Random Thoughts

what would you do if you were a messiah? if you knew the answers to all the questions in this universe? if you knew exactly how many points Nasdaq is going to gain tomorrow, which team is going to win the soccer world cup, and what questions are going to come in tomorrow's exam? to most of us, i am sure, this is a very wonderful thought. it will take us only week to become the richest person in the world, and only a few more days to find the girl of our dreams. why, if you are a messiah, do you need to find such a girl? you can just pick the hottest girl around and wish that she should fall in love with you immediately, isnt it?

the truth, however, can't be more wrong than that. this is what they show in the movie "Bruce Almighty" starring Jim Carey, and this is what Richard Bach (of the jonathan livingston seagull fame) has tried to say in his book "illusions". being a messiah, miracles come automatically to you. somebody bruises past you and his/her terminal cancer is cured. you cast your eyes on somebody and he finds a treasure buried beneath his home. people flock to you, asking for more miracles, more blessings. you are happy, for you do need people to listen to you. you want to tell them the higher purpose of living, the supreme truth, the ultimate reality, but all people care in this world is miracles. they flock you, and if they dont end up crucifying you they will start worshipping you. you end up like a stone statue, unable to persuade them that whatever miracles you are able to perform are within everybody's reach. you are lonely, yes, and that is the biggest problem you would face.

haven't we heard that it gets lonely at the top?

“One hundred years of solitude” is my favorite book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I am a big fan of him. Some time ago he published a new book – “In memory of my old prostitutes” and I have tried very hard to find a pirated soft copy of it, but have been unsuccessful so far. (Please, this is not a porn novel. This is about an old man who is unmarried, has no friends and to remove his loneliness, he hires a young prostitute every day. She comes every evening and sits in a corner of the room in a chair. The old man keeps on telling stories of his younger days to her till he falls asleep, and then the girl goes back). This book was so much in demand that pirated copies started selling in the black market before it was officially published, and Marquez did what had never been done by any author in the past 300 years of publishing- he changed the ending of the book and rewrote the final chapter for the officially published copies.

However, this post is not about Marquez. This is about my loneliness, and how I have got absolutely bored at home. I still remember how homesick I used to feel when I had gone to Kgp for the first time. It’s been six years since then, which really is a long time. I have gone through the phases where “home” was in Kharagpur or Ahmedabad, and Jamshedpur was just, well, a place from where bank drafts used to come at regular intervals. (I know I am a bastard J ).

I have nothing to do except play games and watch movies all day long. My attention span for movies has kept on decreasing for the past few years, and now I can’t even finish a 20-minute episode of Friends in one go. But if I am bad at watching TV, I am worse at playing games. My brother, who has got introduced to Quake and Age of Empires 4 years later than I was, plays both the games better than me. Back in my institutes I always used to get around playing games with my friends (and thus losing my face) by saying that I was out of touch for a long time. But with my brother, I don’t have even this excuse. Sometimes my cousins come over to home to play. They both are little girls, one is six years old and another one is only two and a half or three. I would love to play with them, but they are afraid of me because my mausi has made me the modern avatar of Gabbar Singh – “doodh pi le beti, warna Rahul bhaiya aa jayega!!!” God !!! I knew my face always looked serious, but I never wished to be Gabbar Singh….and why him of all the villains whose roles I would love to play in the movies!!! Can’t I be that serial kisser, for example?