The Deep Cut

As you leave the pavilion and walk on to the vast plain spread of bright green that lays in front of you, you suddenly feel the rush of anticipation and excitement that surrounds the minutes before the commencement of a 5 day-long sporting event. You put away your half sweater or jacket to warm up before the game, you do your best to condition yourself somewhere between feeling the sting of a chilly Sunday's morning air and the warmth of the early morning's sun, creeping in through the disappearing mist. As you close the gate behind you and go over the thick white rope that acts as the restrictive boundary of the game, you can't help but start wondering about the various conditions that will covertly govern the rest of the game. Is there a hint of breeze? Which direction is it blowing? Is there an early humidity? Will the sun choose to play little to no effect due to an impending cloud cover thus affecting the red sphere of leather differently than a blazing southern

Yesterday I heard him say my God doesn't exist. Who does he think he is? How dare he? I didn't talk to him yesterday. I walked right past him. He was dead to me. Yesterday he said my God is fake. I stared at him angrily, while he hissed. He should be taught a lesson. I threw a stone at him. By inches, it missed. Yesterday I saw him spit at the name of my God. I lured away his dog. His owner has crossed a line! Till it were dead, I beat him with a log. Yesterday he refused to pray to my God. I burned down his house. Enough has been sought by talks. I kidnapped and raped his spouse. Yesterday he cursed at my God. This time, I took away his daughter. He cried and cried all throughout the day. I raped her, shot her in the head and left her for slaughter. Yesterday I found him weeping to my God. He pleaded for mercy and for his misfortunes to cease. But it wasn't over - I brought out his son. Humiliated him.  Cursed him.

BE ADVISED, CONTAINS SPOILERS. CRAZY BAT SHIT OF THEM! You can tell I was super excited when I learnt that Christopher Nolan has picked up on the idea of black holes and wormholes in his next venture. Unfortunately, he made Inception earlier and ruined everything for me. While Inception was a huge leap in science fiction, it raised the bar for the kind of movies the duo of Christopher and Jonathan Nolan can achieve. Inception was worthy of all the hype it has ever got, because not only was it a brilliant movie, it was also a refreshingly cerebral idea. It was something new. With Inception having set the stage to welcome Interstellar to the movie theatre, it was the sense of expectation that undid everything.  To list a few scientific inaccuracies  (or shall we say) inconsistencies that I personally found with the movie, I would have to start somewhere here: 1. How did the wormhole - the one near Saturn - came to be in the first place? It takes an enormous mass to

These days, I find myself providing strange and quirky examples to elucidate certain   concepts in  molecular biology  to a classroom of 50 sleep-induced, hungover and relatively withdrawn young minds. "Imagine you want to murder someone.. and you want to do it with a knife. Why a knife? Well, because knives are slow and painful and you can see the fear in your enemy's eyes as life slowly drains away.." (Here I paused, to give theatrics a chance)  "..but then I go and hide all your knives away! You come into the room to face the person you want to kill. But suddenly you can't kill him - or her, not to sound sexist - because I took away the only weapon you ever had!" I paused, to let them try to figure it out a little by themselves before I give away the final conclusion of the elaborate example - "that's what EDTA does. It takes away the cation cofactors that the nuclease needs, in order to cleave the DNA. Get it? Get it?" Sometime

It must've been Phoebe, who woke me up a wee bit earlier than I expected to get up yesterday morning. In all fairness, I had fallen asleep late the night before. It was only after I had my dinner, did I start watching the 'Nick Nite' marathon of the never-gets-old TV series that, as I realize only now, is actually a typing nightmare! If you consider the full stops in between each of the unique capitalized letters from the English language... F.R.I.E.N.D.S! While I was doing that, I heard the neighbors drive in late in the night. It was a Friday, so it's only normal. I spied on them for a while from the gaps in the blinds. When they had moved inside their house, I noticed two extra cars parked on the parkway in front of my house. As if the repeatedly rhythmic sound of the bed springs from upstairs wasn't enough to tell me that both my roommates had had their 'better halves' come over after a long time. One of them had brought along her dog, named Phoeb

I shamelessly agree that I watch a LOT of movies. And that I cry every time a Danny Archer calls a Maddy Bowen to say 'Wish you were here Maddy..'  before he dies or the moment when Marley is put to a permanent sleep with a shaking John beside him, whispering in his ears 'You're a great dog Marley.. you're a great dog!'  or whenever Mufasa is thrown off the cliff by his brother Scar, after he whispers  'Long. Live. The King.'  on his horrified face or when Forrest Gump meets his son for the first time and asks  'Is he.. Is he smart?'  or when Ellie gets fatally ill as Carl gets ready for their 'dream adventure' to the Paradise Falls in the movie  Up . Sniff.   I've been moved, repeatedly, by movies and movie scenes and by the fictional characters and personalities that govern the directions they usually go. So when Robin Williams died a couple of weeks back, I shut the door for my room upstairs, climbed up the chair and sile

