Wandering while lying down

Life's symphonies

2007-04-04T22:23:00.000+05:30

When does a place turn from being foreboding and strange to someone which you can connect with and blend right in?in my case-when it plays a song which you think existed only on your life's soundtrack.a few instances--2 years back a little pizzeria off Charing Cross Rd suddenly plays Dreams by the Cranberries.And,I am home.

Closer home:
A dive at Dadar TT by the name of Ashok.Playing the usual mish mash of Himesh R etc but suddenly the Speakers pour out Mozart's symphony no.39 and me and Miggy look at each other with raised eyebrows.And smile.

Hard Rock Cafe last week.It's my first time there.Nice place ,like the ones abroad etc.Good music,but the K-Factor is still missing.And suddenly Collective Soul's December is the next track.
'Why follow me to higher ground,Lost that you swear I am'

And a decade vanishes.

And a new gym.You know how they are.
And yet,in the middle of the crowd,Bob Sinclair's 'World,Hold On' club mix featuring Steve Edwards finds its way into the playlist and gets me tapping again.

Rewind-1

2007-04-04T10:14:00.000+05:30

90 days over already so far in 2007.It has been the best of times,and it has been the worst of times.Though I am glad to say it has been more of the former and sufficiently Dickensian as well.
I have managed to sail on board a fine ship,fly on a superb private jet,get upgraded to the front of the aircraft amongst other things.Not very significant achievemnts,I agree.However,if someone had told me I'll be doing all this and more ,back in 1997-1998,I would have laughed them off.And yet,this is exactly what has happened.My takeaway from this is that if one does what one likes very much,solely as an interest and without expecting any little benefit as an outcome,then there is a probability to be pleasantly surprised by it all.
It can be overwhelming at times,but stay the course.
I also managed to get around a bit;made some new friends with that surprising collision of different worlds which leaves the core values and mindsets intact.I got to discover and explore new bookshops in different places courtesy friends who have been there before and thought that they were the best places in bustling metropolises for me.
I managed to be out in the Karnataka sun for a week at a stretch;was dehydrated most fo the time,was sunburnt,dusty and still had a smile which makes me smile when I look at my pictures from there.
I met a few heroes as well while doing all of the above.
Workwise too,it has been a learning phase.I am not where I would have liked to be but I am a firm believer of a patient approach.I had a superb trip to DXB (where I also took part in the 10-K)

Le Blog est Mort;Vive le Blog1

2007-04-01T10:11:00.000+05:30

Yep.

200 million dead blogs out there.Time to this one rolling again.

The Inner Jester Prompts....

2007-02-17T13:55:00.000+05:30

- Come on, kid. Get in there. Engage.- You've got a bogey at two o'clock.
Take the shot, kid.

You can engage any time, Maverick.

- Where the hell are you going?- It doesn't look good.

What do you mean? It doesn't getto look any better than that.

Hey, man. We could have had him...

I'll fire when I'm goddamngood and ready. You got that?

- He won't engage.- It's only been a few days.

- He just might not make it back.- Keep sending him up.

Fruits of a Classical Education,My Dear

2007-02-17T13:50:00.000+05:30

A pertinent look at the state of Classical Education in the UK today.
I shudder to take a similar look at whats happening in India today.

Kim Karomi?

The decline of declension
Harry Mount
January 3, 2007 4:35 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/harry_mount/2007/01/post_860.html

The news that the teaching of classics in state schools is facing extinction is bloody sad news. But it's not new news.

Latin and Greek have been in decline in state schools for the last four decades, ever since successive Labour and Conservative governments began destroying grammar schools. In 1960, 60,000 children did Latin O-level. Now, 10,000 do the much more basic replacement, GCSE (and, of these, in 2003, only 1,707 came from state schools).

When it comes to A-levels, it's time to drag in the life-support machine: only 5,000 children a year take a classical A-level of any sort; that's less than 0.8% of all A-levels taken. And, if the future looks less than rosy for Latin, it's wine-dark for Greek. Fewer than a thousand children a year do GCSE Greek, squeezed out by its declining stablemate, Latin.

What is new, though, is the terribly defeatist attitude taken to propping up classics as it enters its death throes. Classics is wonderful, goes the thinking. But people are finding it too difficult, so fewer of them are doing it. The answer? Aha! Make it easier.

That's the opinion of Bob Lister, one of the last two lecturers in England to train classics teachers and the man who has carried out the latest research into the decline. Mr Lister thinks that Latin GCSEs should be made easier, with less translation from the original.

