The minutely funny case of the Chilled Minute Maid

Wow Pulpy ! 

So a regular day and four college students walk into a supermarket after an excursion.
Tired and exhausted, they look towards the fridge for a cool and refreshing drink which they'd kill for.
Aah, Mosambi Minute Maid, that's the real deal !

And so, the most intelligent of them all picks up the bottle and looks at it admiringly. Now ours is a species which is always on a budget ( or at the very least supposed to be on one). One bro catches another mid-glance and realises he already has a brand new bottle, only that it isn't cold.
  
We college kids are inherently gifted with the ability to make small improvements in our supply qualities and feel like a genius after accomplishing the feat.

A plan of some serious ingenuity was hatched and discussed, - * Saadi waali bottle ko na bag se nikal kar fridge mei daal lete hain aur andar se thandi bottle le lete hain! *

Giggles were exchanged, backs were patted.
Because asking the store owner for a valid exchange is too mainstream, and stealth is how WE like to roll.

It was a plan that required utmost secrecy and the highest amount of skill.
So the highest achiever amongst us all leapt right into it, without a second thought.
All he saw was the goal of acquiring 2 chilled Mosambi Juice bottles, and nothing else.
 Alas his overconfidence would be his downfall (WAIT-FOR-IT).
So this smug fella strode right to the refrigerator with a cocky smile playing on his lips, his assuring gait swaying past the three of us. We looked at him in awe and with trepidation for we were still figuring out the best way to go about this mission, while he apparently has everything sorted.

" Dude, there are cameras here", shouted the one who originally owned the saadi bottle; in a vain attempt to stop his friend from public embarrassment.
But that wouldn't halt him.
With one swift motion he took out the said bottle from the bag and slid it into the fridge and with another graceful sleight of hand he took out two bottles from the fridge.

" He did it !", we all cried out in unison. There was a taste of celebration in the air.
But we were celebrating too soon, for our dear friend strode right to the counter and thrust both the bottles on it.

Oblivious to our concerns, he was unable to see anything wrong with his action.
And then, the inevitable moment of sad epiphany struck him like a lightning bolt.
Oh- * Lots of feces*

So, instead of having a already paid for lukewarm beverage and a cold one, we now had two cold beverages (Yay!), both to be paid for  ;-(  .

It was a  time of great stress, the remaining three of us hovered into the nearby aisles finding some tit-bits to buy, also laughing at our dear friend's folly while his cheeks reddened as he prepared to face the ultimate humiliation.

Turns out Mr Smarty couldn't bear the mortification of the job he had committed and so he had obediently paid for both the bottles.
" Let's just leave and forget about this."
But we wouldn't let him forget. After trying to convince him to speak the truth and get back his money in vain, we had almost given up. The lights of the store began to switch off, just like our hopes for redemption and with heads held low ( one head drooped particularly low) we proceeded towards the exit.

" Bhaiya! Actually....... ", spoke up a sweet, strong voice.

Yes! We had found our knight in shining armour in the face of our littlest friend. For courage isn't an attribute of the big or the tall.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain

The air was tense, we all looked at the store keeper with dread and hope in our eyes.
Will our friend get back what he lost by his own stupidity ?

After a round of animated explanation, muffled laughter and weird eye contact, we were able to get our story through.
"Take another bottle", the kind owner said while handing us one.
" This isn't ours!" shouted Mr Smarty.
* Humaari toh garam waali hai *

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~THE END ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Our place in the Cosmos

We indeed have come a long way from the times of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The ignorant era where man was boastful enough to believe that the entirety of creation- the vast (our concept of vast was ironically limited) universe revolves around us, and that we constitute its centre.
The belief was rooted in the deep seated philosophy that we are special and cherished creations of the almighty god. We maintained that the supremacy of mankind over every other species was a gift from the gods, a gift borne out of being special. We were quick to adapt such ego boosting notions and so the concept of Geocentrism stuck around for a long long time.

