My Best Friend and I

Listening to Johny Watson's "Gangster of Love", Anna and I cruised the highway on a perfect cloudless day in a silky silver mitsubishi-lancer.The teasing wind in our faces kept our sun-kissed skin cool as we laughed at the good old days that were now only memories which we held onto so tightly with golden silk threads. Right from making our first crank call together in 10th standard to spending blissfull evenings in crowded coffee shops , we had been together for 12 long years.

We drove through the wilderness, feeling nostalgic and awakening slumbering memories
of fun and happiness that coloured our experiences of gentler times.Gentler, for those were the days which were spent in the innocence of a carefree attitude and a simple trust that we would be together forever.

We turned off the highway and into a tree-lined street searching for a restaurant tucked in the middle of the lovely picture-perfect countryside.We parked under a tree where the temperature dropped a few pleasant degrees and walked through a boisterous flower garden that led to the river.

We sat with our backs to the entire world.We looked at the river racing over the pebbles and the shadow of the trees dancing on the rippling water. The bright sun peirced its way through the canopy formed by the lush green trees and added a sparkle to the bright yellow flowers on the river bed. In the midst of this irenic retreat, we celebrated my friends new teaching position at a prestigious university.

Over a bottle of white wine, a salad of wild and garden greens, raspberry vinaigrette and pine nuts,we made most of the precious hours that remained before my friend and my soul mate would catch a flight that was going to take her approximately 10,000 miles away from me.

The summer breeze rustled through the trees as we fixed our eyes on the sand circles i was forming with a small twig.Oblivious of the irenic surroundings we were both lost in a maze of thoughts that both of us had avoided for the past few days. Thoughts that loomed in front of us the million unimagined possibilities of the future we could not see.The threads were going to snap and things were never going to be the same again. We were about to step out of the magical home we had made for ourselves into the mad world. We were about to part ways and walk on separate roads knowing very well that we would never be able to fill in the void in each others lives.

Done with the wine and the 30 minutes of quiet contemplation, we drove back to my home. As i got out of the car, i swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to stop the little tears that trickled down my cheeks. I shut the car door and tried to smile as i stared at Anna long and hard, hoping against hope that our paths would cross and we could re-live our innocent days all over again.

I always look for signs...signs that will tell me the answers to future questions ...those questions for which i cannot wait untill the future happens and answers itself.
I look for the tiniest of signs like for instance there is this demo that happened today and will be graded tomorrow...and as usual i cannot wait till tomorrow...so i start looking for signs...if i open the book in my hand and the page on the right side has an even page number, then the grades will be good else bad. If i look at my cell phone this instant and the the time shows and even digit number then my wish will come true. If i see at least 3 people wearing plain red t-shirts , then my guess about the person in yesterday's party is right and so it goes on untill i cant stop this sign searching activity and i go on and on untill my head starts spinning like a top.

Why do i wanna know about the future ? why cant i wait n watch ?

I dont know

I am confused ....confused about anything and everything. I dont even know if i am hungry and need to have dinner . Even as my mom yells that dinner is ready, i cant decide if im just bored hungry or actually hungry.
I dont know if I want to break rules and do things that I think are right or if I should just listen to the people who have experienced life more than me and just follow what they say.
I dont know if i should tell certain people that I dont exactly believe in what they r trying to do for me or if i should just let them do whatever they wanna do cuz it keeps them happy.
I dont know if i should follow my heart and go and get what i want even if it means the whole world is against me or if i should just accept whats thrown into my arms and learn to be happy.
The thoughts in my head are so many, intermingled like a thousand wires twisted in all possible directions to make innumerable knots.When i try to untie some of these knots , i make new knots and the existing thoughts are so happy that new knots have formed.The thoughts sneer at me as i try to organize them, they laugh back as i struggle to figure out if i am happy or sad. At one moment they make me feel like i am the luckiest person on earth and the very next moment they snatch away the last curve of my smile and make me feel like a complete loser.I wonder how it would be to have a thoughtless mind, something like a fresh clean pure white empty bowl to begin with which i can fill with only nice things.As i wonder, i dont realize that ive just added one more thought to the already existing hive.My head feels so heavy with so many thoughts that i wish i could tilt my head and push some of them over the edge so they spill over and break like pieces of glass on the shiny floor beneath and then i would step on them with hard shoes and crush them further untill they became a fine powdered substance which i could then throw far far far away so the thoughts get carried with the harsh winds to some unknown land and can never ever find their way back into my head......I dont know if i should write more or stop right here....
....well....

