End of a decade!

So we all are one day away from celebrating a decade of existence in the 21st century. I still vividly remember 2000. (When you start remembering what you had done 10 years ago, like you did it yesterday it just means one thing – you are old with a Capital ‘O’). The Y2K bug was the talk of the town. Apocalypse was predicted. The world as we knew it, was gonna end. Huh! Nothing happened.

2000 was the year I got my first computer (Ok, technically it was bought for my sister, but I guess I messed around with it more than she did!). And I still remember the specs – A Pentium II 350 MHz (I wasn’t an AMD fan boy then), 32MB SD RAM, a SiS Graphics card with 2 MB on board memory, Creative Sound Blaster 16 bit ISA Soundcard, Creative Infra 32x CD-ROM Drive, a 4.3 GB Seagate HDD, 15” CRT monitor and Windows 98. Thumb drives did not exist then. We had to use floppy discs to transfer data :) !! I had not seen the internet and I did not own a mobile phone! I can’t believe its been a decade already. 10 years of playing with computers. TV was my only source of entertainment other than playing (real games that involved physical activity :) !! outside!)

Anyway before I give you all further dose of my nostalgia, on this day, I hope you reflect on what you have achieved (or not) in the last 10 years. I hope you all have a great 2010! Thank you for being with me all this while :) !!

Ants for breakfast

So I have been having ants dipped in warm milk as breakfast for a while. Before you jump to conclusions, let me explain. I kinda forgot to close my packet of cornflakes properly one day, and in no time I had an ant colony infestation.

Being from the land of the great Gandhi, I tried to be nice and left the packet open for a while to let the ants get out non-violently. I also displayed a small protest-signboard which read “Please leave my breakfast! Thank you for your cooperation.” But to my utter dismay, that just got more of their relatives in. Now I had more ants to deal with.

My mom has this habit of seeing the National Geographic channel while eating lunch or dinner. So while we are busy eating scrambled egg, a big ugly snake is happily munching away on frog eggs on the television (I had the wicked idea of putting the image right here in my blog, but then I figured it might be disturbing for some people. So here is the link for people who are interested :) !! Have you noticed that frog eggs look like pearl tapioca ;) ).

I have gotten so used to seeing other species feasting on something gross while I am eating, that I guess I wouldn’t mind sitting across the table while a bunch of hyenas feast on a dead deer. I have also grown immune to seeing dead insects (yeah that includes cockroaches) in my food (thanks to have regularly eaten canteen food in India and abroad) that they have stopped bothering me as well.

All in all, this is my daily routine now -

1. Warm the milk for 2.5 minutes in the microwave
2. Open the box of cornflakes and pour the cornflakes along with the ants into the warm milk
3. Merrily watch the ants die of burns the instant they land in the milk
4. Have breakfast
5. Burp!

Ok. I am not that carnivorous. I have discovered that ant corpses float on milk. So you can use the spoon and sieve them out without having to actually eat them. But I hope you get the idea :) !!

Update: I can’t believe this post of mine would have generated so much controversy. Its supposed to be a joke! I do not eat ants, neither do I watch them die. The blog post was a fragment of my imagination when I saw ants entering my cornflakes box!

How to hurt your brand?!!

So an international ice-cream brand decided to open its stores in India. It also decided that it will segment itself as “premium” ice-cream brand from a foreign country. Hmm, well that sells, so far so good. Seeing the success of my neighborhood Mc Donald’s over the amazing Udupi Restaurant, I must say it would work. And in their teaser campaign they say “Exclusive preview for International Travelers” and “Access restricted only to holders of international passports”.

That my dear is a sure public relations disaster in India. Its like putting your own foot along with the rest of your body into your own mouth! I can only pity the marketing genius who came up with that idea. I think in any Marketing 101 course in India the first thing that should be taught is – never discriminate in India based on location, language, religion, nationality, sex, age, color, pets, cars, clothes, spectacles, mobile phones or anything that can be remotely thought to hurt our sentiments :) !!

I can’t imagine how they are gonna recover from this. It will be interesting to see how the company tries to apologize and cover this thing up. Will make a good marketing disaster case study in B-schools all around the world.

This also reminds me of a famous designer’s rumored comment “If I knew that blacks and Asians were going to wear my clothes, I would have never designed them”. To verify whether it was correct, I looked this thing upon Snopes, and apparently it is false.

