The Cheese Potato

Does it sound familiar? Ahh!, don't confuse it with your regular cheese tomato and some of you must be thinking of it as a kind of potato.For your kind information it is not any other kind of potato.

This lip-smacking dish originally prepared in Spain is a superb blend of Brazilian potatoes and Italian Cheese . You would be surprised to know that sailors and soldiers of the Spanish Armada survived on this extremely delicious food. A great care is taken to prepare this delicacy and the contents that are added to it are measured with calibrated vessels. The potatoes are beautifully carved and the cheese cut into perfect cubes. Some say it is the food only fit for the kings and some say it is cooked even in heaven.You would forget all your worries of the day when the hot cheese melts in your mouth. You would feel yourself afloat in the air when you sip the soup and say Waah! That is some paradise!


Now read this carefully. Every word I have written about the Cheese Potato is a cent per cent lie. The true story goes here. This extremely special dish is prepared in the mess of Visveswarayya Bhawan, Pantnagar as a part of Sunday special diet. It is a blend of hard rubber cheese and potato water or potato swamp (In hindi we call it aloo paani). This potato water or aloo paani used to be the royal dum aloo, well that is an another story.

The taste, I must tell you even after adding cheese, potatoes, turmeric, chillies and other spices, this dish miraculously tastes no better than tap water. I, Sir Jagadish Vema coined the name Cheese Potato, as I have wept whenever I stuffed this dish into my mouth. I would be leaving this hostel in a few months and I must say I would be gladly missing this dish forever in my life.

Dilemma

I am not in a dilemma or stuck in any real life situation. I am in a dilemma about what to write in my blog. As a writer, I have a wide range of options. I can write reality, fiction, philosophy etc. If I write reality, it is very much like tight rope walking. I need to maintain a fine balance on what I write. So many funny things happens in our day to day life that we laugh our heads off but finally the joke happens to be on someone around you. When you have friends from different sets of people, it is not easy to please everyone. Some may enjoy what I write, some may feel offended. It is the words that I use that decide who is going to enjoy and who is going to be offended. A fact can be viewed differently by different people, but it is the words of a writer that make a reader to think in a particular direction. The very people who had enjoyed what I have written may feel offended if I state the same fact differently. It is all about vilifying or glorifying someone at the end. 
Writing fiction is bit easier than writing reality. You just have to write the real emotions you have ever felt, in a fictional scenario, but again to get that scene on paper, you need to feel it really. For me it is easy to write action, adventure as I try out different and crazy things and I could feel the thrill, fear and sometimes current flowing through my nerves every time I go out for an adventure. But I can't write action and adventure all the time, I myself get bored. I tried out romance too, but it did not work out. I felt like posting something on Valentine's day. A story had developed in my mind, I could visualise the scene, my protagonists were two birds, the symbollic lovebirds, but when it came to romance my thoughts became hazy. I felt I was not doing justice to their romance. I could not get the feeling from my heart, the words looked stale, then I realised, to write something about love, you need to be a romantic atleast if not in love. Then I decided to save the story for my lady love. I may get the right words when I may actually fall in love. But right now it is not my cup of coffee(I dislike tea). Now my mind says why don't you try some philosophy. I feel I am too young to write any philosophy, I still have to look at various aspects of life. I had developed some philosophy of my own and used to think myself as one of the great philosophers, but as I grew up I came to know I was wrong about many things and realised life is not that simple as it seems. One thing I learned is that I have to keep my philosophy to myself and that philosophy is not applicable to all as everyone grows up differently and in diferent conditions and everyone learns life his own way. So I am a bit of a dilettante as far as philosophy is concerned. Now I have decided to let my mood direct me on what I write and express so that I can discover various aspects of my personality when I look back into my writings. 

Origin of life on Earth

There are so many stories and theories explaining the origins of life. It would be absurd to assert that in this entire universe only our planet Earth sustains life. Life force could have been originated anywhere in this universe. The God or the supreme power we earthlings venerate is supposed to be the initial life force. I am not giving theories about the origin of God but I would like to tell you how humans came to Earth.

