Note this!

1. Civil Disobedience – Thoreau
2. De Republica – Cicero
3. De Civitate Dei – St. Augustine
4. Discourses on Livy – Niccolo Machiavelli
5. Defensor Pacis – Marsilius of Padua
6. Introduction to principles of morals and legislations – Jeremy Bentham
7. Lectures on Jurisprudence – Adam Smith
8. Lectures on Principles of Political Obligation – T.H.Green
9. On Kingship – St. Thomas Aquinas
10. Politics – Aristotle
11. Philosophy of Rights – Friedrich Hegel
12. Republic – Plato
13. State, anarchy and Utopia – Robert Nozick
14. Spirit of Laws – Montesquieu
15. Summa Theologica – St. Thomas Aquinas
16. Theory of Jurisprudence – John Rawls

I had this scribbled with a black pen on a 3 inch bit of ruled paper and stuck on the stainless steel shower handle of the bathroom with a cellotape. This is it. I have officially been victimized by the Mad Cow disease ( For those who dont get the pun,Denny Crane!) aka exam fever.

Btw, this post was by (a novel) way of revising what I just rutta-fied in the shower. Help! The aliens got me! :O

 

From ‘The Holiday’

Oh well, Im in love with this scene : –

Iris – ” Turned out that he wasnt in love with me like I thought.What Im trying to say is, I understand feeling as small and insignificant as humanly possible.And how it can actually ache in places you didnt know you had inside you. It doesnt matter how many hair cuts you get or gyms you join or how many glasses of champagne you drink with your girlfriends,you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong and how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think you were even happy. And sometimes in that brief moment you even convince yourself that he’d see the light and show up at your door. And after all that however long that may be you go somewhere new and you meet people who’ll make you feel worthwhile again. Little pieces of your soul will finally come back and all that fuzzy stuff – those years of your life that you wasted, that will eventually begin to fade.”

Miles – Well fuck you need this more than I do. Thats what you are doing here, getting over somebody?

Iris – Yeah, this is me in good shape.

Miles – So he stays in touch?

Iris – All the time.

Miles – So that makes it imposssible to forget him which is great for him but sucks for you.

Iris – Ha! You see how great your life is compared to mine?

Miles – Ok lets go, Im making you some fettucini. It is Christmas eve.We are gonna sit out on the patio,make ourselves a little fire, pop some bubbly and we are gonna celebrate being young and being alive.
You with me Simpkins?

{ Have yourselves a merry little christmas, let your heart be light….next year all our troubles will be out of sight….Have yourselves a merry little christmas,make the yule tide gay, next year all our troubles will be miles away……..Someday soon we’ll all be together if the fates allow,until then, we’ll have to waddle through somehow….So have yourself a merry little Christmas now }

 

I belong…

Viridian realms,fresh air, the scent of wet earth rising through the rustling leaves of the tall coconut trees stretching towards the clear blue skies,vast greenlands,with not a soul in sight, the intoxicating smell of jasmine and cattle wafting to sated nostrils indulging in an olfactory feast of nature spread out for miles and miles around, like scenery on a never-ending canvas, beyond the horizon, the sparkling stream running through spilling its waters onto the pebbles – big,small,hard….several ramshackle, primitive huts resting in the shade of the huge, tall banyan with blades of lime grass and little white flowers at its root – in full bloom……*shudder*….I couldnt last there for more than a day!

I was just thinking about it recently,listening to a group of chirping enthu cutlets going on and on about ‘Oh how I wish I could live in the village, how peaceful would it have been…’ (and you know, that sort of inane thoughts that you voice,with a cappucino in hand,sitting on the leather couches at Barista, once in a while when you are blinded to the dependent city brat image that stares at you outta your reflection on the coffee table) and I have come to the grand conclusion that Im a city person.Out and out.

You can keep all that extra oxygen you offer and all those idyllic pleasures of lying amidst lush fields under open skies. I prefer lying on my couch, lighted by the dim erotic shades of the chinese table lamp i have by my bedside (with painted storks instead of real ones) and finding heaven in the smell of chocolate cake(made out of cakemix) baking in my microwave, and yeah,not to mention the tetrapack of aam panna in one hand as the other types away on my laptop.You might find romance in listening to old melodies on the broken transistor, but I prefer my Ipod Nano with its 8GB storage.You would rather sit beneath the willows and let the wind whisper untold stories to you? I would rather read the Harry Potters in my bookshelf or maybe even listen to the audio book playing on my Winamp.You might actually love skimming your feet in the red mud and wash it in water laced with algae, but I prefer the warm water in a bucket and pampering my feet with foot cream and safely enveloping them in cushioned carpet slippers. Im contended with spraying my room with jasmine room freshener rather than have their dried powdery bodies litter my floor. I prefer to see a sea of lights and buildings when I look out of my curtained and mosquito netted window, a knowledge theres a city out there, rather than be stuck in a soulless, lonely set up.

