As the year wraps up, my blog post counts stands at a dismal .75 post/ month . 09 for me has not been as good as it has been to Mamata Banerjee or Ranbir Kapoor. From an almost lousy Pujo to lousy Christmas. Most of my friends who graduated have moved out of the city in the 2nd half of 09, and each day there were new photo albums or status updates of newfound life to look forward to.

Now, one of the happy things to have happened to mankind in 09 is Farmville. Cows moo, daffodils sway, horses dance, elephants jump, potato pos up. Though I have almost got bored of it, nonetheless I can hardly deny the initial excitement of ploughing , sowing , harvesting and brushing !



Some scary things are up on television right now like Raaz pichle janam ka but more scarier is the forthcoming swayamvar of Rahul Mahajan.
Some trends which I could understand after watching a few episode in bits and parts is :
• Your gender remains the same as that of your last birth
• You remain a human
• Shekhar Suman was from Scotland and Monica Bedi from Portugal.

Its winter, and only when its winter, I suddenly feel this very urge to get up at 5 and go for morning walks. And since there is National handball championship going on at a stadium near home, there are ample hot guys roaming around in the vicinity. Btw , how exactly is a handball game played?

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 ]

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..."""

the other day, while browsing through videos in youtube , i chanced upon my one time favourite video title 'school chale hum' which has music by the shankar-ehsaan-loy trio, lyrics by mehboob n sung by kunal ganjawala. it was created during the launch of vajpayee government's launch of 'sarva shiksha aviyan' scheme during the year 2004 and shown on the doordarshan channels many times during the day. and i remember everytime i used to hear the prelude ,i used to jump before tv , irrespective of what i was doing !
And thus started a whole lot of thoughts--what are we doing for the education of the more than 192 million children who do not have the privilege of going to school? n why do we still complain?

The video brought back many memories i had, while growing up, when television meant only doordarshan channels.Its not been a year since we subscribed to cable tv, not because of any thing else,but out of the wonder that when we can't watch these 2 channels,how can we manage a 100 of them!
memories of watching DD dates back to those sundays when the whole family used to be glued to the tv to watch mahabharat,of those monday nights when me n my bro used to finish studies fast to catch alif laila n sindbad, those saturday evenings when my granny also used to join us as sri krishna was dubbed in bengali! shows like 'superhit muqabla' n 'chitrahaar' were my first window to bollywood & the 5:30 pm cartoons on DD metro were the ones for which we waited after coming back from school! How some of my friends used to envy me because i had school holiday on saturday and could watch 'shaktimaan' on saturday mornings !

Now that i have started watching satellite channels, every damn thing here seems to be ghost driven for craving high TRPs-- be it glitzy serials or a sting operation on news channels.Reality shows are bitten by cheap controversy and so are fictional ones dealing with regressive concepts.
Every other day you have an awards function and new year programs are the same old song-n-dance routine!
with more than 10 scores national and local 24 hour cable channels , every idiot, be it your next door neighbour, or the pretty girl in a mall, is up on the idiot box these days!