You don’t suppose the Nobel Committee will award the Ambani brothers the Nobel Peace Prize next year, in case they just decide to kiss and make up. Giving blow-jobs to the brothers on the air-waves/in print will become so much easier then. Not that it is particularly difficult right now. Heck, maybe the ‘Holy Calf’ should be given a Nobel Peace Prize for ‘cuddling’, can you possibly find a more peaceful activity than ‘cuddling’? Not that I can think of, even though I would rather cuddle a naked woman. Talking of naked women, I take this website to show evidence either of Darwin’s theory at work or hormones in our food – (it’s got most Playmates of the Month from 1958-2008, so its quite unsafe for work, but… so is listening to Pearl Jam’s Backspacer at volume - even though it is a kick-ass album).
Does anyone else have my peculiar Wikipedia fascination? Not that I'm fascinated by Wikipedia, but where I can spend hours just randomly surfing Wikipedia finding out bizarre things - yesterday I spent hours reading how whales evolved (and related articles, some having nothing to do with anything in general). Don't ask me why or even how I got there. Maybe the copious amounts of Kingfisher Blue I had drunk while Veeru and Dinesh Kartik were batting had something to do with it. But, despite the fact that I support Delhi - no I am not going to fall prey to parochialism and support KR - methinks they're missing AB deVilliers. But it is always good to get in a few games at Feroze Shah Kotla.
-----------------------------------------------------
A couple of answers to the last post, I have no idea where my friends mom is, I don't even know if she is alive. Sure, it won't be that difficult to find out, I'll have reactivate some contacts, maybe even some I would rather not, but it can be done I guess. Dealing with death is never easy, no matter what age you you have to stare it in the face. I guess I had to deal with it so up close and personal when I was young that I lost a bit of my, I won't call it innocence, but, I lost something.
Both those times I never attended the funerals, the first one I attended was a few weeks after I finished my Class XII boards when another school friend died in Uphaar fire. I won't forget the chaos and the horror of a mass funeral. It isn't as if I had not seen death close up otherwise, as a kid on a drive back from Chittorgarh to Udaipur we saw an accident scene, which let me assure you wasn't pretty. But then again, that wasn't someone close to me. Maybe, all these things helped me acquire that crazy detatched demeanour they say journalists need, call it cynical or whatever, it has to come from experience. Which is why I could pull off assignments like this without getting caught up in the human tragedy of it all, and avoid, for better or for worse, bleeding heart syndrome.
Which is why I cannot become a Naxal apologist like Arundhati Roy. That said, seeing how the sugar lobby has bled Maharashtra dry and the immense poverty in some parts of the state. Weirdly enough, in my 16-odd months as a reporter in Bombay I saw more of interior Maharashtra than I should have - and that is where my antipathy towards Indica's comes from. Yes, there is a dichotomy in India (two India's, maybe not), the rich, even some of the apologists have never seen how poor the dispossed actually are and what the problems really are.
But the fact remains, violence doesn't solve anything - as the Communists have shown in West Bengal - the oppressed can become the oppresser within a generation. And one worse than the previous oppressor ever was. There are solutions to these problems - it is not as if the Naxals are 'anti-development' as some insane NGO's would have you believe. I've seen how ham-handed rehabilitation programs for the dispossed have been in Orissa. Heck, a majority of the Naxal's are nothing more than sexually-depraved extortion racketeers! Some more equal than others.
There are no attempts at trust building by successive governments in the state and centre. As well-meaning the 'Holy Calf' really is, and I won't be a cynic and say that he is a hipocritical bastard whose brother-in-law spends tens of thousands on drinks for him at Delhi's better bars. Because that leads to the rhetorical question - how many 'cuddles' could a bottle of Chivas buy?
OK, I take this post as a nother example of my tremendous ability of 'flow of consciousness' writing with no real aim in sight. But it is so much more fun that structured pieces about fat and balding farts! And then again, it is just the start of 'Swag' week. Yay!
