During the semestertime, several blog post ideas used to swim in the upper lobe of my brain,but as the semesters have ended,it seems that someone has hit me with the Ghajini rod and hence I've forgotten everything and can't even write a single post.

With the blog ideas, have also vanished my post exam resolutions of getting up for morning walk at 5 am and rejoining swimming classes. But my father being out of town and my maids being on leave, my mom has made sure that at least I get to see the Sun at 6 and make my way to the market.The vegetable market being a place where I have several embarrassing moments to recount,I am not particularly happy to make my visit there , a daily affair.[ Okay, I've embarrasing moments at every public place , be it banks, post officetelephone office :( ]

Cutting vegetables is also an art where you make sure you save your nimble fingers and yet not turn your product into a geometry lover's delight.

To draw a conclusion, if its Wednesday , then I spend most part of the day with vegetables. Big Bazaar has some amazing marketing strategies.Months back , they had this offer for people who shopped for more than 999 and having fulfilled that criteria , we were bestowed with an offer which said 'you get a year long supply of aloo and pyaz' .So the rule is that every Wednesday , you need to shop for 99 or more and you get to carry a kilo of aloo and pyaz each , back home.Now it so happened that my mom suddenly remembered about this offer and since she thinks me to be a jobless fellow, sent me off to BB.Little did I know that standing in the cash counter would turn out to be one of the longest queues of my life and that an entire civilization would turn up to get aloo and pyaz!

Tough Maggi still doesnt have competition in its proximity, Idli can come close if you have an idli mix and microwave handy.All one needs to do is stir the mix with curd , wait for a few minutes and then put the mixture in the idli container and you have it ready in a couple of minutes. This is again a realisation during semestertime.

P.S: This is a very stupid post.Was just too desperate to write anything:(

Since in this semestertime, all I'm doing is contemplating about blog posts, hitting the new post button, writing a line and saving as draft,and fearing that people will forget my blog, I hereby ask you not to forget my blog, and that I'll blog sometime soon.

Its mid April, and all I've been thinking is coming up with a sensible post . Nah :(

Teasing the teaser
It was some months back.Some Saturday afternoon.I had got up in the bus from my stop and got a window seat. A couple of stops later, a man got up , and sat beside me.A few minutes later he started behaving as if I'm his newly wed wife, putting his hands around the seat and odd stuffs suchlike.So. I turned towards him and asked him to behave properly.He called back his hands and tried to sit properly, though he kept pushing inside.I was on the verge of praying to God that this chap gets down somewhere near, when he called the conductor and got a ticket for Park Street. Gosh!
Now I thought that I was wasting the window seat by thinking about this idiot and started looking outside.Now again this man started pushing and trying to put his hand around.That was too much , I thought.Even the most wild billi of mine listens to me, but this man was worse. I just turned towards him, and said, "Why can't you just behave properly??" I don't remember whether there was something exceptional in my tone. The man said, "S-sor-ry" and promptly ran out of the bus. The place was some 8 km away from Park Street!

In the family
At times I wonder why both of my parents are engineers?
I tell you why.
On a recent trip to a seaside holiday, in the train. Conversations.
Me and my brother , as usual and as expected, talking crap.
-"Hey see those lotus leaves in the pond".
-"Hey remember how we used to count cows on our way to Jamshedpur?"
-"Not me idiot, you and Mithudidi used to."
-"What are those scarecrows made up of?"

Now my Mom gets excited seeing something.
-"What are those? Beside the scare crows?How come the utility poles are so wide apart? Doesn't that violate the norms?"
Now my father steps in.
-"Thats a three-phase leakage transformer, right? Its okay, you can't expect better mounting, at least in villages."
-"Last dat I was checking the 98B clause of the Electricity Act,it does mention the implementation of APDRP. blah blah.
And this the general scenario everywhere, in the dining table, in the car :(


Beginner's guide to Bargaining
3 simple steps: (from a Mtv program)
1> Shock shock shock---> Whatever price you are told at the beginning, just convey to the man , that you are simply shocked by the high price.
2>Know your maths---> You need to be really quick.
3>Half is full---> Remember this thumb rule. Even if you can't gauge the exact price of the product , just bring it down to half an your job is quite done.

