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Cupcake conversations

The other day I was having a conversation with a gentleman. I told him that I felt the safest in Pilani since every other place in India; urban or suburban is a potential target. He asked me if the monumental increase in terrorist activity over the years made me want to reconsider India as my home and move base to America upon graduation. I retorted saying that Pilani was probably safer than any place in the US right now. The drug lords that once ruled the sands have had their age catch up with them but despite that I think Pilani is peaceful and serene.

Since migration is nothing new for a Kashmiri who have plenty of experience in this domain, he was expecting me to give him a nod and so my obscure reasoning might have raised his eyebrows. However, I quickly changed the topic to why I felt it also made good economic sense to stay in India, giving him the low down on how our economy will stabilize sooner than other nations. So if it was imperative for me to move camp, I’d rather shift to China (since their economy is also doing well). He told me how on his recent visit to China he observed that the people there were extremely hard-working. Agreeing with him on that point I also chipped in another interesting yet peculiar observation; the lack of hair on their body.

At this juncture I urge you to take a moment and try to remember when was the last time you saw an oriental man sporting a beard, or for that matter a chinkey girl having hair on her legs, and no they don’t wax their legs (thus saving them thousands of yuans throughout their lifespan and increasing their propensity to save); their follicles just don’t produce enough hair.

This prompted him to change the topic of our conversation to his next international visit; to Pakistan, which he recently cancelled. Having been to Pakistan several times, he disclosed that even though the people have been extremely kind to him the times just weren’t suited for such a visit. Probably his numerous visits to the land would invoke suspicion from the Indian Government and spur off an investigation. Alternatively he also believed that its only matter of time before India launches an attack on Pakistan, in which case he would be detained and made a POW.

Upon me telling him that, if such a situation were to ever arise, international groups such as Amnesty International would come to his rescue, he scoffed saying that his head would’ve been smashed to pulp by the butt of a Kalashnikov by the time any action was taken.   

  

Hayden's boo boo

Ah how good I felt after going through news portals last week.

What started with an angst against the passionate yet unruly Indian cricket spectators as well as the presumably lethargic Indian batsmen has now become a platform for us to showcase our achievements.

Reactions follow a typical pattern:

An introduction leading up to Hayden's comment.

The next paragraph features why Hayden's comment is factually wrong, with links to the relevant statistical data.

The third para demands that Hayden issue an apology; followed by some kinds words directed towards his mother.

Since the second paragraph would also unfailingly mention our wonderfully executed lunar mission, Hayden can give himself a pat on the back for contributing to this unique SEO method for promoting Chandrayaan-1.

Those trying to bank on satire have been dealt with severely, for example Their reaction to his post forcing him to apologize for his actions (seen in the update section of the post).

Akram is pissed and so is the BCCI. Australian Cricketer's Association has even suggested a shrink accompany the team on every tour to tackle the stress their players encounter on such tours. Though the ACA have not mentioned explicitly mentioned Hayden's name here, the implied reference should not be missed.

But then there's the other side of spectrum too. People from all walks of life are coming forward and joining Hayden's Sympathisers Anonymous (HSA). This tweet by a BBC Mastermind winner who has been identified solely by his initial J, says it all

Origin of creativity

Here's another comic strip I came up with in my free time.

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tribute to XKCD

Here's my tribute to one of my favorite webcomics. This is something I came up with while in my Measurement Techniques lab.

Catch them Young

There was an interesting proposal (which clearly started off as a rant against the system) which my friend concocted as we were talking about the pros and cons of Indian education.

The bulk recruiters ( you know who you are), who visit campuses in huge Volvo buses and simply engulf the students with arms wide open and snatch away a sizable portion of the population only to dump them into their cramped workspace, my friend had an idea for these guys.

For most (almost all) of these companies, the only prerequisite (if any) is that the candidate must be aware of basic C programming and can to a certain extent speak English. And oh yes, pass off that rigorous aptitude test they so carefully set ages to make.

My friend proposes that they should instead hire students (read outsource) directly from the tenth standard (or at the most 12th) for by then the student is highly comfortable with C, C++, HTML etc. I don’t think that the folks at my college who made it to these companies ever learned anything beyond the school syllabus, or even if they did, it’s certainly of no use to the company. The aptitude tests? Surely, a tenth grade student has a better chance at cracking them for he’s a seasoned problem solver (thanks to various comics and dailies). This way the companies can heavily cut down on the costs and also get most of their work done. Students can then learn the other stuff (such as Java and other computer languages) while on the job or can opt for technical courses.
The companies can approach the school authorities formally or ask the bloke in the administrative unit for the student roster (a transaction would take place obviously), quite similar to what web2.0/Insurance companies are using banks for. Or they can even hold their tests on one of the hazaar Sundays in a little hall down the street.
After four years of education if you are going to end up in one of these companies doing the same thing that you learned while in school, then why not go for it right after school?
The point being that the bus companies (for that’s what they truly are) know what they’re looking for, so then why not start off at the grassroot level?