Zero out of ten, Mr Lister. To paraphrase Kingsley Amis, easier will mean worse. No one points to, say, maths, and thinks - ooh, calculus is a little difficult; let's not inflict it on the poor lambs; adding and subtracting is enough to be going with.

And the same should go for Latin. The reason why people who have done classics are often bright, with a command of grammar and an understanding of the roots of classical and English literature, is because it's actually quite hard to learn all those things. Hard, but highly worthwhile.

Learn Latin and not only will you understand English better, but you will also, more importantly, understand Latin better - the language in which some of the most stirring prose and poetry ever was written. Know Latin, and you will know world literature from the third century BC, when writers got going in Rome, through the so-called Golden Age of Latin: Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Cicero and Caesar; the Augustan Age: Ovid, Horace, Virgil and Livy; down to the end of the Silver Age in 120 AD: Martial, Juvenal, Lucan, Seneca, Pliny and Tacitus.

Wonderful books to know. But, like a lot of wonderful things, they need a bit of effort to be appreciated.

A College Education Without Job Prospects

2007-02-14T16:07:00.000+05:30

A thought-provoking article from Yenn Why Tea

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/business/worldbusiness/30college.html?ei=5088partner=rssnyt&en=23907b6b6f9b384e&ex=1322542800&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

November 30, 2006
A College Education Without Job Prospects
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI, India, Nov. 29 — The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.
India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.
Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.
But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.
In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India’s 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obedience and light on useful job skills.
Students, executives and educators say this two-tier education system is locking millions of people into the bottom berths of the economy, depriving the country of talent and students of the chance to improve their lot. For those who succeed, what counts is the right skills.
“It’s almost literally a matter of life and death for them,” said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade body that represents many leading employers. “The same person from the same institution with the same grades, but not having these skills, will either not get employed at all or will probably get a job in a shop or something.”
India is that rare country where it seems to get harder to find a job the more educated you are. In the 2001 census, college graduates had higher unemployment — 17 percent — than middle or high school graduates.
But as graduates complain about a lack of jobs, companies across India see a lack of skilled applicants. The contradiction is explained, experts say, by the poor quality of undergraduate education. India’s thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to turn out degree holders whom no one wants to hire.
A study published by the software trade group last year concluded that only 10 percent of graduates with nonspecialized degrees were considered employable by leading companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the Indian government on overhauling the education system, said, “The real crisis for me is the place where 70 percent of your graduates are students who do basic science, bachelor of arts and bachelor of commerce.”
Bijal Vora, a commerce student at Hinduja College here in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, would welcome a redesign of the system. “We have not done this to become salespeople,” she said.
Hinduja is in one of India’s richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, little-known school, and so it exemplifies a middling college experience — neither the best nor the worst.
Between lectures there, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.
“What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different,” a commerce student, Sohail Kutchi, said.
Kinjal Bhuptani, a final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. “The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,” she said. “We might as well not have studied.”
The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as the essential job skills evolve from pushing papers to answering phones to making presentations. They said their courses offered few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this supposedly English-language college, the professors often used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.
Across India, half of graduates are not taught in English, effectively barring them from the high-end labor market, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys, a leading outsourcing company. And where English is taught, it is not necessarily the kind employers need.
“Depreciation nikal diya, assets ko less ho gaya.” So went a lesson being given by the accounting professor at Dahanukar College in suburban Mumbai — removing depreciation reduces assets — an example of the widespread use in supposedly English-language colleges of Hinglish, an amalgam of Hindi and English.
A lack of communications skills may be the most obvious shortcoming, but it is not the only one. A deeper problem, specialists say, is a classroom environment that treats students like children even if they are in their mid-20’s. Teaching emphasizes silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis and debate.
“Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!” a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. Soon after his departure, the door cracked open again, and the student asked if he could at least take his bag.
The reply: “Out! Out! Who said you could stand here?” A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up and cease taking notes.
Then there is the matter of teaching style. At Hinduja and Dahanukar, the mode of instruction at times evokes a re-education camp of some sort. In a marketing class at Hinduja, the professor paced in front, then pressed her chalk to the board.
She drew a tree diagram dividing it into indirect and direct marketing, then divided those into components, and those further into subcomponents. As students frantically took notes, she kept going, and before long she was teaching them that each region of Mumbai would have its own marketing representative: eastern Mumbai, western Mumbai, central Mumbai. There was no discussion, and there was little to discuss.
The professor then led the students in a chant: “What is span of management?”
“Span of management is the number of subordinates a supervisor will manage.” She chanted the refrain four times.
Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons — to read books, found clubs or stage plays.
That is not good news for Indian companies, which are hiring these days. Infosys will take on 25,000 people this year from a pool of 1.5 million applicants. The ranks of the rejected are likely to include smart graduates who lack qualities like poise, articulateness and global exposure, Mr. Pai of Infosys said.
And even if rigid teaching ways are changed, experts say the rigidity of Indian households will continue.
“When we are raising our children,” said Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who is chairman of the Knowledge Commission and was an adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, “we constantly tell them: ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. Stand here, stand there.’ It creates a feeling that if there is a boundary, you don’t cross it. You create boxes around people when we need people thinking outside the box.”

