That was a long break! And it included the first week of hectic activity after joining here, thanks to the crazy 2nd-year batch.

Things are settling down now. Though life will probably get busier once the 2nd-year guys get free after their mid-terms.

I have been enjoying the courses, and most of everything else that this place incorporates. The water, the humidity and the reptiles are a pain, but not enough to dampen the spirits.

The net speed's great here, and the LAN is almost as good as IITD's. But, I am trying to control myself, and not give in to the temptations.

To do everything the way I want to here, I'll have to change the way I have been doing things earlier. That includes sacrificing a bit on books, films and writing. We have to read so much in terms of handouts and books here (and who's complaining?) that I am not sure I'll be able to get done with even one novel during the normal course of studies here. Will cut down substantially on movies too. But the greatest casualty could be this blog. Even now I had to coerce myself to write this post by way of explanation. The high of meeting new people daily personally is great enough to keep me from communicating through this blog.

I am not sure if this is the last post on this blog. It most probably isn't. But posts from now on would be very infrequent.

I have been waiting so long to use that post-title.

I spent only a few hours within the IIMC campus today, though. And most of my time was spent in buying stuff for my hostel room and fitting all of that inside it (which was difficult as my entire family was also trying to fit themselves into the room at the same time), and after that I was busy with getting done with the formalities for the loan from SBI. The employees at IIMC's SBI branch are a welcome change from most government employees I have seen before this, and definitely a lot better than the ones at the IIT Delhi SBI branch. The ease with which I got through the piles of forms and documents was unbelievable. And I did a smart thing in turning up early to get all of it done, as it'll get terribly crowded tomorrow.

I returned with my parents to the place they are staying at, so couldn't see much of the campus. But it looks beautiful, and is cleaner than what I had expected thanks to the horror stories I had been narrated. It's definitely the greenest college campus I have seen as yet. Hopefully the remaining two years will be as nice as the first day was.

Will report more as I get to know more.

Meanwhile, a few points I forgot to add to the Poonam Saxena post. As I discovered the day I was leaving home, not all is rotten on Indian TV. NDTV Profit is a nice channel for one. And one program I really felt glad about is Just Books, the only show devoted completely to books that I have seen on TV. There's also a show by Siddharth Kak, anchored by Irrfan Khan, which is pretty decent. And one program I liked in particular was a show called Business Badshah (or something similar), anchored by Cyrus Sahukar (who I have become a fan of after Semi Girebaal), that promotes entrepreneurs with interesting ideas. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how nice it'd be to have a business of one's own (and have been thinking of ideas overtime too) and maybe that is why I liked this show a lot.

 

I am in Kolkata right now, and, thanks to Reliance, am able to pass time in my guest-house surfing the net. Reached the city yesterday in the afternoon, after our train was late by over 4 hours. Kolkata hits you hard when you get out of the train, and move out of Howrah. The chaos, the traffic, the heat and humidity, you experience the worst within 10 minutes of entering the city. And then, it gets only slightly better.

The first day was just about okay, and it took time to adjust to the heat after having spent the last two weeks comfortably within the air-conditioned confines of my home. Of course, my mother's constant cribbing about the heat and crowd didn't help. Why did my family choose to holiday in Kolkata of all places at the peak of summer?! And shopping to top that!

The second day was better today. Our company's liasion officer had booked an AC taxi today, and the weather was slightly better, and we spent most of the day moving around in Forum, a relatively new shopping complex, which houses INOX and Shoppers' Stop too. But even shopping with my family is a pain. I mostly do the waiting and baggage carrying while my sister, my mother and my father take hours going over every piece of clothing in the shop. My sister finally managed to buy one pair of Capris today after spending close to 3 hours yesterday and today trying out different shops! I bought one pair of jeans in 5 minutes.

Watched MI-III with my family at the INOX at Forum, and for a change my parents liked an English action flick. Was it Tom Cruise, or was it the INOX experience? Or is the movie actually that good?

