Aw, you guys…

… I wanted to do a lovely end-of-year post, eM style.

And I would have, but I have to rush to the airport. I’ve been packing for the last two hours!!

Prior to the new year, hopefully. If not, I hope you all have as much of a blast as I surely will! Much love.

Constriction In The Gut

Fuck… talk about being tense before an exam!

The portions are simple, but vast. Nothing new there. And I’ve prepared well, so I should be fine.

Yet, something is telling me it’s all going to go horribly wrong. I’ve had bad law exams before… case names get mixed up, appellants become respondents and plaintiffs defendants, I forget case dates entirely, sections of the Act in question (in this case, Motor Vehicles, 1988; Motor Vehicles again, 1939; Carriers, 1865; and, as one defence, Act Of God [Vis Major]) run into each other. I do NOT want to be in that situation today. It is critical that I pass this exam.

I wish I believed in God, so that I could pray and mean it.

Time to head to college and see where I’m sitting, then. 70 minutes before the paper begins, and see where my focus is– WordPress.

This is the first time I’ve found blogging therapeutic in any manner!

Hit 40 UK

I’m listening live to the countdown for Christmas number 1 on Capital Radio, London. Muchas excited!

The main contenders are:

> Leon someone-or-the-other, winner of this year’s X Factor TV show (he won just last week– the show is aimed at cornering the Christmas Number One Single spot. Simon Cowell is a producer and judge. I’ll do a post on that next), which from what I gather is the successor to American Idol;

> Leona Lewis, who is a different person, who won X Factor last year (her song Bleeding Love was top of the charts for ages and is a great tune);

> Eva Cassidy and Katie Melua (Katie went to school with Leona!) with their duet cover of Louis Armstrong’s classic What A Wonderful World (it hit number 1 on the charts last week, knocking Leona Lewis off after like 11 weeks);

> and some Christmas songs that are quite nice, but I don’t know their names.

People are messaging in their opinions to the studio live, and they’re reading out the text messages on air. Opinion is highly divided… many people don’t want Leon The X Factor Guy to win, mostly because it’s seen as a slimy way to manipulate the charts. (Again, tune in to the next post for more on that.)

Alicia Keys just played… No One is another great tune… as Lucio (the RJ) said, “Let’s all just take a minute… and thank God… for Alicia Keys’ voice!” She was Number 11. I’ll do the Top Ten countdown live… anyway I can’t study with this excitement, hehe…

Number 10: Timbaland presents One Republic — Apologise (down 4 places)

– Another great song. Man, I’m a sucker for Top 40 British pop music!

– I think Timbaland is a big stud, though. The Way I Are is one of the best hip-hop songs I’ve heard in the last couple of years.

Number 11: Girls Aloud — Call The Shots (again, down 4 places)

– I’m not such a fan of Girls Aloud. But the Brits love their own artistes…

Number 8: Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse — Valerie

– Guess what, it’s two more British artistes! An okay song, IMHO. Catchy, yes, or it wouldn’t be up here at the top of the charts. But I haven’t downloaded it.

Number 7: Take That — Rule The World

– Take That have made quite a comeback this year. From Patience to Shine to this track, it’s very commendable how far they’ve come without Robbie Williams. Apparently they offered him the chance to reunite with Take That and complete the legendary lineup of the early Nineties, but he declined. Good show, guys!

– Yeah, okay, I like Take That. I have their Greatest Hits on both CD and tape. So what? :)

Number 6: Mariah Carey — All I Want For Christmas (Is You!) (down 2 places)

– Oh, Mariah. How I love her! She is SO sexy it’s not funny! I can’t get enough of those curves! And even if you don’t agree, you have to admit the lady can sing her pants off.

– This song was released a few years ago, but it makes a comeback in the charts at Christmas time every year since then. Understandably, I feel!

– This song is also indelibly linked in my head to that scene in Love, Actually where the little girl sings, “All I want for Christmas is youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu….. and you, and you, and you!” and the little guy’s hopes are dashed!

Number 5: Souljah Boy — Crank That

– Ewwwwwwwww. It’s a decent dance song, but completely out of sync with the rest of the list. Britain, what are you thinking??

Number 4: The Pogues — Fairytale of New York

– What a lovely song. An Irish folk ballad, according to Wikipedia. Charted at number 4 for the last few years, apparently, and rated the best Christmas song of all time by VH1 UK in 2004, 2005, and 2006! If you haven’t heard this song, you must get it from somewhere.

