Change of address - finally!

After being undecided for a long time, I have decided that the address of my blog needs to change.
I blog here now.

We have a new home minister!

Finally, its over. The last of the crackpots has been killed (apparently one is still alive and kicking in costody and pleading to be killed. I would have loved to grant his last wish in the most brutal manner possible, had he not been young enough to divulge a little more information). The Taj Hotel might not look the same again. The death toll is uncertain. As most of my fellows demanded, Mr. Shivraj Patil has stepped down and our beloved PC has taken over his office as well (why do I get this feeling about us as a country having only one decent minister on the board? Maybe I don't like PC or maybe I am just ruthlessly objective in noticing that PC is also in charge of the Finance Portfolio in a country which might be on the threshold of suffering from huge home loan, car loan and credit card loan defaults, which has a faultering growth rate due to the global meltdown, whose benchmark index was at 21000 in the beginning of the year and is still shy of 9000 on December, 1st. Also, Mr. Chidambaram is supposed to present the interim budget for an election year, come February!)
Maybe I am just over reacting in thinking that the Centre is really looking at the whole issue as only a matter of replacing the Home Minister with another person who commands respect among the people.

Operation Mayhem

I don't care if they came in a speed boat. I am not bothered about where they came from or what their ideology is. I don't know if they came from the lands of our friendly neighbours of if they are 'highly motivated'. I have no interesting in finding out if the gunmen were Deccan Mujahideen or their brethren from Damascas. I want them chopped to death in some dingy corner of the laundry room in the basements of Taj. No glory, no martyrdom.
All I care about is that a hundred of my countrymen are dead, one of our most prestigious landmarks has been mutilated and the common man in the country's financial capital, after losing much of his hard earned money in the market meltdown, is now scared for his life.
Hence like any normal human being, should I not proceed to look for the first and most visible scapegoat? Most of my friends would say, "Sure! Pull the shirt off Patilji's back!", "Bring out Afzal Guru and hang him right away!", "Lets bloody drop a nuke somewhere west of Wagha!"
Since there are so many people already looking at these myriad interesting solutions to the problem of blatant man-slaughter in the name of some fundamental dictat (which I refuse to buy because I am 24 and I know that no regilion asks you to kill)
I would prefer to look at the mirror and think if the person on the other side has had something to do with it.
The world knows how divisive a crowd we are becoming in India. Eighty percent of us don't know what's happening in our neighbour's house. We are just not bothered. We are happy competing amongst ourselves to earn more money, fame, grades, contacts, cars, houses and foreign trips. We are least bothered about what the country goes through. We have reduced ourselves to that crab tank which doesn't need a lid. Why so? Because whenever one crab gets too close to jumping out, the others pull it back in. Hence people come to our country in speed boats, kill a hundred odd innocent folks and leave the country paralyzed.
Oh, an observation I totally forgot to mention. I haven't heard anything from the great Marathi saviour, Mr. Raj Thakarey. Is he too scared to get out of his hole and wave his tongue uttering filthy incantation in pure Marathi against the people from northern India? Or does he think that this massacre is another dastardly act of our brothers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh?
He has probably played the biggest role in dividing the city at a regional level.
My country lives on though and I must get back to my books because I also belong to that tank of crabs, I have a TT match in the evening, a session of Toastmasters after that and a presentation and a quiz on Saturday! They are still important.

The nightmare refuses to get over!

I don't know if I deserved this. I have no idea what went wrong and I don't even have the inclination to fight it out any more. I just want to escape. Yes, I accept, for this one time, I had rather be an escapist than fight a losing battle.
I don't know how to make contacts or use them, I don't think I am as useless and mundane as the people here make me out to be. I have no idea if all my accomplishments till this date are so insignificant that they don't matter at all to anyone involved today.
I am not fit to join the great clubs on campus, neither am I fit to get decent scores in my papers. Nor do people think that I am worth a pence when it comes to the two painstaking years I spent at Mathura working my arse off on multiple project estimates and piping designs!
Its been a downhill journey since the time I came here and my confidence has been shattered in every possible sphere in life.
Now-a-days I am scared to open my mouth to speak, lest I said something inaccurate and people came after my blood for not being as suave as everyone around them is. I don't even look or feel good these days. Every time I try to pull myself together and try to fight it out, another huge hit grounds me .
Life has become totally insipid now, hardly anything to look forward to any more.

Dope is a good thing

I don't say so. In fact I had written "Hope is a good thing" on my white board a couple of days back. But when my team mates left my room after a project meeting, I noticed that the H had been surreptitiously changed to D behind my back without much hullabaloo.
The mood on campus is very much like that as of now. Except the handful of brilliant people who feature on every firm's shortlists, there are many who are yet to find their names on a company shortlist. Yet, given the fact that we are at one of India's premier business schools we may still stand up and say that we will be placed and placed real fast.
But till that point in time arrives, we don't know what's in store for us. With the Investment Banks busy taking care of themselves and the Consultancies looking to pick only the best of the lot, it's a tense time on campus.

It's just an unending roller coaster ride. And I hate to hang on to it for too long.

But then again, if you have seen the cloud, maybe the silver lining is just eluding you.

Sometimes...you have got to let go

Yeah...sometimes, you just have to let go. No point building the castles when you have that gut feeling that they are going to come down crashing while you stand alone looking helplessly at them and try and make things work for yourself.

Life becomes horribly difficult to get along with. But then again, you can never summon enough courage to get over with it either. Hence you keep living and keep complaining like the algae that floats on the water and keeps it looking beautiful while killing it slowly. You keep showing a facade of perceived brilliance while people, with their incisive and presumptuous natures, gnaw through your armors and threaten to expose that soft spot that you were trying to hide from the world. You become a miserable fraud who doesn't have the courage to speak the truth to himself or the shamelessness to let the world know that he's worth nothing more than an eroded dime lying on the walkway for eternity.

Life goes on and you keep waiting for the almighty to give you a chance to find out if you really fit into the play or you were born to play a supporting role all through your life.
The story keeps rolling till you have lost faith or sometimes, if you are lucky, you are dead before that.

But some people are just not born lucky. They live through it, telling themselves that they are doing something good for people who matter till the day when its time to go.

Time out!

Its been too long since I did something out of impulse and just because I wanted to do it without binding myself in a predefined time frame and work schedule. I called up a cousin of mine only to find that he was spending time with another one and I was the missing out on catching up with people. I slipped out of campus and came straight down to meet my cousins. No questions asked, no plans prepared, no ideas exchanged.
It felt liberating, as if I was breaking out of a prison of my own mind in deciding to be spontaneous and not stay bound by my own prejudices. As someone in my class keeps reminding us all, "In the long term... we are all dead." So why bother so much about the long term when the short term is what you actually have.
Guess he has a point. I feel weirdly happy to have been able to get out of campus without giving anything else a thought. I hope this keeps happening more often and I finally figure out what is most important to me. I hope this last academic tryst becomes a true journey of self discovery and not something that will always be measured in marks, grades and salaries. Because, at the end of the day (assuming the day is long enough) we are all dead.
Therefore, its imperative, we keep taking the occasional time-outs, or else, we'll have very little of short term gain to show.