a few things that've kept me busy!

Yeah.. the workplace now resembles a russian warzone.
Scant respect for ethics and total emphasis on results!
This is how the russians work.. and if we need to make them happy.. then we better do the things they like and more importantly do it like they like it.

This apart, mom and dad haven't been home since a couple of weeks.. so its me and Tina all alone!
Its always delightful to be on your own.. everytime this happens, you discover a new facet to yourself.
This time its cooking.

Now, i have been a non-entity in the kitchen till I was 25-26 maybe.
The only thing I knew to cook was Maggi ( which most Indians would know ).
The tryst with cooking took shape in Apr-May 2008 or thereabouts.
There was a colleague in Moscow, who used to come over and that's when i started learning the basics of cooking.
At the end of the trip I could make rookie dishes like bambino vermicelli, egg bhurji, dal (it was a super spicy andhra variety dal) and rice.
Nothing much to be proud about.. but still, the seed had been sown.

Much later, whenever I got a chance, I tried my hand at small experiments.
None too extraordinary, but I always managed to be kind of above average.

With 3 ladies in then house, my kitchen stint was always a non-starter.
Tina herself never got enough chances to enter the kitchen, poor me stood no chance.
And then, there is also a thought that I could end up making a fool out of myself!
Tina is light years ahead of me, when it comes to cooking.. so I prefer to remain in the shadows. :)

But, this time around, I thought why not try something different.
How long will I sit on the couch and watch Tina make all those yummy dishes... all this when I knew the abc of cooking.
My help never went beyond fetching vegetables from the refrigerator or washing utensils. :P

Now, then Divya was here for a couple of days too, that was when I decided to do a little something of my own..
A colleague from office was coming for lunch too.
That day I decided to make chhole :) and believe me they did not come out bad at all...
That day served as a further inspiration... and I was only too glad from there on to try my hand whenever possible.

The coming Thursday I made some more chhole, this time to be had with puri. So they had to be be a semi gravy kind and bingo.. they turned out exactly like that.
Tina was thrilled and so was I :D

Then today, I tried out Rajma chawal.
The planning from the onion paste to the tomato pulp to all the masalas were all planned and there was Rajma in front of us in about a hour and a half!

Satisfying and refreshing!
Another one of those feelings that money cant buy!

Was so thrilled that I told her in the late evening to watch a movie and not get up from the couch...
meanwhile I went, made some noodles and did some extra garnishing over the Rajma chawal that we couldn't finish in the day.
Got a green chilli too to enhance the contents of the dish :)

It was a wonderful weekend.

Will leave you with some pics of the chhole :













And now, some for the Rajma :

I stand corrected

I stand corrected on my stand on 'Dancing'.
I now understand. Its not about how the world would feel when you dance.
Its about how you feel.
I have always respected singers.. now i respect good dancers as well!
My wife and her sis are some of the best that get produced!
I felt good today... doing crappy movements... because i was enchanted.
Loved it... thanks Divi and Tina!!!

You guys rock!

All the Mithun's thumkas now work for me!! love u guys!

A life more ordinary

The below is a work of my imagination. You are free to draw any conclusions from it.
You are also free to conclude that I am an ass.

A life more ordinary.
No, this entry is in no way related to or adopted/influenced by Danny Boyle's 'A life less ordinary'.
However the recognition that this statement deserves is often scoffed at by people everyday, me included.
Why do I want a life more ordinary?
There is no straight answer. There has to be a huge explanation whether the readers like it or not.
If you think this is lecture, if you think this is philosophical, then exit.

For the survivors, the deal is like this :
I would say that there are only, yes, ONLY 2 truths in this world.
Every hour, every minute and every second is spent by every creature on the face of the planet in realizing one of the truths.
How?
Let me first harp a little on what the two truths are :
1. Emotion is supreme. EVERYTHING else is secondary.
2. The Cosmic truth will supercede Truth 1 (any emotion).

How on earth do these 2 lines make sense to anyone? I'll tell you how.

