Leisure's Lament

There used to be a time when Man
Would set aside his trivial vexations
Would find relief from his monetary pursuits
Would slide off the corporate treadmill of docs and sheets
To lay his tired head on my lap of contemplation.

Free to ruminate about the wonders of the world
The possibilities that existence has to offer
The moments that made him bawl with laughter
The moments that made him appreciate being
And free to ponder why those occasions affected him so.

And in so doing, unlocking the blueprints
To his elusive, shifting, complex nature
The million minute neuronic cogs and gears in his brain
And how they sculpt, mold and foster what we call personality.

Pick up any dime-a-dozen self-help book
Go to any swindling sadhus or conniving conmen of Christ
From the two dollar tarot reader to the two thousand dollar image consultant
The advice drops largely the same
Know thyself.

But how can you know thyself if you have
Never spent time with yourself in silence?
Never gone backpacking with only your backpack for company?
Never applied to yourself the critical filters with which you happily judge others?

For it is only when you step back
That you see the forest for the trees
That you see what is and what should be
That you see what you are and what you want to be.

Money is my bête noire
A little bit for sustenance, sure
A little bit more for pursuing me, even better
But every extra penny earned is another free second sacrificed
And the ticks have a nasty habit of slipping you by until it's too late.

And is it not weird that in the prime of life
We spend five hundred minutes of sunshine in a capitalistic cage?
And when we are withered, wizened and wasted
We reward ourselves with the leisure our young selves were denied?

So make a lengthy voyage alone
Pass some time with your own cerebellum
Understand it as you would your best pal.
For sometimes solitude is its own reward.
For sometimes leisure is worth its weight in gold.

Stud's Story

There was once a boy in our batch who was a stud. This is his story. Let us call him Stud. And what a stud he was, that despite being in the first year, a female in the fourth year fell in love with him. Things progressed quickly from Facebook to Gtalk to missed calls to phone calls to brief encounters to amorous meetings. Every moment spent together was full of blissful happiness, every second apart felt like an eon. Like out of the pages of a Mills and Boon novel, they found themselves living and breathing the cliches all of us have come to know and cringe at, only they found bliss in it.

But alas! Fate played its cruel hand. The lady passed out from the institute the next year. She lived in Lucknow, a good 4 hours away from Stud's heart. The boy was to remain in Kanpur for 3 more years. But they stayed in touch, exchanging amatory words and secret messages, blushing at what the other said, exchanging their innermost secrets, and living as one soul. Suddenly all the things in the world made sense: the romantic movies, the people risking their lives for love, the mushy conversations that usually make one wince, the fuzzy feeling in the pit of one's belly, the Beatles' songs, being on top of the world, the raw unadulterated happiness, the best half hour of the day when they would talk to each other. As a kindergarten student learning spelling would say, they were in l-o-v-e.

Then one day came The Call.

The girl told Stud that her parents were going to a neighboring town for the weekend. Finally, an opportunity to see the other's visage! Stud wasted no time. He was on a Lucknow-bound bus in 15 minutes flat, and reached her house some 3 hours later, picturing her in his head the whole time. Her colony. Her house. The welcome mat. The doorbell. The footsteps. Her beautiful face. He was rejuvenated by its sight.

He had no time to make any romantic proclamations. A rapping thud on the door announced the parents' return. Maybe they forgot to take their tickets? Why do people always forget their tickets? There was no time to contemplate. Stud scurried up the stairs like an unfaithful husband dashing away from his rolling-pin-armed wife. He zipped into the first room he could find and quickly scanned his surroundings for a place to disappear into. There was none. The closets, locked. The space under the bed, occupied. The space behind the curtains, too obvious. Leaping out of the window from the second storey, too adventurous. Like a video-game addict in a free-to-play arcade, Stud was stuck. 

Trying situations bring out the best in people. Normally, Stud would not have dreamed of being brave enough to jump two floors. But as he heard his lover's parents climbing up the path leading straight to him, Stud discovered a cache of courage hidden deep inside his conscience. As the voices got closer, Stud wasted no time in pulling the latch, pushing the window and hurling himself downwards.

