Disconnecting starts now...

Things I'll miss about living away from America:
1. Smug Jewish Comedians giving me the daily/weekly dosage of irony, sarcasm and intentionaly poorly veiled double entendre. Or in 2 words - Jon Stewart.
2. Icecream and Chocolate cake for breakfast with a side of seasoned fries.
3. My dream library - whatever books and dvds I want that can be picked up at the place and time convenient to me. For free. [Long live NYPL]
4. Black Coffee. The more the merrier.
5. Seasons- Fall, Spring, Winter.
6. Having a night life without unintentionally screaming- "I am an unmarried adult woman out after sundown. I'm asking for it! Do your very worst."
7. I am a clothes size small petite here.
8. Living my life entirely online. Watching my TV there.
9. Maggi being the staple food of the NRI. Add the soy sauce.
10. No one accuses you of being a "Peter" or a "Mary" when you are most fluent in english.
11. Comic Book stores with washed Aquaman Tees.
Aquaman being the lamest super hero in the entire known set of multiple universes.
12. Washing literally dirty linen in a public laundromat in full view of all strangers who choose to look your way. Yes, that is my underwear.
13. Celebrities cycle into you randomly when you are just trying to cross the street on the way to office. Or sit in the table next to your when you are out having lunch. FYI. I always meet celebrities in the airports on my India trips. 100% successful track record.
14. Usage of double negetives -"You ain't got nothin' " and double positives - "Yeah right!" in everyday talk.

...more to come...

Want to help me by adding to this?

disengaging slowly,

Rain

The place of the silent 'T'

I love The Colbert Report and I think Stephen Colbert rocks.
D and I went to the taping last month and it was everything we expected it to be - funny, smart and entertaining. But I should definitely state my disappointment with Stephen himself.

Don't get me wrong, he was a comedy king that evening like he is always. He rocked a monologue that was an utter tongue twister with literally no practice because that was a last minute rewrite. He has to be a genius to have pulled it off so flawlessly.

Subsequently, he certainly deserves the rock star treatment but it felt sad that people who make sense to you , who you spend so much time following on TV and twitter and who you really like are just so very distant and not as friendly as you'd expect. [Also we were made to stand for nearly 3 hours before the shooting started and I'm still having the swelling on my ankles from the strain]
:(
This is why I hate meeting celebrities.
Living in the big apple, I have run into more than my due of famous and beautiful people and I'm still yet to meet one who is actually nice in person.

I'll be going to the Jon Stewart show taping next month.
I adore the man, so I will just go there, scream my support and come back after enjoying the show. I won't expect him to take time to talk to the audience or connect with every day people.

(Also won't pray hard that the guest should be Daniel Craig and then be disappointed again)
Rain

Browsing away

Now that I am back to living on my own with nary a soul to care for my well being or being at all, in this entire side of the world...I am also back to living online. Amidst waiting for my family to log in and enquire what's up with me every 12 hours (and my responding with "nothing" each and every time) I browse around picking up a million things (all useless, I am sure) I find interesting.  

My space geek and a sci-fi nut side (which is practically the whole of me) totally loved and identified with this article... so read it - 

http://blogs.discovery.com/space_disco/2009/10/5-frightening-but-true-space-stories.html  

Nothing like a true creepy space story to chill you on a fall halloween weekend! 

I'm a bit of a fan boy but not really a nerd because I am not very knowledgable in gadgets - their use, manufacture, need, alternatives or troubleshooting. This is shameful because I work in the related field and am popularly viewed (very mistakenly) among the masses as a pundit of sorts, probably because I used to wear glasses until recently and have a lot of forehead lines. But even a false gadget nerd like me was interested by this very illuminating article because of how sheerly relevant it was -

http://gizmodo.com/5391271/giz-explains-why-every-country-has-a-different-fing-plug

Having forked out a gazillion dollars on electronics for my family, I estimate atleast an equivalent sum has been invested back home in just purchasing adapters for using the stuff bought here. Awesome. 

Not all of my current soaking of information has been pleasant. There are always these weeds that are increasingly populating the garden that is the world wide web. Some real life low-lives and definition of douche bags who are "the story" in all news and/or other sites. Idiots who can't keep it in their pants and get famous for that, morons who leave their families and pretend they are 17, 2 young people who are a couple or just "good friends",who split and unsplit alternating every day and may or may not be pregnant. 

