Rider with a storm

The drive was taking longer than I expected.  I plan to be in the office by 10 but office was still 30 KMs away.  I had reached the outskirts of the city and with the increase in traffic the speed had reduced considerably.  I estimated that the remaining distance would take more than an hour.  The journey that started pleasantly as I had thought it would had by then turned grim.  Early morning sparse traffic and the smooth highway ensured that my speeds were in the three figure mark most of the time.  The loud music screaming out of the speakers enhanced the experience.  Many would not have termed the situation as pleasant but for me it was good enough to scream out a few lyrics.  

The traffic increased considerably when I was about 70 KMs from the destination.  It is at around this time that my abdomen informed me that the fluid pressure was building up.  It had not gone above the danger mark but it was something I need to take notice of.  I thought of getting out of the highway and letting go in proper Indian style.  But I had long passed the bushes and fields part of the highway.  Now it was all factories and offices that preceded the city.  I could not possibly let it out on a factory wall; the security might kick my butt.  There were a few ideal vacant spots but by the time their existence registered in my head I was a good 500 metres away from them.

My head requested the abdomen to hold on for an hour and ordered the body not to generate fluid for the same amount of time. Though the abdomen responded positively the remaining part of the body turned down the request summarily by letting me know that it was all my fault. "You did not take heed of our order to avoid washing down 500 ml of coke over and above the unaccountable ml of water" was their charge.  All this liquid cannot be assimilated by the already flushed up cells and had to go someplace, which was outside.  So the pressure continued to build up.  The road took my attention off this build up.  I ran into a traffic jam, right at the entrance of the city.  I cursed and craned my neck attempting to see something.  I could only see the tops of many stationary cars.  I cursed and fell back.  That is when the realization of the unbearable pressure build up hit me.  I was in the center of the road and there was no spot for me to relieve myself.  I cursed again.

From then on thing became hazy.  I could only remember a few things between that time and the time I reached the office.  Every time a vehicle ahead of me slowed down, I cursed every ancestor of all the persons in that vehicle.  Every time a police man stopped my car to let some pedestrians cross, the ancestors of the policeman and the pedestrians were affected in a similar manner.  Every time I remembered the existence of my abdomen, I felt like the Mulaiperiyar dam in monsoon.  One time I parked the vehicle on the side of the road, picked up the empty bottle of coke and considered using it.  But I was not sure, if the contents I planned to pass into it would be less than 500 ml.  I threw the bottle away, cursed my ancestors, pulled the car back on to the road violently and in the process nearly ran over a pedestrian who cursed all my ancestors too.  I continued on and with every passing KM tightened the muscles in my pelvic region.  I am sure that region must have reduced in size considerably due to all the tightening.

Finally, the office was in sight; just one signal to get through.  I had to cross my legs while waiting the signal to turn green.  My control seemed to slip away now that the destination was so close.  I rubbed my eyes and looked again to ensure that this was no mirage.  Nope, the office remained there.  I started off with a "come on" and made up a sentence with many combinations of the F-word - the intent of the sentence when you removed all those words was "Why is the signal taking so long?",  God, I guess, responded by turning it green and soon I was pulling into the parking lot when the bloody watchman put up his hand and stopped me.

"ID card please"
"Aye, move away.  I need to go urgently."
"ID card please"
"Bloody hell! Where the hell is it?  Ah, here it is.  Are you happy?  You bloody fool."

The actual words used were not as innocent as the "Bloody hell" and "Bloody fool" but for the sake of readability I choose not to put those precise words.  I guess this reduces the authenticity of this write-up and I have to probably put a rider "based on real life events".  To cut short story short, I reached the restroom.  Contrary to my expectation, I found the restroom unoccupied, ran into it, opened the zippers and LET GO.  An amazing amount of liquid started flowing out at an even more amazing speed.  Its landing was so noisy that the Niagara falls would have hung its head in shame.  I am not sure how long the flow continued but it was long enough to flood the area around the office, that evening.  Of course, the rains that day might have helped but I carry the guilt that I am the major contributor.

Shabbaaaa ABBAaaaaa

The meeting did not turn out the way we thought it would.  We thought the customers would jump out of their seats with a pen in hand and demand a place to sign the deal.  They had shown a lot of interest and enthusiasm during the presentation and ensuing discussions.  But at the end of the show, they requested, very enthusiastically, another meeting to discuss the details.  Except for our boss all of us were disappointed.  He thought the meeting went exceptionally well.  The customer had expressed interest and that was good enough for him.  He had a smile on his lips and as we went down the elevator, a whistle started blowing out of it.

