Ninaivugal...Thoughts

As the clock chimes 12 on Monday night to set off a frenzy of global celebrations, and as the New Year hype reaches a crescendo, we would have passed off yet another year having touched the " usual " landmarks on the way. Happy New Year mails and phone calls are exchanged to enliven the moment. It's not a moment of a lifetime, but there's a feeling of new found hope and excitement, as you look forward to life with gusto, albeit for those few moments. Though the general lifestyle of people has changed considerably over the last few years, and as technology has shaped our lives dramatically, the sameness in me has ensured that life has moved on at a steady pace in the year 2007. Personally, there is nothing much as far as I am concerned to unravel the timeline of events in the year 2007. December 2006 The last week of December 2006 was spent with undergraduate classmates at Washington, DC , and we got back to our respective places just a day before the onset of New Yea...

Pic: Graduation ceremony at Recreation Center Life is rife with little expectations; the little things that can spruce and spice up your life in equal measure. In today's highly global world, it is not unusual to find friends in even the remotest part of the world. United States may be the largest country in the world with vast space, but every state in the US is filled with a known face. It is truly heartening to know that there is nothing to worry when you land up in a new place, because you just can't be devoid of friends. The flip side is that, with so many people in different areas, it has become increasingly difficult to find a common meet-up place. So, when you get a chance to meet up for the right occasion, we just have to make use of it totally. These little expectations may not change your life, but this fleeting passage of a quick time out together leaves you lingering for more. Pic: Graduates seated! So, last weekend was a great way to break the norms of life...

My knowledge of Kannada movies was strictly limited to the single source of entertainment channel in the mid-nineties. I used to wait for the Saturday evening show (later moved to Sunday evening) eagerly, hoping I could see Annavaru Dr. Rajkumar , "rebel star" Ambareesh, "Kottigobba" Vishnuvardhan, or the Nag brothers in action. Movies were plain and simple, and it always ended in a feel good factor. I was never into watching Kannada movies in cinema halls. But as the years went by, as different channels came into existence, I could not keep up with the pace of Kannada movies; not that it was way ahead, but sadly, it had fallen way behind the standards set by its regional peers. So, I moved away from the solitary source to keep track of other things, but I still made it a point to watch the movies played on DD9, the regional equivalent of DD1, as and when I caught the Kannada movie watching mindset. Though I am not a big fan of Upendra , he brought some enterta...

There are some things which you can live without; there are some things which you just cannot live without after having lived with it for some time. This blog post is coming to you at 12:27 AM (to be absolutely precise) EST, and you can imagine, at this wee hour in the morning, how my mind is clouded with random thoughts. Life has taken a fast track in the last twenty years, and I just can't imagine how quickly our lives have got adapted to it. It is strange, but in the process of making things simpler, how we have lost out on some of the simple aspects of life. In the last many years, I have always fought for simplicity, trying to steer my life away from the norms, since norms are no longer associated with simplicity. Yet, the more I try to get away from it, the more I am interested in the development of today's world. I clearly remember the day we got the land line phone back in Bangalore. I was in my fifth standard and was getting all excited about the new device at ho...

One of the greatest wonders of life, according to me, is the ability to communicate with a wide set of people, identify a select few with whom you think will share an unknown closeness, back your instincts and give it all you can to be in touch with them. Many a time, I have pondered how much a new face means to us after some point of time. How many of us really keep in touch with our old friends? All of us have met so many people since childhood that the number keeps increasing by the day. We lose track of some of them just due to the sheer number of new faces that we meet everyday. Obviously, you give it your best shot to stay in touch with all, but the inevitable slowly seeps in. The good old days of yesteryears is slowly forgotten. The hourly phone calls are replaced by daily phone calls, which soon turns weekly and before your realize, it has already become bi-monthly, until one fine day it dawns on you that you haven't spoken to your friend in a year. You think, by then, it i...

The habit of maintaining a foot long distance between the mouth and spoon dates back to early stages of childhood when my mother had a stern eye on the proceedings in the kitchen. The typical conservative South Indian touch that I inculcated at such a young age under the watchful eyes of my mother has actually made life difficult for me several years later. They are simple set of rules, but when I see the general population bypass them, I have an unexplainable sense of exasperation seething through me. The first feeling I get when I see such things happen is Oh! What would my mother say if she sees this! The concept of echchal was made clear to me at home when I had just crossed the stage of crawling I guess. It remains distinct in memory to me because at every stage it was explained to me the consequence of not following the general protocols of life. I remember as a toddler, I would follow my mother into the kitchen holding the pallu of her saree, and demanding some offerings from...

