the silent scream

sneaking back in

2007-07-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

why is it that its only when you are swamped with work, do you find a need to blog. thats not entirely true. i found the need to blog when i was trying to comment on guru's blog and realized that i had forgotten the blogger password, and after some time realized that i had forgotten that blogger had been integrated with the google account password. and i thought that it is indeed time i did something about the dying scream.

as for the news here, well my blog has never really been about news or how i feel or anything. it was mostly anecdotes and "chori" - a word popularized by her (another dying blog :p). and i guess i had been too wrung up in the existential angst to actually come up with any. but i now feel that there is no time in life where you shouldnt tell a funny story. especially when a lot of the stuff happening around you is not funny :)

caving tunnels

2006-08-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

the other day something occurred which made me realize that the human spirit fights its most glorious battles without even realizing its in one. alosh and i never realized at the time that our actions were so full of the spirit of never giving up, the same spirit that helps people climb everest or win the tour de france, when we were actually going about our heroic feats. it happened when he came to bangy and we decided to go to this water theme park. now i wont go into the details of the rides there. suffice it to say that they were numerous and quite adequately adrenaline-jerking. however our greatness was revealed to us ;) in a tunnel ride. the ride basically consists of an inflated 8-shaped dinghy thingy on which they seat 2 people and push them down a tunnel which twists and turns and opens into a shallow pool where u climb out of the dinghy laughing at ur bravado.

now we were sort of put off with the look of apprehension on the faces of the couple going ahead of us. and when they came out of the other end giggling alosh and i got on with the smirk of the fearless. we were determined to ride the bally thing to its extreme. let it know its been in a fight and all. and so we lunged into the tunnel with the fore-mentioned smirk. and we attacked each curve with great zeal leaning with the raft to get maximum acceleration (sixth grade physics). the problem with the plan was that there is only so much acceleration u can get out of a stupid no-motor-driven-by-gravity dinghy with the result that when we leaned more it threw up its hands in the air in defeat or rather, its ass and spilled us head first into the miserable little tunnel. it was a very philosophical turn of events as i had a lot of time to cogitate upon the meaning of life and all while wriggling the other half of the way down the tunnel. made me think that we are indeed a strange species if our idea of fun was climbing four flights of stairs only to be pushed into a dark winding tunnel in a dinghy which has holes not cushions to rest ur bottoms and emerge into a pool of chlorinated water at a temperature several degrees below comfort level. i mean if we were emerging into a flowery paradise it may have made some sense to other animals.

anywayz... back to the human spirit and all. we went back to the ride and decided to do the thing together again to prove to the world that we wont be beaten and also because the others refused to ride with us and this time around we had a clear mission. we shall emerge successful, smiling and not be toppled no matter what. and thus was started the great saga of leaning against the curve and quelling the raft with a look when it lurched too much and in general, plodding relentlessly towards the pool. and thus we emerged from the tunnel with the targeted smile. we even flung up our arms in victory as the dinghy splashed into the pool and looked at the ppl standing around with the smile turning to a smirk. however some of them werent quite able to appreciate the full extent of the smirk as it was reached only just before my head went under the water, the dinghy having toppled spilling us into the pool.

nagarjuna sagar

2006-08-09T01:54:00.000-07:00

almost broke my back that day driving 400kms on not-so-good roads on a not-in-its-best-form pulsar :)

Nagarjuna Sagar

Jul 8, 2006 - 30 Photos

background

2006-06-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

now here's a song i have been listening to rather too long these days:

it's quiet now
and what it brings
is everything

comes calling back
a brilliant night
i'm still awake

i looked ahead
i'm sure i saw you there

you don't need me
to tell you now
that nothing can compare

you might have laughed if i told you
you might have hidden a frown
you might have succeeded in changing me
i might have been turned around

it's easier to leave than to be left behind
leaving was never my proud
leaving new york, never easy
i saw the light fading out

now life is sweet
and what it brings
i tried to take
but loneliness
it wears me out
it lies in way

and all not lost
still in my eyes
the shadow of necklace
across your thigh
i might've lived my life in a dream, but i swear
this is real
memory fuses and shatters like glass
mercurial future, forget the past
it's you, it's what i feel.

you might have laughed if i told you (it's pulling me apart)
you might have hidden a frown (change)
you might have succeeded in changing me (it's pulling me apart)
i might have been turned around (change)

it's easier to leave than to be left behind (it's pulling me apart)
leaving was never my proud (change)
leaving new york, never easy (it's pulling me apart)
i saw the light fading out
you find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart
you find it in your heart, change...

i told you, forever
i love you, forever
i told you, i love you
i love you, forever
i told you, forever
you never, you never
you told me forever

you might have laughed if i told you
you might have hidden the frown
you might have succeeded in changing me
i might have been turned around

it's easier to leave than to be left behind (it's pulling me apart)
leaving was never my proud (change)
leaving new york never easy (it's pulling me apart)
i saw the life fading out (change)
leaving new york, never easy (it's pulling me apart)
i saw the light fading out (change)
leaving new york never easy (it's pulling me apart)
i saw the life fading out (change)

the recipe

2006-06-04T01:24:00.000-07:00

heres the recipe... forget the other post.

1 egg
1 slice of bread
butter
salt
pepper

butter both sides of the bread and cut a square hole in the middle of the bread. heat up a frying pan to medium heat. put bread into the pan to melt butter. drop a small amount of butter into hole of bread and let it melt. then drop an egg into the middle and break the yoke. add salt and pepper to taste and cook until the egg is done.

Preparation Time: 3 minutes Serves: 1 each

of eggs and baskets

2006-06-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

i am editing this to remove a few indiscretions induced by alcohol.

i dont know if u are familiar with the term egg-in-a-basket... i wasnt till a few days ago. i was fulfilling a promise i had made to someone by watching v for vendatta... but it turns out i actually loved the movie... not liked... loved... it might be all this anti-reservation thing thats going on in india or maybe the ban on da vinci code... whatever... i loved the preaching of anarchy... and yeah... i am drunk when i am typing this... but that doesnt make the movie (v not da vinci) less great.

anyways there is this recipe in the movie called egg-in-a-basket thats being made in the movie by whoever has an anti-establishment sentiment. and i decided i need to learn to make the same. it actulally involves a slice of bread which actually acts as the basket in question and an egg which u might already have guessed given the subject... anyways... i'll go into details maybe in a later post... but for all those who are interested, the ingredients required are a slice of bread, a bit of salted butter and an egg... (did i repeat that!!!)

smoking barrels

2006-04-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

methinks its time to post something... and when i heard this bit on aaj tak, i knew i had to post it. aaj tak is arguably india's most "entertaining" news channel. they are such unabashed rumour-mongers that there have been instances wherein they had contradicted their own reports without batting an eye much like times of india which killed yasser arafat twice without so much as an errata or an apology :)

anywayz, these guys have this edge-of-the-seat crime reporting programme called "vaardat" which is dixit's favourite as one can always count on it for a few laughs. their staple diet is violent murders and any rapes that they can lay their hands on. the "vaardat" reporters have been known to have withdrawal symptoms during weeks when the unruly indian libido had rested and refrained from molesting the gentler sex. they were almost condemning the lack of enterprise on the part of horny men.

we were watching this piece about how someone was caught in delhi for possessing an illegal weapon. yeah, the "vaardat" guys were desperate and snatching at straws. apparently no murders... still they ploughed on valiantly. excelsior... "shaks se ek videshi pistol aur kayi goliyan baramat hua" (a foreign gun and multitude of bullets [the 6 ones in the revolver] were retrieved from the person) the background voice was saying with such outrage that for a moment i was wondering if he was carrying some kind of biological weapon. dixit and i looked at each other and burst out laughing.

aaj tak are taking "rang de basanti" a bit too seriously :)
and yeah... me has taken a leaf out of their book too ;)

sanyaas

2006-03-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

i have skipped a whole month without a post! i guess its been coming for a while... but never thought i would let the trickle stop completely. but then what a month it has been. hope to write more... soon...

