Shutup and feed me!

4.30 p.m.

[Stomach rumbles. Sends a HUNGRY message to Brain ]
Brain: Didn't we like just have tea?
Stomach: All part of the forgotten past, my dear fellow. Wonder what we will have for snacks today.
B: [grinning evilly] Poha
S: Oh, shut up!
B: Upma
S: Cant you ever think positive?
B: Health foo..
S: No! Don't say it! Unless you want me to flood you with HUNGRY messages for the rest of the evening.
B: Alright, alright. I take it back.
S: [dreamily] I hope its bhel. Or pav bhaji. Or...
[Brain has moved on to more productive tasks]

4.50
[Stomach sends a TIME message to Brain which it passes on to Eye]
Eye: 4.50. Oh, this must be S asking.
B: Who else? Sigh, its goodbye to all work until it is filled. I'd better pass on your message before S interrupts me again.
[to S]
4.50.
S: What?? 10 whole minutes? And thats only if He (the cook) is on time! Oh, i don't think i can take it anymore.
B: [rolling eyes. Not Eyes] Do you want a toffee?
S: Oh, how heartlessly it mocks. No one understands my troubles. Not even Nose, which has to be fed every 6 seconds. It has the memory of a goldfish, really, takes in a lungful, promptly forgets about it and starts all over again! Disgraceful, i tell you, this dependence...
B: [who by now knows the routine well enough to have asked Nose whether it has inhaled any smells] Nose says it smells onions
S: Really?? [Does a little jig] That could mean Bhel! Oh please let that goldfish be right. please. I'll never ever call it a goldfish again! I'll... are we there yet?
B: [sighs] I'll ask around.
[to Eye]
One of you look at the clock, only the clock and nothing but the clock until further notice. Interrupt me with the time every minute. And the other, look out for tray carrying office boys. Only they can save us now.
[to Ear]
Open doors. The clank of plates. Until further notice, everything else is noise. And keep me posted.
[to Nose]
I don't care if you don't take in air, but take in the smell. And for God's sake, not everything smells like onion. You'll break the poor fellow's heart if it turns out to be Poha.

[For the next how-many-ever minutes, they are all professionals. Eye, knowing that it is no good at parallel processing, multi tasks between the clock and passer-bys. Every passer-by who is not a tray carrying office boy gets the look. The look is the look that a drowning man would give a log that turns out to be a straw. Nose does not forget to breathe, but it analyzes every breath for clues. Ear hears every creak of the door, every footstep that follows, every hint of a clank. Brain is so busy with I/O, it has suspended all processing. Evolution never seems to have heard of DMA]

5.10
E: I spy an office boy! With a traaaaaaaaay!
B: Its here!! Stop rumbling, you idiot!
S: [with a weak smile] Cant believe i made it. Couldn't have done it with you, guys.
Eye, Ear, Nose, Brain: Awwww.
S: Shutup and feed me!

Life with directions?

Have you ever wished while wandering along life's roads, that some of them came with a danger sign? Skull and crossbones that say - Keep Away!

I don't. One, because i don't believe in danger. No, its not quite that. Danger as a distant, faraway possibility does not scare me. Like, if I ever come face to face with a tiger, I will
a. be terrified
b. faint
c. do something incredibly stupid like throw a stone at it and yell shoo
d. all of the above

But, my fear of tigers will not scare me from entering the jungle. I guess sometimes it pays to be unimaginative!

Secondly, no matter how hard a road is, no matter how much it hurts you, no matter how desperately you want it to end, you never come out the same person. Every road teaches you something about yourself, shows you the kind of person you are, the kind of person you want to be. And that to me is worth a few bruises any day.

Untitled

Like a rock she stands
Firm, unyielding
Throwing back whatever the world throws at her.

Oh why not be a lake instead?
Unprotesting, but unchanging
Swallowing whatever the world throws at you
With only a burp of a ripple to show for it.

The geek that never was

Sigh. Its time I admitted it. Although I've been to all the places they go to and spent two years among the best of them, I've come out remarkably unaffected. It can only mean one thing - i am not one of them. Technology does not excite me. What goes on behind the technology does not excite me. Don't get me wrong, I like my job, doing it well gives me a lot of satisfaction, But I think i can safely say that would have been true about any moderately challenging field fate would have pushed me into. And I doubt if such lukewarm sentiments can get me even a visitors pass into geekdom.

I've seen people go crazy about puzzles. They spend days trying to get to an answer, thesis pushed to an unobtrusive corner, discuss them over birthday dinners (birthday boy included!) I've seen whole groups of people obsessed with finding a better way of solving some obscure problem. I've seen them give up movies and sleep in order to participate in programming contents that for some inexplicable reason, always being at midnight (I tried it once, under influence, but didn't make it past 5 A.M. She never asked me again). I've seen people go crazy over games, mobile phones, Ipods, Macs, gaming consoles... But I've always watched from a distance, wanting to want to join in the fun, but not really wanting it.

Its like Phoebe's husband says in Episode 204 (yeah, big surprise, i quote from FRIENDS):

I thought I was supposed to be someone else, you know. I'm an ice dancer. All my friends are gay. I guess I was just trying to fit in. But you reach a point when you cant live a lie anymore. I guess at some level I always knew I was straight.

