Mr.Dog

Dear Neighbor’s dog,


Until last Sunday, I was fairly content with your existence in the apartment right above mine. Yes, I do feel bothered by your occasional bursts of paw-thumps in the middle of the night. I can only imagine you do that at 12:30am to test the sudden urge to reassure yourself that your legs are still attached to your body. I could not imagine any other reason why you would run around randomly in the middle of the night.

However, I have had no complaints about your midnight-running-exercise - since I had gotten used to them. My brain taught itself to effectively ignore these noises just like those fancy noise-cancellation earphones claim they do.

Things changed last week though. Let me refresh your memory on the series of events that took place that day.
I was sitting on my couch staring outside the window, marvelling at the first perfectly sunny day that we were having after a terribly cold winter. I heard your footsteps on the wooden staircase out side my front door. 

I saw you casually stroll on the walkway right across my valued patch of lawn.

Now, let me take this chance to remind you of the fact that I value this tiny patch of green grass quite a bit. I love its fresh green color and the fact that it is slowly coming back to all its glory after that awful winter we just had. 

Coming back to the series of events…

You had stopped strolling.
Your head then slowly turned to peer into my house.
Our eyes met.
You slowly took four steps to land on a spot on my lawn.
I stared at you and you stared right back at me.
At this point I had a hunch that you were up to no good.
We were in a stare-off contest, I realized.
You maintained your stare. You did not blink at all.
And with utter disregard to my love of my green patch- - proceeded to take a dump right on my previous patch of grass while still staring at me.
At that instant, I think I even saw your mouth curl up a little as if you were smiling ever so slightly.
You then casually just walked away, breaking our stare-off contest.

You could have at least looked away or even blinked. But there was not a single iota of guilt in you while you performed this blasphemous act and that disgusted me. As a result, You, sir have now earned a permanent spot on my list of ‘most hated’. Just saying.


Your very disgruntled and annoyed neighbor.

The Three Magical Words

First off, Happy New Year all you sweet creatures who actually read my blog.

I am going to start this blog by asking you a question:

When was the last time you called your parents and said these three beautiful words: “I love you”, without needing a special occasion or reason (gifts)? You must keep in mind that “Love you mum/dad” or just “Love you” does not count.

Take a minute and try to recollect the last time you said exactly this to your parents---> “I love you” and be honest (to yourself) when you think about it.

Chances are that, while there will be a few of us who say this to our parents every time we speak to them, I bet there will be a majority of us who would agree that it has been a while and  there will be many who won’t even remember when the last time they said those three words as a sentence.

If you belong to the latter two groups (the majority), then I urge you to start doing it right now and see the difference. When we sit and think about it, our love for our parents is more often than not, taken for granted. And that is perfectly natural. There’s nothing wrong with it. But trust me when I say this, calling your parents and saying “I love you!” makes one heck of a difference. I would bet a $100 that you would have a winder smile on your face after you hang up than you usually have.

I started doing this last year. I have the most loving and understanding parents anyone could wish for, yet, I realized one day- that I had never explicitly told them that I loved them. So one fine day, I started ending my telephonic conversations by saying “I love you!” to both my mom and dad. The first time my dad heard me say it, he just laughed.

When I asked him why- he said he wasn’t expecting me to say that and was slightly amused. So we both laughed it off, but not before making sure that he knew I really meant it (he never doubted that though) and hung up. I had already made a promise to myself that I would end every single conversation of ours henceforth by saying I loved him.

We spoke again the following weekend like we usually do. I told him about the 'on-steroids-weather' that Missouri experiences and how it still surprises me every single time. We exchanged our customary health-reports where I ask him how his blood sugar levels were and he asked me if I was being regular at the gym. All in all, a perfectly routine and normal conversation. As we prepared to say our goodbyes and hang up (and as I was preparing to say “I love you Papa.”) he suddenly said  bye and immediately followed it up with “I love you Smaran!” before I could say it to him.

I took a second and blurted back out “I love you too!”. I hung up and sat in silence for a few seconds and realized a wide ear-to-ear smile had crept up on my face. I do not remember the last time my dad actually said that (especially after I had moved away from home). I think I was as unprepared as he was,  the week before when I did the same thing to him.

Society teaches us that saying I love you to your parents aloud is not really needed since it is an understood fact and that no one can change that fact. However, I say we do have the need to call our parents and tell them exactly that ---out aloud. For once, we should disallow our brain from telling us “Hey man, you don’t even need to say you love them. They already know that.” and instead just say it because your heart really wants you to. It makes a huge difference in relationships, even the ones that are taken for granted since birth. It creates this imaginary warm puffy cloud that floats around you for a couple of hours and brings this weird sense of calmness and joy to you.

So I urge you to do this-- as an experiment. I urge you to do it not for your parents but for yourself, to feel how wonderful it is to say something so beautiful to someone who has always loved you with everything they have got.

Go ahead, take the time , give it a try and post how you felt or your parent's reactions in the comments below if you want. I promise you it will be wonderful. 

Tell your parents you love them not because you must, but because you can.

P.S- Me and my parents now make it a point to say “I love you” every single time we speak to each other. And in all honesty, I will never become tired of doing it for the rest of my life.

Volunteer work

Ever since I started earning a couple of years ago, I had been very interested in giving back to society through volunteer/charity work. At my first job, I had signed up to donate a small sum every month to the non-governmental environmental organization called Greenpeace. I was happy to have been doing that and kept telling myself that I was indeed helping give back something to the world in my own little way. But always, there was something amiss. I wasn’t fully satisfied with the automatic monthly debits to my account which was, I must say- quite mechanical and did not produce the true feeling of satisfaction that I craved for. I longed to personally get involved at a volunteering event. Usually most of us are content with the donations we make to such charitable organizations/non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We go about our daily lives, satisfied with the fact that we are doing something good for the world without ever wondering how and where it materializes. But trust me, that feeling of satisfaction when you do volunteer work only magnifies if you are personally involved.
I am not saying that people at the charitable organizations around the world are swindling your money and use them to buy a new Porsche or to fly to Hawaii for family vacations. No sir, I have the utmost respect for every one of these organizations for what they are doing.
But this is a blog about ‘My’ perspectives on issues and topics that I like to talk about and that is what I am doing.

