Virtual Ramblings

Yesterday, I did my 500th post over here at virtual rambling. Yep “Kiss” was my 500th post on this blog.
I can’t believe that I just did that, remembering myself who had no clue as to what to communicate, what to write, and scrambled thoughts always. Today I am filled with nostalgia from blog world, people, posts and friends, so many over the last two years I have spent over here. I thought it would be nice to walk down the memory lane, and remember some of the blog world nostalgia.

When I began blogging, I really did not know how it works out, are you supposed to just blog, get someone to read your blog, tell your friends that you have started blogging, advertise, or just don’t bother about all this and just write, I think I decided to tell my friend, and “Random Thoughts” was my first reader.

That reminds me, “Virtual Ramblings” was not the first choice for my blog, it did start with the name “Random Ramblings”, just a week and “Random” got the ax, “Ramblings” survived though :).

I was very apprehensive with people online, and I hardly interacted with any blogger online. I am not sure how she came across my blog, but Ireland who used to write at “The windmills of my mind“, she was the first one whom I spoke over the IM, shared my real identity, and it was fun knowing her as a person. Its been a long time since I sent her an email, or spoke to her on IM. It would be nice to get her back to blogging. I did shoot her an email today.

There were parts of me which I totally ignored, I found it really difficult to acknowledge those hidden emotions in me, and thats when I came across Ideasmithy at XXfactor happened, and an idea of starting an exclusive blog for my pure pursuits. The idea got me in touch with people with so many different approaches to life. Many people participated in the body or soul series, and many have remained very good blogging friends. Paisley who writes over at “Why Paisley” has been one blogger who has always given me a different view, someone who always breaks the cliche, comes out with an alternative look at my subjects over at pure pursuits.

Finding someone who really gets what you mean, corrects you when they feel you are wrong, is very difficult, not just a word that you are wrong, but also make sure you get their point and realize what you are doing wrong, I was fortunate enough to find a friend who did all this, its been a real pleasure to know a good friend sunshine.

He has been my sole regular male reader for as long as I can remember now. Extremely talented writer, Matt writes over at My life as a conscious observer

Prompts, it began with “Poetry Thursday” which my good friend Darlene used to participate, I got hooked on, and then moved on writer’s island, and then many others to follow. Silverneurotic one of my oldest blog buddies introduced me to Heads or Tails, which I continue to enjoy doing every Tuesday.

Blogs were meant for discussion and honest opinions, so there were times when there was strong opinions against my posts, some of you might remember “couple of good news“, and it was real fun discussing the point of views with ashu over the post .

A couple prompts and a scribbling of poems does not make me a poet, does it, I was reminded of this by a critique over at this post, good to be brought down to ground once in a way.

I said this is one of the previous posts, there are few people who write informative blogs, highly passionate about their subjects, do research about the facts and provide you amazing factual evidence, something which I never do. Nita and Shefaly both have provided me with a different approach to blogging. I still remember Shefaly as the one who made me spell something right, something my teacher could not get me to do.

Books, so many people have suggested me books over here, I am so thankful to many people, It would be stupid to list them out here, but people thank you so much for the book suggestions.

It’s amazing how many new people I have got to read in this blogosphere, some who have got me hooked on, and some who have made me really wait for their next posts. I wish I could export my google reader over here.

Guys thank you so much for all the memories you have given me.

Veens had tagged me to link ten people, I think this counts :).

Why do I have a strong feeling that 500 should be it, the “end“?

