Lonely Cricket.

The tennis ball bounced back from the wall, the little boy swung his MRF bat with all his might, and he missed it completely.

"Don't dirty the walls Roshan, " his mother called out from the kitchen.

"What's this with this boy, playing cricket all alone, all the time? " she asked her servant, her advisor on matters pertaining to children.

She didn't wait for the reply, and questioned again, "All day, he's throwing that ball on the wall, and hitting it back to the wall, What kind of game is this? "

Unaware of the conversations inside the kitchen, Roshan waited for the last two balls of the match. The situation was critical, nine wickets down and two balls left, and the batsman on the other side had learned to hold the bat a day ago. So it was up to Roshan to play both the balls and get the required six runs for his team. Fortunately, for Roshan, he can have the ball bowled like he wanted to, for he was the bowler too.

Roshan, the batsman held his bat in the left hand, and Roshan, the bowler, threw the ball on the wall with his right hand. By the time the ball touched the wall, he got to his position to hit the ball on to the wall. He swung it hard , and missed it completely. It was too good a ball to hit it for a six.

He's left with one ball, and six runs to score. For his own benefit, he threw the ball very slowly on to the wall. The ball returned from the wall, as if it was on slow motion , it pitched quite in front of him and curved away in the wind. Roshan struck hard, the bat flew out of his hand, and the ball went straight past him. He'd missed it again.

Roshan lost to Roshan by five runs.

Roshan picked up his bat from the floor, and said, "What a bowler ?"

Rat race ? What has cheese to do with it ?

This post is dedicated to my dear friend Sriram, who often comes up with highly creative Facebook status'.

What's a rat race ? I got thinking about rat race after Sriram posted his status on Facebook as this :

" I dont mind the rat race, but like it with a little more cheese, coz no matter what, u will still be a rat at the end of the race......!!!!"

He asked me what I thought of his new status. My first idea was to post this as a comment ,now this is too big for a comment.

To the uninitiated, a rat race probably means an endless, self-defeating, pointless pursuit for something that the rat is never going to get. It must have come about from the research labs where the rats were trapped in cages or mazes. They run around the maze all day and finally end up where they started, a bit tired than when they started. They do it again and again, but never realize that they are never going to get it. They are just expending energy.

So, cheese in a rat race is not something you lick it like the pickle with your booze. It's probably the booze you'll never get as long as your mother is at home.

It wouldn't matter how big the cheese is, as you are never going to get that in the race in the first place. When cheese is a mere illusion, the size of the cheese wouldn't matter as well. So much like so many other things :)

I agree with one part of his status , coz no matter what we are all rats at the end. And probably tired rats.

Cat and Man - A piece of memory

Do you remember the first song you heard on a CD when you were young ? On your own CD! I had no idea till a month ago. I never looked for it, it was never important. But what I didn't know was that it can make you happy, it can make you a child again.

For me it was a CD from my uncle, who got it from some Arab at his work place. He didn't listen to English songs, so he gave it to me when he came to India. The CD, gold plated with black font , stayed on the book shelf for a long time, until my father got a Discman from somewhere. I'm still not sure if it was a new one or a second hand one. It was a new gadget and we didn't have a CD to play on the Discman. A CD , at 300 rupees for just ten songs was an expensive proposition at that time . Even now if not for the easy downloads we get over the internet. A CD was just not meant for normal people. I even remember my neighbor taunting me that I can't a record new song on a CD unlike his Singpore imported audio cassette player with double speaker and Woofer. The CD's wouldn't last , it was way too expensive he said. Yes, he was right, the CD's didn't last, because MP3 format was born, and then iPod was conceived. I must ask him if he still listened to his audio cassette.

I dug the golden CD from the book shelf, with only ten tracks, of which only one would work. That was no fault of the CD, I didn't know how to turn off the repeat mode on the new Discman for a long time, an by the time I learned about repeat function, the CD had just vanished. Being bad with lyrics, and more so since I didn't understand a single word of what the singer sang, I could not find what the track that was. I liked the song, but I could n't and ask anyone what the track was. I wasn't sure of the singer's name too, just that he had some sort of an animal name , a pet animal. Cat, Parrot or something on that lines.

A month ago, years after I heard that track on Discman, by then even the Discman had vanished, I chanced upon the very song at a book store. I knew it instantly. It transported me twelve years back, the time when I was only twelve, wearing a checked shirt, and sitting at the reading table , strewn with comics, and color pencils, listening to Cat Stevens 'Wild wild world' over and over again. Just that I didn't know that it was Cat Stevens or 'Wild wild world' at that time. Memories of school days rushed inside my head, the new school, new people, and the anxiety of English speaking teachers. The way around my old house, the spots were I used to gaze older guys playing cricket on the street, the noise of my father's kinetic engine, and so much more. It's a piece of memory. And I realized music is the way to make a crisp time travel , is it the only way ?