Let me explain it from another angle-All through school and college, I’ve been the kind of person who falls in the category of those who learn better while performing a task practically, rather than mugging up facts. I realized that the same applies to doing social/charitable work too.

Last week I had a beautiful opportunity to do just that. A small team of seven from my office went to help at a place that provides housing and food for families who have  children being treated at hospitals and other local medical facilities around the city. Now, we all know that hospital food is not exactly considered a delicacy. So the thought of providing fresh hot food to these people came across as a very unique and an extremely thoughtful way to help. This place is called the Ronald McDonald House.

Our team was to prepare food for at least forty people. At the Ronald McDonald house, the expense for all the ingredients is borne by the volunteers themselves, who get a fully equipped (and must I say- beautiful) kitchen to work their magic in. Our small group consisted primarily of women who had perfected their culinary skills with years of cooking for their families. I, on the other hand was just an over-enthusiastic lad amongst them who wanted to be involved in the volunteering in any way possible. 

Everyone in the group was super-duper-efficient and we ended up dishing out quite a spread for our guests.
Here is the complete menu:
-White Chicken Chilli
-Beef Chilli
-Vegetarian Chilli
-Corn bread (two varieties)
-hot dogs (three varieties again)
-Green garden salad
-cheese and crackers.
-fresh baked brownies and cookies
-fruit salad
-ice-cream cups
-and something that resembled a peach souffle

Ha! My colorful salad.

And if you must know, I made the salad. Yeah, yeah-- I know you will probably snigger at this and say “A salad?! That’s not called cooking!!”. And I agree. BUT, in my defence I’d say that it was an effort in my own little way, that came from the heart and I did contribute to the platter. I am extremely pleased about it, to say the least.

The experience of actually cooking for families and helping them savour fresh and homely food was just beautiful. This is because I actually got to be a part of doing something that was immensely rewarding (mentally).

One other thing that I liked about the evening was that we actually cooked all the food there. None of the aforementioned items were pre-packaged (read: canned) food that was just heated up in a microwave and served. It was actual homely food (I have used those two words side by side on two occasions now and am beginning to doubt if that’s even grammatically correct...but you get the point).

I went home that evening with the widest smile on my face, having done my part and having experienced immense satisfaction while doing it. I also had the company of some of the smartest and hard-working women I have come across in my life. They have been working at our company for years (some have been here for more than 10 years). Their work in the kitchen that evening was as sharp and spot-on as their work is at office. And each and every one of us cooked with the same level of passion and enthusiasm. 

I realized that I will volunteer to do this again and again in the coming years because I know with the highest degree of certainty, that I will never get tired of being a part of something so nice and satisfying.

I urge every person who reads this blog -to go out and volunteer in your city. It can be any kind of volunteer work- It could be helping care for abandoned animals at a shelter, spending an evening caring for the less privileged of our society or even a small thing like cleaning a street or planting more trees. I urge you because you will experience the wonderful feeling of having helped someone in your own way and that feeling will stay with you for the rest of your life.
:)

Thanks Mr.Lee for proofreading this for me. I know this isn't the first time you've done this for me. Just wanted to let you know that your proof-reading skills are beyond awesome and I will continue to exploit them for a long time. :D

New Year 2013

For all the people I haven’t wished this year—Wish you a very Happy New Year. I mean it…I hope you have a good year and have some amazingly good things happen to you this year.  Needless to say, smelly-poop-filled-things will continue to happen to us all this year too but I just hope and wish for us all, that the awesomeness of the good things in life overshadow the negative ones.

This year started out rather well for me. I had the rare chance of welcoming the new year with my mom, grandma , my uncle and his family. There is really no alternative to spending a good time with family. No matter how ‘hip and modern’ I’d like to portray myself, or how badly I want to impress my friends by putting up pictures of myself at the outrageously overcrowded Time’s square—I’d still pick spending a New Year with my family members.

This year is going to be no less challenging than the past one for many of us. We will again vehemently try our best to impress our boss at work and earn some tasty brownie points (I actually don’t mind being rewarded with brownies for a job well done *nom nom*), some of us will strive to conclude our education with a thesis defense (and Good luck ), some will get married this year  while a small portion of us would again wish to find his/her ‘ soul-mate’ at least this year and last but not the least—most of us will continue to sit on our bottoms for more hours than we want to, while leaving senseless comments on facebook and/or wishing some distant old friend a ‘very happy birthday’ just because facebook reminded us of it.

Let us all strive to be better human beings this year, to help a friend or even a complete stranger in some small way regularly just because we can,  to learn to respect each other’s opinions and thoughts without overburdening them with our own, to behave like the educated people that we are and not think-small in a big-world and on the flip-side continue to dole out justice to victims of inhumane and heinous crimes committed by the scumbags of the society.

Will blog again soon and hopefully be more regular at it.

I’ll conclude this post with a web-link that I love checking out from time to time- it proves that there still are kindhearted people in this world: 

http://www.boredpanda.com/random-acts-of-kindness/

P.S- Thanks Nisha for being a good sport and giving me the nudge I needed to blog again :)

Barfi - the movie

Off late, there have been very few things that have pushed me to open up MS Word and type out an opinion or a thought about something I want to share with the world.

I will admit, that my work (‘office ka kaam’) has slowly tightened its grasp over my mind and has engulfed me in its dullness with surprising strength.

Anyway, I am not here to talk about all that. I am here to tell you about something that I come across very rarely nowadays—a well made Bollywood movie.

Barfi: 'one of a kind' movie

Every few years, there comes along that one movie that has the power to pull you into it, to engulf you with its simplicity, a story so well-told that you are left thinking about it long after you have exited the movie theater.