The worst thing about Kolkata, very similar to Mumbai, is that the affluent and the poor areas are too close for comfort. In Delhi, one can avoid coming very close to the crowds, and the slums, and still go about one's life in a normal way. But, in Kolkata, barring a few  areas, some very posh localities are surrounded by old, weak, buildings, housing lower middle class or lower class families. People having their bath, cooking, eating, and virtually living their whole lives on the pavement is much too common. The roads are narrower and the traffic more chaotic (though my parents still consider Delhi's traffic worse). Like most upwardly-mobile middle-class families in India, and I suppose all around the world, ours too would like it a lot more if in the normal course of our lives we only had to come across families of our economic strata, or higher, moving in nice cars on smooth roads, to-and-from shopping malls or eating joints, especially when we are on vacation. But, that's not possible in Kolkata. It'll take some time getting used to that.

The best thing about this trip, as of now, has been meeting a friend at Howrah station yesterday. He was visiting Kolkata for two days only, and I had given him my phone number when I called him up last from my home, but the great man had misplaced that number. He had also not got time to meet up any of our other common friends, and I wouldn't have been able to get his Kolkata number if I had tried later. And anyway it would have been pointless as he was leaving Monday afternoon. In an amazing coincidence, while he was waiting with his dad at Howrah station for his train, I walked out to get to our taxi with my family, and was pleasantly surprised to see him walking towards me with a huge grin on his face. If you have seen Howrah station, you can get an idea of the chance of something like that happening. And I wouldn't have been able to meet him if my train would have been on time!

Most of my time at home has been spent on saving stuff from my old comp, which is about to be sold, playing AOE after a long time (it didn't run on my old comp, which might make you wonder who the hell is buying a comp like that), unpacking and repacking, and, of course, eating and sleeping. Unlike previous visits home I have watched very little TV this time, except for watching almost all the World Cup matches till now. And I don't need to give reasons why.

There's absolutely nothing to watch on Indian TV (and we don't get any of the English channels). Soaps are extremely idiotic, with the same set of bovine daughters/daughters-in-law and evil, scheming, mothers-in-law/aunts in ostensibly different settings present everywhere. I watched one episode of one of Kekta Kapoor's (actually all serials are like that now) creations, and was amazed how people, my family included, remain spellbound by predictable, slow-moving stories, and hilarious camera movements. The close-ups of every single character present in the room after each dialogue is spoken, and slow-motion repeat shots of the main characters accompanied with jarring music whenever an incident of any remote consequence occurs, are copied by every serial-maker worth his (misspelt) name.

Even other shows are boring and moronic. The Great Indian Laughter Challenge is watchable solely because of the female anchor (Perizaad Kola, or whatever her name is), but not enough that one could tolerate the deadly combination of Sidhu and Shekhar Suman. There's a show hosted by Saurabh Shukla, based on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, called something like Lo Kar Lo Baat, and it's an insult to the original. Shukla, for a change should stop laughing himself, and ensure that the actors do a better job at making the viewers laugh. Sa Re Ga Ma Pa has undergone another change, or maybe it's a new show altogether, and it's not half as good as the previous versions. Boogie Woogie reincarnate, after having been absent for a while, is still one of the more watchable shows on TV.

But, the greatest letdown have been the 24-hour news channels. All leading news channels, without exception, seem to believe unfailingly in the mantra of overkill. They cover inconsequential news-stories, probably to fill up the absence of anything worth showing, with such detail that one loses all interest in the story. The Rakhi Sawant-Mika case was given more than half-an-hour on Aaj Tak! And most new TV journalists are extremely dumb, and at times insensitive, and seem to be concerned only with getting the story, and their face, on camera.

MTV remains about the only channel that packs some punch. Semi Girebaal is absolutely classic, and MTV Bakra remains fun, even though some of their jokes are in bad taste. Saturday will mark the premiere of Ghoom, which, based on previews and trailers, seems like a fun spoof.

