D base is Gurgaon

the first weekend after i'v come to Gurgaon that i have actually spend in gurgaon, all i did today and for that matter yesterday was laze arnd reading catch 22, processing pics from my last 2 weekends (which btw were spend shooting those pics in Jaipur, Kasauli, Chandigarh and delhi) and by sitting and reading all the mail i havnt opened since long - yes i'v actually not had decent internet for the last 6-7 mnths. anyways as i was saying i spend a lot of time opening forwards, obviously i forwarded them again to others who would now have something to do on otherwise boring weekends /workdays as the case may be, although some of them ungracious people then told me to stop, one of them even put up a notice on fb calling it spam.. terrible!

ignoring that, there are nice forwards :) there is this one that i found interesting and here it goes..

"If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears
With their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning

... Uphill...

BOTH ways

Yadda, yadda, yadda
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that... I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my
childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look

it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write
somebody a letter, with a pen!

...Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to
steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you
were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video
Games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or
screens, it was just one screen forever!

And you could never win. The game just kept getting
harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only m-net and there was no on screen menu and no remote
control!

You had to use a Little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no
Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons
on Saturday morni

ng. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK
for cartoons, you spoiled
little rat-bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove ... Imagine that!

If we wanted Popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids
today have got it too easy.
You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

Regards,
The over 30 Crowd"

yeah.. nice one no?

it is slightly frightening i am laughing tho i am a long way from 30.. i mean i am a lot younger... y do i find this funny!

i even found a t-shirt in the mall that i found funny.. and it said .. wait i will upload the pic instead..

if u cant read it says.. "I am not your UNCLE, i dont know you, you dont know me, so dont you call me uncle!

...

i must be getting ancient!

Back in Pune,. hu haa ye yaa

huhaaa! i am back to civilization .. the lights and the tall buildings..how beautiful they are :).
nyways it still takes a moment to realize i am back in this city i love. the young crowd, its slow yet energetic flow. ..i tell you it s cool man
net is still limited to GPRS on my phone(which here is fast enuf for me to connect on to my lappie and browse at nearly acceptable speeds).. unless i go to the cyber cafe's - which is something i am very reluctant to:i'd rather have my net slower than in some smelly dank place

we appreciate the mundane stuff of the cities only when we are forced away from it for some time..so what are the ten best things about cities..
1. lights.. man! how important it is to have some light about! if after 7pm roads become dark and empty i am psyched.. i want people around.. and decent people..which brings me to the seconds point
2. PEOPLE.. cities have educated, good looking and well dressed people to hang out with. and rural india does not!if i am forced to stay in a village, i still need some educated and polished people with me!
3. european closets in the toilet. i cant squat
4. phone and net connectivity..i
5. people can speak english or hindi. tamil or malayalam.
6. FOOD..FOOOOD..how could i have left it down to 6th place... food. i wanut some fine dining once in a while. i want clean restaurants. i want my waiter in full pants. i dont want my waiter digging his nose with his left hand and serve mw with his right. i dont want to search for the meat in the oil...
7. grocery.. i want to buy that particular flavour of lays and want to drink a appy or minute maid as and when i want it
8. stores.. i want them all close by.
9.

One month @ Kurkumb.. all posts uploaded in one bunch...

FIRST WEEK @ KURKUMB

there s this guy at work and over the few days we are stuck together at the Kurkumb factory, something about him seemed familiar.. and that vague familiar feeling had a sense of unpleasentness attached with it, it was like i knew this guy long back and i dint like him then..
i couldnt place him however much i thought but suddenly this monday morning when i was sitting in a bus from Pune to the Kurkumb plant (he was somewhere in the back of the same bus)..it came back to me, he reminded me of the SriLankan from Rivoli -- Yusuf..
This dude has the same voice, he articulates or rather misarticulates the same way - the 'a's are short and o's and e's are extra long.. , the same look of 'i have seen this before' attitude..' he spits all over the place.. and he keeps sayng 'i mean'.. he says "i mean" for his i mean's

and now..i think he even looks a little like yusuf.. amazing. maybe they were separated long back.. long lost brothers and imagine me being the key that re-unites them both!

