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Showing posts from 2012

'Learner' Day

My day today started at around 7 am when my mom woke me up and said I need to get ready and scram for my LLR issuing appointment at the RTO at 9.15 am. I was to go to the Mandaveli RTO office along with the assistant at the office of tho owner of my old house. I wake up (not without a lot of groaning) eventually at around 7.20 am and then go through all my morning must-do-before-leaving-the-house rituals. By this time my mom has left for work. A quick heads-up, she works at a school which is a 1 hour bus ride out of the city on the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR). Yes, it's outside Chennai - it's in - wait for it - Kanchipuram. So anyway, after I'm done with my breakfast around 8 am, I go back upstairs to my room to pick up whatever documents I necessarily require for the application and realize that I don't know where my passport is. That was my address proof and there's no way I'll be let anywhere near the license issuing dude in that dingy place without the o

The Effects of Price Rise on the middle class

Wrote this for the Imprint (the college monthly) as part of a competition of sorts. Please refrain from being judgemental! :P I prepared this at the last minute and it's not really my best! Price rise. The time when that kid from a middle class family gets to eat only half as much of ‘upma’ as he/she usually would, gets only one glass of milk a day instead of two, is dragged along to the fair-price shops with his mother or grandmother to help them carry essentials back home, house rent goes up, public transport is crowded because few people can afford ` 70 per litre of petrol and the opposition parties are often going on strikes against a government ‘fishing the economy out from turbulence’. Everything from toothpicks to the S-Class parked at the Mercedes showroom is suddenly costly enough to elicit a second thought before purchase. Not that the average middle class breadwinner would even give a Mercedes a second thought though. Added to this is the issue of remuneration not be

Is the Sedition Act relevant today?

Wrote this for the Imprint (the college monthly) as part of a competition of sorts. Please refrain from being judgemental! :P I prepared this at the last minute and it's not really my best! The last month saw the front pages of national newspapers splashed with the news of a cartoonist who went to jail for drawing pictures of an Asoka emblem with the heads of bloodthirsty wolves and of politicians in India defiling the Indian constitution. His name is Aseem Trivedi, now miraculously a symbol and inspiration for the fight against curbing of freedom of expression and speech due to his alleged imprisonment for ‘sedition’. I’m guessing that at least 50% of the newspaper-readers must have said, “What is sedition?” a few of them would have looked it up in the dictionary, a fewer still would have cared to search for the provisions of the barbaric Sedition Act. So what is it anyway? Sedition is basically any form of expression, either through print media, the internet, or through speec

Waiting...

Annoyed at a long wait at the TIFAC-Core building for getting exactly, wait-for-it (God bless you Barney Stinson), one page, I wrote this in the following free English class! I can think of many 4-letter words that can be an immense cause for frustration to the average human being. but the one that makes us the most impatient person on the planet is : 'Wait'! Everywhere in life we are made to wait - standing in queue to get mess food, waiting for the green signal at a traffic junction, waiting for a text message reply from a particular someone ;) and so on. The absolute sense of restlessness that we experience while 'waiting' for something to happen is unparalleled! Every second is a minute, every minute an hour, every hour an eternity. The instability is more pronounced while we 'wait' for an outcome that would decide our fates, like when a soldier is in the trenches waiting for their enemies, or when we have to endure 2 gruesome months to receive our Bo

The Joys of Reading

Just after reading Eragon, Eldest and Brisingr, all in a row, the light-headedness one gets after reading a string of awesome books hit me hard and motivated me to write this! ;) It begins as a casual glance, then a stare, a sudden emotion bursts forward, followed by a longing to possess it. Once obtained, the emotion is in hiding till another one is spotted. No, I am not describing the arcane methods of ornithology that male members of the human race employ! I am describing the flurry of emotions that rush forth to an avid bibliophile when he/she spots a book they had longed to own or add to their collections. The feeling is spontaneous. Bibliophiles can easily be ferreted out of a store. They will be the ones who gravitate towards the books' section when they enter Landmark rather than running towards the new iPad on display. A true book-lover knows the value of printed material and values it the way a mother would value her new-born. As such, common enemies to all bibliophi

Epic Single Sentence Page!!!

I wrote this during one EVS period when we had a sub prof and she was like "Write something about the conservation of natural resources and blah blah..." so I got down to doing what I'd done once with Prashanth Sridhar in school - making a huge mess of a single topic so much so that the teacher gets pissed and throws either the writer, or the written material, or both, quite unceremoniously out of the class! Nothing of that sort happened at SASTRA though because I slept through the rest of the period after writing this and marvelling at it! If the reader will notice, the whole passage is a single sentence! ;) In view of the current degrading standards of environmental awareness, coupled with the unreasonably high existing rates of pollution, degradation, exploitation, over-use, misuse and unscientific harvesting of earth's natural resources obtained from the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere, it may be deemed absolutely necessary that all of mankind is put un

Beginnings

This is the speech I gave at the Athenium meet at SASTRA University on September 5, 2012. I find beginnings a really difficult ordeal. For instance, I stared at my pen for at least 7 hours, on and off, before I could think of the first few lines. I would say I have this general difficulty in beginning anything else too - fraternizing with someone I meet in class, talking to a girl I might meet at Canopy and so on. I'll just sit there (or stand), tongue-tied, lost for words. Beginnings are difficult. Besides being hesitant in talking to someone, beginning a new course in German (which I was supposed to during the holidays that followed my Board exams), starting up a new routine, commencing a novel diet (facepalm), in fact anything can be a pain in the derrière! Different people hesitate to "begin" due to different reasons. Some have an inborn shyness in them, some are just lost for words when they see some people, whereas others may be lazy, preoccupied or simply abse

What would happen if I started a political party today?

I wrote this one fine day in class while, as usual, I was bored in class and had slept too much the last night to go to sleep again... The topic suddenly popped into my head thanks to +Aniruddh Vaidyanathan   who had a heated discussion with me a few nights back about why we must form our own political party and try to convince the general voting public that we were "good". The political system, I emphasize on the word 'system', is really good in India. Each member of any legislative assembly has to be formally elected by a majority of people in his/her electorate. The elected member of the legislative assembly is now entrusted with the power to solve the problems and woes of the very people who elected them. In that perspective, a politician would be no different from a social service volunteer at any NGO. However, politicians are among the least trustworthy people in India because of their manner of execution of their duties. Besides being legally bound, they are