Some of the weird things I have prayed for…

Oh God,
Please make sure we get the movie tickets today
[I am very passionate about my movies]

Oh God,
Please let her not get more marks than me in kannada
[It was my weakest subject in middle school, and used to always loose top position because of this subject]

Oh God,
Please make me big enough, to fit into normal adult jeans
[I had a tough time moving up to waist 26, where all  pairs of standard jeans began]

Oh God,
Let me wake up one day, and power of my eye vanish
[Used to hate wearing specs as a kid, even now I do]

Oh God,
Let me not get any calls tonight,
[On days I am on call, I may have to wake up middle of night and work]

Oh God,
Please get me the joker, in the next time I pick a card.
[Card games can be fun, and am never less competitive]

Oh God,
Let India win today, don’t want them to loose this one..
[Cricket is an important part of most of us]

Oh God,
Please do make the Microprocessors paper go easy
[The only subject which I thought I would have tough time. Surprise surprise I got highest marks in that]

Oh God.
I want to ask something, but having nothing on mind now, so just surprise me this time
[he he believe me I did this once/twice]

And the list continues…

Skittles has an interesting topic for this week’s Heads or Tails. She wants us to share a fond memory. I could’ve brought something out of the my 26 year old memory bank, but I chose to bring out a very recent memory, something as recent as this weekend.

This weekend I took a break from my routine work and decided to take a small weekend vacation with my my parents, my cousin and his family, and my aunt’s family. It began with a plan to spend the weekend at a resort, only to find out they were all booked, we didn’t want to cancel, so decided to spend the weekend at my aunt’s place instead. However we just stopped over on the way to Mysore, to see if there were any last minute cancellation at the resort we wanted to stay, and to our surprise we found what we were looking for. We booked for a single night stay for Saturday, and we negotiated a good deal from Saturday morning till Sunday late afternoon. What followed was a string of sweet memories.

• Nostalgia from years down the line spent in Mysore with my two cousins, the times we have had fun, places visited and pranks relived, fun remembered. Sometimes it fun just reliving the moments from the past
• An Aunt’s special dinner, with a delicacy which she prepared the best, I have to admit I ate a little too much
• A place which is very small, and has an almost unnoticeable grandeur, well I am not talking about the famous Mysore palace, but a place called “Mylari hotel”, famous for their amazingly soft Masala Dosa. Saturday morning spent over a sooper cool breakfast.
• Being greeted by some Bikini clad people at the resort by the pool [well I am naughty sometimes :)]
• An hour spent along the river kaveri, trying to help my 6 year old niece catch a fish.
• Hours spent lazing in the pool, without knowing how to swim, and almost blind without my specs, with my niece and my cousins.
• Playing cards with the family till 1 am filled with roars of laughters and lots of fun.
• Sleeping till 9:30 in the morning to be woken by a bored niece
• A trip to a local hillock and a very calm temple, walking bare foot in a scorching sun.
• A long enacting of a being a wild flower, with a lot of swaying and hushing noise as well, my niece is playing a flower in her summer camp’s play. So we got a demo of her play as well as the dance she is gonna perform.
• A post lunch card game to wrap up a lovely weekend spent, with a lot of fond memories to carry away from.

Remember the question I asked some time back?

“People who do not affect us, people who really do not care much about us, people who were close to us once upon a time, people who have grown up and apart, why do they still matter to us so much?, why can’t we forget that people who have drifted apart?“

I think I am back to the same thought again today, I think I found the answer, “Time”, how effectively it makes us forget people, and reduced their need, their importance.

This put a even bigger question on my mind, are people really important?, people who did not stand the test of time, do they still matter to us?, is “mattering” just a function of time?, or time just hides the importance and people will be back to haunt us soon.

Topic over at skittles today for Heads or Tails is “Fool”, in spirit of April 1st being the world fools day. This also happens to be the day when one of my close friend P turns an year older. So wishing him a very happy birthday!.

Years ago when I was a teenager, the movie Titanic released in India. This was one of those over hyped movies, which everyone wanted to see, the movie got released in many theaters and all of the shows were running full. The word about a nude scene by Kate Winslet had spread like wildfire in our high school and all of catch the movie, so we boys went early in the morning to stand in the queue and got tickets for the evening show paying a huge amount for the ticket, almost more than half of monthly allowance around that time. I did not like the movie that much, I found it really boring. We came out of the movie hall fuming at the censor board for depriving us of basic pleasures, and also robbing us by taking such high ticket fares. What fools we were, both to expect censors to be liberal in India, and also to think such big of celebrity nudity.

