staying.cool « Saying a lot, saying a little… who cares?

pulling things off the back-burner

Jul 9th

I’ve mentioned the general tendency for things to remain in ‘Drafts’ for way too long around here. Take for example, my deconstruction of ‘Raavan’ vis-a-vis ‘Raajneeti’.. which was started on 2 weeks ago. And has yet to see the light of day. I don’t think it ever will now. I can only wonder about what is going to happen to my Disney/Bond deconstructions.

Yes, you read that right. Disney/Bond. Deconstruction.

I’m now going to throw my hat over the fence and try something a little more ambitious than just saying to myself “1 post a week, dude. Thats all it takes to keep your blog alive”.

*drumroll* I’m attempting a serial story. *drumroll peters away as player batteries run out*

The underlying idea, to be honest, is not my own. Its a hybrid of ideas that one friend threw at me.. another sort of fleshed it out a wee bit more. But, since then, it’s languished in my archives for nearly 7 months now.. and I think that if I start writing it, I might actually get round to having it in readable form. Which would be nice.

So, given that I’ve only barely thought out a few parts of it so far.. there will be continuity issues. You know it. I’m going to retroactively edit in case something turns up as a glaring error.

Plus, I’ve wanted to write a serial story since I was in 8th grade. You don’t want to know why. It had nothing to do with reading stories from the Womens Era magazine. Honest.

Currently, it is entitled ‘The Man Who Was’. Will update this post with the archive link for this story once I have at least one part up. As of now, it is just another ‘tag’ on this blog; assuming I complete it, I’ ll make it a proper page and everything.

Parts will be numbered. Parts will be regular, as else I lose track of all trains of thought regarding this story. Parts will.. be interesting?

Part 1 will be up later today.

Comments/feedback, as always, will be essential. And much appreciated.

Update: Link to archive.

back, blogging, writing

posts are slow in coming round here..

Jul 1st

Posted by SEV in staying.aside

No comments

..I think it has something to do with the fact that my work is in a slow phase.

Funny how that worked out.

p.s. Yes, this is yet another “filler” post. Lets see what July has in store for us.

break, sorry

sibling rivalry

Jun 22nd

Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts

8 comments

Purple or orange? Orange or purple?

She looked from one to the other. And back. Then back again.

Someone moved in the far corner, and she whipped around to see what had happened. There was a movement in front of her which she felt, rather than sensed, and she reached out blindly. While turning back to the choice at hand.

The decision had been made for her: she was left with only purple now. Where was the orange?

*******************

“Ammmmaaaaaaaa! Ammmmmmmmmmmaaaaaaaaaaaa….”

Yes, that was me. Yes, I was whining.

My little sister was bullying me. She wanted my Superman. Actually, she had taken my Superman.

And given my parents absolute lack of concern about my Superman, it didn’t seem like I was getting it back.

*******************

She wanted the orange water-bottle. This purple one was clearly substandard. The cap had come off when she had pulled at it to open. Her elder sister appeared to have an invulnerable bottle. Plus it was orange. Orange was awesome. She looked around, her parents only seemed concerned that she not fall off the table. She had to make them see the point. She pointed at the orange bottle. No reaction. Split-seconds later, she started crying. Out loud. Pointing. And crying. Immediate reactions.

Except her elder sister. Who seemed perfectly content to watch TV while drinking. Out of that awesome orange water-bottle.

“Oh she wants your bottle, P___. Just give it to her. Its ok. See this purple one? Just as good.”

No effect on the older sister.

“She’s a baby, P___. You are older. Give it to her, na. When Daddy says something you’re supposed to obey, right?”

Read On… »

*******************

“Mom, she’s breaking my Superman!”

I was explained to that I was an older brother now. I had to share with my little sister. Plus, she was a little kid. How could she break things? Just watch over her. My mother had to get back to the kitchen, the rasam would boil too much otherwise. In the meanwhile, I should be a good boy and make sure that my sister didn’t get hurt while playing. In fact, if I played with her, I could play with my Superman too.

And so I sat with her and tried to explain how Superman could be made to fly. With his arms upright. Which was taken as an indicator that he should be rattled around while being held by one of those upright hands. Or his cape.

My poor Superman. That cape bit had to hurt. I winced in sympathy.

*******************

The older sister, now orange-bottle-less, sat patiently with the purple bottle that had been cast away. The cap hinge had come apart. She kept trying to get it back in place.. so far no luck.

The orange bottle, in the meanwhile, was happily being sucked out of by our erstwhile heroine. Somehow the water tasted sweeter. She gestured towards her parents with the bottle, receiving indulgent smiles in return. A wide, gap-toothed smile in return from her. And she went back to drinking.

Ah, life.

She glanced at her older sister. Who had managed to put the purple bottle back together. Hmm.. it didn’t look so bad after all. But then..

*******************

I had had the best plan in the world.

It had been to to make Superman fly really far away and really high into another room… only to have him come crashing all the way back to my sister due to interference by my mother. My sister didn’t quite like the idea that he was so far away from her.

