I'm in love

yesterday, a friend of mine gifted me an iPod Shuffle. I've seen and tried it before in an apple store, but nothing like owning one...obviously :) its hardly the size of a USB memory (and it can be used like that as well) and looks super cool. when I thought iPod was the best thing, then came the awesome iPod mini and then the Shuffle. just keeps comin huh :) but can't keep buying everything :)

I'm simply in love with this gadget, it rocks :)

my lone crush

boy oh boy I was reminded of my college life crush yesterday by a friend. those were amazing yrs. I had a major crushe during my college life. it happened in the first week itself :) she used to live in the same neighborhood. but it took me a few months to find her home. and that I did by following her dad :) I still remember the confused look on his face when I asked for time, pointing to my watch and saying that it was mal-functioning :)

a few more guys had a crush on the same girl, and they used to ask me some insider info, as I happened to meet her mom once in a temple :) I somehow have a feeling that she too had a crush on me, or why else would she ask me for those electrochem notes when there were 50 more people in my class? and she was in a different class too. some guys would simply pep me up "ava un notes ah mattum kekkala, unnaye kettu irukka" ...a typical yethi vidura dialogue :)
and I even wrote some lines like "vaaymaye vellum" and "sri rama jayam" on the first page, just to impress her. dunno if she got the point :)

and like most of the crushes, mine too got crushed soon. now she is married to an old friend, who used to tease me with this same girl :)

ennada ambi....

was watching some stills of the movie "Anniyan". looks like Vikram is an iyengar boy in that movie. and as expected he was wearing a 'panchagajam' and 'kurtha' with a 'kudumi' (pony tail for males). barring the priests, almost none sports a kudumi these days (even they combine it with sunglasses for a kool look) :) I dunno where the tamil movie industry got this idea about the brahmin community.

the most hilarious ones are --

"thoppanaar" instead of "appa" -- enakku therinjadhu ellam moopanar dhaan :) I haven't heard anyone adressing their father like this :) enga appava naan ippadi koopta oadi poiduvaru :)
all married women wear 'madisaar' and unmarried girls wear 'paavadai dhavani' on all days -- can someone tell me where this happens :) and almost all the time, they'd either be singing, or drawing some 'kolam' in the agrahaaram :)
address someone "ennada ambi" -- this too happens very rarely

and all these will happen in chennai, let alone a place like Sri Rangam :)

shiatsu massages :)

these days I visit a local brookstone store atleast once a week :) yeah just visit, I don't buy anything from them. its their amazing massage chairs that attract me all the time :) these guys are so generous, that they have been putting these for demos since time immemorial :) Oh need I say how comfy I feel after a nice full-back massage, that lasts anywhere btw 20 - 45 mins :) they call it some shiatsu massage, didn't even care to look up what it is...its SO NICE :)

since I'm using it and would never buy it (the price is simply too much), I felt a little indebted to them, so thats why me publicizing here :) :)

hindi prachar sabha

wondering if still people have the same enthu to learn hindi through this organization? back then, when I was in 8th std, lot of us flocked to these classes to learn hindi. and we found it very useful too. its always nice to learn a language like hindi, as it is spoken by many within our country. and thanks to some insane politics by parties like the DMK, many never got a chance to learn it. even these sabhas were vandalised every now and then.

learning hindi wasn't just for communication (that actually never happened, thanks to my grammar :) ), it infact helped us in learning about a totally different culture as well. I had some friends from Bhutan who picked up Hindi by watching all those mindless bollywood flicks :) their hindi was actually good, for colloquial purposes though. doesn't take you beyond an extent.

the dakshin bharat hindi prachar sabha is actually doing a very good job. their syllabus is also excellent, in terms of coverage. some might say that these sabhas are just supressing our tamil language, but in my opinion they are just racists!

the last laugh

so today is the finale of the hit show "Everybody Loves Raymond". as rightly pointed out by everyone, even after 9 yrs, everybody still loves Raymond :) a nice family sitcom with clean humour, thats what ELR was. I'll miss him for sure :) but am sure there will be re-runs for the next 100 yrs :)

but I doubt if ELR can match Seinfeld, in terms of being a classic. Seinfeld was something. as my friend Manoj once mentioned - it has given so much to the pop culture, that none can ever match it.

IIM selection process

does a manager need to be analytically super smart? is it an absolute necessity that he/she has to crunch numbers accurately and probably much faster than even a super-computer? this is what one will tend to beleive if he/she looks at the selection process of the IIMs. recently I learnt that a CAT score of 95 percentile won't take you even near the gates of these prestigious institutions. I think its ridiculous to filter out people just based on an analytical test. I'm not having any reservations against the ones that get more than 98 percentile in this test...I mean they are good. but who knows, there might be people who can't do well on this test but still become a really good manager. I think its unfair to screen them based on the performance on a single test.

there are people who can crack any test, lot of us cannot even compete with them. its like me against a professional assassin...maybe I can shoot accurately, but not like a pro, definitely no.

IIMs are not IITs, then why bother about technical and analytical skills. they should consider the whole application...instead of just screening blindly.

Wal-Mart in India

looks like Wal-Mart might enter our market pretty soon. I'm not really that left, but still I feel that wal-mart would only be a bane for our economy. ours, as I keep repeating, is primarily a manufacturing-dependent economy. if this happens, we could see a huge influx of foreign goods in India. already it is prevalent, and this could entirely wipe out domestic consumer industries. not good at all for our country.

why wal-mart is good for the US? primarily because US has a service oriented economy. there is so much IP (intellectual property), that they can still survive without manufacturing even a small small toothbrush :) ours can never be like that. US economy is more like the famed IBM Corp. they are still a guerilla in the tech industry, but are slowly shedding away their manufacturing components and concentrating more on business consulting. they rely on their patents and IP. I don't think if any Indian company could do that.

hitting the saturation point

well guys I have hit a saturation point and finding it difficult to come out of this :( my daily activities have become so routine that I find it no more interesting. nothing really bad or dangerous but just that I'm finding everything boring. the only thing that I still passionately follow is the NBA playoffs, which also will end in a few weeks.

does this happen with a lot of you guys as well. when we do the same thing every single day, at some point we hit a wall and things seem to just stand still. this happens at the gym too, when the same set of exercises stop producing those expected results. its easier over there, to change the workout sets, but much harder in life.

I think its time to pick up new things :)