Criticism!!

I have posted quiet a few videos on youtube, 5 to be precise and every now and then I keep getting comments on some of them. I got a comment on one of them half an hour back.....and wasn't a really favorable one...in short it said ...I sucked. I diligently blocked the user and removed the comment from my page. Was I right or wrong in doing so...or am I a sore loser who can't take criticism?
Now that I think of it...I really would have liked to go on the profile of that commenter and check out any videos that he/she might have posted and then judge him/her.
Or I am taking all this a tad too seriously....

hell...I am no Superman!!

Colourblind-ed

Accidentally got hold of a website. It belongs to one of the members, Siddharth Acherakar, of a band named Colourblind. They published their one and only self-titled album back in 1997. I caught hold of the cassette in my early college days from a friend. Played it on and on in the retarded blue and red cassette player which was sort of a hostel whore, it being owned universally by the hostel. The tape was much abused too and I finally lost it somewhere in between times. I am no music critique but I can make out good from bad and these guys were genuinely great. Don know what went wrong but they might have made it big someday. The other guy in fact has. Ram Sampath is a music director of sorts.

Such long lost things cloud the mind with nostalgia as I see myself cruising in my dad's zen, windows open, stereo turned way up, blaring "colourblind". I am contemplating on writing a mail to this guy. His site has a contact address. Just as an appreciation for their effort at doing something great. I have got hold of all the songs again and theirs a video as well on the ubiquitous youtube. The video's abstract and pretty well made I think. Take a look here.

Next up is the effort to play the song . I will be trying to decipher the tabs myself as nothing seems to be available on the net. Much grief and frustration to follow.

Guitar Heaven!!

The kit is complete. And its high time for the Iron Maidens and Metallicas of this world to stand in awe at the total destruction of their concentrated efforts at greatness. And right about now is when you chip in and say, no dude, why would you say that you'll destroy there music, you play darn well. And I'll give a sheepish grin and say, Well If you say so, because I really don't think I am much of a player. And we live happily ever after with you immune to my playing and I blissful in my ignorance.

Alas, If everything would be that simple,ow beautiful the world would be. But it is not, because NO you are not immune from my playing and YES I am still blissful in my ignorance. I will keep nibbling at your psyche with my attempts on Youtube one song at a time. And if you end up banishing the internet completely, I will hunt you down to the ends of this earth and solar system, my guitar and amps and all in tug, and make you sit and listen to it. And just when you though it was over, I would break that final frontier and make you head bang to it. All this pessimism is the result of my efforts with the kit yesterday night. If just one session could conjure up such reactions, imagine a whole weekend at that. I myself shudder even at the thought. Let us not be self loathsome now and head straight into narcissism. Over the duration of last couple of weeks I have amassed an Epiphone Les Paul Special II electric guitar, a 15 W Epiphone Amp, a couple dozen picks of varied thickness, a Digitech RP150 processor, a headphone so I could listen myself deaf to the combined madness of the aforementioned gear and a good couple of miles of instrument cable so I can trip and re-trip on them everytime I try to move in my apartment. My wife has completely denied from being in the same room as me with the gear and every now and then just throws in the dinner and other assorted food items to my face from the tiny opening in the door. Food , Guitar and me, in no specific order. Bliss!

PS: babe, can you throw-in that bag of chips and some chunky salsa!!

Placid in Pics!

	Heading into the bubble beater!!
Thats the wing of our yellow plane....while landing back.
	The enchanting mist on the Lake!

Placid Redemption

I now have a photograph to go with the title of my blog "Road to nowhere...". The photograph is not actually of a road and it does go somewhere, but life's not so straightforward and I have found the hidden meaning of that snap. Whatever that meaning might be. I will be updating my profile with it soon. Or at least post it with this one.

Moving on to the trip that led me to the aforementioned monumental event. I have always been a fan of travelling. And this blog initiated as more of a travelogue than anything else. The photograph seems to have brought me back to my basics. So be it. The preparations for this trip had started way back in the beginning of time when the earth had crawled out as a tiny piece of rock from the primordial soup and my beloved wife was smart enough to figure out then that it would lead to this damn fine trip. The name of the destination is true to its ancient origins. Lake Placid. Funny though we ended up nowhere close to it. We stayed on The Mirror Lake . Whitewater Rafted on The Indian lake. Had breakfast on Saranac Lake. Clicked the 1 millionth snap of the trip on Cascade Lake. Run over some ducks on Tupper Lake. Drove right into the-lake-that-had-no-name. Okie so the last couple of things are obviously not true. And no we didn't click just 1 million snaps, the number was actually close to a billion gazillion. But you get the drift. There's no lake placid in the entire story.

