My quarter life crisis…

I turned 29 today… my orkut scrap book whose count accelerated up a few numbers today stand proof to the significance of 2 things – one that happened 29 years back and I had no control over and the other that happened maybe 5 years ago and in a moment of euphoric madness at being among the first to receive a privileged invite to join this social networking site… ever since I have not deleted any scraps on this site and have been trying my best to at least achieve a respectable scrap count… needless to say I have hopelessly failed due to many reasons (definitely not my vibrant social life) and which is not the reason I started this post so I stop the discussion right here right now…

Yeah I am 29… that is what I would say whenever anyone asked me for my age… well it is simple no… I just have to add up the number of years to 1980 and it is very easy to add something to a number that ends in zero… or subtract a number that ends in zero… whichever way you follow to calculate your age. Anyways, though I am proud of my arithmetic abilities, I am not going to give you a 101 ways to calculate your age – what I am merely trying to point out here is that I am 29 – and it is so easy to calculate that I have not made a mistake… so the next time you put your hand to your mouth and say “what… you are 29???”, I can at least understand that you are not doubting the accuracy of the number.

But yeah there is one person, or rather personified person, who lives inside me screaming at the top of his voice that my age is only 25… 25 – can you believe it? There are only two other persons in who achieved this not growing up thingee – Markandeya at sweet sixteen and probably Peter Pan – the boy who refused to grow up… though I lost the chance to achieve the world record of being the youngest to achieve this feat, maybe I could have tried for the oldest 25year old alive… had I not gotten jolted out of this a few days back…

Now don’t ask me why 25 in particular and why not 20 or 15 or even 30… maybe it was at 25 that I went back to school again or maybe 25 was the time I lost touch with reality or maybe just plain lost it… the point is the magic number was 25… or it could have just been an arbitrary number cloud around the number 25 which makes it into a hazy and maybe even an irrational number – but we all know that we cannot age irrationally – aren’t we all rational?

So there I was happily oblivious to my ageing process living a life without any major burdens, enjoying the in-between period from restrained childhood to a responsible adulthood… partying on weekends and partying on weekdays… spending without a worry whatever little I was paid at the end of the month… when there was no water available, we drank beer instead, taking a leaf out of the wise lady Marie Antoinette’s life… all my friends were quite like me living a life of reckless irresponsibility.

The group got constantly modified – people kept moving out and others came in to replace them. But I didn’t notice… they were all still 25 year olds like me. Until suddenly one day I sat up and took notice, I realized that others around me had been ageing all this while… suddenly my friends and cousins became uncles and aunts… the cute girls fresh from college or working in BPOs seemed like the ones to ogle at and I used to wonder that how women these days were getting pretty silly… while the ones I was used to ogling suddenly became the aunties with the constantly crying misbehaving kids… while the guys with whom I used to drink beer and hung out until pretty late into the night, were suddenly very serious about getting home early…

The telling blows came when these aunties and uncles introduced me to their kids as an uncle and the kids shamelessly called me uncle – far from the anna or bhaiyya which I was used to. And I started looking at the mirror more often to check whether I had any grays poking out of my head… but then after a couple of such false alarms, my brain kicked in dismissing the claims by the adults introducing me to their kids as “uncle” as a mere indication of the jealousy that comes up when older people see younger people having more fun… but by now i was confused on what to call them... i guess definitely not "aunties" as the "uncles" would insist on an explanation...

The final blows came from my mom – her favorite phrases being – “erumai/kazhudhai vayasu achu” (an old tam saying that compares you to a buffalo or donkey’s age - duh) whenever I am having fun… an admonishment which I never understood because I was acting my age… 25… the best part was when she used to say that I was irresponsible and that my dad was married (which is usually associated with being responsible – refer the example above where guys want to go home early) when he was 27… now though marriage seemed like a necessary evil, I was still ok with my present single state because I still had 2 more years to attain that maturity… no?

But, all good things must come to an end and so does my 25^th year… after running successfully for the last 4 years, I decided that I can accept the fact that I am actually older… though my alter ego who sits inside my head still might poke out and claim that I am only 25, I am slowly feeding him the shocking news of his age so that it does not come as a great shock to him...

