Graybeard maven

He sits there stooped, so stooped that you wonder how he balances himself without falling off . His thick glasses hang precarioulsy over his nose, his eyebrows arched in a twitch, his matted beard, long and curly, his dust covered hair completely disheveled and his face, his face devoid of any vexation and completely absorbed in the task at hand. The walking stick sits still beside his bag like a sacred companion who helps him in his travails. His appearance, well its not something striking, like an old house destined to be demolished . He sports a shirt beneath a brown coat and brown matching pants, the tear and loose stitches indicate eons of rough use. he sits there in a solitary cloud, he doesnt look up to see the passing cars, he doesnt look up to see the hooting vehicles he doesnt look up to see the clear sky, he doesnt look up, he sits there stooped, the sidewalk his consecrated abode.

As we meandered through the traffic one early morning i spot him, i pass a passing glance and continue with the book i was reading. The next day i spot him again. The same posture, his one hand resting on his lap, his legs crossed, sitting sideways on the pavement inches from the moving vehicles. The following day i spot him again, but this time i take notice, held in his other hand is a newspaper, white crumpled and torn on the sides. He sits there hunched, his old baggy eyes fixed in concentration straining to read the newspaper, his wrinkled hands moving up and down the paper, his face contorted, the happenings of the world at his wrinkled fingertips. He must have been a freedom fighter, he must have been a goverment official, he must have been an noetic, he must have been somebody few decades ago, he must have been. I watch him everyday, not with sympathy but with admiration, i watch him but im just another face in the crowd peeping through the window, watching , and then moving on.

Voyeurism in the Virtual Vurld!

Ok if you still staring at that last word and wondering wht on holy earth it means, scratch your head no further, cos I couldn’t think of a word which starts with V! Gotcha there! Last week during our regular chai-meet I was humoured by this interesting conversation between my fellow othala members(thats our gang name, jobless, that’s wht it means).
“Dudeh, new rules on Orkut, you can’t view any random girls scrapbook or album unless you are on her friend list”, Othala exclaimed with that extra pinch of remorse.
“Abhe yaar then nobody will use Orkut ”, added Afzal.
“But isn’t Orkut a social netwroking site where you can get in touch with lost friends from school and college and stay connected with people you know”, I thought out loud. What a clumpsy thought!Duh! Obviously I was thinking wrong, cos all the people who come under the ‘Orkut addicts’ community use it for ulterior motives, profile hoping being the most common.
Orkut invaded my space back in college, and this networking site is presumed to be the brainwave of a strange guy who answers to the call of Orkut Buyukkkoten-somethign, what a highly laughabale and strange name I say. I reckon he started all this cos he was somebody who was extremely lonely, somebody who didn’t have friends all through his school and college days cos nobody could get his name right and took more than a couple of seconds tryin to get the pronounciation. This is what I presume would have happened.

*A game of hide and seek in the 60’s*
Kid A :: “..98,99,100, All ready im opening my eyes”
Orkut (thinking to himself) :: “If I jump from the corner of the bush and make ash for the dabba point, im sure to beat him”


With this brave thought he dashes to the pole or dabba spot, the denner(that’s wht the main guy was called) sees Orkut from the corner of his eye and runs in from the other direction,all the while pullin out his hair tryin to recollect his name.


Orkut (exclaiming with great joy):: “Dabba dabba dabba, you loose”
Kid A :: “Die fiend, die, I reached the spot before u did, but your name didn’t roll out of my tongue that’s why I didn’t hit dabba”
Orkut (oblivious of everything):: “Dabba dabba dabba”
Kid A :: “ &%^(*$, screw you, im going home”

Having being tortured by his friends since early childhood, Orkut lived a rather sad and solitary life. To win back his lost childhood and all the joys of hanging around with friends he decides to start a networking site. Jobless Brazilians and Indians lend support in this nobel cause and start scraping each other in the name of “friendship” and the rest as they say is a mystery, sorry history! When I started ‘orkuting’, it was more like a competiton. “That bitch has two friends and 5 scraps more than me, dammit, I better improve my stance here” was my only recurring thought, so I started hunting down lost friends like the end of the world was drawing close and scraping “Hi” to anybody and everybody who was online even if I had scraped them 10 “Hey” the past 3 min! Soon it got addictive, and by addictive I mean tallying scraps and friend requests every nanosecond! There is a downside to this fun way of holding on to friendship, your life is a open book. People prying through scraps and the albums can get a good amount of information about the person in question. Ok I admit even I have done that nosey thing! If the person is the straight-from-the-shoulder types you even have information of his/her eye or hair color and also relationship status, so if you honest and reveal that you are single, you’ll find a filthy lot of people with their sickeningly derogatory english asking you for “fraindship and to get in touch with the baasht friand available”. Shucks! This popularity led to the mushrooming of lot other networking sites like Facebook, where you can give a ‘hug’ to any stranger and your friends accquitances will automatically become your friends. This type of networking is indeed a good way to stay in touch with people ‘you know’ from different corners of the world and also a fun way to stay in touch with people you really don’t care a rats fart, like that guy in school who got away with ass licking all the teachers.

What kicked me off into writing this stuff is when I read an article in the paper which said that on Facebook any online purchases you do on the net will be intimated to your friends, so if you swipe that credit card and decide to duck into a bar of chocolates that information will be relayed to all your friends on the face of this earth. Christ Jesus, some random guy telling me im fat enough and those calories in the choc would just add onto my weight would be the last thing I would want to hear! Till the epidemic lasts revel in it but don't start looking at people as virtual objects, a human touch will do you more good then a virtual hug!

