Sandy

Dark grey skies outside, ominous clouds and an entire ocean eager to kill.

All over the eastern sea board, emails fly, hard drives spin and monitors glow.

Whirring hard drives and monitors rarely know, 

that in their whirring and in their glow 

great things are made, analyzed and understood,

like tides and winds and how they blow.

But glowing and whirring is insufficient

to save lives and make great things come from it

Take my case for example,

with plenty of whirring and glowing - I Reddit.

Coloured man

Simple things, simple words and simple joys.
The colour yellow - and a hug.
Simple handshakes and passing goodbyes,
little things that simply float by.
Simply propelled - by currents, static, convection and aerodynamics.
All abstract forces, that when simplified, don't justify why floaters fly.

Simple folk with simple plans.
Simply living lives in suspended equilibrium.
Myopic neighbours woven into a fabric of simple interactions,
flexing and twisting with the collective tug of simple things,
simple words and simple joys;
the colour yellow - wrung by currents, static and convection.

If simplicity were a colour, it surely would be a Red.
Atomic and cross with the world, but mostly at Blue.
Blue was cool but now distant, icy and cold.

Blue, in his gloom, is simple too.
A colour with breath held; hoping Red still blushed,
a happy rosy glow when she was touched.

Oh and yonder Green, off in the distance,
jealous as only Greens can be
of this polarized binary.
Knowing full well that he is, as colours go,
no less primary.

A twisted technicolor of monochromatic atoms,
spun by currents, static and convection.
None alone and none forgotten.
For it must be so to explain some simple things;
like, the joyous colour Yellow - and a hug.

Yellow is an incorruptible sort.
Made of the stuff that angels fart.
While, often composite and a mixture of two,
simple joys are atomic too.

The simple truth is that simple things combine,
in ways that are simply stupefying.
Propelled and wrung by abstract forces,
that to an atom, when simplified,
don't justify why floaters fly.

For it must be said, as simple things go,
that some simple truths are simply untrue.
For what truth faces miserable Blue;
is that Yellow is made with Red and Green but not of Blue.
While Green plus Blue, well,
is only just Blue.

Of damaged angry men.

5 Bollywood movies in 20 hours. I finally watched five movies I put off for several months. Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, Manorama Six Feet Under, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Dev D.
Firstly they are all fantastic movies, LSD in my opinion was one of the most innovative movies I have seen. Not having read anything about it before watching it, I was the perfect passenger and Dibakar Bannerjee knows how to stitch a ride together for sure. I fell for the funny bits, only to find I had been baited into a very real, very visceral kick in the gut. And my kidneys loved it!
Khosla Ka Ghosla and that 'Lucky' movie were also directed by him and were very impressive also.

The Manorama movie, directed by Navdeep Singh was great as well; set in the small town of Lakhot Rajasthan, it is a re-hash of Roman Polanski's Chinatown. The movie oozes with the same lovable torpor that infects everyone in the movie. I was drunk on noir and the thickness of desert summer air by the end of the movie, needing a hot sticky nap and random jolly bystander to be snarky to.
But while each movie was different, one thing emerged as a common property: Modern Bollywood loves emotionally damaged angry men, emotionally damaged angry men with the stress tolerance of myotonic goats.  Angry men themselves make great muses; they frequently have just been punched in the nuts,  or have had a devious scheme ruined by some meddling kids. Such timeless edifices are angry men that they have been all-time favourite subjects for artists attempting to capture the human form, as elucidated by this archetypal example of upper-paleolithic rock-art from Kakadu, Australia. Followed by an in-praesenti example of ... (pop-art?).

The emotionally stunted angry man is a particular impotent variety of angry man. DevD, for example, is a story of guy who returns to his home town, courting a woman there called Paro. The movie is a document of the colourful and chaotic tapestry that emerges from shit hitting the fan as Dev expertly splits the seam connecting nuanced Indian ethos, sexual attraction and personal conflict - with a wildly swinging chain-saw. The result is a beautifully rendered haze of drug addled dementia, swearing, sickly moping and the self destructive urge to hurt the things he loves.

I find it interesting that this is a somewhat recurring theme with movies and that male characters with retarded emotional maturity are colored with a touch of romance.  I am willing to buy a male character with an impulsive rage and temporary loss of judgement. I suspect that most men can empathize with acts of indiscretion triggered by a hormonal head rush. An uncontrolled impulse, after all, must be something of a vestigial fragment of a reflex existence, where stressful situations needed to be dealt with, in greater measure immediacy than tact. Think, saving your occipital bun from a rampaging woolly mammoth! I find it hard to believe, however, that there was ever anything but a severe anthropological disadvantage for men who attempted to reach lucidity through transcendental binge drinking.  True, the D in Dev D probably stands for Degenerate but there is no doubting that men willing to freestyle dive into self-propitiating chaos are unfairly perceived as remissible juvenile delinquents.

