Post Surgery Day Dreaming.

So here I am...after a long period of inactivity. But really I couldn't post anything, what with operations and stuff. Now, if you don't know, a lot of preliminaries have to be taken care of before the big day - blood tests, CT scans etc. And all of them involve needles, and the person in-charge of needling me invariably fucked up the first time in finding the right vein. So i was pricked twice. And it is not a pleasant feeling. So anyway, i was operated on (3 hours in OT), given antibodies thrice daily for 3 days (injections, again) and let off, only to return 5 days later as my nose became blood faucet with a leak. So there I was, a litre of blood, and painful vacuuming of nose later (3 injections of local anesthesia in each nostril and yet i cried out in pain) in a familiar room with two beds, green walls and no windows. I was depressed, so say the least. Anyway, I survived. And here I am - alive and blogging. Here's my new painting - first one post surgery. I hope to be more regular now. But the humidity, heat and bugs make me want to just sit back with a tall cool drink. More later.

Abstract (oil on paper)

These days i am mighty bored. and the boredom reflects in my paintings. sigh. just grab a brush, some paint and dribble them on paper....

Ink wash (ink on paper)

Winter and Games

Missed

Night

The dark black shadowy night, stretched tightly over deserted streets and empty doorways, stuffed between alleys, almost touching bumpers of parked cars, glittering dark black in the eyes of the lost people standing on December highways, silent between hosts of industrial sirens, riding with psychopaths in the accelerating cars, rattling in the purses of street-side vendors, interleaved in the papers of the lawyers defending serial killers, breathed into lungs with angrily puffed cigarettes, trampled under the feet by walking no ones, hanging by weak threads over social holocausts, is alive and on the horizon there is a tinge of vermilion.

Valentine's Day

I genuinely believe that all the “days” are a result of conspiracy between card makers, confectioners and the florists to make some extra sale. Valentine’s Day is no different. On the contrary, it is the festive season for aforementioned vocations. Though, it is also true that V-Day makes for a great joke amongst the wise singles. In a few days time, you will be able to laugh your asses off at the feeble attempts of the emos to chat up that Goth girl they've been eying for weeks.

Typically, the emo in question will spend even more time in its room than usual while making preparations for the big day. Such preparations may include actually cleaning the bloodstains off their sleeves; an act rarely recorded by the scientific community. They usually buy a card or bucket (it's pronounced bouquet) of flowers off the internet, as they don't want to risk going outside to the local florists and getting beaten up by the bajrang dal. Another commonly practiced ritual is to buy a box of chocolates, darker the better (Goths love black). But most crucial part is the poem, which is usually along the lines of

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.

But the violets are wilting,
And the roses are dead.
The sugar bowl's empty,
And my wrists are stained red.

A less morbid variant reads something like:
“I love you. There, I said it. Now let me do it up your bum?”

After sending the love poem to the girlfriend anonymously, the two emos will meet, usually in the local cafe (which turns out to be 5 miles away), or the erstwhile secluded spots of campus, which do not turn out to be so secluded after all, what with vigilantes waiting for their prey. The female emo (femo) will feel sorry for the male emo's (memo) desperate attempts at winning her heart. Luckily, the femo has her hair fringe so far below her eyes that she cannot see how pathetic the memo is. Hence, the two get along pretty well. It's best to just leave them alone at this point, as they can lash out extremely violently when provoked, and wait for the femo to cut her hair.
Incidentally, as i was writing this, my gtalk notified me of an email from e-bay informing me of special Valentine’s Day offers...