Well, I must say this, that BARFI is one of those movies. A clever love story that slowly surrounds you like a fog in winter which would make you pull your woolen sweater over you and stay there in its warmth.  A story told beautifully and with performances that will be talked about for years to come by people who really value good quality and sensible cinema.

It’s a story about a deaf and dumb boy from Darjaleeng who falls in love twice, but with two people who have  completely different personalities. No it’s not your average love story because the persona portrayed by Priyanka Chopra is that of an autistic girl, which she has portrayed very convincingly. I’ll be honest, I was never a big fan of Miss. Chopra, except in the song ‘desi girl’ with that saree J. But this performance has earned her my full respect as an actor.

The story crawls into your heart as the movie goes on , but the writer and director had something else in mind, than just a cute love story. They slowly and very cleverly turn the love story into a suspense story. So cleverly have they done this, that around the last half an hour of the movie, you are left wondering to yourself “Wait, wasn’t this a love story?”, but that question is not the kind that will leave you shaking your head in disappointment. On that contrary, you will be left with nodding your head in approval.

The music (some really unique work by Pritam)  is charming and mixes smoothly with the 70’s era in Darjaleeng, the cinematography does not cease to please your senses and of course the acting is at par with some of the best out there. Every performance in the movie, be it Ileana (debut Bollywood movie) as the girl who chose comfort over love, Inspector Dutta as the cop who has spent a better part of his life chasing Barfi, or Barfi’s best friend with his genuinely Darjaleeng’ish accent: is equally convincing.

So, please, do yourself a favor and give yourself a break from the no-brainer movies that Bollywood has been churning out with will glory, and go watch this movie. Go experience of stories of  two kinds of people (mute and autistic) in a way that perhaps no other Bollywood movie has been able to capture. A movie that doesn’t generate pity at the disabilities of the people but rather shows how sweet their lives can be. Go marvel at the acting-talent that Ranbir Kapoor possesses which puts him in a whole different league than the current crop of ‘young talent’ without a doubt in my mind. Four generations of actors in the family truly shows in his performance .

Thank you Anurag Basu for giving me that push to start blogging again.

The Letter

It has been almost two months since my last post here. I had gotten a little busy with work and preferred movies and sleep on weekends to writing up something for the blog. I am guilty and I apologize. I finally found something to write about after a long time.

Let me first give you a background of what this blog is going to be about.

First off, it is a VERY LENGTHY blog. So readers are advised to step away from the computer, do a few stretching exercise and then come back to finish reading. 

My younger sister recently graduated from college, she today has a Bachelor of Technology in I.T, of which I am extremely proud of. She also bagged a job with TCS, the Indian IT service consulting behemoth, via her campus-recruitment program. She is set to join the company in three days time and as an older brother, I had some words of advice for her before she left to start this amazing new phase of her life. This blog is an open letter from an older brother.

The blog hasn't been proofread yet. So kindly ignore the grammatical errors...

our Angel :)

My dearest baby-sister,

They say that the human mind can retain a few memories from a person’s childhood with amazing clarity. For me, the day you were born is one of those memories. I still remember every single detail of the time when Shruti and I were first brought in to say hello to mom, after she was okayed to be visited by friends and family. We did not get to see you since you were too tiny and were kept away from everyone except the nurse. But, we were very well aware that we had a baby sister now, someone actually younger than us, who had just come into the world, and were as excited as a cat with a ball of yarn would be.

Two decades have gone by and today you have turned into this smart and fantastic young woman that I am super-duper-proud of. You graduated recently from college and are now ready to step out of our family’s wings into the big-bad-world out there.

Being your older brother, I am probably as scared as mom is today to be letting go of your hand. I’ve always seen you more than a sister. You are to me, like my own kid, if I ever had one. And I will always love you like one.

As you get ready to leave the house and start your own life, please take a few moments out of your life to read this letter where a brother wants to share some advice and caution you against what is out there. This might be really boring to you all who are so used to having super-short conversations via texting or tweeting (I know you don’t use twitter…but it was general mockery at your whole age-group) , but please do finish reading the whole letter. Remember, most of the things I will say here- I KNOW that you already do and safeguard yourself against. But I will write them down anyway.

So here goes,

-sweetheart, if you think you have seen your share of ups and downs in life so far, you are wrong. Life will continue to shoot arrows at you, maybe even bigger and sharper ones as you grow. You will have to deflect them, maybe even take a few hits, but heal from the wounds and move on. Life isn’t easy, it never was.

-Do not ever forget your family and friends. Respect everyone who have helped you out during your earlier problems. Stay in touch with them. Your family would be calling you every other day for the next month or so, to see how you are doing. The frequency of the calls might come down to one call per week. But we WILL keep calling. It might become a little irritating, but trust me when I say this, we will NEVER have heard enough from you. Also. Take time out of your life to actually make a phone-call to  good friends on their birthday to wish them. Sure, you can wish them on facebook, but a personal wish face-to-face or over the phone goes a long way in cementing a relationship.

-You will start earning now, for the first time in your life. It is a truly fantastic and euphoric feeling. This may sound clichéd but you will soon learn that ‘ With great power, comes great responsibilities’ which means, with the power of earning money, you will also have the added responsibility of managing your money and how to spend it. You will not be taught this in school or the college, but life will be the teacher for this. Spend carefully and save wisely my dear sis.

-You are moving to a new city where you will undoubtedly meet new people and make new friends. You will want to go out to party on some weekends when and if work pressure permits you. That is completely fine. Life after all needs some fun in it. If you happen to go to a pub, do NOT accept a drink from a stranger (Especially men). Actually, let me rephrase that: do not accept drinks from ANY MAN. Have your drink made on your own, or accept it only if it is ordered and made in front of you. You have no idea about the evil-creeps that lie out there waiting with their fangs open. Being an older brother, I will ALWAYS feel insecure about your safety. And I hope you don’t mind that.

-Trusting people will be an issue. Be very picky when it comes to choosing your friends and even more careful when it comes to choosing who to include in your ‘circle of trust’. It may even mean you will have a few lesser friends than the most popular girl in the group, but trust me: you will be much safer this way.