It is no secret that the flexibility and endurance of the human anatomy can be improved with practice.  Certain disciplined individuals can train themselves to swim a dozen kilometers, cycle two dozen and run three dozen, one after another. Other springy individuals can coach themselves to contort their bodies like a mobius strip on acid. But Stud lacked this elasticity, never having had the time to practise leaping off buildings. He knew he wasn't bendy enough to survive this fall unscratched. As the hard concrete ground wrapped his descending anatomy in a loving embrace, his ankle bone bent and pushed up against his calf bone, and Stud let out a horrible, piercing, blood-curdling scream that woke up every non-drugged baby in a dozen kilometer radius.

It took no time for a sizeable crowd to gather around Stud, attracted by the abnormally loud howl of his acknowledgement of his body's shortcomings. The girl's parents were soon at the scene, and things were not looking good for our hero. Based on the location where he fell, an amateur trajectory-calculator could conclude that he had leapt from the house of the girl. The parents undoubtedly had some questions for Stud, but they first asked their daughter if she knew the gentleman lying spread-eagled on their porch.

All eyes were on the female. Stud could hear his own muffled breathing in the silence.

"No, I don't, I've never seen him before. I didn't allow him inside the house, he must have broken in."

Mob mentality is a frightening thing. One does not realize how soon they can be stirred to action with an avalanche-like exponential speed. All it takes is a good initiator. It is very scary. They have strength in numbers. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Good Initiator: "A crook! He broke into the girl's house in broad daylight! Let's teach him a lesson! Don't spare him!"

Poor Stud. He was given a sound thrashing on top of having a broken foot and that too in front of his darling. They always said that love is painful.

The poor girl (not as poor as Stud though, he could literally feel the pain) had to see Stud get pummeled and it was because of her. Once the pugilistic public had their way with him and left, she could not even utter some words of apology and consolation, as she had to shepherd her parents as far away from Stud as possible. Stud's college wing-mates had to come down from Kanpur to put his injured, humiliated soul in a homebound bus.

And this is the tale of Stud, an anecdote of youthful crazy love, which must be kept in secret isolation from the adult society, due to the so-called rules of  proper and decent behaviour imposed by them. The optimistic storyteller would say that one day, lovers like Stud will be able to express their love-dovey feelings in the open, without fear of public bashing and two-storey-falling. But I am a practical storyteller, and hence I say to all the young couples out there: next time, make sure your parents don't forget their tickets.     

Baseline Wolves: The CPI Song

This is the third post in the Baseline Wolves series: links to the first and second post.

The CPI song was the only music video we made during our movie-making courses in IIT Kanpur (IITK). For the uninitiated, "CPI" stands for Cumulative Performance Index, a scale from 2 to 10 which measures your academic performance in IITK. The CPI Song started off as an idea to lightly lampoon everyone in campus, from the pot-smoking, devil-may-care sluggards to the hyper-excessively-sincere angels, the "maggus", as we affectionately call them. After a casual viewing of the CPI song, a few people incorrectly infer that our purpose was to mock people with high or low CPIs, but really, all we wanted to do was make fun of everyone without any fear or favour.

The Lyrics

So we started with the idea of a song making light of all the different types of academic species observed on campus. We decided to use CPI as a structural element and go from CPI 2 to CPI 10, creating a caricature for each one based on our friends and experiences. This turned out to be buckets of fun; I still vividly remember many spasms of exploding laughter that made me stop typing and rest my laughing, bobbing head on the keyboard for a pause of breath between all the maddening mirth. 

We put a second chorus in the middle, after CPI 5, to create two roughly equal groups of stanzas. We had only one lady in the video, CPI 8, because of two reasons: actual availability of actresses and the fact that 9:1 is kind of close to the actual sex ratio on campus (the actual ratio is much, much worse, as if you care). After CPI 10, the song was supposed to end with the original chorus. But we were in a rapturous, crazy, experimental mood after all the fun lampooning and decided to add a 'wild card' to our gang. This feral ace-of-spades is so far removed from the CPI system that he possesses a CPI which does not even exist. That's right, Mr. CPI 1 may not be well off academically, but he is a paragon of the entrepreneurial spirit.  

