Hiccups in love

Based on Plato's Symposium: "People were initially hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all our halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost...."

There was this friend of mine who was good looking, topper in the class, a great sportsman, an orator, a painter. We all envied him for we believed that God had given all talents to one single person.

But there was one minor defect he had. Whenever he saw a beautiful girl, he would start hiccuping infront of her. His hiccups would never stop and no water or no panacea could cure his disease. It was as if, God would have made a perfect human being but then later he decided to leave one imperfection in him. And that he hiccuped talking to a beautiful girl. Hiccups as heels for my Achilles friend.

He would approach a beautiful girl or a beautiful girl would approach him and then he would indulge in serious amorous talks. And amidst all seriousness of mutual attraction, he would release one blip of non serious hiccup. And then the girl would lose interest.

I even asked one of these girls that why was my friend being denied all the time, despite being a stud. And then she would reply, "Vikas, do you really think that we girls seek studness in love, we only solicit serious, incessant, unrelenting love".

Yes, now I remember once I had drunk lots of beer before giving a presentation for my strategy class during MBA. Initially I was doing well, shedding my inhibitions, describing strategic frameworks, talking more and more (although out of inebriation). The only success parameter in MBA is that you have to talk a lot and fake seriousness. But then, alas lots of beer comes with a side-effect. I burped. That typical beer burp.

Similarly, love has its similarity to MBA. That desire for uninterrupted seriousness. Alas, the curse of my extremely talented friend was proving detrimental in the world of love.

One day, he was passing through the city streets and on pillars, he noticed a poster which said, " CURE FOR THOSE WHO HICCUP WHILE TALKING TO A BEAUTIFUL GIRL. CALL 9811872714."

He was shocked at the exactness of time and the space coordinates of that poster. He immediately dialed the number and there was a beautiful girl's voice who received it. She asked him to come to his flat, giving him her address. When he met her, he realised that she too had the same disease. She hiccuped while talking to any handsome guy. They both talked and hiccuped and talked and hiccuped.

That's how they lived happily ever after.....

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Based on Plato's Symposium, love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

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World of unrequited loves

Dear students,

Imagine a world of unrequited loves. My sample size of today's discussion is the entire universe whosoever is capable of loving. But then today our lecture is about one of the most beautiful concept of "unfulfilled loves". We all love it.  Last evening, I screened for you the movie Vicky Christina Barcelona by Woody Allen in our auditorium . In the movie, Javier Bardem says "Maria Elena used to say that only unfulfilled love can be romantic". I saw the reaction in each of your faces and it was perfect. Half my job was done.

So now, imagine a world where 'A' loves 'B' but 'B' does not love 'A' and rather loves 'C'. 'C' loves 'D' and does not love 'B' back. And so on,.... 'Y' to 'Z' but not 'X'. 'Z' to 'A1' but not Y and so on.....I have bored you with alphabets but I have repeated it so many times that the concept is drilled in your head. And the introduction of A1 is to ensure that I have taken the entire population.

Now, try to enforce one of those characters on yourself. Let us assume that you are P25 in our sample size. You love P26 but P24 loves you.

So tell me, would our world not be awesome that way. We all try to find heroes in Romeo and heroines in Juliet. In our world, we all would be our own heroes and our own heroines. Living a heroic world, hahaha.

Remember I had told you once that there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. In our world, there would be no bad luck but above all no misfortune!

Now Prakriti, I know, you would ask me from your last row seat "Profesor, would there be marriages also in our imaginary world?". See, I saw that coming. I like the way how you add to my ideas from your backbench. But to answer your question, marriages have nothing to do with love. Marriage is altogether a different arrangement, probably to keep this world going. So marriages will be there in our world and few of them might be borne out of unrealized loves.

We will discuss later about marriage in detail. Marriage is a bit of permanent concept (altleast in most of the countries). And that permanence in the world has always had contrary charms for man. It drives him to both despair and hope. It never says but one thing: first it interests, then it bores and then it interests. But marriage always wins out by the dint of its obstinacy*. It is always right.

Anyways, we will do a brainstorming and attempt some roleplay on our concept in the next class. The groups have already been divided. So, just go back and think about this before you sleep tonight. And Prakriti, you are the only student who has not submitted your last assignment on "the state of zero"...

