Rocking in the Free World » Peter Pan in Real Life

Conspicuous Consumption Goodbye

Hari — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:10:12 +0000

When I was much younger, I was told of how North India is culturally different from where I was born and raised. I paid little heed to these words, simply because it was of no consequence to me. I had spent a third of my life in South India and it made little sense for me to deeply analyze something that I felt had no direct impact on my way of life.

Not anymore.

Having gotten around Gurgaon and Delhi has given me a sense of how strong the concept of conspicuous consumption is among the residents of this part of the country. Its not just the noveau riche that are guilty of ostentatious behaviour, it is also those that have been rolling in wealth for many years that seem to want to pwn the new kids on the block.

Neither party is to blame, for a show of wealth is in general considered a positive trait in most circles and with each new batch of billionaires (Rupee, not Zimbabwean Dollar) adding to this spiral, the number of grand weddings, ceremonies and flashy automobiles purchased is only going to increase with time.

In the midst of all this, how would a minimalist with a mere bicycle (albeit a good 21 speed bike) and a strong disinclination to own personal transport or have fixed assets tying him down cope? Not too great, but not too badly either, I admit.

An interesting article by Stephanie Rosenbloom in the New York Times speaks of how a couple began to divest themselves of all possessions until such time that they had few assets with them, leading to an overall increase in happiness.

Money is definitely the means to an end, but it seems as though there’s an increasing trend among people to spend money on experiences rather than on anything tangible.

Taking vacations, spending on important people rather than on important things, indulging oneself in a good meal or a short, spontaneous trip seem to make more sense and provide pleasure in greater magnitudes than mere purchases, for the value of the latter decreases with time while the former still stays fresh in one’s mind.

What is somewhat eerie is that I personally feel that I am already in that zone of shunning heavy purchases and instead opting for experiences. As times change, this sort of behaviour is widely being acknowledged as the ‘new’ normal.

Maybe there is more sense in chasing windmills than in chasing money.

Weekends in the NCR

Hari — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

After moving out of home in 2004, Gurgaon is the third city that I have lived in after Bangalore and Hyderabad.

In Bangalore, my weekend planning was initially governed by when I would leave the city to head to Mysore. When things settled in and I began discovering, exploring and understanding Bangalore, and eventually falling in love with the place (for the most part), my plans revolved around spending time in the pursuit of various things within the city, as I slowly trudged up the Maslovian pyramid.

That glorious run of nearly five years came to an end in 2009 when I had to move to Hyderabad to study and weekends there were mostly spent working on assignments or studying or doing something or the other that entailed being on campus for the most part, as a result of which, there was no real need to make any weekend plans or follow through on them had they been made in the first place.

Cut to the NCR where I have been at for the past three months now, and I find myself in completely different circumstances. I don’t have the comfortable proximity to Mysore that I had previously found myself in when I was in Bangalore. Nor do I have enough work yet (if work at the office is discounted from the equation) like I did either in Bangalore or Hyderabad to keep me completely preoccupied.

In such situations, weekend planning becomes vital to one’s attempts at keeping the ennui monster at bay. When travel to places outside of the NCR isn’t conducive due to constraints that narrow down to lack of time or money or enthusiasm or a mix of two or more of the these factors, checking out the sights, sounds and tastes that Delhi has to offer then becomes part of the weekend menu.

As part of my sojourns, here’s snippets of experiences I’ve had that I find worth documenting.

A walk down Chandni Chowk – I had a chance to walk down the world-famous Chandni Chowk, built by Shah Jahan’s daughter Jahaanara Begum one particularly humid evening in early July when the train I had to take to head towards the mountains was delayed by two and a half hours.

I’d had a tiring week, I hadn’t had enough sleep either and this delay only compounded my misery. Since I had to board my train from Delhi junction (the old Delhi railway station) which is served by the Chandni Chowk Metro station, I figured I might as well see why this place deserved as much fame as it had.

The exit from the metro station led onto a temple and a huge Gurudwara right opposite it. It was late in the evening and most of the shops were closed. Traffic volumes weren’t as high as they’d have been during the day, but there was a lot of hustle and bustle still around. I walked westward and could see lines of shops on both sides and it seemed quite like most crowded main streets in most towns or cities that I’d visited.

What was different, however, was the sight of the iconic Red Fort looming large on the horizon. I am not quite sure how long the walk was, since I was numb from having walked so much already. But the heat and dust notwithstanding, with tracks from Incubus’ ‘Morning View’ playing in my ears, the sight of the Red Fort in Old Delhi was majestic and the way it awes you when you see it first is probably a good reason to visit it both during the day as well as after sun-down.

