The economy talk - Monologue

Much has been talked about the economy of late. In fact, small talk and economy talk have become synonymous. I don’t think about the economy much, but there was a point of time when people kept telling it was overheated; to me it is just over stated. Here is a list of buzz words I kept hearing during these talks and how I comprehend them ..

Globalization – I hate globalization, not because it gave us economic downturn or the pandemic flu but it gave me the job I right now have.

Investment Banks – Well, to me they are like dinosaurs. They were huge and all that, but one fine day a big catastrophe struck and they are extinct now. My friend says it’s all a big con they are just lying low and would come back once the economy is in good shape. Seriously!! The dinosaurs are coming back??

Interest Rates – Lot of people kept telling me RBI is cutting rates and they are going to do it more et cetera. In fact, I heard FED has cut the rates so low that it’s almost free to borrow from them now. And I was thinking to myself, I should add them to 'my best friends' list.

Madoff – They told me he was this white-collar guy a big fraud, now in jail. I really don’t understand this kind of punishment where you bring a guy working in office and put him in jail; it’s like just giving him a bigger cubicle.

Recession- They said the experts were always talking about it and predicting how it would be, but no one was sure until it actually happened. I say, you don’t have to be an expert, in college every one used to talk a lot about it and predict how it would be . . . oh wait, that was not recession.

Wall Street – It seems there was this huge bloodbath on Wall Street and most people caught in it would like to get back to a time when there was no bloodbath – or even Wall Street.

My experiments with culinary delights - Part I

We all, by now, would have stumbled upon the latest buzzword 'gastrosexual'. The word to me sounds more like some kind of infection and a word that would definitely make a prude's jaws drop. Anyhow, on the lines of hetro and metrosexual, this word was coined to recognize the class of males who like to cook. Men have always grown a certain penchant towards cooking and being one (I mean man!) I would like to believe that this has got something to do with the overuse of knife.

If you are just out of college and trying to be independent, self-cooking is an important part of the process or it can be that you are just too damn bored in life. It can also be a good method for cutting cost if you are good at it, or else, take it from me you will end paying for all the burnt marks on the wall. So, all the Investment bankers and Madoff investors and investment bankers invested in Madoff's; don't jump the gun at the word cost cutting and burn your fingers (this time literally!).

Now, my acquaintance with cooking can only be compared to Sarah Palin's familiarity with foreign affairs (not that I see Russia from my kitchen). But the eternal desperate search for killing the 24 hours a day god gave us, if you believe in one, being done by the media or rather all that is done by the media, made them stumble upon this new attempt to make cooking look cool. So, my affair with cookery started after watching one of those chef led shows which made the art of cooking look not just attractive but easy to learn. If I think of it now, that show was more like one of those stupid mountain dew action packed ads without the statutory warning 'Following stunt was performed by experts and should not be imitated without proper guidance'.

So, one fine week I’ve decided to make my debut and an hour before the show on TV, I ran to the nearest shop I can run to, and asked for onions, eggs and all the basic ingredients. The shopkeeper was awe struck when I calculated 20+12+3 faster than his jumbo sized fingers could type on the poor tiny calculator; with a sense of pride, we all usually obtain after outpacing the mathematically challenged shopwalas, I made my way back on time.

I was all prepared and the movie preceding the cook show was nearing its dramatic end, it was one of those mushy poor guy rich girl love types and where the bald daddy writes a blank check asking the, insanely indigent yet heavily built, protagonist to walk out of his, extremely hot and so dumb, daughter’s life. And to everyone’s utter surprise, like defying the laws of gravity, the poor dude always rejects the one bail out that could get him out of all possible troubles (like dowry, heart operation and now a day’s tampered balance sheets).Anyhow, getting back to the show and cooking, which we seem to have digressed from,

…. Hopefully will be continued. .

colbertica

Tonight!!! .. India leaves its footprints on Moon;
Oh boy! Didn’t we get a better place to forget things.
Hi, I am your host and I was born on April 1st the day everyone gets fooled. Twenty two years back, the same day, my dad got a fool.
My name is Satya Uday Kiran V; they say every bullet has a name written on it, I guess mine has to be pretty long.
Welcome to the show!!! ..

little updates

"So, what's the difference??" - tutor guy
"What are your dreams? and what are goals? "
"Is marriage a dream?" as he heard some one from behind say marriage and giggle.
"No, it's a nightmare! "came a quick reply from the crowd that I was a part of. The whole class burst into laughter waking me up from a nice comfy nap. Don't we all love those naps in the last row of an extremely boring lecture by an equally dull dullard.

Not a pleasant feeling to listen to one of those boring business communication lectures, especially the day after a late night show of an incredibly mushy movie which has three good looking damsels to keep one awake. (Extreme pervs often see pun here)
The tutor kept going "okay you at the back, what is the difference?" , pointing towards me.

