entranced

by the 'khwaja mere khwaja' track from jodhaa akbar. words fail me.

tagged

by the vyas. and challenged *not* to whine about work or gloat about africa. bah, total dimaag kharab, i tell u. but heck, it's saturday and mohd. rafi has put me in a good mood. so here we go!

"post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. the posts have to relate to the 5 key words given (family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like). tag 5 other friends to do this meme. try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better."

family: heh. here's one with sheetu.

friends: this one stars a vyas, a car and a cop. fun fun. has to be my longest, most enthusiastic post yet!

myself: my life in a nutshell.

my love: aw, it's complicated. can't make up my mind between this and that.

anything i like: one of my favorites.

stuff of dreams

sometimes (very, very rarely), robohit can post uber cool stuff. unintentionally, of course.

heh

this one popped up on my gmail window:

"a high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of picasso"

and for some reason, it's giving me the giggles.

ever feel like

you've been there before?
feel that pulse quicken
and hold your breath, wondering
what you'll see
if you turned that corner
again?

and the 38th happened while i was sleeping

life's wickedness knows no bounds.

besotted

i've been up since 2:30am. jetlagged as usual. i called my parents. made some chai. fooled around on facebook. contemplated 2007. planned the great escape of 2008. twiddled my thumbs. tossed moments from last week around in my head. and tossed some more. there's one stand out. far and away, the best. you know love at first sight, right? like that.

i thought it would be one of those palaces. it isn't quite. it strikes you differently. it's not far at all from the bustle of charminar. but it seems far far away. aloof. beautiful. in its own world. not cold. just dreamy. my jaw dropped when i first caught sight of it. and i couldn't take my eyes off it. or my mind, as it turns out. falaknuma, it's called. reaching for the sky. mirror to the heavens. or like my walkie talkie urdu dictionary says, quite simply, divine. vicar-ul-umra took nine years to build it. and almost went bankrupt for it. it's that kind of a palace.

how's it going?

two months into the consulting life and the questioning has already begun. there's no glory to be had. no rush of blood to the head. no startling insights. no sudden bursts of creativity. just a steady pace. a steady race. a steady snip of the the scissor hands. a cut here. a cut there. heads roll. and the dollars roll in. and it seems, that's all that matters. the question then is, what am i doing here again?

story of my life

happy independence day!

happily, there's been a deluge of independence day specials everywhere. but nothing as special as this tribute by india's best musicians. gives me gooseflesh every time.

that thing called star power

so here i was, still waking up after my siesta, holding my chai and letting harsha bhogle give me an update on the oval test. harsha, sunny & i shook our heads at how jaffer threw his wicket away. and then it was time for a break. harsha made mention of some special guest or other. geoff boycott, i hoped. and then, for a teensy weensy moment, the camera shifted. SHAH RUKH KHAN!

i was suddenly awake, excited and unexplicably gleeful.

you'd think she'd know me by now

aunty: "so footloose, do you like watching movies?"

jaw crashes to ground. eyes fall out of head.

heartbreak on centre court

"anyway, i lost", said nadal. i wish he won. anyway, he will.

stuck in my head

is that something-else rahman song from sillunu oru kaadhal, new york nagaram.

i've no clue what the song's about but it keeps coming back to loop endlessly on my laptop. in my head. on lazy afternoons. at midnights.

the oldest trick in the book

so my camera's been dead since the first lion sighting on safari. it fell at the precise moment that i had been saving its batteries for. after much murphy-cursing, i left my sleek little sony to its lifeless fate for the next 3 weeks. and then, over chai on a nice rainy afternoon, a much-had epiphany struck. like a bolt from the blue. just like they say. i took my sleek little sony and flicked it. and again. no luck. no life. epiphany failed.

this morning, emboldened by my success with the idea customer service chaps, i tried my luck again. and voila! i have a fully functional sony DSC-T33. what can i say, these laaton ke bhoot are just wired to be beaten.

and btw, all you fellow idea dialer tone sufferers, call idea right away. you just have to say the d in dialer for them to scamper around and promise prompt action and freedom from all d-rated promotions.

whoa! this thing looks good, steve!

i'm thrilled with the brand spanking new iPhone.


NYT has a pretty promising review. my favorite parts:

"You’ve probably seen Apple’s ads, showing how things on the screen have a physics all their own. Lists scroll with a flick of your finger, CD covers flip over as you flick them, e-mail messages collapse down into a trash can.

...

You scroll with a fingertip — much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.

Finally, you can enlarge a Web page — or an e-mail message, or a photo — by spreading your thumb and forefinger on the glass. The image grows as though it’s on a sheet of latex."

so! what about africa then?

first things first. to travel, you need visas. and it ain't fun running around for those with an indian passport. if you actually manage to wangle a passport, that is. pick any mildly exotic destination and you can look forward to a maze of broken links, long obsolete 6-digit phone numbers and bheja fry travel agents. and then there's the ever ubiquitous note on foreign embassy sites: "no visas required for citizens of commonwealth countries EXCEPT india, pakistan, bangladesh, sri lanka..."

so anyhow, sapped and battle scarred, i got on the kenya airways flight to zambia. could barely lift a finger, so there was no question of excitement or enthusiasm. i exaggerate, of course. or the opposite. but you get the picture. had to change flights in nairobi. as i dragged my feet across the tarmac, i saw the sunrise. the great african sunrise. my first sunrise in decades. it was a spirit awakening moment. a life altering one even. and i fell in love with the vast, unspoiled, dark continent. NOOOOOOT! was a pretty lovely sunrise though. and that was that. welcome to africa.

my brand new buddies rescued me at the lusaka airport just as i was cursing myself for not calling ahead to find out what exactly the plan/protocol was. the three of us then stylishly rode off in mawala's chariot to meet up with the rest of the gang. and a fine, fine gang it was. and fun, fun too. a very good thing when you have three weeks of 24x7 to spend together.

the most unexpected thing about lusaka was this constant sense of deja vu. everything about it was familiar. this was NOT the africa i was promised on the discovery channel or even the BBC, come to think of it. from its street-side stores with crazy signs to its fancy multiplexed malls, lusaka could've been any city in india. the landscape was familiar. the mango trees were familiar. and most jaw droppingly, even the street dogs were familiar.



wow. such a long post. and i'm still on day one. now you know why i was stalling.

more after the break. don't touch that remote!

if you broke your camera

like i did, you might want to check this out. precis writeups on the best digital SLRs in the market.

when, oh when, will we have teeny SLRs?

that feeling of redundancy

seems like every thought has been thunk, every song has been sunk. every feeling has been felt, every word has been sait. every angle has been shot, every clever thing in the world has been dont.

i figured. i might as well sleep.

the african hangover

is going to last a while. at least as long as my tan does. i've been back a week & i'm still shocking assorted people. 'ooooooooooh, what happened to you!', is the common refrain. that, of course, is the cue for my african story. i've told it several times. and i still haven't told much of it.

trouble is, i'm still figuring it out. and by the time i figure it out, i might not want to tell the tale any more. even if i do, you might not want to hear it any more. and that's just the way it goes.