So, surprisingly enough for someone like me, a greater part of my TV watching time has been limited to the Sports channels. Some of the World Cup matches have been truly crackling, even though most of the prospective winners have not been performing upto their calibre. The Argentinian victory against Serbia and Montenegro on Friday (today) was awesome. Duniya Goal Hai, hosted by Ranvir and Vinay, is really funny. The second test's result was heart-breaking, and the combination of rains (when are they going to visit India, btw?), bad luck, Lara and some stupid team selection ensured that we missed anothr of those elusive vistories on foreign soil .

This might be my last post before I leave for Bongland on Sunday, the 18th. There might be a long hiatus as I might not have access to a comp, or internet, for sometime, or at least not long enough to make a post. Will be back as soon as I can with insider reports from Joka.

One gets so used to a sedate lifestyle at home that a task as simple as making a blog post, especially when there's almost no chore that I am responsible for, seems like too much work. So, this is only my second post in almost a week's stay at home, when I could have easily made one everyday (except for a couple of days when my dad was away with the phone that I connect to the net with).

Coming home after close to a year, I was definitely expecting some changes, but I have been more than slightly baffled by the improvements. Moreover, since my parents have almost always been posted at remote areas at the back of beyond (present location not being any exception), where normal telephone functioning  was close to a miracle, some of these improvements still appear incredible. My father's always been some sort of a gadget-freak, but remote postings and prohibitive costs have very often made the possibility of splurging on new gadgets difficult. But, right now it seems, in words similar to what I saw in an ad recently, it's a great time to be alive for people like him.

At this moment we've got 9 cell phones, 2 desktop computers, 2 laptop computers, 2 TVs, 3 digital cameras, 2 handycams, and some other stuff that I probably haven't been shown yet, in our home for the four of us (no, my dogs still haven't learnt to use any of these, though they probably will pretty soon). And I forgot 4 cordless telephones. I still haven't been able to learn to identify most of these phones from their tones, and I dread the times when more than one starts ringing at the same time. Almost the first thing that my father did when he came to receive me at the railway station on Tuesday morning, and after we had settled in our car, was to show me his snazzy Motorola cell-phone that he's bought recently. Which means that I'll be getting his Nokia 3230, which, though very nice and impressively-endowed, is slightly difficult to get comfortable with for someone as technically inept as me. I must be such a letdown for my father.

What is most fascinating for me in all this confusion though is my first proper encounter with Bluetooth. After having heard different forms of the popular quiz question related to the origin of the term in connection with some Scandinavian king for ages now,  I had always wondered what the fuss was all about. And I am a fan now. I apologise for sounding so ignorant, but I honestly wasn't aware of its powers. I am flabbergasted with the ease with which data can be transferred between the Bluetooth-enabled phones and computers. Even more enjoyable is the almost wi-fi like internet surfing experience that I am having these days thanks to the service provided by Reliance. We have a nice lawn in the house we are living in at present, and making this post, sitting on the lovely grass in the lawn in the evening, with my dogs playing around me, is princely. I can even surf the net while moving around in our car!

And to think I am experiencing all this for the first time after moving from Delhi to this small town (or is this a village?) in a backward region of Madhya Pradesh!

There have been other interesting, and not-so-interesting experiences over the last one week, which I'll write about later, but one that was the best was our family's trip to Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve over the weekend. I have been to Ranthambore twice and Sariska once too, and barring one brief sighting of three tigers at Ranthambore on my first visit, the trips were pretty uneventful. The safaris are enjoyable anyway, even if you don't get to see a tiger, but one does feel a bit disappointed if that happens. The MPTDC lodgings at Bandhavgarh are very nicely maintained, quite unlike my experience at Panchmarhi, and the cottages are very comfortable and beautiful. Though incessant soccer matches conducted by teams of langurs on the rooftop makes it a tad noisy, and scary when the langurs try to take a closer look at the humans sharing their lodgings. The prospect of an early morning safari seemed very pointless, based on my past experiences, and I wasn't in the best of moods when I had to wake up at 4:45am. But my grumpiness vanished soon enough when we were rewarded with the sighting of a tigress and her two full-grown children resting after a hearty meal very soon after we entered the forest area. And they were just a few meters away from where our gypsy was parked. It was actually closer than what we get to see very often in enclosures in zoos. After spending about half-an-hour watching them toss and turn and play with each other, we moved on, and almost immediately were informed of a kill made by another tigress at some distance. When we reached the place, we saw two cubs feasting on a huge freshly-killed sambhar while their mother was having a dip in the cool waters of a nearby stream after an expectedly arduous hunt. This was even closer than the previous sighting. We also saw large herds of spotted deer, at times running parallel to the gypsy at distances close enough to touch them, and were blessed with a rare sighting of a sloth bear rushing away after a drink in the river. A thouroughly paisa-vasool trip!

