Opinions and more

Moved to a new blog

2009-02-13T14:39:00.001+05:30

I have changed loyalties and I now blog at
http://shivangisays.wordpress.com/

Please visit the new blog from now on and leave your comments.

Thinking aloud

2008-09-23T09:45:00.003+05:30

We work to live or we live to work?

This thought reminds me of a debate I participated in my 9th standard at school - "Education is for life or livelihood? " That time I had just asked my elder sister to write a prize winning speech for me without actually understanding what livelihood would mean later on. She wrote, advocating that education is for life first. I delivered the same and won the prize from judges who were teachers educating us all for their livelihood ..(or life ?)

But the question still remains unanswered and changes its meaning at every phase of life. So sometimes you do something to follow your passion, which you later on convert into a profession to make money. In few lucky cases both passion and profession come out from the same place, but most of the times they dont belong to the same stable. Boman Irani (the actor) said on an awards ceremony once - "I get to do my hobby and get paid for it". Wow. But that is not true for so many of us. There would actually be 3 types of people - first like Boman Irani - for whom passion and profession are 2 sides of the same coin. They don't fall for things like job security and a calculated life. They risk and are willing to toss all their energy & efforts on one bet. 2nd - like few of us - where both these Ps are poles apart and one (profession) is done to support the other (passion). This category of people would want to keep the distance this way, so that they can do complete justice to both individually. They dont take many risks in their life but have their own bouts of adventure. And 3rd - like many of us- whose life is devoid of any passion and they work, to live. So these ones are surviving life, but not actually living it. Life, for sure, is very simple for them and follows one single track.

And here, like a consultant (which actually I am not - either by profession or passion) , I have given a 3 pronged framework here, which may or may not mean anything to anyone :) And left my original question with the universal answer- "It depends".

Ya, right.

I am here to stay !!

2007-03-07T21:33:00.000+05:30

So you all thought I was dead and gone ?? ...not so soon..I am as alive and kicking as Jeetendra is in the 'mast baharon ka main Ashiq' song. CUCKOOOO!!!

I was in the middle of what is called the "placement season" at B-schools. How much of an Autumn-like season it was...we poor souls only know. So I took a job in a media company..and I am all YIPPEE,HURRAAHHHHHHHHH, OOH AAH, YESSSSS, WOWWWW about it !!! So there is nothing to do now - chill , chill and more chill..before I graduate in another month.

There is nothing I have to write today so just came to dust my blog after a long time . And oh yes in the last 10 days I have read 3 books - one good, one bad and one ugly.I was starving to read this entire year but never could get time.

1. The ugly one was mother Anita Desai's 'Fasting Feasting'. Now I dont know why she wrote that book and why it got shortlisted for Booker some years back. It is as cliched and as predictable as a software engineer's job of the day. And there are two stories in it one after the other - having common characters but no link in these two at all. So there is one Indian conventional family with 2 daughters and a son and one girl is pretty while the other is considered to get misfortune and all that blah. Anyone, believe me, anyone who has read NCERT's Gulmohar English Reader in class 7 would be able to write that kinda stuff.

2. Anyway the bad one was daughter Kiran Desai's 'The inheritance of loss' which was actually not really 'bad' as to say. But to compare three things , the expression of 'good ,bad ,ugly' looks really cool. (I thought of using Amar Akbar Anthony first, but it was making a little lesser sense in this context). Anyway, now this one actually got the Booker this year and so I paid my tribute by buying this book - that too original print :(. This one has all flowery language and GRE words and vivid description and all but there is not much depth. Not a very bad read though as the setting and environment in the book look very well researched. The north east India - Nepal backdrop is very fresh - something I haven't read in Indian writing yet.

3. And the good one, the excellent one was Richard Llewellyn's 'How Green was my Valley'. Too beautiful and too captivating. The emotions are so well displayed and the character Huw Morgan a teenager boy is one of the strongest characters I have ever read. The book is so simple in language , infact has wrong ,Welsh english but the depth is so much. Somehow these Europeans and Russians really know how to write stuff man. You actually sip and relish each and every paragraph of the book and want to read again and again till you absorb it. An amazing read.

Anyway..that is all for now...I shall be back with more...till then keep commenting.
Cheerio

Dude, be cool…in a B-School!

2006-12-20T03:05:00.000+05:30

I have been in the middle of many things. Totally MBA-ish stuff, you know all those meetings, projects, surveys et al (Note that matter of fact, CEOish tone when I say this). Sounds cool ain’t it ? Well not really. You gotta be here to really see what that means. Try making a questionnaire with random questions varying from ‘what is the number of times you’ve seen Simi Grewal cry on her show?- 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion ’ to ‘how do feel when you see a snake devouring a lizard? – very ugly, ugly, nauseated, confused, very confused, very very confused, what the heck’. You have to plead like hell to get responses to such questions, after you have made up some 23567456 results on your own, that is. This is most difficult when you yourself have always abused the people who have asked you to fill up such surveys for them. It really hurts, believe me. But you have to do this. No MBA degree is complete without this. Another thing that you gotta do to live up to your degree is do some 2 dozen meetings on a daily basis. The more you do, the better it is. The more you do with a different set of people each time, the better it is. And the more you get late for the next meeting and have people waiting for you, the better it is. Some fancy names always help – like ‘focus group’, ‘consulting preparation’, ‘finance domain specialization’ etc etc.
Then you have to have to have to have to have an idea in mind (better if its on a paper) of starting your own business, if not right after your MBA (which rarely is the case), then may be later , like in your next birth or something. If you don’t then you are not ‘cool’ enough. I mean you have to do your own business. How can you ever work ‘under’ someone? Shhheeeesh. How lowly. And the idea of your business has to be totally innovative – something like building a saloon that looks like a Tollywood film studio- where you can get you hair styled like Rajnikanth, Mammooty, Balakrishnan and their brothers, just by selecting a picture from the South Indian version of the Stardust. See if it is not innovative than no one will put money in it, and you will have to go back to the industry to sell detergent powder or a software company service. Dude, Get a life.
You also need to participate in some competition of the IIPM college fest, (Arindam Chaudhari fame). Make sure the competition asks you to give some high end strategic recommendations for the survival of some company, without which, the owner of the company would be selling Santa caps on the traffic lights. You need to differentiate yourself, Dude.

And while doing all this, you gotta remember one thing - DON’T EVER LOSE YOUR FOCUS IN LIFE. Even if you don’t have one, you have to stick to it, whichever imaginary way that is possible. You should know what you want from your life. In fact you should have known that right in your cradle, but nevertheless it’s not that late after all. So just do anything, get that thing in your life somehow. ..what is it called?...yes..FOCUS !!!
Or at least, if you can’t get it, don’t tell anyone that you don’t have it. So next time when someone asks you ‘what do you want to do in life’? – Just leave him confused by saying that - ‘I want to synergistically collate all my core competencies and enterprisingly join an organization where I can passionately develop a long lasting symbiotic relationship with my institution in order to strategically implement all my insightful learning and acquire the maximum possible value’.
WWooaahhhh…Damn cool , Dude.

An earnest request

2006-12-04T01:52:00.000+05:30

All nice people who visit this place.....please click on the link below, hit the button that says 'ENTER' and boom !!!....you will find the owner of this blog spring out of your computer screen and stand in front of you !!!

