Random randomness #28/09

July 13, 2009 at 9:49 pm | In Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Guys this time around, I have slightly changed my randomness post, instead of the usual format, I have just listed the thoughts, because I felt these are something which I want to get out of me, and not really dwell about them.

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It must be so easy for kids, all they got to do is cry, to be taken home.

The questions are so easy to answer, when there are only right and wrong answers.

Over years you build up an image of yourself in your own eye, you build theories you believe in and most of them are those you “ought to” and not “actually” believe in.

The worst part of murphy’s law is that it always comes true when its the worst time for it to be true.

You thought real life stories do not have an end, unfortunately every single episode does begin, does have its good and bad moments, and it does end. In some cases its a happy ending, and in some others, not so happy one. But the key is just like the stories, it does end.

Some fear the ending, some want it to end, but its really of not use, the moment where it ends is so quick, you will neither get to enjoy it nor dread it. Both the happiness or sadness, are just an aftermath.

Wish Amazon.com sold something like this “no stress chess” for our life, we could just pick a card, and make a move.

No, I am not bitter, nor sour, nor sweet. I wish, that was the truth.

Beauty and the geek

June 23, 2009 at 6:57 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

She likes the moon.

She’s began to thrown in nice hints, once in a while.

If I had a list, she would strike most of the lines.

What next?

hey hey! you got to say!

February 13, 2009 at 7:55 am | In Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Prats who writes at Retrospections! Emotional ecology, gave me an idea with here post here. This was a simple exercise which a teacher did at her son’s school, and I thought it would be really good to try it out in the blog world. Its fairly simple, all you have to do is write a single phraze word, or even a comment, or let me make this freestyle, write whatever you feel about “rambler” as an anonymous comment, you could criticize, debate, praise, or anything you want to say. Please make it anonymous.

You are free to try this at your blog, I will surely come around to say what I think about you.

So enough said, let me leave the window open, go ahead, say what you have to say to Rambler, about rambler.

Hours of darkness

November 23, 2008 at 8:39 pm | In Moi, Personal, Realité, poetry, poésie | 24 Comments

I am grateful,

For those hours of darkness

When you force me

To come out of my blinding room.

Away from the lights and puters

Into open air and sky full of stars.

To a level of highness

Which I knew existed, but somehow avoided.


I am grateful

For those hours of darkness

As I tumble along

In the semi darkness of the moonlight

Free from a feeling of being pulled back,

With a unknown smile on my lips

With music in my ears,

And sways of dance on my hips.


I am grateful

For those hours of darkness

As I discover

Those hidden thoughts and desires

As I for once

Live without caring for being watched

As I forget

All inhibitions and fears and be not ‘me’


I am grateful

For those hours of darkness

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This has to be the most absurd thing I have written, with the daily power cuts here in Bangalore, I am left with no choice but to think of something to do with no power. Today I just out of the blue decided to go up onto the terrace, with my ipod stuck to my ears, I just walked around tumbling on small stones and looking into the sky. Its strange isn’t it, the feeling of the freeness you get when you think you cannot be seen, once in the darkness, even though you have no walls around you, you have a open sky above your head, and darkness all around, you feel a kind of freedom, and bid goodbye to all your inhibitions and shyness. 

 

The topic over at Sunday scribblings this week is “grateful”, aren’t I grateful for thoughts like these.

Scaling lives.

November 22, 2008 at 10:20 am | In Life, Moi, Realité, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

I saw this post sometime back here, and was immediately drawn to the concept. It is like evaluating yourself and I liked the idea a lot. Who better to gauge the progress of my life, than myself. I guess this would really help to improve things which I am not so happy about, so here it goes my answer to the all important question

“How would you rate your life?…On a scale of 1 to 10.…”

Work wise?? When one moves from a job which you hate a lot, to even something which is mediocre, you just love the change. I guess my current job began like that. And once you get to see the extreme, you are always afraid to change the job because from mediocre you could go back to the worse. Even though I crib about my job, somewhere subconsciously I am satisfied, otherwise I wouldn’t stick for almost 5 years now. Decent money, decent work load, and decent workplace respect, so can one blame me for being complacent?.
I guess I would rate my work 7/10

Health wise??  I am no macho man, nor the hunky fit poster pinup, but I have never fell sick in a serious manner. Yes my eyes require glasses to see properly, and my hairs wouldn’t need comb few years down the line, and may be my knees aren’t world strongest, nor my teeth. But still a working piece I am.
I guess I shall rate myself 6/10
[I know all the food I eat, my heart may not be the healthiest ;) ]

