"The Wheel of Time spins the Pattern of the Ages, threads being lives of men and women, cities and towns, nations and destinies. The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. The patterns created can never be comprehended in full, but maybe we can see bits and pieces of it. And this is the only power we can wield to save ourselves from the Darkness within Shayol Ghul."

I took a long time buying Priya her birthday gift. Mostly because I couldn't make up my mind. I thought I would get a whole load of fluorescent stars to light up her room with, help her create galaxies and constellations on her ceiling: the idiot beat me to it, and bought the stars for herself. Thought I would make her into the heroine of a tiny comic book: sounded cliche, I've done it before for others. I surrendered to fate, in the end, and bought her Book 2 of the Wheel of Time: the only one she was missing to complete her collection.

Turned out to be a gift for myself as much for her: best sort of gifts really. Frankly, it's not all that great: not exactly an epic of great proportions, to wrap you in wonder and carry you far, far away from your room, like Tolkein does; but it aspires to be. It's not a fantastic legend, with creatures and characters far too fabulous to conceive of, with lands one longs to go to; but it aspires to be. However, it does have a compelling weapon that forces people to keep reading: a promise of a story. (Unlike that stupid book about some dumb dragon and an even dumber boy - Eragon - which was so obviously a Tolkein wannabe. The story was boring, the hero maddeningly hard headed and stupid, and worst of all - the pompousness of the author, Christopher Paolini, seeped through the words: 'Oh, yeah, this is a great story isn't it? I'm only 19, you can make out from the general immaturity in the story, but I made tons of money from this book. Fabumungo, isn't it?." Point being: it was a loser of a book.)

The Wheel of Time is the sort of book I would love to buy my nephews. It makes me wish I was in a different place, with a purpose. In love with a fierce warrior, who fights battles with all he has. A fierce, bloody, feared warrior, who is chivalrous and dreamy. A bunch of friends with weird quirks who take me off on adventures. Family who are respected and a bloodline to make one proud of one's inheritance. Life with everything super intense: love, romance, adventure, friendship and everything that comes with it.

I wish I was a book. Not the characters, but the book. Life would be so much easier if you were a book. Actually, maybe we are all in a book. A very complicated, intense story, maybe we're being read by someone.

Now that's a thought.

Cheers. Claps. Shouts. Laughter. Someone throws a paper cup whose graceful trajectory ends in meeting the sufficiently hard surface of a manager's scalp.

Yep, we're watching the 20Twenty finals, India vs Pakistan, on widescreen in the cafe. I check my phone after the first innings and find 7 missed calls in my register, 6 of which I knew, straightaway, would be from my dearest ma and pa.

The 7th call came from a mildly interesting source. Interesting because the source had declared itself isolated from all communication with me, mildly because, well, it wasn't terribly interesting anymore.

So, I sat there, sipping my cardamom chai, while the chai fellow spoke to me in passionate, fluent hindi, on the state of Indian bowling and the various bowlers he liked/disliked/thought had great hair. Maybe more, possibly, cause most of what he said went over my head.

And I thought, alright, after it did give me a call, what the hell, might as well call it back and say, hey wassup with call. And so I look around, and my colleague passes me her phone with a knowing smile.

'Hello,' it picks up the call with it's usual weird intonation.
'You called,' I say.
'What?.. No, I didn't.'
'Yes, you did, at 6.11..'
'No, no, I didn't..' and then, typically, it mumbles incoherently and keeps the phone down.

Interestingly, this particular specimen is supposed to be an intelligent sample of the male species, going by it's brand value: Pilani, XLRI, currently working for a well known company in a managerial position.

Isn't it sad that the heterosexual women have no other choice but to mate with such amazingly low quality counterparts of nature. No wonder mankind is going nowhere these days: the male strain must be getting stronger in our gene pool.

'Well, there's nothing much to do today.. '
'Not really...' Priya brightened. 'Wanna go Mirrors?'

Mirrors, I later learned, was a beauty salon somewhere in Banjara/Jubilee Hills (I think). And it was a pretty high fly place: a unisex salon, with separate quarters for men and women.

'You could get a protein pack done..'

I brightened, in turn. Display products/services describing them with the words 'fruity,' 'natural,' 'aromatic and soothing,' 'nutrient packed' and the like and I'll fall for it. It's nicer when people use words like 'tea tree oil' and 'strawberries.'

So we called and made an appointment for two (never went to a big shot salon where we made appointments and all) and left. It was a very posh looking place and the receptionist greeted us politely.

'Appointment for two? Oil massage, protein pack and a haircut? You'll be wanting Pradip, yes?'

