Its been a while !

Its been a while since I wrote anything . Basically attributed to my own innate inborn inertia and laziness and the tendency to procrastrinate on things that should be done much faster. So a possible new year resolution could be : I shall blog atleast once a week but again considering my track record its going to be a tough ask on myself.

Anyways I blog this from the location from which the nickname "madrasi" originates, Madras the city of 3 summers , and currently in the winter of summers. Am here because of certain family reasons, and promptly fell ill with a nice flu. Receiving brickbats at my appearance (forgot the art of shaving for the past month) , countless arguments for a smaller waistline from one and all (the one thing that unites my considerably large family who disagree on everything else inclusive of the kanchi seers arrest ) and generally staying away from the computer for a while inspite of promising some research work to a couple of guys. !

Went and watched Swades at Satyam , an eminently likeable movie thankfully without the matkas and jhatkas of a typical bollywood movie. The only sad part about the whole experience was the presence of the innumerable silk saris ads and gold jewellery ads. It appears as though the whole of Madras is obsessed with silk saris and gold in general . T Nagar should be rechristened , Thyagaraya "Pattu Javuli" Nagar (Pattu = Silk in Tamil ). Things certainly have improved here except for the meters of the "humble" madras autorickshaw and the state of the water . ( it just gets redder and redder) ...:-) ...


Well enjoying the music season and the associated arrival of audio tracks in the music stores. Had fun in obtaining a few cassetes for the daily drive from home to office and back :-) .... Did some time pass in Landmark . A visit to Madras is never complete without a visit to the Landmark store in Spencers which puts everyone else to shame ! Looking at it am reminded of Charles Trumper's Barrow in "As the Crow Flies " by Jeffrey Archer , though the Barrow would have sold everything that Landmark did and tons more :-) ...

More on the travails and travels in Madras tomorrow as I go down south to Adyar and the associated locales.

A weekend of reunions and some extremely crappy tamil movies.

Its been a rather interesting weekend to say the least. Considering the fact that Srikrish finally flew down to Pune I decided to be a nice guy and go pick him up at the airport and managed to do that in an Accent thanks to another of my friends going to pick up Beta. Thought that 4 years of the U.S. of A would have quietened "the man" but he was as effervescent and bubbly as ever with the result that I realized that it would have been better if I had not introduced him to the others for the general interest of humanity (read "humanity" as yours poorly truly ! ) .

After a general banter of jokes which included the usual crappy one about senseless and sensible humour which IMHO is in great demand and in short supply. I ended up spending the remainder of Friday ribbing Srikrish about his great fear of the Great Pune Traffic show on Karve Road in an autorickshaw whose driver considered himself a competitor to Juan Pablo Montoya in terms of the number of times we escaped near crashes, things that a hardened commuter in the contraption that they call a rick I have gotten used to . Needless to say that it left him in a flit of bother regarding the traffic sense or the lack of it. !

Later ended up having dinner at ShangriLa and watched Athu thanks to reviews by Krishna due to his brilliant surfing habits for crappy tamil movies. It was nice in patches, though definitely not watchable at 11 pm at night giving up precious sleep. Having made the 3 of us wake up inspite of our protests and watch the entire movie, Krishna promptly dozed off intermittently asking us for a summary of what had happened since the last time he dozed off. The same thing happened the next afternoon when we watched Giri on his recommendation where he claimed that Arjun would do a double act making me give up precious siesta time to watch a not too great movie .... This would earn him the sobriquet of the "crap" movie reviewer !


Well the only highlight was watching The Sound of Music and going to Khadakvasla with Srikrish and showing him the beauty of nature. Even though it was sunset we managed to get some phenomenal pictures which I should put up sometime.

Here we go.

Pillaiyar chuzhi or "Hello World" ! Well I said Hello World a couple of days back but heres the first serious post. Nothing very serious has been happening in life other than Srikrishna attempting to visit me and Ram tomorrow. Well for the uninitiated Srikrishna is one good friend of old whom I shall be meeting after 3 and a half years. Another South Indian though a guest of Uncle Sam Gora Saab is returning to say hi to us Software Recluses here ! So tomorrow is meeting up with him and spending some over due to time away from document writing and bothering about the tools and bugs !

The other good thing happening is listening to music out of the comp. punctuated by the odd cracker . Diwali the festival of lights and crackers was over ages ago though an attempt is made to punctuate Hariharan's voice in Raincoat with the odd cracker.


Now to explain the title "Across the pale parabola of joy " , its one magical line in a book by PG Wodehouse's biggest hero as far as I am concerned , the joy of life ! PSmith in "Leave it to Psmith" ... It epitomizes the fact that joy AFAIK exists only as a parabola paled by the darkening power of the document.... Now thats why I call my blog an "Indians" rant.

Hello World

The world seems to exist and there seems to be a faint parabola of joy around it as is epitomized by leaving it to Psmith.