Friday, February 24, 2006

What to do?

Sleep or Blog? Sleep.

Spend aimless hours on Orkut or Blog? Spend aimless hours on Orkut.

Watch Family Guy or Blog? Watch Family Guy.

Feel guilty about not doing thesis work or Blog? Feel guilty about not doing thesis work.

Look up Yearbook Layouts Online or Blog? Look up Yearbook Layouts Online.

Go to McDonalds or Blog? Go to McDonalds.

Windowshop at Fabindia or Blog? Windowshop at Fabindia.

Sit Through a Well-meant Artistic Piece or Blog? Sit Through a Well-meant Artistic Piece.

Fantasize about Food With Cheese and Men with Britsh Accent or Blog? Fantasize about Food With Cheese and Men with Britsh Accent

Observe Lizards in the Library or Blog? Watch Lizards in the Library.

G-Talk with Anj or Blog? G-Talk with Anj.

Attend Rare Class or Blog? Attend Rare Class. You see, it is very rare.

Wonder about Cleaning my Room or Blog? Wonder about Cleaning my Room.

Watch Sex and the City or Blog? Watch Sex and the City.

So, who said I led a boring life?

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Back to Now

Back to being connected. 36 hours without the Internet and life seemed to have come to a standstill. Laptop was bored of being used only as jukebox.


Back to campus after 36 hours at Diu. Not a very different trip from last time... the all-female group being the one change.There isn't much that you can do different in a place like Diu anyway - eat egg-pie & crêpes, drink wine & vodka, and be merry on the beach & in bed (wink... not the way the average reader would imagine). Other activities included celebrating Shee's b'day, watching late-night TV, finally getting to use my camera & a lot of gossip. The Resort Hoka dipped on the hospitality rating this time around. It was quite disappointing, considering that we enjoyed it so much last time.


It was good to get out of campus for a while. Hmm... am always "getting out of campus" lately. I wonder if two years is too long for an MBA. I know I could've finished learning whatever I've learnt here in 15 months. Now it's getting to me. The place, the people, the pettiness of various issues.

No, skinny dipping didn't happen... no fun with girls only. And I haven't uploaded the close-to-skinny dipping pix too. For the common good of the 9 women on the trip.


It was fun, albeit unprincipled, being the irritating co-passengers on train for a change. Helped us take our mind off how dirty the train was. I've always hated co-passengers who:

a) Eat large meals (complete with pickle and oily gulab jamuns) on a 10-hour journey.

It is an obvious invitation to the creatures of the night that inhabit the dark corners under the berths of Indian trains. This time it was us who did the eating... contributing to a large part of the turnover of McDonalds in Ahmedabad that day. We didn't litter though... The roaches & rats were already around.


b) Sing songs & late into the night.

Yes, it was us doing it this time. But when you're in a mob, it doesn't matter, does it? This is for all those noisy families who make it a point to discuss current affairs and play card games late into the night, while their noisy, high-on-sugar (from the gulab jamuns they just ate) kids play Catching-Cook along the length of the compartment.

I would have hated traveling with us!

I also went to a temple and a church without having to be religious. Achieved a bit of enlightenment too - I realised that equal representation of of sexes is essential for a holiday that is sane and happy.



Friday, February 10, 2006

Heart-shaped Habits

It's Valentine's Week and marketers are working on overdrive to take advantage of lovesick Indian couples. Everywhere I go, whatever I read & wherever I log in, all i can see are pink hearts and red hearts and purple hearts. The teddy-bears carry hearts and so do diamond rings.

Not that I'm the "Velenstines is against our sabhyata" kind. Nor do I believe that the festival is over-rated. I was smitten by the concept of Valentine's Day when I was eight. And over the years I've had Valentine's Days that've ranged from depressing to infuriating to surprising to dreamy.

But as you get older and arm yourself with an MBA in marketing-kinda-sorta-stuff, you realize that V-day isn't about hearts and teddy bears and greeting cards. Or about culture and values and courtship. I just wish marketers would leave some stuff untouched. Ditto for political parties.

It's just not special anymore.

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Here's a paradox though.

Went bowling today. It was damn fun. (Anj sums it up brilliantly here.) Fun Republic has a fairly decent alley, except for pins that go mysteriously missing. And terrible background music.

