One of the Best Things

Someone said or I read somewhere that if you put couples from different nations on an island including an Indian couple of opposite sex, they would keep waiting for someone to introduce them before they speak to each other. Well things have changed a lot from those island days now that you can see many couples walking and openly expressing their love for each other on Indian roads, parks and other public places. I for one was open enough in talking to a girl in my company food court for the first time and how glad I am that I did that thing.

It all started in my Pre university days. It was my first kannada class. I was always bad in my my mother tongue and took the elective over Sanskrit and hindi because my brother had forced me to. The lecturer asked who was the top scorer in 10^th among the students attending the class that day. He took the magic figure of 600 (max was 625) and starting reducing it by 10 marks until he could find one.When the lecturer reached the mark of 550-560 stood a girl shyly and timidly saying she had her total in that range. The lecturer was very happy that it was a girl over a boy and asked her name and to come front of the class. What an intro she got! He then asked her to write all the different divisions and sub divisions of kannada grammar on the board. She took the chalk and started writing and writing and writing until there was no space left on the big board. I was amazed how anyone could remember so much about a language. Then he congratulated her and sent her back. We all were expecting the boring class to start but the guy had some other intentions. He started from where he left and wanted the next best scorer to be identified. I was happy that I will be seeing another beautiful girl come in front but that was not to happen. Unfortunately I was the next top scorer in that class that day. The lecturer somehow smiled in an evil way and asked me to stand up. He then asked me to spot the missing division/sub division of kannada grammar on the board and fill it up. I was coming to know that the language had so many faces to it let alone find the missing thing. I gave the stupid reason that I didn’t want to take the language and wanted to take up hindi as my elective and took this because my parents and brother forced me to. Everyone had a good laugh and I had a pathetic intro to my PU days. Ofcourse that was my last day in kannada class and moved to hindi class knowing that I had no chance among any of the girls in the kannada class.. not that I had any.

After that dashing entry I never saw that shy pretty girl again.. till I joined a software company after finishing my graduation. Though I pressed hard on my weak memory to recollect the name she had told in her soft voice.. my brain asked me to give up inspite of a fag. And then one day when I was drinking and smoking with my friends over a weekend her name flashed. I don’t know how I remembered but guess my brain was asking more than a fag for it to reveal the name I wanted to know.

I am very courageous and dashing you know.. but somehow when it comes to girls I don’t get any close to being smart. So I looked up her name in the huge repository of employees in my company. After applying some clever filters I managed to find her mail id. I thought of dropping her a mail wanting to know whether my name sounded anything familiar in her head. And she promptly replied back that she did recognize me and also mentioned those famous words that “world is a very small place”. I was happy that her brain was better than mine and she did remember me easily.

Some days passed and I never got to see her again in the company. And one day when I was returning back with my friends after my afternoon lunch from the food court I saw her having her lunch alone. I decided that it was now or never and excused myself from my friends and went up to her. Hi… was the most common way a boy introduced himself and I also took the tried and tested way. She then mentioned that she had some training/meeting and hence couldn’t join her friends for lunch and so was having it alone. How I thank her friends for not being there.

Since then we kept on meeting now and then..slowly but steadily we became friends. I thank her for her patience and myself for not trying any of my innovative stupid methods to get close to her. But without knowing when, we became very close friends. I would eat her head about my technical problems and my pathetic behavior with my managers and she would listen patiently. I would also keep talking about my failures with girls and she would listen to them as well. She somehow had this great patience to listen to my never ending crap. We used to go to the food court almost every evening and talk about our lives. I used to make two visits..once with my roomies and once with her.

And then came the twist in the kahaani..One fine day she told me that she is getting married and will be moving to Bangalore after marriage and working from there. I was very much disappointed. I never had any girl talk to me so nicely and listen to me so patiently in the office. Though I had a great number of boys having a girl as a close friend is a really great experience. And now I was losing my only girlfriend.

She invited me along with her teammates for the marriage treat but I couldn’t make it. I think I had genuine reasons for not making it that time but can’t really recollect it now. So she politely offered to treat me alone the next day. As always I took my roomies bike and we went to a good restaurant had dinner and dessert and then when returning back I was joking to her that there was no petrol in the bike and behold god granted me the wish. Why god Why?? Luckily there was a petrol bunk nearby and more luckily I had cash in my wallet. So I managed to drop her safely home.

I didn’t attend her wedding. And after marriage she moved to Bangalore. From then our communication was limited to the company messenger and phone calls. As expected I didn’t find any other girl to go to the food court again. She with her charm could always manage to make more friends and had her own group built up in Bangalore.

After my short stint in London it was time for my next onsite assignment. I was pestering my managers to send me onsite again. This time by luck I managed to find an assignment in Melbourne. Lucky that I was.. god wanted me to be more happy so it somehow happened that I was to go to Bangalore and fly from there to Melbourne. Most of my friends were in Bangalore and my newly wed brother was also settled in Bangalore. I was happy for more than one reason that my trip is crossing bangalore. I will be able to meet her as well. So I called her up and told her that I was coming to Bangalore and that we can meet up. God wanted to give me more happiness so he extended my travel date by a couple of more days. We used to have lunch together and I used to again eat her head on how my travel is getting extended. When I was having a similar lunch my manager called me up and told me that they have resolved all the issues related to my travel and that I will have to fly that night. She was the first one to know about that. So we met again in the evening the last day and I could see tears in her eyes though I was leaving only for 9 months and even if I did return I would have returned to my base location and not to Bangalore. I was deeply touched by her sensitivity.

