The Missing Melodies

A really long day in the office, one crazy exam, another crazier assignment (whose just one problem took three people’s brains and one and half hours to complete), an impending presentation etc. etc..! As the list of things on my plate goes on and on, the one thing that is concerning me as I go off to sleep tonight is something that no one can imagine- a missing earphone!! Now you may call me crazy, but I actually am concerned about this little piece of apparatus that has been such an integral part of my life for over 4 years now. And while I caused enough heads to shake in disbelief in the department today with this fact but yeah, the ‘year’ in the last sentence was not at all a typo. The responses for the shock on the faces were not actually surprising considering that out here, their life-expectancy usually do not exceed a year (for which Apple charges an exorbitant $29!!).

Four years is a long enough time to form a connection with even something inanimate and the fact that it was part of the first birthday gift I received in my college life made me sort of emotionally attached to it. Unfortunately, the walkman that it had come with lies now in a little corner back home as the world of audio cassettes finally draws to an end. But aside from the obvious emotional attachment that I had with it, it was a marvelous product in itself. In fact, I often used it as a benchmark to test other earphones that my friends often bought. In the process often comparing and finding its worth against the best in the business. In cases where there were only subtle differences in the quality of the earphones, I had even found the perfect songs that I can use to prove my earphone’s mettle. I know, my roommate does something similar; the song that he uses is Gupt’s “Bechainiya”. For me, there were two of them- Evanescence’s “Bring me back to life” and Dil Se’s “Ae Ajnabi”. And nine times out of ten, my earphone came out trumps!!

So how did I lose it? Well like all brave soldiers, this one too went missing in action! It was actually early in the morning when I was talking to my sweetheart on Skype when I realized that I was pretty late for my office hours. So rather than keeping everything in their designated place like every other day, I dropped all of my stuff in the living room and went rushing out. When I came back in the evening, sadly for me, it was simply gone. As I grew impatient, me assisted by my roomie made a thorough search of the house but it was nowhere to be found. I finally gave up and realized that now my laptop speakers have to do some extra work. The worst thing that has been affected though is my sleep. I had been used to plugging those into my ears and turn on some soothing playlist while I slumbered into dreams. But I dare not try the same with the fragile Apple earphones (my last pair had lasted just four months!). I tried to work around this problem by using a shutdown timer and using my laptop speakers to put on some music before sleep. But alas, not every tune is music to the ears if they don’t come from the same source!

So while every black wire in the house reminds me of what I am missing, I have to try to get tired enough to fall asleep without the little fellow’s help! Well, it’s a big house that we have, so I still search for it. Hoping one day, that I will get a chance to make everyone know that it was just one of the usual mistakes of a demented mind and that my memory had been successful in turning back time and I had finally found it. Amen!

My First Award :)

Its just past the afternoon on a really cold Saturday (Toledo is really getting all set for the winters now!!), and the first thing that I see on opening my laptop is that my blog has been awarded!!

Woohooo!! My first ever award :)
It was awarded to me by Urvashi , a fantastic blogger!! Thanks a lot Urvashi for the award :)
As I am not a  frequent blogger, though I really love reading other people’s works, so I was pleasantly surprised on getting this award.
Rules for the award :
- List five current obsessions.
- Pass the award on to your favorite and more fabulous blogs.
- On your post of receiving this award, make sure you include the person that gave you the award and link it back to them.
- When you post your winners, make sure you link them as well.
- Don’t forget to let your winners know they won an award from you by leaving a comment on their blog.
My Five Current Obsessions:
1. Health Care Disparities: Its one of the primary focus of  the thesis I am working on. When I had initially begin on it, it was Hypertension, the disease state that was more interesting to me but the more I read about the disparities, the more engrossed I became by this problem. I had never thought that standards of care could vary so much by race and ethnicity in such a developed country like United States. Check the AHRQ link if you want to find out more.
2. Farmville: It was another invitation among hundreds of invites that I get on Facebook everyday. But it was from someone whom I hadn’t actually seen enjoying any Facebook applications the last time that I saw her. So it was the curiosity factor that got me in but then instantly got me hooked. Having my own farm and tending to it was so much fun and addictive that it really is an obsession now. I just love cute animated characters and the pigs and ugly ducklings are really adorable characters that you get to play with. Awesome fun!!