In about the 2nd century AD it was realised that the differences of seasons and retrograde motion of various planets should logically conclude to varying distance between the planets, earth and the sun. The original model was modified by shifting the centre of rotation of the cosmos away from the earth. All this while preserving the view that our precious planet would still sit at the middle of all the action, grand and resolute. Ptolemy's model explained the observations of the day well, but questions were soon being asked and the world gradually moved on to Heliocentrism, thanks to Copernicus.

 It took us ages (and god knows how many shouts of 'Sacrilege') to battle and ultimately defeat religious dogma and accept not what we would like to believe rather  what observation and mathematics pointed us towards.

It took exceptional courage to come to terms with the fact that the world does not revolve around us after all, and that we too were just another planet orbiting the mighty sun. 

But our notions of self-importance were to take many further hits.

Our dreams of perfectionism were shattered when Kepler helped establish the elliptical motion of the planets, rather than the more perfect-circular orbit.
With the advent of technology and telescopes, man was enabled a view of the cosmos that revealed great many secrets and most of them made us feel tinier and tinier, also more and more ordinary.
As we ventured beyond our solar system, into the Milky Way our collective ego took a grand hit as we realised that other than our sun, existed billions of more stars in a sparkling galaxy that we named the Milky Way. Our mighty sun was in actuality just another yellow dwarf and was out-numbered and out-shined by a plethora of hot and fiery worlds. 

We soon began to fashion the laws of the universe which were governed by reason (and started being reasonable about our own place in the universe).
We've established that we aren't the centre of the universe or our local group, or our galaxy not even our own solar system. 

So are we then, truly ordinary?

 A teeming group of species on a beautiful blue planet (with patches of green) in some solar system at the fringe of a galaxy somewhere in the big, vast universe? 

Or is there more to the story?

Astronomers and scientists have established that for life to thrive on planet earth there must have been a delicately balanced plate of ingredients to start with. Over the years our planet could have faced major disasters, and shifted the balance towards chaos. Somewhere about 4 million years ago our moon was bombarded by a heavy meteorite shower which had a significant effect on our future and most of all the inner planets. Termed as the Late Heavy Bombardment, this event may have rendered life possible on the blue planet. The earth's environment was drastically changed thanks to the bombardment and most of the water found in our oceans today can be traced back to water-rich comets that delivered the liquid of life to us. The event that made our blue planet blue! 

Another event that ensured that earth would be a habitable planet is its location- which is just right for living beings to exist and prosper.  We are one of the three planets located within the Goldilocks Zone- an area in space wherein a planet is just the right distance from its home star so that its surface is neither too hot nor too cold. Although our neighbours Mars and Venus are also within this life nurturing belt, the ravages of time haven't been kind to them. Mars has lost most of its atmosphere while Venus has a highly poisonous one composed of clouds of sulphuric acid. 

Counting our blessings, we have another one to include. The gas giant Jupiter protects us from the lumps of rock and ice in the asteroid belt. The gravitational influence of Jupiter has and continues to deflect many potential threats en route our home. 

We are the third planet from the centre of our solar system- the sun. Moving from our Solar System to a larger picture, we are about halfway between the centre and the edge of our galaxy.  Despite our humble location relative to other heavenly bodies we are the centre of our own observable universe. 

Narcissistic much? 

Maybe not this time. 

As we know nothing (PRETTY MUCH NOTHING) travels faster than light. Our universe began (by some solid estimates) about 13.8 billion years ago, in all that time light can travel very far. If we were to fashion this distance into a bounding sphere around our earth, we would get our observable universe and we would be its centre. The important thing to note here is that how significant the concept of our observable universe is. Since nothing (pretty much) travels faster than light, nothing on the outside of this great sphere (if there is anything at all, no way to know) can influence anything on the inside, in any manner. So who cares if we aren't the centre of the entire universe, right? We are the centre of the one that can possibly affect us. This area keeps growing with the passage of time, but the centre never changes. 

The further man has ventured out into the cosmos, the more insignificant we seem to become. Wonder and awe fills our hearts as we gaze up to the heavens but the most awesome wonder of all remains the one of Life and Civilisation.

