ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You Can Start To Win At Any Time

2006-12-18T22:28:00.000-08:00

To solve any problem or to reach your goal, you don't need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach. All you have to do is know where you're going. The answers will come to you of their own accord.

Don't procrastinate when faced with a big difficult problem, break the problem into parts, and handle one part at a time. If you can get up the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed. It's the job you never start that takes the longest to finish. Don't worry about what lies dimly at a distance, but do what lies clearly ahead. Your biggest opportunity is where you are right now.

Once you begin you're half done. when you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody You want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible ..........

contributed by: Pravs world

REAL LOVE!!!!!!

2006-12-18T19:34:00.000-08:00

It was a gloomy Saturday afternoon. A flock of birds was spending great time searching for food and playing on the main road. Out of the sudden, a big truck sped through... sad thing had happened again.

Birds can feel too. Although this bird had already died, another bird flew over to her immediately, just like a family member, unable to accept the truth.

Not long after that, another car stormed in causing the dead bird's body to whirl with the wind. The spouse noticed the movement. As if she was still alive, he quickly flew beside her again.

He stayed beside her and yelled ... "WHY ARE YOU NOT GETTING UP!?"

Unfortunately, she's no longer able to hear him. In the meantime, he's trying to lift her up.

He, of course, was unable to bear the burden. Another car soon passed by. He quickly flew off. Once the car had gone, he came down again....

Although other birds told him its useles, he never gave up. He was trying his best to lift her up to see her flying again. Another car passed by, her dead body whirled again as if still alive and trying to fly.

He had used all of his energy, however...The photographer said he couldn't shoot any longer. The photographer was so worried that the living bird was going to get hurt by passing cars. So he picked up the dead bird and left it at the roadside. The live one still lingered at a nearby tree as if crying with his singing and refused to leave.

Do humans have the same feelings nowadays? I wonder.

HEY ITS MY LIFE- I

2006-12-18T02:42:00.000-08:00

As a child, I thought that growing up meant untold freedom. I was probably right. Freedom is not about no baths and no frilly frocks any longer, but it’s here. Maybe our grandparents thought the same way when they became the first generation to receive liberal education. Maybe our parents thought so when they became the first Indians to grow up in an independent democracy.

Elder brothers and sisters became the first desi teenagers to taste the sweetness of MNC fruit. And we—we are truly free because for one, all those important things have been ours without even having to ask for them. And then, think about how barriers have fallen in our lifetime. I don’t even blink at wondrous things like satellite television, PalmPilots, celltels and MP3 sites. That says a lot about pace and progress, not to mention money.
Just look back, and it takes your breath away, so many things!…in so little time! 1986 was actually twenty whole years ago! And what kind of weird coincidence is that anyway, nineteen eighty-six, the only year that shares it’s name with a cult book that predicts stupefying happenings in said spell. What the hell, George Orwell.

When I was old enough to understand, I was secretly horrified that The Chernobyl Disaster took place in the year of my birth and that Indira Gandhi was assassinated two years back and secretly pissed off that I had missed the World Cup win by a a couple of years!!!! By the time I realised that I had nothing to do with any of this, I could already identify Imran Khan as the rightest captain of the wrongest side in the world. And someone over the radio was screaming that Rajiv Gandhi, that handsome young Prime Minister, had been killed in a village with an awfully long name.( Fine!!! Its Sriperumbadur)..

The Rajiv assassination became the first public tragedy understood and felt by us five-year olds. Being a Madrasi child,I loved the sound of “Scheduled Caste”, but had to have the term explained repeatedly before I understood—only very little. Newly-arrived BBC told me who George Bush was, but any connection between his wood-paneled conference rooms and the bleak battlefields of the Gulf—well, what do you know. Cable TV and colour TV stick together in my memory. Maybe we had colour before, but it was completely wasted on national programming.

