Burning the bridges that have grass growing on them

How do you get things done? Do you take it cool and calm and chilled out and let things take their way around, go with the flow, so zen...summer comes, grass grows, type of thinking?

Or do you straight out fucknut insane, fire up all engines, blast through the doors, kick down all obstructions, burn the grass and then get cracking with the things that need doing and things that need fucking up?

Both approaches are perfect for when you need to get things done. Work that needs to be done, needs to be done. You can choose either approach, but beware of the price you'll have to pay for both. Different case scenarios, different approaches, different energy expenditures, similar outcomes. 

It all boils down to the level of energy you want to put in it. Some things need a calm and collected (summer comes, grass grows) approach, others need a burn down the bridges and everything around them kind of approach.

TL; DR? The genius of a person lies in knowing which approach to apply at which occasion. You fuck up in knowing that and you might as well forget getting those things done. You can't slow down an explosion and you can't speed up growing of grass.These are not facts, this is science. And science is true, whether you believe in it or not.

That's all that is boiling in my brain bucket for now. 

What really happened at Barbecue Nation?

Do you like to eat? I bet you do. Food is fuel and food is fun. We all eat. There is not one person living on this planet who does not eat something.

I presently live in Chandigarh, Punjab and more than rest of India, food is serious business here. Extremely serious. The only thing people of Chandigarh take more seriously than food is drinks. Hard drinks. The liquor is cheap here. And people here like loud cars. They spend more on buying a VIP number for a car that costs half the amount they pay for that number. But back to the food. We love food. There are whole markets devoted to food. For a city that is as small as Chandigarh, there are at least 4-5 McDonalds, 4 KFC restaurants and a number of other food specific establishments. There are two Barbecue Nation restaurants here, one in Chandigarh, and one in Mohali.

A friend gave me the link to this news today.----

MOHALI/CHANDIGARH: As many as 27 persons, including four children, fell ill after consuming food at a swanky restaurant in phase-V on Thursday night. Three of the seriously ill have been admitted to Government Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) in sector-32 in Chandigarh.

According to the police, 23 employees of an IT company in phase-VIII of Industrial Area went to Barbecue Nation restaurant in phase-V for snacks. Immediately after consuming the food, they started vomiting and a few of them lost consciousness.

Health officials also reached the spot and took samples of the food. They said that it appeared to be a case of food poisoning.

- See more at: http://www.punjabnewsline.com/punjab/27-taken-ill-after-eating-food-at-mohali-upscale-restaurant/87436#sthash.N2n2QJM4.dpuf

Back in 2009, I went with a colleague to BBQ Nation, Chandigarh and being out first visit there, we ate like normal Punjabis do. Which means, we ate like it was the last meal on earth and the whole planet was going to be swamped by zombies in the coming hour and we'll never see a shred of meat in our life ever again. Which means we ate a lot. And there was beer.

After a few hours of food-panthi, when we were sure that in case of an impending zombie apocalypse, we'd be able to survive on basis of the food we'd eaten that evening, we left the restaurant. My colleague stepped outside the restaurant, stumbled, and balanced himself by putting a hand on a parked car.

Then, he started to puke.

You might wanna skip the next few lines. Don't say I didn't warn you.

There is nothing beautiful about puking. It's gross. It should not happen to anyone. But this dude, he took puking to an extreme level. It was like a torrent (not the kind that we download) of all the meats that he had eaten. It was a multi-colored offering that stank like fuck and made people in his immediate vicinity shrink away in disgusted horror. A stray dog near him fainted and died instantly.

I think about that now and I can feel my bile rising. It was horrible. But then he stopped. Took another step and started to puke again. I was too drunk on food to notice that this was food poisoning, plain and simple. He puked four more times after that and looked noticeably weaker. Somehow, he reached home, and so did I. That was that. BBQ Nation has not changed in all those years it seems.

The problem with Barbecue Nation lies with the meat and the open fireplaces/roasting place/whatever the fuck they're called. Fine, the meat is prepared by the staff, but you can never tell the conditions in which it was prepared. The restaurant might have all the health certifications and inspections in order, but slip-ups happen. And when slip-ups happen, people fall sick. People who are your customers, and that's never a good thing for a business.