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*Lines twisted and presented from Albert Camus' book

Dedicated to Albert Camus (7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960)

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Ask the Expert

Inspired by Ask-the-Experts columns by Suhel Seth (for Telegraph), Pooja Bedi (for Delhi Times) and several other experts, my friend too decided to try himself on this counselling business. He started the same job long back but then no newspaper or magazine was ready to publish him, so he approached me quite saddened by his failure to launch a life-counselling career. Hence, I am helping him by lending a space in my blog to publish them.
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I am 28-year old guy working in one of the trashy offices (as probably no one else would give me a job). My problem is that there is hardly any intellectual talk in the office. All the time, everyone is talking about how many houses they have bought. They discuss square foot rates of the next coming apartment that they are planning to buy. They earn four times my salary only through renting out their apartments, some from the houses they bought while some from the houses their papa bought. For that large sum of money, they really need not work hard as they already have taken post dated cheques from tenants. 
While I keep sitting spending 70 percent of my salary in my education loan, my parents are also pushing me to buy a house and save a lot of money. While I am able to change topics with my parents, my office colleagues are quite a mess. I try a lot to ignore them but then they are too loud to ignore. Please help.
                                                                                                                        - Gaurav S (Gurgaon)

My friend, I think your problem is not quite unique. Lot of young people like you (who assume that they are intellectuals) render other talks to be trashy. However, if you are an intellectual, you must be smoking pot often. If not, stop considering yourself an intellectual.So in each smoke break in office, try and find a corner where you can smoke up and after that read my columns. You will also start finding rhythm and music in the real estate talks of your friends. This will surely help.


I am a 26-year old Gujarati girl who is currently working in Mumbai. My problem was quite trivial and hence I did not ask bigger experts who are published in newspapers. My place (like all other places in Mumbai) is quite tiny. My bathroom is so small that I can't even open my arms fully under the shower. But then that is not my problem. 
I have two shelves in my room. In one of the shelves, I have kept my books. I treasure that shelf a lot. In other, my mom who visits me once a month has kept some idols of God, a coconut from Siddhi Vinayak temple, a 500 ml coke bottle containing (holy)Ganga water from Haridwar. While my mom is very religious, I am quite an agnostic. My problem is that the bookshelf has been overloaded and I have no space to keep my other books. So I am always thinking of using the religious shelf. However, my mom does not allow me this. I always tell her to take it back to the place where she spends her rest 28 days in a month. Nowadays she retorts that once Narendra Modiji comes to power, girls like me would be behind bars for denying her Gods. I really see that coming and am quite scared. Help.
                                                                                                                                 - N. Patel (Mumbai)
I think only one of the Gods can help you in this. Try sprinkling some Ganga water from that 500 ml coke bottle on you or definitely on your mother. Sense will prevail probably.

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Address your issues to me at ask_the_expert56@yahoo.com. Please remember to add your name and city of address at the end of your question.

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The state of zero

Dear Students,

I have always been fascinated by zero. The state of nothing. The position of zilch. Spanish call it "nada".

I had written about it in one of my previous posts that how life was blissful only in the state of infinity or zero. We all try to chase infinity and are unable to attain it, thats the root cause of all sadness. Hence, zero state is much easier and probably Buddha and many other philosophers prescribed the same.

Now carrying that discussion ahead, there are two ways of attaining zero or rather going back to zero. (Lets be assured that we are all born zero and we all die zero. So today I reveal to you about attainment of zero while we are still alive or say we are in the midst of our lives.)

First way is to stay at zero and not move and the second way is to move and come back to zero. Let me give you an example. One day, you wear your favourite dress and you "think" that you are looking fabulous today (Mind you, its just an assumption of your mind). A beautiful girl comes to you and does not compliment you. Thats the first zero.  Later, another beautiful girl comes to you and says "Hey, you look fabulous today" and then she follows it with a highly sarcastic smile which erases her entire statement. You don't know whether the girl really meant that you were really looking fabulous or was she just sarcastic and meant it that you had overdone it. So its like she wrote a line with her words and later rubbed it with a sarcastic smile. Thats also zero.

Another example, you are a girl madly in love with this guy. You had a void and were zero (relatively). Now this guy has come and filled the void. He is filling your heart with feelings and emotions. And like all love affairs, this also ends. Now your heart aches and is sorry. You aspire to go back to void. You want to take him out of your life, throw away his pictures and gifts so that nothing takes you back to him. You aspire to go back to void/zero. And one day, like we all, you will eventually come back to normal and you acquire that state of zilch. (Mind you , you will still have that nostalgia which will make you happy about the time you spent with him. Thats why Tennyson said that its better to have  loved and lost and that to have never loved at all).

Anyways, think about it. The two examples which illustrates ephemeral zilch (and not a permanent state of zero). The lecture is to attain a permanent one. But like all professors I have started with A B C D and will finally teach you how to dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can*!
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*Expression from Jack Gilbert's The forgotten dialect of the heart.

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The heartbreaker

There is a positioning of every person's life in this world. His positioning was that of a heartbreaker. He did that all the time- breaking hearts. He grew over women and they fell for him like a trap. They were aware that he was a heartbreaker but somehow falling for him was like some subliminal power act and as much inevitable like the birth and  the death. Hence the fall and the pain had to happen. He was a part of the most important learning in their lives. In short, he was not a heartbreaker but a prophet.