PS. My luck seems to be changing on my 29^th birthday though. Something good happened – mclaren is back on top.

PPS. Throughout the post I was reminded of koundamani’s famous “take the 25” comedy… here it is on youtube…

The Chronicles of Varuna: The Line, The Ditch and The Downpour…

It is that time of the year again – where the sun the gets blotted out by shades of grey, and smell of wet earth hits you into a knock out sense of euphoria, the cold air makes you want to curl up under a thick woolen blanket, with the noise of the water pouring in the backdrop sipping noisily on a cup of hot ginger tea… no wait I am dreaming… I don’t have the tea or the woolen blanket… cut to reality – this is the time of the year I get to play cat and mouse with the rain gods…

Today, after so many days of careful meteorological planning and evasion tactics and having upgraded my arsenal with a car, I was exposed vulnerably to the wrath of the rain gods… I had to travel some 10kms through the evening peak hour traffic to get back home without a mobile roof over my head (if you don’t count the helmet as one that is) after I picked up my trusty companion on such missions – my pulsar 150…

And of course Murphy was waiting for one such opportunity… with the patience of a hungry wolf (please note Mr. Murphy that I am using the comparison in a complimentary way). Of course no points for guessing whether I got drenched or not today… but the bone chilling dunking I got through reminded me of the events of last year and the different strategies we played against each other… and I hope I will find time to put them all down here so that maybe some day in the future, i would have gotten into a better mood to have a good laugh…

One particular day's strategy went something like this –

There is this route through the main roads that I used to take to get home – a pretty long route, almost an unbroken but not so straight line, about 20kms one way interspersed with traffic signals to slow you down to give you the time to stop and smell the flowers – only they will be dripping wet like me and I already had enough water in my nose… but then it was usually safer to go this way because this particular route had something that the other routes did not – a road.

As usual the game began as soon as I left office, and the rain started pouring consistently… whenever I tried to race against it, Murphy stepped on the pedal too increasing the quantity of the water pouring from the heavens above… and slowing down back to the old rhythm as my speed fell in tune with the slow moving traffic… following me throughout the path I took…

That day I suddenly decided to experiment – I broke off at a signal, took a detour through another road perpendicular to the direction I was traveling and lo behold – a totally dry patch of land lay in front of me… really – not even the smell of wet earth… it was as if some water tanker lorry was spilling its way along my usual path and it did not turn in this new direction…

I was astounded to say the least at the availability of a non slippery dry road… but at the same time I got a new found elation pumping up my adrenalin giving me hope that today I might end up at my home less wetter than the previous days… I revved the engine only to realize that I can’t make speedy progress because of the enormous number of ditches all along the way… still I tried my best to make it home as fast as possible before Murphy realized I was not getting the water any longer…

But my euphoria was short lived, and as I turned the next corner to catch the general direction to my house, Murphy had finally caught up… he had realized that I was not on my original path any longer and he definitely was not a novice to the streets of this city… in a fury at being outsmarted by a mere mortal he sent forth a gushing torrential cascade that started filling up the ditches on my road… the downpour was not only making my visibility poor, but was also filling up the depressions in the road, disguising them to merge into an evenly flat surface smooth road… in order to avoid causing damage to my trusty steed I had to leave the path less taken and get back on to the main roads as soon as possible…

I did just that, rejoining my older path a few kilometers from where I had taken the diversion, only to realize that I was not exaggerating when I said I was being singled out and chased by Murphy… the road was dry as a new huggies diaper… and since Murphy’s GPS was maybe guiding him along the other path, I had a few seconds of dry and good roads to make my escape.

