This is the first time I’m visiting a foreign country but what’s weird is that I don’t feel like I’m in a foreign place at all. I feel like I feel when I visit any Indian city for the first time. This in spite of the fact that Germans are all around me. Is that weird or normal? Whatever!

I have seen quite a few new things here though. Graffiti being one of them, pin drop silence on the streets being another and most surprising of all, cars stopping for the pedestrians to cross the road. Plus it was a li’l difficult to adjust to the fact that it gets dark only after 9:30 pm.

I know this isn’t a long post but I wrote it using a German keyboard which, I tell you, is not easy to use.

In the meanwhile, here are some new developments:

• The new blog toy, cocomment, is really cool. Its definitely one of the “in” things right now. It allows you to keep track of all the comments you make on others’ blogs and also allow you to share your comments on your blog with help of a blog box, which can be seen on the sidebar of my blog too. You can customize it so suit your template but I haven’t done that because of paucity of time. Its still in beta but then so is Flickr and even Gmail so it’s okay.
• I met Sher-e-Jalandhar last weekend and for some reason he thinks that I am very serious which I don’t think I am. I’m only a little serious but don’t mind being called “brooding types”. He seemed like a fun and easygoing guy. (Sorry SeJ, I don’t do compliments very well. I am far better at criticizing.)
• I also met an old friend from school after 14 years (the one I mentioned in this post). It was fun to meet her after such a long gap. Also, NamesDatabase has now linked to that post and I am getting a lot more hits than usual. But what makes me really happy is when someone they refer checks out some of my other posts too.
• Our company is taking us for an outing this weekend and since the location is top secret and we are all supposed to have loads of fun there, if I don’t blog for next few weeks, it would be safe to assume that I died bcos of all the fun.
• Update: I always wanted to apply for The Amazing Race. But now that they are actually allowing Asian people to apply for an Asian version, I realized I couldn’t apply. Firstly, I don’t have a teammate and secondly, I can’t take a leave of 30-40 days if I get selected. Actually, I don’t have a passport either but it is expected any day now. So looks like I’ll just have to be content with watching TAR.

One of the earliest posts on this blog was about short stories that I read quite some time ago. One of those stories that I really liked was The Man Who Married Himself. I was quite fascinated with it. I think that it’s quite possible that I might do such a thing. Okay, may be not, but you get the point.

Our office has this tradition on Valentine’s Day where anyone can buy a rose; write the name of the person he/she wishes to send it to and put it in a box. At the end of the day, the guy and gal who get the most number of roses are crowned the “King” and “Queen” of hearts.

I ended up with 3 roses, just one less than the guy who was crowned “King”. If only I had sent a rose to myself. I let myself down.

Also, apparently, I remind girls of their younger brothers. Last year, my batch mates told me this in unison and yesterday my new teammate told me the same. I don’t think I told you all but four newbies have joined my team and I’m not the youngest in my team anymore. But even they find me to be the most immature so things aren’t all that bad.

• 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!

There was a time when I didn’t get a single comment, though I always had a regular reader in Akanksha (who never commented on the blog in the beginning but directly told me what she thought of the posts). And I was kind of okay with it. But if a post doesn’t get a single comment now, I would probably go crazy.

An important aspect of commenting is the reply you get from the bloggers. I always check for replies to the comments I make and I’m mostly happy with the way people have replied to my comments till date. There are few bloggers, however, who simply refuse to reply to a comment, which is rude. If they don’t care about comments then they should simply turn comments off. In the past few months, I’ve commented on countless blogs but two bloggers who deserve a mention for being the best comment-repliers (in the order in which I discovered their blogs) are:

Megha & Sayesha

They get an average of 50-60 comments on each post and yet they manage to reply to all the comments in detail and without much delay. And I think their promptness in replying to the comments is one of the many reasons why they get so many comments in the first place. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of their blogs.

I try my best to reply to all the comments here ASAP but if I’ve ever forgotten to reply to your comment or not given it due attention then this is your one chance to let me know.

Speak now, or forever hold your peace.

It was fun and I have decided to maintain a prioritized to-do list from now on.

With the help of one of the questionnaires, I also discovered that I have a “Strong Urgency Mindset”.

I haven’t been able to blog and read blogs in the past few days. Maybe I will manage time better in future and such problems will be reduced.

Update: I forgot to add that one of our HR guys is a major dodo. He laughed himself to tears when a guy was discussing his problems and used the word “delivery” and was later seen smiling when somebody used the word “homogenous”.

There was this girl in my class who didn’t speak to anyone in the class and nobody spoke to her cos she was kind of timid (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Lets call her Gehu. She was a weirdo. The legend had it that in a viva in first year, she didn’t answer a single question and later proudly told everyone that the examiners tried a lot but she didn’t open her mouth.

Now one day, in the third semester, during a very boring class of Electrical Measurements, my boredom mixed with my dumbness (dangerous combination, that) caused me to write this letter:

To you,
I hate you.
-From Me.

Dumb, huh?

And thanks to two of my friends, Sameer and Sonal, it made its way to Gehu.

They thought it would be funny. I had my doubts. And I was right.

She cried later that day in her bus (as reported by our bus news bureau chief, Ritu), got her section changed and complained against all three of us to the director. But we only came to know about it a week later when the three of us were asked to go see the director.

Since we figured out why we had been called, we cornered Gehu first and asked her about it. She said that she was really hurt by the letter. We feigned apology and got her to go with us to see the director.

Fortunately for us, the director found this whole thing as dumb as it was and we almost convinced him that she made a big issue out of it cos she wanted to get her section changed (she had tried to do that once before too with no success). Basically, the three of us said that it was just a joke, that we were passing that note to all our friends and we didn’t mean to hurt anyone. We were a little worried though that Gehu might say something in front of the director but guess what she said. C’mon, take a guess? No? Okay. She said nothing!! So the legend must have been true.

So we got off easily with just a small speech about we shouldn’t do something that might hurt someone. But the most important thing in all this was that even though I wrote the letter, in the list of names that Gehu gave to the director, my name was the last. Yes!!

P.S.: I just realized that this post shows my friends and me in a very bad light but we’re really not that bad, especially not me.