Doodles of a crazy man!

I am amazed by the display of naivete by people, their naivete so deeply conditioned that it ceases to be artificial. These people are very well aware of the reality, but when you show them some proof to confirm that, they are aghast and shocked. What the hell am I ranting about? I am talking about "The curious case of N D Tiwari"! To be honest, when I heard about it, I laughed out loud. Not because there was something funny in his achievements, but the way people reacted to it. So I am trying to understand what exactly bothered them? A Governor was doing 'it' ? ('It' upsets more people than lets say, if he was taking a bribe of crores of rupees from those 3 women) A Governor was doing 'it'? (Come on seriously, are we not taught in schools that politicians work for people and poverty is dropping like Walmart prices?) A Governor was caught doing it? (What is revealed is always only the tip of the iceberg. Just imagine the uncaught! Is it the "env...

There are two reasons why this movie might run away with the worst movie of the year - one, obviously its horrendous and two, its terribly long. During all the Hurman - Priyanka interactions, I was initially shocked by the amount of screen time Hurman's face was getting. Soon I realized that its because the camera was always behind Priyanka's almost bare back. I was half expecting Joe Pesci to pop up from somewhere and yell - "Wanna know my raashee? I dont know, you should #&*$ing know. Tell me smart guy, whats your raashee? Whats your #&*$ing raashee? What the #&*$ is your #&*$ing raashee?" or something on those lines. The greatest achievement is this movie proved that Bollywood can come up with 12 different names for a girl - yes, who was that idiot who said there are no names other than Pooja, Sanjana, Tina, Simran and Anjali. 2-5-1-6-3-4 <-- Tarantino         1-11-3-7-4-5-8-6-12-2-9-10 <-- Gowarikar You must be thinkin...

At the lunch table last friday, a colleague's mobile beeped. Twee Twee SMS. He picked up his mobile and read out the message: "Hey buddy, I am planning to throw a party to all my friends tonight. Please attend it without fail. Venue Taj Hotel". A few of them laugh. I feel sick.

Terrorist (to his wife): Honey, I am going out for lunch with a few friends. Wife: Okay fine. So you dont need your "tiffin box" today? ****** Terrorist in Delhi (TiD) calls his friend Terrorist in Chennai (TiC) TiD: Hows you dude? How was the weekend? TiC: Pretty boring machcha. Did nothing. Stayed home all day. How was your weekend? TiD: Awesome. We had a blast!

Remember the baddies in movies of yesteryear who would tie up the old rich man and threaten him of dire consequences if he did not offer that "one signature" so that they can get the possession of his bungalow, car, factories, properties, his undergarments etc? How simple were those times! Nowadays even for a simple home loan, the bank guys insist you to sign in at least fifty places. No wonder the recent movies have no baddies who ask for that "one signature". I am sometimes happy that such naivety in Indian movies is gone. But, I sometimes miss the stupid charm of such scenes! *** Another major improvement in Indian cinema is the disappearance of the "poor hero". I dont think there is any other country which glorified and celebrated poverty as much as we did. In the old movies, the poor guy is a honest ' paapa ' person. And rich guy is evil. Almost always. The reality is, a poor guy need not always be the one who was cheated by the evil guy. He c...

You are asked to do the estimation for a module or a task. You consider the coffee breaks, orkut scrapping and the innumerable hours spent on Wikipedia and IMDB. You make a very high end calculation and add 30% buffer to it and send it to your lead. Your lead takes into consideration the time he would lose in mindless discussions, unwanted conferences and adds his 30% buffer. Your manager thinks of time lost in motivational meetings, online trading and the estimation goes up by 30% more. Finally, your account manager not wanting to be left alone, follows the 30% funda and sends the final estimation to the client. Everybody seem happy dreaming about the happy days ahead. But, from the day the project starts till it ends, everybody starts slogging their posteriors off. I wonder, where all those 30 percents vanish! I know this was a lousy post. But, there are many reasons why I wrote it: One, I dont have enough time. Two, I am in a cribbing mood and is there a better listener than a blog?...

You know when the supposed-to-be-motivating team dinners and unavoidable lunches with acquaintances become much more painful to me than they usually are? When the topic happens to be on food habits. Here is a sample: "You dont drink?", asks the team mate in a friendly tone. "No" "You dont smoke?", unable to hide his surprise. "No" "You dont even eat chicken?", the italics for "even" would barely convey the utter shock he would experience. "No" "Man, you are amazing. Do you at least eat eggs?", the shock has now turned to pity and the look in his eyes tells that he cannot survive another "no" for an answer. "I eat eggs. In fact, I love them", would be my biggest sentence in the whole conversation. "Thank God, you at least eat eggs", he exclaims, a mighty relieved now - and in his book my existence is not as useless as it would have been if by any chance I did not eat eggs. I e...