But yeah the traffic signals who were the good old friends of my enemy simultaneously slowed down my progress and sort of seemed to send a signal to the rain clouds to change their direction. So a short distance from my home, the rain had caught up… and this time in all out fury seemingly to compensate for the short dry patches in my journey trying to get me as wet as possible before I made it to safety…

Of course, once I got under the roof of my house, the game ends and both of us retire for the day to restart a new game the next day… I guess by now Murphy must have realized that his adversary will not give up without a fight…

written sometime back… forgot to post... now i can't remember it well enough to think of a good title... sorry for the period post…

(awesome... probably the first time anybody puts a disclaimer in the title)

For those who dinno yet – santro it is… the sunshine car reflecting pure white light…

Somewhere I read that a transaction happens when the buyer and seller feel that they got the best deal… to me it happened sometime in December, in the heart of the recession when heads of auto companies were trying to offload their stock and quickly bundle the cash into a clean white dhoti and run away to some obscure place before their line employees come back after their sudden pay-now-claim-later vacation that their usually tyrant boss had so benevolently insisted on them recharging their batteries…

Ok to cut a long story short… Hyundai offered a price cut and the government offered to reduce some of the tax burden… overall it seemed like a good deal to me… and for the dealer it seemed like a good deal too as apparently the discount was borne by the manufacturer (at least the papers said so) and he thanked god for sending in a dumb customer who was not bargaining for discounted accessories – not even the free ganesha idol he normally gave away in happier innocent times… the customer in turn thanked god for granting him the power to resist swiping the evil plastic to revel in some cheap thrills of pirated music and button press power windows…

So there it was, occupying the unused space I had being paying the rent and the maintenance for over 6 months… thanks to spiderman and yuppie-da for getting it home safely… yes I didn’t drive it home… in fact for the next few days I would be re-living those pre licecnse driving class days with a guy sitting to my left shouting instructions aloud to hide his panic, while I through clenched teeth and sweaty palms drove to office in the slowest speeds possible that tested the patience of my followers…

But yes… here I am… come a long way from that scared L-boarder to a scary L-boarder (yes I still retain the big red L – my dad, an ex law student, advised me against removing it so that I could have an upper hand in a situation if required) – 3123 kms to be exact… that too with a trip to Chennai (350kms one way) and one to Sivasamudram (about 150 kms from Bangalore) about which I hope to write some day too…

But, the new arrival in the family has not been accepted without friction. In fact barely had the one month deadline arrived for the first servicing, that I felt like a guy with two wives… after a month of aggressive driving around Bangalore and nearby, I just managed to cross the required run-in kilometers… a satisfied owner, I took it to the nearby service center for the regular servicing, again resisting offers of extended warranty which did not include parts I did not even know existed, got the “free service only” words out of my mouth and came back home to go to the office on my trusty bike…

Only he was not any more… yeah – the definitely male “HE”… but he did not hide his jealousy at being neglected all this while… refused to start till I kicked the s*** out of me… then within a few meters I felt a loss in the rear wheel stability… puncture… with that I felt my cheerfulness draining out with the air… had to please him with some new pretty expensive accessories to get him to behave…

But yeah… back to focus on the star of this post… after the first service, she was much more smoother… that is when we took her to Chennai… I was a bit apprehensive – all those nasty trucks and mean speeding vehicles on those highways… how would I cope with it all… in fact it was such an overwhelming fear, that I took a detour in between to visit a temple… haha gotcha… I did not go to the temple out of fear… I just wanted to soothe my nerves fill my tummy – heard their puliyogare and curd rice were very good… after this and a couple of drive arounds in chennai’s jammed roads (after which I patted myself on the back for living in the outskirts in Bangalore), I realized that I actually enjoyed the freedom of the wonderful highway from Chennai to Bangalore… so much so that I actually drove back in 4hrs straight… all those nfs trainings during the mba seems to have helped…

After this, there was no going back… huh… I mean… I love biking, but then I have to spend some time with the car too… a good amount of money has been invested… what is the point if I don’t use it… (s*** I have to now worry about diplomacy with my bike !!!)

Anyways, there are some side-effects of getting the car… the rain god thinks I played spoil sport… so he has roped in his friend the sun god to cook me inside the glorified solar cooker… But yeah… another way to show the finger to the autowallas in bangalore…

feelings on the valentine’s day

It was a bright sunny morning… wait... it was not supposed to be so bright… oh no we were late already… so a few hurried phone calls to wake up the other eligible bachelors who were accompanying me, and another set of hurried morning procedures we were on our way to the great indian aeroshow… after all the hype generated by the press giving us photos of dazzling display of gravity defying and pure foolhardy stunts, who would not have their brain floating in adrenalin already.