Now that I have caught your attention, can you please give some more of it to me for next 5 minutes and fill this survey:

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225X86G6UZH

It will save many lives, bring peace to the world, ban Himesh Reshammiya's songs ,wipe off Simi Grewal's tears and help Ganguly score a century.

Well, not really, but it will definitely help me great deal.

Please.

long time ..no blog..

2006-11-17T00:34:00.001+05:30

Been a month since I wrote. Too long a period in a B-school where a zillion things happen everyday. So I got back from vacation, Diwali happened, self sale pitches written,Don kickassed the box office, Umrao Jaan bombed, Adobe's CEO's son got kidnapped, some of us got interviewed in campus, studies became extinct, B-school competitions held and I celebrated my 26th birthday.

In the middle of all that, I wrote this short story for a competition. The starting and ending line (in bold) were given, and word limit was just 300 words.

“If I hadn’t read the letter that night, I would have never known the truth.
Rahul always had a dream of becoming rich and famous. “One day you will see, I will rule the world” – he often used to say. On completing his CA he joined an investment bank. He was awarded with the “young achiever” award within the first year. Within few years, he was playing in heaps of money. A black Audi and a honeymoon in Venice had cost him a fortune.As he kept on growing, so did his wants. His wife Reena and two children would long for him to come home by the evening.

I met Reena in the Chicago downtown that day. After a long chat, I offered to drop her on my way back to home. It was 4 in the day, a very unusual time for Rahul’s car to be seen at home. For the following week, Rahul didn’t go to office and told Reena that he had resigned and now they should move back to India. Reena was ecstatic at this idea, only to know of her husband’s death in a car accident the next day.

I came to stay with Reena and while helping the children dress up for school one day, a white envelope fell on the floor. It had a letter from Rahul’s bank, saying
“The management has come to notice of your fraudulent practices. You have brought disgrace to the institution. For the sake of our bank’s reputation, we are not making this matter public and we are giving you one week’s notice to pay the amount of USD 20 million , the amount you have laundered, failing which you will be taken to court”.

Rahul did not die of a car accident, he had committed suicide and may his soul rest in peace.”

This was the story:).

By the way, one more thing has been happening - unsolicited people trying to give unwanted opinions and obscene comments on my blog. To which I have just one thing to say , that Dude, you are just hitting your head against a wall. The comments will be seen only when approved by me. But converse is not true, I can always abuse the comment writer on my blog, and he can't remove it !!...
I won't do that though, but the mere thought of it is exciting , isn't it ??

Think about it

2006-10-20T12:06:00.000+05:30

They say we live in a much better world today. There are more numbers of working brains today than in the yesteryears. Mental faculties are getting expanded, more and more people are joining the workforce, and industries are growing.

But then, why are creativity levels dipping? Instead of one we have 10 minds to think, so the number of ideas generated should increase tenfold. We have ten different perspectives instead of one, so innovation should also have magnified in that ratio. We boast about technology to have taken a paradigm shift today. Yes, it has. How else do you think we would have been able to copy some creation so finely to make an indistinguishable twin in such a short time !!

After two successful movies, why did Farhan Akhtar have to make a remake of Don? Did he think that in his version, he would improve on whatever lacked in the original ? Well, I am not sure, especially when he’s casting SRK in Amitabh’s role. The reason is nothing but convenience – the plot, the script everything is readily available. All that needs to be done is to fill colors in the ready made sketch. ‘Umrao Jaan’ is another victim of the same ‘remaking’. Why don’t we just leave the classics untouched ? Imagine someone trying to add new sparkling colors to an original Picasso painting.

The same is happening with songs. Poor Pancham Da (R.D Burman) must be crying hard in his grave. When he was mesmerizing the whole world with his melodious tunes, little did he know that after 20 years, the same songs would turn into nothing but a blasphemous concoction of Rakhi Sawant’s raunchy dance movements with some western beats lifted from hip-hop. Not only are these masterpieces getting brutally destroyed, but they are also being presented to the audience as an original piece of work. How many of today’s generation would know that Anamika’s famous song ‘Kahin karta hoga who mera intezaar’ was actually an old sweet song sung by Mukesh as ‘Kahin karti hogi who mera intezaar’ ??? The remixed songs are liked by everyone, but the whole credit is given to some DJ Aqeel or Bally Sagoo, who have tampered with these songs. No music director or singer of the golden era of of 60s and 70s is saved of this disrespectful practice. The audience doesn’t even know the names of many of these artists and the original CDs lie unsold in the music stores.

The whole argument that is put in favor of remaking and remixing is that, it is an attempt towards adding spice to the otherwise boring pieces of art which are long forgotten. This is a totally absurd piece of logic. If we really have to give the due respect to the classics that they deserve and make people remember them always, we should do it the way Mughal-e-Azam was revived. With the help of technology, the black and white classic was converted into a colored one and marketed like any other commercial movie of today at all the major theatres. Why can’t we do that for movies like Bandhini, Sujata, Khamoshi and all other such Bimal Roy’s , Satyajit Ray’s and Raj Kapoor’s classics ?

A remake of these magnificent classics is nothing but a sad mockery of art. We have such a rich heritage of art and it is really pitiful if we don’t do anything to preserve it.

The Doomsday Conspiracy

2006-10-10T22:41:00.000+05:30

Q : Why does the word ‘dentist’ start with a D ?
A : Because Diabolical, devilish, dungeon, dark, dingy, demon, daemon, doomsday, death , Dolores Claiborne (name of a Stephen king’s scary novel) and all such other frightening words also start with a D. (hah!)

Visiting a dentist has been the most horrendous experience for me all through my life. Specially when it comes in the middle of my vacation , when I sit whole day like a cabbage in front of the TV, brain almost dead, sending a signal only when I feel hungry. And then suddenly my world goes topsy-turvy. How could Ogden Nash, in the name of heaven, dedicate a ‘humor’ poem to a dentist’s visit always remains beyond my comprehension. I mean you are supposed to shriek when you see a snake even from 250 miles right, even if it turns out to be a parker pen later on ? And you are supposed to jump over a sofa spilling your coffee when you see a cockroach crawling on your foot right? And you just can’t sleep if there is some sound of 2 lizards copulating or something like that breaking the already eerie silence of your room, right?
If all these behaviors appear normal, then believe me fearing a dentist is the epitome of normalcy. The worst of them being RCT (short for root canal treatment), the baap of all tooth agonies. It actually means that you have screwed up your tooth so bad, that your sins of dreaming about chocolate in night and suddenly getting up and eating it at 3 in the morning are taking a toll on you. You are‘d’ for ‘doomed’. Plain. And if you think that you can happily dig your teeth on that truffle cake thinking that you can pull out that cavity laden tooth whenever you want, hah ! you are mistaken. This one creeps into your gums , roots, canals, rivers, veins, arteries and all those objects under your tooth that you saw once in the biology book. This sinister thing will pain whenever you eat something extra chilled or extra hot, mostly in the night. If for some reason it stops paining, it means that your nerve has gone dead !!. So the point is that there is just no getting away from this one. The dentist will make you lie comfortably and expect you to open your mouth the size of a whale till after 2 hours your jaws start hurting. He will then enter all armed with huge monster like iron weapons and start scraping, hitting, piercing, shoving all of them inside. And only when you make all sorts of frowns (as you are unable to speak) looking like a crushed cotton shirt coming straight out of the washing machine, will he decide to give you local anesthesia. But now this one is not complete unconsciousness, so you can very well see all the atrocities happening on you, and feel like the defeated Japs in world war 2, but can’t yell. The injection on your gum is no less painful. The instruments he uses (I am not making these up) are a drill , a suction pipe, another pipe similar to the tire inflating pump, albeit smaller, forceps, a small hammer kinda object and several other sharp , razor like things. And this goes on for hours and days. You come out lisping as you talk.
Getting a cavity treated would mean the drill will go on pouring cement into your otherwise ignored teeth at the back end of your dentition. If not the pain, then the irritating sound similar to that of scratching your nails against a wall, and the strong gush of air into your tooth will kill you. Something as simple as getting your teeth cleaned also has a satanic meaning at the dentist’s. By asking for this, you are allowing your dentist to poke your gums wherever he wants until he starts seeing blood.
Blood !!! Dracula’s staple diet !!!. See the D word comes again. I told you, all this sure means something. Some supernatural , unholy powers are hovering above us.
All this D-ism is deeply interconnected.
Who encrypted this code ? Da Vinci ?. What ?? ? Another D …NOOOOOOOO!!!!

