Flop October 2009

Faculty of Literally Outlandish Practices

October 2009

editorial

bushi baboor

Call me Boor.

When FLOP beseeched me to write an editorial for them, I told them why not just put down my most influential statements of the present century and call it the editorial. For instance, I said, “There is something about engineering that makes its most proficient graduates vulnerable to the temptations of violent extremism.” This sentence in itself is consistently providing bread and butter for many in the field of post hoc fallacies in Economics.

But then I was told I should not talk about myself in the editorial. So let me condescend a bit for you and talk you through the most amazing events in the past two months.

The event that confounded many was the awarding of Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Barack Obama. I suggested that FLOP should do its bit for World Peace and award some prize. So they decided to give him the prestigious FLOP’s Butt of the Year prize. No, you are mistaken, Obama is not a butt. We think he will be an influential figure of his times. This prize commemorates the most popular journalistic event of recenttimes, which was Mr. Barack Obama staring at the butt of a girl, who had completed her puberty in flying colours, in G8 summit at Lal Quila, Italy. This is a significant event for many reasons. A black man looking at a white’s butt, a grand reconciliation of blacks and whites which obliterated the race boundaries. A perfect marriage of the most powerful man with the most common girl, which abolished the class boundaries.

So in a single look, he has solved all the pernicious problems that have afflicted mankind since times immemorial.

Now about the complaints of the Indian-born scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He said he was persecuted by incessant phone calls from us who are taking the credit and who are in no way related to him. I was one of the first to call him. He did not take the call, of course. But I would like to take this opportunity to remind him that I was the one who introduced him to Chemistry by gifting him a test-tube and a pipette for his tenth birthday.

Well, finally we must talk about the ad of a German AIDS awareness group, which has come under fire for posting an online video that starts off with a young couple having sex in an apartment before revealing the male to be a grinning Adolf Hitler. Its closing message is “AIDS is a mass murderer.” When I saw this video, I grinned too. However, the message would have been more powerful if the girl were on the top of Hitler.

At this point, FLOP wants me to talk about some of their new stuff in the past two months. They would like to thank all those who have embraced the photography events whole-heartedly. I submitted a few photographs of mine containing me in my prime.

They pleaded me to remove them for they were sure they would be sure shot winners and that we would be disfavouring those entries with cats, birds, snakes... Literature event is next up. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the write.

Before I sign off, my new book would soon be on the stands. It is called, Life and Opinions of a Boor. I won’t give away anything about the plot but I would say this: each chapter is a gem and there are two hundred of them.

Advantage Agassi Before being crystal clear

‘I didn't lie. I just wasn't crystal clear.’ - Andre Agassi

After being crystal clear

Life without a cell phone

Its all slow and free Gives me more A bit inquisitive to know what's going on A bit more convenient to just imagine still Its more uncertain All my taste

talk when you walk or rather just walk or walk your talk there are ways to rob your talk save it for the outside

you might lose the right side but you find a place to hide and fall asleep

sagarb

Dust Nothing's for real It's all dust What lures today 'Morrow shall rust" preached a wise old sage along the green western slopes of the Trendelburg hills. He seemed to have attained his enlightenment thru' a gruesome process of earthly woes and tortures.

greenest of hill-slopes, the yellowest of fields and the sparkling blueness of the river Diemel. She hadn't seen a speck of pollution in this quiet little country-side.

Next day was the same story. "Oh, I was caught in a steed stampede" was his excuse. Explanations got designer till the day Rapunzel got suspicious. "I won't let down my hair anymore if ya won't tell me the mystery of this dust all over you", she yelled at Atop the hill stood a tall tower with no doors nor him. "Ok ok... it's not all that important", he said as stairs. There was only a small window at the very he gave her a sheepish glance. Hands on her hips top. Legend was that the tower was under an evil spell and that it was the den of the wicked sorceress, she kept looking sternly at him with intent and wouldn't budge without hearing. "It's dandruff" he Dame Gothel. No one knew for sure, but no one admitted. She stepped ahead to inspect his curly dared to find out. Who'd play with fire? brown hair, but he stepped back and remarked A handsome young man, with strong built and blue "Yours". eyes secretly visited this tower everyday.

Rapunzel was all shaken up. She had the finest of hair in town and would not tolerate any damage to "Rapunzel, Rapunzel them. She pulled up her braid to inspect & it was Let down your hair indeed infested with soft grayish-white flakes of That I may scale dandruff. "Look, split ends too!", she yelled. "But The golden stair" yelled he upon reaching it. A beautiful long braid of they are 20 ells away from u", trivialized the man. golden hair then reached down from the window. It She looked up and gave him a nasty look. Fearing was 20 ells long! He scaled it to reach his lady love that split-ends might split their relationship, he quickly changed the topic. "Oh, don't you worry my everyday. Rapunzel had magnificent long hair that lady-love. Morrow, I shall get ya a cure", he had never been cut. It grew fast as summer vines assured. and seemed as gold sunlight trailing behind her as she walked. Curious wisps of golden hair fell across her forehead to peek into the coffee-brown mystery The next day he visited the local therapist and picked a hair-cleanser made from the finest of green of her lively eyes. apples and walnut bark. It seemed to work but was not very effective against dandruff. "Get me the one These visits continued for days and their love made from the natural sap of the Margosa tree", blossomed. All was fine and dream-like till that demanded Rapunzel. "And where will I find that?", fateful day when Rapunzel observed that her man quizzed her lover. "50 yards to the south of the was all covered with dust when he arrived. "Have you been at war, my Lord?", she inquired. "No!", he water-hole in the forest is a thick growth of Margosa trees", she directed him. That afternoon replied. "Then what's all this dust resting over the love-slave ventured into the scary dense forest you?", she asked. "Err... Pollution" he replied, avoidingly. This word was new to the vocabulary of for Margosa.

Rapunzel, who from her window, had only seen the

"U think these cleansers are making my hair too dry?", inquired Rapunzel after applying the Margosa sap. "Oh, they're just fine and lustrous again", assured the guy in a desperate attempt to avoid any more trips to the forest. "Oil from the Flame-of-the-forest & Hibiscus is very good for hair", she said as she looked longingly at him. These ever-increasing demands had started to irk him.

Nevertheless he loved Rapunzel too much to say, "No".

Oil made her hair shine but also made it greasy. "I need to wash it off with egg-yolk", she said. "Oh, that's easy" said the man as he jumped up to fetch eggs from the poultry-farm just round the corner. "But the eggs need to belong to the weaver-birds. That makes the hair fine and full as their nests", corrected Rapunzel. Now that was a tall order!

He knew that the weaver-birds were the picky kind who almost always built their nests over branches of acacia trees spread over water bodies.

On his way down from the tower, he slipped over Rapunzel's greasy braid like a bead over the line of an abacus and had a bad fall. He dusted himself and limped his way to the water-hole a gain. The soles of his feet were now blistered from the pebbles and the thorns along the forest-path.

"Weaver, weaver Let down your nest That I may pick Few golden eggs� he sang to the weaver-birds. A flock

a short story

of agitated tiny weaver-birds attacked him and pecked him all over. Their eggs weren't meant for charity and they fiercely guarded them. He braved their attack as he climbed up the acacia tree. His clothes were all tattered by the thorns as he stretched over the branches to reach the nest. He did manage to pick an egg, but slipped and fell into the pool of water.

"Did ya get the eggs, my Lord?", asked Rapunzel excitedly as a tired, wet, tattered, blistered, pecked lover put his scratched hand into his pocket. A croaking frog leaped out of it. "Oops, wrong pocket", he said as he fetched a tiny-round dotted egg from his other pocket. Rapunzel lovingly hugged him.

"Tell me something, Rapunzel... How do u know so much about hair-products?" asked the agitated man who had by now become frail from his frequent forced visits to the remotest of places in the forests and hills.

Rapunzel felt flattered. "Oh, Dame Gothel tells me" she answered as she cracked the egg. "What???" quizzed the shell-shocked guy. "U mean, she knows all about my 'secret' visits?" he gasped. "Oh yes, and she likes it. She gets to use all the left-over hairproducts from me. U see... U are only the second man in her life. The first one was her lover. He used to fetch facial-products for her from the hills. He did so for several months till one day he did not return. He had gone to fetch her mud-pack when news

reached that he had perished after being stuck in quick-sand along the western slopes of the Trendelburg hills". Women blabber too much, when flattered.

"You know darling, Mountain-ebony is very good for hair-regrowth", Rapunzel added.

"Most certainly, my lady" said her man with a smile. Rapunzel had seen a smile upon his face after such a long time!

Rapunzel kept waiting for her Mountainebony, but the guy never returned back to the tower. News was that he was mauled by a hungry pack of wolves in the forest.

"Nothing's for real It's all dust What lures today 'Morrow shall rust" preached a handsome young man, with a frail built, blistered soles, tattered clothes and blue eyes along the green eastern slopes of the Trendelburg hills.

