Won't Get Fooled Again

I’d never thought of golf as an exceptionally difficult sport. It never seemed difficult. You saw those pro golfers on the telly, just one easy swing and WHACKKK, right on the green for a birdie.  Football could be considered difficult, what with all the constant running and the gorgeous flicks and piledriver shoots and flying two-footed lunges. Even tennis, or squash, or table-tennis; hitting a moving ball is always gonna be a bit of a challenge. Or any other sport, with anything moving it. But never golf. How difficult could it really be to hit a stationary ball at a stationary target from a stationary position?

Well, approximately a fortnight into it, that target still eludes me and many of my countless golf shots. It’s almost as if there’s some Force at play here (some incredibly dawdling Jedi maybe?). So now it’s dawned on me that golf has a learning curve far, far steeper than any trajectory I’ve managed to achieve so far. Ask my caddy, he covers more distance fetching the balls back than Michael Carrick probably covers in a whole match (no offence really, I’ve reconciled my differences with Carrick for the time being).

Anyway, here’s what I expected  would happen at the golf course:( of course I’d seen some videos. This is all they did.)

Place the ball, hold the club, take aim, WHACKKK.

Except the whackk was never heard in the first few tries. It was more like a dull thud, and I’d have been happy with that if the ball had gone anywhere remotely far. (In fact, the first time, I could just stretch my golf club arm and get the ball back. So encouraging!) Wow, so youtube was having an #epic failure here. I decided this was probably a good time to find someone good at this to help me..umm.. refine  my technique. After meeting with a whole bunch of seasoned golfers, shameless flukes and hopeless wannabes, and getting confusing, often conflicting advice from each, I can honestly inform you that there are three kinds of people you’ll meet at the golf course  (I’m the fourth kind; the noobs . There weren’t many.)

  1.   The Really Helpful Kind – Don’t get fooled by the name, it’s only that they appear to help in a way that would seem really helpful to an outsider. There are mostly relatively new to the game themselves, so they look to you as their apprentices (which is not a good thing), or they are really old and have nothing to do the whole day except talk to a stranger at the golf course the whole day.

What they basically do is fill your ears with a tome-worth of golf instructions. The bad thing here is that everyone has their own tome, so what you really have is a huge mash-up of pretty useless golf jargon. At the end of the day, they’ll always leave with a shameless “You know, that is how it worked for me, you gotta find your own way.” Like hell I will.

  2.  The Constant Critic Kind – Stay away from them! They’re the supercilious snobs who’re in constant awe of their marvellous skills. So when you line up to demonstrate your self-righteous techniques, there’s always a bucketload of “No, that’s not right”, “Nah, that isn’t the way”, “What? This doesn’t go here”, “That’s very wrong” and some more shit coming your way (and the occasional snigger, of course). Then you ask them to shine the Holy Light upon you and before you’ve even said that, they’ve stuck the ball with a mere twist of …well…it all goes so fast you can’t really see what exactly happened (fate?) So while you’re still flummoxed by that, they take another ball and whackkk. Then another. This goes on until they forget all about you, and you’re just one of those delinquents who stands and stares at people.

  

  3.  The My-way-or-the-Highway Kind – One of those will in all probability find you on their own, make you watch the way they do it, then slowly reduce their fps so your tired eyes can keep pace with all the motion going on.  All this is normally accompanied with phrases like “This way”, “I  do this”, “You should do this”, “it’s done this way”…you get my flow. Then they want you to repeat all this. First in words, just to make sure you’re not baselessly retarded, then the real way. And just as you’re about to swing, they’ll roughly pull your arm back and start forcing you around like a rag doll to the position they want to see you in. This is very awkward, and occasionally very embarrassing. After a lot of fiddling and tickling and poking around, they give a half-appreciative nod. And you swing…and the ball…there’s no need to get your hopes high, the ball goes where it gotta go. The reaction? “That’s strange….stick to it, you’ll be fine, you just need more practice..”.  And you’re left smiling sheepishly at your gross incompetence but with the faint hope that it’ll be fine.

