Bar Camp for Dummies (read: me!! :P)

Bar Camp Edition 2 is here in Chennai on the 18th and 19th of October guys. This post if for all you people who are going “bar camp”?? does that mean like u know, ahem, errr.. a camp which gives you free booze ??(errr which is kind of how I went when I first heard about it!! :P)

So here is a bar camp FAQ which i compiled for people like me.

1.Ok. So what is this bar camp thingy and why such a name?
Ans: well, do u know this guy called O reilly who write books on Java and bugged the crap out of us in college? And remember how he used the words “foo” and “bar” to give examples of objects in Java? Well the “foo camp” was something which was started by open source publishing guy O reilly and was an invitation-only participant driven conference. And to counter the foo camp and have an unconference which was open to all and not an invitation only event the bar camp was started and is a very famous un conference with sessions being conducted all over the world. Just google for bar camp and you will know what I mean.

2.Eeeeeeeks!! You mean like a geek fest?? Where people will talk about technology and open source and the likes? I would rather be caught dating Rakhi sawant or Vijaykanth than be caught in such camp.
Ans: Jeeeez. no. That would have been the foo camp. In the bar camp everyone who attends it is encouraged to present or facilitate a session which need NOT necessarily be technical. You can talk about blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, pod casting, wiki-ing. Everyone who attends the session would be encouraged to pick a label which reads “I am blogging”, ‘I am tweeting’, “I am wiki-ing” , “I am podcasting” and the likes. It is basically a place for u to meet a lot of likeminded people and talk about your interests with people who share them. The bar camp was born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. Some of the best conversations happen in the corridors and in between sessions where u can get to meet a lot of interesting people is what I have heard.

3.Hmmmm. Tell me more. I am not really convinced
Ans: first thing. You do NOT have to be a geek to enjoy/participate/organize a bar camp. Organizing, getting sponsors, getting a venue, setting up a wiki for this event are fun. Apart from that bar camps mostly contain an all night session where they have fun events (an all night hackathon where you are given a very secure site and asked to hack it is an example) and is basically and arena where you can learn a LOT not just about technology but about a many other things. This bar camp in Chennai is basically trying to shatter the “techie image” of the bar camp. So rest assured it will be fun.

4.Is this the first time it is happening here in Chennai?
Ans: Nope this is the second time. Bar camp is very popular in Bangalore and it just completed its 7th edition

5.So why are you talking about it on your blog??
Ans: Oh well!! Apart from being on the organizing committee (albeit a very very dormant organizer :P ) Cognizant is sponsoring this Edition of bar camp in Chennai and we are hoping to make it big and plus if you choose to be a part of the bar camp you have to help by spreading the word and doing your bit.

6.Naaaah. I am still not very convinced. Jeeez!! you are asking me to believe a half baked bean like you and come and attend the bar camp?
Ans: errrr. Ok. Fair enough. Do read about the bar camp in the following sites. I am sure you will be convinced. Though I take offence to the fact that you don’t take my word but choose to take Wiki’s word!! :P
Read THIS and THIS


7.Hmmm. Ok. So how do we register?
Ans: all right!!! Now we are talking!! :). Hurry up and register for the bar camp because there is place only for about 200 people and places are getting filled fast. Pass this around and tell a lot of people about it. Go Bar Camp Chennai!! :)

Click HERE to Register

Ganguly - Part II - Ganguly doesnt like Hide and Seek biscuits!! :P

Read PART I HERE

Slowly but surely ganguly became an integral part of our lives. We sought ganguly as soon as we came back from college and played with him till he got absolutely tired of us. He was adorable and the friendliest dog we had ever come across. His mother soon forgot about him and it was just us and him. He would mourn woefully when ever (if ever) we left for college and would wait eagerly for us to come back from college leaping on us with his forepaws on our body and his hind legs on the ground. In spite of the plethora of dogs on the campus it was ganguly who attracted us the most and was our favorite mainly because he was the cleanest dog on campus. All the other dogs were flea infested and growled fiercely and menacingly when we tried to shower our affections on them.

Ganguly apart from being clean also had class. He completely REFUSED to eat the mess food and turned up his nose at it just like us. We would coax him and cajole him and try to make him eat the inedible unpalatable muck dished out by the mess workers but he would stubbornly refuse. On the other hand give him anything which we bought from home or the college stores and he would eat it with relish. Milk bikis, ribbon from grand sweets, chicken biriyani from home, pulikachal from home would be gone in a jiffy. Keep a chapatti from the mess in front of him and he would stare disinterestedly at it and give us a look as if to say “you don’t really expect me to eat this do you? I have my standards” and refuse to touch it.

Another characteristic thing about ganguly was that he hated bourbon and hide and seek biscuits. It was fermie who discovered this I think. On the nights of exams when we would stay up till 3 or 4 in the morning studying (errr. We would have figured out what paper it was only at 12 in the night and hence it was mandatory to study till 5 at least to get the much coveted 36 marks) we would be ravenous with hunger and one of us would have a stock of some biscuits to keep the pangs off. Fermie, who loved ganguly more than any of us would keep at least 4 biscuits for him. This would be conversation between us

Me: (coming into her room) hey Ferm. Mi and I are hungry. There are still 4 biscuits left. I am taking this.

Fermie (usually a very soft and kind person would flare up saying): Adhu na ganguly ku vechirukken. (I have kept that for ganguly)

Me: Duh-huh?? I could die of hunger, I could faint at 7 in the morning and not be able to write the exam and you Fermie dear would be the only one responsible for this. Whats more important, my life or Ganguly’s?

Fermie: (making shrek pussy cat eyes at me): please Revs. He hasn’t eaten anything since dinner (neither had I but that didn’t seem enough to invoke fermie’s pity. I have often joked that Fermie would probably have liked me better and given me more to eat in college if I had had four legs, a pink color tongue hanging out and if the noises I made sounded like “Woof woof” or “bow bow”. Aaaaargh. Stop imagining me like that guys!!! :-\)

Me: Fermie please. Mi and I didn’t even have proper dinner. And u r wasting hide and seek biscuits on that mutt?? (don’t get me wrong. I loved ganguly but this was the heights. Given a choice between saving a malnourished kid in Somalia and his dog humanitarian that I am I would choose the kid. Fermie unfortunately didn’t think the same)

Fermie (with a determined look on her face): I am going now and giving it to Ganguly.

So I followed her and watched as she threw one hide and seek biscuit at him. He sniffed at it and looked away in disdain.

“Maybe we should feed him. It was kind rude of me to have thrown it at him” said Fermie

“Aaaaaaaarghhhhhhhh!!!” – that was me

So she called him close to her, opened his mouth and pushed yet another biscuit into his mouth. And would you believe it? Ganguly spat it out. 2 perfectly delicious, edible hide and seeks had been wasted all because Ganguly didn’t like chocolate biscuits. Eeeeeeeee!!!
Fermie tried the same thing with bourbon biscuits and discovered that Ganguly didn’t like even bourbon biscuits. KKK

In spite of our love for Ganguly, It was during exams that Ganguly irritated us the most. During exam times when we would spend sleepless nights and restless days worrying about how we were going to fare in our exams he would sleep peacefully, eat good food and play the whole day. oh for a life like ganguly’s is what we all wished for. Because he stayed with us we thought it was only fair that he should be made to study what we studied and know how difficult (?!?!?!) it was to be an engineer. And so we forced him to study thermodynamics, electronics, operating systems, DBMS etc with us. Following is a picture of muhizh and Tanya trying to teach him the basics of thermodynamics. Ganguly just wasn’t interested and only slobbered over the books and hence didn’t learn anything. I guess he didn’t want to become an engineer. I wonder why? Given the fact that most of us with an engineering degree work like dogs I wish he too had graduated with a degree



Then in second year when Ganguly was 14 years (ideally 2 but 1 human year is equal to 7 dog years) old he became an adolescent and before we knew it he went into heat and started fathering children left right and center all over the campus.
(To be continued)

Ganguly - Part I -Birth and entry into our lives

DISCLAIMER : Those of you who are reading this post expecting to read something about Dada and his unfavorable position with the selectors let me warn you that this post has nothing to do with him.

Twenty 17 years olds with no common bond between them, out of their homes for the first time in their lives, terribly homesick, hopelessly failing in all the class tests, ragged by seniors, awed by our “day scholar” peers who were “city girls”, apprehensive about everything and completely hating hostel life in an engineering college.

And then Ganguly happened. I still distinctly remember the day he came into our lives. It was 5 in the evening and the day of an India Pakistan match. Our seniors had bunked college and were sitting in the TV room watching the match. All of us (first years) had just come back from college, back to the wretched hostel and were sitting outside hostel, drinking a brown colored mildly warm, sickeningly sweet liquid which the mess workers liked to call tea and making polite conversations with each other about the day’s happenings when we heard whines and yelps from behind a bush where we were sitting. Having heard horror stories from seniors about how our hostel was infested with snakes (stories which we later passed on to our juniors!! :P) a few of us retreated from the bush while a few brave ones ventured into the bush to discover the source of the noise.

