This is something I should have written a long time ago and it is one of many pieces for eg. that I plan to write about all those who have influenced me.

Nanga Fakir, as he's known in the blogosphere, is often aka'ed as Abhinav Anand Dwivedi, Shuchikar, Ghongha Basant, etc. A writer par excellence, his is well known and respected for his lit giri, which spans the most obscure recesses of Indie movies and Russian authors all of whom have a fascination with committing suicide. Its hard to imagine, given his sordid life style, why he hasn't chosen to commit suicide himself but one must realize that procrastination is not just something he thinks is cool, indeed, it is the ends and means of his livelihood. A self-proclaimed hard-core dehati/poriki, calls his hometown, Lucknow, a B-grade city and thinks of himself as one with the masses. Well, he is and he isn't. He is, for better or for worse, a social chameleon capable of consorting with those higher up the social echelons(read, a certain person known for spouting Quantum Field theory on stochastic graphs in the same sentence as shimmering tapestries of post-existentialist pseudo-neo-feministic literature) and those whom, society calls boors from East UP/ West Bihar. If only, he wore clean clothes, he would have been the toast of New York's intelligentsia and pictures of him in cocktail parties, snogging persuadable blondes, would have appeared in Page 3 of Bangalore Times. Its a pity we never get to see such things. His knowledge on obscurities is not limited to avant-garde movies and manic depressive writers, he can talk in great detail about Taiwanese math prodigies or influential Czech economists. Some say that he has read the original Perelman's proof of Poicare's conjecture in Russian and that he had an incredible proof of the Riemann hypothesis on the margin of his notebook in high school. On more than one occasion, he has been accused of destroying other peoples lives and breaking hearts. He also has this uncanny ability to discover people's deepest insecurities.

Yet, for all his criticisms, I owe a great deal of debt to him. It made four years of college going interesting. Aspirations, movie tastes, fascination for dark, depressing literature, love for pulp fiction(the genre and the movie) and pure mathematics, Science Fiction were all off-loaded onto me. If this post seems more of a mockery than a tribute, I take consolation in the fact that NF, probably, won't have it any other way. All that I described above are simultaneously some of his biggest weaknesses and the reason why he is endearing to one and all.