Random Musings.......

The April Tag Line update..

2009-04-23T21:58:00.000+05:30

Its been a while since I presented a Kannada movie tagline update. Some diehard Kannada movie followers who have complained in the past as to why I do not present tag lines from other language movies are welcome to provide me this information. If Okalipuram area has movie posters from other movies, I would be more than glad to add taglines from other languages as well.

But for now, we have only the following movies.
a) Minchu – Touch me if you can
b) Prem Kahani – A Pucca love story
c) Macchaa – On Field (Movie also has an A rating for some reason)
d) Paper Dosa (Not kidding) – S.O.S (Not kidding either)
e) Yagna- The Fire Within.
f) Auto – Wheels ‘N’ Bottles

Among other news worth noting is that Mr.Vatal Nagaraj was spotted near the town hall wearing a Policeman dress and carrying a Mace (The Gadaaa). He had been allotted the coconut symbol by the election commission and was pulled up by them for allegedly selling these at 2Rs a piece. If elected, he has promised to take care of all the animals in the area, with a specific mention of donkeys. Again, I do not kid here.

Back and the election season and the fast passenger trains....

2009-04-12T18:09:00.000+05:30

The bloggard is back in the blogging business after a small break....!!  And what made me come back is the headline in today’s newspaper. The headline couldn’t be more hilarious given the election season in India. A certain party from North India which uses the bicycle symbol released its election manifesto. According to this manifesto, the party aims to remove the usage of computers and English since this is apparently causing mass unemployment. And this is the plank on which the party wants to win elections. Brilliant strategy, I must say. Can’t wait for the election results to see how this party does. The tragic thing is that these guys may actually win just enough seats to get a couple of ministries in the government. We may even get a prime minister from this party.

This election promises a lot of soap operatic kind of drama, back stabbing and front stabbing (if there’s such a term), rhetoric, at least 11 aspirants for the top post, extremely biased news reporting etc etc. This is of course the norm in any election, but this time the scale is unprecedented.

On a trip to the railway station the other day, I saw this train called the Hubli Fast Passenger. So I wonder, what exactly is a fast passenger? Normal passenger trains stop at every concrete slab by the railway line thinking that its a station. The average speed is known to be roughly about 13 kmph. So does a fast passenger still stop at every station but zips at incredible speed between two stations? But then what happens to a train like the Udyan Express which in spite of its tag, stops at every station and travels at reasonable speed. Or is it that the fast passenger is nearly the same as the mail/express train except that it will always be late in reaching its destination? The esteemed reader is more than welcome to enlighten me on this issue.

Customer Service Centre and the Emotional Blackmail…

2009-01-11T21:57:00.000+05:30

In India, business development clearly happens through shrewd manipulation of the customers’ emotions and not through some good sales gimmick or some witty ads. The companies have a fundamental assumption while they use this emotional blackmail tactic. They assume that customers have brains the size of a peanut. In many cases, that definitely could be the case though. Sample this conversation of mine with a customer service representative of a television cable company.

Me: I wish to cancel my subscription to this particular channel. While I can add the subscription to this channel online, why can’t I cancel this online?
Customer Service Representative (also called CSR): No Sir, you have to call us to cancel it.
Me: Ok, I want to cancel these channels for now.
CSR: Why do you want to cancel these channels?
Me: Currently, the channel has all useless programmes.
(Now comes the most important line)
CSR: Sir, Do you realize that if you cancel these channels, you will not be able to see them anymore? Are you sure that you want to cancel them?
Me (stunned for a while): Yes, 100%.
---End of conversation---

Now, why would CSR remind me that I won’t be able to receive these channels if I cancel them? I am not the brightest of persons but I do have enough intelligence to know that if I cancel a channel, I won’t be getting that particular channel. So my guess is that CSR has used this line before and met with success. There does seem to be a section of the population that has renewed their subscription to channels when they have realized that cancelling them would mean no further reception.

The cancelling thing also made me wonder if partial channel cancellation is possible i.e. can I have the reception cancelled only for time slots which have serials of Ekta Kapoor or reality shows playing? Now that would be a wonderful feature.

Still staying on to TV channels, I made a few random discoveries while flipping the remote the other day. There’s a Hindi movie channel that plays only dubbed Hindi movies of South Indian origin. Arjun Sarja, Nagarjuna, Chiranjeevi and Balakrishna are regular Hindi speakers on this channel. For some reason, all of them have the same Hindi voice and accent. All villains also have the same voice and accent. I think this channel does the dubbing itself employing the same voices for every movie. Cost cutting seems to be the mantra of this channel.

Continuing my research further on the Rajashri Productions from my previous blog, I have found out that they now make serials like Bidaai, which needless to say borrow stories from their previous movies. Alok Nath continues to cry in this serial as well and in many occasions, more than the heroine and her mother.

Return of the Trivial Thievery...

2008-12-14T10:34:00.001+05:30

Thievery seems to have reached a new low this season. While I have had an ancient hole ridden umbrella and brass/iron taps (called faucets in certain English speaking countries that I don’t wish to name :-)) stolen from me, this time it was the handle grip from my bike that was stolen. This grip was 7 years old, made of rubber and cost roughly 27 Rs. What’s worse is that the thief stole only one of the grips. What kind of a thief is this? Mostly a sadistic one I would like to guess. Because, when he stole the grip he exposed the glue coated handle (which I didn’t know until much later). I happily set off on my bike only to notice that I couldn’t take my left hand off the handle and that it was stuck to it. Some force later, I did manage to free myself leaving behind some glue imprints on the exposed handle. Needless to say that the glue also left a black imprint on my hand and this did take some effort removing off.

This thief will definitely not be going to heaven for this.

These days it’s dangerous for 2 wheelers to ride in the night near my place of stay. And not because of muggers or any anti social elements. There is a huge black street dog stalking the area which chooses to chase every unsuspecting rider. Recently, I was this unsuspecting rider. The dog when it saw me had only one aim and that was to bite my leg off. The dog was running by my side ready to chew me off and I had also my leg ready to kick in case it lunged at me. But suddenly it stopped dead in its tracks and then I realized that I had moved out of its territory when I saw another dog in the distance. This one seemed to be a more peaceful one and let me pass through harmlessly. And this is how the intrepid explorer survived another adventure and continues to live to tell his tales. :-)

Ek Vivaah Aisa bhi and the protector of Gardens…

2008-11-09T12:32:00.000+05:30

After seeing the poster of yet another movie by the illustrious Barjatya clan (of the Rajshri Productions fame) based on the Indian marriage, innumerable songs, joint family and roughly about 1000 actors, I was forced to dig deeper in this “direction” (Excuse the pun). I was intrigued by this director, who year after year churns out similar kind of movies with the same actors and music directors. I found a few disturbing facts though. “Ek vivah aisa bhi” is a remake, nothing surprising is what you would think. But what is disturbing is that this is a remake of one of their own movies made roughly 25 years ago called Tapasya. This is the first instance that I see of someone remaking his/her own movie. This is what I call a serious case of director’s block.

The idea of Hum Aapke Hai Kaun is also based on one of their earlier movies called Nadiya Ke Paar, which according to my research had roughly 200 songs. Needless to say, this was their top grosser in 1979. There was a brief attempt to venture into the action genre through a movie called Agent Vinod, in which Vinod a CBI agent is out to hunt a certain villain called Scorpion. This movie won the Filmfare for the best sound recording. The way I understand, this was their only foray into this genre and soon they were back making movies like Sun Sajna, Rimjhim Geeton Ka and Maine Pyaar Kiya. I truly salute this genre of film making. I never have and will never comprehend this kind of film making.

But, surprisingly and surprisingly is the operative word here, they were the ones who produced Saaransh, which one of the finest movies Indian cinema has to offer. I think they have already atoned for making Hum Saath Saath Hain and Mein Prem ki diwani hoon.

*---Change of topic----*

I henceforth declare myself the protector of gardens. A new crime wave sweeping across the gardens of West Bangalore (which are also my usual places for running) is people stealing flowers as if it were ones own backyard. While jogging today, I requested a certain pilferer of blue flowers to stop his act. He calmly replied saying he needed them for his “puja”. My retort was going to be, “So why in gods name wouldn’t you buy your own flowers?” But I froze there, too shocked to reply at the utter disregard for a very well maintained public garden. Next on my target are certain aunties, who prefer some orange flowers from the garden. Hmm, I ought to have a nickname somewhere on the lines of Blade, Iron Man etc. The Flower Warrior seems to fit the bill perfectly. Maybe the esteemed reader can suggest a better name.

The Diwali Cracker Discoveries this time…

2008-11-01T10:37:00.000+05:30

The Diwali Cracker Discoveries this time…

The recently concluded Diwali saw me return to the Diwali celebrations scene with the gang again after an absence last year. This year’s celebrations saw substantially more participation on account of some new entrants.

One thing heartening to note about crackers this time is that they came with “No Child Labour Employed” printed across them. But this time, I saw brands that I had never ever before seen in my life. Standard Fireworks were no where to be seen, while KRS and Navarathna fireworks seemed to be very prominent. And this particular KRS brand has sub-brands like Calf Brand and the Sheep Brand. While I was in the process of using the product called Aero Dance, I also noted that the company provides additional specifications of this cracker like Original Name: Shell, Class 7, Sub-Class 3. I was under the impression that only navy ships, planes and missiles had a classification system like this. This goes to show how our firework companies have reached a new level of sophistication and they probably have a new database system as well.

While the packaging is very professional these days, the names of the products are extremely hilarious. The Red Gangster cracker had Amitabh Bacchhan, Rajnikanth and Kiera Knightly on it. The Lazer Show (note the spelling of lazer) had extremely suggestive and provocative pictures from a movie, whose actors I don’t recognize. And then there was the Pearl Hunt fire cracker, which had the Pirates of the Caribbean pictures all over it. The Tamil actress Asin also made her presence felt on one of the crackers. As mentioned earlier, Rajnikanth was a standard feature on all of them. The celebration ended with a lousy fancy cracker called Jukebox 100 which looks like a car battery and which is supposed to fire around 100 small rockets at will in all directions making a rather irritating noise while doing so. To the best of my knowledge, only 30 or so of them fired in ALL possible directions that left people scampering for cover. The jukebox 100 package also mentioned that this product was the pinnacle of the company’s innovation. Somehow, I do not happen to think so.

Lastly, the company is also careful enough to inform the prospective user that for best results crackers should be lit at night only :-)

Finally, the right spelling of “puncture”....!!

2008-10-07T21:16:00.000+05:30

Puncture and vulcanizing are the most misspelt English words in India. After years of searching all around, I finally found the right spelling of puncture not 75 metres away from my house. Karnataka Puncture Shop proudly displays the correct spelling of puncture. In the past, I have seen many different variations; panchar, pancher & puncher. Puncher seems to be the most common variant though. The only difference with Karnataka Puncture Shop is that its advertisement says “puncture done here” while all the other shops tend to remove them. Looks like this shop has a different and an innovative business strategy according to which perfectly good tyres are punctured at a cost. My quest to find the right spelling of vulcanizing still continues though.

A very bizarre news as of yesterday is that the state of Himachal Pradesh has recommended the Great Khali, (for the uninformed, he is an Indian wrestler in the WWE) for the Padmashri to the Central Government. While I let the reader chew on this news, I can’t help but wonder as to which genius came up with this idea. Readers who don’t believe me are kindly requested to read the Times of India dated 6th October. I also won’t be surprised if the CPI(M) objects to this and claims that this nomination would hurt the sovereignty of India. Whether the President’s office will accept this recommendation remains to be seen.

The swimming trunk discoveries......

2008-09-15T22:33:00.000+05:30

As a part of my new endeavour to survive if I was ever stranded in an ocean or a river, also called swimming by most of us (Michael Phelps prefers to call this his livelihood :-)) , I was “exposed” to the world of swimming trunks in order to cover myself up. Now one would like to think that shopping for swimming trunks should be a two minute job. No, its not. There are many choices on offer here. One is what I call the Govinda category with mostly fluorescent colours. Now I wouldn’t want to be caught wearing these either dead or alive. However, a distinct advantage of wearing these is that if you are ever lost in the sea, you would be very easily spotted by the search party in the dark. You can see these fluorescent things miles away. Even satellites can easily spot you.

I was also surprised to see that some swimming trunks are equipped with pockets large enough to hold an ipod or a mobile. Some trunk designer seems to think that it’s not a bad idea to listen to music or talk on the mobile while swimming. I would definitely like to meet this innovative swimming trunk designer.

Lastly, there was this type of trunks with elastic so thin that you needed a microscope to see if it was indeed there. This was a very high risk swimming trunk and it is trunks like this that make a second line of defence a necessity should the elastic give way when in water. Given this wide choice of 3 varieties, the pocket variety is the least risky and I believe that the would be swimmer would definitely be safe in these.

I believe that this will serve to be a very comprehensive guide to swimming trunk shopping for beginners.

On a different note, was most impressed with Aamir. Superb direction and a great soundtrack. Haven’t seen this kind of fast paced no nonsense Hindi movie in a while.

Lastly, Richard Wright, the pianist of the legendary Pink Floyd is no more. May he rest in peace.

The city renaming issue and this year’s mistake....!!

2008-08-26T19:52:00.000+05:30

The title does not refer to the changing of city names by politicians as the reader might first like to think. The title actually refers to a disturbing trend that I noticed last year and this trend being on the rise, I am now forced to bring it to the notice of my fellow Bangaloreans. For some vague reason, there is a large section of Indian citizens who refer to Bangalore as Bangy. Why would someone like to call a city as if it is one’s pet? It’s only with great difficulty that I have forgiven the person who calls a laptop a “lappie”. But the inventor of the Bangy will have to pay dearly for this :-) I give respect to all cities that I know. I don’t go around calling Mumbai as Mumby or Kolkata as Kolky. I don’t mind if you call Bangalore/Bengaluru as BLR (which is the airline code) or SBC (the railways code). It still has a professional feel to it. Call it Bangy and it sounds like a coffee shop/pub. And every time it has been a lady who has called it Bangy. Guys never call it as Bangy.

Anyway now that I have raised awareness on this new issue, moving on to the next issue.

Every year there is a major mistake that I commit unwittingly. This year’s mistake is definitely worth a mention here. The mistake cost me about 250 Rs and the mistake was a watching a movie called Kuselan. There hasn’t been this forgettable a movie for a long time since a movie called Prem Qaidi (seen on TV and not in a cinema hall). Now Prem Qaidi was a Karishma Kapoor starrer (I think she was in school then) and had an actor called Harish, who is not necessarily the best actor that Bollywood has seen. Anyway, back to Kuselan. Cynics and diehard fans of Rajnikanth may question my knowledge of Tamil and my judgement of the movie. But in this case, no prior knowledge of Tamil was required. A bad movie like this easily crosses the language barrier. I demand that Mr. P. Vasu, the director of this movie should refund the ticket money to all the viewers. This is the only way he will be able to atone for this disaster of epic proportions.

Motorized Treadmills and a Tag line update..

2008-07-26T20:42:00.000+05:30

I happened to notice this advertisement the other day- “Contact here for Motorized Treadmills”. Now while I really don’t know what this means, the cynic in me tells me that Man has reached the pinnacle of laziness. Does this mean that on this peace of equipment, I don’t really need to run? I just stand on it and the motor runs for about 30 mins and I lose the calories equivalent to a 30 min run? Would love to find out. I wouldn’t really be surprised if such a machine was indeed being sold in the western part of the world.

The Okalipuram area, as some of the esteemed readers know is a very important area in Bangalore. This area showcases the talents of the tag line writers of the Kannada film industry. Thanks to the watchful eye of Chilli who can spot a Kannada tag line a mile away and also due to my thirst to find out new Kannada tag lines, I present to you this months update. Of course, some of the readers would be also familiar with the latest taglines. This is purely for the benefit of Bangaloreans not in Bangalore currently. Henceforth, there will also be a monthly update on the tag lines.

a) Minchina Ota :- Chase to Live, Live to Chase.
b) Muggina Manasu: Tag line 1 – Only for Girls, Tag line 2 – Injurious to a boy’s heart.
c) Maadesha: Tag line 1 – There are no rights or wrongs, only power. Tag line 2 – Hero is a man who doesn’t follow the law.
d) Citizen: Peace, let it begin with me (This one was extremely difficult to spot. Kudos to chilli for this one)
e) P.U.C. – Please, U C ( I swear this tag line is true)

A recent trend I notice is that many Kannada movies have two English tag lines. Wondering why.

Surviving the back seat in a BMTC bus....

2008-06-29T08:38:00.000+05:30

I have a suggestion for the Indian Army. As a part of the army training, they should make BMTC last seat travel along Ring Road through JP Nagar a mandatory exercise for all soldiers. This would further help to toughen our jawans and put them in a much better position while handling border infiltration.

While I have a tremendous respect for the kind of connectivity provided by BMTC, the BMTC buses (excluding the Volvos of course) do not seem to have any shock absorbers beyond the back wheels. The shock absorbing system ends right there. As a result, if you are standing or sitting beyond this point, you are on your own. I also believe that I ought to be charged lesser for having to sit in the last seat.

In case the bus approaches a pot hole or a crater, the jerk caused by this is more than enough to snap your spinal cord. And this is quite painful. What’s even more painful is when the bus approaches a speed breaker. At first, you will fly. And I am not joking here. Do not be surprised to find yourselves airborne for a good 2-3 seconds. You can see your life flash before you in this time and this time is also good enough for you to beg forgiveness for all the wrongs and the sins you have committed. Because, following this flight, you will crash land or nose dive back into your seat. And this crash landing is almost fatal. Notice that I say almost fatal. Clearly, I made it though the journey. Others weren’t as lucky. In order to experience the best of the back seat journeys, I strongly recommend the 500 series of bus routes. For a preview, the 60 series should do the job. An advantage of using the number 500 bus is that it takes you through parts of Bangalore which you didn’t know existed.

Cost cutting the entertainment….

2008-06-21T17:11:00.000+05:30

Of late I have been seeing that the cost-cutting bug has bitten even the entertainment industry and even these guys have been hurt by the recent increase in the oil prices.

For example, let’s take the notorious Hindi soap operas playing on every channel from 7pm to midnight. Earlier these serials had a distinctive background score, had songs and a music director. Now, these serials just pick up songs from Yash Chopra or the Karan Johar “romantic” movies and use them as a background score. And since Yash Chopra and Karan Johar movies have songs for every imaginable situation in a love story, the serials have absolutely no problems finding a suitable song to use for their particular situation. This kind of innovation has eliminated the need for a specific music director and thus saved costs for these serials. Not only that, I am sure all the serial guys have come together and created a central repository for all the costumes just like a public library. That’s why don’t be surprised to see the heroine of a serial wearing the same saree as the main vamp of another serial. All these measures have tremendously benefited the soap opera industry.

Another recent instance of this is the new Kamal Hassan movie “Dashavataram” which has Kamal Hassan in 10 different roles. My guess is that the movie went so much over-budget and he was forced into these multiple roles instead of hiring 9 more actors. I will refrain from saying anything more about this movie since I do not know the language in question and my comments are totally based on only what I saw.

Lastly, another update on funny and bizarre Kannada movie tag lines (which I am always on a look out for). This week, I read this very interesting tag line whose meaning I do not understand at all. The tag line reads “The Procession of Pyaar in War”.

Actors, the Nicknames and the JP Nagar warzone….

2008-06-08T12:40:00.000+05:30

Karnataka has this long tradition of giving its actors titles, which range from the extremely creative to the ridiculous. While most of us know these titles, no single database exists which contains this valuable information. I thought that this blog might be a good starting point for collating this information. While my knowledge is limited to the following few, I would be extremely thrilled to have more entries from my esteemed readers. The reader is also encouraged to contribute from any other language.

The list will of course begin with
1) “Rebel Star” Ambareesh and continues with
2) “Golden Star” Ganesh
3) “Hat trick Hero” Shivaraj Kumar
4) “Sahasasimha” Vishnuvardhan
5) “Navarasa Nayaka” Jaggesh
6) “Crazy Star” Ravichandran
7) “Kicchha” Sudeep

On a different note, I had the chance to visit JP Nagar yesterday after a year. Due to the “alleged” construction work, the place looks like a war zone. You can see the remains of a few roads in some places. You can also actually conduct guerrilla warfare in this area with ease. Che Guevera would have been at home here. The other amazing this about this area is you cannot get out of it by using the same “road” (or what used to be one) you used to get in. When I tried finding my way around, the local residents were also were not sure of the exact road to get out. One guy told me that he had heard of someone the previous day who had actually made it out of JP Nagar. (Ok, I am making this last part up, but had to in order to stress the gravity of the situation)

Lastly, there still exists a cyber café in Vijayanagar that uses Windows98 and hence does not allow users to attach USB drives to its computers. Hence, any prospective users wielding USB sticks containing data that they require printouts of are requested to stay away from this place. I would love to know how the owner of this place is still making money with the printing business.