3. Pink Floyd: I wasn’t too much into music and movies and more into physical sports till I reached adulthood. A fact that may surprise many when they look at the big collection that I posses of both of them and the absolute lack of participation in any sports whatsoever. While I caught on to music by myself it was my friends in Manipal who made me a regular movie buff. But as this fascination started late I missed out on many of the first crushes that my peers posses. My roommate on the other hand has a good taste in both which goes back to 50s and 60s sometimes!! It was he who introduced me to Pink Floyd by first playing “Comfortably Numb” on his laptop. Few months later, I have their entire discography and they are a regular on my playlist!!! Need I say more!!
4. LOST: For those who haven’t watched this awesome TV show, you really don’t know what you are missing. For the people who hate the show, left it mid-way, and who criticize it- thanks a lot for not watching , for a show of such epic proportions does not deserve an audience of minimal IQ and who love the regular saas-bahu or Gossip Girl soap operas. The fact is that even though the show isn’t on air, thousands of people as obsessed like me still discuss it everyday on various forums waiting for that grand finale in 2010. Well that may just spur you on to start watching it on curiosity alone!!

5. Numismatics: Had pretty much given up on this hobby since moving out of the country but recently have got a new theme that I am getting a chance to work on here and which has got me right back in and that theme is of possessing a collection of quarters of all the states of US. Its much harder than I thought because of the fact that I have to part with 11 of them every weekend to do my laundry!! :(
In conclusion,I would like to pass the award to a bunch of really talented bloggers that you would enjoy to check out:
Zoy
Patrick
Sathira
Let the good times begin!! :)

Fortnight of a Life

There is something about falls that makes me so lazy and I end up doing things that I am not supposed to do- like not doing something. I don’t know how much sense the last statement made but that’s the way usually I am when laziness creeps up on me in this wonderful weather. Ironically, the past two weeks have been absolutely hectic cramming up on so much of course content in so less time. But the moment that I get back in the safe environs of my home I always seem to forget all the work behind although technically I should still be working on them!! It’s that time of the year when the winter is at a knocking distance and I am really eager and anxious to get the feel of snow once again. But there was something else that kept me pretty excited in the last 14 days besides my courses and other works.

It had all started at the very first day of the Fall semester. I was a bit late for the day and was rushing to get my hands on the keys to the lab in the office. I just caught the glimpse of a large blue transparent box lying behind the secretary’s chair which on first thought looked like an oversized lunch box to me. On my usual days I would have rushed out with just the thought on the back of my head to ask her about it later in the day. But as I said before, falls bring a certain amount of laziness in me and I often take my own time to complete the things that I am already delayed for. So I turned back and asked her about what it was.

“It’s my new pet” she replied.

I was a bit perplexed, I couldn’t see anything that closely resembled a pet and I was pretty sure that she had not understood that I was asking about the little blue box. But before I could ask her the follow up question she added on to her previous reply.

“A caterpillar” she said in a matter of fact tone as if it was something as normal as a dog or cat that people have!!

I peered in closer to the window and found the little multicolored tiny creature perched atop a brown stick. Satisfied and happy it lay there eating some leaves being fed to it, a lifestyle that I really envied.

“So what happens next?” I asked her.

“It’s going to form a cocoon soon and then spring out into a butterfly in the next 10-12 days” she replied

I took out my phone and snapped a quick photo of the little one and promised her to come and check on it every day. I quickly ran off to my work that was already delayed.

So began my daily ritual of checking on the progress of the little one. We tried to assign it a name but the inability to determine its gender posed a big hurdle and finally we gave up on it, letting the little one enjoy its 4 minutes of fame in anonymity!! It didn’t take long for it to form into a cocoon and that turned out to be something unexpected. I don’t know why but I always had this mental picture of a cocoon to be silky but this one was a small little green pod that was even smaller than the caterpillar in its size. After few days of inactivity I asked my secretary again regarding the timeline.

