A Good Year

Time was romanticized. And laziness. Pseudo-sounding words. Empty thoughts. Would-be intellectualism.

Lack of ability poorly veiled by a veneer of an affected nonchalance. Indecisiveness became a way of life. Courage was mustered. And then squandered.

Words were written. Obliterated. And another way of life was laid to rest.

I'm Watching Too Much TV

This evening I was listening to the radio in the car. And it was taking me only a beat to figure out which song was playing.

Yeah, and I actually found myself singing along,

Holle holle se hawaa lagti hai...

Dance pe chance maar le, o soniya...

Dil roye ya ilahi tu aaja mere mahi...


Well, I could go on but you get the point....

Damn, I'm watching too much TV.

I Can't Think of a Title

When you're young, you have these stars in your eyes. And it's just so damn easy to dream. You think this is possible, and that is possible. And you're all inspired by some silly self-help books that talk about the power of dreams and all that jazz.

You watch all these movies, and think, "Yeah, this is good shit, man. I'm going to live my dream like the guys in the movie. I'm going to do the things I want to do."

And then reality comes and does it's bitchy thing. And you're still a jackass.

The Whine Post

Why, oh why do I have to suck at the thing I want to rock at, goddamit?

Why am I the worst sucker in the history of sucking at the thing you want to be good at?

Why is it so hard to chuck it all up and take a chance?

Okay, so this has finally become exactly the thing I didn’t want it to become, but the thing I knew it would become some day. A whine-about-your-crappy-life blog. Damn.

Glory Glory Man Utd

Even as John Terry walked up to the penalty spot at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow yesterday, a large part of me knew that he wasn’t going to score. Moscow has always loved the color red.

It’s always nice to get the better of Russian oligarchs in their own backyard but I don’t bear ol’ Roman any grudges. After all, being a Russian billionaire is not easy. But I have a few bones to pick with some of his employees, past and present, at Chelsea Football Club, Didier Drogba being one of them. Big D, much like his (pet) namesake of Whinging Street fame, never seems miss an opportunity to throw his weight around, and show just how petulant he can be. I think Big D and Emmanuel Adebayor hung out a lot together this season, watching Thierry Henry videos. You know what; I won’t be surprised if the three of them get together and start a School Of Petulance For French-Speaking Strikers, with branches in West Africa and the Caribbean.

And at the exact moment when Avram Grant received the loser’s medal from Michel Platini, miles away, somewhere in Portugal, a crabby man afforded himself a rare smile. Jose Mourinho never came across as a gracious man. He’d be thinking that if he hadn’t been booted out of West London, he’d be the one to bring back Europe’s most coveted prize from Moscow. But he’d be wrong, because no one in the whole wide world could have stopped Ryan Giggs and Rio Ferdinand from holding aloft the piece of silverware that their club had last won nine years ago.

There is something about these big European nights. Little else in the world can get me to scream at the top of my voice at 3 in the morning, and twirl my T-shirt around like a maniac.

The Intellectual Paralysis Syndrome

Optimism will be my death one day. For about 10 seconds, I actually hoodwinked myself into believing that someone might just comment on this blog, and remind me about that 'non-interactive school project research process' that I'd promised to write on. But, then reality struck me like Sunny Deol ke dhai kilo ka haath, leaving indelible bruises on my do kodi ka self-confidence, which had taken enough beating already due to the absolute inability of my limited intellectual prowess to transcend the literary barriers posed by a prolonged bout of Writer's bloc (Erm...Writer's bloc...really now, I must realize that pretence is as potent a killer as the optimism I was talking about) I've been thinking that it's about time I write something of substance, probably a thesis on the evolution of Marxist thought in post-colonial South Asia (No, no, you judgmental people. I'm not a Communist. You see, I pander to my collective readership of 2, and they're both Communists. Oh, the things you have to do to keep a blog running....*shakes head in disgust*) But, as you might have already figured, I've dropped the idea and I'm back to churning out the non-consequential rubbish I usually churn out. You see, a rather severe bout of chicken pox has compelled the scholastic elements of my rubbish-generating brain to go take a hike (again!), which makes me wonder whether I’m going to ever write anything of consequence.