When you set your heart to something the whole world conspires to help you achieve it is a popularized myth created by a equally hyped author and his mindless readers… the truth is generally just the opposite… when we set our heart and mind to buy those ridiculously overpriced tickets, the whole world was conspiring against us… first it was the alarm that didn’t go off loud enough, second it was the traffic police… looking up google maps I had charted out a nice course along the much touted superfast national highway to the airport when we found a few totally tacky banners which had an arrow pointing to a right much before the right shown on the google maps…

Anyways, despite our mind telling us not to follow that route, madness took over and we turned… we did realize the mistake immediately… traffic was crawling not because it was overcrowded, but it had to move ever so slowly for fear of hitting the people who had set up shops so close to the road, making it a drive-through market… and they had put in a lot of craters like any other major road for good measure… and of course the traffic police were conspicuously missing after that stupid sign that made us take that right turn.

A pretty bumpy ride followed during which we met a lot of people who were absolutely ignorant in geography, and finally we managed to catch a caravan of cars following a huge overloaded truck which was trundling along slowly negotiating the craters like a huge rolling ball. And since this was a Monaco grand prix track, overtaking was literally impossible. Somehow we managed to stumble into the elusive NH7, but the elation was short lived as we had to slip into another narrow service road to enter the parking lot… ok, not so fast… we had to drive through some long winding dirt road in a slow procession as people who had managed to wake up earlier than us tried to find their parking spots…

Finally we did too, passing the scrutinizing eyes of the tired sunburnt security guards and the indifferent nose of the sniffer dog. Ignoring the shade provided by the tents we eagerly made our way towards the fence to be as close to the jets as possible… and we waited for the show to begin hoping to witness the famed defense punctuality.

And begin it did I think on dot at 1000 hours, since there is no way to ascertain the exact time by our highly inaccurate personal times and the inaudible voice from the tents, let us assume the indian standard time effect has not yet affected them. The first jet was already parked a few minutes ago and it rolled on to accelerate for take off… the cheers of the crowd seemed to contest with the booming of the engines as the mighty metal machine took to the skies.

It came back, flipped over – once, twice, thrice… and then in the opposite direction… then a straight pull up and an apparent free fall… and a smoke trail drawing lines and circles in the sky… then it came straight at us and then did a few more back flips intertwining the smoke trails behind it… then proving that it could also do a slow motion fly past drawing audible gasps from the crowd at every pass, before coming back one last time to land, parachute extending and all that. Again the crowd cheered, despite the sun beating down upon us. And for a few minutes, the pride of being able to witness the amazing capabilities of the indian airforce swelled my heart, brought a shortness of breath, like when you watch a super patriotic movie of Sunny Deol, and a curse to my lips about why I could not have joined the defense forces.

Then a second jet went up in the air, a slightly different looking one but still the same grayish blue colored body which camouflaged perfectly with the clear gray sky behind it (pardon me for my illiteracy in identifying models from their looks). It came back, flipped over – once, twice, thrice… and then in the opposite direction… then a straight pull up and an apparent free fall… and a smoke trail drawing lines and circles in the sky… then it came straight at us and then did a few more back flips intertwining the smoke trails behind it… then proving that it could also do a slow motion fly past drawing audible gasps from the crowd at every pass, before coming back one last time to land, parachute extending and all that. Again the crowd cheered, despite the sun beating down upon us.

Then a third jet went up in the air, a slightly different looking one but still the same grayish blue colored body. It came back, flipped over – once, twice, thrice… and then in the opposite direction… then a straight pull up and an apparent free fall… and a smoke trail drawing lines and circles in the sky… then it came straight at us and then did a few more back flips intertwining the smoke trails behind it… then proving that it could also do a slow motion fly past drawing audible gasps from the crowd at every pass, before coming back one last time to land, parachute extending and all that. Again the crowd cheered, despite the sun beating down upon us.

No the last 2 paragraphs are not a copy-paste error… this is how the show went on. As each jet answered its roll call and did the same set of maneuvers, the sun beating down upon our heads seemed a little more relevant now. And with each passing model, it seemed to take away my patriotic pride that had sort of reached its peak at the second jet. After the third or so jet, I lost count, and my mind started wandering much like it does when you are attending the marriage of some distant relative at around the same age.

