Of friends and their "songs"

Its getting colder at Penn State........brrrr yesterday was 14 degrees Celsius with wind and rain. And I was out moving only in a shirt and jeans and my umbrella. And it seems today is colder, but I haven't bothered venturing out. Speaking of umbrella, it now has a new significance for me....we've been having parties all week long now......me going over to some people's place or people coming over etc etc. And whenever the parties happen in the building I stay, the song that HAS to play is



And just yesterday S told me that whenever she hears this song 3 years from now, its gonna remind her of the first week at State College. New friends, people, surroundings, relationships this is all so much fun. Though I catch myself thinking of all my years in Bombay and especially the last 5-6 eventful years and how I just have to get in touch with all the people but I just don't get around to doing it. Bra, bawa, akki, pavi, krits, dips, soo-zay, pj, shitty,dave,vg,kp....all you guys......I do plan to mail soon :D Please don't give gaalis! :D I've had such awesome fun times with you guys........it would have been so fun if all were here at Penn State.

And here's to all new friends........and more parkway parties and a whole new sem and so much fun that I can wirte about you guys in my next blog like this 2 years from now when I am somewer else!

For all those who were not there......


whobeinlilreminiscent

Of Glittering pavements and 3 inch shorts

So, I had my first true do-it-yourself trip of my life. "Look at New York City", planned oganized and executed by me. They were the best 24 hours I have had in a long long time. Beginning on 1st August at 4:30pm from Bernardsville Station, NJ it ended at the same station at 4 pm on the 2nd.

Having had a full itenary planned out, it was all blown to bits when my frined (whom I was supposed to meet at WTC), called saying a meeting came up and he had to rush back at 8. So, anyway, we decided to meet at WTC.While waiting for him to arrive on the hot NY sidewalk, I observed the people moving past me. Indians, Chinese and Americans.......these were the headings under which I classified them. Each of them dressed in formal clothes or suits, they had this air of purpose, a look of determination and some sort of destination to which they purposefully strode, pushing others out of the way, sometimes with an "excuse me" or else a shove. This was so much like Bombay.....it was instantly apparent they are called sister cities. No one but yourself. Just for kicks, I felt like asking for directions to Wall Street, so I asked one white guy dresssed in a classy suit to help me out. The guy turned around to hear me out, but didn't stop walking! So I'm hurrying behind him asking him and he continues walking while giving me perfect directions to Wall Street leaving me displaced from my resting place by a 100 metres ! Again total Bombay-style.

Mah friend came, we caught up and then I realized I needed to pee. So what does he suggest? Go up to this Indian Restaurant (which served naan for $3, paneer-mutter for $6) and ask him if I could use the loo. So, thinking Indian-Indian bhai bhai, I did that.

"May I use your bathroom? "

Stares..........20 seconds.Then a nod of the head and a finger lifts in the genral direction of loo.

After I'm done, "Thank you"

Nod towards exit.

Unbelievably rude behaviour! But again, Bombay :D.

Anyway, then we had slices of cheese pizzas, beer and then went to Times Square at 10:30 in the night. Stupendous is not quite the word which does justice to the scene that greeted us. Flashing neons, a mass of humanity omg, Times Square has to be visited once in the night! Friendly, jovial people, tourists and couples mainly. The footpaths again reminded you of the street stuff in Bombay, with various people coming up with innovative ways of earning money.Potrait painters, entertainers, robo-impersonators, stall owners, name em and you find em. Indians, Pakis, Albanians, Chinese, Koreans saw all of them side-by-side with the French, Africans, Italians. Roaming around in Times Square I saw the flashiest wheels on one side of the road, while just next to me there lay an old homeless guy in deep sleep on the pavement!!!

And the pavement, oh my god !!! It actually glitters because of some granite or whatever it is that they have put in it whie making it. So in the faintest of lights you can see it glimmering and shining in front of you, twinkling away, and that makes you feel so good coz you feel like you are walking amongst the stars :D :D

These are the pics of the night :D. Enjoy them and then continue reading !





Cut to 2nd August, morning 7:30 am. After spending time at Times Square till two in the morning (and seeing lesbians and straight couples make out on subway stations ) and spending the whole night awake chatting to friends and uploading pics, and seeing the sun rise in New York City, I was out on the streets again, heading to Rockefeller Centre. On my way I stopped at a roadside cart for coffee (really watery crap) and an onion bagel (cold as an ice-cube, hard like rock). Eating and walking while looking at hurrying locals on their way to work in the sweltering sunny weather made me feel goood in a sadistic way ! :D That I was here, free without a care in the world while they had to go do work and routine boring crap!

