Curious Case of a Part Time Insomniac

One realizes the true virtue of something when one experiences its extremities. The warmth in the dead of winter is best appreciated when the heater goes kaput, the value of a charger is realized when the battery level on our devices reads 1% remaining and the sight of a recently emptied toilet paper roll in the bathroom when we're done with our 'business' makes us realize that we possess emotions like shame or humiliation.

In the life I`ve known so far - I`ve been a morning person. Waking up when it is still pitch dark and dead silent outside, taking in the crisp air that is pregnant with freshness and making the first brew of strong coffee; not merely as chores but rituals that I have grown up with while pacing myself for many a day- ahead.

In order for me to be up by what would still qualify as the middle of the night for most people; 10 PM irrespective of the day of the week is when I fell asleep. The world shut down at that arbitrary point on the clock only to restart again in the wee hours of the morning and lights out wasn't merely a physical switching off of the lights but of my eyelids as well. This system literally worked like clockwork ( no pun intended) when I would wake up from my hours of necessary rest  at precisely the same time every morning.

However recently, things took a turn for the worse. For the first time in life - I found myself straying on the dark side - with being consistently awake beyond my bedtime and struggling to get some shut eye despite lying in bed for what seemed like all eternity. Being new at the insomnia circus, I didn't really know what one did to kill time. To add to the sleeplessness, the silence in the room is so thick you could literally cut it with a knife. It is like a floating entity watching you stare at it while sneering at you. 

There is only so much staring that one can do in the dark without one's subconscious going into overdrive. Some of the areas I constantly touch during such bouts of sleeplessness are stark boring but other earth shattering questions like - Why are the housewives in Desperate Housewives so desperate? Does Sex and the City actually show porn? Did the makers of How I met your mother suffer from a brain freeze post Season 2? Will there ever be a show as awesome as FRIENDS? also figure in the mix.   

If this were at home in India, I surmised that I'd have the luxury of staring at the creaky rotating fan for solace but not here. To top that I'd probably go and wake up Amma in the middle of the night and she'd very sleepily make some wisecrack about reading her Doctoral Thesis for leisure which has magical sleep inducing powers and shoo me away. 

Eventually when I did fall asleep, it was because I was bored out my wits and finally decided to take solace in the last resort - to read through an extremely drab Control Engineering textbook filled with pages and pages of equations and circuits filled with dozens of alphas, betas, gamma's, delta's, PI controllers, feedback loops, Flux capacitors and time machines to finally get some shut eye in the succeeding few moments. 

To the wiseass who coined the phrase - Mommy knows best; Amen to you kind Sir/madam.

Hello World

                             

1. This post is titled Hello World because 

a) I couldn't think of a title that would reflect the content of this post. 

b) I am trying to compensate for the fact that my first post is not called Hello World. Apparently it is an abomination on blog space to not have your first post called Hello World. Who would've thunk? 

c) 'Hello World' as a title is less obnoxious and irritating than the done to death - 'Random' (If the crazies on social networking sites who have a thousand photos under an unsuspecting album called Randomm Picx/Piczz/Pixxx had their way - they would probably name their kids Randomm)

d) Rinse and repeat pointers - a through c.

2. I do not know where 2013 went. The first half of the year warmed up pretty well and I recollect that part. The second half, oh good lord - I swear it whizzed away like it had had a cocktail of coffee and red bull for breakfast.

I`m amnestic about the second half because I don't recollect anything *insert grandpa jokes*. So I`m going to go out on a limb and state - Life happened, there.

3. What I do have is a faint recollection of my end of the year road trip to The Netherlands. It is by far super tolerant, friendly and the single most awesome country in the EU apart from Germany(who are we kidding, come on) that also has a huge chunk of people that speak proper English. Whats more, they have cities that are called Maas and Best. I had half a mind to move to the latter and taunt my friends about living in the Best city in the world - lame joke - I know.

The capital, Amsterdam though technically LOW (below sea level)  is actually HIGH, if you know what I mean. I kid you not, one of my friends actually rolled a joint and went to a police officer to get a light - that ladies and gentleman is what Tolerance looks like.  Although drinking beer on the street is a no go probably because people end up doing stuff like this.

4. The blog remained dormant for most of 2013 - I did contemplate  writing more often but contemplation was all that remained because I morphed into a big fat pile of lazybones perched comfortably in my comfort zone refusing to budge an inch. 