I am however still to figure out what the big deal about Chandni Chowk is. Only time will tell.

I’m going to be there at the Red Fort on Independence Day to see our Prime Minister give his speech live and that, I think, is quite a big deal.

Safdarjung’s Tomb – My forays into the capital have been more or less through South Delhi, thanks to its proximity to Gurgaon and also thanks to the yellow Delhi Metro line running along in that direction.

On this route, I’ve seen the remains of Tughlaqabad and even the sight of the Qutub Minar is now something that I’m used to. But whenever I get a chance to go to any monument or building that looks like it is older than a hundred years, I make it a point to step inside and take a look. I like them much better than the glass high-rises that dot the landscape, air con being the only redeeming quality about most of these buildings.

At the start of Lodhi Road lies Safdarjung’s Tomb. The tomb is a majestic building with water fountains on all four sides, making the aerial view of the place look like a plus sign with the tomb in the center. One can clearly tell that Safdarjung wasn’t probably as historically important as the Mughal rulers (SJ was in Ahmed Shah Bahadur’s court), since my friend and I were the only two people that were at that place at half-past five on a Saturday evening.

There was a solitary guard and pretty much nobody else with administrative capacity in that huge plot of land dotted by numerous trees including the coconut palm, the sight of which, I confess, was a refreshing change from the traffic outside.

My landlady, who seems to be a bibliophile, judging by the huge number of books lying around in her house, has been nice enough to give me two books on the history of Delhi, and combined with ‘City of Djinns’ by W. Dalrymple and some other literature that I plan to read, should give me enough information about these buildings and more when I begun a self-initiated tour to check out all the seven cities that make up our capital. Of course, this requires a strong dip in temperatures to set the ball rolling.

The Delhi Metro – I am a big Delhi Metro fan boy. My cheapness to a large extent and my sensibility to a smaller degree have made me like and enjoy public transport immensely. I am a judgmental person, and how much I like a city is governed by, among other things, how efficient its public transport systems are.

Gurgaon’s score on this is quite low, but the saving grace for now is the presence of the metro line that serves some parts of the city.

However, travel around Delhi is so convenient thanks to the presence of the Metro. In fact, the first time I used it was when I was traveling from the Indraprastha station to Rajiv Chowk in early June this year.

I wasn’t aware of the smart card / token systems that one needs to know about while traveling on these trains. The important difference between other regular modes and this one is that your token / smart card needs to be checked in at the turnstiles twice, once while entering the station and once, while getting off at your destination.

My first journey had me face quite a few d-uh moments; including being unaware of where to place the token at the turnstile and such, but casual observation of how other passengers behave is more than enough to understand how to go about using this service.

One of these d-uh moments was when it temporarily slipped my mind that Connaught Place was now officially named Rajiv Chowk. It was only thanks to a funny dinner-time conversation I’d had at home with the family that I remembered in time and was thus able to choose the right station while buying the token.

Since that day, I’ve got me a smart card and my frequency of visits to the capital has gone up. Most commuters, yours truly included, are waiting for the time when the metro line will open up fully until Rajiv Chowk. So far, trains travel only until the Qutab Minar metro station from Gurgaon.

The fact that the Metro is brilliantly air conditioned only adds to the charm of traveling on it in the cruel, cruel summer. But its presence has so far prompted me to not buy a car and instead divert all those funds into travel.

The weekends will get more interesting with time, as the mercury shall fall and more opportunities to indulge in new, interesting things present themselves.

Of Writing and Travel and Travel Writing

Hari — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:25:20 +0000

There are many reasons why one would like to travel to a particular place. I can’t say for sure what motivates other people, but I am inspired to visit places that are on the cooler side (temperature-wise), that have rich history and culture, aren’t particularly crowded or over-run by the average ignoramus camera-toting, loud-mouthed incidental visitor tourists and are accessible within my (currently) not quite meager budget.

The interest generated towards places that are on my “must travel to” (and possibly live at for a few months) list have been because of similar reasons, as well as because of how good the portrayal of said places has been in travelogues and other associated forms of literature, how much media coverage that place has received and to a reasonable extent, due to the nice way in which most televised travel programs have showcased these places.

Recommendations from trusted friends whose travel sensibilities match mine have also played a huge part in choosing where to go, depending on how much time is available at hand.