Compare the grey walls and black moods of DD newscasts to the magenta lycra and red hair and golden saxes that trumpeted MTV in! Zee followed soon after, and I fell off my chair with delight. Hindi was good. English was bad. Much as I hated the news (I still gag at the words “Sansad Samachar”), I hated MTV more.
Dad and Mom watched it a lot, but the only song I could bear was “Too Sexy”. I liked the growl even if I couldn’t catch the words which was best, since my convent school psyched me out to think that ‘sexy’ was the word that would damn Karishma (then with the ‘h’) Kapoor to eternal hell. I still can’t swear without feeling a twinge of guilt.

So was Janet Jackson or was it Paula Abdul. I ignored Madonna completely, because deep down I knew what my beloved cousins would think of her. Give me Kamalhassan any day. Or Sachin Tendulkar, who became better than Sunil Gavaskar, brighter than Kapil Dev and more beloved than Imran Khan, then embroiled in a controversy over one young Tyrian Jade White he allegedly fathered, just weeks before general elections in Pakistan—which he was contesting.
Ohh, we shiver! Their cricketers—like that! Our cricketers—like this! (pointing to Sachin.) What a guy. What a batsman. What curls. Wehelped to build his legend, we kids with considerably fewer heroes than other little people. All the boys wanted to be like him—they still do.
None of us girls came out to watch the match unless he was at the crease. This latterfact changed with the dawn of Dravid, slow and steady and shy and sweet.

Then came Ganguly, and Boycott’s accent, and Azhar and Jadeja shown up as no better than that ape Cronje. God, how I hated the team. Scum. LOSERS. I had lost interest in their sorry fates long ago, but you can’t help being shocked at these people cheating a whole nation. Years have passed. Hansie has made his last horrifying headlines. Only a handful of eighteen-year olds who watch cricket are girls.

But I still watch Sachin. I watch him sell cars and cola and credit cards because Sachin doesn’t just play cricket—he IS cricket, three ducks and all. Communalism came home in 1992. For the first time, I was a little scared. The pictures in the paper were the worst I had ever seen, and everything was quiet, deserted. It was fun playing catch on the main road minus any vehicles, but the silence was eerie. We weren’t being sent to school, we were told, to keep us out of danger. The violence ended with a bang. Of those days, one thing rose clear above past the bombs, the burning chawls and charred limbs. Someone had gotten this neatly stencilled onto some BEST buses, right near the door so you couldn’t miss it: Black Friday: Hundreds die in riots. Saturday: 99% attendance reported at workplaces.

SALAAM CHENNAI!There was a sudden transformation in the name from Madras in 1996!!! The older people were going to work, the apparent reason being that they were Chennaites. At that instant,Chennai became my favourite city, apart from the rest of the world, better than London and New York and dumb old Delhi. No one from Chennai’s 1986 batch thinks otherwise. Do big cities do that to everyone who’s born and bred in them? Chennai now is different. Buildings and places that were once grand and imposing now look tired and faded, sagging like wrinkled cheeks.

There are scandalous whispers of new hubs for India. We are ignored by rock bands, solar eclipses and earthquakes alike. We don’t know what happened. Did it change with the name? Certainly the people didn’t change. They still don’t give a damn about what happened yesterday, or about the fact that they have been robbed of their identity as Madrasis and been made Chennaites, or else.

Chennai is no longer the paradise Madras was, but there’s no place else to call home. Miss Universe, Miss World, Rajinikanth, Sridevi, Ilamai Idho Idho,and all those hip hop songs. So many different children, so many things in common. Some parts of our lives are so similar. As ten-year olds, we wept…WEPT! Cant help!!!!

We probably did hear of Kurt Cobain’s last little shotgun stunt, but I can’t remember a single person being perturbed. Maybe because America was still too far out of reach, and guys with girl’s haircuts didn’t make much good music anyway. (kids, KIDS!) For us, books became redundant. Meaning, they’re there alright, lots of ‘em, and they’re more fun than most things, but they just don’t tell you anything the TV and the Net can’t.

The fanatic reader, for the most part, is no longer a teenager. Naipaul is the old man who cried when he got his Nobel Prize. Rushdie is the fatwa guy. Convenience is writing a book report about the movie version. It’s as if the scope for imagination has seeped out of the world. When you can see it, why make-believe it? What we can see is very much like fantasy anyway—larger than life, faster than thought and stranger than fiction.