There were 2 changes from the normal routine, when a jet sported the indian tri-colors over the gray of its body came into the tarmac – of course there was no change in the routine, but seeing a difference in the colors and that too the tricolor seemed to send a short spike in the patriotism-vs-time graph. And then one jet seemed to send out a challenge to the anti-anti-indian-culture-upholders by drawing some hearts in the sky… maybe it was hearts, or maybe due to the hot sun and my muddled up brain it looked like hearts, some respite from the routine.

Then there was a huge plane which had the US Air Force painted on it, which drew gasps from the crowd mainly due to the fact that it was a US Air Force plane and in size it resembled a boeing passenger jet. The flight took off as the crowd waited with built-up expectations of the same routines. Then it came back, and passed us, took a turn, came back and passed us and took another turn much before than last time, and again came back and took a turn before finally landing. No flips and the maximum tilt achieved was when it took the turn. Being an engineer, I had not built up my expectations on the bulky plane doing acrobatics, but hope is such a wonderful thing…

Then came the helicopters and the crowd heaved a sigh of relief, as the press had put up nice pictures of the chopper formations. As the crowd expected some death and gravity defying feats from the helicopters, the helicopters surprised the onlookers by disappearing behind some trees in the distance. After some time, when the crowd was getting excited over contemplations of a pakistan planned abduction of the indigenous technologies, they reappeared in the horizon flying damn too slow for someone who was low on impatience and tolerance to the hot sun, with nothing else to distract the mind as by now the distractions with all their boyfriends and/or escorts had retired to the safety of the tent shades.

As they passed by each other in slow motion, this way and that way, letting out smoke to remind us of the unforgotten paths taken by them, the patriotic feelings were slowly entering into the regions of irritation. We moved on closer to where the aircrafts were parked, but were stopped by the fence a few kilometers away from them. Those (#%*% exorbitant tickets could not even buy us a closer view of the planes. Meanwhile some parachutists also emerged out of nowhere and appeared and disappeared in spots as the blue shaded fabrics merged with the sky in the background.

Now a totally new feeling had taken over – hunger. So we just moved on, found our car thanks to the remote locking mechanism, and after a few roundabout routines trying to diligently use the map printed behind the tickets to find the exit, gave up and exited through the entrance. Saturday afternoon did not seem to hinder the people taking to the roads and crawling through the signals of NH7, finally reached the restaurant for a decent meal and huge glass of spiced buttermilk.

Our hunger satiated and tired out of the drive in the sun, the new feeling that took over now was sleepiness. As I retired into the cooler confines of my bedroom, darkened by the curtains, I drifted off into a dreamless sleep, the forgettable aeroshow already forgotten.

 

“chocolate exhibition in bangalore”

Today, like a well read and well informed local that I am, I got to know of a chocolate exhibition going on here, that was started some 5 days back, from a source in Delhi… so immediately I embarked upon a journey to gather as much information on the event as I could so that maybe over the weekend I could take a break and spend some time in the midst of my favorite food.

google google google…

Being highly lazy efficient, I just copy pasted the last part of the headline “Hundreds of enthusiasts throng a chocolate exhibition in Bangalore“ into the text box and voila… for a second I thought hundreds of journalists had thronged the exhibition and they had just floated the same article over to hundreds of papers… but no, it appears as if Mr.Jaipal Sharma had just sent a mass mail to all possible magazine/newspaper houses and crossed his fingers hoping that he would get lucky… much like an engineer’s dream of getting a paper published in some such journal which they can later claim to be on par with IEEE…

As luck would have it, Mr.Jaipal Sharma seemed to have overcrossed his fingers… almost every state’s journal has published his article. I will just put in a few prominent links to prove my point…

http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090210/824/tnl-hundreds-of-enthusiasts-throng-a-cho.html

http://www.topnews.in/hundreds-enthusiasts-throng-chocolate-exhibition-bangalore-2122747

http://www.andhranews.net/India/2009/February/10-Hundreds-enthusiasts-88882.asp

http://www.sindhtoday.net/south-asia/61555.htm

http://www.newkerala.com/topstory-fullnews-90230.html

http://story.chinanationalnews.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/b8de8e630faf3631/id/464559/cs/1/

http://videosfromindia.smashits.com/view/6238/hundreds-of-enthusiasts-throng-a-chocolate-exhibition

awesome!!!