Showing posts with label Death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Death. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2009
Friday, October 09, 2009
Death
This is a slightly personal post, it might make no sense to anyone, in fact there is only one person I could talk to about this. But writing out things is easier for me at times.
Last night I went to a cocktail reception somewhere in Central Delhi. Not bizarre in itself, other than the fact that I’ve severely cut down my alcohol intake. But big deal, the occasional ‘low-sugar’ Mojito never hurt anyone. Anyway, when I drove down I noticed something peculiar, I knew the lane where the party was happening very well.
A long, long time ago I had a friend who we’ll call A, who used to stay on that lane. Me and another friend of mine, we’ll re-introduce Doc here, used to go over to A’s house quite often. To do what kids did back then. Play video games – Double Dragon, Super Mario; watch cartoons on VHS – classic Transformers and Thundercats is what I can remember right now. Actually quite too many cartoons. These in the days before mobile phones which used to make my paranoid mother even more paranoid than usual when I didn’t land up home with the school bus.
Long story short, during the Class VIII summer holidays when I was summarily packed off to Calcutta to twiddle my thumbs and experiment with cigarettes, A died. I didn’t even know until I came back and called Doc. When A’s mom, who was an extremely sweet lady came to school on the first day, I remember crying and running away and then I never bothered to keep in touch. I don’t know why. I guess I tried to rationalize it – I was 13 at the time. I had barely experienced death, let alone death of someone close to you, someone your age and not some fogey.
Death is a funny thing at any age but when you face the concept in your face when you’re thirteen it does change your thinking in a way I guess. I never thought about it until someone accused me of having a casual attitude towards death. Firstly, I could not get what having a ‘serious’ attitude to death is, but I am horribly bad at comforting people. Because, while A died in the summer holidays, four months later just before the last exam of the second-term exams, Maths I think it was, the class heard that we had lost N, another classmate. Two deaths of guys who sat close to you when you’re 13 or 14? That screws your mind up rather bad.
It also taught me a couple of lessons, the first is to respect electricity and the second was never to want to kill myself. I’ve done plenty of stupid things, and inadvertently tried to kill myself more than once, coming very close to doing so in a car. But, inadvertently mind you. No matter how high I’ve been, or how sad, and believe me I’ve felt horribly sorry for myself every so often, I’ve never tried to slash my wrists or fill myself with Phenyl. If anything, as much as I have screwed up my life, at a level I have to live a full life, to the best of my ability because someone else could not.
And I have to go meet A’s mother sometime. I don’t know what I’ll do or say, but I can’t keep running away for ever. Even from something you would rather forget. Heck, I tell people all the time to suck it on and deal with it. Maybe I should do that too.
Last night I went to a cocktail reception somewhere in Central Delhi. Not bizarre in itself, other than the fact that I’ve severely cut down my alcohol intake. But big deal, the occasional ‘low-sugar’ Mojito never hurt anyone. Anyway, when I drove down I noticed something peculiar, I knew the lane where the party was happening very well.
A long, long time ago I had a friend who we’ll call A, who used to stay on that lane. Me and another friend of mine, we’ll re-introduce Doc here, used to go over to A’s house quite often. To do what kids did back then. Play video games – Double Dragon, Super Mario; watch cartoons on VHS – classic Transformers and Thundercats is what I can remember right now. Actually quite too many cartoons. These in the days before mobile phones which used to make my paranoid mother even more paranoid than usual when I didn’t land up home with the school bus.
Long story short, during the Class VIII summer holidays when I was summarily packed off to Calcutta to twiddle my thumbs and experiment with cigarettes, A died. I didn’t even know until I came back and called Doc. When A’s mom, who was an extremely sweet lady came to school on the first day, I remember crying and running away and then I never bothered to keep in touch. I don’t know why. I guess I tried to rationalize it – I was 13 at the time. I had barely experienced death, let alone death of someone close to you, someone your age and not some fogey.