The lift journey lasted for ever.  The boss' elevated mood further depressed our already depressed feelings.  The whistles and hums in that small space racked our tender nerves.  To stop this joyful outburst I put forth my disappointment about the meeting.  Boss looked at me amused and said "did you expect him to sign on the dotted line by the end of the first meeting itself?"  "That's what you said prior to the meeting" I retorted.  "Yes, but I said that to keep you guys motivated" boss retorted back. "You should be happy; he asked us to come back right?  Show they are interested."  "So when will he sign?" asked I naively.  "Next meeting definitely" was the response.  "You say that to keep me motivated, right?" was my exasperated response.  "No, no my dear.  I got the vibes today.  Next meeting is the one, we go to Leela for dinner after that.  Its party time my boy" came the comforting response.

I hated it when the bugger tried to humor me with "dear"s and "my boy"s.  Unfortunately, he is my boss and I have to put up with this nonsense.  A few minutes later, we were in the car and my dear boss was revving up the engine as though he was at the start line of a race.  I had chosen the back seat to keep my distance from him.  Also, I did not like to wear the seat belts and so I thought the back seat fit my bill.  But when I heard the engine rev up I changed my mind about avoiding seat belt .  I had just about enough time to buckle it on; the car literally jumped out of the parking spot and sped towards to the spiral ramp.  We hit the ramp at about 40 Kph, I think.  I was pushed to the door and was stuck there as we went up the ramp - round and round and round.  I prayed hard and promised a visit to Tirupathi if I got out of this car alive.  Finally, we reached the ground level alive.  Three floor of spiraling hell came to an end with a hard hitting of the brake. Thanks to the seat belt I did not fly our of the wind shield.

I prayed to God again and requested him to put some sense into my boss - "Please let him not drive recklessly through the roads.".  But my prayers went unheeded.  His trademark style of driving continued.  The road was teeming with people and vehicle but our car bull dozed on.  It was like one of the scenes from the comics wherein cyclists, hens, dogs and cows jump out of the way as a car zips by with the driver peeping out of the window waving his hands wildly at the people and the animals.  I had a good mind to ask him if he thought the accelerator pedal had dual functionality.  The first press accelerates the vehicle and the second press brakes it.  Someone had to tell this guy that it accelerates more when pressed the second time.  But that cannot be me - he does not like to be corrected by his subordinates and so I kept praying.  By the time, we covered two kilometres, I had promised visits to most temples in the state of AP.  I could not afford further promises and so decided to distract myself.

"Sir, don't you have any music."

"Oh yes! A large music collection.  I love music.  Do you want to listen to something?"  As he was saying this he dove to his left to get out his CD pack.  Along with him the car turned sharply to the left.  I did not dare to look out but I heard a lot of noise and commotion from that side.  Boss straightened, threw back the CD pack and continued driving as though nothing had happened.  "Go on, select something" he said.  I opened the pack and found the pack had about 10 CDs.  All the CDs had ABBA written on top and the numerals 1 to 10 written underneath.

"I love ABBA.  Select the CD that you want from the pack." he insisted.
"I don't listen to ABBA." was my response.
He turned around, looked at my face and exclaimed "What!".  I am not quite sure what happened to the car in those few second (or minutes or hours, I am not sure which).  But we seem to have again left behind a chaotic scene.
"Pick up CD four or five, whichever you like best.  Both of them are good." he said.

I had no idea which songs they contained and as such I did not know anything about ABBA.  I have always preferred the number five over four and so I picked it up and handed it over.  Soon our vehicle was filled with the soothing sound of the ABBAs.  I am not sure why I had not listened to them but now they seemed to be the best sounds I have heard in my whole life.  I closed my eues and let my body rock to the crazy rhythms of the car as the beautiful music filled my ears and head.

Where is the ice bucket?

Wash away with ice
With glee lights a face
Supporting a suffering
Inflicted are feeling
Giving away money
While pictures come out funny
Making all aware
How much I care
Something I know not
Little more than naught

Book Tales

So i am going to tell you 10 book writers and name of the book and here they are:
THE NUMBER DEVIL  HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER,
CONNECT THE DOTS RASHMI BANSAL,
 THE  OATH OF THE VAYUPUTRAS AMISH,
 ROOTS ALEX HALEY,
 ASHOKA CHARLES ALLEN,
 BLINK MALCOLM GLADWELL,
THE TELL - TALE BRAIN V.S. RAMACHANDRAN,
 THE WORLD OF MALGUDI R.K. NARAYAN,
 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL ANNE FRANK,
SCENES FROM A WRITERS LIFE RUSKIN BONDS






