Magix

"You get what you deserve'. It's an old saying. One that survived the years, because it's true. For the most part. But not for everyone. Some get more than they deserve. Because they believe they aren't like everyone else. That the rules, the ones people like me and you, the people that work and struggle to live our lives, just live, don't apply to them. That they can do anything and live happily ever after, while the rest of us suffer. They do this from the shadows. Shadows that we cast. With our indifference. With a pervasive lack of interest in anything that doesn't directly affect us, we, in the here and now. Or maybe it's just the shadow of weariness. Of how tired we are, struggling to claw our way back to a middle class that no longer exist, because of those who take more than they deserve. And they keep taking, until all that's left for the rest of us is a memory of how it used to be before the corporations and the bottom line decided we didn't matter anymore. But we do. You and I, the people of this city we still matter."

Have you logged in to Facebook today? Of course you have. You never logged out. Neither did I.

As it does every day, my phone alarm went off at 7:30 in the morning. I woke up, slightly annoyed, as I do every Monday. I picked up my phone to shut the alarm up and tried to get those sweet five minutes of sleep, but I knew I could not afford to be late to work again. Maybe I'm growing up, maybe the fear of another poor quarterly rating from my manager did not let me go back to sleep. My mind, which is much smarter than I can ever be, decided to give me an incentive. "Why don't you check Facebook? It's been 5.5 hours since you last checked it. There are bound to be so many new stories to look at. Somebody may have been married yesterday. Honeymoon Pics? Maybe someone had another baby. Where in Hauz Khas Village did everyone go for dinner last night?" Unable to contain my curiosity, I picked it up the phone with closed eyes and felt my finger open up the app.

It took some time for my eyes to adjust to the light. It was lucky that a small part of the brightness of the screen was dulled by profile pictures. Everyone's profile picture was sepia-fied with what seemed like a stylised curved transparent tricolour superimposed on it. It had the caption "Created using fb.com/supportdigitalindia" A quick scroll down showed that it had happened to many others. What had happened while I was asleep? How had so many people suddenly changed their minds about Net Neutrality? A couple of scrolls further down, I had my answer:

ABC and 10 other friends liked Mark Zuckerberg's photo

and soon after, XYZ and 47 other friends liked Narendra Modi's photo

"He's done it!", my groggy, almost awake mind said to me,"The brilliant bastard has done it!". Unable to completely comprehend what this meant, I went to Mr. Modi's profile page and found this video

It was already 7:45 and I had to rush. I decided to keep the Facebook app open and listen to the interview on the way, wondering what could Mr. Modi possibly have said to change so many people's minds, people who had so vehemently agreed with each other that Internet Neutrality was second only to God and Internet.org was the devil incarnate.

I listened to the interview during my 1.5 hour drive to work, listening to how Mr. Zuckerberg travelled to India on Mr Jobs' advice to visit a temple, which was where he, upon seeing the masses of humanity, got the inspiration to grow Facebook even further and connect everyone in the world with each other. Mr. Modi then talked about some of India's recent achievements and how he looks at social media in India. There were some further questions about the government's investments in Internet connectivity in India. This was the last of the internet related questions to be asked in the interview, which was a bit of a let down. Most of the rest of the interview felt like a continuation of his address to the United Nations one day previously. Towards the end, a question about Mr. Modi's mother caught me off guard. It felt like it was supposed to follow from the discussion about Women's rights in India, but it seemed completely out of place and context to me. Mr. Modi handled it very well and gave a very honest and moving reply. That was the end of the discussion.

Perhaps I had expected too much from the interview. As publicised as it was, I should have expected the questions to be pre-vetted and the lack of controversial topics should not have been surprising. For the rest of the way, I listened to Reply All, a fantastic pod-cast about the internet. As I walked to my seat, I looked at Facebook once again. Two people had become married, one had had a baby, a few had been to Social Offline and everyone was tricoloured. Oh well, I thought, time to get to work.

All day, I kept coming back to the thought of what a master-stroke Zuckerberg had played. This June, Internet.org had turned into a fiasco after everyone on Facebook and their dog had learned that there were websites on the internet other than Facebook. There had been long discussions about what it entailed and how it is a right of everyone to have access to the greatest repository of knowledge, entertainment and pre-wedding photo shoots ever created. 750,000 emails were sent to TRAI demanding that the government not support Zero Rating as it would pave the way for Internet.org and help monopolize the internet for established giants of retail and telecom.

