Fueling Thoughts

 

 

From a hardcore caffeine junkie to milk-tea (Chai) drinker, the transition has been as much due to developing gastric symptoms due to half a dozen espressos daily as much as due to the innumerable Corporate Panhandling and Freeloading attempts I had to endure at their expense of 1 cup of coffee(usually a lousy machine made one with the cheapest beans), their wish list encompassing all that is mentioned below for everything from Tyres to Batteries, Industrial Chemicals, Refinery Equipment, Military Grade tech, Amphibious vessels and what not… So the resolutions for 2021 are: No personal meetings (only Zoom or Skype calls for the preliminary interaction where I first specify my charges and terms or work before starting the conversation) and yes... No Coffee!!  

Last night, I f inished reading the not so incredulous story of the Biomedical startup and biggest corporate scam of this century the - Theranos saga in "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Va lley Startup" by John Carreyrou.  Though quite engaging, I can’t  say I am very impressed by his style of delivery which at times is more suitable for House and Garden magazine or a woman centric publication with a penchant for describing dresses and mascara. But, on the whole it was a tenacious labour of uncovering the truth behind a corporate scam shielded by powerful men,  weaponized legal intimidation and absolutely unscrupulous promoters.  A story of how a young blond blue-eyed woman from a privileged background, a Stanford dropout with a fake voice having all the hallmarks of a psychopath and her unlikely partner, a Bombay born, bullying, boastful, uncouth and unscrupulous Sindhi rouge who earlier made it big in the US by a fluke, peddled a non-existing technology an...

It was way back in February while talking with a respected friend, an ex-senior journalist on the phone, I expressed my views on the emerging so-called pandemic. My exact words were "It doesn't add up, the body count doesn't add up, the facts don't add up, the 24x7 fearmongering by the media doesn't add up, it's all to choreographed not to be preplanned, and all the countries are falling in line with the narrative as if ordered to do so. I think the global economy is being reset using the excuse of a cooked up scamdemic. First they will crash the stock-markets, next the economies. Can't say if it's good or bad, because either way the current consumerist standards of living are unsustainable." Later, when I shared the same views with a friend who is a banker, he asked me what I was snorting, but a month later he told me that all his investments in the shares market had been wiped away.   So how did I guess?  I told him that I snorted facts! Then the...

While I can't claim to be a brilliant eccentric, but being a loner, living alone, I know first-hand how it helps preserves sanity in taxing times. Hence, in the early days of the ScamDemic,  I used to roam around the neighbourhood with a "what me worry" attitude, sans a mask of course, oblivious to being the target of the collective evil eyes. Meanwhile, my neighbours downstairs were lowering down a bag on a rope from their balcony for groceries ordered on Amazon. And my landlord and friend decided to utilize the time to create a walking regime by prancing to and fro on the terrace which alternately made me think of a poor caged feline in the zoo or just gave me vertigo watching him going round and round. That with a park next-door... So, when concerned friends asked me how I was dealing with isolation and the quarantine, I always replied "Marvellously!!" The thing is I had already self- isolated myself for almost a decade...from needless social interaction and ...

 I cancelled my streaming services because I realised binge-watching was even more wasteful and addictive than social media. However, except for saving me a bit of money on subscription charges and making binge material a bit less accessible, it has not really eliminated the pastime. I ended up wasting two nights watching a so-called supernatural drama set in semi-sepia tones, with 30s era cars and people wearing period costumes in a contemporary western liberal (read as US Democrat propaganda) indoctrination series masquerading as a TV serial. All because of a brief flash of flesh in an altogether different film.  Honestly, I started watching it only because Natalie Dormer gave a peep of her stockinged thigh in the "Counsellor," which I consider as one of the most sexually charged scenes in cinema, paradoxically in a film with the most morbid ending I have ever seen.  I had neither watched the Game of Thrones, except for a compilation of all the nude scenes in the series...