Hungry?

It's three in the morning. You've been in the pub since lunchtime. You just spent five minutes trying to unlock your front door before you realised you were using your car keys. You finally stumble in, reeking of 100 pipers. You know you should drink some water, then go straight to bed. But you're hungry.


Time to hit the kitchen!

Hygiene

Tip: Silicone rolling pins are more hygienic, easier to clean and longer lasting that wooden ones. They also hurt a lot less.Remember: with cooking, the most important thing is hygiene. So before you begin, stumble into the bathroom. Then pick up a bar of soap and stare at it for about thirty seconds while rocking backwards and forwards. Try to remember why the fuck you are in your bathroom holding a bar of soap. Leave bathroom.

Enter the Kitchen

You now need to find the kitchen. Think hard, you must have left it around here somewhere. Stumble in its general direction, placing your hand against the wall. This will help support you and maybe if you're lucky you'll find a lightswitch as well. Light could help at this point. If things are rotating, try rotating in the opposite direction to make them stay still. After entering the kitchen, turn on the light and stare blankly. After a minute or two, realize that this is not the kitchen, unless you recently put a bed in the middle of your kitchen. A bed which seems to be occupied. By a woman. If you can call that a woman. Man, whoever dragged that skank home at closing time is going to be seriously traumatized when he rolls over and sees her tomorrow morning.

Keep stumbling from room to room until you find the kitchen.

Care in the Kitchen

If you are single, you can skip this. If you are married, you need to remember that loud noises in the kitchen could wake your spouse, and you're in no condition to try to win an argument with anyone sober. So it's important to move with exaggerated caution whilst inadvertently making loud noises anyway, in order to preserve the precarious delusion that you're being considerate.

Now you're ready to begin.

Recipes
Soy cheese on Burnt Toast
Get some bread. Uh-oh, someone bought unsliced bread. Try to find bread knife. Fail. Find electric carving knife. Wrap knife in tea towel to muffle it. Cut two rough slices of bread, approx 2mm thick at one end, four centimeters at the other. Put bread in toaster. Try harder. Shit. Well maybe if you put the thin end in first. Yeah, that did it.

While the bread is toasting, get some cheese from the fridge. Fuck. None there. Never mind, there's that soy cheese that your spouse's irritating vegan cousin brought along to the picnic that time, but no one ate it. Find cheese knife. Well, just use the foil-cutter on your bottle-opener. Slice soy cheese. Is soy cheese the same as tofu? I mean what can the difference be? Does it even melt? Never mind - you smell burning, so the toast must be done.

Place unevenly burnt toast on griller (or broiler, for Americans) then place soy cheese on top. Melt soy cheese, assuming soy cheese actually melts. Drop grill (or broiler) on floor, waking your spouse. Suffer consequences.

Huge Sandwich
Open fridge, and lean on door while contemplating contents. Continue for up to ten minutes. Decide that you'd like a huge sandwich like Scooby-Doo or Dagwood Bumstead always has. Look for baguette, fail to find one. Use frozen garlic loaf instead. Cut length ways. Look in horror as bits of frozen garlic bread go everywhere. Painstakingly reassemble bits using toothpicks. Now we're in business!

Assemble filling - some lettuce leaves, some pastrami, some hot sauce, some pickles, some tomato slices... uh oh. Is that red stuff on the chopping board tomato juice, or did you cut yourself? You don't feel any pain, but you're pretty well anesthetized... never mind, if you get some blood on your sandwich it's just extra protein, isn't it? Or vitamin D or whatever blood is made of. Where were you? Oh, yeah, cold chicken, mayo, bok choy, hoummus... wow, everything looks kind of funny... mango salsa, salami... like kind of monochrome, you know, all black and white and your ears are ringing and...

Cake

Cheap instant cake (drunk chef's impression)Preheat oven to whatever seems appropriate. Get packet of cake mix. Try to focus on instructions on packet of cake mix. Hold a hand over one eye, so you stop seeing double. Ah! There you go. Gather ingredients. Realize that you don't have butter, decide that mashed potatoes has similar consistency. Realize that you have no milk, use beer. Realize you have no eggs, improvise egg substitute from weet-bix soaked in milk. Shit. Looks like you did have milk, after all. Too late now. Attempt to grease a 30cm (12 in.) cake tin. Remember that you have no butter. Grease tin with garlic flavored stir-fry spray. Mix ingredients in what you hope is a bowl, then pour batter into tin. Cook until bored. Eat immediately, regret soon after.

Two Types of Leftovers
Right, you've learned from your mistakes. No more complicated meals. Just have that leftover pizza. Or maybe that Chinese takeaway. The pizza looks kind of inviting... but it's just plain cheese, and you want something spicier... hey, wait a minute, why not, like, put the chow mien on top of the pizza, and put it in the microwave?

