Category Archives: Myself

Music, Myself, Travel, Weirdness

Three songs

Leslie Feist – Mushaboom

Jussi, an old old friend – not in age, mind you, but someone who goes back quite a few years – flew over from Helsinki to come meet me in Cluj, Romania. We had planned a road-trip towards the Carpathian mountains, all the way to Castle Bran – otherwise known as ‘Dracula’s Castle’, and as soon as the man arrived, friends from the office helped us find a rental car agency, where we had to decide between a Volkswagen or a BMW. Jussi and I looked at each other, and he asked the question that was on my mind – “Do they have music systems with auxiliary inputs?” Well, the question on my mind was actually – “what color is the BMW?”, but I had to agree with my friend – priorities are priorities, and no self-respecting road tripper would venture out without ensuring that the car is well-equipped in terms of audio paraphernalia.

The Volkswagen had a CD system – “Plays MP3 CDs”, the person at the rental centre assured us. No auxiliary jack, though. The BMW had squat. Decisions having made, I  spent some time that night – after having imbibed quite a few glasses of wine ( I claim 7, others say 6) – burning an mp3 CD. And the next morning, as we started on our journey, we popped the CD in, waited for the music to play and then, nothing.

The music system only played audio CDs, goddamnit.

We burned two CDs on my laptop while having breakfast at a motel. One didn’t work, the other did. Wrote 4 more CDs in a hotel that night, 2 didn’t work. And finally, the next day, we burnt three more CDs, out of which one worked. That last CD included the song that Jussi had been trying to play for me the last few days. Leslie Feist’s Mushaboom.

On the last leg of the trip, the GPS on the car – the way to Cluj from Bran Castle – took us through a route that took us through a forest, and gave us a clear view of the mountains. There was not a single car to be seen, and the sun broke out of the clouds at brief intervals, but the overall atmosphere was that of complete serenity save for the open road in front of us. It was at that magical moment, when the two of us were more than a little tired from the trip, and a wee bit melancholic about the end of a good vacation, that Mushaboom began to play on the music system. And it’s because of that I’ll associate the song forever with autumn evenings, the Carpathian mountains and the open road.

The video was another source of joy when I saw it much later, making me feel giddy with laughter. Bacon bat wings, whee! Flying guitars! Empty carnival grounds, which are usually creepy, but suddenly seemed fuzzy and nice and welcoming.

Katie Melua – 9 Million Bicycles

So when I played Mushaboom to a friend in Romania the week after Jussi left, she asked me – “Have you heard Katie Melua?” I hadn’t. That was remedied within a few minutes, and as the strains of the Chinese flute opened ‘9 Million Bicycles’, the first song in Melua’s ‘Piece By Piece’, I almost held my breath and waited for the song to disappoint. Happily, it didn’t. This was one of those rare songs whose lyrics I paid close attention to during the all-important first listen, and smiled along to the references to light-years and the world’s population. Her voice is a combination of Norah Jones and Joss Stone, and the production in the album just quirky enough not be repetitive.

Later on, I learnt that Melua’s song invoked the ire of science guru Simon Singh, because of the line “We are twelve million light-years from the edge, that’s a guess” – and she apologized by coming up with a witty rephrasing of the stanza, which you can see in the snippet of video below.

Regina Spektor – Fidelity

And there are the songs that just come to you, flying out of nowhere just when you think you cannot be surprised anymore. A friend at the office enjoyed the two songs I played for him – no prizes for guessing which ones they were. He created a last.fm profile for himself, and as he was listening to my station, he asked me if I had any Regina Spektor songs. I did, and the next day, I loaded up his iPod with all the albums I had.

Last night, I sat down near the laptop, and the only music I had on the drive  ( it’s the office machine, and I don’t keep music on it, as a matter of principle. Also because it’s only 80 GB) was the aforementioned Spektor albums. I put on the first song from Begin To Hope, which happened to be ‘Fidelity’. I had heard the album before, a long time ago, but the way the song infiltrated my senses – at that precise moment – was unbelievable. Pizzicato strings, piano tinklings and Spektor’s voice kept me company for quite sometime. It’s still the only song I’ve listened to all day, and I have no doubt it will keep me company all of tonight.

And now I wonder – which song lies in wait for me next, ready to be discovered? What memory will I associate it with, and who will I think of when I listen to it?

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Myself

A Hundred Things About Me ( Contd)

Part two of a vanity post to end all vanity posts. Part one here.

52. It’s very, very, very hard for me to stand still. I constantly shift from one foot to the other, if I am made to stand in one place. It’s worst when I am on a phone call and saunter around from one room to another, like an unstoppable clockwork soldier.

53. I suffer from ophiophobia. It began sometime in my early teens, got so bad that I could not open a book with pictures of snakes in it without feeling completely petrified. It’s come down in recent times, ( I would think it lessened because of the ridiculous Anaconda movies, which I watched without much effect) but I hate to think how I would react if I was on a flight and there were snakes on the plane.

