Portland Musings

Oh boy, its been a long time. More than a sem since I last blogged. Finally some respite, finally some time off. If there is one thing I realized in the past few weeks, vacations typically mean spending (money)… and I had quite a few things pending(no rhyme intended). Well, most of my spending (I think and pray that this is correct) is done, and I am flush with stuff. Hope you holidays on a similarly bankrupting note.

Well, I am in Portland right now. This place has sunsets even earlier than Raleigh. Its sunset before 5 here… suddenly, the time zone difference doesn’t make much sense. And, since I have got a bit of time off, and more importantly, out of my laziness to write a blog, here I am writing one. Hope you enjoy this one.

Two distinctly different things have caught my attention in the past few months. The first one is marriage. Although I am not getting married anytime soon, the sheer number of people around who have, to use the cliché, taken the plunge, is quite large. There are a couple of things I have noticed. One, that north Indians get married a lot sooner. Tamilians get married sooner. Probably the rest of the world gets married before a Telugu Brahmin takes the plunge (last time, I promise). I am just guessing that the ruthlessly pragmatic mindset among gultis which (wrongly) pushes almost everyone into either engineering or medicine, also wants to wait until the guy is settled, earning well, got an H1B and can demand the highest dowry possible. And I also realized that engagements can happen in India while the groom and bride are in US. This came as a major surprise to me. I always thought the groom and bride are integral to the whole thing. But apparently, even the organizers of the event, share my view of it. A large scale food-distribution program to everyone you know, and some you don’t. Wonder if the marriage could also be done that way? Engagement I guess, is more of a formality in India, than the “last-chance-for-you-to-bail,-have-your-bachelor-party-and-plan-the-wedding” thing that it is here. But the marriage would need to be telecast (ustream, youtube or maybe even doordarshan) for people back home. Wonder how the muhurtham stuff would work though? Would it be the time zone of the bride and groom, or those in India?. And FYI, since we are on the topic, I think God is nocturnal, and expects us to be so, because most of the muhurthams I see are in the dead of the night. If you are like Ross (Friends), you should be scared.

The other thing that caught me is this whole holiday/vacation stuff. Up until now, I have never really thought about it what it meant. It was simply “holidays => find friends who are free => spend time with them => start new year with zero bank balance”. But now that I asked myself the question “WTF does all this mean anyway?”, it kind of dawns on me. It’s just the best way to skip work. They are so conveniently placed that it couldn’t be anything else. The American ones are placed towards the end of the year/sem (depending on whether your are rich/poor) to get your pumped up and work hard. Once you hit thanksgiving, you know your work for the year is done, and you can be the Santa for your credit card company. Otherwise, it has to be a mighty coincidence that we bunched up Christmas and New Year within a week of each other, so that we bunk the days a little before, a little after and in between. The Indian ones in constrast, give any worker an excuse on any given day. They are distributed so well over the year that five day weeks are not necessary. We already take a day off every week or so, and sometimes, bang in the middle. Secular credentials don’t hurt in this regard.

As I am relaxing, sitting before a huge tv, bose speakers and too lazy to take a bath, I hope you all see the point of a vacation. To kick back and write blogs like this. Here are my thoughts on a few things…
Guzaarish – I was really hoping that the court permitted Ethan Mascarenhas (Hrithik) his much-wanted euthanasia(when Hrithik smiles while saying “ethanasia”, I almost killed myself. And he was smiling because he knew that.), since, after watching the movie I was hoping for euthanasia for myself. This movie proves the other fact — I prefer that the hero of the movie is fitter than I am, otherwise I won’t like the movie.

Golmaal – 3, 4? Can’t remember – the new one. Well, they say that even in the best of your moods, there are still things which can very easily piss you off… actually, they don’t. But after this movie, they should. I think if the cast of the movie actually talked what they had in their head, instead of going by the invisible script, the movie would have been a million times better. I seriously think Indian movies should start looking 90min movies. That will atleast leave a few brain cells alive in the audience.

Gossip Girl – yes, I do follow this – in the Rahul ka swayamvar way – but more religiously. Hope Dan and Blair hookup… I think that is the only combination left.

Two and a half men – please write full episodes. Don’t make half-ass shit. It’s a great franchise, don’t ruin it.

Komaram Puli – babies cannot march when they are in the womb! — I rest my case.

Highly recommend: Unstoppable, Udaan (slightly longish but good) and PS3.

