Avial

Avial : It is a thick mixture of vegetables,curd and coconut, seasoned with coconut oil and curry leaves. Avial is considered an essential part of the Sadya, the Kerala vegetarian feast” - from the Wikipedia entry for Avial

Though I love this brand of Avial too, the one I am referring to is a mallu rock band. I came across their songs very recently and I must say I was impressed. This is the not the fake mallu rock folks who sing with an accent. The malayalam used and the pronunciation is pure. Especially enjoyed “Nada Nada” song

Quite catchy, I must say !!

The Wall ….

Sitting around with a set of impacted wisdom tooth and it hurts like hell. Good time to get back to blogging. Lot of things have kept me off blogging so far, laziness being right near the top of the list.

When the return is after such a long break, how can I not mention the retirement of The Great Wall of India  . Folks, you will realize how good he was only when a bunch of unknown seamers knock us over for next to nothing on the next foreign tour.

Here is a salute to a guy who never gave up
A guy who always put his team ahead of him
A guy who always stepped up to the plate and delivered when the odds were stacked against his team
A guy who never complained
And to a nice guy who finished first

Class is one word that comes to mind when I think of his on field and off field behavior. Little wonder that the class shone through in his retirement press conference too. A very neat piece written by his wife is also worth reading. If Dravid ever pens his Autobiography, you can bet I will be among the first to buy it !!

Now that the wall is gone, whom will we hide behind ?

Rs. 32 …

To have so many people struggling to meet ends in such a vast nation is sad enough, what we don’t require is for moronic excel sheet economists to come in and say if you earn more than Rs.32 a day, you are not poor.

Most likely that guy never stepped outside his air-conditioned office, has no clue what it is like to live on the brink. 

The guy who is poor has enough things to worry about, least the economic wizards can do is not to insult them and us with this definition .

Read this too : http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article2622214.ece

Lows in sports

How can you tell when a country is going through a low point of sports ?

Would it be when three of the country's top cricketers are jailed in U.K for match fixing, thus confirming what the rest of the world already suspected ? Hmmmmmmm, that sounds bad enough.

How about when you lose in Kabaddi to U.S.A in the kabaddi world cup ?? (I can count like 3 counties at best which play kabaddi, I'm shocked that there is a world cup for this ! ). Man, that must hurt.

All I can do is this: Hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa......

Older , Wiser

Yet another birthday passes buy.

A sign of growing old is that …………….. well , I forgot :-D

Done with the mandatory growing old part, the growing up part continues to be work in progress. Guess it always will be , belated happy birthday to myself :-)

The gadget guy

Well, quite an accumulation of gadgets at home now. iPad2 ( gifted by me to Wifey), Kindle ( gifted by my friend to me) and Samsung Galaxy S2 ( Wifey to me). I love gifting :-)

My phone has simply been brilliant so far. Especially in my trip to U.S. It hooks on to free WiFi networks ( which are plenty in the U.S), so then I can be online through Skype , Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk etc, enabling easy access to staying in touch. No need for the exorbitantly priced international roaming plans !!

Need to recharge battery on a daily basis though, I don’t really consider that as too much of a drawback though.

Ad from yester years

Remember seeing this ad several years back. They did not play it very often, but somehow I liked the theme of it a lot.

I could not find the full video, but I think it went something like this ….

In the beginning you just love to play,
because you are a kid, and it's a game.

Then the forehand gets stronger,
and the serve starts to pop,
and the expectation grows.

But you still love to play,

because you're a kid …………... a 27 year old kid,

… And it's a game !!

Sometimes when I watch Sachin Tendulkar, I wonder where he still gets the drive. Maybe he still loves to play because he is still a kid , a 38 year old kid ……. :-)

Daddy, what do you do …

“Daddy , you have seen my time-table at school, right ? “

Yes Indeed, I have

“So you know what I do throughout the day at school?”

Yes, I do know what you do at school. In fact I almost have your daily schedule memorized

“So tell me this. What do you do whole day in office ?”

Errrr ….. I go to the lab, test some things. if they are not working, I try to fix it

“So you are like a repair-man”

Well …… no, not exactly. Sometimes I think of better way to do things. Like I get lot of ideas.(Actually daddy goes to office, drinks coffee, cracks lots of jokes, browses the net, checks mail and comes back . But what the heck, the previous explanation sounds impressive, even to me)

“BLANK STARE”

What do I tell ?

How about “I think about the really tough problems facing us today and try to come up ways to solve them” ? Nice statement, but that is not really what I do most of the time :-(

Should I say that I am a researcher who does not know half the time whether he is right or wrong ?

Or if I am someone whose job involves making vague power point presentations on how to solve problems that may or may not exist ?

I really need to think on how to put this nicely to a 6 year old !!

Terrorism …..

I was browsing the net when I came across this article talking about a potential 9/11 10th anniversary attack in the U.S. I certainly hope that this would not be true

However I am confused after reading the article. The article quotes a person from Homeland security as saying “In this instance, it’s accurate that there is specific, credible but unconfirmed threat information.’’

If its accurate , credible and specific, how the heck can it be un-confirmed ????? I can’t figure this one out, can you ?

One year

“If you want to know the value of a day, ask a schoolboy on the last day before summer vacation.
If you want to know the value of an hour, ask a criminal sentenced to death.
If you want to know the value of a minute, ask a person that just missed their flight.
If you want to know the value of a second, ask a person that just avoided a serious car accident.
If you want to know the value of a millisecond, ask an Olympic silver medalist”

(http://www.johnboe.com/articles/time_management_tips.html)

Wifey informs me that she has completed one year in her job as of today. So if you were wondering whom to ask about the value of one year, you have the answer now :-)

Joys of life

My little one has her headphones plugged into wifey’s 5800 Xpress music. She is listening to “Country Roads” by John Denver. Not just listening too, she is belting the tune out at great volume, with the occasional Air Guitar routine thrown in. Nice to hear , her singing genes ,thankfully, are inherited from the Mom’s side:-)

So different from a year or so back when I was wading in pools of misery. Where have all the dark days gone ? The nature of human mind must be such that a few months of good times and you begin to wonder what the fuss was all about during the not-so-good times .

Here is the song :

Hiding behind the wall

One more article on Rahul Dravid, nicely done. http://www.espncricinfo.com/england-v-india-2011/content/current/story/526147.html

The wall

Two well written articles about my favourite cricketer

Dravid's flame still burns - Harsha Bhogle

Dravid shows his greatness - Sambit ball

Got to learn an interesting stat too. Of the 33 hundreds that he has scored, only one has come in a losing cause !!

Have I made it large ?

Apparently Harbhajan is going to sue. What happened to our sense of humor ??

10 years and a farewell

A colleague of 10+ years quit today. After 10 years, you no longer think of people as colleagues. they become so much part of your life ..The morning tea sessions, chatter over lunch, technical disagreements, office gossip, jokes, family outings … Somehow you cannot think of people just as “colleagues”

Hope the break helps her and family.

And that brings me to the point in the title, 10 years !! Yes, I have completed 10 years in one company. Almost a Dinosaur by modern day standards !!