Being thrown out of class was something I was supremely thrilled with, because it provided me with a grown-up’s endorsement to go out, play in the school grounds, sit and watch slugs move and leave their slimy trails behind, help the aayah in school in ringing the bell, a few minutes earlier simply because I liked the sound of it. This was more enjoyable than attending class on some occasions, and the propensity towards missing out on classes only magnified further as the years progressed.

This particular train of thought veered towards what the future generations would think of us, the first generation of bloggers. I can only imagine my kid reading about my ‘Dorky Guffaw’ adventures, or about how strongly hippie I have allegedly been, and wonder whether his/her image of me many years hence will be the same as what I’ve portrayed now through my online content.

Our generation has been simultaneously privileged as well as encumbered in some ways due to the revolutionary changes having been brought upon us due to the internet. While communication channels have been made so easy, and long lost friends separated over space and time-zones can still stay in touch as if they were only in the next room, and information of all sorts is available to us within a few clicks, I am led to wonder whether we’re really better off compared to previous generations.

The internet has also brought about a significant invasion of our privacy, and a lot of time is spent on the internet instead of in getting a first life. The future generations might be even worse off than we are, or might ridicule us for our extreme involvement with the net. Nothing exemplifies it better than the constantly changing arbit facebook status messages.

For instance, my current facebook status is as follows: “Hari is astounded at how make-up can make the prettiest women look majorly scary.”

While I might think it is funny right now, or at least, somewhat vaguely relevant, this is just going to be arbit nonsense once I end up saying something else.

While those bloggers who have a defined intent which leads them to blog, and have something topical to write about will have their work appreciated over time, those who use their websites as a means of unleashing arbit (case in point being yours truly) might just as well be better off covering their tracks, lest our children get inspired to do crazy stuff and then conveniently state how their folks’ blogs provided them with the inspiration.

In any case, such an eventuality is quite a long way ahead, and we shall cross the bridge, if it shows up, when we come to it.

I have noticed that while I can talk about any leave plans I have with some manager that I have already worked with for a few months, if I have to inform a manager about my prospective leave plans at the very outset when I begin to work with him/ her, I am met more often than not with a WTF expression that makes me want to do this thing again and again, cheap guy that I am.

The trouble with switching managers and working with different ones for different projects / accounts, aside from the adjustments required to make towards their working styles is their approach towards the whole leave issue.

Some of the people I have worked with have been awesome enough to just ask me to go ahead with my plans, while some others have had the chutzpah to ask me why I need the time off, and where I was headed to and so on.

As far as I know, I don’t need to provide justifications for asking for holidays within the limits allocated to me annually, since I am entitled to them in any case. It is sort of like being asked why I eat how much ever food I do consume.

There have been a few instances where I have been asked to re-think my leave plans due to some situations that have come about, and I have been shameless enough to go ahead anyway, comforted by the fact that crisis situations can be mitigated by clever and able project management, and my time to address such situations isn’t yet on the anvil.

In retrospect, the attention paid by teachers in school to students on leave strikes me as ironic, since it was the student’s loss if he/she played truant from school for whatever reasons and the teacher did not stand to lose anything in the student’s absence.

However, I feel that it is the dedication exhibited by most teachers and their committment towards ensuring that their students were taught properly, that led them to be as strict as they were in these matters.

In any case, I am glad the festive (read:leave) season is upon us.

The first time I got my voter’s ID was when I turned 18 and was gung-ho about getting the indelible ink put on my left index finger after having exercised my right to vote.

Having had a change of address when my family moved to a new house circa November 2003 resulting in a consequent change in both the legislative assembly constituency as well as the parliamentary constituency, it was time to get another voter’s ID done.

However, I had to miss out on getting my ID issued when the rest of my family was having theirs done for the same reasons as I missed out on gatecrashing RJ Malavika’s wedding with Madman Aadisht (comments should indicate why such an action wouldn’t be undertaken even if I were in town).

