The art of picking your woman in your arms

You know, I was dying to do some armchair activism today. I was looking forward to write a post titled – Dear India, what the fuck? – and scream my lungs out about the way our priorities are royally misplaced. How we don’t care about rapes and farmer suicides and discuss AIB as if it is the latest discovered deadly virus. How we don’t bother about the bovine Sakshi Maharaj distributing his pearls of unbelievable wisdom but are ok with attack on an activist’s car because she circulated pictures of rapists. But then I thought, what is the point? We should all acknowledge the fact that we have been self-centred chu***as since hundreds of years and move on to other important topics.

Like the art of picking your woman in your arms.

Bollywood has always been an inspiration to the society. You can actually trace back all the crimes to Bollywood. If you go to a jail and do a heart-to-heart with all the inmates, 99% chances are that 99% of them will cry over how they saw a Bollywood movie and lost control of their senses. So, it is only understandable that we can find the roots of how we romance in Bollywood because that too is a crime in this country.

I was exposed to Bollywood as a kid. I think it was accidental that the first scene I saw of a movie was a man strangulating a woman with a wire. I could not sleep the whole night. The second scene that I accidentally saw was of robbers looting a village. It took mom a while to pacify me. For the longest of times, I imagined Bollywood movies to be a dreadful and nasty planet where people hurt each other for fun. Much like Earth.

How wrong I was.

Because then I discovered its romantic side – couples smiling at each other and singing songs while heavens play the orchestra, couples changing their clothes five times in a song as if they had a whole day dedicated to this activity of changing and singing, couples kissing behind gigantic flowers and making the flowers shudder. It was a new world. Blissful and sensuous. But then something was always disturbing me, slowly pushing me into the depths of anxiety. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to put a finger on it.

It was the ease with which heroes picked up the heroines in their arms. Even as a child, I knew that was something superhuman. When Shammi Kapoor lifter Sharmila like a dry twig in An evening in Paris, I gasped. Was it that easy? The question nagged me for years. The first thing I would notice in a song is the picking business and then wonder about it for hours. Of course, there was a category of actresses who were never lifted (like Meena Kumari) because lets face it, our heroes were not trying to be in the Olympics.

image from here

And then SRK happened in the 90s. I think he set some sort of a world record by picking each and every woman who crossed his way. It drove me crazy. It was as if he was not able to control himself. Whenever he saw a woman in his movie, he had to open his arms, tilt a bit, give her a dimple. And then while she was swooning at the gestures, he would pounce at her and pick her up.

Of course, I never tried it at home at that point of time. With woman that is. I tried with buckets. And boy, were they heavy! When I got married, I told my wife (very early in our relationship), that I was going to pick her up and walk across the room in a slow gait singing a song, just like Veer picked up the heavy Zaara as if she was tied to strings from the ceiling. My wife was game.

Image from here

I remember, the first thing that appeared in front of my eyes after I picked up my wife were stars. Not the romantic, twinkling variety but those that appear with shooting pain. But then I remembered to my horror that I was supposed to walk across the room and my wife was looking expectantly at me, as she gripped my neck in what I think was a deadly Taekwondo lock. There wasn’t much time and I was not supposed to drop her on the floor. It was an arranged marriage.

I galloped across the room cursing all the Bollywood actors. I even forgot to sing the song. We never tried it again.

Now that I look back, I don’t blame the heroes. They must have been on drugs. You really don’t know what you are doing when you are under their spell. It must have been tough for them. SRK had a back problem years ago.

It was a childhood fantasy for me. But I did what I always wanted to do. At least I tried. My wife was euphoric later although I could see beads of perspiration on her forehead when I was sprinting across the room with her in my arms. Isn’t that is what is important in life? Trying.

Valentine’s day is upon us. So I thought I would share the story of what I thought at that point of time to be one of the most intimate and romantic gestures I had shown to my lady. Of course, now I think it was anti-feminist. And no, it isn’t a case of sour grapes. How can you even think like that? Look at the way our society treats women. It is all because of these Bollywood heroes picking actresses in their arms and showing them as weak. Why would anyone pick a woman in his arms? She can’t walk? Did you take her permission? I think we should carry out a campaign, burn effigies and beat our chests if a hero tries to do that again. We should debate this on news channels. How dare they show women in poor light?

The armchair activist inside me is waking up again. Maybe I should write the “Dear India, what the fuck?” post. It is amazing how my perspective changed over the years. It took only a handful of stars.

Randomizer : Eurovision, Dances with Wolves & IPod touch

• A few of my British colleagues introduced me to Eurovision  just before the semifinals started this year. I was quite surprised that I have never heard of this contest before. When something has been going on from the last 50 years, you are bound to hear about it sometime. My faith in my “already gone to the dogs” general knowledge was yet again shaken and stirred. Anyways, Eurovision is a song competition in which all the active members of the European Broadcasting Union participate.

