2 1/4 Year Anniversary

Greetings, loyal reader. Yes, I know what you are thinking. “Here we go again. Another long, self-absorbed paragraph to exculpate himself after not having posted in ages. You know what, bro? This is just not good enough.” And, my dear reader, you would be absolutely right. That is quite unacceptable behaviour. To make up for it, here is a kitten.

Sorry about that. If  you have finished throwing up, here is a picture of Nadal winning Wimbledon, to make up for it.

Okay, that was unfair of me.  Here you are, with my sincere apologies.

Do not blame me, you brought this upon yourself!

As the two of us, you, who impetuously asked for this, and I, who equally rashly agreed, sit here and wonder what repulsive image(as a matter of perspective) is going to appear next,  Isner has actually managed to win the third set. Sigh, there goes my prediction. But the great white hope has won, so Nadal won’t have such an easy time in the semis. Sigh, do you think I just jinxed him? I don’t know how this keeps happening.

Did you know that there are more horses than people in Mongolia? And there are more descendants of Genghis Khan than horses alive today? Ok I might have made that one up.

And now, I should bid adieu. With this final, real, picture of Nadal, we will part. And I shall return soon with an actual post. Hopefully. But don’t blame me if the return is not post-haste though.

Hyuk hyuk!

Angels and Running Demons

Much like GB  Shaw, I, too, often enjoy quoting myself. As I once said, whenever I run out of things to write about, and I apparently last ran into them 6 months ago, the easiest thing to do would be to write an um “opinion piece” on some movie Iv watched. So, in keeping with the title of this post, let me start with Angels and Demons.

When I read Dan Brown’s books I remember wondering why no one had ever explained to this man the virtues of writing short sentences. I was also curious if everyone in Dan Brown’s surroundings always found the need to say out loud every damn thing they thought. And also how Robert Langdon’s detective skills were almost superior to those of the Hardy Boys’. He kept landing himself in one “impossible-to-escape-from” situation or another, and then suddenly, the case magically unravelled itself.  And quite clearly, the makers of the movie have been labouring under the delusion that this is why the books became bestsellers and they have adopted all these salient elements in the movie.

I have to concede one thing though. Angels and Demons, while comprising of a lot of running, pointing and explaining, was a pleasant change from Da Vinci Code, which was mostly just pointing and explaining. Tom Hanks, while taking “thinking out loud” to a whole new level, has broken his own record for Maximum Number of History Lessons Delivered While Escaping From Mad Assassins While Accompanied By Hot Girls Who Are There For No Particular Reason Because Dan Brown Already Had Movie Rights In Mind While Writing The Book. There was one part of the movie I was waiting to see, after reading that section of the book with a “wtf? WTF?! WTF!!!” expression on my face, and it definitely didn’t disappoint.

Out with the old

This time two years ago, I had written that one of the easiest posts to write would be a “year that was..” style post. That is only if something significant or chronicle-worthy actually happens during the time. As you might notice from the lack of activity in this space for the past half year or so, nothing chronicle-worthy did happen(apart from a night spent sleeping in the middle of the sports ground and a certain period when I was busy being escorted out of the premises of half the Residences in NUS). Hmm. Maybe I am being too cruel on my  ability to spend time chronicleably.

Moving on, I saw this movie called Rock On a while ago. Now usually, I am grateful to the theatres in Singapore for having subtitles for the movies they screen. It helped me understand Sarkar Raj and it was something I could amuse myself with while suffering through Vettaiyadu Vilayadu(Humour in transliteration never gets old). While watching Rock On, in order to further advance my image as another abey rockstar, I tried to follow the movie without looking at the subtitles. The intro song started and I had a strange feeling I could actually understand the lyrics, but I was sure I was mistaken. After all, I still had enough faith in Indian Cinema to trust that no one would write stuff like “Why is there only one moon, why is the sky blue” and try to pass it off as a song. So I took a look at the subtitles, sure that my Hindi knowledge was, for the first time, letting me down. After 3 minutes of reading in stunned disbelief, I considered the possibility that maybe all Rock songs were in fact philosophical musings on daily life and fundamental facts of astronomy. After all, I never really understood who or what James Hetfield wasn’t forgiving(thrice, now) and basically had no clue what those fellows at Iron Maiden were screaming about. So with my unprejudiced mind, I continued watching the film. But as time went by and another song about laundry bills and telephone books got half the audience in a frenzy, I started wondering what this movie was actually about. Was it to show that lead singers in rock bands automatically become investment bankers? Or was it to show that Fish sellers dealers saleswomen entrepreneurs were hot by profession? Or was it to show that guitars, in fact, do not need amplifiers to prodouce sound? Maybe this could be the intro song of the sequel, Keep Rocking On.

