Revelations

Just saw a cockroach trying to cross the road. reach to the other side. Cars were speeding past on all sides and it barely missed being squashed onto the tarmac. Revelation. Isn't this life? All life, including all of our lives? Trying to cross over to the other side for some blind inexplicable reason, feeling with our antlers and scurrying around in haphazard trajectories hoping the cars' wheels would somehow miss. Why are we here? Where are we going? The saving idea : We have to keep moving. To what or where nobody knows. Futile all. And yet we cling on to our stupid beliefs like they mean so much. How fucking stupid.

'Waiting for Godot' hit it, you know, that white haired old fuck Beckett knew what he was talking about. He might as well have dramatised this scene. A puny little cockroach trying to cross the road with cars at full tilt passing all around it. Post modern. Modernism is all about so much bloody wallowing and trying hard not to show it. God knows why anyone would do a PhD on that subject! Its our Romanticism. Fucking escapists.
Why the fuck does Charlie Chaplin have to rant that moralistic bullshit into the microphone dressed up as Hitler? I mean, did he really mean that? "Help your fellow brethren". Wtf is this shit? Help them do what? Pull them up from their sorry, pathetic states and make them lead better lives? The same old systems repeated by new fodder? Why not speak of annihilation rather, of the existing beliefs. No Utopias, just instinct.

All this Eng Lit bullshit is dying. Shakespeare is going to die soon. If history has taught us anything it is this, that roughly every 5-10 centuries, old languages an texts get metamorphosed and give birth to new lingos, new forms of expression. That bearded fuck Robi Thakur did the same to the Sanskrit stylised Bengali language, the prose writers mauled English the same way. Soon history will be forgotten. We won't study Shakespeare. Who gives a flying fuck about a Danish prince procrastinating about killing his uncle who usurped a corrupt throne? Who gives a shit? We're one sorry assed bunch of self esteemed garbage. Our own fucking standards of everything-love, art, morals. All bloody centralized, canonized.

We can't even see that this whole motto doing the rounds about "live the moment, seize the day, live for the now" is one big fucking advertising proposition devised by the heads of all major MNCs to create a false appetite in our cockroach communities. Who the fuck lives for the now? Cockroaches and pigs. Live for the now, go to malls, use your credit cards, spend it all, don't think about tomorrow or the past, blow away all your money, give it to US. Take a big, collective fucking 'upper' pill and stay anethesised. And watch those fat fucks value their creative shams at 12.5 billion dollars. We got rid of Sunday family shopping and invented 'deal of the day'. Wow. Genius.

Ramblings

Stereotypes appear to be somewhat true in some cases. The Chinese do look all the same. Especially the women. It's amazing how after spending almost six months walking among them, I can verify this with some certainty. Long, 'poker' straight hair, small tennis-ball sized tits, yellowish-fair plain stretched skin and ugly hands (the cuticles especially in the case of middle aged women). Doesn't the description fit all Chinese women in some way? Six months and not a face I can particularly remember. 'Tis strange.

It's remarkable how I feel nowadays. Or have been feeling since 2008 when I decided to become an advertising student at IIMC. I feel numb, like Alice in Wonderland. I'm sure Alice mustv'e felt the same way. Not sure why or what she was doing in the rabbit hole, but continuing to walk nonetheless. Is that really a symbol/metaphor for life? Does everyone really feel vacant and directionless most of the time but having taken a certain course feels too defeated to alter it and just carries on? Is this the realization that made Shakespeare liken life to an actor's time on a stage in a play-scripted by someone else with seemingly random 'scenes' and characters? If you're playing the part of a character in a play, you often times wonder, why is this moron behaving in this manner? Why doesn't he do this or that and not what he's actually saying or doing? It's like you're being forced to lead someone else's life, words and actions already thought of for you by somebody else-an invisible, omnipotent specter not physically present but looming over the proceedings of the play nonetheless. Yes, that's exactly how I feel. When I was doing my masters, I felt like I had control over what I was doing. I wanted to pursue something in a certain way and knew how to get it done. Then I left Calcutta and into advertising and everything seems to have changed. I feel like I'm an actor on a stage-I don't speak my words or perform my actions-they have been written and thought of by somebody else. I'm not what I am. I wasn't supposed to be in this rabbit hole meeting freaks, but now that I'm here, I might as well keep walking or risk loosing my mind. I have broken clear of this earth, like Kurtz in that cerebral wilderness and something dead is inside me.

