The kid has finally grown up

That’s what my mum would be telling herself at the end of this week. This week turned out to be one of the most gratifying week of my entire life. It ranks right up with the week that I got married and the week that I graduated and the week that I joined my first full time job. The reason is pretty simple. I finally, I mean finally, learnt to mix rice (anna) and curry (saaru) with my own hands and used my own bare hand to eat the mixture. No spoon, no fork, no knives, just my fingers. Believe it or not, it felt great !!

You may be thinking “what’s the big deal !?” Wait till you hear this – I have never mixed and eaten rice curry, which also happens to be the staple food of the people of Southern Karnataka, with my own hands continuously for a whole week for lunch/dinner with my mum around ever ! I simply cannot think of a time when I had to do that. My mum has always mixed them for me and like an icing on the cake, given me a spoon to eat it up. It is funny but mums are mums. After completing the process of eating rice n’ curry myself on the first day of the week in front of my mum, I actually felt empowered ! I felt like I owned something ! I felt like I controlled something ! The feeling is akin to one felt by a fledgling when it takes its first flight ! The feeling is just indescribable. And add to all this, my mum started giving me smart tips on how to mix rice and curry better and in the end she said "Remember, add a pinch of salt to the mixture of rice, curry and ghee and that will make it a lot tastier". Does this "Remember,..." dialogue ring a bell in you ? It certainly does in me. The Lion King, ladies and gentlemen. This is when I thought she felt that her son has come off age.

It doesn't mean that I've never mixed or eaten rice n' curry like this before. I have, but only when I haven't had an option, when ever I had an option I was only happy to take it. Weddings and other functions were my experiment grounds. I've to admit I haven't embarrassed myself doing it, at least that’s what I'd like to believe, but it was never a 100% satisfactory performance and I was never at ease doing it. Now, I will have no qualms mixing rice and curry. In fact, I may become an expert at it. Probably, I will open a school for all the people who are absolutely incompetent, like I once *was*, in mixing rice curry. I may even win an award for my social service activities of enlightening people of this wonderful art. The possibilities are countless.

This also means that I don't have to hang my head in shame when my 8 year old niece is telling me about how she is so adept at handling rice curry and I, so inept at the same task. Now, she will not dare to talk to me when we are having food together. She did giggle and make fun of me for the first two days, but even she has started taking me seriously after a week's marathon. She sees a responsible individual who needs no hand holding when he feels hungry. In summary, it is a wonderful feeling that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I've overcome an obstacle that seemed insurmountable till last week. Today, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all those wonderful ladies who've helped me with my disability. My sisters, mum-in-law, aunts, mums of few of my friends, and finally, my lovely wife, thank you !

And Thank you Maa !

P.S : I am a 26 year old "boy" who is already married for more than two years. This is just to emphasize how important an achievement this is. You got to appreciate it !

Barack Obama is the president of United States

This is an attempt at a comeback of sorts and you may think what a no-brainer of a title for a post that is suppose to be a “comeback post”, but some people in my country just don’t get this simple fact. Prathiba Patil is our president, albeit a nominated head of the state with zero powers, not Barack Obama, whose powers know no bounds, apples and oranges you see. He is the President of United States of America (USA), you idiots !

Now don’t start looking behind you, this was meant for the electronic media of my lovely country. Specially a section of the media which claims to represent the heart and soul of India. And that heart and soul is the urban upper middle-class. Really !? I am not really sure if they do represent them though. I think we should form a JPC and let them find out the truth or perhaps a SIT, no ! we should form (sic) a one-man Justice I-will-take-twenty-years-to-complete-investigation commission to verify the authenticity of the claim. Now that we’ve settled that debate lets move on to this epic visit to India by the President of United States. Epic, not because he is here to do business with India to the tune of about 10 billion bucks in just three days but because this visit inspired me back to my long forsaken blog ! OK, I am little self-centered, get over it !

He is here to serve the interests of his own country. He is their President and he is right in doing so. I am not expecting my PM to go on a world tour and give freebies to who ever he meets at my cost. And why are we so upset anyway ? The answer is that the President didn’t mention Pakistan in any of his addresses ! Now, WTF ! US needs Pakistan, they blocked NATO supply routes through NWFP for a couple of days and Americans were shitting in their pants ! That’s how important they are to them. Obama can’t say Pakistan is a terrorist state, it may be one but that is irrelevant. Obama can’t even say Pakistan is a failed state, hell ! he can’t even call Zardari by his pet name : Ten-percent ! Even if he calls them some name, it won’t be anything than just that – name calling. The same media was up in arms when Obama had said China has a role in South Asia. We don’t approve of that comment, do we ? One man’s meat is another man’s poison. You can count on Obama to not shoot his foot again with a shotgun. And seriously, we should stop running to some one else hoping that they will fix our problems. You got hit in the guts, spit the blood out and get back on your feet to punch back. We are the USA of South Asia, aren’t we ? Flex some economic muscle, I say ! And this is from a country that aspires to be a global power. If we don’t stop acting like sissies then even Nauru will not give us a hoot !

