The food at IISER-K is usually pretty awful. Breakfast is usually a bowl of some local corn flakes with a banana. This banana is so thin, it makes me feel proud of my weenie. If it’s not corn flakes then it’s bread and butter. Sorry, bread and butter. The bread consists of two huge one-and-a-half-inch thick slices. The layer of butter, emergent only at the nanometer level, is smeared around the centre of only one of the two slices. It gets hard for me to get it down my throat. I have had to throw up twice. Or it’s puri (that’s luchi for us Bengalis) with daal. The puri is like circular pieces of hide stripped off cattle. The daal is… well, daal, which property, in my opinion, suffices to justify its awfulness.

Lunches and dinners are usually a mundane veg thali. Not everyone complains, ‘coz most of those effing students are veggies. Even if some of us agree to pay for some non-veg dishes, the canteen guys don’t always cook them. I don’t see what’s their bloody problem.

Anyway, the other day, they had something new for breakfast. The standard cuppa was there, along with a brown cubical fried something, with ketchup. And a bowl of chestnut coloured soup. The soup had something tiny, yellowish and cubical floating in the middle of it.

Midway through the course, as I was looking at the ketchup, the tea and the soup, something struck me. I had finished my fried thing (which had turned out be sandwich, fried somehow), so that my plate had only some ketchup. I poured some tea on the plate, and swirled it around so the ketchup could mix a little with it. When I was satisfied with the composition, I poured the solution into another fresh plate. I took that plate to Vishwas, a freshman who was sitting at the next table, and asked him, ‘Vishwas, what is this?’

Vishwas looked at it, then with all the confidence in the world and a little confusion at being asked such a simple question, answered, ‘It’s the soup, what else.’

I hence proved the soup to be the arithmetic mean of the tea and the ketchup. To explain this occurrence, I also came up with a hypothesis. These canteen guys have this tea machine on top of which they have to stick an inverted bottle of water which slowly empties into the machine as the tea is being made. My guess is some dunderhead tried to set it up that morning when he wasn’t fully awake, and he had stuck a ketchup bottle there instead. When the canteen guys saw what was coming out of the machine, their team innovator decided to pass it as soup. Bravo, team!

Tags: tea, ketchup, soup

Vignettes of an old puja are embedded in me. I feel it now, when it has arrived again and I’m listening to the songs that were released around that time.

That cheap blue hair gel, that girl.

People keep telling me to just throw it all away for ever from inside me, and I know too that it does not speak well of my mental strength, but if I did, it would be lying about my mental weakness.

It feels bad to think that I keep harping this same string, becoming annoying, when there’s a deaf ear at that other end. But the thing is, I don’t really want it to listen. This is not really a moaning to call anyone back. This is just a favourite pastime of one part of my head which loves to dwell in the dark melancholy recesses of my life.

Not really black, just conveniently grey-blue. Rain-like.

That’s exactly why I started another song from the same folder when the last one ended.

The Chamber has got to Dishari. I tried my best, but couldn’t really help. Nobody can, can they? That power will blot out all other efforts, because (I hope she isn’t reading this, but she knows by now anyway) it’s true.

Why should truth be depressing? I think it’s because we’ve had a crooked angle to look at reality all this time. There’s no one you can blame really. Not everyone knows stuff (although this belief of mine is slowly dwindling), and the establishment just somehow got to be this way.

However, there are some things which I think are not nurture, but nature. Like the inherent discomfort we feel with the unknown, unfelt-before, unlived. We presume it would be bad. And somehow there’s a logical ring to it, maybe because we like to be safe. Or maybe we are all paranoid (why? Because of nurture?).

I’ve strayed again. I guess that will be it for now.

If you’ve read till this, I’m surprised. This wasn’t supposed to be understood by everyone.

1Life.

Tags: resume.

Courtesy this site.

Tags: comic, computer.

Tags: comics, smbc.

