Who stole my Sunday?

Its 3:30 in the morning and i am too bored to sleep. A totally uneventful , useless day where i did not do anything at all . Got up in the morning, did some errands for my mom and then sat with the newspaper for about 2 hours , cleaned my bookshelf which was littered with useless stuff. And then slept a lot in the afternoon. Really dont know what i did throughout the evening except that i just went out for a walk once.

What a way to spend a Sunday. Sundays used to be soo much more eventful when i was younger. Sunday programming on television was also something to look forward to. Remeber watching Mahabharata , Ramayana , Chanakya , Tipu Sultan and many such serials as a kid. Towards my teenage years it was the Bournvita Quiz Contest and cartoons. Then the lunch was always something to look forward too as we sit together as a family and have an idylic chat. Evenings used to be full of fun as i either used to go out with my parents to visit some fun family friends or play with my colony friends. As night approached a sense of gloom usually engulfed me as i thought about going to school the next day. I used to hate school on Mondays. So many times i used to act as if i have stomach pain so that i could escape school that day. Worked a few times before my mom was on to it. Many sunday evenings i have also spent watching movies with my family. Those days simply were so much more fun. The day had a special meaning and feeling attached to it.

Nowadays almost everyday is like a Sunday. I used to wake up at a particular time every sunday as a kid so that i could watch my particular serials. There is nothing to wake up for these days . The day used to feel like a well earned holiday. Used to be my favorite day of the week . Now it doesnt matter which day it is tommorow, it could be thursday for all i care since i dont have anything special to do anyways. My mom used to drag me to the market on this day so that i could carry all the heavy stuff. Used to watch her haggle with all the shopkeepers , pick up vegetables and poultry and learnt quite a bit. My reward for coming with her used to be a bar one. Love that chocolate. In Delhi , a sunday during winters meant that i could stay inside the quilt for as long as i want and it is one of the most relaxing and satisfying feleings in the world. To be warm and comfortable .

Damn this Sunday

Some stupid 'Hell' creating stuff off the net

General asshats
Circle I Limbo

Hipsters
Circle II Whirling in a Dark & Stormy Wind

Greens
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow

The Pope
Circle IV Rolling Weights

Militant Vegans
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled

River Styx

Parents who bring squalling brats to R-rated movies
Circle VI Buried for Eternity

River Phlegyas

Republicans
Circle VII Burning Sands

Scientologists
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement

George Bush
Circle IX Frozen in Ice

Design your own hell

Written one after a long time.

Killing Fields

I see blood again and again,
In this world full of pain.
The fabric of morality lays torn asunder,
Hawks of news-gatherers feast on this plunder.

I experience disgust this day and everyday,
From carnality to barbarisation as the world sways.
No relationship thus can be ever consummate,
As destruction is this new world's new fate.

I am blind as i see no reason,
So is this world to the omnipresent treason.
Lies and accusations are our new faith,
The gospel just proclaims the convergence of all possible hate.

I abide my time and await my turn,
Grimacing myself for the scars that the world will burn.
I pray my soul shall never yeild,
And be a part of these mindless killing fields.

Sriharsh Mallela

i love this song

For You

If you're lost and feeling low,
Circumnavigate the globe,
All you have is hope.



And the way you seem to flow
Circumnavigate the globe,
I never seem to lose control,
With you.



Everyone of us is high,
Everyone of us is low,
Everyone of us is here,
How about you?
Your eyes are closed,
Your head held low,
Your eyes are closed.


Everyone of us is high,
Everyone of us is low,
Everyone of us has hope,
For you. (10 times)

I said it

Currently i am reading 'The Inscrutable Americans' by Anurag Mathur. Bought it second hand for 40 bucks. Less amount of guilt involved hear. I have lots of pirated stuff though. The thing is if i do not get all this content in the pirated form , i would never have been able to afford it at all. Like for example, the game- Call of Duty- which i picked up from the streets for 100 bucks. The actual MRP of the game wil be anything above Rs. 1500 and if i blow up my fathers money on this he will certainly throw me out of the house.

I read recently in the papers that the BMC has decided to arrange a raid a day to get rid of the pirated CD's menance. When will they ever learn? It is all futile and plain economics is enough to prove that it is futile. There is a voracious demands for such pirated CD's/DVD's. These days a decent DVD player is available in the market for lees than Rs. 3000. Almost every other home is in possesion of one. But their income levels are not high enough that they can buy CD's at their mrp rate. They certainly aint going let their systems rot now, will they?

Moving on, old habits die hard. I still aint studying leaving it for the lastminute. Got no motivation at all this time and i am in my dreamland most of the day. Wonder if this is going to change in anyway whatsoever in the coming few months.

