Bye's First Law of Model Railroading Anytime you wish to demonstrate something, the number of faults is proportional to the number of viewers.
Bye's Second Law of Model Railroading The desire for modeling a prototype is inversely proportional to the decline of the prototype.
Happy news.
I made my own Sambhar (with spinach). I ate it. And I survived.
I made my own Dhal. I ate it. And I survived.
I made my own curry (of Snake Gourd). I ate it. And I survived.
Well, here I am.
Did I promise a review of Aaitha Ezhuthu? I did, I suppose. But then, so many had written about that movie, that I decided not to venture into that movie, but rather, I will try to capture some quintessential points about that movie.
Madhavan did a superp job, though it pained me that he did not as Maddy - the boy next door. His face suits that better. But, still he played his role to perfection. Same can be said of macho Surya, though that was the role he was designed to play. Siddharth (of Boys fame) did a good job, and it was a good transgression from his previous stint in Boys. The girls too did a good job, and I would rather not delve into the nitty-gritty details. And, of course, Bharathiraja, a great director himself, conjuring up macabre schemes is excellent stuff. What I judge of the story is my own opinion, and I would rather not discuss it here.
But what I did like about the movie, and what most did like were the songs. They were just too good. I still dont know whats stopping me from getting those songs. I could just listen to them again and again. Kudos to Rehman. And the song blend with the movie very well, even though they were not initially planned. I mean, its not like other movies, where the cast is suddenly transported to Switzerland or Himalayas in one dream-song sequence.
For all this, I am planning to go again. Anybody coming along?
I decided that I would give my pious side a visit again, by paying my due respects to the Lord of the Hills, the Lord of Tirupathi, that is, I mean Balaji. Will be heading there tomorrow morning, along with a gang of collegemates (9 to be precise). The actual reason for going there is a friend's Upanayam (a religious pooja, the exact details and reasons of which, I am not even sure of) for which he has cordially invited us. Besides, it is probably the last time, the Tam gumbal of our hostel may go together.
I will be back the day after tomorrow, evening. On the way tomorrow, I am also planning to go to Koney Falls, for a little fun and frolic in the water, before we begin the arduous climb to the top - Tirumala (Oh yes, we are planning to climb, my third time). And while coming back, to another temple nearby, Thiruchanur, it is called.
So long now. Wish me a nice trip.
One thing that did spoil the weekend was that I could not meet Shobha inspite of her being here. (The reason was very simple: There was not way to contact her)
Butler's Law of Progress All progress is based on a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
The days seem to fly by, an eternal second lost in the span of less than a day. A quagmire of profusingly confusing thoughts seem to gather more and more momentum as the days seem to go by.
When the hell am I going to learn cooking? Properly? When the hell am I going to drive the car? Confidently? On Chennai's busiest day, at the busiest time of the day, in the busiest road? When the hell am I going to go shopping to buy a huge number of clothing and other accessories, food stuffs and all?
When the hell am I going to realise that I would have to leave this country in 2 months? When the hell am I going to realise that I would have to live alone? For a very long time? When the hell am I going to realise that I am going to be missing a lot of people? Again for a very long time?
When the hell am I going to realise that I do not have enough time to finish playing all the games I have? (this one was an afterthought)
As more and more shades of answers turn up in the aimless brain of mine, I seem to have difficulty in keeping up with the times. No No, I am not going to stop blogging. Heavens sakes NO. I just seem to have some problems to overcome with a related activity - blog-hopping.
A couple of months ago, I had access to net 24 hours a day. High speed internet, just 5 minutes of cycling away. A dream. That now seems soo far away. Now, I have to battle my way to the computer, which seems to be occupied by my mom (chatting with dad in Kabul) or with my cowsins (who live nearby) checking their mails, or myself totally involved in playing one game or the other (My desire to blog Vs my passion to play games). And finally, after connecting, all I get is net, ironically at cycle speed, and much more costlier. Which limits my connection timings to the nite-time. And hence, I am forced by the BSNL to become an owl. Definitely, a modern-day burlesque of hell. That is probably a reason, many of you wont see me online @ day times.
I am not all that busy now, too many things happening in my life, to focus clearly on every little detail that rather seems to entwine with me.
One positively good factor - I managed to see Aaitha Ezhuthu. With a gang of cowsins. Next post probably
Thats precisely the feeling I am in now. Nothing could be better.
