Trip to Bombay - Part II - Train journey from malad to churchgate

Having spent four days in Bombay I have come to the conclusion that Bombay is a hugeeeeeeee city. But hey!! That’s like stating the obvious. That’s like saying anupam kher is bald or saying TR Rajender is animal like. Anyway where was I?? Ah yes!! Bombay. Bombay is a beautiful city. . After reading shantaram I wanted to see the city with the eyes of one having read shantaram. Having been in Madras for almost 7 years now I am loyal Chennai-ite and I completely love it because of its people and kind of life it radiates. Bombay I noticed exudes the same life. Delhi and Bangalore somehow never charmed me. Maybe it was the lack of beaches or the people I saw. I dunno what. They somehow seemed beyond salvation but Bombay is still so Indian and a very charming place. If u really want to see Bombay I would say take the electric train. Even as I write this I am traveling in an electric train from malad to churchgate in a first class ladies compartment to catch my train back to Chennai. I am surrounded by 10 women and since I love observing people and for lack of anything better to do I start looking at them and start sizing them up.

The 55 something woman sitting near the window has prayer beads in her hand and is praying fervently. I try to guess what it is that she is praying about. Maybe she is praying for her daughter to get a job or for her son to get married. :P or maybe she is just praying for the general good of the world.

Near her is sitting a woman not more than 28 or 30 who is so made up that I cant resist the temptation to go touch her and see if she is for real or is one of those mannequins u see in these clothes shops. She has so much lipstick on her lips, so much kohl in her eyes and so much of foundation on her face that even if u dug a feet deep into her face you wouldn’t touch skin. Ok I exaggerate. Make that half a feet. She is carrying a Gucci handbag, has fast track sun glasses on her head and is screaming of brands. She is wearing a funny kind of skirt. I mean in my humble opinion it looks like she left home wearing a complete skirt with a proper hemline and on the way was chased by a dog which managed to get a bit of her skirt and she was left with a skirt with a ragged end. I mean I don’t understand. Why else would her skirt be of different lengths at the sides and different lengths on the front and back? Aren’t skirts supposed to be of the same length throughout? Fashion. I never will understand it I think. Anyway this porcelain doll doesn’t smile and I guess it must be difficult to smile when u have so much of weight on your face. I mean imagine having to push layers of make up, curl up both sides of your mouth and attempting to smile. Phew!! Must be tough!! I quickly lose interest in her and concentrate on the woman sitting in front of me.

She is one of those “i-can-manage-everything” kind of woman. One of those super moms I decide. She carries two cell phones. On one of them she is giving instructions to her son named Ashish telling him that the dal is in the microwave oven, curd is in the fridge, asks him not to fight with his sister and dirty the house as they are having guests for dinner at night. On the other phone she is giving instructions to someone asking them to pick her up at Hyderabad airport. “GTL - 143” she says “G for go, T for tomorrow and L for lucky 143 is the name of my flight”. Just looking at her makes me tired and I wonder how these women do it.

As I finish writing about super mom and look out the window I pass this station called marine line and I can see the beautiful marine drive before me. Of course since the train is moving I can’t see much but I love what I see.

I shift my interest to the woman sitting next to me. She reeks of cigarette smoke and some kind of mint. The smell is far from pleasant and I guess she realizes it because a minute later she takes out a can of deo from her bag and sprays it liberally on herself. It only results in people moving further away from her. Bagon cockroach spray smells better than her deo I decide as I turn to look at the woman sitting diagonally opposite to me, next to the super mom.

She is a nervous 35 something woman, whose eyes keep darting here and there and she is biting her nails so fiercely that I am surprised that she is not drawing blood. She seems to me like one of those insecure people who keep worrying about what people think about them, try desperately to fit in and fail miserably. I dunno why but as she smiles nervously at me, I feel sorry for her. I smile back and avert her gaze. The other women in the compartment are not doing anything interesting. Two are sleeping and one of them is reading a book. This interests me and I try to look at what she is reading. I am deeply disappointed when I discover she is reading something called “the power of your sub conscious mind”. Such books bore me. Suddenly I wonder what each of these women is thinking about me.

old aunty: (she hasn’t opened her eyes even once during her prayer so has not seen me yet).
porcelain doll: God!! Just check out her fashion sense. Totally wrong. Who wears a yellow kurta over blue jeans? Yellow is so not the color of the season. She is approximately 20 years behind times. And why cant she use a little bit of lip gloss. Would do a world of good for her sad face!!
Super mom: (I dunno why but this is what I think super mom would have thought about when she looked at me.)Sheeeesh!! I forgot to ask Ashish to feed the dog. Should call him and tell him that. :D
Bagon Spray: why the hell cant she keep her bag on the rack above. There is no place for me to keep my legs. (in my defence I had all my original certificates in that bag and didn’t want it out of my sight)
Nervous lady: I wonder what she is writing. Maybe she is writing about me. I wonder what she thinks about me.
Of course I could be totally wrong in my interpretations but something tells me this is precisely what they think of me. By this time I have reached churchgate. And my 20 minute walk from churchgate to Victoria Terminus deserves a post in itself. A lovely walk. Made me feel like Lord Emsworth going for a walk to see the Empress while admiring his garden on the way. That reminds me. I added two more wonderful wodehoueses to for my collection during that walk and I am as happy, to quote a popular saying ,as a dog with two tails!! But more about that on my next post!! :)

Trip to Bombay - Part I - TISS!!

The TISS campus is beautiful. I wouldn’t call it a sprawling/huge campus or anything but it is an extremely handsome looking campus. The miute I eneterd I felt at home, felt one with nature. It is the kind of campus I have always wanted to be a part of. One of those really old campuses which is wild and completely overgrown, with these huge peepul and banyan trees whose roots snake on the ground and make their presence felt everywhere on the campus. Each of these trees must be a hundred years old and would tell stories, maybe narrate epics if only they could talk. It is a campus where the canteen benches bear the names and remarks of batches and batches of students who have passed out, who I imagine would have sat there, and had some great conversations over piping hot cups of tea and a plate of samosas. A gentle breeze which caresses my cheek and naughtily tousles my hair blows and makes me feel comfortable though its noon of a very humid day and the temperature is a sweltering 38 degrees. A couple of age old buildings (built in the british era I think) with the paint peeling off tower over me and they have these old doors with lovely knockers. As I walk on the old leaves crunch under my feet and I wonder if they too have something to tell me. Suddenly I wish each of these inanimate objects could talk and tell me stories of life at TISS, a life which I so want to be a part of. I have completely and hopelessly fallen in love with the campus. My first love. Poets have very often said that there is nothing more devastating and painful than unrequited first love. Something tells me I am gonna experience that pain soon.

Disclaimer: The contents of this post are completely my thoughts. They haven’t been influenced by anyone. I am sorry if this post hurts anyone’s sentiments or if anyone thinks its contents are sacrilegious. My intention is not to hurt anyone.

I was a believer. A staunch believer. I used to make it a point to visit the temple at least twice a week, say a prayer daily, say a little prayer every time I passed a temple on the road. But somewhere in the past two years something has changed, some part of me has started asking some fundamental questions. In the past two years I have seen so much and experienced so many things that I have started asking some blasphemous questions. The past two years of my life have been relatively relaxed and as a part of college and also out of my personal interest I visited a couple of orphanages, old age homes, spastic societies to try and do my bit for the society.

The scenes which met my eyes when I went to these places were heart rendering and as I visited more such places I found it more and more difficult to believe that up there, there exists someone who is supposed to be looking after all of us, supposed to be doing justice, punishing the wrong and rewarding the right.

What wrong has 15 year old shabana done that she is “blessed” with the intelligence of a 3 year old, cannot wear clothes, cannot button up her dress, and cannot use the bathroom without someone helping her. What wrong has she done that while her peers talk of board exams, farewell parties and the latest trend in clothes she cannot even speak a coherent word let alone a sentence. She suffers from down syndrome.

What wrong has 67 year old patamma done that at the age of 67 though she has 2 sons and a daughter none of them want to keep her and have sent her to a depressing old age home where she gets a 5 feet by 3 feet space for herself, 2 sarees for diwali, one for new year and no visitors throughout the year though her children live in the same city.

What right has laloo Prasad yadav done that inspite of charges of embezzlement of so many funds, inspite of being such a corrupt politician he enjoys the status of a king?

What right has jagmohan dalmiya done that after misappropriating “just” 2 crores he gets bail and most probably will escape scot-free?

What kind of a justice system is this, where the innocent get punished and suffer more and the guilty enjoy a hassle less life? This is the justice system which is revered all over the world, accepted by one and all despite its horrendously screwed up laws and principles. The juctice system of God.

My grandmother tells me that every person who is suffering is actually repenting for the sins which he committed in his previous birth and every person who is happy and contented is reaping the benefits of the good things he did in his previous birth. What kind of a stupid, skewed system is this where u get punished for something but have no clue what you are getting punished for?

She says that this is the kalyugam and this is how god’s system works and that once evil has completely overshadowed the good, that is the time when god will descend in all his glory to take his last avatar and save the world from the evil. BullShit is all I can say. Even the most cruel person or a person with a heart of stone would melt if he saw the likes of shabana and patamma and we are talking about God here. The compassionate and considerate do gooder who cares for nothing but the “well being” of his children. If he does exist and is looking at all the pain and suffering and not doing a thing when he has the power to change all of this, then I cant believe we trust and pin our hopes on a person like this who just likes to look at all this suffering and not act. I would rather build temples and worship the person who started the old age home where patamma lives or the people who started Banyan the home for destitute and mentally ill women. My blood boils when I see people drop obscene amounts of money into the hundis in temples, some of which goes to decorate the idol of god and most of which goes god knows where.
I am confused and hurt when I think of the fact that something which I believed in for 20 years of my life is actually a farce.

I was a believer, a staunch believer, then I became agnostic and now I find myself tending towards atheism.