No Eureka
Most of the cities have banned people from sitting beside the autowallah in an autoride. I don't mean to sound like robbing a privilege though.Now suppose you are sitting either on the right or left of the autowallah and the auto takes a winding turn.Are you going to fall towards the autowallah or will have a possibility of falling outside.
On this futile note I end this post :(

Alert: The following stuff was written for a technical love letter writing contest , some days back. After reading this, if you feel like puking, throwing rotten eggs or feel its gross, I won't object.

To the Faraday of my heart,

I still remember the day I met you while surfing from one college ground to the other, and realised that you are the site I was googling for. My life was just a mere uncompiled program without you,but after I met you, the p-n junction of our hearts broke down and recombination led to the formation of a bond as strong as the Nitrogen molecule.

Since then, I'm like this happy electron, making revolutions around you, the central tendency of my heart being always towards you,every bit of my mind responding only to the signals from your function generator. Integration and differentiation of my crystallized feelings for you have been polarized to the direction of your heart and believe me, they don't have any finite limits. Whenever your image is formed in the yellow spot of my optical system, the periphery of my oblate spheroid heart experiences a unilateral force which provides the necessary support for the projectile motion of my feelings towards you with constant accelaration.

What I wish to transmit through this letter is that, if we finally manage to establish a link in the remote future, will you be able to provide me the necessary standard library functions to lead a syntax error free life? I just pray to God that you have the lattice energy to break the electrostatic hate-bond between you and my father and finally agree him to our electrifying union. I have this full faith in you , that you have not given the password to anybody else, other than me, to log in to your heart.

Since we know our life is like the Wills ad (made for each other), all we can wait for , is a peaceful equilibrium as propounded by loveguru Le Chatelier, when finally the distance between us will be a straight line, giving way to perfect mutual inductance following laws of electromagnetic induction.

Yours Curie.

In an age, where one speaks one language with his boss, talks with his fiance in another, and his parents in yet another language, how much relevance does 21st February hold? How much significance does the fight of those hallowed martyrs of Bangladesh several decades back, who laid down their lives for the sake of their love for their mother tongue, still count? 21 st February is widely celebrated all across the globe as the International Mother language day, since UNESCO's declaration in late 50's.
Being a Bengali, it gives me an immense sense of pride that lives were laid down for the cause of my mother tongue. But 21st February is not only about the Bengali language. Its stands for the victory of every language, be it Hindi, be it Gujarati, be it Tamil or be it Tulu. Its about tolerance. A friend of my had once expressed her view that she used to think that mother tongue is the language of the land where a person is born. Thats one interesting perspective, though. So after living in a place for , say, 3 decades , if one says that I still don't know the native language, there's no act of smartness in it.So. if one says , to live in a place , you need to learn the language of that place, one can not be completely ignored. Learning the language of a place you are staying in gives you better understanding of its culture, of its essence and a sense of security.
Barring a chunk , most, dream in their mother tongue and resort to peace of mind in it.
Some years back,I had watched this Bengali movie , which few of my generation has watched. There a character , seeing that the protagonist was speaking only in perfect Bengali, asks him, 'You don't like to speak in English, right?'The protagonist's reply comes as "Actually , since I know both the languages perfectly, I don't feel the urge to mix them up and converse". That essentially justifies the cause of khichdi language that we at times resort to.And since the main aim of a language is communication, getting the message across is what matters. But when a mother says to her son, "Beta bottle ta pick it up kore okhane put it down kore dao", ("Beta,woh bottle wahan se pick it up karke wahan pe put it down kardo" , you wonder , whether its too much?

My Dida thinks that my cousin who is 27,has reached her marriageable age, and since she has not managed to find a groom for herself, its the elders who should take up this mammoth task . So every Sunday she makes it a point to go through the matrimonial columns in a vernacular newspaper , scan them and put a tick mark beside the ones which can be considered.So it was this Sunday,while I visited my maternal grandparents house, that I picked up the matrimonial supplement and started reading some of the ads:

# Alliance invited for Bengali girl,26+;mother senior college lecturer,father senior bank officer,brother settled in USA,cousin working in mnc. Mob:--, box no--- .
Now, we all know that its about loving your family, but where is the minimum information about the girl in question?