Posted simultaneously on Mutiny.in

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‘…didn’t realize that. Anyways, so the hip-hop wars continued. There would be frequent Mexican stand offs, perhaps even shoot outs in certain hoods. The pandemonium caused by the east-coast west-coast rivalry was reflected in the music. Almost every song was reminiscent of gangsters and bitter relations.’

‘Tupac died and many others followed’

‘Tupic was a dude! He could do anything he wanted!’

‘Oh, you mean like Jesus?’

‘Yea, but then this bloke could sing and had chicks all around him’

‘So did Jesus, it’s just that they were in the barn, with the other animals!’

Tongue in cheek!

What? You've never seen a hot popular football sensation stick his tongue down a struggling committed actress? :P
A Portuguese with a Bong( does that sound familiar????)
Actually if you zoom 10x, you'll notice that there's no lip contact in the picture. There's just one photo for the two caught-in-the-act, and this is it. Zee has been raving about it.
It might very well have been a friendly peck, but you know what made the difference?
The mother fucking hand!
Him caressing changes the entire tone of the pic. It accentuates the sensuality and sends the message that they aren't just being cordial. And this is rather ironic considering Bipasha is the one who is the spokesperson as far as her relationship is concerned.
It was bad enough that Bipasha was compering the new 7 wonders ceremony. She has proved that Indians are extremely wary when in company of foreigners and just have to make a fool of themselves by trying to be someone they're not.

And yes! WTF is she wearing? What color is that anyways? Chameli pink?

Decc@n Chronicle

For those who have not come face to face with this phenomenon, I present to you Exhibit A. It's ad campaigns are flawless, with tag lines sporting "78% of the trendy middle class people who own a scooter read DC"
Isn't that just so splendid? It rules the plateau with its massive sales.
Every now and then(more often than not), they come up with these advantageous snippets. Have a look here

Now shouldn’t I just thank my stars for that serendipitous encounter while I was browsing the net?

Travel Bag. How convenient. I would’ve never thought about that because I am generally too busy being the brand ambassador of jute by sporting gunny bags to carry my stuff.

It is imperative to sport a clean, handsome look when you are holidaying.

Oh really? Coz the last we all checked our office dress code, being sloven and covered with muck fetched us brownie points.

Also, its terribly interesting how mp3 player/walkman/cellphone has been conveniently replaced by the ubiquious iPod.

Do check out the sports blog Pavilion Seat. Its being regularly updated!( wink wink)

Memories...

I was cleaning my room and found my old answer scripts. I always made it a point to preserve them, especially the English ones. After the initial splash of nostalgia came the agony. Going through those answer scripts I realized how the teachers meticulously took advantage of our naivety and our gullibility became our vice.

Can you imagine the amount of B.S they fed us while at school? And some of us were indoctrinated so effectively that we continue to believe some of that crap till date.

Remember those essays on the merits and demerits of the Television. I’m sure all of you wrote those essays, and more often than not wrote the same points albeit in a different style. Allow me to butcher them one by one.

TV lets us know what’s happening around the globe. The news and the Discovery channel along with other informative channels like the history channel and NatGeo increase our knowledge base.

Honestly, in the sixth standard most of us weren’t even attracted to the opposite sex, leave alone consider the use of knowledge as a probable weapon in wooing them. At this age, for the majority of us the daily happenings of the political scenario of Palestine didn’t interest us much (I’m not sure how many of us are even interested today). Nor did we really care about the extent to which the Alps beautified Switzerland. And the only reason we might watch the Animal Planet would’ve been because we found the sounds they made funny. We were too busy playing with our friends or joining some classes which would enhance our inborn traits.

We should watch TV with caution because we may get hooked on to it. It also causes harm to our eyes.

Okay, now who the hell started this one? It’s the BIGGEST hoax of our time. Watching too much TV from up close will make you myopic or astigmatic or something like that. Let me clear you of your dilemma, IT DOESN’T HAPPEN! It’s been scientifically proven that kids who are subjected to strain work (to the eyes) such as reading, TV, Computers are at a much higher risk of getting spectacles. However this effect takes place only when their eyes are developing, a process that ceases after 6-7 years of age. So this means that at 11 years of age, you can stay up all night with a packet of chip(s) and commit sins.

