Frida

Memories.

2008-09-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

She thinks back, and the memories are still there.

It’s like the ancestral home, very much there, and very less visited.

She remembers her grandmother’s deep laugh.

And her grandfather’s gentle smile.

The times her grandfather carried her back from school.

Every time he visited, she would hear his voice, calling out her name, and she left whatever she was doing, and ran into his arms...actually, ran and hugged his legs, she was so small.

The love of grandparents that made her feel she was a princess.... and then they went away, one by one... a year after another.

Just after she became pubescent. And got questions. And uncertainty. Woudn’t it have been better to have her strong grandmother with her when she grew through it. Or her grandfather to give her more of his values.

She’d like to become a grandmother. And hug her grandchildren, and spoil them with sweets, and stories, and give them memories. Call them sweet names that they would always remember and feel warm about.

And try to live till they tell her that they can manage on their own.

She

2008-09-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

She’d like to be like the brook, rolling on, past stones and thorns, smoothing them down, bending herself to fit new grooves, constantly reinventing herself, and when the sun shines, people would look into her and see themselves in her sparkling and radiant beauty. And when it is dark, they would hear her, and gain comfort from the sound.

Good start to the day.

2008-09-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

We always think of the autowallahs as lazy people questing after our blood, or at least our wallets.
Sometimes, you get the fortune of riding the auto of someone so industrious, you feel happy to have met him.
I was lucky that way, when I took an auto from NGV to Ejipura signal.
My first surprise was that the driver agreed to drop me for the actual price.
Around half way, we saw another driver pushing his auto, obviously low on petrol.
This guy waited till that auto was to the left and in front of ours, stuck his left leg out so that it touched the other auto and continued driving. In this way, he pushed the auto till the nearby petrol pump.
It was a nice start to the day. To see someone honest, enterprising, and helpful.

Stuff

2008-09-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been surfing like crazy on my free time, and have been seeing some really nice pictures and videos.
I chanced on this pic, and found it really funny:
http://incredimazing.com/page/Caught
Narendra ‘s blog is very funny. He has linked some really funny videos too. I was too lazy to get the actual video link and embed it....
http://narendrashenoy.blogspot.com/2008/09/laughed-my-beast-of-burden-off.html
http://narendrashenoy.blogspot.com/2008/07/must-watch-for-engineers-humans-may.html
http://narendrashenoy.blogspot.com/2008/09/laughed-my-beast-of-burden-off.html
Benny Lava:
I thought we had seen the end of Benny Lava, but not yet...
Click here if you haven’t heard of benny lava before.
And this is the Croatian remake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT17krg3NtU
Absolutely funny.. I laughed as much as others might have laughed watching the original.
I even downloaded the buffalaxed version, and the Croatian one, and ran them in parallel. The steps are totally in Sync, and it is much funny that way.
And I admit, I got a high from seeing them white folks dancing to a tamil song.
That’s it for today.
Wanted to write a real post today.
My muse visits me only in the day,
And I forget by night what she had to say.
So I had to dredge up some comic stuff and put here.
Bye for now people...

2008-09-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

I was a compulsive blogger on the intranet at my previous company.

After I quit, it was a forced sabbatical… now I think I’ll start again…

All I need is the habit of blogging regularly… guess would get the words flowing, yes the same ones that are stuck at my fingertips right now.

Look forward to more posts…

Idly yours

2008-07-08T04:48:00.000-07:00

The place where I live is not the optimal for people paranoid about health

It depressed me no end to see people use asbestos at home, till I shut myself to the thought. I get even more flustered when my grandmother, (a glorious 70 years old), spreads DDT around the legs of our dining table, to prevent ants from climbing up.
What about the time I looked under my mattress (made by my other granny, now deceased) and found that it seeped DDT? She had thought it was a great idea to keep pests away.

Very recently, I had another reason to freak out.

I stay as a paying guest in Bangalore, and “PG uncle” provides us food and board (which is just a bed and cupboard for yourself) for a modest 4200/-.

I have found this place okay for the most part, their food is palatable, and Uncle is a pro when it comes to south Indian dishes, like idly, dosa, and ooooh, thick sambhar and chutney… so much that I regularly look forward to idly day and dosa day every week.

A few weeks back, I went into the kitchen to get breakfast, and since Uncle was not around, I opened the cooker myself to take the idlies out.

And that is when I realized that he was using plastic paper instead of cloth, as a lining for the idly plates.

I later asked him about it, and mentioned that plastic is the main source of cancer.

He answered that all restaurants in town use the same method, so that idly is perfectly shaped, and does not break like it would if you use cloth. He has been eating and cooking the same for quite some time, and was healthy, so he did not find a reason to stop using plastic lining for idlies.

I realized that my concerns about idly were considered idiosyncratic, and there was little I could do except avoid eating idly outside for the rest of my life.

