Perpetually Perplexed

Straight hair, silky and shiny hair, lustrous hair!!! How do these terms matter to us, who have crossed the expiry date? But when I saw that one of the prizes is Galaxy Tab, I decided anything for a Galaxy tab. Step 1: Head out in my scooty which also looks tired and aged. Come near a Kirana store and stop. But where is the Kirana store, it has changed into a super market. There goes the plan of asking the shop keeper to give me one bottle of Sunsilk straight hair shampoo. Step 2: Go to a super market and head for the shampoos section and take out a bottle and move it close to your eyes and then far, then again near and again far. Shoppers around me wonder if I am looking at some optical illusion. No I can read only it is sunsilk, but is it straight hair shampoo or ordinary or anti-dandruff or some thing else. Why do I always forget to wear glasses when out shopping? Step 3: Ask the sales girl whether this is straight hair shampoo from sunsilk, giving her the bottle. She first s...

What is placed in the world except your eyes ? They went out in the morning It curtails bowed pm I live my eyelids die under these You know my English is not impeccable. It is not my mother tongue, nor it is my father or brother or sister tongue. But the above lines are too bad for my standards. I am proud of the fact that,  even though I did my first 10 years of schooling in Kannada, I have read too many English books - OK English novels to write or talk bad English.  So what on the heaven's name are  above lines? They are part of very beautiful song, a movie song, translated by google from Hindi to English.  Guessing of the original song is left to you. For some of you who speak Telugu and kannada, here are the translations.  మీ కళ్లు తప్ప ప్రపంచం లో ఏం ఉంచుతారు ? వారు ఉదయం బయటకు వెళ్లి ఇది వంగిన pm హరిస్తుంది నా కనురెప్పలు ఈ కింద మరణిస్తారు నివసిస్తున్నారు ನಿಮ್ಮ ಕಣ್ಣುಗಳು ಹೊರತುಪಡಿಸಿ ವಿಶ್ವದ ಯಾ...

Ka as he likes to be called, is visiting his home town Kars - a small town of Turkey, after a long time. He is a poet and journalist staying in Germany. He is curious and also disturbed about a lot of girls and women committing suicide in the town. And people believe that he has come to write a report on that. One of his friends suggests that these women were sad and upset, which caused them to kill themselves. But then another person reasons, if all sad women commit suicide, half the women in Kars would be dead by now. (Half is under estimation , and not only in Kars). There was a girl who wanted to wear head scarf to her college. An intelligent and hard working girl. But the secular government has banned head scarves in public places. She protests and continues to go to college wrapping the head scarf. She is removed from the college and the same day she kills herself. This is how the story of " Snow " by Orhan Pamuk - a Nobel winning author , starts. The book ...

Satyanarayana puja     Image source : mantraonline.com I did mention that we had a puja in our house, last weekend. It is in fact called Satya Narayana Puja - one of most popular pujas done in Karnataka. Satya - truth, Narayana - another name for Lord Vishnu. Why is it more popular than others? My guess is the prasad - offering to God - made for this puja is really delicious :). It is somewhat similar to kesari bath (which is basically sweet upma). It is prepared by roasting equal measures of wheat flour, ghee, then cooking it with same amount of milk, with equal amount of chopped banana and sugar. Why do I celebrate such a puja - when I am not even sure if there is a God - if yes, is He a Ram, Mohammed or Jesus? My husband, unlike me, is a practicing brahmin. He performs sandhya vandana every day before leaving to office. Sandhya vandana is recital of Gayatri , thrice a day, morning, noon and evening by all brahmin men who have sacred thread on their shoulders. It i...

Silence is the language of God. All else is translation - Rumi

Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore I love water. River, sea, lake or even a bathtub. Even though my native town is in malnad (male - hills , nadu - land), visiting a river was an exciting event in my childhood. And this passion did not diminish during youth. During our stay in Muscat, frequent visits to beaches there, were always exciting. May be I used to be more thrilled than our son. Now staying in land locked Bangalore, only water bodies to be seen are kocche mori halla (storm water drains), which are in abundance and more often than not, open and stinky. So a visit to Brindavan Gardens Mysore last week end, should have made me jump up and down - all 60 kgs of me - if at all possible. No, but that did not happen. Luckily for our floor!! No, if you think finally my mind is mature - at the ripe age of 48, you are so wrong. I am still child at heart. (childish as others put it) - dil to bachcha hai jee. The reason behind non-excitement was  my tired feet and aching body. Di...

There was an article about govt schools in Karnataka. 13% of the students in class 7 can only read class 1 text books. 29% of the students do not know how to subtract according to ASER report. All this nullifies the whole RTE effort of the government. Yes, every child has a right to study in a good school. But why should that good school be a private school. Why can not the government schools provide qualit y education? Or are they providing any education? Why is the condition so pathetic in these schools? And after that, if the government says allow poor children admission in rich private schools, it is like saying I have built myself a crappy house. So let me stay in your cozy house. Not only in Bangalore and tier two cities, even in small towns also, the strength  of students in government schools is very very low. My domestic help is ready to send her son to a private school by paying 25000 Rs as donation, rather than sending to a govt school which provides free educatio...

