Still, it's a good feature.Poll #1228405 Ooh lookie!
Open to: Friends, detailed results viewable to: Friends
LJ polls rock!
Yup
1 (50.0%)
Nope 1 (50.0%)
I've expressed this worry before as well - being incapacitated while living alone. Of course I have a few emergency medicines and I am in a large city after all - but for me this is a form of ultimate horror. Being totally weak and helpless and unable to look after myself.
And of course, the stock reply to this is 'get married!!'
Bah.
- Mood:
worried
And yeah, princesses kiss poison arrow toads that turn into handsome princes to be married and live with happily everafter, instead of dropping dead from the neurotoxin venom.
Truth- there are not many success stories, but even a few simple steps could greatly improve matters. Take caller ID, for example. When you call up your mobile phone providers' helpline, why can't they detect your number via caller ID and figure out whether you're a subscriber or not? Imagine getting transfered to a call center employee who can see your number, so that s/he can directly confirm your details! An even better example. I order pizza from Domino's quite regularly. They usually store the phone number and address so they can look it up. How hard is it to also keep track of the last 5 orders made? I always order the same kind of pizzas; by now they could have figured out what my tastes are and make recommendations accordingly. Instead, each time I call I get to hear 'HelloDominoeswouldyouliketotryournewSic
Why can't they just see that I always order garlic bread with a regular pizza, no side orders with a medium and never any soft drinks, and perhaps ask me if I'd like to order the usual? In an undifferentiated market, customer service is the way to win loyalty and attention. Personally, there's no difference between Pizza Hut/Domino's and Pizza Corner, other than how much they gouge you for. I would definitely prefer the one that offers better service.
A company may have the most charismatic CEO at the top, who would mouth platitudes about quality and service and what not. It matters a jot if the ideology doesn't percolate down the rank and file, the people who actually are in contact with the end user.
Why must I be harassed with endless telemarketing calls from the same bunch of banks, offering me loans or credit cards? If they kept track of responses, they'd figure out the difference between people like me, who will never, ever buy anything that is thrust upon them,vs. others who might. It might prove to be quite enlightening, I'd be surprised if there were many people who responded positively to these calls.
This seems to be in keeping with the myopic view of most companies that live on quarter by quarter results. Screw the end user in the short term, forget building any longterm relationships.
- Mood:
cranky
A while later, we're chomping away on huge chilly pakoras, served with crunchy onions, while we wait for our dosas to get ready. The vendor wipes off the huge griddle with a brush, and the steam that sizzles up from it is as potent an aromatic advert as any neon sign at an upmarket establishment. Who cares? We're hooked anyway. Then I spot a place serving Indian style cauliflower manchurian, and A goes off to get a plateful. After all we can't just hang about idly for our other stuff to get ready, right? Heavenly. Cauliflower fried just right so it's crunchy outside and soft inside, a cocktail of yummy spices.
And here's the dosa. It puts anything in any of the so called better joints in town to shame. Soft-crunchy, to be slathered with coconut chutney and downed in one go. We're done here, except for some puranpoli, which is like a sweet roti. K swears that you get the real deal in Pune, but well, one has to make do with what's available here.
A spots a shop selling paniyaram- a south Indian dish that usually is only made at home. Think small cupcakes of rice batter mixed with coriander and onions, cooked with oil and served steaming hot with the usual assortment of chutneys. So we down a few.By now everyones' feeling a bit queasy, so it's time to adjourn for dessert.
After much deliberation, we make our choices. Nothing like delicious cool rasmalai to wind up an evening. Especially when it's so great you end up ordering another round.
I'm so stuffed I can barely walk when we get home. But I give in to K's idea of ending the evening with a glass of fresh sugarcane juice.
