Bakwaswani

Wishlist 2012

2011-12-18T23:54:00.006+05:30

There has been no bakwas from me in more than 5 months because honestly I have been getting a lot of it in my everyday life. Off late I have discovered new realms of human stupidity which I had never thought even existed. And to add icing to the cake I have discovered why stupids continue to be such a pain in the ass. The theory is "a stupid goes the proverbial extra mile to prove that he or (in most cases) she is not stupid and in turn ends up doing such blunders one may have never imagined or prepared for". To add a few I have seen an engineer entering ‘username’ and ‘password’ literally when I asked her to enter her username and password, I have overheard people thinking FDI is a part of Jan lokpal, I have seen people who have only read Revolution 2020 discussing English Literature, people saying Ra.One is a super movie and that it deserves awards and well I have seen Kapil Sibal trying to make us believe that Facebook status message is a bigger threat to national security than terrorism. I rest my case.

So 2011 draws up to a close in a couple of weeks and people are getting ready to welcome 2012 with those super shit, age old, copied, plagiarized or forwarded smses or the new but equally irritating technique of putting up an e-card photo on Facebook and tag people in it. Also, a huge number of people will be busy drawing up a set of new year resolutions. Some of those resolutions like ‘work hard’, ‘do charity’, ‘practice yoga’, ‘quit smoking’, ‘no alcohol’, ‘learn to play an instrument’ etc. will be made public on the Facebook walls soon, whereas the resolutions like ‘eat less’, ‘bath at least thrice a week’, ‘not fart in public’, ‘stop chasing the girl I have been chasing from high school without success’ etc. will be filed and placed in secret cabinets where no one else can access it. New Year Resolutions have never been my cup of tea. Not that I have not tried but none have lasted more than a week. But given this year 2012 may actually see the end of the world I wanted to have something to look forward to do in it. So, instead of a New Year resolution I draw up a 2012 wishlist. If at the end of the next year (given that world exists and also I am still alive) if I have checked half the item of this list, I would be able to say this was the good year. So here is my wishlist:

1.Punch someone, who uses the word ‘ideally’, right in his or her face.
The world is not supposed to be an ideal place but then it does not stops some moron to use ideally with each and every sentence they use. Add to it whenever they use ideally these idiotic souls will invariably follow it with ‘you should’ or in a more politically correct corporate way make it sound ‘we should’ (which essentially means the same). Here is a sample

Him: “Ideally we should finish it today”
Me: “But its not possible. It’s already 8 P.M”
Him: “Ideally you should have finished it before. However, ideally we would like this sent before EOD today”
Me: “But you gave me these just five minutes back and EOD has already happened”
Him: “Ideally we should be ready to go the extra mile. Ideally we should not complain. Ideally it is our responsibility. I need to go home and watch the game but ideally we should finish it ASAP. Ideally you should finish it off today. Ideally we should question less and finish task at hand.”
Me: “FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!”
Only thing I should be doing ideally is punch such a person’s face so many times that next time he says ideally it comes out as band-aid.

2. Roughen up at least one employee of India TV
I will very dearly like to do this for all the shit they keep churning out 24x7. I know news quality has gone down but seriously ‘chajje par billo rani’ (cat on the roof) in a news channel. Why do we even allow such a channel to exist and also use the word India in its name? They know when the world will end, what fruit does Ganpati like, who does black magic and basically anything which is not news.

3. Kick the ass of one rash driver
If there is one sect who is worse than the terrorist it is this sect of rash driver for they too kill innocent people each year. I don’t know the reason behind their rash driving, whether it is bad parenting, mental disease, piles or just a lack of bladder control, but these should be hunted down and eliminated. For once I even advocate the Hitler’s gas chamber for these assholes. My target for this year is to at least get hold of one such moron and tie him on his belly to his vehicle and get his ass stoned by the crowd.

4. Slap a SRK fan
Need I say more? The whole 2011 was a living hell as wherever you go all you saw was Ra.One, and then finally when it came, and we thought it was over came the Dont' u or probably Don2, which is again likely to continue for some time. Obviously neither I nor anyone else can slap SRK, I would love to slap one of his fan for the sole reason of being so stupid to be his fan.

5. Put a piece of burning charcoal in the mouth of one public smoker
I have nothing against smokers as long as they take their cigarette home, lock their rooms and smoke their lungs out. It’s your lung go ahead and burn it but why the hell do it in a public place and take others with you? Due to these sons of bitches I have to do away with roadside tea, something which I really liked.

6. Write an app which automatically registers the email id of those, who post OMG shit on my Facebook, to a gay porn site
Self explanatory for everyone who uses Facebook. If you click on those shits to know ‘who viewed my profile’, or to check whether or not ‘you look funny in the picture’ and by your bad luck you end up posting those shit on my wall, be ready for changing your email address.

7. Beat the daylights out of someone who talks in a fake accent

“A fake accent and a low IQ are usually found in the same head” Anonymous. (Its actually me, but quoting some source gives one more credibility)

In a society where ability to speak a language is perceived as intelligence, stupids have gone the extra mile to acquire a fake accent. It gives them a sense of bravado and importance as the listener is not able to make any sense of what they just said. I admit, I have daylights confused out of me when I am in conversation with such people, and thus this year, come what may I will beat the daylights out of at least one such retard. If not beat up, I will at least replace their tomato ketchup with a bottle of red-chilli paste.

8. Break the mobile/TV/laptop/ipad/any other valuable belonging to a person who says to me ‘look at the bigger picture’
I have lost count how many times I have been exposed to this irritating phrase ‘look at the bigger picture’. Whenever I am sad, dejected, disappointed, feeling life has been a bit unfair, angry, frustrated, or simply disagreeing to a stpid logic, someone or the other has asked me to ‘look at the bigger picture’. I am just sick of it. Where is the picture even present, where is the smaller picture first of all. Next time, someone brings it out, I swear I will do the above mentioned, and then say, oh don’t worry about the broken stuff, look at the bigger picture. If they happen to ask what bigger picture, I will calmly reply ‘same one which you asked me to look at’

So here was my list for the next year. Does your list even match up?

Philosophy 101: The new national pastime

2011-07-10T00:34:00.007+05:30

I return to blogging after more than four months break and lot happened in the time I did not blog and seriously I had a lot of topics to have a take on. A team with Sreesanth in it won the world cup despite Ian Chappel’s brilliant pieces to win the world cup for Aussies even before it started, Poonam Pandey did not keep her promise, Osama was killed in the greatest country on earth, Facebook patriots sent me cause invites to click and support movements by Anna Hazare and Ramdev and obviously Rahul Gandhi, naam hi kafi hai. So what really kept me away for all these days? The reason is not difficult to guess, a job which sucks and leaves your mind so much cluttered that you may lose a truck in it. But I will not go in details of that here as those things are meant for Facebook walls to gain some sympathy. And anyway it’s not that bad, though I do not like what I do, this was probably best I could have done with my life, given that I am no IITian and moreover I did not spend my college life locking myself in a room and reading all those geeky stuff. Add to that the salary is high enough to make some people jealous.

Before I deviate further let me come to the point why I started this. I don’t want to deviate further as I told you my mind is cluttered and currently I can’t think straight. Oh wait, I did not mean that, I meant my thinking is not very clear and precise at this moment, I still think straight though. In the past era philosophy was left for leaders, thinkers, poets, politicians and people who did not get laid. But all of a sudden philosophy has quickly and subtly become a new national craze in the nation which till now was obsessed with cricket, movies and some shitty saas-bahu serials. As a matter of proof, take the following tests.

1. Goto your Facebook wall and see the updates, if you do not see couple of motivational quotes by retards and clicked like by bigger retards, I respect you.

2. Go to a book stall and try finding good fiction (this does not include CB’s books) to read, it will be like finding a needle in a haystack of all Deepak Chopras, Robin Sharmas and Shiv Kheras stuffs .

3.On top of this blog click next blog around 3 times, if you do not get to a blog which talks about life, relationships, dealing with change etc. lady luck is sitting by your side and now is right time for you to buy a lottery ticket.

4.Join twitter, follow some obscure folks, you know the rest.

5.Pick up your phone and call a few friends and ask for some advice.

6.Sign into google talk and read status and you will be confused if it is actually Google gyaan.

Obviously when I talk of philosophy I do not talk about originality in it. I know at some time you may have read some status message and felt how come this guy/gal who struggled to pass in English in school is suddenly writing lines like Wordswoth or John Keats. Answer is obvious.

Now let’s come to the point. So why did I call this philosophy 101. So did you think I was going to give you some gyaan on how to be philosophical? Well that was a trick, and if you fell for it, this is the time you get lost from here. I was fine as long as philosophies was there on Facebook, for I could simply hide such people for timeline, Twitter was even better, I can unfollow, I could have switched off the TV, I could have chosen not to read stuff. But then this rage spread like wild fire and people seem to bring these on right into your face. There seem to be this issue with most people; they seem to believe that they always have an audience. They talk in quote and prose and often modify quotes from eminent leaders. These people seem to be ashamed of sounding practical. Let’s dissect the practicality of couple of these philosophies and people who do that.

All of us have some friends whose existence in our lives is like our orkut accounts, something which we enjoyed some time back, but have outgrown but still have it. On my last visit to my hometown I met one of those and we caught up on some old times. I realized he taught Mathematics in some school and ultimately I told him about my job and how demanding it was. So now he switched on “You know, one should not work for money. There is more to life than money; your job should have some meaning attached to it. I think one should just do what one loves”. So precisely he chose to become a teacher as he loved teaching. A little strange, that he gave numerous Engineering entrance tests for 2 years, before doing a B.Sc in Mathematics, then sat for numerous Bank P.O exams, took UPSC once, tried to bell the CAT before going to do what he loved. I replied “But didn’t you love watching porn too, why did you not become a porn-star, I guess you would have got a higher salary and may have loved the job more, or maybe even a CD shop where you could have given expert opinion also.” He laughed out unable to see the sarcasm. But the point is, what was the point in philosophizing his job so much, obviously it was not his job description, since he teaches Maths, and there was no audience around to listen to his brilliant and spiritually enlightening speech. But then that is how it works. Gone are the days, when if you felt low a friend will join you and accompany you to a restaurant or pub to make you feel better. No sir, he will first throw in a few Martin Luther Kings, Abraham Lincons, Mahatma Gandhis, Deepak Chopras in your face and then finally start ranting about his life, to prove his/her life outsucks yours.

The glorification of failure seems to be the cornerstone of many of these amateur philosophers. I have always maintained that girls are allowed to be a bit stupid, but then some of them seem to abuse this privilege. There is this friend of mine, who writes numerous written exams for various jobs and keeps blowing them up. And then on each of her result day for some reason she used to give me a call. Initially I used to be sympathetic but then it turned irritating, for none of her discussions were practical self-assessment, they were just for glorifying failure. So instead of working out what is going wrong what she would do is buy herself another ‘chicken soup for some stupid soul’ and come up with motivational lines like ‘If you want to succeed double your failure rate’ or her favorite ‘Failure is a stepping stone to success’. Seriously, how many stepping stones do you want, or are you planning to build a stone mansion. Finally, I let go off my hidden agenda (isn’t it obvious) and stopped taking her calls and blocked her from google talk. Last I heard of her was the day when CAT results came out and with it a new philosophy which stated ‘you don’t need a exam result to judge yourself. Even Albert Einstein was thrown out of school’. And that was it, my admiration of Einstein and her comparing herself with the great man sealed it. I am sure she would come up with something like ‘laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone’ when someone mentions me in a conversation with her.

And just to further prove my example I just opened the Facebook app for android, which unfortunately does not give me option for hiding people from timeline, here are the few I see (In case it was your status, let me offer my apologies first)

1.Life is confusing, Sumtyms u donno, Whether u shld b smiling or be worried

2.A group of Donkeys led by a lion can defeat a group of Lions led by a Donkey....Leadership makes the real difference

3.Life is not so simple...are yaar to y dnt u make it simple...?

Now, seriously if only someone can give me a penny each time the word life appears on my timeline, I would have been richer by quite a bit. Some of you may argue if you have problems why you don’t remove them from friend list. In truth, this is not so simple, most of them are actually friends and totally likeable in many other ways, and this one irritating trait is not solid enough a reason to end friendship. 'Things are not plain black and white, sometimes they are grey'. (This is infectious, see I philosophized it too)

I don’t have much idea what has made it a rage. Was it the impact of social networks? Or was it suddenly realized that being intellectual is of primary importance? Was it the effect of shitloads of self help books available? Was it a result of overall depression and frustration which led people to try and philosophize their miserable lives? I have no idea and neither do intend to get idea.

The point is with so much of philosophical advice being constantly poured on you, it is but normal to get confused, depressed and frustrated once in a while. That is the time you need to find the counter of it to overcome it. So next time when your friend gives a philosophy you know where to look for overcoming him/her. If you don’t, go figure.

Seven special days that mankind really needs

2011-02-09T23:16:00.008+05:30

At the start of this year, I had made a silent resolution (silent in the sense that I did not use it as a status update) to not to mock anyone, i.e, say no to sarcasm, which, for some reason, had suddenly became associated with me. For more than a month I did keep the resolution. So, even when someone posted stuff like “lyf s much lyk facebuk..people will like your problemz n comment , bt no1 gonna solve dem..bcoz everybody seemz so busy in updating dere own...” or even “the most terible situation is wen u stop luvn ur best frd coz u knw 1 step behind ruins ur frnsp n 1 step ahead mak u fall in luv !!! best frdshp is nthng... jzt a sickk state of mind...!! dedicated to oll whu belive dey hav bst frds...!! its sheer waste...!!” I let it pass without adding a comment that would hurt. Even when someone posted this monstrously lame status stating “I like Bear Grylls for he is the only intrepid man on the planet Earth who's jst anxious of the word "Impossible" & nthng else in the universe!!” and also clicked like on it himself, I let it pass. (These are real status messages I have seen on my Timeline, and if you are the one who updated it, screw you, I am not giving you any apology).

I held on, at times, even miserably to my resolve of not mocking at anything, but then came the week Feb 7 to Feb 14, which I didn’t know till yesterday, is probably the WTF week of the year, for every day is supposed to be a ‘Day’. I had known about the 14^th being the valentine day, and someone had once told me that 7^th was Rose day. But then on 8^th, someone on my twitter timeline said it is the propose day. Add to it, on further googling I also heard there is something called as chocolate day, and finally somebody sent me link to this newspaper pic, http://twitpic.com/3xsk9q on twitter, which almost made me poke my pencil into my eye, for this whole week was marked as some ‘day’, which included a teddy day, a promise day and also hug and kiss day!!!!! Call me ignorant, but in all these years I have been on earth, I had not known it.

I was about to break my resolution and go ahead with a sarcastic take on it, but then I thought about it, and then suddenly I realized, mankind needs these special days to survive. A person needs Mother’s day to send text messages to 10 people asking to forward to another 10 people in case they love their moms. A nation needs Children's day to remind politicians like Rahul Gandhi to talk child rights and elimination of child labor. A country needs women’s day to remind about evils of dowry, domestic violence, female foeticide and violence against women for a day. Independence Day and Republic day are needed so that you can wave flags on Facebook. New year day is needed so that you can post a e-card picture and tag people in it. So what’s wrong with having days to gift chocolates and make promises and spend some money on a rose as long as it serves a bigger purpose. So, on the same note, I thought of drawing a list of special days, which will serve mankind much more than the days already available. I have finally concluded my list and will love to hear more from you intelligent people.

Poison day: Let 15th of Feb be marked as poison day. In case you ended up spending half your salary on a girl for all those seven days preceding it, and still she rejects you on Feb 14th, you do not deserve to die unknown. Let that be known as a sacrifice made on poison day. You will even get special discount on rat-poison on this day in case this day is marked as posion day.
Slap Day: Let April 25th be marked as a day when you are allowed to slap people publically. You may ask what is so special about this day. In 2008, on this landmark day in history, Harbhajan Singh had slapped Sreesanth right in middle of Mohali stadium and reduced him to tears. Just imagine having a day when you can go and slap each and every moron who is screwing your life right in his or her face. Had Sreesanth been slapped each year once, we would have been spared the horrible dance show he had put out last month in revenge of not being picked for world cup. Add to it he would not done the black magic to get innocent Praveen Kumar injured to get himself a place in world cup. Imagine yourself slapping a moron bike rider who was riding a bike very rashly and endangering others for his sole aim of getting laid, or slapping a fat ass who is for some reason standing aimlessly right in middle of narrow footpath of a busy street and has no intention to move. Don’t you need this day even more than new year day?
‘Abuse your boss’ day: We all do need such a day, right? Let this day be 1st March, just a day after union budget screws you again, and lets you realize the imbalance between salary and inflation. This will give mankind an opportunity to vent out some frustration with bosses who have screwed up their lives for generations.
Inactivity day: This day you should just sit and do nothing at all. If you feel like doing anything, just sit and wait till that feeling goes away. Just pull out your chair and sit in front of the window and keep looking at the distant horizon. It will build patience to bear your screwed up life the way it is. Just tell screw you to people who talk about hard work, smart work, etc. and say screw you twice to people who tweet stuff like ‘early bird catches the worm’. I propose 26th September to be marked a Inactivity day as on this legendary day in 1932 our prime-minister Manmohan Singh was born, a person who has redefined inactivity at the last stage of his career.
Junk food day: How many times have we heard the irritating talks on harmful effects of junk food? Doesn’t a person still die even without eating junk food? Isn't chocolate bad for health too? Then why this crusade against junk food especially if junk food gives you 10 minutes of happiness. Let there be one day which can be declared as eat only junk. Let’s vote for the date.
Vent your frustration day: This will be a day when you can sit and complain about all things that have literally screwed up your life. You can say all stuff like ‘I was born to win but conditioned to lose’ or blame your genes or blame your colleague, but blame you must. If you feel like, you can get on top of building and grumble all your frustration out. You will be allowed to tear your hair out, bang your head on the wall or even smack your TV when you see another Docomo ad. You can take out the sim from your phone and put it under a crusher after seeing another promotional message. Any date will do, but this day is a must.
‘I’ day: I did not mean the Independence day. It’s a day, when you accept yourself the way you are and do realize that you probably suck at anything you do. No matter, how much self-promotion you do, how much motivational lines you try, the fact remains is that you suck, which is evident from the fact you are still reading this blog, which in all fairness stinks. So, why not celebrate one day a year on occasion that you are still alive despite being an inconvenience to so many people around you. So, I propose let’s first settle on a date, then key a text message with any line you get from google about stupidity, moronity, assholeness, etc.etc. and add the last line as ‘If you love yourself forward it to 10 persons’ and send it 10 times to yourself. Repeat the process until you are convinced that you suck and you probably can do nothing about it.

This was my list of days I feel should be there. Off course this won't be enough. We need more such days so that each day of the year can become 'dayworthy'. However, I'll leave the decision to all of you to add more such days.

Eleven things you may see in 2011

2011-01-09T23:13:00.011+05:30

This is a set of predictions which may happen in 2011. This is not a list of utopian dreams which I wish to happen in 2011. None of this is based on position of stars, planets or for the sake of it, satellite image. All of it is based on pure observations of things happened in past year. It has come late by a week to make derivations based on the early trend and also due to the reason the author was busy bashing people who were making public new year resolutions on social networks and those who were uploading image of new year e-cards and tagging people and assuming it to be a unique way to wish new year to someone. All these are mere assumptions of things that may happen, and in no form I take responsibility if anything does not. So here goes the list.

Suresh Kalmadi will walk scot free. No matter how much Kalmadi jokes are made on social networks and how much Arnab Goswami yanks on his news channel, no shit will happen to Suresh Kalmadi. Ultimately by end of year everyone will forget about him and he would be sitting coolly over the heaps of money he has made. After all, what has he done apart from making crores of rupees from public money? Isn’t that what is expected out of every bureaucrat in our country.
Mercy petition will be filed for Kasab just as it was filed some time ago for another terrorist named Afzal Guru. The signs are already there. Everyone seems to have forgotten what happened on 26^th November 2007 or was it November, 2008. Congress is a great party, they think of common good. Forgiveness is a virtue known to them. So they will sit pretty and take no action against the country nurturing terrorists. After all none of them and neither their close ones have ever been killed in terror attacks. So why worry of death of a few common people.
Shahrukh Khan will continue to whine after his team would yet against crash out of IPL. As I write this he has not picked Saurav Ganguly for his KKR. No wonder he may need police protection next time he goes to Kolkata, if he ever does. Add to that he will also lose out on the profit as people in Kolkata in most likelihood boycott all the matches. He will again flop on small screen as he has not learnt from his mistakes in KBC and another shitty kids show and is again coming to host a show which he himself mentions as ‘meri tarah pagal’ but media will still keep referring to him as King Khan.
Ravindra Jadeja will win a Man of the match award, given to him for ‘lack of cricketing ability’ quota by the winning team (Isn’t it obvious that he will be a part of losing team). He will continue getting picked for Indian team despite all Jadeja jokes (While I was writing this he has been picked for IPL for almost a million dollars). He will also be awarded with Ajit Agarkar award for all rounders this year.
Shitloads of stupid self-help books will be written and there will be buyers. There will be countless sessions on Spiritual healing, anger management, stress management which will be attended by people somehow believing this will improve their quality of life where the gurus will talk of not valuing money and in turn will make a lot of tax-free money. Chetan Bhagat will write another novel and sell it at Rs 95, and this will become a good seller despite having storyline and mellow drams of a bollywood movie simply because Indian readers want to buy something cheap and light to read on train which is expected to run late. So mediocre writers will still have a great year as no improvement is expected in services of Indian Railways. Add to that a few airlines like Indigo and GoAir do not give any magazine to read on the plane, so even if people start using flights instead of trains, they will still need to carry their own stuff to read.
Reality TV contestants would be specially trained in public crying skills and abusive language speaking skills. The beep sounds in Big Boss 5 will be replaced by fart sound so that contestants can be allowed some freedom of gas exit without anyone realizing. Ekta Kapoor will make four new shitty saas-bahu programs and people will continue to watch them. Rakhi Sawant will get a image makeover and this year she will host a new show called 'Rakhi karegi ghar saaf' in which she will go to each house and inspect cleanliness there. News Channels will continue to hold debates which will not result in anything. Sony TV will stop showing anything apart from CID. ACP Pradyuman will not be promoted this year too and he will still continue to be the ACP despite serving as ACP for past 11 years and cracking each case ingeniously. Daya will however be awarded the best 'darwaza todak' award.
Ian Chappell will write more articles whining India’s number 1 rank in Test Cricket and will demand for a better ranking system which can ensure Australia remain on top. Australians will still continue to screw up Indian cricket system. If Greg Chappell’s planned destruction of promising players and Buchanan’s Four captains theory was not enough, this year will see much more of Marsh, Lawson, Bevan and others who will complete what Chappell started and the effect will be seen during IPL4. Australia may continue to lose and India may continue to win, but Ian Chappel will be writing about flaws in ICC ranking system, and in each of these articles jingoist and jobless Pakistani cricket fans will be putting their expert comments, completely forgetting their own fuckups. Sachin Tendulkar will complete 100 international hundreds, yet there will be debates on who is the best batsman, and Australians will say he made his runs on ‘flat’ tracks, conveniently forgetting that on the same ‘flat’ tracks the average of Ricky Ponting is less than Harbhajan Singh. In other sports (no one cares a damn about) Sania Mirza will continue to lose in 2^nd rounds and still believe she is number 1 player. Hockey players will still continue to lose but will beat Pakistan occasionally. Charu Sharma will continue to haunt viewers with his fake ascent and his expert comments.
The Pakistani cricketers will find new ways of ball tampering, as ball biting did not taste too good. A new committee will be formed of former and present Pakistani cricketers along with underworld mafias to discover new ways of match fixing which cannot be caught. Cricketers will be trained to use the morse code to communicate with bookies as mobile phones have been found to be too risky and unsecure. PCB will ban the fixers for life and in two weeks overturn it. If all goes well Pakistan will only appoint 3 new captains in this year. The Pakistani cricket fans will continue to blame India for their fuckups.
More people will learn to use Photoshop or other image editing softwares. The sale of digital cameras will go up. For what? Did you guess it? Right. For picture uploads on Facebook. People will put their touched up photos more frequently than ever. Some people will continue to click on like on all status messages which do not make any sense. Traffic on google will increase as more people will google for status message. There would come forward a web based startup which will provide status messages to people at some price and will guarantee minimum number of likes.
The number of Man U/Chelsea fans in India will increase as the more village kids will come to cities and start believing the only way to show that you are not a villager is to start following Man U or Chelsea but not both, no matter whether or not you understand anything about football and no matter whether or not you know which country is Manchester even in. Colleges across the country will include a six week course on 'English Premier League for Villagers' in their curriculum in which they will be trained to learn the league table and made to swear their allegiance to one of the clubs preferably ManU or Chelsea. On current counts it seems there will be higher increase in number of ManU fans than Chelsea fans. However, there will be no improvement in Indian football and not the knowledge of Football among Indian youth will increase.
ManMohan Singh will continue to do nothing and still be the PM of the largest democracy on earth. More people will start using Bi-Cycles as price of petrol and diesel will continue to rise. Investment companies will come up with new investment schemes where one can invest in food grains and vegetables. Price rise will continue to happen and people will start locking up the bought food vegetables in lockers when they get home. Onion smuggling scam will be brought to light with the medium of leaked phone conversation between various politicians and Nira Radia. Poor people will struggle for food items and education will become more expensive for them. Then someone will make a Facebook page against all these and send cause invites to everyone and in a week the page will have 245467 likes. On the other hand India will be making a bid to the Olympics as possibly the only reason that China is more powerful than India is that China has hosted Olympics and nothing else. Off course who cares about the facts that China has a higher literacy rate, higher quality of living, lesser number of people under poverty lines, better defense system and other such things since the world only sees the Olympics. And on January 26^th, August 15^th and maybe October 2^nd we will be patriots for a day and watch all those patriotic movies coming on television.

