Year Two Thousand and Nine

So an eventful year comes to an end.
The world came torn apart by mad bankers who played poker with the world economy, the mother of all presidential elections came to an end, making an African American the most powerful man on earth, a handful of youngsters tore apart Aamchi Mumbai (making it stand up stronger and more determined than ever).... and on a personal front, we both celebrated our first 12 months of the institution thats called marriage.

Christmas time is an empty kinda thing here in Germany. Streets are void, the snow is chilling and people are all inside their homes. So unless you have family here with whom you can spend your 4 days of vacationing, stuffing yourself to the ends of obesity in the process, you (read: all desis) MUST plan a trip out somewhere. Europe gives you quite many options to do that, though they are fairly limited during the cold winters.

So what was it be this time? Salzburg - the land of Mozart and the Von Trapps (remember the Sound of Music?)
After a good 3 days and a hugely overjoyed wife, we both are back to home, although not without a considerable hangover which (obviously) wants the vacations to never end.
The highlights of the trip surely being the Untersberg trip - up in the snowy peaks, and the trip to the Beer Museum - StieglBrau that was followed by a number of complimentary glasses of freshly brewed Austrian speciality washed down the throat.

Its that time of the year.
The aftereffects of too much beer
Makes you feel funny in the head,
And you say instead...
Meppy Christmas and Hairy You Near!

Have a great 2009 everyone!

Enough is enough

(A new post appears on this webpage after almost 5 months. But when would one speak out, if not at this time?)

Few months ago, we Indians were talking our heads off about a group called NSG - The Nuclear Suppliers Group.
Politicians threatened to resign, the media speculated and sensationalized, the intellectuals debated, discussed and the indifferent ridiculed the whole circus about the Nuclear Deal.

Come November 2008, India was talking about another NSG this time. NSG, the elite group of commandos that was supposed to protect our...... err... great leaders against misbehaving crowds and the occasional assasin!
Did someone say they were also supposed to protect us? We the people? Are you kidding? They way they were stationed back there in Delhi, the way they were brought in to Mumbai in a plane borrowed from Chandigarh, the way they waited at the Mumbai airport for an hour, waiting for a 'best' bus (notice the irony) to take them to the scene of action, it certainly didn't seem so...

Looking at the way the NSG men worked non stop for 60 hours, I felt a sense of pride.

And I have never felt so proud and sorry for my country at the same time!

On one side there were the unselfish staff at the two hotels, the dutiful firemen, the unitiring police constables, the common people who quenched the thirst of the ones at the site, and of course the NSG themselves.

And on the other side there was the ever sensationalist media, and the juggernaut called Maar-khaa Dutt who ran amok pushing aside survivers, commandos and the onlookers, the spineless politicians profiting on the situation, all the bickering to get to the CM's seat, the Intelligence failure or the government's failure to heed to intelligence, and the complete bureaucracy which ensured that the NSG arrived at the scene not earlier than 9 hours after the attacks started.

Can somebody pls explain to the procurement department in the Government, police or whatsoever, that rifles and pistols from the world war 2 do not work in this new century! And yeah, Bullet proof vests are supposed to stop... you got it.... bullets!!

Guess any fundamentalist anywhere in the world might be thinking now... "Hell, I could just borrow my friend's fisherman raft, 'pak' my rucksack with the latest ammo, reach the shores of Mumbai and just bomb the hell out of the city! Wait, I need not do that myself. I'll just get a downtrodden guy in the 20s, brainwash him against the Western ideology and he will be ready to kill left-right-center even before you can say, 'Jihad'!"

This is simply not done!

And yeah, bombing the neighbouring country isn't going to help. Even though if it might, then the first thing is to get our internal security system in place. Someone needs to get tough and tax the junta a few percentage points more, just so that our police and the NSG get the minimum required equipment, the Naval guards get the right gear to monitor our porous shorelines and the people in the public security services get paid well !

Till the time we have malnourished-looking and underpaid policemen, who have to sadly cling to old time rifles and 'laathis', and till the time we all started respecting their profession just a little bit more, things wouldn't change.

