Cheers!

“Shall we have the prayer now, sir?” asked Sateesh the Showroom Manager, as my dad clambered out through the passenger door.

Pop and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes slightly. We’d discussed this on the drive there. “[Mom] isn’t with us; why don’t we dispense with it entirely?” I’d asked. But we figured it better to just let the salespeople do what they normally do.

And so, as dad and I stood by the side and watched, they lit a lamp, bowed down in front of the bonnet, and moved the lamp-plate in slow circles: first this way, then that. Next, Male Parent had to “drive the car forward a little bit, and then we’ll take it down to the yard for you.” Only then was the puja lamp extinguished, to the sound of much clapping.

I don’t suppose it even occurred to them that we might not be Hindus. Or even the sort of amalgamated Indian Christians who follow select Hindu rituals.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised, the folks have just bought themselves a new car, for the first time since 1995. (All cars since then, including the one I drive, have been pre-owned. (Pwned?)) At first they seemed set on a Honda Civic, but balked at the last minute and settled for the smaller City. A good thing too, because even the City barely fits lengthwise in their garage. (If you’re in a Western market and perchance haven’t heard of it, the City is basically the saloon version of Honda’s Jazz hatchback.)

When we pulled in home, Mater was very happy to hear that the new car’s registration number adds up to 9. That is to say, the sum of its digits is a “good” number.  “Seven is the best, but nine is good too,” she chirped. “Four is the absolute worst for a car.”

(My car’s licence plate reads ‘1867’.)

This piece of gibberish, coming from an allopathic doctor who shares half my gene code. It might have been vaguely acceptable had she been an ayurvedic quack, or a yoga instructor, or in some other nutjob profession. But even then, numerology really pushes the boundaries of belief.

Sceptic rationalist wannabe that I am, I don’t believe in a lot of things. Religion, gods, superstitions, vaastu shastra/ feng shui, alternative medicine, car showroom rituals, being on time, politicians, Germany—the list goes on.

But I must admit, when the question papers are handed out at every start to three hours of exam torture, even I bend my head, apologise for my doubting, blasphemous sins,  and pray for all the help I can fucking get. Just watch me do it this time around.

The Miracle Of

Dumbo (also known as Kat, but that’s a stupid name), our half-mongrel, half-Labrador Retriever mangy cur cute little doggy wog, has delivered unto us no less than seven little Dumblings.

“Seven!”, my mother shrieked as she walked in the door to hear the news. “What the bloody hell are we going to do with all of them?”

Apparently Dumbo is reasonably fecund, having pumped out 19 little dogs in three years. All but one has survived, leading to much suitable-home – finding stress for my mother. The odd one out was taken home by our manservant, but poisoned by his neighbours because they didn’t like it, or they didn’t like him (the manservant), or something. I kid you not. (The man is a story unto himself– living proof that even the ugliest, dumbest bugger among us can have repeated extramarital sex well into his forties.)

Anyway, here are some photographs. I’m about as talented a photographer as Michael Jordan was a baseball player, so don’t complain.

I miss the days when kittens (not pups) would be born in our house. I used to enjoy looking at a cat strutting haughtily away from me and thinking, “Don’t act too smart, mister– you were born under my bed!”

As If You Didn’t Already Know

Here (in the comments section, more than the post itself) is proof that you know nothing. Yes, you (not me!), know, nothing. You’re not smart on any sort of scale. You may as well go kill yourself now, and get it over with.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/01/boltzmanns-anthropic-brain/

(Shared via Han on Google Reader. Both of us have Bachelors degrees in Physics, although what we’ve done with them is an entirely different matter.)

What Perakath Did

In briefs:

Delhi

Saw me being invited to be a panel member on an episode of NDTV’s flagship waffleathon show: We The People. The episode will deal with the phenomenon of blogging in the context of social voyeurism, so I understand. I admit to being rather chuffed at the invitation, even if the referral did come via two sources who, albeit independently of each other, know me in person. (Rather than as a result of anonymous popularity.) It’s not every day Saale Bhehnkilund is offered such exposure! Anyway, I had to politely decline, because that weekend was the weekend I left the capitol for the city of slumdogs. If you happen to watch the show, look out for my acquaintance, fellow lawyer, and fellow Dream Theater lover, Mr Crowley.