Would I Still get my Big Ben ?

It was an extremely boring day and i was debugging some extremely boring problems.We had just got back from an extremely boring lunch and i got back an extremely boring bottle of mango-banana smoothie. Although the sticker on the bottle said it was a mango-banana smoothie with a nice picture of a juicy mango and a delicious looking banana, the ingredients writen in small letters said it contained half a mango, quarter banana and 3 full oranges.Yeah thats right - England is strange in more than one ways but not as strange as my friends in Southampton :-)

I somehow managed to pull through the boring day and when it was time to leave , I put in thesmoothie bottle in my bag and ran along. Next morning i was in office quite early. Pratap came in later on and as soon as he came in, he climbed up desks to reach for the humax TV thats kept on one of the higher stands. Yeah he loves dis-integrating that TV just to find out how many tuners in contains although he finally looks it up on google :-). He came to me with some problem but then he did not really ask me about the problem. He instead asked me if i was drunk cuz he cud smell alcohol.Well helloooooooooooo.......i did look sleepy with red eyes and i was talking crap but that did not mean i was drunk.....Could he not see the halo around my head ?? Blind as ever i thought ?? Yeah a human usually has 2 eyes and one mouth so we can see more and talk less but if u meet pratap for just 5 mins and he did not even ask u if u were drunk , u wud still surely think he has 2 mouths and no eyes at all and maybe a malfunctioning nose. By the way...for the records, its pratap who has to run to the bar every evening after work for a smoke and a big mug of beer .After all this about pratap...how can i forget deepak....yeah deepak is usually too busy debugging something to notice anything else other than his monitor, the tv next to him and the blue box with wind river writen on it.

Ok ...so i told pratap that he must be drunk himself. The day went on as usual untill after lunch when i wanted something from my bag. I opened it a bit and got the shock of my life....u wont believe what i saw......my air tickets, passport and wallet were all floating in a yellow ocean of stench. Yes u guessed it right......the smoothie bottle was actually a devil in disguise, the yellow liquid devil had forced open the cap and was drowning my hopes of getting back to india that weekend unless ofcourse the british customs did not mind letting me out of the country with a completely soaked passport and matching yellow air tickets. I rushed to the rest room and used up all the tissues i could find to clean up my bag and passport....hahaha god save the lady who comes in to the restroom and realizes that there are no more tissues only after finishing her job....well....like i care.....i had to clean up the mess if i ever wanted to return to my home country....it was pretty much a "do or die in one of the prisons of great britain" kinda situation.

I managed to clean up everything and went back to my place. I spread out the imporatant docs on my table and left them to dry only to spill a glass of water on them after half hour....why god why.....why was all this happening to me.....i was not even thirsty but i had to drink water and then my butter fingers had to slip and the glass had to come tumbling down on my passport again. Hmmm....so i took another half hour to clean up this mess.....but thats not the funny part. We left at around 8 clk for dinner ...pratap, deepak and myself. While in the taxi deepak and me were planning to get back to office after dinner to finish up some pending work and all along pratap was saying that its not a good idea. He dint say why even thought we asked him. We reached deepaks favourite popaddum express and only after pratap had his usual dose of beer did he say that he thought it was not safe for us to travel late in the night by taxi cuz he smelt alcohol and he was sure that the driver was drunk. Sooooo much for the innocent taxi driver who had a clumsy girl sitting in the back seat with a blue bag that still smelt of spoilt mango-banana-orange smoothie. Yuuukkkk. Oh yeah....now i am 100% sure, pratap has a malfunctioning brain along with a malfunctioning nose :-) cuz u need the brain to co-ordinate with the nose, eyes and ears to relate the stench in office with the visuals of my passport and tickets spread out on the table along with my loud cribbing to the same stench in the taxi later that evening :-) I wanted to tell him then n there but i thought a blog post would be much better :-)Pratap are you gonna kill me for this post ? Would u still get the miniature Big Ben i asked for ?

Trip To London

We were all ready at 6:30 AM sharp. By ' we ', I mean Deepak aka Kido, Pratap aka ' the insane talkative man '...(well this name is cuz he refuses to give out some of his other nick names...but i will soon find out) and myself ( since this is my post, i am not gonna give myself a nick name ).