54. I am also terrified when I am driving/riding behind a truck carrying iron bars that’re jutting out. Pretty common on Indian roads.

55. My weight fluctuated between 55-60 kilos until two years ago. I weigh about 80-85 kilos now.

56. For a long time, if I managed to obtain a book that I wanted to read really badly, I would think up ways to postpone reading it. Because if I finished it, there would be nothing else to read. It’s an irritating habit that persists even now, and it’s a constant struggle to convince myself that it’s ok – I can go ahead and indulge becaause there’s a shitload of stuff waiting to be read.

57. I am both a cat-person and a dog-person, with slightly more sympathy for cats because they are so misunderstood. We had two cats named Lobo and Simba, the first out of necessity, because our house was being overrun by mice, and the second one because we had no choice, Lobo just brought a kitten home one day and none of us had the heart to let it go.

58. The only time I’ve been vegetarian was for a whole year, when a rabid dog bit me and various herbal experts ( quack quack) advised my parents that I should not eat meat. It was a tough year, made a little better when three months later, the neighbour’s dog bit my sister and everyone in the family stopped eating meat.

59. When learning geography in high school, my brain refused to understand the concept of latitudes and longitudes until a friend made things clearer using a roundish potato and a knife.

60. I whistle somewhat differently from the normal way most of you do. Most of the time, you wouldn’t realize I was whistling because I don’t pucker my lips. Also, my whistle-pitch is somewhat different, which makes it impossible for me to whistle along with someone else.

61. In order to make myself look cooler, I started to memorize weird acronyms and abbreviations – KGB for Komitet Gozudarstevenonny Bezopasnosti, PT Usha’s full name, all the latin acronyms like NB and i.e. While this did come in handy in quizzes later on, I don’t think it fulfilled its original intent.

62. I created my first comic character when I was 9, a flying man named The Eagle.

63. I don’t like circuses. It’s all because of Target magazine, which did in-depth coverage of the cruel treatment meted out to animals in travelling circuses around India, and appealed to kids to boycott them.

64. I can’t dance, saala. Though lord knows I tried, especially at the height of Muqabla fever in the nineties. I could pelvis thrust continents into oblivion, but my hands and feet refused to move the way my brain told them to.

65. A rickshaw-puller bears witness to the first time I kissed someone. And that’s all I will say about that, other than clarifying that I was not kissing the rickshaw puller.

66. One thing I genuinely envy in some of my friends is their ability to quote verbatim from prose/poetry pieces. I can not, under any circumstances, repeat sentences word-for-word. This is partly the reason why I suck at cracking jokes – more often than not, I flub the punchline.

67. The Matrix and Kill Bill are two films that changed my movie and music tastes radically. A lot of interests – Japanese culture, anime, Ennio Morricone, noise-rock, Italian spaghetti westerns, Kung-fu/jidai-geki/wuxia films, electronic music – was sparked in some way or the other by these films.

68. The first film I remember seeing was ‘Andha Kanoon’ – I believe I was asleep in my mother’s lap in the theatre and I woke up when some lady was running around dressed in a police uniform. ( It was Hema Malini, and I like to believe the image resonated with me because I’d seen my father wearing the familiar khaki outfit. )

69. The one thing I shoplifted was an Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novel that the bookstore was selling for 50 Rs, even though the official price at that time was 10 Rs, the difference arising because the former was an imported edition and the latter was an Indian reprint. I spent one summer blackmailed by a classmate at school with whom I had shared my secret, and who threatened to tell the teachers if I did not do his homework for him. ( Happy ending: he flunked that year, and changed schools. )

70. I have library-lifted once, and I am terribly ashamed about it, so let’s not bring it up again, yeah?

71. I don’t like rain. I am ambivalent towards summer. Winter is my favourite season. You get oranges in winter, that’s why.

72. When I am in pain, like if I stub my toe or run into a door, I say “aaargh” in my head. Not “aaa”, not “ooooooo” but “aaargh”. The only thing that differs is the number of a’s.

73. When my voice broke, I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to sing along to Michael Jackson and Bryan Adams songs.

74. I tend to lose my temper far more often than I should, and at very frivolous things. Yes, I am unacquainted with what you earthlings call a “chill pill”.

75. One person I would like to meet before I die: Alan Moore. Another person I would like to meet before I die: Hayao Miyazaki. The first is vaguely possible, the second is unlikely.

76. On one particular occasion, I have sneezed 41 times non-stop.

77. The worst thing you can ask me to do is list out my favourites in any field. My answers will probably different depending on when you ask me.

78. I rarely contradict myself.

79. Actually I contradict myself all the time. Most of the time. Sometimes.

80. My favourite quizzing achievement was winning the Lone Wolf Quiz at IIT Madras, way back in 2001. It was my third time at Saarang and I made it to the finals almost by fluke, in a tightly-fought semi-final round.