And I just realised that I have killed my entire blog in a genius stroke of sentence construction. I'll play dumb though and pretend I never wrote that ,continuing with my story in chronological order. It was a labor day weekend and it was our holiday, we being bonded labors my wife and myself. So we just thought of going crazy. Started on Saturday morning drove through minor traffic jams while leaving Jersey and entering NY state and listening to all sorts of non-sensible and at times fine music we reached the destination in good time. The last 30 miles were particularly scenic with lakes and mountains and gorgeous valleys and trees with just a hint of yellow to keep us company. First on the agenda was this 20 minute flight in one of those single propeller planes. Our camera died on us so I don't have a snap to show the entire plane. But I have caught a few glimpses of the wings and the views from the plane as proof. It was a bright yellow colored cute little thing, swaying and holding its own in the brisk winds of Adirondack valley. We had a birds eye view of the North and South Lake Placid, the tear drop shaped origin of the Hudson river and the two highest mountains of the region among the other things. Here's the website for anyone interested.

Scenic flight....check.

Found a decent Italian place right across our hotel. I am maintaining my distance with fowl, so I opted for the pasta with shrimp. The next few minutes were just slurps and burps with both my wife and myself forgetting existence of the other and just hogging. It was the only meal of our day. Tanks full, we took a leisurely stroll on the banks of the Mirror Lake. It was a little chilly and we had caught the glimpse of the indoor heated pool and jacuzzi in the Hotel while checking in. Ever the Desis to utilise the facilities offered to the fullest we quickly headed to the artificially heated pool. Nature be damned its payback time for the hotel for charging us exorbitant amounts of money.

Swimming Pool and Jacuzzi...check.

Sunday started early and was worth all the effort. The views from the hotel patio were breathtaking. Fog hanging over the picturesque Mirror lake and the baby orange of the sun's first rays illuminating it was fascinating. Drove almost 2 hours to reach Indian Lake. The drive is meant to be done on a motorcycle with its curving roads of highs and lows. I so missed my ThunderBird. In fact there was a Harley Convention scheduled for Monday in Lake Placid so there were bikes a-plenty of all sizes , shapes and color with their ever the dude riders. We crossed so many different lakes on our way with view after view of serene beauty that there was no point keeping track of the names. Next up was a hunt for the White water Rafting gig. I being ever the lazy bum had skipped the reservations hoping that we being the erstwhile Queen and King of the Kingdom of Lazistan would be treated to a royal welcome and club class seats to the raft. Welcome it surely was with No Vacancy signs hanging all around. I quickly tapped into my reserve of good luck and evil mixed together and stole the berths of not 2 but 3 unsuspecting desis whose only crime was to follow IST(Indian Standard Time) and arriving an hour late. My wife allayed my fears of eternal damnation by rightly pointing that we have already sinned enough to be dispatched to hell and back 3 times over and this act of pure evil would only prove to be a confirmation of our tickets to the same. Speaking of hell, my wife again raised an interesting point. The all mighty sentries at the gates must sure have changed their requirements to enter the cozier part of after life namely heaven because if not with the exponential rise of sins committed these days, heaven must be a really empty place. Damn Sure it must be. And now I would like to officially put a disclaimer on the views expressed on the existence of heaven, hell , afterlife so an so forth as views expressed solely by my wife and the blog and author thereof holding no responsibility for the same. So we made the cut and were on board a rattling bus to this launching point for rafts armed with life jackets and big blue and yellow pedals. There was quiet a bee line of rafts to enter the water before us.