An uncanny association

2006-09-10T14:07:00.001+05:30

Blogging after a long time, but all blame to my exactly 2 and a half day long illness. It was not bad at all, as my publicizing did get me some ‘get well soons’ and lots of people around me all the time , serving food , water , taking care of me - it was total bliss. Only grudge that it didn’t last for long. And the day I recovered, my laptop fell ill. There was some major glitch, it would just not respond to any key stroke. No ctrl+alt+del , no alt + f4 , no shutting the power switch off helped and it was getting heated up like a Chinese sizzler (sans smoke). When all my engineering had failed, I tried banging and beating it up, the way we used to bang our old black and white TVs to make the reception clear, but that also didn’t help. Finally I had to leave it on its own for a day. This is the latest in the list of gizmos that I have bought in my life. Actually it’s just another laptop, with no gizmoism that I can really see in it. I have never been a gadget freak, may be it’s just a normal girly behavior that clothes and perfumes have attracted me more, or it’s my bad experience with electronic objects at home, which for some reason never worked well. Out of some 23 music systems that my family members have bought till now, the huge dinosaur-like record player was the first I saw when I was a kid. Playing music on that record player would be an exercise to lift the lever kinda object, place the record gently and put the lever back. The records used to be at least 7 times larger than today’s CDs and in a paper cover with big colorful pictures like that of amitabh bachan dressed as a ‘coolie’. It used to be great fun, especially when the record used to get stuck.

‘Baabu samjho ishare , horn puka puka puka puka…….’ (lift the lever and place it back)‘pukare pom pom pom. Yahan chal chal chal chal…..’ (lift the lever and place it back) chalti ko gaadi , kehte hai pya pya pya ……’ (u know what to do) 'pyare pom pom pom…’.

( Hey but surprisingly, Himesh Reshammiya’s songs sound like that even today. ‘Kitne armaan maan maan maan maan jaage tere vaaste soniye’ and that too without the CD getting stuck , I wonder how !!)

Then one day when the store room in my back yard was all filled with water from heavy rains and the records were floating there, my parents decided to dispose the record player and we started listening music on a ‘national’ brand radio cum cassette player which had an antenna as tall as Hrithik Roshan. You would go on pulling and pulling it till the time ‘awaaz ki duniya ke doston’ was not loud and clear. And the flap or the shutter in which you put the cassette was broken, or it never existed at all. So whenever you wanted to listen to music, you would shove the cassette hard, hold it there with your index finger so that it doesn’t fall out of the player, listen to the songs, and take away your finger once you are done listening. Sometimes the cassette also would get ‘stuck’ making Mohd. Rafi’s voice sound like Mahendra Kapoor’s . We would then take the cassette out, pull out the brown reel inside till it broke, and then put nail polish to join it back. One day when we got tired of this exercise my brother and I saved up some money to gift a new swanky looking Bush music player to our Dad on his birthday (So that more than Dad, we could use it). My contribution was a princely sum of 200 bucks; rest 4800 was done by my bro. So whenever I used to fight with brother for letting me use it claiming that I too had a stake in it, he would ask me to take the power cord and go away which was what my contribution was worth :-). But anyway this one worked well for quite some time with a facility to record from one cassette to another and it could record our own voices too. We could also play two cassettes at the same time which we were the most excited about. And by doing this again and again, we managed to screw this one up also. In fact it also developed some rust in a few months. Shocked and devastated we kept on continuing our music system shopping spree. We bought another jazzy system, with all red, green, yellow lights that would go up and down with the highs and lows of Madonna’s voice. It had two big black speakers the size of a maruti car. In a few days it started producing croaking raven-like sounds which could be heard at the other end of our street. We bought many other small objects in between, like a few car stereos one after the other, till finally my father gave up last month, some small portable music players like walkmans, discmans, and other similar stuff. In fact every time anyone used to come home from US, with chocolates they would bring along about a dozen of these tiny gadgets, which would fill the house with joy – the joy that would end in flat 2 months when we would be finding ways to dispose them.

I have really never got the pleasure of seeing some gadget work properly in front of me. The agony extends to cell phones, cordless phones, televisions, DVD players and all other such man made contraptions. It has made me cynical now and I don’t get intrigued by any flashy gizmo, coz I have had a real bad history dealing with them. That reminds me I have to again give my laptop for repair.
That also reminds me that I am an electrical engineer by all virtue, means and a decent GPA and that my non engineer friends call me a 'techie'.
Life sure is ironical.

WHY WHY … WWWWHHYY???

2006-08-16T22:36:00.000+05:30

No no no …not again ….Karan Johar has released another K movie !!!. There are three things in India that you can’t close your eyes to - Men answering nature’s call on roadside, stray dogs in a procession following your car, and Karan Johar’s movies. I have suffered thrice, hoping the agony would decrease each time But no it does not happen. And again I go to watch it after a lot of deliberation, compulsion, deprecation, and dilemma. I do that so that I can badger the bugger in public. So that I can waste some nerve wondering why theatres look more crowded than the Mecca in Ramzan days whenever he releases a movie. So that I can take a vow, that this was my last time.