81. There was a time I considered buying clothes an unnecessary evil, and relied exclusively on gifts from distant relatives, parents and the occasional gift coupon won at quizzes to buy my clothes. I like to believe I’ve evolved a bit since then.

82. I spent years trying to design the perfect cardboard boomerang. One that would actually return to my hands once I threw it, instead of falling into a sewer or getting lodged in a tree or landing on the roof of the house.

83. Personally, I think panipuri is the greatest thing Indian civilization has offered to the world.

84. For a long time, I was confused between a protractor and a divider in my geometry box.

85. I have broken a door and a shelf ( which is referred to in my part of the country as a “show-case” ) trying to skateboard inside the house. The skateboard, of course, was self-built, using a piece of wood and three ball-bearings. It made an ungodly sound if I tried it on the road and I thought it more prudent to hone my expertise away from curious eyes.

86. I can play complicated rhythms on wooden surfaces, using my fingers. Many of you might scoff and say there’s nothing to it, but I am really good at it, honest. I try out the acoustics of any new wooden surface I encounter by tapping out a beat.

87. Among the things I’ve written and will never share with anyone else – a prequel to Sholay, an epic retelling of a failed love story in my college days, and a porno version of a part of the Mahabharata. In fact, I think two of them might be irretrievable – I burnt one of them in a folder in a game collection, and there was a virus on one of the games and I threw the disc away, and the other is in a protected zip file, and I’ve forgotten the password.

88. The first website I visited in my life was www.spawn.com. Ah, the follies of youth.

89. I used to be really terrified of chronic insomnia. Yes, because of the Stephen King book. So I made it a point to get my share of daily sleep regardless of where I was and what I was doing. I made it through my college life without a night-out – I would inevitably fall asleep around three thirty in the morning. Then I worked in a project where the rest of the team members worked from the USA and I found it more convenient working throughout the night. For six months, I would work from five in the evening to six in the morning, and then have breakfast at seven and sleep till three. It was an amazing experience, and needless to say, I no longer have my fear of insomnia.

90. Because I’ve never bought a house or a car, I have never had to pay EMIs. But I have made monthly payments for comic art, though; the longest period of time has been 2 years of straight instalments. It gets over this month.

91. I can sing in languages that I do not know. Tamil, for example. Also, Spanish, Finnish and Japanese. I can also sing Mile Sur Mera Tumhara by heart, and it has 14 languages in it.

92. I have a very very irritating laugh. It has provoked people to violence more than once, and over the years, I’ve learnt to modulate it enough, I think.

93. I cannot bring myself to watch television for more than a few minutes at a time. Ad breaks kill my interest in anything that I am trying to watch. The TV shows I like, I would rather watch on DVD, one seasonful at a time.

94. One near-death experience I’ve had – a narrow hilly road, a downhill slope, a truck hurtling down the road, and I decide to run across to be with my father, who was getting some tea and biscuits for us in a small shop on the other side. It was when we were moving from Karimganj to Tezpur, I was 6, and I still remember my mother screaming at me not to run, and my father slapping me really hard after I survived the dash.

95. My general attitude towards new technology – any new technology –  is analogous to that of a kid about to dip into a swimming pool at five AM on a winter morning. 

96. I have this earnest, I-am-listening-to-you look on my face during meetings, lectures and presentations, which I punctuate with occasional nods and smiles. Maybe it is because I feel very nervous while speaking in public, and become very gratified when someone is paying attention. The downside of this habit is that the presenter tends to look at me very pointedly throughout the bulk of the talk/lecture, which means I need to pay attention throughout. I am still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

97. The first time I boarded a plane in my life was with my own hard-earned money. In 2002, when I made my first trip back home after getting a job.

98. One of the things I would like to do is organize India’s first comic-book convention. But I think I am too lazy to do anything about it, and someone else will probably beat me to it. 

99. I am very, very, very hesitant to catch up with old friends who I haven’t met in a long time. It could be because I have a golden-haloed view of the past, and that makes me whitewash my memories of friends and acquaintances. It could also be because, after having met a few folks from my past, I realized that ‘real life’ had made them very different from what I envisaged them to be ( they thought the same thing about me, probably), resulting in banal conversations and a half-hearted attempt to exchange phone numbers. 

100. Meta Fact: I loved making this list, even though it took me a very very long time to write it. This shows that like nearly everyone else, I love talking about myself. It also tells me how much of myself I am willing to talk about on a public page – obviously, I deleted and redid a lot of  stuff just because I thought it would be giving too much of me away. Yep, I guess I like the illusion of being a private person. Whatever.

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Myself

Collecting origins

Once upon a time, I was a coin collector.