I think I will wrap up my letter with that point and another small paragraph about how much I love you.

I have and will always continue to cherish the times we spent growing up together. I will continue to regret all those times when I hit you because you were getting on my nerves as a pesky 7 year old. I will always love you more than any or all of your friends ever can or will ever do(all put together). I will continue to call you ‘beta’ every single time we speak on the phone. I will continue to invent quirky ways to greet you when we speak on video-chat. I will continue to look-forward to every single time I call you and you greet me with your chirpy ‘hi BHAI!’. I will continue to include your happiness  and safety as the first thing I ask of God everytime I pray.

You my dear lovely young sister, will NEVER EVER be a grown-up for me. You will always be my baby-sister. The day you bagged the job was one of the proudest days of my life. I will be proud of you no matter what you do, I am proud of you for just being my sister. Remember this Shillu, if a day  ever comes (May it never come), that the whole world has turned against you, you can be assured that there will be one person who will ALWAYS be on your side…and that will be this older brother of yours.

With all the love I have,

Bhai.

fraaandship!

So here I am, on yet another Sunday that seems to come and go like the trucks on the national highway in India. They just ride along and people along the highway hardly even notice them. Sundays are something like that too, hardly noticed nowadays.And as my good friend Nisha rightly predicted,  I end up getting up early morning and thinking what to do. I finally end up with a novel in the loo to help me pass time. Oh before you go all “eeeewww!!”, don’t think I don’t I know you’ve done that too. After all, having a long relaxing loo-trip is indeed a luxury for all working people. ‘Sheesh!’ you say? Well, I say “just wait till you start working pal…and then you’ll know what I am talking about!!”.

Another weekend, another AMC12 trip, another movie. Watched ‘The Grey’ yesterday. Liam Neeson packs in a power-packed performance as always. Intense movie but I would’ve wanted a better ending than the current one. The movie still manages to hold  your attention till the last moment and which is precisely why the ending could’ve been better.  Ok..so enough movie talk for this blog. I am sorry, it’s just that I’ve been watching so many new movies (one every weekend…compared to the 3 movies I watched in Rolla during my entire three-semester stay there! ) that I just had to share something about at least one of them.

I wanted to write a deeply-thought out blog this time but I guess I won’t be doing that. Don’t have the patience for that today. Maybe next time. So I’ll be pretty much just ranting about foolish, and small things that I’ve come across in the recent past. Kindly adjust. I would, at this point warn you that this particular blog is just going to waste your time..but then, which previous blog of mine hasn’t?! hehehehehe. *No I won’t use LOL for that, I am against using LOL. I prefer the much more realistic laughter*

kind of sums it up :)

The other day I was having a conversation with my best friend Mr.Lee (his real name is something else but I like calling him Mr.Lee on my blogs…and in case you are wondering, No, he’s not a chinki. He’s as Indian as you can ever get). So, it was our typical conversation with us tripping over each other at every available chance, taking dirty jabs at each other over and over again, to the point that neither of us have any more derogatory things to say for each other.

That’s when I realized that the foundation of our friendship was on these very highly idiotic conversations. These very brainless and insult-filled conversations that we shared is what makes us best friends. I really can’t have such conversations with any other human in the world, chiefly because I cannot insult people like the way I can with mr.Lee.

Friendship isn’t created. It just happens. A chance encounter with a fellow newbie in class can turn into one of the strongest and humbling relations you can have with  another human. For me, friendship is about bitching about my best friend to my best friend and then the next instant talking about how cool the latest movie was. It’s about being as spontaneous as that damn chicken that suddenly becomes possessed and tries to cross a road when you are driving down at top speed.

This one’s to all those people who know that no matter what they do, they’ll always have one person in the world who will take their side – their best friend!

Peace!

I Baked a Christmas

The Christmas tree at Harshita's place that I helped decorate

So, it’s Christmas and a non-white one at that. I will have to grudgingly agree that a white-Christmas would have been a welcome change from the cold-lazy-days that I have become accustomed to off late making me fall in love …with my bed.

Most of my peeps are out of town on vacation. While most of them are in some aunt or uncle’s place in NewYork, Philadelphia  , others have gone back to India for the winters. Those lucky buggers! So that leaves me alone in this town with hardly a soul to talk to. I won’t lie, It can get really lonely out here sometimes. So I have been trying to chalk up plans for Christmas day and trying to find something to do that really makes me feel …well..’Christmasy’. After a lot of pondering , and struggling with my head to keep myself away from facebook.com (for the half an hour that it took me to home-in on what to do on Christmas), I finally decided that I’d bake.

Oh yeah, you heard me..bake! I started baking last week and had already dished out some pies, oatmeal cookies (by Ritesh, my roommate) and the highlight of my baking-spree, the Banana-almond cupcakes and the banana-almond bread (my sister’s recipe). So this time, I decided that I’d bake simple white cup-cakes (you know, the ones available in every bakery in India, those light brown ones).

So I got up today morning, fresh after a long nine hour sleep (winters can do that to you allright!!), had some cereal for breakfast and set about arranging my ingredients in an orderly manner. I happen to be one of those people who like having their ingredients ready and in separate bowls (like them cookery-shows). I started around 1pm and after a few hits and misses, I was finally done with three batches of white-cup-cakes by 4pm. The first batch turned out impressively well but the latter batches were stubborn and did not follow on the same lines, unfortunately. (Bake tip: when using Baking ‘soda’ in your recipe, bake the ingredients immediately. Leaving the batter after mixing allows the acid to start fermenting or something and the cake can go the ‘what-the-hell-happened-there’ly way).

My main intention around baking three batches of cup-cakes was to give the cup-cakes to my good friends who are still here in town. I did just that and dutifully wished each one of them ‘Merry Christmas’ when handing the cup-cakes.  They were really thankful and that alone made my day and the 4 hours I spent in the kitchen, all worth the effort.

