pooja of the car

hey

hey hey, hey.
leave me alone for just one day.
turn back on me, and look away,
wait for me to come again

hey, hey hey.
look here, i am not a kid anymore.
i have grown up, and some more.
my life has changed
but you never noticed.
i'm not the same one
you used to know.

look into my eyes
i dont want to lie
theres no party and there no time
its all work thats all i am.

i wish what you are saying was a little true
i'd probably be closer to what i thot i'd be
but its the image you wanted all the time
now that you've got it, you doubt it all the time, time , time.

hey hey, hey hey hey.

ladakh



this site belongs to a junior at IMI's dad. the photos do too. in any case, i thought the photos look so good. this is one of the things i want to do. go to ladakh and take pictures of the place. stay there for a month and have yak tea. avoid yak cheese or butter bacause it is like stone, and the cheese definetly has some hair in it! i know this cause some of my nepali friends once bought yak cheese from nepal and i was chewing and gnawing on it for about 2 hours! and then it finally went down my throat. along with some yak hair. and i dont care to know which part of the body the hair came from.

suggested websites

live plasma

chromasia

try out these 2 sites. live plasma will really blow your mind at the possibilities. its 347am and i am sleepy. i just got back from work. and no, its not a night shift. its like the whole day and then the whole night (almost)

i dont think this is how i want to continue 2 years from now. till then, here i am.

STAND BY ME

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

So darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me
Oh Stand, stand by me, stand by me

If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
And the mountains should crumble to the sea
I won't cry, I won't cry, no I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

And darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me
Woah stand now, stand by me, stand by me

And darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me
Woah stand now, stand by me, stand by me
Whenever you're in trouble won't you stand by me, oh now now stand by me
Oh stand by me, stand by me, stand by me

put up on show (and rightly so)

the rock music party

the leaves fading into the blackness

the leaves were big and heavy. when i looked up, they were fading into the night above. deep green, turning into an almost black, turning into the night.

sitting on a good cushioned chair having my coffee, i felt life like that tree. with the leaves of the next few days and the next few months gradually fading into an inky blackness.

at one point i used to be very interested in writing. i used to think of myself as a better form of hemingway. writing in that simple style. making an impact over many people. i used to think like joyce about flowery and achingly beautiful language. that it was so easy to write like that. to emote through language. rather than to describe. actually, while writing this last paragraph, i suddenly realized (like a bolt from the blue), that i actually do think like this even now. i just cannot stand the beautiful writing thing (like a puff cake waiting to be smashed onto the heavily made up literature woman). what i do really like is desciption. the smell. the view. the animals. the people. the cars and the cows. and everything inbetween. what i was thinking. and what that other person whom i am talking to is saying. nothing else. not his/her thoughts. i cannot sense them. no feelings in the air, nor about the eagle looking at the scene from above.

simple. straightforward. statements.

truckful of colours

S T O P the L I F T

through the windscreen



the rain finally came in chennai. it was quite a day. business was down and the weather was beautiful. sometime during the day, i had some tea someplace and it all felt good. then i had to get back to work!

things are always like that. its all good till the next moment.
the yellow autos and the rain on the glass and on me will always remain as a striking memory within me. something about the freshness about that day has cut deep. especially since in chennai you dont get too many of those kind of days!

to the end of something




a letter putting everything in words
anger, hate, disgust for the love
somethings in life used to have a meaning
now it is like a jaded memory

when i think of all the time we had
it makes me want to shut my eyes and cry
my stomach hurts and my shoulders shake
in anger and in hate.

he was thinking it could end somehow
in another country and in another place
the world is small and the people think the same
there is no possibility for all that is not plain

its not what you think that counts
not the silent looks and the countless thoughts
its someone else who thinks for you
its the world around which decides for you

sad, isint it?
that it should get washed like this
just because you became rational
and believed that the whole world thinks like that same asshole

delve deeper into your mind
and perhaps the true nature of things might be found
that all that is not right is always not wrong.
but this thought buried will not even get flowers
because you have moved away from this memory
to create another sweet story.

light and shadows

waiting to be filled

candyfloss

above the beach

motion in plastic

Big Yellow (taxi?)

cameras and action

saturday at work

73, armenian street

what to write?

