Ethereal Reminiscences Part-I

One of my inceptive experiences with the evanascent glances of the 'eye of intuition' occured on the day I lost my paternal grandfather. I was immediately informed about the sad event and I boarded a bus for a nine hour long journey back home. It was when I had consciously closed my eyes, I conversed with my grandfather without any control of my mind. I specifically call it mind for a reason I will explain later. Let me remind myself that my grandfather had some of the qualities that I find most difficult to emulate even today. A God fearing man who took upon the oath of seeking the divine at a later age when he had been freed up from his worldly duties and had became a pensioner. He had made it a habit to lead his life in the most simplest sense, unfussy with his Bhagvatam and Gita. A person who never spoke ill of anyone and loved his descendants unswervingly. A golden hand in anything and everything related to household cultivation, be it vegetables or fruits. He always made it a custom to bring sacks full of homegrown fruits and vegetables whenever he came to his son's home. And alas! papayas again, which I grudgingly called durniti(english equivalent is 'corruption') as it was mixed with pees-potato curry cooked in our home in the most camouflaged manner, for I only hated papayas instead of potatoes and I had loved that pristine dish unadulterated with durniti.
That night with a slightly heavy heart and my mind focused on my grandfather, I consciously closed my eyes after being seated in the bus. After a few minutes, it seemed that I was conversing with him. None of the events was within the control of my mind, it seemed it was all proceeding intuitively. Moreover some soul conversation was going on. Suddenly I asked him to take me with him. And I don't know why! And that was it. I felt a screeching pain in my forehead as if something was being forcibly drawn out of it. I immediately began to scream "no! no! " in a soundless intuitive manner and then only I could open my eyes. This was my first ever ethereal experience after the death of a close person.
That was the start of my astral beliefs.

Random escapades of Pique Pie

Pique Pie ran for his life in a bitter frenzy. But this was not the first time he had done this. It has been quite a while now when this had become a routine exercise. He never valued his own life at an exceedingly imposable stake, but then he would be bereft of his unfinished business, should he die. It was time for deliverance. He was quickly running out of all his strength to keep the pursuit on. It was time when he needed a teleport. He glanced at his wrist with a look which indicated neither expectation nor despair. The battery of the portalpass had been drained last night when he had performed fifteen unsecured teleports. He remembered Dr.Zine's cautionary words when he had presented him the portalpass, "Use it well, and make sure you recharge it once with a 35nm ultraviolet charger after every 12 teleports." And then, Dr.Zine disappeared into thin air. This was the last he had seen of Dr. Zickely Zine. He came near the platinum turnpike. The giant screen at the entrance displayed the the year 3100. It was a 1200 km long spiral road extending to the shore of Daydalis, which was a safe haven for the Pine Raiders.

He took the diversion to one of the nastiest areas of Daydalis called the Hall of Doom. A not so ubiquitous bar, where wretched scums of the society made merry with their days being numbered. Here is where he was destined to meet his fate as the stars had told. The stars had went wrong rarely, most of the times they were bang on target. Pique knew his destiny. A bright green cylinder was hung from the ceiling of Hall of Doom. It was glowing with luscious green which seemed to flourish inside the enclave. The ceiling had been created by the Dune King and it provided a real time mirror image of all the constellations of fortune. Naysayers always ascribed the mirror in helping the fate of the bandits. Pique went straight into the dingy chamber which was connected to the sewers. He has to travel 500 miles more to connect to his destiny. He jettisoned his rucksack in the sewers and climbed the ladder to the run way. The pursuers had come behind him but not for long. Pique activated the turbochargers and started running. He was gaining monstrous speed each nanosecond. A few seconds were left when he would touch a speed of 299792458 m/s. 10...9...8...........3......2...1 and flash. It was flash of blazing white lightning and it was touch and go. It was indeed time travel.


Few moments later, some billion light years away Ray woke up. He was feeling rather dizzy. He looked upto the wall and the calendar told him it was August, 2009. He tried hard to hold on to the fleeting memories but he could not. He had to go to college. And it was time, again!