I have visited quite a few places on a whim, but there has been a reasonable degree of background research that has gone in to knowing what to do when I get to a particular place so that I have my bearings correct. In that sense, I haven’t yet tread the paths that a true blue itinerant would’ve already sprinted on.

In recent times, I have had strong tendencies to want to join the travel literature bandwagon, after reaching near-saturation levels while covering the rock and allied genres music scene in my three year (and counting) stint at RSJ. I’ve not had opportunities yet, but what I have figured out is that traveling and writing (and pardon me for stating the obvious) are both integral parts of wanting to achieve that goal.

While scanning travel literature of all sizes including what I can see in popular travel magazines, to content on travel website to reading books (that are sometimes tomes in disguise) about intrepid travelers who have had a chance to eloquently express in words the entire gamut of their numerous experiences, I have noticed a strong tendency for most to romanticize a place to make it more appealing.

The opinions of travel writers about a place and their outlook towards their experiences are what shapes their prose and makes them wax eloquent about a few locations and diss the other ones completely. I have learnt that it makes immense sense to take what has been written with a minimal amount of skepticism because the grand majestic buildings described might not be the way you imagined them to be, the cozy restaurant situated in a small cobbled by-lane might be too cozy for comfort with flies running all around and so on.

Taking someone’s worded opinions as being sacrosanct and trying to re-live their travel experiences would result in massive disappointments, especially if the author in question is a major fan boy of the place he has visited, for reasons that you would not necessarily subscribe to.

What I have managed to learn from all this is that there are a few good reasons to visit a certain place and those reasons will remain constant. A subset of those reasons would comprise what I have mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

However, your outlook and what you expect out of your travel would strongly differ from mine, or that of the travel writers’ and if this distinction in individual tastes is accounted for, then the appreciation that you have for those who write about where they go to and what they do when they get there might increase beyond you merely appreciating what good wordsmiths they seem to be.

Where the Hell is Matt?

Hari — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:53:59 +0000

I am extremely jealous of Matt Harding, but not in a bad way. He’s been to 42 different countries and has been sponsored by Visa to make an advertisement by travelling all over the world just to do that dance of his.

I can dance like that. I am undeniably goofier. But alas, he gets to put all the travel. Such is life. I will have to resort to other means to travel the world.

On a side-note, pay attention to the background music in the video embedded above. It is lilting and melodious, with the lyrics in Bengali, drawn from a poem in the Gitanjali. The background music adds a brilliant extra dimension to the whole video.

Notes About Nothing – 18/03/2009

Hari — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:19:40 +0000

The last time I did this series of bloglets was when I was inspired by Purely Narcotic’s LJ to write about stuff that took hardly more than two hundred words to pen down.

By itself, it wouldn’t make for a post, given my verbose nature of posting, and clumping a few of them together seemed to make more sense.

This series of posts comprises of things I thought of while enroute to Hyderabad and back within a span of two days. Uncharacteristically of me, I hadn’t carried a notepad to write things down, so I had to rely on the funda of associating ideas to get all of this in.

***

Eating Out Cheaply:
Ever since my stint of eating out as a result of choice rather than compulsion came about, I’ve always tried to search for the best places to eat at, keeping cost-efficiency in mind. I don’t think I’d ever be a fine-dining-every-night sort of guy, regardless of whether I could afford it or not.

In my various attempts at hunting for places where I can get cheap, but hygenic and tasty food, the canteens in colleges have no competition.

In early 2005, I had visited the IISc campus, and eaten a substantial quantity of food, at decent rates. Similarly, our engineering college had a small eatery named Cuckoo’s situated close to it, where no item on the menu was priced more than INR 20, and the tea that our man made was to die for.

In a fit of absolute hunger, the kind that makes one’s stomach seem like it is a vacuum, as I was walking through the Hyderabad University campus, I saw this small place named the ‘Eating House’, and for ten bucks, I had some incredibly tasty bajji, vadas, and a cup of tea.

My cup of joy sure runneth over.

***

The Curious Case of Mysore Bajji:
Speaking of bajjis, I noticed in four different places where I snacked at Hyderabad, that they sold this particular type of snack named the ‘Mysore Bajji’. Now why it was called what it was, I don’t know, for I have never come across a ‘Mysore Bajji’ elsewhere. I’ve eaten ‘Mysore Pak’, ‘Mangalore Bajji’, ‘Maddur Vada’ and all that, but this was certainly novel.

***

Malls Ain’t So Crappy After All:
Speaking of eating, we’ve also gotta cover the other end of the spectrum.

