The Chic Life : Episode II - Me Loves This Game

Well not very much, but I do like the game (it should be sport actually) a lot. For those people still in the dark, "I love this game" is the tag line of NBA. They also use this ultra cool quote of Ralph Waldo Emerson in their ads: "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail".

For the 100th time, I miss life in India a lot; but there are some compensations America has to offer. Like, for the 101th time, ballroom and ice skating. A close third, fourth, fifth and sixth are NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA celebrating American football, ice hockey, baseball and basketball respectively.

Well even if you are not much of a sports fan, once the playoffs begin, the temptation becomes too hard to resist. I tuned into ESPN to watch the first few minutes of the Suns vs Lakers' sixth playoff game. It was a must win for the Suns or else they are out of the league. Well there were six seconds and needed three points to tie or go home. You guessed it Tim Thomas shot a three pointer.

They won the next game to come back from a 3-2 lag, to beat the lakers to the Western conference semi finals. Now they have the honor of being the first NBA team that I am a fan of. Not a mean achievement considering, when it comes to me, I am all! And Steve Nash, the two time MVP of NBA, becomes the first God representing basketball. He joins the likes of Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Roger Fedrer etc. in my personal and customized religion, which is an off-shoot of Hinduism.

That inspired me and the rest of the Chicago holiday was shooting baskets. My uncle has this mini basketball hoop installed in his garage. Thats good, but there are no ppl around; now how do I play? An idea struck. Me vs. me! I keep shooting, if I get three-in in a row, the good-me get a point, if I get three-out in a row, the bad-me gets a point. Like I said when it comes to me, its all about me! So me and me played some six games. Good-me won all of them, though two of them were pretty close 10-9, the rest were no contest.

It is a mile stone in my mini basket ball career. Phew! That's the silliest thing you have ever heard? Yeah me too. The moment when my in-probability goes higher than 50%. Hoping to repeat this tremendous success with the regular basketball also. Now that we are speaking in probabilese, the chances of my reaching that milestone are a modest 10%! Lets see if the game loves Me. :-)

The Chic Life: Episode I - In Love, It's ok to Fall

Well it is one of those childish titles. All I mean to do is blog about my four to five days in Chicago. There are only a couple of things I will write about . This is the first one; the second will be about basketball.

I went Ice skating. Well I came to Chicago promising myself that I will go to ice skating every other day. It was not a promise well kept. I had my limitations, transportation, transportation and transportation being the three major ones. It was over come, I just had to cycle myself across eight kms of suburban Chicago to reach the skating center. It was a good warm up exercise. I went in what are called public skating hours. I had to cycle back too, obviously.

This was my second time in the rink. The first time I went to a rink was in Atlanta, a much warmer (less icier) city on a Friday night, where as now it is in Chicago, where there are rinks every five miles. In that rink there were more than a hundred people here I was all alone. It was a wonderful feeling, standing alone on a big hockey field on flimsy skates, it was a white unspoiled world out there for me to leave my footprints on err.. skate marks on :-) Yeah, nothing comparable to leaving my finger prints on the Stanley cup.

I soon started to miss inspiration, I mean people. In Atlanta that is on my first date with skating, it was very inspiring to see all the people out there and it was very easy for me to step right into to the middle of the field and skate on for the next 10 feet after which I would fall.
By then I was in love, and in love, it is ok to fall. I saw her in the winter Olympics, it was love at first site. After a while, my inspiration was back, there was this small three year old girl who joined me on the rink, it was so nice to have someone smile to you, we were like two kids on a secret adventure. That made the rest a smooth sailing err.. skating.

Here are my tips for twenty three year olds comparing themselves to girls twenty years younger to themselves on skating rinks. The two things in ice skating (as you do not have much time to play it safe) are don't be afraid of a fall and don't be ashamed when you fall. After all what counts is after three hours on ice, now I can skate Mr. 'It-is-so-embarrassing-little-kids-can-and-we-can-not' can not. Apart from learning to skate, you will also develop a very good learner's attitude which I was taught gives you a lot of money in the long run. I made quite some money myself that way.

After sometime, I thought I saw a thin figure move smoothly across in a glass window, the size of a TV. 'Don't tell me there is another rink beyond that door there'. Another figure moves. I go over to the door (walking on blades is worse than walking in the proverbial 'tight shoes' trust me). Yup there it was another rink! Boy these Americans have a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure. Two rinks side by side ?

In the other rink were two couples moving at the speed of light (that is relative to mine, as einstine said everything is relative you know). They were moving so fast that their dresses were waving in the air. It is the next level. It is grad school for a freshman like me. Before you start envying them and all, they fall! Trust me they do. As I mentioned in a previous blog of mine, everybody falls, winners are who can rise faster. But they fall attempting things much more difficult, pushing the limits of what they can do, given two blades and ice.