We were so unlike each other but still somehow we managed to build a great friendship. I am so happy that I met her and somehow managed to break the ice and talk to her. I still consider that as one of the best things I have done in my life so far. Or else I would have missed a great friend. And she on her part keeps asking herself as to how she could bear me with all my eccentricity and bad habits. But as you know opposites attract and so we stay close together even now. Now when I am in Melbourne and miss my friends the most she makes sure that she replies to me on messenger and whenever I sign off without saying goodbye she signs off with style by dropping me some great offline messages. If I ever choose to reply to those offline messages through a mail she gets very happy. She grips everyone with her silent but caring nature. And when she is scolding you can feel the sincerity with which she is scolding that she wants you to stop doing those bad things for which she is angry. But how much ever we may fight or argue.. this friendship will live on forever and she has to bear me till my lifetime.. Thank you girl for bearing me. I will cherish you forever.

RSS Feed

RSS stands for really simple syndication. This provides a method to allow subscribers know about the updates one makes to his/her content. This is a cool way to integrate things into one page. i have my own personalized google homepage with feeds from various news sites, weather, clocks showing times of different zones and lots more. you can create your own personalized google page by visiting http://igoogle.com/. there are even programs written to read all the feeds that you want. these are known as aggregators or feed readers. they will keep checking the sites for latest content updates and update them in the feed. Feed normally appears in the form of hyperlinks or other web page contents and you can click on the interesting update to know more about it.

Now how are some of the interesting ways that you can use them?? well i have embedded the feed to my flickr album in my orkut profile and also in the homepage of my blog. So now i need not update my orkut album as my friends can see my new images by just following through the link. Google has even come up with feeds for videos on youtube.

The second cool thing that you can do with RSS feed is .. know only what you want to know. i am not keen on keeping updates with politics and am into technology news or entertainment news. no problem i can mention the tags "technology" or "entertainment" and get updates only when new information in my interests are updated. Isnt that cool.

so what are you waiting for?? Get started and feed as much data you want to.. burrp.. Bon appetite :)

3J

hmm..3J what may it stand for? before anyone starts coming up with crazy full forms for the J in the letters 3J let me tell you that it does not stand for anything not Jokers, not Jacks. its the name of my apartment in melbourne where i stay with 3 other people. it used be 4 lately but now one is down temporarily :(. And no we don't change the name of the apartment depending on the number of inmates. in that case we would have to shift floors you see.. its our home far away from home.. its the place on which we claim LAFHA.. no, its not hindi laffa.. this is the regd abbreviation used by infyA for Leaving Away From Home Allowance...

without much ado let me introduce you to the crazy inmates of this apartment.
Number 1 Srini: anyone who has to stay in 3J has to get in touch with this guy. he was a weightlifter (it really shows) and he drives cars crazily.. thank god only in cyberspace... there are other things which he does very fast and the known among them is boozing ;) i bet a beer that you cant drink it faster than him.
Number 2 Venkat: Big ben of our apartment... he is very interested in chess and keeps insisting us to play with him. and when we do oblige he attacks us from all angles and happily watches us helplessly trying to just defend his attacks.. he also can be sometimes found holding his laptop like an harmonium and listening to sad songs which will make anyone cry.. except for venkat.
Number 3 Nikhil: there is no game that i have come across that he does not know about.. he keenly follows cricket and F1 and can be sometimes found debating on the sport with the other two...and what he does at night is one amazing thing... before u devil minds start imagining wicked things.. let me switch on the ligths.. he runs a BPO from one of the rooms..and can be found talking on the messenger to his endless list of friends back home.
Number 4 Pandey: beti beep...(censored)!!!! if you hear that.. then thats pandey calling you.. he is one keen follower of mahabharath and dragging srini too in the chakravyuha of it. his hindi is as virgin as he is not ;) and if he wishes he can keep talking for hours which none of us will understand.

we also have a community dedicated to the apartment inviting x (to be read as ex) inmates to cherish their stay over here. you can also find the above members profiles within the same community and sometimes may contain interesting conversations about the happenings within it.

why name anything

naam mein kya rakha hai.. (what's there in a name?) well its your identification to begin with. when you go to a different country you will realise the importance of even the surname,given name, family name too. you will have to expand your initials on each and every form and i believe it will be the first time to many indians like me and when you are addressed by your last name you would be wondering who the hell is calling my father in this county. so you better know your name and the different parts of your name as well..

so you may be wondering i give importance to names. yes i do. how many times have we faced embarrassing situations not being able to remember the other person's name. We have to start memorizing a lot of things as soon as we land in a different place. staring with the house and street name of our residence to the route names and shop names.

so the next time you come across a name try to relate something very funny about the words within the name and remember the association to remember the name ;). well of course some names don't need much effort from our end.. like tom, dick and .... i know most of you will definitely fill the last blank without any effort.