Baby Wolverine

Snikt, snikt…the retractable claws have stealthily emerged out. The hardened keratin is ready to pounce on its victim. The young boy who is oblivious of the developments around him continues to play with his toy car. The small creature with a disarming smile and doe-shaped eyes stares right at him. The boy is in no mood to let go of the toy in his hands so he shoots back a grimacing smile with an attitude of “I am the big Daddy here”.

 The sweet chubbiness on its face hides the menacing plan working in the back of its mind. The rosy cheeks, the twinkle in the starry eyes and the vibes of cuteness floating in the air surrounding her acts as a charade before Baby Scissorhands unleashes fury on her elder sibling. With the astute timing equivalent to Sourav Ganguly’s off-drive, the small brute makes a wailing cry declaring war on its enemy and darts in the direction of the poor boy. The young kid is startled by the shriek and looks to find the Baby Wolverine attacking him with its razor sharp claws. The soft skin is torn open by the nails and a hint of blood seems to ooze out of the wound. The boy goes dizzy at the sight of the red fluid and  lets go off the car. He runs for cover from his unrelenting sister and stands at a distance.

The unfairness of the whole episode makes the boy resolve to get back his property. He musters up the courage to teach this menace a lesson but then he saw a scary sight. The body of the stuffed toy, which his little sis had been given to play with, was lying disheveled in a corner of the room. Its limbs had been torn to smithereens and its decapitated head was nowhere to be seen. A shiver runs down his spine after seeing this grotesque sight in front him.  Good sense prevails, and like his country, he resorts to diplomacy to solve the issue rather than go for and all out war which would have eventually led to his defeat. He thought it better to lodge his complaint to the Master of the Dungeon rather than face the fury himself. So, he runs to his mother to express his grief. He tries to gather her sympathy by showing off his war wounds. Finally, he convinces her to take a look at his case and forces her to put all other important matters at bay. As the contingent of mother and son enter the room, the girl, all of two years old, quickly understands the dynamics of the situation and camouflages herself in the garb of a benign angel. A dollup of tear drops down her plump cheeks and suddenly the accused seemed to be the victim. The boy is amazed by the transformation and he runs out of words to defend himself. All his well construed statements to win back his mom fall on deaf ears. His stance sounded gibberish in front of the ‘gugu gaga’ of his sister. She had the final laugh.

It’s been nearly 20 years hence, and I am reminiscing about these small fights. The near invisible scratches which were the making of her little hands may have healed long ago but the memories are still afresh. Ah, those days with you bumbling around me and doing nonsensical things together are totally priceless. Not everyone is lucky enough to get a sister who backs you up in the form of Luigi while you venture out to save your princess, or covers you in those shooter video games, or kicks some serious ass in Age of Empires.

Words fail me. Love ya sis :-*. I hope this laudatory post would make do for the gift this Rakshabandhan. Snikt, snikt…did I hear those claws? Oh no, this isn’t working! Mammaaaaaa…!

The Dark Night Rises

Yes, the Dark Nights are rising, and No, I am not talking about Gotham city. If that title reminded you of the much anticipated and hyped movie of Nolan and you came here expecting a Batman fanboy, suffering from a post- Nolan -movie -induced-hallucination, raving  about how epicness and awesomeness is written all over it, then I will do that for you tomorrow. As for now, you are just going to be subjected to a longish rant about a much darker and grimmer city than Gotham. The Dark Nights we are subjected to in this city are on the rise and the sorry fact is that except for the bats in the neighbourhood there is no caped crusader coming along to save us from this misery.

Let there be darkness. –Gurgaon

If Gurgaon was a person and the above line is quoted from him then I would give full points to him for integrity. There would be very few people in history who would have toed the line they have spoken to such an extent.

