Musings on slowing down

Too quick to imagine! Too slow to blog!! Well, borrowing a line from Neil Young is not going to help me defend my actions. No excuses for keeping silent for long this time around.Got too involved with office work- actually, inter-office politics. Perhaps, ensnared is the right word.Saved myself by the skin of my teeth.For the moment, though.Not to forget the grace of God. Gawd....the offline world is dirty with internicine minefields masquerading as skinny alleys and swarming with a gargantuan population of back-stabbers. The world is full of *@##$#$ and other real slimy-shady characters. I am sure Eminem will concur.
Are these the opening bars of : "It was a dark and stormy night" ?
Not really. Two bright spots in a man's morning : Got my Saturday Club corporate membership after months of intense lobbying, and rightfully reclaimed my sparkling new Wagon R ( actually fresh from the oven, as they say)from the garage a week after it was unceremoniously banged and damaged by a mentally-unstable psychopath of a driver. The marwari Jack D Tripper was dripping with alcohol and reeking of pan masala.Took him by his collar and extracted 2000 bucks from his purse, besides forcing him to write a confession, and lodged a formal complaint against him with the local police station. In India, the Police happens to be the most organised mafia syndicate and it was only after raising my voice several notches higher to break the sound- pollution barrier was I able to convince those "uniformed gentlemen" to accept a "General Diary" from me.
On the Republic Day, travelled to Madras ( self-funded) to participate in the Odyssey Trivial Pursuit slugfest.Got KO-ed in the prelims by just a point. Therefore have to wait till next year to prove a point. Couldn't win against any of the usual fiends but influenced some friends who agreed to team up with me next time around. Most importantly, got a handle on the Do's and Dont's. A puerile act ? Well, the child in me propels me to act unabashed at times and take outrageous risks. Why did I end up spending an everest of currency notes from my pocket for participanting in an event which attracted 850 3-member teams ? Because it was there.
Last Saturday was at the Calcutta Club's International Night.Mixed business with pleasure. After dishing out plastic smiles to the clients, tried out some exotic dishes from Morocco, Iran and Qatar. The worst act of the day : Trying out the Turkish Melon flavour from Bacardi. But where were those Pretty Young Turkish Delights gone ? All I could survey was a galaxy of "Thirty Plus" over-the-hill crowd around. I watched a random set of last-chance-trendys flirting with desperate abundance while Indian Ocean played on with their usual nonchalence.
A sleepy Sunday categorised the day as an authentic lost weekend.

Gazing at remains of the day. 

Not about just putting a lipstick on a gorilla

“The intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex” quipped Edgar Wallace in early 1930s. Indeed the “thinking man’s crime writer” found his own immortality within his creation : King Kong. Many lightyears later came Peter Jackson who firmly established the fact that Kong is King. Yes, I just saw “King Kong” this Sunday morning ( Jan 1, 2006) at Inox with the entire family and I am still reeling under the sledgehammer performance put up by “the 8th wonder of the world”. In his inimitable style, Peter Jackson de-positions Steven Spielberg as a jurassic inhabitant of the Special Effects park. Yet the director doesn’t treat computer-graphics wizardry as billions of blue blistering barnacles littering the silver screen. I can visualise the “wide-eyed school kid” alter-ego of the director looming large in all the frames. I take a trip down the memory lane and I vividly remember the dazed state of my mind after watching the 1933 version in a B&W TV set at my mamato dadu’s place at Lake Market. I was a school-kid that time. The gullible soul that I was, I used to believe in a lot of myths and mysteries in those days. Almost of all them got shattered in zillions of pieces over and over again by the time I grew up. Thank you Peter Jackson. For re-assembling some of those broken pieces and giving me back a part of my childhood memories. For transporting me to the “Island of the Day Before” aka Skull Island where characters from Borges’ “The Book of Imaginary beings” tumble out into the open. For making me reinterpret the inner meaning of the line : “It’s the beauty which killed the beast” at this age and time.

Followed the movie with a family dinner at the Calcutta Club. Superb food from Ambar. This time the service was much better. Maybe because there were less of lazy bearers.

Spent a quiet 31st Dec night with my wife watching Ray’s “Days and Nights in the Forest”.

2nd Jan : Took a day off from work. Went to Belur Math to watch the evening aarti. Had a soothing effect on my frayed nerves.Met my dida at her spartan Galiff Street flat. She is a retired college prof but a very interesting person to talk to. Her advancing years ( she is eighty plus now) and her deformed legs notwithstanding, her mind is razor-sharp. In lot many ways, she reminds me of my deceased grand mother which whom I was attached for long. I clicked a picture of her with me. Perhaps a child’s way of snatching a candy made up of memories and tucking it away in some corner.