RIP

The world will remember you for your amazing talent and not for anything else.... hopefully

Life post #3

Now I realize this is getting to be more than you bargained for. But am going to make you sorry you asked about my personal life and swear to let me be.

Nyways, another one of the anxieties of parenthood (or hopefully soon to be parenthood, but not too son that its before the expected date) is that it makes you superstitious and anal. Even a super logical guy like me makes sure that everything he says (or blogs apparently) is safe. I have found myself correcting my sentences, and adding an ‘*’ with conditions apply followed by a long annexure of ‘subject to’ clauses.

Anyway, today’s post is about the bigger anxiety. That of having to think of a name for your kid. As I had said earlier, gender determination is illegal, so we have to shortlist a boy name *and* a girl name…. (we aren’t too big on gender neutral names… like Kiran for example)

Deciding on the girl name was not a decision at all. I had decided the name as long ago as 2003. What’s the name? Many of you reading the blog, would already know. And the others, maybe you will find out real soon.

And since I got to decide the girl name, Sandhya got to the power of veto for the boy name. A fair bargain I guess. So she made a list of names which were :

* Modern

* Uncommon

* Region Neutral

And I added the following conditions

1.  Should go well with his last name

2.  Cannot be easily ‘manipulated’ into an insulting nickname

3.  Sound ‘good looking’

Now, (1) can be easily explained. In my jaat, we do not have a last name. We use our dad’s name as our  last name. My name is Vikram Mohan. My dad’s Mohan Seshadri. My neice is called Samiksha Vijay. So logically my kid’s last name would be Vikram…. a really sucky last name to have admittedly. But more on this later. The girl name, btw, so totally goes with her last name.

As for (2), allow me to give you an anecdote. I had a classmate called S Prem, he would spend most of his school life as ‘sperm’. I think I made my point here.

Condition (3) is a tough one. What’s a ‘good looking’ name?. Some names conjure up a decent looking face in your imagination while some are better left alone.

So how do I come up with a ‘good looking’ name? Ideally a nationwide survey would be nice. But I took the easy way out. I put up each name proposed by Sandhya on google images and saw the mugs that it spat out. Once I showed her the faces of the possible namesakes, she vetoed it herself. (smart eh?)

We have more or less decided on the guy name too. I have run it through my family and though the results are not highly encouraging, we might stick with it. You would have guessed by now that I am not going to tell you the name (its supposed to be bad luck). But I will let you have a look at the mug shots of the namesakes from google images. Who knows, maybe you might actually know (or be)one of them and guess the name yourself.

Girl namesake faces:

 

 

 

Boy namesake faces:

 

 

 P.S. If you are indeed one of the people featured above, sorry for picking up your photo from the web. If its any consolation, both me and the wifey think you look decent enough to want to name our kid after you. :-)

Life post #2

Life Post #1

For those who are not in the know, me and Sandhya are expecting. The stork is scheduled to make the stopover sometime in mid August. Of course, we do not know the sex of the baby since sex determination is illegal here in India.


Now, when for the past few months I have got the 'dad anxieties'. I have started worrying about things. Wierd things. One of them is this.

When growing up, most kids learn basic skills from their parents. Boys of course, rely on their dads and vice versa. In the good old days, the 5 year old would want to grow up and 'be like daddy'. After my ' train driver' phase, my dream job was to eventually work in a bank and earn three thousand rupees. Not only that, I wanted to be surrounded by tonnes of paper files and have an Air Cooler in my cabin.

My first fear is that I am not equipped to teach my son any useful skills. I realized this while watching Lost (to which me and wifey are hooked on to) and pondering over my fate if I had been on that island. Not only that, imagine the episode where my backstory was told.... on second thoughts, don't imagine.

Unless the kid needs to know how to create a wicked PowerPoint deck or an Excel based tool to track work flow and measure  value created.... then I would be a kick ass dad.


Secondly, when my kid asks me what I do for work, am I supposed to say 'Strategic Sourcing Consulting' ? No way in hell, my kid would win a 'my daddy strongest' argument. My only consolation is that the father of the kid across the desk would probably be a code monkey with an equally lame title. 


Aah, I have acquired 4 new grey hairs while composing this post.

This guy is goooood....

Its no secret that I love comic strips. In recent times, I have found only two three strips which have been consistently funny. Two of them are Pearls, and Basic Instructions.

The third is amazingly an Indian strip. Now it is my opinion a cold fact that no Indian strip has ever been funny yet. ( No! Dubyaman sucked man). People who read either DC (its TV guide more specifically) or HT know who I am hinting at. 

It's Rajneesh Kapoor's strip, "This is our life". Sample the below yourself and decide. 
Funny! Non-pretentious, and original (to my knowledge). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would have loved to link to his site... but couldn't find it... 

Life post #1

In the past year, I have got two (yes, 2.0) emails that the blog doesn’t talk much about my life, and they visit to kind of catch up with me.

In my defence, Vixdom (as the title intends to suggest) is about me dispensing my ideas and whatnot. It isn’t meant to be a personal journal. I did start a ‘brief history of mine’ blog which was a journal and the results were very discomforting.

Only when I read the excruciating details of my life in black and white did it strike me. My life is spectacularly boring. In fact reading it was such a torture that Dick Cheney wanted to buy the rights to it.

Vixdom….is a blog about nothing (Sorry Mr. Seinfeld). But when your life too seems to be ‘about nothing’ (and i mean that in the best possible way) it does make sense (to the mad hatter perhaps) to write about my life.

Doesn’t it?

Nuff said

 

I still stand by my statement that cartoonists are the philosophers of this era.

Are you 18 or older?

I recently put up google analytics to get some stats on who read vixdom. Interesting results to say the least. Thought you might be interested in a few stats.

I got 16% of traffic through a google search on the keyword ‘pornography’

This confirms yet again the fact that sex drives the internet. Long ago, I had put up this article. This is one of the very few posts which I ‘copy pasted’ from another source… but it’s about sex (kinda) and so it gets the hits….almost 2 years since it was originally posted.

My Ladakh trip report, remains popular, averaging 2 visits almost every week.

We have some mysterious ‘repeat’ viewers from Singapore, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, and New Zealand.

I call it mysterious, because I do not know anyone in these countries. So its kinda wierd (and flattering) that someone there finds it worth their while to keep visiting vixdom.

A surprising number of referrals from google images.

For a personal blog with very few images, I find this surprising. But maybe all these referrals are for the ‘sex post’ mentioned above. Even so, if google spits out my site for a search on ‘pornography’, google sucks.

This remains one of the most popular posts in recent times. Surprizing!! And now that I have linked back to it, maybe I can help it stay in the top for some more time. Clever eh? :-)

77% of people visiting stay for under 10 seconds :-)

I love this fact…. and am not surprised. Some horny bonehead in Morocco (another country I got a few visitors from) wanted to see naughty pictures but ended up in my site… would love to see his expression… (uh..on 2nd thoughts, I would rather not) when (s)he lands up here.