Favourite Comic Book Quotes

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Just some quotes I can remember off the top of my head.


The Devil made me do it.
Lucifer: I have never made one of them do anything. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.

- Sandman #23

Phantom Stranger: Can you travel into the future, John Constantine?
John Constantine: Only like everyone else boss. You know. One minute at a time.

- The Books of Magic #3

The Joker: If I am going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice. HA HA HA!!...

- Batman: The Killing Joke

Calvin: The Horrendous Space Kablooie!

- Calvin & Hobbes

Ogami Itto: Tsuwabuki some call it. The only flower to bloom in winter snows. The world all around it is in winter, frigid and cold. But yet it flowers with all its might, this Tsuwa-no-hana. (Note: The analogy is to a prostitute)

-Lone Wolf and Cub: Chapter 14 (Winter Flower)

Fone Bone: Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures!

- Bone

Batman: I keep this city safe, even if it is safer by just one person. And I do not ever give in or give up.

- Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader: Part 2
(Detective Comics #853)

Dandele: There is no goodbye, Chunky Rice.

- Goodbye, Chunky Rice

The Beautiful Game

Football season is here in NLS again and I've spent the last few days playing and building up stamina for the tournament. It's been lovely to feel the touch of a football on my feet again and horrific to find out that I have lost said touch. The recent rain is only helping matters; softens the ground and brings back nostalgic school days of playing football in the mud, there is really no better weather to play the game than a stormy wind and rain.

I would love to write pages on Barca's performances this season, but until it is over I don't want to say anything and jinx my team. Still, regardless of how many trophies we get or don't get, I have never been more proud of supporting this club in ten years of being a cule. I got interested in the club after playing FIFA '98; shallow reason to start following a club, I know, but one decision which has worked out well, methinks.

Related: We are apparently going for an ambitious 4-3-2-1 Barca style formation in the tournament. I like it. For the record, I'll probably be playing in right central midfield.

Where There is a Will...

The last fiery rays were clinging to the sky, sending bright red streaks across the horizon in a vain attempt to hang on. The waves crashed against the shore with escalating ferocity as the tide increased by the minute. Each time the beach broke a wave another smashed into it. Slowly the water began creeping upward, inch by inch.

He sat on a rock, legs dangling, and watched all of this. His life had been miserable for a long time, today it had reached its climax. His boss had called him and handed him the pink slip, saying that the orders from above were to 'downsize' the company branch and they had unfortunately named him among the people to be fired. He said nothing and impassively walked away. He knew that no one else had been fired and that he had been chucked out so that the boss's son could join the company. He went straight to the shore, probably entertaining thoughts of drowning and ending his existence there and then.

Now he watched the ocean slowly winning its battle of ground supremacy. A crab scuttled away to higher ground to avoid the sea but was caught in a wave and got pulled back. It waited until the wave had receded and then made a dash for dry land, This time it succeeded, the waves only managing to wash away its trail.

A seagull suddenly dropped out of the sky and dived sharply into the sea, hunting for fishes. it came up a few seconds later, its beak empty. Undeterred, it started circling the area, its eyes focused downwards. In its third attempt, the seagull succeeded and the man watched the fish wriggling in its beak, slowly getting gulped down the seagull's throat.

The next time the seagull dived down, it came up with another fish, but this time the fish twisted and turned with all its might, finally managing to break its hold and flopped back into the sea.

He saw all this and noticed that Nature never gave up. The waves, the land, the crab, the seagull, the fish - all ceaselessly trying to achieve what they set out to do. Even if they did not succeed, they knew that if they kept fighting they would get another opportunity, and that was enough. He decided that he would also keep trying. He never liked his job anyway, so it was no big loss. He now had the chance to start all over again and was not going to let go of the chance. He silently thanked Nature, just as Nature had silently taught him a valuable lesson, and walked off with a spring in his step.

The sun finally set, but it set with dignity and a flaming farewell, as if it knew it was going to rise again at dawn and rule over the sky yet again.