And there behind the bush lying next to his mother, looking at us shyly with black eyes which were limpid pools of innocence was Ganguly. The smallest, whitest, cutest and loveliest puppy we had ever seen. (Though I have many photos of Ganguly I don’t have a single one of his in that almost divine form of his.). we quickly called all the scaredy cats who had run away to show them the puppy (not christened as yet). We watched in unmasked delight as he shyly hid behind his mother probably embarrassed by the presence of 10 girls looking intently at him.

One of us (the only one who was in the senior’s good books – Fermie was it you?) called them to have a look. The match had just gotten over with Ganguly performing abysmally as the captain and losing out to archrivals Pakistan by a huge margin.

"Yevlo azhaga irruku" one girl squealed

"Eeeeeeeeeks. Rabies varum." Maintain your distance. That was me. I was a person who was very very scared of dogs (stress is on the word “was”. Ganguly completely changed my outlook and the day I make enough money and buy a house of my own, I will buy a German Shepherd or a cocker spaniel or german shepherd to give me company and name him Popeye!!)

It’s a boy squealed another one who had a dog at home

Yenna per vekailam? What shall we call it? this question was doing its rounds and suddenly a voice said “Lets name him Ganguly. The way he performed in this match only a dog deserves his name”. this sent peals of laughter and hoots of approval amongst all present and we turned around to see who had christened him. It was Sita akka. One of the nicest, seniors, then known to all of us as padips (a crude term used in engineering to refer to anyone who studied) and scholarship holder. So Ganguly he was and since his mother was friendly enough we gently lifted the little fellow and held him up high for everyone to look and admire while he yelped and whined for his mother.

Having restored him to the safety of his mothers lap (errr. What else would u call the part of a dog’s body where her children lie?? ), We spent the entire evening and a better part of the night looking at Ganguly, feeding him the mess food (which he refused politely, preferring his mothers milk to horse hide chapatis) and talking about him late into the night with the seniors.

At last we had found a common bond amongst us. At last were not scared of our seniors but were chattering happily with them about Ganguly. At last it looked like we were settling down.

(To be continued..)

Ganguly
For u guys to be able to relate better to ganguly here is a pic of him!! :)
Click to get a better image and to see Ganguly in all his glory!! (do check out his eyes!! :))

Of silly friends, the english language, office and marathons!! :)

1. So one of my closest friends Akila has gone to Sweden on an “on-site” trip. Being the first one to go from our group of “we-are-useless-and- we-hate-the-software-field-but-we-still-will-rot-here” group, all of us were enormously excited about her trip and asked her to mail us ASAP about Sweden, her hotel, her life, her work everything. Now Aki, nice though she is, for the life of her cannot write or type long mails. She uses all kinds of short forms whose meanings we are never able to decipher.
If I were to give an appropriate analogy I would say “Aki is to long letters as Osama Bin Laden is to world peace” or “aki is to words as maneka Gandhi is to non-vegetarianism”. You get the drift? She cant write.

So the other day we get a mail from her saying

(quoting her verbatim)

“hotel provides bf....thr r lots of stuff for bf...but then they don display the names”

And she sends this to our group of 6 friends all of whom are perverts in their own rights and whose thoughts are as straight as a Jalebi!!

One friend replies saying “they give u boy friends in the hotel?? Whoa?? Are they like tall dark and handsome. What do u care about the names of the ‘BF’??”

Another one replies saying “Aki, what the hell is wrong with u and what kind of a hotel are u staying in which provides blue films?? Eeeeeeyuck. And this is company accommodation??? And u want the names of the movies??? Eeeeeeee!!”

Another one thought it was buffet.

And not a single one of us actually understood that by ‘bf’ she meant breakfast.
It was only after she clarified, that we were enlightened!! :|

2.Sometimes wrong messages i.e messages of which you are not the intended recipient can be fun!! On Saturday I was to meet another very close friend of mine, Milinta, in bessy at 6 in the evening to share some high profile gossip about who’s going out with who and who’s marrying who. (Sighh!! Yeah. We are a group of sad individuals who meet at besant nagar ever other weekend, sit at Barista and discuss the lives of other people over a plate of dark temptation. Who was the dude who said “Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People?” Yeah, so we are small minds!! :P). So on Friday after a friendly round of unparliamentarily words had been exchanged and after we had politely called each other a “stinking pig” and “rotting piece of garbage” for not calling/mailing, we fixed up a time to meet and “discuss people” we hung up and I suddenly get a message from Milinta saying (quoting her verbatim)“I am meeting Revs tomorrow. :) :) :). God. I dunno y but I am so so so happy”

:D:D. I was flabbergasted when I saw that message coz among us friends we have a rule. No gooey sappy senti shit whatsoever!! Anyway not the one to let go a chance to throw some weight around all I can say is “Jeeez Mi!! I know I am smart and sexy and awesome and funny and intelligent and people are thronging and languishing outside my gates to catch a glimpse of me but do u really have to be so explicit??” :P

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww Mi!!wipe that embarrassed expression off your face. Now not only me but the whole world knows that u like me and die to spend time with me!! :D

3. I hate the English language. I think it is the most illogical and ridiculous language ever. This Saturday as I was volunteering at deepam and teaching the kids the spellings of a couple of words I was stumped by some of the questions posed by the kids. I mean sample this. I asked a kid the spelling of culture and he says “c-u-l-c-h-e-r” and I go “no, that’s wrong. Its c-u-l-t-u-r-e” and he says “but last week u asked me to spell teacher. Wouldn’t culture be spelt the same way?” and I am like “errrr. Ahem.. cough. That’s english” and the boy says to his friends “Yenna da indha akka ke onnum therila”!! :| :|. Pretty embarrassing u say and I completely agree. I dunno how to tell the kids that, that’s how the English language is where “feet smell and noses run” and “plural of goose is geese but moose remains moose” and so many other things. Next was teaching them how to use the “conditional formatting” feature in excel. Now I am pathetic at excel. I cant even add two numbers using excel and I have never heard of conditional formatting. Needless to say I made a complete fool of myself in front of 20 kids half my age with one of them telling me that I if I wanted to enter a formula in excel I must put an “=” sign in front!! :-\
Sigh!!! so much for having done “computer science and engineering”!!

4. my enthusiasm (for people who don’t know, I have been blessed with amazing levels of enthusiasm and energy and I very rarely get tired or lazy) reaches a nadir when I am organizing some activities in office. I hate office, I hate organizing games for people who are about as enthusiastic and interested as a wet sponge. I know I am being judgmental but I sit like a zombie in all the “Connect” (that’s what the “fun” group in my account is called) meetings keeping my mind shut and refusing to give any ideas and refusing to refute crappy ideas like “lets play housie or lets play antakshari (who plays antakshari except 14 year old school girls going on a bus to picnics)”.
This is soooo not me but I just cant bring myself to be enthusiastic about something being done in office. :-\

5. I ran the marathon. Yay yay!! I ran all 7 kms.
Ok. I walked 6.75 kms and ran the rest. Don’t blame me. There were about 50000 people running and there wasn’t even place to crawl let alone walk or run. The bottom line is that we finished running all 7 kms!! I ran mainly to get a “I love Chennai“ t-shirt but didn’t get it!! :(

So this Saturday fermie and I were in odyssey browsing through the books section to buy a gift for a friend.

Suddenly I notice this book called “World’s best short stories”. I open the book , see names like E.M.Forester, Saki, O henry and my BP goes up by several notches, my heart starts beating fast and with my fingers crossed I flip the book to look at the cost, give a huge sigh, realize that I have already bought this month’s quota of books and unwillingly place the book back on the shelf not willing to let go off it.

Fermie standing in front of another shelf is holding princess diaries part I (errr. yeah meg cabot is Fermie’s favorite writer. If u know Fermie you will NOT find this surprising). The book which she has wanted to buy for a long long time. She has all other parts except the first one. She slowly flips the book looks at the price tag, lets a huge sigh and replaces it again.

Suddenly she looks at me and says “Revs, u know what? I didn’t get u anything for ur birthday. I saw your reaction to that short stories book. I m gonna get u that”

And I go “U know Fermie, even I never got u a book for ur birthday. I am gonna get u princess diaries part I”

We look at each other for a minute and start laughing like crazy, get weird glances from an old man holding a book by Leo Tolstoy (weight of book = weight of old man) go to the billing counter and bill our books with a huge grin on our faces

I walk away with my short stories and she walks away with her princess diaries, with no guilty conscience of having spent too much on books. Buying gifts for friends aint such a bad thing, is it? ;)

Friendship - I just love that word!! :)

P.S: Ultimately we never got anything for the friend for whom we went to buy a gift!! :-\

P.P.S: Errr if any of u guys are having birthdays in the near future do come with me to odyssey. There is this book which I have wanted to buy for quite some time, and I am sure there is some book which you would like to have too!! :P

P.P.P.S: the book which I was referring to in the previous P.S is the entire calvin and hobbes collection worth 4000 bucks!! :rolling eyes:.

