Life As I Know It

“But why?” is a question I constantly seemed to ask people when I was a child. There was this Sports Shoe Shop in our neighbor hood and everybody knew the owner, he was dumb and deaf, yet he never seemed to have any problem communicating with any of us. In 1992-93 things changed. The change was apparent, some people stopped talking to this man and others maintained cordial civilities expected of them. This was a very strange experience because noticeably the neighborhood which once used to boast of being very cosmopolitan was suddenly divided. Babri Masjid was demolished on 6.12.1992 and all hell broke loose. Curfew was declared, violence continued, schools were closed, people feared venturing out of their houses. During one of these days while walking on the streets with my mother I saw that the shoe shop was not there any more, it was burnt down. Why? Because the owner was a Muslim. Who burnt it down? Hindus. But am I not a Hindu? Are Hindus bad? My parents fortunately don’t harbor c

When you read “ASHOE”, read between the lines and think of the politician. When you read “god bless you” think of the one throwing the shoe. Game on politicians.

When one has a complaint about something it is natural that they will approach an authority who they presume is duty bound to take care of the complaint. But what does one do when the complaint is not taken seriously? I unfortunately have a very low threshold for patience. Me complaining to authorities is rare, but when I do it is always about something serious, things that actually matter and need immediate attention. Unfortunately the system here is that unless you make your complaint heard thrice or preferably more number of times you’ll probably have some response. I couldn’t give a rats tail about authority if they are not capable of doing their job. They are being paid from the taxes we pay right? We are further paying them to look into a matter we have put before them. But nothing can make them budge except a hefty bribe. I don’t want to a pay a bribe. If they are too lazy to do anything about the problem, I have no intentions of letting things pass. I have my own ideas about re

The Lion Cub v. P ot B ellied F rog E yed B alding T witching K lutzy O ld S kunk [ PBFEBTKOLS ] Round 1: I hate you . Result: Tie Round 2: Taunts Result: “Sticks and stones might hurt me your words surely don’t, you lice blood drinking, leech poop munching old fool!!!!” – Lion Cub Round 3: Provoke Result: Lion cub took the bait and lost to PBFEBTKOLS. Round 4: Accusations Result: Lion Cub has clean chit, no allegations proved. Round 5: Bloodshed Result: Duration of battle: 50 hours Umpire: The wise Elephant Winner: The unscathed Lion Cub Looser profile : PBFEBTKOLS --->Integrity- Ripped, Raped & Shredded, Character questioned, Obvious Biasness proved beyond reasonable doubt, AND lost the wise Elephant’s respect forever :)

I read a recent Supreme Court judgment where the judge made a reference to Mimamsa while interpreting a constitutional enactment. This decision was purely based on the dictums as provided by the Mimamsa school of Hinduism. The judge who delivered this decision made an observation that as a country that has had 6 glorious decades of independence we still find ourselves bound to the British culture which has seeped into our society and more so in the judiciary. Our laws, rules, courts, mannerisms in the court to the dress code is Briticism all the way. Mimamsa has been in existence for the past 5,000 years yet we choose to uphold Maxwell who was on this planet just 500 years back. This is what led to me trying to find a distinction between the two. Frankly I would rather have a sound man than an insane bunch of religious fanatics tell me how to interpret the law. But, when I finally got down to reading about this group and their ideas for the first time I felt relieved while reading som

Mysore churned up the best hail storm ever and what timing! Today it was awesome! Till this evening all the windows in my room and study were open to defy the stifling heat so you can imagine when the storm broke out I had hail stones crashing on the floor from all the windows. The winds had gone berserk and there was no clear direction for the rain. Closing the windows was such a task. If it were left up to me I’d probably have left the windows open and allowed the rain water to flood the house but since I am not the only inhabitant here and I have parents to answer to, I couldn’t really do that. I have a very bad habit of leaving my books under the bed instead of on it so my books were slightly damaged nothing that the iron box can’t remedy but I don’t like it when the books look all puffed up and wavy and I most definitely dislike the water mark. :( It was nice while it lasted, but the aftermath needed lots of cleaning. We don’t have gulmohur trees on our street but I had a whole bu