I am still at this transient stage of life, where the past is still associated with the present, but a wholly different future still beckons me. It seems that I could go to the future either all guns blazing or ride on the back on a mule. All depends on the decisions that I would be taking in the near future from now. And I hope to take the correct ones. And fast.
Enough of mumbo-jumbo.
One extremely good news, for me atleast. I have got my interview preponed (from 6th July) to the 22nd of June, which is like a very optimal time. So I still have a month to get everything ready, even though all the documents are already in my computer, ready to be printed. My shopping spree is going to start tomorrow, and my cooking itenary is being decided to day. And driving, the day after, though I seem to drive the fastest cars much better in NFS Underground or even in GTA Vice City, even in lots of traffic. My driving skills in real life are, I admit with with utter ignominy, are pitiful. I hope to improve in this 2 months.
Hope to meet a few bloggers in real life this week (or this month as the case may be), Laks, Shobhs and if possibly Divya. Lets see how well this goes.
Also will be going to Tirupati next week, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of June, to attend a college friend's Upanayam. Will be going with a huge gang of college friends. That may be my last chance of the Lord of the Hill before I fly away from him. And will also try to climb the hill. Not a difficult task, and I have done that thrice already.
Me still going strong on gaming, somehow that doesnt seem to bore me. And hearing Skoar's openings for game reviewers, me still thinking whether to go or not. I mean, they would be paying me to do what I like most. But I seem to have other responsibilities that will get in this way.
No matter how low you bid the job, there is always an idiot out there willing to do it for less.
The more you cut your price to get business, the more likely you are to go out of business.
The more you try to compete on a price basis the lower your prices will go. Corollary: Your income will follow.
The bigger your yellow pages ad , the more low priced calls from non-repeat customers you will get.
Increasing your ad size increases the percentage of low profit calls you get.
The prize for beating out all of your competitors for the biggest most expensive ad in all of the different yellow pages books is bankruptcy.
The more you advertise that you have 24 hour service, the more security guards and insomniacs will call you in the middle of the night with requests for price quotations.
Advertise as a 24 hour service and you will get angry calls from people who stopped by your shop at four in the morning and you weren't there.
Your best apprentice will quit and open a shop across the street and cut your prices.
The one who is un-trainable will stay with you forever.
This was a nice forward I had got.
You know you're living in 2004 when...
1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.
2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.
3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.
4. You e-mail your mate who works at the desk next to you.
5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends is that they do not have e-mail addresses.
6. When you go home after a long day at work you still answer the phone in a business manner.
7. When you make phone calls from home, you accidentally dial "0" or "9" to get an outside line.
8. You've sat at the same desk for four years and worked for three different companies.
10. You learn about your redundancy on the 11 o'clock news.
11. Your boss doesn't have the ability to do your job.
12. Contractors out number permanent staff and are more likely to get long-service awards.
AND THE REAL CLINCHERS ARE...
13. You read this entire list, and kept nodding and smiling.
14. As you read this list, you think about forwarding it to your "friends".
15. You are too busy to notice there was no No. 9 on this list.
16. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a No.9 on this list.
17. And now you are laughing at yourself! This was another set of good jokes.
A woman gets on a bus with her baby.
The bus driver says: "That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen. Ugh!".
The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: "The driver just insulted me!"
The man says: "You go right up there and tell him off go ahead, I'll hold your monkey for you.
Two weasels are sitting on a bar stool. One starts to insult the other one.
He screams, "I slept with your mother!".
The bar gets quiet as everyone listens to see what the other weasel will do.
The first again yells, "I SLEPT WITH YOUR MOTHER!".
The other says, "Go home dad you're drunk.".
A turtle was walking down an alley in New York when he was mugged by a gang of snails. A police detective came to investigate and asked the turtle if he could explain what happened. The turtle looked at the detective with a confused look on his face and replied "I don't know, it all happened so fast."
A doctor says to his patient, 'I have bad news and worse news'.
'Oh dear, what's the bad news?' asks the patient.
The doctor replies, 'You only have 24 ho urs to live'.
'That's terrible', said the patient. 'How can the news possibly be worse?'
The doctor replies, 'I've been trying to contact you since yesterday'.
A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer.
His friend says: "Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man. "
The man then replies: "Yeah, well, we were married for 35 years."
This woman rushed to see her doctor, looking very much worried and all strung out. She rattles off: "Doctor, take a look at me. When I woke up this morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw my hair all wiry and frazzled up, my skin was all wrinkled and pasty, my eyes were bloodshot and bugging out, and I had this corpse-like look on my face! What's WRONG with me, Doctor?".
