Writings I do

I have started to write a lot these days. Even though m y blog posts are rather sporadic, I have done some significant writing on paper recently. Unfortunately, I want to lose those writings and start all over again, so I don't have anything to justify 'thinking sessions'.

I had recently written a sort of love letter for icubed's Valentine's Day contest. The first draft was rather bad, so I edited, until the 11th draft. After that, I just got tired of the piece and left it under my bed to 'mature'. Sunrose found it some days ago, and he thought it was 'kinda nice', so I might work on it again. I don't feel so sure about that piece though: everything in that 700-word piece looks and sounds so fake and forced to me. It would probably have sounded better if I had written about something I felt, but I realise creating a fictional identity to fall in love and write a love letter to is not a very good idea.

Oh, and I found today that very primitive versions of some of my writings that I hope to turn into personal essays have been making the rounds. I am ashamed. They are bad. I can definitely do better, but I am alarmed people got hold of them and actually bothered to read. When I write exclusively for myself I write illegibly--even more illegibly than my 'real' handwriting-- so that no one else can read. I must work hard to make my handwriting worse-- they apparently read every damn word, even those I really did not want other people reading until it was very well done.

I am also thinking about working seriously on the novels. I know they will probably never be published, but I feel I have to do this, if only for those who have asked me to put them in the story. I have a very interesting(hopefully?) plot in mind, but the writing will probably be too provincial. 10 years of living in ta boarding school with the same frikkin' people has taken its toll on me, so the best time to really start the book is way after I have left the school. I have already have had several ideas about the characters and the places, but of course, they have to fit into the story once I get started. I'll keep posting my progress on the book on this blog.

Since I am already talking about writing, I might as well write about my plans for this blog. I realise this has not been taking the pace I had hoped it would, and looking at the webstats, hardly anyone reads what I write, but after the finals are over, I will probably start writing daily, or something like that. Ideas come to me only when I really get into writing. So the more I write, the more ideas I'll have for the book, and essays for the colleges, and I can whittle away the bad ones. I don't really care if no one's reading me, because my writings are terrible anyways. Right now, at least I am not being ridiculed for my poor writing.

Scientific Curiosities explained

So, what really happens if Pinocchio says ‘This statement is a lie’?

Will his nose grow big, because it’s a lie? Or will it not, since he is telling the truth that the statement is a lie? Perhaps, the fabric of space-time continuum will rip apart because the universe is not sure about what to, and instead of admitting that it cannot find a solution and that it has lost to a simple wordplay and fallacy, it decides to destroy itself.

Such questions are intriguing. For example, there’s the chicken-egg question. The answer is much simpler than it’s made out to be, of course. The egg came first, because you have eggs in the morning and chicken in the evening. Unless you have chicken for breakfast and eggs for supper, in which case the answer will be just the opposite. But then, you would not be bothered by the answer; all the high-fat chicken you will have had in the morning will have given you enough heart diseases to make you permanently give a damn about stupid philosophical questions with stupid implications, which have no application in the real life.

There are other questions you should be more concerned about. For example, did the old Nepali royal family like fish or chicken more? Did they fart too? Do ghosts fart? What happens if you put your hand between the blades of a moving fan? Why can’t anyone take his head out of a vehicle without getting reprimanded every time?

Scientists and philosophers alike should work on finding answers to questions like these instead on working on their so-called ‘research’. The topics of those researches sound more like jokes than something academic. Einstein’s research where he proved everything is relative (no, he didn’t) was called ‘Dancing with fat ladies—A conundrum facing Swiss youths, and the solution to the problem’. To avoid dancing with his fat aunt Marybel, he pretended to be working on something  serious, and one day accidently stumbled across all those theories that have revolutionised the way we look at fat ladies and their dancing partners.

Newton was no genius either. You might have heard the apocryphal story about apple and gravity, but that never happened. What really happened was, he had asked for a nice cup of English tea, but instead was given the recently-discovered-in-India curry gravy. The waiter was French, so to be clear, he said ‘No, gravy, tea. Gravy-tea.’ The Frenchman misheard it ‘gravity’ and thus did the law of gravitation come to practice.

The Posterisation Postulation

I have posterised our cubicle-- literally.

The other day, I was getting very bored, with all the exam preparations and the movie-marathons, I decided it was time I changed things. So I collected all the pretty College Prospectus I could gather from the two houses, cut out the prettiest pictures, and put 'em up. It took me one whole day(and some more, actually), but it was worth it.

Our very small cubicle is now decorated by 83 pictures and data-sheets from 27 colleges in the US and Canada. Some of them are informative( Colgate informs us that Triskaidecaphobia is the fear of number 13), some witty, and some I put on just because they had pretty girls.

Nimesh and Sajan(my roommates, fyi) were pretty concerned in the beginning.They were worried I would mess the room up. Now they are thankful. In fact, Sajan is shouting around the houses, telling people that out cube is the most colorful of 'em all.