Anyways, the actual story I was thinking about is not that one, slightly related though. I did not tell at home that I had watched the movie, mainly because Titanic was released in India with an A certificate, [Adults only movie]. A group of cousins came home on a Sunday morning and persuaded my father to let me go to the movie with them, and my father obliged. Now I was not interested, because these guys were planning to watch Titanic, and I had already seen it, I did not want to spend so much on the tickets again, nor could I tell them I had already seen the movie, I kind of struggled to excuse myself out of the plans, finally I brought out the triumph card, saying I had a test the next day and I had to prepare. This was too good a weapon, so I got excused and all my cousins went for the movie. This was the night show, the one which begins at 9:30pm and finishes at around 12:30 am. Since one of my cousins stayed with us, we had given him the keys so that when he comes back late in the night, he can open the door and let himself in.

I slept at my usual time of around 9:30pm thinking that these guys will be late, at around 10:30 I heard a noise and I woke up to see that my cousin was already back, I was surprised because I had already seen tickets with them, and was wondering how come they were back so early. I was too sleepy to ask though, so just went ahead and slept. Next morning, I came to know what happened. Apparently these guys went in a little late to the movie, since the lights were already off, they went to the person with the torch to show them their seats, he promptly showed them the seats and went away, these guys began to watch the movie, when few people came their claiming the seats to be there’s, looking at the tickets these people realized they had been duped, the guy showed them the seats had exchanged the tickets to that of an older show, and sold them outside for a huge money. [Sunday night show for a big movie fetches big money]. My cousins fought with the manger in the movie hall, and every possible person but in vain. So finally they were thrown out. Poor guys came home with a long face looking sad, feeling foolish to get duped in such a way. Everybody at home scolded them for being foolish and careless not to look after their tickets .

The topic today over at skittles is “Part of our house”. I did not find any part of my house that excited me. Well, I do like my shower a lot, mainly because that’s the place where I get lot of ideas, and I also love the kitchen because that’s the place which gets me my favorite food, but both of these places were not something which I wanted to write about.

Over the years, modernization has set into our lives, but until very recently, when I say recently till 2004, we had an interesting corner in our house, in bathroom to be precise. We had the traditional water heater or what we call “hande” or “neer vale” which means a water stove. Even though we used the electric geysers to heat water daily, once a month or so we used to use this traditional way to heat water. It mainly runs on wood, and saw dust, but we used to it generally, to get rid of waste paper and the waste hard paper cartons that came along as the packaging material with any items we buy. It was my mom’s ritual of heating water with the waste stuff to take a nice relaxing oil bath.

I was always fascinated by this corner in our house, because as a kid I loved to watch the smoke which used to escape from the long pole attached to the stove. I mean we had a broken pipe, so the smoke would leak out and get out of the window. The sight of escaping smoke was something which always interested me for hours. No wonder as a kid I spent more time in the bathroom looking at this, rather than finish my bath.

All was not great about these boilers, since we used them very rarely, the place where the wood burned was a place where rats could easily hide, in the night when one entered the bathroom one needed to be very careful not step on the rats which came out in night. But still the stove was worth retaining, for the nostalgia I had associated with that corner.

Now that we have moved on all we have is a solar water heater on the top of our house heating water sans fun, sans tradition.

I searched hard for the photos for people who have not seen what I am talking about, unfortunately not much of pics around.

Here’s one of the full fletched ones, which I used to find only in our native villages.

http://flickr.com/photos/akshath/1890732239/
http://flickr.com/photos/surendarb/2240613909/

This is a not so clear view of the typical ones we had in our houses in old Bangalore

http://flickr.com/photos/hiremaga/72308714/

Guys before I end todays Heads or Tails topic, I wanted to tell something, l kind of missed last week’s heads or tails as I had some connection issues at home. The topic last week  was “green”. I wanted to post a link to a poem which I had written some time back about magic of green, here it is “Magic”