Hope you have a wonderful vacation. I’ll try to check in again with another blog real soon. Please feel free to drop comments, as usual.

My post from the iPad

This is a small blog post from the iPad. I am playing around with one that I borrowed in the library. Here it goes…

The device itself is classic Apple design. Extremely good looking, inviting you to play with it, beautiful screen. Woke up from sleep in an instant, and for an iPod touch veteran like me, it didn’t take long to notice the new features. I have read a million about this device, and since I am in the US, most of them have been exceedingly favorable. I am trying to be as impartial as possible while I review it. Let’s start at an unlikely place, Pages. For all non-Macs, Pages is Apple’s rival for Microsoft Word. The interface was pretty simple, and didn’t need any learning, although surprisingly enough Apple has a tutorial on how to use it. That’s very unlike Apple, since I have seen or heard of an Apple application which needed tutoring. It was unnecessary but there it was anyways. I tried my hand at typing and… It was hopeless. Apple has tried to do the best it can with a touchscreen keyboard but it is nowhere near good enough for my typing. I am back to an extremely irritating single-double finger typing. That’s why I am going to keep this blog short.

Tried out Safari. I expected this device to shine since it has, arguably, one of the best browsers, if not the best, in the market. Unfortunately it looks like this device seems to have the same wi-fi problem that has been plaguing other iPads. So, the pages painfully slowly, although once they loaded, the scrolling was just amazing. Navigating a page on this device is brilliant. Apple mostly carried over the browser design from the iPhone/touch Safari. This interface was good but far from ideal. For someone like me who is used to keyboard shortcuts and multiple tab views at a time, this seemed to slow things down. I did play a video from nytimes on this (presumably it is html5 since this device doesn’t support flash) and it was pretty smooth, until the wi-fi card screwed up the streaming. I am not judging the quality of the video since that is website and/or app-dependent.

No apps on this one since it’s borrowed, but I did manage to test the quality of photos on it. I tried viewing photos in 1600×1200 resolution. That’s the typical laptop resolution. They look the same or slightly worse.

Overall, this looks like a mediocre product compared to the iPhone or iPod Touch simply because you expect so much more when you pay a premium of 300 dollars over the comparable models. I expected a lot from the device but came out pretty dissatisfied. However, since tablets are just starting to come out now, I can’t judge this against others yet. I will once I have tested other tablets. I do think this is a good benchmark for other tablets but not one as high as the iPhone was for the smartphone market.

As always, thanks for reading. See you next time.

P.S. thanks to auto-correction I managed to finish this blog in one shot

Rahul ka Swayamvar / Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jaayega

Before I start the blog, a very strict warning… If you are lactose intolerant, skip this blog. It is… how do I say it… say… cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesey!

Okay. So let’s start. RkS (Rahul ka Swayamwar), if you didn’t know was the reality aired on NDTV Imagine this past month. It was about five weeks of fun-packed show, which I truly adored. I spent more than 16 hours of my life watching it. Granted that, I was multi-tasking for a while, but still. I did keep my ears firmly glued to the best show on earth. Since it is the best show in the universe, I assumed that the whole universe was watching it. So, I picked a couple of unfortunate souls at my workplace and home, and starting discussing the show with them. To my horror, I realized that they weren’t watching the show. I could not tolerate that. Being their well-wisher, I could not see them miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I convinced a few of them to watch it, and I must say (and I am not making this up), they were extremely enthusiastic to share their experience of watching it. That made me extremely happy. However, being the mankind-loving-person-that-I-am, I wanted to ensure that no one else missed the show. So, almost every single Indian friend of mine (that’s about 99.9 %, if you include my boss) knew that my opinion of the show and some of them (I hope) watched it. All my friends loved me for my recommendation. I realized it was time to take this global (in a way), and put it on the third most frequently visited site in the world(Google and Facebook being the first and second)… errr…  this one.

This blog is dedicated to the show. The show which had me gripped for more than a week. The outline is pretty simple. Rahul Mahajan wants to get married for a second time, after his first wife (apparently) left him after drug and physical abuse. NDTV, showing outstanding judgment makes a show out of this. Oh wait… that is wrong. There was already a show, and this is the second season. The first one had Rakhi Sawant… and that was equally “Imagine”ative.  I didn’t have much respect for the one-shot wonder MBAs but after these two shows, I have grown to admire them. I’ll reserve that for a later blog though. For now, lets “focus”!  As the host, they chose the one and only Ram Kapoor. His charm was no match for Rahul’s… ahem. Anyways, show started with 16 (yes, you read that right… sixteen) out-of-this-world- -should-been-miss-universe-ten-times-over girls. Rahul was initially very confused. He had so many girls to choose from, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Neither could I, so I shut them instead.