The White Water Rafting part was quiet a roller coaster ride. Scary and apprehensive to begin with, exhilarating and immense fun there on and dragging in the end. I was donning the lead position in the raft and it was like an (Inter)National Integration convention in the boat. A couple from Canada, a family of 4 originally from Romania settled in Maryland , the instructor and navigator a local and my wife and myself the desis temporarily settled in Jersey. All of us were just settling in the raft when to every ones surprise the Romanian girl decided to take a dip in the water and made a lunge for it. No she wasn't suicidal. Life saved 1, scared like hell - priceless. Quiet a lot of good rapids followed and thankfully there were no more lunges in the water from anyone else. Also swam in the slower parts of the river and jumped into the water from the top of a rock good 15ft above water. They called it the bubble beater, everyone else called it the whirlpool of drowning. It was one monster of a rapid just pulling everyone under and pounding them hard. We did a good 4-5 rotations under the swirling water before escaping unharmed with the loss of just a pedal. The water gradually died down and we were almost stagnant for a good part of a couple of hours. This was the dragging part of the whole thing. To top it off were the lifeless jokes of our navigator. But better sense prevailed, everyone jumped in to share their own sense of humor and we finished the expedition on a very happy note and great bonding. The navigator was very good at what she was supposed to do but a tad sad with the sense of humor part. No ones perfect after all.

White Water Rafting.....Sore bum and aching body but check definitely.

Came back, opted for yet another pasta, more slurping, lesser talking, only meal of the day again. Slept like there was no tomorrow. There were no specific plans for Monday and we had to check out by 11 in the morning. Did some lazy walks around the Winter Olympic Centre of Lake Placid, clicked a few more snaps, did some long-sought-after-faded-black-jeans shopping from the gap Outlet in the vicinity and headed for Sarnac Lake for our breakfast. It was on the way back from Sarnac Lake that the monumental photograph was clicked on a rarely used railway line heading into nowhere and coming from nowhere.

Fought through crazy traffic on our way back into Jersey to finish of what we had started. And finally my dearest wife candidly said that she kinda had fun this time around. Thanku thanku dear lady, finally you liked something that I planned.

Fine trip ....check , check and check!!

PS : A few snaps to follow. I just couldn't resist the urge to post at least a couple of the gazillion ones that I have been talking about all along.

Withered in Chicago..

Back from Chicago. I am now officially looking for a big city that's land locked and is not located on the shores of an ocean. And yes, I count lake Michigan as an ocean because its just plain stupid to name a water body as large as that , a lake. I have visited San Fransisco , Boston , NY City , now Chicago, Orlando. Okie so the last one doesn't count, but I have to show the numbers to make my point, so I'll keep it there. Apart from the ocean view, there are very many things that are common to these cities and especially the downtown areas. Each has a couple of really really HIGH rises, which invariably have an observatory on the 86th, 91st ,106th floors, take your pick, with a breathtaking view of the surroundings for nocturnal and general viewing pleasures. Each has a huge public open space, NYC has central park, Chicago has Grant Park which the respective locals claim to be the best ever in the history of mankind. Each has a boat cruise that goes around the city inducing ohhhs and ahhhs from the unsuspecting commuters for the absolutely amazing skyline that the city has to offer. And all of them claim to be the hubs of culture and trade, every last one of them people. The unseen, namely the LA's and San Diego's and Seattle's might be no different either. But I guess its the subtle differences in this similarity that attract the hoards of tourists to throng to these cities. NYC has its times square. San Fransisco has its Golden Gate Bridge. Chicago has its Navy Pier.
I just can't stop myself from making this comparison now. Even if this just stems from my inner vice in proving that why India is better. Indian cities, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangaloroo or whatever its name is ,are poles apart from each other in all respects. Though each of them is a cosmopolitan with people of all backgrounds calling it their home every one of them has its own distinct localized influence. May it be with the dialect, the food, the commute or the people themselves. Mumbai has its bhel puri, bambiyaa slangs ,and the infamous locals. Delhi has its chole bhature, its clean hindi obscenities, and the deadly blue line buses. Kolkata has its macher jhol, nomoshkaar, and the trams. So on and so forth. They are all so different and so rich in their own distinct cultures.

Coming back to Chicago though. It indeed is a beautiful place and I liked it a lot. The current visit was an official trip but it also was a reconnaissance mission on behalf of my strategic command post in jersey city, read my wife. The foot soldier had gone to scout for locations to plunder in Chicago and the foot part was proved right to the T. I am literally half an inch shorter than my original height due to all the walking that I have done in that one afternoon and evening. I stand now at 5' 11 and a half ''. Yes I am not a 6 footer now.

PS: Neha dearest ignore the strategic command post line, you are no tyrannical general. I don't know who wrote that part. I love you!!

Aftereffects...

The concert proved thoroughly entertaining, so thorough in fact that I couldn't pen down the experience for a week. Now that the week has passed and the stars have aligned in their pristine glory for an auspicious date and time, I forge ahead with typing down all of it.

I have already forgotten quiet a few details , so I might make up stuff, just to add to the excitement.

