HNO3 + HCl

Sleeping for the next day's big gig is a PAIN. I lied down at 10, after an hour or so of packing and unpacking. Slept at 1.

November is awesome. Especially when you cuddle in  inch-thick blankets with the windows open :)  Woke up by 8. Bruv had just returned from one of  his LONG pan-India Yatras.  He returned from Chennai, I was going to Chennai. Irony,eh? Got ready by 9:15. Dropped at school by 9:30. Wandering inside the school without worrying about Exams or classes is a BLISS. Met  PT sir. I was standing with a rucksack heavy with clothes and stuff and ogling stupidly at him sitting there with a TINY bag. What could possibly fit into that thing?


Had to wait for PR. Ass, he is. Told me to come by 9.30, came himself at 10.15. And also forgot his tiffen.  Why, I ask."I'm a Hypochondriac", he says.We stupidly hoped for the Principal to drop us by his Innova. After all, *We* paid for it. Indirectly.
________________________________________________________
The bus journey was long. It became warm, and I wondered why I wore my jacket. I still think that a bus-ride is the cheapest roller-coaster you could ride. You know, with the bumps and the rickety suspensions and all? Finally a few seats freed up before we reached the station. PR wanted to know why I love Harry Potter so much. "Convert me from a non-believer to a believer", He said. I love explaining complex Harry Potter plotlines. It was SO much fun.

At the station bus stop, Sir went to charge his phone, and then wandered off someplace. We called him asked him where he was. " I'm over here. Come."  the Genius says, and cuts the line. But we found him and hence, went to Platform 3.

The woman who announces the train arrivals. I always imagined her to be some sorta middle-aged woman. Kinda sweet voice.

I love Tinkle. I still read it. It's right up there with The Deathly Hallows and The Bourne Supremacy. But we refrained from buying it at the stall. Good thing, as we were about to realise.

PT Sir is overreactive. The train stopped for a whole five minutes. But for unknown reasons, we were running like madmen to reach B1.

The train journey was long and quite uneventful, except perhaps when PR prank-called me. He got down at some station.I had just  bought some vadas, and was eating them when his Cell rang:

"Dei Banthia, We've caught the wrong train."

Yeah right. I swear, we must have read the whole ticket atleast some 10 times.

"Oh right. Are you sure?"

"Yeah." I could hear the train moving behind him.

 What should I do? Get down at the next station? Meh, I'll just finish my vadas.

Then came PR smiling like a prat, with PT Sir following suit.

____________________________________________________

Chennai is fricking HOT . And Humid. It was raining cows and buffalos and yet I was sweating.

I so wanted to eat at Saravana's. So I dragged them to the upstairs restaurant.  3 Chappatis, 2 biryanis and a curd rice later, the bill came to 250 bucks. That's when I realised we were short on Money. Uh Oh. And to top it all, the Auto fellow charge a hundred bucks to get us to the hotel.

Palm Grove is a sucky hotel. It's atleast some 80 years old. I'm not talking heritage-style, ancient-design old, I mean OLD old. The room was tacky, to say the least. And bell-boys came every hour to ask for tips.
 This time, it was easy to sleep. We were so damn tired. 
________________________________________________________

8 AM. Humid. What kind of a cruel joke is Chennai? But Devvarman kept us entertained. Yes, the room had a TV. Thankfully.  We dragged ourselves to the in-hotel restaurant for the 'complimentary breakfast'. Now here I was, wearing a jersey and shorts, and in comes the Bangalore team uniform-dressed. With the fancy school blazer and all. I could almost see the scorn on their faces. Nevertheless, I wanted to keep it cordial, so I talked to them:

" We're the team from Bangalore. We were the national runners-up last year. We're gonna kick your asses over here."

Okay, they didnt actually say the last line, but they as well might have. Stupid tactics, as PR says.
___________________________________

Finally went to the venue.  8 teams for the City finals (:O) and the competition was damn close.  Some team with green shirts made it through. And the Regionals started.

I'm not going in detail about the fiasco at the quiz, as I can only remember the Bangalore team prancing in their seats to tell the answers. But from nowhere, the Vizag team won. Woah.

At first, yes, it was disappointing. But then, hey, Fourth place isn't so bad. We still have loads to look forward to.
__________________________
Returning home. Cash in pocket: 300 bucks. But we still went to the Cybercafe in the station, to do some *ahem* life-changing online work. But apparently, the cafe was hacked, and everytime we tried to log in, it redirected us to some other site asking for the password again. So we gave it up and just went to the TIME website to gleefully look up our names.

