the dog ate my blog

yup if u can believe it thats the best excuse i could come up with.doesnt matter that i dont have a dog, not even a nintendog. you wouldn't have believed my other excuse of suffering from temporary dyslexia of the kind where one forgets long blog addresses. i had to learn language all over again, competed in a spelling bee with a few 7 year old south asian kids and i lost out spelling T-E-S-T-O-S-T-E-R-O-N-E.

i was doing other far less interesting things when i could've written abt the time when my cycle was swallowed alive during the night by a giant robot that needed the grease (or at least thats what my parents told me). turns out its going to take some more time for me to reorganize and sort my brain and remove the cobwebs that've been woven between the links on the right.

but as one of the future great rulers of this noble country so succinctly put it :
"ah'll be bach"

add arizona to that list

a week without the net and i am still alive.i didnt jump off mather's point or the abyss in search of a wi-fi signal. just a couple of quick thoughts and i'll be gone :

in vegas the party is still going on with no sign of relent. i wrote about it at length(measured in meters) after my first visit but will not subject you to the worst travel writing ever. did get to the top of the stratosphere at last. also learnt to navigate the side streets of vegas like a vegas cabbie.

the grand canyon is incomprehensibly vast. probably the closest i'll ever come to experiencing the Total Perspective Vortex. at most points it was quite difficult to assess the depths/heights. google didnt reveal where shankar shot that song for jeans so had to skip the idea of asking ash to go out there for a run around the stubby bushes.

unfortunately a digital camera fell into my hands and the total mayhem that resulted was like a version of die hard with cameras instead of guns. i went about like bruce willis shooting his enemies behind, above and all around him without aiming. my (t)rusty slr was there too and made a case for its instant execution by running out of film just as the sun was rising over the canyon. after such a long break, it'll take me a bit before i remember how to do things like uploading pics, so hang on for a bit.

stop the blog

i've been thinking and thats a pretty rare occurence. nevertheless i've been thinking about my blogging and i've realised that all i've really blogged abt has been about my past memories (u'd say DUH and i concur ). but the point is that many of my memories have jumped from being mere encoded neural connections to the physical realm taking the shape of a collection of words. no longer are they vague and hidden in a corner of my mind only to be woken up by a smell, sound or visual cue. they are now monsters on their own, roaming the blogworld scaring the wits off anyone who comes here looking for some decent writing. whats more scary is that i still have some more dormant in my head.

there are some consequences to this permanent form i've given them. lets say in a few years or decades i attend a family get together. having been blessed with some nice genes i volunteer myself and my memories to entertain the assembled masses and start to recollect how i was once saved by unhygenix from near drowning and a niece interrupts saying 'oh is that the one where u pushed him down..we've heard that' . after affirming that fact i begin relating another of my spelling prowess only to have some other child ask "can we watch the live webcast of the India vs Indiana cricket match now..we've read ur blog a thousand times after u made it compulsory reading for any child who knew the alphabet in the entire extended family". would i be happy that my blog could now suitably pass off as my clone or should i be sad that no one wants to listen to my stories any more?

another consequence is of course one that any blogger would be afraid of. what if someone steals my identity. its pretty easy. people can already comment as if they are someone else , so why cant some moron with no memories of his own steal mine. (the moron part of course quite obvious..who would want my memories in the first place). it would be like an old bad joke if i ran into him. he would be from the same country, city, street and house as i am but he would be like my evil version ( in all probability my good version). would i be worried that he has my identity or would i be more concerned about the fact that he gets more page hits than i do?

two many questions and not many answers. should i then stop this blog and save my memories from permanence ? the good consequences however may yet outweigh the bad. what if by some strange sequence of events i completely lose my memory? maybe the clever, beautiful lady doctor (who took me in from the fishermen who rescued me) would read my blog and then painstakingly relate it back to me while feeding me tomato soup ( no chicken stock pls). i'd probably do the same thing that many of our fillum heroes do - pretend that i dont recollect a single thing even after 6 months of tomato soup (double advantage, one more unique visitor to my page..HA). for all this to happen i need a way to convey my blog address to clever, beautiful lady doctors. if my memory serves me right a new tattoo parlor opened up down the street. i'm rushing there right now. how do u think textosterone.blogspot.com would look in a nice gothic font ? and once its inked in i'm going to have to stick it with it for a lil while.sigh. i guess i'll stick with this blog for a lil while too. lets see where it takes me and my not-so-fleeting memories.

english as the first language

this conversation happened close to 12am . the scene - me & my 2 roomies at their lab, where i'm supposedly working on my thesis while they work on theirs. we decide to take a break to get a drink from a vending machine.3 cans and $2.25 later we are walking back. one roomie has his can open, other roomie and i are struggling hard to get our cans open. thirsty and lazy, we hand our cans over to him. he opens both with relative ease. i start referring to an age old joke

me : you got it open cos of the shri ram factor

roomie1 : whats that

me : roomie2 and i'd already put a lot of effort trying to open it and we gave up just before we could get it open. all you did was put a little more effort into it and got it to open

roomie1 : so what is the shri ram factor

me : in sita's swayamvara, all those other kings tried breaking the bow one by one and successively increased the stress on the bow. when shri ram finally stepped up, the bow was almost broken. all he had to do was touch it and it crumbled instantly

roomie1 : the point is why did shri ram's turn come only towards the end after all the others?

me : maybe they were going in the alphabetic order..i mean "s" does come towards the end of the alphabet right ?

roomie2 : so they already knew english during the time of ramayana ?

at last count each of us had a masters degree in engineering