Random works

The Fall of Adam

Morpheus' Musings

Summer

Reclining Matron

Mother and Daughter

Patriotism

ai'm sure you've noticed that come 26th january or the 15th august and everyone is suddenly playing patriotic songs (they are also heard blaring from the loudspeakers). there is a sudden surge of patriotism in every indian, almost. but i can't help but wonder at the emptiness of these gestures. if you are patriotic, you should [i]do[/i] something for the country, rather than shout out your feelings. there was a parade in my college this morning. i was asked whether i'll go or not. i gave an honest answer - if i wake up, i'll go. the person was infuriated and labeled me unpatriotic. i asked a simple question. if, during the placements, schlumberger (one of the leading oil companies of the world) offers you or those of you who are going for the parade a job, who will decline? schlum usually employs people in foreign soils. so taking the job means leaving the country. most of the people who say they are patriotic will take the job (no one has declined schlum till now in my college).

i love my country as much as anyone of you. but i don't believe in blank show of it. i listen to patriotic songs when i want to, but usually it is not on the afore mentioned dates. i also know one thing. i won't leave my nation and waste the resources she has bestowed upon me on XYZ. patriotism doesn't mean going to the parades. it means respecting your country and her citizens.

Hangover Cures

What is it we are all going to be trying to make next Tuesday? New Year's Resolutions, if we are halfway sane.

In fact - if i may digress for a moment - it turns out that there may be a very good reason why we fail to keep our New Year's Resolutions other than the obvious abject feebleness of will. It's this. We can't remember what they are. Simple. And if we actually wrote them down, then we can't remember where we put the piece of paper, either. Oddly enough, the piece of paper has known to turn up again again exactly a year later when you're casting around for something on which to write the next year's abortive attempts to pull your life into some kind of shape. This is not, it turns out, a coincidence.
Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression "it turns out" to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actual is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors "I read somewhere that..." or the craven "they say that..." because it not only suggests that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I?

It seems that the brain is affected by alcohol. Well, we know that, of course. and those who don't yet are about to find out. But there are different gradations to the effect, and herein lies the crux. The brain organises its memories like a kind of hologram (it turns out). To retrieve an image, you have to re-create the exact conditions in which it was captured. In the case of the hologram, it's the lighting, in case of the brain it is, or can be (it turns out), the amount of alcohol sloshing around in it. Things that happen to you or, frighteningly enough, that you yourself say or do while under the influence of alcohol will only be recalled to your memory when you are under the influence of that exact quantity of alcohol again. these memories are completely beyond the reach of your normal, sober mind. Which is why, after some ill-advised evening out, you will be the only person who is completely unaware of some barkingly stupid remark you made to someone whose feelings you care about deeply, or even just a bit. It is only weeks, months, or in the case of New Year's Eve, exactly a year later, that the occasion suddenly returns to your consciousness with a sickening whump and you realise why people have been avoiding you or meeting your eye with a glassy stare for so long. This often result in your saying "good grief" to yourself in a loud voice and reaching for a stiff drink. which leads you up to the next level of inebriation, where of course fresh shocks await your pleasure.

And the same is true on the way back down. There are certain memories that will only be registered by revisiting exactly the same state of dehydration as the one in which the original events occurred. Hence the New Year's Resolutions problem, which is that you never actually remember the resolution you made, or even wrote them down, until the exact same moment the following year, when you are horribly reminded of your complete failure to stick by them for more than seven minutes.

So what is the answer to this terrible, self-discipline. A monastic adherence to a regime of steamed vegetables, plain water, long walks, regular workouts, early nights, early mornings, and probably some kind of fragrant oils or something. but seriously, the thing we are most going to want on New Year's Day, and be desperately trying to remember how to make, is a good hangover cure, and especially one that doesn't involve diving through ice in the Arctic. The trouble is, we can never remember them when we want them, or even know where to find them. And the reason why we can never remember them when we want them is that when we heard about them we didn't actually need them, which isn't any help, for the reasons outlined above. Nauseating images involving egg yolks and Tabasco sauce swill through your brain but you are not really in any fit state to organise your thoughts. Which is why we need, urgently, to organise them now while there is still time. So this is an appeal for good, effective methods of freshening up the brain on the New Year's Day that don't involve actual cranial surgery.