Shooting Stars ? …… Not really!!

There’s been some film shooting going on in the campus where I work. Under other circumstances, I would be glad. I would even venture out to see how the shooting takes place. But I didn’t.

Reason for rant – They’ve blocked the main arterial road for a month. The company bus has to now travel all around the perimeter of the campus to reach the main road in a total of 15 mins (which otherwise takes just 2 mins).

That means 15 mins of further delay in reaching home!!

That means 15 mins of fretting over whether the babies have gone off to sleep without me 😦

That means 15 mins of time spent inhaling copious amount of smoke and dust.

That means 15 mins of further stress to the eyes (because I just CANT sit in a bus if I dont have something to read!!)

Thats means ……nothing. Cant think of any more complaints.

Rant over.

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A mind of their own….

You know your babies have started developing a mind of their own when,

….you end up feeding a morsel of food to their cheek.

 

….changing diapers becomes a test of  your patience and skill.

 

….you end up rattling the toy yourself,  because the kids are no longer interested in it.

 

….you excitedly point out someone/something to your child and he/she is deeply interested in your pointing finger.

 

….you make a gurgling sound (like the one your baby makes) and he/she looks at you as if you have lost your marbles.

 

….you try to teach them to say ‘abba’ and they look at you and say ‘pbfrrrrrrrrttt’.

 

….you pick up a doll/toy/clothes from the floor and put them on the bed, and it is promptly thrown back. A zillion times.

 

….you try to make them sleep, but they slither away from your arms, to turn back and pat you to sleep.

 

….you claim to guests that your babies get clingy in the presence of strangers, to find that your baby refuses to come back to you once he/she finds that the guest is leaving!

 

….you try to prevent them from pulling people’s hair by gently pulling at their hair, only to find the baby take it up as a challenge and yank your hair harder!

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Writing in English….

……should have been easy, since all kinds of tools are available these days to proofread your content. Right?

Wrong!

I’d posted here about how Skitt’s law prevented me from commenting on grammatical mistakes made on other sites/links.

But this one, I couldn’t resist. It’s not a spelling mistake.  But it changes the meaning of the text entirely.

Let me not rant  more… see for yourself  (Click on the snap to get a better view):-

'distress' or De-Stress ??

For those who cant see the text clearly, it says, ” Dark chocolate will also distress you and keep you skin looking radiant“.

Not only has the word ‘distress’ been used in the wrong context, the rest of the statement has also been worded incorrectly.

And to think, a reputed site life Indiatimes cannot afford proofreading!!!

Hire me 🙂 .

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“Garam Chaaaayaaaa….”!!

Thats how the tea-wallahs on  a train call out to prospective customers at 4:30 in the morning. However groggy I am, a hot cuppa on a moving train never fails to delight me :).

The cool morning breeze (and I’m talking about non-AC section here. Even though I travel AC these days, it just doesnt capture the charm of the days past when we used to travel 1st class non-AC. Alas, I digress) , loads of greenery, lack of chatter (since most people are still sleeping), a hot cup of tea and maybe a favourite novel or magazine in hand. Sheer bliss.

On long journeys, I usually used to consume a cup (paper-cup, which in normal tea-terms would amount to a  ‘cutting chai’, exorbitantly charged at Rs.5 ) every hour.

All those memories came down crashing a few days back. Its taken me a while to recover. Tea drinking on a moving train is never gonna be the same again!!! Sob 😦 .

See the pics below . Got them in a mail forward by a friend. I tried to figure out if they were photoshopped, but naah. They seem genuine enough.  These people just killed some of the best memories of my life!!

Heating tea 'water'

Water is taken from the train's water storage (for washrooms)

Its IRCTC alright!!!

And all along, I used to believe that the tea came from the train’s pantry car. Nicely boiled on a blackened kettle. I was so mistaken.

Travelling by train wont be the same again 😦

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Discipline and Humiliation

To,

The Lady at BigBazaar,Satara Road.

Sub : Disciplining children.