Conclusion: Food is as dangerous a business as war. And in the food business, the casualty is always the customer. Rarely, the establishment. I am not going to eat at BBQ Nation again, because thank you, I like my food to come out of the designated end only and I'd very much prefer it follows a one way path through my body.

You are not that great

                        

You are not that great.

Actually, none of us is really very great. The fact that you have time to read this and I have time to write this simply means that we are not using our time in the best possible manner.

Of all the things we have, time is the only thing that is perishing away at an increasing rate. Every moment that passes means you've less time to live. Like the saying goes, RIGHT NOW is the youngest you'll ever be.

I also like to think of it as -- once your exit your mother, it's a downhill ride into earth or fire.

Have you ever studied any of the productivity books? All that GTD stuff, Kanban, To-Do lists, productivity matrixes n shit, yeah? Maybe you have, maybe you have not. But all these techniques just aim to do one thing, to make people do work. Do work that is useful. Work that means something. Work that can maybe help them and others and make some money along the way and leave the world a bigger, brighter place.

BUT, at the same time, all those productivity methods are in place, because the default nature of man is to NOT do the work. You don't need a to-do list to breathe, eat, fuck or shit.

Man was designed to hunt in jungles, wear animal skins and live to 30-40 and make space for the next batch. We were not meant to sit in chairs and type shit because if we were, we'd all have more fingers than ten.

As world has progressed and life spans have increased, there is less space, more specialization and very few of us would be able to survive in a jungle environment. The lack of Wi-Fi, air-conditioning, and toilet paper would kill most of us in a day or two.

Crux: Stop thinking that the sun shines out of your asshole. Because it does not. You're crap like the rest of us.

What's going to happen in next five minutes?

Let's not lie to each other. You and me. What we have going on here is not a social experiment. It's not a way to get a reaction out of you. I am not selling you anything (yet). There are no books, no t-shirts, no courses to make you a better blogger, human being, or whatever the fuck you want to be.

What you and me have here, is, by a freak chance, an honest relationship. I am writing something and you are reading it and it might make some neurons in your head trigger a little bit differently, and that's about it. Or maybe not. I won't know it. But you, will.

Now, let's talk about the illusion of control. Here's how it goes.

You're reading this on a screen, maybe your smart phone or your laptop. Maybe you are in office, or home or anywhere else you like to catch up on your reading. Just take a look around you, everything is

calm and collected, because if it were not, you'd not be reading this.

But who, or what says that things will remain this way, say, in the next five minutes.

And you say, "Of course, Pallav, what kind of crazy talk is this! Things will surely remain calm and collected for the next five minutes, and I'll finish reading this blog post."

To which, I'll say, "Dear reader, you cannot see the future, you don't have prescience, you have absolutely no fucking idea what's going to happen in the next five minutes, but you're absolutely sure that it's not going to all explode in chaos, bloodshed, and tears."

Give this a thought.

The illusion of control.

Thank you.

Write Angry [updated]

You've just downed a small mug of black coffee like a vodka shot. Your eyes are open, your pupils dilated, there is a mad energy behind your eyes, you're typing like a god possessed by another god and you're not making any typos. Your fingers a blur of the keyboard, flinging letters on the screen with the passion of new lovers flinging their clothes in a dark empty room, and the backspace key...is a distant memory. Fuck auto-correct. We are taking this thing down the old fashioned way.

There is a fire behind your eyeballs and there is electricity in your balls. You're not writing from the brain anymore, it's all impulse. All natural. All madness. Fueled by amazingly bad coffee that felt more like downing a mug of old engine oil. It has set fire to your neurons and the blank page is a vista that you're going to cover with the black blood of words that you will slaughter mercilessly on the page.

Inspiration? Muse? Creativity? FUCK ALL OF THEM.

You don't need them. Grind the writer's block under your mighty finger muscles and snort the dust and get high on it. So high that you never want to stop. So high that even if the computer breaks down, you'll grind this keyboard to pulp by mashing your fingers on it, till you're just left with bone stumps covered in tattered skin.

You come to the blank page. You come to it angry. If you don't write, you'll die. Here and now and they'll pry your dead fingers from the home keys of this keyboard with rusted crowbars. But your soul will be stuck here. Forever.