Looking at this list closely, I found there were few which didn’t apply to me. Hence I am snipping few and listing out what I think are relevant to me, or at least those that I feel are universally true. Maybe you can do the same and see if you reach closer to being a human being.

01. You can’t change other people, and it’s rude to try – That’s a tough thing to learn in life, and so is trying to change yourself, but the other I feel is little more achievable.

02. It is a hundred times more difficult to burn calories than to refrain from consuming them in the first place – Got to agree to that.

03. If you’re talking to someone you don’t know well, you may be talking to someone who knows way more about whatever you’re talking about than you do – As they say, if you shut your mouth you’re worried people might think you’re an idiot; you open it, and you confirm it!

04. The cheapest and most expensive models are usually both bad deals – Bad deals, yes!

05. Everyone likes somebody who gets to the point quickly – except when Shakespeare was talking!

06. Bad moods will come and go your whole life, and trying to force them away makes them run deeper and lost longer – I always thought, and still think the other way round; if you’re in a bad mood, it’s your job to make it better.

07. Children are remarkably honest creatures until we teach them not to be – Yup!

08. Yelling always makes things worse – Yup yup!

09. Whenever you’re worried about what others will think of you, you’re really just worried about what you’ll think of you – I do worry about what others are thinking about me, but I try to see if their criticisms can bring about anything positive in me.

10. Every problem you have is your responsibility, regardless of who caused it – Hmmm… not easy, but it does have a point.

11. You never have to deal with more than one moment at a time – Easy to remember, difficult to practice.

12. If you never doubt your beliefs, then you’re wrong a lot – never gave it a thought!

13. Managing one’s wants is the most powerful skill a person can learn – you bet it is!!! Indeed the most difficult thing!

14. Nobody has it all figured out – knew that, but then we won’t have anyone to look up to!

15. Cynicism is far too easy to be useful – oh yeah!?

16. Every passing face on the street represents a story every bit as compelling and complicated as yours – Yes to that, which also brings me to one of my favorite methods of passing time during travel. But more on that maybe next time.

17. Whenever you hate something, it hates you back: people, situation and inanimate objects alike – difficult to digest, but perhaps equally true.

18. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s works alone can teach you everything you need to know about living with grace and happiness – man this guy’s writings are indeed awesome; his quotes aswesomer!

19. Anger reveals weakness of character, violence even more so – but suppressing anger also doesn’t help much.

20. Humans cannot destroy the planet, but we can destroy it’s capacity to keep us alive. And we are – It has begun.

21. Those who complain the most, accomplish the least.

22. Putting something off makes it instantly harder and scarier – so true again! Something I do  often and at great expense!

23. Credit card debt devours souls – I have two and know what it means! God indeed save America!

24. Most of what we see is only what we think about what we see – Definitely true and people really do need to understand this! Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear!

25. A person who is not afraid to present a candid version of themselves to the world is as rare as diamonds – Diamonds are not that rare!

26. The most common addiction in the world is the draw of comfort. It wrecks dreams and breaks people – Yup

27. If what you’re doing feels perfectly safe, there is probably a better course of action – dunno about that!

28. The greatest innovation in the history of humankind is language – I agree!

29. Blame is the favorite pastime of those who dislike responsibility – this needs to be adopted even in our personal life!

30. Everyone you meet is better than you at something – the difference I guess is knowing what the other person is good at!

31. Proof is nothing but a collection of opinions that match your own – except mathematical proofs; yeah they can fill pages!

32. Self-examination is the only path out of misery – also another way into!?

33. If you aren’t happy single, you won’t be happy in a relationship – I have to nod here as well!

34. Even if it costs no money, nothing is free if it takes time – all of us need to absorb that into our minds!

35. Emotions exist to make us strongly biased towards or against something. This hinders as often as it helps – align it with your brain!

36. Addiction is a much greater problem in society than it’s made out to be. It’s present in every person in various forms, but usually we call it something else – like what!?

37. “Gut feeling” is not just a euphemism. Tension in the abdomen speaks volumes about how you truly feel about something, beyond all arguments and rationales – yes, we need to give a bit greater attention to our instincts!

38. Posture and dress change profoundly how you feel about yourself and how others feel about you, like it or not – unfortunately yes indeed; although the posture speaks more than the dress.

39. Everyone thinks they’re an above average driver – indeed, I’m a better driver than….

40. The urge to punish others has much more to do with venting frustration than correcting behavior – hmmm… it is!

41. By default, people think far too much – yeah, ask me!!!

42. There is nothing worse than having no friends – scary thought, scarier imagination!

43. To write a person off as worthless is an act of great violence – and violently vicious and voracious violation of volition!

44. Try as we might to be otherwise, we are all hypocrites – I have to hang my head in shame!

45. Kids will usually understand what you mean if you keep it to one or two short sentences – Bet this is difficult to prove unless tried.

