Coming back ... Feeling Better.

I feel like a soulless casual fling my blog once had, someone in the past who was fun and colorful but was always meant to be forgotten; to be thought of as a fast fading memory that you went to on desperately lonely evenings. That heartless prick that left you at a sharp turn of an argument and never came back.

It is like that mail you were to write or the phone call you should have made a long time ago, but now that you’ve put it off this long it’s become that much harder to get to it. Sometimes, you just don’t want to rationalize and reason over things, you just want to let them happen without having to decapitate them with reasoning.

It is great to be back! I’ve no clue how long I’ll last this time around. But hey, who cares. 

Holiday in Nice - Remaining Bits

As the sovereign crown prince of procrastination I herby proceed to fill in my loved ones on the remaining juicy bits of my Nice holiday, without much of that usual fuss about being the lazy butt. There is nothing much I could do about it all these years. Perhaps, it is an essential element in my chemical makeup, the additional element - Laziness (Lz).

As the husky golden sun rose over the glassy blue waters of the sea, we stirred in our snore ridden disturbed sleeps. All our meticulous plans of making it sharp on time to the station to take our train to Cannes were dashed. With boozy heavy sleep still strapping us down to our beds, we argued in muffled tones as to who is to have bath first. Well … eventually we did get up and get dressed in appropriate sunny holiday clothes. With a classy looking camera and a few of us with light backpacks and a silly smile over our faces we left home to take a bus to the station. With two other work colleagues of Bhakta joining us we boarded the train that sped towards Cannes.

We weren’t quite clear on what we expected to see in Cannes. I for one was hoping to catch a glimpse of Mr. & Mrs. Pitt trotting the red carpet. Cheeky of me! But honestly we weren’t too concerned about ogling over celebrities. Like the cheerful crowd there, we just wanted to have our fair share of sea side fun.

Walking out of the station at Cannes, we filed into a nearby information centre to arm ourselves with maps and schedules for various events. After much careful speculation we came to the unanimous decision that we should spend a good hour aimlessly walking the narrow shaded streets, squeezed out on both side by little shops bursting with their wares. And so we did. Coolers in place and cameras clicking at every object that vaguely resembled anything of an art or antiquity, we walked the tourist strut. It really was a funny feeling. With every snap we clicked we felt that we were capturing a bit of the magic that the place had to offer, so that we could at some later date open up these pictures and conjure up that enchantment all over again. Perhaps this was the best decision we made during this trip, to roam the quaint city with no purpose in mind, with nothing to rush us, just taking in every piece of the wonder that the place is, at our own relaxed pace.

Covering a few historical places, we heeded to the calls of our belly-quakes. We went hunting for a traditional French eat out where we could sit at a large table on the side walk, under shades of a generous canopy of balconies and open windows with criss-crossing clothes lines above, watching expert violin and accordion playing beggars. (Well… that isn’t fair. I can’t call them beggars, though badly provided for; they were richly endowed with the beautiful art of music.) For once I am going to skip describing the food we had in detail. Been rebuked enough over it by my sis! The food was simply perfect. And that’s all am going to say about it.

Paying the lady who waited on us, we thanked her and made our way towards the sea shore. For some reason despite the heavy food we had, some of the guys were aching for a cup of coffee!!!

So we found a coffee shop just by the sands beneath a spares looking tree. As some of us sipped on hot cups of coffee under a blistering sun, the remaining sane members of our group, looking out into the tantalizing bright blue waters and the hoards of sun bathing vacationers, promised ourselves that we would hit the waters next. We then walked skirting the shore looking for the right patch of golden sands where we could set our belongings down and get dressed for the waters. Soon finding the right spot we got into the waters. It was blissful. Perfectly cool for the warm sun. For the first time, I managed to swim a couple of yards in the sea! Never thought I would ever be able to do that.

Once we had had enough fooling around we decided we should do justice for having come this far to get wet in salty water and sullied in dirty mud. We had to join the mad crowd in peering at the celebs as they drove past in sleek black sedans. So we quickly dried ourselves and got dressed and joint the gongoozling empty brained open jawed crazy crowd clicking frantically with their cams. There were many picture perfect people we stood staring at. A few we caught on stills too. Just so that we have a few snaps that were proof enough for us to tell people back at home that we were at the film festival.

