The Diwali post

My first Diwali post in the three Novembers on Blogspot.Diwali being the most favourite festival of mine.Diwalis in Ranchi were always special.There would be that special chill in the air with the coming of winter and the days and the afternoons would be marvelously sunny and blue-skied.Invariably we would have a four day mini-vacation from school.I remember a lot of Diwalis-some pretty routine,some out of the ordinary.There was this Diwali when we went to wish a family friend of ours and came back to see that all of our diyas had disappeared.This being a house on the ground floor.Me and my sis had an argument whether the diyas were carried off when lighted on lots and lots of steel trays or the thieves had a well laid out plan of extinguishing the diyas,emptying the oil in a can,collecting the wicks together and then stuffing all the diyas in a huge boraa, this latter suggestion being from my sister.Then when we were living in Satellite colony,we had a gang of boys going from block to block blowing up all the letterboxes(made of wood).Their modus operandi was to go in two groups of two to blocks facing each other and blow up the boxes simultaneously using two aloo-bombs stringed together.This was to cause simultaneous pandemonium.Apparently they also gutted the insides of a post-box made of steel (as they could not blow it up-if they had succeeded,then they would have sent scraps of hot metal flying everywhere - a la Flak Cannon in Unreal Tournament 2000).

Then there was the usual pre-Diwali notorious cracker bursting in school.It was always a ritual in school eagerly anticipated by everyone.Whoever attended Shyamali in the 90's would surely remember the sudden sound of a bomb going off in some corner or toilet and the roar that would rise instantly-the roar of the students cheering.There were special fireworks when we were in class 9th.The Secondary building students had just assembled for the morning prayers and there was an ear-shattering explosion and smoke was visible from the corridor of 10th std(Some people recall that this was at exactly the moment the Princi had started pleading for the cause of a cracker free school-but that I think is just melodramatic trickery of memory) .The Princi was furious and ordered for an immediate round up of the 'culprits' which resulted in Modi lining up some random ppl(which included some hapless victims from the late line) and pushing them on to the podium.Then the Princi in an attempt to act 'tough' started roughing up the slimmest guy of the lot,shaking his collar in front of the whole secondary section.It was the most pathetic display of arrogance by the teachers I have ever seen.There was also the Diwali in which Aashu had burnt his hands and there was collective universal mourning in school what with all his Bhakt log falling over each other to convey their sorrow and all the teachers hearing out his tepid tale of woe with the utmost seriousness.(There is this interesting tale about of a follower of Aashu*- Bhakt Pandey) but pardon me I am slipping into Shyamali folklore again.

What was once fun turned into a boring ritual once I came to Bangalore.Routine trips to relatives place and bursting crackers with cousins much younger than you is no great fun.Also in the Hostel there were a lot of crackers burst but that satisfaction was not there.Today for the first time-I lit diyas and found it pretty enjoyable .This time I am down with food poisoning(yes, again) so can't gorge on the usual sweets and delicacies as I used to.Hope your Diwali was fun.

*Aashutosh-Aashu for short(yes the two a's are there to appear at the top of any list alphabetically) is a friend who was the 'star' of Shyamali and the apple of every teacher's eyes.The Maryada Purushottam Ram of the batch.

Yeah, back at the roadhouse they got some bungalows

"All right,all right,all right.Hey listen ,listen,listen man.I don't know how many you people believe in astrology.(to a woman in the crowd)Yeah that's right baby.I am a Sagittarius.The most philosophical of all the signs......But anyway I don't believe in it.I think it's a bunch of bullshit ma self. But I tell you this man.I tell you this-I don't know whats gonna happen man but I am gonna have my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames!!"

--live in Boston '70

A life of unrestrained hedonism.The dream that was always there and now will see fruition.

When I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer
Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain, and the end is always near

Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, all night long

Yeah, I am gonna have my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames.

and we go to Brazil......