The train was a nightmare. COCKROACHES! Ohkay, I'm not much of a manly man, and I cant bear watching those creepy little nightmares crawl upto my food, or to my sleeping body. *shudder* But I miraculously went to sleep, somehow.
What else, woke up, went home.

An uneventful end to an eventful little trip, eh?

PS: Hope you get the title of the post. It's an inside joke.

The FacePhases.

Facebook. You know it. It's THE social network. 

One fine day, sitting at home and ignoring that Chemistry textbook on my table, the Aristotle in me took over. 

If you observe idly (which is my favorite pastime), an average dude's social nework life can be classified into four broad phases:

 FacePhase 1:

You create a facebook profile with no profile picture, a fake year of birth and zero friends. It was either your friends pressuring you, or you wanted to give it a shot ("What IS it with this bookface, anyway?"). It's extremely boring, and poking is completely alien. Now, there are two ways this could wind up: 1. you end up bored and log in so rarely that you forget your password (thisisfacebook) OR 2. you keep going at it, and watch your life being taken over.

FacePhase 2: 

Change profile picture to Justin Beiber/ Justin Timberlake/ Rob Pattinson/  INSERT GAY HOLLYWOOD STAR as you think it's 'kool'.You receive friend requests from other misguided 'kool dudes'. (All the America THEY know are the stereoypical Americans from local movies, or AXN.) Feel encouraged, start sending more friend requests. Get accepted into the gay hollywooders community.

Now come the status updates. You start up by copying some dude's emo status, and posting it as your own: Life is nothing without your love/ I don't wanna love, because it hurts/ (INSERT RANDOM STATUS CONTAINING THE WORDS 'PAIN, LOVE AND HURTS' IN VARYING COMBINATIONS). Then you pester every online dude to comment on it. ('Dei, please comment on my status da!'). Recieve comments like 'correct da machi', 'you say the truth in life', etc,etc. Feel more gloated, more emo statuses. 

By this stage you would probably have sent a thousand friend requests to all the girls you could possibly could. One or two get accepted. More gloat. More emo.

 FacePhase 3:

Now the mania REALLY kicks in (read 4-5 hours on facebook per day). Your Farmville farm is fertile, Mafia is growing and the Cafe brings in customers.  Your wall is filled with " ____ needs you to help him fertilize his farm", "____'s Mafia needs more men", etc.

By this time, you gather up the courage to upload a personal picture. It's probably a crop of some group photo you chanced upon, or some picture taken manually through a cell phone.

Notes. You see  X gaining popularity through that Note he wrote about some exaggerated incident. You try writing you own. Tag all your friends in it. Pester them online dudes again. "Hey check out my Note! :link:"

BTW, till this time, pronunciation marks and capital letters are completely alien to you, and an excess of exclamatory marks is absolutely necessary to stress the importance of the sentence.

FacePhase 4: 

FacePhase 3 may last from anything between 6 months to one and a half years. After those months of comment-pestering, girl-befriending, etc, etc, you finally get some sense knocked into you. You realise the importance of punctuations after that embarrassing incident (whore you?).

Zynga fades away, online time reduces, you realize how much time you're wasting.

But you still have to ABSOLUTELY update that you won 5K in a science quiz.

Funny got ANOTHER new name.

Oh.My.God.
Another (hilarious) attempt at a love poem: http://www.links2love.com/poem_generator_1.htm


This night I shall dream of your bedazzling Magenta hair and Okapi-eyes.
Wrapped in echoes of your mellifluous Gluteus Maximus-music,
I long to sip from your Tigermelonful lips.
In my dreams, we fly on the exquisite winged Bitter gourd of Purpleness -- skimming vast continents of pubic hairs and Orangutans.
The depths of all the oceans of the universe shall never separate our Water melons.
Brilliant as screaming Guns, the seas greet us from afar.
In the twilight we feast on chocolate-coated Baboons and tender Rosehearts of love
Adorned in white silk, we pluck our schreeching love chimes from our calfs.
I press the goonda that you wear around your neck against my pubic hair-muffin so that our Tigermelons melt into one.
You will always be my little Dhudheri lal-cakes face, the Okapi of my own screaming eye of love.

An Eventful Sunday!

9^{th May, 2010 was an eventful Sunday.}


It was the 26th anniversary of my parents' wedding. We planned on leaving Coimbatore for Athirapally at Kerala, where the so-called "Niagara Falls of India", Athirapally Falls, are situated. My dad had received an Email forward claiming them to be so:

Unfortunately, May isn't September, and it was the latter when this picture was taken.


