The Empress Strikes Back!!

Wonderful week, brilliant weekend, and the empress turns 32!
And is back to carpe-ing the diem, every last particle of it!!
The empress still likes Emily Dickinson and her ilk, and mournful poetry, but from the vantage point of merely Enjoying Mournful Poetry, not living it.

What a relief to get back to the sunny side of life again! My place in the sun, as it were (though not the Montgomery Clift kind.. see, I told you I like noir, but I just shan't be living noir anymore!)

La vie est belle, vraiment.

In which the Empress turns to Emily Dickinson

Heart, we will forget him,
You and I, tonight!
You must forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

When you have done pray tell me,
Then I, my thoughts, will dim.
Haste! ‘lest while you’re lagging
I may remember him!


What a cracking good idea.. to just forget! These poets knew what they were talking about!

The process

I wonder what John Lennon would have thought of Assange.
I wonder what he'd have made of Mark Zuckerberg, and the social networking phenomenon!

****************
What do you do when one last dying ember ends up escaping from many years ago, and messes you up like an icy glass splinter, and then the splinter sort of shatters within you. You didn't want that ember coming back into your life, you'd moved on beautifully well, you were ecstatically happy with your life, and even then it managed to sneak right back into you. You still welcomed it, politely, hesitantly at first, and then, wholeheartedly, unabashedly, as if the ember stood for all of destiny, and it was meant to happen precisely that way. And right about that time, without warning, that warm spark, that half-revived ember suddenly morphed into a cold shard of ice, a glass splinter that messed with your mind and your soul and your heart, and reduced you to writing dumb meaningless prose about dying embers and frozen splinters.

What do you do? You just end up looking immensely stupid with egg on your face, and you lose sight of the good things about life, the things that were (and will be) precious to you, before this stray, rogue ember decided to shake things up and play around with you, just like that.

What do you do? You end up introspecting, thinking about what's really important to you. You know that integrity and respect is something you'd never give up, no matter what, and you're actually glad your faith in yourself is reaffirmed.
You also end up counting your (many) blessings: your almost charmed life, your family and friends with their staunch, untiring support while constantly reaffirming that the path you chose was the correct one, your work, your belief system, your unwavering spiritual faith.

And you even know you'll find it in your heart to forgive the ember, eventually.

And that's when you start going back to the beautiful business of living, and loving life. You start falling in love with the sea and the sun and the stars all over again, you notice all the beauty around you, and you know you'll always find peace when you choose to look for it.


***************

Oh wait! I was supposed to write about Lennon and Assange, and Nixon and Hoover and Palin and Liu Xiaobo and Bahadur Shah Zafar and modern day imperialists and double-standards!
Heh, maybe another time!

Tout de meme...

This anti-social-networking empress finally succumbed to this particular meme floating around..couldn't resist revisiting the Beatles! (Plus I had to do *something* to help me stay awake for the Spain-Portugal match!)

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. You can't use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Repost as "my life according to (band name)"


Pick Your Artist
The Beatles (but of course!)

Are you a male or female:
Girl

Describe yourself:
Here comes the sun

How do you feel:
I Feel Fine

Describe where you currently live:
Glass Onion

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
Across the Universe

Your favorite form of transportation:
Yellow Submarine (or Flying....can't make up my mind!)

Your best friend is:
I Me Mine

You and your best friends are:
Here, there and everywhere.

What's the weather like:
Rain

What's your favorite time?
Yesterday

If your life was a tv show, what would it be called:
Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (Or, A day in the life...if it's a reality show.)

What is life to you?
Magical Mystery Tour

Your last relationship:
Think for yourself.

Your fear:
Taxman (haha, kidding. Maybe... "If I fell.")

What is the best advice you have to give:
Can't buy me love.

Thought for the Day:
Come together

How I would like to die:
I'll follow the sun.

My soul's present condition:
Lucy in the sky with diamonds

My motto:
Let it be.

Rafaaaaaaaaaaah!!! The new king!

Wheeee!!! The amazing young Majorcan does it AGAIN!!! Olympic Gold!!!!!!!!
Hot on the heels of the French Open and Wimbledon victories! Absolute dominance on three different surfaces - clay, grass and the hard courts..AND he takes over as the new World No. 1 tomorrow.
What a magnificent year it's been for him!
Am absolutely beside myself with joy, yeeeehaaaah!
Vamos, Rafa!!! :) God bless you!!

Turkish delight

I'm back! From a whirlwind trip to Istanbul, Kayseri, Cappadocia, Pamukkale, Hierapolis, Ephesus, Selcuk, Kusadasi, and Izmir.

