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.

(N)Ice Fall...

Another weekend has set upon me, and with it a couple more days have vanished from my so called "countdown to extinction". I ended up visiting Boston though.

Since the late night thanksgiving excursion to NYC, watching people skate their heart out in the ice skating rink at Bryant Park, I was itching for my own first bout with ice and my wish was to be fulfilled this time. I reached the "Frog Pond" after a rather loooong walk in the Boston downtown. I have no idea why the skating rinks are called ponds here, and further clueless about the frog part in this one. Whatever the case , may the frogs rest in their frozen graves in the pond!! Well there I was ,about to enter the skating area, with a zilch of an idea about ice skating in particular and any other forms of skating in general. Though as a by stander it didn't look like some rocket science.In fact it looked fairly easy, and pretttty cool, people doing all sorts of antics to top it all. But the moment I stepped on the ice, it was pretty clear to me that I may not be able to do this ....ever. Hanging to my dear life which in this case was the fence surrounding the pond, I succeeded in making a complete ass out of myself to start with. But then as I started getting the laps under my belt , it dawned upon me that may be at some point in time even I might be able to do it. The dead frogs must surely have had a laugh riot in their graves watching my antics over their heads for those 3 hours. But in the end when I finally got out of my skating boots all blue and black, I was really thrilled by the experience, it was like learning to walk all over again. Although I am really not sure of my own reactions when I first learned to walk ages ago, alas I was too young to remember.

My tryst with snow and ice is gonna continue this weekend too when I hit the real thing. I am going skiing for the Christmas break. Wish me so that I may return victorious , conquering the Pocono Mountains.

Escape...Again!!

Twice in a day is something…but I have my reasons and they are compelling enough for me to write this one too and post it today itself. And yes, I am going to write about the so called compelling reasons here.
At the time of posting the last one, when I went to my page to cross check if everything was alright, there staring right into my face was the date today December 10th. And then it struck me, that it is kinda special today. Well apart from my best pal Sunit’s birth day, someone else has got older today. My ThunderBird. My beloved bike. It’s completing its 2 years in my ownership, albeit on paper for most of the time. But we have had our fair share of moments together and we do have that chemistry thing going, Sufficient enough that I refer it as a companion. I remember writing a post for the same reasons last year, in fact right after I put this one up, I will go and read it.
It is kinda strange though how an inane object can become so special for someone. And I am not being weird here when I call my bike a companion or something, most if not all of us have certain non – living things they feel very close too. I will stick to my gender here, because the fairer sex I truly fail to understand, they almost seem to operate in a parallel universe which although has the same physical and psychological appearance but still has an entirely different set of laws governing it, definitely not Newtonian. Most of the guys are very touchy about there motorbikes, me obviously being one of them, some have their computers/laptops and so on and so forth. And it’s not just the sense of ownership that I am talking about here. It’s the feeling of being one with the thing. Almost love.
And so now that I have entirely digressed from the topic that I had originally had in mind, I will put in my closing remarks. And in that I would like to quote myself….
”And the world was my play ground so to say….and from that day on it has become my escape…”

PS : Although my fingers are aching now, its Fade to Black on the guitar right now!!

Four Leaf Clover...

Listening to No Leaf Clover, original composition by Metallica, re-recorded on acoustic by none other than yours faithfully. The daring feat was performed on a late Friday night a couple of days ago. Since the time I have started to learn this amazing instrument known as the guitar, I have always wanted to play these insane riffs, and now to be able to pluck at least a few of them is quiet a high for me. And I am such a self obsessed guy, and a proud one at that, that although I have shared one of these recordings with a few of my friends, I would prefer to keep all the others as a private collection. Its quiet a kick when someone praises you, but then its kinda silly, if you need someone else’s praise to recognize you. So although I may not practice the above statement to the core, it’s still the thoughts that matter, don’t they??

On other fronts, finished watching Doogie Howser, M.D., kinda old TV show, one of my favorites from my Star TV crazy days, when it used to be purely in English. For the ignorant it’s a story about a teenage prodigy, a genius, so to say doctor and his brushes with childhood, adolescence and maturity. I liked it a lot back then and I still stand by my choice.