I hate malls with a vengeance, in general. I dislike their over-priced pretentiousness and their fraudly hedonistic ambience, and the only things I like about them are the fact that they sometimes contain bookstores and movie halls. Both of which, I am a big fain of.

Now, after yesterday and this morning, I have another reason to like malls. They have places where you can take a proper crap.

The worst place to be caught at when you need to go shit is on a train, as I found out yesterday. Unless it is a Shatabdi or a Rajdhani train, and nobody else has used the loo before you.

Thankfully, the feeling wasn’t that strong, and despite the fact that the train was late on the way to Bangalore, I was able to get home and do the needful.

I’ve been caught in situations where I’ve had to crap at the Forum Mall on two occasions, and it wasn’t too bad. Another point in favour of the malls, I’d say.

Someone had correctly remarked to me a long time ago that the best feeling that you get in the world is when you need to crap urgently and you get to relieve yourself.

***

There will be more Notes about Nothing to follow. But you knew that already.

Paranoia Sets In

Hari — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:17:07 +0000

The first time after the Bangalore serial blasts, I had to head towards Majestic to a bookstore to pick up a few text books for my sister. This was about a week after July 25th ‘08, and as I alighted from the bus and walked up on the bridge that leads towards the Majestic theatre side of the bus stand, despite the fact that I was listening to music on the radio, I was feeling a bit weird.

A weird sense of paranoia had set in, and that walk I took seemed to be among the longest I’d taken. I am sure that a few others walking there that day might’ve shared that same feeling that I felt, and I can only guess. However, I have travelled by BMTC buses on umpteen occasions thereafter and the thoughts of the serial blasts had been relegated to the back of my mind.

It was only the first time that a certain sense of tension was present.

Now, I’m headed to Majestic tomorrow to board a train that heads to Mangalore for a cousin’s wedding. I am waitlisted for both the onward and return journey, and I will receive confirmation about my travel shortly.

After what happened in Mumbai’s CST, I must admit that I am feeling a bit jittery about going there, and that I would be prone to being extremely paranoid and on my guard. I have a strong feeling that nothing will happen, but that strong feeling of being unaffected by events seems to have gone for a toss after what our country has gone through over the past year in particular.

Making up for Lost Time

Hari — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:34:12 +0000

On the second Saturday of March this year, I was out in the evening to watch this movie titled ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ at a cinema hall in downtown Seattle. After the movie was over, I was still in no mood to return home. Thus, I made a beeline for my favourite bar there, at the Capitol Hill Arts Center, and was sipping on a mug of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, when at 00:59, the bartender changed the timings on the clock to 02:00, and most other people present suddenly engaged themselves busily in resetting their watches as well.

I was initially puzzled at this, but I suddenly realized that everyone was now switching over to daylight saving time, and Pacific Standard Time (PST) had now become Pacific Daylight Saving Time (PDT). The entire nation had moved ahead by an hour, and I was inadvertently caught in the middle of it all, not having experienced this previously in 25 years of my existence.

The repercussions of this change were soon to follow. In my last two weeks there, I had to wake up an hour earlier, and given how late I used to sleep, it was quite a task. But there were enough and more relevant motivating factors that prompted me to do so, without much trouble.

However, when I got back home, it dawned upon me that I had lost an hour of my life forever. I did not see 01:00 to 01:59 in the wee hours of 9th March 2008 for no fault of mine. I want that hour of my life back.

The only way this can be accomplished is by being in some place that is already running on DST and then being present there when they switch back to their regular time. However, if, due to circumstances, I am unable to travel to any place and be present when the switch back takes place, I’d like it if someone were to sponsor my trip.

I did gain an extra day by crossing the International Date Line onward to the US, but lost it again when coming back home. This meant that I had two days of my life which had the date 9th February 2008, and no day which had the date 24th March 2008, but since the total number of days evens out, I am not complaining.

Maybe I can go ahead and start an NGO, inspired significantly by Aadisht, called – ‘I want my hour back‘, which will ensure that whoever has been a victim by losing time due to the DST switch over gets to be regain it during the switch back.

This problem would, I realize, be compounded further when the person has experienced N DST switch overs, and less switch backs, but those complications can be remedied on a case by case basis.

The theme song for this NGO, if anyone would bother to compose it, can be sung to the tune of ‘Life is a Lemon’ by Meatloaf. If anyone wants to implement this idea, go ahead, please, knock yourselves out.

