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!