THE BAD GUYS

It was frustrating to watch Lewis get stuck in the pit-lane-gravel and even more frustrating to see Kimi win.I was kinda hoping Hamilton will seal it today but that was not to happen.If only McLaren had called him into the pit lane one lap before.However this leads us to an absolutely gripping Brazilian Grand Prix and the championship again being decided in the last race.The points tally reads as follows:
1. Lewis Hamilton 107
2.Fernando Alonso 103
3.Kimi Raikonnen 100
(10 points for 1st place,8-for 2nd and 6 for 3rd)

so Lewis can win the Driver's Championship if he comes 1st or 2nd.However if he comes 3rd and Alonso 1st then it is an absolutely delicious case of a tie-which I do not know how FIA resolves.Kimi can only win if comes 1st or 2nd and that too if the other two do not make it to the podium.So it is really only about Alonso vs Hamilton.Keeping fingers crossed for the 21st.


update:Yeah all you comment trolls-Kimi won. and the most F-ed up part was I couldn't watch the race.couldn't watch bcoz i don't have a TV or a radio and almost puked in the morning when I saw the papers.and yeah-NO MORE ANONYMOUS COMMENTS.I am putting an end to the guessing game that I play every time I see a new comment.so there.

A post a day.....

The folks at the office say that Agile is really the way to go but me being a newbie don't know really.We (the torch-bearers of hardware) never really had an exposure to Waterfall anyway,so can't really judge which is better.Life is increasingly spent at meetings,trainings and presentations which is fine as long as you can sit somewhere where you can become invisible and snatch a wink or two.My strategy is to go for a little behind the middle seat so that I can still be at the back if the back-benchers ( seaters?) get called to the front.I am slowly getting addicted to Excel and Confluence-the wiki they use in our place.Life's little achievements consist of avoiding the maximum number of traffic lights by choosing bizzare driving routes,buying novels from shady second-hand books stores and by trying to eke out the most tax benefits by investing (planning to invest rather) in schemes which make you feel like that masterji in some old Doordarshan era ad-"Samay samay par LIC ka premium bharna jaroori hai".I am really thinking of writing book reviews to make this mundane blog a little more exciting by posting scandalous ideas and in general antagonizing everyone.Yeah and book reviews are very subjective things(that's what writerscafe.org says about Book review guidelines)-so everything is an opinion and not fact.

If you think that you have a tech(or a science) bone in your body,
check out boiledbeans
A visual quiz a day complete with a scorecard .What fun! this is the first thing that I do in the morning at the office.

Happy birthday to the Dutta twins(1st and 3rd from right).Even after so many years,I still cannot let go off the excitement that is your company.Right from the tennis matches to your music system, the double ride on your cycles to the insane laughing bouts.The Vietnamese hat in your living room to the frenzied accounts of your various escapades in school.The cynicism and the constant chatter about Cobain and Axl to the rides towards HEC.From talk about Noir films to Marijuana to the pandal hopping - I know it is not coming out well and I don't know how to put it but all I want to say is that you(including the Black field gang) are the only people around whom I am completely uninhibitedly at home.You are the very few people who have seen the real me.I don't say this often enough but I am grateful that I met you guys and even when I grow old and weak in the bones I will still cherish the memory of the time spent.Thanks for everything(and for a change I really mean it) and stay the same.peace.

Copy-paste from Dreamcatcher's blog.


