Amit's Reflection: "Fuck me? Fuck you! Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it. Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job you fucking fucks! Slow the fuck down! Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps. Fuck those motherfuckers that grenaded our soldiers in Uri. Fuck this fucking Metro Traffic. Fuck this smell of people in the bus. Fuck those grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in their country, still no speaky English? Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. shit. Give me a fucking break! Tyco! Imclone! Worldcom! Fuck this fucking job change. Fuck the colleague next to me. Fuck that chick with a conniving prick. Fuck overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched, all taut and shiny. Fuck the uptown brothers and those fucking YouTube trends. Fuck the priests who put their hands down some innocent child's pants. Fuck the church that protects them, delivering us into evil. Try seven years in fuckin Otisville, Jay! Fuck al-Qaeda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling, fundamentalist assholes everywhere. Fuck all for killing innocent thousands, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your seventy-two whores roasting in a jet-fueled fire in hell. Fuck this phone. Fuck that Apple 7. Fuck this misery. You ain't fooling anybody sweetheart! Fuck you bitch for putting me up on the rocks for 5 years. I gave you my trust and you stabbed me in the back. Sold me up the river. Fucking bitch sipping on club soda, selling whiskey to firemen and cheering the Bronx Bombers. You had it all and then you threw it away, you dumb fuck. Fuck I still love you. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck that I am into it today. Fuck this anger that I project on others. Fuck that I'm angry at myself, at my shortcomings and my helpless failures. Fuck that I look for scapegoats and dump the unreasonable avalanche of emotion on them. God Kill me. I wanna die.

                 Amit's MBA in Anger Management

Amit's Reflection: 
"Fuck me? Fuck you! Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it. Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job you fucking fucks! Slow the fuck down! Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps. Fuck those motherfuckers that grenaded our soldiers in Uri. Fuck this fucking Metro Traffic. Fuck this smell of people in the bus. Fuck those grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in their country, still no speaky English? Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. shit. Give me a fucking break! Tyco! Imclone! Worldcom! Fuck this fucking job change. Fuck the colleague next to me. Fuck that chick with a conniving prick. Fuck overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched, all taut and shiny. Fuck the uptown brothers and those fucking YouTube trends. 

Fuck the priests who put their hands down some innocent child's pants. Fuck the church that protects them, delivering us into evil. Try seven years in fuckin Otisville, Jay! Fuck al-Qaeda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling, fundamentalist assholes everywhere. Fuck all for killing innocent thousands, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your seventy-two whores roasting in a jet-fueled fire in hell. Fuck this phone. Fuck that Apple 7. Fuck this misery. You ain't fooling anybody sweetheart! Fuck you bitch for putting me up on the rocks for 5 years. I gave you my trust and you stabbed me in the back. Sold me up the river. Fucking bitch sipping on club soda, selling whiskey to firemen and cheering the Bronx Bombers. You had it all and then you threw it away, you dumb fuck. Fuck I still love you. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck that I am into it today. Fuck this anger that I project on others. Fuck that I'm angry at myself, at my shortcomings and my helpless failures. Fuck that I look for scapegoats and dump the unreasonable avalanche of emotion on them. God Kill me. I wanna die.

       You've got a terrible name? Pity!

Do you know the name of your maid? If you don't, chances are you'll be the first to accuse her of theft if you misplaced your earphones (only to find it in your car two weeks later). When you don't familiarize with people, the communication and emotional barrier is always present. And what is the first step towards building a relationship? Bingo! Knowing each other's name. Something we tend to ignore mainly because of laziness than anything else. The immediate excuse is, why include one more contact to your phone? There's already more than enough on your contact list whom you haven't met or heard from in over a year now. Fair enough. But the people i'm talking about here happen to belong to the lower rung. People who are perennially overlooked for some reason best explained by the fast emerging middle-middle class. These are the very folks who serve you in the cafeteria on a daily basis; the guy who salutes you (as if you won PoK for the country) while opening the colony gate; even your office boy whose job is to clean the mess your leave on your desk. They are everywhere and yet nowhere. They remain nameless. The most basic tenets of civilization is not accorded to them. And then we wonder why some restaurant didn't let a driver have a meal. Chances are racism might go out of fashion someday soon. But classism? Can't say.

        Along the way to a journey called Life

They say life is a gift given to you by God. They say life is beautiful. Maybe they are talking about something that I never got to experience. For me life has been a little rude. Maybe a bit more than that. I got married some thirty years ago. But you can never guarantee the success of a marriage. Initially it felt good. I believe there should be two people to keep the relationship together. I wanted to be a good house wife and only God knows I tried my best to set things alright. God knows I tried to become a woman every mother-in-law wants. Sometimes you give up on people for so many reasons. Not because they don’t treat you with respect and love but because they try to snatch your freedom of becoming an independent woman. I had a dream of becoming an actress which dried up along the way in life. 

But there was always something within me that didn’t let me give up on my dreams. As you go along the way, your dreams also change. New ideas open your mind. So, now I am a successful dietician and astrologer. I believe health is the biggest gift in life that you can give to yourself. I truly know it from the bottom of my heart. I cannot skip a day without good healthy food. I also run aerobic classes for women. It feels good being with them, sharing happiness. I work 15 hours a day.  I have decided that I would be keep standing by truth, by hard work and by everything that makes me happy. Because I don’t like being lazy, most importantly, being dependent on people. I am a happiness seeker. After all, happiness is all what everyone is seeking. Isn’t it? 

