Rabbitty Tale

Sorry about the silence. Were you guys waiting for a post anyway? Alright I don't really want to know the answer to that. I am at this moment extremely happy which is making me excited like I could stay up all night on one hand and also relieved like I could curl up and go to sleep this minute on the other. After nine days, I have the wi-fi working in my place and this means no more lugging the laptop down two kilometers to Remedy to stay connected. I am a lazy bum and I do dragon boating and go to the gym twice a week and I hope you don't ask anything more from a house-cat. Also did I mention how DIVINE it feels to be online laying on bed?!

I know I should post some pictures here because Edmonton is at its best these days and the river valley is simply looking gorgeous. Again my house-catty self was preventing me from going out and taking pics. So to pretend that I am better than myself, I went out and met a dog named Coconut and a bunny with a personality disorder (let's just call her Chandrakanta) which behaved and/or looked like a headmistress in my junior high school. I was having a blast from the past when it (or, she) kept looking at me like this as if I was playing in the sand even after recess forgetting my hair-band, shoelaces and manners and was begging for a detention:

But then she started to fidget and nibble grass and scratching her ears with her paws- all kinds of rabbitty stuff that headmistresses won't or shouldn't do in front of students who anyway fail to see the seriousness that headmistress-dom is all about. At this point I lost interest, said HAAARRRRR and she ran for life. I wish I could do that when I was in junior high. 

Happy Canada Day

Yesterday after posting I got out of Remedy with a decent intention of going home and realized that thousands of people were walking past me towards the river as if in a zombie walk. Only there were no zombies. It was fireworks time for Canada Day! I had spent the July 4th last year in Ormond Beach and saw fireworks that went on for an hour but we were then fooling around in an almost empty beach and the thing was happening in a distance.  But yesterday was a horse of a completely different color. I was at the top of the bridge across the Saskatchewan River and they were booming and bursting right in front, so close that you could reach out and touch one as they kept bursting into lights. Quite nice. After that I walked all the way home with people all around cheering, hooting ,begging for small change and smoke and lolling around in parking lots completely drunk and it felt like the Pujo-crowd in Kolkata. A grad student went home, looked out on Whyte and all those people from her fifth-floor window, ate milk-cereal and dalmut and went to sleep after finishing Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent.

Retribution is a bitch

Um okay, let's first start with the new achievements of Awkward! Came to the computer lab, turned on my comp and KABOOM! I could have poked a Banshee in the eye with tiger nails with as much effect and lot less effort. The CPU was protesting in a voice that almost reminded me of the stick-thin SUCI women activists lying in front of the minibuses and shouting their head off in protest of almost anything under the sun. I was freaking out and when other people started freaking out as well , we called out to our resident tech buddy for help. He came and guess what! Two slaps and violent shaking later, the comp went quite like a sleeping baby. Everything went back to normal pretty soon except my ears which had taken the color of beetroot and took sometime to drain all that extra red.

Later today, I was trying out a shirt in some random shop and a toddler crawled in, sat in my cubicle while I was still changing and we had a really philosophical conversation about what's the right thing to do in life (aka the conflict between what one wants to do and what one's mom asks to do) between us for about four minutes. He was soon convinced that I was not his mom and he needed to go to mom. With that as the marching order I don't know if he crawled out and went into somebody else's cubicle. I thanked god that at least we were not in a public bathroom peeing. That would be a bit too much. I guess this was just a reminder that the glaring-at-kid karma can jump up and bite in the ass.

On my way back, I sat on the bus sandwiched between three couples that were kissing and making out as if it was their last day on planet earth. Gosh it was awkward. PDA is fine by me as long as you are not eating up your partner's facial parts in crowded buses without table manners. And then I re-learned the truth about straight women : here. Enough for a day, right? Right??

Let her ride!!!