The doctor looks her over for a couple of minutes, then calmly says: "Well, I can tell you that there ain't nothing wrong with your eyesight.. .." .
A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?".
The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."
There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?" .
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner and a bottle of wine, they retire for the night, and go to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend .
"Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
"I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes" replies Watson.
"And what do you deduce from that?"
Watson ponders for a minute. "Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the universe. What does it tell you, Holmes?"
Holmes is silent for a moment. "Watson, you idiot!" he says. "Someone has stolen our tent!"
The bus that left the stop just before you got there is your bus.
The amount of time you have to wait for a bus is directly proportional to the inclemency of the weather.
All buses heading in the opposite direction drive off the face of the earth and never return.
The last rush-hour express bus to your neighborhood leaves five minutes before you get off work.
Bus schedules are arranged so your bus will arrive at the transfer point precisely one minute after the connecting bus has left.
Any bus that can be the wrong bus will be the wrong bus. All others are out of service or full.
Ahh. One of my more favorite laws. Any extra additions?
One important decision has been made by me that may or may not have far-reaching consequences in my life. I have postponed my VISA interview date to a very late July 12th from the original value of May 25th. The reasons are many-fold and so are its outcomes. This reason for this sudden, and what may otherwise seem utterly butterly ridiculous decision is solely the result of the bumbling Academic Section of the college.
Background check:
The Academic Section is a kind of department that is responsible for collection of grades for all courses in the institute, give the respective grades to students, issue the grade cards, and other such silly miscellaneous, but nevertheless important stuff.
A degree certificate is necessary before coming for the VISA interview in case of a student visa, and in my case, the B.Tech Degree Certificate. Now since I cannot have that certificate so soon (it is given durign the Convocation Ceremony), I am supposed to take what is called a Provisional Certificate, or if I am not able to furnish that, atleast a Course Completion Certificate which just shows I have completed all my courses.
Now, at present, I am extremely confident that the above-mentioned academic section wont even release the Provisional Certificate before the end of June (that came out of their own mouths) and the Course completion certificate before the end of may. So I cant go to the interview with nothing to prove that I have completed my degree, apart from word of mouth. So thanx to the supreme inefficiency that characterises the bumbling Academic Section (I am extremely morose even to use capital letters to address the Academic Section), I am forced to postpone it to the next available date in Chennai Consulate, which I luckily got on the 12th of July. (Would you believe it, even as I write this, the Consulate appointments are fully booked upto 22nd July - more than 2 months ahead).
I am still trying for earlier dates, between June 15th and July 10th. Will announce when I get it. But my flight, is mostly to be on the 6th of August, so there is enough of a leeway between, and I am confident that I would get a VISA. So that, hopefully, should not be a problem.
At present, I am extremely pissed off at myself, and am hanging in an extremely short thread of civility. Until I get dates between those two above, I guess I will be like this, but I dont want that to affect my blogging spirit.
Burns's Balance If the assumptions are wrong, the conclusions aren't likely to be very good.
Well, sorry for the inordinately long delay before this post. I was stuck up with purely non-academic office work for the past three days. But I will pain you people later with its utterly butterly boring details.
To continue on about my Graphics card (refer 2 posts back), I will talk about 3 games that I have been playing on it.
First one: Max Payne 2: The fall of Max Payne. That is one of the bestest games I have played yet, and that is quite a lot. If you have played Max Payne (the first one), then this is a much better sequel. The Bullet-time mode has been enhanced a lot, with a nice touch added to it. The object detail level has been revamped a lot, and the lighting in the game is so realistic, its like straight out of a movie. The bad thing is that, the game is too short, shorter than the first one, but it occupies a hell of a lot of space, 1.7GB. And the game loading time is also pretty high, but I have been able to play it very smoothly at 800 x 600 resolution, thanx to the card
Second one: Need For Speed - Underground. Another helluva game. Another 1.4 GB, but it is worth every MB it occupies. The graphics is top-notch. I havent been able to go to its full settings, as the game becomes very slow, inspite of the card, but I have seen the screenshots, and it looks too good. But with more than 20 cars, even more tracks, and 4 different modes of gameplay, some amazing catchy background music tracks, and with too-good customizations, its a different class of racing gameAnd I possibly couldnt have played it before.
Third one: Grand Theft Auto - Vice City or GTA - 4. This one is a completely different genre of game.
You come home late from work. You are frustrated, and been reduced to a door-mat. What do you do to make yourself perky?
