Pensieve 2.0

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The Rain Tree tagged me with a wake up call, and expected me to be the first to respond. I’ll be a gentleman (Ahem!) and oblige her. Moreover, this will probably be the last post before I leave India on 23rd.

Last movie seen in a theater:
If you count sleeping in the theater as watching a movie, it was “Love Story 2050″

What book are you reading?
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist by Richard Feynman

Favorite board game:
Monopoly

Favorite magazine:
It had been Reader’s Digest till around 2000.
I have the entire collection of RD from 1994 to 2000 in my personal library.
Nowadays I don’t read magazines.

Favorite smells:
Smell of fresh rain

Favorite sounds:
Sound of sea waves at a beach, Heavy wind blowing through the trees, the sound of music, saxophone

Worst feeling in the world:
Tension. I feel like my head will explode any moment.

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?
I affirm that just for today, I won’t get angry, will work with integrity, will be kind to all and will be grateful for all the good things in my life.

Favorite fast food place:
Subway

Future child’s name:
That would be far-fetched because I haven’t even started thinking about my future wife.

Finish this statement, “If I had a lot of money I’d…”
I’ll roam around the world, and if there is still money left, I’ll set up a charity fund.

Do you drive fast?
Fast and Furious with a car. Bit lousy with a two-wheeler.

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?
No. Never had a stuffed animal in my life.

Storms - Cool or Scary?
Cool. I love ‘em, as long as trees are not uprooted.

Do you eat the stems on broccoli?
I hate broccoli

If you could dye your hair any color, what would be your choice?
Black.

Name all the different cities/towns you have lived in:
Palakkad, Calicut, Pune, Trivandrum, Bangalore

Favorite sports to watch:
Formula 1, Football

One nice thing about the person who sent this to you:
Bubbly, Smiles heartily in all her pictures.

What’s under your bed?
Simple answer for a simple question. A cot!

Would you like to be born as yourself again?
Tough question to answer. I like the way I am, but if possible I would not like to have rebirth.

Morning person or night owl?
Night Owl

Over easy or sunny side up?
Over easy

Favorite place to relax:
Home, My best buddy’s home

Favorite pie:
Don’t like pie

Favorite ice cream flavor:
Hot Chocolate Fudge.

You pass this tag to:
It ought to be sleeping ones. So Miladysa, Vinay and Sanjuz

Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?
Honestly, no idea. I would bet on Miladysa though.

I just remembered about my blog which was gathering dust. It has been more than a month.

Anyway, I wrote in my last post about quitting my job. The reason for that is something which I had been contemplating for more than a year. I am following the footsteps of some of the fellow bloggers in my blogroll and going to get Permanent Head Damage.
Well.. it’s a different field, in Electrical Engineering, but you got the drift.

I will be traveling on 23rd of this month. 10 days at my uncle’s home in Sacramento, CA. Then I’ll be back to academics at North Carolina State University. Wish me luck!

There was a reason I didn’t mention this earlier. I thought I’d better wait until my visa is approved.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying my 2 month vacation in Palakkad.

That’s it!
I did it and it’s over!
I am back in the state of being unemployed, after 4 long years.
3 years with Batwings*, and I didn’t feel any “normal” emotion (i.e. sadness or elation or anxiety) when I quit my company.

I could not help myself from posting this video, because this symbolizes my exit really well. Think of my company as the sinking boat and me as Jack Sparrow. (Sorry.. Captain Jack Sparrow)
Sorry if I’m showing this video to some of you for the umpteenth time; I just can’t get it out of my head.
Oh… the company really is a sinking boat, because it has been losing market share for quite some time now.
And I really am indifferent about all that.

Of course, I have other intentions with my career, of which I’ll write in a later post.

* Not the real name of the company. But if you can guess it from the name, good for you!

Me.
21 years ago, while in kindergarten, I guess.

Found this picture while browsing through old albums.
(Picture quality is not very good because it is a photograph of a photograph. I kept the photo on the floor and snapped it with my DigiCam)

I was wondering how niceness is so similar to air.

