What to do in the 'Red Light' area...

It's been 2 years to me traveling 12 Kms to office and back home everyday and whereas it was hectic in the beginning, I accepted it in due course of time. That was when I started observing other people on my way. And by now, thanks to the observer in me, I have about half a dozen trends on my book.

Whereas a few of them are disturbing, the most recent one is the funniest. So, if you feel bored waiting on traffic signals, this funny one would help you enjoy your time on the red lights. Oh yes, you would be able to observe it only on two conditions. One, you are in one of those tier 2 cities like NOIDA that have started to have some organized traffic but still don't have proper traffic law enforcement system. Two, you yourself wait for the traffic light to turn green before you cross the signal. Of course, we both know that you do. I just mentioned the second point for the sake of completeness.

And let's not forget that the people in such cities are mostly middle class educated ones, true ambassadors of Indian culture. This poor creature's observation is about the behaviour of those ambassadors on traffic signals in such places. It's frighteningly simple to observe and is, somewhere, a menifestation of a child in all of us.

When the signal is red and the timer beside it shows more than about 40 seconds, you may easily notice even the slow ones hesitantly seeing both ways and jumping it as if it doesn't exist. 'Well, what the hell, if I wait for it I'll be late for my daughter's tuition classes. And anyway the road is not very busy at the moment', is perhaps what goes on in their minds.
On the contrary, when it shows less than about 15 seconds, even the speediest of those responsible dad's would screech the brakes obediently. You might find them even respecting the zebra crossing at such instances. Needless to say, a sense of self righteousness or may be a contentment with fulfillment of their duties as a citizen of the country is what inflates them with self-pride at such moments.

I tried to observe the behaviour for between 15 and 40 seconds too but couldn't make out any specific trend. If you can, please don't forget to put me a comment here. Will you !

Sodium's Self Realization...

There are only two types of IITians :

Those who have brains...
...I belong to the other ones !

The sky is falling....

Things happen. They happen with everybody. The world is not trying to zero in on me. That's what I keep assuring me these days. Why, sample my days.

I am in Gym in the morning. Get to see Rohit after quite a few days there. So does he. I am doing my set so can't say hi. He comes to me and
"Hi"
"Hey hi" I say with effort because I am towards the end of my set.
"Say buddy! What's going"
"Biceps and Triceps dude" I say putting the barbell down.
"I was asking as in life you loser ! Do you tell everyone such replies when they ask you what's up" he snaps taking out his shirt.
He sometimes makes you feel as if you are the biggest of them all...idiots, of course.

And just the next day I am doing Pullovers in Chest. Rohit enters again.
"Hey. Whoa so heavy ! So ! It's legs today?"
I drop the weight midway, without finishing my set. It's more a shock than surprise.
Now now, if someone can call such an obvious chest exercise as a pullover a leg exercise then where in hell did he have any right to call me a loser the previous day !

A few hours later, I am in office. The bachelor party is discussing the grave subject of singles vs committed. The conclusion after about half an hour of debate, more serious than any project meeting I have ever attended there, was that girls like committed guys because they must have something in them which attracted somebody enough to commit herself to them.

I am a quick learner. People have always told me that. Now what would you expect from such a person after this debate. I come and change my relationship status on my profile on the social networking site to 'Committed'.
And guess what. This girl I met at a party a few days back and had been trying to flirt with for sometime now, writes to me
"Hey what's the surprise? You got someone at last ! Who is the lucky girl? So now I have nothing to fear from you and we can keep in touch. You won't mind me calling you a bhaiya ! Hai na !"
I celebrated a black day that day.

'Original Sodium'...

I hold product designers and campaigners in high regard because their mind works 24x7 for new ideas and most of the good ones play with human psychology. But this one has been perplexing me for some time recently.

Here is one new-comer to my gym whose jacket always brandishes the label of 'Original Nike'. One big mouth in my office also sports something which displays another 'Original' attached to its name. This is not very uncommon in branded apparels these days. Perhaps you have guessed by now that what catches this poor observer's eye is this word - 'Original'.
It's been attached to the actual brand name as if the fake ones would have ethics enough not to attach this to their own stickers or tags. And in that light, I wonder how this benefits any of the two, the manufacturer and the customer.

Similar is the case with holograms. I see so many books having a fancy line written on their cover page to the effect of warning the customer not to purchase the product if it doesn't have such and such hologram. Now what use is this? Are the publishers assuming here that the fake ones are stupid enough to print this kind of line on their fake copies of the same book and still not attach an almost similar hologram ! Who, anyway, ever 'wastes' his effort in looking at the hologram from 3 different angles to see if it indeed shows up that publishing house name in 3-D. And in the end, after all, it should not be too difficult for the fakes to get the hologram copied as well.

I would be obliged if any of you product designers or amateur observers could find some time to enlighten this poor observer on this, if you yourself happen to be more fortunate than me to have its answer.

Mirchi sunne waale always...

I have been away from my blog for quite sometime and a lot has been happening all the while. There are things we don't speak of now which led to this hiatus in my blogging activity. But this incident today was enough to goad me into writing about it here.

They shouldn't be allowed to run Gyms if they can't even put the latest music CD in the player. To avoid the inconvenience of keeping track of all the latest hits, they tune it to Radio Mirchi. And even that's perfectly fine with us until they (Mirchi) play only the latest hits. But what's the fun if everything in this world went as expected. The problem arose when this fun of theirs took its toll on 3 unsuspecting knees and one innocent elbow.

