Insanity Continues..!!

Who would've thought that just a casual look would spur up such an intense craze..
And now my mind longs for an eternal gaze..!!


What should I call those kohl-filled beautiful eyes, the enticers or the enchanters?

With which you cast a spell and leaves me off-balance and takes me to the cleaners!



The place which I hated by all ways..
now feels to be visited always..!!


How do I strike a conversation..?
When I am plagued by a consternation..!!


Will you respond well when I gather courage..?
Or throw a caustic look with all rage..??


When was the last time I was disturbed to this extent, 
And wrote pages without my heart reaching any content!


And I just realized, I wrote my first ever verse..!!
Does this make any sense? or is it really that worse??


Image Courtesy: Google Images

In one word I say, Discordance!

When the blogger within me woke up on a late Saturday night and rambled few random thoughts that were marked by vent, and signed off  with a tinge of tollywood!


Work-life Imbalance!
The last two months have been the busiest of my work-life so far. There were some heart in mouth situations followed by a little phase of contentedness. And the time when my mind was idle, it went in retrospecting 'being 24 - Something'. Thought I would write about it, but backed off thinking that wouldn't be 'Substantial'. Then I realized, like many cricketers who lose form, may be, I too have hit a rough patch, and needs some time to get back to the original form flair. Also, this phase has helped me understand the importance of the line This too shall pass better than ever.

Sucker punch!
I thought I should write about this song, which talks about the 'firsts' of a couple in a relationship. This song meant a lot to me then! and a little now! (Please excuse me for the poor quality of the video. That was the only one available on the net.) And yeah, the human senses are so powerful, aren't they? Just the tune of a song, smell of a perfume/deo would make you travel to the past in a split second time.
Thank God! we are blessed with forgetfulness as well, else life wouldn't be that easy. I wish I write a dedicated post about the power of forgetfulness and olfactory!

Athithi Devobhava!
I was on a short vacation to my home-town the last week, my not-so-cricket-crazy parents didn't opt for 'Star Cricket' in their channel À la carte and hence I had to catch the action on National TV, it was after some years that I tuned into this channel.

One thing that amazed me the most were the advertisements broadcast-ed, those of educating people to maintain cleanliness while cooking and serving food, and Aamir Khan endorsing the 'athithi devobhava' campaign, enlightening us not to spit on roads,  scribble on walls of heritage sites, and other conspicuously trivial matters. That shows that there is still a large population of our country engulfed in stark darkness, where the light of civilization is yet to break through.

But considering some of the oldest civilizations being flourished and evolved in this great country, how did these common and basic human behavioral skills vanish? or were they never here and only we imbibed those from other countries/civilizations or through education?

After all this, they still stay, "India Shining!"

PS: I am perplexed why I kept one of  the sub-titles as 'Sucker Punch'!

Off-topic: My FB status read 'spider man.. spider man..' today, its because of this, its quite sweet, funny, raunchy, and a little stupid! The USP of this song could be accounted to the mellifluous voice of Gopika Poornima.


Image Courtesy : Google Images

Just books! Nothing else!

It was more than a year that I caught up with some good book to read. The last weekend, a read of this post made me restart my reading journey in this new year of 2012. Also joined here, and created an online shelf of the books I read and the books to read this year. And on the Sunday, I went to 'Odyssey', my first visit to this book store, all this while I used to buy the second-hand/pirated books at Jayanagar 4th block.

I entered level two of the building, and as I moved in further inside, I was only welcomed by some kid stuff - children fiction, stationery and some toys. I approached the store-helper and asked 'where do I find the other books, uh, the adult books?', he gave a half-grin and said 'I didn't understand what you said', I broke into a smile as I realized that I just used a wrong word there, or rather used a word wrongly. Later, my mother-tongue came to my rescue, and he asked me to go a level down for the 'adult' books !

Yeah! There it was! A sea of books, ok, a good number of books to say. I loved that sight. I always loved visiting the book stores, picking the nicest of the books, sitting on the stool and turning few pages. During my college days, whenever I visited Forum, I made sure that I stopped by Landmark, at least for a window shopping or to get to know the best-sellers and to make a mental notes of which books to buy from Jayanagar 4th block at a price 1/4th of the price of the original book. Somehow, I wasn't that guilt about buying a pirated copy that time.