The Music

We wanted to make an original, catchy rap beat to go with our merry lyrics, however a lack of time prevented us from doing so. If I remember correctly, we started this ambitious project a mere 10 days before the commencement of the end-semester exams, also known in IITK as the worst-time-of-your-stay-here-by-far. So, to save time, we picked up a song from Youtube that matched our requirements (sorry original creator, we would've passed you some money if we earned it ourselves). 

The song was sung with a little help from my friends, as the song budget was $96 million too less to hire The Beatles (performance fee: $96 million). We gave the stanzas of every CPI to a different person, however, just for fun, as far as possible, we made sure that the person singing for a particular CPI was never the person who acted for that CPI in the video. 

The Video

The storyboard ideas for the individual CPI stanzas came quite naturally from their lyrics. For all the chorus stanzas, the idea was to "go to all the cool places on campus and do all kinds of silly dancing". Here are some desultory thoughts of mine about the video:

Some of the dancing shenanigans were inspired by Youtube jesters like Jon Lajoie and Remi Gaillard. 

For CPI 4, we intentionally wove in Hendrix and The Doors as we knew their larger-than-life tattoos existed on campus. 

CPI 9's story is often misunderstood or not understood at all. We were trying to satirize the hypocrisy of the people who study all the time but always try to appear like they never study.

The random-cycle-spoke-zoom shot at 1:47 is a personal favourite.

I also love the flippant and amusing manner in which CPI 8 shoots down the line-up of hopeful Romeos at 2:21.

CPI 10's what-the-%&^#-am-I-watching shot at 2:50 is another cherished chuckle-worthy moment.

CPI 1's packet of cocaine (3:24) is a packet of chuna (lime) obtained at MT, the place on campus where you get cigarettes and tea. And chuna, of course.

Hitler was mentioned in CPI 1's lyrics as a reference to the parody Hitler video we had made earlier (link). Hearing it now, it seems a bit out of place!

The Music Video

I guess that the best thing about the CPI song is the large number of people who make an appearance in it. The song will serve as a fine musical memento of all the good times and fun people in IITK. I'd like to thank all the people who helped us make this memory. I am also thankful for Lady Luck for putting me on a collision course with this music video, and I hope and pray that it is not the last collision I have.

The music video:

Nocturnal

Suraj was facing a problem he could not solve.

As a physics student in an engineering college, this was not new to him. He regularly faced mystical riddles about relativity and quantum mechanics which he could not fathom, let alone answer. He often said that the things he did not understand in those two-hour physics sessions could fill the Library of Alexandria many times over. But it was palatable. He was not the only one, after all. The baffling and complex strings of physics had trapped many a poor student in its 12 dimensional web.

The issue facing Suraj was how to get to the physics class on time. The class occupied the much-loathed 8 a.m. time slot.  But Suraj was a nocturnal fellow. All kinds of productive ideas as well as fun ways to waste time would ferment in his head after the sun went down. It went against his raison d'etre to get out of bed before noon at the earliest. So Suraj did the only thing he knew.

He did not get out of bed before noon at the earliest. And missed four classes in a row. He skipped the 5th one in order to wake up early enough to catch the 6th, but missed that due to the mountain of laziness triggered by the greasy pizzas he devoured at a birthday treat that night. His alarm malfunctioned and the 7th class went down. He decided to take a break from the stressful pursuit of waking up on time and gave up classes 8 and 9 to recuperate. Class 10 was the one. He was fresh, eager and guilty enough to do it. But would he?

Well, he didn't. The guilty party in this case was caffeine. Suraj developed a strong liking for this drug during his recuperation period. The repeated pumping of sweet coffee into his blood stream made him overflow with excitement. To satiate this intense excitement, he pursued and finished a lot of strenuous tasks which exerted his brain and got him tired and made him sleep even more. 