I discovered Cat Stevens, and he keeps me happy these days.

Links :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens

Two of my favorites from Cat Stevens. Thanks for reading.

Would love to hear about your piece of memory.

A noise inside my head

Look around the world,
It's quite bright and cold,
I heard a static noise,
But that's not a voice,
I pinched my nose,
And scratched my scalp,
Oh! I lost my poise ?
I Cried, what's the noise?

It said , " I'm your boss,
Come back to work,
I have no voice,
I make only noise,
You ought to dance,
Nothing to chance,
You hate to work,
but that's so quirk,
better come back,
or you'll wither like flake"

I pulled my scarf,
Over my head,
I cried aloud,
don't annoy,
I'm back to sleep,
Where I like the most.

Rain, Chennai, and Global warming

Latest survey by a U.S based company in collaboration with an Indian research institute has come up with a list of cities enjoying the benefits of global warming. Yes, it's not a typo, you read it right. A list of cities enjoying better climate than the previous year. The clever person you are, you must have realized from the title that Chennai topped the list. So what next, why did Chennai get it and what are the countries in the list ? I'm sure you have already thought of googling the list, and if not , why not google it instead of making this blog a newscast.

Nothing else can justify the change of climate that has happened to Chennai. For the unaccustomed, Chennai is not a place to visit during summer, nor it is during winter. (yes, it's not the climate but nevertheless we call December and January as winter.) For an average guy, the animosity with Chennai increases proportionally with latitude , and a guy from Delhi might do anything to get away from Chennai. Leave about the boy from Delhi, he might get angry with me. Who is that boy anyway?

A nice way to start your day on a rainy day is to think that rain can bring joy in your life, and soon you'll realize that you are dumb to accept my suggestion. This is the non-exhaustive list of rainy woes that might find a place in your rainy life ; clothes left unwashed, gutter water splashed on your best shirt, traffic moving as if roads are yet to be laid in front, and the inevitable lost umbrella. I lost count of my lost umbrella's that I plan to steal some umbrella's this time.

P.S:
The reference to the so called report is just a gimmick to make you read further. You are clever if you happen to read the post script first, but still it won't hurt if you go back and read everything.

On Procrastination by an expert procrastinator.

Whenever I have a task on my to do list , I stumble on a clever justifications to hang it loose for some time. Then the same task comes up, fattened with time, and tedious than ever, bugging me forever.

Unless , a dead line looms ahead and threats of serious implications are announced on a my ears , I find a better reason to avoid it. The reasons I dig out from the bottom of my not so deep brain are the works of a genius. I believe I'm a genius of sorts when it comes to procrastinating a task and pretty average in everything else if you don't consider thinking rubbish as one of the item in the list of everything else.

I realized this very early and decided to write a book on procrastination ,titled, " How to find reasons to procrastinate? " That would have sold like hot cakes, not because it would be barrier breaking and highly informative. But people who procrastinate would definitely want to know if they have missed out on any new tricks on procrastination. They are always on the look out for better reasons to procrastinate. They won't find it, not because it is not there in the book, but because they will procrastinate the very idea of reading it. Then my books would go unsold if I target these unreliable procrastinators, for they would not mind procrastinating their decision to buy my book. I might end up selling my books to a local eatery for absorbing oil from their deep fried bonda's and vada's , the one with the hole and the one without or the make shift tissue papers.

It's such a defeating thought, imagining the pages from my book being torn up and used uselessly. So defeating that I have dropped the plan to write that book in the first place. I will procrastinate this idea of writing a book on procrastination until I find the right market, which, I know that I will never know.

It happens in Hyderabad - Ocean Park trip

That's a long break to post the third post. Come next June I'd have completed two years in Hyderabad. The weather is getting hotter by the day, and we are trying new ideas to fight it out everyday.

We have been to Ocean Park last month, a water theme park some twenty five Kilometers from Kondapur. There were five of us , running from share auto to crowded buses in the middle of the soaring march Sun. I had even packed my swimming suits , and the hot weather didn't matter much as long as we had a great trip.

Unfortunately, the only ride we had was the roller coaster ride in a government bus. The theme park was closed for the weekend. Can you believe a theme park closed on a weekend in the middle of summer, you should. It happens in Hyderabad. And of course we saw water , just the bottled one in the racks of a nearby shop. He sold us Lassi and Faluda for outrageous prices, not even mentioning a word about the status of the theme park. He even asked how bad his Faluda tasted.

Technically, the theme park wasn't closed. They were open with four rides, of course we were too big to ride them. The swimming pool (two feet deep ) too was open, only if we can prove that we were of the fairer gender. We thought , it was wiser to avoid entering the place. The prices were slashed of course; just a hundred for walking around the park.

Why should any one believe me ? You should , because I have evidence to prove it. Just see the photos and be happy that it did't happen to you. But it happened in Hyderabad.