One year

A year ago...
robe. cap. audi. parents. diploma. promises. aspirations. enthu. friends.

A year later...
gold cards. sleek laptops. blackberrys/Nokia E series. excel sheets. ppts. hush puppies. arrow. traffic jams. air traffic control. 8:57 ki fast local. finding our better half (for some of us).

One year. hazzar memories. One truth. Joka was the best daze of my life.

ps: 1st April is the anniversary of my convocation.

if you were LOST ...

The gtalk status message of a friend of mine read 'LOST' ... within minutes I had given him a dose of gyan on what I call going back to the nets ... I dunno if it helped him or not .. but it surely made me blog after a looooong time

lets spend a few lines on this funda .. basically .. every once in a while, we are stuck in a state of moodlessness or lostitude (i hope u understand what it means) ... it is beyond sheer disappointment or helplessness ... it is the state when our belief in ourselves is shaken to some extent ...

a way of coming out of this is to get back to the basics ... just as a cricketer goes back to the nets when he strikes poor form ... so where would I go ? may be to people who matter to me ... people who care to listen .. going back to things that I loved doing .. watching my favorite movie again ... plugging in the headphones and playing my favorite songs at full volume ... calling up a dear friend whom I havent talked to for a while .. eating daal chawal with hands ..
what would you do when u r Gtalk status would read LOST ?

How far .. and which way ?

It was not a great day ..

In other words it was a forgettable day ...

Life to me has pretty much like left with Manmohan Singh and subprime with traders ...

Really dont wanna dissect my own mood right now ...

Too far backwards .. and I wud be ...

Too far ahead ... and I wud be ...

Some questions .. are better left alone

Lets not disturb them .. and let them not disturb me

good best hai ya best better hai

this post is about 2 ways of life. and i want to come to the point right away.

So, the first one is called 'good-life'. It is basically about living a simple and comfortably paced life ( i am using comfortably instead of easy here, coz different people have different capabilities). It doesnt mean that one does not work hard, but it is about not running madly after things. Its about being a little sure of what you want, about enjoying the small things that happen to you. It is about feeling great that you have a 'good' life.

So far so good, ,many people would agree that this sounds great. But is it so easy? how many of us actually live a life like that? I dont say that such a life is free of complications. Complications to some extent make life challenging. So they are very much there in this good life too.

Now, lets call the other life - 'best-life' (pardon me if it reminds you of westlife, i dont like them at all). This is about running hard and harder and harder. Simple sa funda hai yaar, having an unending quest for perfection and excellence. Now is that good or bad? thats not really the question here. Many a times I have seen people troubling themselves in this pursuit of best-life. It seems that they are never satisfied, unless they achieve what is best according to them. And often, even that doesnt seem to make them happy. And sometimes, they have similar expectations from others. For them, anyone who settles for anything less than the best is no good. Imagine having a boss who thinks like that. Imagine what a 6 year old goes through when he has parents who are not satisfied with his 2nd rank.

So where are we going with this? am not passing a judgement on which of the 2 approaches are good. May be both, or may be there is a way to balance them. May be with time I would learn to appreciate the best-life more (I have learnt to appreciate it a bit in last 2 yrs). Till then .. hoping for a good-life as I start down counting my days at home .. wishing you a good-life or a best-life depending on what you feel is better.

ps: I honestly believe that this is a half cooked post. I should have given more thought to it before writing it down. But consider it to be a ceaserian rather than a normal delivery as I could not have held it for long in my mind.
I am trying to do away with my triple dot (...) style of writing and using proper english punctuations. Plz to correct me whrever the punctuations have gone terribly wrong.

Here I am ...

Writing after a long time ....

Well!!! I m writing this post as aussies are on their way towards a world cup hattrick .. it was pak in 99 .. india in 03 and this time it is the island nation from the sub continent that is getting trashed ... I am writing this post as mandira bedi is in the middle of another controversy, no prizes for guessing that it is related to something that she was wearing .. after noodle straps and tatoo on bare back .. this time its her sari ...

I am writing this post at 1.30 am at home ... some of you would be a little surprised at the 'am' part of the time ... you might be thinking that what is this guy doing so late at home ... well i am trying to answer that question for myself for last few weeks ... honestly, i just do aimless surfing in the so called happy hours of my dial up connection ... dont worry, I am not hooked on to any of those sites which a lot of people would surf at this time of the day (night)

I am writing this post as I read few other blogs of people discontended from corporate life .. disappointed by indian cricket team and even the ones who are dejected coz a foreigner called richard gere managed to do what they always dreamt of ...

I am writing this post I am getting desperately restless because there is something inside my mynd that is dying to get an expression ... I am writing this is as a confused 26 yr old ... I am writing this not to keep my blog alive but to feel better .. I am writing this when I am with my family ... with people I love the most ... I am writing this while I am at home .. I am writing this while I feel alone ....

