one of each kind

I haven't blogged in some time because a lot of things have been happening lately in my life. Some of them have turned my life the other way around, other not so significant and some have made me ponder over various trivial issues which we normally "busy" people tend to ignore.

"It was around 9:30p.m., on a Friday night. My dinner was done. it was my treat along with 7 other people for my entire project team. The food was great, so was the ambience but as usual people just did not want to be on time. So, whilst some of us finished licking our lips after the yummy carrot halwa, others just started arriving. And these others include even the senior most of people who are supposed to set examples to us beginners. Life is not just about being and doing well at your work place. it is about carrying that same spirit and ideas outside too. It is quite sad to see how the very guys who insist on punctuality and efficiency in some delivery to be done to some person sitting across the world just because he pays us in those little green notes, now do not care about keeping up time and making people wait as the stakes are apparently much lower. This is one form of hypocrisy I despise and i suppose one form which cannot be stopped. It has to come from within. It cannot be induced. Anyway, not deviating from my main theme, I had to excuse myself from the dinner party as it was quite late and I would miss my bus to my place if i didn't leave then. So, I said a final good-bye to all and left for the night. Waited at the bus stop for 15-20 minutes but there wasn't any sign of the bus. There was this other lady who had to go to her home which was quite close to my place. She was a little older than my mother and I felt maybe if we were off towards the same way, we might as well share a rickshaw, as it was getting pretty late. She agreed on the condition that i share the fare with her. OKKKKK...In the rickshaw I did offer her, more than 2-3 times, the choice of taking the auto to her place, and I said I would manage if she dropped me off somewhere close by to my place but she politely disagreed. The whole journey was quite eventless. She said a sentence or two about how she had to get home before 11 as her son would be home then and she had the house keys. That one concern of hers quite touched me. Here she was, this lady, who knew nothing of me and yet in these dangerous times where the headlines in most papers read about so-and-so person being abducted, abused..etc etc., accepting an offer to share a rickshaw with someone less than half her age, all for the fact that her son need not wait after he gets home. WOW. I was quite amazed by the unconditional love a mother can have for her child. Then, her stop came and she paid for more than her share. Asked me to keep the money in spite of my reluctance to do so. She then quickly jotted down her number on a piece of paper and asked me to call her around 11. That was quite surprising. I reached home at around 15 minutes to eleven. And then called her exactly at 11. She asked whether i reached home safely without any problems and said I could call up anytime I needed to talk. "

I do not know how much significance this incident may seem to have but it sort of gave me a new look to life. there I was surrounded by people who I work with day in and day out, not caring much for making me wait and showing that all I really was to them was a piece of resource to show to the client. And here was this lady, who knew nothing of me and yet she was concerned whether I reached home safely and invited me to call up anytime I wanted to talk... What a world we all live in!!!!
" Tell me, tell me, who are these around me with no mask
With no more, with no more intentions than those shown
In their words, in their covers.........."

comfortably bum-ed

YES!!! its the Floyd influence which has got me writing again. This time around my behind is comfortably sitting in..wait..lemme check..nope.... the maker's name isn’t there anywhere on the chair.Surprising!!! probably they didnt want people like me to come after them for making such comfortable chairs and making us soooo very lethargic and make us think so much. You may wonder why they call it "BENCH". shouldn't it be called like "CHAIR".

Where does the "bench" word originate? Maybe in the dark ages times, in the times when feudelism was a craze, the landlords and the czars used to punish people by locking them up in dungeons and giving them nothing but a bench to sit on with no work also. just chained to the BENCH. I probably guess thats what set the "BENCH MARK".I can imagine the simple peasants who eyed the evil landlord's daughter with little malicious intent sitting on planks of oak or teak muttering to themselves." how can this be that bad?". MUHAHAHAHA. Thats all we all think at the start.."hey. i am on bench. not bad. i get paid for doing nothing. only research or prostitution can be more gratifying". But thats why peasants will be peasants.