Education ?? I think I did what I wanted to, and chose not to do things I didn’t. However stupid it may sound to others, there were my decisions and I still stand by it. You know what I am satisfied with what I achieved.
I shall rate myself 8/10

Spiritual factor?? I am at a stage where I do not understand spirituality, or rather trying to define my own meaning for the word, because I feel spirituality is a very subjective thought. I do believe in religion as well as spirituality, and the practices excite me a lot. I guess I haven’t yet found  my spiritual interests. 
I think I will rate 4/10

Family factor??  I love this part, I am not embarrassed to say that I am a family man, and most of my decisions are keeping them in mind, I might argue/fight with my parents a lot, I may not be the friendliest person amongst the relatives, but I like to believe I just love the family bond, and blessed to be in a family like mine. So I think I shall rate this 7/10 

Stress factor?? I suck at stress, even though I handle stress decently, I make my life stressful unnecessarily, I guess I really got to improve this one 
I rate myself 3/10

Psychological factor?? Hmm I don’t know how one can rate themselves on this factor. If this is about moods and state of mind, I guess I am extremely moody and get highs and lows very quickly. I can’t say if that is good or bad, I can’t say being sensitive is good or bad. So let me take the middle ground on this one and rate myself 5/10

 

here’s the grand total 40/70 .. that would come up to nearly 57%

I am not sure If I should be happy about my rating, but am now sure about few things to work on.

Guys any of you interested in trying this one?…try it, I found it really interesting.

Rajasthan vacation tidbits #2

November 12, 2008 at 8:23 pm | In Family, Personal, Realité, Taking a break, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Guys I am back to bore you with more vacation tidbits, this time its the two days which we spent in Udaipur following our two days at Jaipur. You can read the first part of the post “here“

*We were supposed to leave Jaipur by around 8, I got up at my usual time of 6am, and discovered something, my stomach, excruciating pain that ran through my body, I rushed to the restroom, but all the eating I did at chowki Dani the last night had taken toll on me, and man it was bad. I skipped breakfast and just had couple of glasses of orange juice. Couple of trips to the restroom and few pills later, I was ready to leave Jaipur. The plan was to visit Chittorgarh, a big fort on the way to udaipur.

*One thing that strikes you during the journey from Jaipur to Udaipur is the road, the highway is just too good, huge 4 lanes on both the directions, and smooth with no path holes, we just cruised along in our innova, Just loved this aspect of the travel

*When we reached Chittorgarh, I was floored by the hugeness of the fort. The best part was that you could take a tour around the fort in your car, and this helped a lot especially with my bad tummy. The guide we took was extremely knowledgeable and well past his middle age, this meant that he spoke a LOT, he started with the history from loooooong ago and began telling us, we spent first 30 mnts learning when the fort was built, by whom, and when he moved out. The bad part was the scorching sun, and my bad tummy. The sun meant that along with tummy, now I had a bad headache, which made it impossible for me to stand at one place. You could easily spot a restless rambler hoping for the lecture to end. This has to be easily my worst day of the vacation.

*We moved along and checked the Rana Kumba palace, the meera temple, the vijay stumbh couple other places in the fort slowly, and tummy was a little better now, but the headache, and no lunch had made my condition worse.

*We finally reached a dhaba at 4pm, imagine me, and no food till 4 pm, just two glasses of juice, I was really miserable, all I wanted to do was sleep, so for the first time I just choose a bench slightly away from where others were sitting and ordering food, and just dozed off.

*food took a long time to arrive, and by then I was up, a plate full of curd rice is what I had, and was just hoping to reach udaipur.

*We reached Udaipur by 6:30PM and we didn’t have any plans for the day except boating, we learnt that boating gets closed by 6, so we were late. Our hotel person suggested a place called “Bagore Ki Haveli”, this is a place where they showcase all the traditional dances from across Rajasthan. The show was to begin at 7, so we quickly freshened up an got into the car. We reached the place by 7:10 and the show had already begun. We rushed in, and tried to find seats.

*Bagiore ki Haveli, is very different from normal places, its just an old haveli with a big courtyard, where they perform dances. They have put these carpets around the court yard where you are supposed to be seated, and they perform various dances in the middle. This was an surprise, we liked this a lot. The strange thing was that there were very few Indians at this place, and we were surrounded by huge number of non Indian travelers all enjoying the dance. The ticket price is just 30Rs, and this is very close to the Lake Pichola. The only drawback though are the dancers, most of them are really old :)

*After a nice hour spent at that place we came out to the main market which is close to the haveli, and started searching for a place to have dinner. That’s when someone suggested a pure vegetarian restaurant called “baba palace”, we went there and found out that they serve pure veg chicken biryani. Well we had been totally mislead. As we had already gone inside, we decided to order food. This was a roof top restaurant, so I decided to go up further to get the view from the watch tower. The view of the fully lit Udaipur palace was just amazing, this was a day before diwali, so the jagadish mandir too was well lit, the view was just too good.