Death is a funny thing at any age but when you face the concept in your face when you’re thirteen it does change your thinking in a way I guess. I never thought about it until someone accused me of having a casual attitude towards death. Firstly, I could not get what having a ‘serious’ attitude to death is, but I am horribly bad at comforting people. Because, while A died in the summer holidays, four months later just before the last exam of the second-term exams, Maths I think it was, the class heard that we had lost N, another classmate. Two deaths of guys who sat close to you when you’re 13 or 14? That screws your mind up rather bad.
It also taught me a couple of lessons, the first is to respect electricity and the second was never to want to kill myself. I’ve done plenty of stupid things, and inadvertently tried to kill myself more than once, coming very close to doing so in a car. But, inadvertently mind you. No matter how high I’ve been, or how sad, and believe me I’ve felt horribly sorry for myself every so often, I’ve never tried to slash my wrists or fill myself with Phenyl. If anything, as much as I have screwed up my life, at a level I have to live a full life, to the best of my ability because someone else could not.
And I have to go meet A’s mother sometime. I don’t know what I’ll do or say, but I can’t keep running away for ever. Even from something you would rather forget. Heck, I tell people all the time to suck it on and deal with it. Maybe I should do that too.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Homoerotic Tribalism
One of the surprises that I found in the Supreme Court appointed committee to report on the Aman Kachroo murder was that the students were always advised to carry condoms. I have been through college and I have been ‘ragged’ physically. There was something called ‘lifting’ in SSC where a whole plethora of junk was poured on your pubes and believe me, toothpaste hurts. But beyond that, ragging has degenerated to becoming a tribal order. And the sexual element verges on the disturbing.
Why on earth did the college promote intense male-on-male and often forced promiscuity. Going to college is not going to an American prison where a big highly tattooed man will rip your posterior asunder. Being anally raped is not ‘getting to know your seniors better’. Nor was lifting, even though the guys who lifted me were friends and I’m actually still in touch with most of them. Yet, I knew it ended there. At other colleges in Delhi University’s North Campus, there was much worse, our seniors told us stories of the candle dance at KMC and beer bottle sodomy in the seediest hostel of the lot. The guys at Hindu had it pretty good, other than their chappatis.
But when it came to my ‘turn’ to rag juniors all I did was find two hatta-khatta guys to help me with my luggage and because I had gotten a first div in my second year proceeded to get drunk with and several others. I got ‘lifted’ but I still found it grotesque, and very honestly being made into a servant is acceptable, getting freshers to fill water is fine, a senior called ‘Trippy’ made me his personal joint roller, and believe me I didn’t mind that one bit. But then like now, I found the extreme homo-eroticism mildly disturbing even at St. Stephens.
But at least, we were in a city and there were girls around. In essentially all-male engineering and medical college environments, as the Kachroo case prove, we really have no clue how bad it is nor will I even try to guess. Most of my friends from school and college went to top-notch colleges and at the IIT’s things are very mild compared to shady colleges, the only guys I know who had it bad were the guys who joined the NDA, but then again that wasn’t homo-erotic but rather really strange things that soldiers end up doing which would be classified as torture by the Obama Administration. Out in Andhra and Karnataka, things I believe are really bad and while Supreme Court pronouncements make a difference in Delhi and other major cities, they don’t flow down deep into the countryside, even 50 kilometers away where residential engineering and medical colleges pop up like mushrooms. There is a problem and solving that begins with educational administrators
Which brings me to rape, and also the Bombay case where the police are trying to paint the woman as a ‘loose’ character by saying she tested positive for cannabis. Needless to say, the police need sensitivity training, and painting the woman as the criminal by saying she brought it upon herself does not work. Making out with someone is not an invitation to have sex. And what the f*** were police checking for cannabis anyway. No bruise marks – the woman might have been drugged. The milieu our beat constables come from is horrific, but a fact of life, which is why we all condone bribery, but do your job, which is to find and arrest the rapists. No matter what the character of the person who was raped, it does not mitigate the crime.