Makku!!! :)

I have been wanting to write about this incident which happened in my final year of engineering. It was the 7th semester exam time in hostel. Incidentally sem exam times are when our enthu levels are really high. Do not mistake me. By enthu levels I mean enthu levels to have fun. Enthu levels to study are usually at an all time low during semester times. Normal college days in hostel are just spent sleeping or watching movies endlessly but sem exams are the times when all of us make a sincere attempt to stay awake (the reason we stayed awake was to study which invariably never happened) and refrain from watching movies and hence ended up spending lots of time with each other. We used to stay awake till 4 in the morning pretending to study but gossiping and giggling and talking about everything except the course.

Anyway during the seventh sem exam time I dunno what came over our college management, but they decided that the hostels would have a coffee and tea vending machine. (similar to the ones we have in office) but not free of course (yeah our college was good but not that good). I wonder what they thought. Maybe they thought they could improve results by providing tea and coffee to the students.(preposterous idea. The only thing which could have improved our results would have been forging our mark sheets). Anyway it worked like this. We would have to get a 5 rupee token (a round gold colored coin) from the college stores, which we would have to insert into a slot and then select our option, keep the cup in the desired position and the machine would give us tea/coffee. like any other machine it would work at times and not work at times. Sometimes we would put the coin in and it wouldn’t react at all.

Anyway let me come to the night of November 26th 2006 2 a.m in the morning when five of us were pretending to study in the corridor. We had a paper called engineering ethics if I am not mistaken. An extremely dry paper. Now if one of us had a craving for tea invariably all of us would have it. So it all started off with me saying

Me: hey!! I am sleepy. Tea u guys?? U have tokens??
All friends in chorus: Yeah yeah. Lets go. Nothing seems to be entering our heads. maybe some tea will help. Tokens irruku.

(giggles because we know tea had nothing to do with our productivity and is just an excuse for us to while away time)

I put in my token first and it got stuck half way and refused to go into the slot. I tried pushing it in but a major part of it stayed outside. In my frustration I banged the machine hard with my fist. I was trying to aim the coin but my fist slipped and I banged the machine a little above its slot and wonder of wonders it started pouring out the tea with the coin half outside. We couldn’t believe our eyes. My friend then tried to pry out the coin and it came out. We were thrilled. Our first free tea!!Another friend suggested that maybe I should give it another blow to see if it was a fluke or if it really worked. I gave it another blow at approximately the same spot that I had done before and voila!! There it was pouring out tea again. We were ecstatic, surprised and scared all at the same time. First emotion was obvious, second one was because we were surprised at the stupidity of the machine (we later went on and named the machine “Makku” or stupid in tamil). The third one was because a part of our conscience pricked since in our heart of hearts we knew what we were doing wasn’t ethical. (ironical that we had our ethics exam next!! Sheesh!!). next thing was maintaining the secrecy of the whole thing. In a hostel of 200 odd girls if the news spread we knew both free tea and the machine would vanish. So the five of us vowed that apart from ten final year girls (our gang) we wouldn’t tell anyone else. And all of us would use Makku only at night or when the machine was unattended to.

Among the ten that we revealed our secret to there were a few harishchandras who went “hey this is wrong man. Our parents give us enough money to buy what we need. Why do we need to steal tea?”. It was then that we split our group of ten into two parts. The RH gang and the HBP gang, abbreviations for Robin Hood (the non-harishchandras) and the Honesty is the Best Policy gang. The HBP’s believed that honesty is the best policy and even in times of adversity and poverty (read most of the times) we must be honest and get tea only after putting in the token. On the other hand we the RH (errrr. Yeah. I was part of RH) believed in stealing from the rich (the college management. We figured they were rich enough to provide a few teas to poor malnourished gals) and giving to the poor (us of course). So we stole shamelessly, relentlessly and on a daily basis, all the time being careful in maintaining the secrecy. We were criminals. Occasionally we would put in a coin (borrowed from the HBP’s of course. :P) just so that people wouldn’t suspect that we were free loading and we did most of these criminal activities at night when only our gang would be awake and “studying”!!

Despite maintaining secrecy the news somehow got out (C’mon!! When u take ten girls into confidence basically u are taking 10! girls into confidence because each girl will in turn tell 10 other girls and ask her not to tell anyone.). Eventually the boys hostel came to know and they started free loading too and a month later after the sem exams were over and we came back after our hols, Makku was gone. (Apparently only 5 coins had been deposited and 75 teas/coffees had been claimed and I guess the management smelt a fish!!;))

It was an amazing thing while it lasted and even now when I think of it, the incident always cracks me up. It happened one and a half years back but the incident remains as fresh as it was when it happened on nov 26th 2006. Of the original five who were present one is married, one is in bhuwaneshwar, three of us are here working for cognizant. We guys don’t meet often now and there are many thing which we will forget but the night of November 26th 2006 will always remain fresh in our minds and is not likely to be erased from our memories. I dedicate this post to Mug, Hems, Moti and Touch me not. (I have used the pet names which we used for them in college. I have already trashed my name. I wouldn’t want to do the same to them also!!)

A Slice of my life

Some random happenings in my life lifted from my diary and censored for a larger audience!! :P

1. Today for the first time someone called me aunty. For a long time the kid was calling me and I just ignored him thinking he was calling someone else and then he says “shruthi aunty can u please pass me the ball”? I was taken aback. Its like discovering the first white hair on your head, like discovering that you are not completely impervious to knee pains and back aches, discovering that its been so long since you passed out of school that you now have friends whose children are in school and you gulp and gasp and stubbornly try to hold on to whatever remaining youth is left in you. I am sure you are smirking right now and thinking “hell, she is only 22 and is hyperventilating as if she is 42 and is suffering from mid life crisis”. I am not disagreeing with the fact that yes I still have more than half my youth left ahead of me but it is just kind of unsettling that children call me aunty and adults expect me to be responsible, take my own decisions and also help them take decisions. the other day I almost burst out laughing when someone asked me “I am planning to invest in so and so mutual fund. Do u think it is the right thing to do”. It was hilarious. I have no clue about mutual funds, the bull and bear are just one domestic and one wild animal to me and it is best not to talk of my pathetic knowledge about the share market. Anyway coming back to the point I am just not used to this sudden adulthood which is being thrust on me. I hate it when people tell me “you are so immature. Cant u act your age?” I know I am trying unsuccessfully to cling on to my childhood and college life. Sigh!! I wish I grow up soon.

2. my sister’s husband has got a job in dubai. Even the person with the meanest intelligence can understand that this means my sister and her husband will be moving to dubai some time soon for a of minimum three years. I have been trying not to think about it and trying to postpone the inevitable but yesterday as they sat talking about things like visa, house, transfer, flight tickets etc it just struck me that in less than three months I am going to lose the one person I am closest to in this world and the thought is killing me. Things like “arey email hai na” , “flight tickets to dubai have become so cheap you can almost fly once every six months” , “arey yaar, mai every week tujhe call karoongi” are just idle talk. The truth is that things will never be the same, with her some thousand of kms away. Its weird. From the time preethi was in 10th till she got married we lived separately. She did her 11th and 12th in Chennai while I was in Jamnagar and then she went on to college and work. All those years I never felt any of the things which I am feeling now. Its just that for the past 2 and a half years we have grown more closer than we ever were and I hate having to break that. I am going to miss all the night shows, midnight chats, midnight movies at her place, her miserable cooking (read semiya upma), her good cooking (read everything else), stealing all her good clothes, pigging out on ice cream, teasing her intelligence (or the lack of it), being the peacemaker in all the fights which my sister and BIL have, riding with her on the two wheeler, screaming at all the chauvinists on OMR, eating vegetable pulao at punnu da dhaba with her…. Sigh!! So many things. Its an irony. The things in my life which I want a change in remain exactly the same (I have the same software job, same working hours, same miserable code which doesn’t work etc) and the things in my life which I wish would remain the same are changing (my sister moving and other things which I cannot mention). Life is cruel.

3. I have lost 5 kgs of weight in the past 3 months with absolutely no conscious effort from my side and I am sick and tired of people squealing, screaming and shouting at me saying “Eeeeeeeeee. You have lost so much weight. What did you do?” , “Oooooo!!! Don’t you eat at all? It isn’t good to lose so much of weight so drastically. So what did you do to lose all this weight”. Please!!! I don’t know why I am losing weight. If I knew then I would stop doing whatever it is because this weight loss has me also worried. How much ever I eat, however little exercise I get I lose weight. Might sound like an ideal situation (and trust me I was pretty happy when it was happening. Imagine. You can eat all the ice cream in the world without caring a damn about ur waistline) but now I am not so sure. One doctor said I had borderline tuberculosis (no kidding!!), another said it was work stress and said I should take it easy and stop working hard. Now work has been extremely taxing for the past 6 months but not so much that I start losing weight because of stress. After that I stopped visiting doctors. All my family members have their own theories though. My mother thinks it is because I work too much, eat very little and worry a lot. Her solution? Quit your present job, come and live with appa and me in this godforsaken place also called Jamnagar, work in reliance and eat good home food”
I would rather run a mile in tight shoes than work in Jamnagar. K
My grandmother in her typical predictable fashion thinks it is because I don’t drink milk and eat curd rice. I am tired of telling her that it has nothing to do with my eating curd rice and drinking milk as that’s how I have been all my life but no use.
My sister in her usual dum dum style thinks it is because I have fallen in love. I have not even tried telling her that the only man in my life right now is Herbert schildt (errrr. He is the guy who authored complete reference java) and the probability of my getting a boyfriend sometime in the near future is equal to the probability of Andrew Symonds completing evolution and becoming human. In other words zero. But she goes on and on and on, teasing me with every person she can think of. I have told her in typical hindi film style that “mere maang mein mai sirf george Clooney ke naam ka sindoor bharoongi” but even that doesn’t stop her!! L

4. though it sounds extremely clichéd and lame I have just realized that we realize the value of someone only when they are gone and dont care a damn about them when they are actually there.