The transience of his every act and living-in-the-moment philosophy of his made him what he was. His heart did not lie at one single place. He was a traveler with only his journey being permanent. The journey of his love also had no destination. Like an ideal traveler , he always traveled light. No baggage except only the quintessentials. Hence he reached a place, treasured the sunset, grew over a woman with his charm and moved on carrying no baggage (feelings) but only the quintessential (nostalgia). In short, he was not a heartbreaker but a traveler.

He was not in the realm of happiness and sadness but only magic. Happiness and sadness are always outcomes of ambitions and goals. While magic is altogether a different dimension. When he talked to these women, their pupils would expand and shorten like a magic being run over them. They never listened to him with their hearts and minds but felt him with their spines. And then when he left, a part of them missed him but they were happy as they knew that he was but just a moment of an extraordinary energy which had grown over them. In short, he was not a heartbreaker but a magician!

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Driftless Scribbles....

" May be in general scheme of things he couldn't find any meaning in life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time....."-Keret

Scribble 1.
Well I am not a reader, a traveler, a thinker, a music lover, a movie buff or a blogger. Even though I do read, travel,  love thinking, love good movies, listen to my own set of music and am blogging now. I hope you understand the subtle difference. As much I love doing them as much I hate being labeled one. The contrasting beauty of verb over the stereotyping nouns and the charm of 'doing' over the 'doer'.....

Scribble 2.
I am pretty sure that my love for anonymity is not taking me places. But then either I love too much crowd or pure solitude. Probably infinity and zero both are equal. Probably life is blissful only in the state of infinity or in a state of zero. And between zero and infinity, zero is my favourite and relatively easier. Aren't we all chasing infinity: infinite wealth, infinite fame, infinite time. We can't attain infinity and hence all the sorrow, its easier to attain zero but hard to convince ourselves to chase it. Probably, Buddha also preached the same....

Scribble 3.
Probably life is symmetric in nature. Like the ubiquitous Gaussian curve. Even if it is not, I desire so. I spent my childhood days (8th year to 18th years) in mountains. I would like to spend my last days (last 18th year to last 8th years) in mountains too. I would buy or set up a bookshop and a small place in the Himalayas. I would sell books to those adolescent and young people and see the beautiful sun setting down the sky. Selling books would be easier; books I really believe in and very much unlike selling bonds, debentures, advertising spaces, credit cards and cars...

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Weird thoughts

1. Birthday

Well, I did not celebrate my birthday this time as I turned 28. It had been my long live dream to die at the age of 27. I believed all cool guys die at the age of 27: Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. I wanted to be in that super cool league. It had been my long lived dream. This birthday marked a special day, a day of my shattered dream.

2. Materialism

Everywhere people are flashing their iPhones, Samsung apps trying to be cool and others are really admiring them. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things but has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
There should be marketers, guerrilla marketeers, ambush marketeers, subliminal marketeers trying to teach people the benefit of not having an iPhone6 or a  samsung S4. How the world is better without these trapping gadgets.

3. Middle class

Sigh, and one day we all will be raising middle class kids feeding them on Horlicks, sending them maths tuition and desperate them to have an engineering degree (which will be of no use) and then MBAs and then ultimately work in an organisation where compensation awarded would be inversely proportional to the performance. Well, life work in circles my friend!

4. Love Chats

Well, I do not have any love letter but love mails and gmail chat histories. They are mostly crap and dangerous evidences too. How foolish and mushy I acted, how prisoned I was to the whims and fancies of a girl(s). The worst mails are those exchanged during break ups, where I plead and pleaded just to be informed that I was some monster!
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PS: Well most of the thoughts above are not that I could gather it right now (at this very moment). Well they sprung up during my casual conversations with some of my mad friends when we were just trying to escape the inequity of the restlessness of our minds!

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Sentimental.

Today as he laid on his bed injured, nostalgia hit him, reminding him of good old days. Days when she visited him in his shoddy place and read him books while his legs ached in physical pain. She pampered him  by fetching water everytime he needed it, did all the silly household chores but above all laughed at his bad jokes. He asked her why did she laughed at his bad jokes, and then she would transform herself into Jack Nicholson (Mc Murphy) of One who flew over the cuckoo's nest and quote "Man when you lose your laugh, you lose your footing..."

She read him Catcher in the rye though he had already read it before. She read him Crime and Punishment, Catch 22 , God of small things and lots of poetry. He could hardly concentrate on her words because his mind was mesmerised by her act of reading. Her words were clear and she read like our favourite English teacher who changes her pitch and the tone with the flowing emotions in the book. Despite that, he could not understand her readings. Probably because when heart opens, mind shuts itself.