…….. drum roll ………. the Top Three…

Number 3: Leona Lewis — Bleeding Love (down 1 place)

– Oh, no! This was my choice for number one. Leona has by far the best voice of any reality-tv show I’ve ever seen. Reminiscent of Mariah! Again, get this song, if you don’t already have it.

Number 2: Eva Cassidy and Katie Melua — What A Wonderful World (down 1 place)

– My heart sank when I heard this in at number 2 (viz., not number 1)

– But it’s a gorgeous cover. Soft, soft jazz. Guaranteed to get you (me, at least) teary-eyed and thinking of loved ones, better times, being with loved ones in better times, and generally wishing you were somewhere else. Unless, of course, you’re so incredibly lucky as to be there right now.

– And, to top it off, it’s a charity recording, with proceeds going to the British Red Cross.

– Crap, was that a tear rolling down my face?

and, Christmas Number 1 2007: Leon Jackson — When You Believe (new entry)

– Man… Simon Cowell and his business sense…

– This is a cover of that theme song from The Prince of Egypt, by Mariah
Carey and Whitney Houston.

– My gosh, what a Scottish accent this guy has when he’s talking! When he’s singing too, for that matter. Capital had him on the phone when the number 1 announcement was made. Man, they’re a powerful radio station! Ryan Seacrest DJs for them on weekends, for crying out loud…

– He’s nowhere as talented as Leona Lewis, poor chap. But he sounded like a sweet guy on the phone, and, let’s face it, he has the Christmas number one single this year, and I’m sitting in Delhi writing overexcited tripe about it all. Congrats, fella.

Next week– the number 1 record of 2007!

Hit 40 UK… err, not

I’m sorry, I spent 45 minutes on this post, but WordPress is being a complete bitch and is screwing up my formatting every time I press “save.” It’s bloody unreadable.

All thanks to their HTML editor. Hey, assholes, if we knew that much HTML we wouldn’t be using your shitty site, alright?

I’ll repost tomorrow with proper formatting. It’s almost 1 am and I should be either studying or sleeping!

Edit, ten minutes later: Figured out a shortcut, and fixed the formatting.

Happy Christmas Eve Eve!

(Yes, I quote from F.R.I.E.N.D.S in real life as well.)

Peace

Eating muesli, listening to assorted Andrew Lloyd Webber, and reading blogs. The balcony door is partly open, to let some sunlight in. All is well in Perakathland.

Deck The Balls…

Some nice modern-day carols over at you-know-where.

Should I stop plugging my Zonuts posts over here? What say ye? I’ll get tired of it eventually, I’m sure.

Cut-and-Paste

“Cut and paste kind of guy,” read the About Me on the Orkut profile of a very funny senior of mine from school.

I can’t be bothered to rewrite this, so I’m cutting and pasting an email I just wrote to my parents.

Ten days of freedom from exams! Next one on the 28th of December.

Email below…

———–
 

Today’s exam went well… only one left now, on the 28th! next thursday.
 
I didn’t tell you about what happened to me on Saturday night… didn’t want you to worry before my exam…
 
A friend of mine from calcutta was in town so I’d gone to meet him n some others. Was riding home when I was stopped for routine police checking… gave the cop my licence and registration… then there was a loud bang, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the ground! A car had hit the police barriers at full speed… later on an eyewitness said it had sped up after initially slowing down.
 
It was a major accident, made the front page of the papers the next morning. 4 persons were seriously hurt and are still in the ICU at AIIMS… 3 cops and another motorcyclist who had been stopped just before me. One of the cops is likely to die.
 
I’m ok… have a small bruise on my right leg, but it’s virtually gone now. My bike fell over in the impact, but amazingly there’s hardly even a scratch on it. (I had gotten off the bike to get my licence etc out of my wallet.) Was rather traumatic, though, seeing people lying on the road badly smashed up. One guy’s face was smashed in, one guy’s leg was at a weird angle. Only one was unconscious; he’s the guy that might die. The rest were moaning and there was blood everywhere. A car stopped soon after, and dialled 100… 3-4 cop cars came pretty soon. An ambulance arrived well after the injured had been taken to hospital in the patrol cars.
 
The car that hit the barricades sped off; the cops think it’s a dark blue Esteem. They’re looking for it, but have next to no leads.
 