Coming to the girls…. Some of them were trying to be cuter-than-cupid, a few others were trying their hands at cooking, while the rest of the lot was just trying to get as-much-Rahul-as-they-could… because, of course, they loved-him-more-than-anyone-else-could-Imagine. One of them even confessed to loving him decades before they met. My guess is she may have started loving him even before he/she were born. A couple of others fell in love when they first saw him. It was as if, cupid was in Fatehgarh palace (that’s where the show was filmed) on the first day with unlimited supply opium-tipped arrows. And why wouldn’t cupid want to be there… there was so much beauty, brains, brawn, booze and balderdash on display. And boy, oh boy, was the opium strong. The girls looked like they were hooked to him for millennia. Some people have said that the girls had a hint of desperation in their actions, and they were looking for silver screendom. But you know me. I wouldn’t buy such cynicism ever.

The show also had its set of extremely accomplished guests. Movie and television stars who have made a mark for themselves, purely based on their acting talent, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE. One such guest was… errr… Neha Dhupia… umm… uh-oh…  Anyways, moving on…

The show was down to the final three, after many girls had to leave the show, and the love of their lives. It was truly heartbreaking for me to watch their true love not materialize. As they say, sometimes you crack an egg just to see what is inside.

The final, as you might imagine, were the most eligible of the lot for him. RkS had reached its finale, and I finally caught up with all the episodes on www.rahulswayamvar.in. I was waiting for the final decision. I was rooting for Dimpy I must confess. She was competing with two others who were equally beautiful, talented, accomplished in their… ahem… fields. Although the average age of the three girls was less than two-thirds of Rahul’s age, they were up-to-task in every way.

Then came the fateful day, March 6^th 2010, and the whole universe (except me… I was sleeping. I missed the live broadcast, but I did catch up the recorded one) held its breath. Everyone was anxious… and surprise, surprise, I hit the jackpot. Dimpy was the one!!! Times of India has a very flattering article about her. I encourage you to search to Google/Bing for it (Dimpy Ganguly interview).  Her pics on Google Images are equally good, or even better. A picture does speak a thousand words in this case.

For all those people who haven’t watched it yet, and I hope there aren’t many, I strongly encourage you to watch it. Consider it a personal request from me.

Being the idealistically-romantic, completely-unsarcastic, gullible person that I am, you can see why I say this is the best show in the universe.

There may one other reason why I liked it. You see, before this show, I thought there were two types of humour.

1. Humour by amatuers. The comedian in all of us.
2. Humour by the professionals. Professional comedians, cartoon-writers.

Only after this show, did I realize the third way…

Unintentional comedians. People who do not intend to be funny, but who end up making you laugh until your stomach breaks up. They bring you laughter by saying things you never expected. They really mean them… maybe. But they are so hilarious!

If you didn’t heed my previous request, I hope you do take it seriously now. Watch it. I never knew Indian Television was this good!

Snow, a reckless driver and two months

This blog started sometime in January and I have completed now in March. Hopefully you won’t notice the break in the middle… Happy 2010. Enjoy!

I am starting this blog at 3 in the morning. It has been snowing for a while today. Went out for a walk in the snow. It was a very very nice experience. A hot coffee sent me to heaven. And here, I am back at home.

I have a few topics in my mind which I wanted to talk about. And today, I got the proper introduction I was looking for, on my way back home. This place is pretty much covered in snow. Some people are excited to see snow, others aren’t. That’s because it snows here once a year, if you are lucky. It is cold, but it doesn’t snow often. So, most people who drive here are not used to driving in snow. So you see people driving cars without having removed the snow from the top, which is quite dangerous. That was a surprising thing I noticed, however today night was a little more serious. A guy driving an SUV, talking on his cell phone, skids while trying to stop for a red signal, and stops in the middle of the intersection. He knew the red signal was coming on. Nope, this guy wouldn’t just care. If he tried to stop sincerely and missed, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Even then, he is stopping an SUV which is bigger than everything here, and frankly, has nothing sporty about it. And this great soul doesn’t think it is necessary for him to actually stop talking on the phone even then. Nope. And why am I concerned? Because I was trying to cross the road and luckily didn’t assume that he had brains. Talking about brainy people…

