Perpetually Perplexed

Pi Patel is religious. Multireligious to be precise. He visits temples and mosques and churches. The priest, pandit and maulvi fight with each other saying he is theirs. He also asks his parents to perform baptism for him and buy a prayer rug for him to pray to Allah 5 times a day. His parents who are non-practising Hindus like all of us, reluctantly agree. ( If you disagree with me, consider this. We have a puja room or mantap in our houses. Our Devar puja done once in a day by one member of the family is chore which everyone tries to avoid. Our festivals are more for preparing and eating sweets and savories than for praying devoutly. We know that we are supposed to be having some religious texts in some unfamiliar languge. But we never bother to read them. So we practice hinduism but barely so. ) But then when his ship wrecks and his family members disappear along with all the animals, he is saved. My doubt is who saved Pi - Ishwar, Allah or Jesus? But jokes aside, I am rea...

Now a days drama companies (natak company ) of our childhood have all vanished. So if we want to see a drama, we should see the same old boring mother-in-law/ daughter in law serials of Hindi or kannada channels or same friends and similar serials in English. But not to worry. Our leaders are coming to our rescue. And they are providing drama free of cost. Or is it? You can watch didi drama where the mighty lady makes king dance to her tunes. You can switch channel and watch our own home grown "who wants to be the see emm" drama where two grown up people are trying to play musical chairs sans music. Or if you are inclined towards sob stories, you can watch the helpless leader drama where the hero cries saying nobody listens to him anymore. Well the title is part of famous kannada film song "Jagadeeshanaaduva jagave nataka ranga" This entire world is a stage directed by God!!!

Many a times we try to find reasons behind things ignoring the obvious. And more often the problem would some kind of miscommunication or misunderstanding. I was not able to use share dialog in my android app. This dialog must let the user send text or image using gmail, bluetooth and in some cases facebook, twitter etc. I searched for many code pieces , most of them were similar, and put them in my program. But my program would say, no program suitable. I tried to hunt for similar problems and their solutions in google, but to no avail. I started thinking that I should re install my IDE, my android sdk etc, etc. Then I installed the same program in the phone. I was testing all this while on the emulator. And lo, my share dialog appeared with gmail and bluetooth option. So the only problem was the emulator. Leave alone this coding. Let us look at some real life situation. A week back, I got a phone call. A man started shouting that he is calling from such a long time and why am ...

When I look at the beautiful user interface of other applications for android and iphone/ipad, specifically ipad, I am filled with envy, fear and some tiny bit of inspiration. My designs are so dull in comparison. Let me ctrl c ctrl v the designs. Anyway I got something accomplished today. My inspiration app for android is responding to fling event. That is I can swipe from left to right or right to left to move to next or previous quotes. What is so great about it? It is great because I spent almost a day to implement somebody else's code. And the funny part is, the quotes to be shown in this app are funny. No, the inspiration quotes are not funny, they are humorous quotes. I thought, funny quotes might be more popular. And where am I writing all this? Is it not oh life mail. oh life mail is something I have subscribed to and get a mail every day. Which asks me how was my day. And I pour out everything. Helps me in emptying the heavy heart.

We Indians, specifically Hindus are well known for our broadmindedness and religious tolerance. Have you heard otherwise? Well, the intolerant ones are misguided people. Ignore them. Let us see the reason behind this. We are polytheistic. Every morning, we pray to many gods, by showing arathi to many idols. I have 5 of them in our puja room. And I sing (I think I am singing, but neighbors don't ) hymns (of course in Sanskrit) of at least 10 gods every morning. Why not two more? Along with Shree Ganeshaya namaha, Shree Vishnuve namaha etc, I can easily add Shree Kristuve namaha and Shree mahammadaya namaha. Not so difficult, see. And not only that. Each of us will our own mane devaru (house god??) and grama devatha (village god??) etc. And we accept another person whose mane devaru is not Ganapathi but Venkatramana. So we can accept people whose God is Jesus or some other. We should and we had been, all these years. Until recently, when Ram, the new form of intolerant Ram came ...

What would you do if your name is Piscine and everyone in your school calls you Pissing? Pi has a similar problem. He develops a new strategy. When the teachers ask the students to introduce themselves, he walks to the black board and writes My name is Piscine Patel. Everyone calls me Pi pi=3.14 So instead of getting ridiculed for his name, he gets new cool nickname Pi. Innovative kid. This is how, the book "Life of Pi" proceeds. I am liking the book.

Our leaders are fighting a ferocious battle. Not against the merciless murderers who killed the IPS officer Narendra Kumar. Not against the goons who are punishing the people who have not voted for them. Not against the lawyers who have hurled stones and bricks to media men and police and injured 87 people. Not against illiteracy, poverty, malnutrition. But against other leaders who are trying to snatch their gaddi. Again a curious fact here, if a Narendra Kumar is crushed by tractor, how or why could not he escape from it as it moves really slow?