Ek Chaalis ki Last Local??? Yeah right...

The long wait is finally over.. After a hiatus of about a fortnight, I am back to regular blogging… Though that itself is not sure coz my broadband connection is acting real weird, and MTNL, acting as per the standards of all organisations of the Indian Government, has still not looked into my complaint.. So as I wait for the ever-indispensable MTNL phone-lineman, I have been granted permission to use Mr. C’s computer… All hail Mr. C for that

If anyone has yet chanced a glance at the time when this post was entered, you might be wondering as to what I am doing at Mr. C’s house at this unearthly time (it may seem to you that 6:37 PM isn’t an unearthly time, but in my time zone the time is 7:07 AM).. Well, sadly Mr. C has been transferred to some place and is leaving Mumbai soon.. So all friends decided to have a night-halt at his place.. That ended up with me, Mr. A, Mr. C and an until-now-unintroduced friend Mr. E at Mr. C’s place.. So basically we gorged on six pizzas, until Mr. A decided to give vent to his sleep and dozed off very early, even by normal standards… Mr. E, the youngest and the most adventurous of us, decided to bid adieu to our friend Mr. C by making a rather adventurous plan, which I am sure owed its origin to the four drops of Romanov Vodka which he had consumed before the pizzas…

Whatever be the case, it is to be noted that at exactly 00:35 hrs on the 3^rd day of July 2007, Mr. E decided that we friends (three of us, coz Mr. A had already started snoring) should go for a walk to the local railway station at Elphinstone Road… His initial plan was to take the last train home, and as per the recent movie “Ek Chaalis ki Last Local” we were led to falsely believe that the local trains run till 01:40 hrs.. It was only after we reached the station when we realised that the last local train had already left at 01:15 hrs (the movie makers should be sued for this)… To while away time Mr. E had this idea of walking down from our station to Lower Parel station along the railway tracks.. Bowing down to his wishes and ignoring the threat posed by the numerous pools of shit and the rowdy “taporis” by the trackside, we decided to accompany our friend on this quest of his.. But of course it isn’t the journey which made me write the post.. It was the sight which met our eyes when we reached the station back..

On reaching our beloved Elphinstone Road station, we three musketeers saw that the station had undergone a huge metamorphosis during the 25 mins that we had been away… The previously empty benches were either occupied by sleeping beggars or chatting labourers returning from the mills.. One could occasionally spot a policeman.. One such philanthropic policeman came to us and inquired as to what we were doing… When we told our case, he started warning us about the unsocial elements present at stations, and being teenagers, we didn’t give a damn.. When we had finished talking to him, we just walked on with the intention of paying no heed to his warnings.. After one full round of the platform, we reached one extreme end and found staring at us a group of people whom I couldn’t distinguish at that point of time.. It was only after a hurried nudge from Mr. C that I realised that the group comprised of eunuchs, or Chhakkas, as we more often call them.. Then there was this defining moment in my life, when the Chhakkas gave me one such killer look which conveyed that they would like nothing more than to have my balls in their hand and smash it to smithereens to make me like them (it actually happens in Mumbai)… This one moment has caused me to consider adding the words homophobia and eunuchophobia (if such a word exists) to my long list of fears.. Then one of the “taporis” seemed to have problems with us conversing partly in English, thus giving some rather loud comments, which, combined with the killer look of the Chhakkas, catalysed our unbelievably fast trot back home…

So this was our experience when Mr. E missed Ek Pandrah ki Last Local… And the moral of the day, or should I say the night : Never trust a Bollywood film and a guy who had his Vodka… Just kidding, Mr. E

The Theory of Relativity

Ten days pass away, and the ultimate sense of grief and longing sets in… Grief, for not having written any blog entry.. And longing, for talking to my friends, which is not possible here as my cell phone is on roaming.. Of course, I have an excuse for not writing a blog entry.. I am currently pursuing the ever-so-difficult and inevitable task of finding myself a college and this quest has led me to New Delhi (that explains why my cell is on roaming), where I have put up at my cousin’s place and taken admission in Hans Raj College for the course of B.A Economics (Hons.)… Some may say that the excuse is hardly valid, coz I sure did have access to the net from this place.. But the saddest part is that my younger cousin has already exorbitantly exceeded the maximum allowed internet usage limit, and he requested me to curtail my net usage, otherwise he would be in some serious trouble…

So what have I been doing since the last so many days??? Getting bored, piss bored.. I did manage to do some commendable things, though.. For starters, I finished up Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”. Amazing book by an amazing man… I was shocked to know about the realities of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, and the oddities of her son Sanjay Gandhi (sterility drive and all)… All in all, a very good read.. I also started reading the Lord of the Rings, phinally… I had been waiting to lay my hands on it since a long time, but never had the courage to pick up the 1100-page mammoth.. So in the last few days, I finally overcame my fears.. This suddenly reminds me that my blog entries have been a bit too long, especially the last one.. So I will try to curtail it from the next time onwards..

