A Dreamy Slashfest

Last night i had this weird dream. I saw myself, in the first-person-shooter-game-style, walking around and all of a sudden i pop these adamantum claws from my hands a la wolverine. I gaze at it, startled at first, but i grin when i see some bad-guy-type of fella running towards me and i tell him "Time to get slashed into itsy bitsy ribbons, bub". Well... i wished i had said something like that anyways, the way heros are supposed to do and all. Anyways, after the carnage scene is over, i hang around looking for more stuff to try my new claws on but am suddenely confronted by my clone smoking one of those cigars. Contrary to cinematic expectations, he's not here to challenge me to a me vs me fight, psychological or otherwise. He just stands there, in the third person, and smokes the damn cigar while looking at me with one of those "Bet you don't have the guts to smoke despite all that tough guy posturing", and i wake up all of a sudden, sweaty faced and panting hard.

And then this still sleep-fuzzed brain gets into analysis overdrive. Number one. Explaining away the claws is easy. Almost everybody wants to be in logan's heavy canadian branded, probably made in china, boots so thats a piece of cake. Number Two. But since i am one of them non-smokers it looks like, even in its house-keeping and filing-away process, my brain couldn't make my dream of being my fav x-man even virtually true along with the fact that i am supposed to be blowing smoke if that has to happen. So it, divides me into two to keep me happy while at the same time getting me to wake up cause you know, the memory spring cleaning is over for the day (or night) dude and you better rise and shine, sonny. It was only later that i remembered that since wolverine has this high regenerative ability that it didn't matter whether he smoked or not since his lungs would repair itself into that of a new born baby's faster than you can say "adamantum balls". So, if you managed to put him into one of those huge hospital scanners, which seem to be used for almost every other diagnosis whether in the movies or in real life, and you made him smoke his cigars while zooming into his lungs area, you would see his lungs turning black and then his mutation kicking in and turning it bright healthy red (yellow? white? somebody with the necessary medical knowledge, help me here).

So, in the parallel universe where our mutants are having fun and getting a piece of each other, you can imagine the disclaimer on the cigarette ads: "Smoking is a major cause of... blah blah... except if you are born packaged with the quick healing chromosome. So to all you unlucky ones, gnya gnya :P"

With that split resolved, i go back to sleep and get ready to enjoy the rest of the dream, blazing cigars, a stronger than steel, six bladed beast, smelling blood in the cold night sky and running towards his prey composed of gun totting army men from the Weapon X program. AWOOOO!!!

The Look and The Way

When you go places, you notice this one thing. If you are a girl (and you don't need to be overly hot for this to happen in India), you get a lot of stares when you are walking the streets. If you are a guy, you catch other people (or yourself) doing the same. I do it too but i have perfected the art of subtle observation to perfection and would like a lot more guys to go about it the same way. When most guys give "the look" its more like as if they were panting with some sort of animal lust and wear a gaze so intense to put even super-man, with his X-ray vision, to shame. So here's the solution. When a girl passes by, look coolly at her (eyes NOT popping out) and then look away after a few seconds. If you really need a second "helping", go for it but keep it to few seconds at a time and not as if you will die there staring at her forever. And if she sees you looking, give a gentle smile (showing 32 salivating dracula like dripping fangs doesn't count). That way, she knows you are admiring her and not about to do some unmentionables at that exact moment. Try it out... she might actually smile back.