Well luxury had never appealed him. He liked simple things, books, poetry, being alone or with someone who understood*. She definitely understood him. Last person to do so.

Well, but then his image killed him. He came out as a nonchalant and a sarcastic guy and he could not help being judged otherwise. Alas, even his love for her sounded too nonchalant and sarcastic to her and she laughed at his confessions of love as well. She once got drunk and told him that he was not the right guy for her because her prince charming was someone else. He did not mind it that much. He loved chases. He wanted her to love him back. Guess what, she did love him but only confessed at the moment they parted.

With her around him, the world did never seem a struggle or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and largely unappreciated**.

And today that he laid sentimental on his bed.......

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PS: Inspired by **Nabokov, *Daphne Du Maurier.
(Tried to come back to writing world through this post with some confused thoughts, twisted lines and having read some inspired pieces by some kickass writers mainly Nabokov, Calvino and Camus).

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Moments of retrospection

Dear diary,

Tomorrow, I celebrate three years of my job life. Well "celebrate", I wonder? Frankly, it has been a tiring, tedious, seeing-the-same-bullcrap-everywhere and a taxing journey.

Well you got it right. I am here to crib and vent it out.

Yesterday, I read an article which was of the title "Date a girl who travels". Not as well written as the original "Date a girl who reads", but made some sense.

Anyways, here is my story. I travel alone so many times and never a girl in my compartment and now when I was traveling with parents there was this beautiful Kashmiri girl traveling alone back to Kashmir from Delhi. Her eyes shone in the dark  like pearls but then it also reflected that she was very scared. She kept talking on the phone in the incomprehensible Kashmiri language. She even asked my dad to exchange her lower berth with dad's upper berth. I wondered why would a girl leave the lower seat and make an uncomfortable climb to the upper seat of Indian Railways. But then I was happy for I was at the other end of the upper berth. She was all the time on phone or had earphones on. But then the earphones were very loud (even under her scarf) and I could here Beatles songs being played. It made her even more beautiful.
In the morning when I woke up, I could not resist making a talk with her. She told me that she was scared because she was traveling alone for the first time and everyone back home was horrified of increasing rapes in Delhi. Thats why she had swapped her berth to upper one where it was more difficult to be reached and hence raped. And on phone when her brother had asked in Kashmiri that who else were there in the compartment she had told that there was a guy of 27-28 age (about me) but then it is assured that he would not rape me because he is traveling with his family. Yes, she told me that in complete innocence. I was shocked at hearing this and this has left an indelible expression in my mind.

Well you know, currently I am missing those moments when I used to visit her place and we would watch Charlie Chaplin movies together. (Don't ask me who this "her" is because I have written enough diary entries about her.) She would cry tonnes of tears at those impersonation of The Tramp by Charle Chaplin and I would laugh and clap at those comic scenes. But then those were one of the few moments combined of tears and laughter that I wanted the time to stand still.

Anyways, books are the only ones who are keeping me going. I am excited about this new book I am to read. Nabokov's Speak Memory. So many books, so little time!

Love,
vC

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How to crack arranged marriages?

Well, yesterday I met my old school friend who narrated me three of his most horrifying stories where he had to evaluate girls to be his potential wife in line with the doctrinal arranged marriage process. To give you a background (Strictly my opinion), my friend is a sort of a combination of 3 characters: Catcher in the rye’s Holden Caulfield (but more grown-up), English August’s Agastya Sen (but a little more complicated) and Tainspotting’s Mark Renton (minus too much of drugs).

In two of the three horrifying stories, my friend’s background had been due-diligenced on all the possible social platforms (facebook./orkut/linkedIn and others we may not be aware of). 

Girl1:

They met up in a crowded surroundings of India Gate where she told him over the phone that he could recognize her as a girl eating a pink icecream. To his dismay, there were plenty of girls eating icecream but with different shades of pink. So he called her back to check what she was wearing and that’s how he met her in her heavily dressed-up attire and gaudy make up that even if he consented to marry her, he would not recognise her on his eventful first night of marriage. She gave my friend a packed gift to which he was utterly disgusted for not having brought a return gift. She asked him to open the package she had gifted and he found out that the gift was a Sidney Sheldon’s book. He tried to hide his evident sorrow expression at being gifted a Sideny Sheldon book and evaluated that no gift is better than this gift. But then she quickly jumped up and said “hum jaante hain ki aapko padhno accha lagta hai, humne FB pe dekha (I know you like reading, I saw it on FB)”.

