Restless, bored out of my wits, listening to some band called Rubyhorse and waiting for 4 o' clock to leave. I am leaving early today. My flight to Chennai is at 6. I have one bag, not very heavy. It has 4 books and around 15 DVDs and some clothes. Why am I telling you this? Why do I tell you anything at all? Some questions have no answers. I'm rambling.

 

I saw Alien Vs. Predator 2 days ago. I liked it. What is wrong with me?

 

I like Keane.

 

Read 1984 again. Big Brother is Watching.

 

Apparently condom sales are the highest during Navratri in Surat.

I want to see School Ties. Don't ask me why. I just do.

31 out of 100; you?

 

Time Magazine's Top 100 movies

 

A - C

Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972)
 
The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959)
 
The Awful Truth (1937)
 
Baby Face (1933)
 
Bande à part (1964)
 
Barry Lyndon (1975)
 
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
 
Blade Runner (1982) (Seen)
 
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) (Seen)
 
Brazil (1985)
 
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) (Seen)
 
Camille (1936)
 
Casablanca (1942) (Seen)
 
Charade (1963)
 
Children of Paradise (1945)
 
Chinatown (1974) (Seen)
 
Chungking Express (1994)
 
Citizen Kane (1941) (Seen)
 
City Lights (1931)
 
City of God (2002) (Seen)
 
Closely Watched Trains (1966)
 
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)
 
The Crowd (1928)

D - F
Day for Night (1973)
 
The Decalogue (1989)
 
Detour (1945)
 
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
 
Dodsworth (1936)
 
Double Indemnity (1944)
 
Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
 
Drunken Master II (1994) (Seen)
 
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (Seen)
 
8 1/2 (1963)
 
The 400 Blows (1959)
 
Farewell My Concubine (1993)
 
Finding Nemo (2003) (Seen)
 
The Fly (1986) (Seen)

  G - J
The Godfather, Parts I and II (1972, 1974) (Seen)
 
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) (Seen)
 
Goodfellas (1990) (Seen)
 
A Hard Day's Night (1964) (Seen)
 
His Girl Friday (1940)
 
Ikiru (1952)
 
In A Lonely Place (1950)
 
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) (Seen)
 
It's A Gift (1934)
 
It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

K - M
Kandahar (2001)
 
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
 
King Kong (1933) (Seen)
 
The Lady Eve (1941)
 
The Last Command (1928)
 
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) (Seen)
 
Léolo (1992)
 
The Lord of the Rings (2001-03) (Seen)
 
The Man With a Camera (1929)
 
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (Seen)
 
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
 
Metropolis (1927)
 
Miller's Crossing (1990)
 
Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980)
 
Mouchette (1967)

N - P
Nayakan (1987) (Seen)
 
Ninotchka (1939)
 
Notorious (1946)
 
Olympia, Parts 1 and 2 (1938)
 
On the Waterfront (1954) (Seen)
 
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) (Seen)
 
Out of the Past (1947)
 
Persona (1966)
 
Pinocchio (1940) (Seen)
 
Psycho (1960) (Seen)
 
Pulp Fiction (1994) (Seen)
 
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
 
Pyaasa (1957)
 

  Q - S
Raging Bull (1980) (Seen)
 
Schindler's List (1993) (Seen)
 
The Searchers (1956)
 
Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
 
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
 
Singin' in the Rain (1952) (Seen)
 
The Singing Detective (1986)
 
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
 
Some Like It Hot (1959)
 
Star Wars (1977) (Seen)
 
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) (Seen)
 
Sunrise (1927)
 
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
 
Swing Time (1936)

T - Z
Talk to Her (2002)
 
Taxi Driver (1976) (Seen)
 
Tokyo Story (1953)
 
A Touch of Zen (1971)
 
Ugetsu (1953)
 
Ulysses' Gaze (1995)
 
Umberto D (1952)
 
Unforgiven (1992)
 
White Heat (1949)
 
Wings of Desire (1987)
 
Yojimbo (1961)

I have marked those that I have read. I have read only 30 out of this 100. How many have you read?

Time Magazines 100 best English Language Novel from 1923 to the present

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm (Read)
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories (Read)
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin (Read)
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited (Read)
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

C - D
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22 (Read)
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye (Read)
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange (Read)
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

F - G
Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman (Read)
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind (Read)
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath (Read)
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby (Read)
F. Scott Fitzgerald

H - I
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas (Read)
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius (Read)
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

   L - N
Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Read)
C.S. Lewis

Lolita (Read)
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies (Read)
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings (Read)
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim (Read)
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight's Children (Read)
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway (Read)
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer (Read)
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984 (Read)
George Orwell

O - R
On the Road (Read)
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Read)
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India (Read)
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime (Read)
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

S - T
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five (Read)
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury (Read)
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Read)
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises (Read)
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

I don't like people who laugh for nothing. There is this guy I met a few days ago who did "Hi, How are you? How do you like Hyderabad? Ha ha ha ha". Why? Why force yourself to laugh when nothing funny happens? Ugh. And then I have to politely smile.

