Mundane Musings

M y grandpa, who is in his mid-eighties, is sort of tech savy. Though medicine is his first love, he is forced to become a computer geek at 8:00PM IST, daily. Thanks to his twenty-month old great- grandson, who instilled that geeky urge in his great grandpa - the two-footer, my legal heir, who is situated twenty thousand miles away from  Madrasapattinam , would get ready by 10:30AM EST and eagerly await his great grandpa's arrival. While the budding toddler would be able to get online effortlessley via his 6MBPS AT&T broadband, my grandpa would have to wake his techie-alter up, to wage a war against the 256KBPS BSNL  narrow-band . To add to the intensity of the battle, Yahoo Messenger and it's voice/video suite would shower a quiver of Plug-in missing  and Version Incompatible  error messages. After fighting all odds, just when my grandpa would be about to win the battle, either the microphone, or the headphone, or sometimes both, would simply refuse to work. Not...

See below.

... primarily depend on what you EAT - slower, the better *grin*

... Drive down to the nearest liquor store.

... even the best engineer in town could struggle to open the lid of a pressure cooker!

...are selective amnesiacs.

...is a permanent storehouse of diseases - don't ever let yourself get there! Stay healthy, always!

Search giant Google is known for its creativity in morphing the characters of its "Google" doodle depending on the occasion. For instance, on Oct 2nd, Google for the first time, became a Mahatma by transforming the first "G" in its logo to a majestic pencil sketch of our Bapu . However, today, when I visited www.google.com briefly, I felt Google was up for sale. What else can a person who has a confused brain like that of the author of this post think of when one sees thin strips of alternating black and white patterns that resemble a bar code, in the place of the Google doodle? The fact though, is that it really is a bar code and Google is surely not for sale - yet. Upon decoding, one would be able to unravel the word "Google", says Digital Inspiration . Brilliant, isn't it? Device magazine says that it is Google's way of honouring the invention of Bar Code - a typical this day, that age material! - rings a bell? Let me know if it doesn't. ...

About Skanda , a nine-month project, nicely developed and delivered on the  9th of September 2008  at 6:05PM (EST) , two weeks ahead of schedule! Specifications Name : Skanda Sex         : Male Weight  : 5.6lbs  Height  : 17.5 Inches Biceps : 0.5 Inches Released in : St.Mary's hospital, Waterbury Sun sign         : Virgo Education : Illiterate Salient Features Capable of crying, drinking, peeing, pooping, sleeping, and repeating the cycle again in a set interval. What's missing in the bundle Only the teeth, but has an in-built technology to develop the same. Current challenge Coping with the jet-lag! Favourite punch-line "Size doesn't matter. It's the attitude. And I have one" Autograph Available upon request -- thumb impression only. Photograph See above ........hope that explains what kept the blogger away from the blogsphere for the last few months :)

Driving at a pulse-pounding speed of 120mph, not caring an atom about the disastrous traffic, or the driving rules, or other highway regulations could be the trendiest of things for a budding teen. But how about a middle-aged woman? Why would she want to get herself killed? What in the name of god might have gone wrong with this lady who was zipping past, faster than the fastest of the falcons ? These were just a few of the many questions that were lingering in the minds of the dutiful cops who were right behind the reckless driver, chasing her. After thirty trecherous minutes, though the lady did not voluntarily pull over, the cops somehow succeeded in cornering her. While three of the officers surrounded the car and took positions, one of them cautiously approached the driver's seat, only to find a seemingly harmless woman with a ghastly look on her face. The terrified lady, who kept mum when she was fired with a dozen questions, did not speak up until the officer asked her, ...

Yahoo messenger, MSN, GTalk and the likes can either make or break a relationship, depending upon the marital status of the individual (read 'geezer'), with the likelihood of the former happening for a budding and young lover, and the latter, for still a budding, but old lover. One of my pal's bosom pals' had the habit of categorizing his buddies into groups on one of the chat applications. So what? Most of us do that, isn't it? He had groups such as 'School friends', 'Relatives', 'Machees of Mannaargudi' (friends from the city Mannaargudi in Tamilnadu ), 'Santhome porukkis' (hooligans of the Santhome area in Chennai ), 'NIITs' (read Not Interested In Technologies), 'Kathaadi kawasakis' ( kaathadi means kite in tamil. I presume kawasaki is a Japanese word), and even 'alfonsa undies' (I'll leave that to your imagination). Not too long ago, he had a tiff with his wife, when she accidentally happened ...

"Man proposes, god disposes" -- Ask a man who just fathered a child and he'd say the vice-versa is also true Happy father's day. (I meant to post this on June 15th, but accidentally clicked on the 'PUBLISH POST' button -- such accidents can happen, but beware of getting knocked up like the guy above!)

