Average thought process on an average evening

19:00

I am bored

19:25

Maybe I'll write something

19:27

What do I write about though?

20:00

*Phone call*

Me: Hello?

Friend: Hi. I am at this cool fort kind of a place and the girlfriend whom I ignored you for all these months is not talking to me or posing for pictures with me, so I am feeling awkward and need to project a cool dude image to all her roommates, so I need to act unconcerned and busy, so talk to me.

Me: Um ok.

Friend: So how's it going?

Me: Oh well, it started out with-

Friend in background: Oh wait, take one of me like this. With this hat on. One sec.

Friend to me: I'll call you in a minute.

Me:Bye

20:12

*Phone call*

Me: Hello?

Friend: Ok, talk now

Me: So as I was saying-

Friend in background: Ha ha. I'll tell you later. I'll tell you later I say.

Friend to me: I'll call you later.

Me:Bye

20:17

Me to roommate: You know about this article about how girls just use nice guys to get stuff done and to crib about their boyfriends and when they get asked out by said nice guy, they don't want to 'ruin the friendship' so the nice guys basically always get ignored and finish last?

Roommate: No

Me: That's ok I'll send you the link. But anyway, I'm gonna write an ode to nice girls- the girls who get ignored; the girls who set their friends up with their bff's and then fall off the face of the earth (or atleast the terrain of their friends' love stories); the girls who get called to proofread SOPs, Resumes, Cover letters, who get called up when referrals are needed for an internship, a part time job but never for holiday meetups because the 'girlfriend wouldn't approve'; the girls who get called when there is trouble in paradise and who sit through hours of "that bitch.." and "I cant believe she is doing this to me.." when they have a project proposal due the next day; the girls who will always be 'the best girl I've ever met, but..'.

Roommate: Dude I cant find my cell phone charger. Have you seen it?

20:40

Staring at laptop is nice

21:05

I am bored

21:11

Maybe I'll write something

21:13

On all the jerks I usually attract???

21:15

Gender stereotyping in the movies???

21:17

On why I am not a big fan of Selvaragahavan movies???

21:20

On how my mom is the coolest and I admire her more as I grow older and more mature???

21:35

Me: Back home?

Friend: Nope... In car...   Sent from my iPhone

Me: I'm bored. Want to write. Dont know what about though.

Friend: Write about why each of us is a hero and an asshole at the same time.

Me: Mmm... too deep. Something else?

Friend: How maturity comes with age.. How what we did few years back seems dumb now.

Me: Ok that kinda occurred to me in a different way. I'll work on that. Give me something else.

Friend: Environment. Sent from my iPhone

Me: achi peh

Friend: Seriously .. You can write it in a lot of depth if you research.

 *silence*

21:40

I am bored

21:43

Maybe...

21:43:20

Screw all of you. I am going to watch ugly betty and kill some brain cells.

Do I know you?

I wrote earlier about how I stuck this trackbar (yeah the Live Traffic Feed in the lower right) in my blog to figure out whether my family knows about the existence of this blog or not. After several excited data analyses the first few days after I got the trackbar, I gave up trying to imagine who could be reading my blog. Now, every time I open my page, I scroll over to see if anyone other than myself has visited it and try mapping it to people I know. I am fanciful that way. I try to imagine the lives of people who read my blog and whether I ever pass them on the street without knowing it.

That brings me to my question. Who are you, oh person from Richmond, Virginia? Do you live in Columbus, Ohio? Why is the DoD your Internet Service Provider? Do you work for the DoD? Do you VPN in to my blog? Do you like it? My blog I mean, not the DoD. Do I know you?

Who are you, reader from Scranton, Pennsylvania?

Who are you?

Time

I wonder a lot about the flow of time through my life. How it speeds up and slows down at will so I can never say if a summer went by too fast or too slow. I wonder about what I would be doing a couple of years from now, this very date. I try to remember what I was doing this exact same date, a few years earlier. It helps put your problems into perspective and it reminds you of the person you were. And dream about the person you might be. That's one reason I write. It makes the past a lot easier to remember and a lot clearer.

On prejudices

A few months back I wrote about prejudices, about how I was falling prey to the convenience of them- the convenience of fitting people into different categories that predict expected behavior so you would know how to behave around them. The problem with prejudices is the problem with any classification algorithm. You are trying to fit an infinite range of people into a finite set of classes. And even the strongest classification algorithm supported by the strongest of data has its flaws. And there will be outliers.

