Idle thoughts …..

Interesting, the way sun decided to come out today amidst the harsh winter, as it was expected to be, this time of the year at this part of the world! It has been amazingly slow today at office. And I decided to read every post I wrote on my blog(s), including my old blog, having suddenly been hit by the fact that it has been 5 years since I started blogging! Read every single line including the comments and I realized that I just managed to kill 2 hours! It almost seems as though Time has decided to go lazy during this holiday season trying to drag its way to the end of the day!

I have been rather unusually steady on my “reading” assignments over the past few days. The new book - People of the book by Geraldine Brooks which I started over last weekend, seem to keep me engrossed. It tells the story of the oldest Jewish text - Sarajevo Haggadah, tracing its survival path over the ages. Interesting the way the author has managed change her style of writing to suit the era she was describing. I still have a long way to go. But at the onset, it certainly stands top among the better books I have read in the recent past.

I have always had an amazing knack of putting off visiting places close to where I stayed to a later date, simply due to that fact that they were close by and could be seen anytime. This quality to mine, perhaps dates back to the days when I was growing up in Cochin, India. Fort Cochin was one of the places I’ve always wanted to see, with its high rising fish nets, Synagogues and a history going back to the early European settlements. I must have passed by the place, a countless number of times, but never paused to take a look. It was not until my last visit to India, years after I moved out of Cochin, that I really took time off to go see the place. Niagra Falls in the state of New York is another interesting example. The place where I studied was just a couple of hours away from this breathtaking wonder. And I must admit, I have not managed to see the falls in the past 2.5 years of my stay in US although I did take time off to visit the Florida Keys, 1500 miles away!! Now that I have moved out of New York to a state that is a little further away, I guess my probability of visiting this place has gone up leaps and bounds.

For this same reason, when my plans for this Christmas got thwarted by bad weather and cancelled flights, I decided to get to know the city I live now - Philadelphia, a land rich in history, perhaps the city with the most stories to tell than any other city in the whole of United States, through its spellbinding graffitis. Although I could not do much justice to what I really planned due to the limited transportation that I had, I did manage to catch a glimpse of this land which played a significant role in the American Independence, being the largest city in the 1800s. I have always maintained that the best way to know a city was to walk around. And that was exactly what I did - through the swarming population on the streets to the cobbled side roads, past the gigantic wall paintings, watching the real talents of the street performers. From what I saw so far, this city has not failed to amaze me.

Here are a couple of shots, taken amidst my wanderings.

I plan to make a trip someday, tracing the graffitis (Perhaps murals is a more positive word for this) spread around the city. And I promise, the art of postponement will not stand in its way this time. Let that be a new year resolution for 2009!

“I’ve had three careers over the past four decades”, said the aging man behind the wheels of a cab that I took one fine evening in Philadelphia.

It must have been the way he used the term “career” that made me lift up my head from the book I was reading. When it comes to having long conversations with the person next to me while traveling in a bus, train or even a cab, I can safely call myself more inclined towards being an introvert. This was not because I had a chronic aversion towards making conversations. In fact I do like engaging in interesting talks at any other place, but on road. You might find it rather amusing, but it has just been like that for a really long time now. I considered being on the road as my own personal space - a Time to be away from everything that was around me. I would rather read a good book, than look up to see who was sitting beside me. If by any chance somebody actually started talking, having been misguided by the quick smile that I usually managed to give when they came over to sit beside me, I would quickly try cutting it off, with the shortest possible answers.

But that does not mean that I’ve never ventured into conversations with my fellow travelers. If there was something that sparkled my interest, I always made it a point to latch on to it, like this time.

“So what exactly would you term as a career”, I asked, genuinely curious about what he meant by that and hoping to gain some wisdom from an old man.

“Any work that you do, which spans more than a decade can be called as a career, in my view. One, two or even five years would just make your work, a job”, he said, perhaps a little surprised by the way I asked that question. “I worked in the restaurant business and then in an advertising agency and finally moved on to become a cab driver.”

Well, that came as a surprise to me. I thought the most uninteresting of the all the “careers” he had chosen was being a cab driver.

“So what made you leave those careers to pursue new ones?”, I asked closing my book and leaning forward so that I could hear him better.

“I realised that I was never cut out for those careers”. he replied. This amused me even more. I never thought it would take ten years to realise that you were not cut out for a job. “I was a waiter at this small Italian place. Have you been to the Paradiso in down town Philadelphia?”, he asked. I nodded my head. Having come to this place just 6 months back, I would rather not call myself a native, yet. “I have always liked the intensity and the pace of the work at a busy restaurant such as this. I also had an opportunity to go into a managerial role after the ten years I was at the place.”, he continued. “But then I realised that the job did not give me the creative freedom that I wanted. It somehow restricted me from doing, what I would have preferred to do in some of the circumstances I had been faced with. That was the same case with the work that I did at the advertising agency. I was never as happy as I would have wanted to be.”

“So how is this job giving you the freedom that you wanted?”, I asked, having realised that my destination was just around the corner and I needed to find an answer to quench my curiosity. I would have preferred to have a longer conversation with him.

“Like for example. The place where you want to go is just around the corner. I cannot take a turn here to get you to your place.”, he answered, pointing towards the “One way” signboard. “I would have to go a couple of blocks further up and make a turn towards the road leading back to your place. Although it is just a 2 minutes walk from here. I wouldn’t want you to walk in this rain either.” That was perhaps the first time I looked out to see the rain pouring down on the streets. “So what I plan to do now is to stop the meter, go around the two blocks to get you as close to the place as possible, and let you pay me just what the meter says at this point.”