Leave the habit, don’t be ignorant!

TV makes us couch potatoes.

So does sitting on a chair from 9 AM to 3 PM with minimum break time and staring at a black rectangle (which might have become green and made of fiber at some places). But we can’t reduce the time at school now, can we? Oh now don’t give me crap saying that there are “games” periods, those are like twice in a week. Are you kidding me?

Somehow using TV for entertainment purposes was considered as a sin according to higher authorities. As if watching Friends was like taking a mural of a deity and smashing it to pieces and two movies back to back was a feat achieved only by the spoilt and delinquent.

Conclusion: The emphasis on writing an idealistic (idealistic according to the society by large) answer scripts (faultily termed as flawless) supercedes the thinking power. Though the teachers at the beginning of any writing activity say that try to be original and creative, they seldom mean it. This is because many of them truly believe in all those aforementioned points. Also students seldom feel rebellious when it comes to writing an essay and would much rather go with the general perceptions of things. So let me go ahead and blame the system, for its always easier to lay the blame on something else, right?

Let there be rock DOS

The lights came in every hue and looked down upon us. Showering their light contemptuously at the millions of onlookers among which there was I. The place felt like a Rastafarian party. It reminded me of the good old days of ‘Hare Rama Hare Krsna’ being ad-libbed by saffron clad and long haired hippies promoting world peace and legalization of Hashish. There was a cloud of smoke in my vicinity and what more, it seemed to be perpetual. As one cloud would move on, another would strategically take its place. It wasn’t all tobacco, there was a lot of weed too, guess that was the saving grace. And then this stick wearing a dress apparates and he’s wet and is wearing this gigantic hat and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ It’s (He’s) the epitome of glam rock. Steven Tyler.

And almost instantly he gets to work. The previous night Siddharth and me were listening to all Aerosmith songs(a pathetic attempt), so that on the D Day we wouldn’t look like schmucks head banging to stuff we didn’t know while the crowd chanted the song in unison, almost mocking us.

And then the song started. And I didn’t know it. I turned around to see Sid, with empty eyes, as though hinting to him the ignominy of being a fallen pseudo-fan. Sonam didn’t care much. She was too busy balancing herself on her toes, trying to get a glimpse of the onstage act, or so I though.

And then it happened again, the next song too! No clue whatsoever! Zilch! Yet I regained my confidence and started jumping up and down screaming, hooting and well trying to get a hint of the chorus. Boy was I looking like a jackass. My huge overgrown body screaming for me to cease the relentless motion. Telling me that I wasn’t meant for this sort of physical activity. Begging me to stop. And the weed.

And the weed

And the weed

It just kept coming from all directions, as though I was a sort of beacon and it surrounded me.

Tyler sang “Crazy”. Ah finally something familiar. Oh so familiar. The large screens started playing the video and almost everyone’s gaze fell to the young and carefree Alicia Silverstone (who features in the video).

Suddenly my ears get to hear the incoherent vocals from spaghetti clad damsel who is riding a man’s shoulder as though in a rodeo bar. Intoxicated probably because what she was singing didn’t make much sense.

Another thing I noticed during the concert was that Steven Taylor isn’t afraid of his sexuality. I understand the whole glam rock set up, but come on…

then there's this....

Oh come on, get a room!

After that Joe Perry announces that the true reason he’d come to India weren’t the elephants or the spices, its Kamasutra. He wanted to thank the nation of a billion where the Kamasutra took its birth and ironically people were forbidden to speak about it as though it doesn’t exist. I mean come on! A country of a billion people, somebody must be seriously getting laid!

Honestly, that is just freaky. Its like a cave! I have never seem a man with a mouth so wide!

Well, the concert was short, or so it seemed, apparently they sang a dozen songs. In between they decided to bring a couple of chairs and chill there.

Tyler was obsessed with saying ‘Namaste’, I think someone told him that it was the Indian equivalent of “Rock on dude!”, coz that’s the zeal with which he kept announcing it. The crowd was maniacal. Millions of yuppies head banging and swaying. I’d say it was a nice experience.

Digging the Past

One of Jolies earliest movies. Hackers!
The first time I saw it, my reaction:
Whathaaa!
Followed by a roaring laughter!

Mother’s day is celebrated throughout the world. On this day children present gifts to their Momma’s/Maatashri’s/Mum’s/Amma’s, it can be looked upon as a payback for all that milk they sucked when they were infants.

Its origin varies from nation to nation.

Some believe that Ancient Greeks sparked off the tradition for they had a festival called Mother Worship to honour Cybele, a great mother of the Greek gods.

