So here we are. After days, nay weeks, of fretting and fuming there’s finally something up on the blog other than the token first entry.

First up, what is this business anyway?

Well, everybody and their great aunt usually has some cause for unhappiness with their body mass. Which leads to most of us harboring weight loss aspirations, which we keep to ourselves, oftentimes making private half-hearted attempts towards achieving said objective. What eventually holds us back is lack of enough motivation, when it finally comes down to brass tacks, to keep us from hogging that extra piece of cake . Or Chinese food, as is my weakness. What one needs at such times is a figurative kick in the nuts.

And this site is meant to be exactly that. A public gauntlet, if you will, thrown by two men more at their own selves than at each other. So here’s a pledge. By December 31, 2011, I, Vulturo, shall have the body of an underwear model (Which , if not much were to be read into it, essentially  means a body that’s good to look at). And given that this is public, if I fail, I’ll probably have no place to hide my shame. Hope that serves as the proverbial kick in the nuts in times of weakness.

Well, I’m no stranger to obesity or weight loss. The thing with elephants in the room is that they eventually tend to get noticed. I noticed the elephant first in 2009, when a morbidly obese physique was one of the primary factors that brought me down with deep vein thrombosis. That proved to be an awakening of sorts, when I managed to carry the momentum while staging a recovery from the wretched disease and brought my weight down from roughly 120 kilograms to about 94 at the glorious peak, all in the space of 10 months or thereabouts.

From here (2009)

to here (2010)

And roughly six months later, I lost it again. It doesn’t matter two straws if I explain it as a result of depression, getting too comfortable, or just plain mysteriously dropping the ball. What I can’t run away from is that I’m back to 104 kilograms. And ugly to look at.

Guess what, I  know, that supposedly smart picture of mine wearing glares makes me look like a perfect douche. But for the moment I’m stuck with it, because a better one cannot be taken for reasons grounded in the reality of physics. And I intend to change that.

This time round there shall be no excuses. I bloody well have to do what it takes. And keep doing it as much as necessary if I love myself. As the Jedi say, Do or do not. There is no try.

It’s underwear model or bust. Guess that just about sums it up.

PS: More entries on how I’m planning to do this coming up shortly.

Many new people I meet me often ask me about the origin of this internet handle. I had already documented this over at my 1.0 blog, but that has long since been destroyed.

Guess this is as good a time as any to do it again: Vulturo is a Hanna-Barbera super villain from the late sixties, who appeared on a few early episodes of Birdman, and was then since revived in Cartoon Network’s parody spoof Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

As kids, my little brother and me often watched Cartoon network for hours on end – the non desified variety, remember the Yogi Bear era? – and had numerous disagreements about the stuff that came on air. One of the most common ones was my brother choosing to root for the good side while I chose to side with evil, often out of awe, and sometimes just to spite him.

For example, my brother rooted for the Centurions while I did so for Doc Terror. There was Autobots vs Decepticons too. Birdman was this extremely annoying series which we often watched with ambivalence. Brother always rooted for Birdman, I didn’t care. Then Vulturo came along, a formidable adversary for the irritating Birdman, and I became an instant fan.

Here are those nostalgic videos:

Vulturo, Prince Of Darkness

Birdman’s sinister foe Vulturo suddenly appears at an astronomic conference and threatens the whole assembly unless Birdman agrees to meet him in a duel that will match Birdman’s superpowers against the awesome powers that Vulturo has devised. He even has a match for Avenger, a mechanical bird called Dirth. Fighting off each attack, Birdman’s powers begin to fade; he flies evasively, but finds out that the lives of the scientists at the conference are under threat of a time-bomb. Given back some strength by a passing comet, Birdman rushes to the scientists, as Vulturo escapes.

The Return Of Vulturo

An old enemy begins operation revenge by luring Birdman’s young companion, Birdboy, to his laboratory. First weakening him, he puts Birdboy on a conveyor belt directed toward a bottomless pit and waits. When Birdman arrives, the schemer causes the sky to cloud over to keep out the sun’s energy, locks him in with a paralyzing ray, and puts him on the conveyor belt too. Avenger stops the motion of the belt to allow Birdman time to wrench himself free, intercept the revengeful Vulturo, and have him locked up.

Come to think of it, the classic episodes don’t look so cool, and come across as frankly, quite stupid and cliched given the advances in animation and changes in modern sensibilities. But they were released in 1967/1968, more than 40 years ago, and were still entertaining for us Indian kids in the 90s.

Memorably enough, certainly, for me to choose Vulturo for an internet handle on IRC in early 2000, followed by MSN Chat, Blogger and everything else.

The show is in a freewheeling discussion format, and attempts to be a mix of news and opinion on business and personal technology.

The first episode was recorded pretty much impromptu over the phone, and has already been released. Do look it up and send me your feedback. The content is bound to evolve in some ways over the next few episodes, and of course, we’ll look at making it slicker. Thanks for listening.