Back….!!

2008-06-01T13:05:00.002+05:30

Feels great to be back in Bangalore and already many interesting things have occurred within the last 4-5 days. As soon as I landed, I made the fundamental mistake of still assuming that as a pedestrian, I had the right of way on the zebra crossing. I got into a rather vocal conversation with an angry taxi driver on this issue of who had the first right over the crossing. Then the realization struck me that I now back in India and hence I have no such privileges. Zebra crossing is a purely ornamental marking in our country and has no significance whatsoever.

Spotted this gem on the back of a car yesterday. “Thinking is a solution but too much thinking is pollution”. India definitely does have a hidden pool of talented deep thinkers.

In the recent elections, a very important news came to light. The notorious “activist” Mr. Vatal Nagaraj not only lost the election but also lost his deposit. When I last saw this man in 2003, he was sitting on top of a tree in Adugodi waiting for the press to arrive. And to top this, my city has named a street after him. In most cities that I know of, streets are named only after deceased important public figures. Our Mr.Nagaraj is neither.

Everyone’s dear & favourite actor, Rebel Star Ambareesh also lost the election. Apparently, there were no celebrations on his 57^th birthday. Don’t know if this election was the Operation Antha for him. (For the uninformed, Operation Antha is a must see radical movie of its time ,:-) I can write a separate blog on this. )

The mid week night show tradition still continues in the gang. Some people in the gang still continue to sleep during movies . Some things haven’t changed. That sure is a relief.

The end of an adventure…

2008-05-24T00:57:00.000+05:30

A lack of activity in this blog can be solely attributed to a blogger’s block and a lack of interesting incident to report and of course something known as work. Work is always a convenient way to hide a total lack of imagination. This is of course totally based on the assumption that I did have some imagination in the past. The gang would definitely like to contest this assumption.

This will be the last blog from the holy land. The explorer will fondly remember his exploits in this part of the world before he gets on to an arduous task called packing up. I seem to have accumulated a lot of stuff (not necessarily useful) over the past one year. How this will fit into 35 kg of baggage is a complex question.

From what I understand, I will be landing at the Bengaluru International Airport on its second day. I sense an airport review coming up here.

It sure feels good to be soon getting back to the days of the late night coffee, the squash, the FNU and late night movie shows.

Like they said here, L’Hitrohot (See you soon)

Pearls of wisdom….

2008-04-30T00:01:00.001+05:30

Three important words of wisdom for this week:-

a) The approximate time between having ones car cleaned and a crow leaving its mark at a very strategic point on the car is 16 minutes.
b) While jogging, the biggest of the dogs will never chase you. It’s the small, allegedly “cute” looking ones that you need to look out for.
c) All good movies play on TV at the same time.

More such wisdom is highly appreciated from the esteemed reader.

Recent random findings…..

2008-04-12T00:00:00.001+05:30

While reading the news from a popular website, I discovered that the series Simpsons was pulled off from the state run Venezuelan TV because of complaints from people that it was not suitable for children. That time slot earlier reserved for the kids now plays Baywatch and no complaints have been received since then. Where was doordarshan when such important decisions had to be made?

Again back to the TV media. For this first time, to the best of my knowledge, an American series has borrowed an idea from an Indian one. Found that the series Ugly Betty bears an uncanny resemblance to an erstwhile Indian series called “Jassi jaisi koi nahi’. For the record, my knowledge about “jassi jaisi koi nahi” comes only from the ads and dinner time discussions at home.

Staying still on TV, there is a reality show that is called, “who wants to be a superhero - season2”. The name of the series itself should indicate that we are staring at the bottom of the barrel of reality TV. The series explores how the superhero in man comes out when he is faced with stark realities of being on television and when he is also forced to wear ridiculous superhero costumes. I am still finding it hard to believe that there’s a season 2 of this.

Still on TV, most Israeli cable channels have no ads. Indian channels, are you listening to this? Especially sports channels which show only 4 bowls of an over in cricket. And in spite of this, the Israeli channels are making money. Wondering if there will ever be Indian TV with lesser ads someday.

A well known, but not so popular Hindi new channel also hit rock bottom recently when it reported the news of the loss of the dog of a police commissioner of a small town as flash news. If this news channel has any conscience whatsoever, it’s high time that this channel got out of the reporting business. Credit goes to Pamsy for providing this important piece of information.

And finally a very interesting finding came to light from my recent trip to Jordan. Samsung also makes cars and this brand is very popular in Jordan for some reason. Evidently, cars are not their best selling product, it seems.

Lost in the elevator and the rain detecting wipers….

2008-03-09T23:51:00.000+05:30

One might wonder if it is possible to get lost in an elevator and would definitely dismiss the possibility of such an incident. But we live in interesting times, and yours truly has managed to achieve this. But there were definitely circumstances leading to this incident and had I been aware of them, this wouldn’t have happened.

Firstly, the hotel where the incident occurred had 15 floors, and only 5 floors were visible to me at that time. The reason for this, which I realized later was that the hotel is built on one side of the hill and the unsuspecting guest enters it on the 9th floor. Secondly, the car parking is on the 7th floor. So floors, 8 to 1 are below you and not visible from the road. Lastly, I painfully realized that room 1406 means the 14th floor and not the 1st. Took me 2 trips from the 9th to the 1st floor to understand this concept. 10 minutes later, room 1406 and its occupant was finally located.

X---Change of Topic---X

Now, a latest car ad from a large car manufacturer informs me that its new car model has automatic rain detecting wipers, which means that the car detects rain on its own and you don’t really need to go through the Herculean and calorie burning task of actually turning on the wipers by yourselves.

Two disturbing things about this ad. This is a perfect example of useless inventions technology has to offer. Its not like I cannot see when it rains and need a third eye to tell me its raining and that I need to turn on the wiper. What’s worse is that, there will be people buying the car just for this feature. Man has become so lazy now that he is finding flicking his fingers to just push down the wiper switch too arduous.

Second disturbing fact is that if this is the unique selling point for this car model, I most definitely don’t want to be buying this model. In this day and age where fuel efficiency should have been the headline for the car or even its looks and power, the rain sensing wiper is a dampener here, literally. I can almost picturise the customer being finally left with only the automatic wipers as the rest of his car falls to pieces. The customer would probably advertise the car for a resale with these lines “Automatic glass wipers for sale, almost as good as new”. Cost 10,000$ only.

The blade scams...

2008-02-27T23:29:00.000+05:30

The supermarket never fails to amuse me and always brings more information to light. This time around, the supermarket has enlightened me on the scams surrounding shaving blades or razors. I actually saw a razor which has 4 blades. While I have seen razors with 1, 2 and even 3 (of course the mach3); 4 was a novelty to me. This 4 bladed razor cost many a dollar or many a shekel in this case. I shall refrain from mentioning the price in order to avoid shocking the unsuspecting reader.

But my main point here is, why would anyone need a 4 bladed razor? If a 3 bladed razor like the Mach3 cant do the job, that means you are probably a big hirsute animal like a wolf and hence even 4 blades wouldn’t help ( a sword might). If a three bladed one works, you don’t really need a one with 4 of them. But someone seems to be buying them, and I want to know why and who. This looks like one of those mysteries mankind can’t explain.

Then there’s this shaving foam scam. Actually a very small quantity is more than enough. But, the way the foam spray cans are designed, almost 50% of the foam comes on to your hand even if you press it lightly. Which means that on an average you would need 50 foam spray cans a year. And that’s how shaving cream companies are reporting massive profits every year. Compare this to the shaving cake sold by a much respected Indian company, which according to my father lasts for many a year and costs 16rs as of today.

Then there’s the electric razor, which costs nearly 250$, comes with 6 different kinds of blades for different kinds of stubbles and with a weird socket which fits into certain plugs only. Hotels have special plugs for these razors. A shave in India costs 10rs (could be lesser) at the barber’s with the inflation and the rise in petrol prices. The barber gave me this explanation for raising his prices once, I swear. Anyway, back to the main point. With this price, I can go to the barber’s twice a week for the next 10 years. I see no sane reason in investing in an electric razor.

On a rather sombre note, No country for old men seems to be a rather overrated movie. That’s 350rs I am never going to get back and also 2 hours of lost sleep.

A week of disturbing trends….

2008-02-08T15:53:00.000+05:30

This week saw what I think are extremely disturbing trends in the Indian Television scene.

Trend 1

India’s self proclaimed “largest” 24 hour Hindi news channel had this flash breaking news 4 days ago. Loosely translated into English, it read as “Amitabh Bacchhan catches a cold”. While words fail me here, I shall let the esteemed reader ponder at this. I wonder what the television equivalent of newspaper yellow journalism is called.

And this was the flashing news when the other events on that day in India were the falling stock market, the ongoing tirade of this particular Mumbai’s political party against residents from other states and of course cricket. I am also wondering if this channel is paid. Au contraire, I ought to be paid to watch this channel should I ever want to this channel.

For the record, I got this piece of info from a friend. I was NOT watching this channel at that point.

Trend 2

A 100% Israeli owned cable channel which normally shows Indian movies starts showing a soap opera called “Kanyadaan”. This means that this channel actually paid Ekta Kapoor for the broadcasting rights. And from a brief glimpse of 5 mins, I gather that the main protagonist of this series has 2 daughters, one not necessarily legitimate and the other one being married and having marital problems like a wicked mother-in-law, an husband with extra marital affairs, and a jealous sister-in-law. Chew on that for a while.

Trend 3

Zee TV, which is the premier channel broadcasting these soap operas, whose names start with K, is very global. While it earlier restricted itself to Middle East and the US, the channel is now being broadcasted as far as Vietnam, Fiji & Phillipines. This means that people pretty much all the over the world are being exposed to this world of the scheming daughters-in law, jealous mothers-in-law, guys with 3 wives on an average etc etc. What’s worse is that these serials have English subtitles, which means that the viewership is not restricted to the Indian viewers.

And Indians wonder why the foreign countries have an image of India contrary to the reality.

The Egyptian diaries…

2008-02-02T21:15:00.000+05:30

My first blog of 2008 comes a wee bit too late as a result of the “work routine” and “vacation”. While the work routine requires no mention whatsoever, the vacation part definitely does. It was a childhood dream come true to see the places I had only read about in the history textbooks.

In a random order, some of the interesting new findings on this trip are as follows :-

1) You enter Cairo, its like Mumbai or Delhi and it beats the crap out of Mumbai or a Delhi in the number of people. Cairo boasts of 20 million people compared to the 15 in Mumbai.
2) The great Indian auto rickshaw made by Bajaj is very much a part of this country and so are the hamara bajaj scooter brands like Chetak and Super. But these don’t contribute so much to the traffic. The taxis contribute to this, and these taxis in most of the cases were manufactured around the same time as the pyramids themselves. Random honking and lane changing is a part of the Egyptian life. And so is the Maruti 800.
3) Cairo has a metro and at least 10 times the number of flyovers that our cities have and not so bad roads. Bangalore should stop referring to itself as a class A city until it also has these things in place.
4) All Indians will be treated cordially and will be correctly recognized as Indians. They will either be called as India or Amitabh Bacchhan. Amitabh has a cult following here, thanks to his movies playing every Wednesday on TV. Amar Akbar Anthony seems to be the Sholay of Egypt. My sister was referred to as Hema Malini by a souvenoir vendor, which indicates a small but a healthy following for Hema too.
5) The current hit movies in Egypt are Kalashnikov (with a poster similar to the Kannada AK-47, not joking here), Special Missions (looks like a CSI poster) and a comedy called The Presidents Chef. The chef looks uncannily like Vijayakanth.
6) Egyptians refuse to use coins. So the paise/cents equivalent called piastres are in paper form, which makes you feel that you may be a millionaire , thanks to a bulging wallet, but you will probably have an amount less than 1$ in there.
7) You food bill may have a total of 120 pounds, But unless you are alert, the total with the taxes and the service may somehow magically add up to 180 and then the restaurant will try to negotiate it to 150 but you still give 130 and walk away.
8) Bargaining starts with ¼ the original rate.
9) The first class trains look very unenticing from the outside like a British relic but amazing from inside.
10) Hibiscus Juice was an important finding on this trip and tastes amazing.
11) Deserts can be unforgivingly cold at 5.30 am, making one to stop ones bus in the middle of nowhere for certain reasons.
12) Egyptians seem to very punctual. 6.30pm does mean 6.30pm and not 8pm like in our country.
13) Finally, the Pyramids, Aswan, Luxor, the Suez, the Red Sea, the Sinai and a travel of over 3000kms make this one worthwhile trip. A special mention of the Tel-Aviv to Cairo bus ride must be made here. While the bus may not be comfortable enough, the scenery outside is a breathtaking one.

The picture below pretty much sums it up :-)

Death to the coffee vending machines

2007-12-30T01:02:00.000+05:30

As of today, I am trying to garner a world wide support to ban coffee vending machines. When humanity had the need for a machine that made coffee automatically, it got more than it bargained for. Today’s coffee vending machines are extremely sophisticated machines armed with artificial intelligence and complexity, a little lesser than your average super computer.

It’s been 3 weeks now since I managed to get a decent cup of coffee from the machine in my office. Firstly, everyday I get a different amount of coffee in my cup. While it overflows more often than not, there are also times when I have to stare at the bottom of the cup to check if there’s any coffee in there. Since this machine seems to have emotions and has an inherent hate for me, I never get the exact amount of coffee I need. After some investigation, I was informed by an unknown coffee drinker who knows this machine all too well for the past few years, that there exists a knob that controls the amount of coffee. He showed me how to use this. When he used it, he got the perfect amount of coffee. When I did, the mug overflowed. That’s AI right there for you.

A second problem with this machine is that it gives me espresso even when I ask for a cappuccino. When I ask for a cappuccino, I clearly see the milk going into a tube from the milk container kept next to it but alas, no milk ever comes out. I have no clue what happens to the milk. This is a mystery that is yet to be solved. Lastly, the coffee machine comes equipped with a steamer so that one can dip this steamer into the cup and heat ones coffee. Why provide a steamer when the machine promises a hot cup of coffee is something that I will never understand. This means that even the manufacturer of this cursed machine could not control the machine and was aware that when the machine gets angry it will provide a not so warm cup of coffee. As of yesterday, I have developed a new way of getting the coffee. I push the espresso button to get some black coffee, pour some cold milk into the cup and use the steamer. That’s the best the vending machine could do for me. I swear that I saw a smirk on the coffee machine that day. The machine is also equipped with some sarcasm and has a digital display showing the message “Coffee ready” and the sign of a hot mug next to it.

From tomorrow, I am shifting to tea. No machine involved there. All I need is some hot water from the water fountain and a bag of tea. I say that this issue should be taken up in the UN Security Council’s next meeting calling for a worldwide ban on coffee vending machines. I also request that this issue be tabled in the council right after the global warming issue given the gravity of this widespread problem.

On a different closing note as usual, I have begun to rate Prasoon Joshi’s lyrics right up there close to Gulzar’s. After Rang De Basanti, the lyrics from Taare Zameein Par are very impressive, especially the song Kholo Kholo.

The hugging issue and the globalization of Mithun

2007-12-09T00:04:00.000+05:30

On this particular website visited by millions everyday, I happened to notice this piece of news which went as “Study reveals that the Swedes hug the most”. Since I had no other important business to attend to at that time, I went ahead and read this extremely path breaking piece of news. Let me share the contents of this article with you. It said that when it comes to hugging each other the Swedes beat everyone else and more so the Swedish women. I started wondering as to who conducted this survey and why. Did he have so much time to survey the people from various countries to find out how many times they hugged in a week? And lastly and most importantly who funded this survey? I would like to meet this person and ask him if he can fund my traveling/vacation expenses. If the fund”er” wants to part with his money, he might as well do something useful with it. The writer of this article, fearing that such pertinent questions will be asked called this an independent study and also did not mention his name. The article was signed “from our staff reporter”. The use of the word “independent study”, I am hoping, implies that the study was a mere conjecture of the staff reporter or was independently conducted by someone with no funding and enough time on his hands. Lastly, is there such a word as a funder? What do you call a person who funds someone?

In the words of Monty Python, now on to something completely different.

Since people in India now refuse to watch Mithun’s movies, he has decided to globalize himself and take his business elsewhere, for example to Israel. How I found this out goes something like this. I get into a taxi in Tel Aviv and explain the place I want to go to. The taxi driver nodded in acknowledgement and the next thing he asked if I had heard of Mithun Chakraborty. And mind you, he said the full word “Chakraborty” perfectly. I was amazed at this. Clearly, Mithun classics like Commando, Dance Dance and Pyar Ka Devta had clearly left a lasting impression on my newly found taxi driver friend. In unrelated news, Mithun is currently fighting the Bhojpuri Film Producers Association since it decreed that all Bhojpuri movies shot outside Bihar will be boycotted. This is clearly affecting Mithun’s business, who chooses to shoot all his movies in his Ooty studio and hotel, needless to say owned by him. I got this important news from India’s oldest and largest national daily. Again, no surprises there.

The supermarket dilemma…

2007-11-18T01:10:00.001+05:30

Supermarket shopping in foreign countries is almost a herculean task. One tries to find out Indian equivalents in the supermarket and one often ends up with some unexpected results especially if the country in question is not an English speaking one. The situation gets worse if the language in question uses a different script altogether. In this case, you have only the picture of the product to go by. And the picture on the thing you are trying to buy almost never looks like the actual thing.

Indian and British “ladiesfinger” = Rest of the world “okra”. Then, there’s the vegetable brinjal which is called eggplant in many countries and to add to this ruckus, aubergine in many other countries. You would think that potato is commonly used all over the world. There’s a country that I don’t wish to name that also refers to it as augratine. And of course, there’s the coriander which is also referred to as a cilantro in certain countries that I again don’t wish to name. Also coriander looks eerily similar to parsley, so you will end up buying parsley atleast once with not too pleasant results. Lastly, capsicums are also called peppers. There ought to be a world wide standardization of vegetable names to avoid the kind of accidents I have been through. This issue exists in the fruit world as well. Orange, depending on its size and colour is often sold as Clementine or mandarin. I demand a standard nomenclature for fruits and vegetables all over the world like chemical names. (Gang!! No wisecracks here).

Another important thing I wish to make the reader aware of is that the Indian “chana” daal in foreign countries looks again eerily similat to the “tur” dal, which is what the Indian in the foreign country set out to buy. Now this chana daal is a big culprit because it takes 20 times the time of tur dal to cook and it belongs to what I call the explosive category. The other members of this category are kabuli chana( chole/chickpeas) and rajma (red kidney beans). I think the reader should get the drift here. Only 6 months of chana daal later did I realize that it wasn’t tur dal. That was 4 years ago. A much wiser man now, I use masur dal (red lentils) as substitute.

Just 2 days back, I bought what looked like an instant soup packet because it had a picture of hot soup in a cup. The soup picture showed that there were some bread crumbs (or croutons which would be the correct culinary word to use). So I bought this and to my horror found that it was not a soup packet but a packet containing these “crumbs” and intended to be used on soup. What does it take for the manufacturer to write at least one word Crouton in English on this pack, I will never know. That’s 2$ I am never going to get back.

As a free public service, I would be more than happy to coach inexperienced supermarket entrants on these issues. Queries on this are more than welcome.

Spelunking and the new Tarzan…

2007-10-27T18:21:00.000+05:30

With a title that makes no sense to the prospective reader but still hopefully manages to evoke some curiosity in him (or her…I am not an MCP), I shall first clarify on the new Tarzan issue.

The online edition of India oldest English newspaper gleefully announced last week that Salman Khan is going to play the role of Tarzan in a forthcoming movie. I am wondering as to why this made headlines. Like every other movie of his, even in this one he will not be wearing many clothes except for the bare essentials. Even in this movie like previous one, he will enact the role of a young man who has grown in the wild and undomesticated. The headline would have made much more impression if in his forthcoming movie he announced that he would be completely clothed the entire time. Now that’s a news story which would have even displaced the current prime minister and his ongoing tryst with the Left from the front page. I am now expectantly waiting for the release of this Hindi Tarzan so that I can write a review on it. I am also curious to know if the Indian Tarzan will be from the northern wilderness of Uttarakhand or from the southern wilderness of M.M. hills (previously ruled by the erstwhile Mr. Veerappan).

With the Tarzan clarification out of the way, this weekend saw me Spelunking in a place called Rosh Hanikra near the Lebanese border, which means cave exploration by the inexperienced (Courtesy:- Wikipedia). Didn’t need wikipedia to tell me that I was inexperienced in this. I did realize this myself. An amazing place where the Mediterranean Sea makes amazing caves inside the mountains. But somehow the British had already reached there before the sea in world War2 to make a railway line. Trust the colonial British to be everywhere. I shall leave the reader with 2 pictures, the first one of the caves itself and second one on the Lebanon border, pointing to the directions of Jerusalem and Beirut.