sometime has gone by since i wrote last. as always i am again at a quandary over what to write. i have been very busy at work, which has intruigingly affected the gathering of knowledge or issues that i would have liked to do. instead, i find that i have learnt nothing about anything. it is quite depressing, that in the pursuit of making money, we end up not learning anything that interests us. most of the time, it is mere survival and instinct that gets us through. not some new thought or the application of a new idea.

sometimes i wonder if all life had to offer were the formative years and that now is perhaps payback time! the only way to avoid that situation is to ensure that your formative years continue for ever or something like that...through studies, or through adventure (whatever that means) and so on. this post if pretty pointless. let me cut here.

flattened flowers on a tar road

almost every day on the road i see crushed flowers of so many colours. walked over, run over, stamped over. but initially, thrown over the cart which is at the head of a procession carrying a body on its final journey. and once the body has passed, the flowers colouring up the road are a testimonial to life's passing. and as further proof, life actually passes over those flowers, and they become part of the tyres and the houses and the streets where those tyres go. soon, the perfume and the colour of death passes into every house in the entire city. whatever after all is on the road, must reach somewhere.

never tomorrow

the world is today, isint it?

there is never tomorrow. over the last few days, i have been working a lot. till late in the night and the whole day the next. somehow, watching a movie mid week seems like a good idea to break the routine. what good does that do? not much, actually. it just makes me feel a little bit more alive. like there is something else to my life than just my work. everybody needs something, dont they?

i need to do other things too. like learn the guitar. read some more. i am not doing all that these days. i wish i could. i will actually.

work life balance is such a hollow concept sometimes. because of its impracticality. what do you go after? the money, the fame, or after what you want to do? in my case, learn, listen to music, expericne the world. so many things.

we all wish the world to happen to us. but i am trying for a few pinches of salt.

BULLA KI JANA

bulla ki jaana is now definetly one of the best songs written. that, inspite of it having being written in the 12th century. sometimes, it takes a long time for someone to get famous.

my father had an interesting interpretation of the song. its actually in the first person. and it is god singing to bulla, you dont know who i am. i am so many things. and so on. i think that is probably true. rather than it being bulla singing about himself, which seems to be version the video gives out.

hey, rabbi, what do you think.

i also found some other poems of bulla sheah. some of them are agonizingly beautiful. do check them out.

for random visitors, bulla sheah was a 12th century sufi saint who wrote a number of songs with love and god as the central theme. recently, in india, a 21st century sikh musician called rabbi shergill did a cover version of one of bulla's songs. that song is now the chart hitting track accross the entire country.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS



i saw this movie over a year ago at home. it raised johnny depp's status in my eyes more than a few notches. something about he delivery of his acting is unparelleled even in hollywood. if anyone can close to being a nut like him in any other move is probably brad pitt in twelve monkeys, another absoloutely incredible movie.

i was reminded of depp and fear and loathing from this post, which i got to by clicking on the 'next blog' bar at the top. something i suggest everybody should do.

for, and here i unquote, it is not the things that you search for which are the most interesting, rather, it are the things which search you which are the most.

SERENITY



the net's unique ability to excite continues. sometimes, once i come back home, i like to browse through to some of the sites which are apolitical, uncontroversial, and dont involve the words iraq, the US, iran, politics and the like.

the website with this image and others like this are here.

this ad here

this italian ad brought back memories of the time i read gandhi ji's entire autobigraphy in class 7th. the entire series was in the kendriya vidhyalaya i studied in and was printed in sevagram, sometime in the 1970's. it was quite wonderful to read all that his mind held.

today, there is a feeling of betrayal sometimes, to that kind of thought. one that is possbile, yet elusive. the achievable dream.

perhaps just like everyone else, i should try out the big bad world first before thinking of this path as the dead damm wrong one! i wish to err first, not later.

dont take D cold

Over the course of a conversation i got to know that paras pharma's drug 'D Cold' has the drug Phenylpropanolamine (PPA). i got some info on the drug from the govt. of singapore's health dept. site. Which had something quite serious to say.

Phenylpropanolamine (PPA) is a nasal decongestant and is a common ingredient found in many cough and cold medicines.

Since November 2000, all medicinal products containing PPA have been withdrawn from sale or reformulated to be without PPA in Singapore. This is a precautionary measure to protect public health and safety and taken in relation to a study published by the Yale University in the United States.

I catch a cold quite often and have taken an entire course of D Cold over a few days. To know that in the process I have been exposing myself to the risk of a stroke is not a comfortable thought. Especially when the Singapore website says that drugs without PPA formulations have replaced the ones with it. I don’t understand why that same process hasn’t happened in India. D Cold as a drug is fairly popular in India and most people take it without it being prescribed by the doctor.