When the electoral officials declared that there would be another round that would take place on 19th September 2008, I decided to get my card for it provided me with the ideal opportunity to play hooky from the office and not feel guilty about doing so.

When friday morning dawned, I was in for quite a surprise, because the government school where I was to get my ID done was not the one in the vicinity of my house, but one that was about two kilometres away in a village named maTTikyatanahaLLi.

Just as backgroud information, the place we live in is quite far removed from Mysore city, for unlike in Bangalore, if someone lives outside the Ring Road that surrounds the city, they are considered to be living on the outside of the outskirts.

Hence the place we live in is unblemished by the ways of the city life and is a peaceful and quiet sub-urb of sorts. Unmitigated bliss are there.

This explains why the whole hoopla of having to go to some random village transpired and now, I can actually get on with the narrative.

The walk to the village from our area was quite a pleasant one that afforded quite a few opportunities to take photographs, some of which I’m going to put up on my flickr account if I don’t feel too lazy later on.

When I got to the school after cutting through some fields and seeing a live mongoose cross the road without a care in the world, and also being witness to what I can only term as two buffaloes making out in a shallow pool of muddy water, I was quite surprised at how I enjoyed myself completely during the entire unplanned walk across semi dried up lakes and farmland, rendering me oblivious to the large distance I walked in order to get to my destination.

At the school, it was absolute mayhem as some lucky class was given the day off in order to accommodate this particular exercise. I saw kids peeping into the room where the photo IDs were being issued and giving all the assembled adults furtive glances, some of whom they were no doubt related to.

The queue was quite long, and the villagers were cutting in without any heed being paid to the protests by those behind them, who weren’t entirely overjoyed at the prospect of having to wait for longer than was necessary. So much so that some woman cut right in front of me, and stood her ground despite my repeated protests, which I realize in retrospect sounded more like polite implorings than anything else. Also, I Wasn’t keen on picking a fight with someone from the village because I was in unfamiliar territory and I guess I have to thank my lucky stars that I knew to speak the local language and have myself understood.

There were two main things that happened that morning that will remain in my mind for a long time to come. The first thing was not so funny, despite being superficially so.

The photo station was manned by some guy who had some basic expertise in operating a laptop with a webcam, and he was in charge of getting people’s photographs clicked. Most of the villagers that came to the school had no clue about their dates of birth and thus were not sure about their age. On being asked to provide their age / DOB, they were quite clueless. Some of them managed to give out a rounded off number while some others were assigned a number (usually a multiple of five or ten) by the guy behind the laptop.

A woman changed her age from 30 to 45 to 40 and finally settled on 37 because some guy was kind enough to calculate the mean of her maximum and minimum age. While this might seem quite funny, with the villagers having a hearty laugh when someone who was 50 saying he was 35 and all that, it showcased the basic issue of illiteracy among those in the villages to a large extent. While we monitor our ages, wait for our birthdays as occasions to celebrate and cherish, most of these people just struggle to make a living and are oblivious to regular things that you and I would take for granted and this particular incident was quite an eye-opener in this regard.

The second incident, which was quite funny was something I had anticipated. With three names that comprise of a family name, a given name and a surname (out of which I generally tend to drop the first one off), I knew that the probability of some fudge up taking place with the spelling tended towards one, and my fears were not unfounded, for the laptop guy, despite my having given him my old voter’s ID, mis-spelt two out of three words in my name, and made them all as part of one word.

(Turns out that the same mistakes were done for my folks’ voters IDs as well, but quite unusually, despite being highly vocal in their protests towards anything under the sun, as opposed to their easy going offspring who say ‘Meh’ for most things, they didn’t bother getting a correction made.)

After I recovered from the initial shock and shook myself off all the painful memories I’ve had since I could spell my name, when I found out much to my continued disappointment that others couldn’t, I launched into a vehement protest to get my ID done the way it was supposed to be. The official was not used to this, given the fact that he’d randomly assign ages and spell peoples’ names the way he wanted to, and after almost twenty minutes of arguements, I was finally given an opportunity to get a duplicate ID done.