It is about time we move from this Pakistan fixation, it is not worth the time and effort really. We can deal with them bilaterally but bringing Pakistan in our talks with US, China, Russia, Uganda, Somalia and who ever else we are talking to, just gives them undue importance. It completely messes up the equation. Getting fixated is a thing for the Pakistanis, one look at their newspaper websites and you will know what fixation means. In any case, what ever happens between India and Pakistan is a bilateral issue. Lets keep it that way and try to resolve issues rather than expecting head of state of every other country to toe our line. It is sheer stupidity. I must admit, however, these TV-wallahs do all these drama to just get the eye-balls. Rest assured my friends, you’ve got a couple here !

No reason to celebrate

Another day, another week and in fact another year has gone by in my life and when I look back at 26 years of my existence, I don’t think I have learnt enough about this world to understand the grotesque human nature that drives us to commit crimes that even the Satan would spit at. As I entered the 27th year of my eventless life, I tried to retrospect and summarize my life in this blog. Did I mention “eventless” ? So, I gave up on it, in any case getting older ain’t no fun, and turned to my favourite pass time, that is to read up about wars and battles that has wrecked this beautiful planet. There I stumbled upon the one of the greatest crime this century has seen, next only to the Holocaust in terms of number of people killed or rendered homeless. I won’t even try to rank genocides one after the other, because it just isn’t possible. How can one rate someone’s misery above somebody else’s ? That will be a great disservice to the people who actually suffered to an extent that is beyond our comprehension.

Anyway, I am talking about the Srebrenica massacre that had commenced 15 years back on July 11th. It lasted about 10 days and for that many days I think God was on a vacation out of this world or perhaps He just got sick and tired with the Man and left him to ruin himself. Reading about this incident, I was awe-struck at the sheer cruelty with which young men were butchered, women raped and even children not spared. I am outraged ! What sort of animals are we ? We are not even animals, because even they feel some sort of compassion towards their fellow beings. At least, they will not kill each other only because they belong to a different religion or a race or speak different language or simply don’t agree with each other. We are suppose to be a species with better intellectual capabilities, well, I don’t disagree, we seem to be thinking of creative ways to kill and rape people.

I am just amazed at our ability to not feel sorry for mass murdering an entire population. How can only a handful of people convince an entire nation to do things  nobody could even dream of !? No, I don’t think that is possible unless the majority of the audience is corrupt, now I know you can’t just generalize things in this way but I can’t help but think that there would only be a handful of men in the crowd that feels otherwise. If the collective feeling is one of hostility towards something, the demagogues are just too happy to exploit it and the sad part is people don’t realize that there are being taken for a ride.

You know, Adolf Hitler in his autobiography ‘Mein Kampf’ says something to this effect – Give a man an ideology to fight for and he will fight for it more than he would for his own survival. I guess religion, race, country and all the other things that differentiate us from one another can be turned into an ideology and used to further some personal agendas.

We are blessed with intelligence that has taken us to Moon, perhaps we will colonize some other sorry planet in the future too, but I’d rather trade it for a more understanding, tolerant and accommodating human touch.

A week that was !

So, here I am, just when the weekend was about to end, I pushed myself to post this blog, because I knew, if I didn't do it tonight, I will never ever blog again for the rest of my life. It is like kicking out a bad habit, for example smoking. You may read about smoking and how it ruined lives, watch all the videos that educate people about ill-effects of tobacco, see innumerable pictures of patients suffering from tobacco's gift to mankind - Cancer and feel your tummy twitch, finally convince your good self to kick it and that is when a guy in office turns up and says "Dude, lets smoke", like you don't have any other option you do just that - smoke all the resolutions, you just made, to death. Not with me ladies and gentlemen ! I have decided to blog regularly and that is what I am going to do !! I couldn't quit smoking altogether though, but that's a different matter, not worth discussing really.
Now, this week was quite happening really, I am sure there were a lot of things happening in lot of people's life, things that brought them joy, grief, sadistic pleasure, you name it. But there were three things that drew my attention.

