Olympic Darshan

I was in Chennai during the Olympics. I thought I was lucky. I had forgotten the DD factor. DD is a mystery. No one knows why it is there, what its purpose is, what its logo means, why it started a sports channel for the explicit purpose of spoiling once-in-4-years olympic and occasional cricket experience for the viewers, why it actually started side-fitting channels like Podhigai, DD-1, DD-2 when the combined TRP of entire DD would not equal what one episode of Kolangal (a tamil serial that started in the most difficult phase of my life in school and has gone on to bring me joy through the rest of my life) etc… Ms. Renuga Cowdhary (its a bird found in TN that I like to eat) should promote the DD head office as a package along with the Taj Mahal, Red Fort etc… It could potentially be dubbed the International Channel of Mystery with its publicity poster having all the anchors in James Bondesque poses and flowery symbols in the background. I have a vision of Sakal Bhatt holding a gun in her hand, wearing business suittu with a seductive look plastered on her face. (I am a fan of Austin yes.)

Anyway, romba mokka poda virumbale (no put too much blade). Staitta matterukku povom. (Go straight to the matter). So, here are some life lessons I learnt thanks to DD sports.:-

1. If you studied in a Delhi based english medium school, but if you are unable to study well and get sustainable employment, then don’t suicide. The government has kind-heartedly introduced a reservation policy even for this category. You can be an anchor at (drums roll) DD Sports.

2. The programming head of DD Sports is female (or a perverted male, or even worse, an equal-rights believing male) hockey lover. Only that can explain the 4th-5th placing women’s hockey games that were broadcast for almost their entire length.

3. I feel like I have taken a summer module on the anatomy of Michael Phelps. I learnt so much about his body that i can say which of his nipples is darker.

4. I realized, really to my surprise, that north Indian guys are actually capable of winning medals.

5. I understood the meaning of patriotism when the whole of India celebrated a shooting gold.

It started with my mother bringing in the morning coffee at 1 pm. She proudly proclaimed that India had won its first gold medal (as if there were more to come). Switch on TV after coffee. DD Sports. Anchors showing their sets of 39 teeth each talking about THE medal. Darn. Change to IBN live. Slo-mo clips of the winning moments with (I think) Vande Mataram (the listenable version by Rahman) playing. Darn. Switch back to DD Sports. The man of the moment in an interview with a north Indian guy asking him a question (I know he was north Indian because of the question). “Sir, what are your plans after this?” Mr. Bindra’s reply in that most irritating Punjabi accent – “I’ve just won an olympic gold yaar, gimme a break.” And to think that school text books five years down the line may have a photo of Mr. Bindra with the medal with this above quoted quote. Aargh. In my last moments of desperation, I turned to NDTV, the more sober among the hindian news channels. I witnessed the Bindras attempting to do a bhangra for the camera. Some things in India NEVER change.

6. I saw the pain of losing and the joy of victory on the faces of subhumans. I mean of course the DD anchors. When Akhil Kumar and Jitender (surprisingly, these are now household names. How many of us remember Gurcharan Singh, who managed to accomplish the same feat as these 2 four years ago at Athens?) lost their respective bouts, the faces of the (especially female) anchors was quite a sight. Coupled with the mandatory “Medals are less important and it is registering your presence that counts.” kinda dialogs made it all the more hilarious.

7. Indians can bring in the B word into the picture anytime anywhere. When Vijender won a medal, I was fearing something would happen and it did. There were soon discussion on “primetime” news about the possibility of him becoming more than just a sportsman and morphing into a lifestyle icon. And of course, speculations about his B’wood offers and career. Bah. These northies can be an embarrassment sometimes.

8. On its programming staff, DD has managed to employ certain despot psychologists for whom Mr. Hannibal Lecter would be a kaaldhoosie (dirt on foot) undergraduate student. They have studied our minds so thoroughly that they know exactly how to avoid putting what the viewers want to see. For example, against my own wishes, I know the intricacies of the sports like fencing and synchronized swimming and this unnecessarily clogs my brain like malware, leaving little space for other things I may want to store. Like for instance memories of the very graceful Allyson Felix and other things which I shall refrain from mentioning. And worst is I actually saw women’s equestrian. Ayyooo.

Anyway my best moments in the olympics were watching Akhil beat that world champion Russian youth (I didn’t get to watch Sushil Kumar. No one expected him to win I think. Not even the ever optimistic anchor team. Or we would have got to hear about him much earlier.) and watching Usain Bolt burn rubber. I propose we do a chromosomal analysis to verify if he has the mandatory 46.

Ok. Its 5 am in the morning. I need to do my prayers before going to bed. I am gonna pray for a set top box at home.

Prof Clip and his time machine

I know the formatting sucks for this, but i can’t seem to make it look more dignified. Ok, some background first. This story is not for everyone. To appreciate this, one requires some education especially of the astrophysical kind. This was actually written for a school project. And excuse the rabid names. They are plays on the names of my professors.