* I met couple of people from Isreal while at the top, and we have good fun discussing Rajasthan as I tried to help them set up a make shift tripod for their SLR.

*We had a huge fight with the management at the hotel as they took almost 90 minutes to deliver our order, all of us lost our cool, and infact my aunt barged into their kitchen to check if they were really cooking our order.

*I woke up early next day to take a walk around the place we were staying. We stayed very close to Fateh Sagar Lake, so I wanted to have a early morning view. I went to the terrace of our hotel, to get the gorgeous view of the sunrise and also the garden surrounding the lake, A morning totally well spent.

*This was supposed to be a busy day, as we were supposed to do sight seeing all day, we went to the Udaipur palace which is a very good spectacle, we also saw the jagdish temple and garden of fountains called “Sahelioyon ki bhari” which was a waste of time, and then we went to shilpagram which is like a place where they exhibit and sell Rajathani art and handicrafts. It too turned out to be not so good.

*We had a great great lunch, gujrati thali at restaurant called “natraj”, god bless the owner. Just loved the food there.

*I forgot to mention that this day, was the diwali day, and we could hear firecrackers bursting all around. Our driver wanted to take the evening off and celebrate diwali. All he had to do was ask that in a straight forward manner, instead he kept beating around the bush, saying we couldn’t do anything in the evening and stuff like that. People around me kept pushing him to take us do the boating, he reluctantly agreed, we found out that the boating is just till 5, and he had mislead us that it is till 6, so there went our plan. He was supposed to pick us up from the central place, but he gave some excuse and we had to take a rickshaw.

*I got the best ride of my life here. As its diwali time there were no rickshaws at all and all we could find was one three wheeler. 9 of us, including the rickshaw driver all got into that small automobile and reached our hotel. I cant believe 9 of us fit into that.

*The driver was still not spared as all people with me wanted to go to the same place for dinner. I was so embarrassed, all I wanted was just to let him go, poor guy wanted to celebrate diwali. I was just sick of the people

finally we ended the Diwali day at Udaipur, with all of us taking a sound sleep. 

more tidbits to follow…

Rock On

September 30, 2008 at 6:12 pm | In matinee | 9 Comments

I finally watched a movie in theater, the last one was on Jan 26th 2008 “Taare Zameen Par”, and after almost nine months I got to see the next one, “Rock On”. I know I am late, its long time since the movie released, and the blogland has almost forgotten the movie, so many reviews for and against the movie some weeks back. So here is my take on the movie.

To say my verdict in least number of words, “I liked the movie”.

There you go simple as that, liked it. Now lets talk a little bit more about the movie, like all movies which I watch, in this movie too I found some positives and some negatives. Lets start with the positives first.

Dil Chahta Hain got released in 2001, and it has been a gap of 7 years before this one came out. Its from the same makers, and the lead actor happens to be the director of movies “Dil Chahta Hain” and “Lakshya”. I have been a big big fan of Lakshya, even though it bombed at the boxoffice, and it had some really unwanted drama with AB, I guess the main theme of a confused mid-twenty person was never told with such a poise before. On the same lines DCH too had a pretty common story, An youngster falling for a old lady, couple denying love, or a casanova types who falls for a homely girl. Every story has been told umpteen number of times on celluloid before, but what stood out in the movie was the freshness in the narration and treatment of the subject. Rock On too begins with the same weakness, a coming of age story of a rock band has been told so many times in english movies that you can hardly innovate in terms of story. The Idea of narration through flashing flash backs is amazingly fresh, even though its very similar to DCH, it took 7 years for someone to bring back this kind of narration back to Hindi cinema.

Next big winner in the movie is editing, very slick and sharp. I never felt a scene was dragged throughout the movie. Precise amounts of a scene is extremely important to keep the interest of the audience, even a slight slack can result in boredom, and specially in a movie aimed more towards an young audience. So Kudos to the editor Deepa Bhatia for such good work.

