I hoped that I wouldn’t crib about the weather again and my prayers seem to have been answered by The Almighty. The city of Chennai (or in my case, the outskirts of Chennai) have been receiving rain showers daily since the past 3 days. I would be lying if I said that I was expecting rains here at this time of the year. One of my friends actually expressed his amazement at this natural phenomenon thus – “Bloody hell! It rains in these parts too?”. We made it a point never to curse the rain Gods ever again.

Meanwhile, I had another misadventure with a Hindi+English-illiterate shopkeeper. I wanted a 500ml bottle of Sprite and if that wasn’t available I was willing to settle for a baby bottle of LMN. My attempts at guiding the grocer to the goods using a combination of hand gestures plus broken English bore no fruit. Finally I had to use the linked-list concept of ‘next->next->element found’ to get what I wanted. I left with a cold drink and a hot head.

Another curious incident that occurred last week was when me and my friends went out to dinner. In order to avoid any conflicts, we go Dutch as a rule. I was bored of the usual stuff, so I ordered a Paneer dish. At times like these, it’s easy to make assumptions about the price and I dismissed it as a non-issue since I considered myself to be a regular at this particular restaurant, fully acquainted with the pricing structure. Dinner was served and midway through the dining I realized that my order was beyond the capacity of my tummy. There was no way I could finish it. None of my friends were willing to lend a spoon/fork/handful since they had already filled up their tanks. Leaving the plate half-full (optimism, you see) was the only option. As I walked up to pay the bill, I was shocked to find that my ‘for-a-change’ dinner cost double of what I usually spend on a meal. I turned back and saw my (still) half-full plate being carried away by the waiter, the contents laughing and sticking out their collective tongues at me.

“Hey! Bring it back! I’m not done yet!!”, I almost shouted.

So that was the week that was. Next week has already begun and that means more trips to the coffee machine and if the weather stays pleasant, maybe I’ll get to visit the real Chennai too!

I spent the week pondering about my second tutorial regarding Firefox. I’ll probably work on it tomorrow, since I’ve got nothing lined up for Sunday. The first one is here, if you’re wondering.

Okay, since this was a pretty uneventful week I’ve got nothing more to crib about. I’ll keep myself busy on Sunday by working on that little tutorial and cursing the heat again.

Here’s hoping my next post won’t be full of whinging and whining.

“Why?”, you ask. So lemme tell you, I live in a God-forsaken place where I’d be lucky to find a restaurant open on Sundays. Saturdays are comparatively better, since most food joints in this area are open. Now this may or may not apply to Chennai ‘city’, so don’t get too wound up. However, the heat is still terrible. Apparently the Sun doesn’t do us any favours on weekends. The heat just makes me wish I could run away to the office and spend the day in the air-conditioned rooms.

So yes, we don’t have an air-conditioner in my room. In any other place, this wouldn’t be a big deal. But when I mentioned this to a friend of mine who was brought up in Chennai, she was shocked. Not having an AC in this city is equivalent to a death-wish, it seems. Still, I shall brave the weather and try to survive the 2×4=8 days of a month or two, somehow. After all, I’ll probably be posted at some place other than Chennai after training is over, right?

Right?

Right??

At the risk of schadenfreude, I must say that at least it’s better than getting cooked in the scorching May heat. The 5 minute walk from my house to the office seems like a marathon thanks to the ‘default’ Chennai weather. But like most things in life, the bad inevitably followed the good. My bed was the first one to suffer, getting drenched in rainwater leaking from a wall socket while I slept. The poor mattress is currently being kept under the intensive care of a table fan. And the mattress didn’t go for a dip alone. It took 2 of my bedsheets along, colouring them violet in the process. The worst part? I had changed the sheets right before I went to sleep that night.

For now, the weather is quite pleasant and I know it won’t last long. But anything’s better than having to suffer at the hands of the dreaded Chennai weather.

I moved to Chennai a couple of weeks ago and since then my life has become more hectic, faster and busier than ever. Priorities have changed and a lot of things have had to be reorganized. That leaves little time for posting here. Still, I’ll have something to say every now and then.

My experiences in this new city and a lot more will soon follow.

