Interview with blogadda

Here is blogadda's interview with me. Apparently I am known outside of my cubicle. Warning : The post contains partial frontal nudity.

My Indibloggie winners (in short)

On this momentous occasion of the 2008 or 2009 (who the hell knows or cares) Indibloggie winners being declared, I have compiled my own list of winners in categories I have created myself because they make more sense. To me. I shall be curt because I'm in a hurry and I'm doing this now because I haven't posted anything for a while and this would be a good way to write something without having to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

So here are your winners:

1.> Most useful blog : Patrix. Also very useful, his twitter feed. Always learn something new from him. He is always the first one to answer any technical question you might throw out in the twitterverse. Go forth and drink deeply from the fount of his wisdom.

2.> Most honest blog : TGFI. She is not trying to impress anybody. She is honest. She is all of you. Except of course, those among you who are dishonest.

3.> Blog most likely to make you an alcoholic : Bongopondit. He will most likely make you an alcoholic. Worse, he will utilize a wide variety of liquors towards that endeavour, thereby making you a destitute for life. If you don't already drink, save yourself and stay away.

4.> Blog most likely to force you to revise your opinion of yourself as being master of the English language and other fine stuff : J. Alfred Prufrock. He will force you to revise your opinion of yourself as being master of the English language and other fine stuff by the simple process of out-mastering you.

5.> Funniest blog : Neo Indian. This is humor done right. And, according to reputable sources namely him, he is also good looking. Something else that is as funny, his twitter feed.

6.> Most cutting edge Indian political commentary blog with a bite: Overrated Outcaste. His skewering skills are second to none.

7.> Lifetime achievement award : The Acorn. India is serious business. And nobody's been at it longer and better than has Nitin Pai.

And those are your winners. Congratulations to everybody. Good night folks, and have a safe drive.

Picture?

I appear to have lost the farm picture on the top. Why did you have to shut down, Geocities, why? Where will all those homeless gifs and jpgs go now?

Anyways, I guess it was time for a change. That farm is probably not even in business anymore.

We are finally online...er

Great news, folks! We are now available on Amazon.com . I'm not really sure how it all works, but apparently, you pay 1.99 USD a month (or 20,000 Canadian dollars) and then you can read this blog all day long. Even when you are in the bathtub and I know you're a clean freak so that's like most of your day. The alternative, of course, is to read this blog for free, but you wouldn't want to be taking food out my baby's mouth now, would you? No, I don't have a baby, why do you ask?

It seems you need something called a "Kindle" to read the paid version of this blog. My literary agent (and manager) asked me to try and get people to purchase it, because that will help him feed his own baby, which also currently doesn't exist. I said to him, "But bhad, it don't feel right, asking people I don't really know to purchase things I don't really know". Bhad means pimp or fucker or something similar in Marathi. You're probably saying, what the...is that how you treat your agent? But it's okay because he is also my best friend. Also, he does some pimping in his spare time. But anyways, he replied, "Look, these people who read your blog, they've been following the painfully mundane narratives of a complete stranger for a while now, so there is a significant possibility that they will also make a purchase based on his recommendation." That made a lot of sense to me even though it didn't answer my question.

So let me give you a little insight about Kindle and you can be sure this is an unbiased review because I don't own, nor have I ever used one.

1.> A Kindle is very light and as thin as a magazine. If you've ever screamed out in a dentist's waiting room, "God, this magazine is so fucking heavy it's making my wrists fall off my arm", you should probably be visiting a different doctor.

2.> It has a crisp display, reads like paper and has 16 shades of grey. It's like they made this product specifically for you! You adore grey, remember how you were telling me it is the color of your life? And how you said no you weren't crying, those were tears of happiness and wails of joy?

3.> If you are blind, illiterate or somehow managed to superglue your eyelids together, this thing can read out loud to you. It's got a bit of a Southern accent, so as long as you manage to suppress your laughter, your relationship with your Kindle should be free of all awkwardness.