Right now, EBU spans 75 broadcasting organizations from 56 countries. Each member country submits a song to be performed on live television. People from all the countries vote for their favorite songs. You can’t vote for your own country. 😉 The program broadcasts each year since its inception in 1956 and is the most watched non sporting event in the world. Believe me, the statistics are mind boggling! An estimated 100-600 million people watch the show. 

This year’s Eurovision was held in Moscow and was a bit special. 42 countries participated this year with 25 countries reaching the finals. You can watch the 25 entries that made it to the finals here. The contest was finally won by 23 year old Alexander Rybak from Norway for his song “Fairytale”. The song was written and composed by him and Alexander won by a whooping 387 points, the highest ever in the 50+ year history of the Eurovision contest.

UK somehow managed to bag the fifth spot, which was very good(according to my colleagues here) because the country has been on a downslide from the past few years. I was a little taken aback when I saw Andrew Lloyd Webber playing the piano while Jade Ewen sang “Its my time”. That is when the enormity of the contest hit me. 🙂

“Fairytale” is a beautiful song and it has that old world charm. If you listen to all the 25 finalists, this one stands apart. I personally also liked Croatia’s entry “Lijepa Tena” for its “Kaun hai jo”-ish tune from Jhuk Gaya Aasmaan and Germany’s “Miss Kiss Kiss Bang” for obvious reasons. 😉 Do watch this performance by the 23 year old winner:

• Besides the usual popcorn flicks like XMen Origins(3/5), StarTrek(4/5) and Angels & Demons(2/5) I saw quite a few noteworthy movies last month. Dances with Wolves was one such movie. When I finished watching the movie, I realized what an Idiot I was for not watching it earlier. It has been lying in my laptop from almost a year now. 😐 Beautifully shot, its a story of a Civil War-era United States Army lieutenant who is sent to an American Frontier to find a military post. The story evolves around with his friendship with the local Sioux tribe. Most of the dialogues are in Lakota language. Do watch this movie if you haven’t seen it yet. Another notable movie was the German movie titled Das Leben der Anderen(The lives of Others). Its the story of a Stasi agent named Wiesler in East Germany of 1984. He is assigned to spy on a playwright named Georg Dreyman, who is a suspect because of his Western contacts. The movie has a very interesting screenplay and the end is just perfect. A must watch!

 

• Now since this is one of those I-will-blabber posts , The Great Indian elections left me with mixed feelings. I was expecting nothing less than a 90% turnout in Delhi and Mumbai because of what both the cities have gone through the past year and because of the ubiquitous Lead India initiative but the results were shocking. Somehow the Delhi crowd is too smart. They knew that even if its a 10% turnout, no one would ever let BJP win. So there. But, yes, it somehow made one thing very clear. The average citizen is tired. Tired of the foolery they are subjected to now and then.
• Well, in the end, some good news from my own life. No I am not getting married. 😐 Be a little less predictable. 😛 Ok. Here goes. I was awarded the Blog-o-laureate award by Arpit a few days back. Thanks Arpit for considering me for the honour!

Also, I got my own Ipod Touch and Camera. Something very funny happened with my IPod touch after a month it was purchased. A thin horizontal line started appearing on the screen, which made me instantly sweat. I went to the nearest Apple store and they asked me to take an appointment. 😐 Appointment?!?

Anyways, I took the next day’s appointment and reached there 10 minutes late. The appointment was missed and the chewing gum chewing blonde asked me to fix an appointment for the next day! I grabbed her it for the next day and was there on time. Phew! I was expecting that the technical staff would have a look and probably keep the Ipod to find out what the problem was. Instead the guy looked at it for a few seconds, plugged it into his Mac and checked it again and coolly told me that he will be giving me a new piece. I stared at him for a good 10 seconds. And then ladies and gentlemen, I came back home with a brand new Ipod. 😉 It is definitely the coolest application made by Homo Sapiens. 

And, about my camera…well all of you have seen the results! All the flowers in my previous post were shot by it. If you still want to have a look, click here.
And now with great sadness, I announce the end of this blabber post. Over and Out!

Isle of Wight Trip

Phew! I feel like an underwear in a washing machine. Life is running faster than I could have imagined and all I could do is to muster up enough strength to stand steady. Getting used to a place is not easy as it sucks out all that you were used to. For me, it sucked out blogging, and for a few days I could not gather my thoughts to put them on my laptop screen and neither could I raise my finger to open my Reader. So, apologies, dear friends! And I hope that all of you would understand! 

