Rebecca Black Named Prime Suspect in Mantralaya Fire Case

Disclaimer:  None of it's true! Seriously, this isn't serious.

The Mantralaya fire that broke out at 3 p.m. on Thursday in Mumbai was horribly mistimed, according to reliable sources. Startling news yet to be revealed as part of the CBI’s, in their own words, “unbiased investigation” was related by a CBI official to this news body.

            “We have strong reason to believe that the infamous Rebecca Black is the mastermind behind this entire thing. However, we are yet to figure out jurisdiction problems.” He secretively revealed after much persuasion.

            Black’s single “Friday-the worst song ever” is speculated to actually be a coded message to her cohorts in India. “It was not supposed to go viral!” is what she is alleged to have said exasperatedly to the friend who’s by her right, yeh-eh.

Read: right-hand-man.

            An intricate plan of deception and greed is revealed on digging deeper into her would-be secret message.

“It’s just so obvious!” is what Mr. Prithviraj Chavan, CM, Maharashtra said, throwing his hands up agitatedly while giving us a statement. “How the CBI missed it until now is mind-boggling.”

            What they missed is Black’s brazen words. “Which seat can I take?” says it all.

“She wants my seat!” Mr. Chavan said, close to tears.                                                  >>>                                         

                

            The Adarsh Scam, which was the reason for one Chavan’s accession and the other’s ouster, seems to have been targeted in an in-genius plan to wipe out all relative documents. The sheer stupidity an over-optimism of the act seems to have led CBI directly to Black.

            

            “Na rahega baas, na bajegi bansuri” seems to have caught the musical Black’s fantasy. Allegedly a die-hard Ashok Chavan supporter, she figured that once the documents were gone, Prithviraj’s seat would be hers to give to Ashok.

            

            But everything did not go as planned. The fire was premature!

            

            The fire was supposed to break out at 7 a.m. on Friday, the 22^nd of June, it has been confirmed. Black’s first line, “7 a.m., waking up in the morning,” implies a desire to wake the city up with a bang at the indicated time.

            

            The bomb is yet undiscovered at the Mantralaya, but then, perhaps her friends did not adhere to her every direction rigidly. “Tickin’ on and on, everybody’s rushing” seems to very obviously point to an explosive with a timer.

            

            “It’s Friday, Friday, getting down on Friday,” is directly indicative of getting him down on Friday.

Black seems to have been big on numerology. The 22^nd was fixed because of his being the 22^nd CM of Maharashtra. 6+2+0+1+2 (June 2012) = 11, which is the exact half of 22! And of course, it’s Friday.

Ironically, this song was blaring out of the CBI official’s radio as we asked him for a statement.  “Kicking in the front seat, sitting in the back seat..”

What remains to be seen is the actual prosecution of this ‘singer’. Meanwhile, the CM lives in fear of his seat being sat on, or worse, kicked. 

Rain-maker Dhoble

                Combine sadistic inclinations, a lack of general knowledge, a studied search for old irrelevant laws, a sinister laugh and a bald pate and what do you get? A rain of misguided hockey-stick-brandishing lunatics, you say? Well yes, their leader, at least.

                Vasant “Rain-maker” Dhoble brings work to the Social Service Branch in the most effective way conceivable. The creative genius that hides behind his innocent salt-and-pepper moustached visage is a real delight to nobody in particular. But that deters him not! The sheer willpower that drives this man to incessantly hunt up those elusive, forgotten laws is condemnable...my mistake, commendable!

                The fighter is a man everyone is forced to look up to. His high-handedness besides, he’s lathi-charged against all odds to clear his name of alleged murder and continue as a shining beacon of morality today. This strikes no one as being gigantically ironic.

                The unique thought-process wherein invading the privacy of law-abiding citizens (or laws that make sense anyway) is considered acceptable, even downright necessary, is what sets him apart. In his impossible mission to show the power and activity of our preservers he stops at nothing. Accusing proper young women of prostitution because of his own ignorance of this world’s customs is just another day’s work for this young man. One can just imagine him blushing and muttering “Am I (MI)?” Cruise would probably choke at this reference.

                One can only imagine how over-stressed his limited mental faculties must be thinking up day-in and day-out which loopholes in our laws to exploit this time. They seem to be his friends, almost inviting him into every bar or nightclub there is and charging everyone present with drunken behavior. A startling image fills our mind wherein Rain-maker whirls around with a wildly happy look on his face and magically shuts off music and all activity besides chaining all his victims to the bar. One wishes he’d spontaneously combust with the sheer velocity of his rotation.