I have never been exposed to people from other parts of India much. Tamil Nadu has always been stereotyped as an extremely self-sufficient or in less flattering terms 'not a very convenient place to stay in if you are an outsider and don't know the language'. So we don't have as many out-of-state people per unit area in Chennai as, say. Bangalore. Thus I grew up conveniently ignorant of how the rest of India behaves and had no need to learn the prejudices and stereotypes that try to describe an entire group of people in a few words. Now that I am outside my little cocoon and meet new people from across India all the time (what better place to meet Indians than the US) I have given in to this deplorable habit of learning about stereotypes and trying to fit people to them. And as I do that, I also come into contact with stereotypes about Tamilians. Like any self-obsessed blogger, I love hearing what people think of me and how they perceive us as a people. And a lot of it is news to me. As a disclaimer I must state that my family is not the stereotypical Tamil family and a lot of that is due to my mom who is not the stereotypical Tamil mo. So the reason I cannot make any sense of Tamil stereotypes is not maybe because the stereotype is false but that I am an outlier. That being said, I feel a lot of the people I know would be outliers.

Myth #1: Our ability to speak Hindi and English
A lot of my friends can speak impeccable Hindi though I personally suck at it. But most of us are pretty good at English. Most shop keepers and auto drivers can understand English and the ones that do love showing off. So have no fear. But I speak for Chennai more so than any other city/town/village. So dont take this as a general rule.

Myth #2: Our food habits
I hate curd/yogurt. I prefer rotis more than rice.

Myth #3: Our language obsession
We are not all fanatical about our language. Speaking for myself, I don't understand a lot of the most beautiful words of Tamil beyond the ones I use in everyday conversations and the only reason I can read and write it haltingly is because my grandmother taught me the letters of the text from gossip magazines about film stars. And that is the case for most of the urban youth. A lot of us are more comfortable with English than Tamil and I agree that that is a sad sad thing.

Myth #4: Our chutney serving sizes are too small
Chutneys come with unlimited refills. Ask and it shall be given.

Now follow the Chennai myths.
Myth #5: Autodrivers rip you off if you don't know Tamil
First things first. There are no fixed auto fares in Chennai. The meter is for show. It hasn't been in popular use since 1998. Everything is negotiable when it comes to auto drivers. The direct implication of that is that you are only as strong as your negotiation skills. If you are an outsider, you are going to get ripped off because you are not going to know the standard fare for going from point A to point B and that is a chink in your bargaining armor. And trust me, our auto drivers are a hardened lot. If they see a weakness, they will swoop in for the kill. The end result? You will be taken for a ride, pun intended. It has nothing to do with the fact that you don't know our language. It is not personal. If you don't want to get ripped off, study up on the rates you have to pay and brush up your bargaining prowess. Else, call a cab. We do have them and share autos and buses for the faint of the heart.

Myth #6: Chennai Tamil is ugly Tamil.
This is a myth that people who grew outside Chennai love to propagate and stress on every time I comment on their Tamil. Chennai Tamil is NOT just slum Tamil. We are NOT just a city of slums. The slummish version is a stereotype that Vivek the Comedian made famous and we didn't mind because he was funny. But we do not all start every conversation with "Ae kasumaalam".

Some generalizations about Tamilians and Chennai are true. We are a coastal city and the climate is typical of that. It is extremely humid. We love Rajinikanth, more so because he is a humble and generous actor, than for any other reason. We are not yet completely conducive a state to outsiders but we are slowly becoming better at understanding what outsiders need and implementing it- English signs on all buses and road corners and most shops is one such step.

All being said and done, stereotypes exist for a reason and do apply for the vast majority and as long as you remember that there will be exceptions and take care to not judge people too fast you should be fine. And personally, I am going to stop subscribing to prejudices and trying to slot people. That can be my new year resolution.

My Australian cousin shot this pic. Due credit therefore must go the typical NRI Praveen Gounder

And it begins again

I've been meaning to write for a long time. After all a lot always happens in December. I have a lot of half written notes floating around in my laptop's disk from all the posts I meant to write but got distracted through midway- one about my birthday, another about my trip to Arizona for a friend's graduation, another about being awkward around strangers, another about getting drunk on other people's happiness and happiness sponsored tequila shots and yet another about pretty girls making bad relationship mistakes which was precipitated by my Arizona friend's roommate bawling her eyes out several times a day everyday over her boyfriend.