Much to my disappointment, they took the misspelt ID from me and said I could keep it only if I could provide them with INR 25. Stupidly, I hadn’t carried any money with me and by the time I returned home, I was too lazy to go back to get it from them.

All in a day’s work. Whoever said getting a Voter’s ID card done is a cinch should be made to go through what I did on that fateful friday.

One such instance of discovering new music and getting mesmerized had taken place around May 2007 when my ex-flatmate Kutty had given me a CD titled Adviteeya by a certain friend of his, named Kuldeep M Pai.

The CD is a unique effort, as Kuldeep, a native of Cochin, not only renders the vocals, but also plays the Kanjira, the Mridangam, the Ghatam, the Veena and the Violin among other instruments. Multi-track recording had rendered it possible for Kuldeep to come out with a CD that contains six pieces, for which he’s supplied the complete music as well as the vocals.

I am not trained in classical music per se, with my only first-hand exposure to the same resulting from having been one of the few guys in our class in school to have been selected to attend the music class during SUPW, more as a luck of th draw thing rather than as a conscious choice.

Most of the girls in school opted for music and dance, while guys were also inadvertently bundled in along with them. This provided the girls with a much needed opportunity to make fun of us guys, and was one of the prime causes for most of us indulging in the first of many instances of truant behaviour.

My memories of the music room include that of smelly socks and dilapidated instruments that were placed within showcases safely out of harm’s way, with our music teacher using a tambourine to keep time. Somehow the only two mental images I have of people playing tambourines are those of my music teacher in school playing it and seeing a video of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ when Robert Plant plays it as well.

It would be fun for them to switch spaces, but you’d have to be there, I guess.

In any case, I did not learn any Raagas and only learnt a few Taalas that I’ve promptly forgotten in the absence of practise. However, I think I can spot good music when I listen to it, and Adviteeya is certainly good music to listen to.

I’d given the CD to my landlord to check out sometime last year, and it was quite recently that I decided to ask him for it again, and my mornings now begin with Mr.Pai’s rendition of Mahaganapatim, and I must confess that it sets the mood for the rest of the day. Thank God for the music!

PS – This does not mean I endorse those who sing about Dwarapalakas in open forums. (Inside joke. Once again, you’d have to be there, I guess.)

There’s stories of how Tom Sawyer played with an ant during a class that he didn’t want to pay attention to, and there’s also tales of many a truant student who got into trouble for having made a conscious choice to make the most of a class where it wasn’t possible to pay attention. The student was however compelled to sit in the class anyway, and escape from this world into an alternate one where time flew by instead of being in reverse gear seemed to be the best way to conform to what had to be done, while not losing one’s mind in the process.

There are many pastimes that one would engage in to hasten the progress of time in such situations. One would end up letting loose one’s imagination in a Calvin-esque flight of fancy, or play with walking on one’s desk, or end up scratching out messages on desks to be read by others that were to share a similar fate eventually, in the next academic year, were those engravings made to withstand the test of time.

As adults in a professional environment, the same people with poor attention spans would think about blogging or LJ-ing, or end up thinking of making tally marks out of catch-phrases uttered by those less verbally equipped, who would spout the ‘like’s, the ‘means’s, the ‘actually’s, the ‘basically’s and so on and so forth.

As the number of meetings attended grew, it also brought in an increase in one’s catch phrase vocabulary, and this tally mark system evolved into the grid format where one would make a list of catch phrases in one column and the names of the participants in the other, making tally marks against each person for each catch phrase uttered, and then coming up with a final score that would be the total sum of the products of the number of times a catch-phrase was uttered by the weight assigned to that particular phrase, which in turn was directly proportional to its frequency of use.

