Random Musings http://ligesh.com Its all about me. See evolutionofgods.com for the theory of religion Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:26:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2.2 en What Women Want - Part II http://ligesh.com/2009/01/what-women-want-part-ii/ http://ligesh.com/2009/01/what-women-want-part-ii/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:41:40 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2009/01/what-women-want-part-ii/ Many people were miffed after reading part I of this post. Considering that it was quite ambitiously titled What women want , I don’t think they can be faulted for expecting something more than some incomprehensible tale about my peculiar incidents with some females I dated. They had expected something substantial, and felt cheated because I just broke off in the middle of nowhere, and they were quite vocal about it to me, accusing me of being a charlatan pretending to know everything. So let me just address that specific issue initially itself:

The ideal of womanhood would be the ideal of motherhood; someone who would do anything for her children, and thus would be a woman who marries a dull rich guy and then has affair with an interesting stud, so that she gets both the resources (from the rich guy) and the genes (from the stud).

The above definition not merely runs counter to everything that the society considers as virtuous, it would indeed be considered as the apotheosis of pure evil. Our society not only looks askance at a woman marries into wealth, it would positively crucify a woman who has an extra-marital affair.

But let us look at this from the child’s point of view. The most important thing about wealth is that adults don’t need it at all, but it can make quite a lot of difference in a child’s development. A woman who is attracted to wealth is a woman who is sacrificing her happiness with an attractive personality for the sake of providing a good life for her children. And a woman who has an extra-marital affair is someone who is undertaking a dangerous task, again with the sole intention of getting the best for her children.

Thus the simple answer to what women want would be: have the perfect child and raise it in the perfect environment. If she can get both of this from the same male, she would definitely follow that, but if she can’t — which is how it would be in most cases — she will have to compromise, and hope to attain her aim in a more convoluted manner.

Contd…

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2009/01/what-women-want-part-ii/feed/
I am thrice as big as wipro. http://ligesh.com/2008/11/i-am-thrice-as-big-as-wipro/ http://ligesh.com/2008/11/i-am-thrice-as-big-as-wipro/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:17:56 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2008/11/i-am-thrice-as-big-as-wipro/ I have always been 3.14 times bigger than God.

According to Alexa, a third party website traffic monitoring service, my company has more than thrice the reach world over compared to Wipro or Infosys. You can check Wipro’s traffic statistics here. Wipro or Infosys: . Check the bottom of the page for rank in individual countries. If you include India, Wipro has more than twice my reach, but discounting India, (which I am sure is mostly their own employees, since Wipro has more employees than clients), in every other country, I have nearly thrice their reach. For instance, in the US, wipro’s traffic rank is 95,000, while mine is 29,000. The difference is much higher in other countries, with my company having 5-6 times the reach of Wipro or Infosys.

Of course, Wipro/Infosys — even though they generate millions of dollars in revenue, and employ 100s of thousands semi-intelligent hordes — are 9th rate outsourcing companies that exist solely due to an accident in history where the standard of living in US/Europe are much higher than in India, a disparity which these people have shamelessly exploited. They do not write any real software, and their entire job is pretty much exercise in animal herding.

What it also means is that I now have intellectual property in software that’s worth millions of dollars.

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2008/11/i-am-thrice-as-big-as-wipro/feed/
Conversations with the religious http://ligesh.com/2008/05/conversations-with-the-religious/ http://ligesh.com/2008/05/conversations-with-the-religious/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 01:52:20 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2008/05/conversations-with-the-religious/ As a rule I never discuss religion with any of my dates. It is simply impossible to have a sane discussion on religion with a guy sporting a tattoo that says ‘God is a fucking idiot’, and my dates recognize that. Seldom have any of my conversations veered into the realm of religion. No, it is not that all my dates are atheists. Quite the contrary, I am yet to meet a girl who can be categorically considered as an unbeliever, and I have indeed dated women who were seriously religious. In a woman, religious belief and the attendant delusions are part of the female mystery and adds to the overall charm of being a woman. I find religiously oriented males extremely creepy, however. Even Christian Fundamentalist females seldom broach the subject of religion in conversations with me. So my first encounter with some earnestly religious Jesus folks who were actively intent on proselytizing bordered on the surreal.

