Tamse, you little bugger

My heart pines for Goa. Not in the uber-emo way I whined about hating engineering in the last post (any military dirge jokes will be met with the contempt they deserve), but in more of a there's-no-place-like-home sort of way. And unlike a certain homesick Konkani civil engineer in English, August, I'm not reacting through horrible paintings of boatmen in Vietnamese hats. But I do miss Goa. Even the humidity and the rude bus conductors. Come to think of it, I probably would give my appendix to be pushed to the back of a tiny Goa bus with 45 others, while laughing at the sign saying '11 Standing'. Then again, I'd probably give my appendix for the chicken rolls at the shop behind the Indian Coffee House in Jamnipalli (Tara has promised to treat me to one for carrying her bag today, so I think that the vermiform one is safe for a few days yet). It is an organ I don't put too much of a price on.

I've always looked at myself as intrepid. I pride myself on being able to live anywhere, with anybody. I am a Bengali (a rather proud one at that) who grew up in Chandigarh, with parents who took me to most of the states in the country. I often styled myself in the image of the rootless outsider, with no real native place. Of course, I wasn't an Army kid with a father who got transferred every month. I lived in one place. But home to me wasn't Chandigarh, or Kolkata, or Kumarhatti or Timbuktu. Home was wherever my family was. It still is, but ever since I moved to Goa, it seems more often a home away from home.

There are a lot of things I love about Chandigarh. It's clean. It's organised. It's where I grew up. But it has no soul. It's lost in a sea of Jats in pimped out BMWs stalking girls with blaring rap music (the depressing part is that it works), and mega-sales and "Ooh, I want a Guchhi bag!" Culture is restricted to Shiamak Dawar dance workshops and housefulls for, well, Housefull. Again, as I said in the last post, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not me.

In Goa, I finally found what I had always been telling myself I never got: acceptance. Not just in college, but everywhere from Porvorim to Palolem (okay, I haven't been there, but the only other alliterative place I could come up with was Panaji, which restricts my geographical acceptance radius to less than 10 kilometres). Forgive the cliche, but Goa is not a state, it's a state of mind. It wasn't just acceptance; in Goa I found a place that moves at my pace. At the risk of sounding like a neurotic foreign tourist discovering myself, I fell in love with the food, the language, the music, and the people. I found heaven at Ronnie's in Cortalim, and I found Bogmalo, which is somewhere between where I want to be put out for the vultures when I die (I'm still torn between whether to use coconut chutney and beef vindaloo as stuffing) and where I'm going to open a shack with my retirement fund. I saw the stunning beauty of the Vasco-Panaji bus route in the rains, and the exhilaration of Carnaval. Ultimately, I guess, I fell in love with Goa because of all the friends that I made.

I love Goa. And I want to go back.

(I guess I knew this post was coming the moment I wrote the last one. Over the last few months, every time I think about how much I despise engineering, I remember that without it, I would never have come to Goa. And I really need to stop clicking on New Post without thinking of what to write. I must sleep now; I need to report in the Bake Oven tomorrow morning)

Soul Searching at 4 AM: Never a good idea

There is something mesmerising about watching molten aluminium flow. Those few seconds between ladle and furnace were one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. As I stood transfixed on the cast-house floor, a crane passed overhead, and the shouts of my fellow students shook me out of my reverie. If that thing fell on you, your hard hat couldn't save your ass. After a considerably pissed Sreedhar - who I suspect is scared of me - gave me a lecture on safety, I thought that for the first time in my life, it all meant something. That being an engineer wasn't just memorising Reynold's Transport Theorem. The sheer brilliance of that pink liquid drew me to a life spent in factories like this. And then, the BLC tour guide ruined it all by rattling off figures and capacities and temperatures and procedures.

I was never meant to be an engineer. Well, I was, but only in the life planned out for me by my parents. In the larger, dare I say cosmic, sense, I was always meant for greater things. Or so I said to myself on numerous occasions. The seminal novel in Anglo-Indian literature, the Pather Panchali of the twenty-first century, the celebrated role in breaking the deadlock in multinational trade talks, the daily dispatches from the latest African war zone... these were all, and - I'm not ashamed to say it - still are, roles that I saw myself playing in my eventful life. A bestselling biography, starting with, "To everyone else he was an enigma. To his sister, he was just a pig," would be written by the Roman Rolland of the day.

But, life's a bitch that way. Through some bad decisions, quick capitulations and great expectations, I find myself at the end of two years of engineering. I'll make a bad engineer, I know that much. Why? Because I do not, can not, love engineering. Because I will always be drawn to the poetic splashing of rapidly cooling aluminium, or the redness of the furnace, rather than the beauty of the elegant Hall-Heroult process or the complexity of an Integrated Circuit. Because when someone tells me about how the unions are ruining their industry, I retort by saying that the unsafe conditions at the plant are a good reason for the latest strike. Because I recoil at the amount of pollution spewed out by the massive chimneys more than I am impressed with the 13 Thermal Power Plants in Korba.

