Look!

Pune in the monsoon is a sight to behold. Sure the roads are muddy, clothes don't dry and you need to carry a brolly with you wherever you go, but it is a SIGHT to behold. Lush greenery offset by the sky that's alternately grey and blue, with the Western Ghats as the backdrop. I guess there's more than one reason they call this place the Oxford of the east :)

Something not nearly as pleasant is that they've installed Linux on all the common systems in the institute. Now I'm all for open-source software, but not for crappy execution. Being able to log in is a hit-or-miss affair. There's no guarantee that you'll be connected to the internet. And Firefox takes a full two minutes to load and crashes at the drop of a Red hat (pardon the pun). Plus, there's this whole red theme, which just makes everything seem very Orwellian.

But the biggest news is that the new batch of students will be thrice as big as my batch. Which means we'll be up to our ears with 12 std pass outs. Good or bad? I'll know in a couple of months.

In the meantime, I'll keep beholding :)

Don't gimme red!

So it looks like a verdict of some sort is coming out of these elections. I just hope the UPA without the commies is a different beast. What I do not like is the fact that Dayanidhi Maran, A Raja and TR Baalu are all coming back to power. In order they are, Opportunistic bastard, Thieving bastard and Nepotistic bastard. Yes, I know there are worse politicians around, but these three really get on my nerves.

The vacation is going nicely so far. Although I must say at this point that I feel completely and utterly inept when it comes to handling kids. My nephew and niece (bless their heart) think I'm pretty cool. Yes, take your time to shake off the shock. And I just feel, well, old and what's worse, very "adult". I'm going to be in Hyderabad a while longer, so let's see if things change.

I met up with a senior from school on Thursday. It was fun to look back at "the way we were". And I found out that I'm not the only one disillusioned with my school. It's almost a rite of passage of some sort. It's like, "Welcome to the 11th standard. Here's the remains of your shattered beliefs" . And it's been that way for nearly every batch before and since mine. Meanwhile, the principal goes on YouTube talking about how India should lead the global economy. Seriously. I mean, get your own house in order before worrrying about the rest of the world.

Apparently the Next Big Facebook Thing is the "How well do you know me?" quiz. Really. Every day when I log in, either somebody's posted a new one, or somebody's taken another one, or there's a whole lot of commenting about how correct the "correct" answers are. Pish.

Enough negativity for today. Go out and do something positive !

40 degrees and rising...

I'm typing this as I'm watching Kings XI Punjab getting creamed by the Mumbai Indians. Now I'm not going to apologise for not posting in such a long time and I'm not going to call this a comeback post either. This is just a post to make a very important announcement.

I'm on VACATION!!!!!!

(Come on now. Where's the wild cheering and thunderous applause???)

Anyway, coming back to the mundane details, I won't be able to vote in this, the first election I'm eligible to vote in. I won't be in town when the bandwagon passes through. Call it poor planning. And spare the brickbats. I don't feel good about missing it, y'know.

Right now I'm in Hyderabad. Visiting a cousin. And to be honest, the weather ain't much better than Pune. In fact, Pune is slightly better, since we have fully air-conditioned classrooms. But hey, the weather's just one side to the whole thing. I've been to Hyd only once before, and I haven't seen too much of the city, so if anybody has any suggestions let's hear 'em.

Other positive news this week is that now it seems that instead of having a race car that's both slow and unreliable, the Ferrari F60 is merely unreliable. So that's a step forward for a team that only a few years ago could do no wrong.

I'll keep you posted over these vacations, but don't hold your breath. And stay safe :)

A question of knots

I did it! I finally figured out a permanent fix for that annoying way Word 2008 automatically inserts a space at the end of a paragraph, so that when you copy everything you’ve typed onto something else all those spaces disappear. And most importantly, I figured it out by myself. I know it makes me sound like a bit of a spaz, but then I don’t have to type stuff out all that often. (okay, now that sounds even more old-fashioned. I should stop)

Earlier this week, somebody told me that I’d be the first in our old gang from school to get married. It didn’t make sense to me for two reasons. One, I’m a boy and let’s face it, social pressure comes in a lot later for us boys than it does for girls. And two, there’s no way I’d get married while I’m still studying/establishing myself at work. I’m not willing to compromise on my development as a person.