I'm still quite overwhelmed, so it'll be a while before I can actually get down to writing about the trip coherently.

Oh, and Nadal won the Monte Carlo Open! Hoorayyyy! For the fourth consecutive time!

The Empress is very pleased indeed.

Nitpicking

A few of my pet peeves, more to follow soon!

1. Using "anyways" instead of "anyway".

2. The phrase "My bad".
It sounds so terribly incomplete somehow, without a follow-up noun to the phrase.
I'm rather surprised to discover that Shakespeare used it too, apparently:

"our love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?"

3. Incorrect use of archaic English.

4. Incorrect use of French.(Or Spanish, or Italian, or Japanese, for that matter.)
I see this in a lot of shop/restaurant signs, blogs etc. I met a Frenchman
recently, and he said he was bemused to see boards blithely peppered with "la" and "le" and even " l' ", without thought for whether the noun following the pronoun was actually feminine, masculine or starting with a vowel.

5. People who've learnt British English (and spellings) throughout school suddenly switching
to American English. Yes, even those who're still in India.

6. SMS-speak. (shudder.)

7. People using "loose" when they mean "lose".

8. Corporate-speak . ("on the same page", "paradigm shift", "revert back")

9. Nouns turned into verbs. ("He lunched at noon.", "Loan me a fiver.")

10. Incorrect use of apostrophes. (It's, its, its')

All in a dahl's work..

And then we got this Roald Dahl fixation, what a lovely name to pun about with!!
A sample from those mad days:

--Roald dahl's uncle once threw him into the river. And said, mama ka maal, dariya mein dahl. And when he came out covered out in black mud, his uncle said, dahl mein kuch kala hai!

--Did he throw him into the dahl lake by any chance?

--And what did his mom call him?
Dahling.

--Weren't his kids called that? The little dahlings!
--Them too! And his aunt was Aunt Dahlia!

--If Roald was a Spanish tennis player, would he be called Nadahl?

--I love dilly dahllying in office too! Dahl tried to call his aunt once, but the line was busy, so he
redahled and redahled, finally panicked and sent the dahlta force to look for her!

--And they dahlt him rather a blow when they couldn't find his aunt either. Finally he hired a sleuth who found that she was carrying on a dahliance with the maharaja of gopal in new dahli!

--Har de har! On learning this, Dahl was hopping mad. He gathered anatole and rushed to new dahli and found dahlia, and let out a yodahl of joy. The three caught the next flight to dahlas, but by then anatole had already picked up how to use dahlda in cooking!

--And what did they watch on the return flight?
For a few dahlers more!

--(Aside: Say, if Roald was your brother, you'd call him Dahl-da no?)

How dahlighted we were to have met each other!

knockturnal smses doing their back-and-forthing..

Stumbled upon a few surviving messages that preceded the Arthurford days, should probably put this up on the other blog, but I'm feeling much too lazy! Here they are, in no particular order:

Why didn't the biscuit crumble when I dropped it?
Coz it was one hell of a tough cookie!!

What would you get if you crossed a beet, a gangster and a horse?
Red Riding Hood!

When we were doing the Romans:
What would you call a musically inclined Roman actor?
Robert de Nero!
And yes, he used to play the fiddle!!

What would you call a Bollywood actor in Italy?
Roman Irani!

What would you call an Italian sailor?
A row-man!

What would you call an italian flea?
A Roman-tic!
If the Italian flea acted smart, his girlfriend would properly tick him off!

Prefect: Hahaha!! Awesome! Looks like our Roman saga isn't over yet!!
Dent: Of course it isn't over senorita! You know as well as I do that rome was not built in a day!

Doesn't petrificus totallus sound like a roman prefect?

Dent: In the old days, the romans used to grab their ladies... they lived by the
laws of Caeser!!
Prefect: They really carpe'd everything eh? They veni vidi vici'd the ladies hey?
Dent: Heh heh, forgive my choice of words, but they were more likely to have vidi vici veni'd them :-(.

Why is an elephant so wrinkled?
Just you try and iron one!

An elephant really needs to be ironed.. it's a problem.. Ivory and vory
about it!

Prefect: Well, it IS a gargantuan and difficult tusk, vell vorth vorrying about!
Dent: I, with thy graceful permission, add one adjective. It is also a mammoth tusk!

And then there were the Potter puns, the ones that didn't make it to the other blog:
What did the daily phophet say when bathilda bagshot got killed?
We're hag-rid!

