Sid-O-Scope

Sometimes in life, we are faced with problems much more difficult than the derivative equations in subject of Maths -3 of engineering (Yes, we have three subjects of Maths!!!). It took me three years to solve six of those problems, so when I say, more difficult than them, you get the idea. Consider this problem- you are walking in the mall, grudgingly ambling with your wife, still wondering at what point her purse climbed up on your shoulder, when she suddenly pops up the question, "Did you see her?" Now, you have seen 'her'. Every person in that mall has seen 'her'. She has painted her face for endless hours so that everyone will turn around and see her. Every man has seen wondering how lucky would someone be to be with her, every woman has seen her, wondering what does every man see her. And yet, the married man, in the infinite wisdom of surviving the marriage finds himself in the limbo of answering the question. There are two possible answer...

For many people, he was the God of cinema, a director, a storyteller and an academy award winner. But for many years his stories didn't click with the audience. The world was changing, he observed to himself in private, and this new generation of millennials was not interested in his stories anymore. He heaved a sigh of relief as his hands rested on the wooden table. He craned his neck to look around, what is this place? He wondered again. Did he expect to travel all the way to India at the age of seventy? He had heard of this place, who didn't? Everybody knew what the 'Double Shots' bar was. A homogeneous bar for the who-who of the industry, useful for networking and getting things done. Where else would you get the hand-rolled Cuban cigars in the crowded lanes of Delhi? He wondered as he leaned in on the high-chair and let out a puff contributing his bit to the smog filling the streets. His agent, an old friend, had called him late night and informed him about t...

According to certain media reports (do not know if these are paid or unpaid) only 56% of Bangaloreans voted yesterday. Using my super secret research team of ninjas, I set out the real reason why bangalore did not vote. My team of ninjas surveyed every part of bangalore in such a secrecy that no one came to know about it. Enlisting the top ten reasons why bangaloreans missed voting yesterday. 1. It was not a holiday in America. 2. They avoided traffic jam towards pooling booth. 3. Polling booth was far away from Infosys office 4. Polling booth was not inside forum mall. 5. There was no home delivery service. 6. The polling booth didn't have AC. Mall did. 7. Election timing clashed with gym appointment. 8. They had very urgent work in office. Manager promised pizza. 9. Last night's Biryani was too spicy. 10. Finally a four days long weekend, time to catch up on sleep that was missed. There you go. If you live under the rock and have woken up just...

On a Sunday morning as I left the humble hug of my cosy 'rajai' (a cruel form of blanket that hypnotizes you to procrastinate) to engage in the oldest profession of humans, hunt for something to eat, every door along the way was tuned into some famous show.  By the time I reached my parking, I had listened to the complete title song in bits and pieces. To their credit, one house was watching Chota Bheem but thats not the topic of this post. Over the period of time the condition of Indian Television has deteriorated much worse than the concept of auto meter on streets of Delhi.  I had this crazy idea a couple of months back that I am going to turn into a perfect Indian. I replaced my toothpaste with Vicco Vajradanti, got a Chandrika soap and even used Chik Shampoo. During this phase I decided to abandon American television on and switch to Indian tele-serials only. Yes, that means no... wait for it... Star world HD, no HBO (gasp) and definitely no Star Movies HD (Suicida...

"Humans are the most curious creatures," said one alien investigator to another, "They carry super computers powerful enough to launch missile systems halfway across the globe and yet they choose to use them in forwarding funny jokes about other humans that sometimes makes no sense" "Indeed, internet is one of the most sophisticated network grid of computers we have ever seen," said the other. "And yet the power of 30 billion connected computers is used to find pictures of other naked humans and dreams of copulation" "That's indeed curious, pray tell me then," said the commander, "What are the most important issues that humans are researching on?" "There is a difference of opinion on almost all issues on Earth. Humans doubt everything that is said by other humans. They even doubt our existence, in our front." "Thats even more funny, can we attack them?" asked the commander. "We can ...

"Its all smokes and mirror," screamed an oversmart audience to the magician on stage. The magician looked at the over smart spectator and said, "You sir, will join me on stage for my next act." "As if," said the over smart spectator. "And for my next act," the magician said, "I am going to make this man disappear." "As if," the over smart spectator said. He was told to inspect the box, which seemed fine. "I am going to expose your trick," said the sceptic. "And now ladies and gentlemen for the magic," he asked the sceptic to step inside the box, "Abracadabra..." Puff, a big ball of smoke surround the box. Someone coughed. The box opened and the sceptic was not seen anywhere. Encore, claps, claps, Once more, once more, screamed the audience. Everyone was too busy to notice the sceptic walking outside the magicians tent counting money in his hands. India on an whole is a funny country. Y...