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - A Review

I have just finished reading 'A Fine Balance' by Rohinton Mistry and though not the one to do book reviews I find it impossible to not talk about this book. At 600 odd pages the book might seem like an onerous read but it is not. Once you start reading you never know how time flies but only revel in how wonderfully the writer etches out the lives of each of the four characters and seamlessly integrates them to give us a masterpiece of a book.

The book is set in 1975 Indira Gandhi’s regime at the time of the emergency and is set in an “unnamed place by the sea” and it takes you little time to figure out that the author is talking about Bombay. And it talks about the lives of four people (two tailors, a widow and a student) who are innocent victims of the emergency, and how they co-exist under the same roof. Mistry defines the lives and background of each of the four characters beautifully and spends a lot of time building up the plot. By the time the book ends you don’t complain about the size of the book but wish there was more to read.

This is one book which can make you sit up and think. There are many parts in the book where you will go “Chiiii, disgusting!!” and you will try flipping pages to reach a good part and ignore the bad part when a small voice inside you will tell you that however disgusting it is and how much ever you try to ignore it, it is true and your not reading it wont change it. You realize that though the characters are fictitious their lives and stories are those of real people.

It portrays India in its rawest form, telling us about its villages, telling us horrific stories about how the lower castes were/are oppressed by the upper castes, telling us about the unscrupulous politicians, corrupt police officers, life in the chawls of Bombay. I could just keep going on. Mistry is such a wonderful storyteller that at many points in the book you find yourself almost pleading Mistry to make the protagonists have a happy life. The book is painful, depressing, sad, thought provoking and is bloody brilliant.

There is a particular line in the book where the widow asks someone if she should inform the police, which will always stay with me.

This is the conversation between them.

“Should I make a complaint to the police” asked Dina.
He gave her a weary look. “If you like. But you might as well complain to that crow on the window.” The bird cawed and flew away, he felt vindicated.

The sarcasm, light humor and irony of the line hits you right on the face

After shantaram this is one book which I badly wanted to write a review about. After kite runner this is one book which has made me cry, after thousand splendid suns this is one book which has made me empathize with the characters and after a long long time a book has made me sit up three nights in a row to complete it and I don’t regret it.

Do NOT pick this book up if you are looking for some light reading because this book will make you brood and think and give u sleepless nights, making your question your own insensitivity and blissful ignorance to so many crying issues in this country. This book gives you the raw truth the way no other book does.

Waiting to read Family Matters by Mistry

Snap out of it - part II - The ordeal of passport size photos!!

Inspired by arun I decided to write a sequel to “THIS”. I forgot to write about the one situation which sends shivers down my spine even as I think of it.

Passport photographs: now I have never really understood the concept behind taking passport size photos. Right from class 6th onwards when I got my first passport size photograph taken, I have dreaded sitting in front of some unknown person who asks me to lift my chin, smile a little, straighten my hair, hide my bald pate etc. I don’t understand. Why do u need passport size photos for exam application forms? I mean ok. If u know you are going to top the state and expect to see ur picture in the paper with a caption below which reads “Srinivasan Ananthakrishnan (errr.yeah. These toppers, I have noticed, usually have names like that!! :P) has topped the state with a whooping 495/500 and the last time he saw a TV or read something other than subject books was when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated”.

Ok. I know I am being sarcastic but coming back to the point if you know you are state topper material then it makes sense to paste ur photo in the application form. For normal folks like me who get the 1258748th rank in state and the only way we can have our picture in the paper is, if someone is kind enough to write an obituary with a picture for u. why the hell do I need passport size photos? I am not exaggerating when I say that not even one passport size photo of mine looks decent. In most of them I look like some serial killer who gets pleasure out of gouging out the eyes of her victims, drinking their blood and wearing a chain made of eye balls. And remember I am not exaggerating.

And it doesn’t help that I get my passport size photos taken at this place in adyar which is run by a woman and a man who loathe smiling as much as I loathe being photographed. I mean they NEVER give any expression. They have this deadpan expression on their face all the time which betrays no emotion and even a person as charming as me has been unable to penetrate their thick skins!! :P. Most of the times this is the conversation between us

Me: passport size photo?

Lady: mhmmh kum ulla oklum

Me: (thinking) errr. Sorry ma’am I don’t understand Swahili, or was that Maori?

Me: eh? Sorry?

Lady: mhmmh kum ulla oklum

She says again pointing to a dark room at the rear of the studio.

(sitting on a small stool in a dark room staring at a man who looks like he has never seen sun light in his life)

Man: look at the red light

I sincerely look at the red light

Man: chin up, eyes down

I Chin up and look down.

Man: small smile please

I mentally strangle him, slit his throat and gouge his eyes out. The image gives me a lot of happiness and a smile creeps on my face

Man: give good smile please

Me (mentally): eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! Baring all my teeth

Man: look to the left and straighten ur shoulders.

Finally after giving me approximately 45637 instructions he clicks, the flash blinds my eye and I close them.

Man: one more photo ku okkarunga. You have closed ur eyes in this one.

After about 20 minutes which would even test the patience of mother teresa the ordeal is over and the result is a photo which would fit perfectly in the wanted list in the police stations and looks nothing like a person who wants to apply for admission into a prestigious university!! :-\

Till date I strongly believe that I didn’t get admission into any of the colleges that I wished for only because of my photo. :-P.

I suck!! :(

I cant talk to relatives. It gives me the heebie jeebies. With friends I am in my element. I can talk about that latest PGW book or she can tell me about the cute guy in her office who has been giving her the looks or about the sad lunch in office or about where to go this weekend and which movie to watch or about the latest pepe jeans, 60%(GASP!!) off sale in adyar or soooooooooo many other things. I never run out of things to talk about when I m talking to friends. I may run out of time (mostly), energy (rarely), patience (hardly) but I never run out of ideas.

But what do u talk about to a person whom you meet once in 2 years. What do u ask about after u have finished talking to them about the weather in their country, the weather in your country, your work, their work, their college, their trip etc. though these might seem like a lot of topics to talk about talking about all of this takes exactly 2 minutes and 33 seconds

Them: So, how’s work Shruthi?

Me: Yeah!! Good!! *GRIN*(I cant tell them that the query I tried to run did everything but run. It crawled, it stumbled, it walked, it made me cry but didn’t run. I cant tell them that the guy at on site has a certain funny of speaking and ends each sentence with a sound which errr sounds like a release of gas and most of the times I am caught laughing like crazy when I ought to be listening seriously. I cant tell them any of this so I say good.) you?

Them: yeah good. (they again cant tell me about so many things primarily because I wont understand)

Me: *GRIN*

Them: hmm. So nice weather in India

Me: yeah. Rains. How is London?

Them: good good. It always rains there

Me: *GRIN*

See. Maybe I was exaggerating when I said it takes 2 mins and 33 seconds. It takes even less.

It was different and great when Preethi (my sis) was here. we had a deal. Preethi would do the talking and I would do the grinning. No two ways about it. only the questions which were addressed to me would be answered by me otherwise by default it would be her answering. It worked perfectly. I didn’t have to listen to complaints from home about how I never visited relatives and neither did I have to talk much when i went visiting. But now with Preethi in Dubai I have to do it all alone. I mean imagine having to do the grinning and talking all alone!! :(

I miss Preethi. She is amazing. She loves to talk. She can talk to ANYONE. There is never a lull in the conversation when she is talking. Most of the times I just google at her in amazement. I mean how can anyone talk so much so easily. She will talk to them about office, about home, about how she has been putting on weight (while happily munching the chocolates they bring) about how she still uses something which they bought her 4 years back (how does she even remember things like this??) etc etc.

Like a cousin of mine says “Preethi loves everyone and everyone loves Preethi. You can either love her or really really love her. No two ways about it” . Needless to say all my relatives love her and feel uncomfortable around me and I don’t blame them. Its an irony. She loves it when relatives come visiting and spends the better part of the year waiting for my uncles to visit. She is crying buckets now coz she is in dubai and cannot be in india to visit my relatives. I on the other hand don’t exactly look forward to their visits the way she does. Mind you, I love them and all that but I cant talk. I can grin, I can smile and I can nod in agreement and even make little grunting noises but I cant talk.

So yesterday before visiting a couple of relatives, I thought I would ask Preethi for some tips on how to talk and this was how the conversation went

Me(mailing her): Preeethi. Call!!

(Tring Tring)

Me: Hello

Preethi: hmmm. Bol. Kya hua?

Me: (almost hysterical) Preethi. Help!!! I am visiting ABC and XYZ today and I have no clue what to talk about. I am going alone, all ALONE. Help!!! come to india NOW!!

Preethi: Shut up Shruthi. Is this why u asked me to call? I cant believe I am wasting an international call on this. Shruthi. They are ur relatives. You have known them all ur life. They have done do much for us. Why cant you talk to them. You are insensitive and ungrateful and cold and sarcastic and..