Back to the scene, I had few books in my mind, mainly some biographies, so checked the 'BIOGRAPHY' section for  'Open' , 'Truman',  'The Story of My experiments with truth' but found none.

Then, for a while I thought I should read some philosophy, and checked some Robin Sharma's, but for some reason his books failed to impress me, may be because I am very much influenced by Paulo Coelho's thoughts, and hence the former really failed to make a mark on me.

Then moved on to fiction, I had two books in my mind, 'Midnight's Children' and 'The Fountain Head', while checking for these, a book with the bold letters , 'GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ One hundred years of solitude', caught my attention. I remembered reading about this author the day before and picked up a copy of this book, read the review by Salman Rushdie, who described the book as the greatest in any language of the last fifty years. I thought it would be nice to read a book just like that without doing much research on it like how I buy the 'wildstones' or 'the park avenues' without testing them once. Most of the times the choice would turn to be good and at times a dud! Whatever the outcome be, the surprise factor that comes with it would still be great!

So there I go, bought the book, read a few pages, and updated the 'Currently reading' section in my goodreads account.

PS - I wish facebook would add a plug-in to update our 'Currently reading' status, that would help some lazy readers like me to read more for the heck of utter show-off !!

Here's one more dimension of what I said above, a pic of the book from my new HTC Wildfire S!

Down the memory lane..

Pasanga, a children-centric Tamil movie that I watched recently made me write this post. No, this post is not a review about the movie, instead it is about the school-life memories that are etched for life in my mind.

It was a day during class 7, a notice was read by our class teacher saying that our preparatory/final exams were advanced by a week or so. Listening to that, the class went quiet, and I on a funny note said 'we will go on a strike!'. I thought I wasn't that loud but it fell into the ears of our teacher. The look on her face stated that she did not understand my so called 'humour'. Hell with it! She in turn called me to her desk and rewarded a painful whack on my back! Huh!

I was like Harbhajan Singh that time, a good student, at the same time, one who was always close to controversies, and our teachers used to rope in Sachin Tendulkar, my elder sister, who also was my immediate senior in the school (read it as who was always in the good books of my teachers), to pass on some words of wisdom to me.

The next thing that reminds me of high school was the "rote" method! I was so much into mugging that time that I even used to count the words of an answer (yes, that includes the count of the articles used in that answer!). And for me, a word written in the answer paper which wasn't printed in the text book was a crime. I thought answering a question as what printed in the texts would show that I was ridiculously meticulous. Somehow, my teachers and parents didn't observe that I was on a wrong learning method. May be the good marks I used to get masked the underlying fact.

About the games now. Though I wasn't that lean a boy, I had rather a poor throwing arm, and so I rarely played the 'catch-catch' game, where in a group of people would split into two teams and a member from one team would throw the ball up in the air, and the other team people would catch it in its descent. Ah! buoyed up one day, I too joined the league to play, and the first time I took the ball and tried to put it out of earth's orbit, it went off the flight and fell off the school's compound. Well, loss of the ball meant the end of the day's play. And ten bucks!

Those were some moments!. Thanks for the movie for putting me on the lane of reminiscence.

PS - I promise I will write something substantial the next post! Bouquets and brickbats are welcome!
Here's a pic of the heroes of the movie -

Image Courtesy: Google Images

Being Kolaverised!

It was a regular visit to Facebook and a link with the name 'Why this Kolaveri di' caught my attention.

Just opened to see what was that. Boy! That was addictive! Hilarious! And stuck to my head for whole of the day as a hard, sticky chewing gum!

Thought I would be fine the next day! But the song emerged to be the winner over my mind!

It was still running in my head, I took a bath, and was performing my regular prayer before God, my head processed a different suprabatham that day, with few remixed lines as paa paa paaan.. paa paa paan pa.. paa paa paaen pa paa.. sariya vasi..!!!  I somehow managed to finish the prayer. My sincere apologies to the almighty for my wavered concentration!

I started to office, to my surprise, my kolaveri-addicted mind didn't force me to download the song and made me save into my mobile. I was on my way.

