If Monday was a Man...

...I would knock his silly teeth out.


In other news today is my first Monday after a long vacation at home.

Tennis Tales...

In the 19 hour period between 6 pm yesterday to 1 pm today I've played 8 sets of tennis, accounting for around 7 hours of tennis and have slept for 3 and a half hours.

I am dead tired.

I would write more but my fingers refuse to flex.


So i'll just tell u the scores:

3 singles sets:

7-5, 6-1, 6-1

3 doubles sets:

6-2, 6-4, 6-3

Thank God none of them went to a tie breaker or I would've passed out :)

Is this the holiday I signed up for?...

i'm so angry.

When I was coming here I was dreaming of an absolutely relaxed and lazy ten days when I took those expensive tickets to go home for a short vacation.

And what do I get instead?

So much work, so much effort, strenuous days, tired rest at night. Is this what I signed up for? Really?...

I mean, right from the moment I gracefully open my eyes in the morning i'm enundated with tasks that make me exert myself both mentally and physically.

You're my loyal readers so I shall tell you all about my woes. Yes, I expect sympathy - lots of it.

So this silly round yellow thing that loiters around across the sky all day long sends in sharp and bright rays through the window nearly at the crack of dawn. Ok, maybe its nearer 11 but c'mon, i'm on vacation, cut me some slack. It was just 6 hours after dawn. Anyway, after this tortuous waking up ritual I have to drag myself on tired feet, dreading the looming effort full day ahead...

And then i have to take such important decisions. Do I read the newspaper first (but I'll have to go all the way to the living room for that), do I go see whats for breakfast/brunch? (what?? all the way to the kitchen?) or do I just go and plonk myself infront of the TV in the other bedroom?

Why God, why? Such important decisions, as Bertie Wooster says, cannot be made before breakfast. (I'm assuming all my readers know Bertie. If not - WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR MISERABLE EXISTENCE? GO, read P G Wodehouse. )

Anyway, so i manage to drag myself after exercising my jaw while eating breakfast to the TV room. So I plonk myself and arrange all the pillows and blanket around me. All snug and cozy looking forward to watching TV and what do I find? The remote, taking a cue from its name, is at the remotest corner of the room. All my efforts wasted. Just managed to drag myself on my hands and knees to reach the remote. I'm not proud but I think I had tears in my eyes when I finally reached the remote. And then the long journey back to the bed, rearranging the pillows again.

This is my life nowadays. Now tell me, is this anything less than third degree torture in Tihar Jail?? Am I wrong to complain?


PS: I'm having the laziest and most awesome holiday ever :) I'm loving it.

PPS: Met all my friends one night and got that warm fuzzy feeling when I saw that two of them had gone wau out of their way to get a food item which they know I like in comparison to getting one thats easily available and which they like better. Sniff..what friends, what lovely friends :)

Home, here I come...

Here's how I described Delhi to a Mumbai based friend over emails today :

"Aww cmon, how can anyone not be excited about visiting delhi. Lal Quila, Qutub Minar, Jantar Mantar, wide roads and boulevards, tree lined avenues in central Delhi, metro rail, traffic signals that work, earthy swear words hurled lovingly at everyone, pretty girls, fast cars, expensive phones, the glitz and glamour, the food, the chat, Kake da dhaba, Murthal ke paranthe, Transport nagar at 3 at night, Q'BA and DV8, Connaught place from the air at night, my college DCE, home ….sigh…Delhi – its wonderful"

IN other news, as the great philosopher and thinker (and er..sleazy act doer) Shakti Kapoor once (almost) said: 'Haki tiki haki tiki ha, I'm going to Delhi tomorrow'

Of course this is the same chap who calls himself Crime master Gogo and plays gotiyan after aankhen nikaloing, so I don't know how much value his statements have. But yes, I'm going to Delhi tomorrow for a much much needed holiday. And am so excited about it. Infact this is what I wrote to a friend:

I'm going to delhi tomorrow. I'm going to delhi TOMORROW. I'm going to DELHI TOMORROW. I'm going TO DELHI TOMORROW. I'm GOING TO DELHI TOMORROW. I'M GOING TO DELHI TOMORROW.

SO, as is rather evident, work does take a bit of a back seat when I'm on the verge of a Delhi trip.


Really sorry for this silly silly post but i'm all excited about going home and meeting all my friends and just relaxing for 10 days. :)

Weekend Diaries continued...

Well, its been a bit of time since I regaled all of you with tales of my adventurous weekends in Bangalore. To tell you the truth my weekends have not been very interesting for some 3 months now. I mean I enjoyed them but they wouldn’t make very interesting reading. Going by the high standards of entertainment I maintain on this blog a tennis game in the morning followed by sleeping all day long does not exactly match up as the most exciting day ever. And that’s what I’ve been doing consistently for the last three months.

