Funny Competition?

or Google just showing off?

You decide.

Shutterbug

You little beauty.

A Really Bad Day at Office.

I'm sitting at my desk staring at the computer screen. No work to do. No one from our office gang is in today. I've come to office to finish some paperwork with Finance which, as expected will only happen after 5 in the evening. There is not a single person in the adjoining 5 cubicles. Where the hell is everybody dammit? What am I doing here??

Winamp is running on shuffle mode since morning. I've even read all the user comments on rediff.

Bangladesh were giving me something to look forward to, but even they folded for 410 odd.

Okay, I shall drown my boredom in some random musings.

• Saw Ghajini on friday. Good masala movie, although I felt that there wasn't enough of the intriguing short-term-memory-loss concept even though that was publicized as the USP of the film. I watched it in Urvashi theater with 2000 other people. The ambience was terrific. Aamir khan can take a bow for his versatility. Asin is like a breath of fresh air. Jiah khan has super potential, methinks.
• Went to Mysore over the weekend. Me & the missus visited chamundi hills & the temple. Huuge crowd. Chaos. Screwed a couple of smartasses trying to jump the ticket queue. Sadistic pleasure :). One funny incident though: A marwari guy walked toward the small hanuman idol inside the temple, pointed toward the idol and asked the poojari "yeh kaun hain"? The poojari looked at him dumbfounded for 3 seconds, then just lost it totally and chased him out of the temple while yelling obscenities!!
• Visited a friend and her cute li'l 3 month old baby girl. She'd dressed her up in a pink frock we'd gifted her when the baby was born. So sweet. Is it just me or are girl babies a little quieter & less destructive than boy babies?
• The fact that I only have 2 more days to eat all the indian junk food is making me feel miserable.
• Whatever happened to Anuradha Paudwal, that singer with a distinctly melodious voice? I'm listening to the title song of 'Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain' (I know), and she sounds so damn melodious. Good song that.
• My office gang is disintegrating. And its making me sad. I'm leaving for the US, one quit the company, one moved to a different department and a different office.. all this at once. Dunno if life will be the same again once I return.

Okay, enough rambling. Its 3:30. Time to harass the finance guys once more.

Back to Blogging

After more than 28 months, I've decided to take another shot at blogging.
Let me see if I can sustain it this time.

Here we go!

Women & Football

Got this in a forwarded email:

Explaining the football offside rule to women!

You're in a shoe shop, second in the queue for the counter. Behind the
shop assistant on the till is a pair of shoes which you have seen and
which you must have.
The female shopper in front of you has seen them also and is eyeing them
with desire.
Both of you have forgotten your purses.
It would be totally rude to push in front of the first woman if you had no
money to pay for the shoes.
The shop assistant remains at the counter waiting.
Your friend is trying on another pair of shoes at the back of the shop
and sees your dilemma.
She prepares to throw her purse to you.
If she does so, you can catch the purse, then walk round the other
shopper and buy the shoes.
At a pinch she could throw the purse ahead of the other shopper and,
*whilst it is in flight* you could nip around the other shopper, catch
the purse and buy the shoes.

Always remember that until the purse had *actually been thrown* it
would be plain wrong to be forward of the other shopper.
This would be offside.


Priceless!

Currently Listening to: Rob Dougan - Furious Angels (Matrix Reloaded)

Mixed bag

Oh yeah... Life's a mixed bag, if you didn't know already.

Here I am, in Taunton, an absolutely bea-uu-tiful place, with more greens, old churches and houses, lovely people.. some kind of serene, natural feeling attached to it. Work is going on at a leisurely pace. Co-workers seem very nice and all...
...but still I'm not entirely happy.

Why? For starters, I'm living in a hotel for the first time.. which is kinda new, but in no way comparable to living in an apartment...
can't cook or wash here.. so, have to pay a lot for these things which automatically makes me sad.
Annnnd, since this is a small town, Internet is not too.. er.. 'all-pervasive' lets say. Turns out that I've to pay 12 quid (a slang for pound!) for a night of broadband!! That's plain outrageous.
So, you see, this is nothing short of confinement.

Anyways, everything's not glum. The drive to taunton was quite nice. Lots of broad, green fields and nice scenery. Office is nice too. Check out the view from my window in office.


My architect here is an Indian-born-settled-here guy. He's some sort of guru when it comes to anything technical. He has a pretty cool attitude and a refreshingly candid demeanour, which, for me is like finding idly-sambaar in Burger King!
I feel that, underneath, he's still a 22 yr old who likes to hang out with his friends in Chennai! :) (Hmmm.. that sounds familiar)
Anyway, It feels good again to talk in English without subconsciously putting on a fake accent! Not to mention the bliss of being able to use 4 letter words in office again!

Life, is indeed a mixed bag.

Currently Listening to: Black Eyed Peas - Shut Up

Can I get any lazier?

I think I've outdone myself.
I have spent the entire weekend inside... without even stepping out of the house once!
More than 50% of the time lazing on the bed... and the rest split between
a) Browsing the net, chatting with friends (hail google talk!), orkutting..
b) Watching every sitcom on TV..
c) Eating..