Unfortunately, his absence in ten classes had not gone unnoticed by the eagle-eyed physics professor, Mr. Verma. He was a reasonable man who had been in the profession of teaching long enough not to take things personally.

"At the time of the birth of the universe, there was only a single point. A singularity which exploded and gave rise to everything we see and beyond."

Rajeev was Suraj's best friend. He was sitting in the last row of the Physics of the Universe class taught by Mr. Verma. He was enthusiastic about many things but cosmology was not one of them. At present, he was pondering about the beautiful motion and the delicious violence of the action sequences in a superhero movie he had watched last night in a slightly inebriated state.  There was some physics involved in those fight scenes, so any diligent lawyer could argue that he wasn't slacking off in class entirely.

"And what name do we give to this explosion? You, on the last bench."

In Rajeev's mind, Batman was about to deploy his batarang to end a long, stylish fight when a sudden shake of his shoulder by the boy sitting next to him dissolved the entire scene, and brought up another one, that of a class, with fifty students and a bemused professor looking straight at him. The tension in the room told him that the question had already been asked, and he had not heard it.

"The Big Bang." Someone whispered next to him.

"The Big Bang."

"Yes, that's right."

"Thank you so much." Someone whispered again. Experience told Rajeev to trust this voice.

"Thank you so much."

"Right, OK. Don't get too excited. It would be an embarrassment if you didn't know that, so knowing it doesn't exactly deserve a medal."

Rajeev was too sleepy to taste the snipe. Also, he was groggy and the professor was a soft talker so he didn't exactly hear him on the last bench. One could say that he just heard some mumbling.

"Right, of course. The medal I deserve but do not need right now. Wait, what?" he muttered incoherently.

Fortunately for him, the professor returned to the story of our universe's grand birth. Five minutes later he stopped to take attendance.

"Suraj". He liked to start the roll call with the students he had never seen.

A very long but completely expected silence greeted him.

"Does anyone here know him?"

Several heads turned in the direction of Rajeev, tacitly revealing to the professor the identity of the truant's friend. Unfortunately, in the five minutes that elapsed since his last eventful conversation with Mr. Verma, Rajeev's mind went back to its usual thespian business. It was now in the middle of a tense confrontation between Batman and The Joker.

"Rajeev, is it?" asked the professor loudly.

It's quite amazing how the human brain works. You could be musing about marshmallows and mulled wine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, but a single sound of a growling predator will be enough for the brain to pump up the heartbeat, focus your attention on the threat and get some of that sweet adrenaline flowing. The sound of his name had a similar effect on Rajeev. It launched a rocket into his hypothalamus, which made him sit upright, suddenly realising where he was again.

"Could you tell Suraj to come to class and see me once in a while?"

"Yes, of course, Sir. I will tell him about the...um...the thing you said."

"Right," the professor said, looking amused and perplexed in equal measure.

Rajeev remembered to relay this message to Suraj later that day.

"Mr. Verma asked about you today in class."

"Dammit, that's the one at 8 in the morning, isn't it? I've lost count of the number of classes I've missed."

"You've missed enough to get yourself to the top of the roll call."

"He starts attendance with me every day? Damn, there goes any hope of a proxy."

"Why have you not come to class?"

"Look, I've been trying, OK? Nothing is working."

"A loud alarm?"

"Snooze button."

"Coffee?"

"Overcompensation."

"Sleeping pills?"

"Woke up 14 hours later with purple pimples all over my face."

"Make a friend wake you up."

"I once slept though a magnitude 8 earthquake, so a mate shaking my shoulder will not be enough." 

"Shaking your shoulder? How about a pail of cold water to the face?"

"That's a bit too dramatic for me. Maybe I'm not cut out to do it. I feel that getting up early is against my raison d'etre."

"Why the &%$( are you using French you pretentious sloth? Have you been reading Voltaire's philosophy again?"

Only Rajeev was nice enough to insult someone in a manner that made him look good.