More often than not the role of mending or at least valiantly trying to mend these men, at great personal cost and sacrifice, falls on the lead female character. And honestly, these female characters are quite awesome, balancing a figure relatable to viewers as a "real woman" while dealing with events of cartoon proportion. I hear from individuals broadly identified as female movie goers that there is a lovable aspect to damaged men, the myth that women love men who are projects. At the very least, the claim is that women find inarticulate men with troubled emotions more approachable and human.

In contrast, I believe there is nothing human about Dev, him and his cohorts in films alike are caricatures of disarray. An anthropomorphic representation not unlike Homer Simpson. They are the contrast you need to be able to see all the other humans in the movie; so dull in their similarity to you, me and the people we know that we wouldn't notice them unless you set them against the absurd.  So then DevD is not a movie about the complexity of Dev's glaring dementia, but a movie about the intersection of a fantasy with regular lives.  The regular lives of Paro, the guy who sells Dev drugs and the random stranger who jumps out of the way in time to not get stabbed by Dev in a murderous rage. A collection of characters that just as well could have been us.

Even the vamp character in the movie, Chandramukhi, is not illogically fucked up and without the ability see choices ahead of her. Her fuckeduppedness has back-story, purpose and beguiling charm. Vamps in general are far from the vapid seductresses they are advertised to be, being instead highly put together gold diggers with guile and wit.

Truth is, it is not our frailty, ineptitude and weakness that writes the human narrative. Wooly Mammoths had frailties, weakness and consequently are extinct. Devs from history have all shared the Wooly Mammoth's inadequacy at articulating a growing sense of incompatibility with their surroundings and have shared too their fate. The human story is that we survived, we survived past the ice age to talk about the the time we were in an abusive relationship with a drunken asshole or the day we almost got stabbed in the chest. It is our ability to make choices and plan for a future with less assholes and fewer opportunities to get stabbed. Oh by the way here is an approximate rendering of that lunatic who tried to stab me, his legs and arms were like that of a mantis, a snarling mouth as big as his head with hair flying in all directions, never have I seen a scarier sight in all of upper-paleolithic Australia. Now hand me that rock I am going to draw him for you,... and did I mention he was like 10 feet tall and was holding this gigantic bottle of Red Label!?


Rock faces stand everywhere, marked with the blood of human cruelty, headstones to inexplicable hatred. But gleams amongst them, the monolith of human existence, coloured with grit and volition, shaped by the men and women who survived, lived and contemplated.

Coffee at 3

He and I go to the Cafe Coffee Day a lot. We sit and talk and look out the window, sometimes our conversations last several seconds and then there is silence but it is a silence I look forward to. I am not ashamed to say it is easily a daily highlight.

We are the young professional types often times seen in coffee shops like this one, well he is and I am along because with some imagination I can pretend to be one. He is true blue business sheek though, the real deal, he bustles when he moves and when he sits down he does so with a confident sigh, like he earned the well padded sofa-chair in the upper seating area by the TV. I, on the other hand, fidget a lot when I am at any table, it is too noisy if I don't. I am fidgeting today with the fork and the thing that holds packets of sugar, waiting for him to walk in from his office down the road.

I like the upper floor because it offers a good vantage on the busy Sadashivanagar 5th cross road, a multi-species ecosystem made up of organisms that would rather be anywhere but there . There are dogs on the pavement below, German Shepherd mongrels, Labrador Retriever mongrels and the common golden wheat Bangalore street dogs. Breeds diffused and mixed together by the freedom of social life. There are people too, escaping being run over, ponderously inspecting a ditch behind the bus stop before spitting into it. Hindi Bangloreans, Tamil Bangaloreans, Pissed off Bangaloreans, on my way home to Malleshwaram from a liquor shop in Yelahanka Bangaloreans, just scammed a dealer in Cottonpet to scam customers in Gandhi Bazaar Bangaloreans. Shirts tucked in, common Bangalore mongrels with wheatish complexion and no pedigree.