Me: hey hey!! Easy on the praises ok? I didn’t call you to get a lecture from you on my character

Preethi: see. That’s your problem. you are sooooo sarcastic. I don’t understand you man. you can talk so easily to friends. It’s the same with relatives. I have seen, you always do this. On the phone you will give the phone to someone else and run away, you wont talk or give straight replies. Maybe you should stop writing blogs. that seems to fuel ur cynicism. Frankly shruthi, what is your problem?

Me: ok. How about we have the “Lets psychoanalyze Shruthi” class later? Can u help me out or not?

Preethi: you are impossible. I cannot talk to someone who is as stubborn and receptive as a 100 inch thick wall. I might as well talk to the nearest wall than talk to you

Me: Right!! Thanks for being so helpful

Preethi: oh. Don’t mention it!!

Me: bye

Preethi: bye!! HUMPH!! :-\

So I went yesterday and made a fool of myself and came back. :-\. Not my fault. My sister wasn’t helpful!!

If any of my relatives are reading this, I am sorry I am such a boring and frigid person and I am sorry you have to put up with me. I love you guys, but I cant talk!!

I am jinxed

I am jinxed. I am soooooooo jinxed. Why why why why why me? Why is it always me? Why does Murphy like to **** (four letter English word starting with ‘F’ and rhyming with duck and truck to be inserted here) my life up always.

When I board planes they get cancelled, when I try to get into trains I don’t get a reservation, when I get into buses the bus will break down 9 times out of ten, when I go to withdraw money at the ATM the ATM will run out of money, my only favorite thing on the office lunch menu will miraculously get over EXACTLY when my turn comes. When I am driving the signal is always red, when I am walking the pedestrian crossing is always red, when I watch saina nehwal play a match, she loses, when I ask for a particular book at the book store it is never there, when I write code it, never works, when I am typing a mail or a post and forget to save it, 10 times out of 10 I will accidentally switch the main switch off with my leg, when I sometimes blog/read blogs from office my manager will pass by, when I do an exam well everyone in the entire country does it well, when I do an exam poorly everyone in the entire country again does it well.

I am SICK and TIRED of my wretched unlucky life.

The other day I had to withdraw some money from the ATM and went to the ATM machine in office. The machine worked perfectly for the person just in front of me. my turn came, I went in put my card inside and what does the blasted ATM machine do? It eats up my god damned card and says “Sorry, this ATM is temporarily out of service”. Here I am standing outside the machine without a single penny in hand and there the ATM machine happily gobbles up my card and expresses regret over doing so. I kicked the machine, pressed the cancel button, pressed the exit button, pressed the cancel and exit button together, pressed the cancel button and the exit button in quick succession but to no avail. So I called up the darned bank told them that their ATM machine has this weird problem of gobbling up cards and not giving it back, blocked my card and turned around and what do I see? The machine is working PERFECTLY and the person who was standing behind me is putting his card in, withdrawing money and giving me a condescending look which says “Jeeez, 22 years old and u cant even withdraw money without goofing up?”

I mean it could have happened to the person in front of me, it could have happened to the person behind me, it could have not happened at all but no. even inanimate objects like ATM machine sense a jinxed person and start acting up.

2 days back a friend and I were watching saina nehwal play against some Indonesian player. And she lost and I am like “Jeez. Maybe we shouldn’t watch when India plays in the Olympics. Thank god we didn’t watch Bindra shoot man. Heh heh!!” and my friend says “Actually no, I watched bindra’s shooting live. hmmm’. and I am like “ :-\. Ok great!! Then its just me.” Poor Nehwal she was leading by 9 points when i switched on the TV to watch her play. I mean heights.

I try my level best to be positive and optimistic and try telling myself that it could have happened to just about everyone. I try telling myself that there must be people whose mobiles fall into the lift shaft from the fourth floor EVERYDAY, that there must be people whose buses break down at 12.00 in the afternoon on a really really hot day EVERYDAY, that there must be people who get caught by their manager for having embarrassing messages on their communicator windows EVERYDAY , that there sure must be people whose ipod gets infected by a deadly virus and they end up losing 800 songs everyday!! :-\

I am tired of being optimistic also. I am tired of thinking that there will be a day when I will get up in the morning, open the tap in our house and find water coming out and not rush to my grandmothers house everyday to take a bath, tired of thinking that there will be a day when I will step out of the house and not have my white salwar splattered with dirty water by an insensitive motorist, tired of thinking that there will be a day when I will reach office smoothly without the bus breaking down or getting caught in traffic, that there will be a day when I will enter the restroom in office and find both tissues and soap present (everyday either one will be missing!!), that there will be a day when my code will run without issues, that there will be a day when I don’t accidentally switch off my comp.

I am not being pessimistic, neither am I being optimistic. I am just being practical when I get up everyday in the morning and remind myself that there will be no such day and tell myself “Your day is gonna suck Revs. You might as well be prepared for it and brace yourself.”. This at least makes me value the small things which bring happiness into my jinxed life, like a courier from a friend with a lovely note and a chocolate, a mail from another friend over the seas, a silly chat with my sister, chain mails from college friends, a word of praise from a reader, an uuuu from a friend, music by Rehman, Atif Aslam’s voice. Hmmmm
You know what? Life aint all that bad!! :)

P.S: Read Part I and Part II of Jinxed HERE and HERE.
Sigh!! Now i have started a series!! :(

I dont care!! :-\

I was not born to optimize SQL queries. My parents DID NOT give birth to me 22 years back for me to sit and optimize queries. I don’t care if a blasted query takes 200 seconds to run or 187 seconds to run. The fact that the queries I write are even running is a big thing and now I need to optimize it??? I don’t care if I overload the server because the pathetic queries I write tend to run twice as longer than queries that size are usually supposed to run. I don’t care if the left outer join I wrote cannot give good results, I don’t care about the number of seconds which can be saved by using an inner join instead of a normal join, I don’t care about the difference between a right outer, left outer, inner and equi join.

For all I care the wretched query can run all my life, overload the server, hang the database, kill all operations and sabotage the entire project. I DON’T CARE!!

Writing optimum queries and good code does not give me a kick. I DON’T CARE!!

I do not shed happy tears when I see “Query executed successfully” on my screen. Given the fact that I have to run 20 more similar queries which will take their own sweet time to run, the only tears I feel like shedding are the ones Sreesanth shed when Bajji slapped him. I DON’T CARE!!

I DON’T CARE, I DON’T CARE, I DON’T CARE!!! :-\

P.S: I started writing this post and running a miserable query at the same time. I am done with the post. Mr.Miserable query is still running!! :-\
P.P.S: it ought to be a crime to have more than 4 lakh records in a database!! :-\

Operation Sunrise - II and a perfect weekend :)

Read Part I of Operation Sunrise HERE

Sometimes in life there are moments which are so beautiful and perfect and their beauty is accentuated by the fact that they are so commonplace, so simple that you would miss them if u blinked. I had many such moments this weekend

Perfect moment 1: 2 o clock in the afternoon, four friends sitting in the theatre and watching dark knight, mouths wide open, eyes wide open and with one single thought in their mind. “Please please let Joker win at the end and batman can go take a hike”. Heath Ledger, I cannot understand what possessed you take your life after that absolutely mind blowing performance as joker in dark knight. Lets put a smile on that face!! Sigh!! Move over George(clooney), heath has my attention now.

Perfect moment 2: 6 o clock in the evening, three friends in a garment shop holding up a shirt, falling in love with it, trying it on, realizing that since they are errr horizontally challenged they cant get into it and looking wistfully at another girl who looks like she has a carrot for breakfast, cabbage for lunch and water for dinner reject the shirt because it is too big for her. Sighhhhh!!!

Perfect moment 3: 7 o clock in the evening two friends in odyssey, buying books left right and center without a care about the price tags (something which we have never done). Reason: errr. We were supposed to be buying books for my sister and she was paying for it. (ok Preethi. close that mouth of yours. i just spent some 2000 bucks of your money. you cant be angry with me for that?? *making shrek pussy cat eyes*)

Perfect Moment 4: 9 o clock in the night, five friends sitting in ascendas drawing a errr ummm graph writing in centre the name of the guys from college whom we liked as much as mallika sherwat likes clothes, china likes democracy and karunanidhi likes jayalalitha, and connecting their names to each other and giggling like a bunch of hyenas while commenting on the four losers sitting in our adjacent table who all had laptops open on their tables and were pretending to be really busy working. Further investigation told us that one of them was orkutting, another was chatting on yahoo and the others were errr watching pics not suitable for children under the age of 18!! :-\

Perfect Moment 5: 12 o clock in the night five friends watching re runs of Friends, laughing at Joey and the craziest of them screaming “Its twelve guys. Happy Friendship Day!!!” and all of them falling on top of each other in an attempt to wish each other happy friendship day.