The photograph incident and another lockout….

2007-10-21T01:30:00.000+05:30

I have recently drawn another ground breaking conclusion. It goes like this. The more technologically advanced a particular country is, the more difficult it is to find small services like public phones which accept coins, passport photograph services, public internet cafes and photocopy machines.

I was in dire need of some passport sized photographs so I headed to the nearest and the town’s largest mall where I was told I could find this service. Upon reaching the far end of the third floor, I saw a certain kiosk which had a camera inside it. This looked like what I was looking for. There were no instructions on how to operate this thing and what it was capable of doing. After putting in coins equivalent to the Indian 100rs, the camera snapped some mugshots of mine. Then the most shocking thing happened. An automated voice from the machine told me that it was now ready to print a portrait of me based on the photos taken. There was no mention whatsoever of any passport photograph at all. I am now currently owner of a portrait of mine on an A-4 sheet which cost me 100rs and which is worth nothing in the open market or the black market. With this disappointment, I headed to the other end of the mall nearly 200m away, where there was one more such machine. But this one made photo stickers and was even costlier. I still do not understand as to who is using photo stickers of an unstandard size and where. But looks like lot of people are since the machine seems to making some money. I actually saw someone print out 16 stickers bearing his face. Needless to say, I did not lose some more money here. After searching all the nearby malls for a photograph, I was still unsuccessful. 2 days later, I am now the proud owner of 6 passport size photos of mine. A discovery made the following day was that the store in my very own place of work actually provides this service. To put it in my own poetic way, I had a flower blooming in my own backyard and I was searching for florists all over town. Ok, bad analogy. I am not exactly a poet and don’t ever wish to be.

Another discovery made the hard way was that there are parking lots in some parts of the world that do close in contrast to India where nothing ever closes. I reached late evening to the parking lot where I had parked my car earlier and to my horror found it was locked. How I got out of this mess is another action packed story which I shall tell the gentle reader some other day.

On a final cryptic note, there will be some more group photographs of the October and November events that I wont be a part of. :-(

The away series…

2007-10-01T11:37:00.000+05:30

As the intrepid explorer continues his vacation and tries the make the most of it by getting ample rest and food before he heads back to the holy land, he cant help but compare this trip to that of the Indian cricket team in Australia.

The intrepid explorer has been found wanting on bouncy tracks like that of Perth. The footwork and technique was lacking and he was unable to handle the pace attack at all. But now that he has a feel of the pitch and the harsh conditions, he swears to be back for a return revenge series in a few months, hopefully well equipped to handle the bowling this time. He also realizes that good technique and perseverance is required like in Test matches and that a Twenty20 like casual approach will not work.

He shall ramble on no more on this topic.

Tool’s rendition of the Led Zeppellin classic “No quarter” is simply superb and does more than justice to the original.

Home sweet home...

2007-09-29T12:35:00.000+05:30

I am back after a month long blogging hiatus. This time from good ol’ Bangalore. Awesome weather as usual. I have already noticed some interesting things here, like

Bangalore airport having a thermometer showing temperatures in Fahrenheit possibly for the benefit of the American travellers. But what about the passengers from rest of the world that use Celsius. No such facility for them. Wonder why that is.
I have observed that flight attendants on Indian domestic airlines do not have normal commonly used Indian names for ex:- Mehrzaan, Ruma, Rosita etc. Again wondering why that is, but not really complaining about this.
No trip to Bangalore is complete without passing by Okalipuram where we get to see an entire range of tag lines for Kannada movies. This time it was “A big story of a small village”. Then there was one called “take care of your heart” for a movie called Krishna and lastly “Power of heartbeat” for a movie called Satya in love. :-) These are all priceless gems.
Finally had a chance to see Sivaji the Boss. Extremely strong social message in the movie about introduction of plastic money in the future to root out black money. Special effects give Matrix a run for its money. The hero is looking extremely hale and hearty at 60 and very flexible to say the least. He is also extremely comfortable dancing with a heroine younger than his daughter.
Kalmane masala coffee with cardamom is awesome. New finding on this trip.
Another finding was that there’s a new crime wave in the city. Thieves are apparently stealing internet cables. This was an explanation given to me when my internet stopped working last week. Good to know that Bangalore continues to be innovative in all aspects.
And of course, great to see the gang again and of course, sip the night coffee as well.

Lockout and shootout

2007-08-25T13:44:00.000+05:30

I hope I have managed to sufficiently intrigue the unsuspecting reader with a catchy title. I would like to begin the shootout episode first. Ok, I was not involved in any if you thought so. I experienced it virtually and I was lucky to get out of this one alive. The incident goes like this

Place: Haifa Cinematique, Israel
Incident is an unfortunate movie called “Shootout at Lokhandwala”.
Occasion: The Indian Independence week and 15 years of Indo-Israel cooperation

Firstly, a totally wrong movie to show given the occasion. The director has made a conscious effort to copy all the Quentin Tarantino style but failed grandly at this. Jerky camera & bad editing is a hallmark of the movie. “Fake” blood spots on the camera are seen at least three times. Of course the movie had English subtitles for the non-Hindi viewers. I was surprised to know that every Hindi curse word means scoundrel in English. I definitely would like to meet the translator of this movie. His translation of the songs was staggering. I never realized how the same song could mean a totally different thing in English. I also don’t know why the police took so much time to find the villains in the movie. All they had to do was to hang out near some dance bars and they would have found them easily. The villains were mostly in the dance bars in the movie and sometimes headed out to threaten and kill people. They also got out once to sing a rap song before heading back in. So I still don’t know how they ended up in the apartment where they were shot. They also shot a rocket at the police. The rocket launcher in question looked a small rifle. Mr. Bachchan senior also does his bit for the movie by refusing to talk in Hindi and Bachchan junior in his brief role doesn’t speak at all. (Thank god for small mercies). Sunil Shetty is the true hero in the movie since he takes 4 bullets and still emerges out hale and hearty in the movie. Overall, a must watch and a piece of extremely meaningful and serious cinema.

Place: Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv. Name of the road unknown

Incident: The intrepid explorer manages to lock the car with the keys inside, 100 kms from his home. It took only 5 minutes and 40$ for the car company dude to pry open the car door. Another case of “shit happens”. He also gleefully enlightened me with some statistics like how this has happened twice earlier to this very car. He also points me to the marks created by the previous attempts at prying the door open. I was also amazed at the ease with which locked cars can now be opened. I can now add this to my list of potential professions I could be in.

Finally, a picture of old Jerusalem from the mount of olives and the golden mosque in the background. A piece of info. A grave at this place costs just about 40,000$.

The elusive smiling gals this time…

2007-08-05T02:14:00.000+05:30

I am noticing a very disturbing trend over the last 3-4 years which I do not like at all. While it was the elusive travelling damsels earlier (this link provides some background on the issue), now it is the elusive smiling gals this time. On 3 occasions now and in 2 different countries, I have met extremely pretty gals at the checkout counters of supermarkets who gave me their most amazing smiles whenever I was there. Of course, I smiled back with what I think was the best smile I could give. But I have also got the feedback that this smile of mine is uncannily similar to an expression sometimes shown by a gorilla. This feedback obviously also came from a guy. But this is not where the disturbing part comes into play. After doing my shopping, I obviously head to the line where this gal is. Now comes the disturbing part. On all the three occasions, the pretty smiling gals did not know English. The communication was mainly done through single English words from her, some single Hebrew/Swedish words from me and of course sign language playing the dominant part. I got to know the cost of my purchase by the girl pointing her finger towards the screen.

This is a clear example of someone up there not liking me at all. Not many pretty girls at supermarkets have smiled at me. With these odds, I would like to think that it is not unreasonable to hope that at least 1 in 3 smiling girls would know English. But as realities stand today, it does seem to be unreasonable. Imagine the case if I were to ask this gal in question if she was free for a cup of coffee in English. The gal would think that I wanted to buy some coffee and point me to the Nescafe super saver jar in the second aisle. This would be a disastrous start to a relationship since good communication is the basis for any relationship. But I have accepted the ground realities that Smiling Girls at Supermarkets do not know English and have moved on.

To continue my traveling exploits here, last week saw me go to the Red Sea which is not red at all but an extremely transparent blue coloured sea. The Red part comes from the red mountains all around the sea. I happened to see three interesting signs here, which I probably will never see again. Number 1 was “Beware of the camels crossing the roads”. Number 2 was a signboard pointing to a road that takes one to the high profile Gazza Strip and Number 3 was a signboard that said “Left- Jordan, right –Egypt”. At this spot, the countries of Jordan and Egypt were not more than 200m away. To conclude, here is a snapshot of the red sea surrounded by the distinct red coloured hills.

On basement parkings, revolving doors and dying very hard…

2007-07-16T01:37:00.000+05:30

As of last week, I hate basement parkings. Reason, it took me about 20 minutes to find where I had parked my car. In my defense, I had to find it among 1000 other cars atleast and some of the signs were not in English. I knew I had parked the car on the -2 floor in the basement near the entrance. So after a hard days work and with hunger making its presence felt through some pretty loud growling, I reached the -2 floor entrance and within 3 minutes reached a conclusion that my car had probably been stolen. With some new found vigour, I started walking along the circumference of this parking lot which is as large as a stadium. 10 minutes and one round later, I was still car-less. So I decided to go back to the entrance of the car park, 2 floors above and retrace my footsteps. 8 minutes later I found the so called 3rd entrance to the -2 floor which somehow didn’t exist when I was walking there earlier. And on the left of the entrance, I saw her. Yes, I firmly believe that my car is a woman. The reasons for this will not be disclosed to the esteemed reader here. Since that fateful day, the car has not seen the inside of a basement parking. She is now parked in the hot sun where she can be reached in exactly 4 minutes. I am sure she doesn’t like this treatment, but she has to live with this unfortunately given the circumstances.

On to revolving doors now. I have no clue as to what extra benefit they have compared to a normal door. Normal doors are quite clear as to which one is for entrance and which one is for egress. I have seen revolving doors rotate in different directions in different countries, so that adds to the confusion. Secondly, one has to pace himself with the rotating door so as to not get mauled by it. Lastly, I don’t see how they can be locked. At best, revolving doors are costly blunders. Only Charlie Chaplin and the 3 stooges put them to some good use by providing some laughs.

Die Hard is a very realistic drama which is a must see for everyone. Mr. Willis has a run-in with a F35 plane this time which has no qualms flying 1 feet over a road and under a flyover. No guess is required as to who wins this contest since we are going to be blessed with DH5 in 12 years time. Bruce Willis will be seen wielding the walking stick as his primary weapon instead of the pistol that he proudly uses now.

Finally, Tel Aviv has some good Indian food which can definitely be called Indian.

Shoe size units….

2007-06-26T01:27:00.000+05:30

After some new found knowledge about shoe sizes, I am proposing that the shoe size should be added as the fourth unit of measurement after distance, weight and time in the SI system. Last week, a friend and me (or is it I??) were on a shoe buying trip in a considerably English challenged part of town. As we entered what looked like a shoe shop, a girl (pretty at that) asked my friend in halting English as to what his shoe size was. He knew that in India his size was 10 but didn’t know what that corresponded to in this country. So we set upon to investigate this and to my horror I found that 4 different systems of shoe sizes existed. Since I assumed ours would be closest to the UK size, we checked this one. We found out that the Indian 10 size is equivalent to the UK 9 size. Since the Americans like to be unique, they had their own system as well. So now, UK 9 size = US size 8. As expected, the rest of the European Union decides to follow its own system. So now we have, UK 9 =US 8 = EU 43.1. But wait, that’s not all. There exists a fourth system called CM which has an equivalent size of 28.1. I am guessing that this must be Japan since this is norm for most other units. So I ask, why this arrogance of having a different size number in every country. Is this the shoe company’s idea of a joke? I also just happened to google this and found out that even Mexico and Korea follow their own system. Well, I think I am going to follow my own system from now on in which the shoe size will be the inverse square root of the EU size. I am also going to request Nike to put this on their boxes.

Now that the main topic has been discussed, I am going to bore you with some more of my traveling exploits. I proudly claim to have floated in the Dead Sea which was a thrilling experience to say the least. A word of caution here for the guys, do not shave on the day you are visiting the dead sea. This is one potent after-shave and can cause involuntary screaming. The mud baths are something to be experienced, but this is what I call too much information. :-) As usual, I shall bid you adieu today with pictures of the dead sea and the nearby Judean desert.

The exploits begin…

2007-06-14T00:53:00.000+05:30

I am going to use this opportunity to propose new Murphy’s laws of travelling here, namely
Law 1: In a new country, you will get lost atleast once within the first two weeks. (exceptions to this are MeNoSaint and Akilles. They will lose their way at least 5 times and Dhi or Chilli will see them roaming about somewhere and rescue them :-) )
Law 2: When you get lost, it will be in a part of town where no one speaks English.
Law 3: The time of getting lost will be late evening to midnight when expensive taxis are the only mode of transportation available.
Law 4: Sign language and a kind stranger will help you get back in one piece.
And since all Murphy’s Laws apply to me, it must be very clear as to what happened this Saturday night and needs no explanation. The only point that needs elaboration is that the part of town I was lost in was Russian. Now coming on to a lesser known and an irrelevant fact about Israel. I am convinced that Israel must be the world’s largest consumer of sun glasses. The sun-glass industry is alive solely because of this country. I have noticed that at any given point of time 90% of the people in your line of sight are wearing sun-glasses irrespective of the time of the day.

A lot of things I found are somewhat similar to India like for example impatient drivers. Honking very much exists and is rampant and changing of lanes is random. The Mediterranean food is amazing and your typical Indian vegetarian had nothing to fear about. Taxi drivers in Tel-Aviv need to be told to put the meter and some negotiation is needed. There is an extra charge for taxis between 10pm-5am. While there are no stray dogs around here, there are ample cats around. But the degree of this is of course not as extreme as in India, but enough to make you feel at home.

Lastly, jogging on the roads is a pleasure here due to multiple reasons. No dogs to chase you, no newspaper boys around the corner to run into you, no cowdung, nice footpaths to jog on along with a superb view of Haifa and lastly and most importantly lots of pretty women also jog on these paths. I have also been advised to jog on the beach (which also happens to be right next to my office) and enhance the whole jogging experience. Let’s see how that one goes.

And lastly, (this lastly is the last one) two pictures of Haifa. First one is a unique underground cable train which takes you from the top of Haifa hill to the bottom, probably the only one of its kind. Second one is a view about 100 metres from where a friend stays. That’s one hell of a view there.

About holy lands and cloak rooms……..!!

2007-06-06T01:36:00.000+05:30

Shalom !! The intrepid explorer in me is back after two years and this time around in the holy land of Israel. I guess I have lots to talk and write about this in the days to come but as of now I am going to explicitly ask the question which many of you have wanted to ask too but never dared to do so.

Who coined the word restroom? And what in the world possessed him to do so? Its not like you can rest there or atleast I haven’t encountered any where you can. I understand that is was more of a euphemism for the word toilet. I see absolutely no issues with the use of the word toilet. Maybe call it a bathroom, that makes sense to a point. But I refuse to call it a restroom until someone puts a sofa in there. And I just recently found out that two of Bangalore’s popular restaurants agree with me on this. They also don’t call their toilets as restrooms, instead they call it a cloak room. This terminology makes even more sense, doesn’t it? Any common man understands this. You want to take a leak, you head directly to the cloak room. I am wondering if the restaurants in question want the users to put on a protective cloak before relieving themselves. And if this trend continues to gain popularity, I have no idea what the traditional cloakrooms at our train stations are going to do. Who is going to store the luggage? Maybe the “toilets” will do it.

Now that such pertinent questions have been brought to the fore, its time for me say “Laila Tov” or Good night as the English people call it.

The mystery behind a doctor’s handwriting….

2007-05-20T23:46:00.000+05:30

I am yet to meet a man who claims to have completely deciphered a doctor’s handwriting and this excludes the pharmacist. Doctors are single-handedly responsible for bringing back the hieroglyphics script back to life.

I had been to the doctor few days ago and I was recommended to go in for a scan. When I got the results, I saw that there were some black and white pictures looking like clouds and some observations written next to it. While the pictures gave no clue (to me that is) as to what I was suffering from, the written observations used letters previously not known to me. I assumed it was hieroglyphics brought back to life from Egypt. When I showed this to my doctor, not only were the pictures making absolute sense to him, the written observation was crystal clear to him. I guess this doctor must have had special training in reading illegible handwriting. In fact, I am sure the doctors must be taking two special courses in their university days namely the art of illegible handwriting and secondly, the art of deciphering illegible handwriting.

The other issue due to this kind of handwriting is that the patient never has a clue of what he has. And how the pharmacists manage to read the doctor’s prescription without any formal training is a big mystery as well. Maybe they learn it the hard way, like an on job training. The only way to solve this problem is that legible handwriting and usage of only the 26 letters in the alphabet must be a made a pre-requisite during the medical entrance exam. Maybe a written essay section like the GMAT/TOEFL should do the trick.

The return of the wedding season….

2007-05-06T12:08:00.000+05:30

While 2005 and 2006 saw me attend about 10-12 marriages, 2007 will see me being invited to at least 16 marriages. Marriage seems to be an epidemic this year and this has quickly overtaken gastroentritis in the numbers of casualties :-) . While I have attended 3 of them in as many weeks, this has resulted in me travelling all over South India in the sweltering heat where the average temperature seems to be about 42 degrees. I have just completed one sojourn to Kerala and immediately travelled to Hyderabad for the next one. A Pune marriage attendance had to be cancelled due to some unforeseen circumstances else that would have covered the western part as well. I have a humble request to all the people getting married. Please get married in the following places:- Ladakh, Sikkim, Kaziranga National Park, Bhutan, and Lakshadweep. I haven’t travelled much in North and East India, and I guess this occasion would provide the right opportunity to visit these places.

These marriage trips have also had two good side effects on me. I travel more lighter than I used to and I have now learnt to shake a leg thanks to the wedding dance rituals. I still continue to be dance challenged but the situation is way better than it used to be. I can at least move my feet now. But this whole marriage thing has also brought a very serious problem to the limelight. Getting the right gifts for the newly married couple is a Herculean task and I do not seem to have any bright ideas in this department. I almost always have to turn to the ladies for some help in this regard and they often come with the most bizarre as well as the best of ideas.

On a closing note, almost the whole gang is in town this month. Its back to the good old days for a while and back to the days of the late night coffee.

The elusive travelling damsels

2007-04-25T23:13:00.000+05:30

This blog will definitely strike a raw nerve with most guys. Every guy when on travel hopes that his long arduous journey will be made much more bearable by a damsel who happens to have a seat right next to him. Statistically, from my personal experience I can say that this happens once in 24 years. Sadly, I am over 24 and this has happened to me twice which means this is not likely to happen again for a long long time. Guys while entering a train will immediately head to the reservation chart stuck outside and rather than finding their own seat numbers will do a quick search of all the maidens on the chart. This will be followed by a quick reconnaissance of the coach in case they missed a name in the chart. Of course, I have never been lucky with the trains. I mostly end up next to wailing kids or aunties/uncles who are very interested in knowing as to why I don’t work in certain large Indian companies and why I really work for the one I do.

In my 24th year, for the first time during a travel, a plane this time, an extremely pretty looking damsel ended up next to me. I did get talking to her and made considerable progress in the short flight time of 45 mins. Of course, while making this considerable progress I forgot to get her name and she mine. Actually, I think she really wasn’t interested in mine and I was too chicken to ask hers. But I did get to know her college and her favourite music in this short span of time. Sadly, this story had to come to an abrupt halt since I was to leave for another country for a long time. There was really no ROI for me in this. ROI = return on investment. Its one of those three letter acronyms often used in the finance world.

The second time this happened a few years later, the story is even more a heart wrenching one. :-) In a bus that I used to travel by often, I noticed this damsel who suddenly ended up next to me through some timely divine intervention. This time, I did make it a point to get the name and also ended up getting a substantial knowledge of classical music while doing so. After a nice 45 mins of interesting conversation, I was to see this damsel nearly one year later which I found out later to be due to a change in the bus routes. When she saw me again, she actually smiled at me and we again got talking. In this conversation about how the year had gone by, I also got an invitation to her wedding. And this previous sentence pretty much signifies the end of the blog among other things.

On another note, beware of fake lime soda sellers in the Ernakulam region of Kerela. In these parts, the lime soda is equivalent to 7-up with salt in it.