I am heading towards a big milestone in life, and everything seems to bending towards it right now, it’s a countdown to extinction as I like to state it. It sounds sort of cool, primarily and secondly its partially true, my single status is an endangered species right now and there are no chances of preserving it, the damage has been done and there s no saving it. I might sound that I am fretting about it but I am actually not. It would be a new beginning, a clean slate and 2 sets of hands to write on it.

PS: Trying to play Seek & Destroy, another Metallica classic.

blues and blacks and whites and greys...

On board a San Francisco bound flight. It’s an official trip so to say but for me it’s off for a week from the usual office grind. Was having a long long talk with my sweetie after check in and before boarding. She is majorly blue these days and I really don blame her for it. Neither can I blame myself, well at least partially. It’s more situational rather than consequential I guess. I gave her all sorts of pieces of my mind, which I seem to have in abundance. That’s purely my perception though. But I guess whatever I say would ultimately mean zilch because it’s her life and she knows best. But I know she looks up to me with those dreamy eyes of her for support and all she can see is a dumb pic of mine or even worse the cell phone in her hand. And it’s been like that for more than a year now. I may have the magic wand in my hand in the sense that I can just make all her blues vanish in a puff of dust, but then life’s not a fairytale.

Holiday!

It’s a Thursday and I am sitting at home in the peak office hours. Reason, I am not well you know. This weird NY weather has caught up with me. One fine day it would be chilling winter winds the other bright and sunny and on cusp of breaking a sweat. The ailment per se that I have caught is called “garam – sard” in poetic Hindi. Literally translated “hot - cold”. Sounds fluke, but don’t blame me for the naming conventions. The standards have already been patented by the likes of Munshi Premchand and Mahashweta Devi. Okay that’s all crap! Bottom-line, I am cozily perched up on my sofa typing away on word and my guitar lying right next to me. Bliss!

Holidays are luxury commodities for IT professionals like me. Because although we might just be breaking office chairs while searching weird terms on google during our usual so called busy work day. It’s the number of hours of this chair breaking work that the client pays us for. And so our managers insist that in the spirit of the company we should spend the maximum of our lives in the office, in sickness or health, till death do us part types. I won’t go into the dynamics of how our companies make money and why the client pays us for this high-end work, because that’s way beyond my comprehension.

Back on track, what’s the POA for today? For the ignorant POA stands for Plan of Action. First and foremost lots of rest, lest I forget I am on a sick leave. Then there’s this guitar tutorial that I have bought, couple of chapters to be covered in that. Write a blog.Well I am already writing one so that’s taken care of. Cook a nice lunch, afternoon tea, a nap may be. Basically chill.

And that’s an FYI. Go figure that out for yourselves.

Slam Dunkin

Was sitting in a Dunkin Donuts this evening, sipping on a tall rather very tall plastic cup of Iced Latte, which seemed to be missing sugar in it and there were these flyers of back to school hanging around over the head here and there from the ceiling. FYI…it’s the beginning of the school season here in the US after the long summer breaks. Back to the flyers, they read quiet a lot of stuff including welcome backs and animated books of math and the works thrown in for the spice. One thought led to another and soon I was thinking when I last studied those subjects and for the matter of fact any subject. I was trying hard to remember myself studying anything…any darn thing; I just couldn’t picture myself at all. Has it really been that long? As in it’s hardly a couple of years, okay, 3 to be precise. But then it’s not entirely a time thing you see. I really haven’t studied much in my life. In school I used to be on my bicycle perennially, partially because my best buddies used to live miles away from my place and secondly because I just loved it. School was a breeze, with the assemblies and the long sunny corridors, where I used to run around chasing or being chased, the chemistry labs, the falling pens in the bio labs to sneak under the tables and just like that I was in college. Away from home for the first time, alone per se, though I never got to be alone actually. There were freaking 200 other guys like me in the hostel. And another 200 in the other hostel next to ours and at least 100 girls, who used to put up in some hostels a little too far for our liking. Bull…I wasn’t writing about girls.
It’s about the studying part, and its funny I remember one of the tougher of the subjects of all Control Systems. Khiljee saab, the purveyor of the now famous phrase maut ka kua, was the prof .I just saw myself solving those positive and negative feed back loop problems from all those books written by authors with weird names and always russian sounding. Used to love solving them and it was a matter of prestige as to who would get to the farthest problem number on the back of every chapter. It’s really amazing how fast and how far once thoughts can go in a matter of split seconds. I hadn’t even finished my latte yet, and I was already at least 4 years back in time and many thousands miles away in a not so clean hostel room. Although as a foot note, the latte was really humongous.

drizzling rains!

