Leave this town!

2 years and we have the sophomore album by Daughtry. I am in the process of listening to it. I know lot of you might think, its an industry made sound. Cliche, formula. All agreed, but it makes me feel good. I have always wanted to sing like him. I have always wished that there was atleast an American Idol in India. Unfortunately that is not possible and i don't want it either. I just would die without singing. I want to fly with it. Somehow i don't have the wings, somehow i am not the one spotted yet and maybe i would never be. Sometimes i wish to break free into the open skies but then insecurity pulls me back. I strum by guitar till the strings break and ask god, that i wish there was someone to listen to me. There was someone who would keep me inspired to sing. Anyway, i shall keep it coming, its my living necessity as same as air and water.


Cheers to music!
BTW...check out our new single: One song for Dystopia...here is the wallpaper to it :)! Keep rocking!

Long awaited Freedom!

What happened to me for the last two years? Guess what...4 shows with Dark Project, 1 at IIT KGP, 1 at HIT, Haldia and 2 at Some Place Else, Hotel Park, Kolkata. One disastrous solo performance at my office campus. An album done, called "Liberty & Entropy". Joined one of the coveted software firms from College. Came to Bangalore for the first time and settled for this phase of my life. I also lost my love in the process. A girl whom i had deeply loved, things did not work out. I am kind of bogged down in my life. The fuel to run Dark Project is enormous till date. But then, its disheartening to convey it when i see the attitude of certain people towards art and music. I somehow know that i am definitely at the wrong place. I need to break out and break free but then the chains that bind me are too tied up for me to achieve freedom right now.Talking about Freedom, "Liberty & Entropy" is my first attempt towards that goal. This album has the outright dedication from Me, Sauvik and Ugyal. I am happy that i can see the reflection now on Digi and Abhishek. I am thankful to Chux for being there for me always. Its been a long wait...for me. I want to relish this moment, but my hands are tied up in getting it to you and many others like you...So i can't afford to relax and enjoy this glory.More than an album, this is a monument of perseverence, the driving factor that me and Sauvik had took on back in School. Even i can't believe that i have been able to live with it for the last 7 years. People came and they went by but i am glad that we were always focussed on what we wanted to do...This album gives me the pump to move ahead and assists in me affirming to "Never Say Die" attitude...If you think it was easy...then think again...And now that i am probably all alone, with my Mother supporting me. I will not let it go by.Toast to Dark Project...my soul carriers in this mortal world, take a bow:Sauvik - You have been my inspiration. My guide, to whatever i have achieved.Ugyal - I know what you hide inside...your belief for Dark Project, is amazing.Chux - The best Roomie and partner i could have ever imagined in this new life. I will never be able to give you back what you have given me.Abhishek - Distances don't matter and i told you this on the first day. You are impetus to everything i do in life.Digi - A big brother, with only a month's gap between our birthdays. I am surprised pleasantly that i am still following you and vice versa.Nochiketa - Unconditional support, thanks for that.Korak - Thanks for believing in us and Dark Project.and above all...My Mom - She is a lady with the heart and courage. I would not live my life without her. The support i get from you can not be replicated by anyone.The moment of Truth...29th May...hail the world...hail Dark Project...A new life and a new freedom!

Vote for freedom!

Unfortunate indeed that the gap between this and my last entry is for over a month. I really could not find time due to my ocassional commitments with Dark Project shows and of course a yet so hectic life style at the office. 

Well good we are coming up with a new album but i would keep that off from here as i have a separate place, where i talk about it. This time it's all about the elections. Vote banks are all that we seek for. Notable point is that we always end up having over 50% of the "Junta" voting. A real sad story where you can say that the government is selected without a consent of half of the population who should have voted.

I remember seeing Barack Obama taking the oath for his presidential tenure. If i remember correctly then it was -5 degrees in washington that day, yet it was truely amazing to see how many people had actually turned up to see him. Some of the channels showed reactions from their citizens and each an everyone of them believed they had a change to take over. I won't comment about the after math, even considering that it is too early to do so.

Instead we shall turn our heads back to the nation. I would ask you, would you be there for the oath taking ceremony of our Prime Minister or how many of you would actually look forward in listening to the speech live on national television? I believe i know the answer and so do you...Question to ask here is why? Is it called lack of accountability? Is called taking things for granted? Or is it called Lethargy where you think that things cannot change here even if someone rubs his ass over the word "Change"?

Maybe we won't see an answer in all of these questions. What might give us the clue is the very fact that we still are imprisioned. We are still suffering the after maths of slavery. After all that we fought to get out freedom, our bones have lost the courage to fight. The last day, i was asking someone about her casting her votes, she replied by saying that she doesn't even have a voter's id card. With Amir Khan on television in the middle of every commercial break, i believe we were a bit deaf to hear that. 

You can't even deny us blaming the politicians and always hiding behind the sentence, "All are corupted". Too easy to say, if i ask you to step in for the nation, would you? There are enough reasons for you to site at that time, after all you have dreamt of MBA or an MBBS or maybe the old school engineering degree but politics? Not at all. 