I stumbled on them while I was at the mall on the Christmas day where they had staged a skit on the life of Jesus. The show was pretty much amateurish and I was amused by the overtly histrionic enactment of some of the incidents in the New Testament. I was a bit surprised though. The show had semi-naked girls dancing in a very provocative manner, and was altogether a bit too ribald for something that was purportedly about Christianity, since Christianity is the only religion on this planet that has made sexual repression — especially of females — the central tenet of its dogma.

It might be a height of inanity that the symbol of Virgin Mary, a woman who gets pregnant without recourse to sexual intercourse, and which is the root cause of the excessive sexual repression practiced by the Church, is a result of mistranslation of the Hebrew word [i] almah [/i] which merely meant a [i] young woman [/i] to Greek [i] Parthenos [/i] which does mean a virgin. Years from now, when Christianity and Yahweh has become a footnote to history in the same vein as Thor and Odin, historians will record it as one of the greatest tragedies of humanity, where a mistranslation of a single word, resulting in the consecration of female chastity, led to the lifelong misery of billions of people.

So it was quite strange to see the purposeful sensuality exuded by the females in the skit, and I later learned that these people were not mainstream Christians, but rather a cult with provenance in the Hippy culture of 1960 California, and they espoused quite unconventional notions of sexuality, that deviated not only from the Christian absurdity, but even from the mainstream society norms. Talk of irony.

Getting back to the story: there was a huge crowd, who were obviously enthralled by the performance, though I am certain that if you asked a guy in the audience who is Jesus, you would be greeted with a blank stare. But who cares about Jebus anyway. Pretty girls dancing provocatively, and it is simply impossible to not to impress the unwashed masses.

I hung around, since, given the nature of the show, my tattoo was obviously attracting attention, and I was amused by the expression of the people around there. A lot of people were glaring at me, and I am a guy who thrives on negativity, and so I was feeling quite good: I had managed to rile up a lot of idiots, and that was always good in my book.

The performers themselves had no issues with me though, and after the show ended, the Jesus girls, who were distributing some pamphlets came to me:

“God loves you, you know”. One of them said.

“That’s irrelevant. I am going to kill god”.

That was something they didn’t expect at all, and they retreated, shocked. But after sometime, another more determined girl came to me:

“God loves you, you know”.

“Hey, I already told them, god’s love is irrelevant as far as I am concerned, since I am going to kill him anyway”.

“Kill God? You are joking.”

“Heh, it is quite trivial. Where’s Thor, Odin and Zeus? They are all dead. Only Yahweh and a couple of hundred of Hindu Gods are left. A god dies when people stop believing in it. When I say I am going to kill god, what I mean is that I will make it impossible for people to believe in God”.

“Is that so. Did you read the Pamphlets we gave you?”

“Hehe. I know everything. I have seen the entire fucking universe. I am actually omniscient. I have read the entire Bible. I have a new theory that all successful religions are based on legitimatizing rape”.

“OK, if you know everything, what’s my name”.

“Err. I only know what’s worth knowing”.

It didn’t end there. Later I met some more of the same Jesus people. The conversation continued in the similar vein.

“We will pray for you”.

“The person who is in dire need of prayer is God — and not me — since He is going to get killed by me. So you should pray FOR god, and not for me. And anyway my sole ambition on this planet is to kill God, so praying for me to God would be logical contradiction, and if you do it earnestly enough, I am sure the Universe is going to disappear in a puff of logic.”.

As you can see, there is a good reason why I don’t discuss Religion with anyone. It gets a bit too weird for comfort.

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2008/05/conversations-with-the-religious/feed/
Drug Binge at 3:00 am http://ligesh.com/2008/05/drug-binge-at-300-am/ http://ligesh.com/2008/05/drug-binge-at-300-am/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 01:51:45 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2008/05/drug-binge-at-300-am/ It is 3:30 AM. I am dropping my date back to her place. I stop the car, and said: “out”.

But she refused to budge.

“I need fortwin”, she says.

I told her that while I have no issues with people’s lifestyle regarding painkillers, I am not very keen on being the facilitator for someone’s drug binge. As for me, my father has had a life long addiction to painkillers and alcohol, and I don’t even ever remember talking to him without him being high on some chemical. In fact, his own patients have told him that they prefer him drunk rather than sober. He suffers from clinical depression and when sober he wouldn’t open his mouth and is extremely pensive. Lightly drunk, he is quite jovial and a really interesting personality, so it is little wonder that his patients prefer him drunk.

