Sunday, November 29

Please put sunrise on my schedule!


You have a schedule at every stage in your life. When you are a student you have a schedule. When you grow up and start working you have a schedule. Irrespective of whether you are a housewife, working male, struggling worker or a retired romeo, your life revolves around schedules which you stick to and these schedules changes at every stage in your life.

I was a morning person in my school days. For a few months when I was in Class X, I used to get up before sunrise and go to my building's terrace and watch night turn into day, see the moon go from being the brightest object in the sky to almost invisible in a matter of minutes, see stars for a few minutes even after the sun was out, see the sky change color from black to purple to orange to yellow and so many shades of all of these colors every single morning.

My schedule changed when I joined college where getting up early in the morning was no longer a priority. I started loving the sunsets then. At one point I used to work for a BPO so I used to work all night and sleep all day and had no chance to catch the sun rise or set. After college, I started working and have been working for employers who do not insist on me coming to work at 9 am sharp. That gives me time to sleep past sun rise and work is never done even when the sun has finished its duty.

I was in KL this September (2009) for a quick weekend travel and my return flight was a 730 am flight if I remember. I had a long taxi ride on my way to the airport so had to leave the hotel at about 6 am. I caught the sun rise that day. It was special because it had been a few good months / years since I saw this beautiful sight. My camera was in my bag which was in the cab's hood so I clicked a few pictures from my cell phone camera. The pictures below do not do justice to the beauty of that morning.


I would love to become a morning person but getting up earlier than usual on a working day is becoming too much to ask for given the fact that I do not sleep on time but I am sure one day when things in my life change, my schedule will force me to become a morning person and I will get to catch the most beautiful sights of the night-morning sky again and again and again.

Saturday, November 28

One way street


Some of the most profound thoughts do not make sense when you read them the way they are but add a real life example and it all makes sense. A lot of proverbs do not make any sense at all and you wonder what made someone make a disillusioned statement that does not make any sense at all but then there are instances in your life which are almost the most perfect application of that proverb or that profound thought that never made sense when you read it.

I did not come across anything profound. Nothing depressing happened in my life leave alone anything depressing happening related to any proverb.

I just came across this signboard at a park while walking through this popular tree-top bridge. The bridge had a fixed capacity and was built to not handle weight beyond a certain limit so they put up this signboard to manage the flow of traffic on the bridge.

Think about life and read the same signboard and it still is as applicable as it was on that wobbly tree top bridge. I think it is more applicable to life and how it is so complicated and how there is so little under our control in spite of us trying to control everything that we do. Here is the sign. I will leave it for you to do the deep thinking from here on. If it does not make any sense right now then it will make some sense some day when some thing happens.



Sunday, November 22

Are You Seriously Selling That?


Imagine this: It is a very hot day. You have been running around getting a lot of things done on a weekend. You go to a food court. You are very thirsty. You need something to drink. You go to the most popular stall in the food court. They are selling 'PEE Blender'.

Yes you read it right. It is pee blender. Sounds ugly right? Thats what happens when you grow up thinking in one language and you read something that is written in another language but means something in the language that you grew up thinking in.

Look at the picture below to see what I mean:


For those who don't dig what I mean above,
in Malay, susu = milk
in Hindi, susu = pee

Breakthru solution to an old scientific problem

For years, scientists have been trying to find out what goes on in a human's mind between consumption of cyanide and death. The chemical is so strong that within a few seconds of consumption, the heart stops functioning and the person dies. The premise and the approach of current research is very smart actually. Researchers make the subjects consume cyanide and give them a piece of paper and a pen so that they can write what happens to them after they taste the chemical but because there are just a few seconds, most research has been inconclusive.

I have a solution to this problem. I figured out a way to make these subjects communicate how they feel after cyanide. The method requires a few months of preparation before launch.

Steps:

1. Create a TWITTER account for the subjects
2. Make them post their every single moment from something as major as taking a leak to something as minor as feeling dizzy while out for a jog
3. Convince them that they will go to hell if they don't publish every thought
4. Promise them 7 virgins if they make it to heaven (don't disclose gender at this stage)
5. Create fake twitter accounts, follow these subjects and appreciate their silliest updates

Once you have confirmed a thorough addiction to twitter take the following steps:

1. Take the subjects to the lab
2. Give them their cell phone
3. Remind them of point 4 above
4. Give them cyanide

You will find the result of the test on your twitter timeline if you are following them or on when you search for their twitter handles. Do RT their final tweet and leave @replies with RIP messages. At this stage you might want to disclose the gender of the virgins you promised in step 4 of stage 1 above.

You can follow me on twitter too. My twitter handle is @jitendraba and if you are new just visit twitter.com/jitendraba, login to your twitter account and follow me. I am not planning to consume cyanide anytime soon but I eat good food, watch loads of movies and post reviews of all this and more on twitter.

(Apologies that understanding of the above article requires geek level 3.5/5 and above. This is right back at those who write articles with words used in the 14th century and earlier just to show off that they have no life and went to the library more often.)