 Obviously, the meeting went in a disaster because the girl’s ambition was to free-ride on her husband’s money and have trips to Ooty, Darjeeling, Golden Temple, Vaishno Devi, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Amarnath and several other Shiva temples (Shivji humaare favorite bhagwaan hain/ Shiva is my favourite God) and she added humne fb par ye bhi dekha hai ki aapko ghoomna bahut pasand hai  (I have also noticed it on FB that you like traveling)

Girl2:

She was one of the pretentious film arts students (a complete contrast to Girl1) sponging on Dad’s money and was a self-proclaimed cool, arty, photographer clicking all the sadhu babas, cows and the beggars on the road. He agreed to meet her because she told him on phone (albeit with a put-on accent)- “Come dude, we will get high”. So they agreed to meet at one of the most wannabe places in Delhi called Hauz Khas Village. After they met and found a corner space to get-high, she took out from her bag all the junkie stuff-grass, pink paper, powdery substance, liquids, syringes etc. He was dumbfound at all the large syringes she took out and he was like “hey hey stop, I cant take all this syring into my body”. She was shocked at his reaction and she injected one of the drugged syringe into her fully tattooed skin. Later, she started talking of how cool she was and started mocking at his uncool job, his poor background,, his Hyundai i10 small car, his poor physique, his facebook profile picture, his facebook cover picture, his absence from twitter. She took out her camera and showed him the pictures she had clicked and he found them awful. He missed his earplugs as  that shallow, verbose and insolent girl got more and more intolerable.

Girl3:

It has less to do with the girl3 whom he could not even meet but more with her kith and kin who dropped by his house to meet the guy. He had arranged his bachelor, unkempt house to his level best but as far as I know my friend the place even at his best would be below par in terms of neatness and cleanliness. 

They dropped by to interview my friend of his credentials of keeping their girl happy where he was asked the capital of Andhra Pradesh and an arithmetic table of number 19. When he said he knew cooking, he was asked that when did one decide when rice had been fully cooked. He was asked certain embarrassing questions like was he a virgin and whether he smoked, drank, had any diseases, how much dowry was he expecting to which all the answers were satisfactory.

In reward they handed him a cash of rupees five thousand one and the phone number of girl number 3.

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Bombay revisited.

This time when I revisited Bombay, I did my usual marine drive walk from the start to the end clicking pictures of the sky changing colours. Those who have been to Marine Drive are quite aware of the street kids who sell flowers to the couples, water bottles to the thirsty and some eatables to be snacked.

In my regular photo session, I asked a bunch of kids selling flowers to pose for me. They were more than happy to do it for me. They really enjoyed being clicked and thanks to digital nature of the camera, they could see their own pictures in my camera.

This activity went on for quite a time. Then one of those kids offered me a flower (in lieu of all the photos I clicked) to which I replied that it was of no use to me. Then the other kid (whom I had clicked Dabang style, giving my sunglasses and asking him to hold his belt) asked whether I liked any girl around in the marine drive. I jokingly pointed at the girl sitting very close to us. Well, she did look pretty. Before I could say that I was joking, all of them ran to the girl and offered her a flower each. The girl was taken aback and shouted "nahi chahiye (I don't want it)". then came the coolest part when all of them in unison shouted "le lo free hai (take it, its free)". Before they could point at me or giggle while looking at me or admit that I, with the camera, was the culprit for those flowers, I ran immediately and apologised to the girl stating it was all a joke and emphasied that they were kids and I was to be blamed. She understood and said "nahi theek hai (Its OK)".

She accepted one of the flowers. The first thing that came to my mind was that had I done this in Delhi, I would have surely been beaten. Later I sat with the girl and talked for quite some time. She told me that she had noticed me clicking the kids in all poses. She loved the dabangg pose as it was the cutest. Later she asked me what did I do. I told her all about my boring managerial profession in the most interesting way I could. And when I asked her what she did, I was startled to be informed that she was one of the sex-workers from Grant Road!

No wonder, I consider Bombay my love and Delhi my wife....

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Chapters and Lessons

These following stories could be about one of us. Let us call our protagonist 'he' for it is concise and might give you an inkling of having some connection with him.

Chapter 1: B-school
Well, many of his acquaintances tend to attribute his awesomeness to his 2- year education at one of a premier B-schools in India. He was not sure whether to dispute it or to just submit to their innocent assumptions. Somehow deep inside he felt that his B-school was not much of a value-add but just a mere placement agency than some academic institution he had dreamt about. I choose to narrate one of his incidents from one of the most comic times (read: placement times) when he felt shallow and superficial about talking and looking similar as others students.

 Lesson 1: Tanking
So friends, this incident is of placement process at our protagonist's business school, when one of the companies like all other companies, astounded at the number of people interested in joining them, chose to conduct a group discussion (GD) to screen out candidates. The screened-out candidates were mainly poor students who could make themselves heard in all that chaos, pandemonium and ruckus rising out of other desperate jobless students.

