Insomniac's Dream

Holiday

2006-06-29T18:00:00.000+05:30

Off on holiday. In search of bliss…

Guess Who's Back

2006-06-18T23:08:00.000+05:30

My time away from blogging was interesting. Honestly it wasn’t even that I didn’t have time. I had time aplenty, even during my exams. But something just kept me away. I didn’t intend to take such a long break but I didn’t account for my laziness…

I noted four phases:
Phase I: The ‘don’t care less’ phase. Almost glad to be off blogging.
Phase II: The ‘I wish I was blogging’ phase. Missed the therapeutic catharsis. However managed to stave off the craving to blog.
Phase III: The ‘my exams are on and I’m too busy’ phase. Indifference. Self importance…I’m never going to change!
Phase IV: The ‘damn I’m lazy’ phase. Last 17 days to be precise. My broadband service tells me I’ve been online for 55hours 12mins and 32 secs in which time I have failed to find any time to blog.

Well, it’s good to be back. It seems the blogosphere has changed a lot. Old blogmates are no more. Rest in peace….

Hiatus

2006-04-04T22:16:00.000+05:30

Aar bhallagche na…

Destiny

2006-03-18T21:39:00.000+05:30

I have never really believed in destiny as such. Destiny as in your-future-has-already-been-determined destiny. It has been my belief that only one can change one’s future. I hated the idea that events were pre-planned, a part of some larger scheme of things that humans are too small to perceive.

However, my conviction is beginning to waiver. I never knew that someone could have it so hard. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. As if it weren’t already bad enough. I remember having commented ‘Bole na, kichu joner kopale dukkho achhe’ (It is said that some people have misery written on their foreheads…a Bengali expression for destiny). It’s unfair. And I’m not at the receiving end. And yet I feel like crap. I don’t even know why I care so much. Well, maybe I’m just deluding myself.

Truth

2006-03-03T20:30:00.000+05:30

Nothing much seems to make sense these days. I wish things were back to black and white. I hate all the grey.

Sines I wish I had a friend like you in real life.

Onnesha (provided you visit) how do you know me? (your blog seems to be stuck in time)

To all others whose blogs I have not visited. My apologies. It seems that life has just taken a bite out of me. I’m no longer whole.

My Blog

2006-02-26T12:25:00.000+05:30

I have always been a private person. Especially with my problems. I have always felt that they are mine and it is up to me to deal with them. There are very few people whom I would discuss my problems with but I don’t want them to worry about me so I don’t tell them. All they will notice is that I am a bit quiet. I try to hide even that but I’m no superman. So far I have laughed with the world and cried all alone. Quite frankly I don’t think I want to continue this way. I want to share all with someone.

Somehow my blog is my proxy friend. It helps just getting it out. Not trapping feelings any longer. Sometimes it’s nice not to be judged.

Discovery

2006-02-18T21:01:00.000+05:30

I have a new found respect for women. I had never realised how much they put up with. Our mothers, our wives. How much more they put up with.

The last time I saw S-di I would never have imagined what she had had to bear. Somehow I thought her life was perfect. As good as it gets. A pretty young lady, with a good job and a great personality. Now I know how much pain was hidden behind that facade. And I am thankful. I feel awful that it took another’s pain for me to wake up.

Yesterday

2006-02-09T10:49:00.000+05:30

Yesterday should have been a good day. It was even what I had expected it to be. What I had not expected was my reaction. I don’t know why I have this habit of yearning for something, and when I finally achieve it or get it, I am utterly disappointed. I think to myself – ‘well…now what?’ I hate that. Why can’t I enjoy something that I have worked for or something that I have persisted at for so long? Does this mean that I will never experience true satisfaction? Why does that thought leave me so unsatisfied?

Yesterday opened up a new channel. I am no longer apprehensive. Events will take their course.