The realization that I liked being on the metaphorical couch in my comfy jammies is more scary to admit than the blatant lie that I was tied down by life's many challenges - like I was single handedly finding the cure to cancer while rescuing beautiful young women from burning buildings and brokering world peace simultaneously.

5. Is it just me or are people getting married and popping babies like there's no tomorrow or like its going out of fashion soon. 

A couple of close friends and I have a weekly wager as to how many wedding invites or relationship updates they got in the past week. We tally them up and decide on a winner - Yes, we're that shallow and shameless.                 

    

Holler from the beyond

*clears cobwebs and runs fingers along dusty surface - coughs*

This is precisely what happens when the closest you come to writing involves documenting not one but two extremely volumnious, exaggeratingly drab and pointlessly boring 'scientifc' thesis projects both of which have no traceable semblance of commonality whatsoever - so much for cut, copy, paste and their second cousins.

If that doesn't kill whatever the heck you were passing off into the world as your precious sense of creativity - I don't know what would/ could.

PS: I know that this space has been as dead as Kristen Stewart's acting skills  in Twilight  - I hope to give it the required shot of adrenaline and defebrilate it back to life.

PPS: I promise to write more often - Motherpromise, Godpromise...

The House Hunt Circus

Travel and migration have been and will be salient points of reference while narrating the tale of human kind to future generations. Humans have moved from place to place from time immemorial mostly in search of better livelihood, food and favorable living conditions. The world today is no different from that a thousand years ago; today we move across  localities, towns, cities, states, countries, continents and by the looks of it - very soon planets as well for the very same reasons. The first item on a mile long checklist of any individual making a move is to ensure the presence a roof above his/her head and therein lies the house hunt circus.

Having had a part to play in this mad circus when I moved out from the university for my internship;  I imagined it would be comparatively easier to score a place to stay in a big city where the population is hardly a fraction of what it is back home. I was probably as mistaken in making that assumption as the Khap leader in Haryana who blamed fast food for the rising number of rapes in his state. So let me break down my experience of house hunting for you in this post.

Having landed in the city of Munich looking for a roof over my head, firstly lead to an onlooker giving me a dirty stare for gaping my mouth so wide open on  reading the rent numbers for the different localities. Brushing that aside, I had already made initial contact and fixed up a few appointments for the purposes of "house seeing" akin to "bride seeing" only more frustrating and cumbersome. Confident that people had asked me to come over to their houses to inspect the said room(s) on offer gave me the hope that my current state of homelessness was  about to meet its speedy end. Off I went to inspect the first room - Surprise, Surprise - I found that I only had to wait in line before 20 other people who were there for the very same room.

After a start like that - the next step was making an impression with owners or leasers of different shapes, sizes and dimensions with varied preferences, likes, expectations from a potential tenant. To compare their expectations from a potential tenant to an intelligence agency scrutinizing an enemy spy for critical information would be a grave travesty. 

They wanted to know it all - what I ate, when I ate, when I would use the toilet in the morning, when I would bathe or if I would bathe at all, if I watched porn, if I smoked or drank or did drugs, what my belief system was or if I was an atheist, if I partied or sodomized. The questions were unending and  trying to answer them was similar to a scenario of bomb disposal - one wrong snip on the wrong wire and everything was bound to go boom.

The process was all the more overwhelming and confusing at the same time because each experience of inspecting and talking to the owner seemed to be sending out different signals about what the average home owner was expecting in a potential tenant. That compounded with the fact that I was soon to be homeless accelerated the desperation quotient in landing a place to stay even more; after all how long does one stay in a hotel paying through one's nose?

Thankfully after 9 tortuous days of browsing the city map, walking the streets, hopping on and off buses, metro trains, underground trains and trams I did find a place to stay and funnily enough the landlady asked me just one question - When do you want to move in? The rest as they say is history - I moved in and have a  roof over my head and a place to finally call home.    

What is your crazy house hunting story?  

      

        

      

An Ode to the Bad Guy

In most fairy tales, stories, novels, plays and movies the most common pattern of narration employed is the characterization of the Hero(protagonist) -Villain(antagonist) pair. We all like a Hero who saves the day, stands for all that is righteous in the world, helps those in dire need and stops the antagonist in his tracks when he/she is conniving or implementing a sinister plan usually to destroy cities, kill people or cause destruction - large scale or otherwise. In the end it is usually the hero who steals the limelight leaving the villain regretting his misdeeds or usually dead; but lets do an autopsy of the Hero - Villain complex shall we?