there aint no free meal

2006-01-20T07:48:00.000-08:00

there's no such thing as a free meal.

as a rule i have found the people of hyderabad pretty hard working. but daku, dixit, alosh and i were to find that this attribute didnt quite extend to the city's restaurateurs who are among the laziest buggers that ever walked the earth. we went from place to place only to be told that they were sorry but they were closed between the hours of 3 to 7 in the afternoon because the chef was sleeping off his lunch of left-overs. thus it was that we went to taj krishna reasoned that the folks there wouldnt have this laissez faire attitude and an utter disrespect for the hunger pangs of the deserving public. another reason of course was that it was daku's long-due treat and we werent letting her get off merely with a pizza hut.

and when we did arrive there we werent disappointed and were offered a table by the window and a nice menu each. we were having a jolly good time of it and were nearing the end of the meal when dixit got this puzzled expression on his face. it was like he had stumbled upon some unseen stone or something but he rallied around and kept on ruminating in a cogitative soviet-russian manner. but the story wasnt to end there for he soon put a couple of digits into his mouth and came out with a piece of clear-wrap like one of those magicians who keep puking long pieces of clothes and somehow think that its entertaining to the people who have to watch it! if i had such weird dietary habits, i would at least try my best to hush them up.

anywayz we were now placed with the problem of what to do and after some soul-searching decided to inform our waiter that while we appreciate the plentiful bounty they bestowed on us we werent particularly keen on organic polymers. the guy was a bit of a disappointment as his face betrayed no emotion whatsoever and merely cleared away the dishes with a brief sorry. this sort of disconcerted us and alosh and i ordered a calming bowl of rice to sooth the nerves.

of course, they werent going to leave it at that :-)... the manager apologized profusely and was eager to explain how they were very careful with hygiene and offered to waive off the charges on the meal and was even very insistent when we offered to pay for the others' portion. all in all it was like a scene from dickens. however such happy things werent to last and even as the manager was basking in his bonhomie, alosh rather apologetically pointed at one of the table declarations and said that he didnt think much of taj trying to present, without the loss of their individuality, diverse tastes, in "hormony".

now there are people who can take their "hormony" and then there are people who cant. alosh obviously is of the latter kind. now i dont want to be all judgmental about it and i think the fellow is more to be pitied than censured. i for one completely enjoy my "hormony". however the manager somehow was of the opinion that this was an embarrassment for him and scourged around and managed to find another of those thingummies which was from the era wherein the taj group had given up their biological approach and opted for the more mundane "harmony".

soon we stopped spreading more light and happiness in the taj and decided to call it a day. and as were going out dixit turned to daku and gave her one of those patronizing looks. "so, daku... how was my treat?"

country roads... take me home...

2005-12-23T04:11:00.000-08:00

times have changed and times are strange
here i come, but i ain't the same...

off to home. like never before ;-)

me - brutus

2005-12-12T01:06:00.000-08:00

methinks there needs to be an elaboration on the emotional outburst by abdul wherein he has raised questions on my ability to speak...

well the previous story was about a practice we had planned a day before the match for which we got the walkover. and around afternoon the other team called us and declared the walkover. but given our chronic inability to turn up for practice, we thought that this might be a good chance to get everyone out in the field. so we kept mum abt the walkover and next day everybody turned up for the match, heard of the walkover and decided to go ahead and practice.

now why is abdul pissed off? coz i had refused to go with him to guzzle beer coz i had a match the next day and he later found out abt the whole walkover thingy and that i knew we had a walkover when i had refused ;-)
such is the world dude... trust is whatever you can still betray ...

cricket practice

2005-12-11T02:51:00.000-08:00

call to organize cricket practice at 6:30 in the morning for a match the next day:
sleepy me not wanting to open my eyes, in bed, "oye, junta pahuncha kya?"
"sab nahin. tu kahan hein?", equally sleepy pani.
"raste mein... listen if nobody is coming we could just do it later."
"the match is tomorrow."
"hmmm... evening..."
"ok..." *yawn*... and off he goes.

highway robber

2005-12-05T01:21:00.000-08:00

one should never go out to have breakfast on the day after a binge ;-) after drinking a mixture of beer, bacardi and tequila till the wee hours in the morning, abdul and i woke up and decided to grab some breakfast keeping in mind what the whats-his-name dude had said about breakfast being the most important meal and what not. most of the places that we sort of banked on for providing this nourishment was moving on to lunch, hide-bound i say, one would have supposed they would want to corner the niche market of people who want to breakfast at mid-noon, but these short-sighted street-peddler-turned-restaurateur types dont have any vision. but we still managed to down a masala dosa and about 5 cups of tea apiece ;-)

and being the kind-hearted guy i am (and because he called and asked me to), i decided to buy dixit some breakfast. and this was a mistake as this meant i would stay back and get the stuff while abdul went on home... well i got the food and returned to my bike only to find someone leaning on it and having a seemingly long chat with his friend. i asked him to please move aside and the guy gave me a weird look. and i hopped on the bike and was getting it started, aware of the guy now openly staring, when i found that the damn handle wouldnt unlock!!! and then i saw that one of the scratches in my bike had miraculously vanished!

i looked at the guy, "your bike huh?"
"yeah", he said with a broad grin.

i dont know if you have tried to hijack somebody's vehicle after asking them to move away from it and jumping in yourself. but let me tell you that it is not the most prudent choice for an experience to alleviate your mundane day. i could still feel the grins on my back as i was driving away having spotted my bike. i am seriously contemplating getting it done a violent scarlet with yellow stripes.

cold night

2005-11-29T10:57:00.000-08:00

been a long time blogging! thought i needed to start again.

i had been sitting in a cab last night and staring outside at the passing line of trucks. it was cold and i was feelig strange. numb... the driver was stealing glances at me, almost meaning to ask me something... and i just didnt feel like making his job any easier. i just lowered the window and let the chilling air blow against my face. at least it was a feeling. and then the guy was saying something.

"kuch kho diye kya saab?"

and i smiled. it was the perfect combination of curiosity, knowledge that it is a personal question and knowledge of the answer.

"haan... lekin nahin..."

free speech

2005-10-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

blogland india seems to be on fire:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/2005/10/10/
india-defending-freedom-of-speech/

yeah... india does have a long way to go for that.

sincerity

2005-09-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

how much sincerity towards work is too much sincerity? now before people start making protesting sounds or dishing out them suggestive discreet coughs, let me clarify that this is not about me :-)

our office was shifted to this new campus and i am beginning to wonder if the housekeeping here isnt a tad too zealous in keeping the house. i started thinking about this today when i made a visit to the loo. i had sort of opened the door and stepped inside the loo and was about to close the door when i found that i wasnt alone! there was this chap standing next to me with a sort of sheepish smile! i dont know if u have ever entered a loo and had somebody sort of come along u know, just to keep u company or something... but if u have, and didnt find the experience disconcerting, then all i can say is that u r a better person than i, for i found the whole ordeal a bit trying on the nerves. i dont claim that my whole life passed in front of my eyes, but i did start wondering whether its just me, or has this kind of thing become the norm! well i was abt to give him a to-what-am-i-indebted-the-honour-of-this-visit routine when i noticed him holding a roll of toilet paper, which he proceeded to wordlessly change.

now this too was a new experience for me! i mean, i thought such stuff were done when the booths are sort of empty but no doubt the guy had his reasons, probably an approaching deadline or something. and i guess it was this that rendered me sort of confused and not properly appreciative of the guys determination to leave no paper roll unchanged. and to this confusion i attribute the dumb way in which i looked on as he left closing the door. but in my defence i must say that i did murmur a thank u some time after the door closed. hmmm... i begin to understand the word proactive.

fishing

2005-08-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

i have been wondering how people manage to fish a 20 kg trout with a normal fishing line! well not exactly a trout, but thats beside the point, which now that we r mentioning it is, how does anybody manage to catch a fish which can break the line? the key i believe is in letting out the line whenever the fish seems too determined to fight and reeling it in in the slack periods till finally the fish gives up the fight and decides that it is better off being ur dinner.