And all this doesn’t even compare to the hopelessness when your too-cheeky-for-his-own-good in- 7th-grade caddy comes back with a significantly lighter bag of balls than you started with(he says it’s my fault, I hit them all over the place) and starts explaining things to you. Wow, the sheer hopelessness. But you gotta hang on, cuz with an evil grin you know he’ll be the one running mad chasing balls.  

Phew, after all this(times the number of days in a fortnight)…i’m really glad of the progress I’ve made (yes, I have made progress. Shut your pessimistic mind.)  I can hit them hard and long now, and get that sweet “whack” most of the times. Too bad the direction’s still off, but the joy of helping a young kid fight obesity in this evil world? Priceless.  

A Rush of Blood to the Head

It was a glorious sunny afternoon. It was around 12, and we had just plonked ourselves in our raft, ready for the 26-odd km ride down the hallowed curves of the Ganga. There were 4 of us , plus a guide and two of his helpers.  The water was delightfully cold, the flow frightfully strong-ideal for a great day of white water rafting. Or so we thought.

and it begins!

The first rapid, rather intuitively called ‘Good Morning’, was a pretty lazy one, it dint toss us around or slap us with sheets of water. The next one wasn’t much either, so ever the adventurous kind, we stood on the sides of the raft and tried crossing the rapid that way. No one managed to (something the guide was pretty disappointed with) but no one fell off the raft either, so that went well.

The guide shouted that we were approaching the ‘Three Blind Mice’, a grade 3 rapid, which consisted of a series of three small rapids (hence the name). Fresh with confidence, we were rowing forward with great aplomb. We struck the first rapid head-on, still rowing against the will of the water, and then it happened. We overturned.

The only thing I remember of the fall is seeing something fast and blue and swirling for a fraction of a second, and then I was out of the torrent, gasping for breath, hands trying desperately to grasp something. For a moment I was clutching the raft’s rope, and I tried to pull myself up, but the damned thing was still overturned. I felt myself being pulled under the raft. Now that was a scary thought, and I hastily managed to somehow push away from it.  I was quite ok up till now; I was kinda wishing earlier we would overturn for the heck of it.  Suddenly I felt a hand grabbing my neck, to the point of choking. Things got really scary then. It was one of my friends, he dint know how to swim and he was turning frighteningly white, swallowing water with each passing second.  If he went down, he would make sure I went with him, and that really freaked me out. It took some real effort to make him let go of my neck and grab my shoulder. We crossed the other two rapids this way, him losing more hope all the time.

After the gushing rapids had passed and we were in somewhat calm water, I looked around. One of our oars was floating close to me; I grabbed hold of it. I saw one of the helpers to my left. Heaving a sigh of relief, I asked him what to do now. The look on his face when he muttered this brought all the dread back: “Bhaiya mujhe terna nai aata!!”*^#$%#$ I cursed him for all it was worth, but it was all I could do.  Apparently, the freak was new in training, and this was the first time he’d overturned. So now I had two really scared guys clinging onto me, and this made my hands rather useless. I coaxed them to tread some water with their feet and try to make for the shore. Using the oar as a support, we managed to force our way across to dry land. Oh, the earth felt real good then! Luckily, the side we’d chosen saw the sun for most of the day, thus was thankfully dry. We climbed on top of a cliff, and saw our raft a couple of kms away on the opposite bank. The main guide guy had somehow steadied it and managed to get it to the shore. The other helper guy was trekking towards us with another of my friends, and that brought cheers.

A half-hour must’ve passed during all this, and still there was no sign of the fourth guy. My other friend was at the front when we toppled, so there was no one ahead of him, and he couldn’t be behind because the flow would’ve carried him onwards. Fearing the worst, we asked the helper (the other one, who knew how to swim) if people actually drown here. His words brought no comfort…

We shouted across to the main that we were missing a person. He went back upriver, scrambling over rocks and bushes searching for some sign of him. The waiting was unbearable. Finally we saw his head surface over the farthest ridge on the opposite bank. Phew!

