freedom butchers : battle of the half-wits

Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, with George W Bush spewing venomous rhetoric, with oodles of saliva dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, watering at the prospect of waging more wars and fuelling his country's fucked up economy, UBL decided to turn a whole lotta tables, takes up some 'strategic leadership and vitriolic rhetoric 101' classes at ISB (Islamabad School of Business), and comes up with something that would make GWB's speech writers sit up and take notice of the fact that they have competition!

Freedom butcher.

Yes.

You read it right.

In a world that runs mainly on oil, and hot air orally generated by all the gas bags on the planet ( George W is not bothered about the rising oil prices because he talks to his Air Force One fuel tank each morning before setting for any trip, and the hot air he generates is enough to sustain 2 round trips around the globe, non-stop?),Osama finally decided to take some initiative on his own.

Honestly, would you like to lose to George W Bush in any sort of a contest?
Nevermind the fact that he is a 33rd degree Freemason, just like all the other US Presidents were before him. Nevermind also the fact that he leads the country that is allegdly the most powerful one on earth.

A normal average person losing out on anything, specially a battle of words or a war on terror, to someone like GBW would be much more insulting than it would be for Einstein, should Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, along with N'sync, Reeky Marteen and my other favourite artists ended up formulating the Grand Unified Theory of physics.

To delve into the psyche of a suicide bomber, an umpteen amount of research has gone into profiling and studying their backgrounds. A whole lot of studies have been undertaken to eventually arrive at the grand conclusion that a suicide bomber could be either male or female, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or Neutral, could be educated or not, could either be well off or living in dire straits, could possibly be either on the side opposing the party that was harmed, or on the agressor's side and so on and so forth.
Yawn.
How typical.

Do you really think this is a failure on the part of all those brilliant people out there who conducted such heavy duty research to identify and zero in on a person, who could be the next Mohd. Atta? Or would you like to delve into the realm of the obvious and come to the same grand conclusion that I now have?

To all those of us who are not part of the 'great US of A' or in some cases adoringly referred to as 'the great Satan' by some of its adversaries, GWB personifies America.

From a general standpoint, America is Bush, Bush is America.

I know this is not at all true, because they've given us Edison, Martin Luther King Jr, Elvis not to mention Will Smith and the thriving lesbian porn industry, for which I fervently count my blessings.

Isn't it then surprising that people would be so vehemently against the US? Think about it. Did 9/11 take place when Clinton was around?
Even Pearl Harbor is now suspected to be a Japanese faux pas. The planes set off along the wrong side of the globe, and those japasses mistook Korea for Hawaii, and the rest is the second half of World War II, or, if you want me to throw cliche, history. Who would have known that faulty compasses generated by some disgruntled worker in the Mitsubishi factory for manufacturing Zeros changed the world so much, eh?

But the past is past, and there is only the future to sit and mope about.

Anti-US sentiments would most naturally come around in everyone, for the prime reason that the country, to me, resembles a gigantic troll with a club, bashing things, people, places and everything else in its vicinity randomly.
GBW's presence, under these circumstances is as helpful as kerosene oil is for putting out a raging forest fire.

For someone like Osama, who has always had his way with the chicks, been a good stud in college, has billions and billions of dollars, and is generally very good leader material would naturally be offended by the fact that he has to share the world leadership platform with a doofus.

But ladies and gentlemen, now the dude has smartened up. He has learnt invaluable lessons from his adversaries. He has now decided that the only way to make himself visible on the world stage, next to hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, is to use a whole bunch of gassy words, a ploy of his that would have worked wonders in favour of the world in general and John Kerry in particular, had Osams decided to embark on this course of action orignially instead of attempting to sabotage the Indian IT and outsourcing industry by hijacking planes on a different continent altogether!

Where else do you think terms like freedom butcher would otherwise stem from??

Think about it. Or better still, step away from the monitor, slowly and then run away as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

Better still, head for another planet.

Things that make you go.....whoa!!!

There are wonderful things that a software engineer in a happening IT company gets to see in Bangalore. I generally equate women, specially the pretty ones with wonderful things. Of course, it is implicitly understood that wonderful things and IT company recruitment policies are mutually exclusive.

On an average, Mangalorean girls are the prettiest on the planet, with their freshly clean scrubbed look, sans the gaudy outfits and the three-inch thick layers of make up. They are the kinds that you'd wanna take home to your mother too, though most of them would consent only if you managed to imperius them.