Tiny feats

Winter, wine, wool, what a way to usher in this festive season, and my typing that above link you made it doubly fun cos staring back at you is my 50th blog from the dork-talk blog factory. !Paradiddles! Ok the applauses are ringing in my ears, so you can all sit down now. Whats strange about those clapping is that, its coming from all corners of the world, now when I say “all corners” I really mean it, unless the sitemter is lying throught its teeth, a vitual liebite of sorts! So all you Scandinavian guys, I know it’s the dead of winter in your countries and half of your time is spent shut-in, but you could do better than typing random things on google like “retarded cherry yummy yummy”! Jesus christ, blondes are really dumb I say!

From here on ill be dwelling on the past, the howz and whyz of my blogging story. Way back in March when the heat was really taking its toll on us, and venturing out in the afternoons was like sacrilege(I didn’t want to increase the revenues of fairness creams!) I decided to write stuff, and by stuff I mean random shit which require minimal levels of intelligence to comprehend. The start didn’t start of with a bang as expected, I had to resort to bribes, coaxing people with bitti stuff etc to get them to read my blogs. Bravo, bravo, they all cried out, those goons were after more bitti stuff, so I gathered. Some of my other friends, the critics that they are, called by blogs self-indulgent gibberish, ahem! I pardoned them for those sweet words cos I didn’t want to loose friends and become a troglodyte. But inspite of all the brickbats and drumrolls, blogging opened up a whole new world, a world I have slowly started taking comfort in, a world were boredom is non-existant and forty winks is something I have completely eliminated from my weekend afteroon agenda.

Men and the Melanin Mess

The sun is beating down hard, and across the paddy fields a group of guys are soaked up in a game of snake&ladder, the huge mango tree along the dirt track provides them with that much needed respite from the late evening sun. I walk upto those 13-14 year old fellas and ask why they aern’t playin running and catching or hide and seek games that I used to indulge in when I was around their age. A young lad looks up from the board, points up and says “look at how hot it is, we are scared we would get tanned and chechi, the mallu sun-burned look is out!”. Now now now, I stood their shocked, when did the word ‘melanin’ take the fun out of young guys. That shock is what woke me up from my sleep, and the dream guys, was fostered by the recent SRK ad, where our dude with arithmetically correct ab's promotes a fairness cream sayin "gora banne kha instant blah blah (fuck knows what)". Well i would have loved to know what he said in that ad but i couldn't resist pressing that remote button.

On a recent visit to H&G with friends this cosmetic enlightment hit me on my face. As I was walking between the racks of soaps and creams and shampoos, a different variety of creams stopped me on my track, staring from the rack were a dozen or so pancy loooking men, with clear exfoliated face, shaped eyebrows and white bleached skin, and above their faces in white bold letters were written the words “Fairness Cream for men”. Going by the number of skin whitening creams on display and the sheer number of companies making these products I looked like indian men were considering this cosmetic wonder as the next best thing after Viagra! Whatever happened to the tall-dark-handsome look that sent girls crooning on their knees, i guess the likes of Dhoni and small B sure need to go someplace else.

I still remember my teenage years when we would sit oogling at the jungle wonder,Tarzan, his strong calloused hands, nice even sun-tan, unruly chest hair and unkempt hair could now be considered passe, whats in is the manicured-pedicured-exfoliated metro sexual male. Hah! I think this whole cosmetic enlightment among indian men started with our very own SRK bathing in a tub full of milk, with rose petals strewn in to create the atmosphere and clearly glowin in this new found skin, yeah yeah its the Lux Ad. This triggerd another series of Ad’s where men clearly conscious of their melanin infused skin goes snooping into his mothers or sisters closet to steal creams. Probably men were always conscious of their looks and these ad's are just fuelling that innate desire, the no of creams in the market should be an acting proof. Whatever it is the fairness cream companies are not complaining, for them things wouldn't have looked errr...fairer !

Cradle to the grave, a short journey indeed...

It not true what they say about the past-you can bury it, the past can leave a scar, deep enough to be visible through all your years. The past is what she’s been trying to grapple since that fateful day.
“I’ll see you all in the evening, after my exams, bye ”, Sandra heard her sister scream out these words before zipping off on her bike. “Awrite, good luck, bye” , she called out but her voice was muffled by the roaring engine. That was the last she saw her. The events that unfolded later during the days seemed to her as irrational and surreal as a dream, her sister wrapped in white, her body motionless and farely unscathed, her face a picture of placidity, the funeral pyre beside her and her shell-shocked family all around…
Our life hangs precariously, one moment you live a blissful existence, and the next moment you at the gates of the heavenly abodes. ‘Live every moment’, this is one of the most cliched phrases you get to hear but what I witnessed last weekend made me realise that you should indeed live every moment cos you never know if you’ll be around long enough to smell the evening bloom. I’ll not be able to fathom her grief, the condolences will not help in filling that deep void her sister left behind and life for her will not be the same, but these are the things that forms the crux of our miniscule existence. When I read about people who meet an untimely end I think to myself, it always happens to somebody else but we are also a ‘somebody’ to someone else. Drive carefully, death is lurking is every turn and every move you make.

