Caesarean Rhapsody

I am leaving for Bangalore on Saturday, 31st July. For good or bad, I know not. One thing I know for sure is that it’s that time when one has to give up all things that were treasured and protected over a long period of time. The “dont-care” attitude, the double meaning jokes, my worn-out jeans and most of all my friends. Not that I’ll give up on any of these. It’s just that there will never be enough time to be like we were back in college. Boy, I sure will miss those days.
This may be the last post for a while. At least until I get my own computer at the company with a continuous, all access, net connection. Catch you guys then.

Opened today's Pune (Sleaze) Times and found another shocking story on the front page. Spiderman is being brought to India, in a totally new avtaar.

Last month, Marvel Comics USA decided to bring Spiderman to India. Not in a dubbed version, but a total makeover. An Indian superhero who has a totally different origin. A village kid called Pavitr Prabhakar is the central character, ladies n' gentlemen. He'll be swinging from places like the Gateway of India and Taj Mahal (let's hope he doesn't run into trouble with heritage activists). All the while, our superhero is clad in a dhoti with some sort of a red spidey-style belt. And not to forget a ponytail to complete the look. oooh…….how trendy?!

He transforms into the famous swinger (whooppiiee) after being blessed by a rishi who has been performing some sort of yagna. And our hero here, will be facing no mean adversary. The Green Goblin or Dr. Octopus have no stand before the ever scary Rakshasa. I wonder how many hours it took them to think up that name!

Pretty rad, huh! The producer says it will all give spiderman the closer-to-the-heart mythological feel. The kids will readily accept this new and improved (?) spidey. It's better for both the parties he says.

"Bull crap!" I say. Why does it always have to be some mytho crap when it comes to kids' entertainment? I fear another Alif Laila is about to happen. Will someone put a leash on the imagination of these guys? You could have at least let the cartoons retain their entity in entirity. I hope they don't play with the name at least. I remember "Tomb Raider" being marketed as "Sherni No. 1" some years back and "Stanley Ipkiss" being mutated to "Sachin Sabnis". Do these guys live in some remote village where it's a taboo to use foreign names?

The horror…….the horror…….the horror!!!!

Yahoo's been one of my favorite portals for a long time now. Their chat was the only one around when the concept hit India. The email service was (and still is) fundoo. Recently they raised the mailbox limit to 100MB. I was happy that I wouldn't have to pay or have to wait for invitations from people to have a decent no-nonsense email service.
Now they have given me another reason to be loyal. I discovered LaunchCast. Finally there's a place I can find some good 80's music. Anyways, about LaunchCast…..it's a cool service whereby one can listen to songs, sorted by genre, in the messenger itself. Something like Shoutcast started by Nullsoft (the Winamp guys) which was the pioneer in web radio. However I found LaunchCast better since it gave me a good sound quality and longer listening intervals than Shoutcast (even at dialup speeds) . Check it out, here.

I am furious…..
 
Two of my closest friends are going around for the last couple of days, and I wasn’t told about it until today…..I feel violated…..even molested, if one may say so……
 
Just the day before yesterday, we were hanging out at a friend’s house, which happens to be close to her place. Me going to her place that day, felt like being a wine bottle, a bouquet of flowers or a candy box in retrospect. Ouch! At least I could have been the first to know………but no, I get sidelined by a two bit someone out there.
 
Not that I am not happy for those two individuals. But I felt bad when they had to hide it from me while talking on the phone, when I was around. And one of them happens to know me since school.
 
Some faith, huh guys!

I like to read old newspapers sometimes. It gives me a chance to read stuff that I may have missed out earlier. There isn't a lot you can read in today's newspapers (TOI for example). But then again it is the only media that gives me the information at a comfortable pace so that I can digest it. Jug Suraiya's column dedicated to acerbic critique on the current haalaat is a personal favorite.

The supplements (read Pune Times) are slowly turning into American Fitness Magazine look-alikes, though. Sadly something that can be used to showcase local news, is being used to popularize :

1. uneducated hotel and multiplex owners
2. half baked ABCDs who want to draw the spotlight onto themselves and 'happen' to be friends with someone from the press
3. DJs with remix videos that have a dancer whose skin is oozing out of whatever little threads are attempting to cover her body
4. models with sub-zero IQs trying to emphasize the point that they "actually thought" before deciding to do an item number (take a hike)
5. businessmen with villas at a popular foreign location (eg. overlooking the Monaco GP track)
6. gay fashion gurus or women in their late 40s-50s who fancy young lads and happen to be sources of terminology like metrosexual (yuck……..isn't it time for your face lift ma'am or was it a liposuction)
7. demigods, politicians and other such low-life with a penchant for Page 3.

Whatever little space is left after all this pandering, is taken up by advertisements where people promise to take off weight from around your waist or help you cover up your scalp more gracefully. The only thing that eventually slims is your wallet and the only stuff that grows is cobwebs in the bank locker.