I would love it if they went away somewhere and never came back. I refuse to mention their names and increase the hits when some airheaded preteen googles them instead of spending her time learning, playing sports or spending time with her family. So There.  

It would do to get some global perspective if the energies devoted to the above could be redirected. Standards need to be raised all around. People are not stupid. They don't have to be treated like they are. Then it becomes a self fullfilling prophecy.

Its quite appalling that a person with any diction and hold of grammar is considered condescending and superlicious. This I see increasingly in op-ed columns and article comments; for example use of "Herewith" was condemned by almost a whole angry e-mob. Get out the pitchforks, why dont you?  

Another deeply upsetting occurrance is the frequency and the quality of the updates of your loved ones on social networking sites. Someone who keeps uploading pictures of herself by the tanker-ful (accompanied by a bunch of creepy friends who put in comments on all of those 2 trillion photos with just nano seconds between the upload and the posting) thus displaying the nympho side of herself, people who find Farmville/Mafia/<> addictive (OMG! I really tried to get on level with that but simply can't get myself to do this.), a blood relative who takes all quizzes that make you cringe and proudly publishes the results to those (and that person's accompanying set of obsessed fans who immediately comment on the update). 

I am very seriously considering retiring from both the sites I currently am active in for the fear of turning into one of the above from just prolonged use. These people are ones I know/raised from babyhood/adore in real life and their social networking personas are insulting to them in complete contrast to how intelligent and talented they actually are. 

God knows I havent been the best judge or made the correct calls always. Its a lifelong process.  

Far from perfect but learning little everyday,

Rain

Obvious Science

My current visceral malreactions are towards people who state the blindingly obvious condescendingly or as if it were a revelation to the listener (me).

It happens with unfortunately unerring regularity in my place of stay (which I will not call my apt because I am still looking for a place to call - my apt) and to a more amusing extent during my perusal of the Google News.

So focussing on the less bile invoking option, here are some headlines in the Health and Lifestyle sections over the past few weeks which I thought was just common knowledge but it took a team of scientists years to research and come to the exact same conclusions in some corner of the world (only to be debunked by a small variation of the same in a microsecond?)

Junk food is manufactured to get you hooked - I am so shocked. You mean to tell me the good people at McD, BK, Wendy's are only behind my money and don't care about my behind?

Study Says There No Such Thing as Empty Nest Syndrome - For generations, Indian parents have been happily getting rid of their daughter accompanied by music and gaiety; so yeah this one, I saw coming.

Women show grace under pressure, while men are likely to take risks in the same high stress situations - Which is probably why we don't work on combat duty and only serve drinks at high stakes poker.

Daily sex improves chances of conception for couples where the men have low sperm count - D'uh...try try try again till you succeed works on all levels

Modern men prefer skinny women: Study - This one's right out of the blue! With all those celebrated stars and models who eat bi-annually, I would've never figured its because the men would prefer them, I just thought they were good at what they did. [No, I didnt]

Women more likely than men to hit nail on the head when there is light - Why would that be relevant to anything ever? Its not like 'hitting the nail on the head' was a metaphor...these guys actually mean taking a hammer and hitting a nail with it.

Migraine pain more common in women - that is because we are supposed to be skinny, keep trying to get pregnant and show grace under pressure. try living with that on your head always!

Heavy women have low quality relationships - or the corollary of the previous headline 'Modern men prefer skinny women'

Men, women use Facebook differently - wow...that is so difficult to determine, how did they manage to find out? Next related discovery could probably be that men and women select different options in the signup sheet which asks for gender.

Being careful about the future is in our genes - Mind boggling! Really?! That does explain Life Insurance policies and Wills. So those werent random inventions as previously held by scholars!

Boys 'have sweeter tooth' than girls - that is why girls are sweet and made of "sugar and spice and everything nice". And I extend this great finding with my addendum - Guys have sweeter everything than girls and present for evidence the Daniel Craig in swim suit shaped, grape flavored popsicle. Or was that my evidence for how easily we can cross lines from eye candy to actual candy in a very wrong way? I forget. [I may think he is yummy but eating one of the above mentioned popsicles would take a bite out of the object of my affections...the puns end here]

Men set for 'extinction' - poor things. You became redundant with co-existence of the concepts 'Being Gay' and 'Cloning'. New nail in your coffin human parthenogensis becoming possible.

