Day 2: Random Rants

#1 Dear Dr.XYZ, Convener of ABC Conference and countless other people who do the same thing include telecallers,

After we had a conversation on telephone and I sincerely believe I do sound like a girl/woman [Male bloggers like Suda and Vimal can verify], how come you address me as “Dear Sir” in your email/call ? And after I replied back with my name highlighted in bold, red color and increased font size, why do you still continue with that? 👿

Readers, tell me how to diplomatically point out the error to that person?

#2 Dear Person driving with his small child in his lap and his 2 counterparts I saw on the road,

What are you thinking? That you are a very cool father or a cool driver? How can you be so irresponsible? and to the mother sitting beside, how can you allow such a thing? Few years later you will be very proud parents when your underage kid will start driving your car. I am worried about the child’s future. Some of them will grow up and become those drunk spoiled brats who drive their SUVs on people sleeping on the footpath. Wish we had stricter traffic police. Your license should be cancelled. 👿

#3 Dear Nth person asking me “so you are not a Bengali” when I tell my hometown is in Chattisgarh

All Bengalis DO NOT live in Kolkata. Firstly West Bengal consists of many cities other than Kolkata. Secondly many Bengalis have resided outside WB since many years and for many years. And home is where we have been born and brought up, where we have lived atleast 18 years of our life! Not where my lineage is from. I always have to repeat the same dialogue “my roots are in Kolkata but I have been born and brought up in Chattisgarh” and then pat comes the next question “so you are not a Bengali?” Grrrrr 👿

#4 Dear Kannadiga people in my Lunchmates group

Lunch is a common conversation time for all members in the group…to eat and chat together. By starting off in Kannada between 4 of you, the remaining three of us feel very isolated and bad. When all of us can talk and understand English and Hindi, resorting to Kannada is not good IMHO. A lunch or dinner conversation at a table should involve all the people sitting at the table. Please speak in a common language.

Phew!! Feeling lighter after getting these rants off my mind.

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Just Another Day

A birthday is just the first day of another 365-day journey around the sun.  Enjoy the trip.

As a child, I simply loved celebrating birthdays with cake cutting ceremony, balloons and gifts 🙂 Lunch also used to be a major event with an extensive menu of at-least 7 different types of dishes. Not that I had any huge birthday party…it was just a family affair. Later in teenage, when I developed a close friendship with my classmate and neighbor, she became the sole invitee to my birthday celebration. As soon as my birthday was over, I used to countdown to the days remaining for the next birthday. 🙂

Then I went to hostel. I still remember the first birthday I celebrated in hostel; the midnight wishes, receiving card and gifts, the cake smearing more than cutting, midnight snacks and cold drinks, dancing routine and the birthday bumps, giving treat to friends next day or someday in the week. 🙂

Then I came back home and though again there was no invitee, celebrated birthday with same enthusiasm. If my birthday was after summer vacation at work, I distributed sweets at work and gave treat to colleagues-friends. Although I had the policy of taking leave on that day if there was nothing urgent.

After marriage, birthday celebration has been with D alone. But with cake and balloons nevertheless and of course gift, movie and restaurant lunch/dinner. And blessings/wishes from both sides of the family.

But this year, after many years, I had to go to work. Though it was a holiday due to fourth Saturday, there was exam scheduled on that day and those coming to work will get a compensatory leave later. So for the benefit of an extra leave I decided to go. It was an enjoyable day. I distributed sweets to all colleagues present and my lunch group colleagues-friends gifted me a saree which was a complete surprise. By the time I reached home it was 5.30 pm and we were going for dinner outside so no time to bring cake, cut it etc. So there was no cake and no balloons. Just a quiet dinner at Barbecue Nation. Well not exactly quiet…with the loud music and servers doing a dance routine 🙂 That is Barbecue Nation style.

D’s 6-year-old nephew called to wish and inquired about my birthday celebration and after hearing that I didn’t cut any cake and didn’t put up any balloons, concluded that I had a very “boring” birthday. Sigh!! 😦

So I think, as my mother used to predict, I have grown out of the phase of usual birthday celebrations and counting days to the next birthday. Someday in the coming years I may even forget its my birthday. God forbid!!! 😯

But then……….Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.  ~Chili Davis

P.S. for those who don’t know, my birthday was on 22nd June and it was also my WordPress birthday as in I had moved my blog from Blogger to WP in 2008 on that very day.

नौकरी की तलबगार

“The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.”~ Oscar Wilde

I had resigned from my job in July 2011 after working for 6.5 years and moved to Bangalore with D. After being in the teaching profession for so long and loving and enjoying it to the core, I couldn’t think of any other career. But I had no idea that the search for a new job in Bangalore would be hard even when there are so many engineering colleges here. For the same reason I had not searched for a job before resignation. Though I admit I was not that proactive in the beginning because I was kind of enjoying the break from work and was also busy setting up home and playing host & good DIL to in-laws. 🙂 But soon enough I became proactive and here is my tale of job search in Bangalore.  Why a whole post on a topic like job search? Because it is my first experience of job hunting. My first job is the only job I have ever been in and I had got that quite easily. I stayed at same job and same place for 6.5 years.

