Pity is very much the last fucking thing I ask for. Ever.

Of food and losing weight

There was once a time when I weighed around 110 kgs. Until two weeks ago I weighed 74 kgs. Everyone kept asking me how I could lose almost 40 Kgs in about two years. And I kept saying that its all due to my exercise regime which consisted of running around 2 miles, 3 to 4 days a week(the "mile" also helped flaunt my American connection, though it doesn't help much :-( ). Another reason that I didn't mention was the food. Not that I ate less or skipped meals or ate less healthy food. But notably for the last three years I have been mostly living away from home. Not that I am complaining. Everyone needs to stay away from home at least for a year or so. It enriches your experiences, helps you become truly independent and most importantly of all, allows you to booze as much as you want. For teetotallers it allows you to smoke as much as you want. For teetotallers and non smokers, God Help You! That apart, I was talking about staying away from home. Now, the single most important thing about it is you don't get food cooked by your mom. Which sucks. Bigtime. My mom cooks excellent food. I am sure that everyone else's mom also does. But the taste is quite immaterial in our present discussion. Its the very fact that its home made concerns us. I have been home about two weeks. And I have already gained around 5 kgs and developed a cute little pot shaped belly. Now my old denims fit. But that also means I can't buy new ones. And this little observation about my gain in weight made me reallize that the most important factor behind losing weight is not being able to have home made food.
A lot of people around me have been trying to lose weight. If you are reading this, take my advice. Stay away from home for about an year and see the result. And I won't even charge you for the advice. The good hearted chap that I am :-)

P.S: I had wonderful biryani in a shabby place in Baruipur. Golbari reopened. My mother's recovered completely and is in a cooking spree. Looks like I will be my old self when I go back in another two months.

Homecoming.

10 months and 10 days. Exactly. And I was coming back home. Long flight. Bandhs. Long waits . Delayed trains. Then two faces peeking in from the window. And two more standing eagerly at the doorsteps of the old house. I don't ask for nothing else.

And then there's the city. Nothing's changed. Really. Except for some faces. And that's the way I like it.

I have come back to life :-)

Another tag.

I didn't get tagged this time. But on reading this here, I decided to do it myself. Not because it looked interesting but I had nothing better to do. So there you go.

1. LAST MOVIE YOU SAW IN A THEATER?
Tare Zameen Par. I want half of my money back.

2. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING?
Theory of point estimation by E.L.Lehmann. Its actually pretty interesting.

3. FAVORITE BOARD GAME?
Ludo. The usual one. And I hate saap-ludo. I always find the snake. :(

4. FAVORITE MAGAZINE?
Used to be Anandamela and MAD. Nowadays I prefer Maxim.

5. FAVORITE SMELLS?
Wet earth, any variety of alcohol, ChNapa ful-er gondho, LyangRa aam. And I absolutely love the way my mother smells.

6. FAVORITE SOUND?
The sound of silence. :D On a serious note, the sound of my watch ticking away. I love to listen to it, observe it as each second rushes by.

7.WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD:
Humiliation. I can’t live with it.

8.FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU WAKE UP?
“Shoot! Why? Why? WHY??!!”

9. FAVORITE FAST FOOD PLACE?
Tough one. It can be Hot Kati Roll, maybe Humro Momo. But, I think I would go with Aadi Maloncho in Haatibagan. Heavenly chicken kabirajis! *drools*

10. FUTURE CHILD'S NAME:
If it’s a boy then “ghonTa” and if it’s a girl then “pNuTi”. Btw, when I was primary school, there was this hugely popular Bengali song “pNuTir maa pNuTir maa, pNuTike biye korbo na” :D :D

11. FINISH THIS STATEMENT.
"If I had a lot of money I would...buy myself a beach house and spend the rest of my life relaxing on a hammock with beers and steaks on the table beside.

12.DO YOU DRIVE FAST?
I don't drive.

13. DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL?
WTF????!!!!!!

14. STORMS-COOL OR SCARY?
Very very cool.

15. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR?
As far as I remember I got a tractor and a fire engine together. This reminds me that according to my grandparents, unlike other kids who learn to speak “baba”, “ma” etc first, my first words were “gaayiii”. :P

16. FAVORITE DRINK?
Good scotch. On the rocks.

17. FINISH THIS STATEMENT,
"IF I HAD THE TIME I WOULD... sleep more. I don’t get enough sleep nowadays. I stay awake for almost 9-10 hours every day. :(

18. DO YOU EAT THE STEMS ON BROCCOLI?
Huh! I am chlorophyllophobic.

19. IF YOU COULD DYE YOUR HAIR ANY COLOR, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR CHOICE?
I like my hair as it is. Thank you.

20. NAME ALL THE DIFFERENT CITIES/TOWNS YOU HAVE LIVED IN.
Calcutta, Kanpur, Piscataway.

21. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH?
Soccer all the way.

22. ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU:
She’s the most random talker I’ve seen. And in the nicest possible way.

23. WHAT'S UNDER YOUR BED?
The carpet, I guess.

24. WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE BORN AS YOURSELF AGAIN?
Absolutely. I totally love myself.

25. MORNING PERSON, OR NIGHT OWL?
Late night owl.

26. OVER EASY, OR SUNNY SIDE UP?
Sunny side up.

27. FAVORITE PLACE TO RELAX?
My bed.

28. FAVORITE PIE?
Chocolate pecan pies and chocolate fudge pies.

29.FAVORITE ICE CREAM FLAVOR?
Chocolate. I gorge on chocolate fudge brownie.

