WORKING NOT WORKING

Electronic equipment at work always seems to have a way of making me look like a fool.

All it takes for a software error to vanish or for a laptop to get connected to the office network is to take it to IT Support (or call them to my desk). And when I try to demonstrate what's not working - it works ABSOLUTELY fine, making them wonder if the only things not working are my eyes.

BIG SISTER

As I was walking home this evening, I was charmed by the sight of a little girl (about 6 years old) and an even littler girl (about 3 yrs old) holding hands and trudging along the walkway of my apartment complex. The littler girl squeaked, "Didi, legs is paining!!" (yes, in that cute lack of subject-verb agreement) and immediately, the bigger girl scooped her up in her arms (somewhat clumsily though) and walked ahead. After about 20 steps of huffing and puffing which was the best that she could, the big sister put the little one down, and they started walking hand-in-hand again.

The gesture of the older girl moved me so much it brought tears to my eyes. She probably knew that she couldn't carry her little sister all the way home, but tried her best, for what it was worth. And the instantness of her responding to her little sister's need - at this age!

I have rarely experienced before - this deep pain associated with not having something that I long for, and yet feel a bizarre current of happiness when I see someone else have it.

MAADI MAADBEDA (DON'T DO THE DO)

I am constantly irritated by the use/abuse of the word "maadi" in the Kannada language by urban colloquial speakers. For those who don't know, 'maadi' means 'do'. It makes me feel sad everytime I hear the word because it loudly rings the silent death of the language. No one needs to know the verb in Kannada anymore; just use an English verb, suffix 'maadi' and voila, the job is done! Stop maadi, Adjust maadi, Jump maadi, Dance maadi, etc.

And then, there are those who think they are cool and use the word even more atrociously like 'cool maadi' and 'have fun maadi', shattering whatever stupid grammatical logic that existed in the first place. But the award goes to this guy who screamed (in a crowded BMTC bus) - "Driver, back door open maadi!!"
Driver + back + door + open + MAADI!!?!

Aamir Khan recently said that he's ashamed he can't speak Marathi, his state language, well. That made me think - I've been in Karnataka for close to five years now, and I still cannot read/write Kannada or speak it as fluently as I would like to. When I landed in Bangalore, I began learning with a vengeance, but that enthusiasm gradually waned. I think about the reasons(excuses)...

1. I realised I could get around with my two-bit Kannada - with shopkeepers, autodrivers etc. Very few people speak pure Kannada, and colloquial urban Kannada (like most other Indian languages today) is junked with English words.
2. Also, knowing Telugu, Tamil and two-bit Hindi made me further lazy because knowing these languages covers most people in Bangalore.
3. Not having a constant practice-partner.
4. Most 'Learn Kannada' books are useless, because they focus on a pure form of Kannada that is not spoken anymore, or do not explain grammar very well.

However, when I don't know how to say something in Kannada, I use a different language. I don't do 'maadi or other funny concoctions.

Searching frantically for steely resolve.

BUS FUN - PART 2: GAMES

Continuing with Bus Fun, this post is a list of the most popular games played in BMTC buses. The rules are fairly simple, but could be lethally confusing for the uninitiated.

1.Secret Number
When you hand the conductor excess money to buy your ticket, he/she will scribble a secret number on the back of your ticket and hand it to you. To decipher this number, you must subtract the ticket value from the amount you tended. The objective of this game is to squeeze your way through the crowd (only when you are 10 seconds or less from reaching your bus stop) to the conductor (who is usually at the farthest possible distance from you in the bus) and get your balance amount back.

Bonus Trivia: Conductors say this game helps them attend to more commuters faster, but it has been scientifically proven that it takes longer to scribble the number on the back of the ticket than it would take to dig into their bag for the change.

2.Thore See
The commuter boards the bus. The conductor makes eye contact and says "tigit-tigit", to which the commuter says "Pass". If the conductor smells a rat, he says "Thore See". At this point, the commuter must quickly produce the bus pass. If he cannot, he will be flung out of the bus. If the conductor doesn't say "Thore See", the commuter gets a free bus ride.