Snap Scam…

2007-04-13T20:25:00.001+05:30

Picturize this, and I am sure this has happened to you at least once in your lifetime. You have to go this particular government office which opens at about 9.30 am. In order to get your work done early, you are already there by 8.30 am and you realize that half the city also happened to have the same idea. And there you are standing in a queue, with a zillion people ahead of you. You have all the necessary forms and photographs ready. After 3 hours of standing and waiting you reach your destiny and then you read this sign. “Photographs should have a light background and not dark”. You hesitantly look at the photographs you are having and turns out that they have dark RED background. So you fervently pray that you can actually get away this. This time you actually do, but the guy ahead isn’t as lucky. He scrambles to the nearest studio in search of a white background like a thirsty man searching for water.

The funny part here is that just one month back when I visited this office, the sign said “Applicants need to have photographs with a RED background” only and hence the reason for carrying a red background picture. A few years back when I had visited this office, the notice said “LIGHT background photographs required”. Next time around, I am definitely going to play it safe. I figured that there are atleast 10 different backgrounds possible for the photos. I am going to carry 2 snaps of each of them. Depending on what the background colour of the day is, I will use the appropriate snap. I am also interested in knowing as to how the colour of the day is chosen. Is it based on a lucky draw or the roll of a dice or the whim of the minister in question? Of course, the studio owners would be extremely happy with this system. Thanks to the uncertainty in the colour of the day, they are doing booming business. Every applicant probably has at least 20 pictures taken, 2 per background. But in defence of this office in question, it has an extremely fast and a systematic system of handling applications given the volume. They have taken every pain to make this a hassle-free process barring the photograph issue.

Finally, on a bus journey in a private bus do not go by the conductor’s words even after he checks your E-ticket. Talk to the driver and confirm that the bus is indeed going to that place. Else like yours truly here, you will end up on a bus to Cochin, travel a km towards Cochin, then realise that you are in the wrong bus, run back to the bus stop at breakneck speed to catch the Hyderabad bus for the fear of missing it, nearly kill yourselves of exhaustion while doing this and then find that the bus is late. Phew!! That was a long sentence.

Dis-“concerted”

2007-03-26T08:38:00.001+05:30

Over the last two years, I have managed to catch 4 great rock concerts namely Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Mark Knopfler and mostly recently Iron Maiden. The Iron Maiden concert, albeit a brilliant concert has taken its toll on me. This will be probably the last concert I attend. After this concert I get the feeling that I am too old for concerts. Going to a concert is a big process and requires a lot of management skills. It starts with getting the tickets, which fortunately is easy and hassle free in India. In US & Europe, getting the tickets is another ordeal in itself and begs for a separate blog. The next step is to get hold of an Iron Maiden T-shirt which sells for 10 times its normal price until the day of the concert. Most wannabes also get hold of bandannas and other paraphernalia. (To Mary, I hope I used the word paraphernalia right…heheheh!!)

On the actual day of the concert, one has to park his bike a few eons away from the actual venue to avoid traffic hassles. The way concerts are these days, the gates at the concert open almost an eternity before the actual concert begins. The actual concert start time is a very closely guarded secret, so one has to reach the venue an eternity in advance. A word of caution and advice here, use the rock concert restrooms right when you enter the concert arena and don’t bother venturing there again. A lot of smoking material also seems to be around in spite of the “thorough” search by the security agencies. Then you are subjected to the 2-3 hour torture of listening to some cover bands who always use this occasion to play their “original compositions”. I agree that a violin sounds great in unison with drums and a guitar but this can happen at an another concert. Doing this before an Iron Maiden concert is not the best of ideas. Having an all-girl rock band in the genre of Avril Lavigne prior to a heavy metal concert is also not the brightest of ideas.

Once the concert starts, all the 15000 strong crowd wants to be within 10 feet of the stage which leads to a free for all. Only the fittest survive here. While I have a reasonable height, I am not exactly wrestling material. I cannot fight with headbanging stark raving beasts wanting to get front. I had to give them way. Most people of average height just manage to get a glimpse of the top part of the stage only. The big screen does provide some succour though. With all this, was the pain worth it? It sure was. The fact that I am writing this blog proves the fact that I got out of the place alive. Next time, I would prefer Coldplay to come to Bangalore. The concert could be held in a stage theatre and we could all sit and enjoy the concert for a change.

Me v/s Customer service

2007-03-04T23:14:00.000+05:30

Of late, I have had run-ins with customer services of two well known companies and the kind of responses I received leave me puzzled and speechless. Wondering if it was only me or everyone has had this kind of an experience.

The first tryst was with my mobile phone operator last week which went something like this:-
Me: You have been giving me undesired calls with automated messages at least thrice a day and I DON’T want them anymore.
Customer Service Executive aka CSE : We are sorry to hear that. Why don’t you send a Do not Disturb messages to this number and also include the number in the message from which you want the calls blocked?
Me: Ah, I c.
CSE: And this will cost you 3 Rs for the SMS.
Me: See, its not the question of 3 Rs, but why should I pay to stop a service I didn’t want in the first place. Plus, you give me crank calls from 4-5 different numbers which means I spend 3rs for every SMS.
CSE: We are sorry sir. Every connection comes with this service. You don’t want it, so you pay to not have it. It takes 7 days to activate this service.
Me: Why should it take 7 days? Isn’t that too long? Do I have to bear with crank calls for the next 7 days?
CSE: That’s the way it is. Is there anything else I can do for you?
Me (talking in my mind): #$%%$#%^^^ @#$#@%@@$#@$ #$@#$@#$
--End of Conversation--

Tryst No.2 was with a well known nationalised bank. This happened in a time when all the banks are more than glad to give you a loan for anything.

Me: I wanted to have some information about home loans since I am interested in this property which seems to have been approved by your bank.
Loan retail manager aka LRM: Oh I see. Where is this property?
Me: I tell him the name and place.
LRM: Sorry, I am not interested.
Me (Shocked, speechless and flabbergasted): What do you mean by that? Isnt it me who is supposed to say that?
LRM: The construction site is too far for me.
Me: How far?
LRM: 22 kms.
Me (in a sarcastic tone): No way, I have lived in Bangalore for a while. I know that its not more that 15 kms. Does this mean that you fund only projects which are at a walkable distance from your office?
LRM: That is correct.
--End of conversation-
I was too stunned and just kept the phone down. Rest assured that I shall never approach this particular bank ever again.

To end on a different note, there exists in Bangalore a restaurant with a wooden elevator which I swear never to use again. On the positive side, this place boasts of an appetizer called Disco Papad which is a must try. And not a must try here is the sweet minestrone soup.

The mystery behind greater Bangalore

2007-02-20T21:30:00.000+05:30

I think I have finally nailed down the mystery behind the creation of Greater Bangalore. The town planners were just pondering over a map of Bangalore one fine morning and they realised that there were many settlements in Bangalore devoid of roads and the only possible means of access to these parts was a plane. And lo, they decided to name these parts as Greater Bangalore. To improve the accessibility they also added in a muddy path which the bullock carts could negotiate safely. Needless to say, after this declaration happened, the land prices quickly rose by about 100 times and advertisements for 3-bedroom self-contained ultra super luxurious apartment townships costing about 80-100 lacs immediately sprung up. According to the developer of this apartment, these have obviously been completely sold out creating a huger scarcity of dwellings in that area. This was a discovery I made when I chose to ride to Konankunte this weekend. I had no clue what I was getting into. I was led to believe that this was an area by the Kanakpura highway road and as such a very accessible place. (Accessible by air only was at that time unknown to me), No wonder Sivarasan and Thanu had hidden here since they knew that there was no way the police would catch hold of them there. Anyway, my bike and me travelled across many hills and mountains to reach my destination. On my way back, I took a slightly better route but pitch dark. Looks like the concept of electricity hadn’t reached this part of “town”. I am sure that I will never ever be able to retrace this path if asked to do so.

Finally, a warning to the uninformed reader- Stay clear of konakunte and anjanpura layout.

Silly English transformations…

2007-01-28T21:55:00.000+05:30

The aim of this blog is to enlighten the humble reader about a disturbing trend that I am seeing in the usage of the English language of late. A few months back I was surprised to see a laptop being called a “lappie” in a top business school in India. Dismissing this usage as a business school lingo, I didn’t pay much attention to it except for laughing at it. More recently, I came to understand that the usage of this word is much more spread out that than I thought. Common non-business school going civilians are using this word now. I heard this word being used 5 times in the last two weeks and two of the five times; it was guys who used it.

I am convinced that this transformation was coined by a woman. Like a dog became a doggie, a laptop became a lappie. The justification by this woman in question would have been “It sounds sooooo cuteeeeeee”. And her boyfriend in order to show that he is of the sensitive kind also decided to go along with this usage. And that’s how it caught on. Business schools often are the places to “lap” up such kind of lingo. With this trend setting in, don’t be surprised to see a mobile phone being called a “moby”, the windows operating system being called a “windy” or a “wendy” in the near future. Let’s ponder for a while and give the laptop the respect it deserves. If you really want to name your laptop something, call it something manly like a Rocky. If you prefer a woman’s name, call that laptop a Maria Sharapova or even a Mallika Sherawat, but for heavens sake don’t call it a lappie.

The Devil also enlightened me a few weeks back that a new word called “ortho-conso“ has slowly crept into the daily usage which apparently stood for orthodox-conservative. I don’t know why or who came up with this one. Not much extra effort is really required in saying orthodox-conservative instead of “orthoconso”. However, I could put this system to a very good use. Swearing can be made very effective by using this technique. The best part is that the party being sworn at wouldnt even guess the meaning of the word. :-)

Return of the January trips and sadistic games….

2007-01-15T18:39:00.000+05:30

As usual, I have multiple things to talk about after another gap thanks mainly to my laziness of typing out thoughts. Still would prefer to write my thoughts rather than type them out.

Like every January for the past the 3 years, pretty much the whole gang somehow managed to make it to a weekend trip. In 2005, it was Munnar; 2006 it was Devbagh and this time around it was the Sandur mines. Thanks to Chilli’s dad for making this one a great trip. The enormous amount of food consumed over the weekend is also worth mentioning here. The “devil” and “dhi only one” were noticeably absent but Rajneesh happened to grace this trip. Mary and MJ are also very conspicuous in this photo :-).

And here is a glimpse of the mines

---Change of subject here---

Guys tend to come up with the most sadistic and painful of games sometimes but still enjoy playing these to the hilt. The game that tops this list is called “Choochand” (in kannada, I hope the spelling is right) or “rappa – rappi” which is its Marathi equivalent. Most guys have played this game as kids. The game is very simple. You take a tennis ball and hit other guys with this ball as hard as possible. The guys are allowed to stay only a within a small area which makes the chance of getting a good shot very high. Obviously, this is an excruciatingly painful game. And god alone help you if you are caught unawares right next to the guy holding the ball. The last thing you remember is the devil like smile on his face ready to nearly kill you and you praying that the guy would miss just this one time. And then you suddenly feel that pain on mostly the back or the back of your legs. You reach home in agony and you notice a big swelling and apply some iodex to it and hope that you will be ok in time for the next day’s play. You also swear to get back at this guy. The next day also you come back home with another swelling but probably a smile this time. The smile obviously indicates that you did get back at the other guy.

Also if there are some new kids or younger kids in the group, you cut them some slack and add some rules like if you touch the guy holding the ball he can’t hit you or you can hit the new kid only with your weaker hand. The pain in the game could be raised a notch by using red coloured MRI rubber balls which can have a much more devastating effect than a tennis ball.

The only thing that can be said in defence of this classical game is that it increases your resistance to torture and its benefits would become the most apparent if you were a spy and were caught in the enemy camp. Lastly, I feel that this game should definitely be showcased on that MTV program called jackass.

End of guitar tuning woes and other stories…..

2006-12-25T12:23:00.000+05:30

As the title suggests, this blog will have multiple short stories. Turns out that after a long time I have some ideas and time to write something.

Among the headlines, I am the proud owner of a digital guitar tuner (thanks to Rajjo). My guitar tuning woes are over now. I can proudly tune one in less than 5 minutes using this marvellous invention. The pitch pipe now rests peacefully in its graveyard, namely my cupboard. For my trysts with this ghastly pitch pipe, the esteemed reader is referred to this link.

This is that time of the year when I get nostalgic. Today the nostalgia is about my winter spent in a frigid Scandinavian country three years ago. (Yes, I could have used the work cold instead of frigid. Just wanted to show that I did write the GRE once and encountered this word). This country is a fine example of weird things that people do when they get drunk. I have actually witnessed the following incidents in my stay there and these are true to the best of my belief.
a) My German neighbour after a few extra helpings of whisky put a cactus flower pot into the microwave and turned it on. Following which he went on to block my other neighbour’s door with the living room sofa.
b) I used to distribute newspapers once upon a time. A few drunk Greeks stole my newspaper cart. I found the cart four days later outside my window with a flat tyre and filled with snow. Apparently, it was their idea of a joke. :-(
c) In a drunken state, my neighbour (also a good friend of mine) just took away some of the ads and newspapers I was supposed to distribute and kept them in his room. Few days later, he asked me as to why some newspapers which were mine were in his room. He had no clue how they got there.
d) I was once returning back from the university and I was approached by a rather pretty lady (who was needless to say stone drunk) if she could hug me. I of course acceded to her kind request :-). She thanked me for the hug and walked away. She also referred to me as a gentleman. So much for an ego boost!!!
e) At the local student pub, a certain student in very high spirits stripped himself and was seen running naked around the pub until he was escorted by the police. It later came to light that he was studying to become a priest.
f) A British guy chasing a bus down the road at 1am and requesting the bus to come back.
g) Lastly, I have seen a cycle hanging of a lower branch of a tree. I can only guess as to how it got there.

Anyway, last week the “entire” gang met after a gap of 6 years. This event was rarer than the Halleys’ comet. Don’t know when this will happen next.

Deep Purple rocks. Seeing them live was an amazing experience. Though I do get the feeling that I am getting too old for standing for 5 long hours at concerts.

Parking Woes

2006-12-03T21:56:00.000+05:30

A good percentage of my countrymen lack common sense in general and especially in the area of parking vehicles. And if you were to select a group of people living on my street, you would be staring at the bottom of the barrel. My street represents the worst of Indian parking.

The people living on my street do not believe in parking their bikes and cars in normal places like the garage or the side of the streets. They directly park them in the place that’s the most spacious, which is the middle of the street. I have actually seen a motorbike parked perpendicular to the road and in the middle. The concerned “parker” in question when asked about this nonchalantly replied by saying that it was only for 5 minutes. Then there are 2 more specimens who park their cars right across each other such that there is enough space only for a bike to pass through this gap. So many a time, we have a stranded car on the street wanting to cross this gap and honking away to glory until one of the two guys comes out and blames the other guy. The other guy then slowly comes out of his abode with expression that resembles kumbhakarna being woken up from a deep slumber. Totally ignoring the three cars and the commotion, he disinterestedly asks “Whats the fuss all about? Why are you honking?” Five minutes later, the situation a little clearer to him , he goes to get his keys and moves his car a little front so that the stranded car can pass through.

Now comes the most senseless part. Instead of leaving his car in the new parked spot so that there won’t be repeats like this, our hero parks the car back right where it was and the whole history repeats every day at least twice. I have subtly hinted to him about this but it hasn’t been of any avail.

Just yesterday, I had parked my bike on a big street and when I returned I found another bike so strategically parked behind mine that I couldn’t remove it. I was angry. Period. I waited for this grey cell starved human being to return and when he did all he said was “There was no other place to park, so I parked it here”. I was stunned at his seemingly simple logic. I see no hope of Indians improving in this regard. Bitterly, as I look outside the window, I still see the two cars parked right across each other. :-(

The Glassman cometh….

2006-11-05T18:10:00.000+05:30

I see a “spectacular” change coming up in my life two days from now. Contrary to what I think, the doctor insists that I have short sight and that I need glasses. And he also went on to give me some medical jargon like I definitely need glasses because my cornea is apparently a little conoid rather than being spherical. So here I am, from being called Bhide to soon to be called Bhide “Four Eyes”. Sigh!!!!!

But then again, bhide “four eyes” isn’t such a bad nickname. I sound like a local mafia leader in the same league as Sammy “four fingers” of the Chicago Triad or maybe Langda Tyagi of the Omkara fame. The mere mention of my name would instil a sense of fear among the public. But I digress as usual. I am almost sure I made the wrong choice for the frame. And the amount of laughter I will hear on Tuesday will give me a real good indication as to how funny I look. And given my forgetful nature, I will need to leave around a spare set of glasses in my office, the gym, chilli’s place and my bike. And I also have a major concern now. How will I fare with the fairer sex with the glasses on? Will the glasses help my image or have adverse effects? These are very serious questions that only time can answer. Its time I started gearing up for these new complications my in life.

But then again, I had half expected something like this to happen when I wandered into the doctor’s office for a general eye check up (the first one of my life). This also fits into the chain of events over the past one year that conforms to the law which goes as “Shit happens”.

The torchbearer

2006-10-13T09:39:00.000+05:30

I am still holding the flag high.

So is he.
So is he

And most definitely

So is he.

Abs and the flab

2006-09-29T19:18:00.000+05:30

To me, the entire concept of the gym exercise called crunches or abs as they call it is a big farce, a big scandal. My gym instructor makes me do these crunches in various poses and ways promising me that someday I will see the effect of these crunches and that my abs will someday be like Brad Pitts’. One year of crunches later, not a single cut is seen on my abdomen. There is still that obvious flab. In the gym I see everyone doing these crunches. And not a single person in the gym I have talked to has actually said that the crunches have had some effect. I have decided to stop this abs nonsense and spend 10 mins lesser in the gym doing something useful like grabbing an extra glass of orange juice. The only effect you get after doing these abs is a severe pain in your abdomen, which makes you think that you have the whole abdominal flab under control.

The only way Brad Pitt could have got those abs was through liposuction or through some trick photography. I am tending more towards the liposuction theory. There are more such meaningless exercises in the gym like the rowing machine for example. I still haven’t got a clue as to which part of the body it really exercises. Then there’s that thing called the twister. You just stand on a rotating stand and twist your hips violently until the lower part of the body separates from the upper part. I havent actually tried this machine but I still have my reservations about the exact usefulness of this machine. The only thing that these machines do is eat away all the space in the gym. I hardly had any space to do some push-ups (or dips as they call them in certain parts of the world) last week thanks to the endless sea of useless exercising machines.

And of course, there is that mandatory weighing machine which shows a different weight every time (it only shows higher values). Stand on it three times and you see three different readings on the machine. The only way to console yourselves is to attribute the increasing readings as being due to your heavy shoes. In all this chaos, the gym music doesn’t help either. I cannot jog while listening to jagjit singh. Period. The guy who put this on deserves a serious whack. That apart I have nothing more to whine about in the gym since I am not really the complaining type. :-)

Cable Tennis

2006-08-27T20:13:00.000+05:30

While table tennis is a hobby of mine, my cable TV operator indulges himself in something called cable tennis. This kind of tennis involves randomly paddling the tv channels around instead of the ball. For one thing, this is one hell of an annoying hobby and I demand a ban on it. Heres why.

A few weeks back, after discussing with all the people in my house a conclusion was reached on the TV channel order to be followed in the house. After this discussion, I set on the Herculean task of locating the required channels out of the 100 odd channels that I happen to get. Two painstaking hours later, the channel order was fixed. It began with the news channels, then the wildlife channels, the Hindi ones, the sports and then all the movie ones. Satisfied with this effort, I headed off for an afternoon nap. Exactly three hours later, I turned on the TV and was shocked to see a Tamil movie instead of HBO. Instead of ESPN, there was folk dances of India going on there instead. (Obviously that was Doordarshan). On further flipping of channels, it turned out that the @#$#@#$ cable guy had shuffled all the channels around and all the morning work had gone down the drain. Determined not to lose hope, I waited for two more days before I restarted on the arduous task again of arranging the TV channels in the order I want. Exactly 4 days after this second effort,VH1 was replaced by POGO. AXN by Jetix and Zee Café by Sun Music thanks to my cable operator’s creative hobby.

Exasperated, I did these small changes again.

As of yesterday, Fashion TV had been replaced by the God10 channel where Rev. Paul Thangaiah was last seen preaching at the top of his voice. Star world wasnt to be seen around anywhere until yesterday. After some investigation, the channel was located at number 89.

To make things worse, my cable guy just doesn’t simple swap two channels when embarks on his shuffling around. So I am not even able to swap the two channels back to their original locations. To top this, my TV doesn’t have swap channel option, which means that I have to use a third channel as a temporary storage in order to swap the two channels.

In the recent past, I distinctly remember that HBO was on these channels 25, 52, 35, 55. As of today, its on 33. One thing I have noticed is that he never fools around with the location of certain local channels. To do that would have meant a death wish. He would have been lynched by certain very passionate and excitable people who are diehard supporters of the local language. For the record, I also support the local language and can speak it. Just that I am not as passionate or excitable about it.

Anyway, suggestions are more than welcome as to how I can stop this ordeal of mine and get back at my cable operator.