Unlike Edvard Munch I wasn’t experiencing a moment of fear and pain of not being able to love again. My anguish has its roots in not being able to take my time in my hands and do as I please with it. This sketch was done in a moment of inspiration in the D.P.C class when th e lecturer just went on and on and on about deeds and the various aspects that one has to concentrate while drafting a deed. Found myself holding on to my dear head barely able to stop from screaming and my neighbor said I look as pained as the face in the movie “Scream”. After entertaining my bench mates by contorting my face to express as much pain and sorrow as possible I decided to put my “anguish” on paper.And THIS was conceived --------->"The Anguish" I call my sketch “The Anguish” took me 5 minutes to complete my master piece. In the

When I open a bottle of water and take a sip it has musk melon juice in it, every water source is filled only with M.M juice. So I resort to eating vegetables and fruits with lots of water content like cucumbers and tomatoes but for some reason they taste like Papaya. Disgusting stuff. I cannot stand the smell or the taste. When I eat rice even that tastes like papaya!!! Dreams are like movies. Only my dreams are both Technicolor and black and white. That is I am always in black and white and the rest of my dream crew is always in color. One very terrible dream I get is of me chasing a chocolate cake, the closer I get to it the smaller it becomes. When I withdraw from it and let it chase me it becomes big, huge, humungous screeching “eat me!” I had never had papaya and musk melons in my dream – until recently. Of all the fruits I hate these two. I can’t eat them even if they disguise themselves as other fruits I wouldn’t eat them. Kind of like a papaya by any other name or fram

During weddings and other personal gatherings there is always an excess of P ublic D isplay of A ffection. Everyone is hugging, kissing, holding hands and there is an effusive amount of mush flowing amongst all the guests. PDA is like a creeper curling around tightening as it goes up completely squishing the lungs of any air making me claustrophobic even though I know that there is an opening to escape. The mush flowing was directly proportional to the amount of bubbly going around the guests at my friends wedding. Having been friends form childhood I knew most of the guests and after being extremely polite I decided I needed air and was heading out of the hall and at that very moment I saw my French teacher who I had been avoiding for over a year. I knew she had seen me too, I had to do some fast thinking but all the love in the room had clouded my brains. *think* When no brilliant idea came to my rescue, I just went over and gave my teacher a hug and a peck on the cheek and a smile

I like the Evidence lectures because our lecturer invariably deviates from the topic and starts discussing about people and the general trends he notices among students these days. One such observation was “multi tasking” . Doing many things at once and not really enjoying any task exclusively and doing them mechanically. According to him man has evolved from being an animal to become a dual being which is part animal and part machine. The animal being recessive and machine being dominant. We tend to set ourselves a pattern and follow that without changing, which pretty much makes us devoid of any spark which people once referred to as enthusiasm. The machine in us has so progressively taken over that even emoting is a thing of past. [Do you smile when you put a smiley after a sentence? If so yay! You are not that rusty. If you don’t then the machine needs oiling] It’s just expressing without feeling. The education system in India is one of the best in the world and the one thing I h

Okay the title of this post has been purposely ripped off from Sarah McDonald’s Book with the very same title. I read this book almost 8 months back and was really surprised by things that foreigners seem to notice that we Indians just glance at and move on. We aren’t shocked, surprised or horrified about things that we see around us. It is not because we are insensitive but because we know . I don’t know how exactly I am going to explain the “we know ” attitude about the things happening around us. But here goes: While walking on K.D road with my friends a bunch of little beggar kids circled us and started asking us for money. [I don’t encourage begging, I don’t give money to beggars and no I will certainly not agree that by giving them money I am helping them] We have learnt to break away from them and even these kids know who they can prey on. Walking behind us was a Singaporean lady, and two American men. The lady looked at the kids and immediately fished out change and started

After my last post I decided that my posts have been extremely depressing so to perk things up my friend and I decided to take some Facebook[Henceforth referred to as FB] quizzes. Here is what happened: According to FB, My name is Sachiko(means happiness in Japanese!!!), I am 22years old and I am Spanish! :D In my past life I was Pablo Picasso ;) and in my future life I am going to be a cat! [I don’t like cats and I am going to be one in my next life? I hope I don’t remember that I don’t like cats in my next life or I’ll probably end up hating myself :P] As to my current predicament as to what next after college? The Oracle spoke and this is what it said, “you have mastered the case law doctrines, you have memorized the constitution, you know every Latin maxim and you need not cram by the time bar review starts! Who knows? You might even top the bar”. [Yeah okay will mention this in future interviews] To know if my choice in studying law was in fact right I took the “What prof