Obviously I hope none of this happens in this year. May Kalmadi get nailed and terrorists do get punished. May Chappell brothers be ignored by rest of cricket world and may we see Pakistani cricket out of the turmoils. May the media finally get its act together and may price rise get controlled. I would have loved to end on this positive note but, honestly, you can’t bet against my predictions, Can you?

The Farewell of Varun Shyamak

2010-12-23T09:13:00.005+05:30

Hi All,

I had not blogged for quite some time now, and this too would not have come soon, had Gaurav not reminded me by posting on my Facebook page. Well Varun Shyamak story series had been fun but I think it has lived its time. So here I decided to finish this off by giving him a fitting farewell. For all those who have not read me before and have not heard of Varun, you can still read this story as there is not much relation between previous stories and this one except the characters, however, if you want to know more about characters you can read "Weird Weird Varun Shyamak", the first story of the series.

As this will be my last post this year, wishing everyone a merry christmas and a very Happy New Year 2011.

It was true. Varun Shyamak was finally going away. It had all started when one fine day he had barged in, looked at us, looked around for some strange object and to our surprise had announced that he had ‘cracked’ the GRE, a phrase which I always find slightly incorrect, for I have not yet met anyone who had not ‘cracked’ the GRE, for the simple reason that unlike combined entrance exams for Indian universities, GRE score is not a sufficiency but a mere necessity to get an admission to a foreign institute. Varun had found this the hard way last year and finally did not manage to get through, but this year he had fared much better though not exceptional enough to earn him an easy call. But after some exhaustive search and numerous letters he had finally managed admissions to some unheard university in South California. In South India, especially in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, it is almost customary to have a foreign degree, not necessarily a MIT or a Harvard, any ‘foreign’ would do. It is like a criterion here for how much dowry a man is worth (same being ‘Government’ job in North India).

The time for Visa processing was there and for some reason Varun wanted me to come to Chennai with him for that. Off course, Ramesh had already prophesied that Varun is not going to get the Visa. “Hey Jeet, Please yar, come with me. You know the city more than me.” He had said, as I had done my engineering from a college just about a 100 KM from Chennai and had visited the city a few times.

“No, no chance. I don’t want to have anything to do with that city in my whole life.” By chance or fate or bad luck all my previous visits to Chennai had not been good and I could only expect worse if I had Varun for company.

But then, this was no ordinary person trying to persuade me, it was the Varun Shyamak. He would never give up unless he is made to give up. He would go to the height of quoting exceptional quotes from Wordswoth, Einstein, Buddha, Vivekanada or recently even Barack Obama to convince all. So he started “See Jeet, so much of bitterness in not good for you. It’s high time you make you forget all that happened in your past in the city. I agree you didn’t have the best of your time there, but for how long you will carry it in your system. That’s why I’m telling you to come. It’s for your own good.” The theory of pseudo-righteousness and the peace of mind, works today on most people as is evident from some innocuous self-help books becoming bestsellers and pseudo-spiritual gurus plagiarizing Vivekanda’s words becoming highly revered, but then this was not a spiritual guru, nor was he a monk who had sold his Maruti leave alone a Ferrari.

I simply replied, “It has got nothing to do with it. And so still no, no chance.”

But then he was not going to give up, he continued giving me the lecture. Soon others, except Vikash, joined too. Seeing this, Varun changed stance and started proposing a group outing. “Guys! This might be our last trip together. Soon I will go, then Ramesh may follow too, even Saurav is looking for a new job, Jeet has plans, and Vikash Sir will soon move his family here and may not have time for us. Let’s go to Chennai together. My interview is on Friday then we will be free for weekend there. We can also go to adjoining places on those days. What say?” he said and paused.

“Hell no” said Ramesh and soon everyone, except Rachit, declined. Rachit had never taken a stand in his whole life so I was not sure which side he was on.

So, he left alone, and when he returned back, I slightly regretted our decision, as Varun Shyamak’s Visa application was rejected and I just missed another fun story for we never got to find the real reason. We drilled him, but the only answer he gave was “the interviewer was an asshole”. To this day we don’t know the reason as to why his Visa got rejected. Meanwhile, Varun got his interview rescheduled, this time in Mumbai and for a change his Visa application got accepted.

Very soon Varun Shyamak’s luggage was packed. Sunday was supposed to be the day we will wish him good bye (good riddance as it turned out to be). He would go to his hometown, Mysore, and will plan his travel to US sometime next month. The emotions were mixed. Varun with his weird activities had often given us moments of real fun, be it him wearing one underwear for six consecutive days and live the Sunday without it so that it can be washed and dried, or getting accused of misbehaving with a cute waitress at a Pizza joint when in reality he had just asked if she was happy or rather ‘satisfied’ with her job, or be it touching the feet of a hot female student at his first music class assuming her to be the music teacher.

On the Saturday morning, a day before he was supposed to leave, he came to us and said, “Let’s go for a party tonight”. This was unexpected and was not a good idea. Last time when he had invited us for a party he had chosen a roadside eatery and to top that at end of the meal he had refused to pay the full amount which was only 300! Friendship had turned sour for some time following that. So now when he invited us again it was fair to be skeptical.

“Are you on tranquilizers?” asked Ramesh, mocking subtly.

“What’s wrong? Let’s hang out tonight” Varun replied.

“I still remember the last time, so clarify that you pay the whole amount.” Ramesh said.

“No. I did not say that I will pay. I said that we party tonight” he said and paused to add some effect amidst the confusion, looked around and after some ten painful seconds of silence added “… each one pays his expense”

Ramesh gave him a stern look, looked around at me and then at Saurav, shrugged his shoulders, took a deep breath and said, “Tell me you sick moron, how come is this party if everyone pays his expense?”

Varun was unmoved and replied in a very calm manner, “Well, grammatically there is a difference between a treat and a party. What you are asking is a treat and what I suggested was a party. As you see a treat is a word which has its root in …”

“Ok shut up!” I had to interrupt, “we all know that you are a sick miser, so no need to modify theories to suit the facts. And I am not joining you. I have some work tonight. I have to go somewhere else in evening” I lied.

But Ramesh for some reason took the baton of convincing everyone and when he is out to convince, you can do only one thing, you agree. And so we did.

“Where do we go?” asked Saurav. Rachit suggested a place and no one agreed at first, but at the end everyone settled on that, a trend which I had noticed each time.

“So let’s say we leave at 7:30 tonight?” Vikash Sir finally said something.

“Can we leave a little early? I have a little shopping to do.” Varun almost begged.

“Seriously? You have shopping to do?” Saurav mocked, but not subtly, for on each previous occasion he had wanted to shop, it had been like we would go to mall, Varun would go to each shop, look at each thing with a kid like I-wish-I-had-that-lollypop look, and finally come out without buying anything, leaving us all exasperated.

“Even I have to buy batteries for my camera, old one is not charging. We will need it today, so let us leave early by 6:30” Saurav added. It was obvious. It seems like a mandate in social-networking era that whatever you do needs to be captured to be put on Facebook. It is but obvious that at a time when everyone spends the majority of his or her time contemplating how to make his or her life more Facebook worthy, capturing the moment has become much more important than actually living the moment.

So we agreed to leave by 6:00 P.M. And ready we were by 6. Varun had again pulled out his age old green T-shirt, too small for him and having a lame slogan stating “I am going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes”, his rugged, and by rugged I mean rugged with overuse, low rise jeans, which scarcely hid the underwear he had been wearing since Monday.

We took the Volvo bus despite some opposition from Varun, who was of opinion of travelling with normal bus, as it ‘costs less than one-third of volvo’. Once in a volvo bus in Bangalore you can see three types of personalities. The silent ones, who will be in majority, will just sit idle, sometimes with earphones to shut everyone out, and not care about anyone or anything and occasionally showing a lot of frustration with traffic. Next there will be a few confused and excited types, most of them new in city and somehow believing, “wow, this is amazing”. Thirdly, and more importantly, there will be ‘I-cannot-live-a-moment-without-show-off’ types, whose only agenda will be to show off, foolishly believing that people are really interested in them. These will either be talking loudly with co-passengers giving gyaan to everyone around, or talking super loudly on phone so that everyone knows about how important they are, and if they happen to possess one, they will be pulling out and I-POD or a smartphone and using it with an eye of an aesthete, intermittently looking around to see the effect on co-travellers, as if they are the only ones who possess that. Varun belonged to the third category.

So Varun started endlessly talking about U.S., his future plans, American food, American girls, American universities and whatever he could to ensure that everyone around him knows that he is going to U.S. Saurav and I wasted little time and moved to a seat as far as possible to avoid hearing his droning monotonous voice, but then there was no respite, for right in front of me sat another guy, who was talking loudly on the phone about his miserable job. In some 20 minutes of the ride, I came to know that he works for oracle, his job sucks, he wanted Java but got .Net, his seniors at work suck, he has now got an interview with google (which I doubted), a girl is flirting with him (I doubted this even more), and all such fucking details without talking to him once. I was mighty relieved when my stop came as I was on the verge of snatching his phone and throw it out and ask him if he has no one at home to talk this stuff to.

We had to cross the street to go to the mall. The only rule to cross the street in this city is look left, look right and run for your life and thank god when you are done. Before we could cross the street, Varun said, “Hey I need to find out about the air tickets from Bangalore to Mumbai next month, I will just check with the agent and come” and pointed to a small board on first floor of a building which read ‘GEO travels’.

“Why don’t you book this over the internet?” Vikash had made the mistake of asking him.

“No, internet banking is not safe; you know recently there was an article in the paper …”

Before Varun could complete another excellent piece of information Ramesh interrupted him, “Ok Ok! You check and come back fast”.

Varun looked angry on being interrupted but simply walked off without a word.

Fifteen minutes passed following that but there was no sign of Varun. I called him and he said “That fellow was asking too much commission, I am checking at another place and will be there in 2 minutes”. Another twenty minutes passed but he did not return. We tried calling but he did not answer. Saurav then said “I think I will go and get the battery for my camera, in the meantime. Rachit, why don’t you join me? Ramesh, you give me a call when Varun comes and then we can decide.” Both Rachit and Saurav trudged off and Harpreet joined them too.

“This guy is a pain in the ass. Jeet, I think we need to remind him of Jog Falls before he leaves” Ramesh was getting irritated every passing moment.

“What Jog Falls? He never joined us for that trip. It was Coorg” Vikash Sir said. Off course, he was unaware as to why he did not join us, which in fact was known only to Ramesh, me and obviously Varun.

Finally Varun appeared after some five minutes but before we could heave a sigh of relief, we saw he was running and three people were running behind him who caught a hold of him by scruff of his neck soon and there seemed to be a heated argument around.

“Let’s see what is going on” Vikash sir said and as we were about to rush, Ramesh said to me, “Let him be on his own, let us get out of here.” Before I could say anything Vikash Sir gave us stern looks and we reluctantly rushed towards him. I wish I had taken Ramesh’s advice that day.

“What happened? Why are you manhandling him?” Vikash Sir tried to raise his voice amongst the confusion. They ignored him and simply went on arguing in language which was greek to three of us. I pulled one of them aside and asked “What is wrong?”

He replied in a husky voice “He said Bangalore-Mumbai ticket book maadi. I booked, and now he is not paying and after we asked him to pay he was running away”

“I never told to book the ticket. He did it by himself” Varun shouted.

Before we could figure out anything they again went into alien language fighting mode. Ramesh tried to free Varun from their hold and said “Let’s talk decently here, why you people are manhandling him?”

But one of them pushed Ramesh and asked him to mind his own business, which invoked anger from Vikash and me as well and we too started arguing.

One of them who seemed sensible tried to defuse the issue. “We do not want to fight. Just ask him to pay the cancellation charge and the commission and we are done. How can you ask us to book the ticket and not pay for it? It is 3500 bucks ticket and 300 is our charge, however at least pay the 1000 Rs cancellation charge.”

“Why should I pay?” Varun had found his voice again and looked much more brave as he had got us for company.

“Why did you ask to book it then?” the man asked.

“I never asked to book. I simply asked to reserve the ticket” Varun replied leaving all of us stunned.

“What is the difference between book and reserve?” the man looked clueless

“Reserve means I just wanted to block the tickets for a day” Varun had done it again.

“Let’s get out of here. Leave this idiot here to sort it out with them” I whispered to Ramesh and Vikash but they did not follow.

“You pay him the cancel charge or you take the ticket, anyway you had to take it. And it is your mistake, reserve and book do mean the same thing and firstly, domestic tickets cannot be blocked” Vikash Sir made a sensible suggestion but Varun seemed to be determined to mess this up, so he continued arguing and in to time police was there to settle it out.

Now we could not even walk out as they have asked us to stay too. A big fat policeman with a monstrously large belly seemed to be in charge. He listened to both sides and it was obvious who was wrong, and to add to that he might be also getting a share from the shopkeeper every month.

He came to us and to our horror said “Handcuff all of them”

“What? Why all of us? There is only one here who did the fraud” I panicked.

“You all came together right? And then all of you have been seen fighting. Take them all” he replied.

“What is your problem? We never fought. We were just asking what is wrong, you just take Varun.” Ramesh said in a very high voice which clearly did not amuse the policeman.

“You are shouting at me? I am your father’s age and you are shouting at me” he said. I don’t know he was sarcastic or emotional.

“Sir, how much do you want to end it here?” Varun was speaking again!!!! Even a thief does not want to be called a thief in public and here Varun had offered bribe to a policeman in public.

As expected this pissed him off. He held Varun’s collar and pulled it upward and said “What do you think? I will make you learn all the lessons tonight in lockup”. Saurav and Rachit had also come in meantime and had understood and did not want to get involved.

“I will pay the ticket cost” Vikash sir said, “please finish it off here, There was just some confusion”. The shop owner agreed to not press any police complain if he got the amount. Varun said “Why are you paying, I will pay”.

“Fuck off!” Vikash Sir said, two words I had never heard him use before

Thought he policeman did not like Varun questioning him the amount, he asked me to silently slip 2 five-hundred rupee notes into his pocket, which I immediately did and they were gone in no time. As soon as they disappeared and Vikash sir moved in the shop to pay him the money, Varun said “I will pay Vikash sir later. Sorry guys, but it was not my …” before he could complete Ramesh punched him hard right in the abdomen and mouthed an expletive and walked off leaving Varun reeling, while Harpreet and Saurav ran behind him to calm him down with Rachit watcing silently from distance.

Varun soon recovered from blow, “What is this attitude?”

“We were about to be handcuffed because of you” I said

“So? They were just looking for money” he was dangerously nonchalant.

I could not bear it and I pushed him hard and he fell on the ground. Harpreet ran and stopped me. I said “Just get lost from here. Do not come near me again before you leave”

“I would love to choke you to death. Don’t you come near me too” said Harpreet pointing his finger to Varun and then he asked me to leave from there and he was about to leave with Ramesh and me when Varun again spoke “Hey guys let’s forget it. Let’s not spoil the occasion. Let us go to the party now.” Of course this was not taken lightly but then something amazing happened. Something which we never thought we would ever see in life. It was Rachit who jumped out and ran and tackled Varun to ground and kicked him in butt twice before Saurav pulled him over. For what we have known Rachit he had always been someone who did not get angry and did not take stands. Normally in such situations he would start laughing aloud leaving everyone aghast. And to add to that the sight of a lanky 48 Kilograms person pouncing on a rather healthy person weighing over 70 and dusting him to ground was something I had never seen before.

Tears rolled down Varun’s cheeks. Rachit was fuming still and somehow all of us apart from him started laughing. Vikash Sir had paid and come back by then and he too had seen the cat-fight and even he could not hold back his laughter.

We never went for the ‘party’, we all returned to home leaving Varun there who came back after some time. Some people chose to put the incident behind and did wish him luck when he left for good the other day. I was not one of them, neither was Ramesh nor Harpreet.

We have neither seen Varun nor heard from him for more than a year now as none of us kept in touch with him through any medium, my last memories of him being, Rachit standing over him after dusting him on the ground. We never came to find out whether he paid Vikash Sir the money for that air ticket. However, it would be a lie to say we did not miss him after that. For whenever in future we look back at our first two years in that city most memories will be of Varun making it all go wrong. The plans never got executed, we did often end up in places we did not want, but overall it did give us some unforgettable memories.

A Moron’s reply to Moron theory

2010-10-03T00:02:00.018+05:30

Hello All. Inexplicably some people had reported abuse against my blogs after the anonymous shit comments on one of my posts. Perhaps they were not happy with the moron theory. I kind of know who they are. So I contacted them for the reason and asked for an explanation as to what has offended them. They have sent me this letter in response. Some sections of this letter have been removed/redmarked to keep it politically correct (Also some comment modified to make it funny). Let me know your responses

Dear Abhi,

What the hell is wrong with you? Have you taken it on yourself to eliminate our sect? Do you really think you will get away so easily after demeaning us so badly? If all those sarcastically poisonous comments to anything we did post for attention on Facebook were not enough, you decided to come up with something called Moron theory. I decided to let it go, when you posted something here at http://bakwaswani.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/the-moron-theory-part-1/ but just when I visited this page today and saw that this page has some sixty odd hits, I know I had to stop it. Just then I also saw something written here at http://bakwaswani.blogspot.com/2010/09/bangalomorons-study-of-different-type.html and that was it. I know whom were you hitting at. I had tried to warn you by posting comments as anonymous on http://bakwaswani.blogspot.com/2010/08/this-is-for-independence.html but you insulted me there as well. Now your blog’s time has come, as now officially I and my moron-full family will be reporting abuse to your blog.

Yes, you people might have mocked at my family, a family which is not based on relations of blood, but a common thread of ridiculousness that is deeply rooted into our blood. World has conspired against us but this family has continued. We had known your intent all along ever since you created the character named “Varun Shyamak”, who, which any moron can see, is not one character but a culmination of all characters we represent. And now when you say you are working on his farewell, we know what you actually mean.

After all what is the thing that you are so pissed about? Why do you get so agitated whenever we post some status message stating “what have we eaten today”, “What color chaddi are we wearing today”, “what are we reading” , “what nail polish have we applied” , or any philosophy we get from Google or whenever we post our awesomely irritating photos? Why do you put an agonizingly irritating witty remark on those and thereby leading to everyone lose track of original issue? Can’t you see how much time and energy we spend each day to make our lives more Facebook worthy? Don’t you see this is the only space we get the attention we really deserve? What is your problem with us posting “looking hot/sexy/beautiful/gorgeous” to every disgustingly ugly photo one of our temporary rakhi sisters (as long as they are seeing someone else) upload on Facebook? Why should we say to her that you look ugly and lose the chance of upgrading her from our rakhi sister/facebook friend/friend to our girlfriend? If you don’t like it why don’t you delete your facebook account and go back to your fucking miserable life?

And what the fuck is your problem with Bangalore? Isn’t it one of the nicest cities in India? Agreed that the traffic sucks, the food is not great, rented houses are overpriced, and there are a lot of dogs and by dogs I don’t mean the ones you insulted for wearing the ID card after office hours. What harm does it cause to you if we wear ID card after office? Even though sucked and miserable look are enough to indicate that one works for a Software company, still ID card is a great value add to the otherwise unvalued persons. Have you ever heard of a term called ‘impression management”? If not, just google for it and find what it means and why it is so important to have a correct impression management. If you have something important it is utterly important to flaunt it to death. If the ID card of an MNC is the only impressive thing present in your life it is not but mandatory to show it to the world. You never know when a chick may just come to talk to you for uploading her resume for a position in your company. Don’t tell me that you haven’t received friend requests from random chicks and it had turned out that they just wanted reference for a job in your company. While getting such requests on Social networks are useless, they may lead to bigger things if it happens in real world and so there is no harm in being prepared.

Have you looked at yourself when you are walking in public places, having your both hands in your pockets and an arrogant look into your eyes, sporting an ugly unshaven look, looking angry and amused at everything around you and at the same time plotting how to put it into your blog? What is your anger about? Why can’t you bear anyone not giving you way? I agree footpaths are narrow and people standing on them cause problems. But have you ever imagined one of the persons standing on these footpaths can be the next Newton who at that time might be working on an algorithm of physics. Why do you find it funny when people wear sunglasses when it is raining or in the dark? Don’t you know how much one pair of Fast Track sunglasses cost? So, how can you even expect someone who has spent a fortune to buy himself a pair of sunglasses to wear it only when sun is out? Those people wearing skin tight sleeveless clothes and walking as zombies also belong to this category. They have spent so much time and money hitting the gym and also consumed certain non advised medicines to get those biceps and that abs. So it is only fair to flaunt that even if it requires walking as a robot. Noone, not even Raju Srivastava, has a right to mock them. And why do you always prefer to use the term “Man U, Rooney, Chelsea shit” for English Premier League? FYI, Man U and Chelsea are names of two clubs and Rooney is a player. So this grouping is totally lame. Do you really think that EPL is just some club Football season that one should see at home and not flaunt about it at all the places and let the whole world know about it? In reality showing the world that you love EPL is more important than actually watching the game. It is something every youngster has to watch to give himself a feeling of being cool. Unless you watch it, how will you join the big leagues? If you don’t watch it then you may be considered a villager. So take my advice and start wearing those jerseys and at least keep track of the scores. You don’t necessarily have to understand football to talk about EPL. And also you do not need to recognize each and every player name. Just remember Rooney, Ronaldo, Messi, Man U, Barca, Chelsea, Madrid and you are started. Always talk about either Chelsea or Man U but not both. Once you swear your allegiance to one of these clubs and post the scores everywhere just see the increase in your popularity. Your blog will have more followers once you post a wallpaper of Man U or Chelsea club photos.