It started with a small cloth bag that belonged to my mother. It was fascinating to me as a child because it was covered with brownish stains – sealing wax, but we thought they were the wrong kind of brownish stains – and that’s how she would discourage us kids from handling it during those occasions when she took the bag out. There was a tiger claw inside, and a bit of a rhinoceros horn, some odd-looking heirlooms and, as I found out one day, coins. Old coins, of different sizes, shapes and colours – and one even with a hole in it. There was a small one paisa coin that boggled my mind – “When I was in school, we would get two chocolates for a paisa”, she explained.  There was a yellow 20-paise coin from 1948, the year MK Gandhi died, with a lotus on one side and his face on the other. Brass, not gold – she said, before I could ask. The oldest coins were from the forties – the hole-in-the-centre was one pice, from 1944, when they were trying to save metal because of the War. There were interesting inscriptions all throughout, and inscribed heads of various Georges and Edwards.

Ma saw my curiosity and, I really don’t know why, told me to keep them. “Start a collection”, she said, probably thinking I would lose interest and misplace them soon enough. I was eleven years old.

What happened was quite the opposite. I was enthused enough to look up coin collecting in the Britannica set at the local library, and found out that numismatics had a long and detailed description. When I look back, the fascination was probably because of repeated readings of Treasure Island – old coins tinkling in your hand is the closest a boy can get to becoming Jim Hawkins. My collection, therefore, was in equal measure a role-play and a serious pursuit. Over the weeks, I grew more and more fascinated with coins. My small collection expanded via contributions from my relatives and neighbours – strangely enough, everybody had a coin or two stored away, either old or from another country, a relic of the past or a souvenir from a family trip, that they would willingly give away, seeing my eyes light up when I held them. One of the good parts of staying in the North East was being surrounded by so many nearby countries – very soon, I owned coins from Bhutan ( which were very, very easily available), some from Nepal, Tibet, Bangladesh and Myanmar ( Burma then) and even a few from China, which was a little tougher to get. My father made a few trips to Delhi every year, and he would buy a few every time – I got a few Pakistani coins, a few Russian roubles and more examples from the British era. My collection was an equal focus of foreign coins – the plan was obviously to own a coin from every country – and old Indian coins.

Initially my coins, all ten or fifteen of them, would fit into a small container my mother gave me. But very soon the number increased to a quantity where I had to hijack my geometry box – which we had to take to school only once a week, on Friday – and used it to store my collection. And one day, I decided to carry the coin-filled geometry box to school, after which things got very interesting. Mild digression – our school had a mixture of Assamese, Bengali and Marwari students. One of the good things that came out of this was that we spoke in English to each other, because the Assamese students were wary of their poor Hindi – even though we could watch Hindi films and TV serials, there was a major complex about actually speaking in the language, probably because our accents were bad enough to evoke laughter among the Hindi speakers. The same thing held good for the Marwari kids – their attempts at broken Axomiya made us giggle. The Bengali kids somehow managed to speak in three languages, but out of an unspoken contract, we would speak in English most of them time, to avoid possible violence and “miss-he-laughed-at-me”-type complaints.

Coming back to the topic at hand – the first day I took my coins to school, I discovered two things – one, there were a lot of my classmates who had coins at home – “my father has been to Somalia, I think there are some coins lying around”, or “My grandfather gave me a few old coins, you can have them if you want”. So in a very short time, a lot of those stray pieces made their way inside my geometry box. The second thing was that some of them, mostly the Marwari students, already had coin collections of their own, and over the weeks that followed, they let out that they were interested in trading. Or “exchanging”, as we called it.

The weird thing – well, weird at that time, but natural now that I look back at it – was that within a few weeks, the number of coin collectors in the school increased radically. I am not taking credit for that, mind you, probably there was already a network in place and I was made part of it the day I brought my coin-box to school. But the strange thing was that classmates who were becoming my ‘sources’, who had brought me coins from their elder brothers or parents or relatives, either stopped or in some extreme cases asked me to return the coins they had given me – because they were starting collections of their own. Dang and blast! Coin collecting became a school fad, much like quizzing after Siddharth Basu’s India Quiz or exotic weapons after Amitabh Bachchan in Toofan ( to which I contributed as well).

And with open season came Fucked-uppery of the highest order. “I have some coins for exchanging”, someone would say, looking disinterestedly at my collection. “Do you want?” “I will see”, I would reply and proceed to feign disdain at the ones he was offering. This was probably my first exposure to the cut-throat world of collector politics, and I can’t even begin to imagine how much this prepared me for my future life. Things got more complicated. Exchanges would have to be conducted in secrecy, because rival collectors were always waiting to offer bigger and better deals to the unsuspecting newbie who has been convinced that a 1970 US dime is very rare, much rarer than the Italian coin his father gave him. Exchange deals were also marred by the crowd-swipe, which goes like this – some guy comes with bunch of friends and says he wants to see your collection. Everybody surrounds you, and as you show the coins one by one, somebody palms something. It needed eagle eyes and steel nerves to maintain one’s collecting enthusiasm in the face of such strong competition. On top of it, most of the well-to-do children were taking to buying coins – apparently, in a corner in Fancy Bazaar, the commercial centre of Guwahati, there was a shop called Bargola, whose owner sold coins at high prices, and quite a few of my fellow collectors sourced stuff from there. I was in no position to put any money into my hobby; finances were tightly controlled by my parents until quite a few years later and they would probably just take away collecting privileges if I insisted on pumping their hard-earned money into it. I had to figure out creative ideas to expand my collection.