As we sat outside McDonalds sipping the post-game drink, I realized that it felt awesome to be in post-lib India. Where you can eat pizza, go bowling and buy martini shakers (even if not Martinis) and do a lot of things that a New Yorker could do, even in a pseudo-metro like Ahmedabad.

A for the marketers.

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We hit Diu this weekend. My second trip in three months. All girls this time. Things to do include any 3 of the following: Getting a friend drunk, Photography, Exploration and Skinny Dipping.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Why I love being South Indian*...

Pardon the blatantly regionalistic title, folks from North/West/East India. And, beware... the following blog is very communal. Not in the VHP/RSS way. But communal, all the same. My love, of course, isn't restricted by region. The blog maybe pro-Dravidian, but certainly not Anti-any community. It's just about how much I love the Indian Dixieland and its outputs.

That's disclaimer enough.

After 22 & 1/2 years of existance, I realized that it's amazing fun belonging to a community that has its roots in South India... being Tam... being TamBrahm Iyer and all. A bullet-pointed account of why:

  • People assume that you're intelligent. You don't have to work to hard to prove it.
  • You can speak a third language (most of the population of the world is mono-lingual) and maybe understand a fourth, without being extremely talented.
  • Your friends always want to learn Tam from you (wink)
  • You can laugh at stuff like "South India-la Narthangai kidaikkum. Aaana, North India-la Southangai kidaikuma?!"
  • The yummy techies are mostly from the Deccan and further south. Even if they aren't genetically Southie, they studied there :-)
  • The best bloggers have Southie roots...
  • As do the smartest quizzers :-)
  • They make the best coffee in the world.
  • And they also make vegetarian food that's delicious even without slopping it with ketchup, garlic or cheese.

* South Indians include genuine & wannabe Tams, Gults, Mallus, Kannads... and all the Southies-at-heart... like Konkans :p

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Candymen

Long before the advent of Internet or concupiscence (or knowing what the word meant), we had our shares of celebrity crushes. Ronn Moss as a delectable Ridge Forrester in The Bold and the Beautiful of the early 90s. There was Akshay Kumar, who in the pre-historic era of unshaven chests, sizzled his way through cheesy movies with Raveena Tandon & Shilpa Shetty. And Sachin Tendulkar, in the 1996 World Cup and thereafter, who I was so madly in love with, I had plastered my room, my bookshelf and my bed with his posters.

Delectable, sizzing, yummy, hot, sexy - they weren't words that we used to describe the men back then. In the post-school gossip sessions, the most common squeal would be "Ooh! He's sooo cuuuuute!" or "Isn't he adorrrrrrable?!" All crushes fitted conveniently into descriptions of cute or adorable or handsome. We fantasized about meeting them. We reserved pages in our autograph books for them. And had endless arguments with the girls over whose crush was cuter (or more handsome, or more adorable). When boys our age were discovering porn, we’d follow the lives of our crushes on Stardust/Sportstar/the Friday movie section in the newspaper.

We then evolved, as did our fantasies and our vocabularies. Some of us outgrew celebrity crushes and realized that guys nextdoor were not all that bad. They probably didn’t have the same kind of looks/money/aura as the celebs had, but at least they weren’t taken/gay/too much in demand. The rest of us never gave up on crushes (celebrity or otherwise)... and continue to have them now and then, in a fashion that isn’t really much more sophisticated than before. The crush terminology though, is delightfully different.

They can range from to sweet-toothed carnivorous...
“He’s so yummy, I’d like to lay him down on a plate, drizzle some chocolate sauce on him and eat him up with a spoon.”

... to pedophilic...
“My my... come to momma”

.... to feline...
“Rowwwrrr”

... and sometimes, plain horny.
“That bicep is screaming out to be felt up.”

Which brings me to why I blogged about celebrity crushes in the first place. Every girl I know (believe me, EVERY girl) has the hots for Abhishek Bachchan. I don’t feel it – not even a mild tepidness. Will someone tell me what it is about an arbit actor (who passes off brooding as acting) that makes him so desirable?

PS: Had I not outgrown celeb crushes, I might’ve wanted portion of John Abraham with chocolate sauce. He comes close to the original teenaged version of yum.