I spent two small bottles of Fevicol, one small stick of Fevi Stick, and wore down an old scissor. The room was messy for the next two days, with Sajan refusing to clean up the mess I had created, Nimesh out of School, and I so tired by the sticking that I did not want to do the clean-up. Yesterday, Sajan and I agrred that we could clean half-and-half. I kept my part of the deal by cleaning the inner half, and Sajan swept away all the pieces of papers just outside our door. With all the coming and going, a lot of the dirt is probably coming back. I'll have to tell house didi to please clean things up.

The pasting was fun, but I am really concerned about myself now. At some point between the 10AM and the 1 AM next morning, the project turned from my quirky idea to make our room colorful(sometimes painfully colorful, as Sajan says) to an obsession. Towards the end, I did not want to stop cutting and pasting. My writs and heels were paining terribly, and I was very hungry, but I did not want to stop. While cutting and pasting, I ask Sajan to throw away the glue so that I could sleep. He teased me and went to the day room to watch his 3rd movie that day. So I had to force myself to get out of the room, and throw the bottle as far as I could. Immediately after throwing, a part of me actually wanted to run to the bushes to get the bottle back, but I controlled myself and went to sleep.

So now I know cutting and pasting is fun in more fun in real life than in word. Also: if I ever go crazy, I can probably control myself.

Story Time 2!

The woodcutters were tired of Gods showing up and messing around with their tools, so that they could ‘test’ them. In the grand assembly, everyone agreed that instead of performing cheap tricks to prove they are cool, the Gods could just have used their Omniscience to see if the woodcutters were honest or not. The gods were messing around for their own fun, and they had to be stopped. Otherwise, the Gods could get ideas and start interfering in daily life, giving unfair advantages to people who ‘worshiped’ them and putting people who did not agree with their ideas at sticky spots. The Gods were too undemocratic and mercurial to be trusted and something had to be done.

Hjeyrrdal rose up and volunteered to take up the project. He would teach gods such a lesson that they would never again dare mess around with human beings. The other woodcutters agreed, and offered him whatever help he required. He selected five of the best architects and craftsmen from the crowd and promised to the rest that he would be back to report success very soon.

It took the team three weeks to build the maze. The maze was a jungle of lifelike woodcutter dolls, wells, forest, and a small candy house with a fake with who would pretend to cook the children in her oven and try to eat them.

And thus the plan was put into action. A carpenter from the Guild of Carpenters Hating the Stuupid Gods pretended to lose his axe to a well and like charm, a god appeared out of nowhere and started offering him all kinds of expensive axes. The woodcutter feigned amnesia and asked the God to follow him to his house, where he had a photo of his old axe. He took the God to the middle of the maze, pretended to have forgotten something, and got out of the maze through a pre-planned route. The maze was then closed, making it impossible for anyone to escape from it.

The God waited for several hours until he realized he had been tricked. He did everything he could to get out of the maze but failed. Finally, the chief negotiator of the woodcutters communicated to him through the hidden speaker and offered him release from the maze if all the gods could promise they would never interfere with humans again. The God thought for some time, and agreed to it. Thereafter, the gods have never interfered with human lives.

Story Time!

I have not written stories for a long time now. Ever since the story I considered my masterpiece (comparable to Chekov’s, I thought) was given a universal MEH!, I have not dared go into the field. Stories need to make sense. They need to be interesting, captivating. They need to end when they should. They pose far too many constraints for a buffon like me who does not want to write at all. Only after I recently started considering writing to temporarily make money, did I decide to abide by the rules and start improving my writing. Here’s the practice story. I might continue writing stories for some time, and make it another series of posts, but that really depends. If you see that the next post is a story too, you might want to expect a few more stories after that, otherwise fiction writing will be for another time.
This story is as cheesy as it could probably get, specially because of all those stupid CID episodes, but it's a start!

***

Avinash had never understood why Sitasma was so fickle. One day, she would want to go to Manakamana immediately, the other day she would be too tired to go anywhere ‘for another year’. Her wardrobe was a rainbow of different colours, designs and patterns. She had worn the expensive red Sari only twice, the second time Avinash had had to blackmail her into wearing it. A lot of her clothes and shoes had to be given away every six months because she would never wear a blouse or a Kurta more than twice unless she really liked it. And then there was the liking. When she did like a piece of clothing, she would wear it until it wore away. A sleeveless that had become her favourite had to be thrown away only after a month after it was bought: the colour had faded after thirteen washes, and the elbows already had tiny holes.  She would just not let go.

He had learned from her parents that she had been so compulsive since childhood; they fondly recalled the time when she had cared her pet bunny to death. She did not wish ill—she could not control her emotions, and even when she meant well, her compulsiveness would always cause harm one way or the other.

They had met at college. He had joined to become a ‘business consultant’; she had joined because after returning from Singapore with her parents, there was no better place. Her company was rich spoiled brats, his friends were people working in NGO’s and INGO’s who aspired to lead international conglomerates and agencies. By some strange stroke of fate, they had clicked together while organizing the farewell for seniors in their second year. They were together on and off for the next two years, until her parents were fully aware of the situation. It was the best chance they had, and they did not let it go—they insinuated that she should propose to him, and later offered more dowry than he would earn in two years. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. They were married in an extravagant ceremony from her side, and a ceremony that mostly said he-would-have-gotten-a-better-one-if-he-had-concentrated-on-career-but-who-are-we-to-say-its-his-life from his.

