What me worry? :)

You know times are bad when non-essential goods cost as much as essential goods.

Yup, petrol costs as much as beer nowadays.

When I first bought my car, I remember the sales guy tell me it can cross 15 km after putting in a ‘fine’ liter of petrol. It’s only later I realized that he actually meant ‘five’ and not ‘fine’. Some other bloke said I’d get very high mileage under “showroom” conditions. I so really want to find where that stupid conditioned “showroom” is cos the only time my car crossed 15 km on a liter of petrol was after pushing it myself for 10. Some other idiot later told me that my car gives me more smiles per liter; well, the only guy smiling has always been the pump owner whom I generously donate a big part of my meager salary every month just to satiate my car’s incurable addiction to petrol.

Sure I down a few glasses of spirit every week. You think I’m alcoholic? Well, you should meet my car – it downs so much spirit every week that if Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Sharaabi’ was remade today, my car could play the leading role with so much conviction that even the film’s then heroine, Jaya Prada, would not be able to tell the difference.

And damn that thing called inflation cos now even petrol prices are going up now (as if price increases of beer was not enough already! L)

So, I’ve been wondering what’s the best way to beat the rising fuel prices.

My first brilliant idea of marrying the local petrol pump owner’s daughter did not prove to be too enterprising mainly cos I ended up snooping around and spying on the wrong house (yes, like my car, my sense of direction also sucks!). Later I realized that it was not the local pump guy’s house but the local police constable’s house that I was snooping on. Also, a pump owner can’t slap people that hard (ouch, it still hurts!) Well, my unreliable set of good friends later gave me a reliable set of bad news that all the owners of all the local petrol pumps, within a 5KM radius of my area, only have sons (damn u, sex ratio skew!)

And the price of petrol keeps rising….

My next idea was to completely say ‘No’ to petrol and use a cycle to go to work- so I bought a high end trekker mountain bicycle to juggle Bangalore’s stagnant city traffic. Moreover, I was proud of me going green. But I guess I achieved a third of the ‘blood, sweat and tears’ phrase a little too effectively. Office folks started gifting me deodorants and perfumes for no reason at all. People started spraying air fresheners wherever I sat. A nose by any other name smelt my cabin just as bad and I became known more for the nose rather than for my nose for details. People used to call me to their haunted houses to drive away the ancient ghosts that incidentally had very weak senses of smell. And for my appraisals, my boss ‘rewarded’ me with a years’ supply of Pears soap and Axe deo, in addition to a lecture on personal hygiene, body odor and other Raj-made natural calamities. Also, I realized that you can’t pick up women with a BSA SLR and that biker babes actually prefer bigger&better bikes. I thus realized that, in the interest of public welfare and hygiene, I seriously needed the petrol car and personal cleanliness back in my life and thus gave up on my bicycle.

And the price of petrol keeps rising….

My next bright idea was something I’m still proud of and I still think has potential. I thought of going up the ‘value chain’. So, instead of tackling issues at a local level, I thought of going to the root of it all– I’ll go to where it all begins – to the petrol-rich Arab sheikhs where the petrol story begins. I’m told that the Sheikhs marry so many women and have so many children that they themselves are confused which is whose(and vice versa). And I also heard from a lot of people that in the Arab states, petrol is cheaper than water. Since I hail from God’s Own Country and water is always in abundance during the monsoons, I could trade petrol for water(sheer brilliance, don’t you think?) And since everyone from Kerala, except my dad and mom, seem to be in ‘the Gelff’, I figured it’d be easy doing business there. But that dream was short lived when the immigration officer looked at my passport photo and asked me, “What are you?” and drove me back home.

And the price of petrol keeps rising….

