Finally!!!!

Boys love toys.
This particular boy's love for toys by Apple (as my long-suffering friends know) is particularly intense.

I had been lusting after an iPod for a long while but for various reasons I never came round to buying one. Well, finally I have one and its a beauty. What you see is my brand new iPod (and my left hand...). What you don't is the song its playing, "Rammstein: Eskimos and Egypt"

This funny thing happened today. I was sitting at this restaurant, drinking my Iced Lemon tea, reading my news-paper and generally minding my business. In the table in-front of me and facing me was this nice guy. He was enjoying his cup of tea very visibly and was going slow on sipping it. He was also generally minding his own business and there was this look of pleasure and calm limning his visage. Birds were singing and all was right with the world.

Suddenly in walks this GORGEOUS and AWESOME Indian woman. She had this iffy pink top on as well as this dark pair of jeans and pink slippers. No make-up, nothing. Beautiful eyes, beautiful hair, wonderful complexion. Simply a sight for sore eyes. I took one look at her....and then another one. That guy also practically ogled at her and forgot about his tea which he was enjoying so much.

This girl suddenly went and sat at the same table this guy was on. Diagonally opposite him with her back to me. Oh well....

I have always maintained that its fun to look at beautiful women. What's more fun is to look at the guys who are looking at the said beautiful women.

Now suddenly this guy who was enjoying his tea finds a beautiful woman on his table. His enjoyment evaporates. He gets shy, feels insecure about the blue bathroom slippers (tastefully decorated with a Mickey Mouse each) he is wearing and of the thinning hair on his pate. Equally suddenly, half of the world ceases to exist for him (or rather he does not want to acknowledge it). While earlier his vision included the entire 180 degrees in front of him, now suddenly he only does the 45 degrees in which that girl is not visible. Also he starts gulping down the tea he was enjoying so much.

That girl made no attempt at conversation. She just stared straight ahead. Apparently she was waiting for somebody and decided to use the available chair to her advantage.

Poor guy. I saw the difficulty he was in but I am not one to sympathize. I stared at him. He scowled at me. I grinned back in enjoyment. I also cracked a joke about this state of affairs with this buddy of mine in loud and clear Hindi.

He finished off his tea, put on his slippers and moved away. Both me and my buddy watched him go. If looks could kill, he would have murdered me....

Blogging from work

This is the first time that I am blogging from work early in the morning. I am the only one here right now and it feels eerie.

Could not sleep last night. Got up at 4:00 AM and went out for a walk. Got some breakfast somewhere and came back to my desk to chat up junta all over the world at 5:30 AM....

Have you ever run into a blog of a person you don't know and have no connection with but still find interesting? These past weeks I have been reading the writings of this particular lady in Bangalore. She is one of the usual IT crowd. She hangs out at discos, has an active social life and colours her hair parrot green. Whenever she puts in one of her posts, people fall over themselves to comment (not me... I prefer to stay incognito). She is good-looking definitely, which is partly the reason why I keep coming back to her blog .... Her posts remind me of my days in Bangalore and are a pleasant read. The topics are the usual girl stuff - boyfriends, discos, dresses, hair colour and eve-teasing on the streets.

This morning when friends did not turn out to be very forth-coming in chat, I turned to editing this video we made this weekend. Nothing special. A few chaps making ABSOLUTE FOOLS of themselves to 'jhin-chak' Bollywood music. Yours truly included.

Don't hold your breath. Its not coming online anytime soon.

And yes... I am still reading "A Suitable Boy". Its long but quite quite nice. I refuse to talk about it further for the same reason "Deep Thought" gave the answer "Forty two" to the question of "The Meaning of Life, Universe and Everything" and refused to go any further. A book like this is just beyond me.

Now to work... Sigh!

To all my buddies....

I have been very lucky in having more than my fair share of absolute wackos as friends. I met two of them in my recent trip to Bangalore and we together trekked up a mound of rock on the Karnataka and Kerala border (Proud inhabitants in that area call it the highest peak in that region... Well if you say so).

Coming back to Bangalore was a strange experience. All the girls on M.G. Road that I used to swoon over earlier now looked no elder than college kids. Purple Haze played one very limp song of ACDC at 10:48 pm while all this while I emptied beer tankards in anticipation of something loud and alive. The one friend who kept me smiling while everything went wrong in my life looked care-worn and sad (His wife was not well). And when couples started an impromptu dance on the floor of Pecos, me and Surya turned around and said, "Kids!!!"

But Bangalore still retains the freshness that I mentally associated with it in my six-month sentence in South-East Asia. India Coffee House still serves that great Tomato Omelette. The Hindu is still eminently readable. The book-shops are still full of books which go beyond the usual thrillers and sex-novelettes. You can still buy beer/vodka/whiskey at 3:00 am by knocking softly on a door off Airport Road. The auto drivers are still surly. And M.G. Road is still bursting with young people.

So what was wrong? Why did I feel slightly out of a city I (still) call my own (Yes.... Ahead of Delhi/Ghaziabad and definitely ahead of Singapore). Has the city changed? Or have I?

I have definitely changed. But I feel that the city has changed a lot more. Most of my friends are now out of there. The city does not make you her own. Its the people who give you a sense of belonging.
This is for all those buddies I found in Bangalore, who stayed with me in G-7 Richfields and basically made us a terror of that neighbourhood, who humoured me when I wanted to climb umpteen hills, who had me chasing phantom women and who let me cry on their shoulders when real ones ditched me.

Guys.... the city is not the same without you....

Going Home...

Going home feels so much like a retreat to childhood. You can wake up late. You can get food brought to you and have your gripes patiently listened to by your long-suffering parents. Away from all the debugging, the stress and the petty back-stabbing and politicking outside.

You make solemn promises to yourself about meeting your friends but they all go right down the drain. You get up at 9:00 A.M, mooch around till 2:00 P.M., have brunch then and then go to sleep again. You wake up at 4:00 P.M., have tea with Mom, read something, chat with Mom and Dad (Get a dog Mum, come Dad cut down on your smoking atleast now!), have dinner at 10:00 pm, sit next to a fire in the verandah and then go to sleep again.
Life is tough!

Whenever I go home I stare at my book-case with all those classics lying in it. Then I pick up a thriller. I always promise myself that I will read the classics and the philosophy books "next time". The books I read at home are always these:
1. That Thriller
2. Collected Short Stories by Noel Coward
3. Gone with the Wind (The passages with Rhett Butler are really funny)
4. Dragon-Fire by Humphrey Hawksley (Only the passages in which India pummels Pakistan)
5. Another Thriller


Now that I have sufficiently shown off my intellectuality, here's wishing everyone who reads this a very happy and successful 2008. I would not wish you an eventful new year.... I have had a belly-full of them of late. I could do with a boring year for a change....