Heh.

She: "So how did you know?"

Me: "Male intuition. Men always know."

Tolerance

Tolerance is not something that comes easily to me. Somehow, I instinctively feel threatened by people who make different choices from me and I have to make a conscious effort to get over that initial reaction.

But I try.

Foo...

Motivational speaker-ese for the day:

Too many people confuse courage with cavalier risk-taking. Courage is not always about quitting your job to start a rock band, it is also about having the perseverance to chase your dream even when you know that it's going to take you a lifetime to realize it.

I have a question for you. It is a rather important question, and I sincerely hope you take the time to answer it.

Do I have some talent for this, or can everybody pull stuff like this from their asses?

Fooo..

- That last post was something, huh? Full four word title, abstract photo, 55 words. This one was the whole enchilada, wasn't it?

- Motivational speaker-ese for the day:

Everybody gets into situations where it seems that it is impossible to succeed. Successful people treat these situations as an opportunity, sometimes as an opportunity to beat the odds, at other times simply as an opportunity to fail. Everybody knows what failure is a stepping stone to, right?

I know you guys are going to get all cynical and ridicule me and everything, but I really think this is the start of something good.


- Faith is a beautiful thing. Faith is what gives us hope when the going gets unpleasant.

Faith is what makes us check our email in the morning with pleasant anticipation even if reason tells us that the only new email is going be the university newsletter.

Update: Almost immediately after I wrote this, I got an email from a really old friend saying that she was getting married to a common friend.

There. Can anybody say now with a straight face that miracles don't happen, that faith is misplaced?

Portrait of a woman

She's 35, recently divorced, no kids. She’s from Springfield, Illinois.

She sits up at night sometimes, stares at the emptiness around her, and wonders if there will be other men in her life, if those relationships will be better than the one she ended.

Who is she?
Stabbed her cheating husband. Attempted murder, seven years.

Update: n takes it forward....

In the bunker above, Alison sensed that her cellmate was awake again, gazing out of their solitary two-by-two window, wondering what the future will bring, whether happiness would be hers again.
Ah Betty, she thought. If only you would look within. What man can understand your needs, and love you, as well as I can.

Fooooo

- Motivational speaker-ese for the day:

Success is always about the here and now, about this play, this program, this sentence. The big picture is an abstract masterpiece that you pull out once in a while from your safe and stare at with bewildered bemusement.

Would that be something that would be called 'good shit' in modern parlance?



- Yesterday, on a 3rd and 9, Tom Brady rushed right past Brian Urlacher for 11 yards and a first down. That's like Saurav Ganguly hitting the ball straight to Jonty Rhodes and running a really quick single. Chicken soup for the soul.



- I have a pretty nice naming scheme going for my posts, don't I?



- Monday mornings are a thousand times worse when you've run out of tea bags.

Foo.

- Isn't it funny when India loses a cricket match and people start raising questions about it in Parliament?

So, how is this ironic?

Let me count the ways.

That, my friends, is one of the most over-used lines in the English language. Now, finally, it has been used in this blog.

- "Boys are smelly" and "Stupid Factory: Where boys are created" : Public service announcements that a 9th grader I know has put up on her fridge.


- I just realized after looking at my last few posts that my life is so pathetic that the few mildly amusing lines that I come up with are actually the highlights of my day.

Anybody who can put a positive spin on that gets to pat himself/herself on the back.

Foooo.

The key to happiness is the ability to accept your inadequacies, the key to success is the ability to fight them.

I am so full of crap, it's going to be such a pity if I don't become a motivational speaker.

Women

- One of the few important things I learnt in college, I learnt from being around my friend G. I learnt that no matter how much I tried, I would never understand women.

I was reading this girl who blogs about old relationships and break-ups and such. Sometimes it was so complicated that it made my head hurt. Sometimes it felt like I was watching Saw-III. It might not seem that way, but I meant that in a completely nice and sympathetic sense.



- Sometimes I'm in complete awe of people who are happily married. At other times I think it's only a matter of not expecting too much.



- I look back fondly at the times when I wasn't the oldest person I knew.




- When you're boiling eggs, how do you know when they're done?



Update: The first part of this post doesn't make sense to me any more. And a very kind friend has now taught me how to boil eggs.

One more question

Doesn't deja vu sound like a Chinese professor's name?

Orkut fiction

Dear miss X,

I have come across your profile when I was wasting time on Orkut instead of making my parents proud by studying like a good boy. I have seen on your profile that you are a journalist and, by the grace of god, I also want to become a journalist. I will be much obliged to become your friend and get your guidance towards starting a journalistic career.

Please do not think that I have bad intentions in asking for your friendship. I am a pure and innocent South Indian boy who stays at home in the weekends eating rice and sambar instead of going disco dancing like the other bad boys who try to make friends with girls like you. Since I am asking you to help with my education you will be like a guru, like Goddess Saraswati to me.

I hope you will show kindness and allow me to be your friend.

Sincerely,
Y

Yet another question

The women who say "I'm going out with so and so because he makes me laugh", can't they just buy a Da Ali G show DVD instead?

Just kidding.

Why I like grad school - 2

I emailed somebody last night asking if I could use his code, something he had worked on for almost 5 years. It was there in my inbox this morning, neatly arranged in three folders with readme files and block comments and everything, along with an offer to set up a meeting in case I didn't understand something.

I didn't work for very long, but I got the impression that things didn't always work like this in the industry.

Completely uninteresting factoids about me.

- There are some things that people say that get my blood boiling. I start writing an angry post about them, and I then realize "This is exactly the kind of thing that I would have said when I was in college"[1].

Life humbles me sometimes.


- I didn't know what Thanksgiving was about till a conversation with a Swedish couple made me realize that it might be about time I found out.


- I still can't get my car out of first gear without making the car sound like one of those NASCAR monstrosities.

- I still can't downshift without some unpleasant things happening to my backbone.


[1]: If you're the kind that's easily amused, you might find that funny, considering I'm still in college.

Tutoring

From my personal experience, the most important quality a tutor needs to have is the ability to keep his/her mouth shut and let people discover the things they know.


I'm pretty good at coming up with this crap, maybe I should become a motivational speaker.

Another question.

All you mysterious people from Gainesville who are reading my blog, can any of you get me into a Gators basketball game for free?

Heh. If you have a personal blog, why not use it for personal gain?

Lost

- I was 30 minutes late to an appointment because I got horribly lost. I was half an hour early for another appointment the next day because I over-compensated. Such is life.

- What makes you get out of bed in the morning? My reason for getting out of bed this morning was so pathetic that I was actually thinking in third person and pitying myself.

But, as somebody said somewhere, having a life is extremely overrated anyway.


- PhD comics. Classic stuff.

Graduate school sometimes feels like a cynical, messed-up place where there is widespread poverty and rampant exploitation. But I'm here because, above everything else, it is fun.

What does your blog say about you?

n rambles about anonymous blogging in this post. The part that I was really interested in was:

1. When you venture into the world of blogging, you are putting yourself out there. Just not mentioning personal details cannot protect you, because you reveal much more about who or what you are when you react to the world around you. So K, even though I don't know who you're dating, I know the kind of person you are likely to.

and the excerpt from the DNA article:

They are a good psychology test of the candidate. Around two to three articles in the blog subscribing to a particular trend/behaviour should be noticed.

This is probably true to an extent, but I'm really not sure to what extent. I think human beings are inherently complex, and I am generally skeptical about people who claim to understand people's personalities by observing how they behave in specific situations because I feel they tend to oversimplify things.

What kind of character/personality traits can you reliably infer from a person's blog? Let me know.

Question

Is it ok to leave a comment on somebody's blog post saying "I didn't really get that last line" or is it just wasting people's time?

Why don't you talk about this?

Too many people have asked me(not me personally but generic me, if that makes any sense) this question. Let me tell you why.

I don't talk about:

- the victims of rape and sexual harassment because I don't know what to say. I just don't.

- the victims of bomb blasts because anything I try to say sounds completely hollow.

- the greatness of the Vedic culture because I just don't know enough about it.

- the wonderful progress India is making in IT because I don't find the topic either useful or interesting.


Some things you should know:

- You have a voice and I never stop you from using it. The conversations we have are not solely my responsibility.

- Not talking about something is not the same thing as denying its existence. It is silly to pretend that it is.

- I don't provide news, I give opinions. That means that I have no obligation to provide balanced coverage. As long as I don't lie or deny the truth, I don't need to balance my criticisms with alternative view points or praise.