This note however is not about something that happened. On the contrary, this is about nothing happening and about how my life seems to have become stuck in stagnation and how i wake up everyday with an incredible sense of deja vu. I talk a lot about the minor events of my life, how I'm feeling on any given day and in general treat my blog as a diary with minimal explanation about why I am feeling what I'm feeling and minimal context. The reason is I have no idea who reads my blog and who doesn't. Over the last few years, some very random people have told me they read my blog, my ex-roommates aunt for one, and I dont know if I am comfortable with some people knowing some parts of my life. Not to be secretive or anything, but I dont want to worry my family or scandalize them. Which is why I came up with the very clever idea of tracking my audience (thats the bar you see on the lower right) but clearly it is useless for anything except to feed your ego. So I've given up. I think this is a personal dilemma every public blog writer has to go through- how much do I put on my page, how much can I reveal and how do I not use my blog as a vessel to showing off and projecting an image of you that is not the real you but the you you've always wished to be.

Anyway, breaking out of this digression, the reason for my worry these days is that I am planning on graduating in March and my job search still winds on. When I got my internship a couple of months back, I was pretty sure I was set for life, that I'd never have to face the debilitating waiting and applying and hours and hours of staring at job listings and the slow waning of your confidence with every rejection. I thought I'd know what to expect this time around. And that would prepare me better- to get a job and to deal with the pressure if I dont land one straight away. But even knowing what to anticipate doesn't really prepare you for the depression when it hits. And the fact that this time the stakes are higher, that I need to find a job within the limited time I have, does nothing to help. Its like a constant sour taste at the back of your throat, an itching niggling prick that pulls you back to it, even when you try and prioritize and concentrate on something else. I so tried to avoid reaching this point, starting January and my final quarter without a job. There are a couple of my friends in other universities who just graduated and who are still on the lookout for jobs and I saw what that did and does to them. Slowly counting down to a deadline, reaching it, stepping over it and now starting another and more final countdown while waiting for a call and an offer. I saw what the stress does to them and it scares me, makes me kick myself for every interview I messed up.

I miss my friend K. He's gone to India for the winter holidays and among all my friends he is the one person I miss the most. Which is surprising. He is my cribbing partner. Especially when it comes to jobs and relationships and sometimes money, which I guess covers the whole gamut of reasons to crib about. Over the last few months, we've perfected our own cribbing routine.
 "Why is our life like this?" I would go.
"Why should we always be put through this stress and worn thin before being given what we want?" he would ask.
"Why do some people always luckier than us?"
"Why is life so unfair?"
And then we would comfort ourselves with our weak and watery consolation, "Someday we would look back at this and laugh. And we can tell other people that we too struggled to succeed in life. And we would know we are capable of getting through life's incredible penchant for pressure tests."

I had an interview two weeks back with Qualcomm that I kicked ass in. I got a reject a couple of days back and ever since then I have been walking around like a zombie. And yes, that is what precipitated this post. Life begins to descend into the chaos it once was. I am running out of the money I managed to save. I've always had money, so it surprises me that it would mean so much to me and cause me to dissolve into a fit of panic every time I open my account details. I feel lost at times and find myself staring into space for long periods waiting for someone to tell me what to do. I find myself shying away from talking to people I am convinced will never understand this, alienating myself from friends who really have no clue and can only offer mindless platitudes. I find myself letting Led Zeppelin blare through my eardrums and I wonder if anything has changed at all from the last December 23rd.

I tried writing a personal Zeitgest for 2011 but I really cant see much that is worth mentioning and that has changed my life around in the last year. I am sure that is not true and my perception will change when my mood improves but right now if I had to choose a soundtrack that will describe the year with all its associated growth pains, I would go ahead and choose exactly the same song Google chose- "Sooner or Later" (I would have chosen "Good life" for last year too. Seems like the world or atleast Google search statistics  reflects my life, like the country and the protagonist in Midnight's Children which I just finished reading). Its sad that the prevailing sentiment at the end of a year would be "we made it". Here's to an overall better 2012 for everybody.