The women in Bangalore on the other hand, are the kind who are supposedly the most sophisticated ones in the country, miles ahead of everyone else. The plethora of women in the top managements of most companies seems to just reinforce this fact.
Suave, sophisticated, mentally strong, they defy Mick Jagger when he sang "you can't always get what you want" many many times over.

It is also note to mention that they are very very good at taking care of themselves on a superficial level too, and after a thorough study of the female form which has taken up a whole lot of man hours on my part and those of the others who also boast of the inner eye for such things, we have arrived at the inescapable conclusion that even the 'slept-in' look that some women have, complete with messed up hair, and wrinkled clothes and an extremely casual style of walking involves a lot of preparation on the part of the subject in question. This is only reinforced by the fact that they look so so so very hot and attractive even in that look!
For all I know, thats probably the hottest look right now, hair gone awry, with a loose fitting sweater, a pair of jeans and some vague chappals, and all this just goes to give you yet another reason apart from the fact that I am fanatically non-homo a s to why I cannot give Prasad Bidapa or Rocky S or the other designers (a.k.a non straight people) out there a run for their money!

One of the most interesting things that I have seen is how low-cut most women's jeans have become, while contrastingly, their t-shirts have become shorter, ensuring that they give us more leeway to admire the work of art that is the female form. Sometimes, you get to see what colour their panties are, and the more smooth operators have actually met their future wives by starting off a conversation revolving around that very issue. Picture this conversation at a bar in Bangalore:

(the color of the garment has been masked to protect the identity of the people involved!)

Stud(S): hey lady, I couldn't help but notice that you're wearing ***** colour g-strings!
Belle(B): (chewing gum lazily) yeah? so what's your point?
S: I got the same thing on myself!!!!
B: you do? come on, lets go back to my apartment and make sweet love then!!!
S: (thinking to himself) "Praying to the ITPL Gods actually works!!!"

And Stud and Belle hook up, discover other common interests, have a lot of deep and meaningful monosyllabic conversations, get married, have a couple of kids, get a house in the sub-urbs and live happily ever after.

I am getting to be too too good at this romance thing, whatsay???

Anyway, I was travelling on a BTS bus towards Residency Road along with a couple of friends of mine, and I looked at something that made me miss dinner that day. We saw a guy with a medium sized potbelly, and a short t-shirt and low waist jeans.
An offensive stretch of brown skin, with stretch marks here and there, and that too on a dude, was just a bit too much to bear.
In retrospect, had I known what a deep psychological scar I would have had to deal with after just glancing at you-know-what, I would probably have not ventured outside of home that day!
There were a whole host of jokes about the anomaly sitting on the bus, one of which I have reproduced here, to try and divert your mind away from that morbid vision:
"Maybe he's just trying to fit in!"
I honestly can't remember the other ones. My mind is trying to use the smoke screen of selective amnesia so that I will not be traumatised and scarred for life.
I think I can use this excuse at the office to try and get away from work for yet another day!
I think I should try and end this post with something to justify the fact that there is a lot of good out there in the world, despite ugly fat men wearing low t-shirts and low cut jeans and venturing outside their mental detention center to psyche us out, and you can find solace and be at peace with yourself by watching a Mallika Sherawat movie. I wouldn't recommend any of the lesbian porn that I watched because I want to maintain a good-boy image.
Au revoir!

The day the music came back to life

Tony Fadell is a God. An absolute God.
Most of us might not really know who he is, but trust me, we have a lot to thank him for.
Next in line is a gentleman named Jonathan Ive. He is a God too, made one because of Tony Fadell.
I guess at this point in time, if you've been irritated enough for my not having elaborated their virtues, you're probably googling these names to find out for yourself.

Tony Fadell was the guy who originally came up with the concept of the iPod and was hired by Apple later on, and Jonathan Ive was the person responsible for its subsequent designs.
This is not a blog posting extolling their virtues or their contributions to society and to music lovers (and of late, music video and photo lovers too). I have not reached the level yet, where my blog is going to revolve around anyone but me. Tis true, empty vassals make more noise, sort of like empty vessels themselves.

Anyway, for more on these guys and the iPod, go here.

In the last posting I spoke about how the music died, ever since I started work. I thankfully have the good fortune of being able to have 24/7 access to the internet, which I shamelessly exploit by downloading mp3s, among other things.