1. The user really is the weakest link in anything that needs security: I got myself a laptop bag and a small lock. To be absolutely safe during my journey, I locked the main pocket that houses the laptop and had a sound sleep. Woke up next morning and unlocked it to take out my laptop. Horror of horrors, it was empty! But oddly, the bag still weighed the same! Frantic checking revealed that I had blissfully locked the wrong pocket at night while the main pocket remained unlocked. Thankfully, none of my stuff was missing.
2. Never, ever, ever give up: One of the partitions on my laptop’s hard drive seemed to have developed a problem, probably bad sectors. Any attempt to write to it would randomly result in either crashing the system or scary noises (scary as in, scary coming from a laptop). I had no time back then, so I promptly deleted the entire 40Gb partition to get rid of the trouble. I planned to come back to solving the issue later. A couple of days ago I finally decided to bring my lost partition back to life. However, Windows’ ChkDsk, Disk management Utility proved to be useless. I got hold of Spinrite and let it run for about 3 hours. the stupid piece of software swiftly reached 15.4% in 10 minutes and remained stuck at that figure for the next 2 and a half hours. As a last resort, I tried Acronis Disk Director and surprise, surprise! It worked! Now I have 40GB more space to store my useless junk.
3. There’s no place like home: Yup.

Oh, and I know there haven’t been any updates lately but hey, I can’t cook up stories and post them over here. That would be so downright Sun-like.

If anything interesting happens in the next few days, I’ll ensure that it makes it to this blog. Unless of course, I manage to blow myself up in the process.

Have a great weekend, folks!

While aspects such as your choice of apparel, cuisine etc can be attributed to the maturity you gain over the years, I don’t think any such explanation exists for a person’s musical taste. Or at least, there is none that I know of.

Since the time I first gained exposure to music, I’ve listened to numerous artistes. Some of them became instant favourites while the others faded away from my memory instantly. Today, I find that my choice in music has evolved (or devolved, depending on your point of view) to such an extent that I can hardly imagine myself listening to artistes that used to be my idols only a few years ago.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I used to be a huge fan of boy-bands such as Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Blue and Westlife, back when they were all the rage. That was largely due to the airtime provided to these bands by the music channels on TV. Owning a cassette (yup, CDs were way too expensive then) of these bands used to be a sort of status symbol and ensured that you were always in demand. Those were the days…

Then, I moved on to Linkin Park, whose mania lasted for a little over 3 years. After that, came the lostprophets, Green Day, Franz Ferdinand et al. The next phase in my musical journey saw A Static Lullaby, As I Lay Dying and Finch take over my headphones. And right now, I’m mostly listening to Daughtry and Fightstar.

So what makes me reminisce over these things now?

The reason is, the Backstreet Boys are gonna be performing live in Bangalore on the 21st of this month. This could be my only opportunity to see my one-time favourite band in person, on stage. So now I’m mulling over whether to attend the gig or not, considering that I’ll probably have to go alone since most of us have spunked our cash on our weekend trip to Coorg. The tickets are not exactly dirt-cheap at Rs.1000 apiece, but that is a fair price to pay to see your boyhood favourites, right?

I’ll see if I can entice someone to part with his dough, and if I can’t get someone to take along, I’ll probably go solo (or not go at all, depending on what my mind tells me then).

So if you’re in Bangalore/Delhi and have fond memories of the band, do go and watch them live. It’ll surely be ‘larger then life’.

So now you can catch me on Twitter by clicking the shiny little button the right side of this page. And if you find anything interesting, insightful, informative or amusing, do start following me!

Also check out my profile on Last.fm, Orkut and Flickr. My Flickr account has not been updated in quite a while, but it’s worth a dekko, methinks. I’ll try to add some more stuff pretty soon. Till then, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter. I swear, it will be updated a LOT more frequently than this blog.

Okay, so here’s a brief recap of all the things that happened and didn’t happen during the past couple of weeks. First off, I got myself a new cellphone – the Nokia N79 that I’d been dreaming about ever since I read its review on GXSaurav’s blog. It’s a sleek petrol black model and I am in complete awe of its beauty, intelligence and all the things that a pretty girl should have. Okay, so that was a little weird, but what else did you expect from a techie?

My New Phone

Then we had a freshers party on the very same day for the latest bunch of recruits. That went well, even yours truly managing to jive a bit. Sunday was nothing special, what with all of us catching up on the several hours of sleep lost during the week. Then came Monday, and I agree with Garfield. It’s the worst day of the week. I just about managed to scrape through it, half-awake. On Tuesday, my Internet connection started acting up and wouldn’t let me log in. The same had occurred with a couple of friends who had bought theirs from that retailer. The next day I went to the retailer and told him about the problem. He asked me to fill up another CAF form and assured that the connection would be re-activated soon. But as expected, his assurance turned out to be holow. 3 days passed by without any action being taken. I’d made up my mind to get this thing sorted out myself, since complaining to the customer care didn’t help matters either.

My Internetz

On Thursday, I got a minor shock. I was out having a cup of tea during lunchtime when a friend called me up to tell me that the speaker from our classroom was missing and the IT guy was calling the Class Rep, which happens to be me. I frantically rushed back since the stupid thing costs Rs.6500, which would have to be  borne by the scapegoat. Err, I mean the Class Rep. Thankfully, someone had casually picked up the speaker and kept it in the conference hall. My wallet could breathe easy once more and we enjoyed ‘Chak De India’ after a few initial hiccups.

