Dear Miss Anonymous, I do believe we've got off on the wrong foot :-).

You have taken the pains to point out my callous behaviour by posting comments for each and every paragraph. No one's ever done that before :-).


I read your comment last afternoon in the office, just after I'd finished lunch. I'd just come back from the canteen and was settling into my seat, readying myself for one of those open eyed naps (The kind where everybody thinks you are working, but all you are doing is staring intelligently at the screen saver) when your comment jumped out of the screen and buried itself into my eyeballs.

Was a bit of a nasty shock I must say. No one's accused me of being a non-objective,immature,narrow-minded, ill-tempered and self-centered person who tries to impress people at a different level.

So what can I say?

Perhaps it would be better if I were to convey what I meant in that particular post.

So here goes : When someone half your age tries telling you right from wrong, it will get your goat no matter how right he or she is. Being correct does not give you the authority to tell people what to do in their own homes.(Wife beating and related stuff excluded ofcourse). Cant you see how I was highlighting my own dilema initially? To know someone is right, but still getting bugged with being told what to do. Thats exactly what I wanted to write about. It was the human aspect of it I wanted people to consider, not who was right and who was wrong.

Another thing that distresses me is the fact that you gave an abridged, made easy version of each and every paragraph. A lot of what I've written is obvious. It certainly does not need to be taken apart and have some deep inner meaning(mostly incorrect) culled from it. Please dont try reading between the lines when the lines themselves are pretty obvious.

So let me summarize. I dont intend to preach morals from this blog. I attempt to showcase my own human failings in a humorous manner. If it amuses readers, then well and good. If not, there's nothing I can do about it.

If the contents of the post had instead read " A girl of 14 came home and asked me not to waste electricity and switch off the lights and fan. I did so immediately because wasting electricity is a sin and I'm glad someone much younger to me had much more common sense than I did. I dont harbour any ill feelings towards her because I'm a mature adult who knows when he's made a mistake and is willing to admit it."


Not only is the above post incredibly boring, its an outrageous lie! I wrote about how I felt about the whole issue. Not only that, I was honest about it.

Please dont undermine Kroopa's intelligence either. She is a deeply honest person and she certainly isn't biased towards me. If I were to write something that she didnt agree with, she wouldn't have any qualms about ripping me to pieces :-).

I hope I've made myself clear.

I shall narrate an incident that took place last week. A family well known to us visited with their 14 year old daughter. Let me tell you a little about them. The wife used to teach at my school and is a very good friend of my mother's. The husband is well.....one of those dynamic types. He preaches what he practices and practices what he preaches. He is one of the most intense people I've ever met. He also harbours some very strong opinions and is permanantly on the lookout for someone to debate his ideas with. Dont get me wrong, I'm not trying to be negative about him. He is an idealistic man....but he tends to put his ideas across rather forcefully.This usually does not go down so well with those at the receiving end of his lectures.

Anyway, when the doorbell rang that evening, I left my room to open the door. I welcomed them in, asked them to make themselves comfortable on the sofa and tried making some polite conversation as I waited for my mother to come and join us. The daughter had just written her 10'th board exams and I was asking her how she'd done. The girl looked at me, smiled sweetly and said "Dinesh, if you dont mind, could you switch off the light and fan in your room? While you are here, there's no reason they should be kept on..."

I like to think of myself as a principled person. When someone points out a rather blatant error I've made, I do my best to rectify it. I try not to get annoyed with the person who pointed the mistake out. However the moment the words left her mouth, I could only feel indignation build up inside me. To have an outsider, a teenager, a precocious girl telling me what to do in MY house! She had some balls!

Undoubtedly the kid was right. I had left the lights and fan on when I should have switched them off. But I just couldnt hide my irritation. I grunted and asked her switch them off. She smiled and complied. When she came back, no further reference to the lights were made but I stewed inwardly. I labled her as headstrong, just like her father. She'd have a tough time making friends, she'd be a person who got results but someone who failed miserably with people.....these were the only thoughts going through my head during their visit.

Later I had to endure another lecture by the father. He feels that the Dravidian parties who have governed in the last few decades are a disgrace to the state. He wants to start a youth movement, spread awareness and ultimately form a more responsible government. He wants to spread his message using yahoo groups. He's been after me to register with his site...and I've always avoided doing it.

So why do I feel this way about them? The girl was right about the lights and the fan. The father is certainly right about the current state of TN politics. I should be admiring both of them for trying to make the world a better place.

Except I dont. No matter how hard I try to listen to the voice of reason, I can only feel irritation when I think about the two of them. I dont like to be told right from wrong by a kid and I dont like to be forced into doing something I'm not very clear about.

So I let the matter rest. I've not troubled myself like I usually do..a battle between ideals and desires. I've let the desires win this time...I must be growing up.