In USA, the tradition emerged due to something totally different that what many may expect. There was this woman, Ann Jarvis. A young married cleanliness freak, she wanted to promote sanitation (probably back then they were perpetually covered with dust). During the Civil War she organized the Women’s Work Days, and this legion of her would go around and clean whatever they could find. This trend eventually caught on in 45 states, before hitting the entire nation.

Today is Father’s day

No rich history here. It was just made to complement the Mother’s day, for the sake of secularism I suppose.

Life in Metro

I saw Life in a Metro Yesterday.

I had heard from friends who had seen the movie that it was worth watching. But I didn't want to watch it because I was afraid I already knew the plot. I mean come on how hard could it be to guess? The name of the movie is Metro. Obviously the movie had to thrive on sex and more sex. Sex in the elevator, sex in the car, sex on the rooftop and sex with multiple men. And obviously this isn't the exhaustive list.(Thats impossible!). There would have to be a lot of stress, because once you earn so much and don't sleep(sleeping for rest not pleasure, pun NOT intended) work-related mostly and well the stress would lead to huge differences between the couples(mostly married ones) and this would again lead to more stress and they'd find solace in ..well...sex. With another person obviously. Some how Indians never get into drugs. It's either women or Booze(or both). At least that's what they show on the golden screen. Drugs are mostly forbidden territory, a taboo not worth chasing. But drinking bottles of poison, consuming unfathomable number of tablets(they never mention what those are, they are either really small like homeothepic medicene or really large ones, like rat poison) and newly introduced into the list, courtesy of Life in a Metro: Phenyl.
And the movie would also have few item numbers thrown in between(ok so I was wrong about this one) and because the director wouldn't want gay activists butting in, ergo a dash of homosexuality would have to be thrown in albeit it would HAVE to be something like how it was projected in Page 3. You know, being caught in the act, betraying a beautiful innocent girl in the process.(Co-incidentally it happens to be Miss Sen here as well, are they hinting something here?)
As it turned out, the movie was somewhat on those line but the director or rather the script-writer made one thing very clear: YOU CANNOT BE HAPPY IN A CITY.
Well even if you are, its short-lived. Because someone will fall short of breath or semen(though not necessarily in that order). Every two minutes feelings keep developing. And I keep insisting that it's the music that does this is. Its been stereotyped. Make a girl laugh, say something while looking her in the eye(with some really sentimental music playing in the background) and eventually all the moments will flash in her head and she'll leave her current hubby/boyfriend/fuck-buddy and come after you, running(either on a railway platform, road, beach etc).
This is fine.
But then something happens. Its almost as though the script-writer is contradicting his earlier gospel and goes against the stereotype and makes one of the couple accept the truth. Family is important. You can't leave your hubby(even if hes been having the best sex of his life for the last two years and you have been getting NOTHING AT ALL). I guess that's to show that its a man's world and that women have to endure everything(which isn't necessarily true, though as it turns out in most cases they have to).
One of the greatest gifts given to women is their power to weep. Seriously you have to be a real bastard if you don't sympathise with a woman who is crying, and to add to that the background score, its a fool proof combo. For directors, this is a steal if they capitalise on it. So even if a girl knows that she is sleeping with the man who
1. Is married with a kid
2.Is her boss
3.Will give her perks in return
she feels that maybe someday after relentless hours of fucking she'll change his feelings towards her(whore) to something else(love of his life).

The worst part is that she is successful in doing so, but by that time someone else has come into her life because you can only love someone who takes care of you when you being the douche bag that you are drinks a bottle of phenyl because your boss who was initially humping you just to let out his stress won't love you.
So well conscience comes into play and as usual messes everything up.

Also, the director very clearly wanted to show one simple fact. Old people can't have sex. They can sleep in the same bad and even have a live-in relationship but can't fornicate. Nay! That is unthinkable. But that's discrimination don't you think? Everyone around them is getting some and they have to kill the poor old lady(played beautifully by Nafisa Ali) before she gets any with her boyfriend(Dharmender, oh yes it was quite a treat watching him as well. Everytime he's day "I love you" in his "Main tera khoon peejaonga" tone, I just couldnt help sniggering).

Eventually they had to end the movie, so they showed that everyone is happy the way they are, as in the respective people they were with(or without) and that the hulla gulla should stop. It was almost like a stay-order had been passed and no more fooling around was allowed.Otherwise, if the story was to continue, we'd end up having 7 factorial relationships(read elementary permutation and combination on how).

The music was good, really good. They got these bangladeshi and kashmiri dudes to sing. They blended it into the movie by actually casting them as full time singers in the movie. At any given high or low, they'd appear with their band baja(and guitar/banjo) and start singing. Kudos to them!