Hurt

Some incidents that hurt us might change our lives forever...even more so if we have been hurt by someone close to us…

The emotional fools that we are, we continue to bear the pain caused by our close ones; even though we’re been hurt time and again by them and seldom learn our lessons quickly enough – just because we ‘love’ them and are ‘attached’ to them.

How wonderfully painless the world would be if not for these two seemingly pleasant emotions!

It is these emotions which bind us and sometimes even suffocate us; yet we cannot break away and we continue to endure all the pain, for God knows what.

It hurts even more to know that the other person doesn’t care a damn for you or your feelings or your opinions and continues to hurt. Hurt on hurt; pain on pain; this will go on…till we break away…but can we?

If the pain was a choice, we can blame ourselves to an extent. But sometimes it is imposed on us…and we have no other choice but to face it.

I’ve learnt my lesson at last today…through a real eye opener. It has only increased my determination and has hardened me further. I believe I am what I am today due to all that I’ve been through and I’m thankful to life for teaching many important lessons early on...

As quoted by a friend in Orkut (Just when I needed it):
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending”

Book review - Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics

I’m bundling up two reviews in a single post
Reason #1: I read the books successively without a gap
Reason #2: One of these books doesn’t deserve a separate post
Reason #3: I’m also a teensy-weensy bit lazy (this had the most insignificant impact on the decision, really :D)

Freakonomics is the result of an economist asking questions (and answering them) that typical economists never ask. For example: ‘What do Sumo wrestlers and school teachers have in common?’ (DO NOT try to guess!) Steven Levitt answers such questions by digging into huge amounts of data, analyzing them from a never-seen-before perspective and with Stephen Dubner, presents it on a platter through this book – all we have to do is digest it…if we are ready to digest and believe the facts.

Despite the name, Freakonomics is neither freaky (maybe it is in the mind of a typical economist) nor ‘technically economics’; atleast not the way we know economics to be. The book was fun to read and the authors added a good dosage of humor (Don’t expect to go LOL-ing for every page though, it isn’t a joke book right? Besides what are presented here are solid facts)

I felt that no other book can explain human psychology and nature so perfectly…

Economics or for that matter anything boils down to one simple statement – People respond to incentives…is there any other sentence that explains human nature so correctly?

The book gives a clear explanation of many weird yet commonplace things with lots of data to back it, that you can’t help but believe. While reading the book, at the end of some revelations, I was unable to believe I believed what was stated! (I'm even now in a state of unable to believe that I believe – some intensive googling needed to make it settle in my head)

Hmm…hence I had a good incentive to read Superfreakonomics, immediately after.

To tell the truth, Superfreakonomics is nothing like its title, it should’ve probably been named 'Subfreakonomics' – for that’s what the book is. The book doesn’t live up to its expectations as the sequel of Freakonomics; the book reveals too little a number of facts and goes on and on and on about them till you feel, ‘Enough! What’s the next startling fact?’ Maybe the authors should’ve done more research and garnered enough number of facts before going for the second book.

The only topic I liked in Superfreakonomics is its eye-opener on Global warming – I just read this today, so I still didn’t digest it (The next stage would be unable to believe…blah blah)

So are these books recommended?

Freakonomics – yep!
Superfreakonomics – not really

In case you’re thinking that these books are too technical/ complex…

…I found these books to be much much less (actually nowhere near) complicated than The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari...I still have to come out of that trauma, only time can heal certain wounds! :(

Save Our Tigers?

The words ‘Save Our Tigers…only 1411 left’ stare out at you, accompanied by a picture of a cute little tiger that makes you go ‘Awww….sooo cute!’. In how many places have we seen these hoardings? – Countless probably.

I’ve received many emails too, asking me to ‘pledge my support’. All I had to do was register and voila – I was supporting tigers! A number of ‘celebrities’ (quotes coz I hate that word, many people don’t deserve to be in that category) ‘pledged’ their support. A crop of websites popped up too, to campaign for the issue.

But, will this all help?

I happened to visit the 'Save Our Tigers' website and was aghast at what I saw in the ‘Be Informed’ link. The last update was on August 21, 2009 (!) and the link to the file read ‘66 tigers dead in 8 months’. Well, that is how informed we are on the issue!

