void main{}

(Of Nothingness, with nothingness..)

Of late I have started wondering what it would be like talking, As in talking with no other intention than to talk - Maybe to let out some steam, but not in a directed spout – not pointed at any one, so it wouldn’t serve that purpose either - Pointless blabber with the only point in it being to stay pointless.


Best industries have the best practices, and the best of the best practices says get organized – Classify your data , so that your thinking may be evaluated, approved, and documented so the lower-downs can put reading them on their timesheets, and the higher ups can find the spelling mistakes..
Taking the aforesaid possibility, steam of course has to be classified (unless he’s Achuthanandan’s nephew, that is.. which I don’t think he is) into the ones that fit in the pattern – our pattern, and the ones that do not. What fits our pattern? Not the sort that comes out of the pressure cooker with that low hushed whistle (before you put the weight on it) and not the more noisy and irritated (and/or irritating – depends on your cooking- yes if dal or no if chicken) Shhh… after you put the weight and it had had enough.. They don’t fit in – no Sir!


In both the cases the steam has a purpose and a direction – the purpose being to cook and then the direction being upwards – all steam goes up, but that is a steady viscous speed – un-accelerated velocity – that is acceptable, but when the pressure in the cooker rushes the process, pushing it out, that is an unnatural directed push – wholly, totally unacceptable.
Like your boss asking you to work – wholly, totally unacceptable!

Thanks to all the free time that my job gives me, I have taken to reading – and of all the things in the world, I have taken to reading BLOGS! Until a very short while ago, all reading to me was futile (The fact still remains untouched by and large, but I have discovered in the meanwhile what a great pastime this can be.. writing stuff, and having people to actually read it – amazing!).
Serious fiction to me was useless depression; and all the lousy roantic thrillers make life look too easy and happening, so that amounts to the same thing as well, but of a slightly higher degree.. emotional desperation – total distress!

I have already deleted three whole lines (on MS Word 2003 – would have been two lines on the a fine print paperback, I think) because what I was communicating were my views about certain things – things meaning books and writers - plural, hence things. There would be two deviations from stated objectives – one being that it would be a breach of the original theme of this leaving a void in your brains, like a laxative – it goes in, and it goes out, and washes itself out in the process.. End of procedure- nothing remains, at least what remains would be less that what was already there, and what triggered the process would definitely not remain.. I have been told several times that olive oil taken raw works. Or was it olive oil ? Gramma’s cure – am I giving you an idea? Well I don’t think I am, because you’ll be a fool if you take it.. This was not supposed to give you any information*– remember? (*The book definition of information being data that has been organized and presented in a systematic fashion to clarify the underlying meaning)

I have a cold – contracted while riding on the outer ring road pillion to a friend whose bus was supposed to leave at six. It was a quarter past six already, and we were doing a sixty, and even at that rate, the bus bay was a good quarter of an hour away (provided we don’t fall down and split our heads open in which case it would be different – I have always fancied hanging like the city smog in the air post death, seeing all that is to be seen - distance no bar, engulfing everything, and the time standing still like the republic day tableau..)

Anyway, we were on outer ring road doing a steady sixty, when the rain came down, uninvited and most definitely unappreciated and seeped in through my permeable (instant discovery) jacket forming numerous serpentine streams finding their way past the chest hair..
Who said life was totally unpredictable? The first sneeze and I already knew he was coming – the cold clod Cold (the first two were adjectives and the last cold was a noun). He was waiting inside me like a dry withered seed, waiting for the first drops to comedown, so that he could grow a tiny root, and a tiny shoot.. and grow, against all odds, and become huge. Like them saplings on an unattended moss covered old cracky wall, growing in the crack, growing outside the crack, and finally leaving an enormous crack where the wall once was.

GSP (Something like GDP) This one is called Gross Slimy Product!

That seed of Mr. Cold grew in me, and his shoots emerged through my nostrils – thin watery shoots – watery would be a less than apt description.. It was much more free flowing.. Consistency something like that of alcohol.. Thinner, a lot quicker..
Like time thickened barks, the shoots have now grown thick.. They are so much like automobile grease now.. It has all coagulated into a sticky semisolid mass in the dark depths of my nose.. There is only one word that can describe the feeling in it’s in near wholeness – Irritating!
I cant breathe, worse still I cant smell the smells of the world.. The world therefore is much smaller a place now, There is a hollow now where the smells used to be.. Like a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle- they never seem to make any sense without the pieces in the centre, and the smells for sure are pieces from somewhere there. It is like MTV when you got a call and the mute button was the minimum courtesy to be applied – it’s so much less than incomplete.

Mr. Smell has died of suffocation, because he tried to swim in that pool, but the pool thickened, like gravy that was put to simmer, and then forgotten... Gravy that has solidified, and got burnt at the edges of the pan.. Mr. Smell died of the state transition of the fluid he was swimming in - and he froze, like the fly in Jurassic park – A sad premature death.
Wonder how long it will be before some nosy scientist finds him, the fly, and builds the monster that once was, back..


(I sigh, blow my nose on the already sticky hanky, and leave.. exeunt Bala, his nose, the slime.)