Dont put the horse in front of the bike

True Story:
So V was taking his 15 month old for a walk around London, and caught a rare spectacle of about 40 horses going in a procession of sorts. V thought this toddler would be super excited to see that many horses, and kept saying "horse" in the hope that toddler would repeat after him and show the same level of excitement. To the utter disppointment of V, kiddo showed no enthusiasm for the horses. Then a biker whizzed past those horses and the kiddo yelled in joy "biiike".
I guess 40 horse power wasnt enough to please the little one, it took about 800 horse power :)

Stats Guru

When will Tendulkar retire?

Take a look at his stats here. My prediction is he retires the day he has hit 50 100s and 100 50s in ODIs.

How bad is the economy?

Will the string of bad news ever end? First, it was Bernie Madoff, then it was Satyam, and more recently Allen Stanford. What would be funny is if Madoff had actually invested in Satyam stocks, and Satyam had those fake FDs held in the Stanford banks. The economy must be in a really bad shape. It is so bad that even the crooks like Raju and Madoff are finding it difficult to survive. I meant this in a very serious sense, but people who heard this thought it was funny. The easy money machines are losing the grease looks like. Also, is it a coincidence that the oil prices decided to fall suddenly just before the transition of power across the pond? Its almost like all those people who do "dus ka thees" quietly disappear at the first sign of mamus. There is more to it that what meets the eye, says the conspiracy theorist in me.

Broken King

Recently, Shah Rukh Khan who is the owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders said the credit cruch had left him with no money to buy expensive players during the auction, and finding it difficult to even pay the salaries to the existing ones. A few days later, it was announced he was going under the knife to have some shoulder surgery. Looks like this glamorous and expensive game is literally costing him an arm and a leg!

Eng vs WI Test Series

Things just seem to be getting worse by the day for the English cricket team. After their humiliating innings defeat in the first test match, to the rude shock of both teams the second test had to be called off because the new Viv Richards stadium was essentially a paper thin coating of turf on top of sand. Yes, the outfield is all sand! The stadium is perfect for beach volleyball, but no fun if the cricket ball gets stuck in sand.

Andrew Strauss, the new England captain, must be having a miserable time right now. They were hoping for a chance to make up for the bad moves in the first test but who would have expected an entire stadium to be dysfuntional! So, the summary of the first & second test so far has been Naach na jaane & Aangan teda.

Perfect mismatch

There is a UK retailer of mobile phones, mobile broadband etc called The Carphone Warehouse. Unless I told, you probably would have never guessed what they sell. Anyways, minor gripe. Moving on....
Giving away free laptops seem to be THE marketing tool these days. If I recall, AOL started the trend for their home broadband. That idea has crossed over to the mobile broadband market these days. What drew me into one of the Carphone Warehouse outlets a few weeks ago were the new 9 inch laptops on display with the Atom processor. These laptops were being given away from free to a few hundred quid depending on the length of the mobile broadband contract. This sounds like a match made in heaven - light & portable laptop good enough for all the basic things you do on the move such as email/surfing, combined with mobile internet capabilities. Finally, a notebook that looks like a note book!
As I continued the tour, there were some real monstrous laptops on similar combo offers - one of them was a Sony 18 something inches, must have weighed atleast 10 kilos. This is quite the opposite of a match made in heaven - this is more like Britney Spears having a 2AM drive-through wedding in Las Vegas. This Sony laptop may not actually fall within the carry on baggage size limitations. Its that big!
There is an old colloquial saying that somebody bought a buffalo because the seller promised a nose string (wire) free. This seems to be relevant even today - just the products have changed! Ironically though, the new wire is wireless.

Guest blog

P was inspired to blog recently, but doesn't think she will blog regularly enough to warrant its own home. So, I have been kind enough to provide some space to encourage her creative efforts :)

Brown through and through

One of the advantages of living in metropolitan city is that you are not crippled by lack of personal transport. You can use the ‘public’ means of transport, but would have to ‘share’ the space with hoards of other people. 8 million people, if you live in London.

Generally, I don’t mind sharing the breathing-space with my fellow commuters, but with flu season around the corner, the situation has changed ‘germ’amatically. On one of the journeys, I happened to sit perpendicularly opposite a woman in her twenties giving finishing touches to her make-up on her way to work. With her stylish pin-striped suit, blow-dried hair, manicured hands, colour-coordinated stockings and stilitoes...she was a picture of beauty. And then it happened. As I was looking at her from the corner of the eye, she started sneezing and coughing uncontrollably spewing germs all over the carriage. And not once through her fit of coughing, did she try masking her mouth or excuse herself. She continued painting her eye-shadow to match her lipstick, as if nothing had happened. Don’t people have a sense of moral/ social responsibility towards the fellow passengers? Shouldn’t they progress from being metrosexual to being ‘metro'-sensible?