21% of the people are not nice.
Similarly, 21% of air is Oxygen, which is not very pleasant to breathe in it’s pure form.
78% of the people fake niceness.
78% of air is Nitrogen. Nitrous Oxide, which contains Nitrogen, makes you look like you are laughing, but you are not actually laughing.
0.3% of the people are real vermin trying to poison your mind.
Just like the 0.3% of Carbon Dioxide in air, which is actually poisonous if taken in high quantity.
The rest are the truly nice people.
Like the trace gases. They are not very easy to find.

We need all these kinds of people in the right proportion to survive.

I got a topic to blog about (Finally, after more than a month!)
And quite obviously, it is about another round of troubles. For some reason, I often find myself in trouble through the most bizarre ways.

It all started when I went to HDFC Bank to pay the fee for a US Visa Interview (VI). I filled up my name as it should have been (and I thought it was, until 5 seconds later!) in the passport. But the snake eyes of the clerk, who matched it with my passport, found out that I had written my name wrong. According to my passport, I had no Given Name. My entire name was my surname. So I was wrong about my name all along. He told me that if I don’t fill up my name as in passport, there will be a problem in my VI. It was all weird since I have once traveled to USA with this passport, and by giving my name as it should have been. Evidently enough, my B1 visa had my name correct. The Given Name field indeed was Deepak here. It was funny that nobody had noticed that till now. I failed to notice the discrepancy for a whole 9 years.
The clerk suggested that I write my name like in passport in all matters henceforth. I didn’t think so. I didn’t want strangers to call me Mr. Deepak Ranganathan, and my friends to call me “” (I don’t know how to pronounce a nullity of characters)

I told him I’m not paying the fee. He asked me the quintessential question of modern day bankers, “Why Sir?”

Like in
Telephone caller: Hello sir, we are offering an excellent personal loan for you.
Me: Not interested
Caller: Why Sir?

“I’d rather change my name in the passport before scheduling the VI”, I replied.

So I was here in Palakkad, for a vacation of 10 days, one of my mission objectives being the change I have to make in my passport. The lesser objective was to be a couch potato at home, which would have succeeded, if not for the constant power cuts which made sure that I moved around so that I didn’t sweat.

On Tuesday, I set off on my crusade to the passport office - a grueling journey of 3 hours in shaky buses with little padding on the seats and not enough room for your legs. It was close to 10am by the time I reached there. The queue was already a gargantuan slithering python. Slowly it moved until there were about 10 people ahead of me. It was 1pm. Closing time already. We pleaded and cried to the lady at the counter. It was just a matter of 12 more people. She was ruthless when she asked us to come back the next day. After having so many trysts with trouble, I should have seen this coming. I start to wonder if a little optimism is a dangerous thing. It seems like that to me. Murphy’s law is a fundamental principle around which the world revolves.

The next day, I caught the 5am bus, so that I will be in the forefront in the queue. Luckily enough, I was about 20th (!) in the queue at 8 am. The counter opened at 9am, I filed my application by about 10, and I was told I could collect my passport back at 3.30pm. I had to kill time till then. ( Wandering aimlessly in Malappuram was better than a bus journey to and fro) I had my breakfast, then went to an autowallah and asked him to take me to any cinema where a good movie was running. Unfortunately (again!), there was only one where a morning show was there. The movie was “Malabar Wedding”. I hadn’t even heard of it until then. As my luck would always have it, the movie was a bore, except for a few scenes which were humorous. There were like 10 people in the entire theater.

It was about 2pm now. I went back and waited in the passport office. By 4, I was back in the return bus. Later that day, I couldn’t sleep on my back, nor could I stand up. My buttocks hurt because of 12 hours of journey in the last two days. My feet hurt because of hours of standing in the queue. But, as a consolation, I got my passport corrected.

I’m not frustrated by the whole incident. I think I have found an equilibrium with the whole trouble-seeking phenomena. Nowadays, I just blog about the trouble I faced, with an air of a connoisseur carelessly using French terms to philosophize. Sigh! That’s life!

Enough said!

As kids, we used to imagine ourselves as some superhero and savior of the world. As we grow up, the situation doesn’t change much. The only difference would be that we dream of ourselves as someone who does something extraordinary, but still real, instead of flying or spinning webs or crawling through rooftops.