Meliorating spectator fervour

My friends claim it to be the most dramatic climaxes to the Formula One season. The Brazilian grand Prix saw Kimi snatch away the championship from favourite Hamilton who eroded right from the start. I logged onto the g-talk today morning and saw a plethora of status msgs like “Go KIMI”, ”Kimi yeah, Dig it alonso”, ”Kult Kimi Konquers yet again” and pure simple plain ones like “Kimi!!” (some ppl even wrote that in a mix of upper n lower case). Its pretty obvious that a lotta of my friends follow F1, and to get along with them you have to learn how to talk F1. To me, these phrases may not have a lotta meat on them but an average 20 year something guy can use them to keep a conversation going for hours.Phew! So I was hooked last night watching the Brazilian Grand Prix trying to figure out the Driver Standing, Consturctor Standing, funda behind Compound tyres blah blah for the pure sweet simple reason;I could activley participate in the F1 discussions! So much for being ‘cool’ I say. As I saw the sleak, shiny, colorful machines go round and round with that annoying mosquito-buzz like sound I thought, they can turn this mundane boring sport into a truly exciting, dangerous and audience-grabbing one by adding some view-excitement. We could achieve this by diggin up deep pits(slightly bigger than the cars) at unmarked locations, so everytime the driver takes a turn he would have to swerve his machine to avoid fallin into the pit. This would result in a lot more collisions and ‘pit-falls’! woo! We could extend this concept by spilling some super slippery oil or grease, also at unmarked locations which would send the cars flying in different direction. Yeah baby now we talking Sports! They sure to rake in millions! Why do we have to stop this view-excitement concept to F1 alone, we could extend this to other sports also. Read on..
Golf
Yawnn! Few sports are as dull as professional golf.Any imbecile in his right state of mind wouldn’t spend precious time watching this but when a beehive is placed right above the flight of the ball, it demands a more flawless swing on the part of the golfer and boy! lets not even get to the exhilaration part of it. We could make it even more challenging by placin a deadly hornets nest right beside the hole, this simple handicap will attract even greater violence and tragedy loving fans will sure be screaming for more.

Sking
Come winter olympics and all you get to see is sking, sking and more sking. Currently all that the professional skiers do is lazily wind down the hill bending and turning and bumping. Simply chaining hungry lions and tigers and grizzly bears to each flag will demand more precision and greater challenge from the sportsmen. Woohoo!

Volleyball
A game that mainly consists of jumping, smashing and hitting some really fast balls that any sensible person cannot return back makes volleyball a big “So what?”, but placing some really sharp barbed wires above the net will turn a simple foul into something really foul. Sponsors bank accounts will turn green as the sand soaks in all that red!

Shooting
Concentration, silence and no movement, a game like this can put you to sleep inadvertently, but don’t loose heart brother we could spice it up with some bikini-clad babes doing the honour of holding the dart boards. We could also make the boards reboundable so if the arrow doesn’t pierce through the eye it would revert back towards the shooter. Viewers will sure pony up big bucks to watch it!

Basketball
Ok lets not touch this game cos its excting enough. What with all the rebounds, cheerleaders, 7foot tall dunkers and cuttie-pie Tony!

Distanced from reality

“… its not only the war that’s disturbing, our freedom is curbed in that flea ridden place”, my uncle retorted when I asked him how his stay in Bangladesh had been. He had a far away look in his eyes when he thought back on his 6yrs tenure there. The stories he told shook me up, the two leading candidates contesting the election have criminal records to boast, and they are both ladies, the army has taken over from the government, the whole country is engulfed in a political turmoil, with fourtneen different heads of government and alteast four military coups. Woo! I sat spelbound listening to all this, the army has banned all private TV stations and the national media is under censorship, shucks!so much for freedom. A couple of days back Bharghav had written this blog, which gave us an insight into the terrible times we live in. India is sure trampling on troubled waters with nobody to steer us clear of all the hullabaloo happening around. For starters we have the whole nation fighting over the existence or non-existence of a blessed bridge, then we have the media and ahmm junta fighting over whether jail is the place to be for a guy who gave the world the term gandhigiri. Sheesh, our nation is a story of how far from reality we have truly come. We need to open our eyes wider, open it wider to take in the situation happening around us. So as a nation are we really screwed up? I don’t think so.

Nestled between the two mighty oceans we have a country which was once called ‘pearl of the indian ocean’, the pearl is tarnished beyond repair. After years of peace, Sri Lanka has again plunged into a conflict between the government and the Tamil tigers popularly known as the LTTE. Peace remains plagued in this war torn country which has witnessed ceasefire followed by killing without impunity and an economy which is still coming to terms with the upheaval.

Thousand of inocent monks in their orange robes were mercilessly shot to death. I watched with sympathy the horrors unraveling on the streets on Burma these last few weeks. When Aung Kyi (she is so breathtakingly beautiful!) won the last election there was much joy, but it was short lived cos the military took over entirely- the govt has been invisible since then. Half the population is in some kinda forced labour and reports say AIDS is ravishing the country ferociously. Denying human rights, killing, and using rape as a war against minorities is wht Burma/Myanmar fights everyday thanks to the military regime.

This place boasts of eight of the world’s ten highest peaks but at the apex of it all is a constitutional monarchy that is very close to becoming a Maoist state. The aristocratic king has lost all his power as head of state and army thanks to Maoist rebels and new political leaders who want to completely overthrow the monarchy.If the Maoist seize power then the kiling, kidnapping, torturnin and bombing happening now will look pale in comparison.God forbid something like this happens !

China is one of the worlds oldest civilization but its economic progress the last couple of years is almost scary! This rapid urbanization has resulted in over 50million farmers(yeah u read the figures right,no wonder they are the most populous in the world!) loosing their farmlands. We might be sharing their problems of population and corruption but here we atleast have the freedom of gathering up a group of like minded ppl and walking down the streets hurling abuses at the government !

This country is a piece of cake. Musharaff said “lets have a general election and elect our leader”, sure enough an election was held and a general was elected! Military dictatorship statred 10 yrs back, parlimant was disbanded, constitution was suspended and the country plunged into a monetary debt from which it has still not recovered. An ex-prime minister who was ousted in a coup detat and a woman ex-prime minister who is contesting the election have both been in exile. What pakistan needs is an end of the military regime for it to gain ground from the bombing and killings that has plagued it for over a decade.