The Merovingian

The King hath come,
With the wind he swayed his mighty wings,
Foregone were those days of indolence,
Forlorn were those consequences,
It was time to claim what was left unredeemed,
For the sake of life with the right to live.

Megalomaniacal Mediocrity

We think, we aspire, we achieve. We desire, we dream and we do. Unfortunately enough if doers were so much prevalent, Scott Adams would not have the luxury to sketch Dilbert regularly.

And fortunately enough, we all have a fair chance to dream and succeed however incompetent we may have become or be from birth, when the doing part is kept with as much clarity as a puddle of muddy brown water. Here comes a living legend who is most talked about and its not because of his impeccable talent but due to his grandiose achievements. We all fondly call him "Daroga", now he is known as D0(pronounced as 'Deo'). He is a strategic achiever in the field of his own core competency or rather incompetency as a consultant. And above all, his ersatz verve for achieving whatever lies on his way is so laudable that we get a new kind of vivacious energy and it rightly caters to our amour propre with an exclamation.

Truck Loads of Coffee

The story starts with a red little truck with a yellow load, called import button. Perhaps D0's fetish for trucks starts from his childhood, when he had his mind less screwed, along with the same diminutive body. But, he wore the same 'Burmuda Browns' those days too. Whenever, he saw a truck, he tried to figure out whether he would have to buy a ladder or not so as one day he would fulfill his final destination of riding them. Know what, he could not buy a ladder, his father would hammer his head those days, obviously with a hammer because it would cause the least damage at that location. Then with the eternal search of trucks in his mind, he set sail towards the software field. Now, how would he find a truck in a field of computers, all hi-tech as he used to boast about, in front of others! All he could do earlier was to gaze upon a black cobol screen with a few alphabets on it. He took a year and a half to get the coffee out of the coffee dispenser, forget COBOL programing. May be he thought, he needed to learn some esoteric cobol code to get the coffee out, by chanting a mantra-program infront of the dispenser. Anyway he survived seven valiant years without figuring how to get a cup of coffee from the coffee maker. Then came the IT revolution. Every 1.5 people in 2 were getting jobs in software. Deo wanted a change for the first time in his life. So 'Self' as he calls himself, shifted to one of the companies he would never have even dreamt of in those days of trucks & ladders.I bet if the Nazis were there, they would have definitely killed him in their pogrom even if he is not a Jew. I personally feel he is a cross between an alien moon man-an ass-a beetle-an eucalyptus tree-a cactus plant-a pegelite zinovicks* and a plastic bucket.

*They are polyphrite ant suckers according to some research published in scientific journal Dublello Didicles.

Riding with the truck

He felt an incredible amount of elation when he was given his onboarding material in a carry-bag. Of course he had seen a carry-bag, every morning when he went to get vegetables from market. But that was made up from his own discarded burmuda brown and this was made of colored paper and the greatest of all there was a LOGO on the bag! He had no logo on his burmuda browns. He was assigned to lead his first project.

He had mails requiring urgent transports to production box and to his indignation everybody had left. He saw two types of trucks for the first time. One was half empty other full. He thought of his position as a lead and pressed the full one, half one was for lesser mortals like members and all. At least this is what he thought proactively. And then all the changes were transported into production. Next day he came to office unaware of anything with victorious smile on his face. He had burned the candle from both ends, 6 hours straight overtime to oversee the completion of his full-truck button. Once in a while he wondered why he could not have someone like Size-zero or why did the clocks turn round and round! Truck went straight then. He must have thought that it takes overwhelming effort to unload a full truck anyway, and may be after he hit the full truck, a Tata truck went all over to Germany from his office and it was unloaded.

Run Over

The nasty client had escalated with a hefty fine of $100 000. They wanted only one change in production not the thousands of waiting ones. D0 looked as if he had seen a banshee wailing for his dickhead to be served for dinner. What he did next, to save his ass, only three people know in this world. God, Self and Self's Local Gods. May be he had willingly inhaled his Local Gods' farts but lets not jump to conclusions with such a little knowledge of the premises.

