Something to chew on...

Au revoir, 2011

2011-12-31T23:07:00.000+05:30

The stone Pensieve lay in the cabinet where it had always been. Harry heaved it onto the desk and poured Snape’s memories into the wide basin with its runic markings around the edge. To escape into someone else’s head would be a blessed relief..

This post is more of a pensive reflections sitting in the banyan tree breeze looking at the temple pond type.

Time, I have come to believe after reading stuff like The Egg, is something we have created, something that exists within our frame, realm or any other spatialistic references we use. However, another year has just slipped by and one can't help sitting up to think. Almost everyone, from real life to twitterfolk whom I havent met, have been bitching about how bad the year was. I would say this has been one of the most profound times of my life.

The year has been bittersweet. 'Twas the best of times, 'twas the worst of times.

People.. from your best friends to someone as relatively obscure as the gate keeper at a railway level-crossing.

Boring topics to excited texting. Quite a bit of fights. Sweet smalltalk.
Conversations. Nods, smiles. Straight faced talks about god knows what.

Movies, concerts, alcohol.

Lewd comments to spontaneous poetry.

Disillusionment, disappointment, listlessness. Rage. Fury. Uncontrollable laughter, aching cheeks.
Possessiveness. Chumminess.
Hugs, Pecks.

Travelling long distances, walking around a new place all alone with your hands in your pockets, taking in all the sights and smells and sounds.

Being off twitter for a very long time, logging back in and finding out that things havent changed much.

Catching trains right on time. Sitting at the door and watching the sun set while the world goes by in a blur of green and gold.

Staying up all night doing absolutely nothing except watch random crap on the comp. Staggering into class the next day and falling asleep on the desk. Waking up because your buddy just spotted a cute chick walk by outside and thought your sleep could wait.

Strange detours to satisfy stranger hunger cravings.

Falling asleep texting. Face. Palm. Facepalm.

A cold run through Cubbon Park followed by strong hot coffee.

Watching the shunter go about his daily business and clicking tongues in pity.

Sleeping..a lot of it. Losing sleep, a lot of it.

Knowing friendship and how much it means.

Giving someone a gift and watching their face break into a smile.

Here's to a new year of hope and fun and good stuff. And happiness :)

And the promise that I will blog, regularly.

Poda, my-rage

2011-11-07T20:03:00.002+05:30

I've expressed my love for driving on more than one occasion up here. The following incident is true word for word. Read and let read.

The car had been deposited in the service centre for its periodic overhaul and i was entrusted with the job of driving it back home while dad made the necessary financial exchanges and rode home in his bike. So with the vehicle out from the service station, we did a few quick checks (signs of uncleaned niches, the customary oops-sorry-sir-the-wiper-blades-must-have-been-overlooked excuse, to name a few) and the baby was ready to roll. The smell of cleaning fluid filled the cab as I got it out onto the road, and the car felt as sprightly as a newly serviced vehicle feels.

All was well on a cloudy November evening until I got to this junction near the posterior end of Chalai. There dwells quite a busy intersection there, guarded by a traffic policeman ever ready to pounce on you if you aren't wearing your seat belts. I did have the necessary strap embracing my torso, so he merely glanced in my direction. The road has signals guarding the left, forward and right. As I approached the lights, they turned to red and I stopped in the lane which was supposed to proceed left.

There is this convention regarding the left lane in this place, which tends to approximate on the fact that the left lane signal is an appendix. Basically, every Thomman, Dinkan and Hariharan ignores the signal and pass right through. It was under these circumstances that I committed the grievous error of having stopped at a red light. A Maruti 800 drove up behind me and started honking its guts out. A glance at the rear view mirror showed a kinda middle aged guy driving, with presumably his wife inhabiting the other seat up front.
I remained still. The reason? Firstly, the light was red. And secondly (before you call me a sissy), there were some people crossing the road to my left (which the gentleman still leaning on his horn behind me couldn't see). Hence, like I said, I stayed put.

But not without doing something I love. I imitated his honking, tone for tone and rhythm for rhythm. It went on for a couple of stanzas, before he vented his ire and shouted at me from the back. At this point I had had enough of it and took off across the road, ignoring the stop sign. This happened in something like fifteen seconds or so. Now, the chap ended up tailing me and honking as if asking for way. I was belting out a steady forty kmph but he wasn't satisfied. There were a couple of trucks to my left, in plain view from his car as well, so I guessed the guy was just trying to take out his irritation. I went back to imitating the honking. At this point something clearly happened to him and he started honking continuously, doing a peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. I answered with an equally long peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep (I had my blood rushing at this point), and finding the left side clear, let the goddamn chap overtake.

As he drew up to my right, I knew what was about to happen.

"Odikkan arinjoodeda mairey!", he spat forth. (Dontcha know how to drive, you #&*^#)

And then, came out my first ever reply to road rage. I was beside myself, and shouted out in full volume:

"Athu nintachann, po mairey!" (That's your dad, go to hell you #&*^#)

My face flushed when I shouted it out (it was quite loud) and I realised what I did. Of course it was good while it lasted, in case you're wondering.
The bloke had overtaken me, and had heard it. I noticed his brake lights come on, as he attempted to slow me down. I daresay I did feel a bit scared at this. I hadn't given a thought to how hulking a chap was sitting inside, or considered the fact that I hardly presented a formidable image myself.

But no, he merely slowed down and said a few words which weren't reaching my ears in the din, and all I saw were his hands which were pointed at me as if threatening me (with no doubt, dire consequences). I honked another pattern (yes, that is fun!) and left him to drive away.

I spotted the unfortunate fucker held up at the next junction where I took a different turn and reached home safe and sound. And fast.

Now, I might have been wrong in some matters -
1. Not having followed the so-called convention while the red light was ablaze. (and not having chosen to mow down the people in that lane)
2. Committing a fallacy in deducing that his dad was the one who should be addressed 'mairey'.
3. Generally leading to flaring of tempers by irritating people.

However, if this is the case with middle aged motherfuckers who accuse the younger generation being irresponsible and flouting rules, this is a fuckin bat to their faces. There are just as many hopeless cases in their generation as there seems to be in mine. If haughtiness rules here, hypocrisy reigns supreme there.
Alright, he might have been in an emergency, you might click your tongue. I have one word - HEADLAMPS. Put the fuckin headlamps on, and drive with a pair of fully functional balls.

This goes equally well for those who cry their hearts out regularly on The HIndu Open Page, saying the world is going to end because of the younger generation. You say rash driving? Please drive well yourself. We listen to crap music is it? Recognise Kambhoji played on an electric guitar with distortion before I do and I will admit that.

You feel we have no respect for elders?

Then mairey, Y U CALL ME MAIREY?

Rain is..

2011-10-31T23:49:00.010+05:30

Lying curled up in the mornings, snoozing the alarm one more time.

The lone crow lamenting atop the slippery coconut leaf while the morning express to Hyderabad sounds its melancholy horn.

Listening to Stairway to heaven while walking with your buddy late at night in a thunderstorm.

Rushing to the door, looking up at the sky and savouring the drops of the fourth monsoon shower that day.

Sitting legs drawn up, looking at the rain and texting your best friend.

The innumerable innuendoes that make their way into conversations just because the weather feels good.

Standing at the door of a train and savouring a hot cuppa watching the world go by in a blur of green.

Walking in the drizzle to enjoy a spicy molaku bajji from the tiffin centre.

Clamouring that the teacher leave because it was too dark in the class.

Wishing it was colder and that I was at Hogwarts.

A pillow and a Wodehouse.

And above all, rain is - the gentle pizzicato, the haunting notes of the wailing violin, the warmth of the heavily bowed cello, the playful prance on the piano, the flirtatious nuances of the flute, the musings evoked by a clarinet concerto.

Rain is Desh on the sarod, and Yamuna Kalyani over the temple speakers with earthen lamps illuminating a beautiful face.

Rain is music, happiness and love.

First love, and two timing.

2011-05-03T12:34:00.002+05:30

I fell in love many years back. It was beautiful, being given that feeling when one was young. And the lady was just perfect. Everything I'd dreamed of.. My friends who were also into the phase, (there were just a few of them, mind) endearingly welcomed me into the world that was to rule over our lives for the next many years, as we'd thought then.

I was barely a teenager. And when things happen in these years, they strike it big. So there I was, hopelessly in love. I spent a little amount of time with the love each day. Playing, sometimes working together. To my folks it seemed like a normal, childhood fancy. After all, this was the new generation, and this was how things worked for them. Little did they know that it was to become an obsession, a fatal charm that would carve its own huge share of my mind in the years to come.

The minutes I spent each day turned to hours. Sometimes entire days spent dwelling in each other's thoughts. Nights. In school it became widely known in its due course, and by the time I'd reached my last two years in that hallowed institution, it got to such an extent that to talk of one was to talk of the other. I was proud. And God knows I did it solely driven by passion, and not with any intention of pride. Pride came as a consequence, but it was merely a passionate pride, a sort of obsessive possessiveness that one may be excused of.

It was, thus, many years into this relationship that I was confronted with the decision. The legalisation. Or to pronounce the relation in a solemn manner. Of course, they said, the time to play around was over, and it was no secret to anyone. Little surprise, then, that a majority of my friends and people-who-knew expected the natural course - marriage.

However, my mind had taken a disturbing turn. Of course, first love, when it happens is blind. And so I was, I gathered. Even pleasure, after a long period of it, forces one to crave for change. I presume my mind must've succumbed to this inherent desire for a change of things, just like one craves for a change of fashion - a new hairstyle, a different beard - though I know I was to blame, atleast partly. For it had been under no low opinion, that I was introduced to the new girl. A rather close friend of my mother she was, and mom just vouched for her in all ways. I had also learnt that my cousin (who has a rather keen eye for these things) had had the pleasure of working together for four years. I was no stranger too, for many a times when we'd met had I eyed her with a new interest. She seemed elusive, enigmatic and full with physical vitality that I immediately found myself attracted to. The physical nature of the new love would be what I held the biggest reason for my separation from my first love.. the reason I cited to old friends who seemed surprised at my change of tidings. Also, the reason I used to repeatedly console myself with, whenever I was at the brink of regret.

I married the new girl months later. I was convinced I was doing the right thing. Change was wonderful. This was something solid, something physical, something to be content with, while my first love was just a crush. Or so my mind was thinking. And boy I loved my new life. Everything seemed awesome, and brag-worthy. Just talking about her made my friends interested. And narrating stories of the times we had together was enough to stir envy.

Gradually, a thought that had seeded itself in my mind began growing on its own. I loved my wife, but only those characteristics in which she resembled my first love. For instance, there were definitely a lot of traits about her that I detested, traits that I knew I was incapable of handling, hence I ignored. It took me some time to come to terms with the truth. The marriage was holding together in some strange way, but I could just not forget my first.

And we met, again. In a passionate embrace of body, soul and minds. For this was the oft-spoken chemistry at its best, and it had happened without my knowing it. And she became my mistress, my enchantress, my seductive lover. By day it was up to me to spend my time with my lawfully wedded (a very good time - that I wouldn't deny), and by night, after a hard days work, I would succumb to the charms of the mistress. It made me distraught, this two-timing, but of course it was the only way things had to work. For I had read in some novel, "Great men have great desires". Perhaps it was so in my case. I did not regret it, though it made me uneasy, and prone to failures on both sides occasionally. It was no secret to some, and those who knew even appreciated it for some strange reason.
Maybe it reminded them of the fact that Life, with its conventional and rigid framework that is but a work of human minds, can be beaten down to its bare essentials; and that to live without any obligation to mere societal ideals, to live just true to oneself and one's happiness, was a beautiful thing. I still am striving to make it beautiful.
To satisfy oneself.. and not just One other, but Two.

I fell in love with computers in sixth standard. I major in Electronics, and not a day passes by without my detesting the overdose of equations, to long to get home and immerse myself in pure and simpler computing delight. But I love both of them for different reasons. This is my story.

Maruti, moms and meandering roads

2011-04-24T17:32:00.005+05:30

A road trip, however short, is by all means awesome. Mention that it is a family trip, with folks of all kinds cramped into the Maruti and still one shrugs but beams at the thought.

So it was that just under two years ago, yours truly was given the chance to pilot the vehicle on his very first proper road trip. Now let me for a moment, elucidate on the word 'proper' spoken there. There are, you might be aware, phenomena such as born-twice, etc during the course of a boy's lifetime (three, if the chap in question is a tambrahm). One being the all important biological birth. The next important one is the instant the boy gets his driver's license. (In the middle of this, tambrahm boys have the upanayanam - a second birth as it is called). For until that birth happens, it doesnt matter how many times you've driven the car perfectly in your dreams or in real life, you know for sure that once a traffic cop catches you there's no use even if you happen to have won the F1 Grand Prix many times in a row - you simply dont have that important card with your photo on it! It was, therefore, with no slight elation that I enthusiastically cleaned up (I dont usually do this even if I'm paid handsomely) the white and spotlessly-maintained M800 sleeping in the shed. Following which, I opened the bonnet and checked the status of things under the hood (yes I do this even if I'm paid to stay away from it). Brake oil, coolant, battery acid-level, even the windscreen washer-liquid level. All was fine.

So there it was. Up and ready at six in the morning to go. Contrary to what readers might have assumed, we werent really going as far as Goa, Chennai or something. Tirunelveli, to do shopping for uncle's wedding. Yes, I was gonna be stuck within the reach of vast legions of bales of fine cloth - RMKV, Pothys and the like.

The operative word being - But still.

Now when it comes to getting ready within a specific time, nothing beats my family. In terms of the hilarity that ensues, I mean. Amma would be the planner, setting limits for 'getting out on the road' as ambitious as five thirty. But everyone, including the lady herself, knows it is similar to the opening quote for an auction, and consequently everyone agrees to try to kick off at six twenty (the amazing precision in setting ten-minute-intervals as least count being merely a by-product of compromises and averaging that happens with multiple opinions). As always, I'm the one who wakes up last thanks to the exhaustion of having gone through the ordeal of having had to snooze my alarm five times. As it always turns out, I'm the first one who is out in the drivers seat and honking to elicit angry shouts from everyone else too. A bit of a childish obsession you may put that down to. Also to partial joblessness as all I have to do is take a quick shower, put on some stuff that resembles tees and jeans, and stuff my phone and camera into my pocket.

So once the water bottles, breakfast (piping hot dosas or idlis neatly folded and submitted to the embrace of plantain leaves lovingly wrapped under old newspapers under the strict grip of a few green and yellow rubber bands), and sundry items which family members carry about whenever they go out somewhere (never bothered to ask), not to forget the sibling, were nicely crammed inside the vaahanam, we set off, with all the dignity that happens with a modern family of homo sapiens living in the 21st century.

(Pic shot on the Madurai-Tenkasi section many years back)

Not so soon. The sibling shrieked that she had left something behind (some trifle that little girls usually forget.. some blue comb or better bit off a broken belt or something). We made a stop akin to how a prestigious express train stops much to its chagrin when someone pulls the chain moments after it has started pulling out of the stating station. A quick run back to the house, and a quicker run back again. Honk, chug out slowly.

Just like the express train, we cleared the points slowly (wallowed in traffic until we got to a wider portion of the road) and then prepared to notch up. Uncle was driving while I was fidgeting, clearly not concurring with his view that i should wait till we reached a better part of the route before taking the wheel.

The route from Trivandrum to Tirunelveli is dismal and irritating until one clears Nagercoil. The road till Nagercoil was apparently built for a maximum of a truck and a car to pass side by side without tempers flaring up on either side. And the road builder seems to have assiduously stuck to that motto throughout the stretch of gravel. To make things worse, the scenery one gets to dedicate the corner of ones eyes to, comprises mainly single-storeyed shops with hackneyed names or houses which you could've sworn you'd just passed a few minutes ago. After half an hour of meandering between trucks, cars and smoky two strokes, uncle had enough and we had a crew change.

It was like playing Roadrash all over agan. Peninsula.

It tires you out. The 40 odd horses under the hood (however meagre compared to SUVs and the like) struggle to be let free while all you can do is keep letting them go and suddenly pulling on the reins to avoid killing someone on a blind curve. On one hand it feels awesome and God-like to be at the controls of and be one with something weighing so much more than all the people inside it, making it dance and charge at your very whim and fancy; but on the other hand it pains you that it is being so under-utilised.

And then there is the phenomenon of mom-in-the-back seat.

Moms are, to the highest possible degree, discouraged from sitting nothing other than blindfolded in the back seat. For if given anything more than a crack to peer out of, they will have eyes on everything from the road ahead, all four corners of the car, the speedometer, to what gesture your left hand is making while you're overtaking a particularly annoying biker. It is not the omnipresence of their vision that bothers, though. Mom has this particularly blood-curdling way of calling your attention to probably significant things when they are nothing more than a speck in the horizon (in any direction). And this results in involuntarily swerving to avoid what was actually a few hundred metres away and travelling at a safely slow pace. You get the gist, I presume. You would, for I'm told moms are universally like that.

Speeds hardly stayed above 70 for more than half a minute each time.

The section was, like you must've figured by now, largely uneventful. Until we cleared that busy town called Nagercoil. From there I was in for a very satisfying ride. The road suddenly became much more than benign. It became the truly luxuriant gun-the-throttle-feeling-inducing carpet of asphalty awesomeness in six lanes. (Or was it eight? I dont remember exactly). It was at this juncture my rightful stomp on the accelerator pedal ordered the ECU to feed the horses their rightful amount of petrol-and-air (much like whiskey and soda to the parched), which got them singing. For at this moment they purred like satisfied tabbies, and the engine sound changed from the quiet whines the tiny little 800 (the MPFI version) is famous for, to a much more masculine growl befitting any well bred IC engine. "Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, we're in for a ride!", I said, mostly to myself. And how. There comes the first time a legal driver in the country stops hedging around bumpers of cars in city traffic and sips the true taste of taking the car out on the fertile highway at a speed only limited by his guts or that of the engine. I steadily took the old horse to eighty, and followed by a brief nod from dad (and words of caution from good old mommy dear) the orange needle snogged 100. Followed by rather train-like braking to enter a toll booth and some mandatory monetary offering made to encourage infrastructure growth of this type.

Which reminds me, my driving instructor's first question (while manoeuvring an old diesel Ambassador through a particularly bad road) to me was "Hey have you driven a car before?". I assume it was in a positive sense.

In a serious vein, the whole NH from Chennai to Tirunelveli and beyond is pretty awesome. Yessir, treat to drive. And for train freaks, the best place to pretend you're driving one. Oh yeah, I'll make it bold, my confession. I sometimes pretend to be piloting a train when I'm on highways. The method varies with which loco I've decided to take out for the day though :P If you're lucky it might be the WAP5/7 - which guarantees near-normal driving you'd expect with a car. If for some reason I imagine a lower class one, or worse, a freighter with a particularly tiring load, prepare to endure it. But the long honking and graceful brakes stay.

Oh yes, I'm pretty insane at times.

The pit-stop to have breakfast is a story in itself. When the hunger call happens, and majority of the passengers approve of it, we start hunting for a pit to pull over at. After we find a courteous shelter under some tree, out come the hampers. A smell of fermented curd fills the car on my request for the anesthetic (un-aesthetic to some) liquid goodness. A bit of bickering for this and that, mostly by sis. After a set of happy tummies are filled, the earth around is made damp by many sets of hands being washed (and the crew answering nature's call in a well hidden part of the road.. HEY we're the crew, we do anything we want! Anyone with a problem may please alight and walk back home, thank you!). The car purrs happily in response to a satisfied crew member at its reins. Even the traffic becomes more benign. The sound of human voices in the vehicle slowly dies down, most of the passengers having resigned themselves to a happy stupor, while the crew members lower themselves to conversing in hushed voices, discussing cricket or music or philosophy. The wind and the monotonous rant of the engine keep us company. The travel continues in a subdued manner :)

Into the horizon, destroying the miles. Till the journey ends, or till a road-side molaku-bajji vendor's ware is so attractive that one whiff awakens everyone and we simply have to make a pit-stop.
________________

Dedicated to the faithful automobile, the hardworking road-layers who work at night to fabricate stretches of national highways to enable people like us to travel in comfort, and to anything you wish to attribute this to. Cheerio!

Oh ye Googligans!

2011-04-15T18:52:00.015+05:30

Alright, I just had my much-justified Sunday afternoon nap. Wait, it's not Sunday yet? Alright, who cares. It's a bloody sunny day anyway.

Let's come to the point (and forget about the fact that I'm blogging after a pretty long time now).. Google. Yup we know that's the reason one third the internet lives wherever it lives (it lives on the internet, in case you were wondering) and that for millions of years it [ie, G. Inc] has been helping people find the answers to questions. (There are also pretty scathing rumours that the '42' answer was actually the computer passing on an error code [Error 404 was Error 42 in those days, the proponents of the theory claim] that popped up when it did a google search - {reverse BODMAS bracketing, I like!} ).

The point. Yeah, I'll be right there. We veteran bloggers (as a nice young lady referred to me yesterday) are not the ones who regularly play around hedges, bushes or similar dark, stubby vegetation. And no sir, I do not know what you just thought when you read the previous sentence.

Google, like I was saying. It's a matter of great pride for the company that their name became a widely used verb and that the word earned its place as a widely known name, but few know it's also a place to spend a lazy afternoon trying to earn a few chuckles.

So here's what I did: Fired up the browser (I still use Opera, if you must know), opened two tabs - google.com and google.in, and typed in some profound questions. The little screenshots down there speak for themselves:

Search query: What is
Both the International community as well as the Indian community seem to be curious about a lot of things, with the latter being slightly more technologically curious. Swell.

Here's the Indian version:

The google.com version:

Feeling rather curious now, I put forth the better question: How to. And the results were not surprising (to an Indian, that is).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Indian crowd wonders about. (Lemme tell you, the list was far worse, some months back when my buddy and I tried this out for fun). Around the globe, our homo-sapien counterparts were mainly concerned about trivial stuff like How to tie a tie, write cover letters, write a resume, to knit, draw etc. Boy we're one horny crowd.

Slightly more hilarious was the profundity people displayed when it came to the question "Why"

Take a look at the International version:

And coming to desi wonly - here's the Indian version:

Now this pissed me off for many reasons: One, I dont know the answers to most of the questions posed in the international version. Two, WHY the fuck are we being so narrowed-down, dumb and job-oriented? I mean, those are probably interview questions - the one about hiring, career etc and if it comes up on google suggest, it means a majority of our fellow men dont know what the friggin hell google is for. And I felt warm at heart when the "what is" of google.co.in revealed a lot of tech. They're probably interview questions too.

Alright, moving on to something more interesting.. Search query being:
"Why guys "

Global googling:

One can guess that the driving chromosomes behind these searches were primarily female. And largely pissed-off ones, that. Now, our country is more concerned about:

Hmm well. No prizes for guessing the gender in this case. This is the dwindling sex-ratio evidence right in your face here.

I have this obsession with a certain OS here. Undoubtedly, the search queries also included something about linux. And I was happy. The international crowd is a bitch. Fuck you, global homo sapiens! I hope you bluescreen to death!

Query: "Linux is "

On the other hand, look how the penguin fares in India. Much obliged!

It's been a rather rough ride so far. To leave you with a nice aftermint-ish taste in your mouth, here are three wildcard entries, like they're called in some pretentious quiz events.
Google.in knows I'm somewhere near Ernakulam, so it very generously offers localised search suggestions: *shudder* That's the mind of my mallu populace laid bare right there. Very very interesting:

And here, we have "How to", courtesy Google Pakistan. Not really surprising.. or is it?

I promised you I'd not leave you with a bad taste in mouth. Back to google.in here, and thankfully, we know some things are true :) Jaya He!

PS: I know precisely 10% of you bothered to read what was between the images. No, there's nothing very interesting in there. #justsaying, it's not gonna tell you why you should go for an MBA either.

PPS: [Update] Karan just brought me back to my senses as to where this was inspired from. Now I remember. Here's his post, way back in Dec 09, and it's strikingly familiar. However much I feel like taking this post of mine down, I hate undo on blogs, so here it is.

Figments: Coffee, chyech and sandai

2011-01-23T09:54:00.014+05:30

Sunday mornings are the most happily laid-back. I killed the alarm, laid on my back (I assume a helpless foetal position right about the time I'm supposed to wake up) and muttered "Another ten mins".

A couple of ten more minutes later, coffee, Sunday mag. Front page - a pic of some kids being scantily dressed up for a so called fashion show. The phone had been unusually quiet and I did the morning H-breaking (an old term, shall discuss origins later) by tapping out an outraged tweet or two. And then, the phone beeped nonchalantly, signalling the morning byte from R. Over to text..

R: He stinketh like an adder and biteth like a serpent
Me: [moves the paper aside, yawns] Rings a bell.. but adders stink? never smelt one.. Btw whom were those charges directed against?
R: [the curtness oozed thru her brevity. The dame was obviously in a dark mood] You.
Me: [thinks quickly] Hmmm.. Sunday-la Sandai-aa?

R: [flourish. she'd probably grown two feet taller and assumed a Gandalf-in-anger voice] Your one and only sister. Oh okay, one among the one and only sisters, twin soul, wired other-piece, a lovely young lady, miles away is confined to bed to the matresses, with a bump on her head and a rather twisted little cute ankle. [I suppressed an 'awww' here] Any loving caring brother, would've flown to his sister's side with mutton soup, and morning paper, a hug, a kiss and promises of a dairy milk. Any normal brother that is. Online brothers are subjected to certain restrictions.. shortcomings resulting from being on different sides of the Arabian sea. But a text enquiring about the wellbeing of the sweet sensitive sister was expected.

Me: [tosses the paper away, determined to see this thing out] The good ol' chyech has been subjecting herself to the ever good old PGW snack in bed, I see.. Certainly, an increased verbosity doesnt necessarily mean an increase in intensity of the scolding. Anyway, let me, on this occasion, put my why-disturb-her-while-she-might-be-asleep thought to bed, for subjects who're under the forty winks certainly do not exhibit texting capabilities..and hence, it is with deep regret and a quivering upper lip that I gently touch her forehead and ask her with concern, how are u feeling today, my dear chyech?

R: Paying a tribute to the title of the book she was perusing and also to enlighten the little, very small, insignificant bro about who the boss is.. She replied with a 'stiff upper lip' that she was indeed fine, but irritated at lil brothers in general, as is the case with big sisters all over the world who were cursed with insensitive indifferent idiots as brothers. Stiff upper lip jeeves, stiff upper lip chyech.

Me: *Now feeling like a 20 year old with the zero on the wrong side* The lil brother gently pointed it out to her that she should indeed be fortunate the ankle is on the healthy road to recovery, as opposed to, say, an unknown stranger stamping on it while she was asleep, or some heavy object mysteriously succumbing to gravity from right above it, as is what (purely coincidentally) happens in houses that house li'l brothers in them.

R: *enlightened* it is a rather queer feeling of relief one experiences when mere njanjools, eyesores, point out to you that life, with all its twisting ankle comedies can indeed be worse that it already is. happiness is rather a result of objective relativity and a matter of perspective [I start rubbing my eyes at this point] suddenly the world seems bright.

Me: Always glad to help ppl look at things in the right perspective. I feel like an enthusiastic telescope, which, after a hard day at the office, gets recognition for its farsightedness.

R: Life, eventhough beautiful, is inevitable jotted with such minor tragedies which we call brothers, as the rule goes, you cant have everything. Meh.

Me: And with that meh-ieval sigh of hers, she indicated that she had, as always, gottent he last word in it. Tch. Brothers worldwide have this responsibilty of letting their sisters FEEL they've won. For the love of things that can be gotten only when the subject is in a good mood, that is.

R: [continues, mindless] .. brothers who can crack PJs. Ah my fluttering heart stay still, be deaf and dumb to those cruel shots at humour. You are safe, think of bright yellow fields, Abhay Deol, Hugh Jackman - shirtless, and the world will seem okay, bearable, even with the tuxermans.

At this point, (after I stopped chuckling over the shirtless thingy, that is), I was overwhelmed with an extremely selfish thought. The blawg's been rusting for over a month. Time for another figment.

And so the fingers moved from the cramped keypad of my glorious text-phone (Nokia 1209, if you're wondering) to the evanescent lettering on my older PC-keyboard.

And one wonders why my handwriting sucks.

Stereofuckintyping

2010-12-20T22:28:00.004+05:30

Supposedly, according to newspapers, I've turned overnight into a mascot for hot steamy dosas, gooey chutneys and probably mundu-barechested-bald-headed-heavy-poonal-wearing middle aged sambhar-burping vegetarian men too. But justice must be done, and truth they say, rears its head sooner or later. Hence, I begin.

Our TRUE story begins not-very-long-long ago, not-very-far-far away, in this sleepy town called Trivandrum, home to an Engineering College (well, lots of them, to be precise) and also to a very screwed up species of homo sapiens named Reporters.

A warm afternoon, sometime like a week or so before the exams I think.. This guy, lets call him A, working for a (lead) newspaper, calls up. He's working on some column where he, among other equally boring things, describes places where college students hang out, and have food. Fair enough.

The bloke wanted to ask me a couple of questions on where we usually chose to satisfy our growling tummies. The first thing he asks is,
"How is your canteen.. Does it have good stuff?"

Now, no person who has done his graduation in a college in tvm will ever think of his canteen with anything except disgust. I kept a straight face (he couldn't see it over the phone but anyway..) and told him,
"Well, a lot of ppl do eat at our canteen, but frankly, the food there is boring. So most of us, when we dont bring lunch, choose to eat elsewhere."

A: "so what other places do u frequent?"

Me: "Well there's this Punjabi dhaba near college, or better, one at Overbridge, called Ramji, where both school buddies and college buddies frequently go. It's really good. Other than that, you have the usual hangout places - CCD, Ambrosia, etc. The usual food they have there is eaten there"

A: "Sri, you're a vegetarian?"

Me: "Yeah, why?"

A: "You eat these dosas and stuff dont u? At these roadside eateries.. thattukadas..."

Me: "Um well lots of ppl do eat there, that's why they're so popular in tvm arent they?"

A: "Alright Sree, give me names and numbers of a few of your friends too (non vegetarian folks I mean).. I'll talk to them, thanks"

I did the needful.
All was peace and quiet. Till a twisted, andwicked piece appeared in the paper. So now, to the world:

1. I seem to adore dosas from roadside eateries and speak orgasmically of dipping them in steamy smokey chutneys.
2. I seem to have (committed the terrible mistake of having) called my canteen food tasty.
3. Horror of horrors, I seem to like SOUTH Indian food at the DHABA.
4. While my friends talked about better (albeit with fantastical names.. yeah he made a lot of that up too) food at seemingly better locations, I have turned out to be the complete jerk who has tasted nothing beyond the roadside eatery and have no idea what a dhaba is anyway.

Well, we did have a good laugh over it. Hilarious, but still, what the fuck, Express?!

So that's what a vegetarian is supposed to do eh Mr A? Alright, next time someone asks me, I'm a fuckin cannibal.

PS: For those who didnt understand what the heck all this is about, kindly ignore and wait till the next blog post. It will be more coherent, I assure you.

Figment: A crossing in the rain

2010-12-04T15:20:00.005+05:30

Misty rainy afternoon. The noise around me slowly ceases, and ends in a low thud, followed by a hiss. The train stops. I get down on the opposite end, and two tracks stretch out on the side, deserted. Piercing rubies adorn the signal posts as far as the eye can see, except for one shining, pleasing emerald on the opposite end of the line.

And then the rumbling becomes more apparent. The thunder grows louder, and finally two screaming green WDG3As show up hauling a tanker rake, smoking for all their worth, in the cold. Smell of petroleum fills the air, and the clickety clacks with occasional strange clanging noises and thuds rebuke the silence. I stand right next to the gentleman who hauled us up till here, as he waits, occasionally hissing and idling up to keep himself warm. I cast it a look now and then, like a rider gives his steed.

The passing train rumbles away, and all that is left are the receding sharp clicks in the track, the engines beating far away.. and the world returns to the sound of the incessant drizzle, silently piercing the low, grey wisps of diesel smoke.

Drawing in the cold air, I'm tempted to have a smoke again, and I remind myself that this is precisely the reason I never allowed myself a first puff. The signal has turned to a sober amber and the loco sounds its wet horn. I haul myself back in and get some coffee. Blowing on my hands to keep dry, I resume my stand at the door while the train picks up pace and the din resumes. Green out the windows, out the door.. all around, and hopefully, shining ahead for the rest of the miles too.

_____________________________
This post marks the beginning of a new set of stuff called "Figments" on the blawg. Random, hot outta the mind pieces. Unedited, for most parts. Figments of imagination, figments of ahem.. poetry, scraps from some really engaging texting session, so on, if you get the drift, and so forth.

Perspective.

2010-11-01T13:24:00.007+05:30

Perspective - What engineering and a lot of curiosity can teach you.

(Dedicated to the ultra strong coffee that just made my morning today. You'd better have one too, in case this gets too much on your nerves and you end up like this.)

I'm gonna take the example of the modern day machine - the aircraft. A teeny weeny bit of its HUGE system. A tiny bit of the whole stuff that happens during operation, the take-off. Even more particularly, one operation - the engines pushing you forward. I might not be exactly technically correct to every detail, I wish I was, but I'm kinda not far off. Now you've fastened your seatbelt after repeated requests from the pretty hostess, looked around and are tapping your fingers. The plane has taxied away from the base and is RIGHT NOW, about to take off.

The pilot up front, after receiving clearance, enables the necessary switches, checks that the gauges and instruments are all right, and in one fluid move, moves the thick lever (that sits between the pilot and the co-pilot) forward.

Pause.

Now. Moving the big bad lever forward. The lever is connected via a cable to a sensor system. The sensor is simply a device that 'reads' how much the lever has moved forward and in turn, sends an electrical signal to another system. (Warning: For the uninitiated, this is gonna be like Inception, only with a lot more levels)

Zoom in on the electrical signal. It is just a potential difference (in layman's words, Voltage) that exists between the wire and parts that are not connected to it.

The cable goes through a lot of other systems (filters, digital signal processors, etc which one needn't bother about), and reaches the main control computer. The computer, in turn is made up of a couple of hundreds of integrated circuits (ICs), connected together via metallic wiring etched onto a circuit board or as normal cables. Our voltage signal that set off from the sensor attached to the Big bad lever, has reached one of these ICs in the tiniest fraction of a second.

Zoom in to one of the ICs. The signal is processed and the computer now knows the pilot has engaged the lever. Now, during the time the IC was made, it has been taught to do its job, by programming a lot of code into it. This code now resides INSIDE the IC and is continuously running, monitoring any incoming signals and doing what must be done. Zoom in, fellas.

The code that we talked about, was written in some programming language, compiled and finally 'burnt' onto the IC in a way the machine can understand. Zooming in again, you see a tiny slab of Silicon on which a lot of etching, metallisation and doping is carried out. Now, on this slab are billions of transistors, which are the building blocks of an electronic circuit. To give you an indication of size, each transistor is around a few nanometres (that's one 100,000,000th of a metre) across. Zoom in. These transistors store a tiny bit of charge in a part of their body called the 'floating gate'. Depending on whether this charge exists or not, each transistor is considered to be on or off, and thus, (lo and behold) comes the 1 and 0 that we know in binary. No it's not over yet.

When the program was written, by a geek sitting miles away in some airconditioned office, he did it in something like C. The thing got translated from all those "int main(void)" stuff to hexadecimal code that looks like rows of rows of something like like 0xABCD12340. And THIS code is stored as BINARY, as those little ones and zeroes indicated by the thousands of electrons that store the charge in each transistor.

(Remember, it is just a few hundreds of microseconds since the pilot moved the Big bad lever high up in the cockpit..)

ZOOM IN.

Inside each transistor are thousands of electrons, flowing across 'junctions' that came into being when they were being 'fabricated'. (The beauty of the whole thing is, all this is exactly under our control). Now, once the signal had reached one of our computer's ICs, a part of the signal goes through these transistors, and automatically, a particular piece of the IC, which handles what must be done when the lever is being engaged, gets activated. This is how the code works, deep inside.

Plane --> Pilot --> Lever --> Sensor --> cables --> Computer --> IC --> flip flops --> Transistors --> gate-charge --> electrons.

Zoom out (whew).

A couple of hundreds of transistors actually form the inside of a few dozen flip flops, which are set to perform what the computer wants to do. The flip flops have been triggered, and they generate a control signal that (zoom out) goes out of the IC we talked about, through a lot of cables, onto the actuator system.

The actuator system has a lot of electrical power circuits connected to the engine to control its firing. The signals that reach the actuator undergo a similar electron-driven transistor-poking, and a few microseconds later, a power signal hits the engine control unit. The engine control unit now assumes power, and begins conducting its own show... Zoom out to watch!

The drama begins. The compressor sucks in air, as millions of air-molecules from outside. The fuel is drawn from the pipes, and the valves are instructed to open, admitting a spray of fuel into the jet turbine engine. Simultaneously, the control unit has initiated (think electron-transistor-powerAmplification again) the sparking system in the same engine to fire. The spark happens. A chemical reaction between the hydrocarbon in the fuel and the air, molecule-by-molecule, happens.. and the highly charged aviation fuel ignites, sending a mass of hot gases out through the engines back.

Zoom right out. Out and out, to the first layer.

*static* "You have control."

ONE SECOND or so after the lever has been moved forward, the pilot smiles smugly hearing the whirr of the engine slowly building up, gaining amplitude, to what is pretty loud inside and definitely a deafeningly friggin LOUD roar outside. Every fraction of a second is being monitored and controlled by the onboard computer, and the maze of wires, cables and copper strips are kept ever busy by the (deafening?) sea of electrons that are sent from one place to another, in some way, completely under human control.

The engines build on power and a few seconds later, the aircraft is pushed forward by one giant invisible hand of hot gases, rapidly building speed till the tyres lift off the ground and the big bird is airborne.

All this in a few seconds of your life.

So the next time my dad gets started onto me about "looking at life in the proper perspective", I'm gonna get him to read this post.

Prick.

2010-08-24T23:15:00.005+05:30

It's a vacationed-off weekday and I sit in my usual place, opposite the beacon of irradiance that happens to be my ancient CRT monitor (kept around working for sightseeing purposes), in my ever usual posture (read, knees drawn and one foot crossed over to the adjacent table and stroking the UPS subconsciously). Ahem. The room's abuzz with mosquitoes feeding off God Knows What appetisers during daylight hours, to return in full force and smother me with extremely passionate and buccal kisses. The haze of vibhuti surrounding me as a result of today's Avani Avittom rituals isnt helping either. Apparently they've woken up to the fact that the 'bhuti is only skin-deep.

Long years ago, my readers, existed the original form of the meek insect which we now call kosu, bloodsucker, mosquito, kothu (not to be suffixed with paratha), etc. Incidentally, the first one, the Tamil word, despite sounding the most affectionate, is also part of one of the greatest inventions by mankind (more on that later). The earliest record of existence of the creature is recorded by our good old friend right here. The Latin-speaking blokes called it the culicidae, which is derived from a corrupted version of the Tamil "Kulikkaadae!", a sarcastic warning "Dont bathe!", hinting at the fate of the person at the mercy these creatures had he followed what was said. The name mosquito also is said to have sprung from the Chinese Mu Chi Tao - equivalent to saying Musky Toe. The Chinese had, long before the creature even came into existence, prepared recipes such as "fried Mu-Chi-Tao leg" or "Wingy side-up", thus leading to the latter word.

A very very (*prepares to run*) corrupted origin of the word can be traced back to Mallus living in Hindi speaking North India long back (Yes, we were all over the earth right from the age of the dinosaurs). Legend has it that malaria was on the rise in those days, and poor, impoverished people looking for ways to kill themselves found a fascination to die by the bite of this buzzing winged menace. The desperate (mostly driven to mental retardation) ones used to open up sewer slabs et al, looking to get bitten by the kosu, muttering "Mauth Kitto?" to themselves. Mauth (hindi) - death. Kitto (malayalam) - would I get? Ah now you see it. It's construed. I'd warned you in advance, so dont whine.

Enough of history. Now that it has been bitingly proved without doubt that this eternal pestilence is better off having been wiped off the earth, mankind looked for ways and means to send this thing for a tea-party with its maker. And the efforts started quite early, I assure thee. Homo habilis, that stooped miserable ape-man had gotten quite pissed at receiving pricks of an apparently invisible (they didnt have rear view mirrors then) pest. The poor forefather having barely mustered up courage to start a vocabulary, could only growl "Go.. Shoo!". (There. Now you know where Tamil picked up that word from). And it was in a flash that he invented fire, to keep this things out of the way. (The fire proved handy in that he could also light the stick of tobacco he kept in his mouth for peter-purposes).

Fast forward. By the time Homo Sapiens evolved out the assembly line, we possessed juice in the lemon to know that "Use the force" actually made sense. Hence, swatting. Medieval England saw the rise of a different form of weaponry against the raptors. Inspired by fighting lance-men on horses, the Good Knight mat was born. The theory was simple. You hung the mat out to dry at night and the next morning it would have gone. Given the rate of theft those days nobody complained. Then the golden age of physics, and mathematics and geometry. The cheap, retail version - The Martein coil. Inspired by Einstein and Rammstein (Feuer Frei, remember?), and marketed in Elizabethean Walmart stores, this symbol of conservation of angular momentum became the Vishnu Chakra for the gnats for a horrifying(for them) period of time.
Fortunately for the mosquitoes, Darwin had said they'd still keep evolving.

And finally we're blessed with the epitome of good (Chinese) technology - The kosubat. The beaming, arcing kilovolt of goodness. The weapon of godawesomely swift and satisfying justice. They say, In the wielder of the Kosubat, we trust. And so we do. What better way to arrange the divine tea-party (spoken of earlier) than to apply a blessed kilovolt pulse between the limbs and wings of the bug? No blood, no gore, no need to say "Gaaaddammit!" and walk to wash off the blotch of blood off your leg. And sparks. Which means fun. Whee.

There's also an open source version project to develop an OS for the kosubat, for all you linux geeks out there. Try telneting from the kosubat terminal :D Awesomeness.

Have been truly sleeping. Shoots a glance to the KB charging in the wall socket. Looks at watch. Smug grin. Narrows eyes. Kosus, tonight, we dine in HELL!!!

The goody woodpecker - a shenoy

2010-07-04T19:54:00.013+05:30

James had just stepped out into the big bad world. His lean, sinewy arms at his hips, he stood at the door of his small house. Life, just a week back, had been so different. He was the typical indifferent son of a hard-working father. His father Chellappan passed away three days back, set finally at peace from a life-long chase by tuberculosis. And hence the family business of cutting wood now rested upon his shoulders, heavy and bearing, like the long teak trees Chellappan used to set to work upon in his heydays.

James surveyed his father's shed. There was the powerful torch which the saaypu had presented him when he did a handsome job of bringing a jackfruit tree to its knees in the summer seven years back. The photo of The Lord and the lamp flickering reverently beneath. Sundry little tools - jacks, saws, wedges. And in a corner, resting upon a formidable-looking block of teakwood, was the axe. Like the Gandiva to Arjuna, or the sword of Hattori Hanzō. It was beauty in sheer functionality.

However, James did not really like the tree-felling business his father had carried on with pride. He'd had a tough time distinguishing between 'wood' and 'would' in primary school anyway and it had plagued him till the time he'd dropped out in fifth standard. He still did not know, but by now he did not give a damn.

Trees were meant to be. They'd been there for ages, and he hated the thought of having to wreck them to their roots. The smell of sap as he introduced the axe to the wood stung his nose. Then there was that mournful creak and the huge saddening thud, signalling the be-all and the end-all of the tree. This was definitely not his cup of tea. He was a man of nature. There's this feeling that overcomes a man who stands at the summit of some hillock nestled in the bosom of the Western ghats, when the monsoon wind strikes his chest and the drizzle caresses his face, and all that lies ahead to sight is a vast expanse of greenery.

The axe. Today was the fourth day he set out with it, to chisel out his livelihood. The sun had barely risen. Approaching the shed gingerly, he paused at the door. The growing repulsion to what his father had been doing all these years kept rising within him.

He'd had two passions in his life so far. One, and the latest, was the girl he'd seen two days ago. Like a forest fairy. Fair, tall, and pretty. He'd enquired about her discreetly to his mother, and had come to know that she lived half a mile away. Ria. Her name was Ria Kishan. What a strange surname. But it mattered to him not. It could've been Kishan or Shanky or Krishnan for all he knew. His manly heart was filled with a passion for the woman, filled like the first time one truly falls in love. Yesterday he'd seen her face in the tree he was cutting down. It was too late, though, to stop. The damage had already been done and the wood lay at his feet. He was too scared to do it again today.

The other thing close to his heart was too general to be described in words. A passion. A passion for knowing things, and how things were the way they were. It wasn't science. All he knew of science was the stuff he'd been dictated in his late school days. He used to walk with two older boys to the small school four miles away. They spoke things he'd never heard about. Of how water is actually two gases. Of how you could make fire that did not hurt you. And there was this talk about a strange constipated guy they called Noottun. Noottun apparently wrote about his loss of motion and became famous all over the world. He still remembered the things they said he'd written. Three things, was it not? First about something being stuck the way they always were, until you pushed it out or pulled it in. The second thing was about the force you needed for motion. And something similar for the third. He'd forgotten. Try as he might, he couldn't recall it.

Not that it mattered anyway.

He eyed the axe. And there she was, her face clearly seen in the shining metal that clasped the wooden handle. He made up his mind. The sight of the axe and what it could do filled him with disgust. He closed the door of the shed and began walking. Out into the woods. He didn't know where his legs took him. He walked on like a man possessed, strong legs steadily hammering away the distance.

And there she was. Standing by the well, with the steel bucket by her waist. Her hair danced in the wind, and her anklets made the best music he'd ever heard in nature. She turned back and looked at him. He stood dazed, entirely enraptured by the sight of her. She kept looking. He felt weak at the knees. There must've been something, something in the way he looked, or the way he stood.. his pose, that must've caught her fancy. He stood totally transfixed by her gaze.. And then it rang true. Noottun was right!! The forgotten line rose in his mind..

For a very axe-shun, there's a knee-quell and a pose-hit Ria Kishan.

---------------------

Note: For those who are in the dark about what a Shenoy is: They're named after their master - Narendra Shenoy. To understand the Shenoy, you've gotta read the entire story, then go through the last line carefully. Read it aloud, in fact. Fast, if needed. I'd suggest going through 'groaners' like this and this one wiki entry.

Mazha.

2010-06-02T11:11:00.007+05:30

Rain.
The second word which brings joy, peace and a feeling of universal brotherhood into the untainted minds of Mallu-folk. (The first word's alcohol, but that's not the subject matter here).
~~Ah, nothing indeed, compares the ethereal feeling of putting ones hand and face to the sky, relishing the first drops of rain amidst that o-so-sweet smell of heavenly precipitation upon warm topsoil..~~ No, this is not one of those made-hopelessly-romantic (in an effort to please the old hags correcting it) English board-exam essays. This aint SPAARTAAAAA either (just saying). This is, a bored-out analysis into the effects the famous kerala monsoon produces upon the normal headbanging, slightly geek, unkempt and unshaven, jack-of-all, jobless college student-ish types.

1. Mind: The master of the body is uplifted. Every sonofamother feels warm and brotherly. Spirited, the word. Spirited, even if you haven't touched spirits in your life. The monsoon unites the industrious village-folk (<--oxymoron alert), the simply-go-about-life townsfolk, and the cursing city-folk into one beaming sea of humanity, raining goodwill and kindness in general. Picture this:

Scene 1: Busy city street. Sun shining with all its might, mercury on the bad side of 35. Two well dressed gentlemen walking, frowning at nobody in particular, happen to bump into each other quite by accident, and let's say, drop a bag or two.
"Engottu nokki pokuvaada my#$*&^!! Maanathu nokkiyaanoda nadakkane, P*&^#$(*&#$. Road entha, ninte achante vakayaa?"
[Now where the hell are u looking, you [expletive]?!! Walkin looking at the sky are we [expl]. Does this road belong to your dad or wat.] And then the passers by gather, pick up sides and a nice brawl starts shaping up.

Scene 2: Busy city street. Dark clouds threatening to open up above. Quite a strong wind blowing about. Temperature not straying above 27. Two well dressed gentlemen walking, happen to bump into each other quite by accident, and let's say, drop a bag or two.

"Aiyyo sorry.. Njaan eduthu tharaam. Entoru kaatta ithu! Oru nalla mazhakkolu thanney! Sir vegam veeti pokkolu!"
[Oops, sorry.. I'll pick it up for you. What a wind, I say! lovely atmosphere for rain... You'd better get home soon, sir!"]

Business cards exchanged, informal invitation to come for daughter's cousin's wedding. And all is well with the world.

2. Music: Quite obviously, if you're sitting at home and looking at them raindrops outta the window, your mind must've started craving for those mushy, soft romantic stuff. Metalheads, don't get alarmed! No, DONT pick up that bass guitar from the rack either. It's natural. It's like.. hormones. So unless you are driving a fire-truck without a windshield at ripping speeds, and all that heavy rain amidst the thunderstorm is battering your face and anterior, do not as much as look at metal. In moments like this, all one needs to do is, relax, sit back and listen to the mush wafting forth from the music player. It does sound lovely. The heart flutters, the mind aches. Aches for --> point no. 3

3. The girl: If you've read point 2 and happen to be one of those rather lucky types who have a girl, you would have definitely called her. Again, it's natural. Since these types won't be around for the next hour or so (owing to a lot of eda, chakkare trans-ceiving across phones), lets talk about the so called less fortunate of the lot. Oh well we'd primarily be craving for those picturesque moments when - the camera shows a drop of water bouncing across a fresh green leaf, then slowly zooms out, to two folks holding hands by the window and looking at infinity, while oh so lovely music plays in the background. Yessir, you know how it feels!
At this point what one would be doing is, start texting friends. And then the girls start going bolder, peppering msgs with enough double ententre and ample amounts of :P or ;).. An evening to laugh about :D Oh well what the hell.

4. Food, and drinks: As everyone agrees, the best time to sit and have a swig or two is during a minute drizzle, or post shower, in the garden. Talk about general state of affairs, blogs, tweetups, buddy's affairs, oh anything under the.. er.. clouds. Even tea tastes splendid, while on a Sunday afternoon (afternoon as in when it looks as dark as 6pm), one takes some toast and tea, out to the perch, and engages in a light reading of the Sunday Mag.

5. Sleep. Oodles of it. Sleep like a baby, without worries. Sleep like you can really hear the rain battering the concrete roof and creating a tantarataanum on the asbestos sheets yonder. Wake up, ponder, and go back to sleep again. Leave the window open, please :) Don't study. You can't.

Rain, is good for you.

The weathermen have just engaged in another of their atrocious prophecies, and the moment they proclaimed "Monsoon sets foot in Kerala", the rain we'd been having for the past week vanished and it's sunny as a clean shaven cheek now.

So, dear Met-department, please, Shut the fuck up.

Y

2010-04-13T11:32:00.015+05:30

Some people have been created as solid logic machines. They don't seem to understand the fact that some things can exist without a reason. Atleast without an obvious one.
One of those days, when one feels totally frustrated with the world and life in general, it's not uncommon for anyone to look in the direction of the heavens and plead "WHY, God?? WHY?!".
And then, it's not like there comes this shrill noise (of a mic test) from above, followed by a deep voice, "Ahem.. well my child, it's like in this particular differential equation that happened to ruling your day on the fourth of November 2010, there was this inherent flaw in the precision of one of the constants, this loophole having been exploited by the probability of your screwing up your day, unfortunately, I may add, contributed to the whole thing, resulting in this particular distasteful blemish on the happiness of ur life". Nopes, that never happens.

Yet, somehow, life goes on..

It's in my college that I met most of the specimens of this type. The one which left me particularly shaken was this incident involving a smiley badge. One of my buddies had got hold of this badge with the most innocent-looking, cutest smiley you'd ever have seen. Anyone who glanced at that face was sure to have a most affable smile on his face the next moment.. such was the power of smiley-man :) One fine morning I decided I'd sport it on my chest and make the world seem a better place for the day. And so it was (with the same smug attitude which Calvin carries about him while wearing his rocket-ship underpants) that I walked into my class. Mixed responses. A couple of people see it and smile and ask where I got it from.. All well and good. Then come these other people..
"Aaha.. enthaada ithu?" [Ah what's this da?]
"Smiley aliya" [Duh.. Smiley, man!]
"Enthinaada ithu ittondirikunne?" [Why're u wearing this, da?]
"Uh... chumma" [Uh.. just like that]
"Chummayo? Alla, ithinte upayogam entha?" [Oh? But I mean, what's the use of it?]

I really ran out of words at this point. I quickly blurted out the first thing that came up in my mind: "Ah.. ath actually Vaastu Shastra-ile powerful sambhavamaade.. Oru rekshayilllatha paripaadiya" [Well, it's this powerful thingy mentioned in Vaastu Shaastra. It's really awesome]
He was like.. "Gee..", and said no more :) Yaay!

Suffice it to say I get consulted for Vaastu tips these days. And given my latest flair for 'thallu' [gas-adikkufying] in exam papers quite successfully, I've managed to dole out random tips pretty well. (Offering Vaastu tips to girls is a really adventurous opportunity, for I've managed to persuade many into thinking even dressing is an integral part of Vaastu.. ah u see the point)

Speaking of girls, there was this time I bunked some class in the peak of summer because the classroom was nothing short of a goddamn furnace, and went straight to the Department's computer facility, to cool off in its air-con interiors. Unfortunately, the internet connection was on its knees and crawling that day, so determined not to make myself any more nostalgic (being reminded of dial-up days), I headed off to the library. I was sort of interested in this subject called control systems of late (it being a really multi-discipline subject, and my being on a high off train/aircraft videos recently), so I take this nice-looking book from the shelf and take a seat, hogging the fastest and airiest fan-space.

All of a sudden this nerd girl walks in and does a :-O expression (or better, the zoozoo style shocked-WTF expression). My words of gentle enquiry as to her well-being fell on deaf words as the scared-out-of-her-skin lady could only utter one sentence: "God.. Did they change the syllabus??"

Apparently, I was reading up on a subject which was part of the syllabus one or two semesters ahead, and I had not taken the proper precautions to put up disclaimers like "DONT PANIC" by the side of the desk. I managed to shrug off, saying "Naah I was just going thru it for fun.. y'know, just like that :)". With a final look that spoke volumes about her lingering doubts, she went about her business. I felt as if I'd said the "Naah just for fun.. y'know, just like that :)" line while holding someone at gunpoint and the person was asking me what the gun was for :|

School was exactly the opposite. We had a bunch of maniacs doing stuff totally crazy and WTF'd, and nobody gave a shit about anything. If someone liked something, they joined in, and nobody was hurt. And everything went as merry as kids going round the mulberry bush.

Just two days ago I had one of those lovely experiences falling just in line with the theme of what I'd been talkin of till now. I was at my mother's native place (Coimbatore) and it was a cool Sunday morning. I was woken up by the regular 6am-9am load shedding and was looking around. My cousin sis was still fast asleep beside me and the kiddy cousins hadnt stirred yet. Feeling bored I nudged the former awake and we had a cuppa tea. The tea having gone inside, we thought we'd go for a morning ride. So her old battered Scooty was prodded to life and off we went. It was randomness all through. We took a couple of turns here and there, and ended up on the highway, buzzing along at a comfortable fifty an hour, wind in our face and the sun rising in the distance. What made it even more perfect was when I asked "Hey enga poroam?" [hey where we goin?] she laughed and said, "Haha thereela" [I dont know!] It couldnt have been more kickass :)

At some point we turned back and followed the road we came by.. It was at this juncture that she remembered that there was this level crossing somewhere nearby and we thought we'd check it out. A few miles down there was this small road leading left, and we took it and came upon the aforementioned place. It was the now-closed (for gauge conversion) metre-gauge line from Coimbatore to Pollachi. Single line, surrounded by open scrubland, grass and weeds on all sides. We went past it and suddenly sis has an idea. She stopped the scooty and says, "Hey come on!".
And then we held hands and walked along the rails. Just like that.

It couldn't have been more beautiful. The sun was rising behind our backs, and the birds were chirping for all their worth. The cold morning breeze was still about and there was not a soul in sight. And here we were, just like kids, holding hands and walking on the rails. Occasionally stumbling, falling, tugging on each other to regain balance. We talked and laughed a lot. I felt a sense of joy I'd never felt for a long time.. It was back to being a kid. From a big, mature nineteen to a carefree six or seven year old..

And what made the whole thing even more beautiful was the pure serendipity. It was, indeed, 'just like that!'We walked a few hundred metres down the track and turned back; got back home just in time for breakfast.

"There you are! Where the heck had both of you gone?" chimed our moms together. "Ahh ma.. we were at a secret place :)" said sis.
The kids in us were still about :)

Image copyright: http://www.flickriver.com/places/U6hNy5iYA5nczaxm5g/

Om Wittala Wit-tala Pun-duranga!

2010-04-04T12:03:00.009+05:30

And so it happened one lazy Saturday afternoon (Haha die, you grammar freaks who threated folks starting sentences with 'and'.. Here I am, starting a whole goddamn blog-post with a lowly conjunction!) that @Schreiwarduhnn came up with this idea of twitter-shenoys (Update: He's posted his collection here)
Shenoys, for the uninitiated, are named after the delightful creations of (you guessed it), Shenoy, and are very similar to the so called Feghoots. A long cooked up story, ending in a rather 'groaner' pun at some popular saying or phrase. As with twitter invading the world, the 140 character version took wings too. Here are a few your humble blog-owner's old lemon churned out, for your rreading pleashurre saar:

Meet Sasi.. He is a head-load worker in a specific section of a huge spice farm. He loves his job though.. Calls it labour of clove.

The lady was so distraught she ran all the way to the mine, and went inside it to meet her husband, to weep in his arms. Unfortunately, he gave her the coal shoulder.

That girl's already been proposed to by four guys. She's four-bidden fruit.

Mama kangaroo was really upset at little joey spending his whole time snuggling up against her instead of climbing out and growing up.. "He's such a pouch potato!", she exclaimed.

Apple initially christened their music player 'Pod'.. but seeing it was so sexy and steal-worthy, they were asked to keep an i on it :)

Atlas meets another Atlas: "Why, its a small world!"

When you create a document in MS-Word solely using the speech recognition tool: Word of mouth.

The HOD, quite unexpectedly, admired the mass bunk: It was a class act, he said.

How do old men who're hard of hearing convey that to u? "Go on, talk.. I'm all years!"

"As much as I love sodomy", one gay said to another, "I really wish you'd keep your mouth shut during the act.. I dont like people talking behind my back".

Mallu friend was puzzled over how to address his new pet.. Finally after much thought he says, "Well I suppose I'll call it 'eday'" :P

The witty king often used to send the royal cobbler into a tizzy, saying, "I shall be giving you the boot this afternoon"

In the olden days, rather than locomotives, deer (and similar antelopes) used to pull small trains. So much that at the far ends of platforms in railway stations, there used to be a board saying: "The buck stops here".

The bullet pierced through the darkness, and got him right in his manhood. Yelling in pain, he screamed, "You bastards!!! That was a fuckin shot in the DORK!!"

The circuit assembler guy was insanely angry the whole afternoon. It was, after hours and hours of searching for a missing IC that he discovered, he had the chip on his shoulder.

The rapist was busy teaching the apprentice 'the old in-and-out'.. Summing it up nicely, he said, "As you sew, so shall you rape".

The accountant was caught sleeping with her co-worker.. The boss (her husband) barges in, sees that and shouts, "TALLY HO!!!"

The sleepy office is about to shut shop for the day.. It's 'leave and let leave' time.

I fuckin HATE that boy at the flour-mill like anything.. One of these days I'll give him an axe to grind!

Overheard at a level crossing: "This freight train seems so damn long.." "But it'll pass by soon.. All goods things must come to an end!"

Le first Shenoy!

2010-03-07T20:26:00.008+05:30

Note: For those who are in the dark about what a Shenoy is, I'd suggest going through 'groaners' like this and this one wiki entry.

It was the time of the intra college fest again. For those who were accustomed to ripping the competition competing with people from other colleges, this was a gratifying experience. Of showing Who was The Boss. Or who ran the things around here.
As usual, the dudes from Mechanical Engg were off at their proud best, shouting slogans and flinging engine parts about; the electronics people were sick of being called the nerds of college and were protesting by amputating poor Field Effect Transistors; and the compsci people were too busy trying to get Windows to shut down for them to make it to the events in time. The Civilians were being civil enough and the electrical people were too shocked to respond. And the chicks at Archi were as hot as ever :P

The big events started and as the tension built up, the talk about who, from which branch, would walk away with the grand prize, also known as LeGrand Prize (after the sponsors). For the dude/dudette who scored the maximum, all the events included. All eyes were on two people - A girl from Compsci and dude from Mech. The eyes who were not looking were on the Mech Man(MM), because he happened to be the son of a well known Professor. The Compsci chick(CC), on the other hand, was very popular in quite a few circles too.

The whole thing was not without any loopholes. Any time MM got the pointers to slide in his favour, the gang supporting CC cried foul. When the latter won something big, the MM-supporter guys panicked and shouted about; and had it not been for the reassuring chime of the next event coming up, it would've ended up in a fight. And it almost did once, but that's another story.

Tom and Mot were two friends who were exactly like what their names suggested: Quite the opposite of each other. As was the case here, Tom supported MM and Mot was for CC. But they hit it off quite well, and never hit anybody else.

At the present time, they were discussing the points for and against both of them winning, and the discussion had all the symptoms of turning into a pointless philosophical one. Tom had started off remarking, if not anything else, CC's hairdo was an instant turn-off and Mot had retorted (prefixing the age old "You male chauvinistic pig!") saying something it was nothing but bad wind that messed it up; following which Tom had bitten back a rather ill-humoured comment on CC's posterior. He also had nothing to say against accusations of bias when it came to the son of a Professor.

And hence time flew (aided by the bad wind, asserted Mot) and it was time for the winner of LeGrand prize to be announced. The cheering team for Mech and the ones for Compsci had finally arrived in a huge gang, as it was sure that the grand prize of the LeGrand switchboard belonged to either MM or CC. The chief guest got to the stage and spoke a few words as befitting a gentleman like himself and the time. The world waited with bated breath as he announced: "And LeGrand prizzze... goesss to... Mech Mannnn!!!!"

A roar erupting from the cheering Mech dudes drowned out our poor CC-supporting Mot's cries of dismay. The Compsci people were on the brink of tears. However, one line of age old truth from Tom made them see it in the proper light:
"Cheer up, people", he said. "It was bound to happen. Mech hai while the son shines".

Of labs and labradors

2010-03-03T20:20:00.012+05:30

Keeping in line with the latest ruling of the ASSociation of Hopelessly Obdurate Lab-Engaging Staff (ASSHOLES), students who have been ~~condemned~~ given the golden opportunity to experiment, innovate and serve humanity in a noble manner by ~~copying readings from seniors' records~~ designing, experimenting with and trying out various circuits in the electronics labs, will have to observe the following rules.

0. The lab record is the single most important thing in your possession. You are required to eat, sleep, play, take a shit, etc with it in your hand all the time. Anatomical difficulties like requiring two hands for certain jobs will have to be made up for by tactics like holding the book in between your teeth (Also see #4)

1. You shall not enter the lab without carrying your rough and fair lab records, held vertically in front of your chest perpendicular to the ground, in such a manner that it is visible to the main lab staff from a minimum distance of one and a half kilometres under normal-to-cloudy lighting conditions.

2. Your sessionals for the lab subject will be awarded strictly in accordance with various factors, including your performance in the lab, your attire, the state of health you turn up in everyday, the number of times you swear (and the number of times it's actually heard), grooming: for boys - the amount of stubble on your face, for girls - (consult staff advisor for details), the deodorant you wear, etc. All this will be STRICTLY calculated to a razor sharp precision of seventeen decimal places, applying the HDE whenever and wherever necessary. The final results shall be obtained after thorough calculation on the PARAM PADMA. Decisions made will be final and binding.

3. Speaking of binding, your rough and fair records are to be bound, tied and gagged with multiple layers of brown paper, and suitably insulated to withstand temperatures ranging from -187 to +242 degC and voltages of the order of 61 milliVolt. Bullet proofing is optional, though recommended.

4. A slight chink, crack or tear in the afore-mentioned insulation will be taken as a serious case of contempt-of-the-'cord and the violator shall be Record-martialled in full view of the ladies hostel (in case of male violators) or the mens' hostel (in case of female violators). Also, the insulation shall be restored within a period of twenty four hours from the time of

5. For those of your smart-alecks out there, the name rough record is a misnomer. All diagrams drawn in it have to be painstakingly sketched after atleast two rough drawings at home, spending a minimum of two and a half hours per square inch of drawing.

6. Following entry into the lab and preceding any experiment, the rough record will have to be submitted for ~~crucifixion~~ scrutiny, during which all blatant errors and mistakes (like non-uniformly dark lines, accidental eraser marks, slightly slanted lines, slightly non-neat handwriting) will be ~~yelled at in the world's most irritating voice~~ gently pointed out, following which it will have to be re-done in five minutes. Pleas which include words like "WTF" or "Herculean" will be instantly dismissed. The word "please" is banned.

7. The fair record will have to be immaculately maintained. It will have to be stored in a strongbox, shielded in ESD bags and kept out of reach of children and rodents. The handwriting of the person will be electronically scanned once, following which the same style will have to be maintained throughout his life and well into his afterlife, if any. The record shall be watered twice a day and exposed to sunlight of intensity 5.6 candela thrice a week.

8. Using mobile phones in the lab is blasphemy. Violators will be dealt with as in Section 42(Y) of the Code of Conduct in Labs and Other Subterranean Crevices, 1993.

9. No one shall do anything except what is required to be done in the syllabus DURING lab hours. During non lab hours, the lab shall be closed. However, the permission of the HOD and the staff advisor will have to be sought in writing, before making that extremely annoying discovery stated in the previous sentence.

10. You are nothing, you mortal earthling. You have been extremely lucky that your name happened to feature in the Entrance Exam result and it is pure chance that you got admission to this universally revered institution.

Update: Hmmm it's not this bad, actually :P

iSpeak!

2010-02-26T11:27:00.015+05:30

I was born unilingual. After a year or so of staring at whoever came up to me and uttered 'tcktck' or 'Heyo there chweeeeet baby wassup?' it seems the revelation about every Indian's freedom of speech finally stuck the li'l ol lemon, and thus spake the baby:
"BRBRBRBRBRBBBB"

Sadly, my folks werent that savvy enough (it was in the days of Windows 3.1) to understand that i'd said, with a large effort, that I'd BE RIGHT BACK.

By the time I'd got to LKG the vocabulary had greatly increased and I was capable of a few coherent sentences in Tamil. And no, the puns hadn't gotten in yet.
Once in playschool, I immediately was aware of the fact that none of the kids, save one or two, actually knew to speak!! LOL and I was pretty proud of being to only one who could speak the language, until life, as they say, introduced a bat to my face, and (recovering) I realised it was another species which spoke Malayalam. #Awesomeness
So in the fourth year of life I was Tamil-ready and Malayalam-ready (Vista-ready came much later but by then I knew much better. And Eveready is a battery, dumbass).

Somewhere around this time we were also taught a string of nonsensical sounds and letters going somewhat like this: "Yaay bee, see, di. Eee effigy! eh chai jaykay LMNO Pee...", looping from that last word LMNOPee again and ending in a solemn "Ex-wife Zed", followed by a moment of introspective silence. Had I been older, I'd have called it a total WTF silence, as in WTF are we learning? (Sadly that was outta question since WTF was part of the syllabus and thus not part of everyday language yet).

Fast forward to class three. We get introduced to this strange language called Hindi. What looked like lines and (familiar to us southies) squiggles all seemingly suspended from one omnipotent line drawn atop every word. I gave the language a one in ten chance of surviving for a year, what with all that need for support, and hence never took it seriously. As it turned out, I got a one in ten for my tests. It had to recur a couple of times through the year, and then the Konkan skybus project came up. By then I thought stuff hanging from lines had to be taken seriously, and therefore the beloved national language had to stay :D (Further reading: Civil engineering. Building-structures or whatever keeps proving that point too, in a less patriotic way)

By tenth, Rashtrabhasha had gone (being reduced to an elective) but the Mathrubasha stayed, along with that yaabee see di thingy we now knew to be the grand old beloved-of-Shakespeare, lover-of-Milton, taught-by-a-funny-guy English. 'Mathrubasha' was supposed to mean the language of mom in malayalam, but in tamil 'mathrai' meant a tablet, so I swallowed all its phrases and idioms like pill, and regurgitated them colourfully on the board exam paper, for a mindblowing 88 percent :D #EPICawesomeness

Finally, to college. Quad-lingual, da! Whatay awesomeness allede? English is here, Tamil lesa appidi local groups-la irugudhu, ha Malayalam illathe pinne? Aur kuch hindi bhi yaar. Albeit a very mix-n-match form of the four:

1. Retardedspeak: This is the name I give my struggling (and usually vain) attempts to butt into a Hindi conversation and do the 'while in Rome..' act. Usually results in me getting LMAO'd out or ends up being totally kickass (my getting my posterior kicked). For example:
Hindi dude 1: Abey yaar vo staffie hai na? Chootiya saala vo mere ko blah blah blah.. Aur kayi kaam hai assignment, record..
HIndi dude 2: Mere ko bhi yaar..
Me: Eh.. ahem.. Mujhe karne do. (trying to say, 'I have two jobs to get done')

*two HDs falling on the ground and laughing their goddamn asses off while I scoot before I start laughing. Someone says, "Sambhavame you gay, you gay" (due copyright to kevin for that one) :P

2. Manglish: Spoken rather offhanded.ly, careless.ly and a bit.ly consciously. As in "WTF man!!! Aarengilum aa my*inittu onnu pottikku. Chumma avidirunnu aalkare desp aakkuva. Sonofabitch." Includes novel words like thallu, kallippness, despoy, verumm. (meanings will take a new post in itself)

3. Tamanglish: Evolved because my Tamil is corrupted with Malayalam and I have to make conscious efforts to prevent sentences like "Ente akkaavinte vittile kadhavine ongi chathi", if I try to speak Tamil. And Malayalam is corrupted with English.
Usually involves liberal use of words like Macha, aliya, monay (and other family-relation-speak), plus long stretched exclamations like Daaaai and Dooood dudedudedude. (As in "Dududude.. check out the chick at 9 o'clock!)

4. Broad-house: Unlike what it sounds, this is a style dedicated to two people: My buddy Brajesh and PG Wodehouse. (Before you start makin up jokes on the first part of the former's name, I'd like to say that half his class and probably the whole of the ladies hostel calls him that, so you're late). Also, this language exists only in txt and is not spoken (for obvious reasons). Sometimes consists of archaic swears or ones like 'u dilapidated dick' or 'u drunken gravedigger'. Its familar, one sentence consists of fifty six words or more, packed into comprehension with the help of commas and semicolons, or even the occasional colon; including maximum use of words and phrases like blighter, old-lemon, wassup old bird, etc: the prime significance being, over txt msgs this sounds chuckle-inducing, but over speech nobody attempts this until he or she ('she' being a rarity) is drunk and completely plastered.

Self explanatory.

5. Panjaara-speak: (As the name suggests, its a sweet one) Used usually when talking to nice girls. More than usual use of 'da' (the male to female 'da'), sweetie, nice, yuppie, hehe, etc. Its rarely used in my case, but I know people who can use it very very efficiently :P People who blast their way down the humble 2000 free msgs balance in a single week :P

6.English: Spoken rarely.
7. Malayalam: Spoken rarely.
8. Tamil: Naah
9. HIndi: Dont even think!

Appo sheri, njan publish-atte, kai valigithu.. Adios and shukriya buddies :)

Glimpses of the city

2010-02-14T21:18:00.018+05:30

I've been very busy doing precisely nothing these days. And when that itch to update the blog grows into a nasty guilt (similar to the one you experience when you suddenly realise you havent fed the dog for a week) you have all sorts of nasty guilty dreams of the God of the Internet condemning you to dial-up speeds for a month, or worse still, sending his thunderbolt outta heaven and frying your modem.

*shudder*

Salvation comes in various forms, sang they. So I rummaged (what's left of) my memory and tried to recollect all what had happened in the last few weeks. What follows is a vague and totally pointless narration of the 'stuff I've been upto' for the past (calculate) days.

First and foremost was this much revered, overhyped and sexily named programme held at college called CETEX. (The nickname 'sexily named' is a misnomer. It sounded to me like a mixture of a co-operative textile and a poorly named contraceptive). No offences anyone. We lurve CET :D Yeah we love Mohanlal and Mammooty too. (Dear whoever-it-may-be I beg your pardon because I named these two in the same sentence and some aliyan says, by the rules of either's welfare association it's supposed to be a punishable crime). Yup, CETEX was a boon to us poor slogging assholes condemned to the yoke of Kerala University Syllabus. It was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, cos it gave us, apart from other benefits, the possibility to enjoy five days of doing-precisely-nothing vacation at home :) It also offered (on the proverbial other pan of the balance) the opportunity to make something in the way of a product for the tech exhibition.

I preferred the latter, for a change, because all these strikes we'd been having had put us on an OD of the former. And so it was decided. I'd heard of this awesome thing called the Arduino and was determined to do something with that.. And as luck would have it, Gautam bought a lappie :) Man oh man oh man we took one look at the device, and we threw our thoughts to the Kaamadhenu which was the college Wifi, all ready to be milked. And that's how all those "Muhahahaha!" "God bless internet radio" and "Die firewall, die" tweets turned up in various twitter accounts :)
Righto, cutting stuff short, we got our heads and hands together to create this nameless thing which we later named, in the most boringest stiff-upper-lip-way possible, a "360 degree dynamic display". The thingy was essentially (oh goddammit here I go again) a row of five unnassuming LEDs, which, when made to rotate on a fan, blink in a specific sequence such as to display any word we program it to. Oh, and the reason behind the whole 'seeing words' phenomenon is the old trick again - Persistence of vision.

So we made it and were pretty proud of having got a real experience of having done it (plus all the supplementary experiences like soldering-iron-burns, breaking legs of microcontroller ICs, displaced sleep cycles and a whole lot of swear words tailor-made to be hurled at electronic items). By the end of the week I knew my way around Thakarapparambu blindfolded, and most of the chaayakkada owners around there knew us by name :P

Finally once the exhibition began, EVERYONE was interested in the college.. people from God knows where turned up, (chicks included :P) to the very same place we'd been calling a shithole, the_grind and other assorted names. Finally it ended in a pile of exhausted guys, aching legs and sore throats.
Boy and the next day was 'regular class'. We swore under our hushed breaths and cracked voices, and then my classmate and I hatched up this nifty trick; and turned up to college in the most disheveled way possible, hair all untidy and falling over eyes, dirty denim and long saggy tees. As if in appreciation/disgust we got the day off right after the first two lab hours :D
We got a special jury mention for what we did(the display I mean), and it was a tad too literally meant. Our names were 'mentioned' during the prize distribution ceremony. Classic :P

On a different note, I've become more and more addicted to twitter nowadays. There was this #kickass night once. It began thus: Shuffle was on, and my music player was belting out one good one after the other. Finally, it played a paandi dappankoothu bit: Puli Urumuthu from 'ilayathalapathi' super duper trooper red pink shining 'thalaivaaa' staaar Vijai's 'Vettaikkaran'. One listen and I went all nostalgic to the days Guru and I used to get high off pandi dappankoothu, featuring the awesomest instrument of its kind, the Urumi. The ultra awesome classique growling moaning sound produced by this 'drum' is what infuses the ultimate high in the whole drumming ecstasy induced by tapping out these beats on anything sonorous, like school benches, waste bins, geometry boxes and stuff. And so it began. Tweets @tuxerman:

- #nowplaying Verum Dappankoothu!! Addi Monay adi!! LOL!!
- Thalley I'm on a fuckin high off dappankoothu!!! Adi machi adddi!! Podu!!! Bring in the urumi :P
- The urumi should be incorporate in the standard drum kit :P Preferably with a foot pedal! #kickass #dappankoothu
- Shit I'm laughing hysterically!! This is definitely a #dappankoothu high! Time to stop the music! Illengil ippo aattam thudangum!
- LOL! #kickass #nowplaying transition today. Nightwish in the morning, Sajda in the evening, Rahman, then Neelambari, finally #dappankoothu!
- Absolutely!! RT @vanwinkle: wat do u get wen u cross black metal n dappankuthu??laid to rest by lamb of god!! #nowplaying
- More #awesomeness #kickass stuff: Listening to #dappankoothu kidichu paambaayi royally plastered :P paandi lungi, burmuda-jetty :D
- LOL #nowplaying Cheena Taana from Vasool Raja MBBS.. tana toin toin toin toinnggg!! LMAO!! #dappankoothu
- Whaaataay way to bring in the weekend mwaaney! #kickass
- Paattu kettu paambayi! LOL!! God bless #dappankoothu God bless @twitter God bless music :P Adi mwanay good night tweeps!! Whew!

So that made up my twitter timeline at around midnight last Friday. School friends and awesome college buddies piped in and everyone's timeline was a mess of #dappankoothu and for a while, life seemed all crazy and fun, just like the old days :)

Mosquitoes. Bloody bloodsucking bastards. Ah I do so miss the good old bat which dispensed these infernal parasites off on a shocked death. LOL that was funny :D

Weather in trivandrum is fucking oppressive. Sweat and heat everywhere. Amazon rainforest, zaire, Spa, come to mind.

Note: This post is titled glimpses of the city on purpose. It means nothing, but that is precisely why it's there. Please bear with the goddamn thing.

LOL now that this post is up on the mainpage, the goddamn college firewall's gonna blog my blog with the reasons "P0rnography(African), P0rnography(Dutch), Goddammit-just-a-bad-site", etc listed in red. Poor automated piece of code.

Haha I'm going mad. Someday all this will make sense. Bye for now.

Update: Shit I hate this post.
And for the people to whom a lot of words would sound Greek and Latin, please note that they are probably not Greek and Latin(owing to my not knowing these revered languages) but zimbly Malayalam and Tamil.. Ah the pleasure of being multilingual :)

Pointlessly interesting

2009-12-13T20:53:00.018+05:30

It was nearing five twenty. A ten minute ride was more than enough.. I hurriedly pulled on a tee and my faithful pair of jeans. I was on my way to this rather embarrassing thing called lab class, necessitated by the awesome faculty we'd got for our electronic lab sessions in S3.

The key was in ignition and on kickin the starter, dad's old warhorse the CD100SS ~~roared~~ sputtered to life. I downed the visor of the huge helmet I was wearing (Trivandrum cops were now in the no-helmets mode for the past one week) and started off. I made it slow this time.. going leisurely at under 40kmph, singing Stairway To Heaven to myself, and trying to imagine how Vincent in Pulp fiction must've been feeling when he drives his car, havin taken coc, to take Mrs. Wallace out for the evening :D

Past the hustle bustle, going up the flyover over the Vanchiyoor bridge aka Uppalaamoodu paalam.. I spotted something. Hurriedly braking and takin a sharp right, I let gravity guide me down the road.. past the smelly fish-hawkers' place and the various shops that adorned the side of the road. At the bottom of the slope, I saw what I was looking for. I pulled over, turned the bike off and took off my helmet.

One of my most familiar and relished sounds.. the chugga chugga chugg of the diesel warhorse of IR, the good old WDM2 idling at the TVC home signal with the afternoon passenger from Kottayam hit my eardrums. To anyone who must have been following me on the road must have quite arrived at a certain conclusion regarding my sanity now.. I was standing, just a couple of metres from the tracks, watching the 'engine'. I knew what I was doing, though! I was doing precisely that. The passenger was no doubt, waiting for the outgoing TVC-MAS express, which, I knew was coming in a few minutes now.

Here I was, in the evening sun, enjoying the breeze and just watching a loco idle away. I had nothing else in mind right then.. Exams were over, lab exams were still weeks away, and I had nothing to do for college the following day. Joblessness at its height... and under such beautiful circumstances, even a thing as pointless as standing by the side of a road, watching a train feels insanely fulfilling.

A short toot from the distance told me that I was in for another sight.. Slowly, the beast came into view. A brand new WAP4, #22806, hauling the late afternoon superfast to Chennai.. The loco pilots exchanged a wave and the beast passed me, its traction motors grinding away loudly while it accelerated.. the thud thud at the rails and the onlookers at the doors.. the last coach was easily doing 40 when it passed by.
Now the fellow waiting leaned on the horn and departed in classique diesel style.. the looooong horn, a tug at the coaches and the rhythmic beat of chug chug chug, slightly smoking away.. The chugging grew a bit faster and the loco disappeared out of sight.. People were already waiting at the doors to get down at the station and continue living their own little busy lives. Time.. business.. strange.

I took the U-turn, went back up the road and continued.. I was late for the class, but I was not complaining. It was back to working away at the world of resistors, capacitors, bootstraps and schmitt triggers.

Being 'crazy' over lots of things makes you insane in the eyes of people.. but it makes your life interesing. You enjoy doing something which otherwise means nothing to people, which they would just pass of as something part of the city or the world. They gain nothing from it.. and you lose nothing, but you gain the little pleasure you derive from watching a robot work, building a linux system from scratch, watching in dismay as an IC dies drawing a lot of amperes, or looking at and feeling a 3000hp beast chug off while its V-16 engines beat away in harmony.

Maybe I'm just crazy. But I'm not complaining :)

Mediocrity and Pissed-off-ness

2009-11-29T06:50:00.007+05:30

Disclaimer: For the uninitiated, this post drips a vain and high-n-mighty attitude. If you know me well, you'll understand. If you dont, and still think the post oozes all that, fuck off.

College really pisses me off sometimes. Yes, I have an awesome set of friends in there and they are the reason why I go to college. But apart from them, the whole atmosphere there is, I may say, really disillusioning.
A thick fog of mediocrity hangs about forever. It's very disappointing. The average person on the campus is someone who comes, sits and gets back to his place. He comes to college for a degree and to sip his cup of chaaya. He doesn't care what's happening around him (as in the world), for he doesn't process such stuff up there. Thank god college is not filled with these species, for a lot of unfortunate people would have gone for the rope (or the dope) had it been so.

So here's something I'd really love to tell the faceless person in the crowd someday. Maybe I'm just exaggerating but again, if you really care for your time, go read the newspaper or soemthing.

1. Dont be the Average Joe. If you still are, understand for Gods sake that the Average Joe isn't very proud of being so. He's just a dumbass.

2. I dont need to have a goddamn reason for everything I do!! Just cos I wear a smiley badge to college one day, it doesnt mean I'm now a vaastu or tai-chi or whatever person. I wear it cos I can. Go dig your nose if you have any problem with that.

3. Sitting in the back row doesn't necessarily make you god. And for the fools who ridicule the guys sitting right up front, lemme tell u that we laugh our asses off, get online and tweet about it sitting there, while your sorry arses get picked on to answer a question by some prof.

4. Movies is not always equal to malayalam movies. There exist English movies that are not equal to porn. And English movies are not always equal to action/thriller.

5. Oh yes, a lot of people dont give a damn about politics. Maybe we're just not that passionate. Also, see #6.

6. When I say Fuck off, I mean it. Nobody says fuck off for the panache.

7. Nobody needs to turn heads when someone talks in English or uses some expletive. Sonofabitch is just the same as panna naayinte mone.

8. If you dont listen to metal, you can have my sympathy (and my collection if you bring a portable HDD). If you show your disdain/disgust(god save u!) for it without being asked, accept the finger.

9. There exist a lot of people who have interests other than what's required in the syllabus of the goddamn university. Just because someone reads a book on python or microcontrollers it doesnt mean you need to panic.

10. Relax, goddammit.

11. Girls, wearing tshirts is sweet :D The ones who usually don't needn't be embarassed to do it the first time (pun unintended :P )

Feels good to have administered CPR to the blog :) S4 starts soon. Hmm six semesters to go...

A tag to the rescue

2009-09-05T18:00:00.000+05:30

The dear old blawg has been lying stagnant for a long time, thanks to both my laziness and microblogging (read: twitter) :D
And from somewhere in the blogosphere, like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, salvation comes in the way of a tag, by school buddy nitin.. thanks mate!

Well then here goes.. I'm supposed to: "Pick up an artist, fill up the tag questions with answers only using the name of songs from that artist". Interestinggg..

Pick your Artist:
]\/[etallica! \m/

Are you male or female?
Of wolf and man.

Describe yourself:
Master of puppets.

How do you feel?
The outlaw torn.

Describe where you currently live:
The house Jack built

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
I disappear :)

Your favourite form of transportation:
Ride the lightning!

Your best friend is:
Enter sandman.

Your favourite colour is:
Fuel.

What's the weather like?
The day that never comes.

If your life was a TV show, it would be called:
For whom the bell tolls..

What is life to you:
Sad but true.

Current Relationship:
Ain't my bitch :P

Marriage:
Eye of the beholder :)

Looking for:
One.

Wouldn't mind:
Whisky in the jar :)

Your Fear:
Trapped under ice.

What is the best advice you have to give:
Nothing else matters.

If you could change your name, you'd change it to:
Orion.

Thought for the Day:
The Frayed Ends Of Sanity...

How you would like to die:
Fade to black!

My motto:
Seek and Destroy!

Oh boy oh boy this was fun.. thanks to Metallica's ways of naming their songs! I had a feeling Green Day would have offered more choice but the days of listening to punk are over with school I guess...

Theyppu!

2009-07-31T01:04:00.004+05:30

Word definition: Theyppu (variations: theppu, thyeppu etc). Abstract noun, meaning the general but strong and definite inclination of things (or life in general) to screw themselves/itself up so as to cause maximum inconvenience and irritation to the person concerned (aka we).

Today dawned as just another day.. bright sunshine in the morning was a bit unusual given the chilly monsoon morning atmosphere. I woke up earlier thn usual, at six, and switched on the torrent downloads. After a long time downstairs I checked the computer only to be told that it had been doing precisely nothing for one hour, wasting free internet time, as the torrent signalled an error and was stuck. Thyeppu number one: Led Zeppelin download torrent stuck at precisely 50%, with not a single file fully downloaded. I cursed the computer and shut the damn thing down and got ready for college.
As I was getting out, I happened to notice that the charge in my phone was in depleting mode. Well my phone has this behaviour by which charge just drops as fast as possible once the battery level gets below the maximum number of bars in the level indicator. So this meant I would have to get back home as soon as possible, regular time, after college or else I would be stuck somewhere in the city/college with a dead communication device. Great.
The bus timings being rescheduled to being 10mins early meant absolute mayhem in the mental timetable I had carefully fabricated over one year of getting ready for college in the morning. Hence I arrived at the same old Vazhappally bus stop (rather, shed) a good fifteen minutes early (God knows how or why on earth).. After some moments of pretending to be busy on the phone I gave it up and resigned to just picking up random conversations with buddies at the stop. The sun had decided to give us a surprise. Give ME a surprise, more like. I was wearing this dark shirt with a round necked tee inside just because I expected the day to be cold and rainy.. well hence the sun was shining with all its might and by the time the bus made its appearance I had perspired off litres of water and got a good tan too :P

The devices lab in the first three hours was the only brighter part of the day.. we breezed through two experiments - a differentiator/Low-pass filter and the famed(in our circles) RC-coupled amp :) No batch in the history of our class had got the latter so far in their first try for some godforsaken reason and thus every experiment hence was succeeded by the RC-coupled amp ritual. My group was doing the ritual for the 238th time and today something happened. No, dont ask me what. It involves a deep understanding of the intricacies of the Chaos theory and various higher levels of philosophical-domain Fourier transformation on functions mapping the general theyppu behaviour of resistors, capacitors and the like. Anyway the result was that the damn thing worked this time (again, dont ask me why this time or how - we had been connecting it EXACTLY the same way every session) and left three boys and a girl feeling high :P

Post lunch were all (by now) boring hours. I was feeling sleepy and if our electrical madam hadnt called my name to answer a question I would have dropped my head on my book for sure. I vaguely remember her asking me the answer to some equivalent reactance of something something of a something in a transformer problem we were supposed to be solving. "Ma'am.. I still haven’t started doing it", I said, as matter-of-fact as possible, and sat down and attempted to fight off sleep. It was hopeless.. I longed for just six feet of space to lie and drift to slumberland. The last hour was, contrary to our ~~belief~~ hope, not free :(

Four o'clock. Finally. Was a boring day. I got my stuff and cheered up thought of a good sleep back home in bed. Theyppu again! Just for the fun of it, I offered to shout out my classmate's number during the attendance ritual. In my very alert state of mind, despite him telling me that his number was 45, I called out a proxy for 44. Only after he called out his 45 with a bewildered look did I realise the goof-up. I turned back to see the 44-girl with a 'WTF!" expression on her face. Now this was the ultimate in utter-nonsense-theyppu!

Time for the bus to leave... when another of our guys caught up with me and said I had to stay back for some ISTE work.. By this time I had given up my desire to get a good sleep anytime today and stayed back till five. That meant I had to catch a city bus back home. After having a bland sharjah at the bakery nearby I started the wait for the bus. The first bus showed ITS theyppu by just not stopping. I almost expected the driver to look back and smile a mocking grin but he didn’t :-| The next bus was packed with humanity and it stopped. No seats. Still blazing hot evening. Tee shirt inside. Library books and record to add to weight of bag. And I knew I'd kept my mp3 player at home. Theyppu!

So I stood with the bag all the way through two traffic jams, for a 45 minute journey and got a seat for the last five minutes. It was as if life was never missing out an opportunity to make fun of myself or itself ( I don't know!). Walking from East fort to back home I get a call from home informing me that my sister had gone for a carnatic concert from her music class at such and such a place and that I needed to stay there for her programme and accompany her back home. By this time I had lost all hopes of ever sleeping for many days or even weeks and I sighed and resigned to my fate. I arrived at the place to see my sis sitting with several other kids, patting 'thaalam's to what some singer was singing onstage. She signalled as if to say hers was yet to take place and that it would be later. I got myself a chair far back and started the wait. Ragam Hamsanaadam... rather fine song. Then came some weird ragam, which sounded like the typical 'made-for-complexity-alone-and-not-for-any-mood-or-emotion' kind of a song, so I just went out of the hall and walked along the road, which was the one overlooking the Padmanabha swamy temple pond. I got myself something to eat and drink, for I was famished, and it was then that I came into the same situation as hari chettan did in his blog post.
Nature's call. And there are no public toilets here. I slunk along dark corners of roads in search for darker ones to attend to the call, but had no luck. Finally I had to pee near a transformer while praying against any stray current in the premises :P Getting back, it was some other recital and there was no sign of the lady winding up. I sat nevertheless under a working fan and sent a good load of mosquitoes to meet their maker. I was increasingly getting impatient and tried various means of passing the time(It was still some boring song, not the sounds-good ones) - couting the number of heads I could see or the number of times the guy next to me said 'wah!' or 'besh!'.. My phone had now almost died (the battery, remember?), so I couldnt switch it on and that form of entertainment was out of reach :( I was getting real pissed off with my sis. Finally at 8.30 pm (after two hours of being in that place) she came up and told me that we could leave.

At first I didnt believe her.. I told her it wasnt proper to leave just like that without participating in her programme and singing what she was supposed to. And that was when the last and ultimate theyppu struck. Ladies and gentlemen, yes, after all the theypps of the day, this one 'was the unkindest cut of them all'..
She said, "Hey mine got over long back.. even before you came! I was just sitting and watching the rest"

I just ran out of swear words.

----------------------

PS: So it was true: I never slept yesterday :(
PPS: One more theyppu. Getting back home I found I had my mp3 player in my bag!
PPPS: I'm getting delirious. I havent even read thru this post once fully before posting.. so ignore any errors.. It's now Friday and I need to hit the sack!! NOW!

Morning raga vs. the unsolicited songworm

2009-07-08T21:04:00.013+05:30

Monsoon is the best time to be in Kerala. The weather outside right now is just splendid, with a cold breeze continuously yet unobtrusively keeping one fresh. Some soothing song from the temple nearby sails down in the wind.. at times rising in volume and other times falling.. the horn of the Malabar exp or the occasional night freighter.. Soft music is most beautiful when heard from afar, carried by the breeze. Metal, on the other hand is the most orgasmic when heard in a live concert.

My mind's always in a song.. it's been so for so many years that I dont know when it started. I wake up in the morning to some nice tune, (but not always though.. many a times has 'dappankoothu' frolicked in the morning), shower humming something to myself. Tap my feet in some rhythm or the other when I walk barefoot. Heavy metal runs in my veins when traveling in the college bus.. All this is interspersed only by minutes of speech or much relished moments of silence.

It's only a matter of time before technology is misused, as those idiotic oldies (who love criticising the internet, mobile phones etc) say. Somehow, God seems to have issued a royal decree ordering loudspeakers of highest decibel levels to be installed in the nearby streets whenever there's a festival at the temple.

God: ..and get the makes by Bose. Ye'know, those tiny unassuming ones which make a LOT of noise.. I LOVE them!
%$%!@#: Yes your omnipotence.. but those are real costl-
God: Do not interrupt me, thou mortal earthling. Thou shalt be playing all these songs *takes out a list of the latest, and time honoured favourites of the festival audio managers* This one in the morning.. then this in the afternoon.. NO SHUFFLE, mind you. I want this in the exact order and crossfaded. Get me?
%$%!@#: Yes your majestic Godliness.
God: Righto, run along and do what I told you.
*ching* (disappears)

%$%!@#: (to manager) Well we can't afford Bose.. We'll get a couple of 'duplis' from Thakarapparambu.. and dunk the rest of the finance heheheh
manager: njeheheheh hm.. okay.

Two days later, a petti-auto arrives and depostits loud-speaker dabbas every fifty metres, and special amp-cum-reinforcement-speakers at every junction surrounding the temple. The volume knob on the amplifier is disfunctional (nevertheless at highest volume setting) and the party is on!! And what a song selection this time... Usually the songs are bearable, but for the last one week (precisely the inspiration for this post), they are goddamn driving me mad! I can only arrive at the perfectly logical conclusion that the eject of the CD player they're using has stopped working and thus the one CD they have is stuck inside for eternity, for our sons and grandsons and greatgrandsons to hear and go mad. The guy behind the controls just comes and turns it on, and switches between live and CD at times. That's pretty much the arsehole's job. He's probably deaf, or with as much sense of music as a tapeworm. The same songs keep repeating in the same order every day, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again... :(

Seems 'Alaipaayuthe' has turned into the national anthem. I hear it everyday in the morning and at night, and every goddamn sonofamother wants to sing it in a carnatic recital and every damn daughter wants to dance to it. I've developed a clenching-fist reflex to that song now. Maybe my brain imagines myself strangling someone. And if somebody is listening, CARNATIC MUSIC SOUNDS REAL HORRIBLE FROM A GODDAMN LOUDSPEAKER BOX, EVEN FOR A MINUTE. Carnatic music is meant to be enjoyed live, not blared over some black box. Ditto for Hindustani. There's this real pleasure in hearing the sympathetic strings of a sarod or sitar twang richly in resonance with the strings plucked by the player..

Then there are the repetitive devotional songs. They're basically the product of a jobless tramp turned composer who suddenly divined on a tune for two lines of a song and met up with a devotional-song writer, and the two went out to a kallushaap to discuss plans to make quick money. The question of 'what abt the music for the remaining lines' changed into 'why any music for the remaining lines' by some spark in the godforsaken brain of the 'composer'.. and the influence of the spirit acted as a catalyst for the spiritual :P Result: One tune, three songs in praise of three Gods. Three hours of pure spirituality for the masses.
God knows how people tolerate the same tune going on and on and on with just changes in lyrics, for one whole hour. Height of retardation. And the lyrics ha.. Some of them are threats to the tourism industry. Straight from what clothes to pack, what bus/train is the best suited for the journey, to where the temple is, the history behind it, and what people do there.. all in a question-answer form of a child asking her dad. (Rumours of multiple-answer type QA albums about to be released soon are about)

The torture continues.. I restrain my urge to blow those boxes up... and I don't step out of my room nowadays. My headphones are my best friend. And sometimes Megadeth sounds infinitely better than spirituality.

Ninety nine plus ONE!

2009-06-30T19:41:00.006+05:30

Finally.. after three years of kinda continuous blogging, my posts now count to a hundred :)

After a long thought about what to post on the 100th, I thought I'd be faithful to this good old blog by actually including a part of itself as a sort of tribute to itself... *sniff* For it's been what my mind has been all these years...
Hence I got an excuse to dig up all my old posts outta the archive and atleast glance through each one of them.. And it was worth it, for I really couldn't believe (and I'm not saying this just for the sake of saying it) that I had written certain posts.. I've really changed over the years it seems.. :D So ladies and gentlemen, presenting the specially handpicked (mouse-clicked) list of my favourite posts(as of this moment!) over the last three years (in chronological order: oldest first):

Horlicks Fest: My first post in the 'criticism' category. My total, comprehensive pissed-off-ness that day led me to "aishwaryamaayittu" start blogging (and swearing on it). Got my first comments on it too.. A bit of nostalgia wouldn't hurt eh..

Through the landscape...blah blah: Straight from the bored heart of a travel-bug cum shutter-bug cum railfan waiting for his exams to get over :)

Up and down the motherland: A longish post about that awesome trip with our dear Vice Princi and five class-buddies to Chandigarh for the 1st National Aerospace Olympiad. Enjoyed it like hell.. being my first trip this far with classmates :)

Vista on 128MB RAM?: Misleading as the title is, it's undoubtedly the most popular post on the blog going by the two-three hits everyday for it by desperate people who are looking to run Vista on their old machines (LOL!!!). It reeks of Linux propaganda, btw :D

Ghanan Ghanan: A long short-story :P I simply love this one!

Chengalisation: One of the few posts from the Criticism category which made it to this list.. this was written with all disgust!

Top Linux Slogans:Another linux post :D But this one was a listing of hugely hilarious pro-linux slogans(which also happen to be jabs at W!ndow$... Became rather popular by appearing on tuxmachines and fsdaily.

This evening: My attempt at overcoming the lack of something to blog about, my just going for a walk and making this post out of absolutely nothing. Ironically I liked this one a lot :)

Up, up and away: The first of the five-part series of HUGE posts about my first trip out of India.. I typed furiously for days that I almost got Carpal tunnel syndrome :-| Still, going by the comments people felt it was a good read I guess...

Why am I so?: A one stop explanation for people who got curious about my fascination for trains. Says it all.. and proves I'm not mental :D

A Monsoon Sojourn: The advantage of blogging these lovely trips/joyrides is that you can always refresh your memory by going through these a long time later...

Christmas as a Loyolite: Christmas was the best season to be in Loyola.. *sigh* I miss school!

A Leaf outta Life 01: Finally, a college post.. to complete the circle eh? But I like this one a lot.. makes it seem like lots happen in a day!

Well that ends what undoubtedly looks like a boasting vain display of posts.. well I don't care if it appears so :| Had such a nice time sifting through archives and poking bytes at parts of Google's databanks which remained unaccessed for years!

Finally... thanks to anyone who has gone though my blog at some point of time or the other.. And a warm hug to all who have stayed through till now :) Love y'all!

That HUGE tag

2009-06-15T09:39:00.011+05:30

I'm havin no min for some serious blogging, yet it tugs at my heartstrings to see my blog having not been updated recently. Hence the lazybones, easy-peasy method of filling up space on the Google server... Picked this rather tiny tag from Nitin. Okies here goes:

1. Last beverage – Sprite :) Just emptied an ageing bottle lying in the fridge
2. Last phone call- Abhi
3. Last text message – Brajesh
4. Last song you listened to – Metallica - No leaf clover
5. Last time you cried – Hmm... Not very far back actually :D

HAVE YOU EVER..

6.Dated someone twice? – Nopes.
7. Been cheated on? – Nopes.
8. Cried yourself to sleep? – Ditto.
9. Lost someone special? – Not really. But miss them :(
10. Been depressed? – Lots lately. Over particularly nothing infact. Never thought such things would happen to me!
11. Seen ghosts – Never.. I don't believe in them!
12.LIST THREE FAVORITE COLORS.
Blue, white, green.

THIS YEAR HAVE YOU

15.Made new friends – Definitely :)
16. Fallen out of love – Naah...
17. Laughed until you cried – Yeah.. big time :)
18. Met someone who changed you – hehe that never happens :P
19. Found out who your true friends were – Yup..
20. Found out someone was talking about you – Much to my surprise :)
21. Kissed anyone on your friend’s list – In my dreams :D That one was wonderful!
22. How many people on your friends list do you know in real life ? – Ah.. around half of them I reckon.
23. How many kids do you want to have – Two. A cute li'l girl and a naughty li'l devil of a boy :D
24. Do you have any pets – Visiting pets. There's ubuntu, g-man, cat#1, cat#2, BumbleBee#1.. can't think of more right now...
25. Do you want to change your name – Not given it a thought as of yet..
26. What did you do for your last birthday – Ah turned 18 :) A bit of gorging about restaurants, talkin to ppl over the phone, bossing my lil sister around.. Met KK, AO, RajeshSir to tell them where I was and that coll was starting the next day.
27. What time did you wake up today – 6:26. Woke up to her missed call :P
28. What were you doing at midnight last night – Texting Brajesh about how sweet, angelic, lovely (etc) Shreya Ghoshal's voice was... then switched off the mp3 player, and slept over my Mechanical Engg textbook.
29. Name something you CANNOT wait for – Get the hell outta this fuckin place after three years.
30. Last time you saw your father – Ten mins earlier.
31. What is one thing you wish you could change about your life – Ah.. lots *sigh*
32. What are you listening to right now – Some little birdie chirping excitedly atop the banyan tree near the pond. My headphone conked out.
33. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom – If I did, I don't remember now. Screw my memory.
34. What’s getting on your nerves right now? The infinite time needed by the Kerala University for conducting a goddamn exam.
36. Whats your real name – Tzreiraumm. What the hell.
37. Relationship Status – Single.. and experimenting :P
38. Zodiac sign – Libra/Virgo. Somebody called it a cusp or something. Whatever...
39. Male or female – Male
40. Natural Hair color? – Black
41. Hair color now – Kinda dark brownish to black.
42. Pet Peeve – The way people just can't seem to mind their own goddamn business.
43. Need Glasses- You bet!
44. Long or short – Now what the fuck does this mean? Length of what?
45. Height – Five ten.
46. Do you have a crush on someone – Have openly admired a lot of 'em.. No real crush as of yet :)
47. What do you like about yourself? – I can do a hell lot of things well. Open boasting but that's the truth.
48. Piercings – Ears. Not by choice though.. Had it done when I was a baby :)
49. Tattoos – Want this one: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2075/2417129525_43ec687684.jpg
50. Righty or lefty – Right. Don't even mention the other word to me. I've had enough of hearing it.. what with living in this state for 18 years.

FIRSTS.
51. First surgery – None as yet.
52. First piercing – Ears.. at the age of one I think.
53. First tattoo – Heh.. some fat blue bloke with Boomer written across his chest :P
54. First best friend – Ranjeet
55. First sport you joined – Cricket :)
56. First pet – Again a visiting one.. some striped tomcat.
57. First vacation – Oh this one I simply can't remember. We travelled like crazy when I was small.. all over South India I guess. So the location would be somewhere in there.
59. First crush- I remember I liked girls a lot right from when i was small :D First one was the girl in some ad behind the telephone directory.. I even used to keep the directory with me all the time.. Cute love eh :)
60. First alcoholic drink – White wine.

RIGHT NOW.
61. Eating – A couple of almonds...
62. Wearing – A black tee (it's almost a rag) and grey short. And Jockey. There u go :)
63. I’m about to – Resume that crap in the third module of the text.
64. Speaking to – Isn't it obvious that I'm typing dammit!
65. Waiting to – Go railfanning after the exams.
66. Want kids? – Naah not atleast a couple of years from now.
67. Want to get married? – Ditto.
68. Careers in mind? – Eh.. now looking at tech-journalism :)

WHICH IS BETTER WITH THE OPPOSITE SEX?
69. Lips or eyes – Eyes.
70. Hugs or kisses – I love both :D
71. Shorter or taller- About the same height.
72. Older or Younger – Younger, or the same.
73. Romantic or spontaneous – Romantic :)
74. Nice stomach or nice arms – Ah.. both matter a lot!
75. Tattoos or piercings- Taken an interest in ear studs recently.. the ones on the edges of the ear lobes are cute :)
76. Sensitive or loud- Sensitive but not too much. Loud is kinda bitchy.
77. Hook-up or relationship – Relationship
78. Trouble maker or hesitant- Trouble makerrr!

HAVE YOU EVER.
79. Kissed a stranger – Nopes :(
80. Drank hard liquor – Not yet :P
81. Lost glasses/contacts – Never... Touchwood!
82. Sex on first date – Lemme see.. that warrants a blogpost anyway!
83. Broken someone’s heart – I don't believe I ever have.
84. Had your own heartbroken – Yes.
85. Been arrested?- Plenty of times on GTA and NFS but evaded 'em :)
86. Turned someone down – hm...
87. Cried when someone died – No.
88. Got someone into trouble intentionally – Muhahaha yeah baby :D

DO YOU BELIEVE IN.
89. Yourself – Definitely. But tend to go overboard at times.
90. Miracles – Hopefully :D
91. Love at first sight – Yes..
92. Heaven – on Earth, yeah :) Up there— Where? Andromeda?
93. Santa Claus – No.
94. Kissing on the first date? – Yes :D
95. Angels – Which 'angels'? :P

ANSWER TRUTHFULLY.
96. Is there one person you want to be with right now? – Yeah...
97. Had more than one boyfriend/ girlfriend at one time? – Not really.
98. Do you believe it’s possible to remain faithful forever? – It is.
99. What’s the one thing you cannot live without? – Music. The computer. The internet. My people. That counts as a BIG one.
100. Posting this as 100 truths? – You need me to swear or something? Nopes sorry I don't fuckin swear in my blog posts.. yeah right :P

Study Hols - an oxymoron

2009-05-16T17:17:00.009+05:30

Right when life kinda settles down after.. um.. well particularly nothing but I mean those smooth parts of life where everything behaves the way it should and there is a good whiff of the smug 'ah' factor in the air, comes the old enemy: the exam. Dragging before it comes the so called 'study holidays'. There couldn't be a worse misnomer. Not because it's an oxymoron but because the first part makes no sense. (Nor would this post, if I go on like this.. so I guess I'll narrow down to my case):

After the machine-gun fire of ten-exams-without-any-break-whatsoever-of-two-exams-a-day, (named meekly the 'series-tests') we collapsed, worn out physically and mentally, that weekend. I resorted to watching some movies and.. well.. spending pretty much the entire time in front of the good old computer. Then it happened. Dire threatening messages warning of impending doom. 'S1S2 university exam dates announced' it screeched.
It was a fake. After two or three more such forerunners, the real deal came up and pointed a jagged finger at May29th.

Fast forward back to today. The oxymoron thing.. right. Now there's this inevitable, undeniable truth about study holidays. However hard you try to study, the world against you doing it. Nature, people you know (and those you don't), your computer, your phone, your mind heck you yourself are dead set against the very idea of you opening the book. Hence there's absolutely no option except trying to have fun, albeit with an irritating, nagging thought at the back of your mind.

And who says you can't? Heck, I haven't been at home for two weeks for nothing! Here's a good but in no ways complete list of all the stuff one can do during "those three weeks" ;)

1. Computer *murmurs of approval around* Don't waste time shutting it down. Dont. If you're one of the unfortunate who just need to keep restarting the computer once in a while to keep the OS running (a.k.a Windows user), also see 4. Do random fun stuff if you're getting bored. Try rearranging the icons on the desktop, and play pegopolis with them. Press down Alt-tab with many windows open, and predict which one will appear when you release it. Award yourself another try when you win and two more if you lose (this one's obviously addictive ;) Play all your CDs in the drive and listen to it spinning over and over again to such an extent that you can identify which is which from the noise it makes inside the drive. (Dedicated and thorough practice recommended) Set up an infinite howling feedback by putting a microphone right in front of your speakers and turning up the volume. Play death metal in between such howling sessions for a break.
Also try the infinite screenshot thingy: Screenshot of a desktop inside another desktop inside another desktop inside another desktop inside another desktop inside another desktop inside another desktop inside another desktop (yeah that stuff..)

2. The internet Get addicted to it. Set a 'make 1000 friends' goal for youself at Omegle (If you don't know what Omegle is, click on the link. If you already know, go back to it only after reading this post :P) In my case, the addiction happened with twitter! (Yup, here I am on twitter :) ) Try tweeting so fast that twitter says "just a nanosecond ago", "just a picosecond ago", instead of the usual less than a few seconds ago. Another way of entertainment would be playing the amnesia game on all the friends in ur chatlist. Start with 'uh.. who are you?' and make it convincing so that you get bored of it soon. Then switch over to 3.

3. The TV Channel surfing!! Also try memorising all the numbers and names of the channels while not forgetting to watch all the movies in HBO and/or Star Movies. Re arrange the channels and memorise the numbers again. Again, keep track of the movies!

4 Install some very new distro of linux on a 486. Or better, install Linux from Scratch!

6. Learn to play a musical instrument, preferably one that's horrendously difficult and requires a lot of patience. Teach yourself and practise it day and night. Learn to juggle ice-cubes. Or water for that matter. Juggling liquid water sounds funny but I guess it's achievable. Give it a try and let me know :)

7. Blog huge posts like twitter updates. Around a hundred a day would sound fair.

10. Try to format your brain so that you forget to count.

11. Repeat all that I've mentioned. Then write a short blog post about it.

13. Try your hand at a bit of study (this is the unreachable part of the infinite loop I've set up between 1 and 10 muhahahaha)

Guess that'll do for now. Glad to have revived the blog. Gotta run... think I'll perfect the art of juggling water atleast today!

A Leaf Outta Life (LOL) - 01

2009-03-20T22:22:00.003+05:30

"WHATTHAFUCK!", I exclaimed in horror.
"Yup.. it's true", said Gautam. "It reached most people around here.. Navaneeth, Sruthi, Praveen, Athulya, Balu.. everyone's got it."
He was right.. One by one, the survivors trooped in, shuffling under the weight of bags which carried mostly nothing. All with wan faces in which lingered the phantom of devastation.
The marklist of the recent test-series, with the marks of all the members of the class, had been mailed home, straight to their parents. A few of us had still not received it, so the only possibility was that exactly the following afternoon, our mailboxes would have a brown envelope, labelled "Parent-Teachers Association; College of Engineering, Trivandrum".

Not a very pleasing way to start off a warm Friday morning. The question remained: How to bail ourselves out? Gautam had stepped out; he now entered the class with a smug expression, under which shone a sinister grin. "Got it all planned... Have told bro to stow it away as soon as the damn mailbox feels it".
Easy. For him. I got the pest of a sister at home, who, unlike the fellow-conspirator-cum-comrade-for-life attitude of a two-or-three-year-younger brother, would do all that was possible in her power to bring shame and downfall or get me courtmartialled by all the folks at home. That, I may safely assert, when seen in the light of her ten-year old brain fuming under the recently stirred kiddy envy at my showing off my driving skills whenever and wherever possible nowadays, is an entirely unpleasant situation.
In short, the possibilty of getting the letter safely out of sight by an accomplice at home, while I fretted and waited anxiously at college, was Zilch. Zero. Don't even imagine it.

Home...just fifteen kilometres away. I had woken up to my alarm sounding for the fourth time, after being piteously killed (snoozed) thrice. "May u begin this day with a smile on ur face, and with happiness in ur soul to embrace.. Gud mng :)", sang the sms from a newly found friend of mine :D
The daily chores: Starting up the computer.. resuming all the torrent downloads checking mail quick bath charge the mobile-phone shave get dressed wolf down hot breakfast run up and downstairs stuff the wallet ID card phone into pocket.. and walk to the bus stop. This time, I had the violin with me. My ten year old beauty of a golden instrument.. the one which, I fondly remember, had earned me a standing ovation two years back, from a very special audience ;) As is usual with any accessory, I forgot it in the bus when I got off, only to be reminded of it in a casual remark by a friend, on which I had dashed back and slung it back over my left shoulder. Nothing very out of the ordinary.

Back in class... Statistical mechanics. The whole topic hung thick like a grey cloud, about which I knew nothing. After the initial futility at trying to grasp the stuff, I gave up and reverted my mind to the mark-list. Creating good but impractical theories I gave up. My hands reached down under the desk, till I felt the texture of synthetic cloth. I groped for a moment.. and unzipped.
The bag opened. I took out the book I had been reading: Salman Rushdie - Midnights Children. My head at the critical angle between looking-up and looking-down, I resumed reading.. with the applications of Bose-Einstein Statistics floating about the class.

"The frankness of the urchin girl, the honesty of latrine cleaners, made Ayooba sick; he told her she had a soul composed of pig-droppings, and a tongue caked with excrement also; and in the throes of his jealousy he devised the prank of the jump-leads, the trick of the electrified urinal. The location appealed to him; it had a certain poetic justice."

"You.. what does this g-i term signify? Yes, I mean YOU". I jumped and dropped the book into the bag between my legs. Looking up, I saw our Physics sir's stern gaze, his eyes fixed (I heaved a sigh) on one of the most picked-on guys in the last bench. I was happily reminded, for the umpteenth time, of the innumerable merits of being a front-bencher.

Fermi-Dirac characteristics... bosons. 'Can't feel, huh?' Ayooba sneered to Farooq and Shaheed, 'Just wait on: I'll make him jump for sure.' My outer ears picking up Quantum Physics and the inner one glued to the book, my brain was working hard to filter the rage of English streaming in.
And as if in compensation, the second hour was free.

Feeling slightly sleepy, I lay with my head on the desk and the book on my lap.. resumed reading. Farooq yelps, 'Grab your ears and pray for pity, he's brought us to this drowned place and run off, it's all your fault, you Ayooba, that trick with the jump-leads and this is his revenge!' The book was into me, gripping my soul and refusing to give my tired eyes the luxury of reprise. As a result, I drifted in and out of reality, and in and out of sleep.. oblivious of the two guys playing cricket in the class, oblivious of a professor who saw them and walked inside and started scolding, rebuking, advising and finally walking out.
Maths hour. This time, I paid attention. Thank God, for by twelve o'clock I had learnt something about Eigen vectors.

Lunch time. After contemplating for a few moments on whether to get out from the left side or the right side of the bench, I jumped out straight across my desk. (Sometimes in life you really take useless decisions). Straight to the cooler -cum- wash basin -cum- place to see some really pretty chicks come to hygenise their hands before having lunch. There must have been something jinxed in my timing since, at the exact moment I (and my pals), were greeted by the sight of some of the most lovely looking faces in the whole college. I don't know if I have mentioned it before, but the very presence of a beautiful face pumps a lot of feel-good-factor in the air :) We washed our hands, loitered about a bit and returned to class feeling as a light as a bird ;)
A bit of 'puttu' from Abhi, some soya-meat from Gautam, and lotsa curd from my ol' bottle.. my dosas doused in spicy sambhar went down a satisfied digestive tract. A visit to our Physics lab was in the offing for a while, and after a long wait our Optics professor found the right time to take us on a visit to the tiny lab. A Sodium-light lamp glowed menacingly in the distance... a Michelson's interferometer sat beside it. We were awed by the sensitivity of the instrument, which showed changes even on a small pat on the table. The next half an hour went in about ten of us engaging in admiration of the precise and delicate optical instruments invented by man.

Friday meant two hours off in the afternoon. Around one, finding all the computers in the CCF occupied, I joined Abhi, Gautam, Vishnu and a couple of others on a largely aimless walk, which somehow ended up at the Indoor basketball court. And after a long gap of more than a year, I played... a lot. About forty five minutes later about ten exhausted, sweating guys dripped down the road, and trickled into the 'civil-canteen'. Gulping down lemonade we warmed up the already hot room. There wasn't much time left... and our Civil Engg. hour was about to start. Gautam decided to call it a day, picked up his bag and left. If only I had known what he had in mind...

'That's it,' the buddha says. 'Saleem: that was it.' Damn, wrong page. Hardly twenty people in the class... easy visibility. No choice. I closed the Rushdie, kept it under the table and took up an almost-sleeping-but-not-exactly-appearing-to-be. Drifting in and out of consciousness, my ears grabbed a lot of stuff about paints.. base, vehicle, thinners... My phone buzzed a couple of times signifying the time when a host of messages: News, one-liners, quotes.. troop in from Google sms channels. Qualities of a good paint.. drying time.. distempers... moisture absorption. After some time the professor marked our attendance and made his exit.

A free hour at last... I mean, 'again' :) I thankfully waited until the horde of students had left the class. Walking over to under where the working fan was blowing warm afternoon air down, I placed my bag as a pillow and resumed reading, the book on my chest. The lone figure of Marco was busy completing his workshop record a couple of desks away.
He sat cross-legged amid the wailing storm of his companions' fear, forcing himself to remember; but no, it would not come. And at last the buddha, hurling spittoon against earthen floor, exclaimed to stone-deaf ears: 'It's not - NOT - FAIR!'
Solitary, under the breeze of afternoon fan blowing warm tropical air down over my sweaty self, I was feeling happy :) The feeling continued as a cutlet, a vada followed by a glass of piping hot chaaya went down my tract in the canteen.

Evening.. after the buses are gone and the silence of a dignified educational institution returns to the college air, the quick notes of a violin, in harmony with the melodious chords of a grand piano accompanied a couple of voices... Medley. Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil floated in the music-rich fabric of air that clothed us, till it was time for us to leave. We walked out of the main hall, past the lovely whispering crackling acacia trees, down to the main gate, and flagged down a crowded city bus. Violin between legs, phone in one hand and the other hand tightly gripping the overhead handrail for fear of being accused of harassment (I was standing amidst a crowd of chattering women ;) the bus rumbled on to the next stop where a bunch of familiar-but-only-familiar faces board. One of them is the lady with the beautiful eyes.

The reduction of ragging to near-nil has one major problem: You never get to know your elder-most seniors very well... Take our case for instance.. if only we had been forced to confront, propose to (etc.) senior girls, I for instance would have referred to the lady I mentioned previously by her name. But the sad fact is I don't know her name! Hence referral names take various forms such as: The shortest one, the sweet-voiced one, or in this case, the "aankhen teri.. kitni haseen" lady with beautiful eyes!

Srikanth and I were in the bus together and we finally got places to rest our tired bums. The rest of the journey was typical. A medley of topics... PIC microcontrollers, the Raga Jog, the lady-with-beautiful-eyes (I tried to logically prove she would alight at PMG, but later she proved me wrong and alighted with us, at East Fort). As we walk away ('we' as in Srikanth and I ;) Gautam sends me an overjoyed message saying "Lotsa chicks everywhere... don't know where to look :)" meaning he's at _____ Institute of Technology for Women, and he's at their tech-fest. I dash off a txt msg saying: "let my fire of envy burn you into hormonal neutrality, thou fiend!" and laugh over all our silly boyish infatuations and the gaping-at-the-fairer-lot business... and finally reach home.

The final good thing.. the completing significant bit.. the stuff that comes around, completing something in the story is: No letter reached my mailbox! Thank God!!

And you sir..?

2009-03-06T18:51:00.012+05:30

There's this quiet little temple near my house... built to typical Kerala architecture: A closed Sanctum, surrounded by a walk forms the central portion. At various places along this you find other deities, most often under the shade of a huge banyan tree. Typical.
Then you have the lovely 'grove' in which a small path leads to a tiny pond, surrounded by small leafy trees, in the midst of which stands a Krishna, complete with his wooden bansuri, and a little calf grazing near his feet. Tiny little bells hang above the idol, which tinkle by themselves as the breeze filters through the trees after rustling their leaves, and the morning sun-rays illuminate the smoke wisps emanating from the sandalwood incense sticks placed nearby. As if to complete the serenity, a soft, devotional song in the soothing Sahana raaga or a mellifluous Yaman Kalyani floats in from afar..

This evening I felt the urge to spend a few minutes at the place and took off. After making some customary salutations I sat down to enjoy the evening breeze under one of the huge banyan trees which adorn the temple. A few people were sitting on the stone platform surrounding the old, wizened tree. One side of it, however, was a figure. An old man with an unkempt grey beard, a shabby, randomly buttoned green shirt, and a dirty white dhoti. He was sitting crosslegged, eyes staring into the distance. No one was on this side of the platform. Having given it a thought, I went and sat a few feet away from him. A few questions popped up in my mind... was this guy a tramp? Is he okay in his head? (this is one thing all we Indians think on seeing a haggardly dressed figure in a decent place).

Out of a few furtive side glances I saw that he was tapping his fingers to the music. My doubts started vanishing.. I wondered what he would be thinking of this young man sitting next to him. I feared he might have put me into the category of people who dismissed him as 'just another tramp'.. and something told me he was not what he seemed to be.
A couple of minutes later, I turned my wrist to look at the time.. but my watch had died the previous night and so I slid my hands into my pocket and had a look at the mobile phone's screen. 18:32.

Then he spoke. A quiet voice: "Samayam entha.. aarara aayo?" ("The time.. is it six thirty now?")
I looked at him, surprised for a fraction of a second, and replied in the affirmative.. "ah.. aarara aayi". He smiled.

I was right.

A few seconds later, he spoke again, in Malayalam. "You shouldn't get used to wearing these glasses... try moving about without them... do some exercises, ones that stimulate the nerves and the blood vessels of the eye"
I nodded, "Yes.. but my glasses' power is very high"
"You should have thought of that before... this has become a sort of a compulsive accessory for students nowadays.. and is promoted by certain medical companies too... forcing the community away from regaining good eyesight, and to become dependent on spectacles."

He asked me what I did, and I told him I was an engineering student. Where, he queried. "Trivandrum Engineering College.. at Kulathoor", I replied.
"Oh", he raised his eyebrows, "the government college?" he asked. I nodded.
After asking me which branch I was in, he asked me if I knew a certain Mr. M, in the Civil Dept. I told him that I didn't know him personally, but that I have heard of the professor.
Ente aniyante mona, he said. ("He's my brother's son")

He then went on to say where he had been working (I forgot), that he lives in Sreekariyam(12 kms from here), and also mentioned the names of some other lecturers in my college and how he knew them.
Every statement he made, was uttered from a completely normal, educated mind. I asked him his name and got an answer. He then asked me about the opportunities for higher studies in my field, told me how his sister moved to a good research post in the US after a brief stint at TIFR, Bombay, and made a remark about how nice an atmosphere my college has. All except about himself.
It was getting dark. I made a gesture as if to rise, and said "Well okay then.. see you again sometime". He nodded.

I made my way out of the temple, and walked back home. Just another day... and I had met a new friend. I wanted to ask him a lot of questions.. "Why are you dressed like a shabby tramp? Or have you fallen upon bad times? How do you come here all the way from your house? Why don't you give a thought to your appearance?"

I thought he would take the conversation to that direction when he spoke, but he preferred not to.

I respected his dignity.

Breaking the silence

2009-02-27T20:09:00.009+05:30

It's been almost an era since the any bits and bytes went through this humble abode, thanks to one hell of an attack of acute blogger's block I had been suffering.

Anyway, the reason for the long hiatus? I just dunno. The reason for this sudden post? Goddammit I don't know!

"I dunno why.. I just did not feel like writing.." is what immediately comes to mind. Of late, I've been watching a lot of movies. Maybe to make up for the near-nil coverage of movies I did till now. For those in whom it didn't ring a bell, the piece of quoted text at the beginning is inspired by what Tom Hanks says ("I dunno... just felt like running..") in the movie Forrest Gump (bingo! I watched that one too.. it's a must-watch :). Since I'm too lazy to add links for all the movies I'm citing here, I assume you know the way to wikipedia ;) Forrest Gump, the Departed, of course the much-talked-about SlumDog Millionaire, RangDeBasanti (ok I admit, I'm this idiot who saw it only recently!), Kal Ho Na Ho (ditto :), Die Hard, the much-inspiring The Pursuit of Happyness, Castaway, Saving Private Ryan etc... all of them awesome ones.

I just finished watching 'Mozhi'.. a decent, lovely Tamil movie (yeah those are rare, aren't they? ;) My sis has already done a post on this, so I'm not going into much detail... but one thing about it is that it simply oozes feel-good factor. Something about all the Major-only chords in the soundtrack I guess :) Here's one from the movie.. the heroine is deaf and dumb, but the way the stuff is shot, and the way the characters are portrayed, it's just not like any movie in which you sympathise with her. Watch it yourself:

Heck, I can't believe that I, of all persons, am doing, of all things, a movie commentary! But you might excuse it to my having just got up from watching it. Anyway, it's one of the very few Indian movies that gives as much, or more, importance to the thoughts of the viewer than to his damn hormones.. one of the few Indian movies which have subtle symbolisms and "stuff that comes around, completing something in the movie", if you get what I'm trying to convey. English movies have lots of them.. in that respect our own little industry has to come a long way... whoa but I'm in no way qualified to be even the slightest critic of movies!

There's no point to this post, only a solemn promise to myself that I'm not going to let my beloved blog rust in piece!

A huge thanks to BSNL's Home-500C plan, for an awesome provision called Night-Unlimited, without which I would have gone broke and my broadband connection gone extinct by now :)

A lot of random thoughts are flowing in the moment I touch my fingertips onto the keys... a lot has to be said, a lot has to be thought... sometimes I think I have changed a lot, but sometimes my mind tells me that I'm the same little brat I always was :) Writing has to save my language from going to the dogs, since in college I barely have anyone to talk in English to, save a few. I find myself fumbling for words I would never have fumbled for a year ago... Sometimes I blame it on myself, sometimes it's easier to lay the blame on something called Fate, something I never believed in, but which increasingly keeps forcing me to.

Have to catch up with all the fellow blogger-buddies... have to get the great blogging machinery fired up and moving again :)

The shortest one ever

2009-01-11T20:16:00.005+05:30

I wish I had done a lot of things I didn't
I wish I had been told a lot of things I hadn't been
I wish I could turn back the time
I wish my life hadn't turned out to be one great irony
I wish I wasn't where I am...

Life sucks real bad.

Christmas as a loyolite

2008-12-23T18:39:00.014+05:30

I was hit by a massive attack bloggers' block for the past couple of weeks, resulting in a *cough* slight stagnation of the blog. The grey cells remained largely topic-less till now.. till I had a look at the calendar. Up came the text editor... keep in mind this is gonna be one hell of a memory-dump.

Christmas, for us in the warmer part of the world is not exactly like they have it in the rest of the earth. You know it's December here in Trivandrum when the air chills down by three or four decimal places of a degree and people start switching off fans, air conditioners and not a crow wakes up before six thirty. Christmas time would be heralded by the sudden appearance of stars in all shapes and sizes (and nativities: think "Made in China") at all shops, from the Big Bazaar to our local 'palacharakku kada' (provision store). Peeping back the memory lane, Christmas time for us school students would be marked by a sudden rush to cram up everything from the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857(?) to the chemical properties of the famed gas Hydrogen Sulphide (together, for weird combinations of exams like History and Chemistry on the same day were commonplace). In the midst of all these, like a shining star, our school's Christmas celebs.. oops, celebrations would be held.

My earliest memory of Christmas is of wondering why Santa Claus never came to our house while Thomas, John, Joseph, etc showed off their presents 'Santa gave' them. After a while I hit upon a rather logical conclusion:
Simple... our house did not have a chimney!
(Those were the days before the artificial chimneys came into existence, so my desire to bore a hole through the top of the hall fell apart. Thank God for that, for my room upstairs would have fallen through it, had the hole been dug)

The next leaf in the book is undoubtedly that of Christmas celebrations in school. Murray ma'am and her gang of choir boys (of which yours truly was a part). For days we ate our food in a hurry (I took most of the lunch back home) and gathered to practise the songs. The first song was "Silent night, holy night"... I can hear Murray ma'am's sharp voice singing it and teaching us the right pronunciation of the words... then we had in some order, songs including "The first noel", "Joy to the world", "Oh come let us adore him".. etc. We stitched ourselves white outfits (think: railway guard) for the event, had red bows tied to our necks and stood upright atop wooden benches (we were one gang of less-than-or-equal-to fourth graders), singing to the tune of the keyboard, played by our beloved 'music sir', or Jerry sir as we called him later.

Then there was the arrival of Santa. The fattest and preferably taller-than-usual(to accentuate the bulk) boy of a senior class was the Santa of the year. His job was to don the Santa garb, stick on the beard, put on the best bubbly attitude, jaunter onto the crowd and watch the kids go ga ga over him. Great job it was :) He was also allowed a few words on the mic... "HO HO HO!!! Hows Christmas dear Loyolites? What's that?? Father Principal, you've been giving them exams, eh? NO presents for you this time sir!" and the kiddies would go crazy :) *sigh* one could watch it over and over every year!

There was also the decoration of the buses.. A couple of us who used to stand in the front every day - (acting as the assistants to the 'driver uncle' - cleaning the vapour on the windshield during the rainy days, pulling the 'stop' switch to power off the engine, joining in with uncle to swear at people who drove rashly or very slowly, listening to him talking about his old days or just admiring the way he maintained a steady 60kmph over the very worst and congested roads in the city), we were undoubtedly the ones on good terms with the bus crew and were given charge of decorating. Walking the entire length of the bus millions of times during the forty five minute journey, putting up stars, deco-balls, bits of coloured paper, stickers, calling out "dei, cello tape evide?" "paypaar, paypaar", while the good old bus rumbled on and our youngsters looked upon us, the big-chettans, with admiration.

After so many years, Christmas time in school still holds a charm for me. The general atmosphere was so cheerful and bubbly, what with running about for "Choir practice", decoration, etc etc. I was part of a gang of 'musical people' whom Jerry Sir always used to recruit for 'Christmas duty', 'Onam duty', etc. A couple of years into this thing, when the senior guy stopped playing the keyboard for the songs, either out of boredom arising out of repetition or seeking VRS, I was promoted to the position of lead keyboardist. (There wasn't any accompanying keyboardist, but there was someone always accompanying the keyboardist, and that was someone who always carried the keyboard cover, or the AC-DC adapter along with the lead keyboardist when the heavy Yamaha PSR-210 was being transported from the music room to the stage and back.) I, as lead keyboardist, had the elite power of choosing my accomplice in this matter ;)
At the moment, a couple of songs come flooding to mind: "Christmas time comes once a year.. into most people's thoughts", "God bless you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay", "Christmas praises in the year.. Alleluia".. there are more but my favourite was "A long time ago in Bethlehem.. so the holy Bible says.." These were the usual songs that were sung every year, albeit each one by a different class, and one by the teachers.

The gift exchange slowly turned from 'Coca Cola' water-bottles to pens, hair gels and what not as we grew up. The concept of a feast was also started later.. with hot, spicy biriyani from some restaurant arriving in boxes towards teh afternoon, invariable causing a "that's for OUR class.. your's still late!" or a "Man.. this food looks cold.. this is not ours" squabble. Finally the 'feast' would be eaten sitting on grass under nice shady trees which were aplenty every nook and corner.
Our eleventh standard Christmas was the most memorable. The class had earlier written what had turned out to be an extremely difficult Chemistry exam, and the majority was sure of flunking. We brought all our question papers, put them in one heap, and burnt them to ashes. The ashes we smeared on our foreheads, as a sign of.. no not luck anyway.. maybe as a sure sign of a red mark(fail) in the progress card.

Our sixth standard Christmas was a different experience.. our class visited a home for mentally-challenged children. It was a real sad, but enlightening experience to talk to the children, sing songs, and bring true smiles to their faces. We realised what a lucky group of kids we were.

These are just a few snapshots from the memories of Christmas in school. As the end of 2008 creeps in, let the spirit of Christmas spread joy, brotherhood and hope to the world as it is today.

Here's wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy and fulfilling new year 09!

Enough.

2008-11-28T20:40:00.007+05:30

When will this madness stop? Some bloody bastard with the totally perverted brain of his, a complete failure in life, turns to the 'radical' way of life, brainwashed by other fucking bastards in such a manner that the fool is ready to give his life to take the life of others.

Again and again, the target is the junta. The same gory images flashing across all the news channels.. reporters risking their lives covering the whole events.. the brave and noble army-men, the NSG Commandoes, mindless of the danger lurking at every step, at every instant of their lives.. putting their lives at stake for the sake of the lives of the others.

The same robotic, lukewarm speeches made by the politicians, supposedly the leaders of this great democracy... their hasty arrival at the scene of disaster. The VIP, requiring Z category security, is flanked by security personnel, thus relaxing crucial security atleast by a fraction elsewhere.
Absurd is a mere understatement.
(Oh, and where is our North-Indian hating f(r)iend? Now that he has hundreds of dedicated armed soldiers, a large part of them from outside 'his' state, to take care of 'his' city and his safety while he can sleep peacefully, there is no sound from him... how very beautiful.)

We are fed up. 2008 has been the worst hitting year for the Indians. We are sick of watching attack after attack, the blame game (the way Tom and Jerry hastily pass the lighted bomb to each others hands comes to mind), the same old cold-as-a-marble-slab response, the way the hue and cry dies down, the stoicism of the people who are after all helpless, the paranoia that creeps into our day to day lives.. The pity... for all those children searching frantically for their parents, a young couple looking for their baby, brothers searching for their beloved sisters... the tears that give way to anger.. the broken heart that frantically tries to heal the wounds so tragically inflicted upon it, for no fault of its own.

When will the assembly line system of putting old arses in the control system of the nation stop? We call ourselves a youthful country when the majority of the blokes up in the House are about to shrivel and need walking sticks to go to the loo. We need quick-thinking, zest, the energy, the vitality and the action.

My heart goes out to those affected in the Mumbai attack, what is being called "India's 9/11".. and I salute the police and the commandoes who have done the best of what they can for the common man. May the souls of the brave and innocent rest in peace.

And to the fucking bastards who planned this tucked away in some part of the world, who are watching all this with glee.. I did not believe in hell. But now I do.. solely for you.

The Time Tag

2008-11-06T15:29:00.007+05:30

Long time since I ever did a tag... but this one's a celebrity tag!! Thanks silverine, for thy gesture :)

The tag is like this: Two questions from the past, present and future. Answer them and then tag your friends from the blog-o-sphere. Leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been tagged and you are all set.

Yesterday
Your oldest memories...
Toys! I had such a variety of stuff back then... three train sets, assorted 'building sets', a bespectacled duck which rocked on a chair while pretending to read a book, a 'yawning' car, a swinging monkey, trucks, cars and what not. (The fact that almost none of them survived in their entirety a couple of years later may be conveniently ignored).
The way I used to HATE going to KG.. it looked like it was miles and miles away from home, and towards the middle of particularly gloomy days I used to look from the window, see the tops of trees far away and go crying for ma!
The way my KG teacher called me "Kannaa" and used to spoonfeed me the curd rice I carried everyday...
The day I entered Loyola... the 13 years I spent inside that campus now looks like a dream!

What were you doing ten years ago?
Rewind back to third standard... Maithri Madam, such a wonderful lady one could get as a class teacher. At this time I would have been sitting in the crowded bus no.1 with all the elder guys who looked precisely like ruffians, waiting for the forty five minute-long journey back home to end. School seems like eons ago.. dunno why :|

Today
Woke up at the rather early time of six thirty. Went through the same routine and donned the "Workshop-uniform" for College since it was a Thursday. Boarded the college bus, stood for an hour all the way to college. Lugged my unusually heavy bag to the class. Sweated it out in the stiff navy blue shirt only to return home at 2 pm since classes were dismissed early due to a religious thingy today in the city. All that stuff transported 26 kms for nothing.
Then I saw this tag.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?
Complete backup of all my photos, and my blog posts. And of course my hard drive packed in 150% shockproof, bulletproof casing.

Tomorrow
And tomorrow and tomorrow... blah blah something something.. out, out, brief candle. Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.. and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Wohoo! DP, did you hear that?? Your students can still quote Macbeth :)

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?
hm.. that would be.. er... *Firing up addition engine* Ah, 18 + 14 = 32. Whoops. That's too far in the future.. I'd hopefully be married to a sweet n hot n loving beauty *ahem.. ambitions!* and will be one hell of a weird dad.. My kids would be staring at dad's crazes going from Music to Trains.. to Mom.. and computers.. to linux hehe! They'd probably have the craziest, geekiest dad they'd ever imagined :D

Thus ends the tag.. Silverine has snipped out many pieces from the original tag, and I have followed the snipped version simply because doing a short one is easy for the lazy ass I am. As always, firing up the random tagger:

Hari chettan,
Karan,
Nitin,
Sidhusaaheb,
consider yourself tagged :)

Oru mazhakkaala sandhyayil

2008-10-26T08:08:00.008+05:30

My first post whose title is in a language I've been speaking for fifteen years now... in malayalam it just means, "On a rainy evening". Yeah, the rains are back... people in Kerala this year have been in a state of shock following the paucity of rainfall in one of India's most rain-blessed states. Part of it may be attributed to the Met. Dept, who regularly irritate the monsoon. Picture this: a steady monsoon wind builds up over the region, and the rains lash one fine morning in their full fury. People scuttle for cover, with glee. The next days paper invariably carries a photo of a couple of bare-chested little kids in shorts, jumping into a muddy puddle. Few people miss the words from the Weather report: "Heavy rain expected in parts of Kerala for the next 48 hrs". The rains stop that noon itself and the sky looks crystal clear for the rest of the week. This time however, the Met. Dept guys kept quiet and fooled the rain after the lack of SW monsoon, and bingo! the NE monsoon leaves no patch of earth dry.

Niranjani had written a few days back about her memories of spending her summers in Madurai. Oye but this is Kerala and we can't remember anything about the weather except the rain (atleast we're not supposed to). As for me I just love rainy days. Apart from the obvious (and rather sadistic, I may add) pleasure of watching people outside, soaked to the skin making their way around puddles from the cool yet warm interior of the house, one hand in a sack of potato chips and the other hand feeling around a steamy cuppa tea, the rain in general dulls the sky but brightens the mind of the people here. Everything (and everyone) looks fresh after a shower, and who does not like cruising on a bike with a cool, drizzly monsoon wind across the face?

Enough of romanticising :D

I cant speak of rain without thinking of my school! When it rained there, the whole world turned into just two colours - green and black. Monday morning would be as gloomy as hell, the dampness everywhere from walls to desks, and the lights in the class would deliberately be switched off by us (and anyone trying to brighten up the room would be threatened with dire consequences in both this life and the next); so the classroom would resemble nothing short of a cave but a very open one that. Over the years we learnt the lesson of never underestimating the monsoon, albeit the tough way. A few of us sitting towards the centre of the class left our notebooks on the table before going to the lab. There was a good deal of thunder to be heard inside the lab and when we emerged out it was colder outside and looked like it was past six in the evening. Groping our way to the classes all we found was a pulpy mess of white and blue on our desks, the whole classroom looking like it had emerged from a steam bath. The monsoon wind had blown like a gale from the windows into as far as the centre of the class, from both sides. *sigh* Those were the days one could get drunk on rainwater...

(College is no different.. CET is just a couple of kilometres from school and what with the same vegetation, it even smells the same during monsoon :) During the wet, cold mornings, the floor's frictional coefficient dangerously approaches zero and many a times have I thanked my luck for not having slipped on various places)

Ah college... it's almost a month into college now and things have started falling into place. Right now there isnt much activity around, what with curbs on ragging and stuff; so the only things one can look forward to is Sargam (an inter-batch fest) coming up and another one for freshers called Prarambh; else it's just the same routine day after day. Things are bound to improve a lot anyway.. I've come to like my subject a lot nowadays, and Electronics is one of the classes I look forward to :)

Speaking of college, we have a Central Computing Facility (CCF) which is common to all students, besides computer labs in each department. I haven't been inside the latter, but as far as my knowledge of the former goes, all the computers there are dual booting with Windows XP and Suse Linux. There exists a very nice way to persuade users to use linux... viz., not revealing the password of the XP user. So any noob opens XP and stares at the login asking for a password, when the sir in charge of the CCF at that time asks him to boot into Linux, and bingo! if everything goes well, a new, curious and most-probably a future-convert-from-Windows Linux user! Great :)

A nice big college, ample free time, friends, a good course, awesome monsoon and linux everywhere... life is getting better by the day :)

Eternal Favourites

2008-10-17T21:12:00.004+05:30

It's a shame that despite being such a harcore music addict, I have never done a post which talks of music... so this is a tribute to all the people who have taught me and from whom I have learnt all the bits and pieces of any musical skill.

I LOATHE the way Bollywood music is heading towards nowadays.. or even Tamil music for that matter. Mindless yet vain copying from English... but still so devoid of the 'heaviness' of metal (to which a large majority of the so called 'hip' audience is still deaf) - all in all a half baked attempt at reproducing a repetitive tune is what I deem it. Don't even compare it to Rock or metal!

My music tastes have kinda refined over the years and is (as of now) stable :) I have separated the favourites into my three 'genres'. (All links point to Youtube videos)

Soft:
# New York Nagaram (Sillinoru kaadhal - A R Rahman):
An absolute stunner from Rahman... very complex background instrumentals, amply loud guitar chords all through the song, and an absolutely beautiful ending... this song has the best ending I've ever heard in a long, long time.

# Nila Kaigirathu (Indira - A R Rahman, sung by Hariharan):
Classic Rahman style.. simple yet never plain instrumentals too... soothing, ideal for dropping off to sleep on a moonlit night. It's nothing short of music therapy.

# Maula Mere Maula (Anwar - Pankaj Aswasthi):
I just can't help myself from listening to this one from time to time... little known film, little known composer, but a real beautiful song. Really well done backgroud score too.

# My Immortal (Evanescence):
The sole English song in this list.. Amy Lee's powerful voice renders this passionate song in all its glory.. watch out for the part where the band kicks in with the guitars and the drums towards the end... orgasmic!

# Kuzhaloothum Kannanukku (Mella Thiranthathu Kathavu - Ilaiyaraja):
Old Tamil classic.. beautiful one from the Maestro himself.

# Oru vaakku mindathe (July 4):
Little known song, this. A lot similar to "Ay Hairathe" from Guru, I may add.. but the beat is a different timing.

# Ye jo desh hai mera (Swadesh - A R Rahman):
Rahman-tic.. need I say more? Listening to this song on an absolutely still, chilly night gives me goosebumps every time :)

# Akhri Alvida (Strings):
We performed this one during our batch's farewell at out school.. makes me nostalgic. Powerful chorus and soft enough to be instantly likeable.

Heavy:
# Wherever I may roam (Symphony and Metallica):
I get a high every time our band plays this during a jamming session! Simply awesssumm orchestra at the back, the classic ]\/[etallic/\ style... and awesome lyrics!

# Diary of Jane (Breaking Benjamin):
I just keep listening to this one every now and then.. powerful chords, an awesome hi-hat tapping at the beginning.

# Rime of the ancient mariner (Iron Maiden):
Loong song. Iron maiden guys are poets or what? Just listen to the lyrics!

# Jesus of Suburbia (Green Day):
Another long song... with lots of variations.. typical Green Day punk.

# Knockin on heaven's door (Guns n Roses):
Classic GnR with an awesome lead by Slash... you may safely click the link :)

# Sweet Child of mine (Guns n Roses):
I dont need to give any introduction to this one!

# Beyond the realms of death (Judas Priest):
I liked this only after I listened to this a couple of times over... it's real awesome... Philosophical sh!t all over.. based on a riff which the band's drummer made when he was fooling about with the guitar.

# Livin on a prayer (Bon Jovi):
The chorus and its pitch gets you on a high... classic Bon Jovi.

# In the end (Linkin Park):
No intro.. everyone's heard this one! My first Linkin Park song.. and my most favourite!

# Going under (Evanescence):
Whatta voice... Amy Lee! Awesome guitar chords and superb singing :)

Instrumental:
# Instrumedley (Dream Theatre) God how could I forget this one??? And how the hell do those guys remember all the bits and pieces in this utterly complex and sophisticated medley!! Must listen to this, anyone!
# Fuer Elise (Beethoven)
# Scenes from childhood (Schumann)
# Symphony in G - [the one as a monophonic ringtone in the old Nokia sets](Mozart)
# Toss the feathers (The Corrs)
# Any good Carnatic/Hindustani piece in my favourite raaga: Yaman Kalyani
# Moonlight (Beethoven)
# Hymn to the sea (Titanic sountrack)
# Khwaja Mere Khwaja - instrumental version (Jodhaa Akbar - A R Rahman)

So there... check out the tracks... I give you my word that you wont be disappointed! Bricks/Bouquets welcome as always..

Hence ends another post construed due to lack of time and patience ;)

A monsoon sojourn

2008-10-08T12:15:00.019+05:30

This is something that was long pending... this is about a journey had nothing meticulous to it, yet is something that I remember so vividly now. Sometime during my post-school holidays, a couple of months ago, I took a ride to Madurai on the Anathapuri Express. The route was Trivandrum --> Nagercoil --> Tirunelveli --> Madurai. The train left TVC in the evening and would arrive at MDU near midnight.

The weather till that day in Trivandrum had been blazing hot, without as much as a speck of white in the sky. My train was scheduled to depart at 1620 hrs and an hour before, almost eveything was packed. All of a sudden Murphy struck and the skies darkened threateningly. I glanced outwards and uttered the foulest curses... it had started raining heavily and the sky was pouring for all it worth. All my plans of a perfect evening journey were foiled and I was really angry. Boy little did I realise what was in store!

Anyway, braving the thundershowers, our humble and faithful old M800 took us to TVC. By the time we got into the platform, the rain stopped and I heaved a sigh of relief. Since there were just a few minutes to departure, I didnt do my usual routine viz., checking out the loco. Anyway the beast at the helm was a blue-white WDM2 from the Erode stables.

At sharp 1620 the diesel sounded its twin-tone horn and we set off, negotiating the points south of TVC till all the lines merged into one and the speed restriction was cleared. Then came the sound and smoke show... the V16 engine inside the locomotive roared to life as the loco-pilot yanked the throttle open and the smoke rushed out of the exhaust stack. Within minutes we were cruising at a comfortable pace of 70-something kmph. This route is non-electrified, and single line. The world outside was green, and devoid of the 25-kV wire mess and also the cantenary posts which appear at regular intervals and threaten to smash into your head (if you happened to be leaning out the doors on the left hand side, in an electrified route ;).

The weather outside was just perfect... thanks to the rain that had stopped a few minutes before. Unlike the case when you travel by train north of TVC, the south-bound route immediately gives way to greenery, instead of winding through residential areas. I had got the emergency window (which is devoid of the iron bars) so I was having a great time with my head out the window, the monsoon wind in my face, and a very microscopic drizzle to add to it. The WDM2 at the front was doing a great job, constantly at notch-8 (full throttle) and since my coach was the third or fourth from it, I could hear the symphony clearly from my perch. There was nothing I had to care for... my exams were over and my results were long out. For now all I had to do was to enjoy my holidays.. and when carefree journeys like this happen in the midst of nothingness, the feeling is just not expressible!
There are a couple of stone tunnels in this route near the Kerala border.. we roared into them in full song, and even as the lights were switched on and it looked like night, the tunnel would refuse to terminate. With even more obstinancy, our loco would refuse to notch-down the throttle, and so the aroma of the smoke would fill the whole coach and put me on a high ;) A few seconds later the sea of darkness would end and out we would emerge into fresh air and greenery.

After an hour or so we trundled into Nagercoil Jn.(NCJ). Here the loco detaches itself from our rake, runs around and couples itself to the other side, as the route here is like a Y (we come by the left fork, reverse and take the right fork). The north end of NCJ was spectacular - the Western Ghats in all glory, clouds kissing the green peaks and the skies threatening to open up any moment. At the station, I stood at the door and savoured the place. A couple of rakes were stabled at the lines, and the green-grey mountains loomed above the azure-blue coaches. A couple of locos idled in the trip shed far away. As we pulled out of the station and the far away mountains came into view again, we took the track to Tirunelveli and moved closer to the hills. The monsoon breeze was getting stronger and stronger as the train pulled into the twilight. Finally we took a gigantic curve and slowed down to enter Aralvaimozhi station. Well I had come across a photo in wikipedia and I knew precisely what to expect:

Windfarms studded with windmills! Hundreds of them in the distance.. I got myself a cuppa chai and went to the door to watch them. The breeze was really strong here and the windmills were infinitely rotating on and on. It was getting dark and the train gathered speed and chugged away from the station, right into the windfarm! I had to crane my neck from the door to see the full height of the machine.. (Many of them were those of Suzlon). For a full fifteen minutes or so we played hide and seek with the mills, darting across them till we left them behind as they receded into the distance. The last images in the fading light were undoubtedly those of the towering white giants.

We reached Tirunelveli station (TEN) well after dusk and had our supper here, accompanied by the famous brown gooey halwa. The dim, loud station atmosphere.. the "chaaya", "kophee kophee" vendors and the intermittent announcements over the PA system... all made the previous couple of hours look straight out of a dream figment. Trundling past its dark, silent yard populated with freight wagons and the occasional idling loco, we picked up speed and rocked into the night. The drama was not yet over... the breeze soon turned into a gale.. albeit a very dry one. It blew like a cyclone into the coach and at times I even feared that the train would topple over. The wind spared no one and within a few minutes every shutter was down in the coach. Feeling a little adventurous, I ventured over to the door. The heavy metal (pun unintended) door was swinging wildly in the wind and I didnt want to risk my life.. It was quite frightening really! I returned to the coach, only to be given the job of "responsibly looking after the baggage" while my parents and my sister slept. It was already around nine o clock or something and the train slowed down at a wayside station. For a night crossing...

I headed to the door(after waking up my sis ;) and stretched my hands and legs in the breexe which was still blowing. The station was a typical wayside one, with a single platform for the loopline and none for the mainline. We waited on the loopline, to the sound of crickets in the bushes nearby, the only sounds being the soft chatter of people and the gentle whirr of fans inside the coach. The semaphore signals at both ends were at danger with their arms held horizontally. Then the pinprick of light appeared in the distance, growing larger and larger and finaly materializing in the form of two WDM2s smoking for all their worth with an express in tow.

Soon after the tail lights faded into the darkness, the semaphore arm lifted up and we tugged off. The rest of the journey was a dash in the darkness.. going on and on for miles and miles into the night with the WDM2's headlamps illuminating the darkness ahead while the train was on a curve, the piercing green signal far away, the glow of some city far out on the horizon, tiny wayside stations where we stopped for a crossing or two... and finally pulled into an ever busy MDU station a couple of minutes past 2300 hrs. As I took a final look back at the train I was surprised at why I loved this journey so much.. After all, I have travelled such a lot on trains and there was no particular speciality to this one! Well these are things we cannot always find a reason to like...

Total distance covered - 300 kms.. ticket fare - a hundred and fifty rupees.. the six hours spent in the sleeper class coach on an unelectrified single line route, relishing the monsoon magic - priceless!

PS: Photos are not exactly of good quality as this was the best I could manage at very low light and at ISO200 on my cam.

College: First impressions!

2008-09-24T17:46:00.014+05:30

After a long period of almost five months of holidays during which I dreamt of spending my time usefully, but ended up doing nothing at all, college has begun. For those who didnt know/care, I'll be doing my B.Tech in Applied Electronics at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum (better known as CET). Considering the fact that we are in a country which churns (yes, churns is the word) out engineering graduates year after year, and in a state which, if you double the number of colleges, would produce more engineering graduates than the whole of the US, I'm just a tiny speck.

But I'm proud to say I'm one of the people who chose this because I liked it and hence wanted to do the course, other than just going with the flow or succumbing to parental pressure or doing it just for a job. I had always had an inclination for the engineering world from my younger days, and today I'm happy to say I'm doing a subject I would love to do. And it was the icing on the cake when one of our professors told us (who had taught in many top colleges in the state) that though we might not be the best engineering college in the state (we're considered to be the second best), as far as our department was concerned, one could safely say it was the best in the state.

I have had many 'first day's till now. Three to be precise :) One was the admission day, when we were told that it would be another two weeks till college would start; the second was last Friday, when we had an orientation seminar, got our timetable and stuff; but the third and true first day was the day after my birthday - Monday, the 22nd. Managed to get a seat in the crowded 'M' route bus which then wound its way through snarling city traffic till it traversed the thirteen odd kilometres from my stop to the college. A senior chettan tickled me for a few minutes asking me about my spectacles, why I was wearing one with a red leg.. then demanding that I talk in C++ for five minutes, asking me what I knew about logic-gates etc etc.. could be called ragging :D Well I reached the huge, green, campus around nine o'clock.. proceeded to our rooms (after a seminar), and settled down to our classes.

As far as my class was concerned, there were a few guys and gals whom I knew, so making friends was not a problem at all.. Around sixty people in all, and something like twenty-plus of them girls :p Classes were of one hour duration, with a lunch break after three hours in the morning... Sorely, no other break between periods. After all those lazy, idle hours spent at home, the body was having a tough job sitting and being forced to concentrate. Something was being done to curb ragging in the college and it was omnipresent. A bus 'exlcusively' for freshers, teaching staff hanging about near the first years' classes to pinch off any ambitious senior with an intent of ragging.. there are rumours that the whole 'ragging' phenomenon will begin in full blow after two weeks, but no one knows the truth. Anyway. it would have been nice if there was ragging (IN THE ORIGINAL SENSE of the term) - as in a casual but interesting way of seniors introducing themselves and also getting to know the newcomers - so we missed the part where we would get to know some of our seniors; but I'm not asking for anything here, let me put that clear! (just in case anyone is reading this ;) So nowadays the 'moving-about' around the campus is limited, and in groups (there's safety in numbers :)...

Well in a nutshell, college life has begun.. as everyone says, the most memorable four years of one's life.. well that also means my internet activity is bound to decrease in frquency and duration.. :D Right now I'm happy I've got into a reasonably good college and am doing a good course too.. so it's just a matter of a bit of time before I become a real part of CET and enjoy my next four years in its beautiful campus.

Seventeen plus plus

2008-09-21T00:00:00.003+05:30

[Note: Blog on autopilot... I am not responsible for anything untoward which it posts while I'm asleep.]

The blogowner turns eighteen this moment. He's happy. In fact, he's so thrilled. Even ecstatic. um.. wait he's asleep.

The bike awaits his touch.. the politicians have one more guy to depend upon for their survival in the battlefield.. oh and he can watch anything he wants ;) [but dont quote me on that!]

Damn... I screwed up a perfectly respectable post.. hm, that's why I let him do all the writing. It's better when a real person writes stuff.. instead of a blogger-Bot coded in Python.

Time to stop my stupid automated gibberish and wish him a happy birthday.

Signed,
The Blawg

From a fascinated kid to a ferroequinologist

2008-09-16T10:24:00.011+05:30

People acknowledge that I'm a normal person on first glance and first conversation. By and by the talk drifts to what I do, and finally to my passions and hobbies.

Someone: So Sriram, what are your interests?
Me: uh.. you know, books, music, computers, linux..
Someone: Ah.. geek eh?
Me: Well if you think so.. :D
Someone: And what else man?
Me: And.. trains.
Someone: Er.. what did you say? I thought you said "trains"
Me: Ye got me right. I did say trains :)

By this confirmation of the whole matter from my own lips, the person mentioned above begins to seriously doubt my sanity. That is one of the reasons I chose to write this post. Instead of blabbering about my craze for trains, or to answer 'what is railfanning' and 'why do you have such a lot of people in your friends list who talk weird stuff like WDP4, WAG9 etc with you'. No people, I am no secret agent :D

All of us have loved train journeys as kids. A lot of us do so even now. The scenery outside the window, the cool breeze rushing through your hair as you stand at the door watching the world go by... As any kid would, I was fascinated by the whole thing... the huge brown "engine", the long array of "bogies", the rhythmic clickety-clack from the wheels, etc. We travelled a lot when I was small. Many a times my dad or mom would take me to the end of the train to show me how the locomotive was being attached to the rake. (No, mom and dad were NOT railfans... they were just usual people :D ). Later, I observed what caused the clickety-clack, why the signal always was red and my train was going past it without stoppping, etc. There was also this book "The train: how it works" which my uncle bought for me at some point of time when I was still a kid, from that I learnt how the whole thing worked (obviously).

At almost every journey, I used to watch the locos(please, it's not an "engine".. the engine is within the locomotive). The locos were the very epitome of power, the sounds emanating from within only highlighted the power of the beast. (Yes, those were the days Kerala was un-electrified and diesel locos ruled the rails).

It was in early 2004 that the biggest step happened. I had chickenpox, was confined to bed. In the initial days, though I was strong enough to walk about. I searched on the internet for stuff relating to Indian Railways, just by serenendipity. I then stumbled on a site, which led me to the biggest base of Indian Railfans - IRFCA.org the Indian Railway fan club. Imagine my joy at realising that I was not the only one, and that there were thousands of people in the country who felt the same and knew cartloads more things that I did. Then there was no stopping... seriously, that site is a real good one even for non-railfans. Then I moved on to railway photography, snapping a ripping WAP5 or a screaming WDG4 as it roared past with the force of something beyond imagination...

In the US, railfanning ("trainspotting" as it is called there) is a rather recognised hobby. In India it's rare. I love bikes, cars, jet planes... but most of all trains. So much that my love for locomotives (especially diesel locos) influence my taste in other vehicles also :) I'd rather own and ride a Royal Enfield Bullet than suck off some Pulsar's ass. No offfence, but the Bullet SOUNDS better, and gives you the impression of the POWER that's in it. It's the same with diesel locomotives. They give you the right impression of the power that's within them - listen to the heavy-metal chugging of a WDM2, or the jet-plane-like revving of a WDP4 and you'll see what I mean. Today, I can identify a loco from its number or from its horn. My house is like one and a half kms from the Trivandrum-Quilon mainline and I can hear the horns during most of the day or even the chugging of the diesels when the loco pilot clears the speed restrictions and lets the beast rip through the night, throttle wide open. And thanks to me, my sister is already a railfan :)

I guess it's time to wind up 'cos I'm boring you already.. Its a big relief to have written this post, for I can always point people to this one when the inevitable question is asked :D And of course I'm not the only one. Besides the 5000+ people in IRFCA, a couple of bloggers in my blogroll list are also IRFCAns - Shanx, Vrij, Ranga, Macabreday, Naren.. Their recent blogs might not give it away but dig their archives and you'll find compromising material ;) Oh, and coming back to the title, I guess the word ferroquinologist would make sense by now. (google it if you want, but try to work it out yourself!)

In short, people like cars and bikes. What's wrong in liking something a hundred times more powerful and a lot more times bigger?

Die Geschichte bis jetzt...

2008-09-07T12:17:00.018+05:30

I finally decided to.. er.. clean my room. Really, I mean it. I should have been in College these days, but as luck would have it (or in the way of life, rather) - classes have been postponed to start only on the 19th of September. Four months ago, it was the time of the boards and the entrance exams. During such laborious times of my life, my faithful room bent space around it so that it could hold more than its volume. It did the job pretty well, but it can't for long..

For the past four months precisely, this was one 'job' I kept putting off till eternity. I mean, there's absolutely no need to clean my room. I have argued a lot in that respect and since my points are clear and logical, my folks don't usually win the argument.

1. Only I use (most of) my room.
2. Besides my things, only two almirahs are used by others.
3. To use the almirah, the only requirement is that the pathway to it should be clean. That is satisfied.
4. My room is a separate siding(a loop line), through which people need not pass in order to get anywhere else.
5. Therefore, point #1 rings true.
6. I know where exactly everything is, where anything was, and I have the absolute guarantee that it will continue to stay there until disturbed by an external force. My room is the only place in my house where Newton's first law still holds true.
7. I hereby prove that there is absolutely NO NEED WHATSOEVER to clean my room.
--------- quod erat demonstrandum ------------

But then at the end of the day, it's the persuasion that gets on your nerves until you decide to do the damn thing yourself. But it's no easy task.

The whole thing has to be planned out, and one has to think logically, in terms of layers. One layer currently covers the floor. A second layer occupies it here and there. The third layer temporarily holds things like dust and people walking in the room, and the fourth layer is one onto which things fall when you drop them. The biggest challenge is the book-rack in the corner. To clear that you need to put it on the floor. But the floor is already loaded. So another layer is added. Once the shelf is clean, you need to figure out what to put in there. But as it always turns out, the things you decide to put in there are miles below, in the first layer kissing the floor. You need a lot of planning and a lot of resistance to dust to get the dirty job done.

I looked almost similar to g-man in his Osama-ish pic while he was cleaning his room months back. One heave brought down all the preparation material of yore (Objective books, Physics, Chem, maths today magazines and a couple of other odds and ends) in a huge show of smoke. (My neighbour swears to have seen a mushroom cloud, but I'm sure he was exaggerating). God, looking at those things was akin to moving a dear one's belongings after he is no more or something. My heart ached to see such material having been of not much use to me. After all, I had counted on acing the AIEEE so much :( So much so that I even kept a copy of an India Today issue featuring an "India's best colleges" article somewhere under my desk, to take it out "for inspiration" whenever I got bored on studying for the entrance exams long back. I took out that mag for one last time, and tore it into pieces.

Countless sheaves of paper, notebooks, all scrawled with Physics, calculus, chemical equations, or arbit calculations went the same way - torn, disfigured, and into the dustbin. The feeling was horrible. I was so crestfallen by the way something, someone up in the control-panels of life had screwed up somethnig I was looking forward to. Everyone, almost all of my friends in my little circle had gone elsewhere and I was left to rot in this same old city for the next four years of my life. True, I had got into a good college right now, but I couldn't simply ignore the fact that it was something above that which I was aiming for. All the extra work, all the time I put in was simply wasted.. thrown out the open window into the gloomy, rainy afternoon.

I have finished stage-one of the cleaning. The bookshelf is clean, with just the dictionaries, a few of my school books which I dont wanna part with, and a couple of blank papers. Everything else - entrance notes, objective books, tuition study-material have been dumped into a big cardboard box. I don't want them now. Or again. Hell, I dont want to look at it again. College starts two weeks from now and I know what I want to do and where I want to be. Four years ahead, I want to look back and smile.. and to give my past mistakes the finger..

Right now, it's a new beginning. A new page in the book of life... once or twice I received a bolt from the blue. It ends there.

I will not let life surprise me again.

hmph... Education!

2008-09-03T10:00:00.002+05:30

Being a jobless(for now) brother at home doesn't guarantee you exclusive rights to the computer, the internet or the license to do anything you want. As a result, one fine morning I found myself nodding in acceptance to mum's order to teach my sister whatever she needed to learn for the next day's exams. This wasn't as difficult as it may seem, as she is only in the fifth standard.
We had breakfast together and proceeded upstairs to her room. I committed a particularly dangerous act by thinking of starting off the day with whatever she thought was difficult... Hindi. Little did I know that I was at the deep end of the pool.

When I was in school, we started off Hindi in third standard, beginning with the alphabet.. then to simple words for pen, cat, cloud, etc. After that came simple sentences - Hindi equivalents of "What's your name?", "This is a boy..." ."Look at this family. How many people are there?" and moving on to grammar. It seems they have done away with the last two steps. In other words, after the alphabet and words, the books jump directly to something of the level of a Bachelor's degree in Hindi or something.

The teachers are least bothered. After a lot of coaxing and sly prompting, my sister revealed that her Hindi teacher wasnt really teaching them much. It seemed her teacher just explained the whole point of the lessons in one go and only took the trouble to point out the meaning of simple words that the students knew otherwise too. No explanation of grammar. None of why this is suffixed with "oonga" and not "tha". All this was revealed rather hesitantly, as she belongs to a quite well known school in the city and is, obviously, rather proud of her breed.

I was furious. It was because of those lazy teachers and the idiotic syllabus-setters and the even more moronic book-choosers that my eyes were popping out trying to explain stuff that I stopped studying years ago(and I really didnt like it, frankly!). I just know my way around in Hindi - basic stuff... and my knowledge beyond that is so poor that I want subtitles for Hindi movies :D Pathetic, yeah I know. Well atleast I'm okay in English. Thank God the international language isn't Zulu or something (no offence meant to anyone *whew*)...

I have talked so little Hindi that I remember almost all the long sentences I have spoken in my life! One of them is particularly interesting.. it happened in the October of 2006 in Delhi, during the Aerospace Olympiad - Chandigarh trip: Vice Principal and six of us standing near a chaayakkada(tea shop), where really nice smelling tea was being served piping hot... I found it too hot to taste, so I wanted one more glass to ..er.. is there a word for the process of "transferring the tea from one glass to the other (preferably held at a higher position than the cup into which the tea is to be transferred next), cyclically" ? If there is, please let me know for it was my lack of knowledge of the Hindi equivalent for it, that prompted my next (I think longest ever) continuous sentence:

"Bhaisaab, ye chaai buhat garam hai.. isko yehi(making the cooling action with my hand) karne ke liye, ek aur glass chahiye"
*applause*
Well I spent around two or three minutes making up that sentence, and it paid off.. the good man handed me another glass without as much as a glance in my direction. Boy I felt so insanely proud of myself :)

I was, I think with that happening in mind that I must have ventured foolishly to teach my sister Hindi. The rest is rather obvious... halfway through a particularly torturous poem I told her to learn it herself.

Righto, coming back to the original point (dont ask me what now), none of the kids in her class know how to speak Hindi. They mug up meanings(in Hindi), mug up bizzare-sounding question-and-answers. Someone up in the book-selection and syllabus dept. of their school got it all horribly wrong. It doesn't end with Hindi though. She was trying to mug up "What is force? Force is something that can cause, or tend to cause; stop or tend to stop motion" last year, without understanding a bit of it. Being physics, I was enthusiastic to tell her in simple words what the heck it all meant. But you can't always blame the teachers. Why the hell would a fourth standard, nine year old kid need to learn the formal definition of force? The Indian education system is soooo f!!ked up.

I'm just waiting to see in which year they are taught the Special Theory of Relativity or numerical calculations based on Integral Calculus... oh wait, I havent checked her present textbook yet.

Lorem ipsum and other stuff

2008-09-01T21:12:00.001+05:30

I hope the new template looks good... spent all the time from morning till afternoon looking for a suitable one. The main requirement was a wide template. Pages and pages of mindless surfing, testing around 20 odd ones on the blog and hours later, I finally settled on a rather inadequate prototype of the one you see now. The rest of the time was spent in the XML column and in photoshop (as much as I admire Gimp, I hate its multiple-window interface). And the end result looks satisfying.

Damn, 150 MB eaten out of my broadband transfer... on the very first day of the month :(

On the other side of the things, it looks like college will start soon. Soon as in very soon :) I'll thankfully be doing my B.Tech in something related to computers and digital circuits... Applied Electronics in the College of Engineering, Trivandrum(CET) beckons. I screwed up my AIEEE, and this is the next best college I can get into. Thank God for not springing up yet another unpleasant surprise on me again :|

Finally four months of vacation are drawing to a close.. I haven't done anything really worthwhile (see earlier post for a detailed rant!) Thought I'd start learning PHP, a few days ago.. and that language is awesome. It forms the basis of all the 'working' things you see on the web (ok, besides HTML and Javascript).

This isn't a regular post, anyway... but do chip in with your comments about the template --> what you like about it and what sucks.

In true sync with Kerala's weather, it's started raining heavily for apparently no reason at all. Whatever. I miss the chilly, rainy morning rides to school. Almost everyone in my circle of friends is scattered all over the country. I miss the songs we sang together, the countless lunch breaks that turned into heated discussions on technology, international politics, girls in that-other-school and what not., "Dont Panic" messages being flashed around to alarmed backbenchers during Chemistry classes. I miss the phone calls calling me for tech support, city bus rides with G while listening to anything from Rahman to Rammstein... Damn, I miss my school life a lot :(

On an angrier note, boy I was damn surprised to see that some dude actually's got a site something-to-chew-on.com. And some other inhuman creatures seem to have started blogs with the same name. DAMN IT! I'll sue you people! Wait till I *&#$(* @#$*&#$(%*@ #$(@

Think I'll hit the publish button now.

i -what?

2008-08-28T16:50:00.009+05:30

No I didn't pick this one... was properly tagged :D Thanks Merlz!

I am: myself... a sophisticated Earthling.
I think: heh therefore I am.
I know: that it (^) was an extremely boring cliche, but I just filled up two difficult things in this tag!
I want: (everyone) to laugh, and be happy all the time.
I have: a lot to live for!
I wish: the world was rational.. each and every human being in it.
I hate: people who seem to be nice outside but are quite a different sort inside.
I miss: My school and my circle of friends. Waaaaaah :((

Miss you, Loyola!

I fear: none. ha!

I hear: A lot. Maybe seven years of training in music made my ears rather sensitive :|

I smell: A lot here too! I've heard that when one sense organ becomes weak, the others grow strong to compensate. Or as mum says, I was an alsatian in my previous birth.
I feel: music. I feel the song in me when I play it or sing it or listen to it. That feeling is heavenly.
I crave: For better means of expression than words.
I search: I dont. I send in a request to the google server and it returns a page to me.
I wonder: What that wasp is doing, making regular trips to the hole in the back of my monitor. Think I should check... AAAAAAAAARRGH!!!
I regret: My impulsiveness to over-react at times.
I love: A lot of people, and a lot of things, which have made my life what it is now.
I ache: When I long for some happy days that are simply indelible.
I am not: Stuck-up or vain just because I dont talk a lot. First impressions are false.
I believe: that someone, somewhere will love me for what I am.
I dance: Correction: I never have danced.
I sing: Rather often and whenever I feel like. My mind is always in a song.
I cry: Inconspicuously.
I don’t always: remember to eat while at the computer.
I fight: The most with my sister. (Merlz, I can't change this one!)
I write: a lot. I'm more expressive when writing in English than anything else.
I win: almost all the arguments I start :)
I lose: my temper only at home. Wonder why :|
I never: seem to remember anything important which mum tells me to do :D
I always: am straight from the heart. I don't hide my feelings.
I confuse: people sometimes, with long and loopy sentences! Looks like I have a lot or RAM or something :|
I listen: to heavy metal, Rock, AR Rahman, the Yaman-Kalyani raaga, the chugging of a diesel loco, some song floating from afar in the midnight breeze, the raindrops falling on leaves...
I can usually be found: in front of my computer, or roaming about with no particular intention.
I am scared: of a failure surprising me at the last moment. (Correction: I'm fed up of them).
I need: to skydive atleast once before I die.
I am happy: most of the time. I mean it :)
I imagine: myself riding the Y2K superbike.
I tag: Nikhil(your first tag buddy!). the mysterious Maverick and Guru(whenever you choose to update).

This evening...

2008-08-24T19:20:00.011+05:30

The blogger's block had struck me for the last couple of days. Today in particular, I was in a surly mood. To top it all, it was bright and sunny... rainy days atleast let you savour a bad mood :| Stuck with nothing to do in a city with absolutely nothing to be done, life wasn't quite fun and excitement.

I had only my three loves to turn to... who nowadays work in shifts ;) One of them at night, one of them for most part of the day, and the third comes to me now and then. I mean, music at night, computers (and linux) during the day. The third beckoned - the rails. I decided to take a walk to do a bit of railfanning, and in the process, think of a topic to blog about. Thus began the evening... and you'll either love this post, or feel bored(which is the case if you 'skim' over the post) and think I'm a nut. Either way, I don't give a damn :)

A quick evening bath and a shave were refreshing. Putting on my favourite jeans and a tee (that hadn't seen daylight for a long time), I set out. All I had was a ball-point refill in my pocket. Time was 1740 hrs...er okay, 5:40 pm :D I rounded the curve from my house to the mainroad and started walking, towards Eastfort. Road-widening works on one side of the road meant that one side of the road resembled a desert (with particular reference to sand-dunes), and that the snarling traffic always chooses to take this particular road. Implying --> continuous risk to life :\ Hardly had I walked a few steps when I was greeted with a hiss of airbrakes and a loud honking, putting me wise that it was just a few inches that had saved one Mr. Sriram from having become the late Mr. Sriram. I continued walking...

South Fort... with its numerous little houses. A small girl trying to master her bicycle. At the end of a particularly daunting turn, she falls. Her friends, ahead of her, turn at the noise, giggle and go back to help. A couple of old women sitting on their perches - stone steps that go up to their houses - chat idly. 'Rajdhani buildings'... a long line of jewellery shops greets me as I turn left. I have always wondered why the people construct their shops right next to another one which deals in the same articles. Altogether, there are some twenty jewellery shops in some hundred metres. The very refreshing breeze on this stretch is a plus point to the pedestrian movement on this road, apart from the shops.

East Fort... The bus stand. I have been through this thing almost every alternate day one year ago. Long line of passengers waiting for their buses amidst a continuously moving stream of would-be passengers walking to their respective buses, while hawkers peddle a variety of items like magazines, peanuts, mobile-phone covers, and the poor owner of the makeshift umbrella-repair facility or the watch-service one goes about his livelihood. The whole affair takes place in a concrete shelter perpetually reeking of foul bus-exhaust and occasionally, of pee.

I walked up the perpetually busy road leading to the bridge which passes over the north-bound railway tracks from Trivandrum Central, and is obviously named "Overbridge". A huge stream of humanity was trickling in and out of Big Bazaar, one of the few shopping malls (if it can be called so) in the city. The road climbed up and up, till it levelled out over the tracks. I paused and had a good look at the station. Electrification had taken its toll and there were only a couple of diesels to be seen. A right turn takes me along the road to Thampanoor, parallel to the tracks at the station. Under the shade of huge, leafy trees sits an occasional beggar, who manages to earn out some coins from the many pedestrains who walk along the footpath. Casting a few glances at the movie posters that adorned the wall (which hid my view of the station yard) and a couple of furtive glances at a few sleazy ones, while the electric locos hum inside the tiny tripshed, the occasional "phisssshhhh" of air-brakes sounding, walking down the gradient to the main entrance of the station is literally a breeze.

The only diesels visible at the northbound end were WDM2A #18332 from ERS and TNP's WDM7 #11001(which is now the regular shunter). Erode's 22558 was moving to the trip shed while 22670 waited at the helm of the Malabar Express. The surprise visitor was a blue-liveried WAG7 #27355 from Tughlaqabad!

Moving down the road, a guy was painting a picture of Ganapati and the Shiva-Parvathi duo, maybe in view of the coming festival concerning the former. A good amount of the junta were trickling out the station exits, carrying bags, looking worried for apparently no reason at all, talking into their phones and waiting to hail an auto. An army truck was waiting with a few civilians (or people clothed like civilians) inside it. The road, now having passed in front of the station, climbs up again to pass over the southbound track in the form of another bridge near the place called Chenthittai. The evening breeze feels awesome here, and this flyover is not as congested as Overbridge. A few people from the nearby houses were standing in the evening light and watching the activity below. The regular shunter WDS6 #36011 (from GOC shed) was smoking up and shunting three coaches. WAP4 #22357 was lurking behind some rake at platform 1.

After some time I went back the way I came, back to Overbridge and arrived just in time to see the MAQ express go thundering under the bridge. Another train (this time of the evening sees pretty heavy traffic in and out of TVC) was waiting at the outer signal, so I went down the road, this time towards Vanchiyoor. A man and his little boy were also looking down, watching the train come in. Erode WAP4 #22527 brought in the Sabari Exp. from HYB.

It was dark already and I took the long road that stretches right alongside the track before it crosses over it in yet another bridge. The sun was down and the sky looked beautiful. The breeze hadn't ceased and birds were making their way back to their nests. Crickets began their high-pitched din from the tracks nearby. Sparrows chirped from the trees in the houses along the road. It was another one of those beautiful moments when one feels that the world isn't so bad after all and that the best things in life are indeed free. In the fading light, the mullah's call from some mosque far away and some song from the nearby temple floated about in the breeze.

I had made up my mind.

An hour out in the evening.. some five or six kilometres... and still no blog-topic? I couldn't be more mistaken.

Frivolous Feline?

2008-08-17T12:21:00.006+05:30

Meet ubuntu. A couple of months old. Regular visits to my backyard, and its characteristic colour has earned this kitten the name of the widely poplar linux distro :)

Ubuntu is not alone. Its friends are... no, not Kubuntu or Xubuntu, but 'Jammu' and 'GMan'. Jammu - the thin, white kitten has a very ravishing appetite compared to ubuntu, and GMan(yeah, the pic looks rather like a painting, so I didn't crop it) is one hell of a frightened kitten, darting away at the slightest drop of a pin.

The liberty used in naming the above two kittens may be attributed to my kid-sister who no doubt compared Jammu's colour to snow in the actual place called Jammu, and the grey colour of the second one made way for "Gray man" and further shortened to GMan. (Sorry g-man the blogger, but I've had no part in the naming of these two). The mother's name is still pending.

My earliest memory of cats near me was a greyish striped tom which used to rule the places around my backyard(sort of). It wasn't exactly tame, but could put up with humans around it. As a kid in an urban environment, I was so fascinated to see an animal that was not a human and this even led me to write my first poem at eight (quite obviously titled, 'My cat'). Generations and generations have risen and fallen thence, but my fondest memory is of what may be called the grandma of these kittens, a black-white-tan blotched cat. She was hugely popular among local toms, and thus raised a lot of kittens in her life. One rather amusing encounter with those infants took place some years back. My sister, who sleeps along with my parents got frightened at some mysterious noises coming from the loft above her bedroom one particular night. It appeared to be coming from the TV's cardboard box, which was then empty and just kept up there among various other rubbish. There arose thuds and sounds of paper being ripped apart. We had decided that it was some big, fierce rat and I banged on it, trying to scare the creature out of it. At the first bang, the noise ceased. A little while later there arose a small, weak meeeew, which had all of us laughing! Whew... it was just a new member on the earth after all!
What I remember about that cat was that it was decent. Some days of encounter with cats will do justice to all those quotes and the first paragraph, about this animal on uncyclopedia. But this cat was way better. No upsetting the milk in the kitchen, no territorial-peeing, no running about inside the house without anyone seeing. Infact, many times have I been studying in my room, when this cat stopped at the door, gave a small meow as if to say "I wanna go through". Upon my giving a nod or not minding it, she walked through to the other side. After so many years of bringing up kittens and leading the feline family, one morning she was found dead by the side of the road. RIP you gentle creature...

Coming back to the present gang...it's noon and ubuntu is already bathing in the sun, and the kitten's brown hue exactly resembles the shade of brown used in the 7.04 version of Ubuntu - the Feisty Fawn (and thus the post title - Ubuntu 7.04 Frivolous Feline!). Jammu and GMan are busy trying to chase and kill a spider. Ubuntu looks up to my call and gives a faint meow as if to give the green signal to hit the publish button, while the terrified GMan runs for cover and a hungry Jammu goes back to hunting.

It's the Potpourri tag...

2008-08-14T12:53:00.010+05:30

Picked this tag from a couple of blogger buddies: Hari-chetan, Merlz, Nitin to name a few. Ok, lemme get down to business:

LAST MOVIE YOU SAW IN A THEATER: 300! *ROAARRR* And spent a week discussing it with my dearest pal :) Let's be frank: I'm not exactly a movie person!
WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING: Linux from scratch by Gerard Beekmans. Oh.. if you mean fiction, The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. A must-read for anyone.. simply awesome read.
FAVORITE BOARD GAME: Scrabble, monopoly (well that makes it two I guess)
FAVORITE SOUND: A bit of elaboration here: Fav. music --> Good, complex instrumentals, rock and metal; Fav. female voice --> Shreya ghoshal, Fav. noise --> The powerful chugging of a WDG3A locomotive!
WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD: Being suspected or framed.
WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU WAKE: Huh... morning or afternoon?
FAVORITE FAST FOOD PLACE: Fast food... in Trivandrum? lol!!! I'm a fan of Northie dhabas anyway :D
FUTURE CHILD’S NAME: hm... if it's a girl I'd go for Krishna (dont really know why.. I just like it).. and if it's a boy, maybe Sriram v2.0 ;)
DO YOU DRIVE FAST? Well that depends upon your point of view, and what I'm driving.
DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL? No. Prefer my own species.
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? Boys will always love their toys! My first toy car was a white-blue sportscar (I took it apart before I could learn what model it was). In real life, its the M800.
FAVOURITE DRINK: Tea... custom-made :p
DO YOU EAT THE STEMS ON BROCCOLI? Never eaten one :| But I dont think I really wanna devour the stems...
IF YOU COULD DYE YOUR HAIR ANY COLOR, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR CHOICE? Deep shades of burgundy... I want a preview and an undo facility too!
FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH: Cricket, football, tennis.
ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU: I picked this one off many, so we'll skip this.
WHAT’S UNDER YOUR BED? Nothing usually. At night, my glasses, my mp3 player. And no, that's not a crocodile.. just my violin case lurking yonder.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE BORN AS YOURSELF AGAIN? hm... yes. Why not?
MORNING PERSON, OR NIGHT OWL? Night owl! Wake me if you can :)
FAVORITE PLACE TO RELAX? Usually in front of the computer, with music streaming through Amarok. Or (if power fails), the terrace above my room. Otherwise at the door of a train somewhere far away in the country(wish I could do this often, though!) :)

Whew... that about winds it up. Firing up Random_Taglist_Generator: Tagging - Niranjani, Vrij, and Vipin for now.

That boy with thick glasses

2008-08-09T21:20:00.008+05:30

My eyes are not exactly top notch. To be precise, my spectacles are my window to the world, giving perfect vision at (minus) six-point-five diopters. Ah, the nerd, you might say, but thats not exactly how it is...
My myopia('short-sight', if you prefer) began to get noticed when I was eight or something, when my parents found (to their alarm) that I conveniently chose to ignore sign-boards that were far away and started to copy down rather gibberish text from the blackboard at school. Being quite an innocent kid then, I attributed the fuzzy text on the board sympathetically to the teacher's growing old age. At home, the situation would be analysed:

Someone: Hey Sriram, whats that score at the bottom?
Me: hm... *cough cough* (squinting and trying hard to make some sense of the blurry mess)... excuse me, what did you say?
Someone: The score, kid.
Me: Oh that.. (choosing a number that looks almost similar) hm.. Two hundred fourteen for five.
*TV commentary*: Well that wraps up a fantastic over... England at a hundred and seventeen for three.
Me: Uh oh... *sheepish grin* Well, a slip of the tongue, ye know!

Well, mom decided that enough was enough and asked me to read some random stuff that seemed far away. Needless to say I was (literally) at a loss for words. The next day saw a visit to the ophthalmologist, resulting in my being caught red handed with a power of minus one-point-five. As most kids are, I was filled with glee at getting my own pair of glasses (in my family, everyone had glasses and so this was just like getting your own bed or something) - round, black, carbon-rimmed spectacles with that pair of strings hanging down from each leg, and over to the neck (something analogous to an 'L' board for an automobile). Thus I was induced, at the young age of eight, into the community of the bespectacled.

For the less enlightened, shortsightedness DOES NOT mean the world goes black when i take off my glasses.. objects get blurred(the farther away, the more blurred and out of focus). Read about it on wikipedia.

As the years passed, my age increased and so did the power of my glasses. It kinda struck a new high at minus five, and it elevated my position to the guy with the most powerful spectacles in the class (or the guy with the most retarded eyes, but I preferred the latter). I held on to that post for seven long years and still am :) And as a result of nine years of having to look at the world through lenses, I can reproduce the far-sight test chart at my ophthamologist's letter by letter: (Beginning in a giant A and ending in a tiny line NEPCATOL)!

People's first reaction at hearing the power of my glasses is similar to a person hearing the height of the Eiffel tower for the first time. Then, invariably, LASIK is suggested. True, wearing spectacles for the whole of your life is a pain. Those who dont have glasses, but want to wear them for the fun(or whatever) of it, kick that thought off your mind. My most haunting thought is the scene in the movie The Mummy, where one of the guys loses his glasses in the fight and a short scene is shown like from his eyes - the dark, raining night, and the blurred vision of the monster far away, advancing. *shudder* If I happen to lose my glasses in a life-threatening fight or a flood or something like that, I'm lost. Lost as in hopelessly lost. It's almost like an enlightened state - all blurred and nothing in focus - an elevated state of mind where no worldly object is important ;)

I'll have to be 21 before I can get a LASIK surgery done. Though it would be a relief to throw away my glasses, a part of me still wants to hold on to them.. the piece of metal and (fibre)glass that faithfully serves as my window to the world... and of course I look better with my glasses :)

Minus six-point-five and still going strong!

PS: Comments about the redesigned blog header welcome!

Clickety-clack

2008-08-03T14:52:00.023+05:30

As much as I love trains, something recently struck me as my most boring, stupid train journey in my life: New Delhi to Amritsar on the Amritsar Shatabdi. Well this train gets an Alstom LHB rake (unlike the regular azure-blue rakes that we see all over the country). Click here to see a video of an LHB rake. The loco we had was a WAP5, slightly less powerful than the one in the video. The train started slightly late from NDLS, negotiated the various points slowwwly and continued slowly for the rest of the journey.

Or so it seemed. Till I went to the door. Before I reveal what happened, a little word about travelling at the door in Shatabdi and Janshatabdi trains in North India: You are automatically assumed to be what I call, "the ubuquitous and disinterested traveller", in other words, the "I'm a busy arse" kind of person, who, at the first moment of getting into a train (or any other moving object for that matter), shuts down completely and goes to sleep, his only goal being his destination. So, most doors are jammed with big crates and what not. If you try to open the door when the train is moving, you are given stern, suspicious("Suicide case?") glances by the people inside. Well I managed to evade a couple of those glances, and parked myself at the door. The train was doing 110+ and the gentleman at the helm (read Big White WAP5) was making mincemeat of the whole rake. Add to it the fact that the WAP5 loco has a feature called BPCS, similar to cruise control, and it was probably set to 118kmph, so the whole train was just going on and on at that speed. It was quite frightening to stand by the door, actually :) Since it was a straight, long section of track for most of the journey from NDSL to ASR, it was pretty boring too. Last but not the least, it was an electric loco at the front, so none of that powerful turbo or chugging sounds or the smoking action all we diesel lovers love :)

So much for the outside, now for the inside. Inside, it was a room. A 'room' because in any room, you wouldnt expect it to shake or emit sounds or give you an identification at what speed it's travelling (given that it travels at all). That was how the LHB coach felt from the inside. Food kept arriving by the minute - snacks, tea, soup, supper, ice-cream. None of that "clickety clack" of the wheels, none of the air rushing through the open window at high speeds, none of the echoes of the horn of the loco sounding on a curve, nothing.

Miserable.

And the people inside read magazines and listened to music from their phones without so much as a cursory glance outside. They have a sleek carriage.. they need to get to their places fast, they have it. What else?

Amidst all this smoothening, polishing and trying-to-make-it-look-more-like-an-aircraft kind of design, what's lost is the very essence of the train journey. The journey is what entertains you, unlike journey by air. Heck, that's why they HAVE the inflight entertainment onboard aircraft --> simply because there isn't anything else to do. (Oh wait, maybe you could try counting the number of electric lamps inside the plane, or try to guess the air-hostess's age. Which are, in my opinion, rather dull and pointless means of passing the time).

Take the second class coach in a casual express train on a non-electrified route. The lovely horn sounds, and a slight tug tells you that you're moving. A few seconds later, the chugga-chugga-chug music from the loco sounds and the train picks up pace. There are no cantenaries (posts that hold the overhead wires) periodically blocking your view..Just plain green Indian countryside, with rocking movements from the coach and lovely rhythmic track music to add to the cheer.

This is India laid bare. The train passes at a comfortable pace, blowing lots of dust at top speed onto the tiny platforms in wayside stations, and stops for a crossing somewhere deep in the heart of the journey. Enjoying a cup of fine tea and waiting for a crossing train at some wayside station, under the shade of old banyan trees with the birds chirping overhead is something with no words to express it. Yes, in a couple of decades we will have high speed rail transport - plush cars and sleek trains, but what is lost is the Indian touch to it.

Yet the ever present irony continues across the country. Parents still introduce babies to trains in books as "Koooo.. chuk chuk chuk". Steam traction disappeared off Indian mainlines and branch lines by the end of the last millenium. When these toddlers grow up and see an electric locomotive on the track, they'll obviously be left to wonder what the hell went "koo chuk chuk" in it. Hell, you want those lovely steam engines in colouring books, picture charts and general train 'iconification' but you DONT want it in real life. HOW MORE HYPOCRITIC COULD YOU GET? I fully agree to Ranga's view that the steam locomotive is the most awesome machine ever created by man. Who would have thought it possible? Just climb into the cab of a steam loco (in Ooty, for instance) and check out the number of levers and gauges inside the beast. It is mechanical engineering at its best. All run on superheated water.

Countries like England have preserved their steam beauties with a sense of pride. They run these locos for specials in weekends and the like, to uphold the reverence to the machine man engineered and perfected to embody the very notion of speed and power - You fed it fire and it ran. We Indians on the other hand, just waited to dispose of these workhorses and move on. I listen with envy when I hear my grandpa relate how he used to watch coal being piled into the firebox and how the smell of steam rose and the pistons hissed as the train inched out whistling, from the station. I was born too late to hear a whistle blow. I guess my children will never know it ever existed.

That's the way everything is, I guess. Life just goes on, isnt it. How very beautiful.

The bleak situation

2008-07-31T15:24:00.004+05:30

Holidays started three months ago. A welcome relief from God-knows-how-many-months of self-imposed slavery to routine and study. After the initial couple of weeks of not-knowing-what to do and trying-to-do-as-much-as-one-could-inspite-of-not-really-knowing-what-the-hell-to-do way of lifestyle that usually takes one by the storm at the start of any long vacation, there was the overseas trip. And of course the big upgrade. After that, life started to settle down...

Everyday, it was(and is) the same thing... Wake up at 1100 hrs and wonder if it is noon or still morning..take a leak.. switch on the computer, check mail, blog, forums, etc.. Brush teeth.. Head downstairs and read the paper while breakfast+lunch combi is being packaged by grandma. Take the parcel and head upstairs. Read something (blogs, articles on tuxmachines.org, or just Calvin&Hobbes while shoving food into mouth). Head downstairs to wash plate and return, to continue in front of the computer till evening..eat something..hang about downstairs, quick walk to buy some milk or something.. listen to music till the body falls asleep at around 0000 hrs or so.

A quick examination of this routine made me realise that it wouldn't do. So I drew up an ambitious little plan, rather a to-do list. It ran soemthing as follows:
1. Learn linux shell-scripting.
2. (if possible) Learn JS, and hopefully PHP too.
3. Go for swimming classes.
4. Do some railfanning.
5. Find some time to do some stretching exercise, pullups, etc. to improve my pathetic physique.
6. Read some books.
7. Blog!

Bleah! That was two months ago. As of now, the status stands.
1. Shell scripting knowledge: Moderate
2. JS learnt: Bare-basics... PHP: Nil
3. Swimming classes: Not joined yet
4. Railfanning: Hardly any
5. Exercise: Nil :(
6. Books read: Few
7. Blogging: Somewhat regular-ish.

As a result, my chair has a perfect impression of my bums on it and by now, my neighbours and people in the street have given me up for an illusion. My grandparents(who live in my house) seriously doubt my existence during the daytime. My weight has remained strictly the same over the past three months, and I doubt if I will make it through half an hour of rigorous outdoor-play. And still rake-thin, with dense glases.

After months of serious linux usage, I feel a void whenever I'm forced to use Windows... and to my horror, I found that stuff like certain software reviews published on DIGIT, etc., actually are not interesting me any more! One look at the screenshot, the 'Start' button in it, and the thought, "Oh.. it's for that-other-OS." crosses my mind and I head to another page... I SWEAR I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP!!! I dont know if whatever is happening to me in this context is good or bad.. maybe I'll just wait and watch :)

In the true spirit of my health and immunity, I caught a cold from nowhere. My eyes start to drift and my fingers feel heavy as the sedation induced by the medicine takes over my system. All's left is the publish button.
And it's not a long way to bed.

whereis whatis which who

2008-07-24T10:00:00.011+05:30

Looking back at the archives, the ever evaded question popped up again --> Why do I blog? WHY? Possible reasons for anyone to blog could be:

1. For a living? That's definitely not the case here. I waste precious bandwidth everyday posting, checking for and replying to comments, and reading others' blogs... and no bloody soul pays me a paisa for this.

2. Because one is a self-obsessed, pompous bitch seeking fame and power, and striving to do so by blogging on abstract topics like 'magnanimity towards saucepans' and 'how to effectively pee against the hailstorm'? ? This statement requires a thorough dissection for anyone to understand it fully. Please close all other windows/tabs and devote your complete attention to the following reasoning:
Well, there isn't anything much to say you fool.. The fact being, the above statement doesn't apply (in its entirety) to me.

3. Making a point about anything? You got me waaay off there. I havent made the slightest point about anything in this piece of crap that has been hogging space on Google's (may its tribe increase!) servers since July 06. Well the point is.. oops! forget I ever said that. Onto number 4!

4. ... (Since this reason itself doesn't exist, there is no reason for us to assume it means anything. --Ignore--)

5. Too lazy? What do u mean? Do you guys know how much of hard work it takes to climb the steep stairs up to my room, bend down to hit the power button, and type each key on the keyboard? Oh, and that heavy mouse..

6. ... (uh.. See reason 4)

(If you somehow managed to break out of the infinite loop from #4 to #6, I congratulate you on your very human ability to control your mind... move on)

7. Life? I refuse to comment on this reason because I dont understand what it means anyway. And then. whoever(if any) said blogging is life was probably dead when he said it.

8. To disillusion and disappoint poor guys searching for serious topics in google, who get directed here in hope and see cartloads of junk? Well I dont mean to do it to them anyway! If you're one of them, sorry buddy but that's how the world is :)

7. #Error... entry already exists, replace(y/n): y --> Replacing failed. Segmentation fault. Core dumped.#

Well I still don't know why the hell I blog. Reasonable topics I kinda have a hint why I blog, but as to crap like this I am in the dark about. In a serious tone however, the scribbles in the header image (Ravings of a blah blah..) would shed some light in the direction of my intention in blogging.
Finally, I seek to dis-crap this post and make it a tag :) All ye loyal readers, TAKE THIS AS A TAG and write a post on why you blog.

PS: The title may blend well into the theme of this post in general, but linux users can make out four commands in them. As someone said, linux is something you learn easily, but spend a lifetime trying to master. Hats off!

PPS: Pic courtesy "http://ogrecave.com/2001/04/29/complete-cavemans-club-book-preview" I dont know if doing this is right or wrong yet, but I'll make this statutory statement anyway :)

Public Enlightenment?

2008-07-19T10:30:00.008+05:30

Here's an incident which happened a few days ago... My grandpa asked me to send an email to a company, something to do with deposits and stuff... I led him to my room and typed out the whole thing, and clicked the send button. I, rather proudly, showed him how lightning fast email was, and how the receiver must have been staring at it within moments. he took a great interest in it, and soon I was showing him how to compose one, and how another lands up in your inbox, etc.. the basics of which are crucial to the very means of electronic communication we rely so heavily upon now. All went merry as a 1mbps connection until I opened the inbox once again.

The mailer daemon... sincerely apologising in its vile tone that it couldnt do anything more, it threw at me the error: "Recipient's mailbox exceeded quota". Two happy faces fell.
My first reaction was a "Dont panic" to grandpa. He behaved quite casually about it - saying "Why cant they take care of these things?"
My second reaction was a "F!!king retards, they proudly give away their mail address and have their draught-ridden bandwidth full!" Well, hasnt anyone heard of gmail here? That company doesnt have its own domain for email, its hosted on a vsnl.com domain... well I bet they even run their business on dial-up. Irritated, I phoned the officer, and told her what had happened. On hearing it, the first reply I got was "Did you type the address correctly?" Now I got pretty pissed off. I retorted that if I was sane enough to email them and report what the damn error was, they could have probably figured that I was intelligent enough to TYPE the address correctly. This remark worked..she saw the matter in the proper light and said hurriedly, "I'll check and call you back later". Of course that call never came.

A mean trick which hardware retailers love to play on buyers is bundling operating systems with their laptops or computers. In other words, forcing consumers to accept the latest OS with its cost added along with the PC. The recent trend is selling laptops and PCs with the ever fabulous Vista. The standalone cost of the 'Ultimate' version of that OS, I guess runs close to twenty thousand... People are tricked into thinking Vista offers unbeatable security while in reality it sports a BigBrother attitude, going paranoid over everything. I have had some experience with it and it just seems like... well that's not the point here :) Recently one of my friends had to buy a laptop and the retailer actually refused to give it without the OS! My friend wanted plain old XP but the retailer put his foot down and said he could only sell it with Vista. Of course, my buddy only went blue in his face when I told him how much more he could end up paying for the laptop than its regular price if he opted to buy it with Vista.

The story doesn't end with PCs... some years back a letter appeared in the CHIP magazine. A good samaritan was buying some accessory for his computer at a local hardware dealer's when a customer enquired about the Core2Duo processors. The dealer's reply was that Pentium4 Chips were faster and better in performance than Core2Duo and that for Core2Duo chips to work, you needed atleast two RAM sticks! The customer was about to fall for that dirty trick... Our good samaritan went red in his face at the dealer's blatant attempt at cheating customers, and assured the customer that he'd better go for Core2Duo as if his life depended upon it and not to pay any heed to the dealer, who obviously was desperate to clear his old stock.

Well? Whatever next?

PS: I do not want to spark off any controversy about that pic in this post... I do not endorse it in any way. It is NOT my creation. The original image can be found here. *phew*

Better broadband in *ubuntu

2008-07-05T12:59:00.010+05:30

Having used linux for a long time now, I also do my part in persuading interested friends to switch over to Linux. And the distro I recommend? Kubuntu. Well I dont want flame-comments by die hard GNOME users, I'm only supporting the ubuntu family of distros(Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu etc) and you will agree that the community suppoert for the ubuntu family is HUGE. Huge as in overwhelming. This applies to the whole ubuntu family. If you're a KDE fan, go for Kubuntu, GNOME fans reach out for ubuntu and if you are sticking to an outdated config, simply shut your eyes and get Xubuntu.

Back to the point... most newbies are stuck over a very commonplace question --> How do you set up your broadband connection on this damn thing? If you already know, skip the instructions and read the rest of the post. And in case you have come to this blog searching for an answer to the same, well here goes a n00b version:

0. make sure your modem is on and properly connected.
1. Open your command-line (terminal, konsole, xterm, whatever).
2a. At the prompt, type sudo pppoeconf
sudo is an ubuntu adaptation of 'su' (SuperUser) command in other distros. This allows you to assure the computer that you are root. And in case you are curious, PPPoE stands for Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet.
2b. When asked for your password, yield.
3. You will get a primitive-ish user interface that automatically configures the modem at eth0 and asks you some questions. Dont lose your head if these make no sense; the default/recommended options are fine.
4. Type your username and password for the connection when asked.
5. Follow what it says after that and set it to start at boot time if you prefer it that way. (For data/volume-based billing this is fine)
6. As it says, you can use the command pon dsl-provider to start it, plog to see the status, and poff to terminate the connection.
7. Bingo!

Less hassles for better broadband.. my efforts :)
I've been learning linux shell sripting(BASH) and some javascript to keep myself busy these days, and the disappointed attitude of a friend over the connection ("look at all these commands") prompted me to write my first practical shell script. Well for those who dont know, a shell script is the linux/unix version of batch-files in DOS. Only, infinitely more powerful that those .bat files!

My shell script is a tiny bit of code that gives you a menu based user interface(text based, however... I'm still not into graphics programming) that you can run from your terminal. You can connect, disconnect, view logs, save them etc. Nothing much actually. But quite useful... I use it now :)

You can download the file as 'dsl.tar.gz' by clicking here

Download and save it somewhere. From linux, extract it to your home directory. Follow the instructions in the README.exe file provided with it (if you are a n00b, follow them carefully!). I'm working on better features like terminating the connection at a set time, and stuff. Comments and suggestions on this first little venture always welcome :)

Suezmijne

2008-07-03T13:40:00.000+05:30

Suezmijne (pronounced "Sess-mij-jne", 'jn' as in 'jnaani'. First syllable accent):

The phenomenon is NOT the newest phenomenon as many think it is. It's been around in some special circles for some time, precisely three years(and counting). Made public under some classified reasons of contingency, it made its first public appearance barely a few hours ago. Many great thinkers like John Hobston, Daniel Dickson, Samantha O'Sullivan, Bran "The Brat" Philhardy who dominated the progressive outlook of their time have spent the majority of their lives contemplating the numerous mysteries of this inanimate, yet profoundly (often explicity) hyperactive phenomenon.

The origin of the word is shrouded in mystery itself. People of the northeast claim it to have coined in semblance of a man trying to say "Excuse me" in the middle of a particularly embarrassing sneeze, but critics often point that out as an error arising out of the increasingly-politeness-consciousness of the folk.
Yet another speculation is that it originated from the Blauvian word for a purple pencil sharpener(disambiguation --> the sharpener was purple, not that it sharpened purple-pencils). However die hard supporters of this theory are still working to find out what the purple pencil sharpener had in common with this interesting phenomenon. (Update: Govt. has sanctioned a mainframe computer for the same) Archeologists, on the other hand have gone on strike complaining of lack of funds to continue their work at the base of the Kaynz stationery store, looking for ancient remains that might provide a clue to the above argument.

Often, the gauss theory of electromagnetism has been found to have yielded comletely unexpected results in bizzare exponents when applied to suezmijne. This made it a hit with chemists worldwide, who used it to ridicule the physicists. In late 2005, a group of shady teenagers went on the rampage with poisoned ballpoint pens, asking random pedestrians (and often stopping cars (whose drivers looked kind enough to stop (and not mow them down))) in the street, "Are you suezmijne?". To this day, no one knows what answer they expected - since all those who answered were pricked with the pens coated with some powerful alkaloid, ensuring seizure withing 24 hours. Three days(and tens of mysterious deaths) later, the gang disappeared as mysteriously as they had surfaced.

Suezmijne has interesting properties. It causes the sun to appear to rise in the east and set in the west (rare exceptions have been sighted by regular users of LSD or opium, where the earth was reported to have rose and set in the middle of the Qwarjzk desert on rainy days and spun over Mount Everest in winter). But no more properties have been discovered owing to its rare availbility for examination. The last phoenomenon attributed to Suezmijne was the gruesome torture and subsequent killing of Twenty eight pangolins reported missing over a year ago. Thirteen carcasses were found in a state of extreme horror, in grotesque postures such as never exhibited by the species. Two were beheaded and the rest were found in a terribly ecstasic looking stage, most presumably in hysteria. (There has been some argument over the latter, with some experts claiming it to be a deeply enlightened state of exhilaration and not hysteria - sources unknown).
The cadavers disappeared under mysterious circumstances (some point to spontaneous combustion) on the eve of the autopsy.

Nothing more was heard of the Suezmijne until wee hours of Thursday morning, when a sheaf of classified papers were spotted at the desk of the highest authority (who prefers to remain anonymous). The papers have been withheld in safe custody thence (but there are rumours of some contents having leaked out a few hours ago -- await update), and their appearance have sparked off fresh interest in the subject that has fascinated man for decades.

What's with eight?

2008-06-26T17:31:00.016+05:30

This would give you an idea of my situation... Of course poor Calvin was never so explicit, but that is just another case of photoshop-ing ;)

I picked this tag from g-man It revolves around the magic of the number eight, while seeming to be the usual unassuming tag.

8 things I'm passionate about:
# Music --> Ma says I used to ask her to sing to me evey night to lull me to sleep. My bond with music grew when I started playing the violin at eight years(another eight, eh?)... later I taught myself the keyboard and the drums(thanks to the freedom I enjoyed at our beloved school's music room!). Today I can't live without my mp3 player, be it heavy metal, A R Rahman(To this day that no one can handle instruments like him), or even certain Hindustani and Sufi melodies.

# The internet --> I get up and check mail and the blogs even before brushing my teeth. And cant the BSNL guys please provide more data transfer besides the measly 1GB a month?

# My computer --> Follows from the above. I love tweaking my box all the time!

# Reading --> I go mad if I cant read something a day. I have probably talked more in English than in Malayalam or Tamil (or hindi, obviously). I cant/dont express my emotions in the last three, simply because I never actually have!

# Cars, bikes, jet planes, and of course TRAINS! --> Well we are boys and we love our beasts >:)

# Travelling --> By rail preferred :)

# Photography --> Follows the previous passion. As of now, I have a humble Powershot A410 (Canon rulz!) which I have been using for two years to get some work done.

# My ideals --> Nobody tells me what to do.. they may only give suggestions if they are that desperate. If I dont wanna talk, I dont. Go jump off the nearest cliff if you are offended.

8 things I wanna do before I die
# Footplate a diesel locomotive (though it looks like I'll be doing this soon!)
# Drive a 'pandi' lorry, complete with the experience of being clad in a lungi-banian and on a full load of local brewed toddy.
# Ride a screaming Y2K turbine Superbike!
# Own a Royal Enfield Bullet - I LOVE that machine!
# Get a job I love and get rich.
# Build my own Beowulf cluster at home >:)
# Learn to hack using the infinite capabilities of the linux/unix terminal.
# Play the drums for Metallica, Maiden or any such metal band at one of their live concerts...*sigh*

...or did it mean 8 PEOPLE I wanna do ;)

8 things I say often
# Dammit
# What the F!!k
# I dont give a f!!k/damn.
# Yeah
# (placeholder for more)
#
#
#

8 books I read recently
# Black wind - Clive and Dirk Cussler
# The Blood Dimmed tide - Rennie Airth
# Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
# Blood Memory - Greg Iles
# Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
# Midnights' Children - Salman Rushdie
# The Broker - John Grisham
# The great Railway Bazaar - Paul Theroux (stopped this midway since it was boring)

8 songs I could listen to over and over again
# Wherever I may roam - Symphony & Metallica
# Rime of the ancient mariner - Iron maiden (yeah, they're poets too!)
# Instrumedley - Dream Theatre (WTF! How the hell did they remember all the bits and pieces in this medley)
# Ache Zu Ache - Rammstein! (For best results, listen to it at full volume while inside an aircraft, precisely during takeoff - I've done this and it's mind-blowing)
# Leja Leja Re - Shreya Ghoshal (What a voice! The BEST female voice ever to sing on earth)
# My Immortal - Evanescence
# Maula Mere Maula - from 'Anwar'
# Any A R Rahman title with splendid instrumentals

8 people I think should do this tag
Heck, I dont think eight people read my blog! So I too adopt the g-man way --> Pick this and do the tag if you've read this!

Top M$ jabs <> Top linux slogans

2008-06-21T14:48:00.027+05:30

Sometimes, certain situations (like my earlier post)really support the fact --> never trust anyone called Gates, who sells you W!ndow$.
After reading Hari-chettan's recent post, here is something to.. um...inspire(!) you further!

www.humorix.org has some splendid slogans dug from across the world. A few of my favourites:

# A computer without W!ndow$ is like a fish without a bicycle
# Scared of speed? If so, then try W!ndow$.
# W!ndow$ and DOS -- a turtle and it's shell (<-- shell.. got it?)
# The word "W!ndow$" is a word out of an old dialect of the Apaches. It means: "White man staring through glass-screen onto an hourglass..."

# Bugs come in through open W!ndow$.
# I still miss W!ndow$, but my aim is getting better.
# Hiroshima '45...Tschernobyl '86...W!ndow$ '95... W!ndow$ '98...
# A fool and his money are soon using W!ndow$.
# W!ndow$ is a pane in the ASCII ;)
# M!cro$oft broke Volkswagen's world record: Volkswagen only made 22 million bugs!

# I once heard B!ll Gate$ say, "WHAT?!?! Netscape caused an 'invalid page fault'??! Only M!cro$oft programs have the code to do that!"

# W!ndow$ found - Remove? (Y)es (S)ure (F)ine (O)K (G)reat!
# Two computer people discussing those old stories about B!ll Gate$' name adding up to 666 in ASCII:
"I hear that if you play the NT 4.0 CD backwards, you get a satanic
message"
"...That's nothing. If you play it forward, it installs NT 4.0!"

# To segfault is human; to bluescreen moronic.
# Why use W!ndow$, when linux gives you the whole house?
# The best W!ndow$ accelerator is that which works at 9.8 m/s²!
# Computers are like air conditioners, dont open Windows if you want them to work properly.

# M!cro$oft should switch to vacuum cleaner business, where people actually want their products to suck ;)

To finish it off, "The box said, works with W!ndow$ Vista or better... so I installed linux!"

Update:
1) N just saw his Vista Ultimate display a BSOD! HA!
2) Thanks to tuxmachines.org, the traffic to this blog skyrocketed since yesterday night, with visits from Europe and the US outnumbering those from India :D
3) Wohoo! Most number of comments :)

gasp Identity Revealed?

2008-06-20T14:06:00.010+05:30

After a lot of tossing and turning, and a subsequently sleepless night, I've decided to scrap "The Smokin' WDM2" from the profile... Why did I choose it in the first place? Dunno. Seriously. Privacy? naah... Just search for my name in google and see what the first result is... so definitely not privacy. Well then what else... oh well what the hell :D

So Sriram it is.. and sriram it will be. Spare yourself the "WTF?" when you see some 'smoking W..D..something' in the profile. And dear ol' Calvin is back on the profile pic... and this post shall be the dump for all profile pics (updated monthly :)

But the WDM2 is still my favourite loco, and so is the WDG3A 'Shakti', so there!

UPDATE (25 July 08): It seems revealing my name has led my blog to lose its Google page-rank no.1! The irony of the world! *swear*

fuel.. gasoline.. PESTICIDE!

2008-06-18T11:33:00.014+05:30

I dont fancy funky digital watches - love those awesome dials and pieces in a swiss chrono. I dont like smooth, silent electric stuff - but love the sound and heavy metal inside a diesel engine. (Electronics is an exception - I wouldnt want my mobile phone to be coaled, watered and the ash emptied every two hours, not would I feed my MP3 player diesel everyday)

Coming to the case in point - I detest exotic ballpoint pens which run on refills. Refills that are simply not available in any part of the wide world. On the contrary, I love the fine craftsmanship of an ink-pen --> from the local ten-rupee nibber to the Hero or the Parker Beta.

My kid sister Ju (her shortened name is Anju, but the lazy ass I am - further shortened it to Ju) had just entered the pen-era in school - fifth standard. Entering pen-era in my school days was marked by all our impeccably white shirts turning blue in the evening, more ink having gone into the shirt than onto any paper. By the time we entered home, our shirts would be a fine specimen of chromatography, what with the sweat and the ink all over. We blamed it on the absorptive nature of the fabric. It was no wonder how we managed with just one pack of Ujala for one whole year.

Well, the pest (Ju) had grandly started off the pen-era in school with a couple of cello ballpoints and one Add-gel, much to my scorn. I wanted her to start off the way I did, so in the evening I treated her to my repertoire. Running up to the room, I dusted the top of the shelf and slowly, carefully exhumed the carcasses of a silver Hero and a red Parker. Both the specimens were working fine after some kickstarting and liberal doses of ink. I showed her how awesome an ink-pen was and how smooth it got once you got started with one. She was impressed.

Scene: The next evening. Venue: My room. Enter me.
Me: (to nobody in particular) Alright lets get the box running. *gasp*

A Parker lies cruelly disembodied on the floor. Its cap is nowhere to be seen and its royal blood is sprayed all over the floor. For a moment, it looks like it's too late. Not wanting to disturb the evidence, I step gingerly over the ink spills and examine the nib with trepidation. Murphy again. It's undoubtedly broken.

I rush down, and the pest is nowhere to be seen. I take a couple of shots of the crime scene and clean up the mess myself. The pen is dead. Ju arrives and I charge her under Section 302. After venting my anger, I decide to buy her an ink pen of her own. As long as she's breaking them, it makes sense to be breaking her own pens, I savagely thought.

Next evening, I took her to the nearby stationery shop and bought her a Camlin for twenty bucks. Pleased with my big-brotherly-care I proceed to fill it. It doesnt write. I rip the damn thing open and clean whatever I can and fill it again.. fortunately it works.
"Try it now - it works beautifully... no no, the other way. NO! nib forward, facing straight. You'll get the smoothness best that way. JU! Oh fff...flush!" I euphemise the expletive.
Five minutes later, the training is complete(with a lot of muffled language). Knowing her well, I warn her repeatedly not to open the ink tank. Job done. I head back to the computer.

Fifteen minutes into the internet, I catch a lot of shouting in "Wherever I may roam" playing over the headphone... weird. It continues even after I switch off the song. I curse loudly and head downstairs.

Disembodied Camlin. Blood all over the floor.
Grandpa's clean white dhoti now dotted blue.
The pest nowhere to be seen.
And I to blame.

Mera phasht tag!

2008-06-15T11:15:00.006+05:30

Thanks be to Ranga for this most interesting tag. I'm supposed to make an image of myself. Of all the people who have been tagged, mine is probably the worst. Here it goes:

I have always been of the opinion that black and white is the most pleasing to the eye, and takes away the strain of viewing all those unneccessary colours. Yes, I love minimalism to a certain extent, but I'm rather a mixture of opposites. Let's start with the images in clockwise. The first - the traveller down the lonely track is a tribute to one of those 'crazy' obsessions - trains! Believe me, I have walked down kilometres from home to the rails, and back all on a scorching summer noon to catch some rare locomotive. Call it what you want :D

Next, the treble clef (or "the music symbol" as some call it) - my love for music. I wake up in the morning listening to heavy metal, and sleep listening to A R Rahman. Music has kept my soul from disintegrating all these years. People turn to their Bible or Gita in times of trouble... I have found solace in the rhythm and harmony of all those notes. The music theme is continued in that collage-like depiction of some instruments.

The garish red, blood stained feet is a tribute to one trait that has always been in me. I dont know if its good or bad, but it's plain that I tend to fly off the hook sometimes, and when angry, I often tend to forget myself and where I am.. to often regret later.

The meditating figure atop a hillock refers to the deep, contemplating moods I sometimes go into - talking all the less to people and shunning humans. The road into the horizon - travelling, one of my favourites.

The bottom left assortment of icons is the techie in me - linux, blogging, etc etc. The central crosshair is something I've often thought of myself as - focussed nowhere, just a wee bit of many things, yet nobody in particular. Frustrating. It's also a tribute to my love for photography.

The disorganised nature of the whole image reflects how disorganised my life is...

Well, thats it. I tag g-man, sidhusaaheb, harishanker, and nitin.

Monsoon(bleah!) mumblings

2008-06-13T12:40:00.002+05:30

After all those long, boring parts of Up, up and away, it's such a relief to be blogging crap again :) Well, there's a point to be made.:

Looking at the feedjit widget in my sidebar ('People and Places'), one can easily spot the wretched souls who come in search of one universal longing: 'Vista on 128 MB RAM'. Everyone - You, me, he, she, it, them, thou, Bush, Blair, Hillary, Obama, Osama, Lalu all seem to be faced with one intriguing million dollar question they type into google in their search for truth: "Can Vista run on 128 MB of RAM?" The number of hits from around the world (look at this!) for this particular post makes you wonder if Vista on 128 MB RAM was something even the Buddha went meditating for. Hell, my buddies, who come in this quest: Vista is too greedy to run on 128 megs. It cant even crawl. And what big deal does Vista offer? If thou still not realiseth yond Microsoft's evil intentions, thy life is a waste, pitiful human. Try running Xubuntu on thy legacy PC, as slick as it gets, and as fast as thought on even the oldest of PCs.

Speaking of Linux, yesterday I had the shock of my life - I was refused entry to my own computer! I had changed my user password in linux, and something had gone wrong ("Malignant fate sat by and smiled, eh?") and I was greeted with login failed everytime I typed the new password(or what I thought was the new password). Also remember, Kubuntu has no 'root' login via the normal way. Panick soon gave way to hope.. oh well, what the hell! No.. no question of a reinstall. I rebooted and entered the recovery mode. The scrolling text-bootup soon greeted me with a 'root@wdp4:" *whew* I was safe. From there, command 'startx' and the beautiful GUI(do I see someone shaking their heads?) logged me in as root. A quick visit to system settings, user maanagement, and setting a new password (It didnt even ask me the old one - well, I'm root, aint I? Authority has its previleges).
I resumed breathing normally when I logged into my good ol' user ID, into my good ol' desktop. But now I shudder... Wasn't that a MAJOR breach of security? I mean, any illiterate infant could come in and change my password via the recover option in bootup. The recover option doesnt even ask me for any password - just logged in as root. So, the paranoid Kubuntu user, beware... edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and delete the second bootup option(recovery mode).

Just look at that weather-widget in the right-centre of the screenshot! Its June, and yet the damn temperature is 28 degC with a tiny 8kmph wind. Well, IS THIS THE MONSOON? Whatever the hell happened to the famous Kerala monsoon? Where are the dark-as-7pm afternoons, the roaring winds, the smell of the sea being hinted in the thundering wild rains? Dark, lazy afternoons when one could sit on the balcony and listen to the raindrops, glimpse the green canopy all over and smell the gallons of fresh water being poured all over God's own country... it's still hot and bright outside.

The time is 1240.. the bell rings 12 kms away in school, to signal the end of the luch break. Sweating, we walk into our bright classrooms, to while away the time for two periods till the interval. It's three months and I've begun to miss school already. But school's not the same now...

Things change... and its time for me to get out of some of the dark days I've been in for sometime. Coincidence is omnipresent, and Mac's latest post is most meaningful for me, too.

Up, up and away: Part five (finale)

2008-06-11T20:32:00.006+05:30

It is with a ~~heavy~~ happy heart that I open Kate(my 'advanced text editor' duh) to dump the last part of the trip from my memory onto the hopefully reliable servers of Google. Traffic on the blog has been steadily declining, with viewers coming to the page, but getting turned away by the some long piece of junk, beginning with 'Up, up and away: Part nineteen hundred and eleven'. So I make the final dump... fellow bloggers, and loyal readers, I welcome you to part five :)

Again, for some history, here's Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

******** DAY 8: Sun shines in Singapore ********

Our kind guide had given us a lot of time to sleep and continue sleeping before we dragged ourselves out of the hotel at 0945, tucked in some BBJ(bread, butter, jam) and plonked ourselved into the coach. After the 'Numbah 1(Yes), Numbah 2(Yaaaees)' ritual, Mr John announced that we were going first to see the 'Padang' (if thats how it's spelt... second syllable accent, with a 'dh' sound for the 'd', and the second 'a' stretched to the effect of two 'a's is how it was pronounced) - Singapore's Independence square. Nice, grassy place with tall buildings occupying the skyline in one corner, and assorted others in the rest of the places. Quick photo shoot... depart.

This time, to see the Merlion, the iconic lion-head-with-the-tail-of-a-fish-spewing-out-water-with-no-fear-of-a-fine-of-$500. The bus was parked about half a mile away from the actual spot, and it was a delightful walk. The sun beat high upon our heads the instant we peeked out of the coach... and after walking a bit I made a dash back to the coach, thinking I should rather get sunburnt with my cap on, rather than without it. On the way, I run into A, who thinks she'd rather get sunburnt with her goggles on, rather than without it. On our way to the coach, both of us bump into Bs, who thinks, he'd rather get sunburnt with his handycam, rather than without it. Goods procured, the three of us dashed back to the group.

The group was standing at the side of the river, where, as the guide said, the eye-level was hogged by "Old Singapore" (small buildings barely three stories high) and the skyline dominated by "New Singapore". The latter part consisted of Govt Buildings, a hell lot of banks - Bank of China, Standard Chartered, etc. The riverside looked more like an English town. Neatly paved walkways, cute little kids from the nearby school sitting on the neat floors, drawing the surrounding scenes(as part of their school activity to "get them out of their computers and video games"), various other architecture, a bridge across the river(looking straight out of an English story), an underpass ("Please push your bicycle through the undepass...No riding - Fine:$1000" What the- !). As a tshirt proclaims, "Singapore is a fine city, lah! Spitting: Fine $500, Littering: Fine $200, Crossing the road at no-crossing zone: Fine $500"... But the neatness of the place is one thing to be proud of.
A stop at a souvenir shop, and a walk under a huge expressway going over the river, and we reached the edge of the land - and amidst the salty spray onto our faces, we stood with the merlion and snapped merrily. (Tourist tip: Guard your camera lens! Open it only at the instant of clicking and close it immediately afterwards. Cleaning up all that salt spray from it is a pain in the er...optical device)

Next stop was a Chinese temple dedicated to the Goddess of the sea, who, with her humanity-friendly deeds had won over the hearts of the people, that they deified her after her death (The religion was Taoism).

For lunch we headed to Little India, Sitara Restaurant adjoining Mustafa centre. I was feeling really ill this time, cold and a slight fever to add to the cough and sore throat, but a good half an hour of Metallica and Iron Maiden did the trick. The fever subsided and the cold got better. Sore throat virus is immune to heavy metal music.

With the fever gone, I was ready for a roll. The coach headed straight to Senthosa Island. Had we known what was awaiting us, there would have been second thoughts - a queue. And what a queue! The whole of humanity seemed to be wanting to go to Sentosa on that particular drizzly evening. We waited and waited, moving inch-by-inch until we came to the entrance, to board the cable car that would fling us over to the island, but the queue went about 3 times round the entire venue before finally entering it. On the way, people were frustrated. There was a nice patch of wooden floor overlooking the road yonder, with flowers and stuff. With no seats around, everyone seemed to be eying that spot, longing to park their bums, but not quite willing to do so in front of all the waiting people. I gave the public hell, left my family on the queue and went straight over to that place, sat down, stretched my legs and popped my earphones in... music poured over. Then, people got brave enough! A lot of them came over and sat down merrily :) After some more time of crawling, the queue ended and we plonked ourselves into a red six-seater car.
After about five to ten minutes of gliding slowly down the cable to the island's station, our guide, waiting for us with his sceptre(the red ribbon tied to the stick), went off to pruchase tickets for the dolphin show. After yet another long queue, we boarded a bus, and hung about in another one, and finally arrived at the venue, which was packed. I fought my way to the edge of the water, where I could employ my tiny 3x zoom to its best. The show was very impressive - Three dolphins, doing that popular jumping-thru-the-loop, 'kissing' volunteers, balancing balls on the tip of their nose, 360 degree flip-overs, etc. Shows how much training goes into these things. I hope the dolphins are happy, though...

It getting dark by this time, so we joined another queue, through to the bus stop, into the air-con bus, (the place was really humid) through another queue, to the famous under-water world. There is a slow-moving conveyor belt, on which you can stand(if you are tired of walking) and watch as an awesome array of sea-creatures in all colours, shapes and sizes swim about you. It was more of a 'human-show' for these beings, as we are the ones in a glass tunnel, and they are free to roam about! Disappointingly, no big sharks, though... There was a touch-pool outside, and just as I was trying my hand at feeling some fishes(they don't feel very pleasant to touch, though), some Indian kids(early teenage, maybe) came over and were having a tough time... wanting to touch the fish, but too scared to. Everytime they put their hand in and a fish passed by, they would squeal and take their dripping hands out of the water, and the water droplets would splash over me. It got annoying after sometime despite my disapproving glares, so I put on a deep voice and blared, "Hell, DO YOU WANT TO TOUCH THE DAMN FISH OR DO YOU WANT TO SPLASH THE WATER ABOUT?" The row subsided ;)

Out of the building, we met at a cafe and had something to satisfy our tummies before the late supper. I bought a mug of tea, and unfortunately took a tiny sip of it to see how hot it was.
I swore that I would NEVER commit that mistake again in my life. SCALDING would be an understatement. Hell, one could run a steam engine with the amount of heat trapped in that small paper mug! I swore under my hoarse breath, lisping from the burnt tongue, cursing my sore throat which prevented me from buying ice-cream like the others. F!!k you, all you people who like to drink boiling tea... I hope you f!!king freeze to death!

It was getting dark and we reorganised ourselves, joined yet another queue and proceeded to the laser show. We waited in a disorganised queue-like-fashion(60% Indians, remember?) and waited and waited, moving a centimetre a minute... but little did we know that we were waiting for the damn best show of our lives!
Upon entering we lost ourselves and scattered ourselves in different seats. The view up front was a little row of timber-houses on stilts, built over the water. Somebody bought some packed snacks, and started eating it... and it smelt like puke. So much for their appetites :|

The shore-lights came on and in ran five children. A bit of singing in all languages, and dancing followed, when the guy called 'Lee' started his "Aaaaaaa" (musically, E F G C..... in C-Maj scale) The whole background came alive.. Laser beams created cartoon-like creatures. Well, the whole story is, they glimpse a princess, and Lee and his friends set out to find out who she is. As usual, she is trapped by some magician. On the way, the friends discover forms like the God of Fire, who has lost all his powers, and orders Lee to sing to him.. loud, louder, LOUDERRR!!! till the whole thing goes up in fire and the God smiles... my goodness, it was like a live Rammstein performance... Flames of fire shot up from the rocks near us, from the sky.. and we could feel the heat! AWESOME!!! Though not laser in this case, the next forms were the Goddess of light and that of sea. These were superbly rendered with the laser beams, using sea-water spray as a medium. Simply awesome... No words can describe how it looked.
And all through, idiots were using their stupid cameras (WITH FLASH haha) trying to capture the magic of it all...imagine their faces when they peer at the darkness and blurred lights in the playback later! I pitied the ignorant asses near me and let mine eyes feast. But the real thing was yet to come...yes, the princess!

Lee finally frees all the Gods and Goddesses and helps them get their power back, and sings one more time. The entire audience held their breath as the long drawn "Aaaaaa" filled the air. Then, an explosion of light, and the air ahead came alive, revealing a splendidly crafted, beautifully human face, so alive and blinking, her hair dancing in the breeze, Princess Amy! The laser creation was stunningly perfect.. words fail me.
This easily beat the fire-show to become my favourite. The show ended with the children singing a song for Lee "Who did it, we did it, whodidit, hedidit, whodidit, hedidit, he did WHAT?".. And the show ended with some spectacular fireworks. The audience made their way out, the Whodidit song still stuck in our minds :)

Only dinner was left. wolfed it down, and caught a cab back to our hotel.

******** DAY 9: One last glimpse ********

After breakfast, it was up to our ~~bus~~ coach to take us to the Bird Park. Fortunately, there weren't much queues here. A predatory-birds show, with bald eagles, griffin vultures, fish owls, SNOWY OWLS!(these are cute), hawks, etc. There was a penguin world too, with penguins behind temperature controlled enclosures. Emperor penguins stood just like we see on discovery channel, and a lot of them were swimming in the water. Straight out of Pingu!

After a lot of photography and stuff, we had lunch and were let free. Presumably, everyone headed straight to Mustafa centre for some shopping and was lost for the day. During supper we were visited by Mr.K, a former colleague of my mother. Mr K is now settled in Singapore. We had a short walk and were joined by another colleague Mr.Bj and we also visited the nearby Perumal temple. The Indian temple looked great with plasma screens and cars. India seems to be following you everywhere.

We tumbled out of Mustafa centre sometime past midnight and trudged back to our hotel.

******** DAY 10: Seyonara Singapura ********

We had to start off at noon. I slept till then. After lugging all that luggage down to the reception, it was a goodbye to our hotel and we boarded the coach one last time to the airport. Everyone was pretty silent, except for the goodbyes to our good ol' guide and so on. Depression hit me like a bag of wet cement. Typical leaving-and-going-back-home depression. The good old mp3 player was switched on and I found some refuge in the ocean of melodies.

Then I discovered the free internet centre, and that's how a certain comment on this post came :) Some time later in the day we boarded the flight to Colombo(what's with the tour operator and Srilankan Airlines, I cannot imagine). Airbus A330. Managed to fight sleep and dumped in some food(the same as I described a few days ago - typical). No wine. Damn. I settled down and watched a boring Hindi movie and killed time by looking at the snowflake-patterns forming outside my window. But landing was torture. When you have a bloody cold, landing is bloomin' painful. I have NEVER experienced any form of airsickness or ear-poppiness or giddiness in an aircraft before. But this time it was different. Some excruciating pain shot up my head and settled near the top of my left eye. The ears went fully on mute, and I was forced to put my little finger into the right ear shaft, and the other hand pressed hard on my left eye to stifle the pain. Weird posture.. I looked like I was crying, when in reality I was cursing the pain in choicest words of my own :\ In between this, I also managed a shot of the plane's shadow on the ground, sailing atop palm trees near Colombo airport.

After waiting some hours at Colombo International airport, we again went through the stupid, paranoid routine of removing our belts, watches, and shoes(well? what next?)for the security checks, and found ourselves in the cramped A320 to Trivandrum. We took some time to take off, and while the cockpit doors were open, I had a glimpse of the awesome cockpit lights at night. *sigh* I wish I could footplate(yeah right) an aircraft! Barely a few minutes of flying, before we found ourselved dipping to land at TRV. Upon touching terra firma, I thought, "Thalley, Thiroanthoram!" ;) hehe

I need not bother to say how small and un-airport-like TRV domestic airport is, compared to the others. It was around eight o'clock and our taxi took us along the sandy beach, into snarling early-night-traffic, back home, loaded with hundreds of pics and sweet memoires of my first ever international trip.

If any of my co-traveller-friends happen to stumble upon this, do drop me a mail. It's been a nice time together...

Up, up and away: Part four

2008-06-08T20:53:00.007+05:30

If you have missed the earlier parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

******** DAY 6: The Malaysian 'cithee thuah' ********

I woke up in one piece, sans my voice. I suspected the cold of Genting more than anyting else... and the water in one of the restaurants we dined at. On coming down after breakfast, down to the reception we discovered that we (the people of bus no.2) had a new guide - Hasina, as Zai had duty elsewhere. A couple of our co-groupers were yet to come, so I ploked myself onto the plush chairs and got down to talking in a hoarse whisper to my friends. All of us missed Zai very much and more so, after A told me that the guide in her bus, Linda was not very talkative or good humoured as she heard about Zai from me. A few minutes later we boarded the bus and traversed the smooth roads to the King's palace. Well, I have not a good memory for names, and the King's name is not easily memorable either. Anyway, our arrival was bang in time to witness the change of guards... stiff gentlemen sitting upon chestnut-brown horses, guarding the palace gates. We stopped for a few minutes to allow ourselves a couple of photos with the horsemen. Everyone seemed scared stiff of the horses. Our guide had told us to approach(and touch, if needed) the horses gently, but some of our co-groupers took it as a warning and as a result, came out in the pictures looking as if they were standing next to a lion or a bear or something. Yours truly ended up holding the bridle of one of the stallions :D

The bus rolled on at some 80-90 kilometers a jam(hour) and stopped next at the lake garden. which was a tribute to the soldiers killed during the fight for malaysia's independence. And so it read, "may the blessings of Allah be upon them"... Fountains, lampposts with the national flower (the hibiscus rosasinesis - 10th std biology, hehe) as shades for lights... the details fade in my mind... it's someting like two weeks since I've been there. Too many happenings, places in a day dont stay well in my memory... yet obscure details like the reg.number of the bus, colour of fellow-travellers' clothing, etc stay... weird brain of mine :-\

We then zipped off through the traffic to reach Independence square, near the confluence of two rivers that gave KL city its name. There was a considerable difference in architecture around the place, from British to moorish. All thoughout our afternoon ride we could see the twin towers and the KL communications tower since those two were so freakin' high.

Next up was the original chocolate-making centre, where we were treated to some mouth-watering samples of exquisite oriental cocoa, almond, strawberry, durian, tche-something, coconut, white cholocate, etc etc delights... Premium quality at premium price... bought for family members and close relatives to chew on :)

After a sumptuous lunch at an Indian restoran, the next stop was the famous twin Towers, landmark of KL city. This is the office of Petronas, Malaysia's petroleum company. This structure is incredible... It ges straight up unlike the Eiffel tower and the like so one never got enough of (literally) lying on the ground to look at the tower(s) rising to touch the jets :) Weird feeling leaves you speechless... but with a doubt - What the hell do those Petronas blokes do inside such a huge structure everyday? Accelerate subatomic particles?

We went into the public domain at the base of the building and spent sometime loitering around and playing about with the info touchscreens and 360 degree view machines (a telescope like thingy into which you peered and touched buttons to zoom in/out or turn left/right within the image you saw inside).

On the way, in the bus Hasina pointed out a long painting on a tumbledown wall and called the place a seven star hotel, where one could get accomodation and food for free. A moment after surveying our bewildered looks, she announced - "kuala lumpur prison house!" She then mentioned the torture(aargh!, no detailing now) and punishment to drug traffickers. Horrible :|

The rest of the evening was reserved for shopping at the Sungei-wang Plaza - a huge shopping mall where we purchased some stuff. After about two hours of wearing away our feet, we parked our weary bums at the entrance to it, where there are a big, wide feet of steps. It was raining heavily, with a lot of thunder :) In the first few minutes of sitting thee I had spotted a monorail way running above the road in front of us and I spent a few minutes trainspotting the stupid, silent monorails! A short while later I was conscious of the fact that I had been passive-smoking like hell and had come to the conclusion that if I were to remain sitting any longer there, I probably would pee out smoke the next time I visited the tandas :) A few other friends of mine had also come to similar conclusions and we spent the nexty half an hour or so talking, standing away from those disgusting smoking bastards.. (I prefer smoking-locomotives, not homo sapiens). After T,M,Mb,S1,S2,Aj,A and yours truly finished a not very engaging conversation, our guide and Mr. B had finally decided to brave the rain and walk to the restaurant.... and so it was - on a wet, sulky evening, the whole group walked down the slippery pavements and reached Restoran Ghazal (Authentic fine dining North Indian cuisine, the subtitle read)... and it went happily down the digestive tract.

We then headed straight back, past the mall, to Bukit Bintang station to board the KL monorail that would drop us somewhere near our hotel. The ticketing system is like our own Delhi metro... drop the torkens(or touch the cards) into the slit and the gates open... at destination station, drop the damn thing into the collection slit and hurry home... simple.

After a long queue we were waiting at the platform for the train. It glided in smoothly a few minutes later and after the mass of outoing humanity got out, we, the incoming humanity got in. I got a place right behind the driver to stand, so I was able to examine the controls. The throttle and brakes are fused into one lever that is at the left hand armrest of the driver. Simple - move forward, it applies tractive force and accelerates. Ease it back and you coast at no power... bring the lever backward and it brakes. Small cab.. minimal power(duh, what do you expect for a small, silent thing that glides on the rails - a WAG9?) Three stations away, we simmered out and walked for about fifteen minutes through the drizzle and reached our hotel.

I was desperate to find a computer to unload all the pics from my tiny 256 MB card to my mp3 player(which fortunately had 2GB), but the reception would not entertain me.. nor did they have a business centre nearby. It was somewhere around midnight and there were no cafes nearby. Then Mr. B invited me to his room and had it not been for his laptop, I would not have those five hundred plus pics on my hard drive now.

******** DAY 7: Down the expressway to Singapore ********

Our coach(in Malaysia and Singapore calling a bus, a 'bus', is taboo) was waiting and ready for the 250+ kilometres down the supersmooth expressways to Singapore. We boarded, sniffing for the umpteenth time the citric smell of the lemon-flavoured air freshner, inside. "GIVE us lemonade dammit, not just let us sniff it!", exclaimed one of the guys. After a few initial quirks like M3 forgetting his bar of chocolate inside the fridge in his hotel room, we were off... We revved up once outside the busy city roads and went at the maximum permissible speed. I once or twice wondered if the bus had cruise control.. well they needed it anyway! I tried a few vain attempts at playing dumb charades with S1,S2, T, M and Mb, but couldnt concentrate, owing to some restless feeling hitting me. M3 also seemed to be similarly affected, so the end result was both of us plugging our earphones and switching on some metal... Iron Maiden, Rammstein, Metallica, went flashing by.. I contemplated nodding off. I was vaguely aware of some cultural outrage going on, with T and some other folks of the upper generation singing and stuff, so I increased the volume on my player >:)
Losing track of time, I woke up when the bus pulled over to a drive-in for a bite and a quick Tandas :)

The sun was blazing outside. Running through the shelter of some trees, I took a leak at the spanking clean public Tandas, and bought a mug of scaldingly hot tea from one of the numerous little shops there. I had about fifteen minutes to kill before I could make the slightest attempt at sipping the tea. At around t = 10 mins, our pairing bus came up and we booed at them, reminding how we had started off after them.

We left the place after a while, when I decided to travel in my way - right up front, enjoying the view, chatting with the driver, and not sleeping under some air-con spoilt seat. So the rest of the journey was covered with me sitting in the small seat right near the door, left of the driver. And from there I couldnt help but click my tongue in pity at the view those people inside were missing!
The speed limit for buses was 90kmph, liberalled out to 120 in many places.
And most of the time, Suresh, our driver(and owner of many buses) was just relaxing with his hands crossed over the steering wheel, making just flicks of his elbow when a small turn was required(which was very rarely), with the cool breeze pouring in from the aircon vent above, and music streaming from his Nokia Nseries into his bluetooth headset! The drivers seat was a special one (and quite unlike our buses, where only the passengers get the benefit of the AC), with springs beneath it, so when we hit a slight bump on the road, he went rockin up and down :)

The expressway stretched like some huge ribbon of grey, down the green slopes, through the little valleys, and winding through palm-plantations. Behind me, a lot of interesting activity was going on. Hasina (our guide) had been discussing how the people in this country used monkeys to harvest coconuts from palms, and how they made toddy(to loud cheers from drinkers inside :). Then Mr. R held a sort of quiz, based on stuff related to the tour. The prizes were donated by many, and the result was, most of us ended up munching Malaysian chocolates :p Then it was down to Mr. C and Mr. SM who discussed anecdotes from their life.. to peals of laughter and amusement of the co passengers. It was real fun inside :)

We then alighted at the border state - Johor Bahru, to have some food at 'Restoran Amma', run by Tamils. It was damn hot outside but we the younger generation braved it and stood chatting till the buses arrived to take us to the border for customs inspection. The guy behind my counter was an ass. He took as much time to dismiss one passenger as the other officials took to dismiss THREE. (He ignored my parting "Wow! You're FAST". Damn)

Here, my folks and I had a change of bus - over to bus No.1, since there was a change in accommodation. Disappointed at leaving the jolly group behind, we boarded the first bus. The only remnant of the later-teenage-plus-or-minus-a-few-years generation was me, A(a couple of years my senior) and A2(a contemporary :). Apart from the three of us, the bus consisted of the upper generation and a couple of pretty young half-tickets ;)

We headed straight for our Hotel Windsor, and headed out after a quick fresh up. We met our guide, Mr. John, an enthusiastic sixty seven year old, "one of the most experienced guides in Singapore", according to our tour guide Mr B. Well, Mr. John looked so much an English gentleman, but his face showed a little bit of his SouthEast-Asian Ethnicity.

His English was flawless, with a hint an accent. "It's more than a welcome to people like you", he said. "For your people and our people have lived so long together... harmoniously, ya, both peace-loving. We have borrowed a lot from you - Buddhism, ya, was from India.. and it was your people who helped us build this wonderful city".
We liked him immensely... his age, his dedication and his experience.. all spoke volumes about him. He had his own ways, assigning each family its own 'numbah', "so that I just need ta call out, Numbah one - Yes, Numbah Thoo - Yes, and so on... I don't wanna leave anyone bahain... in Singapoh. Y'all haf come spending youah hard earned money, and y'all will haf a wonderful time, ya"
It was already evening, so we were going to the 'Night Safari'. Throughout the bus journey Mr. John was pointing out peculiarities, and listing ways and means by which his Singapoh had become a neat city - "We shoot the crows! They littha the roads, turn ovah trash cans... ya". The talk had progressed to criminals(the lack of them) and city lighting, when we reached our place.

The night safari venue is brilliantly designed, with quaint little oil lamps right in the midst of green bushes(they looked awesome!) and the whole place constructed(or made to look as if it was) with rock and timber. Our guide carried(till the last day) his identification symbol - a stick, with a thin red ribbon tied to it("Red keeps off the evil spirits"). We stood in a long, never ending queue for the first show, "Creatures of the night". The host was a lady, proficient in almost five or six languages. The hosting was almost like the ones we see on American and European TV, very good. Sadly, we are yet to see such enthusiastic, humorous and indulgent hosting anywhere in our blessed country. We were treated to hyenas, owls(wow), A PYTHON(which also had a volunteer let it crawl around him!), anteaters(or so), and various other animals. All through the show, a few of us were seated at the edge of the spectator-steps, so we were treated to ominous growls and howls from the nearby pit where they caged the creatures :)

A loooooooong queue was awaiting us for the next major show - the tram ride through the forest. This one was awesome - people seated in a silent (electric?) tram with trailing coaches, which moved through the dark, softly lit forest-like enclosures, showing us animals in their natural habitats, a guide sitting in the front car, speaking softly through the PA system... all very quiet and dark. Awesome way to see the animals so close(Yes one could almost touch them, but it was strongly warned against, for our own safety)... Couple of hyenas, deer, cattle, lions, pigs, zebras(why not 'zebrae'?), giraffes, the rhino(this one's fearful), Asian elephant, etc. made up the show.

After that enjoyable experience, it was back to our coach, which took us to the famous "Little India" area to dine at a tandoori restaurant (with the same name)... and yeah, God bless the Paneer :)
We hunted about to buy a calling card, and A's family also wanted one, so we went round and round till we came to a 'callable' phone(ie, where you could actually use the card). A few attempts were not working... when a little door popped open near us and a man told us in HIndi not to prefix 91 to the number. Thanking the good soul profusely, we made our telephonic conversations. It was already past midnight. This part of Singapore never sleeps, as the famous 'Mustafa' shopping mall, open 24x7, selling everything under the sun(and the moon ;) is bang in the middle of it. Our hotel was a couple of miles away.. fortunately Mr B was around and he hailed his familiar cab driver, Kuldeep Singh (yes, there are so many Indians around the place that we wondered if there'd be any left back in India). A and I had become good friends now (what with those long, boring queues!) and she, my sis and I spent the time chatting in the cab till it dropped us back at the hotel. Then it was a sleepy pull to the room, and the eyes shut.

Finish it off at Part five

Up, up and away: Part three

2008-06-02T15:01:00.004+05:30

If you have missed the earlier parts: Part 1, Part 2

******** DAY 4: Malaysian mania ********

Early next morning (it was barely morning - 0300 hrs) we woke up, had a cup of tea and awaited our ride back to the airport. A few of the members of the group had chosen to spend the night at Colombo airport itself rather than wear their bums going all the way to the hotel and back as we did (and they had a point), so we were eager to compare and see who had the last laugh. Their advantage - 3 more hours of sleep. Our advantage - freshing up and mattress to sleep on.

Our flight to Kuala Lumpur(KL) was due at around 0710 hrs or so. We lingered about in the lounge before boarding. The aircraft was a huge Airbus A340, with 2-4-2 seating in each row. Every passenger had mini TV sets embedded in the back of the headrests in front(not touchscreen, however) and the inflight entertainment was very good. The only thing good, again. Terrible food was served and I settled down to watching Om Shanti Om (WITH English subtitles, of course :) The movie was pretty good, except for some liberal amount of sleaze in the songs. (If I had wanted sleaze I'd rather have watched porn. And instead of having some nice videography they got some rubbish dancers to show skin, spoiling the serious atmosphere of the movie. WTF).

We reached KL International airport (KLIA) around noon or so (KL time) and boarded a train that took us out of the airport. That done, we split up into two groups (consequently, two buses) to proceed to the famous Genting Highlands in malaysia. We had a guide in each bus, mine was a fat little lady who introduced herself as 'Zai'. And for the next few days we would see wierd words on signboards, which we would attempt to understand and then suddenly remember that Malay was written in the English(Roman) script itself. Well, since some boards were thankfully bilingual, I remember(and guess) some of them:

First and foremost -- Tandas, meaning toilet :)
Keluar, meaning exit. (both Tandas and Keluar can be spotted almost everywhere)
Pematan api -- fire extinguisher (I guess api means fire... yes mallus, I can see you laughing!)
One more for mallus: Kurangan Laju -- doesnt mean 'Laju the monkey', simply means "Reduce your speed".. not very obvious, this one :)
Jam -- hours (so you find spped-limit boards like "90 km/j" on roads, and "24 jam" outside shops)
Many english words are kept, but with a simplified spelling - Bas, telefon, execituf, restoran... a lot more)

And hiyah we goth ova faahsth thaysthe of the famous South Asiaan accenth, ya? Qwyth differenth from ova khanthree, ya? (It later dawned on me that this continuous application of 'ya' was derived from their 'lah', which is very common in that region). Our bus was a rocker... very comfortable suspension, spring seats for the driver (or is it pilot? ;) and numerous other bells and whisltes. The first thing that struck you was the disciplined nature of traffic there. Everyone stuck to the rules (and his speed-limit, and his lane) - a more extreme form of which was awaiting us in Singapore. As a result of such neat driving, there is absolutely no honking. Unlike India, where we lean onto our horn-buttons and swear using the horns in morse code, here in Malysia you needed to honk only if someone jumped in front your speeding vehicle unknowingly (and similar circumstances). And there is no congestion, implying, traffic glides like over oil.

As I was saying, we were proceeding to Malaysia's highest region - Genting Highlands - altitude: 2000 MSL or so. They had this impressive conveyance - "South Asia's longest and fastest cable-car": The Genting Skyway. Seating about eight passengers in a small, light car that moved with the cable supporting it, through three and a half kilometres of lush green tropical rainforest. Since it was cloudy when we arrived, we saw nothing but fog for a while, with visibility restricted to something like five metres. We passed through the jungles at stomach-churning heights as the car ascended and descended, clinging onto the moving cable for dear life! After a thoroughly enjoyable twenty minutes, we arrived at 'First World Hotel', one of the five or six HUGE hotels situated atop the highland. The weather was very cool and would get chilly at night. Our hotel itself had two towers (we were in "tawthoo" - Tower 2) around three thousand rooms, all opened with electronic cards (which would cease to function after 1200 hrs on the day of checking out... neat, huh?) Our rooms were kinda small - something like those on a cruise vessel - but we had been warned in advance to expect such a contraption. Anyway, dinner was waiting for us famished souls and we proceeded straightaway to the blessed 'FirstWorld cafe'. At this point, certain complications arise:

First of all, we(two families out of 15) were vegetarians. This habit is, be warned, recognised only in our beloved country. The rest of the world thinks of you as some kind of exotic breed. But that was not the problem. Outside India, people think vegetarian food is made by chopping veggies raw and putting them 'as is' into a saucerful of water. (YUUCCCK!) This was the case. We first found some noodles, to our delight and got our chopsticks ready... but looking around we saw: Lettuce put in a bowl of water, tomatoes and cabbage put in a bowl of warm water (with some bits and pieces, like the ends of carrot, fallen leaves of some plant, seed-coats, mud off feshly dug potatoes, etc for company). AND NO SAUCE/KETCHUP AT ALL. I asked a waitress politely if they had any, and she seemed not to have heard of it. There was, however, sulking in a corner, a big bowl of mushroom soup. Finally finding something viscous (if you get what I mean), we poured liberal quantities of the stuff over the sphagetti and got the first mouthful to the buccal cavity.

And that was all. Quite unlike-... Horrible would be an understatement. I wonder how many of you have tasted fan-belt. You guess the rest. But, merciful heavens, sitting over the other end of the buffet was a whole load of fresh cut fruits, which formed the chief item at dinner for the day. After having had our fill we came out of the cafe and I went over to some people (they preferred non veg) and asked them good humouredly how it was. Boy, if looks could kill... Well, our tour operator dude Mr. B came over with his ever smiling face and assured all of us that this was the last meal of this sort. From the next day we were to dine at Indian restaurants wonly :)

And God bless the Paneer!

With not much of the brighter part of the day left, we went around the whole of First World plaza (the HUGE shopping/recreation/entertainment complex attached to our hotel), trying to call back home. After a little roaming about (and LOTS of window shopping :) I got an 'Inthenasinal Khollinh khaah' - (I think she meant an International calling card). The lady at the counter was apparently giggling at this 'foreign guy in some stupid clothes and a funny cap' and I too smiled at whatever joke she found in my tshirt and jeans. I had to 'yoosth thiths khaa on a puppyfon'. In reply to where in the world a puppyfon(whatever that was) could be used, she again hushed her friend who was giggling uncomfortably and pointed to a board nearby that said, "Public Phone - Telefone awam" *sigh* We made the necessary telephonic conversation and retired.

******** DAY 5: Getting high on Genting ********

Morning... woke up frozen after sleeping right below the air con vent. We had most of the whole day to try out the rides and activities (which included a casino) The rides included - roller coasters, a slow monorail that covered the whole of the 'indo an otdho thempaa' (indoor and outdoor theme parks - I swear I'm not making this up!), skydiving (yeah! but sadly it was closed for maintenance, damn), the numerous water-based stuff, etc etc etc... Genting Highlands was discovered by someone who struck it big in the tin mining trade, and he liked the place to such an extent that he built a private guesthouse for his people... later the bloke died and the place has been expanding and expanding since... "Yoo com bakh aftha three munths, ya, an yool find something has change... iths alwaaays being upgradhedh...", as Zai, our guide put it.

Around mid afternoon it was another ride down the dizzy heights in the cable car, back to the hot and humid KL. Now, KL would seem to be a small city, but that is because you always spot the Patronas Towers(the famous twin towers) and the KL communication tower anywhere you go. But before we could go there, we had another stop - Batu caves - "tha playce of Lod Muroogha"... we were quite a jolly bunch of tourists in the second bus, and our guide Zai was also very good humoured. We heard from her how the people there ate five times a day - brekfasth, brunch, lunch, dhinnah. suppah. "And somethimes, ya, we also haf tea", she added, amidst loud cheering and remarks like "Kochu kallee!", "Ippo pidikitti ee size-inde rahasyam!" :)

Batu caves is a natural formation that has been conveniently annexed by Lord Muruga :) There is a huge gold-plated statue of the latter at the base of the hillock, with the rock-cut temple up at the summit. Two hundred and seventy two, very very steep steps is what one had to climb in order to reach the temple... and boy, we were few of the adventurous who chose to climb... Around 150 my legs started to give way, but I spotted two guys(co groupers) making it up further, so I thought I might as well be the third up there and went up the remaIning, without stopping... and up there, all three of us boys stood in weird postures, gasping for breath and holding our leaping hearts in place :) "Aiyyo.." "Entammey.." *wheeeeze* *Phooo* *wheeeeze*
Well, you get the picture.. it was only about five minutes later that we could see properly and admired the view from the place. A few steps into the cave, and one sees the temple. The cave at this position is very very tall, with small naturally formed holes to let in air and light. Monetary offerings were accepted both in Malaysian Ringitts(RM) and Indian Rupees(INR) ;)

As a rule, it is recommended to have atleast ten minutes of rest before climbing back down. Brakes are very important while going downhill and if you legs are not strong enough to control the whole mass of you, then chances are that you'll have a very blurry ride down, headfirst and end up unable to go back to India before your visa expires >:) My 60-kg minimalist frame was supported satisfactorily by the legs and we coasted down. Once down. I recommend trying out the various Indian eateries at the base - "Restoran Rani" for example, and taking a leak at the nearby Tandas for 10 sen(0.1 RM) - they're very clean, quite a world different from our govt's public conveniences :)

It was twilight already and we proceeded straight through the congested evening traffic(again, no honking!) to the KL communication tower. The tower is four hundred and something metres tall and the observation deck for the public is at the first level, which is at two hundred and someting metres. We were taken up to the deck in a very fast lift (so fast that your ears go on mute, like during takeoff). At the observation deck, we were greeted by the nothing-short-of-awesome view of KL city by night. One could see the brightly lit Twin towers, vehicles speeding like ants on the orange expressways... There was a telescope too, which almost everone used to take a peek at the Petronas towers. We also had headsets, with which took place a guided tour at each and every window of the deck. We then came down and had dinner at a Tandoori restaurant at the base. Then it was back to Hotel Puteri Park which held us for the night.

...Continue to part four...

Up, up and away: Part Two

2008-05-31T12:39:00.008+05:30

If you have missed the earlier parts: Part 1

******** DAY 2: Amritsar sojourn ********

At the breakfast table we met the other families and I met a few people of my age-group. One girl of my age, two elder girls, four elder boys and another girl who closely resembled someone I knew but couldnt remember; besides a few younger kids belonging to my sister's age group :) Anyway, after having had our fill we proceeded to the Golden temple. We were split into two coaches and rumbled for an hour though the very very very dusty roads of Amritsar.

Amritsar is a peculiar town. it looks quite unkempt during the day. Everywhere you look, you see unfinished houses, bricks exposed, unpainted, half constructed, walls without plaster, shops painted only on the business side of them, etc. Quite unlike what I had seen anywhere. And the roads, Oh my God... it would have been like driving through traffic in a sandstorm. I really felt sorry for the people living there.
We reached a sort of (dusty) parking space for the (dusty) tourist buses and bought some (dusty) kerchiefs to cover our (dusty!)heads before we were to be allowed into the Golden temple. We then ~~boarded~~ climbed a tonga led by a young lad who seemed to have difficulty controlling the pony(or whatever it was). The tonga creaked and jingled as it passed over rough bumps and stones on the dusty road. The words of Ruskin Bond (from "The Story of lost friends") immediately come to mind: Hood sinking, wheels slipping...the entire contraption always about to collapse, disintegrate; but never quite doing so
We reached the Golden temple in a few minutes and spent a lot of time inside the grand structure, a fine piece of architecture. Even the floor-work is excellent - clean, simple designs on marble.

The next stop was Jallianwala Bagh. The (now)restored garden is coldly reminiscent of the cool hands that so unhumanely pressed the trigger to open fire upon hundreds of innocent people. At around noon we proceeded back to the hotel for lunch and then took off to the Wagah border.

At that border between India and Pakistan, the usual exercise of taking down the flags at sunset has been modified for the enjoyment of the public. We arrived amidst a very thick crowd (and a whole load of flying dust) and fought our way to the seats. I pushed around and finally managed to find myself a seat overlooking the road which passes between the countries' borders.
A lot of patriotic songs were blared over the speakers on the Indian side and the energetic part of the crowd (viz., ladies and children ;) got down to the road and danced to the music. Nothing like that happened on the Pak side. Since the crowd was thick on our side, anyone who stood up and (unknowingly) obstructed the view of the people behind was immediately shouted at. People who continued standing inspite of protests from behind were showered with liberal doses of water from the water-bottles of those behind. Inspite of all these squabbles the patriotic feeling there was awesome... something one should experience to understand. At sunset, the flags of both the countried were broght down gracefully and taken away by the respective border-forces (BSF in our case and Pakistan Rangers in their case), amidst loud cheering for each country from the respective sides.

After negotiating the flying dust, we boarded our buses which took us to ASR railway station after dinner. Since we were late, we just had time to board the Golden Temple mail to NDLS. From the pickup and performance, I guessed it was a WAP4 at the helm. But next morning I would discover to my surprise that it was a TKD based WDM3A that put up the superb performance! Anyway after the tiring day it was time for a good sleep and I retired to the cramped two-berth, end-cubicle of HA1.

******** DAY 3: Leaving the motherland ********

Morning found our train ambling slowly through the outskirts of Delhi. It had rained heavily the previous night and all the tracks and rolling stock were wet and shining. I went to the door and enjoyed the cool breeze. A few of our youngster group were up and about and I spent some time talking with some of them - T, J and M, often drifting off midway to ogle at some WAG9 or a WAP7 ;) hehe. Later I went off to have some tea and was drinking it by the doorway of the coach (we were just cruising at some 40-45 kmph) when I spotted A - the girl who reminded me of someone-whom-I-could-not-remember, combing her hair or so by the wash basin mirror. I then remembered - Amy Lee! lead singer of Evanescence... there was something in her face that reminded me of Amy Lee.

Our whole group then got down at NDLS station and made our way to a guest house for freshing up before we proceeded to the airport for the flight to Kuala Lumpur. We had a kinda sick lunch at the guest house before we made our way to Sarojini nagar market for some quick shopping with superb bargaining. I got myself a black GnR tshirt and was satisfied :)

It was already evening as we entered Indira Gandhi international airport. Since our tour operator had some connection/agreement with Srilankan airlines, we were to take the SriLankan Airlines flight to Colombo, spend the night there and then take the SriLankan(again) flight to Kuala Lumpur(KL, as it is known for obvious simplicity). Since we had plenty of time before boarding, we (ie, youngsters) sat together under the freezing air-con vent in one corner of the lounge and played dumb-charades, acting out extrememly difficult movie-names like "Collateral Damage", "Double Jeopardy", etc :) When it was time, we boarded the flight.

Disclaimer: Personal opinion below: if you might be offended in any way, I don't give a damn
Srilankan airlines is the most repulsive airline I have ever traveled in. Right from the cabin crew - yucky airhostesses in some weird outfit to hulking stewards with shaven heads... and the food, oh my God! Dry rice, dry curry(yeah, DRY) to some weird looking things in trays formed part of the VEGETARIAN meal! Maybe they put disembodied insects in the non-veg meal. The only thing that seemed good onboard was the wine and the beer, (I refrained from drinking the beer... didnt want to go alcoholic at seventeen :) but the wine did some good to my stomach and prevented any urge to puke :) The ride was bumpy thanks to the low cloud cover and I slept till we bumped down at Colombo somewhere around 2230 hrs.

After the tideous process of filling in the immigration slips (the airline provided accomodation till the next morning flight) we plonked ourselves into a really comfortable volvo bus that took us to our resting place for the night.

... Continue to Part three...

Up, up and away : Part one

2008-05-29T21:59:00.004+05:30

*cough*

Ten days out of home... and some ten thousand kms. Did a dash across the motherland, across the deep blue waters of the Indian ocean and skimmed across the tropical sands of Malaysia and Singapore. Saw a lot of food - from awesome to replusive - and tasted some of them. Met a lot of people.. And finally crash-landed with a cough, cold and a deaf right ear... well, more on those later :)

*cough* *wheeze* *cough*

******** DAY 1: The Delhi-Dash ********

The whole trip was part of a holiday package which entitled officers working in the same bank as my dad, to travel to the above mentioned places. The only condition being (rather weird) - you had to touch the farthest bank region from here, and while on the return journey, you could visit Singapore and Malaysia. We were travelling in a group of about 15 or so families.

Date- 18-May08... time-0400 hrs: All baggage packed and ready. My sis all excited about the trip.. I was feeling sleepy and excited too.

The tour operator, 'Holiday Shop' had arranged for a car to convey us from home to Trivandrum Airport. A cool, pleasant ride at speeds around 80-90 kmph ensued, with the roaring diesel engine of the Indica doing a good job with the five passengers and all that baggage. At the domestic terminal of the airport, people were fighting sleep as we waited near in a queue at the baggage check-in counter. The guy behind the counter was an arsehole, and managed to screw up everybody's boarding pass. Even with everyone giving him hard stares, he made sure our queue moved the slowest. Finally after a lot of WTF(form my part) and what-the-hells(from other people) we got our baggage tagged, passed through the security check area and went up to the lounge. After a cup of scalding tea (sold at the scalding price of Rs.20 a cup), the announcement crackled over the PA system for all passengers of the IC 466 to board the aircraft.

The plane was a small one - Airbus A320 - with the usual 3 + 3 seating in each row. Our whole tour group included around 15 families, who were to board at various places to come to Delhi. The group from Trivandrum thus boarded the aircraft and awaited the take-off.

I myself was flying after a long time, the last time being when I was kinda small - in 2000 or so. The aircraft taxied for sometime about the small TRV airport, before halting in front of the runway for takeoff. The captain's voice came over - "Cabincrewgetreadyfortakeoff". What happened in the next few minutes is something I'd never grow tired of. The huge fuel-guzzling jet engines of the aircraft roared, and an invisible force pulled us like a million horses. The roar grew louder and the plane shook for a moment before nosing up into the air like some huge bird of prey. We pitched and yawed for sometime, keeping near the coastline. Looking down I could see nothing but lush greenery everywhere, which ended in a small yellow sandy strip near the sea. No wonder foreigners who visit kerala say "I've never seen India so green!" This was the ultimate testimony.

Back inside the plane, our small crew consisted of the pilot, the co pilot (a lady with the same name as my sis :) two stewardesses and a very smart-looking steward. Some time later, We crossed the western ghats and ZAP! all the greenery disappeared in a flash as we entered Tamil nadu, never to reappear in its full glory again as we passed the whole of India... that's the beauty of Kerala for you.

A light snack, then a full fledged breakfast - idly, vadai, fruits, fruit-drink, etc - all went down the digestive tracks quickly. Since the weather over most of the country was clear, it was pretty much a live Google Earth show up in the plane. After sometime I walked up to one of the cabin crew and inquired if I could visit the cockpit while flying. He answered that it wasn't allowed in these days. A fine plan foiled. Anyway I had nothing else to do except switch on my music player and watch the dry land go by below...

At around noon we reached New delhi airport. Due to some VIP activity going on below, the aircraft had to circle for about 20 mins over the airport (much to the dismay of some passengers who started puking into their bags the moment the big bird flipped to its side) The horizon outside tilted up and the rivers seemed to be coming from some huge hills. I was enjoying every moment of the extreme angles and g-forces... fortunately my digestive tracts remained intact. Oye bhaisaab, No puking if you are enjoying :D

Finally the big bird landed smoothly down the clouds into the blazing hot runway and taxied for a long time into the domestic terminal. The moment I got out I was shocked.. Something like a 45 or 50 degrees heat wave struck me in my face and did a full loop inside the auditory canals. But then a side glance told me my current position - right behind one of the jet engines :) Anyway with the infamous 'loo' of Delhi blowing around, there wasnt much of a difference outside the vicinity of the engines either :D Our pilots then alighted - the captain, a well built guy and his copilot was a tall, ~~gorgeous~~ very smart looking lady.

One thing strikes you if you visit north India at this time - dust. (yeah, that 'strikes' was a pun, heh). It's inside everything - from yourself to what you eat and what you see. You have dust-roti for breakfast, dust-rice for lunch and dust tea for tea.

Even leaf tea tastes like dust tea.

*yawn* *silence*

Ok gentlemen, I stop these terrible jokes of mine and continue...

Well, we swam through the dust and boarded a very nice air con bus and traveled for about an hour to reach our lunching pit-stop - Andhra bhavan restaurant. The crowd there was plain bad and we met our other half (of the group) there; they had arrived the previous night. After some spicy mash of rice, puri, various curry and stuff, our stomachs gave forth happy gurgles and away we set on a short sightseeing tour.

Since Malaysia and Singapore, not Delhi was our main aim, we did just a little bit of sightseeing. Indira Gandhi museum - #1,Safdarjung Road - the official residence of the former Prime minister of India, where she was assassinated has been converted into a very neat little museum featuring her life and her articles. Right from news clippings to pictures drawn by Rajiv Gandhi when he was a child, not to mention lots of photographs, everyday items used by them, last robes(still smeared with blood) worn when they were assassinated, etc. I couldnt help feeling how smart R. Gandhi must have looked at that time and how those people could think of putting such a fellow human to death. (Disclaimer: no political propaganda/opinion expressed here)

Firing in self defence is one thing. Killing a person you know, in cold blood is quite a different thing. Yet another it is to understand the mysterious complexities of the human brain...

Next stop was the India gate. The heat was unbearable and it was only a matter of time before we ran back to the cool interior of the coach. We were to catch the evening Amritsar Shatabdi to Amritsar. We whiled our time away, the coach taking us through the Parliament, North Block, South Block, Rashtrapati Bhawan, Janpath Road, etc etc. Finally at around 1530 hrs we crawled into NDLS station. The crowd there was overwhelming and the station hadnt changed a bit from the last time I went there. Same bloody dirty tracks, same myriad of electric locos(that's all right Sid, you know me), not a single diesel loco except for a tumbledown WDS4B making strange noises as it clambered about the platforms, shunting rakes from all over the country. I couldnt help comparing this station with Trivandrum Central. No, there isnt half of the traffic there as in NDLS, but the place is neat and walkable. Locos neatly lined up, a variety of diesels and electrics, clean coaches, and no little girl saying "maa, susu aayegi, kya karoon?" and her mother replying "Teek hai beti, platform mein kaam karo!" (not even in malayalam). Though Kerala is one of the most densely populated states in India, you wont find a single person crapping outside in public. The railway line passes beside houses a vast majority of the time in southern Kerala yet I've never seen a person doing his/her early morning ritual near the tracks - that's the social development of kerala for you (statistical reports say the social development of people here is alike to that of modernised contries). As for economic development, you might as well go hang yourself off the nearest cliff. The problem with kerala is everyone is damn educated and wants to have his or her own bloody way in everything... so nothing proceeds in the way of development. *sigh*

Back to Delhi. We were waiting at Pf #1 for the ASR shatabdi. Earlier researches (by yours truly) had revealed the presence of LHB coaches (unlike the usual azure-blue coaches - ask anyone who has traveled in the ASR shatabdi, Bhopal Shat., Howrah Rajadhani, or Bombay Raj., etc and you'll know) for the train. The sceduled departure time was 1635 hrs. At 1625 the WDS4B shunter brought in a shatabdi express rake. It had the usual cream-blue Shatabdi (non LHB) coaches and I knew this wasn't the one. A few of our co -groupers were fooled (naturally - non railfans ;) into thinkin this was the train and were about to jump in when I told them this wasnt the one(besides, there was a board that said -"Darjeeling shatabdi" but it was not easily visible - I spotted it because I looked for it :D ), and in a few seconds the train reversed with the shunter loco pilot giving a sheepish smile :p Then at 1630 hrs the LHB rake pulled in smartly behind the same nutty shunter. I jumped in, frustrated because there wasnt any time to check out the loco... I had ascertained from fellow railfans that this was gonna be a WAP7-hauled train, and it was my first ride behind India's most powerful loco class. A high tone sounded at 1650(late by 15 mins already) and we crawled out of NDLS, wended our way through slums, garbage heaps and various small stations. I went out to the doorway after sometime and found it blocked with some big boxes.. damn.. these northie Shatabdi trains never let anyone take a peek out. Finally I came upon one that was not blocked and managed to get a glimpse of our loco... much to my surprise (and indignation) - it was a WAP5 and not the WAP7... a case of an odd link, exactly on my day of travel. I thought, "oh well what the hell". I told my sis that it was a P5 and not her favourite. She wasnt too let-down anyway since she had never travelled on the WAP5 too, whereas I had.

After about 1715 or so we picked up spped with the white beast in front determined to make mincemeat out of the clean LHB rake. Inside, there were no jolts and no sounds of the track, so it was quite boring. i went and stood by the door and had the real feel... The wind outside roared as the train flew over the tracks at a hundred and ten kilometres an hour. It was quite frightening to stand by the door, so I sat on the small stool-like contraption near it and watched the dust flying as we thundered past stations. What a loco!
Then it was back to the cool smooth boring interiors of the coach. Food seemed to be the prime thing in the train. It arrived every half an hour or so.. something or the other to chew on :) After dinner I went to the doorway and enjoyed the cool breeze. It got very boring after sometime (this is what happens when you have an electric loco at the front - no sounds, no smoke, nothing), so I slept off inside.

I woke up as we arrived, very late, into a sleepy Amritsar station. Half asleep, we dumped our bags into yet another tourist coach and slept till we reached our place of stay for the night - Hotel Khyber Continental. Nice big one. We entered our rooms and i slept like a log till next morning.

...Continue to Part two...

Hitting the skies... for a change!

2008-05-18T08:00:00.000+05:30

From today, I shall be away on a week+ long holiday to Singapore and Malaysia. I have scheduled the posting of this blog entry, which means, I'm on the plane right now :)
Which also implies, no blog entry till the 28th.

(Ranga, your tag is pending and it's the first thing on my mind after I return :)