The trouble with scientific writing by an amateur is you gotta write something that makes some remote sense. Especially because the person reading this was going to be an eminent professor, I could not just randomly bullshit a few scientific jargon hoping to convince him. In other words, like in tamil films, one cannot have the actor working in MS Word and make him a software systems architect. You gotta do a better job. So the beauty behind this story is not so much the time-loop (run of mill concept), but the time machine itself. There will be flaws naturally, but it was good enough to interest a prof whose pastime is kalaichifiying. Im done with the buildup. Stattt Moosik. Chee, forgot. I wrote this post a year back. Don’t remember half  the concepts. So, aaruva kolar people, please don’t do technical baitings.

Strange Signals

It was an early Monday morning. But in the stillness of the artificially lit corridors of the Turnton Fundamental Research Center, one would never know. This stillness was broken by the clatter of footsteps. A man walked hurriedly down the corridor. He then stopped as he arrived at a door, his destination. The sign on the door said ‘Relativistic Research Lab 12’. He opened the door. Inside was a small, wizened, bespectacled old man in a lab coat. He turned and his wrinkled face lit up when he saw his visitor.

This was Prof. Clip Hahn. Prof Hahn was born to Adalbert Hahn, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Dorothea, in Hamburg in Germany in the summer of 1988. His family migrated to Texas soon after his birth. He enrolled at the Spillfour County Secondary School in Austin. As he grew up, it became apparent to his parents that he was unlike other kids his age. He was very reclusive and did not enjoy playing with other kids. He instead preferred to immerse himself in books and study. Even at a young age he distinguished himself as a brilliant student. At 15, he won gold at the National Physics Olympiad gold and qualified for the international event in which he finished within the top ten. While in his tenth grade, he gained admission at the University of California at Berkeley as a recipient of the prestigious Miller Fellowship. He chose to do his major in Quantum Physics. He pursued a masters’ degree in the same field in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the brightest minds in the country, he was invited to continue his research in theoretical physics at the Turnton Fundamental Research Center. He was only too glad to accept. He remained there for the rest of his life pursuing his own research, only occasionally traveling to the most prestigious universities to deliver lectures to the next generation of scientists.

It was through one of these lectures that the professor met Halim Nizh, his visitor. He was the professor’s research assistant. After a lecture, Halim came up to the professor and presented a paper which countered one of the claims the professor had made during the lecture. Prof Hahn was duly impressed. They then met on various other conferences and struck a good rapport with each other. Scientific minds can be somewhat unpredictable. The professor soon invited Halim to be his assistant at the Turnton facility. It was an offer Halim could not refuse.

Prof Hahn appeared rather excited, about as excited as a man of his age and bearing could get. “The machine! It seems to be producing some strange signals.” It was Halim’s turn to get excited. “What? So the machine is working? Well I’ll be..” “Yes! I tried to analyze the data and detected discontinuous pulses of high frequency gamma ray radiation! Also, the pulses are repetitive! It could well be that it is a message! I think we are on to something big here..”.

The Machine

‘The machine’ was the result of five years of intense effort put in by the professor and Halim. It was what a lay man would term a time-machine. However, it was not the kind of machine often depicted in science fiction where one just had to step into a wormhole and end up in another place at another time. There was still some time for that. The Hahn Engine only allowed for transfer of information in the form of electromagnetic waves between two different points in the four-dimensional universe.

The development of the engine was preceded the most important discovery of the decade, which made Prof Hahn an international scientific icon. The professor performed an experiment where atoms of Uranium were heated to very high temperatures and collided at high speeds in a vaccumised chamber. The chamber was made of thermolister-pf22, a silicon polymer that was similar to diamond in structure and was a very good conductor of heat and capable of withstanding very high temperatures. The collision resulted in the creation of particles much heavier than the Uranium atom and some other strange particles that simply disappeared on contact with matter, along with some of the matter itself, whenever attempts were made to isolate it. It was also found that there was no release of any form of energy in the collision. The heavier particles were found to have masses that were almost even integral multiples of the mass of the Uranium atom. They actually seemed to have the structure of nuclei thus making them the heaviest ions ever isolated. These ‘ions’ had a very short half-life of around 300 micro seconds on average. This, although small, was still significantly longer than most of the other synthetic elements isolated.

For almost 2 years, scientists were simply baffled by this strange phenomenon. It was Professor Hahn himself who came up with an explanation. He made a startling claim that the strange particles where particles of negative energy. That was why, at cooler temperature, on collision with matter, or positive energy, the two got cancelled out without any release of energy. He suggested the Uranium ions, after colliding, coalesced into a single particle of almost around twice the mass. The stability of the new particle was accounted for by the formation of the negative energy particles. The corresponding positive energy was converted into excess gluons which helped to sustain the existence of the ions formed. This explanation stunned the scientific community and made the professor the most well recognized scientist alive.