5. Its amazing how you can totally relate to a complete stranger at times and how ever lasting friendships are sometime built in a jiffy. I recently started mailing this really really nice lady in los angeles (indian - working for cognizant) who i came to know because she reads my blogs and its incredible how we hit it off right from the word go. Its wonderful to mail her and i do not find peace until i have mailed her whatever happened the whole day and all our mails to each other always exceed two pages!! :). Thanks Anupama. You have made my life so much better. Your mails have given me something to look forward to when i get ready to go to office each day.

6. This is the 102nd post on my blog. i cant believe i have written 100 (gasp!!) posts!!

Its that time of the year again. Board exam time when lakhs and lakhs of students across the country sweat it out to get good marks. This year one of my first cousins is giving her 12th CBSE boars exams and everyone at home is behaving as if swathi (my cousin) is going to the war front to fight militants and not to write an exam. Suddenly the house is abuzz with calls from “close” relatives like my grandmother’s sisters husbands brothers son’s wife calling up swathi and giving her valuable advice like “get 8 hours of sleep and eat food on time. When my brother’s wife’s neighbours son was giving his board exam he slept only for 7 hours and 26 minutes and ended up getting only 92%. Disgrace to the entire family he was. Don’t make the same mistake”.

So when I called up swathi day before yesterday to wish her she was at her wits end and said “please shruthi. I have had people calling me up from the morning wishing me and giving me all kind of weird advice. I am really really tensed. I will talk later. bye”. It was then that I realized that we give entirely too much of importance to these silly board exams. I mean seriously. NOW, 5 years after I have given my boards (man!! Am I old or what??) I realize that its not such a big deal. I have seen people do miserably in their boards and still come up very well in life and I have also seen people who excel in their boards but today are doing what everyone else is doing.

Anyway coming back to the point yesterday an hour before the board exams began I was watching some news channel where the following conversation made me sick early in the morning.

Person 1 in the news studio : moving on to the next big news item today. Today the CBSE 10 and 12th std exams begin and the air is pregnant with tension with more than 4 lakh (he stresses on 4 lakh and pauses for effect) students all over the country taking up these exams which decide their future. Lets ask our correspondent malvika who is present outside the ABC public school noida about what the situation is like right now. Yes malvika. So how is the atmosphere right now? What is the mind set of the students?

Malvika : (striving for an intelligent expression and nodding her head periodically and then suddenly she starts speaking at the rate of 75 words per minute). Yes ravi. As you can see I am standing outside ABC noida. With just an hour to go students as well as parents have started streaming into the school and the atmosphere is thick (stress+pause) with apprehension and tension. Also topmost on every student and parents mind is the fact that CBSE has changed the pattern of its exam papers and introduced different kind of questions which test the students abilities. We have with us the principal of ABC with us. Lets ask her what she thinks about CBSE’s decision and how it will affect the students?
Thank you for joining us ma’am. So what do u think about CBSE’s decision of introducing very short answer type questions and how will it affect the students

Mrs Principal: (obviously this is her first time on TV. She is immaculately dressed and speaks like a true principal at the rate of 4 words per minute). Personally I think CBSE’s decision should not affect the students at all. Because if a student is well prepared and is fundamentally sound he/she should be able to tackle any kind of questions. And yes it is a good decision of CBSE’s part to introduce this concept for it will test the true understanding a student has of fundamental concepts

Malvika: So ma’am what steps have u taken to ensure the success of the students in your school

Mrs Principal: well we have conducted 17 pre pre board exams, 18 pre board exams, daily mock tests and assignments which will help the students be prepared for the real thing. We have also made sure that we don’t put much pressure on the students (I cant help but smirk at this)

Malvika: what steps do u think students preparing for the board exams should take to come out with flying colors?

Mrs Principal: Oh!! A student should get a minimum of eight hours of sleep, eat food regularly. Eat many small meals and not few large meals which would make him/her sleepy. His/ her mind must be “completely relaxed” and stress free for the D day because in the end it is not only intelligence which will help you but also a cool and composed mind.

At this point I am not able to take it any longer. Completely relaxed??? With each and every news channel offering their smart ass comments and giving advice which no one asked for and splashing the board exams across the media like this, how can any student or parent for that matter be relaxed? With such immense pressure to perform any child would break. It is no wonder that the number of children committing suicide because of failure to perform in the exam has gone up so drastically. I cannot even begin to imagine the kind of pressure a 14 year old must have undergone if it actually drove him to take his own life. And the case of kids committing suicide will be made into a big issue by the same news channels

The first people who should be blamed are these news channels. I am not joking when I say that ravi and malvika continued this board exam nonsense for half an hour in the morning for the breakfast news. When these news channels have no idea what to talk about they just pick up random, inconsequential things and talk about them as if they are the most crucial and vital topics. (the next news item in breakfast news was this “after the break lets look at a village in bihar where a little girl was married to a dog (stress+pause) to ward off evil spirits”). Any parent would have got a nervous breakdown if they had watched the way ravi and malvika spoke about the board exams thinking “Oh my god. My son wrote only 4 pre pre boards and only 5 pre boards. If only I had put him in a better school…”

Secondly parents must also try to understand and accept their children and their shortcomings. (I really hope Taare Zameen Par goes a long way in helping parents realize this). We cant all have prodigies as children. Give your child the freedom to be what he or she wants to be. Don’t pressurize or terrorize or your children.

And finally stop calling up kids, giving their board exams and boring them with your advice. I am sure you have great intentions in mind but trust me the advice which you are giving would have already been given by 7 other people in 8 different ways (unless of course your advice is “get drunk before your exam and go to the exam with a bad hangover” or something!! :P). So just call, wish him/ her luck and keep the phone down and you will earn a child’s good will!! ;)

This is just a random rant which I penned down after I saw what my cousin was going through. I sure hope she does well but even if she doesn’t it doesn’t matter because after all they are just board exams and not the kargil war!! :)

I hate giving titles so this post doesnt have a title!! on second thoughts i would call it Life's Like That - Part II

My 7 year old cousin is going through a phase in his life where he wants to be everything. One day he wanted to be spider man, the next day he swore that he was born only so he could bat like dhoni and then he wanted to be a footballer like zizou. Everything he sees around him enamors and charms him. It reminded of the time in my life when I was going through a similar phase. From the time I was 4 to the time I was 18 there were approximately 137 people I wanted to become and 3764 things I wanted to do when I grew up.

Age 5: Revs the garbage collector
I am extremely serious when I say that at the age of 5 I thought the coolest profession and the best thing to do in the world was to collect garbage. The reason was this. When I was young and amma used to give me something to eat, me being me I would invariably always drop what she gave me. A bar of chocolate, a ladoo, fruits EVERYTHING. And most of the times I would drop it in the dirtiest of places possible and just when I went to pick it up again and put it into my mouth to eat it my mom would say “chi!! Gandha hai” and flippantly throw it into the dustbin without realizing how it broke my heart to see a perfectly edible, delectable piece of chocolate go into the dustbin just because my mom suspected it had contracted germs. So most of my childhood went by with me sacrificing most of the things I liked to the dustbin. Every morning when chandu the garbage collector came home I would stare at him wistfully and think to myself “if ever I grow up I would want to be someone like chandu so I can go from house to house and collect garbage and retrieve all the things amma cruelly threw into it”
Needless to say after I attained a certain level of maturity this dream died.

Age 9: Revs the teacher
Though this sounds like an extremely sane and serious profession to choose, now when I think of it , the reason I chose it for seems extremely silly. All through school the one thing which absolutely enamored me was writing on a black board with white chalk. In class 4 there was nothing in the world I would have liked to do more than writing on the board with chalk and the only person I knew who always did this was my teacher. Because of my lack of stature though I have been monitor many times I was never given the opportunity to write the proverb for the day on the board primarily because I never could reach so high. It was such a grand thing for me to be called by the teacher to solve a sum on the board or something and I used to almost swell and burst with pride and hold the chalk as tightly as possible and do the sum as slowly as possible but that was a rare occurrence and So every time I looked at the teacher I would be like “That’s it. If ever I grow up the only I thing I want to be is a teacher and the only thing I want to do all my life is write on the board with chalk”
This dream died when amma and appa bought my sister and I a black board at home and after writing for 6 months to my hearts content the charm wore off.

Age 11: Revs the pilot
I think EVERY child would have had this dream at some point of time in their life. I haven’t known a single person who didn’t want to be a pilot when he/she was a kid. I think it is just one of those childhood things. Kya banna chahti ho badi hoke? someone would ask me and pat I would reply “Mai to badi hoke pilot banoongi” . I dunno why or what made me chose this profession but the very thought of sailing high in the skies among the clouds and wearing all those badges and stuff seemed like the most interesting and fun profession. I think this dream of mine never did die and never will. Even today I nurture a secret desire to ride a jet or at least a helicopter. The fact that I have never seen the insides of a jet or a helicopter and have a mild fear of heights is something which we shall not waste time discussing.

Age 13: Revs the sleuth
Extremely predictable. Every kid who has grown up reading enid blyton, nancy drew, hardy boys, agatha Christie, perry mason or sherlock holmes would have nurtured this dream. At the age of 13 I knew that I was a reincarnation of fatty (the main character in the five find outers and the dog. My favorite series by enid blyton). I used to dream up non existent mysteries and suspect extremely innocent people . I got the hiding of my life when once my dad had given my cycle to the cycle fellow for some repairs and I went and told him “hah!! Ramanan!!! So u thought u could escape by stealing and selling my cycle, getting some money and then claiming the insurance claims also by declaring the cycle was lost eh? (errr.. yeah. That was the way the book “the mystery of the burned cottage” ended when Mr. what-his-name would set fire to his own cottage to claim insurance claims). Needless to say my dad wasn’t pleased. Parents!! No appreciation for creativity or lateral thinking.
So because of extreme parental pressure I gave up this dream of mine.

