All I want Is You (Possibly Creep-2)

I’d just finished watching Juno so I messaged her asking if she had seen the flick and then I added a line about how girls look very pretty while playing the guitar.
Her reply was small and carefully worded.
“I Hate You.”
I stared at the cell phone screen for some time. Non sequiters were not her forte. I didn’t know where this sprang up from. I considered asking her if she had sent this message to me by mistake, perhaps (hopefully) she wanted to send it to her boy friend. Or maybe it was because of her boy friend that she had sent it.
My mobile screen flashed again with another SMS. I was hoping this would be one of those ‘sorry not meant for you’ messages that I had always heard about but never received myself.
The second message was ‘Don’t ask me why, cause I won’t be able to tell you.’
Well that dashed all my plans of asking her why she hated me. Still against all the rules and regulations that she had set just now I asked her, “Why?”
She replied, “I told you, don’t ask me.”
This time I decided to go along with what she had said. Loads of replies came to my mind, ‘But we’re still friends right’, ‘Is this because of Shantanu?’, ‘There’s a thin line between hate and love’, ‘Say it isn’t so, I love you.’
I rejected each one of them, considering them to be risky if not out right suicidal. Instead I waited for her to say something.
She messaged me again, “Aren’t you gonna say something?”
I wanted to reply, “Well you yourself have told me not to ask you why you hate me, hence I am not asking you and so forth.”
And then I waited for some sort of long and descriptive message explaining why she thought so. I did get a slightly long message. “Don’t you get it? I told you not ask me.”
Ah, then I guess she meant talk of something else. Since she had decided not to tell me I started thinking on my own of the past twenty four hours and all the things that I might have done to invoke her ire.
In fact, everything was normal before I started watching Juno. We were chatting normally, there were no ‘I hate you’ messages flying unidirectional. Everything was peaceful on heaven and earth.
My thought process was blocked by the sms alert of my phone. The message was “And I don’t ‘think’ I hate you, I really do ‘hate’ you.” Including the inverted commas and everything.
I became slightly irritated, and then I used my talent for being long and drawn out and wrote her a long missive, circumventing on the general theme of friendship and how close we were as friends. I told her (thinking this would do the trick) that I did not demand but I deserved an explanation.
There, I thought, that ought to melt her.
Her reply was, “Well if we are so close, in that case you should have called me up as soon as you received that sms.”
Oh, ah.
I called her up that very instant, she let the phone ring for a few bells and then she rejected the call.
I called her up again, and she cut the phone. She messaged me saying “This is not what I meant.”
Not deterred by this sms I continued my routine of calling her, she too reciprocated by rejecting each call.
I messaged her giving my reason for not calling her before by saying that when I received that ‘I hate you’ message I was confused and confounded etc. I pleaded with her to pick up my call.
After a few minutes I called her up again, this time she picked it up.
“Hi!” I said.
“Hey…”
Then there was (for want of a different word) a very pregnant pause.
“So…what?”
“What?”
“What about it?”
“What about what?”
“You know…what!”
She got angry, “Don’t irritate me. Come to the point.”
And presently I did, “Well, what about that message you had sent me? Why do you think you hate me dear?”
“Cant you talk of something else?” She replied in a very cold voice.
Ah well I could, but you know for some reason it was something that was clouding my mind.
“Please, I want to know. I need to know.”
“Why? Why do you ‘really’ need to go?”
Because I love you, I wanted to say, and break into some Lionel Ritchie song at the same point. Instead I said, “Because you are one of my closest friends and I can’t stand you being angry with me.”
She took a deep breath (or probably exhaled, or did both) and said, “I am not angry with you.”
Now this was a revelation, “Are you sure?” I asked, and then cursed myself for asking.
“I meant, I am not ‘that’ angry with you.”
Oh, okay. And then like the idiot I am I decided to make sure the hate part too. “But you do hate me, don’t you?” As if it was a good thing.
“Yes, no…I don’t know.”
Of course ‘I don’t know’ was her defense/way of stopping conversation/not answering/answering stuff that she didn’t want me to know. (I’d get to know this later.)
I repeated one of my earlier questions again. “So why exactly do you hate me?”
“Look, we have already gone over that!”
“But that’s the whole point! We haven’t! You’ve told me nothing yet.”
“I’ve got a class test tomorrow and I really gotta study. Can we talk about this later please?”
I was irritated by now, she told me she hated me, and she wouldn’t tell me why, and she wouldn’t tell me now.
“Come on!” I said, “You can’t leave me hanging like this. I’ll keep on thinking about why you hate me and won’t be able to do anything else. Please! This is important, you are important to me.”
She took a long pause and said, “Right now I really got to study. But I promise later I’ll talk about it…and don’t think of it too much. It isn’t a big deal.”
Well to me it was.
“You promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“So how about we discuss this at dinner tomorrow night?” I said, trying to be smooth.
“Sure! Whatever, now I really gotta study, bye!” And she cut the phone.
I was surprised by two things. Firstly that she hung up on me, and secondly that she agreed to dinner so easily. It was the second thing that made me reach for my wallet which was gathering dust under a corner of my keyboard. I opened it and turned it upside down, a twp rupee coin and a small spider fell out apart from my ATM card, my college ID and used train tickets. The spider cursed me in arachnid tongue and went to make another home for itself in my CPU cabinet.
A couple of hours later she resumed messaging me. She didn’t mention anything about hating me that night. I put it to her reserving the talk of it to dinner the next day.