Casting, I think the makers could have really screwed in this department, but they didn’t. Instead for opting some really famous actors, they took people who are not very starry, and suited the role. The idea of a singing rock star could have been really spoiled by well known actors. Instead they choose Farhan Akthar, I knew he could sing well, but the idea of him being the leading man, and a singing star still sounds a little unbelieavable to me. He doesn’t disappoint, he has done a decent job as an actor, and a great one as a singer. Regarding the rest of the cast, it pains to see the talented Purab Kohli being wasted, how can one spoil such a good talent. He hardly has anything to do in the movie, so is Luke kenny. Arjun Rampal was decent. The leading ladies, I guess Prachi Desai was good enough, but not a meaty role at all, and the other lady who plays Debbie was good. But again, not much of the role for the ladies.

Guess we should move onto the negatives.

Even though editing was very good, I guess somewhere in the screen play there was a lack of continuity in between. I mean screenplay could have been better. Places where you felt the story was unbelievable, one does not generally walk off a close relation like the one FA shares with the lady Tanya.

Music. I know the songs have been a rage, and very popular and I liked some of the songs as well. But what really disappointed me was the lyrics, real crappy wordings. I think people might not like this criticism, or may be I am not used to the “rock” kind of lyrics, but then Javed Akthar saab doing this work, I think he could have done much much better. The songs are catchy, but lyrics a big let down.

The cliches, why on earth do we still get stuck in the old cliches?. Like any romantic movie should have the airport scene at the end, where the lovers meet, any band movie should have one of the member joining the party late, one of the member should fall terminally ill. Haven’t we seen this before so many times?, still we continue to use these cliches rich in melodrama to attract viewers. I think this was the biggest let down in the movie as far as I was concerned.

All said and done, it was a good movie, certainly different from the rest of the pack.

A slap tale

September 23, 2008 at 8:47 pm | In Moi, Realité, Uncategorized | 15 Comments

I have never been slapped by anyone, and so I really don’t know how it feels like, to be slapped. You might be wondering what on earth made me think about how it feels to be slapped, It was nothing but an evening on streets of Bangalore, being struck in the traffic jam. Confusing ha?.

Tech parks around Bangalore are quite away from city centre, and if you live in one of the old parts of the city, then you have to travel a lot to reach your office, and worst part is the traffic, which has gone really bad over last few years. My workplace is very close to BEML, which makes train coaches, for Indian Railways and for many other rail services across the world. They have a track laid to transfer these coaches to the nearest railway station. And these tracks are not used often, and hence not well maintained, the bad rains over last few days has lead to further degradation of the tracks, and the result, the new coaches derailed on last wednesday, more than the derail, the coaches got stuck and could not be moved. This meant it blocked the only two entries and the exits to the tech park where I work at. Huge jams greeted me as I came out of my office, traffic stranded all around, people walking out of their buses and cabs to take a puff, or a cool drink, as they we were all in a picnic.

We finally got moving after an hour wait, and amidst the slow moving traffic reached a point, where I had an excellent view of the traffic jam, A lake to my right and a long line of headlights appearing like the English alphabet Y. Immediately the blogger in me woke up, I wanted to capture the sight in my mobile camera, and probably do a post here about it, so I take out my mobile, adjust the zoom, and ask my friend to move to the side, so I get a better view, move a little front, so that I am closer to the window and can get a better view.  

Now how does this remind one of being slapped. Well what followed was something which drove me into a complete shell.

A friend who was sitting next to me suddenly stops me and asks, what are you doing?, why are you taking picture of that girl in the car, she is staring at you from long?.

One could visibly see how scared I was, I immediately closed my clam shell phone, and just turned around, and could not get enough courage to look in the same direction again, then I slowly began to talk asking him what happened. Apparently I had been so busy looking at the traffic jam, I never realized that there was a car quite next to our cab, and it had a girl and a guy in the front seat, probably her husband. And from the way it appeared to all the people, I was taking her photograph, openly, adjusting for a better view, and apparently she saw me once, and began getting annoyed a little.

Thinking that we were struck in a traffic jam, and were moving closely, and our can was just in her husband’s striking distance, gave me goose bumps for long time. People noticed that too, they started teasing me about how I went silent, the fact was that I could not speak for sometime, man was I scared.

Well there goes my experience of an virtual slap.

One lesson learnt, mobile phone camera’s are not my cup of tea.

Goalies.

August 26, 2008 at 10:02 pm | In "Theory of pursuit", Books, Life, Moi, Thoughts, thoughts to think | 12 Comments
Tags: ,

It feels great to achieve goals. Goals and aims are such important part of our lives, unless we want to achieve something how will we focus in its direction, rather how would we realize what our focus should be on.

The only way I know to achieve my goals, is hard work and complete determination. As far as I can remember this what has been taught to me, more importantly this is what I have used to achieve what I have set out for. This is something which we all have realized from the life of so many great personalities, people we all are proud about.