While making the awesomely-awesome cup-cakes (what?! I love boasting about those cup-cakes ok?), I realized that I really enjoyed cooking  / baking so much. Yes, cooking needs effort and time, and in most of the tasty-dishes, some painstaking preparation time too. But it’s one of those few things where hard-work can really visibly pay off and you can have a good time at the end of it, digging into that tasty dish you just whipped up.

lookin good fellas.. :)

Baking, now sits near the top of ‘my favorite things to do’, right up there with reading a good book, having an intense and thought provoking conversation with a good friend, and of course- sleeping. I don’t claim to be the best baker in town, or even the best in my friends-circle, but I sure can dish up a decent cup-cake. Here, check out the photos of the cup-cakes that I made today..

Merry Christmas everyone! J

Facebook'ing Tips

I doubt if there is any college student out there today who hasn’t heard of facebook. Almost everyone who has heard of it are also probably using this super-popular social networking website and helping Mr.Zuckerberg laugh his way to the billion dollar bank accounts.

I'll admit...I spend a lot of time on facebook. Being so far away from home, I rely on this website to keep in touch with a lot of my friends from back home.
However, I do keep bumpig into some really lame and annoying 'occurances' on facebook. I am pretty sure you too must have often come across some really really dumb instances on facebook. Things that people do and put up that's just a smelly load of bullcrap and makes you  want to roll up your eyes and say 'Weirdo!!' . So today, I’ll be offering some tips  to those few who actually read my articles every week, about how not to become a douchebag on facebook.
Note: I am not claiming to being a pro at facebook’ing and neither am I claiming that I am completely, utterly and compulsorily correct.

So here is the 'gyaan'  (Oh and it FREE by the way...  :

1. You update your facebook status message. I’m fine with that, completely fine. But you cannot and must not ever ‘like’ your own status message after updating it. The same applies to updating your relationship status or adding a photo and then liking it yourself first. Dude, that is just pure dumb. It only shows how obsessed you are with you own sad darn life.

2. This one’s related to relationship status as well. Please do not be so desperate for attention

and ‘facebook alerts’ (the tiny red comic bubble with that magic number in white inside it signifying

that there is, after all, someone who actually ‘cares’ about you and what you do) so as to update your relationship status to ‘engaged’ or ‘in a relationship’ and then changing it back to ‘it’s complicated’ .

Personally, there’s no such thing as  it's complicated in relationships. You are either ‘in’ or ‘out’, so man up and face the truth, buddy.

3. Never put up a status message that reads BRB . No one really cares man? There is probably no one in this universe who cares if you have gone for a washroom-break for a minute. You are not going to be missed. So please, BRB is a strict no-no as a status message.

4. Adding a profile picture that shows you clicking a picture of yourself in a mirror, with you staring at the cellphone screen in your hand is lame. Come on man, you have more than a hundred friends and that not one of them had five seconds to spare to click a decent picture of you? Really?

5. Keeping a continuous tab on the newly added ‘tickr’ sidebar and then claiming to have caught your friend ‘like’ing and then remove like (unlike) your status message (Yes, people actually do that) is not the right thing to do. Stalker!!

6. Becoming the first person to like the ‘new picture added’ by that hot girl in your class will definitely not put you on the speedboat to her heart my friend.

7. Do not ever leave a message that says "hey..have u chkd out dis hot chick xyz on ma friend list yet? " on your friend’s public wall. First of all, those braindead english spellings there, do NOT show that you are 'cool and hip and one of those sms people' . Next, the profiles are ‘public’ if you remember, so you typing all that horseshit on your friend's wall is visible to everyone on your friend's list man. If you however, DO intend to so that, then I have just one word for you - 'ShowOff!!'

8. Spamming your own photo with lots of comments on some silly issue that is not even slightly related to what is in the photo, in order to get into our walls in the ‘top new stories’ is not a good idea, please. If you have something to talk about, do it on your wall or as a private message conversation. We really do not care what your cat had for lunch written beneath a picture of you in the Bahamas with holding a pina-colada. That is the definition of ‘they don’t go together’.

So, all you facebooking folks out there, Pray keep these tips in mind to avoid being viewed as an obnoxious individual with an obesessive compulsive disorder to put up the most unwanted status messages on facebook earning the ‘facebook douchebag of the year’.

special thanks to my 'brethar' Murali Gumpeny for proofreading this blog for me.. cheers bro!
peace..
;-)

Barber bhaiiya...

I've always been fond of short hair on my head. But like most other Indian youngsters who have been through college, I've had my share of 'trying-to-grow-long hair' days and attempts of masquerading the hair so that I looked less like Abdul Kalam and more like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2.

The last time I had tried growing my hair long, a fellow and one of my prettiest classmate had commented rather rudely that I needed a haircut and that I looked like one of those villian's sidekicks from south-Indian movies. That was that, I never attempted to grow my hair long again (at least not intentionally).

I have been kinda infamous amongst my family (immediate family and the extended one too.....far far extended) for visiting a saloon or 'Barber shop' as it's more commonly known in middle-class India-  to get a haircut at least twice a month...that's once every fortnight. Of course, I would confidently defend myself by saying that I had a thick mane of hair and that my hair grew faster than other mortals (I still think it's true btw). My mom and siblings made it a point to humiliate my publicly by saying that I didn't even look like I had had a haircut (this was right after I got home from a saloon...freshly trimmed hair  et al. ) thus hereby questioning my decision to get a haircut and 'waste' Rs.20 (Rs.10 before soft and proud hair started sprouting above my upper lip).

