Wednesday, May 30, 2012

My reverse evolution

So I seem to be undergoing some sort of reverse evolution, going towards the least fit specie.
The road to the all time misfit is not exactly smooth, but it is one you undertake without having a say in the matter.
The evidence is too much and I cannot possibly document it all. But there is a recent, grim Friday I remember, because it was the day I broke my pen.
Not literally, of course. Who wants to waste a good new shiny blue pen? I can always use it for sketching silly but elaborate patterns on unsuspecting victims' hands\feet\clothes and if I am lucky enough, faces. So I just tucked my pen away, for the poor thing had done a lot of hard work (writing a lot of pages in legible writing which can be read by ordinary beings is no ordinary feat for me.)
For this intensive task, I even put an important assignment aside. As a consequence, I later had to explain to the instructor that yes, my assignment was late, and yes, he could deduct marks for it.
The things I  do for books.
Despite the very hard work, my story failed to fetch a single pamphlet, let alone a book. It probably stood at the nth place in the competition, where n is the number of entries submitted, if I was lucky.
If I was unlucky, or if fate was feeling particularly fair towards me, as in "Let us show this girl some true reality, for she talks way too big' then it probably stood some place in the range of exp^n.
The real world is so real, I'd rather live somewhere imaginary.
 Besides, we went to a literary session and missed the particularly interesting part like we always do.
Recently, I was lured to a party in spite of my reluctance to get up and wash my face and untangle my too-tangled locks by a group of particularly insisting friends and then dumped unceremoniously by the said group. They avoided me before, during and after the party religiously. They even avoided me on the way back, and I had to sit all by myself in the bus.
This sitting alone part is not due to reverse evolution.It has been so since time immemorial i.e. time when I started school. I have always possessed a special force of repulsion and I am secretly proud of it (hey,people even let me cross them in a queue due to this).
The reverse evolution part is related to how I have started noticing these things when I have always scoffed at other people who notice such things (noticing such things or no, scoffing is my usual manner of interacting with life, the universe and everything in it.)
To gain some sympathy, I went to my mother. She said flatly, 'I told you so, tumhari kahani bus aisi si hay' .
At least my friends never say that to my face, and I have shown them some really mad stories, but maybe that is because there is always some electronics or microwave lecture droning on in the background.
 Recently I learned the art of calculating the weight of a couplet. There has been a folder intended for burning in my room ever since.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

A nuclear touch

So I have been ordered here, despite my uttering the tujh say bhi dilfaraib hain couplet.
Boy, are they dilfaraib! I had to clean the house and produce some weird compound. Strictly speaking it wasn't supposed to be weird but strange accidents do happen when I enter the kitchen(not that they get me exempted*sigh*).
There is this strange touch I have.Things tend to go haywire when they come too close to yours humbly. You must have heard about the golden touch that a king suffered from due to his greed. In my language they have a phrase that describes a very successful person as someone who touches dust and transforms it into gold. Some opposite power resides in my poor hands.
There is absolutely nothing in my home that I cannot destroy or disturb or break or annoy. I had a fairly reliable printer. At least it was very reliable as long as it was out of my reach.
Then it became mine.
Then it stopped working one day.
I deduced , quite correctly, that it had run out of ink ( I am good at deductions, its just that the practical thing is difficult).
So I fished out a new cartridge and swapped it for the old one. The thing started working but gave me way too much confidence with a printer.
(Hint: injecting me with more confidence is always bad. Always.)
So he next time it stopped working, I tore it apart to no avail. The poor thing currently resides on my table, crawling with cobwebs and spiders. Maybe you, the reader, can shed an imaginary tear or two for its fate.
Then there is my desktop pc. I manage to blow up its os at least 4 times a year. In my defence, I have to reinstall everything from scratch all by myself.
Some time ago the fan in my precious graphic card started whizzing too much. I confidently took it out and oiled it. Only later did I know that you can burn a fan by oiling it the wrong way.
Again, in my defence, the fan works silently as a mouse now.I just hope I don't have to take it out again, for its own sake.
The last time I got someone's out-of-order pc to repair, I let it gather a lot of dust and then fished out its browsing history and showed it to their mom (ouch!).
 For my life I cannot count how many LCDs I have destroyed while doing one thing or the other. Just hand one to me and consider the thing done.
And it is not for want of practice that the daal chawal I cook are always lacking in salt.Or biryani or aaloo gosht or bhindi.
Anything that I cook, that is.
I rarely press my own clothes, but on last Eid I managed to burn my zero-second shirt. (I hid it in my closet and simply took another dress out).
A couple of weeks ago I was trying to kill a lizard nicely, and ended up splattering its blood on the floor and the wall.(I know it is gross)
Some time ago, being a poor person, I was trying to straighten my hair with an iron.Fortunately (for my hair) my mom found out.
I guess I do like experimenting with things too much to be considered safe.
As for annoying people on purpose, I am considering doing that for a livelihood now.
Its this tendency towards self-destruction that I identify with in Mohsin Hamid's characters(he is quite a favorite writer)
You may have read an excellent work titled 'mujhay meray doston say bacchao' by Sajjad Hyder Yelderem.
One of these days I am going to be forced to write an essay 'Save me from my self'.