how to tell home address

today' s evening was booked for a promise, to attend the birthday of my youngest sister whose house is not very far away, although the traffic jam in the city road connecting made me wonder if i would ever reach her house.

there i was also expecting to meet my younger, actually youngest of brothers who gels well with the sister in limelight.

it was a yellow light of a candle with which we were greeted. but i chuckled it was better than darkness. we had no choice, the state electricity board has failed miserably. it has failed to provide darkness to every household in the city. some coal still finds way to power plants.. to keep some lanterns glowing.

And so the proceedings went the usual way, the way which would make children happier. I played chinese whispers , the robot i had brought was walking, the cake was cut, gobbled, metabolized, with help of one glass of rasna and while i might sound nonchalant, it was lovely to be in a birthday party after a long time! i asked my brother who's in class 4 that how can one reach his home. he told that for this i would have to stop after haldiram's outlet, enter phase 1, and there would be a long road ahead, as i would walk along, i would encounter a cut on left, a narrow lane, but this wasn't where i was supposed to go, so i should continue walking , take a right( he actually turned positions to make his description in sync and aligned with his body, soul and spirit) and reach a field. i interrupted to help him ( actually help myself, given his discourse) and asked him his house number. he replied it was 20D/8. but added, that there were two 20D's once i would reach the field, there would be a flag-pole no farther than our refrigerator is to the sofa on which we were sitting. from that point i was supposed to turn left, and there would be a building path to my left, and on the first floor, counted from the ground floor there would be flat number 8 . and then he yells,' so simple n easy'

but he continued that if i wanted a shortcut ( as if i was interested in knowing only the longest route) , i would have to stop before phase I, enter haldiram's , and get out of its back door and not make a silly mistake of entering the main door of food outlet. at the back door, we would be facing a pillar reading' Anupama apartments'. i should walk in, and take a left, then right and then again take a second left to reach the field.

then came a philosophical statement ... see there are two ways to reach the same place !

then he told there was another way to reach his home, the one thru gorabazaar, but that road had 50 lanes left and right, and so was complex..

( as if this wasnt enough :))

then i realized that he would grow up to be a true represntative and champion of all his senior brothers..

