CAT

Another pathetic attempt at CAT is a week away. I feel like Jack's cold dead shit.

#cleverreferencetofightclubandtitanic

#fuckiwillhavetoworkforanotheryear
#fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

End's coming

We shifted to Ahmedabad when I was in the 8th standard and people in the new school weren't the douches I was used to being around. These new people used to solve the Maths problem book in the free period, watch Friends, and read thick story books. These were cool people. I have some of them on Facebook, and watching them is still a pain. It was like being Leonardo DiCaprio on the Titanic, except there was no in-the-facing the pompous bastards by having sex with one of their chicks.

This one day, we were ushered out of our class to some hall where we were told that one of the girls from my class was supposed to be reviewing a book. It was, as it usually is in these cases, tough to give a fuck. My legs were numb, which always pisses me off. The good thing was that this was the first time I heard about Harry Potter. I guess Goblet of Fire had come out by then. The English teacher was mighty pleased with the girl. I don't even feel like abusing any of these people now because they used to be dumb kids back then, but really, fuck them. I should add a note here: I didn't wear no underwear till I was in (I think) the 10th standard. So every time I sat on cemented floor in the 40 degree Ahmedabad heat, I left ass-marks on the floor and had a tough time hiding it and all.

So I read the first three books less than a month after that review, and it was pretty satisfying knowing I could go through a thick story book too. Apart from Harry Potter, I don't think I've read more than 10 other novels/books till date. It was one of those things a lot of us grew up with. Waiting for the next book, cursing JK Rowling for being lazy and then cursing them motherfucking spoiler SMSes.

The last Harry Potter book was released in 2007, which is when I was in the third year of college. Standard 8th to third year of college. That's a long time. Point in case being that Harry Potter is something I'll always remember certain things by. For instance:

1. I bought pirated versions of the first three books in Daryaganj. This was how I discovered the legendary book market of Daryaganj.

2. My sister's Kinetic got towed away while she was in Crosswords reading the 5th book. This was how an entirely irksome evening was spent retrieving the wheezing piece of shit.

3. A guy from school borrowed the first three books from me in the 12th standard and then stopped talking to me when I was in the first year, and thus never returned them. This was how I unfriended an asshole at a price.

4. When I told my English teacher in class that I read the first three books after that horrible review, the girl went all "Awwwww :)" and "Thankkssss ^_^". This was how I felt naaiice.

It was sad when the last page was read. It is a rare feeling. It doesn't compare to the last day of college in magnitude, but it was qualitatively similar. The end of a long association. And now something similar is about to happen.

As is evident from some of the earlier posts on this blog, a good part of life after college has been spent bitchin' 'bout it all. Shit people, shit jobs, shit sex and the like. Well, the shit sex part has not been mentioned.

Anecdote time: This guy I know hired a hooker and watched IPL with her, so I guess it's fair to say that the sex has been shitty. It is in fact an episode awesome enough to feature in a Tarantino movie.

Coming back, this is how the IITK calendar works:

Semester 1: July end to November end
Winter vacations: December
Semester 2: January to May middle
Summer break: May end to July end

The 10-week summer break is when certain losers repeated courses after failing them, while other losers did projects in college. Staying back at college was always a loserly thang to do because it was hot and you woke up all drenched in sweat if you didn't put contri to smuggle a cooler in. So the summer break after the second year was when PG and I discovered something sinister. It was called Naruto. If you haven't heard about it or (worse) don't give a fuck about it because it happens to be a Japanese comic, then let us file for divorce coz srsly bitch, your gettin 2 mah nerves whore.

In a nutshell, Naruto is a phenomenon that occurs once every two lifetimes. It is the sort of thing that defines #win. If you're not familiar with what #win is, you should probably close your eyes just right now, take two very really deep breaths, think about the lowest low that you have faced in your life and then play this video that is embedded here, and that will make you create a Twitter account and re-tweet your own tweet twice, which will be the URL to this video. At the end of the third tweet, you will have an epiphany which will make you end up writing #win.