Welcome to the Millennium city. I had this friendly neighbor kid in my locality named Sourabh. You know that quirky play of fate where you name a kid and when he/she grows up they epitomize the exact opposite of what their name means. This kid’s consistency and frequency to fart would even put Sachin ’s 100s to shame and you would be calling the name of a hundred Gods (Sau- Rab) to teleport you away from his vicinity. Bush should have gone after this kid if he was looking for weapons of mass destruction instead of attacking Iraq. I have absolutely no clue how people came up with the sobriquet ‘Millennium City’ for Gurgaon unless you are talking about the fact that you get relegated back to 1000 AD where people lived in the Dark ages.

The city is full of MNCs housed in their fancy towers and office buildings. The roads are expressways with well manicured lawns to complement the landscape. It tries really hard to give you the illusion of a city of the future. But then it all falls apart when it comes to the power woes. The power problems in the city are so acute that it can put even the remotest village in Lalu-era Bihar to shame.  As my roommate puts it, to say that there are power cuts in Gurgaon is grossly inappropriate; it is more like there are intermittent occasions when power is available in Gurgaon.

The astronauts who are chosen by NASA have to undergo extreme physical tests and endurance. In case, NASA is planning for a mission to the Sun, then I must say, they should look no further, but pick up their candidates from Gurgaon. We are subjected to temperatures in the mid 40s and we survive in this awful weather condition even without a fan. That is no menial challenge and one which we are forced to undertake. We act as real life counterparts to the Human Torch, the guy who blazes in Fantastic Four, but with the opposite ability. We are like the human showers whenever the electricity goes ‘puff’. There is sweat oozing out of every single pore from the body and before you know it, you would be drenched and  standing in a pool of saline water.

The situation is not all that great even when the lights are on. The bulbs and tubelights get converted into psychedelic lights because of the constant voltage fluctuations. You can raise the excitement quotient higher by having a makeshift arrangement for a discotheque in your very own room. Also, you can have the odd spark from one of your electronic items to give you the necessary techno-beats, and if you are lucky enough, you can create a fog effect from the smoke coming out of your burnt devices due to short circuits. I was able to manage this surreal fog environment when my laptop charger got burnt on two occasions.

Don’t even think about venturing out, the streets are like dark alleys where the odd street light is put up just as a showpiece from the days of yore. The presence of modern marvels amid a lackluster infrastructure to support it has given Gurgaon quite a contrasting Two-face.

Here I am, typing away my frustration on my laptop sitting in my room waiting patiently for the bulb above me to show a shimmer of light. Only 5 minutes of power backup is left in the laptop before the last flicker of light in my room dies out. When are the authorities going to get serious or are they going to need an anarchist like the Joker to ask them “Why don’t you get serious?”

Guitar (get-her) syndrome

I was a kid when I use to roam around my house with a toy guitar being a rock star. It was considered cute at that time but if I do the same thing now still I would have the association with a rock-star albeit in a different fashion i.e. people throwing rocks at me and I seeing the stars. I am lucky to have an uber cool uncle who had been a guitarist in a band in his hey-days (he is still good at it) and he used to buy me these toy guitars and I was Jimi Hendrix in the making. Jimi’s magic was short-lived and mine was even shorter .  But then not everybody is able to translate their childhood toy fantasies when they grow up. Girls realize that when they find that Barbie is a different species altogether as her figure is biologically impossible.

But some people refuse to grow up or should I say they go in a trance when they reach the adolescent age (that’s the beauty of life). Most of us guys have been through this phase. The Guitar syndrome. We run around the pretty girls and even the not-so-pretty ones (engineering guys would understand) trying to get-her but end up with a guitar. It’s the age where we switch to hard rock as our preferred genre of music . Even if some of us feel our ear drums being drummed by the hooves of an unruly horse and have absolutely no clue what Rock music is, we are ready to bang our head at the sound of metals clanging. (This is in no way a derision of rock music; I’m a fan of it too. All in good jest). We see ladies going gaga over the guitarists and feel that somehow this is the ultimate lady-magnet. The ones wielding this weapon are able to bring alive the legend of the Pied Piper with respect to the girls. Going by the research based on some empirical data that I collected this fact has turned out to be true. But owning a guitar is only the necessary condition there is a sufficient condition that needs to be fulfilled. YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW TO PLAY IT (yeah buddy, there is always a fine print which we conveniently forget to read). So, we end up buying this piece of instrument by spending 3-10k depending on how deep our parent’s pockets are by convincing them that they have given birth to a music prodigy. The self-confessed prodigy then gets a reality check when the guitar refuses to heed to his heart's tunes. Eventually, we come to the realization that playing with guitar strings is not as easy as that with our parent’s purse strings.