Deepak began his day as usual by dropping something at the breakfast table. His day has to begin that way...some kind of a lucky charm i suppose...on normal work days he has to drop either a knief or a fork but on holidays he has to drop cereal. So in accordance to rules, he dropped his choco chip cereal on the table. Good. Things were normal :).

Before i go ahead, I need to mention that deepak has been training very seriously under the tutorship of pratap for mastering the fine art of cracking the silliest jokes one can think of.

We reached London water-loo station and here's what happens...
Pratap : " excuse me maam, how do v get to London Central "...to a lady sitting opposite us.
Lady : "ummm U have to take the underground, its 2 stations further".
Pratap : " Oh okay...how do v get to the London Eye ? "
lady pointing outside the train window " Well...here it is, u just need to walk ".
Pratap : " Ohhh do i look dumb or what ? "
Anu and Deepak : "Yes ".


So we flew the London Eye. The view of London city was very very beautiful. Here's a snap of it.We could also see the Big Ben from right on top but we wanted a closer look....so we got a london map, went to a code cofe shop, opened the map, decided what other places to visit, went back to the railway station, studied some more maps on the wall, decided which train to take, which platform, which line , waited for about 10 mins for the train to arrive, boarded it, was quite crowded, so we stood for 5 mins and then reached the Big Ben station, came out and.......voila.....there it is right opposite the London Eye ....we only had to cross the road....but no...we decided to make use of the underground railway system :)))))




By now we came to the conclusion that all other places of attraction were "walkable" distances away and so walked all the way to WestMinister Abbey, Buckingham Palace ( we did not realize that an old building on our left was actually buckingham palace untill we read the board that said it was..yeah thats how "not palace - like " buckingham palace actually is.We then went to Horse Guards parade, Downing Street, London Bridge, Tower Bridge, Tower Of London, Baker Street and hmmm....thats about it. ....Oh wait...for some strange reason, Pratap wanted to go to Trafalgar Square...he insisted on this all along and after a while we saw this tall monument
sort of thing and Pratap goes....."hey thats trafalgar square...lets take some pictures". So all three of us waited our turn to pose in front of the monument and religiously took 3 nice snaps ....only to realize later while looking at a postcard in some shop,that the great monument was at " Our Trafalgar Square" and not the " Actual Trafalgar Square of London".

All along the way, Deepak killed us with his PJ's....
Pratap: do any of u have a london guide?
Deepak : No but i have an electronic program guide. ( for my non-philips audience, electronic program guide is what we are working on currently )

We are at a coffee vending machine....
Pratap : Hmm where do i get sugar from
Deepak : Sugar Cane.

We are at a cofe shop...Costa Cofe...
Pratap: This cofe sucks.
Anu: I know...I want my Mom's cofe
Deepak : Then what will ur mom have ? ...This is an old one but deepak doesnt care.

We are at some old fort..
Anu : where are we ?
Deepak : here.

At one point, we wished we could kill him in self defense...thats allowed u know.

Well...all in all ...it was a nice goof-up filled trip to London.

The Flying Sauce-Errrrrrrr

Its amazing how your own senses ditch you when you need them the most.
When i say need them most i mean in very very difficult situations for eg when u r trying to open a sauce sachet.

Ok so I am in Southamton with my English Collegues - yes everyone knows how " table mannered " the english are.We all go for lunch and i fill up my plate with macroni and vegetables.
I pick up some sauce sachets on my way. WHy? Why did i have to pick up the killer sachets ?? I taste my macroni while laughing at some joke my English collegues were telling me without really understaning what was so funny. The macroni tasted soooo very very bland.This is the wretched moment when i realized that i needed some sauce to spice up my boring macroni. So i opened my first sauce sachet, poured it on one side and yeah the macroni tasted slightly better.After a while i realized that i needed to open another sauce sachet and this is also precisely the same moment when my senses decided that i dint need them for the next 5 mins.


Listen up friends, Lesson Number 1: when u open a sauce sachet next time, i am warning u, ensure that ur senses are with u and apply ur full concentration only on opening the sachet.

I picked up my second sachet while listening to some boring remark my indian collegue was making on how spicy indian food can be. i was thinking of why he could not eat without talking so much. If only i had not worried too much about him and concentrated on what i was trying to do. Sigh!I dint realize that i was actually struggling to open the second sachet the reason being my fingers were slightly oily and before i could say Crisp Crunchy Cabbages, the sachet opened up and the sauce went flying straight ahead over and above my plate on to the white table cloth and even further onto the clean bule shirt of my english collegue sitting right opposite me.