So there was no going back once we saw the first anime episode. I guess some things just really get you. I could write a 400 word summary of the premise and the plot, or maybe you could do yourself a favour and just watch it before your miserable life reaches its inevitable sorry-ass conclusion. FYI, narutoget.com.

So that's when we started. From watching the anime, we went to reading the manga which is released every week, and let me tell you why. Do you know the feeling when you call up a friend after several days and 2 minutes after the niceties, one of the two of you asks "so what's new?" and you know that it's pretty much the death of the whole conversation? Do you hate the middle of the week because Wednesdays seem like God's way of making you understand the meaning of the word 'mediocrity'? Do you occasionally look at your book collection and pick Harry Potter up because it reminds you of everything nice you associate with it?

If so then I don't think I know what the fuck you're even talking about.

Wednesdays are when happiness in life peaks for about 10 minutes, after which you call some motherfucker and discuss how bitchass the week's manga was. Wednesdays are probably the reason why the rest of the days exist. Wednesdays are, as of the 10th of September 2011, probably the reason why all that shit that life has thrown at us since that tragic graduation has been fought with a background score.

But like all good things, Naruto must end. And the time is near. Six months probably, or a year. And the day will come when every remaining mystery would have been unraveled, the last page would have been read, the last graphic would have been stared at and I'll click the 'Next' button, probably as heartbroken as I ever have been. It will be yet another of those reboots I have come to dread. The next day will probably have no background score. Our Great War will be a spiritual war, our Great Depression will be our lives. We're good men and this shouldn't happen to us over and over again.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go see a drunk Rock lee taijutsu the crap out of Kimimaro, because it's teh shit.

Drinking and Driving

i figured out why it's not advisable to drink and drive. it's because you get fucked like a stranger. in the ass. please don't assume i'm not capitalizing first letters because i'm drunk and i want to sound like it. somehow blackberry os6 with all its fancy motherfucking features doesn't let you capitalize no first letters on blogger entries. how fucked is that? it's fubar. what's more fubar is that it lets you capitalize first letters in the title, but not the body. that's fucking irritating. there was a foreigner chick in the elevator, but she was with a firang budhdha. however, they got into separate rooms. what's more? she checked into the room next to mine. i wish i had real balls. not the kind it takes to climb the stage and screw random chutiyas in mridaksh. i'm talking real balls. the kind it takes to knock on a foreign chick's door at 10 in the night and ask if she'll have dinner with you.

she'll never have dinner with me. because i'll never ask. because i worry, i weigh three times my body. that's fucking loads. and i will wait to find, if this will last forever.

Hotel Related

Some professions take you places. Consultants, for example, travel lots and from what I've heard, post the bills to the client afterwards. It's pretty neat, I have to say. If the world wasn't as retarded as it is, they probably wouldn't get paid squat. But I don't really get what consultancies do. I say that because a consultant told me so. They're always right.

Sales people travel a lot too. Unrelated, but people think we're thieves. That's when I use the IIT tag. Sometimes, I can't imagine why, that doesn't work. I used to dwell on it, but then I figured it's like trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle. It's tough when you start solving, and gets really simple with time. Then if you keep solving them regularly, it dawns on you that it's stupid and then you go back to only reading Calvin and Hobbes on page 2. I really do want to thug the panties out of people to be honest, and I'm getting better. I've never owned any panties - gifted, bought or stolen, and it makes me want some every now and then. The closest I came to stealing some was when I put election flyers in them. Not mine, the opponent's.

I stay in a hotel or two every week because of all the traveling, and they're scary due to a number of things I'm not always sure of:

1. Is breakfast complementary? Asking the receptionist this question makes you look cheap. Since the company is going to pay for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and escorts billed as formal dinner, I couldn't really give a shit if it actually is. But I still ask, out of curiosity. For the record, I don't bill whores as formal dinner. I hate formal dinners. Everyone obviously knows that.
   
