Predictable Results

Things have happened since I last wrote. Predictable things. I had written that it felt like the days of the final examination before the jury, and it turned out to be exactly that, with results almost identical. I failed. At least in my eyes. I was told, as they were failing me, that getting an extension was not  a failure, but its all rubbish in the end.

At the end of the day, one knows intellectually that success is not having your picture in a book, or your work displayed at a graduation show, or even collecting a certificate. But feelings don't follow these dictates. Feelings will heartily herald your misery when you see people who you were learning with, with some success and some failure and plenty of angst, pass you by, and plan for life ahead, when you are stuck in a purgatory from which your departure seems more unsure than ever. But the pricks say, alright, we fucked your case- now you have precisely one day to lick your wound, and then that's it. You can't moan. You can't grieve for the useless effort you put in, can't complain, can't be anything but cheerful. Just smile and help people on their way, because being miserable and letting everyone know about it is a crime. To besmirch another's trip is a fault which is greater than that of one being obliviously happy and gloating in the face of another's misfortune.

 And so I have lived through this hell, and still living in it, and keeping the proverbial stiff upper lip, and welcoming all the success of others to surround me in all my masochistic glory, deeply burying my complete loneliness and alienation that I feel for the entire human race at this point. I cannot even identify with others who share my current fate. Obviously their plight is less immediate than my own.

 Maybe it is because my definition of an extension defers so vastly from the others. I have always judged the others who have ever received an extension as lesser in some ways. Their work didn't cut up to the mark. And now I am in a position to say that maybe mine didn't either. Yet the effort. The effort that has been put into it and the simple ignorance of the work involved is something i cannot seem to wrap my head around. 

 I need some clarity. Some time away. And I will not have that. My entire life's structure has suddenly changed drastically and I don't have time to ponder that or plan my way through it. I'm just rushing through it like a horse with blinkers on yet who has only managed to chip off half of it so only tantalizing glimpses of the outside is flashing through my optic nerves, yet having no time to comprehend.

 Well I am still inspired, but not with things that I was doing. With something else. I am attempting to write another story, a child's tale. And I hope to make an illustration project of it. But inspiration only comes in short inconsistent bursts and it refuses to stay, or rekindle upon revisiting. But I will keep on going. Because being involved with something other than me or other people will get me through this.

I feel very strange right now. I know I have had this feeling before but its been years since I felt it and hence the strangeness and the delay in recognizing what it is.
 This, I am afraid, is not a romantic song about a hooker who marries a millionaire. Its a note about how it is seven in the morning of fourteenth of november, 2011, and I am about to face what is like a final exam, or more like a university exam, about two years since I graduated.
 The comic panels are done, the blog has been updated, the test site had been coughing along quite successfully, and now the actual site has been activated and comic uploaded to, and its not perfect, with elements of design going all over the place, but its working, with a lightbox I installed myself(Im more kicked about this than anything else) and an archive page which currently lists two pages of comics. The final presentation has been prepared and someone I think of with fear and awe when it comes to design, has pronounced it "crisp". Now all there is to do, is to sleep, and wake up, and do some menial things that is required of me before they let me sit for the jury, and then talk my heart out, be pronounced a success or a raging failure, and then to drink regardless, and then to sleep again. I don't think s Shakespeare(?) was this long winded tho.
 There is an emptiness in me tho. That space where this project had been occupying. Its not over, by any long stretch, it won't be over till december. But there has been a bit of a displacement of mass in me where the project used to be lodged tight, like a stubborn fish bone. And that little space of emptiness is scary. Because its reminding me that come december there will be a gaping hole. That mass that was the project will not be there. I really don't know who I will be then. I won't ever be the one who is perennially "dipping".
 What on earth will I do? How will I figure out if I will be happy? And oh the life changes! I might not return to calcutta at all, and work somewhere else. Thats terrible! I still won't be near the family, no matter how much I pine.
 Tho the plus points are that, the stagnating social life does become optional, yet I am left with the apprehension of NO social life at all. That is the problem. How many times am I supposed to start over from scratch? I am not a child that I can adjust easily. But the possibilities and the fears seems to go hand in hand.
 Anyway, I shall now go to sleep, or I turn mowgli in front of the effing panel. And thats never a good place. Must make a list before I do, tho.

On Discovering Who Niall Fergusson Really Is. Huh.

