I am not too sure what I am more pissed by – morons who do not know how to zip and attach a folder to a mail and thereby end up screwing up a day of feature-based productivity ( did you know how much confusion the lack of a single file in a configuration folder can create? ) or one more passing comment about would-be Prime Ministers and Chief Ministers. Do I care? No, let me frame this better – do I look I care? As far as I am concerned, I would still be shooed to the side of the road and made to stand in the heat, along with a hundred other people while our Hallowed Leaders pass by. As if it would make a difference if I knew who’s sitting behind dark-tinted windows in an airconditioned car whizzing by me at ninety miles per hour.

Yes, I am politically retarded. Shoot me. I have never had the inclination to vote, nor the desire to do so in the future, immediate or otherwise. No, I have no inclinations whatsoever of leaving this country and settling somewhere else because you know, everything about India sucks and Indians suck and the Whole System is sooo far gone, sweetheart – nope, it’s nothing of that sort. Just that I do not see any good in adding 0.00000046 percent to the balance that decides which random way the shit will rain on Our Beloved Country by exercising my judgement, Free Will, Democratic rights et al.

I have been trying to figure out why exactly politics evoke such negative reactions in me, you know, sifting thorugh childhood memories and finding Jungian roots and all that bunkum. Maybe it’s an offshoot of being in a family where the Father is in the Police Department. Or tuitions under a Social Studies teacher who thought the best way to deal with politicians was to put them in a train and have someone drive the train off a cliff.( Aha! Transferance of Guilt! ), and realising a little too early that life in India is always hunky-dory if you know the Superintendent of Police. Even the OC in the local Police Station would do, actually. ( Of course, knowing a Minister or two would be a definite improvement. But there is this ingrained feeling of sliminess involved. Apologies to anyone who knows any politicians. ) Maybe I have seen too many of those socially relevant films where the Main Man’s sister gets bad things done to her and he runs from pillar to post looking for justice and finally decides to take a gun and shoot everybody’s collective asses to hell and back. There were loads of them socially R films, true. But the one that sticks to my mind is the one with the old guy with the mystic martial arts from Kerala.

Then there is this peculiar thought I once had, about my kid coming and asking me something like – “Oh my gosh, papa ( or daddy, or dude, whatever my kid decides to call me ) you actually voted this freaking moron into power? What are you, some kind of dimbulb or something?” Well, I can take that from my wife, for sure. But a kid, my kid – telling me this? I would rather let him beat me at Tekken 3 as much as he wants.

Fact is, I think my thought processes are somewhat…er…infantile. I have had people telling me that I live in a world of my own, and to tell you the truth, I kinda believe them too. That world does not have electoral processes that involve me deciding how best to contribute to Chaos. ( interesting, I thought of the word “Chaos” with a capital C because I am reading a Michael Moorcock book right now. Interesting to me, that is.) That world definitely does not have ANY part of my mental or physical faculties dedicated to keeping myself up-to-date with whatever my Khadi-clad brethren are up to. Of course, with this concept of “my” world also comes the allegation of losing touch with reality, you know, being someone who is totally unaware of what’s going on around him, and all that jazz.

You know what? I am perfectly happy with that.

And I still hate morons that cannot zip and attach a folder to a mail.

Life’s not exactly rollicking right now. Too much work, or maybe it seems like too much work because I have been procrastinating for quite sometime now, and the deadline doesn’t just loom nearer, it positively hugs me in the face and refuses to let go.

That doesn’t quite mean I am not *ahem* indulging myself.

Friday, i got the DVDs of Ringu and Demon City Shinjuku and the audio CD of Danny Elfman: Music For a Darkened Theatre Volume 1, which had been ordered three weeks ago. My first online order, delivered piping hot from the US of A. Yippee!

Preacher continues to blow my mind. The profanity and the gore serve as a neat counterpoint to the interesting character developement – punctuated by off-the-cuff conversations on John Wayne movies , Laurel and Hardy enthusiasts as opposed to Chaplin fans, religious “revelations” which shock and evoke peals of laughter at the same time. Preacher is undoubtedly the most fun I have had in months. I wonder, as always, whether I should proceed slowly or whether I should complete the 66-issue run in one extended sitting. So far, I have gotten to issue 25.