Plan B. I attempted to barter Superman for my WWE wrestler action figure. It was proving a hard-sell. She wasn’t interested. Muscles and pose be damned.

*******************

The orange bottle was somewhat empty. That purple one appeared full, the one her sister had been drinking out of. Now it was right there on the table. She idly tossed the orange bottle one way, and reached out for the purple. Crawling. She had it!

Her older sister absently reached back for the bottle… and found it gone.

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…”

*******************

sibling rivalry I watched the mother put the orange bottle away, while the father swung the yelling baby off the table. The older sister sat content with the purple bottle, which she now shook tauntingly at the baby who was looking back while being carried away. Fresh sobs and yells. Exasperated admonishment from the mother: “P___, don’t! I’ll take that one away too!”

I smiled at the mother when she looked at me with a half-smile of exasperation, realizing that I had been privy to the drama. “I never won battles with my younger sister either.”, I said, as I left.

My younger sister always did get to keep my Superman. Until she pulled his arm off, after which he was discarded thoughtlessly. I never did manage to fix him, or restore him to his former double-handed flying glory.

War causes the most destruction to those most innocent, after all

True story.

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felt, memories

the inevitable filler

Jun 14th

Posted by SEV in staying.general

5 comments

If I had given it another 6 days, it would have been all of 2 posts over the last month. True writer’s block, I guess.

In past times, I’ve been able to resort to movie reviews, memes, random thoughts on tech and… you know, those items that apparently interest almost no-one but me. To fill space up. To have something to put in here.. the empty text box under ‘Add New Post’ that I have opened in a new tab every single day.

I kid you not. I’ve had this page open for one full f*ckin’ week. To no effect. Words I put down seem cliched at best. Lamenting the lack of inspiration. Lamenting the lack of time. Lamenting a deadline.

Y’know. Something similar to what you’re reading. Right now.

Well if its to be a filler post, a filler post it shall be. No point delaying the obvious.

Read On… »

Twitter twitter, tweet tweet twe– : As I knew would happen, post the initial high-throughput tweeting that happened after joining the damn site.. things have dulled, to say the least. A large portion of my tweets are RTs, to my frustration (I might have mentioned this in an earlier post, come to think of it). Original content comes rarely… mostly because I really don’t have that much to say. Life is not so exciting as to make things like free wifi interesting enough to tweet about. It feels like I’m not exploiting the service as much as I should or something, but I have no solution in mind.
Lights, camera, action!: The dullest summer yet as far as new movie releases go. Iron Man 2 was worth it for the phenomena that are RDJ and Scarlett (double props to Scarlett)… but that’s been about it, really. Even on the Hindi movie front. Whether we talk of good movies or awful/awesome movies. There is the highly anticipated ‘Raavan’ to come.. we’ll see what happens. Frankly more interested in ‘Raavanan’ due to the Vikram factor, tho. Testament to how dead the summer is movie-wise.. not a single movie comes to mind from the past month-and-a-half. ‘Inception’, ‘The Expendables’, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ are still yet to come.. so things may look up. We’ll see.
Dim lights, remote, sofa: Thanks to an awesome Sony Bravia EX308, I’m slowly making inroads into my massive to-watch movie list. And I’m worshipping the Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature (baked right into the TV). HD movies right in my living room! Including those random foreign selections that I keep looking for. TV serials too. See, movie studios? Piracy is so easily avoided when you make it easy to do things legally. I want to say that your 28-day moratorium on Netflix acquiring your new releases is a bad thing… but for the kind of online content made available in return, I’d say Netflix got the better deal. OK, getting too niche, moving on. Am I going to review any of the movies I’ve watched? Possibly only to say that ‘The Hurt Locker’ deserved every accolade it got. And ‘Death at a Funeral’ is pretty damn insane.
Tchuk-chuk-click: Despite owning my most awesome computer for a while now.. no games have made their way onto it! In fact, I recently realized that my 6-month hiatus from having a proper powerful machine has really taken a toll on how much I exploit my machine. A lot of the stuff I normally have on my PC has just not made its way onto it. Shocking for me, uninteresting for you. Will things be rectified? Stay tuned over the summer (for those who didn’t get it, the title for this bullet point is the cocking of a gun.. with an empty bullet chamber).
Search, search, search again: Batting a perfect game as far as paper acceptances go (on a side note, the phrase ‘batting a perfect game’ is highly misused today). But, as with everything else, at some point ‘rock bottom’ has to be replaced with ‘top of the rock’. That said, a recent experience has shown me just how much I can do something, and yet not really be bothered by the possibilities associated with it. Such is life. In case some of you are wondering why I’m being cryptic.. well.. get with the program.

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back, nothing to say, random crap, sorry

we’re still on..

Jun 4th

Posted by SEV in staying.in.my.head

3 comments

..at least for another year. I’ve paid for it. I’m going to pay for it. Ah well.

I think I should get down to one of those challenges where you post every single day for a month or something.

One of these days, I might.

Back to remaining deathly silent here.. complaining that I can’t think of things to post.. and slowly killing off any remaining creativity that I might have dormant within me.

That is all.

anniversary, back, demotivated, frustration, nothing to say