2. This bellboy uncle just rolled my trolley-bag to my room. Sure I could have done so myself, but he really did hijack it. Awkward moment: bag's in place and uncle asks "Fine, sir?". Too bad I'm out of 10-rupee bills. How do I not give him a tip? One option is to make a call and ignore uncle. Another option is to smile at said uncle and thank him. A third option, as I learned from a colleague is to tell uncle "Kya iss ke liye bhi tip lenge? Jaaiye." This translates to "I'm an asshole" in English, semantically. But it gets the job done. Fact: I spend between 400-600 rupees every week in tipping waiters, bellboys, doormen and drivers. Tips are non-reimbursable and they piss me off.
   
3. Progressive hotels don't give you no water or ass-nozzles or ass-showers. But they are still preferable to post-modern-progressive-gonorrhoea-causing hotels that don't give you no buckets and mugs either. I'm not telling you what I do in those cases. It should suffice to know that walking without cleaning creates a real mess.
   
4. What does "check-in time" mean? I was 21 by the time I understood what check-out time means. I don't remember it any more, but I knew once. The reason behind the unlearning is that some well-wishing hotel person once tried to explain how exactly the check-in time will affect my bill. Halfway through her explanation, I remembered I'm not paying, so I went straight to my room and took a well-deserved potty after a long journey. The unnecessary lecture also made me forget what check-out time meant. It was like the time I learned what the Fourier series was, and 2 lectures later, we were taught the Fourier transform, and it basically erased any understanding of the Fourier series that might have seeped in. However, I have thought of many theories on what check-in time could mean, and owing to my keen sense of observation, I have ruled out all but one. A hotel's check-in time basically refers to the presence of at least one chutiya among the hotel staff. Yes.
5. Why do female receptionists call and ask whether or not I'm havin' a good time? If I need anything else. If I have some feedback. Don't get me wrong, I'm not pissed about it or asking a rhetorical question. I sincerely would like to know if this is supposed to mean something. Is there something that seasoned hotel guests are supposed to know, and I don't. There were a few other such things, that I took time to learn, thus the apprehension. For instance, I didn't know till recently about this lie that hotels tell: that the toilet seats have been sanitized for our protection. What hotels actually do is wait for the previous occupant's piss to evaporate. I have checked online and this is not a valid method of sanitization. Anyway, what I would like to know is if the receptionist is hinting at giving me a happy ending for being a regular visitor. Does that happen? What is a polite way of asking?
   

It has been 1 year and 359 days since I started working for this company. It's kind of sad that I'm still uncomfortable about hotels. Once this receptionist asked me if I am "doing science". How does one even start answering that question? Science has done me for years. Fuck that shit. Abbreviated henceforth as FTS. This is FYI.

Thank you.

Warm Regards,
Salesboy.

Targets

Let me start by giving advice to people appearing for IIM interviews this year.

The selection procedure of certain IIMs includes essay writing. Not that I need to worry about the selection procedure of IIMs given my current IQ, but Sam and I have decided that "Solipsism and the Great Beyond" would make a good title for most topics. Be it for the Commonwealth Games, or for a post-recession market study or for Terror in J&K. By the way, the RTI-enforced compulsion on all IIMs to make public their selection criteria is pretty damn painful.

Now, one (I) must contend with the fact that they (I) will probably never get selected in IIM Ahmedabad since they (I) do not have a GPA over 8. Compared to what happened earlier, this is disastrous. I have no inspiration to increase my IQ anymore, which is tragic for the nation's defense labs and IITs.

This brings me to targets. Sales targets are evil, unachievable motherfuckers and they piss you off like cowshit stuck to the sole of your shoe. You learn to live with targets and it's similar to you knowing that if you walk in the right places, like a paddy field, stepping in cowshit will prove itself to be a useful exercise and therefore you would end up feeling cleverer at the end of the whole episode. However, you will never walk in a paddy field. So fuck off.

