My Own Widget

Green-Citi Ver Alpha 1.0

Ahh! Last Weekend

“There is nothing like resting your ‘Butt’ after a strenuous climb up a very steep hill on a very (very) hot day.”

Tuesday afternoon; I can’t but soak in the afterglow of the weekend past. It wasn’t an ordinary (‘regular’ would have been a better word) weekend filled with booze filled haze and a Sunday evening despair. This one was about traveling by buses furnished with cramped seats, visiting a temple town and an ashram, climbing up forts perched on steep and rocky hills, hot climatic condition that drains out the last bit of your energy, meeting new people on the road and having a cold bottle of beer while the evening sea breeze sets in.

I went on a road trip last week end... :-)

When There's so much Beauty in the World

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much; my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... You will someday."

- Lester Burnham in American Beauty (Screenplay by Alan Bell)

The Rest of Your Life

"Remember those posters that said, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life?' Well, that's true of every day except one: the day you die."
- Lester Burnham in American Beauty (Screenplay by Alan Bell)

Deep Throated Growl

Years back, when I was still in school and summers meant holidays, I remember spending a late summer afternoon with my granddad. Both of us had just woken up from our afternoon slumber and were eagerly awaiting grandma’s loving cups of tea to arrive.

It was a typical Indian summer (we were in India anyway, so what else do you expect), temperatures soared well above 45 degrees Celsius. The merciful evening sea breeze was setting in but only added to the languor of the late afternoon.

I was idling my way thru that day’s paper or could have been a Readers Digest from my granddads stash of Readers Digests, I really don’t remember. The fact was, none of us were making any conversation and granddad didn’t really like that. He wanted noise and meaningless conversations that revolved around him and his vast and extensive knowledge about everything and anything... or so he boasted, from time to time.

‘Do you know how music originated?’ he challenged me and thus breaking the silence and taking me by a bit of a surprise. My brain hadn’t responded yet and before I could even produce a murmur for an answer, he rushed forth with the answer. “Echoes! He said “Man learnt music from the echoes”.

“Echoes!” I wondered, but only for a moment, and not to eager to ponder upon his answer for to long and try to make any sense of it, I went back to reading whatever I was reading.

This morning as a sat on the great modern convenience called the potty or a western style closet (as they call here in India), and cleared my bowel, I produced a deep throated growl, a ‘catharses’ noise which I’m sure even the most sophisticated of us produce during the that private and intimate moment called ‘shitting’.

The entire room ‘kinda’ reverberated to that growl and resulted in a nice little harmonic. This harmonic ‘surprisingly’ thru some light upon my granddad’s ‘enigmatic’ answer, which I had dismissed as one of his attempts to sound clever, but still lingered in the back of my head like a tiny little tumor.

Music originated when a caveman, in his desperation to find a cool and secluded place to shit, entered a cave with the right reverberations to harmonies with that caveman’s deep throated growl.

Granddad was right after all, just got a little mixed up between the meaning of echo and reverberation.

The Chic Old Lady

I’ve done my fair share of ‘traveling’ by the general compartment (a.k.a. the unreserved compartment), way more than what my back would have liked me too. Though it often means being cramped for long hours into a tiny little portion of a wooden seat or the luggage rack on top of it, I’ve grown to enjoy these trips, where I spend an entire day and/or night in a overcrowded, irate and nosy space in the company of a class of people that I often don’t get to share spaces with.

These trips also mean a ‘lota’ reading and there is not much you can do otherwise, except gaze out of the window perhaps and the chances of getting a seat by the window is rather slim given the crowd et al and there are way to many bodies in your way to get a decent view of the world outside if you don’t get a seat by the window. You definitely can’t sleep either, not unless you are trained in the art of sleeping while you are seated upright in a lit up (F.Y.I. the lights never get switched of in an general compartment), cramped and noisy environment.

There are two other ‘activities’ (apart from reading and gazing out of the window) that you can engross yourself in, the first, and something that I often don’t indulge in, is to pick up conversations with your fellow ‘general compartment’ travelers. Like I said, it’s not something that I too keen on, though I’ve had some interesting conversation with the person seating next to me, these conversations have, more often than not, been initiated by the other person.

The second ‘activity’ involves your fellow travelers too, but instead of picking up conversations with them, you merely watch them, keenly, silently and discreetly (no one really appreciates a voyeur), and try to read their faces and eyes and observe their mannerism, their idiosyncrasies, their eating patters, their clothes, footwear or the absence of it, and eavesdrop on their conversations; personal or otherwise.

I don’t wanna get to deep into the entire man watching or women watching (sadly more men travel by the General Compartment than women) thing. I don’t really spend a lot of time doing it either.
I spend a majority of my time reading, and that is perhaps the only reason I travel by the general compartment this often (plus it’s cheap and you don’t have to book tickets in advance). And when my neck and eyes get a bit sore from the long stretches of reading, I straighten my self a bit and indulge in the whole man, women or (as in my last trip) old lady watching thing.

The lower middle class and the working class are an interesting class of people to observe. They are, heterogeneous (unlike the middle class) and brimming with character and intrigue and some of them live very fascination lives with a deep and mysterious past or so I would like to think.

But their fashion sense leaves much do be desired and one can’t really expect much from them either, they hardly have the means or the need to dress up. Having said all that, some of the women do sport a really nice sari from time to time, like the old lady who was sitting right besides me on my last journey.

She was dressed in a unique shade of green that fell right in-between the olive green and leafy green. It was bright and earthy (at the same time) and contrasted really well with her deep and dark brown skin and her tribal Dravidian features; large forehead, sunken eyes, prominent and high cheek bone and thick and pouted lips. Her face and skin was wrinkled and her face in particular overflowed with CHARACTER. She wore a thin gold chain and a gold year piece that consisted of a large and intricately designed ear-stud in the shape of a bell and an extended thin chain which went around the top of her ears and joined the stud in the other side. She also wore blue glass (or plastic probably) bangles and a large red Bindhi on her forehead, which added to her colorful and ‘chic old lady’ look.

It was her green sari though, which still lingers in my mind as an afterimage and I can still see the gold color embroidery that bordered it. And I still remember trying catch glimpses of the green in her sari as I plodded my way thru an Alice Walker book that I had brought along to read during that particular train journey by the General Compartment.

The Fool, the Pebble

The Fool: I am ignorant, but I read books. You won't believe it, everything is useful... this pebble for instance.
Gelsomina: Which one?
The Fool: Anyone. It is useful.
Gelsomina: What for?
The Fool: For... I don't know. If I knew I'd be the Almighty, who knows all. When you are born and when you die... Who knows? I don't know for what this pebble is useful but it must be useful. For if it’s useless, everything is useless. So are the stars!

From Federico Fellini ‘La Strada’, the only movie I’ve ever cried watching and I normally don’t do that for the movies...

Scary shit!

Happened to me today, Monday, 23 Jan, 2006.

Got to office with absolutely no (fcuking) recollection of what projects were on or what project I was working on… a bit like the above Dilbert comic strip.

"Only a total moron would forget over the weekend how to do his job" - Alice

or as in my case, what job to do...