But the professor himself did not rest with the accolades he received. He realized the plasma of particles of negative energy and the heavy ions, which were subsequently named hahnions, provided a suitable condition for the creation of wormholes! He theorized, if the mass of the hahnions, and the pressure on each individual particle in the hahnions, became sufficiently large, they could be made to collapse in around the exotic particles to form temporary wormholes. The exotic particles that are forming would serve to prevent the throat of the wormhole from collapsing in on itself, allowing for temporary space-time travel! Another use of the exotic energy particles was that it prevented the formation of a blackhole. The wormhole would be formed before the particle collapses completely and the exotic particles would make this state stable by holding the throat of the wormhole open. On cooling, this state will collapse resulting in a very small nuclear explosion which would not even cause any damage to the equipment. A method to actually send information was still far off. But that was really not the professor’s aim. He only wanted to listen to universes by trying to detect radiation that may come through the wormhole. This, by itself, would prove that his machine works..

The professor embarked upon the development of this machine along with Halim. The project was a secret between the professor and Halim. They set about modifying the chamber in their previous discovery to include sensors to observe any incoming radiation. Also, the amount of Uranium gas to be placed in the chamber was precisely calculated to increase the probability of sufficient number of collisions occurring to allow for wormhole formation. All of this took the professor around two years to develop and the result was the Hahn Engine, ‘the machine’.

Significance of the Signals

Halim sat contemplating the significance of the ‘signals’. The professor and himself had succeeded in achieving what had long been a dream of mankind: space-time travel.

Only the previous week, the Hahn Engine had been giving erroneous results, when they first tested the machine. Although there was a yield of heavier hahnions, which in itself was significant, no wormholes were created leading to a great deal of disappointment among the two. Halim and the professor had spent the rest of the week trying to figure out what went wrong. Halim took the weekend off. But the professor spent the entire weekend at the labs trying to solve the problem. He knew he was on to something big. Sleep was an avoidable disturbance. And he did solve it. The calculation to determine the density of the gas was based only on the probability of effecting collisions among the heavy hahnions and had not taken into account the most effective way the energy passed to the machine would be distributed among the individual hahnions. The density of the Uranium gas was thus recalculated and the professor decided to do another test on Sunday. The result was the formation of a near vacuum situation and disappearance of observable matter from the chamber. The result could mean only one thing. A wormhole. Furthermore, on the sensors indicated a burst of gamma ray pulses. Pulses from another point in space-time. The experiment was a complete success. The professor, typically confident, simply sent a message to Halim asking him to report immediately.

‘Less Jagged’

All Halim could say was “oh!”. The professor continued, “I have a plot of the signals. I am sure it is not some random noise. The signal seems to be of a constant frequency and the pulses repeat every once in a while. The amplitudes of the pulses, however vary wildly. I am certain it is some kind of amplitude modulated code. I have quantified the pulses into digits. Here. Have a look”. Halim took the document and studied it meditatively for a few minutes. “Well this code will require all your genious to crack professor. The only thing I can conclude is the graph of the wave is a lot less jagged in the second part than in the first. “Hmmm.. Yes. You are right.” But I have run the data in the TFRC supercomputer to try to break the code. I suppose we will have to wait to see what the computer can tell us.

That night, the professor could hardly sleep. He knew he was on to something big. His position in the annals of science had already been assured. If only he could go a little bit further. The professor tried to recall his conversation with Halim. What was it that Halim had said which had drawn his mind?… ‘Less jagged’… Yes… That was it… Suddenly he could see a pattern. His mind took him back to his university days. His first year project. He had developed a theory for secure storage of data. It was literally impenetrable. Encrypted using three codes. One to code the data. One to code the previous code itself. The last one to randomly store the digits. It would take even a quantum computer, something still theory, many years to crack. Except, of course, the person who coded the data himself. He recalled the look on his professor’s face when he presented him with the paper, with a lingering sense of pride. He clambered out of bed and dashed to his study. He took out his logbook and started working feverishly. By morning, He knew the answer to the code. The codes were in fact the very ones he had used in his paper example. He also had a slightly dazed look on his face. He now knew something else…

A Blueprint?

The next day, Halim entered the lab to find the professor busy at work already. He looked at the professor. “Any luck with the codes?” The professor took his time. “Ahem.. Why yes as a matter of fact.. I managed to break the code myself.. It might sound surprising, but this particular code was something I had discovered as a student.” By now, Halim was too disoriented to be even surprised. “The pace of the recent developments had really shaken him. “The code actually is a blueprint of a machine. A machine which the message claims could be used to send messages across different points in space time. The part which you said was ‘less jagged’ actually represented a matrix which when assigned colours proved to be the blueprint. I really must thank you for your observation Halim.” “Aren’t you going to publish your findings professor? You know we have done something monumental here..” The professor looked up at Halim’s face. “You know Halim. I have come to think upon science more as a pursuit of truth. A tool to dig up the secrets of the creator. Acknowledgements from other people is almost irrelevant to me now. And I most certainly would not like to have others interfering in my quest. I shall build the machine and then inform the world in good time.” Halim enquired “haven’t you found out what the first part represents professor?” “Hmm.. Yes.. I have actually..” That was the professor’s cryptic reply. Halim did not press the issue further.