The Spiderman of Pattu-chinta-puram

boffin

Spiderman, Spiderman, Does whatever a spider can.

Spins a web, any size, Catches thieves just like flies.

Look out! Here comes the Spiderman.

Thus sang Sasirekha, a tearful lullaby to her son. She looked up to the skies for her husband, the spiderman of Pattuchintapuram. A bronze statue of him soared from the village centre on a marble pedestal; one of his six arms wielding a silk-spinning wheel; the others brandishing weapons of mythological significance. He stood on two legs crushing a bug with a head of a demon; large black globes nestled in the sockets of his eyes and obscured his face; a golden plated dhoti with draped waistband covered his lower-half down to the knees; a silvery cobweb haloed his head. He flared up at the sky as though protecting the village from aerial monsters. He would become a legend in the times to come, but he existed in flesh and blood only recently, having impregnated Sasirekha and put Pattuchintapuram on the world map.

a short story

His real name was too long, even for him to remember. He was the most eligible bachelor of Pattuchintapuram, which used to be a small nondescript village ensconced somewhere in the middle of nowhere in India. He was popularly called Tiptop Surya, for the denizens of his district believed him to be as brilliant as one thousand, one hundred and eleven – an auspicious number – blindingly hot suns or Suryas. The qualification 'Tiptop' in his appellation was due to several reasons. He topped his school, and then his college, topping his state at the same time. He then topped the entrance examination to stroll into the top university of the country for his graduation, and then topped the university. This procured him sumptuous scholarship in the top university of the world where he finished his doctorate in top time, and leaped in a single year to the top in a top company. He was chocolate-colored, and had rose-pink lips, so luscious that women could not resist the thoughts of putting their breasts in them.

He had Brahminical aural hair that leapt out like flames. He had oiled hair, so neatly combed and parted on his top that it looked like a wig made by a hairstylist of singular talent eliciting comparisions to the parting of Red Sea by Moses. It was so thick and black that his village folk ran out of vocabulary to describe it. They called it jet-black, pitch-black, black as ink, black as coal, black as a black moonless night, black as the heart of a black hole, the blackest of all blacks, and blacker than black itself. He had a round rice belly, which was the envy of his village men and so pluperfect round that one only has to tap it, and it would spin forever like a flawless spinning top. It was so famous that spinning tops were sold in the shops with the brand name of Suryam. The farmers availed of its services to test the quality of the rice after every harvest. He would be asked to taste various rices. A warm glow in it indicated superior quality. It was the beacon. He was also renowned for being a prodigal talent in sports. This monstrous wrong impression was due to a small misunderstanding. It happened when he called his folks and told them that he scored a century. They mistook it for century. They mistook it for an achievement in

cricket, although it was the score of his body on the weighing scale.

But this stamp of highest eligibility was affixed to him not only because of his extraordinary feats in academics or the exaggeration, instead of a woeful dearth, of his talent in sports, but also because he remained fiercely loyal to his family traditions. He spent half a dozen years living in the West, but he did not change his habits, attitudes, and outlook. He brushed, defecated, bathed, ate, drank, worked, and masturbated facing East. He offered prayers unswervingly after his bath in the morning before going to the office and before his supper in the evening. He ate rice for every meal and cooked only vegetarian meals; he did not smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol; he listened to music, watched movies, read news and books; all of these only in his native language, and like a faithful servant of one's customs, wore chappals, the whitest shirt, and the whitest dhoti, everywhere and at all times. He considered himself a great authority on all things Occidental, which was a fundamental case of self-deception.

With a sense of immense pride, he showed his friends photographs of him dressed in dhoti in all possible positions and places; in the office, in the famous streets of the famous cities, before the famous monuments such as the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Sphinx, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, skiing and trekking on the Swiss alps, cruising on the canals in Amsterdam, rowing the gondolas in Venice, on a lion safari in Serengeti, and riding on the horses in Ireland. He would also drill into them the advantages of wearing just a shirt, dhoti, and chappals, especially when going in and out through the airport immigration and the metal detector and the xray machines, where you don't have to remove your chappals and are not groped by the security guards, and your pockets are not checked sice dhoties don’t have five pockets.

The astonishing thing, however, was that he had travelled to all these places, around fifty of them, in a matter of a week. It was a whirlwind whistlestop tour, which he had accomplished without a wink's worth of sleep. This was what he defined as a holiday. One only has to ask if he had travelled around when he was abroad and he would reel out these places in alphabetical order, and if one is curious enough and probed further, he puffed up like a pigeon and said that he had seen them in a matter of a week with a sense of a real achievement.

He eventually made the customary return to his village to marry the girl of his parents' dreams.

Her name was Sasi, short for Sasirekha. She was considered the incarnation of the most voluptuous goddess, and was the most virtuous and the most fertile woman in the state, for it was believed that one of her ancestors gave birth to hundred and eight children - unquestionably an auspicious number too - and breast-fed every one of them for five years. She had a magnificient bosom and hips highly suitable for child-bearing. The sight of her drove young men wild, and filled them with so much lust that they copulated with the cows and the nanny-goats in the fields. Her dazzling beauty blinded old men; many of them succumbed to heart attacks and dropped dead like flies, due to which some of the streets in the village were called widow bazaars.

She was a navigational hazard and was not allowed to walk on the highway that skirted her village since it led to countless fatal accidents, undoubtedly due to the distraction caused to the drivers by her killer sensuality. She had very luxuriant black hair tied into a braid so long and strong that it was used to draw water from the village well; strands of it were reaped every year and used to build village mats and cots and a robust fence for her house. Her parents had fields of amla, coconut, rapeseed, and sunflower, specially farmed to produce oil to lubricate her beautiful hair.

The moment Surya and Sasi saw each other for the first time, they both fainted. This was

interpreted by their elders to be delirious love at first sight. They began frantic preparations for the wedding after the family priest pronounced a flawless horoscope match. He said that the match was so perfect that a problem in their married life is a premonition that the world is coming to an end. He also said that Surya will spin a beautiful life for Sasi, although unaware of the import of his words.

Sasi visited the jewellery shops in the neighboring towns, cities, and the capital, and bought anklets, armlets, brooches, bracelets, bangles, necklaces, ribbons, earrings, and waist belts, weighing a hundred kilos of gold, and a few hundreds of the most exquisite silk sarees.

When one of her servants had the temerity to tell her to buy silver ornaments for the sake of variety, she was whipped mercilessly and her tongue ripped out. Meanwhile, Surya shopped for the dhoti extraordinaire to wear for the wedding. The dhoti of his dreams, according to him, must be very expensive, white like the purest snow, ethereal like a cloud, smooth like silk, slippery like an eel, wrinkle resistant, and must be so flexible that he can fold it and store it in his wallet. He searched relentlessly in hundreds of places and tried thousands of candidates without any success. He would dress in it and pose before the mirrors in numerous positions, some graceful, some awkward, some that would have provided ample material for a conference on Yoga, whilst some so grotesque that they shattered the mirrors. He would walk and run for kilometers to find out if it stuck to his skin, for the wonder-dhoti should have climacool properties, one that perfectly conducted heat and sweat using intricate ventilation channels, the second that dissipated moisture, and the third that improved airflow.

He would walk and run for kilometers to find out if it stuck to his skin, for the wonder-dhoti should have climacool properties, one that perfectly conducted heat and sweat using intricate ventilation channels, the second that dissipated moisture, and the third that improved airflow. He would then smell it, for the most

desirable one should have everlasting overpowering aroma. He would set fire to it and then try to disrobe. The safest dhoti should drop down instantaneously with a flick of a finger, which would also be very useful during pressing sexual situations. He walked up and down the stairs to see how it impacted his knees. He burrowed his hand into it to feel his genitals and measured its intrusiveness.

he ventured into the deepest and the darkest part of the thickest tropical rain forest to apprehend the holiest of Nagas for the main village festival due to take place that year, and how he found him guarding this divine cloth. After the fiercest and the goriest of battles lasting thirteen days and that flattened a considerable area of the forest, he subdued the Naga and claimed the garment. He sold it to Surya for a superstitious sum of one lakh and one rupee.

When Sasi came to know about the harrowing unfruitful quest of Surya, she stopped eating, let her hair loose and stopped oiling it. She cried nonstop until she ran out of tears from her eyes and snot from her nose. She spent all her time offering prayers in the temple in her home, and broke thousand and one coconuts as a sacrifice everyday.

On the day before the wedding, he met her and told her with heartbreaking sadness that he would not marry her if he failed to acquire that perfect pancha fit to adorn and house his manhood. She asked him why it is so important to him. He told her that it was his birthright and that he wanted to show her all the wonders of the world in it, although he meant that he wanted to take her to all the wonderful places of the world with him wearing it. She was so besotted with him that she vowed to take her life by drinking gallons of rapeseed oil, in the event his final pursuit failed.