It has been almost 9 months since the campaign started…hasn’t there been ANY change in the number of tigers since then? No births or deaths??? Even the brand new banners or websites carry the same message ‘Save our tigers…only 1411 left’ specific to the units place, is it even accurate data?

Hundreds of people have ‘pledged their support’, so what? Is it of any use? What are the activities taken up to ensure that the tiger population thrives? What has been done to save our tigers in the past 8 months???

And the most important question I would like to ask…did everyone suddenly realize the dwindling tiger population only now? I don’t think the number of tigers plummeted from tens of thousands to ‘1411’ in a few days! As far as I know I think the dwindling tiger population has been a problem from not less than 10 years. What were all these people doing all these days? What are they doing now???

I think it’s high time to stop the hype and take action; just ‘pledging support’ won’t help in any way.

Corrupt officials who partake in poaching should be removed…but I know that this idea is too far-fetched (the whole topic of corruption is like a huge dirt pit, too deep and wide to fathom and there’s no end to it).

Maybe from now on each ‘celebrity’ and each organization should adopt a tiger since its birth, sponsor it and be responsible for it and its safety completely - Just like how villages are adopted for development. But who wants responsibility? Everyone wants to just ‘pledge their support’ (I’m beginning to hate this phrase) throw in some money (God knows if this really reaches the right place) and announce to the world that they’ve, well, ‘pledged….’

Let’s just hope that these pledges translate to actions somehow and do save these magnificent creatures from disappearing from our country….and planet.

Book Review: A Suitable Boy

Can’t say how much my life changed due to ‘A Suitable Boy’ – In terms of the time spent on it or mustering up the determination to complete the novel

It all started when I went to Crossword a year ago just to check out its sale. I chanced upon this book and bought just coz it was quite cheap for such a big book and the author was well known :P

It was after getting the book home that I realized that what I had in my hands was one of the longest novels (1349 pages) ever written in English Literature!...and I patted myself on the back for that :D

Of course, I didn’t expect myself to read it right away…the pile of books I had to read for my impending project work/ exam had already turned into a mini mountain.

So…finally after all exams, when I knew I had all the time in the world (I did not know till when though) I started reading THE BOOK. After reading about 400 pages, I decided to give a gap for a few days, coz the book’s not a thriller and I wasn’t dying to know what happens next. This gap of a few days soon turned into a gap of a few months…

…until I began reading it again in December 2009.

Through immense determination and giving credit to the book – through the interest that slowly crept on me as I turned the pages, I finally completed reading the novel last Sunday (28th March) !!! (Hurray!)

Btw, while reading this book, I also simultaneously read ‘Tuesdays With Morrie’, ‘One Night at the Call Center’, ‘You Belong To Me’, ‘Blink’ and ‘Freakonomics’ (halfway through).

The pace of the narration is smooth, slow and the book requires patience to read. You can’t just expect something miraculous or incredible or thrilling to happen in a couple of hundred pages. Once you get started, the interest builds-up, but slowly.

The story basically revolves around four families – The Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis and the Khans. The main story is about how Mrs. Mehra looks for ‘A Suitable Boy’ for her daughter Lata.

There are quite a large number of main protagonists in this story (there are four family trees in the first couple of pages of the book for easy reference) and an even larger number of other ‘side’ characters. Given this, you will never once get confused who is who, related to whom and how…

As I kept reading the novel, I felt the characters come alive, so real, so natural, so very like each one of us…it later becomes quite hard to imagine that those people do not exist, that they are just figments of a person’s imagination.

To tell the truth, somewhere towards the end of the book, I expected something dramatic or a sudden turn of events to take place in one scenario and something totally unexpected happened in another scenario… it’s quite a dumb way of putting it, but it’s hard to tell the story without telling it!!!

In this story, there are no heroes, no marvels, just ordinary people, living ordinary lives, which turn extraordinary under certain circumstances and the lives become temporarily turbulent, but then just as any storm should settle, so do these lives; and then life goes on.

At the end it left me with this feeling…

...that I traveled all alone to an entirely different place and was introduced to these characters such that I knew all of them, but they did not know who I am, I could see them, but they couldn’t see me; something like a spirit…

…and that I watched all what was going on in their lives for a brief period of time, smiled when they were happy and felt their pain, before the author beckoned the spirit and told that it was time to leave.

At last…broke the jinx!

This year will always be special…for it is the year the greatest jinx of my life has been broken.

