An Evil Dark Lord making his "Point"

--- with permission from the Dark Lord, I present to you, the brand new, improved version of our diabolic Dark Lord resurrected back from the infernal flames into his consummate satanic regality, but this time with a fiendish cunning. Heroes beware, the bad just got evil...The Evil Dark Lord ---

Being an Evil Overlord was a good career choice. It pays well, there are all sorts of perks and you can set your own hours. However every Evil Overlord I've read about or seen during my adolescence invariably got overthrown and destroyed in the end. I've noticed that no matter whether they are barbarian lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists or alien invaders, they always seem to make the same basic mistakes every single time. With that in mind, allow me to present...

The Top 17 Things I'll Do as the next Evil Overlord:

1. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.

2. When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."

3. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled "Danger: Do Not Push". The big red button marked "Do Not Push" will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

4. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum -- a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

5. All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

6. I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."

7. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.

8. I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way -- even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless -- my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks.

9. I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

10.I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw my enemies into confusion.

11.All bumbling conjurers, clumsy squires, no-talent bards, and cowardly thieves in the land will be preemptively put to death. My foes will surely give up and abandon their quest if they have no source of comic relief.

12.I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

13.If an enemy I have just killed has a younger sibling or offspring anywhere, I will find them and have them killed immediately, instead of waiting for them to grow up harboring feelings of vengeance towards me in my old age.

14.When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly cute little animal capable of untying ropes and filching keys happens to follow him around.

15.I will only employ bounty hunters who work for money. Those who work for the pleasure of the hunt tend to do dumb things like even the odds to give the other guy a sporting chance.

16.If an advisor says to me "My liege, he is but one man. What can one man possibly do?", I will reply "This." and kill the advisor.

17.My main computers will have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.

Muhaha (keeping it short as mentioned in point 7)

IITM Information Brochure

-- was cleaning up the now useless piles of paper when i came across my information brochure that I had got when my admission to IITM had been confirmed. It was a welcome book informing us about the various facilities, clubs and all the oppotunities we would find there. In that book of no use to me now, I found this poem/excerpt from Shakespeare's Hamlet. These were the words of advice that Polonius gives his son Leartes as the latter leaves home --

And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg’d comrade.  Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;

Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!

-- I kept the book back in the closet --

Catch 22 - excerpts

-- picked up the Catch 22 Novel to read the last few pages again--

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

-- another --

A distant warm look entered Major Danby’s eyes. "It must be nice to live like a vegetable.", he conceded wistfully.
"It's lousy." answered Yossarian.
"No, it must be very pleasant to be free from all this doubt and pressure,” insisted Major Danby. ”I think I'd like to live like a vegetable and make no important decisions."
"What kind of vegetable, Danby?"
"A cucumber or a carrot."
"What kind of cucumber? A good one or a bad one?"
"Oh, a good one, of course."
"They'd cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad."
Major Danby’s face fell. "A poor one, then."
"They'd let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow."
“I guess I don’t want to live like a vegetable, then”, said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation.

-- These were among the best paragraphs in the book. Lovely book. --

Business Studies

-- Had listened to a friend of mine doing business studies in Stan, and well these are my afterthoughts --

This is what these business kinda schools do to you; make you equipped with enough lyrics to sing your way past any kind of subject creating utter chaos in the tiny meeny miny crumbs of muscles that people call their brains, leaving them with a disgusting feeling of a newbie in a law school campus who finds himself utterly incapable of finding the right words which might allow him to sputter some multi syllable sounds that again "might" allow him to converse with another person who is not in the same misfit state as him.

-- PS: This blog is written before my CAT results, which are still held in suspension by the political web of "quota", and hence bears no relation, now or later, to its outcome --

Halol...

--Had gone to Halol recently, a place some 50 km away from Baroda. Loved the car ride on the way. It is some 30 km of flat, pitless, ready with reflectors, road. Nice to see that such roads exist in India (please bear with this keeping in mind that I stay in Mumbai, a place where roads are infested with traffic, potholes, honkings and pollution)--

Driving on the highway shadows running by,
Feel like a plane with wings ready to fly.
Twinkling lights guiding your way,
On the road and in the sky.

TEN

--It is a golden number we always come across when we are listing priorities. People are so swamped by it that anything and everything that they think about comes in packs of TEN. Don’t believe me?
Let’s look at this:

Best movies of the year; the list goes up to…10.
Favorite songs… again 10.
Talk about the Top Universities; and you obviously mean… The Top 10.
FBI Most Wanted... 10
Heard at what number Downing Street the British Prime Minister lives? Let me guess, 10.
What is our whole number system based on? …10
Wickets to take… 10
GPA, I wish I had… 10
Number of Commandments… they had to be 10
Number of items on this list … intentionally 10

I can list out 10 more things like this but seriously, why do somehow all kinds of broad rankings extend themselves to the figure of 10. And not just rankings, you think of any number and chances are it is going to have a 10 in it. Take Google for instance, a spelling gone wrong of the word Googol. Googol, a humungous number thought right of the blue. You know what that number is -- 10^100, basically 10 multiplied hundred times! I mean people just can’t get enough of it. --

Well, here are my Ten things which feature high on my to do list:

• Go for a course on Paragliding
• Learn to play Guitar
• Get my self a couple of these R/C Cars (A Ford GT Model)
• Go on a trek in Tibet
• Read up on Architecture
• Get completely sloshed out on drink party thrown by a friend
• Be able to converse with a stranger for more than 10 minutes
• Get some cooking lessons from Mom
• Learn Horse Riding
• Go on without sleeping for a week (no sleeping equivalent to 3 hours/day)

Celebration means...

Among the mails that are circulated...loved this one

Celebration means......

A winter evening.

Four friends.

One barsaati.

Four glasses of chai.

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Celebration means......

Hundred bucks of petrol.

A rusty old bike

.And an open road.

---

Celebration means......

Maggi noodles.

A hostel room.

4.25 a.m.

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Celebration means......

3 old friends.

3 separate cities.

3 coffee mugs.

1 internet messenger.

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Celebration means......

Rain on a hot tin roof.

Pakoras deep-frying.

Neighbours dropping in.

A party.

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Celebration means......

You and mom.

A summer night.

A bottle of coconut oil.

A head massage.

Gossiping about absent family members.

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You can spend Hundreds on birthdays, Thousands on festivals, Lakhs on weddings, but to celebrate all you have to do is spend your Time with your loved ones.

Keep in touch with your loved ones ........ Celebrations are rarest form of love....keep it glowing