While I am not socio-phobic, I am definitely misophobic. Instead of crying hoarse over the split germs, I have developed my own defense against this offense. Every time, I see a person coughing, I immediately cover my nose to prevent the germs getting in to my respiratory system, not caring what the other people around me think. Is offense the only way to counter offense?

Mr.A thinks I am paranoid, but he who suffers, knoweth. He counts this amongst my other queer tube-habits. For ex. whenever, Mr.A and I travel by tube, I liking sitting opposite Mr.A and not next to him, which he finds very weird. Well, the explanation is bleeding obvious, if I sit opposite him, I can keep an eye on him and keep his wandering eye under check.

He also has nicknamed me coconut, as I am brown (almond beige complexion, to be precise) but white inside. Well, looks like I am brown through and through on this one!

Which came first?

For those planning to watch Rab ne bana di jodi, I may be giving away a twist in the tale but there is only a 50:50 chance you will be awake till then anyway.
In the movie, the lead female character, Taani (Anushka Sharma) tells Raj (SRK), "Mujhe yeha se le chalo, Raj". Raj is devastated to hear that but he promises Taani that the next night would be the last night in that town and that he would take her to Delhi the next day. Now, my guess is that they would take the RajTaani express the next day :-)
If you thought these character names & the incident were concocted to fit this joke, decide for yourself by enduring the movie. At least, this is an easier mystery to solve than the age old chicken & egg problem.

The Closet Republican

Has everyone been following the mad string of resignations by Obama's nominees over tax evasion disclosures? One of them, Nancy Killefer, resigned because she hadn't payed a few hundred dollars in taxes - I think she just decided she didn't want that position anymore. But Tom Daschle's case is no petty one - he owes 100s of 1000s of $$$. Joe, the plumber who made headlines during the election campaign, falls somewhere in between. Hence, the term "average Joe" I suppose.
I tried to find out if the taxes Tom Daschle evaded was in the last 8 years, but nowhere could I find when exactly he evaded that amount. Let's assume for this blog's sake that all the tax Tom evaded was prior to 2001. Dashle in 2001 must have been thinking "Phew! Atleast the next 4 years, I don't have to fudge my tax return". And, deja vu in 2005, of course.
Obama has already appointed 3 Republicans to his cabinet. If any of these guys have tax problems, atleast they have their publicly held ideology as an excuse. I hope the tax problems ends here. Otherwise, Obama would have no choice but to cross party lines to pick all his nominees. It all becomes too murky at that point, and all of a sudden Rumsfeld's famous incoherent rant about known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns start making sense. (Just replace known and unknown with Democrat and Republican)
If this Animal Farm ending is inevitable, let's not hasten it. Let's keep Obama and Michael Jackson as far apart as possible. We cannot let Obama truly change colours!

Immig Rant

London is considered a melting pot of cultures and religions, and that's one of the things that makes it special. The level of diversity may not be same but the US is pretty diverse too with a lot of immigrant workers. You would think these countries would be proud of the contributions of these immigrants, but the way they refer to this workforce doesn't sound very thankful at all!
In the US, if you are an immigrant, you probably have one of the alphabets that lets you stay legally (F, H, J, L visas, etc) but at the end of the day, you are an Alien (Resident or Non-resident). The next time you enter the US, try filling out the port of departure as "planet far far away" and Flight number as "UFO-111" in that I-94 card. I hope those programmers writing the code for those expensive NASA probes aren't ex-INS officials. If they are, they will never be successful finding life on Mars. They may find a Mallu selling cup tea but that doesn't count.
For an immigrant in the UK, you either have a "Limited Leave to Remain" or an "Indefinite Leave to Remain" visa. It almost sounds like a court sentence "You have limited leave to remain" and you can hear an imaginary gavel hit along with it. The words "Limited" and "Indefinite" are the saving graces there. Otherwise, you wouldn't know whether to leave the country or remain in the country. I guess all those illegal immigrants have selective hearing when they heard their sentences - they just chose to remain, most likely indefinitely!
There must be other diverse countries and cities, but if these English speaking nations cannot find a comfortable term to refer to their immigrants, I dare not try and understand the visa systems of other countries.

A bi-partisan stimulus plan

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. While all the experts argue their hearts out on the root causes of the global downturn and all the politicians are trying to figure out how to become expert darners, it occured to me (and two other weirdos) that the solution might have actually been easy and cheap. Everybody that I have been catching up this new year has either been ill in the run-up to Christmas or around that time or shortly after that. And, not just for a day or two but for 2-3 weeks at a stretch. So, this would have prevented the majority of us from going to the high streets and even when the retailers tried to entice us with deep discounts, we were busy loading up our bodies with paracetamol, lemsip, day & night nurse, etc. So, if the government had vaccinated the whole bloody country, and then had planes hovering over the borders spraying Dettol disinfectants before Christmas, none of this - retailers shutting down, global downturn, etc - would have ever happened. So, the required solution was actually a "medical stimulus plan" to this financial problem, and would have definitely cost much less than 850 billion dollars for the US tax payer. The best part, it would have been bi-partisan! The saying goes "When the US catches a cold, the whole world sneezes". Just, this time around its a nasty cold and the time has already passed for my medical stimulus plan. Alas, very sad indeed.