Get up. It is time to get ready. Ma, 5 minutes, please! I have no idea how many times I would have played out this situation in my life. It all started during my school days, when I had to get up early in the morning. My school started at 7:30 in the morning, and my mother would start her wake-me-up process from 6:00, which would easily go on till 6:30. The struggle would continue relentlessly every morning, shuttling between the room and the kitchen every five minutes. She would coax and cajole, give a stern call at times, and finally, would consider that the best option would be to drag me off the bed. I would react as if my mother had committed a sin by treating me so "violently". I would never help her cause by reacting too slowly in the morning, contrary to the way she pulled herself up every morning, never flinching even once in her daily chores. How could I explain to her the bliss of early morning sleep? The day began by deriding the cold Bangalore weather, which neve...

Pic: In front of MIT Blogging is a strange thing; there is so much to be written, and it depends on you to pick the right topic to be written about. I thought I was bored of writing travelogues, but then after a rather eventful weekend, I just could not think of writing anything more important. It was planned weeks earlier that Yadu and Karthik would be joining us for the weekend here at Boston . Boston is one of the cities on the east coast which can make you feel absolutely pleasant. There is a feel good factor associated with this city, so famous for education and sports, among many other things; a touch of class that can be experienced by staying in this beautiful city. Truly English! Pic: In front of Harvard The best part about friends visiting you from far off places has more to do with staying together than just touring the city. You look forward to meeting them with a sense of longing to catch up with the good old times. All of us hailing from the same school, we generate tonne...

The dreaded years of English language in school began with short essays, compositions and paragraph writing in your own words. I had to adapt to the language through a series of mind conversions from the local tongue, before it actually took some time to think in English and write in English. When I wrote my first essay in my own words, there was a startling revelation of how hard it is to write something without by-hearting what the teacher enforced upon us. That was class fifth and the beginning of a whole series of problems with grammar and other small nuances. The English text books were fun to read, which gradually got complicated with Shakespeare entering the fray along with a whole lot of Russian writers. As you like it was a brilliant read, and short stories like God sees the truth but waits by Leo Tolstoy , The bet by Anton Chekov , Gateman's gift by RK Narayan , The last l eaf by O' Henry just elevated me to an unexplainable trance by getting me introduced t...

Well, well, well, before I break your head with acronyms, three out of the five refer to the same topic. I am referring to the Harry Potter (HP) series, which had readers hooked all over the world, thanks to JK Rowling . What really pleased me was the fact that there was so much anticipation, that kids and adults alike had lined up stores at midnight to procure the first copy of the book. That really is a good step and it was good to see people give so much importance to literature instead of other trivialities. I read the books after a long time, actually, really long. After the final edition of the series had come out, I took up to Harry Potter reading. I just wanted to know what was there in the book that people were going crazy about. I read the six books in about two or three weeks time, in between office and household chores. I don't know why, but I could never take out time to read it over the weekends. There was a point when I was reading the fourth book that I fel...

I had to check the title twice so that I did not end up adding an 'h' somewhere that could result in a vegetable. The whole meaning of the post would have been lost. But, Google has always helped my cause to verify things instantaneously, and here goes the post to convey the right meaning. Bindi is a symbol anyone from India would be familiar with. In South India, it is referred to as Pottu or Bottu , and since I am from the South, my first reaction would be to associate that tiny dot on a woman's forehead as Pottu . I do not want to write about the religious significance of a bindi since a significant lot has been written about that. I have always wondered how that tiny addition to the forehead of women serves as a nice decorative item. A bindi comes in different sizes and shapes associated with a myriad of decorative features thus answering a big question Why do girls spend hours and hours of their time selecting a bindi? But today it is different. It is no m...

Simplicity is certainly the norm of life, and sometimes, when you look back in time, you just wonder how in the world, the world has changed drastically over a period of time. There are so many people with whom I can easily share this view How I wish I can go back in time . Life was simple, with all the little things having the greatest of significance and extravaganza was limited to just over the top luxuries, luxuries which do not even qualify as basic necessities in today's ever changing world. Life was all about doing the simple things in a simple way to get simple results and more importantly getting satisfied in a simple way. Simple, isn't it? Pratap and I go a long way in sharing some of the good and bad times together. Today, at lunch time, we had a brief conversation over phone, and invariably, the talks centered on Bangalore and the simplicity of the early nineties. He told me Praveen, I want to go back to Bangalore and experience the thrill of life as...