop talking): I see something.

At a distance Ram sees a ten headed man wearing ten caps of the cricket teams walking down the terminal. Ram goes delirious with excitement. Laky stands up frantically. Both Ram and Laxman run towards the ten headed man.

Raavan: Before you hit me or something, I am really sorry. You don’t want to trouble a bankrupt man further.

Ram(in a threatening Hollywood hero tone, fists clenched) : What do you mean? Where is my wife?

Raavan: I mean your wife just drove me crazy man. I gave her my credit card and she just blew it up. She purchased so much jewellery that the card statement is the size of a 9 yards silk saree. Now I am so screwed and bankrupt.

Ram does not respond. He just stands calm, fists clenched.

Raavan: I mean my palace is still on EMI man. And I’m just a king. No onsite and stuff for me. I have already gone through so much in life. People have been making fun of my ten heads for long. Kids used to call me base 10 in college. Do you know how much I spend on shampoo and hair-dye? Insane man. And I get ripped off with flight tickets with their ‘per head cost’ rule. Abducting your wife was a mistake. Please forget and forgive this as if it were a bad windows bug where you click ‘dont send error report’. Your wife is waiting in the visitors room. Now if you will excuse me, I will depart.

Ram pats Raavan on his shoulder. Raavan shakes hand with Ram. Laky does a rap star like hi-five with Ram and Raavan walks off from the place.

---The End---

Black And White.

There is no point in teaching darkness a lesson or two in racism. It won't understand.
In any case, almost every little thing under the sun has a grey shade, UNLESS you are in Antartica. Moreover, only penguins have the right to see things in black and white. That's also why they choose not to fly and play chess all day. No kidding.

But what's currently going on in Assam as well as Myanmar tells us that we are NOT living in a colorful age. Those on social media might beg to differ thanks to their over-dependence on Photoshop but lame jokes apart, racism is a grievous human shortcoming. Taking into account the way our stupidity appears now, our species may never rise above this narrow mindset.
Of course, there are moments when we get hope. For instance, when Usain Bolt stretches mankind's limits on the track and is loved by everyone, irrespective of their skin tone. No wonder he is the greatest racist of all time. Errrrr, I mean he wins race and all? OK, chuck it. On a serious note, how about Mario Balotelli hugging his foster Italian mother after winning the match? And there are many more examples—especially from the world of football because UEFA may have discarded the B&W patched footballs but Europeans are still mired in racism—where tears jerk and colors turn into celebration. Wish I was talking about Holi here but I'm not!
Iam a football loving adult, Even as a child, i was never a cricket-loving kid, But I was ignorant as well as racist (lethal combination), whenever my dad would watch cricket matches, as I felt all black people lived in a faraway nation called West Indies. But to compensate this notion, I used to discriminate against red ants and adored black ones. My Mom played a small but significant role in developing this psyche. She told me that black ants are good omen. I guess that's why I keep seeing these tiny creatures today even when they are not around.
Being from a country which literally gave birth to racism, I don't know what is politically correct. Because a majority of my country(wo)men wish to be fair. What they don't acknowledge is the fact that despite all their lightening products, they'll still be black folks with brown skin and whiter-than-Anushka Sharma's armpit. This is also the reason why irony dies a painful death when Indians accuse others of racism. But let's get real for a minute. Humankind is inherently racist. A few words, said or unsaid, won't change that.
On a more serious note, black isn’t the color of hopelessness. Hopelessness is too hopeless to have a color of its own, Nor is the term 'blackmail' Black.. it isn't. Fortuitously, unlike racism, racial jokes are always colorful.

No News is Good News!

Disclaimer : No journalist or media-person was harmed during the making of this blog post.

You wake up everyday. I’m sure you woke up today, too. Once you are done with that, you get started with your routine. And one of the commonest human rituals is to read newspaper or to switch on the TV for news. (Unless you are one of those lucky people who are illiterate but content with their mundane ignorance!) Now, if your day begins with news, what does it say about you as a person? You are curious? Yup, always been. Want to stay abreast of current affairs? Great!

But what exactly do you do with all that you read and learn and watch presented under the garb of news? Nothing, in most cases. Following news is just another evolutionary practice inculcated into our daily life for knowledge’s sake. There is not much one can do about a majority of stuff out there on the paper or screen. So why are we so fond of news, be it good or bad? Because we are an entertainment-loving species and news is gossip presented in a very refined manner. As elementary as that.

On a personal scale, I relish half-baked truths. I have them for breakfast daily. The French in me calls it biscuit. They call it news. To add to the misery, I read something or the other every morning which tells me I should quit reading them. But I never do. In fact, the recent events revolving around Barkha Dutt, and the 2G scam... made me realize that even some of the oldest media giant might go down for news. Meanwhile, I’ve got no doubt that the world would miraculously change for the better the day we stopped reading newspapers. But then, even if I switched to TV, I’d still be hopeless. After all, in India, the thin line separating TV news from TV soaps is almost invisible now. And this has been the case long before India TV decided to put the media in comedian.

You see, there might be absolutely nothing out there to report but our media will beautifully turn it into news for gab-hungry masses. Anyone can create news out of thin air. If nothing else works, the media can report on the thinness of the air. [No, wait, the weather bureau is already doing that, aren’t they?] Moreover, watching news destroys a few of those newsworthy moments that could have been ours. Being the minions that we are, we’ll never know what is true and what is being reported as true. Unfortunately, rumours won't give up on news at any cost and vice versa. Fortunately, the spread of fire will never catch up with the spread of its news.