Bombay

Was nice. Much better than my last (and only prior) three visits to the city, due in large part to the weather.

Talking about the weather gets a bad rap as a conversation piece, I know, but pooh to that.

So yes, Bombay’s weather in March evidently lacks the shirt-sticking humidity of its June to October monsoon season, which I’m more familiar with. The humidity on this trip was perfectly bearable. Combined with an air-conditioned home base and a short-sleeved shirt (ten times as comfortable as the long-sleeved variety, in my opinion), I found I didn’t have to worry about large amounts of perspiration embarrassingly disfiguring the rubric of my attire. I went on local trains and in taxis and up tall office buildings meeting and greeting old contacts and making new ones, leaving a poopy trail of little Perakath CVs behind me. Around 4 o’ clock on the Saturday I stood on the sunny but breezy embankment of Marine Drive, looking at the Pearly Necklace or whatever that stretch of road is called, and thought to myself, “Fuck, I want to work in this city.” Bombay has even warmed to the concept of free left turns for traffic, the absence of which used to annoy me no end– although I now realise that free lefts {or rights, if you’re from the lands of the free and the homes of the brave} can be disastrous for pedestrian road-crossers.

That night, at 9 o’ clock on the Saturday, the regular crowd shuffled in and we (including bloggers and friends Village Person and Blim Blop) did some legen-dary raging (to use the local lingo, yucky as it may be), also known as Spending Your Rent on Alcohol in One Night. Special mention to the DJ at the new Zenzi in Lower Parel: man, was he good. I also drunk-rode a friend’s large, purple, throbbing Enfield Thunderbird along Carter Road and loved it, even though I was wary of really opening the throttle on unfamiliar roads with possibly unmarked speedbreakers.

Home

Has today seen me announce my retirement from the world of competitive sports. My 23-year-old knees (technically, patellar tendons) are no longer able to take the strain of jumping on our outdoor cement basketball court (B.B.C., we sometimes called it), and I could barely walk after I got back home. There goes my shot at joining the NBA, hell and damnation. A veritable Nathan Scott I am, in sooth. And it was a stupid lousy game today, too.

Deviant Porn

I jacked off to this. What a turn-on.

Goodbye To Romance

Bombay bloggers, sorry for not giving you notice of my impending arrival in the city. I’ll be back in late June / early July; you can all feed and water me then.

Today was my final day of classes in La Fekelty, as we call it with a thick Indian accent. I won’t miss it much! Study holidays and exams left, followed by gainful employment somewhere. I’ve spent two days driving all over Delhi and Noida applying in person to every law firm on my database. Now I’m going to spend a day in Bombay doing the same. Later I’ll be able to say I tried my ‘level best’ to find a job up North / West.

My taxi to the airport will be here in ten minutes. As usual, my suitcase is lying open on my bed and things are being flung into it all willy-nilly.

I don’t think I’ve ever been packed, ready, and calm well in time to catch a plane/train.

WTF? Thursday Again

Real/fake? Emesis/excretion?

NSFW.

Is, Is, Is

That’s two days now Perakath hasn’t smoked a cigarette, despite having them in the room (as a sort of pack of seductive temptresses from hell).

It is a big deal.

Old Hat

I’m finally coming down with a cold. Old wifey as the tale sounds, I usually get one when the weather changes (in this case, from cool to warm), but sickness hasn’t struck me for a few months or weather-beating-retreats now.

The four or five days each time I’m badly sick, coupled with the standard week or two of runny-nosed sniffydom, are usually enough to wipe out a large part of whatever gains I’d have made at the gym in the previous months. 

Given my love of paying to work against gravity with round and oblong pieces of metal listening to overly loud Bollywood music in a damp, stuffy basement, why would I want to suffer an inflamed respiratory system? Why have I been awaiting the onset of a sprinting nose and a sore palate?