I'm not taking the high ground here. I know how important aluminium smelting is for our economy. It's just that I could not live with myself if this became my life. Not because it's inhuman, but because it's not me. I couldn't take the pressure that the engineers I've talked to live with. Not because I can't take pressure, but because my heart wouldn't be in it. Of course, it'll be extremely hard to walk away from engineering, considering all my formal education is centered on it. And I'll be turning my back on a comfortable lifestyle, the kind I've been brought up on (let's face it, for all the leftism I claim to possess, I am but an upper middle class kid who can't use an Indian style toilet).

The dilemma depresses me. And it troubles my parents. But it exists. And it must be resolved. The thing is, I've been digging myself a deep hole for the better part of twenty years. And the prospects of getting out of it, and living the life I alway wanted to live, and signing copies of the biography I always wanted written about me, are looking bleaker every day.

Why I don't have too many friends

Yesterday evening, I watched a couple breaking up. A stray gust of the coolest breeze had drawn me away from the library into the inviting darkness of my favourite riverside path for a solitary walk, and I couldn't resist sitting in on an argument between two people I don't know. (A welcome change from couples sitting silently, leading me to think that all they do do is sit silently for hours on end, and make others believe that they do actually have a life.) I don't know why I did it: I don't usually like watching arguments, even though I have consciously started more than my fair share. It was probably the refrain that the guy kept up, in his efforts to show indignation:

"What have I been doing these two years?!"

A fair question.

The mind is restless, O Krishna!

"I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Mrs Frost probably agreed, as she gave poor Robert the business end of her umbrella for getting them infernally lost.

Turns out poor Robert actually led a generally fucked up life, with a dad who left the family $8 when he died, him, his mother and his wife suffering from depression, a daughter he had to commit to an asylum, and all but two of his children dying before him. Ouch.

In other news, it has now been 16 days since my laptop died, and the days of hand wringing, verbal diarrhoea and crying myself to sleep are finally behind me, and I have successfully negotiated the five stages of the Kübler-Ross model. (Yes, I get the callousness of grieving over a lost laptop, while poor Robert wrote abominable poems after the loss of his children.) On the bright side, I've taken recourse in books, finally getting around to reading 'Mother' by Maxim Gorky.

One book that I recently reread is Upamanyu Chatterjee's 'English, August' (This would be the time to get scandalised, Mom). A brilliant book and one of my perennial favourites, it struck a peculiar chord this time, with its theme of dislocation and culture shock. Once you get past the brilliant satire and often adolescent humour, you get a profoundly sad story of a permanent outsider as he struggles to define his ambitions. I know it's terribly bourgeois, but there's been many a night when the question has given me sleepless nights. As for the culture shock, I am going to spend the next two months getting hazaar fucked in Korba, Chhattisgarh. Oh, and the characters of Prashant, the ample-bosomed childhood friend and Sathe the cartoonist are just plain creepy.

P.S. Meta-fiction is fun at first, but trust me, a hundred pages of it makes you want to do horribly unspeakable things with a certain Signor Calvino.

I love this so much, I think I'll post this again.

Can't Sleep? Try Studying PoM: The Guaranteed Cure for Insomnia

It Works! Joe couldn't sleep for days. He tried everything, from opiates to hammering his skull for 20 minutes. Nothing worked. Then last month, he studied a Chapter on Organized (not Organised) Structure and Design. He hasn't woken up yet.
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PoM: Who cares about A's and B's, when you can get those well-earned Z's?


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Cake or death?

So I promised to write more. Then waited two days in which I wrote nothing. And now, faced with the choice of studying ES2 or writing, I say, "ES2, no wait! Blogging!" Oh no, you said ES2 first! Transformers await. I shoot the voice in my head, curse Messrs Nagrath and Kothari, and decide to do what you do when you can't write, you write about writing. Tweeting, to be precise.

So, I finally came to terms with this whole Tweeting business and decided that the whole "I'm not on social networking sites because I have a life" argument is defeated by a lack of said life. My mother's frequent diatribes on the subject, which I happen to agree with, echo in my head, but voices in my head have an abnormally high mortality rate. Stop that bandwagon!

I sit on my bed, laptop on the chair, sweating profusely (it's hot, is it not?), cursing myself for not registering a complaint against this excessively slow fan of mine, and I decide to sign up for Twitter. Easier said than done. Twitter, it seems is blocked. What?! After a minute of frantic Refreshing, I give up. I regurgitate my mother's arguments, sulk, then start randomly Wikiing.