1st Truth :
When I say emotion, i will talk about human emotion because I consider myself human :)
Human emotion is the be all and end all of everything.
What does a human work for?
When he is a kid, he sees his friend who has a cricket bat. He too wants one.
He can use his friend's bat for playing, but he wants his own. Why? Because of the emotion which drives him.
When he finally manages to get a bat, he is satisfied.
There is nothing that compares with this emotion at this stage of his life
Checkpoint 1

Fast forward 10 years.
He is preparing for a board exam in 10th Standard. He is nervous. He thinks his life is complicated. He starts cursing the education system, hopes that his college building collapses, hopes that Pakistan declares war on India and his exams get cancelled.
Now, this is again his emotion which speaks for him. He is least bothered about what happens to the world, least bothered about India and Pakistan. All his emotion wants is postponement of exams.
This is also a kind of emotion.
There is nothing that compares with this emotion at this stage of his life
Checkpoint 2

Fast forward 5 years, he joins an engineering college.
Everything around him is new, he joins a college in a new city. He is new to college life. His adrenaline keeps him jumping 24*7.
He starts the first day, saying to himself : I will be the best student, make my parents proud.
But is that nature? Is it a law which nature has decided for you? Is that something that evolutionary cycle has decided for you?
No. He goes to his class. Sees a girl.. and instantly falls for her.
This is what evolution teaches a human.
Everything else that is human is only built around it by the society.
He goes to college before time everyday now, just to get a glimpse of her and maybe a quick chat before the classes begin for the day.
This liking for her, is emotion.
There is nothing that compares with this emotion at this stage of his life
Checkpoint 3

Fast forward another 5 years, he manages to get his dream job.
Here too, the opposite sex chapter remains open.. albeit for a short while.
Work piles on. He is taken advantage of by the greedy bosses.
He has to oblige. Smiles in front of them and mouths the choicest expletives once he is a few feet away.
He really does not care, does not see the big picture. He does not know the goals of the company or the unit he is working for.
All he knows is that his boss has given him a small job to do, once he is done, he leaves for the day. Life is so simple :).
For everything bad happening to his life, he has his boss to blame for.
Hating the boss. This is also an emotion. A real universal one.
There is nothing that compares with this emotion at this stage of his life
Checkpoint 4

Few more years down the line, he becomes more responsible at his job, maybe a tad over-committed. He works late for most days a month.
He spends time during lunch and tea time talking about work, his drive back home is boss-bitching time. He hates a few colleagues for the way they work.
He is ultimately tired of himself, tired of the routine he follows and finally wants to break free.
But cannot. Because this is what he does for a living.
Living in this highly commercial world is tough...
This internal ambition of breaking the shackles but developing cold feet at the time of execution is also an emotion.
There is nothing that compares with this emotion at this stage of his life
Checkpoint 5

This is just a sample cross section of an average human's life that I have put in front of you.
If you notice, all 5 check points here, have very very different and contrasting human emotions.
All these emotions are THE ONLY things that a human has and works towards.
If its a positive emotion, he works towards it, if its negative, he will display it.

Whatever it takes to achieve these emotions, is what we do everyday in our lives.

People work hard so that they can be achievers, they want to be achievers.
Being achievers solves 2 things. It gives them a status which is a happy emotion.
It also gives them a good rating in their appraisals. This gives them good money.
Good money helps them achieve the material pleasures.
This is again a happy emotion which everyone wants to achieve.

To get this, the human also overdoes things. Does things which the nature never prescribes. Tells lies, cheats, tries too hard.. to reach the top.

Come to think of it, all of this is man made. All of it is just a sugar coat that the society has built to continue life.

If we are just monkeys with an advanced brain, the nature would want us to be like that.
Eat & mate. Thats it. That's life.
Everything else is a sugar coat.

2nd Truth :
Cosmic truth.
This is a truth which is outside our control.
This is a truth which wiped out the dinosaurs.
This is a truth that none of our advanced monkey scientists can ever resolve.
This is a truth which says that every few million years, the earth will be wiped out.
This is a truth which turned the trees and dinosaurs into fossil fuel that we use today.
This could be a truth that would turn us into petrol.

This would mean an untimely death for all of us on this planet.
This truth is DEATH.

This would supercede all the other truths.

So I strongly feel there are only 2 truths.
One when you are alive, your emotions.

The second. The inevitable.

Once the second arrives, all the bats that you have accumulated, the colleges you have hated, the girls you have loved, the bosses you have hated and the shackles that you have wanted to break cease to exist.
It will all be a big void.

Ever wondered why animals dont go through this drama?
The homo sapien is also an animal.

They don't because they haven't evolved so much.
They really dont care if the financial ledgers dont tally in a bank. They really dont care if they get a good rating or a bad one. They dont care what their boss thinks of them.

