Hee hee hee ho ha ha!

Last night, at precisely 10:20 PM, I completed the Death Row mission in GTA: Vice City. Then, exactly 30 minutes later, I completed the next mission, called All Hands on Deck!. I feel good!

It all started the night before, when, as a result of multiple rampages passed and stores robbed, I gathered enough money to go buy a place called Hyman Condo. And as it so happened, Hyman Condo has this heli-pad on the terrace. And that has a helicopter parked, just in case an occasional homicidal maniac should choose use it to carry out some unspeakable acts.

So, very leisurely, free from the perils of traffic and sudden urges to jump off the bridge between Little Havana and Vice City, I flew to the junkyard, dispatched of those no-good Haitians, freed Lance and escorted him to el ‘ospitale.

And then, with a broad smile on my face ( and peace in my heart), I had my dinner. Read some of From A Buick Eight – the most guilt-free reading session since last week.

Then I proceeded to Cortez’s yacht and carried out another mission. And then indulged in Kill Frenzies and rampages until it was lights-out.

It’s small things like this that elevates my life from the mundane to the sublime.

So, once again –

Hee hee hee ho ho ha ha !

The major part of last week, I played Grand Theft Auto:Vice City.

Correction: The major part of last week, I played the same freakin’ mission in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That is because I could not complete that freakin’ mission, though I must have played it something like seventy-two times.

Did somebody say “lousy gamer”?

I am. I definitely am.

The mission in question in something called Death Row. Tommy Vercetti ( that’s me) goes and meets an obnoxious Brit-clubber named Kent Paul at the Malibu club in Vice City, and learns that his partner Lance is being tortured by the Haitians in Little Havana ( that’s on the other end of a bridge). So what I have to do – go and resuce Lance before he croaks. That means – I need to drive fast, all the way to the Little Havana junkyard. The goons ( and there are lots of them) open fire at my car. I need to ram the car that’s blocking the gate of the junkyard, get out of the car ( which, in all likelihood, will start burning. Being fired at and hitting another car at full speed is not good for it’s constitution) and run like hell. (Time’s ticking away for dear Lance) Millions of other Haitian goons open fire with automatic guns, you know, the kind that go rat-a-tat, and very accurate they are, too.

There have been times when I actually manage to get inside the shed where Lance is kept and free him. Now I have to take him out of the junkyard and into a hospital. But there are still more goons firing at me from outside. And sooner or later, either me or Lance eat too much lead, and well, Hasta la Vista, bay-bee. Reload game.

Stuck!

I think it’s because the game is so insanely addictive that I have carried out the above procedure – load, drive, fire, get fired at, die, reload – so many times. And I refuse to cheat.

Friday evening, I realised that enough was enough. There were just too many things to do than waste my time failing the same mission over and over. ( Well, I been saying this to myself over the week. I would ditch the game for sometime, and try to read some novel, then say “What the heck, i’ll do it this time.” and start playing again. But on Friday it got serious) So I took out the Philip K Dick and finished it. Then I got The Princess Diaries and finished that too. Then I realised I had the second book of the Princess diaries with me, so that, too went the same way. Also squeezed in shows of LOXG and Bad Boys 2 over the weekend.
( Mental note: No, beatzo. Don’t. No movie reviews. Enough. )

Then yesterday, this itch came on again. For a time I kept it in control, by playing Soldier of Fortune 2. It got too much, though, and very soon, I was on through the same pattern – load, drive, kill, yadda yadda yadda…

I suck.

My uncle from Kathmandu passed away on Friday.

He was a cartoonist in a famous newspaper in Kathmandu, and he was a genius. I met him thrice in my life – I know that sounds strange, but my father and his elder sister couldn’t meet each other for fifteen years, because she and her husband ( my uncle ) shifted to Kathmandu and my father was in Assam. One fine day, when I was about 16, there was a knock on the door, and this timid-looking lady asks me “Is this where *my father’s name* lives? It was them!

When I met him the first time, he appeared so eccentric and absent-minded. He was very startled to see my comics-collection, and (I learnt later ) it was because he had collected comics too, when he was young.

He would sit quietly on the living room sofa the whole day, occasionally reading, going through old newspapers and cutting out important bits of news.

He loved old Hindi songs. I made him listen to AR Rahman ( in Tamil ) and he just couldn’t stop smiling along with Paarkadhe and Mama Madurai.

It was the Golden Age of DD2, when Turner classic movies used to show every Friday night, and Buena Vista movies on Saturdays. He would ask my mom to let me watch the Friday movies ( my Board exams were getting closer, and TV was strictly verbotten ). We watched them together, movies like Robin Hood and Three Musketeers and the next day, he would draw scenes from the movie from memory.

When he left, three weeks later, he gifted me a small cardboard box, filled with newspaper clippings, his artwork and some books on nude photography by Andre de Dienes(with strict instructions not to inform my parents, it seems the books were part of his boyhood collection in Shillong) .