And yet, and yet, I see so many men around me, somewhat successful in their own ways, settling down to lives of domesticity at fairly young ages. Seriously, there’s something amiss about a man who gets married before 25. (and don’t you dare say there’s nothing amiss, there’s only a Mrs. We do not tolerate poor pjs)

Why do men do it? And not just men, why do people give in to marriages when there’s a whole world out there waiting to be conquered? Why do they give in to moulding themselves to suit the life of a grihasta, when you should really be out there finding yourself? Does anybody out there have answers? Or is it just me, labouring under the illusion that I’ll figure out what I am one fine day in the future?

On a less self-doubting note, the notebook view in Word 2008 is super cool! (never thought I’d say that about a word-processing software)

Going round and round once again

The new Formula 1 season is under way. Brawn GP (formerly Honda racing, (formerly British-American racing, (formerly Tyrrell))) (Man, I do love brackets!) scored a dramatic one-two finish in the season opener in Melbourne on Sunday. And this by a team that almost didn’t make it to the grid, because Honda decided to pull the plug on their F1 program in December last year. Bet there are a lot of people in Tokyo kicking themselves right now, because that Brawn race car was developed with Honda money. And now Honda has nothing to show for it. Poor saps.

Summer is upon us. It’s always funny to watch people agreeing with Al Gore about global warming every April, and then promptly denying it in November. (No really, Madras has had fairly cool “winters” the last few years.) I’ve seen it happen enough times over the last few years. It almost seems cool in a way to blame bad weather on global warming and climate change, without actually knowing anything about either, and then simply crank up the air con. FYI chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant gases are still legal in India, even though there are non-CFC alternatives that will work with existing machinery, forget buying new compressors. So if you’re in the market for a new air con this summer, try to stay clear of those that use R-22.

I’ve been writing a science blog as well over the last few months. Not very regularly, though. If anything, it’s even more irregular than ymitif. Check it out if that part of you which wasn’t quite a nerd, but still liked poking, prodding and looking at things isn’t quite dead yet.

And... ACTION!

It's been a hectic couple of weeks since my last post. I was in Hyderabad for a few days after pongal. Spent some time with my cousin and her family. Good fun, although I didn't get to see too much of the city. I'm a total flop as a tourist, so no surprises there. But what I did see of the city, I like. Naidu did a pretty damn good job sprucing up and streamlining the place while he was in power, and it still shows. It makes infrastructure in Madras seem very outdated (which is no surprise, since MK only has time to change the Tamil Calendar, hold the UPA for ransom, stick up for Stalin and write movie scripts. Who has time to actually govern a state after all that?)

Our college annual day is coming up in two weeks, and I'm directing four skits for it. After Hyd, the days have just disappeared in a blur of meetings, classes and rehearsals. (Meetings, because for a while it seemed as if the function wasn't going to happen at all. Strictly speaking, this isn't an annual day. It's more of a fest for students in all the different campuses of my college. So, cancelling it would be a pretty major blow.

Anyway, it's happening as scheduled so I'm going to be pretty busy for the next two weeks. I just hope I don't reach the point where I stop caring SO THAT IT ALL JUST ENDS!!! The upshot is that all this hard work is going to give me new "insights" into the way people behave, so look out for new posts.

I'm off now. A director's work is never done...

P.S. Many thanks to TheDropper for the list on how to deal with a 1/5th life crisis. I rather like the voodoo doll bit

Very hand-waving, but that's what most comeback posts are

Happy New Year! Yeah, it isn’t exactly New Year, we’re already two weeks in. And I’m sorry that there’ve been no new posts for over a month now. It’s just very easy to go M.I.A. when I’m on vacation.
It was a pretty great vacation though. Hectic, but good fun. We had a class reunion type thing. My dad’s old college batch had a reunion. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet estarra, soupy and a lot of others. I didn’t get to some things I’d planned to either (I didn’t finish more than 4 chapters of the Compulsive Confessor’s book). But I can’t say there were too many dull moments in the last month. Especially not after I started playing Ultimate Frisbee with the gang at evam.

I was working at evam again through most of last month. Went with them to Bangalore on Christmas day, where they premiered their latest production “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Made some new friends, got some pointers from the actors. All in all, good fun. If you’re in Madras sometime this coming weekend, try to catch “The Importance…” You’ll get discounts on tickets at their website.

Now that I’m back in Pune though, things are going a lot slower. I watched Quantum of Solace and Goldeneye this weekend. Quantum… has a somewhat complicated plot, and it didn’t help that I got a very poor print, which had half the dialogues missing. Goldeneye, though, is just plain lame. Frankly, I’m happy they made Bond grittier, less gadget-y and with fewer lame comeback lines after Brosnan.

I’m off for now. Happy pongal y’all!