But now I really can’t encourage that any more. I had a fit of headache in KKHH, where everyone is tying friendship bands to everyone else wearing bright Gap t-shirts. Anupam Kher is trying his hardest to make you laugh, and the whole world is singing and dancing. Farida Jalal is trying to be the cutie pie matching her granddaughter’s intellect. Shahrukh Khan as always is God, and has passed over some super natural powers to his daughter, who starts reading and understanding the human psyche, love and emotions through Rani Mukherjee’s letters even before she steps out of her cradle. And when she turns eight, she has found the mission of her life (much earlier than Buddha could find) – to make her father meet his long lost friend Kajol again. Kajol, who is very coincidentally still single after 8 long years, is just about to get married. Not to forget, it took her 8 long years to become feminine and learn to tie a sari. No climax, lots of tears, lousy jokes, an American style college, and a Punjabi marriage song in a house more decorated than the Mysore palace in evening – and loads of crap.
Then came the next one. This time in the form of KKKG . So KJ thought he would increase the number of tears this time, make Kajol look a bit more retarded, and balance the equation by taking another hero in the movie, so that one heroine does not have to die. To make a bigger impact he brought the Bachans dance to hindi-punjabi-english songs. Say shava shava mahiya. Oh yes, and Rani had to be there, as it is against the law of nature to show only one woman falling in love with SRK. He also added some haunting effects by making Jaya Bachan run around like a mad woman whenever her son misses her 100000 km away. Farida Jalal again, called as DJ this time , is trying to do a la-Da Vinci Code, by cracking some very cryptic puzzles, when she makes out that if a 26 year old, 6 feet tall , well built guy can’t tie his shoe laces, he has to be none other than Hrithik Roshan. There are around 2 dozen kids this time also dancing in background. They are cute though. Roshan, easily finds a way in the philanthropic SRK’s house and Cupid is right on time . If KKHH had an American school, this one had to have a prom party. And if we don’t see Kajol and SRK acting mushy on Karwa Chauth, what would happen to the next door Sharma Aunty and Walia Aunty and all other ladies at the kitty party?
KHNH, with the weirdest name so far, was surprisingly an inch better than its predecessors. At least there was Saif who had a good sense of humour. Dialogues were better worked on and no one was made to look retarded. Plot was half lifted from Anand, (with SRK the cancer patient, larger than life as always) and half from Masoom (Jenny the illegitimate child) and packaged with better music and slickly dressed up Zinta. But SRK’s mother was still shown crying rivers and SRK had again taken birth to set everything right on the earth. The Good Samaritan Khan could make everyone smile, transform the business model of Jaya’s café and make the love story work between Preity and Saif. As KJ can’t show any ugliness of reality on his movies, to show Preity’s family a little less well off, he had to take them to US where they still looked nice and beautiful. And the Indian-American confused culture could still not be parted with – a Hollywood style proposal to Preity by Saif, melting the college girl’s heart and Saif’s family doing a whacky Gujju number followed by the Punjabi ‘Jind mahi we soniye’ .(I wonder if these are his favorite words : Mahi, soniye, shava)

But not anymore now. This time this KANK has 4 lead actors, each one marrying the other (I’ve heard) so there will be a lot of emotional nonsense and melodrama. Everyone will have 2 parents each, who will dance together in a big house. There can be chances of some other festival like Lohri or baisakhi , being picturised in Sydney this time. And there might be 15-16 hidden actors whom KJ has still not shown in promos.

I have to make my resolve very strict this time, as my friends will definitely drag me, and I’ll be pulling my hair for the fourth time now …NOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!!!!!!!!

This day this year

2006-08-07T00:51:00.001+05:30

Somebody wished me happy friendship’s day at 12 in the nite. I am always at a loss of words when someone does this to me. I mean you are required to smile back and say ‘thank you, same to you’ ….‘Same to you’ ???...what ???? ..this is like the corniest phrase ever from childhood days, when speaking in English was an attitude thingy. The more elaborate form of this phrase , what chintu used to tell munnu was ‘ same to you, back to you’…as if he was taking out all his vengeance on the person who wished him and he didn’t want to keep others’ wishes with him.

The point is not that. The point is this archies-gallery-created pious and auspicious festival called the ‘friendship day’. I have been seeing this occur every year since I was in college and a regular shopper at these pink, mushy card shops. Like any other festival, this one would also change its date of occurrence every year. But unlike others like Diwali et al, the reason is not the unpredictable Hindu calendar, where the size of moon decides the date of festivals. This anglicized, man-made fest is on every first Sunday of August.
Why august? There may be two reasons. One, a rather historical and insignificant one, is that the US congress proclaimed this day in August 1935 as the friendship day. And two, which looks more plausible to me, is that one bad day in August in 1990s, Archies and Hallmark saw their sales plunging. The quarter results were very bad. The managers were about to be fired. And there this idea was born. Pick any day, call it friendship day (as valentine’s was already taken, and platonic relations were on a rise) and print bright colored cards to sell. And why Sunday? – so that people are free and would not mind shopping greeting cards.

Okay I made some incidents up, but doesn’t it look like the reason behind this entire gimmick? We in our MBA lingo call this as ‘demand creation’ - Selling an utterly obnoxious idea to people and making them demand it. The more emotional strings you attach, the better it sells – a recipe adopted and copyrighted by Karan Johar in his too-beautiful-to-be-real movies. In fact, his blockbuster movie ‘Kuch kuch hota hai’ takes a lot of credit for pioneering the ‘friendship model’. Not only cards, the archies stores have a huge range of merchandise from teddy bears, to mugs, golden chocolate packs and even rakhis now.

This is not bad or immoral. Some really smart asses are reaping money out of the growing consumerism and financial independence of young adults. And till the time they are young, these demand creators will milk them.

Who knows, then, they might come up with a ‘divorce day’ or ‘diabetes day’ to cater to all ages of people !!

And by the way, happy friendship’s day to any of my friends who read this. Don’t expect me to buy a card for you, and please don’t say ‘same to you’ to me.

All in the family

2006-07-29T03:31:00.000+05:30

“I love you, you love me, we are a happy family” . I heard my 6 year old nephew singing this one day. It was very cute. The words ‘happy’ and ‘family' almost always come in tandem (if we excuse the Ambanis and other antagonistic clans, that is). One such hum-do-hamare-do , happy, successful family that catches my eye is the ‘Kapoor’ family, which interestingly is not the Raj Kapoor family. Ok, take a shot at this :

“ I am an old guy now
Known as ‘Ravi Kapoor’ long time ago
Changed my name to enter films
Generally found in white pants”

Guessed it? No??...Our very own jumping jack Jeetendra. All 4 in this Kapoor family have been entertaining us for years in their own different ways.

Big Daddy Jeetu swaying his white-pants-tucked-hips with Sreedevi on the celluloid with ten thousand pots in the background was a sure ‘feast’ to watch. Or even better was watching him wearing a frock in ‘dharamveer’ and trying to woo women with our Dharam paaji. If he was not cuckooing in ‘farz’, he was synchronizing his steps to the badminton strokes in ‘dhal gaya din, ho gayi raat’. All that was okay, till the time he really opened his mouth to speak. I could never understand why and how he would make a simple dialogue like ‘I love you’ sound so very rhetoric – as if he was giving the speech of independence to a nation. But whatever, he wins full marks for making the audience throng to theatres to listen to his constipated like, full of effort voice. Are people crazy?. They might be, but Jeetu was a smart ass to win out of their craziness.

And if papa wasn’t enough, sonny Tushar Kapoor is carrying his family trend forward. This one is a classic case of being able to sell a totally unappealing and outlandish product to the public and sustaining it. Just think about Tushar Kapoor, the very first thing that cuts all his marks is the fact that he is Jeetu’s son. Okay we may ignore that. Next, he has a very ordinary (or rather less than ordinary) looks and physique. Fine, that is also taken. Further, his voice is still not cracked and is like that of a teenager. …Okay, can he atleast act…the very reason we would want him in the film industry for ?. NO. Ever seen those extra artists in a drama, who stay right at the back of the stage, and are given the roles of a tree or a sunflower, where all they have to do is stand and sway their arms ? According to me, he should do one of those roles, or like the latest role of a speechless guy he played in ‘Golmaal’. (What a relief it was !!). But somehow he also sells. His first movie was a hit. These kapoors sure have the knack of making money out of crap, like the other two members, Ekta and Shobha kapoor, the TRP queens of today.