The God or the initial life force had fully evolved and had reproduced what we call the demi-Gods. The God and his tribe of demi-Gods had advanced and reached the pinnacle in all technologies possible. Now what, everything was just perfect and harmonious. Believe me if everything becomes perfect, life becomes monotonous and boring, imperfections add spice to life.

But in God's world nothing could be disturb the harmony of perfection, so the demi-gods convened an assembly and it was decided to create life with lesser intelligence and watch it develop and struggle with imperfections(It is supposed to be a movie for gods) and control their destinies(This served the gaming purpose).

So God and his team of engineers and explorers started searching for a platform to launch their project. Now it is quite obvious that this platform is Earth. God's engineers started working on various aspects of the environment that surrounds us.

Some designed immovable life(plants) and some movable life(animals) and some designed forces of nature as humans know and some designed emotions that would develop in the Earth's environment(Human emotions like love hate, anger etc were inbuilt into this system).Now, we can view Earth as an Operating System for God.

The initial life on Earth was designed for testing and the test results were encouraging to continue designing life with higher intelligence. So the platform (the Earth) had to be reset for new entities to be introduced. As result, the meteors came crashing down on Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and other test life forms.

Testing continued with increased intelligence levels and after several resets(the ice ages),came the humans. Humans were prototypes of demi-Gods themselves with intelligence levels at par with their own. With the advent of Humans, stage was set for the first play station of demi-Gods. The goal of the game was to reach the pedestal of God struggling with all the forces of nature and other living beings.

Humans started with zero knowledge levels and needed utility tools for sustenance and development. The God's engineers who designed forces of nature sent humans the updates on harnessing these forces(very much like the updates we get for the softwares and patches for operating systems). Humans revered these engineers and started worshipping them. This is the beginning of religion and very well explains the practice of polytheism in early civilizations.

Demi-gods controlled the destinies of their pawns (the humans) and soon they were vigorously competing with each other. These competitions became unhealthy and the demi-gods got split in two groups- the angels and demons. The demons were responsible for creating and spreading viruses (tyrants and savages) and angels countered them with anti-viruses(superhumans and powerful weapons).

Humans, being an active part of this struggle between angels and demons, were approached for help by the both sides for added advantage. Humans took sides carefully in exchange for the technology of demi-gods. Humans became masters of extremely powerful technology unnoticed by both the groups. Humans who started out as pawns had actually become players now. But Earth itself had become a mess and the great God left humans and demi-gods to their fate, yes fate started affecting the demi-gods too.

By the time demi-gods realised this it was too late and a great war started which resulted in complete annihilation of demi-gods and near-complete annihilation of humans(Humans were smart enough to hide and protect their kind). Though humans had won the war but had considerably lost their life span and got reset frequently (life-death cycle). As result, the data storehouse of the technology they acquired vanished as humans rebuilt their civilization slowly from the ruins of the war.

Everything started anew for humans with no strings attached and with no one controlling their destinies. Since humans were the only intelligent legacy of God, He helped them out time and again you can guess how (You can attribute all turning points in Known history to Him). But this time He gave technology to them one at a time so that humans could learn all the pros and cons of the technology and advance sensibly and responsibly. It has been nearly 9,500 years since the great war and humans had regained just 35% of the lost technology.

This is an overview of the novel I am working on.

Desire Drives Life

We might have heard this many times from the so-called self-proclaimed spiritual gurus that man should be free of desires. He should free his senses from all desires and blah,blah,blah.
But I say Dear "Spiritual Guru" Why don't you cease to exist? You are useless on Earth rather a burden sucking up all the Earth's resources. Some religionists may point out that its written in sacred scriptures. I ask can you guarantee that who wrote that scripture was no hypocrite or just a mediocre and did he not have a "Desire" to make his point to the people.
It is desire that drives a man's life. Desire to excel, succeed, conquer drives a person to greatness. Do I need to assert this when history itself is the witness. Let alone greatness, every man has a desire to achieve something or get something be it as basic as food. If you desire something, won't you go get it or atleast try for it. History has not known a man who had desired for something and not even tried for it once if he could. Every human has desires till the last breath of his life. Let us suppose a man who says he is free of desires(desire to breath, drink,eat are excluded, let us be a bit easy on him), then I ask why is he living on this earth, even to serve a purpose in life one needs a desire. Without a desire you are nothing but a zombie.
Even God has a desire "Well being of his subjects" .