Return of D0

With a tinge of vengeance on his face, D0 was back at work. He had been promoted to something manager, the position from where he is likely to cause the least damage to technical work. It not that he is good at managing and bad at technical. It was precisely because still after 8 years of IT experience, he could not achieve puberty in technical know-how. And if its a case, then of lot of scrapping of projects could be in the air if Do was rolled into any of them. One fine day, when stickers were distributed for free, he got his own sticker of a half horse and joyously stuck it on his laptop. He fondly gave the nick name of 'Pegasus' to his laptop. It felt like a warrior within , the horse with wings that he would ride in near future. But most of the times it was the mythical creature that rode him. He tried Yoko height increaser but it failed to work on him. He blamed yoko, and explained to his wife that he would have sued them if he had time.Then came his first thanks award. He was incredulous at first but gradually he gave in to his clairvoyance. The very thought that he can stay in a industry gives me jitters, yet a subtle confidence exists that if he can then probably the ass who was crossed before Deo was born also could..

Epilogue

Do would love to do an La Shiney anytime, but the only problem is that he spends more than sixteen excruciating hours at the screen, trying to figure out the role of a team lead. He is strangled between half and full trucks. Still Dumbass promotes his talent, rather the lack of it. All his work involves carrying papers fron one conference to another with Godspeed hurry but without any purpose. The legend will continue to live on till he is ousted by a more incompetent successor. We will address his successor as D1 once he arrives. He once aspired to go for the NBA championship , so he decided to start playing basket ball from office side. Alas! the participation paper was posted a bit high and he could not reach it to sign it even when he tried 16 times that day. I guess he washes his yellow full-sleeves once in his life. It will be a full moon for him then.
Yet megalomania exists and so does mediocrity.

Bitter-Sweet Symphony

"I let the melody shine,
let it cleanse my mind,
I feel free"

'A nice canto!', as you might perceive or might not do so. But for Ray, it meant a lot more than a sudden gust of a balmy breeze. A bizzare kind of ennui seemed to have pervaded his thoughts already. Somewhere down the memory lane, he could see a young fifteen-year old standing akimbo, beside his bicycle with his usual alacrity.The verve and impatience repudiated every claim of any logical analysis. Each of the umpteen strategy was promptly disowned and committed to a low priority level but his own instinct, with the only hope that it will last till the last puff of air is drawn into his body. But change is perpetuity and hope hopeless.

A sudden wistful longing at rather sporadic moments drew his mind to fairly intangible things. Things which were always greyed out. The thoughts that can never be conclusive of anything and betrayed his imminent judgement. 'A free mind can make a free man', is a simple adage with an unnegotiable wisdom. Yet, it takes a life time of struggle to realize that. Somewhere something had been mistaken in an inference which precisely violated the laissez faire law. Still it would take a monstrous effort to amass every shred of confidence which was lost in translation.

Time had been standing in its usual unviolated sense of amour propre. It behooves 'time' to use such means to make ordinary mortals to realize their own worth. The time had come to renounce inaction and live. The thoughts gradually seemed to be unshackling and a mere change in mindset made thoughts clear, judgements clearer.

Camouflaged in a Black Glass

14:00 hrs IST: 21 killed as cyclonic storm hits Kolkata..(I get a call from my friend telling me to stay put!)
15:30 hrs IST: Worst storm in 20 years hits Kolkata..(Cellular Network lost)
15:50 hrs IST: Two people including me try to brave the storm. We find a lone taxi standing. We hire it. But alas! it cannot reach my place. Tree trunks lie everywhere preempting any movement of vehicles.

16:30..31.... I get out of the cab and start walking.
Somewhere in midst of a storm outside, I felt the futility of a mere black umbrella against a behemoth of its' kind. A similar kind of feeling delved into my thoughts and that was for myself, I suppose. Ah Boy! Leave that euphemenism aside.