However, this weekend was radically different and was in sharp contrast to the staid weekends of yore. There was no tennis as the guy I play with was visiting home. Thus began the debauchery filled weekend again.

Friday: The favorite day of the weekend began on a rather frustrating note (By start of course I mean after office). I was supposed to go to this pub called Purple Haze with a few of my colleagues but ended up getting lost. Yes, yes BEFORE I even hit the pub. It so happened that I missed the entrance to the pub and then had to use my amazing direction sense to come up with an alternate route to reach the place traversing through myriad one-way streets scattered around that part of the city. As is a well known fact my sense of direction is consistently wrong, without fail (In fact if Delhi was not a circle I would never have been able to reach any unknown destination there). It didn’t fail me on Friday either. I finally managed to reach the place after driving around for an hour – in a 3 kilometer radius.

Anyway, after that it was just super. It had been such a long long time since I had so much fun in a pub. It was good company and I had a rocking time – head banging to unknown songs, playing the air guitar, jumping around, tipping waiters and attendants, getting into small challenges, jumping some more, recognizing some songs and getting totally excited about them. Really amazing evening. It had been way too long since I had such an evening out.

Saturday was even cooler, if that was possible. Bangalore open, the Women’s Tennis Association event, was going on and Saturday had some very interesting matches lined up. These were semi-final level matches featuring Patty Schnyder and Yan Zi and Venus Williams and Serena Williams. AK, as usual, was enthusiastic about trying new things so we tried to get tickets for the matches but failure loomed ahead as no tickets were available online or at the Café Coffee Day outlets that the newspaper ads said would have them (The Coffee Day I went to to ask, the guy gave me a gentle smile you give to a child when you tell them that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and told me that no such thing was happening). But did these failures keep us down? Or did the indomitable spirit of adventure nestling in our heart seize the day and shouted out "Carpe Diem"?

Er…slightly melodramatic…but anyway AK drove us down to the stadium which was a decent distance away and we managed to get tickets for the evening.

We reached there by 7:30. A word or two about the stadium. Excellent. Just walking inside the stadium (Kingfisher Lawn Tennis Association stadium in Cubbon park) transported us to a new place. Brilliantly floodlit with excellent facilities and international looking courts and stands. Excellent display screens for scores and previous set highlights while the players rested. Everything was hassle free and well managed. Seriously, this Vijay Mallya is amazing. He puts his hands in all glamorous endeavors but executes them to perfection. Seriously we need entrepreneurs like him to highlight the importance of quality and flair.

We missed half of Schnyder’s match but it was really cool seeing these top players of the world. Patty is ranked 11 in the world right now, Serena 9, Venus 7 . But the game itself was not particularly fast paced. It was more gentle and forehands were going well over the net rather than just skimming the net. Patty was playing more with slice and top spin than with power. Her opponent Yan Zi was trying to put power in the game but it wasn’t enough. Patty had way more guile and execution ability and ended up winning in straight sets.

The next match was the big one. The Williams sisters facing off against each other. And man, they’re huge. Venus is 6’1” and Serena is 6’0” and looked way way bigger with tremendous reach than that.Both are extremely athletic though Venus is more lithe. Now this was a game with a totally different tempo altogether. Both of them had so much power and their strokes were burning up the court. Excellent game that went right down to the wire (6-3, 3-6, 6-6 (7-4)). Serena won the game purely because she was more composed on the important points. Venus seemed to get ruffled, though Serena also did her share of double faults and unforced errors.

All in all a wonderful way to spend a Saturday. Seeing world class athletes slugging it out in a sport you love.

Sunday was interesting as I met a couple of friends, discovered a great lunch place and ended up watching an inane movie (Bombay to Bangkok. Don’t ask, just please don’t ask) on a 42 inch LCD tv at a friends place. Very very cool TV. I can just imagine what it would feel like to watch some gripping match on that large screen!

All in all a very good weekend. These are the kind of weekends that pump you up and make the previous five days worth it :)

Foreign Discovery...

My parents have gone for a two week vacation to Italy and some parts of Europe. Yes, they haven’t taken me along and that’s got nothing to do with how I behaved on our Goa vacation where I went with my parents and granny. {NO I wasn’t staring open-mouthed at those girls playing volleyball. I was..I was yawning, yes yawning. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!}

(Actually, it wasn’t quite the most adventurous Goa vacation anyone can have – think about it, parents and granny, not the ideal recipe for Goa type fun. You can stop snickering NOW. I finally did have a good Goa holiday with friends near Diwali 2006.)