Humans are curious beings, and we've gone through extreme measures to quench our hunger for knowledge. We are explorers by nature. The fact that makes us feel truly special (at least for now) is the miracle of life. Technology and human innovation has allowed us to peek into worlds far, far away from us. We have even been able to send probes, robots and messengers to some of these places in an effort to find out more about them. And truly, during this grand journey we have found some astonishing stuff. We know how stars are formed by spotting giant nebulae; we got to know how stars die in supernova explosions and the multiple fates they may undergo after the big boom. Man has walked on the moon, collected samples from Mars, seen the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn up close and flown past a probe by Pluto beyond the realm of the Sun.  

We have found ice on the red planet, seas of ammonia and sulphur but we've never ever come close to finding life- intelligent or otherwise- beyond our planet.

In Arthur C Clarke's words -" Two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." 

Despite the continued and zealous search for extra-terrestrial life, we have yet to come into direct contact with any. If we are truly alone in the Universe, which many say is a  statistic impossibility, maybe we are truly special.

On July 20 1969 as Neil Armstrong took one small step for a man, which was a giant leap for mankind he was in his own words, suddenly struck by the tiny pea that the earth was, pretty and blue. 

"I felt very, very small", he said.

Small we truly are, dwarfed by the magnanimity of infinity, but we sure aren't too small to count.The scale of the universe and the tiny speck that we are in it will serve as a constant reminder of our humble abode when (not if) humanity cruises to the zeniths of success. 

As for the question- Special or Not?

I'll leave that for you to answer. (I am a sadist who loved having you read all this without giving you a definitive answer.) For maybe it’s a good thing we can't say for sure, so we might not get too complacent or break our hearts.

 And no matter what the truth be, we still have time on our hands to sway it in our favour (Unless some crazy alien invasion happens soon, which -let's be honest- will be way more exciting.)

The Story of Stories

To Rushdie's question  -"Who am I?"

His own answer was : "I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me."

My answer would be a little distortion of his - I am the sum total of everything I have read, every story I have heard and of everything done-to-me and by me in the duration of my own tale.

In the world of stories we meet our wildest fantasies and also confront our darkest fears.

The power to associate with someone other than us, their circumstances and situations, their tragedies and triumphs is uniquely human. To plunge into their story, heart and soul, and let it affect you is what connects us as a people. A people with a shared heritage and a future that ties us together. For it isn't just compassion that helps us identify with characters real or fictional (although it is a major component). Even animals and birds are compassionate beings and they may have the ability to identify with one of their own when they see it ( some with higher intellect, I hear can even dream about their mates) , but the ability to observe, form, narrate and appreciate the tales we weave out of experiences like these is specially gifted to us. Or maybe it's a gift the human race presented itself with and thus while beasts perish and flowers wither, if not us, our stories live on.

We began by conveying tales verbally. A fascinating idea with strong effects but the method had its flaws. People die but pass on the stories they have heard from the older generation, adding their own adventures to the mix. But at other times, entire civilisations die and with it ends all the tales and fables that they may have concocted during their reign. Word of mouth is effective but not efficient and that's how we moved to documenting our beloved stories, to hold onto our imagination more vigorously.
 It is amazing to see how tales are distorted and re-fashioned as they move forward in spacetime.The renditions can give us a worthy peek into our collective conscience.And that's exactly why we need tales to be written down, so we may digress anytime we want but preserve the spirit of it for who says there can't be more than one version of a story.

Tales are able to blur the line between fantasy and reality in a way that adds to their enigma.The concept of truth is rendered false in a world like this, for your truth isn't mine and mine isn't yours and we can't even complain because in this world, truth is anything but objective.
But the true beauty of stories lies in the fact that it changes shape with every telling, and its effect grows stronger too with repetition.