There were so many, so many other things I wanted to become. A lawyer (the thought of wearing a black robe and carrying a rolled up white paper and shouting “your honor” gave me quite a kick and I have done it many times in the privacy of my room when I was young), an actress (ok!! U can stop heaving a sigh of relief that I did not pursue this dream of mine), a cook (never will become a good one I guess!! :(), a writer, a doctor (I grew up watching corny hindi movies so I have always had this desire to come out of an operation theatre, look at anxious family members and say “inhe dawaa ki nahi duwaa ki zaroorat hai”. Lol. Morbid!! I know!!), a cricketer, an army general (because the fact that there were no women in the cricket team or Indian army rankled me.) and sooooooo many other things that I have lost count.

It is indeed surprising and rather ironical that not even ONCE in my lifetime did I want to become a software engineer. I have nurtured so many dreams when I was young and in none of them have I pictured myself sitting in front of a computer screen and typing away to glory. Well what I am doing now is way way way better than some of the things I have wanted to become. (I mean seriously. Just imagine what would have happened had I pursued my first ever dream of being a garbage collector. Incidentally I am also doing that. Yesterday one of my team mates asked me if my variable in java had been garbage collected and if I had done garbage collection. I couldn’t help but laugh!! :D) and I am extremely happy and have no complaints but sometimes I wonder why I never pursued some of the things I wanted to when I was a kid and ended up becoming something I totally did not think of. But I think all of us have extremely romantic and exotic dreams when we are young but reality is so much different and I guess life’s like that and though right now I may not be exactly fulfilling some of my dreams (Thank god!! :P) I am extremely happy and contented and I hope I stay that way!!

Life's Like That!!!

DISCLAIMER:This is a long post as usual but I don’t have the heart to edit any of its contents so please bear with me!! :)

When my sister and I were born my mother took one look at us and hoped that she would have daughters with the looks of rani mukherji, the agility of PT usha and the voice of MS subbalakshmi.

I guess something went wrong in my mothers prayers coz we ended up with the looks of PT usha, the agility of MS and the voice of rani mukherji. :P But my mother, stubborn that she is decided that though god hadn’t given her gifted children she would make her children gifted and somehow make them great singers or athletes or orators. As a result of this my sister and I were sent to extra curricular activity “classes” right from the time I was in class 3 and she was in 6th. I shall try my best to recount my experiences in the various classes I attended.

The Singer:
Now I am not exaggerating when I say I have a voice which closely resembles rani mukherji’s. people who have spoken to me on phone have given the following adjectives for my voice. Bellow, raspy, howl, shrill, grating etc. Even in class 3 i knew that I could be anything I wanted to be but not a singer. Now in tam-brahm houses it is a tradition that if u have girls u have to necessarily send them to singing/dancing classes and if u have boys u have to necessarily send them to singing/ instrument classes. My family is no exception. I have cousins who are brilliant singers, excellent violin players and graceful dancers. I am none of them.

My mother not the one to accept defeat sent my sister and me to this 86 year old vidhwan (I still remember his name: dhinanath updhyay) to learn Hindustani music. In the year 1993 in surat there wasn’t anyone who taught carnatic music so my mother settled for Hindustani. Now Hindustani music is beautiful and soulful and some of the songs which our sir sang have moved me to tears even at the tender age of 8. (our sir sang mind u not us. If it had been us there would have been different kind of tears in our sir’s eyes)

So we were sent to music classes. Now this music class was from 2.30 – 3.30 in the afternoon. School used to get over at 1.30, then heavy lunch and then music classes. Please note the heavy lunch point. By the time we reached the class we would be half asleep. Now this guy who taught was an excellent singer but had poor eyesight (obviously he was 86. I still wonder how he stayed awake from 2.30 – 3.30). So as soon as we sat down to sing preethi would doze off saying “I am sleepy and anyway sir cant see me sleeping so I am going to sleep”, leaving me to face sir’s wrath.

Sir: Gao beta gao. Saaaaa
Preethi: zzzzzzzzzzz
Me: (Pssst. Preethi utth. Sir is asking us to sing)
Preethi (almost musically): zzzz.z.zzzzzzzz.zzzz
Me: (after futile attempts at trying to wake up my sleepy sibling I would start shouting at the top of my voice coz I had to produce the effect of 2 ppl singing): SAAAAAAAAAA…
Sir: (he cant see preethi sleeping away to glory): aur zor se sur mein gao, taal se mila ke gao beta. Sa re ga ma
Me: (thinking): sur aur taal ki to aisi ki taisi. I cant even sing and I have to care abt ur sur and taal also
Me: Sa re ga maaaaaa

And so on and so forth the great man tried to make the voice coming out of my chops a little bearable - in vain. Finally at the end of 3 months he couldn’t take it any longer and he called my mom.
Mom: ji. Kaise gaati hain meri betiyaan?
Sir: awaaz mein dum hai lekin sur aur taal ka milan nahi hai.
he said mustering all the panache he could instead of telling my mom, “Frankly, in my 55 years of teaching music I have never come across anyone so hopelessly disinclined towards music”
And so that was that and my mother dropped dreams of ever having sudha raghunathan’s and MS subbalakshmi’s as daughters

The Orator:
Next was oratory. My mom began having dreams of daughters who would be lok sabha, rajya sabha speakers or Indian envoys of the united nations. Honestly speaking public speaking was something which I was fairly decent at. Till class 10th I have never had a fear of crowds or people. I used to love taking part in debates, extempore and declamation contests in school. And then “THE” incident happened. I am not sure when it was, whether in 10th or 11th but I had to give a speech introducing a particular chief guest who had done a lot of work in uplifting the poor etc.

At one point in the speech I had to say “Sir, your enthusiasm is infectious and has encouraged all of us to follow in ur footsteps” and I dunno what came over me, I suddenly got really really scared fumbled and said “Sir. Your infection is enthusiastic and has encouraged all of us to follow in ur footsteps”. :oops:. I could have left it at that and no one would have noticed but I went ahead and said “I am sorry. Your infection is enthusiasm and …”

The entire school howled, the teachers giggled, the principal frowned and the chief guest wasn’t very impressed to say the least. I still wonder what would have happened if he had really had some serious infection or something. Whatever. Since then I have had this inexplicable fear for public speaking which has never gone completely and since that day I have never gone on stage to give a speech or anything. And so my mothers dreams of making me a lok sabha speaker also went down the drain

The Tennis Star:
Next my mom tried the sports arena. “Badi hoke monica seles banegi meri beti” said my mom when she enrolled me into tennis classes. When I joined tennis classes I was as high as a tennis racket (for people who have seen me stop saying “you still are!!” humph!!) and weighed 10 times as much. Meaning I was really short and really really fat. I could never lift the tennis racket to do a service or do a volley and even when I did miraculously manage to lift it my ball would never cross the net. Now my tennis sir had this weird punishment.
U come late to class – run around the court 2 times
U don’t wear proper sports attire – run around court 2 times
Ball hits the net – run around court once
Drop the racquet – run around the court, talk while practice – run around court, laugh while practice – run around court. U get the drift? Half the time I was running around court. So much so that many times I would come to class and start running around the court without even being told to coz I knew I would break some rule or the other during the course of the day.

Sir: Revathi today u…
Me: sorry sir. I will run around court
Sir: (puzzled). No wait. Today for a change u r on time and have worn the proper attire. U can start practicing ur serve.
Me: (running)
Sir: why are u running now?
Me: I know I will mess my serve, talk or giggle or something!! I’d rather run now than run after I am caught!!

Anyway at the end of 3 months of coaching I was 6 kgs lighter and a fairly decent athlete (all that running finally did pay) but tennis wise I was still the same. MISERABLE. I never did get the hang of the game and I was always made to play against people who were masters at the game. Before I could understand what was going on they would say ace, deuce, game point, match point and I would have lost.

So that ended my mother’s “meri beti monica seles” dreams.

Over the years I have realized that there is nothing I that I am really good at. I mean I was fairly decent at studies, fairly decent in sports, fairly decent in everything but never exceptionally brilliant in anything. I have never been a very ambitious go-getter kind of a person and am extremely comfortable with my shortcomings because I have realized life’s like that. U can never have everything and the beauty of life lies in the fact that it isn’t perfect. Its imperfections define its beauty. Ultimately i never did become any of the things which my mom hoped I would become and neither did my sister (at least she did justice to the looks of Rani and agility of P.T Usha condition. I was completely hopeless!! :P). But I have no regrets because though I know I never will be a monica seles or an MS subbalakshmi I am extremely happy because I am sure monica seles and MS Subbalakshmi (may her soul rest in peace) can never be me. :)

(Nope!! I have gone deaf so I cant hear u say “Huh!! Who u kidding?? They would never want to be you!! ;)”)

I am dead!!

My last and final hope of leading a better and meaningful existence just bombed today. The last silver lining on my cloud decided to hide itself behind the blasted cloud. For people who know me u know what I am talking about. For others I am really not in a mood to explain. I am in a “look at me and I will cry” and “touch me and I will scream” mood!!

What with today’s debacle and the fact that blogger has been banned in office I have a feeling the entire world is on a “lets screw Revathi’s happiness” mission. My blogging frequency will drastically come down now and I will be “busy” doing coding, designing and testing!! :(

All my life lines are being blocked one by one and it is suffocating me. Its like this. Imagine a man drowning right in the middle of the pacific ocean, and a helicopter comes to rescue him. He is suddenly very hopeful and thrashes his arms to catch the helicopter’s attention. The helicopter comes really close to the man and then flies away because it is unable to spot him. The man screams, shouts and ultimately dies. I feel like that man now.