Random Thoughts:
Recently I read a comment “here“, even though I thought the whole post was with a sense of humor, my eyes did catch a comment which said about about being tongue tied when guys approach a thinking woman. Lets forget about the distinction of being a thinking women, and take women in general, how many of the men really approach a woman and talk freely. I guess there is a lot of difference with boy approaching a girl, and a man approaching a woman. I have seen and have myself been at one point of life in the category where the shyness in approaching a person of opposite sex was very high. I think somewhere we grow out of it, may be that is called maturity, or may be we just grow up. Coming back to the comment about thinking man/woman, I do not think there is anyone who does not think, may be the topics we think about may vary, and also our sensibilities.

Random update:
Driving classes, I have finally started ticking of things I planned to do in next two years. I started my driving classes last week. Waking up early was never an issue for me, but it had been quite a while since I got scoldings from some one, when my driving instructor scolds me early in the morning sometimes, I feel like being in my primary school, where my teacher used to scold me for not doing my work properly. It is almost the same environment as before,where I do some silly mistakes and the instructor is all set to pounce on me. Its still all in fun

Random Reality:
Last week has been really taxing mentally, I had a feeling of an unknown urgency, an unknown mental blockage, I was not able to think for most of the week. It all changed on Friday, as I reached home a little early, there was a big power cut, for about two hours, I had nothing to do, I was laying on the bed, that cleared my anxiety very much. I began to think again properly, and for a change, the unscheduled power cut in my locality had a great soothing effect on me. Well I did receive some comments about writing block on my post of Thursday, more than the writier’s block, it was my mental blockage which was making me very anxious, I am glad to be out of it

Random changes:
For starters I hate to change my routine life, more importantly I hate to change things associated with me. It took almost more than 2 years for my cousin to make throw out my old outdated mobile. I guess I am guilty of attaching too many memories to things. This week I finally am going to move onto a different number, I mean I am changing my network provider, it had been Hutch from last 5 years, and the same mobile number for as long as I can remember. Finally they have lost my loyalty and me my number. Not that many people call me on my mobile.. still its something which I brought with my first earned salary, even though I lost the instrument the number had a lot of memories associated with it.

Random Nostalgia:
Speaking of mobile phones, and memories, the week had a lot of nostalgia associated with it. Somehow I was ending up remembering many people and incidents from the past, not just the incidents even the movies I saw, kind of had memories associated with it. The week had some interesting movies being shown early in the morning in one of the channels, just in time of my breakfast when I get to have 20 mnts of TV time. Why do we do this, why do we associate memories with things around us. Its not just a movie, its the people who have watched with, the state of mind I was in when i watched the movie.
BTW, that reminds me, Its been quite sometime since I watched “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.. should catch it on DVD

Random quotes:
This was an interesting observation made my fellow blogger shefaly on one of my posts extremes. “Rambler: Have you considered an academic career? I notice you notice things (empirical data) and then try and identify a pattern (define algorithm or propose hypothesis) around them. And of course, from what we know, you are not married so this discussion is purely academic, no? “
Actually this kind of surprised me, she might have just joked about this, but does Rambler really do this?, hypothesize a lot on available data and experiences?..

So goes Gavin DeGraw’s song. Its finally happened, I am going out, out from the normal, out from the mundane, into something new and untested.
Yes I am taking the break, from all that’s been me….
Before you make any more conclusions, its a short break. I Will be back in a couple of weeks, hopefully, with lot more thoughts and a better insight.
Now as I will not have blogs to bug you guys for next couple of weeks. I have put up a list of all blogs of mine which I have liked reading myself. Hopefully they don’t disappoint you guys too.
Check them out…

Here they are, [not in any particular order]

Fight against your beliefs

Inspired by the 2 Way

Acquiring Taste

Early mornings surprise

Identity

Dreamless

Embarrassing embarrassment

Parental blues from a non parent

Lift- My attempt at Haiku

Truth behind praying

Yet another happy post- What has happened to me.

Picking up from where left - A lone evening in a cafe

Goodbye - Wish I could do it

I need, I want