Sundry for all and sundry......

smileys and slangs

2012-01-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

Boy: Hey, I think you were looking great today.

Girl: What??

Boy: :P

Just putting that one smiley at the end of a statement makes it OK. Frees you from the burden of responsibility for owning what you said. What this trend of smileys and slangs like LOL has done is make our conversations less sincere. It has made us responsible for what we say because you can always add a smiley or LMAO and escape the responsibility of being associated with a thought.

as the poet in you rests

2011-11-28T05:57:00.001-08:00

You have a laid in a corner....your poetry scalpels
Just tell me one thing....
....where do I go for the giggles :P

How airtel does business: Telephone bills

2011-10-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

I have a post paid connection which has the monthly payment due on 25th of every month. For some reason, they start sending reminders right from the the first week of every month. The underlying assumption.....the customers need to be reminded a hundred times about those bills. Now receiving a reminder everyday with a deadline nowhere around renders those reminders kind of useless. As a matter of fact, I don't want to make a payment when the due date is still week's away.

That said, when I do attempt to make the payment, there website doesn't work most of the time. Now, there is a limit to the time I can spend trying to make my telephone bill payment. I have a job to do and a life to live without having to spend days trying to make phone bill payments. Then, they have this twisted system of assigning the job of bill collection to some local parties who send some shady characters for the bill collection.

For god's sake airtel.....fix the goddamned website and send the reminders AROUND the deadline.

What the movies tell us- Trying to find out the meaning of life is a male conquest

2011-06-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Think about those movies like Matrix, Limitless- in which the protagonist gets up and feels lost or is being followed or is in some state of confusion but later on goes and finds the real awakening, some super power or the red pill. Now try to think of one similar movie which has a female as the lead. Nada....right??

It's true. Subconsciously, we accept that redemption, awakening, nirvana...(or whatever you call it) is meant for the male, only the male yearns for it while the females are busy drooling over shoes (remember Sex and the City) and dresses, trying to get married, nagging their boyfriends/husbands to death or just being cute and dumb.

Why should you stay away from your office

2010-10-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was struck by the realization that I don't remember the stuff I read the way I used to, which launched me into a retrospection spiral. I think I have come up with some explanations.

On a side note, this is essentially how causality works. Things happen and then we dwell upon them and do the "platonizing" (this is the latest addition to my "fake smart talk" library which I have picked from a book written by an ex-Wharton student...go figure), i.e. calling something the cause, labeling the remaining as the effect and then slapping on some random statements as the explanations. Let's just not get into the list of professions where people make their living from this intellectual fraud.

Now, back to the square one, why did I stop retaining the stuff that I read as opposed to my verbatim recollections from books that I had read which had often bored my friends to death. The thing is, that earlier I used to travel a lot while not driving myself. When you are travelling for more than three hours through the same route everyday, you will get tired of site seeing sooner or later and will resort to something more engaging. I remember that most of my fellow travelers took refuge in broadly two activities-talking and laughing a lot on the cellphone and staring and gawking at the opposite sex. There was a minority which was a little more considerate and these people restricted themselves to texting, playing games on cellphones (it was not the internet on every cellphone era) or reading.

Now when you read with a fierce underlying need of ignoring your noisy and tiring surroundings, you learn to...well.....read and ignore them all....and that's why you remember it all.

So, if you really think that you are missing out some quality reading time, it's time to think about relocation.

Worst pick up lines

2010-06-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

"Though this looks like a date but we won't call it a date."

And this one was recited to me by a good friend (he is the he in the conversation below)-

He enters the bus and goes to a seat on which she is siting.

He: Can I sit here?

She: Sure.

He: Thanks. Btw, I am He. What's your good name?

She: She

He: And what's your bad one???

Me and my cell

2010-04-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

I do way more things for my cellphone than it does for me. I use it to receive the daily call from home (a purpose that can be very well served by the landline phone as well)....otherwise I look for it after having forgotten it at someplace, I move to go somewhere and then come back to pick it, put it in silent mode prior to every meeting and charge it before the battery gets drained.

I wonder whether it serves me or .......

You name it and it has been captured in a book

2010-03-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

There was a quote in the end of Fight Club (the book) saying, "There is nothing a blue collared nobody in Oregon with a public school education imagine that a million people haven't already done". And I find it to be extremely true.....name anything however crazy, however perfect, however whatever that you have done, experienced or whatevered.....there is someone who has written a book about it.

PS- I am just done reading a book called "Keep the Change".

Begin 2010

2010-01-06T07:41:00.000-08:00

It's really cold and foggy these days. I actually witnessed a less than 1 m visibility yesterday. I really love it when it gets cold like this. My life as ever is uneventful and today was another of the days when I tried to shut it off by refusing to wake up to the reality of it. My refuges are the sitcoms, movies, some books with a philosophical bent, some pulp fiction and a lot of sleep. I am really amazed at my ability to sleep and dream. I dream almost like some TV series...come sleep and they start...pause if the phone rings and start again as I doze off again. All the time I fantasy about some alternate form of living (like raking leaves in the backyard of a monastery).

Ajaan...

2009-12-11T16:09:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here in my room. I didn't sleep the entire night because I had slept almost the entire day prior to that. I am done with all the arbit stuff that I can do on the net. I thought of studying French but doing something (especially the things which I associate some aesthetic value with) with an immediate purpose usually oozes out all the gumption in me. So French was out for tonight. I started reading a book which has diary entries by Sartre but then gave it up and took up another which I read almost as fetishly as a staunch catholic would read the bible. I was revelling in it when I heard this ajaan from some mosque nearby. My thoughts went to the person who would have got up at this hour for morning prayers and I just thought, " .....if only, I also had something like that to get up for...."

Why???

2009-10-30T04:16:00.000-07:00

"When you discover something like that it’s like discovering a tooth with a missing filling. You can never leave it alone. You have to probe it, work around it, push on it, think about it, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s on your mind and it won’t get off your mind."

Zor se ignore

2009-09-11T09:23:00.000-07:00

Another completely innovative and "bang on the target" slang by one of my friends. Two of the people from our gang had just started seeing other. As they were walking hand to hand in some mall, they chanced upon a colleague and ex-collegemate (guy's). Explaining the encounter later, the guy from the couple said, "Usney humein dekha aur itna zor se ignore mara ki...."

Beautiful ironical slang. Kudos Stinky!!

My old book shop...

2009-08-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

I went to my college time book shop after long. It is a place where I have spent many of my evenings sitting on a stool between the racks and reading, sipping the coffee which they used to serve as a gesture of hospitality. As always, it didn't disappoint me this time either.
I thought that I might find their collection small after my tryst with the OMs, Odysseys and Teksons in the NCR but then, there it was with the small yet enticing and beautifully organized collection of books. And the best part is, on asking about some particular book by say Galbraith, you get an informed suggestion about some other books by the same author ("JK Galbraith ki yeh book out of print hai, waise 1929 ke depression par unki book is topic pe likhi gai sabse easy read hai.") and also books by other authors along the same lines instead of awkward looks (read with no ideas whatsoever about the book or the author) with mipronunciations of the author's name. That's the kind of difference which comes to things when people care about the work that they do.

Defining economics....

2008-11-27T11:04:00.001-08:00

Economy is what you practise when you don't practise your practice well.

Wit is a little too in.....

2008-11-26T02:39:00.000-08:00

I don't know since when did this start, since when the conversations around me stopped communicating things and became desperate attempts to come up with a joke or a witty punch immaterial of the triteness or staleness of it....it just has to be said....because being humorous is "in" these days.

It's not that they are completely useless, they do generate laughters and smiles at times but then since all the people are preoccupied with their joke hunts, the conversations become a series of sitcommish jokes (which are not always laughable even in the sitcoms) which seem to be rather unbearable at times.

I often get reminded of a quote that I read somewhere-

"Humor in life is like salt in food, without it life's tasteless, but a little excess of it spoils the taste completely."

Positive attitude....

2008-11-24T20:54:00.000-08:00

Thought for the day-

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth your effort."

Lipstick

2008-11-12T07:39:00.000-08:00

There are things that you find extremely hilarious when said in some particular group at particular time while the same thing when told to someone else might sound as trite as a thing possibly can. Same might be the case with the following conversation on lipstick when we were on our walk to Laxmi.

Tiku as she so often does (quotes her brother verbatim) said that her brother had related to her his observation, "Punjabi bandiyon ka lipstick mein bharpoor vishwas hota hai." All unanimously agreed with it and added that the lipstick is so important that if a newly wed Punjabi girl returns to her parents' home without having applied lipstick to a certain level of saturation, her mother or aunt or an elder sister or some such figure asks her,"Beti! Woh tujhe theek se toh rakh rahe hain na."

At this Mickoo commented that it's the Punjabi girls only who can carry that because if we apply lipstick like that, we will resemble langurs beyond any doubt.

At this Misra started, "Waise bhi humari side lipstick ka jyada prachlan nahi hai."

And stinky added icing to the cake,"Hota toh tum lagate na Misra?"

Another weekend walk to Laxmi....

2008-11-12T07:34:00.000-08:00

This idea for going to Laxmi (A South Indian Restaurant) followed by desserts at evergreen sweets or coffee at tea shop has become the routine for every weekend when we don't have anything in particular to do. This is what we ended up doing the last weekend. And it was fun...

Need we ask anyone....

2008-11-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

And what is good, Phædrus,
And what is not good...
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

so true...

2008-10-17T03:02:00.000-07:00

I've done a fair share of stupid things in my life, a couple of which should have put me in the grave. But here I am, typing away as if I had a brain.

-Craig Wilson

stanza....you stand on the top of mountains

2008-10-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

Actually my close friends Misra and Stinky(names changed complying with principles of proxemics) were trying to come up with some quote for their team T-shirt after releasing their product "Stanza". Here is the conversation between them and the senior manager-

Misra: Sir, "East or West, stanza is the best" kaisa rahega?
SM(with an amused smile): Isse zyada cliché kuchh nahi soch paye tum log?
Stinky: I think we should go to my cabin to brainstorm on this. Then we will come to you sir.

Brainstorming session in Stinky's cabin, some excerpts-
Misra: Yaar main accha quote toh btaya.
Stinky: Haan yaar! It was amazing in it's simplicity.
Misra: Wahi toh sir ko chamaka nahi. Chal kuchh aur sochte hain.
.....and the session continued.

After 30 minutes of brainstorming-
Misra: Sir, hum log soch liye.
SM: Bolo.
Misra: "Stanza-You stand on the top of mountains!"
SM: And do what?

Have you read "Atlas Shrugged"?

2008-10-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

A recent event in my life reminded me of the pure meritocratic world, Ayn Rand had talked about in the above book.
It was another weekend when I and Shivani were rushing for some morning errand and to our dismay, there was no rickshaw at the usual spot. So we started walking and in a moment I saw one coming head-on towards us. I signalled and he stopped very matter of factly and it was then that I noticed that he had just one hand. Well, trying to behave normal, I asked him about the fare and there came the second shock. He just asked (in the same matter of factly manner) for the amount which we usually pay for that destination unlike his other colleagues who follow the protocol of quoting a higher price. Shivani whispered, "Is it okay." and I nodded as subtly as I could because I didn't want to affect his air of self-assuredness with ny dumb expressions or our whispers.

Economists

2008-10-10T12:17:00.000-07:00

"If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions"

Some good advice I got today.....

2008-10-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

Be passively watchful of your habitual responses; simply be aware of them without resistance; passively watch them as you would watch a child, without the pleasures or distaste of identification.
Passive watchfulness is freedom from defence, from closing the door......

........to be vulnerable is to live, and to withdraw is to die.

Well said....

2008-10-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

"Since you depend, you want to possess that upon which you depend."

Another weekend.

2008-07-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

This weekend like many others...was one when we ran out of things to do despite having slept to our hearts' content and having idled till we started feeling worthlessness of our existence to the possiblest extremes. So, as always I told myself that I have got "things to do", had a bath (don't know why cleaning oneself never occurs to the mind when the world seems to be devoid of anything worth doing) and somehow reached office by 2:30 pm when they were winding up the lunch(the big shots in my office had foresight enough to estimate the incapability of their "single" employees' to even collect food) and so I got to eat there....am not the only one of my kind...amongst others lunching at that hour, four were my acquaintances. After having had lunch and having competed over who plays "worser" TT, we came upstairs and then it occurred to us that we can go to teashop......

Orange candy.....

2008-05-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

"Ummm...orange candy......."Well, till date this is reply that I have got from almost every person whom I asked about his/her choice after stopping next to some "icecreamwale bhaiya".There are some observations that I and one of my friends made during one of those ice candy strolls.
There are basically two types of ice candies-icy and juicy. The typical example of the icy variety is the one from Mother Dairy and that of the juicy variety is the one from Vadilal. So, let's get back to the mainstream-the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two varieties. I find it more suitable to do a pointwise comparison-

ICY OR MOTHER DAIRY TYPE-

This I guess is what most people expect when they ask for an ice candy.

This is optimally sweet.

You can eat it in a sucking manner so as to suck out the juice leaving the ice behind(that's why the name "icy")

The feel that you get as you suck the color out of the candy is eternal(at last there is some thing where am the sucker rather than the sucked one.)

Hence, this is a highly recommended remedy for the "life sucks" feeling.

The only disadvantage that I find with this is that it tends to fall off when you are just midway through sucking.

Apart from this there are times when you have sucked the color from all the possible edges and there is no way left to reach the area around the stick without being ridiculous.

Your hands are likely to get sticky which you generally realize after having finished your ice candy.

JUICY OR VADILAL TYPES-

This is supposedly better in quality as this is more coherent and uniform throughout.

This is a little more sweet than you expect it to be.

Rather than having an absolutely icy composition it's somewhat jellyish.

Hence rendering it somewhat "unsuckable" and more suitable for being licked.

Licking(immaterial of what's being licked) is generally not good for one's self esteem because of the abundant usage of this term in sycophantic contexts.

Then you miss on the eternal pleasure of sucking.

But this has a lower tendency to fall off so you are more likely to finish your whole candy yourself.

Your hands get sticky most of the time as this variety has the tendency to keep dripping from the stick end.

So, all said and done orange candy(whichever variety) is "the" thing to have while you are on a leisurely stroll after dinner or you are discussing with your friends about where to have dinner after having parked or any such time when you happen to be on the road side and there is the ubiquitous icecream wale bhaiya around.

Disclaimer:-These are completely personal views based on individual sensory perception and hence there is no claim as to this being "the truth about orange candies or something".This is completely a point of view of a single obscure individual.

Fundas from fiction.....

2008-05-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few authors who seem to have a knack for evolving concepts from the usual daily experiences of life.I love them because they are cool and amusing.So, here follow a few examples(you can take a guess about the source as you read)-

Disorientation

Disorientation is loss of east.Ask any navigator:the east is what you sail by.Lose the east and you lose your bearings,your certainities,your knowledge of what is and what may be,perhaps even your life.Where was that star you followed to the manger?That’s right.The east orients.That’s the official version.The language says so and you should never argue with the language.
But let’s just suppose.What is the whole deal-orientation, knowing where you are ,and so on-what if it’s all a scam?What is all of it-home ,kinship,the whole enchilada-is the biggest ,truly global and centuries oldest piece of brainwashing?Suppose that it’s only when you dare to let go that your real life begins?When you are whirling free of the mothership,when you cut your ropes,slip your chains,step off the map,go absent without leave, scream, vamoose, whatever: suppose that it’s then and only then that you are actually free to act! To lead a life nobody tells you how to live, or when or why.In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them,or for god or comes to get you because you brake one of the rules,or because you are one of those people who are for those reasons which unfortunately you can’t be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you have got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you have got to accept the loneliness,the wild panic of loosing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air.
You won’t do it. Most of you won’t do it.The world’s head laundry is pretty good at washing brains:Don’t jump off that cliff,don’t walk through that door,don’t step into that water fall,don’t take that chance,don’t step across that line,don’t ruffle my sensitivities,I’m warning you now don’t make me mad,you’re doing it,you’re making me mad.You won’t have a chance,you haven’t got a prayer,you’re finished,you’re history, you’re less than nothing,you’re dead to me.dead to your whole family, your nation, your race, everything you ought to love more than your life and listen to like your master’s voice and follow blindly and bow down before and worship and obey; you’re dead, you hear me, forget about it you stupid bastard, I don’t even know your name.
But just imagine you did it. You stepped off the edge of the earth or through the fatal waterfall, and there it was: the magic valley at the end of the universe, the blessed kingdom of the air. Great music everywhere.You breathe the music in and out,it’s your element now.It feels better than belonging to your lungs.

Decompartmentalisation

The breakdown of boundaries, what Erwin Panosfsky called decompartmentalistion, gave rise during Renaissance to the modern idea of the genius.The 15^th century manifests and treatises of Alberti,Leonardo,Centini leave us in no doubt that this decompartmentalistion is intimately connected to the urbanisation o artistic sensibility, or rather to the artist’s conquest of the city.The Renaissance artist is no longer a worker bee,a mere craftsmen dancing to a patron’s tune but polymathic, a master of anatomy,philosophy,mythography, the laws of being and perception; and adept of the arcana of the deep sight, able to penetrate the very essence of things.The achievements of the modern artists Alberti proclaimed, prove that the modern world is not exhausted.By crossing boundaries,uniting many kinds of knowledge, high and low, the modern artist legitimizes the whole project of society.
Such is genius!Leonardo,Michael Angelo; they claim kinship even equality with gods.The opposed destinies of immorality and destruction are their.

Abstract

“Monotheism sucks like all despotisms. The species is naturally democratically polytheistic, apart from the evolutionary elite which has dispensed with the divine requirement entirely.You instinctively want the gods to be many because you are ONE.”

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears you lose a version of yourself.Yourself as you were as you were judged to be.Lover or enemy,mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our character like diamond cutter’s tools.Each such loss is a step leadind to the grave where all versions blend and end.”

“Really there is neither store nor video, just these doors, yes these apertures, you are a photographer so you understand that world, the aperture opens and light flies in,light like a miracle, staining another reality, leaving it’s image behind.So we are all lights from somewhere.”

“to admit we don’t understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably to accept the limits of human knowledge.God was invented to explain what our ancestors could not comprehend:the radiant mystery of being.The existence of incomprehensible, however is not a proof of god.”

Gibberish jargon.....

2008-03-06T04:18:00.000-08:00

The other day, I asked one of my friends who happens to be an expert in economics that how is inflation controlled by varying the interest rates and ended up enduring incomprehensible dialogs over an extended dinner.So, as far as I recall he went on like......

Him: Well, by inflation do you mean the inflation rate , the RPI or the CPI?

Me: (Sheepishly) What have the communists got to do with this? I asked in a completely economic sense.Why are you giving it a political angle?
Him: (With an amused smile) I meant the Retail Prices Index and the Consumer Prices Index (which I assumed to be the Communist Party of India).

Me: I asked such a simple and straight question and you are dishing out jargon?
Him: Now these are common place terms .They are just the terms used for quantitative representation of inflation in India, UK and US.

Me: See, what I understand by inflation is a general rise in prices across the economy.Now,
will you tell me in simple and comprehensible words that how exactly is that inflation
controlled by varying interest rates?

Him:See as long as you don't understand the terms in which inflation is expressed , how do you think that you'll understand the interrelationship between two economic concepts?

Me: Well, is there something like an intrarelationship of an economic concept with itself that you have to use "interrelationship".(I swear I had asked this question very earnestly.)

Him: Oh! Come on. Those spoofs of yours will lead you nowhere. Now do you want me to tell you about it seriously?

Me: Please! Go on.

Him:So inflation which obviously means a rise in general price of goods or services or alternately an increase in money supply can be expressed in many ways like
CPI(Consumer Price Index, this came after the request for it)
COLI(Cost of Living Index)
PPIs(Producer Price Indices)
CPIs(Commodity Price Indices, and I thought that I new the full form)
GDP deflator
Core Inflation
TII(True Inflation Index)
blah
blah
blah
blah
blah.....

Well, after a while I lost track as he talked about something like Keynesian View, Austrian Theory ,Monatrist view and god knows what not.
Well, I made my cellphone ring and left him with his concepts and dinner.....thinking, "Chhodo yaar wikipedia se padh loongi."