but then, if this were the case, any bright fish might know that if it keeps pulling and forcing one to let out more line then eventually the line would run out and the fish can break itself free. so i wonder if the fish really wants to break the line. and if thats the case, how is it that u make the fish not want to break the line! what the hell... who cares for a stupid fish!

the truth about the p07n queen

2005-07-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

i feel that i owe it to the world in general to reveal the truth as to how it was that daku consolidated her position as a porn queen. well not in the usual, common, crass sense but in her own style. after all who is the real queen? the artist who just, well for want of a better word, "performs", or the sleek gangster who rakes in the moolah and spreads her distribution network for procreational cinema? she probably realized that she was destined for greatness long before i first met her and like many successful people, she was looking around for some pro-bono work. and here was her chance - a poor desi, stranded in redwood shores with a VCR and no tapes. and before i knew what was up i had a drawer full of high-brow porn (the lady, one admits, has class) in my room. most of the titles were understated but some i must admit were really tawdry like the one with a john-travolta lookalike on the cover - dirty dancing (where do they come up with such names)!

/me being the sharing kind, offered daku's largesse to my friend, whom we shall not name here. now, he is a very focused person and has his priorities all set out in mind. so unlike me, he didnt want anything to do with most of daku's pretentious stuff. he believed in keeping it simple and opted for the ones that proclaimed proudly what they held inside. one of the tapes was "exotica", a name which really cracked me up. what kind of a loser would name a movie that! i mean just change a letter and u have a box office hit! well, when the time came for me to leave and i had returned the bulk of her "babies" to daku, i remembered the others left with him and asked abdul to get those for daku.

with hindsight, i do confess that it was a bit of an unfortunate thing to do as it brought daku all this publicity. i guess part of the secret of being a successful porn trafficker is in keeping a low profile and not flaunting ur stuff (no pun whatsoever intended). i mean we all know what happened to capone. and thus i think it was irresponsible of glam to leave the merchandise out in the open where prying eyes could easily spot them without even attempting at prying.

i dont know what it is about the partially nude female form that attracts men (i mean i do know, but i am willing to sacrifice my strict adherence to the truth for the sake of melodrama just this once). but whatever it was, it was doing a pretty good job of it. people were flocking to abduls desk like arabs at an oasis. soon they were running excursion trips and abdul was contemplating charging admission. but he maintains that he did ask for id. after all he had a certain responsibility to tomorrow's generation. my heart bleeds when i think of the anguish he must have gone through. through no fault of his, he was being associated with daku's deplorable trade.

and even as the crowds were gathering daku got wind of the security breach and rushed over for a quick grab-and-run operation to retrieve the goods. years of experience had of course made her quite nippy but if rumours are to be believed some of the folks did manage to get a snap or two of daku in the act. the last i heard, and this came from daku herself, was that the fbi was investigating her background! but these things probably happen for a purpose. it was the little nudge that propelled her from greatness to legendary. i mean just the other day she had sent some stuff (dvds ;-) ) for sood and one of glam's team-mates (who was at hq with him) had seen me carrying the stuff and had asked me where they were from and i had resigned myself to a long explanation.
"these are from hq. a lady we know sent it for some friends here..."
"ah",he interrupts. the guy's eyes practically lit up. he gazed into the void, lost in a reverie, oblivious of my existence, "the lady with the porn"...

daku's loot

2005-07-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

abdul, sood, V... u guys owe me big time.

daku in a moment of misplaced generosity had sent some stuff for the above 3 ungrateful souls and the undersigned the "indian" way. poor chap didnt really realize what he was letting himself in for when she asked him to carry "some stuff" for her friends :-) anywayz, the chap brings the loot all the way to his office, probably cursing daku all the way there and calls up abdul and i to go over and rid him of the stuff. of course, anybody would think that if he wanted to do a thorough job of it he would have come over to our office (which is only half a km away) and delivered it in person with a happy smile on his face from the satisfaction of having done a good deed. but, probably due to some inexplicable flaw in character, he wasnt too keen on the good deeds and since abdul is a congenital bastard and refuses to do anything that involves dragging his posterior out of the office, it was urs truly who finally ended up going over to collect the stuff.

well the stuff included some dvds, a novel, some nail-polish and some weird stuff in small containers, which no doubt plays some major role in enhancing the feminine countenance. all i can say is that somebody should have packed it all in non-transparent stuff. i mean there i was waiting for the damn elevator (that building suffers from an acute shortage of elevators) and a couple of women come by and start staring at the stuff that i was endeavouring to balance somehow. and then they notice the nail-polish and the other thingummy and exchange meaningful glances (is there no decency left in this world)!

i had the futurama dvds on top of the pile and was quite unsure whether they were cool enough to counter the nail-polish and thought that maybe i should promote the book up the ladder. the problem with this was that i was underestimating daku's generosity. not only had she sent a book, but she had also put in one of those plastic things which show different images when we look at them from different angles. and when i was moving the book this piece of optical marvel seized the opportunity to jump right out of the book onto the floor. and there it lay proclaiming to the whole wide world "FUN" in big yellow letters. somehow i couldnt share its feeling of unbridled glee and picked the bally thing up with the 2 females, blights on the fair sex, following every movement.

"it also says sun", i explained with a grin as the elevator doors opened.

battle of middle earth

2005-07-08T14:50:00.000-07:00

pictures from the battle. the victors write history.

the forces of neurohavoc and glam gather strength.

the lull before the storm. figo and dixit joins the cause of truth.

the bugle has sounded. there is no going back.

ashes to ashes... dust to dust...

grungy gift

2005-07-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

people should stop giving their loved ones crappy gifts!

well lemme begin by describing the gift. about 2 years back one of my friends had bought an alleged cd-player. well one must admit that it did play audio cds and when pressed, also managed vcds but if u have this sleek portable cd player in mind, u r way off the mark. this one is a bulky monstrosity which the manufacturer blew up in size in the vain hope that this would beguile the ignorant customer into buying the damn thing. and when last seen (about 18 months back) this had been, in a moment of frustration, dropped on the floor resulting in a screw-up in the latching mechanism - a mark of protest by the player to let my friend put any more cds in it. of course, he, without taking the hint, continued to torment it by inserting the cds and preventing their ejection by means of some weight (ususally a book purchased with the intent to read). if this was the state it deteriorated into (from a pretty bad beginning) in 6 months one can only imagine what toll 18 more months of atrocities and abuse would have taken.

and it is this player that he gifted to the love of his life! a symbol of eternal love and caring! i was just wondering what the message was that he was trying to convey. or was there no message at all. which would be worse for it would be a random act of "kindness" with no thought or consideration behind it ;-)

well, the surprising part is that the lady is still with him and all is apparently well. when asked his explanation was that her need was greater than his! his exact words - "look at it this way, for her, its no less than a gold mine !!"... i need to meet this girl. i need to ask her if when she mentioned her "need" for a cd player she had in mind something that for want of a better name, people call a cd player. and if getting it was indeed her "gold mine". and if it was, i want to ask her where i can get a girlfriend like her!

they defy

2005-06-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

been trying to come up with movies that defy the norms :-) and its slim pickins:

planet of the apes

a.i

total recall (i know... was getting desperate... at least everything aint blue or grey. its all red :-D)

help me out folks.

bottoms up

2005-06-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

sloshed after a looooooong time. thanks to the pottan angel ( beginning to realize how he earned the angel part :-) ). well it all started off with the pottan urging me to have an evening snack with him and since i had a code review later in the night, i thought i might as well go along. and as we finished the light snack of 2 teas + an omelet + 2 samosas each, the pottan wanted me to help him finish off a bottle of smirnoff which had like a couple of drinks left. that was where my downfall began. i reasoned that with a couple of quick ones sloshing inside me the code review would be a walkover with all and sunder bowing to my brilliance of pl/sql manipulation. so we went off to his place and on the way got some juice and lime. and when we reached his place we found that the other buggers, who are part camels, had almost drained the entire bottle leaving just a miserable residue. and there we were with a predicament as to what to do.