If I were a beginning, I would be: The dawn
If I were a month, I would be: December
If I were a day of the week, I would be:Saturday
If I were a time of day, I would be:Three am
If I were a planet, I would be: Uranus(A planet which rotates with its axis on the side-Punster's keep away)
If I were a season, I would be:summer
If I were a sea animal, I would be: a Great White Shark
If I were a direction, I would be: East
If I were a piece of furniture, I would be: a couch
If I were a sin, I would be: lust
If I were a liquid, I would be: Petrol
If I were a fraud/scare, I would be: making headlines by now
If I were a gem, I would be: a Lapis-Lazuli
If I were a tree, I would be: a Banyan
If I were a tool, I would be: a Swiss Knife.
If I were a flower/plant, I would be: an Aloe Vera
If I were a kind of weather, I would be: a bright blue sky on a winter morning.
If I were a musical instrument, I would be: a tabla
If I were an animal, I would be: a tiger
If I were an emotion, I would be: joy
If I were a vegetable, I would be: spinach
If I were a sound, I would be: the sound of a didgeridoo
If I were an element, I would be: Calcium
If I were a car, I would be: a Ferarri
If I were a song, I would be: The end by The Doors
If I were a food, I would be: apple pie
If I were a place, I would be: Goa
If I were a material, I would be: Velcro
If I were a taste, I would be: sweet-sour
If I were a scent, I would be: scent of Pulao
If I were a religion, I would be: Hinduism
If I were a sentence, I would be: All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players
If I were a body part, I would be: the shoulders
If I were a facial expression, I would be: a grin
If I were a subject in college, I would be: Algorithm design and analysis
If I were a shape, I would be: a spiral
If I were a quantity, I would be: a carat
If I were a colour, I would be: black
If I were a thing, I would be: a garden
If I were a landmass, I would be: a mountain
If I were a book, I would be: Ulysses
If I were a monument, I would be: The Colosseum
If I were an artist, I would be: Dali
If I were a landscape, I would be: a valley
If I were a watch, I would be: showing EST
If I were God, I would be: laughing
If I were a vowel, I would be: u
If I were a consonant, I would be: r
If I were a formula, I would be: The Fourier-series expansion formula
If I were a Science, I would be: Organic Chemistry
If I were a theory, I would be: Post-modernism
If I were a famous person, I would be: Salman Rushdie
If I were an electronic equipment, I would be: a super-computer
If I were sport, I would be: tennis
If I were a movie, I would be:the Casino
If I were a cartoon, I would be: The Simpsons
If I were an explorer, I would be: Magellan
If I were a scientist, I would be: Alan Turing
If I were a relation, I would be: elder brother
If I were a river, I would be: The Amazon
If I were intoxication, I would be: marijuana
If I were alone, I would be: content
If I were a question, then I would be: why don't I have enough time?
If I were a hobby, I would be: reading
If I were a habit, I would be: being generous
If I were in an atom, I would be: U-235
If I were an end, I would be: the end of the solar system.
If I were you, I would be: laughing by now.

A random conversation at work:

Female 1:but the J2EE trainer was good.
Male1:No,was bad.I did not understand much.
Me: Me neither!
Female1:but he was very helpful.
Me:You have been afflicted by the Stockholm syndrome.
Male1:but thats when........
Me:Yeah but it's similar to that.analogous.
Female1:what's what syndrome?
Male1 and Me:you wouldn't understand-you need level for that! bwahahahahaha!!
*Female1 grimaces*

And this featured in our conversations too. Wikipedia fascinates always.


Also innumerable Homer Simpson conversations......... with Male1 being a Springfield resident-almost but Male1 has been sufficently irradiated.(I will have names for my co-workers soon)


D'oh!!!!-just look at his expression here!!.LMAO :D

I love my job.

Feeling fidgety.revolted with myself.lost.lonely.bored.fatigued.nerves on edge.blue-black vs turquoise blue,in an eternal dance of wits.

Has been a while

Its has been a while since I did a decent post.Life's been pretty busy,hectic would not be the apt word.Wake up-go to work-come back and sleep and then wake up on Saturday around 7 and think-oh, no going to work today- and then promptly dozing off for a couple of more hours.It is a strange feeling,I never actually imagined how life would be working and so far this life has been good to me.My routine in the office usually involves-reaching there by 9:30,coffee break of 10-15 min around 11:00,lunch around 12:45,loitering in the campus for about three quarters of an hour,another coffee/tea break around 3:15 and the office crowd starts thinning around 5:45-6 and everything is quiet around 6:45-and yeah around 6 ,some head to the cafeteria for snacks while some go to the gym-I head back home,cursing and breaking furiously in the maddening MG Road traffic and in between I also do some coding desperately trying to come to grips with unfamiliar programming concepts/vocab "requirements"-"analysis"-"design" all mean different things in different contexts and the most scariest word of them all-static............
I dream of red lines and yellow lines and light bulbs and red crosses and cntrl-x,cntrl-v,cntrl-c all running in wild maniacal circles around me- taunting me to confront them till I hear the sweet purring of the CPU acknowledging my almost perfect resizeable-resistant -pesky user defying-UI.

it's almost Asok-in-Dilbert ian this love for my workplace is but I cant help it if my manager is a very co-operative man and that my team members do not actually suck but the honeymoon is gonna end soon- I have a vague premonition.Sometimes I do have that instinctive urge to bunk-to run away form work and cool my heels but then as a friend of mine pointed out-'you get paid to do this' so I curb the desire and get along with the job at hand.Finally read HP-7 and the last duel between Voldermort and Harry is almost anti-climactic- Expelliarmus?against the most feared wizard?The last chapter is such BS but it was unavoidable 'coz this would be the only way of ending the saga.I couldn't help feeling a bit sad at the end of it all-no more waiting for the next book ,no more Hogwarts ,no more Hagrid's creatures or Hogsmeade....