Pradip turned out to be the expert in hair care at that place. He did the following things:

a) gave me an oil massage
b) applied a protein pack
c) gave me a haircut

Strangely enough, contrary to what I expected, Pradip was extremely gentle and good with everything he did. The massage put me to sleep (the idiot woke me up to ask me how it was), the protein pack was ever so cooling, and the haircut was gently done. Much more gentle than any woman who has handled my hair before.

I think I'll go back shortly. This time for a full body massage. (But I think its as much to scandalise my mother who was horrified by the very thought of some guy giving me a haircut. Should be fun to let her know that I had a full body massage too).

Rustle rustle rustle -in mind darkening suffocating fearsome blindness moonless snake infested murderous foaming mad night lonely sad missionless defeated wandering existence defined by left right left right foot after foot rythmic plodding and enervated motion on barren waterless godless lands in a blanketed dark-ugly face-in-the-nearby-window screaming awakening wide eyed sweating dream of terror...rustle rustle rustle

Listen...it is not the mouse... swishing tail drooling fangs striped body standing eight foot tall clad in blood soaked deer skin pounce ready to snap your spine in two fang sinking into blood spurting neck punctures silky white sheet of breathless ever after for cold body foul vapors ...Rustle rustle rustle...stars reflecting infinite insignificance clouded out by tomorrow's rains the past till the minute is absurd and vanishing re-emerging as pulses of hope and desperate attempts at meaning there is none only heart beating very fast in the throat...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

a=b*(a+b)

c=b*(a-b)

a=b=c?

The End

Hacker for Prime Minister!

A poem

Each night, man enters

the waterfall of dreams

Come dawn, he emerges

victorious,

with swordfish in hand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/health/20period.html?th&emc=th

Exercise in Poetry Appreciation

My name is an Incantation
An exclamation on the face of ancient men
Looking up at thundering skies
Whispering dark secrets
God to ear to the ear of the Priest
Who wonders in mute amazement
At the will of the demons
His heart beating faster
His legs drenched in the golden rains
The name evokes

My Name...

It is an ancient secret this name
That travels through souls in the kiss of lovers
Entwined in amorous touches
In wide eyed dreams of unknown lights
Like the light of the setting sun
Embraced by darkness
As the God Queen follows
In her large wooden boat
Sails filled with the eastern wind
Down the western abyss
Off the river, off the sea
Off the horizon, off the flat
End of the world
Off the waking edge of her eternal sleep
She follows the Sun down and down

Down the rabbit hole
The black knight knows
The Red Queen wonders
At her ancient quest
Her sacred lust
Among visiting heroes
And snake bitten lovers
Among shadow ghosts that once had lied
And sinned between husbands
Moaning out loud
In the very depths of love
Never looking back
Aided by a clue
She searches for the name
And whispers its power


And says it again
Like the sound of fire
A warning for approaching death
Fearful of what dreams may come
At the misty headed glimpse
Of the cavernous dark
Sticky black pit
Of after-life
Like the mouth of a monster
Beneath his bead

My Name...

She says
Languidly slowly secretly
Quietly
Into ears that are far away
Hearing him breathe
Hearing the silence
Revolving around him
Listening to the quiet stillness
Of a sleeping love
Engulfed by the illusion
And whispers...

The stillness responds
She grasps the illusion
And descends into
Comfortable sleep
Like a serpent’s tongue
In the blades of grass
And towering brown heights
Of forest scenery

Kurt Vonnegut

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: April 13, 2007, NYT

If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.

Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.
He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end. He says not only what no one is saying, but also what — as a mild young person — you know it is forbidden to say. No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith.

So you get older, and it’s been 20 or 30 years since you last read “Player Piano” or “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough. You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose. “It’s not that simple,” you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.

And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut and your life is now the footnote. Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.

Thoughts on Muzac

It's like an old blues song you know -You wake up one mornin...
Everyone wakes up one mornin in a blues song They normally find their woman gone.

Or that they don't have money.

Or in most cases the Key don't open the door no more.

They must be returning from the Crossroads.

Crossroads are places in Blues songs where you pray to the Lord but the Devil teaches you the guitar on a full moonlight in exchange for your Soul.

Most blues musicians sing from their soul. They never had one. It was gone. So they sing from a vacuum. The blue note on the guitar is the sound of emptiness. It sounds better than the songs of most people whose souls have not been sucked out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I was a kid I idolized a lot of people. These people acted in movies, sang songs, wrote the books, put movies together... I never thought of these people as people. I had another word for them. I am not sure what that word was because I never really thought of a word...maybe Hero is the word.