And ,if all these were not enough you have also pissed off girls and branded them as Rakhi Sawants. What is so wrong with girls wearing something that does not suits them? The fake ascents, the fake walking styles, the monstrously exaggerated expressions, the cynical use of terms “how cute” and “how sweet” are all secondary and why don’t you just ignore these and focus on important stuff. Have you forgotten the story of that girl you almost turned into girlfriend but missed out once you mocked her over her obsessison with soft toys? Girls should be allowed to be infinitely stupid and you don’t even try to make them intelligent else guys like me will be at infinite loss.

Coming back to Facebook again, why does every cause invite pisses you to the edge? Cause invites are a great way to give you some popularity. In this way you don’t need to move your ass out of your chair to make a change. So now rather than doing candlelight vigil and risking mosquito bite leading to dengue, you simply need to join a page and in a minute you are a reformer. Don’t you see Chetan Bhagat has turned into a 10% reformer by simple tweeting and writing blogs. Don’t you want to do something for your country? Why did you not join the page requesting to “delete Fuck India” page? Why did you not join the cause to make one million flags fly on Facebook on August 15th? And to add to the insult when one of my brothers in arm invited you to join these causes you removed him from your friend’s list after giving him a piece of your mind and then went ahead to write "this is for independence" mocking this cause. Do you realize by removing so many people from your friend list how many enemies you have ended up creating?

My family will not take it lying down. You do not realize as to whom you have pissed. You are alone in this fight and I have a big family to back me, a family that has stood the test of time and has been together for past five years and more; a family that has survived all conspiracies and has never shirked from cutting other’s legs to make ourselves look taller. We demand an immediate and an unconditional apology, not only from you but from all your readers who read all those craps you wrote and had commented and/or liked it. In case we don’t get it, beginning from now on, each and every member of my family will abuse report on your blog unless we get it dead and buried. Don’t take this lightly else you will not even have time to regret it.

Thanking you!
Yours faithfully,
Gladdened Rimjhim Kumar,
Chief Secy, Immortal Cantt. Parivaar,
Suraj Nagar, Bangalore
bakchdikulelispecial@gmail.com
(Branches available in Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad )
(We are hiring for entry into the family, send in ur CVs)

The Bangalomorons --- A study of different type of morons found in Bangalore

2010-09-10T20:07:00.011+05:30

I am still working on the story of Farewell of Varun Shyamak. Till then there is another post making fun of some people in Bangalore. Don't take the post seriously but just enjoy the bakwas

I had initially covered Facebook Moronity coefficient of people at http://bakwaswani.wordpress.com/ as Moron theory Part I. Now going a step further I have been studying some morons in real life, that is, the ones who carry their Moronic activities whenever they walk on streets. Having lived in Bangalore, which is undoubtedly, one of the most moron-full cities in India, I decided to scan the streets and see what kinds of Morons are there who walk this city. On rigorous analysis, I shortlisted some categories in which the morons found this city can be broadly categorized. Now the boundaries of these categories are not rigid, but these are fuzzy boundaries. One moron can belong to more than one category.
Now before continuing further, let me first clarify that I don’t hate Bangalore (don’t love it either) and have nothing against my fellow Bangaloreans and hurting anyone of them is last thing I will want (though it is still on the list).
So here is the list of categories that research has found.
1.The Buffaloes: These morons are worse than the buffaloes. Already the city is cramped, with a hell lot of traffic and footpath are as narrow as they can get, leaving very little space to walk, and then you have these people who for some reason stand aimlessly right in the middle of sidewalks or footpath. Add to it, they have no intention to give way to anyone who is in a hurry. Any request like ‘excuse me’ is ignored by these morons and they will simply turn their ass towards them. You either have to leave the footpath and walk on the road or, if you are one like me, literally shove them away. Even buffaloes move out of the way when you shoo them away, but these morons, never. To deal with them, simply stick your elbow with a little force just under their rib cage or your knee on the back of their ball and socket joint as you walk past them, then simply turn back and raise your arm in apology as if it was not done intentionally.

2.The Pet Dogs: These people always have an ID card hanging like a dog’s collar even when they are not in office. FFS! The ID card that company provides you is meant for security purposes, and there is no law stating that you need to wear it even after you are out of your office. Just because you may be working like a dog (no pun intended) in your office does not mean you need to actually show the world that you are a dog. Why the hell does one need to wear his ID card before office when he is sitting in a cheap (once again no pun intended) roadside eatery eating that idly floating in a river of sambar with the white thing made of grated coconut? Why the hell you need to wear it while you are having dinner? Aren’t your clothes decent enough to avoid the embarrassing situation of someone confusing you to be the waiter? Or do you think it is really so cool to work for a company like Oracle, IBM or Accenture in a city where every Tom, Dick and Harry works for a MNC, that you want to show off so badly? Really? I don’t think so, this is just a moronity.

3.The Honkers: Just because the economic boom couple of year ago allowed you to earn much more money than you actually deserved and you ended up buying a Car or just because you father is a moron who spent his hard earned money to gift you a car at an age when you can’t even tie your belt correctly does not give you the right to think you are some sort of a prodigy who cannot bear anyone else driving on their lane. These morons just cannot stop honking anytime they see someone in front of them. The horn is meant to be an informative tool and not an irritating one. These morons don’t seem to get that they are not the only ones in the city who are in a hurry. Why the hell do you honk when the person in front of you can’t move as it is a traffic deadlock which is ever so common in this city? I have even seen some of them honking even when there is no one in front of them but only the traffic light is red. Do you think that the traffic light will somehow listen and understand that you are in a hurry and turn green? Best way to deal with such morons is that when you are right in front of them and they honk, simply turn down your engine, plug in your earphones and play a loud song. Let them honk till traffic clears, and then too don’t give them way. Drive as slowly and calmly as possible. Out of frustration he or she may stop honking and then he or she may hear others behind him honking too. Out of frustration he or she may bang his or her head on the steering wheel and get hurt (purpose solved) or in case if his or her moronity coefficient is even higher and he or she comes out to fight, simply say in an insulting tone “Oh you wanted way, I thought it’s your habit” and simply speed off.

4.The Footballers: This name is sort of a misnomer, as most morons in this category have never played Football in their life. They simply walk around streets shouting ManU, Chelsea and Rooney shit. Why in the world do you want to ensure that everyone around you know that you love football? Why the hell do you need to spend so much money to buy a jersey with a player’s name? Really, do you think that just by wearing a jersey bearing the name of Christiano Ronaldo, you can actually end up having half the number of girlfriends Ronaldo has had? Why can’t you simply sit in your house and enjoy the game? Why do you need to post it everywhere that you actually see EPL? Do you think that makes you look cool? No sir, you look like a moron who is just desperate for attention?

5.The Gyanis: This city has a lot of Gyanis who know everything ranging from launching a satellite to cooking lemon rice and for some reason they put extra effort on their vocal cords to teach everyone, not only their reluctant followers but to anyone 30 feet away from them. These are people who seem to know the solution of all the problems of the human race. Go anywhere in the city, a restaurant, a shopping mall, CCD, a bus, or even for a walk in a park, there will be at least one such moron less than four feet from you who will be talking how growth can be achieved, how children should be handled, how to make money, how economic policy should be, how can one deal with price rise, how can Manmohan Singh deal with Obama, how Dhoni should set the batting order, and also how world can be saved from destruction in 2012. Add to that they have a strong urge to pour out all the advice on you. Many of them may be your friends always saying “You should do an MBA?”, “You should not eat junk food”, “Avoid drinking”, “You need to change your job”, “You should try this beauty cream”, “You should hit the gym”, “You should …blah blah blah”. Give me a break. Why the hell can these people not improve their lives when they know so much?

6.The call boys and call girls (no pun intended, but totally avoidable): These are a set of people who for some reason cannot get the phone away from their ears, whether they are in a bus, in a mall, having food in a hotel or walking on a super crowded street during peak hours (don’t blame Junior Bacchan’s Idea ad for this). Even when they board a flight, the air hostess will virtally have to coax them to switch off their phones leaving them looking utterly miserable and as soon as the plane lands, first thing they will do is to pull out their phone as if they have almost missed a call from Malikka Sherawat. Add to that they seem to have a notion to make everyone around them aware that they are actually talking something important. In 5 minutes that you are around them you will come to find out, which friend of the guy is ditched by which girl, which friend of the girl has bought a new dress from which shop, which person has been fucked how much by his or her manager, which person has got which interview, who has used what super algorithm to solve which problem and the credit to which was taken away by his team lead, which person always feels he or she is a genius stuck with fools. Is your life so miserable that you don’t even have someone to talk your problems or secrets to in person that you are so driven to let everyone know how important you are? Or are you such a monster of a moron who for some reason still thinks you are one of the privileged few who has a mobile phone? I don’t have the answer.

7.The Crybabies: These are constant complainers, living miserably themselves and making everyone around miserable. They will complain as if it is their career to complain. They will wake up complaining that they don’t have a sound sleep, then complain about the weather, then complain of the fucking traffic (still valid). When they reach office, they will either complain that they don’t have enough work, or complain that they have too much work. They will always complain that their manager is a moron and all his colleagues are out to get them. They will complain that the food is bad, health is bad, and they don’t have enough money. When everything is right in their life they will complain that their life is monotonous. They will sit in Domino’s or Pizza Hut and complain that junk food is destroying younger generations. They will sit in CCD and complain that price rise has stuck them badly. They will spend hours in online chat rooms and (yes still there are few, who play asl game) then complain that they don’t have time. If your life is so miserable why the hell are you even living?

8.The Rakhi Sawants: Well girls are allowed to be a little stupid, but then some of them are abusing this privilege. Isn’t one Rakhi Sawant enough to take care of all the dramas? Why the hell are all of you turning into Rakhi Sawants? Why the hell do you always walk as you are always on the ramp? Why you need the fake ascent to speak? What is the need to fill up your house with soft toys? Do you think that just because the some guy says you are ‘gorgeous/hot/sexy/beautiful’ means you really are one of them? No absolutely not, we say that to every second girl. And also your perfume may be nice, but that does not mean you start marinating in it.

9.The Smoke Chimneys: Well if you want to smoke, take a cigarette, go to your house and smoke your ass out. Why the hell do you do it in public places? It has become almost impossible to stand anywhere in the city, without passive smoking. Every day I walk from office to home, I gulp in so much of their bloody smoke for they are standing outside their respective offices blowing away. At times I feel like snatching their cigarette, and stuff it in their ass, burnt side pointing towards them. Do you think it is such a cool activity that must you do it in front of everyone? If you want to die, go and die alone. Why take others down with you?

10. The Rockers There are people who have an agenda, that if they hear rock music, everyone should know about it. As long as it is restricted to wearing Jerseys, stuffing an I-POD or it's poor cousin to the ears, and walk with a swagger, these are bearable, but what the hell is playing it so loudly when they are at home causing utter pain to everyone in the rocker's locality. These are people who can't seem to go to sleep without waking everyone else up.

Well that’s all the categories I have currently found out. Off course, with a little more research, we can come up with more categories, and also each category can be further subdivided into smaller sun-categories. Soon we may find an algorithm to decide a person’s membership value in each of these fuzzy sets. Well moronity is not a crime, so they cannot be driven out of the city, and as a result city cannot be cleaned of these morons. But then nothing is more satisfying than insulting these morons, so never, I say never, miss a chance to insult them.

P.S. If you are reading this and are also a moron, avoid negative comments for you will be insulted and even if you post as anonymous I will expose who you are for I have a stats counter which tells where are my visitors from.

This is for 'Independence'

2010-08-15T20:33:00.005+05:30

Ok. First things first. This is not a story. There are no Varun Shyamaks and no other morons out here. I have been too crunched to think for the past couple of month, so I can’t form a story to share my opinions that I have got used to doing. And even though today I am not in a position to sound sarcastic when I want to sound bitter, I wanted to write this. I wanted to write this even though my life is too burdened at this time with the ‘more important’ stuff, the stuffs that you require to do even though you despise them. For today is our independence day, the one of the few days that reminds us that we are Indians and that we are free.
So I woke up today and as a usual routine logged into Facebook and saw a lot of people have waved flags on the facebook, some of them had posted poems and some due to maybe a lack of time to google such poems or anecdotes had just posted a “Jai Hind”. I just pondered over it, as to what I should do to show that even I care about the Independence day. Unable to find a way I decided to not do it, as I logged into office network to do some pending work even though it was a Sunday and there is no way an Indian employee will be paid more for putting in an extra day or even an extra hour. But there was no relief as people kept pinging me on gtalk wishing me happy Independence Day and then suddenly I started getting a hollow feeling. I started feeling that I am not a ‘true’ Indian for I have neither updated my status, nor have I joined a page asking facebook to delete the page “Fuck India” created by “true” Pakistanis, nor did I joined a page promoting a social cause, and till then I haven’t even ‘waved the flag’. I waited for the feeling to go away, but it didn’t. So I decided to walk out and go to a restaurant alone, even though it felt awkward. When I walked out I saw a biker standing and having a tricolor flag made of paper installed just above is headlight. I wanted to point him that this is a disrespect of the tricolor and if you want to have a flag on your vehicle, it must be hoisted on a stick 1 at least one foot above your headlight as the rule says, but then I did not. As I moved further I saw a car which had a tricolor spread like a mattress on its bonnet. I thought it was ridiculous but again I didn’t say a word. Then there came a procession of pampered ‘dudes’ who till yesterday could easily be seen around wearing a English football club jersey and shouting ManU, Chelsea, Rooney and Barca shit, who were driving a car probably gifted by their parents, and shouting ‘Bharat mata ki jai’ and waving the tricolors some of them even holding it upside down. I wanted to ask them do you even understand what three colors symbolize, but again I didn’t.
When I reached the restaurant, the ever polite waitress told me that they have a special Independence day buffet, and looked at me slightly incredulously when I told her that I wanted a table for ‘one’. However, before starting I just wanted to see what was special about that buffet. So I browsed over once, and just when I reached the desserts section I saw a large cake which was formed like the tricolor and also had the chakra in between and some parts of it had already been eaten and then I saw that even the pastries had three colors same as our tricolor. I wanted to shout, I wanted to tell the owners of that Chinese restaurant to fuck off from my country if they cannot respect our symbols. But then I simply walked off the restaurant (after considering taking a pic and posting it on facebook so that there is a discussion) and went straight home and didn’t leave till now, planning and plotting how I too can show that I am a true Indian. Just then it dawned upon me that I have just done that what most true Indians do. We just see things and talk about them and do nothing about them. I could have got the biker or the car owner to correct things. I could have pointed the disrespect shown by the Chinese restaurant, but I didn’t. So now the feeling has slightly evaporated. Tomorrow, I will again go to office and work for the Americans and I might totally forget about it until maybe republic day, so I decided to post this today.
I have still not ‘waved the flag’ on facebook, but as long as we have the great Indians who wave the flag on facebook, join patriotic pages and invite people, tweet what great leaders have already said and people who write blogs about it (Chetan Bhagat has solved all problems of India in one two thousand word long blog post!!!!!) we don’t need to worry for things will correct itself when it wants to.

Varun Shyamak and his Musical Mistake

2010-06-07T09:30:00.006+05:30

Hello All. It seems like the Varun Shyamak is really catching up. The last story was read by more than 100 people and when you consider that when I started this series there were only a total of around 10 readers, it has gone a long way. Special thanks to Avinash Sir, Unmesh and Gaurav to originally come up with this idea of same character with different stories. In case this is your first visit to my blog you can know about Varun Shyamak after reading ‘Weird Weird Varun Shyamak’ or other stories started with the title beginning from Varun Shyamak. Whatever Varun Shyamak does leads to a comical situation. Just imagine what will happen if one fine day he wakes up and wants to be the next rock star and play the Guitar. If you can imagine it, do read on :

Yes, Varun Shyamak did this. He did it. He had just done something that could make all my theories on him being one of the sickest misers on the face of the earth go wrong. If Ram Gopal Verma starts making good movies, Chetan Bhagat starts writing like Jeffery Archer or Zayed Khan learns acting this would still be the most incredible thing to happen in this decade for Varun Shyamak had just bought a shining new Guitar, yes a first hand, shining new guitar from his own money. For a person who used to wear one underwear for 6 days and live the Sunday without it as long as the washed underwear dries in sun and who still used his school time water bottle to store water, buying a guitar is like a cosmic event that happens once in a millennium and it was not an electronic guitar but the one which works without electricity (I have no idea what this version is called). As we kept on looking incredulously at him for an instance and the guitar at the other, he had taken the guitar out, sat down on the stool with his legs crossed and was holding the guitar striking an expert guitarist pose.

He kept sitting in that pose looking outside the window for some 5 minutes without striking the wire. Finally someone, I don’t remember who it was, asked, “Varun! How come you got interested in Guitar?” He looked up as if he had just been woken up from a dream of Mallika Sherawat, gave a smile, looked in some other direction and after some 30 seconds replied “Music is just ‘cool’. People who can play an instrument specially the Guitar are considered very ‘cool’. True story!”

I am not sure of the validity of his statements but one thing I am pretty sure that these two words ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ (was originally kewl) have confused an entire generation of age group between 14 and 34 and made them do stuff which they would had not done in good sense under normal circumstances. Not very long ago these terms were only used for weather, food or other such stuff but now it is used to tag people as likeable or not likeable. So you have girls literally starving themselves to get a size zero, a number which we hated when we were in school, guys forced to smoke, to wear low waist jeans and branded boxers, forced to follow soccer leagues and shout Man U, Chelsea, Rooney shit and walk with a swagger with I-POD or a poor cousin of I-POD stuck to their heads and listening hard rock(no pun intended) music just for one particular reason and that is a feeling to be ‘cool’ and more precisely to be ‘like others’. Hitting the gym is no longer a way to stay fit but it is a means to the end of wearing skin hugging clothes and walk as if the whole body has been tied in bamboo sticks. To add to the confusion these terms do not have a clear-cut definition. To be like most others is ‘cool’ and to be different is also ‘cool’. Intelligent person can be called ‘cool’ or called a ‘nerd’; loud mouthed morons who talk with ‘fuck’ and ‘ass’ in every sentence can be called ‘cool’ too. Thus it gives rise to another set of people who do neither of the above mentioned things but look sane and sober even when they are drunk, for they feel that is the way to be ‘cool’ or the other reason is that either they are too lazy or too busy to hit the gym and walk like both legs running in opposite direction causing the body to sway in different directions. For them, social networking sites come to rescue. They will spend hours to find a suitable status update and then refresh the page every 5 seconds with the hope of a comment or a like and this process will repeat multiple times a day.

Varun Shyamak was no different in the fact that he wanted to be cool, but with Varun obsession is not a mere obsession but it transforms into desperation. He had done everything in his power to appear different or ‘cool’. Of course he was too miser to hit a gym or buy an I-Pod. For him the idea had been to sound intellectual and look intelligent. He was often seen carrying around magazines like Frontline, Business today, and Discovery channels journal or National Geographic journal and he managed to read at least one article which he would bring out at a later time in a public place but sadly enough none of heads would ever turn when he started whining of the new economic policy or how monkeys have a weaker heart. Of course he always had a copy of Debonair just under his pillow but fortunately he did not discuss its content in public. Then for some time he had turned into a facebook addict hoping this would get him the attention of opposite sex that he so desperately needed. He would update every minute details like “Getting late to work, but can’t find my shoe police”, “The traffic in this city sucks. The metro is becoming a must”, “Just screwed up at work. ****** boss is pissed up” and this would continue the whole day. However, he stopped it after some 3 weeks when he realized that he did not receive any ‘like’ or any ‘comment’ on his status. He had done everything in his power but he was as far from being ‘cool’ as Arjun Singh is from sanity. But now he has gone out of his league. He had spent more money that he had spent in an entire year preceding it on this instrument not because he wanted to learn it, but he wanted to look cool.

“Why don’t you play it?” said Rachit who had till now been eyeing the Guitar like a kid eyes a lollypop.

“I have learnt ‘Addicted’ on Youtube. Will you like to listen to it?” said Varun.

“Sure. Play it” said Saurav.

Varun placed the guitar in his lap, wiped the strings looking at them with the eye of an aesthete. He then put the straps on his shoulder and again held the Guitar like an expert, looked outside the window at some strange object as if praying at that divine object. We waited patiently for around 1 minute when he finally struck a note. What followed was 2 minutes of utter torture in which Varun closed his eyes and played a tone which in no way looked like addicted and with it he was also trying to sing ‘addicted’ in a fake accent. I had occasionally heard Anu Malik singing ‘Dekho Barish ho rahi hai’, I had seen Sunny Deol dancing and I had seen two Ram Gopal Verma movies in a single day, but I had never felt like throwing up like I did that day. And to add to that Varun seemed to be in no mood to stop.

I had had enough after those two minutes. I said “Ok Ok!!! Stop Now. Enough.” He stopped looked around probably expecting an applause. He waited for some more time and said, “You people want to listen ‘Kal ho na ho’, I learned to play that too and I know the full lyrics.”

“Varun! We know you are singing, you know you are singing. But, for neighbors it may appear that we are torturing you.” As soon as I said it Rachit got a fit of laughter attack. He held his stomach and started laughing hysterically and after some seconds he was sitting on the floor still laughing inconsolably while Saurav and Ramesh tried to pick him up laughing themselves while Vikash was chuckling silently.

Varun looked rather nonchalant even as others were bursting out. Finally the laughter resided and Ramesh said “It’s not bad yar! Tomorrow let’s say if he loses his job Varun can play this thing on roadsides and I am sure people will have to pay him to stop.” Listening to this Rachit got a relapse of the fit he just had and this time even Vikash Sir giggled.

Varun looked humiliated but either he had got used to it or he did not have balls to hit back, so he kept quiet and kept adjusting the Guitar in different position. Finally Vikash Sir said “Why don’t you join classes if you really want to learn it?” Vikash Sir always liked to play the big brother role to us and would always give advice on everything and we would generally take it without a second thought and mostly it turned out to be the right one. But then this was not Ramesh, Saurav or me, it was Varun. He said “No need to do that. You can learn it on Youtube. The classes charge around 1000 per month for only weekend course and it generally takes more than 6 months to learn it.” I looked at Ramesh and gave him a ‘here he goes’ expression.

Varun was not finished, “You see there was recently an article in The Week about a person who learned a lot of things on Youtube” Now Ramesh looked at me and gave me the ‘here he goes’ expression as Varun continued, “that man learned musical instruments, driving and lot of such stuff from Youtube. He also learned how to handle wife’s pregnancy by it.”