My comp at work has a sound card, and I am given the liberty of being able to use headphones while at work, whenever it is not required that I listen to someone. This is rarely the case, with a million interruptions about this bug, or that doc update or a whole host of other things that inadvertently ensure that your listening experience is as smooth as travelling on an unserviced pre World War I era bicycle with flattened tyres on the roughest stretches of Bannerghatta road.

In addition, my material assets, allegdly portable, did not warrant being carried around because my built is not conducive to me wearing pants whose pockets are big enough to accommodate a five inch diameter discman, without it appearing as if I have a bulge in my pants. The bulge in the pants would not be such a bad thing if only God made me look more like Adam Garcia, so that it would invite pick-up lines from nubile pretty young things, and not so young nubile pretty things, and not so nubile pretty young things and so on (3 parameters, how many combinations....go figure!). But for the one single time I took it, all that the flattened lunchbox lookalike of a discman that could only play audio CDs and not mp3s invited, was looks from jackasses with mp3 players and compact ear plugs with long battery backups, who made me feel as if I was Leopold, (from Kate and Leopold) minus the charm, the good looks, the charisma, the money and the sex appeal. In short, apart from the fact that my headphones looked like I had robbed a 3 year old of her hairband, and the flattened lunchbox thing which was half out of my pockets when I sat in the office bus, I thought the music had come back to my life.

Note: travel advisory- please travel in office buses without speakers, which keep blaring songs from radiocity 91FM in the morning, for they will induce a feeling that makes motion sickness seem orgasmic!

I don't get paid much. Come to think of it, I think the salary that I draw is about 0.0002 percent of what my CEO's fixed deposit for his pet dog gets as interest, and that divided by 12 is what I get monthly, and minus tax cuts and so many other deductions that leave me as confounded as I did when I tried to understand women from as early as class 2, I am left with this paltry sum of money with which I can barely make ends meet (whatever the definition of that is).

The prospect of listening to music on my antiquated discman was so inviting that I totally overlooked the fact that I couldn't carry the bulky 9V adapter with me in the bus. Hence I had to rely on batteries, and alkaline batteries are about 40 bucks a pair. I didn't for the life of me imagine that I would have to make daily investments of that amount, to be able to listen to 13 songs on a CD burnt when I was a little less musically enlightened than I currently am. In short, it was not exactly a pleasant experience. I decided to switch to standard batteries for some time, but they ran dry so fast, (half a song listened to at volume to drown out radiocity playing on the bus) that I felt that the company that made discmen had some sort of connection with these battery manufacturers to make the lives of the ordinary consumer miserable by draining them out faster than a swimming pool would be drained if Obelix jumped in it. So much for asinine consipracy theories.

After the debacle that was CAT 2005, I figured that I had to do something to get a fresh start to the new year 2006, and made up my mind to get the music back into my life, and do a proper job of it this time.
To cut a really long story to pieces and examine the most relevant part with an electron microscope and present it to you, I zeroed in on an iPod.
A work of art, a wonderful companion, black, stored 30GB of whatever you wanted it to, played videos and stored photos, and was sleek and thin.
A good friend of mine named Vinayak Kamath came down from the US for his engagement, and at the same time, managed to buy me an iPod that meets the above specs.
It was love at first sight, and it felt like a new relationship altogether, me and my iPod.

Life has now become an endless movie soundtrack, and right from the time I take the long walk to the bus stop till the time I get back home, everything feels so good.
The other day, I had to catch a bus, and had to chase it for quite a distance. PF's "in the flesh" was playing in the background, and I could actually visualise myself running towards the bus in slow motion, with other hapless motorists swerving to avoid running me over, to make it to the bus stop and lunging towards the door just in time before the driver could get the bus into second gear. The whole mundane exercise of chasing the bus seemed so romantic that now, I really look forward to even being chased by a ferocious canine at the dead of night, with some appropriate song playing on the pod.

I need to add something to my definition of an ideal life, something I guess I had taken for granted for quite some time.
Good food, good sleep, good shit and good music.

This blog posting is dedicated to an amazingly talented guitarist, someone named Prashant Linus Patrick (fondly called Prashant Anus Fat-dick), who was the lead guitarist of the band I used to play for onceuponatime ago, who lost half a finger on his left hand in an unfortunate accident. Hope he gets to play again.

The day the music died....