The next morning I woke up to her sms wishing me GoodMorning and all that. I wondered whether she’d completely forgotten that hate message or something. I decided that I would not be the one to bring it up, at least not until dinner.
Er, did she remember agreeing to dinner with me?
I did not bring dinner up in the conversation until lunch time. We were both lamenting the food sitting in our separate messes when I reminded her of our dinner date.
It took her a few moments to recall who or what I was talking about. Then she remembered it and said, “Yeah, its fine with me.”
Her hostel had a nine PM deadline and we had to rely on public transport so it had to be someplace nearby. There was a good Chinese restaurant nearby that would tax a bit on my pocket, but the food was good and they had a ten percent student discount.
I grabbed Vinay (possibly the thinnest man in the world) and we rushed to the ATM. Standing in line I explained to him why and how much money I intended to withdraw from the ATM.
“I am taking Khushi out for dinner tonight.” I said, hoping there would be a distant roll of drums with this announcement.
“Yeah o could tell something was up, since you are pretty much skipping on the ground.”
“Well, I am looking forward to it. And don’t tell Driganshu or the rest of the guys. At least not the fact that I am treating her.”
“Ha ha, for keeping this information secure I need a treat too.”
After withdrawing money on the bike ride back to the hostel Vinay asked me, “Wouldn’t Shantanu have a problem with it?”
Shantanu? The name seemed to ring a bell.
“Why would he have a problem with me taking Khushi out for dinner?”
“Well for starters, he is her boyfriend.”
Oh, ‘that’ Shantanu. I hadn’t really thought about how he would feel about me taking Khushi out.
“It doesn’t matter to me. And remember, its Khushi that I am taking out, not him.”
I did not let thoughts of a boyfriend spoil the evening for me.

I put on my favourite black shirt and strutted towards her hostel. Fortunately I caught a rickshaw on the way and stood outside her hotel with the rickshaw like some prize ride.
She stepped out of the gates of her hostel and I was stunned. She’d kept her hair open and was wearing a long blue kurti and to sum it up was looking mesmerizing etc.
She looked at me and stifled a laugh.
I told her that she was looking nice but didn’t dare ask about my own appearance.