"I'm using it because it means "purpose of existence" which is the meaning I want to convey."

"Then why not use "purpose of existence" itself?"

"Because...umm...OK, well, anyway, how do I get up at 8 and still be nocturnal?"

"I'm sure a battery of sleep scientists are working overtime figuring that out."

The sarcasm missed its intended target as the target was lost in thought.

"Wait, I've been going about it the wrong way," the target finally said.  "I've tried a dozen ways to wake up early. But what I should just do is stay up all night."

"That idea may just be stupid enough to work."

Indeed, it was. With a combination of caffeine (in moderate doses to prevent the recuperation catastrophe) and combo-heavy video games, Suraj kept himself completely conscious and comparatively chirpy till the chime of his cuckoo clock announced the cosmology class.

"Today we will look inside of a black hole."

Suraj felt like a black hole had taken residence inside his brain. He had been awake for 22 hours now, and a tedious thrumming inside his head clamored his eyes to pull the curtains down. He fought it, second by second, minute by minute.

The end of the class loomed near. The professor stopped for roll call.

"Suraj," he called out, expecting the usual silence.

"Here!" Suraj replied, shattering that silence.

Dr. Verma's curious eyes scanned the room to find the source of the shattering.

"Good morning Suraj, it's nice of you to finally decide to join us."

"Er...yes."

"I can only wonder what calamitous circumstances prevented you from coming to any of my earlier classes."

Fortunately, Suraj had a long and undistinguished history of fabricating petty falsehoods. As a teenager, he once got out of detention by convincing his teacher that a stray cat sneaked into his room, attracted by the smell of his non-existing pet hamster, and ate his homework. ("I tried to catch the cat burglar, but you know how agile those felines are, professor.")

"I had to visit my relatives for a wedding."

"Where was it?"

"Mumbai," Suraj replied immediately.

"What was the name of the bride?"

"Erm...Pooja," said Suraj after a bit of hesitation. Hesitation implied guilt.

"It took you rather long to come up with that."

Unfortunately for Suraj, Mr. Verma had a longer and more undistinguished history of running into fibbing truants. His bullshit detector was in prime lie-catching and truth-probability-detecting form, enhanced by years of practice on nocturnal equivocators.

"Well, they're only distant relatives. I don't know them that well."

"I see. And the wedding took 2 months?"

"Well, no...see, there was also period of recovery..."

"Recovery? So you had to endure a lot of physical hardship during the wedding? Did you take part in the nuptial triathlon?"

"No, I meant the recovery from the nasty cold I got just after the wedding."

"Right. And of course, you visited the Health Center for a certificate right? You know the rules."

"Well, by the time I was feeling fit enough to step outside, the cold has already dissipated..."

Mr. Verma sighed at this shockingly unoriginal fabrication. The students were losing their mojo. They weren't the Frank Abagnale-esque yarn-spinners he had encountered in his salad days. Wrecking their house of lies wasn't even a challenge anymore.

"All right, Suraj. I'll give you one last chance. If you miss one more class, you have to come to my office with some proof of the wedding and your infirmity. Otherwise, I will be forced to send your name to the Dean. Are we in agreement?"

"Yes Sir."

"That was a close shave, what?" Suraj uttered right after attendance.

"I thought for a second that he saw through the whole thing." Rajeev replied as they started walking back home.

"See, that's the thing. I think he knows I was making it all up. I think he just gave me a chance out of kindness. But you know, I've learnt something today. Everyone is unique. We should explore and understand our body clocks and circadian rhythms and be in sync with them. We owe it to ourselves to live our lives to the fullest."

"Aren't you trying to justify all the classes you've bunked by lazily slapping a cliched moral to your sad adventures?"

"I guess that's the advantage of telling your own story."

Baseline Wolves: A Day in the Life

This is the second post in the Baseline Wolves series. Link to the first post here.