Perfect Moment 6: 2 o clock in the morning five friends, one dressed in pajamas too tight for her, one dressed in pajamas too loose for her, another errr not very dressed, and the rest still wearing their dirty jeans and not changing out of sheer laziness, talking about extremely profound things like our single and happy status, about why XYZ and ABC who were going around were a not so perfect match and why PQR who told us about it and heard about it from LMN should probably tell EFG that she loves him but was EFG in turn in love with JKL who was broken hearted because UVW had ditched her and ended their relationship when college ended? And the sleepiest friend came up with the brilliant suggestion that maybe PQR wasn’t errr straight and liked people of the same gender!! :P

Perfect moment 7: 3 o clock in the morning, five friends in a dingy kitchen, one making maggi noodles and acting like she is making aloo gobi and butter naan, another one taking a video of her making maggi noodles and acting like she is PC sriram shooting a movie with the top hero and heroine in the industry, another taking an interview of her and acting like she is simi garewal interviewing tarla dalal, and the rest giggling like there is no tomorrow.

Perfect Moment 8: 5 o clock in the morning three sleepy heads falling over each other, one sleepy head complaining that she has to write a mock CAT and needs her intellectual sleep if not beauty sleep, one kozhupu edutha nai (errr. roughly translated as fat filled dog) who kicks the other four in unmentionable places to wake them up and says “Lets finish operation sunrise II. Lets go to the beach and watch the sunrise” and five friends stumble out of the house and walk to the beach to watch the sun rise over the bay of Bengal

Perfect Moment 9: 6 o clock in the morning five friends sitting on the beach, the waves touching their feet, not a word spoken between them, admiring the break of dawn something which we saw during the last operation sunrise an year and a half back and wishing the moment would freeze like that forever.

Perfect Moment 10: 6 o clock in the evening two friends at the beach surrounded by some acquaintances, looking at each other and asking “Where do we go for dinner”, both thinking for a minute, smiling and going “MIK” in unison. Errr. for the uninitiated MIK stands for Murugan Idly Kadai on besant nagar beach and if you haven’t had the butter onion utthapam and Sakkara pongal there you are missing out something big in life.

Is it plagiarism if you borrow a couple of lines from a friend and paste it on your blog??? Naaah. Its just called borrowing and never returning something which we guys have been doing for ages now!! ;)
So quoting Milinta from her post on THIS unforgettable weekend “Give me some memories, give me some laughter and give me some chatter. Or just give me my friends.”
Here’s to another successful Operation Sunrise, another great weekend and a great set of Friends!! :)

Notes

1. On a happy note, it rained today in Chennai . After 4 long days of having oppressively hot weather it rained and it felt like heaven. While everyone around me went around carrying umbrellas, I had a capital time splashing in ever y small puddle I came across, wetting my legs (and thereby allowing all kinds of germs to reside on self), humming a song, loving the feel of the little drops on my eye lashes and shivering a little. Only after it rained I realized how much I had been waiting for it to rain.

2. On a sad note, two of my closest friends who work in the same office as me have been shifted to another god forsaken office. They were my only touch/link with my college life and now that they are gone lunch will never be the same again. No more giggling sessions, no more looking at everyone and commenting, no more fight for the gulab jamoon (the only decent item on our office lunch menu). Sigh!! I am supposed to be a very change liking and accepting person. How come things in my life in which I want a change in remain the same ALWAYS?? :

3. On a distressed note, my feet have started stinking again – BIG TIME. I mean the smell had abated fairly such that only I could smell them but for the past 3 days the smell has become worse with my team mates saying “what is that disgusting smell like a rotting dead rat which hasn’t been discovered for 4 days”. I don’t have the heart to tell them that its me!! :( Guess its time for me to buy mycoderm again!! Sigh!!! why me? :(

4. On a euphoric note, a certain post written by a certain friend of mine on a certain unpleasant event which happened in my life (I cant confuse u more can i?? :P)has me grinning from ear to ear . I have fallen in love with my friend all over again (errr. in a totally platonic sense of course!! :P). Thanks a lot A!! love ya!!

5. On an important note, henko stain champion is a much much better soap than Surf excel/rin supreme bar. I never knew the white salwar which I had could actually be this white till I washed it with henko stain champion. Leaves a pleasant smell too, which is more than what can be said of my feet and shoes!! :P. so all u people out there struggling with rin supreme and wondering “itna jhaag aata hai par daag kyun nahi jaata?” throw that bar and get henko stain champion. Trust me I m no brand ambassador for henko stain champion

6. On a very serious note, a friend of mine has started an NGO which is a first of its kind called earn karma. Please do check out the site HERE. Remember all those times when u wanted to help, but didn’t whom to approach or knew someone who was in need of help and wished to raise funds but didn’t have enough contacts? Well now u have a forum which does away with those small problems. So register today and EARN KARMA!!

7. On a boastful note, Revathi Ramanan will register for the 21 km give life Chennai marathon which is being held in chennai on august 31st and whats more she even hopes to win it and buy a flight ticket to dubai to visit her sister with the prize money of 10 lakhs!! :P

8. On a surprised note, I was reading my 12th standard slam book the other day and most of my friends then have written “stay the same revs, don’t change”. I m very surprised. Even if I were given a million dollars I wouldn’t want to be the person I was in 11th and 12th. I have changed by leaps and bounds in the past 6 years. I was a nerd whose idea of entertainment was solving math problems and I wasted two golden years of my life slogging my ass out to get into BITS (which I eventually didnt). I was a silent, morose, boring, painfully shy and sad individual who wore specs, had braces and was 10 kgs overweight. Something tells me that for lack of anything better to write they wrote “don’t change” in my slam book!!

9. On a wistful note, I read THIS article and I am still hopeful that one day I shall become Mrs Clooney!!:P

10. On a sarcastic note, personally I feel the person who writes the use cases in my project might as well write them in swahili or Egyptian hieroglyphics rather than wasting his time and doing it in english. Would be easier for me to translate hieroglyphics and symbols rather than trying to understand what the hell is it that he is trying to say. Seriously. It would be easier to make a 5 year old kid understand leo tolstoy’s war and peace than make me understand the use cases. (assuming that I have the IQ level of a normal 22 yr old and the 5 yr old has the IQ level of a normal 5 yr old!! :P)

Say Cheese, Click...Oh "Snap" out of it!!

I hate posing for photographs. Well!! Not that I am a celebrity of some kind whose house is being thronged by photographers of all kinds who go “Please please come out so we might get a glimpse of u and take a picture” but the rare times that some one does actually want to take a picture of me I cringe and shy away and try to give lame excuses about how the flash blinds my eye or pretend to not notice that fact that the photographer is actually waiting to take a snap and purposely wander to a place which is devoid of photographers.

No seriously. Maybe this makes me sound like a snooty and haughty person who thinks she is too high and mighty to actually pose for a photograph with peasants but most of the times I never know what expression to give when I am being photographed. My expressions in all the photos which feature me range from “please finish taking this photo soon coz I badly need to visit the loo” expression to the “I am a model for close up toothpaste and this photo is to prove that I have 32 teeth” expression to the “I am a mean machine and I eat small photographers for breakfast and the big ones for lunch” expression.

I have some friends who are naturals when it comes to posing for a photograph. I envy them and I wonder how they manage to strike the right expression at all times and how their face automatically curves into a smile while my attempts to smile result in leaving a constipated expression on my face and a pain in my jaw due to the forceful smile. There are a lot of occasions where I am stumped as to what expression to give

1. Marriages:
Now what do u do when u go to the wedding of a person you don’t know very well? You go up on stage, give the gift all the time hoping and praying that the photographer doesn’t grin and say “one minute photo please” and the minute u finish ur prayer u hear a voice saying “one minute photo please” and u stand there wondering what to do with ur hands. Do u put them around the arm of the person next to u – but wouldn’t that look too informal? or do u fold ur hands across ur chest and stare stupidly into the camera (my standard and favorite expression which I have mastered after years of practice and attending useless weddings) but wouldn’t that look too unfriendly? Or do leave ur hands by your side – but hey this is a wedding not the national anthem being played at the republic day parade that u need to stand in attention. So every time I attend weddings I try to hide behind a horizontally challenged person (read: fat) so that I don’t feature in them snaps!!

2. Eating at marriages:
This is by far the most uncomfortable and irritating situation ever. All the times when you sit to eat the wonderful marriage food and wonder if you should drink the payasam first or attack the bisibelebath first and are trying to solve this delectable confusion, the second vilest threat to mankind (the first place goes to… brokers) a.k.a photographers and video men will materialize from no where, put a blinding light on your face and try to capture a picture of you eating there by broadcasting ur eating habits to the entire world (the world wasn’t supposed to know that u put all five fingers into ur mouth when u eat!! :rolling eyes:)

And all the time you are left to wonder what you should do. Should u eat like a glutton unmindful of the camera – but jeez!! What if geroge Clooney stumbled across this video one day and decide against marrying u saying u had disgusting eating habits? Or should u just stop eating and look into the camera and stare stupidly – but wouldn’t that be too artificial and wouldn’t people think u r trying to hog the limelight? Or should you eat daintily just picking at the food and pretending that the bisibelebath and aloo sabzi are trivial things for a person with your level of sophistication? Naaah? Given my level of “sophistication” (the most sophisticated I can get is using one straw to drink milkshake rather than using two of them and inserting them into my nostrils!!) I could never do that. So most of these marriage videos which feature me capture me with food on my hands and a stupid expression on my face.