Simply put, final score F = w1.n1 + w2.n2 + w3.n3….. + wm.nm (wi = weight of particular catch phrase and ni= number of times said catch-phrase was uttered)

The one with the highest score would then be awarded a mental atomic wedgie. Sadly, it being a figment of one’s imagionation, such a thing hardly made a difference to the ‘real world scenario’, but made for some priceless amusement all the same.

Now, a long time ago, some genius who wanted to kill time came up with the game of ‘book-cricket’, which proved to be quite entertaining and engrossing, insofar as making father time rush by in supersonic mode. The best part about this game was that one could play it in class with a text-book and, with enough discretion would seem like a pedant, which would then come in handy while currying for favours with the teacher concerned.

The rules for book cricket, for those that aren’t acquainted with this beautiful game are as follows:

1. Take a book, any book will do. It can be ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy, or it can be ‘I Have Read That Somewhere’ by Aswath Venkataraman. So long as it has page numbers on it, preferably arabic numerals, or numerals of any other kind that you would be comfortable reading.

2. Make a list of 22 players, 11 on each side. During the time book cricket was a craze in school when I was going to school to get beaten up by my teachers and sent out of class thereafter, we used to make lists of national teams. Students in schools and colleges nowadays can use any combination of players. Heck, throw in football and hockey players too, just to spice things up. You could even have mythical fairy tale characters playing cricket, or have politicians make up the teams – UPA XI v/s NDA XI. I wish I had thought of this when I was playing this in school! Hindsight 20/20.

3. Start playing the game by opening the book. Look at the right-most digit on that side of the book that contains even numbers. Runs are awarded, or player is out based on the following conditions -

This whole hoopla leads me to think how simple it was not so long ago, when there was tremendous hype about the release of particular movies only in select circles or in movie magazines such as ‘Filmfare’, ‘Cineblitz’ or ‘Screen’ which I would invariably end up reading from cover to cover while waiting for my turn to have a haircut at the barbershop that I have been visiting ever since I learnt from my class teacher in school that a haircut was the only way I wouldn’t end up having to sit with the stupid girls in class, a school of thought that prevailed in a 10 year old version of me, but something that has been thankfully remedied since. Now a grown-up, enlightened version of me prefers the company of women, but that has already been posted about in my livejournal.

These magazines would result in me knowing which movie Salman Khan would be acting in next, or about a certain rising star named ‘Divya Bharathi’, who died on my 10th birthday in 1993, much to the disappointment of many people who really thought she was cutemax, and about how a certain Tamil music director named A.R. Rahman was creating waves in Bollywood with the release of ‘Rangeela’.

However, it was never the case that one had too much information at one’s hands about a particular movie, and the cinemas retained a certain sense of exclusivity, a particular charm or a mystic allure to their being that somehow could be experienced only through visiting a movie theatre. The alternative was to rent a VCP (not a VCR) from the video circulating library along with a few tapes and then sit and watch them at home together.

It is time for an interesting (?) digression in the insipid narrative here to highlight the fact that though our household was open to books, magazines and printed material of pretty much any kind in much the same way as the Playboy mansion is to promiscuous women, the same openness was not extended towards the movies, and we’d end up watching movies mostly whenever the almighty DoorDarshan deigned to telecast them, invariably with breaks in between for the evening news and other such interruptions. This was one of the reasons why bringing home a VCP to watch movies, which happened about three times in my entire childhood was such a big deal, and we watched movies such as ‘Mr.India’, ‘Dances with Wolves’, ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ during those ventures, which to my delight, have added to my collection of treasured childhood memories.

Going to the theatres and watching movies was a big deal, and it was a ritual that required extensive planning and a substantial amount of time invested in choosing what snacks to buy and which day to watch the movie on, which city bus route to take to get to the theatre and so on. The first couple of movies I saw with a good friend of mine from school were the result of these extensively planned outings, and I remember the movies we watched were James Cameron’s ‘True Lies’, dubbed in Hindi and Mani Ratnam’s ‘Bombay’, in Tamil, which was incidentally when I, as a precocious 12 year old boy just out of class seven fell in love with Manisha Koirala and realized subconsciously that a feeling of vulnerability combined, paradoxically, with a fierce streak of independence in women is indeed a highly attractive trait.

