It's been quite a while since I left the blogging scene, four months actually, and these months have been quite eventful I might add, from a very questionably gay friend of mine who gets drunk on what can only be referred to as 'engine-oil', to the arrival of Yankee Bitch No.1, Koshal P Thirumalai, to a rather brave trip to Goa in an Alto, which deserves a separate post to itself, to my birthday to the arrival of Yankee Bitch No.2, Arvind Venkatraman, to New Year's and RC, to MBA Examinations, to the interviews and finally, to the highly vetti afternoon yesterday.

Life is getting interesting. Work is actually causing most of my brain cells to die. I keep staring at the monitor for 9 hours straight reading news and what-not, oh did I mention, I actually get paid to do all this. It should get interesting in a few weeks, people have gotten wind of the fact that there is a guy who gets paid to log on to reddit.com everyday. But I doubt it would make too much of a difference, since what most of them are doing can't be quite termed as 'productive'.

I came back yesterday after spending a day at Kumbakonam, a small town in Central Tamil Nadu. My parents figured that it would be a good idea to go and say 'Wazzup!!!' to Mr. Murugan at Swamimalai (who happens to be my 'kuladaivam', transalates to God of our Clan, I think) and perform a rather dubious activity of bribing him (archanai) with a couple of old bananas and a very questionable coconut and pray for the general welfare of all mankind. My good friend wrote a post, 'Karma's a B***H', a few days back, and that's when I started thinking about what my idea of 'God' was. It would definitely not be the androgynous, smirking God my friend seems to believe. The concept of 'God' as a person still seems kinda messed up for me.

'God', in this post, henceforth refers to the idol in the temple, unless told otherwise. This does not in any way explain my position on idolatry, a discussion which I have no intention of getting into. When I was in Kumbakonam, I went to about 6 temples, and started thinking. Here is a God, who is sitting on real estate that would be worth millions in Chennai (these temples are f***ing huge, trust me), adorned with jewels that will be worth some more millions, collecting donations and offerings (add a couple more millions), and people seem to think that their paltry coconuts and bananas will be enough to convince God to listen to their prayers. Okay, maybe God is not concerned about the 'value' per se, but actually the 'conviction' in the prayer. This again leads to questions like, a poor man who is dying will probably have a very high 'conviction quotient' in praying for money and he most probably will not get rich. It can be argued that he is a sinner and all his past sins, which were accumulated in the 'Bank of Sins & Punniyams', work against him and he is destined to lead a pretty f***ed life. This whole concept of Karma escapes me and I wouldn't want to get into a further discussion on that either.

I don't think am any closer to answering the question 'Who is God to me?', but I did check out some amazing works of architecture that are still standing after 1500 years (while the constructions by our college-educated civil engineers break apart after 5), had some very good filter-kaapi, ate at a place called 'Maami's Mess', which makes the best dosas I've have ever eaten, and made my parents happy by accompanying them to all these temples.