There’s been a nice little drama going on here regarding NBC, a television channel. I won’t go into the details of the whole drama, but this is basically what happened. The network had two people who wanted to host the same legendary comedy show, The Tonight Show. One of them, Jay Leno, was hosting it for the last two decades, and has been hugely successful. The other is a younger upstart, Conan O’Brien who might be the future. So the channel decided to go with the younger one, and pushed the older one elsewhere. Now both the shows were doing badly, so they decided to bring the old one back. The younger one didn’t like it, and he got 40 million dollars (i.e. the rest of his contract) and he is going to leave the channel, for another one which will give him the same time slot there. The older one is getting back his show. The way it has been portrayed here is that the younger one is being kicked out. And people stood in rain outside the channel’s headquarters to protest his expulsion. And he thinks he is a victim, and is milking it to the max. I mean, come on!!!!! How dumb can people be … This is a country with an un-employment rate of 15%. Walmart, the cheapest store in town, is shedding jobs by the thousands because people don’t have the money to buy stuff even at their bargain basement prices! And of all the things to worry about, the biggest thing to do apparently is to show sympathy to a comedian who has made 32.5 million dollars, for the rest of his contract! Pardon me if I am wrong, but how dumb can people get. I mean, he didn’t like the spot he was given by the channel, so he quit. Isn’t this like any other job? And for god sakes, he is making more money than 99% of the American population will ever make. Leno on the other hand is being blamed for “kicking out” Conan. I am sorry. How is that wrong? Leno wanted his show back. NBC wanted Leno more than Conan. Simple. Why can’t people accept that?

The next topic I want to talk about is something which has even more people hooked on. Telangana. One fine day, one guy goes on a fast-unto-death, and students are “agitated”, and start burning down buses they haven’t paid for? They start damaging property they don’t own? I have a question here. If you are upset about anything in your house, do you go and torch your neighbour’s house? No. Because then you would be jailed. However, in this case, the students were apparently “emotionally upset”. Frankly, I don’t know how they can get emotionally upset about someone who hid from public view after elections because he couldn’t face his own party men, but then, even if they did get emotionally upset, why should they be allowed to torch the buses? Is this straight out vandalism? These are students who are studying to get a Bachelors or a Masters degree. Granted, it is in arts, and not a technical field. But still, if this is the emotional state of these people, that they would erupt so violently when something “aggravates” their minds, then shouldn’t they be in rehab? I keep “quoting” the words because I don’t believe in any of these explanations. I agree that there may have been some discrimination in the way the funds were allocated. But I guess the more important question here why this is happening now. If this was close to an election, it would be legitimate but it is not. At the end of the day, all these students who are actually damaging public property end up being corrupt politicians, or corrupt government workers.  I don’t think Microsoft would like to hire a student who has “I torched Bus No 3K during Telangana agitations in 2010” as one of his extra-curricular achievements. I am so grouchy about this whole thing is because it’s basically a set of people with money funding others, for their own benefit. And the rest 99% of the population pays a price for it. The more I see democracies in action, I realize that it is not the perfect solution. It needs to be tweaked so that when combined with capitalism, it doesn’t end up servicing the top-end of the population. Talking about Telangana, and Hyderabad…

There is company called Notion Ink, which released a tablet called Adam. It is based in Hyderabad, started by a handful of IITians and MBA grads. They trained students from a local engineering college, BVRIT, to write the software for the applications running on the tablet. In a matter of a few months, they learnt themselves and educated the students how to write applications on Google’s Android. They did this because, as a startup, they couldn’t afford to pay the going price for professionals in the area (1 lakh a month for an Android developer).  The tablet is priced lower than Apple’s tablet, the iPad and has more features. Granted that it may not “look” as polished, or have a picture of half-eaten fruit on the back, I think this is a bigger achievement than the rave here about the iPad. This might look very Hyderabadi of me to bring up this tablet, but I am taking this as an example to prove a point. Even in this era of online news, there is still a hierarchy in terms of which news gets covered. I admire the iPad for what it is. A bigger iPhone , without the phone functionality. Its running a basic operating system for its size, in a strictly environment, by a company which thinks apps with explicit content are not in the “right taste”.  I know how the system works, with the advertising money and market muscle, but I just wish that there was a way in which companies like Notion Ink are given the publicity they desperately need to come up. I don’t believe that the products from a big brand company should be called awesome even before people have seen it. Did I tell you that Notion Ink was showed to the world well before the iPad? I believe that the best products will only come out when you have a lot of companies in the same field, fighting for market share. Not when you declare the verdict and bombard people with marketing 24 hours a day regarding one arguably sub-standard product, from first look. I am sure most people would agree that, for all the hype and speculation, the iPad was a dud of epic proportions.