The funny thing is that I have almost never been satisfied with a haircut that I had get. There have hardly been four or five occasions where I remember getting that perfect haircut ....the one that I had envisioned. Our desi-barbers seem to have a mind of their own when cutting our hair and not to mention the scissor in his had has a mind of its own. No matter how many times and in how ever many languages you tell them how you need the hair to look after he's done cutting it, he would nod vigorously and set about cutting the hair just the way HE liked and not how you'd have liked, all the while listening intently to the discussion on the radio about how houseflies can be tamed or whatever. And you end up looking like you’re taming a porcupine on your head or sometimes are left squinting at your reflection to see if there’s actually hair up there or is it a layer of charcoal dust the the ‘naai’ peppered when you weren’t looking. The barber though with so much pride in his eyes that you begin to doubt if the government has awarded him the Padma Bhushan or something. The sad thing about haircuts is once it’s messed up, you’re as screwed as that harry potter guy minus his wand in front of Voldermort. There's no going back-- only wait for the jeers you'd get from your friends at school the next day, from family members who think you are ridiculously wasting 80% of their income on haircuts, and from your neighborhood stray cum pet dog who would growl at you as you walk past it on your way back from the saloon showing its distaste of your new haircut. You suddenly go from being ‘that crazy fellow from the last bench’ to ‘that guy with the funniest haircut…haa haa haa’…..God I so used to hate it when that happened.  

Now, after having moved to USA, I found to my utter disbelief, like most other Indians there, that each haircut costs more than 20 times than what I paid for in India (after we convert the USD to INR). Wow! I will have to get used to haircuts only once every few months. It's going to be more difficult than getting over drugs at a rehab center, but I think I will live through it. God will give me the strength to live through this... sniff. I am almost used to it now btw.

Reality-bites ..

As soon as the clock strikes 8pm, most of the TV channels in India switch from their pallu-clad-saas-bahu-serials to the 'reality shows' every day.

They've had reality shows for singing and dancing since quite some time now (I do consider TVS  sa-re-ga-ma on Zee tv a reality show hmpf! ) but channels and their overpaid-overintelligent-overcreative staff off late have started rolling out a buffet (quite literally) of reality shows ranging from talent shows (anyone can do anything....Am actually planning to go and show my talent of counting from 1-20 in one single breath!! ) , cooking, dare-devil stunts on bikes and helicopters,stand-up- comedy and even marriage.

So the general public in apna-Bharat-mahaan now churns out 'reality-show-stars' faster than that mouse in your attic churns out tiny hairless 'mouselings'. People can dance their way to semi-stardom, cook their way into your friendly-neighborhood-dhaba, marry their way into some bizarre household that has the mother-in-law decked in more make-up than Simi Garewal or even jump into a pitiful of shit as a daredevil stunt and find themselves starring in Slumdog millionaire part 2.

The other thing I find quite disturbing about these shows are their judges or a.k.a- guru, master, dancemaster, chef-master, chaddi-master, fartmeister etc. etc. They seem to be graduates of Subhash Ghai's Whispering willows or whatever acting school and have hence mastered the art of giving out appalled expressions performance after performance (I bet they can give apni Amisha Patel a good run for her money on a one on one keep-repeating-the-same-expression-over-n-over-again-contest). These judges can give out a barrage of the same feedback in so many different ways that it would put Shakespere and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to shame.  The pure dumbness of their comments just for the sake of increasing TRP', which includes having a verbal-tussle or two with the fellow            judge every now and then, can be edited and telecasted separately as 'Indian Judgment show' that I am sure will attain even greater TRP ratings than the WWE (formerly known to all Indian kids as WWF) itself.   Wonder how the judge of the 'Comedy Circus' - Archana Puran Singh keeps laughing over and over again at some of the world's saddest jokes. Me thinks, she secretly inhales laughing gas every now and then when the camera isn't focusing on her wide jaw. 

With that being said and done...I urge the TV channels to show some more sensible programs that involve more than just people cooking tuar-dal, singing 'munni badnaam hui' without even the decency of showing the video when the participant is singing this song, or jumping into a bed of scorpions and later sobbing about how one of the scorpions almost ate her up, and the judges gawking with the most artificial acting in the universe.

Gotta go now....going to watch 'megastructures' on Discovery channel (Now THAT is a show!)

peace!

COMICS-NOSTALGIA

My grandma has been wanting to throw away some stuff from the store-room in order to accommodate the ever-swelling 'junk' that each household magically keeps producing at a steady and unstoppable pace. I was given the duty to clear away some old boxes that apparently contained things from my childhood.
Upon opening one of the boxes, I found a bundle of comic magazines. Comics are how I had been introduced to the world of 'Reading' and I have always been fond of them.
I very fondly remember the times when I used to devour these comics at a rate faster than than I used to gulp down food.

FLASHBACK: imagine the following in a crackling black and white movie frame:
I am all set to journey to my grandparent's place in Bhopal, from Coimbatore (a 20 hour journey). My excitement of visiting my beloved grandparents is peaks with the fact that I will get to read comics on the train. Now, in 'those' days, I was allowed to afford the luxury of a comic if and only if we were travelling by train (my parents later confessed that the comics kept me from jumping out of the train at every station that the train stopped).
So there I was, entering the railway station...one hand being held firmly in the confident but relaxed grip of my dad and the other swaying happily by my side like a dog's wagging tail. I knew the exact location of the book-store in the railway station and prided myself at being able to get to it even blindfolded. I knew that the train would arrive only half an hour after we had stepped into the station (which I thought the train did on purpose by the way). So I started looking in the direction of the book-stand. My dad sensing my desperation to hold a comic in my hands, smiled down at me and took me straight to the book-stall.
I happily bought myself a Tinkle 'digest' and two Chacha Chowdhary comics.
Ah! I was feeling like a king now, clinging on to the comics like they were worth more than my life. The rest of the journey I do not remember too well....it's all hazy with me buried into the comics and noticing almost nothing else.

OK...Now you can come back to the present day...full-color picture in HD ...

