You know it when..

.. the Indian cricket team stalwarts are on avg 5 years younger
.. the next eye candy Bollywood stars are of same age
.. the IPO seeking CEOs are 5 years older
.. and the budding politicians are 10+ years older

that you are on hope to be on verge of
.. knowing what sports you
.. settling on what shines you
.. leveraging on what gets you going
.. and aah ..  giving up on politics and politicians forever

That it is the year when you had just accomplished 30 years on bloody damn Earth :) ..

This post was triggered by thought that M.S. Dhoni (born July 7, 1981) will be last of the guys to retire, who is older than us 30 something..

मेरा धर्म

मेरा धर्म क्या है?

• मेरे भगवान? 
• मेरा देश? 
• मेरे माँ बाप? 
• मेरा प्यार? 
• या सिर्फ मेरी सोच?

• किस सोच ने बनाया मुझे?
• किस सोच ने मुझे बड़ा किया?
• किस सोच कि आधार पे, मैं अपना रोज निकालता हूँ?
• किस बात पे मुझे गुस्सा आता है? किस सोच पे में जग उथता हूँ?
• यह सोच केवल एक कल्पना या एक fact?

जीवन की यह अनोखी यात्रा पे भटकती मेरी सोच ...

lost in technology...

All this has only made me more delusional. Lying on a bed 14,000 kms away from home, it suddenly struck me too. People have called this chill "the sinking feeling". Right when the lights were off and the laptop was out of my sight and I look up towards the ceiling. I have never been struck with this nostalgia before. Others have been palak paneer, lassi, indian supermarket in jersey city, paan waalah in Atlanta, B4U music + cricket talks with cricket fan, kashmir etc. But never before A ceiling. I know where it is coming from though. It is something I dazed towards until the I dozed off. May be few sleepless nights made it more dearer in period of time.

Now, there is something different about this nostalgia though. It's not the celebrations, it's not the memories of someone, it's not the love. It's purely me. Purely me who has lost touch with home place. Come to think about it many such nostalgic moments have been take care off by who .. wait ..

Communication technology! technology has made me delusional. It has helped me forget oh no not forget but shift my eyes off the glaring fact that I am 14,000 kms away from my home. It has lead me to believe that my mom's voice is not that far away, my friends chat wisdoms are not too distant, my cousins' leh venture is just a facebook away, my right there all the time. It has kept me away from home and still brought all the movies I wanted to watch right at my lap. It has still brought my cricket live to me. It has shown me those diyaas once already and is gonna happen again this Diwali.

So all this, though sounds praise worthy, is scary. I am sure it's not just me who feels this way. How can this new place in middle of nowhere be my new home? how can I just by voices, or decoded live digital images of my loved ones, be so sure they are All right? I can never be. How can they be so sure to believe I still exist for they haven't seen me .. i haven't seen them .. touched or sensed each other ... ??

I could very well be butchered to digitized image of myself, digitized voice of myself, digitized awaaz of myself, digitized intelligence... they don't really know I exist. well turn the tables around - i don't either :( :(

Headache!

9am got up

10 am reached office

12 pm had my lunch

2pm took a small nap

5pm left office

i m tired !! i m so tired that even typing is most difficult job right now ! :(

i have absolutely no clue why!!!???

being an Indian ...

I have wondered.. discussed.. thought .. as in what exactly is being Indian. The chaps living on the other end of Indus river ! ? I have built my affinity to being an Indian on many grounds .. set of common prejudices .. common weaknesses.. common incapabilities.. common jugaad ideas ... common ancestors... and one big one being common raj!! ... how we have been so brought together by those folks!! Hardly we would 've recognized each other if it weren't for them ...

