Holier than thou...

I know a secret....

Earlier today (though it's barely noon now), under the cover of a veshti, dad and a pundit whispered what I suppose was a secret. I have no clue what they said, but by the time our short game of 'house house' was over, I was declared a full fledged brahmin.

Yep! I got my poonal done today, and i have the thread to prove it. A few pics below...


It's not what it looks like.....



With my 'license'

With the best man...

Tagged!

By (horror of horrors!!!) Ms. Divya Iyer Nerlekar

1.Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it.

You don't get too many scars playing Transport Tycoon or by lying belly down on your bed, with a good book and hot pakodas on the floor. I am man enough to say I am not man enough to take physical pain.

2. What is on the walls in your room?

I don't have a 'my room' right now. But my hall has Calvin and Hobbes lazing on a branch in autumn and another one of Charlie Brown and Snoopy on a pier with their backs to me.

3. What does your phone look like?

Always been a sucker for flip phones. Blame it on watching the 'old' Star Trek. Here is how it looks like.

4. What music do you listen to?

What don't I listen to? Boy bands, Himesh, Latino, Trance.

5. What is your current desktop picture?

This is horribly predictable.... Calvin and Hobbes...its been the same for years.

6. What do you want more than anything right now?

I want it to be September 10th now, so that all the shaadi ka jhamela is over.

7. Do you believe in gay marriage?

Whatever rocks your boat...

8. Are your parents still together?

Yep! I think they are gung-ho about the 'till death do us part' thingy.

9. What are you listening to?

My paati snoring like a deep sea oil drill...and my rhythmic keyboard patter.

10. Do you get scared of the dark?

I love the dark. Doesn't scare me if I am home.

11. The last person to make you cry?

P. Chidambaram

12. What kind of hair/eye type do you like on the opposite sex?

Streaked hair, and black eyes.

13. Do you like pain killers?

No drugs.

14. Are you too shy to ask someone out?

Naah... Unless its someone I have a massive crush on. I always stumbled with those.

15. Favourite pizza topping?

Olives, Pepperoni

16. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?

Uhhh... Pizza with extra cheese, Olives and Pepperoni...

Recycle bin hard drive stores your deletions, mimics a trash can - Engadget

 

Recycle bin hard drive stores your deletions, mimics a trash can - Engadget

Wishlist 07- 08

Technorati Tags: wish, wishlist, list

My wishlist for this year is out... and here it is.

:-(

The Dark Knight - Teaser Site

Error

If you can't figure this one out.... then maybe it's not for you.

यह तो काफ़ी कूल हे ना ?

Google had indicated that they are about to offer something special to us in India...But this really took me by surprise, even though I had heard rumors that they were working on something along these lines. (How dense am I?)

Check these out...

http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/

http://labs.google.co.in/indic.html

http://local.google.co.in/

As for the last one, I did a quick test run and still prefer Guruji

Stewie

The Trio Factor

In another of my startling revelations, it struck me recently that I have always been part of a group of three.

School: Me, Asad and Sanil

Inter: Me, Asad and Ali

Degree: Me, Vivek and Bhanu

VisualSoft: Me, Vasu and Sayeed

Adea: Me, Anil and Riwin

LGS: Me, Anu and Runki

Deloitte: Me, Arpit and Zafer

This can't be a coincidence can it? Or do everyone hang out in groups of three? Tell me about you.

Where Concept of a ‘Pet Rock’ Has Reached Its Apex

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/world/asia/17india.html?ref=world




HYDERABAD, India — They rise unexpectedly between glass office towers or at the base of a 12th-century fort. Sometimes they are perched precariously, one on top of another, as though they were the left-behind playthings of a civilization of giants. More and more, they are broken into bits, first by dynamite, then painstakingly by hand, so that the earth can be flattened and new office towers can come up.

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J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times

At construction sites in booming Hyderabad, the rugged rocks are being turned into gravel to make way for high-tech offices.