I had intended to make a formal final post from Delhi. But too much last minute work, and bad planning on my part, ensured that that desire remained unfulfilled. On my way home from Delhi last night, looking into the moon-lit wilderness outside the superfast train, sitting on the side-lower berth, I thought about that, and a lot more. And I decided that it is in a way right that I didn't make a 'final' Delhi post. Things like that provide a closure to episodes in one's life. But Delhi, and IIT, will remain a part of me for a long long time, if not for ever, and I can't think of them as brief chapters that I can move on from now.

I had a whole lot of luggage with me, and I didn't feel like sleeping, despite not having slept the night before too, and for most of the night, except for short periods of dozing off or reading, I was thinking about my life in the last six years or so, and the course it is taking now, and also about the people I have come to know during my stay at college. I smiled, I laughed, I cried, while everyone around me slept and, in some cases, snored.

In an interesting coincidence, the stretch of Madhya Pradesh that the train crossed at night was the same area that I passed through while moving to Kota for coaching so many years back. That was almost another life. I was analyzing, as I have a habit of doing, the changes these last few years have seen in me, for good or for worse, and the changes I have resisted. While I couldn't wait to get home at one level, I was also wishing for that train journey to go on for an eternity at another.

I can't possibly write down every thought that crossed my mind. Nor do I think most of you would be interested in reading all that. But after more than a couple of hours of looking back at my life as it has been, in a slightly filmy scenario (though it's only fitting in my case), as the train chugged out of Jhansi railway station, as I saw a man of about my age foraging in the garbage for food along with his family, I could not but feel amused at the pointlessness of all the analysis. The most I can do is be thankful for every good thing that I have in my life, which I am. And be ready to bear, and learn from, every bad thing, which I have tried to.

But most importantly, as I move from one important stage in my life to another, in my continuing attempt to meet the (sometimes unreasonable) expectations I have from me, I take this short break to thank every person who has been there for me, every single individual who has helped me in some form. I have named some in the past, but most remain unnamed, and un-thanked, but you'll still know if you are one of them.

...kaise kahoon?

Before you start getting any ideas, especially if you remember the ad that this line is from, let me clarify that the problem that I am going to talk about in this post is no way as serious. Actually, most people might not even consider it a problem. Come to think of it, even I don't. It's just that I don't like doing it, or the frequency with which I do it.

The thing that I am talking about is the much too frequent use of smileys/emoticons that I seem to have picked up. I am sorry if that was a bit anti-climactic for you. Every other, if not every single, sms, scrap, or IM, that I send, I seem to use one of :), :D, 8), ;), and so on. Even when there is absolutely no need (is there ever?).

In fact, I have noticed that at times I write something dumb, ignorant or plain rude, and then end it with a :) or a :D to temper it a bit. And it actually works. The person that the message is intended for doesn't react angrily even if you abuse him to your heart's content, only if you take care to finish off with one of these two emoticons.

I never use SMS-ese. Not even in sms-es. Which is understandably exasperating to a lot of people, especially when they are waiting for a reply, while I am taking my own sweet time composing an elaborately worded work of literature. And so this habit caught me unawares.

Though it's not all that bad. Yet. I don't use it in official letters. Yet. That'll be the day.