So, coming back to the topic, one of my roomies here returned to India last week. Before going back he wanted to go to a nice, beautiful, peaceful place and the options were very less because:

• Usually October-March is considered off season here in UK as Winters is a terrible time to roam around.
• He had already seen London, Scotland, Blackpool and Lake District, all of which I still have to visit. So all these options were ruled out.

The only two options left were Wales and Isle Of Wight, both of which were again under an Off-season spell. Finally Wales was ruled out too and we ended up booking a car and Preeto(our TomTom aka GPS) for three days. Before going further, let me tell you about Isle of Wight as most of you must be in an impression that its the name of a Crater on the fifth moon of Saturn. Isle Of Wight is a small island on the Southern Tip of Great Britain. Its about 257 miles from Manchester which is about a 5 hours drive. The Isle is not accessible by road which means that you have to shove your car in a ferry and take it to the isle and vice versa. During summers there is a huge advanced booking for the ferry but we were fortunate due to our perfect timings!

This is the island as you can see in the map above. We went upto Portsmouth(upper right corner in the map) in the car and then took a ferry to Fishbourne, which is on the north east corner of the isle. Ferries also operate from Southampton and Lymington. Take your pick! 

The Island is spread over an area of mere 380 sq Km and is famous for its beautiful beaches of Shanklin, Ryde, Sandown and Yarmouth. Besides the beaches there was so much to explore that we found it extremely difficult to keep up the pace. And all this during the off season! Two notable, must visit points of the diamond shaped island are the Culver cliff and The Needles. If you really want to understand the meaning of breathtaking, you must visit these two points on the island. The Needles is undoubtedly the most picturesque area of the island which looks like the end of the chalk coloured ridge which runs across the whole island. 

The Culver Cliff on the other hand was used as a defence point as it was used to keep an eye on the vast ocean all around it. There were two nine inch guns kept there but the cliffs kept on eroding and most of it was lost. Now also, if you walk along the cliff, you can see the warning boards and the broken cliffs all around. I would suggest you to park your car at Yaverland beach and walk up the cliff from there towards the last point. Its a tiring walk of about half an hour but what you will see along the way is what you would never forget. 

Finally, there were many points of interest like The Osborne house, Carrisbrooke Castle, the zoo and the Railway Museum which we missed because they were closed due to the off season. It was a beautiful memorable trip and there were a bunch of breathtaking scenes which I would never forget in my life. I leave you with a few attempts to capture them:

This is a view of the Culver Cliff from Sandown Beach. If you see closely, there is a pole like structure on top of the cliff. That is the Yarborough Monument at the edge of the cliff. That is where you could walk up the cliff. And you have to be there to understand how the vast expanse of the ocean looks like from there, sprinkled with ships and with shimmering spots of sunlight strewn here and there.

Well, this is what I was talking about. A few pictures of the view from the top of the cliff.

Here are a few pictures I took while I was walking up the cliff

 

 

The Yarborough Monument

We woke up a 5:30 in the morning on the second day and went to see the sunrise. It was freezing cold and apparently we were the only one on the Sandown beach. The island loves to sleep!

And that’s me, staring at the Sun.

I took this picture in Portsmouth from the upper deck of the ferry. The ferry was about to move towards the isle and I saw this building just next to the port. Isn’t this a beautiful place to live? Sitting in the balcony, sipping tea and looking at the vast expanse of the ocean and the huge ships moving around you!

View of Portsmouth as the Ferry moved away from it. By the way, Ferry seems to be a mild word for that ship. There were atleast 60 cars in it when it left Portsmouth!!!

Thats the “Ferry”!!!

The Needles was another fascinating point of the island. We reached there after the Sun had just jumped into the sea and the play of colours on the sky were seen to be believed. Here is a view of The Needles as we moved towards the edge of the cliff.

This picture was taken while we moved towards the Needles. Everyone was coming back after seeing the sunset and we were the only ones who were moving in the opposite direction. 🙂

That is the view of The Needles from the nearest point. It was quite dark by the time we reached there.

A few more random pictures:

This was taken while the ferry left the British mainland.

Taken at Ryde Beach. Are these Seagulls? They made an awful lot of noise.

The sleeping city in the morning.

An unknown castle on our way to a beach. Don’t know the name.

What a way to go up!!!

Water gushing up during a high tide. The foot of the Culver cliff which is accessible during the low tide and are great for an evening walk are completely immersed in water during a high tide.

This was taken from the ferry back to Portsmouth as the sun set behind the isle.

And finally I would like to dedicate this post to Preeto, our Tomtom(GPS) who was very patient with us and always guided us with her sweet voice even when we went off track atleast 5 times! We love you Preeto!!