The sky was already looking ominous, perhaps with a streak of prophetic entanglement. The trees started swaying with the wind, but it was in anguish rather. I could not hear them cry, but I could rather see it through the wind. The view through nakedness looked like one through a pair of black sunglasses, with the lenses having an exceptional defect of optical abberation. At that point, I happened to realize that my fate could be no more optimistic than that of the trees' and then even a bigger fact that I did not seem to care about it any longer. I was still walking, unaware and unconcerned of the distance left to cover. Trees had crashed into their own species, stray inanimate cars, man-made obelisks in a theme park and then, I saw some survivors scampering ahead of me in godspeed hurry. A little while later, I witnessed an unusual sight: A girl picking up flowers from a fallen tree and a boy holding up an umbrella above her head with precious meticulousness. Although, the rain was falling at a near horizontal angle. A tinge of a faint smile came to my lips, with a silent wish, "Careful! Dolts."

I could see a gigantic tree trunk lying ahead of me and it stuck my mind like some paralyzing force with a trace of wistful longing. I did not want to go ahead nor I wanted to admit the unverified veracity to myself. I took a few steps that exhibited my reluctance to continue yet my steps goaded me to carry on. I could get under the log with an aching screech coming from my backpack which had rubbed against the wood.

Sometimes in life, a devastating force is all that what serves to make equilibrium with a foresaken will. The living force needs to serve its own verve to make it worth living. I could get the portentous message: "Be the change you want." Thinking of my dreams and fleets, I started running among hushing inhabitants. I needed this life as badly as the storm and perhaps as exhuberantly as its intensity. I reached the house marked "11" and barged into it through the front door. I felt the gloom gradually clinging to evanascence as I fell asleep in the couch..

A rendezvous with Destiny: Enter Rainman

What could you possibly do when all circumstances sketch an incontrovertible visage?

What if there is neither an inception nor an end?

What if all the possible alternatives have preempted one another?

And finally who wins the duel of the fate?

You or is it your fate!

Call it divine intervention or be it serendipity..... or what ever else your mind can make you delve into..

There is one road to be taken, there is one destiny to be reached. There enters 'The Rainman'.

A dimly lit hall with few broken pieces of furniture, an ancient couch and a table with a visibly allergic layer of dust, incapable of attracting attention of even something remotely humane, was occupied by its only tenant : Ray. He always felt a deep abhorrence for the place, like he did for stinking canals with floating waste. But these days were special, though not in that specific sense. Somehow all the difficulties had taken an insurmountable stance before him and he was finding it impossible to deal them all, at once with impartiality. His usual confidence was swaying in a bottomless chasm and yet he was fighting for poise. With a fleeting smile and insane humor, he managed to make people laugh at times, yet he failed to make himself do the same.

Nobody occupied the couch either at late night or during the early part of dawn, when no palatable television soaps or sports were aired. That served as a prime advantage, as a quantum of solace. A glistening drop of rain glowing with the street light, caught his eyes when it was struggling along the window glass trying to make a mark, perhaps it was too a question mark. Ray had seen disgrace but could not feel it because it seemed just unbelievable. He had gone numb.

He had lost faith in God a couple of times before, but this time it was like a thunderbolt, as they always are: they arrive unexpected and are immensely penetrating. He smiled at himself in the brazen mirror, as if at all there was a road to be taken which he did not. If at all there was a mistake to be committed which he could not, so that he can justify it to himself by putting the blame upon.

He gradually delved into his intermittent heart-beat and yet he could not feel himself. His body seemed to be non-existent, his mind seemed to have transposed the balance. He realized it was a heart he had, it was blood he lost to the leech sucking his blood in his left foot. He remembered one word from his mother..'salt'. He ran across and then decimated the leech with salt. It melted down into a pathetic skeleton of itself. Just like something else.

It was around 5'o clock in the morning that made him realize that there was a thing called a bed and there was workplace to be visited at sharp 10'o clock. And now he seemed to be everything it was :"Destiny's Child" rather a step-child.

He thought of the solitary Rainman:"He walks unperturbed, unfettered with the same vision unchanged with non-linear time."