                But all our wishes to the heavens seem to bounce off him, and giddy as he may be with all that turning about, drunken he is vociferously not. Harassment charges have not yet reached his khaki-cloaked existence, and one dares not wish again.

                That he is a rave on Twitter seems to leave him publicly unfazed, and privately in moral dilemma, it is imagined. One does not often arrest oneself, and his unbelievable lack of common knowledge may leave him wondering at the best possible route by road to this Twitter place and how best to hush up all this nonsense about him. Nobody around him has either the guts or awareness to enlighten him. Or perhaps it’s his enormous stick that scares them.

                Anyway, party-goers are now in awful danger of developing a permanent crick in their necks from all that glancing over their shoulders. Doctors are increasingly worried about this threatening to become an epidemic. This impact on society has the incredibly sensitive Dhoble in splits and musings about his own greatness. Hold him in the tiniest bit of respect we owe every fellow human? As there are doubts as to the authenticity of that statement, I’m going to have to take a rain-check on that.

Image in the Glass

             I turned this way and that, admiring my heavy dress in the mirror, its swish-swish sound perfectly in time with my sway. The intricate embroidery was a silver mystery on the cream satin. A smile of wonder started at the corners of my mouth, and abruptly stopped as something odd caught my attention. I had thought I was alone, but suddenly they were all I could see in the darkened reflection, right behind me.

I stared at the bloodshot eyes in the mirror. The sight sent a tingling chill up my spine. They widened and the black irises enlarged to fill the extra space. They narrowed as the pupils became vertical, cat-like. The irises turned green. A piercing, unsettling, irradiant green. And the colour began to fade…began to reappear as a brilliant, bright, terrifying scarlet. The colour began to overflow, slowly trickled past the lashes as tears of blood fell on my neck. I could not move, not even to release the shiver building in me, not even to look away from the compelling, accusatory expression in those eyes as my sight blurred, my eyes filling with tears. I raised a shaking hand to wipe them away. I stared in horror as my fingers came away covered in a viscous, rich red. Those eyes…they were mine. Those bone-like fingers covered in rotting flesh…they were mine. That dead, gray, matted hair covered in seaweed…it was mine. My lips curled back to release a horrified wail, and no sound escaped them. I had no tongue.

I could only watch in silent, screaming terror as my full cheeks receded slowly, so slowly, as the tears continued in a shower of hot bullets. I blinked and there was nothing in the mirror but a gaunt skull-like face grinning back at me with a perfect set of dazzling teeth.

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                I woke with a start, sweat covering my neck. My hand frantically groped the bedside table, and found the tiny mirror. I lit a candle and desperately stared at the reflection. My terrified eyes were bloodshot and my hair matted alright, but there was the rest of me – complete, whole. Full cheeks, full lips, straight nose, long lashes, whole skin. I sighed. The nightmares wouldn’t stop.

                I knew exactly why I was having these dreams, but would not admit it to myself; could not admit it. Because that would mean I was weak, and I was not. I refused to believe I was. It was not possible I was. Was it?

                My mind was trying desperately to tell me something, and I was fiercely denying the situation. Even my subconscious knew I was in trouble. Enormous trouble.

                I was eighteen years old, and I was going to be married. My mind was a strange place to be in, aflutter with so many varied emotions as it was. Doubt, anticipation, anxiety, and happiness – above all, swelling, glowing happiness – seemed to be swirling around in my head like light wisps of silver steam. But there was a dark, gray, thick smoke of another situation entirely that threatened to smother all the lightness, present at the very edge as well.

                My fiancé was a powerful king of a distant land. I knew not what he was like, not even how he looked. My people had heard only that he was thought of as handsome, shrewd, and merciful. He was twenty eight and looking for an alliance with my father. I had been trained all my life to be a married woman. I was ready.

                But I held a secret that I could not even admit to myself. The nightmares had started two months ago. And the cause for them four months previously, when I had stuck two fingers down my own throat.

                I had always had an extremely light, dainty figure. But I had recently gained some weight, and it showed. It was not much, only enough for everyone to comment how becoming I had started looking, how ready I was now for marriage to the king, how much rounder my already round face seemed, how my figure also had filled out and looked more womanly.