I have started replaying No One Lives Forever, which used to run choppily on my old Celeron-366 machine. The gameplay is superb, as everyone and his mother can tell you. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is static at the Babylonian level because my gore quota is being supplied by Preacher, for the moment.

I seem to be reading more comics than books this year. Not that I mind. It’s just that the combination of downloaded CBRs and Gotham reprints has succeeded in making me feel absolutely at peace. The word “satisfied” has never been used in conjuction with “comic needs” in my lifetime until now.

Last night I was reading Preacher. I read the first seven issues in white heat, and then spent about three minutes giggling to myself in my room – and then decided I had to call up vrikodhara and tell him all about it. Tell I did, and I was still giggling to myself when I fell asleep, about an hour later.

Today morning, I had this conversation with a friend who had read one of my “here, read this”-category of comics. He didn’t like it at all. He was extremely pissed, in fact, by seeing panels where a guy shoots another guy in the eye – the fellow who is shot shouts something like “Ugh! I am hit! I am hit! ” and the shooter pumps a couple more bullets into him, with the consoling words – “Oh, don’t worry, you look swell.”

Personally, I would have found the spectacle extremely funny. And Preacher is gory as hell. You have people with the lower end of their skulls shot away, you have vampires sticking knives into their own necks to escape a police dragnet, a guy called Arseface who has got an arse like a face – er, the other way round, actually, and then you have a serial killer who rips body parts off people. Plus there are truckloads of blasphemous ideas thrown around. I enjoyed every moment of it.

Am I the kind of person labelled “sicko” in a normal society?

Now let me get things straight. In all the years of my indulging in things of an amoral nature in comics, films and various other forms of art, I have never really had real-life repercussions of whatever it is I was indulging in. Occasionally, I would read or hear about people who get bad dreams or depressive thoughts because they read so-and-so book or watched so-and-so movie, and when I go and watch the same movie or read the same book, I would enjoy every blood-soaked minute of it. I got into horror fiction just so I could feel the horror, you know , the way people say Exorcist made me pee my pants, or Psycho messed with my head. There have been books which have made me scared when I read them, no doubt, but nothing that has given me nightmares or scarred me for life. There has been no permanent effect on my psyche. I do not make bombs in my room, I do not torture neighbourhood cats. I love cats. I do not necessarily love human beings, but I stay in harmony with them, barring the odd bout of verbal insurgency.

Likewise, violence. It is strange that people moan and complain when they see graphic depictions of death – gunshots, swordfights, whatever – onscreen or on the printed page. Hello? Isn’t this better than showing a superman ( your average X-ollywood Film Actor) who’s being fired upon by twenty men and survives without a scratch? This is what freaking happens when someone shoots at you – you will be very if you are still alive. You will be bleeding. You might not have been hit by the freaking bullets at all, but even the ricocheting bits of the surface where the bullet hits can be deadly. Seeing geysers of blood spouting from a decapitated torso may upset you, but remember that this is what would happen if you are in a swordfight.

It’s even funnier that it’s okay for children to watch cartoons where a mouse does unspeakably horrible things to a cat or those mythological serials that show armies on a battlefield shooting arrows at each other. Or one “good” god shooting at a “bad” demon and lopping his head off. “Cartoons are divorced from reality”, is what I have heard parents say. Oh yeah, right. Is it okay to mislead ( yes, it is misleading, isn’t it? ) children into believing that violence is all cartoony and non-bloody? If it’s okay to laugh at cartoons, it should be alrght to laugh at the “real” stuff too, isn’t it?

Everybody says we are a generation inured to real-life violence, so hardened that things barely shock when we read about it in the papers. We are drawn to violence, fascinated by it. So is it a problem when I go a step further and laugh at it? Just to make things clearer, let me point out that it’s extremely unlikely that I would be laughing at somebody who has been shot in real life. I would hardly be in a position to be humorous if somebody is pointing a gun at me. It’s just that, when somebody who is not real, who is an imaginary character in a make-believe world, is in deep, deep shit, I find that extremely amusing. I kind of relish the glee with with the writer must have thought up this situation, or I applaud the director and his twisted sense of humour and the enthusiastic people who went along with his ideas. I envy the rollicking time they must have had, when they were doing all this.

Shit. I wish you would laugh along with me.

Holy Gory Happy Birthday, moccacino!!!

Next year, we’ll watch The Last Temptation of Christ on your birthday eve.

I shall wail.

WAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!