And basically, once you have a target to meet/beat, you start living each day with the number in your brain. Though I have no idea what it feels like to be shitting tapeworm eggs, I think the feeling of having a target up your ass would come close. But had you studied harder in college, you wouldn't be doing any of this in the first place. Therefore, everything is entirely your own fault and now you must pay for all the class-skipping you did.

So kids, attend classes, study hard, get good grades and be a rich person. Though people like Sam will tell you that they do not regret anything they've done in their lifetime, always remember: pay no heed to poor people.

The Zune-iPod finale

The Zune-iPod finale concluded 3 days earlier. Proper understanding of this post will need a bit of background for most people who read this, so kindly read through everything I have ever written to get it.

So Ganguly and I were discussing how our respective lives would greatly benefit in spiritual and philosophical terms if we could start a business together. Like all employed people, we're heroic procrastinators when it comes to the subject of leaving a job. I was trying to justify the grand idea and to put a number on the amount of money we could make, though since it turned out to be less than what the Bangali is presently earning, he was obviously not interested. Like he is known to do, he was trying to steer the discussion towards girls, naked girls, Jack Daniels, whores, naked whores, etc.

For those who want to learn how, it is a pretty effective method of avoiding meaningful conversation, since everyone has an opinion on these topics. This is not to imply that Ganguly uses it as a tool to avoid sane conversation; it's just that he is genuinely not interested in other things people talk about. Nevertheless, I managed to turn it around and went back to case studies on how people start companies and earn money.

Ganguly has, for a long time now, been troubled with his occupation. We used to have a wisecrack on his drilling job and half of the oil in the world being up his momma's ass, but that died out when we realized he doesn't even drill. What he does is mug for a fucking test that has been pending for months now and clearing which will get him a step closer to something, no one can tell what.

Admitting that starting a business of our own would do us good, he went on to enlighten me about how big corporations heartlessly rob people (apparently, his company does a lot of it). Which is when he conceded: "Take the iPod..."

Thus concluded the saga of the iPod and the Zune. Any further argument in favour of any product can kindly go fuck itself.

About our grand plans and business, it's going to be. One day.

Thanks Sam for restarting this shit.

Blogs die

I had imagined I would document here whatever happened to happen around, here and there. But the sad truth is that blogs die. We cut down on writing, but I don't think we forgot why we wrote here in the first place.

I used to refresh these pages on the right a few times a day, expecting wonderful things to turn up any minute, and they sometimes did. I still do that once a week. If you come here sometimes too, you would know what it feels like. Probably like knocking on a locked door. If you have followed those 100-odd embarrassing posts, I know this rusty one will be forgiven. The burden of expectation is gone, and that is not necessarily a good thing.

I know we are all still the same, just that we have still not gotten over the shock that graduation was. It would be funny to write something very smartassy under Ganguly's latest post on his blog (trust me, we still have a sense of humour), but the pic and caption are all too fucking sad. The truth about college is that it was once a means to an end, or to another means to some end, and I hope it still is to the students there because that is why people go to colleges, but we had stopped caring about it a while back. Which is why this post is not about the present. I might tell you about the present and try to give myself false satisfaction in the process, but I realize now what it will be. In our own ways, we are all probably trying to make the future better, but I have strongly felt that in reality we have been trying to make it resemble the time that was semesters 7 and 8.

Fourth year, IIT Kanpur is where it should have stopped. We might just wake up one day and find ourselves in our wings and rooms, but we do not. We wake up in weird places, meet weird people and do weird things all day. Fourth year, IIT Kanpur ended - so here we are. No matter what here is, it is a bad place to be in. Giving it time does not help you get over it. We had planned about, or at least dreamed of doing something, but we chose to be safe and maybe there still is time to take a risk worth taking. I hope we take that chance one day.

So here's to what Ganguly says - we never did leave Hall 1. One day we might. But I hope that day we move somewhere close by.