So the point being I witness these Facebook videos on being an Indian .. the Great Indian Zero and Chip inventors of India etc etc... I feel sense of nothing anymore.. I just don't do ! ... its as if the whole idea of being Indian is just a farce .. how can common Bollywood or cricket or Bombay stock exchange or Nehru or Gandhi or IIT or IIM be the only elements of resultant kinship.. and the only other thing that binds us is religion and its people... so am I encompassing all the essentials building blocks of the nation state of being Indian .. or is there more to it? Why I feel like writing about it? Why does goose bumps don't feel genuine anymore? Why do I feel almost nauseated when I feel those goose bumps ...

I know why... cauz I have been doing absolutely nothing about those goose bumps! .. its like that feeling which has made you feel nice time and again .. only now you are just so sick of its vanity!! :(

few posts that I have been bumping into and have bumped into or have keyed in myself - all adding to farcity ...

Update 1 -

1. http://supershanki.blogspot.com/2010/08/fire-in-ice.html

2. http://aristotlethegeek.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/dependence-day/

3. http://speakya.blogspot.com/2008/08/kashmirs-burning.html

Update 3 - I just had to google for one and i knew I would find a news story within 24hrs -

4. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Dalit-woman-paraded-naked-in-Punjab/660374

5. http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_farmer-commits-suicide-in-amravati_1423074 - heard Aamir and Peepli live? :(

Update 2 -

Sandy chose this for the follow up - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epw_4jEnDRU&feature=player_embedded

I chose - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CLgy4H3WNw&feature=fvst

hard times

times hard enough to make me do nothing. I can see myself without a job in another 30 days and i am not working hard enough! ! ! and you know what .. the working hard part... towards WHAT? do I work hard? towards .net lame internship, development lil-lesser-lame internship, IT intern lamest-of-all internship, or this job which has all what i ve learnt... all wat i wish to learn .. and all i want is internship fuck do i care about converting it to full time ! !

Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

1kg boots up the fibula, another kg Skis slid in to those shoes! the first thing person learns when learning to ski is to learn to fall down cauz there is no way to learn otherwise :P

The number of times S took that dive just to avoid hitting the person in front him (cauz he still hadn't figured out how to stop - a technique called pizza) was innumerable. It took him all super human efforts to walk- start slid - see an obstacle - determine best position to fall - make a dive - roll down- regain senses - bend your ankles - regain foot (err ski) hold ! and the multiply that with innumerable times = beaten body next day.

And A had mastered his pizza quite well. He went through steepest the slowest. Man that was caution of the saint. This guy didn't fell down until the very last of his rides (hands down to him).

I gave up figuring out how to get up with those skis on. I too fell down innumerable times but my process was little more longer but less painful. Take my advice always take off your skis and then get your foothold.

Lets get to the fun part. The glide down the hill, skis on the foot, chill on your face, and inevitable fall. All bring part of excitement!! I kept falling down and all 'in deep shit' sense by end of the hill. But when I looked up again, that steep simply pulled me back to it's cliff. Kept doing it every time saying 'one very last time' :P

I hate snow.. i love skiing .. skiing entails snow.. so I cannot hate snow anymore!! but fact remains I LOVE SKIING!!

... date and venue - Feb 28th, Perfect North Slopes, Lawrenceburg, IN

End : Why I never liked this place

all these thoughts cauz i bumped into photos from an alumni party guys and few gals had from our batch of 1999 ... I wondered - i could only recognize a very few of them! who are others??!! i m not even able to recognize those names ! link

all said and done ... one of the few good things that happened to me was a friend indeed! always there in fun!

The End.