To round up, I prefer Leno to Conan… I would like to see Andhra Pradesh as a unified state for purely sentimental reasons, or in the worst case, Hyderabad should become a UT by itself, with Naidu as its CEO. And I am hoping that the Paradise restaurant is not damaged in all this agitation stuff. Hyderabad wouldn’t be the same without its biryani. I have an iPod Touch and I love it. I am not likely to buy an iPad, because I am not impressed by it.

This is my longest blog so far. If you read it till here, thanks for your patience. Hope you liked it. Before I finish, a disclaimer. I have nothing against Conan’s supporters who were standing in the rain (as long as I don’t have to do anything like that), the Telangana agitators (but please don’t destroy the buses that we pay taxes for, and frankly, you don’t) and Apple fans (I know quite a few of you, and Apple did a great job with the iPhone and the iPods).

The third Q… SQ

We all have taken tests for IQ and EQ. We all have taken tests on F A C E B O O K on IQ and EQ. There are also a shit load of personality tests out there to make you feel better about yourself. The tests are more like drugs, for the faint hearted. All of the results suggest that you are really God’s gift to humanity, and that you are one in a million. The point is, the quiz says the same thing to the other 999 thousand also! And we imagine all those good things actually exist within us, for a moment at least, and feel happy about it. Wonder why we just don’t like being called a human… a selfish, materialistic, greedy, ambitious, faulty, sadistic, hypocritical human. Probably it’s that one thing in us which is only happy when it is told that we are good. When someone tells us that we are good, it feels happy. When we are accepted into the society, we feel happy. A currency to measure this acceptance is friends. This is just one measure, not the only one. But, it is an (if not the most) important one.

We pretty much can’t do anything about our IQ. Maybe we can but its rare that you fail tenth because you can’t add numbers, and end up discovering something great in science later. Self-help books can make you believe, and in some corner cases, rightly so, that you can change your EQ. But how about your social quotient. How about that? Can you change that? Can you read a book, or take a course, and increase your social score? My view is that you can’t do anything about it. Its one of those things that quintessentially you.

For a while, I believed that it was possible to change a person’s social score. I thought there were a certain set of things that you need to do, and you can change it. It is probably true with girls, because… lets face it.. there are enough desperate guys around to keep them company at any point of time. So, if a girl really want to hang out, not too much of a problem to find “a” guy. Rerouting… but I realized quite fast that basically there isn’t anything you can do about it. It’s what you are. There are many things we love about ourselves, and many things we don’t. And this is just one of those many things. Its a part and parcel of what we are. I thought this was worth a blog because of two reasons (i) blogs are free (ii) i think there are lot of people who agree and disagree with me on this. Something contentious makes a good blog.

This is how I view things. Everybody is pretty much the same. They possess all the wonderful (please get the sarcasm) qualities (and more of what) I described above. And I am pretty happy being a human in that sense. My Friday and Saturday nights are just like any other night… watching a movie, sitting in the lab and debugging code written by someone from Mars, cooking food, sitting in a coffee shop or sleeping. No clubs, no discos, no parties every other night for me. To a sub-20, or just 20-plus year old, that may sound lame. And for a while I thought it was. But then I realized that we all live in different worlds. We are a product of our childhood, our environment, and our decisions. So, when I see people who want to change what they are, I feel quite bad about it. I think they are just perfect being themselves. We may be from the same planet, but Eve isn’t our mother. And I guess the faster you accept you, the easier everything is. I think its great to party, but it’s equally good or even better to be excited when you fix code written by another underpaid grad student on a Friday night at 12. I think the same applies to relationships. Relationships don’t define people. It’s the other way round. You can love life, irrespective of whether you are in one, or out of one. And I am out of words.

Just to keep track… I wrote this blog around 3am. Thanks for reading it. Hope you liked it. See ya.

Its a game called Life… or is it?