NOTEBOOK: by IAN JACK

Thanks to my children I’vebeen watching the latest British sensation on YouTube,which is a three minuteclip called “GapYah”. An upper middle-class student,Orlando, is talking on his mobile to his friend, Tarquin, in west London.Orlando is apparently in Burma, travellingthe world in his “gap yah” —gap year — which is what studentswith rich enough families tend to dobetween school and university. Youmight call it “poverty tourism”. Hetells his friend that in “Tanzanah”,meaning Tanzania, he met a woman who had “like, flies around her eyes”and who looked at him “with this vacantstare but with this sense of enduringhope, yah?” For a second herecognized her as a fellow humanbeing. And then, he tells Tarquin, he vomited all over her. That’s what Orlandodoes: he skips through poorcountries, has adolescent insightsinto their condition, drinks too much,throws up, and then chortles cheerfully at the mess. A hundred years ago asimilar young man might have had “Isay you fellows, what a lark!” as his verbal tick. Orlando’s equivalent is alazy way with vowels and consonants,so that ‘yah’ can mean ‘year’ or ‘yes’.Orlando is, of course, a parody. Ayoung actor and writer, Matt Lacey,created him to satirize, in Lacey’s words, “the great number of peoplewho seem to be leaving these shores tovomit all over the developing world”.In Britain, they’re known as ‘Rahs’and what they have in common is a private education and a place on offer at one of the older universities:Durham, St Andrews and Bristol are among the favourites, though Oxbridgecan never be ruled out. Their sense of entitlement often outweighstheir intelligence.None of this is new. You can catch glimpses of Orlando’s riotous ancestors in the memoirs of William Hickeywhich record with a fascinating detailand candour Hickey’s adventures in Calcutta in the late 18th century.Like many of his compatriots in Bengalat that time, Hickey drank astonishing quantities of claret and brandy (a detail I remember is his spewing from a carriage window, perhaps in Chowringhee) and persisted with a heavy English diet of roast beef and dumplings however hot and unhealthy the season. Diet alone should have secured him an early resting place in the Park Street cemetery,but he survived to live a long and happy retirement in London.The moralism of the Victorian empire put an end to this kind of public excess — the whoring and gamblingas well as the eating and drinking— though the English upper-class buffoon survived as a comic element in literature. In this way, you can see Orlando as a character updated from the novels of P.G.Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, as the latest twist in a long tradition.The surprising thing is that despite all that has happened to British behaviour in the years since— the changes, for example, produced by pop culture — the stereotype still endures. How many people are like Orlando? Quite a few, because my children recognized him as a type immediately and it’s the parody’s accuracy that has made it such a hit.And now a paradox:Orlando and his kind are the butt of popular comedy,and yet within a few weeks it seems likely that Britain will elect a new government that has at its heart a group of men who in their youth were just like Orlando. If all goes well for the Tories, the new primeminister will be David Cameron and his chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne.They and quite a few of their expensively educated colleagues share a common background:prosperous families, the very best schools and Oxford University. At Oxford,Cameron, Osborne and BorisJohnson (now the Tory mayor of London)were all members of the celebrated Bullingdon Club, a socially exclusive dining society the purpose of which, so far as any outsider can tell,is to trash restaurants in drunken sprees and then pay handsomely for the damage. Members dress up smartly in dinner jackets and waistcoats.History records quite a bit of throwing-up. The dry-cleaning bills must have been expensive.Today, nobody in the Tory party is keen to remember the BullingdonClub. Copies of official club photographsfrom the 1980s showing Cameron, Osborne and Johnson can still be found on the web, though theTory party is reported to have tried hard to have them withdrawn. Their membership is excused in terms of “ayouthful indiscretion”. Being an Orlando doesn’t win votes.How then not to be like Orlando?The answer is to sound more ordinary— no more yah-ing, chuckling and braying, no mention of previous pastimes such as hunting and shooting, a new emphasis on pop music and other demotic pleasures. Cameron now likes to be known as “Dave”, just as his political model, Blair, was known by all as “Tony”. Osborne is rumoured to have taken lessons todown-class his voice. The most notable example, however,comes with Cameron’s wife Samantha — “Sam-Cam” in the tabloids — who has an impeccable social lineage. Her father is a baronet and her mother by as econd marriage is Viscountess Astor.The family has large estates in atleast two English counties, and Samantha was educated at one of the best girls’ boardingschools. And how does Samantha sound now? He rvowels are those of a woman who grew up in a London suburb and attended her local stateschool. Orlando, we laugh at; Samantha,we like. If her husband wins, as he looks very likely to, he’ll know that he owes his victory at least partly to social disguise.

kumaon-2

we clicked our camera a few times in the temple area, and came back by SUV

to the main market. next we spent the noon and evening by walking 5 km to the golf course ( returned by a jeep), we were tired and then we wanted a lodge, a good one at reasonable price.so we heard we could get hotels at mall road, ranikhet. but whats this, when we reached mall road, we realised it was the worst mall road i have visited.one restaurant, two good lodges, and 3-4 other hotels. no shops, no people or hustle or bustle. infact it was so quiet that there could be a hissle or even bad, a rustle, given that there was no lighting in road.

so this small inn was where we took paranthas, and tea and rushed back to our den to end the day.

Ranikhet is a highly controlled area by army.army jeeps, vans carrying equipments, ammos, sign boards showing 'restricted entry' are a common sight. another thing common to this hill station is,

that army and other vehicle owners and other people know each other, and these people help each other and greet them on their way.

next morning afer our visit to apple garden, we ran into one such vehicle which dropped us to the bus stand.

a visit to kumaon- I

Jim Corbett wrote world's one of the most famous books ' the man-eaters of kumaon' and made himself immortal.the corbett national park was named in his honour in 1957.

( by the way i am talking of India)

a month ago i paid a visit to ranikhet and almora amidst a hectic schedule , which i suddenly renounced for greater and higher reasons. i managed to complete an assignment of treasury management and gave it for submission and left all other work to catch a train at midnight from ghaziabad station. thus its a personal account of how i felt and may not interest you at all.a more specific blog regarding the trip can be http://exploreindiaa.blogspot.com/2010/02/kumaon-explored.html. but i thought this was my blog so..

the month of February

February is a small month, it is also perceived shorter than the actual 28/29 days it has. and no great birthday or anything good happens in this month. not surprisingly , people show least liking to it and they are right.

