Tag Archives: Palakkad

This is not a tag, and I’m not an ignoramus

Humor, Just Rambling, Life etc., , , ,

For those of you who still are fooling around, this blog is still alive. The quiescent melancholy may make it seem otherwise, rendering it almost worthless, perhaps even depressing to those who love my blog (That would be just me, I guess!), but it is breathing nonetheless. And it will stay alive. But the only way I see to get my mojo back, is to hunt down whoever is running the new-age idiot boxes called Facebook and Twitter and kick their ass into oblivion. FB and Twitter have essentially killed the little skill I had in writing and confined me to one-liners and wordplays. To top it all, I tend to go overboard with wordplay that I make the world pay!

The safe (and usual) way when one can’t think about anything to blog, is to dust off some old tag and take it up with some utterly useless facts. A generally futile attempt at a comeback, it at least gives a signal that the blog is not abandoned. For example, “25 things I have done which made me look like an idiot” or “What am I doing right now”. I always wished to say “I’m giving a flying fart” to the latter one. It is fun to see disgusted looks in the faces of people. I get it.. but that’s indeed what I’ll be doing because if I don’t reply to that tag, that means I don’t give a flying fart about the tag.

Anyway, getting back to tagging, I feel it is the most unimaginative form of blogging. I’ve done it several times. That was because I was not being real. To quote a certain buji (Short for “Buddhi Jeevi” or intellectual(duh!) ) from NITC, I was playing around with equations in the realm of complex numbers.

So I am not going to take up a tag here. I won’t, until I start behaving like an imbecile and go against my words. So let me think about what I can write here…

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing!

I can think of nothing! It is a well known fact that I’m a literary ignoramus (Some people even say I’m just an ignoramus, literary or not, but that is debatable!). I have forgotten almost all the 3500 tough words in English from Barron’s which I mugged for my GRE. Hmm.. wait. I just figured that I remember “imbecile” and “ignoramus”, as is evident from the last couple of sentences.

So, since I can’t think of anything else, I’ll say something about what is going on in my life. It is boring, and it stinks, because I’m in deep shit right now. I don’t have a job (Heyy! Wait a minute! It is not because I’m an ignoramus. It is because the economy is fucked up!), I don’t have a life.. I don’t know what is happening to me.

What I have are an amazing family, and some amazing friends, that I forget all my woes. Little nuggets which don’t seemingly do anything useful – the incessant rain in Kerala… my mom trying to run when she passes by a nagging neighbor’s house… my dad trying to outsmart my mom during their morning walk… my brother’s silly complaints about his life in Bangalore… his switch from Telugu to Mandarin… my uncle annoying me and my aunt by showing the big sign in “The Hyatt Place” which is black or white depending of the time of the day, every single time we pass by that road… teaching my cousin how to make dal, when I myself don’t know how… gossips about V6… coming up with new nicknames for V6… gossips about me… some people saying they will commit suicide if a deserving guy like me don’t get a job… missing 1729D, Poker, Bamboo Garden, Pan-fried Paneer, Sammy’s Tap and Grill, and inane discussions with V6, the technically challenged girl (TCG) and the Green Dutch.

These little nothings in fact do much more than the somethings. What is life without real people in it, right? People who never fail to bring a smile to your face. Many of my friends too are going through tough phases in their life. Hope is all that is keeping us alive. The hope that good things will happen to good people eventually. That, and being there for each other!

C’est La Vie

Life etc., Trouble Trouble, ,

I got a topic to blog about (Finally, after more than a month!)
And quite obviously, it is about another round of troubles. For some reason, I often find myself in trouble through the most bizarre ways.

It all started when I went to HDFC Bank to pay the fee for a US Visa Interview (VI). I filled up my name as it should have been (and I thought it was, until 5 seconds later!) in the passport. But the snake eyes of the clerk, who matched it with my passport, found out that I had written my name wrong. According to my passport, I had no Given Name. My entire name was my surname. So I was wrong about my name all along. He told me that if I don’t fill up my name as in passport, there will be a problem in my VI. It was all weird since I have once traveled to USA with this passport, and by giving my name as it should have been. Evidently enough, my B1 visa had my name correct. The Given Name field indeed was Deepak here. It was funny that nobody had noticed that till now. I failed to notice the discrepancy for a whole 9 years.
The clerk suggested that I write my name like in passport in all matters henceforth. I didn’t think so. I didn’t want strangers to call me Mr. Deepak Ranganathan, and my friends to call me “” (I don’t know how to pronounce a nullity of characters)

I told him I’m not paying the fee. He asked me the quintessential question of modern day bankers, “Why Sir?”

