ALT + TAB

Ya’all must know what ALT+TAB on your computer keyboard does. For all of you pre-historic creatures who don’t know what it does, here it is. Pressing ALT+TAB on your computer keyboard allows you to switch between various windows on your computer system. Now let me tell you what happens when the ALT+TAB misfires :)

This was the 2^nd year of my grad college LJBCA or as we in college used to puff our chests and call it ‘SYBCA’.  The time when we were really getting hooked onto the PC, being a part of the PC frenzy and with that the mania for PC games.

This special incident is about our special man Nisarg Pancholi a.k.a Nis a.k.a Andha a.k.a whatever… Nis like every other one of us was crazed about computer games. His folks always wanted him to work hard on his studies as they knew he could be much better than “paper backs” if he wanted to. But unfortunately, he wasn’t much interested. He was in love, with computer games of course. So after many failed efforts of persuading his folks to accept him as a gamer and to allow him to buy games from his non-existent pocket money… lol… he decided that he would beg borrow steal to get games onto his system, particularly that soccer game, FIFA.

After bribing some classmate with a couple of cheese-puffs and samosas, Nis finally manages to get his hands on the FIFA game. He also manages to come up with a fool-proof plan to rid his folks of suspicion. He knew that if he got caught playing games on his PC that would be the end of it. His folks had even warned him of selling off the PC if they had found him playing games.

But the wily fox that he was, he had a plan. He had created a hierarchy of folders on his drive that had names of everything pertaining of studies. There were folders called ‘study’ itself which in it had more folders called ‘java’, ‘dotnet’ and what not. But the fun part was these folders were empty. They had nothing in them but more empty folders. He would have 2 windows open, one with his game running and the other with the empty study folders. So whenever his folks wanted to take a peek as to what their son was up to, he would press ALT+TAB and would switch from the game window to the study folders window. Ass Saved. His parents would be led to think that Nis was studying. Big risk but he was ready to take it for he loved the game so much.

So one fine day, here I was sitting in his room reading up for the upcoming tests and there was Nis, busy with FIFA. What was to transpire then would leave Nis injured both mentally and physically perhaps for a long time to comeJ. And yes, I would be denied entry to his house for a longer time for having been a part of it. So Nis was busy playing when all of a sudden his dad turned up in the room. Panic spread. But Nis knew what he needed to do and in a confident jiffy, pressed ALT+TAB. Ooops.. the screen blacked out. This time Nis panicked for sure. He didn’t know what to do. He thought the ALT+TAB did not work. At the very moment when he required it to work and save him, it bombed and the screen blacked out. So his dad watching, he tried to maintain his cool and then did an ALT+TAB again and to the combined shock of everyone present in that room…. the FIFA screen popped up………..

THE END………..

I am Back...

After 6 long months of blog hibernation, here I am... back with more crap than ever...
First post-marriage-post coming soooon...

New Age Marri-age

Here’s welcoming you all to the crazy me :). Today I try in this effort of mine, to explore a territory which no one has ever tried to explore before. Just kidding... :) Millions and billions have already tried and got their hands, legs and what not dirty and maybe I just intent to make fun of it. This territory, they call marriage ceremonies. In these times where everything from life to death is influenced by technology, my imagination takes a crazy twist to explore a “what if”... Yes, what if our present day marriage ceremonies were to be completely, or if not completely, crazily influenced by technology. What if people were so crazy that marriages would turn bizarrely online?

Since this is about crazy people and their crazy efforts, who better a protagonist for this bull crap than yours truly... :). So I finally decide to get married and the D-Day finally arrives. Just, for your reference here, let me tell you that I have invited gazzilion people, but have specifically asked none of them to turn up physically for the wedding. I want my wedding ceremony to be streamed live on YouTube. Yes, YouTube... That way, no one needs to make an effort to get up really early in the morning of the wedding and curse the bride and the groom for it. Get up only at the time of the main ceremony, come online, login and voila..... you have my marriage ceremony live on YouTube being streamed to your desktop screens. How convenient.... you could save a fortune, from effort to petrol and new clothes and of course, the best part... avoid highly irritating relatives

After the main ceremonies, it’s time for gifts, This is where you login to eBay and order gifts for the new weds. And please do not forget, the shipping address is the address of either the bride or me depending on whose family you are from or otherwise depending on whom you can tolerate more out of the two.