4.> 20% faster page turns! Remember that one time when you were taking forever to turn that page and we waited and waited and finally we took you to the ER and it turned out you had just suffered a massive coronary? You never paid me for the cab ride.

5.> Check out how pretty you look, using a Kindle. You could use the extra help, really.

(Above : You, using a Kindle to look pretty)

So folks, get an expensive Kindle and follow this blog from wherever you are for $ 1.99 a month. In fact, I have been informed that the subscription might even drop down to $ 0.99 in case someone at Amazon were to find the time to read this blog and correctly determine that it is way overpriced. On the other hand, you could also pay nothing and "log on" to your "computer" everyday in order to read this blog. But that would be so January 2009. It's already April now.

?

A sudden influx of people to this blog from IIT IIIT Hyderabad leads me to ask the question : Am I on the syllabus?

Twitter

Fuckit I'm on twitter.

HNY

May your new year be filled with happiness and joy and most of it be triggered by good things that happened to you and not somebody else.
May your fridges overflow with and kitchen utensils be forever dipped in leftover food.
May the erroneous payment of a ten dollar bill instead of a dollar bill continue to not bother you all that much.
May your flexible health plan benefits go underutilized.
May your home dwindle in value due to the real estate bust and not because cardboard got cheaper.
May your indoor plants continue to prosper and grow in spite of your presence in their life.
May your doors continue to keep out visitors and windows continue to drown out their cries.
May you age only in body and not in mind if you're a man and do the exact opposite if you're a woman.
May your children continue to disappoint you only to the extent that you've disappointed your own parents.
May your unhealthy self loathing turn into a healthy loathing of another person.
May you continue to find copious amounts of evidence that you are the most important person to have ever dwelled upon this planet.
May your better half and significant other continue to be that in name only.
May your frowns turn upside down, yet your head stay attached to your torso.
May all your bullets find vital organs and your vital organs continue to elude bullets.
May all your friends continue to find the inner strength to suffer your interminable bitching and moaning in silence.
May your hair reverse its lifelong trend of southward migration.
May your hopes and dreams be sufficiently unrealistic for their dashing to cause too much heartache.
May you finally discover your soulmate or at the very least, a credible, constantly refreshed password hack site.

HNY.

Amazon review

Oh you fickle amazon.com review raters, why won't you like my review? Only three out of four of you found my latest review useful. What about you, fourth rater-guy? In what way did my review displease you? Did I not say enough times that the game I was reviewing was awesome? Did I not inform you that the weapons were awesome? I even touched upon the awesomeness of the maps and how the atmosphere of the game was awesome and how the dualshock 3 controller added even more awesome to the pre-existing awesome of the game. And finally, just so as not to leave you wondering, hmm, I wonder if this reviewer thought this game was awesome, I even titled my review, "AWESOME!!!!".

So how come you didn't find my review awesome? You must be hard to please, little man.

So I was going through my old amazon.com reviews that I appear to have written about eight years ago and I was shocked at the quality of my writing. It turns out that there was a time when not only did I spell the word "rocks" as "rox" and "sucks" as "sux", but I even flaunted those usages in public. Also, I appear at that point in my life to have subscribed to the mindset that typing "r" instead of " are", "u" instead of "you", "wud" instead of "would", "cud" instead of "could, "wot" instead of "what" and "mebbe" instead of the word "maybe" could result in tremendous time savings. Additionally, it is also clear that I used to belong to the Sarah Palin line of thinking which heartily recommends getting rid of the "g" at the end of every progressive verb, thus leading to a number of "freakin"s, "makin"s and "killin"s in my writing. You know, I am now thinking that my decision to remain oblivious of this blogging business right upto the crack of 2005 was probably a good one on my part.

Okay then.