Bottom line time once again. Freedom did come on 15th August 1947 but it is now a chapter in the history books more than anything else. We are strangled in our own lives and have become a slave to it. Wake up India!

No wonder..how we do it!

[Substitute the word "unbalanced" with "imbalanced" on my last post. It's only an illusion that i really missed it, rather diplomatically it was a conscious effort to see how conscious you were while reading it.]

I plan to write this post about the perfect mantra to success. This one would really interest those who are our so called "MBA aspirants" or the ones who are like me, "the non-aspirants". So here we are.

Long time ago, there was a girl, who asked her boyfriend, "O can you get me an MBA degree?". The boy asked in agony, "Why do you need that?, I am already an Engineer?". The girl replied back, "What about the status Q? Don't you know that it's the master key to open the locks of the gates my father has closed for you?". The boy is really in a dilemma. He gets sleepless nights, staring on the walls, thinking the goods and the betters that would happen if he really listens to the girl. In comes the question of priority. In comes the fact about where he would want to see himself in 5 years time. He takes a call finally, he tells the girl, "Look i don't want to wake up in the morning everyday and be the person that i really do not want to be, if MBA is the key to success then, i would want to be me"!

So by this time, i think we have a divided opinion about whether the boy really did the right thing or not. Let us look into both the aspects one after the other.

What if our protagonist had agreed to whatever the girl had to say. Mmm...He would have studied his ass off to become a MBA scholar from some mediocre institute if not the best ones. He would have had a Bently car waiting for him in the next 5 years time and of course he would have had a family with the girl (having baby sitters taking care of his ward). And then he would have a pile of nuts to crack. Now the problem is that, the same girl asks the man,
"You have no knowledge of responsibity, you always come late from office. Is work you life? Am i not anything to you?".

So our protagonist sits lame and wonders, if i were not an MBA. Well enough cast on one side, now back to the other. What if he was not. Mm...He would be an employee of an IT company (considering that they are best employers of our country). Living in a rented house, coming by office bus and yes, maybe still "Unmarried". But a lot happier, he still has a handful of dreams and complete control on his life. What happened to the girl? Well she is happily married to a guy in USA, who might not be an MBA but she has changed her preferences because now its all about shaking your booty in the United States of America. The place where she had always dreamt to be from her childhood.

Huh! So we are here, a breather. What confusion is this life? Well nothing actually. The positive way of seeing this is that, Live your life the way you want to. Most important than all,
"Follow Your Dreams"!

Do you deserve this?

No time to hover around. I shall directly come to the point. Let's roll back 20 years from now. The term "Engineering" (I was a 4 year old kid) , was like a substitute to "Genius", rather the other way around. I would grow up as a child, thinking that its too big for me to fill in those shoes of being an "Engineer". I never really bothered about it and neither my mom might have ever thought about it a single day. So i aspired very little and i became..."Luck by chance"... Well not much the same way like my ancestors in this profession might have done it. None the less, the "Engineering" mania was on in full throttle until....errrr.....Some terminology which laid dormant in English dictionary...suddenly wakes up bigger than anytime...Well enough of suspicion...I am referring to the giant, the killer, the slow poison called "The Recession"...

"Engineering" was a decent investment...approximately 1.5 lacs for 4 years and then a guarantee to sign the dotted line for a multi national company. Sadly the days are no more same and it has happened before than most of us might have anticipated it 4 years back. Suddenly the final year passout students are sitting at home, listening cautiously to whatever the rumour trademills are running. Suddenly there is a pause in confidence, when a father would meet his old friend in the market and say...my son is an "Engineer"...All of a sudden an engineering student starts feeling that he had made the wrong choice...Somewhere he hides the truth...the truth of taking a short path to survival. Depressions everywhere...What do we do now?

One thing to understand here is...that recession maybe bad to many...but this is the time when you can really ask yourself the BIG funny question..."Do i really deserve it for what i have put in"...Hikes that would give the exponential curves a shame...Did we really put in all these to get that much? I guess we know the answer...So what do we do now...that we have already plunged one feet into the sinking boat which was full of gold mines...If you really ask me...this is the best time that you would know yourself better. You would know your limitations and realise your abilities. This is the time where sustainance is more important than demand. The best always comes out when its tough...So is for us...Buckle up your seat belts...Take the plunge with both hands say to yourself that "Yes i will survive"...Believe me in 3 years from now...you would be different man...Actually this is the best time to really pay for taking that short route to success. To show to the world that...yes we were the chosen ones...:)!

After all...we created this money...we created this world...its sometime when the social ecosystem gets unbalanced due to our ever growing needs...something which is an artificial phenomenon takes the shape of a God's desire...and we really fail to prove that we deserved it all along...

