In my last post, I mentioned my life’s rules and just yesterday, I received a forward from a friend titled “Life’s Little Instruction Book”. Now, I don’t know how popular this forward is or if everyone knows about it but I thought I would share some of the points. My comments are in italics.

Points that I agree with and practice:

• Always accept an outstretched hand.
• Be brave. Even if you’re not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference.
• Give people a second chance, but not a third.
• Don’t allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It’s there for your convenience, not the caller’s.
• Think twice before burdening a friend with a secret.
• When someone hugs you, let them be the first to let go. – Of course, otherwise it gets awkward.
• Take charge of your attitude. Don’t let someone else choose it for you. – Absolutely
• Once in a while, take the scenic route. – I do this as often as possible.
• Remember that 80 per cent of the success in any job is based on your ability to deal with people.
• Wave at the children on a school bus.

Points that I don’t agree with or can’t practice:

• Whistle. – I’ve tried, I can’t.
• Avoid sarcastic remarks. – Oh come on, I might as well stop talking altogether.
• Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all that they have. – I think false hope is just not worth it.
• When playing games with children, let them win. – Why? Nobody let me win when I was a kid.
• Be modest. A lot was accomplished before you were born. – Not gonna happen.
• Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them. – Its difficult for some people.

Points that are very interesting or I might want to try:

• Make it a habit to do nice things for people who will never find out.
• Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know. – I think I might be that already.
• Begin each day with some of your favorite music. – I try to.
• Show respect for everyone who works for a living, regardless of how trivial their job.- I know I should but some people themselves make it hard to respect them
• Become someone’s hero. – Who knows, I might already be someone’s hero.

Moving on, I’m sure everyone must have heard those people on TV going all nuts about the new superman movie. Apparently, they would explode into thousand pieces of Kryptonite if they see anyone other than Christopher Reeve playing the title role. I mean, it’s been a long time since then and I didn’t see any of those movies so who cares! I saw Superman Returns last Saturday and it was pretty good. I honestly never expected it to be that good given all the okayish reviews. Brandon Routh is excellent as Superman. There’s James Marsden aka Cyclops in the movie too. Kate Bosworth though is not very good. She looks more like an overworked mother than a fiery journalist. Or maybe I’m too used to watching Teri Hatcher play Lois Lane. But the movie was awesome. It made me take a superhero seriously for the first time and that’s not a joke even though I am laughing and it sounds totally ridiculous.

Few hundred thousand minutes ago, Sayesha wrote a post about her life’s formula and in my comment, I gave a small list of the rules I follow in my life. I still live by those rules. So I thought it would be a good idea to post those on my blog. So here are the rules:

• Do what you feel is right.
• If people are bad to you, be worse to them.
• If people are nice, be nice to them.
• If people are too nice, be rude to them until they r nice or rude to you.
• Once you realize you did something stupid, try apologizing. If it doesn’t work, forget about it.
• Create a new rule when needed.

And I like the way I live my life, so the rules must be working for me.

Moving on, have I ever mentioned how much I love Pandora? It’s simply fantastic. In case you haven’t tried it yet, do so now. It creates a radio station based on your favorite artists and the sound quality is excellent. Lately, I’ve had a chance to listen to lots of new music and my current favorite is “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. Even its video is superb. I’ve recently discovered Frou Frou too. I love their electronic sound. The tracks “Flicks” and “Breathe in” by them are truly addictive. It’s sad that they disbanded. Speaking of music, I woke up today with the song “SOS” by Rihanna stuck in my head. I have no idea why but it was. I tried hard to get it out of my head but failed. As a result, random people on the streets I passed by got a sample of the song cos I kept humming it and every time I hummed the line “Someone help me, Its not healthy”, I thought to myself that this isn’t healthy either.

I was talking to a close college friend on ym yesterday when I told her that it’s very easy for me to hate someone. And it’s true. I’m a man of strong feelings. The smallest of faults in others can make me dislike or even hate them. Then she asked me why it is so and I thought for a little while and said that that’s just who I am. But after thinking a little more, I’ve decided that it’s because finding faults and shortcomings (in mostly others n sometimes myself too) is the very basis of my existence. And that’s what I’m best at (besides my work, of course). And it’s not like that people don’t deserve my hatred. I mean some guy who’s a friend of my colleague used my system last weekend and left a blue pen mark on my monitor. Now, I don’t know the guy but I know that he a freak. I mean who uses a pen to point to a TFT monitor. Now all I can notice on my monitor is the blue dot. And there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t ask for a new monitor cos this one has a small blue dot on it, can I?

It’s been a long time since I wrote my favorite kind of post, the one with an unordered list. So here it is.

• I used to get a lot of spam 2-3 years back when hotmail didn’t have a spam detection engine. Most of these mails claimed that I had pre-approved credit cards and loans waiting for me. Of course, it was a lie. But last week, I got a real mail from Citibank telling me that I had a gold credit card waiting for me and I just had to login to their site, click on a button and it would be delivered to me. Now, I know it’s no big deal and I already have the card they are offering me so I won’t even be taking it but still it felt really good to be “pre-approved”.