Boy, they have changed the world of TV shows today. Smart females, they have hit bang on the most sensitive nerve of audience. They have glorified the life of an Indian family, packed it in bright golden paper and put it on the television. The ladies in the shows, no matter what happens in the world, are always garishly dressed up. The grandmother who
is most sought after by the viewers is like 329 years old and still active. The husband who dies in the show (because he picked a fight with director madam Ekta) comes back after some episodes with a changed face, depending on the fall and rise of TRPs. Big, beautiful houses, businesses worth crores, and latest fashion trends – they are showing the middle class families their dreams. Nobody would want to watch a tattered house and a poor family on the TV. The daughter-mother duo is doing exactly the right thing, making viewers think that life really is what they show. Ladies discuss the lives of Tulsi and Parvati more than their own at kitty parties. Each character is like a part of their families, visiting them every evening.

And so by making the public suspend their disbeliefs, they are churning green notes. Smartness flows in this ‘happy family’. Indeed.
You might hate them, but you can’t avoid them.

why no new posts ?

2006-07-14T16:49:00.000+05:30

Some unavoidable things like exams and some more interesting things like college magazine editing are not letting me blog these days.
Will be back very very soon, keep visting this place....it increases the TRP ratings of my blog :)

Idiosyncrasies of the idiot box

2006-07-02T21:03:00.000+05:30

We really are in the 21st century. We can do almost everything that we imagine. Don’t like your nose ? - get a surgeon to change it. Want a baby who looks like Al Pacino and thinks like Shakuntala Devi ? - Get the bio tech guys produce one in the lab by combining the right DNAs. Lazy to go to school ? – Get your clone do the job for you.
While we think we are almost God-like to control the things around us, there is one thing that is still beyond our reach.

The television shows.

Try surfing tv channels at an unearthly hour in the night, and you will feel truly helpless.
Start with the south indian channels, you have a lot of variety here. Asianet, surya, udaya, vijay ajay, sujay etc etc. People are always happily dancing there in big crowds unlike the ever sobbing garishly dressed bahus on star plus. There is a hero and a heroine madly in love, and 2500 of their other friends celebrating their happiness in chorus. The hero is generally clad in body hugging white pants, a tight shirt that well accentuates his curd-rice filled belly and a tie that is as wide as a plantain leaf. He looks exactly like some distant uncle of yours in mid forties but only difference is that your uncle wouldn't have done pelvic thrusts on the telly with a woman. The heroine is generally the same size and she loves to show her thunder thighs in skimpy bright colored skirts. High energy music, ‘Chinamma chinamma aadoo aadoo aadoo ‘ and powerfully synchronised PT like dance moves, this one is sure fun to watch.

Or go to the tele shopping network – some firang faces talking in hindi , as articulate as your junior school hindi teacher. Consider this : ‘Main hoon Paul. main kaafi mota ho gaya tha. Mera parties par jana band ho gaya tha. Samajh mein nahin aata tha main kya karoon. Aur tab mujhe mila yeh Tupperware ka slimfast. Isse to meri zindagi hi badal gayi.’
These products remind me of the self help books that sell crazily on streets, assuring you that all you needed to become a millionaire was to read this book. The dubbed voices are really really funny, as there is a same set of people doing this for all channels be it cartoon network’s johny bravo or the unhappy - happy Paul on this channel.

Even better, watch any of the hundred and one punju music channels (etc punjabi , alpha ,beta et al). There will be a Jaswinder Singh Bains (who ,now that he’s on tv, likes to be known as a cool ‘Jazzy B’) and millions others. The rocket speed at which the number of ‘punjabi pop’ singers is growing, chances are that you can never see the same singer again when you come back to the channel. Earlier on the countryside bumpkins of Punjab used to sell their lands to buy tickets to Canada, now they sell them to produce their music albums. It takes a green field of paddy, one tractor, one macho Punjabi munda with a bottle of rum in his hand and a few long-braided women in multicolored clothes to shoot such a song. Modern ‘jazzy B’ versions are generally shot in Chandigarh.

Then there are the bhakti channels. Very cool. And very easy. Anyone who cannot do anything today has one employment guaranteed by the Indians. And that is to become a ‘baba’ and talk about the meaning of life, happiness and other theological topics. You will get crowd in huge numbers and highest of TRP ratings ; just talk about any arbitrary thing like : 'Why did God create lizards' or anything similar.

If all this does not satiate you, you better switch on to the Hi-music channel. This is the one where you can call up and request for a song of your choice. And why is that entertaining ? Simple. Because no matter what you request, 90% of the times it is our (un)sung hero with a cap doing rounds – Himesh Reshammiya.

JUST WHO ON THE EARTH REQUESTS FOR HIS SONGS AGAIN AND AGAIN ??????

Am I not justified to feel helpless now ?

Kiss and tale

2006-06-14T00:19:00.001+05:30

Once upon a time there was a birthday party. People were singing and kissing the birthday boy. Everyone was merry and gay. Suddenly the birthday boy got excited and in the wake of showing his gabhru-tandoori-chicken-punjabi-munda machismo, held a girl tightly and kissed hard on her lips. And then, all hell broke loose. The girl abused the Punju lad in public, in papers and on the idiot box. While the lady was trying hard to become the cynosure, the whole world laughed. And yes, everyone has been living happily ever after since then.

This is not a concocted fiction piece, but a reality. Thanks to the bright-yellow, page threeish journalism of today, this news has hogged more limelight than it ever deserved. The characters in the story are no more significant than you, me, or the road side chai wallah near your house. In fact I got to know the name and existence of the lady only after reading the news today. She is some Rakhi Sawant, an ‘item girl’ (Item girl is a term that has lately achieved cult status here). You must have seen her wiggling her hips on some raunchy number created after blasphemously remixing a good old Hindi song. Like everyone else of her clan, her motto is - “ Have body , will flaunt “ ( rather more appropriately – “ have no mind, no job, no other talent, need money , will flaunt”) The guy is one of the million Punjabi pop singers – Mika , brother of Daler-tunak-human-traficker-tunak-Mehendi. Mika’s hall of fame goes beyond his brotherly relations, to his very inspiring nasal voice. (Didn’t you always wonder where Himesh Reshammiya got his voice from ?)

Now Ms. Sawant has apparently charged a molestation case against Mika, which has made all news channel people very busy. Her uncouth bad mouthing is being aired on the TV. Both have managed to get a full 400 words article published in a major newspaper. One is crying for sympathy from the crowd (after having shed almost all her clothes) and other, by saying “she approached me first”, is trying to show what a gentlemanlike Casanova he is.

But whatever their motives are, I am sure we can do with the media not wasting our time on such riffraff. I mean who’s interested in knowing who kissed whom on whose birthday party??? The last time they did this was with the Kareena-Shahid lip lock story which was hyped as if it was the news about Pakistan throwing nuclear bombs in India. All that for cheap and zero content publicity. Its high time media stopped thinking that public will digest whatever it feeds them. Some serious work on quality improvement is required here. And that too urgently.

