Maximum City????

I am 23 and it is rather surprising to note that I have never traveled alone to any other state/country. There are two reasons for this

1) My upbringing.
2) Never got the opportunity to do so.

I came close to traveling abroad alone on two occasions. I missed out on both due to some situation cropping up in the family. Here I am, after 23 freaking years, embarking on my first trip alone. I know it is not such a big deal in this day and age but to do it so late is a bit weird. The best part is that I am traveling to a city which was once my dream destination. I am heading to Mumbai after a gap of 17 years. The last time I went was in ” Udayan Express” from Bangalore. The 24  hr train journey was a lot of fun except for the fact that I was 6 years old and holding on to anything that came in my line of sight. I do not have any great memories from ” Bombay” if i may call it so. I am sure Raj Thackeray does not read my blog. I hope the city lives up to the hype. I have heard enough and more about the place from my peers as well as from movies. The night life, the women, the food and what not… I think 3 days is good enough to judge a city. Although I expect to have a nervy day 1, I am sure that the remaining two days will be legen.. wait for it…daryyy. Looking forward to it..Any suggestions for important places to visit. Please feel free to comment. Will blog about my experiences once I am back.

The good old days of writing letters

I was having a brief conversation with my Post Man the other day and it got me all thinking about how life would have been if we did not have E-Mail. A decade ago, I would have contacted the Post- Office close to three times a week. Now, I have no idea what their number is.The jobs of the post man have become so much more simpler.

Letters have played a brief but exciting role in my life. Ever since the advent of E-Mail, letters does not have the same charm that it used to have in the earlier days. I am glad my granddad retired from the esteemed position of a Postmaster. Those days, it was one government jobs that had buoyant competition. Now, it is outsourced to anyone above the age of 60.  When I moved to Chennai from Bangalore in 1997, I was so fascinated by the concept of exchanging letters. Most of my friends would spend substantial amount of time to draft a letter. I would do the same in return. I would in fact sketch stuff and send it to them. That is probably the only occasion where I ever spent time on art. There is a major sense of fulfillment and anxiety as soon as I send one. With E- Mail the entire equation changes. Most of them are links or quick messages that convey truck loads of information. There is minimal effort. The only and probably the biggest advantage of E-mail is the fact that it is real time. But I guess it kills the suspense.

I still have each and every letter I have received with me and it is great feeling to read them ten years later. The letters may sound silly but it makes a good read. When I was twelve years old, I have actually written a letter to Rahul Dravid praising him for his wonderful batting and asking him to hit more runs. Obviously I didn’t have his address to post it. The letter will be retarded and the English will be pathetic. Looking back at it, it is so amusing.  I have attached a copy of the letter as an image below. I doubt I will ever write an E-mail and save it in My Drafts. Sometimes technology can take away the beauty of  traditional methods and indirectly make us extremely lazy. I hate writing any more. I prefer to type. I am sure most of you will agree with me.

I am guessing that most of us would have invested a lot of time in jotting down our thoughts and feelings and sending it to people whom we wish to. A letter can reveal the mood of the person and convey more than just few lines of text.  Nowadays the only letters we receive are that of bills from the various private banks in India. No one has the time to sit and write in a piece of paper about their life. It is either communicated publicly through a social platform or privately through emails. Sometimes E-Mail can be so artificial.  There is no value for effort spent. Effort is belittled whereas Time is worshipped. There needs to be a balance between both.

I still prefer opening an envelope and read a letter rather than checking my email ever 10 minutes. I used to be the first person to open the post box to check if I have received any mail. Now days we are online all the time checking e-mails and not realizing that we have lost an able trusted mode of communication. Whenever possible try to send a few letters. It would take people by surprise and would make them feel extremely important.

BORED (of) EXAM

It is finally official. No More board exams for Class 10. The government  has made it optional.  This comes as a huge bonus to the students who are studying in Class 9  now. Longer Summer  holidays,no tuitions,  Dish Tv’s can stay,no one is grounded  and no career defining  decision to be taken. IIT Professors can now scratch their bald heads to identify ways by which they can select candidates . The need to shift schools is not required and our education system has opened the gates for students to enter into a level playing field.