I went dragon-boating last evening and came back with a sore back, a black and blue thumb and soaring spirits. So the next time you see someone walking stiff as a log, holding her multi-colored hand at an awkward angle and with flamboyantly dissimilar whiskers, that would be this bird. Anyway, the river valley is surprisingly near where I live and I have practically just found it out and needless to say, would  be going back with my camera soon. It was interesting to push myself do something I have never done and had  never even heard about before I came here. Just hoping that I learn enough and fast to keep up with the rest of the team and not ruin their chances of winning the trophy again this year. While I splashed half of the river onto the exceedingly polite paddler behind me, it was fun to learn the boating lingo. For those of you who expected something X-rated from the title, "let her ride" means "stop paddling" or in other words "you may breathe now". Not so exciting read but puts a life back into you.

Bottom line: "Dragon-Boating aka Furious Paddling and Splashing Self and Fellows - Curing Broken Hearts with Sore Backs circa 2010" coming at your nearest theater... SOON, SOON, SOON!!!!!

Live and let live, Kepe-Mama and some other shit

Whenever I am pressed for time and all that shit, I feel like stopping everything else and start blogging. Give me nothing to do for days and you won't see a tiny dandruff-flake sized post. To which simile I say Ew.

I was up since god-awful 6.30 because my throat and ears hurt like I had tried to swallow the shards of someone's broken dreams. I have simply no idea what to do with myself before its at least 8 and less when I am up after discovering cacti growing inside my ears. The thing is I detest paying visits to the doc unless I am absolutely on the death bed and there is no other alternative. I mean, NONE. The simple sermon that is engraved in my headboard is something like this:

Go see a doc coz the docs have a right to live.
Get those pills coz the chemists also have a right to live.
Throw those pills away, hold yourself and rock gently on your bed coz you have a right to live.

Well, that's a lie. I don't have headboard. And even if I had, they would probably hang me for vandalism. But, seriously. If I ever have a tattoo, I am going to have that thing tattooed in indelible golden letters pretty much in the same part of anatomy where a certain favorite professor of mine (Uncle Kepe for the initiated) supposedly have a tattoo of The Envelope Theorem. Or, was it Differentiate? I forgot which. May be both.

So apart from the minor detail that I still don't have any insurance for a few more days even if I lugged myself to downtown today to get hopefully the final paper-pushing done, this is pretty much THE reason why I haven't been to the docs to save their lives. But it's nothing that Ramdev and I can't handle if we tried together. And, finally talking of Ramdev, if you Google "Ramdev Fun Facts", out pops the page where he claims that yoga cures "the gay disease". I am touched to see that Google has such a sense of humor.

More random stuff then...

Um, okay, not the last one yet I guess.

For years, my once-boss has been writing "teh" in place of "the" and only today it struck me that all this while she was LOLspeaking and I didn't notice!

You guys remember my cat-fetish? And also the fact that I was a puppy? Good. Then today I just became re-christened as Mowgli and guess what? There's something called a Mowgli Syndrome. The people who become trapped between the animal and the human world are Mowgli's. For realsies! Watch out coz I might swing on that nearest tree branch of yours in my leopard-print underoos and come and say hello!

I guess there won't be many more Nyara updates coz I think he has finally taken the hint. I will find you all lovely people someone else, more interesting. That would be no trouble really because in any way I am up at one in the morning -
(a) eating nuts (that is, a hard-shelled fruit of some plants, not how Confucious defined it: Man who stick dick in peanut butter jar is fucking nuts),
(b) secretly dreading the point where I would actually need to sleep and for that have to clear my bed of the shitloads of notes and books that I didn't touch all weekend,
(c) Google-ing Mowgli and Nuts so that it makes a blog post.

So, you are welcome.

I guess that would be it, for now. Traala..

Seeking Remedy...

Okay, a few things.

The only time I talk these days is when I am sitting in the ENR class and literally squirming with impatience because it means three hours of confinement, twice a week and all these pain while I am not learning new stuff. At least, so far. Sometimes I just try to keep shut coz no one likes a show-off but most of the times I just have to speak because otherwise I will just go crazy. I hope the professor doesn't mind but if he does then the damage has been done already.

