Ninaivugal...Thoughts

Ganesha: The Lord of good things It's a fast paced world, and there are a million things happening at the next instant.  When I leave work, you can bet on anything in the world that I would reach home within the next hour, give or take a few minutes.  There might be an occasional stop at Dillon's, the super store, or, at the gas station so that I don't spend those precious minutes at the gas station instead of being tucked under the covers on a cold wintry morning.  Life is pretty much simple and predictable. I was a nine year old or a ten year old, I don't exactly remember.  After much harrowing and convincing, I was given a bicycle at home.  It was the first step towards adulthood.  It was a Hero Ranger LE that had the mountain tyres (tires) with a black surface coating.  It was one of the coolest bikes of its time.  I still don't know what the LE stands for, but even those extra two letters did sound pretty cool.  During the first wee...

It has always been appalling at the way China treats its dissidents.  It quashes even a remote hint of authoritarian overture by suppressing any speculation that could develop into a movement over a period of time.  Freedom of speech is not restricted, rather, it is something that is not even heard of.  A democratic tone is killed without any trace and the "nipping in the bud" phrase is followed in the most precise way.  If you had the guts to take on the government, you are virtually left naked.  There is absolutely no place to hide.  The jail terms can be astounding, and the jail conditions absolutely dark, literally as well as metaphorically. As I was talking to one of my Chinese friends, I was stunned by the level of control that the government exercises on the common man.  The fundamental rights of the citizens are snatched and the suppression is taken to a level that virtually leaves a person with no way of getting information that is not gover...

As I walk through several hundred unread posts on my Reader on a daily basis, it failed to cross my mind that I had a registered domain for blogging.  It waited endlessly, and the ravages of time had brought to it an almost antediluvian look, and, at a time when web 2.0 was carrying along with it a rapid approach, leaving everything behind in obscurity.  At long last, at the stroke of the hour that had no impressible significance, I decided that the blog had been dormant enough. We(read my wife and I) finally joined the gamut of smartphone holders.  The astronomical data rate plans prevented us from getting one earlier, and the procrastination (my friends can vouch for that) to switch to one that had all the advantages of the cloud bore fruit after more than a year of endless wait and admiration for those sexy creatures.  Anyway, it was just a matter of time before the fear of extra expenditure was outweighed by the tons of advantages of holding a smartphone. ...

I was staring at the symbols.  The debugger was throwing a hell a lot of tantrums.  The memory locations and debug symbols were actually making life difficult for me.  I craned my neck as closely as possible to the monitor with my nose maintaining a thin 1mm distance from the screen.  It is not too hard to imagine when you consider the fact that my nose to face ratio is as high as the noise to signal ratio when making a call on the AT&T network.  It was like the day before the last exam in school.  You just wished the holidays started a day earlier.  What kind of an instruction is that? I wondered, knowing fully well that another few hours of persistence and few more hard and cold stares at the figures jiggling in front of my eyes, I would have my moment of peace. In the midst of this insolvable problem, my mind wandered to other issues.  I could as well take something simpler and get back to this later.  I narrowed down to one from a m...

It's been quite a month.  My wife and I share a 1500 minute mobile family plan, and I can bet on almost anything in the world that a significant amount of that time has gone towards customer support.  It has been a month of inquiring with customer representatives, showing an abundance of patience, and putting on a brave front as though you have just been hurled aside in a battle.  I can say with a measure of absolute confidence that it is no easy task to listen to the same cacophony over and over again while you are kept on hold. The wait is almost endless, and worse, there is not even a flicker of light at the other end of the line.  The customer representative just compounds your agony further, and at the end of it, you are left wishing that the wait time music lasted a touch longer than the outrageous solutions received. Almost every other customer support call begins as though you are about to leave a voicemail message.  The drab monotone almost kills you....

Pass me that bag lying in front of you. In a rather intriguing way, I stretched my neck and strained my eyes to find out in the hardest possible way what was in front of me.  There was no way in the world that that bag was lying there.  My mind was blanked out and it was as though a black piece of cloth was wrapped around my eyes.  It is quite probable if that was the case, at least my other senses would have helped me in locating the bag.  Locating is actually a wrong word here, rather, it should be, seeing. Praveen! It is right there, shrieked my wife.   Where, where, I asked, in a pleading tone.   I just wanted her to put an end to the aura of "invisibility" (definitely, I wouldn't use invincibility).  Looking at the number of words that are getting replaced, one shouldn't be faulted for thinking that this is some kind of a Find and Replace word editor. She stood stoically, at least she tried to, but I was not sure whether her express...

Nataraj Theater (courtesy: Flickr ) The times were clearly in favor of standalone theaters in Bangalore; a time when multiplexes were an unheard of phenomenon.  A building hosted a single theater that could withstand a capacity of about six hundred or more people easily.  There was a clear demarcation between the first class and the balcony tickets.  Just like the categories bestowed by the Indian railways, first class seating was second best in this case as well.  The balcony tickets were the premium priced tickets and people clamored well in advance to get the special seats.  It was priced more not without a reason.  It was a good ten or twenty feet above the supposedly inferior seating arrangement, and the viewers seated in this area did not have to crane their necks to catch the reel life heroes in action. Plaza (courtesy: Flickr ) Like today, the nineties too believed in location centric charges.  A theater in a good location charged a...

