How can they be happy at a time like this?

I was flipping thro the channels on a lazy Sunday evening and "Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na" came on, right about the time when the friends have gone on a drive when the car breaks down.

So while they are cursing the guy who owns the car and are looking for someone to give them a lift, there's not a word about what happens to the car. And then they get into the back of the truck and start singing a song. No worries that their car is in the middle of nowhere.

How can you sing at a time like this?!?!

Or maybe it's the ability to sing especially at a time like that is what I need to learn. Shit happens. Shit happens on a daily basis. So why worry.

Only problem is: My folks would have kicked my ass all the way to Guantanamo Bay had I left my car in the middle of the road. I would have heard about it every time I took the car out for a long drive. Oh, now I remember why I can't sing at a time like this!

But hang on, I didn't get my dad's car to go on long drives anyways! The first long drive I ever did was when I bought my own car. And even if it did break down, there's very little hell my folks could put me thro. After all, it is my car! So I do need to learn to sing at a time like this!

But then, what about all the luggage? What about vandalism? What about people just taking my car apart piece by piece? After all, I am paying for that car with my blood, sweat and tears. Plus it's my first car! So you can say I am quite a bit attached to the car! So I would worry and I would worry some more till I got the car back home and to the garage. Hmmm, another reason not to sing at a time like this.

So much confusion!

I guess movies show a lot of young folks living care free lives and having a ball. And as A-Ha said more than 20 years ago, "The Sun Always Shines On TV". But most of us, who live in the real world, have to worry about these things, but subconsciously we are all fed the same fairy tale. We all want to be care free and really live every moment to its fullest rather than get bogged down by worries.

I guess responsibility is life's way of saying to us: "Hey now, Hey now, Don't dream it's over!"

Aromas of China, Taste buds in Heaven

Felt like eating Chinese food for lunch today, for no rhyme or reason.

After a lot of deliberation, we decided on Aromas of China at Richmond Circle. When we entered, we noticed the festive decor celebrating Chinese New Year and we were informed that they had a special menu for just the occasion. So we decided to order things from that menu and boy, was I blown away!

We ordered the Sliced Chicken with Peanut Butter Sauce (Chicken Bann Bann if I recall correctly) and steamed spiced wantons. The chicken just blew me away. It was spicy and sweet and tangy and my taste buds had a field day. Perfect start.

For the main course, I had chosen the Mongolian Pepper sliced lamb. This dish rocked! The lamb was ever so thinly sliced and cooked so nicely that it seemed to melt in my mouth. And the flavour, oh the flavour! I could not resist ordering more just so I could take it home and eat it again (which I did…for dinner) :-)

I recommend you try it!

I'm looking up...

By me, I mean my blog :-)

OK So I know I have just started writing after a long absence, but that does not mean that I gave up on all the vanity I have accumulated over the years. So obviously I was curious as to how much traffic the blog is getting. Here's what I saw:

I started out towards the end of 2004, so I ignored that year. Between 2005 and 2006, I started to write quite often and saw a nice rise in the number of people coming to my site. The peak seems to be 2007, but there were fewer people coming back to the site.

Here's the astonishing part: I didn't blog much during 2008 and not at all in the whole of 2009, yet there are over 5500 hits and over 3000 unique visitors to my blog. And since I have started, I'm averaging as much as I was during the peak of 2007, so I guess that's a good start.

But there is another thing: 75% of the people who land on my blog usually land there because of some search string they keyed in on Google (usually some variant of the word "bakwas") and they leave within 5 seconds after they realize that these are nothing but the ramblings of a deranged man. But then…

If they stick a little longer than 5 seconds, they invariably tend to stay on for between 2 and 5 minutes. And these are the people who usually come back and stay for between 5 and 20 minutes. And that is the 25% that make my regular returning readers.

And it is to you, my 25%, that I want to thank for putting up with the bu11$h1t that I am infamous for posting up here.

I will keep endeavoring to make my bu11$h1t more tolerable and easier to swallow (yuck!).

Scheduled Maintenance

We usually get these mails from our System Administrators down in the office telling us something or the other in the backend is being upgraded or repaired or installed anew. But this topic has nothing to do with computers at all.

It's about me.

The last couple of weeks, I realized that I had had a little too much of the old nicotine stick, so much so that I had gotten to the point where I was fidgeting for one if I had nothing else to do. And I realized that the more inactivity I had, the more I was going towards it. And not because my body needed it, but because my mind had nothing else to do.

So I waited for the party yesterday afternoon to get over with, had one last stick (for a few days anyways) and have not picked it up since. I know it's been a very short period of time, just 24 hours, but I'm there and I have not felt like lighting up the entire time.