Chacha Chowdhary and Tinkle. :) who doesn't remember them? They've been one of the most important memories  of every child who grew up in the 90's. Quite honestly, these comics were some of my most treasured posessions till a very long time. They were almost like my best friends. The Chacha Chowdhary comic's  trademark one liners 'A volcano erupts in Jupiter when Sabu gets angry', or 'Chacha Chowdhary's brain works faster than a computer'  were their unique-selling-points. Every child loved these characters and even sometimes wished to be as intelligent as the Chacha himself. Then there was Tinkle with its 'Tantri the Mantri'  with his ever-failing plots to assassinate or get rid of his king (which rhymes really well btw) and 'Suppandi'  the simple village-lad with his never-ending goof-ups. The jokes at that age seemed so funny but now seem to be pretty lame and I chuckle to myself thinking 'how did I find these jokes even funny?' Then there were numerous other comics from the 'Diamond comics' (which were quite a rage in the 90's) stable like  Billoo, Captain Vyom,  Chotu Lambu which were also quite popular.

Anyway, the fact remains that these comics definitively occupy a vast part of my childhood memories and I will always be fond of comics no matter how old I grow. Only now, the comics have shifted to the more radical and 'cooler' super-hero genre. :D Everytime I see a Chacha Chowdhary comic or a Tinkle Digest somewhere, It unknowingly triggers a wave of nostalgia as I find myself back on a railway station as a 11 year old waiting for my dad to buy me my 'treasures'
:)

Wedding planners..

So, my sister’s wedding was successful and went smoothly without any major glitches or hiccups. I must say, all the forewarnings by my brothers (those with prior experience of helping with their sister’s marriage) did live up to their hype as my sister’s wedding kept me super-hyper-ultra-busy the last three weeks.

Taking care of the transport logistics alone cost me most of my time as I had to deal with the six hired vehicles and two of our own (totaling upto nine vehicles).

Here are some of the tips and things that a guy who has the responsibility of his sister’s wedding should know or be aware of….also some point from the following are my own observations and realizations from the entire event.

The e-invitation that I personally designed and created for my sister's wedding===========>>

1-      Learn MS Excel and become proficient in its use including the keyboard shortcuts. It makes life a lot easier when you will be needed to keep tab on a ton of things during the marriage.

2-      If you are a US returned brother/son—then you are expected to magically appear upto three* tones fairer than even your rich-A/C-house-dwelling-uncle and his family.

*conditions apply  

3-      Always keep a notepad handy with you along with a pen who will most likely become your best friend in the weeks leading upto the wedding.

4-      Be prepared to become the bargaining leader of your family (getting trained under the current-bargain-champion-naani would be a good idea to get started).

5-      you can kiss all the lip-smacking hot food being served on the marriage day goodbye as you will become one of the last persons at the wedding to eat that day after having taken care of all the proceedings.

6-      Maintaining a good relationship with the drivers of the vehicles, the security guard, the pan-wala, the banquet manager at the hotel where the wedding is going to be and the caterer will really help smoothen things out (thank you Abhishek Chowdhary for that valuable tip)

7-      Never walk beside a stranger on the road who has either a cough problem or a tobacco-chewing habit.

8-      You will appear in only 2% of the photos clicked on the night of the wedding.

9-  Get ready to be absent from Facebook and twitter for at least a week (yeah...it's tough...but you gotta do what you gotta do :-)
10- Have a backup pair of footwear hidden in a back-pack and keep them close to you...you never know when your current footwear might become a victim of 'mistaken identity' or when they might become the 'object of desire' for your friendly neighborhood stray dog.

Well, I guess that’s all about it …I did have a good time working exceptionally hard to make the wedding a grand success….and nothing pleases you more when at the end of it all- your efforts are heartfully appreciated. 

Peace always..

flight home: PART 2

So, after much hassle and headaches, I managed to board my flight to Visakhapatnam (after having missed it the previous day). Like I said in the part1 of this blog, that I was one of the last persons to board the aircraft.
I had to sit right at the front of the plane, the very first seat, staring at the wall with a strange drawing of a puma with two tails (which apparently was the cabin interior manufacturing company’s logo). I was pretty comfy on my seat and was enjoying the final phase of my journey back home. The captain (an American in an Air India flight… the irony.) announced in his usual authoritative yet friendly manner, that we would be landing in about 15minutes. I looked out of the window in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the always-beautiful vizag coast line. Unfortunately, all I could see were thick dense clouds. In face I could not even see the wings of the flight, so dense were the clouds. Usually, this would trigger a panic attack thinking whether the flight will be able to land or not. But since the captain had already announced that the flight will be landing shortly, I sat reassured and home-sweet-home isn’t too far now.
A few seconds later, the flight started experiencing quite a lot of turbulence. It almost felt as if we were riding a bullock-cart on one of our good ol’ muddy-kachcha roads in India. Now, those who have traveled frequently by air know that turbulences are common in airplanes and they die out pretty soon, often within seconds. My co-passenger (sitting beside me) though was surely not a frequent flier as was evident with the look of terror on his face and suffocatingly-tight grip on the arm-rest that had turned his knuckles white. He was ready to pray one last time and even gave me one of those ‘now-would-be-a-good-time-for-you-to-pray-too’ look.
About a minute filled with turbulence and tightly gripped arm-rests plus and my neighbor’s terror-filled expressions --the radio crackled to life and the captain announced with some slight jitter in his voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, due to the unexpectedly rough weather over vizag airport, we will not be able to land there today and we are now enroute to Chennai, where we shall decide the next course of action”. That’s it, I almost felt God smiling up at me and ticking away a point on his list of ‘Smaran’s patience test’. My smile faded away at the bat of an eyelid to match the weather outside (read: dark and gloomy). Agony and anger filled up inside me as other passengers too started their trend of long exhales, shrugs and sighs.
The flight landed 45 minutes later at the Chennai airport. We all waited patiently inside the plane as we were not allowed to disembark and walk into the airport. Although some passengers (including me) did get out in the pretext of feeling ‘suffocated’ inside …I even took a small stroll around our rather small aircraft which ended with the chief-cabin-crew lady glaring at me with her huge bindi on her forehead that made her look like a Hindu-demon-Goddess. The pilot and the passengers were hoping that the storm in Vizag would die down and we would be on our way back without further delay. Sadly, this did not happen. The weather over Vizag airport was only getting worse. We eventually were allowed to switch our cell-phone back on. This was when the plane erupted in a cacophony of calls, with each passenger calling up their near and dear ones to inform them about the situation. I could distinctly figure out the same sentence (plane could not land in vizag…we are in Chennai now) being repeated in 5 different languages. It was actually pretty cool :)
About an hour and another round of refreshments later, we were finally told that we would be accommodated in a hotel (courtesy Air India) in Chennai and that we would be flown out to Vizag on the same flight the next day.
We were taken into the Chennai air terminal and were asked to collect our bags from the claiming area. Another shock/ patience-test waited for me here as I discovered to my mounting sadness, that my main bag (check-in) had not traveled in the flight as it should have. At this point, my patience level had overshot the boiling point. I was at peace with myself…..basically because there was absolutely NOTHING I could do about it. After having lodged an official complaint for missing baggage, I was whisked away to a ‘three star’ hotel which from the outside looked like my school. It was painted in a weird bright yellow, that is pretty reminiscent in the buildings of Chennai. All meals, I was told were courtesy of Air India. This, my friends was the best piece of news I had received in the past three days. I immediately and shamelessly gave a big grin to the front desk guy as soon as he said the food was free. Hehe.
The rooms, thankfully were really nice and had all the basic amenities including those tiny complimentary shampoo bottles that I so love to use. I have this habit of using the shampoo and based on the smell, I would guess from which shampoo bottle was this so called ‘sample’ taken.
Over the next 19 hours, I did not venture out into the city of Chennai (which I would have loved to), I slept and got over my jet lag, gleefully devoured the paid-for-mutton-biryani and chicken chettinad (reminding me of my roommate Vivekananda Reddy’s own recipe) for lunch and dinner and almost finished my novel that I had started reading in Frankfurt Airport.
My co-passengers, who I kept bumping into in the resturaunt, looked somehow thrilled at the fact that they were in a new town and did not have to pay a penny for it. And none of them, had ventured out of the hotel. Ha!
We finally were taken to the airport the next day at around 8am in an old, rickety mini-bus that was noisier than the airplane’s turbines itself.
I finally made it to my destination around noon, minus my main baggage, and almost leapt into mom’s arms with such force that she almost tumbled over.
And so, I came to the end of a missed-flight, Delhi’s-cheap-hotel-staying, turbulence-experiencing, free-food-gorging, noisy-airconditionless-bus-riding journey that led me to my home two whole days behind schedule.
It was an experience of a lifetime and I will pray that none of my friends ever run into such a situation.