He told her that the oil would be very bitter. She told him that she would jump into the holy well then. He promised her that he would follow suit, but allayed her qualms by saying that he would choose a different position in the well for his plunge.

Then, all of a sudden, he started feeling many tingles all over his body like pins and needles.

They made him run wildly all over the room screaming like a barking baboon, colliding into the walls, stoting like a gazelle, gamboling like a calf, hopping like a goofy grasshopper, dancing like a crude classical dancer, somersaulting like a gymnast, wallowing on the floor like a warthog in the mud, scratching his body violently like a mangy dog, until he managed to doff the dhoti and crashed on the floor wheezing.

His final attempt, however, yielded the fruit of his quest. Its brilliance outmatched his; according to a local legend, it so humiliated the sun once, that the moment it rose to the top, it set immediately and cringed beneath the horizon, like a bounce of a rubber ball. It had the whiteness of a million stars of Bethlehem and had a hem embroidered from the purest gold. He asked the textile merchant how he manufactured this masterpiece. The mendacious merchant told him an incredible story about how

When he regained his poise, he saw a large golden spider on the dhoti looking at him menacingly with two inflamed bulging eyes in the middle. It stood on two legs and stretched as if ready to pounce on a prey; the six other legs struck battle poses; it sharpened its fangs making rasping noise like a pair of knifes; sparks flew from its body; red hot liquid streamed out from its mouth like lava; ripples of colors flushed its eyes and the body.

The day of the wedding when Surya wore the dhoti and paraded in the procession to the temple, nubile girls fell and writhed from searing orgasmic paroxysms. While Sasi embellished herself in the bridal room surrounded by a dozen maids, one holding a tray of perfumes, the second a tray of necklaces, the third a tray of saris, the fourth a tray of garlands of flowers…, Surya proceeded to the groom's room and waited to assume his rightful place before the fire on the wedding mandapam.

He carefully lifted one end of the dhoti, and shook it to displace the spider, but it clung like a limpet. He got a stick and poked it. The spider evaded it and then fended it off like a skilled fencing master and then using its legs and fangs with an uncanny dexterity, whittled it down to pieces. He then lit a pack of beedis and tried to stub it; it doused the flame with a torrent of venomous spit. He then lifted his leg to squash it, but stopped it mid-air, because he heard somebody speak the words, “Hold it, you village bumpkin”, with pristine clarity. He looked around perturbed, wondering who would dare call him that. He resumed the descent of his foot on the eight-eyed, eight-legged freak. This time, he heard a volley of abuse, “Look at me, you scatter-brained, lily-livered, donkey-faced, snotridden, noxious nitwit.” His head reeled, for it was the spider that delivered. Its English was impeccable, its tone most intimidating. It said, “The dhoti you are wearing is my house, you drooling dunghead. It is my lifetime's work. It is my dream home. You! You! Just come along and had the bloody nerve to appropriate it without any regard for my feelings. Do you know how many years of excruciating labor went into building it? Where do you think I should live now?”

Surya said, “What nonsense are you talking? I own it now, ok. So you beat it before I squash you, man.” The spider, purple with rage, continued its cursing, “I am not a man, you illiterate, hare-brained, ham-faced, flea-bitten, bug-ridden, diseased, decrepit, barfing berk. I am an arachnid, an invertebrate, classified in the order Araneae.”

His head swam. Clearly flustered, he replied, “How can you call me illiterate, you disgusting, ugly-looking animal? You have no idea of my academic credentials.”

The spider, now crimson with fury, spoke with spits of venom flying from its mouth, “I know everything about you, you ordurous obnoxious

oaf. How can you consider yourself an educated man? What has all that education taught you?

What use is it when it can't make you openminded?

Let me remind you of your miserable insular life abroad. You said 'Chi' in disgust for everything.

Chi to meat, Chi to foreign movies, Chi to foreign music, Chi to bared legs and semi-naked bodies, Chi to kissing in public, Chi to drinking, Chi to smoking, Chi to cheese, Chi to chocolates, Chi to makeup, Chi to showers, Chi to fitness centres, Chi to sports, Chi to burgers, Chi to cutlery, Chi to pizzas, Chi to pasta. Your life was a book of Chis. You were a chimera of Chis. You were a churlish chimp.

You spoke loudly deliberately to parade your proficiency in English and you never let others speak, but let me be honest with you and say that your English was and is pathetic. You hated whites, but you wanted to look like them, and you needed them, and you used them. You were a parasite. You whitewashed your face with soap hundred times a day as though you wanted to get rid of the color of your skin, and powdered so profusely that it looked like snow.

Why do you need to wear that dhoti everywhere you go? Is it because it allows you to scratch at will your pestiferous genitals?

Why can't you leave your village habits in your village and open up? Why can't you shed your frog-in-the-well mentality? How presumptuous of you to call me disgusting? Do you know how unclean you were? You used your dhoti for everything as though it was the panacea; to clean your body; to wipe your nose; to clean the sink and the toilets, and then you would use it in the kitchen for handling utensils and cooking. Did you know how tasteless the food that you cooked was? Instead of blaming your incompetence, you blamed it on the lack of requisite spices and greens and the dismal weather? Did you know your house smelled so vile that even the pigs would have fainted in it?

And good god! Your incessant burping. When you were not talking, you were burping; when you were not eating, you were burping; when you were not breathing; you were burping; when you were not sleeping, you were burping. It was as though there was someone inside you that was speaking to you; it was as though you swallowed someone who was screaming inside and was struggling to get out. You burped as though it was the most melodious sound in the world. You burped every time and everywhere.

You are a master at stating the obvious. When someone is watching television, you would say, 'Oh! You are watching TV!' when someone is listening to music, you would say, 'Oh! You are listening to music!' when someone is eating, you would say, 'Oh! You are eating!' when someone is walking, you would say, 'Oh! You are walking!' when someone is coughing, you would say, 'Oh! You are coughing!' You elevated every trivial fact to unnecessary significance.

You prided on the fact that your colleagues called you exotic. In fact, you are an exotic fruit. God created you initially as a donkey, but at the last moment before sending you out into this world, due to profound misjudgment and rarest lapse of concentration, cut your tail, converted two of your legs into hands, and gave you a human form.”

He stared at the spider for a long time and did not realize that its tirade had ceased; when he r e v i v e d , i t s s p e e c h w a s s u ff i c i e n t l y inflammatory to destroy his poise, which was an unusual event for he was well known for his imperturbable composure and levelheadedness.

He gathered his friends and they smoked the lungi repelling the spider. Before darting off, it warned, “This is not the last you have seen or heard of me. I will be back.”

The wedding and the post-marital rituals were completed peacefully. Then one morning, Sasi screamed in bed. Her saree was riddled with holes that flaunted her sexuality in its most

arresting form. She blamed Surya for being prurient and then praised his artistry. He, though filled with massive sexual desire, disowned this act. However, much to their chagrin, all her sarees and his shirts in the wardrobes sported perforations with intricate patterns. He understood this to be the evildoing of the spider and looked around for it with feverish madness.

He saw it reclining on the mirror table next to his bed like the god Vishnu on the coiled, thousandhooded Shesha Naga, two of its legs posed like scissors and one leg holding a stick with dead bugs, like a meat on a skewer, which it nibbled. It said, “Sasi looks lovely, doesn't she?” This was like driving nails into his body. He took hold of a stick and started lashing at it wildly, but kept missing it, and then he started beating everything in sight, as if he was possessed of the devil. His house became a battleground except that the enemy he was fighting was nowhere to be seen, but he kept on beating, as if whatever he saw was the enemy. His fight with the invisible opponent took him from the bedroom to the dining room, dining room to the main hall, main hall to the kitchen, kitchen to the bathrooms, bathrooms to the granary and then finally the sacred temple.

He then fell on the floor sweating copiously, and gasping so loudly, as though he was stifled with his head in a hermetic plastic bag. When he returned to normality, he realized that he beat the idols of his gods and goddesses, which led him to wail boisterously pleading for forgiveness and to lick the idols. The spider then appeared at the door. Before walking out, it said, “This is just the beginning. It is not too late. Return my property and save yourself.”

Now he took desperate measures. He set traps in all nooks and corners of his house. Some were bottles with bugs stuffed with spider poison, whilst some, sticky pads. He used spiderrepellent sprays. He carried a spray in his dhoti, sprayed on himself and Sasi all the time. He removed the sprinklers in the crops and installed them in his house. They sprinkled aromatic oils

and pesticides day and night that repelled spiders. Then to drive away the spider, they started beating the carpets, pillows, mattresses, cots and bedclothes and ended up driving out all the wild life in the vicinity. The beatings went on for days and there were times during the day when they mingled with the beatings of the dhobis on the village river ghats. Sometimes the symphony of the beatings drove the kids to dance wildly in the courtyard of the village centre. The beatings however stopped when the village elders warned that these beatings, instead of driving away the spiders, would repulse the guardian spirits and bring adversity. Then acting on a suggestion of the village doctor, he plastered dung, mixed with borax and chalk, all over the floors, the walls, the ceilings, the furniture, and the homeware. The smell in his house became so odious that he and Sasi now slept in the cowshed on a cot, and made copious amounts of torrid love between the cows under their nonchalant gaze and in their drool, urine, dung and fodder.

