Choice

No matter how strong or independent we think we are, people we choose to include in our lives can make or break us.

Just a thought

A person of many colors need not be a chameleon, always,...he/she could be a rainbow...

To be or not to be

So I was reading this article tonight, in which the writer was talking about good-looking women being ogled at on the roads.

She said, "Do you know what is worse than being ogled at? Not being ogled at."

Funny and unfortunately true at times :)

Freedom

When I get older, I will be stronger..They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag!

Is waving flag a symbol of freedom?

Not really. I don't think so.

It's freedom in confined space. Flag can flutter but it will always be tied to a post.

Our lives are just like waving flags. We're free but within certain boundaries which brings another question in my head- what is freedom?

So while searching (googling, okay!) I came across this which explains the meaning of the song Waving Flag.

Silence

Sometimes when we are away from the hustle and bustle of life, we get a moment to hear our own heartbeat and breathing.

Up in the hills, as clouds descended upon the peaks (or so they say!) and drifted towards no man's land, I could hear my own breathing.
And nothing else.

Sound of silence, is it?!

Far away some bird was whistling and Sahil was impressed :)
Nothing was moving, nothing dared to make any sound.

I thought about many people, I thought about many places, I thought about many questions, I thought about many answers...

What is it about silence that invokes thoughts?

T-shirt

So, I am at Palladium and see a pretty girl checking out clothes at Vera Moda. She’s wearing a white t-shirt which had this written across the front:

ALL THIS AND BRAINS TOO!

Lol, interesting isn’t it!

FRIENDS

Ross: What is Chandler Bing's job?
Rachel: Oh! Oh gosh, it has something to do with numbers.
Monica: And processing!
Rachel: Oh, well... and he carries a briefcase!
Ross: Ten seconds. You need this or you lose the game.
Monica: It's, um, it has something to do with transponding.
Rachel: Oh, oh, oh, he's a transpons... transponster!
Monica: That's not even a word!

FRIENDS fans will know this. While watching this episode tonight I was wondering how true this phenomenon is. How many times have you been asked about your work?

I am faced with certain few questions every time I meet my old friends and cousins. My answers are usually less than five words for each question. A sample conversation goes like this:

Someone: “So, how’s your work going?”

Me: “It’s going good. I love it.”

Someone: “I heard you’re in bank?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Someone: “You’re a graduate in chemical engineering, right, what are you doing at the bank?”

Me: “Yes I know, I didn’t want to go in core chemical side.”

Someone: “Are you manager at bank?”

Me: “No, I am analyst, junior most post.”

Someone: “Which bank?”

Me: “Deutsche bank.”

Someone: “What!?!”

Someone: “What is your work about?”

Silence. There’s no way, I know, to answer this question in few lines and explain them what I do. After I say a few things about my work, I’m cut…

Someone: “So MBA over?" (MBA? Who's doing an MBA? If you mean Masters in Chemical Engineering, yeah, that's over.)

And so on…

After one such conversation it struck me - instead of being glad that most of them at least know vaguely that I have abandoned engineering and plunged into banking, I go "What buggers! They're supposed to be my close friends and they don't even know what I do!" without wondering for a moment if I know for sure what the hell they do.

I mean face it, your friends, your cousins... do you really know what they do? I’ll confess- I don't. I mean I know some are in IT, some are in banks, some are doing their MBA degrees, some are doing random things, but if you ask me exactly what they do, which company they are in, what their designation is, what they are studying, I have no clue most of the time!

When you become friends with someone, the first thing you find out is what they do. The closer you get to your friends, the less it matters what they do, and after a while, it stops mattering at all. And it comes naturally.

Conclusion: That’s why Chandler doesn’t bother whether Monica and Rachel knew his occupation, because he knows they are his close FRIENDS. J

Mails and Emails

So, I was checking my 100 years old Archies polybag. It’s got some greeting cards and letters (these are too valuable and too important for me and like a child I refuse to discard these). I exchanged these letters with few of my friends and cousins from the days when there was no concept of emails. This was about 12 years ago! Omg suddenly I feel old :-|

Then came the www revolution and we all started emailing. I had decided that I’ll keep writing letters because they had their own charm. I remember I exchanged my email id with my cousin and friends through letters. But soon fingers became too lazy to hold a pen and comfortable and soothing sound of tapping weirdly arranged keys took over. I used to wonder why the alphabets are arranged in this random fashion, why not our good old ABCD sequence where we all know that D will come before E and not under E.

Soon everybody got email ids and letters just vanished. Sometimes I miss the non-internet days and feel sad that only envelopes I open these days are credit card bills, phone bills, electricity bills :-|

I used to wait eagerly for postman and the sight of envelope in the letter box would bring an anxious smile on my face. Sigh!

I remember the transition from letters to emails. I used to check my inbox (@rediffmail) once in two weeks and I paid Rs.40 each time I opened it. In the beginning it was fun. Emails were long and descriptive and delightful. I would pay Rs 10 extra to take the printout so that I could show it to my parents. Over the years they started getting shorter and shorter. I actually preferred them longer. Then people who did not know us started emailing us. People who were trying to sell you online university degrees, or drugs to enhance body parts your gender doesn't have in the first place, or promises to transfer gazillions of dollars to your account on no account, or plead for help from 8-year-old Ethiopian orphans who never grew a day since the early nineties when they first started emailing us.

We hated these emails because they were not sent to us - these were not personalised. These were stupid forwards sent from the whole damn world to the whole damn world. We deleted it all. Then came gmail and the spam disappeared. So for all those jobless blokes who checked email just to delete spam and hence have-something-to-do, gmail was of no use.

But we continue checking. I am not even sure why we do it. I highly doubt that it’s in the hope that someone someday will write us a nice long email meant only for us. If we do get a personalized email and we reply, and we get a reply to our reply, and after that, there is not much to say anymore. But isn’t that why we were checking our email in the first place – to receive something meant for us? Didn't we delete like everything else??

We keep checking our email. Day in day out. At home, at work, during the weekdays, during the weekends. From our PCs, from our laptops, from our phones. We keep checking. Several email accounts. Several times a day. Like maniacs. And if we can’t, we get restless.

Can someone tell me - what the heck are we checking for? :-/