Simple, my dear Kapadia: because it’s far easier to stay off cigarettes when one is unwell. Every inhalation can bring a racking (whooping?) cough, and in severe cases the very smell of a burning fag can turn one nauseous. And I really do want to stop smoking. As we native Hindi-speakers say, ab bahut ho gaya.

I can see you rolling your eyes and getting ready to move on to the next stop in your little time-wasting internet exercise of the day. “There he goes again,” I see you thinking. “If he really wanted to stop, he’d just do it and stop writing about wanting to do it. Why does he bother pretending?”

And here I must descend into corny movie-quotation mode, and remind you of lines from the third film in that brilliant series (incidentally, did any of you ever hear about this? Too much!):

Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? –Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose.

Note: I must say I agree with that last line there, as a general life philosophy. Along with another flash from Smith: ‘The purpose of life is to end.’

And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist? 

And as Neo said, in a line that simultaneously delighted me with its implication of the strength of humanity above AI and disappointed me because the answer could have been much more: “Because I choose to.”

That’s It; No More Story

A couple of guys from my old stoner gang from college have recently moved back to Delhi after a year or two and, like me, are job-hunting in the city. We had a get-together last night: us long-term Delhiites and the new returns. It was good fun. It was as if we could all have been sitting in Muk West or Outram Lines or Vijay Nagar four years ago, having a very similar conversation. In-joke for readers from College: spoken last night: “I keep expecting Madhu to call and ask, ‘Dude do you want to go play Counter-Strike?’”

The same old accidents happened: someone knocked over the dustbin, someone spilt his beer, someone wet the joint, someone didn’t pass it for ages. Some people got more severe munchies than others, and demolished the pizza/garlic bread we’d splurged on.

And, as always, always happens when Stephanians smoke up together: someone picked up the folded newspaper containing the weed-tobacco mixture and spilt it all over the floor. Sigh.

I volunteered to drop the new returns to their Paharganj hotel at 1 am, because (as I may have mentioned before) I love to drive. I hung around outside as they talked to the night receptionist (an attitude and habit quickly learned in “protect the womenfolk in your group” Delhi), and it soon became apparent there was a problem. The original booker was fine, but the other fellow planning to stay with him was being refused entry to the hotel because he couldn’t provide a government-recognised ID card. At 1:30 in the morning. Hmm. Being a true stoner, the deniee didn’t take offence (“He’s just doing his job, man…”), and I proceeded to drop them to a safe house in Lajpat Nagar, and make my way back to North Campus via the truck-infested Ring Road.

Can I Just Say

I usually play along when people begin talking about them.

“I’m a typical Scorpion [sic],” she’ll say. “What are you?”

I’ll then tell the story of how I’m a Taurus/Gemini cusp, but I looked up this website (I can’t find it any more) and it showed me that on my actual birth date, all those decades ago, I was born under the house of Gemini, not Taurus. I’ll explain that I was rather disappointed to read that piece of information, because I’d rather have been a Taurean. You know, for the testosterone quotient?

“Ohh you’re a Gemini? Good, ya… you have a dual personality. Taureans are stubborn and obstinate. Scorpions don’t like Taureans, anyway! “

I’ll then explain that I was only joking: I am in fact a Taurean.

“Oh really? Er… don’t worry… it’s like two sides of a coin… Taureans can be considered confident or stubborn, both…”

I’ll then explain that I was only joking when I said I was only joking: I am, in actual fact, a Gemini. Or one half of a Geminian twin, if you will.

“Perakath!”

I’ll then clarify that the website I used to calculate the House of my birth was, in all probability, designed for use by North Americans. Because the time of day varies with global position, my birth in the Temple Town quite possibly fell under a different house than as advocated by said website.

Which means I could actually be a Taurean.

This is usually the point in the conversation where somebody changes the subject.

 

You’re free to believe in what you will, but really, what a load of cock it all is.