Please stop taking D Cold or any other drug with PPA immediately. What with so many things killing us these days, one more is hardly necessary.

State of mind



exit stage left got me onto rush and made me listen to frank zappa (which i dident like at all). i just went to his blog and it isint updated since the last time i saw it. more than a year ago. a sudden thing. for me. like a disappearence.

gorgeous writes though. but the tone has changed. its not the same as earlier. i hope everything is right.

so often, our blogs and the websites and emails and the photos we take mirror what our mind is going through. it is almost scary. that a mind can suddenly become so public. that writing about going to the shopping mall can be so different depending on the particular phase of our lives.

i am like that image right now. just connected words. needing all the help science and tradition can provide.

more than anything else in this world, its the ability to enjoy our lives under the greatest adversity that transforms a mans vision into insight. it gives us the look of a man who cannot be affected by anything.

in the meantime, where is my madira?!

To Kill The Child

2 new singles by roger waters. he's saying the same thing that most of the world is saying.

hey, america, listen!

iranian theocracy being destroyed by its students

what is the meaning of information?

is it about an idealogy, or is it an opinion?

for if it is an opinion, then the facts dont matter. the truth is, just as in this case above, where the theocracy in iran is being destroyed by its own students. the same students who are being given the support of the US in case they have an uprising. it is so blatantly ironic that the world's largest country needs to give support to the students in another nation to rise against its own government for its own selfish interests. its all about oil after all. or another one or two things. the dollar rates against the euro. israel. control over the middle east. either way, it aims at establishing US political authority over sovereign nations.

check out this excerpt below, which talks about US support to iran for a very long time. and do check the link.

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, began his reign in 1941, succeeding his father, Reza Khan, to the throne. In a 1953 power struggle with his prime minister, the Shah gained American support to prevent nationalization of Iran's oil industry. In return for assuring the U.S. a steady supply of oil, the Shah received economic and military aid from eight American presidents.......

the news is quite genuine i think.

some points:

• the ayotollah came into power on the strength of a popular uprising.
• the shah was spending oil dollars (obtained because of a strong demand from the US) to purchase weapons (again, from the US) , therefore, in effect not spending any money on developing iran as a nation! money comes from the US for oil and goes back to them as payment for weapons!
• i think there is a distortion on the storming of the embassy. it seems to be incited because of the return of the shah, a guy not very popular in iran.

the objective of this piece is to give another perspective to the very beautiful image of a pencil breaking the iranian theocratic sword. i have a lot of respect for the cox anf forcum cartoons. however, i have no respect for people who pursue a particular line of thinking just because the majority or government policy thinks so.

hang up

The Supreme Court today issued notices to mobile firms and private banks on a public interest petition alleging that they were providing........

this article in the business standard has a little more relevance to me than usual since I work for a very large MNC bank. my bank also happens to indulge in such practices time to time. clamping down on cell phone cold calls will have a direct impact on business. from the bank's perspective, this operation is defended on the basis of customer reach and competetive pressures. however, for the customer, it is nothing but a string of calls from unknown people trying to sell a million products. the ideal thing to do would be to maintain a directory similar to the one in the US which has people segregated according to their preferences on getting calls from commercial establishments. that system however, would be sifficult to put in place in india, and would be horrible difficult to monitor. what could however be done is to allow calls only to numbers available through directories (which are defined!) and through references.

during a discussion between us at the bank, there was talk about setting up of a credit bureau in the country (India). The conclusion was that it wouldn't be set up till we don't have a single unique number For each citizen in the country. Like the social security number in the US. We over here have a different passport number, seperate PAN nos., election cards (with no numbers!) , ration cards and inexplicable other cards.

ofcourse, the entire debate of whether the country needs to uniformly encode its citizens is another discussion all together. a very relevant and interesting one at that.

in the same light, I was also thinking about why India does not have a single phone number across all cellular service providers. It would increase customer choice which is limited at present due to his inflexibility in losing his old number. However, having a single number across networks would definitely make the telecom market in the country a fun place to watch!

tomorrow i will start a series on my earlier company! some things that they could do to imporove (but they wont!), inspite of being the largest company in the sector in this country. i will tell you that precisely due of that reason, they will be unable to maintain competetive edge over the next few years.

a woman, a man with a large white bag and an invalid man.

this was the scene i saw this morning on my way to someplace. they were collected together because a bus had broken down and they were the only 3 people unable to move on. obviously waiting for another means of transport to come their way. it was almost a movie scene, perhaps even the starting of something like yuva. intercrossing lives and all that. it would have been interesting had this happened on a country road rather than in the heart of the city. eaither way, it was an interesting site. flat tyre, a woman sitting on the pavement with her hand to her head. a man on this crutches looking onto the coming traffic, and a labourer with his huge white bag of something, sitting whiling away the time without a care.