The following is a real-life incident which occurred to me recently. But it turned into a daydream midway through the incident. Curiously enough, I didn’t do it in reality; I just imagined doing that. Now, that was something which required some mulling over. This is no fiction.

Scene: National Games Village, Bangalore

I go to NGV for an hour of Badminton every weekend. That one evening was sunny and warm. I had just finished my game and was exiting the Builder’s club with AM. So were 4 other people who were playing in an adjacent court. Three guys and a girl. One of the guys was drinking water from a PET bottle as they were chatting. He finished the water, and he casually threw the bottle under a tree. I looked at the bottle for a few seconds, then noticed that he was busy talking to others.

A sudden rage started erupting in my mind. How could a person, who looked educated enough to me, be such an imbecile? The other part of me said… Curb your anger, but don’t leave this case as it is. Teach him a lesson. Teach him the right thing to do.

Deciding to teach that guy a lesson, I slowly went near the tree, took the bottle from the ground, and looked at the person who threw it. He had noticed me taking the bottle. He was looking at me, completely puzzled. His friends were alternately looking at him and me in disbelief, possibly because I didn’t even remotely look like a tramp. I just smirked at him and started walking.

“What are you doing?”, the guy apparently decided to go ahead and ask me the reason for my irrational behavior, as I strode past him.
“Putting this thing in its rightful place”, I said, pointing to a waste bin which was about 20 feet away.
The guy was blushing red by this time. He mustered whatever dignity was left in him and said, “Please. Let me do that. It was really stupid of me to litter, and I want to correct my error.”

I gave the bottle to him. His friends were nodding at me approvingly. I smiled vaguely.

“What are you staring at?”, asked AM.
I was still looking at the tree trunk. The bottle was still there. I turned around to see the guy still in conversation with his partner, the girl.
That was just a daydream. But I still had a chance to actualize it. Instead, I chose to wait for them to leave before picking up the bottle.
“We’ll just go for a walk before we return home”, said AM.
And as it happened, by the time we returned, the group of 4 had gone and a cleaner was already clearing the litter.

I went home and pondered over this for quite some time.
Many of us want to do something extraordinary for the society. To do that extraordinary thing, we need a lot of kindness and altruism, and from what I learned through the above incident, a hell lot of courage.
Now, many people are good and altruistic, but I think that they are not really courageous.

That singular act in my hallucination carried a very strong message. We can only stagnate the process of societal degradation, but never revert it, unless we spread awareness in others also. The hero in my dream (Ahem..that would be the “surreal me”) was courageous enough to insult a stranger, because he had done something which I thought was wrong.

But even stronger was the message that my realization carried. That we are all robots, but our subconscious mind is not. The real me didn’t do it. I just didn’t have the courage to do it to a stranger. I didn’t have the courage to stand out in the crowd; be an oddball.
We always want to be in the zone that we consider to be safe. It would have been a different ball game if someone asked me to do something which deviates from what I believe. Because the doer in that case would be me, and I would strongly resist.
But in this case, I was weighing the consequences of confronting a stranger for a matter that had no direct impact on me, with what I believed to be just. Of course, the first plate weighed more, because our society has degraded to such an insolent level of courtesy, which makes any mildly offensive gesture indistinguishable from disrespect.

There are a lot of do-gooders around. But an improvement in the society will be expedited if they teach others a lesson or two about their misdemeanors. But very few people dare to go that extra mile, because it is a murky forest full of hostile creatures out there. I realized that I’m definitely not among those courageous ones, although my daydream suggests that I want to be. But what good are thoughts or words, if they are not enforced by deeds?

As you can see, majority (Yeah! Right!) of the people have voted for The Pensieve than The Surreal Me.

I am deeply disappointed with the number of people who voted. I know many of you who read my blog are too lazy to comment. But this was just a matter of 2 clicks.

Anyway, I have to yield to the winning entry and change the name of this blog back to The Pensieve.
Only this time, it will be Pensieve 2.0.

You can expect the change with a changed theme in a week.