So it had come to this.

There was nothing he could do. It had all been her doing. She had moved the pieces, and he was just the pawn.

In chess, sometimes you have to give your queen away to their pawn to win the game. Perhaps she had wanted this and planned it all along.

She would become herself.

Not only did she cheat him, she would do it so blatantly, and with no hint of regret or fear. It was the third year of their marriage, and he made it abundantly clear that he was aware of her escapades and wanted them to end immediately. She would pretend not to understand. He had to be with her because divorce after three years was not going to look good for an aspiring National Director of an international agency that focused on children and family values. She did not care anymore, he had given her what he could, and there was nothing new there.

So he got rid of her—permanently. Her saris and expensive crockery finally came to use. He choked her to death, took the dead body to Pokhara, dumped her in the Fewa Lake, and reported her missing. The police caught an Indian gang who had called for ransom immediately after Sitashma’s disappearance had been reported, and with all the kidnappings already upon them, the police refused to believe that they had not taken her. A cleaning crew in Pokhara found the body two weeks later, decomposed but recognizable, and police started searching for the remaining gang members who could have murdered her.

No one ever found.

***

The sad state of Nepali papers

There are many things you should care about: babies, football matches, the state of your nation, the tax the government imposes on you, the person who is ruling your country, and the quality of articles newspapers in your country publish. Since I do not have babies (phew!), care for football matches only in the world cup (Cameroon supporter, ’06), am not obsessed about the state of my nation because so many people already are, do not pay taxes except those levied on restaurant meals—they are outrageous and I might organize a tea party against them someday, know the ruler and everything there is to know about him, the only thing I really care about is the quality of articles in English newspapers. Republica and Kathmandu post S.U.C.K.

Actually, I am ashamed to be in the country that has those two so-called ‘national dailies’. For most of the part, they do not care for spelling and grammar, their puns are horrible, and what they want to pass on as ‘news’ is truly despicable. In fact eh only parts of the papers I care for are the cartoons, the international pieces, and Prawin dai’s and Sushma di’s articles. They are quite good. Thankfully, there are some other pretty awesome writers in the op-ed section, so I have never felt the need to burn down those papers yet.

When Republica launched recently, I had hopes and dreams about it. I dreamt it would bring out a new era of great responsible reporting and witty writing. Then I realized—the people in Republica are the same old Kathmandu Post people who left for the new paper. It was kind of nice in the beginning, but issue after issue it’s becoming more like the Kathmandu Post, but with a different layout. Uggh.

I bought one of those glossy Nepali magazines today. It was much cheaper than I had expected, but even the shopkeeper was surprised. She kept checking if the cover price was in IC or some other currency. It does have a very good paper, nice pictures, and okay write-ups. Maybe after I finish with my A-Levels, I could write for one of those. They pay by the word, and pay even for those pieces that are not published. It’s like a goldmine for anyone who writes/wants to write. Je dai wrote for one of them, and he says he enjoyed every moment of it. His writing is actually good though, so I am not sure if I can get in there. Still, it is definitely going to be better than Republica or Kathmandu Post.

The Dirty Dirtbags called Quilts--Things as they are 10

This is probably the last post in the Things as they are series where I talked about everyday objects in our cubicle. I still have a lot of things in the cubicle that I want to write about, but this is kind of stunting me. I want to write things that are broader, but I feel guilty about not continuing the series. So I am ending the series here with the tenth post. I am not doing another series for quite some time now—this one took too much of my energy. But doing this was certainly fun and enjoyable. I hope you—my imaginary readers—enjoyed it too.

There’s something on Sa’s bed that would scare some people out of their wits. It is big, kind of black, and no one wants to get near it. It’s not a snake—it’s Sa’s quilt.

Sa’s quilt gets interesting reactions from different people—people like Aa are horrified, others are disgusted, and the rest are Meh because they are ‘Hah, its Sa! What else would you expect, a clean quilt?’

The color of the quilt bothers me though. In the beginning, it was white. Then it went to light shades of brown. Now it’s gray-brown. I am pretty sure it gets all the color from the filth stuck on the cover, but since the owner’s not bothered about it(he uses it every day), I am not going to cry too much over it.

Talking of quilts, a quilt that had been put on top of lockers of one of our neighboring rooms has apparently rotted. I am not sure what ‘rotting of a quilt’ means, but it looks pretty disgusting: blue and green things all over and there’s a viscous reddish-brown liquid oozing out of it. Our house didi says it’s just caught some fungi and that the liquid is actually rust from some nearby iron structure, but I am having a hard time not believing that some creature is breeding inside the thing and the red juices are its excreta or something similarly gross. So there at least, Sa’s quilt is tidier than someone’s.

Oh, before I forget—Av’s quilt has been subject to maternity pains. A bitch (a female dog) gave birth to six litters there. After looking at the quilt, I feel sorry more for the dog than Av: the way the quilt is shredded says that she must have felt way more pain than I could imagine. I am not going into maternity and stuffs like that, but get well soon, doggie!