Bonus Trivia: "Thore see" means "please show" in Kannada. This game is believed to have been inspired by the card game 'Bluff'.

3.Couth Coley
This game involves waiting for a seated commuter to vacate his/her seat. The main challenge is to compete with two hundred other standing commuters vying for the same seat. Other challenges include false starts provided by the seated commuter. A man may pretend to vacate his seat by half-rising, but checking his back-pocket-wallet and sitting down again, or a woman may half-stand, only to adjust her saree pallu and sit down again. During these precarious moments, you have to strategise your leg angle, dig elbows into stronger competitors, or brush your private parts against easily-offended competitors.

Bonus Trivia: "Couth coley" (kooth-ko-Lee) means "please sit" in Kannada. This game appears to have been inspired by the all-time party favourite 'Musical Chairs'.

Note to bus commuters from other Indian cities: These games may be played in bus services across India, but known by other names. I have referenced "BMTC" because of my usage/proximity with them.

BUS FUN - PART 1: LINGO

Being a frequent BMTC (public transport bus service in Bangalore) commuter, I am compiling this lingo list for newbies. Thank me later.

1.Holdeen
Pronunciation: whole-dean. preferably whole-deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen
Meaning: Beseechment to the driver to halt the bus.
Origin: Old English hold on
Usage: Typically screamed by a commuter or conductor to the bus driver, when a commuter has failed to get in to or get out of the bus.

2.Strite
Pronunciation: strite (rhymes with write)
Meaning: Extending continuously in the same direction without curving.
Origin: Old English straight
Usage: Question "What route does this bus follow to JP Nagar?"; Answer "Strite"

3.Tigit
Pronunciation: tig-eat, ti-yet
Meaning: Request to the commuter to buy the slip that entitles him the trip.
Origin: Old English ticket
Usage: Usually uttered quickly and repeatedly, until the commuter can no longer pretend not to have heard the conductor - Tigeet-tigeet-tigeet, Tiyet-tiyet-tiyet-tiyet

4.Pass
Pronunciation: pass
Meaning: Declaration of possession of a card that entitles the commuter to travel in the bus.
Usage: Spoken by the commuter to the conductor when their eyes meet.

Typical Scene:
Conductor looks at commuters in bus, one by one.
Person 1: "Pass" (conductor moves to next person..)
Person 2: "Pass" (conductor moves to next person..)
Person 3: "Pass" (conductor moves to next person..)
Person 4: "Railway Station" (hands ten-rupee note to conductor)
For some reason, this always reminds me of a quiz competition.

5.Levot
Pronunciation: lay-vote
Meaning: A planned area in the city
Origin: Old English layout
Usage: Mico Levot, Arakere Levot

6.Maystick
Pronunciation: meigh (to rhyme with 'weigh') stick
Meaning: Kempegowda Bus Stand (KBS)
Origin: Old English majestic
Usage: Though buses still display KBS in writing, no one refers to it by that name. Maystick it is.

7.Dorro Punmaadi
Pronunciation: door open maadi. (Stress on the 'r' real hard. Like 'rrrr')
Meaning: Beseechment to bus driver to allow commuter to exit the bus.
Origin: Old English door, open; New Kannada maadi

SCENT OF A MAN

Axe ad: Guy 1 in an elevator spraying himself with Axe deodorant. When Guy 2 leaves, Guy 2 enters, followed by a girl. The girl whiffs the deodorant, and is so turned on, that she jams the elevator to make out with him. Watch the ad here.



A rather unsettling variant of this ad happened to me. Replace 'deodorant-spraying man' (Guy 1) in the above ad with 'deadly-atomic-bomb-flatulence-spraying man'. Replace Guy 2 with me. And three girls entering the elevator instead of one.

SO CUTE GOOGLE

Totally made me smile, first thing in the morning! :-) Been a while since I saw something other than a girl or a baby and exclaimed, "Cute!"

Click to see what: http://img.labnol.org/files/google_logo_animated.gif

GOOGLE HOSPITAL

I was shocked, last month, to find out I had reached premature menopause.
1. Since I am not female; 2. I am pretty sure I am not cycling.