A week later, Sasi ran into the house from the courtyard hollering that there was an enormous elephant sleeping in the cowshed. It was one of the buffaloes, dead, bloated like an elephant. The village doctor diagnosed that it may have died from a bite of a king cobra. It was that same night, when he was mourning, the spider appeared before him and grinned at him. It then raised its legs to the sky pumping them like one pumping one's fists in the event of victory, and then performed a chicken dance. It followed this with a lewd dance, sliding its head horizontally and pushing its abdomen like a pelvic thrust.

Surya, now raving mad, assembled groups of villagers and they killed every creeping, crawling, sliming being in sight - spiders, insects, flies, snakes, mice - and set fire to the gossamers, nests, lairs, and holes. The spider appeared a day later in a dolorous mood. It addressed him with heavy grief and utmost vehemence, “You are an implacable idiot and have been a stubborn adversary. I have tried everything I could. Now

there is only one thing left.” Saying this, it crawled up his legs into his dhoti, and then scurried up his buttocks, and before he could act, disappeared into his arse, making him erupt like a hot geyser in a horrific cry. He was afraid that he may have been bitten on his buttocks, and underwent an elaborate ritual from the temple priest and a thorough checkup from the doctor, who applied the traditional boiled rice remedy used in the Capital city to cure the bites of venomous serpents. To put it succinctly, he cemented the crack in Surya's butt with porridge.

Few days passed very peacefully engendering a false sense of complacency in Surya, who now rested assured that his nemesis has finally accepted defeat and fled. But then, when he sneezed, spat, pissed, and shat, gossamers tumbled out. He thought this could be the aftereffects of the bite, which the village doctor, a charlatan, has undoubtedly failed to detect and cure.

One morning, Sasi woke up to find the bed next to her missing Surya. She turned and froze in horror looking at the ceiling. There she saw him facing her and snoring with his eyes wide open.

His whole body was supported on springs of threads from the ceiling. They emanated from his body like hair and provided the suction. He was like a house lizard. His belly sagged like a honeycomb. Her shrieks woke him up. He used his hands to grip the walls and scaled down.

His appetite increased manifold and he was now eating like an elephant. He lost his speech gradually and started expressing himself in silk fibres. There was a burglary one night in a house in the neighborhood. The shouts of 'thief! thief! thief!' made him curious and he came out, only to notice the thief running towards him with a knife in one hand and the loot in the other. He cowered and implored loudly, “Stop! Please don't kill me!”, but what came out was a lightning bolt of thread that hit the thief in the head and turned him

into a hero overnight.

A few days later, he started devouring ants, bees, butterflies, beetles, wasps, and other insects in his house and the fields. Surya, once a stalwart vegetarian and the hater of meat-eaters, had now become the scourge and consumer of insects. To stop him from wandering into the neighborhood preying for them and make himself a laughing stock, Sasi regaled him at home with delicious curries of insects with rice, and cakes and marzipan sweets made from fried insects, which caused him now to shit colorful balls and ribbons of silk.

Very often, he would swathe Sasi in silk mistaking her for a prey; she would look like a specimen prepared for demonstration purposes for students of human anatomy. He soon started crawling on all fours. The children of his relatives called him spiderkaka lovingly and played novel games with him. They would sit on his back and he would take them up the walls and the ceiling. One of the games was called mummified ghosts. He would cocoon or mummify kids in silk and they would play ghost games, on some occasions giving heart-attacks to old people with fragile health. He would be invited for their birthday parties and overfed before the commencement of the merriment. He would then be requested to decorate the rooms.

He would scamper all over the walls and the ceiling and bedeck them with silk garlands discharged from his body. He would then station himself on the ceiling and when the birthday child blew the candles and cut the cake, he vomited silken confetti over the gathering.

The story of his silky evacuations and crawling on all fours rightfully earned him the title of Spiderman of Pattuchintapuram, but he caused a lot of embarrassment and great dismay to his elders and Sasi, who advised him that a change of people and scenery may restore his human nature.

He left his village and returned abroad to his work in the city of skyscrapers. He worked on the topmost floor of the highest skyscraper; it would be downright impertinence on our part to assume otherwise. He crawled into his office very early in the morning before the arrival of his colleagues and left very late in the night after them. He would remain in it all the time. He carried lunchbox containing rice and curries cooked from the choicest of insects by Sasi every morning. He shat pellets of silk out of the window that gathered so much force due to gravity that they injured the pedestrians on the street.

He took the conference calls in his office and would appear on a screen during the meetings.

His seated posture gave the impression of a sprinter on the track waiting for the pistol shot to make his sprint. He kept quiet all the time due to the fact that he now spoke volumes of silk threads instead of words, and had to suffer listening to others for a change. And when asked for comments, “What do you think of this bar chart with the business projections for the next year?” he would speak the most amazing balderdash, “That bars would look better if you use sugarcane sticks. For those figures on the top of the bars, use roast beef, boiled eels, and picked tongues of peacocks. For the background, you should use the color of ordure of an ox. Well, on the whole, it looks very dull. So to sex it up, I would suggest you put a small video on the right showing the mating of spiders. I would suggest that every one of you has tea three times a day and what a divine combination would it be if you dipped slugs, gnats, aphids, butterflies in the tea instead of biscuits and had them.”

His physiognomy had changed so much for the worse that it raised suspicions that he carried a deadly virus, which led his colleagues to reason why he was resigned to his office all the time. His eyeballs bulged so perilously as though they

were about to fall; the hair from his body pointed out like barbs and were being shot like missiles to impale prey. He would, very often, dash from his chair, but out of the display on the screen, and pounce on an insect on the wall or the floor.

His ignominious existence, however, came to an end one morning during a fire drill. Instead of taking the fire exits to evacuate the building, he crawled out of the window and down the glass façade of the skyscraper. There were shouts of 'What the hell', 'Bejesus', 'Holy smoke', 'Holy Moses', 'Holy Mackerel', 'Spiderman is real' from the people on the streets. His descent was caught on mobiles and cameras, and was now relayed all over the country. He raced down for sometime, but then restrained himself after the novelity of the situation hit him. He then crawled down slowly, and noticed that the street had come to a standstill, and that he was being watched. He reversed and started climbing to return to his office, but realized that the building would soon be engulfed in fire. He reversed again and continued his downslide.

After he descended a quarter of the building, the spider vacated his body. He lost his grip and plunged headlong. His dhoti created a funnel of cloud around him; it was as though a giant white hibiscus was falling from above; he resembled a big chocolate-clappered white bell. His nosedive misled vainglorious beauties on the street to think that he was coming for them to cradle them in his arms, and take them on a magical journey to a wonderland. But he crashed into the road and perished instantly. His dhoti became his shroud.

His heroism was celebrated in his home country and all over the world. The most common explanation for this bizarre accident was that he assumed there was a real fire and tried to save people on the lower floors, but crashed, unfortunately, due to a mysterious loss of grip, after having scaled down a quarter of the building with ease.

October 2009. Newyork

Sasi returned with his body, which sheltered the spider, to the village where he was cremated in his prized dhoti. The heartbroken spider looked at the flames melting its many years of toil to ashes. It eventually started spinning a new home.

But this time, it built a less lavish and an inconspicuous one.

voices | visions

| voices within | I would've called out to you, and embraced you warmly too.

handwriten

| voices without | my shoulders tire my limbs, and my limbs refuse my

| voices around | a six year old girl fully draped in a white sheet by a young man on a dark rainy evening. where is the poetry in that?

thrown open this shroud and danced with the rhythm of this rain.

a verse

feeble support. but the pleasures of my eyes alternate between watching this girl, my daughter,

a last word, a last hold, and a last joy—

| voices around |

not for me, anymore.

for once, the father doesn't

and the rain.

I imagine the possibility that the life-giving

draped tenderly

want to carry

in this white sheet

the daughter,

your tears and in the rain,

the daughter

drops of rain would make you wake up, call me 'father'

I see not

isn't going to

what could be,

leap persistently

but what has become,

in protest.

and from now on, there must be

for a last time, once again, and make me forget for a moment the sudden demise of all hope.

and for this once,

father,

poetry in this

I will live

the poetry

as a memory

of separation?

of the daughter who wasn't meant to be.

The Guide sutirtha

a verse

My guide told me she'll give me a blow-job for just a hundred rupee note. She was a tribal woman, ugly, aged, with tattoos on her wrinkled skinI gave her the money and waited under the waterfall holding my cock in my hand.