And then today, in the world of YouTube, you can verify whatever you want .. so here is the video which lays to rest all speculations about it..

I don’t know what took him 10 years to come on her show and confess that. His publicist should have tried to cover this up like a decade ago. Cause when I had heard it way back in 2000, my young impressionable mind resolved to never use the brand ever in my life (Unlike some other very expensive designer brands, this particular brand potentially has people like me in their target market). Now, that I bet was the resolve of many other impressionable minds like me. Well, frankly speaking, I don’t think we really make a big market to actually affect the sales of such big brands. But still its a disaster I must say.

Wasabi

Have been feasting on a lot of sushi in my life lately and I thought I dedicate a blog post to the wonder herb “Wasabi”. Being an Indian used to eating Medu Vada (Vadai for the Singaporeans) dipped in a bowl full of coriander chutney, I had to specially adapt to eating a tiny morsel of wasabi elegantly stirred in soy sauce considering that wasabi can be easily mistook for the yummy chutney. However, that is where the similarity ends.

Three of my friends I bet can still recall the horror of gulping down a mouthful of wasabi in the friendly neighborhood Benihana only to be snickered at by the helpful waiters while they were crying and grasping for breath. Wasabi is something that can easily give you the feeling of seeing stars in front of your eyes, and I have experienced it many times when I eagerly dip sushi in the soy sauce only to later realize that I hadn’t stirred the wasabi that well.

For me, sushi has been an acquired taste. I couldn’t stand the taste of seaweed for a long while but now somehow I have started liking the odd taste that it got. I still however haven’t graduated to eating raw fish and sashimi. So I guess some of you veteran sushi eaters still look down upon me :)

Update (01/19/2010): I came across this website that has made a nice info graphic for people to eat sushi the “right” way. May be this might help you in your quest to eat sushi the next time around….

Christmas Songs

Singapore has already started celebrating the arrival of Christmas for close to a month now. The streets have been decorated, the malls are having fake snow-falls, Christmas trees and East-Asian Santas every where (I bet most sport a six-pack below that pillow they stuff over their stomach) and the atmosphere generally is festive and happy. So I have been trying to get into the “happy” mood lately by listening to Christmas songs :) !!

Christmas songs always give me that “holiday” feeling even though I don’t really have a vacation in sight. Anyways, I have been digging through my Christmas songs collection and came across the song “Santa Baby” as covered by various artists. I think this is one song that I have heard covered by most number of people (of course after Unchained Melody, which I have lost count of number of cover versions it has!). My favorite rendition is the one done by Kylie Minogue. She makes it more naughty than the others (yeah and that was my opinion even before I saw the video!). So here are the lyrics and here is the song for your listening pleasure…

Alternative Medicine

It all started with a sore throat. All my sore throats result in a full blown flu which then refuses to go away for a while. So I press the panic button the day I get a sore throat. Over the period of several years, I have figured that the easiest way to get over your sore throat is to have hot & hot – hot (as in warm) drinks and hot (as in chilly spice hot) food. Top it up with a gargle of a mouth-wash before you go off to sleep, and more often than not you are good to go the next day.

So off I went on my quest to cure myself of the sore throat. A friend of mine suggested that having the hottest noodles in the local Thai Express should do the trick. The noodles were as close to eating raw chilies as we could get. I cried through the ordeal and drank like a gallon of water. Not only did my entire throat burn, but so did my stomach (for hours later).

And then next day morning, my body setup a super efficient supply chain, the one in which there was no wait-time between input and output. The digestive system started giving output even without any input. And in all this mess, I also cut my foot while running around.

So now I am in bed with my foot resting over my body with a grumbling stomach which is not happy about the chilies I put in it yesterday. And the sore throat remains….

Cardinal Sin

I confess, I have sinned. I have given myself in to gluttony. Not once or twice, but for 3 continuous weeks. That is 15 days and at least 30 cookies down the throat, through my stomach and into the love handles to last me for eternity. I can't resist eating these biscuits and have been eating minimum 2 everyday, each time consoling myself that this is the last one I am ever eating again. I finally decided I confess my sin and tell you guys something about it. I am also putting up a picture of the addiction for all of you to drool over. Amazingly addictive and I bet laden with enough fat and sugar to fuel a gasoline car from New York to San Francisco.