Another thing puzzled me lately, the death of Aakriti. Personally, and I have no love lost for MSVV, I don’t blame the school. What were the parents thinking when they sent a kid who had been to hospital a few days ago to school? Bad school administration? Sure, but many schools don’t have doctors and things would have been better. But I also blame bad parenting I’m afraid. Also, Sheila aunty and Renuka chichi are going to meet Aakriti’s parents, yet Shano, the poor girl who was made to stand in the sun who died the other day haven’t received such high-profile guests. Is it me, or is the life of a upper-class kid more important to both policy makers and the media? You know, there is something seriously fucking wrong in the country if it is.
And another point, why should I be ashamed if I say I support a nationalistic party and what is the big deal if such support is also given by a member of my family. I do not agree with everything the Sangh does or says, I find certain elements of the Sangh as disturbing as the next person. But I believe in the national identity of India they project. We need a pick-me-up in this country, we need to know that all lives are valuable, we need to know India means something. 1992 and 2002 will mean that the West and the genteel educated types, the ones whose homes ministers will travel to (which is why despite my antipathy towards the Congress, I do give Rahul Gandhi some credit). I don’t know if the solution will be to form an alternative right –wing force in India, maybe it is. The BJP maybe unelectable going forward as I have elucidated before.
Why on earth did the college promote intense male-on-male and often forced promiscuity. Going to college is not going to an American prison where a big highly tattooed man will rip your posterior asunder. Being anally raped is not ‘getting to know your seniors better’. Nor was lifting, even though the guys who lifted me were friends and I’m actually still in touch with most of them. Yet, I knew it ended there. At other colleges in Delhi University’s North Campus, there was much worse, our seniors told us stories of the candle dance at KMC and beer bottle sodomy in the seediest hostel of the lot. The guys at Hindu had it pretty good, other than their chappatis.
But when it came to my ‘turn’ to rag juniors all I did was find two hatta-khatta guys to help me with my luggage and because I had gotten a first div in my second year proceeded to get drunk with and several others. I got ‘lifted’ but I still found it grotesque, and very honestly being made into a servant is acceptable, getting freshers to fill water is fine, a senior called ‘Trippy’ made me his personal joint roller, and believe me I didn’t mind that one bit. But then like now, I found the extreme homo-eroticism mildly disturbing even at St. Stephens.
But at least, we were in a city and there were girls around. In essentially all-male engineering and medical college environments, as the Kachroo case prove, we really have no clue how bad it is nor will I even try to guess. Most of my friends from school and college went to top-notch colleges and at the IIT’s things are very mild compared to shady colleges, the only guys I know who had it bad were the guys who joined the NDA, but then again that wasn’t homo-erotic but rather really strange things that soldiers end up doing which would be classified as torture by the Obama Administration. Out in Andhra and Karnataka, things I believe are really bad and while Supreme Court pronouncements make a difference in Delhi and other major cities, they don’t flow down deep into the countryside, even 50 kilometers away where residential engineering and medical colleges pop up like mushrooms. There is a problem and solving that begins with educational administrators
Which brings me to rape, and also the Bombay case where the police are trying to paint the woman as a ‘loose’ character by saying she tested positive for cannabis. Needless to say, the police need sensitivity training, and painting the woman as the criminal by saying she brought it upon herself does not work. Making out with someone is not an invitation to have sex. And what the f*** were police checking for cannabis anyway. No bruise marks – the woman might have been drugged. The milieu our beat constables come from is horrific, but a fact of life, which is why we all condone bribery, but do your job, which is to find and arrest the rapists. No matter what the character of the person who was raped, it does not mitigate the crime.