Kashmir on boil again
This saga doesn't seem to end. I mean, we are what, now, 63 years old and we cannot seem to solve a problem that has indirectly caused couple of good kick-ass wars with our "neighbour". We achieved our objective of avoiding war at two fronts in the future. Pakistan will never forget that India sliced it into two pieces and had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, perhaps evening snacks too. And that has to hurt. Just imagine some other country doing that to us !! We would be up in arms, screaming and shouting like there is no tomorrow. So, their reaction in completely understandable. We kicked ass and we don't want them to kick ours. That's legitimate. And so far we are successful, try as they might Pakistanis haven't been able to take away even a 30x40 site from India administered Kashmir, something that I am proud off. Anyway, coming back to the core Pakistan issue - Kashmir, I see that this is a dead-lock situation. India doesn't want to let go Kashmir, Pakistan wants to rip it apart from India and turn it into another SWAT valley, Kashmiris don't have a clue which way to turn. India needs to be little restrained in its approach though. By killing 9 year olds we are just antagonising a population that is already pissed with us. I understand the cops didn't have an option but to protect themselves, but really, 9 year olds ! I also understand that it would have been completely accidental, its not like there are snipers out there looking for innocent kids for target practice. Some people may also argue that protesters shouldn't have brought along a kid to, what is a virtual battlefield. You also feel for those cops who were just forced into firing, when you see a rogue mob is looking for your blood, first thing that comes to your mind is "how the hell am I gonna save my ass ?". Using arms at their disposal is just a neat, fool-proof escape route. From a protester's perspective, when he sees his pal's guts being spilled out on the ground, he will know exactly what to do and that is to pick up stones and fire the projectiles at the security forces. So, it is a vicious circle, which I cannot resolve sitting in some god forsaken corner of the country, but one that can be broken if the security forces exercise restrain. I can rant about this for hours together, but I have a life and a wife, uncommon combo you may say, so I will post about this sometime later when there is no rioting happening in Kashmir. Obviously, I don't see myself posting that piece anytime soon.

Howard stumped
To people who are far away from the workings of the cricket world, let me give you a brief intro to the world of cricket. Ah ! never mind, please go to cricinfo.com and read it up yourself. "brief" is not a word that I should use. Anyway, now Australians are pissed. So are New Zealanders, at least to the outside world, among themselves they will be drinking, laughing and cracking jokes to their heart's content on Cricket Australia. Aussies vetoed NZ's candidate and ICC vetoed Aussies's candidate. What goes around, comes around. Now the Aussies like Gideon Haigh are livid for no apparent reason. He conveniently ignores the fact that NZ were browbeaten to support Howard, who is despised by Afro-Asian countries. He thinks Howard will bring transparency to the ICC. Nothing can be farther than the truth. Howard is a bloody politician and politicians are always just that, irrespective of caste, creed, religion, race etc. Haigh seem to have hopes on someone who the Aussies themselves don't trust. Haigh hasn’t been able to digest the fact that India is ruling the roost. I don't understand what he expects. There is a piece in cricinfo.com by Harsha Bogle, which basically says people who have power will exercise it specially when their position is threatened by someone. This is true not only in cricket but in all walks of life. Heard of a country called United States ? It basically destroyed another country simply because their President didn't agree with the Americans. Bush lied about Iraq having WMDs, but who the hell cares now ! Not a single country had the balls to stop them back then. What India did in ICC was absolutely nothing ! Howard is a person known to have a racial bias and that is a good enough reason to keep him out.

Paraguay should be given the World Cup
I need not say much here. All the men of this planet, please send in your petitions to FIFA to give away the World Cup to Paraguay this time ! They need it desperately, so do we ;)

Madness begins - Genesis of a blogger !

OK, finally I get a move on and start blogging. Lately, I have been thinking about blogging more often than not. Although I must admit, it was one of the hardest decisions of my life. I think I my marriage was less stressful than starting this blog. It kinda helped to know my wife for a century before I took the final plunge into the institution of marriage and all, then again that is a different matter. FYI, I am known for starting something and not seeing it to completion, and I take this blog as a challenge to my mental and physical endurance at keeping things running, no matter how uninteresting it may become. I am the perennial Jack of all, Master of none. ALL THAT IS GOING TO CHANGE NOW ! If I don't come back in a couple of week's time (giving myself more than just a leeway) then you know nothing changed and world continues to be a better place to live and die.

Now, what will I blog about !? Interesting question, the answer to which I don't know yet. But I will blog something every now and then. You must have had an idea looking at the title of this blog but hey ! things can change (did I mention "change" for like 20th time already ?), unlike the name of this blog. So, expect the unexpected unlike in a 007 flick where the film makers expect you to "expect the unexpected", not only we all know oh-oh-seven will kill the Baddy eventually, but also few other amusing, for lack of a better word, goes to show how pathetic my English vocab is, things along the way to the finale (wink, wink). I promise my blog will have no such incomprehensible, unfathomable, unintelligible (I know they all mean the same, heard of something called exaggeration ? English purists, I hate them) mystery.

OK, what a stress filled half hour, I need to take a break... I am already drained out, oh why did I start this useless thing called blogging ! Perhaps, world will continue to be a better place to live and die, we will find out in about a week's time.

Hasta la vista !