B B Shah

a few days back i bought a pair of contact lenses from BB Shah at spencer plaza in chennai. within a week, one of contact lenses tore during the night due to some reason. i had cleaned and kept them through the night as usual in the solution. however the next morning had one of them torn. i went to BB Shah to get them changed. on a previous occasion in mumbai, the optician exchanged the contact lens without any problem. here, however, i was asked to pay rs. 600 for the new lens. when i explained that it was probably old stock or there must have been some problem with the lens, the shop owner haggled with me and agreed to pay rs. 300 if i paid the rest of the 300!

i really dident have any choice and had to pay up. on top of that, the new lens that i got wasnt the same size as what the other one was.

what really got me worked up was:

• as a shop, BB Shah did not wish to take any responsibility for the products it sold, irrespective of what the manufacturing company's policy on such products is.
• it did not matter to them what a single customer's opinion is about the shop, as long as that customer isint going public or isint able to.
• the most disturbing fact was the attitude of the owner to share costs on a product which i had already paid for. from my perspective, i was essentially buying the same product twice.
  

all this is interesting because in other parts of the world (say the US and europe), customer centricity is tantamount to survival. here, with few making any efforts to ensure customer retention through service, there are high chances of them being over run by large experienced retailers who will gobble up market share and the cutomers.

often, service from small shops is what prevents consumers from venturing into cheaper discount stores. however, this kind of attitude does not leave any reason to stay with the smaller shop. a sad situation for the small shopkeeper and the consumer both.

the game call of duty has me hooked and in awe of computer graphics technology. its based on the ravoc engine so realism is total! the physics and the ai of the enemies are very close to what could be experienced in real life.

i think it should be made mandatory for every 6th standard (and above) students. by the time they finish this (and the expansion pack) they will be experts on the II world war. a piece of knowledge always useful anywhere in the world.

what i need to do now it buy a new 3gig AMD processor. that should happen sometime next month. :)

B L A C K

the movie's review can be read here.

on the way back home, my parents were discussing about what the movie kind of taught. i thought it taught responsibility. the kind of responsibility it takes to take care of individuals. my parents thought it made them realize how lucky we are to have all our senses and whatever else god gave us. i think they denote 2 different perspectives on life.

i dont think i have to review the movie since it has been dealt with to almost death. the one thing which really struck me though was the excellent cinematography. something i have almost never seen in any indian movie before. if at all, perhaps the closest use of shadows and light before this was probably in the movie pyaasa, by guru dutt. even that, wasnt as good as black.

this is a winner, yessir!

iraqis voting- what does this mean?

this image was at res republica. it was about iraqis voting successfully. somehow the image to me shows a lot of voters showing their fingers to be cut off....with red marking the spot.

it bears more resemblance to the 'democratic process' in iraq. in todays state of the union address by the US prez, he was talking about giving support to any democratic process shaping up in iran. at some level, americans need to realize that cultures and countries should not be bought to a common denominator. in this case, the democratic process. what use is an imposed democracy?

the democratic process of governance is only one way to govern. what matters is the choice to decide the manner of governance. that choice rests with the people of the country and not with another country.

one of the first things i am doing after getting onto the net is familiarizing myself with firefox. its a very neat browser and a lot of you must be using it. however, dont use it wothout the mouse gestures extension. and the load in ie extensions which comes in handy whenever firefox is unable to open a page (all because some punks who designed those websites dident want it to anyway!)

its free like music and movies on the internet, and is definetly much better than good ol ie.

one other thing....why the hell isint edonkey connecting?!

the net and the insanity of connectivity is pulling me in. even when i have nothing to look for, there is something to see, like this fotog, or fotolog as yeyang calls it. the colours are just amazing.

back at home. charting a different path. hope things work out fine.

in another few days, ater my brother returns to the US, i am going to blog much more. there are some interesting things i want to talk about.

so check this place next week.