I was having some problems recently with my Nokia headset, so I went to their service shop to deposit it for fixing. They handed me a job sheet, on which particulars of my repair were printed. On the reverse of this was a long list of Terms and Conditions. I was reading them lying on the sofa under the fan, cooling off after returning home. It was a string of the usual unfriendly, intimidating talk you usually find on any Terms and Conditions, but when I came to clause 10, I stopped for a while. This is what was written:

10. RT (Ramdev Telecom, the service shop) is not liable for any delays, non-performance, failure or non delivery of the products due to contingencies arising from any force majeure such as acts of God, storm, earthquake, accident, strikes, lockout, industrial dispute, labour trouble, transportation embargo, imminence or the existence of any state emergency, war, civil-commotion, riot, in ability to obtain any material refusal of license, approval imposition of sanctions or any measure taken by government which renders it impossible or impractical for RT to perform, supply service or deliver the product to the customer.

What act of God, I ask, might be directly inflicted to hinder the repair of my Nokia headset? What the f**k are they talking about? And then I try to imagine the storm and earthquake bit, and the war,…

1Life.

Tags: nokia, service, clause

You humankind, you put too much weight on success. It’s not your fault entirely, that’s how you’re wired. You need to eat, live, have a shelter and make a few babies. And if possible, degrees, a phone, a car, a vacation… of course you need to believe in success and set much store by it. Worship it. Not that you shouldn’t, but you have found one of the wrong ways to approach it. I think so.

You know what I think the problem is?  I think you take success as a certificate that you worked hard. That’s not a problem, but sometimes, you know, it isn’t so. There are sometimes dirty little hidden stories behind success. These are not much of a bother, though. What is, is another connotation that is intermingled with this notion. That bit does bother me.

And it is that failure is often taken as a certificate that you didn’t work hard.

That’s wrong.

I really don’t want to be talking that cliché, believe me. I have something else to say.

What I think is that in any particular pursuit or effort, success as I would like to think of it, or failure for that matter, is accomplished a little distance before the end of the effort, or the announcement of the result, or whatever is usually taken as verdict as to whether one has succeeded or failed. It is accomplished while you’re still on the job, and you’re knee deep in the middle of it, or just clutching your way out of it and seeing light at the end of the tunnel. That’s when it happens. You either succeed or you fail. And yes, you feel it. You know it. But you humankind, you pathetic flock, you push that feeling away, feeling that it’s not important. What’s important is that certificate at the end, issued — and this is funniest — by someone else, someone who had no hand in that effort, someone who didn’t get in there and get their hands dirty and doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, someone who entered the scene only conveniently late in the proceedings, and on a high chair of some sort from which they do all their surveying. Now, let’s not be unfair, not always is this other person like this, but it doesn’t matter what they are like.

What matters is when in the middle of your job you suddenly get that good feeling that yes, you’ve been doing something worthwhile, and you can do it, and you have worked your pants off for it. And you’ve succeeded then. Even if you don’t win the competition or whatever. And if in the middle of it the job seems too easy, and you aren’t so serious, or you are, but your plan failed to materialize the way you would’ve wanted, you have failed right there, even if you get the first prize.

The pity is that it doesn’t seem to work this way for you, humans. You don’t like it this way. You always feel the need to appoint an external factor to decide the verdict (this part always makes me feel a little tickling at the base of my stomach), and maybe that’s not so bad or you’d have problems of all sorts, but hey, keep that guy for administrative purposes. You just put too much weight on what he says. Success and failure of the kind I talked about can’t be decided by him. He’s just not in the equation.

Anyway, that’s your way and it can’t be changed. You’ve all just settled down this way and no one ever really thought of changing this and even if someone did it’d be an alien concept and wouldn’t shake down too well. But when you don’t succeed, you start thinking along these lines, don’t you, that perhaps the effort should have had a greater say in the matter than the ultimate verdict? Perhaps success or failure is decided a little earlier? Internally? And then you vocalize these things, in your different words, sitting down in front of your neighbour over a cup of coffee and telling her how your son didn’t get the scholarship doesn’t mean he didn’t work hard. And while you’re telling her of all the ways your son worked hard, you start to wonder whether the words that are coming out of your lips are starting to sound like excuses, maybe?...

And the more weight you give to success, the less, obviously, is the chance of succeeding. It follows logically, see, when you invert that sentence. So you see, the more you worship success, the greater will be the number of failures. And you, humankind, will be forced to glorify failure every once in a while and in small conversations, put in a little word here and there about the effort.

That is your punishment.

1Life.

Tags: success, failure.

At the heart of everything is that

I don't know exactly what, or why I bother to speak

And I feel no urge to change the topic now

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