Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Predictions of monsoon looming in. May 29th is what the wise men say. Lets see! In this post we will witness Rockus, the budding business man and entrepreneur. Monopoly is a very popular game. If you haven't played it, well, words fail me. When I was around 6 or 7, I got a monopoly like game called "Business" on my birthday*. It was totally unlike your run of the mill monopoly. Squares upto 100, you had throw dice and reach 100. The twist was that you had money, and had squares where you gained or lost money. Never really read the rules anyway. I always played it the way I wanted to. After a couple of years, the real clone of Monopoly surfaced. This was also called "Business". The game was entirely like Monopoly, except for the fact the names were all Indianised. Instead on Connecticut, you had Calcutta. Instead of Illinois, you had Indore. This one spread like a wildfire. We all got it, and we played it from dawn to dusk on several days. At that time, we had an...

Yesterday we ended with a promise about the tales about wheels and business. Young boys are fascinated by cars and bikes. Older boys too! Being young lets you dream about a lot of stuff uninhibited. You can dream about the cars you are going to get, boast about without getting the "huh" stares. Anyways back to our tale. I used to live near a slum. (Near would be an understatement since the distance was like 3 meters!) Temple pond (a large one at that!) converted into a slum over a period of several years. Without any doubt, I was forbidden from playing with the slum kids. I was still fascinated by their games. One of them was wheeling. I don't know the exact term for it, but it involves running along with a tyre, guiding it with a stick and making "beep beep" noises. Couple of kids with whom I used to play, were also fascinated by this. So, without getting close to the "bad" kids, I also got to play the game. We started of with cycle tyres as we could ...

Have been telling myself to write this post since the beginning of April. Like so many important and unimportant things, I have been putting this off as well. I live near the court complex. May be a good 40 meters. On weekdays its a mad rush. Traffic is hectic and court premises are teeming with hordes of people, bat (wo)men, and khaki (wo)men. Sundays are wholly different matter. Hardly anyone on the road or the court complex. On these deserted days, the grounds inside court are taken over by kids of all ages. Several groups of kids play cricket all day. If I happen to pass by, I watch them play for sometime from afar. Its always fun to watch them play. The concentration on their faces, the dejections, the elations, the nasty schemes etc. Above all, I feel nostalgic about my own summer days. My childhood was spent in a rather sizeable family. In addition to it, lots of other relatives lived closed by. So, as kids we always had company. During the beginning of my boyhood, my best frien...

Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade is a short film directed by George Hickenlooper, starring Billy Bob Thornton. Really great short movie. Its about a killer being released from an asylum after 25 years. He is interviewed by a reporter on the day of his release. He delivers a monologue in which he says how he murdered his mother and his lover. Fantastic performance by Billy Bob. His performance as a mentally disturbed person who has not talked to a woman for 25 years, someone who hates people looking at him, some one who believes he is the ugliest person in the word; is very impacting without going overboard. Really makes you ponder about fundamentalist values and their effects on young minds, and how insane criminals are to be treated by the society. At the end of the monologue, the reporter woman blurts out a chilling question, "Will you kill again?", to which he responds, "I ain't got anything against anybody to kill." Must watch! This short film formed the bas...

I took this pic while commuting to office. It came out pretty well considering the crappy phone camera and the fact that our van was moving. If only the Pachyderm held his trunk closer, it would have been perfect! :-) An effervescing elephant with tiny eyes, and great big trunk once whispered to the tiny ears the ears of one inferior that by next june he'd die, oh yeah! because the tiger would roam and the little one said oh my goodness I must stay at home and everytime I hear a growl I'll know the tiger's on the prowl and I'll be really safe you know The elephant he told me so And everyone was nervvy, oh yeah! and the message was spread to zebra, mongoose, and the dirty hippopotamus who wollowed in the mud and chewed his spicy hippoplancton food and tended to ignore the word prefering to survey a herd of stupid water bison, oh yeah! and the jungle took fright and ran around for all the day and the night but all in vain because you see the tiger came and said to me, ...

Came across a set of short films by four of the celebrated Indian film makers on AIDS. Conceptualized by Mira Nair, this venture is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to increase awareness of AIDS. The four short films are by Mira Nair, Vishal Bharadwaj, Santosh Sivan, and Farhan Akhtar. These are available from the movie download service Jaman (more on the site on my tech blog .) as part of their AIDS Jaago section . They are available for download, or as streaming video (pretty nice quality). Just finished the first one, Migration by Mira Nair . Pretty nice short, focusing on how AIDS is a disease beyond the societal class. Decent acting by all the actors. Shiney Ahuja is a little bit too urban looking to pull off a villager though. Still its a very decent performance from him. Mira Nair's craft is very much evident albeit this being a short film. Will update the rest after watching each of the movies. Update: Finished watching Blood Brothers by Vishal Bharadwaj....

I hate updating status every now and then. Period. Now, I don't have to update my work status every 3 hour or every day like some unfortunate souls. I am supposed to sent a weekly report every week and update while doing some project. The last time sent a weekly report update was...*drum rolls* last June! Even then, I sent a report which was pending for around 6 months. Hmmm...I have been working for say 20 months now...which would mean atleast 80 weeks. 80 weekly status reports due and I have sent around 3! Fucking unbelievable! Hope I won't get caught for this! :-D Anyhoo, why do we need to update? After all, life is full of surprises! I want my lead to get his fair share of good and bad surprises. Good, when I actually do complete work on schedule and bad, when I don't! Bloody bureaucracy is hindering my strive for human touch in a corporate house! P.S: This is applicable to me! Only me! People who report to me/will be reporting to me *must* update daily to prevent me fr...

Lazy May Day... Hope to make some Hay... Feed it to my donkey Bray... Yeah, for this stupid poem I shall Pay!