To all u dorks who are going “ha ha!! Yeah right. Like u have an intelligent expression on ur face all the time” I am going to show u how sophisticated and intelligent I am – Author putting out her tongue at the audience and going Uuuuuuuuuuuu!! :P Humph!! Now if that’s not sophisticated and intelligent I dunno what is. :-\

3. group photos:
Now I have close to 8 gb of photographs of college life which is close to some 1000 odd snaps and only about 100 of them feature me. All through college I enjoyed being the photographer rather than being a part of the photo. All through college two words which I dreaded the most weren’t “internals” or “results” but “say cheese”. The photos which were taken without my knowledge were ok because I didn’t actually have to strive for an expression. But as soon as someone asked me to pose I would become conscious and try to achieve what looked like a smile but what finally came in the photo was a cross between a grin and a smile which would look so artificial that people would look at the photo and go “you spoilt the entire photograph man. Everyone is smiling and you look like a person who has escaped from rehab and badly wants a bottle of liquor”.
Not my fault. I just wasn’t born with the “smile-when-someone-clicks-a-camera-gene” in my body

I just hope the day George (Clooney) asks for my hand in marriage he agrees for a quiet ceremony and does not insist on a huge wedding inviting everyone and being photographed because I HATE being photographed and posing for snaps!! :P

Tagged!!

Aravind has tagged me and because i am as occupied and as busy as a 90 year old woman and have as much work to do as Parthik Patel does in the indian cricket team this weekend i decided to do it. So here goes the taggg!!

6 whatever’s about me:

1. I have two completely contrasting personalities. Revs-1 is a brooding, morose, silent person who speaks only when she is spoken to, doesn’t like the presence of people around her, wants her personal space and enjoys solitude.
Revs-2 is jolly, extremely talkative, speaks all the time, silly, needs to have people around her all the time and can get depressed when she is alone.
People who know Revs-1 cant believe that Revs-2 exists and vice versa. Mt attempts to merge these two personalities have not succeeded.

2. I am extremely scared of sharp things and fire. Surprisingly when I am holding a knife or a candle I am not scared but I get the heebie jeebies when someone else holds a knife or candle.

3. I suffer or rather used to suffer from severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) but thanks to a friend of mine who told me about it, its under control. I used to do crazy things like
--I have this fear of odd numbers. I dunno why. When I get into the bus I try to make sure there are even number of people in the bus. When I am walking from one place to another I count the number of steps in between and if its an odd number I decide I am going to have a crappy day.
--I cant stand it if one hand of mine is wet and the other is dry. I feel the need to necessarily wet my other hand too. Apparently this is because people suffering from OCD need to have a feeling of evenness
--I also have this obsessive habit of adding up the numbers on all the number plates of the vehicles I see. There have been times when I have ignored a signal change and gone on adding the numbers
--if I see a square flooring I do the knight walk. I dunno why but involuntarily I take three steps forward two steps right when I am on a square flooring.
--I have this obsessive spell check habit. If I am typing on MS Word I HATE the red and green squiggly lines I see. I have this habit of doing away with all the errors however small and silly they are. Most of the time I end up doing an ignore all but still I must do it
And many other such weird habits.

4. I don’t dream. I have never had a single dream till date. People tell me that I dream but I don’t remember them but personally I think I don’t dream at all

5. I am a very very very absent minded. I pull push doors and push pull doors, in the rest room once I dropped my cell into the dust bin and put my tissue into my bag, weekly at least twice I board bus no 38 though the bus which goes to my place is bus no 39 and I end up walking at least a km everyday, I cant carry two things. If I carry my handbag and another bag I misplace one of the two, if I carry my handbag and a pen or book more often than not I will lose the book. Sometimes I think I lack a brain.

6. I hate milk. I cant stand the sight, color and smell of milk. In spite of threats from my mother who says if I carry on like this all my bones will crumble and fall due to osteoporosis at the age of 30 and I ll die a premature death I find myself unable to assimilate the goo.

5 things I miss right now:

college life. My carefree existence. My friends. My room. My room mate. My warden. The hostel food. The hostel dog ganguly. The snake catching pit behind our hostel. Our gossip talking nook behind the mess. The culturals. The symposiums. The crazy night outs. The insane semester exams. Makku. Watching 5 movies a day. sleeping till 1 in the afternoon. The trip to stores. The walks to the temple. The miserable cup noodles. Sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! I wish I could go back to college.

errrr. That’s 20 things I miss right now. I hope that’s ok.

10 things I wanna achieve in a decade:

Achieve?? Naaah!! I don’t like that word. Makes me feel like Anil Ambani. I have small dreams which I hope to fulfill by the time I reach the age of 35 and they are:

1. To go on a tour of India with nothing but a backpack with four pairs of clothes, a good pair of shoes, some friends and some money. To climb all the mountains, at least those in India. To go on a trip to the north east and see arunachal Pradesh, imphal etc.
2. to go bungee jumping
3. to do scuba diving and go in a submarine
4. to adopt a girl child
5. try my level best to not get married
6. to start an NGO
7. to start and be the editor of a good youth magazine
8. Build an independent house with a large library with all my favorite books and huge couch for me to sit and read all day, a small garden lined with flowers of all kinds, a white picket fence, a swing and slide in the back yard for my little girl to play in and a golden retriever called Popeye in one of the following places. Goa, Chennai, Pune, Bangalore.
9.To ride a black bike wearing black clothes, a black helmet on ECR in the dead of the night and to learn to drive a car.
10. Earn a lot of money to be able to do all the above!! ;)

I have already done the boring book tag so I am skipping it. I tag the following people

Kilpauk Mental (Have fun. I cant wait for ur tag and the crazy answers!! :))
Jass (Muwhahahahahahaha)
Sree
Sowmini

Lessons learnt by Revs - Part II

1. Sometimes little things which you do can make people really happy and you don’t even realize it, until they write or tell you about it. So I have been going around feeling as benevolent as mother Teresa, though I haven’t done a thing but because someone else thought I did!! :)

2. Never make new year resolutions. I have shamelessly gone and broken all my new year resolutions. I am PATHETIC. Earlier this year I promised myself that I would be nice to everyone, write accounts and do more of what I like and I have broken all of them.

--I was rude to a really really nice person and u know what’s the worst thing about being rude to a nice person? The nice person doesn’t mind it and says “Naaah. That’s ok!!” and gives a benevolent smile when u apologize to them making u feel lower than Mallika Sherwat’s neck line, lower than the blood levels in Vijay mallya’s alcohol stream, lower than the lowest form of aquatic life which resides in the marina trench of the pacific ocean (errrr.. the lowest point in the earth). Sigh!!! you get the drift?? Really low!!

--I stopped writing accounts two months back and my finances have again gone for a toss. I withdraw whenever I feel like and I have been doing quite a bit of withdrawing and my account looks malnourished as usual. When I was writing accounts there was some kind of control which doesn’t exist now.

PJ: what’s the similarity between Revathi’s bank account and Kareena Kapoor
Answer: both of them are a size zero!! Ha ha ha ha!!
Sad joke!! but then I am a sad person!!

--And despite lofty promises to self I have hardly been doing the things I like. And in fact I have been doing the things I dislike more and more. :(
--The only resolution which I have been keeping successfully is reading books. I have been religiously reading good fiction and spent most of my salary buying books, reading and re reading them but sigh that’s one resolution which I knew I would have no trouble keeping, given my inexplicable love for books. I always take time out to read however busy I am. Always!!! Its like taking a resolution to brush daily (I really do guys!! Cross my heart and hope to die!! )

3. It is not a very good idea to listen to music when you are working. Last week I was listening to “Love me Tonight” by John Denver and without realizing while listening to the song, I went “Kick of your shoes, turn of the lights, love me tonight”. Apparently I was really really loud and the men in my team have been maintaining a safe distance ever since. Sigh!!! I wonder what they think about me!!

4. It is best to read and re read your mails before u send them to others. Yesterday I had to send a mail to a team mate saying “Hi XYZ, mandatory fields have to be marked in blah blah use case” and I ended up sending “Hi XYZ, mandatory fields have to be naked in blah blah use case”. And I quickly scanned the mail for read marks and not seeing any I sent it and needless to say was the butt of all jokes the whole day with some perverts asking me what pleasure I got out of looking at naked mandatory fields!! :

5. Never grow up – It sucks: Lately I have been reading asterix and tintin comics over and over again thanks to my 9 year old cousin (I added the word cousin while re reading the post and editing it. before that, it read “thanks to my 9 year old who seems…!! Eeeeeks!! Thank god I corrected my own mistake!!:P) who seems to have taken a fancy to it. I completely LOVE asterix. Every time I read I am like “oh my god!! Now where does this guy get his sense of humor from?”. Will I ever grow up and stop reading asterix, tintin, archies and tinkle? I hope I never do.