Now, I was in total consensus with Seinfeld when he said ‘All these super heroes e.t.c are not fantasies for we men, they are options’ or something like that. I always think of myself as a superhero with special powers, my ability is invisibility and not the crappy hollowman kind. It has never happened in my entire life that a professor pointed to me and said ‘hey you! Yes you, tell me the answer for this’, trust me. Again total consensus with Spiderman’s uncle when he said 'with great power comes great responsibility’ or something like that , it has not even once happened in my entire life that I raised my hand in the middle of a class asking for a doubt or something, not even once.
Getting back to the tutor and the lecture, I was more than shocked when he kept pointing to me shouting ‘You! You! You!, what is the difference, give me your opinion’. I felt the same way Peter Benjamin Parker felt in one of those sequels when he lost his powers; he at least got to wear that stupid outfit. Anyhow, it is very difficult to not get noticed when you are in a classroom in the northern part of India where everyone else other than you is dressed up like Salman Khan’s look alike and you are left looking like a big fan of Rajnikant. (no offence to any one, please don't burn my house)
The tutor kept going ‘do you have a dream?’ I nodded back, the kind of nod that wouldn’t reveal a strict yes or no leaving room for ambiguity. But the tutor dude kept repeating the same question obviously looking for a more prolix reply.
Now, I hope every one of you would have seen that typical Bollywood scene where the poor protagonist was so smitten that he starts seeing ‘the damsel’ in every one including his grand pa. Finally, this utterly gross and idiotic scene started making sense to me when I started seeing not just one but all the three damsels from the previous night’s show instead of my tutor asking my ‘Do you? Do you? ‘.
For a moment I felt like going down on my knees and shout: yes I do! Luckily I didn’t, that would have been more embarrassing than what happened last week when I asked the bartender for Jack Daniels on rocks and he bent forward with a frown and whispered 'Are you sure?'

India unplugged ??

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/world/asia/13india.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Article in NYtimes which sums up our politcal & economic state.

vetti times

Two months have passed by and boy it seems like I was caught in a time wrap and got catapulted to an obsolete world. People are talking about new movies kicking out the all time classics from imdb’s top 250 list and here I am trying to get tickets for the only movie that’s running in the only theatre of my village. Never thought a four year old regional movie of a 50 year old protagonist dancing with eighteen year old scantily clad damsels can attract people to theatres even after 4 years (Phew).

A little hope to update myself came from the 24/7 relentless news scrolling from the news channels. And of course the UPA NDA and other acronyms that want to rule my country made it a point not let these people rest

Anyhow the last two months of semi rural life has taught me few things

Those fantasies about village fights you know like the one in sholay, not true.

There is no concept called responding to blowing horn on roads here, best way to get a bovine off road, get down take a stick beat it. Best way to get a person off the road, do the same

When you are in a train get used to the constant squabbles happening around, as a matter of fact they are just friends talking.

When pharmacists tell you to take the blue pill in the morning white pill after lunch and red big one after dinner, he is no way assuming that you are an illiterate he just doesn’t know the name of the pills.

Finally when you tell your post man you can sign, it is for some reason assumed that you are doing so because you cannot fingerprint.

Just some thought

He was getting bored; need to find ways to kill time he thought to himself. Life to him is pretty much restricted to the living room and the bedroom, pretty much restricted to the idiot box and the fathomless World Wide Web. He has reached new lows in life because of boredom; he has seen dubbed Hindi versions of some south Indian movies on TV and now knows exactly why he has not even heard of these things before. He started counting the number of jokes Cryus and his team “the week that wasn’t” (of CNN IBN) was copying from Late show by Letterman and The daily show.

I should be doing something different, something risky, and something people have warned me against He thought to himself

He got up and walked outside the house, took the lift to the parking lot and looked at the mirror inside the elevator to find a rather disheveled appearance. He didn’t go out of his room for a quite a while now and didn’t even bother to look at himself in a mirror, the last time he looked at his face was the profile picture on Facebook some time back
For a second he couldn’t recognize the figure he was looking at in the mirror. Wow, that’s some weight I gained there he said to himself with a grin. Slowly a strange idea struck to his brain, what would happen to this world if the concept mirror was never invented, never existed. How much time would one end up not wasting looking at oneself in the mirror; be at a mall, theatres, elevators, there are mirrors at every part and every stage of the life. People will have to use a camera to look at themselves. His train of useless quixotic thought was interrupted by a kid, who entered the lift in the floor down. The kid had a cricket bat in his hand and made a nonchalant gesture by raising the bat and said

“Hi uncle, we have a 20-20 match at the parking lot today want to come and watch us play?”

He replied in the affirmative but was surprised at the new appellation kids are giving him now a days Uncle? I really need to shave, che there was a time when these kids used to invite me to play he thought.

A few minutes later he was downstairs watching little kids scamper around in a small open space, towards his right he could hear the sound of cars backing in the parking lot. He noticed something strange most of them had patriotic songs like the national song or some other famous ones as their tunes for the reverse gear. Why do so many people prefer these songs? National chauvinism or is it that it catches the attention of everyone minimizing accidents. Some jobless moron somewhere out of tedium would have conducted some bizarre experiment to prove this, need to Google

His useless thought train was once again stopped by the same kid; the kid is now chasing the umpire kid with a bat and there is chaos around the kids about a run out decision the umpire kid gave. Slowly the chaos lead to an abrupt stop of the match and the kid ended up hurting the umpire real bad.

He got up from there walked back to the elevator. There are two 40 yr olds already there waiting. They kept pushing the button in turns till the elevator came down. Why do people do that, almost 90 percent of the people keep pushing the lift button continuously in expectation of it to come down fast. Does it really work that way? No. Do they do that because they have nothing else to do standing there waiting? He was again interrupted by the kid who came running inside the elevator after being chased by the opposite team kids for quite sometime.

“Brats! I will complain to my mom” he screamed at them

Then looked up at the grownups in the elevator and said “It was notout you know, I dived into the crease well in time”

After the small trip outside he walked back to his room not knowing when he will again have the patience and enthusiasm to step out. He switched on the TV and one of the channels said Coming up Next Ramgopal varma ki AAG. Well there is something different, something risky, and something people have warned me against He smiled to himself.

World Environment Day

Well it's that time of the year again people when newspapers, media and everyone talks about going green and polar ice caps melting. The time of the year for optimists to dream about a clean and green planet and the pessimists to make their own version of Noah of Arks in expectations of the great flood to arrive

For me it’s just another reason to update my blog. And if you get a chance please watch this show called Planet Mechanics on National Geographic. Brilliant show and a must watch for all the renewable energy buffs.