Hop on into one of the fastest cars in the game, change to some nice music tracks, cruise around the city mad, run over any person you like, have the police chasing you to give the thrill, kill of some bad guys, and some good guys too with ample measure, take the boat for a spin in the sea, drive people into mad terror by being a cabbie, or head to the local club for some *ahem ahem* action. You name it, you can do it.
Call it Role playing. Call it first person. Call it racing. Its got all, baby. And this too is another of the 1.5GB game. But it has got to be one of the most addictive games ever. The negative point is that, it is not very easy to go through the game, after the few initial missions. Even cheats dont help.
Well, I have been trying for a fourth one, called XIII. Its a completely different First person shooter, and comes in 4CD's and occupies one helluva 2.5GB's of HD space. (But of course, nothing can beat Unreal Tournament 2004 which comes in 6 CD's or 1 DVD, and occupies 5.5GB of HD space. No partition in my comp is as big.) Anybody played either of these?
Ok, now leave me alone, I have to have some serious Underground action.
Law of Bureaucracy When a problem goes away, the people working to solve it do not.
Well, now you are looking at the blog of a certified B. Tech. Yeah, thats rite. I am now a fully qualified B.Tech from IIT Madras. I finished my viva with swimming colors. And all that is left is purely non academic official, boring work of going around to all departments and offices to get a no dues sign from them. Too much walking and cycling ahead of me.
I finished my presentation only yesterday nite. And then started preparing for it, amidst playing of NFS Underground. Got up early today morning. More preparation and praying that it would go well.
Hurried to college. Luckily the bus was empty, and that kept my mood up. Reached at 8:30am. My viva was scheduled at 9am and that was the first one for the day. Loaded my presentation into the computer.
At 9:05, I was called it.
My mouth was already dry at that time. Call it nervousness or something.
The panel had 3 profs. One being my guide. Another prof S was easy-going and lenient. The third prof V was very strict. But luckily, I had done 3 courses under her and I banked on that. That luck did play out an important part later.
I started the presentation. Inspite of having a laser pointer in my hand, I forgot to use it till half the presentation. Call it nervousness, again.
The presentation went zippy, as my prof had instructed before.
Then the viva.
Some probing questions regarding the implementation. But I flew threw easily all of them. They did suggest some changes in my report. All said and done, it was a better viva, for what I had expected.
Then I came out. I realised that my mouth was so very dry. I couldnt even swallow my own saliva. Headed to the nearest water container.
Luck, or even temperamence, did play an important part. Prof V was not happy with the next two students, bashing them by saying that they had lifted many sentences from web-pages and all that. Serious discussions going on even as I write.
Anyway, menial drudgery left now. Lets hope the weather keeps cool as I roam under the hot sun now.
Bunuel's Law Overdoing things is harmful in all cases, even when it comes to efficiency.
Well, I finally finished my project report, a hefty 75 pages of that. And I have submitted it to the panel members who are to conduct my Viva tomorrow. And I am still in the middle of making my presentation for that. My viva is the first one tomorrow morning @ 9am - Wish me lots of luck for that. Election results being announced today - or rather the counting is still going on. It seems that the Center will head towards a hung Parliament. (Actually, I so desparately want to hang it). And in the state - TN, it seems that the DMK is going to have a landslide victory.
Have you observed one thing. In Tamil Nadu, every term, the government keeps changing. Its either headed by Dr. K or Mrs. JJ. I mean, it never remains for more than one term. What does this tell of the respective parties - both are completely inept bumbling parties, who are fit for nothing. What I want to say is that,these people are so incompetent that they dont fulfil what they promise (their enmpty headed promises on the manifesto) and hence they are usurped in the next term by the other party.
God, when will they ever learn.
That is why I lost all my faith in voting (as if I had any before.). It is pointless. Its going to be the same blistering barnacles out there who never seem to do their job they were entrusted with.
Anyway, I was not allowed to vote, inspite of having a valid Indian passport, thanx to no extent to those bumbling idiots that they are.
The Bumper To Bumper Theorem Traffic congestion increases in proportion to the length of time the street is supervised by a traffic control officer.
Well,
I seem to have got well, or forgotten in the same well, but that well-ness does ring a bell, though it sounds more like a knell. But, at last, I have gotten well, and hope to stay in the same well as long as I am well.
If you managed to make any sense of it, you will be able to understand what well I am in. Since enough people are pleading about my graphics card, and even I am desparate to post one about it, here comes. It may be split into two parts though, dunno for sure. Lets see how it develops.