 

Then there are these people who are always smiling. Oh god I hate them. Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman.. that kind of smiling all the damn time.. I don't know if I am expected to be my normal self or if I am also expected to be smiling all the time? My face hurts, people! 

 

So, is Bin Laden dead or not? He has become like Elvis.  

 

I want coffee.

 

3 days to home.

Brilliant weekend. As usual, I didn't do much of what I had to do - like grocery shopping and throwing out the milk and taking out the garbage and calling people and stuff. And I did a lot of TV and books - I finished Winds of War - 3 hours on Friday and all of my waking hours of Saturday and 6 DVDs of amazing stuff. I saw this almost 10 years ago and I remember so much of it differently - or maybe I am mixing up two different 2nd world war movies/series. Didn't Natalie go to concentration camp? Didn't Warren die? Wasn't Byron part of the French resistance? How many movies am I mixing up?

 

And then on Sunday, I finished Young Hornblower and Admiral Hornblower omnibuses (Is the plural of Omnibus, Omnibi?). Again, brilliant stuff; though I didn't get why he married Maria. That brought me to Sunday evening and I finished up the day with Enemy of the State and I, Robot. I saw the end of I, Robot for the first time. I sort of liked it better this time, than when I saw it earlier. Maybe the print makes a difference - and the end wasn't cut off, so that is a huge plus. I got confused between Jack Nicholson and John Voigt in Enemy of the State. that ever happen to anybody? If J.N hadn't been wearing glasses with yellow lenses through the movie, it would have gotten very weird.

 

My eyes hurt.

 

How was your weekend?

I was in an accident last week. My bus hit an auto and it toppled over. The bus driver ran out of the back door and didn't come back. The people in the auto were ok and we, in the bus, were just annoyed that it had to happen when it was raining so hard.

 

And today, another accident.

 

Is there a patron saint of accidents?? Anyway, this time I was on my way to work and we were about 10 mins to destination. A truck tries to overtake us, my driver swerves for some reason and the truck hit/scraped a window. I was fast asleep and woke to the sound of shattering glass. Glass showered over 4 girls sitting on those seats and Squeal! Shriek! The bus stopped, the truck stopped and both the drivers proceeded to yell at each other for the next 15 minutes. Then we finally went to work. Why do people smile so much after an accident in which nobody was hurt? Adrenalin rush? Oh we live again, so let us be happy? Anyway, in the 10 minutes that it took to go back home, everybody was big grins and loudly talking of all the other accidents they/their family/their hairdresser's third cousin's great aunt had been in. Much fun.

 

This would be the third bus accident I have been in without getting hurt. I am going to run out of luck one of these days.

 

What plans for the weekend?

Don't you just hate people whose feet/shoes/socks stink? I was that person today. I really really need to buy foot wear that don't collapse with the first rains. Horrible. Nobody is coming within 10 feet of me. Rooms empty when I go in and the queue at the bathroom mysteriously vanished.

Have you ever wanted to fart very badly but couldn't because there were other people in the small, closed, air conditioned room with you? If you can't run out of the room, and don't think that you would be able to fart silently and blame the guy next to you, what do you do? Let it rip and say "Better out than in"? or "Who me?" or "What smell? What noise?" or "Is the toilet leaking again?"...

 

Not that this has ever happened to me.

Notice anything different here?

I just love listening to Staind, reading comics, checking out Go Fug Yourself, planning my next trip to Chennai and the one after that, and making appointments at 10.30am on a Friday.

 

What should I do next?

Chronicles of Riddick - I didn't remember most of the movie though I had seen it twice before. I totally did not remember that Judie Dench was in the movie. And was that Eomir?

 

My bus was in an accident yesterday evening. He was going way to fast and took a corner on slope at around 80kmph on a busy road. An auto was crossing the road and BAM! The auto fell on it's side. Tires squealing, brakes screeching, yelling, cursing, honking - the works. The bus driver got out of his seat, walked down the bus to door at the back, got out and was never seen again. He vanished. In a few seconds, a crowd gathered, bleating for the blood of the vanished driver. They righted the auto and fortunately the two guys inside were ok. Rattled but otherwise fine. I hung around for a few more minutes, got bored and took an auto home. How jaded am I?