Dear Ms X,

I had the bad fortune of witnessing you disciplining your 7-year-old kid in the shopping mall yesterday. I’m all for non-interference between a mother and her child. How you deal with a difficult, boisterous child is your own prerogative. I will not preach you on that.

But yes, I would like to point out that that particular method of disciplining does not work. Not in public. It’s the where you discipline, that matters.

Slapping your child in public only makes his/her humiliation worse. It does not guarantee a meek child, who will suddenly give up demanding a particular toy and follow you around obediently.

The fault, if any, lies sorely with you. You bring a 7-year-old to a shopping mall containing rows and rows of toys, and expect the kid to have restraint. My dear, how many times have you ever practised restraint in a shopping mall?? Did you really expect a kid to have self-control? What world are you living in?

And no, that was NOT a look of pity that I directed at your plight. It was plain disgust. Because you were plainly at fault. If you could drag your mother and son for shopping, you could have also left him in her care at home. Lesser burden for you both , right?

Hope you behave better next time.

N.

 

 

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Where would all the chickens go?

I’m all for supporting the fight against Global Warming.

But asking me to give up a favourite dish for it…..is stretching environment-friendliness a bit too far, dont you think?

Alas, this is what “Lord Stern” thinks!!

I guess , we’ll save a lot more ‘heat’ if we give up on  spices, innit? (always wanted to use this word since I heard Jade Goody using it on our own Miss.SS 🙂 )

Imagine the amount of body heat released on consuming  peppers, chillies,spices, and what not! Lets save the world. Lets banish the spice from our meals.

Lets just not banish the meal itself 🙂 (hehe…that was a sorry excuse of an appeal!)

Nevertheless, Lord Stern, you’ve made your point. And I’ve made mine. Now would you like to join me for a dinner of “Dum Biryani” and “Shami Kebabs” ? (sans the spice, of course !! But then, it wouldn’t be the same. But then again, who cares? We’re saving the environment, arent we? Bon Appetit :)).

PS: Err.. Lord Stern, I just found out that ‘methane’ gas is released by ‘live’ cattle and chicken.  Does this mean, you want to eliminate all cattle/chickens from the face of this earth? If yes, then what better way to eliminate than to eat them up?? If you were trying to make a point….I guess you lost the plot somewhere.

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In search of Home Remedies

OK People. I need help. ASAP.

SIL’s kids are suffering from severe cold n cough. She has tried different types of medications (even changed 4 doctors!). Still no reprieve. The little ones continue to suffer.

I am strongly against administering allopathic medicines to kids and hence, I’m looking for side-effects-free home remedies for treatment.

She has tried the usual cloves-boiled-in-water-with-honey kind of tricks. No results yet. If any of you have ideas which give better results, do reply to this post. I do so want to reduce the babies’ misery!!

And yeah, it’ll also act as a handy reference point in case my kids ever catch the winter bug (once I have a couple of wailing babies in the arms, I really wont get the time to go googling, would I ??)

So please, ask around.Call your Mamma.Or Granny. And please reply soon.

I’ll be much obliged :).

TIA.

PS:  TIA is for “Thanks In Advance” and not TIA from here

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Errr….Aishwarya…a ‘Buffalo’ ???

We did some de-cluttering in our home a couple of weeks back. While sorting out a huge pile of books, I came across an old issue of “Star-dust” (does anyone read that anymore??) in Hindi!!! Since I’d never read a gossip magazine in Hindi before, I gleefully kept it aside to peruse it at leisure . I dont recollect the exact date , but it was dated somewhere around 2006.

I know Stardust was famous for being ‘Catty’ (which these days is also called as being ‘b****y’), but I wasn’t ready for the levels of ridiculousness this magazine had stooped to.

Sample this :-

The cover has a small snap of Aishwarya Rai, with the comment :-

“Bhains Bhidant: Aishwarya aur Bipasha mein Thani….”

