Dear Cricket,

It has not been the easiest of 3 years for us. We have broken up and gotten together more times than even SRK has in his film career. There is no denying the tremendous part that you have played in shaping me as a person. I still remember the day I went to Olympic Sports almost 10 years ago to buy my first bat. Consequent bats might have followed but it is something similar to a wizard first choosing his wand. The touch felt magical.

I remember those first few days of our association when I woke up every morning to wear those oversized shirts and struggle to run a complete lap in the ground. The first match and the first tournament now seem a blur, but i clearly remember the pride when i won the "Best Batsman" award. It is to this day, my most coveted award. My first half century came in a small pitch and I still remember the sheer exhilaration I felt after winning the match and scoring those 50 odd runs.

The first of many victories, and the first of many more defeats.

I came into school, bragging childishly about my supposed exploits in You. I did manage to get noticed and play for my school as well. It was both a pride and a responsibility to play for school. Thanks to You, I became recognized as "that cricket kid" in school and subsequently came to represent the whole cricket team. If not for you, I would probably have turned out to be just another student in school.

The friends I made during our 10 year courtship and the invaluable lessons learnt both on and off the field are too many to be mentioned here. I came to understand myself better because of you.

You may think that I am being unnecessarily squeamish about this whole affair, but it is high time we reached a conclusion.


There is no easy way to say this, we have to break up. We have both forseen this day arriving. Somehow, I do not experience the same thrill when I pick up a bat now. I do not feel the same berserker-like emotion to succeed. Somehow, the losses have not been hurting that badly and the wins do not seem that sweet.


Tomorrow is perhaps my last chance for us to get back together. And I am not going to take it. For the present, I no longer have any interest left to play. I know it is impossible to let go of you completely, but I have taken the decision I think is best for myself.

This is it.

Goodbye

Of Passion

The word "PASSION" is something that is used very loosely. I'm sure we have all been enduring sentences like "be passionate about what you do", "if you are passionate about something, you will excel in it" and many other such sentences. And after all is said and done, at the end of the day we are as passionate as we were the previous day.

So what is passion? I do not know. They say passion is like a fire that is burning inside you. A fire that lends you a lot of energy in the subject or activity that you are passionate about. I have never experienced anything like it.

In my 18 years of existence, I have not been able to recall any incident where I was driven by pure emotion. It has always been about rationality and a certain amount of ignoring emotion. There is a school of thought which says that emotions must not play a part in whatever we do. There is another school of thought which is of the opinion that working with certain emotions actually increases the quality of the work.

What is passion if not an emotion?

Does a person suddenly realize what he is passionate about? Does a person instinctively know how he wants to spend his life? And what about people like me who are still knocking two stones together to start that inner fire?

Is passion an acquired taste? Or is it supposed to appear magically in a person's life? IF it is magical then I probably have to wait longer. If it is an acquired taste then I probably haven't tasted enough to realize which taste I can get used to.

But "Passion" has become a very confusing term for me which is kinda ironic looking at the name of my blog. Guess I have to reconsider the name of my blog now!

May the force/passion be with you...
Ciao

The Two-face dog

I know I shouldn't be doing this. I can also predict the fairly dire consequences that await for wasting an hour's time blogging, but when the whole world conspires to keep you from studying, there is little that you can do to resistht the waves of distraction.

At no other time can you have such profoundly meaningful insights into so many things that will in no way help you in the exam tomorrow. At no other time can you appreciate the hypnotic quality of the arrangement of seeds in a pomegranate. At no other time can you truly reflect upon the illegibility of your handwriting. At no other time can you come across fascinating discoveries like the mole which was hidden all these years amidst the hair on your head. At no other time can you imagine "lol" looking like a drowning man. Well, you get the drift...

As everybody will have experienced, "study holidays" make for some of the most interesting time in a person's life. Be it watching movie after movie, flipping past pages with zero concentration, the sudden berserker-like urge punish yourself for wasting time and the occasional piece of information which is promptly forgotten, study holidays are extremely useless. (for me atleast).