I was doing the routine chin-ups as part of my warm up in the gym when this 'Hasi ke favvare with Sud' happened. Nobody cared. It comes daily with its usual dose of PJs, those everybody has been hearing since his childhood. I continued with my chin-ups. Saurav continued with his shoulder front rod. Akki with his reverse squats. And Sukh with his bench press.

And in absence of any protest from any of us, Sud also continued with the second last joke on Page number 9 of Hasi Ke Favvare.

Madam to Suresh: Birds which fly in the sky lay eggs. Mammals which live on the land give birth to young ones. Now who is that which flies in the sky but gives birth to its young ones on the land.


Suresh, as he told us, waited for a few seconds, perhaps thinking of the best possible answer of a tough tie between several choices. And then came up with his best possible answer:

..
..
..

Madam, Air-Hostess !!

Silence for a moment.

Of course, there is a reaction time to things, especially when you are expecting just another PJ. But you need to have extraordinary control over yourself to make use of this reaction time to save yourself from the imminent misery afterwards and all of us were mere mortals.

All hell broke loose.

My arms lost strength momentarily as I struggled to fight hysterical laughter and my knee hit the support below, throwing me into a huddle of cry and hysteria. Saurav couldn't keep the rod in the air and it came down crashing right on his knees. Akki brought the thigh press down and couldn't lift it up again. And it was difficult to tell the louder one between the sound made by his knees and that by his mouth. Sukh, it seemed, tried to control himself better than any of us and had almost succeeded when he gave in to all the things happening to us and brought down his 45 Kg rod at lightening speed on his chest instead of balancing it on the bench support behind. His elbow played the hero in trying to save his chest and cramped itself in the process.

It took moments. It was like everybody going through his daily chores when suddenly an earthquake shakes the foundation of their homes and you can imagine the scenes afterwards.

But it was not an earthquake. So Mirchi house foundations were intact. And the last thing we heard them playing was "Mirchi sunne waale always khush, always khush !!

Of Course ! What else would you be when you don't have to go to office for the next one week with such a genuine reason !

The simplest philosophy to lead you to success...

"In life go straight and turn right"

-- From one of my heros

Love and Physics is a lethel combination, I tell you...

My mom always remembered her friends' birthdays. But my dad anyways never assigned so much importance to birthdays and his parents didn't remember his exact date either. And in my childhood, my friends maintained a red diary on birthdays and checked it every week for the birthdays falling in that week. I never did because I was inspired by my dad. It was my girlfriend (Yes I have had that honour, only to be revoked later) who drummed the value of a birthday into my head.

"You would always remain a Ganwar. How the hell would a girl bear with you all her life !" she would say. And this was one sentence that really freaked me out. I tried to be my smartest self with her and she would so blatantly mock my efforts at smartness.

"What a birthday really marks is an integral number of rounds around the sun. What the hell special about completing a circle around the sun ! And anyway it reduces your life expectancy every time it comes !" I argued.

"You IITians are real idiots !" another sentence to freak me to the hell's limit. In those moments, I hated those idiot IITians who don't know how to talk to a girl and bring bad name to all their brethren. I worked so hard to show her that I didn't give a damn to studies (Which I am paying for badly till date ! ).

"But tell me what the hell is wrong here !"

"In the entire year, this day is yours Mr. Idiot !"

And that day it was her birthday when we were sitting in the stadium after being chased from everywhere we tried to find some solitude and she was checking her mobile for any new birthday wishes from friends. It was about 8.30 night and just 3.30 hours left of her birthday.

"All are bad. 7 of my bestest friends ( ??? Girls' jargon for a friend whom they haven't fought with in the past week, I found out) haven't wished me. Last time too 5 of them recalled it only the next morning. How mean they all are ! "

Man ! When you are in love, the tears of your girlfriend are the hardest thing to bear.

"Hey cheer up dear. Let me tell you something. Look at it this way. You were born in Feb 1984 and that was a leap year. Now this year is 2004 and is again a leap year. The last leap year was 2000. Now between Feb 2000 and Feb 2004, the lag in calender has been one full day for which the correction would be made with one extra day in this month this year. So that means if you look at it from cosmological point of view, your Birthday is not today. It's closer to tomorrow ! And all those friends who have wished you today have, in fact, wished you on the wrong day. The real friends would be the ones who would wish you tomorrow. " Of course, before saying all this 'logic' I had mentally checked my calender for the next day to see if I would be available to wish her the next day too.

"What? Why are you looking at me like that ?" I asked, bewildered and apprehended of something terrible coming my way.
"Hey where are you going. Listen !"

It was a tough, trying day of my life and the last time when I argued about it before I started believing in Birthdays.

My birthday is my day of the year !

So all you morons who wouldn't wish me today, can still do so more accurately. I was dispatched to earth in 1982. 2 years later was the leap year. Now 2008 is leap year. And since 4 years constitute a lag of one day in a human calendar year in S.I. system, the lag in actual 25 rounds of mine around the burning ball has been a little less than half a day now. Next year is a leap year. My 25th round would actually be completed sometime tomorrow.

Hey who's that ! Now who called me an idiot here !