The GD he was about to face had the topic "Looming crisis in Indian industries" but the organiser had said it in such a low and feeble manner that only 2 guys sitting nearest to this man/organiser were able to hear it. All the candidates shied away from asking from the organiser directly about the topic because it showed their inability to listen (which was important in a good manager) and hence asked the candidate sitting next to him about the topic. Blame it on Chinese whispers, the whole panel except for the two closest managed to understand that the topic was "Crisis in loom industry". Everyone talked about loom industry and how khadi could help redeem the loom industry and blah blah. They all shouted and yelled over the two guys who were actually aware of the original topic. They all talked about loom and loom and looming-of-our-economy just evaporated itself to the unsound nature of the entire process.

The company, which few minutes before, was very happy on the number of people interested in joining their company suddenly became unhappy over number of candidates tanking in the interview. Tanking is a term in MBA colleges where a candidate deliberately throws away his candidature as he had already been selected by some other company.

Lesson 2: How he got his job
He always felt that his CV was a disaster on both the basis of quality and quantity of it. He, who had read lots of books and was a literature student, even hesitated on writing 'reading' as his hobby because he visualized  being asked annoying questions like "Who wrote the novel- My Great MBA Days". He struggled to fill even a single page of his CV as he who had little time out of reading was a member of no committee and even had won no paper presentations. So his half page CV went to an interviewer who promptly asked him that why had he not written any of the papers or committee names as everyone in his college seemed to have been in a committee or won a paper competition. He was sure that he won't be selected  so early and hence took a chance and replied that he had not felt it relevant to write such petty victories in for interview of an esteemed organisation who surely sought brilliant students beyond their CV points like committees and paper presentation. He was selected then and there.

Chapter 2: Boarding days
Lesson 3: Where Gods lived

He graduated from one of the rare boarding colleges in India which taught literature and gave a degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Literature.

Regionalism was highly prevalent in his college and student bodies were formed based on regions ( Bihar, UP, Punjab, Andhra etc.)

Some of the best political campaigns he ever heard about were from these student parties. He once narrated me about one the seniors luring a junior to join his Uttar Pradesh party:

Senior: have you ever seen the UP map? How does it look like?
Junior: No sir.
Senior: Go and look again. it looks like a tiger.
Junior. Oh yes sir.
Senior: Do you know in which state did Gods Rama and Krishna lived?
Junior: Yes sir, in UP sir.

Hence UP party was great and thus one joined it.

Lesson 4: Word power made easy

He recounted his funny days when he used to go back to his small town during his boarding school vacation days. In small towns, uncles and aunties are the most ubiquitous and awesome species. So one of the uncle got very determined to prove that his son who was getting educated in a local school was much brighter and smarter than our 'he' who was studying in a boarding school far south of India.

So every time he passed by his uncle's house, the uncle called him and asked the spellings of some of the most commonly misspelt words and mocked at him for not spelling it rightly. He was asked the mathematical table of 31 which he could not recite and hence uncle was able to prove that his son was getting much better education by being in home than him who was traveling miles to a boarding school.

Once uncle called him for a game similar to what we call 'Antrakashari' of english words. The game was that the opponent had to utter an English word starting with an alphabet which was the last alphabet of the word uttered by the opponent. If the player 1 said love (which ends with e), player 2 had to utter evil (which starts with e) and now player 1 cannot say love as the word has been taken and hence says loser (which starts with l).

The uncle's son had learnt all the words which ended with the alphabet e and whenever our protagonist said a word like ear he was faced with race, he said elephant and he was faced with tree. An oxford dictionary was kept to be the judge. Fortunately our dude 'he' caught the game and started uttering word which ended with y like early, eagerly, easily, earnestly and our uncle's son could only manage yale, yoke.. It was funny to see the uncle's son beaten in his own game. The uncle intervened and made a rule that 'he' will not utter a word which ends with y. He laughed heartedly at his uncle's rule and left. After that uncle never ever stopped him to prove anything.

Such is life.

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Three Encounters at Rishikesh

If you are fed up of daily mundane life at Delhi, then let me suggest you that you go and visit Rishikesh. Just pick up your ruck sack, some  basic necessities, some eatables and some books and leave. Sit near the cold Ganges flowing at some great speed, see the pebbles rolling under it and get immersed to yourself.

I do it often and hence fellow readers, I bring to you three of the pleasant encounters which have been a part of my escape and self-immersion....