Continuing with my High-society-status-suicide, I was watching this show called Roadies on MTV that day. There was this bald dude who was apparently conducting “orientation sessions”(to use a sad euphemism) for a bunch of Rock On inspired um..youngsters. As my Hindi vocabulary enabled me to only comprehend simple contemplations on the colour of the sky and the cardinality of the moons, I was not able to follow what Bald guy was saying half the time and whatever he spoke in english was censored by the channel. As I am not one to judge by appearances, I will not venture my opinion on why he would be subjected to such nazism. What little I understood what Bald guy was reading out from the application forms(why they would actually apply to be “oriented”(sigh we should really find another substitute) by a random Bald guyis beyond me), and some of the answers on the application forms were only marginally less amusing than Ms.Teen South Carolina’s views on maps and South Africa. My curiosity was piqued I set about trying to find out what these people were actually up to. I have come to the conclusion that MTV is undertaking a systematic campaign to reduce the IQ of Indians(or atleast those who follow its shows)  everywhere. There cant possibly any other reason why some of the shows they are running, are still running. It is a conspiracy. It has to be.

All in a day’s work

2 AM : Set alarms for 7:35AM, 7:40AM, 7:45AM,7:50AM, 7:55AM and also set reminders in phone diary for 8AM and 8:15AM.

8:20AM: Wake up.

8:35AM: Search for a cab which will accept Nets payment(the alternative being accepting 4 dollars 60 cents in 20 cent coins)

8:45AM: Find the cab.

9:10AM: Enter office in a rush, pretending to have climbed up all 34 floors in a bid to reach on time.

9:12AM: Realise that no one actually cares.

9:16AM: Turn on office computer. Open mail box.

9:17AM: Receive mail from HR department extolling the virtues of a Pear, the choice fruit of the week.

9:19AM: Search for last week’s Fruit of the day mail and perform Change Management analysis. Figure out how a Pear is more efficient than a Lychee.

9:22AM: Keep hitting refresh button on mail box in hope of receiving a new mail.

9:35AM: Give up.

9:45AM: Walk over to pantry, make self a nice cup of Lipton Yellow label tea, with 2 tea-spoons of sugar and some amount of 60%fat free milk, along with hot water.

9:55AM: Walk back over to desk.

10AM: Drink tea. Appreciate how everyone seems to be so eager to work on this fine morning.

10:20AM: Message every person in a 600m radius asking if they are free for lunch. Every person with a double digit IQ. Which usually left out most of my comrades from NUS.

10:45AM: Keep spamming till one of them replies.

10:50AM: Start thinking about a second cup of tea. Decide on Milo instead.

11:00AM: Walk over to pantry and make self a cup of hot Milo.

11:10AM: Drink Milo, once again appreciating the dedication and commitment flowing through the surroundings.

11:30AM: Wonder if Watch has stopped. Attempt to synchronise Watch with the clock on the computer.

11:40AM: Attempts fail, as Watch apparently has not stopped and needs no synchronization. Watch doesn’t realise that that wasn’t quite the point.

12:00PM: Be the first one out of the door, beat the crowd to the food court and lunch in peace.

1:00PM: Having finished milking every minute of the hour, slowly make way back to desk.

1:05PM: Realise that another mail has been received. Again from the HR department, but this time explaining the benefits of the Employee Shareholder Program. A big N.A.

1:15PM: Analyse mailbox and realise that 60% of the mails received are from HR. The rest being from the IT Support team informing everyone which system wasn’t functioning that day.