And pay for it with a bad stomach ache the next day :(
- Mood:
contemplative - Music:Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg - 1969-Every UK Number One - 1969 -17 - Je t'aime... moi non plus
I grew up in the 80s, having been born at the end of the 70s. So I don't know anything firsthand about that decade, other than the bellbottoms, disco music and hideous hairdos. Again- most of this is from an American perspective, since the sources for such info are also the same. I briefly touched upon this once before, when thinking about a name for our generation, it's a pity we don't have much stuff on the net about what India was like back then.
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- Mood: nostalgic
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bouillabaisse the other day, and we started off somehow on what our ancestors might have done. I for one, know nothing beyond what my grandfathers do/did - one was a clerk for the railways, the other retired from a PSU. She similarly, had only sketchy information about people more than 2 generations removed from her family.I think this is partly due to the age old phenomenon of migration from villages to cities, that continues to occur today. I know, for instance, the name of my ancestral village on both sides of the family. But it means little more than a name to me now-I've never been to it and neither have my parents. So I find it thrilling to look upon the 'distinguished' royal families and others of the world. People who can trace back the lives of their ancestors for hundreds of years, know about what they looked like and possibly their achievements and behavior.
In a way, it's also sad when royal lineages die out. Their descendants are sort of like 'living heritage' so to speak. I'm not saying that they can take credit/blame for the doings of their ancestors, but they're a sort of link to the past. With the murder of the Romanov family at Lenin's behest, there also ended the whole Russian family going back to Peter the Great, Catherine II and Ivan the Terrible.
Similarly, when you look at the British princes William and Harry, you are looking at a family tradition that goes back and includes William the Conqueror, Henry the 8th, Queen Victoria, Lord Mountbatten and other famous historical figures. Let's not also forget the popularity that at least some of the royals have with their population- The Nepali royal family before they were all massacred, the other continuing sovereigns of Europe, be it King Juan Carlos of Spain or Carl Gustaf of Sweden. Or Emperor Akihito of Japan - the Japanese simply love their emperor- indeed, his predecessor Hirohito was accorded a god like status and during WW2 soldiers had a fanatical devotion and willingness to lay down their lives for him. The Japanese royal family is the oldest- it can be traced back to around 600 AD.
Recently I saw an article about the last living descendant of the Mughals - an old lady in her late 90s living in penury in Old Delhi. She is supposed to be the great grand daughter of Bahadur Shah Zafar, or something like that.
Absolute monarchy's days are long gone in most parts of the world, and they remain ceremonial heads of state. Some people argue about abolishing the monarchy altogether, and that has happened in many places- Turkey (The last Ottoman ruler, Sultan Mehmed VI was deposed in 1922), Libya, Iraq, and recently Nepal.
So to get back to the original topic- I have no clue about my ancestors. In fact, due to the rapid changes over the last century, I'd be hard pressed to feel any connection with them at all. I guess I can only stand at the beginning of a new 'tradition'.
- Mood: thoughtful
I just can't get enough of some flavors. Cinnamon is one of them. It has this delicate flavor that wafts off fresh hot apple pie...the only other place I've had it being 'Spout' liquid filled chewing gum! Wish there were more cinnamon flavored things. Another favorite is mint. I love mint flavored anything- toothpaste, ice cream, gum, chocolate, mouthwash, deo(yeah, mint flavored deo!!). Something about it being icy cold gets to me- a cold blooded cold weather freak.
I just realized- the herbs used in continental cooking are so delicately flavored compared to anything in Indian or south asian cooking. Look at em- parsley sage, rosemary n thyme, all the way from Scarborough Fair too!
And compare with coriander, mint, curry leaves, ginger, chili powder, fenugreek, garlic!! A good Indian meal is an assault on the olfactory nerves as well as a tittilation of the tastebuds.
Some flavors are combinations of others. Try this- longitudinal cucumber or radish slices with lemon and chaat masala. Lemon squirted over anything. The smell of deep fried methi(fenugreek) when making the ever popular alu-methi. The part where the roof of your mouth is subtly set on fire yet tempered with sweet chutneys and curd- when eating street food.
Garlic bread from Domino's, along with jalapeno-cheese dip- the crunchy-soft combo texture of the bread..along with the mild spicy notes of the dip.