It was a late Saturday afternoon on a quiet sunny NJ day, when I began the road trip down to lets call it Bryandale NJ because I don't seem to recall the exact name of the place and I don't have the inclination to actually look it up. Because there in an obvious chance that I might lift off on a tangential journey from there on and never come back to edit this post again. So the show was supposed to begin at 6.30 in the evening, but the utter enthusiast (read over zealous and stupid) that I am managed to reach the place a good hour and a half before. Now my fellow concert goers had informed me that I should expect bunch of people camping in the parking lot besides enormous SUV's of this country blaring Bryan's songs on there stereos. To my utter surprise it was all true with just a minor glitch , they were playing songs of some thorogood guy rather than Bryan who happens to be a big rock N roll star from the yesteryear's. WTF, I thought, we are at the wrong place and its good that we were smart enough to come early. Now we can still reach the right place without being late. It turns out we were at the right place and Bryan was supposed to play AFTER this thorogood guy. So in the spirit of the concert I tried to wade through my minds library for any songs that might resonate with the name thorogood. None. Deep breaths, breathe in, breathe out, don't panic. You might still be able to salvage this. I tried to listen in to the songs that were being played across the parking lot, and after a few agonizing minutes I could make out the sounds of a couple of songs, most notably, Bad to the bone with flash of a leather bound Arnold Schwa$@*#&& , whatever his surname is, stepping out of a dilapidated bar in T2 and Moving on Over with no such flashes. Hi Fives and punches in the air. I won't be sitting like a jackass in the concert. There were serpentine queues on the entry gates, me being the head of one of the serpents thanks to the lead time. We were at the concert arena well before Bryan had ever thought of singing in the first place in his native Canada. Lawn chairs secured, sleeping bags rolled in front, umbrellas over our head, did I mention Mr Sun himself had come down half a distance just to scorch people that day, we were all set. Bring on Mr Thorogood. It took a good part of an hour for any live action to start on the stage but around me there was no dearth of action. Plenty of kids crying, guys getting drunk already and women who should never have worn anything less than a circus tent parading in skimpy clothes. Ohh the horror. But the actual action turned out to be pleasantly melodious with guitars riffs flying through the air and pounding drums getting the beat going raising my rock crazy spirit. A fitting opening act, I must say, to the amazing music that was to follow. It cemented my belief that a live act far supersedes anything recorded and even if you are listening to it for the first time in your life. Enough said.

Finally Bryan arrived on stage with There ll never be another tonight and the crowd erupted. The set list went something like this:

Can't stop this thing we started
I need somebody
Kids wanna rock
Life is an open road
18 till I die
Let's make a night to remember
Back to you
Summer of 69
Everything I do
Cuts like a knife
Baby when you re gone (with the person from the crowd)
Its only love
Heaven
Only thing that looks good on me
Run to you
Straight from the heart
All for love

In fact this is the precise set list because I was typing it down on my blackberry during the concert. The gifts of technology I tell you. I was singing along throughout minus the time I spent typing that is. Bryan did his customary "call-a-person-from-the-crowd-and-make-her-sing" routine, which has been duly noted in the set list. Damn I am good!
In all a divine experience which I would definitely like to repeat with other monks of the business namely, St. Metallica, Guru Iron Maiden and others in the upper echelons of Rock divinity. The setting would have been complete if I would have come back and played a couple of the above mentioned songs on my guitar, but alas the sleeping monster in me awoke and St Bryan had to migrate to my dreams.

PS : The thorogood guy actually has a name. He goes by George Thorogood and is accompanied by the Destroyers. And he is thoroughly good.

Bard and Bryan.

In my perennial hunt for the weird on the net and the world in general, I came across this. Its added on my personalized google page as a daily dose of Shakespearean Insults. I sincerely do not understand 99% of them , but then an insult is not meant to be understood in the first place rather its meant to be thrown at you in disgust and its supposed to hurt you. I quote the Bard :

"Thou caluminous dismal-dreaming flirt-gill!"

Now it doesn't sound that bad does it, nothing that could make your blood boil and seep out of your ears in the form of molten lava. Thats the beauty of language. Whats one linguists heaven could be the others hell ,so on and so forth.

Speaking of another kind of language, the language of music. I am off to a Bryan Adams concert tomorrow night. As it happens to be the case ,my first post on this blog was inspired by a Bryan Adams number. So all the madness on this blog over the last 2 something years could simply be blamed on him. Looking forward to having a good time.