Dinner was great with her, firstly it gave me a chance to constantly gaze at her for more than an hour. Stealing food from her plate, fighting over the dessert brownie and talking about nothing in particular I found myself falling deeply.
On the ride back I hardly spoke a word. She kept on asking what it was that I was thinking about and I couldn’t tell her that I was thinking about her and even though she was sitting next to me there were things that I couldn’t say to her.

I came back to the hostel and stood in front of the wash basin washing my face (or trying to). I looked at myself in the mirror and the thought came to me ‘She has a boyfriend.’
I let the thought slip away and at midnight wrote her a long message telling her all the things that I liked about her but not telling her that I loved her.
And I got no reply to that message cause she had fallen asleep by then.
When I lay tp sleep that night I suddenly remembered there had been no mention of the ‘I hate you’ message through out dinner. It now seemed to me to be one of those unexplained mysteries of life that remain so.
A week passed which I can’t say was uneventful because it wasn’t but exactly seven days later at ten in the night I got an sms from her which said ‘sent you a mail.’
Now this sms would certainly not mean that she had sent me a chain letter of some sort of some song. It meant this email had something urgent and important.
I rushed to my room and saw Vinay lazing around in front of the computer. I politely shoved him to one side and logged into my account to check my mail.
She had written about how much our friendship meant to her and how much her relationship with Shantanu was hurting her and that she couldn’t continue with him any longer. She had written a lot about how close we had become and what she had started to feel for me.
In the end she said that she loved me.
And she was strong enough for whatever my reply would be.
Time slowed down.
I read the mail again and again, I saw that she was online and wished that she wasn’t.
I logged out and logged in again.
In the end I knew what I had to say. My reply to her was small and carefully worded.
“But…I thought…what about…oh hell…nevermind..I LOVE YOU!”

Pandey and S.T.A.L.K.E.R

A few days ago my computer crashed, I believe it did so in order to prove it's existence, that is to say that it crashed to shout at me and say that it could crash whenever it wanted to.

In moments of any sort of doubt related to computers etc, the first couple of names that come to my mind (or to the mind of anyone in my class are...) Pandey and Nishant, two whiz-kids who are so damn good at troubleshooting that they have made the rest of us complacent and lazy.

I called both of them, here's a record of the different reactions...

Self-Pandey! My computer's crashed, I need to fix it...there's a repair option....I have a CD, what should I do?

Pandey-(alert)-What! How? When? Ok do as I tell you, start the computer once again, boot from the cd.....then do this...and that...

Self-Dude it's leaving me at a DOS prompt and I know nought of operating in DOS, 'help!'

Pandey-wait dude, let me get hold of the CD myself, I will go thru stuff...and I will call you again...

(...later...)

Pandey-Dude! Have you tried working out this...?

Self-Yeah I have, to no avail,

Pandey-No, dont worry, I am on it!


A call to Nishant Singh the Stalker...and the following conversation transpired.

Self-Stalker! My computer's crashed, I need to fix it...there's a repair option....I have a CD, what should I do?

Stalker-(sleepily)-format it...

Self-but there's a repair option...and...

Stalker-Format it.

Self-But it shows...

Stalker-Format it.

Self-Are you sleeping?

Stalker-Format it.

That's stalker for you, clear and to the point...

The Intelligent Wish (Part 1+)

R.

He must have been a rather good poser, otherwise it is hard to comprehend how someone can change so quickly.

I have been, no I had been his friend for over a couple of years before he changed. In fact he was the first guy I could completely relate to in my college. We lived in adjoining rooms, had identical interests and basically were so alike it was hard for us not to become friends. He didn't give a damn about studies, so did I. We always talked about the goddman system and how we should escape it. We talked about larger than life ideas, personal rebellions, always the wish to do something new and not fall in to the trap of a 'routine.' There was one thing that he did not want was mediocrity.

He was a little weak in studies, and coupled with the fact that he did not take his academics seriously he faltered in his exams. He never failed but his grades were always low. And the stupid assholes of my class used to judge him at this value, they didn't see much beyond what he was academically, instead they saw him as a joker, an aimless idiot who they could laugh with when he was with them and laugh at when he wasn't. I hate people who do that.

