Guest-list of the wish-list of the voice-list

Technology has developed very much!

This is the one line that loops around in my head as I sit down to prepare a guest-list for the unique party that WeChat has dared me to put together in fantasy. This new application, claiming to be a new way to connect by voice and chat through mobile, sure does open up new possibilities in being connected. Quite specifically in this post, it opens up new possibilities in putting together a wish list of voices with whom I want to chat. They throw an interesting question to me: If I could connect with 5 or more people in a WeChat group - who would they be, and why? What would we chat about? And they also give me absolute freedom in choosing from dead, alive or even fictional people. Hence this guest-list of the wish-list of the voice-list!

This list, just like the app, is all about the magic of 'voice'. So I think of the magical voices I would like to hear and I narrow down the list to possibilities which are otherwise impossible to mere mortals like me. Instinctively my mind rejects most voices that I can hear by turning on the TV or Youtube any day. This chance is not to be wasted on them. Nextinctively, my mind rejects personal friends, girl-friend(s), parents, dead forefathers etc. Though there are many interesting people in this group, I don't want to make it a personal diary. Thus, with due diligence and great care, I compile this list of people, whom I might never ever elsewhere assemble together, to set up a group voice chat.

Technology has developed very much. What else to say?

The bloody red thing

Hi folks, this post is about my personal experiences with a bloody red thing. It is the fluid of life... but, not water. It is that magic potion which helps us to breathe... but, not oxygen. It treats each and every one of us equally regardless of our religion, race, class, caste, sex, belief or IPL team prefrences. The world has produced hundreds and thousands of scientists and millions of new inventions have been made. There are artificial kidneys, artificial lungs, artificial legs and there is even a substitute for Mother’s milk. But till date this red bloody thing has no worthy substitute.

My very first experience with this thing is the curious doubt I had when I learnt how to spell it in elementary school. My teacher wrote this word on the black board – B .. L.. O.. O.. D – and asked us all to pronounce it as ‘blood’. I was confused. With my English knowledge, I could only justify pronouncing B L O O D as ‘blued’ but it is not even blue to be named that. Of course, the bloody red thing I am talking about all this while is the blood itself and this post intends to tell how B.. L.. O.. O.. D can spell L.. I.. F.. E  to many in the world today through a process that is spelt D.. O.. N.. A.. T.. I.. O.. N!

A must-see place in Chennai and a must-introduce man to our kids

I am going to start this article with a little anecdote. It is about the fashionable Che Guerra t-shirt. We all have seen it and of course I met a cousin of mine who was flaunting it one fine day. Out of curiosity, I asked him, “Brother do you know who this man on your vest is?” He said , “Ya they've written his name there – Che Guerra”.. “Ok.. Who is Che Guerra?” "He is a revolutionary” "Well, what kind of revolution did he do?” That became tough for him it seemed.. “Hmm.. he fought for communism.. Against USA perhaps” Perhaps! "You know where he fought for communism?” “Well,that should be one among Russia, China or Cuba”.. O Ernesto Che Guerra, if you are up there and listening, better rest in peace! Well, I don't have any regrets with my brother's notion of Che. We live in an age where we have revolutionised the very act of revolution. True, we get involved in many revolutions against corruption, against injustice to women etc. We raise our voice vehemently and fervently against social injustices! We change our facebook profile pictures! And update status messages and say ‘I am a champion for this cause’

With this context, I am going to tell you about an old-school revolutionary whom I adore and salute. This man is a lunatic, a visionary, an outcast, and a poet – he lived amidst our forefathers in this very own city and his name is Mr. Subramanya Bharathi! I came to know that the home in which he lived has been converted to a memorial and it is still in Chennai. And I went there recently with some of my friends.

Beach cleanup for the olive ridley turtles - Tiruvanmiyur - with CTC and EFI

On February 10, 2013, I chose to wake up early on a Sunday morning and ended up feeling very contented for the decision eventually. Chennai Trekking Club had partnered with Environmentalist Foundation of India to organize a clean-up morning at the Tiruvanmiyur beach, Chennai. This initiative was to keep the beach in a welcome position for the olive ridley turtles that are soon to migrate in masses to these shores to lay eggs. The cause intrigued me and I signed up for the project and managed to convince 2 other friends too to wake up early that day. 