The next time I met him was in Kathmandu, after my boards. He showed me around his office, the walls of his tiny room which was covered with cartoons and posters and newspaper clippings and awards. Then he showed me around Kathmandu. Though I stayed inside the house most of the time, poring through his cartoons and clippings ( he happened to have a newspaper clip of JFK’s assassination, among others). He had created this entertaining comic character, a combination of Nepali folklore and Mandrake the Magician, called Samanta the Tantrik. He gave me all the original strips, and a lot of drawing paper from Japan, and asked me to continue the story if I had the time.

The third time was again in Kathmandu, two years later. But I had gone with my friends, and he was busy, and we didn’t meet too much.

I thought I would meet him next year.

I love you, peha. You were always an inspiration for me. Rest in peace.

for the weekend, so I went and bought those books last night.

Almost committed a social faux pas with the MR book stall guy. He normally prices books very high, and is quite happy (I think!) to give me a 20% discount on whatever I buy. And yesterday, me and sasi go there – and to my surprise, he refuses to lower the price by anything more than 10 rupees.

“This is unfair”, I say. “I thought you would give this to me for less!”

“Arrey, sir, you won’t find these books anywhere else. This is the best price I can offer you.”
“No, no, no!”
“Yes, yes, yes!”

and so on and forth.

And the problem was, those books were really good. Top of it, I saw something else on the shelves. The Tintin Companion by Michael Farr, one of the best books ever written on comics, or so the legends say. And it was priced (in terms of Market Price) very decently – 650 rupees. The book sells in Walden for 1395. So I ask him, “How much would you sell that for?” , with just the right amount of nonchalance. Meantime, I am trying hard not to pant with lust. He says he can lower the price by 50 rupees, not more. It was getting to be a frustrating deal. And all the time, the guy was saying things like, “Take them. Take them. You can pay me later, and if you don’t like them, you can return them, no problem.” That’s the usual modus operandi to get me to buy books even when I don’t have the money. That guy knows a junkie when he sees one. He has seen me for the past…four years.

So I got frustrated and angry. There were other customers waiting. Sasi was getting restive too, we had two more places to go, to get cds and check out some more books. Gave him 500 rupees, as a deposit and took everything I wanted.

Right.

a vcd-buying spree, then a trip to the MR stall at Abids ( the other one, the one I went to first, is at Panjagutta), and suddenly we realise that we left some cds back at the Panjagutta stall. Called him up, and said we were coming by.

We reached the stall again, and just as we got the cds, this guy smiles and gives me a consolidated bill of how much I have to pay. I note, with surprise, that he has priced them with quite good discounts, even though he was saying otherwise.

And then it hit me.

There were other customers around then! Poor chap, had I persisted, most likely the other people would also have asked him for discounts, and of course, he can’t say things like “beatzo is a privileged customer.” and he would have lost out on a lot of sales.

Sometimes I tend to think the worst about other people. I tend to think too much on my terms and my perspective. That has to change, really.

So finally, the books I bought:-

1) The Tintin Companion – Michael Farr.
2) Fantasy Masterworks:Elric of Melnibone – Michael Moorcock.
3) The DreamThief’s Daughter:A Tale of the Albino – Michael Moorcock.
4) The Complete Guide To Middle Earth – Robert Foster
5) The Mammoth book of new Sherlock Holmes Adventures.

Orion books has done an amazing job in reprinting some hard-to-find titles in sci-fi and fantasy under their Sci-Fi Masterworks and Fantasy Masterworks imprints. Most of the books ( all of them described here ) are available in Best and MR, so will just have to buy whatever I want ( what I want are the fantasy ones, the latter books of the Amber series by Zelazny, the Conan books by Howard, Philip K Dick and Richard Matheson )

I also finished reading Philip K Dick’s Dr Bloodmoney last night. Probably it will be the only book I read in which a benign tumour ( a benign talking tumour) saves the day. Really weird shit, and I loved it. Nuclear paranoia, a guy who was supposed to have been the first human settler on Mars, and is now the last DJ on earth. ( he plays readings of Of Human Bondage for people from an orbitting satellite), talking dogs, musical rats and other animals. Very funny at parts, especially when a horse (named Edward of Wales, ha , ha, i found that hilarious) gets eaten by hungry hoboes when he has been parked near a boathouse.

I have now need of extremely light-hearted reading, and so I have taken up The Princess Diaries vol 1 by Meg Cabot. Needless to say, the storyline has very less in common with the movie. Who cares?

Just back from a panipuri spree at Abids. Yes, this is a weekday, and I am supposed to be in the office, but some temptations are just too hard to resist. Sni wanted to buy a cellphone, and she wanted it today, so off we went. The post-shopping celebration was, of course, a panipuri treat.

I had 25.

Right now, my mouth feels like if I hold a kerosene-doused stick near it, and go “foooooooooo” , with just the right amount of pressure, the stick will go *whump * as it bursts into flame.

I also dropped in at MR book stall. They have two new Michael Moorcock books, an Elric SF Masterworks edition and another one. Also the Definitive Tolkien companion, all for 70 rupees. I fled before I could find anything I couldn’t resist.

please please god stop me from going to MR again today evening,….