mad rush

last post for the year and the first in some time. what can i say, was out of station... or was i in station for after all i was visiting my folks at home. and then when i land back, i had to drag myself off to delhi for a visa interview. well it wasn't so much dragging as a whirl for i had forgotten (not so much forgotten as didn't know it existed) to get this letter from our hr which states that this guy ain't a beggar and has the backing of a big bad corporate machine. whatever... and i learn about this document of absolution an hour and a half before my flight is due. don't even care to remember the things that followed. i must have given half a dozen people a heart attack. the hr woman thought this was all some kind of joke. she simply refused to believe that such things could happen in today's highly integrated, process-perfect world. boy! was i glad that she didn't hyper-ventilate or something. my manager had this stunned look as if he couldn't believe that he was the guy who hired me but on the whole was very supportive helping out with printing the letter and even managing a pep talk which amounted to "go get'em tiger" though all i was going to was hours of standing in a queue for the privilege of talking to this highly energetic visa guy, whom he (the guy, not the manager ;-) ) would himself probably have described, accurately mind you, as male caucasian in a tone that has probably never seen a voice modulation since the last time he said "mummy, i wanna pee" or in his case, "mother, i desire to urinate".

but all in all even that was interesting. i always enjoy delhi in the cold. if you want to enjoy real privacy, you need to be in a teeming city. though sometimes, i guess, it could get a bit lonely. watched a lot of footage of the tsunami. made me feel thankful to be breathing. well in the words of mr.gump, "and thats all i have to say about that".

melady

have to do this in 2 minutes. my friends are waiting for me to go to this party thing and i just had to do this before going. karate kid revealed another side of his n-faceted personality. and somebody was commenting on how he liked older women and then i realized that i just had to pay my all time favourite a tribute. anne bancroft in the graduate... whew!!! i envy hoffman. well come to think of it i have a lot of other women to envy him for too ;-)

sweet stuff

have been busy with booking and cancelling tickets to go home for xmas. and when i returned to the office there were rumours floating that there was cake to be had at some kind of christmas-carol-thingummy organized near the parking lot. the only problem was that... well to put it mildly, the whole thing sucked. It was so unbearable that all my friends had given up the ghost and came back despite the pull of the cake which was supposed to make a late appearance . but since meself was never one to back off from a challenge i persuaded some of my other friends to come with me for moral support. it was to be a quick mission. in - cake - out. not exactly the yuletide spirit but thats the only way they agreed to come. and i lost all interest in the thing when i heard that the santa was so substandard that people were spreading the word that he was on atkins. also people weren't allowed to sit on his lap :-(

and the inspiration for this blast about the party is that the cake kinda sucked too. and as someone said about sorrow crown of sorrow being thinking about happier stuff, i am here thinking of the real christmas cakes i have had...

cellular intelligence

been having a lot of discussions these days about languages. finally took some positive action on that front today. there's this friend (won't mention him. he's been getting a lot of bad press from me lately) of mine whose mobile keeps changing its profile name to the magical word "mappan". rumours abound that this happens under the influence of mysterious paranormal forces but i am inclined to believe that it is because the mobile somehow responds to the mappan-waves emitting from its owner.

half the explanation is in the meaning of mappan. loosely translated it means someone who is stupid beyond the realms of comprehension and is proud of it because he knows not about things other than stupidity and is thus unable to compare it with anything else. this, as i said, is when its loosely translated.

but all this is neither here nor there. so i'll come back to the language bit. well, i felt that though the mobile is trying its best to express itself, there was a little something missing. so i helped it along and changed the language to philippino and its pretty interesting what philippines call a lot of things. but more interesting was watching my bad-press-guy fiddling around with the cell, all the while trying to trace my genealogical origin. all in all the paranormal force and i had a good time though some of my forefathers would be spinning out of control in their graves.

the deal that never was

today i speak of a sad story of betrayal. of treachery in its worst form. today i speak of the brutus who took my "da vinci code" with the promise of getting me "five point someone" and when the swap was made, stuck on to the goods thereby leaving me high and dry. What does one do when faced with such low-down-below-the-beltness! its like the domino's delivery guy ringing ur bell, coming in and flopping onto the sofa eating your pizza. i am not exaggerating when i say that i was flabbergasted.

it's not that the book is that good. it's the principle of the thing. a man who refuses to part with the exchanged book today is a man who could very well deny his dying grandma whatever it is that dying grandmas as a norm ask for. and to think that a friend of mine has fallen to such irredeemable depths pains me... especially since i need to figure out a way to weedle that book out of the wretched bastard's grasps!!!

high on life

today was an interesting day. learnt that vanity thy name is not just woman and received a veiled threat of being taken down in my own tongue! and as if that weren't enough, had to bear the sight of abdul going around wearing a (for want of a better word) cap. it almost made me lose the will to live.

yet, despite these mentally devastating experiences, especially the last, of which all i have to say is that there should be some kind of law or something, i feel very happy today. its like i am on life-cannabis! god is indeed in his heaven and all right with the world!

i am back

this one has been a long time coming. had been too lazy to write anything, but when people started enquiring after my health and wondering if the holy one, in his generosity, had offered me a berth up there, i decided that it was time to do a phoenix act and here goes. one of the reasons of my laziness was that i had enough time at hand to make posts and so lost the interest to do so. well now we are back in the real world with my pl offering me two more bugs in the same area in which i am fixing one so that i can do all of them together :-( the zest he put in while conveying this piece of information almost mislead me into thinking he was offering me a bonus or something.

as for what's been up lately, well yesterday, or was it the day before, i didn't go to this hyderabad-blogger's-get-together-thingummy and that kind of makes me feel better because pradyot did and though he has been swearing that it was very "interesting" i detect that faint twinge of regret in his voice which could either mean that he didn't want to admit that it was pretty pathetic or he was surprised that he found the pretty pathetic thing actually interesting. i mean what can u expect from a bloggers anonymous kind of thing? is this meant to be some kind of support group or something. no man is an island, but we dont have to be tropical rainforests (which i know is a pretty cheesy line but is the best i can think up now. maybe later i will turn it into a land-locked-country or something).