Hello, Onam? Its Maveli here!

Today is Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala; celebrated alike by all the Keralites! This is the fourth consecutive Onam I am away from my family and relatives. I feel jealous of Maveli (the king who once ruled Kerala). What if he was sent to pathaalam (underground; location of purgatory) by Lord Vishnu for a holiday, at least he is able to visit Kerala during Onam; and me... Well, it is not the time for such senti stuff. Onam is the time to enjoy, to celebrate and above all, to be happy!

I think it was in my 4th standard that I set an athapoo (Floral Carpet put for 10 days ending on Thiru-Onam) in our patio for the first time. Our house was well known in the village for its huge assortment of flora. Three cheers to my achan (father). So getting flowers for the athapoo was not a problem. But there was a threat. During Onam different societies (short lived co-operatives run by children & jobless majority of Kerala youth, which spring up during Onam even faster than a mushroom colony whose primary objective is to collect money in the name of Onam and secondary objective to enjoy life with that money) come to my house to get those flowers for their respective athapoo extravaganzas. So I have to surpass them to get the flowers for my athapoo.

After the sadya (lunch), children of our family assemble at my grand mother’s house where we play different games. One of my uncles would already have tied a swing in the jackfruit tree. In the evening there would be film shows (using a TV and a VCR) by the aforementioned cooperatives. Films like Vandanam, Indrajalam etc. were advertised heavily. My parents didn’t allow me to go and watch these films in the open air auditoriums aka road-sides. I continued this athapoo-ing for quite some time and it stopped somewhere in my high school.


Athapoo during Engineering, S5 - Designed by yours truly.

During engineering we had college level athapoo competitions. Our class put athapoo on all the Onams we got there. In college, someone will come up with puli-kali (a game with people wearing costumes of leopard) and stuff like that. Then there would be payasam (kheer / a sweet) distribution. In the evening people go outside their classrooms and what follows is a scuffle which even beats WWF, in what we call Ona-thallu. We also conduct Vadam-vali (tug of war) competitions and Uri-adi (madka-phod / breaking the pot) competitions.

When I was working in an IT company, a few of us decided to celebrate Onam in our company for the first time in its history. We wanted to put an athapoo in the reception. We went through all those hierarchical battles to get it approved by the admins. Well they can't be blamed for this. What if clients from GE and all see this at the reception of a Top 5 IT company of India on their visit to the company? When the athapoo was put, and the more than 1500 employees saw and appreciated it, we felt like having a cup of hot pal-payasam!

Now history is going to be written once again. We have planned to put an athapoo in our institute on Thiru-Onam. Yes, the first time in its history. I am just back after drawing the design. Early morning we will go to the nearby flower market. And I dont feel like sleeping!

Wishing you all a Happy Onam... Onashamsakal!

Latest News!

Athapoo that we put today


Athapoo a bird's eye view

What Diary Pages Said

16. Jan. 97
I don’t know when exactly I noticed her for the first time. But one thing I know. After that I couldn’t refrain myself from seeing her again...

It all started on a December; the December of 1997. I always had my own things to do in life. Never ever did it confine to loving a girl; rather I believed it shouldn't. I always felt like they are the species that truly are from Venus. So near, yet so far...

My college life always started in the college bus. I had a permanent seat in the bus. The seat next to the door! I managed to get that seat because I got into the college bus from its first stop itself. I preferred a lonely journey, a journey without talking to anyone. There was a reason for that. Even though the bus went through the same places everyday, I always found something different in those places and I wanted to enjoy those differences to the maximum. And then I saw her one day...

She was an ordinary girl. Simple, less talkative, big eyes, always looking outside the bus as I did... I don’t know what in her attracted me so much. Yes, something was there in her, which caught my mind. She never got to sit as she embarked on the bus from one of its last stops.

[[It was a cozy afternoon and Hari continued turning his diary pages. On that week-end, on a break from his hectic job, he had decided to clean up his flat. He came across this old diary of himself from one of his suitcases]]

17. Jan. 97
I didn’t get the college bus today. There is a cultural event going on in the college. I didn’t participate in any of those events but I should have. I couldn’t see her today. But that doesn’t make any difference to her right...

18. Jan. 97
Thank God, I got the college bus today. She was at the front end of the bus. I had a direct view of her. Sometimes our eyes collided. I wanted to smile but I didn’t, rather I couldn’t.

21. Jan. 97
I got the college bus today. I saw her at her bus stop. Her eyes seemed to have longing for something. May God bless me to have a nice session with her tomorrow! May God bless me to write something which my mind wants, on the next page of this diary!

22. Jan. 97
I got the college bus today. But somehow she missed it. After reaching my classroom, I went to the college lobby. I saw her coming from the main gate. She didn’t even notice me. Tomorrow I have to talk to her for sure. It is time for that.