Flying-1

2007-02-14T13:00:00.000+05:30

New changes to blogspot and all..
And me not even writing anything!!!

My sis described me in an interesting way the other day--
'You are the one who stays awake on airplanes and goes off to sleep in movie halls'

:-)

What do you reckon folks?

Day 1

2007-01-05T15:06:00.000+05:30

PS-- I wrote this on the 2nd,havent been able to upload it till now .Servers seem slow?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I had a wonderful start to 2007.So did everyone ,I hope.

I went to sleep at 0230 hrs after catching up with Herr M and MP at a 'family restaurant ' at Chembur.A bottle of Sula White was duly opened at 2 minutes past midnight and the assemblage raised a toast to each other secretly hoping they would be with leggy lasses the next new year's eve.
Anyways,more of what was discussed later.But,it was a rock solid evening with two rock solid chaps and that means a lot.
So anyways,I was up at 0600-went for a 6 km run at 0630 which ,much to my surprise,finished in an hour.Then came home,had breakfast,chatted with the folks,went to work.Sent and recd messages and calls through the day.

And so on and so forth...yawn..feeling sleepy..more later....

But,tell you what--2007 promises to be as interesting as 2006 with the added fun of it being the latest model/version/iteration.

Dus Bahane.......

A resolution for 2007

2007-01-01T22:33:00.000+05:30

No more procrastination from tomorow.

Why I am an Historian (Amateur of course)

2007-01-01T21:55:00.000+05:30

This is from today's NYT.A piece which makes you go:I wish I had written this!

Well,anyways,this is from one of the finest Liberal practioners of his art:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/opinion/01schlesinger.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

January 1, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Folly’s Antidote
By ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER Jr.
MANY signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. “The longer you look back,” said Winston Churchill, “the farther you can look forward.”

But all historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and of our age. We cannot seize on ultimate and absolute truths. So the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise — the quest for an unattainable objectivity.
Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present. When new urgencies arise in our own times and lives, the historian’s spotlight shifts, probing at last into the darkness, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had carelessly excised from the collective memory. New voices ring out of the historical dark and demand to be heard.

One has only to note how in the last half-century the movements for women’s rights and civil rights have reformulated and renewed American history. Thus the present incessantly reinvents the past. In this sense, all history, as Benedetto Croce said, is contemporary history. It is these permutations of consciousness that make history so endlessly fascinating an intellectual adventure. “The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.”

We are the world’s dominant military power, and I believe a consciousness of history is a moral necessity for a nation possessed of overweening power. History verifies John F. Kennedy’s proposition, stated in the first year of his thousand days: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient — that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience. Self-knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives. It should strengthen us to resist the pressure to convert momentary impulses into moral absolutes. It should lead us to acknowledge our profound and chastening frailty as human beings — to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly displayed, that the future outwits all our certitudes and that the possibilities of the future are more various than the human intellect is designed to conceive.
Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity — the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Three decades ago, we suffered defeat in an unwinnable war against tribalism, the most fanatic of political emotions, fighting against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests. Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same arrogant folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable. The Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna famously said, “Behold, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”

A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to manage the tragic temptations of military power. Let us not bully our way through life, but let a growing sensitivity to history temper and civilize our use of power. In the meantime, let a thousand historical flowers bloom. History is never a closed book or a final verdict. It is forever in the making. Let historians never forsake the quest for knowledge in the interests of an ideology, a religion, a race, a nation.

The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing — the search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.
History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation’s history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who has won Pulitzer Prizes for history and biography, is the author, most recently, of “War and the American Presidency.”

Happy 2007

2007-01-01T21:50:00.000+05:30

Ok,

So my previous post was titled Happy New Year as well...which means I havent been here in quite some time.

Anyways,

A Happy New 2007 to you all.

Here we are now,entertain us.