Its funny. When you are 21 you think you are immortal and can achieve anything that u want. I just realized that I am dead. IT has killed me. :|

Money Money Money - Must be Funny

What is it with parents and accounts? Why are mom’s in particular so particular about money and where it goes once it is given to a teenaged daughter? What is money after all, when compared to a daughter who is worth a million dollars. My parents sadly don’t seem to realize that and are always worried about how I spend my money. When I was doing my engineering I was given 10000 rupees per semester (four months) apart from my fees and it was deposited in the bank in the starting of the semester and I was to survive with that money for the entire semester. Now it’s a funny thing with money. If u have it in hand u never know how it goes out of ur hand, where it goes, why it goes, when it goes. The only thing u know is that it goes, never to come back.

I tried telling my parents that maybe they should give me a monthly allowance rather than a semesterly allowance if they wanted me to keep things in control but they never listened. As a result of this normally by the end of the third semester I would be in a pathetically impecunious state, with a bank balance which would be equal to the weight of the most mal nourished kid in somalia. In fact the bank in which I had an account had a rule that my account must have a minimum of 100 rupees of balance. Once I was so hard up for money that I had 126 rupees in my account and I wrote out a withdrawal slip of 126 rupees and was given such dirty looks by the cashier that even now I shudder when I think of what he must have thought of me. By the end of the semester i would go to the college stores and buy the cheapest soap, cheapest biscuits, cheapest of everything. A normal conversation between the stores guy and me would be this

Me: give me a packet of hide and seek and a bottle of maaza

Stores guy: that will be 25 bucks

Me: (thinking) what???!!! 25 bucks. That’s an outrageous amount especially when u have exactly 20 bucks in ur pocket.

Me(saying): Errr. Give me a packet of tiger biscuit. ( note to readers : stop thinking “My god. She eats tiger biscuits”. When u r hungry and have no money even pedigree dog biscuits would taste delicious and anyway tiger biscuit was the cheapest biscuit available in the stores)

Stores guy: that will be 7 bucks. Don’t u want anything to drink?

Me: (heaving a sigh of relief and reluctantly parting with my last 10 rupee note. The remaining 10 bucks were in coins.): no thanks. I think I ll just drink some water from the cooler.

I dunno what the stores guy thought of me and at that point of time I was hardly in a position to think of what people thought about me.

By the fag end of the semester this would be conversation between my mom and me

Me: amma. Errr… hmmm.. actually.

Mom: stop hemming and hawing shruthi. What do u want. I am sure u have run out of money. That’s it right?

Mom’s are too smart for their own good.

Me: heh heh. Actually yeah. That reminds me that I am kind of short of money (that’s an understatement. I am extremely short of money. I wear a burqa in hostel so ppl dont recognize me and ask me to return the money I owe them and I am scared some of them will get their boy friends to beat me up if I don’t return it in time)

Mom: ok. I will transfer 200 bucks. Is that enough?

Me: (almost hyperventilating and thinking) 200 bucks?? My debt is running to over 700 bucks and then come my own personal needs.

Me: (saying to amma):Hmmm. Actually could u transfer 1500 bucks please.

Mom: 1500? Shruthi. What did u do with the 10000 I gave u at the beginning of the sem?

Me: amma. There were so many expenses this sem. Plus a mess bill of 1200 per month.

Mom: 1200 per month. So 4 months Rs 4800. what happened to the remaining 5200?

Me: (mind working at a speed which would put Einstein to shame): well u know amma the mess food is so bad that we buy maggi and cook it in the hostel.

Mom: (incredulously): u spent 5200 bucks on maggi???

Me: no!! heh heh!! Actually. It was my room mate’s birthday and then my class mates birthday and then I saw a couple of movies, took photocopies of a couple of notes (terrible lie!! Being in the hostel we never had the need to “Xerox” any notes. If one had it, it was same as all of us having it. I was usually never the “one” to have it) and then the usual u know.
I sounded extremely lame even to myself. Try as I might I just couldn’t imagine where 5200 bucks had gone.

Mom: how many times a year does ur roommate have a birthday. Normally people have it just once a year.
(yeah. Sarcasm runs in my blood!! :|)

Me: (thinking): Damn!! Looks like I have already used up that one.
Me(saying): Actually. She is not really my roommate. She is a close friend of mine and spends so much time in my room that she is almost a roommate. That’s what I meant.

(I am damn proud of myself and the way I handled this sticky situation)

Dad (joining in the conversation): I dunno shruthi. I think u spend entirely too much. When I was doing my engineering appa used to give me 300 rupees each semester. I used to write accounts daily and in the end I used to save 50 bucks and have enough money to buy my ticket home. But you? U spend all the money, demand more and apart form that we also pay for ur ticket home.

Me:(thinking): appa studied in 3rd century B.C when people were still thinking that the sun revolves around the earth and 300 bucks in 3rd century B.C was like 20000 bucks in present day.
Me(saying): yes appa. Sorry appa. I will try to spend diligently from now on and save some money and also write accounts
(even as I say this my conscience is rolling on the floor and laughing. I am miserable at saving, I am miserable at account writing. I am miserable at everything except spending and I lie blatantly to my father. I wouldn’t dare saying this to my mom because being a daughter it is easier to melt dad than mom)

Dad: hmmm. Good girl. I will transfer the money.
Me: phew!! Thanks appa. Umm. Can u do it now. I am kind of in need of it now.

This scenario used to repeat itself unfailingly every semester. Apart from this I also used to get “special” allowances from my grandmom and sis who being the kindred souls that they are would give me “diwali” allowances or “birthday” allowances or "Cool. u failed only in 3 subjects out of 6 this unit test" allowance. Once even going as far as giving me 200 bucks because it was mahatma gandhi’s birthday. In spite of all this kindness from various members of my family by the end of the semester I would be in an extremely impoverished state. Till date I dunno what I did with all that money which came to my hands. All I knew was that it wasn’t there when I needed it and needed it most.

I used to envy my friends who were committed or had boyfriends. They never spent anything. Their boyfriends spent for them and I wondered how that dude handled his parents’ questions every time. My friends who were in love had so many other “love” problems but I was always the one with “financial” problems which I think are much more difficult to handle than “love” problems. Apparently when u r in love u don’t feel hungry or sleepy. I was always sleepy and always hungry and hence always in constant need of tiger biscuits to keep my hunger pangs away. My friends in love had no such problems. So no standing shame facedly in front of the stores guy for them. :-\

Even now after I have started working money in my hands flows like water. And thanks to the umpteen investments which my parents have started for my “safe future”, at the end of the month my bank balance looks like the same Somalian kid mentioned at the start of this post. The day I learn to manage money will be the day Osama bin laden will surrender himself to bush, Vajpayee will take part in a marathon and win, Andrew Symonds will look more human and less primate like…. U get the drift. It aint gonna happen ever.
Suddenly the words of the song by Abba seems to make so much sense.

Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man's world

All the things I could do
If I had a little money

Having more money and not knowing what to do with it. I guess that’s one affliction I will never suffer from!! :(

I am in love - Yet again!! :)

I have to stop doing it. I seem to be doing it on a regular basis now. I really really must stop falling in love. I seem to be falling in love so frequently that if I increased the frequency the shiv sena men would come and get me. At any given point of time I am love with at least 5 different people. Even as I type this I realize that I am falling love yet again!! In the past one week following are the people I fell in love with.

1. I fell in love with my 7 year old cousin. After a long time because of him I laughed at something totally silly.
Now my cousin Siddhu (short for Siddhanth) and I are the only people in my house who crave to have a dog in the house and the other day we were having a discussion as to what we would name the dog, if we ever had one.

Me: Siddhu nu koopadalam - *giggle, giggle*

Sid: shruthi (me) nu koopadalam - *giggle giggle*

Me: hey ile na andha doggie a “Shruddhu (shruthi + siddhu)” nu koopadalam. *guffaw*

Sid: idhu nalla name a irruku aana paathu shruddhu nu koopta approm adhu buddhu aaida poradhu.

Now this was such a lame joke but believe it or not Sid and I laughed for 10 minutes continuously as if we had cracked the funniest joke of the year or something. If someone else had cracked the same joke I would have gone "Soooo lame!! Hmph!!" but that day I was really proud of us.

2. I fell in love with my 5 year old cousin Arya when she called me the other day and said "I love u shruthi" her voice dripping with an innocence and genuineness which only a 5 year old is capable of. Not a day goes by without me wishing "I wish they were here in India". I hate having to see them grow up in photographs.

3. Even as I write this I am falling in love with my sister because she just called me and said "hey I have made ur favorite adai for dinner. So u better come home tonight. We will rent a movie and pig out in front of the TV". I love her adai’s and I love watching a movie with her because every time we start to watch a movie I fall asleep half away and she gets totally irritated. :D. I think the only movie for which both of us dozed off was khoya khoya chand. SAD movie!!

4. I fell in love with an auto fellow two days back because he actually charged less that I expected him to, to reach a particular place. It is a pleasant surprise when u brace urself to bargain and fight and then realize that he has actually quoted less that what u had in mind.

5. I fell in love with myself (yeah guys!! This one is really important. It is very important that u love urself if u want the world to love you. Never fall out of love with urself.) when a little something I wrote for someone’s birthday made that person really happy.

6. I almost constantly fall in love with people who say nice things about me or write nice comments on my blog. (yeah!! I know I am shallow. :P) but every time some one writes something as simple as "hey!! Nice blog" or something I find myself falling in love with them. Lol. I have a really really weak heart!! :P

7. I fell in love with this friend of mine when I re-read THIS blog which she had written about our life in college. I miss college more than anything or anyone else right now. :(

8. I fell in love with a team mate of mine after she came and told me "hey I found a couple of defects in ur code. They were minor so I fixed them on my own. Am not logging them for u". Such an angel she is!! :)

9. I fell in love with George Clooney (yet again!!) when I saw ocean’s twelve last time. How can that guy be so criminally good looking even at the age of 50?

10. I fell in love with P G Wodehouse (yeah!! I know he is dead) after I read pigs have wings yet again last week and laughed till my sides hurt.

