I am raining words

I have heard of people who have a deficiency with their words. May be I am on the pole opposite to theirs. I always find it very hard to say things with fewer words.

Sometimes, I think of short stories to write. But when I actually do start to write, the words consume pages and I end up using at least three times the space I had planned to. The next time I start to write something, I will think of a word limit and then start to write it up.

Yes. This does remind me of my English Board Exams :)

What this means is that, I find it so very hard to tweet. What is it with the 140 characters limit?
OK. Time to practice and wrap this entry up.

BYE!!!

Up And Running

Hooray Hoo!!

I have resumed reading after quite a long time.

Ever since I bought myself a thirty-seven thousand-rupee luxury called a laptop, my reading days have been stalled. Quite a lot of my time went to AVIs and VOBs. The remainder of the time was loaned out to EA Sports Cricket. Any meager time that had escaped the above two went for google and cricinfo.

With so many of my friends competing for my time and attention, I guess I would have to be forgiven for reading and writing less. Once the reality of my dwindling reading hit me, I even fell back to such demeaning books like Prison Diary, for lack of any unread books in my possession. So when I finally latched on to Ponniyin Selvan, man what relief to read some good book again.

As I would like to believe, reading is not my hobby, it is an obsession.

And it feels great to be back.

Sach a power - Still...

What would life be if I could unwind myself and go back? Say, 13 years.

I would still be going to my school in my half-trousers.

My fingers would still be a computer virgin.

I would not have known base tracks about trigonometry.

Petrol would have been 23 rupees in India.

Sachin Tendulkar would have kept my bottoms on a chair for 50 overs.

13 years on, in the present, the last entry in this list still held good.

On the fifth of November 2009, in Hyderabad, history was being made, again, by the little monster Sachin.

The action pulsating and riveting, never once bordering on insanity, Sachin managed to soar above the other 21 mortals on the ground, onto a pedastal upon which only he could dream thriving. The poetry of the innings was so breath taking, for a moment I was reminded of the song 'Loose Yourself' by 'Eminem'.

So complete was this innings, that it reminded me of every phase of his career over the last two decades.

There was the grit of the 16 year old from Faisalabad(1989).

There was the urgency of the 19 year old from Perth(1992).

The defiance of the 24 year old in Cape Town(1997).

There was the hunger of the 25 year old from Sharjah(1998).

The 30 year old rampaging man from Centurion(2003).

The 35 year old cautious veteran from Chennai(2008).

But, as fate would have it, what finally stayed etched in our minds was none of these flashes from the past. As he scooped the ball into the waiting hands of fine leg, as Jadeja and Praveen Kumar enacted the unbelievable run outs, as India stood inches from the finishing line of a marathon, one particular moment silhouetted itself in front of my mind's eyes. The defeated man from Chennai 1999.

As he looked on, forlorn and choked for words at the presentation, there were only profanities on my lips for every single person who blamed him for not crossing the last three inches (read as runs).

Time stood still. No, that was when it moved back 13 years and took me back with it.

Not only was Sachin the only one left standing between Australia and a defeat, his other 10 teammates were egging Australia on, to victory.

With an ache in my heart, I realized that if somehow I could have bribed the scorer to add another 4 runs on the Indian side of the board, I would have.

P.S: This entry was written around ten days back. Bear my lethargy.

An earlier publishing of the entry would have made more relevance to the context than today.

Random Updates

After almost six months of high pressure slog out I am back to the normal way of living I like. From now on, it means nine hours of working per day and will get some 4 hours of free time at my disposal. Now that I have a laptop with me and also some free time, need to do something worthwhile to justify the free time.

Looks like the marriage season has officially begun. Quite a few of my friends are getting married in the next couple of months. It means a fair bit of traveling for me which I look forward to thoroughly. The very next trip due is to Trichy (Srirangam actually) for Krishna's marriage.

Twitter is taking over blogger slowly. But it cannot substitute the love for writing that a blog can provide. May be they both have their own places to stay. Twit when you have things to say. Blog when you have thoughts to put. Even in the Twenty20 days, Test matches hold their own purity and I guess I am not gonna reduce my blogging any time sooner.

Thought of uploading a few pics of the laptop as well. Don't have one right now. Will try to upload one soon. Currently on the lookout for names for my laptop. Suggestions? Welcome....

Out of Touch...

Hiya,
What an isolated year it has been till now. I haven't said a hai to many of my friends out there in a long long time. No mails, No calls, No messages, Nothing. Come to think of it, I have 251 unread messages in my inbox, the highest ever till now. And I am ashamed to admit that I haven't knocked the ball on the Table Tennis court for quite a while now(I just tried a one-off game which I miserably lost 21-10). My mobile bill this month came down to a petty 600 bucks(pretty small given my big mobile history). Very sparse visits to Chennai. To be true to myself, I haven't been myself.

It surely hasn't been the all-pain-no-gain sort of a time. I have indeed shown my total spectrum of talent in the office and have got enough recognition, for me to give myself a pat on my back. But is this adequate enough for all the life I have lost in a hundred days? All the sleepless nights and all the weekends spent pondering over random segments of code? Do they really tilt the needle on the balance to satisfy me? For some time I did reason to myself that they do. But now I guess I need to rethink my priorities.

I guess I would have been more satisfied had I made progress over the new book I bought(Vairamuthu Kavidhaigal). I should have blogged more often. I even started writing my own story which hasn't gone beyond the first 1000 words. My original plan was to have around 6000 words in that. There was that small thing called fitness which I vowed to increase at the beginning of this year - but haven't. There was that really ugly article which I read in a New Zealand daily. I even mentally wrote a big reply to that article. Never got around to posting it anywhere on the net.

All said, I still will have to stick to this unreal, suffocating schedule till the 20th of May. Once that is over, I seriously decide to take some quality time off and gain some peace into this life of mine. May be I need a vacation, like the one I took back in August 2008

P. S.: All I want is a chance to prove that slogging alone can't make me happy ;)