Hiatus and Poetry Hatred...

2006-08-17T09:33:00.000+05:30

I am back after a self imposed hiatus on blogging due to a busy schedule. A busy schedule is a very good excuse for not having any worthwhile ideas to blog about. Plus, its also appears that my lack of blogging was not really missed by anyone. When “Dhi only one” misses to write blogs for even a single day, he is inundated by messages from fans across the globe which demand his return to blogging. Unfortunately, I do not get any such messages.

Anyway, in our previous week’s trip to ISB in Hyderabad (to meet Dhi Only One) we happened to chance upon this gem on the side of a tempo. :-)

I hate reading poetry. Period. I am completely incapable of understanding poetry or trying to understand the poet’s thoughts. It is a very mentally taxing process. As a poet, you would want most of your potential readers to understand what you are trying to impress upon them. Then why would you liberally use complex metaphors, similies, allegories in your poems? Sometimes, you also use other languages like French, Spanish and German in your poems. I can barely understand written English and then you want to dump your thoughts in other languages on me. Plus as a poet you take an awful lot of time to get to the point. Even after a few stanzas of the poem, my fundamental question would be, what’s your point?

Take Edgar Allan Poe for example, whom I was reading a week ago. He has given us some brilliant and chilling stories like the Gold Bug, Murders in the Rue Morgue etc. And then he also gave us poems like the Raven and Ulalume which make no sense to me at all. What really was the raven trying to do besides flying? I was fast asleep within 10 lines of reading this poem. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s every poem can be a book by itself. He goes on and on about the ancient mariner and the albatross. Was he trying to say something in the poem, we will never know. That secret was buried deep with the poet himself. My point is, if you want to say something, get to the point, write something simple and straight and get done with it. That’s where I like the Japanese. They have haiku. That’s good poetry for you. You want to say something; you say it in about 14 words. No beating about the bush.

I have suffered enough in school exams where we were asked to analyze these poems. While the likes of Chilli, Dhimant and Rajneesh found this to be a cakewalk, it was like a trip across the Sahara desert for me. Even today I shudder when I thing about Robert Frost or Coleridge. Conclusion :- poetry is good only when used in a song.

SMS challenged…

2006-07-24T09:26:00.000+05:30

I am SMS challenged, meaning I am painfully slow at sending SMSes. In fact, I can be said to have the slowest finger on the eastern side of the hemisphere. I am not exactly too proud of this and hadn’t made any sincere efforts to get rid of this tag for the last 3 years. I got a new cellphone this week and I decided to take the most drastic of measures to remedy this lack of skill of mine. I actually managed to what very few guys in this world have done. I ACTUALLY opened the cellphone’s instruction manual. Not many guys will openly admit to this.

For a guy, the thrill lies in figuring out how things work without using a manual. If a thing doesn’t work, the manual is never an option. It’s a cardinal sin to open. So, in order to improve my sms skills, I had basically 2 choices; to either ask of the guys how to be a more effective SMSer or look at the manual. Now asking another guy’s advice on this is an even worse sin so I had no other recourse but to read the manual. Now after reading how the T9 input system works and practising it for 1 full day, I already notice some difference. Of course, there is no doubt that I shall improve but my acid test will come the day when I would face a certain K-------P in an SMS battle. I am told by Inder that (and I quote him here) “This person is the fastest finger this side of the east”.

And I also happened to file my first ever FIR in a police station when I was ripped off 100rs by a @#@#$#@ parking lot attendant who goes by the name of Mr. Hubli Raja. After losing 100rs to this guy, I found out this guys name through some brilliant detective work i.e. asking for him in a rival parking lot. Then followed a trip to a nearby police station and then a trip down some shady alleys with an inspector where we tried to locate this guy. Needless to say, we didn’t find him and an FIR was lodged by me. The 100rs loss didn’t hurt as much as getting ripped off part did. Sigh, a sad ending to an otherwise good weekend.

The attack of the Pune umbrella snatchers…

2006-07-05T19:29:00.000+05:30

I am in a train, its raining outside; my mp3 player is playing Comfortably Numb. The fields outside are lush green and the whole situation is unbelievable beautiful and I start thinking to myself……

But wait, this is my blog and not Dhi only one’s. I am incapable of writing (thinking also) such profound stuff like the one you would see in Dhi’s blogs. You want some meaningful and thoughtful stuff, you check his blog. If you want to read about absolutely inconsequential issues like umbrella snatching, you continue reading further. So here I was in a rainy Pune in a famous sweet shop where one has to wait in a queue. I am advised to keep my umbrella in a leaky bucket outside the shop. Two points about the umbrella here. The umbrella which belongs to my grandma is at least 2 billion years old and has more holes than a sieve. In the umbrella’s defence, it somehow does its job. After my sweet shopping, I find that this umbrella has been conveniently been “borrowed” by Jack the “Umbrella” Ripper. The security “personnel” of this shop whose duty it was to guard the antique umbrella nonchalantly replied to me that this was the latest crime wave to strike Pune and there’s nothing he could have done to prevent it. I guess I owe my grandma a new umbrella now.

I can understand people stealing money/laptops/mobile phones/metal taps(that too…they have a resale value) but an umbrella?? I can understand stealing umbrellas encrusted with diamonds and pearls (like the one which the Queen of England owns) but stealing this particular one baffles me. I am open to all suggestions and explanations for this. Feel free to contribute.

And since we are in Pune, let’s talk about Pune as well. Pune can be a painfully direct city and is well known in explicitly stating the obvious. Do not be surprised to read notices like this in Pune.
Please do not peep through this window. Nothing special happens around here.
Extra pickles will cost you extra.
Please do not ride you vehicles over these tiles.
Please complete the ceremony 100% by 5pm. If you start late, you have to curtail the ceremony. (in a marriage hall)
We cannot accommodate more people than the capacity of the dining hall (again in the same marriage hall)

The auto rickshaw meters in Pune do not follow the normal system like the other cities do i.e. you pay the driver what ever is shown on the meter. In Pune, you follow an extremely complex formula like (6.0000*meter value) + 1. Whoever came up with that formula, I don’t know. My grandma knows the conversion rate like the back of her hand. And only in Pune will you also get a piece of plain butter sandwich when your order a tomato dosa. Then again Pune isn’t your ordinary city. It is a utopia and a self repository of knowledge, culture and enlightenment. Well, don’t blame me for the previous sentence. Its not mine, I read that somewhere. In Pune’s defence you can say that, the food there is awesome, especially the chaat

“Loo”natics…

2006-06-24T20:01:00.000+05:30

I had been to the Forum mall recently to watch a movie and during the intermission had a need to visit the men’s restroom which was needless to say, crowded and all the vestibules were occupied (not sure if vestibule is the right word to use, comments and suggestions are welcome!!). So, here I am standing in the queue with my turn being the next and a mobile phone started ringing.

Now it turns out that the ringing phone belonged to the hero in front of me who was still in the process of relieving himself. Most sane or sensible men would have continued to ignore the phone in such a situation and continued with whatever the business they were doing there, then wash the hands and then return back the missed call. But our hero, clearly not belonging to sane category decided to take the call. Now we had a guy who had been relieving himself for a little too long and also was speaking on the mobile phone. Then a funny thing happened. When he was done with his relieving, he needed to use both his hands to zip up and he was still talking on the phone. So he keeps the phone between his shoulders and tilts his head to support the phone. The phone starts to slip and he is still zipping up. The phone eventually does fall down. Thank god it fell on to the floor and not into the vestibule.

Why do men decide to have lengthy conversation in the restroom while taking a leak and when there are a lot of people in the queue? As much as I am a huge fan of the Argentina football team, I would prefer to talk about them before or after I am done using the restroom and not while I am using it. So this discussion about the Argentine football went on for about 3 minutes before some people in the queue (not me, by the way) who were in an emergency situation politely told the peeing Argentine fans to carry their animated discussion outside.

Among other important news, there exists a Sherlock Holmes Bar in Fraser town in Bangalore and so does a road called Cleveland Road. This was an important find for me since I am practically clueless about the eastern side of Bangalore.

Tirupathi……

2006-06-11T10:55:00.000+05:30

This blog has nothing to do with temples. This is a new movie who’s poster I happened to see on my way to Majestic. More specifically, I didn’t happen to see it, Chilli told me where to look for it. The movie has a tagline that goes

“When GOD is silent, he is VOILENT”. Notice the spelling of voilent. At the bottom of the movie name there was a second tag line which was “MASS POLICE”.

With a tagline like this, the curiosity of a potential viewer is definitely aroused. This movie shall be the next one to be seen. While I am still yet to see Da Vinci code or MI3, Tirupathi definitely deserves a higher priority. Kannada movies are now competing neck to neck with English ones with catchy movie names like Miss California. If I ask a guy, what movie he would like to see, Miss California or MI3, most likely he is going to say Miss California.!!

I will also take this opportunity to make the people aware of another upcoming Mahesh Bhatt Sleaze factory movie called the Killer. This movie is an exact remake (inspiration as the director would like to call) of Collateral except that the soundtrack is annoying to say the least and probably has more skin show compared to the original. If the educated reader has had a chance to look at some of my earlier blogs he will no doubt realise who the hero of the movie is. Once the movie is released, I will definitely do some community service by writing a detailed review of this movie.

Gangster – The Review….

2006-06-04T23:06:00.000+05:30

This is my first attempt as writing a movie review. The gentle reader is told to proceed further at his or her own risk. Of course, the review contains SPOILERS. People yet to see this movie should refrain from reading any further.

This is another of those movies that come from the sleaze factory of Mahesh Bhatt. But this movie has two distinct plus points, namely that it’s just 2 hours long which is quite rare in Hindi movies and secondly the fact that is relatively quite a clean movie compared to other movies from this director. Songs aren’t bad for one thing.

Now coming on to the strongly and an intricately drawn plot which has a heroine who is pretty much drinking through out the entire movie and sounds drunk even when she isn’t drinking. This particular lady is apparently hiding in Seoul from the Indian Police since she loves a gangster called Daya Shankar (an ironic name). Shooting a movie in Seoul is also the first for an Indian movie. The director calls this as one of the hallmarks of the movie as well. The next character is Mr. Emraan Hashmi aka serial kisser (which he is also in this movie) who plays an Indian singer but who in reality is an Indian Police officer. This lends more credibility to the whole plot. His aim is to woo the heroine in order to capture the gangster which he does (obviously!!!). Now, the gangster hero is a man of few words. He hardly has any dialogues through the entire movie. He is seen only crying and shooting through the entire movie. Also his attempts at crying leave a lot to be desired. The movie ends with all of them dying. A special mention goes to the character of a Mr.Raghavan in this movie. He appears only when some shooting is required and is instrumental in the death of all the three protagonists. He is the saviour of the movie and I am betting that he will be nominated for the best newcomer in a silent role in the next year’s filmfare awards.

The movie brings extremely important and pertinent questions to my mind like
a) Are people with death sentences hanged by the beach as happens to our hero? Like Achuth said, the gangster’s last wish might have been to be hanged in Goa.
b) Are people from the Indian embassy allowed to carry guns and shoot away to glory on foreign soil like Korea?
c) Do Koreans appreciate and understand Hindi music? Looks like they do since they give our singing hero a standing ovation after his song.

To top it all, the movie has two taglines, namely
a) Gangster – a love story
b) She began to love him the day she betrayed him.

As you can see, the first tag line is very creative and required a very artistic mind to come up with that one. Overall, this movie is extremely watchable, family oriented and suited for general public viewing. I say this because the night show on a Wednesday was nearly house full inspite of some incessant rains.

On an ending note, quote of this week comes from Chilli and I agree wholeheartedly with him on this one. He says “Our ships are yet to sail”. A very profound statement there.

“Cold”play and the truck wisdom!!

2006-05-24T19:19:00.000+05:30

This is my 4th week with the COLD. I am now sounding like Himesh Reshammiya for 4 straight weeks. The doctor attributes it to a rather bad viral attack. Sigh!!! Chilli and the Devil saw on Monday how bad the attack was. Without trying to be gross here, me blowing my nose (trumpet if you want to call it that) sounded like a napalm strike. And of course when it rains it pours as well. The fever and the cough have also decided to join the party. When the party will get over, I can’t say for sure.

On a different note, there’s a lot of common sense to be learnt from messages on the backside of the lorries/trucks on the road. While Forrest Gump told us “Shit Happens”, an Indian truck told us in the early 80’s that “We two, ours two” which in the recent past has changed to “We two, ours one”. We can attribute this message to a very English savvy person who just literally translated the Hindi version “Hum do hamare do” to its English form. As much as the English version sounds crude, it drives home the point. The other day before my fever attack, I was enlightened by this masterpiece on a Tata truck. It went “Man is actor, God is Directer”. Notice the spelling of the word “Director”. From these trucks, I have also learnt that theres no blessing like a mother’s (“Maa ka ashirwad”) and also that if my eyes are bad then my face should be black. (A direct translation of the saying “Buri Nazar wale tera muh kala”). See, even I can translate Hindi to English..Hehe!! Or maybe it’s my delirious state that I am able to come up with crap like this.

On a second different note, Pearl Jam’s back with their new self titled album. Was disappointed a little with the album. The song worldwide suicide just sounded like some instruments being played at random without any purpose.

Wireless handsfree and shit happens again!!

2006-05-14T10:36:00.000+05:30

I think man in general has got too techno savvy. Just 2 days ago, I noticed a certain individual using a wireless handsfree for his mobile. Now, to me this is a very ridiculous idea. Why have a wireless attachment for a wireless device? Does that small length of wire in a typical handsfree(cost Rs 50) impede your movement so much that you feel the need to get a wireless handsfree (which I am sure costs about 25-30$ atleast)?

This also reminds me a class of people riding on their bikes who just don’t want to use a handsfree while riding. Instead, they will still take the call with the phone in the left hand and ride slowly along the road as if it were a stroll in the park. These guys are very very annoying. I have decided to teach these guys a lesson. When I see such a guy in the future, I am going to ride my bike in front of him and suddenly stop so that he has to brake and since he won’t be able to use the clutch on his left hand because of the phone, his bike will come to an abrupt stop. I would love to see the look on his face then.

Coming now to the topic of “shit happens”. Shit continues to happen to me in all aspects of my life. This Wednesday was no different. I was supposed to catch a late night show of Munich. After taking 2 hours to reach home (thanks to a flooded Wilson Garden), I decided against taking the car and took my bike since it would have been faster. I also chose to take a short cut through a rather shady area (which was a fundamental error in judgement) and lo it started raining like crazy. I was forced to take shelter in a dingy pub which sold local arrack. The local street-dogs also accompanied me to this establishment for shelter. The rain gave no signs of stopping for an hour at-least. Finally; disappointed, angry (with myself of course and the goddamn rain) I decided to get drenched and head back home.

Hard Lessons learnt: Use the car if it’s around and do not venture into Ghauripalya after 8pm for any reason.

But there’s one good news atleast. I have mastered the art of sleeping in any bus. Even the new annoying FM channels can’t keep me from sleeping in the bus. I even managed to sleep in a BMTC bus for an hour last week and nearly missed my bus stop as well.

Ridiculous Laws…..

2006-05-08T09:14:00.000+05:30

Our current government seems to be in a mood for having some ridiculous laws and acts. Their manifesto seems to be that “We shall introduce new laws which make absolutely no sense at all”. And I am not even talking about the proposed reservation bill. Too much has been said about this already and I have nothing more to add to that discussion. I am referring to a recent proposal by some hero (I don’t know who) that any letter weighing less that 300gm can be delivered only by the Indian Postal Service and not by any courier service. Should this legislation come through it will be one of the weirdest ones to happen!!

I do have respect for our postal service. I have made 22 applications to various international universities though the registered post to date and 21 of them made it to their destinations without any hassles in 7 days. That’s really good and you spend only 100rs per post. But what baffles me is the fact that a telegram sent by my grandfather to my dad informing the birth of my sister has never reached my dad 18 years later (this was in the days when there was no STD) and my dad was only 5 hours away.

But why have this new law? Why do they want to monopolise this particular post less than 300gm? What’s the significance of the 300gm? Do they find letters more than 300gms to heavy to carry? And how are they going to regulate this law? Black market courier companies will still exist since most courier agencies are owned by transport companies. This also means that mail that goes out from any company/bank/institution will now take about 3-4 days more to reach its destination. Outstation cheques will take more time to get cleared since most banks employ courier services. And the India Today magazine that I normally get by Monday will reach me by Thursday.

Someone care to give an explanation to this?

Highway Stars

2006-04-23T00:45:00.001+05:30

Time: 11.30 pm or so
Location: Sudeep’s veg hotel, Hanumanthnagar, Mysore Road, 30 kms from Bangalore.
The highway stars: Devil, Bandar, Chilli and yours truly. Dhi was present in spirit though.

The initial aim was basically to have some late night coffee in a place close to our homes. The final result was cups of coffee/tea and omelettes that were devoured by the four monkeys 30 kms away. It was almost a mini road trip. Great road, great weather and great music made the drive a memorable one. Quote of the trip came from one of the monkeys (name withheld) which went as “I do not have the luxury to love”. Chilli also expressed his desire to destroy certain coffee shops for reasons other than the coffee itself. I agree completely with him and I am sure Bandar will be only too glad to assist in this task.

A description of Sudeep’s Veg hotel here though. 2 tables, 7 chairs and a wooden bench. Serves food all night long. Good coffee, tea and omelettes. Has an entertainment option for the customers in the form of a tv and a dvd player which plays pretty recent movies. I am sure the dvd used was of the pirated original kind. Of course the cable tv option also exists.

On an ending note, Lock Stock n Two Smoking Barrels is an awesome movie. If anyone has the soundtrack of this movie, please feel free to lend it to me.

That spit right there…..

2006-04-13T22:49:00.000+05:30

My countrymen love to spit. It’s in their blood. If there is a place available to spit, rest assured that someone will or already has spit there. The paan and the tobacco eaters are especially proficient in this art. They mark their spot and take a nice aim. A projectile like spit follows and voila, we have a red coloured bull’s eye. Saw a sign yesterday on a wall that said “Do not spit here”. Needless to say, the P in the sign was red coloured. In a direct defiance of the notice, an angry and a rebellious paan eater had aimed at the P and hit his mark as expected. Why can’t these guys be sent to the archery competitions in the Olympics? We would probably win a medal.

But the more dangerous ones are the random spitters. You never know when you are in their path. Picture this and I am sure this has happened to most of you. You are at a traffic signal on your two wheeler without a helmet. A bus pulls up next to you. Suddenly, a head pops up out of the window and generates a random spit that misses you by centimetres. You glare at that head and probably make an obcence gesture and all the head does is give you a cheeky smile that angers you even more. I have been lucky todate but a friend of my cousin wasn’t. I will spare you the gross details here.

Then there is the third kind of spitters, the chewing gum eaters. Why the hell can’t they spit chewing gums into dustbins? Why spit on the roads, where people will trample upon on the gum and then it is stuck on to your shoe for a lifetime. I have been a victim of these guys myself when I was in college. I was standing in the ground floor when some #$%##$%#% spit his gum from the second floor onto my unprotected hair. A trip to the neighbourhood barber followed, where a patch of the hair had to be just cut with scissors to remove the stuck gum. That patch of hair has been unruly ever since. I never found out who that #$#@# was (#$%##$%#% and #$#@# are two different swear words by the way), but if I do I will see to it that he will remain bald for the rest of his life. I am also a vigilante who will take vendetta against anyone spitting his gum on the road and not the dustbin.

All I can say is, may luck be with you when you are facing these guys.

Unforeseen travel expenses…

2006-04-02T23:32:00.000+05:30

I recently read an article about how more and more Indians are now travelling to Europe on holidays. The article also mentioned as to how the expenses can be quite reasonable with some careful budgeting and planning. I thought I should add my 2 cents worth of advice here about some unforeseen expenses which can occur during trips to certain European countries. One of the main sources of these unforeseen expenses is public restrooms. Yes, you heard me right. These might cause a considerable burden on the tourist’s pockets if they are not accounted for in the trip planning phase.

In some north European countries, your average looking public restroom would cost about 0.2 Euros (about 10 Indian rupees, called INR henceforth). These are the relatively cheap ones which you can find near the markets or the town centres etc. Go to a train or a bus station, the price of using the restroom rockets to about 0.5 Euros (about 27 INR). Now 27 INR is a pretty expensive affair per usage compared to India where the cost ranges from 0 in most places to 0.5 INR in train/bus stations or at the ubiquitous Sulabh International restrooms. There are also countries which have one standard rate for restroom irrespective of its location. It’s 1 Euro (about 54 INR). That’s one expensive leak right there!! Also, you will find machines outside these restrooms in which you can get change in the form of coins, should you have only notes and no coins.