“Ten more days and we should have the butterfly out” she replied excited. I also made a quick note of the date in my calendar and set an alarm for that.

Ten days later I was right on time to witness the impending metamorphosis but unfortunately the caterpillar was taking its own sweet time to come out the comfortable pouch that it lay in. I came back the next day and it still lay there. The next day we had our very first ever Lab meeting for the semester and as usual I was late for it. I came running in to find my peer looking for me

“The secretary has been looking for you since the morning” she warned me.

As I ran in to the meeting, I made a quick stop at her desk. And there it lay when I had least expected it, the wonderful butterfly now out in its full bloom. With little white dots bordering the majestic yellowish brown wings, it simply looked magnificent. I was fidgeting to get out all the while in the two hour meeting. When I came out to witness the true beauty I realized it was also the time for the worst part- to finally let it out in its natural habitat. I hadn’t expected to feel so profoundly but the moment we let it out in the open the emotions that we were going through was indescribable. For us it had been just 14 days but we had witnessed a major part of the little ones life already and that feeling was overwhelming.

It opened out its wings in the open and moved around very weakly. It finally managed to get a stronghold on one of the branches in a small growth of small shrubs. I moved in the big mess to get a final close up in its new home. The students moving around found it amusing to see a man in formals get into the big outgrowth and some stopped to know the story and have a look too. Just five minutes in the open and then our little butterfly took a flight with its new found strength and went and sat atop the tallest tree in the campus and far from our probing eyes. The flight and its ease made the crowd watching break out into claps.

Finally both of us had to return back into the normal monotony of our lives and as we walked back talking, we agreed upon one thing- this had been one of the most wonderful 14 days of our lives!!

Mind of the Stomach!!

Toledo and heat were never supposed to be synonymous but the hot weather in the last few days has made me change this opinion of mine. When I woke up yesterday morning, it was not because my body said that I have had enough sleep but because it was just so damn hot!! Even my laptop seemed to be suffering from the heat wave and just kept slowing down for no reason. In spite of all the criticism that has been labeled against it, I have always stayed a faithful advocate of Vista, but today was not going to be that day. I spent almost the entire day lazing on my bed and flirting with my sweetheart who was in a similar mood of not doing any work. By the time she went off to her sweet lands of dreams, it was close to evening but the weather was still refusing to give any respite. I had been so lazy all this while that in spite of the hot weather I had not bothered to have a cold shower. But finally I decided that the moment has come to enjoy the luxury. While I was cooking my late evening dinner, I received a call from our potential roommate for coming and having a talk with us.

It wasn’t raining today and he seemed to be in much better health than before so I wasn’t too paranoid to face him today. Everything was smooth on his way to move in except the fact that he was a Vegetarian while me and my roommate are ardent Non-Vegs (and sometimes vociferous ones too!!). The different eating habits posed a conflicting scenario, more so because we were not even supposed to use the same utensils as the one in which the Veg. food was being cooked. While the issue remains in limbo for now, it made me think why people turn Veg. unless and until it’s their religion that prohibits them. Even various religions have distinction about what to eat if you are Non-Veg. Islam for one divides food into things that cannot be eaten (haram) and things that can be eaten (halal). Just yesterday my roommate said to me that he was going to stop eating chicken for a while. When I asked him for the reason, he replied just to practice self-control. He had a valid reason although I still think he can do the same with maybe smoking. (Requiring more self-control I guess!!) I then thought to myself why I am not a vegetarian. For one, my parents are non-veg plus I love non-veg and I really cannot imagine my appetite ever in my life saying that it has been satiated about it. But still keeping aside my obvious biases I tried to look with an open mind and try to find out why various people want you to turn veg.