Another thing puzzled me lately, the death of Aakriti. Personally, and I have no love lost for MSVV, I don’t blame the school. What were the parents thinking when they sent a kid who had been to hospital a few days ago to school? Bad school administration? Sure, but many schools don’t have doctors and things would have been better. But I also blame bad parenting I’m afraid. Also, Sheila aunty and Renuka chichi are going to meet Aakriti’s parents, yet Shano, the poor girl who was made to stand in the sun who died the other day haven’t received such high-profile guests. Is it me, or is the life of a upper-class kid more important to both policy makers and the media? You know, there is something seriously fucking wrong in the country if it is.
And another point, why should I be ashamed if I say I support a nationalistic party and what is the big deal if such support is also given by a member of my family. I do not agree with everything the Sangh does or says, I find certain elements of the Sangh as disturbing as the next person. But I believe in the national identity of India they project. We need a pick-me-up in this country, we need to know that all lives are valuable, we need to know India means something. 1992 and 2002 will mean that the West and the genteel educated types, the ones whose homes ministers will travel to (which is why despite my antipathy towards the Congress, I do give Rahul Gandhi some credit). I don’t know if the solution will be to form an alternative right –wing force in India, maybe it is. The BJP maybe unelectable going forward as I have elucidated before.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Indian of the Year
Sorry, this is my Tuesday rant, powered by a Wengers pastry and the accompanying sugar high. I really should go easy on the sugar though.
Everybody has an award nowadays, nice marketing gimmick. Get some sucker corporate chap to sponsor it, get clowns to vote on premium messaging services. Have a nice big show with lots of cheap scotch, keep lots of politicians and corporates happy and then claim that you have to let go of several interns because of ‘cost’ issues. Anyway, I don’t want to rant too much in this post. Primarily because I have a lot of work. But here is my ‘Indian of the Year’ 2008 – wait for it – The silent victim of terror attacks. All of them, from the migrant worker who collects the garbage to the executive who was just eating dinner.
You know, the Bombay train blasts of 2006 (one, two, three) were the first terror attacks that actually scared me. I used to travel in those trains everyday and even though I've probably left office that early once or twice in my life, I could have been on those trains. I’m not an overly religious person, but a few days after the blasts I happened to be in Kolkata and dragged my father to Kalighat (peculiarly enough for the first time in his life).
You know something, every single time I get inside my car and drive through Delhi I know that some jackass at a roundabout might scrunch me, even though the likelihood of me running over an idiot Pulsar biker is far higher. I have had more than my fair share of accidents and serious ones at that but (touch-wood) other than a concussion or two nothing major. Heck, I drive quite knowingly on Indian highways and have stared down enough Tata trucks.
I even survived one week of driving on Kerala roads – and those guys are by far and away the maddest bus drivers in all of India. On a plane, and I watch far too much of National Geographic’s Air Crash Investigation to know that every once in a while a plane will fall out of the sky (though like AI 182 often because people want to make a political point). Marna hai to marna hai, Boss. I know I share this manic fatalism of many of my countrymen, but really I live in a country where every office commute is an adventure.
Well, the fact of the matter is that I can die anytime. But I don’t want to die because of someone else trying to make a political point. Whether it is the lunatic wing of the Sangh or crazy Islamic terrorists from UP or illiterate cocaine-fuelled commandos from across the border. That is not the way I want to die, or for that mater that is not the way anybody should die. From business executives doing dinner at an hotel in Mumbai, to Bihari immigrants waiting on a station platform, to lovers walking in a park in Delhi, to women shopping for the festive season in Jaipur or people offering prayers in a mosque in Malegaon.
No blast is bigger than another, no form of terror is bigger than another. Politicians obfuscate the truth. They proclaim something to be the ‘Real India’ (Rahul Gandhi’s Sarah Palin moment - remember her 'Real America' rant, but that is another post for another time) but there is one India and all of it is ‘Real’. And the people who die are also quite real. Celebrate the achievements of the year – we did put a satellite on the moon, we did not come back with no medals from Beijing and we gave the rest of the cricketing world a big middle finger. But far too many of us died because of terror. And let us not forget that, or in rush towards the next eleven months of 2009 forget all their memories.