Music has been an integral part of my identity, for various reasons, which I choose not to elucidate, for being labelled a megalomaniac. Not a single instance has passed by when I have not been thankful for the music in my life, whenever I have had the opportunities to indulge myself in exquisite aural pleasure.

It was pretty much smooth sailing until college, for I could listen to stuff as and when I wanted to, without much interference from any external sources. Not being even remotely within striking distance of 'rich' or whatever that is, I had to subsist for most part on a walkman and audio tapes for which I had to save about a fortnight's pocket money, later graduating to a discman (gifted by a dear cousin, who I shamelessly ended up cursing for it not having mp3 compatibility, though telling him that my invectives were in jest) , following which I managed to lay my hands on a then state-of-the-art comp, somewhere in my 5th semester, which I managed to scrounge, due to incessant pleading with my Dad that a comp was mandatory for a lot of 'project work' and for a whole host of other things. Little did my poor Pop know that my definition of project work included accumulating all sorts of music, which I thought I might like to listen to , either now or at any point of time in the most distant future as well.
This resulted in me cramming up the entire hard-disk with mp3s, as well as lots of movies which I put in the 'never to be deleted movies' directory, which I inadvertently deleted for adding more movies to 'absolutely-never-to-be-deleted-movies-folder'. That got deleted too, for want of space.

This entire exercise taught me many things, among which, the main one was that I should probably have put attack on Dad to get me an 80GB hard drive, so that I could accumulate more trash, to delay the inevitable. It also taught me that the digital media penetration was substantial enough for someone else in my immediate circle of friends or in its vicinity to have copies of what I wanted.

The same cousin who gave me the discman, probably for my not being annoying as the rest of his first cousins were (or so I would like to think, to shirk away from facing the bitter truth), also gave me a 'thank-you-for-not-attending-my-wedding-and-being-a-pain-in-my-ass' present, which I guess was also his way of thanking me for absenting myself from the sessions where most of his relatives (quite a whole of the Shenoy/ Kamath /Prabhu /Rao /*.* Konkani surname junta) would gather around, and pull his leg royally about the possible exploits that he would indulge on the day that he was rumoured to consummate his marriage.
He gave me an amazing wireless headphone set, which I can never thank him enough for. He redeemed himself in mine eyes for having given me that non-mp3 compatible discman.

You see, our abode was not exactly what one would like to call big, or even medium-sized, for that matter, and that resulted in our TV and my faithful comp being kept in close proximity, and being the average middle class family that we are, TV crazy, there was quite a cacophony pretty much all the time in our living room cum dining room cum hall cum drawing room cum guest bedroom, with incessant scrambles for the remote control, which used to be carried all over the place by whomsoever was watching the TV, so as not to relinquish control of it. I have been particularly notorious in that aspect, having taken it to the loo once for an extended session when I wanted to watch a football match, which was clashing with some pansy serial that my sister wanted to watch. Considering how United got drubbed by Porto at Old Trafford that evening in the Champions league QF, I think I would have been better off watching that pansy serial myself.

Getting back to the music in my life, it was virtually impossible to listen to music or watch movies on the comp while the infernal idiot box was jabbering away, and these wireless headphones which completely enveloped my ears and drowned out all traces of external noise at the flick of a switch came as a welcome addition to my limited material assets, which numbered 4 then(at an incredible average of one for every 5.5 years of my life!).
This resulted in me being able to play music on the comp, plug in the transmitter of the headphones, and retire to the confines of my bedroom, to read or just space out.
Campus recruited at one of the supposedly happening companies in the Indian IT industry kept me in a sense of suspended animation so far as my limited aspirations of grossly indulging in Bacchanalian orgies were concerned. This was at a period of time in my life when I had not even correlated the meaning of outsourcing in the context of what was supposedly the bustling IT industry.

I started work on september 1st 2004, at this 'happening' IT place, and it was within a short span of time that I realised that work was not what it was projected as being, in the campus presentations that we had, and in everything that was said to all of us that were outside of this vicious circle. It was all about the money, and not about the dum dum da da dum dum, and those that wanted it would not let anything stand in their way.
Kicking myself for my naievete was not really an option, for I had no plan B, and it was either sink or swim, and I plunged into the big bad world of the employed in the IT industry, gasping for breath, but determined to have my place in the sun nevertheless, in one capacity or another.

That was the day that cynicism and a loss of innocence came about in my being, and I think a lot of like-minded brethren in this industry would concur with me, in saying that that was probably the day that the music died.