Out of all the movies I made in the movie-making courses during my undergraduate years in IITK, A Day in the Life is closest to my heart. Though it is a bit difficult for me to explain why. It could be due to the personal nature of the story. It could be because when we started thinking about this movie, we were bursting at the seams with ideas. This was the first long (10+ minutes) movie that we made in the course, and hence it gave us the opportunity to put many of those ideas to the test.

The Story and Cast

The assignment was to show the life of an entity for a day. This could be a living person, like a teacher or a student, or even a tree or a piece of rock on campus. Following an inanimate object and giving it a personality would have been interesting, but we decided to follow an IITK student as we had many ideas and jokes we wanted to use in a college setting. 

At this time, I was absolutely in love with the TV series Scrubs and it was the main inspiration for the plot. I wanted to capture the fuzziness that good episodes of Scrubs bring out. I wanted to have three or four parallel story lines which merge in a meaningful and poignant way in the end. I and Saketh were writing the script, and we decided that the main character would solve problems that his friends bring to him. To give the plot a little twist, we wrote it so that the main character inadvertently causes the problems in the first place.

As we were not a super-rich production house, we could not afford to have a round of auditions for casting. Instead, we went around asking our friends to join and act in the movie out of the goodness of their hearts. We were too lazy to think of fictional names for the characters, so we decided to use real names for the most part (except for Savita, who plays a girl called Mira, don't remember why!).

So, the main character was played by yours truly, and Aditya, Shashwath and Saketh were the three unfortunate people whom I would rescue in the story (after putting them in trouble myself, of course). The next step was to think of the problems they could have. So, we wrote Aditya as a bright student who misses an exam, Shashwath as a devil-may-care truant who hides his bad marks from his family, and Saketh as a hopeless romantic who can't express his feelings towards Savita (Mira), a girl he likes.     

Now came the most challenging part of the writing. We had to figure out how my character (Ashish) causes these problems for his friends. We made Aditya and Ashish roommates and decided that Ashish would turn off Aditya's alarm accidentally making him miss the exam. One down, two to go. We then decided that Ashish would get a phone call from Shashwath's mom inquiring about him and Ashish would unknowingly spill the beans about the exam papers being shown. Two down. Saketh's problem was a bit difficult to weave in the plot. But in the end, we decided to use that classic element of humour, the switcheroo. Ashish would accidentally give Saketh's gift to Savita on her birthday. This will make Savita avoid Saketh and force him to express his feelings. Mission accomplished.

The Dialogue and Music

After we finalised the structure of the plot, most of the dialogue came rather quickly. We wanted to show the audience the different types of crazy people you might encounter at IITK, as well as the ebb and flow of a day here. Through our main character, we wanted to show the audience all the usual IITK meet-up spots: the Hostels, the chat stalls and MT, of course. (MT is the place on IITK campus where you get tea and cigarettes at 4 in the morning, from 5:57 in the movie)

Some of my favourite dialogue in the movie is during the "saying things that make no sense" scene in the first half (2:40), because it encapsulates the various kinds of characters you might run into in IITK, which makes it such a fun place to live. I also like the "84 mm at a time" dialogue at the MT, (6:25) kudos to Mohit for that.

I've got to say, writing the dialogue is one of the best parts of making a movie (as long as you've decided the plot beforehand). The thrill of creation really comes alive when you are writing the dialogue. You can glorify the things you love (cryptic crosswords, Arrested Development and gaming) while making fun of the things you hate (Himesh Reshammiya, sadistic professors and KSBKBT), all in your own special and stylish way with your own music playing in the back. The sense of freedom is exhilarating.  

As far as the music goes, I and Saketh were (and still are) huge CCR nuts. Bad Moon Rising had a nice, relaxed groove which fit well with the light first half of the movie. In the second half, we wanted a more emotional and fuzzy song. Aditya suggested Collide by Howie Day, which was incidentally used in Scrubs as well. We tried it and it fit great.

The Movie

It's been around six long years since we made A Day in the Life but many happy memories of creating it are still fresh in my mind. And I would like to thank all the people whose contributions made this possible, where ever you may be now.

Link: