150 Things To Do Before You Turn Thirty

The rules of the tag are,

• Bold for things you have already done.
• Italics for things that you are dying to do!

An American list though it is, here I go!!

1. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
2. Swam with dolphins
3. Climbed a mountain
4. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
5. Been inside the Great Pyramid
6. Held a tarantula
7. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
8. Hugged a tree
9. Bungee jumped
10. Visited Paris
11. Watched a lightning storm at sea
12. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
13. Seen the Northern Lights
14. Gone to a huge sports game
15. Walked the stairs to the top of the Eiffel
16. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
17. Touched an iceberg
18. Slept under the stars
19. Changed a baby’s diaper
20. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
21. Watched a meteor shower
22. 😛
23. Gotten drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run six
36. Danced like a fool and didn’t care who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two six hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 29 states
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
44. Watched whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Taken a midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Played touch football
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theatre
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played for more than 6 hours straight
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Enjoyed hostel life
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted the Snake River
82. Saved someone’s life
83. Been on a television news program as an “expert”
84. Gotten flowers for no reason
85. Performed on stage
86. Been to Las Vegas
87. Recorded music
88. Eaten shark
89. Kissed on the first date
90. Gone to Thailand
91. Bought a house
92. Been in a combat zone
93. Buried Cremated someone close
94. Been on a cruise ship
95. Spoken more than one language fluently
96. Performed in Rocky Horror
97. Raised children
98. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
99. Passed out cold
100. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
101. Picked up and moved to another city to start over
102. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
103. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking with the windows open
104. Had plastic surgery
105. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
106. Wrote articles for a large publication
107. Lost over 100 pounds
108. Held someone while they were having a flashback
109. Piloted an airplane
110. Caused a car accident
111. Touched a stingray
112. Broken someone’s heart
113. Helped an animal give birth
114. Won money on a TV game show
115. Broken a bone
116. Gone on an African photo safari
117. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
118. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
119. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
120. Ridden a horse
121. Had major surgery
122. Had a snake as a pet
123. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
124. Slept for 30 hours in a 48 hour period
125. Visited more foreign countries than Indian States
126. Visited all 7 continents
127. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
128. Eaten kangaroo meat
129. Eaten sushi
130. Had your picture in the newspaper
131. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
132. Gone back to school
133. Parasailed
134. Touched a cockroach
135. Eaten fried tomatoes
136. Read The Iliad and The Odyssey
137. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
138. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
139. Skipped all your school reunions
140. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
141. Been elected to public office
142. Written your own computer language
143. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
144. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
145. Built your own PC from parts
146. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
147. Had a booth at a street fair
148. Dyed your hair
149. Been a DJ
150. Shaved your head

Current count: 77

Update:  90. Gone to Thailand – check. Count: 78

Tag – Tonty nosey Qs

1. If your lover betrayed you, what will your reaction be?
Call her husband! And recommend Harvard case studies to be read every night.

2. If you can have a dream come true, what would it be?
Slow the Time fella.

3. Whose butt would you like to kick?
Butt of Butt – the bugger seems to always score only against India. And all finance professors.

4. What would you do with a billion dollars?
Bring it down to a million.

5. Will you fall in love with your best friend?
Er- isn’t being best friends the whole point about this love thing?

6. Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?
The narcissist me says I’m comfy with either – both would mean the same.

7. How long do you intend to wait for someone you love?
I the don’t the believe the in the propose-pester-pine plaintive. I’ll leave it to Kathir and Mohan. Two people in love wouldn’t even need to propose, let alone pester or pine.

8. If the person you secretly like is attached, what will you do?
Spam their Orkut scrapbook with ‘make fraandship’ requests. Yeah, I’m that evil.

9. If you could root for one social cause, what would it be?
More sleep for MBA ‘participants’.

10. What takes you down the fastest?
The railing on the hostel stairs (esp at 9.29am).

11. Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
Hopefully in PGP-2, the way my quizzes are going.

12. What’s your fear?
Right now? That Hariya would turn up on DC and run a search on Finance Assignments.

13. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
PGP Office material. Definitely.

14. Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?
Single, filthy rich, and living in.

15. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
Wipe the drool and mutter a “Sorry Professor”. Or is it the other way around?

16. If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who will you pick?
The richer one. I’ve got the brains and the beauty (and of course truckloads of modesty).