I have just issued Niall Fergusson's The War of The World and have started reading it. Now me reading nial fergusson is something which has a bit of a history. As in me trying to read, i should say. The history goes back a bit of a way, as history is wont to do. I was in college and I don't quite remember whose paper it was that his book was required reading, and i don't remember which one it was either. But I have to assume that it was The Ascent of Money, since I vaguely remember it being an economic history paper. All this is hindsight research. Well, anyway, all I took away from my college days other than a massive hangover which resulted in a general amnesia about what I studied ( I just don't want to admit that I didn't touch my books very much) was the very vague notion that there was a really old man called Niall Fergusson and he Wrote Books Which Are About History And They Must Be Good Since My Very Important College Listed Them As Essential Reading.
Now fast forward to a more recent date of say of the time I saw Borat. And any self respecting stalker would be peeing in their pants to find that Sacha Baron Cohen is actually a seriously posh Brit who is a history graduate from Christ's College, Cambridge. How awesome is that??? Drool worthy, right? We all want our filmstars to be smart and geeky. As in intellectual not the nerd glassy types. He has a brain!!! Yay! Ok, then you find out that, he studied under Niall Fergusson! (Mind you I still didnt know who the fuck this man actually was or had read a word by his hand) And I am more in love with him ( Sacha Baron Cohen, not Fergusson). The historian, by this point, has become an evaluating point, a mark of distinction that marks an article or somebody as a genuine thing (Damn you institutionalized- well institution!) just because my college, which happened to produce a record number of people who all go to JNU and DU and Abroad and do wonderful academic things which I know not of. Dumb, right? Well it doesn't end there.
 So, when do I discover who this Niall Fergusson actually is? Well, now, actually. When I wash my hands off academia and move into more... well, creative endeavors, do I discover that yes, I do actually quite like knowing thing which might be categorized as academic, but please don't test me on it. And so, go into the library of  my present captor who's trying to teach me, because I had just read a Bertrand Russell essay (this again for the first time. yes, I know. considering he was one of my granddad's heroes, and very high brow, I have never ever bothered to read him. Because I have never been that smart) and quite liked it, and decided I wanted to read some more of things like that, and I discover a new(?) Niall Fergusson book! I issue it. Because Im not supposed to be issuing anything other than design books(obviously) and start reading. And then I do some stalking. And I realize that he is not An Old Historian. He is infact, younger than my own mother.
 Also, what I glean from the book, as far into the introduction of the book I have read, is that I don't like him very much. Sure he seems to be smart, and says things quite cleverly, but he seems to support things that I despise. Like superiority or race and the western empire. Not very nice reading so far for me, who, mind you, still takes the British Raj as a personal insult. But I think, oh well, now, how will I ever get objective if I only read stuff that I think are right, right? Well, the internet tells me, oh, he isn't that big a deal. He's a rockstar academic. And definitely not Brian Cox. Brian Cox is a real rockstar, because he really does work that matters- like recreating the big bang at CERN. He only comes to look befuddled on the Jonathan Ross Show. And loves playing with liquid nitrogen. Well fergusson , on the other hand, is apparently a big empire revivalist, and wouldnt mind that happening again, and he used to advice McCain, and he married a muslim woman, but only because somewhere deep down she really appreciates the superiority of the western state and political thought. Arrogant and horrible much? Well anyway, I hope this doesn't taint my reading of the book, but I strongly suspect it already has. Gah!   

Purge post

Hello,
 This is supposed to be a purge post. Because I can't seem to work. Its horrible. because working at least makes me stop thinking of me. Which is what I don't want to do. I just want to react to things as they come. Maybe it will come as a surprise, but what the hell.
 I need to do something about this self hate thing. Its actually driving me mad. Along with a host of other things.
The Dip is not helping me. I don't have an obsessive distraction. And I need that. I need something which will be so obsess my mind that it will not notice things that freak me out. Like when I am working these days I keep regular hours sometimes, and hence I'm really really clear headed, and I notice things I say and I do. Which is freaky to me. Because it feels unreal, as in I can't believe I am a person. and I am saying these things. I can't believe words are coming out of my mind. I am analyzing everything in my head and my mouth, and basically questioning my existence as a biographical organism. A blank mind, with no addiction or occupation is a horrible thing. A really really terrible thing. Its just making me think that I need to be drunk or doped or just brain fuzzed with less or more than sufficient amount of sleep so that I dont notice extra shit. Yet when I am in the worst cycles of sleep deprivation and bad habits, I think that I really need to get my life back together. But when my mind is finally at its clearest I dont like it at all. I hate it. If this will not drive someone mental I dont know what will.
 And thats not the end of the self hate. I hate how I have handled certain things. I hate that I am that person who has been knowingly callous to this other person and that person is suffering for it, for the only crime of having deep affection and more for me. But I couldn't not do it. Because I hate the person I have seen myself becoming when I am with someone. And its not pretty. It just adds to my self hate. Because I feel like I'm not being myself, whatever that is. The conundrum is that I want to have what other people have. I dont want to feel alone. I dont want to feel like there is no hope for me, that I will never be a person who can feel something so strong for a person that its natural to do things which make me feel sick now. This is a purge post, so I know i am only making sense in my head and to no one else. Its these illusions of things I should want and I should have that has been ingrained into me that makes me so miserable. And its funny because thats the thing the leading philosophies in the world like buddhism teach- that unhappiness comes from wanting something which is not real, at least which is not real and true to the self- I think I'm mangling most of it but still- I guess I wouldn't be this mess if I was a person who never thought that much, who was so immersed in the mundane that they don't know anything else and don't want to either. My greatest want is to be someone else who is normal and mundane with mundane intelligence and mundane everything. And if someone was to tell me that what I am really is mundane and there are millions of others who are the same then I would take it as the greatest of compliments.
 I guess what I keep working towards now is the relative calm in my head. The calm that doesn't talk. The calm that seeps things in. I dont do it now- but I just remember a time I would sit outdoors and look at things around me and just let the outside and the world outside my body and my mind be greater and bigger than anything inside. And I wouldn't think. It wouldn't be about me. I want that calm. I want to consistently be that person who notices things and wonders at things outside, who can be witty with one liners and who didn't introspect about ones own self. This used to generate the most creativity out of me, and I miss that. I could write then. I had opinions and things I wanted to do and did them. It took me out of my self. Now I just feel an inkling of that when I am immersed in a tv show or a movie. Or a book. Nothing too heavy. Photographs and videos of travel zone me in there, to the longing to be somewhere else, living a different life, but not exactly the me I am but someone I could be. Its always the temptation of being something else other than what I am that draws me. I still dream of travelling out of the country, and thats mostly because in my naivette I believe that moving somewhere else, completely different I will be able to be someone else. Intellectually I do know that I can't not be me. But these fantasies keep me going, and its where I am and whats surrounding me, and reinforcing what and who I am is whats slowly making me completely mental.