Bored

What does bored to death mean? Let's see what it could possibly imply :

1) That you are bored and you wanna die. Okie now here I have justed picked up the keywords of the question, put them in a mixer added a few other words like that,and etc. and just let the motor of the mixer do the sentence formation. So this is obviously as correct an explanation as the answer to one of the essay type questions in your civics paper.

2) That you were killed by a hole drilled in your body. Now that sure is quiet a possible meaning in a horror flick. But lets not get into imaginary perverts and their drilling machines. Its too gory a picture.

3) Another one from the mixer. The person sitting next to you in a train is a chatter box and he has been going on and on ,like all chatter boxes have the legal right to do, about how his job sucks and his wife is cheating on him and the neighbors dog shits in his lawn and so an so forth and the only ray of hope, as you see it, to survive from this excruciating mental torture is to die and go to heaven. Okie hell for you. Yes we are getting close.

But lets not get too close to the actual meaning lest we offend the phrase and it in turn accepts one of the above mentioned explanations and in the process dies.

PS : I am bored to death, whatever that means. You happy now Mr. Phrase?

Observe

After reading umpteen blogs, I have finally come to a conclusion and thus the reason for the infrequency of my blogs. I don't observe enough. I just don't notice things happening around me.That and a copious amount of laziness. yupp, thats about it.I degress though, people on the other hand have mastered the art of observing and taken it many a nothches higher by adding the garnish of their imaginations on it and keybording it down into some darn funny blogs. I have always considered myself a "funny guy" per se and it really hurts my ego to know that my capability of tormenting people with my raunchy humour is being laid to waste just by the virtue of my being non observent. shame on me. So off I go about denouncing myself and dusting out those non - observent eye glasses of mine.

I observe so I blog :

1) That I can time how late I am for work by observing the clock. No that would have been a horrible PJ. Actually I can time it by observing the position(you pervert!!), ok distance of a fine young lady from the PATH station. Of I catch her at the entrance I am spot on time, if on the outside steps then I will be missing that 3rd bagel from the street vendor, if while crossing the road then there goes my 7th position in the line for the office coffee machine...so on and so forth. And okay, I am obsessed with food.

2) That just today I saw a guy tearing out a small piece of paper from the road side flyer for writing a number. Buddy haven't you stolen enough post-its and spiral notebooks from the office stationary room to start a dollar store of your own. Its a piece of marketing dammit , don't treat it as your personal stationary.

3) That the steel rimmed shades that I have been much proudly donning lately are favoured more by the opposite sex. I have spotted atleast 7 different ladies sporting them. I stopped counting thereafter just out of shame.

4) That more often than not, I end up having a walkathon with my fellow un-suspecting commuters who are merely crawling to and from their way home. And I treat it as a personal challenge if a person walks past and ahead of me, promptly overtaking him even if I have to make a dash for it, thereby re-establishing my supremacy on all people walking.

5) And now to epitomize by observing qualities, it has come to my notice that lack of a keen eye on my part is solely attributed to the blackberry that dangles from my belt, which more often than not is in my hands with my eyes fixated on it reading the antics of one Mr Jason Bourne in Honk Kong and thereby vanchiting (pardon the parallel slaughter of 2 great languages here) me from the amazing experiences of the NY subway.

PS : All the people who don't use the NY subway have real dull lives.

Coasting Along...

I am in an existential phase these days. Living for the moment kind of stuff. As if I was ever the visionary. Infact I have never thought beyond a couple of weeks bar a few momentus occasions in my life. I am more the "take life as it comes" kind of a guy. But its always good to start a blog emphatically, it gives the reader that sense of greatness. All Bull!

So to the existensial things that crave for my attention these days, in no cronological or any specific kind of order for that matter of fact.

Shares : Good portion of my work day. And minor portion of the remaining is spent on various sites in further varying degrees of information on the latest in stocks. In one of those bar occasions that I think of the future, I see myself chucking this I(dio)T job and retiring to this crazy market governed life. I keep reminding my biwi on my ideas of retiring early and she keeps shrugging them off like Federer lobbing his opponents ball for clean winners. My dear wife, I just might prove to be your Nadal on clay off course!!

