Exactly my thoughts!

Note: this post is only for myself (as if the rest of the blogspot is for others, my wife chides)
Some joy that happened to me suddenly that out of nowhere that i remembered this song.
I was not a big fan of this song before, but suddenly now this song seems heavenly.
The voice is so divine and the hearing this song I feel has similar effect as of drinking chamomile tea -soothing :)
Does anyone know the raaga ?

Not exactly my thoughts but interesting

Waking UP

I have always prized myself for being like the feather in "Forest Gump" taking life as
it comes, not wondering too much about anything and the "thats not a big deal" kind of
attitude. I always agreed with J.M.Barrie-"Young boys should never be sent to bed...
they always wake up a day older" (Finding Neverland). Growing up is a term I never
wanted to get used to.I thought that being a guy who understands all perspectives is
the best thing in life.

Lately, lot of things have started hitting me, where I come to realise "already too
late", or should have done much earlier. LOT of eye openers(most of them through my
wife) where i have been left wondering how did i not notice what was happenning with
the world, and where was I doing what. Vanity, its such a killer. The problem with
vanity is that the person who has it doesn't know it. On seeing some one happy/calm/relaxed
its easy to forget the hardwork/background they did to get there. I am going to think about all those.

I have come to realize is that it is possible to grow old and be mature without losing
your innocence. Its not an easy task mind you. To balance them and not still getting
Carried away with either of them. I am going to attempt to do that. Do instill a
sense of urgency in what I do and how I carry on with my life. Do make sure to live
with a taste and stand up.

I won't go as far as to say i am going to attempt George Costanza's concept of "Do the
Opposite" & "Fight your natural instinct" but something along the lines doesn't sound
bad. Where I am going to fight my natural instinct which tells me that caution is the
utmost thing and make it ready to fight the consequences. I know, its going to be a
long journey here, particular if you start taking life seriously a decade later, but

I know i will have the full support of my wife, I am embarking on that..

The current situation reminds me of Tom Cruise waking up one day and writing a Mission Statement(Jerry Maguire), but eventually nothing but goodness is come out of this.
So hey, what the heck!!

Diwali Wishes

Diwali is not a bad time to wake up & start doing things that we we once started/always wanted to start. So me thinking of blogging atleast at a better pace than before. So here's diwali wishes done by Sandy(my wife)

Yogi B n Nachathira Feat Lock Up - Madai Thiranthu

Is this the next generation of tamil music? Listened to this recently(Courtesy, my wife sandy) . Lyrics are pretty strong at some places. This is a Malaysian based music group which made me pay attention(!)- This is the first tamil song of hip-hop genre that I heard.

The Pen is Mightier than the keyboard

Recently I received e-greeting cards for the new year/pongal etc. Its so easy these days to not even touch the pen(even for a personal greeting) and choose something from the net and add your own message. With so any sites offering free e-greeting cards, pick something, add a tune/voice message and forward it. For a person who believes in personal touch in anything personal(that’s why its called personal) I am still yet to come in full terms of it.

During my college days, when I used to live 1500 miles away from my parents and STD rates not being that affordable, letters were the main source of correspondence with my family. They used to send me an Inland letter every week, and I used to reply with a postcard every other week(mostly for reminding that more money needs to be sent ;) I remember the hindi movie Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge where Amrish Puri smells the letter he receives from India and says he feels desh ki kushboo(smell of motherland) from that letter. I wouldn’t go as far as that but seeing one’s own parents handwritten words

definitely gives you the feeling of being near them(more so than voice & webcam) because you spend so much time thinking about the other person when you write. My mother was not used to writing letters so I would beg her to jot a few lines just to see her handwriting and her style and she used to oblige every now and then.

I had a reputation of having spelling mistakes in every language I had known be it tamil, hindi, English. In Hindi, once I had to write an essay about Gandhi and I had just prepared for that and I wrote a very neat essay. Only then the next day the master recited the whole essay to the class I found out that instead of Gandhi, I had written Gadhi(which translates to donkey) everywhere. Even when I was learning Sanskrit in my high school – I used to make mistakes even when I had to write rama ramou ramaaha(the basic grammar). Thanks these days for the spell check software !! I am digressing here, the point is my sister used to collect all my postcards that I send them and once I go for vacation, it would be a fun session for them pointing out all the mistakes that I had made in the letters written during the course of the semester.

