A Brush with the President

Malegaon Tragedy

Happy Independence(?) Day...

Purani Jeans...

Let me clear the air for those of you, who turned nostalgic about your college days on seeing the title above. This blog has nothing to do with that.

I was once a proud owner of loads and loads of clothes, especially jeans...dozens of them. Black jeans(Jet black, Dark black, Grayish black), blue jeans(Sky blue, Navy blue, Dark Blue),Faded jeans(Both blue and black), Unfaded jeans(If i mention the earlier colors again, some irritated reader will hit me Black and Blue), Worn out jeans,etc etc. Then one fine day the fitness bug bit me and I shaped up a bit...the circumference around my waist reversed its expansionist zeal to now become one of an average Indian middle class stomach.

A solution to an old problem brings up a new problem. Now that my tummy had receded, all those dozens of jeans (whose detailed description I recommend you to read again),now lay useless. I could put both my legs into a single 'leg' of the jeans. Finally, the jeans were packed off to charity, although i doubt which poor soul would be so corpulent enough to fit into those. And this time I bought just three new pairs of jeans- Black(Levis),Gray(Killer) and Blue(Lee).(The words in the brackets explain why only three.)

"In a minute, dude", I called out to a friend waiting in the rain outside my house. I dropped him home on my Aspire(this was in those days when Aspire could run on the roads). The heavy downpour continued on my way back. Suddenly the auto in front of me came to a screeching and grinding halt. And I had to do a similar thing to the Aspire...by applying the front brakes...only. The result was a completely scratched me and a jeans torn beyond redemption. As its forefathers, it too was sent off to charity.

How can i forget the day I spilled red color on my gray jeans? When this jeans was given away in charity, the receiver must've wondered if it really was a 'Killer' jeans!

So the moral of the story so far is that I have been left with just one pair of jeans- the blue 'Lee'. And because TCS requires one to wear informals only on Fridays, I use it once in the 5 day week. And also on Saturdays and Sundays. And if my formal wear hasn't arrived from the dhobi, then on Mondays and Tuesdays too. And on Wednesdays and Thursdays if the dhobi gets reeeally late!

P.S. The real target audience of this blog are those relatives and cousins of mine who earn very well and who know my b'day is fast approaching:)!

Our National Drink

"Surely must be a Tea Drinker!" proclaims a recent ad on the idiot box, after showing a drunkard losing out to a teetotaler in impressing a young gal. A simple heart shaped balloon and a naughty wink is all that it takes for our hero's 'victory' as against the pathetic lines of poetry that the drunkard spins out. The ad conveniently ignores the fact that the drunkard was not drunk at the moment of reckoning.(Had he been drunk and had he been able to express his inner feelings in a heart touching way, who knows the story would have been different and our teetotaler would have taken to drinking!)Or who knows if the girl and our teetotaler were already in love? The ad leaves many questions like these unanswered and ad-critics like me,unsatisfied. All it does is it gives the entire, undisputed credit of this episode to a harmless concotion of leaves, hot water and some sugar; better known as 'Tea'.

For tea is the only other liquid that has flowed in our land for almost as many years as the holy Ganga has.(There are historical records with the Archaelogical Survey of India that Akbar-Birbal drank tea!) And it has also come to occupy an equally important place in our lives. Such is its prowess that even people who otherwise prefer the not-so-soft-drinks the previous night, resort to drinking hot tea the next morning to get their brains, howsoever small, back on track! For millions of Indians, the day usually begins by drinking tea, brushing, drinking tea, washing the face, tea again,(..and now that enough pressure must have been developed),the-morning-must-do,tea,bath and finally breakfast with...tea of course!