Now, getting to the topic of the post, which I just thought of while typing the fifth line: I was a CBSE student in class XIIth, and many of my friends belonged to the ISC board.. It is not a very well known fact, but the truth about ISC is that the board does relative marking.. That is, the subject topper’s marks are made 100, and the marks of the rest of the students are increased accordingly… So if a person manages to top in all subjects, he will get 100%... On the other hand, CBSE believes in absolute marking, and therefore CBSE marks are never as high as ISC…

For applying to colleges in the Delhi University, the class XIIth marks play the pivotal and the deciding role.. In reputed colleges like St. Stephen’s, 75% weightage is given to the board marks, and only 15% to the interview performance, while in the other colleges the XIIth marks solely decide a student’s fate.. So there is an unfair advantage to the students from ISC.. I had heard that to counter this, the percentage of ISC students is deducted by 5%, but on asking the concerned authorities it was made clear that no such thing happens… I started wondering about this topic coz even after having a decent interview, I was only put up on the waiting list for St. Stephen’s College, while absolute gits from ISC (serious dung-headed gits) got through.. So this is where I got stuck… A very practical and logical question : Why is there a disparity in the marking standards of the two boards, and how to tackle it? And this gave rise to a new and more fundamental question : Why are there two (actually many more, if we start counting the state boards) educational boards, in the first place?? What is the need of having separate education boards??... If people say it is less taxing on the infrastructure and management, that is crap… On the contrary, the education system of the country would become less ambiguous and improved if unified… With this I would like to bring the post to an abrupt end (though I am not done at all) coz it is getting very lengthy and dragging, and throw the topic open to you all… All I expect is some comments and feasible solutions to this very basic problem from the readers…

Ulta Pradesh

It is with a really apologetic feeling that I have started to write this post today… Blogging is turning out to be a really difficult task.. Its okay on those days when something eventful happens, but its really tough to write a post on those days which turn out to be totally uneventful… Like yesterday, when I spent the whole day at home.. I was at my wit’s end to find a topic to fill my blog with, and my mind came up with dumb ideas like telling the readers (I wouldn’t have made this statement, coz I never expected anyone to read my posts… But since I can see a few comments, I am led to believe that there are certain people in this universe who are so utterly bored that they considered reading my blog as a very lucrative option.. At this juncture I would like to mention my special thanks to those people, who posted some comments just to keep me happy) about my choice of music… I know that such a travesty would have caused me to lose whatever little readership I have currently obtained (three people by the looks of it)…

But I am also quite happy to inform everyone around that there was something very eventful today.. Apart from me watching the movie “Shootout at Lokhandwala”, there was a very strange incident that took place in a totally different part of India : U.P… Everyone (hopefully) knows that U.P is a state in India and is the abbreviation for Uttar Pradesh, sometimes jocularly referred to as “Ulta Pradesh”.. And let me tell you that I don’t think there is anything funny about addressing the state with the name of Ulta Pradesh… The most recent occurrence that took place there kind of reinforces that U.P has something Ulta-Fulta associated with it.. Now people may think that I have that stereotypical mentality of considering U.P and Bihar as very eccentric states, and I would like to clarify that this is not the case with me… I myself have resided in Lucknow for 6 years and have really fond (and when I say fond, I mean it!!) memories associated with the city and the state… So its not as if I am going to give a biased description of the current event that took place out there..

As the song “Toh phir aao” by Mustafa Zahid plays on my computer, I embark on the task of describing the strangest examination ever conducted in the world… The Combined Pre Medical Test (CPMT) is an exam given by the residents of Uttar Pradesh for a seat in any one of the various medical universities situated in the state, and as expected, students slog their three-lettered unmentionable body parts to get through the exam.. The funniest thing about the exam is that it is not conducted by a fixed examination board… On the contrary, the different medical universities take it in turns to conduct the exam and this year’s edition was to be managed by a complete novice : Jaunpur University… And due to this lucky turn of events, I got yet another opportunity to criticize the educational system in our country, which is one of my favourite pastime activities… The exam results were announced on the 14^th of June, and U.P has been burning since then… Not due to the excessive heat of the summers but due to mass scale protests and riots in the state, especially in Lucknow and Kanpur.. The reason : Out of the 16000 odd students who gave the exam from Kanpur district, only 20 were declared eligible… Now one more important fact about the exam is that to be eligible, one has to score merely 35% in both the papers.. So how can one explain that whereas last year out of the 60000 odd candidates who appeared for the exam, 55000 were eligible, this time out of the 70000 odd candidates, only 14000 were announced eligible.. There was this rumour doing the rounds that every candidate with a roll number resembling (4n+1) {where n is a natural number} was announced eligible…