Consider an instance. Girl marries prince, and England rejoices. Girl divorces prince, and the Western World is upset. Girl dies in crash and the whole world goes into deep shock. Sadder things may have happened, but we did not pay attention. What did we care? What is known is that Diana’s death and the time thereafter became a sort of milestone—in media coverage, in mass hysteria and for some unfathomable reason, in private lives; to remember your first year of adolescence by it, linking it to the thought that after that one particular day, nothing was quite like before.

Four years later, something did happen to surpass that frenzy, to entrench itself in living teen memory as the worst thing that ever happened in the world. And bigger events may take place in the future—circumstances that will obscure the Diana margarine tubs and tribute albums, but the bewildered sadness of those days will be hard to forget. Even Mother Teresa, with a kinder heart and an address closer home couldn’t turn the tide away from youth and beauty and the glamorous violence of it all. With adolescence came the dip in the roller coaster.

Suddenly, things were moving too fast. The Boards—always a grim, if distant prospect—were becoming a reality. Suddenly, tuitions were no longer for slow kids only, they were where you spent your life if you weren’t in school. You had to buck up for your school tests to make it above a cut-off for coaching class entrances. To make things worse, boys were proving themselves to be human, which added to Class Ten’s collective worries. We had to begin thinking about college.

We, who airily chatted of being mountaineers and scuba divers were suddenly faced with choosing between Commerce and Science. So things hadn’t changed so wildly either—you talked of The Alternate Career, unlike your parents, but your choices weren’t all that different from theirs. Doctors and engineers for Science; accountants and corporate heirs for Commerce; journalists, civil servants and shiftless buggers for Arts. Or hey, think about the MBA.
So much respectability, so much moolah, and so much damn space for everyone. This whole proliferation of MBA mania became slightly dubious. It seemed to qualify you to talk a lot, and talk really fast, but what WORK did you do? Something awfully grand that was beyond me, no doubt. The Alternate Career has become a reality for more and more people with the passage of time. You only have to look around at all the DJs, all the adventure sportsmen, all the environmental activists to keep the flame of hope flickering in your heart, that someday you will have a job that you love dearly AND keeps your body and soul together.
Still, the more things change, the more they remain the same...

HEY ITS MY LIFE- II

2006-12-18T02:21:00.000-08:00

Class Ten came and went. By the time it was over, I couldn’t wait to turn my back on school. Really, how did I bear with it all? Ask an eighteen year old to be as diligent, as patient, as attentive to ten subjects and misspelt textbooks and irascible teachers and I guarantee that all you'll get from him is a walkout. Or maybe a cold stare.

What was happening to the world at that time? I don’t remember. My own problems blossomed magnificent and malevolent overnight, like a putrid Jack’s beanstalk. So Clinton saw the devil in a blue dress. So we won a war. Pah-what did I care for politics and pornography when I didn’t know where I was going and what I wanted to do and who my friends were and when the hell I was ever going to get that son of a gun Pythagoras off my back? If I had known what it meant, existentialism—of the dankest, darkest kind—would have been my favourite word. I was fond of big words back then; but I feared it was only proof of what a pretentious little prig I really was.
Folks tend to romanticise teenage angst and discontent by using calling it catchy phrases like ‘the Storm and the Fury’ and things like that, which is pretty pseudo. ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is not the last word on the adolescent experience. In fact, most people’s adolescent experience can be summed up in one word: "HUH?"

I was 11 years old when I decided to fight public opinion and get an Arts degree, despite the fabulous marks I assumed were my birthright. But at 15, I was just a depressed wreck. And then! lo and behold, at 16, I became the horse who saw a whole new world because his blinkers were taken off. I was Peter Pan, trumpeting to Hook, "I am Youth. I am Joy. I am the little bird that has broken out of the egg."