BY DWARAK KRISHNA

Anvil's made out of metal

My Facebook was filled with entries from the night.  Many from one of the community pages I like - 80's The Golden Ages Of Metal.  Usually it was filled with YouTube links to songs by groups like Poison and Warrant.  These were not my favorite groups and I usually browsed on.  For the past few days, the administrators of the group were throwing in songs by some of the lesser known groups of the 80s.  That morning, I ran into an entry on a song by "one of the lesser and most under-rated metal groups of the early 80s".  The group was called Anvil and the song "Metal on metal".  The thumbnail of the song showed the face of the lead singer singing into the microphone.  His expression had an interesting combination of mean and mischief.  It reminded me of Eddie Vedder's expression in the video of "Ten" - A bit of mischief with an overwhelming dose of meanness.  

I clicked on the link and the song came up.  Crunching guitar, pounding drums and a mean voice - the perfect combination of heavy metal cliché.  The song was loud and heavy with a lot of chunka-chunka guitaring.  The singer sounded like a cross between Scorpian's Klaus Maine and AC/DC's Brian Scott.  It sounded like a classic thrash metal song from the mid-80's.  But this song was from the early 80's before the big four of thrash came by but this group was hardly heard of.  So I opened the Wikipedia and searched the group.  Anvil is a group from Canada formed in the late 70's and sure enough they influenced the big thrash groups of the 80's - Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica.

Anvil with "Metal on metal"

The site also mentioned that there exists a  documentary film, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, about their career.  I have been a sucker for movies on music bands for some time now - Woodstock, Doors, The last waltz, Rush.  Fascinating movies that described the route a set of people took to reach the pinnacle of rock's Mt.Everest.  So I got this movie and watched it.  It turned out to be more than fascinating.  The movie starts off with the statements "In the summer of 1984", "Some of the biggest rock bands in the world toured Japan together", "Scorpians", "Whitesnake", "Bon Jovi", "All these bands went on to sell millions of records", "Except one", "Anvil" and then band comes on stage to sing "Metal on metal" .  The movie goes on to tell the struggles that the lead singer and drummer goes through to keep the group kicking.  Rockers in their 50's trying to make that one record that will take the world by storm while driving trucks for Children's Choice Catering.  

A very emotional movie on the sufferings that the group had to undergo touring Europe, making an album and trying to sell it Music executive.  There are a lot of arguments and tears in the movie.  All seemed genuine and did not seemed staged.  A brilliant movie that brings out the passion these two people have towards their group and music.  A passion that started almost four decades back and continues till date.  I am so glad I came across Anvil and will be their fan through my life.

A possessed house possesses

Those were the days of house hunting - for rent that is.  We wanted to move into a good place not too far from the beach.  The search started with us walking around the area looking out for "Tolet" boards.  We also tried to identify uninhabited houses - Windows closed, no curtains, balcony doors closed, cobwebs in balcony and such obviously identifiable marks.  We approached apartment watchmen, random people staying in some house or other and iron-wallahs seeking information.  Some shooed us away, others gave an apologetic no but a few were good enough to give us a phone number or two.  These invariably turned out to be brokers with whom we did not want to deal - the charge of one month's rent for their minimal service (as minimal as "that is the house; now go and talk to the owner and fix it up") seemed to steep for our shallow pockets.  

Next we scanned through the "house for rent" columns in some of the local papers.  We marked the advertisements that fit our requirement and started calling the numbers provided.  Most times the call was received by a voice that said "Allooo".  Soon we realized that this was the Hello of a broker.  The first day we ended up calling 8 to 10 brokers and no owners.  We decided to ignore them and continued to walk around the neighborhood.  The walks continued to be pointless.  We covered a big area and hardly found any house potential.  The few that came our way were controlled by the brokers.  So now our only hope was the newspaper.  The next weekend, the papers had the same result as the previous one.  So we sat for an emergency session and passed a resolution to include brokered houses in our search.  

The resolution filled up our afternoon with houses to be seen - one every 30 minutes .  By the evening our heads were spinning with the words spacious, well lit, airy and the feelings with dark, dingy, suffocating.  Nothing seemed satisfactory; every one of the houses promised a lot but gave little.  Every owner behaved like a king doing us a favor by letting us set our feet in their palace.  A near messy situation also cropped up when we ran into a broker with whom we had a fight a few years ago.  We kept our shades on as long as that idiot was with us.  Fortunately he did not identify us; unfortunately, we bruised ourselves by running into a few walls.  We reached back home defeated at around 7 and plopped onto our beds.