This is an exact reproduction of a piece which was written sometime in Class XII. It started out as a random description writing exercise to pass time in a free period (hence the first paragraph) and developed into a proper prose piece. I didn't think too much of it right then, it was just another random piece of fiction I had come up with, and with a moral to boot. However, I found myself coming back to it in the next few weeks, mostly just reading it. I realised that I had written it subconsciously at some level to help me get through a really tough period. I had rarely showed such optimism in any of my stories, especially the ones I had written around the time. And it did give me the strength to go through a pretty hard time. It's not one of my best fiction pieces, the style is more juvenile than what I usually wrote, but it is very important to me and acted as a tremendous support. It also happens to be one of the very few times a written piece of mine got published (school magazine), so in that sense I'm pretty proud of it. I have reproduced it in a blogpost to remind me to always keep my chin up, and also as a promise to myself that I will get back to prose writing in the vacations, something which is long overdue.

Chillin'

There is something cathartic about a terrace jam session under the full moon in the first breezy night in ages. After one has spent four days cooped up in one's hotbox of a room, stepping out only for food.

I know what I missed the most during my project imposed exile.

Of Pachyderm Blessings, Queen's Baths and Relaxing Jam Sessions: Hampi Travelogues Day II

Day II saw us arise later than we had planned, but not by much. I woke up the first and set off on a solo stroll up and down the main (well, only) road of the town with my newest toy - the music player. It's always interesting to see and hear a place come to life; the shops open, the thoroughfare begins to get busy and sundry early morning noises and smells fill the air. The walk gave me some useful 'me time' as well. I also found out that Elton John's 'Circle of Life' is an excellent early morning song.

After my walk was done, I came back and screamed at the other two to wake them up. It freaked poor Abu out, he's not used to such tactics. But it had its effect, so what the hell. We trotted to the river and bathed and then had breakfast in an 'Italian Bakery' which claimed to have Al Capone pizza from the board outside the shop. Whether that is true or not, I did have the best ever Spanish omelette I have ever had there. It beats Gokarna's Namaste Cafe hollow. And the homemade bread was excellent as well. Definitely my best meal of the trip.

Now we were raring to do some sightseeing. We decided to start with the main temple around which the town is built. As far as I could tell, it was the only temple from that era still in use. It is the focal point of the Hampi rath festival which I gathered to be the highlight of the year. It is a pretty big temple and I have always found South Indian medieval architecture interesting as I haven't been exposed to it much in my travels. We took a tour of the temple and noticed a bedecked elephant with a crowd mulling about it. Closer inspection revealed that the elephant was trained to take money from the devotee's hands with its trunk, give it to the mahout, and then bless the devotee by putting its trunk over his head. It was a pretty unique experience for me, but since I have read about how the elephants in India are trained through torture, also a slightly jarring one.

We had to hire an auto to visit the ruins as they were too spread apart. The tour around Hampi ruins took about three hours. There were the customary remains of a kingdom, broken down fortresses, a multitude of temples (most of which had their idols ransacked), the public places etc. The Hampi architecture is pretty beautiful, one could recognise the fusion of Indian and Persian styles within the South Indian sensibilities and this amalgam had created a fairly unique style all for its own. They are also durable. The amount of detail in the carvings and statues still remaining after 600 years is remarkable. The Mughal ruins in North India are pretty eroded and run down in comparison, even though they are from a later era. Goo was highly anticipating the visit to the 'Queen's Bath' ever since he had seen it in the map (naturally), but it turned to be quite a downer; a simple squarish building with a big empty bath and the customary carvings on the wall. I don't know whether Goo actually expected to find women still bathing there but he looked highly disappointed at seeing it.

By the time the tour ended we had been baked by the sun. All the pansies who are complaining about the Bangalore sun should go to the Deccan plateau for a couple of days right now. They'll stop complaining. We decided to go relax at the coolest near place we knew, Mango Tree restaurant and chill there till evening. We borrowed a guitar from a German tourist and Abu played, and Goo and me sang softly, just like our terrace jam sessions (except for the 'softly' part). It was a most relaxing time. The guitar's owner was clearly impressed by Abu's wizardry with it and kept giving furtive glances at his direction. Finally she mustered up the courage to come on over and asked him to teach the chords for 'Brain Damage'. A fairly stoned Abu was quite surprised by this but he took it in his stride and began to teach her. She actually picked it up quickly enough and was playing it decently and it sounded nice.. until she started to sing. Her voice was weirdly awful and monotonous (although I shouldn't be one to talk about godawful voices here). She was good company otherwise though and we also befriended a group of British hippies there. Once you got past the annoying accent, they were quite nice as well.

