yes, i know the kannimanga has almost(??) become uppumanga! 
I shall soon put it back on the tree!!! 
From Branded to brain-dead… it took me ages…! I know I must have been sorely missed… but hey! Guess who is back! 
I never thought it could get worse than the last year of law school but it just did. Actually, let me confess, this is the worst it can get…hopefully. I am at Work but not at work. In fact the only part of me that is at work is a tiny little part of my brain where Tryptophan is converted into serotonin and then into melatonin, which is then released by the pineal gland[1] and I have had enough trouble because of this with the 5th person just coming and telling me that ‘I shouldn’t sleep ‘cos people notice’. Is there some way I can be totally ‘brain-dead’ where it also stops performing the abovementioned function?
Also I was warned that I shouldn’t be ‘playing with balls’. It’s this absolutely mindless game all of us play in office, consciously, sub-consciously, unconsciously. And indefinitely. After a point you feel like you are going into a trance and that’s when you know you have to stop but you just can’t, even if the Partner is right behind you threatening to fire you from your job. But today I managed to do the impossible, I deleted the game.
I have now finished reading all the posts on whatay.com and also said hello to Sidin Vadakut who refused to say anything more. And now I am in a mood to do some Satkarma and get my Punya quotient higher. (I have been reading some spiritual stuff, excuse the hangover) So I decided to save the long pickled Kannimanga and put it back in the tree. And the people who are busy noticing have now started noticing that I am working on a Word document and is trying to redeem my soul by freeing myself from all the sins I have committed.
I wonder when ‘blogging’ is going to be on the ‘Don’t do’ list…or may be it already is some unwritten rule somewhere…
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep
Blue screen white screen blue bubbles red bubbles yellow bubbles pink bubbles green bubbles blue bubbles shoot hit shoot hit look around stare stare hard harder. ZZzzzzzz…………………
Would you vouch by Gucci, Swatch, Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, Christian Dior, M.A.C, Body shop, Wills, Levis, Benetton, Promod, and Davidoff? Do you know all these Brands? If you don’t, better look it up on Google lest you want to live like a social outcaste and be treated shoddily for being so un-cool and unsophisticated. If your Cupboard has any five of these brands you are cool, and if you have ten of them you are super cool and if you have all of them you are nothing less than a rock star and you deserve to be treated with respect and regard. Welcome to the Brand new world. You might have a bath only twice a week and you might walk into the class room/office in your Pyjamas, you might not shave, you might not comb your hair, but if you use Marks & Spencers body wash and if you wear an Armani T-shirt and Adidas Slippers, and if you have a Fossil and have Boss perfume and come in a Honda City or if you have a Merc at home, you are the dream guy for the modern brand conscious girl.
It could feel nice to own a Tommy Hand bag, a Dolce & Gabbana perfume, Marks & Spencers lingerie, a Body shop lip balm, a Gucci watch, or have a hair cut from Habibs or Juice as an indulgence. It could also possibly turn into a false sense of pride and superiority which goes beyond just pampering yourself. But the worst is when you judge a person going by how many of these brands he has on him and treat him depending on his knowledge of them. It is indecent and absolutely ugly. This is the hideous face of the Brand-crazy materialistic world: to define a person by how much he can buy and own, without seeing beyond/beneath the clothes and the perfumes.
In this world one should surely count and salute simplicity, minimalism and modesty as the greatest and ever-disappearing virtues amidst the greed for money, attention and the unbridled enthusiasm and determination to injure other’s pride and brand them as ‘uncool’ and ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘crude’ just because they do not know how to pronounce ‘Versace’ or that they do not know what Gucci is.
You liked it
When I had to stand
On tippy-
Toes
Just to kiss you.
Then I’d come crashing
Down,
Smiling
Like I
Had saved the world.
courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chasingtwilight/372425816/
posted it here ‘cos i found it is so simple yet so beautiful…
I signed my Retainer Agreement on 20th of January and I am officially an Associate (‘A-0′) with the best law firm in the country and quite rightly I do feel like a zero at times!;)
It makes me wonder how many of us are doing what we truly want to do in life and how many of us are what we truly want to be…
I just came across a forward which was about some people drinking Coffee at a get-together. There were different kinds of Coffee mugs – some plastic, some glass, some wooden, some really ‘cool’ ones and the ‘best’ ones were all taken first leaving behind only the cheap mugs.. Later a guy makes this observation and tells them about how our minds are so misled to be more consious of the quality of the Cofee mug than what it holds, very metaphorical of the choices we make in our lives.I did feel that the E-mail conveyed some interesting message..
