The triumph of bullshit

A subtle kick up the backside. That's what a reference to my blog in this first blog post by a friend was like, because referring to a blog where new posts appear only slightly more frequently than Aamir Khan movies isn't quite the order of the day. So, with renewed effort, I once again take up blogging determined to be successful this time in my effort to post more often (more determined than I've been in the previous 37 attempts)

Starting with the age old what-I've-been-up-to strategy, I've finally joined work. Had 2 months of free time and I passed it by wishing for it to be shorter in the first 1.75 months and for it to be longer in the remaining period. None of those happened, but time did pass. Significantly quicker than I had imagined it would during the period when my wishing for it to be shorter was at its peak.

It was during that period when I chanced upon this remarkable poem by T.S. Eliot. It is titled "The triumph of bullshit" and has been acknowledged as the origin of the word which we now so commonly use. A point to note is that this was initially written with the critics, and not with the ladies, in mind. The change from critics to ladies, when it happened, brought with it a lot of innuendo which I leave unto the esteemed readers to decipher.

Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited

If you consider my merits are small

Etiolated, alembicated,

Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,

Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,

Impotent galamatias

Affected, possibly imitated,

For Christ's sake stick it up your ass

Ladies, who find my intentions ridiculous

Awkward insipid and horribly gauche

Pompous, pretentious, ineptly meticulous

Dull as the heart of an unbaked brioche

Floundering versicles feebly versiculous

Often attenuate, frequently crass

Attempts at emotions that turn isiculous,

For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Ladies who think me unduly vociferous

Amiable cabotin making a noise

That people may cry out "this stuff is too stiff for us" -

Ingenuous child with a box of new toys

Toy lions carnivorous, cannons fumiferous

Engines vaporous - all this will pass;

Quite innocent - "he only wants to make shiver us."

For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

And when thyself with silver foot shalt pass

Among the Theories scattered on the grass

Take up my good intentions with the rest

And then for Christ's sake stick them up your ass.

To sum this up, I spent two months doing bullshit. I even searched for 'bullshit'. I found the origin of the word 'bullshit'. I am currently writing this post full of nothing but bullshit. You all have read it so far expecting something other than bullshit. There is nothing else. It's all bullshit.

The triumph of bullshit, indeed.

This is going to hurt just a little bit

So I come back from IIT to enjoy home-cooked meals and, as is very often the case, nature conspires against me and urges one of my wisdom teeth to start picking at my gums in an attempt to come out. The concerned tooth solemnly agrees. And I've been in pain for three days now. Pain is hallucinogenic. It gives you a high. I've been more high because of this excruciating pain than I've ever been on alcohol (And I've drunk loads of alcohol at times.) (This is the kind of high you don't want to have when home.) (This is probably why a certain Mr. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch observed what he did although I think THAT would be taking it a bit too far.) And then I have to take pain-killers to quell my pain. Pain killers give you a high as well. (That's probably why a lot of drugs people get addicted to pain-killers.) You get a feeling you can hit yourself hard after taking a pain-killer because you think you won't feel it. You do. I tried it. Not once, but twice.

On the topic of toothache, this one's made me believe that "a pain in the tooth" would be far more appropriate an expression than "a pain in the ass" when it comes to describing unpleasurable people, experiences and things in general. I say that having never experienced "a pain in the ass" per se, but this pain in the tooth makes me believe there could be nothing worse. Ogden Nash wrote a poem about visiting the dentist (it lends its title to this post) and called it one of the most horrifying experiences he had had (which implies, it is worse than having a toothache.) I went to a dentist yesterday and found that it wasn't as bad. The guy was nice and friendly. And I was out in two minutes with a prescription and a hope of the tooth not hurting anymore. Hope hurts. So does my tooth. Still.

IPL and all it stands for

I'm one of those very few people who aren't interested in the IPL and it's not just because of some subliminal desire to be different from others - a desire which a lot of people claim I possess. In fact, I'm so uninterested that the first full IPL match I saw was today and all it did was to aggravate my dislike for it. Here, like in a lot of school time answers, I list some of the reasons for my disliking the IPL.

1) It fortifies the hold of cricket over the Indian public: Just when one would have thought that cricket is taking a breather and letting other sports (read "Olympic sports") come even close to its popularity, here comes the IPL and drills cricket as a shortcut to easy money in the minds of the general public and thus drives out all the little impetus that the other sports found themselves to be gaining.

2) It represents the victory of Lalit Modi and commercialism over the Indian television viewer: Lalit Modi has proven once and for all that he holds the pulse of the Indian public in his hands and can toy with it all he wants. We already had the DLF Maximums (or Maxima), the Citi Moments of Success, the Citi Under-23 Success of the Tournament and advertisements abound. Now we also have the Karbonn Kamaal Katch (or Catch, though Katch goes better - gives it the KKK feel) and advertisements between deliveries. Inspite of all this, the Indian public still watches the IPL like crazy. Worse still, other television programs have learnt a trick - Give the junta what it wants and it won't care for the quality of the coverage. 30 minute runtime episodes now have a taped time of about 12 minutes. Compare it to 21 over in the states and 24 in the land of the queen. Isn't it time someone stands up to these people? Yes, it is. But no one will. Why? Because it's cricket and, more importantly, because it's IPL.

3) It exacerbates the already rotten condition our media is in: IPL sends the Indian media into a frenzy. IPL pre-match, IPL live, IPL post-match, IPL parties, IPL stadia, IPL team owners, IPL chaiwallahs is all there is to news nowadays. And when there's a break in that, the status quo has a re-run and all that the media thinks a nation of 1.1 billion cares about is Sania's marriage with Shoaib. Give me a break.

I know IPL has got its plusses. But sometimes, you just can't look past the minuses.

Resume-ing blogging

The reason that the time interval between the last post and this is about half an year is not because these have been some unadventurous days in my life, it has more to do with the inability of blogging to help me cultivate and hone the will to write that I thought it would do - the will to write anything and everything I do, anything and everything I think about, anything and everything I don't think about when I'm thinking about something else etc. Another problem is that I've acquired this weird ending-sentences-with-exclamation-marks syndrome, which not only makes me and others gasp at the end of nearly every sentence, but also requires greater effort to type than the hackneyed full stop! And it just doesn't end there - sometimes there are two or more of them!!

For this post though, I blame my optimism, some friends and a sudden attenuation of my slothful nature. And because of the last of the aforementioned reasons, I now think that I should write about all the interesting things in my life over the past 6 months or so. And what better way to do it than the same way I once became used to describing myself in? So, with this, I "resume" blogging.

PS: I guess you'll have to click on the image to access it. Stupid Blogger formatting. Can never make head or tail of it.