Harry married the woman of his dreams. To him, she was genie weasley.
Nymphadora didn't want to be known by that name, hence at the end of the book,
she went Tinkerty Tonk!
You're on fire! You've got a bill-a-trix up your sleeve!

How did bill propose to fleur?
He just popped the usual ques- Veela marry me? :)

Why did dumbledore give the deluminator specifically to Ron Weasley?
Coz he knew he was the one who would ron away.

Rita Skeeter got her awesome anumagus abilities from her mom - she was a Ma Skeeter!
Mind you, a Ma Skeeter that bites, as opposed to the french one that goes "One for all and all
for one!" :)

Once ron and his wife were robbed. She lost all hermione!
Hehe that was really cute too! They were goblin all hermione, so sad for them na! In one fell stroke, all their silver came to Knut.

Bertie Bott a bit of butter.....
But it turned out to be a pumpkin pasty!

Would he be from Flourish and Botts?
Heh probably.. he bott it there, but in his flourri.. he picked up the wrong package!

Fred put George innto flour.
He was very flourish!

By George!! Percy put his older brother into cocoa, he made Charlie Brown.

Regulus put his brother down the chimney. He became sirius lee black :)
On second thoughts, after the chimney treatment, he could have even become the dark lord!!
And thus the riddle of how he changed his name to the dark lord is finally solved! :)

If Mrs Weasley was into metal, would she be called mollybdenum?

-Goodness! You deserve the O-scar for the best puns in foreign category :)
If you overdo it, you'll be oscar wild!
-There are more wild authors around than you can shake a speare at!
It be-wild-ers you, doesn't it?
-Indeed it does, gives me a lot of tenn(y)son!

You get the rowling trophy for best puns!
Ooh just for that, I give it right back to you! Wow lotsa prizes today - Rowling trophies and O-scars! We're on a rowl!!

I hate this mug world! We get mugged too :) We could fly at top speed, by just going 'broom!'
hehe indeed! And we quid ditch irregular buses and clicking conductors too, then!

Sigh! And if I ever go Accio broom in this muggle world, al I'd be likely to get is a tissue.
Yes, they'd either think you're mad, or you got a cold. Accio!!
Indeed.. that's what I meant! The sneeze :)) Speaking of which, Nadal's knees are very different from
Nadal's sneeze, no?

One of the blacks left the dark lord's services. He was irregulus :)
Grin grin! And he was condemned to recite irregular verbs in french for the rest of his life!


Did Charles Babbage ever manage to create a chip of the old block?
Fab! Only halfway perhaps.. so the whole thing was a major chip on his shoulder he carried for for the rest of his life.

How did the flintstones make ends meet?
The whole family chipped in!

--Ever seen some escalators and elevators in malls or airports?
We call 'em Schindler's Lift.
--Oh lovely!! Otis difficult to take rides in elevators in malls, they're so crowded. :(
--Hee, otis lovely! you lifter of spirits!! You're being o-tease, aren't you?
--Say, would a bartender be called a "lifter of spirits"?

--What would you call a plane that had a lot of passengers waking up after a looong journey?
--Umm, rip van winger maybe? :)
--No, a flight of stirs!

Missed Nadal

Crumbs! Couldn't go to watch the Chennai Open after all.
Fever. Cold. Beaucoup de travaille. More fever and cold.

And Nadal lost.

Sigh. What a way to start the year!

Saawari-yawwwn!

And so the media blitzkrieg reached its screaming pinnacle over the Diwali weekend.
We saw the whole circus unfold over the last few months, the two big banners striving to out-do each other in every way, the stars of both films appearing on TV shows left, right and centre, news channels eating out of their hands for savvy sound-bytes and more.

So the day came when I popped off to watch Saawariya, what with all the positive buzz over its dreamy sets, the pair of likeable young stars, the formidable Sanjay Leela Bhansali with his penchant for intense, passionate cinema, the backdrop of a classic Dostoyevsky short story and a decent music score.Oh yes, the movie seemed promising alright!

And what of the movie itself?
Well, considering that my review started off on that note, it could only mean bad news ahead.
Hence we start with delectable shots of a Venice/St Petersburg-like Old Town, rather reminiscent of Moulin Rouge incidentally, panning onward to Rani Mukherjee, desperately trying to do the role of a golden-hearted prostitute yet again (and fervently wishing she was doing a song-and-dance number with SRK instead, I bet!)
And then we have the Young Man himself, a little larger than life, cavorting with the gang of prostitutes and making them smile and all that.. the jaadu ki jhappi thing happening full-on.