>>>>>>>>>

there are so many things my subcoscidfence knows and yet i dont..for instance
at 7 in the morning most days my mind wakes me up..and yet as long as i am awake i need to keep checking my watch
or
when i start on a trip or some work.. i feel this drift of how it is going to turn out, but i wait for it to get over and mostly the outcome is as i thought

>>>>>>>>>

END OF WEEK 1

lethargy is such a pain in the arse.. it is like a creeper that grows on trees and gnaws on the very branches tht give it support..
it is such a mental torture to sit and have nothing to do.. where decorum and rules disallow comfort or creativity.. the wait for time to pass.. for the mind to find something to keep it occupied..
yeah as far as tortures go this must be in kintergarden category, but it s a torture still
i endure this torture at Kurkumb.. and i feel i keep getting into situations like this.. rivoli was like this.. home is like this.. college at times.. and now this!


>>>>>>>>

MIDLIFE AT KURKUMB


i was reading this speech by JK Rowling at a Harward university convocation ceremony..
one of her para's i found very interesting.. she was talking about her parents wanting her to join a vocational course for her graduation when she wanted to enrol for a course in classical literature.
here goes

"I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools."

bang on the point .. dont you think? for one, poverty is like a sticky gum, and it tends to hold you down, and it's tentacles attempts to hold on to any of its members who tries to get out of its hold.
servitude and poverty i feel go hand in hand. the White tiger (Arvind Adiga) tells a story of how servitude and an inbred attitude of not questioning existing hegemonies makes us so much poorer. poorer not just in a fiduciary sense but poorer in experiences, happines and our creative output.
and in most cases, our parents have been poor in some sense, and they are unquestioning servants of the societial systems that were in place years back. in that sense many of us are held back by shackles that have crumbled ages ago and are just manifestation of the fears of our past generations.

another very interesting line from her speech..
"but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."

yet.. i wonder why it is so difficult to try something that could involve failure..so atleast try something where i perceive failure..

still the best line from that article was one she pulled from a greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

>>>>>>>>>

SECOND WEEK

lame.. things get so lame, its better to quit. and at times conversation between two people get so lame it becomes a spiral..lame conversations leading to still more lame ones. and when we try to keep up the talk, and when both realize that they try in vain to undo the boredom, it becomes downright painful. still worse when one of them just fails to realize how lame it is.. and happines is when both dont realize it :)

>>>>>

MOUNTING FRUSTRATION.. END OF WEEK 2

i vote the indian closet as the worse invention by an Indian - it is such an indignified way to shit! if some stupid Indin hadnt thought of replacing the hole in the mud with a ceramic hole in a cement floor all buildings would have had the normal plain vanilla closet!
imagine...what a turn off it is to have this. if i saw an amazing apartment and if it had an indian closet it would cease to be amazing any more.. it would be like an amazing looking gurl with a an ultra sweaky voice.
and it s even more disgusting to see some1 sitting on the indian...eeew!.. not that i want to see anyone doing the potty, but lets say by mistake i walk into a girlfriend sitting on the normal closet, it is ok right? but if the same was an indian closet i would say that would be the end of the relationship man!..i wouldnt survive a relationship with that image in mind!

>>>>>>

A PHILOSOPHICAL FINAL WEEK


there are never huge life changing moments, atleast they never appear that way when they occur.. insted life is made up of number of small moments. and it is only with hindsight and reflection that we identify even those moments.
i think i keep waiting for this thunderbolt to hit me before i move my ass..or i wait till i am cornered and have but one choice.even worse.. i know it aint true but i still believe that thunderbolt will hit anytime..could be just round the corner.. and i believe i will do great stuff when it does..! what a load of shit!