The Wise Old Man

A retired man moves near a junior high school. He spends the first few weeks of retirement in peace and quiet. However, when a new school year begins, three young boys beat on every trash can they encounter every day on their way home from school.

Finally, the man decides to take action and walks out to meet the boys. He says, "You kids are a lot of fun. I'll give you each a dollar if you'll promise to come around every day and do your thing." The kids continue to do a bang-up job on the trashcans.

After a few days, the man tells the kids, "This recession's really putting a big dent in my income. From now on, I'll only be able to pay you 50 cents to beat on the cans." The noisemakers are displeased, but they accept his offer.

A few days later, the retiree approaches them again. "Look," he says, "I haven't received my Social Security check yet, so I'm not going to be able to pay more than 25 cents. Will that be OK?"

"A freakin' quarter?" the drum leader exclaims. "If you think we're going to waste our time beating these cans around for a quarter, you're nuts. We quit."

The Stranger

Its quite usual to come across strangers in life, sometimes we befriend them, or ignore them and sometimes we fight them. I would like to tell you the story of this stranger.

The other day we were playing cricket in the hostel and the ball was hit high and it got stuck on the ledge just below the roof. I volunteered to get the ball on the condition that all my stunts would be captured on camera. I climbed into the balcony on the second floor and stood on the edge giving poses for camera and then I reached for the ledge balancing myself on the edge. But our dear ball was stuck in no‐man's land and I could not get my hands on it. I decided to swing myself so that I could get near the ball. My legs were hanging in the air and my hands gripped the ledge but the ball was still out of reach.

Someone shouted from below some words of encouragement to get going. Then came another voice "Do you want him dead, idiot? He may not care for his life but if he falls we will be held responsible".

Then I looked below, one wrong move, that’s it, I am dead. I had come too far from the balcony and could not find a foothold. Then a funny thought came to my mind that if I fall, these guys might face a police case and I feared more for them than for myself. I was hanging and still could not find a foothold and could feel beads of sweat on my forehead on a cold winter day. It was fear, it had crept up my spine and I was holding to my dear life. I was no longer in control. I calmed down and tried to pull myself back to the balcony. Some of my friends reached the balcony and held out their hands to grab me and they pulled me to safety. My heart started beating faster now when I visualized the scene of my fall. I would have fallen on the badminton pole and would have got impaled to death.

I retired to my room and gulped down half a bottle of water and sat on my bed visualizing the scene. It was giving me both the thrill and the shivers. I decided to take a walk and clear my head of all that just happened.

A stranger came up to me and said "You are bold but extremely crazy". I gave him a curt smile and said "Thank You". He asked "Don't you care for your life doing such dangerous things just for nothing?". I joked "Had I fallen, my friends would have earned some money by uploading the video on YouTube "Amazing Videos". It did not go down well with him and he asked me to respect and care life and then moved away. I retorted back "I know what to do with my life". He had moved few steps away but stopped and turned around.

To my astonishment, he disintegrated into millions of bee like creatures. The swarm of bees moved towards me and I ran for my life. They kept closing in on me and then I fell to the ground and pulled my jacket over my head to protect myself. Those creatures covered me like a blanket stinging through my clothes. I tried to move my hand but could not move a limb as if I was paralyzed. I tried to shout for help but my voice could not make it to my throat. I felt my life was being sucked out of me and could small the scent of death.

A part of me wanted to give up as it could not bear the pain anymore but something in my head shouted " I am not going to die like this, not without a fight or purpose". I decided to fight to the last and with all my remaining strength I shouted and gave a thrust to my limbs. Then I woke up from my bed and then realized it was all a nightmare. I was sweating heavily and my shirt and hair were wet with sweat. I calmed down and said to myself either I would live a purposeful life or die a purposeful death.

The stranger, should I call him Death or Devil made me realize how precious this life is and I have been given a chance to make it purposeful.