As we hapless consumers, post liberalization of our economy in 1992 gladly bore the brunt of the onslaught of satellite and cable television programs all through the 90′s, it was becoming more and more evident with each passing year that it would be hardly a matter of time before the interlinking of all forms of media would take place, much the same way as physicists such as Planck were intent on propounding a Unified Field Theory for all the various types of forces whose existence was known to man.

This unification meant that the movies would not remain exclusive to those that were actual die hard fans of celluloid, but would turn out to be open access for anyone with a television. The effort one had to put in, or the entry barrier that one had to cross in order to gain access to the magical world of movies had suddenly been reduced to nothingness, as convenience and sloth brought in a new wave of on demand movies, and movie channels of all sorts showing movies so many times that it would have been practically impossible to miss out on watching a movie like, say, Titanic, even if one were to try very hard to miss it on TV.

This next level of dilution of a movie lover’s standing was atleast something that he/she could put up with, because it also resulted in providing one with greater access and exposure to hitherto unknown or unheard of cinema, including the different forms of parallel cinema and indie movies that most people that want to break the mould or want to be cool so fervently swear by, in present times.

However, as one turns on the television today to watch some random program, and all one can see are promos of movies such as ‘U me aur hum’ (whose title could be a dedication to the shorthand using generation that I wish to distance myself from) and ‘Tashan’ (how I hate that word!), which are screened pretty much on the same lines as advertisements, with the producers having purchased time slots on channels, and one wonders why it is that these movies have to hardsell themselves so much if they are good movies that people would be falling over each other to watch. How did movies such as ‘Sholay’, ‘Jurrasic Park’, ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’ and others gain so much popularity without having to resort to a media blitzkrieg?

I am taking an educated guess here to make an assumption that the contractual agreement that most actors would sign as part of their being cast in a particular film would require their services much more beyond the requisite time they spend on the set shooting for a given movie. Once the movie has been shot, and has undergone post production, they would still have to appear for media interviews, shoot promos which are, one tends to notice, mutually exclusive to the content or plot related to the movie, and that would also contain copious references either directly or through the placement of logos to media houses, fashion houses, restaurants, banks or other commercial establishments that are piggybacking on the movie’s gravy train to further their own causes.

Gone are those days, when most people made movies solely for entertainment, or as a mode of self expression or to portray a certain message that one strongly believed in. I would like to fervently believe that it is only a certian section of movie makers that have sold out, and that most of those who haven’t will remain true to their cause.

However, it is quite unlikely that the magic of movies would vanish just because of a new avatar that they have assumed. Any air-headed romantic person would still believe without a shade of doubt that the best movie moments are those that one experiences in real life, rather than in the theatres.

Caller: Hi! Can I speak to so-and-so?
Me: May I know who’s calling, please?
Caller: I am XYZ.
Me: Hold on for a minute, I’ll just pass on the phone.
Caller: Thanks!

A pretty regular and random exchange between two people, but it was something that seemed like a blast from the past. I began thinking of how long it had been since I had such a conversation with anyone. With the presence of cell phones being the norm, its rare that anyone in the present times would usually get to talk that way.

Before cell phones paved their way into our lives and changed forever the way we went about with our daily existence, the grand old land lines ruled the roost. At home in Mysore, we had an antique piece for our telephone, the one which people used in the late 50′s or early 60′s movies to relay secret messages or locations where the kidnapped would be exchanged for ransom and then fail to show up.

It had an old fashioned dial, and a heavy receiver and with the two together, nobody in our family was required to go to the gym for bicep workouts, and one’s fingers became sturdy and well exercised to bear the brunt of canings received in school for not completing assigned homework, or being late to class, or being inattentive during lessons or for being an errant student, though invariably it ended up being a hitherto unseen ecclectic combination of more than one of the four aforementioned misdemeanours.