I still remember how much I struggled that one year. I hardly followed Australian Cricket, refrained from meeting new women ( no kadalai) and had my phone removed from my room. Currently, I doubt I can do without any of the above tasks for one day. Phew!!! It is a huge relief for the students. I  firmly believe that it is at the end of class 9 and the beginning of Class 10 that we forget how to enjoy life. More often than not we end up in front of our books for one year on the trot.Now students all over the country can relax and think about what they want to do for another two years. The tenth standard exam has been the cause of many problems.

From the day the results come till you are around 30, people want to know your tenth standard score. It is crazy that one set of exams can determine what kind of a person he/she is. It used to be a benchmark for most parents to decide what his/her son is capable off. Intelligence cannot be measured with one exam and the students ought to be tested in a wide range of subjects to determine how good or bad they are. The Indian mentality is way behind the west in this regard. There is too much emphasis on marks or money and as a result the competition is sky high. A lot of deserving students get unnoticed while a lot of undeserving students take center stage. According to me, this is very visible in a country like ours and it would perfect if the government can standardize education and  increase the quality. Currently, the rich get richer and better education while the poor get poorer and mediocre education.

By abolishing the 10th standard board exam, the government is sending positive signals to the Mango junta about Next Gen Education. As any other reform, I am sure this would evoke a strong debate and help Barkha Dut and Arnab Goswami earn their grub. Jokes apart, I am in favour of this decision and I am sure most people will be. Teachers and local government officials must stop tampering with the system further and just abide the law. It would do wonders for our country.  Next up is Class 12.

The great Tambram Wedding!!

It has been a while since I blogged and the only reason for this is poor time management. Anyway I am ready to roll again. Over the last month or so there has been a lot of action personally as well as professionally. My next few posts will have updates and incidents that took place over the last month or so. Let me start off with something which I wanted to share with my loyal readers.

After a brief hiatus, I got to attend a few traditional TAMBRAM weddings of people close to me. Not only are these weddings 2 day affairs but also they are extremely heavy on the pocket. The weddings are very biased towards the girls family and the guys have very little say. Starting from the Hall to the Rangoli, every minuscule detail is taken care and has a commercial motive to it. The outsourced party does an exceptional job of it but it definitely comes for a price. The price is very huge and is definitely not worth it. I am starting to think if there is any alternative way of conducting a wedding. Any creative/bright ideas could do a world of good for people like me. Keep me posted on some whacky ideas.

I really don’t know the history behind Tamil Weddings but I would love to know whether there are any books to understand the history behind the various ceremonies. From my experience, I can draw an analogy of a typical Tamil Wedding to that of a Cricket Pavilion. The home team has a separate place for them to play their cards while the touring team face a lot of trouble and are under the mercy of the Home team. Similarly in an Iyer Wedding, The guy’s side takes over the role of the away team. They have absolutely no say and are under the mercy of the girl’s family. The boy and girl hardly have time to talk or discuss the wedding. The girl throws in a guest appearance just for the sake of photos. Who makes these rules? Why should the girl’s family run the show? Why are girls given preferential treatment? These are questions that have remained unanswered for a long time now.
Let me substantiate with an example. I had attended a wedding a couple of weeks ago and it was dinner time. I was served some great food and when I was halfway through my meal, I was asked to get up since there were some extra people from the girls side who had come. They were worried about lack of food and asked us to get up. I was startled. That was ridiculous. That was total misuse of power. This incident got me thinking and I was wondering how the whole concept could be changed to make it short and simple.