Reaching Rockefeller before 8 meant I had sometime to hang around before they opened and let me up onto the observation deck. I spent that time chatting up an Italian couple, Antonio and Camella, from Napoli who were der on their honeymoon (wedding holiday as Antonio put it in his broken English!) and were also waiting for the place to open. NYC from the 70th storey offered a good view, but the dirty yellow-brown smog around the whole city showed the sorry state of afairs Again, made me think of Bombay and its haze. When we went down from the observation deck, in the gift shop below, Iwas waiting while A & C shopped around. We'd decided to go to Times Square together next, coz I already knew the loaction and they didn't have anything specific in mind. So while I was waitin, I got chatting with a black guy at the counter. Turned out his granddad was Indian who went to Guyana and did stuff with the locals there which led to this guy being born. :) His name? Justin Singh. Was funny and awesome at the same time........

Anyway, then we went to Times Square, I'd wanted to see the Ripley's Museum there. On our way to the place, me and Antonio were trying to converse in however way we could, gesticulating, speaking, mouthing syllables. Finally Camella had a brainwave. Digging into her backpack she handed Antonio an Italian-English dictionary while I got an English-Italian dictionary. So der I was explaining that Madame Tussad's was a "muesmo de cera" while he told me he was a "book-keeper" (he meant he had something to do with finance, I gathered he was a fin. consultant or something) and that "mechanical engineering has great profit in Italy". Ohh, it was fun.

After Ripley's I was just moving around in NYC, on the streets looking at the various shops and the goods they had.....did yo uknow you got fake branded stuff on the streets in NY and that you could bargain for it ? I thought that happened only in India ! The 3-inch shorts, by the way refers to the length of the clothing worn by the girls in NYC. The most ostentatious display of legs- fat, thin, wrinkled smooth however the condition, the shorts were ubiquituous. Either that or a tight mini-skirt. Perfect.



love

wholikestravelling.

Stumbled !!!! And loving it !!!

Ohhhhhh...............I love this new feature Mozilla Firefox has...........it lead me to discovering these fantastic site. The first one, its an interactive online radio.........choose what genre you want to listen to, which songs, dance or relaxing, calm or energetic.........its so nice and neat. To think I could have gone through my lifetime without knowing about this site. I need to thank my kid-bro for installing the feature. Good job dude!!

http://musicovery.com/index.php?ct=us

I also discovered this site for just relaxing after a crazy hard day:

http://www.chillmasterflex.com/

I just heard Phil Collins "You Can't Hurry Love" on the interactive radio. Its such a peppy number, I had to log on to YouTube to find and share the video with you people!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brWVEHkP0Bs

love

wholuvtostumble ?

Last times.......

I had Cheese Pav Bhaji, 2 pieces of Veg. Pizza and Cocktail juice today for dinner at Shiv Sagar. A very common place meal for most of the diners at this joint, but it was so special to me.....the last time in a long time I'll be savouring Pav Bhaji with such abandon. I've bought my stuff, done my dental work, got my vaccines, given a few parties, met a lot of people for the last time.......and its 12 days, 5 hours and 37 minutes before I leave home, for a long time, for the first time. I'll miss Pav Bhaji [:(]

Flying............

This is for all the peeps flying to the US soon.......or for those who travel a lot or just for those who love a good laugh. I read this while I was waiting at a dentist's to get my fillings done. It was so good, I actually came back after my filling to complete the article. Here it is for your consumption....

The truth is that airlines have only three types of seats: Misery, Misery Lite and Slightly Comfortable

Charlie Booker
Monday July 9, 2007
The Guardian

Cease wailing, rain-lashed scumsacks, and gasp at my jet-set lifestyle. I've just returned from a bracing whistle-stop tour of Baltimore - or, more specifically, the most impoverished, crime-blighted corners of Baltimore - where we were shooting a documentary about the drama serial The Wire (which is largely set on said corners).

To a wuss like me, it was an industrial-strength eye-opener: boarded-up windows, needles in the grass, crack vials littering the pavement and open-air drug markets aplenty. A staggering corpse of a neighbourhood, so ravaged and despairing that each time you spot a dead rat (roughly every 10 minutes), you assume it committed suicide.

In short, an obscenity; standing in stark relief to the toothless, tourist-oriented central waterfront, where our hotel, a faceless slab, sat coolly humming its way through a minor heatwave. Two worlds, same city. Madness.

Just to make the rich/poor contrast even more apparent, I had flown there first class, for the first time in my life. Not by choice, you understand. The production paid for "premium economy" tickets and, on top of these, I was unexpectedly granted an upgrade. When I stepped on board the stewardess ushered me leftward, to the promised land.

In first class, I had a seat that reclined far enough to become a flat bed. I drank champagne and ate smoked salmon from a china plate with weighty silverware, while watching a flat-screen TV. When I got bored with that, there were a couple of framed pictures on the wall. That was the weirdest, most needless touch. They weren't interesting - just photographs of city skylines - but they weren't there to be looked at. They were there to make me feel special.

