All great tragedies are made of many smaller tragedies. Stories of despair and desperation. And these stories have their opposites. The sterling silver linings to their black clouds. For it is often the worst of times that brings out the best in men.

"The general manager lost his whole family in one of the fires in the building,"
(Ratan) Tata said, referring to Karambir Kang, whose wife and two sons - aged 14
and 5 - were killed. "I went up to him today and told him how sorry I was, and
he said, 'Sir, we are going to beat this. We are going to build this Taj back
into what it was'."

It made me cry.

My life, I have realised, is the pursuit of happiness, riches, and love, probably in that order, though being interrelated, there's no order really. Anything else will take care of itself.

If it doesn't, there's always a jack rod.


"Walking in the race of life
Looking for my own pace
Not always wanting to but I have to
Sometimes feeling like I've bitten off much more than I could chew
But the wind goes though my hair
Lifts me up with ease not a crease
Hair full of grease no weave embracing me
It's you I see
I am you and you are me."

I want to kill someone.

To the hair puller, the white girl with dirty blonde hair, who took great pleasure in bathing in a bucket, and then claiming she would marry a girl.

To the only sibling I talk to, or respect, or listen to, or heed. The only sibling who I defend, and the only one who will ever get to drive my Lamborghini.

Happy birthday!

"Happy birthday to you..."

Today I went back in time.

To an old haunt.

To an old friend.

To another time.

To a restaurant.

To a conversation in a car, outside that same restaurant.

To a moment.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, I heard a dead Parsi guy say:


"Oh how I want to be free, baby.
Oh, how I want to be free."

Sometimes I wish I were her.

Sometimes I wish I were her.

Sometimes I wish I were here.

Sometimes I wish I were here.

Sometimes I wish I were free.

Sometimes I wish I were me.


"All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow."
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you, and you don't belong to me."

Fast cars. Loud music. Alcohol.

Cliches are so much fun.


"You gotta keep pushin' for the fortune and fame.
You know it's, it's all a gamble when it's just a game."

Stairway To Heaven.
Mama I'm Coming Home.
Livin' On A Prayer.
Keep The Faith.
Layla.
Free Fallin'.
Fast Car.
Cocaine.

Pictures capture moments. Songs, songs are different. They capture memories.


"... just memories of a different life.
Some that made us laugh, some that made us cry..."

I have just discovered that my family were the undisputed lords and owners of over 11,000 acres of land. Each of those acres is conservatively valued at 5 lakhs today. To speed your number-crunching up, that's 550 crores, or $ 140 million. And they drank it all away.

It's enough to drive a person to drink.


"Don't forget this fact, you can't get it back; cocaine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; cocaine."

Of all the oxymorons in today's lexicon, and there are many, from thunderous silence to good shit, nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, is quite so disgusting and evil as

Veggie Delite®

Welcome to the new century.

I feel like punching something very hard. It's a great stress-relief mechanism, to shower gratuitous physical violence upon an object or a person. I wish to indulge myself in it.

Actually, maybe I should have some showered on me. Get beaten. To a bloody pulp. Like half-annihilated and almost dead. The sort of violence where the simplest thoughts and actions, such as BREATHE, BLINK, become tasks of great importance and skill. Where you don't so much begin to wish that it were over, because you're beyond pain, but you wish you could figure out what's actually going on. Beaten senseless. So that I look something like


Except with hair. I have nice hair. I'm half Mallu, you know.

I used to know a girl who would cut herself with a blade. She did it because physical pain was preferable to the other kind.

I'm beginning to understand the concept of Fight Club. Maybe we can start one. Disco Pig's Club of Fun Times. No punching on the nose, I'm all sneezy.

This is exactly the sort of behaviour that leads to schizophrenia and DID/MPD.

Remember the first rule?


"Ol' Miss Lucy's dead an' gone,
Left me here to weep and moan."

The last bubble. It's close to bursting. Anytime now.

Coincidentally, this is my 100th post. Very undramatic.

I've noticed that The Beatles' songs contain a lot of wisdom. You have to listen hard, but it's there.

Sometimes I feel like:

"...been torn apart.
Now he's a court jester
With a broken heart.
He said, 'Turn me around
And take me back to the start.
I must be losing my mind.'"

I spend money like a fool. All the alcohol, all the food, and I keep buying ridiculously expensive stuff for cars that I don't own and rarely drive.

But I read this today. And this one comparison of salaries struck me.