As an added bonus, I have decided to take a break from alcohol as well…for a while at least. Usually, alcohol is the reason people revert to smoking and I don't want to give myself that reason for temptation. Will go into dry dock for a few weeks till my body feels like it used to before I started binging.

So the system is under scheduled maintenance and will be unavailable for smokers and alcohol parties for a few weeks.

Early 30's

I was wishing a friend of mine on her birthday and she mentioned how she was still in her "Early 30's" which got me thinking.

Of course, this thinking has been on for a while now, specifically as I was hurtling towards my 35th birthday last year. The thought all this while was that I was approaching Half Time in this game that is my life and it had been a pretty uneventful first half with no real goals and not enough creativity in the play. So the whole of last year was about changing all the things that are dragging my life - and my performance in the game that is my life - down and to embark on things that stimulate my thought and fire up my spirit.

While I have been successful with a few of those - I have started writing again (still sketching the framework for my novel), my photography is improving (but is still a long LONG way to go), golf has never been better - I have not yet seized my life and taken complete control of it. Which is where the catch is. I still haven't found what I'm looking for (Sorry U2).

And so the chat yesterday about the early 30's rang a bell in the same tiny part of me that is my brain, reminding me of the quest I embarked on more than a year ago.

In a couple of months, I will no longer be in my early 30's. I will have officially stepped across a boundary, all in the matter of a few days, which will carry me into the realm of the late 30's. Everything after that spells O.L.D. Even if you say you're in your early 40's, it's still old, isn't it?

So here I am, on the crossroads of my life, on the threshold of starting the second half of this game. Let's hope I will do better in this half and that this half will be a lot more exciting than the first half (which was boooooring).

Wish me luck!

1411

That's how many Tigers are left in India.

Just to put things in perspective…

1. There is 1 tiger for every 830,000 people in our country.

2. There is 1 tiger for every 5 square kilometers of "Tiger preserve" marked reserve forest.

3. There is 1 tiger for every 100 kilometers within India's Wildlife Sanctuaries.

Let's face it. As a people and as a race, we are not helping the environment. And I know it is easy to say that this is all talk and that nothing happens in this country and that nobody does anything. But think about it. Even if two people read this blog, and those two people tell it to two more people, who tell it to two more people, eventually we will have together raised a lot of awareness and hopefully some action to solve this problem.

After all, this is the Year of the Tiger (according to the Chinese calendar) and we owe it to every single species that shares this planet with us.

If you have a better idea, please share it and we can all get behind it. If you don't, the least you can do is spread the word and increase awareness. Help me.

U.S.B. 2.0

I have a daughter who's 9, but thinks (and behaves) like she's in her teens.

The other day, she kept going on how her hair is not right, how her skin colour is too dark and how she is - in general - quite ugly. No matter what we said or did could change her opinion of herself. And she really is quite a pretty girl (if I might say so myself), so I could not really understand where this was coming from.

So I went to youtube and showed her a couple of videos (specifically this one and this one) to show her how, as a society, we have a distorted and false image of beauty and that it matters more to be a beautiful person from the inside rather than worry about what people think of you from the outside.

I knew I had softened her opinion, but I had not won the battle.

So I went reverse psychology :-)

By some sheer coincidence, an advert for "Ugly Betty" was coming on TV at exactly that time. So I said to her, "yeah, you're right. You're just like her. But you're not really ugly, so you must be stupid! So from now on, I will call you Ugly Stupid Betty…USB for short!" And I would call her that every now and then. Every time she complained about it, I would remind her that I was merely agreeing with her original opinion, so she had no right to complain.

Finally, she looked at me and said "look, see my face, do I look ugly? I don't! So stop calling me USB"

So I changed it to USB 2.0 (Unbelievable Sundar Baby)…for those who don't understand Hindi or Marathi, Sundar means beautiful. So now she's USB 2.0 with the caveat that if she ever reverts to her original opinion, I will revert to the original name.

She hasn't once mentioned anything other than how happy she is with the way she looks the last few days...

Crisis averted! :-D

I hit an Eagle…literally

I had a buddy of mine visiting me in Bangalore and by sheer coincidence, his friend - who happens to be an avid golfer - was also in Bangalore. Needless to say, we planned a round at KGA.

One word can describe the way I played. SHANK!

So obviously I was playing quite badly. But the thing that surprised me the most happened after I had teed off on the 7th hole. My drive landed in the fairway bunker and I had to play an aggressive 8 iron to the green from there from a tough lie. I thinned the ball a bit and it flew over the lip of the bunker and…went and hit an eagle who was beyond my line of sight. I didn't even know I had hit it till my caddies shouted out that I had hit an eagle. From where I was, there was no way I could have hit the green and sunk it.