मै और मेरे स्पाउस अक्सर ये बाते करते अगर तुम यहाँ न होते तो ऐसा होता तुम न होते तो वैसा होता मै ऐश्वर्या से शादी करता मै मल्टी बिलियानेर से शादी करती मै और मेरे स्पाउस अक्सर ये बाते करते तुम बाते करते हो तो लगता है बाहर झोर से बारिश हो रही है तुम चुप रहते हो तो लगता है .. पर तुम चुप रहते ही हो  कब मै और मेरे स्पाउस अक्सर ये बाते करते I know now you will tell me that you will arrest me on two counts of murder - murdering a beautiful language and murdering a beautiful song. But I will tell you this is freedom of expression - in our democratic country.

Two days back a trivial event happened at home. Some one asked my help for something. I do not remember the event but just that it made me some how happy. Yes, I have power. That feeling is very important for people like me who have frequent lows mainly due to self esteem problems. I remember one of my previous organizations where many or most of the people had the designation as manager of something or the other. We used to ridicule that. But now I understand the significance. This seems to be a very wise management tool. Make your staff feel important, each one of them. Then, they will be happy and the happiness is manifested in their work. I also remember two ladies, one of them my relative and the other my neighbor. Both had this knack of getting things done by people. Mainly domestic servants. They would talk to them so sweetly. Again at that time, I thought that behavior as cunningness. Looks like, there is nothing wrong in that. Now how can we use this concept for our ben...

I had explained to you how I formatted the hard disk and installed ubuntu. But i have not yet started coding my revolutionary android projects yet. Because I do not have the tools yet. I tried downloading eclipse, android-sdk and jdk which are only three things needed to start android program development. So far no success. Of course the files are huge. And my wifi some how is slow. Add to that, some more problems. The moment I start downloading my maid will arrive and I should watch over assist her. Then my son would want his coffee or tea. Then some other work comes up. And I can not leave the wifi and download on. It is unthinkable. For the paranoid me. And then Packed to the Rafters comes up. That is the latest Star world serial I have been watching instead of Greys anatomy. and some time inspite of it. I like Rachel, her mother Julie, her brothers Ben and Nathan and their respective spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends and their grand dad. So no wonder, even after 5 days I ha...

I must add in my facebook interests formatting the hard disk and installing the OS. Not that anybody cares. I have just 10-15 friends, most of them are part of extended family. Nobody writes on my wall, no messages. Anyways. I have bought my laptop almost a year ago. And so far I might have used system recovery, factory installation, restore to a previous date etc. around 15 times. So much so that, before the help line could explain, I know all the steps and I can give them help I think. In fact yesterday, when I was trying to fix an error, they could just suggest try all the recovery steps again. It all started with system update. Windows 7 pages told that, to imtprove the security, you should install latest windows update. I tried doing it for the first and only time. But after update, the windows would restart. Again and again and again. So I lost the nice game which would have made me another Steve Jobs or at least Zuckenberg I had developed almost 60%. Only thing which is le...

He is crafty. He is smooth and he knows how to look good in every one's eyes. He appoints every position in his government personally, no matter how small or large the position. And makes certain that he is surrounded by loyal people. The moment he suspects a minute amount of disloyalty, he sacks them. His ministers are all mostly incompetent. But if there is any unpopular actions which may make people unhappy, like increasing the taxes, he blames and scolds the minister who is supposed to be in charge. So people always say that the emperor is so kind , but the finance minister or some other minister who is corrupt and causing us all the misery. But thus he rules the country and leading a happy life. It does not matter that people are starving in northern parts of the country where there are frequent droughts. It is good for people to starve, because if people are properly fed and happy, they think of all disloyal thoughts and try some conspiracies against the emperor. But he ...

When all of us are hanging our heads in shame for what happened to Nirbhaya in Delhi, our politicians have different viewpoints If a woman crosses the line of maryada, like Sita crossed Laxman rekha, she will be abducted and punished says madhyapradesh minister Kailash Vijayvargiya. His reasoning nowadays women are not wearing dupattas. And rapes happen in Urban areas due to western influence says RSS chief Mohan Bhagawat. West Bengal MLA asked the chief minister Mamata Bannerjee " What is your fee Didi, How much will you take for getting raped?" Later he apologised. Satyanaraya transport minister said that just because women should not roam at night just because India got independence at night. The girl should not have travelled in the night in the bus. So the sum total of their viewpoint is all the rape victims are some how responsible themselves. Why do they go out of the house? Or better why were they born at all? If not anything else, they believe in one sen...

I saw a movie yesterday. The net. You tell me it was released when you were in school. I too, saw in wikipedia that it was 1995 film. And no, it is not running in any theaters or multiplexes in Bangalore now. In fact, in the last 15 years, I have seen one film in the theater. Nor do I rent the DVDs of movies. We intellectuals feel, it is little mediocre to watch films and stuff. But I do watch occasionally films on TV when I am bored. We need to rest our brain once in a while - after all that reading books of nobel laurates and booker prize winners and coding the apps which totally 30 people download in the entire universe  and watching daily soaps for 6 hours .  So yesterday, I happened to see this film. The name enticed me. But I knew it must be old, the moment I saw 31/2" disk. Yes once upon a time, before pen drives, CDs etc, there used to be memory devices called 31/2" disk drives. Anyway, the heroine, I later read her name is Sandra Bullock, she works from home. And ...