I don't mind rather kinky combinations myself. Try the following:
-Stick Lays potato wafers inside a tomato/cheese sandwich. Preferably a grilled one.
-Slit a boiled egg lengthwise. Scoop out some of the yolk and mix Haldiram's namkeen and ketchup with it.(Aloo Bhujia rocks!!). The soft + crunchy textures will blow your mind.
- Get hold of a Thums up. Yeah. The original. Coke is for wimps. Chill it to somewhere in the vicinity of absolute zero. Now add some black salt and lemon to it..and TOSS IT DOWN! Almost as hard as a tequila shot, though not quite as potent.
-( A favorite when I was in college)- Boil a few chopped tomatoes together with coriander leaves, a bit of cooking oil,turmeric and salt. Let it simmer for about 10 minutes till you get a nice creamy consistent stew. Add chopped garlic to taste (or pre-add crushed garlic if you prefer). Spread the thing on buttered toast while it's still hot and wolf it down!
Mother of all custard recipes- Get a shitload of chopped fruit (no citrus, kthx). Get a can of condensed milk. After you've finished drinking it all,go get another can and a pack of biscuits(the tasteless crackers served with tea would do). Crumble them all over the fruit and add the condensed milk. Freeze for a couple of hours. Now lock your door and drag a table in front of it to keep away the slavering hordes who wanna grab it!!
-Eat a biscuit. Drink water while crunching it up ^^ (yeah my weirdest)
Some of these are weird-but guess what? I can IMAGINE what stuff tastes like. So I thought up some of these ideas before I tried them out, and of course I loved em.
- Mood:
crazy
"Picture perfect. There's nothing wrong with your teeth. Hm..."
So I left the place, armed with a bottle of yummy spearmint flavored mouthwash(alas, loaded with KNO3, which meant a strong Do not swallow warning. Agreed, who wants to blow up while taking a leak the next day?) and some painkiller tablets. They've worked so far.
To the regular readers who suffer from Dentist-o-phobia, remember it's ALWAYS better to go early than late!
- Mood:
lethargic
The 2 go together like tabasco sauce and Baskin Robbins ice cream. The term 'Indian Standard Time' has become a joke to indicate how late we can be for everything-be they flights/trains, attending a party, any event where the chief guest is a politician, and so on. What is time after all? What matters time, we all know that it is eternal and human lives are as ephemeral as soap bubbles before it? If something is wont to happen, it will, whenever fate has ordained it to. Or so goest the attitude.
I was to meet up someone today at 2. I call up beforehand to confirm that the meeting is on, and then after I reach the place I again SMS her saying I've reached. Standard operating procedure for me. Apparently, not for the 99.999% of humanity one has to unfortunately interact with. Finally she shows up at 3.20- after I've lost my temper and sent an SMS calling it all off. And no freakin apologies for being late either. Sorry sistah, u ain't my type.
Some people are wont to dismiss this jokingly, ie this is what's expected in India, what can one do, etc. I find it quite offensive to waste not just ones' but other peoples' time. And all it takes is a phone call, to say that you'll be unable to make it on time BEFORE it's time. So I can also change my plans and reach there later and avoid twiddling thumbs.
- Mood: pissed off
- Music:Epica - 2007-The Divine Conspiracy -09 - Fools of Damnation (The Embrace That Smothers, Part IX)
I call this the modding subculture- people who like to mess around with stuff, be they computers or gadgets or cars, merely because they can. The device is not a means to an end, it is the end in itself. That in itself is a sort of geek credo. Take Linux for example. There are a million things you can do with it, however easy or complicated you prefer. Detractors complain that they just want to get their work done-sync info with a phone/music player or play music and not wank off over a snazzy commandline hack or get into open vs closed source politics.
In the Windows world, I believe the first moddable software was Winamp. From the start, it supported skins and plugins, and there have been thousands of them available since then. No 2 people (of this kind of course) will have the same looking Winamp as a result. When Vista was launched, someone else quickly came up with a Vista theme pack for XP, which would fool the casual user into thinking you actually had Vista..