It made me feel glad that my friends, acquaintances and those whose name I didn't know until they sent me a friend request on Facebook felt so strongly about the sacredness of the internet. I slept happy knowing that we were together in our struggle to keep the internet open. A place where 8 years ago, a brand new website like Flipkart.com would load just as quickly as a retail giant like Amazon. A place where you could call your dear friends and family using Skype or WhatsApp or Viber and talk for hours upon hours when you were abroad, without either of the two worrying about the phone bill. A place where you could still choose to go to Google Plus, if you decided that Facebook just wasn't working for you, or vice-versa. A place ...

Alas, I realise this evening, as I type this out, it was a faux happiness. A happiness built out of fickle minds and malleable hearts. With the Goliath of marketing himself, the Prime Minister of India standing hand in hand with the owner of the biggest social network in the world, it is already a foregone conclusion. Internet.org is coming to India whether we like it or not. And like it, we will, because it is fed to us by our beloved Prime Minister.

I found this grossly exaggerated and hilarious comic on this page today.

Mk2

I had just had lunch at home. Something with rice in it. The world was behaving very wavily, as it tends to do after lunchtimes. But this wasn't just your regular full-stomach induced waviness; it was real, if you can call it that.

It seemed as if the fabric of reality itself had been rippled. As I looked at the world around me from the terrace of my home, I could see the sky bulge and recede in places. I tried to look for a closer object to have a better point of reference and looked at the building across the street. It was a large building made of three vertical sections, the middle one of which looked as if it were made of rubber and filled with water, ready to burst right down the middle. I looked at the road below. There were hills and troughs in the ground which could go up to ten metres and then go twenty below just after.

I decided not to panic and instead, ran back inside to get my telescope in a sudden burst of inquisitiveness. I wanted to see how far all this went and find out why it was happening, if I could. While I was busy setting up my telescope on the terrace, I became aware of a very subtle buzz in the air. It was as if every mobile phone in the world was vibrating at the same time. It was very faint but I could feel the harmonic unison of their vibrations around. It was only four o' clock on a spring afternoon, but the sun was nowhere to be seen. It wasn't dark though, just felt like one of those days when you're just not sure what time of the day it is until its not daytime any more.

As I pointed the telescope skyward, I wasn't really sure what I expected to see. I peered inside and saw only darkness. Not complete, pitch darkness, but a more glossy, polished and shiny kind of darkness. Feeling proud of my telescope-lens-polishing skills, I decreased its magnification and changed its position to see if I could find something to look at. Darkness. Again, the shiny darkness. I had never used the telescope in the day-time before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I decreased the magnification to its minimum and looked in.

I didn't know if I was imagining things, or the telescope had decided to not take the abuse of being locked up in a cupboard any more (The last time it had seen the light of day(so to speak) was when I had failed to spot Saturn in the night sky) and play tricks on me. It showed me something that was curved and bluish white in colour. At first sight, the crazy idea that I was looking at planet Earth struck me and I dismissed it like I dismissed dubstep as a form of music. But as my mind turned its office upside down, throwing out drawers of thoughts which had been carefully arranged in alphabetical order, to try and find a suitable explanation of what the eyes were reporting to be seeing, it was boggled. In order to retain some form of sanity, it decided to accept the only hypothesis it could conjure up. That I was, indeed, looking at another planet which was this close to The Earth. Another planet which looked completely identical and had somehow appeared next to it's twin.

At that point, my mind decided to leave its office and take an adventurous vacation. It raced along and while jumping from thought to thought, each thought acting like a crocodile: with an irregular and hard surface, ready to throw you off and consume you whole. Where had this planet come from? A parallel universe? A wormhole? Was it the other way round? Was it Earth that had somehow been transported to this new location? Could there be people living on that planet like us? Could there be another one of me on this other planet if it was from a parallel universe? Could I meet myself? How would I react if I saw myself?