Goals are not achieved easily, many of them take up your whole life, and almost each of them deserve such a determination and dedication for a lifetime, some even beyond. Most of use do not even think a little before involving ourselves with such dedication, the kind of passion just comes natural.

Even a small of thought about the failure, or that of being unable to meet the goal, is a step in the negative direction, and definitely they should not be entertained. I am not saying one should not calculate the risks involved, or may be develop backup plans and alternate routes to the goal, but trying to convince oneself its ok not to achieve the goal, isn’t that something very negative?.

I am someone who has always believed that my tomorrow is something which I can determine, rather atleast can be made the way I want it to be. A positive approach for sure. I believe that we can definitely influence the way our tomorrow will be, and with our hard work and efforts change the way it shapes up.

I would rather not complain that things happened this way, instead prefer to say I did the things this way, both good or bad. I guess I would rather prefer to be responsible for things happening to me, and around me rather than just be a witness.

Guys how many of you people are with me till this point, if not all the points how many of you agree with the majority of the points?.

I know I do not follow them to the core, I rather aspire to do many of those things. I have made my ideologies based on many of those principles and for even a moment, I have never doubted them.

Remember the book I was talking about “here” , well going by the books philosophy, every point of my belief system is a sure shot at unhappiness in life, and the main cause for out health problems. When I read this topic, for a day or so I was completely dismissive of the philosophy in the book, but really made me think, its not easy to ignore the arguments he puts forward.

So here lets look at the same points from his perspective.

Goals are a means of restricting ourselves, when we have goals all we concentrate upon are achieving them, in the course forgetting simple pleasures in life, in way preventing ourselves from achieving a lot more things then just what we set out for.

He agrees that is good to prepare for your goal, and be complete prepared for the obstacles on the way, however is it really worth spending our whole life in the pursuit?, in a way when we are struck to our goal, our whole life is unknowingly controlled by it, and in a way we loose our independence, and in turn happiness.

Somebody who does not care about the goal, someone who is fine with both achieving and not achieving the goal, is a lot less pressurized and in a better frame of mind to do things. This does not mean don’t work towards the goal, but it also means that be clear that its ok if you don’t achieve it.

Sounds so much alien to me, but I have to admit sounds true as well.

He says its foolish to want tomorrow to be a certain way, he says that its best for one to prepare for the “tomorrow”, rather then work towards shaping it, because when it does not end up the way we want it, we end up far more disappointed, rather if we had prepared to face it the way it comes, we would have the thrill of living it as it comes.

An interesting theory for sure.

He says there is a lot more happiness in accepting that the thing happened, rather then trying to be the person who “does” things. The lesser “I” involved in the life, lesser the sadness and disappointment one goes through. Being a witness to an event, gives you a lot more in life rather than being the cause, one gets to concentrate, focus a lot more in being the witness, than the times one gains through being the cause.

More ramblings to follow….

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I am no doctor – Heads or Tails #49

July 29, 2008 at 9:15 pm | In "Heads or Tails", Moi, Realité, Uncategorized | 15 Comments

I have a confession to make, I am guilty of self medication for a long time now. I have screamed at my parents and grand parents for doing the very same thing, trusting their experience and popping pills, but a little sniff of cold or a little trace of a fever I pop in a mild anti biotic and a paracetamol.

I tell myself “I am not a doctor” every time I do this, but then I cannot really afford to fall ill during weekdays, not that my country is going to crash or my company without me in there, but it always feels good to the male ego to have a feeling of being absolutely wanted.

You may ask what has male ego got to do with self medication, because I see this happening with my mom too, but may be its just that we both are of the same breed of sorts, and it seems we are gradually beginning to think alike, relying on medicine more rather than the natural healing, which at one time I was a big fan off. I never took medicine back in school when I fell ill, I remember going to school even when I ran temperatures of 102. Somehow the idea of not taking risk has gotten into my head.

This time around, I have been careful. I had an upset stomach from last couple of weeks, one thing I swore this time around was “no pills”, I totally relied upon hot water and other home made food to get out of it. I must admit that I did have to suffer for two full weeks, [If suffer includes weekends of eating out who minds it ;-) ]. Anyways the whole point is that one should be really careful while self medication, we might end up aggravating something, or even end of treating and hiding symptoms making the problem even more hard to diagnose later.

So next time you catch yourselves popping in a pill or two, remember “we are not doctors”.
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The prompt over at skittles today is “doctor”, and I chose this confession as the response.

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