My Class (With Lights On)

Then came Friday. Usually the Class Rep gets bullied around by the faculty, has to be responsible for every mistake that the class makes and has to do all sorts of stupid things. But call it my luck, that I’d not been subjected to any of that. That was until Friday. It was lunchtime and I had dozed off in the class, as had most of the others. The next lecture was free since the faculty was busy in a workshop. The lights were off, a few cellphones were playing music and the ambience was highly conducive to sound sleep. Then all of a sudden I heard a call to hide the cellphone and the moment I opened my eyes, there was the director standing at the door, turning on the lights. Needless to say, his first question was – “Who is the CR?”. That was the call for me to get ready for a kicking. But thankfully, I just got to hear a few choice words and nothing much happened. My attempts to save my skin and my class, did earn me a few comments of “Well tried!” from my mates, though.

These don't NEED a caption!!

Oh look! It’s Saturday already! Today I was on my own. That was because I’d been watching a movie late into the night and woke up at 11:39 AM, when the rest of my mates had already gone to the academy to play cricket. “No problem, I’ll just get the Internet connection sorted out today”, I thought. So after a quick bath, I caught a bus to the nearest Reliance Web World. The customer service rep over there was a pretty helpful chap named Santosh. It took 2-3 hours, but he managed to get my connection up and running. I was delighted! After that I just needed to get myself a blanket and a new pair of shoes. Did that, and hopped on the bus back to base. On the way I met a few of my mates returning after the match(es). They had won 1 and lost the other. No need to worry, though. Those were just practice matches. The real thing starts next weekend. My class (F) has been drawn in the group containing sections J and H. I’ll keep y’all updated on the results.

And I hope this time we fare better in football. Last time around, we cruised to the championship in cricket and even beat the other 2 trimesters. But in football, we were knocked out in the first round. We had put out a make-shift team and I had an absolute shocker that day.

And to make things better, Chelsea have just beaten Wolves 4-0 with a depleted squad. We’re now 8 points clear of Arsenal who got turned over by Sunderland. ManU are playing against Everton as I write this. Let’s hope they lose as well.

Joe and Flo Celebrate!

Oh well, I guess that’s about it. If I had to rate it, I’d give this week an 8 on 10. Bring on next week, I say! But first, cheers to Sunday!!!

This Saturday though, was different. The apartment where all of us live, wore a deserted look since most of the people had left for nearby tourist spots on Friday night itself. I didn’t accompany my friends to Tirupati since I’d already been there once. I also didn’t have any intentions of sight-seeing in Bangalore, since there was hardly anyone to accompany me. So I thought I’d deal with some of my responsibilities as the unfortunate Class Rep ( more on that in a few days), namely getting a file photo-copied for the entire class. And for that, I needed to travel to the Academy from the apartments. Our bus leaves at 9 AM on Saturdays and as I had feared, I woke up at 10:30. I took along another friend of mine, Subhash, who needed to get some things done. And as if waiting for a bus wasn’t bad enough, it started raining. Luckily for us, we didn’t have to stand in the rain for too long. The photo-copying got over pretty quickly, Subhash got his chores done and since we had nothing else to do over there, it was back to the apartments for us.

By the time we reached our dwelling, it was time for lunch. Now lunchtime is a time when we actually get to see scores of people, some of whom we might have never seen before in the Academy. But today saw a record turnout of just 30-35 unfortunate souls who were left behind. On top of that, there was no electricity since morning. So our usual TV and lunch routine had to abandoned. Instead, we had Subhash playing his cellphone on full blast, churning out some of his all-time favourite songs.

After a rather sumptuous meal, again we had nothing to do. The weather was very gloomy thanks to the constant drizzle. There was still no power and none of our laptops had enough juice to last the length of a movie. The best we could do now was to go to our rooms to sleep and wake up only when it was tea-time. I had already exhausted my sleep quota for the day so it was almost impossible for me to take a nap again. So for 2 hours straight I lay on my bed, listening to the radio. Tea-time couldn’t come soon enough, I thought.

In the evening, the numbers fell even more – only 20 or so were left by now. Thankfully, we were able to watch a bit of TV and then a few of us went for a stroll in the street. Soon it was time for dinner and TV. After another walk in the street, I sat glued to the TV, watching Hellboy-II. Actually this was the most interesting and exciting thing I did all day. The movie got over at around 11:10 and I rushed back to my flat.

And as I turned on my laptop to check my mails, I felt a sudden urge to document probably the most boring Saturday I’ve ever spent since I’ve been in Bangalore. The result is this post and a prayer – a prayer so that may I never have to write such a post ever again.