17. Would you give all in a relationship?
Alimonies weren’t covered in my Legal Aspects of Business course.

18. Would you forgive and forget someone no matter how horrible a thing he has done?
Lies, fights, betrayals – YES. Most are anyway situational, transactional, contextual or ephemeral in the long run. Hogging the TV remote – NO.

19. Do you prefer being single or in a relationship?
In a single relationship.

20. List of 6 people to tag:

I’m Booked!

1) One book that changed your life.
The Book of Registration of Births at the Taj Hospital, Madurai. Now, if only the nurses hadn’t been so enchanted by my spell-binding beauty even at that early stage of my life and had switched me with that nice family who drove up in 2 Contessas (mid-1980s, remember)…

2) One book that you have read more than once.

I’ve read this like a hundred times but am yet to find anything remotely ‘automatic’ about it or successfully do anything other than boil milk with it.

3) One book you would want on a desert island.
Ok, I’ll leave it to you, which one is it – a desert, an island, or a deserted island? But the next time, don’t you dare talk to me in oxymorons you big oxy moron. An Idiot’s Guide to Survival would do, but then since I’m not not too keen on trusting someone who calls himself an idiot, a Playboy would do nicely, especially if the rescue ship’s gonna take some time coming.

4) One book that made you laugh.
The Kamasutra. No, seriously. If figuring out the eerie gymnastic poses and circus positions for you-know-what doesn’t have you in splits, the TOI referring to India as the land of the KS every time something remotely related to censor boards or PDAs comes up is bound to give you tummy aches.

5) One book that made you cry.
Digital Image Processing – Rafael C. Gonzalez and Richard E. Woods.
I had this with me for the open-book internal test. For the Antenna and Wave Propagation paper.

6) One book you wish you’d written.

7) One book you wish had been written.
How to kill people who pass you tags on blogs.

8) One book you wish had never been written.
My college syllabus book.
Honestly. If ever there was a set of printed matter that was of no use to anyone concerned, this is it. An autonomous syllabus meant that entire Malvinos and Millman-Halkias’ came up as just one subject paper. And then the semester questions were either make-you-think-coz-I-can’t types or taken out of the reference research material that the said authors had used.

9) Two books you are currently reading.
Illustrated Secrets of Lock Picking – Steven M. Hampton
The Dumbest Moments in Business History – Adam Horowitz and the Editors of Business 2.0
~ both pirated e-copies of course.

10) One book you’ve been meaning to read.
Basics of Java. After almost 3 years of working on it and other assorted related stuff, I’m yet to get around to sitting down on this.

Who says only sharing of pirated books is nirvana. Booking their next post with this book tag for :
Curious : As always, the aadu!
Markiv : For going over to the dark side with wordpress.
Crazybugga : Knock, knock. Machi, you read books?
justme : The one guy I know who reads a lot of off-beat stuff. Should be interesting.
Raakesh : My future co-author. Someday machi, someday.

25 things Venus should have learnt from Mars!

In direct collision-inciting response to this :). Remember Curious, you started it.

~ Pink is not a colour!
~ The weight matters?
~ Reverse gear is never near the first gear. And that car in the rear-view is not in front of you.
~ “Just Looking” exists.
~ The label on the inner sole of a super-tight (and super-expensive) pair of heels doesn’t have to match with the colour, texture and lustre of the bit of metal on the hair band.
~ The power button in the TV remote is not technology.
~ “Chumma dhan irukaen” is not a verb.
~ Shopping is NOT a sport/hobby/pastime/work/chore/entertainment and is NOT supposed to be done just because you’re depressed/happy/sad/alive. Daddy pavam, Hubby pavam.
~ Matter movies are a genre of movies.
~ Homework assignments don’t necessarily need to be done.
~ A handbag shouldn’t weigh the same as a dumbbell.
~ The icecream and chocolates taken in the first 20 yrs contribute to the kgs in the next 20.
~ Sports transcends life.
~ Computers are easy to operate.
~ How to lie without your eyes darting all around the place.
~ The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Everyone knows that. Everyone except that bleddy microwave.
~ Considering you the MOST important thing is absolutely different from thinking you’re the ONLY important thing.
~ A home isn’t required to be maintained like a museum. That bit of graffiti on the wall or the bit of sauce spilt on the couch is not worth the emotional melodrama.
~ Tears shouldn’t be used this frequently. Even if they always work.
~ It’s not required to “Choooo Chweeeet” every pink-faced bundle below 5 yrs you set eyes upon.
~ The above point also goes for ’em guys Maddy and Hrithik. (also check this and this for a former chweetie).
~ One can’t score goals in cricket. And Azharuddin is no more the captain.
~ If you don’t want an answer, then why ask the question?
~ Backbenchers are humans too.
~ “I don’t know” IS a real answer!
~ Men are smart(er). Period. :-p

Smack in the Middle!