My inspiration, at that time, was Tom Sawyer. Taking a cue from the book, and Tom’s entrepreneurial abilities, I had a bright idea. On a rainy weekend, I took about 10 Bhutanese copper coins, a hammer and a metal block. At a safe distance away from my usually-sensitive-to-sonic-bedlam parents, I proceeded to pound the coins until they became uniformly flat, with a few grooves remaining here and there. I then kept them buried for a few days, which took the sheen off. In school, a grand story was woven. “We had water in the house because of the rain, the other day”, I said. “And when the water was gone, I found a pot full of old coins just near the verandah. It was probably buried at the back and the water uncovered it.” School-children are a gullible lot ( heck, I was gullible enough to believe a lot of weird things – remind me to tell you about them someday) and by the time I repeated the story to a couple of people, the buzz was strongly positive. On top of this brazen yarn-spinning, I also kept my escape options ready. The collectors in the senior class, and the more retribution-prone among my classmates were told that my parents had strictly prohibited me from displaying or exchanging any of those artifacts. Some of the easily convinced classmates were promised that they would get preference for the eventual trade, if and when that happened. When I finally got two of the mutilated ex-Bhutanese coins, demand was sky-high. I remember getting an 1837 East India company coin, with “Victoria Regina” inscribed on it ( the later coins I had, from 1891, had something else inscribed on it, I forget the exact words) in exchange for one of them. The classmate I got it from asked me once, after many many years, the real story behind the treasure trove, and I finally confessed to the con. He shook his head sadly. I think he hates me now.

There are seven shades of love, the Sufis say – and my love for coin collecting crossed the first four – Hub (attraction), Uns (infatuation), Ishq (love), and Adiqat (reverence) – with a small hop and a skip, deftly sidestepped the fifth – Ibadat (worship) – and landed squarely into Junoon (obesession). Unknown ( or probably not) to those who knew me, I became possessed of a Gollum-like lust for my preciouses. The geometry box, once brought surreptiously on random days, to avoid confiscation was now always in my school bag. The teachers were aware of the rampant trading going on during school hours, and though they did not discourage the hobby, they kept any non-educational contraband in the school cupboard until you went and grovelled and apologized and shed a tear or two – but I brazenly brought the box everyday. Everyone knew about it. Geometry boxes have loose hinges, and occasionally a coin or two would slip through them and land in my bag. When I would search for particular high-point of my collection and discover it was not there, my heart would leap to my mouth, and I would frantically search the bag and heave a sigh of relief when I would find it, stuck between the pages of a notebook. I cannot give you any logical reason behind why I did all this – maybe it was the carelessness of boyhood, the ingrained belief that nothing bad will really happen to you until it actually happens.

The seventh stage – Maut (death) – was bound to come, and it did soon enough. One day the school bell rang, and all of ran for the school bus – a hasty boarding entitled you to better seats. School would be over at 3:00 PM, and the bus would start at 3:10. At 3:09, I remembered, with a sinking feeling in my heart, that I had taken my coin collection out of my bag and had kept it inside the desk, because the teacher in the last class had the tendency to randomly check bags. I stayed a very long distance away from school, no direct city buses – and my sister had seen me in the bus, so I could not even claim there was some after-school activity involved. I took a deep breath and made the worst possible decision of my life. “I am sure the box will still be there tomorrow”, I told myself. “Who on earth could possibly take it?”

The next morning, as you must have guessed already, the box was not there.

I cried a little, picked fights with a couple of collectors who others claimed had some of my coins mysteriously appear in their trades. Nothing much came out of it. It could have been anyone who took the box of coins and I had no proof anyway. The teachers clucked and made sympathetic noises and came up with the obvious question – “why did you have to bring it to school?” I had two choices – to start all over again, or to give up and pretend it did not really matter. I chose the latter, obviously.

There is a semi-happy ending to this, though. Two semi-happy endings, actually. My father and I went to Nepal in 1996, just after my board exams were over. He has an elder sister there, whose husband was ( he’s not alive anymore) a renowned editorial cartoonist and had great taste in literature – I did not meet him for too long, but I enjoyed every minute that we spent together. Anyway, so I was walking around Kathmandu with the pater, when we saw an old man with a bunch of coins on the pavement, and stopped to look at what he had. Strangely, the man was selling a lot of newer Indian coins – my father picked up a five-rupee coin, issued in 1984 with Indira Gandhi’s face on it, and asked him how much he was selling it for. “200 Rs”, he said. Both of us were amazed – we used to come across those coins very frequently, and well, they generally were used for their face value. There were other commemorative Indian coins there – the highest was a 100 Rs coin which had some insane price tag, but most of the rest were all fairly common coins, some we hadn’t seen in use at all. We looked around a bit, and realized that the high prices were fairly standard there – and quite a few of them got sold too. My father, after we came back to Guwahati, started a coin collection of his own, focusing on Indian commemorative coins post-1947. He continues to this day, and I remember to keep newly-issued coins aside for him when I come across any.