I am glad that Mr.Jaipal Sharma has not only been able to spread the awareness of namma bangalore to other major states like Andhra, Kerala and Sindh, but also crossed international boundaries to China… and Indian boy little Karan is world famous now thanks to his creative and amazing witty wordplay while expressing his views on the chocolate exhibition’s importance in the world arena especially in the current economic downturn situation…

PS. While reading the article on kerala news, got to know that cute actress Kavya Madhavan is no longer single… sighhh… 

the great indian olympic challenge

Michael Phelps is my new role model and beacon of hope. The recent rekindled interest in the Olympic legend, by the papers, has brought a new ray of hope into my otherwise uneventful meaningless life. I have decided to train for the next Olympic swimming events and have an ambition and quantified objective to work forward to. A look at the diet work-out plan of Phelps has made me drool energized and given me enough hunger inspiration for success. And not to mention the by product that will put all those bollywood six packers to shame and send them packing (haha, good pun no? a little humor in such serious training hurt no one).

Michael Phelps displaying his 64 packs abs and the small mouth that caused it thereby proving size does not matter.

 

I have googled about Michael Phelps and here is what I found out about how he won the Olympic golds.

       1) He ate eggs, cheese, fried onions, mayonnaise, pasta, chocolate cakes, pizza and lots of coffee.

       2) And yeah he spent some time in the pool everyday, even on holidays. 

It is not that difficult. I love all the stuff mentioned above… except the fried onions… but I find that he didn’t eat the fried onions alone. mmm maybe I could have them with fried potatoes…  yeah, I guess that is ok. Potatoes are a source of carbohydrates... I think. Yes that is what I will do… just thinking about those huge sandwiches with melted cheese makes me super inspired to dig jump in into the pool and start off right away…

I just love eggs… and mayo and… and… of course swimming too… when our school gave me a chance to learn swimming I grabbed it with both my arms and legs too… so now if u threw me into the water I can survive for a few minutes till you threw me the lifebelt… no hurry, you have 3 minutes before I empty the swimming pool with my synchronized thrashing…

But I have taken care of that so that I can train independently (and hence protect my privacy). We have a pool in our apartment complex which is about 5 feet deep. And since I am a foot taller I won’t drown and hence I won’t need that life jacket. Though a nice inflated rubber raft (with an umbrella attached) will be a good idea… so that I don’t have to travel all the way into my house to eat all that food I need for my training. I can just lie on the raft and eat throughout the day – that saves me a lot of time and this way I can spend more time in the pool.

Wow man… I am so clever that I can optimize my time by multitasking… plus my sense of humor will get me the girls… Phelps watch out man… you have competition…

Phelps with no sense of humor says - "hey watch it lady... i just ate… am still digesting… so my swimming will not be as good as… huh… later on…” (which as we all know is a plagiarized dialog from the movie kung-fu panda)

 Olympic golds, and of course lovely ladies, here I come!!! 

 

 

why i didn't blog about the pink umbrella...

Happy new year…

Better late than never goes the old proverb, heh heh…

I have been thinking why I actually don’t get time to blog any more – at least that is the excuse I have been dishing out to people who actually are so bored that they land up on my blog sometimes which true to its name has not changed much…

But much as I try to reason out, “NO TIME” is not the actual valid reason. If I look back at my archives and put an effort into bringing back my memories of the past, I realize that I have gotten most of my tasks done when I was the busiest – in terms of the number of tasks accomplished I mean. When I seem to have a lot of time on hand, and a to-do list to add to my guilt, things never progress beyond the to-do list I have created. Sometimes these to-do lists also disappear and I live in the constant fear that some day they will surface to embarrass me…

The more I think of it, time is not the issue I have with blogging or not blogging. I have come up with an interesting theory – information overload. Sometime back I had mentioned that I had wanted to blog about anything and everything I see/hear/feel/smell or taste. That is true… I believe every second in my life could be converted into a page long maybe longer and boring blog post. But then you may ask why I don’t blog more often and you don’t see a hundred posts a day.