Traitor! Dhrogi! Et tu brutus! Sourav Ganguly! Markiv!
Of all the stupid tags and memes existing on this planet….

The rules of the tag are:
~1. The rules must be mentioned in the beginning of the tag.
You’ll have to get to the wise guy who started this tag if you want this at the beginning.
~2. You must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
~3. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

One of the greatest idiosyncrasies of being Tamil is that we don’t have a surname (atleast most of us). And if we don’t have a last name, that means we can’t have a middle name because, as the word ‘middle’ implies, it has to be between some others. This, inspite of the word being the most influential in India – from the poor-but-honourable middle-class of our movies to the ubiquitous middle-man for marriages and examinations to the great Indian middle-order that sometimes has 11 members in it.

And of course me being Thamizh, and very much at that, I don’t have a surname. This has been increasingly causing me major problems though, most recently when they kept calling out my dad’s name at the visa interview and I kept waiting to see who shared his name. I’d like to get my hands on the dude who had this idea to pass on his name to his son and then to his and so on. Insane idea, I tell you. Pointless. Unnecessary. I even remember the day I first came across the damn surname word, in my 3rd std vacation when I was reading the next year’s English non-detail – The Children of the New Forest *.

* An excellent book, even though it was a part of Macmillan’s list of abridged classics; I still have it in a carton back home. Centred around the 17th Century civil war, there was also a lot about Roundheads – a word that I took a fancy to and the little me went around rolling the word off my tongue although it used to make me think of Narasimha Rao for some strange reason. Almost like engal thalaivar Goundamani’s “Thaenga thalaiya” and “Dappa Mandaiya“. Or “Tupperware Mandaiya“.

Question to Self : The tag is supposed to be about middle names!
Answer by Self : I know, I know. But how else am I gonna mask the fact that I’m not going to actually write what the tag asks to.

And, my name, rather unfortunately, doesn’t have a ‘Thirumalairenga Vigneshwara Warnakulasuriya Rajamanikanda‘ before or after (as one of my schoolmates did), so that I could have impressed thee with high-tech fundaas on calculating the mean, median, mode of the words in my name to arrive at the middle one.

Now, the tag also says I can cook up a middle name (the lengths that some go to, I tell you). But then having a middle name will mean I’ll now end up with 3 words in my name because of which the last name will become the last-name, if you know what I mean. And this is so against the preachings of Thiruvalluvar and Avvaiyar and goes against all things that are quintessentially Tamil. Having a middle-name AND a last-name! Not even our Gods have such luxuries. Krishna, Aiyappa, Ganesha, Siva, Brahma, Muruga – you name ’em. Think of our stars – MGR, Sivaji, Ajith, Vijay, Surya, Vadivelu, Vivek, Shakeela. Or our poets – Bharathiyar, Bharathidasan, Kannadhasan, Vaali, Vairamuthu, TR. Or our politicians. Or our heroineees. Or our freedom fighters. Do you see a Kapur or a Mehta or a Patel anywhere? Or more than a word as the name? NO sirrreeee! And so I’m not going to cook up a middle name for myself too. Thamizhan da naan.

Whew! Epdi ellam escape aaga vaendirukku!

But if there’s one thing that I’d dearly dearly love to see, it would be the ‘H’ being remembered by all you cusses out there who persist in omitting it when typing out my name. Ever since the day I stepped out of the comfort of the Tamil desam I’ve had to carry this curse. Which makes me mad, as in M-A-D mad at all you northies who want to have names with strange phonetics. After more than 2 years, my company still persists in calling me Santosh Khanna – the ‘H’ being moved from next to the ‘T’ in Santhosh to next to the ‘K’ in Kanna. Now I know how Anita would have felt in college. Please note that there’s no ‘H’ after the ‘T, which means she’s not a southie by origin, and so differs rather significantly from the Anithas we’re used to.
“Hi Anitha”
“It’s Anita. Ta. Anita.”
“Yeah! Duh! Yeah Anitha”
“No, it NOT AnitHa. It’s Anita. Anita Kumar!”
“Uh! Umm! Sure! Anita Kumari”
“NO! NOT KumarI. KumaR! Anita KumaRrrr!”
I still agree with the ‘Kumari’ one though. It goes against all instincts in Tamil to think a girl can carry a ‘Kumar’ as her name, surname though it is. And so it persisted all through her college life – the AnitHa KumarI who wasn’t quite. And I’m fast catching up with her on this! So please guys!