What I mean is that I avoid drugs or alcohol for the same reason I don’t watch TV or movies. I don’t find the experience pleasurable. If I one day find a chemical that I actually like, I might take it up, but as for now, my reaction to the entire gamut of mind altering substance is a big ‘meh’. I have indeed tried most of them once, but found the experience to be less than enthralling.

She started pleading. “I won’t be able to sleep without it”.

We argued for a while, and finally I realized that I had no choice here, and I took her to the nearest hospital looking for a medical store.

We were a real pair. Between us, I looked as if I was high at that particular time itself on an entire cocktail of drugs, while my date appeared as a sweet, innocent, angelic girl who was just tagging along with me, when the reality was that I am an uncompromising teetotaler who doesn’t even drink beer, while she was a complete psychopath whose hands are visibly bruised due excessive number of needle holes.

Unfortunately, the medical store turned out to be manned by one of those stereotypical schoolmaster types — the kind of guy who play schoolmasters in old movies, the kind of guy on whom the kids would always play successful pranks.

But we were still optimistic. I stood nearby, while she approached to the counter.

“Uncle, I need an injection. It is called F.O.R.T.W.I.N”.

Yeah, that’s right. She spelled out the name of the drug in a valiant attempt to confuse the pharmacist. I couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Come on, are you this stupid?”, I asked. She shushed me. But the damage was already done. After hearing out her wonderful skills at spelling the brand name of a painkiller, the guy didn’t even turn around from what he was doing, and just told us that he didn’t have any stock.

We persisted, and she explained that we have a patient back home, who has broken her leg.. blahblah… But he wouldn’t relent. As I said, the spelling contest had already made up his mind. We continued insisting, and he finally said he would give us fortwin if we go to the hospital and get a prescription for it.

My date gave up, wanted to find another medical store. But I’d be damned if I was going to search around again for yet another Medical store, and so I grabbed her and we went to the hospital, searching for a doctor who would write the prescription. We entered the doctor’s room, and it turned out the doctor had gone out for rounds; there were 2 nurses there in the back of the room. We decided to wait.

It was then that my date completely surprised me by displaying her extraordinary resourcefulness. She nonchalantly tore off 3 pages off the top of the prescription pad that was on the table. I checked on the nurses, but they were behind the curtain and they didn’t raise any objection at all, which made me think that they hadn’t noticed my date’s act.

The doctor comes in, and we explain the situation, but he turns out to be even worse than the pharmacist, and categorically refuses. We decide to leave. That’s when the nurses came forward and intimated the doctor about the stolen prescription. The situation was kind of turning ‘ugly’.

My date denied everything and feigned complete innocence. (I was very close to giving in, since I have no experience with lying, but she turned out to be much more resourceful here too).

But the nurses didn’t buy it, and they started egging the doctor again.

My date kept protesting her innocence, till the doctor started calling for the security.

I dragged her out and we managed to actually get out of the hospital, since the doctor, a thin, geeky guy with glasses, didn’t really have the courage to make a real scene. We got to my car, and then I asked her to drop the prescription papers inside.

The security guard was there standing at the entrance shouting that the doctor wanted us inside. Now that the evidence was inside the car, I decided that I am not going to run away like a common thief, and I very calmly walked back to the hospital. My date was worried, and requested me not to go back. But as I said, I am not a common thief, and I will be damned if I gave some idiots the impression that I ran away when accused of taking 3 sheets out of a prescription pad.

I went past the security, who, strangely didn’t even acknowledge me. It was then that I heard a some kind of commotion inside: the sound of running feet, and then feet thumping on the hollow floor of the elevator, and then the elevator going up. I couldn’t really make out what it was. I continued through the hall and entered the doctor’s office, but it was empty. There was nobody around other than a guy standing on the outside, who tried to appear completely uninterested in the proceedings, and told me that there was no issue, and the doctor no longer needed me. I politely thanked him for the information, and left.

What actually happened was that when they saw me coming back, the nurses and the doctor literally ran into the into the elevator and escaped with their life upstairs.

I went back to my car. My date was relieved to see me returning back. I explained what happened with the hospital staff and how they literally ran for their lives when they saw me returning. She was incredulous at first, but I pointed out there was no other way people would behave when they saw a guy with a ‘god is a fucking idiot’ tattoo returning resolutely back after you accuse him of being a thief.

