don't you just LOVE pastis :D

http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/

Father, please may I be excused??

The......... Ravenous Bugblatter beast of Traal!! There has not been a single day in the last ohsomany months when I haven't thought about the BBoT. For those who don't know who/what it is, here's a little bit on it

"Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is a creature that hails from the planet of Traal, and will eat anything. If you are to encounter one, the Guide tells you that it's impossible to slay, so you should wrap a towel around your head. This creature is so mind-bogglingly stupid that it assumes that if you can't see it, then it can't see you. Despite this, the guide did state, erroneously, that "ravenous Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists" in its article on the planet Traal. This led to deaths of those who took it literally. The guide's editors avoided lawsuit by summoning a poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty, and therefore prove that their claim, the nicer one, must be true. This led to life itself being held in contempt of court for being neither beautiful or true, and subsequently being removed from all those present at the trial."

Ain't it pretty? I mean firstly, the name itself is gorgeous. Deliciously fullfilling mouthful of a name. The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Say it. Smile. And marvel at the enjoyable satedness. Sigh....
And if that is not enough to keep you going for a good decade, think with a towel wrapped around your head. Cos if you can't see it then it can't see you. Whenever the need for inconspicuousness is felt, just wrap a towel around your head. Poignantly convenient. Delightfully convoluted. And other such high-sounding, seemingly oxymoronic phrases that occur. In fact when you have a towel wrapped on your head, you can think of many more.

And so easy to administer. No need anymore for us to dig holes to jump into. Or pray for alien abduction. Just carry that handy saviour of a towel. And be the klutz that you are. Merrily hop skip jump over emotions, bad vocabulary and political incorrectness in the confidence that you have your faithful towel. The la da da ticket to eternal forgiveness. You don’t need to be cool anymore. Oooooh… sigh, where’s my towel now?

P. S.: Please to be excusing logic leaps, grammatical errors and unnecessary words. No, wait, I don’t mean that. Cos I got me towel. Ha!

One Day You Will be Cool

Yea yea... I know you like almost famous and I know this isn't original... but none of you are anyway, so shove it. :D

Right... so this has been my favourite theme off late. It is the 'it' sentence.. the one I have been measuring my coffee cups with.

Think about it... have you ever met anyone who doesn't want to be thought of as cool? Some might settle for 'not uncool'... but they still secretly want to be cool. Its one of the fundamental desires of the 21st century... right up there along with 6 packs and Beyonce's bottoms.

So what IS cool? Some people say its your attitude. It should come from within. But I think its just their way of not wanting to let the secret out. Its like saying... you wont find god unless you pray for him with a pure heart. If I had a pure heart, I'm sure I wouldn't need his help. And whats with the ego-trip anyway? If you are benevolent and help the needy... get down to business, goddamit!

I think I've thought too much. I'm hyper ventilating. Somebody help me.

To air-castle

Blyton meets Warhol.
Extra strong coffee, white cups,
Gleaming steel spoons,
Sepia. And air-castles.
For silent smiles and delectable introversion,
Lamp-lights and ink pens.

Oscar Wilde in Louis Armstrong,
Borubon touches purple....
...And swirls.

For post millenium kids with 1980s childhoods,
Infant eyelids half open to soft whisper,
And crisp white cotton,
Comfortably crumbling around supple brown
And morphing into muslin.
Black definition, around curious and sparkle,
Dilated to tales of pirates
And little men under mushrooms,
Of golden yellows and pickled reds,
And joyful splash and clutter.

And beside is nut-brown,
Corrupt and dimpling,
Impatiently patient
For tussle will follow this calm
Excusing lack of purpose.

And now,
Nut-browned brown,
Not swirl. But crush,
And tauten.
Again sparkle,
To shadows and lamp-light,
To laugh. Then quietly
Tuck away into soft.
Brown. Dimple.

Of cluttered vacuum and Warhol

Jyenagar Jalajamba is back.. without a bang, but then who cares... grand entries are over rated.

Today she bought bags. Just out of the blue. And its kitsch.. kitschhhhh... kitt-shhhhh... kishhhhh... such a pretty word. A failed attempt at edgy curtness. Like you're sliding out of control. I wonder how the word came about. I'm sure it happened in a new york penthouse... in a late night house party.. with anorexic pretentious women.. russian ones.. with harsh flat pronunciation... in a minimalist setting with synthetic electricity and long cigarillos stuck onto silver pipes.. only they weren't breakfastattiffany's. they were ceramic vaccuum.