There are umpteen numbers of items that go waste. I am estimating that the cost of the wedding can easily come down by around 50% if optimized well. I would love to compare the costs of a typical wedding across all religions and figure out how well the money is being spent. This would help in analyzing whether the time and money spent in such an extravagant affair is beneficial to the investor. In Business terms, there is no guarantee or warranty that the girls’ family is going to break even or get substantial ROI. The marriage could break in matter of days that could result in great losses. This convinces how flawed the system is. But the typical Tamil Wedding follows the suite of “High Risk High Reward” and hence they go ahead. This is just one of many cases where women have an advantage over the men and

I wonder how

I wonder why “Should girls have all the Fun”

Will share more interesting incidents about women and their exploits with government personnel in the coming few days.

This is just a start for many more to come.

FAKE IPL POST!!!

Phew!!!! It is finally over. Life returns to normalcy. Suddenly I find myself having plenty of time and nothing to do. They say “Cricket can be a cruel game for players” but it could be cruel to the viewers as well. The last 37 days has been extremely demanding for passionate cricket fans like me. Just thought I would share with you a few things that kept me occupied. Here it goes..

Creating my Fantasy Cricket Team, Deciding on the TRUMP PLAYER (TP), Reading about the intimate relationship between BHOOKA NAAN and DILDO, Getting home in time to watch the game, Getting through the rant’s of Arun LAL, Figuring out the reasons behind Mandira Bedi’s clothes, watching the exploits of Danny Morrison, Trying to find out the number of times RAMIZ RAJA and Ravi SHASTRI do an EPIC FAIL, Hearing the commentators chant “ It’s a DLFER” ,”That’s a Citi Moment of Success”, Watching a gamut of ZOOZOO’s, Trying to figure out which cheerleader was the sister of Jacque Kallis, Praying that my TP gets MOM, Sending a hundred messages across fantasy league members, Digesting the fact that Rohit Sharma got an hat trick, Crib about the fact that Rohit Sharma got an hat trick, Hope that one day Dhoni realizes that ORAM is full of shit, Wait till the Post Match Presentation, Sometimes wait till fantasy scores get updated were a few things that kept me busy.

To do all this in 3-4 hrs is extremely stressful for the body and the fact that the same routine has to be repeated for 37 days on the trot is not good for my body. Finally it is over and there is a sense of normalcy that has returned to my life. Feels like a fresh start and a new beginning. I suddenly have a lot of time to kill. The day seems longer than ever before.

IPL has definitely changed the lives of every cricket fan in India and it is just a matter of time before it can be compared to the EPL or the NBA. City based loyalty and the media hype has fully been justified and this is just a beginning of something special. At times I did feel money playing an important role in deciding the outcome of the match but to be honest I was proved wrong on most occasions. Summers will never be the same again and I can’t wait to see what surprises the next year holds for us.

With the World T20 and the Champions league T20 coming up, I wonder what precedence the ASHES will take. I still prefer to watch a team defend 210 on the last day of a test match than to watch Rohit Sharma hit 26 of the final over to win a T20 game. Let’s wait and see how things shape up.

My blogs are invariably on cricket and I hope to not cover cricket for a few months. I am looking to diversify my thoughts and capture them nonchalantly and express them seamlessly. My apologies for the previous sentence. That’s how stressed I am. Going to refresh myself by hearing this and watching this.

JOB-LESS!!

This was a mail sent to my friend from a leading firm in India. The mail was sent after my friend applied for a particular position via a job portal site.

It just shows the efficiency of the job site/ company. Who do you think will attend the interview after reading such a mail? Recession is hitting recruiters as well.

From:YYYYY – Sorry I am not sure if I can mention the name of the firm after this.
Date: Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 1:17 PM
Subject: for your final selection
To: XXXX@gmail.com

hello XXX

Thanks for submitted your resume in job portel site. We have received your resume and we will be glad to it. looking forward to a short job oppotunities for you by X.

please contact to us for more details.

Thanking you

Z
Company Name
New Delhi

Who do you think will join? Absolutely nobody!!!

I have received more funny emails like this. I sincerely feel that job portal sites are losing their ground and in times of recession one would expect these sites to witness maximum traffic. Job Portal sites have never been really useful in finding the perfect job and it misguides the users. Just thought I would let you know guys that I believe that one should not waste too much time on these sites since the chances of you getting a call via the job portal site is as bleak as the possibility of having a hot day currently in South Africa.