I call this phase of my life- Stagnating. There isn’t much that I am doing because there isn’t much to do. Whatever I am doing is not interesting. I have resorted to using planners. Everything I have done, going to do, doing this month is time bound. It’s sheer torture when I have to cut into so many activities just to do something that I am not really keen on doing. Like yesterday, I spent 2 hours of my life that I am not going to get back in a chamber for an interview. The very idea of getting into the 9-5 bracket is scary. It will define my work time and my personal time. The work time will invariably slide into my personal time, but my personal time can never slide into my work time. As a kid I never pretended to be a grown up ever. I was just happy being my age. Now I am happy too, but I do miss that feeling of being careless, irresponsible, doing things without bothering about consequences, being impulsive . Does adulthood ever allow a person to lower their guard and just be

After America’s Ex President Bush was Indian Home Minister Chidambaram’s turn to dodge the shoe. Has the common man’s shoe become the most powerful tool to express public opinion? Is this is a trend that is soon going to become the popular means to display the common man’s angst against the government? Lathon Ke Bhooth Bathon Se Nahin Manthe. I agree with shoe throwing. Congress has a chance to give its members a clean chit and it is doing so. Tytler who is one of the prime accused in the 1984 riots was recently given a clean chit by the CBI. This has angered the Sikhs and anyone can understand their sentiments. This is not the first time that Congress has tried to cover its tracks. Remember Office of Profit Act? When they asked Jaya Bachan to declare her assets and the same came back to bite the Congress they enacted OOP Act to protect themselves. Why don’t people see this? Now they are giving their own man a route to escape. This has further got me thinking if we have restricted the

News this afternoon: Just days after the communal unrest in Kyathmarana Halli in Mysore, our very famous Pramod Muthalik decided to visit the place. Fortunately he was taken into preventive detention. It’s nice to know that the police force has taken the pre election safety measures seriously. Later in the evening news channels were reporting blasts in Assam and ULFA is suspected to have its hand in this operation. Again the government had been warned about ULFA’s threats to disrupt peace given that tomorrow is the founding day of the organization. Again the government didn’t take appropriate steps to prevent the attacks.

Yesterday Fenny went for her check up. The doctor gave her a clean chit and she is completely out of danger and has completely recovered from jaundice. I still intend to keep her on a strict diet because I don’t want to take any chances. It’s nice to see Fenny kid waddle around the house instead of looking sad and in pain. The joy of taking her out for long walks or playing fetch or even just running inside the house pretending to be chased by invisible dogs is simply priceless. To kiss her and hug her so tight that she nips at me or simply pulling her tail which puts her in a tizzy because she remembers her puppy hood game of chasing her tail. She makes a pretty picture playing by herself but she always welcomes company and loves being pampered and spoilt. I have no difficulty spoiling her :) The onset of summer means welcoming home plenty of mangos and jack fruit. When I was a kid looking at these fruits used to bring me such happiness and contentment. The smell the taste, licking th

I started following this blogger’s blog from 31st. It’s strange the kind of blogs that get me interested in reading them. This guy has written a lot about prison reforms and what got me interested was the matter of fact way in which he posts his arguments and for a min he even had me wanting to change my mind about my views on capital punishment . I googled him and read his interview. I re read the interview and he reminded me of so many fictional characters all at once. The fact that he murdered someone and showed no remorse for his actions, went to prison for the same and came out of the place as a front man for prison rights is astounding. When I read his blogs I couldn’t imagine him as being a murderer. But when I read the interview it made me skeptical. The interview made me think of him as an unrepentant criminal. Talk about being confused. Finally I guess all he really is doing is protecting himself. It’s clear when he says, “your life sentence only begins the day you get ou

Sigur Ros is an amazing band. My brother got me to listen to them. Hoppipolla is my favorite track as of now. I have 7 reports to submit. I don’t think I’ll be doing it till the last minute because the last minute rush of getting everything done and actually completing is more satisfying than having worked on each report individually treating each one as the most precious creation on the planet. Plus I am at my best when my head is totally muddled. Finding clarity in chaotic situations is far more rewarding than analyzing each word without making any progress. That is probably because when one has more time one becomes overly analytical putting even the most insignificant of things under the microscope and analyzing the same as if trying to find some hidden meaning. Where as last minute work usually gets me to attack all the necessary points and come up with decent arguments. The lack of time probably helps one notice the most important things. Ah to each his own I guess. The electi