46. Stuff that’s on sale usually has an annoying side.

47. Casual swearing makes people sound dumb  – but it seems cool first!

48. Words are immensely powerful. One cruel remark can wound someone for life – even sword wounds heal, but wounds of memory never!

49. It’s easy to make someone’s day just by being uncommonly pleasant to them – you need to be a romantic to believe in it though!

50. Most of what children learn from their parents isn’t taught on purpose – yes man, we gotto be doubly and triply careful.

51. Problems, when they arise, are rarely as painful as the experience of fearing them – just like our belief in friends, that they will come and help us is much stronger than their real ability to help us.

52. Nothing – ever – happens exactly like you pictured it – I was always afraid of it, so nothing really new !

53. There are  not enough women in positions of power. the world has suffered from this deficit for a long time – you can’t say they’re soft, huh! I know few who aren’t!

54. When you break a promise to yourself, you feel terrible. When you make a habit of it, you begin to hate yourself – and it becomes harder to look at yourself in the mirror.

55. You can’t hide a bad mood from people who know you well, but you can always be polite – but please don’t take it out on them, they’re the only ones who might be patient enough to listen to you!

56. Anyone can be calmed in an instant by looking at the ocean or the stars – both of which aren’t always in ready view, so you gotto find something for yourself mate!

57. Breaking new ground only takes a small amount more effort than you’re used to giving – I need to test this out

58. Life is a solo trip, but you’ll have lots of visitors. Some of them are long-term, most aren’t – I find it rather a depressing thought, but yes, we can’t keep carrying others and their memories along with us; both the good and bad ones.

59. One of the best things you can do for your kids is take them on road trips – sounds fun indeed!

60. The fewer possessions you have, the more they do for you – the more you have, the more you crave!

61. Einstein was more wiser than he was intelligent, and he was a genius – yes he was, but what can we learn from that?

62. When you’re sick of your own life, that’s a good time to pick up a book – I would be completing volumes by now!

63. Wishing things were different is a great way to torture yourself – and even bigger torture is learning how not to do it!

64. The ability to be happy is nothing other than the ability to come to terms with how things change – but should we be accepting all changes!?!?

65. Killing time is an atrocity. It’s priceless, and it never grows back – Would that include surfing on the net in the hope of finding an article like this?

This entire exercise gives good food for thought (and a little pain to the fingers as well! )

Many a time we are part of something beautiful, marvelous and wonderful that we create or help create. But over a period of time, sometimes, things get rusted, relations sour and instead of the heroes we were, and hoped to continue, we become the villains; black hats of our own stories. The tragedy of it is we become even more attached to our creation! What started as love, becomes obsession and we tend to lose focus on the true objective; and ironically we do ultimately become villains.

There are numerous examples throughout history to this. Ricky Ponting is on the verge of becoming another.

Evil that men do lives after them

When I heard few songs, I was truly blown off. Here is a masterpiece. The background of it is he sang it just in the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis. It was just amazing listening to him sing!!!

– x – x – x –

Lyrics for this version of the video song “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall”

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, that roared out a warnin’
I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
I heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
I heard the sounds of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

And who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
And who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded in hatred
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

And what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
And what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll hit for the depths of the deepest dark forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
And the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
And the executioner’s face is always well hidden
And hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

– x – x – x –

There is such deep meaning in this!!!

In almost every suspenseful movie, or at least those which pretend to be so, whenever there are accidental discoveries I always wonder how that piece of paper or bit of information or thing found it’s way into the hands of the only person who HAD to read it!? It includes few genuinely mysterious, and few that cross the boundaries of realism. I can give ready examples of Telugu cinemas, like NTR finding the job for a couple in the classic “Missamma” or the more ludicrous example of a piece of message in bottle circumnavigating the southern tip of India to travel from Kerala to Vizag beach in the not-such-a-great movie, (whose name I cannot recollect right now) starring Nagarjuna, a couple of years ago. In Hindi I recollect the marvelously made Byomkesh Bhakshi as an example for the first and for the second, the horrendously bad movie “Ajnabee” where the despondent hero laments that nothing happens by ittefaaq, i.e., by happenstance, only to immediately chance across something that helps him unravel the entire case.

But the one thing these did do was pique my interest in searching for such. I especially revel in reading scraps of newspaper. The ones you find on the road, the piece of paper in which the thelawala wraps your snacks in, those spread on vegetable shelves. Although I admit I did not find any ground breaking news, let alone either a job or the key to some unsolved mystery, it did contain pieces of interesting information, at least to catch my attention and entertain me for few minutes.

Still I keep searching, in the hope one day I will catch my epiphany.

However, there is one serious downside of them. Never use them on wall clocks. Else, you wouldn’t know when their capacities have run down and you will end up happily gazing at the clock showing 6 in the morning while the bus you desperately need to catch to reach your office half an hour late, has just left the bus stop.