Like in
Telephone caller: Hello sir, we are offering an excellent personal loan for you.
Me: Not interested
Caller: Why Sir?

“I’d rather change my name in the passport before scheduling the VI”, I replied.

So I was here in Palakkad, for a vacation of 10 days, one of my mission objectives being the change I have to make in my passport. The lesser objective was to be a couch potato at home, which would have succeeded, if not for the constant power cuts which made sure that I moved around so that I didn’t sweat.

On Tuesday, I set off on my crusade to the passport office – a grueling journey of 3 hours in shaky buses with little padding on the seats and not enough room for your legs. It was close to 10am by the time I reached there. The queue was already a gargantuan slithering python. Slowly it moved until there were about 10 people ahead of me. It was 1pm. Closing time already. We pleaded and cried to the lady at the counter. It was just a matter of 12 more people. She was ruthless when she asked us to come back the next day. After having so many trysts with trouble, I should have seen this coming. I start to wonder if a little optimism is a dangerous thing. It seems like that to me. Murphy’s law is a fundamental principle around which the world revolves.

The next day, I caught the 5am bus, so that I will be in the forefront in the queue. Luckily enough, I was about 20th (!) in the queue at 8 am. The counter opened at 9am, I filed my application by about 10, and I was told I could collect my passport back at 3.30pm. I had to kill time till then. ( Wandering aimlessly in Malappuram was better than a bus journey to and fro) I had my breakfast, then went to an autowallah and asked him to take me to any cinema where a good movie was running. Unfortunately (again!), there was only one where a morning show was there. The movie was “Malabar Wedding”. I hadn’t even heard of it until then. As my luck would always have it, the movie was a bore, except for a few scenes which were humorous. There were like 10 people in the entire theater.

It was about 2pm now. I went back and waited in the passport office. By 4, I was back in the return bus. Later that day, I couldn’t sleep on my back, nor could I stand up. My buttocks hurt because of 12 hours of journey in the last two days. My feet hurt because of hours of standing in the queue. But, as a consolation, I got my passport corrected.

I’m not frustrated by the whole incident. I think I have found an equilibrium with the whole trouble-seeking phenomena. Nowadays, I just blog about the trouble I faced, with an air of a connoisseur carelessly using French terms to philosophize. Sigh! That’s life!

Right is back

Life etc.,

I am partially back in action. A successful surgery at Hosmat and I am back in Palakkad now, to take rest. But being the internet buff that I am, I couldn’t ignore the call of my PC and the internet. So here I am, typing with one and a half hands, a quarter of a bone less and 13 stitches in my inner elbow.

I had quite some revelations about my conditions as well as about some of my friends through the course of this recent development. First of all, this was not a cyst and was some other “benign lesion”. It was nevertheless harmless, because, well, it was benign. The doctors just removed the head of my radius bone instead of grafting a bone from somewhere else. That spared me another cut in my body. Anyway, I had my surgery on Friday, hand was on cast for one day, I was discharged on Saturday evening and a couple of the nurses were pretty.

I was feeling a little underweight because of the piece of bone which was removed, but it was quickly compensated by the weight of the minuscule facial hair which sprang up in a matter of 3 days. After discharge, I came back to Palakkad, supposedly to take rest, but I’m taking everything but rest here. That includes taking pills, taking occasional punches from my brother for bullying him and taking food with my left hand. I have become adept at eating with left hand of late. Guess it is only a matter of time before I become ambidextrous.

I got bored easily, watching the idiot box, so I decided to clear my backlog with mails and Google Reader. But I was flabbergasted when I saw the number of unread posts in my Google Reader. It was a tad less than 100 in 5 days. Now I have to work hard to read all those. Plus I have a pending tag.

Another important thing that I found out was who really cared about me. I found out that some people who I thought were friends, were not my friends, after all. Honestly, all that would have taken to show some sign of concern, was a phone call. I’m not whining here. I’m just thankful that there was one good thing about my condition – I could separate the wheat from the chaff.