In what can be described as the most boring part of the "once in a while" chore, I have no doubt that cleaning, organizing and de-cluttering rank as the most mundane.  It is not something that one gets to do on a daily basis, but it is such a mind numbing task that you secretly wish you are somehow over with it even before you have started.  A dull everyday routine is usually offset by doing something out of the way once in a while.  But, when your once in a while task gets boring, you end up looking forward to the routine stuff. So, we decided that we would clean up the house today, freeing all the crammed up spaces from the world of unwanted information.  When you talk of unwanted information, I really mean it, because there is such a big pile load of trash accumulated, knowingly or unknowingly.  It is utterly painful to sort your way through the accumulated mess, but some time or the other, which occurs, rather, painfully periodically, you are left with no ...

It was not the best way for him to spend the rest of his life.  Rather, it was not the worst way either.  Mr. Srinivasan Iyengar was sitting at the courtyard of his house observing the usual day to day activities.  Except for a few aberrations, life seemed to move on in exactly the same way as the previous day and the day before.  Mr. Iyengar was meticulous with his time, a stickler to perfection, and a man, for whom honesty and integrity were virtues that occupied the highest echelons in his dictionary.  When I say that Mr. Iyengar was meticulous with time, it is not that he followed up every activity at the exact specified hour.  In fact, he was so used to the activities around him that he could call out the time just by looking around him.  As the vegetable vendor dragged his wares on a cart past the house, Mr. Iyengar would sub-consciously be guided into the house, and people at home instantly knew that it was time for his morning breakfast.  ...

It is a fact of life that it is never easy to draw the line when it comes to a myriad of things.  Even if there is a thick line between contentment and greed, it is amusing to find that certain individuals find ways to be on the wrong side of the line.  Now, what's the wrong side? The Indian Premier League (IPL) has thrown open a can of worms bringing to the forefront the involvement of politicians, financiers, famous personalities, and almost every biggie directly or indirectly.  The final entity of the IPL happens to be the sportsperson himself, when he actually should have been the primary, speaks a lot about the way the tournament is designed.  I, personally, have nothing against the IPL.  It is a dream tournament for every cricket fan, who longs to see stars from various countries share the same dressing room in this city based format.  It is an English Premiere League like concept, where the best of footballers from all parts of the world represent ...

Shashi was distraught. His constant state of misery was forcing him out of his current happiness. It may seem like a paradox, but, that's how he was. If he got a salary hike, he would worry about inflation. If he won a lottery, he would worry about the tax. If he got a promotion at work, he would worry about the extra hours he would have to put in. So, in a way, his worries were endless and as a result, he ended up thinking about his future every single moment. Shashi, like every other individual on this planet, was pummeled by the monotony of daily life, and tried every possible trick in the book to escape from it. Every now and then, he would tell his wife, "I have decided that am going to day trade from today. That's where the money is, and that's as easy as it can get to become a millionaire." His wife would turn a deaf ear to his over the top suggestions, and both of them would head to work, as though nothing ever was spoken between them in the m...

What a lucky guy? I thought to myself as I saw him walk past me.  An expression that would be reserved for a fellow guy not if he was an intellectual genius or Albert Einstein's alter ego, but if he was walking with an absolute beauty of a babe or obviously, if I had other intentions.  The most incredible aspect of the male pheromone is obviously the ability to influence every member of the same species with a common trait that virtually nullifies the uniqueness of the individual.  In short, perception of unique thought is nothing but absolutely universal.  Well, I digress, but that's what I was doing literally.  I was launching a scalene triangle to cover half a pace.  You can imagine the frontal movement of my legs.  It was as though I was transformed into a dog when I tried to move forward.  Herculean, monumental, outstanding and sensational were words reduced to grave insignificance compared to the amount of happiness I secured when I moved fo...

Why don't you help me in the kitchen? I have so many things to do. I could just hear the usual faint cry from the kitchen.  After so many years of marriage, I was getting used to these little things. Father, why don't you budge from that freakin' newspaper? The second source of disturbance was from none other than my ever social Sahana .  She was busy too.  At least, it made me feel better that she was calling me as father, instead of various condensed versions of abominate equivalents.  They were fancy killers, really! I mean who would want to be called as papa or puppy (disgusting, who wants to be called like that!) or whatever .  By the way, getting back to the real reason of she being busy. Sahana , don't shout at me like that.  I have a hundred reasons to be unhappy with you.  What are you doing in front of the laptop? Is this the reason you asked me to get you a Mac? Why can't you just communicate with your friends over phone? Or still b...

So, where are you guys headed after marriage? seemed to be the oft asked question.  In a typical Tendulkaresque way, my response would eke out an as-though-well-thought out " Haaan (a hefty five or ten seconds later, well hoping that the topic would have changed), actually, we are heading out to all possible temples in South India, and yeah, we have to catch up with a few relatives as well ".  The smirk on the questioner's face was of course conspicuous, and he would heave out a nonchalant sigh as though he had known it all along.  There was no way in the world that we would be let off lightly had we tried to skip the temples.  We had to appease the Gods (how many ever they are), and this is the time you have all those questions whizzing past your head " Why can't we just propitiate the deity in front of our house? If all Gods are the same, what is the logic in trying to visit every one of them? " These are questions for which you are bound to get only star...