Friday, February 16, 2007

Crop Circles:A message from ET


Ajit Ninan


Ajit Ninan is but a God to me. Now, before to fire at me the all encompassing question of “Who’s he?” reach out for your TOI (Nobody reads HT!!!!! I know that) flip trough the pages till you find a small cartoon at one end in one of the middle pages it says “JUST LIKE THAT” what you’ll be seeing now is a sketch from one of the best cartoonists in the world.

Forget R.K.Laxman he’s too predictable now and his cartoon strip a little too less graphic. Laxman’s “Common Man” is too old to relate to for a country in which half of the population is termed young. (Officially 50% of country’s population is below 35.) Laxman is a habit you without a miss almost everyday go through his contribution and possibly smile a bit; it is in all probability a faint smile.

Now when go through Ajit Ninan’s contribution: its colorful, graphic and most importantly it’s PERFECT down to the smallest details. He’s a mastermind look at the way he sketches a car or a street or even a tank if you carefully observe (you can borrow my magnifying glasses if you need) every detail has been accounted for; every smallest bit of information has been taken care of. Everyday he delivers a work of a genius everyday I have something to marvel at something to awe at.

You can find more of him at Business Times page of TOI and of course at http://www.indiatimes.com/ at the gallery section where they have section dedicated to his cartoons.

Fight Club Quotes

Fight Club is not a movie it's a movement. The dialogues are not conversations they are philosophies i strongly recommend that you watch this movie with some of your more intelligent friends to get the real rush of adrenalin of the truth that the movie propagates.I need you to read the following quotes very carefully and just think about it :

"You met me at a very strange time in my life."

"Losing all hope was freedom."

"I want you to hit me as hard as you can."

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

"I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let's evolve, and let the chips fall where they may."

"Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction...."

"I reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions."

"If we are God's unwanted children, so be it!"

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

"Listen up maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

"Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing."

"You're the worst thing that ever happened to me"

Pre Movie Warning: "If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second of your life. Don't you have better things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all who claim it!? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think everything you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told you should want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned........Tyler." - taken from split second 'pop-up' warning, that appears at the beginning of fight club DVD movie.
Narrator: When people think you're dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just...Marla Singer: - waiting for their turn to speak?

"We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear"

"It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything."

"You just had a near-life experience."

"In Tyler we trusted."

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

"Sooner or later, the things you own end up owning you."

"You have to forget everything you know, everything you think you know -- about life, about friendship, about you and me."

"Tyler: "Any last words?" Narrator"I can't think of anything."

"That old saying, how you always hurt the one you love, well, it works both ways."

"I wasn't really dying, I wasn't host to cancer or parasites; I was the warm little center that the life of this world crowded around."

"I wanted to destroy something beautiful."

"I'd be very careful who I talked to about this paper. It sounds like some dangerous psychotic killer wrote this,and this buttoned down schizo could probably snap at any moment and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-180 carbine gas-operated semiautomatic."

"Worker bees can leave Even drones can fly away The queen is their slave."

"And then... something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion -- dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."

"When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks."

"You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking Khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

"We are a generation raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is the answer."

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Consumerism




Consumerism is but a dirty little word to me and the lovely little places that have sprung up allover to feed the greed of the new “kwel” generation called malls -- the demonic “temples of consumerism”. Welcome to the brand new religion of consumerism and before you can think let me tell you with deep conviction you are very well a puppet on its tunes. Now before you smell communism in my words put your fears aside, I hate it almost as much as you do- they are two sides of the same coin, both co-create each other (more on this another time).Modern materialism and the ever important Admiral Advertising have people chasing things they don’t need. Look around you why are you doing what are you doing? Admit it its only because either your parents trapped you into your profession or most importantly you have been led by media, people or otherwise to believe that the profession X and Y make the most money and hence you are where you are. That you are reading this let me assume that either you already are a white collar slave or preparing to be one.

