The one true Guv’nor

The Guv’nor by Lenny McLean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

FOREWORD- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=guvnor

“I look what I am ..a hard bastard” for a tagline and a cover image of an almost Peek a boo stance (I do not think the “stance” makes any difference whatsoever to Lenny McLean, England’s toughest bare-knuckle boxer) ! The Guvnor cannot go wrong with a Selling point like that.

And then the content of the auto biography . The no-holds-barred narrative makes for a very interesting/ amusing and “street” read. I say street because the narrative in the book is free-flowing but not haphazard. Not really literary but not too crude either(the guv’nor bashing up thugs is not crude, its vigilante-stuff). Delightful and cheeky but not in a “cheap-bloke” kind of manner.

I have known nothing of Lenny Mc Lean before I bought this book. And then 10 pages through, I wanted to meet him someday. imagine my disappointment when I realized he is no more. May all peace be with him. The image of being a “hard-lined bad-ass” is his, all-hands-down! R E S P E C T

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Sleeping on Jupiter – comments

Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I do not often read books such as this  But guess the title’s uniqueness was what caught my attention in the first place (apologies for the narrow mindedness, but I am fussy about what I read, this not necessarily based on visibility-driven literary auras). Anyway hardly spoilers below, so read on …

The author’s acumen to trigger powerful visuals through her descriptions is omnipresent throughout the novel.Also, the overall undercurrent of cracking down on hypocrisies in Indian society is my favorite element in this work. Being an iconoclast myself, loved it. Certainly not for the orthodox folks

Not recommended for the weak-tummied folks either. Some depictions of violence are ..well.. rather violent . There are elements where I felt like I was watching a Rob Zombie movie, only a tad less crude and with a bit more panache, but targeting an equivalent degree of gore (or is that the author successfully triggering worst case imaginations in me ?!?! Well !!)

The most striking thing is the specific focus on child and women abuse. The blood boils at this episodes. Period. Nothing more to say. There are times when my latent schizoprenia (hadn’t known I had that side till I read this book, kudos to the author for triggering such a degree of visualization in the minds of a reader !) drove me to reach out for the antagonist Godman’s throat and rip his inhuman life out of his scumbag of an existence! (Shall refrain from saying anything else to avoid spoilers)

The ending is a tad disappointing though. Felt that it could have been much better in is terms of creating something witty or unexpected.

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The Teacher’s day Rhapsody

FOREWORD: Extracts from a fictitious letter to a non-fictitious P.T teacher (Instructor- Physical education) whose non-fictitious story has been blown up to semi-fictitious extravaganza

STATUTORY WARNING: Neither for the faint hearted nor the rigidly moral

x-x-x-x-x–x-x-x-x

Dear ‘My fav P.T.Teacher’,

Hello sir! In case you are wondering who this little chump (as you used to call your victims, I mean, students) is …I was your student from Niraj Public School, Ameerpet, Hyderabad in 1999 J

You have always been the eccentric one among all my teachers. You took great pleasure in making us kneel down for not doing jumping jacks properly. And how would the then thunder thighed, mammoth waisted, sumo bellied, chubby little me gain the stamina or the buoyancy to do a jumping jack, that too with jumping! My wonderful ma (God bless her! She was my real teacher, unlike some of the power-hungry, kid-torturing, flattery-loving, wannabe-capitalistic fuck-ups & losers who masquerade as teachers in wealthy private schools) used to make me delicious pesarattu for breakfast every Friday, the same day of the week which started off with your sadistic P.T.session! Sadly, after your P.T.sessions, I always ended up puking the slimy sickly mutilated mutated version of a once delicious pesarattu. Often have I harbored the fear that I would die asphyxiated in my own vomit, ala Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham

I mean, I had no problem with the constructive intentions behind PT. sessions, but it is not cool to megalomaniacally metamorphosize them into your own fat boy victimizing, bum-whacking, under-the-hot-sun-kneel-down-punishmenting episode of grandomaniacal torture.  I have a theory that perhaps, in your later years, after you left our school, you became a Catholic priest, joined the Vatican pedophile community and the rest is history. So what you could not do at our school owing to India being a conservative country that is protective of kids, you finally did abroad in a romantic place like Rome!!

Aaah ! That gets me to the point . You didn’t leave our school but got thrown out of it 😀 And  I am sure you often wondered why ! It was ME ! It was ME..the then thunder thighed, mammoth waisted, sumo bellied, chubby little ME! Muhahaha! Now the truth is out. Let me tell you what I did during the teacher’s day of 1999.

As you might be remembering, high school students dressed up like teachers to take classes for the primary and middle school kids on Teacher’s day at school . I dressed like you, stuck a fake moustache similar to yours, walked like you and talked like you! Then I went to the nearest 4^th grade class room and scared the hell out of the kids. I took a couple of  finger-sucking-after-nose-picking-after-ass-fingering    brats and fist-hammered the mud-eating-filthy-toothed-hell   out of them. And then I disappeared for the day.