Yesterday a point that has left me clueless was reiterated. The mantra of life is self-preservation. Yet the predominant instinct of the human psyche is denial. Why do we assume that bad things happen only to other people? We read about divorce, domestic violence, death and rape. The media plies us with images of gore and destruction. And still we assume that none of this can happen to us. ‘Stuff like this happens to other people. It doesn’t and won’t happen here.’ For the rest of our peacefully uneventful lives we will only read about bad things happening to other people. For such a smart and intelligent race, why doesn’t it sink in that these things are happening to real people? People just like us. Who wake up in the morning and brush their teeth. People who know other people and live with loving families just like ours.

Yesterday I realised that not thinking about evil is probably what keeps us alive. The worst part is, now I can’t stop thinking about it.

Jaded

2006-02-01T17:42:00.000+05:30

Exams are at last over! Am not particularly happy with them. But they are over and that’s really what counts. What really angers me is that we had a class test today even though our sems ended on the 30th. Quite frankly I have never given a class test so comprehensively under-prepared. Spent the whole day at the book fair (love it! love it! feel sorry for those Calcuttans who miss it each year), bought two fish for my aquarium and came back home at around nine. No time to prepare. But more importantly, I didn’t even want to pick my books up.

Fast forward to this morning. Dragged my sorry carcass out of bed and proceeded to haul it college. Teech showed up on time. And then I gave the freakiest test of my life. Teech gave us four questions. Beside the questions he wrote ‘ANY 3’. Then we yelled like there was no tomorrow. ‘Naa sir! Korbo na! Duto din!’ (‘No sir! We won’t do three questions! Give us two!’), following which he replaced the ‘3’ with a happy looking ‘2’. As we started to write he walked out of the class saying ‘Cheating korbe na’ (‘Don’t cheat’) and walked out for the duration of the test. Between 10:30 and 11:15 this morning the word cheating was redefined.

The past few days I have been tired as I have never been before. Truly jaded. My back is giving me trouble. Must do something about it.

Dread

2006-01-15T20:34:00.000+05:30

Have you ever felt the dread of being under-prepared for an exam? I am feeling it right now. Tomorrow is my thermodynamics exam. A three hour torture of entropy, enthalpy and steam tables. Not to mention an hour long extra free torture after the larger one. And yours sincerely is posting on his blog.

I have a very strange reaction to this. I freeze. I completely lose it. I run away. Am I a coward? Why can’t I just sit down and face it. Why do I want to call somebody up for affirmation that everybody is as badly off as I am? Why do I want others to do badly if do badly? I usually don’t care how others do as long as I do well.

Considering my track record in t/d I don’t think that tomorrow is going to be my best day. Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Follicular Fears

2006-01-08T21:26:00.000+05:30

I am going bald. That is all there is. That is what will happen. The implacable march of time is taking its toll on my scalp. Ok…I know what you’re thinking. I’m vain. But truthfully, would you like to walk around with wispy fluff poorly concealing a shiny 8 ball on your head? Truthfully.

The saddest part is I don’t usually care about my looks. But this time things are different. I’ve already started a comb-over. Am I going to be one of those forty year old men with pot-bellies, and heads that remind one of bowling balls? Men who really believe that a three second hair dye and a comb-over hide that infamous ‘sheen of a million suns’?

Some men age gracefully. Sometimes I feel that grey hair is quite becoming in some cases. But is a bald spot? Especially considering the fact that I have a forehead that competes with Venezuela in terms of area. This year will I have to say goodbye to my hair? Well, it was good while it lasted…

Shubho Naba Barsha

2006-01-03T21:59:00.000+05:30

It isn’t that I don’t mean the title of my blog, or am dissing the people who did wish me. It’s just that I wonder how many people mean it when they say it. At this time of year we say it like we’re taking a breath. For every person we meet, we tend to play the ‘Happy New Year’ record, or if we want to be different we play the ‘May the New Year bring health, prosperity, gf, blah blah blah’ record.

I took a count of how many times I have said ‘Happy New Year’ and actually meant it, and am quite surprised at my own hypocrisy. It’s something like two out of a hundred. And if you wonder if I mean the title, trust me on this one, I do.

Why should what we say be so different from what we mean. As the BFG said ‘What I say and what I mean are two totally different things’. Why the charade. Isn’t everything complicated enough as it is, without our warped sense of cordiality having its way with us?

