Recently....

Its been a crazy post Diwali November.Getting adjusted to the new house.Falling sick repeatedly due to diarrhea.Planning for January.Work getting a little hectic.This weekend I was completely engrossed in traveling and attending Grihapravesh-es.Have been listening to a lot of classic stuff-The Doors and Sabbath and esp Led Zep (OK what do call a Hippie's and a carpenter's ideal date?--- tripping on Doors ( apologies to Saanjh :-) ) ) .Also I am mostly dead on Orkut but pretty much there on Facebook ( due to company intranet filtering and 'coz I hate Powerscrap) with all its myriad applications which ask you to characterize people , poke your friends, put up your fav comic on your profile and do thousand more fun things.Really you should check it out.*

I have been buying books left right and center since the last five months and lately I have been able to catch up on reading instead of just admiring the bookshelf.

Books bought recently:

1.The diaries of Franz Kafka
2.Gravity's Rainbow
3.Madame Flaubert
4.A clockwork orange
5.Brave new World
6.Nirvana's Biography
7.Step across this line
8.The ground beneath her feet
9.A father and son
10.The code book
11.Dubliners
12.Above average

Among these I have only managed to read A father and son,Above average and Brave new world.All the rest are in unread or half-read stages.I was impressed by Brave new world and I would say it pretty much beats all other Dystopian themes by quite a margin.I like the irony and the grey ending of the book and they way that issues like purpose of life are explored without firmly sticking to one.Another post I did on Dystopia some time back here
Hopefully I would have something interesting to say next time around.Most probably I would be putting up some older posts which are in draft just 'coz I have put enough effort into them to delete them.

*I think that lately, all I have been doing is pimping various sites.I know people come to my blog just to navigate to other cooler pages but what to do, hardly anything interesting happens in my life. I have been told that everything that I do has an air of recklessness to it-including this blog.

The Diwali post

My first Diwali post in the three Novembers on Blogspot.Diwali being the most favourite festival of mine.Diwalis in Ranchi were always special.There would be that special chill in the air with the coming of winter and the days and the afternoons would be marvelously sunny and blue-skied.Invariably we would have a four day mini-vacation from school.I remember a lot of Diwalis-some pretty routine,some out of the ordinary.There was this Diwali when we went to wish a family friend of ours and came back to see that all of our diyas had disappeared.This being a house on the ground floor.Me and my sis had an argument whether the diyas were carried off when lighted on lots and lots of steel trays or the thieves had a well laid out plan of extinguishing the diyas,emptying the oil in a can,collecting the wicks together and then stuffing all the diyas in a huge boraa, this latter suggestion being from my sister.Then when we were living in Satellite colony,we had a gang of boys going from block to block blowing up all the letterboxes(made of wood).Their modus operandi was to go in two groups of two to blocks facing each other and blow up the boxes simultaneously using two aloo-bombs stringed together.This was to cause simultaneous pandemonium.Apparently they also gutted the insides of a post-box made of steel (as they could not blow it up-if they had succeeded,then they would have sent scraps of hot metal flying everywhere - a la Flak Cannon in Unreal Tournament 2000).

Then there was the usual pre-Diwali notorious cracker bursting in school.It was always a ritual in school eagerly anticipated by everyone.Whoever attended Shyamali in the 90's would surely remember the sudden sound of a bomb going off in some corner or toilet and the roar that would rise instantly-the roar of the students cheering.There were special fireworks when we were in class 9th.The Secondary building students had just assembled for the morning prayers and there was an ear-shattering explosion and smoke was visible from the corridor of 10th std(Some people recall that this was at exactly the moment the Princi had started pleading for the cause of a cracker free school-but that I think is just melodramatic trickery of memory) .The Princi was furious and ordered for an immediate round up of the 'culprits' which resulted in Modi lining up some random ppl(which included some hapless victims from the late line) and pushing them on to the podium.Then the Princi in an attempt to act 'tough' started roughing up the slimmest guy of the lot,shaking his collar in front of the whole secondary section.It was the most pathetic display of arrogance by the teachers I have ever seen.There was also the Diwali in which Aashu had burnt his hands and there was collective universal mourning in school what with all his Bhakt log falling over each other to convey their sorrow and all the teachers hearing out his tepid tale of woe with the utmost seriousness.(There is this interesting tale about of a follower of Aashu*- Bhakt Pandey) but pardon me I am slipping into Shyamali folklore again.

What was once fun turned into a boring ritual once I came to Bangalore.Routine trips to relatives place and bursting crackers with cousins much younger than you is no great fun.Also in the Hostel there were a lot of crackers burst but that satisfaction was not there.Today for the first time-I lit diyas and found it pretty enjoyable .This time I am down with food poisoning(yes, again) so can't gorge on the usual sweets and delicacies as I used to.Hope your Diwali was fun.

*Aashutosh-Aashu for short(yes the two a's are there to appear at the top of any list alphabetically) is a friend who was the 'star' of Shyamali and the apple of every teacher's eyes.The Maryada Purushottam Ram of the batch.