I stab a packet of sugar with my fork, the couple cuddling in the corner booth giggle about a sugary explosion of a different sort. I can see him now round the street corner behind a fog of engine smoke, sleeves folded summoning a scowl of arrogant invincibility to cross 5th cross. We are not so different him and I, brown, on the way to somewhere, positively discontent, never once imagining the very real possibility of being flattened under a BMTC bus. Similar beings but ensconced in very different people. I think I could be a Cappuccino drinking, shirt tucked in kind of guy if could stop fidgeting so damn much. I like the way the kind smell, aromatic finely brewed individuals with Income Tax returns to file. Fidgeters should NOT drink coffee though, not good for the fingers.
His fingers however are not fidgeters fingers, they are theatrical instruments, they reflect a collected meditative tension when he talks about the future, they snarl with evil wit when he cracks his knuckles. His fingers are like the rest of him, parts of a big anthropomorphic cast of characters. Acting out his ambition, his sureties and his indecision. He is arrogantly focused on success and he wears his arrogance proudly on his sleeve. It is great because there are so few like that, most only begrudgingly part with their master plan to rule the world, not him. Listening to him is like a romantic escape where it is almost quiet enough to buy into his philosophy.
Like how he always has a method to get ahead, it is always a hard method wrought with idiots, slackers and incompetent adversaries. Things that only become problems if you show weakness and indecision when you cross them. I want to call it naive but I love the idea too much.

He jogs across 5th cross while a motorcyclist loses a game of chicken and squirms out of his way. He pays his respects to the motorcyclist, another slacker dealt with.
I cross the street with a prayer, he does it with faith. My prayer is to the present, his faith ignores the present. In his head he is already in his sofa-chair drinking a Cappuccino, operating a sugar packet as per instructions.

He pushes the door open and nods at the waiter, he will have the usual, he has a usual. The coffee shop is briefly struck by the howling chaos from the outside. The doors close the noise stops, quiet- it is awesome. I put the fork down and sit up. He sits down, leans back and looks out the window, "Fuckers!" he exhales. "Yup", I agree.
Quiet continues.




Over the months I have been privy to several conversations at tables near me here on the upper floor by the TV and the window. The ones that I remember most are the ones between young Cafe Coffee Day couples. Sitting in the corner booth so intoxicated with each others' eyes they forget the brown untucked fidgeter within earshot.
I made this enumerated categorization of couple types on a napkin one day (9/24/06 - 8:34PM) and titled them with fine beverages available at Cafe Coffee Day that have all at some point competed to be my 'usual', I never settled on one.

1) The daily refresh - An uplifting creamy cold coffee with the crunchiness of cookies.
- Relationships sinfully blended to buttress an ego which is aware of its own mortality.
Commonly heard phrases:
-Come on you are much more pretty than her OK.
-You can also do wheely da, Hero Honda is very fast no.

2) Devil's own - Cafe frappe loaded with chocolate and whipped cream. - Relationships are only good if they are yours and people know it.
Commonly heard phrases:
-Vijay told Lokesh you sat on his bike! I slapped him bastard, is it true?
-When I take you to film do I say you can't wear jeans pant!?

3) Cool blue - Bright blue ice slush with a hint of coconut; an adventurous delight. - Experimenting with contact and general giggling
Commonly heard phrases:
-Ushoo! Someone will see!
-What ya! No one is there.

4) Kaapi Nirvana - A chilled-out espresso with subtle Caribbean flavours topped with whipped cream and chocolate vermicelli. A silver prize-winner at the WBC 2002 in Norway! - One day, some day, I too can dream.
Commonly heard phrases:
-You and all are so popular where you will have time for me.
-I know I am not fair but I just want to said you that I love you okay. Okay bye.

5) Assam tea with honey - A light flavourful classic. - At least we can be bored together.
Commonly heard phrases:
-I had idly.
-Nokia is better.

Buckethead vs. Death Cube K

Buckethead is a guitarist and a self titled and cited avant-garde cultural icon. I had until recently only been sort of aware of this masked musician who played with GNR . Lets see, Tracii somebody, to Slash (whom we all know), to Robin Fink who gave up on one upping Slash's hairdo and now torments manicurists in their sleep as the guitar frontman for Nine inch nails, to this masked guy with a KFC bucket on his head, to some guy now that I have not heard of.
But, Buckethead is far from the run of the mill GNR graduate. He is incredibly talented and stark raving mad.
He keeps his fans close by tasking them with having to defend his progressively increasing bizarre behaviour. But, any thesis towards a method to his madness ultimately rests on the quality of his music. Soothsayer and Jordan are two his most popular songs (attached below) in the main riff for Jordan, for example, he uses the hammer-on and pull-off technique on the frets while rapidly operating the pick-up kill switch with his right hand.
In reading his biography, I was struck by his disjointed career. Several false starts with bands that all could have been successful. Failed invitations to work with Ozzy Osborne and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and then I read about his alter ego "Death Cube K" another masked musician created to circumvent contractual obligations with Sony Music and presented as a photographic negative to Buckethead (Death wears a shiny black mask). Mr K's music is more experimental, like the album monolith, which is a 5 disc set with one track per CD.
Infact, Death Cube K is almost a movie definition of disassociated behaviour. The Tyler Durden to the narrator. An internal duality, where one if not both corporeal forms are aware that they share a chassis, and it seems, equally interested in buckets and off-the-hook shredding.
So, this is not complete disassociation then, it isn't an alter-ego invented to vacation from oneself. It is different, a Side-B? A different arrangement of the same instruments, a vantage from where one can sit and fall in love or grow to hate the other person in the room. But, the music is a commonality, maybe it is the reason.