The card I bought is a SparkleGeforce FX 5200 graphics card. These are its following features (which I shamelessly lifted off from here.
Powered by NVidia GeForce FX 5200 GPU
128 MB video memory
CineFX engine
128-bit studio-precision color
AGP 8X/4X -2.1GB/s bandwidth to system - my system has only 4X
Core Clock: 250MHz
Memory Clock: 400MHz
Memory Bandwidth: 6.4GB per second
Fill Rate: 1.0 Billion texels per second
Verticals per second: 63 million
Operations per second: 1.03 trillion
0.15 Micron Process Technology
350MHz RAMDACs support 2048x1536 resolution at 75MHz
4 Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline
Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 2.0
New 64-phase Video Scaler
NVidia Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Optimizations and Support
OpenGL 1.4 Optimizations and Support
Well, all that would hgave gone over the head. For me, what interests me is the 128MB memory, 350Mhz RAMDACs, the 4Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline, DirectX 9 optimisations and OpenGL 1.4 Optimisations.
For the layman (or woman), what does that add up to - it provides a lot of graphical processing power to my otherwise choked system.
Just a teaser of what it can do.
On my old system, a PIII 933Mhz, with 384 MB of memory, Quake III Arena (still being used as a benchmarking tool) gave a meager 40-50 fps (frames per second) at 640x480 resoultion and 16 bit color, at the lowest graphical settings. With the addition of the graphics card, at 1024x768 (my highest monitor resolution) and 32 bit color, with all the frills turned on, it gives a playable 40-80 fps.
Another example. Unreal tournament at 640x480, 16 bit color gave 30-70fps without the graphics card and at 800x600, 32 bit color, with all frills turned on, with the graphics card, it gives 40-80 fps. (UT is a much more graphically demanding game than quake 3)
To top it all, it has 128MB of video memory, bringing my total system memory to 512MB.
LOOOOK MAAAAA, ENUUUUFFFF RAMMMM FOR EVERYBODYYYYYY And its price - 3800 bucks. Its truly a Directx9 card for the masses....
Bucy's Law Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
I was feeling very tired and worn out for the past few days.
Yesterday.
Stood up after lying on bed.
Got headrush.
Vision started to darken.
Thoughts became warped as in Max Payne (which I was playing previous nite).
I fainted.
I opened by eyes.
I was sitting on the floor, with multiple ache points on body, wondering What the hell am I doing here.
Went to doctor that evening.
Diagnosis : Viral fever or Malaria (But there were no mosquitoes and I got malaria three years ago).
Treatment : A blood smear for blood test, an injection in the behind (yuck) and medicines, for every 6 hours.
Prognosis : Come tomorrow. (Yesterday's tomorrow -> Today).
Anything you try to fix will take longer and cost more than you thought.
If you fool around with a thing for very long you will screw it up.
Sorry for not being there for a while. Been quite busy lately. If you are very famished, then lets not keep your stomach waiting.
A treatise - Part II
Course II Time : 7:35pm
As I got down from my house, I couldn't help but get paranoid. I became very conscious of the fact that many people were staring at me. I proceeded very fast to the nearest yellow and black autos. And the autodrivers in the half drunk stopor cast a pale shadow from the gloomy orange sodium vapor lamp.
I was not liking this. I wanted this to get over as fast as possible.
The reason behind this - lets go for a bit of history lesson.
In the beginning, there was the hot, molten earth. Then the lava cooled down. Then slowly due to vapor condensation, great oceans formed, where the first life forms evolved....
Oops, I went back too much. I wanted to go back just a few years, not a few eons.
10 years ago.
I liked the three wheeled contraptions. They were zippy, fast and cheap. And fair. And were a very good way to get around the city. Then things changed. And the nature of autos changed. Their original fairness changed into treachery and fleecing. Their zippiness baceme more and more violent, as they started terrorising all the passengers. Then it became really bad. Now, they are the dirtiest lot of people in the world - Chennai automen, that is. And I am not proud of that. Autos are always the last resort for me. It seems that everytime I go in the autos, my BP increases from a steady 120/80 to what I feel to be 200/120. It seems that my blood and emotions have started writhing with anger. My normally cheerful mood goes to the foulest possible. Even haggling with the autos about the price gives me the sweats.
I would have taken the bus today, had it not been the huge cash prize I was carrying. With that much cash, I am a walking time bomb. Anywhere. Anytime.
To the present.