Mmm... not bad, but it needs a little something... got it! Potato salad! But wait, the potato salad is cold. You could put it on top of the pizza-mien and microwave it, but then the chow mein will be too hot and the pizza base will go soggy. You'd better fry the potato salad separately. Crap, where's the fry pan? Oh, well, you can always use that pressure cooker you got as a wedding present and never used.

Place potato salad in pressure cooker and place on high heat. Get bored, and finally forget about the potatoes. Finish chow mein pizza, which is now cold. Go to bed. Awake early next morning to sounds of spousal screaming coming from kitchen. Hide under pillows. Await inevitable.

Cheese and Mushroom Omelet

Omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, omelet, mushroom, mushroom. Break three eggs into mixing bowl, miraculously not getting any eggshell in the mix. Add a dash of milk, pepper and herbs to taste. Do not add salt to uncooked eggs, as this can make them tough. Beat eggs until light and fluffy. Slice 4-5 medium mushrooms. Heat a tablespoon of butter or margarine in a frypan or skillet, then fry mushrooms until brown. Remove mushrooms from butter.

Turn down heat and add egg mixture, occasionally lifting edges with a spatula. When nearly cooked through, place mushrooms and cheese on top. Put under a hot grill, until cheese has melted. When cooked, fold over and turn onto a plate. Marvel at how well the omelette has turned out, even though you're hammered. Take omelet to TV room and sit down in favorite chair. Remember that you left your drink in the kitchen. Balance plate on armrest of chair while you get your drink. Return with drink, and sit down, overturning the omelete into the chair. Contemplate hot cheese congealing on your best trousers. Sob uncontrollably.

Two minute noodles and Tomato Sauce

Add hot water from the hot water tap to a medium-sized pot.
Bring to boil.
Add noodles and flavour sachet from two packets of Maggi Two-minute Noodles.
[optional] crush a clove of garlic or two and add a pinch of salt
Boil until noodles are soft.
Strain. Put noodles back in pot.
Add Tomato Sauce.
Add fat - butter is best, margarine acceptable, or a little olive oil.
Eat out of the saucepan.
[Optional] Cry.

Cleaning Up

Don't. It will just make matters worse. Just make a note to buy flowers on your way home from work tomorrow hope that your spouse... HOLY SHIT! WORK! You're due at the office in three hours! WAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Mid-sem Blues II

It’s funny how the world appears to you, the way you are feeling at any given time. Right now the world is a hard, cold place. Nothing is right. I failed. Again. Agreed that nearly everyone did badly in the mid-sems, but that’s hardly an excuse for me not doing well. There’s something wrong, and I know what that is – I have stopped caring, and stopped working. This is a very bad sign. To think that only till last semester if there was one thing that never gave me trouble was academics! Never mind. I shall not go on cribbing about how everything around me is unpleasant. It is not. The problem lies within me, and I shall solve it myself.

Comfortably Numb

It always happens. Whenever I watch the recording of pulse, a shiver runs through my spine. I actually feel I was there at the Earl’s Court, present at the time Gilmour was strumming away at his Fender Stratocaster amidst the dazzling lasers. I become completely oblivious of the fact that my friends are raising hell in the corridor, or that I’ve got to take my dinner before the mess closes. Imagine what those thousands would have felt who was actually there. It is a bit of a cliché to say that it’s once-in-a-lifetime-experience. But it is true. Agreed I’m slightly inebriated right now, but that is no excuse. PULSE was the greatest rock concert by the greatest band ever. I am falling in love with Pink Floyd over and over again.

mid-sem blues

i have mechanics today. and i don't know which paper i have tomorrow or the day after for that matter. i spent the entire sunday playing counter-strike, looking for ways to bypass the proxy server of our college, discussing the best speaker systems, downloading music and killing my roommate (this is roughly what everyone else did, with slight variations). guys are giving someone birthday bumps in the next wing, and in mine they're simply screaming. apparently a game of cs just got over and the terrorists are fighting the counter-terrorists in real life. it's 2 in the morning. no one that i know even pretended to study. engineering college is fun!

of human bondage (i'm not very imaginitive when it comes to titles)

Finally finished reading ‘of human bondage’, and what a huge volume it is! I quite enjoyed it in the middle, especially the parts in which Philip was leading a wretched life as an aspiring painter and his relationship with Mildred. My heart went out to him. It became monotonous towards the end though. I could almost predict its end (he finally settled down with Sally, which was the only diversion). Of course it has depicted the human psychology very well. It is very realistic, but of late I don’t care much for realism. We’ve got too much of that in our lives in any case. It was not poetic as a Shakespearean tragedy (I don’t like happy endings), nor was it fantastic like a Wilde or a Kafka. But I must also confess that I agree with Maugham’s philosophy in general, in most of the cases. All said and done, it has all the ingredients of a Hollywood drama (I’m sure there’s already a film made on this novel!).