This, of course, was nonsense; all I did was enter class 11, and everyone knows that Higher Secondary is a dubious period as regards intellectual advancement, or the immense lack thereof.But even a small step is a big step, and I doubt we realised that we were getting a mere whiff of freedom. Nay, it was like we were soaked, drenched in independence. The start was fresh, the air was sparkling, the Internet was here and everything was, like, totally awesome. One gathers much fundamental wisdom in one’s years of junior college( we loved to call like that since we wanted to have the "COLLEGE FEEL"). Consider this unavoidable truth: the harder you try to be yourself, the more you aren’t. ‘Wannabe’, therefore, refused to remain a Spice Girls chartbuster (though the song had stopped being cool a while before) and relocated to a prominent part of being: the identity. There are those who embrace the term joyfully and fling themselves into wholesale wannabe-ing. There are those who rebel against labels, thus unwittingly falling into the conformist moulds of their own nightmares. And there are those who try not to think about it. However bad a word pretentiousness may be, there is no denying it’s diktat of the 16 year old psyche, whose main concern is, “What do I think?”

Come JC( Junior College yaaar!), therefore, and, to use a bewitching bit of B-school babble, the paradigm shifts. Today’s wannabe (see?) 18-year-old intellectual may cringe at the mention of ‘F.R.I.E.N.D.S.’ as the guiding star of his social life, behaviour patterns and conversation, but there you have it. It happened with Clint Eastwood, it happened with Flower Power, it happened with Disco and now it’s happened with this show. Observe, for one, the unblushing pigweed-like spurt of sundry coffee houses all around to know the truth.
My grandfather had Shakespeare dreamily scribbled over his textbook covers. And I—I have nothing to show for an interest in words but huge chunks of ‘F.R.I.E.N.D.S.’ dialogue involuntarily memorised over the years.

One nice thing about being 16 and 17 is the increased ability to understand and appreciate the depth of the human mind better. How heady it was to be on familiar terms with the likes of Joseph Heller and Garcia Marquez and Paul Simon! Plumb in that whirlpool of experience, I began a journal, one in which I promised myself faithfully to record all the movies I saw, all the books I read, the music I heard and the biggest news of the days. Like my own time capsule, constructed around the sole purpose of fascinating future generations. I know a lot of people who were doing their own thing, like that. Trying to make sense of it all.
How appropriate to have life governed by a TV channel catch line. And that’s one more amusing thing now—everything is pop philosophy. Everything is a joke. Nothing is real. When does it all become a part-Seinfeld, part-John Lennon virtuality? More importantly, will it stop being like this someday?

My ambitious journal lies in a corner, unfinished, uncared for. Right now I am more interested in the green light under my computer monitor, and how important it has become to my existence.
Every day, I push three switches and wait for it to flicker briefly before it glows green and strong and fluorescent. I have clattered so much into this box, writing to people, to myself, to earn money, to no end at all. My handwriting has suffered greatly; all that remains for me is a choice made too many times over, between a neat, curt Arial and a frivolous Comic Sans or a rather plump, complacent Verdana.

There will be no yellow, dog-eared pages to hold and mull over when I’m older. It’s a small price to pay for the survival of a few rainforests, and perhaps I am not so sorry about it after all. One gets reconciled to mechanics after a while. Yet I can’t help but wonder: how easy is it to dream and dawdle and be foolish in a medium so chillingly, unblinkingly real?

The first thing I did when I saw a plane crash into the World Trade Center was to get up and drag my feet to this computer, to this very chair in which I’m sitting now, and stare at this screen for a long time. I finally started a mail to a cousin in the States, and the mail continued to become a letter to my editor, a letter to my friends, a letter to a web group. I joined a globe-wide community of millions who did the same before their own silent beasts. Silence is right—it’s the one thing that became the clearest aftermath of that televised Armageddon. Many were struck dumb because of the simple awe with which the sight filled them. And we became the generation that could expect nothing but the unexpected.

The United States took up the grand cause of championing humanity to a glorious victory over its oppressors, for the most part mountain-bred, illiterate teenagers. Revolution over and done with, global shock passed into global disinterest.

