FLAWSOPHY - A Blog Album (Disc 1)

For the first time ever in the history of blogging, we present a blog album … a blog styled as rock and roll music albums. The blog album is titled "Flawsophy" itself as a tribute (since, I suck at the actual music thingy) to my favorite rock bands - Dire Straits and Led Zeppelin who had albums with their band name itself. Check out the album art:

Flawsophy - A Blog Album - Album Art

1. Down the Sillytown

♫ I really, really don't know what my problem with life is. And guess what, I have lost all interest in trying to know about it.

♫ Here's something that would make feel me great - Someone feeling jealous of me. Come on, people, admit it. You can't have a problem with that !!!

♫ The most urgent, interim superpower I always wanted is the ability to induce the bad luck in other's life according to my wish

♫ One time a girl tried to convince me that wearing sunglasses actually improves the vision on a bright, sunny day. While at that time I just nodded, I still seriously have my doubts.

♫ Hey, I am all for cultural integration, but if someone poses in front of the Taj Mahal in a Metallica T-Shirt, it does look a little weird.

♫ I am not satisfied with people doing their best. Infact, they should be doing more than their best. Doing your best is so commonplace these days that it recently replaced the standards of mediocrity.

♫ I hate the squish sound the ketchup bottle makes, the first time you try to squeeze it, if you are using it after a long time - it's not the sound of the universe, it is a disgusting sound created by idle air pressure in man-made plastic bottle - JUST CAN'T STAND IT !!!

♫  Intelligence is (also) like beauty - enjoy while it lasts.

2. Flawsophize me

♫  Philosophers and scientists would like you to believe that no one is in control and everything happens without a particular planning or central authority but make no mistake, folks … while that may be true for grander and broader trends like birth of a universe, evolution of life etc., our lives are definitely affected by planning at least to a considerable extent.  So, just boldly go wait around her house for 3 hrs and act as if you just ran into her by sheer coincidence  - always remember the old wisdom from the colonial period : "a little guile can help you earn more than your share".

♫  There is this one more problem with the world : people thinking that they need not listen to other people. Instead, you should heed to every opinion by everyone you meet personally and change your personality accordingly … something tells me that a lot of good will come your way. But, you know what, people are unlikely to do that. The answer : Genes.

♫  The real problem no one talks about is that there are only 24 hrs a day … in fact, some people twist that around and say "you got only 24 hours. Make good use of it" as if it's my problem. Let's collectively blame position of the sun and cheer for more moon !!! Peace.

♫  One good news is that there must be situations where you can't be a jerk - I think it is impossible to be a jerk all the time because it violates some law of absolutism …

♫  I suspect the difference between an "untruth" and a "lie" is completely made up. Let me save sometime with a little secret : they have always been the same but the difference was amplified to divide the society for a cheap political gain.

♫  Here's another cliché that no one follows: "PRACTICE WHAT  YOU PREACH". If everybody is practicing what they preach, what about team-work and the delegation of responsibilities? Besides, what will happen to all my MBA training? What about it? In fact, something tells me that the world will be a lot better with less preaching and more practicing.

3. People and Places

♫  I think these 24x7 news channels' main target audience are the other 24x7 news channels in that region. Else, how can you explain the outrageous programming? It's like every news-channel is trying to say to the others, "Hey, look at me. See what I can do" - kind of like the supermodels on ramp in a fashion show strutting wares to each other. Naturally, various cultures have different ways to adapt to this existential competitive environment - while some news channels have gravitated towards naked news programming, other countries are seeing the journalists striking deals with the law-makers.

♫  What is a Buddhist extremist like? He'd probably say, "Listen, I am going to lock myself in that room for 30 days - no food, water or air. Don't ever disturb me, even if you die … ".

♫  Do you think some guy somewhere in Afghanistan just pretended to agree with the whole of Taliban & their Sharia Law stuff just to make his girlfriend break up with him (What's worse is that the ploy could have worked, considering Taliban's opinion on women).