There was no point arguing him so I, Saurav and Ramesh slipped out to dinner silently leaving all of them to settle it among themselves. While on the way we met Harpreet who was returning after another long day at work. We informed him that Varun had bought a Guitar and he was shocked but then said, “Ha! He must have borrowed it from someone or stolen it.”

“No he showed us the bill and it was duly packed” Saurav informed.

“Someone must have gifted it to him” said Harpreet.

“Nai yaar!!! He has bought it. Remember only predictable thing about him is unpredictability” I said.

“How on earth do you come up with such remarks” said Harpreet and I just smiled back.

“Anyway, you people carry on. I had my dinner in the office canteen” he said and walked away.

We strolled around for an hour or so after dinner and came back around 9:30 and we saw Varun and Rachit sitting heads bent into Rachit’s laptop. When I reached closer I saw that they had opened Youtube and seeing the video of a man playing the Guitar and playing some unrecognizable tune. Varun was trying to imitate it and producing some different harmonics which only he and Rachit were able to understand. Ramesh shook his head and went out to balcony and lit his cigarette. I joined him there so did Harpreet, although both of us did not smoke. Suddenly, Dipti, the girl next door appeared on her balcony, seeing whom Ramesh threw his cigarette and adjusted his hair very subtly. I signaled her ‘hi’ and she smiled back with a ‘Hi’. Ramesh followed suit and got the same reply. Our interaction with her was limited to that ‘Hi’ only even though she was living here for last 6 months, as she lived with her family and her father was a retired Air Force Lieutenant, and we did not want to screw things up. She always seemed cheerful and was a perfect girl next door, not exactly gorgeous, but nice homely look and very beautiful eyes and she always wore Indian outfits. Whenever we looked at her she smiled back and always replied to our greetings, but then once Varun had tried it and she had straightway walked back inside. Well this wasn’t entirely her fault. Varun was not a jerk but often girls took a first look at him and drawn their conclusion that he is one of the biggest jerk available on this planet, for Varun always looked like contemplating and his eyes always wander in different directions and it appeared that he was always drunk and to add to that his tone of speaking is like he is instructing and not talking.

She stood there for quite some time seemingly enjoying the calm winds. Suddenly Varun came there with his new instrument. She was about to leave but she stopped and looked intently at the Guitar without saying any word. Varun behaved as if he had not seen her even as her eyes were fixed on the Guitar. Ramesh and I looked at each other as if saying to each other “Shit, it works.”

Varun also thought so and he started in a fake English accent sounding like a Tamil anna speaking Punjabi “You know Guitar is just Physics. You see when this string is struck it produces
harmonics and causes a resonance in wood. Now, if the harmonics are formed correctly it is music and if not it is noise. Isn’t it strange? Everything is Physics. Why don’t you people give it a try?”

“Varun, why don’t you play it? Play that song again.” Ramesh had caught him off guard.

“I have been playing it for more than an hour now. My fingers are hurting” Varun cooked an excuse and was still talking in his fake accent.

“Please Varun, just one song. Play the ‘addicted’ again. I insist” I said.

“Yar Jeet, it’s more than 10 P.M. and it is illegal to play it now.” He said and this time he forgot to speak in that fake accent.

We kept on requesting him and he kept on refusing. All the while Dipti looked very amused as if fighting to hold back her laughter and she left finally. Varun looked crestfallen but he did not say a word. We went back to our rooms to sleep feeling victorious.

Next morning while I was about to leave to office Varun stopped me, “Hey Jeet, Can you do me a favour?”

“Yes tell me.” I said knowing full well that this was not a good idea.

“In your way to your office there is some teacher named ‘Kajal’ who teaches music somewhere just near the Accenture building. Can you just find some information about it?”

I was getting late so I did not ask what made him change his mind and promised him that I will do that. However, I forgot totally about it while I was coming back and so when Varun asked me about it when he came back I had two options. One, tell the truth and two, make it fun. Truth that is not fun is useless. So I cooked up some facts. I told him, “Yes I found out by some students and she teaches very well, but she is very strict. Remember when you go there touch her feet and also before entering open your shoes. Remember, she has a very short temper. If you don’t do these things she will not take you as a student.”

“Oh is it? How about the fees?”

“She said that she will talk only to the student and she has many options available and you can choose which one you want.” I was going on making facts and he believed it. You may be having bitter feelings as you read this, but let me state this fact if I fool someone once then it is shame on me, twice then shame on the person whom I fooled and more than twice then you have to agree that either I am a genius or that person is dumb. So in both cases it is not me who was at fault when you consider what happened on the following Saturday.

The following Saturday I had woken up late and was slowly going through the daily routines when around 11 A.M Varun came to my room and asked “Hey Jeet! Can you do me a favor?”

I hate when people ask me this question. Of course, I CAN do the favor but what if I don’t WANT to do it, this question should be as ‘Will you do me a favor’ but anyhow I replied “What?”

He paused. Looked around and waited another 10 seconds to reply “I have asked Vikash Sir for his bike. As I don’t know how to drive can you drop me to the classes? I want you to come because you have already talked to madam. And I will pay for the petrol. I know you may not want to come by bus this early so I asked for bike.”

I had no intention to go but I could not miss seeing Varun touching the feet of the teacher and making her freak out. But there was a twist. It was a fact that even I did not know at that time and it was that the teacher was not Mrs. Kajal, and no no, it was not even Miss Kajal, but it was Mr. Kajal! I don’t know why some men keep names which sound girly, names like ‘Mehndi, Tulsi, Bindu, Anshu, Sonal and even Dimple.

So, as Varun said I took him there and parked the bike. He requested me to come in as well which I would have done anyway. I had drawn a mental picture of Varun going and touching her feet making her shocked. Varun did everything as explained by me. He opened his shoes and placed them aside, even as others walked by wearing their shoes and looking at him incredulously. He asked me to open mine but I said “I am not a student so why should I” fighting hard to hold back laughter.

When we went inside we saw a lady sitting in the center holding the guitar. She was wearing a traditional white Salwar Kameez and was sitting in the posture of a music goddess. We both had confused her to be the Kajal Madam. She looked much younger that what I had anticipated. She looked to be in her mid-twenties and was drop dead gorgeous with a pair of most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. I thought it would be even more fun and signaled him to touch her feet. Somehow Varun was idiot enough to do it even as he saw some twenty others not doing it.

The lady seemed aghast as Varun charged towards her with hands folded and as he bent down and even before he was able to touch her feet there roared a sound of a thundering slap and Varun’s spectacles were thrown away. Suddenly a lot of other students caught hold of him and the girl was complaining that he was misbehaving with her. People were calling call “Kajal SIR”. It was then that it dawned upon me that Kajal was the name of a man. Not sure what to do, I picked out the best option. I silently fled from there.

As I was about to start me bike and rush, I suddenly saw Dipti standing there. She waved me ‘hi’ and after looking around that her father or any guard was not there I moved my bike towards her and asked “Hey Dipti! What are you doing here?”

“I learn traditional dance here.” she said.

Suddenly the picture became clear to me as to why Varun bought a Guitar and why he chose this class. I silently laughed as again his master plan had gone begging.

“And Jeet what are you doing here?” she asked.

I was amazed that she knew my name; of course she may have overheard it just like we had overheard her name. “I came here to drop my roommate who wanted to learn Guitar.”

“You mean that jerk guy who keeps making strange faces” she said rather innocently.

“What! Why do you think so?”

“I don’t know. He always keeps looking with …eh … with those eyes” she said widening her eyes and drawing her nose forward slightly.

“Ya, but those are his normal eyes” I said and smiled and also looked back to confirm he has not come back. She laughed at this remark and I asked “Hey how are you going back?”

“I will take the 335E” she said pointing at bus stop.

I said “Hey you want to come with me. I am going straight home. If you don’t mind I will drop you.” She hesitated and I added “Don’t worry you can pay me the same amount you pay for that bus. You see, I am a little hard on cash” I said and winked. She laughed and sat back on the bike and I added “Don’t worry I had met just two accidents and in both cases the person sitting behind did not die” and to which she replied, “There is always a first time” and then added “but you drop me some blocks before my house, otherwise, you don’t know my father.”

I did the same. We talked some stuff on the way and I let multiple calls from Varun go unattended in the meantime. She gave me her number as well but I never called back as I was petrified by her father although Ramesh and I sent her a few messages in a week, and we stopped it as soon as she SMSed that her dad asked who were ‘Rama’ and ‘Abhilasha’ the names with which she stored Ramesh’s and mine number respectively all the time.

Varun came back in the evening and I expected that he will be pissed at me and we will have a big fight. But he pulled me aside and simply asked me not to tell anyone about it. He also recounted what all had happened after I ran away. Kajal sir had come and Varun had explained him the event and since he found it rather amusing, they let him go. Also he told me that that girl had apologized after that, a fact whose validity I am not very sure of. I spent some time laughing about what had happened. Varun looked angry but he did not offend me. I think I also apologized to him about what happened although I didn’t really mean it.

Next day Varun sold back his Guitar at 70% of the cost he had bought it and then he never bought any musical instrument again. I felt slightly guilty for it but then the whole event was too funny to feel bad for him for a long time. I promised him I will not talk about it to any living soul and I did keep that promise. Anyhow I had never said anything about writing about it for I have to write about it, for it gave me one of the biggest lessons in life, which was ‘never assume that names have a gender’. Had I known Kajal was the name of a man the whole story could have been entirely different. But then great mistakes are always born from small mistakes. True story.

Varun Shyamak and the Haunted House

2010-05-01T02:10:00.007+05:30

Hello All. Off late whatever I am writing is turning controversial whether it is the last story or even a simple facebook message against snobbery and hypocrisy.
So, I decided to go back to writing stories involving Varun Shyamak, the character which has become mine and I hope a lot of yours’ favorite. In case you don’t know him, you can read about him in the previous stories “Weird, Weird Varun Shyamak” and “Varun Shyamak and his theory of job satisfaction”. However this story is an independent one except the characters. So it is not mandatory to read them but in case you want to know the characters better. Ghosts, supernatural beings etc. are some things we often discuss, but with Varun Shyamak it can go weirdly wrong. Writing about ghosts is more difficult than seeing a horror movie. Reading a little about para science led me to such case studies that virtually had me terrorized and tormented. I won’t spoil the story with more details. So, read the story and leave your comments. (And if somebody’s name is Varun or Arun or Tarun, etc. I am very sorry to use a similar name and please do not expect any more apologies).

It had been more than three weeks since something weird has happened, which is like an eternity if you happen to have a person like Varun Shyamak living in your house. Everything was just going normal, except for at times, Varun will suddenly smile at some strange object or laugh all of a sudden (it was still normal for most of us) but mostly he looked disconnected as if living in a different world and had to be constantly pulled out of it by someone. But then no one was complaining. “Sometimes monotony is better than adventure” Saurav had said when I notified him of the time that has passed since Varun’s last antic. But deep down inside we all knew that it was just the lull before the storm, and in fact the more time that passes like this the bigger the storm will be, and thus we were not surprised at all when we were woken up in wee hours in the morning to the harsh cries of Varun.

The IPL 2 season was on at that time and on that night Mumbai Indians had famously choked against Warne’s Rajasthan Royals and lost the game by 2 runs despite needing just 4 of last over with three wickets left and as expected we had started to smell things fishy. It is strange and funny that how amazingly good we are at conspiracy theory. We kept on talking for hours about the game. Varun had been silent this far, looking outside the window at some strange object and intermittently smiling. We ignored him as we had got used to it. We did not realize that it had been 1 A.M. and all of a sudden Varun said “Guys!”, and then he paused for some 10 seconds. Looked outside the window again then looked in and said “Its 1 in the night. Don’t you people have office tomorrow?”

“Yes, it’s better to catch up with some sleep. Guess it’s time we say good night” I said as I got up to head to my bedroom.

“Wait Jeet! I’ll come too” said Ramesh as he too got up and walked towards me and added “Good night all. Sweet Dreams Varun!” and winked back.

Harpreet, Ramesh and I had our rooms on the first floor, while Varun, Rachit, Saurav and Vikash lived on ground floor. We all moved to our rooms after wishing each other good night.

I went to my room, cleaned some mess that was lying on my bed and went to sleep. I had hardly slept when I heard a loud shout from ground floor. It was Varun crying out frantically. I initially thought I was hallucinating and tried to go to sleep again but then I heard him again. I got up, put on my shirt and rushed downstairs and on way I also met Ramesh who did not even cared to put on his shirt and rushed in his vest. When we reached Varun’s room we saw Varun sitting on the edge of his bed, his back to the wall, breathing heavily and carrying a horrified expression on his face. Vikash was sitting by his side looking sleepy and weary. Saurav and Rachit were standing nearby simply looking at Varun. Saurav was yawning while somehow Rachit looked fresh and he had got enough time to get his spectacles on. After a while Vikash asked “What happened, Varun?”

“Don’t talk to me. Please, don’t talk to me” yelled Varun, all the while having the most animated face and moving his head vigorously in to and fro motion.
Ramesh and I looked at each other, and to say the least, Ramesh looked irritated. Harpreet joined us soon. All of us were confused, as to why Varun was shouting. Even though he was Varun Shyamak, one always believed that there may be a limit to his weird activities, and then this whole thing looked like a mystery. His vocal cords may have just woken up the whole colony and now he wasn’t willing to talk. Harpreet picked up a bottle of water and passed it to Varun who gulped it down in no time. After some 5 minutes of utter confusion and heartburn Ramesh asked “Dude, what’s wrong?”

Varun looked fixedly out of the door for some fifteen seconds and said, “Well let’s go to sleep. Let us talk about this tomorrow.”

If I had a camera I would have captured everyone’s expressions at that precise moment. Everyone had a different expression to show the frustration. Saurav simply frowned and shrugged his shoulder and looked away. Ramesh looked as if he had just been robbed of some prized procession. I clenched my teeth and could feel my body get stiff with anger. Harpreet nostrils blew out a fume of anger and his eyes looked blood shot red and wide. Vikash simply placed his hand on his face and shook his face suggesting a “no, not again”. In all this Rachit had not forgot his sense of humour, he was desperately trying to hold back his laughter. He somehow managed to see the lighter side of everything, a quality which eludes majority of this world’s people.

After waiting some time Ramesh said “For fuck’s sake Varun, you woke all of us at …” he looked at wall clock and continued, “3 A.M. and now say you will talk about it tomorrow. Tell us what happened.”

“Seriously, you don’t want to hear it now” Varun replied.

“What is it? Tell us” I said.

Varun shivered slightly, he looked towards the door and after some 10 seconds said “Our house is haunted!!!”

When he heard this Rachit started laughing as if he got possessed by some witch craft and by god he laughed loudly. I don’t know what funny thing he found in ghosts but he continued “He He He He” despite all of us signaling him to keep quite. Saurav slightly pushed him and told “Shut up!” all the while trying desperately to hold back his laughter. Rachit paused, pulled a stool and sat down and to our horror started laughing again. He finally stopped after some 2 minutes. His laughter had suddenly lightened the environment. All of us were struggling to hold back our laughter. Ramesh had drawn his lips inside and curved his mouth slightly to cover his expressions.

After Rachit had stopped, Varun said “It’s not funny. I swear our house is haunted. It has ghosts of two girls.”

Suddenly Rachit started laughing again and this time even Vikash and Saurav can’t hold back. Harpreet was smiling, while Ramesh and I were chuckling silently. It continued for some time till Varun said again, “Guys, it is not funny. I swear there are two spirits in our house. Believe me, I saw two girls who came and were knocking my door and then they walked towards Vikash’s door and knocked them too” He shivered again and sweat beads were forming on his head.

“Were they hot?” Ramesh asked and Rachit was about to laugh again before Vikash gave us all a stern look and somehow Rachit controlled. Vikash then place his hand on Varun’s shoulder and said “You must have dreamt it”

“No I saw them. They were chit-chatting and laughing. One was tall and the other was short.” Varun said.

“Varun, in all fairness, why would the girls come to you and Vikash? Vikash is already married and you are well … Varun Shyamak, and also when there are people like me, Saurav and Jeet, already in the house. What say Jeet?” Ramesh winked and put out his knuckles towards me and even though he mentioned me last in list I still bumped my knuckles on it.

“Shut up!” Vikash told us and said “Varun, you must have dreamt. You are reading all these parascience journals for all past week. It has got cluttered up in your mind”

Parascience is a branch of study that aims to define the paranormal activities using scientific tools and techniques. Ghosts, spirits, witch-craft and black magic are some topics which have been beyond any human reasoning and logic. There are people who simply accept it, some simply deny it and then there are people who simply question it. The work of dealing with these was mostly left to mystics and godmen till the previous century, but then some scientists with the help of some research universities (Stanford University is believed to be the first one) decided to make a living out of it and thus started the study of these phenomenon sometimes in late 19th century. However many scientist still question the methods and basis of these research and even the status of parascience as science has also been disputed as there has been no conclusive evidence despite of over a century of research. But then people often find discussions over these activities very enchanting.

Over the past week Varun had got very much involved reading about parascience. He was picking up journals and web-postings of such experience and each day he will come to haunt us with a new scary story ranging from a unfinished love to a brutally killed young girl. He had once given us 10 ways in which one can see ghosts. None of us ever tried it. One of the weirdest ways however was the one he told for girls and he claimed that it always works and had been accepted by discovery channel as well. It was like “take a big mirror. Exactly at midnight, light the room with very very dim light. Light a candle in front of the mirror. Sit infornt of it and comb your hair and say three times "BLOODY MARY" while gazing into the mirror and u can see a girl with blooded clothes in it”. I asked many of my female friends to try it but none of them did. I once asked him “Why it is that only a few can see the ghost while some cannot?” and Varun gave us all a detailed explanation. He said “You see human sense organs are imperfect. We can see only certain frequencies”, he gave some more details about what frequencies we can see and what we cannot and added, “Now these paranormal sightings emit certain frequencies which our brain cannot decode. However with some people and in under some circumstances, as in some disease or abnormal condition our brain is able to see and decode these frequencies. Some people have trained their brain to decode these, while some parasychologists have certain equipments to measure these frequencies. There are ways by which you can train your brain to decode these”

I hated talk about waves and frequencies as these very concepts had almost stopped my degree but then that is getting away from the story. The point is Varun had for some reason got too much involved in this topic and now he was claiming that he has seen not one but two ghosts. I don’t know whether he had just managed to decode the frequencies or he was just hallucinating or he was simply doing this to attract attention. Knowing him any possibilities could not have been ruled out.

“Guys I did not dream. There are two spirits in our house” Varun was pleading.

“Ok! Let us talk about this tomorrow. I suggest we move on to our rooms. And Varun if you are still afraid, you can sleep with the lights on” Vikash suggested.

I wanted to ask “How come sleeping with lights on going to help. You can just see something more clearly with lights and I don’t think one will want to see ghosts more clearly” but I did not.

We moved back to our rooms to catch some sleep. It took some time for all of us to go to sleep. Even though it came from Varun Shyamak the idea of having two ghosts watching over your shoulders is a scary one. I don’t know when I managed to go to sleep but when I woke up to my harsh alarm clock my head was spinning and I had a strong desire to go to bed again. However, I got up and went to work but was unable to concentrate the whole day. But then it was a Friday, and no one noticed it. On a Friday everyone looks in a mood to not work. Some are plain tired after four grueling days; some are overwhelmed with the thought of a great weekend ahead, while some are grumpy as they might have to work in weekend. I don’t know which category I belonged to that day. May be I was just worried that this may be the beginning of another Varun drama and as it turned out I was not entirely wrong.

I hung around with some other colleagues for some time after the office and finally returned home around 9 P.M. only to find Varun sitting on his bed while others surrounded him. He was still looking scared and there seemed to be a heated conversation going on. I ignored them and went to my room changed and then came back and pulled a stool to sit besides Ramesh who was looking bored and disconnected. I asked him what had happened, and he said “Same old crap, this asshole is still saying he saw the apparitions and saw them again in early morning at around 4:30. Now he had also found out from neighbors that some 6 girls used to live in this house some 10 years ago. Two of them named Pinki and Preeti had died as a bus had rammed their scooty from behind while they were on way to work, following which others had left the house. Now he says that their spirits are in this house”

“When did you find out all this?” I asked Varun.

“Last week. I am telling you this house is haunted”

“Now that settles it. You found about this before you claimed to see them. You are just a victim of chemical imbalance bole to chemical locha of Lage Raho Munna Bhai. You have been thinking about this all long and then you’re over obsessed with paranormal activities. You just saw what you wanted to see.” I said

“No, I am telling you I did see them not once but twice.”

“FFS Varun, we are living in this house for almost a year now, and a lot of people have lived in this house in the meantime. Why do you think their spirits will come back all of a sudden to haunt us?” I said

“Maybe they were always there and we did not feel them. We might have felt them but our ignorance comes in way of fact. If your cup is always full and if you try to add a little more liquid into it, the liquid will leak out. To understand or learn something you first need to empty your cup. We would simply have thought that we are dreaming or hallucinating and slept. And you know I told you about imperfectness of our senses. First you need to get the doubts and pre conceived notions out of your mind to understand this.” Even though he was scared he was still at his intellectual and philosophical best.

“In that case ignorance is bliss. I would rather not understand something which makes me scared and miserable.” I said.

“Jeet I think what Varun is saying may be not totally baseless” said Saurav and added “Now that I learn it I realize how many times I have heard footsteps or my stuffs getting misplaced and sometimes I have even heard sounds of giggling and at times even sound of payal. But each time I dismissed it as some random noise coming from outside or to my dreams.” Said Gaurav

I had heard something called ‘mass hysteria’ but I believed it happened only with masses but now I was seeing a completely different picture. Till now we were happy in our house and in fact had a lot of fun in that apartment but now with a little knowledge people had turned apprehensive. Suddenly Rachit also said he had also heard all this and, probably for the first time since I had known him, Varun Shyamak had got a lot of support.

“Let’s go for a walk. We’ll talk it over.” Said Harpreet.

We went out for a walk. Varun was behaving erratically and Rachit and Saurav remained silent. I pulled Ramesh aside and asked “What is wrong with them? They are over reacting. I hope they don’t ask us to change the house.”

“Abe yar, even I don’t get it. We have lived here for so long. How come all of a sudden this?” he said.

“Varun has got hallucinating and now somehow he has got everyone believing stuff that might not even exist” Harpreet added.

I repeated Harpreet’s comment to Vikash, who was anyway about to vacate this house once he got his family in town. He said he had not felt anything but he could not rule out the possibilities.

We were back to square one when we reached home. I tried to talk them out of it “See guys, even if their spirits are there it is pretty sure that they don’t want to hurt us. We have lived here for almost a year and had the time of our life here. Nothing wrong has happened. So let’s just live as we used to” I knew this would not work and it did not. No one will like to live in a haunted house even if the ghost are that of Mahatma Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln.

“No man! We never know whether they want to hurt us or not. It’s very risky to take a chance.” Varun said.

“Get your head out of your ass Varun. Just because of your baseless fear, you are willing to leave the apartment. And I don’t even believe that there is a ghost or rather two ghosts in our apartment.” Ramesh said.

“I am not saying that we leave the apartment, but we can at least work to get the spirits out of our house” said Varun.

