Quickie!

No...this is not what you think!

I've been meaning to write and somehow it just did not happen. There are four auto-saved drafts and I can't seem to remember why and where I stopped and what I meant to write. I just hope that this does not become the fifth!

There are a couple of tags, one old and one really old, to which I was put up by Macadamiathenut and Silverine respectively, that I will sometime in the near future complete.

In the meanwhile, here's a bunch of reviews of books that I read over the past couple of months.

First off, Chowringhee. I picked this up at the Crossword outlet-let(meaning small outlet) at Shopper's stop after having been dragged there by a friend. I was and still am in this weird phase of reading books by Indian authors. The blurb to this one by Shankar seemed fairly interesting. And honestly, it was an awesome read. I later found out that, this book was originally written much before Haley wrote 'Hotel'. Having read 'Hotel', I couldn't help but imagine that Haley probably pinched the basic idea of the plot. The English one, is of course a translation, but a very good translation. I'd definitely recommend it.




I'd heard a lot about Amitav Ghosh, especially about his 'Calcutta Chromosome' that a friend had once read. I couldn't find that one, but I found the 'Glass Palace' instead. I was a little apprehensive about finishing this one considering that the copy of 'One hundred years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I purchased some eight months ago, I have yet to start. And, the 'Glass Palace' is quite a fat book. It started off nicely enough and is descriptive throughout. Somewhere in the middle it get a little a slowly, but you assume that it will become better and it does. It starts in the pre-independence days and then ends not long ago - in our times. At the end of it all, there is a slight nagging doubt - something does not seem to have fallen into place. Surely worth a read though.


The last one is the 'Silent Raga' - Ameen Merchant's first. I generally find most of the book reviews in 'The Hindu' pretentious and boring - stuff that I read when I have finished reading everything else that is worth a glance. It so happened that I chance upon this one, the same day I read a review in the Hindu. The review was not so great, but it wasn't bad either, so I decided to pick up the book despite the lousy blurb (What do Tamil Brahmin girls do when the turn eighteen...? or something like that) which I thought was damn silly. The story follows the life of a girl brought up in a conservative Tam-Bram family in a small town when her mother dies in an accident . The story jumps back and forth from the past into the present. The story is a little too slow and becomes boring, but when you do finish it and then think about it, is when you begin to see what the author was trying to get at. If you can understand Tamil, then there's a lot of Tam lingo that you will find in the book. All in all - above average - maybe worth a read.

And that bring us all to a very arbit and possibly (no...definitely) lousy bunch of reviews by a sleep-deprived 'saaftwear yenginyer'. Have a nice weekend, folks!

P.S : I swear I've been a good boy!

The Lament of the Laptop

I happened to ask Ra about whether his laptop had a single core processor and whether the Centrino Core 2 Duo was a 64-bit processor. This is what happened. At least, the interesting part.

[17:40] Ra: This laptop is ok.
[17:40] Ra: Serves the purpose.
[17:40] Ra: I'll get one when this gives up and dies.
[17:42] Me: when the processor's ghost exits through the cooling vents...
[17:42] Ra: Yes then.
[17:43] Me: ...and its tormented cries rent the fabric of your display into a complicated networks of tears...
[17:43] Ra: Haha.
[17:43] Me: ...when the keys become so weary that they no longer produce a click, not even the cheap sound that compaq is famous for...
[17:44] Me: ...when your battery will leak critical life blood lithium ions...
[17:44] Me: ...and when there is no nirvana playing in the backfground to make the whole thing ironic as hell...
[17:45] Ra: Ah, my suicidal laptop.
[17:45] Me: ...simply because the magnets in the speakers have long demagnetized to scrap iron.
[17:45] Me: I am sounding bleak aren't I?
[17:45] Ra: You are sounding rather funny.



P.S : I just wanted to rub in the fact that I was getting a new laptop. Fully loaded. Well, almost.

Red pill or blue pill?

Another one. Dead baadi ?

Following dreams.

Here's one. Hopefully, if it is liked, there will be more. Or else, there will still be more.

Update

The story is open again.


It's been moved to http://toscsp.blogspot.com

To make stuff easier, we will contribute and discuss in the comment section of each chapter and then we are ready to close the chapter, I will manually update the post to show the complete chapter and we will move on the next.