I scored slightly better than him, but this never hindered our friendship. Not until...

I used to tell him about those who laughed behind his back, I knew it always broke his heart because he thought of everyone as his friend and he refused to believe in me, but he knew it was true. He said, "Give those guys a chance yaar, they are our classmates. They can't be as bad as they seem to be."

I said, "No you idiot, you don't realise. The other day I overheard A--- and B--- talking about you, and the only conclusion that one could draw from all their talk was that you were a Class A weirdo. Nothing more, nothing less."

He laughed and said, "Well maybe they are right, after all they are the toppers of the batch."

"Stop being such a simpleton! They are not right, they are just a bunch of losers!"

He would smile and say, "Then you are right, and this discussion is worthless, let's not waste time on it shall we?" And that would be the end of that.

I.

It was the middle of first year, and it was raining heavily that day. I was sitting with my friends S--- and S--- at the shed near the tea shop when he suddenly came running towards me all drenched and dripping and said that he wanted to talk to me, when I asked him what was it about he told me that he was in love with me.

As simple as that.

My friends were staring at me, everyone else at the teashop was staring at me, including the owner. I could literally feel my cheeks going red with shame, and all I remember asking him was why did he think that way. He said he didn't know why but he was sure of it, then he looked around and saw that everybody was staring at us.
Then as soon as he realised the situation he said 'Whoops!' or something and went running back into the rain with the same abruptness as he had come.
My friends started laughing, and soon they were joined by everyone else present, and all I could do was hang my head in shame. I felt I was the victim of some kind of a practical joke, but I wasn't the one laughing.

Later in the evening, I called him up, he sounded elated when he heard my voice, and the first thing the silly boy said was "So what is your answer?"
I felt so angry, I said, "My answer is this.." and I vented out all my frustration on him, calling him names, I asked him who did he think he was, I shouted at him for making a joke of me in front of everyone. I was met with silence in the reply. I asked him, "Don't you have anything to say for yourself?"
He said, "Look you are too angry to talk right now, so I'll call you later."

When my anger did subside, I realized that the whole morning situation indeed was funny, when the image of him running back into the rain came to my mind. I almost felt sorry for him.
After about half an hour I recieved an sms, 'i am too much of a coward to call you, i just want to make this clear that my intentions were never what you think, i guess i have hurt you enough, please forget the existence of _____ from your life, i will never bother you again'

I thought maybe I had overdone the shouting part when I had called him, so I called him again but he didnt pick up the phone. I called him several times but he didn't answer, so I sent him a message telling him that I might have shouted a bit too much on him, and that he shouldn't take things seriously so early in life. He replied asking for me to meet him, I agreed because I wanted to make him understand things from my point of view.

I guess I should not have agreed to meet him in the first place.

Yellow Submarine

I got the chance to watch this movie that I had intended to after a long time. An animated film with pyschedelic covers and based on the music of the Beatles (mostly the post 1965 era). It contains various references to Beatles songs, and the puns are funny not boring.

Plus all the great songs that are incorporated as part of the soundtrack, added to the highly unrealistic animation, it was totally a work of art...

The songs used in the movie were

• "Yellow Submarine"
• "Hey Bulldog"
• "Eleanor Rigby"
• "Love You To"
• "All Together Now"
• "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"
• "Think for Yourself"
• "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
• "With a Little Help from My Friends"
• "Baby You're a Rich Man"
• "Only a Northern Song"
• "All You Need Is Love"
• "When I'm Sixty-Four"
• "Nowhere Man"
• "It's All Too Much"

The Intelligent Wish (Part 1)

R.

I knew him before, I don't know him now.


He wasn't like this before, and there's a part of me that still hopes that he changes. He was much better when he wasn't like this. But to the world that doesnt care, he has become superman. He has become all that the system wanted him to be, he has submitted...he is a perfect fit.