It's a whole subculture- one that loves to express themselves by resorting to this form of customization.
Contrast this with the prepackaged hipster chic of something like Apple, or mainstream TV. The company that started out with 'Think Different' until today everyone and his mother is drooling over their products. A niche product that ironically crossed over into the mainstream, so that there's nothing hip about having an iPo(d|hone) anymore.
One of the many side effects of the net is, we get to define our own cultural preferences, and invent whole new subcultures with their own distinct vocabulary, music and art; much of which would be incomprehensible to an outsider.
As I type this, I'm playing the background theme from Uplink-an old hacker sim game. How did I get it? Grabbed hold of the ScreamTracker files, converted em to MP3 in Winamp, and here I am.
- Mood:
indescribable - Music:Timelord - Uplink - Mystique part 2
( Behold! )
My latest gizmo, the Creative Zen Vision W- a widescreen 60 GB portable media player. Hah. iPods are for weenies. Browncoats will of course recognize what's playing on the 4.3" screen. Currently I'm encoding as many videos as I can to push onto it!
- Mood:
bouncy
..er, yeah. So K and I decide to try out 'More than just parathas', a new joint we'd noticed sometime last week. It took a while to get there, while he fiddled around with his phone and waited for its firmware to update, but we sauntered in around 10.30 pm. Onto the menu. A truly mindboggling array of parathas; the last time I've seen so many were at Delhi's fabled parathe wali gali. So we order,and rather recklessly, I also order dessert-in the form of a rabri stuffed paratha.
And what a meal! 2 inch thick paneer parathas,with the sort of daal that has huge grown men blubbering for their mothers in B-grade hindi movies. K orders lassi, and not to be outdone, so do I. A glass of uber delicious, sweet lassi, flavored with
Just as I'm sitting back in my chair, trying to breathe, along comes dessert. Imagine the smell of milk and cream, warmed up due to being inside a paratha that's fresh off the griddle. Imagine the texture of thick cream under a crunchy paratha shell, that swamps your tastebuds with sweetness. Imagine the bliss of masticating through exactly one quarter of this, and realizing with horror that there's 3 more pieces to go. K isn't being helpful either, he's perfected the python act by now. So I plod my way through the other 3 pieces.
Getting off the table, after paying our (extremely substantial) bill, I knock over the chair in an effort to stand upright. Heck, I walked steadier after 6 vodka shots, I'll bet.
The kilometer long walk home ought to have aided my digestion..instead I'm still sitting here with a super convex tummy, basking in the afterglow of my multiple orgasming tastebuds.
Indian food rocks. Period.
- Mood:
full - Music:After Forever - 2006-Mea Culpa -01 - Mea Culpa (A-Capella Version)
I feel more at home among people ten years younger, aka my sister's age group. Going by the past few days at any rate.
Ok i can't continue further-i'm busy staring at this lissome, long legged lass at the Barista that i'm at. As per the laws of the universe, she's accompanied by a big hairy oaf.
Device: NokiaN82/20.0.062
- Mood:
Bored
Take the age factor for instance. Throughout work life, I've been accustomed to working with people my age, or a maximum of 7-8 years older. Currently, my group has an age ranging from 23-35. In this place, there's quite a few grey hairs and people in their late 40s to early 50s as well.
There's...something about having such people around. They're all in a different stage of life now- upto the eyebrows in family responsibilities and one gets the impression that they're just going to work for the paycheck and remain hardboiled and cynical towards work and all that. Or maybe it's the result of having worked with only straightforward software people till now- who call a spade a spade and don't go looking for nuances and hidden meaning. (I'd say I'm lucky in only working with such people till now). Or the fact that I've come across many similar people as a kid when I visited my dad's office.
The atmosphere is so alien here it makes me wonder if this is infact the same company that I work for.