So as u see in the past one week I have fallen in love with so many people and so many times that u can imagine the number of people I would have fallen in love with in the past 21 years. I am worried that if ever I get married and my husband asks me "so, have u had any past relationships?" I wonder what I will say!! :P

Jokes apart. Right now I am totally in love with life and seem to be falling in love with everything and everyone. I love this phase in my life. I love writing about it, I love being able to write about it, I love the fact that I always seem to have a smile on my face, a song on my lips and a spring in my step. I love feeling useful and being able enough to help someone I don’t know. I love the fact that I have just enough time to do everything I like to do, I love the fact that I am getting to spend quality time with my friends, I am also glad that it has been more than a month since I had a fight with my mom. I love it all!! I feel free, I feel liberated, I feel sooooo good!!! :)

YaBa DaBaaaaaaa Dooooooooo!!!

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Blog!!!
Happy birthday to you

For those of you who think that I have completely lost it (No!!!no one gets to say "u never had it in the first place!!" :-\) and think that I have the maturity level of a 2 year old, well my blog just turned 2 and I am just soooooooooo happy about it. 2 years back same day I started blogging. I remember starting a blog because I was really really bored and sick of the Jamnagar winter and had no idea what to do with my time and when I wrote my first blog I was sure I wouldn’t write for more than 2 or 3 months. 24 months and 94 posts I figure is not bad. From "writing because I am really bored" to "writing because I can’t live otherwise" I have come a long way. In these two years I am glad I haven’t suffered a block (not a long one at least. I had one in june last year and I still regret not having an archive link which reads june 2007!! :( ). This blog has seen me through a lot. I have poured my frustrations, my anger, my happiness, my pain, my sarcasm… everything on this blog and I am glad that I still have a lot left to say. I would also like to thank all the people who have taken some time off (I do appreciate the fact that there is so much else that u could have done with that time of yours) and read my ramblings, left a comment or not left a comment. I am glad u guys have been a part of my life. Thank you!! :)
I m in such a good mood today that even the news of george clooney's impending wedding to a waitress half his age wont ruffle me!! :)

Of Sisters and Brothers in law who love to feed me!! :P

I am dreading going to my sisters place nowadays. Why you ask? Well let me explain. Now I have relatives all over Chennai. Like I was telling a friend of mine the other day, if u stumble and fall in Chennai you will either fall over a software professional or a member of the natraja iyer or gopalakrishna iyer family. Name the place in Chennai and I have relatives there. Thiruvanmiyur - Yes, mandaveli – Yes, T.Nagar – Yes, Adyar- infested, velacherry- Yup, kodambakkam – oh yeah, besant nagar – yeah. You get the drift? And all the members of the natraja iyer and gopalakrishna iyer families have one thing I common. They love to feed people. All of them have two passions in life. To eat and to feed. Which is why I avoid going to their houses because all of them love me and the amount of food they give me is directly proportional to their love and the amount of food I eat is proportional to my size.

For example lets take my grandmother. My grandmother spends all her waking hours deciding what to cook. The minute she finishes making lunch her concern is “Tiffin ku enna pannalam”? The minute the tiffin menu is decided it becomes “rathri yenna pannalam”. It’s a long vicious cycle. My grandmother thinks that every problem in life can find its roots to food. She believes that if hunger is wiped out in this world all the problems would disappear. If given a chance she would probably call osama bin laden home for lunch and feed him because I am sure she thinks he goes around bombing world trade centers because he is hungry. I am serious. There are times when I am really angry/sad/pissed about something and she goes “pasi naala dhaan unnaku kovam varadhu. Iru thayir sadam kudukaren” (you are angry coz u r hungry. Wait I will get some curd rice for u). anyway she is a darling and her food would give the best chefs in this world a run for their money and I don’t complain and if u look at me u will realize that I have done more of eating than complaining.:P

Anyway after my sister got married I decided I would give her and her husband (lets call him K) the pleasure of having my company. I had my own ulterior motives. I knew that if I had to reduce weight it wouldn’t help if I went to any of my other umpteen relatives’ place. My sister I decided wouldn’t be that great a cook (Big Mistake on my part) and hence my decision to grace their house with my presence. Coming to the essence of this post I have decided to stop visiting my sister’s place because she has started proving it is the blood of natraja iyer and gopalakrishna iyer that runs in her veins. And as if that’s not enough she has also started influencing K. Not only has she started cooking well but she has also donned role of a mother hen whose sole purpose in life is to feed. My sister and BIL do not have any children yet and they seem to be practicing with me. “Feed your sister and u will feed ur children well” seems to be their motto. With 0 exaggeration (stop rolling ur eyes!!) this is what happens everyday when I visit them

8.00 in the morning

K: hey shruthi. What do u want for breakfast?
Me: Errr.. I think I ll just grab something in office
Sis: no no. I know u wont eat anything. I will make some oats for you

Now there is nothing in this world I detest more than oats because 1. it is healthy and 2. it is white (I hate all white things. Milk, oats, vanilla ice cream etc)

Me: Please no.!!
K: nothing doing. Oats it is. And u must have lots of fruits along with it.
Me: hmmm can I just have the fruits alone
Sis: oats will help u lower ur cholesterol, prevent diabetes, blah blah

She will make a very good mother and will make some poor kid’s life hell I decide.

Me: ok. But just make me a little.

After some time my sis comes carrying this 2 litre vessel full of oats and places it before me
Me: Hmmm. U guys take ur share. I ll eat the rest
Sis: (giving me a puzzled look): our share?? THIS is ur share. Ours is in the kitchen!!
Me: What??????????? You expect me to eat this huuuuuuge bowl full of oats? What do u take me for?? A pregnant elephant who needs her nutrients???
K: hey wait!! I haven’t added the fruits yet.
Me: (voice sharp with sarcasm which is wasted on K of course): only apples? U don’t have oranges or bananas??
K: oh yeah we do. We even have pomegranates.

"Just wait" he says and cuts half a banana, half an apple, half an orange and half a pomegranate and empties into the bottomless chasm also called a bowl of oats. And after that both of them hovered over me till I finished (yeah!! I did finish. I couldn’t flush it into the loo with both of them watching and fussing over me) the entire bowl.
The same procedure was followed for lunch and dinner where for lunch a plate full of bisibelebath (it could easily have been used to feed 5 children for 2 days in Somalia.) + curd rice was forcefully shoved down my gullet by a very loving sister and BIL and for dinner I was again lovingly fed 5 aloo paranthas (no kidding!!) with curd and after that my sister complained that I wasn’t eating what she cooked and being disrespectful. At this statement of hers I was even afraid to stare open mouthed for fear of the fact that they might push some food down my open mouth thinking I am hungry.

So there you go. I have decided that I must make my visits to my sisters place infrequent if I am to keep alive my hopes of reducing my weight.

P.S: Preethi and Kishore – if u guys are reading this u KNOW how shameless I am. U KNOW that tomorrow this time I will probably be at home telling u guys that I am hungry and want food. So though I KNOW you guys wont mind me writing this post, this is just to tell u that u guys are the best!!Love ya!! Muah.:) . and before they throw me out of blogger for such obscene public display of affection I will stop this post!!! :)

Happy New Year

The year is coming to an end. And as usual it is time for me to take a couple of useless resolutions which I know I will never keep but which I will make just for the heck of it.
So here I go. Here are a couple of resolutions which I am making and which I hope I keep.

1.I am going to practice being nice. Nice to everyone I know, don’t know, like, dislike, everyone. I will also try to be the same person that I am with my friends to my family. In short I will try to get rid of my hyde personality!!
2.I am going to start writing accounts. For those who know about my “account writing” skills quit laughing. I am serious. I started writing accounts in my first year of engineering and I have successfully managed to fill up 5 pages of accounts for 5 years. I am pathetic with accounts. I just cannot manage money. The minute I have some money on my hands I spend and 2 days after I have spent it I don’t remember what I did with it. So I am going to write accounts sincerely now.
3.I am going to do more of what I like this year. I hope I get lots of opportunities.
4.I am going to read more books. The past year I would have hardly read some 7-8 books (only 3 good books in that) and this year I am going to take some time out and do some quality reading.

2007 has been a good year on the whole for me. Coming to think of it all 21 years of my life have been good. But 2007 was different. A lot of new things have happened in my life. The best moments of each month would be:

Jan 2007: the unforgettable final year tour. Wow!! Is it already an year?? Unbelievable!! Seems like yesterday. Last year this time I was in kulu manali celebrating my new year in sub zero temperatures and this year I am sitting in front of a computer doing java coding.
I also remember writing THIS post last january. Since the number of relatives reading my blog has gone up I would like you guys to read it again. Nothing much has changed in the past one year!! ;)

Feb 2007: the singles party on Feb 14th!! The last and best singles party of college life. Amazing fun we guys had celebrating our singledom. (MS-Word says there is no word like that but u know what I mean). We have already started planning for this years singles party. Its scary. Out of the 6 ppl who were are at the singles party last year 2 are getting married. The singles in our group are becoming extinct. :(

Mar 2007: The college culturals. The last one yet again. Mind blowing fun. Shit man!!! I so wish I could go back to college now. All those night outs before the culturals, those petty fights over money, petty fights with the boys, petty fights over almost everything. Sigh!!! Instincts 2007 was just so great.

Apr 2007: Successful completion of our final year project. Phew!! How much we struggled to convince everyone that our project would actually work and ultimately we got stuck with an external who was just not interested in our project.

May 2007: leaving college. Leaving a place which was a part of me for 4 years. Leaving friends, leaving hostel, leaving a carefree and joyful existence. I cried so much that if all my tears had been desalinated Chennai’s water problem would have been solved.

Jun 2007: joining Cognizant. And more importantly joining the cognizant internal blogging network. A move which I don’t think I will ever regret. Have met some amazing people, made some great friends and if I can say so myself have grown as a writer. After joining cognizant I think it is one of the best things to have happened to me.