This blog post is mainly to thank (though most of them wouldn’t accept it and would throttle me if I say ‘thanks’ :D) all those who’ve unintentionally and most unwittingly broken the jinx.

Although I’ve celebrated all my birthdays with great fervor and each of them has its special moments, the birthdays (ya, plural :P) I’ve celebrated this year will remain the most special.

Thanks to my birthday falling on a weekday during the vacations most of the time (a deadly combination when you are accessible to neither your friends nor family), or having commitments like exams/ souvenirs (:D) or things going wrong or whatever other reasons, it’s been 10 long years since I’ve celebrated my birthday, ON MY BIRTHDAY. Not only that, due to the same reason and various other reasons, it’s been the same duration of time since I’ve cut a birthday cake! (Birthday cakes are usually not cut other than on the birthday, except in IT companies :P, which was good for me btw :D as you will see...).

In the beginning I tried to prevent the jinx as much as possible, but soon realized that it was as inevitable as, well, my jinx, and gave up. Till last year whenever anyone asked me about what I would do on my birthday, I would say ‘I will sit at home and watch TV’ and enjoy the weird expressions on their faces.

This year – no vacation but my b’day falls on a weekend! And when there's a bandh!  :(
And I dared not plan anything other than shutting up and sitting at home!

And then my wonderful friends and cousins surprised me that day and broke the jinx!

So, why the late thanks?

I had another wonderful surprise today when my team members most unexpectedly arranged another birthday bash (combined with the b’days of 3 others, but anyways broke the jinx again) today!!!

So I thank

My friends for surprising me (u really got me that day!) and coming all the way in spite of the bandh (thanks also to those who wanted to come but couldn't becoz of the bandh) and breaking the jinx…

My cousins for enduring the long distance travel and making the surprising arrangements for my birthday regardless of the bandh and breaking the jinx…

My colleagues for surprising me today and breaking the jinx…

You know how some small gestures go a long way and unwittingly change a person’s perspective of something? ....

Tindly Dum Fry

No, this is not a recipe and hence is in the right blog...

Everytime I don't take my lunch box to college...er...office and have to eat at the cafetaria, one infamous (in my mind) dish pops up in the menu - 'Tindly Dum Fry'.

I used to have an aversion towards the name of the dish and never ever cared to find out what 'tindly' is for many months and I used to skip taking the buffet whenever that dish was served. Finally, 3 weeks back, I dared to try out the dish and found out that 'tindly' is Ivy Gourd or 'Dondakaya'. I managed to taste it, but hated the way it was made by the cafeteria.

As sadness and grief makes poets out of men (as in mankind), the agony 'Tindly Dum Fry' was subjecting me to, caused a poem to flow out of me within minutes of eating the horrendous dish.

Here it is:

Why why why
Why Tindly Dum Fry

Everytime I ate
That was what they made

Tindly tindly who art thou?
Did I ever hurt you somehow?


ROFL!!!


Why did I release this blog now if I ate the dish and made up the poem three weeks back? After three whole weeks of eating from my lunch box, I decide to give it a break and plan to eat at the cafeteria today, and guess what I see in the menu...

Telugu Movie Gyan…Unleashed!!!

I switched on the TV today afternoon, wondering if any good movies were being telecast and I chanced upon a Telugu movie in a channel. I started watching it and could not believe my eyes at the inane stuff they were showing. I had a feeling that almost all scenes in the movie were picked off from other movies. I could’ve just stopped watching, but, somewhere deep down I had some hope that the movie would turn out to be better; as I continued to watch, this hope kept diminishing.

And then, my ordeal was cut short by a power-cut. Hence, no movie review (I don’t think I would’ve taken the pains to write a review for that crap anyways)…

…but it left me seething at what most Telugu movies dole out year after year.

So, here’s a compilation of Telugu movie ‘gyan’:

Caution: Reader discretion is advised

The ‘hero’ -

• The hero is always the most crude person; he almost never has a proper education, even if he does, is in 90% of the movies, unemployed

• He always has a friend who is the biggest bakra anyone has ever seen or a bunch of good-for-nothing friends

• Either he has a family - father, mother and mostly a little sister, rarely an elder sister and never a brother, or he is an orphan!!!