An age back, when televisions were not a thing and books, although abundant weren't well understood by all( Plus we have to remember that reading is a noble, yet time consuming pursuit.), plays and enactments of fine literary work enchanted audience. Music was skillfully integrated in the art of storytelling and the written word was magnified, the imagination of readers glorified and the writer's metaphors simplified; all a hundred fold. The well chosen cast, the set and the costumes all breathed life in what most would see as a lifeless manuscript. In my opinion, however, reading is the best manifestation of our stories for it lets us opens our minds and lets our imagination run and soar. And back in the time when we couldn't possibly store a stage play, we could always hold on to the dear book.
Technology came and revolutionised the way we hear, watch and appreciate stories just like it revolutionised every other activity. Now we went to the cinema, watched television and browsed videos and episodes on the internet.
No matter the medium, the simple act of storytelling and reading, listening and watching has essentially remained the same.

Nothing can enchant us quite in the manner that stories do.

Many religious texts are assisted by stories to bring to life the philosophy and the way of life they endorse. For stories are easily remembered and understood. Instead of drilling down a code of conduct into the minds of believers, the trick lies in showing them how good conduct is rewarded and bad leads to trouble, with a help of a well crafted story.
A nice little anecdote will charm any listener and a speech that begins or ends with a great story to take away would prove to be pretty effective, anyday.
Stories are our best bet when we are looking to connect to people, emotionally.
The best way to teach a child a lesson in compassion is to read him a story.
We indulge in them for leisure and entertainment, we dwell on them to satiate our quest for knowledge and our lust for travel, we hang on to them for emotional support, we narrate them to send out a message or profess the principles we stand by, we tell them to free our souls and teach lessons, we read them to soothe ourselves, we remember them when we are tormented by our demons.

They are the most beautiful gifts of our imagination and coherence.
For don't we all aspire to be the lead in our own story, we aspire in someway to profess our chronicles to the realms beyond our own reach.

Despite stories being the necklace threaded on the string of culture and tradition, more often than not they manage to transcend these very    differences and that's what again makes us, uniquely human. 

From Photographs to Pics

Don't you remember the good old times when photos could not be digitally stored? After an enthralling vacation the most exciting activity left to do was to go to a studio and get the photographs developed. Countless photo albums adorn the-out of reach shelves and dusty drawers in most pre-millennial homes. Homes where aging grandmothers would often turn to these to indulge their overwhelming nostalgia, where these would be proudly showcased to all who visit the house, where these would remind all the family members of the older and simpler times. The photo studio always gave you an extra reel copy that you might want to develop in future, and they were often packed in a brown paper bag and stacked away carefully. Each photograph was taken with the utmost care and precision and there was a thrill in waiting for the final result for there was absolutely no way of knowing how it turned out. All momentous occasions, trivial or profound as they may seem to the third person, were dutifully captured. The entire exercise was given due respect, and all things necessary had to be arranged ahead of time. It gave us all something to look forward to even after the vacation was over, and a chance to reminisce the time long after it was gone. Today, almost  everybody has a phone which  is equipped with a camera, a camera where we can click multiple pictures with the flick of a finger and review them just as easily. We have all but forgotten the times when we had to count each click, where mistakes might cause us a missed opportunity or one less picture to add to our very real collection of memories. There are photographers among us with fancy cameras who still care for a good shot, but the purpose has changed. From collecting memories to collecting likes and hearts on the social media, photography has changed in essence. A well clicked picture just doesn't please the eye and delight the heart, it goes on to showcase your skill and perspective and nowadays contributes to your popularity and assists your friends to readily glimpse your dazzling life. Beauty is meant to be appreciated, memories meant to be shared but the pictures we click are so much more for our own selves than for others. For they might appreciate the lush green landscape, that towering monument might charm them and they might laugh at the antics of the little boy Tom next to the lake but they'll never see what we saw, the significance of our pictures remains with us to be fully understood and cherished.
Today we pose for a thousand empty pictures just for the sake of getting them clicked. We readily upload them online and wait for our friends, acquaintances and family to look at them. Social media has indeed assisted us in sharing our happy times with all those who care about us, it has help us connect with our peers far away. But do we ourselves ever look back at these pictures we clicked so painstakingly? Or are they merely meant to show to the outside world? We save them on our hard drives and shove them in some folder, never to be opened again, as we get busy in our increasingly busier lives. We want to photograph each special moment, the wonderful alignment of the moon on the distant hill, the chance meeting of a highschool friend, the wonderful expression on our pet's face. We have this intrinsic need to capture this all, but sadly it's now meant more for other's eyes than for our souls. 