Now that you have got the gifts shipped to us, you also need to give your blessings to us. Hmmmm... No effort at all.. GTalk, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Orkut and Facebook at your service. Again, all you have to do is login and either write on our scrapbook or wall or plainly ping us your wishes and blessings. Don’t move a muscle and you’ve already attended half the marriage... :)

Now coming to the most important part of attending a wedding. FOOOOD...!! Well, when you did read “Gifts in the form of Blessings only” on my wedding invite, I meant, “Atleast in the form of blessings”... minimum condition required to be eligible for the marriage feast. If you didn’t read between the lines, it ain’t my problem... Strictly, food only for those who bare minimum wish us on this happy or may be not so happy occasion of ours. If we haven’t seen the wish, you ain't getting the food. And talking about food, the sumptuous feast will be parcelled and delivered to your doorstop by the caterers. Conveyance charges for the caterers to be borne by the invitees. Again, don’t move a muscle, avoid the rush, hog in the convenience of your four walls. :)

And last but not the least, all invitees shall be presented with return gifts in the form of online “Thanks for coming and being a part of this mess” cards, with the animated ones only for those who have presented gifts and the plain ones for others.

Well... well... well..., now coming back to reality, all of this above is just my wild imagination. But considering the age and times and of course as I mentioned first, the crazy people to have adorned this crazy planet, this looks very much a possibility. Who knows and who s seen...!!

God Bless...!!

Where is the Love

Raj wants love, seeks love, and craves for love in absolute empty space. Raj believes in dreams, believes in a dream girl, and believes in a dream romance, so much so that he lives in a dream world where reality is a myth. A sucker for love, attention and care. Welcome to the world of Raj.

This is just a chapter in the life of our man, whose life is no less than an out-and-out entertainment blockbuster movie, with its share of happiness, sorrow, hope, despair and every other word in the category of unreasonably sentimental words. This is when Raj has just entered his adolescence. Out of teens, like his eyes and senses on the whole got a complete revamp and ready to take life and love head on. So here goes an episode where Raj thought he could have found love.

Ria was a sweetheart anyone would fall in love with. But for Ria, “there was nothing greater than friendship in the whole wide weird world” or so she would make it seem. Luck by chance, or let’s just call it a dirty game of destiny, Raj and Ria meet up on a social networking site through stranger friend requests which had become a craze then.

Ria had initiated the stranger friend request sending a mail to Raj, letting him know that she found the lies on his profile really interesting. For Raj, there would have been nothing happier or scarier. Happier because hopefully he would meet the girl of his dreams (note that this is all he does, dream) and scared because this was a new, unknown and inexperienced territory as far as he was concerned. He had only had notions of having a love in his dreams. He had no idea about the reality bite. So with hope in his heart and shit loads of fear in his head, he decided to finally meet up the pretty Ria on a blind date.

Cut to the D Day, a cool Friday evening, breezy after a light drizzle, nearing twilight, he met up with Ria face-to-face. Well, to be honest here, he wasn’t blown away by her beauty because when his eyes met her face, it was dark around, power-cut. But this scene was a mere contradiction to what transpired when the place lit up after the ever-bugging power cut.

In Raj’s own broken expressions... beauty, never seen anyone like her before, fairy like, sexiness personified. Alright Raj, we understand. You ain’t never seen a girl before. But this was him and he was blown. Now all he wanted to do is get down on his knees and ask her to marry him. But soon, sanity prevailed and Raj was back to his normal, gentleman self. Projecting a big, bright, flash-bulb smile, Raj greeted Ria. They exchanged nervous yet supposedly happy greetings of “Hi”, “Hello” and “How are you” and got down to the business. Yes... EK COFFEE..!!

Considering how awestruck Raj was after seeing Ria, he let her do all the talking and was highly content listening to her angel like voice and the pretty little nothings being blurted by her. And Ria too, for her part had decided to put her best foot forward, mentioning every single crush and boyfriend of hers from the 3rd standard onwards till now and discussing how she felt love was over-rated and that it was all a time pass for her and how she believed that “there was nothing greater than friendship in the whole wide weird world” Oh wait.. We’ve heard that shit before.

There.... Raj had just received the first genuine shock of his adolescence listening to Ria and her pretty little bragging. He knew there was no chance he could find love in Ria, and if that wasn’t enough, she had gulped down a couple of cold coffees and munched a whole lot on the menu from the coffee shop and this meant, Raj would spend his pocket money for the whole month just to foot the frikkin bill.

Cut to post blind date, where Ria had left after a content hogging and bragging session. Raj... our man was left isolated and stranded in the middle of nowhere with pieces of his little broken heart on the main road with everyone from the auto wala to the Volvo leaving a mark on them. Raj was now confused and sad and of course most suitably “hopeless”. So the moral of this chapter, is not merely a moral but a question mark on Raj’s face. WILL RAJ EVER FIND TRUE LOVE...???