• Last weekend, I watched The Omen and Chup Chup Ke. The Omen was supposed to be a horror movie but it wasn’t too scary. Of course, there were scenes when the women in the audience got scared and shouted and I laughed but the movie was just okay. Also, I could clearly see the boom in at least three scenes. Chup Chup Ke was supposed to be a comedy, on the other hand, which it was in the first half but in the second half it became a cheap family melodrama where both the main actresses (Kareena Kapoor and Sushma Reddy) wanted the actor to marry the other one and the actor (Shahid Kapoor) just moved from side to side like a puppet. It was difficult to sit in the theatre for the last 30 minutes of the movie. On the whole, it was an average movie.

• My training is finally over. It feels so good to sit in a cubicle again instead of a training room. And it’s a pretty nice and big cubicle so I like it here.

• I finally saw “Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind” on HBO last Saturday. It was really good. This was the first time Jim Carrey looked like a normal man to me rather than looking like someone whose teeth are too keen on breaking free from his mouth. For some reason, the movie reminded me of “Vanilla Sky”.

• Things are getting pretty ugly on Indian Idol 2. Sonu Nigam is upset that the contestants are giving too much time to publicity events and makeovers rather than singing and he’s right to a large extent. But he has that unique quality that makes him look like a jerk no matter how right he might be. He makes even Anu Malik good.

• You may or may not have seen Indian Idol 2 so let me catch you up on the 9 remaining contestants.

1. Panna Gill: Everyone on the show thinks he looks good which is a lie. He can barely sing but survives bcos apparently teenage girls think he looks good too.
2. Monali Thakur: She looks good, has big eyes. Sings well too. She should have lasted till the final five but is sadly out now.
3. NC Karunya: Great singer. Looks like a case of Abhishek Bachchan-cloning gone awry. Would probably make it to the final three.
4. Ravi Tripathi: The biggest f**ktard ever on the show. Terrible singer. All contestants hate him, as do the judges. Makes a fool of himself every time he is saved (no thanks to the retarded people who vote for him).
5. Sandeep Acharya: Udit Narayan’s rajasthani cousin. Looks okay. Sings fine. But we don’t need another Udit Narayan, do we?
6. Amey Date: Most deserving but slightly dumb. People don’t seem to like him much so he may lose which would be sad.
7. Meenal Jain: Simple yet efficient. Judges love her, people don’t. Why? Because people suck. She is good but not too good. Final four probably if the Indian public somehow remembers that they vote for the best not the worst.
8. Anuj Sharma: He’s just got in when Jolly Das had to quit bcos of chicken pox. Heh. What luck. Looks lost. Don’t know much about him yet except that he has a girlfriend.
9. Antara Mitra: The village belle. She thanks people in Bengali every week and why does she think people should vote for her? Because she is from a small village and if she wins, it would send a message to all girls in small villages. And what exactly would that message be? That as long as you are from a remote village, we will make you win no matter how bad you sing.

• You might have heard about model and actress Kuljeet Randhawa’s suicide. Read about it here. Now, everybody may not have known her but being the big TV buff that I am, I did. In fact, I really liked her. The news of her suicide was all over the news channels yesterday. The spooky thing is that she was a friend of Nafisa Joseph, who committed suicide one and a half year ago. They even acted together in CATS, a bad Hindi version of Charlie’s Angels. Sad!

I haven’t been explicitly asked to do this tag but I’m doing it cos I want to.

The tag requires me to “list five weird things about myself”. I already mentioned two very weird things about me in this post.

Before going any further, I would like to say that I like all the little subtle weirdness in people. I think it contributes towards one’s individuality.

On with the list:

• I can’t use the T9 dictionary for writing text messages and given that I’m a very tech-savvy guy otherwise, this is very weird and almost embarrassing for me. I have to make do with multitap.
• I always fear that my signature at important places like on a bank cheque won’t match the sample signature although that has never really happened. I somehow find my signatures taken at different times very different. (A friend who wanted me to write a cheque today somehow reminded me of this weirdness.)
• I can’t use bad words or shout profanities at anyone. I’ve never in my life used bad language. I occasionally use the f word on this blog but never in person. Anyone who I’ve ever met will vouch for it. I read once somewhere that the inability to curse is a result of lack of self-confidence but I am very confident perhaps over-confident so I don’t think that’s the reason.
• My shoelaces are almost always untied or loose. No matter which shoe or which laces I use, if it’s mine, it’s always like that. I don’t like slip-ons so that’s not an option. Thanks to this, I can walk for miles with long, untied shoelaces without stumbling or falling.
• Can’t think of a fifth point and that too after lecturing freeze about it. Now that’s weird!