Paranormal activity of the plastic kind

I don’t know why but I always manage to find myself in the middle of stuff like this. If nothing else, then it makes for good writing at least. I had seen the movie “Paranormal activity” a few weeks ago in the middle of a power outage at midnight. Since I was watching it with a couple of my room mates, we only suffered serious moments of fright towards the last quarter of the movie when the reclusive ghost finally decides to come out of his shell and socialize with the girl he had been haunting since her childhood and her unfortunate boyfriend. The ghost was surely not at blame here as he was just responding to the boyfriend’s efforts of communication which is very essential to maintain a healthy relationship and God knows the ghost and the girl had been having troubles since her childhood. However, the spirit can be at fault for maybe being a bit too aggressive and trying to possess the girl. That could be the cause for their relations to hit a ‘dead’ end. Anyways, I can safely say that usually I don’t watch horror movies because of the excessive wastage of fake blood and this one I watched because this movie’s scare to blood/gore ratio was maximum. A similar experience however happened to me recently and I am still behind the wall of sweet denial so would be narrating it as it happened in Ravi’s life.

It was a nice, cosy and cold night in Pune and the lights were dark in every apartment. Even the dogs had decided to take a break from their nightly orchestra. But something else had not.

Ravi was sleeping comfortably covered with his blanket and bed sheet oblivious to everything else around him. His room mate, Adi, who was soon to move out, was also asleep comfortably. Both of them were unaware of the 3^rd living entity present in their room. At 4:45 am, Aditya got up to switch off the fan as it had become very cold. The thing ignored him for the time being.

To those of you who might not know, the fan is an essential commodity for Ravi. Even if he is suffering from fever and it is a cold morning, he needs the fan to continue his sleep. Today was no different. His sleep was disturbed because of two factors – one of them being the fan while the other was the constant out of tune humming of mosquitoes near his ears. He checked the clock and realised he still had 2 hours left before he had to wake up. Suddenly he heard a noise. It came from the left near where Adi was asleep. First he thought that it might be Adi’s snores but this sound was different. Sounded like a plastic bag. That was puzzling since the fan was switched off and there was no wind also. Whatever it was seemed to be moving fast and coming toward him.

Scenes of Paranormal activity flashed through his mind sending shivers down his spine. Such scenes are the last thing one would want to think about especially in the dead of the night when the only thing that seems to be moving is you and that unknown thing in your room. He looked toward his legs and was scared that anytime now something would rush up and pull him by the feet toward the unknown darkness in the corridor beyond the door that was just a few feet away. He pulled up his feet into his bed sheet which suddenly seemed a lot smaller. However the noise seemed to have subsided and Ravi heaved a sigh of relief.

Suddenly it started again, this time very close to Ravi’s feet (Who knows why ghosts have been obsessed with feet!) and he was terrified beyond his wits. He was literally rooted to his bed. Finally mustering up some courage he got up and went near the source of the noise. It seemed to be coming from the plastic bag near his luggage which was strewn there. He went near the bag and picked up the bag as fast as they show in those Hollywood movies where the hero suspiciously picks up some suspicious stuff on a suspicious table in a suspicious place and finds … well… nothing suspicious at all.

In this case, Ravi saw a cockroach whose expression seemed to be a mixture of surprise and embarrassment like one of those fat people who have been put on a strict diet by their wives but have been caught by the same wife trying to steal food from the fridge in the middle of the night. For the record Ravi and the cockroach had not met each other any time earlier. For a minute, both of them looked at one another, unsure of what their next move should be. Barring the unearthly hour and the difference in species, the scenario seemed like the middle of the first date between two people(any gender would suffice nowadays) when all the niceties in the conversation have been exhausted and both of them are wondering what the opposite person’s next move would be. The cockroach was the first to recover and his first move was to run like his life depended on it. I guess it actually did. Ravi also, released from the minute long spell, ran after the cockroach, hell bent on teaching the arthropod a lesson for giving him the scare of his life, but then lost it within a second thanks to the combined effects of the pitch black darkness and him not wearing his thick glasses.