ps: i had posted a quote by oscar wilde a while ago. it's queer that maugham should mention him in this book and also agree with that particular quote of his. the quote's still there if you look for it

The Diaries

Einstein had precisely defined relativity: when you are sitting with a charming lady, hours seem like a minute. And when you are sitting on a hot stove, a minute seems like hours. This is exactly what I feel during the lectures. I feel I’m in an oven, and I impatiently glance at my watch to know when the eternal hour will pass. And here I am in my room. I just watched this movie (Motorcycle Diaries) and didn’t know when it was time for dinner. The movie is captivating! It’s a biographical of Che Guevera, the famous Argentine doctor who became the icon of revolution in South America. The movie is not so much about the life he led as a revolutionary. Rather it is about the road that led him there, and is based on the diary he kept during his journey through South America with a friend on a motorcycle (he called his notes ‘the motorcycle diaries’).

The movie has brilliantly portrayed the life of Che. But more importantly, it is beautiful even as a stand alone. I had watched a part of it with my mum (had to leave half way against my will as I was getting late for my train). My mum didn’t know who Che was. Nor did she know Spanish (we had to rely on subtitles), yet she appreciated it. This is a proof enough of how impressive the movie was! Be it the frozen roads through which they dragged their broken down Norton, or the fling Che had with the mechanic’s wife; the poverty of the common folks and the coolness with which the rich pick out a handful of miners out of hundreds of aspirants; Che’s asthma attacks and their treks through the Andes; or their conduct at the missionary where they cured the lepers – every incident is an art piece. It was a pleasant change from a Hollywood thrash. Then again, I have taken to liking foreign movies. Of course art knows no language. Of course I rely on subtitles.

The next village

My grandfather used to say: “life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that – not to mention the accidents – even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.”

More headbanging

This was even better. Booze and rock all night long. Literally. There were college bands competing in the last round of ‘the rockers’, but they were nothing less than any pro. I forgot all my pain when they started playing numbers by iron maiden and ac-dc, and of course metallica. And what a place I chose for myself to stand – beside the speakers! I was leaning on them! And I could feel the music – the beats and the bass. It was an unbelievable experience. The single best part of the cultural/tech fest that we had over the last three days. And I am looking forward to more concerts next year, but before that I hope to make it to the ‘rendezvous’ – the IIT Delhi cultural festival. I LOVE ROCK!

heandbangers

My neck is broken. So are my arms and legs. My voice is gone. My eardrums are damaged. I’m totally dehydrated and sweating like a pig in this cold. I have no energy left in me…still I never felt more alive thus far in my college! This is what Parikrama can do to a person who worships rock. I had a ball of a time screaming, jumping, dancing and head-banging right in front of the speakers which were blasting away classics like purple haze, another brick in the wall, comfortably numb, highway to hell…it was awesome! And tomorrow there’s another band playing…

String Theory

[this is what I do when i get bored waiting for a train at a railway station]

The string theory was proposed in an attempt to unite all the laws of the universe to give ‘the theory of everything’. It simply states that the visible matter is nothing but the energy produced by the vibrations of ‘strings’, which are very much like that of a violin, or a guitar, but are very small (of the order of 10^-33 cm or Planck length). If the atom were the size of the solar system, strings would be the size of an atom. Just as vibrations at different frequencies produce different notes in a guitar, vibrations of different strings give different matter.

Two main kinds of strings were theorized – open and looped. Both satisfied the mathematical equations. So far so good, but then the physicists encountered a problem. They came up with five different variations of the theory. This was a major problem – how can different theories explain the same universe? And if there are five, there can be more.

Then Edward Witten, the scientist/physicist from the institute of advanced science, came along and proposed that these theories are just images of a single theory (people believed him because he is said to have the highest IQ of all living humans). He went on to propose his own version of the theory called M-theory. According to this, the strings are not one dimensional, but three dimensional, and can be stretched like a membrane (simply called ‘branes’), few of them vast enough to cover the entire universe!

He also said that all the strings are open looped and are attached to this mega brane. But gravitons (the particles responsible for gravity) are closed looped and can roam around freely. They can also leave our universe and enter another and vice-versa.

If the above theory is true, then it may be able to explain the phenomenon of ‘Dark Matter’, which has puzzled the physicists for a while now. May be the extra gravitational force that the astronomers are detecting is not being exerted by some dark matter from our universe, but from the gravitons that escaped from a neighbouring universe and entered ours! In that case, there would be no need to look for dark matter, but other universes.

Scientists at CERN are conducting experiments to detect the gravitons that escape our universe in the particle accelerator. They crash two atoms at very high speed and detect new particles produced. If gravitons do have aforesaid property, then it will show it by its absence, i.e., experiments won’t be able to detect its presence.

Then three things will happen – it will be the first experimental proof of the M-theory; dark matter puzzle will be solved; and presence of multiverses will be confirmed. We live in interesting times indeed.