But then, as my very good friend pointed out to me, people on average live longer in these plastic-infested and pollution-high times, than a couple of generations back.

So maybe an increased risk of cancer is not a bad tradeoff at all…I might as well help myself to some plastic coated idlies..

PJs

2008-07-08T04:42:00.000-07:00

For the uninitiated, the most common expansion of PJ is a Poor Joke.
If you have been in the field long, of PJ-ing, you would know that PJ could also mean a Pleasant Joke, a Passable Joke, a Pathetic Joke, or even a Please Jump-outa-the-window signal!
There are variations too, Like DAJ - a Desperate Attempt at a Joke.
I felt like remembering the PJ's I used to write on the fly, in my previous company...

Q:How do you chase home a lazy diner?
A:Uto, and get an auto

(In my previous company, the beverages from the Nestle vending machine tasted much better than from the Lipton vending machine, so..)
Q:What is the difference between tea from the Nestle vending machine, and the Lipton vending machine?
A:One is Nestea, the other is Nasty.

Q:What do you call a pregnant South Indian?
A:A gravid dravid.

Octopus Eats Shark

2006-12-20T03:13:00.000-08:00


Watch this scary video of a shark being actually eaten by an Octopus... Used to admire sharks.. now my admiration's elsewhere :-)

She turned on the TV and screamed.

2006-12-09T05:39:00.000-08:00

Ammani had suggested the above title in her blog.
Her one-minute stories are simply amazing.
This is my version of the story.What is yours?

She turned on the TV and screamed.
Her friend called her up to say she was on TV.
They were showing the protest she had participated in over the weekend.
Quick, switch on the TV, they are showing a close up of you.
She rushed to the living room, hoping that the green salwar she wore that day was not too crumpled, and that her hair was not too out of place.
She turned on the TV, and screamed.
There she was, yelling for increase in teacher's wages.
Till that moment, she never realized how much she looked like her mother when she was angry.

You do not have the right to enjoy guilt.

2006-11-13T19:18:00.000-08:00

Do not deride yourself that you have lapsed into a moment of depression.
A chink in your armor of positive thinking does not mean you have failed.
Things are not as bad as they seem, and you are not bad as think you are.
Forgive yourself before you forgive others.
Smile at the lapse, laugh even, draw your strength from your laughter, and plod on.
Your goal is not to be perfect, nor to do perfect things. They are secondary.
Your goal is to first fall in love with yourself, and then share the love with the world.

How the pizza got its name...A very tamil story, but not for the serious minded

2006-11-13T19:10:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the pizza was initially a Tamil dish???
Back then, pizza didn’t have any topping, was made of rice, and was called Oothappam (it still is called the same in Tamilnadu).
There was an enterprising Tamil lady, who ran a wayside inn in those days. Business was slow, so she reinvented the Oothappam. She made it out of wheat flour rather than rice flour, which was the standard for dosas. There were other changes, but then the result looked the same.
Slowly, people started trickling in, to taste her new dish, but she wanted more customers.
What did she do? Simple, she pitched in some more creative ideas, by melting cheese, and putting it on top of the wheat Oothappam, along with whatever leftover she found in the house. By the way, she called it a topping.
Finally the business boomed. There was one problem, though. When people tore the Wheat Oothappam into slices, the melted cheese used to tear ever so disgustingly into long strands, and got all over the place, and over people's fingers. (You will find it the same way in today’s pizza).
The lady being very neat, didn’t want cheese strands in her dining area. So she would tear the slices herself and only then give it to the customers. Hungry customers would eagerly wait for her to tear the slices, and then yell “Pitchuttaa!!” meaning “She tore”.
“Pitchuttaa” over time was shortened to "Pitcha", and this became the name of the dish.
And then Marco Polo, the Italian wanderer with no work to do (Guess he was on bench), visited India…
After that… you know how the story goes… Pitcha made its way into the Italian menu, got a local name there, and came back to India as Pitza, or the Pizza. By that time generations had come and gone, and the wheat Oothappam was long forgotten by Indians.

It is the same as when Kalari payattu traveled to Japan / China and came back as Karate.
We Indians need some one else to teach us our own good customs… Well, that’s the way things are.

By the way, if you like / hate / don’t care about this story, please leave your comments/suggestions here. I'd be happy to read them

Starting off...

2006-11-13T19:02:00.000-08:00

Thanks for dropping by..

Friends keep asking me....
"Why not blog???"
"I have once... in the office"
"Why not an external blog??"

hhmm... why not... thathasthu....
Yaan petra inbam, peruga iv vayyagam !!!
(me having happiness, let the world also have !!!)

And the usual disclaimers...
Blog my personal whiteboard... I writing anything... you chosing to read or to skip...
Free world, huh??

Do stop by whenever you feel the world is not crazy enough..