“What? Are you serious? Varun, if the ghosts are there do you think you will go and say them to leave and they’ll leave” Ramesh said.

“They must be here for some purpose. If we can find that and do that for them they will leave the house and go to their world”

“First of all I don’t think there is any ghost in house, and then there is no way to find out” said Harpreet.

Varun looked around and said “Yes there is.”

“What?” I asked

He waited as if he wanted to have some build up to his answer. He looked out of window as if asking some divine answer and looked back and said, “PLANCHIT”

There was a moment of silence. Perhaps no one wanted to comment. Planchit or Planchette is a technique to interact with spirits. I had seen it in movies where some college kids try it out just for fun, lighting some candles, placing their fingers on a coin and chant something to call a spirit, finally spirit comes and coin starts moving. In each movie something goes wrong and tragedy follows.

Finally Saurav said, “No we are not doing that. It is very risky. I don’t want any black magic here”

“This is not black magic Saurav, it is science. I have read about it and I can do it if some of you help me” said Varun.

“No Varun! Saurav is right. It is very risky. Bad things can happen. I will not advise doing this.” Said Rachit and this time he did not laugh. I had not seen him serious any time before this.

“But guys, this is the only way out. We have to solve this problem, we just cannot wait and watch” Varun was not in a mood to let it go. I had a wild thought that Varun had conjured up all this just to make us do planchit but knowing him I didn’t think he could have strategized so much for it as he would simply had talked us into it. I was still not sure whether something was really wrong and to me it still seemed it was Varun’s figments of imagination, his tired brain was showing him what he wanted to see. Ideal thing to do would have been to take him to a psychiatrist, but now he had also infected Saurav and Rachit.

Saurav said “No. No such stuff here. Why don’t we just leave this house and look for another one? I am afraid and I am not ashamed to admit it. I don’t want to come in way of spirits” all the while he looked agitated, something which none of us had seen before. This idea of leaving the house led to one of the most bitter and biggest arguments our group had ever had. After some time I think we also lost track of time and space. While Harpreet, Ramesh and I were firm that there was nothing wrong in this house other three except Vikash, who was not willing to take sides, were convinced that house was haunted. I don’t know how long it went on when finally Harpreet said “Well let’s do it then. Let’s do the Planchit. Varun I will help you.”

There was some silence, following which Ramesh said, “Ya I’m with you too. What say Jeet?”

This question had left me stumped. I had no intention to get involved with spirits. I was afraid but admitting it was going against what I was standing for, and moreover it would not have gone with my ‘dare it all’ image which I had worked so hard to obtain. I was sure same was the case with Ramesh. Most people who are fearless are not actually fearless but just that they don’t want to show their fear to lesser mortals who look upon them. Rachit and Saurav had silently given their consent but they made it clear they will not be a part of it, but they will just sit and watch. And it was on…

Varun had now turned instructive. This was the moment I am sure he would have cherished. He had wanted this feeling of importance for a long time now. He wanted a moment when he can instruct us and we would actually listen to him. Many a time he had tried and failed, miserably, as whenever he had tried to overrule us in any field there would come out someone better than him in that. But now no one was interrupting him and he was continuing in a very serious and stern tone. As he went “Listen, this is a very high risk technique, so I need all of you to concentrate. Please don’t take it lightly as it may lead to something horrible. This act has to be performed between 1 A.M to 2 A.M as that is the time when air is at its calmest. Now its 12:00 A.M, so we can start in one hour. All we will need is few candles, a few incense sticks, a plain A4 (I don’t know why he mentioned A4) sheet of paper, and a coin. We can make the board only just before we start it. We need to cut down all light and close all doors and windows. No fans as the technique required absolute calmness of air. Is everything clear?”

“What will be on the paper?” Rachit asked.

“The paper will contain a circle in center, two circles marked “yes” and “no” on two sides of it. And then there will be segmented concentric circles which will contain all English alphabets and digits 0-9. Something like this” He went on to portray the design on a piece of paper.

“Hey what if the spirits are illiterate” said Ramesh and let out a laugh putting his fist out in a high-fi position towards Rachit, but he stopped almost instantly after realizing that no one was in mood of jokes and very quickly he put down his hands.

Varun continued, “Now there are three important facts to keep in mind. A)..”

“Seriously Varun, why the hell are you talking as a professor?” I don’t know why I interrupted him.

“This is important. A) Your concentration on this is very important. If ever your mind wanders to anything bad or evil, that’s it. You have to concentrate and only call the correct spirit.”

“How do you know the spirit is correct, it may just act to be correct” Ramesh again interrupted and though he made a valid point, he still laughed. Different people have different ways to deal with nerves and perhaps laughing aloud was his way.

“Please listen, this is important. B) Once the spirit comes, never ask the question as to how it died. This pisses them off”

“Oh man! Pissed off spirit!!!” Ramesh mocked and was about to laugh again but stopped as Harpreet and I gave him stern looks.

“And most important C) If you see the candle flicker, it is time to say good bye. Just don’t waste time and say good bye because it means the spirit has just got mad”

“But this can also happen due to air” finally Vikash had said something.

“No it can’t. Remember fan is off and all windows and doors are closed” Varun said and this time we had to agree.

“Let’s get started. We need to make a circle with candles at regular intervals and big enough to seat all of us inside it. One candle needs to be in the center. Also burn the incense sticks all around the room” Varun had suddenly seemingly lost all fear and looked rather enthusiastic. He was shouting instructions like an army chief now and for the first time we were actually following.

He drew a giant circle on the floor. He called it some name as in circle of something which I don’t remember. “We need to light some 8 candles and incense sticks are a must. Now listen to me carefully” he paused, and then after some haunting 20 seconds said, “Whatever happens, don’t leave the circle between the procedure, and also do not remove your finger from the coin.” He paused again and then said, “Any mistake can prove fatal” and then he gave a seriously comic pose of seriousness mixed with fear.

Well, I had been chased by cops for breaking traffic signal; I had been chased by dogs when I entered a protected area; I had sat behind Ramesh on a bike, but never ever in life before this I had felt this scared. I had just said a silent prayer, “Oh Bajrang Bali!!! (I don’t know why I chose his name), if I get out of this, I will live my life differently”, I also made a lot of other promises. Ramesh was nervous too as was evident from his 'out of context' laughters. “Where do we get candles and incense sticks from, I have one or two, but not so many.” said Harpreet. “Don’t worry, I have them” said Varun as he opened his cupboard and took out a packet containing all those stuff. Some piece of paper fell down; Harpreet picked it up and slipped it in his pocket after examining it. Varun slowly started placing candles at regular intervals and I could not help noticing that despite all of us being agitated he looked rather calm and composed, and I appreciated it at that time. Ramesh wanted to light the candles but Varun stopped him saying “No not now! Just before the act and after all lights are out. It is 12:30 now and we will start in another half an hour. Try to relax as we all need to concentrate very hard.”

“I will join you, I need to make a call” said Harpreet and left out. I wondered whom he wanted to call, his parents, his brother or a girl friend about whom we had not heard yet, but I did not ask him. I was feeling suffocated so I too took my leave and went to my room, washed my face and lay down for a while. I still did not want to do it but I could not pull back now as it would have made me a laughing stock for the time to come.

Finally I got up and went to Varun’s room. When I reached there the whole setting looked very gory. Lights were out and Ramesh and Varun were slowly lighting the candles. Harpreet joined us soon. Vikash, Rachit and Saurav were sitting a little away scared but interested none the less. Harpreet walked to them and said “If you are not doing it please don’t sit here. It may be risky. I just asked someone, people who are not in circle may get possessed. So you people go to first floor lock every door and window. Also, while we are doing it you may hear a lot of noises may be of some of us yelling and calling you, but remember, it is a mirage. Don’t even think about coming back here before morning”

They looked disappointed but still followed what Harpreet had said. Varun had finished setting up the candles and incense sticks and was working drawing symbols on a sheet of paper. Finally he said “Now enter the circle.” We were about to do it but Harpreet said “Wait! Varun, would you mind explaining this?” and he took out a piece of paper and passed it towards us. I took it and read it by getting it near the candle light and soon Ramesh joined too. We got it. Varun reluctantly came out of the circle and took a look and after getting it looked stumped. It was the bill of one dozen of candles and a packet of incense sticks, but the important part was it was dated a week back. Harpreet took Varun by his collars and lifted him slightly up and asked “You bastard! You set this up. Didn’t you? Just because you wanted to do this weird act you made this whole thing up.”

“What? Nooooo!!! I did not do it” said he.

“They why in the world did you buy so many candles in a city, where power seldom goes? A miser like you spending money on such stuff” Harpreet said.

“What? No! I just bought this for …” before he could complete Harpreet said “Shut up! Guess what! I just called Vijay and found out that in this house a family had lived for past 12 years, then it was occupied by some students for some 1 year and now we are here. No mention of girls.” Vijay was the son of house owner.

Varun was stammering now. A small piece of paper had brought down his empire. He was trying to come up with something convincing and said “He lied ..” but before he could complete Harpreet said "and I had asked about this from the neighbors’ son who FYI is an Engineering student and is awake till now"

Varun was running out of ideas and now out of a fit of depression said “I am not lying. I really saw th..” before he could complete I pulled his collars and landed a tight slap on his right cheek with my left fist. I don’t know what had happened to me as I repeated it two more times and said “You asshole!! Just because you wanted to practice this weird act you made this up. What the hell did you think, it is some kind of a game”

Ramesh had also had enough, he pulled him up by his hair and smashed his fist in his rib cage and followed it up by a series of resounding slaps on both his cheeks, all the while saying “You bitch, I will kill you today”. Varun’s horn rimmed spectacles had been thrown away. He shouted and I am sure others listened but no one dared come down as they had taken Harpreet’s warning seriously. Harpreet Singh may be a sardar but he was awesome with ideas like these. Varun finally freed himself from Ramesh’s grip who was bent on slapping the crap out of him and tried to run towards the door, but Harpreet stopped him and landed another slap on his face and this was probably the hardest and loudest one coming from a well over 6-feet and weighing around 100 Kgs sardar. Varun collapsed and fell down on the ground. Harpreet picked him up by his collars again and asked “Tell the truth or die” Harpreet’s face looked red with anger and his eyes burning with rage and Varun had no plans left. He said “Yes I made it up. I wanted to try this out but I needed at least 2 more to try this so I tried to talk you all into this. I am really very sorry”

As soon as he heard this Ramesh went berserk. He ran towards Varun and punched and slapped him multiple times. I finally had to pull him off Varun and he said “Asshole! Bastard! Just because of him we had a fight. What the fuck did he think he was trying?” He again freed himself from me and charged towards him and kicked Varun hard on his buttocks and I again had to pull him off.

Varun’s face looked aghast and tears rolled to his cheeks. He had made an excellent plan but just a small mistake had made it go all wrong. Had he just been careful enough to confirm some details and buy the candles on the same day, we might just have done the act and then things could have been completely different. But then Titanic was sunk by a small hole.

Next day we told the others that there we did call the spirits and they told that they came here just once in a year and have no intention of hurting us. Saurav called Varun, who had left early morning to spend weekend in his home town, and he confirmed that our house was no longer haunted. We lived there for another year before we all left the city and nothing remotely scary happened in that house again, in case you don’t count Varun Shyamak and his weird activities. Noone else came to find out what had happened on that night. They considered us their heroes for all that time, a fact which I am not sure I am really proud off.

Well I don’t know if ghosts and spirits do really exist but then I don’t really want to know. Just let’s say I am neutral about them. I have neither intention nor courage to dwell in this unknown world of paranormal activities. Perhaps it is just fitting that some things just remain a mystery which never gets unfolded.

Footnote: Never try Planchit. It is a dangerous act and need to be handled expertly. I have tried it and had a bad experience and I don’t want anyone else to try out. In case if you really need it get in touch of an expert.

Unforgettable Trip to Pondy --- Alok, Beer, Confusion and a Lesson

2010-04-03T01:33:00.000+05:30

Hi All. Thanks for all the following you people had given me. A lot of you had taken time to read my story and replied back with comments or e-mails.
Well this story is not about Varun Shyamak, my favorite literary character. It has again been written in one night. Just going through my college photos when I went home in Holi, I saw a folder named Pondicherry and it reminded me of some weird incident that happened on that day. The story has been inspired from that incident, but then I am not a reality writer and I don’t want reality to spoil an interesting story. I have always maintained that never let truth come in way of an interesting story. So no characters are real here and all characters have been exaggerated to suit the story, so if any of my college friends read this, please treat this as a work of fiction, as otherwise you may end up finding many inconsistencies. So enjoy reading and give me your feedbacks

Danger can be fun at times. Rebelling against higher authority, breaking rules and making your way out of a troublesome situation created by none other than you and moreover escaping a trap and giving a piece of your mind to a person who dislikes you are some things that have an inherent attraction. Just that these little moments of indiscretion and a little slip-up here and there may just redefine your whole life, it can destroy careers, destroy lives and at times finish lives. But in case you manage to wriggle out of it unscathed, it becomes a memorable story.

A similar thing happened to our back-bencher group sometime into the middle of second year of our Engineering in Vellore Institute of Technology. Supposed to be an industry visit to give us some idea on how the industry works, it ended up being one of the most unforgettable days of our college life. It all required a set of confused faculty members, our group of nonchalant students, a girl bent on driving attention not of boys but of an old man sitting in the office of Coordinator of School of Computing Sciences, some beer and above all the tenacious and strategically brilliant display of leadership by my good friend Alok who managed to pull everyone out of trouble and in the meanwhile also had a sweet revenge, something, which I am sure of, he is still proud of.

Things were going normal before that fateful day for all of us back-benchers, Alok, Akshay, Begu(Amit Singh), Riks(Amit Agarwal), Devesh, Manjeet, Amitosh, Nishant, Captain(Amit Kumar), Anand and me(Abhishek). We went to college, bunked when possible, gave proxies of each other, were always late to classes, played computer games, watched movies, talked crap, slept a lot and studied as and when absolutely required. Off course, being back-benchers we didn’t have reputations to keep and all of us silently followed our goal while we also enjoyed life. In the coming time we will end up surprising all of those front row people who when they read this will be rubbing their wounds. Things could have changed drastically that day if it was not for Alok.

It all started when during the break between classes Alok came into the class and announced, “ This Wednesday, Mar 15, 2007, we will have an industry visit to Whirlpool factory located in Pondicherry. Please give me your names and 250 bucks if you are interested”. Lest you may get confused what branch of engineering we were studying, let me clarify, we were in Computer Science and Engineering and lest you may get more confused, what washing machine factory had to do with Computer Engineering, the answer is nothing, but this simple fact was never understood by our department but that is how that department worked and I’m sure still works with all incorrect people in incorrect places. Alok was our class representative and took this job very seriously. He may look weak and his frame may look of only skin and bones, but behind it lay a person with steely determination and extraordinary capability to get things done. He loved taking responsibility and he understood the difference between representative and leader. He was practical, he never idealized situation and always put others before himself. Unlike the other representatives who pushed for attention by being the idealists and acting a puppet into the hands of management, Alok simply got the attention and was a person highly popular without having to seriously try for it. None of us were really excited about the trip but still we decide to go as it might be the only time in college. The despos were highly excited with their prospects as our branch still had a lot of single girls, due to the fact as Riks used to say that all the best guys are back-benchers who don’t give them a damn. I still like to agree with him.

The trip was supposed to start 3 A.M. in the morning and three buses were booked. Smriti Tripathi, the Class rep. of other class had turned at her instructive best. She was shouting orders, giving behavioral guidelines and explaining how seeing washing machines being built will be helpful for soon to be software engineers.

“Make sure all of you when you reach there, move in line”

“Please, don’t smoke and don’t disappear to other place without informing faculty members.”

“Don’t laugh and talk loudly in the industry as it is the reputation of the college which is on stake. … bla …bla …bla …bla”

Alok disliked Smriti and he had his reasons. Smriti with her influence and reach had managed to alienate Alok from all important decision making process concerning event organizing and other such stuff. Despite being zero in these abilities as compared to Alok, she managed to become important by using her charm and beauty (only on some people’s scale) to attract influential persons. The college being situated in South India, she turned friendly with most influential South Indian students who were innocent enough to do all that she wanted and got nothing in return. Her closeness with some of important faculty members including the dean and event the program coordinator were exemplary. Most students who used their brains to think hated her, but this number was way too small in comparison who thought from one foot below the brain. However, Alok will have his revenge and she will finally be shown the door unceremoniously from the post of rep. in final year despite heroic efforts by program-manager himself but then that is another story.

We managed to reach the campus gate, where the buses were supposed to arrive, by 2:45 A.M on that day. Some people had pulled out their best clothes and looked like they were prepared to do a ramp walk. The buses were standing in a row. People were speculating as to which bus all the girls will go in and thus were reluctant to enter any bus and waited till girls arrived. Rohira was dressed like a peacock. He was wearing a red T-shirt with flowers on it, a blue faded pair of jeans with two skeletons drawn on the back pockets and a belt which had a large fan in place of buckle which somehow managed to ensure that his pants didn’t slip a little more low. Alok had said, “What if…. The fan starts rotating dude?”

We chose not to wait and we got into the last bus and all of us filled last couple of seats. After some 10 minutes a bus carrying girls arrived among a lot of cheers from a lot of guys. They got down looked here and there and then suddenly some girl entered our bus and others followed. Smrit entered last, and then began most humiliating 150 seconds of her life. Just as she entered she realized that Akshay was in that bus. Akshay was the guy whom most girls hated as he often got under their nerves with his witty and at times even indecent remarks. He let out a volley of very hilarious comments and also composed a funny song with help of Riks. Smriti realized her mistake. She got down went to the faculties and requested to change their bus as that bus had discipline problems and took all the girls to other bus, which was full of despos. They cheered as if they have won a war. We too hooted as we had won round 1. Alok gave a high-fi to Akshay and Riks, some others joined in and we had a good laugh. Some despos were sitting in front in our bus too. They felt infuriated. Ranjan especially looked devastated, but didn’t have the balls to say anything. Suddenly we realized that Anand and Devesh have disappeared silently and went to bus in which girls went. After the trip got over they were given a lesson but then that is also another story.

We were about to get started after a head count and an attendance, and with it started some confusion. The faculties assigned to the trip were inexperienced and all were given different directions from their seniors. There was some miscommunication regarding path to take and the timing and even which faculty gets into which bus. They kept on discussing for quite some time without any decision being made. All of us were getting impatient as the heat and humidity levels in Vellore were very high and sitting on a stranded bus was like sitting in a hot oven. Sweat was pouring and slowly all girls were beginning to look more ugly with the fading make up and thus they were turning impatient too. Captain had had enough and he got down and went towards the faculty. Captain had a strange urge to be the leader, and we all thought that he is going to get into trouble, but then Alok pulled him back in time. Then he went to the teachers and suggested his ideas. Smriti cut him short and gave some very impractical and idealistic ideas according to Alok. Well I wasn’t there so I don’t know what the ideas were and what the discussion even was, but however we started in another five minutes. Later Alok came and told us that the industry had given permission for only 100 students but there are 180 students on trip. As Alok told me that Smriti wanted to make it first come first serve basis, then she told make it on CGPA (knowing full well that it will eliminate most of our group). Alok had better idea, he suggested that once we reach Pondy make an announcement that whoever is not interested can go roam the city and come back by certain time and in most likeliness there won’t be more than a 100 left. Smriti however was not convinced, she had said “Some people will get drunk and misbehave with girls after that”, something which had never happened before that and never happened any time in those four years, but then somehow some girls seemed to have form an opinion about some of us as to our only motive in life was drinking and misbehaving with them, although there was no such precedent and now most of them only agree that they had wrong opinion of us. However, that is another story.

However, the faculty members finally took Alok’s advice and imposed one condition that no one informs that this had happened to any higher authority. The trip started, and every bus had a different journey experience. The despos had the time of their life singing and dancing, the other bus with mostly Andhra and TN people in that simply listened to songs and slept. In our bus we simply cracked jokes and planned what to do next, while some guys took a puff or two, and most of the time we slept through the journey. There were some more confusions in the way but was sorted out and we finally arrived at Pondy at 11:00 A.M.

Swathi Ma’am made the announcement that those who are not interested can go away but they must be back at same spot by 5 in the evening. Swathi Ma’am was one of the few faculty members who have earned the respect of all the students including all of us. Her fresh approach to teaching and her impartial ways along with her student friendly attitude had made her very popular among students. As soon as announcement was made the students started disappearing and in some time all left were all the despos and almost all the girls, except a few who chose to go away. Smriti’s face had turned red and she felt humiliated. Among us Alok, Anand, Manjeet and me were the ones who did not drink and chose to take our own path to city, Devesh chose to stay with the despos and go to the industry, while Akshay, Riks, Begu, Nishant, Captain and Amitosh chose to go the beach and have some drink and also catch a glimpse of skimpily dressed French girls on the beach of Pondicherry.

We were still uncertain of what to do. Anand wanted us to join the others to industry visit and so did Manjeet as he had already had one visit here before, while Alok and I wanted to go to some beach and also visit the local market place. We decided to discuss it over lunch and as we were about to finish the lunch when Alok got a call from Swathi Ma’am. He went out to talk and when he came back he said, “Smriti had informed Kalyan Raman (the class co-ordinator) of what has happened here on phone. He has instructed the faculty-members to call us all back and take us to industry while he will negotiate with Whirlpool people over the number. So we need to be back at the place by 1 P.M. She is a pain in the ass.”

“Whaaaaat the Fuckkkk!!! What’s her problem?” I said.

“She is such a bbb….”, before Anand could complete, Manjeet said, “So what do we do now?”

“Let’s go back. No other option” said Alok making a frown on his forehead.

“Ya, that’s right.” I said and added “Did you inform the others?”

“I called Akshay, he told that they can’t come by 1 as they have gone far and thus I told them to come to the industry directly. I will tell the faculty members that they could not be reached” said Alok. Alas! If that could be so easy!

We returned to the place by 12:45 P.M., slowly a lot of people started coming still fuming and pissed at Smriti at spoiling their plans. It had turned very hot and sun was beating down giving a burning sensation to the uncovered parts of the body. Smriti looked happy and content and she had an emphatic smile on her face. On seeing Akshay and others have still not returned, she started getting restless. She was seeing an opportunity of a life-time to get our friends expelled or at-least suspended. Alok and I were sitting on a footpath nearby. Suddenly she came to us, and asked “Where are your friends?”

We did not know whether the question was addressed to me or Alok so we simply looked at each other and turned our gaze away from her.

“What happened? Where are they?” She seemed irritated.

“They cannot come now. They will come directly at industry” Alok said.

“Why they can’t come now? What is such a big deal? They have come here for an Industry visit and they must be here.”

I wanted to say “Go mind your own business” but before that Alok said “I have informed this to Swathi Ma’am about this” and turned his gaze away. Alok had informed this to Swathi Ma’am and also convinced her that none of our friends name would go to the Dean. Smriti was getting all the more restless. She hung there for sometime looking at Alok for one instance and me the other but both of us kept silent. Frustrated, she went to one of the faculty members and told her the details. This person with some unpronounceable name was in his mid-twenties and may have just completed his education. He had no intention to get involved in such a situation, but since a girl had told him, he had to do something. He walked to us and asked Alok, “if they will take time we can wait for another half an hour”.
“No need Sir! I have told them to come to the industry and they may have already started, if they don’t come here then you can complain or do whatever you want.” Alok was just too good for him. He went back discussed something with Smriti who did not seem to agree, but still they once again decided to take Alok’s word. Smriti had just lost another round.