The closest we people get to being a guitarist is by having a facebook profile picture of ours with the guitar and a smug smile on our face. The guitar doesn’t help the cause but the fake smile kills the purpose. Nevertheless, it has turned out to be a good business for the ones who really do know how to play the instrument with a guitar class just around any corner. They have varieties to cater to your every need depending on how long you are willing to persist with your futile attempts. Learn guitar in 3 months, 30 days, 7days. Seriously? That’s stretching  (the string) a bit too far. Alls well that ends well.  Some lucky ones do end up learning the guitar (for the love of music) and get-her too. For others sing along “Dekha jo tujhe yaar, dil me baji guitar…” 

Rats III: Dark of the Room

This is the third part in the series:

Rats Part I http://bit.ly/ozm3K5

Rats Part II: Revenge of the Fallen http://bit.ly/pmjuMi

Rats Part III: Dark of the room

Note: There was a delay in the principal photography of this episode due to the high signing amount demanded by the RAF (Rats Artistic Fraternity) owing to the success of the first two installments of the trilogy. Taking inspiration from a certain Baba and following the latest fad they staged a protest outside the production house with a fast till death signboard taking center-stage.  Luckily, we got a sponsor to fund our project in the nick of time. Although we had to use an extensive promotional campaign for the new fairness product in the movie we are thankful to “XXX talcum powder” company for bringing the project back on track.  Being faced by such unforeseen  circumstances the release date had to be postponed by 2 weeks. The delay is regretted but we have done it bigger and better this time.

July 17^th Most of the hostelites have left the premises. Two of us, me and Ganesh (my roomie), are left stranded in this monolithic building with all the laughter and joy drained out of it. There happens to be an unidentified being which makes a fleeting appearance around 7pm  and then at 11pm in the hostel corridors. The contours of this being’s body makes it difficult to determine its gender. The only description that I can give of this creature is that it has a white ghostly appearance with a strong nauseating smell of perfume emanating from its body every time it passes by our room at the above mentioned time. We dread not to come at its sight for fear of being shocked by one of nature’s freak. I am not talking about the rat here. Weirder living things happen to inhabit this place.

I pondered whether my roommate’s godly name i.e. Ganesh had something to do with the rats being frequent visitors to our room. According to mythology the rat was the vehicle of Lord Ganesh but now the mortal counterparts of the rat were making life hell on earth for the mortal Ganesh (why am I dragged into this).  I was frantically searching for my kidnapped `mouse`. Pulling out things from the cupboard and my bags, the room had become a mess, but no sign of the device. Next was my roomie’s cupboard. We opened the safe in the cupboard and found out pieces of biscuits strewn all over. They were living here!  A little more searching and I got my kidnapped mouse back, the rats had hidden it in the cupboard itself. Now, it was getting on our nerves and there was only one choice: vacate Room 208. We shifted our belongings to the adjacent room 209 which was purported to be free of the menace. Our new abode seemed to be a peaceful place compared to the terror we had gone through the past month.