All they care for is food and a partner.
Life becomes easy. Simple. Non politicized.

That's what I dream of.
A life which is easy, very simple and uncomplicated.
A life which I can live and be happy with my emotions which nature prescribes... before the 2nd truth catches up...
I dream of a life more mediocre...
A life more ordinary.

A few unsolved mysteries about 'Dancing'

To begin with, it is very needless to mention that I am not a good dancer.
This topic intrigued me ever since I was a child.
I have grown up watching bollywood dance, the dirty thumkas, suggestive matkas and 'lachkeeli kamariyas' all through.
But then that was a fun activity.. something that people enjoyed seeing actors and actresses do.
I am sure that dance was never meant to give the actors any fan following nor was it fun for them.. the Indian audience just felt lighter after watching the buffoonery.
That's all it did.

From a kid, when I was growing up, I started getting more and more inquisitive about this form of expression which has swept the globe.
I wanted to understand what is so unique about 'dance' that everyone is possessed with the idea.
When I was in 12th, I used to see guys in my class dance in some random meet organized after the exams got over. Boisterous dance, meaningless moves and totally illogical expressions.
It wasn't dancing. It was more of a case of ants in pants.
God I hated dance.

Few more years down the line, I joined college in Nagpur. After every year, people danced in college fests.
There I saw something unique.. there was a fat rope tied between 2 poles.
One side of the pole, guys danced and the other side, the girls.
And oh my god... people went crazy... gujjus, mallus, panjus, telugus all dancing like they just won a million each for failing in exams.
I had not fully recovered from the shock... when I saw a couple of my lady friends dancing.
Dancing with girls... and doing what.. the hugely overdone dandia step.
I cringed and left the venue.
I was... what do i say.. devastated.
Not because they were my friends.. but because.. I just could not imagine people moving and swirling like coffee in a mug in a dirty, muddy and sweaty place.

Few days later, very intrigued, I asked my friend, why do you dance?
She said.. it relieves you completely. It makes you 'mast' and makes you forget everything.
I was again.. what do i say.. devastated.

Girls still are a little graceful, but I just hated the sight of guys dancing with guys.
It is soo.. well.. so rustic.

Then over the next few years I did some more analysis.
What i came to know was.. most people that I met over the years danced because they wanted to be 'IN'.
They always wanted to be part of the happening crowd.
How I wish, they knew what 'happening' was.

I have absolutely no problems with dance. With 28 years of 'dance-watching' experience.. I can easily differentiate the 'wannabes' from the diamonds.

Just yesterday, while surfing thru' the TV channels.. i saw the PFMI finalists.. about 24 beautiful ladies who had let their hair down during some crappy bash.

They were dancing, swinging and supposedly enjoying themselves.
This logic fails me.. they want to be Miss India.. and they have to go through all this. I thought Pond's always wanted a 'woman of substance'.
Not a yo gen.. youngistan ka wow woman.
Some of them were so uncomfortable.. but were faking it.. flashing broad smiles while they were just moving 2-3 degrees in different directions.
Put your foot down and say - "I dont believe in dancing".
Will someone hang you?

I would love to see people who dance to learn the art.. but I absolutely despise people who start swinging, grooving, moving wherever they hear just any noise.
I mean, how can people dance in a pub? all so sweaty, smoky and absolutely stuffed.
There are a zillion people around you.. but still they dance.. dance for what?
Do they really enjoy it?
All beyond me.

Nacho jab man kare...jab dil bole.. this is it! yeiiiah!!
Maybe when you get a distinction in an exam where everyone around fails..
Maybe when the team you support wins after 3 years of close matches.
Maybe when you win a lottery.

But I really do not comprehend people dancing wherever they can... whenever they can.
Maybe the fault lies in me...
Because out of the 6 billion people on this planet, at least a fourth of them would disagree with me.
With so much opposition... I cannot win.
I give in...

I will continue my research. Will always welcome people who can answer my questions on dance.

Till then, my dance God is Mithun Chakraborty.

Good intentions cannot make life lovable

If they could, then everyone would be a priest.
I, all the time have a difference of opinion with so many people around... which includes my near, dear and no so near ones.

Is this difference in opinion a problem? Surely not, but yeah, it does leave a bad taste 99 out of 100 times.
And who's responsible for that taste. Unfortunately me.