The next day, their parents as you might remember, complained! You were screwed then.  Because the finger-sucking-after-nose-picking-after-ass-fingering   brats whom I fist-hammered the mud-eating-filthy-toothed-hell   out of, said that the senior was imitating your mannerisms. So the principle forgot about that episode and looked at the bigger and more threatening possibility of “your violent influence” on the high school teenage students. Oh! The day you were thrown out, I must have bakery-partied enough to add at least an inch each on my then thunder thighs, sumo-belly and mammoth waist J

That was the day I first felt like a boy finally on track to becoming a man ready to fend for himself. I for the first time believed that I was capable of innovative strategy 😉 Thank you for being the root-cause.

For that, I am gifting you with the truth behind your expulsion. No one but me knew this because I was quite low-profile at school. No one ever suspected me. In case you are reading this, you by now realized who I am. You are possibly working yourself up into a pissed-off state. To catch me and whack the monkey-crap out of me would be your next dream so to speak of possibilities.

But … you should understand that I did shed some kilos and pack a tad bit of appreciative muscle in the last 12 years. And did manage to learn a bit of taekwondo, karate, muay-thai   and  Ji-jitsu to name a few.  So it would probably not be a good idea to fight me in your now senile years 😉

Thank you once again,

Yours truly,

The dark, the fast, the fiery, the one and only,

~Ghost Runner

3 SECONDS

DISCLAIMER: Chuck the foreword below if you have  a not-so-long time window! Screw the introduction below too if you have tiny time window! But if you are jobless, read through ….

Foreword: Prof.Srinivas , my +2/12th grade mathematics lecturer was good at teaching mathematics, especially the probability and derivative puzzles.Talking of derivatives, the author need not say that their definition evolves from limits.   Now in this post of the author, let there be  a variable x that denotes clarity of thought and t denotes time. If the rate of change of x and rate of change of t are very very small, it can be denoted by dx/dt which is nothing but the rate of your thought  (has correlated theories from the Inception  logic; but that we shall leave for another day)

Introduction 

By the above logic, if there is an isolated moment where your mind gets oblivious of the surroundings, your thoughts might last longer to your brain than they are in absolute time. (Has a complex and more accurate explanation in relativity; but that we leave for another day)

The main (and simplest) part of the post

It was MMA coaching at * the academy *at Khar.A sparring session was going on.  Neck crank was being executed to near perfection on my …well! …neck (Obviously! Its called *neck crank*)! In that moment of asphyxiated pain, the surroundings went into oblivion and memories became clear and long though within a span of only a few seconds …

THE FIRST SECOND…

‘It was all due to religion oriented culture’  I told Dad…. ‘I mean look at it this way. Christianity was there for two millenia and it did have its share of orthodoxies. But the western world , most of it came out of it to lead a modern existence. So it took them two millenia but they managed to get out of irrational doctrines!’

‘But look at India! Hinduism was there for nearly 4 to 5 millenia. And even then we had hardly got out of many of our irrational doctrines. Why ? Are not persons supposed to get wiser and more mature with age ? So isn’t Hinduism supposed to follow the same logic!’

‘Its not that simple!’ said dad in his usual Donnie Darkoish way.

…. back to present ….. 

I twisted ! The hold on my wind pipe was deflected.I harboured the hope  of getting out of the hold. But then, the well trained opponent of mine wound his legs around my torso to strengthen the hold. And so the 2nd second in mental isolation began  ….

THE SECOND SECOND …

Halley was presiding over a discussion about the education system, economy , and what not on his facebook wall .

The fb status started it all

‎“The more he invests in religion the more he loses himself” ..
“The more the worker produces the more he loses himself” ..
‘How could one person get so many radical ideas ??’

There was a comment saying *Gen X!* Simply and tersely put!

But that ain’t enough was it ? We had to get **** global**** on this 😉

So there was globe-loving-gratiano-style  that followed ….as shown below 

Anyway I was living and chuckling at this fruitless discussion …

back to the real world ….

I twisted again …. the opponents’s foothold got less firm. He was probably not a big master of stamina though his technique was impeccable. But then he tightened his hands around my spine and neck. Then I went into the third second of asphyxiated painful mental isolation …

THE THIRD SECOND  …

It was a phantasmagoria of thoughts and memories. There  was no definition absolute. The surroundings seemed more surreal, like in a dreamy state as opposed to the earlier visions where I saw seemingly realistic memories of isolated incidents.