The other semi-happy ending is that because I had to fill the void left behind by my missing coins, I began to collect comics, which I had treated as very disposable reading material so far. And this time I was careful – no publicity, not much fuss, no evident enthusiasm when some classmate brought bound volumes of Dell comics of the 60s. That collection, obviously, continues to this day. Ain’t life grand?

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Myself

A Hundred Things About Me, Part 1

1. I was born in a small town known for a matchbox factory. We moved out a year later, and I have visited the place just once later in my life.

2. I know how to speak, read and write four languages, and can understand and read one more.

3. My earliest coherent memory is walking with my father to the hospital one morning, to see my newborn sister for the first time.

4. The first time I fell in love was with two girls at the same time. They were twins. We would go to pre-school together, and I would occasionally confuse one for the other.

5. My earliest concern about the English language was trying to understand the difference between the words “agree” and “angry”.

6. I used to draw a lot when I was little. Even went to “art school”, which was a euphemism for a shed where a lot of children were made to copy whatever the teacher drew on the blackboard and then colour them in. Won a few art competitions, but never really did anything much about it.

7. On my sixth birthday, my father gave me a coffee-table book. “Indira Gandhi” by Swraj Paul. I have no idea why.

8. I used to be bored very easily until I came to college. Then I figured out that I could hear complete albums in my mind during boring classes, meetings or dinners – music interludes and all.

9. I am a bad conversationalist. I zone out in the middle of conversations when there are too many people around, and tune back in when someone says something that’s of interest to me. Most of my one-on-one conversations tend either devolve into pop culture discussions, or become one-way talk-fests where I am nodding my head, grunting and thinking of something completely unrelated to what the other person is talking about.

10. I occasionally flex my wrists when I am alone. In my mind, I go “snikt” as razor-sharp adamantium claws pop out of my skin.

11. With a few exceptions, my relatives and I don’t get along too well. I find most of them a bunch of two-faced weirdos and they think I am weird.

12. I made up a new game when in school. It consisted of two teams throwing mud balls at each other, but your team won only if you did not hit anyone in the other team and instead, made your mud ball explode near your opponents. I thought it was a cool game, until somebody figured out that it was cooler when they exploded on your body.

13. One of the biggest joys of my childhood was reading Enid Blyton’s books. It took me a long while to figure out that Enid Blyton is a lady, and her name is Enid and not Gnid as I had assumed from her distinctive signature. My favourite Blyton series was the Magic Faraway Tree books, about a magical tree on the top of which you could visit different, wonderful worlds that parked themselves for short periods of time. Then I grew up and found out that we have a magic faraway tree of our own, called the Internet.

14. I make it a point to not break eggs on the larger or smaller end, but hit it squarely on the middle. Not only does it make peeling the eggshell easier, but it also gives me great pleasure to know that I cannot be executed for treason either in Lilliput or Blefuscu.

15. Occasionally, when I am watching a movie or reading a book, I want the villain to win.

16. I am fanatical about having zero unread messages in my email inbox.

17. Around 1990 or thereabouts, I read a book on international spies and found out that every single one of them had their identities compromised because of photographs taken during their high school and college days. For the next three years, I refused to let myself be photographed. I would go out of the way to avoid family pictures and also tracked down my photographs in relatives’ albums. All because, y’know, just in case I was drafted as a spy later on in life.

18. I refuse to read certain books or watch certain movies or listen to particular bands because some people are too enthusiastic about them. Case in point: The Fountainhead. Pink Floyd.

19. I am bad at debates. I tend to see both sides of an argument, and can come up with pro or counter-arguments that are equally convincing.

20. Religious rituals piss me off. Mostly because they consist of people doing something without understanding or trying to figure out why they’re doing it.

21. I beat up a guy in school once because he was trying to snatch a comic away from me and wrinkled the cover when I wouldn’t let him take it. There was blood. And multiple screaming teachers.

22. I learnt to play the violin when I was little, mostly because of my parents and a violin-playing neighbour who impressed them a lot. Six years and two different violin gurus later, I stopped. Because of the Higher Secondary Certificate examinations which, in my part of the world, is a rite of passage equivalent to the Japanese Genpuku or the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. Later, I taught myself to play the keyboard by ear.

23. I rarely bother about lyrics when I am listening to a song. When humming a song I like, I tend to use a lot of gibberish, instead of the actual lyrics. I listen to the words only if somebody points them out to me and that could happen years after I’ve known the song.

24. Strangely, I learnt two songs – Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby – before I heard them. It was because I had an older friend who would sing these songs and I memorized the words from his diary.