And aeons and many sugary dialogues and yawns from the audience later, the young lady finally makes her appearance.
I guess that was the first sign.
The original story has this painfully shy and serious young man, who happens to help her when she's being aggressively pursued by an unsavoury character, and then they become friends, and he inevitably falls in love with her, knowing full well that she's already spoken for. And it's all about him, the depth of his feelings, the lengths he goes to help the girl get a note across to her lover, his loneliness.
That's a powerful story, just has raw, believable emotion. But here, our young man is portrayed as an extrovert, a likeable do-gooder, a romantic character so "cute", it takes away the pathos and probably just makes audiences wonder why the girl doesn't get hitched to him. Or makes you wonder why he's running after her when he could just remain happy-go-lucky and move on and find other people. Or makes you wonder why you're still in the theatre watching it, when YOU could move on :-).
So amidst all the blue-green haze of dreamy song sequences and Bollywood-y costumes and rowing boats through canals and singing in the snow, and playing football with women of ill repute, we lose track of his loneliness, his shyness, the fact that he's a friendless stranger in a strange town.
And then on, the story is quite, quite pointless, considering that Bhansali botched up the characterization of the main protagonist.
There's far too much dwelling on the female protagonist, the lovely Sonam Kapoor is made to giggle and cry with a frequency that approaches alarming proportions. There's far too much dwelling on the expendable Rani Mukherjee character, really, it's ridiculous to give a narrator so much footage, it distracts one from the main story.
Salman Khan as the mysterious lover with kohl-lined eyes is a little awkward, but passable, he doesn't hog the limelight like the over-the-top Mukherjee does. The crabby landlady character played by the feisty Zohra Sehgal is decent though, the one shining point in the rambling narrative.

This is one movie I'd have so loved to root for, with all its impeccable credentials and promise. It would have been interesting to watch Ranbir Kapoor play the serious, brooding introvert living his life for those few moments of bliss, instead of a cutesy, cloyingly sweet, larger-than-life character.
It should have ended on a wistful, poignant note, it should have been a real tribute to Dostoyevsky.
Instead, it probably has the Russian master turning in his grave, and the audience wishing it had stayed peacefully indoors for its post-Diwali siesta.

Rafa in India!

Hooorayyyyy!!!
Rafa's confirmed his participation in the Chennai Open, Jan 2008!
I hope he doesn't pull out with injuries or something, considering his knee has been giving him some trouble ever since the weeks preceding the US Open.

Now the empress needs to pull out all stops and do whatever it takes to get tickets to the event.

With the number of Rafa bulletins I post on this blog, maybe I should listen to the irrepressible Arthur Dent and rename this space to La maison de Nadal or something, heh.

In the meantime, a few gleeful war-whoops in the hope that Rafa does, indeed, vamos to India, wheeeeeee!!!!!

Of travails and the aftermath

It's been one of those testing times again.
Slaved it out day and night at work, managed to get it done before the deadline came whooshing in, and now I feel the after-effects of it all.
Strangely listless and worn-out, with an ever-increasing desire to go and fling something
sharp at the blundering gargoyle who calls himself my boss.

Some characters are so warped! The four or five of us involved in this assignment have been slogging it out and burning the midnight oil and sacrificing weekends, and my immediate boss (who's about as senior as the other four people I worked with) has been cooling his heels and not participating an inch, when infact, HIS superiors have been highly active.
And then I get a mail from him sometime in the middle of our mountain of work, asking me to shift to a different floor!
That's right, bang in the midst of an important chunk of work, what with the deadline hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles.

And now, he kicks up a big fuss over my not having shifted yet, without even asking if we'd met the deadline or if there had been any challenges along the way. Dunderheaded coconut!!! Bumbling baboon! Bashi bazouk!! (Grateful thanks to Captain Haddock for such satisfying sobriquets.)
How do people like him get to be where they are?

So I had a pow-wow with the HR lady today, and I went to the extent of telling her that I thought my boss was extremely thick-headed, had a bad memory, was inefficient and disinterested!
I suppose I can get mighty blunt when I want to, especially when I know I've nothing to lose, what with the job scene being so positive and all.
I've been meaning to take a break from work, in any case, travel around a bit, and get back to a new job after a month of rejuvenation.
It will be fun to do something like that, troop in to work after a quick vacation, throw my resignation at the hippogriff's face, and just take off, like a free bird... a phoenix soaring into the skies, without a care in the world and a song in her heart.

Yes. That's just what I shall do. Experience rainbows and deep greens, waterfalls and azure seas, craggy mountains and mossy riverbanks, for they await.

Nadal's knee...

