Fist Fights With The Sleep Demons

Diary Entry – 54

Every morning I fight a battle which I often tend to lose. Failing to win this battle will mean a lack of attendance. The victors of this battle however will see no glory. They will only find themselves slain in class by the boring lecturer. Coffee doesn’t give you invincibility against these villains. Expecting such powers will only make you want to file a lawsuit against Nescafe for misleading you.  

This battle is impossible to win, when there is a class at 9 Am. I find myself with the sleeper’s dilemma as I try to decide whether or not to go to class 10 minutes before the actual class.

“To go, or not to go? That is the question.”

I have tried various alarm tones to wake myself up from my slumber. I have used everything from barking dogs to Indian mantras. Nothing worked till one morning afternoon after missing a class, I did a Google Search, “I Can’t Wake Up.” When you have a problem, you should first tell it to Google. That is how I found this app for my phone called “I Cant Wake Up!” When your alarm goes off, the app asks you to perform a math test among other things before you can switch off your alarm or even press the snooze button. The math test requires you to multiply two pairs of two digit numbers together and add them up together. I can now perform speed mental math in my sleep. How I miss Chennai. The 8 Am power cut along with the scorching heat made sure that nobody over slept in the city. That is why you should vote for Jayalalitha.

Unlike India, you can’t get people to give you a proxy attendance in the UK. In the University I am in, there is a lady whose sole purpose in life is to stand in front of the class room, for the first 15 minutes, to get signatures from students for their attendance. If you miss your attendance, she just won’t mark you absent but will send you an email saying, “We don’t have your signature in the attendance sheet. What was the reason?”. Since I don’t like lying about being in class when I was not, I send her a neutral reply saying, “I failed to sign in the attendance because I woke up late.” She will reply saying, “Okay I will mark you as late but present. Please know that punctuality is as important as attendance.” My mother had it right when she said, I could never get into trouble if I am honest.

A Feminist Irony

Diary Entry – 52

My friend, who was preparing for the GRE, once came and told me he was left aghast when he saw his sister’s face. She had come home from Bangalore and he intended to tell me that he was surprised to see her. But when he told me he was left aghast when he saw her face, I assumed she got a plastic surgery or met with some kind of major accident which left her face severely disfigured.

Misusing English words is not a problem common to only GRE aspirants. This world is full of people who use the word irony to appear intelligent. It is not really a bad thing, if they didn’t massacre it. I remember the time when this Chinese girl from my class happened to meet me three times in three different places on the same day. The third time she met me she said, “Isn’t this ironic. We are meeting for the third time on the same day.” It almost felt like she was accusing me of stalking her. Some of you reading this will have no clue why using the word “irony” is wrong in this context. Let me explain. Let’s say you had a sweet tasting vanilla ice cream which had a cherry and a few peanut flakes on top of it. You eat it with great joy until you start falling terribly sick, which is when you realize that you are allergic to peanuts. In order to get better, you go to get medicines for your allergy. But on the way you get hit by a giant truck and you die on the spot. This is not irony. Even if this truck was carrying peanuts (the thing that you are allergic to), it is not irony. It would just be a coincidence. If however the truck was carrying medicines for your peanut allergy, then that my friend is some bitter irony. Most people however would call it irony even if you got hit by a garbage truck. Now that you know how the word irony is used, you can haunt all those people who find your death ironic.

The other word which happens to be severely misused is the word “feminist”. A feminist is an activist who strives to establish equal opportunities for women socially. They usually strive for protecting women against discrimination in education and in employment. It still happens in our country and there are some women out there who think feminism is bad. If you are a woman who think feminism is bad, you might as well move to a country like Saudi Arabia right now. Most people just assume that a feminist is a lady who likes to dominate men and who think women should rule over the world. People who think that, often get confused when they see a male feminist. Women who enjoy dominating men are called Dominatrix and if I try to explain what a Dominatrix does, my blog will start getting kinky. The point I am trying to make is that don’t try to offend someone by calling them a feminist. Feminism is a good thing, unless you are threatened by woman empowerment. I know Mayawathi and Jayalalitha might concern a lot of men and women, but I assure you that feminism is not about empowering these kinds of women.

Why I Don't Hook People Up

Diary Entry - 51


Every now and then a guy comes and says, "intro kudu machi." (Introduce me to her dude.)  When I refuse to help them out, they think I am afraid of them stealing my thunder. Little do they realize that I am doing them all a big favor and have their best interests at heart.

You might have seen pictures and memes making jokes about women’s idiosyncrasies. My friend Jessie served as an inspiration for all those pictures. Of course her name is not Jessie. For the sake of anonymity, I picked the name Jessie which happened to be the name of the female lead of Jessie’s favorite Tamil movie Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa. For those of you who have not heard of this movie, it shares a key similarity with Twilight by having an unusual number of delusional teenage girls in its fan base. Fortunately though, unlike twilight they decided to end things with one movie instead of making a whole series.