Manchester – Photo feature

My first weekend in Manchester thankfully dismissed my doubts that I am living in a ghost town. It takes some time to realize that unlike India, the shopping area and office buildings are far away from the residential area. In the last one week, I have hardly seen any people near my home. Even the cars seem to be moving on their own. 🙂 But, when I visited Piccadilly and Trafford Centre in the weekend, I could hardly walk without bumping into other people. Here are a few noteworthy pictures of the endeavor. Some of them are outright stupid(for e.g. the first one), but I am sure you will enjoy them. 🙂

This one is a random picture which I clicked while roaming on the streets of Manchester. The place is full of such beautiful houses.

Well, yes, Rusholme street is full of Indian restaurants and sweet shops. Indian food is quite a hit here and you can find some good and authentic restaurants here.

The BBC office on the way to Piccadilly.

The Tram cum Metro service of Manchester. The Metro runs on elevated tracks through the city and slides down on the road in Piccadilly and turns into a Tram service. Remember all those songs in Hindi movies where the actors are dancing in front of such trains? Well, I too felt dancing like Govinda when I saw this one. 🙂

The Central park area of Piccadilly is full of such beautiful statues. Look at the folds of the dress.

 The Manchester Eye is build as a replica of the London eye, but a smaller one.

The Manchester Eye during the night. Doesn’t it look like a giant UFO rising behind the buildings?

A Church in Piccadilly. It looked like a ghost church during the night. We sat in front of it while the Church bells rang. It was mesmerising.

A structure in front of the church. Notice the greens here and there.

The Trafford Centre in Manchester. This is one of the biggest Mall I have seen, and the most eloquent. Just to give you an idea, it comprised of a multiplex with 25 screens.

Beautiful statues at the Trafford Centre.

The wishing pool. All the black dots inside the water are coins.

The grand structures outside the Multiplex Odean. Couldn’t stop myself from clicking a few more. 🙂

Here is another one, while I waited for my friend to collect the tickets of “The Curious case of Benjamin Button”. The movie was a masterpiece, by the way.

Another one. The top view.

Tea, anyone?

The massive foodcourt at Trafford center. A mindboggling variety of fooditems at your disposal and a beautiful ceiling.

Another picture of the architecture.

And, that’s me again with Martin Chuzzlewit, sitting on the stairs of my house and waiting for the washroom to be freed of any human activities. Another one of those stupid pictures! 😛

That’s all gents and ladies. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Hopefully I will be roaming around this weekend also and will update you with more pics of my adventures.

Straight from Manchester

Its a strange feeling sitting in Manchester and writing my first post from there. It has been a strange and riveting 48 hours. On Friday morning, I did not even had a clue if I would fly or not and in the evening, there  I was, standing in the bustling Metro and returning home with a ticket to Manchester in my bag. I had to fly the very next day. Everyone was speechless due to the sudden surge of events and I had no time to give parties to my bellowing group of friends. 

While zipping my suitcase just an hour before I was to leave home, I goofed up and forgot the number sequence I used to lock the bag. Finally I realized that since the sequence can only have numbers from 000 to 999, I could try all of them and one of them will open the bag. 😉 Well, thankfully, I did not even reach 200 when the bag clicked open on a combination and my whole family gave a collective sigh of relief. 😀

I had to switch flights at Abu Dhabi. I was surprised to see the crowd in the first flight. It comprised of rustic and shabbily dressed punjabi men who gulped each and every hard drink which was served on the flight. And guess which movie was the Punjabi Munda sitting next to me was watching? Singh is King!!! 🙂 I saw Mamma Mia which I wanted  to watch since a long time! Abu Dabhi airport was not very large but I gorged on the beautiful design.

The flight to Manchester from Abu Dhabi was eight hours long and I slept during the most of it. I also saw Mrs Doubtfire and an episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. The best part was the flight navigation system in which you can see the exact location of the plane on your screen and the trajectory it is taking. Also, there was a camera fitted at the front of the plane and you can set your screen to view the breathtaking cockpit view of takeoff and landing. I know most of you must be familiar with all these features, but then what the hell, its my first time! 😛

And, to torment you further, like all the people who end up clicking each and every bus and building when they go to a foreign land, here are two pictures of a “Sex drive in cinemas” double Decker bus and my neighbourhood.

 

Jokes apart, next three months are going to be very hectic as there are more responsibilities on my head. I have to live upto the trust people have in me. I am happy to be here although the feeling has not sunk in properly. Not yet!  I have really wanted this from a long time and I hope it works out well for me. Pray for me. 🙂

p.s. I have been awarded by four bloggers in the past 10 days. Sorry for the delay guys!! I will be putting it up asap! 🙂

So long people!