We are not so screwed afterall. Am I happy? Oh hell yes!

lets put this on hold

I have been wanting to blog something for the past three weeks, futile attempts at finding a interesting topic and laziness coupled with procrastination resulted in my blog gathering heavy cobwebs. Last week i was in conversation with a friend who happens to be real sloth like me. He said "Ann, even procrastinators are useful citizens who can be effective, admired and appreciated", passing this as a otiose dialogue i continued sipping my coffee. That conversation introduced me to the concept of Structured Procrastination, its pretty neat. I went to google and typed in the topic and blessed lord i was shocked to see 740,000 hits. Lots of sloths in this world i must say. If you are another corpse who struggles with duties , have hope brother, for in this fast paced world there is space for you and me !

If u have put on hold the simple task of tying Structured Procrastination on google, heck here it is ! Maja Madu.

a mistake around the corner

India are the world champions, felicitous i must say. The men in blue(this phrase has become very cliched!) are finally exonerated from the debacle against Bangladesh that happened in the caribbean islands not so long ago. The most famous email fwd floating around these days is the "Misbah's biggest mistake" one, and by floating around i mean close to 23 fwd in your inbox with the same title. Adam is said to have comitted the biggest mistake recordable,so wht's Misbah's mistake anyway? "Misbah thought he was sending the ball where there was no one, wht he didnt know was that there is a mallu in every corner of the world". Snneer!
Now ignorant faggots i have a doubt, pardon my ignorance, i thought a cricket field was Oval Shaped so how could the mallu get to the corner.! Ha ha!
But a quick google and you can see hordes of mallu's right from Washington to Wadakancherri , giving their tips on how to make good vepalla-katti to how to make addapratham with soyabean milk. I shouldn't be suprised if that Nair chai-kada is functional on moon!

c'est la vie !

I’m one year experienceed in the IT industry, doggonut , something to gloat about I must say! “Experience”, the much hyped term these days seem very abominable to me, partly cos im here for the lack of a better idea. A couple of days back ,one ennui filled afternoon ,I was immeresed in a g-conversation with a dude from college, the talk invariably turned into our hoo-hum vocation, with nothing of substance to talk, my teeny-weeny creative gland or rather the dork-shit-is-wht-i-blog gland started working overtime and that arbit chatter resulted in the character Slothy Moo. Hmm , as i write this i see Stalin's ghost looking up from above and sneering.

SlothyMoo(S&M) is a stupendous cow, like “stupendous man”. Any resemblance to Sam the anthropomorphic Dog and Max the hyperkinetic rabbity thing of Sam&Max or SadoMasochism is , well coincidental(so I believe). S&M spend four years in the farmlands of Basavangudi under the watchful eyes of a big black bull. The grass there was green and resplendent and the fellow cows around S&M were like her, grandualar freaks. All she did there was chew on some arbit shit and once every month spit the cud, in a nutshell she could say ‘life was bliss’. There were other farmlands around her which were occupied by other denizens of the green. This blissful life was shattered on one eventful day. What happened changed the course of her life forever.
There came a day when a lotta pigs descended on the grasslands, the pigs as you all know are highly intelligent creatures, with all the worlds knowledge inside their small smart-ass brain. They came in hordes from different parts of the city with lucrative-grazing offers. The braggart pigs said that after they finish their tenure in the basavangudi farmlands they would be taken to groovy farms enclosed in glass, with an AC to boast and what more they would be given extra green-notes to chew on at the end of every month. When the cows heard this they started pransing around in gay abandon but there was a glitch, they had to undergo a test. “Oh boy! What are they going to judge us on, what if we don’t pass the test!” , they quipped to one another, but the test was pretty simple, they had to cud out all the grass they chewed in the past three years. “Ahhh that’s pretty simple, no big deal” said some of the cows with thick inch glasses. So with great emanating force they puked out all the slime which was well appreciated by some of the pigs .The farmlands also sported some nice,opulent, glamorous chicks who gave new meaning to the term “bird-brain”, they didn’t care much about the pigs and their lucrative grazing offers, they walked around nonchalantly without a care in the world. Some cows decided to cross the oceans, for they blindly believed in the saying “grass is greener across the oceans”.
S&M was impressed by one such grassland and their tempting punchline “we are different”! They came singing this song :

All ya cows grazing in the farmlands,
Join us and u will not despair
The grass we offer is toothsome and not bland,
You will live a action-filled,joy-ful and truly imaginative life ,free of all dire.

Even though Sloth was her midlle name ,she did manage to impress the pigs with all her slime and thus she began her new life. The first few weeks were great fun, the cows who joined in with her were given sugar cubes to chew on. The farmlands were beautiful, wht with all the fountains and shrubs and manicured lawns and coffee beans to smell and see, but to get there the cows had to cross a mighty bridge. Little did SlothyMoo and the other cows know that all the sugar coasted grass they were fed initially would come back to bite them. Slowly the pigs turned into the king and tyrant, they started imposing absurd rules. It seemed like the pigs who ruled the grasslands were going 360, it was a perfect instance of democractic-to-communist rule.Sigh! The once, i-can-chew-when-i-wish farmland turned into a you-have-to-chew-for-9hrs one and what more they even monitored the cows and prepared an attendence bark.The cows started voicing their chafe ,but they were ignorant to the fact that a lot more was in store. SlothyMoo was in despair, “This is not coming out the way they promised!”, she cried to her fellow cows but inspite of all that they hung on and ‘that’s the way the cookie crumbles’.

P.S :( The stroy ends abruptly. The continuation is being worked on, all characters are ficitional and any resemblance to anybody living or dead is purely coincidental.)

Slacker or Striver !