These restrooms also have another problem with them. They work on the same principle as the vending machines. You drop a coin into a slot on the door and the door opens and hands back the change. On one occasion in which I had to use the restroom, I put a Euro in the slot. The door did not open and nor did it hand me back my change. Given the circumstances, I was forced to put another coin hoping that this time it would open. It did open and did hand me back the change but about 1.5 Euro (81 INR) was spent on this effort making this the record for the most amount of money spent by an Indian for a single restroom usage. Guides like the lonely planet do not make a mention of these real life issues which an unsuspecting traveller might have to face. I hope that I have succeeded in enlightening the prospective European travellers. The travellers to the US do not have to worry about this particular problem. The Americans seem to be very clear and united on this issue that public restrooms ought to free.

Super quotes

2006-03-26T19:16:00.001+05:30

I happened to watch The Unforgiven for the second time on TV and the has some brilliant one-liners from Clint Eastwood as usual. They are definitely worth a mention here.

Gene Hackman: You sir, are a coward!! You just shot an unarmed man.
Clint: He should have been armed, if he’s gonna decorate his saloon with my friend’s dead body.

Gene Hackman: I didn’t deserve to die lie this. I was building a house.
Clint: Deserve has nothing to do with this.
Gene Hackman: See you in hell, Munny!!
Clint: Yeah!!!

The movie has given me enough enthusiasm to start watching spaghetti westerns again. Have to surely watch the dirty harry and the man with no name series of movies now.

Phone ettiquettes???

2006-03-18T23:12:00.000+05:30

People in India are in dire need of some phone etiquettes driven into them. Take an example from this morning. I get a phone call. I pick up the phone and say the customary hello and then I hear a gruff tiger like voice on the other end saying “Hello, who is this?”. I was startled for a moment and thought, “Excuse me, wasn’t this supposed to be my line?” What an audacity this man had. He calls me up and then he asks me who I was. Startled and angry, I retorted back asking “Who are you?”. Actually, I wanted to say “who are the @$#@ are you?” but had to restrain myself, but the way I asked “who are you?” it definitely sounded like “who the @#$% are you?” and I hoped he got that. I think he did because he didn’t again ask me who I was. Instead, he asked me in a mellowed down voice if is this was phone no. XXXXXXXX. I said no, this is phone number, XXXXXXXY. Then the line went dead.

The point is, this is not the first time this has happened to me. This has happened twice before. I do happen to get pissed when unknown people call me up and ask me who I am.

On another occasion, I got 3 phone calls in 5 minutes asking me where Rajesh was? I had clearly told the guy at the other end that this was a wrong number. The fourth time I got a call asking for Rajesh, my straight reply was Rajesh left yesterday for New Delhi. He will be there on work for about 9 weeks. Peace ensured after this. No calls inquiring about Rajesh’s whereabouts were ever received in my house after that.

A quote I read somewhere recently goes something like this “I love dreaming, but reality continues to ruin my life”. Turns out, it’s absolutely true. And to all Pink Floyd fans out there, David Gilmour is out with his new album called On an island. The title track sounded real nice, which has some heavenly guitarring by Gilmour as usual. Have to check out the rest of the tracks. I sense my first attempt at writing an album review.

Vertical limit....

2006-03-07T22:05:00.000+05:30

This is the title of a real life trek I undertook this weekend. While Chris O’donell was trying to scale Mount K2 in the fictional movie, here I was trying to trek 28 odd kms across a range of 9-10 hills from Mulayangiri to Bababudangiri. In short, this was an amazing trek, very beautiful and exciting and something I have been wanting to do for a long time. A few lessons were learnt on the trek though.

a) In a trek, you need to carry enough water to at least fill up a Sintex tank. 8 litres of water is apparently not enough for 3 people.
b) When travelling in a town bus, the safest part to sit it in is the top of the bus. Not to mention that it is also a very exciting way to travel.
c) When the locals tell you that the trek will take only an hour or so, rest assured that you are not going to reach your destination in less than 5 hours.
d) If a local tells you that you will get lots and lots of buses in lingadahalli, you will not see a bus for atleast the next 10 hours.
e) 4 rural kms are equal to 10 Bangalore kms.
f) You never will end up camping the day you carry a tent with you and vice versa.
g) The more unplanned and random the trek is, the better it is.
h) The local cuisine of Attigundi and Bababudangiri which my dear trekking companion wanted to sample is basically a bun and a cup of tea containing god know what.

Anyway, here are a few glimpses of this wonderful place.

And here is me, with my thinking cap on. I was reminded of Howard Roark here and the starting of “The Fountainhead” which went something like this if I remember rite: - “Howard Roark sat on the hill naked and pondering..” then it goes blah blah blah blah for the next 400 pages, never bothered to complete the last 100 pages. Please note that I am not endorsing the book here and I was completely clothed when I put my thinking cap on.

And in Kemmangundi, this is what you get when you order 3 cups of coffee, you get three different sizes of cups and three different quantities.

I FINALLY managed to tune my guitar all by myself. This is a momentous occasion for me and I shall celebrate this in a while with a hot cup of coffee. Lastly, thought for the week is “Hard work and sincerity has nothing to do with success. Its all about being in the right place at the right time”.

Travails of a guitar learner

2006-02-19T11:34:00.000+05:30

First things first, a big happy birthday goes to Inder aka Bandar (although I never call him that) aka Hathamuri, my close comrade and buddy for the last few eons and a self confessed philosopher and thinker and the weirdest dude I know. I hope that things churn out the way for him exactly the way he wants them to be. This is also a reminder to him for the treat which is pending. -:)

Devbagh provide the much needed relief and succour to the gang last weekend. The 2 photographs pretty much sum up the spirit of the entire trip.

Now to the title of the blog. You would think that learning to play a song is the toughest thing to do on a guitar. But you are wrong. Tuning the damn thing would be the most challenging task on this instrument. My instructor tells me that it would take me a few years to learn to tune the guitar just by strumming it. So he hands me over a certain strange looking device and informs me that it would aid me in my efforts to tune the guitar. The device which goes by the name of a pitch pipe is a strange looking thing with six locations one can blow into. One blows into this thing and strums the guitar until one hears a resonance. RESONANCE?? Why the hell do they have to bring science into everything? Seems easy enough. Nope.

So I start blowing into the thing and hoping that the thing resonates. After 5 minutes of unsuccessful strumming, I get Chilli into the picture asking him to blow it. Neither of us hears this so called resonance. But somehow my instructor, who’s standing a couple of miles away, hears this resonance and signals to me that the guitar is now tuned. Happy at my first successful attempt in tuning, I head home and loosen all the screws of the guitar and start all over again. As expected, I did not hear the RESONANCE again. So I keep tightening the screws assuming that I still haven’t reached the point of tuning. Then suddenly, I hear a loud twang of the G-string (excuse the usage, cant be helped) and I see a part of the string flying across the room and the other part hanging on dearly to the screw. Turns out I tightened the screws too much and the string just broke.

5 days later, I have a set of spare strings, an untuned guitar and a pitch pipe which deserves to be buried at least 100 feet below the earth. Well, what can I say?? These are just temporary setbacks on my way to greatness.

Ponnuswamy and his Valentine…..

2006-02-08T22:51:00.000+05:30

I was walking in the office corridor today and suddenly saw this poster in office that said in bold letters “Ponnuswamy is celebrating Valentine’s day”. Needless to say, I was puzzled by this rather strange poster and had a closer look at it. And you won’t believe this. Turns out Ponnuswamy is a caterer who will be serving us hot and spicy Chettinad food in the office on 14th Feb in wake of Valentines day and this was the his way of advertising it. The whole Valentines day thing is so overhyped that now caterers are also trying to cash in on it.

Of course, we have to put up with the side effects of this Valentines Day. Go to a gift shop searching for a birthday card and you are politely told that no birthday cards are being sold that week. Switch on the radio or the music channel and you are forced to hear “Nothings gonna change my love for you” or “Everything I do, I do it for you” for at least a 100 times in a day. Turn over to a movie channel and most likely its going to be “Pretty Woman” or “Autumn in New York” playing. We have movie channels dedicating the whole day to romantic tearkjerkers on the 14th.

A message to chilli and inder, get the guns ready. We are going to need them this week. On a different note as usual, this weekend has excitement and fun written all over it. Beaches, here I come.

Now the weird roads and the Indian Hockey……

2006-02-03T19:09:00.000+05:30

After a description of the weird flyovers of Bangalore in my previous blog, its time for the weird roads of Bangalore. Cunningham Road and St.Marks Road are one ways in both the direction. The uninformed reader who has never been to Bangalore would think I am crazy. You actually got to see this to believe it. At least, Cunnigham Road is a relatively uncomplicated road. But with the new one way from both sides system coming into effect on St.Marks road it’s almost impossible to get out of this road once you enter it. Bangalore has its own black hole just swallowing up people trying to enter this path.

Happened to watch the Premier Hockey League finals between my home team Bangalore Lions and the Chandigarh Dynamos. I was very happy to see a packed stadium in a sport other than cricket for a change. The league is very well organised, stylish in its approach and relatively good prize money. I am really hoping this will encourage more people to take up hockey and restore it to its original glory. I have been a regular follower of hockey since my school days and. I am still hoping that Indians will win the Champions Trophy or make it to at least the semi-finals of the world cup someday again. The biggest culprit for the way Indian hockey is today is due to the circus that is the Indian Hockey Federation and its dictatorial head Mr. KPS Gill and his court jester Mr. Jothikumaran. When India finally managed to get an amazing German coach like Gerhard Rach (Alex Ferguson of hockey), the court jester caused him to quit him in disgust within a few months.The IHF was back at its usual weird behaviour today by axing Gagan Ajit Singh and Viren Rasquinha for the Pak tour, whom I think are the better players India have. Anyway after seeing the PHL, I felt there is hope yet. Lets wait n watch

On a different note, I hate hospitals.

The weird flyovers…..

2006-01-29T22:08:00.000+05:30

Bangalore boasts of one of the worlds’ weirdest flyovers on Richmond Road/Double Road. This is probably the only flyover in the world which has a traffic signal on it, that too not an automatic signal with lights as we would like to think but one in the form of a policeman (or a traffic cop as some confused desis would like to call him). This particular flyover just makes a mockery of the whole concept of constructing flyovers.

I happened to be right there on the fateful day that this idea of a flyover signal came into effect. It was almost comical and chaotic. So we had one policeman on the flyover and one more at the bottom of the flyover stopping the traffic at the beginning itself. When the traffic on one side cleared up, the dude on top would signal the dude at the bottom by waving a white cloth (like the one used to signal surrender). The dude at the bottom would then wave back to signal his acknowledgement and let the traffic through. Nowhere else on earth would you have seen such a scene. Of course the people using the flyover on that day were absolutely confused. They had no clue where the flyover led them to.

Then again there is the flyover in BTM layout which is a one way flyover basically but the direction of traffic is arbitrarily changed. So no one has any clue as to which direction to enter the flyover. I am thinking that there is someone out there who just flips a coin and decides the direction of the traffic for that day. And by Moore’s law, it always turns out to be the opposite direction you want to go, thus rendering this flyover completely useless.

“Rang De Basanti” is a very watchable movie. Good dialogue, an uncomplicated storyline and good cinematography are the highlights of the movie. Some shades of “Yuva” are also evident in the movie. I have actually liked the last 2 hindi movies I have seen. This has not happened for a long long time. In fact, I haven’t seen two hindi movies in 2 weeks ever.

Zinda Hoon Mein…..

2006-01-23T09:29:00.000+05:30

After seeing the movie “Zinda” from the remake king and self-declared Quentin Tarantino of Indian cinema, I have been humming the title track from the movie for some inexplicable reason as much I really don’t want to. I liked the movie since it was different from the other hindi movies we are usually exposed to. Lots of blood and gore, only 3 main characters (one of them just for providing the mandatory oomph!! could have been done without) , a length of only 2 hrs (hitherto unknown to Indian movies), a pretty decent soundtrack and background music make the 100rs I spent on the movie a fair deal. I am guessing the director toned the movie for the Indian audience and that the original Korean version was more bloody and intense.

Contrastingly, I also saw “O Brother!! Where art thou” from the Coen brothers. It’s a warm comedy and a feel good movie continuing on the style the brothers demonstrated in “The Big Lebowski” and showcases a wide variety of richly drawn characters like in “Fargo”. Brilliant cinematography and has a beautiful folk song called “A man of constant sorrow” in it. I just love the Mississippi accent (southern accent?? I am not sure).

On a different note, the entire gang had a Bannerghatta zoo outing this week. Managing 65 over-excited primary school kids in a zoo can be a very exhausting and a demanding task as we found out. And yes…sugarcane juice with lemon tastes heavenly…..!!!!!! and so does a cup of hot coffee after a tiring day.

Listen to Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer”. The guitar solo is so heavenly that it gives Clapton and Gilmour a run for their money. Seems to me that he was a very under rated artist.

Of flying kites and spinning tops

2006-01-12T22:11:00.000+05:30

First things first, congrats and a big round of applause to Dhi Only aka CEO on his success. Let this be a reminder that he owes us a series of treats in pretty expensive places.

The weekend was great although nothing really special happened. Time flew by quickly amidst spicy Chinese and Andhra dinners, roaming around with the city for no apparent reason and attempts at flying a kite and spinning a top. As it turns out, spinning a top is not exactly one of my greatest skills. This was proved on Sunday when I managed to somehow throw the top out of Devil’s terrace. But then again Chilli isn’t so skilled either, though he claims to have been so at some point of time in his life. Dhi’s attempts to fly a kite were nearly successful until it was torn apart by a tree that just happened to be in its path. Also, Dhi happens to think that you need about 5 km of thread in order to fly a kite. The gun fight between Inder and Dhi deserves a special mention in the weekend’s events.

I also happen to think that everybody should watch this movie called CBB which is a true masterpiece and a magnum opus. Japanese movies are always different and if they are dubbed in Hindi makes understanding the movie much easier. -:)

I can be truly called a guitarist now and well on my way to achieve glory with me learning my first song. Alas, it is not “Hotel California” or “Smoke on the water” as the reader would like to think but a sober hindi song which goes by the name of “bin tere sanam”. Well, at least the foundation stone for success has been laid and my dream of playing a song on the guitar has been fulfilled after nearly 10 years.

Kalyug….

2006-01-01T12:09:00.000+05:30

If you think I am talking about the movie Kalyug (Tagline: To hell and back) from the sleaze factory of Mahesh Bhatt and Co. you couldn’t be more wrong. I am referring to my recent journeys in the local trains of Mumbai. The fact that I emerged out alive from these two journeys is remarkable and this is the closest I have been to seeing the face of death.

The first of these journeys occurred from Churney Road to Andheri which is a 30-40 minute travel but an eternity when in the train. Watches tend to stop in these trains. So here I was at the platform when the train arrived and I was suddenly pushed in the direction of the train entrance by the horde of people wanting to board the train. There was no actually effort from me whatsoever to actually board the train. 5 seconds later I just found myself in the train hanging on to my dear life and my wallet. It was like all the people on the station were travelling towards Andheri (which I found later was indeed the case). There were about 3 million people in the compartment at that particular point of time. To add to all this, a guy boarded the train carrying a 21 inch TV (this happened, I swear) which accidentally hit another guy. This caused a small scuffle and a small fist fight. This also caused the rest of the crowd to join the melee. What resulted for the next 5 minutes was a free for all. I also learnt many swear words in my mother tongue whose existence wasnt known to me for all these years since I claim to effectively swear in atleast 9 different languages, Spanish being my speciality.

But I digress here. My egress out of the train wasn’t too graceful either. I am sure I trampled over a few hundred people on my way out and got sworn at. Mind you, the train stops only for 15 seconds. The fact that I am still alive is proven by the fact I am writing this blog one week later.

Heres a picture of the place I lived in as a kid many many eons ago. This is how the river looked from my house. Had a chance to visit this place again and it sure was worth it.

Back….

2005-12-30T17:12:00.000+05:30

The intrepid explorer is back after a hiatus and after a week long of wandering and soul searching in his motherland, Maharashtra. As usual the explorer is full of interesting incidents and stories, which will form the central topic of the next few blogs, I guess. The most bizarre incident that happened yesterday involves people of indeterminate sex who ask for money in trains and me hiding from them. Enough said!!

Coming on to the new year…Hmmm!! Time sure flies fast. I remember the last New Year’s Eve in Chilli’s place and it feels like it just happened recently. As a post mortem of the last year, here’s the best and worst of 2005.

The best..

Meeting up the gang after a 15 month gap on Jan 1st
The great Munnar road trip
The Mudumalai trip
Sky diving
Dream School Foundation
Taking up the guitar
FNU (Friday Night Unwinding for the uneducated reader)
Magnolia/Aangan

The worst..

Traffic..
Traffic.
Seeing Bangalore change beyond imagination (just goes to show that change is not necessarily good)
Villains, n lots of them around…

Well, looking forward to wiping the slate clean and starting on a new note. Gott Nytt Är as the Swedes would say!!

A series of disconnected events

2005-12-09T08:01:00.000+05:30

Have you tried to ever get rid of the smell of petrol? Try it, its nearly impossible. Was filling up some petrol into my bike (its not a Ducati or a Bullet as the reader would like to think, its more on the lines of a scooter) and somehow I started smelling of petrol after that. I had also put on the deodorant called Brut, which I think is the strongest one. But even Brut couldn’t fight the petrol and I walked into the office like a mobile fuel station. Only multiple showers later did I get rid of the smell.

Apparently, there is a new way of travelling on buses between Bangalore and Hosur. You just get on to the ladder at the back of the bus and hang on to your dear life. I am still wondering as to why the person in question didn’t just climb the ladder and sit comfortably on the top of the bus which is a more popular way of travelling without a ticket. Why perform death defying stunts at the back of the bus is what puzzles me.

Coffee vending machines suck. Water tastes better. Thanks to these machines for reducing my coffee intake in office to nil which means I also get to sleep more.

Have been told by many people to avoid menthol based chewing gums for certain reasons. I shall keep this in mind. In fact all guys ought to.

Finally, song of the moment is “Rhinoceros” by Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan at his best.

Late Night Coffee

2005-12-04T23:03:00.000+05:30

Meeting the gang in the night over cups of tea or coffee has become pretty much a ritual now. Sitting on the terrace sipping hot coffee amidst PJ’s, discussions, gossip and outpourings is one hell of an experience.

This week’s Friday Night Unwinding aka FNU produced the quote of week from a certain member of the gang during a discussion about long memories. The quote went thus “There are elephants and then there are women”. -:)

Animal Farm is an awesome book. Felt it was much better than 1984. The analogies to Stalin, Trotsky, The Russian Church, KGB were supposed to be obvious. Not to me though. They became obvious to me only when Akilles pointed this out. Looks like Pink Floyd’s album “Animals” was also influenced by this book. The lyrics of this album make more sense now. I think Animals is also their second best album after Dark Side of the Moon.

I am also beginning to doubt with more intensity the belief that the day and the time a person is born will dictate certain events of his life.

Four weddings and no funerals

2005-11-26T22:17:00.000+05:30

Well, this is the marriage season and attending weddings on weekends was my charter during the last month. Four of my friends from school and college tied the wedding knot during the past month.

One of these weddings was arranged in an area called the Industrial Estate. Now one may wonder as to why a marriage hall would exist in an industrial area. Conducting marriages is a big booming business these days and hence has been given a much deserved industry status. Now, this Industrial Estate has about 40% space filled by small scale industries while the remaining 60% of the space is occupied by the marriage halls. And I am not even exaggerating. The gentle reader is cordially invited to actually visit this area and count the number of marriage halls and I am sure he/she will agree with me.

So I ventured into the “industrial estate” and I found myself stuck in a traffic jam in the unlikeliest of places. The jam was mainly due to people who were attending weddings. The population density in this part of town at that time must have been more than that of Tokyo and London and to reuse my favourite comparison again “the population of this area was more than that of some European countries”. To add to this confusion, I was unable to find the right wedding hall and nearly attended some other wedding. It was a timely intervention by my brain that stopped me from attending this wedding. I enquired about the brides’ name and found that this was not the right marriage hall. Only after scouting the area did I find the right marriage hall -:)

And yes, I am the proud owner of a new guitar now. Looking forward to playing my first song soon. David Gilmour, here I come!!!!!!!

Travails in Kodihalli….

2005-11-15T21:35:00.000+05:30

The intrepid explorer decided to leave from office a little early last Friday. Little did he know that after a harrowing day at work, the situation was only going to get worse. At the Kodihalli bus stop, only about 1% of the buses go to Majestic. The remaining 99 % of the buses are always empty while the ones going to Majestic contain more number of people than the entire population of some European countries which I shall refrain from naming. For the first time since my school days, I was forced to do some “footboarding” while lugging my laptop on the back. Footboarding has its advantages like it’s the only place on the bus where there is a possibility of some fresh air.