Now, onto the third rule, which I somehow think I’m going to be very happy doing.
Passing the tag along in exactly the same way surnames were passed on – scapegoats :
Curious : The perpetual aadu
Markiv : Nobody told me I can’t tag the tagger back
Raakesh : I know you’re gonna kill me for this.
Crazybugga : For questioning me on the sanity of comment moderation
Calculus : Cheerio man! Get back to English writing!

Tag – 10 things I miss about the 90’s

When you’re asked to compare any two entities and to come up with the nice things of only one of them, the other always comes out looking bad. My guess is this post is going to be no different since the tag is about what I ‘miss’ about the nineties and so the current decade may start looking like you’d rather be in a 11 hour bus journey with the air conditioning down and forced to watch 3 Simbu movies on the trot (happened to me yesterday).
Also, all that I’m listing in this post are more toward the latter part of the nineties, unless you want to hear about my black slate, red crayons and my 1st standard English Miss. And inspite of your rather kind responses to this previous tag, which was purportedly entertaining and so masked the fact that I’d scooted around the tricky questions, I’m afraid this one’s also gonna be devoid of any ‘Up Close and Personal’ stuff, which means I’m not going to be talking about my 4th std best friend or the rasam rice that my benchmate used to bring in my 6th. So, here goes, in no particular order ….

~~ School projects in the pre-internet, pre-MSOffice era used to be done on these brown-paper scrapbooks, with carefully pasted pictures and handwritten notes. For most people the only source of pictures used to be the black and white ones in The Hindu and the Re.1 picture charts (locations of special stores that stocked special or limited editions were more highly guarded than, say, Ganguly’s personal memoirs on Greg Chappel).

~~ Where have all those wonderful Pannaiyaars and the Zamindaars of our films gone? Nobody seems to want to rape the hero’s sister these days.

~~ I’m not sure if it’s just me, but there seem to be increasingly fewer cycles on the roads. Parents and chauffeurs drop their kids in swanky cars till they’re 12-13 yrs and then it’s a quantum jump to Scootys and Kinetics. Nobody seems to want to cycle, not even to school, and peer pressure is fast making sure cycles will no longer be a part of growing up. The sheer joy of racing to school across familiar landmarks and past classmates with the wind behind you and the bonding that comes with cycling triples with armloads of bats and stumps will sadly be but distant memories.

~~ 1 rupee pepsi. This has gone out of vogue in just about every town now but back then they were the lifeblood of treats, cricket matches and warm afternoons for any boy in the then starved Indian economy. There were also variations with smaller and longer ones for 50ps and Rs.2 respectively and I particularly remember that the black and the white coloured ones were most sought after just because they were rare – like everything else in life.

~~ The aura that WWF exuded back then would put to shame the feeble attempts of today’s WWE and TNA. Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart Hit Man, Lex Luger, Yokozuna and the like were all bigger than life and were good enough to sustain a whole new industry with ‘trump cards’ and collectors’ post cards.

~~ There were very few good programmes in the very few channels available and so were anticipated and appreciated much better. The idiot box wasn’t the be-all and end-all that it is now and mothers-in-law had better reasons than fighting over the remote to murder their daughters-in-law. I’m not trying to say nobody wanted to watch TV back then, but the general idea was that you were a sissy if you didn’t come out to play.

~~ Every year you got promoted into a new class, the new teachers would come around asking for self-intros which would include your hobbies and people would go like, reading, playing, numismatics, philately, carrom, gardening, embroidery, cooking…. I’m not sure how favourably these compare with the current, “Oh, you know, I watch a bit of TV, gun down a few thousand in Counter Strike, pub a bit, jump up and down in dimly lit taverns, drink a bit more and on average run over someone once a week”.

~~ Women used to think Karthik (of Agni Natchathiram fame) and Govinda made good dream-boys. Which I think was a tiny bit easier for us men to scale up to.

~~ Sachin. Against better bowlers and on more sporting pitches, he was King. Even if I was too young to remember his centuries at Old Trafford or Sydney, even as I feared for him as the big bad fast bowlers ran up to bowl to him only to see the ball disappear, I grew along with him as he slowly transformed from boy to Emperor.