I ended up not getting my licence and rc back. The cop who I’d given them to was hit, and I searched the road but couldn’t find them. Of course after the accident nobody gave two hoots about me: I was virtually uninjured, and although present at the time I hadn’t seen or heard anything. In fact a senior lady cop who arrived yelled at me… “How could you not have seen anything? ‘Kamaal hain’”. I wanted to ask her how many of her blessed policemen had seen anything?? I was looking forward at the cops, not back at the road in the direction I’d come from.
 
They were just copies of my licence and rc though, so it’s okay. I can make more copies. Currently carrying around the originals when I ride.
 
Very lucky for me that I was standing where I was. A metre or so to the front, and I’d be in AIIMS right now.
 
This isn’t the first time such things have happened; apparently cops dread this night barricade duty for this reason. People drive fast at night, and if they don’t stop this is what happens. I personally feel that if this is the best method of policing you can come up with– obstruct a road out of the blue, with no warning– then you have to suffer the consequences. But it’s sad.
 
Anyway basically, me and my bike are fine. Very luckily.
 
L,
 
me

The Fiftieth One

Well well. Am a little surprised that I’m still around after six months or so. But glad that I am.

I just heard an announcement about the new live-action Alvin and The Chipmunks movie previewing in London this weekend. Whee! I loved the old cartoon. Alvin, Simon, Theo-dore! We have some episodes on videotape back at home… they go exploring in some Central American jungle and sing a song called “The Key”, which goes: “The key, ai ai ai, the key, ai ai ai, out here in the jungle, lost as we can be.” Or something. Do you recognise the tune?

I brought an electrician home to try and fix the power socket in my bathroom, so that I can heat water without carrying the bucket all the way across the room to the plugpoint near the door. I could use the plugpoint just outside the bathroom door, but the extension strip for my laptop/modem/speakers/discman/phone charger plugs in there, and if I’m in my room and awake, it’s guaranteed that at least one of those items will be in use.

Apparently my landlady has turned off the power line to this room, because my room has its own little internal meter, and that’s connected to only one phase. The electrician offered to connect the power socket to the other phase, bypassing the meter, and was rather surprised when I declined. Why are we a country of cheats? I was standing in line at the fee counter this morning, paying up for next semester. (1200 rupees. Find me cheaper university education anywhere.) It was incredible how many of my fellow law students, graduates all, gave their forms to their friends in the queue, or, even worse, blatantly cut the line and barged ahead of everyone. Of course, this being my 6th year in DU, I no longer bother to protest. You just have to roll with it, and take pride in the fact that you are smarter, more principled, and have a better upbringing than those motherfucking pimps. As Arthur Hailey once wrote, “Piss on you, honky.”

Airtel sent me a new broadband bill– they’ve waived 3500 out of the 4000 rupees! Yes! I’m glad I protested the bill, and didn’t just let the connection lapse without paying, like so many people told me to. See paragraph above.

On my new plan, my speed is supposedly a maximum of 128 kbps. I tested it at a connection speed-testing website, and got a lovely 29 kpbs as the result. Beautiful. My internet is now too slow to listen to streaming radio online, except for Capital Radio’s “modem” option, which is distinctly poor quality. I’ll have to upgrade to the 256 kbps unlimited plan in Jan, once my exams are done…

Oh, hee hee… check out some search strings that brought traffic to Saale Bhehnchod over the last week: verbatim:

- PULIPS IN THE SKIN

- does masturbation affect gymming

- bipasha basu fug girl

- abhishek nanda case iitb

- soup mandel

- kasewa

- yamaha psr 210 stuck keys

- anushed

- to get admission through dasa

*snigger*

Ahhh

Today’s exam went well. Praise ye the Lord, hallelujah!

For various reasons, it’s the first time I’ve written an exam in more than 365 days. I was more than a little nervous, let me tell you. I seem to have contracted a disease that makes settling down to study near-impossible, so I finished revising the course only one and a half hours before the paper began at 2:30 pm. Luckily I could recall everything I’d studied, I didn’t mix up any case citations, I didn’t run out of time on any question (in fact I was 5 minutes ahead of the clock right through the paper, a first for law fac). A near-perfect exam, actually. I do hope I do well. (In Delhi University, how well you write your papers has NOTHING to do with how good your marks are. Believe me.)

