Mail's Here!

I love getting mails. I mean, the conventional, postal mail. Though these days, it has reduced to bank statements, cell phone bills and the likes of it, I still love seeing an envelope with my name on it. It gives me a feeling of belonging to a place though I am physically not there! (Not cell phone bills!). Too bad we never got anything from school/college send to us by post. Though I got my felicitation invitation through post, I sort of knew it was on its way, so I don't like to count that. It was a photocopied letter, anyway.

I also love writing letters and occassionally posting greeting cards. They are much better than the stupid flash e-cards that are available. Its just that these things are more personalised. They convey the 'real you'. I agree this form of communication is extremely slow than the ones used today, but I never feel elated in the true sense when I get an e-mail. Hand written letters, even if they are short, always rock!

The hand of the writer moves along as he/she writes the letter...one can never get such a feeling with an e-mail (Fingers of the person punched certain keys? Ew..I don't think so!)
Reminds me of a book, "The Walled Garden" by Catherine Dunne. A major chunk of that book is in the form of letters written by a mother to her children. Also, I could truely connect with Snape's feelings when he found Lilly's letter. So true. My eyes stung reading that bit. Because I myself have a few letters written to me by my grandparents and cousins that I treasure a lot.
On the whole, its better to pen down one's thoughts than to type them out. Is it hypocricy on my part that I am blogging about 'pen-ing down thoughts'? I wonder.

_ _ _

Indian people DON'T understand the terms 'office' and 'colleagues' !! Or at least the ones in my office don't. Certainly don't.

About 2 months back, there was this girl who joined office. Lets call her 'A' for the time being. She used to call me दीदी. And not the entire दीदी; used to be just दी. Ewww ............. And she called a few other guys (more or less my age) भईया !! (Can't write that properly. Something wrong with the Devnagri font tab). Its an Office, for crying out loud!!

And since this week, another girl 'D' has joined। All that she has told me about her is that her name is 'D' and she is from some small town in Maharashtra. And she is so country !! And why am I expected to give her parental guidance?

Why? Why does this happen to me? Why do I end up meeting "absolutely country people" where ever I go? This is positively disgusting!

P.S. The reason this post is not titled is because I am too irritated to think of a suitable title for such irritating events in office!

Weather - Nice and Sunny!

I have been observing the weather for the past week. Bright sunshine, clear skies with an isolated white cloud. Slight breeze, enough to keep one from sweating, but not enough to get a nice cool feeling. Well-defined shadows of people, cars and cattle on the concrete roads. All this reminded me of Maldives :)
And suddenly, I could smell the salty sea. Continued to smell it even while I was stuck in traffic...and even now as I sit in my air-conditioned office at the end of the day, typing this and thinking about the abnormally long 'To Do' list that is starring at me from my table.
But whatever...And the rains will be here soon!!

Indiam Premier League or Intellectual Property League

I am not a very devoted follower of the SpicyIP group blogs, but do read an eye-catching-titled entry at times. I am numbed seeing the way people, particularly team owners, are cashing in on the popularity of IPL.
Just this morning I heard on the radio that Reebok is giving out customised team jerseys to the ardent IPL fans. And this was the SpicyIP blog that finally made me blog about something (again!) I don't like very much:
"Along with everyone else cashing in on the success of the IPL, IPR firms do not seem far behind. With the objective “to protect IP, make a profit and increase brand valuation”, teams like the Deccan Chargers have opted to create an IP portfolio, including trademarks for team logos, copyright over player uniforms and website layouts.
The Mint reports that the exponential popularity of the IPL has led team owners to recognise the inherent brand value attached and proactively protect the same. Aside from The Deccan Chargers, the Kolkata Knight Riders seem to have also applied to the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks for protection of their mark in the fields of financial services, insurance, beauty care products (amongst others) and the Mumbai Indians have filed trademark applications for cosmetics, musical instruments and photographic equipment etc.
Apart from the more traditional protection, with the aggressive promotion in the real world has been coupled with a more defensive approach on the internet. The teams have opted to drive away cyber squatters by pre-empting unauthorized linking of team websites to other sites as well as pre-empting squatters from buying the team domain names.
With matches becoming more exciting, these concerns are definitely well founded. It certainly looks like it has become the Intellectual Property League!"

100 Books

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Put an X next to the ones you've read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 1984 - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X (and the sequels too!)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Duh! One is enough)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Have read the one meant for kiddies, but not the original one)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen X (This is PnP with different names;))

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (Did not attempt due to above reason)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Searching for a copy)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X (All of them, thanks to a dear friend)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Kiddies version)

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X (Both. And loved them)

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Kiddies version)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Kiddies version)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X (The entire original collection, thanks to tai and S)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

And there are so many of them which do not feature in this list that I have read... BBC needs to get in touch with me!! ;)

Julie Andrews On Turning 69

To commemorate her 69th birthday, actress / vocalist, Julie Andrews made a special appearance at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall for the benefit of the AARP. One of the musical numbers she performed was "My Favorite Things" from the legendary movie "Sound Of Music".

Here are the lyrics she used:

Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,

Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings,

Bundles of magazines tied up in string,

These are a few of my favorite things.

Cadillacs and cataracts, and hearing aids and glasses,

Polident and Fixodent and false teeth in glasses,

Pacemakers, golf carts and porches with swings,

These are a few of my favorite things.

When the pipes leak,

When the bones creak,

When the knees go bad,

I simply remember my favorite things,

And then I don't feel so bad.

Hot tea and crumpets and corn pads for bunions,

No spicy hot food or food cooked with onions,

Bathrobes and heating pads and hot meals they bring,

These are a few of my favorite things.

Back pain, confused brains and no need for sinnin',

Thin bones and fractures and hair that is thinnin',

And we won't mention our short shrunken frames,

When we remember our favorite things.

When the joints ache,

When the hips break,

When the eyes grow dim,

Then I remember the great life I've had,

And then I don't feel so bad.

Ms. Andrews received a standing ovation from the crowd that lasted over four minutes and repeated encores.

Courtesy Bits and Pieces

The Laadli Week

I think it is a great idea to customise the western concept of celebrating commemorative days/weeks for a cause so very Indian in nature. However, compared to the other corporate-backed days/weeks that are recognised, I feel very little is being done on the PR front for the Laadli week. Please correct me if I am wrong, but there is not a single banner/poster in the entire city advertising the L. week. No newspaper has properly covered/followed the happenings of the L. week. Even the radio stations have failed to mass advertise this initiative. Infact, had it not been for MSN updates, I would have not known such a thing was happening in the country! (I do not watch much of TV!!)

Another point to be noted is that even though the funds are being raised now (funds were to be raised during the L. week which was sometime in March 2009) for the education of 600 girls in Sawai Madhopur, a village in Rajasthan; will the girls be able to attend school when the academic year starts after 3 months? Would it not have been better if the organisers had shown some patience and carried out this activity in the months of May-June when schools begin to re-open? Or even in July like those in Delhi?

But I am not complaining...a step has been taken towards realising a dream of mammoth dimensions! :)http://entertainment.in.msn.com/bollywood/article.aspx?cp-documentid=2929233