Happy New Year

2006-08-20T16:25:00.000+05:30

Now bid me run,And I will strive with things impossible.

Another year begins.
Its been such a fantastic year,this last year.
New places visited,old ones refamiliarised.
New friends hopped on board.Some have gone on to new destinations,new lives.But they'll always be a part.

The mind is restless,constantly traisping through an enchanted wood of thoughts.
Time to wear the g-suit and begin the sortie....

Hail

2006-05-07T11:01:00.000+05:30

Ah Cha,

I remember my pwd :)

2006-03-08T12:40:00.000+05:30

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.

- They change the sky, not their soul, who run across the sea.

2006-03-07T19:52:00.000+05:30

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.

-Samuel Johnson

And then again-

Gnothi se auton" ("Know Thyself") i

Inscribed on Apollo's Oracle of Delphi temple in ancient Greece.

Wanderings -1

2006-03-03T09:46:00.000+05:30

Chennai.

Already been to Delhi,Indore and Tirupati so far since February.Was in Bangalore last year for Aero India.And was in Delhi for PLASTINDIA to the exact date
from last year.A year gone past.Feels like yesterday;feels like a year away;feels like forever away.SMS Beep as i type this.Its my word of the day service.Today's word-Sojourn SOH-jurn Intransitive Verb: To stay as a temporary resident or to dwell
for a time.
How appropriate.
2 months of 2006 gone by. Delhi flashes past.Meeting Maz-San,the usual industry contacts.The
turmoil when a truck goes missing.The sheer energy of those 6 tradeshow days.Wearing blazers
everyday.First time in my life I have spent so much on myself at a go.On clothes that
too;still will stretch them for along time I guess.Visiting familiar bookshops in
Delhi;meeting personal heroes,hearing about other heroes.Making plans;Hash and Punjabi by
Nature with Hi-Ren 2 days after hanging out with his bunch at Embassy.Visiting the National
Stamp Museum;walk around this hall and you will have walked through all the positive facets
of India.And the negative facet too: we just do not know how to market ourselves.Back to
bookshops.Surprising tendency of self to eerily locate particular sections automatically
even in strange bookshops.Went to Gurgaon and met up with KV and family.Went to Noida once too.Brilliant townships
with a landscape reminiscent of Americana ,specially int nhe case of Gurgaon.Major road
works happenning.The poverty remains the same.And the same retail chains everywhere.So much that you cannot distinguish Mehrauli from
Mulund and GK1 from GK77.On to Indore.Ask for an alarm for 0330.Wake up automatically at 0324;phone rings at 0325.A voice
asks,'Wake up Alarm Sir?' I reply yes.Am brushing my teeth when it r ings again 0330.Same voice:'Good Morning Sir,your wake up
alarm'.Sigh.IGI in the morning.A lot of traffic at the Palam roundabout.Check-in sufficiently
quick.Breakfast in the 9W lounge.Lounge inhabited by Laptop toting,laptop operating types at
0430 in the morning.I have corn flakes,cold milk,a bit of bread and something else I cannot
remember what.Then try id-ing tarmac silhouttes.The AAI Daks are moved to a corner.Proceed for security check,Step out on to the tarmac as a February Breeze flutters the
Windsock.It is good to be back at an airport again.Lots of A320s,ATRs,B737s in varied
liveries abound.Mine is an ATR-42.I feel like a beauty pageant judge.
Of the swimnsuit round no less.

Take off and the flt are good.And then I am in Indore.Cute little airport.

Visit Nani;then go the shop and get back to watching the world go by.Meet a couple of customers.Catch up with Dida and the kids that evening at Mama's place.We make plans for Omkareshwar the next day.Last time I went there was in 1989 .Sonal hadnt arrived yet.So it was me,Mum and Dad along with the Indoris.Sparse crowd that day in Omkareshwar.We go boating.Flat bottomed boats.The reason for this becomes evident as they go over a bit of rocks .Water is cool.I refuse to t ake the holy dip.Then we get back to the city.Drop Dida ,Srish and Hanuman home.Go see Nani again.Feel depressed at seeing her frailness.Then Bed and sleep.
Reach BOM the next morning.
More later.
This update comes to you via the RED WI-FI service at t he Oriental Inn Chennai and the D-Link card purchased yesterday from Spencer Plaza.
Whee.
Liberation.

Mumbai Marathon!

2006-01-15T19:01:00.000+05:30

Did the Dream Run at the Mumbai Marathon today.
7 km
With a Team from MARS (www.mumbai-hams.org)

Pleasant Fun

More later....