Glen Heroy, 45
Hospital clown
New York, N.Y.
$28,000

John Paulson, 52
Hedge-fund manager
New York, N.Y.$
$ 3.5 billion

Maybe I'd rather be Glen.

"Bring Sally up,
I bring Sally down..."

Random memory, in the misremembered and misquoted words of a fat, smelly Gujarati boy:
"You can get her to sing. I've discovered how. You have to catch her off guard. She was in the back of the car and the music was on, and she was singing along with it. Then I turned the music off, and she was singing and she didn't realise. It was beautiful."

I'm addicted to: G'n'R's version of Knockin', the guitar solo from 2:56 onwards. It's like Slash is in me, and my heart is his Fender, and it's SCREAMING.

Deep down inside, I've always had this unshakeable faith. In myself. That it would pan out. That things would be alright.

Now I'm not so sure.

I'm living in some bubble. In fact, I've lived in a series of bubbles, some concentric. One by one, they've burst. Now I'm on my last bubble, and it's going to pop very soon.

This whole straight and narrow thing, there's no point to it really. I've tried hard to do the right thing, as often as possible. Please everyone, be here, be there. Now the point is, you're so busy making everyone happy, you forget about what's happening to you. When it happens, all the people you tried to make happy are so busy being happy, they can't be bothered. Parents, friends, it doesn't really matter. What matters is self, as in selfish. I wish I were.

There was supposed to be a point that I was arriving at. But I can't seem to put my finger on it. Oh well, much like everything else, I've lost track.

Three things strike me. One written by a sometime team-mate and somewhat friend. One written by an American columnist. And one written for Kevin Arnold.

Prashant Iyengar: "Rostom Marker's entire family was killed in that accident. And there's nobody to mourn his death.. nobody to feel his absence. Makes me wonder...if memory is the pillar of existence.. Rostom never existed."

Mary Schmich: "Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's."

Kevin Arnold: "Memory is a way of holding onto... the things you are..."

Four boys meet.

Twelve years on, they meet again.

One of them is a drug dealer. One of them is a failed engineer. One of them is a restaurateur. One of them is an investment banker. One of them is always drunk. One of them builds cars. One of them builds portfolios. One of them bakes cakes. One of them may be gay. One of them may be dead soon.

One of them looks at the others with amusement. One of them envies the others for what they have. One of them envies the others for what they have become. One of them envies the others for what they can be.

One of them is me.


"We've come a long, long way together,
Through the bad times and the good.
I have to celebrate you baby,
I have to praise you like I should."

Happy Holi!

I know what it's like. I used to work with them. You can make that 68.

......

...I hope you're standing.

Memories of a different time. A simpler time. The magic of YouTube and the right search words.

Sweet memories. They sure don't make them like they used to.

"Bathed in blue, the walls of my memory divide..."

Will someone please take the bullseye off my back? I can't seem to reach it.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Clemens, S.L.

Do this: Sit down. Pass the back of your hand near your nose and mouth. You will feel nothing. Now close your eyes and do it again. You will feel the warmth of your hand on your lips. You will smell your hand. You will be able to pinpoint sounds and their sources more accurately.

When you lose your sight, the other senses try to compensate by amplifying themselves. This doesn't happen with any other sense. Maybe that's because sight is the most important.

Right now, the thing I'd like second-to-most is to learn to take good photographs. Pictures are like frozen slices of time, that you can always go back to. Music may bring memories of a time back, but pictures actually take you there.


"Your looks are laughable, unphotographable
Yet you're my favourite work of art."

Closed books are better than open ones. They stay cleaner.

Work is what you're busy doing while life passes you by.

One of the most humbling feelings is to look at your parents, and wish you were them.

So I was looking at my tshirt and wondering.

It's one of those things that your parents bring you in the hope that you'll grow into. My dad lugged it back from DC in the summer of 95, and promptly mothballed it until 2003, whereupon I used it as a rag/mop/bathmat and also wore while doing things to my Herald.

It came out of a 4-pack of them. I asked my dad why on earth he bought 4 tshirts that said Washington DC, and he was like, "Oh there was this Korean family selling them outside the Smithsonian, and it seemed like a bargain". Typical.

Even as a kid, it made me wonder. Selling tshirts outside a museum struck me as the sort of thing poor people did, and at 10 I didn't realise there were poor people in America. I mean, everyone drank Coke and ate burgers, and drove cars.

Then I began to understand. How some people are immigrants. How some people have no choice. How some people give it all up to start afresh, in the hope that things will be better.