Guitar : The quinessential pass time, major source of bouts with my biwi and a source of eternal happiness for me. Trying to play out a few Indian Classical Ragas on it these days. With help from my dad sending in mp3's from India to listen and learn from and a few youtube videos here and there. Quiet a mix. The conflict arising from the fact that the guitar equally competes for my attention with neha. Well, so many fans so little time!! But she rules eventually, because she has the power of emotions you know.

My beloved wife Neha : This ones a shade too existential, infact my existense depends on her. Literally. Perennial source of pleasure and pain. I am a non efficient, lazy bum in her eyes and she consistently tries to straighten me out, but me ever the survivor, prevail with my lazy ways. The battle rages on !!

Add to that a few blogs that I follow, occasional movies, card playing sessions with neha, and regular "against my wish" visits to the Mall, that about sums it all.

Not bad at all, huh ??

Another techno

This ones coming from my new blackberry. Although there isn't anything terribly interesting to write home about , writing on a blackberry and posting via email in itself is a worthy topic. So let me keep it short and sweet this time around. But there would be bigger and badder ones following this one.

Cheers..

buy, buy, buy!!

The Indian Stock Market is at its dizzying highs and investors across the board are holding their breath in anticipation for the pitfall with the bears or a rally with the bulls. This last statement of mine is a mixed bag of cliches and jargons, which a few years back would have meant zilch to a good percentage of population in India. But thanks to the ever mushrooming 24X7 news channels and other unsolicitated and un-sought after sources, its fast becoimg a part of everyday lingo. Atleast in the tiny little subset of people I interact with on a regular basis. Money , as usual, is the source of all the limelight. Infact make it obscene amounts of money which has attracted people from all walks of life into this dangerous business of share trading. I have been brought up in a conservative family, wherein all business is evil and share trading in particular is the absolute sin. The notority reinforced by the likes of Mr. Harshad Mehta who were making the spectacular headlines when I was growing up.

Things have changed since then, I myself have been trading for the past couple of years, with a non-noticable change in bank balance and a few un-realized gains in my portfolio to boast of. As in most of my recent adventures the partner of crime in this one too is one Mr Rathore. He introduced me to the game. I have been changing gears lately, first I went solo and now I have a new partner, my beloved wife. Though Mr. Rathore has taken a forced sabbatical for a few days, hes just lurking around to re-enter.

Now my beloved, she-who-dreams-of-an-MBA-someday is someone who approaches this with quiet a bit of enthusiasm. I pretend to be the cool , sauve guy with all the gyaan. I personally never started trading as a means of making money. It was more of a thrill , the rush that it gave with every antics of the stocks that you owned. And it was mostly governed by the hot tips from anonymous analysts and friends that trggered the buying and selling of a particular stock. Although the hot tips are still quiet sought after today too, there is an analysis (although very basic) which gets added post the hot tip. And I have a relatively stable portfolio to show that off.

All said and done, this business of trading equities looks to be a permanent fixture of my life in the near future and a source of many a heated discussions adding another colour to my already rainbow(ish) married life.

God save the markets!!

Blues inspired generation analysis

It was a fine Monday morning, sunny and warm. Summer seemed to had finally arrived, but the following days have greatly diminished any thoughts of summer whatsoever. Slowly the elements have bailed out, Tuesday it was the sun, Wednesday it was the warmth...so on and so forth and finally today that is Friday, its raining cats and dogs. An absolute nightmare of a day, especially if you are to get up at 7.30 in the morning to get ready for a glum day at your desk in the office. Days like this are meant to be spent in the warmth of the bed or the cuddle of your couch, watching the downpour from your windows, sipping on a cup of hot tea, munching on assorted pakoras and basically being a lazy bum. Its at times like these that I hate my job. Although this is just one of the other countless reasons for hating it. Rather an addition to the already long list. Duely noted.

Life has yet again settled into its monotonous best. I can, in fact now spend my entire day with my eyes closed. Although I might trip and fall a couple of times , but you get the drift. I wake up every day at the same time, get ready, wear the same clothes (as in the same set of clothes in a cycle and no I don stink cause I use a deo stick!!), eat the same breakfast cereal, take the same route to the office, do the same (no) work, start for home at approximately the same time, basically the whole cycle. Not that I don like it or something ,but its just that at times its just plain sad. I seem to lack a certain degree of passion in life. I look at my father and at his age he is still so full of energy. Not that he is too old. But I figured that as you get older you might start losing interest. Not him. And me, I am still officially in the prime of my youth and all I can think about is sleeping and lazing. I look around and find that I am not too different from most of the folks my age. I guess we have degernated with the passing generations.