Anyway I digress. So my parents called me up a couple of days back from somewhere near Rome to gloat talk to me. They’re having a wonderful time there and are planning to go to Venice, see the leaning tower of pisa (they could’ve come to my place to see the leaning tower of pizza --- boxes but no, they had to go all the way there…hmmppff) and maybe even Paris (What? You can see Paris on most gossip channels almost every day. And our Bangalore Times gossip columnists seem to have a dedicated group of Paparazzi just for her)

(* too many digressions again today but I just have to tell you this. I’m never going to forgive a colleague of mine for wasting one and a half hours of my life that I’ll never get back. He gave me this absolutely lame ass movie called Paparazzi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paparazzi_%28film%29 . His movie collection is quite good and so I kept myself fixed to my seat hoping against hope for an interesting plot twist. It is easily the most imbecilic movie I have ever seen. The two line plot is as follows – you’re going to thank me that I gave enough spoilers to prevent you from even thinking about watching it.

Bo is an upcoming movie star whose family is hounded by 4 paparazzi guys who cause an accident in which both his wife and kid get hurt. He then hunts down and kills 3 and frames the fourth one for the murders. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s it. The movie ends.

Aaarrgghh if they have so much spare money to make a movie like this they should probably just give it to a charity. And the producer of this movie is Mel Gibson. )

Anyway, my parents encounters with different cultures has set me thinking whether I’m missing out on being a global citizen because of continuing to stay in India? Does the fact that I’m not even looking for options to go out of India mean that I will develop a closed outlook towards other cultures and languages and customs and lifestyles? Without interacting with and living in different conditions will I ever find out many intrinsic things about myself? I claim to be anti- racism and prejudice and extreme religionism, but maybe that’s just a theoretical take. Would I really ever know unless I work with people from other races and religions and lifestyles in pressure situations?

Hell I’ve just been out of the country once, to Canada and that too only for a few days (Yeah yeah, my parents say that I’ve been to Nepal when I was an infant but that doesn’t count, does it? Besides they don’t have any photos proving their claim. Mysterious circumstances don’t you think?).

Hmm what do you think? Is it important to have stayed in different countries to really know yourself?

Monday moroseness, Gunda etc...

I’ve been suffering from a severe bout of Monday blues all day. I’ve been morose and crabby all day long. Obviously there’s no ostentatious reason for this. That’s how Monday Blues work.

A few things could’ve contributed to this though. I wasn’t really well on Friday and had to take the day off. But by the middle of Friday I was feeling a bit stupid because I seemed perfectly all right and had also exhausted one sick leave. So when conversation turned towards going on an impromptu road trip to Yercaud, some 220 kilometers from Bangalore on Saturday, I wholeheartedly agreed. Then of course I ended up sleeping at 2 at night and could not rest well enough. Additionally I had to do a couple of things for work and Friday’s off meant that I would have to do them over the weekend. RB has a datacard so I thought that that should not be a problem.

Yercaud is that perfect laze-around hill station. The weather is excellent, there’s not too much to do (They have one ‘waterfall’ called Illiyur waterfalls. It has been rather romantically called a waterfall because it lacks the essential property of any waterfall – water. RB says if you stand below it with a bottle, it’ll take a day to fill. We’ve been there once and though the trek is interesting, including a flat rock in a quiet niche surrounded with green trees and gentle sounds of birds, gentle perfumed breeze and a back ground sound of flowing water in a nearby brook. Bliss. Yes, last time I went there I took a nice nap on that rock while the others proceeded to reach the bottom of the waterfall. It was an excellent nap…what I wouldn’t give to have napped in office today, or even to be able to have a siesta right now. I seem to be suffering from insomnia after this trip), and we’ve identified an out of the way hotel which has the most wonderful view. It overlooks a valley which keeps appearing and disappearing as mists and clouds float on gentle wafts of cool breeze. The view at night is absolutely amazing. The last time we were there a bright full moon was beaming down on us from the inky blue velvety sky. The winds were a bit stronger and we could see clouds racing across the sky. Ethereal. In fact the reason for coming to Yercaud was based on that balcony view.

We were all up for a substantial part of the night enjoying the view and watching movie clips of Gunda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunda_%28film%29 : This has to be the most hilarious entry on Wikipedia. Please please read it. Its dripping with sarcasm and humour and plain silliness. It has almost brought a smile to my face, inspite of the Monday blues thing) on youtube. Gunda is a modern classic Mithun Chakraborty starrer with absolutely roll on the floor and laugh till you cry dialogues. Apparently bright people from IIT Kharagpur had once voted for this movie repeatedly and repeatedly on imdb.com and had managed to push it up to number 10 (This on the list which has Godfather and Pulp Fiction etc.). If you ever get an opportunity to watch this movie I suggest you do so. I would’ve put youtube links to the classic scenes from the movie. Unfortunately for you I’m in too crabby a mood to put so much effort. Go on youtube and search for Gunda.

Anyway, I’ve lost the thread of this post by getting too engrossed in reading the Wikipedia page on Gunda so I’ll close it out now.

Sorry about this wandering and strange post but I’m just not upto writing a good piece today.