Couch Potato Bollywood Flashback

Fat Southie actress in dubbed item song - looks like a golden caterpillar. 

Too much shiny gold stuff on her ball gown, separated only by fat folds revealed in between with cutaways; skin always works for Bollywood.  

It seems impossible to demarcate the line of actual separation between breasts and stomach.

Everything's big, even the hair- 80s perm – the colour combinations reek of that lost decade.

Writhing moves on maroon carpet enchant the watching man as he sips Vat 69.

This quasi-villain with mandatory moustache tries to seduce Ms Caterpillar with Rajnikant-style dance moves.

In fact he seems to be an all-out Rajnikant imitator – no wait, he is the Hero.

Thoda aur intezar kijiye, she croons between bum and boob shakes.

Song ends and he proposes to her, she seems troubled by the thought.

Lightning interrupts the scene and a new villain in the form of Om Shivpuri enters the scene.  

Suddenly many men are beating each other up while Ms Caterpillar acts cool and sits reading a film magazine on the sofa nonchalantly.  

Jackie Shroff appears in a totally unconnected flashback somewhere in between the whole fracas.

Villain tries to strangle her and hero shoots him. No one asks why the gun wasn't used before.

Jackie appears again - suddenly the fat caterpillar is driving a car and meets him on road.

Yeh pyaar ka mausam hai, tujhe kitna pyar kare?

Song bursts out new flashbacks once more.

She drives away abruptly – and is next seen praying to the Mother Goddess at a temple.

Meaningless monologues about her troubled and meaningless life ensue.

A villainous looking Police inspector watches her from outside the temple, unbeknownst to the Golden Caterpillar who has not changed her ballroom gown from the original song as yet.

Suddenly, even Hema Malini has arrived and speaks her Southie accented Hindi, apparently advising Ms Caterpillar on life matters. 

The Bad Inspector suddenly appears once more and begins to blackmail the girl- her origins are revealed – are they to be believed?

Thankfully a commercial break arrives to save the audience from mental breakdown.

Jaani Dushman suddenly seems like a really great movie!

The Tavern

The night grew on at the tavern. Yet, not weary as it might have seemed given the laggard week that it was to end, or begin whichever way you looked at it. The regulars always came in with no clock to predict their movements. A pattern formed of habit. Habit formed of years and possibly evolutionary in it's own form.

The deejay interrupts my musings with a call to share a smoke break. The evening is easy on him, in a way not unlike my own situation. The pressures of life are eased down. A deejay can walk away from his console on a night like this. We are brothers on autopilot tonight.

The kids speak loudly of being gay and what it means to look gay. I wonder what truly makes them gay in a happy way. Like what life was before popular convention prescribed urban lifestyles. Oh, to be under the stars with the float feeling.

A nudge at my elbow wakes me once again from my reverie. As always. One of the many loudspeakers asks me, albeit respectfully, if I might share a light with him. He is respectful in a way that his generation has not taught him to be.

This is the respect of men and between men. Borne through the times in the way of the animal instinct, more so in men. Men not clouded in judgment by the frivolity that often overtakes women on such nights. He sees the old school in me through my youthful persona.

I laugh and offer him match. When you grow up, we might share a whisky, Son. 
For now just smoke your cigarette.

So what are you doing after this? Sharing a match lights up a new avenue of friendship. I look at the eyes of youth, lit with the gaze and haze of the night. Her image shines through it all into the night of my reckoning. I smile quietly to myself.

Life is here to be enjoyed. And I will do just that.

A Scientific Meditation on Love

In this supposedly modern world, many self-proclaimed practical people believe that it is not just whether two people love each other or not. The question therefore arises as to whether they can be compatible in the long run- whether two uniquely different personalities can be truly perfect together on all levels for a lifetime.

Can this be achieved?

Lovers can spend a lifetime assessing mutual compatibility and never find a unique constant as the answer.
Looking at this problem from the angle of calculus, it is like trying to find limits to a function that tends to approach infinity progressively.
And when the seekers cannot accept that, they reverse the approach and find that the the other limit tends to approach zero, or a null state.
Thus, it is a paradox that will emotionally cost the seeker either way, if limits are applied to it and a constant is sought after as a unique solution.