Are you getting the hint?


We had planned on leaving early, so that we may have more time, but since I had a 9 am math test, we were off quite late, at about 11 pm.


On the way, we stopped at a "Nungi" stall, where we had some of those watery fruit-like thing(y) s , I had my first taste of toddy, and  sparked off what was going to be an (relatively) Eventful Sunday.


I keep telling this, but I AM an over-dramatic and cheesy person. Sometimes, at least.


I wanted to act all heroic and stuff and so I starting gulping the toddy down. It was sweet and kinda nice, but just for five seconds.


The thirty seconds after my gulp were, to say at least, pure agony.
The toddy had THE most bitter after-taste I had ever felt in my mouth, and my chest felt really heavy after that half-minute. An eventful Sunday it was.  


After a few minutes of laughter at my (failed) heroic-ness, we continued our journey to athirapally.




It was nearly three when we reached Athirapally and by then, it had started to pour hard.
We had also recieved news, that His Holiness Acharya Shri Mahapragyaji, the equivalent of a pope for our sect of Jainism, had attained Nirvana. An eventful Sunday it was.  


We waited for a half-hour before the rain had reduced and after that we went for a view of the falls.


It was a perilously stony and long and steep walk of about 800 mts. to a spot near the base of the falls.


The falls were, to say the least, pretty ordinary:

 

They were not worth the 800 metre walk and the daunting prospect of climbing back up was looming upon us.


The rain had stopped, and it had become humid. Really Humid. Why? Because it was an eventful Sunday!


My T-shirt was drenched:

Phew!

 

15 minutes of pants, chokes, and sweaty pleas for water later, we were up again, drenched from head to toe with sweat.

 

Outside, we were greeted with the screams and shouts of perverted College Drop-outs, looking for a "good time".

 

We then went back to our cars, only to realize that there was no fuel in one of them, and the nearest petrol-bunk was 80 kilometres away. Why did this happen? Because it was an eventful Sunday!

 

We thought of siphoning fuel from one car to another, but there were no pipes around. We went to a shop asking for a pipe to transfer fuel from, and the shopkeeper's innocent "I Don't have a pipe, but I do have fuel. Do you want some?" was greeted rather warmly. How did this miraculous feat happen? Because it was an eventful Sunday!

 

10 litres of Rs.65 per litre fuel later, we were off to Coimbatore. It was nearly nine-thirty when we reached the restaurant we had planned to dine at. After some "Rabbit Food", "Squirrel Food" and "Smooshies", as the restaurant classified its food into, we went back home, tired and sleepy.

 

All in all, this day would be etched in forever in my brain. Why? Because it was an eventful Sunday!

Quick update, and my review of "Housefull".

 Yes, I'm a movie buff now!


Ah, it's been a while since I posted stuff, I've been so busy.
What? Don't look at me like that, I was!
Well, all right, I was actually too lazy to sit and write a nice full-length post here, I was writing a couple of posts for this other activist site: 
The Rebelexicon.

Check it out, and comment on my awesome writing prowess.


Yeah, so I have been busy with that and a whole lotta other stuff. (Read "Facebook"). Plus, I watched this movie "Housefull", and the first words that came out of my mouth were the words, "Oh.My.God.CHEESY!"


Seriously, these movies should get the "Cheesiest movie of the year" award. Decade, actually. I mean, the director stopped at nothing, stooped to the lowest standards possible, just to get a laugh on our faces. The homo/gay scenes were the corniest and most cheeky ones in the movie, and they were the only ones able to vibrate my stomach for some laughs, however much I resisted.


And talk of objectification of women! Ritesh Deskmukh prancing at home, singing "Lingerie, lingerie!", gave me an idea of the disaster I was about to watch.


Add in some typical run-of-the-mill Mr.Bean gags, "Night At The Museum" slapping monkeys, and some seriously irritating songs jumping down our throats every five minutes or so, and you've got yourself a typical Akshay Kumar comedy. In movies like these, there's absolutely no use trying to grasp the EXTREMELY loose plot.


And the trailer is a rip-off.  It said that there would be three wives in one house at the same time, but there were only two; Jiah Khan had an almost-guest role in the movie.


If you watch this movie and like it, you are either a hare-brained gorilla, or an idiot looking for some broads and a laugh. You'll be satisfied if you're looking for the former. 


Just don't watch this.

The trip of DOOM!

It all started with paint-balling.