I am sure many of you have been in situations where you were wondering… Should I just quit? Should I just give up and start over? Or cut and leave right now? And more often than not, the option is “don’t do that… go ahead with it because the right path is the one with all the hurdles”. If you have grown up in India like I have, most of the advice especially in personal matters comes on these lines. And as always, what works at one place, is assumed to work at another. This blog is dedicated to explaining why that is bullshit.

The basic philosophy behind keeping something going… whether it be work on a project, a particular path in the career, or anything personal… like a relationship… is that things will improve. That perseverance is the answer, and no matter what the goal is, you can achieve if you throw effort at it. This is probably correct in some scenarios. Take studies for example, if you hit your head against enough textbooks, you are more likely than not understand a concept. If you work hard enough on a project of reasonable scale, you are likely to come close to finishing it. All this works as long as you know that there are things which are impossible in this world. Nike used it… Adidas did too… and half the population almost believed it… atleast their shirts said they did… Nothing is Impossible. And not the trivial impossible, but the so-hard-its-close-to-impossible stuff. Take for example, trying to get someone like me into biology. Oh yeah sure.. I watch discovery channel a lot. But that doesn’t mean I am anywhere close to good at it. Heck, I can’t make out the green leafy vegetables (one of the phrases you mug till tenth) when I see them. Now, if I set out to become a doctor, I probably would never get through merit quota (or as I would like to call it, the half-eaten piece of crap left after all the reservations have had a stomach upset from over-eating). And if I ever pay my way through, the only thing I would be good at, would be acting like a doctor in tv shows and porn movies. Now, if I had a brain wave, and tried for the medical colleges ( I truly respect those souls who know they have less than a sperm’s chance of making it to the other side), and failed… should I keep going on with it? No. But whats the first advice that you are most likely to get… “You’ll do better next time… try again.. (and most importantly) Don’t give up”. That is a load of bullshit.

Another scenario… how about a wall-street banker… if he stuck onto every stock he bought. Would he go anywhere? Nope. Then, why is it that the adage “Don’t give up… keep trying” is applied to all phases of life. Haven’t we seen enough circumstances where giving up is better than just sitting in the same place and sulking. I used to think that life is a game without a restart button. And that sucks sometimes. I wish I could turn off damage, and have the restart button whenever I want to. Anyways… I no longer think so. Initially, I thought this was maturity. I am “growing up” and “understanding” life more. But no… that isn’t it. I just realized that you don’t keep playing until you win every race. Nope. Its actually a Poker game. Fold when you need to, and have no qualms about it.
Somethings in life just don’t work out. Some people are meant to design processors while listening to songs, others are meant to cut cockroaches and vomit afterwards, and the rest (also called managers) get paid for not screwing up things. Ironically, the toughest job to get is the cockroach-killer’s one. This didn’t flash right in my face until a few days back. I have probably made a few decisions in life based on the poker philosophy, but never realized it then. I borrowed this poker thought from hollywood movies, and pragmatism.

I wrote this blog at 5am… so pardon the …. and any spelling mistakes. Its been so long since I wrote a blog. Thought I should get back to writing them. Feels good. Hope you liked it.

See ya.

Asterix… the best comic ever

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chetan/4055355332/

Rodney Dangerfield Classics

This is a copy of the mail from my friend, Salil Pant. I found it to be extremely hilarious. So, here it is.

 

You know my Doctor, Doctor Vinny BoomBots… I called and told him I had a bad case of diarrhea. – He put me on hold!

A girl called me the other day and said “Come on over, there’s nobody home.” I went over. Nobody was home.

A hooker told me “Not on the first date.”

During sex, my girlfriend always wants to talk to me. Just the other night she called me from a hotel.

I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample it had an olive in it.

I found there was only one way to look thin. Hang out with fat people.

I have good-looking kids. Thank goodness my wife cheated on me.

I haven’t spoken to my wife in years. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

I joined Gambler’s Anonymous. They gave me two to one I don’t make it.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

I said to the bartender “Surprise me.” He pulled out a naked picture of my wife.

I saved a girl from being attacked last night. I controlled myself.

I told my doctor I wanted a vasectomy. He said, with a face like mine, I don’t need one.

I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous- everyone hasn’t met me yet.

I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.

I was so poor growing up; if I wasn’t born a boy I’d have nothing to play with.

I was so ugly… When I was born, the doctor slapped my mother!”

I was such an ugly kid- when I played in the sandbox; the cat kept covering me up.

