The end of the world in retrospect

Dear Mr Cheeniya,
A hilarious snippet. In our flat all were resigned and none bothered about the end of the world.
There are many who are very much frustrated about the happenings around the world and they would have felt happy if the world ended as predicted by Mayans.
It is better all to leave this world together than seeing some living and some dying.
We have to see a lot more good and bad happenings before the world ends.
PS

 

Sorry Cheeniya Sir, just a different take on this:

It may sound a bit odd
Or even cruel to a few.
I don't find it so hard
If I only have a few

Days left for me to live.
Will be happier to go,
Before my dear ones leave.
For I can't see them go.

People may call me selfish
Or even so weak in heart.
Already seen a few, I wish
To go to the yonder part.

On this auspicious day
I lost someone so dear
Years back, yet it stays
In me and heavy to bear.

If only I have the power
To bring someone back
At the cost of mine, I'll never
Think twice or just go back.

I will be prepared to face
My maker with a smile
And may even try to race
With time to write a rhyme.

 

Decipher wrong and blame the writer ! Aren't we pros in such games !

Why blame only Mayans ? ingeye nadantha koothai kelunga ! They showed some weirdo priest/sage doing some homam with dry red chillis to ward off impending doom ( predicted for 21st.Dec.) and later claiming stupendous success for his holy mediation! And the crowds getting into raptures ! Enge poi muttika ! Markandey Katju is 200% correct in his "90% idiots" comment.

And then, there's that joker in Madurai Adeenam who put out some horror stories of a deadly cocktail of earthquakes, volcano eruptions and Tsunamis preparing to despatch earth and humanity to oblivion.......just a day after merrily releasing his institution's glossy calender for 2013, and whats more, naming a successor as well! Ayyoooo ayyo !

The producers of the Movie "2012", who thought up this novel promotional blitz are having the last laugh !

People who get taken in by such scaremongering are losers and deserve to lose, like your acquaintance who bankrupted himself feeding others ( Thats some enforced punyam earning ! He will go to heaven, god bless him ! )

 

Dear Cheeniya sir
I just happened to peep in your ramblings and found your latest post lurking in there..
I think I did mentioned sometime earlier in someone else's post about MY INTERPRETATION of the infamous MAYAN Calender... I strongly believe that this person (GOD bless his soul) simply got bored of counting!!!.. now you as an accountant may find it hard to believe.. but I can fully understand this poor man or woman's (lets not be sexist here what say???) plight.. imagine if you had to carve out all those numerical symbols day in and out with a nasty boss who didn't allow any scope for rest (all my imagination!!) wouldn't you land up making a mistake??? and remember there were no erasers invented for stone carvers.. so these small mistakes happen .. and were at times overlooked...and your point on the bad handwriting simply makes my heart winch in pain as this carver's plight when he discovered his mistake..now what these ancient Mayans didn't imagine is that several centuries later someone somewhere would find their calender.. misinterpret it and sell it to Hollywood and make a block buster movie based on it!!!..and suckers like your illustrious neighbour who sat up all night waiting for the DOOM to happen or the gentleman who distributed his wealth to earn brownie points in the next world made it a success beyond what it was meant to be..
So sir.. I beg to differ with you on your point of the infamous Mayans be branded as bluffers as they were innocently spending their time in the ancient world doing things which they considered a "good and fruitful time pass activity" without realising that this simple act of theirs would be the main plot of a multi- million box office hit and lead to such scare !!!..
enjoyed your blog... please keep blogging straight into the new year....
WISHING YOU AND FAMILY ALL THE BEST IN 2013
Kerman

 

OK old devil, you are finally out of your lair! Man, why do you torture me so? The first three paragraphs of your retrospection were classy, but no more classy than your own long nurtured class. But then you decided to outclass yourself, which suggests to me that you were quietly planning a vicious attack on people like me who have earned the dubious reputation of being born brainless and failing miserably through their lives to grow more than a micromilligram or two of grey cells.

Bad handwriting indeed! “My foot,” say I. You subjected me to a Spanish inquisition of sorts. Perhaps the Spaniards themselves had faced the same fate when they colonized in South America. You forced me to try innocently at first and then finally with disgust to figure out how the Mayans wrote 21122012 or 21122112!

The very first question that attacked me was how these guys accommodated the zero in their system. I used to think that we Indians had mastered the art. And then looking up the ever reliable google sources, I found out that they did have a zero, but they had a system based on 20, rather than 10. No harm in that of course, the nineteenth century mathematician Cantor did show us endlessly many alternatives to the decimal system. But I was nonetheless troubled.

I figured out after some struggle how they wrote their 10, and given that they had a 20 base system, writing 10 did not require a zero. So far so good. But when I went further, I was caught unwarily in this trap you had set up for me and other idiots like me. I stared at their 20 and simply couldn’t figure out how and why it should have been written the way it was written. In good or bad handwriting I mean.

Till, finally, sense dawned, though, much to your satisfaction I guess, I was resembling “folks with puffed eyes and swollen faces due to sleep deprivation …”. With 20 as the base and zero at their disposal, their twenty had to look like our 10!

“Voila,” I yelled in the middle of the afternoon waking Shankari up from her peaceful siesta. She gave a violent start before she sat up and stared at me with eyes resembling molten lava! “Why did you wake me up?” she demanded. “Didn’t I feed you more than you deserve for lunch?”

“I didn’t wake you up,” I mumbled, somewhat embarrassed I admit. “Actually, I was trying to speak to Cheeniya. He lives in Chennai, so I had to raise my voice a few decibels higher than my usual mellifluous sing song.”

“Oh my God! You are still upto your Cheeniya tricks are you? But no, I won’t tolerate this nonsense anymore. What were you exchanging with him? Admit it, before I file an fir with the police. Against both of you.” She said this with an air of finality.

I was back now to my infinitely humble, timid state. So, before she could call up the police, I interjected in my softest of baritones. “I was trying to tell him that the Mayans’ 100 resembled our 50. And that means, that their 2000 ought to have looked like our 1000 and 12 like our 6. So, it is my considered guess that when they spoke of the year 2012, they wrote it as though it was the year 1006.”

“Wh.. what rubbish is this? What Mayans? 2000? Have you gone absolutely crazy? You need to be sent to an asylum, not the police, and Cheeniya be made to pay the bill for your treatment. This is worse than the your Bluetooth delirium.”

She was glaring and eying simultaneously for the nearest weapon available to attack me, unarmed though I was. Having failed to arm herself, she finally expressed her agony with a two syllable command. “Get out!”

“What?” I asked somewhat puzzled.

“Get out of my bedroom before I kill you.” That was scary you know.

So, I tried to plead. “You see, I think I know now how they wrote their year, but I have to yet figure out how the months and days were written …” My voice trailed off, for she had discovered my mobile phone and was holding it in a manner that didn’t suggest that she was offering that I call Cheeniya up over the phone. It looked more like she was aiming to throw it at my skull. Which, as I have already told you, does not contain more than a couple of micromilligrams of grey matter.

To save my rudimentary share of brain cells, I had no choice other than obeying her order. So, I am sitting here in the wilderness now, still wondering how they wrote their months, leave alone days.

“He wants to be alone even in his death.” I seem to recall having read this sentence not too long ago, written by a chap who claimed to be immersed in a “smug reverie”.

I wonder where.