I hope I can work tomorrow,
bye

I want to go to Rajasthan

I was looking at pictures my dad took. He has become very net savvy these days, you know. He had always been tech savvy, what with him owning a mac and all, and yet I am the graphic designer (Okay, its a sore point) but thats not the issue. I was looking at my dad's pictures and I really miss it. I miss the travelling. The road trips and basically the fun. Road trips are unlike anything else. And I have been born into them, seeing I had never been on a train until i was in class 11 and that was for a school excursion and I first got on a plane when I had finished graduation and had to go to Delhi.
 Now all i do travel by are planes and trains. Especially trains. I am so used to trains now that I know where I will be at what point and where the damn pantry picks up the meals from. The airports still hold a romance for me because it gives me fanciful notions of being able to go to the different ends of the world, and world travel, which I don't think I have it in me to do by car.
 But a Road trip is a road trip is a road trip. My life is all fractured right now. I have lost all sense of language and time and distance, and I live in a space of mind somewhere between Bangalore and Calcutta, not exactly in these cities themselves but somewhere in the bad lands of the country in between, and I fear somewhere in the unbearable heat of Andhra Pradesh. At least in my mind. I have forgotten what its like to relax, go on a trip, and not of the chemical kind, and the old fashioned holidays where it was us and Tia's family. That's it. And I am supremely jealous of their Rajasthan trip. I have never felt more alone. There I was in calcutta by myself, in a huge house which is meant to be full of people, living an independent life, by myself, when everyone knows that in calcutta you are supposed to be surrounded by people! Your family is supposed to be there cossetting you!  And then I left. I am in Bangalore now. The lonliness continues. And the fucked up part is that you get used to it. And you end up not wanting anything else.
 Except for when I look at the pictures, and remember the trips, the details of which even I had forgotten. The longing then becomes sharp and painful completely unbearable.

On a little need for inspiration and motivation to work

I felt like I was ignoring this blog, the feeling was almost like when a mother discovers that she has been giving one of her children preference over the other because of impending exams. And the guilt was sitting under the surface and piling on every time I looked at the tab on the bookmarks bar saying that I have another blog other than my  diploma project one, which though came earlier has only about 13(?) posts as opposed to the web comic one which has a big whopping 25 and above.

 Can't have that. For the curious I have just finished watching Music and Lyrics. Hence you might want to read what I am writing in Hugh Grant's voice. With the exact same inflections. Anyway, talking about Music and Lyrics, I have a bone to pick with people- why is it that women only look at Hugh Grant as the sexiest and the cutest thing on the planet with floppy hair? I don't get it. I love Hugh Grant. Because he happens to do the most sarcastic of characters in recent times. And I love him because he is equally if not more intelligent in real life. How can you not be so attracted to the sarcasm? And intelligence? That's more fucakble than anything else. Everything else is posed and very much not heterosexual, so why would straight women want to fuck that? Now the intelligence and the sarcasm, that I wouldn't mind doing. And all who say that the bloke can't act can go fly a kite. You have clearly been brought up on the Bold and the Beautiful ( the trauma of which I still can't forget and everytime it comes on on Star World I shudder and hurriedly change the channel). What I am trying to say is he is very nuanced. He does what normal people would react like. Subtly. Yes, he would clearly be out of place in a Jatra.