She said she'll teach me the spell to mesmerize, so I waited for her. She said she'll show me the cemetery of the constellations, so I waited for her. She said she'll be back in a jiffy, so i waited for her. All this for just a hundred rupee note seemed a fair deal, So i waited for her. Till the water drops fell over and my cock shrunk down. For just a hundred rupee note.

Fine Art

jairanjit

Complicated Simplicity

cabandalism

silver shining

L i f e

Evitah

i n

c i r c l e s

Mondayne

Cartoons and Caricatures

Who is that fellow? He looks so downright drab and down to brown earth. I think I have seen him somewhere.

Yeah, he does look familiar.

Santosh

Excuse me sir, are you Sunday by any chance?

No kid, I am the one who comes after him.

Oh ok, you are saturday, I am pleased to meet you sir.

I guess the most definition answer would have been, "No, I am not Sunday."

Yeah Well, in hindsight you can say even he can come after Sunday, but then in hindsight you can say a lot of things.

Anyway, no, I am not Saturday either.

harendra

graphic design

woman art

Of the blues which make Pangong

upasna

a commentary Pangong Lake, Leh, Jammu & Kashmir I came from the vale- was born there, hopped around, and now I am an eavesdropper on the past that I wasn't (mostly) a part of. I listen. Anecdotes include cherry-flower-season-festivals, women's girls college's Zoology wing (fondly?) named Siberia and the umpteen number of times, all of my uncles almost drowned (with their fiancĂŠs) on a Dal Shikara- amidst their surreptitious love affairs.

Several years later, I stepped into the state. The airplane landed on the 2nd highest airport in the world, right into the Leh mountains. Blank surrounds, majestic landscapes, barren air, huge turnips, gur-gur tea (which by the way is just a variant of sheer/ noon chai/ pink salt tea - totally has to be tried!), and the monasteries- Hemis, Thiksey.

Water was strangely not game - probably it lurks behind the Chinars not far away. Everyone is aware of it. The air hardly misses droplets, and people have developed mechanisms to show that they don't care much. (For the more adventurous kinds, check out the "local toilets") However one look at the Darya-eSind gives water and blue new definitions. The hills and mountains aware of this, also moisten their browns to yield the mossy greens, perchance even turquoise.

A local engineer and a cab driver insouciantly took us upwards to what they call the Changla pass, a mere 18,000 feet up (on the 3rd highest motorway in the world) , which derisively stared us down, or so it felt. Though to be honest, it was tough to “feel� much, the air wasn't exactly in high supply, and breathlessness perhaps the solitary thought.

Scrupulously we crossed more hills, and began a downward journey towards the other side, accosted by Yaks walking around like cows and very hairy mountain goats.

The draw for all this travel was a lake called Pangong. After 4 hours on the road, we nearly refused to believe it existed.

And when our eyes fell on it, it was placid, unadorned, even austere in its azure frames, like a painting one could have the gaze absorbed onto. Amid a myriad of colours- brown, blue, patches of green were probably the most common.

The mountains and hills changed colours as the sun casually ran over them, like hazel eyes of boys playing with the sandy beach soil. We sighed, mesmerised.

Pangong lies on the India-China border, about 60 percent of the lake lies with the neighbour, and the proximity means it is 'owned' by army folks. The vast expanse of water almost teasingly alludes to a border-less existence. One is subjected to a check, and briefed by army men before venturing into anything. The locals were quick to supply details- them filmy folks shot Tashan in this place.

The water is Coleridgeesque - inspite of the huge volume not potable in the least. The copious amounts of salt make sure even on a dip stick survey, the sprig or even your fingers come out with small white particles.

A quick boat ride is what we followed up with. The clarity of the blue (sometimes green) water, the sheer force of the wind, and a small army boat, made it feel unreal.

We wanted to continue, and stop at the same time. Isn't beauty sometimes a wee bit too much to hold? By happenstance one is led into surrounds which seem so surreal, that words can only say so much. At first sight Pangong gives you a nonchalant peek into its marvelous self almost haughtily. But the moment you try to leave, it holds you, water swelling up, pleading you to stay.

Perhaps that's how most romances begin in that one trice.

For the real thrill, and the calm which we surrendered to, get yourself packed, and go out there. Find your moment!

An exclusive FLOP service offering dirt cheap intellectual haircuts.

FLOP sends a hairdresser to you to the location that you pick. It could be as low as a latrine. The hairdresser will dress up like your favorite artist and will speak to you like one.

The cheaper the intercourse, the cheaper the haircut.

wholesome friend

a short story

In Memorium It was a hot and humid day in Kolkata, the evening promised to be so much more. I was going to meet a few of my childhood friends over coffee and today I was the guest of honour. It had been a long time since we boys had met up and the coffee and the snacks were on them.

The evening was going to be a promising one, meeting up with old buddies, coffee and a Bengali's favourite pastime, Adda. It is essentially something which is very Bengali. It's a habit he can't do without. Every culture has its quirks, for us Bengalis Adda used to be sitting at road side stalls sipping hot tea and like all knowing humbugs discussing almost everything under the sun. But two topics were very close to a Bengali's heart, politics and football. Everyone has “read up” Marx, Lenin, Hegel, Mao and even Stalin. But gone are those heady days, yes I agree in some circles it is still considered to be cool if one is a leftist intellectual and discuss the local football clubs but Adda is still Adda, it never did loose its sheen.

Its position in a Bengali's life can only be compared to fish curry and rice.

I took an Auto till Gariahat and walked till I reached the rendezvous point, a brand new coffee shop at Golpark.

Yes, the tea stall has been replaced by the coffee shop and sweet milked tea for café latté. The new generation has moved out of the roadside tea stalls and into the snazzier premises of coffee shops with their printed menu cards and delectable edibles. Some of these places even double up as hookah bars- an added attraction.

I walked into the coffee shop and the air-conditioned pleasant environment immediately agreed with me. It was still sweltering outside and the fragrance laden cool air put me at ease. I took the day's newspaper from the rack and chose for myself a big table in anticipation. As I was skimming through the day's main headlines, a footnote caught my eye. It spoke briefly about an encounter between the army and terrorists in the valley.

No unit name or terrorist outfit were mentioned. A line was dedicated to a young Lieutenant who had lost his life. My mind immediately raced back many years, nine to be exact.

Those days I was an aspiring reporter, well not exactly, I used to work as a reporter for an inter-school magazine. I don't know how else to put it, but in the words of the man who created it, “it was for the students, of the students and by the students”. My reporting career till then boasted a few interviews with minor celebrities and a breaking news about unhygienic food served in many school canteens. That was it, and I was hungry for more as a good reporter should be. As the man who ran the news paper said, a sharp eye and hunger can take a reporter a long way, it was the essential mark of a good reporter. Yes I was hungry and was looking for a good story. My euphoric moment came when I was rifling through a stack of old news papers. I was looking for a story, rather a thread of a story, and I found one. I would write about the Kargil war. It had been hardly 7 months since the hostilities ceased; the war was still fresh in the memories of the people. I wanted to do a feature on a war hero from my city, and I didn't have to look far. A distant cousin of mine had died in the war. He was 23 years old when he died. I remembered how the army had sent his parents a missing in action telegram. Two months later all their hopes were dashed when his body was found. I couldn't attend his funeral because I was down with a fever, but from what I heard from my mother, I was sure he had gotten a hero's funeral. I did attend the Shraad ceremony; I thought that was important as well. I was paying my respects to the fallen hero by feasting.

Remembering how he was rather than how he died. I was touched by the help and generosity bestowed on the deceased parents by the people of their locality. The state government had declared that the grieving family of the hero would get two hundred and fifty thousand rupees and the government in Delhi had promised the family a petrol pump. I remembered feeling a sense of pride and admiration. Proud to be an Indian, a country which respects her glorious dead and I felt admiration for my deceased cousin.

As I sat down to write over-excited and couldn't distinguish between real and false memories. The human memory is not completely understood, it has a habit of filling up the gaps and it always fills up the gaps how it wants to. I had no clue how many I had fabricated in my

deadeye

head, in my zeal for getting a front page story.

I went to a newspaper's archive to research my deceased cousin, yes it would have been easier to ask my family for the number of my aunt; but there was always a chance that I might be accused of “war profiteering”. After I found out his father's name and where he stayed it wasn't difficult to get hold of the telephone number for a seasoned reporter like me. I called up the number I had found in the yellow pages and my aunt picked up the call.

I first established my relationship with her, and after exchanging the usual pleasantries I came straight to the point. I had never ever called this lady up, it was obvious that I wanted something from her. I felt it was going to defeat my purpose if I sugar coated my intentions. I spoke clearly what I wanted to do, I wanted the country to remember a fallen hero again, I didn't quiet get the hint of sarcasm she had in her voice when she asked me to come down for lunch the next day.

