Stupid Joke

I needed to hear a stupid joke, so I called up a friend.

"Hello, where are you?"
"I am at work"
"Oh ok, I wanted to hear a stupid joke"
"I am a little busy right now"
"Just one, give me a stupid joke"
"Why do you want a stupid joke for? I have better things to do"
"Do them, after you tell me a stupid joke"
"Here I am writing a report about murders and stuff, and you are asking me to crack jokes?"
"Oh...ok..."

That's when he decided to come up with one

"You know what? Someone got killed last night"

I don't know about you, but both of us started laughing. Shame on us. Maybe.

On the trail of girls

It is interesting... there is some kind of male that is the casual stalker. They pick upon a random girl or bunch of girls, and follow them for a while just to see where they are going. It might be difficult to understand why such an indulgence is necessary, but if you happen to be the kind of guy girls try to stay away from, this kind of a pursuit is oddly gratifying in some way. Maybe it was four years ago that two guys came behind us - a group of four girls and two boys, coming home after watching a movie. These two followed us all the way from the movie theatre, across the road, through a subway, and almost till the bus stop from which we were about to catch the bus when the girls decided something must be done about it. So my friend and I went over to the two of them, both hefty midgets with clothes that looked like they had come from Fashion Street, and we were good enough to politely ask them what they were up to. Apparently, they just wanted to have a word. One of them cheekily waved to the girls over my shoulder. They were apparently from the merchant navy, back for just a day, and all they wanted to do was talk. Now if they really were from the merchant navy, and deprived of girls, they might go and become homos for all I cared, but neither of us bought their story, and asked them not to follow us. They went away, but not before apologizing heavily to the girls, while keeping a distance. This was the part we felt weird, and didn't think too much about it, and went on our way.
Around a week ago, an interesting development occurred... two boys followed two girls just to see where they were going, but I was caught on the wrong side. There is this local shopping center which is apparently a hot spot for chicks, and I had no clue that guys from a large radius flocked to the place just to get a glimpse of girls coming out of a Junior College or hanging out at the shopping center. Now this might be disgusting to a lot of people, but it is a common occurrence, and that is no justification for what is about to follow.
A casual acquaintance of mine decided to take me to the Shopping Center to "check out" what he called "his girl". I was under the assumption that I would get to meet his girlfriend, and I thought what the hell, I had nothing better to do with my time, and decided to tag along. I have no clue how he managed to have his timing so accurate, for we had hardly entered the shopping arcade, when three girls and a boy walked in the opposite direction. He immediately turned around, and said "That's her" and started to follow the group, out of the Arcade. The group hung around at the parking lot, exchanging goodbyes, when one girl headed back in, the guy went another way, and the two remaining girls headed over to a shop on the opposite side of the road to get some cold drinks. My friend happened to be a smart-ass, and in this business for a long time, he called the guy as he went past us, and questioned him about the girl's name, and where she studied etc...
I was shocked out of my fucking wits, but remained neutral, just to see where all this was headed. Now the surprising thing is, this friend of the girl, totally co-operated. He told us her name, and other details - the only one that grabbed both our attentions was that she was single. I looked at her. She was a kid. I looked back at her friend, and we exchanged one of those looks where each scrutinizes the other, and masks the conclusions. He went his own way, smiling at my friend.
I just realised what had happened. There was no particular girl that my friend set out to meet in the first place, he just picked out one he "liked" at random, or by some own logic of his, if not random, and decided to follow her.
The two girls finished their drinks, and began walking down the road. I asked him if we were going to follow them, and I knew right then, that there was no question about it. I refused, right then, which put him in despair. He wanted me to come along, and this was his logic - If she saw me with him, she would know that he was a good guy because he had decent friends. Now this was a little flattering, so I decided to follow him, but ensure that he would not do anything weird. There was no disgust, there was curiosity about what my friend was really up to, so I decided that it would be an experience, and went along.
We followed her down the road, around a corner, up towards a bus stop, where I hoped she would catch a bus and leave. She didn't, and we walked on after that. My friend was contemplating out aloud whether or not she was headed home, and I barely listened to him - chasing a girl like this, gave him some kind of a kick. I was pretty sure he didn't have the balls to talk to her at any point of his life, and after today, he would forget all about her, but for that stretch of the road that he followed her, I was sure that she was being violated in some way. I pointed this out to him, and he said something like "What wrong are we doing? If she asks anything, I will speak to her rudely, deny that I am following her, and ask her to mind her own business"
Wow. That was exactly what I thought. That was just some logic too hard for me to comprehend, so I did not try to understand. I went along with him, enjoying him as much as he was enjoying her, and I think in much the same way. I was curious about his next move. She got into a housing colony. We went in behind her, he started wondering if she lived there, or would go through it to the other end. She walked right through, and I realised that we would have to walk a long way back, but I continued anyway. She did go through the other end, and entered another housing colony, where she turned in to her building. Now things were going too far. I took my friend away by offering him the bribe of a cigarette, which he gladly accepted. I felt a little used, but I didn't care too much about that. He had enough for a day - and this encounter, had actually satisfied him in some way. All of this was a week ago, and I had forgotten all about it till today.
Like wtf?