R & D

F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

When you see a heading like that you would know for sure that I am going to talk about friends or may be friendship in general. Well, for once, you ought to get your knuckles cracked for this wrong guess :). No, I am not going to be talking about my friends but, for a change, I want to mention the different types of friends I have.

I come across a lot of people every day and have been doing so for the past 23 conscious years of mu life. When I meet people, there is a natural filtering process that runs within me which picks people I would want to meet again and be friends with. My choice is what I call it and it’s a need based choice. I don’t have a zillion friends and to be very honest I don’t think all my facebook or orkut contacts are my DEAREST friends, but there are some hand-picked earthlings, filtered by need and type.

There are friends whom I need when I am happy or when I want to have fun. These constitute “the gang”. These are people whom I feel are pretty happy themselves. The beautiful people, the funny people, the beautiful and funny people (that’s a rarity thou....).

Then there are the social friends. The term “social” has one and only one definition here, the “social drinkers”. These are the gang also called as the “Friday Friends”. These are the people who call me only during fridays or whom I call only during fridays (that’s the party time...:)), dutch the drinks, and forget each other the next morning, only to remember again next Friday :).

This next category may sound a li’l unusual to you and would lead you to think that I’m trying to blow my own horns here, but I’ve had a category of friends called as the “fan friends”. They pose as your biggest fans while you’re on a roll. They love absolutely anything you say or do. Yes, I’ve had such friends too , but then, they are far and few and never stay long. :)

Then there is this category of beautiful women, who are nothing but beautiful and... beautiful only. This, to my knowledge and experience so far has been the rarest category of friends I’ve had. They are the “arm candy”.

Arm Candies apart, there are the good women. By good I mean, good to me. The women who would sit next to me and listen to my endless sad stories of life... :). They are more of a shoulder to cry on than anything else. These women friends, I am whole-heartedly grateful to for having tolerated me.

And at the end of it all, there are people, who fall into most or all of these groups and are the best things to have happened to me in my life. Men and women alike, who have had an impact in my life in one way or another, whom I have learnt from, whom I have shared with, whom I have laughed and cried with. For all of you, I am blessed that I have you in my life.

But hey, I’m not claiming that this is where the list ends. I have a long way to go, a long and interesting life to live, lots of people to meet and lots and lots to friends to make. So the list shall grow and praying so, God Bless..!!

The Red Rainbow

Outings during weekends are always a pleasant way of switching yourself off from the monotonous home-to-work-to-home routine and if such an outing is to the beautiful arms of nature then there could be nothing better. I want to tell you about one such outing last week with a couple of my colleagues and their gang of friends. Yes!! For once, I was out with people whom I was meeting for the first time, but whatever.

Sharan, my colleague was the father of the plan and Ravi a.k.a Chotu was my instigator. And since I hadn’t had much going my way for a long time, I decided that it was time for a break. So, it was set. We were headed off to Red Hills, Ooty. The gang would be nine souls counting Chotu, his friends Himachal a.k.a Boka and Anand, Sharan, Sharan’s better half Seema, her younger sister Siri and a couple of Siri’s friends and of course yours truly. We were divided into 2 cars, Ravi’s Swift (the auto) and Anand’s Honda City.

Friday late evening was when we started from Bangalore. Our plan was to reach Bandipur if we could, and halt there for the night. But, as the Indian Standard Time mentality goes with us Indians, we had a late start and thus, only managed to reach Mysore and that too by midnight, after a dinner halt at a pathetic highway-side restaurant (no one would dare beg to differ on this one...). So Mysore it was for us for the night and the bad part was to find a place for us to stay and with ladies accompanying, we invariably had to find a sane place to put up. Having loafed around the city for some time and having realised that it was gonne be difficult to find a place by ourselves, we let the ever good Samaritan (the auto-fella, and I hope you got the sarcasm intended here :)) help us out for a meagre 20 bucks. Eventually having found a place by very late midnight, we decided it was time to crash since we had to be up early next morning.

Saturday early morning we started off for Ooty and after another couple of pit-stops for breakfast and tea, we were, in the small yet bustling town of Ooty. With the weekend stepped in, the town, as forever, was packed with tourists, crazed to see the botanical garden and the lake and the what not.

