choose your evil

The grass is greener on the other side...but that's because the muck is also deeper there :)

- kris, one afternoon, consoling a friend

my excuse

Relationships are complicated. Friendship is simple. I am lazy. Whatever.

-- kris, late on a tuesday afternoon, on twitter.

Murphy's law of shopping

If you go shopping, and look/check out a few things without looking at the price tags, the one you like will be the most expensive of the bunch.

My list so far: wine (and I'm a very uneducated taster), clothes (every single time), perfume, sunglasses...the list goes on!

un-survival instincts

i have this habit of keeping stuff in my bike's dashboard. tonight, it was a largish book that just about fit.

i was riding home from mich's place with the book jammed into the dash best i could. which actually seemed rather snugly jammed in, to be honest.

till i hit a bump and it flew out.

what happened next is beyond my comprehension.

i took both my hands off the handles, grabbed the book while braking with my foot pedal, and put the book back in. while the bike was still getting out of the bump.

i could have done it easily with just one hand.

the book was resting nicely on my lap, so i could have waited to get out of the bump and then some.

braking could have actually make things worse as the book would have a tendency to fly forward. not to mention the bike getting out of control.

thankfully, the bike didn't so much as waver in the slightest. i did freak out a nearby rickshaw driver though.

i really wonder where that reflex came from. because it certainly wasn't from the need for self preservation.

say what?

Had snip be bad. This tax high y b available tnibd.while coz I game.id ,les I gas r task. Wkaywvec

- kris, on twitter, at 5am, after half a bottle of scotch.

ps: i didn't even know i did this. it would have even slipped by unnoticed if it wasn't for an observant friend. the extreme incoherence is also partly because of the touchscreen and my huge thumbs :D

happy good friday

n is my friend from office, k is (as usual) me...conversation at 10pm yesterday, in office after the maundy thursday service :)

n: so, all set to enjoy the long weekend?
k: ummm...not exactly...it's more of a religious thing...
n: it's some sort of feast right?
k: well not exactly a "feast". just some very religous days. the last 3 days of jesus' life. we go to church and stuff. i was in church just now for like the last 2 hours. i'll be in church for like half of tomorrow.
n: oh, so what do you do in church...you actually pray for so long?
k: no, we don't just pray...it's sorta a re-enactment of jesus' last 3 days.
n: like a play?
k: no, not a play. just some symbolic stuff. like today we had the last supper and washing of the feet.
n: okay, but there is some feast right?
k: yeah, that's easter. on sunday, when jesus came back to life.
n: he came back to life?
k: yeah, pretty much so.
n: and he's still alive?
k: yeah, he stayed around for a few weeks or months and then went to heaven.
n: so did he just come off the cross?
k: oh no...he died and he was buried and stuff, and he came back to life after 3 days.
n: wow, he dug himself out?
k: okay, sorry, he wasn't exactly buried. he was put in something like a coffin and put in a cave.
n: they just left him in a cave?
k: oh no, it was actually a tomb that was like a cave. they closed it with a huge stone and all.
n: so what did he do?
k: he came to life and rolled aside the stone and waited for his disciples to come to see him.
n: wow, he came out of the coffin and opened the cave by himself?
k: yeah he did...
n: *incredulously* wow, really!!!
k: *shrugs* it's what we believe in.
n: cool!!!

ps: reproduced (and probably slightly altered in the process) without permission :D

a day in a train

I've never been too much of a long distance traveller. the longest journey I've ever embarked on took me 25 hours thanks to a 5 hour breakdown (it was a bus journey from bangalore to bombay, btw).

this one on the other hand is scheduled to take 29 hours. bombay to chennai.

I'm currently 23 hours and 4 states into the journey, and it's been okayish with a strong hint of boring. probably because of the company though.

the 25 hour bus journey was wit marj after all, and I do have a record breaking 7 hour phone conversation to set some sort of perspective to how well we get along.

unfortunately for me this time, my friend can sleep almost unlimited hours...and apparently so can the remaining 4 people we share our berths with. I was pretty surprised when I woke up at 7:30am to find everyone in my berth asleep, and everyone in the other berths with their curtains drawn, presumably also asleep. trudged to the loo expecting a long line and a 45 minute wait. but I didn't see a line, and the loo was spic and span, and there was no one waiting impatiently even after I took all of 15 minutes to do my business. in fact, the people who had preordered breakfast were woken up by the trays shoved onto their snoring faces (to be fair though he did perfunctorily try to wake them up).

I on the other hand had already brushed and was already feeling the pangs of post crap stomach emptiness. so far so good. but my friend fell asleep right after breakfast, and so did everyone else. some people just skipped breakfast and woke up straight for lunch. which was at noon btw. I slept quite well myself, probably more due to the fact that it was Sunday morning than anything else. everyone woke up for lunch and slept promptly after. I was bored out of my wits by the monotonies of reading, listening to music, and sleeping. i had just finished my book, and my friend was hungry, because we didn't quite comprehend the menu as it was being recited to us, and ordered just half a lunch. so we went to the pantry, two coaches away. which incidentally is the furthest I've walked in the last 24 hours. the train had stopped at a platform when we were done eating so we walked back on the platform. my only 120 seconds outside of the train today.

the train started as we reached our coach so we were forced back in. so I took out my diary, and after over 2 years of carrying it around on vacations, wrote a whole page in it.

unfortunately diaries are limited to a page a day, so I was back to reading. by 6pm I was bored enough to let myself the luxury of an hour of surfing on roaming charges with no charging point in sight. I was that bored. back to reading, this time arundhati roy's "god of small things", which I read till dinner at 8 and then lights out at 10.

I can't wait for the train to reach chennai. still 6 hours to go. and that's if it actually reaches in time, which trains rarely do.

and I'm still one hour short of a whole day in this train.

ps: first post typed on my new phone. woo hoo!