That was cold!

A few weeks back while I was in Minneapolis, the taxi guy taking me from the airport to the hotel started a typical "taxi driver" conversation

Driver: "Where are you from?"

Me: "From Dallas. How about you?"

Driver: "If you are from Dallas, I am from Minneapolis. If you are from India, then I am from Somalia."

Ouch! The weather was not the only thing that was cold at that moment

Fed raises interest level

Over the two weeks around Labor Day in the US, everyone was keenly following the Fed's moves. For several years, Fed was dictating terms and had managed to maintain a great interest level. In recent times, Fed had to deal with increasing pressure from superpowers in Britain, EU and the old Russia and very recently was unseated from its top position. As contradictory as it might sound, this deflation was the reason for the increased interest levels over the two weeks. It required Fed to play hard ball again to bounce back. Everyone seemed to ask, can the Fed live up to the challenge? Is the US really open to a new legacy? Can Fed recover from the slump? We got our answers on 8th September, didn't we? It may not have made the headlines of Wall Street Journal, but we saw the supreme Fed back to life. It may have been aided by a chanceless British rescue operation, but nevertheless, the King is back. Roger Federer is back to his best. I loved every moment of the final. The US Open is not yet ready for a new legacy.

Doctor Who?

Last week, our friends had to take their toddler to the hospital and the doctor on duty happened to be a Dr. Band. I thought this was a funny name for a doctor. If this doctor were to give first-aid, its only fair to call it a band-aid :)

Acting on an Impulse

A passing glance at an ordinary advert within a London Underground tube station, and for reasons unknown, a decision was taken instantaneously "I want to run". So, I am running for the Royal Parks Half Marathon on Oct 12th at 10AM. I have been training for this event for the last 2 weeks or so and have managed to cover 5 miles twice in the last 7 days.
54 days to go, 8 more miles to train for, should be lot of fun.

The true Twenty20

In the movie Dumb & Dumber, Jim Carrey asks the character Mary "What are the chances that a beautiful girl like you would go out with a guy like me?" to which Mary replies slowly and uncertainly "1 in a million?". Jim is ecstatic to hear that its a non-zer0 chance and says "Yesss! So, you are saying there is a chance!!". Now, thats called hope.
At a time when Twenty20 is the in-thing and Indian test cricket team badly needs a cataract operation, nothing could have been more contrasting to the Colombo Test than the gold medal won by Abhinav Bindra in the Beijing Olympics. If Jim Carrey was ecstatic, Bindra must have been ecstatic times 1000. He is truly 1 in a billion. The nature of the sport he won his medal means that he has perfect vision. Isin't he the true 20/20 champion? Congrats, Bindra - India is proud of you.

Thanks, Norton

Silka restaurant in London was in our short-list of restaurants to dine last week because they supposedly server low-fat India food. So, the usual procedure of the google search, and then the website to get location details happened when Norton Internet Security captured and deleted a Downloaded Virus and from our short-list too. A virus in their website, wonder what would be in their food? Now, that would be useful information to collect anonymously and publish

Another Barack in the Wall

An extract from Obama's speech at Berlin - a metaphor taken too far

Speaking less than a mile from where President John F Kennedy enraptured Berliners in 1963, he warned of the danger of allowing "new walls to divide us from one another".

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," he said, emphasising his lines with clipped, precise movements of his hands as his words echoed through the huge crowds.

"The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand," he continued, as applause began to ripple amongst his listeners.

"The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand," he said.

"These now are the walls we must tear down," he concluded to screams of approval.

Silly question: Was the Berlin wall Made in China?

The Gates Bill

We were on one of the London's infamous bendy buses this weekend. The windows in these buses are almost big as the doors. Anyways, one of the doors wouldnt operate in the middle of the journey. The driver stepped out of the bus, tried a few things and then came back completely turned off the engine and started again - and guess what it started working! So, I have decided to amend The Gates Bill which states that "stuck Windows can be fixed by a restart" to now include doors.
The Gates Bill is more universal than what you think

Inspired by Inspiron

A few months back, Bundar's inlaws and outlaws visited them for a few weeks. His Dell laptop was running literally 24x7 to watch Sun TV, cricket, etc online. A few days after both parents left, the heavy weight use took its toll & his laptop conked. Dell diagnosed it to be motherboard problem. I told Bundar "You had no choice, Bundar. Otherwise, your mothers would have been bored"