If you are not falling, it only means you are not trying hard enough.

The death of Average Joe

When Joe ceases to be Average.
He ceases to be himself.

The suspense is over. Average Joe is dead! Wait! Is he really dead or is he just laying dormant to strike back with vengance. No! That is too scary a thought to contemplate the possibility of. He better be gone for good. This is not an obituary! It is more like an opposite to an obituary. Yes, given the life of Average Joe, the things he did or rather he did not, his life story is rather a silent autopsy of a terrorist of the intellectual domain.

Before the death there was the man. Or was it the spirit? The spirit of the Average Joe lingering around, waiting to jump on the body he would come to reside in, when its actual owner makes a few bad decisions. Like every spirit, the Average Joe died a slow death, typical of a spirit. But there was this smile frozen on his face. The smile of a teenager on a tropical beach full of babes.

On a typical day Average Joe woke up at 9am. Logically all the days in the life of Average Joe are typical. The attibute of staying typical no matter what happens, is what renders Joe Average. He hates to be late to office, this is one of the many things he hates about his office, not to mention his hatred for the office itself. His hatred for being late makes him want to wake up at 6am, but his hatred for office makes him want to wake up at 10am. The latter with all its several components being stronger, Average Joe wakes up at 9am for the office that starts at 8am. He reaches office around 10:30am; only to wonder why he went there in the first place. There is the obvious financial interest and there is nothing else. His presence like his absense is never felt.

On the way to his office, he walks across a newly laid lawn after alighting the bus. Then walks past a sun-bathing area by the pool side, to cross a deserted road and climb a hillock to reach his cubicle whose inhabited-or-not status baffles the best detectives of the world.

In all our previous discussions, we were skipping a very important and un-intuitive aspect of Average Joe's personality. By his very nature of existence, Average Joe is a contradiction (hence like all contradictions, his demise is only a matter of time). The anamoly rendering him self-contradictory is his nature to make his life less Average. It is this property that kicks Average Joe out of his cubicle onto the deserted road across the new lawn and beyond; in the lame excuse of lunch. It must be noted that in this entire process, he passes by the pool side twice in a couple of hours. This performance only increases when he does it again to get back to his office after lunch; however long his lunch might take and how much ever unwanted he might be at his office.

After lunch in the world beyond, Average Joe pulls himself up to one of those couches in the student centre. The ones that are laid in leather with a view for a flat screen telvision. Both of these luxury features are above the Average Joe standards. He is not the secretary of any association, not even the Average Joes Anonymous, since such a thing does not exist; these guys are too average to start a thing like that. Noone misses him across the length and breath of the planet. So he goes into a marathon ciesta on the luxury couch. Wakes up late in the evening and gets back to office along the poolside route, picks up his back-pack and leaves for the swimming pool.

All this ended. On this day Average Joe woke up at 6am, travelled sixty kilometers in five connecting busses and five connecting trains. This is when the illness struck, so much work within five hours is lethal to even the strongest members of the Average Joe community. After the journey, he went and had a lunch in the cafeteria. And this not being an Average day, Joe skipped the slumber on the couch, a luxury he hates to miss; but a faint hope that someone in the office has been missing him owing to his absence the entire morning hurries him.

He walks across the lawn and the pool side. Hark! the blow is struck. This Average Joe is not your Average Average-Joe. Average Average-Joes do not get blogged about. This chappie is a special Average Joe, he has his own mysterious admirer or watcher. On this day as he was walking by the pool-side, he saw her! He saw her seeing him intensely; Average Joe's life which has truned Average a couple of months ago has ceased to be Average any longer! You do not call a day in a Dull Jack's life Dull when he sees a very beautiful woman giving him the looks. Dull Jack is Average Joe's cousin, he has been rendered dull unable to endure Joe's Averageness among other things.

Average Joe instantly entered a trance and an instant later, the building atop the hillock that is his office. The question still hung in the air, "why am I here?". Only that this time it was in the foreground while the background was a trance. The rest of the day was so, things were changing in the foreground while the background remained the same, like the blue sky, only that they were the frozen blue eyes of a woman rather than the sky.

This trance was ON when Average Joe's manager (as if he needed one) asked him what his plans for the summer and beyond were? "I am quitting at the end of the month!" replied Average Joe with resolve. "Ok then I need to get you some work for the next three weeks" replied his manager. It was as if "we can not send this guy away without getting any work out of him at all!" The consequence: two senior ladies in the office approached Average Joe with a proposal for a project that could take three weeks.