‘Taller people get fatter pay packet’ - All I needed to get to come to the same conclusion was look at the depressing pay stub of my hobbit sized self.

Macho guys don't always get the girls - Depends on how you define 'get', I would say Guys in general dont 'get' girls.

Care for elderly, be blessed with longer life - its called good karma

Anger 'is down to genes' - Dammit Parents! See what you gave me?! and all I wanted was travel scrabble.

Second-born kids are more rebellious: Research - that's because their spirit is not surgically wrenched from them at an early age with the litany - you are the eldest, you have to adjust and give up for your sister.

'Night owls cleverer, richer than early birds' - oh yeah, where is my money and IQ then? This is so dimwitted it could only be written by a poverty stricken day lark!

'Milky Way's heart tastes of raspberry, smells of rum' - And we wonder why obesity is becoming an epidemic while we blissfully think of the entire universe in terms of food and drink.

World over, rivers are drying up - which is what we should expect in days of 'Global Warming'

Old smiling snaps predict marital bliss - happy people divorce less. This did need some of the best minds working with zillions of dollars to realize.

Coming soon to the Blindingly Obvious section - The Pope's catholic, Sun rises in the east and I need to move.

Rain

A thousand words

As expected of anyone prone to routoundness, I appear even more spherical in photographs. So I tend to not prefer being in photos unless its of a bunch of us friends frolicking or standing around grinning like some runner up sports team, thereby dispering the focus from yours truly. Single shots of me are so rare that you can possibly speculate a huge auction value (but then Sotheby's is at hard ends with the recession so you never know). Besides decent photographers (almost always guys of the group) usually click away the cuter, more glam and stylish girls (i.e. any other girl but me).

If at all I suddenly develop aversion to being ignored so (happens once in a rare while) and insist on being photographed after defeating the photographer in argument, it angers me so much that I had to convince someone to focus on me that I cannot elicit a smile or any semblance of a pleasant expression anymore. I only end up with photos of me grimacing or looking belligerent which does not paint a pretty picture.

So its sufficient to say, I have no good photographs of me.

This lack of pictorial representation didn't figure even for a second in my mind until the dismal response to my matrimony site profile spurred my parents into requiring photos of me to upload. Assumption of the site was that adding my photo would increase the attraction of the profile. I think it panders to the lazy and shallow minded types who'd rather just look at the photo and move on, instead of having to actually read through the content or the junta who browse matrimony sites when they are bored. Nevertheless I bowed to this filial demand, I began the excruciatingly soul wrenching search of all my digital photos featuring me to crop out my visage and send to them.

The ones I selected were no good to the mater and sister who felt either my hair wasn't good in the pic or that I looked chubby in it or both. The astonishing part of the matter is that I do not have good hair and I am chubby, so one would logically assume that any photo of mine would (and should) indicate the same attributes. There was some debate and certain compromises (on their part) was reached as the only alternate was hair weaving, liposuction and hiring the photography team of National Geographic.

Next was the contention on the dress worn in the photograph. My mother insisted on saree photos of me even though I pointed out to her certain facts that didn't seem to mesh with her demand:

1. I have worn a saree all of 7 times in my entire life (first 3 times in high school)

2. I am not comfortable in a saree and do not know how to wear one on my own

3. A certain unspoken image of a person is presented when the prospective groom is shown a photo of her wearing saree (a black and white tamil movie heroine) and I am nothing like that.

But I had to give her this (my mother is a formidable woman) in exchange for her agreeing to let me also put in photos of me in churidhar and casual wear. I call these my what you see is what you get photos.

Last hurdle was of course the space age technology of the site itself. The first 100 attempts at uploads failed once we selected the file from the local disk. This would've frustrated a saint but my mother persevered and reported success at last. Unfortunately, in their attempts to render my photos in the size acceptable to the site they had mangled one photo to completely distorting resolution and I appeared in the second photo to be someone who'd never been exposed to the concept of grooming. My mother was so triumphant in her victory at the upload that I hadnt taken it upon myself to see the results until today.

Having seen me in such unflattering light, the mystery of why the effectiveness of my profile had dropped further became crystal clear (Astrologers had put it down to unfavorable planetary influences). So I personally took charge of uploading my photos this time around.

This activity only made me further marvel the excellent design and user friendliness of the site.