Read this article today about a research conducted to determine how accurately one can diagnose symptoms of illnesses using Google. While the team reported that "Google could be a 'useful aid' in diagnosing conditions with unique symptoms...", they also stated that "...a successful search needed a 'human expert' user, and therefore, patients would have less success trying to diagnose themselves on the internet".

I can vouch for the second statement. Turns out I had typhoid! :-)

STREAM OF THOUGHT

(Saw this heart-wetting sight this morning as I was walking to office)

A sturdy man wearing a thick turban - standing next to
A thin man wearing a sricharanam - standing next to
A white-clad man who just took off his prayer cap
Joyously urinating against the wall of my street
In unison.

It is the same blood that flows in all of us; it is the same ____ that flows out of all of us. Communal harmony is not a distant dream. Jai Hind.

DIGESTIVE STORIES

These days, Reader's Digest is being packaged with little freebies in order to sell. The June edition came with a strip of Digene chewable tablets! Reader's Digest with Digene tablets - haha! Reminded me of the Koundamani-Sendhil comedy scene where Sendhil places a cool drink (known simply as "colour" in villages) on top of a television set and tells Koundamani "Anne, idhaanne Colour TV!" (brother - this is what's known as a Colour TV!)

Opened a packet of my favourite Britannia Nutrichoice Digestive biscuits and was shocked to find only one quarter of the first biscuit! Has inflation moved on from eating into my paycheck to literally "eating" into my biscuit packet!?

SONY ERICSSON Vs NOKIA

Rathi is not a big fan of Sony Ericsson. After all, just half a cup of hot tea over her W710i - and the darn phone stops working!

My sister agrees with Rathi. "I've dropped my Nokia even into the commode and it works just fine".

A new era in endurance testing dawns...

FAITH

Watching a movie with family. Power goes off.
Damn this electricity board!

After an hour, electricity comes back on.
Thank God!
----------------------------------------------

Major road accident.
Damn that murderous car driver!

Alive and recovering in hospital.
It was only God's grace you survived!
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If God is almighty, why give him credit only for the good stuff?
What a deviant you have become! I told you not to read those misleading Periyar books...
Oh, right. Sorry.

HELLO HELLO

Called someone on his mobile and this young girl answers the phone. Hello.. HEllo.. heLLO...hEllOOO... she goes, growing more impatient with each hello, obviously not able to hear me saying the same thing. Irritatedly, she says "kuchh boltha nahin!" ("not saying anything!") and hangs up.

Miffed at getting the wrong number, I call again. Same girl, same hello. Same "kuchh boltha nahin". She hangs up again.

Third time - same girl. Very surprisingly, she sounds the same way with her series of hellos as she did the previous times. As I begin to get slightly scared that I will be hauled in for giving blank calls to a nubile young nymphet, the person I actually intended to call answers the phone! Idiot, imbecile, bashi-bazouk!!!

I've experienced some infuriating ones before, but I nominate this SHIT for the WORST EVER caller tune!

GETTING USED TO DISCOMFORT

Insane honking of vehicles behind me as I'm walking on the pavement, people spitting on my leg, utter contempt for the word 'queue', more electricity cuts in a day than the number of letters in the word 'electricity', sorry-faced half-naked women carrying fainted/dead babies tapping at my leg and pointing to their stomachs, shopkeepers as friendly as tight underwear, unbelievable bending of laws, wild rabid dogs chasing my tender loins in front of my house, rivers of urine on the main road beside walls of IT company offices - I am back in India!
Thank God for my loved ones who live here.
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On opening my inbox, I find about two hundred emails from friends inviting me to join Facebook. Now all these friends are already in my Orkut list. I fail to understand the need to replicate our contacts on another portal that requires a separate sign in and pretty much performs the same functions.
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I have a request for my fellow blogger friends that's been on my mind for a while now. Please see if you can allow your readers to choose if they want music playing when they are in your blog. Not only is the music loud and sudden when the page loads, but when multiple blogs are opened simultaneously, the effect of several songs playing at the same time is extremely jarring to the mind. Please consider my request; I'm sure other readers are facing this too.