While we are at it, could someone clear one doubt - what exactly is the purpose of :P? Is it a smirk, or something a little less than a smile? Is one supposed to use it when one is slightly annoyed? Or when someone's taunting someone? Or finds something stupid? I have seen it being used at all sorts of places, and the confusion is too much for my little brain. :P

And now, we have another issue, or rather, a non-issue being made into one, which is sure to snowball into a major controversy, given the present environment.

I haven't read any other newspaper today, but TOI has given a lot of prominence to the case of Vivek Langde, this year's SC/ST toppper in GATE for Electronics and Communication, not being given admission to the MTech course at IITD. To make matters worse, a lady from the general category has been given admission, ostensibly on the seat meant for SC/ST candidates.

And TOI is having a field day with this, in the typical manner that dumb journalists get all accusatory on issues that they have absolutely no idea about.

For MTech admissions at IITs, all candidates have to go though an interview, once they have secured a high enough percentile in GATE. If they are found technically suited for the course, they are offered admission. The GATE score is supposed to have 70% weightage and the interview 30%, though I am not exactly sure of these figures. It's quite similar to the admission process at IIMs. And it's also very much possible that a candidate who scores a very high percentile in GATE might actually not be particularly brilliant at technical skills. I am a good example.

Now, if a candidate hasn't been found capable enough in the interview, he can't go and crib in the media that the entire IITD faculty is involved in a great conspiracy against reserved category candidates. There are people from the General category too, with percentiles much higher, who are found unsuitable at times. It's like a 100-percentiler in CAT suing IIMA for not taking him in!

It's getting really unbearable. Reading today's newspaper is an exercise in disgust.

The reservation protests aren't having any effect at all. Manmohan Singh talks as if these are some kids throwing a tantrum. He is beginning to come across as an even bigger of a spineless slimeball than Arjun Singh. As for the latter, I am beginning to think that an RDB scenario might not be very bad actually. It'll be nice if someone shoots him down, and that will hopefully make the other politicians wake up from their slumber.

I don't deserve to get so angry honestly speaking, as I haven't been to any protest or demonstration yet, despite something or the other taking place daily in the campus. But, in my defence, just as most IITians got involved only after their exams got over, I have some important curricular work left, and I was hoping to participate once I got free next week. But, I think I shall at least be present tomorrow at the Ramlila Grounds. And I would request all of you, reading this in Delhi, to be there too. Saturday, 27th May, 4:30pm, Ramlila Grounds. 

And as if the reservation issue wasn't enough to make me pissed off, this whole Aamir Khan - Gujarat issue makes my blood boil even more. What the hell is wrong with politicians? Is there a limit that they will not stoop beyond to? Perfectly innocent, well-intentioned comments have been blown out of proportion, and Aamir Khan is being blackmailed by ruffians like V K Malhotra, who act as if someone appointed them the guardians of the interests of the entire state. I hope Aamir Khan doesn't apologise, and considering his present stand, I don't think he will. I wasn't going to watch Fanaa earlier, but just because of this I am going to watch it in a theatre now.

Once in a while, you come across a movie, or two if you are lucky, that you are able to identify with. A movie, for which the tag of 'classic' is defined almost completely by what it means to you at a very personal level. You almost feel that the film-maker knew you when he shot the scenes, or the characters on the screen are talking to you, or there are certain instances that only you 'get'.

At least that happens to me.

And has been happening to me more frequently over the last year. Maybe it is a sign of the onset of dementia.

But, if it has never happened to you, believe me, you have missed a lot. There is no other way to watch a movie, read a book, listen to a song or look at a painting, except absorbing it as if it was meant for you.

In the last two days, I have watched two movies that have reaffirmed my faith in films. I had started getting bored, and had been watching films extremely passively. These two have proven that there's so much more to see. So much to see in English itself. And then there's French, Russian, Italian, and so many others.