It’s drizzling outside since morning…and it’s almost night now. One wouldn’t be too lively if that was to happen on a Sunday, getting confined to once home with nothing to do. But albeit this common reaction, I am unusually high spirited. I love the rains when I am not in the path of their fury, and when I have nothing important to do or when I have nowhere to head to. Basically when I am idle and have no compulsion to go out and face it. It’s actually pretty beautiful when it rains. The first rains have their unique charm as that of a first kiss. But the prolonged and repetitive ones have their own unique shade of beauty. It’s like being in love for a long time, when everything is all green and lush in all directions that your eye can see. At least I can relate to this simile.

P.S.: I love this committed status of mine. I might not be with her as of now. But she still raises my spirits.

@&^@*^*&##@^*&@^

Picture a father, two daughters and two sons. Three of them married with kids. The fourth one on the verge of holy matrimony. This new development is the centre of his attention for now. And once done he’ll be relieved of all his responsibilities so to say. The stage is set for him to fade away gracefully into his grand old age.

Come into this world as a squiggly wiggly ball of skin. Kid your way to adolescence and puberty. Enjoy the prime in the wild and whacky youth. Work your ass off for a decent life for your so called family in your maturity and then ultimately wash your hands off all this mess that you have made over the years and start the count down for “THE END”.

Is this what it’s all about?

P.S: No Stimuli this time…this one is spontaneous!!

Sinking in the Indian Ocean!

Another stimuli another post. That’s the trend of my blogs these days.
And this ones not just ‘any’ stimuli, it’s the mother of them all or at least the aunty, to downplay things a little.

Venue: Stamford, Connecticut
Date: 18th August, 06
Time: 8ish in the night.

I enter this dingy looking school complex. No signs of any concert definitely, my 20 bucks have gone down the drain alas! People, going somewhere with purpose. All z not lost after all. Enter this school auditorium and there’s the equipment and the band finally. Indian Ocean. I won’t call myself a hardcore fan at this point, in the sense that I have not heard every single song that they have composed, but I know the famous ones, just enough to appreciate the creativity and come all the way to Connecticut to listen to them. But that is about to change big time.

Start with a sober and serene number, missed the title, and straightaway I am mesmerized. The guitar is amazing and so is the melody. Second one ‘kya maloom’, as Rahul Ram introduces it as the tandaav of a reluctant shiv ji in the midst of the chaotic Kargil War. This one followed by ‘hille le’ and ‘Melancholic ecstasy’. The last one being a pure instrumental and pure gold at it. Reluctantly went for a break, which as Rahul Ram very candidly put as a necessity for the sponsors to make some money and letting them play more. Rushed through the chicken biryani which was surprisingly tasty.
The opener after the break ‘bande’ a haunting number from black Friday followed by ’bhor’ which had one of the best pieces of guitaring I have heard for some time. Time just seemed to fly as we were already down to the last three. ‘Boll weevil’ followed by top 2 songs in that order ‘maa rewa’ and ‘kandisa’ wrapping up the proceedings. The last two were particulary good with amazing improvisations and ingenuity from the band members and couple of jugalbandiis between the base and the drums, the lead and the drums and a unique instrument whose name I don seem to find anywhere and the base was particulary awesome. In all a breathtaking experience so much so that I was standing and clapping all through the second act and ended up, me with mohit and gurudev, to buy the entire collection on sale outside.

I was particularly impressed with the lead guitarist Sushmit Sen, and the bassist and vocalist Rahul Ram, the percussionist Asheem and Amit’s drums. Well what the heck, the entire band. Oozing with talent and still down to earth. I had heard that watching a band live is an altogether different experience and so it is , no doubts about that. Sadly the entire thing was not recorded. I wud have been the first one to buy it.


P.S.: Major kick to my inspiration in mastering the guitar. I already can play Maa Rewa now!!

Book Worm Syndrome

The feeling of boredom just echoes s with any and everyone I talk to. Another weekend has arrived…and will pass by as in consequentially as it had started. The days pass really quickly here. It’s already more than 4 months since I have been in the US and can’t really believe that it’s already that long.

