Grumble grumble

If someone were to map the thoughts in my brain right now, it would resemble spaghetti in a chicken soup dipped in chocolate sauce topped with bacon and almonds mixed with strawberries and covered in pudina chutney with dumplings and taquitos with wasabi for sides. Though the last few days have been ok in everything, there’s a lot of thought sitting jumbled up like jalebis. Concentration span has been reduced to seconds and I am jumping from one thought to other like a kangaroo on hot coal.  Need a chat with an expert soon!

P.S. The national animal of Scotland is Unicorn. No Kidding.

Random Post

I have this strong urge for renaming my blog to .. "Sorry I crushed your Nimbu Mirchi ..." ... fists clenched ...  counting from 100 to 1 .... lets see if the urge goes away.
Update: The urge is still there and I made a quick picture with free internet clip art

A Random Walk

Any ideas on, how do you do a random walk in real life? You do what we me and Dylan did yesterday. We wanted to go for a walk and didn't know where to go so we decided not to decide anything at all and leave everything to chance. We started from Alex's and on each intersection made a totally random decision on which way to go :), that's a random walk in real life and it was fun walking without purpose and no destination.

It's been almost a month and a half since I wrote here last that's because I have been keeping quite busy and sadly I don't fore see any respite in the next few days. Writing something was on my list for almost a week so I decided I should take some time out and write something..... anything.

Talking about anything, yesterday was a good day. I had a poster presentation and had to stand next to my poster for three and half hours which almost succeeded in breaking my back, fortunately the presentation got over just before the breaking point. Then we went to the "goat", had coffee and the free pizza at Alex's :). The Tradebot guy who sponsored the pizza was a nice one. I guess Me and Dylan were the only guys there without a resume. PhD students are so easily satisfied, they don't need no jobs, all they need is free pizza :P. Then we did the random walk thingy untill we ran into AJ and the broken car (unrelated events :P) and we talked about the "Rat Attack" in northeast India. That was something I learnt yesterday and I had no clue whatsoever about it. A cycle which occurs every 48 years. Every 48 years millions of rats come, no one knows from where and destroy all the crops. It has an interesting reason which I leave you to explore. After the discussion I went back to the lab and actually worked for sometime till I decided to call it a day and head home and guess what I met Jeremy on my way. Actually he wasn't in my way but you know you sometime have that urge to poke a mad bull and see what it does :P. I kinda like talking to him and listen to how a conservative Christian’s mind works.(..and you thought I had had enough of conservative Hinduism) Well God is one of my favorite topics and I can't resist talking about it. Every time I talk to Jeremy I learn something. How to be patient when someone is talking so highly of something you have zilch beleif in and then how to coerce them into your way of thinking. Was too tired after that so went home listened to Jason Mraz ... I love the geek in the pink live version..had dinner and slept ... to wake up the next morning and write this post. :)
Have fun everybody !

Arre bhai desai

No I am not talking to someone with the name desai. It’s the way I like to pronounce desi, with the “i” as in shine. There is a reason behind this and the reason is that I am confused, I am confused why is ‘i’ not just ’i’ but sometimes ‘a’ and sometimes ‘y’. A great man once said, English is a phunny language and he got it absolutely spot on, at least for us the desis. Till the time I was in india I was quite happy with my English, I knew that I was one of the people who make India the largest english speaking population in the world (we also make india the second largest population in the world),I believed I had a neutral accent, and I used to have no difficulties making people understand me. That’s true for all of us. The trouble starts when the desi lands in amreeka and it starts with your name. I have a two syllable name “vimal” which I believe is not very tough to pronounce and so I fail to understand how can people not get it right. First day in the university, first class and the professor calls me vymal (again vimal but with an i as in shine), which was kinda funny, but I don’t have any problem as long as you can identify me with that name, so for the professor I am vymal. Unfortunately that’s not the end of it, people keep messing my name up sometimes I get called vamal , sometimes vimol and sometimes vimaahh, Embarrassing. But that’s okay because I don’t want to correct people everytime they make a mistake. Like one of my friend’s mother in law, she struggled with pronouncing my name for like ten minutes and finally we decided she would be calling me Jack. That’s just one side of the story, as much as it bothers us, it’s also embarrassing for others when they mispronounce our name, like this one time, a lady in a class was trying to explain something, she wanted to give an example and she asked a student what was his name. “Sanskar” he said. Now then, if vimal is so difficult you can imagine sanskar. After struggling for some time the lady gave up and apologized.