6. Be careful what title you give your posts. I have been following Feedjit carefully for the past 1 month and I noticed that I had maximum visitors for this post. Not that my other posts are great or deserve to be read but this one is definitely not one of my good posts. A little bit of sleuthing ke baad I found out that when u say “lost my orkut account” in google the first link that google throws up is GBCI!! Eeeps!! Sigh!! no wonder I got so many visitors for that post. The number of people whose life orkut rules must be slightly more than the hair on TR’s face, slightly more than the number of pimples on my face and almost equal to jayalalitha’s weight. You get the drift? So I am sure that every day there must be at least a few addicted souls (whose idea of entertainment is refreshing their orkut page to check for scraps, idea of fun is replying to scraps and idea of passing away time is checking out the profiles on unknown people) who lose their orkut account who must be visiting my page!! Hmmm

7. I have decided. I don’t want to get married and I don’t want to study further. I want to go trekking and climb all the mountains in india. Sigh!! I just came back from a weekend trek to tada and it was amazing!! sigh!! will upload someone's pics soon!!

8. It’s a bad bad idea to say “Jeez!! Go jump into a well. You depress me” to a person who is depressed. They, I have noticed, don’t like it. my relationship with a certain friend of mine is at its breaking point coz I couldn’t really understand her mood swings and depression and wasn’t patient enough to listen her out. :S

Me, my family and other Animals!! :P

1. With my sister gone, I feel completely uninspired to write. If you are completely out of your mind (read: if u have been following my blog for an year) you might have noticed that most of posts revolve around my sister, her husband, her house, her habits etc. When she was here she would give me so much of fodder to write humor. Everything she did or did not do would make me laugh. Her non existent IQ, her silly expressions, her stupid talk, her obsessive compulsive cleaning disorder, her insane conversations with my BIL.. Sample the following conversations between my sis and bil

Sis: its your turn to make the bed today.
BIL: mmmm ok
(after half an hour)
Sis: I noticed 4 creases in the bed sheet and my pillow is at an angle of 30 degrees to your pillow and you have folded the bed sheets inside out.
BIL: duh?

And she would proceed to do the whole thing again. I never did understand why she made him do it first because she would invariably find some fault and do it again. My BIL at least would try. I would deliberately make a mess of it because I figured that when she was anyway going to do it again what is the point of me doing it.
She would give me so much to write about and it is not a coincidence that since she has left for dubai I have been writing sad posts!!

2. my mother whenever she calls nowadays doesn’t talk. She only squeals in excitement. She goes “eeeeeeeeeee shruthi, wheeeeeeeeee. Oh my god we went to the niagra falls yesterdayyyy and I cant tell u how wonderful it was. We went behind the falls in this ferry called maid of the mist. Ooooohhh shruthi!! You should have come” or “Shruthiii, today we went and saw the place where wordsworth sat and wrote his poem on daffodils, we saw shakespeare’s village and it was sooooo much fun”. She sounds like a happy 5 year old who has finally been given a chocolate and taken to the circus and seen a clown. My father composed and serene as ever goes “hmmm. Nice place. I played a little but of golf and have been reading quite a bit”.

Their contrasting characters never fail to amaze me. My mother is this round ball of never ending energy and enthusiasm, always excited and always raring to go and do something. She joined dance classes some time last year and an year before that she was studying vedic mathematics and learning telugu in correspondence. At the age of 44 she went on a 25 km cycle trek on rough terrains, up the mountain and my dad and her were the only people above 30 to complete it. Knowing hindi, english and tamil well she helps translate books from tamil to English and hindi to English for this NGO called AID india. She lives life on her own terms and what a life she lives!!! I feel stupid, lazy, incapable of doing anything and uninspired when I compare myself to her. Coming to appa he is this laid back, relaxed, take life as it comes almost saintly person who enjoys a good book, piping hot coffee and my mothers company. I will never be able to understand how two people with such contrasting personalities exist together. Anyway they seem to be having a great time in the US and UK. I am glad.

3. my cousin sister has gotten admission in Amrita Coimbatore and she leaves for Coimbatore in another two days. For the past 2 weeks we have been shopping and packing and buying stuff for her to take there. I am the most excited person. I know how exciting it is to go to a new place, meet new people, set up your room in hostel, get ragged, eat miserable hostel food, be homesick, cry, make friendships, break them, wash your own clothes and sigh!! A part of me is jealous of my sister. I wish it was me instead of her going to hostel and back to college. I wish it was me people were giving advice to saying stuff like “be careful about the friends you make, study well and be careful of ur stuff in hostel”, I wish it were me going to Coimbatore (a place I have never been to though I remember getting admission into CIT- chemical engineering, but later dropping it.) to start a new life, I wish I was going to study there and not just drop her off. She is feeling quite apprehensive and I hope she makes a great set of friends because frankly in college friends is what matters. Studies, I personally think are a very very trivial part of college, something which I don’t remember doing at all except the night before exams. I hope she has fun because that’s what college is all about.

4. I look at my grandmother and I feel sad. I hate old age. There is no one in this world I love more than her and every time I look at her, the fact that she is not getting any younger and that each of her siblings are suffering from some ailment and not surviving it, is very very unsettling. Though a part of me refuses to accept it, I know that there will be a certain weekend when I wont be able to say “Na paati veetuku poren”, that there will be a day when she wont twist my ears and say “thayir sadam saapdu. Odambu naiya irruka”, that there will be a day when I wont see her wearing over sized spectacles, a pale violet saree, sitting on the floor and reading anandha vikatan or talking on the phone. The more I force myself to not think about it, the more I find myself thinking about things which I would be much better off not thinking about. Sigh!!!

5. I have been bugging the shit out of people for the past 3 months by writing and subjecting them to sad poetry written by yours truly. A friend of mine bought a car and I wrote a poem for him, another friend got engaged and I wrote a poem for him and yet another friend of mine has lost his marbles after I started writing sad poetry about him because now even he has started writing poetry. I wish i could copy paste some of that stuff here but all the poems are errr kind of personal and if the concerned person were to know that i am making it public like this i would cease to exist!! :-\ The result of all the curses which I am sure I would have received from the afore mentioned people is that the coding phase of the next stage of my project starts soon and sigh!!! This means no more useless chats on the office communicator, no more sad poetry, no more blogging and no more calvin and hobbes in office hours!!! Back to dreaming about Java, JSP and servlet pages, back to drinking 11 cups of tea in 11 hours, back to blank eyed stares at the Null pointer exceptions and quick 10 minute lunches. oh Java!! how much i hate you!! :(

P.S: please check out the photos of our skandagiri trek here. i havent taken any of these!! these are a compilation of the best pics!! :)
SKANDAGIRI SNAPS

Tagged!! :)

I have been tagged by Sanket with this weird tag where i have to pick up the nearest book turn to page 123 find the fifth sentence and post the next three sentences. Reminds me of the movie Taare zameen par, this particular scene where aamir tells ishaan's parents that he is dyslexic and hence cannot process multiple instructions like turn to this page, so and so paragraph, so and so line.

Can i like pretend i am dyslexic and skip this tag?? :P (rolling eyes)!! but seriously i wonder who thinks of SAD tags like this. i mean it would at least make sense if you were asked to make your own story out of those three lines or something, but just writing three lines??? SAD!!! speaks of the tag maker's abject lack of creativity. Anyway here goes the shortest tag in this world.

The nearest book is Jhumpa Lahiri's "unaccustomed earth" gifted to me by Akiiiii!! :) I have COMPLETELY fallen in love with the way she writes. i mean her stories are about ordinary people and the ordinary lives they lead but the way she writes it is extraordinary. i mean she can write about something as mundane as a housewife washing the dishes but the way she writes it i am like WOW!! her stories might not be great but the reading experience is out of this world!! :)

anyway here goes fifth line of page 123

He saw an open box on the table containing a few eclairs. The sight made his stomach churn up in hunger, and he picked one up, consumed it without pause.

"Looks like we missed brunch" Megan said. After a while she added. "You have chocolate icing around your mouth"

Lacking a napkin or the wipes he always had with him when was with the girls. he drew the back of his hand across his lips.

Phew!! done!! and for a change i tag no one!! but if you want to u can take up this tag!! :)

1. Everyday when I look at the mirror I see the face of a stranger. There are no profound implications of this statement. Its just that I have been shedding so much hair that everyday when I look atthe mirror I see that my hair line has receded further and have trouble in recognizing myself. It reminds me of the protagonist in the movie crouching tiger hidden dragon whose hairline used to start from the middle of his forehead. I used to crack up every time I looked at him when the movie got released but something tells me that pretty soon I will be like that given the exponential rate at which my hair is falling.