The New York Times

They are the primordial rocks that litter this boomtown. Over the years they have earned nicknames that hint at their improbable shapes: Bear’s Nose, Stone Heart. Some have become Hindu temples and Sufi Muslim shrines; others, on occasion, have become billboards.
Today, as Hyderabad builds at breakneck speed, the rocks have become the focus of one of India’s many emerging citizens movements. The Society to Save Rocks, as it is called, aims to protect the geological heritage of the city against the swift march of urban development.
The rocks, formed at least two billion years ago, remain a peculiar feature of the vast tableland, the Deccan Plateau, where Hyderabad sits.
Boomtowns across India have spawned movements of similar vigilance, part of a tiny but visible trend among middle-class Indians to save something of the natural or cultural heritage of their cities against the onslaught of the new.
In Chennai, on the southern coast, neighborhood groups have mounted campaigns to restore Hindu temples’ traditional water tanks, which have either been built over or fallen into disrepair, depriving the city of its water storage areas and worsening floods during the monsoon.
In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, preservationists have campaigned to save colonial-era buildings, and in New Delhi, a government plan to widen a road for big new buses has encountered a movement to save the imperiled trees in its path.
Of course, these first hints of resistance conflict with urban India’s other needs and desires.
To developers in Hyderabad, for instance, the rocks, mostly granite and granite gneiss, are encumbrances that must be cleared for construction projects.
Hyderabad’s population has nearly doubled in 25 years, to an estimated 4.2 million. Once a quaint city of monuments, it is now one of India’s new technology hubs. Developers are rushing to erect office towers and multiplex cinemas. The building frenzy is visible in every corner.
In one of those corners, an ambitious 110-acre development called Lanco Hills is under way, an office park for technology companies, high-rise apartments, two hotels and one of the largest shopping malls in the country. There are no boulders anywhere in its promotional materials, as though the landscape had been scrubbed clean.
In fact, that is exactly what is happening, and at a hefty cost to the developer. On a company tour of the site one afternoon, a drilling machine ground its way through the large boulders, cutting holes for dynamite. Once the bigger boulders were dislodged, the process would start again on smaller boulders, until the rocks were small enough to go into a crushing machine and turned into a fine powder used to fortify concrete.
On a summer Sunday afternoon, Vasu Nugala and C. J. Rao stood on a bluff overlooking the construction site, watching machines gouge out the underside of the hill, as though carving a side of roast beef. The bluff itself, home to a 14th-century Muslim shrine, was not endangered, and on this day families came to picnic and worship, huddling under outcroppings of the giant boulders when the dark rain clouds burst.
Neither Mr. Nugala nor Mr. Rao were averse to the changes sweeping through Hyderabad. In fact, they were part of it — Mr. Nugala being a software man, recently returned from Tucson, Ariz., Mr. Rao being in real estate.
“I know we’re not going to stop the development,” Mr. Nugala said. “I just hope we ease up a little.”
Mr. Rao added, “These rocks can’t go up again once they are gone.”
Their campaign has succeeded in creating a rock park in the heart of the city, overlooking a lake. It has also led to the designation of nine rock formations as heritage sites, including the Bear’s Nose, which is to sit smack inside a proposed hotel in what is known as the Cyber City neighborhood. Some of the technology campuses have artfully incorporated the boulders into their design, transforming them into rock gardens.
But enforcing the heritage designation requires constant vigilance by citizens groups, said Narendra Luther, a longtime member of the Society to Save Rocks. He should know; he spent his entire career in the Indian government bureaucracy. “We are very poor in implementing our laws,” he said.
Mr. Luther lives with the rocks. One dominates his living room, forming a wall that divides the sitting area from the dining room. The same boulder shoots up through the ceiling into the apartment upstairs, where Mr. Luther’s son lives with his own family. His 5-year-old grandson, Rishab, scrambles up and down its steep smooth side.
“I came in 1958. I was fascinated by it,” Mr. Luther said of his obsession with the city’s ancient boulders. “First, the sheer presence of the rocks and the fantastic shapes, sometimes defying gravity, one right over the other. It looks like somebody has placed it there and you can give it a slap and it will fall.”
Developers have approached with sweet offers for his house, which occupies a big plot of land in one of the best neighborhoods in town. He has brushed them off.
Correction: August 18, 2007
A map with a foreign journal yesterday about citizen efforts to save the huge boulders of Hyderabad, India, from destruction during a development boom mislabeled in some copies a city in the southeast. It is Chennai, not Mumbai.

Think Free. Live Free.

Happy Independence Day

Chapter 11

Here is a kicker.... if you had to write your autobiography today. Right up until this moment. What would the name of the chapters be? Let me know and I will post your list on vixlist. To give you an idea on what I am talking about, I am giving below the chapters which would be on my autobiography. The chapters refer to various phases of my life, and may not be in chronological order.

• Re Invent
• Run-up to Feb 9th
• Today...and the day after tomorrow
• Discovering home
• Conquering R
• The Mother Ship
• Fruit Beer among other things
• Among the natives
• Vix Pub
• The second last bench

Anybody care to guess what any of these chapters could be referring to.

Then and now = A photo journey

Vivek & Bhanu late last month and about 10 years ago. Some things don't change....




















Again these two pictures are about ten years apart. Noticeable change in me? The infamous mouche... nobody misses it. Nimish was in his ...or should I say, started his 'fat phase' around this time.
















These are not too far apart though, Sam when she was about 6-7 months and she must be about 4 in the second picture. Amma seems the same.

Now a few more for the road...















The one on the left was on Rimli's birthday....ages ago. I hate me in the other one. While Rahul pulls off an actual 'yo', my yo makes me look like a i am in the midst of a paralytic attack.

And now a moment of silence for the departed....

















What was ..the '5 of us'




















Me and Asad, before he succumbed to a chronic bout of TCI (Terminal Crotch Itch, caused by Fungus Bufonidae) ...

Ironic???

August 15th, 2007. India will celebrate her 60th year of freedom. And it is on this day that I will lose mine.

My mom arrives (along with my grand ma) on the 15th....and herz the kick in the nuts, by the time she leaves, I will be a married dude!

In short, I lose my independence this independence day. It still hasn't really hit me. But I hope it does, before this weekend, so that I can make the most of it (read: Drink like an alcoholic Jat, on new year's eve in an 'all you can drink' place).

As the Alanis Morisette song went... 'Isn't it ironic?'

Hmmmf..wha???? It's mornin already???

I've been sleepin... lemme get my coffee..then write something