We decided to head back home as the sun went down. Bhakta promised us that dinner would be better at the town square in Nice. The rest of the evening was a cheesy blur filled with nothing but a ludicrously super fattening quatre fromage pizza followed by a painfully long walk by the sea front to the apartment where we called it a day. The trip itself didn’t end with that. The next day though uneventful in terms of bloggable content, was perfectly relaxing and holidayish, as it should have been. We spent a great part of the day in doors, cooking, eating, chatting and watching a movie ... well actually choosing a movie to watch! In the evening we went down to the beach, walked a bit and soaked ourselves and splashed around. It was a bit saddening to say our goodbyes the next morning. Though we did make earnest promises to meet up at another such holiday the following year, wonder how true that can turn out to be. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Holiday in Nice - Day 1

Allow a bunch of geeks to decide upon a holiday, and what you end up with is tons and tons of email chains, and a blightedly disgruntled lot who have no idea if they ever would go on that damned holiday. After having changed the destination over a half a dozen times and dropping and including over another dozen people in the glowing list of vacationers, we had finalized the city of Nice in France to be our patch of sunny paradise. We were 5 of us, knights in strapped shoes and bulging backpacks like eager yelping puppies waiting to explore the city of Nice and take a dig at the Cannes film festival.


Chaitanya from Milan and Pratap from Bordeaux were there in Nice, I guess by mid day Friday. And our host … the geek of multiple post docs, the dude with the most comic smile that stretches a mile long from ear to ear, the seasoned French dog with the coolest looking sea view apartment… and well I must say the best host we could’ve ever had, Bhakta the bum, had everything planned out for us. I flew in by early evening from London, and was welcomed by the three at the airport. After a couple of laborious minutes, we slowly got accustomed to each others existence, for it was no joke in trying to acknowledge people instead of their mail ids and chat ids, which by far is easier. On reaching Bhakta’s apartment, over a cup of hot coffee we caught up on all lost threads of gossip and status stories of friends, jokers, nut heads and other literally-non-existent batch mates. Once well rested we decided to go for a stroll on the pebbled sea shore, that was a stones throw away from the apartment.


The sea was melancholic, with a fast darkening horizon and an occasional shroud of sharp cold wind to drape around us, we continued to chat over pointless silly things such as work and research; while Prathap and myself began collecting multi colored pebbles like diamond hunters on African river banks. After about an hours’ stroll, when we were chilled to our bones and our feet cried out in mercy at the piercing stones and pebbles that tore at our soles, we went into the city and got into a local grocer’s market. Filling our baskets with the least needed items (of course, the slab of Roquefort and bag of Parmesan cubes are vital for our very survival!) we proceeded to check out and get back home in time to receive the last to join the group, the towering personality with a rather huge and constantly expanding base (waist-line), Sri Ramulu from Brussels. Hmm … it must have been while we were in the midst of an intellectually stimulating discussion on whether to have Ramulu reach home and then cook for us or to allow Bhakta dish out some of the Indian-abroad survival dishes; that Ramulu found his way home. Well, eventually all of us had a go at spoiling the dinner, which apparently looked better than it tasted! It was great. No not the dinner, just the thing of getting together after so many years into our respective obscurities. Pulling each others leg over cheesy slapstick jokes and going over our plans for Cannes for the zillionth time, we found the night slip by way too quickly. And thats day 1 of our “Holiday in Nice”!

Our Images and Us

Images have always played a pivotal role in our human lives. Our minds seem to constantly gather, analyze, modify, classify and deduce from images. Interestingly, all other forms of inputs that we accrue through the other senses as well, get translated into images before they are worked upon by the mind. Be it smell, taste, sound or touch … there always is a picture that we naturally associate with it. When I eat something that has a unique flavor, which I unconsciously label as an input worth recording for future reference, I either associate with that taste, images of the place where the food was consumed or … an image of the food itself as I dipped my fork/spoon into it. These images then form an encoding for the taste which can later be brought up for referrals, with little effort. So too it is with sound. I can't quite remember, ever listening to music without picturing something in my mind's eye. As I listen to a song, the music dictates the kind of imagery that is formed in my mind's screen, which then helps to encode this song in my mind. Needless to say, touch brings about far more powerful forms of imagery.