Now the reason is something like aamir khan’s short term memory loss in Ghajini…  whatever I decide to blog about I seem to forget within a few seconds… now before you start questioning me about why I am not having a close shaven head with an L shaped tramline cut or tell my parents and scare the shit out of them, let me clarify. I don’t suffer from retrograde amnesia. What I suffer from is limited storage capacity.

Now the brain apparently has small pockets where it stores different kinds of information. The space allocated to my “blogging inspirations” would also fall into one of these pockets and obviously it is limited unlike the terabytes of storage available for USB drives these days. So any new information tends to over write the existing ones. So effectively every second I am going around thinking “hey I should blog about that pink umbrella” and the next instant I am saying “hey I should blog about that lady holding the pink umbrella” and slowly with a couple of more inspirations like “hey I should blog about how sexy that lady with the pink umbrella is” and “hey I wonder if all ladies with pink umbrellas are so sexy” the focus entirely shifts away from the pink umbrella… got it?

Anyways, I don’t think I can tattoo myself to blog about everything like aamir khan does here. But then I tried using a small scribbling pad, but now I don’t remember to update it. Actually, I even thought of blogging about my scribbling pad…

And then when I was trying to explain this to srk the other day, he gave me another view of things – I am not blogging becos my parents live with me? Mmm actually that is a pretty valid reason. I can only blog when I have no one looking over my shoulder to see what I am doing. That is just not exactly the way it happens though, let me elaborate.

So when my mom comes into my room and sees me furiously typing on my laptop, she is first of the impression that I am wasting my time on my laptop… which is sometimes the case when I am working… but other times when I am watching a movie or playing some games it gets irritating when somebody brands that as wasting time when that time can be spent in a useful manner by either sleeping or exercising or just having a nice and relevant talk about current affairs with your parents. So assuming that I do manage to cross over all this minor distractions and convince my mom that I am not “wasting” my time chatting with friends or doing office work and that I am blogging, next question that pops out is “WHAT !!! what is that?”

So I explain how a blog is something like an online journal/diary or just a place where you put up your views and opinions, all I get is a blank stare… that is when my dad who had been disturbed by that loud noise from his game of solitaire, comes to my mom’s rescue – “is that like a letters to editors of papers like The Hindu?” displaying that he is a true descendent of my grandfather who used to read the hindu for 8hours a day from the first character to the last and fold it perfectly into an A4 sized bundle and store it away in a cool dark place for the guy who comes once in 2 months to collect the old paper…

“Huh”, I come back to the present, while automatically making a mental note to blog about my dad’s age old eccentricities, I try explaining that it is nothing like that, and I just put it up there, and I don’t think anyone even reads it except for some guys who are equally vella like me… “Oh” is the only word that comes out in reply from which I understand that my dad ha s just dismissed off one of the most popular and powerful medium of communication in our generation as a utter useless waste of time, and casually returning to his job of saving the world through winning the solitaire game.

My mom seeing that I have been wounded by my dad’s callous remarks tries to pacify my ego blissfully unaware that things are going in the other direction actually. “Hey what are you doing? Mmm you are writing something? Wait let me read what you have written so far… mmm why are you writing about ghajini and short term memory loss like a disease ridden person… why can’t you write something else… something nicer about say the old movies of Sivaji Ganesan who is a much better actor than your aamir khan… oh what offensive words you have used here… don’t do that… I hope you are not writing about that drinking habit of yours for everyone to see… I will have a tough time finding a girl for you who also boozes hahaha”.

As she laughs hysterically over that PJ of hers, I am trying all in vain to maintain my cool… how do I tell her that I am not playing Dr.Jekyll at home and a Mr.Hyde in cyberspace… that I am no longer the scared school-kid she left all alone in that wilderness called engineering college some time back…

I just do a ctrl+S and put it in one of the labyrinths of my “My Documents” folders only to  forget the document totally and look at it after a few months have passed and totally forgetting what the lady with the pink umbrella looked like and I just do a shift + delete on that document. The details of the pink umbrella are now lost to the world forever…

PS. I would request the blogging community to kindly refrain from informing the authorities that I am a victim of parental abuse. I would like to diplomatically term it as a case of the generation gap. Or else somebody is going to get hurt real bad…