If you are reading this sitting on a plush chair in an AC room and the time on ur watch is anywhere between 9AM-6PM , then you are part of the 50million odd people (yeah that figure was got from a survery) who slack away precious time in the corporate world. Today i got this funny forward "How to look busy" and boy i was laughin my head out( ahem! i had to hold back that chuckle lest ppl around me think im dangerously insane), and you guys are thinkin right, even i'm a humble comtributor to that 50million no.
Being busy at work and looking like it are two different sides of a coin, and some of the tricks of the trade to look busy are (cliches consumeth the me!) :

-->Never walk without a document in hand, those with nothing in their hands look like they going to the cafeteria.
-->Messy Desk,build huge piles of documents around your desk, only top management can get away with messy desk.
-->Look impatient and annoyed, this gives an impression that you are unde stress.
-->Send important mails at unearthly hours (i.e 2AM or 7:24AM) and public holidays.
-->Sigh ! and make sure there are lotta ppl sround you while you are doign that.
-->Apart from books put lotta thick computer manuals all around you.
-->Read a lot of computer magazies and memorise the all important jargons and use it in daily conversation.

Well apart from acting busy there is another thing in the corporate world i have to battle ,Team Meeting! Phew the sound of it makes my skin crawl. It might be useful to compare the corporate meetings of today to a Basketball game(im a great fan,Tony i loveth thee) , in which people participating are a "team" attempting to "play" a quarter in which each player "blocks" the "defenders" from scoring, which will result in everybody in the team exchanging "high-fives" and the leaders gettin a "pat-on-the-butt" which inturn results in the "managers of the team" walking happily to the bank. Hmmm, i think we can't really compare it to a basketball game but you can sure comapre it to a funeral gathering, where everybody are wearing uncomfortable clothing, with the i'd-rather-be-someplace-else look on their faces. The idea which ought to be buried is never really buried, they stagger up the coffins to slap us and eat our brains every other week.
Team meetings are held for the same reason Hanukkah is observed, for tradition and most of the meetings are held on a Monday cos , its a Monday no other special reasons! Most of my Team meetings invole a white book and a colorful pen(courtsey our company stationary) and i start the ordeal by writing down the date and underling it twice, rest of the twenty odd minutes is spent looking at the person talkin ,who most probably is your PM with enraptured interest like he is revealing the secrets of the great black universe , i also take the trouble of drawing doodles once in a while just to show that i do understand the secrets of the great black universe.
Things can get dicey if your PM looks at you and says "we need your INPUTS for blah blah blah", now this word INPUT should be enough to bolt you back to position. This is serious cos what he really means is, if i manage to fuck up then you are to be blamed. A sensible thing would be to escape by setting your dupatta on fire or picking up ur cell and declaring "bin-laden is at the other end". If none of it works you could start talking in Hebrew or Latin.

Slacking off, as i see it is not really difficult, what with all the team-meetings, coffee breaks, newspaprer breaks, "lets-go-fill-our-bottles" break and "i-just-need-a-break" break.
The next time you hear that "no, i'm busy" phrase you should be smart enough to understand that the scum is actually sitting and blogging!

screech, shiver, silent prayer !

Early morning breeze, moisture laden clouds, sun playin peekaboo, vehicles ripped off the roads.
Resplendent!
Wind ruffling on top, mind free of all thoughts, music to fill the soul.
Trance!
A wrong turn, missed signal, flashing headlights, shocked eyes, absolute darkness.
Screech!
Battered body, beaten and dented up vehicle, blood, immobile hand but farely unscathed.
Shiver!
Voices all around, curses, water coming down in sprinkles, sound of soft breathing.
Prayer!

And the thing that makes me go (y)hmm..

"wake upp..! we need to get there before the others do",sittin on my bed half asleep i could sense the urgency in her voice! I was to perform a duty thats sort of a cult for my mom and a dozen or so mallu aunty's she's accquinted with. Flies swarming all around the place, cries of sweat soaked proles trying to get the attention of buyers, and a nauseating smell, welcome to the Fish Markets of Bangalore. Being from the coastal region we strive hard to keep the Atlantic fish under check, lest they start spilling out into the fields and highways. Last week when i went with my mom for our weekly fish-purchase obligation , i was humoured by this conversation between Meen Chetan (literally translated as Fish Brother) and my mom.

Mom (eyening the prawns) :: Cheta are these prawns fresh ?
Meen Chetan :: They are first class prawns chechi.
Mom :: Are these mathhi (Sardines) fresh ??
Meen Chetan (harassed look on his face) :: All these are fresh, any fresher they would answer your questions themselves .!!

Solemn silence!

hasta luego, intimos amigos! *

"Hell-heloo".. the voice came cracking over the telephone line, it was barely audible but when i did fathom the person at the other end,Oh! boy i was overjoyed. It's been close to a month since i last saw her walk through that aisle with the tickets in her hands, walking away from me was a friend, confident and my punching bag. Endless mails and chat sessions are the only means to stay in touch but its doesn't quiet amount to the rabbiting on over the phone or in coffee shops we used to indulge in earlier. As i look back on all that has happened, growing up, growing together, how we laughed and bitched, as i look back on all those things i realise how golden those days were. The past is buried forever and the future, well its pretty bleak my end but its the memories that binds these two different world together. Pretty philosophical huh? A little secret, u don't have to be a O.V.Vijayan to sound philosophical you just need to dwell on territories that are sensitive !