I for one have always believed that the mastery of a story teller resonates in the manner in which he/she designs the Anti Hero or the Antagonist - which you can clearly notice in most Best selling books, movies and stories. For instance the Harry Potter series which had an excellent Anti Hero character in Lord Voldemort who gave the teenage wand wielding wizard Harry Potter ample opportunities to unearth the dormant heroism lying within him is something that will be appreciated say even 50 years down the road because the tale of Harry Potter is something I believe transcends age.

Movies on the other hand are a completely different cup of tea altogether. If books focus on maximizing the grey shade element on the antagonist; movies make them look like the latest escapees from a Home for the Mentally challenged. They are often made to look like mindless buffoons who seem to have all the resources in terms of money, political clout, intellect and influence at the beginning of the movie but a hero who 9.9 times out of 10 rises from dust will relieve them of their everything in the last half an hour of the movie not to mention that he usually has his way with the daughter or sister of the villain as well - talk about adding insult to injury.

Indian movie villains across languages are my pet peeve; most of whom are portrayed to be scarily moustached fat rich business men or landlords who usually have the heroes working under them either as their right hand men or as their sons. Now it becomes the prerogative of the writers to sell you 'the villain is pure evil' line so as to lay the foundation for the biblical reminder - Good always triumphs over evil. As a thumb rule they usually end up bringing in a bimbo love interest into the mix - primarily for a multitude of  activities; the most important of which involves running around random trees in a song and whom the villain can at his own sweet convenience abduct or even kill when he deems her presence unnecessary which mind you he never does. Resulting in the hero almost always swearing vengeance at the villain in front of an idol of his favorite deity to the resounding background score of ringing temple bells due to the fiercely blowing wind on an intense thundershower night.

Not surprisingly I am a sucker for movies or stories that have a great bad guy in the mix - the likes of which include Professor James Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes, Agent Smith in The Matrix or Bob Biswas in Kahaani among many many more; simply because their character sketches were done so brilliantly and that they complemented the net plot of the story or the movie. Female villainesses are not too far behind either - they are shown to be dashingly beautiful ladies who wear designer clothes and flirt perennialy with danger and take pride in pulling one over on the protagonist.     

When I was little and boys my age dreamt of being the next Shahrukh Khan; I had it fixed in my pea sized brain that I was the next big villain waiting to burst into the scene - yes, I'm very realistic that way - I know. Come to think of it - who wouldn't want to be a bratty, snotty rich person who has servants that answer to my every beck and call, drive costly cars, dress up in a gaudy night suit with a vintage hand crafted smoking pipe in my mouth and almost always have my way with any woman I want as opposed to being a HERO who firstly has to appear for the entire 3 odd hours of the movie, get beaten black, blue and god knows what shade of green on multiple occasions, fight several hoards of men sent by the villain, be the beacon of righteousness and finally barely but only very barely mind you; end up on the winning side minus half the family who if we remember well the villain finishes off - did I hear someone say BUZZKILL?

While expecting the villain to come up trumps at the end of a story would be a practical impossibility and considering the dime a dozen dozen shoddy movies that come into our cinemas every month I realistically don't see the quality of villains on the silver screen or otherwise going up drastically but one is legally allowed to be an eternal optimist, right?

Lets raise a toast to those poor misdirected souls who believe in upsetting the balance of the apple cart and upholding something that is not exactly righteous for it is them who make Heroes out of ordinary men and women.                   

Why the World is going to end

This one will be a Quickie, oh I meant a quick romp in the hay park. Ok, something is seriously wrong here, maybe the effects of the events/ instances to be mentioned are rubbing off on me - I knew the world was coming to an end - the signs are here already -

Grouse 1. As a guy, NEVER and I mean even if your life depended on it, accompany a lady if she wants help clothes shopping. 

Case in point - A gal pal recently wanted help in buying herself a formal suit for an interview and insisted I come. Ok, she lured me in with food but that's beside the point. In we went to the store; 2.5 hours later and in what looked like three quarters of the entire store ransacked by a vicious hurricane - the lady in question still could not make up her mind on whether she wanted The One Blue suit or the other. After taking 4 different opinions from me and 3 people in 3 different continents - it finally dawned on her that she wanted a black suit and the one's she had so PAINSTAKINGLY shortlisted were all BLUE. 