Tea brings freshness to one's life like none other can. Fatigued at the end of a long, bad day? Drink Tea. Frustrated with your wife's nagging? Drink tea.(In such situations it's better you know how to make tea or else you'll subject yourself to further nagging!) Hanging between "little hungry" and "not-so-hungry" in the evenings? Well,tea,again. Your code is throwing out all possible errors in your plush software office? Pour down some tea down your throat and see how those bugs vanish! Want to stay awake the whole night and complete studying for the next day's 9 'o' clock paper for which 6 months weren't enough to prepare? No problem, trust the tea! Tea unfailingly reminds me of the jingle "Laakh dukhon ki ek davaa hai, kyu na aajmaae!" I start singing this and then I realize that i haven't been blessed with a voice for singing. The windows shatter and hands clasp ears all around me. I gulp down a cupful of tea and then resume singing from where I had left. The vocal chords are more vibrant than ever before and the shattered windows shatter further...:( All said and done, besides exceptions like my incurable, hoarse voice, tea can come to our rescue and be our companion in times of tiredness as well as cheer.

The popularity of this national drink of ours, I think, is because of the fact that you can mix things with tea and blend it according to your tastes. You can have tea with hot water, cold ice, milk (from Cow/Goat/Buffalo/Milkman), ginger, lotsa sugar, lemon, some sugar, cardamom and finally-no sugar! Thanks to this amiable nature of tea to befriend almost any substance, it leaves you with no excuse absolutely of not having it! You are a diabetic, well just don't put sugar! You like things spicy, well have masala tea! Tea has become as unescapable as fate!

The other reasons why tea is so widely popular are its cheap cost and its ubiquitous availability from nukkads and bylanes of India to the comfortable business class seat in an Air India plane. Also, tea is not heavy on the stomach and does not add calories to your flab. And then an office gossip over a tea break about the boss going around with a junior colleague has to be experienced as words fall miserably short!

Just last year, I had the opportunity of visiting the beautiful tea gardens of Munnar in Kerala. Acres and acres of greenery with meticulously cut tea plants and hundreds of women, all brightly dressed against the green backdrop, plucking tea leaves and putting them in baskets strapped to their backs. Tea plantations have revolutionized and uplifted the lives of these women folk in this part of the world by providing employment opportunities.

These wonderful tea gardens are infested with blood sucking leeches, we were warned. But in India, rules are meant to be broken and so a bunch of my friends and me ventured into unexplored territory, finally scrambling out to remove the leeches that had clung to our bodies sucking blood. It took the better of an hour in this cleaning operation with blood oozing from our bodies in the end. Finally the "wounded soldiers" went back to the hotel rooms and did something which you should have guessed by now....ordered some tea!

Zop mhanje....

Fresh from a late night 'Poet Sandeep Khare's-AYUSHYAVAR BOLU KAHI' concert, my chat with my cousin aditya(the same lucky cousin of the Aspire blog) the next day in office:D
adya822003: mala bekkar zop yet ahe
Shreyas: hahaha
adya822003: full akhadalo ahe
adya822003: sardi zali ahe!!!
Shreyas: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste...panghrunaachyaa andhaaraat umalnaare rop aste!
adya822003: waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaila!!!
Shreyas: hahaha
adya822003: here it comes a cartoonist and a new tarun kavi.. Mr.Shreyas Navare!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Shreyas: tu sangitkaar hoshil ?
adya822003: apan zopevar bolu khai navacha prog thevu
adya822003: chala dost ho ZOPEVAR BOLU KAHI!!!
Shreyas: hahaha Shreyas: ZOPET BOLU KAHI
adya822003: he pan sahi ahe!!!
adya822003: zop ya topic var gaani lihu ya
adya822003: kai mag kalacha prog awadala ka tula? (kalala ka tula?)
Shreyas: hahaha (hahaha)
adya822003: are sang na
Shreyas: kalala re ani pahilyanada baghitla mhanun awadla pan
Shreyas: te sod
Shreyas: aaj aapan zopevar kharach kavita lihuyaa...
adya822003: ok sure...
adya822003: pan kai lihayachi?
adya822003: zop mhanaje zop mhanaje zop asate....he kavita pudhe continue karu
Shreyas: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste, drugs gheun aalee tar tee dope aste!
adya822003: nako..maafi
Shreyas: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste, swapnaanchya duniyet janyasathi tee ekmev hope aste!
adya822003: haan he thik ahe
Shreyas: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste, koni uthavle tar mothaa kop aste!!
adya822003: gud..me pan hech lihinar hoto!!
adya822003: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste,koni uthavale tar chandikecha kop asate, pan milali tar swapnatalya paryanche roop asate!!
Shreyas: waah waah
Shreyas: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste, koni pope aste tar koni pope naste!
adya822003: hahaha nako...
adya822003: he agadich falatu ahe!!!
adya822003: hahahahaha
Shreyas: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste, itki gulguleet janu soap aste!!!
adya822003: hahahaha thike
Shreyas: zop mhanje zop mhanje zop aste, divasbharachya vicharanchya kachryaachi tope aste! adya822003: tope???
Shreyas: topli
Shreyas: "top"
adya822003: ee nako
adya822003: nakoooooooooooooo
adya822003: baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas hahahahahaha

