Of Inks and Mightier Swords…

One of my inner ramblings just led me to stumble upon something: that everything I write usually gets me all involved and I pour in everything I usually have…

Now, as my Voice of Reason (read:Girlfriend) says, “It’s not always good, it’s not always bad…”, which confused me all the more, and she wasn’t kind enough to give me an instance, so here I am, writing this, at 4 O’clock in the morning.

I think there has been a lot of gradual changes in me where my thoughts and my expressions are concerned for long time now. My thought patterns, the way I express things, the way I put myself on paper (which I never do now), the way I try and understand things, almost everything. I don’t know, but I rather miss my old self, romantic, flamboyant, and above all else, expressive. Maybe it’s my constant failures, or maybe just a change brought in by time, I strangely find myself alien sometimes. Funny how the smallest of emotions triggered my writing spells… I would spend hours just sitting by my window and just write. That never happens now. I don’t claim to be a good writer, hell knows how I was, but I was proud what I wrote, and thought maybe my writing might take me somewhere one day!!

I miss those old days. A few years ago I would have been at a desk putting pen to paper, now I have to type this out. I absolutely loathe typing, it’s so damn unpersonal, that’s you writing, and it’s not in your hand-writing!! Writing to me always meant a good sheet of paper and my trusty Blue Pen, my trusty Parker pen. Lost it a couple of years back during my fledgling days in the city, and oddly enough, never even missed it much!! Maybe it was the thought that it was replaceable, that I could always buy a same dark blue, oh, indigo in girlfriend-speak, Parker pen. it would be available everywhere. I was in Delhi now, right? I could never have been more wrong. Not only did I not get the same kind of pen immediately, I could also not find my Chelpark Royale, the ink that drove me. Yes, it sounds like me, always making silly excuses for every little thing, but I had OCD, in my own defence… Hahaha… seems like the big city is uselessly big now, huh? I know I will never see another bottle of my Chelpark Royale again, but I did find the Parker pen, and it didn’t manage to leave any memories behind that I don’t even remember the color. It must be at home, on my desk, gathering dust… feel really sorry for it, but somehow I didn’t feel attached to it as I was to my previous ones, My first Parker, the canary yellow one, my second, the dark blue, third, sky blue but of different make with the black cap from Joyraj’s Black one, and the last dark Blue, again. The yellow was with my friend James until the last time we met a couple of years back and until I lost track of it, the dark blue was of a different and cheaper model, “Vector”, if I remember correctly (or is it the other way round? Can’t remember…), and I used it for quite sometime before I changed it for the more expensive and superior “???”, can’t seem to remember the name of my favorite pen!!! The later ones I used with love and care and the nibs either broke or were lost. And The Chelpark Royale!!! Not the “Royal Blue” ink which clueless shopkeepers just bring out and claim that none other existed, but The Chelpark Royale that had the most elegant blue you rarely get to see and left that lasting impression on your mind, well, don’t know about anyone else, but it did for me. But now I go everywhere, even the same place back home where I used to buy it regularly from, and nobody even knows it even existed!! Why?? Am I the only one who knew it?? The guy used to just give it to me whenever I told him to bring me The Chelpark Royale, never even winced or blink suspiciously, he would just go at the back and bring it out to me. And damn you if you even for one moment think The Chelpark Royale was some bogus fake thing, damn you, damn you, just because you haven’t seen something necessarilly mean it’s fake, it is as real as you and me, and the blood that’ll come out your nose if you ever doubt me and question the existence of The Chelpark Royale. Will go online as soon as my line starts working again and find some proof to shove down the mouths of non-believers. I wonder why they discontinued manufacturing it if they ever did. A bottle used to come for a good 25 rupees or so when the ordinary Chelpark came for a mere 11 or 12. And the Parker ink that came for 50? Total crap. C.R.A.P. Period, no questions, no nothing. Never seen a more runny, watery and pathetic excuse of an ink in my life than the Parker ink. It’d never stay dark for more than a couple of weeks, and just fade away like that, and the color was, is, actually the worst you can get for that kind of money. As James Jonah Jameson (the annoying Editor of Daily Bugle in Spider-man for the uninitiated) once put it wisely, “Crap. Crap. Megacrap.”