With no chance of finding the cockroach and no intention of going out in the dark corridor, Ravi lay down to sleep, all the while watching the door and wondering whether the movie was scarier or this incident was.

P.S.: All characters mentioned are real including the stray dogs and the cockroach.

P.P.S: In my opinion, this was scarier since I … I mean … he experienced it alone!!!

The Saas Bahu Saga – An in-depth Analysis

This project report has been made possible due to the daring effort by a field officer who sacrificed many hours of his life so that us lesser mortals could gather an understanding as to why the ‘K’ serials last for so many lifetimes while generations of humans fade away in –relatively speaking – a blink in ‘K’osmological time :D

Day 1: 2:58 PM

As I made my decision to embark upon this precarious mission, it dawned on me that no amount of preparation could have prepared me for the torture that was to follow in the next 30 minutes (Or was it half of my life!!??? I am still bemused!!).

As the first of my subjects was beginning, I realized that there was no advertisement between the end of one program and the start of the next (I had tuned in a bit early) which is an irony as my studies ahead will show. Most of the soaps begin with a lady guiding the camera around the house (an attempt to welcome the viewer into their humble home which is the first step towards your last step: P).

The serial began and I noticed the innumerable amount of characters it possessed – x grandparents, y great grandparents (At least one is older than 100 years of age), z sons, b daughters, n grand children and of course m enemies trying to ruin the family(What’s a soap without your ‘friendly’ neighbourhood vamp, eh!!) Surprisingly, no pets! (At least that was the case in the subjects of my choice) Maybe Menaka Gandhi put her foot down here! A bloodhound would cower in front of so many people. By the way did I mention that all variables are greater than 5??? And did I mention that there is only 1 servant in the overpopulated household to do the cooking, cleaning and other chores!!?? In these days of scarcity of helpers, cooks, servants etc most of us would kill to have such an efficient servant (I am pretty sure he has a degree in management).

Anyway, when I had finished comprehending the insane amount of characters and was listing down some observations, the first ad showed up. By the time, the insanity resumed, I had finished typing till the current line which goes a long way in describing the length of the advertisement and which also confirms my notion of an irony as mentioned earlier. What followed next was an incessant amount of scheming by the vamp, the schemes being foiled by the lead character (who is always a female- the males somehow never have enough brains for the detective work- Gender discrimination, anyone?) through some insanely brilliant thought work of which Holmes would have been proud of and of course, songs being played in the background -of movies in which the brother of the director has acted and finally, at least 3 or 4 more commercial breaks.

As the clock struck 3:30, the serial abruptly ended leaving the story poised at a “crucial” stage and the next serial started. However I knew I had had enough for today.

Day 2: Same time

My professors had said that I have a good aptitude for logic etc and Calculus and other seemingly tough topics in Math didn’t give me much of a problem. However, the 30 minutes of the saas bahu saga yesterday seemed much more difficult to comprehend than the integrals and differentials of various functions. Hell, theory of relativity would be much easier to understand. The soap started and for what happened next, please refer to the last 21 lines of notes of the previous day. Yes, not much changes except the vamp gets closer to implementing her plan and the female lead gets closer to foiling the same plan. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that the two will meet in the center (Imagine two trains traveling towards each other on the same track) and somehow the female lead will win the “battle”. One more thing I noticed today was the insane amount of money the families possessed. Their deals were always in hundreds of crores and tossing away a few crores like it was petty change (I wish they would give me one of those petty crores), yet none of them figure in the top 400 of the Forbes’ list of rich people. Anyways , that’s the progress I made today.

Day 3 onwards TILL date!!!!

Since the story seemed to progress like a 110 year old tortoise on a marathon, let me fast forward and report to you my findings till date

Observations

1. The breakdown of a normal(as if that word could be used here) 30 minute soap is as follows:

• 15 minutes of advertisements

• 5 minutes of special effects that include the drums in the background and capturing everyone’s reaction (from the grandparents to the family cockroach) which -considering the family population (a miniature China, if you must say)- is a small amount of time

• 5 minutes of the songs being played in the background.