Porn is pure. There is something so non-adulterated about it that its freeing. The act of pure fucking-one purpose, no bullshit. No trappings, no morals, no values, no nothing. Just two bodies made for pleasure. And I'm fully aware of the whole commodification of sex, of the female form, artificiality argument that the nay-sayers have put forward. But the 'act' itself, the mimesis, deals with the most banal and the most profound of human achievements. The dramatization of pleasure in its rawest form in the act of copulation not just for procreation. Its the pinnacle of our progress thus far. The highest metaphoric form for human struggle and triumph, the prime fusion of nature-d bestiality and nurtured civilization. It is wholesome and momentous and like all great forms of art ultimately futile, realizing as you wipe your cock after a frenzied bout of masturbation. And just to add and elevate porn to the annals of great artistic mediums, like all of its peers, it makes man seem hopeless, alone and weak.

Random Thoughts Part 1

I hate how none of us, by us I basically refer to Bengalis from Calcutta are ever taught to be individualistically great. Our limitations of greatness is so constricted to exam performance and getting into engineering colleges into far-off godforsaken lands that its sickening. There is no REAL inspiration to tower over others, to lead the way, rather our motto is always to herd in. To be a successful worker, a banker, an engineer, an accountant, a doctor, a lawyer, a professor, but always humbly be true to home and hearth. In fact, its sickening that its always ingrained in us that we should learn how to be humble before striving for greatness or even achieving it.

As a race, who are the luminaries that we have given to the world? Well, those can be counted on our fingers and most of them would be dead a couple of centuries ago. Also, most of these men/figures, with the notable exception of one chose philanthropy and social reforms to achieve the tag of 'greatness' rather than forge a blazing path of Napoleonic glory. It was all about society, about 'them' as opposed to 'me' or 'I'. I don't think any shred of whatever philosophy Ayn Rand was peddling in her novels would've ever applied or been thought of in Calcutta. Why? Why do we have to cower and let others overshadow us. Why do we awe at the fortitude and strength of others and console ourselves with false and fancy notions that they might be 'great' but we're 'honest', we're down-to-earth, that we're 'safe'. Why are instilled with this sense of comfortable numbness  like mice groping around to find a warm hole in a winter's night?

Why don't our parents speak about going forth, expressing a zeal in entrepreneurship and  discovery. Did we need some British arrogant scumbags to enslave us and make us realize that we could be something worthwhile? And if they did, where has all that zeal and industry gone now? Do we need another phase of a 'contact' with a second colonial power before our glory days return?

Acceptance and not enquiry is our credo and its disgusting.

My YMCA sojourn

This is a post that I was intending to finish and put up on the blog a long time ago. But, for various reasons, mostly bordering on the lazy, I haven't gone about completing it. This is the first half of it, I shall soon go down memory lane and add some more character sketches.


One of the advantages of staying at the YMCA was that since I was occupying the dorm with four other people at a point of time, I got to meet people from various nationalities. The international-ness of Singapore really came to the fore here since every couple of days I would meet someone new, from some country that I had only read about or imagined to be so and so without actually being there physically or interacting with any of its people.It helped that the YMCA attracts a large number of tourists looking for a stop over in Singapore and then moving onto more 'touristy' locations such as Indonesia and Cambodia. It was also a good thing that I've been in this dorm for the past 28 days now, occupying the same bed from Day 1. And so, this being the eve of my departure from the YMCA premises, I thought this would be the best time to recollect all the people I've met so far in my brief sojourn.So here we go, I'll try and see if I can remember them all. If I do forget someone then it means that either the interaction with that person was too brief to register an impression or the person was just not interesting enough. For privacy or whatever's sake, I won't be taking names:

Old Swedish guy: Now I met this Old Swedish guy who quite surprisingly has a Bengali name and a Bengali dad who hailed from Calcutta. Now as much as this came as a surprise to me, even more odd was the man's behaviour. With the keen wolfish like stare that reminded me of Hannibal Lecter, this chap had an ego that tried to compensate for the minimalism of Sweden's land mass.When he first introduced himself and spoke about his line of work, it seemed a little complicated to me but then he mentioned that he was a researcher and his area of focus was the impact of IT and outsourcing on the economic and social fabric in developing nations especially South Asia. He also mentioned that he was in Singapore on research work and had an 'office' in the Management University opposite the Y. But something about him kept striking me as odd, maybe it was just my cynical mind, whatever be the case, I ended up Googling him just to be sure that he wasn't a psycho killer or a paedophile on the run from Sweden. However, he turned out to be just what he had mentioned, a prominent researcher and also a Harvard graduate. Hmm, that was impressive. What was not impressive was his tendency to drawl on and on about the quality of social life amongst young people, especially young girls in the city. According to him, the girls here didn't socialise enough with the members of the opposite sex and lead isolated lives. He was of the opinion that they were more pragmatic than emotional, worrying more about college and work than about boyfriends and heartbreaks. He also mentioned that he had an Indian girlfriend, Bengali to be more specific with whom he was having a bit of a tumultous time.He kept assuring me that Bengali women were a complicated lot and how one never knows where you are with them. One morning, while I stepped out of the Y on my way to the MRT station, I caught him walking in, all bleary eyed and dishevelled hair, his shirt hanging out of his belt as if he'd been lying drunk somewhere and enquired. He mentioned that his tiff had now blown out into a whole hearted fight and he was none the worse for it. I wished him luck only to be reminded of the difficulty of dealing with Bengali women. The next day, still in the eye of the Bengali storm, my Swedish friend took an early morning flight to London on some urgent work. When i had met him in the lobby for the last time, I had suggested that he go to India instead to try and pacify his girl, but he had snapped back sharply saying that since I knew nothing about the affair, I was not in any position to suggest anything. So that was the end of that.

My very own Bucket List

Okay, so here goes my attempt at creating my own bucket list. This, my dear friends, is not the 27th time that I'm attempting to create one. In quite seminal terms, this happens to be my first and for that very reason, I am going to go all out in fulfilling each and every one of these. Just to add a touch of seriousness to the proceedings, I'm even going to put a deadline to this list which is the end of September. I'm going to revisit this come September to see how I've shaped up in fulfilling any or all of these below mentioned items. So here goes (obviously not in order of priority):

i) Learn basic Photoshop skills

ii) Purchase a 15 inch Samsung LCD monitor/TV with HDMI cable to watch illegally downloaded movies and TV shows

iii) Complete my first freelance project

iv) Plan and chart a trip to Phuket/Vietnam/Kuala Lumpur and have meself a proper Bachelor's weekend-no holds barred ;)

v) Own a pair of Ray Ban wayfarers

vi) Save $4500

vii) Cut down number of cigarettes in a day to three

viii) Finish reading six books

ix) Download all the music I like and want on my Playlist along with movies+tv shows-Complete the Scorsese collection amongst others

x) Make it to thirty blogposts

The July update

Okay, so I hardly ever converse with my overweight, lady of the Yokozuna thighs flatmate-cum-landlady. I'm as quiet as a doormouse and mostly tip-toe around the premises. In fact, I can safely profess that I would have been the quietest flatmate that there has been till date and yet, my landlady has this weird suspicious attitude towards me.

It's amazing how you start taking people and things and situations in your stride, (atleast I do), until some small yet highly significant event comes around and you begin to have a different perspective on things. Like a painter cleansing his brush in his little bowl of water tinctures it with a hue with which he has been working. There is something sad about that act. Have you ever noticed this? Often, as a kid, when I used to sit with my large paint book and all the accessories and painstakingly attempt to create a master piece out of the Mickey Mouse, or whatever the hell I was trying to fill in with colours, the most fascinating was to wash the paint from the brush by dipping it into this clear bowl of water. There was something melancholic about the act-transience, sadness, realization, all of them together.