Beginning tomorrow, politics will return to its former home.

comment

Quite possibly the best comment I have ever received on this blog. An alternative explanation of "maadi" from an anonymous commenter :

"in punjabi " maa-di" has a very different connotation. The correct usage is "teri maa-di". It can be used to start as well as end arguments. It can also be used in the middle of an argument just before fistcuffs replace vocal cords. It is a very versatile phrase and can also be adapted to other situations - greeting, salutation, frustrations. But mostly it is a a unhappy and angry phrase, that blames 'yo mamma' for all that is wrong in this world."

goog

Google stopped paying me. I don't know how that happened. Suddenly all my ads are public service ads for a hurricane and I don't get squat. I guess that's fine because I have yet to collect the money I earned till now. To collect it, I would have to give Google my SSN and it would go on my tax records and I don't know if I can earn such funds without the IRS pinching my buttocks and the USCIS inserting pointy things inside it. So I never gave Google my SSN and so Google has about 90 dollars worth of my money which it will give me when I become a permanent resident of this country which will probably be my son and not me. But anyways, so click on the hurricane thing even though you know you won't be paying me. It is for a good cause and I might be caught in a hurricane too so I shall click on it as well.

Search

Looking through my sitemeter today, I was struck by how many people appear to be interested in sexual congress between a human and a car stick shift. Unfortunately they land up here because at some point I happened to pen a screed about the stick shift of my car and its disadvantages in the event of a traffic jam, also using some invective to spice up the narrative. Although to be honest, I am not really that surprised. When I bought my car seven years ago, one of my friends was extraordinarily drawn to its stick shift. In fact, I remember him saying to me, "Boy, your stick shift sure is sexy". And although he didn't explicitly say it, I could see in his eyes that he was just itching to ask it out on a date. To this day my front seat is off limits to him.

I guess it's also a good thing that I have yet to reference the exhaust pipe of my car on this blog.

Secondly, I have also observed that many people, while googling, allow their emotions to seep through into the search phrase, thereby reducing the efficacy of their search. For example, a visitor to this blog reached here via the Google search phrase "Oh God, capitalization!". Now sir, wouldn't it make your task easier if you just held your frustrations in check for that brief period of time it takes you to enter "capitalization", or maybe even "capitalization sucks" into Google's search field? After that, you could curse and rant as much as you wish. Just a humble suggestion.

This saddens me

Apparently this is the level of education required to understand this blog.

Cash Advance Loans

I guess it means that all this time while I was laughing at my own jokes, I wasn't really getting them. Someone please tell me what I missed.

Tagged

I was tagged here a few years ago, or so it seems after the green card fracas / fiasco / fuckfest. I will therefore present 8 random facts about myself.

0.> I cannot cook Indian food at all. I have no idea how to put those flavors into a curry. I have tried and failed miserably. Every time I cook anything, I get the distinct impression that the ingredients of my dish are unhappy about being used in my creation.

1.> If I am walking on a tiled pavement, I deliberately avoid stepping on the boundary between two consecutive tiles. If an uneven gait in the manner of a three-legged dog with an alcohol problem is required for the achievement of this objective, I have no qualms about doing so, amused onlooking be damned.

2.> There has been one time in my life when I was literally terrified for my life to such a degree that my brain was called upon to choose between two different forms of death, based on the relative terror caused by each. It happened while I was walking with a couple of friends in the Tadoba Tiger Reserve in India on the banks of the Tadoba lake. To our left were a bunch of Bison a hundred feet away in the jungle. To our right was the lake with a number of loitering crocodiles in the water (A sign on the lake proudly stated "Swimming is prohibited, survivors will be prosecuted"). We were standing and staring at the bison and every passing second of nothingness that followed was augmenting the nervous tension in the air and that was a good time for one of the bison to snort loudly and lunge towards us. That was when all hell broke loose and as my mind went blank and my youthful life flashed before my eyes, I actually remember thinking that I was going to die in the next few minutes. And then we were all running mindlessly towards the lake where the crocodiles lay and the few seconds that separated us from the crocodiles allowed my mind to estimate the amount of pain that would be caused by a raging bison as compared to that caused by a crocodile and I chose the latter. And so I continued running towards the lake. And just before I plunged into the water, I allowed myself the luxury of looking back to see how many seconds I had before I turned into mortal remains and I saw that the fucker had not moved from his previous position. Then I saw his neighbor say to him, "Bless you" and he replied, "Why, thank you kind sir", and the courteous exchange of pleasantries between the two bovines made me realize that the entire episode had been a mere sneeze.