In a few minutes the phone started ringing.  It was a broker who claimed he had found something cool overlooking the beach.  We were too tired for this and really did not want to get out of the house.  But the broker was extremely persuasive and soon we were on the road following the broker on his bike.  The road ran by the beach with some very beautiful houses onto our right.  Whenever we saw an unlit house we started imagining living in it but the damned broker did not stop.  In a few minutes, the houses thinned away and the place was lit by our headlight and the moonlight.

The broker's bike finally stopped in front a lonely house.  Though we could see a few houses around, this one found itself in a lonely stretch.  In the moonlight that small house with a 40W bulb lighting the porch seemed eerie.  We switched off our bikes and walked towards the dimly lit porch.  The sea was roaring behind our backs. It seemed to threaten us with dire consequences for hanging around in its territory.  We felt very uneasy and did not want to proceed further.  I tapped on the broker's shoulder.  The tap startled him enough to let out a snarl that sounded like a "WHAT?".  I informed him that we were not interested in this house.  The anger held on to his face for a moment.  Slowly but forcefully his face eased and a smile ran across his smoked lips . He asked "Why sar! Such a beautiful place.  So quiet; only you and sea.  You should see in morning; very beautiful.  Peaceful, no disturbance and very safe".  I looked around the lonely place in an attempt to take in the beauty, peacefulness and safety of the place. When my sight reached back to the spot where the broker was, I found it empty.  The guy had reached the porch and we had no choice but to follow him.

As the broker inserted the key into the lock, the light went out and we were immersed in darkness.  It took us some time to get used to moonlight, which showed us undecipherable forms moving around us.  We were getting to understand the phrase "gripped with terror".  As the forms closed in on us, the light came on and we were blinded by the brightness.  The forms had disappeared by the time our sights got back to normalcy.  We turned to see the door wide open but there was no sign of the broker.  We tentatively walked into the house and called the broker's name.  No response; we called out his name again; no response.  By this time, our eyes settled into the darkness and our attention was captured by an object swaying in front of us.  Now it was the turn for us to understand that other phrase - "a chill ran down his spine".  The lights came on suddenly.A lady with big terrifying eyes underneath a even bigger bindi stared down at us.  "You are inside is it?" said a voice from behind.  We are not quite sure how we reacted but the thing we remember now is holding the broker by shirt collar while shouting obscenities at him.  The broker was letting out a bleak "What happened?"
"Where the hell were you?"
"The fuse tripped and I went to back to put it on sar."
"Could you not have informed us?"
"Why?"
"What the hell is that object?"
"That is a dupatta."
"Oh! Ah! And why is a dupatta hanging down from the fan?"
"The last tenant left it there"
"But why is it hanging from the fan?"
"I don't know sar.  Maybe they left it there after cleaning"

We asked the broker if the house occupied still.  He said no.

"Then what the hell is that photograph doing there?"
"The last tenant left it sar."
"Why did they leave the photo?"
"Maybe they don't have time."
"Yeah right! Let's get out of here."
"But sar, the bedrooms."
"To hell with the bedrooms and toilets; this place is giving the creeps."

As we started to go out, the lights went out and a gust of wind whooshed in through the open door.  The wind rattled the window panes and the all other rattl-able objects in the house.  Our pace hastened to a run by the time we crossed the porch.  By the time we sped away all those undecipherable forms that come out when the lights went out had started chewing our soles.

Memory improves during sleep while languages disappear with cultures but the size of space is a question

Scientists have discovered what happens to memory during sleep.  Apparently, new neuron connections occur during sleep and this enables memory.  This was experimented in mice and discovered.  The article goes on to say that sleep deprivation leads to a lot of issues and on the other hand sleeping is actually good for our head.  The article ends with the recommendation to students to learn and go to sleep early rather than sit into the night and learn.  The former ensures that the stuff learnt are imprinted in the memory.  Now if only someone could inform the sun to come up later, we could actually sleep more.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-27695144

Languages also convey unique cultures. Cherokee, for example, has no word for goodbye, only “I will see you again”. Likewise, no phrase exists for “I’m sorry”. On the other hand, it has special expressions all its own. One word – oo-kah-huh-sdee –represents the mouth-watering, cheek-pinching delight experienced when seeing an adorable baby or a kitten. “All of these things convey a culture, a way of interpreting human behaviour and emotion that’s not conveyed the same way as in the English language,” Belt says. Without the language, the culture itself might teeter, or even disappear. “If we are to survive, to continue on and to exist as a people with a distinct and unique culture,” he continues, “then we have to have a language.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages


How big is space?  Find it here.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140305-interactive-infographic-of-space