Usually, I'd be disgusted with myself by the end of such lazy weekends and pray for monday to arrive quickly!! (Really)
But, somehow I don't feel that bad now.. Could do with a little walk outside though..

But damn, I've gotta start packing.. have to get up at 5 in the morning to get to Taunton.. Its a location change.. for the next 3 weeks..

Hey, I think Seinfeld in on now... Someone pleez pack my stuff... pleeez.

Currently Listening to: Crystal Method - Born too slow

Loser: ME

After my second futile attempt at Ice Skating today , I've come to the following conclusion:
It is too damn difficult to learn.

Beauty and the beast

Found this on the net.... Superb !!

Beauty and the beast
BY DAVE BARRY

If you're a man, at some point a woman will ask you how she looks.

''How do I look?'' she'll ask.

You must be careful how you answer this question. The best technique is to form an honest yet sensitive opinion, then collapse on the floor with some kind of fatal seizure. Trust me, this is the easiest way out. Because you will never come up with the right answer.

The problem is that women generally do not think of their looks in the same way that men do. Most men form an opinion of how they look in seventh grade, and they stick to it for the rest of their lives. Some men form the opinion that they are irresistible stud muffins, and they do not change this opinion even when their faces sag and their noses bloat to the size of eggplants and their eyebrows grow together to form what appears to be a giant forehead-dwelling tropical caterpillar.

Most men, I believe, think of themselves as average-looking. Men will think this even if their faces cause heart failure in cattle at a range of 300 yards. Being average does not bother them; average is fine, for men. This is why men never ask anybody how they look. Their primary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which is essentially the same form of beauty care that they give to their lawns.

If, at the end of his four-minute daily beauty regimen, a man has managed to wipe most of the shaving cream out of his hair and is not bleeding too badly, he feels that he has done all he can, so he stops thinking about his appearance and devotes his mind to more critical issues, such as the Super Bowl.

Women do not look at themselves this way. If I had to express, in three words, what I believe most women think about their appearance, those words would be: ''not good enough.'' No matter how attractive a woman may appear to be to others, when she looks at herself in the mirror, she thinks: woof.

She thinks that at any moment a municipal animal-control officer is going to throw a net over her and haul her off to the shelter.

Why do women have such low self-esteem? There are many complex psychological and societal reasons, by which I mean Barbie. Girls grow up playing with a doll proportioned such that, if it were a human, it would be seven feet tall and weigh 81 pounds, of which 53 pounds would be bosoms.

This is a difficult appearance standard to live up to, especially when you contrast it with the standard set for little boys by their dolls ... excuse me, by their action figures. Most of the action figures that my son played with when he was little were hideous-looking. For example, he was very fond of an action figure (part of the He-Man series) called ''Buzz-Off,'' who was part human, part flying insect. Buzz-Off was not a looker. But he was extremely self-confident. You could not imagine Buzz-Off saying to the other action figures: ``Do you think these wings make my hips look big?''

But women grow up thinking they need to look like Barbie, which for most women is impossible, although there is a multibillion-dollar beauty industry devoted to convincing women that they must try. I once saw an Oprah show wherein supermodel Cindy Crawford dispensed makeup tips to the studio audience. Cindy had all these middle-aged women applying beauty products to their faces; she stressed how important it was to apply them in a certain way, using the tips of their fingers. All the woman dutifully did this, even though it was obvious to any sane observer that, no matter how carefully they applied these products, they would never look remotely like Cindy Crawford, who is some kind of genetic mutation.

I'm not saying that men are superior. I'm just saying that you're not going to get a group of middle-aged men to sit in a room and apply cosmetics to themselves under the instruction of Brad Pitt, in hopes of looking more like him. Men would realize that this task was pointless and demeaning. They would find some way to bolster their self-esteem that did not require looking like Brad Pitt. They would say to Brad: ``Oh YEAH? Well what do you know about LAWN CARE, pretty boy?''

Of course, many women will argue that the reason they become obsessed with trying to look like Cindy Crawford is that men, being as shallow as a drop of spit, WANT women to look that way. To which I have two responses:

1. Hey, just because WE'RE idiots, that doesn't mean YOU have to be; and

2. Men don't even notice 97 percent of the beauty efforts you make anyway. Take fingernails. The average woman spends 5,000 hours per year worrying about her fingernails; I have never once, in more than 40 years of listening to men talk about women, heard a man say, ''She has a nice set of fingernails!'' Many men would not notice if a woman had upward of four hands.

Anyway, to get back to my original point: If you're a man, and a woman asks you how she looks, you're in big trouble. Obviously, you can't say she looks bad. But you also can't say that she looks great, because she'll think you're lying, because she has spent countless hours, with the help of the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, obsessing about the differences between herself and Cindy Crawford. Also, she suspects that you're not qualified to judge anybody's appearance. This is because you have shaving cream in your hair.

Please Listen !!

Any poor soul who visits my blog and who knows kannada should listen to this.
Link

(Keli kruthaartharagi !!)

Hi!

My first post!! Yayy