Special thanks to:
The New Delhi Air India staff for their utter chaotic handling of their passengers.
The new Terminal 3 at New Delhi airport for their malfunctioning screens
The AirIndia staff (NewDelhi again) Mr.Harpal who made sure I got a ride to the nearest hotel for a ridiculously high taxi tariff.
My NewDelhi-Vizag flight captain, for having ‘tried my best’ to land at Visakhapatnam
And the ever-efficient and alert AirIndia Baggage staff for failing to load all but my suitcase into the flight.

Scores:
God’s patience-testing game: 0
Smaran                               : 1

HA!

Flight-home : PART 1

Yeah…so I finally reached Home sweetest home (read: Visakhapatnam, India)on 21st May, a whole two days AFTER I was supposed to reach- after a taxing and arduous journey that tested my patience to the highest possible limit.
The adventures began after I landed in New Delhi’s newly built Terminal 3 which is being touted as one of the best airport terminals in the world. Well, I for one would like to beg to differ. The terminal apart from being all swanky and shiny, has it’s own set of design flaws. For one, if you need to get from the International terminal on the first floor to the domestic flights terminal on the second floor, then you have no other option but to cram yourself into a small elevator along with other i-want-to-go-first passengers. The lift itself is tiny and can hardly fit three passengers and two luggage carts. Apart from the Bonsai design, it also happens to travel at a speed that would make a desert-road-crossing-armadillo glow with pride at his own speed.
Then after the passengers finally make it to the domestic flight terminal, the boarding of the flights span three floors. My flight being on the ground-minus-one floor for which I had to travel almost a mile and take four escalators to get to. With all the twists and the turns of the path, I was almost at one point- led to believe that I was entering the ‘Chakravyuh’ out of which there was no way out.
An error on the terminals countless Television sets (that display the flight’s status), resulted in me missing my connecting flight to my home. Imagine my shock when I was told the next Air India flight was only the next day (24 hours later). So I had to make my own arrangements for lodging in a city where I hardly knew a soul (no…AirIndia did NOT freakin put me in a hotel on their account). The hotel search itself was filled with sweat, lots of shoulder-shoving, lot of tanning and a whole herd of Delhi’s famous expletives.
Spending a night in a so called ‘guest-house’ I again set out to the airport the next day at 3:30am. I had to go through a lot of tussling and arguing to ascertain my eligibility of being given a free seat on that day’s flight. The authorities (let me take a pause here and unabashedly tell you that The Air India staff at Delhi’s Terminal 3 are undoubtedly one of the worst managed and co-coordinating staffs I have seen) finally gave me a seat and said that I won’t be required to re-check in my luggage (I had checked it in for the previous day’s flight…the one I missed) and that It will be automatically loaded since I am boarding the flight.
I was one of the last people to be handed the ticket and I imagine I broke Usain Bolt’s world 100metere records about thrice on my way to make it to the flight. The plane took off after about half-an-hour’s delay and I was finally on my way to my final destination. I was excited to be visiting my family after almost a year and was smiling widely for a very long time until my co-passenger started giving me the stares thinking I was some maniac who was going to do something bad and was being happy about it.
Little did I know that I had more adventures in store and that my journey was not going to end in such a smooth fashion….
I think I’ve slightly overshot the word-limit on this blog, beyond which people tend to either start dozing off or leave the blog page to rather see what Rakhi Sawant is doing these days. So I will continue this blog in another part…that will be coming out very soon…(not that anyone in this world cares at all…. Hehe).
Until then..
Peace!