P.S.: Never use two batteries recharged at the same time on two clocks. Unless you want to know that nature and science do have a wicked sense of humor!!!

Doesn’t each breath you take curse you, lash out at you that you hit and left someone without helping them? Doesn’t each morsel of food you take scream at the pain of feeding a body void of any soul, and feel ashamed for keeping you alive? Doesn’t your image in the mirror spit on you, puke at the mere sight of the face and body that had no sense of any quality attributable to any living organism that can think for itself? Did you ever look at dogs on roads lick the wounds of fellow creatures, even though they themselves were never responsible for them? Don’t your hands crawl to strangle the neck that bears the mind that thought of nothing before speeding on? Didn’t the scene of hitting them haunt your dreams, replaying a million times? Doesn’t the memory of those moments flash before you every second of your waking moments, to slap them hard in front of your eyes everywhere you go? Don’t your lips refuse to mouth words of obvious deceit and lies you must have told to cover up the dent? Or are the people you confessed equally callous, patting you proudly for not being caught responsible for the misdeed?

What did you do after going home that day? Wash off your body with acid imagining the running stream would cleanse you of the stink of your own actions? Did you scrub yourself hard with coarse sand to rip off all the pores on your skin and let the guilt bleed through? Or did you try to deceive yourself with the thoughts of the person you hit get up, shrug off, smile and get on with their journey? Did you have the guts to look at the next day’s newspaper?

What surprises me is why couldn’t they have called an ambulance? Understandably they were afraid and panicked at what happened. Unless there was real reason to deliberately hit someone, accidents happen, well accidently! I once read somewhere that we all have the courage to face consequences of our actions. They didn’t have. All they had to do in the least was call an ambulance. It’s truly appalling why they could not have done that and made the least attempt to partially rectify the consequences of their actions, which could save the life their reckless behavior almost endangered.

But before that, a brief history of it’s creation. See I have a knack, and am very gifted in it. I believe (and I think I will have many seconding my belief) that I have inherited some very quirky traits from my parents. But of all of them the one I’m most proud of is my ability to sleep in an instant (and I will not divulge from whom I have inherited it, although I must add that my mum is a light sleeper.) And it is indeed an instant, as fast as 30 seconds ~ 1 minute I guess; I never measured, but I will do that one day (of course someone else will time me while I’ll be busy trying to fall asleep). However, that is not what the the number would stand for, the minimum amount of time taken for someone to fall asleep.

We call people, make an appointment and promise we will call / meet them at such-and-such (is it a typical Indian expression?) a place on such-and-such (is it a typical… sorry I already asked that question) a time. And then sometimes we totally forget about it and go about doing other work till the circuits reconnect somewhere in the brain and we remember about our rendezvous. However, this would again be not what the number would stand for, the number of times someone misses appointments by forgetting by the reason of doing something else, however (non-?)productive.

Some other times we come across people (like me) who just fall asleep at the exact time, not deliberately mind you, but just because they just tend to fall asleep in a wink. And once again this would not be primary focus of the number, the number of times someone falls asleep forgetting about some appointment.

With this prologue, I define Siddharth number as:

Siddharth number (NS)= Number of phone calls on your mobile missed from the person with whom you had fixed the appointment

Where provided

you did not  deliberately fall asleep,

or pretend to be asleep,

but just truly fell asleep,

that too within fractions of minute,

extendable up to a maximum of 3 minutes and 5 seconds,

or that you are not avoiding the calls deliberately

it does not include calls from any other person

This number can be further upgraded to Siddharth’ number (NS’) by adding the square root (just for the fun of it) of the number of times the person has knocked on your room’s door.

I, the creator of this number, have set the threshold for NS at ‘19’, after which the number would be upgraded, by providing adequate proof, which may be updated unannounced by the (human) body responsible for overseeing of the proper implementation and usage of this number.

This is, as of now, the maximum number of calls I have missed from the person I had  made an appointment.

And the limit for NS’ is 21.23608.

Was just thinking of defining Siddharth’’ number (NS’’) to include physical jolts or rather the п power of them. I don’t think there has been any threshold for this set. As of now.

I am currently traveling (should say running around) in Tamil Nadu and day before yesterday I covered about 250 km in a single day. The state has a great potential for wind energy and has aptly made great use of it. There is such a variety of technology providers and capacities available and such great incentives from the Government, the local Government joining in increasing the price paid to the generators, things are looking good for Wind power in India. There are two different pockets in Tamil Nadu where they get good winds, one in Tirunelveli in the near southern tip of the state and country, and another near Coimbatore, which is somewhere near the middle of the state, an overnight journey. And when I say ‘nearby’, I mean a little circle of about 100 km radius. Add the great success of CDM and the number of WTGs installed in TN itself runs into near to 2000, with an additional 250 being installed yearly.