For easy reading of the comments section, write you contribution in a bold face. All you have to do it put your contribution within and . It will make things nicer and will be much more easier for me to put stuff together later.

So far so good...!!!

Let the yarn begin...again!

The discussion thread

Hi,

This is the discussion thread as promised for this. Please use this to discuss major twists and turns with other contributors.

Cheers.

UPDATE: Let's not go into a abstract philosophical plot right away, it's just going to make things complicated. Simply stick to nice clean simple line with maybe a hint of mystery. I am hoping that more people will contribute. If you can put a little post or a link to this blog post on your blogs it would be nicer. Bigger the party, the better.

If I feel a plot is too weird then I will delete it, or rather hide it. I will repost it on the discussion thread so that we can see how it can be made to fit in.

Please number your contributions so that we do not loose track. We have hit 3 so far so, continue from 4 now.


UPDATE : We are on to Chapter 3. Chapter 3 is flashback. We need to sketch out the two characters k and the nameless guy. We need to bring the woman who is proably involved with K into the picture NOW! Give her nice sultry sounding name. Nothing raunchy and all but something that reminds of open blue skies and yellow corn fields. Or whatever!

The Open Source Collaborative Story Project

I dunno if it's already been done, but this is something that I have always wanted to try. Simply because Open Source code projects are so much more robust and better than proprietary stuff in many ways.

This is going to go like this :

1) For obvious reasons, including my laziness, this thing will be working entirely in the comments section.

2) I'll start off with an opening line and then as and when people drop by they add a line or a paragraph to the story.

3) If you feel you are nearing the end of a plot/sub-plot/idea, feel free to start a new chapter. This comes with the little problem of someone wanting to contribute to a chapter and then not being able to since it is already closed. We'll get to that when we have to cross that bridge.

4) Feel free to add characters, names for characters, places and so on. But, don't do it just for the heck of it. Let there be a reason. (I'll start another post, that could be used a discussion board of sorts. Feel free to bounce ideas around there.)

5) Please please please keep it clean. I am not enabling moderation on this, since that would be like code review before a checkin and can get quite messy. But, if something is totally in bad taste I shall remove it. Sorry, but let's try to keep it nice. At least for the time being.


Why am I doing this in the first place?

First off, I had tried this a long time ago over SMS and though we did not get very far, there was some really nice stuff that came along. Sadly, all those messages got lost when I changed my phone. It actually felt good. The other two contributors of that effort visit this blog - Ra and CJ. CJ had one excellent line in that - "The cold draught of air passed by him like a stoned angel".

And secondly, I think it is going to be good fun.

To make life easier, I'll post links to this post and the discussion thread on the sidebar so that you can reach stuff easily enough. Or you could bookmark those links on your browser as well. Whatever grabs you.

Let's see where it goes. Maybe, if it hit the right notes we could make a book out of it all.

After all that here goes the first line :

"He stubbed his cigarette out and called for a coffee. The coffee was, of course, lousy and it was by far the safest of all the bistro had to offer. The rain hadn't let up yet; the reflections of yellow street lights danced merrily on the puddles outside."

Horlicks & Boost Services

After a very very long night of work yesterday that stretched into the wee hours of the morning today, the lack of sleep made me a little grumpy. I just refused to put semi-colons at the end of statements.

And then this mail dropped into my inbox. I've been laughing for the past ten minutes non-stop. Yes...I am sure all the third-standard kids here who write software, Verilog and design PCBs will miss it.


Dear All,

We wish to bring to your kind attention that we have received an intimation
from Glaxosmithkline that with immediate effect they will withdraw
from their vending business services.

With reference to this, in future we will not be able to provide Horlicks &
boost.

We regret for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Hospitality Team

This and lots of that.

Now a dear and mostly unwashed friend of mine has taken to using me as a whipping boy for populating his blog here. The conversation, I assure you, did not take place, though if it did, it would have pretty much been along the same lines. I suggest you take a look at the comments sections there for a more accurate version of the probable conversation.

And since we still stuck on the topic of V-Day, here is a little observation that I've made. Read this now to figure out what comes next. There is a mention of a woman in this post somewhere near the bottom.