The Time Machine

The time machine in the blueprint was of intricate design. In an elementary description in the blueprint, there was a electromagnetic, specifically gamma wave modulating and broadcasting device integrated with a Hahn Engine. With this arrangement, the moment the wormhole formed, a chamber containing the broadcaster would begin to flash the signals and this would permeate through the entire reaction chamber and some of the signals would be teleported. Even the professor found it very difficult to work out the inner workings of the time machine. This task itself took him 3 months. Once this was done, he and Haliim started working on building the machine. The time machine, surprisingly, was not very costly to build. The professor could fund the project directly from the grants that Turnton gave him, removing the need for having to publish his work for the purpose of seeking funds for the project. The development of the time machine lasted an entire year. At the end of it, the professor was rather confident about the success of the machine. He seemed almost entirely oblivious to the enormity of the situation. He could not care less. He informed Halim of his decision to go and publish his work. He then decided to give a demonstration in front of a select group of scientists and the media. After all, his work would be of primary importance to entire humanity. It would be cruel to leave them out of the fun.

The Demonstration

The atmosphere at the demonstration facility in the Turnton Center was almost electric. Around a fifty of the who’s-who in the theoretical physics community had gathered to witness what could become the scientific breakthrough of the century. They had all read his paper and come only half-believing. Everyone looked visibly nervous. Everyone except the professor himself. Proceedings began with clockwork precision. The professor called the meeting to order. He declared the purpose of the demonstration was to teleport information through space-time. That put the breath out of everyone. The silence was pin-drop. The professor proceeded to demonstrate the machine explaining in a lumbering voice each step. He soon initiated the process. He then went on to display the readings of the sensors. The readings clearly showed a reduction in the intensity of the gamma ray radiation. The result was almost conclusive. The first teleportation had been achieved.

Questions Answered

The professor asked the scientists assembled if they had any questions about the experiment. Apparently no one did. Halim broke the silence. “Professor. I am quite curious to know what was the message that you teleported. I am sure you would not mind sharing it with us?” The professor took a deep breath. “No. I suppose I don’t. The message that I sent back was the blueprint of the machine.” “Eh? Now why is that? I mean…” Halim’s voice trailed off as his jaw dropped wide open. “You mean.. But how are you so certain professor? I mean the message could have been from anyone or anything..” “Erm.. You see, there was a difference between the first part and the second part of the original message we received. The first part were actually just random numbers. Generated and generatable only once. Also, and more importantly, the second part also carried a paragraph. He brought a small slip and handed it to Halim. It read “This is a message from your future self, Clip Hahn, three years later. This message is a coded blueprint of a time machine. You will build it in three years time and demonstrate to the world space-time travel. The above set of numbers is actually randomly generated at the Turnton center to show yourself that it is indeed your future self that created this message.” There was a brief period of silence when all assembled gathered their thoughts. This time Aleksandr Nemkovsky, a renowned physicist countered “But professor, this message raises more questions than answers. For one, if you did not invent the time machine yourself, then from where did the information come? And how is it that the time machine is able to transport the signals to that precise point in your past?”

“Yes indeed professor Nemkovsky. I have spent a lot of time the last three years trying to answer the very same questions. For the second one, I am working on a theory which says that teleportation can occur only between the two nearest holes in the fabric of space-time. Picture it this way. When water leaks from the tap, a hole, on to a flat rubber sheet with holes in various places, the water will most probably fall from the sheet through the hole nearest the tap. I can only imagine that this scenario is similar. Maybe the nearest blackhole in space is more than three light years away.

Now coming to your second question, it is something by which I confess I am baffled. However it is important to recognize that this situation is possible in any instance of time travel. If anyone does manage to travel back in time, then he can always pass information to people in the past about the know how to develop the technology and this would lead to a very similar situation. This can only mean he himself had gotten the technology from his own future. It forms a cycle you see. Incidentally, this experiment proves that the ‘many worlds’ postulates, which a lot of scientists consider seriously, is quite absurd. Otherwise there is no reason I should get the same random number everytime.

As to the origin of the information, I can only turn to philosophy. I think that we humans make a mistake in assuming that we are separate from the system and that it is out duty to explain everything that happens. We forget the biggest truth of all. WE TOO ARE A PART OF THE UNIVERSE! We need to look at ourselves and ask, do we know everything about who we are? Do we know what it is to live? Do we need to know at all? Maybe the answer to your questions lies in the answers to one of these questions.”