But end of the day aren’t we actually doing what we want to do and what we decide to do at that point when we make the decision, balancing all the pros and cons. It is true that we might think otherwise a couple of years later or we might have thought differently couple of years ago… But does that matter now? Now, we go for the crystal mug if that would make us feel better, even if it can hold only half as much Coffee as a plastic mug… and if we do go for the crystal mug, it means it is more important.period. Call it naive, but it Is. But whether it ought to be? the conflict between ‘as it Is’ and ‘as it Ought to be’ continues….
Some Coffee for Thought??
This post shall be heavily footnoted so that the people around me would think that I am busy drafting an important legal opinion for an important client[1]
My last post was about how I have been literally living online. One (un)fine day the e-God happened to stumble upon it and decided to send me offline for 14 years, something like the Pandavas’ Vanavasam, except that mine had fewer demons. But He was missing me so badly He decided to remit my sentence and take me back. So now I am back to what I do best when I have nothing better to do[2]
I am in the middle of an internship and after successfully pretending[3] to be working hard on FEMA[4] and Companies Act for the first couple of days I decided that I should be more honest and open about my “main areas of interest”. Therefore these days, my boss would stop by my seat and ask me whether something was seriously wrong if he doesn’t see least two chat windows open on my screen and end of the day I am truly a waste of oxygen in this room where we are not supposed to talk nor fart[5].
Now I have decided that its time I went home ‘cos there is an excess of oxygen there which is floating around calling out for me and also because my mom has started referring to our dog as ‘lekha’. The other day when I was on the phone with her I overheard her screaming to my dad, “shut the gates and let lekha out for sometime”.
So now I need a ticket to go home and at the risk of being ridiculed and laughed at, I admit that I checked on the IRCTC[6] website for a ticket to Thrissur for the 23rd of December. It was so sorry for me it had ‘regret’ written all over it.
But finally I managed to find a bus ticket for the 24th and I really hope my mom doesn’t call me appooo when I go home. That would be like the LSOTCB[7]
[1] Who would send a BMW for me to go to his office, send cake and flowers for me, take me out for lunch to the Taj, sponsor my holiday in Goa and then present me a diamond…blah, never mind!
[2] ……………………………….
[3] Staring indefinitely at the RBI website till I start seeing Rabindranath Tagore’s face in it. Then I realize I have spent enough time on it and stare at SEBI website till I start getting a head ache.
[4] Why don’t you Google it?
[5] My boss thought it was so funny that she told me this the first day and laughed so much that she almost chocked.
[6] Indian Railways Cleaning Train Compartments. http://www.irctc.co.in/ even better, go hang yourself if you don’t know this
[7] No points for guessing this one right.
News flash: “the youngest man on earth who was 17 years, x months and y days old was shot dead today…”
Those of you who have seen the movie ‘Children of Men’ would know what I am talking about. The movie opens with this huge racket around the death of the ‘youngest man on earth’ who was about 17 years old. Now, there is something strange about the whole thing. Yes, something must have gone wrong somewhere. Here is the catch; mankind has been under a curse for more than 17 years: humans could no longer procreate; they were under the curse of infertility and the last child ever to have born just got shot.
I happened to think of this movie when I was chatting to a friend from school the other day:
F: You have a laptop?
Me: yeah…
F: do you keep it on your lap?
Me: no, keep it on my head. duhh..!!
F: And you are online 24 *7!!
Me: well… mmm..not really..! yea…kind of…
F: stupid girl, don’t you know, it will make u become infertile…!
Me: :O
I immediately did some research on this, of course I looked online but I kept the laptop on my pillow this time, I didn’t want to learn things the hard way. I spoke to some experts who could clarify things. Apparently scientists somewhere came out with a finding that the heat from the laptop damages the sperm and fertility in men and the theory could possibly be extended to women too. So the Movie was not too far from reality.
For the record, out of 24 hrs in a day, I would be in class for about two hrs and then I would sleep for about (apart from the 1 hr and 45 minutes in class) 7 hrs, which leaves me with 15 hrs of the day which I live online. Everybody on campus would be online and then of course there is the rest of the world. There are very few things for which I need to step out of my room, my neighbour usually pings me to ask me to turn down my speaker volume, my friends give me wake-up calls on Gtalk, we submit softcopies of projects, share pictures, discuss ‘hostel and campus welfare’ through the ‘class-group’ and exchange ‘virtual’ hugs, kisses, cuddles, spanks, flowers and a whole lot of things through messengers and the various social networking sites.
Lately, I have come across a lot of write-ups about how people are losing interest in ‘sex’ because they find more interesting/pleasurable stuff on the internet. So the ‘infertility theory’ isn’t the whole truth, fertility might not matter anymore as long as people are e-fertile.
In my first semester when I didn’t check my mails for a month my hotmail inbox got automatically emptied ‘coz there was ‘no activity’ there. Anyways that seems like another lifetime now, a deprived life. Makes me wonder what really kept us alive considering what we live on these days, could be love and fresh air and the constant, ‘C,’ a.k.a miserable mess food.