Hero is a Greek mythological Character who does fantastic stuff like kill the product of an unlikely coupling of a bull and a lascivious human Queen. Heroes kill these creatures in dark caves and labyrinths and are helped out by beautiful highly fuckable princesses who end up being treated badly in the end by the Heroes. No one in Greek mythology thinks of Heroes as people.

The biggest thing about a Hero is that they do things which people Cannot do. People when asked to do the same thing will say "That's not what I am supposed to do...that's what Heroes should do". People make money, complain about their lives and procreate. Heroes do the same better and also do other things which people don't think of doing because they think only Heroes can do it.

Here's an example

Heroes can fuck a lot of women if they wanted. People cannot do that. Women like to get fucked by Heroes. They prefer Heroes to people if you really wanted to know.

John Lennon, Dylan, Jagger, Townsend, Marquez, Schultz, Beethoven, Godard, Lynch, Kubrick, Brando, Dean, Groucho, Woody, Bugs Bunny, Rushdie, Shakespeare, Homer, Ulysses, Salinger, Marilyn Monroe, Carl Sagan, Muddy Waters... my Acropolis had NO Vacancy boards on all its doors.

The stories on the lives of these Heroes often sounded like Greek myths. They sounded like that to a lot of people…including women people. These Heroes also got to fuck a lot of women. I am not sure if Bugs Bunny did.

Now I am not a Hero. I know that. But now I am thinking if Heroes are people. I am not sure but I have this very bad feeling that they are.

That would be very sad because that tells me, amidst various other shattering revelations, that I am letting other people fuck a lot of women and have a lot of fun just because I (and other people) think that our Heroes are not people. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am newly liberated. I like this anonymity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

what is it?
it is not known
it is dark
I wish i knew it
Is it?
It is?
This is it....


It is the end of this poem on it

And now for...News you can use!!!

Kanpur, Feb. 16 (ANI): Though a lot of people in Kanpur prayed in Lord Shiva temples across the city marking Mahashivaratri Day on Friday, many people worshipped images of serpents that emerged on a papaya.
A lot of Lord Shiva devotees in Kanpur's Bajariya area made a beeline for hours to have a glimpse of the unusual happening on Mahashivratri, or the wedding day of Shiva.

The news about Lord Shiva blessed papaya spread from hearsay after a man, Laxmi Kant Tripathi, noticed it at his home. Being a Shiva devotee himself, he declared it a divine occurrence after showing the same to a nearby temple priest.

"I had cut the fruit after coming back from the office and ate a piece of it but when suddenly my daughter-in-law asked noticed something unique on this Papaya. After having a look I found the images Naag-Nagin appearing on it. I confirmed about the images from the temple and started worshipping the fruit," said Laxmi Kant Tripathi.
Other devotees said that the emergence of such an image of a fruit is nothing but a miracle.

"We rushed here instantly on learning about the information of the serpents on the fruit. We saw the God's images. It feels as if Lord Shiva has made an appearance through his snakes for us," said Rajendra Nath, another devotee.
Many devotees visited the place from neighbouring places and worshipped the Papaya.
Lord Shiva is generally depicted in various images meditating and wearing snakes around His neck.

Deus ex machina dangled around and got stuck with his pants down in mid air and did a humpty dumpty double back loop to land with 9.8 perfection on the soft floors of the towers of Illyum

Indeed indeed said the chorus

All you Base are belong to us!!!! Bwahahahahah!

Preface

Dear Helena

Squirm...scream...the end of the dream...fairness cream!!!

Submit to the will of the Order....Hahahahaha

Yours Faithfully

Rascal Rajashivam

Introduction

It was the new york times it was the india times. It wasa bright February day in Goa and the clocks were all on strike. Call me Isabella. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman who is in posession of Fortune as a bed time read will remain (thank god!) single all her life. All fart is useless.

It was love at first sight!

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Commercial Break- Advertisement

There's nothing so liberating as good wine like Seagram's Nine Hills, Cabernet Sauvignon and some Laughing Cow Cheese and Some Tiffy's Olives while you type your head off on someone else's blog!

Chapter 1

Hey why don't we use this blog to update the daily activities for evaluation...we could do it every monday or if we feel like it update any time we feel free...this way its easier...less bulky and well we could play around a bit too...uh?

More Later...

Credits and Acknowledgements

The authors thank passwords and wine and olives and cheese...ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

"Hero:Love is a many splendored thing...love lifts us where we belong...all you need is love...

Heroine: Please dont start off that again

Hero: (Impromptu performance of All you need is Love)"

Identify the movie where the above scene appears and earn a hearty pat on the back from.... The Golden Hand!!!!

Jai Athena

Long live the Olive!