Encounter 1: Holy Sage

So this sage came and sat next to me while I was reading a book by the side of the Ganges. He took out his chillum, poured some marijuana in it and started smoking. And while my mind had just started taking a gap between two different poems of the book, it received a nasal signal forcing me to look up at this baba smoking up. He gazes at me for two minutes and then says "So this book, you holding is a result of you paying extra money for having a beautiful mind". It sounded something serious but gibberish to me and I replied "What?".. To which the baba replied " Do you remember you bought this book  together with another book whose cost was also same as that of this book". I gathered myself and replied "Yeah, but how do you know?". He added ".. and the cost of that book is same as this one's.. that is 399 rupees". I said shockingly "Yes". He added "Correct me if I am wrong, the bookseller trying to impress you (of her sharp calculation skills) had totaled the costs of two books as 598 (which was actually 798) and you had a doubt in your mind whether should you correct the bookseller and pay 200 rupees more or just stay with a guilt. And the rest of what happened next, you do remember my child.." I was shocked and surprised that how did this sage smoking his joint knew everything as this bookshop incident had happened in Jaipur. I could not read further and asked this sage whether he was some stalker or was he actually present there at the scene. To which he smiled and told "Nahi beta, hum bas ek yogi hain....(No son, I am just a yogi)".Till then, I had inhaled some of the marijuana out of baba's chillum...

Encounter 2: Disillusioned Guy

I noticed this guy in one corner of Rishikesh walking on the rope balancing himself, just out of pleasure. I left his corner and started walking towards a cafe when I noticed this same guy behind me and in no time he had initiated the talk "Hey, you like Calvino? I love his books". I was like yes I do. We walked and talked for few minutes and later he told me that he had been a-yet-another-corporate-guy from Bombay but was fired from his company for mixing bhang (a form of cannabis) in sweets and offering it to his top management faking his own engagement. When I asked him that why had he done so, he replied that he was so pissed off at the nonsensical absurdity of the corporate world and that just to have some fun in his boring life, he had done it. He seemed to have no regrets of his prank. There was  a certain calmness in his gesture and his talks.

Encounter 3: Kashmiri Girl

I was sitting in the German bakery at Rishikesh and was having my breakfast looking at the jhoola and the magnificent scene of people circling the Shri Trayanbakshwar Temple. I could not notice when this girl wearing some ragged clothes came and sat next to me . She was wearing torn worn clothes but still she managed to carry around her an air of special dignity, which is usually found in people who know how to carry poor clothes! I could not help noticing her as she had some magnetic effect on me. She saw me gazing at her and smiled back, a smile which was comforting and hence I began a conversation with her. She told me that she was a Kashmiri and her name was Sabbah which meant gentle breeze in Urdu. Rest of what she told me was about Kashmir which sad enough to make me choke. But her narration was so powerful, her love for life so potent, her eyes so agonizing  She was a well read girl and very versed with Urdu poets and authors. She laughed at me when I tried to fake my Urdu knowledge with few very common verses from Ghalib, Mir and others. She recited some of lesser known Urdu or Kashmiri poems mostly from Sufi poets and told me the meaning of all the couplets. Then after a while, she just stopped speaking all of a sudden and asked "Can you read something from the book you holding" and I read one of the poems from the book I was holding:

"I am troubled, immeasurably
by your eyes.
I am struck by the feather of
your soft reply.
The sound of glass
speaks quick, disdain
and conceals
what your eyes fight to explain...."

Later she left the place. But after a lot of time, I met someone of my age who had no email ids, no facebook account, no twitter page, no phone numbers but above all someone who reciprocated her name so well....

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(Not so divine) Comedy.....

1. Telephonic humor

When I came to Delhi and I took a new mobile connection from Vodafone, little was I aware that Vodafone recycled the dead mobile numbers previously used by some one else. And in my case, it had belonged to a girl named Richa.

From day one, I had been receiving phone calls for Richa from boyfriends, girl friends, interview consultants and insurance sellers (arranged in descending order of the quantity of phone calls and messages). Guys called her Richu, girls called her Moti (Hindi for fat) while interview agents and insurance sellers used her complete name. Even the timing and the content of the callers were different. Girls mostly called to congratulate her on her marriage and banged the phone on hearing a male voice in return. But the most annoying calls came during night and were mostly by drunken men/guys.After the great disappointment of hearing a male voice on the other end, they  requested me to handover the phone to the once bubbly Richa. It took a lot of  my time away from sleep to convince them that the dialed phone number did not belong to Richa anymore.

The quality of messages I used to receive were mostly those loosely rhymed romeo shayaris about the essence of love through fevicol or zandu balm. I got no second thoughts whether to call these senders because I always knew that all the flirty messages sent to me belonged to Miss Richa (who I assumed must have surrendered the number to put an end to this crap as she was ready to move on in life and wanted no masala in her new role of a simpleton wife). The calls and messages started diminishing with the passage of time and guys started to finally bear the bitter truth that their Richa had changed her number. I had also even started to forget Richa and even rejoiced the sweet truth that my cell number finally started to belong to me.

But yesterday I got a message which had a pretty decent quote and was quite flirtatious as well. I was shocked as well  as sparkled over the message and the first thing I excitingly did in the morning was to call the messenger (it was a guy) and to finally awaken the dead ghosts of Richa.