Why?? because I let things affect me.
I am reminded of an interview I watched of Abhishek Bachchan in which he was asked, how he reacted to adverse things happenings around him all the time.
Simple answer : He said, he had 2 kinds of approaches :
1. For all the people I hardly know, I ignore all feedback, good or bad.
2. For my wife, I just say "Yes ma'am".
That's it.

Now at all points of time, all of us, encounter both these situations.

It's actually easy to get out of all these situations.. but on most times, a big ego or plain reluctance to accept comes in between.
There will always be millions of occasions when you want to bash up someone for making a point that you don't like.
Normally I react, and get into trouble.
If I follow Abhishek's first advice i would steer clear.

There will be many occasions when you plan a nice weekend trip and have it in your mind, not really sharing it, expecting the people that you love would love it when it unfolds .. and suddenly office work and colleagues would play spoilsport on a weekend.
Sometimes it would be zealousness to prove a point that plays a spoilsport.

There would be too many things that wait to get on your nerve.. and there is really no liquid that could cool you off or some 'Navratna tel' that could give you some thandak.

Life isn't fair, get used to it.
It's really difficult to walk the talk.. but there is nothing wrong in 'trying' to walk the talk.
Abhishek bhau.. have to give it to you.

The mantra is 'Let go'.
Just said it... and I am feeling much better already :)
Thanks man!

The search for the great Indian stag!

This is one thing I wanted to write about since a month or so.
I don't know if it has been lack of motivation or just lack of will to accept that my words cannot match my emotions on this topic.
I feel it is the latter and it's time I accept it!

Feelings are difficult to decode like I mentioned earlier... but in a case where you are indebted to a person from your soul already, it becomes your aim or ambition to pay back the person in some small way that you can.

In my case, it is my sister in law I am talking about...
She is the single biggest contributor in facilitating my match at her place.. I couldn't be more indebted to her...

Now its time for her to get married :)
And me, I am all over the place... I get so involved sometimes in the process that I fear I don't become too judgemental.
The truth is I so badly want the guy to be 'just-the-perfect-one' that I sometimes become too critical :(

But then, I think being critical also comes with being a Virgo.
I have started experiencing this feeling where I feel that waiting and watching is better than committing wrongly.
It's maybe the kind of love that fathers would experience towards their daughters at this stage in their lives...
I know the gravity of the statement I just made... its huge.. but then.. i feel it!
It would be hard to comprehend for most people my age, but that's how some relations are.
My wife is my most prized relationship... I am the closest that 'close' can be, to my wife.. and who helped me do that? a big push from her side.. then things like convincing the parents was a cakewalk... couldn't have imagined a bigger favour someone could do for me!

Ah.. it's so easy to take a favour.. but 10 times more harder to return it.
Sometimes, when I think about the 200 odd profiles that have been subject to profiling in the last month and half... there are just 4-5 guys that could potentially match up... potentially only!!!

In a country where the males are on the stronger side of the male:female ratio, it is but ironical to find so little on the sifter once the sieving is done.
On a lighter note, it's also another law of the nature, that where there is quantity, the quality suffers :)

Thinking on the sidelines, I feel that MASTERCARD is a great service to the planet. The two things it has given mankind are :
1. Ease of transacting anytime/anywhere.
2. Giving the world an unforgettable line.

The second one echoes in my heart right now..
The kind of feeling that I am talking about matches so nicely with the famous line.

/*There are somethings money can't buy*/
Yes, very truely.
There are somethings money absolutely can't buy.
Money cannot buy someone the feelings that I have nurtured for a person.
Money cannot buy the emotion I am going through these days. Money also cannot buy the decision which ultimately will see her happy!!
Oh yes, there are many many things money can't buy.

So yeah, I know the road ahead is tough... I would quote Robert Frost in these oft-repeated but full-on meaning lines :

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Yes, many promises to keep...
Promises to keep!
All the best my dear... we were, are and will always be one in front and one behind you!

KJo - naam toh suna hoga

I happened to be another victim to the monstrous hype that was created around a film called My name is Khan.
I don't know why, but after watching KCK on Friday night, i asked my parents if they would like to watch MNIK on saturday!
My luck too was on leave that day.. they said yes.. and we set out in my gaadi.

We reached the theatre half an hour in advance.. that was a sign of things to come, maybe God wanted us to get bored and leave the place before the ordeal started... but nahi.. we are destiny's children! and our destiny that night was KJo.

