Have you had this happen to you?

It is almost six months since I took any kind of leave.
I, having planned to make the coming long weekend a longer weekend, broach this topic with my client and my own managers.
I tell them that I plan to skip office for 2 days.
Client says "No problem".
Then I approach my onsite manager. A pretty senior manager this one, heads the entire delivery team at the client end.
She asks me to shoot a mail, just in case she forgets about it.
About to leave, I blurt out the reason for my planned absence. I plan to go on a long road trip, I tell her. I also tell her the places on my plan, the routes I'd take and so on.She just nods and wishes me well.
Next morning, I get a mail from her, asking me to have fun.
Also attached to the mail is a document generated out of a software detailing the routes I told her I'd take, the times, places to stay, map etc.
This doesn't fit in any Dilbert strip, right?
It's a warm and sunny day out here.

Narcissism

Usually I avoid writing about myself preferring to write what I observe. But Casa has asked me to fulfill her tag and here I go. Still I tried to frame answers that are true but don’t focus on me. A difficult thing I found that to be, as I re-read what I wrote.

I am thinking about..
....my oncoming road trip (an arduous one) this long weekend and wish it should be a success.
I said...
....I should buy a home, but yet to do this.
I want to...
....pilot a plane (at the least, a hang glider)
I wish...
....for peace in my mind. (whoa!)
I miss...
:-(
I hear...
....Apple’s gonna release a 100 GB iPod
I wonder...
...why money never stays with me
I regret...
....not doing well in my school finals
I am...
....brutally frank
I dance...
....to no one’s tune
I sing...
....my own meaningless lyrics to popular tunes
I cry...
....unshed tears
I am not always...
....happy. But who else is?
I write...
....to improve my writing. Very little success so far!
I confuse...
....myself when it comes to balancing relationships
I need...
....heavy doses of self-confidence
I should try...
....to clear CAT!!
I finish...
....idlis, dosas and all food in general very fast (of course with appropriate side-dishes)
I tag...
....Paravai
....Janani

I wanted to tag some more of my blog friends but I decided to save them for my future tags. Yeah, I am yet to honour some more tags. Watch this blog for more!

Guns and a Rose

After a long day at office, I slowly make my way through the car park. Two football grounds and some more, the huge carpark can pack. Always one who comes in late, it is a long walk for me having get to park the car farthest from the door.
I push myself in and drop my backpack in the backseat and myself at the wheel.

About to start, I see a car rushing in fast. The car park is hemmed by my office, a creche, a construction company etc. The car stops in front of the creche, some distance from me. Nothing unusual in that except for the rash driving. I am about to turn away when I espy a guy getting out seemingly in a hurry and at the same time being pulled in by the driver, a lady. Rivetted I look at them. A family argument.

The guy peels himself and starts walking away. The woman wildly gesticulates and talks something which doesn't reach me.The guy walks out into a pavement nearby and slowly but surely makes off. The woman starting the car with a ferocious speed matching her temper tries to come on to the other side and take on the guy head on. The guy nonchalantly gets back to this side of the pavement which is long and wide and the woman turns back the car and comes without reducing her speed. She tries to climb on to the curb and hit him. Failing in that, she stops and getting out of the car, rushes on to him. She, her arms spread wide, starts pleading something. I watch a tragic mime. They belong to different races, I could presume from the colour of the skin. A subconscious observation as I am transfixed by the quarrel.

After about a minute flailing and failing, the woman walks back to the car, alone and angry, pulls the door shut and takes a U-turn on her drive back. As the car makes the turn I notice a doe-eyed kid sitting without an expression in the back seat.
Another war, another innocent victim.

'G'agged!

I was tagged.
The Tag Instructions: Comment, and I shall give you a letter. Go back to your journal, and write ten words beginning with that letter, including an explanation of what those words means to you and why. And I was given the letter G.
Hastobeme must have been really mad at me to give me that letter! I think, thank and thunk but for the life of me, couldn’t manage ten words starting with G. Of course, some exotic but had-to-be-censored “G” words, I had them down pat. But I pretend to be a gentleman and so tried to get hold of other words. No progress! So I archived the post in the trenches of my shallow mind {It kept floating :-( }

You allow me in peace, and I’ll ramble, drivel, blather, babble and generally won’t leave you in peace. But you test me with an alphabet and I flunk.

It is almost like stage fright. I can talk by a tea shop for hours together. But remove the tea glass (pronounced T-gloss) from me and give a mike, I’d become verbally challenged. It has happened so many times. How I overcame that and became a proficient public speaker with a stray dog and a lamp post for an audience (yup, it happened, I promise), is the stuff of legend. Will be narrated sometime in the future.

OK, what I am trying to drive home is that this simple tag had me stumped. I was almost tempted to buy up a dictionary and jot down all the “G” words.

Then a week back, Casa threatened with the letter X. That was too much for me. So I decided to hurry up and finish this tag before someone throws a “Z” at me.Here I go!