I then realized that one definitely need a car in today’s times. Sure, hybrid cars are an option but they are still years away from being commercially sold in India. And the only available Indian electric car is hardly a car. And using the bus, car pool, auto etc require a certain level of planning and entails a certain loss of flexibility. You really need a personal means of transportation. It’s only then that my friend said that one really cool way of beating the fuel prices is to change from petrol to diesel. Diesel costs much cheaper than petrol and diesel cars give better economy, have better acceleration and have better resale values. Also, with the improvements in technology, diesel engine cars have become quieter, ensures a more comfortable drive for both the driver and passengers, with lower vibration levels, better fuel consumption and improved responsiveness. They’re less polluting too and it makes a lot of sense for me cos I drive a lot. Stats say that if you drive at least 13,000KM a year, then you should blindly opt for a diesel car.

And Fiat (yup, the same house that brings us the cute Padmini, the sexy Linea and the fiery Ferrari) has come up with an innovative Fiat Upgrade Offer where you can buy any Fiat Linea or Punto car today and you could get lucky with a free upgrade to Fiat Multijet diesel technology – all for the price of a petrol car.

So I figured the best way to beat the rising petrol prices is to forget the pump owners’ daughters, the body odor and the petro-sheikhs and just turn to Fiat diesel.

And the price of petrol keeps rising….

So?... What me worry?

J

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If not, likewise.J

The brightest star in my Galaxy.

Love, it is a pretty darn funny thing.

Just when I thought that everything was going on well with my life, stupid cupid hits me with a dart that changed everything. And then my life suddenly became filled with more color, sweets tasted sweeter, songs that I loved before now found newer meaning in them and my senses only wish that I could breathe the fragrance of her hair once again. Just once again.

And she and I liked watching those old fashioned movies- we decided that if we ever see a huge tree, we’d run all around it. And if we ever saw a lush green field, then we’d try running after each other, in slow motion(J) and yes, with old Bollywood hits playing in full blast to help with the overall ambiance.

But none of these happen. Cos she’s way off in Karachi and me, well, I’m here in Bangalore.

Yup, I’m in a long distance relationship. I know cos my phone bills are close to what I pay as my house rent. I tell her that whenever I close my eyes, all I see is her. And it’s true – cos I keep thinking about her almost all the time. Every day of mine starts and ends with her voice. When I’m low, I call her up; when I’m high, I call her up. And vice versa. She is in my life without actually being here. She is not around me but is still with me. All the time. All the while. And we have seen dreams of growing older with each other, together. We have seen dreams of holding each others’ wrinkled hands in each other’s and walking into the sunset together.

And then one day, we fought. I can’t remember why but I remember it was for some silly reason. Oh ya, it was cos I told her that if I didn’t see her then, I’ll never talk to her ever again (hey, I was just kidding!) But she took it seriously. Very seriously. One thing led to another and we ended up talking to each other in loud voices. After I put down the phone that night, I knew I could persuade her to get back to normal the morning after. I always liked apologizing to her cos apologies have a special charm when one is in love.

But that did not happen.

The next day, she did not take my calls. She did not reply to my messages. She did not answer my texts. I felt weird that day. I could not think properly the whole day. My mind was full of pain because of our argument the previous day. After all, I had started it. And she had not responded to my calls yet. It happened the following day also. And the day after that too. I was growing restless and the pain inside me was becoming more and more unbearable with each passing day. Then one day, after frantically trying to reach her for so many, many days, she took the phone and her trembling voice said, “Please don’t call me ever again.” And then my life suddenly becomes colorless, sweets tasted sweetless, songs that I loved before now became meaningless and my senses only wished that I could breathe the fragrance of her hair once again. Just once again.

But it was over.

But then, we live in a brand new world. In a while, we realized that we could not do without each other. We realized that we were too much in each others’ lives to be taken out just like that. We were inseparable in spite of being separated by time, space and land. And we had already become too much a part of each other’s lives to be taken apart from each other. And more over, we realized that once where there used to be love letters, there were more options today.

