A Perfect Itinerary

(Dedicated to Ani and Lincoln)

*Based on true events.

It was the 5^th day of November 2003 when The Matrix Revolutions released in India. Like all movie buffs, after watching the first two parts of the amazing Matrix trilogy, we were waiting for this big day. But to our dismay, we lived in a place called Warangal where English is the third language, after Telugu and Hindi. So leave alone English, the movie wasn’t even released in Hindi there. And I had promised myself, that I will watch the final part only in a theatre. So as ridiculous it may sound, I decided to go to Hyderabad (which is 150 kms away from Warangal) to watch it. Luckily, two of my dear friends, Animesh and Lincoln shared the same emotions for the movie and thus we grouped up to go and watch it first day in the IMAX screen at Prasad IMAX theatre. For those who don’t know it, Prasad IMAX was one of the very few IMAX theatres in the world and had the largest IMAX screen in Asia.

And thus the journey began. The plan was simple: we’d catch East Coast Express from Kazipet at 2:30 pm, reach Secunderabad by 5:45, quickly rush to the IMAX which is a couple of kms away from railway station and get the tickets for 7:30 pm show. Then we can easily catch a train by the night and get back by 2 am.

We started as expected. Right after our classes, we went to Kazipet, the nearest railway station. The train too was right on time and we managed to catch it easily. The journey was comfortable except that we had to keep standing all the time since there was no vacant seat. The train reached the destination timely and as soon as we got down we met our first trouble. While walking through the platform, a ticket inspector stopped us and took us to his office. I don’t know if he judged it by our speed of walking but he was right; we had no journey tickets. After acting stupid and making lame excuses for some time, we had to surrender. We paid Rs 100 per head under the table and bid farewell to the inspector.

Barely discouraged by the event, we quickly caught an auto-rickshaw and reached IMAX by 6:30. Ani rushed to the ticket window while I paid the autowala. There we met our second problem of the day. The lady in front of Ani bought the last ticket for the 10 pm show while the 7:30 show had already been sold out. We were not as stupid as you might be thinking right now; we had earlier tried to book the ticket on phone but they turned us down saying they don’t do it on credit, hence the risk. Now we were left with two options; either to buy tickets for next day morning show or look for another theatre. As we did not want to spend money for the night stay, we chose the latter.

With crushed dreams of watching The Matrix Revolutions on the big IMAX screen, we reached another theatre screening the movie. It was still around 7 pm. But again thanks to our destiny, the next show would start only at 10 o’ clock. That would mean that we’d reach college back only by 5:30 in the morning. Puffed up with our love for cinema (and to avoid embarrassment of returning without watching the movie) we went ahead and bought the tickets. While we were standing outside the theatre thinking how to while away the time, something pleasant happened. A car entered the premise and a scantily dressed beautiful young lady, with her face shining bright, stepped out of it. It’s amazing how our nervous system can quickly divert its attention. For the next few minutes, we forgot all the day’s events and just stared lustfully at her till she went away.

With enough time to get bored, we decided to go to Paradise restaurant and have the so called ‘best biryani of Hyderabad’. But the Murphy’s laws followed us there too. There was a long queue at the restaurant and we waited for an hour, standing, till we got a seat. Luckily the food was great and we ate like a bunch of slumdogs (lexicography courtesy Danny Boyle).  

It was the happiest moment of the day as we caught our seats inside the theatre and we kept ourselves fully engrossed for the next 130 minutes of the movie, except the small naps that Lincoln took while watching it. I and Ani were self proclaimed movie critics within our group of friends in college and the movie would definitely invite a lot of critical discussion of how disappointing it was. But as was the call of the moment, we pretended it was nice to keep each other’s morals high. With everything gone as wrong as possible, it was the time to get back to college and have a long sleep.

Though destiny rarely plays games with commoners like us, it plays well whenever it does. As we reached the railway station, we found out that no train was scheduled for Kazipet till the morning. With Lincoln already dozing off in the auto-rickshaw, we reached bus stand at around 1:30 am hoping to catch a bus. But there was no bus either till 3:30 am. We had no option but to sleep on the small benches, lying on each other, for two cold long hours.

We reached college by 7 in the morning, had breakfast in the mess and went straight to bed for a much deserved sleep. We never told anyone about the great excursion we had on that fateful day and would always recall it as a perfect itinerary. 