Life for me hasn’t changed tangibly after September 11. But I also know that this way of life will not last much longer. What began in 1986 has come of age in a world that has bubbled over, like a cauldron full of witches’ brew. Will I be living my twenties in a war-driven world? The question even occurs, prompted by a hundred magazine covers of impending nuclear aggression—will I be living at all? But the thought vanishes quickly; death seems distant, something I understand but don’t relate to, like quadratic equations.
So adulthood in a troubled new century is the imminent future. As a generation, we can shrug off any responsibility for what is happening—we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning, since the world’s been turning. That line, if you recall, comes from a Billy Joel song that was meant for the adults before us; it’s not my fault, it said, I didn’t fight the Vietnam war, I didn’t blow away JFK, I have nothing to say. On our part, we didn’t destroy Beirut or imprison Aung San Suu Kyi, we were too young to stop Kar Sevaks and jehadis, we couldn’t picket the cinemas playing ‘Showgirls’.

Will it ever be our responsibility? We don’t know and maybe we don’t care. Because we, more than anyone before us, are the Generation which Minds its Own Business. Technology and psychology have given us the perfect excuse to spin our own cocoons and become wrapped up in ourselves.

Yes, technology and psychology have shrunk the world for us, and expanded it too. We walk a tightrope between literal and virtual reality, and the result of having struck this balance is the sheer inability to gaze at anything open-mouthed.

Our capacity for surprise has diminished considerably. The children of 1986, for all their spiritual illiteracy, alternative healing fads and a multitude of fake Net identities, will never be clueless. We are mastering the science of creating our own self-sufficient worlds, something other 20 yr olds have been able to do only in their dreams.

I say this even as I reason that stereotyping is dangerous. It tends to oversimplify and homogenize, always a dastardly thing to do, since we love nothing better than to prove ourselves as different from everyone else. Each 20 year old is vastly different, having lived his or her life in so many smaller, more personal events than newspaper headlines and music videos.
But those very blurbs and bands have gone into the making of what shrinks call a collective consciousness, something which I believe has ensured this: whatever the confusion within the world and within ourselves, we’re never going to be a helpless lot, indulging in futile soul-searching about having no time left to start again and other sentimental nonsense. We will never be the generation lost in space. Space is just one more holiday hotspot.

VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE- A REVIEW

2006-12-18T02:05:00.000-08:00

I decided to read Veronica decides to die when I read its introductory note at the end of Paulo’s another book, The Alchemist. Turning one Page over the other, I will not say that I don’t know when it started and when it ended, because every single sentence left a mark on my heart.It carries you away swiftly from the reality around you to the world inside Villete,World of Veronica, Zedka, Eduard and Dr Igor.

Veronica decides to die because she thinks that she has spent her life to the full extent and carrying on living will only increase her miseries. She decides to die because she’s not happy or unhappy either. It’s the same routine for her, same working days and nights. And she finds out that now nothing gonna change in her life. So she decides to die.

For that she chooses the most sophisticated method, sleeping pills. She could have thrown herself off one of the new buildings, but she thinks that her deformed body will hurt her parents, and they will have to go through identification process which will only increase their suffering. Shooting, jumping off a building, hanging, none of the above suited her feminine nature.
She decides to take a far more sophisticated method.

Taking the pills one by one and then waiting patiently for the unconsciousness to take over her, a question asked in a article catches her eyes, Where’s Slovenia? So she decides to write a letter to the newspaper, about Slovenia,Which was why she found herself in Villete, when she woke up after suicide attempt.

Villete, the famous and much-feared lunatic asylum. Veronica finds out herself there when she opens her eyes, only to know that her heart is damaged and she has left with only a week to live. That doesn’t arise any more hope or will to live in her heart then she had when she attempted.
When she is moved to the ward with 20 more ppl to share, she tries to get more sleeping pills to end her life as soon as possible because she finds it terrible to wait for death to come a whole week. The news has been spread all through the Villete that she’s the pretty, young, healthy girl who is going to die in a week.

In her search for someone who can give her sleeping pills, she meets Zedka, who tells her the meaning on madness. She tells her that mad ppl also belong to the same planet, once they were also a pat of this very society, but their crime is that they r different, they live in their own world.