I leave it at this thought, and hope to find some good matter in the newspaper tomorrow morning.

P.S: I haven’t made the Himesh Reshammiya part up. He did say once in his interview that he is inspired by Mika’s singing style …I seriously have no comments on that one now !!!

away from the blog world

2006-06-06T23:18:00.000+05:30

dear readers :)

i am on a vacation till 11th june....going back home ...
so no new posts for a week

see ya all later..

Exam-o-dementia

2006-05-27T00:14:00.000+05:30

You will have to excuse me for this. I could not think of a better thing to write about at this point of time. We all have a very very long association with this forgettable experience of taking examinations. The education system in India (I haven’t studied elsewhere) is such that you are barely out of the cradle when you are made to write your first test. While we grow up trying to demystify the reason behind this whole idea of examinations, the teachers are satiating themselves with the sadistic pleasures of putting the students to grind. Ask the kids what they want to become in life, and at least one out of five would scream their wish to be a teacher. Purely because they want someone else to suffer the way they have. Very understandable.

Exams play the spoil sport in a student’s life. The effects are worst at the 2 extreme ends of the spectrum: the toppers and the god-please-make-me-pass-this-time types. The first category ones are those who have made their parents’ hopes touch the sky, by being always at the top. Now to maintain their position, they have to slog their asses out everyday. These are the ones who would struggle day in and day out, and during the exams they will hibernate in some god’s forsaken corner, where days and nights look same to them, as they are reading the four extra reference books inside out , after their course books. If you ask me, they are actually showing disrespect to the examiner, by trying to predict his intentions. Tch Tch.

The other end is hit equally badly. These are the ones for whom a night before exam is all they have to their lives. If they pass through this, they will definitely study hard and regularly from next time. That is the promise they make to their dear God and to themselves. Their books smell as fresh on the exam day as they did when they had bought them (in order to fulfill the last year’s promise to study well this time). They go to the examination hall muttering a prayer and trying to kick themselves in the rear for all the time they were goofing around while their peers were burning the 3 am oil. They, on the contrary, respect the examiner so much, that they are absolutely at his mercy to make them scrape through this time.

Well, whichever category you may fall in, exams will always work towards giving you a psychosomatic disorder if you take them ‘that’ seriously. It generally happens that the more you keep on doing something, the less you get affected by it in due course of time. I have a 16 year long education behind me, and I must have taken some 1859732 exams till now. So I have attained nirvana now. Exams or no exams, life looks as beautiful as ever !

And now that I’ve made everyone wary of me, God can you please please please help me with my exams this time!!!!

P for Politics

2006-05-22T01:20:00.000+05:30

Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. In fact the mere sight of it from a distance entices some of us. What inspires me to write today are the ongoing college politics. I’ll keep it short (I generally excuse politics, sex and religion from my writing…but not pink floyd (?!?!).

So far the scene has been real interesting and full of mirchi masala. Passion is flowing in abundance. Strategies are getting formed and altered. The fight to show how-smart-i-am-when-it-comes-to-empty-bombastic-talking is going great guns. There are some who are ready to give their eyes and teeth to just get any post. You can find them in some corner with a bunch of others planning out things at 3 in the morning. Not to talk about the mails that we have to receive, which count up to about three hundred and forty six on a daily basis (okay, something close). There are some genuinely interested people and some getting pulled into the puddle after a lot of pumping from their friends. Be it buying a drink to throwing a party or showing unwanted concern, campaigning is going on as a serious business. Need based camaraderie is getting formed and broken at the drop of a hat. People are getting sugary sweet to you in want for votes, but I am actually loving it. At least they are warm to you, and I hope the warmth is a little less short lived than it now seems to be. For a laid back blogger like me , this serves a lot of fun watching people sweat out in the quest for power , and giving me stuff to write about. So far so good.

What I am not liking about the entire story are the crafty games that people are playing, which seem to come straight from an Ekta Kapoor saas bahu soap. Groupism and cheap back biting are doing rounds on the dinner table as appetizers. No time is being wasted in turning your back to the same person you supported with all zeal. All this for the most coveted object on the planet – POWER.

But now that is how things are everywhere, so let’s wait to see the scene get juicier by the day and hope power does not corrupt the winners !

DISCLAIMER : The write up above does NOT target any particular individual. Before writing a comment just remember to not take it personally. You rock people !!
And that reminds me, my site meter shows around 300 hits and 450 page views a week, and I sure am loving it !!.
So please keep reading…and commenting.
Cheerio.

Weight and watch

2006-05-13T12:20:00.000+05:30

We women are an interesting species of the humankind. We all are united in our thoughts and concerns. We also have our own peculiar dreams and targets set in life, and most of our lives are spent in achieving those. We never shirk to defy the existing logics, and derive our own inferences. Say for e.g : The logic behind metabolism of human body would never suggest that the moment you eat something, it instantly increases your weight. But we women, the daring clan, would like to differ from this premise. For us, every bite of the sinful chocolate truffle cake that we eat, sticks instantaneously to our waist even before we have enjoyed its heavenly taste. And within those 5 minutes of scraping off the plate and licking chocolate off the fingers, we end up setting a 2 hour workout target for ourselves. We would not settle for anything less, and so we set high excellence standards, something like a Jennifer Lopez body in 2 weeks. We dream big.

We also find a bit of pleasure in deprecating ourselves. In a woman’s wardrobe you will find all the dresses of her present size, plus one DD ...that is to say a ‘Dream Dress’ .This is one dress ,which she could slide in some 10 years back, and she has a dream to be able to fit into it now someday , somewhere. The mere sight of the DD depresses her but she would never want to throw it away.

We also dare to defy the weighing scale standards. I mean, why believe in those stupid numbers, life means a lot more than that. Even after removing slippers, earrings, watch, makeup and all other ‘heavy’ objects , and standing on one foot or the other, giving a skewed look to the scale – the scale shows the same as before. There is something grossly wrong with the machine. And similarly with the measuring tape, it does not know how to differentiate the reduced waist sizes. Huh ! to hell with the standards , we don’t believe in conventionalism.

But all that said, we are a truly balanced lot. We have fairly simple ways to gauge our mood swings, and take care of them. We do feel bad at times to look at ourselves, but we exactly know how to drown away our blues.

And most of the times we do that by helping ourselves with another indulgence of chocolate.
Anyone coming to the café with me? Ladies only please, for only they can understand such grave concerns !!

jargon-ology

2006-05-05T18:17:00.000+05:30

I am on a high. I just finished my economics assignment and a packet of salted peanuts. So both my stomach and mind are clogged right now. Deadly combo for writing a blog entry.