3.> I am an extravagant tipper. I calculate the tip by dividing the bill by 4 and adding a dollar. I use this tip-calculation formula even if I receive exceptionally bad service or if the waiter throws a glass of water in my face after spitting into it. That's because I know how it is to be a college student living in the US on a meagre allowance and sometimes, you really need to spit into a glass and throw it at somebody's face.

4.> I love trains and railway tracks. If I see an abandoned railway line, I feel an urge to follow the tracks on foot just to see where they lead. Sometimes I pretend I am an engine and whistle at people. I possess the extraordinary ability to whistle continuously for long periods of time without having to pause for breath. The key is to alternately breath in and out through the whistle.

5.>The most fun thing I ever did in my life was during my engineering days when the entire mechanical department took an "educational" trip down to South India. During the train ride from Pune to Bangalore, me and a friend, we dressed up as beggars (torn banians and lungis), with myself as the musically (dis)inclined one and he as the blind one wearing black sunglasses. We roamed the entire length of the train at night, with me banging on an Indian drum I just happened to have with me and singing in a high octave as is the custom for Indian Railways alms-gatherers, requesting cash donations from our fellow passengers. We even managed to fool one of our professors into coughing up money. Some amount of blunt-fingered coat-tail scratching was required, fortunately, all of which was handled by the blind guy.

6.> I am a night person. There was a period of two months during the graduate winter of 1999 when I did not see the sun at all. I love how the night air smells. Sometimes I stand on my balcony at night, just sniffing the air for long periods of time. People accuse me of being deranged for doing this.

7.> I have not purchased a single new item of underclothing in the past five years. I am bewildered by the ability of the male undergarment manufacturing industry to stay financially solvent in spite of customers like me. I attribute this to most of them now having switched from male undergarments to feminine intimatewear as their main line of business (For example, Hanes, who now has television commercials showing women wearing their product with the tag line "look who we got our Hanes on now", where "who", stands for women.)

Apparently I have to tag 8 other people. I don't know is there anyone left who has not yet been tagged by this meme? Ok then, you're it. Go, have fun typing. Also, it appears to be incumbent upon me to add the following rules to this post.

Here are the rules:
1. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
3. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

Back of the menu

Ever so often when you go to a restaurant and begin to flip through the menu, you find that either you do not wish to partake of the items of food advertized within or would have liked to, but cannot afford their purchase. So you continue to flip and you flip some more till you reach the end of the menu. And then, in a final burst of optimism, you turn it over and look at its backside, space usually reserved for business hours and spilt food, even though bitter experience reminds you of the extremely low probability of menus in pamphlet form possessing a secret affordable / delectable food section spirited away on their backsides.

Ever since this blog was nominated for the Indibloggies, its readership and feed circulation has doubled in volume. I have a gut feeling that for most of you people who just tuned in, this blog is kinda like the back of the menu. I applaud your persistence in continuing to scour the web for reading material and optimism in hoping that this blog might have whatever it is that you are looking for, and even though I seriously doubt it, I hope you find it here and welcome you with both arms wide open, a carrot in one and a stick in the other, don't ask, it's a long story.

But for those millions of you who came here looking for sympathy and advice on "how to keep hair from falling out" and found flippancy instead, I can only hope that laughter being the best medicine and all, it helped your hair grow back (the lack of it causing you to pull at your hair, h/t S in the comments).

Sell-out

I remember the day as well as the exact time of the day when I realized that I had turned into a sell-out. It was yesterday afternoon 3:00 pm and I was just about to write a blogpost on why I am not crazy about cricket anymore and why, when you think about it in an unbiased manner, the game kinda sucks.