25. It is not humanly possible to keep count of the number of umbrellas I’ve lost over the years.

26. I am very bad at buying gifts. When I buy a gift for someone, I get confused between buying something that’s meaningful and something the other person would want but I personally consider flippant. It’s a constant battle.

27. I collect original comic art, among other things. To the best of my knowledge, I am still the only person in India who spends gigantic portions of his salary buying (mostly) inked 11 inch by 17 inch bristol boards. Fuck, I love it.

28. I am a lapsed quizzer. It’s because I’ve lost faith in people who watch movies and read just so that they can come up with questions and answers for future quizzes.

29. I once hit a girl with my bicycle when I was coming back home one evening. It was her fault, honest, she ran to the middle of the road and then ran back again. That was possibly the only road accident I’ve been involved in.

30. I’ve worked in the engineering division for the same company for about seven years now, and I am still more than a little under-confident about my technical skills.

31. If I hadn’t gotten my first job, I would have probably been a struggling musician. I ignored academics in college in favour of the college band. Sang, played the keyboard and was generally full of it. Now, I consider myself a victim of real life – kind of like the Farhan Akhtar character in Rock On, only a little less sullen and with not as much money.

32. I loathe most sports. I used to play cricket in school, but one day, some guy hit my right shin with a leather ball and I wound up bed-ridden for a week. I still have a dent in my shin. My parents made me enroll in a table tennis class at the local stadium, and I used to go there in the evenings, after school, spend 10 minutes sitting on the spectator benches and then sneak out to the library opposite the road, which had an awesome collection of comics and James Hadley Chase novels.

33. I know how to swim, but people look funny at me when I am floundering around in the pool because I tend to splash a lot.

34. I don’t like social networks because there does not seem to be anything much to read. Or do. Other than seeing people change statuses and take quizzes and write badly-spelt messagesto each other.

35. A recurring dream I have is about my life as an undergraduate student. In my dream, there is an exam the next day and I have to prepare for it because I hadn’t appeared in the mid-sems, but something or the other keeps turning up and I just can’t seem to study. I don’t even remember what books/chapters I need to read and struggle to find my pen and admit card until the last minute. It would not be as scary if I hadn’t really been through such a situation in my undergrad life.

36. I’ve been an A.R Rahman fan ever since I heard Roja. I occasionally frustrate people by raving incessantly about his music, and there are times when I just cannot bring myself to listen to some Rahman albums because I know they’ll disappoint me.

37. All cars look the same to me. I can probably broadly distinguish between three kinds of cars, but I can never understand how people can point out the make and model of any car passing by.

38. I am more than a little obsessed with Japanese culture. It all started when I read Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja and Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings back-to-back, and then discovered a manga called Mai The Psychic Girl.

39. When I was 13, I got my first and only enema. It was at an ayurvedic camp in a small village in Assam, and the quack that headed the camp prescribed an enema for every affliction that came his way. Having warm water and oiled stuffed up your anus when you’re standing on your hands, face-down in a wretched latrine tends to do things about your worldview, I tell you.

40. Until very recently, I suffered from a digital magpie complex – the urge to back-up every bit of digital information on multiple data repositories. I’ve created backups of backups, resulting in a house filled with CDs and DVDs. Now, I just don’t give a shit.

41. I tend to tease my friends mercilessly about things they like. I get very insecure when they tease me about things I am interested in.

42. The only time I’ve been happy in love is right now.

43. One bad habit I would like to give up – procrastinating. Another bad habit I want to give up – swearing when I am upset.

44. For a very long time, I considered eating food as something that interferes with my waking life. I could not sit for lunch, dinner or breakfast without doing something else – reading, watching TV, anything at all that would help make the tedious job of chewing my food a little better. Enjoying my food is something I learnt very late in life, maybe a year or two ago, just when I began to cook properly.

45. When I am in office, I like going for lunch alone. That one hour feels like an oasis of sanity during the day, the only time I exist for myself.

46. The only time I had a fracture was at the end of last year, when I missed a step and broke my leg. Luckily (or not) that was two days prior to my scheduled annual leave to visit my parents, and everything worked out. Except for the part where I spent my vacation cooped up in a room.

47. I consider myself a wannabe gamer. I’ve been hooked to computer games ever since I tried Quake 2 on my first PC in 1999. I currently own a DS and my girl has a PSP that I use far more than she does. I was primarily an FPS-lover but thanks to the DS, I am a fan of puzzle-based adventure games and classic side-scrollers. I don’t think I can ever, ever play RPGs and strategy games.

48. I can’t stand beer.  Surprise, apparently I can, as I found out after a trip to Romania, when a senior colleague asked me to take a sip of a local beer named Silva. I like beer now.

49. Quite a few of my close friends are folks I’ve met online. Some I’ve met in real life, and some, I probably will someday.

50. I am very particular about finishing a book or a series I’ve started, regardless of how good or bad it is. The only exception to that would be Ashok Banker’s Ayodhya series, which was so badly written it made me ill after I read the first 15 pages of the first book.