[all the photographs are copyrighted by me. If you wish to use them, please mail me]

Randomizer Revolutions

Smita and Vishesh awarded me the Butterfly award and the Cup. Thank you so much guys!!! I really have to make a new page for my awards section before my sidebar exceeds the distance between the Earth and the moon. I am supposed to pass this award to  bloggers I like. So, I would like this opportunity to pass this award to Nita, Liju Philip, Amreekan Desi, Pr3rna and Trailblazer. 

I am officially closing the Salsa Diaries Category. I have attended the first few classes with enthusiasm but then this new work came along and I got really busy. We are creating a new website for our client which is supposed to go live in January, so loads of work and no time for Salsa. I was really doing great. 😦

 

I was also busy with photo shoot and release of my new album. I had such a great time recording it and it was really sweet of Paris to come and release it in front of the press. Also I would like to thank Madonna for being a part of the video shoot and for singing a song with me. The female models were great during the promotional photo shoots but I am a little unhappy about my pictures in the exhibition. I didn’t like the red ones. Here is a sneak peek.  

 Here is Paris unfolding my new album in front of the media

Madonna grooving to my new song – “You gave me wings at the wrong place”

A model at the promotional photo shoot for the new album. The designers of the dress had such a harrowing time as it kept on unhooking. It was quite fragile.

The promotional Exhibition in New York

I always knew that our directors copy Hollywood movies and our Music directors copy Korean songs blatantly but can we at least make original movie posters? 

At least they could have changed the positions of the males and females OR AM I ASKING FOR TOO MUCH? Never mind! 😐

So, Congress won again in Delhi!!! Well, I think the simple logic is that if the people have to choose between a government “who is incapable of fighting terrorism and is elemental in the development of the area” AND the one “who is incapable of fighting terrorism”, then they would definitely choose the former. Its another story that the “development” is happening because of the Commonwealth Games and both the parties are equally bad at handling terrorism. 

I am having this feeling that I am turning into a major success as an Agony Uncle. Many of my friends turn to me whenever they have problems in their love life. I sit and listen to them very very patiently and give some sound advise, which thankfully has not backfired till date. One of my friend even took my advice about whether he should go ahead and have sex with this girl he met a few months back. Ok, that’s not the full story. The girl was about to get married to someone else and just wanted to “have” my friend once before she got married to the other guy. I don’t remember the last time I moved my head from right to left to right so vigorously. My friend who was ready to take the plunge under the stress of testosterone was somehow rescued by Yours truly. And………………………………………….I just now realised that he reads my blog. 

I am completely in love…….with this song. There is something very suave and romantic about it. (the video is not that great and it would be good if you don’t see the message which comes at the end of the video. I have been laughing ever since I saw it)

 

Do you believe in signs? Sometimes such strange things happen which do not make sense at all. A few days back, mom was coming back from the market and she took a rickshaw. After she got down and paid the rickshaw puller, he returned back the balance. This is what he gave her – 

Now last I remember, the Britishers left in 1947 and my mom gave him 10 Rs while he returned back 85 Rs(=1 Pound). Does that make sense? Is this some sort of a sign for me? Am I going visit the Queen’s land?

With this incredibly positive thought, I will end this post.

The shakable article of faith

Michael Jackson is now Mikaeel after the singer embraced Islam. According to the reports, Jackson discussed religion with a music producer and songwriter of his new album, both of whom have converted to Islam. Michael warmed to the idea and the conversion happened.

This is not the first time when we have seen a celebrity converting to another religion. Half of Hollywood has already converted to Scientology and Quaker and back home A.R. Rehman’s conversion was the most visible one in the past few years. A common man also finds his own reasons for such conversions. Sometimes its for money, sometimes its because of the fear of death, sometimes its for love and sometimes its because of unanswered question which the present faith can’t answer.

Leaving aside the topic of Forced Conversions, according to this very elaborate survey done by The Pew Forum, 28% of American adults have left their faith in which they were born in favour of another. If the change of affiliation from one form of Protestantism to another is included, the percentage stands at a staggering 44%. Also the number of people who do not attach themselves to any faith have increased.

So, what is the big deal about changing religion and why do people indulge in the activity? Most of the children who are born to parents practicing a single faith, tend to accept the religion. The children born to parents with mixed religions tend to change their faith to an entirely new one because to the conflicts and confusions in their mind. It is nothing more than a mean of ironing out the complexities into which they were born. The whole idea of changing the religion stem out of the fact that people strive to smooth out their lives. It has more to do with psychology rather than pragmatism. It has more to do with finding an anchor.