And then luckily, a couple of seconds later, I realized that it would be a very foolish thing to do because I would get lynched in the blogosphere, ostracized in society and probably lose half my readership, 100% of which is, in all likelihood, a raving demented fan of the game, and then, in a delicious irony, the blog would fill with the chirping of crickets. Not to mention the fact that I would also lose my Indian citizenship and have to move to Antarctica because the US doesn't seem to particularly want me either. So out of these concerns, I scrapped my plan. And then a further couple of seconds later, I realized that I had become a sell-out. And now if anyone is interested, I have a kidney to sell as well and how about you abuse me as you're ripping it out of my body cavity because I have no more dignity or self-worth anymore.

Amerimacka

Been busy, very very busy. It's that time in a typist's life when all the work he was supposed to be doing throughout the year has to be completed in a few days and then bequeathed (bequoth?) to the masses as a new software release.

It's fried my brain, I can tell you that. Yesterday in a meeting, a conversation went as follows:

Boss : So was this done for B-4?
Me : Before?
Boss : Yes, version B-4.
Me : Before what?
Boss : Was this done for version B-4?
Me (mentally trying to get my boss to stop quitting mid-sentence and complete the damn thing : Yes...version before.....?
Boss : ?
Me : Oh, B-4. Version B-4. Ok. Yes, version B-4. Yes, yes.
Boss : You shouldn't have shaved your head. You lost something else in the process.

And to revisit the punchline, I shaved my head the other day. I would recommend it to everyone at anytime, except anyone at the present time, the weather being so fucking cold and when you step outside, icicles growing on the places where your hair used to be. You begin to understand the purpose of life and hair in those short seconds between the time you open your door and the flow of blood to your brain ends.

So to make a long story short, I will be back soon. Maybe even tomorrow. Or the day after. And maybe my hair will grow back and intelligence will return. I can't wait to start blogging again.

==================================
Thievery Corporation : Amerimacka

What? II

It appears that sometime between my last linker error on friday evening and my first unhandled software exception on monday morning, I was nominated for an IndiBloggie award in the humor category. Both my blogs, as a matter of fact. I guess the jurors didn't want to cause sibling rivalry and bloodshed. (Which is pretty fortunate for you, goose egg, since the renegade of junk would have smacked your ass and then handed it back to you.)

These nominations, like well-designed enemas, give me great pleasure as well as simultaneous excruciating pain. The pain will follow from my sure shot miserable performance in this contest. And the Indiebloggies have this habit of rubbing it into the losers of the competition by providing extensive numerical information on how badly they got whipped. Like, they will say, blogger A won the category with 95 percent of the votes. Sometimes, they will even add an "LOL" or a "ROTFLMAO", depending on the extent of humiliation. And therein lies the source of the rectal pain.

Secondly, the other nominees for this category include the great bong. Now if you've been a follower of the Indian blogosphere, you will know greatbong as he who, if he had been blogging then and had decided to run for president in 2000, might have taken Florida away from both Bush and Gore. Resistance is, therefore, futile. Furthermore, after doing some quick blog-traffic-based calculation, it would be clear even to someone, say, from Texas, that it wouldn't matter even if all of my readers voted for this blog (which they probably won't), as long as all of greatbong's readers vote for his blog (which they probably will).

My only recourse, therefore, is to ask all my readers to vote for greatbong. Not only might this gesture have a microscopically slim chance of inspiring greatbong to reciprocate in kind, but it would save the votes of my readers from being wasted. And wasting your vote is the worst thing you can do in a democracy, as my mother let me know in no uncertain terms ten years ago, when I participated in my first ever election and decided to vote for that obscure candidate no one knew just because I felt sorry for him.

Thirdly, I was saving my campaign finances for the upcoming Nobel prize competition because the Indiebloggies are all well and good, but they don't put food on the table for your family, whereas the Nobels not only provide food, but also a table to put it on, a house to put the table in and an island to build the house on. And I do have a couple of great ideas this year.