Lesson number 2: Open up as many sauce sachets u think u wud need before u begin eating ur lunch to avoid trying to open the sachet with greasy fingers sometime later.

The worst part is yet to come. The poor engligh collegue did not even realize that a few zillion molecules of bright red ketchup had just about landed on his nice shirt cuz he was busy looking somewhere else . The tip of another guy's full arm shirt dipped itself mysteriously into the red pool on the table while I looked at everything happening around me with butterflies in my stomach. Nobody saw the flying sauce ......can u believe it ?

Ohhhh god....what do i do now? Do i tell the poor guys their fate ? Or do i let them discover the tragedy themselves ? What do i do ...oh please god tell me what to do??
And before i could make up my mind...." oooops how did this ketchup get here ? ".....said one of them....i froze....now what ?
They all looked around and i was the only one with ketchup sachets on my tray....and i also had some ketchup on my fingers and the most important piece of evidence was that i was still holding the sachet in my hand with the dumbest possible look on my face.....caught red-handed eh ?? yeah.

" hey look at the other guy, he is eating his food with his hand " i wanted to say to divert their attention....but....

" Oh Oh its alright, happens , lemme wash this off"...they left to the wash room.
I broke into the silliest possible grin.

Lesson Number 3: eat ur food without ketchup if u cannot follow the previous 2 lessons.

Sa-ft-ware Engineer's Journey Thru HELL

"yel kelsa madthiya ? "
" Infosys Uncle."
"Ohhh.....very good very good....sa-ft-ware hangadre...no problem, life channagi njoy mad bahudu "
" office yelli ide ?"
" Electronic City nalli uncle ".
" Ohhh very good....nice place i say ".

True...very true :) but my dear uncle, do u know that everyday a little bit of my life is being drained out ?
I wake up in the morning and my heart sinks when i realize that i have 2 whole hours of traffic b4 me. I am still coughing because all the carbon monoxide from yesterday's journey is still stuck in my lungs. No point ....I have no choice....so i get ready and reach the bus - stop to see the biiiiiiiig bus approaching......the passenger hungry bus...i can almost visualize the 2 horns of the bus devil smirking as it picks up weary "Saft-ware Engineers ".

" Adenu dodda samasye ? Actually nevella lucky kanro.....nidde maada bahudu".
Yeah right....with the pot-hole free roads, the dust free environment if u open ur window and the oxygen full environment if u keep it closed and with Lisa Sarah John giving diet tips in a Mallu accent along with Vasanthi on Radio Shitty ( yeah i stole this nice name for radio city from my friends blog) .....its all so very conducive for a nice nap huh.
Ok...i can somehow over come all this but u know humans can never sleep with a straight head. As i drift deeper into my nap, the neck refuses to hold my head straight and before i know it, there is a mini leaning tower of Pisa in the bus, the worst part being the head leans not on the window side but on the pretty girl sitting next to me.Hmmm.....u know whats next..... " Excuse me , Can you please sit straight :-)) ". Well....as if that was not embarassing enough, i even have to get out my hankey to wipe the drool that secretly escaped when my mouth opened without my permission during that short yet blissful 5 minutes of so-called-sleep.

With all this, when am in the doldrums, my friend whose office is within the city calls me up....." Hi dude, I was stuck in such a horrible traffic jam today.It took me 40 minutes to reach office man....Bangalore sucks. So wassup with you"
You jackass, it takes you just 40 minutes on a bad day? It takes me 90 minutes on a good day.

Hmmm....so i try not to crib about my plight, I tell myself good things " there are so many people without a job, at least I have one even if it means travelling so much everyday "....just when i begin to feel slightly better, we reach SILK BOARD JUNCTION and all the optimism in me gets crushed like an elephant stamping a poor lil ant...."THUD"........the sight is far from just depressing, infact depressing is like giving a compliment to the situation......its like u first bring big trucks, buses, lorries and tempos and fill up the road, then u bring in the cars and auto-rickshaws and any space that u now find, u fill them up with scooters, bikes, mopeds...hey dont forget cyclists, vendors, and pedestrians such that u cannot see even an inch of the road, u should begin to wonder if ur actually on the road or in mid-air.... and to this, you have to add the scorching sun and the
irritating sound of horns......Sigh....I close my eyes and wish for just one thing
" A Flying Carpet!".