Guess I'm just a weekend blogger:-).

I've been attending a personality development class in office for the last 3 days, a welcome break from Servlets,JSP's and EJB's.

I cant say I learnt anything new but it was excellent time pass. One of the module's covered presentation skills. Each one of us were required to come up on stage and make a presentation on any topic. Easy enough huh? One important constraint though, we would be filmed on camera :P. So the 24 of us came one by one on stage. Some confident, some akward, some incoherent with fear.I think without the camera, we would have all done well. Just the knowledge every word we uttered, every gesture we made would be recorded caused some of us to become extremely self concious.

So after we'd all been taped came the fun part. Watching ourselves on TV. I'd been the first to go. I was fairly impressed with myself :P. I liked my voice, my glasses and I was quite natural :P :P. I kept grinning like an idiot though. People told me I had a smile on my face all the time, so it was a good thing. Personally I thought I grinned like a deranged orangutan.

Also I was struck my resemblance to actor Matt Damon.No I'm not trying to flatter myself nor am I comparing Matt Damon to a deranged orangutan. I just think I have quite a resemblance to him.

Last evening my mother and I attended a play by The Madras Players at the Egmore museum. It was a one man play, the artist being the famous PC Ramakrishna. The play was titled 'Mercy' and was about Euthanasia. It was about a man whose wife slips into coma. 1 month, 2 months, 8 months pass and she does not come out of it. The man does not know what to do. Should he prolong her life, never knowing if she will ever wake up or should he ease her pain and kill her? He remembers how his wife was always in favour of mercy killing. So after torturing himself for a long time, he decides to ease her pain. He wants to mix sleeping tablets in her feed at 9:00 PM. By 11:00 PM it should all be over. Just before he does it, he drives to a temple about 2 hours from the city to beg forgiveness from his wife's favourite diety. On the way home,it starts pouring heavily and his car breaks down. Its 2:30 in the morning by the time he comes home. He enters the house and finds everybody in his wife's room.Its a miracle, she's regaining conciousness!

The wife slowly regains her health but the man's guilt eats away at his heart. To think he almost killed her! Everyday becomes more burdensome than the one before. Finally he cant take it anymore and he kills himself.

I found myself quite affected by the play because it was uncomfortably close to what my family went through when my father was in hospital. The sheer frustration and

madness the actor depicted was exactly what we experienced.When well meaning relatives come and tell you to go pray at this temple, do a thousand pradharshanams at another temple, smear this holy ash on my fathers forehead, feed the poor at another temple, dissolve jaggery the shore of yet another temple...it drives you mad! What kind of God needs all this nonsense?

I really didnt like the ending though. I know that every play usually ends with a twist but I couldnt digest this one. Was he not being terribly unfair to his wife by killing himself?

So those have been the events in my life this week. I have an alumni meet in college today, guess the update will only come next weekend :-). So until then, goodbye.