Fourthly, the Indiebloggies caught me at a bad time. I should have been nominated when I was at the peak of my blogging career, which was that day about a few months ago when I wrote that really great post and got all those comments. Now, I feel like a pajama-clad housewife with acne and a fever with all her clothes in the washer who just got a call from her husband that he is bringing all his office friends over for a party in twenty minutes. I do not have any clothes to wear, and no time to put on make-up. That was just an analogy, by the way. I am still a man.

So basically in conclusion, I would encourage all of you to go vote for greatbong and maybe if I don't get a single vote, when the contest is over, they might be compassionate enough to not put up the trouncing figures for this category. Thank you in advance, jurors.

Also, if you are one of those undecided voters and would like additional clarification on why you should vote for greatbong and not me, here are some of my favorite posts from my blog. And now you know why.

By the way, just to be serious for a second, whoever nominated my blogs, I appreciate the gesture deeply. It is nice to know that you have readers who would actually spare the time and effort to do something like that.

Thank you. Really.

Twitching eyelid

My right eyelid has begun to twitch in an uncontrollable and repetitive manner. It feels like a mosquito couple having violent but tender sex between the silky linen of my eyelashes. This is very distracting for me because for one, there are some things you just do not want to visualize, such as a pair of fornicating mosquitoes, plus the concern whether they are practicing safe sex, but primarily, it is a problem because it causes disruptions in my field of vision.

Since I consider myself to be an average person, living an average person's diseased life, I assumed that there would be hundreds, if not millions of people in this world who would be similarly afflicted by this malady of mine. And so, I climbed on to The Google to search for these folks and cry on their shoulder. Alas, I found merely one blog post. This guy. What was funny about this blog post is that some time in the distant past, the guy had written a blog post somewhat like mine, where he had complained about his eyelid twitching. And then after The Google found his post, he got a large number of hits from people who wished to learn more on the topic. But sadly for these people, the post contained not an iota of useful information either on eyelids or their twitching other than the author's documented history of eyelid twitching.

So then, compassionate person that he was, he decided to compile a post on eyelid twitching that would actually provide some rudimentary information on the condition. Kind of like the time I wrote an exhaustive post meant for the dissemination of goose-related knowledge to the throngs of goose-knowledge seekers that happen upon this blog everyday. But the guy's post appears to be a huge success, as seeing by the five hundred comments he subsequently received, all from people saying "wow I thought I was the only person who had a twitching eyelid". Talk about the ego on these guys.To be fair, there were also some people in the comments section expressing disappointment because as it turns out they actually had a twitching eyeball, which, again, is not something one would want to visualize if given a choice, but these were few and far between.

But coming back to the topic in question, it appears that eyelid twitching is called myokymia and it is a common condition caused due to excessive caffeine, lack of sleep, lack of vitamins or mosquitoes having violent sex amidst your eyelashes. I am not a coffee person, I take vitamins everyday, I slather myself with mosquito repellent and I sleep a solid seven hours every day. And seven more at night. So what could account for these twitches?

Then, compassionate guy goes on to tell me that my twitching could also be due to brainstem neoplasms, the treatment of which involves "lumbar puncture with examination of cerebrospinal fluid". I like the sound of that even though it sounds terrifying.

So anyways, I have decided to take two vitamins a day now. I don't think I will puncture my lumbar because frankly, I did a cost-benefit analysis and the results concluded that at this point in my life, a twitching eyelid would be preferable to a punctured lumbar.

If you like Sci-fi..

Go here and give it up for RobRoy, who's penned a damn good first chapter of his forthcoming (?) book. For the more discerning of my audience, yes, it also contains violence and brief nudity so go ahead and enjoy. This is RobRoy's entry for a writing contest where the winner gets a book contract and gets to live in a lonely house near a lake (no outboard motors please, thank you). Despite my not being a gigantic fan of sci-fi, RobRoy's writing grabbed me to the point where I am thinking of including more violence and brief nudity in my blog posts to make them more exciting. In case you do not have the time to read it right now, you can also print it out and read it while driving to work. Just remember one thing : do not drink and drive. And also, give his entry 10 stars because I would really love to swim in that lake.