“Bullet”ined

This post was destined to be a movie review post but due to bad Internet connection, laziness, busy life and travel it got delayed and more delayed till it has now become a casual bulleted post giving my readers some random updates instead of a post having paragraphs. Sigh!! Such is the influence of Twitter. But then brevity is the soul of wit! 😀 But this is not a funny post either. Sigh!

Bangalore Calling

No…this post is not about  the book.

This post is about the end of an era. Of life in Pune…perhaps forever.

Rocking 2010!!

Last year I had written about my wishes for 2010. As the year draws to a close, let me now check how many and how much of those wishes came true –

# May my project work get over soon without much difficulty.

Project is near completion 🙂 Will be settling down in Pune in 2011.

Introducing D

He sketches, plays guitar and sings. I read books, blog and tweet.

He loves hot and spicy food. I can’t eat anything having more than 1 mg of chilly.

He dislikes Harry Potter. I simply love Harry Potter.

He loves horror movies. I never watch any.

“Blindingly Dumb”

I had to come back from my blogging break to write this post.

Day – 6th Nov 2009

Time 2:45 pm

Road Rash in Real Life

This is one of the levels of the popular PC game “Road Rash”. Sadly I play this game in real life daily. How? My daily drive from my home to the college where I work is nothing short of  Road Rash’s The City but of Level 5. The description “Nasty traffic and zombie pedestrians” does no justice to the categories of people I come across while driving. Unlike the kicks the biker in the game has, I am armed only with :-

Memories of Ragging

Ragging and its consequences are in the news again after the death of a 19 yr old medical student recently. Debates and discussions are going on the issue of prevention of ragging and enforcement of laws. My post, however, is not on that topic. My post is on the fond memories of ragging I have from my B.E. days and the effect it had on us.

On the first night in hostel, we had the huge task of memorizing all our hostel seniors’ names and hometowns and our introduction in Hindi. Thank god I had pretty good memorizing power and I was in Electrical Engineering branch which was easily translated into “Vidyut Abhiyantriki”. We pitied the girls of CSE or Electronics.I also chose Philately as my hobby to avoid any further questions and it was one of the cleverest decisions of my life 😀 [ You can check out samples of my stamp collection here] Only one 4th yr senior was smart enough to think of a question to ask me regarding Philately. She asked me what was the image on Rs 1 stamp and I answered correctly. She let me go 🙂

T for Tag, R for Retrospection

An alphabet tag is moving around in the blogosphere. A letter is assigned and one has to write about 10 things one loves that begin with that letter. Now Apar assigned me Q, Vishesh allotted B and Willow tagged me with M. You know from now on once I am tagged for a meme, I will put up a header image declaring “TAGGED FOR XYZ MEME” ..on the lines of shouting “don’t touch me” when someone tries to give you a new pinch. Hope you all know the custom of new pinch 🙂

Few weeks ago, Sulz had asked for help from her readers. She needed topics to blog about and I had suggested that she can write about “Ten good things that you have done in past one year. or maybe ten lessons that you have learned in past one year.” After reading her post I was impressed by my own suggestion and decided to write a post about my lessons. So I have decided to incorporate this tag with a round up of the important events of my life and the lessons I have learned in year 2008.

My First Stage Show

Being the faculty in charge of EETA, I’d organised Jhoom – 2008 along with students. Then the students wanted to conduct the yearly branch function of Electrical and Electronics department before the half year session ended. Last year I’d suggested the name Spark 2007 for the function. This year the students came up with Resonanzzz 2008. So I along with my colleagues and students organized the function on 4th Oct 2008. The function consisted of songs, dances (solo and group), drama, some interactive games, dandiya in open space and dinner for around 400 people. Our Head of Department had insisted on having some programs from the faculty side. So for the first time in history of our college, faculty participated in a branch function and showed their talents.

Parents, Daughters and Over Discipline

Parenting is a difficult task. Some tend to do it the way they have sub-consciously learned from their parents, some try out the things their parents never had, some tend to follow books on parenting, some on the basis of some fixed notions and so on. Some parents are very strict disciplinarians and some just tend to spoil their kids badly. And then some are somewhere in between. Some families have the dominating father-docile mom combination whereas some have the henpecked husband-dominating woman combination. And then some are just rightly balanced. But the point of my post is not to discuss parenting or types of parents. The point of my post is to discuss the effect of parental strictness on kids especially daughters. Why daughters? Because I don’t have much knowledge of parents’ behavior towards sons. And because I being a daughter myself can relate more to other daughters of the world. Also the incidents that inspired me to write this post happened with daughters.