Before I move on to describe the other facets of this story, I would like to clarify that though I totally empathize with the protests of the students, I still don’t agree with the means that have been used by the students (or should I say, the means that have been used by those idiotic hooligans who get paid by political parties just for disrupting the law and order in a state)… For one thing, they burnt a bus full of 40 people in the Gomti Nagar area of Lucknow… Although the people escaped unhurt, I think they were as much to be blamed for the exam scandal as the thumbnail of Paris Hilton (who, incidentally, continues to rot in jail)… That is one most peculiar thing about Indian protests… I could go on and on about this topic but I had rather save it for some other uneventful day, when I could fill the blog with my views about the topic…

So going on with the story… I would like to remind the Science students that the eligibility criteria for the CPMT exams this time around kinda resembled Huckel’s rule of aromaticity, the (4n+1) rule.. A very simple way, I would say, of knowing one’s CPMT results this time around… Jokes apart, I was shocked to hear about a guy committing suicide coz he didn’t get qualified in the CPMT after taking a drop for four years… One event for which I think the examination committee should be held solely responsible.. A related event was of this boy getting a 60-something rank in the All India PMT and not even qualifying in the CPMT… Closer to me, one Ms. D was badly depressed coz she didn’t qualify in the exam, whereas one of her really dumb friends got a 500-odd rank, only to realize that the results were withheld by the U.P Government.. Another really funny thing about the OMR sheet used in the exam : Normally questions are given with choices like A,B,C,D , but in this exam the choices for questions were printed as A,A,A,A; B,B,B,B and so on.. There are also allegations that the question paper codes were tampered with, that is, question papers with the same code had a different order of questions… I commend the organizers on how efficiently they managed to so badly screw up the procedure of a totally computerized exam..

Now I have this totally out-of-the-earth explanation of this scandal… I know this is just a conspiracy theory, but who gives a damn… Methinks when Mulayam Singh Yadav was about to resign from his office as the Chief Minister of U.P, he resolved to have Mayawati embroiled in some type of controversy… What better way than to screw up the CPMT papers?? I know it might sound strange, to the extent of being hilarious, but if Mulayam can make Amitabh Bachchan appear as a farmer on paper (refer to the newspapers for this piece of news, in case you haven’t heard of the controversy yet), this is something really accomplishable…

After such a brilliant mockery of the Indian education system, I, an ardent fan of Uttar Pradesh and Uttar Pradeshwaasis, have to admit that addressing U.P as Ulta Pradesh is not totally unjustified… Paper leaks can still be understood, but paper code tampering is something which I am sure is totally unheard of… But of course in U.P, you need to expect the unexpected… And Ms. D, get happy, coz this post was for you…

A Day Well Spent

I don’t know how I am back writing for the blog, but this seems to be getting onto me.. Writing has become my plank of wood, making me float through the sea of sorrows that is threatening to engulf my life.. You may think I am getting a bit melodramatic, but this is seriously true.. Almost all of my results are out, and believe me it has been a disastrous month for me.. So writing is what is keeping me going right now.. The two hours that i spend writing this daily post is like a tonic...

I have this really peculiar habit of giving two or three dots at the end of each sentence, instead of one full stop... My Microsoft Word editor seems to have an issue with it, underlining every such occurrence with a green line denoting syntax error.. There is an explanation to it... Its not as if its done just for the sake of looking different… It signifies that my sentences are never meant to end.. Its meant to be an endless conversation.. But all this explaining goes in vain, coz the editor still continues to underline the occurrences..

You must also have noticed that I take a lot of time to get to the actual topic of the post.. There is a fully valid excuse for that.. I have been reading Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” lately, and he has this same habit of describing trivial things.. So I can assure you that this tendency of beating around the bush is just a passing phase, soon to be replaced by the writing eccentricities of some other author…

Now I have already told you that I am officially unemployed at this point of my life, and coincidentally I have also turned 18 recently, which means I am eligible to drive a vehicle on the Indian roads (or potholes, to be more precise).. So my father (after a lot of persuasion from my side) decided that the time is right for me to get a driving license… So I end up paying Rs. 2000 to a driving school exclusively for having my driving license made, because, prodigious that I am, I had learnt to drive cars when I was in class 8^th (slight departure from my omnipresent modesty, which is well known to all my friends and other special people)… My father asks one of his clients to hook me up with some driving school, so that the cumbersome process of making a license is made slightly simpler (though later we realize the erroneous assumption).. So basically I end up in the Regional Transport Office (RTO) on the 21^st day of May, 2007 to get my learner’s license done… Much to my displeasure, I was barred from being given the learner’s license because I was 17 years 357 days old… So I had to steel my heart and curb my desires of driving the car legally for about 26 more days, after which my father decided that the time was ripe for me to give it another try… This is how I ended up today in the RTO…