in such matters the trick is not to give up hope. and there we were sipping the smirnoff pondering on how unjust life is, when i experienced this weird feeling which i initially mistook for volvulus but soon identified as a brainwave. why not have a shot of the tequila that was in the fridge right beside the smirnoff. the pottan found the idea pretty appealing too. with ppl like us to think is to act. and soon it was that 3 of the best men that ever walked the earth gathered around a fridge on top of which were 3 shot glasses. the stage was now set.

the problem with my brainwave was that it was highly scalable. and before we knew where we were, we had downed 8 shots and was staring at a bottle that had perhaps a shot and a half left in it. and these were all 40ml shots which is like a big shot ;-) now what differentiates tequila from other health drinks is that it also builds moral fibre. lesser men would have had a go at the remaining stuff. but we recognized that we should leave it for his other roommates. their need was greater than ours. but even men of strong moral fibre quiver when they make such sacrifices and counter measures were the need of the hour. to rush ourselves over to the nearest store and get ourselves some vodka supply was with us the work of a moment.as for the rest of it... well memory is a bit vague as to what had really happened. i remember driving myself home *shudder* some time during the night.

and yeah... i have been accused of being apologetic when drunk. but then isnt that the safest thing to do! i mean the world has little patience for us men of moral fibre. and yeah, i missed the code review.

man's worst friend

2005-06-03T02:16:00.000-07:00

the indian dog is a strange being. it is highly resourceful, and if u talk of the indian stray dog, those buggers are bloody mensans!!! but for all their ingenuity these canine supremos dont have much of traffic sense. how hard is it really! before crossing the road, look on either side and if there are no vehicles coming, cross the bally thing. i mean thats all u need to do. its not as if u r in some other country where u cant jaywalk and have to go looking for those crossing. this is just plain look and cross. and for all their ingenuity one would assume that these miserable nincompoops who spend a good portion of their lives on the roads would have learnt how to cross the road. look at chickens. they r famous all over the world for it!

so it was that one of the above mentioned four-legged-ill-advised beings came to stroll into the path of figo's bike. well not so much stroll as dash. now the dog, were it to present its case, would have said that there were a pack of humans following it earnestly with an ardent desire to inflict bodily harm and that under those circumstances, it didnt have time to go through the look-to-the-right-and-then-to-the-left routine. but one would argue that its precisely at such moments that one should be all the more careful. i mean pretty silly it would look if having escaped a couple of sticks, it were to be run over by, of all people, figo :-) entire generations wouldnt have been able to live down the shame. but then we underestimate how hard it is to actually get run over by figo. for if there was a brake-happy guy, then this guy is certainly that.

now many would consider this an ordinary incident. but then many werent following behind figo in another bike :-( the interesting thing about dark narrow roads is that not only are they narrow, but also they are pretty much devoid of light. so it was that the undersigned didnt really see anything of the dog. so i was pretty astonished by figo's actions! i mean one moment he was cruising along the road and the next had come to a complete stop and was looking at something in front of him. i mean, being figo we permit him a certain margin of swerve in behaviour to the other side of sanity, but this looked like a case of him taking an extreme liberty with the watchdogs of mental health. even as i was wondering whether something had finally pushed him beyond the edge, i was aware that i needed to brake fast and hard.

well to make a long story short, the only hard part about the braking was the time i hit the ground. well not i, but we. for riding with me was my roomie dixit. he is perhaps the biggest victim of this. for the bike i was riding was his and this was the first time it really got up close and personal with ma earth. and i was feeling pretty sorry for the chap. but i soon overcame that moment of weakness and started feeling sorry for myself having been a bit at the receiving end myself especially the arm and wrist. and i began to sympathize with those salt-of-the-earth people who were after the bally dog. they had their hearts in the right place. i mean i had known it for hardly five minutes and i could have strangled it with not a sound from my conscience. in fact conscience would have been right there egging me along.

well we were a bruised lot in body and spirit who came back home. and then dixit looks at my arm and says:
"man! u also ruined ur shirt."
and i look at the torn sleeves.
"yeah, but u know what. i dont think this shirt is mine."
the light seemed to die out of his eyes.
"shit! its mine! bastard!"

the freeze zone

2005-05-28T08:39:00.001-07:00

i got a fridge. the story is one of human suffering and the triumph of the human spirit. the suffering was me having to listen through all of my mom's lectures on living like "human beings" which sort of gave me the idea that the first thing that the homo erectus did when evolving was go and get himself a refrigerator. but i was strong enough to resist the parental pressure factor till the chivas factor came into picture. i had got this bottle of the elixir but we were putting it off since hyd is a positive brick oven these days. so we sort of came to this compromise that may be if we had ice cubes we could give it a shot ;-) thus the rather big ice box :-) i also got myself some cool glasses (the drinking ones) to produce the right tinkling sound :-)

okay. it would be a deception if i let everyone believe that these were the only factors. there was also the dirt cheap factor ;-) but thats another story.

oh almost forgot the triumph of the human spirit. this is yet another story of man climbing mountains and overcoming obstacles, even death to get to that all-important snifter :-)

the hypnos killers

2005-05-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

i always thought figo was my friend. but yesterday he did something that shook me to the core! we go a long way back and in all these years i never saw this coming. yesterday, he bulldozed me into seeing kingdom of heaven :-( any more words wasted on the movie would be paying it far more tribute than its worth. but i'll risk it to just say that it sucks :-) and i am not a harsh judge or anything. hell... i even liked national treasure!!!

and i have been thinking whether or not to document this last bit for sometime. after poking fun at v for being at the receiving end of daku's brutalities (aided and abetted by the pottan angel), i thought it would be a loss of face to admit that i was subjected to similar treatment. but i've decided that the world needs to be told of the inhuman activities of this duo who misuse graham bell's inventions to wake people up at the wee hours of the morning. and not only that then proceed to talk to u for like half an hour to ensure that morpheus completely loses interest in u and u r left wide awake with a long day in front of u! i'd also like to make this post an apology to v for not sympathizing with her when i first heard of her plight. one lives and learns. and also to figo (kinda think the movie was a payback for this) for falling into abdul's trap and agreeing to wake him up. all i can say in my defence is that i wasnt in full control of my faculties having been woken up from this dream of which all i can remember is a tunnel. and before signing off i would just like to remind glam that he's got to come back here and face the music. of course a couple of bottles of the finest can somewhat ease the pain (hint... hint...)

i'm lovin it

2005-05-13T01:55:00.000-07:00

i think. therefore i am. the first time i heard somebody quote descartes on this one, i thought it was a pretty cool thing to say. but recently i have been forced to wonder if it really applies to me. i have to confess that i was having a pretty good time of it when i wasnt forced to ponder on such stuff. but then life doesnt always unfold as we plan it. and thus it was that i was forced to realize the fact that i think not. therefore I am. weird, especially since i always wanted to be an intellectual!

but why do i say all this now. Well primarily because i have a lot of time on my hands :-) also because i want to get the bloody thing out of my system and move on. i don’t want to ponder on big heavy things anymore. i know that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is 42 and i am happy in the knowledge. i can take or leave my religion, am just mildly interested in other religions - mainly for the cool quotes they offer. and i like my worldly pleasures.