Veronica soon finds out that her life was monotonous because that’s the way she wanted it to be. She never wanted to try out new things. There she finds out what she lacked , what really made her suicide and that she shouldn’t have attempted suicide at all because she is knowing what life means and how to live.

There she suffers for love, she hates herself and everyone who made her life the way it was, she comes to know that she never did anything mad, she always tried to make other people happy, to be a good girl.Soon she finds out to be in love with Eduard, a schizophrenic.
If I am going to tell the rest, what are you going to read? I leave the rest to you people to find out.

As/this book, soon after you start it, you’ll realize that single page you turn, you confront the strongest of all of our feeling, one by one, which we always try hard to keep locked down inside, suppressed, only to recognize it’s bitterness when it’s too late to make any amendments, hatred, love, madness, fear.

Paulo makes you realize that it’s not life that stops offering changes; it’s what we do to ourselves. Closing our eyes from doing anything that’s different, that can change our life, guarding ourselves inside the high defensive walls of our mechanism. And you feel lingering shadows of death, strongly and deeply.

It gives you a great sense of peace, when you realize that you are not the only one blackmailed in the name of love, you are not the only one who feels. Other people also go through the same feelings, only very few people will talk about it. The intense pressure of society, parents are in a constant war with your desire to be yourself.

Paulo successfully leaves another mark on the hearts of all the people who ever decided what Veronica has, who ever felt like her, or many other characters in Villete.

One Paulo’s quote, from this book and I end my review here.
“Stay mad, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do that without attracting attention.”

DOODLES!!!!!!!!!!

2006-12-18T02:02:00.000-08:00

Instructions to open a book:

1. First take the book.
2. Next keep it in such a way that the bound edge is to the left.

NOW OPEN THE BOOK…….

OR

Just open the last page to get into a whole new interesting world… The world which I ve rightly named as DOODLES WORLD!!!!!

Now the last page of a notebook can say a lot about its owner.. If ur last page is empty or if u think doodling in the last page spoils the beauty of ur Chak-a-Chak white book..Then stop!!! Turn the page.. This article is not for you..

On the other hand if u are a typical student like me then read on. Who else better than us would understand the potential of back pages?? It helps us realize our talents. Here.. I am referring to calligraphers and cartoonists.. From fashion designing to profiles.. from writing names in different fonts to checking ambidextrosity …to err practicing forgery… And of course not to forget the caricatures of our beloved profs…
So next time the talent hunt is on…You know where to begin…

Apart from time pass, our back pages serve as our handy dandy telephone diary. We’ll need to call our friends to ask her/him to clarify doubts or to copy down homework sums)U were busy doodling in the class remember!!!!). So along with calligraphy and the cartoons goes the encircled telephone number. (The fact where you wrote is immaterial.)

Another rule\funda that we follow in back pages is FILL UP EVERY SPACE TILL THERE IS NO PLACE!!! A careful study of back pages shows the existence of conversational writings. A few torn ends indicate the same is used for note passing!!

There are innumerable other uses also.. To mention a few (i) TIC TAC TOE, (ii) HOLLYWOOD,
(iii)HANGMAN (Need more explanation?? Then you are the worlds greatest nerd), (iv) Check whether your pen is working by writing on the last or blot ink pens, (v) Math formulae….Last minute revision??? Just flip to the last page.. (vi) Rough Calculations

The last page gets filled with all this and more and becomes a memoir later. A memoir, which can be looked through and remembered like the fossile of life. More to doodle and not enough space?? Don’t Worry… There ll be more notebooks and more backpages…

ENJOY DOODLING!!!!!!!!!

KID'S BLITZKRIEG OF THOUGHTS N ANSWERS!!!!

2006-11-02T21:02:00.000-08:00

KIDS!!!!!!! That one word turns me on... I love them hell a lot.. And this article is about one of the most hilarious incidents that happened wen my cousin Vishnu was visiting us..