About my future, i have started having doubts about taking up Account Planning as my specialisation. Over the past few days i have researched a lot online about this subject. Have found loads of sites pertaining to it but not a single one could exlain convincingly what the role and responsibility of an account planner is. What i could decipher is that an Accont Planner sits and tries to analyse the creative work and find connections between the work and the TG and recommend whatever is necessary. Now this role is a very intemediary and subjective one. Boundaries are not properly defined and since this discipline has started only about 30 years back no one seems to know what a planner is actually requied to do. If i do not achieve satisfactory clarity on this front in the next few months then this option will be out of the equation.

My mother has already started contemplating how lonely she would be once i go the hostel. I have spent 22 years with my parents and my sudden absence willl be a large void in their lives. India is one of the few countries in the world where the child stays with his/her parents till an average of , i believe at least 20 years. And the bonding too seems to be greater though i am basing this judgement purely on the picture painted about the western world by the media. Wonder whether i will feel homesick.

Gym Gyan

So i joined a gym. It is going great and all. Within three sessions have lost 2 kilos. The instructors are plain sadists. They just push me from one exercise to the other and for an hour and a half i am exercising almost non stop. But then without any pain i wont be able burn off the layers of fat that i have gathered over the year.

What irritates me though are the posters at this gym. Actually what irritates me are posters in any gym in general. All one sees are posters of muscular guys and a few women flexing every concievable muscle in their body with a big toothy grin. Most of them have impossible bodies sculpted painstakingly by them over a period of many years. Barely 0.1% of the people who go to the gym will ever be able to shape out their body like that . Forget that even the darn instructors are not comparable to the posters. So why exactly do they have these posters around. What does it communicate? To me it says ,' Look here you weener , look at my body , dont salivate or hope. You aint never gonna get the body i have and hence my toothy mocking grin'.

And what the hell is going to the gym about. Presently if one observes the situation in India which has a sizable population of obese people the main motive of going to the gym is to lose weight and not to build up a body. True , there are the occasional bunch whjo go to a gym purely for building up their bodies. at least in the gym i go to i can safely claim that most of them come for weightloss. And what the gym is communicating is that we will make you muscular. Instead why has not any form of gym communication not concentrated on the main aspect of going to the gym. It is not about the body but about the mind. Exercising after a certain point is less about physical effort and more about mental strength. The strenght and the drive required to push oneself towards a certain goal is phenomenal. Very few people manage to do it. So i belive they should be communicating us this aspect. Telling us about how we need to push ourselves mentally. Also show realistic bodies and use indian models.

Another aspect about body building is that i do not consider it to be a sport. Though all the practioners claim about it being a sport but it surely aint. Standing on stage , flexing one's muscles and being judged by a portly politician looking for new recruits to his security team aint exactly a sport. Also by all accounts Body Building is a vain thing to do. In a gym, there are mirrors all over so that one can even watch every little twitch of one's ass in the mirror. totally vain i say. After a good work out one can see people flexing in front of the mirror and checking out their own muscles and maybe show it off to the accidental on looker at the gym.

I am a fucking regular guy

I get extremely irritated and hate it totally when i hear someone or some organisation claim , ' we are different'. How often do we come across some actor/actress pouting in the most artificial manner and proclaiming that their film is really different and unique. Or have read about how a company has a work ethic or approach totally different than others in the same line. Excepting very few hard to find exceptions most of these claims are pure bullshit and artificial to the core.

Take for instance the news channels, everyone of them are the same in delivery and content. Some lack finesse but the core news is simply market driven as it will be but still everyone claims to be different. Why cant one communicate and say , 'Hey , i am your regular news channel , expect your daily dose of mindless stories and breaking news stories about which saree Jayalalitha wore today. We provide you nothing really special, though will try to make the effort wherever or whenever we can'. What is wrong in accepting the reality and for someone to say that this movie that we have made is your regular average triangular love story with decent songs and predictable ending, hope you enjoy the film.

I hate the attempt to differentiate when none exists and the parity is clear for everyone to see. We have so many ads running on this 'its different' funda that at least i have started since quite some time to reject immediately when a brand tries to communicate and simply say its different from its competitor. I just cant listen to that rant.

All products these days are similar in terms of characteristics. Brand Managers try to bring in the differentiation between products by working on the image of the product. But i beleive with so much clutter prelevant if some brand has the guts to say , ' Fuck off , i aint special or exotic .i am as regular as you can expect and will try my best to solve your problem or fulfill your need'. Sprite uses this approach and it has worked for them.