Being inside the bus is like a prison camp, possibly prison camps have better living conditions. To add to all this ruckus was a man who had come to a conclusion that a bus is the best mode of transporting sacks of foodgrains around. Eventually, I did reach Majestic a few eons later and badly bruised only to be greeted by another footboarding experience to Vijayanagar. What happened in this journey is left to the imagination of the curious reader.

The evening did provide some succour to an otherwise forgettable day in the form of a thrilling Agatha Christie play. The weekend was good and took my mind off many things. The gang was always there as usual when I needed them the most. On a very bright note, I finally can play the E-E notes of the guitar. -:)

Cursed........

2005-11-05T21:51:00.000+05:30

The dreaded curse of the villain is back and has reared its ugly head again :(
Sigh....

Radio “Shitty”

2005-10-31T12:06:00.000+05:30

As much as I don’t mind good music on the radio in any language, I do have issues with loud blaring senseless music and also the ads on the radio. When you are returning home from work in the evening in the traffic, your mind is mainly focussed on one single activity, SLEEP. But fate is cruel with me as usual. The higher elements have decided that “Thou shalt never sleep in the bus”. The bus which I travel in these days comes equipped with a sub-woofer speaker which has the volume level set somewhere beyond the maximum human withstandable intensity level. But Thursday last week, I was reasonably successful in my attempts to sleep with the radio still on. I managed to nap for like 7 minutes. This is a very encouraging trend. I hope to increase this time in the near future. The reader will be kept up to date on my progress on this front.

Among another news, I have finally become an aspirant for the next Kurt Cobain position which in plain language means that I have taken up the guitar after years of deliberation and I am in that phase where I have begun to annoy the people in the house through my constant strumming. Currently, just playing the octaves seems to be quite a Herculean task. Someday, hopefully I shall conquer the octaves.

This is a list of my current favourite songs. For some reason, I thought I will share this with the gentle reader:-
Schism by Tool
High Speed by Coldplay
Bulla ki jana by Rabbi
Jukebox Hero by Foreigner
I alone by Live
Man in a Box by Alice in Chains
Crying in the Rain by A-ha

India, a Queue challenged country

2005-10-15T21:24:00.000+05:30

I was at the bank yesterday, and I saw that the bank had a very nice token system in place there. You grab a paper token, wait for your token number to be displayed on the large monitor and then just go to the required counter and get your work done. A simple and a supposedly effective system. Then comes along this educated hero, grabs a token and directly walks to one of the counters, waving his token about and also wanting to get his work done immediately. He is angrily told by the bank staff to wait for his number to be called. But out hero continues to wave the token about.

The point is, our hero had managed to make a mockery of the token system in one single shot. And how often have we seen this? From train stations to telephone bills to movie halls, we have people barging in all the time. At train stations, I have often seen at least a billion people crowding at a window when a simple queue would have ensured that everyone’s job got done in time. In a Scandinavian country I was once in, not forming a queue or breaking one is like a social crime. In fact, the author of a travel book describes that standing in queues is one of the national pastimes of this country. And for some reason, these people were cheerful being in the queue.

Among other stories this week, this weeks marks the possible dethroning of the God from his position leaving behind three strong contenders in the fray. In fact, it was a mutiny against god. He refused to step down honourably.

Also, HBO on Friday nights is entertaining with movies like Night of the Demons 2. Strong performances from all the actors and great special effects were a hallmark of the movie. Special mention must be made of the “Commando Nun”, the main protagonist of the movie. She was responsible for saving us from the demons. I am also hoping that Night of the Demons Part 1 will be shown someday too.

Return from hibernation!!!

2005-10-13T11:43:00.000+05:30

After a hibernation period of 3 weeks, I am back. Apparently, my readers have been begging for my return and can’t wait to hear about my recent exploits. As you can see, the author is very humble today.

My recent exploits include a haircut, which for a change has turned out all right. As mentioned in some of my previous blogs, I am generally afraid of only two things, barber and women and not necessarily in that order and a lady hairdresser is like my worst nightmare come true. And as much as I like women, lady hairdressers I am scared of. On three previous occasions I have been to lady hairdressers and emerged out looking absolutely nothing like I normally do. This happens even with guy hairdressers but with a lesser probability.

And finally God met God. If I sound cryptic, check this blog and you will see what I mean. Thanks to God (both of them) for a rainy musical evening.

Holidays finally are here. Had expected a lot from them, but alas they aren’t turning out to be as exciting as I thought they would be. I guess I definitely need a new hobby. Swimming is what seems to be on my mind and given the way Bangalore’s been raining recently finding a place to swim shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Finally, just completed Michael Crichton’s latest offering called “State of Fear”. It presents some interesting views on pollution and global warming but the story itself wasn’t that good. He seems to have lost his knack since the days of Congo and Disclosure. Chilli will happily concur with my opinion on any Crichton novel for that matter.

And The Island is one crappy movie. It does not deserve the 20 Rs I spent on it. Rather, I ought to paid some money for watching the movie.

Another blog with no name!!

2005-09-25T22:08:00.000+05:30

I hate computers….They definitely have a mind of their own, I am convinced. Unfortunately, in some way they also happen to be a source of my bread and butter. I get blue screens on my desktop for no apparent reason. Just when I fixed that problem, the monitor literally blew up. There was some smoke seen emanating from the monitor followed by a rather toxic smell. The blowing was attributed by the technician to be due to a faulty capacitor. 700 Rs of expenditure later, the monitor was back in business. Now it was the turn of the mouse. Now, the mouse and me are sworn enemies. I happen to have exactly 4 mice with me at this point of time, of course none of them work. Correction!! The last one works, but in its own way. When I move it to the left, the cursor moves pretty much in all directions except the one its supposed to, somewhat like Narain Karthikeyan in his Jordan. Ooh..!! that’s an unjust statement, I guess. He does deserve the credit for being at the top level, maybe the car is to be blamed then.

But I digress, coming back to my mouse collection again. I am in a very generous mood right now and willing to donate them to anyone. The 4 mice also come along with an old keyboard, which requires a heavy weight to be dropped on it for it to actually type out anything. With it also comes an old motherboard, which also blew a few years back and the generous technician let me have it. I seem to have accumulated enough computer accessories to start a store.

And have you ever tried looking at whatever lies behind the computer. I counted exactly 1 billion and 3 wires this weekend. I do not have enough strength to untangle this wire mess. I am afraid that I myself will get entangled in it. Drastic actions are called for i.e. throw away the computer, the accessories and all the wires will disappear with them.

On an ending note, this week saw me return to one of my passions, quizzing. Managed to to do a very decent job in the audio-visual quiz inspite of the absence of Rajjo, Akshai and Chilli. If these three guys were also there, I am sure we would have stood to gain at least 2000 Rs. Maybe next time.

Ban the words!!!

2005-09-11T09:06:00.000+05:30

I am seriously beginning to think that some of the following words ought to be removed from the dictionary:-

touchbase
vis-à-vis
per se
bandwidth
placeholder
arbitrary
ad-hoc

Welcome to the world of office lingo. I am absolutely sick of hearing these words. What makes it worse is the fact that I have started using some of these words in normal conversations with my friends. I am ashamed to say that I actually used the words “per se” and “arbitrary” in the same sentence yesterday and was rightly pointed about this my a friend of mine. Use of this kind of lingo has become very fashionable even if you don’t really know the meaning of these words. The number of times you use these words is directly proportional to your designation/grade.

I say remove these words from the dictionary and make the world a better place. I could come up with only the words mentioned above. The esteemed reader is encouraged to give more examples of this kind.

On a different note as usual, I have now managed to successfully fail in all my first attempts in anything that I do.

Of roads and bus-stops

2005-09-04T10:45:00.000+05:30

Just made a new discovery two days back. I found that there exists a place in Bangalore called the Banashankari Mini Zoo. In my 16 years in Bangalore, the only zoo I have ever heard of is the Bannerghatta one. Never thought there might be other zoos hidden right in the centre of the city. I quickly set out to investigate this particular location, only to be disappointed and found that this was merely the name of a bus-stop and that no such mini zoo existed in reality. But then again, a bus stop is anyway like a zoo, so the name is more than appropriate. I would rather call it the Banashankari Mega zoo given the number of the people at the Bus stop.

We (as in the gang) have come up with a classification for the different types of people who tread on the roads of our Bangalore. I am guessing this classification will apply to most of India. The classification goes like this

a) The Shankar Nag’s or the Basha’s: These are the illustrious auto drivers. I won’t bother describing these people. The nicknames have been derived from a movie titled Auto Raja starring Shankar Nag and the Rajnikanth starrer titled Basha.
b) The Cycle Schumachers: The credit for this goes to Kiddo1. These are the cycle guys as the name suggests, who obstruct the traffic by riding right in the middle of the road at approximately 5 kmph. I happen to think that the luna and tvs should also come in this category.
c) The “motor”cycle schumachers: This is my own extention of kiddo1’s classification. These are the guys on the relatively faster bikes, but who happen to have the illusion that they are on a Ferrari or a Mclaren. Any free space left on the road is used by them
d) The uncles and the aunties: These are people on scooters/kinetic honda’s/scooty who tend to take their kids along with them, wear no helmet and drive slower than the cycle schumachers on the right lanes.
e) The Lance Armstrong : My own addition. I saw this category 2 days back. These guys are also on the cycle. But they think that the whole riding thing is like a big race and have no qualms about competing with cars and motorbikes. I saw this cycle dude break a signal, then arrogantly signal an incoming truck to give him the right of way and then race past 2 bikes. The guy was sure in a hurry and he was very confident that the cycle would get him to his destination in time.

Suggestions on some more categories are more than welcome.

How many Volume Controls does it take to get some sound??

2005-08-28T14:07:00.000+05:30

A rather big title for the blog, but this is the question I have been having for some time now. In the morning, I just put on some music and for some reason, there was no sound coming out of the computer. I knew that this was a problem due to some sound control settings. I set to investigate this particular problem and found that I had to deal with volume control settings in at least 5 places beginning with the volume control in the tray bar on the right hand corner of the screen. This particular control also has some sub-controls for wave files and the cd player. Then came the sound card with its own set of sound control settings. Then there’s Winamp which provides a multitude of sound control settings. To add to all this, the speakers are not behind in this volume control race. They proudly display their own volume controls too. After turning the volume settings to maximum in all these places, I still wasn’t able to get any sound. Turns out that the headphones I had connected to my speakers also had one of these godforsaken volume controls. I am thinking, what the hell…it takes 5 settings to get the frigging sound.

Man, why on earth would you need so many settings when one would suffice? I wish Mr.Gates can answer the question. And god help you if own a laptop. The laptops have a separate sound control of their own (esp the Think Pad ones) which are not related to the other sound controls at all. I don’t see how listening to music is a pleasurable experience if one has to go through all this torture.

On a different ending note as usual, I swear I saw this in the gym. A guy was cycling away to glory and also reading a book at the same time. I am at a loss to explain why someone would attempt something like this. Someone care to clarify this?

“Train”ing Days

2005-08-15T19:37:00.000+05:30

In the last 2 and half days, I have travelled about 31 hours in the great three tier sleeper coaches of the Indian Railways. And as always, the second class compartment journeys are “always” interesting. The word “reserved compartment” is a joke though. In a bogie capable of having 72 people, there were at least 100 of them. All the possible places for seating were taken up. I am only thankful that there were no farm animals in my compartment. On a trip to Delhi once, I was fortunate enough to see a shepherd take a few of his sheep through the reserved compartment. And I am not joking.

I have always hoped that there will be some pretty girl sitting somewhere near me in the train. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen in my 25 years of existence. There are always some pretty girls on the station when the train arrives, but they all decide to get into the bogie at least 10 bogies away from mine. Needless to say, I am always stuck with older ladies or whining kids. The return journey was no different. For a change, all the seats near me were filled entirely with women. But wait, Fate is cruel. These women came from all the ages except the age I would have preferred them to be in. There were 2 whining girls, two mothers and 2 old ladies. No pretty girl anywhere in the picture. As a probability, I would hope that at least 1 in 6 women would be in the age range I hoped them to be in (Gang!! No wisecracks or the kiddo jokes here).

Now whining kids I can bear. But not old aunties and ladies. At one point I was crushed between two of them. One of them opened up a book and started praying. Now, I have no issues per se with anyone praying. But I don’t prefer someone praying in my ear. So I put on my music and started listening to Nirvana. Just then the tone and pitch of the praying also increased to near screeching levels. Even Kurt Cobain’s incessant hate rants were no match for this lady’s baritone. It was only 2 hours later this prayer stopped when one of the kids started whining. The only time I am thankful to the whining kid. This lady also turned on the light at precisely 3.05 am, for what reason I don’t know. I beseeched her to switch off the goddamn light. She refused, so I did it myself. This lady also woke up at precisely 6 am and started chanting again and woke me up. Then she started talking to me and our conversation went like this, right in the morning.

Aunty : So, where do you study?
Me : I stopped studying, I don’t engage in these activities anymore.
Aunty: So what do you do?
Me: I work.
Aunty: So where do you work?
Me: I name the company I work for.
Aunty: So where do you work?
Me: I name the company again.
Aunty: So are you a software engineer?
Me: No, I am in chip design, (a smirk on my face)
Aunty: So how much do you earn then? What’s your salary?
Me: I survive on whatever they give me.

She looks at me with sheer disgust and stops the conversations.

And this was how most of my weekend was spent, tackling the train people. However, the one day stay in Solapur itself was very good. Had a lot of great Marathi food, met my aunt and my nephew and remembered all the summertime spent here with my cousins as a schoolkid. It sure was nostalgic.

The gym exploits……

2005-08-07T20:33:00.000+05:30

The intrepid explorer has been jogging away to glory in the gym for about 6 weeks now, continuing from the earlier jogging exploits in the nearby park. So far so good. Joggin’ in the gym is much more peaceful. No more obstacles from the uncles and the aunties. Only one small problem. I happen to have issues with gym covered entirely with mirrors, especially when I am jogging; I hate to have a mirror in front of me. I don’t want to see how I jog nor am I interested in seeing my own mug/face while I am jogging. To echo Rajjo’s feelings here, I happen to see my own mug right in the morning while shaving and it’s not at all a pretty sight. I’d rather have a poster of Monica Bellucci or Maria Sharapova in front of me.

Secondly, I also happen to have issues with some of the music that’s being played in the gym. I hate bhangra music. Period. I don’t want that kind of music in the gym. Gym is not the place for the bhangra. People interested in bhangra are very well welcome to frequent the discotheques. And there also happen to be a few Bryan Adams obsessed people in the gym. I don’t want to listen to “have u really loved a woman” when I am jogging. I would rather have a “comfortably numb” or a “smells like teen spirit” on the speakers. But then again, Bryan Adams is melodious compared to bhangra. And for certain reasons that will not be disclosed to the reader, I am called the celebrity of the gym. I was awarded this title within 30 mins of me entering the gym on the first day.

And on a different note as usual, the weekend was good. The gang came to the rescue on a rather sombre Friday evening. Trust the gang to be there when their presence is required. Listening to Coldplay in Devil’s car late in the night was a very good feeling. I still think Speed of Sound is arguably their best song. And Dhi only one turned 26 on Saturday and the kiddo1 turned 25 on Friday. May both you guys live many a year.J

Shaving and the art of stubble maintenance

2005-07-29T09:35:00.000+05:30

Lately, I have been having a lot of shaving disasters. Every time I shave, it seems to be a blood bath on my face. I have managed to cut myself on the face a lot in the recent times. For example, take today’s incident. I open up a new set of Wilkinson Sword razor blades and when I started shaving it was like a slaughter out there. The blades were as smooth as a blade only about 2 years old. In one single sweep, there were 3 distinct cuts. Looks like I ended up with a real defective set of blades. And I decide to apply some after shave to this. Man, the excruciating pain this caused just cannot be explained in words, it has to be felt. And all this has to happen when I am running a little late to catch the morning bus.

But this was a little better than what happened last week. The same situation, but this time the blade had been used by me at least a few times. The result was inevitable, 4 cuts on the face, 2 on each side and 1 particularly bad. I was asked by a colleague of mine if I had been in some sort of a knife to knife combat situation. For one thing, I am surely going to stop using these $#%#$^#^ Wilkinson Sword razor blades. I used to be a purist, always depending on the conventional razor blades. From now on, it’s going to be only Mach 3, with a 3 blade system as the name suggests. One clean swipe should do the job.

And by the way, I claim to be the only person who managed to cut his nose a few years back with you guessed it, a Wilkinson Sword blade. Thank god, they stopped showing the ads of this particular brand on TV. The ad had the guy using this particular blade who ends up with this amazing looking babe. Needless to say, the man had no cuts whatsoever on this face. I now strongly believe that Wilkinson Sword is just about the worst blade ever made. The maker of this blade is also trying to make a point with the name, “Sword”. Why the @#$@ does he have to call it a sword? He knows sword signifies cutting, slashing and a blood bath.

I beg you, o gentle reader to please use any other brand other than this friggin’ one

Crying in the Rain..

2005-07-17T17:02:00.000+05:30

I missed to write a blog on the great Mudumalai Road trip I had with the guys last week. Chilli’s or Dhi Only One’s blogs do a great justice to the trip and I don’t have anything more to add and hence shall refrain from writing more about the trip. However, I should add that after the trip I have one more principle in life. Earlier, I had only one, i.e. never argue with a male barber wielding a razor blade and if it’s a lady barber never argue with her at all. Now my second principle is , stay at least more than 2 feet away from a male tusker and be in a car ready to run (ready to flee is more like it). I love wild life and animals. But if it’s a giant menacing pachyderm you are looking at in the night with one of your pals using the camera flash liberally, be sure that a cage separates you from the elephant unlike in Mudumalai. Please check Inder’s blog for a mugshot of that particular elephant.

But I digress, back to the title of the blog. Got completely drenched in the rain yesterday after a typical Saturday meeting with the gang over a cup of coffee. To begin with it was an awesome experience getting wet like this and having water splashed all over. It’s been years since I played in the rain. But soon the driving conditions got really dangerous with the hidden potholes and it wasn’t fun anymore. The visibility was nearly nil. And of all the days to rain, I didn’t want it to rain yesterday. But if it’s going to rain, it anyway will (a slight modification of one of Murphy’s laws) and here I was all drenched and for some reason humming the Ah-a tune called Crying in the Rain. The lyrics go something like this “Someday when my crying is done, I am gonna smile and race in the sun……”.Beautiful words those, especially since I don’t happen to appreciate poetry so much.

Anyway looks like the co-god position is now filled. This last line is supposed to make sense only to a few people..

Crowded Malls!!!

2005-07-03T23:05:00.000+05:30

Bangalore is getting crowded. Period. So on this Saturday we decided to go to the Forum mall to get Devil a birthday gift and it turned out that most of Bangalore was in that friggin mall. The drive to the mall itself was quite arduous. Akilles did take 20 mins to cross that particular signal in front of the mall. Akilles also commented that some sort of attack on this mall would at least cut down the population of Bangalore by half. There was hardly any space to walk or even stand. The bookshop had a huge queue at the cash counter. I have seen lesser queues at a Rolling Stones or a Mark Knopfler concert. Makes one wonder, is there a quiet spot to hang around on a weekend?

Anyway, the occasion was chilli’s treat in MTR. Now MTR does not exactly have an ambience of any sort, but the food more that makes up for it. On entering this place we were shown into this waiting room which looked more or less like a doctor’s waiting room. From the waiting room we were led into another room through a maze and then shown the table. I am sure Inder could have never found his way out of that place. Then the royal feast began. The food just kept on coming. I was never able to keep up pace with the incoming food. Chilli devoured the entire food, the Sapad Raman that he is. Inder was seen clutching his stomach in pain after the dinner. He threatened to barf and he swore never to go to MTR again since they just stuffed him with lots and lots of food. Not to mention that he took the window seat on the ride back home and requested Chilli to drive slowly over the speed bumps. The food was truly awesome. One of the amusing things of the evening was the water sinks in MTR. You get to use a car accelerator like pedal to get water out of the sink. A very complex mechanism where a faucet would have actually done the job.

Got back in the night and finally saw some good TV. The Australia-England match ended in an exciting tie. The other channel had the live8 concert going on with some real good music. It sure was great to see Pink Floyd and The Who back in action again. Pink Floyd played a few songs from The Dark Side of the Moon. Gilmour and Waters on the same stage after 24 years was quite a scene. Meanwhile, the new Coldplay album sounds real good. Havent been able to get the song Speed of Sound out of my head for a fortnight now.

