#s3a

Getting somewhere..

For years I've loved S3 Alternate, and was more than happy to see it get a &K half being worked on, after only having DEZ for the longest time! But there was a few thing in particular I wanted to see: The jingles for the S3 half, and the Big Arms music!....using the S3A motif made by marcb0t While I can say I did the invincible music justice, I can't nearly say the same for the big arms track...I just can't put down what's stuck in my head, hence the very plain sounding track up above. -c - Maybe one day I'll get it out of my head and make it real!!

           When a civilisation collapses, becomes stagnant, is buried under the sands of time – since the endgame of an era who becomes the most important person to have ever lived?

            The answer would be “The Chronicler”.

That one person, whose opinions, whose perspective, whose biases, prejudices, and fallacies all of a sudden acquires an unparalleled significance, a treasured written history. That guy possesses something extraordinary – a story, a coherently scrambled set of words which will echo through the echelons of time-space continuum. That story becomes a journey for others who couldn’t have been there in time, and thus the storyteller becomes the fenestra through whom one tends to see the world that is gone.

           It is hard to demarcate the end of a day and beginning of another when you are thus confined. Sleep is a great divider though but again it varies. Hence, in most scenarios time overlaps. It was around midnight when my phone buzzed, I get messages at night but not calls – but then when I looked at my screen, I just smiled. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, I chuckled.

Hold that thought for a second; let me plan you an itinerary.

           One attribute that comes to you naturally, if you have had to change a lot of schools, is the uncanny ability of making friends with ease. Having already changed 3 schools, I had been adept at befriending people. Imagine a 10-year-old chubby guy with a Milton water bottle dangling along his neck onto his belly, standing at the dehlij of the classroom, with a raised hand, requesting permission to enter the classroom – imagined, eh? Okay! Now, post COVID 19, book a ticket to Philadelphia, go to Drexel University and ask wherever the hell they teach Business Analytics. Once you’ve reached there, ask for an Indian guy with a man-bun who often looks as if he were ‘high’ pertinently, and ask him to imagine the same. Give him nothing more than a second, and he will raise you a question, “Was it Sandhya Miss’ class on Van Ek Sampada” – and bam! Congratulations, you would have found the first guy.

Wait a minute! Don’t get high. I know he would have offered you with a charming smoothness the best of times, it would be tempting but remember you have a flight to catch.

           Book a ticket to Bhubaneswar with a one day stop-over at Bengaluru. I will give the guy your number, but rest assured from the time you touchdown on the tarmac and as typical of us Indians, frantically switch on your phones – the first call you are getting is his. The next call when you would have reached hardly customs would be his. While you are searching for the KSRTC Bus, when you have sat in the bus, before you would have reached the designated bus stop – you would have been called thrice, have had your location tracked, route described to you twice and if he could he would have asked ISRO to book an INSAT for you. Finally, when you reach his home you would be welcome by the most adorable couple, whose banter are as frequent, hilarious, and adorable, as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. You would find it a heart-breaking goodbye, but you definitely have to meet the last piece of the puzzle.

           Reach Bhubaneswar, book a cab drive straight to Puri Medical Square. Halt, pray to whichever God you believe in, call this guy, and ask for directions to his home (that is where the fun lies). After the jumbled road you would have followed (the only way of knowing that you are on the right path is that – you must encounter a road where taking the right turn is the ONLY option you possess at that moment), you will reach a building which seems in the midst of somewhere deep within nowhere (it’s an orange-ish building if they haven’t changed the colour by now). Climb up the flight of stairs and you will be ushered in by the sweetest of ladies and as you walk further inside the house you will find a guy in shorts and vest, almost clean shaven on the head and stubbled on the face – talking something… something esoteric. The charm is, I have no idea where the conversation will head. You might end up knowing him, you might end up knowing he knows some friend of yours, or you might end up knowing you knew him and have just blocked that memory – every possibility is a probability.

           Thus, whenever we meet next, I will chronicle you a story, my story. I met those guys whom you did in the exact same order. They couldn’t have been in any different than those were from me and each other. One believed in everything fun and happy, sadness was an extant condition, but he never rendezvoused with it. The other planned and mannered, with a swagger of his own and a bubble of calmness surrounding him. And then there was the guy who should be in a rodeo and not in school, but within him, he never could find a difference between the two. I grew up with them – from proposing a girl to finding out a new porn site, from eating a vendors’ entire stack of egg chop to carrying a cycle on the back of another cycle holding it all along the way – knowing these very times who I was to be. I need not patronise them; you have met them now you can attest but haven’t they grown up to be that too? A maverick, a husband, a seeker - they turned out, best of who they were supposed to be. It has been a lifetime with them, and it doesn’t feel a day old – the talks surely have changed the laughs have-not. In the direst of times or the merriest they all pan out the same way. With myriad plans and bountiful of ideas, plethora of insults and plentiful of advice we always tended to be who we are, the strength maybe we were so different that together we became the ‘Vitruvian’.

           And see what they have attained in life – one has the most charming and sensible of persons as his wife, the other is about to marry the most adorable and sweetest of girls, whilst one has a Mavic Mini – in essence, they all are happy. That’s where it culminates in being so bonded that a JAVA program written a decade ago with a backronym for our first names, still defines us to ourselves and the world we are a part of. Dump all that, our parents see us as brothers, end-of-story.

           We may be geographically apart, sun rising at one end and a stray dog barking at the night shadow at the other end – what actually makes these ends meet is our conviction in the belief of an abstract juxtaposed with a friendship of almost two decades.

           We are just a call apart, is just an understatement. On that note, I should really pick up that call – phone’s abuzz for long. I will be hurled abuses at, and yeah, that’s how it is.