When "Lowe" messages....

I am a single man.
I like to think that I am smart, handsome, funny, trendy and all those positive adjectives in superlative terms. My friends assure me that I might be slightly correct in my assumptions about myself if I take my nose from the clouds a bit. Unfortunately all my friends are male. That is probably why I am single....

This great friend of mine in Singapore has a girlfriend. Lets call her S. She is nice, funny and quite helpful. I caught hold of her one fine evening and told her to do something about my "single-ness". She hemmed and hawed and finally relented.

This is the deal (she said). I was supposed to think of a nickname for myself. Then she would give me a couple of phone numbers with whom I could begin sms-fraandsheep. Thereafter whatever happens is up to us.

Further pressure yielded one number. The lady apparently answered to the name of Julia. I held the cell-phone in my hand and thought up flowery lines to unleash on the hapless damsel who then would be (I hoped) duly swept off her feet, her heart would be mine, angels would sing and everyone would live happily ever after.

Three hours of deep thinking yielded these lines:
"Hi Julia, this is Neil. I had the temerity to take your number from S. How are you doing?"

I dashed off this missive and waited. And waited. And waited.
The next day I called customer service.
S checked up with her friend who denied receiving any harassing sms'es. She then figured out that she had given me the wrong number!!!!

I did not check whose number that actually turned out to be but I must admit that chances are good that "Julia" was a guy. He must have been bemused.

How bemused he could have been I can imagine. You see this happened to this friend of mine once....
Lets call him M. He is a great friend. He looks hard on the outside but is equally soft on the inside (once you get to know him better I mean). He is the type who does fifty push-ups to relax after a hard-days work and sleeps to the soothing lullaby of Metallica howling at top volume. His only problem in life was that he did not have (or ever had) any girlfriend.
Suddenly one fine day it all changed.
His cell-phone started beeping with flowery romantic sms'es every two hours. Those sms'es were REALLY flowery. You know the type which conjures up rainbows, pink hearts and butterflies.
He tried calling this number but the other person never picked up.

M started smiling. He started arguing that women were emotional and delicate creatures who needed men to protect them. He started listening to Boyzone even.

One fine day a particularly flowery sms came along. M woke me up while I was sleeping off a hangover and showed me the sms. I suggested he use my phone to check up on who the love-sick damsel was.

He dialled.
The other side picked up the phone.
M asked, "Hi this is M speaking. May I know who this is?"
(pause)
The other side returned with a manly, sheepish and coy voice answering, "Hi M. This is Mehboob speaking". (Mehboob: Urdu word, Masculine term. Loosely translated to mean a passionate lover)

M was very sad after this.

So I guess "Julia" must have been adversely affected by my missive. I don't think I will pester S again after this to "set me up"....

Now that will be cool....

I was just sitting today watching this ACDC concert. (I know I know.... I am ACDC fixated these days.... just bear with me). I bought this DVD a few days ago and was watching it on my laptop.
They were doing their thing and the entire stadium full of people was on its feet. I just thought to myself, "Wow! Someday in my life I want to attend a concert like this!".
That got me thinking.
What are the things I would REALLY REALLY like to do in my life atleast once? Well the following is such a list of things. Not in any order except the order in which they came into my head:
1. Attend a concert of AC/DC or Rammstein.
2. Trek in the Himalayas. Go up to Lake Mansarovar
3. Take the Konkan Express train from Mangalore to Mumbai during the day.
4. Better still... ride a bike down the West Coast Highway.
5. Hold a new born baby and show it its first sunrise.
6. SOMETIME read through the Bengali Mahabharat my Grandfather gave my Dad.... and which my Dad has a good mind to give to me. (For that of course I will have to learn to read the Bengali script and attain more than a nodding acquaintance with that language).
7. Buy a Honda CBR 400 or better (Fireblade? Hayabusa?)
8. Climb a hill, set up camp on its peak and spend a night. (I almost did that once. Me and a few friends climbed this hill near Bangalore. Once we got there, it got so foggy that we almost decided to spend the night shivering under the watchful eyes of the God 'Nandi' whose statue graced the peak. The fog unfortunately cleared soon after.... We climbed down in the dead of the night and at the village near the base, we discovered that we did not speak Kannada and no one in the village spoke English or Hindi. I even broke into Bengali in desperation but to no avail)
9. Learn to appreciate Indian Classical music.
10. Learn enough General Theory of Relativity to shut this friend of mine up who proses on about it whenever he is in his cups.
11. Buy a 'raddi' laptop for 100 bucks (I mean dollars) set it right, find software for it which will run on its hardware without major trade-offs on functionality, write scripts which will make its use simple and then gift it to my Dad who is scared of Electronics!
12. Keep a dog at home. Call it Jurgen... or Adolf or Pervez....
13. Go on a blind-date.
14. Make a four-course meal for my parents while they sleep oblivious of the treat (or ordeal most likely) in store for them.
15. Learn the fingers-in-the-mouth-whistle

Well I guess the list could go on and on but I will stop here. Would anyone else like to write his own to-do list?