Have been spending my days working a little lately, and reading novels and stuff before that. Read almost 4 of them in the recent times. Oldies, almost all of them, Michael Crichton. I seem to like his writing a lot. It’s something to do with the technicality of the underlying subject I guess. His penmanship is almost at the edge of sci-fi, if not actually it. Like the one I am reading currently, Timeline has Quantum Physics as the basis of its plot and it talks about real technology that exists and is further under research in the form of Quantum Internet and the likes. Then there s this another one, The Terminal Man, which talks about the immediate dangers of mind control. The Rising Sun, a corporate thriller from the same author. Interesting reading, all of them.

Coincidentally caught hold of a promotional copy of a book called The Anonymous Lawyer. It’s a unique kind of writing. It’s a combination of web logs and mails of a supposedly hi flying lawyer. And it’s full of corporate bull shit and sadistic humor and off course I liked it too.
That’s a lot of reading and more is to follow, because I have a very big stock of material and further time to gobble it up.

PS: Would like to read more of non fiction, but can’t seem to catch hold of anything.

the missing one...

Sitting yet again at an airport terminal...and heading into yet another country....so now the list after including this one will stand at , lets see...Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, US of A and UK...thats 4 and if you count in the aircraft parking at Paris ,then 5,not bad huh?? This time arnd its a spl trip for a very spl person and for an even special(er)(...if that’s a word) reasons.
Past few weeks have been at times eventful, boring, routine...and somewhere in between. Had a nice little trip to the Niagara falls a couple of weeks back in the august company of goyal family and frnds.Clicked innumerable snaps...infact so many of them...that we eventually got bored of seeing the fall....and at one point in time in the night...were even trying to avoid a glimpse of it. But in all its an exhilarating place....Food for thought....why aren't there any such places in India...well infact  there are...and might even be a shade better than this one....but the state of management is so poor that they have degraded into obscurity. Sighs!!! We almost went under the fall here courtesy a trip called the "cave of winds" originally called so b'cause it actually took you behind the falls at one point of time...now it takes u under. In all a refreshing experience...although missed out on my maiden helicopter ride....but Niagara s not so far...Had a unique experience today, when my train stalled due to a power breakdown spannig 3 states including NY and Philli...you don come to expect such things from a place like US where a power cut is nothing short of a hurricane katrina of intensity 3. And i guess thats why they r a shade unprepared for this kinda stuff....and very shabby at that...it took them all of 3 and a half hours to get a diesel engine to pull a stalled electric train. Running out of battery now on my laptop...will add to this later on.....to be continued..

Still some life in the battery...and further more time to kill...what better way then to punch it out on the lappie.Had a meaningful discussion with Rathore the other day regarding the hot issues in India these days....the astronomical fall of the stock market and even further fall in the morality of one Mr. Arjun Singh, a facade of our rotten system of governance. Don want to delve into the netigrities of the actuals, enough has been written and read and yelled about them already. But the both of us were discussing of what we could be doing for these...vented out anger which ultimately gave way to helplessness, utter hopelessness and a sense of infidelity. Has irreparable damage already been done to our great country...or is there still some ray of hope...a light at the end of the tunnel...believers in both sides of the coin...we diverted to what we could do abt it....and we could only come up with the following brilliant idea "where could we get a gun"...RDB sure has given us some ideas to ponder upon. But it’s all to hypothetical I guess. But you can't stop brilliant minds. Cheers Rathore!!!

Eternal Jim Carrey

Just finished watching this really screwed up movie, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet and a host of other guys. Now from Jim Carrey one does come to expect whacko stuff…and I like him for that. But this one tops all that has come from him till date. Well although he himself is in no way involved in the actual story writing but the character that he portrays is almost inherently what you expect from him. The film takes its name from the lines of Alexander Pope:

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot;
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

This information is courtesy Wikipedia; it also finds a brief mention in the movie itself.

The story’s got something to do with erasing ones bad memories from once brain and getting a chance to start afresh. A very titillating concept to start with, imagine all your bad memories just gone whoosh…and you have a clean slate to work with. But flip over the coin and you lose all the life s lessons that you gained from all those bad experiences and you might end up going through the entire rough patches again.

Who thinks of stuff like this, how do they come up with such concepts?