My usual walk to the office would always be with my headphones connected to phone and phone connected to FM, however I was so much kolaverised that day, I didn't even think of putting on them, who knows even the FM channels would have been bombarded with the same kolaveri song!

Come office, my teammate was listening to something on her music machine, I thought she wouldn't have checked the song and I wanted to proudly introduce her the song and kolaverise her too, but my excitement dropped as she had already downloaded the song and had several runs of it! Yes! she was infected too, by the kolaveri virus!

Ten minutes into my work, I could hear ring tones from all corners of my work zone buzzing with 'Why this Kolaveri Kolaveri Kolaveri Di', it seemed like people have  intentionally increased their phone ringing volumes just to show off that they are also enjoying this wide-spread musical epidemic.

Then I realised, Kolaveri travels faster than light!

The day went off with some moments of surprise and awe when I found someone who hadn't heard the song yet, and they were made to feel as though they made a grave error by not being active on the social networking sites and someone would even look at them as though they were from a different planet! (Little exaggarated though! ;))

Its day five! Yet the song wins over! and I remain KOLAVERISED!!!!!!!

PS - The success of this song is a clear message to the movie-makers. I hope the SRKs and the DirtyPicture production crew would realise that sense-less promotions, excessive hype is not the way to pull in people into the theatres, its just sheer creativity and out of the box stuff that connects to people world-wide and yes at the cost of nothing!

PPS - I have seen people hitting this post to find the meaning of 'Sariya Vasi' as I have mentioned those words in one of the lines of this post. I don't want to disappoint them. The meaning of Sariya vasi would be "Is it right? Vasi" (Vasi - a tamil name, incidentally the name is the character's name that Rajnikanth played in the movie Robo).Any Tamil friends please clear me if I am wrong!

M S D, Respect.

Behind the three wooden sticks, there lies a cricketing laboratory, powered by a sharp brain and a pair of quick claws. Yes! I am talking about an agile wicket-keeper who also is an aggressive stroke-maker, and above all a calm leader that comes in a package called Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

Let me get nostalgic here, I was always fascinated with the story of King Midas as a child. As I grew up I can only associate the story to the modern Midas, MSD! The forerunner of the modern Indian cricket. Mind you, he doesn't have an MBA degree from the LBS or the IIMs. However, the decisions he take, that burgeon from his instincts, well supported by his enormous confidence produces great results.


Instincts
Be it handing over the last over of the maiden 20-20 world cup final to an unheard name in the form of Joginder Sharma, or be it promoting himself up the order in the finals of the 2011 cricket world cup, the success of MSD has been stupendously stupendous. I fall short of adjectives to describe more about his feats and his super human abilities! '

Sportsmanship
Who would recall the 'dumb' bell to the crease though his dismissal was legal according to the rules of cricket except a true sportsman like MSD, (there were some news that his decision was influenced by Tendulkar). Though this act of him was highly applauded by the cricketing greats it was equally censured by the rest of the cricketing fraternity. But with that decision he helped keep the cricketing ties between the two nations green!

A Leader
He is a true leader when it comes to sharing the credit to his team members, and at the end of the day he makes sure that each one of them gets their pie of honor, credit and respect. At the same time he backs his team and lead from front in the time of adversities. That is the reason he bats at six, and not to keep his averages thick!


Critics
However successful MSD is, there have been critics around the world who comment that his success is only because of sheer luck and not of any cricketing brilliance. To prove them wrong, here's what happened just a few days ago, India lost 4-0 in the away test series in England. And it only meant one thing - "EVEN MSD fails! ". A root cause analysis on the loss would help discover the answer - excess cricket means tired legs, tired body and a tired mind.

The loss clearly makes an understatement that luck has nothing do with the success he has achieved and the laurels he brought to the country. Only self-belief in your instincts, calmness and level-headedness means success for everyone!

PS - How ridiculous it is to compare the batting technique of MSD to number ten Ishant Sharma! Did you forget the days when you basked in the glory of  MSD's mighty sixes and the celebrations you did when he lifted the trophy which the whole country waited for nearly three decades! If you did forget here's that historic image!

PPS -

I remember reading a quote by Paul Strang of Zimbabwe ' What we[Zimbabwe] need is 10 Tendulkars'.

But I say what you really need is just one Dhoni!!


M S D, Respect!