Red Hills, the place we were to visit is a home-stay, around 30 kms from Ooty, over a lot of hairpin bends, up-hill and down-hill. As I said earlier, if you are surrendering yourself into the arms of nature, there is nothing better and I realised and made up my mind for precisely that as soon as I set my foot on the premise of the Red Hills home stay. Let me just give you a heart-to-eye description of the place. The home stay was on the peak of a small hill, adorned with a beautiful lawn fenced with all kinds of flowers. I am not very good at flower names so I ll just go with red, blue, orange or dare I say, a rainbow of flowers. At the edge of the garden was a view point from where you could see the beauty with bare eyes, the transcendental beauty, yes... it would blow one’s senses and it did mine, the valley, the beautiful tea gardens, the lake and the hills nearby and to top it all, the climate which was cool, cloudy and breezy. I couldn’t have asked for more, but surprised I was to know that there was more waiting for me.

We checked into our room, a beautiful singe bed-room wid a fire place, very romantic, but sadly not one I could relate to :(. I thought the room was gonne be not just small but impossible for the 9 of us and then and there was my first surprise. There were 3 tents waiting for us in the backyard lawn, and to my experience the best tents I have seen. Rain-protected, neat, spacious for 2, beds, pillows and big warm blankets. Wowy..!! With that settled, it was time for my next surprise. We, the 9 hungry poor Indians were greeted with a class-apart lunch. It wasn’t five-star or seven-course, but was way better than all that. Good, normal and very yummy home cooked food.

I hogged on the food as if I hadn’t eaten for days together, and why just me, everyone else did too. Chotu had gone nuts. We suddenly realised that there was after all a dog in Chotu waiting to be let out at the sheer sight of good food. :). Post lunch, there was one and only one thing to do, take a power nap. After an hour of sound sleep in the tent I was woken up by the sound of rain drops crashing against the roof of my tent. Yes.. as they say in Hindi, “Sone pe Suhaga”.. I was being treated like the blessed child of nature. There was a light drizzle in the evening which made it look like a beautiful feminine form, just out of a shower, all wet and extremely seductive and to top it, we were greeted with some great coffee. To tell you, things were just getting better for me.

We dint have any plans for that evening since it was getting to twilight soon. So we just roamed around the home stay and in the lawn playing badminton and sitting at the view point just cherishing the beauty in front of us. I did try my hand at badminton though, but failed embarrassingly miserably. So I just let others play and I decided to spend some quality time at the view point by myself soaking the moment. With the light fading off the sky soon, there was my next surprise. Well, I wouldn’t call this a surprise exactly but the way it turned out eventually was the kick of the evening. We had a bonfire getting ready for us and as the night zoomed in and a slight chill set in, the bonfire lit in all grace. But this moment was short-lived as we were pushed indoors by rains.

With the rains playing the spoil sport on the bonfire, we decided not to let our spirits down and so started the party. Drinks were served and with that were served a content dose of absolute thrash-talk. Here entered the “for-so-long-out-of-picture” souls, Boka, Seema, Sharan, Siri, Poornima and Abhi. Boy, did I have a good time listening and laughing at their utterly non-sensical yet very entertaining thrash talk. I can’t tell you what all I blabbered coz I don’t have a frikkin clue of that. :). After a lot of pegs, we decided to huddle in one of the tents. One tent, a single torch light, and 9 sloshed souls inside. What transpired in there was probably my best experience of a huddle. We played games that made no sense and talked about stuff that we dint have any clue about and eventually bid adios to each other for the night and crashed.

Sunday morning, I had to wake up early, for I wasn’t gonne miss the view at dawn from the view point for anything. After a simple yet sumptuous breakfast, we decided to go for a small trek, to the peak of the nearest hill. What started as a small trek eventually turned out to be a tiring climb to the top of the hill. We had just trekked a couple of hundred metres when to everyone’s surprise, our 4 feet 8 inch muscle man Chotu nearly collapsed out of fatigue. His vocal abilities gave up for like a minute (the only minute in the whole trip that the bugger was quiet..). Once Chotu was back to normal, we resumed the trek, slow but steady, pausing at regular intervals, since Sharan and wifey were getting unusually romantic with Sharan virtually picking every single flower on the way and decorating it on his wifey’s hair, which had started to look like some kinda flower vase now :).

The peak was nothing like I had ever seen before in my life. We could see our home stay from the top and it was ant-like. So tiny. I realised then the enormity of things around me and that I was just a small and insignificant creature, a pawn in the hands of a superior power. It was a moment of epiphany. So beautiful, so magnificent..!!

After relishing the climb to the peak and the view there at, we trekked down in half the time, since we had already digested all the breakfast during the course of the tiring trek and were getting increasingly hungry. Back to the home stay, we once again hogged on the yummy lunch that greeted us and after that we cleaned up, packed up and signed off from Red Hills.

Now back to my home-to-work-to-home routine, I am sure that this trip has been a truly refreshing and a jolly-good, fun-filled experience for me. And for everyone whom I joined on this trip, a BIG THANKS and GOD BLESS !!