My good deed for the day

I made someone happy yesterday. I gave him crap work in the morning and took it away in the afternoon.

Today I think I will threaten to kill someone and then let him go.

This day, last year

This day last year, my partner in shame (my thesis partner, just to be clear) and I were ordered by the Master to put an appearance in Delhi. He did this often. Since we served absolutely no purpose other than that of coolies carrying laptops and folders and cost a lot, i still haven't figured out why he did so. I also haven't figured out whether to look upon these trips as a punishment or as an opportunity to spread my wings and fly. Err... walk around the capital.

The first time we went, we were free of cooliegiri by about 4 and spent the rest of the day playing tourists. A couple of classmates who had spent the summer in the city started us off. Relying solely on public transport, we managed to cover an impressive list of places - Qutub Minar, Lotus Temple, India Gate and the mirage of Rashtrapati Bhawan. That India Gate and Rashtrapari bhawan lay on opposite sides of some road had been a part of our astute observations during the morning travel. We were Glad to observe that this was true even after the sun had set. Having done pretty much everything that can be done at a Gate and having lots of time to kill before Shramshaki Express made an appearance, we decided to pay the Rashtrapati a visit. We started to walk towards his house. We walked. And walked. And walked. Came across many crossings, but no Bhawan. At every crossing we were sure the next one was IT. We even attempted to telepathically tempt the owner, promising him a demo of our "this is the way they did it in the US 20 years ago" software. No use. The Bhawan simply wouldn't arrive. Finally, suspicious that we had walked into another city altogether, we gave up. Aah well, his loss. I don't think he can ever completely recover from having missed the demo, but for his sake i hope he has moved on.

Then there was the time i went alone and haunted Connaught place and more specifically Saravana Bhawan. That place brings out the South Indian in me like nothing else! And the fact that a hopelessly direction impaired person like me can find my way from Connaught place to the Railway Station makes it to the top ten achievements in my life.

Then there was the time we had go leaving behind two crippled cricket teams (he was the all rounder of his, i the non performing captain of mine). We imagined all sorts of disasters. Reality of course, disagreed. His team's match got cancelled and mine recorded its best performance ever.

Which brings us to the visit that inspired this post. We knew it would be our last (And it was, unless you count ghar basaofying on the New Delhi Railway platform for 6 hours waiting for a train as a visit). And we wanted to conquer that last remaining spot - the Red Fort. I also wanted to have parathas at the Paratha Gully i had heard so much about. I discovered while trying to locate the place, that i was in Chandni Chowk! Like in the movies!! Only, the place looked nothing like what Karan Johar had led me to believe. The parathas also disappointed. Frankly, I've had better at apna Chaitanya in Pune. On our way back i remembered that it was the partners birthday the next day and he would miss the customary midnight celebrations, since we would be in the train. So i bought some pastries that we could celebrate with at midnight. Of course, i couldn't resist stuffing myself with a few sweets while i was being such a sweet girl. After the light and sound show at the Red Fort (which is amazing!) we paid our respects at Saravana Bhawan. He didn't particularly want to, but i wouldn't hear of it! And the end of it all, when we finally got into the train we were
1. exhausted
2. full beyond capacity

I set the alarm for midnight, for i knew that even though it was just half an hour away, there was no chance either of us would be awake till then. And i was right. The alarm rang at 12. We got up, i wished him, we stuffed down the pastries and were snoring by 12.02.

Happy birthday, Thurupmukka!

And the award for the best actor at silly point goes to...

Much too much fuss is being made of the whole match fixing thing, I think. So what if matches are fixed? Is it really an insult to the viewer? Are they really playing with your love for the game? If you think it is rather like watching puppets perform, whats wrong with that, I ask you? Haven't you ever watched a movie, where rich puppets dance to the directors tunes and unseen hands make money? Does the fact that the director can end it any way he wants take anything away from your movie watching experience?

Hereafter, look at every match as a movie, the ground a giant movie screen, the stadium as the theater, the players as actors who act as players, the director as always an unseen presence. Enjoy the show. Endlessly argue about the casting, the storyline, the ending. And if you don't like it, make enough money to produce your own cricket match!

The desktop wars

The son likes it simple. Minimalistic, no icons (thats right, none) cluttering up the screen. The wall paper? Spartan, with some small figure somewhere the only respite from monotony. Sometimes a cartoon of some rock band that has caught his fancy (the cartoon, not the rock band). Being a young man with unblemished eyesight (marred of course by the mandatory driving glasses) he also likes it small. As a rule, he rules, being the most frequent user of the machine. But he has certain well documented distractions. The mother, nature and his cell phone, which can only be answered pacing in the garden, eating leaves off random plants (a feature his phone has passed on to the daughter's phone).

The old man. Ever patient and ever ready to take over. He likes it obvious. Big. He doesn't need much but he is willing to adjust, to learn to reach out to unmentionable parts of windows to get it. The wallpaper? He wont even notice if one day it packs up and leaves.

The daughter. She always needs it for just 2 minutes. Sometimes its actually true. With taste belying her age, she likes it "4-icons-cover-the-desktop" big. But of course, there are no icons and the 2 minutes are too precious to be spent messing around with the resolution. She squirms, she squints, she winks, but she gets the job done.

The old lady, in typical "you-can-have-my-share-of-the-ice-cream" fashion, keeps away.

With the arrival of his new toy, the son has moved away from the old one. But the icons are still missing, the wallpaper is still white, she still has to squint. A colonial hangover? Long live the king? Naaah. Just old habits die hard.

Thats the way it is?

There is something about the calm acceptance of one's destiny. No fight, no protest, no banging your head against a wall, at most an unacknowledged wish somewhere that things could have been different. Cool, calm, composed, moving on to bigger things. Carrying no scars because really, there never was a battle.
Yes, there certainly is something!