Thank goodness they changed it from 9 am– I’m no longer able to spend whole nights slogging. While studying Physics I used to very often begin studying an entire year’s course at 9 pm the previous night, after a leisurely post-dinner walk to get some ice cream from the nearby Mother Dairy. I’m not joking. In fact, I still remember a conversation with Thesaurus Rex late one night about something or the other, how life isn’t always black and white. Then my friends came along and told Mr King Word that I had an exam the next morning. He was mortified! I was sad that I had to finally get down to studying.

I’d begin at 9 pm, or 12 hours before the exam. 11 hours before the exam, I’d realise just how deep the shit I was in was and begin wishing like hell I’d begun the previous day. (I always had at least 3 days off between papers, and would waste all 3. Inevitably.) I usually ended up finishing only a quarter of the course by 4 am. It’s very hard to work after that… 4 am to 6 am is the toughest part of the night to stay awake through. And of course, midway through the exam I’d be so sleepy that I’d feel– ‘Arrey what’s the point anyway, just write some shit and be done with it, then you can go sleep.’

Luckily (or perhaps not, in the long run) for me, DU allows you to pass its undergraduate physics course without having passed all your individual papers. You don’t have to pass any, in fact, if overall you have a passing grade. And that’s achieved by that saviour of procrastinators, the practical exam.

So, in honour of a well-written Torts paper, I treated myself to a small packet of McDonald’s fries. I love them, but I hardly ever eat them because (a) they’re very unhealthy, full of trans fats and overdosed on salt (b) there’s no point having fries delivered home, because they’re cold by the time they reach. But this time they were piping hot, very tasty, and for once the server wasn’t kanjoos when he scooped them up.

I’m so proud of myself for still not smoking! I was worried that I’d begin again during the exams. Study periods in the last few years have been defined by cigarette breaks every half-hour. But no! The cig stick is as abhorrent to me now as it has been since October, when I decided to not smoke. I do still smoke when I drink, but even that’s on the wane. On Saturday (when I last drank), I could easily have managed without smoking.

Oh, Saturday. Bar with good friends and good friend’s brother, who is also close friend of one of my closest friends back in Madras. Small world phenomenon. Two girls land up. I have had small scenes with both of them in the past. Whee. We leave 4S and drive for aaages. 5 of them in a Zen, me on my bike. Brr. Good thing I took gloves. We crash one friend’s colleague’s engagement party. A rooftop in west Delhi, with a DJ, well-dressed beautiful Delhiites, and masks a la Om Shanti Om. My new Facebook profile pic is snapped there. Then we drive for aaaaaaages (I’m leading the way and I take a few wrong turns) again. We crash another friend’s birthday, to which only I have been officially invited. But by then it’s 1 30 am and who gives a fuck? People are DRUNK. The place is TRASHED. I’ve never seen a place so trashed. There are broken beer bottles everywhere. There’s booze and cups everywhere. The floor is a sticky mess of God-knows-what. Someone pours booze all over the laptop, and the music stops. An iPod is found. Punjabi music. Hai Hai! Dardi rab rab, and all that jazz. Stick your bosom and hips out, it’s allowed when you’re doing a punjabi dance. Slow cliched rock music. Does no-one like trance anymore? Small skirmishes break out. One friend is very drunk and has rolled up a sleeve and is walking around with a clenched fist looking to thulp someone. He never gets drunk, what’s up with him?

I get home at 5 am. Aarghh! I have exams, what am I doing? The Zen driver has forgotten all his Delhi geography, and the others in the car couldn’t navigate a Rajpath-India Gate drive. They reached home after 6, I later hear. At least I took great caution to not get a hangover. (Pouring away perfectly good alcohol when noone’s looking may be a sin, but I needed to stay sober. And that was only a couple of times, the other times I just drank plain orange juice or plain coke. Or I just didn’t drink anything.) I can tell when I’ve had just enough to drink. More means regret, either that night in a bathroom, or the next day on my bed. The previous two times I got drunk, I had terrible hangovers the next day, and couldn’t study. Hangovers? Who actually gets them? They’re always exaggerated, aren’t they?

Not when you’re lying face down on your bed, groaning and holding your throbbing head. Even water makes you puke. Perhaps they only strike people once they’ve crossed the 22 1/2-year-old limit. Hmm hmm hmm.

Go Here

http://zonuts.blogspot.com/2007/12/folk-music-lives.html

For a great song.

Go to Zonuts more often, generally. Do.