What i am trying to say is that, it may not be a “meaningful” life, but as macdonald’s say - I’m lovin it.

weird hypothetical question

2005-05-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

this is a weird hypothetical question. suppose u r a diabetes patient and aren't supposed to take sugar. ur wife and all around u have been constantly telling how much it means to them that u don't have sugar, how its almost a sin to have some as u r not just hurting urself physically but surrendering to the vile sin of gluttony. one day u go out with ur friends and they take u to this pastry shop and u r looking around when u get a rather loud call from nature ;-) by the time u return ur friends are preparing to leave and u decide to skip the sweets 'coz u didn't like those particular cakes anyway. now the w.h.q is - isn't the mere act of going to the pastry shop a betrayal enough of ur values. would u have let down ur wife only if u have the cake? also since u have no apparent objection to having cake in general, is it ur values u r betraying?

of ghosts and cops

2005-04-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

met up with a ghost from the past this saturday and we exchanged some rather old memories. we were in school together till the ripe age of 8 or 9. caught up on old things like how we both thought divya unni's mom was hot. before the bugger denies this lemme say that he did distinctly nod his head and say that its an inappropriate comment to make. but hey... u don't remember a lot of things from that long ago. so u'll have to do with whatever u can get.

after that went on to meet etv (which is something asif should play down :-), etv being a low-world gult channel). and then we went on to a beach around here and after that a hike on a paved road... so i guess a walk. oh forgot to mention that daku had dragged along too with her car :-). now the ghost and i being in a new place and getting to see all this new stuff, one would have expected an unquenchable thirst for the background history and such stuff. well as things were, such queries or discussions were conspicuously absent all of us preferring instead to "chori" (malayalam not hindi) daku who despite such orchestrated effort, i must say, held her ground. the central question throughout the evening was about where to have dinner! it was like this big eternal question about life, the universe and everything with daku pressing for udupi!!! why would anybody want udupi! so the burden of the decision fell on me and i could but suggest the only restaurant i had been to in belmont.

well all that is behind me. been here hardly a week and i am already switching hotels. woke up early in the morning today and thought i would call up the front desk and let them know that i was checking out. and imagine my surprise when the lady who answered replies "911 emergency". she was heavily accented and i was just shaking off sleep, so i thought i hadn't heard right and asked her to please connect me to the front-desk. this really worked her up, which sort of had a bad effect on her accent (probably spanish), and she started letting me know that this is an emergency service and how one should not be misusing it. so i wished her a good day too and hung up now properly awake. i was really disappointed that the hotel would put their front-desk at extension 9112. dashed unthoughtful of them i felt... but then on closer inspection i found that the number had somehow managed to change itself to 6112!!! well i was coming to terms with this dirty trick the hotel had played on me when there was a knock at the door on opening which i found a concierge who was all eagerness to find whether i was still breathing, no fires, nobody molested me or anything and on being informed of what happened, he gave me this rather patronizing smile which i really didn't care for :-(. i think hotels should stop keeping tabs on the numbers you dial. i mean! whats this world coming to with all the snooping around!!! a little more privacy people!!!

crossroads

2005-04-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

my previous post seems to have created some kind of confu amongst fans ;-) (/me smiles deprecatingly, the very personification of humility) and one always endeavours to clear up things. so i'll go on record saying that i'm "livin it up" in san francisco - the happy city. and the experience is pretty good except for when u hit the roads on foot. the whole system of traffic signals for pedestrians wishing to cross the bally road sort of goes against my soaring free indian sentiments. whats the fun in life i ask, if we don't cross the roads at our whims. the sheer empowerment that an individual feels when he crosses an indian road, stopping cars and buses by a mere outstretched hand is lost here.

the worst part of the pedestrian signals is that they make one hurry up and get the job over with. one simply is not able to revel in the joy of sauntering across the road in front of an impatient motorist and giving him or her the languid look thus twisting the knife in. i was just walking across my first crossing signal here and i was plumb in the middle of the road when the damn signal went red. and to add insult to injury a woman in a convertible with the screen up (which kind of beats the purpose in my opinion, but hey, never said the female was smart) hooted at me. i was about to scorch her with my wait-u-low-life look but changed my mind. ok, the female was darned cute :-)

anywayz here i was, sitting pretty, thinking i had the system under control and along comes daku, under the guise of a friendly visit, but with the hidden agenda of scaring the living daylights out of me by describing how dangerous it is to walk the streets here with scary urban legends of cars materializing out of nowhere and hitting people. even as i cringed she went on with the gruesome narration till i broke out in sweat. sigh... /me prepares for a walk home...

i'm off

2005-04-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

after a lot of last minute hurry, i finally did manage to get all my stuff packed. thankfully the bags were big enough so i didnt have to bother with folding up clothes and such unspeakable inconveniences generally associated with packing. and here i am blogging from a free internet terminal in singapore airport. thats the state to which lack of sleep and anything to do has reduced me to. had a philosophical argument with my manager the day before, or is it ideological? whatever... he accused me in not so many words of course of being, of all things a communist!!! i admit that being from kerala it might seem likely that i have socialist (not communist, for the communist party in kerala is more of a blight on the name of communism) tendencies. but i've never really subscribed to those. my idea of economic reform being that if u create enough money at the top it would trickle down to the poor. but thats neither here nor there. the matter was that i found it really tickling that somebody should think i, a guy working for a big bad corp, am a communist :-)!!! now sood would probably understand how it is that such things might spring out of the blue when one's dealing with his former manager... speaking of sood there's another interesting bit of juicy gossip i've to share... but that can wait. /me smiles but the seemingly becoming smile fails to mask the evil glint of mine eyes.

million's good

2005-03-28T08:14:00.000-08:00

back in hyd after a trip to kochi - the pearl/queen (a bit confused on that front and not in the mood to google) of the arabian sea. and it was a pretty eventful trip too. saw a couple of good movies. "udayanaanu thaaram" and "million dollar baby" - the former is probably the only malayalam movie in the past 5 years which has been able to make people laugh without resorting to cheap bathroom humour and the latter is, for want of a better word, a classic. i remember daku saying something about it having a potential for becoming a classic but i guess with all those oscars, it already is. i feel sorry for martin scorsese and was pretty surprised but then eastwood had done a pretty good job, way out of the league of his last one i remember - space cowboys. the chap's like wine :-). i guess there isn't any point in talking of the movie though, as half the world ought to have seen it by now.

and home surprisingly was a lot more hot and humid than ever before. so i request all and sundry to refrain from using cfc! and the trip back was pretty good. the indian railways, it seems, is striving hard to cater to the needs of people for beautiful-eyed girls in long-distance trains - first my friend and now me ;-)

marathon meet

2005-03-08T08:11:00.000-08:00

/me's been working :-(

and as if that wasn't bad enough, today we had a marathon meeting that lasted from 8:30 in the morn to 12:15 with a break of course. still... it's surprising how much bullshit can be stuffed into the very few things that actually need to be conveyed. everytime i feel that this has reached the saturation point, the guys here pull up their sleeves, spit on their hands and come up with a performance compared to which the earlier ones were 20-sec ads. after the meeting i was in a sort of daze till i dragged myself to the lunch table. the mid-day refueling is indeed a miraculous healer and i started feeling more kind towards those around me. in fact /me has been in good spirits all afternoon. though one problem did surface over which me and figo had a heated discussion though the thing, i must confess laid us both stymie. in the he-man series, what posture does he-man take when he says "i have the power" immediately after the "by the power of grey skull" thingummy holding his sword up like the statue of liberty. does he hold the sword in both hands or does he point it at the beast?

mystique

2005-02-22T06:48:00.000-08:00

the past few days have been a revelation for me. sort of received a body blow to my convictions of what is really romantic or even "sweet". let me begin by posting the poem of my friend's that i have sort of lashed out at:

i don't know your name
but for me
life won't be again the same

for i've seen the most beautiful eyes
so silent, mysterious
yet vivacious and so full of life

i haven't written before, i may not write again
i hadn't seen you before, i may not see again
but today i realized why it is said
that in love there is a pious pain

forget the context of the poem. but i had thought that if i were a girl and some guy had given me this, i would be amused and would be thinking that the guy is pretty desperate, but apparently i have been wrong. of the three members of the opposite sex who talked to me about this, two thought that the poem was pretty "sweet"!!! one of 'em even went as far as "i appreciate his sincerity". only one was bit more in sync with me. but then she knew the guy. so i am beginning to wonder whether i have got my take on things all wrong! or is /me going soft...