(May sound monkish, but it isn't. Not that you don't care, but you care only so much)

Something in between

I don't like grey. It is too much of choice. It is this shapeless, flexible mass that I can mould any way I want. And without any absolutes to guide me, I am lost. The mass ends up as a little bit of everything, a mirror of my confusions.
And as if I don't have enough of grey matter of my own to mess around with, some one's black mixes with my white to give, yes, more grey! So much so that I have given up hope of seeing anything in black and white again.

Its coming to get me

Like an expensive vase. Every fleck of dust wiped, every possibility of a crack guarded against. Placed in a corner, watching life go by.

That is exactly how i imagine old age would feel.

It terrifies me every time i brush against it. This time it was bought about by a talk with a grandparent. Just a few days ago she had surrendered her house to the house owner. As she was explaining to me - I am too old to go and live there all by myself. Whats the point of keeping it locked? I nodded. Of course. Very sensible. Until i realized she was talking about her house of 49 years! It is where she lived, where her kids were born, bought up, had kids of their own... It is the only thing in the world she can call her own.

It was.

About a ball...

You might call it a ball, but that would be like calling Azim Permji a dalda maker. Those of you fortunate enough to have experienced its magic will understand. It came into my life about a year ago, and well, what can i say, life was never the same again.

Happy birthday, Yellow Smiley!

How many times I had seen you around
But not really cared to look
All i had to do was to hold you once
And i knew, i just knew, i was hooked

How many times did we play in my room
Before we ventured out
And how long did it take for you to become
The thing i didn't leave without

How many times did I greet fellow mates
By aiming you at their head
And how many times did miss completely
And hit a professor instead

How many times did i whip you out
Just to fiddle around
And how long would it take for the mad ones to join
And no one working could be found

How many times have I chased people down
To get you back, cos your mine
And how many wars have i started and won
By throwing you across the border line

How many times have I held you close
Before you were licked by a dog
And how many times since have i refused
To allow you to be washed

The answer, alas,
Is lost in my past
The answer is lost in my past.

The Mac and I

There is nothing like change to tell you how old you are. If you look upon it as a challenge, as a source of excitement and growth, you are young. If you look upon it as an intruder come to disrupt your careful, comfortable routine, if you judge a thing just because it is different, you are old.

If that hypothesis isn't clear enough, if you need more proof, here it is. I recently measured myself on the change scale and guess what it said? OLD. No hesitation, no second thoughts. OLD.

It all started with the MacBook. I'm a little wary of laptops as it is. Give me one, and I time travel back to the days when I was a computer novice, when typing double quotes was the biggest challenge because it involved pressing two keys simultaneously. I remember my lab pardner and me coming up with a novel solution - I press shift she presses quote. On count of three. We got quite good at it, actually. Teamwork, i believe it is called. And don't even get me started on the laptop mouse. That takes me back several generations, i remind myself of my grandmother struggling with the mouse. Not being able to co-relate the movement of the mouse with the movement of the cursor, tracing crazy patterns all over the screen. Thankfully, my company does not give laptops, at least not to novices. I work in what i like to call a third world company, but that's another story.

But the Macbook is not just a laptop. It is a Mac laptop. Its different. What makes it especially bad is that it is unexpected. I mean, having seen two and a half operating systems, you think you have seen it all. How different can this one be, you think. And while no one in their right mind will call me a geek, calling me technologically challenged is an insult to our temple of education. And, its not like I wanted to change the world. All I was after were the basic functions.

First, i thought i would to watch a movie. It all started well. I got a head start because the knowledgeable one told me that two fingers on the mouse area meant a right click. So i could select the player i wanted and all was right with the world. Until the first interrupt. I decided to minimize the movie and service the interrupt. When i got back, the movie was gone! I looked everywhere, but all i could find was the icon of the player. Clicked on it, got the entire menu of the player, but not the movie screen.

I decided to move on. To blog my frustration on the lost movie screen. But i couldn't find anyplace where i could enter text! And believe me, i searched! No list of applications anywhere. No command line kind of thing. Things could have gotten unpleasant for the Mac had i been slightly more egoistic. The knowledgeable one to the rescue again. I reluctantly got introduced to the finder.

My journey to enlightenment was accompanied by incessant cribbing, partly because i really hated being so helpless around a computer, but mostly because the knowledgeable one has a short fuse and i love fireworks!

Anyway, now i have made my peace with the Mac. I still lose movie screens occasionally, but now i simply restart the movie. And as for text documents, part of this post was typed on the Mac.

You may now clap.

42!

I am not there yet, but the hope is that someday all the pieces of my life will magically fit together to form a beautiful pattern. (Beauty of course, lying in the eyes of the beholder, in this case, me). But why is that not enough anymore? Why are moments no longer adding up to life? Why am I after the bigger picture?

I know the answer to that one. And it goes like this. Ahem. Lets say, optimistically speaking, that i am dead 50 years from now. Again optimistically speaking, I go to heaven. And still optimi... you know what, from now on, i speak optimistically unless explicitly stated otherwise. So I'm in heaven. There being nothing much to do in heaven i get to travel, meet other souls, exchange life stories and in general, eat a lot. (Souls do not put up weight, do they?) During my travels lets say I bump into one of those factory fresh, starry eyed wanna be souls and it wants to know what life is all about. What do i tell it? That its about climbing tress and jumping into rivers and in general being yourself? Or that its about touching other lives and letting yours be touched? Or that its about pushing yourself to be the best you can be? All good, none good enough. What is that one thing I can tell the rookie that will make it want to sell itself for a slice of life?

Those of you who thought I actually had an answer, shame on you!