Let my take you briefly through the course of the evolution of the BENCH....
It all started out one fine day when HE got bored with just creating archaeopteryxes and brontosauruses. HE decided to have some fun and create a new funny breed called MAN. Well, actually this new breed was called NEANDRETHALS but then he gave them two bad characters. ONE was the opposing thumb(you know...that’s how you grab stuff) And another was intelligence. The power to think. The power to say what you are thinking. The power to BLOG. These Neanderthals decided to call themselves different things from ramapicthucus, sivapithucus(yes. Mrs.jyothi…I didn’t sleep in your bio class so much after all.) and now they are called HOMO sapiens (gee!! I wonder why?). Anyway, as I was saying, the HOMOs…wait.. lemme just refer them as humans or MAN in general so that I can be spared being called a sexist and a narrow minded person….so, these humans got bored of doing nothing all day, and hence “adam” and eve decided to PLAY around and eat the APPLE (and they say, “an apple a day…”) and pissed HIM off real bad. He decided “you HUMANs always keep running around, destroying whatever I’ve built. I am going to punish you now. Now go, sit on that little plank of wood and think it over about how bad you have been.GO!!!” and that my friend is actually how MAN was doomed and the tradition began. Because that’s what made man THINK. He was happy till then playing around , eating fruits, screwing “eve” all day long. But now he was on the BENCH. His mind was subjected to what we have called now learnt to call as BOREDOM. He began to THINK and hence he EVOLVED. That’s what set the cave man thinking and he got this load of inventions and discoveries. And all thanks to the rest his buttocks got on that little wooden plank. That my friend is the HOLY GRAIL of all humanity, That very plank of wood on which humanity began. We have all been mislead so far to think it was some cup, a chalice etc.etc but NO. The first bench is what most historians consider the true holy grail.

Anyway, going ahead, that thinking of man is what led to the civilized world Man created fire. He must use it to make women cook and not to light his friend’s cigars. That’s what exactly happened to bench. Men used to worship it in the early ages. Then came Christianity (thanks to something that Constantinople did).which forbid IDLE worship..err …I mean IDOL worship. They preached religion and soon in then dark ages, the bench evolved from being a sacred symbol of worship to a means of torture. People did try and fight back all this during the Renaissance period and then the Reformation period. The great thinkers from all over the world hid their message in their paintings and statues. You think Leonardo drew the last supper to indicate whether the person next to Jesus was a man or a woman? He couldn’t have cared less about it. He was actually showing us THE BENCH on which Jesus had the last supper. That’s where Jesus thought and that is the Holy Grail we should all be after.

A few centuries later came the industrial revolution and along with that came with the steam engine..the printing press. Books were written about this BENCH. And that’s what Thomas Moore wrote when he talked about UTOPIA (no use arguing with me about this because I have’nt read the book). But, man conveniently chose to ignore this message. Anyway, then came the world wars. And again THE BENCH was responsible for this. Some smart ass decided “Throw HITLER in prison. He is no good.” And voila. They put him in those prisons (highly evolved dungeons) and gave him nothing but a BENCH to sit on. That’s where he wrote the MEIN KAMPF which translated in german means MY BUTTOCK. He thought when he was on the bench. And hence decided that the best way to teach the world was a lesson was to go out and kill a few jews and you know how the story goes from there. U.S. and their allies somehow won that world war too, not realizing what the true cause of it was. The cold war, the Vietnam War and many such useless wars came and went but no one realized the truth. All the wars were fought by men, who resting their behinds on a one or the other form of a BENCH. It makes you think man!!!

That’s the power of the BENCH. One bench to control them all. THE LORD OF THE BENCHES. Why do you think football coaches put their not-so-good players on THE BENCH? So that they can think. Think of what they can do to improve the game and the world in general. That’s the true power of THE BENCH. It makes YOU think. Not many people realize it though. Why do you think modern day policticians fight for the “KURCI”?. It’s just another form of then bench where the person sitting in it has to do nothing all day long and he gets to think. This has been the best kept secret in the world. So, I hope I did my part in spreading the message. Now I must go, before I can be tracked down and beaten to pulp for writing this article. But what can I do, it was my duty. I had to keep up the tradition. Don’t blame me. Blame it on the BENCH dammit. I cannot help but think when I am sitting on it…

“…………. Now I got that feeling once again.
I can’t explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably bum-ed.........”