Roughly translated, it means ” Buffaloes confronting each other for a fight : Aishwarya and Bipasha have differences…”

Am sure neither Aish nor Bips would like to be even remotely associated with a buffalo. So guys, if you are reading this and feeling offended, believe me , I’m not the one who used these words. See the pic below (its a bit blurred, but you can make out the text) :-

Buffaloes in the ring..!!

Here are a few more captions from the same issue :-

A pic of Amrita Rao and her mother standing together carries the caption :- “Amrita Rao, apni mummy ke saath. Kahan ja rahi ho? Chai-patti lene? ”

Trans:-“Amrita Rao with her mother. Where are you going? To buy tea-leaves?”

This one’s totally beyond me 😐 ….!!

A pic of  Neha dhupia has the caption :-

“Neha Dhupia ka naya Piya”

Trans :”Neha Dhupia’s  new lover”. Rhyming at its worst!!

Gosh!! I wish I could remember all the other comments in that mag . Will go and look for it today( was laughing so hard the last time I read it, that I had to throw it away before the un-intentional humour killed me 🙂 . I have no idea where I dumped it in my already cluttered room.)

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Coversation these days…..

…between the BF and me go something like this :-

Me : (Calling him on his cell) Salaam

BF : Walaikum Salaam.

Me : Busy

BF : Not really.

Me : whats up?

BF : Nothing much. Work.

Me : hmm.

BF : hmmmm.

Me : Had lunch?

BF : will.Shortly.

Me: any chance of coming home early?

BF : Lets see.

Me : hmm

BF : (silence)

Me : OK then. Carry on.

BF : you too.

Me : Bye

BF : Bye.

Me : (click)

BF : (click)

And I cant believe our telephone bill used to run into thousands before marriage!!!

Where has all the ‘talk’ gone 😦

PS: Both of us have project releases around Dec. Hopefully post that, we’ll have more meaningful conversations 🙂 (Ameen).

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I Hate Hoax Emails…..do you?

If you have received email hoaxes by the dozen and hate them as I do, then read on.

If you are the ones, who panic when they receive such forwards, and then forward it to ALL on your contact list, then I BEG you to read on.Please. Do me this favour…!!

There was this once, I’d forwarded an email alert to my brother on his office ID. Bro sent a stinging reply, the gist of which was something as follows :-

“You are a blot on the IT industry. You should be ashamed of heeding to such nonsense mails which do nothing, but clutter the network bandwidth. A simple google search would have opened your eyes, if only you had bothered to look”. This is a very refined version of what he actually accused me of 🙂

Anyhow, since then, I can detect a mail hoax from miles away. Here is a list of pointers which help to quickly identify them :-

1) Use of CAPITAL letters. Yeah, thats a giveaway. As clear as day. You see a mail which contains half the text in caps, kindly re-direct it to the nearest recycle bin.

2) The mail insists that you HAVE to send it to everyone !!! Yeah yeah, dump that one ASAP.

3) Contains prophecies too scary to comprehend!!! Shudder! Your hard-disk will be wiped out!! All your contacts would be infected too!! None of your applications would behave as expected!! Your Favourite Aloo Chaat would be taken over by the Baingan Bharta!! (Ok, that last one was by me….but you get the drift!). Dump this one too.

4) “If you click on so-n-so link, AOL will donate such-n-such amount for a so-n-so cause”. Its a wonder AOL isn’t bankrupt yet. With the number of hoaxes using their name, AOL sure is getting some much-needed publicity!!

5) “Poor so-n-so is dying of cancer and needs help immediately”. These hoaxes have been going around for so long, that the poor so-n-so must have died a natural death due to old age by now. Stop wasting your sympathy. The trash goes into the bin. Right now.

6) Contains hoax images. Most people forward such mails because they arent able to detect the fake from real. Test your hoax detection skill here. And yeah, dont forget to delete that mail!!

Happy mailing people 🙂

Hoping to get some reprieve from hoaxes henceforth ….. 🙂

PS: For a post warning about mails containing too many Caps, I seem to have overshot the limit meself. Sincere apologies 🙂

Edited to add : Do let me know your scores once you take the hoax test. I scored 70%. Not bad I say!

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