The Week that Wasn’t!!!!

It has been a long time since I have blogged and one of the main reasons for that has been the lack of inspirational topics. My creativity has been hit due to the recession and I am looking for a potential buyer now who could help me rejuvenate. I am currently reading this and it is extremely fascinating. This book helps me relate to the various incidents I have faced in my life over the last few years. I am sure all of you will. BTW the sad part is I am stuck at Chapter 10 for the last 2 weeks. I am struggling to reach Chapter 11 . It could be a blessing in disguise but the fact that the credit crunch is ubiquitous , continues to torment me. I badly want an LMN to unwind. A light post during these trying times..enjoy…

Some interesting snippets from the news of last week.

1) Did you guys know that Rakhi Sawant has requested NDTV Imagine to conduct a reality show to find her husband? Surprisingly, within hours of that announcement, MTV bagged the rights for the Rakhi Sawant Reality Divorce show titled Vodafone SPLITS- WILLYOU. At the end of the day VIJAY TV launched a reality marriage prime time show called Airtel Super Husband. The judges for this event is expected to be Salman Rushdie, Pramod Muthalik and Varun Gandhi. Apparently they are planning a Wild Card round where in real husbands can take part. The show is expected to go on for 1 year till Rakhi finds her match.

2) Anurag Kashyap launched his sequel to DEV-D last week. The movie is called BHAB-E. The movie is supposedly inspired by this. Kashyap’s hoping for the altercation between producers and multiplex owners to end so that he could release it there. Abhay Deol is most likely going to be the protagonist in this movie although rumors are spreading that the controversial Jagadish TITler may have a cameo performance.

3) The potential buyer of Satyam will be out by the time you read this. It looks like IBM is desperately trying to buy some company. They showed interest in SUN last week but latest twitter updates from IBM employees indicates that they are looking to BAIL-OUT Ramalinga Raju. Mr President Obama luckily had allocated some amount of money in the stimulus bill to bailout Raju.

4)Did you guys know that the grand daughter of Chidambaram is named Vaishnavi… And no brownie points for guessing what he calls her. It is obviosuly VAI-SHOE!!!.

That I guess completes the top stories last week. With IPL v2.0 coming up, I hope my blog beats the recession.

The "IPL" FARCE!!!

I was looking forward to the games in Chennai since the conclusion of IPL 2008. My friends decided to sponsor tickets for a couple of games for me as well. The entire hype surrounding city based fans and a bigger IPL Season 2 has turned to a dream. I doubt if the IPL will ever be the same again. Being one of the craziest cricket fans in the country, it is not an easy pill to digest. It is very disappointing that of all the things that they could have done with the prevailing situation, they chose to shift it out of India. The Indian politics scene is so bad that the election spread over a month is just an eye wash. We all know that at the end of the day the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.With a nation of over 1 billion people, I don’t think it is hard to manage an election.

Our elections have very little impact on the people if not any. It’s a matter of great national shame that the IPL is not held in our country. Any time someone or some media outlet props India’s name up as a rising power or the ‘world’s largest democracy’, this example should be brought up. As a friend of mine says , “India is a shamocratic nation and not a democratic one”. Nandan Nilekani was a guest at ” The Daily show by Jon Stewart” a couple of days back and he had said that the elections are one of the biggest events in the country and it spans over 1 month and is held ” Peacefully”. I really doubt if it could be held peacefully without any unprecedented incident. As my brother told me the other day ” Hope the next Indian guest would mention that we can’t hold a sporting event fearing nationwide riots and attacks and hence will move an event named after our country and with teams named after 8 of our cities to a different country where we will be watched by 5 old men and a dog”. It boggles me that the BCCI could not have made it a 25 day event with money spent on some private security force.It is just inhuman to do this to fans. Being a cricket fan, I just cant accept the fact that due to a stupidity of a few shenanigans we are losing the IPL. Big busy cities will always have security issues.The fact that the government is refusing support because of petty politics and the BCCI monopoly is not placing the interest of the fans’ and players’ above their ego is mind boggling.