Some people wrongly think Jessie is my girlfriend. What she really is, is a pain in the a**. She is a part time model and has a reasonable amount of intelligence that fetch her good grades in college. She is someone you would call beauty makeup with brains. Most men including my own male buddies are actively pursuing her on Facebook for reasons unknown to me. Jessie however doesn’t add men she doesn't know. The other day, a friend of mine came to me and said, “Dude I got rejected.” At first I thought his masters’ application got turned down. But he went on to ask me to give him a recommendation. I politely told him he needed to ask his department’s dean for that, as recommendations from me won’t be valid. For that he replied, “That old man doesn't know Jessie.” He was talking about Jessie rejecting his Facebook friend request and he wanted me to give him a recommendation to get accepted. What has the world come to?

I don’t usually hook men up with my female friends but I didn’t want anybody to think Jessie was my girlfriend, so I made no fuss. So that is how Jessie added this guy on Facebook and she did it from my very own laptop. She sent him a hi and he was on fire. He was typing so much and he was doing it so fast that if he wrote a book with that speed, he might have finished it in an hour. Jessie however is very adept in conversing with monosyllables and how long her replies were depended on how many mS she chose to put in her hmmmm.

Jessie didn’t waste her time engaging in idle chat with men. She had more important things to do like stalk people’s profiles. She stalked both men and women without discrimination. She will like every picture in a girls profile but when it came to guys, she had this "I don't give likes to guys photo" policy. Apparently liking pictures where there are men in it will create some sort of controversy in her life. Only when she was about to log out did she notice the chat window of the poor guy I gave recommendation to. She said  “hmmm. K da. wil talk 2 u later” and she logged out. That was the longest reply she had given him. 

From Chef To Cook

Diary Entry – 50

When I was left to fend for myself in the past, I usually went to the nearest restaurant which offered the cheapest food. Hygiene did not concern me because I had a gut of steel. You could say I never starved in India like how I starved in the country I am in now.

In September 2012, I found myself in this country where the food is outrageously expensive. I decided to have a Domino’s pizza which used to cost me a few hundred rupees back home in India. The bill I got here however reminded me of the time I had food in a Taj hotel.

Since a pizza itself had become so expensive, I started eating cereal and sandwiches three times a day. Needless to say, I missed my mother greatly who was now five thousand miles away. She had kept me fed for most of my life. It was during this desperate time, that I strongly considered the option of marriage. When my friends asked me why I wanted to get married, I said, “To Stay Alive.” My married classmate told me I needed a maid with benefits and not wife. Turns out his wife can’t cook and if he didn’t know how to cook, they would have had to starve together.

See, cooking is not easy for me. When I was a kid, there was only one place in the world that I was afraid of and that was the kitchen. There were so many sharp things that can cut you among other things that could create a possible gas explosion. I still think the stove is going to explode when I enter the kitchen.

Since I had to learn to cook somehow, I decided to hang out with the so called cooking experts from India. These expert cooks impressed me by claiming to be able to make Lemon Rice. But I wasn’t truly impressed till I saw them in action. They made lemon rice in just two steps:

1. Make Rice Using The Microwave.

2. Take “Lemon Rice Mix” and mix it with rice. Lemon Rice ready!

They gave Maggi noodles a run for its money. So much for learning from the experts. I however gained considerable courage in using the stove and I was able to make fried eggs. If you go to a restaurant there is big distinction between a chef and a cook. Someone who can cook is a cook. Someone who can create a new menu however, is called a chef. It is like the difference between a worker who lays bricks and an architect. Usually people go from being a cook to being a chef. I however did things the other way round. It might have been because of my aspiration to be the best that I thought following recipes were just a waste of time. I started making dishes that I don’t wish to name here. When my own personal safety became a cause for concern, I started using recipes.

I have seen considerable success as a cook. Every time I cook now, tears roll down my face and I ask myself “Did I just make this?” I spend more time taking pictures of what I made these days. I know a few women who used to gloat because they made fried rice or biryani. It was back in the old days when those kind of things used to impress me because I couldn’t do it myself. Now, I send them pictures of the stuff I make and I get a weird form of evil pleasure from it. I am no longer in a hurry to get married. If I did give out personal marriage ads, it would have changed from " seeking a girl adept in cooking" to " seeking a girl who doesn't mind cutting the vegetables and doing the dishes."

P.S - Someone insisted that I add that I still cannot make Dosas with the perfect shape. So that goes here in the P.S.

Everything in the pictures in this post was made and consumed by The Narcissist