~~ Cricket, Tennis, and the Olympics were all much better to watch because the teams and the players were more evenly matched. Australia weren’t dominant in cricket and swimming, there were more than a few players around capable of beating Sampras, the Soviet Union were proud outright winners of all individual sports. And then there was this glorious year when Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi smashed across everything in sight and made our pulses race everytime they chest-butted each other to victory.

~~ I miss the innocence that used to come with school life relationships. You could call a girl (or a boy, if you’re a girl) your friend without any prefixes and suffixes added to the word. You could talk for hours on end with her, share things, watch cricket and visit her home at 11 for class notes, and yet remain just friends. And what’s more, everyone else understood that too, even with the teasing.

~~ The silent smiles, the cute winks, the frequent eyeing, the understanding glances, the doe-eyed blushes. These were the things that made up crushes – unlike the current trend that comes with the brand labels and pubbing era.

~~ Oh, the things you had to plan to carry out a phone conversation with a girl (able to talk to a girl on the phone used to make you the Chosen One in class and closed the deal that the two of you were close) – a single-ring missed call, sometimes followed by a 2-rings missed call, the blank calls when someone else attended the phone, the veritable aliases for wrong numbers, the pre-set timings for different girls, the secret midnight birthday wishes, the regular public booth numbers, the awaited days when you were alone at home, the decoys …. Sadly, all this went out the day I got a mobile.

~~ Yamaha RXZ, greeting cards, book cricket, Gems, rental cycles, nannari sarbath, G.I.Joe, Ludo and Monopoly, Chandrakantha & Jungle Book, 25p Orange mittai, ‘Prince of Persia’ computer game, movie-theater tickets for Rs.5-Rs.30, cd’s as reflectors on cycles, Camlin geometry boxes, notebook stickers, Ind-Pak cricket rivalry, Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton, balloonwalla outside marriage halls, Sharjah cricket, 7 stones and Lock & Key, ‘Jokes’ wafers, paper boats….

And then there was fire. Tagging
nana : the American MBA who says he is yet to visit a gay bar
markiv : the Bangkok Boy, before he goes off never to return
sath : come on out of those CAT books
parash : let’s see in how many languages he wrote “Hello World” when we were on “A for Apple”
crazy bugga : this should be the Boy to Sir story
justme : who’s suddenly discovered the net in Toronto
calculus : to strong-arm him into restarting his blog
knk : just for the sake of it 🙂
curious : “aadu yaaru” nu kaeta, vandhu “naanu” nu solra
Everybody who reads this post is also welcome to go back and revisit those memories. Drop your link in the comments box.

Tagged!!!

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it?
I’ll have to use Inky Pinky Ponky for this. Cricket, Skating, Karate and an active childhood have made sure my knees, elbows, and feet have used enough band-aids from Johnson & Johnson to make me their brand ambassador and the passport officer to give me two A4 sheets for identification marks. Then there was this right shoulder-bone injury I picked up in my 11th. And the bit of broken tooth in my 5th. And of course the surgery for torn cruciate ligaments on my left knee. Yet, but, still, however, all these pale in comparison to the day I watched Veerasamy. Mentally scarred for life. Sob.

2. What does your phone look like?
Like something that’s gone down three flights of stairs. And landed the wrong side down.

3. What is on the walls of your bedroom?
There is this bunch of peacock feathers, which I bought in a local thiruvizha. I call the arrangement artsy, though some detractors may tell you a lot of other things.

4. What is your current desktop picture?

5. Do you believe in gay marriage?
Could a gay marriage have produced Angelina Jolie?

6. What do you want more than anything right now?
Endha pakkam oru vellakaari, andha pakkam oru karuppi!!!!

7. What time were you born?
5 mins before some 20 nurses swooned at one go.
And I’m told it was sometime around 10am. So there is why I still can’t wake up before that.

8. Are your parents still together?
They have to. The emotional turmoil and the mental stress that’s gone into parenting me should keep them bonded for after-life.

9. Last person who made you cry?
The one who always does. The Indian Cricket Team.

10. What is you favorite perfume/cologne?
Never been much into ’em but if you’re talking about smells here, then nothing beats the smell of wet earth on a Friday afternoon in school.

11. What kind of hair/eye color do you like in the opposite sex?
A Metamorphmagus would be just great.
But as long as the hair is lustrous and the eyes are expressive and twinkling, I’m taken.

