Monday, October 27, 2008

License to Anagrammatize

All of us would have experienced some form of waiting in our lives be it the ticketing counter at a railway station or the waiting room in a clinic. What does one do when one is “in the process”?

Having spent my childhood in the still evolving India of the late 80s and early 90s, I had no access to mobile phones, leave alone iPods. So, I would be armed with a book whenever I was headed for an expected-to-be “queued” place including hospitals and passport offices. But, there were times when I was not adequately warned and so I would turn up at such places with absolutely nothing to do and lots of time to kill.

I do not possess the most important skills required in such situations
a) Sketching, drawing and other variations of this art-form (in fact in school I used to pray that art class get cancelled and we be allowed to go to the library instead)
b) Playing running-and-catching with other kids in the queue or waiting area (Games class was another one of those in school which I would strive to bunk)
c) Observing people (this is ongoing trouble as I am not even 1% a good listener and observer as a talker)

So in such tricky situations, I would rummage through my mother’s handbag and get a piece of paper and a pen and start writing. Usually, I would bite and chew the pen in an attempt to write a poem which would be very diligently transferred to my poetry book once I got back home. But, one can write only as much in such an environment, filled with people worried and grumbling and wanting to go home soon. I tried my hands at story writing as well, but realized soon enough that it is just not my forte.

Then was I introduced to this brilliant game in school. It was some form of Anagrams, but I fail to remember the name now. For instance, from the word “Anagrams”, I needed to make as many words as I could like gram, ran, sang etc. The catch was that I could use a letter in the word I formed only as many number of times as it was used in the root word.

And, so, in any queue, I would take a word from a poster around me, preferably a long one and preferably having an ‘S’ and start making words from it. The longer the size of the word, the more letters there were to choose from and hence the more the number of words I could arrive at. Also, if the word had an ‘S’ it just made it easier to make plurals of the same word like run, runs, bun, buns, rub, rubs etc. from a root word like “burns”.

As time went by, I made the game stricter for myself. First, I banned pluralized words from the resultant set. Then, I introduced another rule that allowed only words of size not less than four in the resultant set.

I also started playing different versions of the game with improvisations like:

A) Forming whole words or phrases from the root word
  1. Deliver -> Relived
  2. Update -> Tap Due
  3. Respond -> Ponders
  4. Industry -> Try usin' d

B) Extracting sub words from the root word which mean the same as the root
  1. Deceased -> Dead
  2. Hectare -> Acre (not exactly the same meaning, but such ‘anagrammatic license’ is allowed in my game :))
  3. Stripe -> Strip
  4. Strip -> Rip
This game comes in handy even now, when I sit in a class which I do not feel like listening to, when I am stuck in a lecture hall where I should not have been, when I am in a taxi in a sea of traffic. It calms down my nerves and helps me be at peace with a very shifty, pained and irritated ‘queue-world’ maybe because it involves a little bit of concentration and hence provides the required distraction, or maybe because it helps me live in my own world of words, a world I love so much.

Monday, October 13, 2008

GROWTH

You know that you have grown older when
• In the Saraswathi Puja, your cheque books and files replace books and note books
• You start waiting for the beginning of month instead of term holidays and summer holidays
• You look at that young adolescent couple on the road with the eyes of a veteran chuckling to yourself, “Kids!”
• You work towards project deadlines during weekends rather than doing homework
• You start keeping track of the amount of money you earn instead of the CGPA you get
• You do not look forward to your birthday anymore ‘cos not withstanding all those celebrations you are growing OLDER BY A YEAR

You know that you have not grown up when
• You look forward to every festivity solely because of all those sweets you will get to eat
• You still get up at 11 in the morning on a lazy Sunday afternoon with not a worry in the world
• You discuss that handsome guy on the road with your childhood friend with the same excitement you had as an adolescent
• Your mom still packs lunch in the same lunch box to office that you took to college
• You still fight with your friends over silly, trivial issues like “Why did you not call me back that day”
• You still look forward to your birthday not withstanding that older by a year part ‘cos of the rich chocolate cake you are going to eat

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

And badly in need of a nice, witty tagline

This is another of those tagline posts, and, yeah, I am obsessed with taglines. I somehow get very excited when I update my GTalk with some tagline that I perceive to be witty, either mine or stolen. For instance, my most recent stolen witty tagline (with due credits to ‘A Suitable Boy’ by Vikram Seth) goes like this:
“I know that I am indecisive, but he takes the cake. Or, rather, he doesn’t even know whether he should.”

I am not just smitten with my own babies, as I call them, but also painstakingly read through the taglines of each of my friends on GTalk. And I respond to them in different ways depending on the person and the tagline.
• If it is a close friend and if the tagline is happy or sad or witty or K-Max, I ping them and tell them so.
• If it is a close friend and I am in a mood to play, I reply to the tagline with a tagline of my own and the game continues.
• If it is an acquaintance, I just put a tagline which is a response to his/ her tagline and find it very entertaining that the other person has not realized that I am having fun at his/ her expense. For instance:
Acquaintance’s tagline – What to do when there is lots to do?
My tagline – Err.. not capable of much, uh?
• If the tagline has grammatical or spelling errors, I do not care whether it is a close friend or an acquaintance. I just ping them and tell them. It just breaks my poor, little heart to see wrong English up there.

The tagline world is a world by itself. It is a world that comes to my rescue when I have totally given up on life, whether out of boredom or out of ‘running away to the Himalayas’ level emotions. It gives me the opportunity to talk something with people I just want to keep in touch with but do not have a particular subject to talk about except for the same old monotonous things like “How is work?”, “How is life?”, “How is Delhi/ Bangalore/ Chennai/ Singapore/ Switzerland/ whatever treating you?”

The other day, I had “105!” as my tagline and people were pinging me trying to guess what it could mean. Someone said I was running a temperature; someone else thought it was a countdown. Good fun it was. I was actually trying to show off that I had to read a 105 page document in very little time and evoke some sympathy for the same. But, when the explanations were made, my friend just said, “That’s why you are screened through CAT. The RCs test whether you would have the patience to sit and read so much.” :-(

For the past few days, I have been hunting for a nice tagline that would suit my personality. Yes, I firmly believe that one should not copy – paste taglines just for the sake of trying to sound cool. The tagline should really reflect the kind of person one is. For instance, I would never be able to bring myself to put “Winners do not quit and quitters do not win”, for I do not believe in it. I feel that I should quit when I am fairly certain of not winning. And, even more importantly I would not want to put a proverb that has been around for ages. What kind of “value add” am I providing to the society blah blah! Well, putting something like “105!” is not much of “value add”, I agree. But, it at least provides other incentives like catching up with people etc. (Like many others, I put an etc. when I am not able to come up with any more tangible benefits, examples etc.).

Coming back to the topic, as a part of my hunt for taglines, I had put a tagline saying, “And badly in need of a nice, witty tagline”. Three people took the pains to figure out nice, witty taglines for my sake. Thanks all! And, I am not going to share the taglines here for fear of losing exclusive rights on them. I have made the mistake before with
15 odd taglines given out for public consumption. These days, I am marginally smarter. I can maybe share the fourth guy’s idea which was that I should just put a plain K as tagline. K2U, Vinay Vasan Badri.

Taglines rock!

Update:Vikrant wants due credit for being one of those three guys who took pains to give me a rocking tagline.. sigh.. the perils! And let me also give due credits to the other two who gave me rocking taglines, Jags and Denzil! Thanks guys!