Parker pens and Chelpark Royale have given way now to nameless five-rupee pen, Elkos “Velo” pen, Which I find excellent, and the color of the ink reminiscent to the Royale. It’s gel-based, works just fine and above all makes me write sometimes. I’ll never move on from my Parker-Royale hangover, but I know this will serve its purpose and build its place in my sentiments gradually… and maybe one day when all is well again in the World, there’s World Peace, hunger has been eradicated and BJP and the RSS have disbanded for good, The Chelpark Royale will make its way into shelves again, and into my life consequently. I’ll buy a whole life’s worth of stock then, just in case. Then I will feel I have written something, even if it was total crap I wrote…

Of Calls and Annoying Jacks…

Just bought myself a new phone a few days back, a Samsung Star S5233S model to be precise, and I must say, not blowing my own horn or anything, that it is indeed an excellent device. Can’t still keep my hands away from it, am still discovering new ways to tinker and play with it. “Msging” is a breeze, voice quality is amazing and watching videos on the 16:9 crisp screen is excellent. Let me remind you guys here, this thing ain’t the i-pod video, or the i-phone for that matter, so don’t go expecting miracles in the media playback department, but this thing sure kicks some good freaking ass on its own!! Given that you know your way around the video-encoding neighborhood, and you have some free time, you’re gonna have hell lot of good quality stuff to make that quick break at office and the BIG BUNK between college and home a little more interesting. If you don’t, fear not, I’ll post some how-to stuff a bit later. My only crib here would be the insanely useless pair of headphones that the phone ships with. What were they thinking?? Unless a humongous chunk of their clientele are Giants and Trolls, I think they’d be hard-pressed to find actual living human beings who can fit those HUGE ( and I mean HUGE in the Biblical sense) earplugs into their ear-holes. And let’s not get started about that miseable, miserable feeling you get when you follow the head-phone wire to the bitter end and find out that the connector is not the ordinary, common man jack, it’s a proprietary funny looking connector which seems to laugh and mock at you over some cosmic joke you just missed every time you look at it!! Don’t know about you, but I always have this gut-feeling that the punchline somehow involves us… Anyways, long story short, all you gotta do is find an adapter, or easier still, another pair of headphones with the same connector, but the kind which has another connector in between for the regular 3.5 mm jacks. Those things are God’s gifts for audiophiles everywhere!! For those who have the Star, or any other similar phone of Samsung make and model, you don’t have to look further than the Samsung Corby, the headphones that ship with the model have 3.5 mm adapters, so you can trash the buds that came with it and connect your own into it. That being said, I still believe myself when I say that the Star is still an excellent phone, and wrap this up, because I’m running out of adjectives to describe it. Anyhow, watch this space for an in-depth user review, and DYI (Do-It-Yourself, for those who came in late) stuff to keep you interested (Haven’t actually enjoyed any music playback on the thing because of the ear-plug problem you see, and since I consider myself a audiophile snob and also because I paid an obscene amount of cold, hard cash for a pair of Creative noise isolators,  I’d rather wait for my Corby pair).

Note: For True believers of Nokia (I was one before I jumped ship and converted), things are sunnier for you. I believe the newer X-press music models have normal jacks, so you don’t have to worry when you buy one. And if it doesn’t, you still have an easy way out (Well, cheaper, if not easier). Look around your grey electronics market for cheap chinese made adapters, jacks that have 3.5 mm connectors. In Delhi, a good one will set you back by 30-pathetic bucks or so at the Palika Market. Look out for cheaters and posers who’ll tell  you that they only sell Nokia geniune stuff, and want a fat lot for the thing. Well, Nokia didn’t have the forethought to make nifty little trinkets like that, so take your business elsewhere!! Look around, check every shop that stocks the connector, try it out on your phone, see if it fits perfectly or if it’s loose, check the quality out, bargain a bit, haggle the price and see if you can get it cheaper than i did. Happy shopping!!

 

 

 

A Quick Hello to All

Hello and thanks to you all for checking out my blog, hope you like what you read and hang around a bit more and decide to return again afterwards. This is the first time around I’m wandering into the realm of serious blogging, and so please be a little more lenient and patient as I grow as a blogger and maybe and hopefully as a writer too…. Thanks again for dropping in, hang around a bit and read on!!