51. If I ever made it to the finals of Mastermind, my topics would be the Batman mythos, the music of AR Rahman and Indian songs in Aramaic. The third is obviously a topic heavily weighted in my favour.

Obviously, to be continued.

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Books, Childhood, Myself

I’ll keep it brief

I like Stephen King a lot, ever since I read The Shining on a train journey from Delhi to Guwahati and shivered to myself on the upper berth halfway through the book. True to the way I behave, I began to scrounge out Stephen King books right after that. I think I bought close to 7 books in a month, the same month I was coming down to Warangal to join the college. My father and I stayed in Calcutta for a day, and I spent the better part of that afternoon at Gol Park, haggling with the booksellers there for a bulk discount on the Kings I bought from them. Then I bought a couple more at Vijaywada station, where I got them for 50 Rs each, by some strange coincidence.

One of those books I bought and read in that initial white-heat period was Insomnia. Probably not one of King’s finest, the book was engaging enough because it seemed to be linked to King’s other works in odd ways. There were nods to The Dark Tower, and to Pet Semetary, and because most of the characters of all these books were fresh in my mind, I could enjoy the book a lot. You know what the most important thing about Insomnia was? The way it talked about sleep-deprivation. The main character – Ralph, I think his name was – slowly begins to sleep less and less. It’s not like he doesn’t want to sleep, it’s just that he could not go to sleep. He used to twist and turn in his bed and manage to sleep for an hour or so, and even that got chipped down to a couple of minutes per night. And it was then that Ralph starts seeing colours. Auras around living things. And small people in white coats with scissors in their hands.

Needless to say, this completely freaked me out.

Oh yes, I do know how to seperate fact from fiction, thank you. Especially fiction of the Stephen-King-kind. But what happened was – the book made me promise myself that I would never ever forsake sleep or change my sleep-cycle, that every night I would get a minimum of six hours of sleep, regardless of whatever else is going on in my life.

That resolution held good for all of four years in RECian life, except for a night when I had to sit and design a poster on my computer. Photoshop 5, 32 MB RAM. By the time morning came, I was a completely frustrated wannabe designer – woke up the guys who were sleeping on my bed ( they had come on over to offer moral support through the night, and had dozed off at around midnight). Technically, what I am saying is, I have never done a “night out” before, be it before an exam, or after, or because of college fests or whatever. Well, sure, I would stay awake late, but I could not do things like – I had to grab some sleep when it was dark, or else Stephen King’s Insomnia would come to haunt me, and force me to close my eyes and shut down my nervous system. On the positive side, this meant I could fall asleep under any circumstances, with loud music playing in the background, on a bare floor, on a chair, inside a train toilet…

Over the last two weeks, things have changed a bit.

I begin working in the evening, at about five or six PM if things are really tight, and continue until about seven AM in the morning. I see the sun rise every day, and shiver in the cold morning breeze every time I head home. I sleep until about noon, and then I listen to music and read Doom Patrol until it’s time to come to the office again. (Must. Resist. Doom Patrol. Rave. Must. Resist.) Four hours of sleep every day, food at slightly odd hours ( I have been having a very heavy breakfast, courtesy this really swanky restaurant near my place that offers a buffet from seven AM onwards. 45 Rupees only. And they serve pancakes and honey among other things, yummy!) Lunch gets postponed until the evening, and dinner gets done sometime at midnight.

But the fact is, I’ve never really felt better. It’s actually quite fun to work at this time, I have found that more work gets done because of lesser distractions, and also because I am working in synch with the overseas team. I can play Juno Reactor really loud if I want to. I can play anything loud if I want to, hee-ah. I have a secret stash of chocolate bars right here in my office drawer, and the pantry has an ample amount of coffee to soothe my tastebuds at times. It’s not like I stay tired during the daytime, or that I am over-working, none of it at all.

You know what? I think sleep, and the concept of sleep-cycles are a tad overrated.

Social life, you ask? Not too bad, really. My “window” for a social life is between three and six PM, which means that most of normal human society stays away from me, muwhahahaha. But yesterday was good. Managed to catch a surprisingly good Jazz concert at this cafe yesterday evening. Got drenched too, while coming to the office later in the night. I did what a self-respecting software engineer ought to do against natural born dilemmas – I used my credit card. Saw a sale going on at an Arrow outlet and bought myself a couple of shirts. (Had to pinch myself later to see if I was still sane.) But yesterday was a good day, in fact. I found my USB drive again. Yes, the same one that had gotten itself dunked into the washing machine the last time ( that’s called transference of guilt, for the uninitiated). I could not find it for about a week, and just as I had given up all hope of finding it altogether ( I thought it had fallen out of my pocket), there it was, inside the pocket of a shirt that I was about to put into the washing machine. I have a feeling this little bugger likes refreshing its memory every now and then in the washing machine.

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