Days, then weeks pass. I start reading Kundera, fall in love with Immortality (the book, not the concept), and annoy the hell out of everyone with recommendations. Quark rolls up, and BITSMUN doesn't leave me any time to think, what with the shouting and being shouted at. But then, the Bogmalo party happens, and certain developments make me rethink my position on social networking. Facebook doesn't work, so I think about Twitter. So, I sit on my bed, laptop on the chair, sweating profusely, cursing myself for not registering a complaint against this excessively slow fan of mine, and I decide to sign up for Twitter (totally, @Prashant). Easier said than done. This time, Twitter opens, and I click on Sign Up. It's blocked. I try again. This time, I get a little further. A protozoically low graphics HTML form presents itself, which I fill, only to find that the word verification thingy isn't showing any words. I Refresh. The Network Proxy is not accepting any connections. Proxy ki maa ka! So, I go off and watch some Nordic Skiing.

You get the drift. I tried a number of times, but failed. To top it all, a Danish female called Miriam Vatshelle is already using the nick 'ajachi'. Feels good, though, to have someone who's not called ajachi, voluntarily pick it to be her nick. Not having ever been conferred a nickname better than Chaachi, I stick with marcopolar. Still no luck.

Eventually, I stop trying again. Buzzing, after all, is a suitable substitute. Then, JD tells me about Twestival Goa, and I decide, fuck it, I'm going to get on Twitter, even if I die trying. I know it sounds pathetic, and I really don't know why I wanted to Tweet any more. It's just something to do, I guess. Maybe it's an Ubuntu complex. You finally shift to Open Source, and you think, screw you Microsoft. I am the master of my own computer! And then you can't play any games, Open Office is a bitch, and you can't download VLC for reasons unknown. And you can't blame Bill Gates for it. So, when something doesn't work, you get pissed off and decide to make it work. Unfortunately, my lack of computer literacy - extremely dangerous for a prospective engineer, but I'll get to that in a future post - prevented me from doing anything about this Twitter situation, other than Refreshing harder and threatening to pour chocolate milk into the laptop's circuitry. So it still didn't work.

So, yesterday, JD says that I can try Signing Up on his comp. I try, and predictably fail. He's as baffled as me. Then I think, maybe it's something to do with my name. So I enter Engelbert Humpledink, because that's obviously the first name you use when you want a fake name, and try markovpolar instead. I don't know which, but one of them does the trick. And there, I have a Twitter account! Social acceptance awaits. The world is my oyster. Or at least, Engelbert's oyster. Somehow, changing names proves to be a bitch, what with a password I've already forgotten, and my utter ineptitude for navigation on a Web page. To cut a long story a little less long, it all works out in the end.

There was a point to all this...

The Customary Dust-Shaking

I wish I had a long-term reader, someone who's been following all my blogging and diary keeping (my sister doesn't count. Then again, her prowess at maths suggests she probably can't). He'd be terribly frustrated at the sporadic-ness (?) of my posts, and the utter lack of substance. In fact, he would've wised up to the situation years ago and stopped reading what I wrote. In which case he wouldn't be a long-term reader. Depressing.

Anyways, apologies all. It's been three months (not counting the minor vignettes from BITSMUN) since I wrote something. I have an army of excuses, including such stalwarts as lack of time, lack of energy, lack of inspiration and good ol' Writer's Block (-ock puns will get you killed). But writing seems to get me through frustration and stress, and there's definitely a lot of that ahead, so I'm back. With a bang, and more importantly, a Hoover.

BITS Mooning

A few random musings during my chairing the first day of BITSMUN 2010:

What were the odds that the delegate of North Korea has such an American accent?

The delegate of Canada, a particularly popular delegate from Lady Sri Ram, Delhi, needs assistance. I never knew someone needed so many people to help her charge her laptop?

St. Kitts and Nevis is going to raise money to feed its population who are hungry because of biofuels by taxing trade through a narrow sea route between St Kitts, and, well, Nevis!

The delegate of Guinea-Bissau is pissed off at the fact that the delegates of China and Pakistan made the working paper without telling him. If all world affairs were conducted subject to the approval of Guinea-Bissau...

Who the fuck is the delegate of Norway? He's been sitting in the second row all day, but I had no idea who he was. Anmol reminds me that I have no clue about the guy in the first row either.

China and Pakistan are getting assraped by the USA. And Brazil's not even got started. Navjyot can't string together coherent sentences in the best of times. Now, he's getting assraped.

Awesomest show-stealing ever by the delegate of Congo. Listed as a signatory to a very enthusiastically presented Working Paper, he bides his time until it has been discussed for ten minutes, then claims that he never signed it. More red faces than a CPI(M) Holi session.