Notes about Nothing – Work Anniversaries

Hari — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:02:00 +0000

Its official now, I’ve spent more time outside college than I did within it. Not that I attended too many classes and all that, but I guess I’ve been a Corporate Ho longer than I was an undergrad student. Four years have passed since I graduated from being a dorky engineering graduate to a dorky engineer who had to earn his living.

This officially earmarks the longest voluntary relationship I have ever had in my life. Either party could’ve broken up at will, but both of us have weathered many storms together and have stuck on, for some reasons best known only to the both of us, while most other reasons for aforesaid situation remain significantly inexplicable.

This NaN is going to focus on the memories I have had of September 1st over the past five years, and for sure, it has been quite interesting in more ways than I could have previously imagined.

2004: First day of work. I was unwell, and I had worn a light green full sleeve shirt my sister had got me as a present. She had overestimated my shoulder width, my height and my girth and in the process purchased a shirt that was two sizes too big for me. I wore it nevertheless, because I thought it was important. My cousin, who’s house I was at on the first day I was in Bangalore, dropped me to the office and I walked in through the doors into the room where we had our induction at 0859, one minute before proceedings began.

For the first ever time in my life, I fell asleep in something akin to a class, because the person who was giving us the corporate presentation could as well have been spraying valium through an atomizer four inches away from my nostrils. In addition to my acute somnolence, I had also been, as I had mentioned previously, unwell, and the medicine that I’d been prescribed had given me a light tremor in my right hand, and for one of the first ever times in my life, I was scared as hell about whether I’d ever benormal again.

The doctor’s reassurance about it being a reaction to some expectorant tablet did nothing to remedy the situation, and it was only after I got better and I was able to write properly did I heave a huge sigh of relief.

I had been to the office a fortnight prior to my joining date, on 18th August to hunt for accommodation that was close to where I had to work. Seeing the amount of dirt, dust, traffic and the accompanying madness and mayhem was too much of a shock for me, given that Mysore was diametrically opposite insofar as the state of affairs on the roads were concerned.

Three days after the entire rigmarole began, I had called my Mum up and told her that I wanted to quit and open a grocery store in Mysore, or teach in my college and I’ve had constantly recurring thoughts of quitting work ever since, but the idea has been mulled over so much that its now relegated to that part of me that tends to over-romanticize trivial situations and circumstances.

Its been four years, and, as is quite evident, I still haven’t quit.

2005: I was not doing too well at work, being torn apart between travelling to Mysore on weekends and attempting to work away on the weekdays, while trying to see if I could get a life outside of work, but failing to do so miserably. Whatever remenants of quizzing I had once thrived on in college had now been reduced to nothing, and things didn’t seem to be going well.

Music, which was such an important part of my life, had also been relegated to oblivion.

In the last week of August 2005, I contracted bronchopneumonia, and as a consequence spent the first anniversary of my starting life as a working professional in bed with a fever of 104 F, getting more pale and gaunt by the minute, but sleeping like a baby and feeling happy about not having to work during that time.

Not the best of times, but not the worst of times either.

2006: Oslo. My second visit there in three months. Awesome place, awesomer experiences overall, and with a trip to Copenhagen under my belt, I was having all the fun I could in the available time. Work was also fun because it was challenging and hectic, and I didn’t really bother much about anything else apart from calling family on occasion and telling them how I was having a blast all over the place.

On the morning of September 1st, I saw two mails – one of them said I had my august salary credited to my account, and another one congratulated me for two years of work in my company. I said Meh to both, as I had said to some other formerly important stuff at the very start of the trip and continued to work, without those two mails bothering me much until a few days ago when I took a lazy stroll down memory lane.

In retrospect, that second trip changed my life for the better in more ways than I’d have imagined it would.

2007: It was three years of loyal service to le company, and for some strange reason, it was supposed to be a monumental occasion, given the attrition rates in the industry. I had put NED by that time to want to stay and celebrate at the office, so I instead took a few days off and chilled out at home instead, growing my beard, combing my hair, trying to figure out the best way to remove knots and having my respect for women go up tenfold because of how they were able to manage their long hair all their lives without wanting to stick their heads in a lawn-mower and be rid of it all.

Nevertheless, this was quite a tame and incredibly lazy time for me, and this anniversary passed on without much ado either.

lt;b>2008: So far, I’ve put one post up on my LJ abusing badly behaved kids, been working away as usual, had a good lunch and am about to go watch Rock On with the band. Nothing out of the blue, just another day at work with the usual stuff taking precedence over anniversaries that don’t really amount to much.