The people assembled did not quite know how to react. Only silence reigned. The professor, seeing that no other questions were forthcoming, declared the meeting closed, gathered his belongings and left. No one else stirred. Halim was left wondering if it would be wise to give up physics and turn to religion instead..

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Females are fatal

Hello all. This is a disclaimer:-

I still want my kozhanda bagyam (gift of child). Actually, I don’t even want that so much. I want only that the preliminaries for the mentioned k.b. be performed with certain modifications if necessary. So, I do not agree with the views expressed in the following article at all. I really don’t.

Ok guys, we may well be the last few set of living men on this planet. Really, if you consider everything that is going on in this planet, you will also come to agree that this is the only way. I shall elaborate in a chronological order.

Adam’s birthday to 1950s – The world was a safe place. Men ruled the world. Men took all the decisions of significance. Men saw to it that commerce flourished. Men ensured that items of relevance such as knives, paints, tables, chairs, cars and airplanes were made mostly. Men even had control over the household. In fact everything was going on just fine until the fag end of this period when men made two deadly mistakes.

The WW-II had resulted in such large scale destruction and problems that women started gaining the impunity to question the male hegemony over international, national, regional, social and domestic affairs. If Hitler had not been so gay (watch his videos and you will know instantly), he would have realized the outcome of his actions and would have been content with the Second Reich instead of getting over his head and demanding a third one be created.

Also, toward the end of this period, science and scientific rationality had been developed by men to a point where it effectively displaced religion from the minds of the people who mattered (especially those who made laws). So now, women, traitors that they are, dared to use this really inane idea of scientific rationality to arm-twist the lawmakers into giving them rights. Bah, whoever came up with this idea of rule of law? Kings were so much better.

1960s to 2000s – At this time, there emerged this scourge on the face of the Earth called feminists. These were creatures who basically read all novels and stories which expressed noble ideals such as bravery, justice, pride etc.. without understanding the limits of the same, mentally interchanged everything male with everything female and started demanding that this extremely implausible situation be made a reality. Fools basically. But they used this deadly instrument called rationality. And this forced the men of that age, who were basically soft men chosen explicitly so that a WW-III is avoided, to agree to their arguments and start introducing changes in the society which basically redefined women as – “creatures of human type which have an XX gene code, lack a protruding apparatus and have the ability to release humans from their stomach portions.” There were literally no other differences, social or physical, between men and women starting from this age. It was the dawn of the age of equal rights, or in the parlance of average men, the dark ages.

With a post-victory haka, the feminists went on about removing any last vestigial differences that existed in society. They started demanding the use of all public facilities making the toilet the only place where men can gather in peace. They got themselves into high end workplaces diverting the attention of original employees and thus destroying the efficacy of these places. They starting making men share the housework. They started dominating commerce to the extent that 80% of the products advertised such as cosmetics, home appliances, cooking and dummies’ guides are targeted at women. They got into religion with gusto. In fact, they have mooku-nozhachified (nose inserted) into so many things that I have little doubt the editorial team of Men’s Health has some women in it.

In fact, they so thoroughly established equality in society that they felt this was insufficient and started pressing for inequality. Indian women only have to enter a bus and there is a seat reserved for them. If they don’t like a boy’s face, all they have to do is give a complaint saying he tried to eve-tease and then watch the fun. If they want a real quick divorce, all they have to do is go to an all-women police station and complain about dowry-harassment and co-conspirators in the station will make sure the husband can never step out in public again. The divorce is just an added bonus.

2000 to 2008 – Women are indeed slow learners. But these days even they have come to realize that men are mere vestiges (which is what the story of the Amazons ought to have taught them). I don’t know if you have been observing the trend fellas, but slowly and surely lesbians are removing even our limited function in society. Amean, in the past decade, I have noticed this worrisome trend where lesbianism is looked upon with some favor among both men and women, while gayness is not so trendy. There seem to be only 2 sexual statuses among women – lesbian and bi-curious. Every female actor (they insist against actress) wants to do a role in which she kisses another hot f.a. where she faces a win-win situation of having an enjoyable experience while simultaneously increasing her market. A male actor who wants to try the same stunt, I have a feeling, will do so only if he wants to commit professional suicide. (Heath Ledger is an exception I suppose.) It started with the Britney-Madonna thing and then the entire female galaxy followed suit.

If that was not enough reason for men to be afraid, Lindsay Lohan decided to go one step ahead and change her status from curious to full-blown lesbo in the process putting sand into the dreams (a tamil expression) of the millions of her male fans. We males gotta be more intelligent than at least women and realize that this trend must be put to a stop. It can’t be allowed to continue. (The more intelligent among us will probably realize that there is not a single fucking thing we can do.)