Jul-Aug 2007: Training. I would be lying completely if I said training was hectic. Training was awesome and rightly called as the honeymoon period of an IT professionals life. Trying to be professionals in an IT company. A very different experience indeed.

Sep-Nov 2007: moving in to a new accommodation. Lots of adjusting, lots of fighting, lots of compromises, lots of fun.

Dec 2007: Assassination of Benazir Bhutto. (Did u notice that?? Someone once complained that I don’t write about current affairs and things that matter. Did u notice what an absolutely valuable piece of information I have provided??). Anyway yesterday the first Cognizant bloggers meet happened. It was amazing fun. It is good to meet people whose writings u admire. Helps u relate more to the writer I feel. And the year ended on an extremely happy note for me when a very nice man told me that if ever he had a daughter he would want her to be just like me!! I have never been this thrilled and happy about anything before. Thanks a lot Mr. nice man though for ur sake I hope ur daughter is nothing like me!!! I shudder to think of the havoc a replica of me would wreak. :)

It’s the year end and I am in a really happy, sappy mood. I hope this euphoria lasts throughout 2008!!
Wish all of you a very very Happy and Prosperous New Year!! :)

Lost my Orkut account!!!

I have lost my orkut account!! The other day I was trying to log on to orkut and it kept telling me that I had given the wrong password. Now I have really fat and stubby fingers and whenever I am typing any password I always hit a couple of wrong keys and hit the correct one only on the third or fourth try. This can be a pain when I am logging on to my machine in office. After three wrong entries my account gets locked automatically and I have to call the global service desk to unlock it. Now almost every second day I call them and ask them to unlock my account. In fact last week my account got locked three times in one day and when I called GSD the third time the woman at the help desk didn’t even wait to confirm my details. She was so used to hearing my voice. This was the conversation between us.

Me: Errr. My account has been locked

She: just a minute ma’am I ll unlock it

Me: my associate id is…

She: yes I know ma’am. Associate id is 123456 and DOJ is blah blah. you called an hour back

Me: Errrr. Yes!!

Well anyway. So when orkut told me that I had typed the wrong password 2 times I didn’t bother. But after trying five times (the fifth time I typed my password in word and copy pasted it) I began to have my fears. The first thought which crossed my mind was "Oh my god. Someone has hacked my account. Soon they will misuse my profile and my photograph will start appearing on "ahem-aaahh-cough-cough" sites." Now I use my yahoo account to log in to my orkut and my google account for blogger and gmail. Then I tried logging on to my gmail and I found a mail from google telling me that my yahoo account was no longer active and that I would have to use my google account for everything and if my blogger/orkut was still using yahoo I would lose all my details!!! :(
So now i cant access my orkut account of three years, i cant edit anything in my profile, i cant accept testimonials and the whole process of creating a new account, re constructing a friend list of 289 friends seems like a very tiring job to do. if this had happened an year back i think i would have probably committed suicide. seriously i was completely ADDICTED to orkut. my day would be incomplete if i didnt log on to orkut, scrap a few useless people, write testimonials for a few friends. if by chance i didnt log on to orkut i wuld think about orkut the whole day. it was like dope. i couldnt live without it. but now an year later i dont feel a thing. i have lost my account and i just dont feel like creating a new account, renewing my contacts etc. i think right now i am more addcited to blogger than to orkut. i am so glad that i didnt lose my blogger account. Anyway so if u know/knew me on orkut and have scrapped me and are angry coz i havent replied u know the reason now. if ever i decide to create a new account i will let u know!! :)

Spring Cleaning - II

Well whether u like it or not here is part-II of spring cleaning. ;)

Bathroom:

The bathroom in our house is a really interesting place!! On entering there is a shelf which at any given point of time has 5 shampoos all at different stages of their lives. Some are new to the surroundings and some are just breathing their last breath. Its funny. My mom uses some herbal shampoo, my dad (who errr…doesnt have much hair left on his head) fears that after using the herbal shampoo his hair might start growing(i tease him saying that hair growing on his head would be like rice growing in the Sahara but he doesn’t listen) so he uses clinic plus, and then we also have sunsilk (for the guests mom says), my sister (when she visits) uses some shampoo whose name eludes me (honestly speaking I cant even pronounce it) and I use a little bit of all. I love experiments. I put a little bit of herbal+clinic plus+sunsilk+$%^*$ and put it on my head (which probably explains why I have lesser hair than my dad and whatever is remaining smells funny (read: smells like a pigsty)). All the persuasion from my side to reduce all of it to one bottle always falls on deaf ears

Anyway coming to soaps next. In the soap dish in my house you will find a green color soap, on whose back is piggy backed a pink color soap on whose back is a white color soap and so on. If u don’t know what I am talking about then obviously there is no one like my dad at ur house!! my dad believes that scraps of soaps should be preserved so that they can be joined along with the new soap thus forming two soaps. when asked why he cant throw the scraps of soap the gandhian inside my father surfaces and he says “there are children in Somalia who don’t get even a bucket of water a day let alone a piece of soap. you should consider urself blessed. never waste stuff when there are million out there in this world who have never seen it”.
and experience tells me that the minute the gandhian in my dad awakens the sarcasm in me must die and I must keep quiet. same is the case with toothpastes. my dad is never satisfied till he has squeezed the last drop of life out of the poor tube of toothpaste!!

Bedroom:

This time I have to face both amma and appa and two box cot’s full of junk (for people who are wondering what a box cot is it is a cot whose lower half aint empty. it is shaped like a box so u can keep stuff in it)
apart from this there is a cupboard full of useless papers
from the box cot I retrieve close to 25 unused dupattas

me: amma!! so many unused dupattas.i don’t care what u say. I am throwing these away. we don’t use even one of these now
amma: don’t be silly. I have been saving it for the winter months. when it gets really cold I can make a rajaai out of all these dupattas.
(she has been saying this for the past 4 yrs since we shifted to this house and come November we always buy a rajaai for the harsh winter, the dupattas forgotten )
next I discover a carton full of diaries dated from 1978 to 1996 most of them empty and some of them have my mothers neat handwriting on it describing in detail how she spent the princely amount of rs 1000(my dad’s salary in 1982) and how much of it she saved
(I cannot imagine how a couple could have lived in such abject poverty and my mother tells me that every month they used to send Rs 200 to each of my grandparents!! )
me: these moth eaten, rat bitten, infection carrying diaries!! do u need these??
amma: yes of course. good that u found these. I have been wanting to show u how wisely appa and I used to spend money and how neatly we maintained accounts. you children nowadays get a king’s salary you don’t save, you don’t invest, just spend spend spend!! tch tch. come here. see look at the entry for November 1983. that is the only time we used to get clothes for diwali. we saved every pie we could and that is the reason we have been able to give u such good education (next comes a long rigmarole about how my children will suffer if I don’t save or have a SIP-whatever that means. (I try telling her that the minute they become my children their suffering starts but refrain from saying so))

anyway the bottom line is I do not take the topic of the diaries again
next we move to the cupboard (I throw one piece of rag from the box cot after dusting and cleaning it for an hour!!)
I pick up around 10 kgs (no kidding) of appa’s official papers and proceed to throw them.
Appa stops me and the gandhian in him surfaces again.

Appa: are those papers printed on both sides or one side??
Me (after checking): hmmm…one side
Appa: so many bundles of paper with only one side written. How can u have the heart to throw them? It is because of people like u that half the trees in the Amazon forest are being cut down and things like global warming have become a reality.
Me: DUH!!! Sorry pa. Wont throw these. Will use it to write something!!

Anyway after cleaning three bedrooms and bathrooms I threw out a small polythene bag of stuff. What is most irritating is that over the period of 20 years my parents have thrown out my entire stamp collection (by mistake my mom still swears). my interest in philately has died since then, 12-13 posters of mine which I had painstakingly cut out of sports star every month, 287 éclairs wrappers that I had collected (don’t ask me why I did it!! I am weird. but I loved to look at those éclairs wrappers now and then and was damn proud of my collection) my entire box of paints, a pair of jeans-my favorite (those are the clothes u wear??? if u wear it out and go people might think we don’t provide for u or something!! was my mom’s argument) and so many other things which I loved and preserved!!
Anyway after that round of spring cleaning I took a vow never to assist my parents in this maddening hobby of theirs and so this is the concluding part of this series (do i hear a sigh of relief?? )!!

Random thoughts from my visit to Bangalore

1. The more I visit Bangalore the more I feel glad that I live in Chennai. I m not very fond of Bangalore (Sorry to hurt pro-bangaloreans but this is just my opinion). Some of the things about Bangalore which I will never get used to are
Traffic: the traffic in bangalore is a killer. A mere 7 kms will take you one and half hours. Its maddening to waste 2 hours in the traffic doing nothing but waiting at signals and waiting and waiting and waiting for an absolution that never seems to come!! :-\
Transportation: the Bangalore government should be kicked in all the wrong places for running buses which have numbers in kannada, number plates in kannada, the place names in kannada and bus drivers who speak nothing but kannada and have this inexplicable hatred for Tamils. U can’t go anywhere in public transportation in Bangalore unless you know kannada or know someone who knows the city well.
Weather: I am sure 99.99% of the people will disagree with me on this but I hate the Bangalore weather. I cant stand cold places. I hate being bundled up in woolens. I love the tropical climate of Chennai and the nippy Bangalore weather gets on my nerves

2.Old age is a sad sad sad thing. The more I look at old people the more I wish I die at the age of 50. It is scary to visit a relative who just a few months back weighed close to 60 kgs and now weighs less than half the original. It is even scarier when u bid her goodbye and realize that this is probably the last time you will ever see her. I wish they would find a cure for cancer.

3.The more I see cousins and relatives from the US the more I am convinced that I never want to visit the US and never want to leave India. I made this decision in my final year when everyone I knew was writing GRE to do their masters in some university in the US. I was just not interested. The very thought of leaving my parents and sister and grandmother scares the shit out of me and more importantly I never want a day to come when I will have to address the friendly neighborhood mosquito as a “bug”.