One of the common themes that I found everywhere was that it was supposed to make you slim as you are cutting down on fat. A statement surely to lure all the diet conscious people, who will turn veg. but strangely will not let go of their cheese burgers! But there was no incentive for me in this statement. As said before am a vociferous eater of the meat but have yet not been able to cross the chasm of underweight. Now I know I am often labeled a genetic anomaly so I will not try to generalize this statement. The second most common reason was more related to moral rather than health. Almost all the sources that I looked at said that killing animals was inhuman and barbaric and it inflicts avoidable pain and suffering. Appropriate and justified, but why disregard the pain and suffering caused due to uprooting the plants. At least one of the sources was kind enough to admit that but then added on that as the nervous system of plants is rudimentary, the pain inflicted is much smaller when compared to animals. It also said that in cases where the plants fall off by themselves after getting old, this pain is non-existent. I was wondering then how many times the author had waited for the fruits to rot off and fall so that he could avoid causing them pain. The final reason was religious and that is something that I won’t debate. But one writing in an Ayurvedic literature caught my eye; it actually quantified the sin you are committing by eating animals. The person who handles the killing of the animal bears 70% of the sin while the person eating it bears the rest 30%. Interesting considering one of the avatars of Vishnu, the Hindu god, was a carnivore. Although it would be unfair to transfer this logic to animals but the king of the jungle will now think twice about his crown which makes him the biggest sinner!!

So in spite of trying my best, I am still remotely interested into turning veg. Much of it is a personal choice, religion and the manner of your upbringing and a combination of several such factors that orients you in one direction rather than the other. But if someone just tries to justify his change by citing the advantage of one over the other then I am not buying into it. So my next task for today is to take advantage of “Two-ledo Tuesday” offers of my favorite pizza joint and get myself two servings of chicken wings!!

Paranoia of the Swine!!

swine

n. pig, hog, any of a number of omnivorous animals that have a flat disk-like snout and cloven hooves and are raised or hunted for meat; mean and contemptible person

As I opened my hazy eyes early morning after a great night of good food, bad movie and ugly drink, it felt good to know that the crazy semester had finally ended. My laptop screen was flashing at that time with breaking news and the only word that I could make out with my myopic eyes was “Swine”. I hurriedly put on my spectacles and fixated my attention on the news. The city of Mumbai had witnessed its first Swine flu death. The warnings of my mother of staying alert when the first outbreak had happened rang in my ears. My sweetheart had also warned me about staying away from eating pigs, not because I do that on a regular basis, but just because my hunger pangs are sometimes too much to resist having a pepperoni pizza!! I calmed her by reminding that it actually doesn’t transmit by eating the poor swine. In fact pigs are such harmless, gentle creatures that I cannot fathom any malice attributed to them. The fact that pigs move more rampantly about in the roads of India than out here, it was actually people out there who are more at risk of catching the flu than me!!

The thoughts of pizzas had made me hungry and I wearily shifted out of my bed. The house wore an absolutely deserted look. One of my roommates had shifted out of the house while the other was out of town. The last night’s delicious dinner still remained as delicious over the kitchen stove, so now I had the luxury of finishing them all by myself over the weekend and not cook a thing. I transferred all of my new specialty- Chicken Chilli into the refrigerator. I felt good that thankfully this wasn’t another outbreak of the bird flu that I should worry about!! I checked my calendar for the things that I had to do today. The gloomy rainy weather almost tempted me to curl back into the bed, pull on the covers and fall asleep. The calendar thankfully lay empty; it had been an awfully long time since it had. I jumped onto the comfortable couch and finished up Prince of Persia on my PSP in the next hour. I checked back on the news site. The breaking news had now turned into full-fledged news report about the death. The phone then rang and I remembered that I had to meet a potential new roommate of mine. I walked out in the rain to let him in.

“It’s like Mumbai out here” were his first words, referring to the pouring rain.

I realized then that the guy had just arrived from India, and from Mumbai. The first death that had been reported was also from Mumbai. He walked in and let out a big cough. I looked at him suspiciously and sat far apart on the other side of the couch. Every cough and every sneeze magnified my paranoia. As minutes crawled by he finally promised to move in by next Sunday. I let out a sigh of relief as he walked out of the door. (Enough time to be correctly diagnosed before he moves in!!) By this time the news channels had also started reporting how thousands had thronged into hospitals every time they had sneezed or had felt the slightest inkling of fever. Miles apart, I was also getting infected with the same. The flu was surely as much swine as the name that it actually possessed.