It takes guts.

Once in a while, I think about that Korean family. I hope they made it. That their kids went to Harvard or Columbia or MIT, or wherever they wanted to. That they bought their Buick and paid off their mortgage.

It can't be too easy to leave your homeland. They're not particularly good at English, them Koreans. What made them leave the warmth and security of their country, to gamble on a better life thousands of miles away? No knowledge of where they were going, no one to fall back on, no guarantee of success.

Just hope.

It's always hope. Hope that things will get better. Hope that one day, your children will have a better life than you did. Hope that you will have all that you ever wanted. Hope that one day you will find happiness.


"And it’s hope that keeps me holding on
It’s just hope that makes me carry on"

Blah. Bleah. Bleargh.

Snap out of it. Stop moaning.

How?


"When you try and try and you don't succeed..."

Things I've learnt over the last year or so:

- Most people suck.

- You cannot trust anyone.

- Friends are an illusion. Friendship, doubly so. People take what they want, and give what they feel like. If this mutual whoremongering works out, beautiful. Otherwise, fuck off.

- It's your life. No one else cares. Don't expect them to, either.

- It has little to do with how hard you work or strive for something. Shit happens.

- Alcohol never solved anything. But then, neither did milk. So drink as much as you want.

- I'm really bad with money.

- Grab that holiday while you can. You may never get the chance again.

- Grab whatever it is, while you can. You may never get the chance again.

- Nothing lasts forever.

- Driving drunk may be dangerous, but it's fun as hell.

- When faced with a situation, ask yourself 'What's the point?' The right path will become apparent.

- Most people don't suck. They all do.

For teaching me to

Believe. Laugh. Learn. Love. Live. Dance. Listen. Smile. Trust. Think. See. Enjoy. Dream. Cry. Covet. Hold. Touch. Sense. Care. Open my eyes. Take pride in. Believe in myself. Speak my mind. Hold a hand. Lean on someone. Break free. Be brave. Think about myself. Live for today. Live for someone. Believe in someone. Give it all I've got. Give it a shot. Open my eyes. Take joy in. Smell the flowers. Chase the sun.

For teaching me to be me, by being you.

Thank you.

Sadhappy.

To the man who had the vision to change history. Who had the courage to pursue his dream. Who had the faith in his people, and his country, to overcome all odds.

Fifty years from now, they will speak of it in the same breath as the Beetle, and the Model T. And then we will say, yes, we were there. We saw it take shape. We were there.

Ratan Tata, I bow to you.


"A promise is a promise."

Someone wise once said: "The hardest thing you can do is make people believe. To believe in you. To believe in themselves. To believe in the truth."

I startle myself.

The new year resolution is happy, or bust.

So, within a given timeframe, I will be (tick one):
- Happy [ ]
- Bust [ ]

Thing is, I don't know the timeframe.


"C'mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin a blue rock
On a blue bus"

I think Bangalore is beautiful.

.

.

"We all live in a yellow submarine"

"You don't win silver, you lose gold."

So this is how it feels to not get what you want.

"Second is first among the losers."

Rage. Blood red rage.

Lots of anger and hate.

"Young at heart and it gets so hard to wait
When no one I know can seem to help me now"

It seems so far away, just like yesterday, an eternity ago, little large heads with big, wide eyes and curly hair. Driving home for the first time, like everytime.

"So nobody ever told us baby
How it was gonna be
So what'll happen to us baby
Guess we'll have to wait and see"

It feels like I've failed this really big exam and now I have to face the consequences. My throat swells up with fear/anxiety, my cheeks flush, my head and eyes ache, all the usual "Erm, Mom and Dad, I didn't do too well..." symptoms. Except they don't go away. For weeks on end.

"When I find out all the reasons
Maybe I'll find another way
Find another day
With all the changing seasons of my life
Maybe I'll get it right next time"

Lots of hate. Lots of love.

Lots of questions.

"Beyond the door
There's peace I'm sure
And I know there'll be no more
Tears in heaven"

"I knew the storm was getting closer
And all my friends said I was high
But everything we've ever known's here
I never wanted it to die "

Ironically,

"Tommy whispers 'Baby it's okay, someday
We've got to hold on to what we've got
It doesnt make a difference
If we make it or not"

In the end, Ozzy is always right...

"You made me cry, you told me lies
But I can't stand to say goodbye
Mama, I'm coming home
I could be right, I could be wrong
It hurts so bad, it's been so long
Mama, I'm coming home"