I had to cover few in the south and then move the same day to the other pocket, where I reached at about 4 in the morning, not a very comfortable time to wake up after not so comfortable travel in a bus. I and my friend were booked in this hotel, a small distance away from the bus stand and we hired an auto-rickshaw to take us there. We reached the place soon and I got down with my baggage and got busy trying to wake up the guard and let us in while my friend was reaching into his pockets to pay the driver.

It was just one of those days! The rickshaw had stopped on a drain which had thin pipes running over it, instead of the usual slabs. Out takes my friend bucks from his pockets. And along with them something else accompanies their friends and down it slips, right into the gap between the pipes and into the drain. I turn around and see him peering over and to our utter surprise that ‘thing’ turns out to be the biggest cousin running around the pockets, a crisp, raspy 500 rupee note. I join him and to his even bigger agony it turns out it wasn’t just the cousin but he had taken his twin too.

And then both of us jolted up entirely.

There in the middle of the dirt and slime and blackish brownish, albeit (thankfully) stagnant semi-liquid, lay two pieces of Gandhiji. We did eventually succeed in taking them out by forking them between two pieces of sticks, but we did offer a spectacle to early walkers who I am sure should have found it very amusing watching two people dancing around funnily with sticks in their hands early in the morning around a drain and flashing lights.

And so began my day.

With all the commotion and discussions that went on during and after the release of “3 idiots”, and with so much praise showered on it from all ends I was a little skeptic, how could a single movie impress different generations (like my parents and friends)!? I have a very weird sense of marking movies worth watching, and those worth watching many times. Though I was laughed at for exactly the same, i.e. being skeptical of a movie which was liked by so many different people.

Well my hunch proved correct.

This is one of the worst movie adaptations of a book.

That Chetan Bhagat was really fighting that his book was mismashed into this horrendous movie filled with cliches is hard to understand. I think he should be very happy the movie looks nothing like the book. The book is, this time again, better than the movie. The review might seem harsh, but that the Perfectionist was working on this makes it even more culpable.

I want to list out the cliches in the movie and this time it was not at all difficult to predict what the next scene would be –

1. The minute Virus asks that student to ring up his dad, although honestly i expected the father to have another attack

2. Hero’s final triumph in setting the project of that boy

3. What would happen just as the camopter (new name i can take patent for? – shit some organization already has that registry name, which i think was very idiotic of me to think that no one else would have thought of that name) is being used to view it’s supposed original creator

4. Anyone who ever had difficulty in communicating to fathers will sympathize with Farhan, but not  in the simple way all disagreements are resolved!

5. Well another important question I had was how come Rancho never attended any interview!?

6. But the cream of the cake was the finale. A baby delivered using vacuum cleaner chord (I’m no expert on that subject, but I have a very tangible fear that someone will try that and I don’t know how effective and safe that procedure is) on the instructions of a hopelessly frantic girl, with an incessantly Hermoine-like-worrisome-look, who has animatable props ready to demonstrate how an untrained person can deliver a baby; how someone can regulate the pressure of vacuum (how much was it? 0.1? man that technique should be learnt by all in the world and so much of pressure would be relieved!) just by holding it against your hand (god dammit did no one ever get their hands and clothes stuck or sucked into a vacuum pump before?) who is accompanied by an equally dumbfounded and astounded doctor who has never seen such a delivery ever attempted in their entire life, and the supposedly stillborn responding to the chants of “all is well” which, by the way, he had been listening to since inside the womb (reminds me of Abhimanyu, learning only the way inside to Chakryavyuha from Arjun while still in the womb of his mother, Subhadra, seemingly interrupted by Krishna so as to avoid being killed by the re-incarnated Kamsa) followed by an emotional grandfather, erstwhile villain, declaring and setting the new born free to choose his course in life!

The biggest reason for my tirade is that this is Aamir’s movie! The same guy who was in “Rang de Basanti”, who made “Taare Zameen Pe”. They were movies, and they too had cliches, but not in the absolute stare-in-the-face kinds, they were real, they were true to life! And this movie was marked to be true to life. This is an out-and-out bollywood movie, nothing more. It is not true to life. If you want to look at real lives of engineering students, watch “Happy Days”. You want to see honesty? Look at the face of the guy attending the Microsoft interview or the attempt by the senior to help his junior with whom he always had a bad relationship.

Except maybe in the message that how engineering students spend their lives learning nothing, just lots of equations and formulae, and I really wonder if the message goes across to thousands and hordes of South-Indian parents thinking thinking engineering is the only ticket to a good life. But the same message is delivered better by the book, and a way lot better than the movie.

I never thought I would say this but “Hello”, the adaptation of “One night at the call center” was a better movie than this! Please Aamir, please don’t make us suffer such a movie again.