I once again settled back on my couch and watched the first rays of sunlight creep in through the windows. On the other side of the phone line, my sweetheart gave me sermon about how important the sunlight is for the house and one should always let it in to keep the house fresh. Just as I was about to open the windows, the sunlight had faded away and exonerated me from heeding to the advice. But as I am neither a scientist nor a PHA so I thought of only one thing that I could do about this pandemic. So as a small gesture of kinship towards my fellow humans I sided with rabbits and took on the NPA (National Pig Army) in the immortal game of S.W.I.N.E.!! :)

Scents of the Past!!

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise”. This statement was used without fail by my loving father everytime he woke me up in the morning. Those were the good old days of home when my parents could control when I woke up but cut to college days, I would doze off to sleep sometimes at hours when my parents would be waking up back at home!! So no surprises that I never turned out as wealthy or wise they would have wanted :) Even now I am the type of person who never wakes up at the first ring of the alarm of the mobile. The manufacturers of the alarm created the snooze function for people like me and I never fail to utilize the great tool to the fullest. I am not going any deeper into my sleeping habits but this prelude is very significantly related to the events of the past day for me.

Just like every other day my alarm rang early morning, but unlike the usual routine of putting it to snooze, I actually got up!! I had no real reason for doing it and actually I never intended to but somehow I was up and sitting. I got up and after my morning ablutions came back to my bed and thought “Now what?!!”. If I would have woken up any other day then I would have switched on my laptop and called up my sweetheart to catch up with how her day was while letting her know about my plans for the day (thanks to the wonder of living in two separate time zones!!). But as luck would have it, she was spending her holidays back home. I might have still called her up on the phone but then I thought of giving her some peace from myself for at least few hours!! But I did switch on my laptop and checked out all the news sites trying to be wiser. I hadn’t listened to music in the mornings for long so I quickly turned it on. Absent mindedly I picked my starting song as My Chemical’s Romance “Desolation row”. Awesome song, Bob Dylan at his best and lyrics whose meaning I could never understand but surely something that you don’t expect to listen early mornings so I switched to a quieter and soother Jordin Sparks. I then had this great idea of having breakfast. Again something that I usually don’t do, relying mostly on vending machines of the college for getting me through the day. I took out a bowl full of cornflakes and milk and gobbled them up. An action that would have made my parents proud back home!! So finally I was all set for going off to the college.

I actually didn’t have to be in the office that day as it wasn’t my office hours but still I had to turn up to assist my colleague in her work. We started working and things went almost smoothly for an hour when something funny happened. I suddenly had this sudden recollection of the wonderful aroma of Masala dosa waft into my mind. Something that I surely had at a place called Shanti Sagar back in my college days in Manipal. What surprised me even more was of remembering that particular place. If I had to feel “collegesick” about food, it wasn’t a place I would expect to remember as it was one of the less frequented places by me. The more I thought about the queerness of it all the more I seemed to remember the places I did actually frequent back then!! The wonderful chicken lollipop of Dollops, the just fried egg curry of Paratha point etc. etc. started floating in my brain. I hadn’t realized how engrossed I was in it until I suddenly found my colleague just staring at me.

“What happened?” I asked her, perplexed about how could she see what was going on in my mind!!

“You just gave me the patient ID; you didn’t give me his clinical values” she said confused.

I quickly apologized to her and got back trying to concentrate on my work.

"Damn.. It's all due to getting up early today and maybe the cornflakes!!" I thought.

But then the wonderful smells of the food never really left me whole day. It actually got late in the day when we finally finished the work and by then I was really famishing, especially with all those food thoughts!!

My friend then turned up just in time to see how things were going on with the work. Glad to see him at the late hour, I suggested having an early dinner somewhere outside. I had this really good Arabic restaurant in my mind but it happened to be Tuesday and so my friend could not eat non-veg. So he suggested an Indian Restaurant instead. I always thought that the nearest Indian restaurant was in Detroit and I didn’t want to stay hungry for the hour long journey but much to my pleasant surprise there actually was one closer home. We dashed off to the place and the moment that I entered the place, all those lovely aroma of Indian food completely saturated my senses. All the wonderful memories for the food back home came rushing back as I literally dived into my food once it arrived. Both me and my friend were filled up to our necks by the time we had finished!!