# Match for B.sc(h) girl, 23, Ghosh,5'4 , complexion dusky( like Bipasha),parents self employed,own house.Contact ---.
Dusky like Bipasha? What next? Husky like Rani?

# Match for businessman, 45(looks like 30), divorcee(with no fault of his own),passed 10.Bride should be extremely beautiful and educated.
!!!

So, I had enough of my entertainment and put aside the newspaper.
On other news , porshu is Valentines day. I was planning to get hold of somebody and venture into some parks , malls and places suchlike, but have this damn gd sessions in college. The blog was there on V day last year, but it didn't have any reader. But this year it has at least a few! So my dear readers , I love you all , Happy Valentines day .

This one is from Mads. Thank you :)

1. What does your user name mean?
Vanilla sky? I think I was watching the Tom cruise movie of the same name , some days before I created this blog. Liked the name, so kept it.

2. Elaborate on your user photo.
A girl dancing , I think. Was given by a friend.

3. How many comments do you have?
On what?

4. What's your current relationship status?
Current? always single.

5. What exactly are you wearing right now?
White pant, black tee.

6. What is your current problem?
The link of the modem going on and off.

7. What do you love the most?
Roaming aimlessly, travelling, singing, books, blah blah.


8. What makes you most happy?
Walks. Good food. Music. Friends. Family.

9. Are you musically inclined?
Yes, yes.


10. What would you do if you woke up one morning and found out you were on cocaine?
First brush my teeth ....then will think about it .


11. If you could go back in time and change something, what would it be?
Let me think....


12. If you MUST be an animal for ONE day, what would you be?
One animal only? Pigs, donkeys, squirrel, zebra ..whom will I disappoint?

13. Ever had a near-death experience?
Yes. In dreams. Every night I almost die.


14. Name an obvious quality you have.
Modesty :P

15. What's the name of the song that's stuck in your head right now?
The trailer of Delhi-6.

16. Are you happy today?
Yes. No particular reason though.

17. Who will cut and paste this first?
I think everybody has done this by now.

18. Name someone with the same birthday as you
Let me google.Ok, Greek philosopher Plato .(427 BCE; d. 347 BCE).

19. Do you have a secret crush on someone?
Umm..maybe !

20. Do you have a garbage disposal in your kitchen sink?
Below the sink, I think.

21. Have you ever been in a fight?
Recently, no. But had those fights in school bus lines, in class.

22. Have you ever sung in front of a large audience?
Yes, many times.At times, forgot lyrics, then audience started prompting. Too embarrassing. Chorus performances are safer.

23. What's the first thing you notice about the OPPOSITE sex?
Height, shoes, hair.

24. What's your biggest mistake?
With each passing day, it gets bigger and better :(

25. Say something totally random about you.
Being confused all the time.

26. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celebrity?
Mayawati is a celebrity. Maduri Dixit is a celebrity. And about the answer, No.

27. Are you comfortable with your height?
Yes. Though would n't mind being an inch taller.

28. What is the most romantic thing someone has ever done for you?
*sniff*

29. What are your favourite smells?
My shampoo, vanilla essence, my bed, petrol, paint.

30. What's something that really annoys you?
People spitting, littering.


31. What's something you really like?
Roaming, travelling, singing.

32. Do you give random hugs and kisses?
Well...random hugs to mom.

33. What's the latest you have ever stayed up?
20 hrs maybe.

34. Have you ever been rushed to the emergency room?
No , no.

By the way, this bloggie has completed a year today. I know I write shamelessly bad, but thank you all for dropping in here.

As the sun sets on the western horizon of 2008, and a new day of 2009 beckons , as memories fade away and come back in a harmonic motion, time calls for a farewell post.
No obviously I'm not going to talk about Chidambaram, Bush and Harman Baweja. There are qualified people to tell you about them.