Anger-the wrongfully exiled emotion

Anger- an emotion with a reputation for ruining moods and relationships, is one sentiment we all have been made to look down upon and consequently avoid.

 It is dangerous they say, to let your mind wander into the clutches of wrath- you'll endanger your personal well being and destroy your peace of mind. Do you want a piece of my mind?
I believe it's GOD DAMN human to be angry. Nobody has the right to take it away from you, your one chance at addressing loud and clear what it is that's bugging the shit out of you. We will become pitiable lost souls, devoid of power and drive if we were to let go of this urge to unleash our fury.
Rage is what connects us to our inner-vulnerable,irritable,raw,uncouth,disturbing,appalling,passionate,tumultuous,frenzied,excited selves. And however frightening it may seem (it ends up being more), we NEED to address it, listen to it, ask it if it's okay? and give it a chance to come tumbling out and then to calm down. Although the display of heightened emotions isn't very much appreciated in our diplomacy-obsessed society, burying them within us isn't the healthiest thing to do. So we are at a cross-roads, almost every time we face this volcano of an emotion- to unleash our true self, or to lock it away, perhaps to release it later, on an unsuspecting pillow or a blameless person.
There are obvious disadvantages to keeping it all inside, the toxicity of unrequited anger can poison your soul forever.The effort used up in being nice to your offender, to not antagonize them; can instead be employed for nobler pursuits. Like hitting them with a chair and telling them they are losers destroying your otherwise faultless life.
Okay, don't misunderstand me, I do not support violence-but that's soon going to happen if you don't let the other person know about their bothersome nature. If you were to always be nice, you'll end up becoming nothing but a pushover. Worst Case scenario- you will ultimately lose hope in the goodness of people altogether.Don't let anyone wield such power over you.
Remember that nobody,no matter how saintly they are, will not take you for granted if you insist on becoming the doormat to their dirty shoes, soiled by the dirty world.
If you feel passionately about something, anything; then you must have felt the sentiment of anger well up, when that 'something' is defiled- by words or by actions. The wrath when somebody belittles what you hold so dear, when your contributions are looked over, when friends or family won't understand and neither will they seem to try, when your precious 'something' is broken and your spirit is shattered with it. Protectiveness is an instinct that springs right up with anger. You'd fight to death to protect what you love, may it be a person, a people, an idea, an activity or just yourself.
To feel strongly about something attaches our meager selves to a greater entity. Even if that greater entity is some extra sleep, when nobody around you seems to shut the hell up.Or much craved for solitude when nobody around you seems to leave you the hell alone.Or some good food when nobody let's you dine in peace. Or when it is the degradation of that plan you formulated so proficiently- even if it was just a weekend getaway. When it is the undermining of your abilities, the withdrawal of support, the use of lies and falsehood. It may be trickery or downright betrayal. However trivial or profound it is that is bothering you, you are allowed to voice it out loud, take it up with the concerned person. Face him and look him right in the eye, don't cower or bicker, don't complain to others or turn to them for help.
Let go of all inhibitions, all shame. You may be wrong, your outburst may be completely uncalled for- but if you've felt so strongly about it- there must be something  painfully pinching about the entire ordeal . When the toxicity leaves you, you'll know what hit you,what broke and what or who stood up. Great relationships, real familial bonds aren't so weak they'll melt with the fire of your anger. If anything, they'll be forged into stronger chains once it's over.
Allow yourself the luxury and satisfaction of occasionally being angry. And like everything else, best results are obtained under moderation.

yours
An inexplicably angry-all-the-time person in the past, on the way to becoming a pushover, but trying to fight back hard.