July 19^th We heard the clicking sound of the levers being drawn back in the lock. The door creaked open, I went out of my room into the corridor to see where the familiar noise came from. The silhouette of the strange creature (the one I mentioned at the beginning) started approaching me from the darkness. It’s hands were like sledgehammers and the familiar smell permeated the air. This time I stood there to have a look. The face pierced itself from a white fog.  It had the face of a man, the hands were like, as if ,the upper part of the hammerhead shark had been transplanted into its place. The upper torso had muscles ripping out of the tortured T-shirt.  When the picture became clear It turned out that the exotic creature was my colleague. He had dumbbells in his hand and was going to the gym. I later realized that he used to wear T-shirts one size too short to create the illusion of Arnold Schwarzeneggar. It seemed like he had taken a bath in truckloads of talcum powder which explains the smell and the ghostly look. .  I can understand our nation’s fascination with the fair skin going by the sales of the ubiquitous fairness creams but powder, come on man, that is so not done. He waved at me with a squeaky hello on his way to the gym. I waved back at him with a confused look.

The sound made by footsteps diverted my attention to the adjacent door. Two guys entered Room 208. It was too late of me to warn them of what lies in store for them. The chase begins all over again. No room for escape for the new entrants.

We are grateful to our sponsors

XXX Talcum Powder.  Dare to think beyond fairness creams.( As effective as Arindam Chaudhari’s dreams to think beyond the IIMs. He is still in the thinking stage)

Premiere of Rats III: Dark of the room

   

Newspaper clipping: The lead actor of Rats trilogy with supermodel Heidi Klum (former Victoria Secret's angel) during the premiere of Rats III. As you can see the actor did make a liberal use of XXX talcum powder and the results are before you. (X-effect)

Disclaimer: The author isn't responsible for the claims in the ads. So, don't come crying to me if the results seem to go awry.

Rats: Revenge of the Fallen (Part II)

Please go through Rats: Part I 

Based on true events.

 8:58 am Location: Office (undisclosed location in Gurgaon)

If Monday would have been a person then he would have drowned in an ocean of cuss words. I was so stodgy as I had slept late Sunday night that I felt like being pulled into an ocean of sleep myself. There is no more addictive drug than sleep especially when you have just woken up from an incomplete one. It’s not college anymore so no naps in the afternoon. I was still trying to make out the patterns of the real world around me when I was jolted into reality by a shriek which would have touched the 140db in the decibel scale. This time I didn’t confuse it for Sharapova.

They were back, the rats. The reflex action with which madam jumped on her chair would have put Jonty Rhodes to shame. The rat catching team (for the lack of a better term) was summoned to get rid of the rodent and soon the chase began. It leapt across the mountain piles of stacked files and disappeared into the dark of the room.

11:23 am Location: Conference room 

I had a presentation to attend. An Englishman was representing a company which was supposed to give us some insights on the new technology and safety measures to be taken for a better tomorrow (read: buy my company’s product so that I have a better tomorrow). We do get freebies at the end of it that’s the good thing about promotional events. So, 1 hour into the presentation (it was interesting) the guy slowed down and went back to his desk to catch a breath. The head peaked out and then it made a dash from the centre of the conference room. Four legs, a tail and of vibes of filthiness was all that was needed to make the people in the room dance on their toes. The English had a bad experience with these rodents in the 1300s  (Black death) and our presenter wasn’t amused by the presence of the uninvited guest.

5:21 pm Location: My Secret hideout (Area 51)

 I returned back to my room in the evening and pulled out my laptop to catch up on the world (okay, okay facebook it was). I searched my bag for my mouse (as in the computer accessory) then followed it by a thorough scan of my messed up table. It was nowhere to be seen then I saw the hole drilled into my bag and I got the message “The rats kidnapped my mouse” (Fact: It is still missing).  This was a coordinated effort and there were more than one of these pests involved in the heist. My worst fears came true: attack of the clones. They are everywhere now and it’s time to pull up my socks for the finale.

Next in seriesà Rats: Dark of the room (Coming soon, 17^th July 2011)

Rats: Part I (It’s a trilogy, I am bitten by the Hollywood bug)

The incidents are based on true events although I did take “creative liberty” of Speilbergsque magnitude.

Recommended to be read with Mission Impossible theme as the background music.

