Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

As you may have noticed if you've been a follower of my blog for any considerable amount of time, I'm not much of a believer in God. Not that I have anything against religion, or God, I'm just far, far too lazy to believe. I don't have the sheer dedication required to go to a temple every week and sit through a pooja, or go to a church and sit through a sermon, or say my prayers five times a day, or any of that. Forget the dedication, I'd probably do it one week and forget it the following week if I tried! However, that doesn't mean I'm atheist - at least, not necessarily. My policy is more, "I don't know if there's a God and frankly, I don't care." I've not believed in God for over half my life now and I've been quite alright, so it's really just easier to carry on as I am than to suddenly invest in large quantities of jaggery or wine to satisfy the divine. However, if, upon my death, I find myself standing in front o...

A couple of weeks ago, I took up running as a hobby. For an hour every day, I go outside and run, praying that I don't keel over in a dead faint and am able to make it home. When I began, I was barely able to do one and a half kilometers. Now I run 10km. I've been trying to get into running for a long time - years, really. My parents pushed me to run back when I was only 12 or 13 - when I first began getting fat. Back then, I hated it. I never pushed myself, and I tried to run as little as I possibly could, walking for large parts of the track. Now, I have this odd, love-hate relationship with running. I hate it right before I head out - "I don't want to go running today, it's tiring and I'll get blisters on my feet," I think to myself. Then I go out and run because honestly, what's life if your soles remain un-blistered? After an hour of doing the bare minimum that can be considered running, I come home soaked in sweat and giving off an odour th...

A few weeks ago, I signed up for a Civilian Rifle Training Course at the SAI (Sports Authority of India) Shooting Range in Bangalore. Assuming you're under 18, for 2600 rupees and 8 classes, you can learn to shoot a pistol and a rifle and, if you happen to be good enough, get a membership to the Karanataka State Rifle Association. With one of those, you can walk into the range any time you want, pick up a 9mm from the armourer and pepper a target with holes. Why would a peace-loving 16-year-old want to be trained in the use of firearms, you ask? Well, I've begun to read news again lately and I've decided that I no longer want to be involved with our nation's administration, so I need some way to deal with tax collectors and census men without having to make the effort of going out to stab them. I'm joking, of course (I can hear the Modi government's sighs of relief all the way in Bangalore). I signed up for the CRTC because I'm in the NCC and I need to be ...

I've been making jokes about Scientology for a long time now. I make jokes about all religions, but I think my personal favourite religion to joke about is Scientology. Either that or Mormonism. I think they're both pretty much identical in terms of how attractive they are to kooks of all sorts, anyway. Recently, though, I was thinking about Scientology (don't ask why) and I realised that, aside from the fact that it's somewhere between a joke and a cult of celebrities, I don't know the first thing about it. I didn't know when it was founded, by whom, or why it was able to convert the likes of Tom Cruise and John Travolta (to name but two) from being moderately intelligent actors to being, well, idiots, really. So I asked my all-knowing friend Google about it. Having read through a Wikipedia article and a couple of other sites about Scientology, I can now claim to know more than most practicing Scientologists today, so I figured I'd record my findings in a...

I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with travel. I love the idea of going to new places, meeting new people, seeing new cultures and all that fun stuff. What I don't like about travelling is the actual getting-from-place-to-place part of it. The countless hours spent sitting in trains and buses and planes and cars, the mindless tedium of endless highway zipping by, that's the part of travelling I don't like. I had this driven home to me last week when we were coming back from Chennai. We had spent a couple of days there and Mom had booked us on a train at half past five in the evening. The ride from Chennai to Bangalore takes around five hours by train. Let me repeat that: five long, boring hours of sitting on a train. Normally, I'd be completely OK with this - I'd have my phone and my headphones with me. I'd plug my ears as soon as we were on board the train and ignore the existence of everyone else for most of the trip. This time, though,...

I was rewatching the second Matrix movie a while ago and got to that really pumped-up car chase - you know, the one with the truck that smashes into all the cars and all the Michael Bay-esque explosions? I remember watching and wondering why the car looked like it had recently been attacked by chainsaw-wielding lunatics while the truck barely had a scratched-up paintjob. A couple of years later - because I'm really not that big of a fan of the Matrix series, the last time I watched it, I was around 12 - I learned about the forces that occur in a car crash. It turns out that both the car and the truck experience the same amount of force, but the car is lighter, so it moves further. The force exerted by a vehicle in a car crash is influenced by two things - the mass of the vehicle and its speed at the time of the crash. The car weighs around 1300 kg while the truck weighs nearer 13,000 kg, but they both experience the same amount of force - doesn't make much sense, does it? We...

I have a confession to make: I don't read the newspapers. I know you are all silently - or, if you know me personally, not so silently - judging me, but here's the thing: I find reading through 30 pages of 3-by-one-half-foot pages boring, cumbersome and ecologically damaging. On those grounds, I no longer rely on newspapers to find out what's going on in the world around me. I can say now, with great pride, that I get the entirety of my news from Twitter. I'm kidding, of course - I don't think the 140 characters allowed on a microblogging site are anywhere near enough to provide a clear picture of any event of moment - though, if the Times of India editors haven't changed since I last read it, there are many who could do with aid in the clarity department when writing even a thousand words. There are, of course, many who disagree with that notion - an app called Inshorts  claims that it delivers the news in a mere sixty words. However, while I may not derive...