The return of the intrepid explorer

2005-06-26T19:18:00.000+05:30

I am back to my “mahaan bharat” and “namma Bengaluru” after a three month hiatus. Sure feels good to be back. Upon landing was greeted by the typical and great Bangalore weather. After being in Bangalore for 15 years and seeing it change beyond my imagination, the weather still reminds me of why I am still in love with this city. The flight was much more pleasant this time and I was saved of eating sushi in the flight for a second time. I showed an extreme foresight in informing the airlines at east one week in advance about my jehad-like hate for Japanese food and that I wish to be served only Indian vegetarian food on the flight. The otherwise good flight was only marred by a snoring man on my left and a couple on the right who was a wee bit too intimate. If I had my way there would be only aisle seats in the plane. For some inexplicable reasons, I have always found it hard to get aisle seats on a plane. Aisle seats give that extra little space to stretch your legs and make trips to the restroom easier. You don’t have to wake up a multitude of people on the way.

As a side note, I would like to add that of all the major airports that I have seen like Heathrow, LAX, CDG, Castrup, Sahar (if that one can be called major), Narita; the Changi airport is the best. Incredible facilities on the airport ranging from free internet, movie theatre, xbox & playstations and the free trip around Singapore they take you on and reasonably priced food. I had this nice ride on what is called a bum-boat. On Heathrow, you pay 1 pound for 10 minutes of internet and 2 pounds for an iced tea. I am one of those bright people who purchased this 2 pound tea. In my defence, I can say I had 2 pounds in the form of 20 coins and I needed to get rid of those since the coins were actually pulling down my trousers. Like Seinfeld once said, the airports have no idea about what the prices are in the rest of the civilized world.

Was greeted by the gang on Saturday morning. Interesting things have happened during my absence and I needed to get myself updated on these and get the views of all the people on these happenings. I felt really happy about some of these happenings. Chilli now sports a distinct Zakir Hussain look and has cemented his position as the GOD. No change in Inder at all. Finally got to see Akilles’ “specsy” look as he likes to call it. I was also enlightened about a new word that the gang has introduced, “villain”. Now villain is a very common word, but for the gang this word has many implications and a deeper meaning. I say death to most of the villains. For the concerned people, notice the usage of the word “most” in my previous statement. I guess I am getting cryptic again.

Anyway, Bangaloreans, I am back.

How I met the gang…

2005-06-17T10:43:00.000+05:30

I was in a very nostalgic mood today after seeing the Goa photo posted by Inder on the Monkey’s Dancing blog. I have been with these guys more than one-third of my life now. Every interesting story that I have to tell will have these guys in it. Here’s how I came to meet each one of them in chronological order.

Inder: Met him in 1990 and kept on just saying occasional hi to him until 1995-97 days. Since then, one of the closest buddies I ever had. Even way back in those days I thought he was one weird dude. I still maintain this belief. He is the weirdest guy I know.

Dhi Only one: Met him in 1990-91 at the bus stop. He had the “I am the CEO and I scoff at you lesser mortals” look on the face even in those days. We were music directors together for that play way back in 1996.

Devil: My first glimpse of him was in a purple trouser while he was playing cricket at the New Public Grounds. This was somewhere in 1993. That image will be very hard to forget. Unfortunately, I don’t have this image on celluloid to show the other gang members.

Rajjo: Met him as a partner in a quiz contest in 1994. Was scared to death after seeing him. You never argue with someone who is twice your size and has had a moustache since 1st standard. Of course joking about the twice your size part, make that thrice. Hehehe!!!

Akilles: Met him in 1994 as he was looking for directions in a corridor. I showed him the directions but he refused to recognize me the next time I met him in a market. Dude..that was arrogant.

Chilli: 1995, Scene : The classroom. A quiet boy in the last bench answers the roll call. He has that intellectual look on the face. My guess was right. He is the INTELLECTUAL, of course followed by Rajjo.

Pramod: 1997. A guy comes up to me and says sorry for no apparent reason. That’s Pramod for you.

That’s all I have, folks.

Damn them Infomercials…..

2005-06-12T23:44:00.000+05:30

Bruce Springsteen once said something about killing the TV as it had 56 channels channels but nothing really worth watching. That was a few years back though. Now there are like 100’s of channels but still nothing to watch. In India, the TV is rendered unwatchable due to the surge of the K-serials and the soaps which promote extra marital affairs, adultery, debauchery and conspiracies. The various channels like GOD TV, Maharishi channel, Sanaskara also add to this effect. In the US, there is the concept of the infomercials which only adds to the frustration & exasperation. Man, out of the 100 channels on TV at least 21 seem to be exclusively dedicated to shopping (I counted this). And the kind of ridiculous products they sell. And there’s this channel dedicated to selling knives and coins.

Picture this, the camera focuses on to a table which has thousands of knives ranging from sizes which can easily fit in your fists to sizes at which you can’t really call them knives anymore. I would call them Excaliburs or swords. The number of knives on the table is enough to fully arm an army from the dark ages. Who’s buying so many knives that the guy selling them can actually afford a TV channel for them? Have all the serial killers decided to put in a bulk order, so that they could get these knives cheaper? And these knives aren’t cheap, the smallest one costs atleast 50$ to the exacalibur which costs about 300$. And the same guy selling knives sells coins sometimes on the same channel. He sells pennies and quarters for many a dollar. I am just plain confused at this, and also speechless. Some intelligent soul can explain me as to why someone is paying dollars for the pennies.

I thought the amount of commercials they show between programs was bad in India. Its even worse out here. I was watching Friends the other day and it had had ads after every other scene. Bottom line, I am giving up TV. I am willing to make an exception for NDTV and BBC world only.

Gods and Mortals…

2005-06-05T01:34:00.000+05:30

Our gang has been now divided into three distinct categories: the Gods, the mortals and the confused ones, who haven’t made up there mind. The Gods are solely dedicated to spreading the religion known as singularism while the mortals are trying to follow it and the confused ones, like me really don’t know what to do. This religion was started by Akilles, the God and who is now being actively supported by Chilli, the Co-God. To a certain extent I can say that some of the basic tenets of singularism were laid by the Cow and me a few years back on the way to the office (while passing Jyoti Nivas college, I might add). The idea was this, monkhood is the only option in life. By retiring to a quiet monastery in the mountains, salvation can be obtained. But somewhere along the way, we lost our belief in this concept but this concept came out in its modified form called Singularism. By 2005, the Cow and me were supposed to have started a monastery or atleast joined one. But this hasn’t yet happened. I am trying my level best not to join the gods, but it seems to be inevitable. The Gods should atleast be happy with me as I am trying to spread their message even in distant lands though I myself am not a permanent member. The Cow who is also currently in these distant lands has been given a sermon on the benefits of joining the singularism movement. With a bit of help from god and co-god, I am sure he will be convinced.

To the uninformed reader, my previous paragraph will seem like gibberish. To the informed one, it will make absolute sense. (hopefully!!)

On a completely different note, I had another road trip last week. This one being through the sylvan state of Oregon. Oregon pretty much has only trees, hills and waterfalls. Occasionally, one does see a few houses and humans amidst the trees. The place is beautiful to say the least. A roller coaster ride on the dune buggy through the sand dune beaches was the highlight of the trip. 2700 kms of distance was covered in 3 days, which easily makes this the longest road trip I have been on. A plan is forming in my head about make a hiking trip in Sikkim. From the pictures that I have seen, it looks amazing. There’s so much of India that’s yet to be explored and experienced. I think a trip to Sikkim with the gang would be one hell of an experience. What say you, guys???

Lord of the Skies!!

2005-05-23T08:23:00.000+05:30

This weekend provided a much needed kick and thrill to my otherwise monotonous life. Skydiving from 14000 feet with a 50 second free fall and a 60 second parachute fall made those 2 mins the most exciting of my life. Looks like I found an alternate profession should it ever come to that. The only scary moment was leaping out of the plane part, rather being pushed out of the place part. But once that happened, it was rock ‘n’ roll along the way. The fact that my instructor was a veteran of 5000 jumps helped too. The jump was followed by a fourth trip to Saravana Bhavan. One cannot ask for a better day.

The weekend also gave me a chance to redeem myself at go karting. As a few members of the gang may remember, I have a record of sorts at the go-karting place near Sanjaynagar. I am the slowest driver ever to have been there and I am not exactly proud of this. So when I set my hands on the steering wheel, the only thing on mind was to erase the memory of that painful day 3 years ago. I decided I will not use the brake at all. Starting from the last place i.e. the 7th, I came in first. Without bothering to describe my superior skills, I will let only the results speak for themselves.

On the flip-side, it turns out that I am not exactly the world’s best mini-golf player either. I did come in last in this particular game though. And one particular hole, it did take me 10 shots to get the friggin’ ball in. Atleast mini-golf is quite interesting if there are enough people unlike the longer version where some rich and fashion challenged people decide that they want to spend their day roaming from a hole to another hole which is spaced atleast a few light years away. The players get to traverse this distance in those cool looking golf carts while the poor and the so called spectators have to trudge along. Frankly, I am even amazed that this game has spectators. And the one thing I have never been able to figure out is the presence of the caddie. Why is he even there? He is the most redundant entity in that whole sport. I always wonder why the players can’t carry their own clubs. To top this all, I bet Tiger Woods’ caddie is quite a well to do dude, and he did this just by lugging those clubs from one point to another. Thankfully, being a bad mini-golf player doesn’t hurt as much as being the slowest driver does.

Phone “Spam” anyone?

2005-05-09T08:08:00.000+05:30

Interesting things seem to be happening to me. A few days ago I became a victim of what can be termed as phone spamming. Came back to find around 10 messages on my answering machine. All from people from some store or sales departments offering to sell me some cheap cars, furnitures etc. Too add to all this, some Indian guy has given a wrong number somewhere and now I have to receive his calls. I get calls as to why this guy, whose name is Yogesh as I found is not responding to a certain other guy’s calls. For all I know, these spam messages were intended for this certain Yogesh. Yogesh sure deserves a good whacking for spreading wrong numbers around.

A thing I noticed in offices here is the presence of water fountains for the thirsty employee as opposed to normal water filters/coolers and glasses which are used in the rest of the world. The water fountain splashes water pretty much all over the face except for the mouth. No wonder they call it a fountain. I haven’t still mastered the art of drinking water from these wretched things.

Also saw this intense drama called 21 Grams, a movie shot in a different style with the chronological order of events in the movie being completely mixed. Took me some time to get hang of the idea and the entire movie duration to understand why it was called 21 grams. Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro really gave an interesting performance. And as usual, my hiking exploits continue. This time is was the Yosemite Valley. Amazing secenery and waterfalls. Too bad we couldn’t hike the entire trail to the Half Dome on account of dangerous conditions and snow. On the way back, nearly lost the way in the dark. When you are lost and you ask the locals for directions, each one of them suggests different roads. In one case, I was even pointed the road to Nevada which is a different state altogether. I shall refrain from asking directions in the future and stick to the directions given by Yahoo maps. After taking some back roads with weird names like Rawhide Road, Chinese Camp & Angela’s Camp I eventually did reach home.

And now I proclaim that I am sick of Mexican, American and Thai food. I demand Marathi food. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a Marathi restaurant. You find Gujarati, Punjabi, South Indian and other cuisines. But you will never find a place selling Marathi cuisine (except Maharashtra of course). As a noted Marathi comedian once said, a Marathi businessman is a fictional character. Maybe I could start my own Marathi restaurant here. Hmm!! Not a bad idea, even though I say so myself.

The “Tabloid” of India

2005-05-02T10:57:00.000+05:30

I was reading the online version of the The Times of India, supposedly one of India’s most “illustrious” and oldest newspapers and I thought these guys ought to change its name to the The tabloid of India. The online version contains pretty much everything except a section called the news. And I see the paper version turning into the online version also. I remember the Times being the only newspaper I have read since my birth and I have seen the deterioration from being one of India’s best newspapers to where it is now. This was the newspaper that exposed the western world and culture to us in those 70’s and 80’s, while still giving a great coverage of the Indian news. Now days its pretty much dedicated to giving the “news” on fashion, movies and the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. The less said about the supplement titled “Bangalore Times”, the better. In defense of the Times, I would say the Sunday edition is not all to bad and sometimes readable. It does have some good articles which have been pretty much a regular feature since the 80’s.

Then comes the Hindu, with a great coverage of politics and sports. But sometimes a little too conservative and withholds some important information. The alleged use of the word alleged atleast a hundred times in every article can be quite irritating at times. But, the sports coverage is probably the best in India, I must admit. Deccan Herald seems to be improving and is trying its level best strike some balance between the Times and Hindu. But only continues to be a local paper and does not have reach outside Bangalore. Indian Express is not worth mentioning at all. It has transformed itself from a bad newspaper to not being a newspaper at all. I expect to receive a few comments on this blog. Everyone is definitely bound to have comments on this issue. Seriously makes me wonder, what paper to read.

On a different note, had a great hiking trip on the Palomarin trail and the pelican beach along the Pacific Ocean. Great view with the ocean on one side and mountains and forests on the other side. Some snakes on the way, some poison oaks and some muddy parts added the excitement to the trek. The day ended with another trip to Saravana Bhavan, where there was another big queue. For some inexplicable reason, we managed to get a table in just 2 mins. A sumptuous meal consisting on Idlis, dosas and pongal followed. Returned home a contented man.

The “under” covered wanderer

2005-04-24T23:45:00.000+05:30

I love unplanned trips and treks. They add that much more excitement and thrill to this whole travelling thing. There was one such trip to Lake Tahoe and Reno. The trip was amazing but I also realised the pitfalls of unplanned trips. Always check the weather of the place you are heading to. Tahoe being only 2 hours away from here, where the temperature was about 20 degrees ; I ventured to Tahoe in Bermudas and a cotton T-shirt only to be greeted by lots of snow, skiing enthusiasts and kids on their tobbogans (reminds me of Calvin). Venturing out in this weather underclothed leads to what is known as a “----“ freeze situation , a term probably the gang is familiar with or can guess. This term was coined by Juanma (A Spanish friend) and myself one cold Swedish evening when we ventured outside “under”covered so to speak. Then I was unleashed on the American freeways for the first time. Nice experience, drove above 100 kmph for the first time in my life.

Also went to Saravana Bhavan in San Jose. Was greeted by a huge queue. Looked like most of the Indians in the US had turned up there that night. I don’t ever remember standing in a queue at the Saravana Bhavan in Chennai. Well, the wait was worth it. The food was true Saravana Bhavan style. First real good meal in 3 weeks. Last week also visited a place called Samosa Garden. What a name to give for a restaurant. And the owner had tried his level best to give it an Indian look i.e. kinda like the roadside chaat stall look. The aloo tikki we ordered was distinctly pink in colour. I have absolutely no clue as to how one can actually obtain such a colour in your food. Suffices to say that there will be no more adventures in the Samosa garden.

That’s it, my dear friends. That’s all I have for this week. Time to cook some Puliyogare now.

In a small town far far away..

2005-04-19T08:54:00.000+05:30

Hmm..US has many time zones but I am perplexed about this zone called Mountain Time. It could have been given a different name. Does that mean the guy living on mountain is ahead in time than the guy living at the foothills?? I live on the 3rd floor. Maybe my time is 5 minutes faster than the guy on the first floor. The Mountain Time zone seems to give a literal meaning to the expression “Time flies”. I guess I have a lot of time these days to come up with crap like this.

Anyway past 2 weeks in this land called California have been very quiet compared to good ol’ Bangalore. My exploits continued with me getting hold of a crappy car called Kia Rio. A verbal duel with the Hertz guy ensued for a week before I got hold of a Chevy Classic. Cool car. Unfortunately, I need someone by my side to prevent me from turning/driving in the wrong direction. The weekend was real good. The traveller in me was unleashed. Went on a long drive along the Pacific Coast Highway with 2 colleagues. The beaches were awesome and at most of them we were the only lonely crusaders (I love using this expression whenever I can) on the beach. Then a drive to San Francisco followed. The Golden Gate looks great in the night and the Coit Tower gives a great view of the skyline and of course the infamous Alcatraz. Not to mention the crooked street on Lombard which is nearly a vertical street and shaped like a snake.

Sigh!! Anyway miss home and the people there. Would have been truly fun had they been here. The presence of the gang is sorely missed. Only one particular member of the gang in this part of the world but he is too busy mooing away on the other side of this country. Meanwhile, hoping that the Devil’s eye gets ok soon. Inder has made squash a sport nearly as dangerous as being a pillion rider when Rajneesh is driving a bike (If that should ever happen!!!). Chilli’s latest blog is on one of his favourite topics. He probably has unleashed a controversy already. The Actor aka Dhimant is as usual talking abstract stuff in his blogs.

The exploits of the intrepid hero in distant lands

2005-04-05T06:23:00.000+05:30

My first trip to the land of Uncle Sam and it’s already been very eventful. To begin with the journey itself, I literally had to travel halfway around the world with the exact path being Bangalore to Chennai to Singapore to Tokyo to Los Angeles to Sacramento to Folsom aka the destination. To say the least, this ordeal lasted about 48 hours.

First things first, when on a journey through the Far East inform your airline well in advance that you will eat only vegetarian food. Else you will get 2 choices, the international cuisine or the Japanese one. International cuisine will give you some sort of unknown fish and some sausages in the main course. Me being the adventurous one or the intrepid hero went in for the Japanese cuisine. This particular meal as I found out after tasting to be unfit for human consumption at best. The menu being Japanese rice (tasteless) with some chicken and other things in it (I don’t know what the other things were and I don’t want to know). Not to mention the raw prawns as a part of the salad. The fact that I did not eat for the rest of the journey goes without saying.

I had a 12 hour stop in LA for my connecting flight, so the fearless explorer decided to explore LA on his own on what was known as the BIG BLUE BUS which also takes one through some scary neighbourhoods especially at night. The first stop was at Santa Monica shopping district where I roamed in the malls and the various streets listening to some good music being played by the roadside. Here, I also became a photographer to 2 couples sitting outside a restaurant. I was told by these rather good looking women that it was my lucky day to be singled out of the crowd for taking their photograph. Then followed a long walk to the pier along the beach, where suddenly a girl just came out of nowhere, did some sort of a dance around me, gave a big villainous smile and left. Was a strange incident this one....people sure are weirdos. The beach was an amazing sight. Too bad I was alone; I was possibly the only lonely crusader on the beach, with my heavy laptop lugged on my back. It was getting dark and I returned back on the blue bus which had some rather shady and huge looking characters travelling in it. I was tired by the end of this trip. But what made my day was another Indian passenger sitting next to me in the plane. Upon landing in Sacramento and after a welcome to Sacramento announcement by the pilot, this dude asks the airhostess if the town was Sacramento. The airhostess did not understand the question as our friend could hardly speak English. Then he asks me in Punjabi if this was Sacramento. Then in Hindi….to which I just show him the welcome to Sacramento sign. That incident just made my day. I laughed like a crazy guy. Maybe 46 hrs of travel and waiting does this to a guy.

Still got to catch on my sleep. I am waking up at 3 am these days. So off to bed now. Will be back with more adventures next week.

The blog with no name

2005-03-21T09:37:00.000+05:30

Like chilly and Rajneesh have already said, coming up with a blog title is the hardest part of writing a blog. So this blog shall be a nameless one. I am also facing what is known as a blogger’s block i.e. let alone coming up with some meaningful stuff, I am unable to come up with even any crappy ideas to write. So, I am trying to evolve a new style of writing here. The blog will only be a set of unconnected statements. No central theme for the blog and adjacent statements may not necessarily make sense and/or may not be connected at all.

Why are there fans in elevators? And are people feeling so hot that they need to use the fans for their arduous long journey from the ground floor to the first or the second floors? As a follow up to my jogging blog, I have finally decided to abandon the park. I now prefer jogging on the main roads, it’s much safer and less painful. Last week, most of Bangalore had descended upon the park to “jog” making it nearly impossible for me to even walk in the park, let alone jog. The dogs in my area, seeing my pitiable condition have promised not to chase me when I am jogging on the main streets. As a follow up to the spellings blog, the Sugar Can Juese centre on Mysore Road for some reason has been renamed Sugar Juese (the sign is painted in bright yellow, so that it cant be missed even at night).Sridhar Swami is back from the mountains after his penance, he shall henceforth be called Sridharacharya since he is now an enlightened soul. Dhimant finally turned up for squash yesterday in bermudas, which prompted Inder to call him West-undies. I was also told yesterday by chilly that I was lucky to have missed the movie “Boogeyman” on Friday. The pain and mental agony caused by seeing Page3 is still afresh. Will be quite a while before I muster enough courage to see another hindi movie. Completed the book SeinLanguage. Awesome book, Seinfeld has the gift of observation and sarcasm, but only next to Jerome K. Jerome and Dave Barry. Finally, in a major achievement I cleaned the visor of my helmet. I was unable to see through that thing even in broad daylight. As I recall, it had been cleaned only once many years before.

And this is the end of a rather uninspiring blog. I hope to get some bright ideas soon.