January was the month when this blog thing happened to me. For the past couple of years all I knew was blog comes from weblog. Then unfortunately came across some blogs which was reluctant to talk about anything other than PM's actions and Cm's inactions. So while I was ready to shed the wish of having a blog, there popped up certain blogs which had the 'why so serious?' message on them.And thank God for that.

I have realised that I am at my best behaviour with my parents during exams. Thats the time when I don't have the leisure to fight over whats in breakfast or lunch, why does the paneer curry taste like horlicks, and why does she have to give away all my coloured chalks to the maid's son.

Something needs to be done with these so-concerned mobile service providers.Vodafone has this message on the backside of its recharge card which says Register your number at xxxx.com to get rid of telemarketers. But what about the nuisance they themselves create? Its quite a confident shaker when run around your room trying to find your phone or jostle to open your bag in crowded bus only to find that the caller asking to set Himesh Reshammiya's croonings as your caller tunes.

Kyunki .. has ended and and with it has ended people's favourite game of guessing Ba's age. Big Boss was about watching people holidaying after being released from jail and now we have Big Brother too.My cable wala released back zee cafe and studio after hijacking them for over 6 months.

To my bro: Though we have scratched and kicked each other lesser this year, it does not give you the liberty to torture me with your guitar practice and exhausting our download limit with your games and other similar useless stuff.

Rediff predicts that the tech industry will the fastest one to recover from recession.

Harman and Emraan will be back with their new movies, Rakhi Sawant and Chunky Pandey will continue to be judges, Mtv will continue to be crappier, the likes of Mayawati and mulayam will continue to rule , Ram gopal verma must be thinking about his next venture.
So, as you can foresee, there are enough things to be afraid of the coming year.
The Loksabha elections are coming . And if I don't manage to lose my voter's Id card, and if my booth is not rigged, I might be debuting as a voter!

To anyone who's wasting time reading this, have a happy and prosperous year new year !

Enough of my croonings about no-net show. I'm kind of assured that whatever education I have received till date has not gone waste, completely.
So, in between cursing my service provider and tossing coin to decide whether to go to a cyber cafe or not, I decided to check whether the connections in modem were fine or not. Obviously the connections were fine. I'm not that dumb that it will strike after 3 damn weeks. But what went wrong was the copper oxides deposits which were blocking the contact between the phone line and the modem port. A few rubbings with a brush , insertion of the wire and there glows the link in the modem !

Inbox full of 'How will be 2009 for you? Dial 12345 @ Rs 9/min to know' messages tells you that new year is round the corner. New year means getting a year older, one more semester less for college to end.
While flipping through the pages of a magazine , I came across this astrology section , which says 'Know what 2009 has in store for you'. Its no wonder that in times of recession temples are doing better business than before. So here's what is in store for me:

1)Get married this year because your spouse will bring you loads of good luck and happiness-
Anyone , with similar predictions?

2)Students will have a bad time as they might have to discontinue their studies-
I mean why? I do pay my college fees, don't see chances of expulsion, will not be entering Miss India contest or Roadies or Indian Idol.
Ah well, if I may comply with the first option , get married in a family which doesn't allow girls to study after marriage like in those daily soaps, then its quite possible. Duh, I should stop uttering crap.

3)Your friends of foreign origin will do you good in times of need-
I do have friends in foreign lands but of Indian origin. So extending the definition of foreign origin , should I expect the likes of ET or Jadoo to help me out?
2009 seems to an exciting year !

"Whoever says money can't buy happiness , doesn't know where to go shopping"- read the 'about me' section of the Orkut profile of a friend.
The weekend was spent fiddling with the newly bought Sony Ericsson Cybershot. My dad and bro had gone to buy it, so I wasn't exactly aware of the features it was imparted with.
Zoom is an obvious feature and I used it for the first time, to get the snap of my pet crow.

Any doubts , as to how I get to identify my crow among many, should be ummediately scrapped off.

One of the unique feature available is 'Smile detector'(okay, its a year old technology)
This is the first smile it detected.

Since I decided to declare myself jobless on the Sunday afternoon and devote all my time to the newly added member of our family, thus followed some silly observations.
After a few pathetic search results, Google did deliver some read-worthy stuffs.