I also believe that once a person has converted, he begins to subconsciously unclog his life. For e.g. the person can be a true blue dipsomaniac but might tend to leave the habit after conversion. This is something he could have done without converting but maybe he just needed a driving force. This does not mean that we can ask questions like – “So, would I be better off if I convert to another faith?”. The question should be – “Do I have to convert to another faith to be better off?”. Most of the times, the answer would be No, but as I pointed out earlier, some people do need a strong driving force, specially when their life had been turbulent.

Another aspect which raises its hood after conversions is – “How much does the life of the person change?” You can read the story of five people who converted to Islam here. Yes, the person has to go through a tough process of making the family and friends understand specially when the religions had always been conflicting. Sometimes, when the person converts for love, its hard to make the family understand specially when they realize that its the whole persona which is going to change.

Ofcourse, I must emphasise that I somehow don’t subscribe to the thought process which might lead to a conversion. To me, its something similar to changing your shampoo brand. Its still a shampoo which you are rubbing on your head! I somehow don’t connect to the idea of religion playing such an important part in my life and thus this whole topic fascinates me. I have been to a Church, a Gurudwara and a Temple and I could not find much of a difference. We pray in all of them for a better life. I could not grasp the idea where people stop calling God by a certain name and start calling him by another one. But I would love to meet a convert and understand his point of view.

Have you ever known a person who has converted from one religion to another?

Two interesting links which I found –

The Big Religion Chart

The Psychology of Religious Conversion

The Journey and the Inspirations

On 29 August 2008, I complete one year of blogging. It has been an exhilarating journey of a world I was quite oblivious to, until last year when one of my friend introduced me to WordPress through her newly created blog. Although her blog is long abandoned at present, she passed the germ to me.
During this one year journey, I came across a variety of bloggers who inspired and awed me in various depths. I haven’t written much posts in the last one year. I haven’t even reached a count of 80 yet but I was able to reach a lot of people. I connected somehow and that is all that matters. So, I would like this opportunity to thank everyone who read my blog and provided their selfless comments. I know that there are people who read my blog without commenting and I thank them too for their support. I love it when someone who has been reading my blog from a while finally decides to comment. I remember Manoj did that and also Preeti. 🙂

I came across many bloggers who encouraged me to go ahead and not give up when things got really tough, because they amazed me with their knowledge and zeal and are now a part of this new facade of my life. There were posts which made me laugh when I was feeling low and there were posts which made me think and ponder. In such a short period, this place has become an essential part of my life. Here is a list of my favourite A list of Blogs –

Ruhi’s Time and Again – It was through Ruhi’s blog that I came in contact with this loony bunch. I saw Ruhi’s post on the Dashboard once and clicked on it. I was wide-eyed and amazed with what I saw. It was my first – most amazing blog visit (although I saw many after that) and I was hooked. She is not regular nowadays but she still pops up at times.

Ish’s Dead End – I still remember my first comment on Ish’s blog : “You are one hell of a kid!!!”. I was so amazed to see a kid maintaining such a fabulous blog. If you are in a bad mood then Ish’s rants can really cheer you up. I remember how I was in splits when I read his “The Ruhi” post. And yes, I was the winner of the PFHOI contest on his blog. How can I forget that?

Nita’s A wide angle view of India – This woman is amazing. She writes everyday and there is not a single day which goes without one of her posts being published. Everything is so diverse and well etched – The topics, the research, the writing style and the professional way in which her blog is maintained. She is a true blue journalist. And don’t even look at her Blog hits. Your eyes will pop out.

Poonam’s Visceral Observations – The Ms Best Blogger!!! She is also quite infrequent with her posts(like me), but writes very informative and hard hitting posts. Her posts are well sketched out and sometimes full of uncountable links(I am talking about her link posts) 🙂 . She writes on two other blogs and juggles between her job and blogging with ease. A true inspiration.

Ashish’s Thunder of the Dragon – He can drive you crazy with his loony posts and his love for Rock music. In most of his posts, I end up writing a comment which resembles a – 😐 but I must admit that his crazy ideas have inspired many posts on this blog. The Randomizer and the Nebula Mindspin were spin-offs from his blog. He calls me – Zero the Hero and he has an illusion(??) of being the Next Geeky Emperor of the World. Rock on My Lord!!

Reema’s My Random Thoughts – The most dazzling debut in the past year. She climbed up the charts very fast with her sometimes sentimental, sometimes bold and sometimes journalistic posts. An intelligent blogger which I feel is stuck in the wrong city (??? 😀 ) where people are too nosy to be believed. I remember how all of us almost pulled her out of Blogspot’s claws and landed her safely in WordPress. 😆

RamboDoc’s A twist of word and Mind – The father of all “Don’t take them at face value” posts. Believe me, you can’t dissect humor better than him. You might be fooled in the beginning by the seriousness of his posts, but a few visits and you learn to take everything with a pinch of salt. A doctor by profession, RamboDoc has huge female fans following him his blog. Not to be missed at all.