I cannot pin point the exact date, but it was one year ago. Before that he was different. He was my friend, he was everybody's friend. The gentle guy, the nice guy, the funny guy.

I have tried talking to him about this, I have tried to fight with him about this, I have even tried to get him drunk and explain, nothing works. He has become stronger, and in the process he has become stubborn.

I remember when he literally pushed me out of his room, telling me that I was coming in his sphere of things, and that I was eating into his space, and his ambition. That was the first time he had talked to me like that, but not the last time.

I remember the time when he did not behave like this, and when he was so easy going that it was a great relief just to have him around. Something went wrong somewhere, and I cant quite figure out what and when.

He was my greatest friend, all the good times we had, they all seem just a part of some long lost memory. Of a friend who has moved away.


T.


What can I tell you about him, he is the best there is. He wasn't always like this, he was generally foolish. But in the past one year he has overshot us all, he has become a source of inspiration and admiration for all of us.

I mean what can I say, he used to hang around my room during examination times just to get enough information so that he may pass the exams, but now his intelligence amazes me. Infact there are some areas where he is even better than me. I remember during the last exams, there were certain subjects where I had doubts and I went to ask him.

Yeah I guess he was slightly rude and brusque, but I think that is part of his objectivity.

No I dont think that I am scared of him, or even vary of him. He has risen as a great competitor. And I respect him for that.

K.

Not that I can tell much about him. He wasnt really a part of my friends circle, we all considered him to be some sort of blabbering fool. Yeah he was fun to be around, like a joker or someone.

One thing is for sure, he isn't as funny as he used to be. He has stuck his head in studies or something, but I don't know, he always was a weirdo. So there's nothing I can say for or against him.

No it doesnt make any difference to me.

I.

The saddest thing is, I was almost in love with him.

Chak De India

Starring-Shahrukh Khan
Directed by-Shimit Amin
Produced By-Yash Raj Films

Normally I wouldnt go to a Yash Raj production unless dragged by several tractors and stuff, but Chak De India is a movie that I had on my must see list from a long time ago. The basic premise of SRK doing a Denzel Washington (Remember the Titans)/Al Pacino (Any Given Sunday) type of role and being in a YR film without ham-acting seemed interesting. Also the director's last offering (Ab tak Chhappan) is one of my favourite movies.

The movie begins with the final moments of an Indo-Pak match of the 'World Championship' (not the world cup), with captain Kabir Khan (Shahrukh Khan) playing center forward for his team. He gets tripped by a Pakistani player inside the penalty region and India gets a penalty shot. Kabir Khan takes the shot himself and misses, going over the Goal post and India end up losing the match.

After the match images of Kabir Khan shaking hands with the opposing captain and his team mates are used to portray him as a match-fixer. He gets tainted by the media and the people who lose faith in him quickly (Aaj Tak plays the media channel in the movie, I wonder whether they were being honest or did they know that they were spoofing themselves). He has to leave his ancestral home and live away from public view for the next seven years.

The Indian Women's Hockey federation is shown discussing the fate of the team which has been already selected from the various state quotas but the members of the board show their skepticism by saying that the national team doesnt even deserve to play against a school team from a foreign country. Kabir Khan says he will do the job, knowing that no one else will do it. His brief is to get India to win the woman's world cup.

The team pours in from all the different states with each of the girls having a different story of their own. Memorable members of the team are the girl from Haryana, the girl from Chandigarh, the former captain and the Punjabi girl.

The rest of the film unfolds in a true underdog story style. And although somewhat cliched, it is good to watch.

Shahrukh Khan plays an understated role, Shimit Amin's last film had Nana Patekar in the lead and he managed to get Nana Patekar to act without his usual histronics, he does the same for SRK, this is a non-SRK type role that he has played after a long time.