I tried changing the newpaper once, but it's all the same everywhere. All of them are trying to pack in that little bit extra masala to improve the readership survey figures. Sunday reading is thankfully still in shape with a little more paper left to print articles, after the ads have been laid out.

All I can say is 'God help the reader….'

The feeling of going away to a distant land is finally beginning to sink in. I haven’t stayed away from home earlier. Well, at least not for as long as this job expects me to. Staying with my relatives at my native place doesn’t count. It was almost like home. Minus the continuous nagging to clean up my room or running an errand (which I usually shrug off anyways).

I hadn’t thought about all the extra work this meant. Washing, ironing, cleaning, shopping, groceries, even the occasional cooking……the list seems endless. No more familiarity of my room. No more home cooked food. No more convenience of playing Age of Empires late into the nights. No more listening to Megadeth at full volume. No more internet-at-my-disposal. Can it get any worse?

Sad but true…..baah, it had to happen some day!!! But why now?

Was hanging out at Oasis with some friends the other day. One of them a tax consultant (let's call him X), but kind of interested in Marathi theatre was in a particularly cheerful mood that day. He's done couple of shows with some pretty well known faces from the field. Jokes and anecdotes were passing across the table and so, he decided to share a rather funny incident with us…..took me some time to figure out what it meant. But it took me 5 minutes to stop laughing after I got the joke. Anyways, here's how it goes :

It is the night before the dress rehearsal of a play. The director is giving people instructions about their attire. He tells X's friend, who was to be a baldy in the play, to get his hair trimmed. The next day, this dude walks onto the sets with a hairstyle somewhat inspired by Salman Khan in Tere Naam (apologies for not having thought of a better example). The director, who was obviously pissed, approached him and enquired about his non-compliance.
He promptly replies with an, "Aai naahi mhanaalee, re!" (My mom refused.)
The director is quick to shoot back, "Arre mag nhavya kade jaycha naa." (You should have visited the barber in that case.)

Think about it….

Silly, huh? Well, can't help it. There's been a drought of jokes lately.

Adios amigos.

After a lot of email badgering, the good guys at Tata Elxsi have given me a final joining date. I have to report at the Bangalore office on the 2nd of August 2004 at 0930 hrs. I feel really relieved now that I have confirmation of a job in hand.
 
When the exams got over, I had no concerns with anything other than pure enjoyment. Back-to-back movies, countless hours of gaming on the PS2 and hours together of hanging out at food & coffee joints. Life was (and still is) pure bliss. But as my classmates started sending in emails about their respective first days at the job, a certain feeling began haunting me. Since I was the only one without a certain date of joining, I thought ‘What if Tata Elxsi doesn’t appoint me?’ Then I consulted my father, who only added more fuel to the fire by saying ‘It’s not binding on them to appoint you, even if they say you’ve been recruited.’ Since then I have been flooding the HR’s mailbox with pleas to give me a clear-cut date.
 
Today since I read the email, my joy’s known no bounds. Although I haven’t stayed alone before, and Bangalore is as good as an alien land to me, I am really looking forward to this experience. My parents, especially my mom, look upon it as something I need to go through so that I’ll “grow up”. Haah, fat chance of that happening.

Been using Mozilla Firefox 0.9 for all my browsing activities, all of last week. I found a small link where the page says MSIE 6.0 has a lot of bugs that may not even get patched up by XP Service Pack 2. Not that I am totally paranoid about security, but the author of that little article sounded very convincing. Hence the switch…

I don't miss IE though. Firefox has support for most IE plugins and has a facility to install optional extensions and skins (my favorite). And it's blazingly fast. IE seems like bullock cart when compared to the BMW-like Firefox. (sorry, but I don't favor Ferrari too much)

Another reason for this shift is the induction of a certain someone into Microsoft. Due to the presence of that someone in the company creating the software I am presently using, my resolve to make a complete shift to freeware, more specifically Linux, has been reinforced.

I pray to God, to give me enough strength and patience to refrain from using this crappy piece-of-dung software and deliverance from fear of mockery by my unforeseeing friends, that this activity of mine shall entail.

Hasta Luego crappy browser…

Niranjan and I saw a round neck Barking Dog T-Shirt the other day. Niranjan wanted to buy it. But it was available in white. Not wanting to buy any whites, he promptly moved on to other sections. I, on the other hand was trying to give him reasons for buying the shirt, like 'You could wear it to a party'…'You are going to the US, get some attitude into your clothes' and some such. The main reason I persisted was because the punch line was closer to the heart. It read 'Beer makes you smart. It made Bud Wiser'
Niranjan denied on the grounds that it was white. 'What if it rains? I can't be washing clothes all the time…'
I came up with this
'Come on dude. I know it's USA, but there are going to be Dry Days out there.'

Both of us were in splits. We didn't buy that T-Shirt, but left with 3 others (non-whites).

This I thought deserved a spot on this good-for-nothing-else nook of mine.

Ciao.