 Another point, in fact this is a confession, is that I love these movies. I love them not because they have a happy ending, and not because its about falling in love, because they genuinely make me laugh. I can equally appreciate a King's Speech or say a Transformers ( Megan Fox, is one fucking hot lady. As long as she doesn't open her mouth). But imagine you would really like to forget the mess that is your head. I wouldn't touch the King's Speech with a ten foot pole. I would grab at the Ugly Truth and in this case Music and Lyrics. Because they are Hollywood's equivalent of the Bollywood staples. What I mean to point out is that I really don't want to read a review by say A.O.Scott or Mahnola Dargis pointing out to me that these films are fluff or that they dont have substance or that its plot line is sieved like a bullet ridden vest, because I can see that and get that in the rational section of my brains. I would love for critics to appreciate what is good in a film, on the same level as the film is made, not on the Kurosawa and Bicycle Thief exalted standards that they think are cool. Why don't you notice a cool bit of dialogue? A funny bit of dialogue, that genuinely makes you laugh, because its bloody intelligent and 'bourgeois' at the same time? It won't kill you, and people will actually like you for being like them, and not some pansy shnitz. 

Any how. This is what I have been doing. Not working very much, because I have developed quite an antipathy to my computer and my hypochondria is acting up. So until the next time I remember this blog, Goodbye.

I need to feel physical pain. I need for my skin to rupture and for blood to gush out. Only then will i feel satisfied in both sensations and guilt. Because I'm not fit to be human. I lack the basic qualities that make for a normal person. 

I'm feeling...

...  oddly at sea.
Things have changed. I feel like i'm dying. but thats normal. I wish i could work. At least get started. Then I would feel normal.

The trouble with Jack was....

 Jack was a born happy as everyone is wont to be. But from then on it was an uphill battle. So much so, upon reaching the grand old age of twelve his countenance was so filled with misery and despair and some permanently fixed expression of unknown terror, that it roiled around in a tense mixture, completely transparent to anyone, like a fishbowl filled with water.

 There came a day when Jack started killing things he came near- rabbits, bees, board games, hopes- flowers wilted when he walked by- but he couldn't do a thing about it. He refused to leave the house, no matter what anyone told him. He refused to believe that fresh air might cheer him up. A sparrow had dropped  on him, quite injured, as he sat tentatively on the front porch yesterday, you see. It's will to fly had suddenly died an unnatural death. He'd rather haunt his house forever more, he thought, than put himself through the embarrassment and pain of his predicament.

 For the trouble with Jack wasn't that he was the world's most miserable wretch- it was that he wasn't actually real at all. Jack was just a collection of oddments and curiosities put together by someone who had really wanted to build a scarecrow but made him instead.

Map Making

This is a part of an info graphic course i just finished. I was supposed to be informing people and generally letting people know where to go to eat if you come to Srishti. I ended up on my own trip trying to recreate maps of yore when Magellan set out to Find The World. Shows how well i work with brief. but its colorful and I'm feeling down and sick so this is here to cheer me up.

And to add something that maintains with my character of the most juvenile so-and-so, this infographic I did which shows a brief history of human sacrifice. and Im not talking about the Elton John song.

There is an empty hole made in the ground
where tears fall in a futile effort to fill it
and bring me into existence
one drop at a time.
But it is useless, the hole screams.
the blueprints have long been forgotten,
it has disintegrated in the natural order of things,
something to do with biodegradability,
and the memories aren't there any more.
what's the use of futile tears?
they have no reason,
if anyone asks.
they just prove that i am descending into madness,
one step at a time.
the staircase might be long and winding,
and a black hole gapes at the bottom,
where steps might not exist.
But I'm getting there.

As normal, it is something like 5.03 in the morning and i struggle to string words along. Not because I have nothing to say ( I don't.) but because I am drunk enough to prove the myth about not able to write straight when inebriated true. Why am I writing? Because people do strange thing when they are drunk.
 I just saw a number to things I had written/commented on on facebook i have absolutely no recollection. And I am listening to portishead. One of my great discoveries of 2010.
 I want a life. I have one, but I want a consistent one. One of Highs, which sustain, and give you memories like a bruise. Even after it melts away you always remember that it had been there, and exactly where too. I am sick and tired of days when my vision is so dark it seems like i am blind. then there are days its all so clear, my vision, that it is painful. I want those clear days. I realize the clear days happen when i am really drunk the night before. This is scary. What it means i mean. I want to have stuff that excites me. like it did before.
 Wow. this is the most juvenile post I have written in a LONG TIME. this is like a blast from the past. back to the future.  Wow. I am drunk. I will have a head ache tomorrow. Wow.