I was off to this place here called "Reload Da Fun" where they have a bunch of adventure sports, paint-balling and zorbing to name some. At paint-balling, being the over-dramatic, cheesy person I am, I imagined myself to be a real soldier and I wanted to "sacrifice" myself for my team. So, I ran out of cover, screaming dementedly, "SHOOT ME!!".


KABLAAM.


Off went a paint-ball, or rather a bullet, through my exceptionally stinky helmet (coconut hair-oil. Eurgh.), and slapped my exposed jaw.Ouch. That's when I realized, paint-balling hurts.A lot. A LOT.


Thats not the end of the story,folks.


Next: Zorbing. Harmless fun, right? Not so in my case.


Me and the other person were strapped well in the zorb-ball, but when the ball was pushed, RIIIIPPP. Off went the other person's leg straps, and her legs were flaying helplessly.
Five tormented seconds later, at the end of the ride, I came out with a excruciatingly painful bruise on my head. Double Ouch.


A couple of days later, we were off to Ooty. Yay!


On the hills, the same unfortunate zorb-ball partner felt sick, and so  I had to exchange seats with her. Our car was an Innova and I was sitting in the last row of seats, and since I had to get out, a middle-row seat was folded. I came out of the car and out of nowhere, came a drunk, creepy old-guy who was staring at us. We asked him to move but all he did was stare. I was shit-scared by his creepiness, and went back inside. Some genius inside said, "Sourabh, sit down!" and so I did. Except there was no seat, it was folded. My buttocks, along with my dignity, fell on the hard car-floor. And how. Triple Ouch.


Everyone burst into derisive peals of laughter, which lasted the entire trip. My condition was so pitiable that everyone there would just look at me and start laughing. Even my brother, who was relatively quiet the entire trip, had a sly smile on his face.


One hour of self-embarrassment later, we reached Ooty. It was the opening day of the hotel we had booked and so there were various artists performing there.


The last act, and the most dangerous one, was  the fire-breathing by a "Dangerous John". And Mr.John had to pick ME, only ME, for a volunteer. Of course, it had to be me. Who else?


He offered me to drink some of the kerosene, which I refused. And to add more to my misery, he covered my head with a towel, which made me look ridiculously stupid, and breathed fire on my head.


Fortunately, there were no causalities, and I wobbled back to my seat.


After these acts, the host needed a volunteer to start dancing, which I am not so good at. Who can it be? Of course, ME.


I started shaking my body like an idiot for quite a while before anyone joined me in my constantly failing attempts to move my body in rhythm with the music.  WHY ME? WHHHYYYYY?






The next day, we were off to the lake at Ooty and we went for paddle-boating. And the other person paddling was none other than my zorb-ball partner. Everyone thought that we were jinxed. So to prove that we were not, we went on the same boat. And this time nothing went wrong, at least for a while. Right in the middle of the lake, when we were discussing about the so-called jinx, came little drops of water, which then turned into a horrendous rain-shower. 

We were drenched from head-to-toe,but I was a bit happy.


"At least I'm not the only one suffering this time!"




Fortunately, the rest of the trip went accident-free, and I learnt something from the entire ordeal :

Stuff can be funny, as long as its not happening to you!

PS: Nothing is exaggerated here and everything has happened for real. Poor Me.

Funny just got a new name!

I visited this random poem generator site and this was my attempt:

http://www.links2love.com/poem_generator.htm

My Love

Your skin glows like the sapota, blossoms stupid as the Mirabilis jalapa in the purest hope of spring.

My heart follows your Drums voice and leaps like a hyena at the whisper of your name.

The evening floats in on a great ostrich wing.

I am comforted by your socks that I carry into the twilight of Raja beams and hold next to my kidney.

I am filled with hope that I may dry your tears of sulfuric acid.

As my pancreas falls from my brief, it reminds me of your Cymbal.

In the quiet, I listen for the last honk of the day.

My heated gall bladder leaps to my dinner suit. I wait in the moonlight for your secret Skin so that we may creep as one, gall bladder to gall bladder, in search of the magnificient indigo and mystical New Delhi of love.

Oh Facebook, how tortuous art thou!

FB...FB....FB.....


ths is d  thin tht thot me hw 2 typ lik dis.....lolz ;)


I'm not going to continue in this seemingly Greek-and-Latin language for fear of lack-of-acumen.This enslaving little bastard of a website has me running to my computer every half-hour to check whether I got any new comments, or any new notifications or if my crops have grown or my energy refilled or my dish cooked.