Why dont the Lufthansa air hostesses smile? They seem too unfriendly, too cold. Its okay if Indians dont smile, we are used to it. Any others, we expect a smile, even a very fake one. Their entertainment facilities suck! There is a common TV on which we have to watch the movie being played. And why oh why are they so costly? I hate the Frankfurt airport too, it looks too hostile. I guess visiting Singapore raises the expectation too much. Not every airport is Changi! I observed that the seat numbers in a row are listed A-B-C, D-E-F-G, H-J-K. There was no "I". I remember noticing this in other aircrafts as well. Not sure what the funda behind this is. Any idea? When I asked for Asian Veg meals, I was told that it was over. I thought of taking a salmon meal and eat everything else except the main item. But, then the air hostess asked me if I am okay with a "Hindu meal". That was the first time I had heard something like that. What has a food got to do with religion? D...

I often overrate my instincts. I do have huge self-destructive tendencies. On such days, I pick a really bad movie to watch. Today, it happened to be "Dus Kahaniyaan". I had no big expectations from the movie. The movie was just 2 hours long. That makes it a mere 12 minutes per story. Even if 3 stories are good and a few are not unbearable, I felt it was not a bad choice and it did not seem too risky. How wrong was I! I would not bore you by writing about all of them, but definitely a few that got on my nerves. Strangers In The Night Mahesh Manjrekar and the lady with the longest face, Neha Dhupia are a weird couple who spend their anniversary day disclosing their past infidelities. Neha discloses that she had kissed a stranger in a railway station before meeting Mahesh. Flashback, we get to see Neha kissing the stranger's palm, her chin touching his elbow! She kisses his palm, his fingers - some of the most innovative ways of kissing never seen before on celluloid....

Tring Tring. Tring Tring. Tring Tring. Tring. "You have reached the automated voice messaging system of so-and-so. Please leave a message after the tone" Can you talk to the voice messaging system the same way as you would talk to its owner? If you can, I envy you. If you cant, do you know if there is a name for this disability? :) Just like anyone else, I talk to different people in different ways - the way of addressing, the tone, the language changes with each individual. Its like a protocol set between two people. The response of the person on the other side of the conversation is very important to that protocol. If its a voice messaging system, which is nothing but a dumb recorder - I cannot talk to it like I talk to its owner. I have tried it too hard, but it does not work! I try to sound as normal as possible, but I sound too weird! My recorded-voice-o-phobia is not limited to voicemails. I also hate calling customer support centers - it makes me very uncomfortable. If...

No matter how strongly you love something, there are some aspects about it that will irritate you. I happen to love cricket very much. I think Manindar Singh - Yashpal Sharma - Arun Lal brigade's hindi commentary easily takes the first position among things I hate about cricket. The second place deservedly goes to Charu Sharma, "I-will-give-cute-smile-by-stretching-my-mouth-to-fit-wide-screen-tv" Mandira Bedi and the entire Sony channel who turn the game into soap opera. The next place definitely goes to the losing captain's cliched speech in the post match presentation ceremonies. Here are a few samples: "We had a bad day at the office" ( I hate the guy who invented this statement. Why not work from home for a change? ) ----- "We are playing non-stop cricket for the last few months. Its taken a toll on the players. I know we are professionals, we are proud of playing for the country, but, well, I mean, you know...(and the show me sympathy look)...

Janani Janmabhoomischa Swargaadapi Gareeyasi I read this adage in some blog yesterday, I remembered hearing this during my school days. What I did not know was that Rama told this to his brother Lakshmana, when they saw Lanka full of gold. This quote had definitely seemed very "inspirational" when I was a kid, but now that I question a lot of things, this sentence no longer holds the same impact for me. The good thing about "Janani" is that its not abstract :) But what was Rama referring to when he said "Janmabhoomi"? Was he referring to the city of Ayodhya? Or the entire Kosala kingdom? Does his "Janmabhoomi" change with conquering and relinquishing certain portions of the land? Tough to answer! I somehow cannot admit that the very earlier freedom fighters were actually the "freedom fighters of India". No, I am not questioning their commitment - but its just that most of them fought for "their kingdom". I am not sure how many...

There are two theories about how to win an argument with a woman. Neither one works. Now, what was your first reaction when you read that quote? You found it funny and a smile crossed your lips? Or did you frown, started screaming that its a stereotypical statement that is offensive to women? If you belong to the first group, cool! If you belong to the second group, cool down, here is a statement that might please you. What is the difference between men and pigs? Pigs dont turn into men when they are drunk! No no, this post was not to trigger a venus-mars supremacy fight. I was just thinking how difficult it is to be humorous without offending anyone. And the second quote might upset not just the oversensitive men, but also the oversensitive drinkers! Just to give a few more examples. A conversation that happened at the lunch table. "Did you meet the new manager, he is sick" "He is sikh (sounding as sick)? I thought he was hindu" (we all laugh) Do you ...