Well, I got this imagery fresh in my head after my landlady knocked on my door last Sunday night. This was a rare phenomenon, her knocking on my door because she has NEVER done that. After I gingerly opened, she enquired whether I had used her frying pan to "make some food". I answered in the affirmative, because I had, and then she filled me in on how she was a Muslim and only touched or consumed 'halal' food and how she was touchy about other people using her utensils. Our conversation ended abruptly as she told me that it would be better if I purchased my own set of utensils. Okay, so I was guilty of using her stuff without informing her, but can you see the coloring, the tincture so to speak that infused itself into this situation. How a seemingly idyllic state of things between you and your flatmate, that fine balance of not speaking, meeting, bumping into each other kind of familiarity can be blown to smithereens by a word, pithy with political, religious and historical currents. It got me thinking, and morose at the same time. I'm not the guy who bothers about things as meaningless as religious identity, being the pseudo bastard child of liberalism and foreplay. A Berlin wall created over a relationship that never even existed.

I used to stare out into the horizon at the mountains in Mussourie from the edge of the concrete playground at my boarding school, now I stare at the city skyline from my 13th floor verandah. A lot and nothing has changed since then.The loneliness exists and the bridge between people, misunderstood, little islands, with a gamut of isolated identities and prejudices.

Rango Trailer HD

Singapore: First Impressions

Well, technically its been more than a week in this fabulous city of Singapore and I have to say that my first impression of this place is pretty awesome. I don't know whether I'm qualified enough to make this comment because technically (again!) this is the first overseas country that I've traveled to. I mean I have visited Hong Kong and Bangkok as a 4 year old kid with my parents, but thats way before my memory began to take up a cognitive nature. So, although I've been living away from home (which is Calcutta) for the major portion of my life thus far, this is my first stint on foreign shores.

However, I wasn't expecting the city to be, well, what it is! Images of South East Asian cities conjure up the same images that any Indian city would-high ride structures residing besides slums, multitudes of people jostling on the streets, noisy and vibrant, throbbing with the pulse of life, the glorious and the bastardized co-existing etc etc. The list is lengthy. However, these images all flew out of the window of my mind the moment, I left the precincts of the airport and ventured my way into the heart of the city. Everything was so manicured-driveways leading onto lawns of lush green, leading onto golf courses overlooking the harbour with yachts and small vessels lazily floating by overlooking the impressive high rises over the harbour front with the Singapore eye in the background. This surely was a grand city!

However, the measure of a city, a metropolis does only nominally reside in its architecture. Its the culture of the place, the people who live there that create the fabric that constitutes the true  character of a city. Although a little premature, the citizens here came across as well behaved and civil but not warm. Somehow, like everything here, everything and everyone has been imported, plucked out of hitherto natures and environs and placed here in this unfamiliar and unresponsive territory to go about their lives. Its like putting the whole He-Man entourage on a game of Monopoly. Everything here seems "curbed"-the vegetation, the emotions, the people.

Its like Singapore is an interim between two places-people are waiting here to ultimately go away somewhere else which suits me fine until now, but I'm not sure about the coming months. I remember an old Latin line from a Francis Bacon essay I read in college (he said this of London I think):

"Magna civitas, magna solitudo" (A great city, a great solitude)

In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Japan, its made me wonder what would be the impact here if a similar event (hypothesizing here) were to befall this perfect city of restraint? Would the curbs disappear to give way to a heightened sense of belonging and camaraderie.

Ok, now to snap out of all the cosmo sentimentalism and onto some matters of higher importance-the state of the women in Singapore. If Bangkok is well Bangkok (read shady brothel) then Singapore is Milan. The women are unbelievable, adjectives would prove futile-elegant, fashionable, lithe, beautiful, so on and so forth. Byron would have a field day here, he would written a 1000 or more other love poems.

A more detailed post on this is definitely merited and I shall oblige myself with this later. Also not to forget some of the people who I've met here and even made friends with. My impressions on them in my next post. For now, just signing off with 2 lines I conjured up sitting at a roadside joint:

"In this flossy city by the sea,
Sullen with sea winds,
This island of lost dreams and 
Flitting fairies, I write to stay alive."