I had to change two buses to get to my aunt's place. I was tired, I had attended school and it was hot for a February day, but my mind was fresh, it was buzzing with millions of questions that I wanted to ask. I needed to be sincere, I needed to be strong, and I needed a front page story. It didn't occur to me then that I was in a way furthering my interests over someone's misery. I mean we do it all the time don't we? Someone's loss is always another's gain.

That is how society runs. Now some would like to argue that the men who join the army are state sanctioned killers, well that's true, but it is because they patrol our borders and lay down their lives so that people like me can think about protesting by burning the flag. People in the uniform give us that freedom, but what we forget is they return home draped in that very flag. Call me an idealist fool, but I believe we need romantic fools who will die for a higher cause. I can safely vouch for that. It is very easy to criticise, very hard to be part of a system and try to improve it and fight its evils from within.

My aunt had a smile on her face as she opened the door; she asked me the usual questions as I settled down on the sofa. She gave me a glass of water and a plate of sweet meat, she had dressed simply in a white cotton sari with a red border, I noticed my uncle was in the house but was listening to the radio. My cousin sister, the subject's elder sister joined us. I took out a note pad and asked them to tell me a bit about the man.

His mom took out a family album, it had pictures of him as a kid, and she had a fond look on her face as she recounted anecdotes about her little boy. I had a lot of incidents from his family about his childhood, how naughty he was, how generous, how he used to be the life of any social gathering due to the money business he was always involved in. how he had a life long love affair with karate and cricket, two very different sports- the lessons from each game was easily transposed to the other by the man. He was a winner, an achiever. A good student throughout school, a scout, a debater, and a quizzer- I began to wonder why he joined the army? When I asked the question to his mother she simply said, he wanted to prove he was the best among the best and he loved his country, I was happy I was getting good material for my front page splash. The questions and their answers went on smoothly for sometime till I broached the subject of his role during the war.

That's when his mother fell silent and his sister chipped in, it was all sketchy, he was leading an advance patrol to access the enemy's strength when his platoon was ambushed from almost all corners, wounded and bleeding profusely, he still managed to get half his men out alive. A few survivors of that ambush later came and told his family that the last they saw of him was when he did a bayonet charge to allow the wounded to escape. He was 23. I couldn't hold back my tears. This was a war where 20 somethings marched to their deaths, where you were old enough to die but not old enough to drink. Most of the men were facing well stocked, well trained and well entrenched enemies, but that just wasn't it, my cousin was ambushed at 13,000 feet, fighting in those kinds of altitudes is not a joke.

One is not just fighting the enemy but the environment itself- near vertical cliffs and spine ridges were crossed to fight the enemy. It was where the young guns of the Indian army rewrote the concept of mountain warfare.

Those boys might have been hungry, cold and bone tired, where other men would have given up they fought on. Everyone who witnessed the war from the sidelines thought we would never be able to capture those ridges back, but we did.

Two months after my cousin was reported missing, my uncle received a telegram stating that his son's mortal remains had been found. His body was brutalised by the enemy like so many bodies of Indian soldiers. My aunt with tears in her eyes remembered the last time she spoke with her little boy, he had said” we will get those wolves out”, and promised to be back home for his sister's engagement. I couldn't help but notice that his sister had no bracelets on her hands nor was her forehead adorned by vermillion. I noticed how proud they were of their little hero, I couldn't hold back my tears either, but then something happened I had read in the newspapers about a monument erected by the people of the locality to commemorate the hero. As soon as I asked about that, I released a dormant volcano. His mother started to cry profusely and his sister got up and left for her room. When I stupidly enquired why she was crying she asked me to accompany her.

She led me to a veranda from where the road was visible, she pointed her finger, and I looked in the direction. There stood his monument, about 5 feet high, it was simple in design, two concrete blocks placed on top of each other, and a railing surrounding the monument. I saw dogs; I saw dogs roaming about in the garbage littering the area around the monument. I saw the dogs tear open bags of refuse and fight over them, I saw a man reliving himself on the sly. I saw the stream hit the side of the monument. She entreated me through her sobs, “Please tear it down. I don't want it there, he is my son”. I just kept thinking he was only 23 when he died.

I put my heart and soul into the story, I wrote about the injustice faced by the veterans and their families. I started the journey trying to find one man's story, I ended up biting more than I could chew I guess. I waited eagerly for that issue to be published, I wanted to see the story in print. I was too excited to sleep and waited near the door since the early hours of the morning.

When I finally got my hands on the copy of the news paper I found that the front page contained only a huge blow up of Hritik Roshan. The rest of the pages were mostly dedicated to an interview with him by one of our correspondents. I never wrote for that paper again, that was the day I decided I didn't want to be a journalist.

Story Of A Barrel

santosh

a short story I I'll leave the court room for some time, imagine it in your head, make a picture of what a court room looks like in your opinion, we'll come back to it later.

The person in chair on the raised platform looked like he was in his late forties.

Magistrate, without details as to at what level, seems to be a better word than judge here. We've had too many stories about judges or involving them. This one is not about judges or judgements anyway. It is more decisively aimless.

“Why did you kill them? Now that you refuse to refuse admitting killing them, that's the only question that remains. None of them remain to speak about this question that remains and it is very important to know why you killed them before I decide how stern the punishment should be. So Adwan, why did you kill them?” he asked the man sitting in the dock presently. This person, in turn, seemed to have unlocked his lips multiple times already as his lips looked dry and the voice that'd follow shortly sounded a little hoarse too. He spoke; still; again, “Third law of mechanics” he said, in a clear reference to some sort of an actionreaction scenario, but what followed was not as obvious, not without prior knowledge of the context, which the magistrate seemed to be having trouble with too, establishing the context. “Sometimes context can't be separated from reasons” he had thought to himself some time back; he had yawned too.

“Smell, the smell” man uttered, stammered a bit, as if knowingly and added, “Rose Bud!” and laughed, clearly, audibly, first looking up and away, at the people sitting behind the public prosecutor's desk and then finally at the person on the chair.

Sound of his laughter was way clearer than his voice had been so far and so far had it reached that a crow sitting on a branch of a tree in the quadrangle somewhere hesitated for a moment in his small, confident leap before the flight. He flew away anyway, wayward to start with, wayward still before settling into hoppy yet smooth short bursts characteristic of any crow of reliable pedigree.

“Rose bud, hmmm….., well, since I know it is difficult to know if you know what I am alluding to, let me clarify. It is a joke. It doesn't mean anything no matter if you have seen the movie or not. Name of the movie is Citizen Kane.” he explained further.

Magistrate on the other hand, looked at him, straight faced, looking offended and conveying his displeasure at something, may be that he indeed had seen some movies and Citizen Kane could very well be one of them, or may be he was just pretending to be offended so that he could cut straight back to the point. It couldn't be figured. It could also not be figured if the likelihood of him being offended was because of constant disregard to his question, which he seemed to have asked a number of times, or if it was because of the assumption on man's part that the magistrate hadn't seen the movie. But since we can't figure out if the judge was offended at all, we wouldn't bother figuring the 'why' out.

Out in the canteen, Sachin Tendulkar just square cut someone to the boundary and some claps could be heard, even inside the court room and it was this sound that finally managed to wake the teenager who served tea to the staff here out of his slumber. He slurped a little, wiped his nose and eyes quickly, erected himself and left as if jolted out of the reverie that was to be followed by his employer scolding him.

“Don't test our limits and answer the question, Mister” the magistrate said finally, putting so much emphasis on Mister that it seems appropriate to spell it fully.

“I know you are acting, I know you are in your senses alright and are behaving this way just to evade a tough judgement” he continued.

“So now let me know why you killed them. Eight of them, have you any realization! You have killed eight people in cold blood.” And now he started to look a little flustered as if he himself had this realization just now.

“Well, firstly, when I killed them, they were normal, hot blooded mammals and secondly, when I last counted, the number was six, but didn't count after killing the last two. I haven't had the time, first I was busy convincing myself not to run and let them catch me and since then the smell, you see, it's stuck there, the smell. Nausea equates to that smell these days.”

“Are you trying to be funny here!” responded the magistrate, his throat sounded dry, his lips looked so.

So it can be deduced that the exasperation was a result of something more justifiable than impatience.

“Now I can't hear you, the disease is back, the disease is back, the disease is back, the disease is back …………………… ……………………”

Man seemed to have gone into a hysterical trip of sorts. Two policemen, standing on either side of the dock, moved their jaws abruptly yet slowly, one because he swallowed the beetle leaf he had been chewing on and the other as he was about to call out to him to help him do the usual routine of dragging this man back to the van.

“Take him away.” The magistrate said.

“Scoundrel,” he murmured, pulling his sleeves up and exhaling forcefully, expressing his displeasure at being left with no choice but to wait for the next hearing. Adwan, in the meanwhile, and amongst some degree of chaos as some papers were dropped and collected and some voices were raised and hushed, was dragged out of the room towards the van.