I made another mistake today and that was checking the price of the air-tickets to Kolkata. That was when it got hammered in as to how god-forsaken this place is. And its so far from everything else that even if I get to go someplace, I will be a fucked up pauper.

Sorry if this post joins the list of dark ones of which there are so many these days. But funny things have stopped happening it seems. I am writing this sitting in Remedy Cafe which is another version of Indian Coffee House, College Street or at least the Jadavpur one - which did nothing to improve my mood.

Dandelion again!

Gadhesh has settled down at his new place and I hope is enjoying himself and the attention of his three human pets at this moment.. better than a single grumpy one who mostly slept or used to be out. Here's a photo of him on a particularly special day before the move when he was not feeling so camera-shy:

And guess what people! We repeated Dandelion this time with a bigger team and it was GREAT! We ate till we felt like pythons gorged on spotted deers and then went out to investigate their garden when I realized that I don't remember anything of the high school botany. (Actually, I don't recall anything but the supreme debaucheries that were high school for me but that's another story for another day.) So here's a piece of Dandelion for you.

The Prodigal Returns

Three tired souls and a few hours of frantic sorting and trash-bagging later I moved and then survived one tiny computer crash before I started writing this post like a wannabe-responsible blogger. Like everything else, I didn't entirely plan for it to happen today but at least I have made my first move and finally has turned back into a resident at my surrogate parents' house which proves extraordinary forbearance on their part I am sure. The last thing I did today was to sort through twelve courses worth of material and decide what I absolutely need. Couple that with sardonic chuckles and throwing off of seminal papers onto the rubbish pile and the resulting threesome is what you can call the irony of grad school.

In other news, it was fucking mind-blowing to notice how many Indian and especially Bengali nicknames are loaded with sexual connotations and are often just variations of the words for boobs, dicks and balls. That's RIGHT! When grad students that are fuckillion years old get together, they talk apples and nuts. 

Finally, I did something all the while feeling it was gonna be an uber calamity: I (happened to) urban-dick Manicorn. There are five definitions in case you wanna check but for this one time I am too mortified to share beyond the most upvoted one.

Manicorn : a mythical male creature who is successful (read: pursuing his passion and can pay his electric bills/rent), funny, chivalrous, masculine (read: not chauvinistic), adventurous, artistic (read: not suicidal).

Game,  Set and Match - Dudette!.

Resident Poet Issue

(Man, that puns in so many different ways...)


I have found two things to share with the bongs, presuming I don't know enough of either Bengali or English to translate these pages: 


1. Kaurab for those enthusiasts of Bengali little magazines, who think that visiting the Montmartre pavilion in the Kolkata Book Fair is kind of integral to the idea of this entire Bong-connection thingy and nostalgic what-nots. Personally I have been rendered choke-full of the various patrons of little and big magazines in and around the city - poets and artists who want to hit it big, poets and artists who think its against their entire life's principle to try to hit it big, poets who worry about whether its a fair thing to break up with girlfriends with disabilities, stone-broke writers who spend their entire miserable savings to publish the first book, artists who break up with the incumbent girl/boy friends every month and still get back together, poets who cut off the nicest of braids and tonsure their heads to protest against the typical standards of beauty held by the Bengali slash Indian males and so on. You get the idea. One of them wrote me my first ever letter when I was three and asked me if I could get some details about a book "Jalpai Kaath-er Esraaj" (loosely, The Olive-Wood Guitar) from my father when we are not too busy with our respective preoccupations and please let her know. I prized the blue inland-letter and probably still have it somewhere back home. And then there is the thoracic surgeon-turned poet who called me Misibaba, introduced me to my first scotch (on the rocks, baby!) and kindly divulged the secrets of getting the best doped slash Bhang-ed Kulfi in town. So you kind of see that they remain somewhat the necessary evils of my life but nevertheless this post would not see the daylight if I was still living among them. 


2. I knew that the resident poet publishes hugely on Kaurab but this is the only thing I found online: Bondhu (Friend). 


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