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Liquor consumption in Kerala on X-Mas day!!!

A friend of mine, had mentioned in his facebook update that the state of Kerala sold 28 crores worth of liquor on Xmas day. So here I was, sitting idle, waiting for another friend to go to the movie Avatar in iMax 3D. Which meant I had a little time to kill, so I did a little math, which goes somewhat like this - Starting Official figure: 280m So including all the bars and toddy shops etc, the unofficial figure should hover somewhere around 130% of that: approx - 360m(I feel 30% is still a very small figure, thinking of all the toddy shop-scenes in Mallu movies. The soul of Kerala lives in those toddy shops, literally, If you know what I mean..) Population of Kerala - Around 32m Male population(Hmm.. we still frown upon females who drink!) approx - 15m (thanks to the superior sex ratio) Which got me thinking. Look at the development indices, and we are somewhere up there among the most developed nations. But mention a female who enjoys a drink or two to a mallu guy, and a ser
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First fall in my life

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower" - Albert Camus Everyone had warned me about it. I had seen pictures of it. I had read about it. So I thought I was prepared, with my camera. I had framed my shots mentally, even found captions for it. I monitored foliage news constantly, and planned trips around the fall-peak. But finally, when it came, I was so overwhelmed, like a kid who forgot the first lines to utter on the stage. All my carefully charted out plans suddenly seemed like a chaotic mix of things to do which was not important at all. Maybe for the first time, I felt as if my camera is totally useless in my hands. The pictures I took screamed of my ineptitude. The plans, though executed, seemed hardly appropriate, or meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I was simply blown away by the beauty of fall. Finally, I decided to relieve some stress from myself. I told myself, it's okay if you cant capture it all, it's OK to feel frustrated to see a
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Read this if you want (me) to make money for free!!!

I did a remarkable thing today. I 'monetized' my blog. Like many of you, I didn't know what the hell that means. But fortunately, our brains and eyes are hardwired to cling on to anything that has the letters M-O-N-E in it. Even if the 'Y' is absent. Wow, I just made a super-cool statement! Good start! Bottomline, I signed up for google's adsense. So If I am smart enough to make a few people come read my blog, and they are prudent enough to click on any of those links, and a few and then a lot many of such clicks happen, google will send money to me! By the time I finished writing that, it has already started to sound like a bummer! What do I write, that millions of others cant write about? I have had many starts with this blog in the past, and many false starts too. By far, the most successful streak has been the time when I started it, when we had a bunch of friends who had time at their disposal, and I used to be a very active member in blogger cicrles. Means
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Many many happy returns of the day? Maybe not!

Thus, Bejoy Babu enters into the thirtieth year of his  great struggle for existence against the elements of this planet last week. Like his very first year, he did it again in a hospital room. Talk about the ironies of life. Back then, he had a young and energetic father, who had sat hours on end admiring the red little thingy in a white wrapper (am hoping he did, most newly promoted fathers do, don't they? At least Ross Gellar of Friends did when Ben was born!). And now, 29 years later, his father was lying down weak, with tubes attached to his body, while he sat hours on end looking at him. Not admiring, but worried when his father will become alright, he will be able to go back, whether his leaves would affect his job, how the great plans of a first birthday together with his wife was spoilt etc etc. Oh 'cmon, there's no use being pretentious about it. Nobody enjoys this particular disposition. He didn't do it either, and he managed to kill time with 2 activities. 1
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The nomads

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I have lost the knack of waking up to the alarm. I cant believe I used to wake up at 5:45 every day, and go for a jog. The pox had rattled everything. Now all I can do when I hear the alarm is: turn it off (even snooze aint an option!) or even better: not hear it at all, so that I can throw a tantrum when I wake up finally, some time when the sun has reached directly above the head. So last Saturday, I set the alarm at 5:40, as I was supposed to meet some friends at Madiwala at sharp 6:15 AM. And so, it was riding the bike at spine-numbing chill winds at 100 kmph, and jumping the traffic lights (its no harm when you are the only person on all the four sides of the junction, right? And besides, obeying rules is my principle, but its no use being a fool about it) Finally I met them at madiwala by 6:40. Turned out that they waited for a long 2 minutes or so. Afterall, we're all running on IST(Indian Stretchable Time)!!! We proceeded to our destination, which was in front of the Yeshwa
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waking up...

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I guess I have been quiet for a while. I knew that nations won’t go to war if I stopped writing. Heck, I thought no one cared. But what happened last week challenged all such notions of mine. I was asked 3 times, in a span of 48 hours, why I had stopped posting. And considering the fact that everyone suddenly got concerned after a span of almost 2 years, I have reasons to believe that the blog had started turning in its grave. Yes, I had decided to burry it. Now I need to dig it up, and create some magic, like Dr. Frankenstein did. And one of the three people who asked the question, happened my own dear wife, so I couldn’t just push it away. Hmm, well, you see, quite a few things happened in my life during this period. (We’ll ta lk about that, hold on…) So seeing this sudden spur of interest in my long-lost habit of blogging, I went back to the blog, and read it. It made me smile, several times. And then, I was convinced, I should resume writing. So let me write about what I did last S
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when the rainclouds paused for a while...

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There are no rain pictures this week! Because it has been raining incessantl y for the past 48 hours or so... So I cant go out and take a rain picture. I cant go out and take a rain picture when its not raining either. Catch 22! Anyways, there's been this wonderful sight that has been raising my hormone levels whenever I go to drop my sister in college. Naah, its not girls am talking about, I have grown out of it(pretens ion, nevermind!) Its the lush green paddy fields on the way. So I took a calculated risk, and ventured out with my bike, when the rain seemed shying away for while today afternoon... I took a deviation from the main road, and I wasn't disappointed at all. There was this narrow pot-holed road lined on either side with trees, and beyond them lay the vast expanse of green green paddy fields. ***click on the images to enlarge Two women were cutting grass to feed cattle. They would have made a pretty picture. I contemplated walking upto them and asking for a picture
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