- Mood:
sleepy
- Mood:Pissed
There's two things that can have interesting consequences when combined. One-a mind filled with heap loads of useless trivia-comics memorised chapter and verse, poetry, music of all weird sorts and the detritus of a million websites that have never seen page one of a google search(no, not those kind of websites!!). Two- aforementioned mind that jumps like a cat with its tail on fire between reality and any of the zillion topics.
The result? The sudden memory of something hilariously funny-such that the effort to suppress it results in a manic grin and facial twitch which would send sane people scurrying for cover.
So I've gone to the loo at work and am washing my hands after doing the business, idly looking at my unshaven reflection in the mirror. All of a sudden- the Jim Carrey song pops up unbidden 'Don't u want somebody to luuuuuurv/don't you NEED somebody to luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurv...' and i find myself mouthing the words.
Try doing that when looking at yourself in the mirror. And well, wouldn't you just know it? The next image that pops into my head is 'Shikaka! Shishkebob! Shushlik!' Or to be precise, the scene with the 2 spears jammed into Jim Carrey's knees in Ace Ventura 2. Now try maintaining a straight face!!
There's a couple of other people in the place-currently marking territory in the usual spots-so I can't start guffawing now, can I? Instead I try to squeeze in the semblance of a straight face. The result is a rictus that spreads wider until I'm grinning with the effort not to grin. As I exit the loo, a coworker approaches, takes one look at my face and suddenly remembers something he had to do very quickly and far away in the opposite direction.
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- Mood: bouncy
- Music:Sheryl Crow - 2001-Sheryl Crow -04 - Sweet Rosalyn
Oh and you other million lurkers reading my blog..(in theatrical Ash voice)..SHOOOOW YOURSELVES!!
- Mood:
nervous - Music:Guy Whitmore - Game themes -01 - No one lives forever
If i'm at my computer i'd much rather read.
Enter the podcasting client for Nokia S60 3rd edition-it's built into my phone and available as a download for others.
Instead of just music-one can listen to these on the bus. Found a few nice podcasts as well as this free PC client called Juice-now i just copy to phone and listen ^^
Device: NokiaN82/11.0.117
When it comes to tea however-the best place to go is a roadside Mallu-run teashop. Average serving time-ten seconds. Hardly have you said the magic word 'chaya' than a steaming glass is plonked in front of you.
A glass of this-along with one of those huge biscuits that one only finds in teashops-and you can say 'Bring it on!' to the day.
Device: NokiaN82/11.0.117
- Mood:chipper
A while later, I started working and got to play around with Linux at work. For the heck of it, I got a book on Linux administration and even spent a day watching the sysadmin setup a fresh installation and configure it. But I've always been leery of running it at home- and if I ever did, I'd want a separate PC to experiment on.
Linux has changed a lot since then- Fedora and now Ubuntu are claimed to be super friendly distributions- and there are glowing testimonials even from non technical people. So what's kept me off it? Gaming, for one. I'm a firm PC gamer- and there's nothing but Windows there. The more important thing is- Linux STILL has so far to go doing things that we don't think twice about on Windows, or on a Mac. I've read about people struggling to get their wireless adapters to work, or their flash drives not being recognized, sound drivers getting corrupt and so on. Hardware is such a no brainer on Windows- it's either auto detected, or the manufacturer's website has the necessary drivers.
Today I was synchronizing songs to my phone using Winamp. Is that even possible for Linux? Nokia doesn't offer a Linux version of PC Suite, and I'm not willing to risk one of the half baked open source drivers that exist out there. Today, I can synchronize my office Lotus Notes calendar with my phone, besides transferring songs/podcasts (yup, I'm looking for a few good ones now)/photos.
I really wish I had another old PC to experiment on with Linux, either Fedora or Ubuntu. But there's no way I'm making it my primary OS right now. I definitely have better things to do than google various forums for drivers and hacks for things that ought to work out of the box.
- Mood: energetic
- Music:Pink Floyd - 1983-The final cut -08 - The fletcher memorial home