The terrorist menace that the city of Mumbai and this country has been dealing with for over the past twenty-four hours just changes the dynamics of everything. I consider myself to be fairly desensitized against information about crimes against humanity, like terrorism for one, as long as personal kin is uninvolved. But with things turning out the way they have, I’m experiencing a plethora of new feelings.

Of course, I’m angry. And frustrated. It is only human to feel those things. But more than anger or frustration, what bothers me is a feeling of helplessness. A feeling that we are being subdued. That we are being personally violated. And that we can do nothing about it. This is disturbing. And I’m horrified.

All recent terror attacks in major Indian cities shared one common facet. To use a cliched expression, they were all acts of cowardice. No, I mean seriously. You plant 8-10 bombs in different areas using anonymous vehicles and innocuous items without drawing too much attention. The bombs go off. You have fled by then. You may get caught later but then that is just a risk you take. On the other hand you may not get punished at all.

This is different. This involves you taking to the streets, hotels, railway stations and other public places with an array of sophisticated weapons in your backpack and a smile on your face. You personally killing as many ordinary people as you can, fully comfortable with the knowledge that you are going down yourself soon. It is one thing to dream of something like this when you are feeling particularly evil, or another if you are playing a modern-day first person shooter. But this is reality – You can’t respawn here.

You can’t be a coward if you do this in real life. You must have serious balls. Either that, or you must be completely mental. Whatever be your reason, this scares me. And it scares everyone, more than it should.

This is scary because it clearly means you are out to get us. And you will not stop at things that human beings usually stop at. What does one do to deal with you? More importantly, what does one do to deal with you if one has the misfortune of being an Indian?

Previously, when we dealt with terrorism, there was this brilliant weasel route available wherein you could trick yourself psychologically. You could berate the terrorists and call them cowards. You could even bring up abstract concepts like the spirit of Mumbai or ordinary patriotism and get this really cool feeling of oneness which basically meant you alone weren’t fucked, everybody else was, too. Back then, tough talking politicos could still manage to temporarily assure you that something would be done, without specifying what. And you would buy it, albeit half heartedly.

But this? What do you do when on one fine evening, twenty odd^[1] people shake the very foundations of your city and continue to systematically rape your collective soul in your fucking face for a lot longer than you would be comfortable with? Kill three of your top cops, just for starters? Shoot indiscriminately at people on the road without any fear for the consequences? Hold people hostage in a 105 year monument, and make you see it burn on national television? Evade capture or death and be at large for a period of over 24 hours^[2] no matter how many cops, army-men or counter terrorists you throw at them? Make you watch the death toll steadily rise over time?

You know this sucks because nothing much can be done. You can kill the twenty-odd people who screwed over your city, but what do you do about the fact that you know more of them will keep coming at you, over and over again?

It doesn’t matter if they are Islamic. It doesn’t matter if they belong to this militant outfit or that. It doesn’t even matter who financially supports them. The only thing that matters is what you can or can’t do about them.

This is a democratic nation of over a billion people. You can’t police everyone. And you can’t deal with the problem at source. What do you do? Wage a war on Pakistan?^[3] Is that even possible? And even if it could be done, what would it achieve? Nuclear standoff?

We do not know for certain if we even have a serious intelligence agency. Most of our policemen and politicians are either incompetent or corrupt. There’s a hermaphrodite with a blue turban that we keep trying to pass off as Prime Minister. All he can do is ask people to remain calm and he’s been doing that for over four years now. No matter who we elect to office in the near future, we can’t say for certain that they would be competent enough to tackle something as complex as this. We can get scared, but what else?

The only sensible thing one can do in this scenario is get a job with the media. And milk this. Or like they advised on a financial channel today, take advantage of the markets tanking and buy stock so that you can sell it during the next bubble. You’ve got to make the most of what you’ve got. Am I even making sense?

This is meant to take nothing away from the brave men and women who lay down their lives or suffer great personal hardships to restore normalcy every-time something this happens. But I don’t see much hope here. Correct me, if I’m wrong. And I seriously hope that I am.

1. Turns out that there were exactly 10 people. Makes it even lamer for us.
2. The outrage lasted 60 hours. Beat that
3. Well, turns out you ask your Finance Minister to take over as Defense Minister as a corrective measure. I don’t know how that helps

All work and no play makes Vulturo a dull boy?

This morning, I decided to see what information I could glean from my Twitter usage statistics, and apart from the fact that I could never get a hang of Thursdays, what interested me was the supercool weighted tweetcloud.

Its high time that I acknowledged that over the past one year, I’ve been almost unnaturally work-obsessed. Work and Office are my top two twitter keywords (apart from twitter itself. Isn’t that so very meta?) closely followed by meeting, blackberry and mac. I’m not quite sure if that is a great sign. Do I deserve a raise?

Or am I just a loser who needs to fuck this shit and focus on getting a life? No, seriously. I don’t know.