4.the hot chocolate which is available at the Bangalore city station coffee day sucks big time. Its just a spoon of drinking chocolate in plain hot water. Not even milk or milk powder. So if u are feeling cold in the night and happen to be at the Bangalore city station u know what not to have.

5.I have decided that if ever I have enough money I think I will buy a motorbike and ride it at a speed of 90 kmph on ECR. When sitting behind on a bike can be so much fun I cant even begin to imagine what fun it would be to actually ride one. A bike displaces the i-pod on my list of things to buy with my salary. I can ride a bike fairly decently, the only disadvantage being my height. My legs don’t reach the ground!! :(

6.Finally I had ice cream at the much hyped corner house in bangalore. Had this flavour called death by chocolate and for the past 48 hours since I had that I have been feeling guilty. Ok!! I will be honest. I hogged on the death by chocolate like a kid from Somalia who hadn’t seen food for 15 years but I wonder why all good things in life are fattening!! :(. criminal intake of calories but the ice cream was worth it!!

7.I have a problem with showing affection. When I am with a person who is close to me I act all cool and aloof and don an I couldn’t care less attitude and then later after the person is gone I sit for hours wondering why I was such a bitch. Sigh!! I am so confused.

8.I learned that it is not a very great idea to share your radical views on marriage with anyone above the age of 40. Have discovered that it is FATAL to tell them that you would rather have a dog than marry and have a husband. Warning: Never try this with ur relatives. U will get a specific marriage oriented lecture for an hour, then a general lecture about children today for another hour.

9.I love Chennai. The happiness that shedding sweaters and the warm weather give me is enough to make me live in Chennai all my life. There doesn’t exist another city which has as much life in it as Chennai does!!

10. I love the way Somerset Maugham writes. was reading a collection of short stories written by him on my way to bangalore in shatabdi (sad train!!) and back and i completely fell in love with some stories. have decided to do more quality reading from now on. should buy another collection of short stories by maugham!!

Butter Fingers!!!

I am clumsy. Ok I am very clumsy. Ok finally I am very very very clumsy. I cant do anything right the first time (or for that matter the second third and fourth time). When I try to cook I always burn whatever I am cooking (attempting to cook), if I am painting I spill the water on the canvas first, if I am drawing I smudge the paper and go oops, if I m driving a nail into the wall I drive my thumb in first, then I drive my parents crazy with my screaming and with the remaining energy I drive the nail into the wall, if I walk on a carpeted floor I trip on the carpet, if I walk on a non carpeted slippery floor I lose my balance and slip, if I walk on a non carpeted non slippery floor I stumble on some object and fall down, if I walk on a non carpeted non slippery floor with no objects I have the amazing ability to stumble over my own feet and fall down. I m not even going to talk about wet floors. On an average I bang my head on doors and walls at least thrice every week, skid on the stairs on all weekdays, stumble over my bed sheet and fall from my bed on weekends, get soap into my eyes everyday, put the soap into the commode periodically, cut my finger whenever I enter any kitchen, always drop whatever I am carrying. (sometimes I really do wonder what my fingers are made of. Butter?? Marble?? Soap?? Foam?? What is it?)

Till date I have broken 3 of my fathers spectacles (two by sitting on them and one by dropping them), broken 2 watches ( banged my mothers watch against a wall and my own watch broke when I fell from my vehicle), lost 3 pairs of gold earrings, broken a couple of plates and glasses at my sisters place (god bless the person who invented stainless steel. I cant even begin to imagine the havoc I would have wreaked had all cutlery been in porcelain and glass. My parents would have given me food in aluminium plates like they give doggies. Ewwwww!!). my grand mother tells me that instead of going oops, ayyayo, Sh*t, damn,(I will not mention the other words I use for obvious reasons) if I went rama, krishna the number of times I broke innumerable, countless things I would at least have attained moksha for all that punyam. Sarcastic grand mother u say and I totally agree with you. On a more serious note it is tough having a walking disaster like me in the house. My sister tells me I should enter her kitchen with a helmet and gloves if I have to avoid banging my head on the doors and cutting my hands with a knife. My mom and grandmother are smart. They don’t let me come anywhere within 10 km radius of the kitchen. The other parts of the house though, have to bear the brunt. Why I am built this way I don’t know!!

So needless to say in my family people don’t trust me with anything. if I am given any responsibility I either break the responsibility, lose the responsibility, forget the responsibility or disfigure the responsibility. errr yes. Once I was asked by mom to keep a potted plant on the parapet of our balcony (silly idea given me as a daughter and a house on the third floor). I diligently and ever so carefully carried the plant successfully till the balcony and even till the parapet. After that I placed it on the parapet, only the silly plant instead of resting its posterior on the parapet chose to go all the way down and smash itself into a million unrecognizable pieces. To this day I swear it was only because of the fact that I was suffering from astigmatism that the parapet seemed farther than it really was. The smirk and the sarcastic grin which my mother gives me make me think that she doesn’t believe my astigmatism theory. Parents can be so skeptical sometimes. That brings me to another aspect of my parents. Sometimes I think they only care for the objects in their house and not a priceless (priceless as in precious and not priceless as in priceless ass!!) daughter like me. For eg: sample this conversation between my mom and me

Me: amma!! I need to tell u something.

Mom: Hmmmm. What is it?

Me: I have decided that I have found my only true love and it is yousuf the milkman. I am deeply in love with him and have decided to run away and marry him because u will never allow us to get married otherwise. We have our future all planned. After marriage we will be moving to Afghanistan where he will join the mujahudeen or al quaeda and do social service by bombing more countries, I will convert myself to islam and bear him three children called osama, bin and laden who will grow up to be terrorists. Together we will wipe the human race off the face of this earth. In fact I urge appa and u to join the mujahudeen too and serve people. Inshallah!!

Mom: ok!! But shruthi if u are running away at night don’t stumble over the lamps and pots near the entrance and break them. Put the light on and run away if u want to but don’t break the pots.

You get the drift?? They just don’t care. Sometimes I think my parents should have given birth to pots and lamps and carpets if they care so much about them. I mean yeah I have broken a few (ok!! More than a few) things at home, lost a lot of things but still I am their daughter!!
But lately they have started caring a little. The reason?? Quoting my sister – “Oh my god who will marry an ungainly, clumsy girl like you. You cant cook, you are destructive, you cant walk without falling, cant carry food without dropping!! What are u going to do?”. Ah well. As Krishna so wisely quoted in the gita “whatever happens, happens for the best”. So if my clumsy and ungainly nature can result in “eligible” suitors rejecting me then there is nothing like it. I am glad I am this way and I hope I stay this way!! ;)

Random Rambles

Saw aaja nachle on Saturday. Good movie. Madhuri looks fab, kunal kapoor looks like a dream; konkona sen sharma does a great job. So why am I not exulting and going "Oh my god!!!!? Such a great movie!!"? Well it was just too predictable. Half an hour into the movie u know how the movie is going to end. U know the good guys get the bad guys, the bad guys lose, some bad guys become good guys and so on so forth. So the movie was just yawn!! But excellent dance. Someone who loves to dance would have completely enjoyed the movie I think (yours truly has got two left feet. I can’t dance even if u told me that George Clooney would marry me if I danced!! am that bad!!). but one time watch.

Sunday: Well. Nightmarish. An extremely trivial issue (at least I think it was trivial) got completely blown out of proportion and I was at the centre of the explosion. I think it is silly to make such a big issue out of nothing but I am also kind of glad it happened. A few things are out in the open and I can talk about them freely now. General opinion is that I seem to have a double personality. People mail me and tell me very politely "I think, maybe u have a double personality". It’s funny. There are people who have a double personality and are unaware of it. I am a person who is completely aware of it but I seem incapable of doing anything about it. I am like ur desi version of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Jekyll part of me is this nice, genial, happy go lucky person and the Hyde part of me is grumpy, complaining, aloof and a somewhat bitter personality. I am completely aware of the existence of both these characters yet I seem unable to change the Hyde into Jekyll. the irony is that people with whom I can afford to be Hyde I am all Jekyll and people with whom I should most definitely by Jekyll I am Hyde. u don’t understand what I am talking about.??? Good. Coz even I don’t understand!! :P.

I am a Gemini and most Gemini’s I know have this double personality. I am not justifying my behavior but I was just musing that maybe if I were born 20 days later or earlier I would have been a different person. Ah well!! Whatever!! I have had a gazillion ppl calling me names and telling me what to do and what not to do for the past week and I have reached a point where I am thinking that if all the energies which these people have been expending over me was used constructively and converted into some usable form, it could probably solve the energy problem of India and the world. is there some convertor which can convert advice energy to electrical energy? I would patent it using just the members of my family (i know their ability. i would be a multi billionaire in a month. i trust their advice giving capacity). I can almost hear some members of my family who read this blog going “my god!! She will never learn. Always sarcastic. Sheesh!! ”. Lol. But seriously I have reached saturation point.

Monday – work – break – work – lunch – work – work – work – take cab home at 11.00 reach at 12.00.

Tuesday – work – break – work – lunch – work – work – work – take cab home at 11.00 reach at 12.00.

Wednesday – work – break – work – lunch – work – work – work – take cab home at 11.00 reach at 12.00.

Did ya notice that? Did ya notice the absolutely happening life I have been leading for the past three days. Phew!! Each day has been so exciting I dunno what to expect. The thrill of anticipation just kills me. :-\ Ok!! I know I am being overtly sarcastic but seriously. I have had enough. Yesterday night I actually dreamt of JSP, Servlet and javascript pages. I can’t wait for the weekend. But then if my family members are in the same form as they were last weekend I wish the weekend flies away too!!

Thursday today. Not that I expect anything earth shattering or mind blowing to happen today but I hope it is peaceful without any comments from the guy sitting at the on site.