We reached to the industry around 3 P.M. and found that our friends have still not come. Alok was panicking now. He moved aside and made a call to Akshay. I could see his expression change suddenly and he looked concerned to say the least. After he had completed the call, he pulled Manjeet and me aside and told us “Goirala had met a minor accident. Akshay, Nishant and all had joined Ankan, Mrigang and Goirala on the beach and Goirala and Mrigang had drunk too much beer. Then they had hired a bike, which while driving Goirala had met a small accident. Mrigang had also drunk too much and he is lying and vomiting at the beach. No way, they can come here now and if they can’t they and also we are in trouble for supporting them.”
I was thinking what to say when Swathi Ma’am came to us from nowhere. She asked

“Where are they?”

“On the way. Stuck in traffic.” I lied.

“Make sure they are here at least before we leave from here” she instructed as she walked away.

Smriti had smelled something fishy. She walked to me and asked, “Is there any problem? Tell me, I can help” she said.

I was not to fall in this trap, “No, no problem. They are on the way, stuck in traffic.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Ya. Thanks for the concern.” I mocked but very subtly.

“Ok” She walked away.

“Let’s hope that this industry visit takes a long time, we will need every minute” said Alok.

As luck had it, a problem surfaced. As expected there was another goof up. The permission was for only hundred and Kalyan Raman had promised he will negotiate to get all the students in, a promise which he had failed to keep. Now the industry was willing to allow in only 100 to their campus.

Some faculty members were in negotiations with some industry people when Smriti started, “Since we already knew that this may happen let’s face it. Let’s 100 of us go in while others can wait outside. Let’s make it on a CGPA basis”

Alok had reached his combustion point. The sun was blazing and it was really hot at that place, he was already in tension and now this stupid theory of Smriti, even an angel could have lost it and Alok was only human. He broke out, “It’s because of you that these people have come here and now you say they can’t go in. Either all go or no-one goes”

“What can I do yar? I though it will be negotiated. Now that it hasn’t it will be better if at least some of us more deserving should go in” Smriti said.

“Oh great! And what is your scale of deservingness?” Alok was getting irritated.

“Let it be on CGPA basis. That’s the best scale”

“Oh so is it like the caste system? So higher castes can go in the temple and lower castes cannot, similarly, higher CGPAs can go in the industry and lower cannot.”

“Why are you…”

Before she could complete Alok fired “Shut up! Just shut up! Who the hell do you think you are that you are passing your judgments? Don’t forget you are just a student yourself and you have no right and no business to comment who deserves and who does not. You are just a representative of the class and not a representative of the college management. Who has given you the authority to decide what we all need to do? Better hold your tongue and if any decision is to be taken let the faculty members take it, if any announcement is to be made let them make it and not you.”

Smriti had just been given the dose of her life. Alok had just told her everything that every one of us wanted to say to her for a long time. A public chiding to her was Alok’s dream and finally he only fulfilled it. Most of students were delighted, they clapped and hooted. Gaurav Thaddani came to Alok and said “Well done dude!!! Keep it up” Swathi Ma’am was chuckling silently. Everyone whom Smriti considered her friend were either laughing or smiling silently except may be a few. Her beautiful eyes were filled with tears. One or two hot tears rolled down her cheeks which she quickly wiped off. I admit that had I not known her for past one and half years and if I was one of them who don’t think with their brains, I would have beaten the hell out of Alok for making her cry. Two of the male faculty members looked sympathetic but they didn’t dare reprimand Alok publicly as now suddenly he was the star of the show, but they had made a note in their diary to reprimand him whenever an opportunity arises which did not arise in future.

Now this incident remains to be a legend and people still talk about it. Alok is still proud of it and I feel Smriti still longs for revenge. But there was a small incident after that one which very few know. Smriti had been reprimanded; people had congratulated Alok and dispersed here and there. Alok was trying to reach Akshay or Nishant and I was standing there by myself not sure what to do. Smrit walked up to me that moment. Before this Smriti and I were on good terms even though we were not exactly friends. She looked straight at me and asked “Don’t you think having 100 people with higher CGPA’s in will be the best thing to do in such circumstances? Do you have any better suggestion?”

I don’t know, to this day, why she had walked up to me. Maybe she felt she could divide Alok and me, or maybe I being the one in our circle (only one as Riks and Ankan were away) who could make into the industry with my CGPA will support her theory. But, then I had had enough of her that day. I didn’t shout back, I simply replied “I have a better idea. You see a pit over there” I said and pointed a big pit probably used for dumping some industrial waste, and added, “shoot the 80 people whom you don’t want to take in and put them in that pit and then take the rest of them in.” I was walking away but she followed me and shouted right at my face “How arrogantly are you talking? How badly? Is this the way a second year Engineering student should talk to a girl?”

Now I don’t know whether it was a trick or she was serious but I just replied “Just go away. I don’t want to shout at you now. Just go off or let me be off” and walked away and after that day we did not talk to each other for quite some time and we talked only on the last day of college after this and that too was a simple “All the best” and “Good Bye”

Smriti stood there looking furious and finally walked to Anand and Ishaan who gave her a patient hearing but uncharacteristically chose to keep quiet after this.

But our problem was still not solved. The confusion had given us some time but the issue was far from over and now the wounded tigress in form of Smriti wanted revenge. One mistake and she would end up with the upper hand. Our friends were in trouble and there was no option seemingly available. One option was to take one of the faculty members into confidence and seek his help. But that would be too risky as most of them were very wary of management. Another way was to save our ass and tell them that we tried to contact them but we could not. But this was not what we wanted to do.

Suddenly Deepak Joshi came to us and asked Alok, “Alok, shouldn’t we ask them to go to the beach for some time. It’s no point coming to Pondy, having our lunch and going back. At least one hour there and then we can have our dinner there and go back.”

This was a Eureka moment. Alok had just found the way out. He went to Swathi Ma’am who meanwhile was busy negotiating the entry of 180 students into the campus and asked “Ma’am the students want to go to rock beach after the visit even for one hour. We had come here and just going back after lunch won’t be good. And you see every other branch which came here went to the beach. So please one hour.”
“Ok let me see.” She said. Smriti heard it but she was in no mood to go against the students’ wish once again. A few more guys joined and started requesting. Finally she said “Ok! But one hour only. We leave at 6:30 max.” Some students cheered while we just breathed a sigh of relief. Alok had once again become the hero of the masses.

Finally a deal was struck with the industry people and they allowed visit in two batches. First batch went into the industry at 4 and came by 4:30 P.M while the second batch went in and came back by 5:10 P.M... Manjeet, Alok and I did not go in. We contacted them and told them all to reach at the Rock beach by 6:15 sharp. As the beach was near to place where they were stuck, chance was optimal that they may make it. Before leaving for the beach Swathi Ma’am asked us “Where are your friends?”
“They were stuck in traffic, not getting a vehicle and so I told them to come to the beach. Don’t worry they will be there.” Alok affirmed though his face told different story. Smriti was just seeing a glimmer of hope. She smelled something fishy and she was alert.

We reached the beach by 5:45 P.M and clear instructions were given to leave latest by 7:00 P.M. While everyone joined the fun on the beach Manjeet, Alok and I stood near the bus making frantic calls to our friends who were always saying in the way. Our impatience grew every passing moment; all sort of negative thoughts were clouding our mind. We were hungry but did not feel like going for food. It was nothing short of the climax of a bollywood movie when they all arrived sharp at 6:50 P.M. Mrigang and Goirala were still under effect of alcohol. We pushed them on back seat and covered them with blankets. We covered the wounded face of Goirala with the blanket carefully and sprayed some deodorant to mask the smell of beer.

All the students slowly filled the bus by 7:10 P.M. Smriti came near our bus to confirm and looked hugely disappointed to see all of our friends have arrived. She was once again given an unceremonious see-off as Akshay once again let out a volley of hilarious remarks to send her off. Our hearts skipped a beat when one of the faculty members while taking attendance came very close to Goirala but then walked off without further inspection. As the buses started we allowed ourselves to let out a huge victory cry despite our tiredness.

We reached Vellore in 5 hours drive and we have just pushed ourselves to the tunnel and came back. It was a day that none of us will ever forget. We had given ourselves a lot of memories to laugh about in future and a big lesson to people like Smriti.

A lot of water has flown under the bridge ever since. But even today whenever I am reminded of this day I am filled with a sense of admiration for Alok. Putting your ass on line for protecting your friends even when you know they are wrong requires courage and resolve. Alok may not have won a war but he had saved many careers. The day, 15th of Mar 2007, on which we laugh and have fond memories may have had been a day we would have regretted our whole life had it not been for him. I haven’t met Alok and neither met Smriti after we passed out. But I’m sure wherever Alok is he is still proud of the fact that he moved Smriti to tears and wherever Smriti is she still longs for revenge for that day, if only life gives give her another chance. I just hope it never happens but if it does it would be another memorable story.

Check out Save Our Tigers | Join the Roar

2010-02-15T12:58:00.001+05:30

Title: Save Our Tigers | Join the Roar
Link: http://gotaf.socialtwist.com/redirect?l=-257432413361779920231

Varun Shyamak and his Theory of Job Satisfaction

2010-02-03T09:30:00.001+05:30

Hi all. This one comes after a long time and has been written in only one night. I got a response from a lot of you that you will like to read a lot more of Varun Shyamak and the other characters. However, this story is completely an independent story but with same characters. Still I would like you to read the story http://bakwaswani.blogspot.com/2009/10/there-are-strange-people-then-there-are.html to know the characters better.

Many of us has a philosopher inside us and love to give a lecture now and then, but with Varun Shyamak things can only get weird when he decides to philosophize job satisfaction and theory of Happiness. Well this is a more of a spontaneous story that I have written so there may be a few mistakes here and there, but I still hope you will like reading it.
Also I would like to thank all of you who read the last story which was one of the most challenging piece I had written. Before you read this piece I will appreciate if you cast your vote in the poll I have created which you can see on the right hand side of the blog.
Waiting for your comments.

“What do you know about frogs?” Varun asked me.

“Frogs?” I repeated. I had no idea, why I listened to Varun or so as to why do I even hang out with him.

“Yes, Frogs. You know if you take some water out of a pond in which frog lives and put it in a jar and place the frog in it, what happens? The frog will happily live in it, even as you slowly start heating the water. It will not retaliate and it won’t try to jump out. Slowly the water will start boiling and still the frog won’t jump out. And finally it dies fat and happy. Interestingly if you had placed the same frog in already boiling water it would have straightaway jumped out and escaped.” Varun explained. This was Varun at his philosophical best. Off course this line might not has been his own but from one of the numerous magazines that he had read.

“So?” I asked.

“So I want to say that even we are a little like the frog. I mean most of the time we don’t realize that we are in the jar and we smartly develop an attitude of adjustment, and before we realize our lives are messed.” Varun was disturbed and mentally unstable, but it was totally understandable. If someone has to work from 6 A.M. in morning to 6 P.M. in the evening and add to that the office being on other end of the city which takes 2 hours to commute, even an angel would have turned grouse and Varun was no angel. Add to that the sleep deprivation and excessive pornography and you have a perfect recipe for insanity which Varun Shyamak was. “Just look at us. We all are stuck in jobs that we don’t like, we are away from our families and living in a real mess but we have just got so accommodating that we happily accept it. We are not really happy.”

“Yes. Right.” Said Rachit, but this was more out of a habit rather than agreement. Rachit had a habit of saying yes to anything without thinking. He would say “no” only to plans of a fun weekend or to a better dinner that would make him move his ass out of the building and more often than not it was only because of him our plans would get rachited. He was a geek in his domain but outside it he was just someone who either had no opinions or never wanted to express his opinion. If you say him Domino’s is way better than Pizza Hut he would say “Yes. It really is” and just then someone would walk in and say Domino’s Pizzas taste like chapattis in comparison to Pizza Hut he would again say “YES!!!! Dominos Pizza is really bad.” Someone had once told me that people who always agree to everyone are really dangerous for they are masters at manipulating people and will often end up getting everybody to do what he or she wants. It didn’t seem to apply at all to Rachit but slowly as we started hanging out together more, I had silently realized that the advice was totally right for I had often seen all of us landing in exactly the same restaurant or movie which he wanted despite the fact that the initial verdict for that place being 1:9 and what was more surprising that no one would ever notice it.

“I think you are going overboard with it Varun. It’s true that we don’t like working but then you don’t need to like your work for after all it is work. It doesn’t really matter that how much you like your job as long as you are good at it and if they pay you well, I think it is fine. At the end of the day you have to do some work to earn a living even if it is not to your liking.” Vikash explained. Vikash had started his career as a lecturer in an Engineering college and had moved to corporate world very recently, but he still loved to give a lecture now or then.
“Yes! That is right Vikash Bhaiya” Rachit said. In my opinion Rachit had the most satisfying job among us, but still he didn’t seem to be happy with it. He was working for Intel and was into chip design, something which is a dream for every two out of three computer engineers. But for him his problem was nostalgia, rather than a dissatisfying job. Being a Mommy’s boy staying away from the family was haunting him and though slowly he had resigned to his fate, he still wished to go back.
Ramesh had just walked in. The clock showed 8 P.M. and this being a Friday night all of us were quite relaxed. Ramesh pulled a stool and sat beside me. Rachit sat down on Vikash’s bed with Vikash leaning on his pillow at 45 degrees. Saurav was standing by the wash basin preparing to shave and has been uncharacteristically quiet till then. “What are we talking about Abhijeet?” Ramesh asked. I narrated him the story of the Varun and the metaphorical frog. Strangely none of us remembered why we started discussing this out of the blue.

“Seriously yar! We are not totally happy with our lives; we just go on accommodating with it. Recently there was a study to find out which are the world’s happiest countries and India was as low as 71, while some really small country Vantau was number 1.” Varun was not letting it go.

“Ok! So what is the great Varun’s definition of Happiness?” I had had enough of his speech.

“Happiness in my view is living the life on your own terms. If you do what you want to do and not what you are supposed to do, then you will be happy with life. What say Rachit?” Varun continued.

“Yes. You are right.” Rachit said.

“This is the most ridiculous definition of happiness I have ever heard. You are linking job satisfaction with happiness? This is insane. There are millions of people in the world doing menial jobs, many are unemployed, many of us don’t exactly end up getting what we truly deserve and according to your definition no one is happy.” I couldn’t take it longer.

“Yes! Right” Rachit repeated.

“Shut the fuck up” I shouted at Rachit. “Do you ever cross anyone? Why are you so much in love with being so diplomatic?”

Rachit started laughing without any reason and continued for some time. Very few people knew that Rachit was a white collared criminal. He would make fun of everyone behind him but in front of him he would be a sage. I bet if at that time I had told Varun that Rachit once told us that Varun eats like a rabbit Varun would never have believed me.

“No I am not saying Job satisfaction is only prerequisite of happiness but….” Before Varun could finish, Ramesh shouted, “Shut up! Enough of the frog and rabbit metaphors. You know you are sick. You just want importance and this is why you want to sound intellectual. Just because you think you are not happy with your life, you want to make sure that everyone else starts feeling so.”
Well, Ramesh was right. Varun Shayamak wanted everyone to be like him. He had bouts of depression which he tried to cover up by making everybody feel miserable or by turning into an intellectual philosopher and then he had this never say die attitude no matter how much stupid it gets.

He was still not willing to lose this conversation, so he still continued “It is not only about me. Are you people happy with your lives? What say Jeet?”
“Of Course, I am” I said, “I work for one of my dream companies even though I don’t quite love the work I do, I get a good salary. I have a girlfriend who though not exactly hot, is very beautiful and I have parents who understand me. What more do you want to be happy?”

“But, what about your dream project? Your plan to change the world and to make this world a better place. And what about you Ramesh? You wanted to be the opening batsman for Indian team? Now are you really happy working for a Bank?” Varun said shaking his head to and fro in simple harmonic motion aka the Simple Pendulum we studied in school. Varun for some reason had decided to get under our nerves that day, and he is sort of person who only has a start button, and there are no buttons for pause or stop, and the only way to stop him is to pull the plug.

Saurav did exactly that. “Let’s leave it for later. Let’s go out for dinner tonight. How about Pizza Hut?” Saurav said. He had carefully chosen the expensive hotel knowing full well that Varun, the miser will defeat Varun, the philosopher.
“Ya. Let’s go” I said getting up and Ramesh followed suit. Vikash sir also agreed.

Varun looked crestfallen. He looked out of the window for 10 seconds, smiled at some strange object for some time and then added “Well let’s go to U.S. Pizza no. At the same price you can have more Pizzas.”

“Yes. U.S. Pizza is also near. It has also started Pizza buffet. Pizza Hut is very far. Too much of a walk.” Rachit said. Now, one fact that often went unnoticed was that if Varun rated 9.9 out of 10 in miser rating scale, Rachit was also around 9.88 but he very subtly managed to cover it in a veil of laziness and nerdity. Very few people noticed that Varun despite being proclaimed miser always ate outside more than once a week, the same being more than a month for Rachit and Varun may had had watched more movies than Rachit. Finally decision was made. All of us, except Rachit and Varun, left for Pizza Hut while leaving them to go for cheap Pizzas, which we even doubted they would.

While walking to Pizza Hut Saurav asked, “Why do you people even get into argument with him? This guy is a jerk, he should be ignored.”

“I don’t know why I do it or why do I even hang out with him.” I said.

“Same here” Said Ramesh.

“However the example of frog in boiling water was classic” Vikash said.

“Totally!!!!” I replied.

“What about Harpreet? Haven’t seen him tonight.” Saurav asked.

“He was in room man. His job sucks big time. He had to make some presentation and thus is working whole nights.” Ramesh replied.

“Then maybe, Varun should have approached him with his Shayamakian school of Happiness” I added.

“Exactly!!!” Vikash added.

We cracked some more jokes as we went to Pizza Hut, had some Pizzas roamed around in the mall some time and returned to home around 10:30 P.M. We did not find Rachit and Varun and we were surprised that they actually went.

“Strange. Varun actually did go.” I said.

“Maybe he remembered the hot waitress at U.S. Pizza” Ramesh winked.

“Anyone wants to watch a movie? I have some CDs” Saurav said as he passed us a bag of CDs. We were checking the CDs when my cell rang. It was Rachit. I picked up “Hey!” I said

“Where are you?” he asked, as I heard a lot of noise in the background.

“We are at home. Why?”

“Come to U.S. Pizza. Fast”

“Why? What Happened?”

“Varun Shayamak and his job satisfaction theory. Come fast I will explain you here” he hung up.

“Let’s go. Emergency” I told all. We rushed to U.S. Pizza only to find a lot of people surrounding some table. I asked one of them what had happened. That man, well in his fifties, gave me a ‘you young people’ look and told “Someone misbehaved with waitress”

“What?” we all called together. Well Varun was desperate but we could not believe he could have done this. We forced ourselves through the crowd, to see Varun being manhandled by two waiters, his shirt spoilt with salad and Rachit standing at a little distance and to our amazement he was inconsolably laughing.

I approached him and brought him to the side and asked “What happened?”

“He He He He He……” he went on laughing.

Ramesh pressed his neck and told “What happened? Tell us.”

“He asked the waitress… He He He He”

“What did he ask?” Saurav asked.

“Are you satisfied… Ha Ha Ha Ha.”

“Then. Whats’ with that?” I asked.

“He kept staring at her….ha ha ha ha….at her….ha ha ha ha” we understood and he added “and asked ‘Are you SATIS…FIED ... haaahaahaahaaa…all the while staring at her….ha haha ha he he he he. She smashed the salad bowl on his … ha ha ha ha …head..he he he he” he continued to laugh.

I had to do something. I and Ramesh went to the waiters and asked one of them what has happened. He recounted what Rachit had already told us and they told that they are going to call the police. Varun said “Are yar, I just asked …” before he could finish, I took him up by his collars and said, “Shut up! Is this the way to talk to a lady? She is doing a job here” and I gave a sympathetic look to the hot waitress standing in the corner with her beautiful eyes moistened. “Go and apologize” I pushed him.

“But…”

“Shut up” Ramesh shouted, “Just do as he says” and he pushed him again

“Just apologize and run from that door, run as fast as you can and don’t stop before you reach home”, I whispered in his ears as we pushed him to the waitress.
Varun went near her, looked as far as possible from her and said, “I am sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you” and then he suddenly ran and by god, he ran fast. He disappeared in moments.

Ramesh went towards the waitress and said “We are sorry. Our roommate is insane, we can’t help it” He deliberately didn’t refer to Varun as friend.

“You don’t need to be sorry. It’s totally fine” she said clasping her hairs.

Ramesh looked at her and said “You, however, did the right thing by hitting the bowl on his head. I like this attitude. You should rather have hit the hot Pizza Pan on his head or drop that melting cheese into his... ears.”

She laughed and before Ramesh could continue, I whispered in his ears “Enough of the flirting. Now run before something else goes wrong and she puts the melting cheese in your ...”, I didn't complete.

“Hey! We need to go. Catch you sometimes later Miss ...” I said.

“Komal…” she replied.

“Ya, Miss Komal, see you then”

“Sure. Thanks” she said.

As we walked back, Saurav said, “Jeet, you people are too much man. You pulled Varun out of an embarrassing situation and then went to flirt with that furious waitress”

“Forget it! Just some fun” Ramesh said and winked.

“Well I hope Varun will never talk about job satisfaction again” Vikash said.

It turned out that he was sadly mistaken. When we returned home, we heard Varun shouting frantically and the sound was coming from Harpreet Singh’s room. We rushed to his room and the last scene we saw was Harpreet slapping Varun repeatedly and finally pushing Varun into the bathroom and locking the door from outside.

“What happened?” Rachit asked him.

“I haven’t slept from last three nights working on this fucking presentation and on top of this, this asshole comes and asks me if I am happy and he talks about some fucking frog, a lizard or something and asks me if I am satisfied with my job” he said as he switched off the bathrooms light, “Noone, takes him out of here tonight or I will kill him”
Varun started crying and shouting frantically, banging the door and calling he is afraid of the dark and something something in Kannada. Vikash tried to open the door but Harpreet was in no mood and he stood in front of the door and said “Sir! No! I respect you but you don’t.” His eyes were red, his nostrils fuming with anger and he looked dangerous to say the least and we knew that no one can dare stand up against him and we rather reluctantly returned to our rooms. Varun shouted some more time before Harpreet told him that if he shouted once more he will come in and thrash him again.
So Varun had to spend that night in bathroom and we learnt two very important lessons of our life. One, never mess with a hot waitress no matter how cute she looks, and two, never screw up with an already screwed Sardar. And then I thought about it, that why did we hung out with him. Things never went as planned when he was around. Plans got spoilt, Bizarre things happened and you didn’t always end up at the place you had wanted to be, but still we had no idea why we even hung out with him. To this day I don't have an answer.