As I moved out of the place, I realized the appropriateness of Voltaire’s quote of “Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.”!! I hoped that I had pushed all the wonderful scents of the past into the backburners of my mind for at least six or seven more months. Why? Well they had just cost me a fortune to satiate and as I said before, I never had been very wealthy and wise!! :) One more thing, I decided from next day to use my snooze in the mobile as always!!

Xibalba’s miseries!!

The moment I began, I knew it was not going to be just another day today.

“Left..outer circle.. once.. inner circle..right..back to outer circle..repeat..repeat…left one final time!!”

After two hours of frustration of going round and round in circles, finding treasures that hardly look line one and knocking out pumas with my superbike, I had finally cracked the two puzzles that would unlock the world of Underground for me!! Extremely pleased at my effort, I hopped back on my superbike and ambled away trying to find my directions to the wondrous land that I had opened up. I even took my own sweet time and collected all the little artifacts lying around. When I finally reached my destination I found that all the brilliant fires, the larger than life snake statue, the wondrous doors to the abyss below had all disappeared. The path that lay visible from the place above had disappeared just like the island in the TV series Lost!! This all was happening to me, of course, in virtual reality, as I tried my hand at Tomb Raider: Underground, the latest installment of Lara Croft’s adventures.

So what happened next?? I ran around trying to find answer to this unintentional fresh puzzle. After spending 15 minutes of trying to find answer to the problem, I finally gave up and decided to take some help. I Googled searching for any walkthroughs for this game. You got to be a hard core gamer to realize how hurting it is for your ego when you have to look at walkthroughs for moving ahead. In fact, I rarely had looked at the in-built field assistance option available till that point of time. Back to my Google search, I finally found one such site and immediately navigated to the stage that was giving me all the trouble. I went over the exhaustively detailed narration and found that I had done exactly as expected. Still not understanding what I had done wrong, I made the final click to reach the end of walk through for that stage. It contained the answer to the puzzle (which I already had discovered!!) and written in bold was the final statement: REMEMBER, this is a TIMED event and you need to get back in time or the path to the Underground will close up and you will have to repeat the quest!!

Swearing profanities at the game makers on why they could not explain this ‘minor’ detail inside the game in even the most subtle manner possible, I got back and finished the level in the next ten minutes. I could have finished in eight maybe but the frame rate had now dropped down to near matrix like slow-mos (in spite of my 4GB worth of RAM!!). But that was it for my patience with Lara and I decided to give this game a bit of rest. I went back to my studies, finished up some assignments that were lying around for quite some time now and then got back to my laptop. The icon on my desktop tempted me to open the game that I had just only debunked. No!! I said to myself; let my hurt ego at least have rest for while. But I sorely wanted to get on with any form of gaming. I picked up the phone and called up one of my friends.

“Dude, you got some old game CDs lying around with you?”

“Splinter Cell works for you?” he replied much to my delight.

“Hell, Yess!!” I said and jumped off to his place to get the CDs.

An hour later, I was back in front of my laptop filled to the brim with excitement. I inserted in the CDs, installed the game and everything went smoothly. It wasn’t until the game menu came up that I realized that I couldn’t understand a word that was spelt out in the screen. I immediately picked up the phone and called back my friend. He didn’t seem surprised by it at all.

“Of course, you can’t understand..It’s all German!!” he replied to me coolly.

“Why the hell are you playing games in German?”

“Cuz I am German!!”

It was surely a day when mysteries got unraveled!! We fought over how I had missed knowing this trivial detail and how he should have told that to me much before. He shot back at me and said that I never told him that I was Indian but he knew that! After calling each other racists we got back to the point where it had all started- Lara pounding miseries on me at that point of time. To be fair to Lara, the game wasn’t bad at all. Who wouldn’t want to maneuver a pretty form through a wonderful underwater exploration (the very first stage!!) and then kick some butt fighting sharks. I finally took his suggestion to give the game one more try. But that was after I made him swear to me that he would never send me a German game ever again :)