Anyway, one must not stray so much from the topic at hand... no... wait... i have more to say.... just remembered that I never took to the word 'bling'. I'm sure it was invented so it can be the new 'with it' word. Convenient tickets to acceptance. But something about the word is so bland. So 'tchain'... like a bunch of useless keys falling onto a plate. But then I digress.

So yea, Jyenagar Jalajamba spent a bomb on poor quality over sized embarassingly loud kitsch. How comforting a feeling. Almost like you're wild enough to be cool. Mind you, where I come from... big fat over priced kitsch bags ARE wild.. especially if the most unpredictability in a tambram's life is the consistency of their daily cups of curd. And even THAT we know how to tame.

Right so the bags are basically big and have huge prints on them. But I love them. My bags are rexine meets Andy Warhol in asymmetric poor stitching. And the fabric is not tweed coarse... its rexine coarse... not natural coarse.

And it can hold my entire world in it. All the comfort goods that a woman needs. Her own portable weaponry - face wash, tissue, comb, deo, chap stick, kajal, another comb with thinner teeth, another wad of tissue, old bills, dirty wallet, pens, pencils, pretentious reading, random keys, lacto calamine, everything. It hangs right under her shoulder and hangs pretty... and loud.

To measure one's days by the coffee cups. Such prettiness. Such vacuum.

Glum Greyed Gloomy Grounded

Have you ever watched those 'X-treme' game shows on sports channels? Where there are those Asian (read yellow, small eyed, almost always super rich and always in white tees for some weird reason) uber cool kids that semi sit on super bikes and go up a flight of stairs or down and skate over railings and stuff like that. All of those shows were so ... distant. Cos none of the people who belonged to our immediate lives did anything like that.

Thank god for lazy Indian childhoods playing 'kalla-polis' and chasing old cycle tyres down the road. Where all we did was stuff face with mangoes, fight about who cheated in 'hide-n-seek' and waited till we fell sick so we could get some attention. Well, thats all I did. When I had friends that is.. which most of the time i didn't.. but seeking sympathy is bad.. so no more.

I simply never got how those kids did so many things and they were almost always 2-3 years younger than I was. I felt like I had gotten a raw deal.. I was bored, in an 'uncool' country, with parents who were always too busy or tired, a completely uninspired landscape and absolutely no energy. To add to it, I was born too early. How mean is that? Tops MY list of mean-ness for sure. I mean, there I was, all of 13 with buck teeth and big glasses and I'm being bombarded with images of cool, slick, over achieving, better looking kids who are all younger than I am.

Is this depressing or is this just me? Of course its depressing.. why else would I write about it.. I expect people to sympathise.. no.. wrong word, i meant to say EMpathise.. Rahul Bose says, bloggers are people who want showcase the lives to the world, right? Seek attention. Well, he didn't put it as well, but that was the gist of his comment. Isn't he like so absolutely amazingly bang on right???

Uh.. so.. yea.. I 'happened' at the wrong place and wrong time. Come to think of it, its probably the only constant in my life.. that at any point in time I know exactly what my life is missing.. why else would I remember inane TV shows from 10 years back... There I did it again... reminded myself.

Do you remember the skateboarders? There is this big deep scary looking trough with high walls on either side and they would go up and down and jump off the edges and make cool looking poses.. do you? Isn't life like that? Atleast mine is. Like the weak law of large numbers. I don't know what in f**ks name it actually is.. but it sounded so cool..and so I made one up for myself. Anyway, my interpretation is that no matter what highs and lows you might notice or 'significant' changes, repeat it enough number of times and everything will hover around the average.. like an unspoken word.. a 'weak' law. In simple words, no matter what you try, how hard you work to delude yourself, you will always regress to the average, the middle point of the trough.. and all you are doing is oscillating around it.

You read the title of this post first, didn't you? Yet you continued reading?? Tch Tch :D

...

A core of conversations we never had/lie in the distance between your wants and mine/
.../and in case you have ever tried to reach me/and I could not hear you/these words are in place/of the dead air/still between us -Audre Lorde

"For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us." Audre Lorde