I just got back from lunch and i am in a huge dilemma!
I wrote earlier about these flying objects on the roads and how they scare me, so well today when i was driving back to work, there was this truck with a trailer attached to it, going in front of me. It didn't look very well kept and there were pieces of cardboard in it and some empty plastic crates. The crates were all loose and were moving around in the back of the trailer and this trailer was open at the end, so things could fall off!

nothing untoward happened but the crate fell, it caused people to change lanes and such, but the truck driver happily and ignorantly kept driving his damn trailer and took off!

now my dilemma is, i want to report this guy, i want him to tie his @#$%^&* crates together and not have them strewn around the whole Metroplex. but i don't know what the cops will do, i don't know if he has a license even, if this is his only means of lively hood and how i might endanger that. but i want such drivers taught a lesson.

what should i do. i still remember the registration number of the vehicle.

Ctrl F

Finally i am back to feeling a 100%, it's been an ordeal fighting fatigue, weakness, fever, cough...but now i am back to being healthy! What is not strange is that i had been willing illness to come to me, i mean i was praying that i would fall sick, that way i would get the much needed rest, but i think I pleased the god of sickness too much and the god of wellness too little and thus the infection and symptoms went for a bit too long. lesson learnt, too much praying is literally not good for health!

Meanwhile, for a lot of time now, whenever i have some time and am not looking for anything else on Google or wiki, i am looking for 1 of three things. Now for quite sometime now, i have been spending a lot of time, trying to find two lost friends and 1 series i used to see in India way way back and now want to see it again. Now, one of the two friends, Mandavi Saxena, I am writing her name here so that if someone who is in touch with her, reads this, can tell her about me. So she and I were very good friends in school, then i moved away, and for sometime we kept in touch, we even met some 7-8 years ago in my solitary trip to Ranchi. But after that, I have not been able to find her. None of my other friends who know her, know how to get in touch with her! to imagine that in this day and age there are people who do not have an active email address. Same story is with another friend of mine, but in her case, i have finally been able to get a valid email id and if Gods willing and Jagariti willing, she will reply soon!!!

Ok now the third thing and arguably the most irritating, most tempting and most sought after amongst the three! When i was maybe 12 or 14 years old, there was a Japanese series that was aired on Indian television, Oshin. It was one of the most popular, non-Hindi series ever to hit the indian television! The showed us a significant part of the series, but suddenly for no apparent reason, the series can canceled and was aired no more! Back then, there was no Internet and i had more pressing matters to deal with, like my friends, school, the games we played and so much more. But now for about 8-10 months, i have been looking for a DVD collection or any such digital copy of the series, but so far i have come up with zilch. I do find some DVD collections on amazon, but they are in Japanese and cost like $2000 but other than that i have found wiki entry and some blogs and even IMDB mentions it, but i cannot find any digital copies. Not netflix, not blockbuster, not eBay, nothing.

But my search shall continue, i am not going to give up this soon...

Why is that one cannot tell someone something that matters to you and they not pass on the thought to someone else? And then those super geniuses have to trespass your thoughts all the time!

The week-end that was...

The weekend is over...and i must say it was one of the nicest weekends i have had in a while...of course i was running fever for most part of it and gourav was nursing a twisted wrist, but we still had a very nice weekend. gourav was gone during the week and therefore the time we had together seemed rather special! It started with me trying my hand at some traditional Indian food, since it was shivratri on friday. I had set my heart on trying some traditional food and i surpassed my own expectations! i was highly impressed with the outcome and so was gourav! then sat was the "finish" chores day and we had a cousins movie night and i saw an amazing Indian movie, now indian movies in general run for 3 hours or more but this movie was 2 hours, so it had that to it's credit and so i was thinking even if it's bad, it's a short torture....the movie started with all these vibrant colors and wonderful acting by boman irani and can you believe even raima sen!!! she's not unbearable. but i think the cream on the cake was amitabh bachchan. I cannot stand a screaming amitabh, but this was a surprisingly calm amitabh and very controlled performance by him.

The last day of the weekend saw me trying my hand at some daal-bati...it's a Rajasthani dish and it's very very rich, with lots of ghee in it! And i did make them well, only to feel guilty about the loads of ghee both of us had consumed that day!