One lesson newspaper teaches us every single day – better not believe every crap you read. Times changes, perceptions changes and of course, news changes. Remember when they got Osama (at last) and how he got killed by breaking news? No one was allowed to see his face nor his dead body but we somehow managed to gulp the shoddy information of his demise. At that moment, the less you looked out for news, the more you’re convinced of the sheer wastage of time and energy.

And the hard part is when they collect too many viewpoints at once and make you look confused than a newborn dinosaur. Goes without saying, the plural of news is nuisance. As a part of social experiment, we should read last week's newspapers and ascertain its relevance in present day, if at all. Or not check news, at all.

You’ll never come across a channel which will go “We’ve got breaking news for you! Damn. We just broke it!” That’s the whole point. There’s hardly anything sacred about truth or news or journalism at large. I don’t mean to sound cynical but everything is commerce now-a-minutes. And the day each one of us is happy is the day news dies.

The Mumbai 'Local' Mob..

Mumbai is one of those cities where life moves faster than excuses. 

Every one is in a hurry. Here, we don’t have time for rationality about speed and deadline. 

We just work. We just do our jobs and move on to our houses for a good night sleep. 

That’s pretty much the case in almost every other metropolitan city, which is fueled by dreams and ambitions of gigantic proportion.

Mumbai is fast thanks to two reasons:

One. Coz of it’s local trains and other is the people traveling in it. They both compliment each other, pretty perfectly. 

The crowd and hustle-bustle that comes with these trains in Mumbai is a legend of sorts that can’t be ignored. People literally breathe into each other’s lungs with hardly the space to share fresh air. 

According to Wikipedia, more than 5,000 passengers are packed into a 9-car rake during peak hours, as against the rated carrying capacity of 1,700. Literally, that means, 14 to 16 passengers are standing on each square meter of floor space.

Now, imagine you are one of those 14 to 16 passengers stacked in that bogey and the train stops in middle of track. How do you feel? The answer is simple.
You are utterly frustrated, distressed and would want to break free. 

There could be hundreds of reasons for that train to stop there. It could be failure of signal or could be overlapping of time schedule thus creating a case of traffic. It could be anything but we forget a more occurring possibility there.

It could be due to a passenger who was hanging on the foot-board a while ago, but accidentally bumped into the passing steel structures or it could be someone who just slipped off the least of support he had.

It’s a mere coincidence that in a city of 14 million people, around 4000 people die due to accidents related to trains every single year.

I came across such incident just a week ago... when the train stopped abruptly on the 8-km distance track (which is the longest distance between two stations in whole of Mumbai) creating a flutter of anxiety. 

As I was hanging on the foot-board like ‘Tarzans of Bombay’ do, I could see it quiet clearly why the train pulled the brake. It was a bloodied man lying on the side of the track. The man was in severe pain and was lifted by 3 men from Railways into the furthest bogey that the motorman occupies.

I’m glad I witnessed this,
but I just wonder, that it could be me or you the next time we hang onto the overcrowded train on a one footed support, to fight time and deadline!...


To Fight Time and Deadline... Seriously? :/ 

The "Once Upon A Time" sorta Thing ..

In a faraway land (No, Not the places Dora, The Explorer shows us), there once dwelled a vain Princess, who had nothing to do, except look forward to her Prince Charming

She was hypnotized to do so by some creepy writer who thought it was soo literary-like to dictate a lady whose only claim to distinction was her fair smooth skin and long golden locks.

As scripted, she patiently waited by the window, Day in and Day out...
She hoped PC would arrive someday on a White Horse (Which aptly makes her a bit racist!) and help escape her moribund existence.

Of course, she wasn’t sure what kind of life PC might provide her once she hops on to sidesaddle him. But the fact that she didn’t know how to clean or cook kept her confidence high and expectations low.

More or less, the future was bound to be better out there on the wrong side of window.

Holding all these reasons in her empty head safe, she persisted.

In the meantime, PC took a lengthy detour and got killed in the ensuing freak accident which involved his horse and a mare.

End result: He didn’t show up.

The poor Princess, unaware of this bone-breaking news, kept her faith.
While she was at it, she lost some weight too. No one bothered though as she wasn’t suffering from anorexia.

Besides, the worst that could happen was some modeling agency landing up at her doorstep and window-shopping her. It didn’t matter who rescued her as long as she was loved by the idea of freedom. Whatever that means.

Meanwhile, weeks grew into months and months got substituted by years and eventually time lost track of itself.

Neverthemore, the frail Princess was still lonely with no Twitter timeline to pour her frustration on nor Facebook friends to photoshop her emotions with.

It was advisable to learn something new like cooking, gardening or knitting but she simply wasn’t interested. 

Her thoughts were with PC (who should have been alive had he respected equine privacy) and prayed the feeling was mutual.

One afternoon, a frog enters the story timeline and startled her. 

He croaked, “Sweetheart, this is me – the one you’ve been waiting for all these years.”

On witnessing a frog that spoke fluent English, the Princess turned pale and was about to faint before she blurted out, “Are you my PC?”

This abbreviated question knotted frog’s long tongue and infuriated him, “Now who the fcuk is PC?”

Having a pair of ears that weren’t subject to harsh words, she got scared and instantly replied, “Prince Charming!”

The frog smiled like they aren’t supposed to on Animal Planet and was relieved to say, “Yeah! That dude’s me.”

There was a long awkward silence and a longer staring contest between the two before the restless frog interrupted: “Well, this is the part where you kiss me and we live happily ever after.”

Taking the cue, she lifted him up on her soft palm and closed her to eyes to oblige. At this very instance, the inevitable happened. 

She turned into a frogess and there was no way to go back other than live croakily ever after.