"Happy" Blog!

A friend suggested that I should also have one of these! So here I am back to blogging. Well, it so happens that, I have quite a few friends who have spent an year in the country that has always been under consideration in most of my blogs! Quite a few of them started writing blogs and just stopped in a couple of months. The point I am trying to make here is that everybody gets on with their lives! Blogging is not as much fun when you are NOT so much frustrated with life!

Well I have ALL the reasons to NOT be frustrated today! I am going in an hour's time to have a few beers with 5 other guys all of whom are americans and discuss where to buy guns! Yeah you got it right! I am talking about guns. The reason Gulshan Kumar is no more. The reason Sanjay Dutt spent 11 months in jail. (Yeah, you got it right! I got all these wierd examples from a certain gangster who features quite prominently in most of the leading indian dailies these days!) If you still don't know what I am talking about, I am talking about the object loosely shaped on the lines of an inverted "L" with a trigger in between. (I added the "loosely" for all those perfectionists out there who are going to come back at me saying. No way a gun is like an inverted L)

So coming back to the beer gang! The first time I participated in this small party, I was baffled. How the hell can these guys talk about firing guns leave alone purchasing one! Then I realised the big american dream. "Shooting for the stars". Only they plan to do it literally. One guy was extremely disappointed with himself. "The only thing I have ever shot(\been able to shoot) was a bird." Gotta tell him, "You're getting there buddy! All the stars on Ursa Minor are just a stone's throw away!"

So apparently, you can just go to some store and buy a gun. Ok, so I will have a loaf of bread, milk and hey that's a cool gun you got there! I'll have that too!
No licence required! I am pretty sure there is a way of ordering one online too!

Ever since I got an email id of @umd.edu, I get mails like these everyday!

From: Campus Police
Subject: Crime alert

Incident: Assault
Occured: Today
Reported: Today
Location: Address

Brief Details: A whole bunch of crap followed by "the victim then heard a gun shot fired from a semi automatic/ (or worse still) automatic revolver of" such and such caliber and so and so make!

Then comes the best part!!

Prepared by: Police Major
Officer of the chief

They have actually hired a guy whose job is to send these mails everyday! My friends were once working on a business plan and wanted to give me the job of CMO(chief mailing officer). Well they were a bit too late! They already have such posts here! And they obviously don't have to do too much. Hand every other guy a gun and these people won't be out of job!

I was discussing this gun problem with a roommate of mine yesterday. His immediate reaction was, "we should have a gun each too!" And I am very sorry to say, he is absolutely right!

Ok I am off to the gun! Oops! Beer party now!

Happy Devoli!

Yeah thats how its spelt....... Ask any native here. And if your instincts yell out, "you can't even say it (or for that matter spell it) properly", then you gotta ask yourself, CAN YOU????
Devoli is actually spelt Da choti ee ki maatra, Va aa ki maatra, La badi ee ki maatra and probably not even Diwali as most of us like to spell it as..... Ok i am not here to teach language classes. And specially not hindi language classes. Because as my good old friends point out, I don't really understand these languages..... I started with Tamil in my childhood. Now i struggle at my mother tongue. Then came hindi where I could never really get the maatras right (feel free to point out any spelling error in my devoli!) Somewhere between(or was it after) that time came english. The language which is probably responsible for my survival..... (My roommate is going to kill me for saying this) Finally, as my good old first yr. roommate likes to say, came C++. So thats FOUR languages I know (Oh! And I also learnt french sometime so that makes it 5) and not one of them I can speak well.

A wise man would say, "Be practical. Just make sure you get your thoughts across." But it gets quite difficult at times. Matlab (no thats not the mathematical computational tool I am talking about), how can you possibly converse in just one language..... Just think about it, the average indian is groomed in such a way that he is just not competent to speak in just one language.....
Yeah I know thats a pretty strong statement to make. But try to actually implement this. You'll find it quite difficult to speak in only one language without any inadvertent use of words of a different language. I am quite sure you'll succeed. But you have to make a conscious effort towards that......