“And yes, I want a complete report from the doctors tomorrow. I am not going to sit on this case forever.” the judge demanded and moved slightly in the chair he was sitting on.

“Take him away, take him away, take him away…” magistrate could be heard murmuring.

Soon the court was back in order and I think by now you must be ready with your image of the court room too. Now add some years to the furniture, some broken chairs at the back of the room, take most of the blue away from the cloth stretched at the front of the platform, add some squeaky sounds to most of the hinges, remove some of the people present and add a couple of ghosts sitting across each other on the frame supporting the frame. Ghosts looked at each other once in a while; sternly. Then they looked at the magistrate; sternly, ruefully. One of them used to be a person killed by the person the other ghost was of.

They both hated the magistrate. One because he was sentenced to death by this very magistrate and the other because he couldn't make it to the court room on time that day and had waited one entire week for his killer to be presented in the court room for hearing, until finally he saw the other ghost in the same room one day. That one week was heavy on him, as he waited anxiously for his killer to be convicted.

“The disease is back.. The disease is back …” Adwan kept repeating religiously, perspiring slightly, twitching his nose every once in a whittled while. In the beginning, as the hearings started, they used to carry him carefully as he'd have such fits, not any “the disease is back, the disease is back…” more. Number of policemen accompanying him Adwan was tired by now and could only murmur as decreased too. he sat in the van, which drove away, onto the road.

here as he grew more and more violent if people wouldn't listen to his stories. It was a sunny day, the day he was brought here. Someone somewhere cried too.

II “Logical sums can only be done at the bit level.” aged voice of a young man sounded. Asylum looked deserted as most of them were still away for their routine check up. “They” is how the inmates were referred to as by attendees here.

“So you see, it's difficult to do a logical sum if you can't think at the bit level. You can multiply without zeroes and as a logical extension can conclude that even divisions can be done without introducing the concept of zero but summation can't happen without nonzero steps. Hence zeroes my dear friend. What's your name? hmmm, yeah, Vrind, imaginative name I must say, but sounds like a tired invention too, as if a writer sat down to come up with something really ambitious, then got bored, sat a little longer and then finally came up with a short name for the protagonist,” the man added, chuckling, twitching his nose a little in every whittled while. It's the 30th day since he was brought here, Adwan, after his last hearing at the court. A report bearing signatures of multiple doctors brought him here. Nobody could say if it did him a favour, least of all him.

The magistrate was still not convinced that he was an invalid, but such are the ways of law that he had to overlook his personal opinion and look at things the way they were supposed to, which is not necessarily the way things should be looked at, he had been observed to have observed.

“Since the doctors' report declares him insane, I have no choice but to send him back to the asylum, though in my personal opinion man is nothing but a sham, a charlatan, someone with a mind utterly capable of scheming, but no soul.” He started thus his final statement and added, as some people looked at the man's sole, “..and it is indeed disappointing that there is no scientifically proven method to ascertain his true mental state. So as I have already said, he can be taken to the asylum and is to be treated there until he is cured and can be transferred to a jail for the rest of his term, which is 14 years of rigorous imprisonment”.

Both the ghosts looked at him sternly as he finished reading the final statement.

Adwan, so, was taken to the asylum. A police van drove through the bricked quadrangle on to the dusty, crowded road crisscrossing its way past the other leaner lanes to the main outer ring road. The van took half an hour once it emerged on to the ring road to reach the asylum. It was a big compound with a decently tall wall surrounding a number of small buildings scattered around. The biggest of all these sparsely distributed buildings stood in the far right corner. This, and all the other buildings were painted in the same shade of gray and looked like they had been given a fresh layer recently. Trees were not many in number and were numbered, each of them. “you see the biggest number on these trees aspires to outnumber the branches of the smallest tree.” Adwan had remarked on one of the days following his first here. The same day he met Vrind, the only person he would engage in conversations with. Vrind was a 24 year old from a small town around 100 kms from the city. A broad, strong frame was covered with flesh sparingly, a rather dark complexion accentuated his sharp, strong nose and made his small glinting eyes more noticeable. Eyes that didn't seem to blink too often. He spoke slowly and gently, taking pauses as if measuring the words coming out, but one thing that nobody failed to notice was that he had a lot of stories to tell. Actually that is what brought him to a mental asylum, he did nothing else but tell stories. Some involved him, most did not.

“Why is he here? he appears to be alright,” a doctor once questioned his colleague after he had heard Vrind narrate one of his stories. “Even the way he tells his stories points to that” he tried to convince everyone about his observation, but then he was reminded immediately that it was precisely the reason why he was brought here, because all he did was tell stories. He wouldn't talk to anyone if he didn't have a story to tell.

He always had one, his family had reported, tried to have him cured and then had to give up and bring him

And that is why it was seen as something rather strange that Adwan chose to talk to no one but Vrind, but then, since it was a mental asylum, everybody seemed to come to terms with the oddity finally. This oddity was come to terms with on a day that coincided with the 6th death anniversary of Salvador Dali. Date read January 23rd 1995 and if one noticed it was also Subhash Chandra Bose's birth anniversary. Nobody noticed that, Vrind did, and related a story about this boy who loses his hearing ability as a kid and never regains it. Despite this disability, he grows to be an excellent musician who upon completion of his first major concert realizes that people need to be overwhelmed to be convinced.

That them regarding him as a genius because he could create music without being able to hear was nothing but a complete disregard towards other faculties.

He also concludes that music is created by mouth and merely heard by ears and that ears in fact have never done anything audible during their entire collective biological life span. Vrind added a number of other elements to make it sound more interesting but the moral of the story was that to be able to express means to be able to chew and swallow. Some people died too in the story. And as always happened with Vrind's stories, this one too was followed by a conclusion drawn at will by Adwan.

“I have told you a hundred times, a cat reluctant to jump on a hot tin roof is either pregnant or lazy; latter in most cases is more likely a scenario given ubiquitous birth control methods these days” It was a sunny day, some clouds were seen the evening before that, but were not heeded to as generally nobody expected them to rain given it was the middle of a chilly winter. Air bore a smell that emanated from somewhere and headed somewhere, so the air was not still. It was the seventh day after

they had met for the first time, fourth since they had had lunch together for the first time and second since Vrind had told a story about a woman who always tells a story to her husband every time she gets back home late, then the husband makes it a point to point it out to her and this altercation is followed by a pointless altercation, which is not focused on anything apart from both of them accusing each other of not caring for the child, who is asleep on the bed and is used to pretending being asleep as they exchange words and stories. Slowly the child grows up, and slowly he grows up because he can't do anything about the pace at which human beings grow, so to say. His mother who has long forgotten all about telling stories is now more open about her not needing to come back home late, as now she is divorced and can bring her male friends along. But she also realizes that the child tells stories about a lot of things now, and this realization grows slowly as the number of stories being told by the child grow.

The story ended with the child telling stories and nothing else, mother calling her ex-husband and accusing him of being responsible for the child's condition and finally, a hospital vehicle drawing its screeching wheels to a halt.

“A man's van is a man's van.” Adwan had concluded then. He had also noted somewhere towards the middle of the story that the man was not justified in not believing in his wife's stories and that women are to stories as men are to jokes about private parts, but then he changed his statement slightly by stating that in fact men tell more stories than women do and that is why it was even more remarkable that this woman was so deft at coming up with stories. Finally he attributed the peculiar circumstances to husband and wife both being drunk by the time she came back home late.

Same day two more people were convicted in different parts of India and were now part of the group of ghosts who sit on erections and frames of different kinds inside court rooms. They looked at their respective magistrates sternly.

I II None of the inmates were given footwear inside the asylum, rooms they lived in were 20x14 square feet halls with a few windows, big ones; on either side of the longer stretch, beds were lined along the walls leaving space only for doors; some cabinets where some stuff which couldn't be seen presently was kept. In one such room Vrind and Adwan were sitting on their respective beds. Their beds were next to each other's and now it could be said may be that is why these two fellows started hanging around together.

But then as mentioned earlier it being an asylum, everybody had given up trying to figure the reason out long time back. Still, for the sake of making a statement it can be said that proximity always leads to something, either a level of antipathy or empathy or both depending on how indecisive one is. Apathy in such scenarios is difficult to maintain. There was a window between their beds and it looked on to a wall at some distance and a few plants planted alongside it.

“Why do they give windows if they have to have walls!” exclaimed Adwan suddenly, gently without being too loud. Vrind on the other hand kept looking at Adwan questioningly, the way he had never looked at anyone before, so it was quite possible that the thoughts going on in his head were not the same as the ones he generally had as he related his stories.

Adwan noticed it too and made another inconsequential statement to evade a question, which he feared Vrind might ask for the first time during his stay here.

“You know, windows and doors were born out of fear and not ennui as most people would tend to think” he said still trying to look away from Vrind.