As I kept looking, I could, barely so, make out the coastal outlines on this planet. I saw an inverted triangular piece of land. I increased the magnification as the coastlines came into focus, I realised I was looking at the Indian peninsula! Not only was this planet similar to the Earth, it was oriented in such a way that, at this time at least, I could see the same geographical region I was standing in! I tried to zoom in further and see what more similarities there were. Panning up and then down, I could see the most obvious geographical features mirrored: The Himalayas, The Thar Desert, The Plains, The Coasts, Sri Lanka! I gave myself (Mk2, or was it I who was Mk2?) a wave just in case I was watching me.
As I panned over the scene, I was interrupted by a bright, white flash of light. I had to quickly zoom out and see where it had come from, but I needn't have bothered. I could see the flash had now become a smaller ball of light and was growing smaller as time went on. It was located somewhere in the middle of the mainland and steadily diminishing in brilliance and diameter. I felt the buzzing in the air grow louder and louder until the air itself began to vibrate around me. It made the telescope fall out of its tripod stand but I caught it just before it hit the ground. Everything was vibrating now, with decreasing frequency and increasing amplitude. The vibration came to become shaking after then until the shaking became quake-ing. The building I was standing on shook madly and I was thrown off my feet, telescope in hand. I didn't know what was happening and felt that the answer lay somewhere up there. With everything quaking and falling apart around me I put the telescope to my eye once again, and looked.

My mind came back from its vacation and decided that it was too late to panic. It put in it's papers and cleared it's desk before jumping off the office building. That was when it hit me.
- - -
Thus ends the story of how Planet Earth was destroyed by the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax whose maintenance workers took their instructions a little too seriously when they were told,"The outer hull should be polished so well that I can see my reflection in it!"

25

He was excited. He was an excited little boy. Even at a quarter of a century old, he remained a little boy however much his oft-practiced apparent demeanor betrayed his actual age and experience. He was old enough to drink in any country where they served alcohol, he had been old enough to vote longer than he knew whom to vote for, which was something he was still waiting to understand. He was old enough to be tried for crimes as an adult which he wasn't bold enough to commit. He was old enough to legally produce a child, but still not old enough to be a father. He was old enough to travel to countries, fly across seas and oceans, to places that still filled his mind's eye with a sparkle and a wonder which only a ten year old can possess. He was old enough to be heartbroken, although his life had been too easily navigated to be.

He was old enough to be interrupted by a phone call, but its hard for a ten year old to tell the caller that he is busy.

He was old enough to own his own house, but what would a ten year old fill his house with: cartoon memorabilia, sports team posters, music idols CDs? He was old enough to have a discriminating taste in cinema, but a ten year old would always find cheap comedy funny. He was old enough to be allowed on any ride he wanted, but a ten year old can't appreciate the ride of his lifetime. He was old enough to be told by older people to enjoy his time, that these were the best days of his life, but a ten year old cannot really comprehend the concept of death, of being old and weary, of being unable to complete the most mundane of tasks. He was old enough to shave, but he still managed to cut his nose somehow while doing it. He was old enough to be employed, but he still felt odd saying that he was going to "office": Thats where dads go!

He was too young to be unhappy. He was too young to be depressed. He was too young to not look forward to a long ride. He was too young to not feel sad for people who were sad. He was too young to let himself be tied down and do what others wanted of him. He was too young to not obey his own heart. He was too young to not look forward to the rest of his life. He was excited.

Canine to canine

Sunday. You wake up after a relaxing afternoon nap. You look at the time. Its 5:30. You remember you still need go shopping for your everyday supplies. You've been putting it off since Saturday morning, so its either now or the next weekend. You realise you can't do without razor blades for a week, so you shove yourself out of bed and make yourself decent enough to walk to the neighborhood market.

So, you're walking down the road, all relaxed, wearing your pair of shorts and an old T-shirt, glad that you made yourself get out of bed and go for this walk on this beautiful Sunday evening. As you're walking, you see another person approaching from the opposite direction. You're in a good mood, you feel like whistling to yourself, but you don't, thinking that passing-by women might take exception. You see a man walking in the opposite direction, towards you. When you're about to cross each other, your eyes meet. You give him a smile, a genuine 'Isn't it a nice evening?' smile, owing to your good mood. You expect him to return your good-natured gesture. Its not too much to expect of a fellow human being. A smile to acknowledge a smile. It doesn't have to be an ideal world for that to be possible.

But he doesn't. Instead, he gives you a scowl. A look, that, for a moment, makes you wonder if you've ever wronged this person in any way. You haven't. This is the first time you've ever seen this person. Then why, why does he seem to hate you? Why does he look like he wants to murder you? Why, oh why, does he look like he wants you to burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity?