Friends are discovered, friends are lost, pretty much a vicious circle , and its painful when u sit and think of life 10-20 yrs from now. How many would remain? How many you would recognize , when you bump into them on the road? Will the new ones replace the old ones? Oh boy im gettin into my once-in-a-while-sentimental moods, but it does make u think about how fragile bonds are. Few months from now my friends from office who keep me company during lunch and chai breaks will become another smiling face on yahoo messanger. I faced this after i stepped outta school and i face it now, 8 months after bidding adieu to college life. We all part with the promise of "keeping in touch" but end up cuddling in our own "busy" cocoon which drifts the frail bonds to intangible distances.
Why these incoherent thoughts now? Well a lotta ppl i know are crossing the oceans, higher studies being the perpetrator and as they leave with the promise of keeping in touch from thousands of miles away, deep down i know a seperation for 2+ years will create a long bridge that cannot be trodden easily. And another factor is marriage, as jagan asked one day "Ann you think we can talk and bitch like the way we do now after u girls get married ?" , at that time it sounded like just another jagan-statement but now it doesn't , when i hear savi's stories of how shy and handsome some of the prospective grooms she's seen are.
Change as they say is constant , its memories we need to cling onto.


*untill later,chadi-budi friends

Oh darn!

After a brief malady of blogstipation im back and what better way to start then by poking fun at people of my breed, oh i soo soo darn love this.! Even if i was half as intelligent as Mr.Sherlock Homes i would not be able to comprehend whats goes on inside a i'm-a-communist-come-kiss-my-ass walking talking mallu.

I was on my way to my second cousin's place which is a small town called Vellangazhlure, i knew how her house looked but the route from the bus stop to the house was a bit blurred. It was my maiden solo bus trip across towns and tension was running high, my cousins had warned me about butt pinching male travellers and you-are-alive-cos-of-the-loud-horns type bus drivers but nevertheless i decided to make that trip. I got off the bus and looked around, thoroughly confused i approached an old man with a long sticked umbrella near the bus stop.

Confused Traveller :: Hi i need to get to Thomana Chittilapilly Paul mashe's(teacher) house, this is the address.Can you tell me which way i should go.
Beaming old man :: Oh its just a couple of minutes walk from here. How is his nieces's sister-in-law's mother, heard she sprained her leg while climbing up the stairs.

(I was dumbstruck, i didn't even know how her sister-in-law looked, leave alone her mother. Regaining my composure i reassure him that she is doing ok, a fib.)
Confused Traveller :: Oh she doing fine. How do you know her.?
Beaming old man :: Nice to hear that,God bless her! she is actually my neighbours cousin. Your uncles kids are still in the Gulf is it ?

(I'm gasping for breath, how the hell does he know so much about my family when i didn't even know of his existence till now. I'm almost sure that he is a spy sent out by the CIA who have mistaken me for a life threatening terrorist. Ghastly images of police cars with sirens shoving a handcuffed me flash b4 my eyes, Haneef incident is still fresh u see.!)
Confused Traveller :: Ye-ye-yess still there in Kuwait.
Beaming old man :: Oh my bus has come, btw i forgot to tell you the route. Go straight, take a left near Palliparambale Johnny's house and then take a right near my brother's house. The third building from the left is the one. And also convey my regards to your uncle in Delhi.

I stood there gaping for what seemed like eternity. Not knowing who his brother is nor who Palliparambale Johnny is, i used my smart ass brain to phone my cousin who picked me up from the bus stop. Phew! It was a lesson learned, if you are lost in Kerala don't even bother asking for directions, zimmbly rely on your instincts.

Come wedding season and you are bound to meet 646 of your imediate family members in shinning, shimmering gold and gold and more gold! Apart from the ostentatious display of food, gold and sari's there is another thing that makes me wanna run for those blessed kalashnikov's, mallu aunty's! They come in hordes to check out the teeny-weeny Alapatt Jeweller's bracelet dangling from your wrist, the same one that your grandmom cajoled you into wearing cos there would be ppl around who come solely to check out gold and discuss how many pavans each one is. Now the problem doesn't stop there, if you are a graduate(engineering preferred) and 22+ then you are bound to meet Jibymon's , Shibu's and other my-son-is-an-engineer mom's who proudly declare that their son is a computer engg in Texas earning $xxx per month and with a car and a house. A typical conversation would go thus..
Menacing Mallu :: Moleeh, are you Theketala Pinto's aunt's grandchild?
Me :: Ahh,hmm, i think so.
Menacing Mallu (cheekily checking out my shoes) :: Oh i'm his sister's cousin's wife.
Me :: Oh i see. Nice to meet you.
Menacing Mallu :: How much do you earn per month?
Me (regaining ground) :: Ahh enough to survive.
Menacing Mallu :: My sister's son finished his kampyuter engg from XYZ college and earns $xxxx per month.
Me (loathing look) :: Oh that's nice.
Menacing Mallu :: My brother's son is in Australia ,he own's a car and a house and earns so much that..
Me :: Ahh yes yes aunty coming, sorry gotta go now.
So thus i move from one aunty to another listening to how much each ones kith and kin earns in different currencies. I must admit i've succumbed to temptation of marrying one of these global citizens !
Eccentric, inquisitive, barbaric and overly gabby, we mallus are strange creatures indeed. I realised that mallu's innate talent of being garrulous can be annoying and at the same time entertaining, you just have to be in the right state of mind to appreciate it.

The day the colours died..

If you are part of that ready-to-burst-at-its-seams population who regularly vist my blog then you must ve noticed the new template. A lot of my avid readers (i love to brag.!) have complained about it, they say its very difficult and yucky to read things in colour. To be honest i really liked writing things in red, green, yellow and blue but due to the overwhelming grievances of my fellow readers i have decided to stick with the serious, journalisitc , seemingly intelligent (i told you i love to brag) black and white , and if i ve to tell the truth im not liking it one bit. What is keeping me from sticking with the colours, you might ask? Well actually im scared the sitemeter which runs at a give-me-a-heavy-push-and-ill-move-an-inch pace will stop moving alltogether if i don't listen to my readers!