                I started hating myself. I felt like a fat old slave woman, and became paranoid about everyone’s attention. It seemed like they were all staring, whispering about my horrid looks behind my back, cackling about how I was lucky the king had never laid eyes on me. But I loved food, and could not get myself to give it up.

                I started thinking about food more and more, and all I wanted to do was eat. Eat everything that was unhealthy. Because I had weakly tried to forbid myself from these very things, my naturally perverse mind craved them more and more. And I lacked the will to stop myself.

                Five months before my marriage, I was desperate. So I excused myself from the table one day and made myself throw everything back up. I thought I had found the solution to all of my problems.

                I now gorged on anything I wanted and simply threw it all up. And I think it started having an effect on my weight as well. But with it came a price.

                A couple of months into my ingenious plan, my teeth felt weaker, and even if I had a small meal that I did not wish to get rid of, my body automatically made me throw it up. I could keep nothing down any longer. I was growing weaker. And I was having nightmares.

                My subconscious was telling me I was killing myself, slowly and surely. It was accusing me, showing me what would happen to my body. Of course, imaginative as I naturally was, it was dramatizing the entire thing to scare me. But one thing it absolutely had on the gold – I had to stop before I seriously damaged myself.

                My parents grew worried about me after they found me throwing up one night. They thought I had some serious, rare malady. One month before my wedding, I sat my mother, the queen, down and told her the truth. She was disappointed, and sad. But she helped me.

                The doctors had never heard of my condition. They were unable to do much. But Mother knew what to do. She helped me overcome my self-doubt and paranoia. She helped me realize my own inner-worth. She instilled in me my lost self-confidence. And I started eating small meals, and keeping them down.

                She kept me distracted. We played games in the gardens, took walks, read books, and ate freshly-picked fruits. And I started recovering. The paleness vanished from my face, and I was a strong, glowing bride on my wedding day.

                Before I departed from my palace room forever, to start my new, glorious life with a kind king, I asked Mother how she knew exactly what to do about my problem. She smiled that sad, knowing smile, gazed at an old portrait of my maternal grandmother and said, “Because there was a time… I was just like you.”

Lotter's Dilemma

Long slender fingers ran through the silky ginger hair, caressing, loving. She stretched, arched her back, with those beautiful eyes serenely shut to enjoy his touch with undivided attention, a low moan developing in her throat. He sighed and thought of yesterday, when his fingers were exploring fine filaments the colour of the darkest purple night. He had loved both his girls, and they practically purred at his touch. He half-smiled and waited. It was always the wait that nearly drove him insane.

She sensed a change and nudged him, finally opening those sharp green eyes. Her throaty purr was replaced by a low voice of appeal. Still he waited. Finally she said the one word he was waiting for. Instantly his hand flashed to her throat and squeezed ever so slightly, with ever increasing pressure. He looked into those wide eyes of alarm, those flailing nails trying to scratch his hand away. He looked, with an increasing delight deep within him, till the arms fell limp, till the eyelashes drooped, till the magnificent eyes of green lost their brilliance, till the last light went out of them.

He huffed out his held breath, happiness filling him, every inch of him, till he felt he could walk on air with his new emboldened spirit. He grinned like a maniac in his empty hostel room, until someone banged on his door screaming ‘Lotter!’ and damning in select words his lack of action just five days prior to Saarang. He gave back a few of his choicest words, and felt the effects draining out of him, felt himself sink back into an empty shell, a mask of his former self, into the Saarang 2013 Cultural Affairs Secretary, lit. Covering her up in his red bed-sheet, one by one Cul Sec Lotter put on twenty rings on his ten slender fingers and slowly opened his door to face the latest we’re-so-screwed story his remarkably unobservant Co-Cul Sec had managed to come up with.

Lotter was literally LOTR, or Lord of the Rings. He was a member of the rarest species at IITM – his name’s funda was neither uninteresting nor related to twisted guy fantasies. He had the courage to leave his room without disguise and fingers weighed down by twenty gold rings for twenty different gods. He locked his door behind him, a secret smile on his face and a plan for the dead he left in his room.

He had been in ‘love’ once (Why all IITians are delusional enough to think their fickle, mechanical, and entirely and selfishly RG-max hearts can experience anything of the sort is probably beyond anyone!). She was the prettiest freshie girl he’d seen last year (the mention of a freshie girl works like magic on IIT’s guys – they are more than likely to step ahead and slip on their own drool). A Tam Brahm to her very soul, she had a 9 point CGPA and the most goody-goody reputation in the Institute. At least she had had, until she was driven to insanity by her Sponsorship Creative Coordinator, Shaastra interview and subsequent rejection for the very year he was to be Cul Sec. She now spent her days in a straitjacket, bouncing off padded walls in the asylum she had to be packed off to, to avoid endangering herself and other students and further endangering the wildlife at IITM.