2008 and beyond - If this trend of women hooking up with women is allowed to continue, imagine what the future will become like. I mean, we can’t have any fun with women without the consent of women, or we could risk getting ourselves in shit loads of trouble. So basically, we may all have to die sex starved.

Then, scientifically breeding sperms from stored designer sperms should be no big deal. So the women will altogether lose the need for men and simply go to sperm banks for babies. (Sperm could potentially become a form of currency. Eg. “Give me oru kattu keerai for five vials I say!“) Unwanted male children could be dealt with using practices such as male infanticide or foeticide (in more advanced civilizations). Or even more probably, science would have advanced enough to allow women to have only female children using genetic selection. And even if some women showed weakness for the old fashioned matter, mechatronics and robotics would have advanced sufficiently to provide a real-time experience to such women.

Back to the present - So, the intelligent men, please drink to the last of mankind everytime your mom/girlfriend/wife gives you permission to drink. Not-so-intelligent men, try to make a last ditch effort to change the laws so that women in the future can proclaim proudly to their girls, how bravely their ancestors won the Battle of the Sexes. And mediapersons (again, gender neutral I am), do us all a favor and please stop referring to this as the Century of China. It is actually the Century of the Chinese Women.

PS: If indeed any of you women have read through the end, I advice you to go back to the top to see the disclaimer. No, in fact, I beg that you do so.

PPS: I have not used the French version (I know its not really a version) of the title because I think French is a really effeminate sounding language and I want to enjoy my stay on Earth as one of the last living really male males.

Killers at the club

It was Friday night and the club was jam packed with people, all gyrating crazily to the ear splitting beats. Alcohol was flowing like water. Multi-hued cocktails were being passed around in crystal glasses. People were screaming at the top of their voices either to be heard or prevent others from doing so. All the other works you would expect of a club such as lit tunnels, laser, lights, strobes, smoke… were present and the effect was about as surreal as it can get.

The crowd was quite what you would expect of a disco crowd. Multi-hued hair, designer beards, heavy fragrance, clothes with dangerous cuts, faces made like a mask, fake smiles, trying to get into the groove, trying hard to flaunt, trying to de-stress, bitching, bickering and the lot. A bunch of affluent pretenders mostly.

All were too preoccupied to notice the entry of two men. These two men were dressed much like the other clubbers. Designer shirts, formal plants, shiny boots, assorted jewelery, long hair dyed and let loose etc.. But it was easy to notice they were different. One only had to look into their eyes. Both had jet black eyes which wore a purposeful look. Their faces too were heavily masculine, jet black and quite unlike the rest of the crowd. They were surveying the clubbers intently.

In fact, they were both professional rowdies. They carried sharpened knives in their sleeves. They worked for a Cuddalore based don who had a successful drug trafficking trade. That was how they gained their entry into the club without being checked. They supplied special orders there.

One of them spoke in a gruff voice. Anga paaru. Blue sattai. Avandhaan andha commissioner pulle. Ingaye pottu thallidalam. (Look there! Blue shirt. The commissioner’s son. We’ll take him down right here.) They walked towards the bar, keeping an eye on the boy all the time. They presented their credentials to the barman. Drinks would be on the house. They took wine. Anything else would hinder their getaway. They eyed the lad as they drank to his health.

The lad in question was a twenty something who blended in perfectly with the crowd. He looked the part of a rich spoilt kid. His clothes indicated the large amounts his father must have swindled. His wild, streaked locks flayed wildly as he swung his head in sync with the music. The only other notable things on his face were a micro-goatie and a pierced eyebrow. His dance partner looked too looked like any other rich spoilt Indian youngster. Only, she looked like she was still in school.

Maari, one of the two men, was getting impatient. Ennavo poo. Indha maari naatu pannikulaam nambala anupparanga. Seekram kaariyatha mudichidalam. Annan kitte sollanum. (Whatever. Can’t believe they are sending us to take down such country pigs. Lets finish the job quickly. We have to tell our boss.)

They waited some more time for an opportune moment. After a few minutes, the couple stopped dancing. The girl took a seat while the youth, whose name was Andy (Anirudh), walked in the direction of the bar, probably in order to get the girl and himself some drinks. The killers decided it was time to move in.

The 2 men set their glasses down and walked up the towards the lad. Maari tapped Andy’s shoulder. He turned and registered surprise upon seeing Maari’s face. The look of surprise turned very quickly into a look of wariness. The other man, Daniel, made a move to quickly grab the lad’s hands and cup his mouth. In a flicker, Maari pulled out his knife from his sleeve and lunged it into the young fellow’s stomach.

Andy astutely side stepped the blow. The knife took some of his flesh and then went into the stomach of Daniel, who was right beside him. He then sent a kick right into the face of Maari, who let go of the knife and fell down. Andy took hold of the knife, drove it into Maari, then proceeded deliver a shot to Daniel’s kottai causing him to crumple to the floor in a heap.