But wait i do have a few things to tell..
If you are a bird of passage ,who chanced upon my blog while typing some random topics on google like ..
"collie apple of my eye"
"the all seeing eye code"
"fair skinned pashtun"
"life at mysore"
"pummy in ananda"
"how to cure mallu's hand"
then all i can say is GO GET A LIFE.!
Oh boy those were some killer search words, and guys i ain't joking, go ahead and type these on google and you will find the link to my blog.! Phew! It's really crazy the ways on man.

If you are the other part of the crowd who secretly visit my blog and don't leave a comment , then all i can say is i know all about your tactics *wicked ,loathy grin*. I know how long you stay viewing the page, which part of the world you from and what time you checked my blog. Ha ha ha.! so its about time you left a comment somewhere , anywhere, i don't mind if you write it in Latin or Hebrew or Spanish( btw i know that language eh.!!) but please leave a comment, even if its nothing relevent to what i ve written its awrite.! Ok i wasn't pleading , if you dnt want to leave your mark it ain't a problem , just keep that sitemeter ticking for me awrite!

So coming back to the topic, i will be sticking to black and white henceforth(kulla/koti, do i see you guys grinning!!) , and if you are some random guy who stumbled upon this blog and have no clue what on holy earth im blabbing all i have to say is , it was nice of you to drop by!

Friends Forever

Another Friendship Day has come and gone, lot of roses were bought, lot of cards were written and forgotten friends were remembered. While i was checking my orkut profile i happened to take note of my friends count, it reads 301, a bombastic number i must say. It's deeply gratifying to know that i'm acquainted with so many friends around the world , friends with whom i played choorchand n lagori in school, friends who got drunk with me in college, friends who hammer the keyboard like me at our workplace and people i met while i roamed this earth for 20 plus years. But deep down i know , there would be very few left with whom i would discuss my blood pressure level and arthirits and brawling grandkids.
Its weird how u go from being strangers to being friendz to being more than friendz to being practically strangers again,and it all happens so fast(as told by shrihari)....


i don't quiet remember my initial baby days,
i lived a carefree life without any worries n calamities coming my way
but as i grew i realised the need for friends,
to discuss cartoons and paintings and play hop-scotch and a game of punts.
school life was a breeze, which looking back whizzed past in the blink of an eye
but the friends i made are the ones i still keep in touch and with whom i laugh and cry.
then came college and all the pressures of studies and getting into the software industry,
here i made friends with whom i haggled on topics like boyfriends, movies and themes that were sultry.
some people say school n college are the golden days that we cannot win back,
i completely agree when i think of all the things this current life of mine lacks
but i must add work is not all that bad cos of the friends i have here,
made exciting by foodcourt lunches, mafia games and BDA chaat trips that we regularly adhere

Oh boy soo many wonderful moments, so many wonderful memories,
all this because of the wonderful friends who made it all worth living !

Painful reminiscence.

It's a story that's buried deep. I heard it eons ago when i was a little kid, the incident is too unwieldy to handle and the protagonist is nestling in the abodes of a place high above. What happened on that fateful day i do not know. What were the thoughts flying through my dads mind , i do not know. Did he even in his faintest of sense think his friend breathed his last in that lacerated car sittin beside him , i do not know. Why don't i know every minute detail of this incident that changed the life of a family friend and shook the earth beneath my mom's feet? It's a topic that i have never broached, partly cos i have been told not to dwell on the past. But i would like to know what happened after the accident. Sitting in the northern part of the dark continent, a land full of unacquainted faces, nobody around for comfort and solace, close friends and family a good two oceans away, a wounded body and a dead soul, wailing girls, widowed friend, ill-equipped hospitals, natives talking a strange dialect, these things must have been irrepressible for a young married woman. How did she handle it ? Didn't she even once succumb to all the turmoil around her, i wish to ask all this to my mom but as she says, its better not to dwell on the past !
It was the phone call last rainy saturday that resurrected the story, but again the details were not anything more than what i've heard before. It's been 25 years since the accident but i saw my mom's eyes swell up right after she heard who was at the other end of the phone line. Uncle's daughter is gettin married, it is indeed a joyous occasion for them and my parents, who helped them bury the past and build up their life one piece at a time.

What scares me is , i wouldn't have been alive if the impact was more severe. I would have been a speck in the twinkling sky, unknown of the perils and felicity back down, oblivious of the wonderful family and friends . Such is the enigma of life.

Mole your way into geezerhood

Ever wondered wht it would be like to eat all those high cholesterol artery clogging food three times a day, or wht it would feel like to drive on an open road at 300kmph , or jump off a cliff into the blue vastness of the pacific ?? Ahhh, now don't sit and think of some super duper philosophical answers, plain simple you would DIE, not of some over-the-top accomplishment but of stupidity !! But have you ever wondered what it would feel like (i swear this is the last "ever wonder" question ill be asking!) to live well into your hundreds so that you could do all the above and not care about death and its inevitability, live to see the four seasons over and over again , see those candles on your cake increase into inconceivable numbers , see the cheekieness of your kids,grand-kids, great grand-kids and every other generation , see those wrinkles on your face turn into gorges , see your teeth fall out, oh boy there is a lot you can see and do if you live well into your hundreds. I'm preparing my list of things-to-do in my late nineties cos of this article . Yay yay yay..!