The thing about prophecies is, they tend to start a war more than prevent it. If Kansa never heard the prophecy of Krishna we would never see the battle. If Voldemort never knew about the potter boy, we would be saved seven horrible movies. But the thing about prophecies is that they exist. Over the period of time, I have come to believe that someone somewhere is jotting down prophecies about me in an language illegible by human. You know something is amiss, and bam that thing is amiss right then and there. There is not a single moment of doubt in my mind about the prophecy of railway and me. Murphy had once said, if there is a fifty-fifty chance of getting something right, there is a ninety percent guarantee you will get it wrong. During my junior college days there are people who sleep on the railway platform who used to watch me run after a train almost every day. Sometimes I even ran after it from front. This made one day, a homeless guy come towards me and said, 'You...

India is a land of spiritual getaways, people from all over the world come to India to getaway from their life, wife, boss and sometimes they just visit to create albums on Facebook. The tourist love to see the Taj Mahal, they want to visit the Himalayas. There are multiple brochures printed in colorful ink of thousand spiritual getaways in India. The tourism and spiritual brochures miss out on one big spiritual one can partake in this crazy country is riding in an auto rickshaw. One small journey in an auto rickshaw will give you the spiritual enlightenment that sages get ages to attain. The biggest philosophical discovery of modern India is how does the auto rickshaw meter changes its value for same distance depending on the country of origin of the passenger or the state of origin of the rickshaw driver. Just like the Knight Bus (from the Harry Potter) these rickshaw will come to your assistance whenever a witch or a wizard or anyone with money needs t...

There are two types of festival, one is social media festival where you receive a flood of social media messages and SMS with a awkward silence. 17 email forward with 70 people in reply to all, 5 SMS (because they are charged extra), 144 friends posted on Facebook about the festival. No tweets thankfully or maybe tweets get buried under other tweets (no complaints there). Social media festivals are secular and geographically diverse. People sitting in Bangalore will freely wish their friends in India a "happy Halloween" without fail. There will be a flood of 'Happy Id' and 'Happy Duserra' posts from all the people irrespective of religious background.

Life is like a lift sometimes you get inside to go up, sometimes you use it to come down. And sometimes when you are waiting in the lobby for the lift to arrive to take you upwards to your desired floor, some bum comes from behind presses the button to go down and proudly announces to his wife, "You see the lift if up so if you want to bring it down, press down..." the wife looks at her all-knowing husband proudly as if he is the sole survivor of the battle that eradicated the entire hemisphere.

Once upon a time in a land far far away, was a village where twins Chinki and Minki used to play. Chinki was smart, Chinki studied well. Minki was brave, and Minki learned well. Chinki is a genius her father used to say.

Today for the first time he decided to finish some work. No it was not due to any pressure, it was due to apathy. He used to see her across his office everyday, begging on the street. He always gave her a coin without fail.He would then proceed to buy two vada-pav for office. He had joined the office twenty years ago, fresh out of graduation. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to do something different. So what he was a clerk in a government building, he still was someone. On his first day to office, he realized he was no one, soon he realized his work didn't matter. "As if the people will go to some other office," said a senior officer shamelessly on his first day of office. "13922125 people living in this city," said another one, with almost accurate data, but then he realize this senior was googling something on the very slow VGA monitor and the statistics turned up, "And we are just 200 managing all that data. As if anyone cares......

The laws of physics had gone for lunch break, he thought. He had jotted down, classified and categorized all the problems he could ever face in his entire lifetime. Hanging seventy feet high up in the air by his shoe lace was not one of them. He was not even supposed to be here, not like this anyway. But his limbo poised a serious question that would reflect on his entire lifetime, which way should he go? He had climbed this building to go down, he used the lift while going up but will now use gravity to do is job to take him down. Gravity you be bitches, he exclaimed. He had seen his shoe lace loosen as he stood on the edge of the building to jump. He considered tying it but then ignored, where he was going there was no need for a shoe lace, was there? All the seventy religious dogma and no one explained if you should tie your shoe lace before dying. Well, it was too late for that wasn’t it? Oh, well nothing he could do now could he? What was that buddhist story about the hunte...

Man is a social animal, whoever came up with this phrase was probably having high tea with his college buddies in canteen. Man is infact an anti-social animal, specially when canteen serves tea mixed with lots of water and a spot of milk which is hardly spotted. Social Media is everywhere, people are spending more and more time on Facebook, Twitter and erm… well… erm.. . Clearly suits (businessmen) and advertising agents do not like it. No after spending a millions of rupees in adding a jingle to their product, they learn that the customer for whose brain wash they had set it up is busy on Facebook, they will get angry. So then they change tracks and start popping on Facebook and Twitter and soon mindless rant turns commercial, and when it comes to money, the policy is prepared for the employee and on and on. One thing Social media does not give you is let live. Earlier when you used to talk to the wall, no one would like it. Now you talk to the wall and you get million likes (y...