Addicted

Can you be addicted to multiple things at the same time? I seem to be! And instead of engaging in destructive competition where the winner takes all, they each seem to have chosen a sphere of my life that they aim to fill to the exclusion of everything else. In no particular order, these are:

F.R.I.E.N.D.S
Yes. Again. I don't even know whichth repetition of the series this is. It never seems to get old! Its so bad that i can watch an episode, laugh at all the jokes even though i know them all, immediately watch the same episode again and laugh all over again! I've tried alternatives, but they don't make 'em like that anymore.

Exercise
Yeah!! Even though it doesn't exactly show, its true. I cant go too many days without some form of exercise. I know its supposed to be a good thing and all, but the dependence is scary! I mean, what if someone kidnaps me someday? (Its not as ridiculous as it sounds. I'm in the software industry, I stay with my parents, I am what you get if you cross a monk with a miser). I will be torn between whether to appeal to my kidnapper's better nature to give me more food or ask him to let me run 10 rounds of the jungle.

Banana chips
This one is an old demon. They would occasionally be found in the pantry at my old workplace. My love for them was so famous, people from faraway lands would come and tell me that there were chips in the pantry. And 5 minuets later, they would be no chips in the pantry. Once one person asked me - Auntiji, how many do you eat? (That address is NOT a reflection on me, its not even a personal thing. Its just how people were addressed there. Part of the corporate culture. I thought calling people by names would be difficult, but this! I did get used to it over a period of time, stopped considering it an insult, even slipped into unclejis occasionally). My reply - As many as i can Uncleji, as many as I can.

Blogosphere
Work, or lack of it, is mainly to blame for this one. I can spend a whole day blogtrotting, skimming through some, going deeper than I'd like to admit into others. It is a lot of fun seeing a person emerge from the writings, shaped by your own views and prejudices. To find that I have yet again judged prematurely, that the person lies somewhere in between posts that make me frown in disapproval and posts that make me go awwww. But sometimes I get the feeling that I am a whole generation behind the youth of today (at least the ones who blog). Sigh. Maybe I am.

A prince. And then a pauper.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

And the Director has lost it. All through rehearsal, he has groomed you for a certain part. You go on stage, you play it brilliantly, like you were born for it. Then suddenly, without warning, he thrusts you into another role. One you don't like, don't understand and were quite happy not playing.

The play is a big mess. The Queen, used to taking tough decisions and living with them, now has to live with someone else's decisions. The soldier, whose has not been responsible even for his own life, and has been quite content to be led, is suddenly responsible for the whole kingdom. The King is torn between the Queen and the Kingdom.

But, they are actors. They will manage. They might fumble for a while, forget lines, slip into their previous roles, but they will learn. Understand. Improvise. Some of them might someday get really good at their new role, like they were born for it. Some will always feel out of place. But all of them, for a long time to come, will curse the Director and wonder why He couldn't stick to the script.

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!

There are some days...

- when rearranging your CD collection gives you a sense of purpose in life

- when wearing a sweater makes you feel protected

- when shared laughter over a silly joke bridges over the deepest divide

- when a song sets you free

David wins over Goliath. And you live to see another day.

How to cvw a nbd in ten days

(I write the story with a she. Feel free to substitute with a pronoun of your choice.)

Day 10: You notice her for the first time. A colleague is working with her. You know you are not supposed to stare, but you cant help it. She is so perfect, you don't even want to find out if she is for real.

Night 10: She is all over your dreams.

Day 9: You cant believe how utterly blind you've been all these years. A different kind of blindness takes over now, the right kind. Like Arjuna, you have eyes for nothing else.

Day 8: You work up the courage to go ask your colleague for an introduction. He knows the symptoms only too well. With a wicked grin, he says yes.

Day 7: You notice the competition. Suddenly, everyone is smitten. Doubts creep in. Do I have a chance in hell?

Day 6: You are ruined. Nothing will ever be as good. The half an hour you spend with her convinces you of that.

Day 5: You cook up dozens of elaborate plots all with same end - you spending 5 minutes with her. Some of them actually work.

Day 4: Everyone knows. You couldn't care less. Up in seventh heaven, other people don't really exist.

Day 3: Its tearing you apart. You cannot ask her, you cannot not ask. In a mad moment you blurt out everything. She doesn't mind.

Day 2: But the world does. Everyone sees a problem, everyone has an opinion. You pick the genuine ones and deal with them.

Day 1: D-day. All clear. You have paid the price. You cant wait to get her home. The macbook is yours!

Like Barney says, true story.

(Apologies to the Apple clan for the calling the macbook a she. Please do not kill me.)

Gimme your lunch, or else...

Human beings expand to fill the space available. Not physically, like gases, but terrirotially. What i want to say can be best expressed in Hindi. Jahan chalti hai chalate hain. Imagine each of us as a goon (complete with a oily bald head and a twirlable moustache, if it helps) out to spread our influence. We crush until we get crushed. What stops us is not a sense of right and wrong, not boundaries, not fences but simply a bigger bully.

Do we ever grow up?

A nursery rhyme with inappropriate words

99 red balloons
Released into the summer sky
See how they stick together
Looks like they are a little shy
The brave ones float apart
Experiencing what it is to fly
Soon the others follow
Grinning, shouting, all eager to try!

99 red balloons
Spread out in the open sky
Each leaving the other behind
In a race to a new high
And when one red balloon
Bumps into another flying by
They rub a little off each other
And go their way with a merry cry!

(What? Big words are inappropriate for a nursery rhyme. Something tells me I will do well in journalistic position with TOI.)