poetry-slice

2005-02-18T05:20:00.000-08:00

i have always wanted to write poetry and now that lots of people are doing it, i am unleashing my creations on the unsuspecting public. /me is waiting with fingers crossed for the call from the griffin trust.

thine eyes

antartica is full of ice
so there ain't no mice
to eat all the rice
or any of the spice
so say the wise
the place is so nice
to sit and play dice
and maybe pick 'em lice
or just sit swapping lies
looking up at the skies
oh, and yes, it reminds me of thy eyes

the maiden strikes

2005-02-16T06:21:00.000-08:00

today had a lot of surprises for me! i was approached by a corporate headhunter and the company profile was so compelling that i had no option but to accept. after all its not every day that you are offered a job in peace-keeping with a bit of mafia troubleshooting on the side. i have always been sympathetic to the unquenchable desire for world peace commonly found in long-legged females of the species and now that i get a chance, i wouldn't want to miss out on it. and just when i thought the day couldn't get better one of my friends posts this. well sort of explains the earthquake that hit tokyo. its the makers of haiku collectively turning in their garves :-)

rout

2005-01-31T07:26:00.000-08:00

recovering from cricket injuries, especially to the ego after we got licked proper in our first match of the tournament. it is strange how myself being neither a good batsman or bowler, having retained my slot in the team through a concatenation of circs, should feel so strongly about being licked by a team who can only be described as "formidable"... the reason i probably feel this way is because we didn't play badly. in fact if one were of a generous disposition one would be inclined to say that our efforts were pretty good. yet the fact remains that at the end of the day, we were the ones who had to swallow the bitter pill of defeat and keep our cool as those condescending buggers came over to say "good show" with a smirk :-(

now don't get into the assumption that this is the lament of a poor soul who for some uncertain reason lost his duel with another guy. this is the frustrated groan of a raiding infantry who having burnt the bridge behind them triumphantly, turns around to find heavy artillery. we had done a good job in the first innings and were pretty pleased with ourselves when we took to the pitch and maintained a good run rate in the initial few overs. and thats when they brought out the panzers and t-72s. after that all that was left for us to do was to turn over and give up the ghost. i patriotically took 3 blows from their pacer on the thighs and am pretty sore today, a constant reminder of the valiant reversal. looking forward to kicking some ass this weekend :-)

gloom...

2005-01-27T07:38:00.000-08:00

the last couple of days have been quite an experience. its not everyday that one gets to witness a "corporate reshuffle". and now that i have seen one all i can say is that it ain't pretty. and what's even worse in this case is that this is more of a "this is our chance" than "we need to do this". and the irony here is that most, if not all of those who got the axe, would have been pretty happy about the takeover that caused it. well, larry never was a saint :-)

though relief was amongst the foremost emotions in my breast when the "streamlining" was over, it wasn't that soothing feeling that is generally associated with relief. the whole office was a gloomy place, with people too unsure of themselves, some trying to put on a front as if this was just another day at work. if one has ever been to a funeral, one would quite understand some of it. though a watered-down version, it was nevertheless one equally uncomfortable. not sure if a smile would be out of place, what words might give offense... so most of us just adopted the easy way out, opting to just stay put and keep silent. and balls to all the buggers who say silence is golden. its goddamn more disturbing than the screech of a hundred engines.

but /me's dealing with it in my own perfected way, making inappropriate comments and kind of joking the whole thing away. may be its time i got some therapy...

extreme academics

2005-01-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

another cool windows based game :-)

my planet sucks... cool :-)

2005-01-18T07:37:00.000-08:00

been moving into a new apartment recently. one helluva mess. so i look around and find that everyone are opting for the easy way to fill blogs. well, i'm never one to lag behind :-)

You Are From Uranus

You shine with brilliant creativity, and you're more than a little eccentric. You love everything unusual and shocking. You're one far-out chick or dude. Anything unconventional excites you - and you have genius potential. Just don't let your rebel side get the best of you, or else you'll alienate everyone. Your original thinking and funky attitude is all you need to be you.

What Planet Are You From?

now that this post looks pretty long lets get down to some glam-bashing. the poor guy is going through some pre-mid-life crisis. he wants to look cool like this and ends up looking like this. well i wouldn't say that his new style is not of the low-temperature category, but when he couples it with this, it makes one feel a shiver going down one's spine. i wonder where he got that css from! and then he goes and makes comments like this. i mean, who doesn't know that people read playboy for the articles!!!

one for the karate kid

2005-01-11T09:15:00.000-08:00

this is a quickie for kk. heard his sob-story about not being able to find an abridged version of atlas shrugged and my hear kinda bled for the bugger. so i thought i would put him out of his misery. so here goes:

dagny goes around being frustrated in life because of a lot of reasons one of which is her brother jim who is pretty much a loser. hank rearden goes around being frustrated in life because of a lot of reasons one of which is his brother (forgot name) who is pretty much a loser. john galt and francisco d`anconia and ragnar danneskjöld go around being frustrated in life because somewhere down the line they realize that they aren't losers. so galt guy makes an engine, francisco loses a fortune and ragnar becomes a pirate thereby showing the world that they are indeed the salt of the earth and galt meanwhile manages to woo dagny but not before she manages to have a fling each with hank and francisco. oh there is also a railroad and a steel plant involved in the story but they are just minor distractions. also there is a peppering of villains but all of these are negligible and are in the story only to have someone flinching when each of the heroes start rattling out their monologues. so there u have it - a great book.

light stuff

2005-01-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

i read this blog entry today and that has kind of made me all philosophical and stuff. but since i don't want to be quite philosophical right now (best time to be that is when you have alcoholic beverages in plenty. sort of strengthens your theories), i thought i would make this light-hearted to kind of bring on a mood change. and thinking back on all the light-hearted moments i've been having, the recent team evening out (pradyot has given this a once over, still...) comes to mind. it was to this (pseudo)ethnic-retreat-resort place called alankrita. the place is actually quite nice and is very well-designed to cater to its niche of corporates and snowed tourists who think in dollars.

the thing started off well with a lofted ball which in golfing terms could have been said to have gone into the 'rough' but since it was cricket, we just conceded the game to the bowling team and moved on to other things. this turned out to be musical chair and though it was something i would have rated pretty low in my choice of outdoor-games, i figured a bit of running around chairs would do me good ;-) but as things turned out i became the second person to be thrown out and in my case that was rather literal. one of my team members of the gentle sex thought i had slipped one by her by running in the opposite direction to the one of progression and grabbing the last chair. i was going to explain the whole "all is fair..." theory and preparatory to this, had raised my hands for gesticulation, when the aforementioned teammate with an astounding display of a complete lack of the gentleness which i had earlier attributed to her, grabbed me by the hand and probably with a firm belief that actions after all speak louder, flung me from the chair right across the lawn. i don't know if you have ever walked down the beach and just when you were feeling that this surely is a bit of alright, been hit in the small of the back by a charging humpback whale. for those of you who haven't, let me state that it makes you feel a bit silly apart from the severe damage inflicted upon one's posterior.

anyway that sort of set the tone for the evening and when i took master of cerems role for a dumb-c contest (i had, in a moment of weakness agreed to do it) i had the sort of impending-peril feeling which one gets when there is impending peril if you know what i mean. but people took most of the stuff i dished out sportingly and there were a few moments when i had to use the utmost restraint; like this time, when another of the gentle sex (this time an authentic one), who hadn't seen "there's something about mary" came up to me and asked me if i could give her some easily identifiable scene from the movie, and i so desperately wanted to tell her to just show as if she were rubbing on a bit of hair gel... i think i have pretty much effected the mood swing i wanted by now. so here's a quick wrap up of the evening - another couple of games, dinner, home.

mad rush

2004-12-30T08:01:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-09T06:44:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-08T05:58:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-06T07:03:00.000-08:00

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).