The PCMB of a Love Story

I first saw her when I entered college to earn an engineering degree. She, being my biological senior, was slightly older than me. The difference between our ages was half the numeric value of the square root of the circumference of a cricket ball in inches. But incidentally, pheromones in my body did not mind it. My vomeronasal organ easily recognized her, with ninety percent probability, as the one who will do additions and multiplications in my family tree. 

Her face was smooth, every five dozen square inches of it, with elliptical eyes and a thirty five degrees tapered nose soldered perfectly on it. Her smile would stretch her lips by an extra inch and mine by another half an inch every time I saw her. That face had the luminous intensity of a hundred watt halogen lamp, enough to power my laptop for three hours. She had long straight line like hairs, averaging two feet in length with four inches of standard deviation. Her holy curves were destined to bring the conic sections to my edgy life. She had a sonorous voice and I knew that once it starts resonating with mine, the amplitude of resulting sine waves could shatter any crystalline substance on earth.  Her body would smell of geraniol and citronellol, rarely found in homo-sapiens.

I communicated my love to her through a girl who sat diagonally behind her in the class and lived four rooms away from her in the hostel number seven. But I don’t know if the transmission signals met an electromagnetic interruption or the viscosity of my message was too less that it went right across her ears without leaving any deposits in her cardiac muscles or nervous system. While I always admired her to be of magnoliacae origin, she took me to be a cactaceae and started maintaining minimum eleven feet distance from me.

Though my love bike took three months to reach her, the news of its engine failure got broadcasted in the college at the speed of light. Suddenly my vibgyor dreams turned into monochrome with extra ten kilogram of embarrassment loaded on them having its centre of gravity right inside my heart. My love life which I expected to take an exponential curve suddenly turned into a null vector. The projectile thrown at a perfect forty five degrees inclination angle suddenly hit the wall and dropped dead with the force of gravity.

But as the learned men say, after every trough in a simple harmonic motion comes an upward wave. This new wave came to me with much higher amplitude and my heart started pounding again like an undamped spring mass system, this time for a biological junior. And as you might have already guessed, the polymer of my love life went on breaking and adding new aromatic bonds.

PSEUDO-RADICALISM

Oxford dictionary defines radicalism as "departure from tradition; progressive; unorthodox". It primary talks about people who have a point of view entirely different from the socially accepted norms. And it won't be an exaggeration to say that it’s a host of radial people throughout the history who have shaped the mankind where it stands today. Right from Galileo to Gandhi, these men have stood for what they believed to be right no matter what the people think of them or their ideas. But this article talks about a different approach to radicalism, which I call pseudo-radicalism.

I define pseudo-radicalism as opposing a generally accepted idea rather than supporting an extremist idea. The difference being that a radical person advocates something which he believes from within and which represents his unbiased way of reckoning. On the other hand, a pseudo-radical first gathers the socially accepted view and then go after it with a negative approach. That is, a pseudo-radical does not have an originality of ideals, opinions or faculty of reasoning. And, I am afraid, the number of such people is increasing day by day and you will find them all around you; maybe you are one of them. Let me discuss how and why they exhibit such a behavior.

Firstly, its a conscious effort to stand out of the crowd in this competitive world. They certainly do not care about either of the point of views but do have an urge to somehow proclaim themselves to be on the extremist side. They do it just for the heck of it and their victory is only in getting heard and nothing else. How many times you have heard a friend telling "Mahatma Gandhi ruined this country" or "Tendulkar is no good for Indian cricket" or "I don't like Forrest Gump. Its too bland". I don't say that everyone making such remarks is a pseudo-radical; in fact some of them strongly feel it from the core of their heart and can fight it out with debatable reasoning. But still there are many of them who say it just to be different. They are hardly aware of Gandhi's philosophy or Sachin's records and don't even care to know how wrong they are. Another easy example of this is the recent article by Mr. Arindam Chaudhury titled "Don't see Slumdog Millionaire. It sucks!” He sure got his share of visibility out of it (he got more than 5000 views and 300+ comments in his blog in merely four days after he published it in TOI).

Second reason, which probably a psycho-analyst can explain, is accreditable to sub-conscious. An uneventful childhood, a distressful family atmosphere or a long foregone episode in life could germinate into such a behavior. Psychologists can perhaps delve deeper to understand it better.

I am not aware of prevalence of this phenomenon a few centuries ago, but I am increasingly fumbling upon such conducts all around me. And I would mainly attribute it to the heightening complexity of societal structure where people are succumbing to this urge to be different.

You might call this article to be a nonsensical and you may even get angry; and that, my friend, is a clear indicator of you being one of the pseudo-radicals talked about here. But don't worry, a little more introspection can sort it out.