God – “I am in him; He is in me” – sounds good and high falutin. But I’ll stick to saying that I have felt His presence.

Green Day – Their “American Idiot” is a masterpiece. I love it.

Goal – I am in a country where there is no interest in the soccer World Cup. And the first match starts at 10.00 AM when I’d be in office busy having my coffee break. By the time I reach home, all the three matches are over. I hate it that I am in a place where nobody talks about it.

Goal – One which I don’t aspire to have in life. I meander like a river shifted by the sands of time!! Big funda but can’t help it. Lol.

Gloating – I never like it when it comes from others!

Grumpy – My current mood

Goa – The place I like to visit, hopefully next year

Google – They have made our world a better place with their search engine. God knows how it was before one could “google” anything.

Godfather - The movie (Part 1) which every aspiring screenplay writer should see. Not a scene wasted. Never an irrelevant gesture. A marvellous movie on its screen play alone.

Girls - :-))


I am done!

Budding Buddha!

As I lay waiting for sleep to come, I was thinking deeply. All of a sudden I had gone into a philosophical mood. I thought whether there could be any person in this whole world without any worry. But I also know that, for any person, there would be atleast 2 or 3 people around him who will perceive that given his riches, material or immaterial, he wouldn't be having anything to worry. But to each man, his own pain. A poor man might think the rich who has a luxurious home and all other amenities would be a most happy person. But in truth that rich person might be neck deep in debt, or a failing business, no family and friends....one may never know. Infact the rich person might actually be envying the poor for living a care free life (his perspective). Nothing with you, nothing to lose would be what rich man's opinion would be. Why so many ills and worries plague this world thought I. And I plunged a bit more into the pessimistic morass.

Whatever I do, there is always a problem to nag me. I seem to be running only to stay in the same place. Not one day passes without me worrying about one thing or the other. Personal, official, genuine, imaginary, whatever but something always troubles me. Deeply I thought and I reflected upon whether there had been any great soul who had over come all these. I remembered Gautama Buddha.

I pondered on how Buddha was so disturbed by human sufferng that he quit the material life and go sit under a bodhi tree! That would be a good person to follow, I decided. So immediately I tried to remember how he had renounced his worldly possessions. In the middle of the night, he'd get up and spend a fleeting moment before his sleeping wife and then leave, I remembered reading somewhere. I too decided to do so. I turned and searched for my wife beside. She was not there. Then I remembered that I am yet to be married. Shucks! What all problem one has to face even to renounce this material world! The path to salvation is never easy. Deciding to wait for my wife, I turned back again and went to sleep!

Curse on those Captchas!

I like blog hopping. I don't stop with bloggers that I know or blogrolled. I like to go to one blog, select another blog from its blog roll, then repeat the process to hop to another blog without looping back to an already visited blog. This way, I go to completely new blogs. I've come across many interesting blogs this way. I've come across funny blogs, serious-with-a-cause blogs, plain but interesting blogs, dead pan humourous blogs, very diverse everyone of them.

Some posts make me wish I had written them. Some are so well written that I think of ceasing my blogging altogether and remaining just a reader. Standards so high! Some blogs I remember without blogrolling them (OK, OK, my browser remembers) and visit them frequently. One widely prevalent thing I found is a majority of them employ captchas.

Captchas or "word verification" as described in blogger are a real nuisance. I'd spy a real interesting post which would provoke a comment from me. But in there a captcha would be sitting patiently waiting for me. After commenting, I'd scroll down to hit the Submit only to find cursive and mangled letters asking me to identify them. Some letters among them are a real pain to identify. Some captcha styles make the letters lean on one another making it more difficult to make out what they are. Even if they don't schmooze, they look twisted nearly out of shape. Simply put, they take the joy out of commenting.

Except for the regular blog network, I don't comment on every blog. Infact I avoid commenting on popular blogs that have an insane number of comments even though the posts are too good to leave without a comment. Still a random blog with a post that stops me in my hop and skip through the blog world elicits a response. But the captcha hurdle has to be crossed before saving my thoughts on the post.

Ofcourse, I realize the reason for them reptilian letters being there. I too had the "spam rash" once. But the spammers now seem to be losing interest in hitting blog comments. They must have got a very low rate of response. I guess only a few cranks just for the joy of annoying others still churn out those despicable things. But the cure for them has almost become a bane now. Sometimes I'd hurriedly mistype in a captcha only to be served with another of its ilk. This time I'm chastened enough to patiently pore over it, make it out and repeat it like a kindergarten child writing out the alphabets!

Only good thing is a captcha is less of a pain than a password. Passwords!! Now they are an entirely different story and deserve a more blistering post!

Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University coined the term in 2000 to describe codes they created to help Internet giant Yahoo Inc. thwart a spam problem. "Turing" refers to Alan Turing, a mathematician famous for his codebreaking work during World War II and, later, as a pioneer in artificial intelligence.