Needless to say, the butterfly effects of us having had the phone model we did made my teachers in school healthy as well, and gave them their much needed workout cum catharsis, something that I would get good Karma for. Now who’d imagine one’d be entitled to good Karma for not having been a good student, eh? Loopholes aplenty!

As times changed, and as the locations of the rented houses we lived in changed, so did the corresponding telephone exchange whose jurisdiction we fell under, and it was the norm for each of the telephone exchange officials who came to connect the phone and hand us the telephone directory to implore with us to upgrade to the new telephones, complete with push buttons and speaker phone and caller ID to ignore blank calls.

I was certain the blank calls were because I had turned 13 and hence fallen into the eligible male category, although we later found out that it was some toddler in the neighbourhood whose baby-sitter’s idea of keeping the kid occupied was for him to press random numbers on the telephone. That sort of explains why the voice on the other end was goo goo gaa gaa over me! Story of my teenage love-life.

Repeated requests notwithstanding, it was a collective decision for us not to upgrade to the new models, even though the exchange offered them to us for free! We were dinosaurs and were proud of our prehistoric phone. Plus, the management at home sort of figured out that the most loquacious ones who’d use the phone copiously would be dissuaded from doing so if one got extensively tired of holding up the receiver, or having to repeatedly dial the number in the absence of a lovely redial key.

The increase in telephone bill amounts in arithmetic progression with a high common difference between two successive members of the series disproved this assumption, and other means, including asking the teachers use the cane with greater frequency had to be then resorted to.

That was the saga of the outgoing calls from our phone. The tales related to the incoming calls was something else altogether.

It is a well established fact that until a boy’s voice breaks, and the vocal chords are fully developed at the onset of puberty, that it is sort of hard to tell if it is a male voice, unless one would, at the tender ages between 6 and 12 resort to using expletives with gay abandon. However, at that formative stage of my life when I inculcated within me everything that my folks, the television, the newspapers and Indrajal comics taught me, I was expletive free.

This led to pretty funny situations (in retrospect) as I had been made the de-facto answering machine when nobody else was around to receive their calls. I was mistaken, on some occasions to be my Mum, my sister or my grandma, and they sometimes in turn were mistaken to be me.

Not that I was a stud in voice recognition either. Most of my friends’ sisters I thought were their Mums and so on and so forth. This let to a situation that had a veritable comedy of errors associated with it, as one went about trying to navigate through embarassing situations in order to take the right message or get through to the right person in the household.

There was one instance where a family friend had remarked about the fact that I had impeccable phone manners, and how hard it was for the kids of today to be polite to elders and all that. My head was swollen no end with the praise meted out, as the center of gravity of my body shifted, as a result of which I had trouble walking for the next few days thereafter.

I think I would have been unceremoniously ejected out of my household in order to go out on my own to earn money had call centers sprung up then the way they’ve done now, more so if child labour laws hadn’t been passed by then and the UNHRC hadn’t raised such a hue and cry about it.

Thankfully, all that I got was a pat on the back and a few extra pieces of chocolate as I was indulgently let off to play when the adults continued their conversations, for I had my 3rd grade final exams the next day, and I still hadn’t learnt where the Manasarovar lake was located, and I was not able to plot the course of the Narmada or the Tapti river.

The times they are-a changing now. Everyone at home has their own cell phones. In fact, I am certain that this is the way things are headed in every household in the country, and its not something I am particularly sanguine about.

Its been a move long pending, but over the past three weeks, I’ve finally reached the place where I’ve made up my mind to make minimal use of my cellphone, except under exceptional circumstances or to talk to people I know I can’t see, but would still want to talk to. Friends and family who are geographically removed from my current physical location would fall under that category, and I’m subsisting on the usage of my office extension for intra-office telephone calls.

I’d prefer to meet people the old way as well, plan for a time and a place and make sure to get there as promised, rather than use the cell phone as a mechanism for constant updating of one’s position.