• The hero’s family is shown mostly during the intro, then once for introducing the heroine to them and then they are completely forgotten about till the wedding (of the hero and heroine in case you were wondering)

• The hero’s parents always pester him about his job/ education etc., but they never bother about whom he’s gonna bring home as his wife! They always oppose our hero for every tiny thing whether it matters or not but they never oppose his choosing the heroine!

• The hero’s sister mainly exists so that the heroine can be her friend and hence get introduced to the hero or for convenient communication between the hero and heroine in tough times

The ‘heroine’ -

• Our heroine, who is the most beautiful and the most dumb creature on the planet, always enters the movie in the first 15 minutes. The ‘entry’ of the heroine is usually when it rains, or atleast when the wind is blowing like mad, and then there’s the focusing of our heroine from bottom to top or her behind (oh bother!)

• No matter how ugly and/ or old our hero is, the ‘heroine’ is always a sweet young thing, the younger the better (even teens will do)

• The heroine was introduced as a sweet young thing right? After the intro somehow, she turns into a mean, arrogant thing to make things difficult for our ‘hero’

• The heroine is always to be engaged/ engaged (thank God never married :P) to another guy (who is NOT THE ‘hero’). No matter how decent, sweet, handsome, educated this ‘other’ guy is, poor thing, he can never be THE hero and can never exceed him!

       In most of the movies, I did not understand why the heroine chooses the hero over that guy! After all, he’s much better than the hero in many ways and the heroine’s parents like him too! :D

• The other guy whether good or bad or much much better than the hero, always has to give up the heroine, either reluctantly (after some ‘dishum dishum’) or by sacrifice (after a long horrendous speech by this sacrificing bakra on what ‘Love’ is and how parents should always agree to such crap

• The heroine’s dad is always big and bad and always wears white starched cotton shirts and mostly a dhoti and has a big curved moustache. He is 90% of the time a gangster (the highest in the ranks), or a factionist or just plain bad for no reason (our hero has to have challenges to live upto his title right?)

• The heroine’s dad (the villain, if the guy the heroine is engaged to is good) always has a huge convoy of white cars (before it was the Ambassador, now it’s the Tavera) and a huge gang of ‘rowdies’ who wear huge white starched cotton shirts which remain spotless even after all the ‘dishum dishum’ and slaughtering and bloodshed (wonder what detergent they use!)

• The most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in any movie: The convoy of dazzling white cars enters the scene and the heroine’s dad’s goons poke their hands and heads out of the cars’ windows and swing the swords and guns round and round in the air!

• If the heroine’s dad is not big and bad, but a little big and a little bad, then she will have an elder brother, who is also a little big and a little bad, but is pesky and hates the hero to the core and does anything to keep the hero’s eyes off his little sis

• The heroine is always a damsel in distress (even though she has a rich dad, good education, is extremely beautiful, is engaged to the most suitable boy her dad can get, has a huge bunch of friends (who are initially shown in the movie, but then they are totally forgotten about) etc. I just can’t understand what the heroine’s problem is…

The fights…

• When the villain/ villains/ ‘rowdies’ hit the hero, there is seldom any noise and hardly any impact on our hero. When the hero, who is weak and thin and most of the times old too, hits the rowdies it makes a ‘dishum dishum’ sound (nowadays just a ‘dash dush dish’ kinda sound) and one knock is enough to blow their brains out or send them flying through the air and land them on some wooden or concrete object…which then breaks

• Sometimes the hero is first hit black and blue by the villains and blacks out, but then he miraculously wakes up and beats the villains to pulp, thanks to a cry of despair by the heroine

• The heroine is ALWAYS present when the hero fights with the villains

• Even if the hero is fatally stabbed, he will continue to fight the goons, but if a goon is even scratched, he will fall to the floor with a thud and never get up

• The most important thing – the goons attack the hero ONE AT A TIME, even if they come in hordes. Sometimes, to break the monotony they attack in 2’s and 3’s and place themselves so strategically that the hero can beat ‘em all up in one go. They might also (though rarely) stand in a circle around our hero and wait for their turn patiently to get beat up!

The songs…

I better stop now…this post has been my longest so far. I surprised myself by writing so much; it’s high time I stopped watching senseless Telugu movies!

Note: Not all Telugu movies are that bad and senseless - sadly, MOST of them are, and then there are some which make you want to tear your hair out. I somehow find the older movies to be more sensible than the newer ones…I’m saving this for another post though.