There was pandemonium at the club. The police soon arrived and took the profusely bleeding gangsters into custody. The gangsters, whose already sad life was thus further saddened learnt the following life lessons.

1. It does not pay to underestimate your enemy.

2. Don’t judge a man by his looks.

3. Looks could kill.

4. Commissioners’ sons can be karate gold medalists.

5. Job satisfaction is very important.

5 3/4. Never try to suppress, oppress and depress the views of a tamilian. (I won’t explain the origins of this one. Only that t’was the very words of a modern day saint.)

Speaking of stories that break convention, there is this new tamil movie aimed at metro audience. It is called mudhal mudhal mudhal varai or m3v. It does sound like ayyooo thangamudile punnage, but the trailer seems pretty decent. The story must probably have some circular storyline where the beginning=end (I am guessing from the title). Will probably watch it online.

The story of the Indian sportsman

With the Beijing Olympics around the corner, this post makes a lot of sense. It might help you prepare for the imminent metal debacle if you still retain the hope that India will bring home many medals this time around. Also, this is inspired from a true story. Though its not quite true. And I follow Indian sports quite regularly and hence am making reasonably accurate observations. ie. Not all pure gibberish.

A baby like any other, was born in 1980 to a farmer couple in rural Nagapattinam. He was smallish, healthy looking, and not as black as men from these parts are. He was christened Mariakumar, a curiously tamilized Christian name. Life, in such places, did not give you much choices. You either had to work in the fields or sea, play, eat or sleep. Maria had a childhood like any other young lad from these regions. Attending school in a ramshackle building, helping his father in the fields and playing a whole lot of time with his innumerable village friends.

He grew up to be a rowdy, extremely arrogant and fun loving boy. He was average at school, but such rural schools did not demand much. They gave you little more than the basics needed to survive. He managed to clear his elementary school without too much difficulty. His parents decided to send him to Nagai town to do his secondary schooling. He was to live with his uncle. The school in the town, while by no means good, was still radical compared to the school in his village. This at least had multiple stories, uniformed students, reasonably paid teachers and sufficient infrastructure including sports facilities.

The last especially, made school heaven for Maria. He would spend long hours after (and sometimes even during) school in the playgrounds and managed to make himself a wanted member in most of the school teams. His forte were football, basketball and athletics. He did not play cricket however. He, and a lot of others around him, considered cricket to be a gentleman’s game, and he was no gentleman. He was tough and ready to fight. His robust rural body did not know exhaustion and managing multiple sports with a reasonable academic record was literally child’s play for him.

Then one day, it was announced there would be an exhibition basketball match conducted by the TN Sports Ministry in the school courts. He, along with the entire school, turned up for the event at the school grounds. Most were curious, and even more, peeved at having to give up their playtime to random outsiders. The event began. They saw a bunch of extremely tall (by Indian standards) players go on about their game with a sense of lazy elegance. The entire school watched wide-eyed as the hoopsters made lay-ups, jumpshots and long distance shots more elegantly than MGR could ever manage. The school’s own basketball team played in the way depicted in the tamil movies of today. Lot of people vying to bounce the ball with both hands in the same spot for a few minutes at the end of which they threw it in the direction of the basket and watch it go in miraculously. Ok, not so bad, but quite similar. This was something new. It filled the sports enthusiasts among the schoolboys with a sense of urgent enthusiasm and Maria himself felt like he had found his life calling.

Maria soon decided to give up other sports and started focusing on basketball. He enrolled in the district basketball club which offered free training to youngsters. He used to cycle for an hour to reach the courts and spent entire evenings there, training with the team and then alone. His game rapidly improved and he was soon deemed too good to restrict himself to the club. He captained the district basketball team in the TN inter-districts, and while the team itself did not do too well, he was noticed by other coaches and offered a place in a renowned sporting school in Madurai, which had an established program for basketball.

Life was looking up and opening out for Maria. His time at the Madurai school proved extremely fruitful. He learnt a horde of skills from the coaches there. They were real professionals (going by Indian standards). They, helped him develop an excellent overall game which even managed to exude oodles of style. His body filled out with regular fitness regimen and gym sessions. He was terribly athletic. He became quite a crowd-puller in local derby style matches with other schools and clubs, which drew quite some support from the public.

Madurai was also a great learning experience emotionally. He grew up to be an arrogant, silent young man quite similar to those portrayed in tamil movies, though it would not be right to suggest that was an influencing factor in his character. He developed a great friendship with some of his teammates. Some, I say, because he had ego clashes with equally arrogant players and generally disliked them. He, along with his friends, visited movies regularly together, had thanni-dum sessions infrequently and ate out very often. He had little time for girls apart from sight adichifying and making cat calls. Madurai was probably not the best place to go after a girl anyway. He had ego clashes with other similar people, but generally got along with those who minded their own business.