On the whole, any event, with all its different types of inputs; sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings are apparently encoded in the form of images. This is often the reason why when we try to recollect a music once heard or a sense of touch once felt, we always bring back with that recollection, the entire event or scene (inclusive of all other sense inputs). The most interesting part is when we begin to manipulate these images in our mind to form deductions. We often play around with these images, trying perpetually to discern patterns in them. And these patterns then go to make filters (our pre conceived notions, perceptions, etc) which affect how we accept and process and label future inputs. This process is best observed in growing children. In little toddlers, we see the sense of amazement or complete indiscriminate absorption of signals/inputs. However, when the same kid grows up, deducing and working with self discovered patterns, the kid begins to:

• Ignore some of the input.
• Label some of them with minimal analysis.
• Would be "startled" by an input when it goes against a formed pattern.

Humans in general, find it very hard to keep the influences of patterns at bay. Everything we ever do is in consonance with well defined patterns. This is apparent in our lifestyles, our civilizations, our wants … everything. The left brain classifies patterns, while the right deduces newer patterns. How we come to balance these two activities decides the kind of personality that we make of ourselves. More people tend towards being more left brained, in the sense that they predominantly choose to classify new input images based on previous classifications and deduced patterns; and look lesser for new patterns that may arise. There is a very thin line dividing our rationale in choosing to look for new patterns instead of going in for classification i.e. being so called open and receptive instead of being judgemental!

Gods be blamed! If you're wondering whats got into me, well it is this damn book that I am reading, turning me into a zyborg or something of that sort! I am trying to allow myself to generously dip into the pool of experiences that this book has in offering, while still trying to hold on to my sanity. Well … heck! Either way I am crazy J.

Bingo! The Coffee Table's First Crown

If there is one thing that I so damn good at, it would be slipping into non-existance and cribbing about it. Ever so often, I get excited with some new found, fun filled change in the droning monotony of my life. But then, even before I realise, I would be fast letting things settle down with those powdery cobwebs over hanging.

It is indeed an oxymoronic and highly ironic paradox (Ahh … it feels a bit reliving after using some stupid bombastic word.) On one hand, I want to lead a very settled life, with every day, every hour planed neatly and lived most appropriately. So that I can get to bed at night, flash through the day's happenings and feel warm and smug. And on the other hand, I want every moment of my life to be a thrilling surprise faced with all the childish elements of splendid anticipation, little agonies and wizening mishaps. I can then hold the memory of every moment like a post card picture out of my shoe box and reflect on all the fun that filled that second.

Perhaps, I am not alone. Somehow I have this feeling that many suffer from the same disorder. Whatever! So … Here I am after a short indulgence with an orderly life, hoping to spin it out of control like a tossed pebble over the pool. For many, blogging has been a means of recording the event in their filmy lives. Sadly, they compare it to diary keeping. Tipping the scales right over, I think of blogging as kinks of excitement in an otherwise very surreal and normal life that I lead. Guess that explains why I am unable to do this very periodically. Boy! Does this give me the kicks! And so, when ever I'm most desperately looking to dash my head into a wall of thrill, I turn to blogging!

Now that I have amply excused myself with utterly contorted reasons, let me get to buissness. Oh!... what a dog I am. A few weeks back there was this very sweet person, Manoj, who so graciously chose to crown my corner coffee table with its first blogging award, so rightly termed "The Freedom and Independent award". Thanks for that Manoj. Wish I learn from you to be more earnest in blogging. And oh!... you have an amazing blog, lots of insightful thoughts and interesting outlooks. The good souled angle that I am, I am impelled by my divine insticts to spread joy and glory all arround. So, with that said, here are a list of buddies and fav blogs to whom I humbly pass on the baton of "The Freedom and Independent award". Cheers buddies ... have always loved reading your bloggings.

With Love to:

1. Puppy's rewind button - Though he writes his posts sitting next to his wife ... it makes you feel as if she writes half of it. I kinda like the holiday accounts and most of all the sweet recounts of all the great-to-remember foolish things that he does to make his simple life all the more interesting.
2. Arv's wall - Here is some one I can hardly belive I knew before he started blogging! He's so prompt and perhaps the Elvis Presley of the blogging kingdom. With an empire of fans and friends Arv has a world of his own, for the simple reason he provides the most honest window to a dude's life!
3. Bridget Jones reincarnate - I often wonder while reading her post whether I am talking to a long time friend in person. Her words are so lively and above all she is gifted with a style that would leave Ms.Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and The City gasping for her damn breath.

Cheers everyone ... There are more people I would love to give this award to. But I am holding back on my temptation. Hope to read more and more interesting stuff of all you people's blogs.