The Hunter and the Hunted

2009-11-21T11:16:00.000+05:30

Hi All. Before I start to continue I will like to thank all of you who took their time out to read my previous story "Weird Weird ..." and also left your comments whether via mail or comments. A lot of you have requested a change in my writing style. Someone even branded me a male chauvinist as my stories never have a female character, so I have decided to give it a try. This one may not make you laugh like my previous ones. It is my first attempt to try a sort of serious story, so You may not like it specially if you have been accustomed to my previous writings. But still give it a patient read and let me know your rsponse. Regd. the previous story, I got a lot of mails that it was not as good as some previous ones. Thanks to all who have actually taken the pain of comparing the stories, and I will take your feedback into the account next time.

Life it is said is a great settler. Nothing could have been closer to the truth now for Praveen Sarkar. Some time back he had nothing except a few friends for whom he would have given his whole life and a dream to make it big in his life. It was with these dreams and some money he had earned that he had moved from a small town in West Bengal to the glamorous city of Bangalore to try his luck in a small enterprise. If Mumbai was the city of dreams for every small town Indian few years back, this place is now slowly being taken by Bangalore especially for the budding entrepreneurs. Praveen had never liked the concept of working under someone and he always wanted to start a business. His father didn’t like the idea but still he supported him by providing him a sum to start up his venture. Once he came to Bangalore his luck has soared. Whatever he touched had turned to Gold. He started with a small coffee shop and soon turned it into a restaurant. He tried his hand in a travel agency and soon that too hit success due to the IT boom and the increasing number of Call Centers and BPO’s in the city. After 3 years he also tried his hand in the construction business and that too worked. In a matter of mere four years he had made himself quiet a name. While his restaurant chain named “Swad” had become a hit among large number of north Indians living in the city, his “Sarkar travels” boasted of more than 20 cars and provided pick up and drop services to some of the Top MNC employees in the city.

But today all his employees were finding him unusually quiet and lost. He sat himself down on a small bench outside his restaurant placed conveniently on the always busy ITPL road. It seemed he desperately needed to talk his heart out to someone but then everyone realized that he actually has no friends there. He had never felt the need to have one. He didn’t realize till now that he has become a loner. That is the dark truth of this city. It can give you everything you want, but for all that it will take away your life. But that generally is a small price to pay for most people. He looked down on the rushing traffic below. He vividly remembered that this was the place where he first opened a small coffee shop and hired four persons. A person who made the coffee, one who took the order, one who did the cleaning and the fourth one was he himself, who managed the accounts and the markets. The other three were nowhere in sight now and the small coffee shop named “Relish” was also nowhere to be seen. The sun had set and dusk had fallen over the city. He at times showed a strong urge to go back to his home town, but soon he rejected the idea, as he knew that was not an option. He had disagreements from his parents following his decision to try his luck in travel business and he hadn’t talked to his parents since then. He remembered it had been more than 1 year. He stood at the railing and looked into the far horizon. It was beginning to get dark and rush to his restaurant was increasing. Friday night always was one of the best days of business. Husbands and Wives, Small families, a group of friends or a boyfriend and girlfriend and at times an occasional loner visited his restaurants and seemed to speak their hearts out over meal. Although he had four restaurants in Bangalore, he preferred to spend his evenings at this one for it always reminded him of his roots. He wanted to take a puff but he could not break his own rules. He took out his cell phone to look at the time. He didn’t prefer to keep a wrist watch and even his phone was a primitive model. He had once tried a Nokia N97 but found it too complicated and he had gone back to his good old Nokia 1600. There are some people who take to new technology like fish to water. He certainly was not one of them. It was 18:45. He took a corner seat on the restaurant and took out his balance sheet with a hope that it will keep him engaged. It didn’t. His staff mostly consisted of waiters from different corners of North India and only one female was her manager Reema. Reema had been his best hire whom he had hired last year following his last manager’s Deepti’s decision to quit the job. Her skills of dealing with uncomfortable and embarrassing situations were exemplary. Just some time ago a man in a black suit had walked in complaining that why has his table not been booked. Once again she dealt with the situation nicely. She went and politely asked a couple sitting on a table to move to a smaller table in corner, which they agreed and then got two tables joined to meet the black suit’s requirement and all the while she managed to keep smiling. Someone had once told Praveen that this skill was called interpersonal skills and for sure Reema Sahay had it in her. He was initially skeptical about hiring her for this job. But as it turned out, it was a great decision for she was highly efficient and even some rowdy customers behaved better in her presence. Reema was also beautiful and her cheeks formed a naughty dimple when she smiled and there were many customers who came to hotel only to get a chance to fall in those dimples. But her boss never seemed to notice her. Reema had also noticed his boss looking glum since last day as if he was still thinking about what transpired the last day.

It was around the same time on previous day that a person wearing a light blue shirt and cotton pants had walked to his restaurant and got seated in a corner. He was talking to a waiter that he had reserved a table for two here. On asking his name he had replied “Deepak. Deepak Gupta.” Hearing this name had ringed a bell in Praveen’s ears. He looked at him intently. It was unmistakable; he was his old friend Deepu. Reema saw Praveen walked straight to him and said, “Hey Deepak! Good to see you. Remember me?” She was privileged enough to overhear all their conversations.
Deepak had looked lost. He strained his eyes and wrinkled his forehead, and after some time said, “Praveen? What the hell? Where had you been?” They embraced each other and sat down at a table.
“How come you are here?” Deepak asked.
“I should ask you that, for I own this restaurant.” Praveen said.
“Stop Kidding”
“I am not kidding. I am the owner of Swad restaurant chains” Praveen said with an air of pride in his voice.
“Unbelievable man!” said Deepak as he brushed his hairs and added “So I and my wife get some discount tonight.”
“Wife? You got married.”
“Yes. 6 months back. Love marriage” he replied.
“Asshole. You did not even call me?”
“What the hell. No contact of you was available with anyone. You had disappeared after college. Neither are you on Orkut.” He said.
“Orkut. What’s that?”
Deepak looked stunned. It seemed as if he couldn’t believe that Praveen has still not heard about the Social Networking site that had around 100 million users, despite living in the IT Hub but he did not want to go into detail and Reema knew that Praveen may not even know what social networking was.
“Forget it. You tell me why you didn’t get married or you have?” he said
“Cut the cliché. You tell me the name of the unlucky girl.” Praveen joked.
“Wait for it. She will be here in some time. You will be surprised as you know her. She has just left office, will be here in 5 minutes.” Deepak said.
“Oh where does she work? And do you work as well?” He joked again.
“For sure I do. I work in Flextronics and she is in Tata Consultancy services” he replied.
“Great” said Praveen. He didn’t want to talk more about technical things for his knowledge was severely limited in this field. Reema had noticed that Deepak looked much younger than Praveen but she was sure that Deepak’s salary would be no way even near to what Praveen makes in a month. They talked about their home town Asansol and their college and relived some forgotten moments until Deepak suddenly looked over to the gate and exclaimed, “Hey! Here she comes” and waved his hand. Praveen turned back instantly and once he saw her, Reema saw Praveen’s eyes froze as if some lightning had struck him. A lady entered the Restaurant. She was wearing a white chiffon kurta and blue jeans. She was slim and tall and her eyes were twinkling and she wore a mischievous smile on her amazingly beautiful face. Her hair was straightened and fell elegantly over her shoulders and some of it covered the side of her left cheek, and those eyes, well, they were just beautiful. Deepak got up, took her hand in his and placed his left hand on her back and said, “Hey darling! Meet him. Do you remember him?”
She looked at Praveen closely and her eyes got wider as she said “Praveen! Unbelievable.”
“You know my name, Priyanka? I thought you didn’t” Praveen said, trying to look away from her.
“Of course I do. The back bencher right?” she said and winked and both of them sat beside him. Praveen hadn’t bothered to get up all this while.
“You know Priya! This chain of restaurants is his.” Deepak informed.
“Is it?” Her eyes went wide again “You must be kidding” she said and giggled.
“I am serious.” Deepak confirmed.
“That is great. You really made it big in life. Congratulations” she said as she extended a hand to Praveen.
“Thanks!” he told as he took her soft hands in his and added “and of course, congrats to both of you too. You look great together.” Reema understood he didn’t mean it. This was the way he was. It was very difficult for him to give complements. “So what do you suggest we can have in your restaurant? And I hope it’s free” Deepak said.
Reema wanted to kick Deepak out of her restaurant and show everyone how wretched this guy was to use his friendship to have a free meal.
“Hey!!! Where is your attention?” said Priyanka as she waved her hand in front of his eyes.
“Nothing” he said and smiled and suggested them some items. They dined together and talked about their past, but all the while Praveen remained mostly silent, just adding a word here and there. Reema noticed it but she found it rather usual as he had always been of a reserved and soft-spoken personality. After a sumptuous dinner they got up to leave and Praveen watched fixedly as Deepak put a hand on Priyanka’s waist as they walked out of restaurant.

Praveen went to the rather empty open air restaurant on the roof top and sat down in a corner. He wanted to smoke and for an instance decided to do it. After all it was his restaurant, and he can break the rules at least. He took a cigarette and placed it into his lips. He was about to reach for his lighter but just then he saw some people looking at him and also the No smoking sign behind him. Off course they did not know that he owned this place for going by his appearance, he was wearing a cotton shirt, black terry coat trousers and old fashioned sandals; he looked no more than a small broker. He took the cigarette out of his lips and threw it aside.
He took out his mobile again and looked at the time. It was showing 20:02. Two persons sitting at the near table had broken into a discussion about how his restaurant has increased prices.

Well, he had to increase prices as the price of all commodities had increased. One of them wondered how a poor person will afford food if food prices keep hitting sky high. Other end of the roof consisted of a noisy group of seven friends probably fresh college grads celebrating their first salary. They seemed to be having some real fun and some dirty jokes. He looked at them for some time and then looked down at the traffic which seemed to be settling down now. He took a magazine from the magazine stand, ordered the waiter for a tea and started reading some article. The rush was slowly decreasing in his restaurant. There were more empty tables to be seen. The staff looked more relaxed now. The noise levels had decreased. He looked at his cell again which was showing 21:32. In half an hour he would have to close the orders and 22:30 he will have to close according to some stupid government rule which wanted to stop dinner at a time when one should ideally have dinner. He roamed around a bit and finally stood at the railing again looking at the darkness.

After some fifteen minutes, he felt someone came by his side and said “Sir, Should we close early today? I don’t see anyone coming now.” He turned and looked at Reema standing beside him. She had taken off her coat and was now wearing the white shirt and knee length black skirt. The top button of her shirt was too low for his comfort and for the first time he looked into her eyes, which actually looked weary as expected at the end of the day.

He looked around and said “Yeah! I think so. Mubarak! Closed!” he said to his gatekeeper signaling him to change the label on door. He remembered all his staffs’ names.

“You will like to have dinner?” Reema asked him.

This was not the first time Reema had asked him. Every other time he will say yes and Reema will ask some waiter to give him food and take her leave. But his reply this time was “Yeah! I think so. Why don’t you join me for dinner? I will drop you to your house today.” It was then she realized that how desperate he was to talk to someone.
“Are you sure sir?” Reema asked.
“Yes! And stop calling me sir now. Work hours are over now.”
“Ok sir, I will get the food.” She said and went in and after some five minutes returned with a waiter carrying some food in a trolley and some plates. She sat down opposite to Praveen and the waiter served some food in plates.
“Bahadur! You can have food and leave now. We don’t need anything else.” Praveen said to waiter.

Praveen looked uncomfortable. Reema realized that it might be because it was the first time he was having dinner with a girl. He looked at Reema who was serving some curry on his plate. Her white satin shirt revealed her chiseled figure and her face glowed in the candle light. She had undone her hair which now blew loosely all over her face and covered the better part of her left cheek. He tried to look away from her but something made him look at her legs, nicely rounded and waxed. He turned his gaze quickly realizing Reema might be looking at him. Reema had finished serving and was waiting for him to start. He took the fork and spoon and signaled her to start.
Reema ate slowly, as her mind was working fast. She had finally got the opportunity she had been looking for quite some time now. Belonging to a small town in U.P, she always dreamt of money, and to her the shortest way was to marry someone rich and famous. Right from the time she had joined the Restaurant she has been trying to get her boss’ attention but the person seemed to be a jerk, not picking any of her signals. She had almost given up, but today seemed different. Her boss appeared perplexed and it was in this time she had to pick her spot. She had to seize this moment. She had caught him looking at her body and she knew this was the time. But she had to be very careful.

“Don’t you think we should also start serving some south Indian cuisines? It will bring us more customers.” Reema knew she had to start conversation.
“No way! Have you seen the way they eat? They will piss off north Indian customers and anyway most of them never visit restaurants. They are the biggest misers on earth” said Praveen. He had his disliking for the food and life-style of south which had accumulated over the past, but this was the first time he had expressed it openly.

“Is everything ok, Praveen?”said Reema in very measured tone and the ‘Praveen’ was spoken even slower to leave some effect, which sir couldn’t.

“Why?”

“No you look very disturbed today? I haven’t seen you so dejected before.” It was going according to her plan now.

Praveen thought for a moment. It seemed he desperately wanted to speak out his heart but said “Nothing serious. Just a mood swing.”

“Come on! You can tell me. Consider me your friend.” She said, all the while looking very sympathetically and invitingly into his eyes.

Reema had played her move perfectly. Praveen seemed to have been caught off guard. Just half an hour ago, Praveen had been his boss, now he has become a friend. “Give a troubled person a good listening and then he can give you everything”, someone had once told her and that is what she did for other ten minutes as Praveen opened his life story in front of her. He told her everything about Priyanka. She had been love of his life but he had never dared to tell his feelings. He had fell in love with her right from the first day in college, but had never dared to approach her as he was an introvert who loved sitting on the back bench while she was the glam queen, popular and always in demand. He had hung around her many times hoping to get a word from her. But as fate would have it, she never quite noticed him. Every day he used to plan of a way to start a conversation from her, but as soon as he went near her, his diffidence got better of him. She never noticed him in all three years. There is a strange thing about girls, on all social networking sites and in every slam book they will enter their perfect match as someone who should be honest, mature, genuine and not fake things, but in reality they will never notice these guys and will often fall for guys who are loud mouthed snobs and pure attention seekers. Even after coming to Bangalore he kept thinking about her during the lonely nights. He would consider calling her, but he kept on procrastinating it, always planning to be a little more successful before he calls her. For some mysterious reason in the world he had imagined that Priyanka would still be in that small city waiting for him. But today it had struck him like a bolt from the blue. He told her about Deepak and their marriage. He told her about his parents to whom he was not talking anymore. He told her how lonely he was in the big city. He told her about his hate for this place and his longing to go back home. Reema heard it all patiently all the while not believing her luck. She had struck the iron just when it was red hot.

Praveen suddenly seemed much better as if a monkey was off his back. Reema knew that sometimes a patient ear works more wonder than soothing words. He relaxed down and Reema had noticed it. She just needed to get some soothing words out now.

“Why do you think you are wrong? Couldn’t you see that that girl did not even notice you in college? You say you didn’t call her but did you not notice that even she didn’t call you. She is a loser and she didn’t recognize your value. She fell for a man just because he is more suave. She just wasn’t cut out for you. You are worth much more.”

These words seemed to put things in a new perspective for Praveen. He seemed to just have realized that Reema was right. “Thanks! I think you are right. I didn’t think about it this way” He finally smiled and Reema had noticed that he slowly looked down at her again. Then they started talking about a variety of things. Reema told her a lot of things about herself that he did not know. They talked on every subject over the dinner regarding how he started an enterprise, how she came to Bangalore and lot more. Praveen seemed to relax more each passing moment and also it appeared as if he was getting more enchanted with Reema. Reema looked beautiful, she sounded childish and her ever inviting smile could have caught anyone off guard. He just didn’t take his eyes off her for all this while. Reema knew this had gone well. Now only one final nail in coffin was needed, that was SEX. This was going to be tricky and may well backfire. She was sure once they had sex Praveen would propose her next day and even if he doesn’t she didn’t lose anything as she had already lost her virginity when she was just 19. The problem was how to get him into that situation. Reema had thought her plan. She excused herself for going to washroom, and very silently called her roommate Deepti to spend the night somewhere else tonight as Deepti had often done with her whenever she brought her boyfriend home. Then she touched up her makeup, pulled her shirt a little lower and walked back to her boss who looked more relaxed now.

She saw Praveen had just washed his hands and looked much cheerful. She walked towards him and said, “I’ll leave now. You don’t worry I will take an auto.” This was another one which could have backfired, for knowing Praveen, he could well have said yes. She was relieved when he said “No no! I’ll drop you. It’s late now. You wait on the gate, I’ll get the car”

She waited on gate as he went to get the car. She felt nervous and could almost hear her heart beat. She had set this up perfectly. Her prey was in range now, but she knew just one mistake and that would be it. He got the car in front of her and opened the front door and signaled her to sit. To many people’s amazement Praveen still preferred to drive a Maruti 800 despite the fact that he could have afford at least Tata Indigo. But Reema knew he was down to earth. She sat down and fastened her seat belt. She reached her house in fifteen minutes drive. He hadn’t spoken much on the way but she had caught him looking at her from the corner of his eye on many occasions.

She got down and asked, “Would you like to come in and have some coffee?”

“At this time?” Praveen looked surprised.

“Ugggggghhhhhh!!!! How dumb?” Reema thought but added, “Yes! It’s rather cold out here.”

He took out his mobile, looked at time and said “It’s rather late.”

“Come on! It will hardly be 10 minutes” she said. As it turned out it took more than 10 hours before he left.

Reema lay triumphantly in bed after he had left in the morning. He had not proposed her and had looked rather embarrassed over what conspired the last night. But she knew it had gone well and there was no reason to panic. He was just like that. It would take some time for him to accept that he had fallen in love with her. She would help him do it. Moreover, he hadn’t been bad at all considering it might well have been his first time. She got up and took a pill, drank some water and looked at herself in the mirror. It had taken time but her plan had finally worked out. She stood some time before the mirror and admired her masterpiece of a figure. All those hours in the gym, the strict diet regimes had finally been worth it. She realized that she didn’t need to rush to her work now. After all, the restaurant will soon be hers in a few days. She went back to bed, pulled her blanket over her face and went to sleep totally at peace with herself.

Praveen drove back home and opened the door and sat down on a chair in his balcony. He felt tired but content. He took out his cell and dialed a number. After some time he heard a “Hello”

“Hello Deepak! Good Morning” Praveen said.

“Hey !!!Good Morning, Praveen. I didn’t expect you to call back so soon” the voice came.

“Just wanted to tell you something”

“What?”

“You know what! The Deepak and Priyanka story worked once again, for the third time in third year. 100% success rate.” Praveen said.

“Don’t tell me! So you had her?”

“Yes. Money has been transferred to your account.”

“Thanks man! Praveen, Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s bizarre man! You could have done that an year ago without any such long drama but you chose to set her up. I still don’t get it”

“It’s just a nice sport man. All the while she felt that she had set me up. It’s a great hunt when all the while the hunted feels that it is the hunter. She will feel that she had earned me. She will feel that she had pushed me into this, but in reality I just let her push me into it. Now, she will never be able to blame me for this and after some time she’ll rather feel guilty about it. She will again and again plot a similar night each time with the hope that I will give her that coveted ring and in course of time she will realize that I am rather dumb and will move on still unable to blame me. So while she will still believe that she had hunted a dumb rabbit the reality that she had been hunted stupid cow.”

“You are too wicked man. Riya, Deepti and now Reema. I wonder what’s next or rather, who is next?”

“I am not wicked. I just enjoy showing the schemers like Reema how much do they really suck, It’s they who plan and scheme and finally get trapped into it.”

“Ok buddy! Next time at least do find a better Priyanka, this one was a headache to train”

“Sure. Bye and take care” he said and hung up.

He made himself a coffee and just for a moment thought what Reema must be thinking now. He couldn’t help himself having a nice laugh.

Weird, Weird Varun Shyamak

2009-10-15T09:32:00.000+05:30

Before I get on with the story, I would like to thank all the people who read and gave their comments on my previous story "Pursuit of Madness". Some of you preferred to use mail rather than giving your comments here. I would still like you all to leave your reactions on blog, no matter whatever it is. Some of you felt that it was a true story, which it was not. True, some names matched with people but it was coincidental. Even this story may use names that may sound heard. So I would like to confirm that it is a fiction work and please do not draw parallels. So read on and enjoy. And also Wish you a very happy and prosperous Diwali...

There are strange people, then there are stranger people and then there are people like Varun Shyamak. I met Varun when I was staying in a men’s hostel in Bangalore some one year back and we were friends for some six months. A Chemical Engineer from Mysore, he was as weird as weird could get. All his activities ranged from funny to strange to bizarre to hilarious to irritating. He would repeatedly talk to himself, laugh all of a sudden and most of the time appeared to be in a different world. His mood swings were mysterious, as one moment he will sound jolly, sober and intellectual only to become depressed and idiotic in the next. One day he will go and spend a lot of money on inconsequential things and the next day he will turn a miser and not even spend a penny. He was psychotic about cleanliness of room and will often land into verbal duels with roommates over it. At times he would wake up at 1 A.M in the night and start reading newspaper intently much to the chagrin of his roommates. At times he will switch on T.V in late night to try his luck on some channels. Some of the roommates still swear that they had caught him doing it in late night. One night he had also woken up shouting in middle of night for some reason which still remains a mystery. In short, he seemed to be a nature’s prodigy, but still for some reason he was a good friend to have for he seemed to be of a clean conscience.
But things reached an extreme when we planned a two day vacation. While we were planning where to go, Varun said to me, “Hey Jeet, how about Jog falls? It’s a nice place and I have been there before.” He preferred to call me Jeet rather than Abhijeet which was my name or Abhi which others preferred. Saurav and Rachit, who were his neighbors, appreciated the idea. Ramesh who happened to be our organizer for each such outing took it upon himself to make sure that more people join us, which he believed would be a memorable one. When Ramesh is out to convince people, you bet he will be successful, and this time was no exception. He made sure that his friend and colleague, Harpreet Singh, a well buit Jat from Haryana with a great sense of humour and jolly mood, joined us. Along with them, Vikash Kishore, the senior most among us, also agreed to come. He was the only married person in the hostel and was here for a short term before he shifted his family to Bangalore. Vikash Sir, as we affectionately called him, had a very subtle sense of humor. In my words, he could peel the skin of other without him noticing it. Ramesh, meanwhile arranged a Qualis for the trip and also got the list of places that must be visited along with the order in which they would be most economical. This was his specialty, the awesome knack of getting things done. The trip was to start at Friday night and we planned to be back by Sunday night. “This is going to be great. We will remember it all our life”, Varun had said. He was serious.