♫  I don't think we do enough fuss over signatures as we could be doing. For example, can I have a signature that would end up being socially unacceptable (due to some kind of unintended profanity) ?  Why can't we have a signature that takes 5 minutes to complete it while the coffee shop lady and the customers behind can just wait while I show my sketching skills along with paying with my credit card ? Also, Did you also observe that no one appreciates the effort even if you have a creative, very artistic signature? Why is that? After all, a signature is the only personal thing we don't do for ourselves, and we get nothing out of …

4. In the land of the free and the home of the brave ...

♫  It took me five years to appreciate the taste of a pretzel.

♫  Here's why America is awesome and down-to-earth: America is the only place where a well-dressed man in a crisp suit and tie would walk up and put some quarters in a vending machine, bends over to collect his packet of zoo crackers and starts munching them. I can never imagine my stereotypical image of a well-dressed European with anything less costly than a classy wine glass. He would probably eat his zoo crackers only after they are orderly arranged on a silver plate.

♫  I always wonder if on the same day, Osama Bin Laden gets captured; Israel and Palestine dissolve their geographical boundaries in a truce argument; Gay marriage is legalized; Someone invents a cool, new fuel cell that's proven beyond doubt to solve the world energy crisis; Michael Jackson comes back from the dead. Imagine all that happening during the Super Bowl half-time. Given that the American media, no matter how many camera crew and millions they got, can handle only one issue in a single day, I wonder which of the awesome breaking news-item will they all pick to tell us.

♫  The first thing that struck me when I landed in USA is the fact that petrol (gas) is way cheaper than drinking water. In 2006, it was close to $2 a gallon (59 cents per liter) and now it is about $3.5 a gallon (~ $1 per liter). A 600 ml bottle of water could cost you $1.5 - $1.8 even today. Sometimes, all you need a good foreign policy expert at home.

Hope you enjoyed Disc 1. In the comments' section, please let us know what your favorite tracks are.

!!!! COMING SOON : DISC 2 !!!!

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The day we broke our history's spine: Telangana Million March

It was indeed a tearful day for the Telugu culture and heritage plus I know I can't beat JP's eloquence with words. So, let me go right down to those goddamn boorish savages.

Alas, they demolished mute statues that were set in stone ... statues of people who were dead long time ago … because they belonged to a certain geography for which they have recently acquired some tasteful disdain. You hate a particular place and you carefully plan and break a goddamn statue of a dead person who was born in that place a hundred years back when the place itself has no meaning. Pretty MAN-ly thing to do. Heh?

If you thought that was dumb,  wait till you hear this. These Telangana morons are inspiring themselves from the Egyptian and other revolutions in the middle-east. The middle-east is fighting dictatorships and you guys lost democratically, fair and square. Where's the logic there? Imagine the intellect of a smelly socks, it must take to come up with this plan. Besides, what does even demolition of a statue accomplish? I am all lost here. What message can you possibly send by breaking a bunch of stones? Desecrating a statue, burning a religious book, giving a milk-bath, torching the buses - Why? Why? From which monkey species did we get this sense of humor? At this point of time, I am perplexed as to which act is more dumb : breaking a statue of a person dead long ago or honking from your car to a passer-by girl.

Look at the kind of people they have managed to annihilate: 17 of most inspiring and towering personalities that we ought to be proud of, but we thought to be from a faulty region of the state. Eminent writers who gave us our grand epics (Nannayya, Yerrapragada), prolific poets (Sri Sri, Gurajaaga Appa Rao), social reformers (Veeresilingam Panthulu) and many, many more. They even knocked off Siddhendhra yogi of 14-century AD !!! 14th century, for Godssakes. I think demolishing the statues of scholars who shaped our very culture and on whose shoulders we stand each day is the perfect metaphor for the dawn of an age of darkness and ignorance. It is a flawless defiance of intelligence and an embrace of impudence. When a million people are self-congratulating the bold act of having defeated an army of stone statues in a bloodless and a spineless battle against our cultural history, on a day when pride was lost and we find nothing worthwhile to defend, you know it's time for history to make space for some more.