Determined not to let it ruin your spirits, you brush it off as a one-off incident. You move along, but now you think twice before flashing a stranger a smile. In your joviality, you become daring, even to the point of recklessness. You decide to give the smiling thing another try. Surely, the scowl won't happen another time. The first guy was probably in a bad mood. In your naïveté, you place your trust in the humanity of humanity, and venture to push your luck. You walk along, ready to flash a smile to the next gentle-man who comes your way. You see one at a distance, walking towards you. From his silhouette, you can see that he's walking with the gait of a boxer who was wounded in his last fight and can't wait to exact his revenge. You walk along slowly, dreading the moment when his face comes into view. For some reason, you heart begins to beat faster, it has nothing to do with your lack of exercise or the length of the walk. You've barely walked 50 meters and you just know you're only another 25 away from an ideology-altering experience.

With your metaphorical finger on your metaphorical smile-trigger, you're having second thoughts about shooting. You wonder if you should have brushed your teeth this morning, you wonder how wide a smile you should offer so that he doesn't think of you as some sort of a pervert or just plain crazy. You finally decide upon a canine to canine smile, barely showing the beginnings of your first premolar.

A car, at high beam as always, comes at a high speed from behind you. His features are suddenly thrown into sharp relief. Shadows of his nose and brow on his face traverse a small arc on his forehead. The sudden exposure to bright light makes him narrow his eyes further which only heightens your terror upon seeing his face. In your stupefaction, you keep on walking, but your metaphorical finger slips, and your face lights up with a molar to molar smile, well beyond the premolar limit you had thought of. The man, now mere feet away, looks at you. He sees you smiling brightly at him through the blind spot in his eye left from the bright headlights of the car. He assumes you're laughing at his predicament and gives you another venomous look, your second of the day.

You don't understand what you did wrong. You had only good intentions in mind. All you wanted was to spread your cheer, share your happiness with the world, but the people of the world have only contempt for you. Your high spirits, flirting with the clouds mere moments ago, fall a long way and crash to the ground around you. You hear every piece break with the sound of your belief in the kindness of all humankind shattering. You walk on their shards, hoping that they won't cut through your rubber sandals and leave a scar at the bottom of your feet, which nobody would ever see, but would make it impossible for you to walk without feeling the pain in every step.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

As I sit here fondling the Les Paul guitar doodle on the Google homepage with my mouse pointer, I am instantly reminded of the real guitar I have lying around in my room. It’s a two year old Givson acoustic that was once a gift from three of my friends. After four years of college was wasted without learning anything of value that I didn't already know, my friends, who were earning their own money by then, decided to make an extravagant contribution towards their pursuit of my happiness. It was a birthday gift, something I had wanted for a long time but couldn't gather enough courage to make such a large investment in one of my whims. I was well aware of my dubious fancies and how I would be obsessed with something one day and want nothing to do with the next. I knew then that letting them buy it for me was a big risk. Not only would I have my own expectations, of learning how to play the damned thing to fulfill, those dear friends of mine would be looking at me with their scornful eyes if I failed to learn a single chord in two years.

I failed to learn a single chord in two years.

I'd like to think that I gave it a try in the beginning. I had already decided that I wouldn't take classes. I'd learn it myself from practice, diligence and good ol' hard work. I wouldn't even use a pick; fingerstyle is how a guitar is supposed to be played. Just your fingers and the instrument, that's the way it should be. I used to come home from office and bring out my brand new guitar and sit in front of the computer, looking at YouTube videos and trying to play the easy chords. I ended up being able to play a near passable version of the first 15 seconds of Pretty Woman. I didn't try much after that. I let other things take higher priorities in life. I had no time for the old guitar any more. So it lay there in its cover, its strings slowly losing their tension, its wood that once smelled heavenly slowly losing its fragrance, expanding in the next summer, retaining water from the air when the rains came, contracting in the winter.

One fine day, when I had nothing else to do, I brought it out once again and fiddled with it for a bit. It was no surprise that I had forgotten everything, even how to hold the thing itself. In my chagrined state of mind, I strummed the strings a little too heavily and the G-string broke in my hand, almost hitting my right eye. Glad that I had barely avoided losing depth perception, I decided to placate my vengeful guitar by getting it some new strings. Some research, shopping, clamoring, fiddling with the old metronome and frustration filled hours later, I managed to get it all together, tuned to the low E, ready to belt out covers upon covers.

And then I slept.

While my guitar gently wept.

'Coz making a new blog is way too much effort.

My experiment with this blog has failed. I had originally thought to keep this place a place of meditation, self reflection and an epiphany-storage of sorts. Not only have I not updated it in more than 4 years, I still see myself thinking about the same things I did when I wrote them down here.