*The Indian military men got carried away in a fucking garbage truck.Is this the way we treat our martyrs ?? *

*Females get killed at birth because of our existing social systems of dowry,  male chiavunism, patriarchal imbalance, etc.*

* If there are somethings which can be described as **beauty queens of Indianism filled ridiculousness ** you find them in overwhelming abundance(Indians paying surgeons to turn girls into boys) *

*Honour killings in rural India*    

*The country being the world’s hair supplier*

*The industry of spiritual Godmen*   

.....It was starting to get annoying!

back to the real world …

Three seconds done and I was going to go completely out of breath. Out of that desperation and the prior-generated annoyance, I did a full body twist, broke the hold this time and got into a side mount  and threw an Ude-garami to which he tapped to submit.

Phew! I won again, my 16th succesive victory in combat sports…but the country doesn’t seem to be on the winning side 😦  Because of which I don’t feel like a winner as my questions in those three ‘hyper thought rate’ seconds remain unanswered …. 😐

-GhostRunner

2010: That year gone by

The previous year (2010) started with a prophecy which to my loved ones (starting with mom), was the prophecy of all prophecies. Potentially the greatest harbinger of my doom`s eventual finality (lol! What words! I should cut down on the ‘epic fantasy` reading :p)

So no matter how hard I didn`t believe  such jyotish (astrology), it did do some damage, I didnt blog for the first 6 months of 2010. Not  that there is any connection, but my blogger’s block and this astrology shit just happened to be concomitant events.

Anyway … I guess I am still alive and 2010 was one of the best years of my life …a pioneering year for many different things …! So Mr.Astrologer , take your prophecies , round them up real nice and stick it  straight up your monkey a**

x-x-x

Anyway looking back at 2010, it was quite the amusing year.Below I tried to stick to a chronological structure though I did give more priority to the free flow of thought …

1. It truly started with a bang  with me getting myself shifted to the Business Intelligence Unit at my company. Lots of statistics, heavy duty number crunching and an infinitely clanish little team! The kind of combo I would dig into any day 🙂 !
2. Then came an event that marked the synchronization of identity with the place I live in. My future generations shall know that event  as *me shifting to a flat in Bandra (West)*, the jazziest of Mumbai residential localities by far. With food, drinks, clubs,Joggers’ park, Gold’s gym, and discotheques a breath away, non-busy times promised never to be boring again.
3. Not to mention travelling with pals on treks around mumbai to Lohagad, Rajmachi, Manikgad et al, incidentally all spiced up by the monsoon rains.
4. Then came the  main course of 2010. the trip to Europe. Everything from the Louvre’ in Paris to the Wall in Berlin to the crazy coffee shops in Amsterdam to the European Union Parliament  in Strasbourg !For good measure, also throw in a large measure of Curry Wurst, Khus khus, Tartflombay and 1 litre beer mugs ! Even raced against an English guy (who by the way was not the stereotypically fat British dumpty)  in Paris for a 10 round race around the Eiffel Tower.   Bumped into Mythalez and Tejo at Amsterdam (all doped in the  jolly good sense of course!)
5. Then, there was Goa (as usual) where besides the time spent at the beaches oggling at the girls, an appreciable time was spent  biking across 100 km of the North Goa coastline … shirtless !! 😛
6. Not to mention visiting  Hyderabad a couple of times in 2010 . Even went to the extent of biking drunk on the roads of Hyderabad . Thankfully, I was driving at 10 kmph (haha!) , too slow for anyone to get suspicious or me falling in trouble.
7. The amount of reading  done in 2010 was a rather amusing observation.  Tried a tad more than lightly to digress away from my stereotypical tendency to stick to the sci fi and epic fantasy genre’.  Did a fair diversification  by  becoming familiar with the linguistic, historical , biographical, autobiographical, social, non-fictional categories too. Of course, never completely lost my loyalty to the epic fantasy and sci-fi genre’ . By the way, the end of 2010 from the books’ perspective sees me searching for Stephen king’s Dark tower series, waiting for Part 2 in the Left Hand of God trilogy and  trying to fully comprehend Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink
8. Of course I did continue ( like years of yore) , with my controversial theories (for instance, the Black berry bitch) So i did invite everything from ire to appreciation from different quarters. Haha ! There was one queer instance when one particular theory (about nosy relatives on FB) got me under scrutiny in family circles.  But well! how do you become a family legend/cult  without controversy, without rising against sardonic moronisms, against …. oh God! forget it  …..
9. Running: I should be shot if I dont talk of this. Yes! I did find my intermittently lost passion for running in 2010 …after two years (one more time!! Before I become old and crippled). Out with it came some new self-made techniques and strategies for running races. I guess I am getting into shape and preparing hard for various running events around India. Hope things work out well.
   

….. Well thats it for now!  2010 was not bad at all . I feel light now that I have put down the important stuff for posterity. There were obviously some bad-ass tales and some tragic ones in 2010 too, like it is for every one! But that set will find its place in the blog’s private part.