While I was standing in queue at Dunkin Donuts , I overheard this conversation between a husband and wife... Wife : I believe the new southern style chicken sandwich introduced by McD recently, is doing very well all over the US and Europe. Did you know? Husband : Oh, really? I didn't know that. Wife : Yeah. Wanna give it a shot? Husband : Unfortunately, am not a non-vegetarian anymore. Wife : Good for the chickens. Hope you also become a 'non- ogle -arian' -- if that's a word -- sometime soon. That'll be good for the chicks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In a recent google chat (edited version) with one of my childhood pals.... Me : hiya dude! (a long pause..) Pal : hey! Me : howz it goin? (a long pause..) Pal : good Me : howz married life ;-) ? (a long...

A bunch of desi chaps, who travelled to the US for the first time on a business visit, stayed in a hotel in New York. One beautiful morning, one of the chaps called 911 to report an emergency. The cops rushed to the spot in no time, only to find the hotel in an unexpected state of tranquility. None of the hotel staff were aware of any emergency situation in their hotel. One of the staff members led the officers to the desi gang's humble abode. After having a brief interrogation with the distressed chap who had called them, the officers left. On their way back, one of the officers stopped by the front desk, leaned forward and gently told the receptionist in a hushed voice, "It appears that we cannot fix their problem. We believe their bathroom shower stopped working. Is there someway you can help?"

It was more than a ritual in my friend's ex-company to offer on-the-spot gratuities (really hefty ones) to their employees who made outstanding contributions to their respective projects. One such competitive employee, in spite of having exhibited his profound skills, was neither apprised in a just manner nor given the due credits. By due credits, I mean the impromptu gratuities I was talking about in the first line -- I believe, these were termed "Bravo awards". The frustrated employee, who was no longer able to endure the injustice thrown upon him, once poured out his indignant feelings to his immediate supervisor, stating that the supervisor better honour him with at least a "Bravo". The supervisor, who was a new hire himself, did not know what "Bravo" meant; neither the true meaning of the word nor the company's lingo. Obviously, the employee meant the latter. Ignorant of these facts, the rookie searched for the "synonym" of the wo...

It is beyond my doubt that whoever wrote the following 'gems', must've been helplessly inebriated, or had an extremely important errand to run, or lost control over one's bladder, or skipped at least one square meal before he/she actually wrote it. I mostly think it must've been one of those chappies working at the restaurant, for I believe chappies have an innate tendency to shut their minds off and drop their jaws open instead, when they encounter delicious, lip-smacking and mouth-watering food -- Take me, for instance -- Show me a plateful of echt Bhel-Poori and a woman-full of zeal and oomph -- you can never buy me for the latter! Anyway, coming back, thanks to Sarvajnya for capturing and sharing these precious writings, directly from the buffet table of a desi restaurant in Amreeka , whose name I don't wish to disclose! I don't know if the cuisine in this restaurant hydrated the eaters' tongues, but I can tell for sure that the following caption...

Sometime in the recent past, I had been to BigY (a grocery store, near my home) to buy chicken drumsticks. Am habituated to checking expiry dates on ANY product I buy -- yeah, at times, I've even flipped a brand new razor pack a dozen times, frantically looking for the expiry date. Having said that, I must also say that all manufacturers across the globe, are habituated to either printing the expiry date at a place that is highly inconspicuous or leaving the column blank! Anyway, speaking of chicken drumsticks, what could expiry date on an already dead chicken mean? Is the chicken still alive and is actually slated to die on the date mentioned in the pack? I don't think so, since I see the formless chicken in front of my own eyes! Then, what could it mean? Is the chicken going to get re-incarnated anytime between now and the predicted expiry date, and eventually die again? Hmm..Whatever, the crude reality was that I knew I was going to eat a dead body that was tested and marke...

One of my friends, who's excessively obsessed with water therapy , drinks gallons of water everyday. In order to quench his thirst (or should I say, douse the fire!), he would often stop by the vending machine inside his office pantry to churn out a 16oz coke after tossing a dollar in. After he finishes the coke, he'd top it up with water, and use it for his therapy. Though his intention was to re-use the empty coke bottle everyday, he couldn't do so because it used to simply vanish from his desk! This made him go nuts and buy a new bottle everytime. He later figured out that it was the Mexican domestic helpers who cleaned his office regularly in the evenings, that discarded the empty bottles. The simplest solution would've been to secure the bottle inside a drawer -- for some reason (unknown to me, till date), he never did that. After several such keep-and-throw games, he once came up with a "brilliant" idea and wrote this text(in CAPS) on an A4 sheet: "...

Sometime in the early nineties, when I was in school, when the eight-letter word C-O-M-P-U-T-E-R was considered nothing less than a machine with divine intelligence (and they called it AI!), capable of performing tasks ranging from processing of complicated accounts in a grocery store to launching of a rocket in NASA, I remember this funny poster (printed from an incredibly slow and lowest quality dot-matrix printer) stuck outside my computer lab in school that said, "Software inside, footwear outside"; as if, the computer lab were a place of worship and the computers themselves, the avtaars of gods! Not to forget the lab in-charge staff and computer sirs/ma'ams, who were considered messengers of these gods. All this hype, for a couple of old and rickety 386 machines with MS-DOS (one of them even had Windows 95!) installed in them! Whenever we passed the computer lab, we'd see the staffs sitting in front of the computer, with their legs crossed and fingers on their c...