Peace to me is in a sense of belonging, not with nature, but in the crowd, in the hustle bustle, in that constant white noise, amongst confusion, even if its just outside my window…….this is where I belong.

 

Tuppence

There are Best Friends and there are Leading ladies…..maybe I was tailor made for the best friend role.Forever.

 

August 2007

The kiss did not turn him into a prince; he morphed into a bloody frog.

 

Blah !

Read this on a friend’s Orkut About Me.

” Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate Love. “

Call it empathy, call it coming across it at the right moment….whatever, struck a chord.

 

Of moots and one night stands

Its a love – hate relationship one has with law school, especially the moots.It gives you the lemons and teaches you how to make the lemonade.Here I am,hadnt slept for two nights, just got up after a five hour seduction session with my pillow(now this pillow of mine is special, really special.Had it couriered to me from Bangalore for the simple reason that its the only pillow I happen to get some sleep on. All the talk of ‘pillow specific spoilt brats’ thinned when I had the last laugh, or should I say zzzz when I slept deeply for 13 hours, without waking up once — *sigh thats called paradise for a light sleeper whose nightly sojourns never seem to be devoid of dreams galore and to whom the slightest pluck of a guitar chord from down the corridor is like the coming of the Great Arkleseizure).First period was the moot(for those who dunno whats a moot, its this exercise we have at law school where we are given a problem and are told whether we are filing the case or defending it.Then we get a particular time period to research on the case and come up with our arguments.We submit these arguments in the form of a written submission called a ‘memorial’ at the end of the deadline, and we argue our case in front of Judges in a mock Court setup.We are then awarded points on various factors ranging from etiquette to how well we defended ourselves against the onslaught of questions). Well, basically I had two moots in the last two weeks.Considering that this semester, we need to give six moots on the whole, aint no surprise. Just that, after having slogged a week for the first moot – the one on Law of Contracts, I got complacent and lazed around the entire of last week…..not having researched a thing for the second moot on Constitutional Governance which was today, the first period of the first day of the week.

Come Saturday, I bunk the entire day aspiring to finish the research and the memorial, only to end up watching Evan Almighty, Pink Panther, Anthony Kaun Hai and Dirty Dancing all at one go…..*sigh…..Sunday dawns on a bleary eyed me, red eyes glued to the lappy screen, no not making my memorial, but organising my 4 GB music collection into categories and burning them on CDs to make space for more movies…..And dusk settles in behind my back, the skies a deep red like the blood rushing to my head, wide eyed, frantic groping at this and that, hoping to finish my memorial by 9 pm…why? because the xerox shops on the Univ close by 9 pm and I hafta to get my friggin’ memo printed by then if I even hope to argue in the first class the next morning!!

It was then Upvan – the angel descends on the scene, offering manna, in the form of a working printer in his room, offering me the entire nights time to make my memorial and that he’d print it out in the early morning, just before my moot. Saviour!! And was it my lucky day or what!! A close friend whos now a lawyer,called up to give me his take on the problem, and his take on the problem was what the memorial was built on!! Saviour, yet again ….

7 hours later, around 5 am,a one night stand memorial behind me, and just the formatting to be done and the issues to be rechecked,I headed out to my balcony to watch the sunrise. my eyes strayed to my pillow, which I had propped up in one corner of my room for fear of gettign seduced by it. As they say, a look did it all and the next minute saw me cuddling up to it, my laptop, MP Jain and IP Massey abandoned on the desk and me,my eyes slowly closing onto the ecstasy of it all….blissfully unaware of the forgotten agenda of setting an alarm on my mobile!!

I woke up to someone screaming at someone to wake up, out in the corridor…..A stray CD that had wandered onto my bed soemtime , pressed its coldness against me forcing me to wake up to the reality of things!….It was 7 am, and I had my moot in precisely an hour. My shirt wasnt ironed, my tie was lost beneath a rubble of shorts in my cupboard, my shoes werent polished……and, my memo wasnt printed!! Forget printed, it wasnt even ready……..

Trhowing caution to the winds and formatting to the Gods, my fingers frantically moved over the keyboard, brutally assaulting it in the process of finishing my memo intercepted only by having to type out upvans number on the mobile delicately balancing itself on my shoulder, repeatedly calling him, hoping against hope he was awake and was coming to class. I finally finished by around 7:40 am and mailed it to him, pleading for two copies to be printed.

Rushing to the bath and back, it was more multitasking than I have ever done in my life. Laptop propped on my bed, me going through the issues and arguments yet again as one hand dried my hair and the other pulled on socks as the iron heated up for me to iron the shirt….in bang 10 minutes I was ready, yeah ready as in dressed up and out, grabbing the Constitution in one hand and IP Massey on Administrative Law propped over it precariously,a set of yellow post its right on the top and a pen tucked behind my ear, as I set my mobile on silent mode, the friction produced by the speed at which I probably ran to the Academic block, could have burned the soles off my seemingly polished shoes.