In other shocking news,Carlos Tevez moved to ManU(was hoping he would move to Chelsea-the presence of Crespo in the Blues starting line up two years ago being my sole reason for supporting them) on a two year loan from WestHam and Alonso continues to behave like a spoilt child.Kumble scored a century(I just love Test cricket!).Amidst all the sporting upheavals ,I decide to start another blog.So I present before you Bourgeoisie Armchair Philosophy- a blog solely dedicated to discussing things other than my personal life,sports,music, random musings -in short everything that I do not talk about on ICISIF.I am co-hosting this blog with Niksworth. No, I could not think of a better name and it just came to me. Bourgeoisie 'coz of my earlier Communist leanings,Armchair 'coz I am not the kind of person who actually does something about what he says and Philosophy is just to validate any post that I might do under the garb of that word though Niksworth might disagree.happy reading.

October, 2001-Life was uncomplicated and a thousand cupids were at work.The Patronus shone across the lake and I was moved by the firebolt of a gift from Sirius to Harry.

June,2003-school came to an end and college was still a few months away:Sirius died and James was cruel to Severus in a pensieve.

July 2005-gave the dreadful C.O. paper and was relieved to have managed to write enough to scrape through.To celebrate me,Akhi and A walked into Crosswords and were offended by the high prices but still managed to learn in the ensuing holidays that Ginny and Harry were no longer a couple and Gwrap didn't prove to be so important after all.

July 2007-Life's pretty smooth sailing right now and hope that Hagrid,Hermoine and Harry are still alive.

good things have always happened to me when ever a book has released.keeping my fingers crossed this time around.

I got tagged by Deepika here.The rules.
1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
4. If you fail to do this within eight hours, you will not reach Third Series or attain your most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes.

OK don't the 1. and 2. points mean the same thing?since the people I wanted to tag have already been tagged,If you are reading this consider yourself tagged.

Eight random things about me:

1.One of the greatest pleasures that I indulge in is laughing at my own jokes.I laugh in such a way that the audience laughs at my laughter rather than the actual joke.So I get away with the most inane PJ's.

2.I get claustrophobic in the AC compartment of trains and have difficulty sleeping in that climate controlled rickety thing.

3.I prefer eating salads,soups and all things 'healthy'.If you want to torture me,just get me a meal of fries,cola and burger.You would rather see me at a SUBWAY than a McDonalds.In spite of this I am not really in good shape.

4.My idea of heaven is a place where you could play tennis to your heart's content and never get tired.preferably clay and under the lights.Also one of my childhood dreams was to win the French Open.

5.oh! and I have a very short attention span.I have only seen about 100 movies in my 22 years of existence.even when I do watch ,I see it in sittings.I saw Bheja Fry in 3 sittings and saw the two seasons of Prison Break over a period of 1.5 months.

6.I like girls with beautiful hair,long hair,coloured hair,highlighted hair-really in love with the Gothic look :D ;I hate girls who gossip,the 'I have to be home before dark' types,the unread/dumb/bimbo types,the typical Bangalore engineering female.

7.I am very immune to weather and my mood does not depend on whether its cold,hot,rainy,windy etc. and I usually can brave it all.One of the reasons why Bangalore's much vaulted great weather has not made any impression on me.

8.I usually do not complain at all and can be a very adjusting person and get along with almost anyone.In case this is sounding like an entry in a matrimonial website,let me tell you that I suffer from multiple Dr.Jekyl and Mr.Hyde syndrome and am different things to different people.That's why all my Orkut testimonials are very different from each other.

PS:have not been able to blog much even though there is no dearth of topics.There have been tectonic shifts in life.College got over and have started work-which is proving to be a strange experience,more about it later I promise.