The camera-work and screenplay are all well matched to the film, and with the big pockets of the production banner, the money has been used liberally and (contrary to most Yash Raj films) this does not look over-produced.

(Thankfully, the movie was not shot in NY or London with SRK being the coach of an NRI-woman's hockey team, although I am sure the idea might have crossed Adi Chopra's mind.)

Pablo's Pop Culture references/recommendations-
Movies
Any Given Sunday
Remember the titans
Hip Hip Hurray (starring Kirti Azad and Shafi Inamdar, a good soccer film about a school team and it's sports teacher)

Books
The Bleachers-John Grisham (possibly the shortest novel written by Grisham and one of his few non-law books, about a small town school American football coach on the verge of his death and the ex-players coming to visit him one last time.)

Elvis and a Bass Guitar

Friday evening can be too taxing if you pretend that you do not have much to do, and shove away all the academic backlog that has built itself over the two and more years that you have spent in college. So I suggested to AD, "Let's go out man."

Asking AD out is easy, he never says no, so he said, "Okay lets go and get the bass fixed."

The bass in question was/is an old relic that he has sort of inherited from a senior since he left it in the college as the plug-in socket was kaput. In the summer holidays AD had got the guitar and pick-ups etc fixed but the old deaf and blind mechanic that he had employed for the job had used a socket much akin to his age as such that a lead for it could not be found anywhere in the world.

We borrowed Divij's bike and head out towards Assi, the place where there was the promise of music shops. The music shops guided us to Agarwal radio which was supposed to be quite the hot spot.

With each destination my chagrin increased cause I can do nought but ride pillion, and I was holding the bass, which is quite heavy. And quite awkward to hold too, again because it is quite heavy.

Agarwal radio turned out to be a portal in another world, it had a dim lighted room with a very low hung ceiling and radio and machine parts that were stacked up closely near the wall. We showed them the bass and they refused to either recognise it or be any part of it.

Instead the man sitting behind the counter and scribbling in a yellowing notebook pointed towards a small door in the wall opposite to him. Inside was another man wiping seat off his brow and working with a rusty screw driver. We ventured to enter the room when the man spoke (and before that you would not have thought him capable of speech) and said that he was not referring to that room, he was gesturing towards the shop across the street which was also named rather unimaginatively Agarwal radio.

The clerks mistook the bass for some sort of a gun or something and backed off as soon as we entered the shop, they listened as AD and self spoke simultaneously about our base predicament and they too said that they were unable (and somewhat unwilling) to help us.

They directed us towards Awaz radio which they said was a certainty for fixing the bass, and all the other problems a man could face. We expected to find a magician sitting behind a desk of old wood with a black coloured table fan on it, instead we found a somewhat less congested shop with no magician and certainly no one to fic the bass.

Although the shopkeeper had tried to mislead us by displaying a poster of a girl in a red mini skirt holding a guitar, he said he did not deal with guitars at all.

We went back to Agarwal Radio once again and bought a socket from them, they said we had to go to Bass-fatak to get the bass fixed.



(Bass-fatak for the uninitiated is a part of Godowlia, which is a region in Benares that has been in a permanent state of traffic jam ever since man invented the wheel. Navigation in Godowlia and regions near-by is tough, especially when one has to compete with man, beast and beastly men)

We made a rather electrifying entry into the bass fatak region with several transformers exploding behind us. With the bass in my hand, we almost made a perfect glam rock band at that instant (long live KISS),

When the transformers finished their exploding bits, the area was awashed with darkness. And the bass guitar found its saviour (as predicted a bit earlier) behind a creaky wooden table with a fan. There was no electricity so we waited in the dark with the bass in the corner waiting for the light to shine.

The bass-man fixed it up for us using borrowed electricity from someone's inverter, and we headed back to the hostel..

And to conclude this long and largely pointless exercise in writing, while returning to the hostel on the way near Assi I saw a board which said

----------Elvis Guest House---

The King lives!!!