Here's the twist - February 10th, I see this woman on the bus and her hands and fingers are empty and untouched as yet. February 15th - there's a thin shining gold band on the fourth finger of the left hand. You do the math now.

I sure the lucky bum in question loves Himmesh and thinks that Strings is the best band ever. He also affirms that Megadeth is a misspelling of the phrase 'Mga Dth' which is what he messages his buddies and her when he gets humped in an exam.

He is rumored to have asked during his Unix lab why there was no 'C:\>' at the prompt but something like 'guest@localhost.localdomain' or 'bash-2.05#'. It irked him to no end that there was no Windows Explorer and 'dir' did not work at command prompt.

He wonders why William Makepeace Thackeray, about whom some of his 'nerdy' friends talked about, did not come to Raj's rescue.

His abiding dream is to appear one day on Indian Idol or India's hottest. His biggest crib against Coffee Day is that they serve cretin on their menu. Why should anybody want to eat an overpriced rat or a mousse, he demands of the waiter. And that too, from Belgium, which he thinks is not even a country.

'Welcome' and 'Jab we met' make his heart sing for joy. But wait, he has heard of Pink Floyd and Metallica, because all his irritating guitar-totting friends are passionate about it. Five-point someone was awesome but One night @ the call centre was a spritual experience. He dreams that one day he too shall have such a story to write about. After getting placed in XYZ BPO and Support Services - the best job on his campus.

And then, legends have been told of his Orkut About Me. The fact that it had absolutely no vowels was a minor technicality. Ambiguous statements like 'Cnt c' could be mis-interpreted for something politically incorrect and indecent never crossed his mind. 'Vowels are for wimps' is a maxim he lives by.

His favorite topic of conversation with friends is about the lastest offers that Vodafone/Airtel has. Next in list is, of course, a critical comparison of all the 125-cc bikes on the market. DKNY, AIX (oh, yes... it is not A|X or Armani Exchange) and DJ&C are labels he swears by. Dolce and Gabbana is probably the cheesiest imitation of DJ&C - must've been made in Ulhasnagar or something.

Beep...Beep

It's her phone. An SMS. Mind you, it is an SMS not a message.

"I luv u so mch. C u n clg. Mss'n u"

Sigh...I don't think that cozy conversation about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset is ever going to happen.



P.S : That, in retrospect, sounds like a highly loser racist rant. But, heck, it was fun writing it.

Old habits die hard

For those of you who have never read my older blogs, this should be somewhat new. I am, of course, hoping that I haven't pulled a stunt like this on this one. But, then again, my memory has always been selective. And for those of you who have read my older blog(God save you..!), this should make you feel right at home. You know that warm mushy feeling that you get in the corner of your heart???

What's the point of it all?

Every year, for the past god-knows-how-many years, Valentine's day comes and goes by and it doesn't make a single difference to me. The week leading up to the day is always the same - is this it? And then, D-Day minus two onwards it becomes progressively clear that it is not this that that 'it is this'. It's just another one of 'those'. It's not that I hate the whole concept, but it is just that I hate the concept of me having to go through it year after year. If there is a glimmer of hope it is shot to hell by either another (or rather the actual) boyfriend or a ring on the fourth finger of the left hand.

I guess it is going to be the same this year too...




22 years and still going strong

How I wish..

This is one of the sweetest ads I've seen in a long time. I just wish it were as simple for me now to impress a pretty girl like the way this kid does it...

If only...

The Week

Monday
Shit! Shit! Shit! The week stretches endlessy in front of you.

Tuesday
Resign to the fact that you have no other choice.

Wednesday
Crib and bitch but get on with it.

Thursday
There may be hope after all.

Friday
You see a glimmer of light in the distance

Saturday
Dammit...! Finally you are the end of it all.

Sunday
Whoohoo! It so bright and sunny...or maybe I am just hungover from yesterday night.

Sunday [night]
Screw it all! The light at the end of the tunnel was the headlight of yet another week that is going to run you over. Damn...damn...damn!!!

That's me in the spotlight... well.. almost

Clickhere for my first onstage performance. I am one in the middle trying to look cool. Sadly enough it did not work. There was no crowd willing to let me crowd surf. It was awesome fun though...!




P.S: Gracias, sundar!

Powered by ScribeFire.