12. What are you listening to?
Apart from the ceiling fan that’s grinding it’s way up my nerves, this :

13. Do you get scared of the dark?
Do fish get scared of the water? Does Spiderman suffer from arachnophobia? Does Schumi fear driving? Does God hate messing up? Does Saurav walk away from a runout? (oh well, the runout came about because he walked)

14. Do you like pain killers?
How else would you finish Max Payne in one sitting?
But personally, no. I can take pain.

15. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
Yes. There is this girl I talk to everyday on the phone. She always says “Please check the number you have dialled”. Number a kanakku pannalamnu……….

16. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
Parakkaradhu, Odaradhu, nadakaradhu, neendharadhu.
Bring ’em all on.

17. Who was the last person you made mad?
The one reading the blog right now.
And you remember the Axe ad where the guy keeps a counter? I have something like that for the people I make mad. I reset it thrice a day.

18. Is anyone in love with you?
There are these dogs in my street (which street in Bangalore doesn’t?). The moment I step onto the road, down they come yapping, yelping, barking, and growling. Talk about loving someone to bits.

————————————-

Anbu naalum sari, adi naalum sari; kodukaradha apdiyae 10 7 madanga thirumba koduppom.
Tagging Calculus, nana, anu, markIV, crazyBugger, aparna, justme

Love Thy Neighbour!

Was reading Abhinav‘s post on Robin Sharma’s “Who will cry when you die?” where Robin asks the reader to make a little list of people one wants as neighbours. Robin says this will help one get clearer about the attributes he/she likes and hence be aware of the need to inculcate them within oneself.
Even if all this attributes and inculcation stuff sounds as interesting as, well, Robin’s books, the neighbours part looks like fun enough.
Well, here goes my list.

Joanne Keith Rowling
Hi Joanne. Howdy. Just dropped by. So how’s li’l Jessica today? Doo deeee… Come Jessica, let’s go play outside and i’ll give you a push on the swing. And once outside, “Now listen, you little monster. If you dont tell me what happens next after Harry touches the 6th horcrux, i’m going to tie you by your shoe laces to the swing and push you off”

The Rock
This guy is primarily for security. It sure would also be fun to have him as a gymming partner as well. And I may just get to be friendly with The Rock, with pleasing advantages. Boss shouts at me. The Rock beats boss. Autowalla charges me “1-1/2 meter saab”. The Rock beats autowalla. Wife shouts at me. Well, that’s normal. The Rock says “If ya smell what The Rock is cookin'” and runs off into the kitchen.

Sachin
Would just love to watch him bat. Period.

Director Perarasu
Me and The Rock go into his place and hang him upside down from the fan. And he stays that way. I watch his films, and go hit him with a baseball bat. I’m frustrated at work, I go punch his nose for an hour. Mother-in-law annoys me, I go beat him up. He releases a film, I collect 10 bucks from every guy who wants to hit him.
PS: He may also at times have company from T.Rajendar or George Bush.

Any one of the innumerable swamiji’s we have going around.
Now this guy is important. I make fifty thousand bucks in stocks and I go to posh hotel and land up in a sauna bath and I feel fine. I lose fifty thousand bucks in stocks and I go to swamiji’s house and he says ‘money is an illusion’ and I feel fine. And an added advantage is of all those beautiful foreigners going around in orange.

Ilaiyaraja – Isai endra Ilaiyaraja
I mute the TV and get the audio live from next door. I’m preparing for CAT, and in comes “singam ondru purappattadhey…” through the window. I’m feeling miserable after a tiff with my girlfriend, out come soothing tones from his harmonica. And with some help from The Rock, I may even persuade him to accompany me on my morning jogs with a mouth-organ or flute.
PS: Would love to have ARR, but with the speed with which he composes, he’d start on “Enakku oru girlfriend vaenumadaa…” and finish it by the time my 6th child was born.

Konaar Mess chef
I’ll get to eat awesome briyani and parathas every day for the rest of my life. And it would make a hell of an atmosphere for me, The Rock, Sachin, and Swamiji to devour kothu parathas on Rowling’s backyard. Wonder if Bush would need extra gravy.

Neena
This girl used to be my next-door neighbour with whom I used to draw and sing and play until we were both 6 yrs old when she shifted to a few streets away. Well, I lost interest when I turned 7 and did not even respond back to the cute little birthday card she sent me. She then grew up I guess, and well, the latest from her mom to mine is that little Neena was a Miss.Chennai finalist 2 yrs back. This time around I want to make sure I draw and sing and play with little Neena well into our 90’s.

So what’s your list?