(Yes,I'm talking 'bout those money-hungry Zynga Facebook apps here, Folks.If you still don't know what I'm talking about, either you are an alien from outer space or a giraffe.But if you ARE actually human and you don't know about all this stuff, God help You.)


Mom, blame this guy for my endless hours on the internet:

(The guy's Mark Zuckerberg,creator of Facebook.Seriously,If you don't know that then you mustn't be alive.)


Facebook is great for keeping in touch with old friends and making new ones, but for guys like me whose school-buddies make up most of his friend-list, its quite weird.
Heres a typical FB chat:


"hi"


"hi"


"watsup"


"ceilings up :\ "


"PJ : |"


"k"


"k"


*five minutes later*


"so watsup?"


"nothin much"


"k"


"k"


"k bye"


"bye"


That was interesting, wasn't it.?




Despite my self-acclaimed genius for observational and vocabulary skills, I've yet to find a reply for this one syllable word used so many times while chatting : "k". The only other befitting word in reply to this is another "k".




Online lives are like a parallel universe.A person can fulfill his aspirations of being Mr.Perfect. I know a guy whose online profile reads:


Male.Birth:15th July, 1986


Height: 6'2''


weight: 135 lbs.


Looks : Very attractive.


IQ: <140


And he had the photo of a winner of a male beauty pageant set as his profile pic.


Impressive,eh?


In reality,he was a flunked student , failed thrice, almost as short as a midget, grossly overweight and on a scale of attractiveness from 1to 10, he was a 0.05. Geezers!


Heres another example of misguidance by a photo:

By further investigation, THIS was revealed:

NEVER TRUST CLOSE-UP PHOTOS!


Sigh.


Well, FB might be a stupid and pointless waste of time, but, hickory-pants, you ain't leavin' it!

A Trip to a Theme Park.

Ah.Theme Parks.

These two syllables have been synonymous with adventure, fun, frolic and above all, a place where you are detached from all that mess at home and at school. (Yeah right.)

Enter one and you'll be welcomed with massive statues of characters, usually with water sprouting from a body hole, trying to look inviting instead of creepy, and failing miserably.

Get in, and you'll be greeted with a tired and bored accountant whose "welcome to *theme park*" sounds much more like "I'm bored and I really want a life away from you bozos, who come and pay 300 bucks for a swim." (A specialty of Indian Theme Parks). 

Get your tickets and go to the lockers. Another one of those unenthusiastic guys meets you and gives you the keys for a locker. Go to the locker room and you find that even the mere thought of your bag, filled to the brim with clothes, creams and towels,no doubt, fitting into that hole of a locker, is laughable.                      

Finally, drenched with the perspiration covering your body after stuffing that bag into the locker, you find that that one of your mates has forgotten to put his watch in. Argh.

After all that bickering and backering, you go to the rides.Yay! (Let me quote myself again :Yeah right.)

Enter the pools and and the sight of  dead flies and dried leaves give you a glimpse of the "fun" you are going to have.

And if that doesn't force you to leave the pool, the sight of a tiny-tot peeing into the pool definitely will.Yikes!

Ohk, lets forget about that for now.

Alright, Land Rides! They look fun!

Lets go to bumper cars now.You sit in the car, press the accelerator.

"I'll bang that guy with the car."

Screeeech.

"Sorry, sir. Time Over"

Next : Merry-go Round: You  get in all excited, get out and you come out feeling like Kumbakaran, looking for a bed to sleep after all that boredom.

These are few of the "spectacular", "mind-blowing" and "exciting" rides, as mentioned in all those adverts.

Oh, and did I mention the amazingly unabashed prices of food items?

Each food item costs quadruple times the MRP !

Finally, you come out, with both your pockets and heads empty. Go home and take a nap.

Wasn't that a fun trip to a Theme Park?

Lets begin.

Hiya,

Today I received all my pre-annual papers.The frantic-ness of the class was UNBELIEVABLE.

"Hey, I've lost 110 marks,what about you?"  "Oh damn.You are racing me by 3 marks."

"racing"???

One of the most indigenous usages of English,I think that this word was created in our school as a substitute for the word "beating".

Anyways,

 I had quite satisfactory results.Except the odd-culprit: CHEMISTRY.

A paltry 18 on 25.

I'm humiliated.I want to shrink to the size of a dried-up raisin.This subject has turned the tables for all those whom I had been "racing".

But the "official" marks would be out tomorrow. So we'll have a concrete answer then.Considering that some papers were strictly corrected(read physics and chemistry) I am quite happy with the 86% I've got.

Bahbye.