Anonymous blogging

I just realized after a conversation with a friend that anonymous blogging isn't about protecting one's real identity from random readers of one's blog. It's about protecting one's 'blog identity' from the people one knows in real life, so that they don't find one's blog just by googling one's name.


Mind-blowing, eh?

Random rambles and deep thoughts

- There are new links on the sidebar if you're interested.


- You know you've become ancient when you need to get help in order to be able to send a text message on your cell phone.


- When I first came to America, I was a little surprised to find that the people here found my name really hard to pronounce.

The conversation when I ordered food somewhere used to go something like:


Me: Can I have an plain bagel with plain cream cheese please?

Bagel Guy: Sure, what's your first name?

Me: Kaushik

BG: Whoa!! What was that again?

Me: Kaushik

BG: Cash-heat?

Me: Kaauu-sshhiik

BG: Cosh-lee?

Me: You know what, just call me K.


I have, of course, learnt from experience. The conversation now goes like:


Me: Can I have an everything bagel with garden-veggie cream cheese please?

BG: Sure, what's your first name?

Me: Here's my driver's license, knock yourself out.


Btw, I don't mean to be critical here. I completely understand why it's really hard for these people.



- Talking of pronunciation, I'm never completely sure if Mary is pronounced 'marry' or 'meri'.

Fooo.

If anybody is interested in knowing how I managed to get aftershave in my eye, please let me know.

Dream girl

Primalsoup talks about her Bharat matrimony profile, among other things, in this post.

Good Iyer girl with strongest traditional values. Visits temples every Friday and eats salt less food every Saturday. Also wears nice mookutti (literal meaning nose poked) with three dangling diamonds. Respects Indian culture, tradition, husband and Sharad Pawar…...

One leches at the image with blatant disregard for propriety, for Section 509 of the IPC and for the sensitivities of certain readers of ones blog.

And get this, she's the great great granddaughter (I think), of the legendary Palghat Seshadri Shastrigal.

/*Throws up hands and shakes his head.*/

Friends

- It's funny, how old friends remember only the weird things about you.

Flashback: A conversation from the Kansas city trip

Friend is introducing me to his girlfriend:

Friend: "Kaushik, this is Girlfriend. She is so and so, she is such and such, blah blah blah............
And Girlfriend, this is Kaushik. "

Me: "Hi"

Girlfriend: "Hi"

Friend: "Dude, do you remember the time you hit on Common Friend's sister. Man, that was hilarious".

Me: "Yes, I remember it. I even have nightmares about it, but how on earth is it relevant in this context???"

- Speaking of old friends: Links to their blogs, for no reason at all. Nine words, nine links: that might even be a record.

- When Adam Vinatieri missed that second field goal, I was telling myself "If the Pats can score on this drive, this is going to be a JFK moment".

- I have renewed my acquaintance with the rather controversially named 'Vegetarian vegetable soup' [1] due to a minor cold. Some nit-pickers make the claim that the name implies that the vegetables themselves are vegetarian (i.e. they eat other vegetables) and that the soup should really be called 'Vegetable soup for vegetarians', but I think they're just jobless idiots with nothing better to do.

Reminds me of the guy who claimed/claims that the terms 'dandruff shampoo' and 'cough syrup' are misnomers and that they need to be called 'anti-dandruff shampoo' and 'anti-cough syrup' respectively.



[1] The 'normal' vegetable soup has meat balls in it.

Trivia question - II

After seeing the overwhelming response to the previous question, I have decided to make this a series.

New question:

What are the lyrics of the song in the 2002 classic Gautam Govinda that refer to the hero being electrocuted?


First person to give the correct answer becomes the 'Randomization blog: Reader of the Month' for the month of November 2006.

Phew!

Finally, a comment.

Foobar

There are times when you are trying to decide between right and wrong, you say "This is probably wrong but, what the heck, this is too much fun".

So, I present to my non-Kannadiga readers these possibly illegal videos from Youtube:
















Inspired, of course, by this post by The Precipitatory One and these comments by Essar and twinkletoes.



PS: On a partially related note, if you have a copy of any T R movie, could you please send it to me?

Foo.

Link.


Quote:

But what next week's election seems likely to illustrate is that the laws of thermodynamics - in particular, the one that states that for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction - have not been repealed.

Aha!