1)Smiles may involve up to 7 different pairs of facial muscles.
2)Its mainly the Zygomatic Major which plays the major role in one's smile.
3)The main role in a smile detector is played by the dataset. A huge number of smiling images under different conditions such as variable age, outdoor or indoor etc are loaded in the chips. The system just compares and clicks !
4)But the fallacy with this system lies in the fact that it takes white (or yellow) teeth as the only parameter of smile( thats what my practical handlings have revealed) . So no matter whether you smile or show out your teeth in disgust, with your eyebrows up raised , you will have your photo clicked.

To my dismay, the bus fare from my stop to the breakstop on way to college is stagnant at 5, inspite of the recent surge in fares.

But the auto fare has increased from 4.5 to 5. And the auto drivers still remember me even after more than 1 month.

Having your fares as 5 bucks is one of the few things that can give a passenger her peace of mind. No moronic conductor clamouring for 50 paisa, no bovine auto driver arguing whether 25 paisa still works or not.

The semester break was mostly spent doing trying-to-be-trendy kind of shopping, running around banks on Mom’s insistence, juggling between mediums of books, net, newspaper and TV, movies, and lots of get-togethers at friend’s place.

My dear friends’ untiring effort to make me watch indecent stuffs remained futile yet again with some divine interventions from the Almighty in the form of ‘disc error’, ‘player not compatible’ etc. What followed was 4 back to back Pie movies, but there also I lived upto my reputation , pretending most of the time of running nose, strong cough and cold and eye irritation and ran away before the 5^th lying about some fictitious birthday party I had to attend.

On the Wednesday morning , just when I was too elated of meeting a friend after 6 months, convincing her to watch Dark Knight over Kismat Konnection and getting tickets for 50, it suddenly might have struck the Fame people that too much happiness is injurious to a young heart and the lady checking my bag suddenly found out a chocolate which even I didn’t know existed, and confiscated it. If that was not enough, a 500ml mineral water bottle cost me 30 bucks. The only solace was that, when the adjacent guys asked for water , we could reply in the affirmative.

Meanwhile my neighbours have acquired yet another puppy. That takes their dog count to 4, all of different breeds. And since I have started believing that I can never possess a dog of my own, and the street pups have betrayed me big time and have shown their liking for the bald uncle over me, I have finally resorted towards my brother, and have started calling him by my dream dog’s name. and it really gives a great sense of accomplishment .

Its fun watching news channels nowadays. You don’t know who’s gonna shake hands with whom admist camera flashes.

Wooing one another, “horse trading”, inviting independents to lunch, kids coaxing with Big Daddies over getting cabinets, people hopping from one party to another,special arrangements being made for those holidaying in the jails, opposition leader claiming that he has members from the rival party in his drawing room, Breaking news such as 'Maya casts Mayajaal', a 95 year old man bothered every now and then, new parties being formed, new principles being brought into light…blah blah

During the Karnataka elections , I came across a channel showing the profile of a local politician, where the verdict of the journalist was that the chances of the man winning dicy since he had oscillated between 2 parties so many times, that a poll showed confusion ruled the minds of the voters about which party he is presently enrolled in.

[As a child , once I asked my cousin that who are elected to the Rajya Sabha? His reply was, "Those who fail to get elected by the people , get elected by their own men"]

The news channels are in one of their busiest phase as ever.

So one local channel wanted to be out of the league by calling a physicist( to explain to the general public what exactly the nuclear deal is), an economist( the impact of the deal on economy), analyst and a filmstar ( you know, that X factor is always needed!) . That left a baffled anchor who usually is seen in a tete-a-tete with filmstars about gossips and stories suchlike.

A nationwide poll says 23% of the respondents are for the nuke deal, 13% are against , that leaves aside a huge 64 % possibly in the ‘can’t say’ option. Maybe they did nt know what IAEA stood for. In a country where people identify the president as some film actress of yester year( if [V] IQ is to be trusted i.e) , this nuke deal is really a non issue in commoner's mind.

Now, how exactly does this Confidence vote take place?