I know cellphones have become a necessary evil, and that although what I am saying sounds nice in theory, and might be hard to put into practise, every time I reach out for my cell to lead me into temptation, my mind wanders back through the recesses of time and space to my old antique earth-quake proof landline with its shiny black dial and 1 kg receiver, and I think of all the fun times that I’ve had thanks to it, and I wonder whether it will ever be possible for things to be that way again.

For better or for worse, I think those thoughts are better off as memories. Plus, my current ring tone, should I ever choose to remove my phone out off silent / vibrating mode is that of an old phone ringing, as a dedication to the times gone by.

However, Al Jaljira has been around for longer, and is the space on which I make dedicated posts only on occasion when I feel that I have a ‘quality post’ in the offing.

Of course, you may choose to disagree with me on the standard definition of quality. Piss off.

But the fact of the matter is that this post came into being because you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Having read the latest post on Sidin’s site, I figured out that I would run my blogs through the supposed readability test, and the results have left me confounded and quite frankly, a tad disappointed at the same time.

My live journal came up with a blog reading level of “Genius“, while my Blogspot venture ranked a lowly “Junior High School“.

Go figure.

The bright side of all this is the fact that I can hope for stupid 10 year old kids also to read my blog and get some cheap thrills out of it.

However, apart from the usual things about cellphones that bug me that can be encompassed within the realm of violation of cell phone manners, that probably are a massive pain for you as well, there is also this new thing about caller tunes that just brings out the monster within me, and a phlegmatic, bespectacled, timid, puny pony tailed IT industry engineer metamorphoses into an angry, vitriol spewing extremist who would make even the Ayatollah seem like a school playground bully in comparison.

Caller tunes, introduced as a relatively new fad are supposed to be a means of expression for the person who one is calling, and hence you get to listen to some song or some piece of music that the other person wants you to listen to. Hence, depending on whom I would be calling, I would get a chance to listen to Where’s the party tonight? to Shine on you crazy Diamond, and as expected, there would be some songs that I would like to listen to, some I wouldn’t mind listening to, some that would mildly irritate me and others that would make me wish I hadn’t been born at all.

It is the last category of songs that have been turned into caller tunes, that make my blood bol. I don’t even know the names of the songs that are playing, but I do know that the latest pseudo donkeys that go ‘club-hopping’ and ‘partying’ consider them as their anthem of the fortnight, and would probably then forget about those songs forever after that.

But before they forget, they tarnish the memories and leave indelible scars in the aural cavities and memory sections of us good old folk who don’t want to listen to that crap, and regretfully do have memories that remember more things than they should, on most occasions.

Now I understand it if YOU would like to listen to a particular song when the phone rings, and that is why you have the new age polyphonic caller tunes to take care of that very situation. However it seems unfair for ME to listen to whatever it is that YOU think I should listen to. It is almost as if you are imposing your will on someone who is unwilling, and that is not fair.

I hope that cell phone companies keep this in mind or that someone comes up with something innovative so that WE can hear what song we want to, rather than the song our callee wants to. It makes for more pleasant waiting periods during the brief time that the phone rings.

For a brief month, I had a caller tune too. It was the title song from the movie ‘Swades’, which is among one of my favourite Hindi movies. I have hence disabled it, a significant time before I actually penned down this post.

I am being elected to be a “Groomsman” by the Groom Sankar(and the Bride,Neerada, as I later found out), though I would’ve preferred being the Best Man. But seeing as how the Bride-to-be also gave fundaes about how it isn’t a Christian wedding, guess I don’t really need to be Best Man and all, for with little power comes little responsibility. Plus considering how the Groom is already buttering up his brother-in-law by electing him the Best Man instead, it’s not like I really stood a chance anyway!

Here is the link to my profile on their ewedding site, and being a stickler for the old school of thought insofar as most matters except for gadgets are concerned, I can’t help but wonder what they’d think of next!