I nicked this idea from one of the blogs that I read - Gypsy. But, what the hell…everyone can have their own list. I’m amazed why this didn’t become a tag though. So I’m gonna make this a tag. This, as the title says is a list of superlatives. You can add any list of superlatives of last year, but keep it to a maximum of 5 items per list. (For eg: Books I struggled to finish is my invention)

Top 5 moments of the year:

1. I “apparently” hurt my right elbow while doing pull-ups and had to undergo a surgery, and the funniest part was that it was not for any injury.
2. My hard disk crashed a week after Times of India wrote that whoever had 320 GB of hard disk space were terrorists, depriving me of a place in the coveted list.
3. My cousin Kavita appearing out of thin air and getting in touch after about 10 years. I should thank Orkut for that.
4. My car was hit by another car on the side, deforming the left rear door. This made me think that whoever buys new cars in Bangalore should be mentally tough enough to see their car turn into an ugly piece of metal. Ladies, sorry to say this. Guys, please keep some distance with vehicles driven by ladies. There may be some good drivers among the ladies, but the truth is that a majority of them don’t know what to do under stress while driving.
5. Ahh..the marriage proposals…how can I forget that? It seems my relatives are more eager to see me caged than anybody else. Thank God that my parents are understanding. Let me count… I got 4 marriage proposals, all of which were rejected rather mercilessly even before the topic gathered heat.

Best 5 movies that I watched: (Released this year)

1. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (This might be highly biased)
2. Ratatouille
3. The Bourne Ultimatum (Except for the shaky camera at some places, which almost gave me a headache. The story was well paced and just good.)
4. Die Hard 4.0 (A good action movie after “True Lies”)
5. Chak De India (Need I say any more?)

Best 5 movies: (Released earlier and watched from home)

1. The Departed (DiCaprio proved that he is not some chocolate boy who spits the farthest.)
2. The Shawshank Redemption (Yeah.. I got around to watching it only last year)
3. The Prestige (Another well-crafted movie from Christopher Nolan. Amazing performance from Christian Bale.)
4. Rear Window (Hitchcock all the way! Believe it or not, all scenes except the climax were shot from a single room!)
5. Sin City

There are more (Amelie, Run Lola Run, Das Boot, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso) but the list says only 5

Worst 5 movies:

1. Ghostrider (Why, oh, why did I watch a movie with Nicholas Cage in it? He just sucks. Period.)
2. Wild Hogs (Comedy which made me sick.)
3. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
4. Billa (But it was worth the money because of Nayantara *EVIL GRIN*)
5. Om Shanti Om

Best 5 books:

1. The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
3. The Argumentative Indian - Amartya Sen
4. Three Men on the Bummel - Jerome K Jerome (Not quite as good as it’s prequel, but still utterly hilarious)
5. Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson (This is an amazing book. Became a big fan of Stephenson after reading this book)

5 books which I struggled to finish (Because I fell asleep before completing a page)

1. Crisis - Robin Cook (I think this will be my first and last Robin Cook book. I don’t like his writing style)
2. Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier (A really sloth novel with too much detail about the surroundings than the characters.)
3. Asterix and the Class Act (Class Act is not an Asterix story. It is rather a collection of Asterix short stories. This was not remotely as funny as the stories.)

I don’t think there are more

Top buys:

1. My new T-shirt (okay I bought it this year, but I like to cheat) which reads:
   

   Alcohol and Calculus do not mix…Never drink and derive.

2. The 160GB Seagate Barracuda hard disk which crashed.
3. My personal web space.
4. Rubik Cube from CMH Road while at the junction. Bought it for just 30 rupees (He started from 60 rupees and I started from 20 rupees. Quite a bargain, ain’t it?), but I am becoming increasingly addicted to it nowadays. My fastest time: 7 minutes 13 seconds. (Nowhere near Ajith’s abilities, but I think it is good enough for an amateur with 1 month of Rubik Cube solving experience) Later, I went to Landmark in search of a better Rubik Cube, but I found the exact same make which was worth 90 rupees.

I now throw this tag open. I don’t like being partial. Anybody who likes can take it. Only condition is that you have to let me know by commenting here. :p