The movie started promisingly with the protagonist getting frisked on the airport.. for reciting a few muslim verses.
The intent was good. I thought I had done justice to myself by breaking my 2010 resolution of not watching SRK films.

A few scenes later, SRK started getting repetitive. Whatever sympathy the audience had gathered for him were now turning into uneasy oohs and aahs and uncomfortable shifts in their chairs.
He was now royally irritating people in the theatre.
Whatever the syndrome was, I really dont think KJo researched it enough.
At the end of the movie you dont even remember what the disablility was called. To add to the pain, it was so horribly potrayed in the script that Khan was only too glad to make it worse by multiplying the pain by 10.

Whatever the disablity was, all he did was repeat the last two words of every sentence he spoke. There was absolutely nothing more to the character.
If you minus those 2 repeated words, he just seemed like his usual 'Rahul, naam toh suna hi hoga' avatar.

He is always so hopelessly affluent and so cool that he forgets that this is not a stage show or an awards night, but a film where he should be getting under the skin of the character.

To draw a parallel, it is so easy to say that SRK can never ever in this life play a progeric Auro or even a Ghajini. He just cannot, he does not possess the ability to.

To be different, everyone in Bollywood these days plays a disabled character, so how can this hyped Khan be left behind?
But to everyones horror, he neither seems disabled nor is interested in pretending to be disabled.
He is the cool Rahul in every film with the same hairstyle and with the same dirty smirk on his nicotine blackened lips.
The problem with him is that he just doesn't want to try, he is happy in his zone where the mindless supporters love him for being a fool.
He is in Madame Tussauds too... err.. but then so is Salman. So that doesnt count as an achievement.
He is very very obnoxiously repetitive. Thats is all I want to say.

Moving on, the film was no better. How could it be?
It was made by the stupid coterie of Khan, KJo and Kajol.
Kajol just continued from K3G. She was too loud in that movie and she just took over from there.
In MNIK, she was so loud that the people in the adjacent screen couldn't follow their film properly.
She keeps yelling when she's happy and also when her son dies.
Yelling is what she does to keep her weight in control. After K3G, she hadn't got a chance to yell, so she put on weight like a water hog.
But now she's determined. She's determined to scare the people of this country by yelling, yelling day and night, yelling in health and death, yell, yell all the time .. yell so much that we get scared and settle in Pakistan.
The Taliban too are scared of her now.

Ab aaya KJo... bhai iske liye toh koi kuch bhi bole kam hai. He is like a bucket of emotions, a bath tub rather.
I thought it couldn't get more heavier than K3G.
All the people, hail Kojja.. sorry KJo.. here comes MNIK. (By the way Kojja in Telugu, a prominent south Indian language spoken by more than a 100 million people, means hijra, a colloquial word used for the term eunuch).
Sorry to get personal KJo, but that is what you deserve, because of what you subject us to.

You have one Kojja friend with whom you make all the films, which are all affluent, which always show people crying out of love and ruling that love for friends/mother/father/neighbour/dog/cat/sheep/wolf and love for anything that is human or non human is everything in the world.
You are such a bucket of mush.
You are sooooooo sweet. Your films are also sooooo sweet that they generally taste like a concoction of cocoa and sugar syrup.
You were born in a sugarcane field.

But wake up man, what do you expect us to do? expect the common indian to do?
what do you expect the average progressive NRI to do?
Sit with you in the sugarcane field every 6 months and weep with you for the sugar shit that you dole out for us?
Enough of this coochie coo friendship with the superstar.
People call you gay.. do you know that? (Oh yeah, you must be knowing that.. not too long ago, people did a graffiti on SRK's mannat wall calling him gay).

You cannot change your image by showing hapless people crying in your movies...
what did you want to do in MNIK? Show a disabled fellow, swimming through the swirling floods and saving an african community.
What was with that african community who were crying with SRK?
Crying with SRK?? My god, this is nonsensical.
The 10 yr old african kid starts singing 'We shall overcome' .. hum honge kamiyaab when the flood comes.
What the fish??
Why would he sing 'We shall overcome'??
He loves shaggy, akon and 50 cent... but then KJo uncle ne paisa diya and bola.. beta bolo.. We shall overcome...
ok uncle...
We shall overcome...

To all the shit in this world, you are much better than MNIK.
Hail your existence because there is something far more inferior existing in this world.