I am waiting for the day when scientists discover ways to convert the fat stored in our body to oil. I will be a billionaire overnight…

LHC

A friend of mine forwarded me this link about things going wrong with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). For the ignorant (that includes me too) the LHC is the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator that will be used to conduct some life changing but dangerous physics experiments. One of the highly publicized experiments is for the determination of the existence of something named as Higgs boson. That particle will help us explain the origin of the universe and rest of it is way too difficult for me to understand. If you read that particle as “Higg’s bosom” don’t fret, it just means that you are a guy. Go read the statement again, it should be clearer this time.

Now coming back to the article. It talks about the theory that the LHC was not functioning properly (until about last week) because people in the future already know the disastrous circumstances of constructing the LHC and accordingly, are sending back time travelers to thwart our attempt of building it. If the plot sounds familiar, you have seen Terminator (the movie) many times before!

Now I have always believed that time travel is not possible. That’s cause like I have quoted Stephen Hawking before "Time travel might be possible, but if that is the case, why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?" However the article kinda made me sit up and realize that we are indeed overrun by tourists from the future! Its just that they don’t reveal themselves as being from the future.

How else do you explain the wealth made by a very few individuals. Don’t tell me that Warren Buffett understands the stock market better than the guy next door. Also don’t  tell me that Steve Jobs can predict what people are gonna like next. All the great men and women in this world are nothing but time travelers. If you wanna be like them, don’t work hard, just find a guy with a time machine, and go back in time to make money and be the next genius! Didn’t I tell you, given enough free time, I can figure out all mysteries in our lives…

Gloomy Days

Every once in a while a day comes when I do - nothing. Nothing as in – nothing. I don't get outta bed in the morning and get on with my life. I just ponder around the whole day thinking about the bigger things in life. What am gonna do next and all the general nonsense that we are expected to plan. Today happened to be one of those days when I really wished we came with expiry dates (I read that blog post of mine again today, and I can’t believe that I was as good at bull$hitting pre-MBA, as I am now :) !!).

Its always been very difficult for me to lead my life without a purpose. After all, when we look at life through the perspective of greater scheme of things, we are here for nothing (yeah I know I have made a few of you sit and listen to my whining about our worthlessness ;) !!). So unless we set goals for ourselves, we are heading towards nowhere, which eventually we all anyway are.

Well, I don’t know why I wrote this blog post. Probably I will delete it later. As I wait for this day to get over, I felt like writing this out to you. Tomorrow will be a better day, it always is. Its always better to think short-term rather than plan for the future. Long-term plans have so much uncertainty that they never work out.

Finally, seeing 2012 yesterday seems to have had a deep impact on my rather impressionable mind. 21st December 2012 is not far away ;) !! You have 3 years to go to the ark :) !! That reminds me, the sad part of the movie was – no Indian was thought worthy enough to be saved and put on the ark to be part of the new world. So much for being 1 in 6 of the world population today!

Brr

The place where I am interning now used to be an artificial polar bear habitat before. So its not just cold, its freezing. Freezing as in brr…. freezing. And I guess polar bears like it when there is wind chill, so the air conditioner is strategically positioned to give a blast of cold air on my head.

 
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I carry my winter jacket to office everyday and if that is not enough, now I have to cover my ears and nose as well. So much for sustainability!! Not only are they wasting precious energy cooling a human being as if he is a polar bear but also they are increasing their water and paper consumption.

How you ask? Well, so much cold makes me pee every hour. And peeing is accompanied by flushing, washing and drying hands. So there goes a paper towel, and at least 30 liters of water every hour for minimum of 8 hours. Now you calculate!

That also reminds me that the water taps in the basin are “automatic”. In simple terms they are made extremely difficult to use so that at times you wanna just break the damn tap. The sensors are strategically placed so that no amount of waving your hands in all the weird ways in front of the tap satisfies them. You actually have to do a ceremonial dance in which you put your left hand in (the basin), then the right hand and then wiggle your butt till the tap is happy. Then it sputters an ounce of water on your fingers and shuts itself off till you repeat the sequence again. As you have rightly guessed, I spend more time dancing in the loo than sitting at my place!