I went to see my doctor. “Doctor, every morning when I get up and look in the mirror… I feel like throwing up; what’s wrong with me?” He said I don’t know, but your eyesight is perfect.”

I went to the doctor because I’d swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.  My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.

I’m taking Viagra and drinking prune juice- I don’t know if I’m coming or going.

I’m ugly I’m tellin’ ya. My proctologist; he stuck his finger in my mouth.

If it wasn’t for pick-pockets I’d have no sex life at all.

It’s been a rough day. I got up this morning, put on a shirt and button fell off. I picked up my briefcase, and the handle came off.   I’m afraid to go to the bathroom…

It’s not easy being me. When I was born the doctor told my mother “I did all I could. But he pulled thru anyway.

Last night I was making love to my wife and nothing was happening, so I said to her “What’s the matter, you can’t think of anybody either?”

My family was a bunch of drunks, when I was six I came up missing, they put my picture on a bottle of scotch.

My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said okay, you’re ugly too.
My uncle’s dying wish: he wanted me on his lap. He was in the electric chair.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

My wife is always trying to get rid of me. The other day she told me to put the garbage out. I said to her I already did. She told me to go and keep an eye on it.

My wife isn’t too smart. She has to reach inside her bra to count to two.

My wife is ugly. She’s so ugly that when you look up ugly in the dictionary, there’s her picture.

My wife was afraid of the dark. Then she saw me naked and now she’s afraid of the light.

The other night I told my kid “Someday, you’ll have children of your own. He said “So will you.”

The other night I woke up and my wife was saying sexy things. I looked over and she was on the phone.

When I tried to kiss my date goodnight, she pushed me away. I said “Is there someone else?” She said “There must be.”

When I was a kid, I asked my Mother for a Bubble Bath, so she brought the water to a boil!

When my wife has sex with me there’s always a reason. The other night she used me to time an egg.

With me, nothing goes right. My psychiatrist said my wife and I should have sex every night. Now, we’ll never see each other!

With my wife I don’t get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to ‘the best woman a man ever had.’ The waiter joined me…

With my wife, I’ve got no sex life. The dog keeps watching me in the bedroom so he can learn how to sit up and beg. I told him to watch my wife so he can learn how to roll over and play dead.

Yeah, I know I’m ugly. I said to a bartender, ‘Make me a zombie.’ He said ‘God beat me to it.’

Falling through fear

Fear of any sort is very capable of causing an adrenaline rush. Whether it’s a fear of failing in the exam tomorrow, the fear of missing a flight, or the fear of losing someone close to you, it makes us so much more alert, and every second lasts longer. In most cases, it is out of compulsion that we experience that fear. Seldom do we decide the dates for our examinations, or the flight timings. But with acrophobia (the official, extreme word for the fear of heights, resulting in panic attacks), you can mostly avoid having to deal with it. Skydiving is the scariest thing you can do if you have a fear of heights, and I am half of an acrophobic. I had to do it.

A friend told me about a skydiving trip being organized by an MNC (I don’t have the rights to mention any of their names). The deal: For three hundred dollars, you will be scared out of your wits. Who can say no that! The friend who suggested the trip to me has absolutely no fear of heights, and she knew I did. Three weeks was enough time to tell my friends how I wanted the funeral after the skydiving accident. Plans to max out my credit card by myself proved unsuccessful, although to be fair to my friends, I refused gracious offers from them to help me out in this regard. One day to go for the jump… and I realized the cost of the humor. Skydiving is a risky sport, but nowhere near as risky as I had portrayed it in the jokes. The fearful half of me took all the sleep with it, and I hadn’t slept for two days by the time I reached the skydiving center. The first shirt on display when I entered the skydiving center was titled “Skydiving Survivor”. I assumed that anyone who lived through the jump would definitely buy one. There were quite a few of those shirts still there… how risky is skydiving?

Meet Jon, the coolest guy in the world. He is an instructor at the center, and an excellent one at that. By the end of his briefing, I was only half-filled with fear. The automatic reserve parachute deployment system and his nonchalant references to the worst case scenarios calmed my nerves. Then came the batch listing, and I was in the second load (guess that is an appropriate name for a freaked out idiot clinging onto an experienced skydiver). The first load came down safely, and the announcer butchered my name. The acrophobic took over… this time worried if I will be able to remember the rudimentary instructions given by Jon. Basically, they were a set of actions which were meant to ensure that I don’t screw up the jump with any home-grown antics. Uh-oh! I have always been bad at following instructions, especially those given by wiseacres. Jon didn’t know that.

