God and the Chinese

'God made the world and the rest was made in China', said somebody.  That 'rest' includes tiny Oscar statuettes with "Best Brother" lables on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and deadly manja for flying kites in Uttarayan in Gujarat. We still are making our own khakhras though.  

Which brings me to Time's list of top 10 evil animals  which started off very promisingly with 2 "originally from China" animals.  But somewhere down the line the list gets uninspiring (I am guessing some Time employee's kid did it as homework and then hacked into Time's servers and posted the thing) mostly because there are no more Chinese animals in it.  Oh the sorrow. 

And here's another one from Time which again stars China and the iPhone 4.

I was wondering what I could post about today - I need to keep the blog alive...I need people to come and visit it - so that if one day I turn out amazing stuff, there is someone apart from my husband and brother to read it... :-).   So here are my thoughts on boredom:

My brain is engulfed in flames of boredom. Have you ever felt that woozy-headedness in the head - a feeling which feels like the brain has packed up and gone - and all that is left is a vaccuum that is threatening to eat you up. You look at the computer screen and feel almost angry to find that everything still remains the same - the web pages look the same - the mails look the same - there is nothing absolutely new and curious. I just took a 30 minute 1.5 km walk around the office, leaving from one gate and entering at the other to take my mind off its own pre-occupation. My mind has a mind of its own - I am not able to draw it away from itself at times - it just keeps brooding and refuses to come out of its misery (even self-inflicted at times). Not that it would take much to cheer it up - just a loved song, or stimulating conversation, or a long session playing the Oblivion (or Team Fortress!!). Of these the stimulating conversation is the hardest to come by - I depend upon my parents, or husband or friends for it. But its rather not an on-demand thing - I cannot have stimulating conversation when I need it - it has to come by - rather like Mr. Right.

Skipping that topic - I read something in last Sunday's TOI that closely resembled the works of Shakespeare attempted by monkeys - packaged as a blog from an urban girl's diary. Should I say that it sucked? It was a plain D grade mushy novel page verging on porn. Definitely the Sunday Times supplement is not worth the paper its printed on anymore.

Jude Law as Dexter Mayhew please...

So "One Day" is over. David Nichols may have lived as a female - for he makes Emma feel the way most of us do. I picture Dexter as Jude Law - and Emma as Kate Winslet, not Anne Hathaway anyway.
Its a nice read - takes time to build up - but definitely worth finishing up.  

Into the semifinals!!!

What a match!!! I do not have another set of 3 words to describe the feeling.   And when the Australian bowlers started mouthing a lot of expletives (atleast thats what they seemed to be), the desire to win must have gone stronger for our desi boys. 
In trying to find updates of the game while in office, I hit upon Guardian's Rob Smyth whose commentary was less about cricket and more about a lot of other people who never rang a bell with me. It must take a lot of talent to type in drivel after every over in a match!  Still it kept me informed - which is all thats expected.

Also caught half an hour of the game in a crowded canteen in the office, where the reaction to every ball was magnified.  Which is what happens with crowds - in a crowd each person is more than a single person.
Great match anyways...we will get the cup after all.

India and England match with Hindi commentary

I would have loved to read Wodehouse describing Sunday's World Cup match between India and England. (Read his "Mike - a public school story" ). It is from Wodehouse that I learnt about boxing and football and golf. Ofcourse, I was coached about cricket in the cradle like the other 200 crore Indians.


Sunday's match was tragic - having both teams lose is a farce.
I watched the game on DD and here are some choice quips from the Hindi commentators :

•  When Sachin hit a four - "Dekhiye kaisi bahaduri se khel rahe hain. Ek dilchaspi honi chahiye cricket mein, aise khelne ke liye". Amazing insight.

•  When Sachin hit another four - "Aisa shaandar cricket na humne bhootkal mein kabhi dekha hai, na bhavishya mein dekhne ko milega". The death knell for Indian cricket?

•  When Sachin missed a ball while fielding that became a four - "Sachin sahi samay par jhukh nahi paye aur ball haath se nikal gaya. Vaise to Sachin kabhi kahin nahi jhuke. Par fielding mein to jhukna padta hi hai." Intellectual.

I wish someone would go around and hand out some quieting potion to these Hindi commentators before the match. Or we should atleast have the option of tuning out their mindless bakwas.

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.  

To my IT siblings...

Living in an Indian IT city means overcrowded public places on Saturday and Sunday. A person eventually comes to terms with it, or starts avoiding it - like we did. We'd rush in on Saturday before afternoon, conduct a marathon run-through the super market, bill it quickly on one of the empty counters and practically sprint away. But there were always lazy days, when we would turn up at 7 PM, to find the place jampacked. We'd curse and curse and run through the crowd to get back home. The funny thing was the crowds kept increasing exponentially every weekend. When the supermarket opened we could leisurely stroll in and stroll out, but a few months down the line, every weekend brought thousands of people more than the previous weekend. So the super market started storing a lot of veggies - which was one of the reasons we went there.



Now though we are from the IT, we are not completely clueless as to what's going on in the world (unlike many of our compatriots who wear shorts to the super market but dont know that they should be picking up the Simla apple instead of the Australia/NZ variety). We wanted to buy local - but the local bazaars (Rythu bazaars) were far off, crowded and offered a mostly sweaty - stinky experience. And sitting in an AC environment for 5 days does not really condition you to sweating it out in the markets. So after a couple of valiant trys at buying local, we went right back to the supermarket - with its cleaned and packed greens and sweet-scented chuddy wearing crowd. Now other than the scent, there was no difference in the crowd composition. At the local bazaar, you'd have a person wearing a dhoti or pants in front of you - who is trying to pick up vegetables and doesn't give you space because he dint see you. The moment he sees you, he will give a smile and move back to accomodate you in the vegetable choosing ceremony. At the mall you'd have a hairy guy in shorts, wearing a branded chappal and tees and maybe a thick gold chain, reeking of having just returned from onsite, choosing tomatoes. He will see you and know that he is hogging the space - but he proves his standing in society by not moving away at all. He will stand, pick up tomatoes at a leisurely pace and leave only when he wants to. He wont step back for a lady because he believes in gender equality. Besides he has a visa stamped in his passport and that visa particularly states that he can stand hogging the entire supermarket if he wants to. And ofcourse he wont smile - because he knows that smiling is an admission of being equal to the receiver of his smile. So he stolidly stands his ground and if he is spirited enough, he may even elbow you out completely.






Most of the people visiting this huge mall on weekends are from the IT. We can conclude that because I frequently saw people from my office and my husband saw people from his office and the others smelled of being in IT. You dont get such a large collection of paunches and big backsides speaking to their kids in English in any other profession. We are like the chicken pox of the working world - we spread like an epidemic. But I digress yet again. At the AC'd market, the shelves holding imported vegetables and fruits are always a huge attraction. Imported broccoli, lettuce, Chinese pears, NZ apples, dragon fruits, canned meats, cereals, juices always sell like hot cakes or hot samosas (which is more relevant to India). Every buyer seems to be swaying to the mantra "If I have the money, I will spend it - without thinking where my purchase comes from - or what it will do to my stomach or my country or my earth." I admit that not everyone can spend time poring over the labels of each product to see if it is locally made, like I do. But atleast one should realise that having money gives you power to shape the world for your kids. Or that "with big money, comes big responsibility". (:-D too good an opportunity to resist plagiarism)  For everybody is not given the power to sling a web. The power given to us is the capacity to generate money. And it matters where we spend it. 

Impressions

"Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe." - Virginia Woolf

A walking human brain that ravages everything in its way and gets bigger and bigger with each destruction - is that what "being smart" entails?