Even if I end up going home after work and just crashing after watching some arbit stuff on TV, I know that I’ll have had fun simlpy because I’ve reached a stage where I don’t give a damn about too many things, and am in a controlled free-fall mode.

I still get goosebumps when I recall Jeff Daniels’ voice in the last episode of The Wonder Years – growing up does happen in a heartbeat, but sometimes, that ain’t such a bad thing either. The important thing is to protect one’s balls to make the most of what you can when you can.

Notes about Nothing – Seattle Diary

Hari — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:22:00 +0000

Its been five months since I returned from Seattle, but somehow something or the other happens that invariably takes my mind back to my trip there. This is a post about some of those memory refreshing incidents that have happened since I got back.

Grey’s Anatomy:
My sister follows the serial, although I haven’t seen more than ten minutes of it, not counting the constant promos on Star World interspersed with a song by ‘The Fray’. Everytime I end up going home, she’s called dibs on the remote whenever the damn serial is on air. The rest of the family sulks in other rooms until such time that the serial is finally over.

However, some evening, I was to lazy to go do something else and I ended up watching the first few minutes of the serial, only to see helicopter shots of the Space Needle, the Seattle Center and 3rd Avenue, after which my sister told me that the serial was based in Seattle. It was kinda cool to see an overhead view of the city and visualize myself having walked along those streets for the various arbit activities I’d undertaken.

A Guy Thing:
Having seen Julia Stiles in ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ and ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ as well as in ‘10 things I hate about you’ (whose DVD is now selling like hotcakes since it starred Heath Ledger), I thought she was a real cutie, and since I was in the mood for a romantic comedy last evening, I picked up A Guy Thing from my friendly neighbourhood DVD store, only to find out that the entire frigging movie was based in Seattle.

Familiar streets, some shops I’ve walked past, references to Broadway and more shots of the over-rated Space Needle were enough to bring about feelings of nostalgia. The movie itself is something people can watch when they’re feeling brain-dead, and still enjoy it all.

The Hungry Tide:
The Hungry Tide, a book by Amitav Ghosh, and the second book by him that I’ve received as a birthday present after having been given The Glass Palace as a birthday gift a long time ago has one of its major characters based in Seattle. She’s a marine biologist who’s here on some research work, and during moments of reflection has her thoughts drift towards the city she’s grown to call her own.

I’ve gone through only about a hundred pages of that book, given my currently pathetic reading speeds, but so far its not been a bad read.

Gimme S’More:
I’d got enough chocolates from my trip to last me all of five months. I’ve been on a recent sweet consuming binge which has resulted in me eating ice creams, chocolates, sweets of all kinds and drinking unmeasurable quantities of Tropicana Twister, ensuring that my blood sugar levels have reached all-time highs. It was during one of these instances when I was gorging on a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar that I was reminded of a S’more.

On my last evening in the city, I had been to a birthday party thrown by some of my ‘native’ friends (I used to refer to American citizens as natives) and while sitting out in someone’s backyard surrounding a fire, sipping slowly on one beer for four hours to as to maintain levels of sobriety necessary to ensure I was at the airport on time the next morning, I was introduced to a S’more, and I can’t honestly think of something else I’ve eaten that’s so brilliantly sweet and tasty at the same time. I gave it my own name at that time, I called it a Hershmellow, because I guess I didn’t think too much of the Graham cracker that was also part of the S’more.

Never pass upon a S’more if given a chance to consume one. In fact, ask for more.

Starbucks, endless solo walks along all the streets, hanging out at the CHAC enough to be a regular there, working decently hard on weekdays and being unerringly slothful during the evenings and weekends, phone calls to India, fond memories of my entire trip and the good times I had have remained, and will be counted as one of the nicest travel xperiences I’ve had.

The times they are a-changin, but the memories remain.

Tell me Why..

Hari — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:33:00 +0000

…is it that most people that I know who work in the IT industry have shots of theirs put up either on orkut or facebook with them sitting proudly in front of their monitor in their cubicle?

It is either that or pictures of them on their travels, proudly standing in front of known monuments with a smug look on their face that says – ‘I was there, hah!’

However, I’ve noticed another trend nowadays of how people I know who’re either dating / engaged / married tend to put up profile pics that contain them as well as their significant other partner for all to see.

For the women, I guess it acts as a deterrent for the potential arbit idiot who wants to hit on them, while for the men, it probably serves as an indication of how he’s been stud enough to net a girl.

What of people on social networks who have members of the same sex along with them in their profile pics? Ai?