Most significantly, he developed a deep dislike for all the players and officials who managed to make it into teams through external influences. This was to prove a thorn in his life forever. To be a sportsman in India, the first lesson that needs to be learnt is there are important people, who do not necessarily have anything to do with the game, sitting in positions of power dictating terms. And the lesson itself is: you are either with them, or you are a nobody. This meant that Maria was benched despite being one of the better players in the squad, decisions in games frequently went against Maria, he missed many opportunities later in life and he generally was not given the respect he deserved.

On the whole however, his stint in the Madurai school was pretty successful. He attracted sufficient attention from the people who mattered and this fetched him a scholarship to study in one of the Sports Authority of India sponsored training programs in a Chennai college. This was one of the best college teams in the whole of India and a place in it meant you had potential. Which was nothing more than a confirmation of his all too obvious talents. Thus began the next phase of his life in Chennai.

Chennai, although India’s 4th biggest city, does have a remarkable small town feel to it. You could be in any unfamiliar spot in any town in TN and you would have to struggle to identify the town or city. Chennai simply felt like a larger agglomoration of colonies and main roads than Madurai. So there was no real problem adjusting to the city life. Except for the tamil accent. Which was not a significant problem anyway. He soon got used to the routine of Chennai life. It was training early morn, college in the afternoon, training again in the evenings and hostel for the night. The few free evenings were spent in a similar fashion as in his Madurai days, but with a different set of friends of course.

The level of competition was significantly enhanced however. Trainings were excruciating even for someone as fit as Maria. The individual skills of the players were quite splendid and they could have taken on any international players one on one. The team skills however were not so good. This was because the coaches, while not particularly bad (except those who got in through red tape), were nevertheless untrained themselves in the crucial factor of team play. Without focusing on the team, you could get nowhere in today’s ultra-competitive world of sport. (This is sadly one of the places where India loses out big time compared to other nations, who have much better trained and qualified staff.)

Continuing, he developed as a prime basketball player through his stint at the SAI institute. In his final year, he vice-captained the team in the national inter-university tournament and the team managed to finish 2nd that year, which was pretty creditable. Soon, he was out of the team and into the real world.

In the college, there were many officials, one of whom had no real talent, but was in through his link with higher ups in the state basketball association. To make matters worse, he was an extremely cunning fellow who saw little more use in his current employment other than the powers it offered. Maria and this man, predictably, hated the guts of each other. Thanks to this, Maria gained a real bad reputation among the basketball honchos in the state. Also, only basketballers who had reasonable height, irrespective of their position, were preferred. Maria, was unfortunately short for a basketball player. This ruled him out of any recommendations into a good professional team. The only way he could ever feed himself and improve as a player was to get into one of these teams through farcical selection processes. He tried a few, but was booted out. One of them, he managed to make it to the final round of selections. There was a choice between him and another really average player. They chose the average player as he had deeper pockets.

Disgusted, and seeing his life crumbling in front of his eyes, he did the next best thing. He decided to forget about improving himself and joined a city school as a coach. Pay was pretty meager but he managed by taking up odd jobs here and there. His dreams of becoming a professional player had crash-landed all too soon.

Anyone at this time would have given up hope. But he got a new resolve and decided to devote himself to coaching. The school boys, who had never really played basketball before, grew a sudden interest in the sport. A hugely successful program was established in no time. Maria managed to produced many players of a very high quality. He played with them by choosing the weakest players on his side and playing all the strongest players in the team. The team started winning a lot of tournaments in the city and grew a huge reputation. Maria, who had been dumped out of the basketball scenario, had managed to regain his self-respect through his pupils. Over a period of six years, the team managed to bring home over ten trophies and medals.

Alas, no dream ever lasts long. He had chosen to coach boys in a padips school. The boys quit basketball as soon as they reached their higher classes. They all had aspirations to go to IIT, NIT, BITS and what not. Basketball was a no-no. Maria was devastated. Although he grudgingly recognized that these boys were probably wiser than him. There was nothing left for him to do. The younger students, who were actually the first in India to experience the lifestyle boom, were a bunch of softies who would have nothing to do with sport. Maria himself was too tired mentally to bring up another winning squad, especially from the current available players. He became disinterested in life and took to heavy drinking and smoking. And India lost another soldier who could have helped, if not guided the country’s sporting destiny. Sports are, after all, the modern day battlefields.

Was it all a sad ending then? Not quite. Maria made the acquaintance of Valli. She was another basketball player who had been left in the dumps due to a mishandled injury. You do not need to connect such souls. They are already one. They had a brief period of courtship (tamil-film-style) and married soon enough. Maria himself continued his life with a burning hope that he would make his sons and daughters into the players he could not be. Like so many other invisible Indian sports people. Difficult, life is.