Do you find people of a certain "type" unbearable? Do you find it difficult to look beyond some first impressions?

 

There was this girl in college; short, high pitched voice, and she had a weird walk. Disliked her on first sight. A guy in college - tall, dark, deep voice and the first impression I had when I spoke to him the first time was "Smarmy Bastard". Cut to now - woman, weird, high pitched voice, round, and smiles all the time. My first thought - fake. I can generally get over first impressions. Some people I thought were stuck up and rude and obnoxious are now very good friends of mine. So I can change my minds about some people, but others, nope. Not a chance. They draw the same reaction from me that a cockroach does and we all know how much I just love the roaches. I don't know why. In the case of the first girl, nobody else liked her either. So I figured, good gut reaction. In the case of the guy, everybody liked him and I couldn't stand to be in the same room with him. And I haven't quite figured out the latest yet.

The girl who sits in my cubicle is just a little weird. She "diets" on puris and sprouts cooked in butter (not together). What is the point, one may ask. She has a logic behind it. Apparently food needs to taste good even if she is dieting; and hence the butter. And since she wants to have healthy food - the sprouts. The puris were just a phase. She got over that after we made fun of her. We are mean like that.

 

My favorite non-healthy food (groups) are cheese, ice-cream, chocolate, chakkarai pongal, adirsam, all payasams, and I am so hungry now.

 

What did you have for lunch today?

 

 

Whenever Amma went on one of her cleaning sprees, I used to make excuses to get out of it. And even if I couldn't get out of it, I never had to do any real work.. Krishna, Murthy or Devaki had all the tough work; I just had to supervise in my area and most of the time, this just involved yelling "No No No, Don't thow away that Tinkle Digest. I know I have'nt read it in a decade but I might want to read it sometime", and Amma would anyway override me in everything. So, no big deal. I could just vegetate in front of the TV when other people did all the hard work and got the house shiney and looking good as new.

 

Unfortunately, things have taken a 360 degree shift in my life. I worked all saturday, got home, and crashed. On sunday, I wake up to my roommate telling me that it is 10.30 and I have slept for more than 12 hours. So what. That is what sundays are for. So I said 10 minutes and turned over. She sat down next to my bed and proceeded to prattle on about what she had done on saturday. I cracked an eye open and asked her if she had decided that I had had enough sleep. She said, "yes and you can lie down for 10 minutes". How kind. I got out of bed, did the dailies and had coffee.

 

By then, I had a vague recollection of the two of us deciding to "clean the house this weekend", sometime during the week. It sounds so easy when it is "later". Later was now and there was no getting out of it. So we started. First job, washing machine balcony. So much garbage!! 2 bags of garbage later, we moved to the kitchen. Much more garbage!! We had bags of all kinds - laundry bags, food world bags, paper bags from fabindia, cloth bags from god knows where and more. So we took all these bags and put them all in a large bag. Then we started on old plastic bottles - pepsi, coke, mineral water, medicines and one bottle of some weird semi-solid brownish sticky substance. We didn't have a bag big enough to take all of this, so we dragged out a large cardboard box and put all of this in that. This was followed by old pressure cooker, and newspapers. We had about a hundred newspapers, still rolled up. We broke some stuff we were planning on keeping and with heavy hearts, we threw those away too. Now, we had no junk in the house but how were we going to take this unbelievably huge and heavy cardboard box out of the house? We tried picking it up but it was torn on one side everything started falling out. Not good. So we used the pai. We put the box on the pai and manouvered it out of the house and to the place street where the garbage guy collects the stuff from every midday.

 

Now that all the crap was out of the house, we swept and mopped. The house is divided into two between us. D cleans her room, the dining area and the kitchen; I clean the entrance, the living room and my room. My area is bigger but hers is more cluttered. So more or less even split, I thought. Then I started sweeping the entrance and SO MANY SHOES! Mine, hers, the earlier roommates. About a hundred. Pick then up, sweep under, put them back. The rest of the house was easy. Then D mopped. Just as I was about to breathe a sigh of relief and go bathe, D said, "Now that we have done so much, why don't we clean the windows too?"... Why don't we indeed. So 6 windows and one cut finger later, I finally bathed. Phew.

 

Bathed, ate and slept. Got up, ate and went right back to sleep.

 

How was your weekend?

 

Oh yeah, I totally forgot, we cleaned the fridge out too.. There was a really bad smell coming so we threw everything out and cleaned it from top to bottom with Pril. now it smells nice and lemony. And clean.