1:30PM: Congratulate self on getting through half the work-day. Decide to drink a celebratory cup of Cappuccino.

1:45PM: Go through the rituals. Enjoy the taste of instant coffee while a few billion dollars changes hands in the background.

2:00PM: Start pondering about meaning of life.

: Try to come up with name for third kid.

5:00PM: Complete pondering. The meaning, found, seems to be 42. Or 6×9, for the daft.

5:30PM: Last half hour.

5:45PM: Observe with some curiosity as a couple Corporate Services amble over to a nearby desk. Congratulate self on identifying the breed so accurately. Steve Irwin would be proud.

5:46PM: Curiosity fast vanishing, watch with no little trepidation as the topic at aforementioned desk turns towards “some Sheep Song”.

5:47PM: Wonder, “Baa baa black sheep”?

5:48PM: Shut ears tight and begin praying in a vain attempt to save self as notes of “This is the song that never ends. Why dont you wait for it to begin..” or some such thing is heard.

5:52PM: Thank lucky stars as Janitor shoos away the flock. Admire his quick thinking and intelligence. Sing his praises for a while.

5:58PM: Log out of computer. Get ready to make a dash for it.

6:00PM: To quote Mel Gibson, FREEEEDOOOOOOOM

Why?

“No seriously, give me 5 reasons why Uttar Pradesh should still be a part of India”.

That is actually a very thought-provoking question.

Have you ever wondered why there are somethings so obviously wrong with the world, which can be easily remedied, but somehow no one seems to want to correct it? Its a strange phenomenon. You are sitting at Subway and are talking about Khalistan and Operation Bluestar while at the next table, the most intellectually stimulating observation your colleague from the other end of the country(albeit not from the region in question, but close enough) can make to his friends is “Abey, this phone doesn’t have a camera!”. The least he could have done was think about why his home state is called the “Rice bowl of India”, that is if there were schools in his township and they actually teach things there. Or he could atleast wonder why he and his compatriots are the only people in the whole freaking country(be it a small one) who still say “iskool”.

There is something about watching 30,000 fanatical Croats singing “Deutschland, Deutschland Auf Wiedersehen” while Ballack and co. are getting their asses kicked. And it makes going to office half an hour late worthwhile.

Ah, the joys of Euro2008. The world finally realised that wunderboy can only be wunderboy against Newcastle Utd and Bolton Wanderers. And R.Mad still want to pay a few billion pounds for him. Oh well, boys will be boys and fools will be fools.

Quote of the day : “Amitabh Bachchan has a bad boy image in Sarkar Raj”.

Murthy somehow never fails to amuse us.

Incidentally, I think Portugal was suffering from the “Dasavatharam-disease”. It fell for its own hype. I thought it was a decent movie though.

I am ofcourse talking about c.ron diving around like a little girl.

Points to Ponder?

I am amazed at the number of people who aren’t aware of the existence of the word “oppress”. They all seem to think it was something TR made up while giving this passionate speech. Kinda sad when you think that TR apparently knows more English than most of the people I know.

Another thing I dont get is the purpose of fire alarms. I was sitting in the YIH the study room a few hours before exam. Its usually a very very quiet place, people frown at you if you as much as sneeze loudly. Suddenly the fire alarm started ringing, but no one paid it the least bit attention. They just took out their headphones and tried to drown out the noise of the alarm with webcasts. It was apparently obvious to everyone in the room except me that the alarm was tripped by accident and that there was no fire. It turned out that it finally was a mistake but I wonder what the point of alarm is, if it cant even “alarm” anyone into not studying for a couple of minutes. How do you tell the difference between a real fire and bobby smoking under the Smoke detectors by just listening to the alarm anyway?

As all of the three of you know, Im working these days. One good thing about work is the flexible lunch hours. Working in Raffles Place has its own advantages, like the numerous overpriced foodcourt and fastfood joints that surround each building. When I get sick of the overcrowded foodcourt(where people reserve seats with PAPER NAPKINS ), I walk over to the starbucks(there are 4 very close to my office, I walk to the furthest) because its usually quite empty during lunch hours, and I can also read the newspaper while eating. For those who dont stay in Singapore, there are two kinds of news.