I wish they would.

Football, flying and the feeling of irony...

Excuse the bad alliteration in the subject line, but its for want of a better phrase...

21st May, 2008, the biggest football match of this season in Europe will unfold.
Mancheter United take on Chelsea FC.

Thats tomorrow.

The 2 best English teams of today will fight out the highest trophy in Europe. Its already assured that an English club will be the Champion of the continent.
And the irony is - the English national side didnt even qualify for the EURO 2008 happening this June.

My Personal irony:
As I travel between 2 of the greatest footballing cities in the world, flying from Lisbon to Madrid (and the next day back to Stuttgart), the feeling of void, of having missed one of the best footballing actions ever, will stay for quite some time.

I wish they had live TV on flights :P

What I now know about flying

- That a 3 hour flight journey is as bad as a 10 hour one, if you don't have something proper to read on the way, and/or you end up in a seat beside a 120 kg fella who conveniently spills over adjacent arm-rests.

- That 'Catcher in the Rye' is different, and good! Probably worth the accolades it has got, but it makes you feel like strangling that guy Holden Caulfield for being so irritating. (but thats what the author wanted I guess)

- That Air France stewardesses will go out of their way to freak you out (and always more than once) if you happen to get one of those seats at the Emergency Door.
"Sir, I have to ask you AGAIN - you must jock open this Emergency door if and when I tell u so. Is it FINE with you? (or should I ask some other ignorant fool to take your place?)"

- That the Emergency Door seats do have their latent advantages. There is so much leg room, you can almost tap dance there! (ok, that was a bit over the top, but you get the drift...)

- That Air France meals are actually decent, but if your crossiant topples out of your tray and rolls over to the bottom of the seat behind (and below the shoes of the guy sitting there), its actually not good news.

- That the laws of Physics do not work inside aircrafts compartments. (Murphy's laws do, though). So, no, the crossiant will NOT roll back to your feet when the plane actually applies its landing breaks.

- That having a connnection at Paris - Charles De Gaulle, and catching it smoothly is equivalent to expecting the Deccan (Dis)chargers reach the semifinals of the IPL.

- That if you happen to be dropped off at a CDG terminal other than your connecting one, then you could might as well say adeiu to your flight if it leaves in less than 45 mins. (forget asking why on earth did the airline offer you this impossible connection anyway)



- That Air France does have Boeing aircraft too on its fleet. 'French connection' doesn't come in way of free-market dynamics. (My solitary MBA gyaan for today. No such observations anymore)

- That at 2200 hours, due to the low flight traffic, the quick-as-ever ground handling staff at Lisbon airport will deliver your baggage to the conveyer belt in record time. In just less than 32 minutes. Really.

- That having an actually decent flight is not half as interesting as pretending it was lousy and cribbing about it online. :)

Of 'guilt at the stoppages' and megapixel rains

Imagine....
Its a nice sunday afternoon and you are just done with a family lunch. Then you get to your fav place in the drawing room and get glued to the television. It hasnt been a few minutes of visual joy, when the screen goes abruptly still! (much like the blue screen of death in Windows) And then there is a flash with the very familiar words:

'Rukawat ke liye khed hai'.....

Rings a bell?

And the 'Guilt at the Stoppage' doesn't stop there. Its very smoothly followed by a black-and-white mesh of haywire pixels, juxtaposed with a sound which is oddly similar to heavy rain falling on a metal sheet.
No other channels to jump to, the disappointed yet hopeful spectator had nothing else to do but to wait till the black-and-white rain subsided.

Circa early 80s: Television had arrived!


Its difficult to forget the eerie DD signature tune that reminded of graveyards and the ugly-looking DD logo that looked more like a top-view of a Mexican hat gone slightly awry. See that and you will agree >>

And what characters! The kid called Swami in small town South-India, the carrot-eating investigator, the forgetful day-dreamer, the Sherlock-Holmes-styled white-clad bengali detective, the huge bunch of myriad characters at a roadside corner (nukkad), white-haired ghosts taking a ride on the shoulders of unnerved Kings, bunch of youth hanging out on campus, a prime-minister telling us stories of India's glorious past, families with a member-count higher than the population of Australia, and badly-done special-effects of mythological characters throwing at each other, weapons of every possible dimension.... just to name a few. They were the ones who made the evenings and Sundays enjoyable for every middle-class home in India.

