Color, color what color do you choose?

Thank you very much, Sony Vaio, for coming up with such a brilliant concept. It makes me feel special every morning I turn on the television and experience the ‘vivid’ness that is me, in the myriad colors of green and red (or is it pink?). And, may I add that you would have done a great disservice to mankind had you not roped in the symbol of femininity, the size zero queen, Her Highness Kareena Kapoor herself to endorse the series.

Now that we are done with the pleasantries, can we please get down to brass tacks?

I want to bring to your kind attention the simple fact that it does not exactly sound very cool to walk into a workshop or a meeting armed with a pink laptop. And, this holds true for all populace, gender disparities notwithstanding.

In layman terms, what it translates into is this. We women do like our pink dresses, the occasional pink footwear, and the pink umbrella on a nice, bright, sunny day. Pink is a pleasant color, it definitely goes well in a bedroom setting. So, we also like our pink curtains and pink bed sheets. Some of us even like our pink teddy bears in our bedrooms. (Although I do know of some women who hate pink, at the risk of sounding stereotypical and, more importantly, to appease the male of the species, I am considering them outliers). However, that does not mean that we love parading the roads like pink fairies (ugh! sounds repulsive), with pinked gadgets.

I remember the time when my Manager was gifted a pink mobile phone by her husband of 7 years. The phone became the butt of all office jokes instantly. She is a strong woman, stood it for a full 2 days; and, then, had the panel changed to blue.

The other day, I saw a Beetle on the road, in a shocking yellow color. My colleague was most certain that it would be a woman driving it. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for me, it was a guy.

There! Now you are getting the point, perhaps? That women may not actually like weird colored gadgets but are assumed to like them because of the whole gender thingy.

I hereby humbly request the product development and marketing teams at Sony, Apple, and other geeky companies to spare us of the vividness please. We already have enough trouble trying to decide between types of gadgets, not to be burdened with the extra load of having to run an elimination algorithm based on colors.

Ruminative remembrances

As the years whiz past,
I look back at my acts, small and big
The follies, they seem to be vast
The feats just a minor swig

I rue over missed chances,
Fret over one too many a blunder,
the good fortune and time’s advances
That slipped past me in a flicker

Perhaps am being hard on my soul
A little cynicism, some more pessimism
Has made me cruel
And left me in a chasm

Some day I will reminisce
Those feats, worthy of much adulation
And hail them for my life’s bliss,
good fortune and gratification

Some day, my friend, I will reminisce
Those sweet memories and acts of innocence
That had caused much of my bliss
And bountiful joyance

But, even then, I wouldn’t understand
Whether it was folly or feat
The silly exploits of a child-like mind
That were cause for many a glorious fete.

Ramp walk model

The other day I was chatting with my friend Denzil, about my now-favorite topic, football. One thing led to another and we ended up discussing the ‘desi mentality’ of looking for masala in every situation. Well, my unwarranted interest in Octopus Paul and not the game was his single point of reference. Sigh!

Anyway, I digress, right in the beginning of the post this time.

Soon after that enlightening discussion on ‘desi mentalities’ (which I hope to dedicate a post to, some time in the future, completely credited to Denzil), I ended up asking him the quintessential ‘What’s up?’ question. Before he could even think up a reply substantiating his existence on Earth, there I was, typing away to glory, giving a detailed account of what he had done the past five days.

No, there is no correlation between my obsession with the occult octopus and my dete(du)ctive skills. Only that I have been following Facebook way too regularly, knowingly or unknowingly stalking people’s minute by minute updates on their life stories.

It is scary, at two levels so to say.

The first is to realize the level of vulnerability I am exposing myself to. All of us, am sure, have at least some 300-400 ‘friends’, most of whom we have not met in ages, who are perhaps just acquaintances, or those we met for once in our whole lifetime. Merely because of an insane need to satiate the networking hunger, we are ‘friends’ and would be aware of everything about each other on a dynamic basis.

What’s news here, so you ask. Despite knowing this, our illusionary returns seem to outweigh the risks, life goes on. And, that is why FB is such a hit anyway.

That brings me to the next fear, my biggest one about being way too well connected. It is the fear of being misunderstood with that single random update or comment that I post up there. It is as if Big Brother is watching me. Eternally. The world is following my every word on FB (I do tend to exaggerate :D). And, as I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, it is a heterogeneous world that is following me. So, each one who sees my words up there arrives at his / her own conclusion about what is running through my mind. Now, I cannot really blame anyone, for I do the same – getting judgmental based on otherwise innocuous statements that flourish out there.

The world, thanks to FB, has become one big masala newspaper, where each of us tries to figure out what is up and about in the other’s life, who has hooked up with whom and who has broken up, who has quit their jobs and who has got a transfer. Sleaze and jazz, a la filmdom, does not seem to have spared the otherwise 'aam aadmi' FB world too.