I rest my case.

Side note -  If you are wondering -Why the world is ending later this year, (which FYI it most definitely is) - I ask you, is this not proof enough.

Grouse 2. I develop something that can only be described as a shade thinner than a boiling rage when people proudly claim that they can't cook - its like they worked on a long dissertation and gave a three hour long presentation to achieve that honor. 

Case in Point 1 - I was once told by someone that their home had no kitchen because their Vaasthu consultant advised them against having one. If this isn't the greatest What the Coitus moment to have seen the light of day - I don't know what is.

Case in Point 2 - If you thought that was a howler, another one told me that she knew nothing with regards to cooking other than to boil water and then to cool it; to which her mother condescendingly added - You need not cool the water, it will cool down by itself. 

I understand it is difficult to metamorphise into Martha Stewart or Gordon Ramsay overnight but you have at the least got to make do with a fistful of edible recipes which might come in handy on a rainy day. Honestly ask yourself if cooking is indeed rocket science and you will have your answer.

Grouse 3 - Love thy Neighbor? - I don't think so.

I now live in a household that can be given the award for being the Epitome of Multiculturalism. The owner of the household is a chirpy and ever smiling Bavarian lady and my neighbors are two dudes from Russia and Ecuador respectively. 

Now, having spent a good two years at a University which has students from more than 120 countries, gelling with these people was never an issue. The frustration began when one of them neighbors - A Know it all tried to one up me with facts about India. If you know me well enough, you'd know not screw around anything remotely Indian or the very dormant patriotic beast in me will wake up from its deep slumber and etch the tricolor on your face.    

You have to believe me when I say - this guy would sit all night on the internet, do his research about India - its customs, capitals, leaders, history, conflicts, socio political environment, economic conditions, family setup and so on and so forth and try to draw me into a conversation nay argument on the breakfast table. 

At one point, I even pegged him to be a KGB agent, given the way and the rate at which he was scouring information and I thought to myself - how cool must I be to be stalked by a KGB agent. My dreams came crashing down when I found out that he was just overtly inquisitive owing to the side effects of working in a boring history archive all day.

In conclusion, I just avoid making conversation with him as much as possible.

PS : I am wrong in contemplating that I'm blessed with a supernatural ability to attract all the loonies of the world with their quirks at the very pinnacle?

             

South Bound

I awoke with a start in the wee hours of the morning - today was going to be another one of 'those' days and she was at it yet again; attention seeking as always - sending me a reminder despite her absence. She made me feel 'me' and every morning spent with her would ensure that the day ahead would end up being nothing less than perfect.

She was made of elements that popular romantic novels described time and again in their lead female protagonists - Bubbly, dreamy, full of life and always armed with a zing that had in it a mystic aura which I believe to be potent enough to reform a maniacal serial killer from his errant ways. I had met her as a teenager and had instantly taken a liking to her. Each morning spent with her was magical - her company and her energy grew on me like no other and very soon falling for her seemed inevitable; like it was the easiest thing I had done till date.  

 

The past few days had not been good for the both of us - we hadn't been spending our mornings together the way we had done till then. I was starting off at a new position at work with which came new responsibilities and changes thereby. It was precisely these changes that came in the way of our togetherness, we had begun bickering and quarreling but it was different this time - the fighting actually made me feel better about myself.

The relationship slowly but steadily and surely began to sour, which meant that we saw eye to eye lesser,  began avoiding confrontation and let the distance and with it walls the height of The Great Wall of China grow between us. It began to seem as if what was earlier treasured and protected was now going South.    

The permanency in the feeling of crankiness, irritability, loss of concentration in daily work and snapping at random people for no perceivable fault of theirs had slowly crept into my life. This was certainly not what I wanted to spill into my life from our relationship or rather the souring consequences of it. I was exhibiting copybook withdrawal signs of a relationship gone kaput and it was only practical that I realized it before I strung on pointlessly for too long and hurt myself even more in the process.

I reckoned it was better to do it in a quick rapid motion like pulling a bandage off your bruised skin and it was the only logical way forward before I ended up more battered than I already was. With a heavy heart I looked at her with the impending anticipation of our separation and said - I will have you no more - COFFEE, We're through.

Here's a pic of her for old time's sake

 

PS: I know this is downright lunacy at its absolute peak but I`m in Caffeine De-addiction withdrawal - something had to give, right?