except the fact that some people try to be crazy as the 14 th day of this month nears.. they call it rose day or valentine's day. its another matter that no love sick soul tries to browse and find out who valentine was.if they were so curious about that they wouldn't be celebrating valentine's day at all ( there are many possibilities..read the Wikipedia please ). i got a message today , i.e on 9th feb from a friend wishing me happy chocolate day !?..another futile effort to cheer up the damned month.the weather in India is undecided and deceptive. the winter returns after everybody is misled that summer has arrived..the author is one of the countless victims who got a sore throat, headache and fever and paid the price for being not clever and cautious. to add to the disgust is the downpour yesterday, the sort that could beat the best rainy day of the rainy season here in delhi ( the annual rainfall here is anyway a joke, 56cm just).No company is interested in preparing its final accounts , no individual wants to prepare his tax returns.march 31 is too far for this kind of job.the sales people are gasping for breath to complete their year end targets and curse the short duration of this month. the stock markets also do not find direction as does the wind in the doldrums.

Maha shivratri is the saving grace during this time, that too for hindus..

i am yet to find someone telling good things about this time of the year..

marginal utility of happiness and other things

in recent past, there has not been any issue which was significant enough to last my attention for more than one day. ephemeral. and mundane.ignore the grammar for some time please.
the stories of economic revival and RBI's exit policies and possible interest rate hikes..i thought i had some thing finally to avoid atrophy . it seemed to me as if i would do some research and come up with some magical relation between oil prices, inflation and interest rates and promisingly deliver the new whole sale price index ( WPI) as requested by Mr. Montek
but my interest got murdered.. u know the reason .. the media always overdoes it. day after day same opinion put in different words..garfield is wiser than us all.. the fat cat is lazy and indifferent by choice , not by nature.
overdoing is not only in media, but in every realm.. telecom got killed and Auto sector is too going the telecom way. poor suppliers are going to starve and those working in supply chain will become more inhuman in their negotiations with vendors
we also overdo happiness and other emotions. for example one day Ms Y ( 'Ms'-to maintain gender non-bias as taught in business communication classes in MBA and 'Y 'for Y chromosomes)goes out with friend watches a movie, eats,drinks etc.. now she feels she is happy. next day also she goes out to a different place. but third day is a quite day. She ignores it as some sort of aberration. But 4th day she feels she is not having fun, so she thinks more about having fun and in turn becomes more and more bored. Finally she decides she is not happy. the marginal utility theory. now i know i am completely lost at this point. not in life - only in this article.
ok. then if we apply marginal utility theory every emotion should work for us. Jealously, lust, hatred all are good for us till some point. and anger? its a god's gift really !! its my favorite.it works wonders only that overdoing anything is bad.

had started with something else in mind..

Article in line………

Any major decision has to be written first, before that it cannot call for greatness, it need not ,be a great article by all index measures all literate and well read people use

Some people try to look for the quality of words, the more unusual the words used, the more satisfaction they derive, while some look for the complexity of the sentences.

Still others can be found digging for the meaning hidden in between the sentences, hence the term ‘reading between the lines’ (it is all together another matter that the writer had written very innocently)

while still others look for the depth of the knowledge conveyed in fewer and fewer words.

‘deconstruction’ is the term they use to un-accept literature easily and tear down the paragraph written into bits and pieces and find the original intention (bet it was some information to the author too..)behind the work…

Our Hindi poetic literature owes a great deal to ‘deconstruction’ technique to help us understand the meaning with the ‘vyakhya’ (explanation) of the poems we have read in school along with some of the poets still un-gobbled by ‘yama’ ( common ! it’s a fact of ‘death’, it spares no one , so why take offence ? !)

All these indices are beyond doubt unquestionable in their validity and many a great article has been written and judged on the basis of these parameters. In fact (and in practice), it is foolish to even raise your little finger against the unsaid and unwritten, but very much evident norms, in front of say, the British society for literature and science … after all,is it worth staking your life for this insignificant cause ?... secondly ( and primarily) , we are dust particles and no-body would listen to us..

But I feel whether, as complex as salman rushdie’s or as simple as Ruskin bond’s , as so overwhelming as orhan pamuk’s or categorical as APJ kalam, what makes an article great is that it comes across as sudden and straight.. it falls into your hands as if it was an unexpected gift,it seamlessly flows like oil and then suddenly is so straight and clear towards end…

( hope i made some sense)