Friday, November 23, 2007

Random Scribblings

Statutory warning - Whatever follows will chart an unpredictable course of its own. It wouldn´t be inane but some of you may find it weird. If you wish or expect the following lines to lead to something meaningful, I hereby dissuade you from reading any further. Open some other blog perhaps, there are plenty of good ones around. Now, if you still haven´t given up, thanks for the faith you showed on me. Read on.


All constructs are going to be mutually exclusive and should be read independent of each other. You can read them in any order you wish to.

1. There is nothing like a Friday evening or night. I don´t know why they hype Saturday nights so much. Fridays are that much better than saturdays. You have two full days still waiting for indulging yourself. You know that that you can do the stuff you want to not only tommorow, but also day after tommorow. You know that you can lie in the bed and read a novel till dawn not only today but also day after today. Fridays are better than what they promise to bring closer to you with every passing moment, i. e. the weekends. :) The only issue with Fridays is that even if you can easily cook at your home and have good food, you still can´t stop yourself from eating outside. It does burn a hole in the pockets when you sum it up at the end of the month.

2. I've spent about 3 years now trying to make myself like reading Business magazines or like checking the Business pages in the newspaper. It has led to zilch. I¨ll complete a cricinfo article before I empty my cup of coffee, I¨ll devour a Chetan Bhagat creation even if I am feeling damn sleepy, I¨ll finish absorbing serious philosohical writings before I realise it, but I¨ll struggle to make myself go beyound a paragraph or two of a usual Business World article. Every line seems the same as the one before it. Every argument put, every conclusion reached seems fake and futile. It amazes me how much of jargon they use, half of which is redundant and repetitive. I´ve tried reading a few books by or about the coporate honchos. All but 1, made me feel like tearing myself apart. The one which didn´t was a gem, a gem coming out of nowhere. It was a book which went by the name of ´The Google Story´. If I were a buinessman in an ideal world, I think I would have considered two books as my truest teachers, ¨The Google Story¨ and ¨Atlas Shrugged¨. Anyway, stepping out from the digression, I think I am just not made for it, for reading the mundane company policies and trying to make sense out of it. But, I¨ll still pick up a business magazine, still flip the pages and still try to understand it. Freaking 3 years, but I still feel like having another go at it. Whoever said old habits die hard, they don´t die at all.

3. The power of Arial. I feel captivated by this font. There is no other font which is so straight and easily expressive as this font. My office mail clients have the default font as Default Sans Serif, duh I don´t know why. There are people who prefer to use Verdana and Times New Roman, both of which are ok, but not quite like Arial. And there are some people who use ridiculous fonts, I don´t even remember the names of those fonts, but I find those fonts way too obtuse or blunt(Cool it folks, no offence meant. You carry on with your fonts ;) ). By the way, 2 cents and a drink to anyone who tells me how to change my default font type in Lotus Notes.

4. Cliches, there are pobably a hundred of them. You can find them left, right and center. But once in a while a statement classified as a cliche doesn´t remain cliched anymore. One such cliche is ¨Music knows no boundaries¨. Well true, it did make me forget mine a few months back. In a stage more fit for clowns to practise their difficult art, being dressed in attires which would make you think if they were actually being made clowns, being heralded by way over the top hindi words like ¨vishwa-yudh, yudh-viraam, etc. ¨, two virtuosos certainly made me forget my boundaries. Two people who went by the name of Amanat Ali and Mussarat Abbas literally rocked the floor and touched the hearts every friday and saturday for a few months this year. Together with other gems like Aneek, Raja and Mauli they made watching Zee Sa Re Ga Ma Pa an addiction. When Mussarat sang ´Sanu Ek Pal Chain Na Awe´, I found myself glued to the idiot box. When Amanat tried ¨Maar Sutiya¨even I found my toes tapping on the floor. The Pakistani singers in general are superb. Down with all the India-Pakistan rivalry, this was sheer bliss.

5. Cultures vary across terrains. What is acceptable at one place may not be at another. Let me cite one such instance. Last sunday I visited the historic Estadio Centenario to watch the World Cup qualifier between Uruguay and Chile. The atmoshpere was electric and the Uruguayan spectators were quite often shouting a word called ´puta´ whenever refree was giving anything against their team. I thought it may mean somthing like cheating or may be that tabooed four letter word. In the later stage of the match when Uruguay had just struck back from 1-2 down and were going for the kill, the entire stadium was singing a song in unison. I was able to make out only 2 words-Chilean and puta. The match got over as a draw, we all enjotyed ourselves and there was normal banter on show in betweeen the players and spectators of the two sides. Everything was normal. Next day, I found out that song, it meant ¨All Chileans are prosititutes¨!!Imagine, the whole stadium, adolescents and grown-ups all singing such a song together. And it was perfectly normal, no hard feelings harbored by anyone at the end of it. This place is amazing and the people here are fantastic, trust me. You probably wouldn´t get such cordial people anywhere else. :)

6. I am having this irresistable urge to watch the movie ´Casablanca´. I had it in my desktop a few years back but had deleted it as my hard disk was running short of GBs. Don´t know why I deleted that movie, I didn´t quite realise how good it was. I should have deleted some other movie like ´2 Fast 2 Furious´.

1 comment:

kaushik said...

you summed up my fridays :)
eating out, late night novel reading and waking up late on Saturday....
but unfortunately...I realize late that I have course deadlines for monday :(