So starved were we of motion pictures or anything remotely similar, that on lazy Sunday afternoons, we ended up watching regional-language movies (forget about understanding a word of it), and even news bulletins for the deaf-and-dumb!! Now thats desperation.

These were just a few lines about the hey-days of old-time idiot-box, fully garnished with doses of nostalgia and memorabilia.... but hey, don't pull out your tissues or mom's pickles just yet.

On a philosophical note, the memories remain at their pedestal, as long as they are those faint memories. The moment you take them out of the grandma's closet and wham - there goes the charm! It hits you right there in the face that something which you always cherished from the past, actually tips precariously towards mediocrity, and towards a big disconnect with the immediate present.

But more about that later...

(Next post - a few of the favorite old-time shows...)

Elect me! I'm a woman and he is black!

The American President elections - everyone knows it 'different' this time.
But why on earth do these polls need to continue for almost an year? The whole cicrus began late last year and the finals would take place in November 2008! Thats really long... I mean, within that much time, the Chinese would have cooked up a bit more of the world's share of greenhouse, Pakistanis would have killed 4 more politicians (assuming there are any more left) and 20 new bomb attacks would have been manufactured in the the Palestine-area!
Ever since the drama has started, CNN, the lone English channel on my television has been covering it 14 hours out of 24, robbing viewers like me of many more important topics - world peace and global warming, for instance! And football.
No, really! :)

I like Obama by the way.
I think its something to do with the confidence that shows on his face when he is on the stage. And its good that a colored person is coming so close to the White-House for the first time. He is somewhere between a rightist and a leftist. Besides, he isn't even completely black! The best part is that he never plays the 'Racial Card' to downplay his origins of his skin-color.
Nice.

Which reminds us of Senator clinton, who never misses out on reminding the world (and the gullible voters) that she was born with two X chromosomes. (We already know that, Ma'am!) Playing the gender card comes as easy to her as it comes to Bush on sending more troops to Iraq. Why do half of the Democrats like her so much? If she could handle her shaky marriage and kept it strong, she would probably do the same to a shaky United States, right?
You bet!
And speaking of confidence, I couldn't trace that at all on her face, which more so showcases a makeup experiment gone horribly wrong. That, topped with an pageant-like artifical smile that refuses to disappear from her powdered chins.

John McCain looks like that solid-old senior citizen who has promised his great granddaughter a seat to the White-House. But he might even end up winning the seat, just because the Republicans would probably rig the polls, or because of the Bush magic, which surprisingly has shone (and still shines) since the last 2 terms.

Poor Democrats. You should have known that the government is for the people, of the people and rigged by the people.

Speaking of rigging, the American polls are a total sham on the delight of elections! I mean, look at the Indian elections. What interesting scenarios here - rigging, violence, booth capturing, mud-slinging, back-stabbing, threatening, bribing, horse-trading, hung-parliament and what not! The candidates in the US are so diplomatically-correct, so cordial to each other, never maligning each other - so much that they make our own politicians seem like satan's offsprings!

Footnote PJ:
Why is the US-head a President, and not a Prime Minister?
Because otherwise he/she would have been called 'Sub-Prime Minister'!

:)

Blog in oblivion

Hello! Anyone there? Koi hai ????????

Seems this webpage has been left alone all along. (I can even visualize weeds growing from the sides of the page... See that?)
Except for the lone visitor here and there, (and a few regular ones who just come in between days just hoping the the blog owner would pull his lazy fingers and type something on the keyboard), there has been NO activity on this blog! Nothing, Zilch, Zuke, Nein, Nowt!

Anyways, as all good things should come to an end, yours truly has decided to restart putting down his random thoughts (or made up ones) on this discarded piece of HTML.

Discarded no more, now...

Reader, pls pull out that weed sticking out from the bottom left, will you?
There! Thanks!