Now, we see each other everyday. We touch each other everyday. We share things with each other everyday. I carry her in my heart and with my tab, which is both thinner and lighter, I carry her everywhere. I see the laugh lines on her face everyday when she smiles at my jokes(PJs they are yaar, but still she laughs at them!J) and I enjoy admiring in detail the kindness lines behind her eyes when they sparkle when she talks with me because of the life-like display of my Galaxy tab. We share videos of each other’s lives and enjoy watching them in Flash Player. She’s always there when I need her and connecting to her is a cinch whether it’s through wifi or else. We always have the feeling that we’re always around whenever we need either of us. We send pictures, watch videos, movies and argue about which character had the best lines in the movie (which sounds and looks great on my tab btw). And sometimes, when I’m a tad too busy, I multitask on my tab with her in the background. We chat, we flirt, we laugh, we share. Just like before. Or rather, even better than before.

Today the sun shines a little brighter on me and I feel like she is the brightest star in my galaxy.

And the brightest feature on my Galaxy is definitely her.

Love, it sure is a pretty darn funny thing.

J

Vote for my star, for me and my Galaxy here.

This post is for the IndiBlogger Samsung Galaxy ''Its Time to Tab" Contest. Click below for the webcast of the launch of the Galaxy Tab 750 in India.

Resto-review: 100Feet Boutique, Bangalore

Every place has got a soul.

And at its soul, Indiranagar is known to be rich, classy and sophisticated. Indiranagar is one of the oldest and poshest places in Bangalore. And between three roads - 100 feet road, 80 feet road and CMH road - live a million souls, collectively making up the place that is Indiranagar.

Little wonder that when a restaurant is named after one of these three life veins of Indiranagar, you expect a slice of Indiranagar in it.

The First Impression: The 100 feet Boutique is located on the famous road of Indiranagar of the same name, opposite to the New Horizon College. The place offers valet parking and in the evenings, the blue neon lights outline the word '100ft', which makes for a very classy entrance. However the construction work nearby takes away a little bit of this elegance. This is one place where you might need to dress up for; not exactly the joint where you can walk in with a night bermuda and tees (which is my preferred attire outside office :)). The crowd is almost always the up society types, peppered liberally with foreigners. As you walk in, you do feel nice to get soaked into the dim lit elegance.

The Parking: Parking can be a little bit of an issue for four wheelers, especially on the busy weekends but since there is valet parking, more often than not, the gentleman will ensure your car gets parked in the near vicinity. Two wheelers should not have that much of a problem.

The Ambiance: My friend and I always play this little game of finding the best seat in any restaurant we go to and we figured that the best seat on the ground floor at 100ft is one beneath the sun shade, with a small tank of water (you can kill time just looking at the fish). However since we had made our reservations late, we had to make do with the corner most seat to the left, which gave us a good view of the place (the LCD right above us did make it a tad uncomfortable.) But in a while, you just start absorbing the ambiance and get a good feeling about the place. The place resembles one of those old majestic residential houses, which Indiranagar is famous for, that has now been converted into a restaurant. The place also has a Boutique, where they house a lot of knick knacks, paintings and artifacts. All in all, it adds up to create a quaint, classy and charming ambiance - very candle light friendly- perfect for those romantic candle lit dinners.

The Service: The service is very good, with the waiters just around the corner but not in your face either.

The Food: And now for the main act - the food. In one word, the food is amazing. One thing I really like about 100ft is that they present your food in a very clean, classy and chic way. We started with a fruit punch and the glass had a slice of orange and a piece of strawberry perched on top of it -somebody really put in some effort to make sure that the two pieces of fruit do not fall off the glass as you drink it. The attention to detail is quite remarkable. And as for the punch, it tasted very fresh and was just right with no fruit flavor overwhelming your taste buds. There's just a hint of a fruit favor but you get refreshed with the drink . My friend and I ordered pasta - me opting for an Arrabbiata (the Italian word for 'angry' - me didn't know :)) - penne pasta in red sauce and my vegetarian friend ordered Genovese - penne pasta in white cream sauce. I also requested to have chicken sausage in mine. The food arrived in about the time that it takes for you to look around and soak in the ambience and also check out the boutique. The pasta was just as we had expected it to be - tasty, creamy and yummy. We didn't have the time for dessert as we were fairly full in a light sort of way.