The Pendulum

The simple pendulum has for long amazed me, more for its simplicity than for anything else. As a child, I've watched for hours on end, the golden bob of grandpa's old pendulum clock swing from one end to the other, momentarily coming to a halt at the extremes and rushing past the centre with the harried look of a Mumabikar chasing a BEST bus. Based on a simple gravitational principle of physics propounded by Kepler, which I was introduced to later in my higher secondary school days, the deceptively innocuous looking pendulum went on to be the bedrock of the modern day precision clocks that have now come to adorn the walls of our houses.

The digital clocks of today dictate the pace of our lives with the precision of 0.01 seconds. I can never recollect a day, and I am sure so wouldn't you, where we haven't sought the advice of a clock for chalking out our next activity-even if it is as 'active' an activity as sleeping! We tie watches on to our hands not realizing the fact that it is our hands that are tied to the time constraints that these watches impose on our lives. I realized this two months after I thought I was well settled at my job as an employee of TCS Pune.

It was a Sunday and I was at home in Mumbai when my cell rang, with my office number beeming on the screen. It was a summon to rush to Pune on the very same day as the project I was working on had run into difficulties and needed all its members to salvage the situation as soon as possible. I reached the Pune station at 9.45 pm and was at my PC at the office by 10, the office being just a stone's throw away from the station. What followed were two hectic months where we had to work for 27 hours a 'day', postpone lunch by 6 hours (and sometimes skip it altogether!), all this deservedly taking its toll on our health. The frustration in the air was palpable. Life seemed to have come to a halt even in that neck breaking fast life. What an irony, wasn't it?

Then, as it usually happens in life, things changed for the better, the project was pulled out of the inextricable situation it had landed into and was successfully flagged off! The excess people who had been taken on board were now released from the project and the rest of us where asked to continue working in the enhancement phase of the project. I was thrilled to experience a little less workload now that I had gone through so much of stress. This phase, however, was shortlived.

Now I found myself at the other extreme- no work at all ! I would be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy this part of the project. Here I was with all the possible free time made available to me- I could now be in touch with my friends (who thought I had gone into hibernation in those hectic months), I could exercise and bring my body back to shape, I could sharpen my technical skills by devouring books and lastly but most importantly, draw loads and loads of political cartoons, which act as my lifeline. But once the novelty of all this wore off, I started running out of new things to do! Life became a dull routine, bereft of challenges and all the thrills that accompany these challenges. Frustration creeped in. I would keep gazing at my watch and see the seconds hand tick away painfully slowly. Again, in a matter of a few months, life seemed to have come to a grinding halt!

At the end of one such 'no work' day, I went back to my home in Pune. My grandmom opened the door and offered me a cup of hot coffee. I was so bored of sitting that I decided to have my coffee walking! As I walked near one of the walls, my eyes fell on something shining and moving- it was the pendulum of my grandmom's wall clock. It swung majestically from one end to other, coming to a halt at the extremes and rushing through the middle with all the haste that it could muster. It was visible through a glass sheet that the front side of the clock boasted of. I could see my partial reflection on that glass sheet with the backdrop of the tirelessly moving pendulum! In that reflection I could conclude clearly, the life that I had lived for the past few months was nothing more than the antics of the pendulum- the pendulum seemed to be teaching me that the 'halts in life' were only momentary and that I had to tirelessly keep moving within the extremes of life, until one day when the final halt arrives, when life, like an old pendulum, comes to a complete standstill in space and time.