We still had to hike over treacherous terrain to reach the raft. The gripe was that we were barefoot, the rocks were slowly turning hot with the sun, and God they were so sharp! It was like walking over an endless trail of hot spiky nettles. And of course no one wanted to jump back in the water again, so there was no other option but to continue this way for what seemed like eternity.

Finally we reached the raft, there were hugs all around. I guess we were pretty relieved. The guide and one of my friends had struggled some more and brought the raft across to our side of the river.  We’d lost all our paddles except the one I’d saved, so we ended up rowing with our hands for some time, until we reached a public beach. Our guide had called ahead, and there were people waiting with reinforcements. To our surprise, the guide refused to continue further, he hadn’t swallowed so much water ever and in his own words, “Mujhe khud chand sitaare dikh gaye!”. He was eventually replaced for the rest of the way. There were still 18 kms to go. There came scary rapids which tossed our raft so high that the paddle won’t reach the water and we’d be rowing in empty air. There were times we were almost vertical, and then the water would come rushing on to hit us in the face, hard. We were very determined not to fall again, so we held tight.  

On the way, we even stopped for cliff jumping. Some of us dint want to, though, the thought of being in the water again was too much to digest. The jump wasn’t much, must’ve been around 10ft or so, and I’d jumped from higher up(in a swimming pool, though). But it was swell nonetheless, the sweet splash of hitting the cold water falling through thin air. That’s me going eeehaaaaw-

 



We continued on, faced some more rapids, and finally the calm waters at Rishikesh came to embrace us. Our story had spread here; there were random strangers asking us how the whole experience was. People rarely overturned at that section of the river, so that's what all the fuss was all about.

It turns out there's a rapid called the 'Wall' further upstream, where there's roughly 1% chance of NOT overturning. Here's what it looks like:

Next destination? You bet.

X

When you can't remember Zion

You know how sometimes you hear an amazing song and it gets lodged in your head?  Then you forget where you heard it in the first place, or its name and slowly the words, until a point comes where it all gets so frustrating.

I knew I’d heard that piece of music somewhere recent, like in a movie or a TV show. Probably a TV show, I knew it too well.  I knew it wasn’t a comedy, so it was easy to narrow the choices down (I’m a sucker for comedy shows). Was it The Wire? Breaking Bad? It surely wasn’t the Game of Thrones.  Finally I found it, Mad Men. 

Anyways, here's the elusive song:

Peace at last.

X 

Worst Things First

I'd always thought I'd never blog, and the chief reason I am now is because I'm so utterly, completely and hopelessly vela, and for want of nothing else to do, here I am writing utter crap. The other reason was that someone told me that this precisely was the point of having a blog. And after a while I'm beginning to get bored of lying down and staring at the ceiling (it gets repetitive), so here we are. Humble beginnings.

So why am I so free? A rough fortnight into my fourth and final year of engineering, I've been placed, and... yeah that ends my engineering right there. Period.

Not that i'm absolutely over-the-top ecstatic about my placement, it's just that i'm not allowed to sit for any other company on-campus. Maybe i'll haul my lazy ass and try for something better off-campus. Just maybe. Oh who am I kidding: i'm lazy.

The next thing I should try to do is make a list of things I could do instead of whiling away time, like work on my guitar skills. I probably could upload some clips, you know, just unleash all that raw material (some people would call that being sadist, I beg to differ). Or go on a road-trip to someplace cold and hilly and has a river gushing through...i should've just written Rishikesh instead of all that. I sincerely hope for all my 'chaud' waale friends out there to get placed somewhere soon, or it'll be pretty sad leaving the whole bunch of their sorry asses behind. Good luck, fellas. Go (study) crack the interview.

Now I don't want to describe what this blog is going to be about. I hope it's as random as shit. As the Tool song goes, 'reaching out to embrace the random'. Give it a listen, it's called Lateralus, and it kicks ass.

Well, that's about it. Back to the ceiling, then, huh?

(I may even be back here. Hooray!)