My ‘uninspired neighbour’ (self proclaimed), P, (I save some comments for later because I wish to live longer) had this funny conversation with her friend from nursery:
F: Hi!! How come you are not sleeping?
P: Yea, I found this thing called messenger, it’s amazing! And now I sleep less.
F: Yea, I can see that. Do you wear specs?
P: No. why?
F: How come your eyes haven’t exploded? Seriously!
P: Very funny! Go die yaaa..! <makes weird faces at the screen, the laptop gets hung for a minute>
Since then she has been seen wearing shades in her room and even in her sleep. And some people have turned a new leaf by uninstalling Gtalk. So there is still some hope.
There are no particular motives behind this post apart from simple retrospection. No advice to give, no resolutions made. Life must go on…line!
We are having a tough time on our little planet which for some strange reason doesn’t seem to be traveling on the back of four giant elephants on the turtle shell but instead on the back of thousand one hundred and forty nine toads and few wolves and Jackals which seem to be slowly climbing over to our side of the planet. There must surely be a mistake.
We wake up to eerie screaming and howling during wee hours of the night and in the morning we see the vestiges of a battle never seen and never fought: overturned waste bins and things strewn around the courtyard and all along the veranda, mysterious stains on the ground and the walls.
They have already taken over the bathrooms and some of the rooms too, almost ousting the occupants who are still determined to stay put and give it a fight (with brooms, curtain rods, Bagon spray and freaky screaming). When we put up a notice on the bathroom door which read “we are all animals living here so it’s ok not to flush”, never thought that the day would come when our loos would be actually used by beasts and our planet would become the next animal planet. The worst was when one of us, endangered species, opened the waste bin to throw a banana peel and found a Wolf inside it. After that she refuses to peel bananas before eating them. Another day some girl woke up with a toad sitting on her chest croaking away: “I cud stay awake just to see you breathing, watch you smile while you are sleeping, while you are far away dreaming…I don’t want to miss a thing”… when she suddenly woke up and what ensued is future. The frog hasn’t, oops, the girl hasn’t slept ever since.
In spite of all this most of us have been very kind to all the wolves, the tigers, the Jackals and the dinosaurs, sometimes feeding them and keeping them warm. We have been surviving by evolving some smart strategies like the ‘Flush and Run’ which works pretty well while using the loo and ‘scream the pee out of it’ which is again not a bad strategy for the effort.
Then one day the blood thirsty hunters found their way into the animal planet and captured a ‘mental’ Wolf and did things to it which are better not be spoken of. The girls fought for the cause of the poor animal and were victimized for their compassion by the hunters and their masters, which happen to be the “One man army” of N*****. We were informed that since some Cross society did not respond to the repeated requests for a solution to the issue of the evolution of this small animal planet, the very cross One man army decided to take things into its own (mostly hairy) hands. The plan is to stage a Coup when we are all away for a while from our ‘vanavasam’ when they would win back our planet for us from the other animals ‘cos they think we are better animals and they prefer us. Long live our planet and let the toads go back to carrying it on their backs. In the end, thanx for all the toads!
Amma had taken this picture of achan feeding a tiny leaf to a goat. It was taken on their very recent trip to amma’s house in Kollam. I am guessing those are my grand mother’s goats and the greenery you can see in the picture is part of our little farm called ‘ammoommayyam’ which literally translates to grandmom’s farm! Amma sent me the picture saying it is a very rare one. It is indeed.
I guess achan was caught unawares and I think he looks most adorable in it. I feel very amused when I see him play with animals or small babies. I get this gut feeling that those poor little things also find it very amusing and also a little confusing, like the goat in the picture which is thinking that probably the almost microscopic leaf is from some heavenly plant which is being fed to it so that it shall never feel hungry in this life. Sometimes achan makes sounds which I never thought he was capable of making though everybody else in his family are exceptionally good at it that our neighbours once thought amma had lost her mind when they once heard her ‘communicating’ (read trying to communicate) to our dog and they were overheard saying ‘pavam teacher, she has gone totally insane’. But I never knew my dad was silently picking up these things from us. My mom is totally not amused with it and is very jealous because our little pet monkey[1] responds to my dad like she understood every word of what he says and all said and done, end of the day, whatever unearthly sounds we make, once achan shouts ‘trampeeee’ (which is supposed to be my dog’s name though it is hardly called that) , she would come runnig even if she was sitting down to s**t and surely, for Trampy, her master is the indisputable Hero indeed.
[1] It’s not a monkey, it’s a dog which is actually a bitch. This is another way of ‘pampering’; something close to calling your baby a ‘little monster’ or your brother a ‘big teddy bear’ or your friend a ‘kallapanni’ (sly pig), runs in the family again.