It was a warm July night... Not to mention it was the vacation time in the middle east and the US! And of course not to forget that the academic calendar has just begun in India...

So.. That meant frolic for kids n students in US n Middle east n frustration for the kids n students in India..

Vishnu, my 6 year old cousin, landed in India on one warm July night.... I would say that he is a child prodigy with a budding talent of a great singer within him.. It also happened to be that time where my 17 yr old cousin from Dubai was also down here... So it was kinda family reunion after a long time...

Vishnu had this habit of being told a bedtime story every night... Vishnu always liked interactive stories where he liked to guess the upcoming part of the story...

So one night it was the turn of one of my uncle to tell him a story.. He finally decided to tell him a Akbar n Birbal story and to conclude how witty birbal was... So he started the story telling.. And since visnhu was a US bred kid, my uncle decided to tell the story in Tamil as everyone wanted VIshnus Tamil skills to improve...

"Ahem Ahem....", my uncle cleared his throat. "Once there lived a mighty king called Akbar... He was a very famous and powerful king....", continued my uncle (in Tamil of course..). "He had nine ministers in his court called Navratnas.. Among them Birbal was a pulavar.." Upon stumbling upon a word which was quite strong in tamil to Vishnu such as PULAVAR, he decided to explain wat it is to him.. He asked VIshnu, "Unshu baby, do you know wat a PULAVAR means??".. Vishnu nodded his head in enthusiasm that he knew the word. He told "I know perippa"..

We were all surprised by the fact that Vishnu knew this word.. SO we wanted to hear from him the meaning.. So my uncle told "Good baby, tell me what does it mean"....

Vishnu sat up in the bed and was kinda so brimmed up with enthusiasm as he felt that he was the center of attention in explaining a word he knew.. He put on a serious face and started to explain. We all leaned forward expecting him to tell the exact meaning of the word...

But BINGO... we had a surprise...

Vishnu continued with his explanation " U know perippa?? Wen we travel for loong distances like from LA to Fremont, and we get tired of driving and u need to stop somewhere on the roadside for eating and taking rest, thats called PULAVAR!!!"

We couldnt help laughing.. What he actually meant was a PULLOVER!! We had a nice laughter until our tummies hurt... Vishnu asked innocently" Oh!!! Was i wrong????", on seeing our expressions...

My uncle immediately told him that he was not wrong and he was right and just that he changed languages.. And then explained him the meaning of PULAVAR which means poet/scholar.. Vishnu just grinned and thus continued the story telling for him..

Still we couldnt forget that incident where we kept laughing and discussing abt it during most of his stay!!!

The above incident is an example of how much kids observe these days and how they imply their observation.....

FREEDOM....WHAT IS IT?????????

2006-10-31T02:25:00.000-08:00

If we are truly free, why have we to adhere to the 75% attendance rule in colleges or stand up for the national anthem??

So, we all read in school about how our country is democratic, right? And we mention it on every Independence Day, Republic Day and all other conceivable occasions. And we all hold our right to freedom of speech and expression so dear to us, and we all stand up for the national anthem before the movie starts (although some of us, like me, do it rather reluctantly!), right?
Dude, we already know all that. Why are you writing about it? I am sure that is the thought racing through your minds right now. Well, my point is not a very simple one, and I don’t expect too many people to understand it. But here it goes.

Our forefathers (the supposedly great but highly misled and sadomasochistic Gandhi among them), created this nation with the very noble ideas of Liberty and Equality. But these people also framed a law stating that any disrespect shown to the national flag, or anthem and other such symbols of a pseudo democracy, is a punishable offence!
Now I ask, is this not a contradiction? If all men are created equal, and if all have the right to say what they want, why can’t a citizen disagree with the ideal of the very nation he lives in? (I’m not saying that we piss on the flag and do other such vile, obscene things; that certainly is disrespect) I raise a simple issue if I live as a free man in a free country, why am I being forced to stand up to a song that I feel is intrinsically wrong? This is not just hypocrisy, this is deep-rooted wickedness. And ours is not the only nation that's suffering!

