Dilbert Day

I am a very conscientous worker.  I maintain a daily log of things that I did or I fantasized that I did.  It helps me fill up my time sheets at the end of the month.  Obviously no one can remember what all one din't do for a whole month right?  So today is "Dilbert Day".  I spent the entire bloody day reading Dilbert 2.0 - 20 years of  Dilbert from Google Books.  Ofcourse you cannot read good stuff in the office without disturbance - if you are having a gripping read, for sure your boss has all the time in the world to march around you.  So I spent my day switching between the .NET studio and the Google books site.  Thank God I know the keyboard shortcut to switch between stuff. 
The book is an excellent read - Scott Adams traces the journey of how Dilbert grew.  It is filled with a lot of Dilbert (obviously) and I kept reading it in the belief that reading these smart things makes my brain develop.  I realised while reading the book that I can only get my sense of humour across through a comic strip.  I should draw instead of writing like this.  But writing is easier and if neither writing nor drawing are going to draw the laughs, then I'd rather do the easier thing. 
Reading through the book, I realised that there were punch-lines which I did not understand. For example the strip about how Dilbert sneezes and causes serious embarassment and injury to the senior management and Dogbert replies with a "Gesundheit".  I had to google this German word to know that its the 'God bless you' response to a sneeze in North America.  I hope we have famous Indian comic strips so that everyone can google for phrases like "chalta hai!". 

The fair skinned eligibles

A reprehensible ad airing on TV shows a fake humble man who has been breastfed on fairness creams grab a job because he is "gora".  God! Atrocious! Why send children to school anymore? Lets have them practice rubbing in fairness creams from class 1.  By the time they are of legal age, surely all the melanin in their skin would have been wiped out.  Even if they will die of melanoma the moment they step out into the sun.  Yes - there is actually an ad which claims to reduce the melanin in your skin.  Talk of honesty in advertising - talk of catering to the retarded audiences.
We are so close to realizing Huxley's 'Brave New World'; the day is not far when expectant moms will be swallowing small packets of fairness creams aimed at the foetus's complexion. It will not matter whether the child thus born looks like a constipated Robert Pattinson in the Twilight series - the fact that they are fair will get them grades, jobs, wives, fair children, fair death and a fair reception at the gates of Heaven, where God will select him first for his paleness (or "peach bloom complexion" if I were to borrow from Wodehouse).  Infact, with such resounding success of the fair-skinned, God may decide to recall us lesser models who sport brown,olive or ebony complexions.  O community of dark ones, let's make hay till that day. 

Amma!

Just watched an excerpt from Amma's (Mata Amritanandamayi Devi) discourse on TV and had to share it. Amma starts by introducing car navigators and other software which alert a user to un-buckled seat belts and open doors. Just as these softwares notify the people in the vehicle if anything is amiss our conscience notifies us whether anything is amiss.  It beeps, or blinks red if we go wrong.  It may even try to bring us back on track like a navigator would recalculate a path after a wrong turn.  And our hardware body is simply a vegetable if it does not have the conscience software installed in it. Amma goes on to compare a bad thought to a virus.  A bad thought damages files in ourselves.  And not only us, it damages everybody we send out an email to.