There has been a lot of learning over the past few days. Real learning I must say. When I had said in my ISB interview that ‘I want to keep learning continuously ‘, little did I know that the guys here would take that so seriously. They keep on hammering a new term better known as ‘jargon’ every second into my mind. It actually started with acronyms like ASA, CAS, PPT, CAF, BTC, LRC, SV, LDP,PPT,GSB,OCD. Okay, not the last one, which means Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but it somehow tends to fit in the series. Next came the real B-school terms. And believe me these words are magical; they can describe every possible emotion of the human psyche. Say for instance : the hypothetical amount of money that you could have earned if you were doing task A, but you were a jackass to do task B instead ,would managerially be termed as the 'opportunity cost’ of doing task B. Now you would say, how does it explain any human emotion. Well, it darn does!!. According to this concept, my total fees at ISB is a lot more than I paid, as I ‘could’ have earned some dough at my work for one year which I lose here. So you know which emotion I am talking about here. But it does not mean that I or all my fellow students are jackasses.

Talking further about terms, my favorites have been the ‘false positive’ and ‘false negative’. Lets assume you miss each and every party at ISB. Saturday evening means Monday morning to you. You believe God has sent you on this planet only to study. You finish each and every assignment even before it is handed out (okay assuming you can do it), and you take the 14 lakh fee so seriously that you calculate the net worth of every minute you waste doing something else apart from studies. And in the end, the recruiters don’t even ask you your grades and after screwing up your entire year, you still don’t get the job you wanted. So all the grind you went through was an unnecessary action, and you should NOT have done something that you did. That precisely would mean that you committed a false positive, by keeping conditions so stringent around you.

Now what would ‘false negative’ be…aha !!..exactly the opposite, you party everyday like there is no tomorrow, assuming that the studies have their own way of getting into your mind and assignments will get completed when you tell them to. You end up ‘NOT doing’ what was required. But even to think about performing this required action makes me sad.
So I move on to the next, the highly hazy -‘marginal revenue’ or ‘marginal profit’ or ‘marginal every-goddamn-economic-term’ Now this one is funny. Marginal revenue for a firm they say decreases as you buy more and more. So would that mean if I keep on making more and more STD calls from my room phone, ISB would start charging me less !!...errrrrr….i sure need to do my economics study again.

While I do that, can someone tell me why the ‘convenience store’ at ISB is so inconveniently named..I mean we could have called it something else right?? For God’s sake, please abbreviate this one.

first day(s) at ISB -part 2

2006-04-27T00:58:00.000+05:30

One major determinant of life at ISB I heard is the parties. I’ve seen that with my own eyes now. Partying is so common that I’d rather say I am ‘4 parties old here’ than saying I have spent a week and a half here. And not only in number, the types are also manifold. There’s a pool party (beside the pool of course) and there is a mirror pool party. There’s a bar-be-cue party and there’s a tang party(tang is some close kin of glucon D) . There is a pizza party and there’s an only booze party. I think we are so creative , that we can come up with a more obnoxious form of party each time. Say milk and cornflakes party (in the morning , if you are badly in need of a prty), or mug-all-books party (u know what that means) or even better, a lets-form-a-new-club party. So you can just party about anything under the ISB roof. Pretty cool.

But my point is not that. What I want to say is that, whatever be the form of the party, there is a common thread going always and that is – the impenetrable, loud and crazy western music. I can enjoy music only if I can hum while the song is playing. So, I stand and go next to speakers to make out what the bloke is singing. After all, when everyone around seems to love the masterpiece poetry in these songs, it must be good. And I am pretty ‘uncool’ if I don’t know the lyrics. I try harder and harder. Increase the volume. Only the screams increase. Can’t make out a word of it. Evreyone around me is singing along, what am I doing !! Not my fault, I’ve been brought up listening to ‘tera mera pyar amar’ or ‘mere mehboob tujhe meri mohabbat ki kasam’. I go back to my room and google out the lyrics. I heard someone saying ‘pink floyd is awesome man’ so thatz how I know it was a pink floyd song. I get some lyrics like :

I have seen the writing on the wall.
Don't think I need any thing at all.No.
Don't think I need anything at all.
All in all it was all just the bricks in the wall.
All in all it was all just the bricks in the wall.

Read it again, twice, three times …..man what is it ???? Is there a hidden divine message in this that my cognitive box is unable to assess ???. People I see are going gaga over this. Again the question ‘am I uncool’ ??
Okay next google search, I somehow could figure out the words ‘my hump my hump’ while listening to the song. So I dig more, and this is what I get
Now this one is really interesting :

I drive these brothers crazy,
I do it on the daily,
They treat me really nicely,
They buy me all these ices.
Dolce & Gabbana,Fendi and NaDonnaKaran,
they be sharin'
All their money got me wearin' fly
But I ain't askin,They say they love my ass ‘n,

I hope Milton or Eliot don’t get to read this ‘poetry’,else they’ll spring back from their graves and stand upright. And for the one above, I am almost sure that there can absolutely be NO hidden meaning in this, because it does not even have a skin deep meaning. Try out some hip hop songs lyrics :

Baby I gotta a big car
I take you around
You put your ass in my car
I love your navel ring you pierce my ear
I buy you pizza you take my nailcutter
You go with the muscle guy
On a horse you go you go you go you go
You ain’t not my girlfriend

Okay I have just made that up. But the actual ones are no different from these.
And I give up now. I can’t carry on with this ‘operation coolisation’ anymore. And I am back to my kinda stuff.

A Mohd. Rafi party at my place tomorrow. Anyone ?

first day(s) at ISB

2006-04-22T12:15:00.000+05:30

I am writing this in the interest of my friends and folks, who've been asking me how is life going at ISB.Its been an absolutely happening week, all 420 of us were put on a week long roller coaster ride last saturday, which gets some halt today ; and that too coz after an enormous dosage of gyan everyday, I realised that it was getting a bit too much and skipping the sessions today was just okay.

Okay how to spot your fellow ISBian at the airport : If the person is carrying huge luggage, that looks like his entire family luggage,even better if he's carrying a sport or musical instrument. Go a bit closer and look into his eyes, if you find the 1crore dream in his eyes : BINGO !! you've just spotted your competitor for the next one year !!
Then starts the introduction, which I have tiringly given and taken for like 300 times now. One out of 10 (or less) will be from IT. The typical intro is : whats your background, your work experience , your family..blah blah...and collating all this info, you definitely find some distant friend or relative of yours that this ISBian has worked or studied with. World is virtually small at ISB in contrast with the fees. One setback that you might face is in all this is that, after getting pally with an attractive mortal from the opposite gender, you are told that he or she is put up in a studio. Disaster. That means he or she is married. Too bad.
Another thing with introductions is that, you are just in flow of exchanging so much information from each other, that you might end up telling your tale to the same person four times. And worse - you still don't remember his name.

But nonetheless, things have started getting better towards the end of this week. 4 parties, quite some group activities and the practices for the inter section fight : we've started to know each other better. The same person whom I first day thought of as the one having a crystal clear picture of his future has turned out to be as hazy as I am . The same person who intimidated you with Mckinsey as his preferred recruiter, does not really know what consulting is, so you see that you have some company here !! Groups are getting formed and gossip mongering has already started - in short we are getting back to our real selves !!

Just a thought...

2006-03-27T15:43:00.000+05:30

I believe a poem need not necessarily rhyme. A poem is similar to a canvas painting, where we start with a little stroke of a brush and slowly pour in all colours that look beautiful. It is also similar to a symphony, created on the piano by different notes in a sequence. The outcome of various thoughts in the same line packaged together form a sketch, a composition or a poem.The essence of art is the same in each, only the mode to present it changes.
Its the thought and not the rhyming of a poetry that matters. If Tagore had thought otherwise, we would have never enjoyed his beautiful thoughts that were unchained by 'rhyming'.