Run Mumbai Run

(P.S-Nice to have you on the phone on the other end as I type this pdate..:-D )

Reading Update-1

2006-01-14T21:36:00.000+05:30

Books to Read in 2006 == 100

Read so far(i.e completed) so far in 2006
=3

1.The Picture of Dorian Gray
2.Backroom Boys
3.Mystic River

..............

2006-01-14T11:22:00.000+05:30

Up.Yes,will update.Readers as far apart as Walkeshwar,Michigan and Bangalore want updates....:-)

Up

2006-01-10T10:38:00.000+05:30

Hurrah!

I remember my password!

2005-11-15T13:41:00.000+05:30

Surprises.
How someone can change to an unrecognisiable extent and expect you to remain the same for them.And you being you,do so.
How the most secretive people will blare everything about themselves to the world on their blog.
How for a fabolously rich agro economy,there are people who still go to bed hungry.
How easy is it for people to compulsively whine,moan,lack the objectivity to percieve themselves as the world sees them,then again be fretful,moody over the most trivial of issues.

I want to be like them.
Normal people.
People who are part of the swirling crowd.
People who only see others in front of them and around them.
People who cannot lift up their heads and look up into the sky.

But Minerva's curse won't go away easily,will it?

Work Up-1-DrinkEx

2005-10-05T16:49:00.000+05:30

Post Visarjan,back to the usual work up routine.3 of the Dons are coming into the Colony in the coming few days.Starting with Rak,then Maz and then Big Boss
Rak has behaved appallingly with Maz before leaving for Injea,so we are pissed with him in return.This is simply not done;As Megs once said,I can find something good in anybody,but now even I am exasperated with Rak.So Rak comes in and we plan to meet up on tuesday the 20th.Darshan,the lost Bombayite in Bangalore is in town as well so invite him in too.Mika,the trusty sidekick,joins in as well.We arrange to meet at the refuelling base in Powai;it rains on the way;your correspondent turns up there on time only to discover Mika has overshot the Kanjur exit on the highway and will be doing a going around at Mulund and coming.Darshan is stuck somewhere in Andheri due to the rain,traffice and the three wheeled beasts.So anyways,I see a figure pop up in front of me while I am strolling in the rain ;the apparition hisses my name with a displaced mallu accent;bingo it IS Rak;he looks fidgety and uneasy.To cut a short story shorter,he says he has to rush back home as his grandma doesnt know where he is,he hands me the gear and then casually mentions he paid a 1000 rupiya to the autowala who got him here as his meter was not working.I stand rooted to the spot and then I am so dizzy it feels like flying with the cockpit canopy down.Anyways,he runs back off to Santa Cruz after i re instruct him how to read meters .Mika turns up after that,we call up DD for his fix,he is still where he was.We ask him to RTB and proceed up stairs for orange juice.With Smirnoff.Turns out it was a happy day there so we get another round free.usual weirdos in the joint,including one guy who looked suspiciously like Jagman but wasnt.
Then the resentment abt Rak and his auto fare,though we hoped the autowala had a kajra re of a time with Rak's money.Complained about it up my direct chain of command-both to AFA and High Wycombe.Both bosses extremely pissed;truly the things we endure doing what we do.
Maz comes in on Friday morning;first goes to local Andheri hotel near Chakala ciggy factory.Austin goes and meets him before i do;I turn up there around noon after getting away from work.Maz is waiting at the steps of the joint as I pay off the rickshaw.And he has a huge smile on his face to see me,laughs at my hair blowing in the wind.We do the usual hail fellow well met routine,Austin is int he lobby goin thru the stuff Maz has got for him.It feels good to be with him again,we end up mystifying Austin.Then we get into the Maruti pvt cab for the ride to da other hotel,the main hub aka the Base aka ITC Sheaton,Parel.Its good to talk on the way back;though frankly there is an epiphany that all this has been spoken before.With Maz,thats the way it is actually.SMSs arrive from Motu in kent and Networ in Sussex enquirin abt Maz's well being or lack of it!We reach the hotel,Maz is on full visual scana nd search,nobody at the hotel is spared.We proceed to check in,go up to the room where I am prevented by Maz fm sampling the bar and fridge.We talk back and forth for a while...then get a move on to Phoenix where his Visual goes kaputt.Its 1500 whenn we end up at Spaghetti Kitchen where we start on the Kilo Fox and yum food.We keep talking,switching topics seamlessly back and forth.Then off to Sharma Saab's house.A thorough old world gentleman.As expected,I blabber and blabber with him.But he has done some amazing things!
Had called Mika to meet us at Maz's hotel.He is waiting for us at the lobby.We go across to aFrederick's for the free tapki.Me and Maz with the LIT and the boy with Mojito.Our drinks order is taken by a Mizo gal and Maz opens up with his cannon.The girl gets pissed and someone else serves us,so Maz is back to mulling over his attraction to girls of the noth east and their lack of regarding him.We talk him out of it,then with 2 drinks down,decide to head back home.By taxi.Anyways a nice evening was had by all.Which means that Saturday will be splendid!
And it was.
Watch this space.
Pathfinder under radio silence.