At around 7 AM, I went to the beach and there was already a lot of activity going on. Around 50 volunteers were actively picking up all sorts of garbage from the sands in a particularly ear-marked space in the vast beach and dumping them all in a common place to be collected later. All volunteers were provided with gloves and garbage was collected in many plastic buckets. There was another pile of black garbage bags filled with waste cleaned up on the earlier day. It was pleasing to see the spirit of people participating in the mission. 

The ultimate social game for the non-player

Thanks to Alan Cleaver for the image

Disclaimer: If you are a Mafia wars/ Glassdoor/ Farmville/ Criminal Case/ What-not enthusiast, you might find the content of this post 'hurting' your sentiments and if you can rally around with a strong army which can threaten chaos to law and order, you might even win a ban to my blog and give me great publicity. That way, I can improve my blog's followers from this meagre number to a healthy chunk. 

Every civilization starts with farming it seems. In retrospect, how fitting it seems to be ! If only people resisted to being drawn into agriculture and cattle rearing on computer screens a few years ago, we would have been living in a different planet now! Of course the Vice cities and the like would still have been around but those people would be innocuously killing and looting in solitude in their homes and at best through a LAN connection. And I would not have been receiving invitations to solve murder mysteries on social media now .... If only !

These game hosts refuse to learn even from the age-old wisdom transferred across generations. They missed their last chance when they all entered into their fancy Glassdoors. Nobody seemed to realise that those who live in glass doors should not throw stone at another. Boy! They were throwing invitations around like a storm, forget a stone. Once the glassdoor fad was gone and they emerged out of the door, there was no turning back. The latest one is the crime scene. Most people who claim to solve murders are people who can't find the glasses on the nose when they desperately search for it all around the place.

Luckily, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is not around to see everybody becoming a Sherlock Holmes now. If so, he should only be writing recipe books titled like 'How to become a detective in 30 days?' or 'Anybody can investigate' to find a living in the world today.

Point emphasized. Period.

Learning a different language of the body

I am going to write today about how I learnt a different language of the body recently. Please note I am not using the phrase ‘body language’. It should aptly be the ‘language of the body’. Is there a difference? There should be in the context I am going to speak. Language is a form of expression and general perception typically confines it to the limits of linguistics. When we explore beyond the conventional, we shall be amazed to know how many languages are out there around us – that which we never consciously take notice of ever in our lives. There are languages of the tongue, which we all are familiar with. There are languages of the eyes, which people in love know to speak. There are languages of computers, which coders and programmers manipulate for a living. There are languages of the soul, which philosophers tend to. And then there are languages of the body, which the human body learns to express. 

Dancers, Gymnasts, Actors and even martial arts experts will tell you what this language of the body thing is. It is an expression of the body, with a meaning, structure and grammar on its own. It has to be learned like any other language. It can be used to communicate to and fro with people who know the same language. The language of the body that I am going to talk about today is that of swimming and my terrain is a swimming pool in the summer vacations where I signed up for a swimming course at the age of 21.

Melancholy, guilt and sexuality - a WTK report

Ever felt so melancholic about the ill-fate hunger serves to countless souls and stomachs across the world? If yes, your melancholy could have possibly been caused because you took an extra serving of dessert at a friend’s party a few years earlier. This is hypothesised as per a gentleman named Christian Heinroth’s (1773-1843) views on melancholy as a psychic disorder. I shall be talking more about his theory in this post later. At least my mind can easily digest that there can be some reason in his proposed relation between the dessert and hunger. What it cannot easily gulp down is another gentleman named Shlomo Sigismund Freud’s view that an intensely repressed sexual instinct could have prompted you to take the extra serving of dessert that night. The world knows this gentleman better as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) – the father of psychoanalytics.