If you are thinking about how the topic of this post is related to everything that I have said above, dont bother thinking. there is no connection.
I had intended to blog about a badly injured dog which had half its face siphoned off and was looking like "Two Face"'s pet dog. and my attempt at getting some medical help for the poor creature.

An hour is wasted! the urge to blog has subsided, and now its the time of panic to set in and give me some much wanted seriousness.

May the force be with you.

P.S. The credit for coming up with "lol" looking like a drowning man goes to Abhijit.

Bunkitis

Blogging for the first time from a laptop. Not even a sentence down and this thing is already testing my patience. It's hard to shift from a proper desktop keyboard to this small, feather sensitive keyboard.

There was this SMS joke which was doing the rounds a few weeks back. "Why was Vishveshwaraiah such a good engineer?" "Coz he didn't study under VTU". Lame as it may sound, after completing almost one semester under an almost VTU-like syllabus, I'm bound to agree with whoever created that joke.

The classes are dominated with the "izzzzit"s of my maths professor and the "wadijit"S of my chemistry prof. And not to be left out is our dearest Constitution of India teacher (Bolamma.. pronounce it as you will!) who has this amazing knack of continuing to teach even when its blatantly obvious that nobody is listening. The best teacher presently is our EVS prof. I say he's the best because he never comes to class and always lives up to our expectations and bunks whenever we want him to.

The general feeling in all classes is the urge to physically throw the teacher out of the class or scream in frustration. This is infact the first symptom of "bunkitis". A condition often found in frustrated college-going students. Other symptoms include constant boredom, hands which refuse to part with the mobile phone, sudden interest in the colour of the flowers in a distant tree, and in extreme cases, a sudden urge to get up and sing in class.

Bunkitis is a plague. One person can transfer it easily to lots of other people. The rate of transfer of the plague is directly proportional to the closeness of friendship and the abundant availability of pocket money. In rare cases, when the whole class temporarily has the plague, a phenomenon known as "mass bunk" is found to occur. Mass bunks are rare and are more often than not foiled attempts.

After a lot of research, a cure was found for "bunkitis", much to the dismay of the student community. It was found that "guilt" is the best medicine there is to prevent bunkitis. This research proved effective in the early 1990s but was soon proved redundant by the most recent batch of patients whose brains find it very hard to generate the required level of guilt to effectively tackle this disease.

A brilliant breakthrough was produced by college authorities to tackle this menace. "Attendance shortage", the latest drug available in all colleges is a sureshot way to cure people of this disease temporarily. But even this cannot guarantee complete cure as "bunkitis" resumes it work on the human brain as soon as "minimum attendance cut-off" is reached.

The student mind is probably destined to forever be in the clutches of this disease.
More on bunkitis when I get affected by it, which will be in a week or two!

Ciao... May the force be with you.

Fashion faux pas

I was going through Bangalore Times yesterday, as part of my daily after college ritual. Along with all the loads of celebrity gossip and the various completely idiotic yet completely convincing relationship advice, there are also posts on fashion. All these days I was ignoring these articles and yesterday, in a fit of boredom I actually did read the complete article.

It was worth it! My fashion sense still remains zero but I did manage to have a good laugh. I don't understand fashion.
Firstly, all those horrible things they do to clothes just makes it seem like a waste of good cloth.
Secondly, most of the things they drape models with rarely fits anybody other than them.
Thirdly, most of their designs (especially the summer collection) seems too garish to wear in decent company.

Some of the clothes that do make it to the market (and are wearable) are too bloody expensive for the common man to purchase. Such being the case, I wonder how that whole industry survives on the clothing equivalent of gluttony on the part of a few millionaires.

Most importantly, I doubt if many people understand fashion. I was reading about the "fashion advice" that these fashion gurus give to people like us. And how moronic are all of us who go by their taste of clothing. Something that they say is suddenly the "in thing" and something that somebody refuses to use suddenly becomes outdated. There are few people who pull the fashion strings and crown themselves the fashion-makers.