Part 3 : Why I never liked this place

contd from .. PTO to day before

So coming to those pranksters, noise makers and irksomeones! damn i hated that guy who used to poke (saala har jagah ungli karta tha) .. i had ticklish stomach so what ... given a chance i would file an abuse case on him now! Then few greyhounds always kept our teacher's on toes.. so much so .. one algebra ma'am actually broke down trying to explain the most irrelevant difference between 'x' and '.' ... I couldn't believe my eyes!! I remember a geometry class which usually had figures on blackboard except for one day the figure put up there was of err.. u know wat .. (8p) . Oh then came the social service camps, those mandatory ones! The SSC were mandated for 10th std in Maharashtra. For this we were sent to Aurangabad, Maharashtra. We wondered, of all the places we are sent to land of Ajanta and Ellora. oh! those rock carvings and our leaking hormones .. damn people went crazy with stories!! All this was topped up by separate boys and girls doubts solving session in the evening. I wonder how many doubts were actually solved that evening. Do not know about girls but guys came out weirdest of instances and Qs.. i remember seeing the instructor's face going OMG! :D. That same camp had plans to show a Jackie Chan movie other day. We all have grown up seeing those movies, but this one turned out to be too much for our grown ups cauz it started with a smooch and whole plan was abandoned right there! damn!! our face went OMG!! grown ups plz plz grow up!!

Then this event that totally is totally frozen in my mind. The song 'Aati kya khandala' was echoed all the places those days and some how a girl student from another school heard it from one of the boys from our school. Well it was St. Xavier's Group Of Schools that had gone for this SSC. Anyways, this girl went crying to our beloved (i hated her though) Ms. Pinto and then the most distressful scene followed. Crying Ms. Pinto, All boys cramped into single room for scrutiny, and leather belt smacking teacher. We weren't frightened because we didn't do anything wrong, but hard leather belt smacker made sure he picked one punching bag among us and he smacked until the boy broke down. Broke down not for the guilt but the pain. I still see that day as worst act of abuse in schools. I wasn't learned enough to lodge a complaint against that teacher, otherwise I would have!!!

...PTO day after

Part 2 : Why I never liked this place..

contd from .. PTO to day before..

Daily routine started with class-teacher doing those attendance calls. Except for the part, i trying to comprehend the noise everything else went about smoothly. It's like a toofaan right in middle of perfect stillness. All there right there in my mind. This lead to me taking least interest on what was ever being taught! I guess I could manage all by myself, given the couple of tuitions, mom's smacks and excellent brain that I had :p. All this lead me, to believe in being street smart and so I knew what to do .. i took interest in Karate and Scouts.. damn! the day I stood up to volunteer for Scouts.. the whole class ROTFLing.. :) and then the Karate .. it sounded too well and for me it just ended being that! .. try pushing out a loudest snort through ur nostrils and there it is all I know about Karate!. I used to like very few subjects and I know which I hated most. It was HINDI! .. and till date when m associated of being the loyal son of HindiLand, i can only smirk at response. I hated it, could never master it and could never take it seriously, for this is my mother tongue and I needn't bother studying it until a day before. About the subjects i liked .. so it turned out that teachers for those subjects were also cool.. maths and science always brought up interesting and cool teachers in our school. Ms. Marwah for Geometry and Ms. Pallavi for science :) or Mr. Venkatesh (all those names sound d same to me) for Algebra .. i remember them ! ... apart from them it was Mr. Joseph for english, who just acted cool along with dumbest person of all PT trainers Mr.Nilesh! Rest came and went and had me only concerned when I had to fill those school notebooks for submission. Know how it used to be, each and every notebook of each and every student of each and every division of each and every class stamped and signed by Principal!! at end of each term. So this lead to hasty copy-paste of history, geography, Hindi, Marathi and English.. well for the Science and Maths i do not remember ever going thru this .. in my defense it was our incomplete curriculum by our incompetent Masternis that lead to all this chaos. Anyways, i didn't care! from what i have learnt (or rather not learnt) history and geography could never be taught. One exception to that now, geography does have some sense if our imbecile minds were made to read it with sense, i remember learning that from one of our geography teacher! she made sense of tundra regions and habitat surrounding that :). Another part of school curriculum i hated was Moral Science. Damn those art work, those oil paints, those ..those ..those hand works with needles and stuff. I used to like painting until i was schooled.