The word confidence stands for the vote showing confidence in the ongoing govt or is it that the vote is going to take place in confidence? Silly ques, still , I was wondering.

Do the MPs have to stand up and tell the Speaker about their choice or do they have the usual ballot box thing?

What if someone who promised to vote for one alliance,voted for another?

[to myself : “Shrug off your Roadies hangover”]

so, it’s a matter of couple of days, to know whose efforts paid off and who has the last laugh !

[to myself : Watch the ever- skipped Loksabha channel at the voting hour ]

As the exam dates come nearer , and the mind becomes already wear out by the complexities posed out by half a dozen of papers, thoughts of spending holidays after semester, meeting up with school friends at our usual hunt KFC, buying Chetan Bhagat’s new book,hopping through the Park street with college friends, finishing off ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ and so on , keep flocking to the crevices of the mind….

This IPL did major damage this sem….people getting over enthusiastic at Shahrukh khan’s buying of Kolkata Knight Riders, speculations and excitements,my bro constantly jumping before the television everyday from 8 pm, friends constantly sms ing from Eden Gardens(“we’ve reached stadium”, “so many people”, “I just now saw SRK”, “lights went off”), and logistics being worked out whether Knight Riders will be able to reach the semi finals or not!(“they have to the all the matches from now”, “Delhi has to lose the next with Punjab”, “If they beat Chennai, they’ll equalize them”…blah blah blah)

The ‘Korbo Lorbo Jitbo ‘ morale booster may not have had major effect on the players concerned , but did manage strike the right chord with the commoners

So, taking that spirit forward and rhyming with that, ‘Likhbo(we’ll write), Porbo(we’ll read) Sikhbo (we’ll learn)…can be adopted as the catchline for the ‘Literacy awareness ‘ programme !!

There happened to be a very sweet boy in my Physics tution who did equally sweet errors in Maths. Like, sin 30+sin 60…..his answer would be a very sweet and simple sin(30+60)=sin 90=1

Then sin 60/sin 30= 2 ( the sine things getting cancelled !)

Geography was a subject I least loved in school , especially the physical section of it , which dealt with some weird landforms like inselbergs, sand dunes. Not that I hated or got poor marks in it, but I was not fond of it. Studying the middle east countries provide an advantage as many of the capital country’s name had just an Al before it. eg Al Kuwait.

I’ve been trying to search for a simpler explanation of the topic in my syllabus, but Google is disappointing me pathetically :(

Since , I’m heading no where in this post , I should immediately stop here and take an oath not to visit this place before my dreaded exams end .

So this weekend I could finally manage to make a long due telephone conversation with a long ago met not-so-long distanced friend of mine.
Actually , I fear calling her.calling her means for the next 1 hour we would be on our glorious glib talk, shutting ourselves from the ongoings of the rest of the world, only stopping when enough heat is generated between the duplex device and our auditory canal .


Calling up her means first of all mourning about our common plight of single hood. Either she’ll stance instances of how every damn dumb girl of her college is committed or I’ll make her even more sad citing stories of how the girls we found so stupid in school were dangling away with their boyfriends. Then we’ll pass some expert advices on on certain very important social issues like relationship of certain filmstars, etc, relive our old crushes and mourn again on the fact that we did nothing wild at all in all our teenage.

Last weekend , I attended a couple of unwanted weddings. No, unwantedly attended a couple of weddings. Usually in such functions, me and my brother make it a point to either stick to our father or fly to some uninhabited corner of the venue to get least noticed. So there I was, this time too , at a nook of a not so huge venue. Suddenly a huge came running towards us, with a wide grin.i wanted to play a ringtone on my cell and pretend a call has come. It was too late.


Lady:so you are Ponu’s daughter?(more grin)
Me:umm…ahhh
Now another lady comes to the picture.
Lady1 to lady 2: “ arre is not she Ponu’s daughter?”
Now, I know, and as many other known relatives say, that I don’t look like either of my parents. So I resemble this Ponu?
To my utter relief , I could see my mother , on the verge of visiting this territory
And I indeed turned out to be Ponu’s daughter. These people , who happen to be my mom’s cousin , calls her by this weird name.