Sometimes the reveries are put into words in their most raw form -straight from the heart onto the paper - just like a freshly baked pot straight from the urn , unpainted, having the natural colour of orange mud....the one above is just like that !

Violins, romance and beauty….

2006-02-28T21:03:00.000+05:30

….that is what makes paris. In my next lines I would try to pen the reveries of the two most beautiful days of my life…the two days that I spent in paris – the place whose very name is sure to make anyone dreamy.
So it happened on a Friday evening that I packed my bags to board a boeing from Amsterdam. Reached the jewel of france at 10 in nite and off to the hotel only to be told that there has been no booking in my name! But still made way to a dingy room to throw the luggage. Didn’t want to waste any time, so came out of the hotel at elevinish and then started the hunt for food – through the quaint narrow alleys – that typically characterize the city. Got some grub and googled out all that of paris that I would visit in the next almost 48 hours.
Saturday morning, a map in hand , I went from one subway tram station to other , to reach ‘musee de louvre’ – (the louevre museum). The photography started even before entering the gates of the museum. It was a difficult choice between endlessly admiring the beauty of the place and capturing all of it in the camera. If whole of European architecture is a chocolate cake, then paris is the cherry on it ! The museum is not only large; it is wide, it is rich, it is magnificent, it feels like ‘ oh my god, where are we !! ‘ . Each painting actually speaks a thousand words or more there and though painted 2 centuries back, each one looks as fresh as ever. The famous mona lisa picture was the only area where you couldn’t click photographs. There were different floors and sections for different types of art. I saw the French and Italian paintings, and a lot of beautiful sculptures – that formed a different world altogether. The Napolean apartments, was another grand attraction, that made the history book chapters come live before my eyes and after that I visited
….the very well known ‘Notre dame’ church, which is more of a visitor’s place owing to its truly handsome, white stone structure. The cathedral is perhaps the biggest one in the country, and dates back to the 19th century. There were thousands of small candles lit up in the dark that make the place so pious and so pure. There were real confession boxes and the ‘light crown’ is a huge chandelier that used to hang in the church back in 1800s and could hold some hundreds of candles – people had to climb over it to clean it back then. Came out of the church and the weather was so pleasant by then and so was the colour of the city, beautiful as in a picture. Each tram station you crossed, you got to hear lovely violins or saxophones being played. Music truly flows in the air of paris along with the romance …which could be very well felt at ….
…the topmost floor of eiffel tower. The view from there was splendid. The feeling was of being at top of the world. The beauty was inexplicable. This magnificent iron structure looks sparklingly pretty when all lit up in the evening. I could’ve spent hours and hours there. Dead tired with the stair climbing to the tower, hit the bed to get up next day and vroom to the…..
….DisneyLand …something that I dreamed of visiting when I was a kid as I used to think mickey mouse actually lived there !. Oh boy ! ..I could not blink my eyes for a split second there.…there were rides, scary Armageddon effects, a trip through how stunts are made in Hollywood movies, animation studios and what not. And what I saw after that was like a world built only on imaginations where Pinocchio was real and lived in a wooden house, where candy and sweets was all you eat, and where Aladdin actually flew on a magic carpet. All fairytales were true in this cute world of innocence. There was mickey mouse in everything, from t-shirts to popcorns to hats to even the floor tiles. This one day subtracted 20 years from my life ! The carnival was one that could never be seen anywhere else.

And so that was it. I wish I had two more days, and two more eyes to watch the city more. But whatever I saw will remain perfectly etched on my mind now.

Windmills, Wooden Shoes, Water and much more...on a weekend

2006-02-27T22:25:00.000+05:30

Okay..i have been delaying this for quite some time now but its high time i poured my musings here...
Before i forget, i gotta leave everything at one corner of my head and write about my weekend which was so very sumptuous and fun-filled this time. Come friday evening and my butt gets allergic to the ground, I just have to have to go out. Saw this jim carrey flick 'fun with dick and jane' - not worth mentioning on my post. A good night sleep after my latest thomas hardy book.
Voila! Saturday morning , time to freak out..just 3 more weekends in amsterdam, can't afford to waste any fraction of second at home. and voila again ! all my roommates pack their bags to stay over their friends' place till sunday evening :(
So that leaves me ALONE, in the 'holy' city of amsterdam for 2 days, and that is when i see the visitor's guide in front of me, and that is when I begin to list all places i have to visit , in fact DISCOVER and then visit..cool. Loaded with my camera , made a dash to the centre of amsterdam with stomach grumbling with hunger , and bought a ticket to the amsterdam countryside tour. The bus first took me through the picturesque countryside into the beautiful windmill village of Zaanse Schans and to a wooden shoemaker here. Windmills, wooden shoes, cheese and houseboats - that is what defines the traditional holland. Took some pictures there; saw how a shoe is made. Its actually called a'clog' and so dutch are playfully known as 'cloggies' . Then went to the 'volendam' village where the fishermen live. Amazingly beautiful .By the sea. Some huuuge ships and very very cold and windy weather. Did some souvenier shopping, to keep memories, had the famous orange liquor pancakes (with lots of liqour :)) and then , a headway to the cheesy cheese place. Various types of cheese on display, and a demo by a young lady in the typical dutch attire of a striped apron on how cheese is made. Lots of memories , that I tried to somehow capture in a few pictures...and back to amsterdam at 7. Saturday evening, can't go home, allergic but syndrome again, so went to this movie 'Munich' in pathe tuchinski cinema : one of the most beautiful and artistic cinemas of europe. Movie was quite some serious dose, but good work and that got me to the end of saturday, back to thomas hardy and fairies snuggled me to sleep.
Sunday morning, hey, so many things on the visitor's guide !, ok then begins the hunt for 'houseboat museum' and 'anne frank house'. Actually its so much fun to explore a place, and getting lost and trying to find your ways through an unknown city again and again..so absolutely thrilling. Gives you a feeling of a kinda treasure hunt game with the clues in the city map. And after loitering around for sometime I reached the houseboat museum , which was so insignificant that I patted my back to have found it !. IT WAS JUST ANOTHER HOUSEBOAT !! on one of numerous canals in amsterdam, but this was one which visitors could buy a ticket to enter into and see how it looks like from inside, no great shakes really, but another item checked on my 'places to visit' list :). Next halt was the 'Anne frank house' which i was dying to visit since the time I had read the book. This was one really nicely kept museum, which actually was anne frank's real hiding place converted to a museum now. Everywhere I could see the excerpts from her diary, put up on the walls, describing her whole story and the house. Tragic, yet mesmerising. I could really live her entire life story through that place. I rate it as one of the top places to visit in amsterdam. This was indeed one rich and filling Sunday for me, and what more, I came out of the museum and it was snowing !!!!...Beautiful it was, soft snow like thermocol balls in twilight. Roamed around to feel that and made a headway back to home only after it stopped snowing.

Phew!..too much for the first post..but the reveries of my paris trip are still to be translated to words before they fade away from my mind...so that will be the next post.

Besides, of many other things , anne frank has reignited in me the spark to write :)