You are in a state of perpetual discomfort, your whole life you keep on chasing and chasing and chasing that ever-receding horizon the one you are hoping to reach. Celebrity magazines, television, movie stars, fashion trends are all that you live on. Our government no longer refers to us as “citizens,” but as “consumers.”. Its what I call America’s gift to the world the food of globalisation and notorious enviormental damage.

Approximately 1.7 billion people worldwide now belong to the "consumer class"—the group of people characterized by diets of highly processed food, desire for bigger houses, more and bigger cars, higher levels of debt, and lifestyles devoted to the accumulation of non-essential goods.

Today nearly half of global consumers reside in developing countries, including 240 million in China and 120 million in India—markets with the most potential for expansion.

America often reffered to as the world only hope and the purest capitalist society on the planet is the largest consumerist society in the world on an average an American spends more than he earns .Remember its also the most depressed societies too the suicides rate is amogst the highest in the world and not to mention the total number of Americans who are behind bars which also amazingly is one of the highest in the world.




“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we
can buyshit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose
orplace. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a
spiritualwar... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on
television tobelieve that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and
rock stars.But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very,
very pissedoff."
Tyler Durden. From the movie “Fight Club”



In this beautiful little world as long as you are a consumer or account to a vote bank you are needed otherwise God Bless You.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Good Morning???


BANG! BANG! BANG!

"open up the door asshole"

"WAKE UP!!!!!!!!"

"MAN have you never slept in your life??"

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Parv rubs his eyes and lets the human alarm clocks enter in. "Wassup dude? you have classes today don't you? Shit man all got to do is sleep." This is the daily dose of morning raga the morning routine mantra to start the day with.

He rushes off to brush his teeth often wondering that this is the only activity he has been religiously performing day after day, everyday, every year for as long s he can remember. Interestingly he can't really recall any other thing which has received this much dedication and diligence from him and the least of them is bathing.

It was only Wednesday. He had a bath on Sunday and the next Sunday is not that far away.No need to wonder that he has never been out of his stocks of shampoo, hair oil, soaps etc. Girls value personal hygiene unfortunately there are NO girls in his class.

The only reason he interrupted his "Sunday's holy baptism" with a few baths through the weeks during his school life was because there were a lot many girls in his school. (If fortune favoured and the seating arrangement made him sit behind, around or even with someone special the frequency would go up drastically)

Post-brush he rules out the dirty, filthy thoughts of personal hygiene.An emergency natural call has to be answered. For some reasons undiscovered the soap "lifebuoy" has been universally accepted as the ultimate potty soap.The little red piece is trusted by almost everyone to be the real germ-killer after all nobody wants to carry the traces of {ahem} okay i will cut that out.

Hostels loo have no locks inside so either you stretch your vocal cords to inform ever-impatient outsiders of your glorious presence or you dedicate a hand full-time on the door so an unintentional push from the outside doesn't turn into a faux-pass.

After that all you need to do is to change your VIP to JOCKEY (personal hygiene you see!). Put the clothes you see lying around (interestingly these are the same ones he's been wearing for a week)

"Who cares?? I go to college to gain knowledge and not for modelling." This is the personal quote and the most replied answer to anyone who pinpoints his dressing sense.

Point is he goes there for neither. All he is is the scum of the earth. But as long as he is loved by people and he loves them he'll go on.For he knows


"All you need is love"
-The Beatles


He could be wrong but this is all he knows.

Smelly Issue


Finally my roomparter came up with a billion dollar idea of expelling our socks and located them on the fringes of our balcony. The great deal is that our stinky socks ( which we made sure gave the foulest smell in the whole hostel by not washing them for months at end) whose smell we were accustomed to way too much.

It was our visitors who frequently complained of the "strange odour" of the room . We had become too habituated to the lovely stink,so much so, that a breath of pure fresh air would have put our respiratory organs to burn.

It took us a very very long time (1 semester to be precise) to figure it out that our socks had been emitting obnoxious substances in the air of the room which we were taking in all day and after entering our brain which disturbed the brains equilibrium and in turn effected our concentration and hence the studies and hence the result........................



p.s. with socks out i will have to search now for new excuses. Any ideas?