All the real good ads that i have seen till date, simply claim to try their best at solving your problem or fulfilling our need. The communication is simple and clear and they do not bother of differentiating from their competiton much but instead focus more on communicating what they want to the consumers. I am a believe in simple and clear cut communication and dealing with the lowest denominator.

Personal DNA

A very interesting personality site. Gives a personal DNA report which is suprisingly accurate on many counts. Not like some other online personality things hich lists out 5 to 6 obvious observations.

http://www.personaldna.com/

apparently i am a generous director....

Guaranteed timepass for 30 minutes plus i love their presenation of the questionnaire.

I am alive

Inertia is a dangerous state to be in . This blog has been in that state for too long and i am back to revivie. I do not have any reason for not blogging. Shit loads of things have happened this past month and i must admit that all of them have happened for my own good.

Out of the 5 MBA calls that i recieved i managed to convert 4 of them. TAPMI strangely did not even waitlist me even though i did good. But then no regrets at all.. i got into the institute i desired for the past 2 years - MICA.

Persistent hardwork in something you are not really that interested in is always difficult. CAT related studies to a certain extent is interesting but then it really gets on to one's nerves. Also luck plays such a huge factor in this exam that one is really left without any odds to defend. After going through months of preparation. anxiety , planning , anticipation and sheer frustration when suddenly i got the news that i had made it, i felt emptiness. I had no idea how to react.

Now, two weeks hence, things are falling into perspective. There is no better feeling than the feeling of success in a task one has toiled or desired for a very long time. To tell the truth i just managed to apply about 60 % of what i am capable of . But i am still mighty pleased since even this kind of application i rarely achieve.

Our mind is a very funny thing though . Months ago i used to dream that once i get an admit to MICA i would have no other desire in my mind. This aint the case though. I am already thinking about what i will be facing this coming 2 years. I have read and heard from many that getting in is the easy part, surviving in a B-school is the real challenge. 90 students have been selected for the batch of 2006-08 after a long and winding process. The CAT must have made most of them really competitive, it has that effect. To top that there is relative grading, which effectively means that if i get 90/100 in a paper which is good but half the class gets more than that, then i end up with a C grade. So now i am thinking ahead and want to perform well while i am there.

Thinking about it further, this cycle will never stop. I will get placed in hopefully a decent company after 2 years but over there too , the degree wont matter performance will. And so we go on throughout our lives performing to the best we can or at least trying to, in order to fulfil what our heart desires.

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In other news , i am joining a gym from tommorow. Finally will start working off some fat. Will keep a watch over my diet too. Had a wonderful time with Sugu last month and will be meeting her hopefully this June again.

Got another bunch of exams coming up, the final semester exams for my diploma in Financial Management. Lots of mugging up to be done, will have to start soon. This course has not been of much use since the teaching really sucked. However i did pick up a few things here and there and might pick up a few more in the coming two weeks. One thing i realised though, all financial investments in share market are speculative in nature and aint really that different from gambling. All the various models of valuation etc can be tweaked and since everything is in numbers , one can mould it to any form and make anything look good or bad. Also i now am 1billion gazillion % sure that i was never ever meant to be a finance guy. It is plain boring to me.

As an afterthought, i am suddenly reminded of this lady i have been seeing regularly on Churchgate station for the past month. She must be living somewhere on the footpath and wanders about in the station aimlessly. Must be between 60 to 70 years of age. She wears a nightgown, a very old and dirty one. The first time i saw her, her nightgown was partially wet , her hair messy and open and she was crying real hard. She looked extremely helpless and was wailing. Crying as if her heart had been broken into a 100 peices. When i saw her that day i felt completely miserable. This nameless wailing woman was one of the most painful sights i have seen in my whoole life. I really do not understand why this moved me soo much as staying in this city I encounter such scenes of povety and misery on a regular basis. But the very first glimpse of her made me think about this woman having a family, maybe she has a son. And that family , maybe that son has abandoned her. She looked so frail and weak hearted, crying with the innocence of a baby. The whole world passed her by but nobody could hear her cry. It was really strange, not even so much as a glance was spared towards the old woman by all who passed her. I stood there transfixed and felt like crying myself. I wondered if i could reduce her misery to a certain extent. But she just kept walking on the platform , her gown wet with water and her face wet with tears. Like all others around her , I too moved on after some time but that image of her is etched in my mind. Started to think how helpless old people are and hoping i would be able to aptly support my parents. I see her on and off at Churchgate station these days. Thankfully i havent seen her cry again. She wears the same gown that is always a little wet and carries a polythene bag with her. i have not seen her beg nor have i seen her with anybody else. Tried making eye contact with her but she is usually in her own world, must be a troubled world and a mind full of broken dreams.

Somehow her image has managed to personify emotional pain in my mind.

God Bless Her.