30. OF ALL THE PEOPLE YOU TAGGED THIS TO, WHO'S MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND FIRST?
I really don’t know. I am very bad at guessing. :(

I have an exam tomorrow morning. And another one, a big big one in just a few days time. And I am up at 2:00 in the night doing good for nothing tags. I tag the short one, the tall one and the nymph. I really hope at least one of them does this. So that at my deathbed I will get some solace knowing that my effort didn't go in vain. Ohh, and methinks the last line makes me a suitable candidate for the post of the scriptwriter for the next Ekta Kapoor mega.

The science of sleep.

My blog's been asleep for some time. People who don't know me very well may jump at this stage and say "aren't you a PhD student? I bet you were busy with TA duties and project submissions and exams and what nots". People who know me quite well may nod their heads wisely and say "you must have been watching a lot of films lately". And people who are smart enough to read the title of the post would just give a knowing smile and continue reading about my sleeping stories. Yes, my blog was sleeping because I have been sleeping. A lot. Literally, a lot. I have been going to bed really early these days. Like around 2, 2:30 in the night. Which is btw, by my standards, EARLY. I wake up around 10 in the morning. Have breakfast and go back to sleep at 11:00. Then I wake up at 3:30 only by the noise of someone calling me on gtalk (which, is a wonderful thing in itself). After coming back from class I take another short nap of two hours duration. And then again at 2, I feel I should go to bed early. This has been pretty much my routine over the last two weeks. And I am worried.
Come on, I have every right to worry. Not that I slept less before. I have always had it in me. My friends used to kick me to wake me up. Sometimes, spray ice cold water. I could sleep for 16 hours at a stretch. Without any intoxicants. Actually contrary to popular beliefs, intoxicants if taken in ample amounts reduces your normal sleeping hours. Hostel life taught me that. Hostel life can be very educational. Even if you skip all the classes. I also learnt that sleep and hunger go hand in hand. If you are asleep, you generally don't feel hungry. If you are hungry, you feel sleepy. Morale of the story: if you are a single student living away from home and one night you don't have anything cooked for dinner and you've run out of maggi, lie down and close your eyes; you'll have the best sleep ever. This, I have perfected over the years.
Okay, I hereby list some more points about sleeping that everyone should know.
1) Coffee in the morning only makes you feel like taking a shit. Coffee in the night makes you all the more sleepy. So "coffee helps you keep awake" is a misconception. Advice: don't drink coffee if you have an early morning exam.

2) Insomnia is not a disease. It just signifies that you don't read. Or at least make the effort.

3) Films keep you awake. Good films, you wonder how good can it possible get and bad films, you speculate if the next scene is going to make it a better film than "Jodha Akbar". Nevertheless, they keep you awake. Advice: if you have an exam next day and need to stay awake to study, try watching films all throughout the night.

4) This is for boys only: don't let your parents come to your room before you wake up; or at least use a blanket, otherwise the poor fellas could be traumatized.

5) Sleeping is very inspirational. Seeing other people sleep gives you very innovative ideas. I shalt not emphasize further or else some people may try to get back at me real hard.

6)Sleeping increases your creativity. One of my friends used to dream about how to clear the difficult stages of computer games. And those tricks worked. Really. I, personally dream about things like the third world war where everyone dies. Only Sachin Tendulkar and Adolf Hitler survive and start playing some sort of a "identify the dead man" game.

7) I don't have any idea why some people refer to the act of having sex as "sleeping". I mean when two people are doing it(as Phoebe would say) the last thing they do is sleep. And by "last thing" I intended on a pun, if you didn't get it.

Thats all I can cook up right now. So much so for sleeping. All this writing and thinking and making up random stuff makes me all sleepy again. I will thus get back to hibernating. Wish you all happy sleeping!

Geror Khata

I have always believed that the journey called life is filled with small pebbles of happiness. All you have to do is pick out the right ones. The sultry siren will bear testimony to this. Besides that she's going to hurl some choicest abuses at me for calling her a siren. I still, stand for the truth. That apart, after a week full of depression and peculiar feelings about whatever's been going on around me, I am happy once again. Ummm, happy would be an understatement. Rather, I am ecstatic, jubilant, elated etc. After a lot of effort, lot of criticism, hindrances and a little bit of help from a few people who care, its finally out there. The second issue of our very own web magazine "Geror Khata" was officially published two days ago. We have been putting a lot of effort into publicity since then. And getting some rave reviews too. It can be viewed at
http://gerorkhata.net/
If you drop by this blog please please go through the magazine too. And let us know whatever you think of the effort. Praises, brickbats, we are ready for everything. And we are also ready for some inputs in the form of prose, poetry, features, photos and drawings for our third issue which will be coming out latest by this June. Please get them coming at gerorkhata@gmail.com.

Shit happens. Which makes the load of crap called life even crappier. I feel stripped, robbed of my own space. Insecurity has never loomed larger than this. Never. Someone said "even this shall pass". Which, I know. But the suspicions will remain. Forever.

P.S: For those who don't know, my email id's been hacked, my personal mails, chats read and a lot more things done with them. And all this, by someone who is, in all certainties, quite close to me.