You are stuck in traffic. You are wondering who should you kill first. The guy in the red car who just changed his lane the fifth time, the cyclist who believes he is faster than you or the guy on the motorbike who’s been yapping away on his cell phone for the past five minutes and then the light goes green and the hope of getting out of this mess rekindles but not for too long because by the time you reach the white line, the signal turns red again.
Disappointed, you stop, curse your luck and try to relax and then this guy on a motorbike comes from behind, dodging all the cars and auto rickshaws, stops right next to you and then after few secs, starts his bike again and crosses all kinds of lines and happily positions his bike in front of you. No freaking, kidding. Right in front of you. Way ahead of the white line. Making you look like a fool for following the rules.
Now you are sure that you want to kill him but then decide to be the bigger person and let it go. The light turns green and you feel relieved and are ready to go but you can’t. Why? Because the f**ker in front to you can’t start his bike. People behind you are honking, everyone around you is moving and you are sitting helplessly and then when its too much, you start honking too and then what does he do, he looks at you, gives a broad smile and makes a gesture, as if to say. “Well, it’s not my fault. It can happen to anybody, right?”
Then you finally reach home, almost forget about it and the next day morning, the whole thing comes back to you on your way to office and to vent your anger, you write a post about it on your blog.
You may or may not know this but I’m a big TV buff.
I watch at least 4hrs of TV everyday and I basically watch anything and everything. Here’s what I’ve been watching for the past few days.
Pogo is airing Malgudi Days, which is one of my favorite shows ever. I’ve never read the book cos, well, I don’t read but I loved the show when I saw it the first time, loved it when I saw its reruns and love it even now. Incidentally, after I came to Bangalore last year, I got to know that the name “Malgudi” was formed by adding up the names of two of Bangalore’s old neighborhoods, Malleshwaram and Basavangudi. In case you are interested in watching it, it’s on weeknights at 8.30pm.
Toon Disney airs Ducktales, which is another favorite of mine. You have to love Uncle Scrooge, Huey, Dewey and Louie. It’s on weekdays at 8.30am. Watch it.
There’s this new primetime soap called “Ek Ladki Anjaani Si”(which translates into “an unknown (stranger) girl”) on Sony. Now, I don’t watch any of the crappy soaps being aired on various channels but since the channel was promoting the first episode with “Something that has never happened to anyone ever before will happen today to this girl”, I decided I should see what the fuss is all about. Do you want to know what it was about? Well, I’ll tell you anyways.
Here it goes. Brace yourself for it. So the male protagonist a.k.a. our hero, is a successful businessman who once suffered from cancer but was cured through chemotherapy and in the process became sterile but not before the clever doctor had put aside few of his “samples”. Now that he is cured, he wants to have a child but his wife is somehow incompatible with his swimmers so he finds a woman who is compatible with him to get her artificially inseminated with his sample. Now, cut to the female protagonist a.k.a. our heroine, who has just got an admission into New York University, that too with full scholarship. She must go though a routine medical checkup and she ends up going to the only hospital in the town where the afore- mentioned artificially insemination is supposed to happen. Now, there’s a stupid rookie nurse in the hospital who mixes up the two files and yes, you guessed it right, our heroine gets inseminated with our hero’s sample. Fascinating!
Honestly, that’s one of the dumbest soap plots ever.
From mid 2001 right up to mid 2003, I was pretty much addicted to PC gaming.
I played all kinds of games but the genre that I liked the most was RTS (Real time strategy) closely followed by FPS (First Person Shooting) and Racing.
Whenever I got a new game, I used to play the game for days. (Yes, I had to go to college but I bunked it once in a while). Of course, it wasn’t easy to play the whole day without being disturbed. Mom used to call (read “shout at”) me at regular intervals because tea/breakfast/lunch/snacks/dinner/something was ready. Of course, even her shouting couldn’t get me away from the game so most of the times I ended up eating in front of my comp.
The urge of finish a game never let me stop before I finished the whole game. I remember playing Max Payne for two and a half days continuously or playing The Age Of Empires in the whole Christmas vacations, campaigns of which lasted for hours and time seemed to just fly by.
Some games were more difficult than others. Delta Force was impossible to win and it took me quite some time to learn to control a car let alone win a race in Need For Speed 5.
And even sleeping couldn’t keep me away from thinking about games. I often dreamed about how I could kill a particular guy in Quake 3 before he killed me or how to win a “Capture the Flag” in Unreal Tournament.
But then as time passed by, my love for games started fading which was partly due to the fact that new games needed a Pentium 4 machine with 32MB graphics card when I just had a Pentium 3/850Mhz machine with a 16MB graphics card. I was sane enough to not upgrade my system just for playing games although I was quite disheartened when I got to know that I wont be able to play Unreal 2. I bought Age of Mythology to help me get over that.
My penchant for games is not dead yet. I plan on buying a playstation very soon. But this was one phase of my life that I will always cherish.
As you all might remember, I love skyscrapers and skylines. I also frequent a very popular urban centric forum called skyscrapercity.
Now, I started visiting this forum way back in 2003. At that time, there were hardly any Indian forumers but as time passed, more and more Indian forumers joined in and now there’s even an Indian subforum there. So it seems like more Indians are interested in skyscrapers. Also, till some time ago, there was a dearth of good high quality pictures of indian cityscapes and skylines but that seems to be changing too.
The following are few new images of Mumbai (India’s best skyline) taken from the forum. These show some new areas of Mumbai and few old ones from new perspective. Please click the images for a larger, better view. The third picture is the best of the lot, in my opinion.
All images are copyrighted by their respective owners.
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