By the way, this sort of stuff used to piss me off until i realized that i should be grateful that at least men were not staring at me THAT way :)

City City, Bang Bang And Boom Boom

Diwali's here and the competition is up. The race is on to see who's the best city in terms of most decibels produced with (deep) respect to crackers exploding, drunkeness (minds imploding) and general nuisance. To prepare for this situation, i had readied my mind to acquire that state of perpetual numbness to irritating, asynchronous sounds. To be frank, i really had not much of a choice in the matter (refering to the Noise Lessons here). My gentle, regular readers have already read my post on the many advantages of living literally under construction so i will not bore you with the same details but will only link it here. And here again in order to give you double the chance in case you decide to close your eyes and click randomly on the screen and let fate decide on whether you should read the dusty, web-covered post. But i digress, for the nth time, so lets get back to more digressing later on. Ahem! Yes, yes... regarding my sound therapy, here's the list:

- Dogs barking in the neighborhood at random. And damned Pomenarians barking 3 and a 1/2 times the normal output of the yellowish-brown color fits all standard sized street dog.
- People yelling (AAAY!) to talk to someone regardless of whether both of them are standing a quarter of a kilometer apart or are ear to ear.
- Homo sapiens yelling louder when they are using their cellphones.
- Guys trying to be macho and reving up their bikes for five minutes. Wroom wroom. Extra points to global warming here.
- Traffic and the ready "Horn Ok Please" attitude.
- Near my home, a regular BOOM goes off in the background every fifteen minutes or so. Don't know what made me decide it was a canon sounding the time. Furthur research, which was simply passing the area courtesy of public transport, yielded the fact that the place was some kind of stone mine with loads of dynamite necessary to make smaller morsels for the lorries to transport.
- And the list would be incomplete without the in-your-ear music, broadcasted non-stop whether its your neighbor's tv, his/her recently acquired car or ancient sound system, marriage function, funeral or simply, for the heck of it, radio volume on max.

Advantages of the treatment:

- Could stand the noise generated on double diwali (both south-indian and north-indian).
- When someone on the road lights a cracker, didn't even need to mentally brace for the explosion.
- All related music and lights suddenely acquired background (and hence unimportant, taken for granted) status.
- Of course, my trusty headphones did share in the burden too (both therapy and reality wise). Its all about teamwork, you know :)

So here's wishing you a Happy Diwali, my friend!

PS: Inspite of all the irritations, the huge sky fireworks were awesome!!!

Under Construction

Currently i am staying in this rented apartment right in the middle of a small village in bangalore. In the morning, it looks all breezy and peaceful. But, come nighttime and thats when the creeps come crawling out and infesting the seedy local bar and shooting out unmentionables around the area and emptying their stomachs in public for extra effect. Its been two years here and am itching to move on. Add to that the fact that my landlord suddenly decides to add a few more floors to his building in which i am meek tenant, and i am close to selling my kidney to get me some money to fund my driving away into the sunset dream. Here are a few of the side effects of living in/near an under-construction sign post:

1. You pick up a book to de-stress or get some learning done and the laborer decides to do some hammering done, at exactly the same moment. So its like, bang bang bang and am trying hard to not pick a chainsaw and run screaming on to the roof from where the culprit is bugging me.

2. A few days later, i acquire the knack of relegating the background noise outta the way of my concentration and i get comfy with the routine. When evening sets and the workers go home, it suddenly dawns on me that i can't get any reading done in the silence. Oh crap... now have to re-learn doing stuff in the quiet.

3. The landlord hires this painter who thinks that he's Karnataka's answer to sonu nigam. The guy's clearly in love with his voice so he starts belting out recent kannada hits to the nuisance of good old me. After waiting for a while and praying that he gets his tongue twisted into a knot or somethin, i decided to do something 'bout it and so i step out and tell the guy in hindi: "Ghana acha hai magar hum idhar padtha hai... tho volume please kum karo..." (The singin is nice but am studying here so please lower the volume buddy). The guy says "okay okay" and after a few seconds of peaceful quiet, he starts singing louder. Hmmm... he must have thought that i liked his singing so much that i asked him to increase the volume. Oh well! Atleast one of us is happy, i thought to myself and muttered a few magic words to mute out the extra noise.

4. Mud slides falling on you when you are all showered, dressed and stepping out to go for work. (Cough cough!). Hey dude... am hyper-allergic to dust, man!

Some one get me outta here!!!