The first movie, the one I had talked about in my last post, is Stand By Me. It's based on a novel by Stephen King, and after The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, this is another of his non-horror gems. The movie is about four school friends who set out on a long trek to find a dead body, their experiences and conversations on the trip, and how all of it changes them. I have a feeling I have seen similar coming of age movies earlier too, but there's something special in the movie, or maybe in the time in my life that I have seen it, that made it a movie that I could identify with. Actually, not as much with the entire movie as with the relationship between two of the four friends, one of whom is the narrator, and the other is played by the late River Phoenix. If he was such an amazing actor as a kid, he would have been great if he had lived longer. Oh sorry, I forget Macaulay Culkin.

Coming back to the relationship between the two friends, I could identify with what the boy played by Phoenix feels for the other one. He cares for his friend like a father, or an elder brother (in this case, the narrator has lost his caring elder brother, and his father doesn't seem to know that he exists, but one could care for another person even when he didn't need it), and wants him to do well in life, and knows that he has it in him to excel. While the narrator goes through pangs of under-confidence and self-doubt, his friend seems to have a much stronger belief in him, even on occasions when the narrator gets annoyed with all this 'fatherly' concern. And this love and understanding is not one-sided. Phoenix's character is supposed to be one of the rotten apples, someone who is almost always misunderstood, and this particular friend is probably the only one who he feels likes him despite all his perceived fallacies, someone who he can be weak in front of. This is in some ways, maybe with some difference of context, eerily similar to the kind of relationship I share with a friend, or at least I think I do.

But I wouldn't call Stand By Me a 'great' movie. The second film, on the other hand, that I saw today, is a truly great movie. It's one of those films that works at several levels, and in fact excels at almost all of them. One of those movies that become parameters you judge other movies by. One of those, where everything clicks together in just the right manner, to the extent that even the bad parts only seem to enhance the whole effect. In fact where it feels that, to paraphrase one of the lead character's closing statement from the movie, it's just the actors, the camera, and the people sitting there in the dark. Nothing else.

With that line, if you have a decent movie trivia quotient, you would have guessed which movie I am talking about. Sunset Boulevard, it is. This post has got long already and I have so much still left to write about this movie. So, I'll refrain from writing a full-fledged review, and lead you here. I'll just talk about what it meant to me.

For someone who has got fed with public adulation to the extent that he starts depending on it, starts living for it, and looks at oneself through the eyes of others, nothing can be scarier than the idea of being forgotten, being dismissed as a has-been. He tries to hold on to every strand of times gone by, and stops living in the present. And so while the rest of the world moves on, he is left alone, and extremely lonely, trying to make sense of things, and failing miserably at it. During this period of abject loneliness, if that person finds a friend, or at least one who seems like a friend, he tries everything within his powers to keep that friend with him. Becomes extremely possessive, even obsessive, and in his desperate efforts to save something that is very important to him, spoils that very thing. The friend, who tries to be understanding, even loving, at the beginning, feels suffocated and trapped, and isn't able to bear the baggage and the constant scrutiny. And if it becomes too difficult to bear, leaves.

This is the story of Norma Desmond. It could very well have been mine. Don't ask me to explain the parallels.

But apart from the complex relationship between the lead pair, there's a third angle, as complex as the first two, which raises the movie to an even greater plain. This angle is provided by Max, the butler, who is the only other person living in Norma Desmond's decadent mansion. I don't want to spoil the movie for you by telling you more about Max, because a revelation, actually two in quick succession, about one-and-a-half hours into the movie when Max is telling Joe about himself in the garage at night, struck me really hard, and you should discover it on your own. 

The thing that I want to talk about is the absolute self-less and self-sacrificing devotion that Max seems to have for this senile actress of yesteryears. As I see it, and it could be because I would have done the same thing, or maybe I am just interpreting it the wrong way, it is not self-less or anything so high and mighty. It is as selfish as anything one does can be. It's just that when you love a person really deeply, or rather one particular version of a person, the only way you can survive is by devoting yourself completely in keeping up that image in front of you. You don't want the person to change. And you try, till you die, to keep that change at bay.