His birth-star glittered in the night sky. That day again.
The sell-sword felt his years. Every one of them. They had removed the arrows and dressed the wounds. Yet they still burned his flesh, more deeply tonight than on any other. As an old crone once said “A warrior carries his battles with him.”
He did.
Each scar. Each blow.
Continue reading ‘The Birthday Post’
Share
Bhagyasree’s “Qaid Mein Hain Bulbul.” Sunil Gavaskar curled up like an armadillo defending against Wayne Daniel. Imran Khan sending Michael Veletta’s stumps walking. Vinod Kambli crying in Kolkata. Zico missing that kick. A man in front of a blackboard and a long wooden stick explaining election results on DD. News of Indira Gandhi’s assassination stopping the commentary of an India-Pakistan match. Cheering for VP Singh as the Congress gets drubbed. Mandal and feeling betrayed by the same man we had once cheered for. Hawa Hawa. Oye Oye. The taste of Re 1 chumchum. All of these feel just as fresh and as vivid as if they happened yesterday. But if you ask me about things that happened in the last few years—all the movies, matches, events become a jumbled mess of color and noise and I have to pause, hem and haw, trying to unravel the tangled web of what passes for my short-term memory.
Continue reading ‘Thoughts On Another Birthday’
ShareOn August 20 2004, Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind was born. Now many of you readers, the regulars and definitely the drive-bys might consider this silly or borderline kooky that someone would consider the anniversary of a blog worth remembering and devoting a whole post to. But for me this entity made up of bits, suspended in the conceptual space called the Internet, populated by my thoughts and supported by technology has assumed a life of its own as I fuss over it, worry about how it looks, change its clothes from time to time, clean the dirt that trolls and advertisers leave behind, fret about illnesses brought about by server crashes and spend days, months and years just watching it grow. And so in this vein of anthropomorphizing, blog birthdays become significant events if only because they serve as an excuse to stop awhile, cut a cake and blow a candle. Or six.
ShareWhile I was off the grid for the last few days in New York City, much seemed to have happened. Harbhajan Singh ultimately got a wicket, Mohammed Azharuddin flashed once again outside the off-stump with his stick and knocked the feathers of a shuttle-cock [Link] (obligatory Gunda reference: Azhar hain jurm se nafrat karney wala, garibon (match-fixers) ke liye jyoti, aur gundon ke liye jwala) , the Indian woman’s hockey coach was accused of doing too much of “Chak De” [Link], Arundhati Roy advanced yet another step towards her Nobel Peace Prize [Link] making it to the list of Forbes (evil capitalist alert) world’s most inspiring women and Wikileaks confirmed that the ship of government is the only ship that leaks from the top [Link].
As to the so-called classified information leak, while it may be big news in the US with Pakistan’s duplicity in the AfPak region being exposed for me it was more like “Tell me something I don’t know.” The day Wikileaks has the full Amar Singh transcripts [link] or the gory inconvenient truths behind all Al Gore globally warming shenanigans [link] or details of Zardari’s five female Turkish “guides” whose services were not compensated for by the Pakistanis [links], I would be mildly interested. But not now. For the present, what was infinitely more intriguing was attending an underground party in the Bronx, thrown in a warehouse, with a “macabro” theme, wherein along with retro erotica from the 1920s being projected on the walls, there were decks of old Tvs showing, in addition to ancient Japanese horror and psychedelic patches of color——hold your breath——Mithun-da’s “Disco Dancer” and Shahrukh Khan’s “Duplicate”.
Continue reading ‘Back From Meeting A Legend’
ShareWatching NDTV’s We the Tweeple was fun if not for anything else but because one got to see a few familiar faces, people I have met in real life (@samitbasu, [His latest book, from what I have heard and based on the sample chapter provided, is a must-read] and @nilanjanaroy) and also because one got to hear India’s most famous anchor, someone known to never take herself seriously, concluding the segment by saying that the lesson of Twitter was not to take ourselves seriously. I felt this was also as good a time as any to do a post on Twitter, one that I have been meaning to do for a while.
The question I have been asked the second most number of times during my book tour (the first one being of course “Do you give ipods for the first comment?) was why I do not follow anyone on Twitter.
When I joined twitter, I felt there were two options open to me with regards to my follow policy.
To be truly equitable, and to make the social interaction be based on “friendship” rather than the rather weird-sounding follower-followee (I am the only Prophet type) relationship, I figured I should follow back everyone who follows me. That however would simply flood my time-line leading me not be able to read most of what was coming on the stream.
The other option would be to do what most people do—–follow a selective few.
Given how “personally” people take the whole concept of “following” [much more than say subscribing or not subscribing to someone's blog feed], I figured that this selection would essentially make a very public distinction between two kinds of people—-those whose opinions I think I want to hear and those whose I do not want to (even though they want to hear mine). This I felt would be kind of impolite.
And so I decided to follow no one.
Continue reading ‘Twitterific’
Share
This means you are not allowed to copy, in part or in its entirety, any part of this blog and use it in your blog, article, "email forward" or any other non-commercial creative work unless you give me credit and provide the original URL. Any use of material in this blog for commercial purposes requires my explicit permission. If in doubt as to what constitutes fair use, please contact me
R