I was lost in the glorious plans for the upcoming weekend and I suddenly heard a piercing shriek followed by maniacal laughter! It took me not more than a moment to realize what had transpired out in the hall in my absence. Our infamous, unwanted, uninvited, undesirable guest was back to spoil another beautiful evening!
Before you become judgmental and wonder against whom I was harboring such strong feelings let me tell you about this "Visitor" that we have been receiving. Its a black, scaly, ugly & smelly BAT (the last adjective is a matter of fact and not my deduction by having smelt it. Yes, you read that right, a tiny but a punctual bat, swooping inside the house at around 6:30 pm every evening and has us running helter-skelter in whichever non-bat direction we can find.
All those Batman fans out there, dont get me wrong.Batman sure is hot but bats are soooo not! When the bat is around, its a very funny and crazy sight that an outsider gets to see. The three of us (me & my cousins) are crouching with hands over our heads on the sofa more like we are stuck on a battlefield or are watching a scary movie than actually trying to ward off the bat.
The entertaining part of this comes when the bat swoops low over our head and that sets off Shru like we set off a live bomb over her head, she shrieks loudly enough to cross the thresholds of human hearing and enter the ones of dogs and BATS!This is funny and terrifying at the same time, Shru's antics being the funny side of it.I and Amri wud laugh our head off at that till that caused the bat to swoop back again in the room.
As if all this wasnt enough, Amri came up with the stupid idea to run around the house screaming 'Bat' at the top of her voice and you guessed right! Cause Shru to yell again! But there's more to it as this caused another bat to come swooping in! Like one bat was not enough, we had two on our hands now! More precisely over our heads!! I had to use an umbrella one late night, as a shield to duck behind, when I had to go out alone to turn off the lights(in the hall and run quickly back to the room and shut the door close) as our visitor had decided to come in late that evening.
Things did not improve over 3 days and one evening we '3 cowards'decided to ask our maid to rid us of this peril! Up she came to our home(probably laughing silently at our cowardice) and armed herself to face the enemy! Her weapon of choice was of course the most favoured weapon of all Indian women! The jhadoo/broomstick. The poor bat stood no chance against that. One swipe and we thot she had it! But she had missed, and after some running around the house she chased one out. The other flew to the room upstairs(which we found had been their roosting spot as some one had forgotten to close the open window above) and she chased that out too.
The excitement now mellowed we resumed our work, I all the time wondering if we would see a second of that visit. Which we did and it was a repeat of all the shrieking and laughing till the visits finally stopped thanks to the closed window!
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
K-PAX : The mind game
If you are wondering that it must be a write up or review of the movie K-PAX, relax! I am not going to bore you with the details. Its the thought process that the movie triggered that I am going to talk about now. For those of you, who have not seen the movie, the storyline is about an inmate(Kevin Spacey playing the role of Prote) of a lunatic asylum, who believes he is an alien of planet K-PAX and has come down to earth for a short duration. His psychiatrist's(Jeff Bridges plays Dr.Mark Powell) quest is to get Prote out of the illusion that he a resident of planet K-PAX. As Dr.Powell delves deep into the mystery of this man Prote, he comes face to face with the horrific past of his patient.
Turns out, a parolee out of the prison gets into Kevin Spacey's house and what starts out as a robbery, ends with Spacey's wife and daughter getting killed in the process. Spacey reaches home to see not only the bodies but the killer too present. Like a crazed man he ends up killing the murderer and tries to drown himself in the river, not being able to stand the agony of the deaths of two people he loved the most.
But, is instead, washed down the river with no memory of his former life. His claim now, is that he is an alien from the planet K-PAX in a distant constellation and has come down only to help his friend Robert(Spacey's original personality), who calls out to him in times of crisis. Now, as is obvious we can predict that Spacey suffers from a case similar to MPD or split personality.But the curious case is that we do not see the original personality of Robert emerge anywhere. There is only the new personality of Prote we get to see.
Now, what set me thinking was how the human mind works. The various intricacies of its working are way beyond me, but it sure does astound me. Its amazing, yet horrifying how it finds a work around for the trauma it encounters which are beyond the endurance of the body. We have all, at some time or the other experienced the deep shock of some unfortunate event in life where we are numbed by the situation. In case of physical incidents/accidents, its the body that numbs, leading to a weird calm that helps cope with the situation at hand, ensuring we don't get hysterical or lose our insanity. But when its an emotional trauma that is getting us bogged down, the mind tends to go into a limbo(not the actual limbo state, that would make us comatose), helping us to deal with the crisis when it gets beyond the body's limit to deal with the same. Its an amazing mechanism that lets the mind take over the body and deal with the situation at hand, with or without us realizing that.
But what happens when the trauma is so intense that the person is unable to identify with his real self and ends up identifying with another temporary personality that has been created by the mind/brain to ensure the person's sanity while dealing with the issue? Is there any way by which we can get the real personality back or in the least help the person realize about the problem without endangering their situation any further? Thats a question that will need some reading/research on my part, probably years of understanding too. But it does make for a good hobby to indulge in. There's a lot more to the layers of the mind than meets the eye.
Turns out, a parolee out of the prison gets into Kevin Spacey's house and what starts out as a robbery, ends with Spacey's wife and daughter getting killed in the process. Spacey reaches home to see not only the bodies but the killer too present. Like a crazed man he ends up killing the murderer and tries to drown himself in the river, not being able to stand the agony of the deaths of two people he loved the most.
But, is instead, washed down the river with no memory of his former life. His claim now, is that he is an alien from the planet K-PAX in a distant constellation and has come down only to help his friend Robert(Spacey's original personality), who calls out to him in times of crisis. Now, as is obvious we can predict that Spacey suffers from a case similar to MPD or split personality.But the curious case is that we do not see the original personality of Robert emerge anywhere. There is only the new personality of Prote we get to see.
Now, what set me thinking was how the human mind works. The various intricacies of its working are way beyond me, but it sure does astound me. Its amazing, yet horrifying how it finds a work around for the trauma it encounters which are beyond the endurance of the body. We have all, at some time or the other experienced the deep shock of some unfortunate event in life where we are numbed by the situation. In case of physical incidents/accidents, its the body that numbs, leading to a weird calm that helps cope with the situation at hand, ensuring we don't get hysterical or lose our insanity. But when its an emotional trauma that is getting us bogged down, the mind tends to go into a limbo(not the actual limbo state, that would make us comatose), helping us to deal with the crisis when it gets beyond the body's limit to deal with the same. Its an amazing mechanism that lets the mind take over the body and deal with the situation at hand, with or without us realizing that.
But what happens when the trauma is so intense that the person is unable to identify with his real self and ends up identifying with another temporary personality that has been created by the mind/brain to ensure the person's sanity while dealing with the issue? Is there any way by which we can get the real personality back or in the least help the person realize about the problem without endangering their situation any further? Thats a question that will need some reading/research on my part, probably years of understanding too. But it does make for a good hobby to indulge in. There's a lot more to the layers of the mind than meets the eye.
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