Err... I have been reading an interesting and very heavy (size-wise and content-wise) book called ‘Sigmund Freud & The science of psychoanalytics’ recently. I know it sounds a bit weird but I can assure you all of my mental health while writing this post. It is a passing reference to Heinroth and his work in the book that stimulated this thought in me that has emanated as this article. Yes.. now you may understand what the WTK means. If you can bear with this kolaveri, read on further. 

Why every entrepreneur should read Harry Potter

A quick question to start with – Have you read the Harry Potter books already? If yes, you will not need my help with the Potter jargon and you might as well find this post interesting, especially if you are an entrepreneur of some sorts, considering the angle in which I have tried to bring out this article. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it if you have the habit of reading and I can give you an assurance that it is not, as per the general perception of most non-readers, an over-rated childish story.

I always have a special feeling about Harry Potter and I just feel that the time has not come yet for it to be unanimously accepted by all reading community as a classic. This is a usual problem that many contemporaries face since the work would not have been time-tested yet. People would have even debated about the quality of Iliad or Ulysses or the Lord of the Rings series when they were initially published. As they withstood the test of time and passed on to our generations, we accept their classic status without a question and some even go on to stack them in the most inaccessible corners of our book shelves.

In my native language Tamil, I can draw the analogy of the most recent cult-classic- Kalki’s ‘Ponniyin Selvan’, which was initially published as a long and continuous story in a magazine that came every week. I can imagine how the story would have fascinated readers back then and made them waiting for the next edition of the magazine to catch the story’s next chapter. This is a fascinating story that made me sit and read about 2000 pages at one go in 3-4 days. I can see the pride in some old timers even now when they say that they read the Ponniyin Selvan in the magazine version and that pride emanates from being a contemporary witness to a classic in its creation stage. Many of them have even went on to name their kids after certain lead characters in Ponniyin Selvan. For all we know, we might be the generation that names their kids Harry, Albus or Severus* and speak proudly about the experience of waiting for the release of the next Potter book in the future.

The bald truth about cynicism

One question before you read anything in this post. Please take a paper and pencil and list down the ten most cynical men you have met in your life. He can be a famous cynical celebrity; your school's principal; or even your distantly related uncle who has staunch doubts about the Indian economy and your company's future in particular (though he thinks that the MNC where his son works is well hedged against all risks). Now that you have written down the names, count the number of bald men in this list. How many did you get?

If you are at any stage of balding yourself, I bet you will cynically complain about the purpose of this exercise, question my sanity and move on to the next complaint. If not, there are bright chances that your answer contained more than half of names in that list. Why did we do this exercise? Let me take a little detour. I had a recent conversation with a very cynical man on a very sensitive topic. What started as a conversation turned into an argument before culminating in a long 'there is no hope' sermon which I was forced to sit out. Thankfully though, halfway into the sermon, this sudden hypothesis struck me and it seems to grow in logic with time as I think of it. Can baldness be related to cynicism in men ?

As I thought further, most cynical people whom I know turn out to be bald, though the corollary does not seem very convincing. Most cynics are bald. All bald men are not cynics.

My bucket list of biking

Image : Thanks to Michael Wilson photography

Motorcycles and horses have a very close similarity in my thinking and they fascinate me equinely - oops .. equally ! I do not know which passion came first but they feed one another mutually with petrol and oats and a lot of dreams. I admired bikers and horsemen alike when I was a kid and as I grew up, I learned to ride one of them and the other one still remains a distant admiration. Considering that I had to wait till I was 18 and officially approved by the state to ride a bike as per my uber-cautious parents, riding a horse seems quite a distance away in my life yet. But I still have a strong hope on the fuel prices and I am just waiting for the day when I can ride my own horse to work :-) If I were to make a bucket list of things to do before I die, horse-riding will definitely figure in that list (the Marina beach horse rides are only teasers and they strictly do not fill this bill). So, that sets aside the status and story of one passion for now. As you read on further, you will be introduced to my bucket list of biking - things that I have planned to do at various stages in my life associated with motorcycles and my current status for them respectively.