Simple-minded folks think that the fault lies with politicians who are prying on people's emotions. I think it's a superficial opinion to urgently explain away the situation so that we can go back to the TV. If you think about it, that's their real job - to catch hold of gullible people. It's completely our inadequacy to not see through the "plan". Make no mistake, folks. They got us where they wanted. That's how any ruling class operates. They run most of Andhra's educational institutions, to ensure that your kids and college students are always in check. Schools and colleges have turned into pitiful poultry farms depriving kids of childhood and letting wild bushes grow on empty cricket grounds.

They also run the media houses and the TV channels to decide what information you deserve to be fed today. They control the cinema too - which, by the way, is the only hobby left in our culture. No one is writing or reading Telugu anymore. The Carnatic music training can’t get us chicks nor lets us be fokii.  Just look at the quality of the movies we got today and the kind of pretentious nonsense we have convinced ourselves that it is our way to relax: Our hero-worship of a Brash, sweaty, preening, strutting alpha-male jerk persona (Thanks, Carlin) whose solution to any problem is to beat the shit out of someone next to him. We are forced to endure someone take pride in a complete disinterest in education and makes a mockery out of his college professors. And to add to his award-winning worthless personality and record-breaking levels of incapacity, guess what, the heroine proposes to him !!! Got that? From an era of delicate romances with batting eye-lids, stolen glances, lost thoughts and sweet smiles, we pay to sit through the most ridiculous male fantasy - a desperate female !!! Extinct male impulses - violence, ego and anger  from a pre-enlightened age in human history have been revived as the telugu movie industry. When these are our heroes today, what more can you expect than broken statues of highly regarded intellectuals. We broke the idea of an intellectual anyway, why not demolish his stone counterpart?  This comedy-tragedy dualism realizes it's full circle when a teenage student at an age of writing entrances exams chooses to bunk his college to sit in the such a movie for 7th time just to lend a support and loyalty to his favorite hero. They got us where they wanted - obedient consumption and silent sufferring !!!

The whole system is run to ensure we are all blind-folded with shallow notions of sweet-sounding equality we need to have and to keep alive the deadly dragons of deep differences and divisions between us. If you thought these politicians enter a disgusting and oft denounced profession that takes heaps of crap from every cross-eyed guy at the road-side tea-stall for nothing, think again. It's pay-back time, my dear friends. Just watch, we will soon be believing that somehow there are larger purposes to our lives than our own sanity.

It's our responsibility to be educated and to be alive. It has always been. Let's begin by blaming ourselves. With a humble hatred towards everything, I hope we get back the statues and some of our dignity.

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Silly Points: Episode 6

MISSING BOSE MISSES HIS AWARD TOO

TRUE FACT:

Indian freedom fighter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was awarded "Bharat Ratna" (the highest civilian award in India) posthumously in 1992. The award was later withdrawn due to a legal technicality. Want to know the technicality? No one could confirm that he was really dead. It seems there was no "conclusive evidence" that he was really dead, so mused the supreme court. My guess is that if he is still alive today, he'd already show up at the Guiness Book office to collect his award for "oldest man alive award". At least give it to him now, please. He's the most classy guy in our history textbooks ...

ANOTHER TRUE FACT:
All fake and eligible Gandhis (Indra, Rajiv) were awarded the "Bharat Ratna" but the real Mahatma Gandhi was not awarded.

THE PROBLEM WITH SUPERMAN

Superman was #1 of my favorite superheroes but recently slipped to #2 because of an inexcusable goofy thing he did, albeit, a long time ago. I was watching Superman 1, for the sixth time before a flash of rationality fired an important pattern of neurons in my left brain. ...And then it struck me. Hey, what's the deal with  the whole "TURNING BACK THE TIME". First of all, turning back the time should not be allowed as a superpower. A superpower shouldn't overtly meddle with the space-time fabric this way. Superpowers should be sublime enough that your villain has a finite chance of beating you but he won't because you are awesome. Trying to go back in time and rectify the mistake is loser stuff and should be left to cricket coaches and corporate consulting firms who make a living by insisting that one should learn from his action replays or past mistakes.