There are certain creatures in this world which when seen in your vicinity gives you that eerie feeling of disgust (I am not talking about Lady Gaga here). I am pretty sure that the rodent family have done as good if not better than Lady Gaga in such ignominious list. Trust me, these small pests are not even remotely cute as the animated versions shown in movies (a la Jerry, Mickey or Stuart Little).

At present, I have the privilege to stay at a place where I am confused whether it is the rats which has infested my place or is it the other way round. To paint a visual picture I would suggest you to see the opening sequence of the movie “Delhi Belly”(yahaan par bhi publicity…damn Aamir is real good at this). In my defense, we (my roomie is a victim too) had no choice unlike Imran Khan but to put up in this messed up room. 

My first encounter with the rat was when we heard the strange noises coming from my cupboard. The squeal was a clear indication of it being a rat or Maria Sharapova. But considering my past luck with girls  the second option was highly unlikely. It had to be a rat and there was no way I was going to allow it to nibble on my clothes. I somehow had to get it out but then how am I going to face my worst fear. That’s when I saw a pet bottle of Mountain Dew laying by the side. I grabbed the bottle and took a sip and in true Sallu style blurted out “Darr ke aage jeet hai”. Apparently, it only works in advertisements and I was soon to find out “Darr ke aage chuha hai”. We actually downloaded the Mission Impossible theme song and played it when hunting for the rat but I guess it backfired because the rat thought it was the theme music for its escape sequence. So now it was Mission Impossible: Rat protocol. I opened the cupboard with the help of a  stick in my hand and started pulling down my neatly folded clothes (which had been washed and ironed for a change…what a pity). There was no sight of the menace while I was poking at my clothes. Absolute silence. Time stood still and I had second thoughts of whether the squeal was that of a rat or was I fooled by one of my frequent dreams of Sharapova (this time the place wasn’t the tennis courts). But we had our feet firmly on the ground (or rather the bed) and we knew it could jump out from any of the corners at any instant. Some more poking and then Ola, there it was. 

It leapt out of the cupboard towards me but then Isaac Newton came to the rescue and made it land on the floor (like Trinity in Matrix). I was stumped by those steely eyes staring right at my face. We made eye contact for a fleeting moment and I felt like being telepathically relayed the message “Die another day”. It scared the shit out of me by the thought that it wasn’t all over and he is going to come back for REVENGE.

Next in seriesà Rats: Revenge of the Fallen (Coming soon, July 16^th 2011)

               

Here goes...

Ah finally, I did it. Now, lets see how long it lasts. Lately, I came across my good friend Shishoo’s blog (awesome guy, check out http://mainbhiphenku.blogspot.com/) and after reading his first post, had a déjà vu. I pulled out my new year resolution list from my mental garbage bin which somehow is always overloaded with similar useless stuff and voila, Blogging featured in my 2011 new year resolution list. It isn’t the first time I am making this audacious attempt. Blogging had made into my new year resolution list for the 3^rd consecutive time (2009, 2010, 2011). Hope this jinx breaks as not even the mighty Australians were able to make it beyond the 3^rd time in CWC. There is always a nemesis(India) lurking around who is going to pull you down. So, I hope blogging doesn’t feature in my 2012 ‘to do’ list as by then I would be a regular blogger (fingers crossed).

Why in the first place didn’t I take off earlier. I consider our government as an inspiration in such matters- good at drawing out plans and making promises. Ideally resolutions are supposed to start with the month of January but I am taking the liberty to take my first lazy steps in the fool’s month of April. I hope it doesn’t end up making a fool of myself.

So, when you get bored, after being constantly inundated with the masaledaar stuff being dished out on our news channels you can take a peek into this place. It will make you realize that there are even more spicier stuffs in this world. On a serious note, your comments are always welcome and an occasional word of appreciation would do a whole lot of good in fueling this lazy soul.

The journey begins…

Till then, enjoy the shadier things in life.