My father was very good in writing letters. Every letter to him would be like a completion. The best place to start would be (as Wodehouse says) at the beginning(like “kshemam, khemaithirkku bathil”, which translates to I am doing fine, reply how you are doing) and then you have to answer all the questions asked in their previous correspondence, current state of affairs, and then enquire about the well-being of all other known people. The information should not be zig-zag and flow like a pattern.

These days, even emails are sent in sms format. My wife, who is five years younger than me claims that she can send 4 complete sms messages in one minute. She always questions why I write complete words when you can do with so few letters. Most of her messages would need interpretation for me . Example :

Hi me zzzz Wanna go shopn. RU cmng (translates in English as Hi, I am feeling bored, I want to go shopping, Would you come with me)

Gues wat shalu did, ROFL stuf spk2ul8r abt tat ( translates in English as to Guess what shalu did , Rolling off the floor laughing stuff. Will speak to you later about that.)

With all these YABA(Yet Another Bloody Acronym)’s I wonder sooner or later, they would start teaching these for English as Second Language courses

Of Asterix and Losing Innocence

I am a major fan of asterix and obelix, having read all the books multiple times. For asterix fans, a new book has recently come out – Asterix and the Falling Sky. I remember eyebrows being raised in my family when after college, I used to buy comic books and read. Aren’t you too old for that was the argument. I think no one is too old for anything. Everyone has their own tangibles that motivates them, that they never get tired of. Its small things like these that keep us engaged/absorbed in life, when life itself is taunting us in a frying pan.

I think the problem with us is we outgrow things very quickly. Whatever was funny to me previously now isn’t. Looks like as the years grow by the number of things that engage us keeps coming down. I have matured(tell that to my wife!) even though I don’t want to. As Voltaire said "If we don't find something pleasant, we'll find something new and interesting together" – we have a need to constantly find something that we don’t seem to grow tired of .

When you notice a child, it always views everything without prejudice and its having fun and being contented most of the time because its sees everything with wonderment and amaze. Everything in nature seems to be a playtool or a source of joy with for them.What wouldn’t I give up to be mature and still retain my innocence. In fact this was one of the qualities that brought me closer to my wife sandhiya. Her ability to be innocent and have fun at the simplest of the things. She still keeps a burger pillow, all funny key chains, scented rubbers and her enthusiasm unbridled. Looking at her at the way she approaches all things mundane, it makes me wonder if really life is so simple and are we the ones making it so complicated ?

Google packs it up

There comes a time in a man's blogging life when he has to absolutely blog something about technology particulary if the blogger in question is in the field of technology, or he starts questioning himself of his credibility in the field he is in. I wouldn't call myself a geek following the latest in technolgy, but i try to keep track of the latest once in a while and try it out.

The problem with saying latest offering from google these days is before you finish the blog, something else new has been introduced. Google pack is nothing new, but they have packed some of their tools into one neat package. Some of these are must-have and some only for people with tech interest and rest for people reading this post(mostly jobless). Most of the tools in there are the best in their trade. My observations on some of these tools as a novice. Geeks(Or-So-Called), kindly excuse, and do what Geeks(Or-So-Called) do.

Google Earth - Simply awesome, except that make sure that your computer has atleast 512 MB RAM and more than 1GHz speed to have a decent viewing quality.

Picasa - Pretty decent tool for organizing your photos on your PC. If you want to share it on the web, I fould flickr a nice way. Better than yahoo photos as it doesn't reduce the resolutions of photos too much.

Google Desktop - No need to mention about Google's search. One disadvantage I found is that it consumes quite some memory(since you need to run it all the time in the background), but it's worth it when you have to search for something in your PC.

Google Toolbar - Pretty convenient if you use google more than a few times and found the pop-up blocker better than MS Service Pack2.

Mozilla - A neat browser, i like this for viewing simultaneous pages in tabs, reading feeds etc. Definitely faster and consumes less memory than IE. Another good browser is opera. Either way you won't go wrong with using any of these two browsers.

Ad-Aware- A must have these days what with the non-stop infusion of ads and spy software. Equally good is spy-bots

Google Talk is what I am using currently to chat whomever I know in India replacing skype. Skype was good intially but with the enormous increase in users, the voice quality has gone down. One of my relatives suggested Rediff Bol (the patriotic indian that he is), but we uninstalled it promptly after we used a few times as the quality/interface is not that great.

RealPlayer Hate this, and when a person and his wife agree on hating a particular thing, it must be pretty bad won't you say.

Haven't tried Trillian or GalleryPlayer HD Images. Any feedback on this anyone?