N-Deal

India sold itself out to America in the Nuclear deal. Who will the nuclear deal really benefit? The nuclear energy may be great for air conditioned malls or large industrial complexes, but the poverty struck farmers stand to gain nothing, and they will continue to live off government grants - a government that continues to be heavily indebted to the world bank. India has no grounds to feel all great about being given the status of a nuclear power - because what we are given some kind of half-backed pseudo recognition. The nuclear deal shows clearly that India has lost sight of its roots, it shows clearly that the government is driven by capitalist policies.
India no doubt has a lot to gain from nuclear energy. In fact, there is no option for India but to embrace nuclear technology, we just do not need American interference to achieve this. The ground beneath our feet is rich in Uranium, and the tests that imposed the sanctions in the first place proves our nuclear prowess much beyond grabbing America's long "helping" hand. If the working of government bodies and national institutions are not disturbed by capitalist multinationals grabbing our workforce, we will continue to develop independantly as a nuclear power and still be responsible for our culture and our ideologies.
The economy is no doubt booming, but poverty, and even hunger continue to be as problematic as they were when India achieved independance sixty years ago. Somewhere down the line, we have lost sight of all those ideals we faught so much for. Cotton farmers and cottage industries are still suffering as much as they were when India burnt foreign goods eighty years ago. The East India Company may have been wiped out off Indian soil long ago, but we still embrace western culture, and therefore western goods and commodities as much as we did all those years ago without realising what a mistake we are making. India has become globalised, and the Individuals are all looking to take care of themselves, with no care in the world for which government is in power and what it is doing. The corruption in the beurocracy and the sad fact that money is might and might is right, has managed to float the biggest pieces of shit to the top of the septic tank, and they are making the calls.
We are a third world population. We have a responsibility to the third world population. We cannot ideologically sell out China, Pakistan, Korea and Iran, which is what we are effectively doing if we go through with the Nuclear deal. America will have pwwwnnd India in a major geoplotical struggle, and gained a hold in the region. India will be effectively helping the American agenda of unipolarisation. Venezuela, for example, is a third world country that repaid all the loans it took from the world bank, didn't want any world bank interference in South America, and increased the price of the oil it sent to America. That is when America decided to head to Iraq in search of WMDs. Venezuela is a good model for India to follow, they didnt loose sight of their ideologies and preserved their integrity, so what if they have no role to play in global politics.
The booming economy of India should not be mistaken for actual, real, developement of the Indian population. We will remain a third world country, only reduced to the condition of the Arab world, where the few on top are very rich, and the rest dont have money to afford Burkhas. In India, the large middle class population centered in metropolitans that will continue to have a slightly better standard of living throughout their life cycles, commodity fetishism will facinate this demographic, and they will be removed away from the cultural security of what what was once India had to offer.
India is shifting sideways ideologically, and it is a dangerous trend in human interest.

Frogspawn

Spoilsort 2

The first rule of swimming is not to enter unknown waters. It was an old abandoned mill, and Amar knew that few people frequented the place. He had three other friends with him, and he felt a sudden thirst for water. The mill had a basement, a ground floor, that had been flooded with water of at least forty monsoons. There was no outlet, no drain, nowhere for all the accumulated water to go. Life was amazing, because it was not just amphibians that had made this water their habitat, but fish had come here as well, somehow.
The underground walls of the pool were mossy, but the water itself was crystal clear. So Amar decided to go skinny dipping. Even though it was his first time, he felt no shame, he was with friends he knew from a long time ago, and thought it would be fine to go in. He stripped, covered his privates, and entered the water. There were steps leading down to the pool. He felt his legs slipping on the moss a little bit, but he let it go. Tadpoles brushed past his body without caring too much about his presence. There was a bar of cheap soap kept on the last step, he didn't know who had come here to wash up. The others were taking a look around and had no clue that Amar had gone into the water.
Amar was still careful, he was an expert swimmer, and his primary concern was another level below the basement. He didn't know if there was one or not. The worst way to find out was to walk along the floor hoping to hold on to something if a gap opened up below him. He knew that this was the way most people drowned in lakes... because everyone always makes beginners mistakes, and when the floor gave way below your feet, it was easy to panic. Amar had panicked once, in a swimming pool. The idea was to look for coins at the bottom of the pool, and he had let out all the air in his lungs, had gone really deep down, and then panicked when he could not straighten himself to come back up. A lot of people were around him, and he had grabbed the swimwear of some uncle in his panic. Hairy butts are not a pretty sight even underwater. He called out that he was in the water and he got a unintelligible shout in reply.
He felt calm. Dipping was about this he thought. He felt naked at an entirely different level, his body was not the only thing exposed to and at the mercy of the elements, for a few fleeting moments, he actually had fun.
His friends began to call out for him. He ventured further away from the steps. The water flowed all under the mill, and the ground floor had squarish holes in the ground through which the water below could be looked at - manholes, more or less. His friends were looking in through a Manhole, and calling out to him to look at something. He found out that the ground beneath his feet were littered with planks of wood, huge blocks of cement, and other garbage he could not recognize. He walked upto the manhole that his friends were looking in through. He waved to them, they laughed that he had entered such water, and asked if it was safe for them to come in as well.
The splashing was fun. The tadpole catching with a plastic container, also fun. Finding coins was given up after the first one got lost somewhere. Shankar outlasted everyone in trying to hold his breath underwater. Nitin was the fastest in the race. Amar and Shivakumar both had a huge argument over who was second. Tired of all the swimming, they gathered under the manhole and were wondering what to do next.
Amar yelled as a clump of human faeces floated by. He tried to push it away in another direction, sending it towards Nitin. They all hurried out with a lot of splashing, which felt dirty, and no longer fun.