p.c. diwali

2004-11-18T00:21:00.000-08:00

the guilt of the non-celebrator... i was looking at abdul's candle-creativity-thing and i got thinking as to how i (and my roomies, i am not the kind of guy who would hog all the guilt ;-) ) didn't really take the effort to do the "deep jalaao" thing in diwali. i mean we did light a couple of those diya-candle-thingummies that a shopkeeper had given us for free but that wouldn't count especially if we take into consideration the spirit of the thing. but to put a positive spin on it, its that much less pollution we caused and the environment sure needs all the help it can get. i would also like to point out that we didn't do any floral decorations or rangoli either thus avoiding a lot of flora mutilation and preventing allergies. so all in all we had a pretty politically correct diwali. as for the fireworks, we substituted a show of naach for it and that certainly was an eyeful.

the comeback

2004-11-16T00:57:00.000-08:00

blogging after a loooong time. it feels refreshing coming to the office after a five day weekend. though i doubt if it can really be called a weekend if its five days long. and it isn't too much fun getting all these days off if u aren't traveling or something. after the first couple of days, you feel so bored that you start breaking some of the rules you have set from past debacles like not watching a shah rukh khan movie. am still recovering from the three hour mush fest and the return to office is a welcome change. i have nothing against romance per se but when the guy dishes out stuff like the tripe he does in this movie and gets away with it, one starts wondering about the mental prowess of the heroine. i mean the guy might be trying desperately to score but what the hell was she thinking!!!

that apart diwali was pretty nice. though i didnt get around to doing much in the way of celebration it was pretty nice. first diwali i have celebrated eating haleem! diwali being the celebration of ram having beaten the stuffing out of ravana, brings back the question i used to have of what if ravana had withdrawn and returned sita. i guess he was afraid of impeachment or something. after all it was almost like the us in vietnam. a no-hope army kicking ass in a pointless battle.

cyber whores

2004-11-09T02:18:00.000-08:00

i had planned to post this on friday... but blogger was down with a cold.

there is a phrase in malayalam - "jeevitham naaya nakki". loosely translated this means that your life ain't worth the effort taken in breathing to keep it going. this probably fits mine to a nicety right now. now don't get me wrong and assume that its a vast vacant timespace of not knowing what to do and cogitating upon how meaningless this whole existence is. its just so damned cramped right now that i can arrive at that conclusion without all that cogitation. its a good thing that guns aren't that common in india...

oh i am not just going on and on because its perhaps the best thing to do right now, i just needed a release (i hate the word! its the 11.5.10 release thats giving me all this trouble). i am not sure if it is some sort of survival technique, but our product is so full of bugs that it would ensure a safe career solving them till the end of days. as if such safeguards aren't enough they go and make releases from time to time on the unsuspecting public thereby reproducing the whole collection of bugs on a separate codeline. sometimes i feel humbled by the sheer genius of the whole scheme. and then they come up with words like "front-port" and "back-port" and there you are busting your ass on the gawd-awful problem of comparing 2 file versions and merging the code changes. its amazing what people do for a living. i guess in intellectual terms, we are the closest to prostitutes.

the ron supremacy

2004-11-01T03:30:00.000-08:00

i had the narrowest of escapes today, well not so narrow as i had it all planned beforehand, still it never hurts being a bit melodramatic. one of the bigshots here had come down to grace us with whatever. here's what happened. in an attempt to pull the "object oriented junta" to attend the chap's speech the company went ahead and arranged a breakfast followed by his speech to sleep it off. as plans go, this was a pretty good effort on the co's part i would say. but even the best-laid plans have chinks in them - the chink here being an unguarded gate in the premises which in addition to being the prime point of entrance also showed its caliber by doubling up as a medium of unobtrusive exit. and yeah, i couldn't resist the carrot ;-) a better man would probably have left the whole thing alone but then these better people miss a lot of stuff.

the joy one experiences when one, through adroit manoeuvres, manages to wiggle out of a situation which others who were equally aware of the imminent danger were unable to avoid, is pretty sublime. the only blemish in this case is a few perverts who actually enjoyed the whole thingummy. ah... well as my mom says, "it takes all sorts to make the world". however there were others whose misery was enough to bring the roses back to my cheeks. am i some kind of sadist or something!!!

inimitable wodehouse

2004-10-28T04:35:00.000-07:00

how is it that u can read a wodehouse again and again and never tire of it! its not the depth of his contents. i mean wooster's or emsworth's negligible mental assets would be enough to ensure a certain amount of shallowness in any perceivable thoughts. may be its got something to do with the numerous twists he manages to add to a seemingly simple, nay plain boring plot. and its definitely got to do with his ability to maneavour the english language. what is otherwise a structured and informative language, in his hand turns into something undulating through whatever it is that good stuff undulate through :-)

anybody who's read more than three of his works dont need to be told this, but scenes like gussie finknottle's speech simply leaves one wondering whether they can be bettered upon.

ps - all this was because i am reading one for the 6th time.

excelsior

2004-10-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

the shades of night were falling fast
and yet i am at my seat coding.
this stupid er and the winding bug q
oh is there no off-loading!
stealing time
to write this rhyme,
i feel like exploding ;-)
excelsior!

the loony strikes back

2004-10-25T02:55:00.000-07:00

my loony friend called me up and ticked me off proper for having disclosed his looniness. apparently some philanthrope had, in a moment of misguided generosity, called him up to enquire after his mental health! and instead of being appalled at how plausible people around him feel his going off his rockers is, he lets off the steam on me. and this on a day when i am trying to recover from the effects of watching a horror movie. now don't be misguided by the adjective "horror". its not the genre that i am referring to. the horror about the movie is its very existence. the mere notion that somebody was able to conceive something so trite and somebody dished out the dough to make it sends chills down my spine. actually, its fascinating what the director thinks is scary to the thinking public, well if not the "thinking" at least public who are more mentally astute than a retarded jellyfish.

and as i said, i was recovering from this merciless assault on my mind when the loony chap gets his act together. he lays the ground work by glaring threateningly at me in the cafeteria during lunch and follows it up with an intimidating call promising dire consequences and an impending "visit" to my desk. and here i sit waiting for the fate thats worse than death...

he's mad... so what!

2004-10-21T01:37:00.000-07:00

if u sustain a raving mad act for a long enough time, do u actually go mad? no this is not about me. its about this poor act who seems to be going progressively loony as the days go by. when i first met him he was pretty stable in the sense that his madness had a method. he was putting on the act to probably justify the otherwise startling things he had to say. but if he was building castles in the air then, now he's started living in them. laughter, i guess, is a very strong weapon. teach a person to laugh at everything and u have taken away the concept of reverence from him. thus there is nothing left thats sacred to him.

well i do think i have done a bit of an overkill. i mean just because he calls me up in the office and mews over the phone, doesn't mean that i have to go around advocating a straight jacket and padded cell for him. after all, what are friends for if not to overlook such things...

does size matter?