1) Singaporean “news”, which usually goes like this :

Headlines : Minister Mentor Lee’s message to the nation and/or “JC Girl wins 100m race in Singapore Invitational International JC Athletics event!”

National News : Minister Mentor Lee’s views on the nation today

Financial News : Minister Mentor Lee’s views on finance

International News : Minister Mentor Lee’s thoughts on why and how China uberpwns the West.

3 pages are now dedicated to NTUC’s latest bargain offerings.

Weather Forecast : Minister Mentor Lee’s views on the weather Its sunny, and will remain sunny for the next 3 days!

Sports news : Uzbekistan 7 Singapore 3

Editorial : Everything is pleasant and wonderful! The rest of the world has problems, but lets not worry about all that! There is a beach party at Sentosa this weekend!

2) The second type of news is, of course, real news.

Let me give you an example. I was reading the Straits Times one day, because some scum bag had beaten me to the Herald Tribune. There was an editorial on why China is uberawesome because it has as many nuclear missiles as Japan or something. He was arguing that China having nuclear missiles and continuing to make them was for the greater good. All this was fine, it is his opinion after all, but suddenly in the middle of the editorial I read this statement “China follows United’s strategy, a strong defense automatically translates into a powerful offense”. I spent two minutes wondering if he was talking about United Airlines or United Arab Emirates or maybe the United Nations. After reading the next line, which I cant recollect right now, I realised he was actually talking about Manchester United. It was unbelievable the way he referred to a football club in a cavalier fashion in an article on world security, where most journalists wouldn’t take the liberty of mentioning “Bush” without suffixing “President of the United States”, if only to confirm. Everyone knows most of manUre’s fanbase is in Southasia (after all, there has to be SOME reason why Park Ji Sung is still playing) but show some class man. Maybe it says something that the editor of the national newspaper mentions football clubs and expects all his readers to immediately understand what they have to do with China’s nuclear weapons. It means that Mancs are commies. Kill them all.

Well there is still a lot to rant about but no time right now. I shall be bach.

Insights

Someone mentioned to me a while ago that it was amusing that I had a separate tag for “Stupid People”. Thinking about that, Ive come to realise now that I didnt write about them because they got on my nerves. I wrote about them because it was endlessly amusing and entertaining. And besides, ranting was always more of my style. So in keeping with a time honoured tradition, here I go again

Some people might say that if you get annoyed by what someone is doing/saying/making videos of, just ignore them. Sure, thats what the whole world did when Hitler started expressing his opinion on the size of Germany on the world map.

Dont get me wrong, I am all for freedom of expression. I dont hold anything against people who claim that Eragon is a real book, I might just point out to them that they are douche bags. It is their opinion after all. But when you make a video of a bunch of people, all of whom rave about the writing talent of Christopher Paolini, and then label the video “Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century” and put it up on YouTube, thats when you start to piss people off. There is general silliness, there is stupidity and then there are affronts to public decency. Videos of people speaking about how they would rather be good at many things than be great at one thing, because thats what the cue card reads, falls under the third category. If you want to make videos about Valentines day, or “Accommodation fiasco@NUS”, go right ahead. But please, dont take up intellectual topics, make Miss.Teen South Carolina‘s descendants speak about it and make a complete mockery of the issue, if I can call it that. Thats all I wish to express on this topic.

Oh, and it is not cool to make your videos “Video responses” to random videos which have no relation to your topic. Just some food for thought.

Moving on, I was looking at Singapore GP circuit map the other day, and I saw that there was a Esplanade Steps “Grandstand”. And a “General Walkabout Area”. Wow, I cant think of many other places which would charge you $200 to sit on steps from where it usually evicts you 363 days of the year. But it shouldnt be too hard to find some 30 storey building within a few miles of the track to watch the race from, which the organisers havent spotted and ticketed yet. Then again, you never know.

Apologies if this post is very contextual, that cannot be helped.

A game plan?