We came back and did our shopping for the various gifts etc we had to give out. Goo took a long time because he was suddenly gripped with an indecision mania at the wrong time. Then we had an hour or so till sunset before we headed back to Hospet. We decided to go back where we had started the trip, up the rocks where we had seen the sunrise. We found a good spot overlooking the town, recollected the trip, talked about how if some other people were there it would have been so much better, but then again we could have never done so much with a big group, and generally batted the breeze.

And that's how our Hampi trip ended. It was a beautiful experience.

Of Dawn Treks, Section 3 and a Little Slice of Paradise: Hampi Travelogues Day I

Every blog once in a while always turns into a boring travelogue. This is it for mine.

On what was mostly a whim and a fancy, and a burning desire to temporarily leave law school environs, Goo, self and Abu caught a bus and landed in Hampi, the site of arguably the only proper kingdom Karnataka can boast of. As we discovered, it's a pretty hippie place as well. I was admittedly the sober third wheel of the little group but that didn't detract from my having a good time.

We came to the town at the early hours of six a.m. and the auto driver was good enough to actually show us a decent, cheap place to stay. After dumping our luggage, we set out on an early morning trek to check the place out. We climbed up what looked like an unfinished path up the mountain and were treated to a glorious view of the early morning sun from the top overlooking some temple complex. The trip was off to good start. We also first encountered the signs which said that that particular construction was protected by Section 3 of the Karnataka Archaeological (something something) Act. These signs had mushroomed everywhere and had been slapped on everything, over the course of our trip we found them stuck on random rocks as wells. We don't know why, but we found this quite amusing.

Then we had an average breakfast (charitably speaking - it was our only below par meal on the trip) and went to the river. The other two bathed in the river while I guarded the luggage. I had already taken a bath so it wasn't a big deal. Then we all went into iguana mode, found a nice rock (the whole area is unbelievably rocky) with a good view of the river and the town and smoked (well, they smoked, I just threw sand at passing dogs and scared the hell out of them.) Then we found a much better place called 'Mango Tree' for another round of breakfast. It was a gorgeously shady open air place where you could just lean back against the slanted walls and relax. Which is what we did. The food was good too.

All this happened before my batch started class.

Now comes the real part of the day's events. The time had come to pass when Goo and Abu desperately needed to score. Their junkie radar told them that the stuff would be found across the river. So we crossed it. Then a little kid in an auto blasted us when we asked him where it could be found (that was one of their plans, to ask a young auto driver. I didn't realsie they were desperate enough to ask a kid). The kid ended his rant with the firm words of "Follow the Road, and don't look back". Of course, he was admonishing us, but it proved to be very sound advice. Having nothing whatsoever to go upon, we followed the road. Every once in a while we would question the sanity of going blindly into nowhere, but I guess the heat had made us kinda insane.

After walking forever, we did manage to score, thanks to directions given by a foreign wanderer with a straw hat and a stick. Then we went back to this place called 'Arba Mistika' which we had stumbled upon while we were searching.

It was a little oasis in the middle of nowhere. Run by a young guy in dreadlocks, it was home to a whole bunch of hippies, and the booze and narcotics was flowing like water. There was a central tent which was magically cool within the unbearable heat and nice, relaxing, trippy music was playing. Mattresses around low lying tables completed the setup.

The guys exchanged their stuff with the other hippies and we soon made friends. There was a German sadhu chap called Marcos, a Dutch kurta wearing fellow named Ramko and who preferred to be addressed as Ram, an Argentinian theatre chick whose name I've forgotten and some others. The others were happy with their grass and hash, I was happy with my beer and chicken (the rest of the town's places were vegetarian except for eggs :|) and my naps. We chilled there till evening and what a glorious few hours they were. Even till the next day Goo kept asking Abu whether they didn't imagine the place up in some stony haze and I had to assure them that they didn't.

As the sun fell we regretfully headed back to our side of the river and crashed in our room. Which was a good thing because the other two were really tired and high still and they needed some sleep. We woke up and went to this Tibetan run establishment for dinner. I had excellent thukpa for the first time after Gokarna but the highlight was a dessert dish called 'Hello to the Queen' which Goo ordered. It had molten chocolate, biscuits, fried bananas topped off with a scoop of icecream and was excellent. The ambience was dim and serene. Another good spot discovered.

We came back and slept soundly. And thus our first day was done.

Highlight of the Day: Arba Mistika, by far.

Why Oh Why did the Ducks Cross the Road?

This is so f*cked up. I personally believe that the pictures lie but that's mostly for the sake of my sanity.