2004-10-20T02:23:00.000-07:00

to truly appreciate anything it must be taken away from you. if u dont have it, u might covet it. u might pine for it. but u really dont know what u r pining for. if u have it u might use it, abuse it, misuse it without realizing how beautiful it is. and all this realization came to me thanks to a flat tyre. i was coasting along a curve, if one can actually coast along one when the great tragedy happened. a small puny nail stood up against the thundering surge of my machine and thrust itself with all that it could muster into the thick hide of my rear-wheel. funny how something so small could cause so much misery and anxiety! guess its a lesson for our generation fed on "size does matter" :-)

blocked and lovin it

2004-10-19T02:35:00.000-07:00

a week into blogging and am already facing a blogger's block! what do u log? what has happened in ur bally life that is interesting and justifies the bytes of space blogger.com is allotting you. i guess there are other ways of looking at it: any and every thing happening in my life is jolly interesting because its happening to me and it will happen to me only this once. it is as much a part of me as the food i eat, hell its more a part of me. besides why should i put interesting things in this space? and interesting to whom? i started off to write for the sake of doing it. it was not a means to anything but the end in itself. so why bother what i put in so long as i want to keep at it. sorta reminds me of the gita. what do i care if i am just spewing out garbled mess so long as i am the one doing it and i am doing it for myself. maybe u need to get it out of the system for it to make sense. maybe its just shit anyway...

pride in prejudice

2004-10-18T02:43:00.001-07:00

i have never given much consideration to the concept of a person's "life's work". i mean, even though i have always admired great works, i never quite got around to thinking of what they must have meant to their creator. and then i saw the movie (for want of a better word) - bride and prejudice. i didnt have great expectations from the flick in the first place but, optimist that i am, i had hoped for something a bit more from the director. now i begin to wonder whether she had secretly hired someone else to make bend it like beckham.

the good thing is that i started pondering abt the stuff i had mentioned earlier abt the creator's perspective. i found myself being glad that jane austen didnt live to see her work being raped to death and then a bit more by an overfed pompous lard-ass. the mere thought of a pea-brained actress attempting to re-interpret elizabeth bennett gives one the creeps.

i wonder why people like me spend good money watching crap? but in a sense it is good as the obscene amounts that these mindless flicks reap in would mislead people into thinking that this is the junta's choice, and probably prevent others from producing any great works for such low-lives like chadha to rip to bits.

ps. liked the young sis in the movie... too bad she didnt get laid.

mind ur language

2004-10-15T02:14:00.000-07:00

the follies of misusing a language which others dont understand has finally caught up with me. i speak the language malayalam and of all the languages i know, it is arguably the most vulgar. the secret of it being head and shoulders above the others (or is it below) is that it is not an exceptionally good language for swearing but if u want to bring in as much obscenity as possible into "publicly acceptable" speech, this is the one u pick up. i have always wondered how it manages to infuse a wealth of scorn and revulsion into simple words like grass, water, etc. a friend of mine (been growing up with his guy. should have been more on my guard. sigh...) and me were talking in the office pantry (in malayalam. somebody should ban this) of, among other things, the girls who had just left with their coffees when this guy dropped a warning to be careful for one of them is a mallu. this was new to me. "which one? miss.x?" "i dont know her name. the fatso." "oh... the fatso..." and imagine my surprise for as i reached the "..." part in that last bit i was looking at her face. one of the other guys had helpfully held the door open (if only curses could kill. got to learn this abracadabra thing.) for we had started moving out of the pantry and the girls for some unfathomable reason had decided that they want to drink their bally coffee right outside the door. this is probably the worst part. i mean, u either drink ur coffee in the pantry or u take it to ur place. u dont... u do not drink it right outside the pantry!!! if u have ever walked down a garden feeling that all was right with the world only to step on a rake and have the handle come up and hit u on the tip of the nose, u would probably understand how i felt. and the worst part is that she wasnt fat by the greatest stretch of imagination. just that of the two she was better fed. and considering that this came from me who could have killed her by sitting on her ;-)

the da vinci cloud

2004-10-14T01:08:00.000-07:00

my roomie's been reading the da vinci code and he was so enthralled by it that he went on till 3 yesterday morning and had to re-read some of the stuff for he hadnt quite read them; or something like that. the book, i must agree, is quite good but i wonder whether its the fast pace alone thats grabbed his interest. to be honest i was quite impressed by the amount of church-bashing dan brown (and his publishers) was willing to dish out in a book, thats after all meant to sell and make money. but they seem to have pulled it off quite nicely. what exactly is it about the church, as an institute, that makes people wanna bash it? they are arguably the most successful religious business and probably the largest organized charity. maybe the anti-church thing is similar to the anti-microsoft thing in the sense that what they offer is not "open" to all. back to the book. well there's nothing much to be told about the book either except that everybody loves a conspiracy. somehow we never get tired of the david-goliath thing, whatever form its presented in. i wonder why people dont write books about how goliath wipes out david and sticks his head up in a pike with a graland made of his entrails as a warning to others who might wanna try ;-). now that would be interesting. but again it wouldnt be a story i guess...

they killed my mockingbird

2004-10-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

i had been reading "to kill a mockingbird" (for the third time, or was it the fourth) these last few days. its been a few years now since i last read it and to my surprise the bally book has changed. the first time i read it i thought that it was pretty good, the second time i realized it was pretty good. but this time around it didnt strike the same chords. scout didnt move me, atticus didnt impress me. its probably diminishing utility at work but i wonder if its more than that. have i become more cynical...

i wonder whether it is better to feel or not to - as in when u see someone moved to tears by one of those popcorn patriotism movies and u think to yourself, "god! how can they fall for that!". well isnt it better to feel something than not to feel at all? are we turning ourselves into voids that let stuff just pass through and stand by as objective analysts judging each thing by its merit; rather than wallowing in them and thoroughly enjoying ourselves by absorbing the little things in life? have we killed our mockingbird? anywayz, the book would still be up there in my list of "best books i've read". one can never forget stuff like "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." and then there is the big question of whether miss maudie had a thing for atticus ;-) and check out the image. learnt the image hosting thing from vaishalee (dunno who), and all in all its pretty neat. boy! read the second para again... what crap!!! :-)

endangered matrimony

2004-10-12T03:50:00.000-07:00

the other day one of my friends, tendulkar* - his friends call him bhikari (beggar), send me an invitation to his brother's marriage. this guy works in a software company which claims to be powered by intellect though its an indefatigable mystery as to why that intellect never realizes how it is being conned into working it's ass off for the pay it gets. but that is neither here nor there. so this guy is a regular nice guy with a prediliction for talking to his girlfriend on the mobile and since those ruthless, capitalist service providers insist on mercilessly billing every single call, he is in a perennial state of bankruptcy which earned him the above-mentioned epithet. also, he is very attached (dont go for the obvious meaning. he's more like hank rearden's brother) to his brother and stays with him in bangalore and helps him out with house-hold chores like eating the food he, the brother, cooked and stuff... back to the invitation. the brother in question works in an ad company and had let loose his imagination by announcing his match in the form of a matchbox-label, a pretty neat job all things considered. so i called him up (the chap, not the brother) to convey my best wishes and also to convey my sympathies about him having to move out and all... and for all his experience with talking on the phone, the guy doesn't get half of what i said. "move out! what r u talking abt?" "u dude... abt u moving out. now that ur bro is getting married." "who ever talked of me moving out. i pay half the rent dammit." "dude, he's getting married. there really is the minutest chance that he may not want u hanging around the house talking on ur cell in the early stages of his marriage. i mean, it would be like starting him off at a major disadvantage..." "he's absolutely cool about it. so is my bhabhi." "when did u ever talk about it?" so there u go. my heart bleeds for the brother who, in exchange for a meagre rs.1500 a month (that's tendulkar's share of the rent which he'll probably negotiate as there will now be 3 people staying in the house), will have to watch on as his initial marital bliss is blown to bits by the presence of a disgruntled, horny software engineer hanging around the thin-walled apartment, eating up all the supplies and talking, nay shouting on the cell (poor connectivity) while he, the brother tries to whisper sweet nothings in his new bride's ears. such is the misery we inflict on the ones we love... * name changed to protect his privacy though he doesnt really care about other people's

virgin blogger upturned

2004-10-11T03:30:00.000-07:00

what does one post in his first blog? for a guy who never had difficulty dishing out crap, it is ironical that i am stuck with what to put in here. so i'll start with why i am cluttering this page with mediocre efforts at breaking the ice. i decided to give blogging a shot when this nincompoop friend of mine suggested, "why don't you start blogging?" as one would say "why dont you take up yoga?" or "why dont we go for a movie?", and i thought "why the hell not!". the obvious reason for not doing this would, of course, have been that i suffer from this chronic malady of a general disinclination to work. However I overcame that with considerable effort and an immaculate display of moral fibre, though i say it myself ;-), and this here is the result. come to think of it, for a guy who had started off with claiming to suffer a writer's block, i have managed to bring out some pretty passable tripe...