Today was a cool breezy morning. The cloudy skies had the perfect script for sun's late arrival. The drizzle was very optimal to my comforts. Chamundi Betta looked as fresh as a girl just out of her shower. Everything was so perfect, it was almost like heaven. It would have been pure bliss on any other day. Though there were a good amount of people, it was not suffocatingly crowded. You can easily categorize the people there. I saw a bunch of college kids just out of their teens, talking non stop about latest mobiles, orkut and campus recruitment. They were blissfully ignorant of unhappiness. I cringed at their loudness. Or was it that I envied their exuberance and optimism? The next type you can always encounter are those on the wrong side of their twenties, primarily the unfortunately-extant boring species called software engineers. I can easily bet my index finger that they talk nothing other than real estate prices, torturing managers and the dark unknown future that lay ah...

Well, as they say, movie is a religion in India (by the way, who the hell are "they"? ;)) I think its very hard to find a person who is completely uninterested or ignorant about movies. I was just thinking about how my movie journey has been. As a kid, it was just the occasional movie we were taken to during some sundays. I dont remember feeling any movie as "bad" at that time. Typically a movie would have a hero and a heroine. All we needed was a "hero" who could fight. And we used to come back home and replay that fight with my granny's soft pillow, visualizing a villain in that. Then came television, and the sunday movie got added to our basket. During our pre-teens, our movie watching was pretty much restricted to Sterling and Skyline. These theatres used to screen only English movies then. Apart from an occasional Ten Commandments or a Mackenna's Gold, our syllabus consisted mainly of action movies. Our movie world was full of Arnold Schwarzen...

I got down from the bus at Majestic. The cool breeze made the overcrowded platform much tolerable. I was thinking about something else, when I heard somebody yell at me - "Surpass"! What? What did he just say? Was he really talking to me? What does 'surpass' actually mean? May be I am dreaming, I said to myself. No, I heard 4 more people tell the same thing to me within 20 seconds. 5 more persons and 30 more seconds later, I realized what they were asking, when a man in faded jeans and a fake Nike cap asked me again. Now, it was clear. It meant "Sir, pass?". Within a minute, 10 people had asked me if I had a daily bus pass, so that they can get it from me and save some cost! I think it was not too long ago BTS came up with daily passes. It was very useful for people who would take 3-4 buses in a day. And just a couple of weeks back, I had seen a slogan inside a BTS bus that said something like this "Dont share your passes with others. Its a crime. It am...

I had stumbled into a blog yesterday afternoon. There was a post on happiness index and suicide rate country-wise. It had lot of interesting statistics (like China is the only country where women outnumber men in committing suicide etc. etc.). Yesterday past midnight, I randomly picked up a scene to watch, from one of my favorite movies Annie Hall before going to bed. It was a stand up comedy scene where Woody Allen says " I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss. "! Traveling by cab today morning, I was reading Godfather. It was the chapter where Sonny gets killed. And Lucy Mancini tries to commit suicide by taking an overdose of pills. Its a strange coincidence that the topic "suicide" appeared from 3 different sources in less than 24 hours. I had a quick breakfast in the morn...

"Oh, he/she is so innocent" Have you heard this statement quite often? At least I have. And "so" becomes "soooo" or "choo" depending on the gender of the statement maker. If you know me, you would have very rarely, if ever, heard me making such a statement. I have always had this confusion as to what innocence means. I seriously did not know the exact difference between innocence and ignorance. You always call a child as innocent, and not ignorant. If somebody has not committed a crime or has no knowledge of the crime, he is called innocent. But, if a person does not know about lets say anthropology, he is said to be ignorant about the subject. Definitely not innocent! So, I started this little research on the word "innocence". People mostly use the word "innocence" to define people who are trustworthy, dependable, not cheating and a whole lot of "good" qualities (including, not being aware of bad qualities). Innocen...

Why is it that most people don't keep their mobiles in silent mode, in general and particularly in meetings, movie halls, theaters and concerts? Why is it that people who hate silent mode, don't ever use "Increasing ring" feature? Why do such people use very loud ring tones? Why is it that most people use a very common ring tone and it takes them eternity to pick calls? (Yes, they don't even realize that its their mobile that is ringing!) Why is it that people with the most irritating ring tones are the ones who get calls very regularly? Why is it that most of the ring tones are monotonic? (Don't you think polyphonic ring tones are so less irritating on the ears?) Why is it that people so frequently use the default Nokia monotonic ring tone or a badly played version of Malgudi Days? Why have I never heard a nice polyphonic ring tone of Hotel California or Pulp Fiction theme or something? Why?

Cricket is a huge obsession in India. Movies are an equal craze in this country. India has played 646 ODI matches in 23 years. That would make around 30 ODIs per year. Indian cinema makes about 1200 movies a year, Bollywood alone accounting for 200. Cricketers and cricket establishment make tons of money, with zero professionalism. Movie stars and producers earn billions making pseudo-emotional NRI Indianism garbage. Half of the major brand ambassadors are cricketers. The rest are film stars. Our cricket is rarely world-class. Our movies in general are nothing to write home about. For all you time conscious people, a person watching all the India ODIs in one year spends 30*7=210 hours on cricket. An average man in India watches at least one movie a week (either in cinema halls or television), which comes to 52*3=156 hours a year. India had won the 1983 World Cup. There were a few other achievements like reaching finals of 2003 World Cup, beating Australia in a test series in Australia...