• Finally the story progresses for 5 minutes

2. The families are obviously insanely rich yet the money never seems to be enough

3. The complexity of the serial varies from extremely complex to beyond understanding and I raise a toast to those people who watch these serials everyday as they must possess an extraordinary amount of brain power. I have a nagging feeling that Moore’s law is being upheld mainly because of the above mentioned people.

4. Last but surely not the least , the one reason why soaps maintain an extraordinary amount of duration – When the long drawn story seems to come to a conclusion, Take a generation jump and run the story again in an infinite loop!

The Lord of the flies...... ahem..... hives!!

Most of us been part of hostel life. It is inevitable that during the 4 years spent in a hostel, many incidents of varying degrees of humor and otherwise, are added to our archives. One such incident, after a small amount of reminiscing, comes to my idiosyncratic mind.

We were approaching the end of the fourth semester and thus had almost earned the tag of being “50% engineers” (That I managed to achieve a re in one of the subjects , thereby delaying my achievement of the same tag, is a totally different story :D). Anyways, without getting sidetracked, let me continue. Preparations for the exams had just begun (For the uninitiated, preparation for end semester exams in the hostel begins just about a week before the exams. You could say that may have been one of the reasons why I got a re and I will reply that don’t let me get sidetracked as that will cause a chain reaction of inquiries that will make Holmes proud).

Resuming our story, the three of us (me and my room mates) were grinning at each other with sadistic amusement at the formation of a beehive on the outside of the balcony door of one of our hostelmates (Yeah, we were a bunch of sadists) who lived just 3 doors away (I think you can guess where I am going with this). While the 3 of us went out to buy some books for the exams (Na aa aa! I am not going to be diverted again!!!), the aforementioned hostel mate called one of the mess workers to purge the beehive. Needless to say, the mess worker did so and with such efficiency that all the bees buzzed away and settled- not on the either of the adjoining rooms nor the trees just ahead, but, as we found out to our displeasure (which the bees obviously didn’t care about) when we retuned to our room – on our window which had been carelessly left open (the optimist in me did cry out that it was fate or destiny or whatever synonyms one may choose). So, there we were, the three of us, watching in disbelief as our whole room, not just the balcony, had been taken over by a colony of bees. That, my colleagues, was the reason why the Battle of Room 37 was fought!

We decided that we would fight till the very end to win back our room and thus began forming a battle plan for the next one hour. It was agreed upon that one of us would go inside to weather the initial storm and the other two would follow him within 15 minutes or when he gave a cry for help, whichever came sooner. For some reason, I was the Chosen One for the initial assault and was handed over my battle gear. So there I was, wearing a thick jacket, sports shoes and a Hero Honda helmet and holding a burning newspaper as two pairs of hands pushed me (rather forcefully, I might add) into the dark room no. 37. No sooner had I entered the room, the assault began. The bees attacked me from all sides and I am rather appalled at the thought of what would have happened had I not worn the helmet or the jacket. I attacked back with vengeance and many bees fell victim to the burning torch of revenge that I brandished. Still, the waves of assault from the enemy kept on coming; I was beginning to tire and starting to retreat.

Then came the moment that completely changed the course of the fight. Ashwin and Abhishek (my roomies), having seen that I couldn’t do much any longer, charged in with a cry that would have chilled the hearts of the bravest and strongest bees. Even I was reinvigorated and the three of us fought like we had never fought before. Paper burnt, bees fell, smoke filled the room and the battle continued. The wall suffered a lot as the three of us thrust our burning newspapers at the bees that were daring enough to remain on the walls. Time held no meaning for us as seconds turned to minutes and minutes to hours. We knew that we couldn’t afford to take any prisoners and we had to eliminate all entities that were few centimeters in size and had wings.

Eventually, a small group of around 20-25 bees, including the prized queen, was left and we knew that we had almost won back our territory. Only a small formality was left. Within a couple of gory minutes, we had tasted the sweet elixir of victory without suffering any casualties. With all the smoke, burnt pieces of paper and corpses, the room looked like the war field in Lord of the rings. The only difference was that Peter Jackson spent millions to create that set and we fought an actual battle for 2-3 hours.

And that was the day , the Lord of the Hives was born!