The Verdict: In conclusion, a great place for a classy night out. Excellent ambiance, excellent food and good service. Expensive on the wallet.

I would really recommend this place for impressing someone. Just remember to make reservations in advance, esp if it's a Friday or Saturday. Yup, it is expensive - our bill for two pastas and a fruit punch came to Rs 844/-.

But for a slice of Indiranagar, in Indiranagar.

Its 100ft Boutique, Indiranagar.

J

Ode to a friend.....

My friend Ruba left.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been about over a decade since I’ve known him. It’s funny remembering how we first met. We were both arrogant gulf bred brats who met in Class 7^th in a sleepy town called Kottayam in God’s Own Country. And like all Gulf bred brats, we hated one another because either of us knew that the other’s tall tales were all a bunch of bull.

“Yes, the Sheikh and my family are very close friends”, I would boast to the group of girls I tried to impress.

And he would reply to the same group, ‘Oh, that’s nothing. The Sheikh sends his car to my dad everyday’.

“Oh really, I thought the drivers went to the Sheikh’s car rather than the other way around.”, I would respond and then we would fight like crazy, fistfights et all.

It was funny that we never got along earlier – we hated the same teachers, the same teachers hated us and we both spent a lot of time in the principal’s office, mostly together and mostly because of trying to break the other’s face. But it was in Class 8^th that we got together – our English teacher, Reena miss, decided to put all the trouble makers of the class sit together and Ruba and me sat on the same bench with Kiron between us. Now the story was that both Ruba and I hated Kiron- so since the enemy of an enemy is a friend, we joined forces to fight the foe no single superhero could withstand and on that day, the Avengers was....oops, sorry.. wrong story J… but the point is that Ruba and I got together then to buddy up against Kiron. But later, Ruba n I realized that we had a lotta things in common and eventually we turned into the best of friends.

School life was never complete without Ruba. One of my most distinct memories was once when the Chemistry teacher caught us talking in class. She picked up on Ruba and yelled at him to repeat what she had just said. Since he obviously could not answer the question, she furiously asked Ruba loudly, “Reuben!!! Tell me why do we immerse the Copper rods in Copper Sulphate solution?”

Ruba thought about it for a long while and answered conclusively with this die-hard confidence, “To kill the germs, ma’am.”

After school, we ended up in the same engineering college. While he was interested in tran’sistors’ and re’sistors’, it was my classmates’ 'sisters' I was interested in J . While he learned C, C++ and other languages, I tried learning Tamil from the Hindi people staying there. Since I was always had a feeling that the college management would one day ask for my thumb as ‘guru dhakshina’, I used to proactively give them the finger anyways. If Standard&Poor had known me then, they’d have downgraded me from ‘AAA’ to ‘???’ (or even ‘WTF’!). But Ruba was always around to my rescue. And in spite of our varied interests, we still were the best of friends and used to meet every Friday night along with half the college at our local assembly point outside college, to pay our weekly homage to Shakeela aunty.

We even liked the same women in college. While I bitched big time about him and screwed his image with the girl he was hitting on for pitching my own ulterior interests , he later took revenge by charming the girl I had a huge crush on. We also had the same set of friends – the resident heartthrob Dannyboy, Estella, ‘Frenchie’ Chandy, ‘Kambi’ Jinny, ‘Commissioner’ Maathu, the mighty meek Ashwin, Moulana mon Moulana, Jetty ‘Dash’, ‘’kaaka’ Kiron, ‘Out’ Varkey, Leejoe Shukhla and a whole lot of other characters who still color our lives in their own special ways.

After four years of college, as it was fashionable then to exchange addresses, I was quite shocked when he actually started making use of it by writing letters to me. Today, I still have some hundreds of letters he’s sent to me. Later he revealed that I was the only person in the world who ever read any of his writing.

A few years later, he moved over to Germany and even though we never kept in touch, we could always pick up from where we left in the rare calls that we made to each other.