Sometimes people say some things which make u see what kind of people they are and sometimes the things that one should've said and didnt say also tells you what kind of a person he/she is. One such moment this weekend, gave me an opportunity to learn something important about people this weekend.

Valentine's Day....

I like the redness, the chocolate, the love, the cutsey stuff all around...it makes it festive and i am a stickler for anything with fanfare...
Here's what i don't like though about valentine's day...the fact that it becomes another Birthday...it's not that, it's not meant to be. It's a day to express one's love and happiness so do something together...why does it have to be associated with a gift?

if people need a reason to be with their loved ones...that's their problem but to add gifts to that...no way....

it was fun to see all the festivity around and i must add my office sure knows how to make it special...but let's not go silly and start buying gifts worth a hundred dollars...that's just borders on guilt!

Lost Memories.

Yes i have lost all of them, right from my first days in USA, birthdays, trips, random snaps, to my parents trip to USA,...i have nothing ...i am very very lost and seem to have misplaced so many precious moments of my life. How did this happen? well i think i was trying to backup my old Desktop and probably put all photos in a "safe" place in it so i could just transfer them onto my laptop. What does survive is everything after February of last year...phew....

So what has happened is that i cannot find the folders. No matter what i look for .jpeg, .bmp or look for folders by the name of photos or pic(s) or backup or memories i cannot place those folders. I have looked even in the recycle bin. But i have come up with zilch.

It's so bizarre, i am one of those people who has infinite faith in the computers and therefore didn't decide to backup precious things before until that fateful moment when i decided to switch from the PC to the laptop. Now i am distraught. All i have are those photos which i had put on yahoo photos and as we know yahoo compresses photos to bee-size so though i can view them, i cannot download them or do anything useful with them.

I did have some photos on my flash drive but i cannot find the drive itself, so till i get that i am sitting here memory-less. Well not really but i am pretty sad and uncomfortable about the whole situation. I love to go back and look at photos of things we would have done earlier...it's the only way to relive those moments. So all you shutter bugs out there, please make sure that you back up your photos and that you use a proper web service to safe keep them. I have learnt my lesson.

The Sun, the moon and the Stars...

One of my favorite memories from childhood is going to bed and my grandfather reading me bed time stories...there was story of the king and the queen whose children are taken away and how they get them back, then a story about a washer man, lots of tales from China and Russia...and of course when he didn't want to tell me a story and was trying to dodge the bullet...there would be the story of the boy who cried wolf...not one of my favorites :)

But my GrandFather or Baba as we used to call him...did a lot of funny and interesting things with us, he gave us puzzles to solve, math problems to do, i owe my high grades in Math to him, take us for walks and tell us jokes, taught us how to sit in the sun on a cold winter afternoon and eat sugarcane by ripping off the skin with our teeth...eat roasted sweet potato and peanuts...

When we had jaundice, he made sure we didn't eat boring food, so he would improvise with the little that was allowed, and would make us drink that awful papaya juice, he would climb on a ladder, propped against the papaya tree and get the juice out of the fruit! pretty incredible but back then i didn't think so, i would make faces and howl for i disliked this juice so much...now i feel silly having created such a scene even after i knew how much effort he had put into this.

My Baba is the perfect example of the grand parent who spoils his grand children rotten, dreams big for them and loves them so much...

He's one of the biggest reason why I want to go for a vacation to India, I miss sitting with him in the sun and discussing politics or talking on the phone with his clients and helping him decipher some of the game show questions so we could win some prizes...

Grand Parents are a luxury and I am glad I have all these wonderful memories to cherish...

I spoke with a friend recently after 9 years!!! we spoke briefly and then chatted and i was super-duper nostalgic, remembered the silly jokes we have shared, the giggling sessions we have had, the crushes, the icons, the gossips, the coffees, the shopping, the late nights, the teasing, the families, the clowns, the friends, the class-bunking, the movies....
old friends are like the sunshine after days of rains, or the first rain after a long summer. it's yahoo messenger at 2 am in the night and sipping coffee to stay awake knowing perfectly well that the next day you have to go to work but the fingers dont stop typing and the mind a playground of old memories...