In all the flights I had flown in till that day, I sat in a small seat without enough legroom, fastened a seat belt round my waist, a flight attendant blabbered some safety procedures, the cabin was pressurized and I knew I didn’t have to do anything myself in order to reach the ground safely. This flight was going to be different. Instead of the safety lecture, I got some simple instructions from Jon: I’ll strap myself to you at 6000 feet; put on your head gear at 14000 feet; and follow my instructions from the briefing… and it’ll be “fun”. Gulp! We reach 14000ft… and suddenly, the first few acrobat skydivers disappeared into thin air, and I was now sitting less than five feet from an open door.

To understand the gravity (no pun intended) of the situation, it is necessary to state the basis for my fear. My fear of heights arises from the possibility that the ground beneath me may give up at anytime and hence, I might come crashing to the ground. As long as the structure beneath looks strong, the fear can be negated in most cases. I had to come up with a whole new theory to calm my fear about jumping from a plane into thin air. But all I could tell myself was what Jon said (God probably built this in, but just in case)… “always breathe”. There is one silver lining to the jump… you do not have much time to think before you are headed towards the ground at 120 mph. Once in the air, there is nothing much you can do about it, and you might as well enjoy it. And that’s exactly what I did.

Fear is the ultimate adrenaline generator, and when you feel that fear, you inevitably feel the excitement. At that point, you are not just falling through the clouds, you are falling through your fear, and right into the heart of excitement. This transition is priceless. I have never felt that level of excitement in my life, and probably never will again. I am so happy with the skydiving experience… never thought I could get myself to do it… but there I was, having the most fun ever. If you think it is an exaggeration, you haven’t jumped from a plane yet!

An Agnostic’s Prayer

Let me start with a cliché. There are two types of people in the world.

Yes, just two, not three, in this case. There are people who believe that there is God and those who don’t. And, there are two types of people in each of these two. Among the believers, there are those who believe that God has told them what to do in life, and those who believe that God only regulates the right and wrong in this world. The non-believers are split over how strongly they feel about the non-existence of God, namely, the Atheist and the Agnostic. I guess I don’t have to say which bin I am sitting in.

I have absolutely no problems with anyone’s beliefs unless they end up screwing the world for the rest of us. The beliefs may end up screwing that person’s life, but then again, he/she asked for it. Until recently, I did not think that there was any way that someone could be misled into thinking that the supposed architect of our world actually wants us to destroy it. But then again, I didn’t know how stupid this world can be. If I were to pinpoint one thing that has the most impact on our lives, I would say it is the stupidity of others. It defines the level of development in our countries, and in many ways, the happiness and peace of mind in our lives. Unfortunately, nowadays, it doesn’t stop at that, and starts to threaten our existence itself. The ironic thing about this situation is that our lives are in the hands of people who have been “asked” by a person in their dreams to create nightmares in our lives.

The first time we realize that there is a subject called philosophy is when we hear the question “What is the reason for your existence?” Ask an evolutionary biologist, and he will give you the scientific answer to that question. Ask a non-stupid person, and he will tell you it’s for having fun. Pose the same question to the devil incarnate with the psychic dreams, and the answer would go something like this. We should do as the person in the dream says, and then, we will be blessed with pleasures after we die. I have just one fucking question to this person: How do you know all this is true? For a fact, you can have a great time in this life. You don’t even know what happens after you die. How can you believe a person in your dreams without any shred of evidence? Even if we excuse that mind-numbing hole in your theory, how can you kill fellow humans who have allowed you to live long enough to have that dream in the first place?

Richard Dawkins argues in his book, “The God Delusion”, that God doesn’t exist, and how every aspect of our life can be scientifically explained. Even if we could not answer all the questions related to life, that is no basis for accepting the “explanations” that religious books provide. I agree with his theories, but since I cannot and do not want to spend the time even if I could, I don’t really care if there exist believers in this world. My own theory is that God was created as a means of assuring people that justice will be done, and that they should not lose hope.

Since the people who want to kill us refuse to listen to Richard Dawkins and others who explain the fallacies in arguments put forward by “messengers” of God, there is I guess only one option left for all of us. Pray to that imaginary person who appears in their heads, and hope he listens to our prayers and doesn’t say anything stupid to them. Because if the person in their dream does say something stupid, we can kiss our happiness goodbye.