POST-911

Figured out what the commotion in the hotel (near Boston) last night was all about. A couple of Indians living in this other room wanted to dial a toll-free number from their hotel room. What they had to do was dial 9 followed by 1-800. Instead, they dialled 91 followed by 1-800. The police were at their doorstep in five minutes.

For folks who are unfamiliar with the 911 concept - read this: 911

Funny when these things happen to other people.

STOMACH SO FROZEN

Being in tune with the lazy Saturday evening in my hotel room, I flipped over the frozen pizza box for microwave instructions. To realise that it was to be baked in a conventional oven and microwave cooking was "not recommended"! Well, there's a way to microwave EVERYTHING - I thought, and set the pizza to 15 minutes on high power. Just to find out if there were additional tips to microwave non-microwaveable food, I did a search on Google.

My internal organs microwaved when I watched the video clip in this link: The Great Frozen Pizza Recall of 2007.


Here I was, holding the box of the SAME brand and flavour as the product recalled from stores because it was alleged to have contained "a deadly strain of e.coli"! And in those specific cases, it is suspected that bacteria (which cannot survive high temperature) did not die because the said people microwaved the pizza against the instructions! Further more scarily, the freezer in the video clip (at 1:04) looked JUST like mine - stacked with pizza boxes!

And just as the 15 minutes on my microwave were up and the three beeps went off, the last few seconds in the video clip (playing on my laptop) blared: "Anything that you see recalled - throw it away! DON'T EAT RECALLED PRODUCTS!"

Back to beef noodles. Frozen pizzas suck. What idiot would buy them anyway?

ONE LAST TIME

Was just thinking yesterday - America is such a great place to live in! Clean surroundings, vast spaces, so many fun things to do, great shopping outlets, restaurants, roads that actually make me want to drive cars - what a drastic difference in the standard of living! Unlike many people I know who miss India like crazy when they're here, I thought I was doing quite well... until now.

Just got news that my paternal grandmother passed away a few hours ago back in India. Numb mind frantically trying to cope with the thought that I will not be able to see her one last time. Because I am here, in America.

What am I giving up? What am I getting? The familiar tongue of death licking all over my neck trying to make me vomit everything that I thought I had chewed, swallowed, and digested about losing the ones I love...

NOT MY FAVOURITE WORD

Just had to get these out of my system.

I never thought another phrase could match the irritation I feel when I hear "How is you?". I was wrong; here is: "My bad"! And all of a sudden, everyone around me seems to be using it!

A couple of weeks ago, having lost track of timezones while travelling from India to America, I asked someone at the Chicago airport what the time was. Her response: "Twenty five to four".

Arghhh - why can't you say 'three thirty five', woman? I can tolerate it if it's just a few minutes to the next hour (like 'five to ten' or 'ten to three'), but twenty five minutes to the next hour?! A lot of people do talk like that! Is the intention to make me waste time calculating?

Okay then, it is ninety eight minutes to eleven - I'm off to bed. Or should I say a hundred and fifty eight minutes to midnight?

BEAUTIFUL NIGHT

In Florida now, and the weather's so cool and rainy - it feels like I haven't left Bangalore! It feels good to be back in the US - vast spaces, clean roads, clean air, nice looking people, nice food!

I observed that many sight-impaired employees work in my office here. And they have guide dogs. Today, as one such employee walked into the elevator with her big black guide dog, my colleague exclaimed: "You have a beautiful dog!"

"Oh he is beautiful, thank you", she replied. "Did you hear that - you're so beautiful!" she told her dog, bending to stroke him. "What's his name?", I asked. "Night", she replied.

As I smilingly pondered over the choice of name for a jet black dog leading a visually impaired person, she heartily added, "He's my night in shining fur!"

NOKIA - THE CHOSEN ONE

After all those e-mails that we thought were hoaxes about mobile phones blowing up... Nokia has announced the biggest consumer electronics product recall. If you folks don't know what I'm talking about - check this link out:

https://www.nokia.com/batteryreplacement/en/

Apparently, only a miniscule number of batteries (46 million) are faulty. PTI News reports that there have been no complaints from India yet.

Well, I'm the FIRST, then! I feel sooooooooo special!!!