Besides, who the hell gave this guy the permission to meddle with the only planet we humans got. Ruining this planet is our job and our job alone. Let no superhero foul things up for us this way again. What if he made a mistake in basic calculus? For all I care, we could be plunged into a couple of ice-ages overnight while we are trying to turn the thermostat up a notch with all the greenhouse gas emissions for a couple of centuries now.

And you know why he did that? For his girlfriend !!! See, something like this would never happen to Batman (#1).

By the way, this is for the Indian kids: Do they still write in Chacha Chaudhary comics that his "brain works faster than a computer" ? I was just wondering because times have changed and today even a computer can work faster than another computer if any of those "Mac vs PC ads" can be believed.

SMELL OF PAPER

Just when we thought the eBook readers like Kindle are doing their bit in saving the environment by letting the interested people do away with actual books and thus, indirectly reducing the cutting of trees, we have some funny gargoyles grumping that they are missing the "smell of paper". Naturally, businessmen with their usual non-discriminatory policy in identifying and supporting stupidity on our planet came up with the following product:

Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite. Pasted from http://smellofbooks.com/

Hey Mr. S-N-I-F-F-M-A-N, I got a bunch of water-dipped, sun-dried, vacuum-sealed bag of yellow pages and telephone directories that no one here wants. Their 90-degree corners were preserved with extreme care so that they can fit easily into any corner of your house. Also, Thank your stars as we have an early-bird promotional offer going on where you get the whole 50 kg package for free - just pay for the shipping and become a proud owner of this premier, round-the-clock olfactory experience. HURRY UP!!! OFFER VALID TILL STOCKS LAST !!!

PG-13

I saw a someone on the internet using "WTH" to exclaim some displeasure over something that could have upset his mood for a short duration. Given that the letters "F" and "H" are equidistant from "T" on a standard "QWERTY" keyboard, I am not granting him any tolerance for this abominable hypocrisy. I think it's safe to assume that every adult with more than two days of internet experience knows the right answer to the fill-in-the blank question: "What the _____" ?. I can't believe grown-up adults still use the language reserved for pre-teens. May be he wants to pretend to be a nice guy in front of someone special. Or May be he is an active member of a support group that is fighting to preserve "WTH" for 18th century cultural significance and nostalgia. I don't care and I want the expression "WTH" to be immediately weeded out by natural selection.

This one is especially for the girls out there who euphemistically use "What the fish" or "What the frak" or "What the heck " or the good ol' classic "What the ****". Hey, potty mind, we know what you are thinking. Nice try. Caught ya (wink, wink).

(SOME) PRE-DATE PRECAUTIONS

Here's a recent thing I learnt. Reading a spiritual philosophy column before going to a date - NOT ADVISABLE, folks. I had sometime to kill after I got ready for a special evening and my eyes rolled over to the spirituality column in the Times of India. The column opened with:

Life is a combination of the subtle and the gross. The gross, though easy to comprehend, has its own set of problems and the subtle is difficult to comprehend. For example, the body is gross, the mind is subtle. Again, the mind is gross in comparison to the soul, or being. While moving from thoughts to words to actions, we are moving from subtle to gross.
Pasted from http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-09-05/holistic-living/28233234_1_subtle-energies-elements-side-effects

I don't about you but I tend to be super-serious while taking philosophical advice from a casual newspaper. So, as I was ruminating how the whole body is gross and how the mind is far superior, she comes over and asks a "frank" opinion on her dress. In case you missed, let me point to you again to the quote-marks around the word frank in the previous sentence. At this point in my life, with no fault of my own, I found myself facing a duality that is completely capable of determining the quality of the impending near-future. Of course, swayed away by the over-whelming rectitude of the argument in the spirituality column and not having enough time to address my delicate composure, I couldn't help ignore the quote-marks and utter the fateful words: "The body is gross, the mind is subtle … it doesn't matter … we are getting late … hurry up".

End of story: A bouquet of Flowers : Rs. 400/- ; Recharge Coupon for cell phone : Rs. 200/- ; Take-out curry point meals : Rs. 55/- . Self-pity: Priceless !!!

(Courtesy : A short story by Woody Allen)

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