Of love-life, mouse and deep faith

Had a few comments asking me to post more often even if I write about my sorry love life ... lekin saala murphy ko bhi akhha duniya mein apan-ij mila tha ... sorry to kya kisi bhi type ki love life se duur ka bhi vaasta nahi hai ... thoda idea apne friends log ki love life ka hai lekin usko kai koo public mein discuss karne ka ... so i have to scratch the rusting corners of my vacuum filled head to find some topic to write about ... The fact that i am sitting at home makes thinking even more difficult ... bole to naa to raat ko 1 baje music sun sakte hain aur naa hi is dial up connection par youtube se videos download hote hain ... to saala dimag chalega kaise

In June, I had my first experience of traveling with air-deccan, last week I had my second. With 19 other batch mates in the same flight we had good fun. The danger of being detained for suspicious behavior stopped us from doing too much non-sense like playing antakshari in the plane. Anyways, the real surprise came on Delhi railway station where checking of passenger luggage has become a new security measure.

With the innocent-soft-spoken-cultured-eligible-bachelor looks of mine, the chances of me being suspected to be a suicide bomber are only as high as malika sherawat playing the title role in jai santoshi maa. Still, as part of usual procedure, I was stopped for a security check at Delhi railway station. The fun started when the policeman asked me to open my laptop bag.

Scene: Delhi railway station,
Cast: me, policeman1 (we call him Hawaldar Bahadur) and policeman2 (we call him Crook-Bond)

With i-am-the-most-responsible-police-officer look on his face, Hawaldar Bahadur picks up my laptop charger

Hawaldar Bahadur (HB): Ye kya hai
Me: (with the kahan-fas-gaya look) Sirrr, Ye ch ch charger hai issska
HB: (with i-see-something-fishy-in-this look) kis liye
Me: (with the super-cool-sincere-student look) Sirrrrr, yye laptop ko ch ch charge karne ke liye
HB: (Inspecting the wire of the charger) remained silent and gave me a thakur-to-tu-gaya look

HB now picks up the external mouse
HB: (with the sherlock-holmes-meets-karamchand look) ye kya hai
Me: (trying hard to stick to the super-cool-sincere-student look) Sirr, ye ye woh mouse hai
HB: (with the stone-age-man-looking-at-paris-hilton-on-playboy-cover look) matlab, ye kya kaam ka hai
Me: (with the i-am-a-techie-nerd-who-thinks-osama-is-just-a-computer-virus look) sir ye woh iske saath (pointing at the laptop) lagate hain kaam karne ke liye
HB: (i cant even dare to look at his face to check his look now) Kaise kaam karta hai
Me: (with the chanting-hanuman-chalisa-yet-appearing-cool look) opened the laptop and tried explaining him what the hell it was

Suddenly, Crook-Bond who was standing a few feet away till now busy checking some other passenger chips in ..

Crook-Bond (CB): (with the humare-paas-har-problem-ka-solution-hai look) kya baat hai
Me: (turning to CB) sir kuch nahi, bas ye laptop hai
CB: Arey haan haan theek hai (gives a ullu-ke-pathhe-itna-bhi-nahi-pata look to HB)
Me: (smile reloaded on face) thank you sir ... pack my bag and leave


Moving to another incident ... The 8 day long festival of Jains ended last Monday (the one that ends with seeking forgiveness for all wrong doings) ... Now to give some background, Jainism gives a lot of importance to fasting ... and fasting here means not eating or drinking anything at all ... ya nothing at all ... now its common to see people doing such a fast for a day or may be two ... and every now and then we hear about people doing such a fast for 8 consecutive days ... the 13 year old girl of the priest of our temple did this 8 day fast this year ... She does not belong to a Jain family ... she stays in the temple premises with her family ... 8 days without any food or water the look on her face can be used to define divinity ... her act made be think about what wonders can deep faith do ...

And I am thinking ... is there anything in which I have such strong faith ? The question lingers...

ps: I request all of u to forgive me for any act of mine that would have pained/offended u guys during last one year ..

Bas yun hi ...

Disclaimer: This post is written at 6 in the morning in a whitish mischeifish mood diluted by some REALly activ juice. The sole purpose of the post is to prevent my blog from atrophic dormancy rustio virus.

I do not recieve too many mails, offliners or orkut scraps. Barring the spam and the mails sent by some random wellwishers with subject lines like "v SAVE 82%: VIAGR*, AMBIE*, CIALI*, XANA*, RIVOTRI*, LEVITR*, CIPRO, MERIDI*, CELEBRE*, VALIU* prettier" i recieve mails less frequently then quizzes at IIMC. The average time between 2 scraps in my scrapbook is enough for increasing Indian population by a few thousands. In short my CyberLife is not really happening. So whenever i see more mails in my box than the number of balls that Ganguly faced before getting out, i get excited. Today was one such day. Most of those mails or scraps were about wishing me 'maitri diwas'. Thanks a lot guys and same 2 u.

I know that you might be shocked with the crap that i've written and would have already used the four letter word. Sorry for all this. It was neccesary to keep my blog alive.