Let me admit it, then. I had a dream…A dream of getting 100 comments a day for my scathing critiques on the way The Left are trying to screw up the N-deal (There goes my readership. These Communist types are not open to constructive criticism, yaar), of having Dell and Levi’s beg at my feet for ad-space on my blog, because it gets 10, 00, 000 hits a day or something, of being quoted in the NYT editorials for my path-breaking piece on the sub-prime mortgage crisis and Sovereign Wealth Funds (Something along the lines of, ‘Moares, financial expert, who has attained cult status in the blogging world, says on his blog A Gallon Of Butterbeer,…. )

But Fate had other things in store for me. Other things being an abysmal page load count of about 5 per day (including my own page loads….so now you know how bad the situation is) and an uncanny knack of getting a paralytic attack, mental and physical, every time I decided to post something that makes sense. In other words, the moment I think of writing something intellectually challenging, I become intellectually challenged, which is very frustrating, especially when it happens all the time. So, the next time you see me with a bizarre, fixed expression, staring blankly at my computer screen and my rigid fingers lying immovable on the keyboard or you spot me in an overall I-just-paused-myself-like-a-video-game-and-this-is-how-I-look position, you’ll know what’s wrong. It’s the Intellectual Paralysis Syndrome. You might think this is some kind of cheap reality-show stunt to win your sympathy and increase my readership. Er…actually, it is. The smart ones would have got the hint

Watch this space for the next piece of faff.

P.S: I’m thinking of changing the name of this blog to A Gallon of Beer. An extensive survey of the human population has shown that 41.7% of the world loves only beer, a mere 17.4% loves only Harry Potter and the remaining 40.9% of the world loves both Harry Potter and beer. Out of this 40.9% of people, more than 75% of people prefer their beer to Harry Potter. Do the math, and you’ll know why this could probably be the best business decision I’ll ever make.

P.P.S: I have stated this earlier and I will clarify again. This blog is not an outpost of some Marxist-Lefty-Communist-Socialist clique that panders only to other Marxist-Lefty-Communist-Socialist cliques. This blog is open to all, irrespective of political affiliation, and religious disposition.

Sum involving the Mercedes-E class car

'Many interesting illustrations are provided drawn from day-to-day life, wherever possible, to highlight difficult mathematical concepts. Hrithik acting in Krrish and Rani in Bunty Aur Bably (Chapter: Relations and Functions) is a point in case.
Further, some special problems have been framed on such lines. For instance, there is a sum involving the Mercedes-E class car.'

-Reliable Series Mathematics and Statistics Textbook ( For Commerce): Class XI, page (iii)

And the deed is done

And the deed is done

After about 90 days of nerve-wracking, brain-wrecking and all sorts of other wreckings and wrackings, I've finally convinced myself to start a blog. I think I owe my readers *cringes and remembers he doesn't have any* and myself an explanation regarding my late entry into the blog-arena:

1) An excruciatingly slow internet connection that compelled me to restrict my internet activities to research for 'em school projects on topics like 'France', 'Wildlife in Australia' and 'The Lack of Deterministic Casualty in Quantum Mechanics' (Now, now, it's not very polite to subject you to such pretensions in my first-ever post. 'Research' during the school days was a non-interactive 5-step process. More on that later. All right, all right, I was lying about that quantum mechanics bit)

2) The dark days of Orkutting and Facebooking mania in school left me so mentally scarred that I used to shiver with fright whenever I read or heard the phrase 'social networking' (don't make me say that again) and, over a period of time, I somehow began to equate blogging with 'You-Know-What'. (For all those who underestimate the impact of two words on the human body and mind, please refer to the Harry Potter Series by J K Rowling)

3) Blogging was to me, in my pre-enlightenment days, merely a refuge for those who wanted to 'be heard'. My conversion stems partly from the realization that it's definitely much more than that and partly from the unbridled joy that one experiences in the course of using a wi-fi connection, especially if one has grown up on internet speeds not exceeding 0.01 Mpbs.

Causes narrated; let us now delve into how this blog was born. (Damn, why do I sound like a science teacher trying to get the Big Bang Theory across to his class? This is what 14 years of Indian education does to you. You start sounding like a friggin science teacher) Well, a couple of days are spent in trying to get my ego to swallow all that it had previously said and felt about blogs to well-meaning friends and relatives. Then, another couple of days are spent contemplating whether it's a good idea to run off to the jyotish, ask him to read my kundali and tell me when I can start my blog. (C’mon, everyone does that these days. A lot depends on when shani and rahu are crossing paths.) But things don't quite pan out that way and the man can only give me an appointment after 3 months or so. So, I decide that I have to take matters in my own hands. The christening is rather easy, as the blog name has been thought of somewhere amidst all the ego-swallowing and the jyotishbaazi. The template is chosen. And in a matter of minutes, I reach The Promised Land

And the deed is done.

Welcome to A Gallon Of Butterbeer