So, its time to move on, out with the old and in with the new.

Its time to sell out.

This will now be a place for regular things, regular thoughts, musings, a review or two.

Going once, going twice,

We are now, officially, SOLD!

Random Thoughts

It has been a long time. Almost a year since I last wrote. When I started this blog, I thought to myself that I'd only write on one of those days, when you think about something and can't afford to let that feeling slip away. Apparently, I haven't had such a day for a whole year. Not true, not true, there have been lots of times when I've felt inflamed, even overwhelmed with my thoughts. But some of those times I could let them flow away, knowing that they would definitely come back to either haunt me or when I call for them. Other times, I knew the feelings I felt were going to be so thoroughly ingrained in my mind that I wouldn't be able to get rid of them even if I tried.

That brings me to now. I don't know what it is that makes me this way, maybe its the thought of the coming winter, maybe its my complete aloofness from the world, maybe its sadness, maybe my cynicalness(is that a word?), maybe just Radiohead, maybe thoughts of the future, maybe my complete inability to be able to do anything about the way I am, no matter how much I may try(which isn't much), or maybe its just me. Whatever the reason, I'm here to rant again.

I just took a walk, a long one, longer than any I've taken in a long time(which is another reason attributing to my alarmingly increasing girth). A walk with the new, state-of-the-art mp3 player with Radiohead playing in my ears at full volume. Its amazing how while looking at the world with your kind of music playing in your head, everything can seem like a music video. I can see the whole world with new perspectives that change with every note in the song. Lives of every person I see, people going home on bicycles with their lunch boxes hanging on their arms, talking as they ride back for dinner after a hard days work, teenage boys hanging around, walking and talking without a care in the world, rich people rushing to wherever they need to go in speeding cars, dogs looking for just about anything to eat in discarded paper and polythene bags, street lights watching every single one of them as they go about as they do every single night. Women in the market, queueing up to choose mehndi designs for their hands, excited little children begging their moms to go back home, guys standing in corners, some waiting for a hot girl to pass their way so they can ogle at her, and yet others worrying about the shit in their lives, discussing their loves, disappointments, plans for the future, and then me, trying to think about how pointless everything is, which actually is the truth, no matter how much I try to live by the opposite.

Whenever I do go on such walks unlike the presumption in most people's minds, I don't really think much. Its much more of feeling than thinking. We live our lives everyday, some days we do it more mechanically than others, some days we are more aware of what we really want than others, some days we don't really feel like smiling at acquaintances which is something we'd do without thinking on our more mechanical days. But it happens very seldom that we actually are present, in the moment, feeling it, living every second of it. But that's not what I'm here to talk about right now.

Lately I've found myself thinking about the future, with a little bit more certainty than before, which is really not saying much. Earlier when I thought about the future, all I had to think of was a vision, a picture of a road at night. I still have that picture, but now its just more defined than it used to be. Now I'm really not sure what I'm doing here, but I'm sure there was a point to this. The future really is as uncertain to me as it always was. A reason for that being that I don't really care that much about it. Its not about the whole "living in the present" thing but more about me knowing that no matter what i do, its very hard for me to be satisfied with what I have. I may try to goad myself into thinking that I am, but I'm actually not.

After the walk I went to the terrace, mainly because I was way too restless to confine myself again. Sat there for a while, looked up wanting to see stars, and saw only smoke. Not a single star, not a single knot at the end of the rope to hold on to, to escape from the enormous dome of the atmosphere i suddenly felt myself trapped in. Don't know why but celestial bodies always give me a kind of comfort. Knowing that I really am standing(or only attracted towards the center of another rock in space by a weak force) temporarily does give me perspective, a good one at that. One thing that calms me down and also invigorates me at the same time is this realization and also of death and meaninglessness of everything there is. Every profession, every religion, every country, every government, every old person, every child , the life of every single creature of every single species that ever existed succumbing to the same unforgiving, unrelenting force. Everyone can interpret this in the way they see fit. Some think it better to worship and pray for their days to be numerous and their lives happy and fruitful, some think it better to kill and pillage and own as much as they can. I judge both as people trying to find meaning in their lives, people wanting to find something that they haven't living in the world they know.

I, for one, do not need or want meaning. It is enough for me to have this one chance to do what I want to do in this one world I know. Knowing full well that i may and will never be satisfied, but still living in the pursuit of life.