The bell rang, I entered, took my place. Constitution- check. Mobile on silent – check. Pen in hand – check. Memorial – #%^$ !!!……..Wheres Upvan?!?! The first counsel had begun her arguments, I was the third…..I kept turning my head to look at the door, half expectantly half scared to death ( there wouldnt be a more preposterous situation than having to explain to the Judge that the counsel is present but the memorial isnt!!!)….and heaved an audible sigh of relief when Upvan entered ( U have no idea how thankful I am to him….Literaly saved the day for me….I would have screwed up this moot real bad if not for him and his timely help!!!)

The moot went well, got screwed, screwed right back and had a mutually pleasurable session.Heaving a sigh of mixed relief and elation as it got over,I headed back to the hostel for what was truly a sated sleep. My gtalk status currently reads ‘After a stormy two weeks of moots, one night stand memorials and the mere tension of ‘Oh damn, theres a moot to give..’……..indulging in a small zzzzz-ing session. DND please.’

 

Potter Rotter

I thought I wouldnt waste space on my blog talking of the seventh Harry Potter of all things….But then, Iv been going aroudn writing comments on blog posts by my friends on the topic and I thought I might as well make a post of it. If not anything, to reflect my umbrage.

After having read the seventh book, the first thought that came to my mind was an instant insane repentance of having read the rest 6 books for such a sasta ending!!seeeembly aw’ribble….chey!! disappointment ooo disappointment…..

The way some of the characters, like Lupin and Tonks were killed was like swatting at flies when compared to the description of Cedrics death, etc….ignominy of the highest order true….To say the least, I was disgusted with the way they all dropped dead….except dobby of curz

and the ending….aiyyoo….twas rubbing salt on the wound….sounded like JKR hadnt yet decided hwo to end the story and was casting around for a vagueness, bordering nay attempting to be ‘poetic’ & ‘happily ever after’ but failing miserably!!!

Iv made a hp collage in my room….the seventh book is simply ommitted from mention….I consider it an insult to the rest 6 books…..JKR succumbed to the temptation of trashy fan fiction, I must say….though there were some parts I thoroughly enjoyed….and a few moments that made me laugh…..in comparison to other books in the series, its a disappointment….She has failed to match her own standards….thats wat i feel

On the whole, its hearty discontent that prevails after reading the 7th book… What a rotter!

 

Faith Fracas

I was reading this blog I regulary go through, and happened to comment upon the particular post…..

To all those fanatics…be it our very own saffron brigade version or this absolutely adorable organisation who put up the stuff on this link that was mentioned in his post….

I stare at their thoughts of blunder
I stare in ceaseless wonder
at the page of wholly incensive text
that advocates intolerance under Islamic pretext
Blindly their frustration they unleash
trussed up in the dark of their fundamentalist creche’
not to build but blindly destroy first
a misinformed, misshapen,abominable thirst
To raise their heads they no not aim
they prefer rather to put others to shame
while others fall, they rise, they presume
the very purity of their Gods they consume
in pain’s pursuit,victory they glorify
in their very downfall, their pleasure manifold they fortify.

 

Kiss bliss

Many a time have I tried, but failed to capture that fleeting moment of magical ecstasy when you kiss…that little butterfly that flutters beneath your belly button and rises with nervous happiness, spinning gossamer dreams beneath closed eyelids’……. the thought passes my satiated mind as I leaned back on the back rest of the wide auto seat, brushing against Preethi and Vibhooti, in the crowded yet not congested auto that six of us were filling out (Jodhpur autos – huge by any stretch of imagination!) on a rainy evening, coming back from a Birthday celebration. As the auto passed over the flyover, I experienced, what I thought was the closest simulation of that indefinable kiss – induced feeling.

The skies were clear except for a huge dark cloud that hovered over us like a UFO. A slight drizzle fell softly as though a goose feather pillow fight was going on, up above. The melodies of ‘Churaliya hai tumne jo dil ko….’ stole over slightly muffled by the hum of the auto and buzz of occasional conversation, lending a mushy mood to the mushier setting.

A slight breeze ran through , unsettling wisps of streaked hair to tickle my cheeks and forehead and then, brushing it away with a sudden gust, as I snuggled in the cozy comfort of Preethi on one side and the seat rest on the other, cradling me in a warm cocoon. The little water droplets collected on the vibrating rods of the auto, flecked wet patterns on my jeans and pitter-pattered against my cheeks, spraying a wet glow onto them, as I rested my face on my knees, hugging them closer for comfort, inhaling the mellow scent of earth that wafted across and stole my breathe…

A strange sense of flying emptiness, a fleeting touch of absolute content, a sated smile spread across my face, as with still-closed eyes, I savored the moment of bliss – a magical moment recaptured – one that almost felt like a first kiss all over again.