PS: Srin, I can’t comment on your blog. There seems to be something wrong with your template cos I can see the code and those sections of the page aren’t rendered.

Digerati

2005-12-20T17:29:00.000+05:30

UI finally bothered me enough to get me to follow this tag. Basically you have to-
1. Go to Dictionary.com and find out the word of the day.2. Using Google search for images, find a picture of this word that strikes you the most.3. Write a ten line riff such that the meaning of the word is brought out within the first five lines.4. Tag three unsuspecting souls.

Digerati -Persons knowledgeable about computers and technology

Fitting, considering I’m a bit of a geek. As for the picture…

And the riff (I'm crossing my fingers for this one)-

Jock says:
Digerati Pimply Smartie!!!
Lord of the geeks,
Bespectacled computer freaks.
Never touched a girl,
Dude, you make me wanna hurl!
Digerati Pimply Smartie!!!
I’m gonna stomp yo ass and then we gonna party!!!

Geek replies:
Man! Maybe we the nerd,
But u the real turd,
Wanna know what’s funny?
Dude, we got all the money!

I tag….

Jaded

Sines

Srin

PS: If you thought that this was a crap riff, please write so. Also, will be putting up a blogroll really soon!

Home Sweet Home

2005-12-13T20:40:00.000+05:30

The other day I was riding in a car down the bypass, with my cousin’s husband. DD-da is a very successful computer engineer and is currently living in Hyderabad, though he’s basically settled in Boston. He’s relatively young and that’s why I like addafying with him. When I asked him whether he wanted to stay on in Hyderabad he gave me an odd reply. A reply which I found (rather inexplicably) that I could relate to. He said ‘I can picture myself dying in say…Boston or Calcutta…but I don’t see myself dying in Hyderabad.’

Is that what we mean by home? A place where we would be comfortable dying? When I thought about it seemed right. I personally would like to die in the house where I presently stay. Maybe that’s why they say there’s no place like home.

Notun Feeling

2005-12-01T22:31:00.000+05:30

My results are out. I remember during our semesters a friend came up to me after a particularly gruelling exam and said —‘jaanis?aamar notun feeling hochhe…ei porikhhata mone hochhe paash korbo’. At that time we howled in laughter (albeit very klanto haashi). Now that my results are out I kinda have the same feeling…

What the hell?

The Duke of URL

2005-11-25T22:30:00.000+05:30

It was while sifting through Outlook (my fav serious mag) that I came across this article on the truth behind the internet. Many of us perceive the internet as the last frontier for free speech (despite the recent blogstorm over IIPM and Gaurav Sabnis). The final place on earth without too many rules. Where each person can reveal his darkest of secrets without having to worry about who will judge him. The place where the world is opened out to a child sitting wide-eyed in front of a screen in darkest Peru.

But the reality is rather different. The backbone of the internet is something called a DNS (domain name server). It is basically a computer that stores enormous lists of URLs (net addresses) and their corresponding IP addresses. To any browser ‘http://www.google.com’ and 64.233.187.99 mean the same thing. However without the IP address, no internet resource can be accessed.

In the world there are 13 root DNS servers in the, that contain these master lists. Of these ten are located in the US. As of now only the US can make changes to these lists. Clone DNS servers contain information identical to these root servers. However they can at any time be blocked by the possessor of the root server, crippling internet services in particular country, namely the US (from now on will be referred to as Big Brother). Not to mention the billions of dollars it earns every year.

Though Big Brother has not to date exercised it’s power, there really is nothing stopping it from doing so. Imagine the economic impact of such a strike on India’s economy.

Big Brother on the other hand claims that it intends to maintain it’s ‘historic’ role in the maintenance of the internet, as a safe and stable environment. Okay. Let’s examine Big Brother’s above statement. By safe, Big Brother means a place where leering old men provide a demand for child pornography. A place where you can arrange a trip to Cambodia. A nice peaceful trip where your friendly travel agent provides you with, among other things a cylinder of helium. For your average painless suicide, if you were wondering. By stable Bigger Brother means a place where hackers can steal your identity. A place where pimply fourteen-year-olds sitting across the border from us can deface the websites of our educational institutions and access the secret databases of our nuclear facilities.

Bigger Brother still maintains that it is essential, that in the fight against terrorism it retain it’s current position. Bigger Brother recently made a complete u-turn on it’s promise to democratize the internet, claiming that it is for the general good of mankind that it not relinquish it’s position of power. An equivalent real-life statement would go something like this – “I have you by the balls. I’m not squeezing, so why should I let go?” Am I mistaken, but wasn’t 9/11 a result of policing a world that did not want to be policed?

So it seems that Bigger Brother will have the power to filter through every mail you send, every page you visit. Essentially, if you press the tilde key on your keyboard, Bigger Brother will be onto you (check out Project Echelon). ‘Thought crime’ isn’t so far away. Wonder what substitute will be found for Newspeak. HTML maybe?

Found In Translation

2005-11-18T13:17:00.000+05:30

This post is a continuation of this post.

I came across this poem in this book. It touched a chord with me then and I would like to share it with you…

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

by William Ernest Henley; 1849-1903

Note: The title is Latin for 'unconquerable'

Now this is what I call a poem. The sparseness adds to the harshness of reality and the power of simplicity…something that I frankly don’t see enough of. Something that people tend to underestimate these days.

In an interesting twist, Timothy McVeigh prior to his execution on June 11th 2001. This is it...

The Progression of My Phobias

2005-11-10T21:21:00.000+05:30

When I was a kid my biggest fear was of the dark. The thought of a slimy alien hiding in the shadows waiting to pounce on me when I least expected it kept me up at night.

Now my biggest fear is falling in love.

Once I fall in love, my biggest fear will be falling out of love.

Sweet Somethings...

2005-11-04T13:42:00.000+05:30

My bhai phota mishti...see them and weep...

Omnis Cellula e Cellula

2005-10-31T18:27:00.000+05:30

Among the household chores that I am expected to perform (thankfully not everyday), the one I like the least is getting the milk. The entire process of convincing a deaf goala that I know that he has arrived, and then proceeding downstairs and squatting to get the milk just gets on my nerves.

This post has, however nothing to do with my disliking for my milkman. It boils down to last Friday when I trudged down the stairs to do the deed. Instead of letting me slam the door in his face (as I usually like to do), he told me to note down his cell phone number! What the hell? Even my frickin milkman has a cell phone.

Though I do possess a cell phone (I admit that I am rather attached to it), I find that I suffer from a rare form of passive-cell-phone-irritation syndrome. It is actually quite like passive smoking, yet much more irritating and not quite lethal. At least not to the sufferer.

I recall the time that I went to watch Sarkar at Roxy. Crap hall, with even crappier sound. On top of that some moron had his cell phone ringing incessantly. Dude! There is something called a silent mode. It’s when your cell phone doesn’t make any noise and doesn’t disturb anyone. Thankfully I was in august company that day. A brief session of bawali and taunts stopped the noise. Well, at least for the next fifteen minutes.

Footnote: India has just crushed Sri Lanka and now leads the 7 match series 3-0. Dhoni 183*. Damn! Dukher bishoi ei je dadar fire ashar aar bishesh aasha nei. Btw, Lonka kober theke eto murgi holo?

fifty-five

2005-10-19T21:56:00.000+05:30

Okay…sorry I’m so late with the story. I’m such a slob…

And babel, I was so supremely confident that I would not be tagged for the story that I read your story but didn’t read whom you had tagged… *holding ears doing mental oth-bosh*. Now I’ll stop rambling and get on with it…

It was a one in a million chance. He tried to stare past the sheets of rain and the cloak of the dark. He was alone. And there she was. She moved towards him. So close he almost heard her breathe. She smiled. The glint in her eyes hypnotised him. She turned and was gone.

Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?

2005-10-13T17:12:00.000+05:30

Aww man…why do all good things have to end so soon. After a disastrous pujo last year this year was going so so well. I had something to do every single day of the puja. Panchami was a bit boring but good. Shashti I enjoyed ragging a ‘dude’ who fancied that Bengalis are rubbish (please ask no further). Saptami I pulled my first all-nighter. Despite being forced to engage in matal-management in the wee hours of Ashtami it was all-in-all great fun.

By far the best of all days was Nabami/Dashami. The day was absolutely sublime. I spent the whole day with my two best friends, of whom one is kinda special to me *blushing*. It was magical. It was like I was on some dreamy cloud (#9 maybe). Floating my way across the aggregation of (sublime) pandals in South Kolkata *dreamy sigh*. For the first time ever, everything was going my way.

Was it to last? Not really. Now I am sure. There is some sort of ‘larger plan of things to keep me depressed’. In what I can term only as heresy, I found people who had partaken in shidur khela. I was passed by groups of people merrymaking while on there way to bishorjon. Could someone please stop picking on me? Am I destined to be the ant under the magnifying glass? Not only do you have to cut short the pujo, but do you have to rub it in??? *takes of specs and massages nose for some strange melodramatic reason*

Well, on a lighter note. MS Word spell-checker’s suggestions for corrected alternatives to ‘Saptami’-

Sap Tami

Septum

Pastrami

Satanic

Pastime

I especially enjoyed number four. ;)

Lost in Translation

2005-10-07T13:56:00.000+05:30

Warning: The contents of this post are highly contentious. They are merely an opinion. Please be gentle when posting comments.

Literature has given one hell of a lot to me. Without it and my sense of humour I would probably have lost the will to live a long time ago. The writings of authors such as Amitav Ghosh, John Steinbeck and George Orwell are sublime, each in its own unique way. The power of a piece of literature just cannot be measured.

There is however one aspect of literature that I have failed to appreciate—poetry. It may be because I found the methods in which they were taught at the school level to be dry and overall attempting to dissuade the student from taking any interest in the subject. I must admit that the collection of teachers from whom I have learnt English should have been in a zoo as opposed to teaching in a school. While we were doing ‘Old Man and the Sea’ I recall one of our teachers summarily informing us that ‘Santiago’ means ‘good morning’ in Spanish.

I am not saying that all poetry (or poetry for that matter) is ‘bad’ or meaningless. Few things compare to the lyrical genius of ‘Lochinvar’, the sheer brutality of ‘The Tiger’ or the brilliance of ‘To A Skylark’. However I find a lot of other poets to have written poems that really seem to have no head or tail.

The single poem that drove me to a dislike of poetry is ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. The first time that I read the poem I thought that I had missed some crucial message. Even when I read it as a text, the poem failed to expose its inner meaning. When a friend (who fancied himself as a poet) explained to me that there are a number of interpretations of the poem I found it almost ridiculous.

Poetry is by far the best medium for expressing abstract feelings that cannot be passed on in prose. The poet should logically have some thought in mind when he pens a poem. If that message is lost behind a veil of obscure references and allusions then it may be that the message is lost forever. Different people come up with suggestions of what the poem could mean. Nobody really knows for sure. People may even interpret messages that weren’t intended. Doesn’t that really defeat the purpose of art?

I sincerely feel that I am missing out on a lot. I love to read and when I see others enjoying something that I find I am incapable of enjoying I feel kind of left out.

Monk

2005-09-26T21:25:00.000+05:30

Of the utter rubbish that TV stations spew out nowadays, I have discovered a few serials for which the wasted time is worth it. One of them on my TV schedule is ‘Monk’, a delightful mystery-comedy starring the immensely talented Tony Shalhoub. He plays the role of a tremendously eccentric detective, Adrian Monk in the San Francisco Police Department. Following the murder of his wife in a car-bombing, Monk became literally insane, developing extreme obsessive-compulsive habits. The pilot episode of the first season shed light onto Trudy’s murder. In a scene, that rates as among the most touching I have seen, Monk comes face to face with the man who planted the bomb, as the latter lies on his deathbed. He looks violently ill, with only days left to live, crippled by a painful condition of some sort. As Monk and his friends enter the nurse informs them that he is on morphine and can feel no pain. After a few words Monk asks to be alone. Let the script (not the exact script but it should do) say the rest…

[Monk walks round the bed to the man’s drip]

Man: Forgive me….