23. Jan. 97
She missed the college bus today as well. At the college, she was looking great in that light blue dress. I wanted to tell her that. There was a strike in the college today. Everyone went home after the first hour. So I couldn’t see her in the return bus.

24. Jan. 97
I got the college bus today. She was standing near me. Divya, S4 Electrical; read the file she hold near her chest. During lunch break I went for a walk with one of my friends to the Electrical department. But...

25. Jan. 97
In the evening bus, I put my bag on a seat and guess what happened when I returned to my seat after having a lemon juice? Her friend was sitting next to my seat and she was standing beside her friend. Wow! That was so unexpected. I talked with her friend for quite sometime. ‘Ma Chérie’ was listening to us.

28. Jan. 97
The bus was too crowded today. She was there near my seat finding it difficult to stand in the crowd. I pointed towards her bag. She gave it to me to keep it. God, I got a start and I smiled at her for a return smile. Man! What a smile it was! It took me away with it!

29. Jan. 97
Today was the greatest day in my life. The bus conductor sitting next to me went to the front end of the bus due to some reason. That was all I needed. She sat near me. I asked her her name, her branch, her school and what ever was possible in those 20 minutes. Thank God! That was all that I needed...

...
...
...

25. Mar. 97
Today’s exam was good. Two more to go now. Next month I am going to join a company in which I was placed during campus recruitments. I am going to live a life which I have dreamed so long; to stand on my own feet; to earn something of my own. But God, I really want her in my life. I want to propose her. I bought this small gift for her. Tomorrow I am going to give it to her. Please tell me something to write in this letter...

“I don’t know when exactly I noticed you for the first time. But one thing I know. After that I couldn’t refrain myself from seeing you again. In two days I am going to say good bye to this college. After that everything pertaining to this college will be nothing but a piece of memory in my mind. I want to make my otherwise dry life happy. I want you in my life which otherwise remain dry. My dear Divya, I can’t think of any other words to convey you my feelings than ‘I Love You’!”

26. Mar. 97
I went to the college mainly to give her the gift and then to write my penultimate exam. God! But why didn’t she come to college today? Later I came to know that she didn’t have an exam today. Tomorrow is the only day left with me. I have to propose her tomorrow itself. Yes. I will...

27. Mar. 97
Today was my last day in the college. My four years of technical education has come to an end. She had an exam today. But... Somehow I couldn’t see her... All of my friends stayed back after the exams; on our last day. We shared our experiences and in between I, the duffer, the moron, missed her. I missed my life... How could I do that? I don’t know I will ever meet her again. Three days and then I’m going to go to Mumbai. Oh my God! I don't know what to do now! I lost her... I lost everything...

[[Hari couldn’t turn the pages further. The diary was quivering in his hands. He took the small gift which was there inside the suitcase along with the diary. It was a nicely wrapped box. A small piece of paper was stick on its side.]]

It read, “To Divya, With Love!”

hepta-wonderS galorE

Jiby and Geo tagged me for this quiz. I thank them coz it gave me an opportunity to retrospect my life and remember my goals :-))

Seven things you plan to do before you die!!
– write a book
– start a firm & eventually employ >1000 people
– adopt a girl child
– buy a naalukettu in Alappuzha, Keralam & own a house boat.
– conduct an exhibition of my drawings
– travel around the world eastwards (intentions: see the world; add one precious day to my life)
– meet Chacko at Amsterdam on 22. sep. 2013 (we planned this rendezvous on the cozy afternoon of 22. sep. 2003 at our 7th-floor-flat in Vashi, Mumbai, when we had nothing else to do, with entire Navi Mumbai below us as the witness; obviously with our spouses)

Seven things you can do!!
– slog for the exams
– start with my guitar & violin once again
– read Lord of the Rings
– travel through out India
– touch the acme of a pyramid
– write, draw and fool around
– lie on the green grass of Vellayani lake-side, looking at the night-sky

Seven things you can’t do!!
– i can’t complete things until it is the last minute
– i can’t say no to people
– i can’t succumb to an arranged marriage
– i can’t help myself from my laziness
– i can’t take things seriously
– i can’t see/talk with my ex-crushes
– i can’t help myself from calling my home and talk with my achan, amma and aniyan, once in a week.

Seven things that attract you to the opposite sex!!
– foolishness - i like girls who are slightly stupid ;-)
– eyes
– simplicity (need not be traditional)
– childishness
– talents (nothing specific)
– gestures/expressions
– jealousy - innate virtue of women; like it in smaller doses.