Now that you have come to terms with your new names, you want to go out to eat. But it’s not as easy, for some weird reason amreeka has turned all the world’s logic on its head. The innocuous cheeseburger is not what it says it is, it actually contains beef, certainly a no no for desis. You want to pay for what you had at the restaurant? The bill here is called the check and the currency note is called bill. San jose is actually called San hose-ay. Rubber is not eraser but something entirely different. The desi is Kompletely Konfuzed now and he wants to talk to people. To his horror however clearly he speaks he can’t make people understand him. Initially he resists but he has to give in and start speaking with the amreekan accent, he speaks with a heavy voice and tries to drag every word as long as he can. Every sentence is littered with more “like”s than actual words. The “Damn” becomes ‘Deamm’, ‘Focus’ becomes ‘fokis’ and “r” now comes on with a rolling sound, but that’s not all, he is so excited about the new accent that he starts picking whatever accent he comes in contact with. American, British, Mexican everyone of them. The desi is becoming kool but now the people around him are confused, why does this guy speaks every word with a different accent. By the time the desi realizes this, it’s too late. He is speaking crap and he can’t go back to his Indian accent. It’s not all about the accents though. Things are a little tougher for those of us who weren’t very attentive in the English class at school. A few days back a friend of mine, was telling me an incident how a guy was pronouncing veggie like a wedgie and how funny it was. Little did she know that I didn’t know what the difference was. A general apathy towards the use of prepositions is also one of our characteristic so many of us have a voice mail which says “ I am not able to pick your call right now”. These sort of things keep happening with us and there are two ways to look at these. One is to think that everyone is trying to pick on you, the other is to realize that this is what we are and how we are then why not just enjoy ourselves and enjoy our desi-ness. I always see the lighter part of it. If nothing else then my desi-ness is at least good enough for a laugh or two.

P.S I am a desi and I love being a desi, it is just a funny recount of my and my friends’s experiences and has to be taken lightly. If at all the D-word and the post in general is offensive to you, then be my guest.

The opposite of "Yes"

“Does it”. The voice demanded “Yes it does” he replied. “Please try to understand its gravity” a female voice from the back of the room said. He could anticipate the hope in the voice, he felt a sudden affinity to it, and he was familiar with it but failed to put a name on it. A glass of water and a few silent minutes later, “does it?” he asked again. Almost involuntarily the muscles beneath his voice box flexed and he muttered a “yes”. How did that happen? Why did he say “Yes” and what was it they were asking? “For god’s sake please say it.” The voice now almost pleading cut him into half. He tried turning back to see who she was but found himself blindfolded and unable to move. All he could do was listen and so he did. He heard her sobbing and he heard footsteps going towards her, he closed his eyes and with all his concentration tried listening instead he could in fact see everything. He could see a man comforting the lady. Could he see? He hurriedly ran his hands to his eyes, he was still blindfolded yet he could see everything clearly. He saw her face but again failed to recognize her. He saw a child clinging to the lady, who hasn’t uttered a word till now overawed by the situation. Unable to speak he wasn’t even sure if he was alive. He looked all around the room, although blindfolded he could still see everyone in the room. Was this a miracle or was he dead, the latter possibility scared him before he realized it was the power of human mind, if you feel something as strongly as he was feeling you could actually see it hear it and live it. Could this be the reason he was here. He knew everybody was waiting to hear just one word, the opposite of ‘Yes’ but as much as he tried he wasn’t able to say it.

Two random questions

I will try to answer a couple of questions in this post, the first one was posed to me by someone and the second has been making me use my rusted brain again. Not very important but questions of life which make you understand more of yourself. Here they are.

How important a good conversation is for you? I was asked, and I wasn’t sure of the answer, moreover I w as in a hurry to be actually able to answer it. I thought of pondering over it later but as luck would have it, the answer brought itself to me. I had a couple of good conversations, let’s make it one and half, the second one was cut short in the middle, but they made me realize how much I like a good meaningful conversation, where people open up their mind for you, and show you a whole new perspective on any given thing. I found that I like it so much so that it gives me joy of an orgasmic level or joygasm as I call it.

The second question was how much do circumstances affect your behavior when you meet a person for the first time. In my opinion the set of circumstances does have a lot of say on how you behave with a certain person when you meet them for the first time and that first interaction, if not last makes a lasting impression. Think about it, recall the first time you met one of your acquaintances and recall the set of conditions and circumstances, now change those conditions altogether, imagine meeting the same person under a totally different set of circumstances. For me, it changes the whole equation, which makes me wonder, whether temporal feelings can be totally dominated by the surroundings. For you, it might not be so, nevertheless an interesting question.

Think