Monk: Forgive you? I forgive you…

[Monk reaches for the morphine switch on the drip]

Monk: This is me, turning off your morphine

[Monk flips the switch. After a tantalizing wait he flips it back on]

Monk: …and this is Trudy, the woman you killed, turning it back on…

----------)—(=@ Absolutely superb…

Love or Something Like It

2005-09-23T19:17:00.000+05:30

Poets have produced some of the most beautiful pieces on love and yet to date nobody has really ever been able to capture the sheer insanty of being in love, or at least thinking that one is in love. Erm…I should speak for myself. So tell me (yes you) how many of you have been destroyed by Cupid’s sickly sweet heart tipped arrow? *meekly raises own hand*

Well…whatever. The thing is that life as a kid is black and white, right and wrong. As the years roll by, well… shit happens. Why the hell is life so complex right now. Not just love but everything. Why can people not take something at face value? Why does every little itty bitty thing have to be examined and over-examined till there really is nothing left to examine?

Back to love…I dunno. Never been successful at it. Yet it always occupies a corner of my mind. When will I ever learn. Sometimes I wish I were P.B. Shelley’s skylark—

“Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety”

Soporifica

2005-09-14T21:51:00.000+05:30

As I lie on my back, awake in my bed my mind meanders. It goes to places I have never been. It thinks thoughts that it should not think. It becomes charged with a desire to explore, to experience. As cars pass by, the clock strikes two. The light of the streetlight invades the privacy of my mosquito net. My own private volume. A space that is solely mine.

I don’t like the light of the streetlight. It is too strong. I much prefer the light reflected off the stagnant water that refuses to leave the gutter outside my bedroom window even in the most ferocious of Calcutta’s summers. The light ripples gently on the ceiling. I look straight up at it through the frantic blades of the fan. The fan seems desperate to catch my attention. It huffs and puffs in its attempts to cover the light. It fails. Light is my hope.

I continue to ignore the fan and to look at the light. I however fail to see it any more. My thoughts take over. I think of everything. I look back to the morning when someone snubbed me. As I grit my teeth I punch his face. My jaw relaxes. I think to two days back when someone told me that they care. That they respect me. The snub is out of my mind. Elation takes over. I am blissful. Yet not quite happy. I let my mind wander. It goes wherever it wants.

This is my time. Nobody tells me what to do. Nobody instructs me what to think. Sleep is my drug. I don’t need ganja or bhang to make my mind dig deep. I call this drug soporifica.

Frankly I don’t know when I fall asleep. As day merges into evening and evening seamlessly drifts into night, so soporifica is the twilight of my consciousness. Thoughts drift into my mind as the stars of the day gently appear and twinkle above the horizon.

I wake up next morning. There is no dawn. It is a new day. I get up…

Genesis

2005-09-10T19:05:00.000+05:30

This is the beginning of the first recorded journal that I have ever kept. Through this page I will relate to you the thoughts, feelings and maybe even conclusions that I have come to in my short, yet not quite uneventful life.

This is not an extraordinary blog. Though a reader may feel that the topics I choose to discuss are solely of local interest, they in some essence or the other have affected or will affect us all. I aim to capture in a unique way the moments that define us. Each individual is defined by experience and shaped by the people around them. I reiterate that this is not a blog about an amazing person. Or even a blog about an ordinary person in an unbelievable situation. I only intend to look at the ordinary things in my ordinary life (things that in all possibility have happened in some way or the other to all of us) in a way that most people don’t want to look at.

So this is the beginning. ‘Genesis’ as they call it. Creation. Maybe not the beginning of something that people will remember after fifteen minutes (let alone a hundred years) but the beginning of an ordinary thing. How many people have looked at being ordinary as an option? That there is joy in being just a face in the crowd, is something that few people enjoy. The privacy of anonymity in a world ridden with hate, fear and desperation. Where there is a price for anonymity. I wonder how soon down the line we will have to pay for air.