Shefaly’s La Vie Quotidienne – The owner of the most “profound” blog on WordPress (according to RamboDoc), she is one of her kind. Her posts are thoughtful, deep and scholarly and sometimes have the Tongue in cheek quality which makes them immensely enjoyable.

Nitin’s Nikhil’s Mirror Cracked – The Funny guy on the block. He can make you laugh with his simple daily life experiences served with a comical twist. I remember how I rolled on the floor after reading many of his posts. He is a writer too and his first book is already in the market. To read more about the book, click here.

Arvind’s An Entertainment Blog – The Entertainment Blog owner who is apparently a die hard cricket fan too. His blog was full of cricket centric posts once. 🙂 His blog is a nice mix of personal mumblings and latest news with Calvin and Hobbes splashed in-between.

Kids zone – After being surprised by Ish’s creative posts, I came across many kids who were maintaining some very interesting blogs. Come to think of it, I was not even aware of the meaning of a blog at their age. Be it Allirekha’s beautiful poems, Bharat’s touching short stories, Prarthana’s examination woes, Perx’s apprehensions about his new abode, Priya’s bubbly and creative posts, all of them have something special to say and share.

The Balancers – These bloggers are married(well…most of them), they have a job(most of them) or are in colleges and they still blog. They could have easily shrugged and said that we don’t have time for all this.They are the true Supermen/superwomen. Anand’s Musings, Balu’s Chupchap, Dinsan’s Blog(hopefully he belongs to this group), Mehek’s Mind Flirting with thoughts, Harshasrisri’s blog, Joel’s blog, Lallopallo’s blog, Liju(recently married) Philip’s blog, Manoj’s Vagaries of my mind, RJ’s Especiality, Suda’s Life Love and Logic and Xylene’s Crapbook are such blogs, to name a few.

More Girl Power – Lekhni, Sakhi, Nova, Pr3rna and Sulz have their own unique blogs. Lekhni and Sakhi are majorly into Short stories while Pr3rna’s posts are inspired mostly by the current happenings. Nova’s posts are vivacious and spicy while Sulz writes about her own life experiences in her own interesting style.

There are so many other bloggers I wish to acknowledge, but laziness is creeping over me. So please don’t feel sad if your name was not mentioned above. It was due to the yawn dripped laziness I am swimming in right now. I also wanted to award each of the above person and I (almost)promised Shefaly, but the sheer volume of links I have created above sent shivers up my spine.

I will do that. Someday…. 😛

Till then, a huge hug to all of you.

The Indian Olympic Medal Dream

Humans have a very peculiar habit of jumping into two things – Beds and Conclusions. Although this post has nothing to do with the former tendency but the latter is quite flustering specially when it comes from sane earthlings.

Every Olympic ends up brimming the hopes of all the Indians to the hilt. Funnily it reminds me of the poor Indian farmers during the British Raj ( wait..I think they still exist) who used to look at the skies for a few godsend drops of water for their lands. We look at our troop of soldiers(read players) with beseeching eyes in a similar way. We want them to bring Gold medals. Each one of them. Even if they don’t match the skyrocketing world standards of sports or even if they have been battered and bruised by the red tape. We still need the proverbial medal. And God forbid, if they fail ( which they do without failing), we tear them apart like hungry vultures.

What chafes me to no ends is the illogical comparisons with US of A and China. USA has a total of more than 2400 medals till date while India has not even mustered half a century even though India has 17% of the Earth’s population to its disposal.

Can there be a more vague and obscure argument? Can we get anymore foolishly funny?

Why Can’t we face it?

India is a developing nation. According to a 2008 estimation, the Indian population stands at a staggering 1,132,446,000. Out of that 27.5% of the population is living below poverty line. The adult literacy rate is 61.3%. India has the highest rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three as compared to the other countries ( It was 46% in 2007). According to the NSSO survey in 2000, 10% of the population at that time( around 106 million people) were unemployed. A 2007 report by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) found that 65% of Indians, or 750 million people, lived on less than 20 rupees per day.

A developing nation has many burning issues to resolve before it can think of accumulating medals in an international sports event and compete with developed nations. In a developing nation like India, people still worry about their next meal and think twice before dishing out the next 10 Rupees note. India is not all about towns and cities. A huge percentage(72.22%) of Indian population lives in villages. Most of the people there won’t even know what Olympics is.

India has many hurdles to cross, to at least provide the population with a decent lifestyle. When a person does not have to worry about his family’s next meal, then he can think of an Olympic medal. And, yes, there is another side of the coin too.

