...as seen by...

Ah, Goawd! Sigh! Here it comes again. For the 26th time in my life. I so want to write a year-end/new year post about summing up and moving on and leaving behind and all such cliches. But the problem is, I am totally at a loss about picking and choosing. And I am not game enough for another harrowing literary ordeal at the wee hours of this wonderful year that had been. So I decided to play it safe and apply some strokes on a few of those amazing blogs that I have been following religiously this year. And I made a rather untidy attempt in trying to figure out what makes me keep going back to them. I don’t like to expand too much and get lost in the mayhem, so I keep the list small and tight. A rather sad side-effect is that, many a noteworthy blog might have been (un)intentionally avoided. **Being diplomatic ** This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many amazing blogs out there which I might have missed .... Okai, uknow the rest. ************************* In alphabetical o...

"Five thousand!!" "Okay ten thousand!!!" "Fifteen thousand????" Her eyes widened at the enormity of the figure. I was playing the guessing game with my sister when she asked me about the cost of my camera. Poor girl does not know a thing about the cost of digital cameras. Good for her. I somehow managed to change topic. The first thing everyone wanted to know was the cost. And when I tell them, most of them look like they wished they had never asked. “What the …” “Some guts you have…” “Couldn’t you wait till the prices come down…err, will they come down?” These are just a few of the reactions I have received so far. Another person just stared me in the face for sometime, and walked off, without saying a word. That set me thinking about the different perspectives we have about money. For ease of comparison, I pitted my latest investment against another most popular investment most of my peers seem to be making nowadays. Land. A cent of land can cost you any...

...12:55 PM, New Hyderabad Road In my life, I must say I don’t have a previous experience of dealing with angry ewes. Forget it, I’ve had 25 whole years of experience in dealing with a bit closer species, which is - angry female human beings. But still don’t have a clue. I am not going down that road again, which numerous eminent men have before me, and failed miserably. I decided to pursue the safest option, which was backing off. Oh, I didn’t tell you, momma sheep was angry coz I was getting a little too close to her little one, which was dozing off so serenely, pic on the right. Couple of clicks more, bemused herdsmen, and we left! 1:30 PM, Nandi hills “The view from the cliff is breath-taking… when u can see it” - I was informed by SnM . But today, the view was rather creepy. A sheer drop to nothingness. We had walked past a pond, minutes ago. Unless I was told, I would have been forced to believe that it was one of those never-ending gorges, the kind you have seen only in starwars...

6:30 AM, somewhere in Tamilnadu I slowly turned my cramped neck to discover that it was raining. Without any second thought, clipped on the ipod and played Mark Knopfler. Knopfler started off by 'post cards fom Paraguay'. Lovely song. It cheered me up instantly. And I chose to ignore happy faces of folks along the road going through their daily rituals, this and that on public display. Ch called in, "Where have you reached?" I put all my geographical, cartographical and anthropological skills to practice, did some quick scan of the surroundings and declared "40 minutes and I'll be there". That was when the first hole appeared. 10:15 AM, Madiwala bus stop The hole was in fact, a pot-hole. And it was the first among the Thousand three hundred and twenty three more I was about to encounter that morning. Not your normal pot-hole that you see on the road every day…, each was just a bit short of being qualified to be called a well or a pond. Despite the great ...

NewYork Times' selection of 100 noteworthy books of the year, here ! There's also a link to similar lists for all years back till 1997.

Psychos! That’s what they are. I am talking about the KSTRC bus-drivers. Sorry, people of Karnataka, u might want to call those from your part of the world something else, I give you the choice, but K is for Kerala, and psychos is what I choose to call them, with dignity. And without it, they get it everyday, from other road-users, enough to go home and sleep peacefully with. Well there was a time when I admired these guys. That was about when I was learning the trickeries of manipulating 5 tonnes of iron in four wheels with the help of a slender wheel and a couple of paddles that looked like slipper soles. Oh yeah, I forgot, and there was this thing sticking out of the steering column, called the gear lever. This was exactly the problem, I kept forgetting it till I was done with pretty much everything else, and remembered only when the car would start rocking like hell or the instructor did, along with my ear in his clasp. Whichever happened first, the latter would happen, invariably....

mp3 was too good to be true. I remember what someone(was it Murphy himself?) said, if everything seems to be coming your way, get out of the wrong lane, stupid! So thus we were, enjoying the bounties of all those wonderful music, without paying a dime, without ever moving out of our cozy comfortable seats, with just a few mouse-clicks! And when all the hyper-reality ended suddenly, here we are, complaining! Get a grip, dude! OK, the irrelevant trivia being that suddenly someone thought let's give the music all the respect they deserve, and cleanup the network, and fizzle out all mp3 from the system. Bad! I mean real bad! You cannot imagine the amount of trauma this announcement induced in a majority of the workforce, which depended on the aid of soul-liberating music for everything right from designing frameworks to getting their shit out after lunch. Some passed out, some stopped working, some started working again, and some, including yours truly, protested in vain. But when all ...