Working this saturday too. How about you?

 

Damn, I'm a poet.

I make fun of other people's fears. But I have my own little secret fear. Not secret anymore, but still...

 

I have always had a very irrational fear of cockroaches. Always. There was a time when I was so scared of them that I wouldn't go into a room that had a cockroach until my mom had gone in and scared it out of the door/window or killed it or told me that she talked to it and it promised to behave nicely. What can I say? I never said it was a rational fear. I am not so scared by them now. And by that I mean that I can approch one from behind a can of Hit.

Anyway. A couple of days ago, I got home at a decent hour and D wasn't back yet, so I had no one to whine about my day to. I turned on the TV. It was stuffy and the fan was stirring up the hot air, so I opened a window and went to get a bottle of water. When I turned around from the fridge, I saw a HUGE cockroach fly in through the window I just opened. It was HUGE. I don't mind small cockroaches. The big ones freak me out.

 

I froze. It went under a pile of cushions. I didn't know what to do. There was no Hit. (D had bought a can of something called Cockroach Stop a couple of weeks ago. But it said Non-Toxic. What is the point? I want it to KILL the damn cockroaches, not make them sneeze! Then I read on and it said "Non-Toxic to humans". Unlike Hit and Baygone which give you death I guess. Then it said, "dehydrates cockroaches and insects from the inside out." Ugh. Does it kill them or make them thirsty??) So I took the Cockroach Stop and a broom and went toward the pile of cushions, gingerly. And nudged it. The roach scampered out and ran toward my room!! No No No. Wrong direction!! So I sprayed a little CS ahead of it and it turned - toward me!!! I ran out of the way and it went to the balcony where we hang clothes to dry. No No not there either. There was no way out of there. So I sprayed some CS again and this time it turned toward the door. Right direction finally, but the door was closed! So I ran ahead of it and opened it. By now it was moving under the influence of CS and seemed a little woozy. It was still not dead. If I had used do much Hit, the damn thing would have died by now. Anyway, it went out of the door without much further ado. Phew. I discarded the weaponry, washed my hands, shut the windows and sat back down in front of the TV.

 

I looked under the bed before I went to sleep. And switched on the light and checked the bathroom before going in.

I was in a call right now for about an hour and a half with two other people. I set up the call, said hi to both of them and then proceeded to not say a word for the rest of the call. And since the speakerphone was being a pain, I had to hold the phone up all the time and now my ear is hot. All for nothing. And at the end of the call I said my good byes and put the phone down. For this I missed lunch.

 

Sigh. Have to go eat now and come back to work.

 

Government holiday today in Andhra Pradesh. For visarjan. Why do they need a whole day to put the Ganesh idol in water? ANd why can't they do it after working hours? Dammit. Why am I in the oofice when an entire state's (and several others') population is enjoying a day off in the middle of the week.

 

I complain too much. Way to much. Chronic Complainer - that's me. 

Sad me.

 

Vish - I have become one of those sad people who are dependant on their phone for everything - remainders, time, phone numbers, and moral support. I am one of those people I used to make fun of.

 

The weekend was weird. I squirmed out of coming to work. A bunch of people turned up in hyd from bangalore and mumbai. We saw Cars. It was not very good. They had taken a generic racing movie and made it colourful, changed the dialogues a bit to fit in a "cars are people" world. Not fun. Entertaining in bits and pieces but overall, bleh.

 

I didn't get my phone back. I have a new one now. Nokia 6030. It does not have a camera or bluetooth or internet and it can't make breakfast for me. I can use it to make and receive calls, send and receive messages, store numbers, as a timepiece and alarm. Now all I need is a connection. I hate that I am so needy.

 

I went back home on friday and looked at the laundry basket. It was full and there was a pile of clothes as tall as the laundry basket next to the laundry basket. (I have written laundry basket 4 times now).

 

So my roommate and I went out and bought a washing machine. That is 9000 rupees gone, bam, between the two of us. Last week, we went to buy bean bags and ended up buying a dining table. Bam. 5000 rupees. One phone. 4000 rupees. And I haven't even paid the rent yet. And cable and electricity and TV rent and refridgerator rent and phone bill and so on and so forth. Money just flows out of my account.

 

I told a cousin about this place. 1st member of the family to know about this other than the sister. Hi S.

 

Go work.

I lost my cell-phone. I think the other two people who sit in my cubicle are playing with me. But if they are, they are damn good actors. Damn it.

 

And I just found out that I have to come to work tomorrow. Ugh.

 

I want my phone.