    Breathing Football Day in Day out

I can’t recall the day I fell in love with Cristiano Ronaldo watching him in the field on TV. I am a huge fan of Ronaldo. I always managed to watch Real Madrid matches. Sometimes, I would get up in the morning at two and my parents would get disturbed in their sleep. India is a big country. But I haven’t given up in thinking as yet that it would not be able to collect best Football players in the world. India is new to Football. But not new to hard work and passion it can put in any game. Be it then in Cricket or Hockey. I have always played Football in my school. My friends always call me as a Football freak but they also often encourage me to be a Footballer. I know becoming a Footballer is a dream for me. But I know following your dream comes at the cost of your family and l don’t want to hurt my family because I love them very much. I can sacrifice even my life for my family. Football is just a small thing. All I want my family to know is that their Manoj loves them very much.

 Sultan Punches above His Weight

It’s not every day in the morning that you get up only to watch a Salman Khan movie. Trust me I am not the ‘coolest’ guy that indulges in watching the typical Bollywood stuff. But today I did. And, I did it for two reasons. (A) I didn’t have much to do (usually I do have a lot do including reading a lot of books, chatting up with people on Facebook and Tweeting sort of some weird stuff) because of Eid. (B) I hadn’t seen any movie in the past few months and this I had in my mind –you can call it a movie reminder but I call it a task-at-hand. So, it was after I was convinced to death by a colleague of mine who not just bought a ticket for me but also made sure that I get picked me up in his Honda City CRV from my home to the Saket PVR. There was a huge crowd out there. Huge! I didn’t see that crowd even when I last voted in Delhi Election –it was my first time when I voted for Arvind Kejriwal.

Coming back to the subject, Sultan is about a young wrestler of India who had no ambitions until he fell in love with Aarfa, Anushka Sharma. Life halts midway for Sultan Ali Khan when he ends up at losing her. And it’s when he starts his real journey in quest of life, determined to take back his self-respect and love. Sultan takes a challenge to be in the Mixed Martial Art (MMA) tournament only to take control over things. I must mention that I sort of cried watching Salman Khan. Yes, I did. Sultan is possibly going to be one of the biggest Bollywood stuff ever watched by Indians, maybe across the world by Non-Indians. There is an emotional touch which keeps you connected throughout the movie, making you think in a what-next mode. You must go to see this movie in theatres –it’s not that fun at home you get to see in theatres, isn’t it? Having said that, there is one masterstroke scene in the movie where Sultan is looking at his body in the mirror, being out of shape and this will surely keep your heart bleeding. So, take a chance, even if you ain't in riding habit of watching Salman’s movies, and thank yourself later.

    Uttrakhand –the Land of cloudbursts

Uttrakhand has been a beautiful place. Not only for me but also, I am sure, to all those people who have ever stopped by there to witness the gigantic mountains made of magnificence and breath-taking greenery supported by Holy rivers of Gods. It’s my native place. Of course, for me it’s a different feeling being out there. Yes, it is.  In literal meaning Uttrakhand means the Northern Land. Uttrakhand is also referred as (Devobhumi) the Land of Gods. Uttrakhand has also been an ancient Puranic term for the central stretch of Indian Himalayas, a mountain range in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, this is the place where ancient rock paintings, rock shelters, Palaeolithic stone tools (hundreds of thousands of years old), and megaliths provide evidence that the mountains of the region have been inhabited since prehistoric times.

However, today with hundreds of people being maimed and killed due to cloudburst and floods in last a couple of years, the government seems to have learnt little and have done only almost nothing to the security of its people. I don’t want to go into the political stuff and neither I want to blame on anyone for this. Because all I just want to say, not point out, that people living in such cloudburst-prone area should be given security from such horrific events for God’s sake. I know it’s not under my control. (you’re right!). But somebody must take the responsibility for this job. After all, it’s us at the end of the day, affected and afflicted. So, we all need to take this thing a little more seriously. It’s the need of the hour. And how do we do this? Well, next time these goofy politicians come to your area scrounging for votes, you must raise this issue. Of course things won’t change dramatically. However, hope is something they say makes things okay for people down the road. Isn’t it? So, let’s hope that God will bestow his grace on us. If the government doesn’t. 

     Laws that made a Chutiyapa out of Americans

Where is a thirsty person supposed to go when the laws of the land don't hold water? That's the question worth sleeping with in times like these. For a change, I'm referring to the USA instead of India here. This is not to forget what a mess of a nation we've built for ourselves but two events from America compel you to think through the surface. Americans takes pride in being a functional democracy with utmost regards for laws. But if a rapist gets preferential treatment for being an ex-Stanford and a psychopath can get easy access to weapons, something is rotten. Brock Turner of Stanford received six months (he'll be out within three) of imprisonment in a county jail (not even a federal prison) for committing unmentionable acts to a sloshed woman. Omar Mateen killed 50 and injured 50+ in Orlando (wonder how he managed to pull off this action single-handedly but then, he pales in comparison to Anders Brevik who killed 77 and injured 300+ in 2011) merely because he couldn't stand gay men. Whatever their backdrop, these two ungentle men proved how ineffectual human laws could be. Neither of them had a Wikipedia page five weeks ago but now they do. They are a part of our daily conversations. A part of our reality we can't escape. A reality we need to deal with. A situation the world, including India, can't afford to see a new chutiyapa out of Americans.