So I am not be blamed for my utter love for lethargy , its the damn generation gap!!

Chalta hai....

On my way to work today, the subway was a tad too crowded for comfort. No comparisions to the records set by the crowds in the mumbai locals, but by NY standards it was obnoxious. We could still accomodate a few here and there, but the reactions of people onboard got me thinking. There is a basic difference between these people and us indians. There might be a hundred other and I might have witnessed another hundred , but right now I am talking about this specific one. tolerance and accomodation. 2 words, but with essentially the same meaning. I was just trying to emphasize the difference here.

I understand personal space and all that bull crap of words these guys come up with, but what harm does the nudge of a tiny little bag of a lady do to you, who like you is just trying to reach her office on time. We could have picked up a lot more people from the platforms had this been a churchgate bound local. The difference I guess is situational. We have so many people in India that we don have the liberty of personal space, or for that matter any space. We are inadvertently invading spaces all the time in India. Its our "chalta hai" attitude towards life that just presses us to go that extra mile when it comes to accomodation.Someone steps on your well polished shoes, "chalta hai", because you know you had done the very same thing to atleast 10 different people on your way. Someones parked in your parking space in the society "chalta hai", you will park in someone else's space. Big deal. It really isn't big enough a matter to spend your precious energies on.

And thats what so cool about desh....everthing goes...."sab chalta hai!!"

PS : I love empty spaces and un-crowded places though. Infact, who doesn't.

Settling Expenses!

Have been settling down in life for the last couple of weeks...and should be almost complete by this saturday when the futon, tables and bar stools are delievered and assembled in my apartment.Almost ,because as any other money consuming activity its ongoing and never seems to end. So now the settling down expense stands roughly at 1000+ $'s including the TV, the other futon and the above mentioned 3 items. Now I could have got away with all that expense, the entire thing, if I had just opted for the demeaning option. Now the demeaning part is a figmnet of my beloved wife and my buddy Rathore's imaginations. I call it a grant.In the US they have this concept of dumping most if not all of your belongings minus the clothes, when you are moving to a newer place. Its sound logic because the moving expenses are far greater than buying the whole stuff afresh, not to mention the hard physical labor associated with. Mind you the hired help here is astronomically costly. So they dump it in and around the dust bins and every now and then the dustbins become virtual megastores of all you can pick without the hassel of paying for it.Now whats wrong with it. You wan't it , they don't. Perfectly simple equation. Apparently not because there's some stupid thing called human pride that comes into the picture. Damn the philosophers for inventing these stupid concepts.
But I extract my revenge by keeping the TV on for the entire humanly possible time and once the TV shuts off, I am on the futon sleeping my way to glory. Take that for pride!!

PS: Well I do secretly love to use all the new stuff. But thats only when I have the temporal amnesia and I can't remember that they all cost me.

Changing Lives..

This really is a reaction to what rathore has written today.....its literally an echo of what I was a few sundays back. A lonely bored guy with a light at the end of the tunnel or a silver lining in the otherwise grey cover of clouds to look forward to as rathore puts it ....But I am no more that guy, I have reached the light at the end of my tunnel and its not a freight train coming my way....but its the sun shining happily on me.
And today I can sit and reflect back on a conversation which rathore and myself had a few days back......about certain things in life that we love so much. This post was suppose to happen at least those many days back...but better late than never...at the least for this one thing. It started off with rathore posting me something like this....

"We were still 2 kms away from entering mahabaleshwar when a guy caught us near a checkpoint. He was a hotel owner (Actually, owner of 4 cottages). Although it was a little outside from the main town, we still decided to give it a chance as he was promising everything on earth for a paltry sum of 200 bucks!! The cottage was not bad at all. Everything except a TV was there and we were not bothered by its absence. After all who the hell was there to watch Kyonki saas bhi..!! By this time our asses were crying for mercy. We planned a short nap of 1 hr and fell on the bed in more or less same condition in which we entered the room."

...which I instantly recognized as the lines from one of his blogs about our journeys. And then another bit of an excerpt. And suddenly we were all nostalgic, reiterating the fondest of our trip memories in chronological , or not so chronological order . One thing led to another and for the umpteenth time we were talking about chucking up everything to become traveling journos for 'Travel and Living' and working as camera technicians for the Discovery channel. We have somehow stuffed the adventurer in us in a closet and every now and then we try and take the sneakiest of peaks at what is the best in us.....and bask in its glory. Who knows we someday might actually end up doing it or may be not. But whenever we are down and out...we can look back at those wonderful driving blogs, read them aloud and remember our days in the sun, out of the dingy light of this laptop.
Cheers to us rathore!!