“Why did you kill them?” Vrind asked suddenly, but he didn't look at Adwan the way he had been till then, now he looked sympathetic instead.

“Hahahahaha, now even you have started. It's a question beaten to staleness now, don't bother.”

And presently one could easily sense that may be both the judge and the doctor were right in their respective observations about the oddity of these two gentlemen being here at the asylum. Vrind sounded full of sympathy and pity, Adwan sounded defensive; none, as we know, fails to point towards them being in their senses alright.

“Why did you kill them” Vrind didn't budge.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Why did you kill them I ask, why did you kill them..” Vrind insisted again.

“But I have killed eight of them, which one do you want to know about” “Don't pretend, I know the reasons were the same for all, in fact there was only one reason.”

The conviction in Vrind's voice was reflected in his eyes.

“Yeah....hmmmmm, the smell, I liked the smell you see. Smell of the gun powder after the shot. It equated to nausea every time I tried to smell the barrel before I took the shot, but after the shot, it was different. Intoxicating.” Adwan seemed to be wanting to say it all finally.

“I am not the judge you know, so answer me, why did you kill them?” And now Adwan, for the first time, could notice that Vrind in fact sounded different.

“But that doesn't matter. I have been telling the truth all along, it is the smell of the gun powder that made me make those shots. Only that the judge could never make me say the complete truth, he would start not to trust me and once that happens you know stories happen. You know they didn't even ask me which gun I had used, simply because I admitted to killing those people. They never asked me any other question but 'why' and whenever I said, smell, they would not trust me and that made it extremely difficult to go on and explain further. They did not even ask me which gun I used. Alright, may be they knew it already through post-mortem reports, still I should feel involved, right?”

“Yeah, but am still not sure why you killed them, you could have made the shots anyway without killing anyone and could have smelt the barrel, it would have smelt the same, wouldn't it.”

“Hmmm…..” Adwan looked like a confused kid who had just gotten an answer he wasn't expecting to a question he held dear to his heart.

Next 10 minutes that followed saw a lot of activities happening; a tree outside the window, next to the brick wall shed a partly yellow-partly green leaf; a lot of voices were heard in the parliament in Delhi, some were audible, some were barely so and some offensively so and one of them squeaked 'please sit down, let him speak,' nobody in the asylum complained during that period, a remarkable event in its own right as it was a norm amongst the guards, to complain, mostly as to how inefficient their superiors were; a girl thinking nervously why her date was even more nervous on their first date and lastly Vrind relating a story about a guy who stole pickles because he didn't like people eating them since people liked pickles and he didn't like that. Somebody asked him one day why he stole pickles and he responded by asking why people liked them and when that somebody said he couldn't explain, the guy responded by saying that may be then somebody would be able to understand why he stole pickles without going into details.

Adwan in the meanwhile sat there, looking at a trail of ants and for the first time he didn't conclude after Vrind's story ended. After some time he lay back on the bed and slept off immediately. Vrind on the other hand went out and took a walk around the complex and picked some small pebbles on his way back to the hall. After that day there appeared to be something on Adwan's head all the time and he would talk even less now, in fact not at all, as Vrind was the only person he would talk to and now they didn't talk. Everybody noticed it, every sane person that is, insane people around them looked too unpredictable to be said anything of. Anyway, nobody knew the reason why it was so. Adwan would not come out of his room except for lunch, daily ablutions and dinner, Vrind would go for unending

I III It was fourth of a cold December morning when someone complained of an unbearable stench coming out of the store room at the back of the main building. It was one of the guards who complained of it and others accompanied him into the room and as the doors were pushed open, they encountered a horrible sight. Adwan was sitting on his haunches in one corner and next to him lay Vrind's dead body, stabbed on the back, hordes of flies circling around it. His satchel of pebbles lay next to him, one of the pebbles read, “My next story”. Adwan had one in his hand too and it had, “Story of barrels” written on it, now as guards entered the room the pebble slipped out of Adwan's hands gently.

“He made me realize that I could have kept them alive and could have still smelt the barrel.” he said looking at the guards, his lips shivering and a stream of tears rolling down his right eye, left one still looked dry.

A pair of ghosts circled around in joy in one of the court rooms as the judge who they had been looking at sternly for some time, murmured to himself, lying on a bed, in his bungalow…

“Was he insane, was he insane, Was he insane,

photography

b l u r r e d linearities

riya27

anaemia

o

p

e

n

theme santosh

rgirl

zimme

colors

Celestial beauty

madlyn

Just Another 'Day'...

ashindore

Peace..not for the sake of it..

viveka

pgudsoorkar scenic beauty

it b n u ky The blurred line between heaven and earth Solitary confinement is melancholic even in Paradise

sacredeastwind

fragrant dreamy ice cream

Sumit Chakraborty

Chau masks of Purulia

Chhau dance (or Chau dance) is a form of tribal martial dance attributed to origins in Mayurbhanj princely state of Orissa. It has several forms like Seraikella Chau,Purulia Chau, Mayurbhanj Chau etc. But all these forms are performed with beautiful masks.

Chhau in West Bengal, referred to as the Purulia Chhau, has a distinctive character of its own.It has received international acclaim and scaled rare heights of beauty and perfection.Padmashree Sri Gambhir Sing Mura was most renowned exponents o f P u r u l i a C h h a u .

The Chorida (Charida or Chirda) village near Baghmundi of Purulia district of West Bengal is famous for Chau artists and Chau masks. This village has produced many national and international award winners.In these village these masks are produced by a particular group of people who have been engaged in this business for generations (Sutradhara).In every alternate house, from the youngest to the oldest member of the family could be seen busy in making these extraordinarily beautiful masks.As it is impossible for the artists to show mood variations through facial expressions , the expression in the mask's face is very important to illustrate different moods. So it needs extremely high artistic perfection and knowledge of the epic and mythology for the artist to make the right mask which depicting perfect mood.

Making of the masks: The making of Chau masks is a multistage process. It goes as follows -

A clay model of a mask is first made and dried in direct sunlight to make it hard. This is the first step known as 'Mati Gora'. It is then covered with powdered ash.

Then layers of old newspapers moist with gum are pasted on this powdered layer. A thin layer of fine clay will be applied known as "Kabij Lapa". On drying, old torn cloth are pasted on it effectively. The mask is then polished, "Tapi Palish", with a wooden spatula. With a small tool, "batali" the features of the face are defined and cleaned. This is known as "Khushni Khoncha".

A layer of clay water is applied on it. On drying a layer of zinc oxide or "khori mati" is applied on it.

According to the characters the mask is painted and decorated. The artisans are well versed in the use of colours.Dark yellow or bright orange are the colours used for Gods and Goddesses like Devi Durga, Lakhmi and Kartik. White is generally used for Lord Shiva, Ganesh and Goddess Saraswati.

Goddess Kali is painted black or blue. A talisman or a tilak is applied on the forehead of Lord Rama and Krishna. The Asuras are painted in black or deep green with thick mustaches, protruding teeth and large eyes

Silver and golden foil cut in different shapes, string of beads, pith works, and coloured paper flowers, feathers of hens and peacocks are used for decorating the masks. A type of oil is applied on the mask for a fine finish.A fished chau masks weighs up to 3kg and costs upto 2000 INR.

problems Making only Chou masks doesn't suffice a considerable lifestyle. Increasing costs of the raw materials, poor marketing, interfering middleman are some of the chief factors which cuts off the profit percentage to make the chau mask makers poorer day by day. So they have to make some other decorative mask which can be used as wall hanging. The workshops of all the artists are now full of such decorative masks staked together , ready to be marketed along with original chau masks.

Servant to the ring

Determination Can Overcome All Odds

arnab sarkar

Black a n d White

savings

bruised

roadside rococo

Have you ever seen a computer mother board, it represents all things crowded. It looks like a well arranged colony of all sorts of things. A market place of sorts. But all this is just by the way, to allude to what occurred to me as I spade my way through this crowded street in a city I fondly refuse to name. It reminded me of the first sight of a mother board and it also reminded me that one day I’d like to see one with rusted parts, out of use yet ready to be sold second hand. But that’s where the mechanical arrangement ceases to make sense as two extremes of our collective existence suddenly fuse their way into my mind.

There is a simple governing law of nature, if there is predominance of youth in one generation, it has to be compensated by the following generation through predominance of the old and this place offered both. The growing and the done. The shining and the rusted. The metal and the scrap.

Everything at this place was small, rusted and scattered. Money existed as change, things existed in parts, assemblies refused to make themselves available and even if they did, they squeaked and all was so cheap that doubts came cheap too. What you saw around you reminded you that scarcity gives rise to the problem of plenty some times and that if you don’t know already is what economy of scale works on. Anyway, like I have said earlier, all this is by the way. My camera has nothing to do with it, firstly because it is not cheap and secondly because I never had to worry about it not being so. It was borrowed.

every everybody needs a cover cover

Protect yourself..

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