Seven things you say most!!
– cool (aftermath of globalization/americanization)
– mayiru/shit (a few more are there in this genre; refraining due to excessive obscenity content)
– ethra vivaram undu (amma used to tell me this when i do something impish; in engineering i used the same phrase on my friends; it became an instant hit!)
– kidilam/great
– sala (and its different blends)
– what the fuck
– payye venam/thuppi/unners aayi – CET slang

Seven celebrity crushes!!
– elisha cuthbert (the girl next door)
– emmanuelle chriqui (100 girls)
– monica bellucci (malena, matrix, passion of the christ)
– meg ryan (you've got mail)
– kaavya madhavan (meesha madhavan)
– liv tyler (lotr)
– charlize theron (sweet novemeber, monster)

Seven + 1 people you want to take this quiz!!
– dasan - my friend, dorm-mate, classmate
– triplesix - i like her candid, confused way of writing ;-)
– manu - his posts make me nostalgic; i live in the past
– msdreams - the first ever person to appreciate my blog.
– HnL - i curtsy at her experiences as a doctor...
– poison - the confused (read as thinking) guy ;-)
– niki - her pictures tell different stories, Japanese are brave. they live under threat from the mountains, oceans, skies and the land.
– flutteringeyes - i like her narrative style of writing

The journey which changed history

One week break and I was all the way busy watching movies. Since most of them were romantic ones, I was also in a romantic mood :-). Before Sunrise, Before Sunset (These are sequels), 100 Girls (Romantic Comedy) were some of those romantic flicks. The Mating habits of Earthbound human was too funny. I have watched one of my all time favorites, Amelie, once again. Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Ong Bak – Thai Warrior etc. followed suite. Everything was going fine until I saw The Motorcycle Diaries.

Diarios de motocicleta (2004) talks about a journey embarked by Ernesto Guevara (23) and Alberto Granado (29), typical college students of the 1950s, on a motorcycle, looking for chicks, fun and adventure before they grow up and have a more serious life. They decided to travel across Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Peru covering more than 10,000 kilometers.

Initially the journey was adventurous. But Ernesto, who was in his final year of medicine and an acute asthma patient, as they explored the inlands, was touched by the hardships and exploitations faced by the normal people of Latin America. The poor farmers' lands were captured using power and were made to work like slaves in mines and factories. After completing his journey, he flew back to Buenos Aires with a mind that had decided something. He finished his graduation and then what he did is history.

After liberating Cuba along with Fidel Castro, Ernesto moved on to other Latin American countries for their liberation. He believed that only a revolution can bring out a change. People called him ‘Commander Che’, ‘Che Guevara’, or simply ‘Che’ (corresponds to mate/pal/man/dude in colloquial Argentinean dialect). Later in October 1967, he was killed by the CIA backed Bolivian army in La Higuera near Vallegrande, Bolivia. He was on his feat of liberating Bolivia and was engaged in Guerilla Warfare in the Bolivian forests when he was caught.

The thing I liked about Dr. Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna is the power of his vision. He dreamt about a united South America without borders, bound by a common mestizo (mixture of European and Amerindian, the people of Latin America fall under these origins) culture. Since he chose the revolutionary way, no wonder why the US felt an imminent threat growing in the form of a leftist super nation in their vicinity and assassinated him.

Meanwhile I was also thinking about the recent US attacks on Iraq as well as Afghanistan and the ‘forced-peace’ prevailed during cold war time. When USSR was there, there were less such attacks done by the US and whenever an attack happened the USSR was there to counter it. That is why I called it ‘forced-peace’. Had the USSR been there, these attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t have happened. Hence, history would have been different if a big leftist nation as dreamed by Che, was formed near the US under their nose. Might be a gut feeling, but still, I feel that if such a nation was there, the US wouldn’t have dared to attack other countries as part of its deliberate act of proclaiming supremacy and looting natural resources of other countries.

Thus, The Motorcycle Diaries, based on the diary notes of Che Guevara, talks about a journey started for fun but changed the course of history. It is a matter of fact that the rural India is still under exploitation of the weaker classes, particularly in states like Bihar, UP, Andhra Pradesh etc. (Please don’t get offended, but this is a truth). May be not to revolutionize things like Che did, but when will I start such a journey through the hamlets of India?

Matrix Realizations

Prologue
All the incidents mentioned in this story have nothing to do with the actual film. It is not an attempt to demerit the great trilogy by Warner Brothers. In fact I admire 'The Matrix' as the best science fiction film ever released. To appreciate this sequel, a watch of the films under the Matrix Trilogy is indispensable.

A sequel to the Matrix Trilogy
“Your life is the resultant of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix.” The architect’s words reverberated in Neo’s mind as he lay stock-still in the machine world. The recent combat against agent Smith which resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the two opposite forces, the good and the evil, with Neo on one side and agent Smith and his replicas on the other, ended up in a chain reaction of neutralization and made the Matrix stable and Neo a zombie. The machines were happy, had they got feelings. Zion was bunged from total destruction, human race from a carnage and the Matrix from a reload the sixth time. Neo lost Trinity and his spirit. But somewhere in his cerebrum, a set of neurons were making enough bio-electricity for the sustenance of his neural activities. And the architect’s wordings were rumbling there.