Coffee cravings and silent afternoons in the university

Am annoyed at myself. I just got mad at a friend. And he wasn't even doing anything. I guess thats why I got mad. 'Coz he wasn't doing anything. I was on the phone with him and it felt like having a conversation with myself. Or talking to a wall. Dont get me wrong. He was listening. But he wasn't really responding. Which was why talking to him was more like talking to myself. And talking to myself is a very bad idea. I tend to out think myself and go back on my own decisions of 5 minutes ago and rethink the common sense of them. And get annoyed at myself. Or at him because he felt like myself in this case. If it makes sense. And annoyed at myself because I got annoyed at him while the person who deserved getting annoyed at was myself. Is that even a coherent thought? I need coffee. A lot of coffee.

It feels like my system selectively metabolizes coffee so fast that I need a cup every hour. I realize I am beginning to sound like a crack addict. I need to check myself into caffeine rehab.

But before that, lets give you some context about my day, just coz I can. I am sitting in my spiffy new clothes, the clothes that were supposed to be my bday clothes (atleast that was my rationalization for going thanksgiving shopping when I neither follow thanksgiving nor christmas, so I really dont have any reason for going shopping except that there was a sale and I really cant say no to a sale but I'd feel bad about spending money for no reason, so  need a convincing enough rationalization. So there!) But now I have already worn my bday clothes so I guess I will have to go shopping again. (Yay!) And I am trying to study. But every time I decide I am going to study some distraction comes up and somebody calls/pings me. Thats the reason I am not productive enough- Technology! And the distractions cause me annoyance so I have to blog about it. And in a bit i will feel guilty I havent done anything all day so I will go study. After having lunch of course. A girl has to eat! Which I havent decided is a good idea or not because according to Hillfiger, I have dropped 2 sizes but according to Victoria's Secret, I have gained 1. I am not sure whom to believe. Commercialism is a confusing source of personal information.

I ran into the professor of the course I am planning on reading up on in a bit, near the vending machine. Gave me such sadistic pleasure to see him as devoid of a life as he cause me to be. University vending machine coffee on the day after thanksgiving.... sad sad life.

I might be visiting India in December again. Just coz I can. And also coz almost every one who mean anything to me in this country will be in India and there really is no point in me just hanging around feeling sorry for myself coz I have no one to talk to here. Might as well go back and hang around with them back in Chennai coz thats where the action in my life is going to be this December. But its still a might, and a rather big one at that. On that happy (or maybe not) thought to my friends in India, I shall take leave now. And get back to my reading about Virtualization.

Someone seems to be on a blogging spree -Life Projects

I think it is all the repressed need to have fun pouring out of me after the crazy week I've had. But I've been having this compulsive need to blog since yesterday and its not like I am doing anything useful anyway, so might as well give in.

Goofy (some) and pointless (most) stuff I've always wanted to do and hope to get around to doing someday.

1. Have a different coffee a day at Starbucks (including the secret not-on-the-menu ones) and write a review blog about them all. Aim: to discover the best coffee there is and get over my single minded obsession with short-Cappuccino-less-foam-whole-milk in the process.
2. Visit every city that has a Saravana Bhavan in the US and order Pongal Vadai and Filter Coffee in it.
3. Brew my own beer. I've been wanting to do this since a friend here actually did it. She still has the necessary equipment. Maybe soon.
4. Go to a strip club. I've been suggesting this as a surprise for every friend's bday party. Somehow always gets shot down.
5. Jump off a cliff. I never really thought I'd do the airplane thing. Always wanted to do the cliff thing like in Rang de Basanti. Maybe next summer.
6. Combine my Flickr page and this blog into a mega me project which will feature my recipes (if I ever cook anymore), my photos and my writing. Update it regularly. Maybe even turn it into a book.
7. Watch the top 100 movies on IMDb
8. Read all of the top 100 books recommended by Times.
9. Print a coffee table book with my pictures of all my travel. Better still, make it a coffee table book of a photo project, like the Red Couch. (I once went around taking pictures of dustbins in Andaman because they were so cute and interesting. Especially in the island of Ross. If you ever have a chance to visit Andaman and go to Ross Island, do notice the dustbins. I am sure some clerk in the Tourism Industry spent hours thinking up each.)
10. I really cant think of any more. Just want to end on an even number.

Sure, I wanna do the serious stuff as well- get back to my music, get back to my dance, buy a better camera, buy a car, buy a house, decorate it, travel the world, get married and sometimes in my idealistic moods, join Engineers without Borders and go to Africa. But for someone with chronic fear of long term plans, this is a good start. Baby steps people!