Ganesha Says

2005-10-05T15:19:00.000+05:30

Did MARS duty at chowpatty thi syear as well.Hats off to the authorities for pulling it all off what with the myriad threats in the area.Met up with Nirav,Shantanu,Huz,Zyros,Ulhas,etc.Good fun to be there and actually help people.
Incidentally,Ulhas is also part of birdsofbombay,so it really is a small world after all.
Its a Seva for each one of us in our own way.Chowpatty continued to be the hub for the Mumbai Golf Alfa Yankee community on Visarjan evening.Thousands of them.It makes one sad to watch the State armtwist these guys so much.Anyways,ours not to reason why and all that.
Too lazy to post pics from Visarjan.Maybe later.

2005-09-26T22:36:00.000+05:30

So what exactly have I been up to?Hmm..let me go back a few days and run past the highlights...Saw the new YashRaj offering Salaam Namaste in the company of two
girls-DJ and her friend whose name,embarassingly,does not jog my
memory.Still it is a pleasant sensation and I did not how much I missed
this until i went for the movie.So anyways,the movieAh well.It is a good example fo what a mass produced,mass marketed,filmed abroad movie is like.
In a word,Unimaginative.
So we have the succesful plot of boy meets girl accidentally,hate each
other over the phone due to a misunderstanding and hate each other
again and again.Then they encounter each other somewhere,without
knowing who the other is,do the weird group bollywood dance on a
Melbourne beach and fall for each other.Pretty soon they move in with
each other ;No,No..not for THAT,just so they can spend time with each
other and learn each other's habits and see where can they take the
relationship from there.Painful hilarity ensues in the form of Javed Jaffrey who is their
prospective landlord with a long legged lass as his mistress and an
even longer reprise of Feroz Khan's B-Gradiest ham roles(by Javed I
mean,not the monosyllabic miss)So all is hunky dory,the metrosexual Saif does the cooking and
cleaning,and the dual role capable Screechy Zinta juggles jobs as a
radio jockey on the eponymous music station and a surgeon in the making
in the day.Eventually,the yuppie couple do fall big time for each other and fall
into bed too.And later,due to a lack of believing in the adage of keep
the South East Asian rubber economies thriving,they end up with child.Now,our lad is so not prepared for fatherhood and hustles the dolly
into getting rid of 'It' ,which obviously she does not,else the movie
would not have lasted past the popcorn break.So,we follow the myriad twists and turns the plot takes which is mainly a display of Saif's character's immaturity.
They continue living in the same house seperately ,because we are reminded they really have no other place to show as both have paid a substantial downpayment on the
rent.And then they fight,go hunting for ice-cream together;the lad comes to
the realisation that maybe the baby thing is fine for him.
Arshad Warsi as his sidekick who marries Screechy's pal Screamy (Tania Zaetta,the
newest member of the YawnRaj family) is bearable.
Big B's prescient comment haunts the mind.
Anyways,all's well that ends well including making Screechy accept the wedding ring before entering the delivery
room where they enact the delivery room scene from 9 Months.
Sigh.
I just decribed a 2 and half hour movie in 5 mins.Anyways,while the movie deals with a topical and bold subject,one
wonders why could not they be bolder and set it in India;and why resort
to hackneyed scenes.One feels let down at the end of it all.
Still ,it gets 3 stars:one each for the babes,the beach and the Ben and
Jerry's ice-cream.
And they din't even show the Penguins of Melbourne.

Come September

2005-09-26T18:48:00.000+05:30

Watching the original Indian Idol show on Chowpatty,inhaling the sea,catching up with other Marians,visiting libraries,getting the rush and thrill of finding an unexpected book.
And the learning,the running,the imagineering,the wandering and the exploring.This has to be the headiest month of them all.
And to top them all off ,hanging with fellow soaks and eating wonderful food.
Explicit details to follow.Soon.
So hang in there fellas.