... PTO day after .. :)

Part 1 : Why I never liked this place

Its the place, where everyone goes back to, nostalgically, in fond remembrance. The gates, the bells, the morning assembly, the teachers, the intervals, the vada paos,the PT, the Karate, the Scouts, the Nuisance, the mis-behaviours etc. I do not like to remember any of them now. My school had gates which opened to an over-flowing gutters when it rained, making it really hard to enter. My school bells used to ring up just before i crossed those gates. Next was the chaotic assemblage of some 700-800 students, instructed by Discipline-In-Chargers (another name for Dogs-in-Charge), hostile teachers, and one Principle ! (i do not remember his name now, we used to call him Bull Dog). Once I reached assembly just after the morning news was read, that's when it struck me that it was I, who was suppose to do that today! Then of-course since you are late and lived just 100mts from School, you had to hear all the bullshits which far offs never had to. I hated that part! how does it matter if u lived so close or so far.. its this school which starts so early in day (6.30am) and all this because it needed same class-rooms for lower grades in afternoon. When you are past the assembly, then cleanliness checkers come in(that AB style won't do.. tat Baby needs to cut her nails lil more short). Most of the time I was stuck here too, cauz my hairs won't stop growing and I hated sitting at barbers'. I remember once, it was my Mom-Dad who did my hairs for sake I pass through those eyes. I had this charisma of AB in me ;) liked to keep those hairs pulled straight back ..but that lead the onlooker to believe that u have the extra long hairs and that wasn't allowed! and so my Mom insisted I keep them parted at one end.. anyways that helped me past the eyes many times until the day I was liberated from that place.. i've never ever thought of getting back to that style now !

... PTO day after .. :)

know why i hate this place...

cauz i never found this as home ... cauz i never realized, people here aren't on vacation always... cauz i never thought people are just people who enjoyed as much as i did and sulk worse than i do ... cauz i m not able to comprehend many and much of the dialect here (dialect: my def. The usage or vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific group of people that leaves you dry for seedhi baat) .. cauz the ghosts take over my precious M&D and that is probably so because they have lived through this place as home and not the summer vacationing resort.. cauz they just have altogether different story to take each other on .. cauz i always thought that these people are definitely special ones to laugh about but not to cry and fight about .. cauz they are just too many faces to comprehend and remember when on a trip back from last vacationing .. cauz the people who helped me vacation do not do so any more .. or may be cauz i still like to see change in positive direction rather than the other way .. वाह मेरी hypocrisy!

am I still dreaming ...

.. I still do not know what are the real world realities... I still do not know that the books do not speak the real world... I still do not know why credit, more than merit, proves higher worth ... I still do not know why Modi was the choice of 300+ seats in Guj elections 2003... I still do not know why many still approve of silent religious sectionalizing across India ( i witness this in Mangalore right now) ... I still do not know what made IPL the flavor above the Elections this season ... I still do not know why Kashmir should be ours or theirs ... I still do not know why many think Bush made right choices, if not for America, but for India! ... I still do not know why should we be scared of Obama ... I still do not know why Climate Scare Mongering is what is needed to make person aware of his home ... I still do not know why MJ choose to be MJ that died last thursday ... I still do not know MTV is MTV no more ...
just a last one for now :p...I still do not know why any one would want to marry Rakhi!

to list is aplenty .. the confused soul is 1 ...

'Let me Speak'

... to think of it again ... hope you do not read too much in to this self indulgent words...

i Matrix...

its been almost 10 years since the first one came out.. it hasn't stopped impressing me since, not even after watching for umpteen times. What has impressed me all this time? the action sequences the very first time.. the enigma the next time... the quotes the third time ... the idea ... the analogy ... the performances ... the etc! ...

i Annoy...

..i definitely feel so... It's always been this way... I stay quite ... I look good... and then I speak ... I annoy ... or do i?

i Scribbble

i drink
i eat
i coke
i enjoy
i blog
i work
i work hard
i work hardest
i party
i party harder
i IPL
i roadie
i NDTV
i HBO
i worship
i meditate
i love
i hate
i earn
i spend
i travel
i quibble
i frustrated
i need change
i hope
WE DON'T vote