The car arrived sharp at 10 P.M on Friday and with it started Varun’s mellow drama. While everyone got seated in the car in 5 minutes, Varun was nowhere to be heard of or seen. Ramesh tried his cell fanatically just to get no response. I and Rachit went to his room only to find him sitting and watching TV, with a shoe cleaner in his hand, as if he had forgotten how to clean his shoes and was waiting for some divine intervention. I wanted to shout but held myself back as it is never a good idea to start a holiday on a negative note.
“Come down Varun, everyone is waiting”, Rachit begged.
Varun looked up as if he had been woken up right in the mid of a dream. “Yar, give me two minutes. I need to clean my shoe” he said.
“You should have done it earlier”, I couldn’t hide my irritation.
“Yes, but it would have got dirty by now. I always clean my shoes just before wearing” he said. It was very difficult to argue his logistics for he added some subtle reason for all his weird activities.
“Ok. Hurry up! We will wait in car. Come down fast.” I said.
“Ya! I will be down in two minutes”, he said.
We went down and sat in car. Ramesh was getting frustrated each passing moment. Finally after five minutes, he shouted, “Whose idea was it to bring this jerk with us?” I pointed to Saurav, who was sitting very innocently in the back seat. “Fuck you! This guy will create trouble everywhere. He will play spoilsport at all occasions. We will want to do something and he will be counting pennies or will be giving his ideologies.”Ramesh prophesied. Ramesh didn’t like Varun and he had his reasons. Some time back Varun had invited four of us, comprising me, Ramesh, Rachit and my ex-roommate Sushant to his treat as he had got a job. Though the hotel was very small, in fact it was more of a roadside eateries, we still agreed and after dinner the expenses came to just around 300 bucks. But what happened after that was simply incredible. Varun refused to pay the whole amount. He paid 100 Rupees and said, “I put in 100, now all of you put in at least 50 each. 100 Rupees is enough for the party.” As expected it had infuriated us and the relation had got strained. Sushant never talked to Varun again after that. Ramesh was always bent on pulling his legs with vengeance rather than anything else. I and Rachit however tried to remain same despite that, but still even we couldn’t forget that.

After waiting another fifteen minutes, Saurav decided to go and look for him again. I accompanied him to Varun’s room, where we saw him frantically searching for something. Saurav asked him what had happened. “I can’t find my magazines. I kept them somewhere yesterday. I’ll just find it and come.” He explained rather calmly.

“Are yar! Everyone is waiting for you. Leave the magazine. Come now” Saurav protested, probably feeling guilty to include him in the plan.

“Just two minutes yar. There is no need to hurry. We will reach in 5 hours drive. I will just find the magazine and come”

“Leave it yar. Buy some magazine on the way.” I was beginning to get frustrated.

“No that magazine is expensive one and is not available everywhere. Just give me two minutes. You sit in the car, I will be there soon.”

“Ok come soon or we leave without you” I could stand it no further.

“Why are you behaving like that? I am just asking for two minutes” he said too calmly for comfort.
Saurav left and asked me to join him, which I did, thereby diffusing a potential bomb. “He is a freak and sure he is needed on the trip for more fun.” Saurav was trying to cheer me up.

On seeing me and Saurav return without Varun, Ramesh lost it. He said “Let’s go! Leave the weirdo. It’s more than half an hour. He is not a VIP.”

“He is searching some magazine and says he will reach in 5 minutes” Saurav said rather apologetically.

“Cool down Ramesh. You know those types of magazines are his medicines. He can live without food, not without them.” Harpreet said, in his typical casual humorous style.

“Correctly said Daljeet!” Vikash Sir said. For some reason, he could not remember Harpreet’s name and each time he called him with different name ranging from Preet to Paramjeet to Manjeet. I was sure that this wasn’t accidental and Vikash sir had very innocently found a way to rag Harpreet.

“Come on! My name is Harpreet. Har—pree—t. Please sir.” He said holding his head.

“Oh, I am so sorry, Parmeet” said Vikash and this had everybody including Ramesh burst out laughing, while Rachit started rolling.

“Are yar! Let’s start without him. Fuck Varun” I said as the laughter died down. The driver too was getting impatient for I could see him playing with the key.

“Right. It’s 10:45. We have waited for him more than 30 minutes now. Whoever wants to wait for him can get out and wait. We will leave now.” Ramesh said.

“Let’s wait five more minutes Ramesh now that we have waited so long. And you do remember how much fun we had when we went to Koorg and he was there” Vikash sir was trying desperately to cool him down.

All of us had gone to Koorg some time back where Varun’s weird acts had made it a memorable one. Most of the time we had kept pulling his leg and some great banter were exchanged. Above all it was Varun’s comedy of errors that had really given some hilarious moments. While all of us marveled the natural beauty from the car, Varun spent it sleeping on mine or Harpreet’s soldier. Even when we got down at some places his attention was more on skinny beauty rather than Scenic beauty, a memorable one being one at Raja Seat. While all of us where engrossed in watching breathtaking scenery, Varun spotted a beautiful girl, rather a beautiful woman, who walked to other side of the hill. Varun said to us “Let’s go and see the scenery from there” as if we didn’t know what scenery he wanted to see. We disagreed but Varun, slowly followed her path, while trying to show as if he wasn’t. He put one finger in nose and slowly and nonchalantly continued in her direction very innocently, still believing that no one knows what he is up to. His fore finger was in his nose and he was seeing the lady from corner of eye and somehow still believing that no one can understand what he is doing. Vikash Sir looked on and joked, “His fingers are either in his nose or his underwear”. As he disappeared, we kept an eye on him using our binoculars. We spotted him standing on the edge of a cliff some 20 meters from the lady, and trying desperately to strike a cool pose. He had put his hands in the pocket and was looking straight at the horizon with the eye of an aesthete. The lady, however, seemed to give him no attention. Finally after trying for around 10 minutes, he gave up and came back to our place and said intellectually, “Are yar! We have come for a tour. Don’t sit at one place. You should go and check out all places. View is also very beautiful from there. You people should have come.” Rachit could not help his laughter and he burst out following which everyone had burst out. “We also saw the view Varun” Saurav had said. Similar instances occurred at a lot of places after that when he disappeared for feeding fishes, taking picture, reading inscriptions or spotting better view but none of the girl had given him any attention. “Probably the sooner he realizes that he is not as cool as he thinks, it would be better for him” Rachit had said. He was damn right.

“Five minutes it is. I am not waiting a second longer” Ramesh warned.

“Right. Even I can’t take it any longer” I said.

To everyone’s relief we saw Varun coming with a copy of National Geographic journal in his hand.
“Why the hell do you need that in journey?” asked Harpreet.

“It’s really good yar. It has very deep insights.” Replied Varun.

“Strange, but not surprising” I whispered to Rachit. “He is a snob” Rachit whispered back, “I bet he won’t read more than a page but he wants to show he is intellectual. Don’t you remember Koorg trip?”he added. “I do remember that” I said and we smiled.

Varun had carried two copies of discovery channel’s journal in Koorg trip. He would take it out in the car, each time we sat down. Will open a page but never complete it. Then when we had to get down, he will keep everyone waiting, while he struggled to keep it back in his bag, which had been kept behind the seat. In fact this habit of his had almost resulted in him losing his buttocks. It happened so, that at one place we had to get down at a temple. The temple being on other side of road, the driver stopped on main road and asked us to get down fast, following which he will take a U turn and park it. Everyone got down quickly, but as expected Varun was still struggling with his journal and bag and was also blocking Rachit. After waiting for some time the driver had to move on and Vikash Sir banged the door on him and what we saw was Varun’s ass was hanging outside the window of the car as the car moved on and found the parking. Everyone had turned furious at Varun’s act, but Vikash sir once again calmed it up by a well timed joke saying “People clean it, yours almost got cleaned up”.

“Sit down. We would have left in another five minutes” said Ramesh as he sat in the front seat. I too took my seat and left the door open for Varun. We were eager that finally it would start. But to our horror Varun was still standing at the door, holding it with one hand, and looking in some other direction smiling at some strange object which only he could see. “Abe sit, you asshole!” I shouted. He again looked back calmly, again turned his gaze in the same direction and after some 30 seconds replied, “Did we get some snacks to eat in the way?”

“You sit first! We will get something on the way” Saurav was pleading now.

He slowly kept his bag at the back, then again stood there waiting some time and then much to everyone’s frustration, said “I have some packets of potato chips and biscuits. I’ll just go and get them”.

“Leave it Varun. We will buy it” even Vikash sir protested.

“Why do you want to waste money, when I already have it?” Varun reasoned.

Anger was slowly turning into exasperation. “Varun dear, please sit down. You have already taken an hour. It’s 11, let us leave” Ramesh begged. When he starts pleading, one thing for sure is that he has no option left.

“Are yar, just two minutes? What is the big deal? I’ll get it.” And he rushed inside, leaving all of us furious.

“We will make sure that he has his worst journey of life. What say Abhi?” said Ramesh.

“Absolutely. If Koorg was trailer this would be the climax.” I said.

“Listen Vikash. I am still telling we should leave without him” Ramesh suggested.

“Let him get the chips no. It would be only a minute” Harpreet said.

“You bet. Only thing predictable about him is his unpredictability. I doubt he will be back in a minute.” I prophesied.

“Yes, right. Even I doubt that.” Rachit said.

We waited and waited and waited. After another 15 minutes Harpreet said, “Somebody go and check. I hope he is not cooking the chips”.

Saurav was about to get up, when Ramesh said, “You sit. I’ll go and see. Abhi you come.” He sounded determined.

Ramesh looked serious and I was sure that this was going to be dirty. He did not say a single word to me on the way. As expected, Varun was not looking for eatables. He had got a steam iron in his hand, had opened his previous T-shirt, and another T-shirt was on the bed, and he was looking out of window with the forefinger of other hand in his nose.

“Pray what are you up to?” Ramesh asked.

Varun blinked, waited some 10 seconds, looked out again and said, “I spilled something on that shirt, I just noticed that. Give me two minutes”.

“You stay there and you press your shirt, eat your chips and munch your biscuits. For we leave now.” I declared.

“What do you mean by that? I have also paid for the car” he said as he kept the iron on the stand and came two steps forward.

Ramesh instantly took out a five hundred note and thundered “Have it. Here is your money. You take it, fuck it and sleep with it.”

I took out a one rupee coin and place it with the five hundred note and said “And here is your tip for finally relieving us”

“This is insulting yar. I am getting angry now. What do you people mean? I am really getting angry now” he said.

“Ok, you are getting angry; I know how to cool you down” Ramesh said as he picked up a glass of water kept on table nearby and threw all the water on Varun’s face.

Varun charged towards Ramesh to retaliate, but I halted him and I landed a tight slap on his left cheek with my sinister hand which left my palm warm for some time. Ramesh did the same thing on his right cheek with his right hand. Varun was stunned and aghast. Tears filled in his eyes.

“What the hell do you think, you are some VIP that we will keep waiting for you the whole night?” said Ramesh as he landed another slap.

“And on top you say, you are getting angry. What the fuck will you do by getting angry?” I said and picked up his magazine and threw it away.

“Now sit here silently. And if Vikash and Rachit call don’t dare you pickup” Ramesh ordered.

We went back to the car and announced, “Varun has refused to come. He says he is not feeling well”

“Shit! Why the hell did he made us wait so long?” someone said.

“Fuck him! Let’s enjoy our vacation. At the end of the day what that guy needed was attention and he got it. Forget what happened.” I said as we sat down and the car started.

“Ya fine. But I still wish he had come. The trip would have been a lot of fun with him” Saurav said.

Ramesh looked back at me and winked. One thing we were certain of was that Varun will never tell anyone about what happened in the closed room for it would not go with his image.

“Even I wish that he had come. It sure would have been fun”, I said and winked back at Ramesh and lay back on my seat with my hands behind my head and closed my eyes. For us, we have had our fun, the fun of teaching him a lesson and with it a sweet revenge.

Pursuit of Madness

2009-08-13T10:39:00.002+05:30

“Wanna Have a Beer?” Whenever I hear this question my pulse start racing and a feeling of nostalgia mixed with a tingling feeling of horror and humor overtakes me, and I end up replying “I don’t”. Though a lot of time had passed and a lot of water has flown under the bridge, the memories of that fateful night are still fresh in my mind.

It was around the time I had just graduated and had both more energy and more wildness in me. I had moved to Bangalore to start my career as a system engineer in a software giant and a simple and unassuming Akshay has overnight turned into an arrogant and wild Mr. Sharma. While looking for accommodation I had met Prem, who was also a fresher and working as a game designer, who introduced me to Gaurav and Amit who were freshly graduated Chartered Accountants and Rajat who was a network administrator in another MNC. We happened to rent a house, which I must tell you, is quite an accomplishment in this city. Although quite different from each other we bonded well and became great friends. It was sometime two months into the new job when slowly the work pressure had started mounting on us and the rosy beds were slowly turning thorny and the optimism was slowly dying that this Friday night changed our life forever.

Every Friday night prior to that one, we used to watch a movie or a cricket match, talk some crap and complain about our work or the south Indian food before going to sleep. Things were looking similar that night too, till Prem came out with this wild idea. We had just finished India vs. West Indies T20 cricket match that India had lost and I and Amit had broken out into an argument about Dhoni’s captaincy. Just then, out of nowhere, Prem asked “How about getting some beer?” To my surprise, he was serious and Amit and Gaurav were actually considering. I looked at my expensive Fast Track watch, which I had bought out of my first salary, and it showed 11:30. “No Chance! It’s too late. This is not Delhi or Pune. This is a faltoo city. Forget about beer we wouldn’t even get a bottle of medicine at this time.” I explained. The one thing that often surprised me and continues to surprise me about this city is that on one hand it claims to be one of the most advanced cities in the country on the other it is being ruled by and is overcrowded with people who refuse to move forward and don’t want others to move forward in the name of Indian values and culture. Leaving aside all important problems concerned to the public they are bent on ensuring that city dies at 11. They don’t have problem with people working whole night for earning small wages but they have problems with people wanting to enjoy a little bit. “I know a place. We can get it” added Amit. I actually doubted he did for I had often seen him claiming things which he didn’t do, but there is one thing that a man can’t kill, and that is temptation. I decided to give it a try. Gaurav also agreed almost instantly. Rajat now was the only problem. One look at Rajat and one could be pardoned for believing that there is something seriously wrong with him or that he suffers from malnutrition, as he weighed only forty eight kilograms and sported a horn rimmed spectacle. I often used to joke that he was a nature’s mistake and he was actually meant to be a girl but a software bug in some part of the code of God’s software resulted in him becoming a boy, and it led to the programmer being fired. He was a typical bookworm and had no hobbies whatsoever. No music, no movies, no fun was his way of living and thus convincing him for a beer would be Herculean task. No matter what argument we used to convince him he simply kept making faces and shaking his head in a haphazard manner saying “No, I don’t like its smell.” I tried the clichés like “You must taste everything at least once in life” and “These days even the girls drink”, but for no avail. Finally we gave up and decided that four of us will carry on and Rajat will stay back and sleep with his books. As it turned out to be, Rajat had taken a smart decision.

Amit and Prem were the only ones who could afford a bike. While Gaurav sat behind Prem, I preferred to sit behind Amit as he was a sensible driver unlike Prem, who loved the accelerator more than his life. I again looked at my Fast Track in which all the three hands had just met, and date was on verge of being changed. The bikes had started roaring and soon we were ripping through the empty streets. There is a strange sense of pleasure in riding a bike after midnight on empty streets. The sound of roaring and the cool wind slapping the face give rise to a strange sensation of ecstasy caused by the rush of adrenaline through the whole body. Both of them had soon crossed 100 Kmph with Prem even performing some stunts and Gaurav silently chanting the Hanuman chalisa.

“Where the hell do we get the beer from?” Amit asked. I wanted to kick him hard at a place where it hurts most, for he was the one who some time ago had claimed that he knew a place. “Pubs would have closed, so roadside wine shops are our only bets”, Gaurav explained. He had a unique capability to simplify complicated things and complicate simple things. We went through various streets, but all we could find were closed shops as if laughing on us, and beggars sleeping on footpaths getting awake by the bike noise. It was only after traveling around one hour that we saw a shop with a Foster’s label and somebody sleeping near it. Amit went and woke him up. He got up and gave us a surprised look. He was well over six feet with red eyes and thick moustache and a belly threatening to tear his shirt. Before we could say something he asked “Beer?” “Great”, I thought.
“One forty ka ek” he said.
“What ekdum double. Hundred Kafi hai” I said.
“ Night. Risky. 140” he said.
“5 Bottles lene hai.Correct bolo” Amit said.
“130 last”
“120. Dena hai to bolo?” Prem added.
“Ok”
“Great. Deal done” I thought.
Prem took out a five hundred rupee note and said “Five Kingfisher Premium. Chilled.” The man tool the note folded it and touched it to his eye, returned Prem 100 rupee note and was just about to open the shutter and slip out bottles, when almost out of nowhere a police patrol party consisting of two bikers arrived on scene, probably to do some moral policing. On seeing them the man disappeared without even returning our money. Before we could do something one of the bikes was just in our way. One of them was short, stout and middle aged and was wearing a leather jacket while the other was younger but looked rather weary.

“Guys. Give me a good reason for you people being here at one in the night and I’ll let you off” asked the younger man. “Probably he has copied a dialogue from a Hollywood movie” I thought and said “We had gone for 10 to 12 show of the movie” and was instantly amazed that how did I get this idea.
“Which movie?”
“Fast and Furious 2” I said, hoping that this could be one movie which have the least chances of him having seen it, lest he might ask us the storyline.

But he had other ideas. “Show me the tickets.” He delivered a googly and left me stumped. “You think we are fools. Right?” he mocked. “Where are your DLs?” the older one demanded. While Amit took it out instantly, I could see Prem’s face getting pale. As expected he was once again the trouble maker. He had forgotten to carry it.
“All four of you, to the station” he said. “One night there will get you back on track”

“Sir we just came for a ride and we missed the DL. If you allow one of us to go, he will get the DL” Gaurav requested.

“NO”

“Is there any other way out?” Prem asked rather hesistantly.

“One thousand!”

“Sir we don’t have that much. We only have 250”Amit lied.

“Don’t you fuck around with me? You want me to believe that four of you came for drink with only 200.”

“Sir, that guy did not return our money.” I added.

“Chalo 500 de do” the older one said.

“We can maximum give 300. If you don’t agree arrest us.” Amit exclaimed rather calmly leaving us all agape.

“Chalo lao. I have to go home.” The older one signed off.

I gave him three hundred rupee notes. He took it, wetted his thumb from his tongue and counted the notes twice and very silently slipped it in his back pocket. All the while the young one was watching him intently. “Fuck off! I don’t want to see you here again. I won’t leave you the next time.” He said before finally starting his bike and leaving.

I watched them disappearing into the darkness and turned back and said “Let’s go back! It’s enough. We have lost 800 rupees and there is no chance of getting a beer.”

“Yes! He is right Let’s go back” Gaurav protested.

“No way!” Amit almost shouted. “There is no way I am returning without it today. Now that we have come this far I will take it at any cost.”

“You are right. Let’s try M.G road.” Said Prem

“But….” Before I could say something, Prem said “If you two don’t want to come, you can fuck off. Take one bike, we will take the other.” He said in a harsh tone. We reluctantly agreed to come. The clock had struck two and the chances of finding beer were anything, but realistic. We searched for another half hour trying our luck at every corner but found nothing. We had lost money, were almost jailed and Gaurav had has his heart in his mouth on many occasions. Finally, we had lost hope. Amit had lost it, he stopped the bike, got down and rip down a poster reading “Bangalore Rocks” and torn it down into pieces and broke out. “Fuck this city. This city sucks, the people suck. It only wants to see people destroying themselves with work, work and more work. Salla what do these bastards expect people to do after working from 9 A.M to 10 P.M by closing down everything at 11. Do they expect us to come back home after being screwed all day and sit and watch the Big Ass TV and listen to these assholes?” He said and sat down on a footpath nearby with his face between his palms.

Just then, like an angel from heaven, an auto-driver reached the scene. He took a look at us and said “Bottles chahiye. I can arrange. Every bottle 30 jyada lagega.”

Amit got up as if some energy had flown into him and had a spring in his step and a song on his lips. “Chalo done. Paanch bottle lao.”

“OK. Follow me...” He said as he started his auto and took a turn into a small lane. We had lost all powers of reasoning and logic. We simply followed him until we reached a dead end, but there were no shops or houses there. Before we could realize anything six more people appeared and two of them had pistols pointed on mine and Gaurav’s heads.
All of them looked rather well built and were carrying some weapons.

“Make any sound and I will blow off you head. Get off the bikes” One with the gun said.

We had no options but obeying. Another man took his hand into our pockets and took out our cellphones and wallets. “Open your watch” he ordered me. I hesitated, and he pushed me hard and snatched it out. “Your Jacket” He said to Prem and Prem innocently took it off and handed it to him. I for a second wished him to shoot Prem for it was because of him we landed into this. We watched helplessly as four of them sat in our bikes and other two boarded the auto and fled leaving us cashless about 20KM away from home, and no means to contact anyone at 3 in the morning.

“Luckily they didn’t kill us” Prem had lost everything except his sense of humor. “You want to die?” said Amit. “Cut the crap. How the hell we get out of here. We don’t have a single penny and no means to reach anyone. Worse, we can’t trust anyone” I said.

“Let’s wait for 2 hours. At around 5 A.M we will take an auto to home and will pay him when we reach home” Gaurav simplified. We waited for around two hours sitting on the same footpath where Amit did an excellent dialogue delivery some time ago. It was only during those hours that all of us decided that we will never drink again. Finally, at 5 we hired an auto and reached home by 6:30 to find a worried Rajat at door and he paid the auto-driver. We explained the story to Rajat who instead of sympathizing with us started laughing aloud. I kicked him hard; he fell down but still continued laughing like a hysteric. I wanted to strangulate him to death. He laughed for around 10 minutes, leaving us infuriated. He finally stopped looked at me and said “You must taste everything at least once in life” and started laughing again for another 10 minutes adding insult to injury.

It has now been two years to that event. All of us have moved out of Bangalore and hear very little from each other. But one thing I can assure is all of us had never tried to drink beer again. Even Prem, one who used to gulp down 3 bottles in 10 minutes hasn’t drunk it for past two years. It is another thing that now he drinks on the rocks whisky. Gaurav and Amit moved to Pune while Rajat is now settled abroad. However, whenever he meets me, he does just one thing. He laughs aloud.
So folks if you want to have beer in night and don’t have one in the fridge, Think again.

A Chapter from my novel

2008-08-19T17:00:00.000+05:30

Due to some problems to some people i have removed this...

2008-08-14T17:31:00.000+05:30

Where the rules are draconian,
and flexibility is a word unheard of,
Where u have to attend classes even when ur leg is broken
Where attendance is the only thing everyone worries about
Where comparisons with IIT's never end
Where promises are never fulfiled(Wi-Fi)
Where students are blamed for everything wrong,
In such a place how can somebody be happy...

A few people may not like it, so comments are welcome

2008-08-14T17:16:00.000+05:30

First things first, I thank my Web Services teacher for urging me to create this blog... But for sure he may not be happy with things I post. On my side my opinion about VIT will never change. This place worships mediocrity, supports hypocrisy, and for no reasons showcases itself as the next MIT. The claim that they are not becoming better than MIT only due to student's insenstiveness is really baseless. They claim that they have "one" student in Microsoft, I say Siddartha managed it inspite of the computer science faculty, not because of them. The faculty is useless in Computer Science and Engineering. All of them seem unhappy with their lives and to give themselves a sense of being someone they try to screw student's carreers. The copy paste culture rules here and originality is something that they punish. This is the only college where practical exams happen on Paper rather on computer. Of course they have a computer but that is just show off, otherwise how can one person pass with wrting a #include within main() (rather he or she gets a S on marksheet) while the other gets a B for doing the program correctly but forgetting to write Sample Input and Sample Output(He wrote it as Input and Output)
Comments are welcome, but don't use names. I would like to tell the stories without hurting anyone, as the stories deserve to be told.