2. I have been reading gerrald durrell’s “my family and other animals gifted very lovingly to me on my birthday and I just LOVE the book. I dunno how I hadn’t heard of gerrald durrell so many days. He is one helluva writer and I would rate him next only to PGW, James Herriott and Richard Gordon in humor writing. Typical clean English humor. I just discovered that I seem to enjoy all books which either deal with animals or talks about them (doesn’t help that my favorite character in PGW is the empress of blandings or that I grew up reading tinkle where kalia the crow was my favorite character!!) what’s wrong with me? I mean I have heard sentimental and romantic people read mills and boons, adventurous people read spy, detective or adventure novels, serious people read philosophical books etc. and I read animal books. So where does that put me? (P.S: on second thoughts don’t answer that question. Milinta and Kilpauk Mental, I don’t, I repeat DON’T want any wise cracks in the comments section about this from you guys. I was just thinking aloud)

3. This weekend I attended the marriage of a very close friend in sivakasi. She is 22. How, how HOW can people get married at the tender age of 22? As her fiancé tied the mangalsutra around her neck I suddenly felt like shouting and saying “Stop!! This is illegal. This is child marriage” but all I could manage was a whimper and a sob as she went from Miss to Mrs in a few seconds. Sigh!! I mean I have known her for five years and she is the kind of person who cant even fold a bed sheet properly, let alone cook and clean and the very thought of her getting married, running a family, cooking and being a daughter in law and wife is very unsettling. I dunno how she is feeling but I am worried sick. Personally I think the legal age for marriage should be pushed to 25. Come to think of it, even my sister got married when she was 22. How the hell did she do it? Now that I am 22 I think I can vaguely understand how apprehensive she must have been.

4. I have the worst luck in this world. I mean its amazing how much pleasure Murphy gets out of seeing me suffer. And my bad luck affects everyone around me. On the way to sivakasi on Friday evening we reached the station in the nick of time after a friend of mine left her bag in office and came to the station without it and we ran all the way back to office and got it. and then the next day the train was 5 hours late and we reached sivakasi at 12. on Sunday after the marriage I was to go to Madurai to attend the engagement of another friend and I caught a bus at 12 to Madurai. As luck would have it the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere, it was sweltering hot, absolutely no shade or trees and I was the only one going to Madurai. Everyone else was going to virudhunagar and got into another bus and I waited and waited and waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally a bus came rumbling and was jam packed and there I was, stuck between a woman who had never heard of the word deo and a man who had obviously never taken a bath and I reached Madurai at 4, only to discover that I had missed the engagement!!! And then the next day morning the train again reached Chennai 4 hours late and i had to miss office (ok. this is the good part!!!:P ). It was all I could do to prevent myself from screaming out of frustration. Why me? I mean there are 137899853226839 other people in this world and Murphy has to play with me ALWAYS. Sigh!!

5. I am not able to decide about my views on many things. I mean I thought I was a pretty broad minded and open person and thought that nothing could actually shock me. But the other day I was in coffee day for a friends treat, a place I completely avoid going to because rather than having one coffee/milkshake there I would rather have bajjis at subbaiya’s for a week. Anyway I was there and I saw a couple getting extremely cozy right there in the middle of coffee day for everyone to see and I was disgusted. I don’t understand. What does being modern translate to? Does it mean having an open mind or does it mean wearing minimal clothes? Does it mean shedding your inhibitions and flaunting ur BF/GF to the entire world? What was the couple trying to prove? Their undying love for each other? Or that they didn’t care a damn about what people think about them and were exercising their freedom of expression? What is the limit for PDA or public display of affection? Don’t get me wrong. I am not a messenger sent by Bal Thackeray whose job is to track down all the people in love and shoot them down. But yes I get uncomfortable when I see a guy wearing jeans so low down on his hip that I feel like buying him a belt or something to pull them up, and I feel embarrassed when I see a couple doing anything more than holding hands. Call me old fashioned, call me conservative, tell me that I am behind times but it will take some time for me to assimilate this new definition of modern.

6. For the past one week I have listened to the song “You Fill up my senses” by John Denver and “Tosey Naina Lagey”(dunno which movie) approximately 5876 times. Both of them are beautiful songs and I just don’t tire of listening to them. Tosey naina lagey is soulful Hindustani music and is the kind which can move u to tears and listening to “you fill up my senses” will give u the feeling that all is well in this world. What an amazing voice John Denver has.

I love birthdays!! :)

I love birthdays.

I love being wished on my birthday.

I love it when people who would normally not call me, call me and wish me.

I love it when someone says “Happy Birthday Revs” and I go thank you thank you!!

I love it when my sister who normally cannot stay awake beyond 10 in the night is the first person to call me at 12.00 and says "Happy Birthday Shruthi". ( the fact that dubai is 2 hours behind us and 12 for us is 10 for them can be discounted. It’s the thought that counts)

I love it when my friends act all “ooooh!! We forgot to get u a cake man” and have a forlorn expression on their face and then at 12 ,drag me to the terrace and make me cut a beautiful chocolate cake. I don’t have the heart to tell them that I saw the "cake world" cover in the hall when they got it.

I still love cutting a cake, blowing out candles on my birthday and listening to the happy birthday song.

I love it when people who normally only pull my legs or tease me say / write nice things about me on my birthday. I know how difficult it is for you guys to write nice stuff about me. I mean I can almost imagine u guys going “Revs..errr..ummm ahhh!! Nice girl with smelly feet, bad hair and bad teeth. Heh heh”. Lol. So all u guys who wrote wonderful things about me on the cognizant birthday blog Thanks a lot!!

I love it when one of my best friends forgets my birthday and I message her saying “you forgot my birthday. Wish me NOW” and she calls and goes “jeeez I am sooooo sorry.”. yeah I am super shameless. When people don’t wish me on my birthday I message them and threaten them to wish me.

I love it when my grandmother says “kazhudha vayasu aaiduthu aana moola mattum valarave ila” (roughly translated as you have reached a donkey’s age but still have the maturity level of George Bush)

I love it when my friends tell me that they are gonna buy a book for my birthday and ask me what I want. I have to be the most shameless person because I sent a message to all those people and asked them to buy a book which I wanted!! :P (Psssst Mi!! I just finished reading my family and other animals and I fell in love with it. Thanks!! :D. others!! I am still waiting for my gift!! Humph!! :P)

I love it when my friends have good fun at my expense. Yeah!! It’s a long story. Will blog about it some time. In short one of them kept a bouquet at my desk in office, led me astray and kept me guessing about the sender of the bouquet till evening. Aravind, Sree, Sow, Trich, Jass - u dawgs!! Thanks for the bouquet and err thanks for having fun at my expense. :)

I love the fact that I can still love birthdays and not worry about the fact that I am actually getting an year older.

Its not fair. Why cant I have more than one birthday an year. :(

???

Why is it that when I wish for something to happen it never does?

Why is it that when I advice someone it never works?

Why is it that I hate the course my life is charting and still feel pathetically incapable of doing something about it?

Why is it that I assume that people won’t mind what I say and will take whatever I say in the lighter vein? Why don’t I understand that people have feelings and can get hurt and feel bad unlike me?

Why MUST I act like I know everything that there is to know and why can’t I mind my own business?

Why is it so easy to convince me? Why do I always say yes to whatever people say? Am I indecisive? Am I a sycophant? Am I vulnerable? Am I stupid? Am I confused? Why don’t I know what I am?

Why is it that I lack the basic maturity to handle simple things in my life but seem to have lots of maturity in areas where it is of no use to me?

Why is it that though I have everything in life that I can ask for I crib?

Is it possible to love someone whom u haven’t seen, haven’t spoken to,dont know how they look, and who doesn’t even know that u exist just because u admire one trait in that person?

Is it possible to completely hate what you are doing, completely hate your job and yet be completely in love with life?

Is it possible to completely hate and totally love the same person at the same time? For that matter are love and hate mutually exclusive of each other?

Its been more than an year since I last cried because I have been really happy for the past one year, but yesterday night I was thinking “now why haven’t I cried for an year? Something is fishy”. Why am I scared of being happy?

The other day my manager told me that I had done a good job and gave me a high rating for everything this promotion cycle and told me she enjoyed reading my blogs. I should have been happy but I told myself “No Revs!! You hate this job. You hate the IT industry. You want to get out. Don’t be happy. No!!” why do I deny myself happiness?

If some one is nice to me I start thinking “ok!! Now what does he/she want” and when someone doesn’t talk to me I am like “huh!! Attitude?? See if I care”. Why am I so skeptical?

This post comes across as a post written by a morose, sad and suicidal person which is FAR far far from the truth. I am extremely happy and content with life as it is right now and life’s near perfect but these are questions which have been in mind for a long time and now they are out there because I decided I could do with a little bit of self introspection. It hasn’t helped because just like in college, though the questions are clear, the answers still elude me!! :)