It's that time of the year when I wake up and find the dorm chummy walk into the room with a laddoo in his hand. Before you brace yourself, his geeky face that otherwise has a permanent creepy smile on it, opens up to shout a 'Vande Mataram!' (a senseless 'Inquilab Zindabad!' if he's a communist) on your unsuspecting face. You turn the other way around and try to go back to sleep again. What's the point? You don't get any laddoos now anyway! Happy Independence Day guys. Yes, today's the day you get those 'Mere des ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere-moti' feels. Are you done posting your patriotic update on Facebook yet? Go on now, don't let me delay you. Do it and come back to read me. Independence Day has only one memory for me. Okay, two. Stew and Silver Linings. ... It had rained the previous night, so the grounds were water-logged. I wondered, as we walked into the mess, of what will happen to the parade if the grounds

Last few weeks have been such a whirlwind that I've been all like Whaaa-?! Okay, so I really dunno and I'm also kind of clueless about what to fill you guys in with.. except.. that suddenly one day I decided to pack up my things back in Kolkata, and shove everything to the back of that giant thing they call an aeroplane (and hop in to like 4 of them - connecting flights) to travel halfway around the globe to this place named Tallahassee, in Florida. Unlike back home in India, where a state-capital city is like a big bustling, marginally chaotic city (usually the biggest in the state), the quiet and slow college-town of Tallahassee is the state capital of Florida. Not Miami, as you'd have  perhaps   thought. Don't worry, same mistake was made there! Nothing could've prepared me for that REALLY LONG journey than perhaps the craziness of American college football (which you get only here, so there goes that plan)! It was something like this: Kolkata to Delhi (2:3

(Continued from How to be a Workout Nazi ...) "I also remember a guy during those initial days of gym. He used to go Ryan Gosling from  Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)  on us in the locker room. Although not fully nude, he would strip down to his bare minimum and do some free-hand exercises that would require lots of bending and twisting. Things, you don't want to see on your first day at gym. So, trust me when I say I braved it out there in those initial period. Trying to gel in, I stripped down myself to those shorts showing some skinny legs, lest they think I was homophobic!" The biweekly weight check and diet counselling was carried out by a professional who sits in an office at the ladies' gym. Not so surprisingly, everyone at the men's gym wants to get their weights checked all the time. After 4 weeks of working out (and two discarded, outgrown t-shirts later), I was asked to get my weight checked at the office. Little did I know, that th

Apart from the fact that I almost fainted on the very first day of it, working out at the gym has rather been a unique experience. I've met some peculiar people there, have encountered some eccentric work-out routines and have come across some distinctive personalities not directly associated with the particular form of 'healthcare'. Sometimes, your whole life boils down to that one insane experience to write a blogpost about. In two parts, in this case. After being cajoled into obtaining a membership at the local gym, I remember to have regretted it immediately afterwards. I mean what was I thinking? Were my 'club-sandwich-for-breakfast' and 'chicken-wings-for-snacks' days over? Was I really going to commit to such self-inflicted atrocity? It certainly seemed like that at the moment. And quite unfortunately, now I had an entire family in support of my decision! Now although you'd think my physique always needed a facelift, I assure you it

This will be an extremely personal post, so don't go reading into it too much if you don't particularly like the sorts. Remember I warned you! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ There are times when you feel utterly hopeless. Like whatever you have done, or are doing, would ultimately amount to nothing. That in the whole seventy plus years you've lived or would perhaps live, and all the work that you've done or would do, they would simply not matter in the end. That you would not matter. Your life wouldn't matter, like so many everyday. Your name wouldn't be remembered. You wouldn't be remembered. That however much you've tried doing things against that, you've ended up achieving nothing. How can anyone live knowing that? Yesterday I went to the market to get some eggs, 'Dada, I'll buy the entire tray. We'll be having guests tonight!' I added, w

Everytime I go to the northern parts of the city of Calcutta, I feel like I have gone back in time on a time machine. Not that I go much. Had I known that I just had to wait for the budding art enthusiastic friend to come back home from her grad studies in New Jersey in order to be rediscovering some forgotten history of my own city, I would have had something to look forward to in the summer! The northern part of Kolkata, oops.. sorry.. of Calcutta, is that old part of the city where people from south seldom visit. Many among the youngsters today, do not know that this city was once called the 'City of Palaces' (now used, rather in reference to Mexico city) - you can see for yourself the dilapidated palaces and their decaying columns from Victorian times on your way to the Howrah station. But you've got to visit North Kolkata in order to truly establish this expression. Just a few steps north from the M.G. Road metro station, further away from the Calcutta Me

The art of Begging. To thee, I must confess, this weird interest of mine has just become an obsession. I have asked people around me for help. But they only seem to say 'Boy, you're a sadist!' or 'That's so cruel!' or 'Kaam-dhanda nai hai terku?' - that last one is a Hyderabadi friend, so the accent is perhaps understandable. But no one seems to pay enough interest to the various beggars around the country and the different styles they adopt. Most of the beggars in the country are poor, as it usually goes with the formula 'I don't have money, so I will browbeat you to give me some money until you break down with guilt.' But that doesn't seem to work in our country anymore. Being irreversibly poor just doesn't qualify. You have to have that extra 'thing' to score big money. Confused? Let me share how. Yesterday I was walking down the Theatre Road, on my way back from the US consulate. I was happy, as I just go