Ode to the Ego

 

Never Surrender the "I"

 

The Corporate Alladin's Lamp

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!!
 

Bad "Servile" Blood

Last night, I finished 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 Valley 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 and successfully raised hundred of million dollars from VCs. 

With the initial team of experts and technologists leaving or fired by the psychopathic duo, later the venture relied on a small army of scared, servile and sycophantic  Indian minions afraid of losing their jobs and visas. There were also a  couple of lying Chinese, and the company was backed by powerful white and Jewish old men ready to sacrifice their grandchildren to Moloch for their seat on the board in exchange for stock and by the highest echelons of the Democrat party right from the Clintons to Biden and the Obamas. 

So when the shit finally hit the ceiling, VCs learned that they invested in an elaborate scam and lost their money, almost a million people jeopardized their lives with inaccurate tests, the female Steve Jobs wannabe remained unrepentant and is trying to play the role of a victim and the only beneficiaries of this Unicorn to Dinosaur story as usual are the American lawyers.

All too familiar elements for me, fake accents,to  bogus antecedents and reports, political corruption, legal intimidation, old coots gaga for a smart confident young woman, greed, caprice,  tyranny and as an Indian the most familiar of them all : Bullying Indian business owners treating employees and  hired consultants like servants.

Considering people's propensity for listening to and believing in fables, especially those promising them heap loads of money, I have thus started reading "Bullshit & Philosophy" by Gary S. Hardcastle.

I said it FIRST !!

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 Globalist think tank, the  World Economic Forum  let the Cat out of the Bag, and now phrase "The Great Reset" is on many a person's lips. But what nobody is asking is what came first, which is the cause and which is the effect? The great reset as a consequence of a Pandemic or a Scamdemic created to bring about a great reset for a totalitarian Techno-fascist global network of regimes? 

Pity the silent majority still prefers to remain as complacent virtue signalling sheep, muzzled and mum...

Looking around for an image of a mask wearing sheep for this piece, I stumbled on this decal for sale on Amazon one of the tech giants who profited immensely for the lockdown. Guess for Bezos, business is business, and he didn't jump upon the censorship bandwagon like google, the mass media  and the social media behemoths.

On Solitude and Sanity

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 human stupidity that is... Contrary to what Hollywood and the popular culture has been indoctrinating, the real Zombie apocalypses doesn't involve  living corpses thronging the streets, but living people who choose to remain brain-dead, watch TV and  hide in the confines of their homes.

On the collapse of life and civilization by Dmitry Orlov in his book 5 stages of Collapse

Vintage Cars, Elfin Eyes...

 I cancelled my streaming services because I realised binge-watching was even more wasteful and addictive than social media, but 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 in semi-sepia tones, with 30s era cars and people in period costumes  in a contemporary western liberal (read as US Democrat propaganda) indoctrination series masquerading as a TV serial, only because of a brief flash of flesh in an altogether different film. 

Honestly, I started watching it only because earlier 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 had ever seen. 

I had neither watched the Game of Thrones, except for a compilation of all the nude scenes in the series, nor the Tudors, where she had acted earlier, so I really had no inkling what to expect from her. One would also be hard-pressed to call her beautiful in a conventional sense, especially without all the makeup highlighting her elfin eyes. 

Yet undeniably Sexy, she is…in Yoda speak!

The serial in question if you have not guessed already is the "City of Angels-Penny Dreadful." I am still quite clueless as to  the connection with the original Victorian-era horror mishmash Penny Dreadful, which I also binge-watched no thanks to being enamoured with Eva Green. Where despite the impressive sets, great acting, the ample nudity, it largely gets my thumbs down solely because it forced me to endure several gay sex scenes as the writer, director and producer John Logan seems obsessed about pushing forth his sexual orientation. The really dreadful part of the series I concluded, was that while nearly everyone from Satan to Dracula and Dorian Gray got to sleep with Vanessa Ives,  Eva Green's character, all except her poor soulmate, the werewolf protagonist - he only got buggered by Gray and well got a consolation prize of a young witch towards the end.

Though set in the late 30s Los Angeles, the City of Angles is a typical modern Showtime production; meaning it's a crime to be white. The Jews are the valiant heroes(a la David vs Goliath, with the wisdom of Solomon), even their gangsters. The Latinos are the poor but joyful  hard-working folks, the victims of racial injustice. The protagonist is a tormented Latino Good-Cop, while his two brothers are both cop-killers (justifiably so, of course) #Latinolivesmatter after all. Quite surprisingly, there are no Blacks or Asians in any role. Again with several (unwelcome for me) homosexual and bisexual scenes imposed upon us, courtesy John Logan and his gay agenda. 

The white characters are portrayed as either sadists, racists, fascists or Nazis, the sole exception being a tragic blond gospel singer, the hero's love interest (diversity politics in love, India they would call it Love Jihad) who is controlled by her hawkish and ambitious, Nazi sympathizer Christian revivalist mother, but who ultimately commits suicide, probably to make space for a Chica in season two, except that they got panned and rightly so.

The role of Santa Muerte, Mexico's Grateful Dead inspired superstar deity and protector of gangsters and drug dealers seemed completely out of place in the 1930s context as the cult rose into prominence only in the late 90s. It's as if the storyline got mixed-up with a contemporary Narcos serial. Or maybe the scriptwriters were just promised a discount on their weekly cocaine stash by the Mexican dealer who demanded the inclusion of his favourite patron saint.

The central figure in the City of Angels is the anti-hero Magda, a multidimensional goddess/demoness of chaos with Caucasian looks, a blend of a Succubus and the Norse trickster Loki. She who thrives on causing mayhem, discord and death played by Ms Flashing Thigh a.k.a. Natalie Dormer in multiple roles, each in a human avatar of the queen of chaos. Can't say she did an excellent job, won't say that she sucked, but yes, she knows how to flash them eye-lashes and stare at you almost supernaturally with those faux elfin eyes.  

She did act like a real bitch at times, well play the role that is, but couldn't be the venomous evil incarnate she was supposed to portray. No personification of madness either, like by Eva Green. And except for the sexless, frumpy secretary  in all her other characters, her acting was overshadowed with her doing what she does best...being Sexy!! 

If Santa Muerte at least has a historical, cultural and contemporary religious significance, Magda is a figment of Logan's imagination, probably inspired by the legions of women who create trouble anywhere they go and for anyone they come across in real life. Believe me they exist,  I happen to know a few, and they don't need Ju-Ju to do their Voodoo!!

With 2020's politically-correct liberal narrative,  Santa Muerte transported back in time and a real lacklustre storyline, it is a guarantee for wasted time...the only saving grace was the Vintage Cars and those Elfin Eyes...

 The end was even more pathetic and straight out of a Biden-Harris electoral campaign with the hero proclaiming, they are building a wall to divide us!!

 Yeah, no nudity as well, unless you consider some Latino guy's arse, but that's John Logan for you!!