"If a terrorist shoe-bombs a hole in the fuselage right now," I thought, "and the plane corkscrews toward the ocean at 1,000mph, I'm going to fix my gaze on that gilt-framed photograph and remind myself that I'm dying in the lap of luxury."

At the time, I didn't really appreciate these myriad luxuries. But come the return flight, stripped of any upgrade, I missed them so hard I went through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Apart from the last one.

Just as Starbucks serves buckets of hot milk in tall, grande and venti sizes instead of "small", "medium" and "large", so airline seating distinctions, whatever they are called, actually break down into Misery, Misery Lite, and the highest achievable grade, Slightly Comfortable. I was now seated in Misery Lite, which was twice - twice - the cost of mere Misery, despite the only difference being a slight spatial increase. Every aspect of Misery Lite was a just a tad worse than first class, for no reason other than it had to be, in order to keep first class seeming first class. The seat reclined (but not too far), the blanket crackled with static, the cutlery was plastic, and the meal smelt like a stomach wound. The in-flight TV had the same movie selection, but a smaller screen. Even the headphones were cheaper. If it were possible, they would make the air thinner too.

Trouble is, the people in first class never get to see any of this, because they are separated by a curtain. For all they know, the whole notion of seating classes could be a con: there might be an open fireplace and conveyor belt sushi bar at the back of the plane. Surely this is missing the point. Whip back the curtain. Treat the first-class fat cats to a guided tour of the poky sardine conditions. Only then can they appreciate their fortune.

Mind you, since comfort is relative, the airlines could, in turn, raise the spirits of the economy section by introducing a new sub-economy class, in which society's most impoverished passengers travel for free, provided they stand atop rickety stools with a noose round their necks for the duration of the flight. Suddenly your cramped economy seat will feel like a gilded throne in comparison. For about 10 minutes. Until the veins in your leg explode.

If they must take the rich/poor divide to the skyways, they could at least be creative about it. Here is the ultimate in first-class entertainment: an interactive screen displaying a floorplan of the economy section. Tap any seat, and up pops a live shot of its luckless proletarian inhabitant. Now, using a videogame-style joypad, you control his environment. You can halt his in-flight movie 40 minutes in, turn the sound so low his ears have to squint to hear it, or play it at half normal speed, so Die Hard 4 seems to be taking place underwater.

You can slowly slide his seat forward, gradually reducing his legroom for chuckles. Blow cold air in his face. Shine lights in his eyes. Remorselessly goad him with a stick. Hidden beneath his seat is a turbulence simulator: activate this if he reaches for orange juice. Seated beside him is an animatronic baby that will scream, dribble or belch half-digested rusk down the side of his face whenever you see fit.

And if physical discomfort isn't enough, why not mess with his mind? Pipe in a faked announcement from the pilot claiming the plane has accidentally flown through a timehole and will now remain airborne for eternity. Chortle through mouthfuls of roast goose as he tries to slash his own throat with his stupid plastic dinner knife. Revel in his desperation! That's what it's there for!

Of course, the inequality of air travel is a caricature of what happens on the ground: space and resources for all, doled out disproportionately. Yet no matter what relative comforts we are gifted, we are all screwed if the wings fall off. Scary thing is, the bolts holding them in place have been loosening for some time. Here endeth the metaphor. Good night.

Let's Dance

A really lovely song.......embodies what all of us should do instead of what we end up doing....

Random fact: Did this song come first, or did the Indian phrase "chance pe dance" come first ?

When I was alone at home....

I was alone (or so I thought) at my place yesterday...watching TV, when I saw her come out of the room. Though shocked at the blatant way she'd presented herself, I ignored her...being engrossed in an inane cartoon on TV isn't too difficult.All of a sudden, I felt her legs on mine......moving across my feet. Thoroughly disgusted, I moved away...trying to keep my cool.

Things were calm for a while, each of us minding our own business. We caught sight of each other at times, but we looked through each other. Its really hard to ignore someone in the same room! She flitted around the room, trying to catch my eye, but studiously I avoided her gaze. And then it happened.....she went in front of the TV screen. And remained there. Not in a mood to argue or talk about it, I just got up and headed to my room. But before I closed the door, she came in behind me. Still not acknowledging, I picked up my textbook and tried studying for the viva I had today.

I felt her whispering in my ear, I could feel her body sometimes near my hands, sometimes my head, sometimes my legs......maan, it was getting more and more difficult to keep myself walled up. With the increased frequency of physical contact, the last of my self-control was gone. I pushed myself up, into position and stared at her. Motionless, we feasted on each other for what seemd an eternity, and then........

SMACK!!!! That was one less mosquito in the world.


love,

whothought-ittoberisque?