Then they started talking of how I wetted their clothes when one of them took me in their lap and lo ! they started having a fight to ascertain whom I had wetted .
These conversations with unknown relatives are more tyrannical than the ragging sessions in the first year of college, I tell you.


There’s nothing good on the TV except for the new vodafone advertisement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB1UPJ4leqs

I rush down from the terrace, climb up the stairs from ground floor,poke out of the bathroom door to see this ad ,whenever I hear it being played on tv.

and i love its jingle too much:

"Everyday I want to fly stay by my side...
Everyday I want to dream stay by my side...

Every morning I wish I could just play....
Wish the mornings would just stay..."""

"My mind is a garden,
My thoughts are the seeds.
My harvest will be
Either flowers or weeds"

My father’s office tour took us to a hydel power station at the border of West Bengal and Jharkhand.
This being my first train journey since watching ‘Jab We Met’ , so..you know…expectations and imaginations were really running high !
But unlike the movie, the train was not at all empty, it was full of a shit people. The women were running around wearing a whole lot of jewellery and men in their shorts and vests!
Man! This is only a one night journey and the train compartment is no way your bedroom !so , please..
The train was another crap character, stopping at every damn station…
Ok, finally after a bad night’s sleep admist cacophony contributed by kids yelling, people fighting over their seats, TTs shouting on the top of their voices, we finally reached the station..
So for the past 3 days , I have been

* Watching village girls and women passing by merrily , clad in clothes of brightest possible colours !

*Visiting the hydel power plant. Its Asia’s largest pumping project, done in collaboration with Japan.
Construction wise, it had an upper dam, lower dam and the usual switch gears,lock gates, turbine chamber, control rooms.
This visit made me realize how vast the difference between theoretical knowledge and practical experience is. I did not have the slightest hint how huge a transformer can be and what complexities it can have in its construction, whose circuit diagram we draw at one go of the pen!
The job in the field and control rooms involve a lot of expertise and tension.

*Visited the ‘Charak mela’…this ‘mela’or fair held in the villages of West Bengal for the last 3 days of the Bengali year, is all about fanatics and faith at its extreme.
People walk barefoot on burning coal,jump bare bodied on sharp iron rods, dangle a child with his body pierced brutally, from the top of a huge stick, hurting oneself in the name of god, and to top it all, on the final night they have 300-400 slaughterings.
The traditional ‘Chau nach’ is probably the only creative aspect of the fair.

*Ram navami was also slated then, when the streets came to standstill with people displaying fights with sticks and swords.

*Our driver took us to a place where bangles of hand made from ‘gala’ . it involved lot of persevearance and creativity. From next time, I go shopping , I’ll try not to bargain for handicraft goods. Their prices are justified.

*Walked the village roads in the mornings,chased herds of goats, took snaps with calves, ate at dhabas of truck wallahs in the afternoon , and counted stars in the evening lying on the terrace of our guest house!

Then , again, there was the inevitable train journey.
This time around, the journey was smooth, if I ignore the fact that the train was running only 4 hours late.i thank the sudoku in my mobile for helping me pass my time in the station.

So back to Calcutta. The taxi breezed fast over the Howrah bridge. There’s some thing in it. Whether it’s the architectural marvel, or the fact that it bridges such a wonderful city….but everytime I see the bridge..it does something to me.....

how about adopting a violet monkey?





this stray Puppy surely needs me!






Green Goblin?

Have nothing better to post, hence...

A for Acceptance—accepting failures, accepting truth, accepting people as they are
B for blue , B for books, B for blog, B for Bicycle…
C for Calcutta, C for college…
D for Dilemma
E for Emraan Hashmi and his ever daunting attitude inspite of strings of flops!
F for college Fests
G for the beaches of Goa
H for Humpty Dumpty
I for Inspiration
J for being Jealous
K for Kitkat, K for Keira Knightley in her role in Bend It Like Beckham
L for ‘lalalala’
M for Maggi—only thing which I can claim to cook and can have anytime
N for anything new, smell of new clothes, smell of new books, joy of new clothes
O for opaque
P for Phuchka
Q for Quantum physics
R for Rains and the Romanticism it brings with it, and the Rainbow that follows
S for School –for all the wonderful memories, S for Scrabble, S for Sudoku
T for Trams—the Kolkata exclusive transport, T for Train journeys
U for Umbrella
V for Veronica
W for “Why should boys have all the fun?”—I love this ad and the tagline!
X for Xerox---for making our lives easier !
Y for Yes! The 3 lettered word full of optimism
Z for Zombie