Or, perhaps, we like all the attention, being the center of attraction, be it positive or negative. And, there is some sense of purposefulness we seem to achieve out of our own little celebrity statuses, without exactly having to do a ramp walk or act in a movie!

What's the good game?

Now that Brazil and Argentina are already out of the game, Germany has lost royally to Spain and the fever is finally going to end this Sunday, am heaving a sigh of relief.

Oh my! What a season it has been.

If you are expecting me to write about the season and if that happens to be the sole reason why you are reading this post, I would suggest you stop right here. No such ‘useful’ things happen on this blog. Ever. Resume your search for WC analysis elsewhere on the web.

On the other hand, if you are one of those people who know for sure that I have jack of an idea about any sport in the world, welcome. You are on the right page.

Getting back to the point, it has been a disappointing season for me. Of rejection that is. My friends have refused to meet, pick up calls, or go for movies because ‘QFs are happening this week’ or ‘SF is happening tonight’. They could have just listened to Mr. Paul’s prediction and saved themselves a lot of precious time, me thinks!

I know what’s running through your mind right now.

No, I am not that nerd who just studied and studied all the way through school and college and B-school. It is just that I never got around to doing all the fun sports that I should have ideally done, or followed at the very least. Today, it would have stood me in good stead at office cafeterias and friends’ meets.

Alas! (ruing missed opportunities)

However, is it ever too late to learn? To learn without watching a single match or even TV for that matter (though I am told one doesn’t need a TV to watch these things)?

So, I have consciously started collecting snippets of information through chat conversations with ever-willing-to-impart-knowledge football fans (when they are not busy following ‘em matches). That is how I know that “Del Bosque needs to do something upfront to ensure that Spain wins the WC” (I initially thought he is a player, not a coach :P) and that “Torres has not found his rhythm till now” (I did not even dare to think who he might be, 0.99 is the probability that I would be wrong).

So, there! Now, I too can talk the Cup talk, don’t you dare try scaring me away from coffee table conversations any more with all your ‘football’nical jargon!

P.S. I am really feeling bad for Paul, looks like he won’t survive the season.

Fear of GOD

I have many a time wondered how easy it is to scare people.

Terror strikes, bomb scares, kidnapping, homicides – all these sure put fear in to people’s heads. But, they are coupled with in depth planning or extensive damage to public and private property or both.

What is the easier way to put that fear in to people? To keep them on tenterhooks, not knowing what would happen next? To make them look around with stricken eyes, restless thoughts and a readiness to bolt and run at the simplest sound?

Call a strike.

In a span of two years, I have had my fair share of strikes in this city. The reasons have been many – fuel price increase, arrests of noted political personas, regional disfavors. However, the result has consistently been the same.

Fear and panic.

So, whenever I have got into a vehicle during any of these occasions, the driver has always asked me, in rare concern, ‘Akele jaa rahe hai aap?’, and then proceeded to bolt all the doors from the inside and roll up the windows – even those rickety old taxis where locking is of no use and the windows no longer roll up.

I very badly need to digress here to provide some unwarranted information.

I hate dependencies. For instance, I hate having to wait for someone to pick me up and drop me. I would much rather prefer getting out of my house and finding some public transport that would take me wherever I want to go. That is one big reason why I love Mumbai much more than, say, a Gurgaon.

On a similar note, I hate having to curb and foil my plans, ‘voluntarily’ of course, because someone decided somewhere that normal life should be disrupted. I become fiercely defensive at such times. Wanting to rebel and prove a point to no one in particular, one of these days, I might just step out despite all warnings and go wherever I am scheduled to go, as if nothing is wrong with the world at large.

Today, despite not being crazy enough to do something like that, I had some other reasons and more importantly, the right support systems, to venture out and, as a result, got a chance to write this –

The roads were empty, sunny and wide
But, there were policemen on the side,
And, a bandh with no taxis to ride,
And, a bandh with no taxis to ride.

I also got to see that fear again in people’s eyes, the same one I saw on television during 26/11 days. Yet, it did not take much doing. No guns, no bombs, no terrorists taking the sea route, no demolition plans. Just one simple ‘Bharat Bandh’ to show “solidarity”, a solidarity that would ensure that stones are pelted on transport systems, shops are shut down for no rhyme or reason. And, that 10% of Mumbai's populace which has traveled defying all odds would be shivering inside office cabins, not knowing how it will get back home.

Then again, we need to be rational and reasonable. Life is full of trade offs and we get only an assorted deal if we want to enjoy the luxuries of a developing, democratic country. Like how we are entitled to elect our favorite candidates, write and speak whatever we want to and migrate freely across the country, unlike some of our dear Asian neighbors, we are also at liberty to call our own bandhs and strikes and ensure general disruption of life.