Should we let the tastes of a few people rule our cupboards? Should we lets the whims and fancies of a few people allow us to mimic stars and lose our individuality? I don't think so. Fashion is surprisingly one of the biggest industries today and I suppose there are many out there who disagree with me.

A beautiful woman looks beautiful in whatever she wears (the gay types please look elsewhere). I don't think that by wearing pink shoes with a black dress suddenly makes her sprout hitherto unseen pimples and freckles and suddenly go out of shape and make her look hideous.

Beauty is skin deep!

And don't get me started with the "bikini collection". Nobody cares what damn designs you do on them. They are never seen or noticed. If you do start looking at the designs then you must seriously reconsider you orientation.

Ciao

Hostly Duties

I had the opportunity to go to a function(along with my family of course) the past weekend. It was a religious event and hence the host's duties were limited.

This post is a critical examination on the multifaceted duties a host has to play... with more stress on food.

Hostly Duty (H.D) 1: It is imperative that you cook for twice the number of people you have invited. This is for 2 reasons. Running out of food is disastrous. It gives you licence to perform the following HDs.

H.D.2: There is no such thing as a full stomach. Loading the plates of the guests until they are an inch from puking on you is considered a very gracious thing to do.

H.D.3: From H.D.1, it can be inferred that there will be lots of food left after lunch. Have a backup guest list to fall back to to clear all that good food for the night.

H.D.4: Insulting, taunting and angering thin people during lunch and dinner is an "ok" thing to do (not if you are the one being taunted).

H.D.5: Dialogues of self loathing after serving one round of food or talking about one's limited expertise when it comes to cooking is observed to be the best way to end anybody's hopes of criticizing your food.

H.D.6: Be careful and don't let anybody serve you your food. (People like me are always waiting to take revenge).


This probably happens in every house (with a few minor changes of course). It is quite amusing that guests, even with the prospect of undergoing such torture, feel let-down and insulted if they are not tortured.

Ciao..

Conversations

In life we have to put up with a lot of things. A lot of nonsense, a lot of people, a lot of supposed intellectuals and instances where all you can do is smile and say "you are right" even though your brain is screaming at you to correct a factual error or just a downright idiotic deduction.

With friends, one has the liberty of stopping the other person or interrupting him in any way possible and put in your point of view. People doing that (me, mostly) are often unwelcome guests in a conversation. And some people (me again!) learn to put up with that and smile inwardly looking at people making a fool of themselves.

It is even more irritating during group conversations among relatives, usually during a function. All the supposed intellectuals come out with all their fine oratory skills to impress a point, often a misinterpretation or a devastatingly idiotic deduction, upon the non-attention-seeking crowd. The ones who are not blessed with the same oratory skills butt in the middle to add mirch masala (read more nonsense), with constant nodding of the head.

Please do not mistake me. It is a treat to listen to people who actually know what they are speaking about.

The usual ice breaker when it comes to a group conversation is politics. And after the usual cursing of all the people and policies of the government, the quasi orators take central stage in discussing a recent political event. Some of the wannabe orators usually come up with a good Deve Gowda curse and the others stop their respective conversations to curse in unanimity. The wannabe then stops with a smug smile on his face.

Then begins the fun part... Especially when they discuss modern technology. example iPhone 4. Some of the features attributed to the iPhone make it seem like a supercomputer! Then there is always another group which will be discussing banking and economics. The conversations are usually loaded with big words like economic instability, self correction mode of the market, etc etc which no one understands, but to which everyone nods their heads.

And in every family, there is always someone who is from Amway and keeps trying to get other to join the network marketing chain.

I might be wrong, I might be right. In either case, this was my observation in a recent function.

Cheers

P.S. Happy Birthday Mahatma Gandhi!
P.P.S Happy birthday to my mobile :)