Feeling really bad over Nadal's injury, I was so looking forward to another fabulous semi-final showdown featuring Federer/Nadal/Djokovic/Davydenko at the US Open. Sniff.

Here's to the gritty champion, for having managed to eke out a victory in the first round despite that excrutiatingly painful knee injury.

Here's the full story.

Rafa rules!

Just Pottering around...

I've just GOT to share this conversation I had with a friend recently..he is absolutely brilliant at jeu de mots, carries them off with such 'pun'ache!
It was lovely to run into someone else in this vast universe who is as helplessly addicted to punning as I am...(May our tribe increase!)
And so, fellow potterers, without further ado, here's the transcript of that whacky conversation:

http://dhatteriki.blogspot.com/2007/08/deathly-hellos.html

While we're on tennis..

Came across this gem recently:

Q: Why is a tennis game a noisy game?
A; Because each player raises a racket.

La Sharapova would like that.

In other news, Novak Djokovic wins the Montreal Masters! Quite a feat, that, defeating the World No. 3, No. 2 and No. 1, on the way to victory. Tennis has been absolutely delectable this year, now if only STAR or someone else would come up with an exclusive tennis channel.
But no, I guess that sort of star treatment is only reserved for cricket, eh?

Vamos, Rafa-aaah!

Yes! It's tennis season again!
The muscular man from Mallorca is in fine form, at the Masters in Montreal.
Looking forward to yet another epic showdown between Nadal and Federer, in the run-up to the US Open later this month.
Now I just hope Star Sports/TEN Sports/ESPN air the matches properly, instead of obsessing over cricket, as they normally do. Hmph.

Language woes

My new firm seems to take its Indian-ness rather too seriously! While I love Indian languages (and all languages in general), this whole closed-clan, "us-them" syndrome is beginning to annoy me like the dickens. It's bad enough when we're party to it at social occasions, but now I realize it has crept into the boardroom as well.

This must have been around for ages, but I was lucky to have escaped it all these years, at my previous workplace.

Here, I've been shocked to note that no-one thinks twice before starting off in their own languages even during business meetings and technical discussions. They just don't seem to care that there are participants who are completely out of the loop just because they don't speak the same regional language. This also seems to subtly reinforce the whole partisan attitude that most of us suffer from.
There's so much hypocrisy involved here; on the one hand, they like to brand themselves as multi-cultural, global organizations with an Indian core, on the other hand, they do not seem to possess that united Indian core, when they start off in their personal languages.
I even noticed this amongst some of the top executives, at business meetings with international clients!
Of course, it's not a purely Indian problem.. of course we know that the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, French, Polish, Russian and many other countries do it too. BUT the key difference is that every Frenchman knows French, every Russian knows Russian, and so on, but in India, every Indian doesn't know Kannada, or Marathi or whatever.
There's a reason why we have an official language, even if it's colonial and non-Indian.
And in any case, the single biggest factor for India being the IT hub and all of that is Indian proficiency in English, there's no getting away from that.
So on the one hand, we tout ourselves as global people with excellent English, and at the same time, we don't bother to conform to it at our own meetings and discussions.

I really wonder why there's so much clannishness really? Does it arise out of a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity somehow?
Are we so happy being big fish in small ponds, that we'd rather exclude everyone who'd bring in enough diversity to transform that pond into an ocean?
Are we so insecure that we need to resort to such small-minded techniques to maintain our exclusivity or superiority, sacrificing basic etiquette on the altar of a warped sense of unity?

I'm truly proud of our diverse culture and our languages, and I'm really glad that there are enough people left in this country to care about their roots and their own particular cultures, so that our rich heritage doesn't die out.
But I wish we'd also be open-minded enough about other cultures, undertand the concept of India as a nation (no North-South divide, no regional biases), and develop a sense of inclusion - especially on the professional front.

And I wouldn't have to smile vaguely or tune out of workplace conversations ever again.

an old gem

From Calvin & Hobbes...

"There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want."

Just how I felt when my notice period/vacation abruptly ended and I had to go join
the new place, sigh!
The transition from the blissful state of inertia of rest to inertia of motion can be (and is) pretty painful! Especially if one arrives at the new place when it's a buzzing bee-hive of frenetic activity..almost took me back to my old start-up days.
But these first few days have been good.. let's see what the new year brings!

On that note, gentle reader, here's wishing you a happy, fulfilling and healthy new year :-).

can't resist posting this...

Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
A. To get to the other side.

Q. Why did ______ cross right back??
A. Coz he was a double-crossing chicken!


Aaah, nothin' like a weeeeee bit of hiss-n-spit at times ;o)