I remember this answer from a Zakir Hussain interview, and I felt it was something I wanted to hold-off and ask myself one day. His answer was," When I play music I feel like I am important to myself." I bet Buckethead nods his bucket in approval.
Sometimes, the internal conflict is not to hide and tuck away, but to celebrate.


"There has been much speculation as to the identity of Buckethead. We do know that he was raised in a chicken coop by chickens. And possibly due to the unusual circumstances surrounding his upbringing, he is a very private person. He doesn't grant many interviews, and shuns most conventional means of contact. The mask and bucket add an eerie air of mystery to his activities and serve as a harbinger for his otherworldly musical stylings and sensibilities. He would prefer that his fans accept his eccentricities, focus on his art and enjoy the wonderland of joy that is Bucketheadland."

Star crossed lovers

She called him over for dinner to her house.
Told him her room mate was away.
He told her he sold his car so he had to take the bus.
She told him that is fine, "I will wait".
He told her bus #2 is running late but;
he will be there.

She opened the door and said she was glad he could come.
He said he bought her a volleyball because she likes volleyball.
But he left it on Bus #2. She said "sit down I made pasta".
He said fine but his room mate made chicken curry at home so he is not so hungry.

They ate and talked about movies. They leaned close and he said he had never kissed a girl and that girls never "like" like him. She said not to worry and that she would show him that she thinks she might "like" like him. He cried and said can't marry her because flight tickets are very expensive and her legal degree will not be recognized by the barristers association of India.

Ending.

It has been years since I updated my blog. I walk around calling myself a blogger by heart though, I tell people I was only truly happy when I was writing. But, over the last two years a blank text box and a blinking cursor have lost their power over me, they remind me of the other, less comfortable, emotions that gain voice only in the quiet of writing. It is a discomfort that is easy to bury though, in the slurry of cheap social activity. Blogging is nerdy and anti-social, there are people to talk to and things to do. Get up and be out going, the confident people are. The last two years of my life have been pretty good from a confidence perspective, my career took a turn for the awesome, I figured out the conversational widgets that kids normally learn in high-school; to maintain social interactions without over-investing in them. I have friends that like me. Really, life is not all that bad at all. In many ways it is highly bloggable; I am traveling quite a bit, there are at least a couple dozen interesting anecdotes where funny things happened to friends and colleagues; some of them are even up on Youtube.
But still I rarely find the need to document a meal I just had, or a person I just met, or a place I just went too. "People, Things and Places" they say are the starting points for a popular blog. I have never written about any of them. I did ambitiously start blogs to document activities in my life but they either became excercises in English composition or a series of unfinished drafts themed around an interesting picture of birds I took on holiday. But I yearn, yearn so much to write! To feel the sentences form, to force them into well-fitting punctuation.

I am not a blogger of events then, I like to write but I like to write because it is the only way I can read what I am feeling. This craving is the consternation of emotions that are not cool enough to make a dinner table conversation. They are the voices inside that are wispy, fleeting, and bound in emulsion that need grammar and typesetting to precipitate. I remember spending hours to get the words just right, deleting and correcting. Forming my thoughts and then mulling over them before the words appeared on screen. Looking back on my previous posts, there is one thing that is consistent, every post is deeply personal. It is a conversation that was a long time coming with myself, writing is the only way I can get myself to listen.

The paradox however is that, while I wrote for myself, I met the most amazing people through the blog world. Surprisingly everyone I hit it off really well with, enjoyed time with, and let my guard down with are either bloggers or active readers of blogs. Maybe it was because all these people I met had the incite to recognize the same parts of me that my writing helped me discover. Nonetheless, with the people that read my writing and chose to be friends with me, I never felt the need to govern how they see me, it felt scary and exciting that they had read what I write.
But while I enjoyed the friendships spun from my writing, once I knew I was writing for people other than me, the need to write never reached the critical mass to actually make me do it. I have stopped and started many times, I started when my Grandfather died and I needed to feel what I felt and talking did not help. I wrote so many pages then. I wrote again when I graduated and felt like there was nothing in the future to look forward to, a scary black void that terrified me, while the people I could talk to were all quite content in letting their lives acquire trajectory by the providence of their current state. Many more occasions, and now, I write today after two odd years.

Being a young man, my tears need to make up excuses before I can let them come. They are justifying themselves to me and I understand. I am writing as I empathise with them. Something, ended today that they never expected to mourn. They believed I could articulate what I felt so they would not have to do it for me. But I cannot.
I need them to see how important this was, why it needs to be marked and how I can move on from here.

I miss you.