The Indian Mentality towards a sports culture

If we consider an average middle class Indian family, how many of us have the courage to encourage our children into sports? We all have a certain mentality that life as a sportsman would be nothing else but a life wasted. And are we wrong? The government does not provide any sort of infrastructure to encourage sports. If you go and see the conditions of Government schools in India, you will be shocked by the condition of some of them. It would be a miracle if children find proper classrooms, leave aside a playground with all the facilities. Even in an average Public School, you can’t even dream of a swimming pool and horse riding facilities.

Even after jumping over all these barriers(whether it may be because of parent’s inclination or the child’s stubbornness), if someone is able to meet up to the international standards, the red tape kills the talent. All of us have heard of innumerable stories of sportsmen dying in penury and not receiving any help from government agencies despite their contribution towards sports. Which parents would allow their children to jump into such a profession?

With all due respect to Abhinav Bindra’s talent, he had a family support system behind him which provided him ample facilities and encouragement to excel in his chosen sport. I wonder what would have happened to him if he would have belonged to a middle class family with a pressure of becoming an Engineer on his head?

And then we compare our sportsmen with those belonging to nations where sports is a profession as common and successful as Medicine or Engineering, where children get all the facilities from the very beginning and they are groomed in the line of their interest from the inception of that interest. How fair is that?

Only a rocket can take you to the Moon

According to this very interesting report, India is not able to perform in the Olympics due to Low Social mobility. If the people of a nation are better informed, they perform better. It also cites an example of a rich nation which started performing well after the radio connectivity grew.

So, essentially, if we want to reach the moon, we have to build a rocket. If we want loads of medals, we need to put loads of efforts into other areas too.

• The government needs to provide facilities and encouragement to upcoming sportsmen.
• We have to encourage our children to choose a sport of their liking and excel in that.
• Children have to be provided facilities from the elementary levels.
• Sports should be a proper subject and not just a filler in-between other subjects.

As the nation will develop, the awareness will grow automatically. There are examples of many nations about how to go for it. We have a sports ministry. Don’t we?

Lets not look at the reflection of the moon in the water and cry for it. Lets make a rocket. And if we can’t then lets just shut up.

Related Interesting Reads

Here are a few links which I found very interesting and would like to share –

More than two sides to this coin by Pr3rna

Priorities by Ish

Thinking about Abhinav Bindra not just India’s gold medal by Nita

Your Jaw drops when…

…you notice a guy in your office who is wearing a white shirt with sky blue polka dots on it. A FORMAL SHIRT WITH POLKA DOTS!!!

…you wake up in the middle of the night and find two of your best friends(a boy and a girl of course) kissing. They are sitting next to you in a bus while returning from a school trip and have vehemently denied any sort of a relationship.

…your project leader sends a mail to the whole team without doing a spell check re-reading(*thanks Poonam*) and has misspelled list as lust.

…your project manager sends a “Happy Birthday” mail to you by copy pasting it from the sent items list in his mailbox and forgets to change the name of the earlier recipient. So you get a mail with a “Happy Birthday Vishnu” written in bold instead of “Happy birthday Amit”.

…one of your female friend tells you that a friend of her had a misconception that the male reproductive organ is 1 foot long and is coiled.

…your mother throws a brick at your neighbour’s house because she wants him to stop singing at the top of his voice on a loudspeaker, because your final board exams are going on and because she is cooking food and does not have time to go and talk to him!!!

…you spot an employee of your company sitting in the discussion room and reading Hanuman Chalisa.

…one of your friend at the office comes to you and tells you that she got engaged in the weekend. She was told about the engagement by her family on Friday and the ceremony took place on Saturday. She saw the guy for the first time during the engagement.

…after being verbally battered and bruised with Physics theory questions by two panels for P.hD entrance in JNU and after loosing all hopes of even being considered for a selection, you are selected.

…your grandma tells you that her father was a very rich man and had just finalised a huge land deal in Delhi for a big bungalow just before he died.

…your grandma(again!!!) tells you that she was offered movies when she was young but it was considered inappropriate in that era for girls to act in movies, so her father refused. You feel like going and yelling at your grandma’s dad that if he would have not interfered with his daughter’s destiny, you would have been launched by now and would have won a handful of awards and would have done some movies with Kareena.

…your cousin drops her towel(followed by a scream and slamming of the door) when she is dancing to “Mere khwaboon main jo aaye” as she moved from the bathroom to her room.

…you come to know that one of your roommate whom you considered to be worthless and irritating and someone a girl will never touch with a barge pole, has a girlfriend.

…your classmate in class eight comes one fine morning in the classroom and declares that he had lost his virginity last night and continues to tell his tale after the gasps had died down.

…and finally, when your parents declare that they are not going to search for any girls to marry you because a moron(read astrologer) have told them that their son is going to fall in love soon.