Thankfully, nothing happened today. I reached safe and sound today, without any untoward incidents. At 7:45pm.
Course III Time : 8pm
I confirmed the reservation at the hotel.
I had drilled all the recruits. They had to be punctual. Their ETA was in 15 min. I proceeded to wait.
Time : 8:15 pm.
The troops arrived in slowly, choosing whatever mode of transport they could commander. Final count revealed a total of twenty nine. Too bad, 6 other people missed all the action. (Including Sudhon (who was furious later)).
The first round of ammunition was the clear vegetable soup, which everybody, gunned down very scrumptiously. The second round was the starters, which yours truly pirated a lot - they were very delicious.
The other recruits already blended themselves into the restaurant, by decorating themselves with food. A lot of things happened. Lets just say that we were winning the battle. Almost.
I myself couldnt survive beyond the third round (inspite of my preparation of not eating from 12 noon). All I could manage was a measly ice-cream.
Just Desserts Time : 9:30pm
We finally finished eating. The bill came. It was decent amount. Not one that would make you put the foot in your mouth. It was 6695 bucks. Shared equally, we ended up paying 3.4k. Very fair. And after everybody's thanx - a lot of it: Apparently, amny had not eaten in this place at all before. I left soon, and got dropped by a classmate. (I didnt have to worry about the 1.6k cash I was carrying :) I got myself a Geforce FX 5200 graphics card with 128MB DDR memory. (yeah - no new computer. This was a wiser investent. More about it in the next post.
A treatise
Appetisers Brownian Motion Rule of Bureaucracies It is impossible to distinguish, from a distance, whether the bureaucrats associated with your project are simply sitting on their hands, or frantically trying to cover their asses.
Heisenberg's Addendum to Brownian Bureaucracy If you observe a bureaucrat closely enough to make the distinction above, he will react to your observation by covering his ass.
Starters Having appetised you with those wonderful sayings, let me proceed to the starters.
Remember, in one of last week's post, I had mentioned that I went to a treat. I am referring it in this week's post today. Well, in last week's treat, it was decided that next week, myself and my friend (sandeep) decided that we would give a treat. So to half the people who had come to last week's treat, who would be coming to this week's treat, we told that we would be having a treat next week on the same day of the week as last week's treat. So this week, which is last week's next week, as we promised last week, we gave a treat. Though last week, we had decided that we would give at a place called Residency towers, 2 days before our treat this week, we decided that the number of persons coming to this week's treat was too much and that the prices in Residency towers (which we decided last week) was too steep, so we shifted this week's treat to Residency, another hotel by the same chain as the previosly mentioned one, and the one we went to last week. (thats the last week, I promise ;-) )
If you finished with the starters, I am sure that you would have lost all your hunger and would be looking forward to the week-end.
Main Course If you had stayed with me throughout the starters, (and understood every bit of it), then Congrats, you are one concentrated reader.
Course 1 Time : 7:30pm
Place : My home.
We had invited about 35 people. The going rate at Residency (a large 3 star hotel in T. Nagar) was 230 per person (buffae, of course). And myself and my friend decided to split the bill. Booking was made (Friday nite is always a busy nite at that place.) for 8 pm.
I was getting ready, vaguely putting fight with my mom so that I could go in black T. Shirt and black pants (as Man In Black - thats what I did last week anyway) Finally she forced me to a different T. shirt and I did not object - that T. Shirt was nice.
In preparation for what I was about to eat, I hadn't had anything from lunch (that was at 11:45 am) - not even tea in the evening, so that I could extract the maximum for what I was paying (though it didnt turn out to be so).
The most important fear that nite, was how to carry that huge amount of cash - I did have an account and a credit card, but not enough reserves were there in that account; so that left me with only one choice - to carry hot cash, 50 hundred rupee notes. (Try carrying it, and you will be embarrased by the bulge it would create in pants. Note - it doesnt apply to females - who use handbags). Finally, I came up with a patch-it solution. Carried half the amount in an envelope in one pocket (I was thankful that the pant I was wearing had ramarkably huge pockets) and the other half folded heavily in my purse (that still resulted in a huge bulge - couldnt help it).
With a good mood (as I always am), I set off at 7:35 am, to find the ubiquitous three wheeled menace of Chennai (an Auto-rickshaw for the unacquainted), still clutching on dearly to both my pockets (I am very paranoid wrt that).
Stay on for the conclusion of the Main Course and the just Desserts PS : Didn't I promise, no more weeks after that, and I stuck truly to my word