Yours truly,

Ghost Runner

The attractive face of D

First things first, D here is Death. But do not get the author wrong. This is not a philosophical discourse. Just a light hearted wandering through the literary depictions of various personifications of death in fiction…

The above fig is an outline of how D is represented. Now this one is a hooded guy with a weapon who instills a sense of mystery ..hmm ..and somewhere down the lane I guess the literary/artistic stalwarts decided to make D appear more menacing than mysterious ….

So came the bad-ass skull features ,background and grandeur. An intimidation of the human psyche not by mystery but rather by the sheer romanticism of the dark side …

Of course there is the comical side from kids’ films and Indian folk tale based movies ….

And then …

… the author during one of his dilettantish random flights through the web , came aross this version of death…

Wabba wabba! Now thats the way to make the death personification actually popular 😛 ……

References : Search for the Sandman series by Vertigo for one scorching depiction of death

The **Metro Kolkatan epic** Episode 4: Kolkatan smokes

Kolkata is easily among the places where people smoke the most.

Anyway I took the metro all the way to Park Street last night. Co-Incidentally this area is the place where you shall find everything from the 2o–beedi packet for Rs.4/-  to the most expensive cigar for Rs.4000 per piece.

Suddenly I realized I never really smoked before. The devil in me tempted me to do it. I got out of the station (smoking in the subway kills you ..more by the security guard’s lathi than by lung damage)

Hmm ..so I   bought a  single piece of Wills Classic Milds (unarguably the most commonly smoked fag among the folks in Jokaland) I lighted it,  smoked a puff, coughed, got a feeling like someone fired a Diwali rocket into my wind pipe. I threw it away concluding that smoking is not my type !

But the irony … is a clear cut case of herd mentality. As I was lighting that cigarette, many pedestrians joined me in the street corner and lit their own cigarattes.  Thus,  in spite of me being able to get rid of the smoking-curiosity in me , I ended up playing the devil by inducing so many people to smoke that moment 😦

Am I, the soul less chap, actually feeling guilt ? Naah ..more like objectively depicting an irony.

x-x

ps:  Episode 5 shall be the last in the series. It is a bit numerical 😛 and depicts the ghost runner’s  last Kolkatan ride to the airport

The world’s killing potential

I was randomly browsing through the net when I found this site

The power of a nuclear war-shell as possessed in the arsenal of countries. If we see below, it is a comparison in terms of Mega tons (unit to measure explosive potential)

An extract:

The Most Powerful Bomb Ever Constructed
On October 30, 1961, the most powerful weapon ever constructed by mankind was exploded over the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Sea. The device was code-named “Ivan,” and it was a multi-stage hydrogen bomb which was built in only fifteen weeks by engineers in the USSR, using off-the-shelf nuclear weapon components.

Ivan– sometimes referred to as “Tsar Bomba” or “King of Bombs”– was originally designed to yield a 100 megaton explosion, but the soviets decided that such a blast would create too great a risk of nuclear fallout.Even at half strength, Ivan was so powerful that it was completely impractical. Much of the explosion’s energy radiated upwards into space, and that which didn’t was so excessive that using the device on any populated targets world would have resulted in adverse effects on Russian interests.

Metallethics-Part 2: the rock star interview (and peformance)

(continued from previous post … )

NOTE: These are purely the views of the person interviewed but also based on generic common sense.Nonetheless, the readers are free to voice their opinions via the comments. The comments are allowed to be anonymous or non-anonymous,gentle or brutal, straight or controversial, clever or stupid, sensible or senseless.Just dont abuse me 😉 😛 ..,

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ_MFZRebnE

x-x

Here’s a complimentary performance by Shetty ,… Black Sabbath’s Iron Man

original links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P7L92LMc4E

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7P7L92LMc4E (for those in IIIT-H)

x-x

ps : Shetty ban gaya hero 😛

ps1: next post … a potentially-very-controversial, supernatural, heavy-minded, psychological thriller of a short story 😉 (gets darker & heavier than even the “Night of the Flip Top” serial)

Metallethics: the rock star interview Part 1

Foreword: Irrespective of whether you know what heavy metal is or not …. go ahead test the waters of this new gyaan

“Metal music + ethics = Metallethics”

What is the distinction of heavy metal from other forms of music ?

What is the philosophy or ideology behind heavy metal music ?

Is heavy metal music a bane to society and low class form of music ?

Is it the reason/influence behind certain tragedies in society ?

Is heavy metal a bad influence on young minds ? ….

etc. etc.,

Here goes the investigation ..see the indigenously made interview-video and you shall understand 🙂

for the original link : http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WxHBcuKuFfI

or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxHBcuKuFfI

x-x

(to be continued in the next post)