Something was not right with this world, he decided. How could this world spin so peacefully? He had lost her, LOST HER. how could the world even spin? There was something definitely wrong. in the final moments of desperation he had panicked. He did not know if it was the right thing to do but he did it. Yes he did it. She gave him immense pleasure, yes she did. Till her last moment of the existence, she lived to satisfy him, to please him. A few moments ago he would not have even cared about her, but he had touched her. He had felt the coldness on his lips, they felt numb. Her cold exterior only gave him intense pleasure. That’s it, he decided, this world should stop spinning. This world should pay the price of is negligence. He stared at her, blue berry ice cream with extra truffle and butterscotch lying limbless on the floor. The molecular structure had come apart due to heat, the ice cream was melting along with his hopes for a decent Sunday afternoon. He had seen her fa...

In the geography class when the teacher used to tell, "India is a developing country," for a moment I was confused, what is developed country I asked. She fumbled with her saree and explained something that was nowhere closed to the answer very confidently. Still however, I never understood the meaning of the sentence and that was the B.W. era, aka Before Wikipedia in fact it was Before Internet era, so there was no one other than my school text book who could give me this information. I remember walking sadly home, that why my country is still developing when it dawned on me. It occurred to be when I was walking home one day from school and I fell in a ditch dug  on the road. I could have sworn that the ditch did not exist fifteen minutes before, no one believed me. However it dawned me inside the ditch that, India is a developing country because someone somewhere is always developing something. It was uncanny. The street outside my house was dug ...

The oldest memory I have of the one dream since childhood was to grow up. If someone would ask me why exactly did I wanted to grow up, I am sure I could not answer it. Why exactly I wanted to grow up, I have no idea, but Ill tell you its not pretty. They say, age brings wisdom, I say they lie. Age just brings you better excuses to things. Every year you live in this world, you adopt to its crazy sense, you lie for living. You give our excuses for things. Some excuses are very common, like act your age or it is against religion or it is against humans but excuses are there. If being 25 is halfway there, on 26 I have crossed the threshold to what? I am not sure. Although however you convince people, you can handle it, they don't believe you. While growing up, you are led to believe that there would be a time when you are old enough, people stop telling you what to do. Turns out, just like other childhood myths like girls are not mean little girls, drinking milk is g...

Reservation is a funny thing, everyone wants it, everyone fights for it and after standing in the line for 2 hours to get the caste certificate, after proudly getting admission in the most premiere college in the state for 10% less than cutoff and after carrying the responsibility of 300 years of misery and slavery of the entire tribe, the candidate walks the shallow halls of a professional college, only to realize, he was hoodwinked. His entire caste told him this was the path to success, the sure-shot way in which the upper caste earned money but here, there is nothing. Nothing at all, shallow halls that remind him that he was nothing compared to everything in place. When it comes to earning the right, there was no caste system. Everyone was and is miserable. The upper caste remained upper because the lower caste never thought otherwise and now 300 years later when he got the chance to make it right, he realizes it is a long way to go because the essentials of why the ...

What actually made him leave the comfort zone he could not tell, he could not even tell when he left the ozone layer. The thing is Rajan left planet earth once and for all. How he left it was a different matter altogether, it had something to do with getting a box of donuts to certain people at NASA and a box of chocolate chip at the pentagon to approve a interstellar flight. The thing is, he did it. Today, 467,700 trillion light years away he felt like it was just yesterday he left planet earth. Which in-fact was actually true. That's what his digital wrist watch told him, only one day had passed since he crossed the asteroid belt between mars and Jupiter (It has to do with some complex time-space continuum maths, I am not the right person to tell you what it is) But anyways, the journey to planet Handltnus was boring, it was not at all as interesting as those space sci fi movies showed them. The intergalaxy national highway was cleaned and neatly paved with ether for s...

Gone are the days when people (read: some model no one knew about) used to take a vow of stripping down to bare basics for the sake of the country. Now a new air of patriotism has hit the market, going on fast till your demands are met. People under the delusion that in a country of 30% people sleeping hungry at night actually care about their determination. Obviously media needs fodder and a godman, abandoning his daily fruits and milk for the greater good of the nation, is fulfilling their need. Obviously this is not as powerful news as a godman in a sex scandal or godman in a murder case (Godmen do come in news for all wrong reasons no?) but it's ok. Its not always that a celebrity buys a ak 47 no? Such things happen once a bluemoon, so anyways the news is hot a godman flew, yup flew, in a copter to Delhi to sit on a fast for.... Err... What is he fasting for? Anyways, coming back to stripping for patriotism, I figured it would be more effective for at least we would be expo...