He recently got married and he told us of his secret to gaining respect from his wife- he grew a thick moustache. And sure enough, after marriage, he was the one who wore the pants in his house, behind his apron.

My dear friend Ruba left. And it’s weird having all these thoughts running through my…..

(Door Bell rings…)

Aah, that must be Ruba back from the wine shop with the booze…

Hope he hasn’t forgotten the salted chips…

Saala hamesha bhooltha hai.

J

Google Plus - a minus from the Googlezz..

I believe I have a gift.

I believe that I can predict the future.

And my super senses tell me that Google Plus will fail.

Even without a facebook account, a great Chinese philosopher once said, about 300 years back, “The way of the world is to meet new people through other people ”

And if you look at it, this is the fundamental premise on which all social networking works on -> you find new friends through your own and on your own. And once upon a time, you could find all your childhood bum chums and chuddy buddies on orkut but later when you started getting multiple fraand-shib scraps from the neighborhood hot, sweet and sexy guy(yuck!), you moved over to facebook (moreover, everybody you know was already there). And you could connect even better with your friends through gaming, poking, sending flowers, throwing sheep and various other cool ways on facebook. And things worked out pretty well so far.

Lekin picture abhi baaki hain mere dost…

Enter Google Plus, the new social networking site from the Other Guy who has got all the answers to all your questions.

You now see yourself agreeing to God, er, sorry… Google, that :

• you do not want to have your office folk know that even though your name on office rolls is something as cool as ‘Raj Aryan Malhotra’, you are actually known as Chuppandi Ram by all your school friends; so ‘Circles’ does seem like a good idea.
• You also nod in unison that yup, it is cool that you can now chat simultaneously with 10 people on HD video chat on G+, even though you have never done that before or ever thought that you would even have a need to do so, unless it’s a meeting with your onsite clients (but who wants to have their clients to be in their friend’s list anyways?)
• You also agree that since your default browser is Chrome, your email of choice is from the G and googling is the most productive thing you do in office (besides coffee), so hence G+, from the house of Google, has got to be superb.
• You also think that since you might most probably buy a android smart phone next, so G+ will definitely have a better interface with your future phone with all the above applications (so in a way, that’s like ‘the site you don’t use on the phone that you don’t have’ J)

And finally, it’s from Google, one of the coolest company you’ve heard about. So all in all, G+ looks like a pretty darn good idea.

But my point is, you still won’t let go of your facebook account. J

My super predictive senses tell me that G+ does not have anything addictive in it to hold the attention of the user. Most of its features (superb features btw) are just me-too variations of fb or things that are slight improvements over fb. And that’s just it. Unless G comes out with something really sticky on G+, my senses tell me that Google Plus will be a minus from Google. Sure it’s still the beta version, but if the alpha version is on similar grounds, me don’t think G+ will hit the sweet spot. I predict that going forward, everyone will have both an fb and G+ accounts and that’s about it. And later due to inactivity, G+ will die a natural death; unless it comes up with something so addictive that G+ becomes the networking site of choice. Of course, my inadequate research also overlooks the opinion voiced by a few sources that G+ is not exactly competing with fb in the same space(whatever that means J) and that the market is big enough for the both players. Adding on, almost everybody I know has got a G+ account but nobody uses it for even a fraction of the number of times they use facebook. Sure stats will show that G+ notched up 20 million users in about a month but how many of them are actually as active as they are on fb?

Let me ask you three questions:

• Do you have a G+ account?

• Have you used it more than 5 times in the last week?

• Don’t you have anything better to do than read this post?

If you’ve answered ‘No’ to the third question, then screw the first two questions and follow my blog.

And about my super predictive senses, well….

I must be honest to you. I don’t have any gift of crystal gazing. I can’t even tell if my house will have gold hidden underneath it, considering that its now becoming a norm in Trivandrum for people who believe in God, Gold and Google.

Of course, I live on a hill so geologically you can’t dig there or can ever find gold...

Of course, I don’t have a house in Trivandrum…

Of course, I’m not from Trivandrum…

But I still think Google Plus will flop.

J