The will of the Halwa

Its a beautiful day and I am sitting in front of a modern idiot box watching Tony Stark slowly turn into Iron Man. On this very fine day, one of my close friends' parents are flying down from India to stay with their kid. This can mean only one thing for me. No, I am not talking about missing my parents or shifting within the house to accommodate their stay. What I am talking about is gaining weight because of some awesome cooking that is coming our way. Its not just the cooking thats going to force me to bloat, but a whole bunch of sweets and snacks that are making their way through customs at the San Francisco airport as I type this.

I look at the glee on my roommate's face as they enter the house, and at that instant I knew what I was in for. Loads of parental love, home cooked food (I cant but mention this repeatedly, because there is absolutely no escaping it), pampering and sightseeing. Before I can finish writing this blog, I would have eaten a sumptuous meal, a ladoo, a kaju burfi, some Kerala special banana chips and something more that they've brought. I do owe it all to my friend who is shuttling up and down with all the savories that I've not seen in a long time.

What intrigues me is the phase that will follow soon after all the pampering is back on its way to India. We will probably realize that in spite of several attempts to maintain our weight (actually attempts to lose weight would be near impossible), we have actually gained weight and need to work harder than before to lose it. I can smell the Kerala special Halwa sitting on the kitchen top teasing me- (Talking to myself) Stop! you shouldn't be thinking about it! Think about the gym, and how fresh it feels after a workout;How much fun it is to play several hours of tennis and burn some calories- Nooooo! I want to taste that Halwa, this very moment! And as they say, the rest is history. That neatly sliced piece of Halwa found its way through a lot of grinding teeth to settle at the bottom of a very satisfactory stomach that belongs to me.

I don't have too much more to say after succumbing to the will of the Halwa. I concede defeat for a brief period. But I shall, like any other guy would, make a conscious effort to not eat the Laddoo that is now teasing me from inside the refrigerator. :)

Calls and its pitfalls

I've been instructed by a very good friend to write something on a lighter vein for this post. And so I shall abide by the wishes of this request from an ever jovial soul who never fails to lighten up my mood. But the question is, what to write about(or 'right' as this friend of mine weirdly writes). Whenever I have this dilemma, I turn to uncyclopedia and I am never disappointed because I always turn up with a topic to write about.

Phone calls seems to be a teaser of a topic. Phone calls, or just calls, range from being used for the most mundane of events to conducting meetings. I used to wonder how coherent conversations could be conducted over phone calls that involved members of a team from all parts of the world, but off-late I've realized that it is not too difficult after all. All you have to do is say hello and then mute the mic of the phone at your end. The monotony of it all may sometimes overwhelm you, but you realize in time that its completely worth it. Just to confirm your presence, you need to unmute the mic every now and then and sprinkle the meeting with your ideas. Its not like they're dying to hear you speak - or are they actually desperately waiting for you to speak so that they can mute their own phones?? Hmmm... fruit for thought people.

Go into the next tele-meeting that you attend thinking about this very thing, and I assure you that whether the others mute their phones or not, you will be dying to have them mute it and only then will you realize that by reading this blog, you've just become a product of my insane ideas. But think again- did you give in to insane ideas or did you just figure out a nice way to get work done when you were in a meeting. It always works for me. :)

So what else do we use phone calls for? Oh yes, I have known some people who make phone calls just because they have free calling on their plan. They discuss events so obvious and mundane as how big their footprint on the sand was and also how many steps they took in going from one building to another while going for lunch. Frankly, does anyone care if you saw Elvis Presley's photo on a website?? Or does anyone really care if you want to desperately talk about whether you should return a missed call or not. Just return the call already! You don't need to be told by someone else if that was a call with some evil plan in mind or whether it was just some friend trying to reach out for something.

And then nowadays, there is this category of people who use data plan on their phones. Oh boy, you people should be hanged! How can you kill so much time on something like facebook without actually posting something?! You should be able to figure out that we have some brains and can guess that you are doing something fishy. LOL! I just can't imagine dabbling away at the smartphone without doing anything useful. I appreciate the patience you people have in doing something that does not serve any purpose. In some cases this satisfies the whims of a few people, but beyond that, you only increase the price of your data bill.

So getting back to the phone calls, oh well alright! My friends think this is already long enough... So I shall stop here and congratulate all of you who just wasted a few minutes of your precious time on this sensible yet senseless blog. At least you looked away from your smartphones/dumb-phones to do something different.

A Rhythm Of Chaos

Many of us know what chaos theory is. For the uninformed, it is also known as butterfly effect and states that any minor change today will cause a world of difference sometime in the future. You don't need a movie with Ashton Kutcher to understand how true this is. We can see it in our daily lives, lingering around us. Our every word, our every action, our every second of life is the cause which has an appropriate effect associated with it. And in this vein, my blog today will discuss how I've seen events unfold as an effect of actions in the past.

You see a smile and you like it, so much so that you're smitten by it. The mistake you make is that you fail to see whats going on in the mind behind that smile. Little do you know that there is a scheming, careless and cunning mind residing there. Like killing a bug that would change things in the future, you kill the brain cells which are urging you to be practical enough to see the real picture. And this action leaves you lamenting what has happened for the rest of your life, wondering what mistake you had committed but give such importance to a good smile.

You charm people with your wisdom and advice, and unwillingly but yet willingly accept followers to your thoughts on life. You take it a tad too far by stepping into what looks like public property, only to later realize that a part of it was privatized without your knowledge. Before you realize and apologize to the owners of the privacy, you are waiting to be stung by the unexpectedly high number of bees thrown at you, not filled with nectar, but instead filled with venom. You have now learnt your lesson on how wisdom is better kept to yourself rather than sprayed out into the open.

You show concern towards tender beautiful things which could get hurt at the slightest hint of stinging words. Little did you know that the same concern was never intended to be returned in kind. Instead, what you get is the return, with interest, but in the form of a huge pile of crap that you cannot handle. It will make you rethink what your beliefs are, what your definition of trust is, and push you to the edge of impatience.

The one thing that is common to all this is the fact that you learn to live life in a better way. Your lessons in tact, your brain is only equipping itself with additional toolkits to tackle more difficult situations with elan and calm both at the same time. You may deviate briefly, but you straighten the path life takes and kick it back into rhythm, amid all the chaos that spans this world.