Her pitiable condition changed him in much the same sense Bella Became Bloodsucker. He became a ruthless killer, vowing revenge on the Sponsorship Core, Shaastra 2013. Five days before Saarang, Shaastra was underway. He’d already had his revenge. Now was the time to display it. 

       Evolve’s Shaastra Hacks had another weird run-down plane to display (their lack of originality, perhaps). Quietly in the dead of night he made his way to it with his strong arms weighed down by the two girls he dragged, and left them in there. The next day, all hell broke loose when a kid broke all the administration block windows with his single high-pitched screech on discovering it. In the KV grounds, Lotter’s eyes gradually met the shocked ones of the Sponsorship Core’s across the plane, and held them. His mouth slowly curved into a smile while the Core looked puzzled, and then alarmed as realization finally dawned on him. While his expression started turning into outrage, Lotter got lost in the memory of the silken cats in his hands the last two evenings, and the exhilarating moment when they had each finally uttered, “Meow?”

Mind's a Strange Place

How many times have you mentally scoffed at the maddeningly annoying amount of noise your we-take-this-route-together-everyday-whoopee neighbours on the morning bus manage to make, all seemingly fused to form one continuous  crap-spouting, mental-asylum-deserving flexible body, and how many times immediately after that have you suddenly and miraculously recalled similar embarrassing instances involving none other than you and your equally insane friends (though you dare admit that to no one but yourself. Learn to accept the hard truth.)? How many times have you condemned one of your love-struck friends forever to the island of There-Is-Less-Hope-For-Her-Than-For-Manmohan-To-Wear-Yellow, when she quite blindly chooses the wrong guy again, the stupid girl, and two seconds later recalled every one of your own failed and, sadly, stupider choices?

                ‘The point?’ you may well ask (probably damning this same piece as a piece of shit in your admirably well-read minds while secretly agreeing with every word, even recalling similar ‘It’s informal!’ instances of your own ill-received, it-hardly-qualifies-as-sense write-up). My entire point is to put on display (Aah.!) the immovable I-was-born-this-way hypocrisy of the human mind which is nevertheless acknowledged by itself, but never ever accepted. Or perhaps we were simply born senseless to our own senselessness while aware with all our (six?) senses of the same in others. Maybe we are selectively kindly and forgiving creatures, entirely self-centered. Or all born misanthropists.

                Whichever the case, it matters not. The conclusion is always the same. Everyone else is excessively stupid and oneself unimaginably superior in all one does. You RG everyone in the vicinity and the first instance of it you face in a situation unfavourable to you, you damn the person to the hottest confines of hell, the disgustingly selfish, unendingly contemptible weirdo. Tell me I’m not right…

                I certainly don’t pretend to be an expert in any way or sense on the bizarre workings of the human mind. I am merely an observer, who is herself not in any way immune to the very human nature I’ve tried to describe above. I’m probably more prone to that nonsense than anyone you know.

                Besides hypocritical, the mind seems to be a strange convoluted thing in more ways than one. It’s downright perverted. Let me try and explain. Can you deny that at least once in your life, probably too many times to remember, you have wanted something, or alternatively, someone with all you possess and on finally attaining the this-is-the-best-moment-of-my-life object of your desire, you’ve promptly lost all interest in it? As long as it was dangling there, elusive, you wanted it more than air (or so your utterly silly romantic heart whispered), and as soon as you touched it, the be-gone-you-repulsive-error-of-creation mode of your mind kicked in, effectively shattering the illusion.

                Perhaps we love the chase, not the finish. Perhaps we are strangely masochistic, and the pain of denial excites us more than attainment. I’m inclined to chuck the former goody-goody explanation off the nearest rooftop.

                With no effective conclusion in sight, I must abruptly sign off. There really is no end to speculation on the varied stages of degradation every mind is in. One can only hope the hypocrisy and perversion in oneself is muted at the surface. Though we may as well be trying to actually die of boredom. Alternatively, acceptance of oneself is, after all, supposedly the key to a happy life. Do I really believe that? Of course not, it’s a large vat of bullshit.