Its high time I admit my ignorance of most of the short forms doing rounds over internet and mobiles. I can claim to know that i.e is for id est, e.g is for exempli gratia, but only a few days back, I came to know what brb and ttyl stands for and I still not know what does zoth,zomg and few others stand for!!so here’s a recollection of some of the incidents that I had to face, in my effort to decipher these short forms!
Case 1: it was about 2 years back . I , along with 2 other school friends were chatting in the yahoo messenger conference. One of them cracked a joke. I being a rookie in the chat world then, only managed to put up a grin smiley. The other one wrote ‘lol’. “Whats that?”, I wandered. Neways , ignoring the trifle 3 lettered word, I continued chatting. Then the friend again cracked a joke. The other one wrote “lolzzz”, then she again wrote “lolzzzzie”. I began to wander what has happened to her, is she not getting that those were jokes? Or her keyboard or mouse is not working properly?it was only after few days that when I met her and dared to ask her what that lol business was all about, that she took out a piece of paper and explained to me as if she was solving an infinite series—
“listen , lol stands for laugh out loud….ok? and loz is the plural form…ok? See..
lol(1)…lol(2)…lol(3)…lol(4)………………lol(n)==lolz….ok? and lol(n+1)=lozz and so on….ok?
I nodded my head.
Case2: I had changed the profile photo of my orkut profile that day .
A friend of mine scrapped me” nice dp!”
I did n’t get it.
After a few days, another friend scrapped me,” awesome pp”.
“whats that ?”.
that very day, somebody scrapped me and said, “ hey liked your op very much, mind being friends?”
generally, never do I entertain those ‘lets-be-friends -kind -of -messages’ ,but that day, I was so very irritated by continuous bombarding by short forms, that I immediately scrapped him back and said,
“ya, I will be your friend, first tell me what op, pp and dp mean?”.
I did n’t have the slightest inclination to know what the person thought about this , but all I knew was, that I must solve this short form puzzle right then.
“Op stands for orkut picture, dp stands for display photo, and pp stands for profile photo”.
“thank you , and bye”, I said.
Case 3: once when I logged in to orkut, one of my friends scrapped me “sup?”.
I searched the nearest and farthest corners of my mind, but nowhere could I find a word ‘sup’. Since I was not replying(rather was not able to reply),the chap on the other side again scrapped me with the dreadful word in it! After 10 minutes, a scrap came,” are you not online? Neways , I am leaving, see you later”. I heaved a sigh of relief!
Some days later. Orkut login, same friend, same scrap ! “sup?” ohh god, save me!
10 minutes passed. Again same scrap . “sup?”. My ignorance of the word ,was taking its toll. I scrapped him back,”what is sup?”.
“ohh you were stumbling at this word?, it stands for whats up?”, pat came the reply.
“I see”.

Can any law of contraction justify the un necessary tamperings of life as lyfe, time as tyme, my as mah,cool as kewl?
Many think, the words look cute .
I had an equally tough time to get that 10Q stands for thank you and 10x is for thanks !
i mean, thanks and thank you are sensitive forms of courtesy and its kind of insult when you stick to such shortened forms of the words, at least over the internet where your words limits are aplenty, unlike sms.

the aim of language is to communicate.there are many ways to save time, but definitely language is not among them. And using these sms lingo, the task of comprehension does not always become easier, mostly it’s the other way round.
In a word where vowels are removed and the remnants are only 3 from the original 6 lettered word,the brain always has to do some extra work,to figure out what it means, by looking at the words suroounding it, which also may be similarly ambiguous .

Neways,chatting and sms ing being informal places, we can a bit of excuse those who wish to let their hair down.