It was only after I saw this poor bird lying on the ground did I realize what he meant!

I was feeling so shitty then, this poor defenseless bird getting hit with a really hard object traveling at quite some speed.

Luckily, I was there to see the eagle soar and fly off.

Aall is well! Thank the Force!

Answering your iPhone in the cold

A couple of my buddies did a very interesting tour across Europe during the last couple of weeks. They went from Vienna to Budapest to Warsaw to Krakow to Auschwitz to Berlin to Copenhagen to Munich and back! PHEW!

And the killer point…it was snowing quite heavily!

So naturally I was curious as to what they did on the trip (as I want to do a similar trip, but not in the cold).

One of the funniest things I heard was how they answered calls on their iPhone. And the reason its so funny is that since they were in multiple layers of clothing and heavily gloved, and the iPhone needs the user to "slide to answer", they used the strongest muscle in the human body to do it.

They used their TONGUE!!!

Yep, thats right! They used their tongue to slide and answer the phone.

I thought that was really REALLY funny and yet and amazing solution to answering the iPhone in the cold.

Just make sure that the phone is clean and has not been to any disgusting places :-)

What nationality?

Now before there is furore, let me clarify right away. I am a proud Indian thro and thro! Love this country (despite all its flaws and its problems) and very strongly believe that it's people (not the number of them, but their characters and culture) that make India different from any other place in the whole world.

But this post is obviously not about my patriotism…

This worm started with someone accusing me of switching sides when Schumi (Michael Schumacher for all you F1 neophytes) joined the Mercedes F1 team this year. Having been a long time supporter of Schumi and therefore Ferrari, I was very much a part of the Tifosi, the largely in red support group around the Prancing Horse.

And that got me thinking…and I realized:

I am Indian when I watch cricket.

I am Swiss when I watch tennis (except when it's doubles, where I am Indian again).

I am American when I watch golf.

I am British when I watch football.

I used to have dual citizenship (Germany and Italy) while watching F1, but have turned in my Italian citizenship to be an all and out German.

I am Indian again when I watch hockey.

I am Finnish when I watch the World Rally Championship.

I am American again when I watch basketball.

Wow! When it comes to sport, I am a global citizen :-)

Fire!

I landed late last night from Delhi and the last thing I wanted was a
truck catching fire right in the middle of the airport road.

But since luck and I didn't share the best of relationships, there it was.

So we spent 25 minutes waiting for the smoke to clear and then finally got on our way. Hope no one was hurt in the fire.

Q(uite a few) B(eers) A(fter)

Facebook surprised me yesterday. I put a status message that I had landed in Delhi and got a comment back telling me that my buddy from Singapore was also in Delhi. So of course I called him and we agreed to meet in the evening for drinks and dinner.

The place we decided to meet is a lounge called Q'BA (pronounced Queue Baa) at Connaught Place. It turned out to be a surprisingly nice place. Music not too loud, comfortable seating, nice food, great service and an option to either sit in or go to the open roof top seating area. Since it was Delhi in the winters, we chose to sit in.

I ended up meeting a couple of his colleagues (one of them turned out to be from my first company and somehow knew me…go figure!) and his engineering-college-time buddy, a boisterous and animated Mr Amardeep "Dippy" Singh. Together, we regaled ourselves with stories of a long gone era, reliving our days in college and of hostel life. And in the process, consumed quite a bit of alcohol. That led to the idea of going out being relegated to the trash can (I use a Mac, so no recycle bin here) and we decided to order food at Q'BA itself.

Which turned out to be a good idea. The food was nice and we saved ourselves an unnecessary tour of Delhi late in the night trying to hunt for a place serving decent food.

Only thing against Q'BA was the bill…or rather the amount that we had consumed. Thank the force that we had someone with us who earned in S$ :-D

A nice place, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have a conversation without screaming at the people around while sitting comfortably having nice food…albeit for a price.

Print your blog?

Was surprised to see this link on my blog composition page. What is does is takes your blog link and gives you a preview of what your blog would look like if you do choose to have it printed.

Curious as to what it will look like, I tried it. And it does not look half bad. And I realized my blogging would result in a mammoth 357 page tome!

But here is the catch:

Do I look like an idiot to spend $140 on printing the drivel that I dish out? Insane, isn't it?

But I admit, I am tempted to get the digital copy for $8. No harm in spending $8, no?

What do you say?