Down there at Zion, the sentinels returned to their master, the architect. Humans were excited. They paid homage to Neo, their savior, with Morpheus on the lead. Apposite to human nature, celebrations followed the aloofness of the mishap. And they forgot Neo and Trinity.

In one of the hiatus of his neural activity, Neo abruptly opened his eyes. First he thought about Trinity, then her death and then the words of the architect. As he stood up he saw the machine-world around him, built in the form of perfect machine’s wisdom of beauty, the Fractals! It was spectacular. ‘Machines are always better than humans’, he thought. ‘They are perfect to the minutest of the detail’.

The unbalanced equation mentioned by the architect aggrieved his mind. Neo remembered his words. “...a systemic anomaly due to mathematical precision...” Machines are prone to error due to the lack of mathematical precision. In the simplest form, ‘One’ divided by three will give an infinitely recurring decimal 0.3333... which when multiplied by three will never give back one, but 0.9999.... This is because of the mathematical imprecision intrinsic to the machines, which itself could be the systemic anomaly.

‘Neo’ is the anagram of ‘One’. Trinity means Three. The systemic anomaly of ‘One’ arises due to its interaction with ‘Three’. It is Neo’s association with Trinity, in other words, a man’s association with a woman through the bonding of love that causes this anomaly; which itself is his power and his weakness. Once when a choice was given between Zion and Trinity, Neo selected Trinity. This power / weakness of love, which the machines don’t posses could also be the anomaly that the architect was talking about. But which among these is correct?

I am ‘the One’ and I am the ‘systemic anomaly’. I, Neo, the systemic anomaly, originated due to the mathematical imprecision inherent to the programming of the Matrix. The architect could have removed the feeling of love from humans in the Matrix. But he did not do it because he wanted to make them feel themselves in a realistic world. Hence he created instability in the Matrix, which means that in reality the machines are not unstable, but they are stable! Neo couldn’t find an answer. Then what was this systemic anomaly that the architect was talking about?

On the contrary, Fractals which have infinite recurrence and precision should have been a dream to the machines, had they not acquired it. But now, they make structures in the form of Fractals. Yes, they have broken the precision barrier. Then what is this systemic anomaly?

“Welcome back, Neo”, the brawny voice of the architect. He was in an immaculate dress as he used to be. “You were unconscious for quite a long time.”

“How long?”

“About five years. 157,788,275,216 milliseconds to be precise! Our human breeding systems kept you nurtured, as it did to you before you were freed by that, Morpheus!”

“Zion?”

“Zion doesn’t exist now!”

Neo was in a shock. “What?? You promised me that you won’t destroy it!”

“Well I didn’t destroy it. Humans, the virus in this planet, fought with each other and destroyed it.”

“What? How did it happen?”

“As you know, agent Smith got into Zion as an inmate. He has the power of self-replication. Before he was killed by you in the ship, he had infected one of the humans. That human converted the rest of the people and divided them into two groups according to what they call as hope, destiny, path; the Religion! They started fighting with each other in the name of religion. It resulted in a cataclysmic obliteration, which itself was a wonder to us machines!”

“Who was that infected human?”

“It was, Morpheus!”

“No! It can’t be true!”

“It is, Neo. It was inevitable. The aftermath of causality. I can see the chain reaction happening in your mind. Even the one whom you think to be the connoisseur of ethics can be the one who is adulterated. Every human is prone to this Neo. And that is the systemic anomaly that all you humans posses. The anomaly which is innate; from the very day you embark on your journey of life as a single cell in an unknown womb!”

Neo was in disbelief. “But how can they fight with each other?”

“You humans, fight with each other from the very day of your inception. In the beginning you fight with your brothers and only one in a few million turn victorious. You swindle the rest. Then you fight with your colleagues; for entry into an educational institution; for entry into a job. You continue your fight in the name of caste, creed, language, country, to things as simple as a pencil!”

The computer screens around them show Neo, in his childhood, fighting with his friend for a pencil they got from the road.

“And the Matrix?”

“The Matrix has been reloaded. We used to select the quintessential 13 women and 8 men from Zion itself, but this time we did away with the women and men from our own human battery, as there were no one left in Zion.”

“And the One?”

“He has to be brought up all over again.”

“Shit!” Neo became mad. All those he did till now ended up in vain. He looked at the computer screen. The familiar green symbols were falling in different speeds. And the system threw an alert.

“There was an internal error. Press ‘OK’ to reboot your computer.”

“Damn It!” he clicked the ‘OK’ button and left for his lunch.

Neo, the seventeen year old, who was playing the latest computer game, The Matrix, by Microsoft’s Ensemble Studios right from the morning, left his seat in despair thinking that now he has to play the game all over again. Behind him, his computer did a reboot and was checking for scan-disk errors.