To Be continued

01:40, Mumbai, 1994

"How often does it happen?"
"I think it happens all the time"
"Are you sure?"
"Look, there is an experiment to prove it, but you'll have to wait it out a long time"
"How long? What experiment?"
"Write down anything recently that you think happened to you, and seal it in an envelope... for a long time"
"And that will prove...?"
"That what you read when you open it will be different from what you think you wrote"

"Trip a photon through a slit"
"Dude like whats your obsession with the slits?"
"Yeah man, its like he's been jamming"
"What?"
"We are late for the lectures, let us head in"
"Amar keeps worrying about such little things"
"Dude like whats your obsession with Amar man?"
"Sssshhh... we are late for the lectures, let us head in"

"What happened?"
"A man came and spoke to me."
"And..."
"He wanted me to volunteer"
"Volunteer for what?"
"This... experiment"
"What experiment?"
"Well, mostly it was paperwork. Tests. Loads and loads of them, we were paid like crazy for every test we took, and they asked us everything."
"Err...."
"Yeah man... they called it counselling"
"Counselling?"
"Yeah, I was signed up for it, so I went through it... shit man, it was crazy"
"And..."

"Yeah!"
"Phew...."
"Does it work?"
"Switch"

थे randomizer

A long time ago, my friend and I got a little out of hand and did something terrible... I took sadistic pleasure in clicking photos of him fooling around with his head... after he had detached it from his body. I had forgotten all about it till the Randomizer threw up his pic.

First Born

Life from somewhere else has been an interesting human facination for a long time now. We have fantasized about life from other planets, other planes and even other universes. We have fantasized of life without material bodies, and life within inanimate objects. We have searched for a logical continuation of life after death, and a logical beggening of life from before birth. We have enlivened creatures that never existed... zombies, unicorns, centaurs, mermaids... the lot. We have aliens and we have robots. Humans have basically looked for intelligent life everywhere, but overwhelmingly, every human knows, that our race is one of a kind.

We are alone in a universe that we will never really completely explore. We can hope, maybe to reach out to the closest stars after mind bogglingly large voyages spanning generations of human inhabitants in colonising spaceships. This at least, for now, is an absolute eventuality. It may begin to happen in the next century or the next millenium, that does not matter. What matters is that some day our descendants are going to go out there.

The universe is young. So is our race. We have barely touched the moon, and as a race, we cannot be stuck here on Earth for ever. The Earth is not permanent, it is a clump of dense matter orbitting a larger clump of denser matter. Life, however, has the potential to outlast the Earth, and even the sun. Attaching our race to the planet is out and out suicidal. We have to leave, and we will, someday.

Life will then take its own course. Speciation occors on different banks of the same river... imagine the gulfs between two bases. Maybe we do not need to head out to another planet. Maybe we don't need a destination at all... just a vessel in an enormous trajectory will do, and something like this is the most basic of all possible plans of action for the preservation of our genes.

What if we are living in the dawn. The early ages. What if our life is indeed unique. What if every strand of DNA in the whole wide universe is entrusted to the gravity of the Earth? As the first sentient life forms in the universe, we might be the very creatures we fantasize about. What if, it is the responsibility of men, to seed the stars. By all accounts, we are the first born.

#

# Clipboard getting contaminated by cut/copied text-strings
# Animated events a waste of time
# Irritation at diversity of formats for audiovisual media
# Graphic User Interfaces too graphic
# Software and hardware too fragile
# Interconnectivity economically taxing
# Short life spans of operating systems
# Cross-platform compatibility terribly low
# Technological blocks parallel to barriers of class, gender, nationality, culture and race.
# Not enough progress

फक थिस ब्लॉगर हिंदी थिंग

This one came over the grapevine... doing the "I'm feeling lucky" thing on a "love" google. Seems to be inspired from notebook scribbles... two names and you get a compatibility index... links follow on to online personality contests... and a campaign for a drug free America.