She turned out to be an expert at writing fake prescriptions too, and we finally got the stuff from a medical store in another hospital.

The moral of the story: Psychopathic girls are much more fun.

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2008/05/drug-binge-at-300-am/feed/
Enlightened by the Devil http://ligesh.com/2008/05/enlightened-by-the-devil/ http://ligesh.com/2008/05/enlightened-by-the-devil/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 01:49:35 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2008/05/enlightened-by-the-devil/ Imagine this scene:

I am standing in the middle of the pub. The pub is full with people dancing around. The bouncers are all standing at some distance from me. I am loudly making fun of them, calling them trained chimpanzees, retards, uneducated, low class, fucking morons, who are no better than monkeys in clothes. They are fuming, seething in quite fury. They want to literally kill me, or at least throw me out, but they can’t. I think I have made history in the history of Pubbing itself.

This wasn’t even the first time I had a face off with bouncers. A year back I got into into a real fist fight with a bouncer at another pub. In the course of an argument, I called the bouncer an idiot. And the bugger actually punched me in my face. We got into a real fist fight, and I got the insides of the lips all torn. I have never seen the insides of gym in my entire life, and I spent the last 10 years of my life doing nothing other than staring at my pc, not even moving my arms, and yet, I have an innate, ingrained violence that suffuses me. Despite the guy being a bouncer whose primary job is to keep fit, and despite getting punched directly in the face more than 4 times, I didn’t even flinch, and we had a real brawl in front of the pub. In the adrenaline driven high, you do not feel anything. In fact, my conscious brain is going: “Fuck! This is going to hurt bad tomorrow”, and yet, at that particular moment, you feel nothing other than the momentum of the impact. The fight got broken after the management interfered and the bouncer got fired.
Anyway, let me get back to the current fracas. The origins of the current fight can be traced to a minor incident a year back, when I had gone to the pub in sandals, and I was turned off at the entrance by one bouncer citing the club’s dress code, which, like they have in kindergarten, included shoes. I got pissed off, and told him that he is a retarded monkey. We glared at each other for a couple of minutes, and then I just left. Fast forward to this year, and I was there with my date. She was dancing near the speakers, and I was standing at a distance bored.. Then this bouncer I had glared at last year and who seem to have remembered me from our last encounter came to me and told me that I was only supposed to stand near my date and not stand alone like that. I told him it is none of his fucking business, and I am clearly not answerable to a fucking chimpanzee in pants, and that he can fucking get lost.

It turns out he is a middle aged guy who is a close friend of the owner. He tried to push me out, and that was when I went berserk. I was literally shaking in apoplectic fury. I never realized that your body will literally shake when you get angry. I told him that he touches me, and I will fucking kill him. We pushed and pulled at each other, with me calling him a retarded low class moron, and he asking me to get out, but of course, he didn’t have the guts to start a real fight. Then the manager and other bouncers came, and there was lot of shouting, and them trying to grab me. But hey, as I had said earlier, even though I spent the last 10 years of my life doing nothing other than stare at my PC monitor, I have an ingrained violence that pours through my entire persona. Not one of them had the guts to grab me, or start a real fight, though one of the guys did manage to land a sucker punch on my stomach. I shouted that I am not going to listen to men who are no better than trained chimpanzees. It continued like this for around 15 minutes, with me calling them the entire gamut of synonyms for retarded moneys, and them asking me to get out. Then my date with me came to my side, and funnily enough, she turned out to be regular at the pub, and well known to the management, and it all got extremely awkward. The manager apologized, but my rule always has been: you start a fight, I will decide when it ends. The bouncer made overtures of peace to me, but I told him to fuck off, and then I just stood there for 20 minutes till the pub closed (yeah, in Bangalore there is a law against pubs staying open after 11:30), laughing and insulting them.

The end result: I spent 20 minutes standing right under the noses of these morons, insulting them, their faces clouded in extreme hatred and anger. I guess, there is something really exhilarating about standing in close proximity to people who would give anything to kill you at that moment.

My date was completely flummoxed, not the least because she knew the pub management well. What she couldn’t quite understand was why I spurned the friendly overtures of the management, even after they tried to make peace and tried to shake my hands. I told her that the last thing I cared for the friendship of some rural losers whom I am likely to never meet again. I imbibe and thrive on negativity. The hatred of those morons feels better than the polite fawning which makes me uncomfortable anyway.