As strange as it may seem, I really don’t identify with nationalism, because I believe all men are the same. Why differentiate between men? Why have borders? True, people who have common culture can have the freedom to stay together if they want to, but why have rigid borders and differences on the basis of race and nationality? Or sex for that matter (no silly, not how frequently, but male or female!)?

The truth is that the priests, politicians and religious leaders want to crush your individuality! They impose all these borders and rules on you to stop you from thinking independently, from living as you want! Of course, they do all this under the garb of culture, political revolution and religion, and yes, through education. Consider this if we are truly free, why have we to adhere to the 75% attendance rule in colleges? Undoubtedly, it is the silliest rule I have seen! If I think I gain nothing from attending a particular lecture, why should I waste my time?

The point, I state again, is that we have unconsciously surrendered our lives to these pathetic morons! The goal of society is merely to create a herd, because a herd has no individuality. Animals move in herds! And all this is being done to curb your freedom. Just look at all that your politicians are saying and your priests as well. Look into it deeply and you will find that they are all out to crush your individuality.

This is not just a time pass article… This is a call to revolution against those very forces that have been oppressing us!
I know most people won’t really understand all that I have written, but if my words can create a spark in you, I shall consider myself a success. And if that spark does come, don’t thank me, thank God or Allah or Bhagwan or whatever you call this existence. May all be blessed!

WHY???????????????????????

2006-10-28T07:51:00.000-07:00

Why do I always seem to have problems with the way this world is? Why can't it be a little saner? Why do you think I'm talking like this?

Why, for starters, do I have to justify every little deed I do? Why do I have to be like the kids of my parent's friends who have flown to US? Why can't I be successful in my own way, my own right? Why is it wrong, if achieving my goals my way takes a lotta time? Why can't I be allowed to take that risk? Why before 30 do I have to be married, employed and have kids? Why isn't a live-in relationship acceptable if that's what I want? Why would an arranged marriage with an unknown someone turn out to be perfect? Why won't that unknown someone not turn out to be a psycho?

Why must my pals who have GFs and BFs suddenly seem different and changed? Why do they always land up with an evolved strain of Yoko Ono? Why then do they stick to their mobiles like leeches? Why do they have less time for finer things in life like flirt, porn, sleepovers and PS2? Why then do they only have time when they are in need of money? Why don't I believe in having a flirtatious fling just to flaunt my status? Why does wasting my precious little time and freedom on an egoistic guy, with wild airs, matter to me? Why aren't there more Drew Barrymores?

Why do we live in a hypocritical society which tries to alienate itself from new concepts, terming them Western? Why are these people the very same individuals who tease, molest or rape women? Why do certain individuals think they have to tell us what we should do and what we should not do? Why should they think they have a right to govern our lives? Why do we quietly listen to their crap and not raise a voice or simply stick a rusted, metal stick up their ass?

Why does a stupid little professor tell us what to watch and what not to watch? Why don't they realize that if they don't want to watch it they can shut the channel, TV or their God Damn Eyes? Why does the damn government always rule in their favour completely forgetting the fact that we are actually living in a democracy which if I am right gives us a right to choose? Why then because of these individuals are we deprived of good, artistic products and not to forget porn?

Why are some people cool and some not? Why doesn't everyone get it that there is no such thing as cool or uncool but simple marketing strategies to sell stuff through know faces? Why are people dumb enough to fall for that? Why don't we have preachers like Cobain anymore? Why can't we have artists like Floyd, Metallica, ACDC, and Ozzy? Why do we have to compromise on nerds like Limp Bizkit? Why do people think Julia Roberts is beautiful and Mallika Sherawat is hot? Why to me then is Julia talented but not beautiful and Mallika a loud mouth Drag Queen? Why is 'The Man' still driving our society?

Why do only half the people who read this take my thoughts seriously? Why do the rest wonder about my condition and hope I find solace in asylum? Why would some guys who read this actually perceive me to be interesting in a weird kind of way? Why would I never get to meet them? Why is the world like this? Why does it suck to be a part of it?

Why would I never find my answers and still continue to live with whatever life I'm endowed with? WHY?