Now let me tell you that the last time I had been at the RTO, I had been made to stand in the queue for about 2 hours before I could get down to having some paperwork done.. But then that was last time… And since all of my paperwork had been completed, I expected that today I would just have to go to the counter and collect the license (and how wrong I was!!!)… All that was to be done was to have a receipt printed and have my photograph clicked by the computer… But like every plan of mine, this one also started coming apart at its seams.. The last time my form had been rejected by the computer only due to the mere technicality of my age not being 18… But this time around, the computer’s human counterparts, the officers at the RTO, considered it as their job to find at least one error per officer in my form… This is one really commendable fact about the officers working under the Government of India… They are always very good at paperwork and finding faults in it.. One officer signed on my document, later realizing that he wasn’t entitled to do so, thus literally canceling the signature on the form and sending me on to a higher authority… The higher authority seemed to have an issue with my address, saying it didn’t come under his jurisdiction… Of course I thought the officer was being strict about the rules, but that doesn’t explain why he immediately signed the form when the driving instructor just made an appearance (I am not trying to point out any unholy nexus between the officers and the driving schools, if that’s what you are thinking)… So somehow I manage to get to the receipt counter, and get a token numbered 210… When I look up at the token machine, I realize that the current number being processed was 88… There was this sudden pang in my stomach, which made me realize that I was hungry… So I decided to give the local canteen a chance, coz my turn was going to take eternity to come… I ordered some food, and then paused to realize that all the waiters were actually minors… There is this silent smile on my face, coz 12^th June was anti child labour day, and on 14^th June I see a government canteen full of minors serving with all the mastery that their young age could permit… The helpless smile on my face soon faded, coz I was back in the waiting room with hordes of people on either side, crazy to get into the photo booth.. And phinally I somehow managed to get my learner’s license…

The day doesn’t end here, of course… I came back home, where my friend Mr. C was waiting for me, and there he told me about his day… He is doing an internship for a society and has to conduct a research about education in India... So he goes to the education ministry and various other government offices to get the essential data, only to be redirected to some other office and then to some other.. Firstly, all the data is manual instead of being computerized… Secondly there is the totally indifferent attitude of the officials.. And the worst point is that when he asks the officials to have the information under the RTI Act, the officials seem to be unaware of the Act itself… Now I wonder…. What is the use of so much paper work and the RTI Act, if the documents can’t be easily accessed??

So all in all, it was a day well spent by both of us… One trying to get his own work done, and the other trying to get some work done for the society… And I don’t need to specify that both of us, with totally different motives, one’s selfish and the other’s social, met with the same fate…

And they say women are from Venus....

Well its a weird start to my blogging days... The topic seems an odd one to start with, and after reading the title half of you people will think that I am one of those guys who started blogging as a time pass activity after some girl dumped me just to get back at that girl.. Let me tell you that you will be partially right if you start thinking that..

Not that some girl dumped me.. But I did start blogging as a time-pass activity coz right now I am officially unemployed... Just gave my 12th board exams and my engineering exams and am waiting to get into some college.. So thats enough info about me..

Some people would want to know what to expect at this blog.. Well, frankly, I have no idea about that.. I just felt this urge to write today, and made a blog for myself.. There is no guarantee that I will again be writing in this blog, if the enthusiasm is over.. But as long as I write, I can guarantee you that it is not going to be about anything utilitive... It will only be about some crap from my crappy life..

Now coming back to the topic at hand.. I have had the great luck of having a great friends' circle.. It consists of a huge number of people with absolutely diverse personalities.. So I have this friend Mr. A who loves this girl Ms. B... Now they have a breakup for no rhyme and reason, and its kinda the 14th breakup they have had.. They have an astonishing rate of 2 breakups per month.. And the most blatant fact is that they were on perfect talking terms 2 days back, and all of a sudden the girl sends him a flurry of SMS's saying that it's all over without giving a hint of any reason..

So this is where I get to my post title... When people say that women are from Venus, I would like to say that this is an overstatement... I am quite convinced that it is impossible to trace the origin of the female members of the species Homo sapiens to one common point.. Not even a woman can predict how another female Homo sapiens is going to react to a situation.. So for someone to classify women as belonging to planet venus is nothing but a gross error.. This statement has been testified by all of my male and female friends, most of whom belong to the species Homo sapiens and some from various species like Corvus splendens(house crow), Mus musculus(common mouse) etc.. (I believe in world unity, you see, and that includes befriending all species!!)

So next time you spot anyone trying to impress people by giving dialogues about women being from venus and men being from mars, don't feel hesitant to give them a piece of your mind ..