I've written about this before. We have a water shortage problem where I live and we get water for about half an hour everyday. In this half hour, I need to fill buckets of water in the two bathrooms, the kitchen and the service veranda. To keep an eye on all four places is a little tricky and involves a bit of running around.


What really bugs me though, is my eighty year old grandmothers insistence that she carry heavy buckets of water. While I'm keeping an eye on the bathroom, she lugs about heavy buckets in the service veranda. Then I'll run to the service veranda and chide her for lifting such loads and ask her to watch the bathroom where its relatively easier(Once the buckets have been filled, one only needs to wait for the tank to fill up). Instead she'll go to the kitchen and start doing the same stuff there. She wont stop until every bucket and vessel in the house is brimming with water. " You never know, we might not get water one day. What will we do then? " she'll ask when I express my annoyance.

We get water at exactly 7:00 AM. While it takes me a couple of minutes to realise that its time to start filling, my grandmother is taut with tension and waiting to explode into action from 6:50 AM. So by the time I get to the service veranda, she's already filled half the buckets.

Her determination to fill water borders on the fanatical. Why wont she understand that if she slips and falls, the recovery will be extremely painful? Sometimes I think she's trying to prove a point. That she might be eighty but still capable of immense feats of strength.

Now I've just resigned myself to the fact that my grandmother will continue lifting no matter what I tell her. Given a chance she'll lift me when I'm filling the buckets. I only hope she never falls.

I've been feeling rather uninspired for the last couple of days. I didnt feel like lifting in the gym, my mind wandered when I tried to read the Java certification book...I'm just feeling rather dull.

Maybe its because of the weather. I certainly feel a lot more alert in the office.The weekends at home are oppressive.

Dont really feel like blogging, not in the mood to.

I'm using the other phone to write this blog. Cant persist with it though, or the bill will shoot up :-).

After 2 months of thought, I've finally got myself a digital camera.Its a
Canon Power Shot A400(http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/a400.html) Cost me 11K.....thats kind of eaten into my bank balance...

Anyway, it seems to be a pretty decent choice. I took a couple of snaps and a few videos and checked them on the comp. They have come pretty well.

Have to go now. Will write more on Saturday.

My phone's down again, so that explains the missing post last weekend. I hope to have it working by this saturday :-). More to follow, I promise. Also Mr Anonymous, I have decided to remove the infy pic.

I've had to go through quite some trouble to write this post. You see, we are having the apartment complex painted and one of the painters unwittingly snapped my phone connection. This is the one I use to connect to the internet( I'm still a dial-up guy. Dont see the point in using broadband when I'm hardly at home.)

So I spent saturday morning perched precariously upon the ground floor sunshade, trying to splice the snapped wires back together. It took me about an hour, chiefly because each time I recieved a tiny shock, I would drop the wires. Seizing the opportunity my neighbour's son Mukund, the 3 year old whirlwind would run away with them. So after a lot of sweating, cursing and chasing I finally got my phone to work.

I spent last weekend at Bangalore as I mentioned before. My sister and her husband have bought a new apartment and my mom was going to help them pick out tiles for the kitchen and bathroom. I just sort of tagged along.

I had a terrible time at the tile shop. I got very bored in about 10 minutes. Being surrounded by nothing but artistic looking tiles and glamourous toilets, I suddenly felt the urge to relieve myself. I made some discrete enquiries and was taken aback when the shop owner said he didnt have a bathroom. Of all the people, you expect a man selling toilets for a living to have a functional loo!

Instead I was lead to a shady looking bar nearby and allowed to do my thing. When I came back, they still hadnt decided on the tiles. It took them about 3 hours I think by which time I'd gone half crazy with hunger. I didnt like the weather either so I was cranky for the entire weekend.

So now I'm back in Singara Chennai. The weather here is well.....something I'm used to atleast. The Air Conditioning in the office conked out, so it was really tough for a couple of days.


I realise that I have a bit of free time now. Being an early morning guy, I have about 3 hours to myself in the morning to myself and also the weekends. I'm thinking of a good way to use that time. I keep wavering between preparing for the Java Exam and the CAT.

I thought I'd solve some quant problems yesterday. I opened my book and immediately my brain revolted. I was wondering why I felt such a strong apathy for the problems when I realised I've been doing the same crap for the last two and half years. I joined CAT class in November 2002. Due to the paper leak, I wrote the same CAT twice, not to mention another dozen entrance exams. After all that, I prepared again for each company's aptitude test. No wonder my mind froze each time I looked at the book.

Still, I cant get over that guilty feeling that I'm wasting my time.

On other matters, I'm strongly considering getting a digital camera so that I may post pictures on the blog. I have a budget of Rs.8000 max. What would you guys suggest?

I'm back!

Really, I am!

I mean it...

Really do...

Gotta go