As the keen-minded among you might have realised, it takes something drastic these days to get me blogging. And “A Game Plan” was exactly that. It was a truly horrible movie, with terrible acting and a conspicuous lack of a meaningful storyline. For one, I didnt know if the movie was about American Football or Ballet. Maybe it was about American Foolet. Or BalBall. Or maybe it was about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s complete lack of acting skills. Whatever it was about, the only thing worse than the movie was Dwayne Johnson trying to do the ballet. The only thing worse than THAT was Dwayne Johnson trying to play American Football. Which was probably why the “football”ing scenes were cut mercifully short to “The Rock” scoring the winning touchdown in all the games he played, except ofcourse the Championship game in which he selflessly passes the ball thingy to some other dude who scores with a zillionth of a second remaining. I wont accuse Dwayne Johnson of trying too hard in this film. In fact, it didn’t look like he was trying to act at all. There could be no other explanation.

On a different note, I went to the barber’s today. When my barber saw my hair, he first accused me of trying to cut my own hair, and then threatened me with crew cuts and oil treatments. He seemed to take my hair as a personal insult. I did manage to escape eventually, but not before he felled most of my curly locks with a pair of unforgiving and apparently very starved scissors. I was bruised but thankfully still in one piece.

It is a dangerous world we live in.

To Varsha, and her dead blog

Quite a few people(two at last count well, half my readership) have asked me why Im letting my blog rot. As I type this I realised that the word “blog” doesnt exist in Mozilla’s dictionary. As doesn’t “realised”. Its a funny language, Americanish.

So getting back to why I havent been posting, well the reasons are many. With a hectic, i.e., non-existent life to and staying up till 6:45 AM to watch El’pool lose to Besiktas, my blog changed from an adorable girlfriend to a pesky little sister you just couldn’t get rid off. If your little sister is adorable too, you need to get rid of those rose coloured glasses. “coloured”. Americanish. Sigh.

Speaking of “Sigh”, our resident english expert came up with a new pronunciation for it. “Sig”, apparently. But thats a long, irrelevant, and possibly unamusing story to which most of the two of you wont be able to relate to.

Getting to more important matters, Arsenal is pwning n00bs and wannabes, in the PL and abroad. They proved everyone from the pundit brigade at ESPN to the FIFA08 game designers at EA wrong(85 for Bent? 71 for Walcott?? 78 for Clichy????). They actually thought we’d be fighting with Top4Tottenham for 4th place. Die bitches. And meanwhile, Rafa wants another 40million pounds to buy more players. He has no brains. Arsenal are going to go all the way, and I’m loving it!

Getting back to the title, this post is dedicated to Varsha, and her blog which she cowardly deleted. Be a man varsha, do the right thing!

There and back again

Its nearly two weeks since I came back to NUS. Eusoff hall rocks! Nothing has changed. Besides the new arts canteen. And the new Alumni Complex. Eusoff hall rocks! And the new SoC. And no more Law School(and soon Biz too, NUS is becoming pollution free) on campus. Eusoff hall rocks! And the canteens at PGP. And the Burger king which is coming on campus. Eusoff hall rocks! And about 95 new juniors. Eusoff hall rocks or what?

The juniors are an interesting lot, the “orientation sessions” have been a lot of fun. Atleast for us. This time, there are only some 20 million people from DAV Gopalpuram, Chennai, compared to about 8 of them last year. Its like if you are from chennai, you are either from DAV or you are smart. But assuming that all non-DAVians are smart is fatal too, as I found out yesterday. Here is an excerpt, which I am lifting from Vbk’s facebook profile, from yesterday’s orientation session:

Me (to jr): Speak for 2 minutes on this topic- “My birth certificate was a letter of apology from a condom factory”. Do you understand the topic?

Jr: Yes it means birth certificate is a reason for not providing condoms.

I swear, I couldnt have made up some thing this funny even if I had tried. And then of course, we held special orientation sessions for ManU fans, to help them see the Light. Ragha made one of them act out and sing “Im a little piggy. Heres my snout. Oink oink oink.”, which bore an uncanny resemblance to Eric Cartman. And the other two.. Id rather not mention here what their cleansing rituals were. I can only hope that they worked.

Oh, and Eusoff hall rocks.