There is no choice, Average Joe has to work from tomorrow, his days are over, it is true this time. Being the third stroke in a day, Average Joe could no longer take it. He died slowly while the words of the two mangers-with-a-proposal were dancing in the foreground. The letters were too small, too dim for such a bright background that held him.

There was this smile on his face. There were these words at the tip of his toungue "Oh sure, it will be done" as he died. His funeral will be on the 28th of April at a local Chinese restraunt. 'May peace be with Joe' a weak Dull Jack would say on that day.

The way we love

I have promised in a couple of posts ago that I will be blogging on a couple of things. Like any movie-director worth his salt, me the aspiring movie-maker is keeping my promises in the increasing order of the interest it can generate in the audience, well readers, ok reader, ok ok (what the heck lets face it) me, the only reader.

Now I thought I will post on the way we love changes over the years. This thought like all the good ones, struck me while I was on the road waiting for the walk signal. There is this beautiful girl in my college and she just crossed the road from the opposite side and walked past me. After I do not know how many years, I had what can be loosely called 'butterflies in the stomach'. You know the way love used to be in the teens. For the purists, lets call it infatuation. The 'I-felt-the-smell-of-the-gutter-and-had-a-deja-vu-of-the-days -I-lived-in-an-apartment-by-a-gutter' experience passed; and I ended up promising people I would blog about that. I would not have kept this particular promise, but some important developments gave this post a kick in the butt.

I was in love among others with this particular girl in Bangalore. Apologies for using the word love very loosely, at the end of the post you would be screaming at your innocent monitor, no that is not love that is just a crush, get over your infatuation and grow up pally. You could rather spare your monitor the trouble until we communication engineers make telepathy official. As I was telling, she is getting married and the usual stuff, I knew this all along but the time has neared it seems. Like how poverty-in-the-world stays dormant at the back of our mind and hurts us only when we are uncouthly reminded of it by a documentary, I also felt sad when reminded of the up coming marriage by a friend. I felt bad for a really long time, the time in which an average satellite communications carrier signal would have oscillated roughly two billion times (let me do the math for you it is half a second).

Well now what is wrong with me? I am supposed to be totally upset, drink some vodka or something and do some stupid things. Here I am hale and hearty watching sitcoms, eating bananas, sleeping for 12hrs a day, solving Bessel equations and what not. You may say well then it is not 'pure love', it only 10% love, 50% infatuation, 25% crush, 30% admiration, 40% youth messing around, 30% attention I was getting, 90% nothing better to do. And guys if anyone is starting an association or a cult or a mailing list or even an orkut group that has members claiming to believe in soul-mates, pure-love, holy-crap etc. Count me out.

Its like saying only one cloud can pour rain on one person. Why today, I got drenched by a Persian cloud I saw in the swimming pool (boy it hurts when a girl, especially a beautiful and thin one does twice the amount of swimming you can), and saw her being very very courteous with the gym door to a fellow student with a load. She is at Tech and wears glasses, which means she is slightly geek, which is a turn-on btw. She is extremely beautiful, she can dance (at the next Swing Dance party, I know one more person I am going to ask - that will make it three - not to worry an average night can accommodate up to 20). It is impossible not to love such a person after you get to know them better.

Err now what am I trying to drive at? There was a butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of love, then there was this-woman-has-an-awesome-attitude kind of love, then there was this we-think -alike kind of love, then there was this we-need-not-talk-our-eyes-communicate kind of love, then there was this her-life-must-be-having-a-great-time-being-her-life kind of love, then there was she-knows-me-so-much kind of love, then we are back to the simpler she-dances-so-well-and-swims-so-well kind of love.

Get wet it's not going to rain for ever.
It's ok to miss, it is going to rain again.

Vanity Stall

I thought I will write a small post on good things that happen in my life. Trust me, though for the most part of it my blog sounds cynical, I have what most people would call a very successful life. However, remeber that most people are wrong most of the times about things that matter the most to you.

I had this interview for a summer internship today. It was telephonic, within two hours of the interview, I was made an offer. I think by now I am damn good at these interviews. It is one of those moments when that old raka with his love for coding and analytical stuff momentarily comes out with his friend the business savvy and confident raka to win things that give the present 'sick-of-it-all' raka a confusing time!

It feels a bit good to know that you are being wanted. For a second there, I felt like Mishti Srivatsava. It is this girl from college who used to have a long following, who used to win them all without doing a thing except being herself (I guess, was not one of those guys in college so no authority on that). But atleast I be myself, its a lot easier that way.
Now, Did someone say vanity is a sin?