Maximum Dreams!!

Another week has gone by and my married status now stands at 2 weeks. I could be celebrating all the stupid kinds of anniversaries at this point which newly wed or madly in love couples tend to celebrate so much, the weekly , the fortnightly, the monthly , the quarterly, lest not forgetting the actual annual flavor. These people can celebrate every day sighting some sort of an obtuse relation with the D-day. But its 2 to tango, a couple and I am alone here....I have no time to celebrate such trivialities, I am single mindedly concentrating on getting her on board before we take off on our journey into the vast ,unknown and turbulent seas of gruhasth ashram.

With that part of my life taken care of, theres' just another .0001% left to my life right now. And that I am using to write this blog. Have been doing a lot of reading lately. At one point of time I was simultaneously reading 3 books, but sanity prevailed and I opted for the linear rather than the simultaneous approach to book reading. So then I am finished with Maximum City and have turned towards Losing my Virginity. Both I must say are thoroughly engaging. The former more so because I could actual relate to a lot of it. Not in the first person but as a bystander being witness to the great chaos called Mumbai. The author has churned up engaging portraits , to such an extent that my dreams at one point had taken the style of a narrative of Suketu Mehta describing one of his many sub plots. It tells a hell lot of stories but in the end the book still makes you think and thats why I liked it so much. The latter is what I have currently at hand and on my reading table (lap).

My life lately has been rather dreamy , the month long leave, my wedding, amazing times with my love before it. And the present is not happening enough to pull me out of my dream land of the past. So here I am sitting back in a bean bag of my dreams...kicking back and relaxing.

trans..

Its 5 O' clock in the morning and I am wide awake, typing away at the keyboard , chatting with a long time friend of mine,have already called up my bibi and am now in transit ,waiting for her to appear online.She was spot on time and an hour and a half later I am back to writing what I had started. My life has been monumentally changed in the last month or so that I was in India. But more than that I have come back with a host of amazing new experiences which I plan to gradually pen down and immortalize.
First things first though, this one is purely about the jet lagged , dead tired from traveling, dazed and confused , sad me.
Jet lagged as I have landed in Ammrica just last evening and my body 's is still working according to the indian clock which means its in the sunday evening mode...far far away from sleep.
Dead tired of travelling cause I have been travelling for the last 36 hrs straight, in various means of transportations. the train ride from bhopal to mumbai which started at an human 4.30 in the morning on friday, with luggage sufficient enough for a small european country to migrate. Traveling the entire day thankfully in a 2nd AC with intermittent bouts of drugged sleep. Then the unearthly cab drive from dadar station to borivali, which lasted nearly the same duration as the train journey minus the AC and plus the screeching noise and total chaos around, and even costing almost the same amount as the train journey.
Dazed and confused/Sad as I am back in this firangi land with zilch of an idea of what i am gonna do here. Its almost like a trance state for now. The month long vacation seems to have just vanished into thin air, with no effect what so ever on my life. Its just like a dream that I had today. And the worst part I am still talking on the darn fone with my heroin who is now my wife with whom I should have been honeymooning right now....

Nail biting beginning...

Every now and then I wonder what my blog is about. I mean I have read various blogs across the spectrum talking passionately about an event which is publicly huge, politics , sports...getting the drift, but when I come back and read my posts, they all seem to lack a purpose to them, in the sense that my posts always revolve around myself, my misadventures , my likes , dislikes. But then again if its my blog, its got to be about me...anyways...so much for the random ramblings of an edgy mind.

Am in the middle of a stupidly extended long weekend here...even tomorrows a leave for me. Its Jan 1st today, beginning of yet another year...yet another set of 365 days of joys, disastors, victories, defeats and things we might never have seen before...ever.Time is a real funny thing, in the sense that it isn't something tangible, yet its omnipresent...twisting and moulding each and every life. For some its too fast, for some its too slow , for some its too bad, others too good, and there s no escape from it.None what so ever. This new year for me signifies a mammoth change, the end of an era so to say (the last line is courtesy FRIENDS). And it seems the enormity of the change has started to dawn upon me gradually, primary reason I guess for my edginess.

PS : I am wrapping up my nomadic belongings in jersey for a month...India here I come.