And as for the Karl Marx quote on the header, and if you get this on a feed...
"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism" Karl Marx, Das Kapital. EDIT: It appears I've been hoaxed. As repentance I will now quote from Donald Rumsfeld.
I put that up because it sounds prescient but also because I agree with a line that Newsweek I think carried - to understand how capitalism failed maybe you should study its greatest critic. I don't think capitalism is dead, someone has made a lot of money in this downturn and is keeping very quiet about it, but capitalism as we know it will have to change.
Everybody has an award nowadays, nice marketing gimmick. Get some sucker corporate chap to sponsor it, get clowns to vote on premium messaging services. Have a nice big show with lots of cheap scotch, keep lots of politicians and corporates happy and then claim that you have to let go of several interns because of ‘cost’ issues. Anyway, I don’t want to rant too much in this post. Primarily because I have a lot of work. But here is my ‘Indian of the Year’ 2008 – wait for it – The silent victim of terror attacks. All of them, from the migrant worker who collects the garbage to the executive who was just eating dinner.
You know, the Bombay train blasts of 2006 (one, two, three) were the first terror attacks that actually scared me. I used to travel in those trains everyday and even though I've probably left office that early once or twice in my life, I could have been on those trains. I’m not an overly religious person, but a few days after the blasts I happened to be in Kolkata and dragged my father to Kalighat (peculiarly enough for the first time in his life).
You know something, every single time I get inside my car and drive through Delhi I know that some jackass at a roundabout might scrunch me, even though the likelihood of me running over an idiot Pulsar biker is far higher. I have had more than my fair share of accidents and serious ones at that but (touch-wood) other than a concussion or two nothing major. Heck, I drive quite knowingly on Indian highways and have stared down enough Tata trucks.
I even survived one week of driving on Kerala roads – and those guys are by far and away the maddest bus drivers in all of India. On a plane, and I watch far too much of National Geographic’s Air Crash Investigation to know that every once in a while a plane will fall out of the sky (though like AI 182 often because people want to make a political point). Marna hai to marna hai, Boss. I know I share this manic fatalism of many of my countrymen, but really I live in a country where every office commute is an adventure.
Well, the fact of the matter is that I can die anytime. But I don’t want to die because of someone else trying to make a political point. Whether it is the lunatic wing of the Sangh or crazy Islamic terrorists from UP or illiterate cocaine-fuelled commandos from across the border. That is not the way I want to die, or for that mater that is not the way anybody should die. From business executives doing dinner at an hotel in Mumbai, to Bihari immigrants waiting on a station platform, to lovers walking in a park in Delhi, to women shopping for the festive season in Jaipur or people offering prayers in a mosque in Malegaon.
No blast is bigger than another, no form of terror is bigger than another. Politicians obfuscate the truth. They proclaim something to be the ‘Real India’ (Rahul Gandhi’s Sarah Palin moment - remember her 'Real America' rant, but that is another post for another time) but there is one India and all of it is ‘Real’. And the people who die are also quite real. Celebrate the achievements of the year – we did put a satellite on the moon, we did not come back with no medals from Beijing and we gave the rest of the cricketing world a big middle finger. But far too many of us died because of terror. And let us not forget that, or in rush towards the next eleven months of 2009 forget all their memories.
And as for the Karl Marx quote on the header, and if you get this on a feed...
"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism" Karl Marx, Das Kapital. EDIT: It appears I've been hoaxed. As repentance I will now quote from Donald Rumsfeld.
I put that up because it sounds prescient but also because I agree with a line that Newsweek I think carried - to understand how capitalism failed maybe you should study its greatest critic. I don't think capitalism is dead, someone has made a lot of money in this downturn and is keeping very quiet about it, but capitalism as we know it will have to change.
EDIT: ContentSutra's post on Times Internet has some really interesting comments
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