2. Strategic Humor

This time when I went home, I found that the average age of my hometown had drastically increased because all the young guys and girls had left the town either for education or for jobs. I met this uncle and despite hiding my lack of pleasure in meeting him, I enquired "Rajeev kahaan hai, uncle (Uncle, where is Rajeev)?" Rajeev was a young teenage son of our uncle who was about to start college or would have started college. Uncle replied "Beta maine use Tamil Nadu bhej diya hai engineering karne, wahaan jahaan koi hindi nahi jaanta, usko angrezi mein hi bolna padega. Isi bahaane angrezi bhi seekh jaayega aur engineering bhi (I have sent him to Tamil Nadu for engineering where no one knows Hindi. Automatically  he will have to converse in English, thats how he will learn English apart from Engineering).
I was silent for a moment and then uncle added "beta, tum to strategy manager ho, bolo kaisi lagi humaari strategy?" (Son, you are a strategy manager, tell me how did u find my strategy?)

3. Erotic Humor

If it comes to rating a city where people are most interested in other people's activities, Delhi will by far be the distant winner. I was traveling in a metro and reading one of my books. Suddenly, an aunty sitting next to me asked me that which exam was I studying for and when I replied that I was reading for pleasure (and no exam), she mocked at me asking who reads for pleasure. Then she asked me the cost of the book to which I replied that it was quite an expensive one. Then she managed to notice the price of the book (which was 350 rupees), she enquired how much had I been able to bargain and actually paid for the book. When I said that I got it on flipkart for 300, she retorted that in daryaganj, books were available for just 20 rupees. A second aunty joined in and then both the aunties started discussing at the top of their voice as how reading a book could be a pleasure experience. The second aunty mentioned that these english books were mainly erotica and hence these frustrated Indian youth even end up paying higher for erotica when they could pay lower at Dariyaganj. I did not fight or tried to prove that my book did not carry any erotica but was just a collection of poems which helped me escape from this mundane and real world....

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The two weird fests

1. The Book Fest

Well, few days ago I created this book fest and gave it an effortless name of 'the Milan Kundera book fest'..Only four people (including me) consented to participate, out of which two of them were a couple (probably in love with each other). Thankfully, I owned four Kundera books in my pint-sized library. All of us four took one book each (through a lucky draw). I got my favourite "The book of laughter and forgetting". Two of us sat on the beanbags in the cozy winter sun and the couple sat on my mattress in the sun. All four seemed like islands in my terrace; each had his own universe, immense only to himself, far beyond the grasp or interest of others. We read and read profusely in the sun. Between the gaps, I occasionally drank some droughts of water, the couple looked at each other eyes trying to locate the protagonists in each other while the fourth guy (who had Laughable Loves) just laughed out loud and clapped in tandem. My neighbors whosoever looked at my balcony, looked at we four, and tried to gather what really was happening. When the sun reached the horizon, we stopped reading (similar as in the war of Mahabharat the fest ended at the sunset), no matter how much had we read. We kept the 3 books back in my tiny library except for the Laughable Loves which by mistake kept lying on the bean bag which I had forgotten to take it inside and thus remained in the open terrace. In the night came the hailstorm (yeah it had hailed in Delhi) and laughable loves got all wet and hit and bathed by the hail. Since next day, the book lies drying up in the sun, trying to regain those lost alphabets about love, humor, women and lies......

“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard.” 
― Milan Kundera

2. The Movie fest

Well I stumbled on this movie fest being held in Chandni Chowk area (according to me: the only alive parts of Delhi) on the ubiquitous Facebook. It was showcasing movies from this director named Fatih Akin. I could not help but give up to the temptation of going to the fest because of the area where it was being held and the director whose movies they were screening. When I reached that rickety building where it was being held, I strarted getting real doubts about the invitation. But then when I reached the top floor, I saw few girls sitting on the rug with a projector infront. The only occasion I faced such a situation (the only guy amongst so many girls) was wen I had accidently climbed up a women's college bus during my engineering internship days in DRDO, Delhi. Hesitatingly I just sat down and enquired one of the girls whether it was really the venue of the movie fest or a prank. She laughed on my face and said that it was a prank by these college students of Delhi University and I was the only fool to be caught so far. I knew she was joking because the aura in the room smelt of restlessness for the start of the first movie (title:The Edge of Heaven). The fest went on fine without any goof-ups and was a wonderful experience.
Well, let me inform you that it was the same girl (who said that the fest was was a prank) went on to be a part of the couple who sat in the serious book fest mattress in my terrace reading Kundera and seeking the protagonist in her partner's eyes...

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” 
― Goethe (the writer often quoted in the movie The Edge of Heaven)

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