Once the server in all its wisdom had loaded your image from your system, you would be taken to a page where you would be asked to crop your photo and save it so that this can be used as a thumbnail picture which when clicked would show the actual photograph. Except and this was added just for kicks no doubt, the square given to select the part of the photo was not click and dragable. There was nothing that one could do considering the save photo button that one should click after satisfactorily selecting the area to crop was hidden by the photo itself.

In the end, the thumbnail pics of my photos look like reflections from a circus mirror - one elongated, one widened and one just right (that one was the least good of the lot).

Atleast this convinces me that any guy who sees these and still expresses interest in pursuing the possibility of a marriage alliance with me is not doing it from being overwhelmed by my striking physical appearance. Silver lining, I am so good at finding those! Hey, maybe I should add that to my profile :)

I am beautiful no matter what they say 
Words can't bring me down 
I am beautiful in every single way 
Yes, words can't bring me down 
So don't you bring me down today 

Rain

Flotsam

Free will is an illusion. I have heard this, felt it minorly before and only considered the concept in theoretical basis. Now I complete get that control over your own life, is just as substantial as a vision of a fountain of chocolate milk in the middle of the Sahara.

Its not like I was foolish enough to resist change. I accept it as a constant, rather the only constant. But all references to a normal life to be torn asunder, for you to be just a wrecked piece of who you used to be and what your world used to be like, one fine day without a sound or ceremony.

Reality just unhinged for me. Suddenly there are no certainities, no answers, no basis of any judgement/decision be it sound or otherwise. No people, no ties, no feelings, nothing familiar.

Nothing to anchor on to the semblence of my erstwhile universe.

It happened naturally and without notice like a season change or ageing. 

Universe decided to shake me out of my comfortable and predictable little niche and plant me on crossroads again. To quote the cliche - "fate is not without a sense of irony".

More frustrated than sad at being given a riddle with absolutely no means to find a resolution, I am completely aware of the fact that its just as well. I have never given up anytime and dont believe in that at all. Just one more turn of the wheel that requires a test of my resilience and spirit of survival. 

Not my idea of how it should be but hey I am just a lazy human in a tiny speck of a larger universe...what do I know?

Bring it on, World. Defiance is infinitely more natural to me than surrender...

Rain

Quote...UnQuote

The plague of our kind in this world is our innate obsession with oversimplifying anything.
We love our quotes, those condensed concoctions of voluminous philosophy. But one fine day, when you look into your inbox, where there is a new quote everyday sent in by some really enthusiastic person, with some amount of clarity in your otherwise completely pre-occupied head and some time to ponder (which, going by the trend of 2008 can also be defined as "Vacation") there is a chance you might feel slightly irritated with these condescending people of the past pushing their wisdom into your thoughts like cholesterol (the bad kind) in the guise of tasty junk food being pushed into the populace everywhere.
The theme being - "You asked for it. Now Enjoy."

To me, Quotes are simply personal opinions. Just because you are famous in your lifetime and people preserve your words doesnt mean they are essentially right. So many of Yogi Berra's quotes are famous because they are funny (hilarious even). Also, your wise and true observation of something at some point of time ( & History) may not be relevant when the world changes. Sometimes contradictory quotes for the same subject appear equally valid.

I felt the compulsion to state and publish my thoughts on this because of the following words that appeared in front of my face in Monotype Corsiva at 36 size-
" Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life."-Joan Lunden, in Healthy Living Magazine
To me that is utter crap. Granted that the guidelines to life are that you are supposed to stay happy for most of it, but imply that anger/hate/disgust is bad or unnatural is just sticking your head into the sand and pretending there is no sun.
You know which observation makes more sense to me with regards to the subject of the quote?This dialogue from a legendary movie starring a lead actor (called 41 below), who passed away recently.Yes, you remember this one-
"Your eyes are full of hate, Forty-one. That's good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength." -Quintus Arias
Here's to you Charlie boy! [* raises a plastic beverage holder of Mocha Frapuccino and takes a sip in honor of the newly dead]

One more of the pithys thrust upon my busy mind that I dont accept as taking into account all realities of life-
"Fortune helps the brave." Terence (185 BC - 159 BC), Phormio.
I am not even going to take the trouble to explain why I disagree.

When something is complex or multilayered, acknowledge that fact and give any topic its due. There are things that cannot be summarized into bullet points or amusing quotes. Things are rarely simple and thanks be to god for that!

Overcomplexified & loving it,
Rain