Can’t wait for Chennai vs Delhi in Durban…wee-hoo!!!

Brains or Bullets!!

Bizarre is an understatement to describe this. Can you believe that the Afghanistan cricket team is practicing in Peshawar for the World cup Cricket 2011 qualifiers. Leave alone that. Can you even comprehend the fact that there is Cricket Team from Afghanistan? I was shocked to see a listing in Wikipedia for the Afghanistan Cricket Team. It is right here. They are actually potential contenders to qualify for the 2011 World cup to be held in India. If they qualify, they would most likely stay at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. Interesting Set up. Let me leave it at that..

The current cricketing situation is already in turmoil and with teams like Afghanistan entering the fray, I wonder how cricket will be ten years from now. Lets all sincerely hope that they play pathetic cricket and not qualify for the World Cup. I do not foresee an Australian or English team touring Afghanistan in the next 50 years. The Sri Lankans may tour if they are promised sufficient security. The only difference is that this time rather than terrorists, the Afghan players themselves might target the opposition.

The team is actually practicing in Peshawar which is likely to come under the Control of Taliban. After SWAT, the Taliban junta are looking to take control of Peshawar. This could happen any time soon and it does not really matter if they are given security cover or not. Imagine bowling in the Nets when you know that the LeT is Practicing in the adjacent ground. Scary thought!!

The only team which is likely to tour Pakistan at this juncture must be Afghanistan. There are no surprises in that since they are likely to be part of the Taliban themselves and not victims. I just hope that ten years from now, I don’t see a Headline which reads” Taliban Tigers win IPL 2020″. That will be the worst thing that could happen to Cricket. Let us just wait for a month and watch the Afghan cricket team in action in South Africa. Be sure to expect one of these…. Brains or Bullets!!!

A Musical Genius!!!

My blog wont be complete if I did not write about ARR. He is a living legend and he has proved it yet again. I have been hearing his music ever since ROJA and every tune of his is different and takes a lot of time to grow into you. I am sure most of you will agree with the fact that his songs don’t sound great when you hear it for the first time. But after hearing it a few times you will never feel like letting it go.

From Puthiya Mugam to Rangeela to Warriors of Heaven and Earth , ARR has showcased his diversity and creativity. His diverse style has made the world stand on their feet and applaud the man whom the world calls ” The Mozart of Madras”. What else would you call a person whose music brought an entire nation to a standstill. The impeccable record of ARR has made every Indian respect his work and hum his tunes in times of joy and disbelief.

I am sure no one will ever forget what he said in his acceptance speech. “Ella pugazhum iraivanuke” (All glory and fame is to god). These 3 words sums up his life. He has shown to the world that Spirituality is his formula for success and this has been instrumental over the last 17 years.

India will definitely not have another ARR and it is going to take a herculean effort if some one can match him. Just like ADI has written , India can be proud for honing geniuses like Sachin Tendulkar and ARR. The latter had only the Oscars to clinch and has managed it while the former is 2 years away from completing a full circle. Please do not be surprised if Sachin lifts the World CUP in 2011 at Mumbai. That’s the only event which could match ARR’s achievement in terms of grandeur and quality. I am glad that I have had the privilege of being in the same country as these two greats.

I am sure I wont be writing another tribute about ARR’s great music but I am hoping that one day (hopefully in 2011) I will have the courage to write an entire piece on the man they refer to in India as ” GOD” .

Let me complete this post with one of my favourite lines from one of ARR’s greatest work…

kaise tujhko dikhaun yahaan hai kyaMaine jharne se paani maa tod ke piya haiGuchcha guchcha kai khwabon ka uchal ke chuwa haiChaaya liya bhali dhoop yahaan haiNaya naya sa hai roop yahanYahaan sab kuch hai maa phir bhilage bin tere mujhko akela

BLISSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!