There was a thundering silence in the car, amidst the pouring rain, the next few minutes as he went up a few blocks and turned back to stop the car right in front of the shop where I planned to go.

“See that’s the freedom I get”, he said smiling, as he waved goodbye, leaving me stunned and silent.

Wise men from the mountains say that most people find it difficult to remember passwords. And every one of them have their own unique way of keeping track of them. Some keep a list in their system maintained by a complex spreadsheet made on the “freely” available Microsoft Excel and others just have a list of 4 or 5 which they tend to alternate between. Me personally, I would fall under the latter group of people. Some others have rather interesting but not-so-secure ways of tackling this situation. I remember a lady back in my school who wrote down all her passwords on a small piece of paper and stuck it right under her keyboard; risky, but effective!!

Recently I have started to realise that I never had a problem remembering the passwords. Instead it was always the usernames that I forgot!! In the beginning, I had tried to maintain a single username across all accounts that I held. But with the more and more users starting to flood into the webworld, this practice became rather difficult and after several failed attempts to create accounts with some of the common names in my list, I started yielding to the recommendations that each site gave me as an alternative. The result, I lost track of the usernames!! I have come to realise that, in every site that I login to these days, (except of course the common ones), I have had to make several attempts by trying different usernames for the same password, like I’m doing right now!

Now the advantage of forgetting usernames and not passwords is that no one locks you out for trying multiple usernames for the same password. It has always been the other way round! Lately, most sites have started to offer logins through the email ids instead of a unique username. That has been a huge relief for people like me! World is adapting I guess….

Lifeless as this world turns itself into during winter …..

There is always a last leaf holding on till the end of it all!

Last week was indeed a week of “weathers”

First it rained…..

And then it snowed….

Although not as significant as in Syracuse, it did manage cause some excitement esp. since it was never expected to snow in November. I have always loved to walk in snow and the morning walks to the office were always a pleasure, although it meant my face and ears were frozen by the time I got to my desk and I needed a coffee cup to get them back to normal.

Life has been rather hectic the last couple of weeks including the weekends. With work taking over a rather unimaginably large chunk of it, the only few breathers were the not-so-solace Quantum of Solace, a surf and turf evening with my office team and a New York trip to meet a friend of mine, this weekend.

It was back in 2005 when I heard this the song for the first time. I don’t know if I would have liked it, had I heard it in any other way than how I did back then! It was in a movie called Beautiful Girls that suddenly popped up amidst the rapid channels switchings, on one of those lazy sunday mornings in a hotel room in San Jose. Something about the movie stopped me from switching the channel again. And along came this song. The moment the movie got over, I remember frantically trying to find this song and download it. Ever since I have had no week, where I had not listened to this song atleast once.

And here’s how I heard it the first time!

I listened to it again last weekend. In another one of those frantic channel switching streaks, I chanced upon this movie……..

And in case you are interested in listening to how the actual song is, here it is - Sweet Caroline by Niel Diamond

Here is one from the Boston trip I finally decided to go for, after several weeks of planning and re-scheduling. And all we managed to do, was to spent time in the subway stations trying to decide where to go

Yet another keepalive, while I let the chaos at my work place pass by…..

For the past two weeks there has been a growing desire to have a plate of poori and masala. I don’t know where it originated from. All I knew was, one fine morning, while walking to office, I felt this sudden urge to eat pooris. Ever since, every other meal seemed tasteless and worthless. I started comparing pastas and sandwiches with poori and they all seemed inferior to this flat and round man-made wonder made of dough and fried in oil! Until last weekend…..

It was a cold and windy Sunday morning in NYC, where I had gone to meet a bunch of my old school friends. It seemed horribly difficult to leave the comforts of a blanket, thanks to the tiring Saturday we had in the city, when all of a sudden one of us came up with the idea of a “brunch” at Sharavana Bhavan. Even in my sleepy state this directly translated itself into poori and masala. Within half an hour, I was up and ready to go. The walk was harsh. Although it was just a few blocks down from where we stayed, walking against the wind almost made it feel like running on the treadmill for an hour (which was something I have never managed in the 27 years of my existence) in a room with a misconfigured air conditioner. And I went panting into a small restaurant with a big sign saying “Sharavana Bhavan”. The place was buzzling with activity, with people from all spheres of life walking in to have a taste of South India. Weather didn’t seem to bother any one of them, although I believe most of them, unlike us, had their cars parked right in front.

We were fortunate to get seats as soon as we entered. The moment we got our menu, there was nothing I looked for, but pooris which laid buried under the title “Rotis”!! I waited in anticipation, downing two “steel glasses” of Madras filter coffee, for those fried doughs and its masala served in a steel plate with three “potholes” - something that had left me hungry and sleepless in Philadelphia for the past two weeks!

What followed was bliss…..

And here’s a glimpse of the Madras filter coffee, which on any other day would have taken the headlines!

In fact I had plans to go up to New Hampshire over this weekend, just to capture those colors that mark the beginning of Autumn. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way it was planned and I ended up not taking the 7 hour ride up north. Instead, I made a trip down to Princeton University, which was one of those places I always wanted to visit. And this is what I saw en-route!