The reason for my longevity sits very conspicuously on my chin, one of the reasons people rarely forget my face. Right from my diapers days annoying aunts and uncles would pinch my cheeks and exclaim "moleeehh!" ,was it because of that big black mole or cos thts the way ppl address a mallu girl i wouldn't know ,but what i do know is that the name has stuck to me like a leech and it pisses me off hollow! Am i complaining? Hell NO! I'm actually damn proud of it but trimming the hair sprouting out of it every week is a pain !

Growing up i have faced a lotta carks thanks to the pigmented growth on my face.
Long time back (school times) we were to perform in a dance competition which required us to be dressed in rajasthani outfits. Now apart from the ghagharas(that spelling looks scarily wrong ) , bangles at insane places like armpits and black jewellery, rajasthani gals adorn their faces with three dots shaped like a triangle on their chin and at the corner of their eyebrows, ahh i know u guys didn't know that. So after the final round of mascara and lipstick we went about the task of dotting each others face with triangles and when it was my turn, lo and behold, only two dots were required cos of my mole. Now there is nothing funny or awe-inspiring in this but the memory is still crystal clear and back then it was one mega tickling joke (innocent humour u see).

Incident #2 :: This happened when i went for my learner's licence. Splittle covered walls, roughshod bureaucrats and agents stopping you at every turn was enough to scare two 16year olds, to tell the truth we were shittin in our pants. After filling up the application form my friend and i went to the RTO inspector to submit the forms. He gave out a deep sigh and exclaimed..

Inspector :: "Eanne madam, identification coloumn yakkae blankuu" (Madam why is the identification column blank??)

Me (muttering something under my breath, kannada no good back then) :: "Ahh,hmm !"
Inspector(lookin up with a i'll-smidge-you-down look ,and then eyeing the mole on my chin) :: "Ahh ok ok parvagilla biddu"

I turn around to see my friend vehemently tryin to prove that the small speck on her left arm is indeed a birth mark. Moments of glory u see..!
So while you guys try to sock up all you can in your limited time here on earth, ill be tuckin in on that extra cheesey burger with fries + cheese dip and thick shake . Oh boy im salivating now !

Slam Dunk and Oh boy how we Sunk !

Ok,ok we lost the basketball finals and by a big margin to haunt the already bruised ego, so to all my friends who are scoffing at me i give you a moments time to laugh your heart out, place that "L" on your forhead and say the most heard duologue, "i told u so!!". Ahh haa it's a pity u can't see the finger im holding !!

I started this wondrous game back in 7th. Skipping ropes and Frisbies were stacked away in the closet after we picked up that Basketball, looking back the first few years were the most hilarious. We didn't know jack about basketball but we would diligently play this game every day. Twenty feet would go scurrying in the direction of the ball ,the cornered girl out of delirium would toss the ball high in the air to the other corner which would sent all of us running in the opposite direction , and so we would go back-n-forth the court. "Oh! the ball had to be put in the basket is it"? That question was asked a year later. Bloop! Picked up the game thanks to a few helpful guys in class who taught us the very basics like,"you cannot run with the ball holding it up high in the air, you need to dribble it". Armed with this knowledge and a few cool phrases like fast-break , convert and pivot i stepped into college.If i could sum up my whole Engg story in one word it would be Basketball. I didn't play any super-dooper game but it was just soo soo cool hanging around in the Basketball court, all those elusive lanky guys with amazing height , loose shorts that went well past their knees and expensive shoes were clearly the cynosure of all eyes. So i spent my 4 yrs doing lay-ups and tryin some cheap scale shots and playing tournaments.I had kissed this game good bye after i entered the corporate world but the magic of it was revived on Saturday. It was like unearthing those emotions stacked away in some safe corner. Oh boy, the emotions of bygone college days are threatening to emanate. *sniff,sniff*

The mails started pouring in a week before the tournament, thanks to our official Basketball Club spammer Mr.Visakan ,but it did fortify our spirits to put up our best and spread the word around. It turned out to be a sure-fire strategy cos on the day of the tournament we had three teams complete with a good set of subs. Belts and polished shoes made way for shorts and jerseys. Saturday ,it was a glorious morning , threatening clouds and a chill early morning breeze set the stage for what happened to be one super-dooper day. People started pouring in at 6:30AM, eyes clearly showing a dirsupted sleep but heart skipping with great enthusiasm.

The three teams were , First Punch , Slam Dunkers and Trail Blazers, all with a right mix of pro's and amateurs. White Blue and Grey colours on court , players two foot taller and wider than me , and no female species around except for moiself and Pallavi. The first match was between my Team(TB) and First Punch. The whistle was blown and thus started the game. We got thrashed left,right and centre but not before putting up a gutsy fight, courtsey Jason and Paddy clearly the two awe-inspiring players in our team. We had to soothe ourselves with the reality that First Punch had some remarkable players. Vijay's gravity defying moves and baskets were a delight to watch. Hail thee dudeh!
We went on to win the second match against Slam Dunkers. Good defense and aggressive press in the final quarter coupled with rebounds saw us through. Yoo hoo.! We stormed into the finals thanks to a snug strategy adopted by First Punch who defeated Slam Dunkers in what was a blink-your-eye-and-u'll-miss-out-on-action game.
FINALS :: Trail Blazers v/s First Punch
Playing under floodlights was one experience, loosing miserably was another. A one sided match right from the first quarter. I choose to believe that the stars were not on our side. If you asking waht the score was, i would say "ahh..hmm, was that a squirrel or a mongoose on that tree!!"

Playin after 8 months was a real challenge , i was puffing and panting right from the start but the experience was exhilarating, something that will be etched in my memory for a long time. It was all possible thanks to the unceasing exuberance of our BBall members. Tight-D , watch-your-man , convert da, drive-in ,these words are still resonating in my ears. We packed our bags and left the court recounting every moment and talking about the aching back and legs to feel good about the following day.