Big wheels keep on turnin'....

Guess who's back!

Yes, I understand its not exactly a 'long time' that I've been out of town for...but when you're as used to Bangalore's pace of life as I am, five days seem an aeon!

There is something indescribably nice about travelling by train that is felt even if you are deprived of a sleeper-class seat and bumped into the general compartment at the eleventh hour....especially if your compartment is filled with funny, chai-drinkin teammates!
My 12 hour journey to Gulbarga was highlighted with drinking 8 cups of uncomfortably sweet train coffee, falling asleep by the window while listening to music for 6 straight hours, trying to get past four pages of Brief History Of Time and fatally revealing to some pals my fantasy of being sexually subservient...faargh!
Our destination was a dreary, dark place called Shahabad about 20 km from Gulbarga.
Finding the lodge in the dead of night was the last thing a sleep-deprived group of train-lagged students could possibly ask for.
The next morning was pretty rushed and frenetic as we were supposed to play a match against PESCE, Mandya which on winning would put us into the semifinals.
Occassional remarks of partial disbelief and sheer dazedness of playing cricket at the inter-zonal university level punctuated the thoroughfare of getting set for the game.

We won the toss, put them in and restricted them to a paltry 136 off 30 overs.
Its so much nicer to chase such totals because you know if you hang in there and get a 30-odd, your score's good enough to get your name in the papers!
I got a 40...yey!
...and yeah, we won.

We had the next day and a half to spend before the next match.
I'd have written about all the fun we had during this time if I weren't so darned drunk as to not remember a friggin thing about it.
A gazillion KFs and 6 hours of r.e.m-ridden sleep later, we played M.S.R.I.T in the semis as lost.

Nevertheless, it was all awesome....and instilled quite a lot of self-belief.
Fallacy of believing that sheer talent in the criterion for success was one of the most valuable lessons the experience taught me.
Among others were the fact that beer can actually cause hangovers and that Stephen Hawking can be nice to read if the last thing on your mind is sleep.

...ooh and I found a Grateful Dead song echoing my thoughts!

You're sick of hangin' around and you'd like to travel;
Get tired of travelin' and you want to settle down.
I guess they can't revoke your soul for tryin',
Get out of the door and light out and look all around.
Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been.

I'm off to Gulbarga....got some Krikkit to take care of!
Be back in about four days...that is ofcourse if I don't get scalded to death. Its 43 fuckin degrees out there, I'm to believe.
Ciao!

Thy Wisdumb Come

1. The word 'paradox' got coined by shrewd American caddies whose masters played golf at competitive levels.

2. Preferring to travel by bus instead of an auto is perfectly normal, especially if you have particular distaste for tacky Hindi songs that the auto-driver plays on his "set".

3. There are very few things more irritating than having to wait at the barber shop when the only available reading material is the TV guide for August 1999.

4. Among the few things that are more irritating, is calling a girl after a long time only to have her give you an indepth analysis of the possible effects of PMS. (eeiw..all I asked was 'how you feelin')

5. 'Maakikirkiri' is the coolest sounding expletive to have ever been contrived.

6. Naming a book "Book" is the cleverest thought no author has ever stumbled upon.

7. Ramya Krishna still has one of the best posteriors in the business. Period.....-->bah!

Extreme Bleah

I got my 6th sem results a couple of days ago. I passed in EVERYTHING!!
As much as that rocks, its totally depressing that I'm actually feeling weird about it.
It kind of reflects that 'not flunking' has come to be a bit of an alien territory for me.

But coming to think of it, its a fairly logical train of thought. Its one way of negating the effect that success' elusion has had on me.
Stuff like this spawns that hidden eclecticist in you. For instance, if you were to start a cult, it'd be a nice idea to present your lack of wealth as a mark of your spiritual prosperity!
I'll probably have to attribute the ironic references to the past couple of days which have had such events occurring that makes one go contemplative and all.

I played for my college in this VTU soccer tourney we just got knocked out of.
Now, normally I play right defence, overlapping in due course down the wing to provide some extra width in midfield. I prefer this because I've been pretty safe in all the games we've played and also because it allows me to put the long ball into the area which I just love doing.

But our captain decided that I was being wasted in defence and asked me to play up front, just behind the striker. I stepped up hesitantly...but equally glad at being relieved of defending the corner kicks which is just about the darndest thing one can attempt doing on earth.
The game though, didn't turn out to be all that good for me...missed a medium-range shot from an easy angle and tripped on my own stepover. But Abhi was at his mesmerising best and saved the day with a matchwinning goal.
The next game, I volunteered to play back again. Restored to 'my place', it all went well. Good clearences, crunching tackles a la Nesta and proper headers came back to the fore. The game went into penalty shootout. At 4-5, our last action hero Abhi strode out and took our 5th penalty that would've equalised the score....only to strike it softly to the goalkeeper's left who lunged and housed the ball.
3 days of hectic practice and a fuck-all journey by bus to Ramnagaram all down the fuckin' drain.

On the way back to college, we were talking about Infy and Siemens when this goods train passed by....which fueled my fantasy to become a train driver someday.
No...seriously, I think a train driver on duty from Bangalore to Mysore is a lot more spiritually prosperous and at peace than a Siemens database administrator.

By the way, the game that we lost got me exactly enough match allowance money to go buy this ding-chak helmet I saw someplace. Its just that it'd have been nicer to have won.
I bought the helmet though....it does feel good to buy something out of your own earnings. Parents do this sort of thing way too much and lose track of feeling good...not that I blame 'em anyway!

But the ironies aside, a fairly satisying past week. This also includes 4 bad hair days on the trot which induced my transition from a state of hair-do to hair-dont.
I like the hair-donters club.
Its convenient not to care...ta-dun-dum-pish, MECHAL MILICHYA!

Bose-udi Ke

You know when they advertise on television the very latest superawesome model of a 2000w Bose speakers? Its makes your neat little Adcom 1500W speakers unbelievably poxy.
So off you stride to the Bose stall at Forum and bump into the exact same model that was on the ad. You walk upto the nice-looking female who's doing a demo of it. Her friendly smile notwithstanding, you throw all kinds of jargon at her about such stuff as bass compression, tube amplification, saturation threshold and the like. After 20 minutes of frenetic highly interactive give-and-take, you realise that she is goodlooking for a reason. She doesn't do much apart from looking good.
Finally, you decide to come to the price...mentally amusing yourself about how its invariably last on the query list. To this, she points at a miniscule tag that bears the price in an even miniscule font. Now all that is for a reason!
So...yeah...you check out her wowey posterior one last time and get out of the place.

I went to National Market and bought a subwoofer for my Adcom model today.