That’s when she told me that she figured everything out: The enlightenment I had undergone at the end of my 7 year abstention was orchestrated by the devil and not God, and now she was really scared of me.

“You? Scared?”, I asked, surprised, “That’s a great achievement for me”.

This was the same rich, pampered, daddy’s girl who loudly and publicly called me a ‘fucking bastard’ on our first date. It was at a late night party, and she was pestering me to leave, even though it was only 2:30 AM, so I told her to wait. She just went to middle of the party, pointed at me, and loudly announced to everyone: “People, this guy is a fucking bastard”. (Yes, she of course, did explicitly use the ‘f’ word. Dating me automatically makes a girl inured to the stigma normally associated with using ‘fucking’ as the universal adverb). I just clapped and cheered her.

Her attitude toward me obviously changed after this. The next day, we had a typical argument and I told her that I had bigger things in life to do than give manner lessons uncivilized females, and that she should never call me again. She replied “I will try to call you less”. Hehe. I am sure prior to that incident, her response would have been to ask me to go to hell.

No, it is not that she is head over heels in love with me. She is a pampered female who genuinely dislikes my abrasive personality. Typically the guys she hang around with are all completely awed and cowed by her strong independent personality, and I was the first male to treat her normally, and at least initially she resented it. But now, she realized I was a generic psychopath with little self-control, and learned not to take anything I say personally.

As for being enlightened by the devil, I think she might be on to something there.

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2008/05/enlightened-by-the-devil/feed/
Is War Adaptive? http://ligesh.com/2007/09/is-war-adaptive/ http://ligesh.com/2007/09/is-war-adaptive/#comments Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:26:45 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2007/09/is-war-adaptive/ I am quite surprised at the number of mails I received criticizing my position vis-a-vis warfare as an adaptive trait. They point me to the World Wars, where millions of soldiers pointlessly died for the sake of their nation states, or even the recent spate of suicide bombers, where overeager young men who turn themselves into live bombs to further their religious cause, all of whom have failed to leave any progeny, which translated to the language of Evolution means that they were miserable failures.

more

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2007/09/is-war-adaptive/feed/
charlatans of art http://ligesh.com/2007/09/charlatans-of-art/ http://ligesh.com/2007/09/charlatans-of-art/#comments Sun, 09 Sep 2007 11:49:24 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2007/09/charlatans-of-art/ Before I start roasting the imbecilic pretension of the so called avant-garde artists, let me try defining what exactly constitutes Art. We can define Art as an artifact that can elicit pleasure in the beholder when he perceives it purely via audio/visual medium. Now, I am sure that a lot of people are going to pounce on me and decry this particular definition as inadequate–even absurd–, since, even traditionally, many genuine artworks weren’t about pleasure. So my first step would be explain this apparent exceptions to my definition. For instance, a good tragic drama is art, and yet, the emotional response from the viewer is a feeling of loss. To understand this apparent contradiction, we have to understand that, whether an art evokes pleasure or pain, people genuinely find it appealing. As in, a woman might shed tears at a corny melodrama, but we can be sure that she is surely going to continue watching it. So ultimately, the quality we are seeking about art is the ‘appeal’. Whether it manages to engender pain or pleasure, it ultimately results in a feeling that makes a person want to experience it again.

more

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2007/09/charlatans-of-art/feed/
Perils of paying in advance http://ligesh.com/2007/09/perils-of-paying-in-advance/ http://ligesh.com/2007/09/perils-of-paying-in-advance/#comments Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:27:47 +0000 admin http://ligesh.com/2007/09/perils-of-paying-in-advance/ I will be the first one to acknowledge that I am a bad businessman. I have squandered away a considerable portion of my inhertance due to my inability to have an instinctive grasp of the value of money. Evolutionarily speaking, this might appear strange at first, but it isn’t. I consider myself a warrior, and in the past, for people like me, cogitating on the nuances of economics wasn’t a profitable enterprise. My ancestors were nobility, and our primary job was to kill and be killed on the battlefield. The petty details of day to day balancing of accounts was a chore that was left to the merchant class.

more

]]>
http://ligesh.com/2007/09/perils-of-paying-in-advance/feed/