The trip...contd

Hence i reached Sounak's place.A 2 BHK flat, a laptop and a couple of unpacked suitcases. He had just shifted to the flat the last night. I washed myself clean and we set out for greames Road Apollo, Saunak's office was on the way. On the road, we found a place to eat our breakfast. We were unsure, yet we saw some guys having poori with some masala dosa sabjee. No questions, we ordered for that. The man who was serving understood that these might be some bloody IT folks, though we were not..completely...Anyways, not much of an excitement there, we set out for the bus which would take us to Apollo. Saunak was new to Chennai and did not know the bus details. We found a guy on a scooty, stoped him by and started asking in english. After sometime, he replied back..."Hindi hai kya"? As if he classified me to be an Indian. We were shocked to hear that yet, he replied back in some broken accent that Bus No. 42 would take us to Apollo. We went to the other side of the road and started waiting for the bus to come. During a 5 minute standing time period, i saw about 10 buses passing us by, none of them were 42. I ghushed into Saunak, "Do you really want to go in these"? He said, well if you are in chennai, you have to be a Batman or a Superman to travel on those buses. People were literally hanging out of the doorstep. This was worse than the number of people i saw for the first time on Bonga Local. We changed our minds. Took an auto. It had a meter, which was fully functional. Saunak with his overtly oozing intelligence asked the Auto guy, about how much he would be taking. The guy replied back saying, 80 Bucks. I was like, why did he have to ask him. Anyways, i was constantly monitoring the Meter. It read 3 Kms and i reached Apollo. I knew from the moment i got on to the Auto that, this won't be a very good day for my wallet.

So i came to Apollo Chennai, the place renowned for India's best treatment. My brother asked me to wait near the main entrance. To my shock i found that everything there was first written in English, and then??? BENGALI. It did not take me long to percieve two things. First one that Bengal doesn't have good facilites and second that Bengalies might be one ethnicity that suffers the most due to deases. I met the patient and everything looked normal there. So i was happy. We went for lunch, me and my brother. To my surprise again, i find that he has taken me to a bengali Hotel. The guy was charging prices for ordinary meals as if he was the worst victim of the Inflation and the economic slowdown. I was more eager to end the day, as it was getting under my skin. I took the 11:15, bangalore city express and came back to the place i love being, Bangalore.

The next day, people at office asked me about my experience about chennai. Now how do i tell them...Its all described better with the words above!

The trip!

The last post was full of gramatical errors and i truely regret for the fact that i am not so bad with english. Talking about english, this is one of the reasons for this post. I had come from Bengal on 14th evening flight. I got a call from my cousin brother that i have to visit Apollo Chennai to see my cousin sister's husband who was admitted there. I was almost slogging till 11 in the office that week and now i get a call from him. I have to be there at Chennai on Saturday morning. A pain in the a** but i had go. I thought chennai is just 6 hours so i can manage. I asked one of my colleagues to get the ticket details. He asked me to book it online. So i did. Going by bus coming by train. 

Finally friday nite and i am standing at Madivala. With a galaxy full of travel agents. I was wondering how i would recognise by bus. There was no bus number on the ticket. I had butterflies in my stomach already, thinking if i got fooled in some way. Ahh! There came a bus, with the same travel agency name. I go rush to its doorstep. The guy speaks in half Tamil and i somehow ask him if i can get on. He said sure you can...are you heading for chennai...the answer was madurai. I was as you would be, a dissapointed guy. Came back to the foot point and started staring at the other buses. I was pinching myslef all the time for not been to able to say a "No" to my brother. With only Maggi in my belly and a brain full of anxiety, the moment was killing me. I had been to Chennai before but did not return with much memories to cherish.Ahh!!! There you are...A chennai bus...probably the one i am looking for. Indeed it was. I went inside. A/C semi sleeper coach as it read on the ticket. Never had an experience of such a bus before. There were people sitting(sleeping) with blankets spread on thier body. I found my seat. Very unsure about how the push back worked, i asked the neighbouring guy to work it out for me. He did help in a very generous way and i asked him his little biodata. He was a pondichery based guy, working foe some company here in bangalore and was very generous again to share his word about the work he does with laser technology. I was happy to find a company for the journey though my eyes were drooling at about 11:30 in the nite. I asked the guy that i would want to take a nap and that he would have to wake me up in the morning. I was unsure about where to get down. Suddenly i get a call from Saunak, he asked me to go directly to his house after getting off the bus and that he would eventually take me Greames road, Apollo. I was more than happy to get that call. At about 12:30 i find that the whole of my body is succumbed with red bumps. Man there are bed bugs, i shouted. The guy sitting beside me was so generous that he almost offered me his blanket, obviously i did not take it.

It was early morning 6:00 am. I reached the bus terminus, i am not able to recall the name, but it was nearer to Saidapet. I get down from the bus and find that there are a streak of Auto Rickshaws, of course in a search for their pray. I had already heard horrified stories about Chennai Auto.I tried to behave as intelligent as i could by bypassing most of them. One of them asked me 100 bucks, i told him 30 and he was SHOCKED! I could very well make out that it would not be more than that anyways. I found one of the autos which agreed for 50 bucks. I discovered that the Sounak's residence was only 3 kilometers from that bus stop. I was helpless and i took the ride.

to be continued....