Human experience shows that lovers can never really understand each others' personalities completely.
Compatibility is a very relative concept with dynamic outcomes as a result of the dynamic variables that make up personalities at different stages of life.

The better approach to relationship success is adaptability, which is also the basic key to survival in any ecosystem.

Quoting a law coined by the late Arthur C Clarke, distinguished scientist and writer:
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
And the only way to venture past is to actually take the ride into the unknown.

Love cannot be questioned and need not be justified.
And this, gentle reader, is the axiom.

- K
August 4, 2011

Why I write

Once upon a time, there was life on earth, and this event was followed, among other things, by the advent of the human species and its subsequent impact on the world.
I was recently born into the aforementioned species and blessed with the ability to think freely. Luckily enough, the external conditions of my life have always been favourable to free speech. With my love for learning and conversation, I have always derived the most satisfaction from intelligent thought and exchange of ideas. Sometimes these ideas are light hearted, at others they are more productive and stimulate further creativity, and at yet other times, they are absolutely radical and possibly frivolous in the face of established patterns.
With so much valuable energy being invested into this intangible enterprise of the mind, I believe I owe it to myself and humanity to record these ideas for posterity. While I’m not an expert on biological evolution, I do support intellectual evolution very strongly and do not want to be a weak link in this important chain. Hence, I write.

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Normal

Normal. The term is so boring. Not to mention relative. There is no real definition of normal to the point of any exactness. For example, what is the limit of normality? Surely there is no derivation that satisfies this value in any form of calculus that is true in spirit. Yet, this concept is as familiar to most people as if they consumed equal proportions of normal as the air they breathed since being born. Or their mothers’ milk- if their infancies were normal, in the normal sense that is.

OK. While this may not seem normal as a topic of discussion, it’s rather important as a matter of awareness. The risk that ordinary mortals run is one of being normalized before they ever have the chance to be different. This is the individual level danger.

The greater evil of this system is the hidden trap of conformity that is driven by the political-marketing conglomerate that actively confuses and controls the minds of the people with its not-so-subliminal messaging on the acceptable standards of normalcy.

Globalisation is normal. Your religious and communal heritage is not. Political correctness is required in public, even if you don’t agree with the subject in particular. Subscribing to causes is the proof of your empathy with normal public causes, even if it costs you money from the hard-earned post-tax benefits that reap from your apparently ‘normal’ nine-to-five-or six- or ten- or whatever grind that you struggle through while the speculative barons of the stock market create pretences of the level of normalcy of the economy, based on their normal practices of greed.

Normal lives are what you empathise with on satellite television as you convince yourself that the trauma undergone by American characters in Iraq is more painful than the trauma of the Iraqi nation, dismembered without remorse by the normal market interests of the capitalist West.

Normal is feeling good for all the dollars apparently donated to good causes like the Red Cross, to buy medicine for the suffering millions, displaced as the result of war-mongering promoted by capitalist coalitions that most probably included your own country’s government, all the while never asking why the arms were allowed to reach the killers in the first place.

Normal is feeling good that you have a job that pays you a fat packet, with a multinational corporation that has no soul in its people practices, either employee or customer- let alone affected parties of its product. It’s not normal to question, as long as your next paycheck is guaranteed. It’s never normal to want to opt out of the system on principle.

Normal is accepting that celebrities are worth the endorsements they are paid for, yet never accepting infidelity in your own personal circles, even if the reasons were better than Tiger Woods’.

Normal is questioning the motives and sanity of the other branch of us that don’t subscribe to this crass commercial need to express our normalcy through retail therapy.

There are still some of us left that can stay clear of sporting the latest I-Tampon that Mr. Jobs has convinced the rest of the herd-mentality homo-sapiens that they can’t live without, regardless of whether their government has provided basic healthcare rather than worrying about 3G telecom networks that really aren’t essential, apart from greasing the wheels of the normal politico-marketing machine.

Normally, I wouldn’t give a damn, but then again I never hoped to be normal.

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