5 steps to a great accent!

So who speaks Hindi anyways? Not air hostesses, for sure! It is not just a weird thing, it is strange to the point of being intriguing! No matter what airlines it is, Indian or Lufthansa, when the air hostesses make announcements in Hindi, you just cannot help but listen out for the English or German one, because their Hindi is simply un-understandable!I know people from 28 states and 6 UTs in India have 34 different accents while talking in Hindi, and I have heard most of them, coming from Delhi, but this airhostess-kind I have never heard in my life. So here are the 5 steps to get a perfect airhostess accent:1. You must preferably be a non-Indian, otherwise speaking so horrendously might make you seriously fear for your karma and next life!2. You should try to deprive yourself of sleep for atleast 72 hours before attempting to speak with this accent, to get the right kind of lethargic drawl.3. Your aim lies in not being understood by any of the listeners so speak accordingly.4. Try and include ancient pure Hindi words but if you can't remember anything other than the easier, more widely used words, then just say it in English. So its either pure hindi+random english or nothing. No day-to-day language use is allowed that makes you sound like you actually know what you are saying.5. Why are you even looking for a 5th point? Practice makes perfect ! So just go torture someone...and if you succeed, you know you've got the hang of it!Everyone who thinks I've gone nuts for writing this note, it was just the 11 hour journey that is the root cause of all this. That and the lack of a TV around here..!

Creative-Chatting

It was a long and thundery night, you could hear the rain and wind lashing across the window and see the lone candle flickering in one corner of the ominously dark room. er..oh wait, that was a different day! Well, this note is about a more mundane day, when at a particularly creative chat session with a friend of mine, I came up with a few gems you might want to read, memorise and keep for the years to come.The lines within the quotation marks are what my friend said and everything else is my response to him. Now read and marvel at their brilliantness! :DThere is a university called Warwick,check it on Wikipedia if you can, quick,I read it in a book,only 5 minutes it took,to know that it's located in a town named Limerick!"popular getting you are"Compliments from people afar...rhyme I can,unless my limericks you ban,till then all you can do is go har har!"I need to find a muzzle"Where to get one is the puzzle,I shall go no further, or me you will murder,specially since i can't think of a word to rhyme with muzzle!Brace yourselves y'all, I'll be back soon with other such interesting literary masterpieces ! And by the way, whoever said limericks can't be weapons of mass destruction(of sanity) should go take a Haiku! Sayonara!p.s. Just so you know, I remembered later that University of Warwick is in fact situated in a place called Coventry in England while Limerick is the third biggest city in the Republic of Ireland and there is no connection between the two :P

President vs. The Government, Round III

So back home in India, its almost time now for the appointment of a new President and that makes me think how these 5 years went and where we are headed to now? Five years ago when Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam had been made the President, I was happy since it seemed like a very wise decision taken. With people like Dr. Kalam at the helm of the country, it seemed like we were finally moving in the best direction possible for India at the time. And for once, the promise of a good man holding a significant political office did not really go awry.As the father of India's missile program and a leading scientist, there was no better person for this post than him, and it showed in the way he worked, during his tenure. Finally, at the end of these 5 years, what proves to me that he really thinks for the country rather than the politics within the nation is when we hear news like this -> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Kalams_relationship_with_govt_fraying_at_the_edges/articleshow/1590376.cmsAfter all, the President may be a just a titular head of state, but there is a certain respect and protocol that should be followed when talking about matters concerned to him and the Government should realise and understand in clear terms that the President is not a push-over. When he returns a file about some judicial appointment recommended by the state, the proper course of action is to review the recommendation and make necessary changes, not just to keep sending it back to the President until he gives up and signs?! This is not child's play, this is about running a country and when the citizens' voices are not mobilised enough, it is upto the President to do what he can within his powers and contempt of the President by anyone, even if it is the Government running the nation, should be considered an insult directed at the country itself. Knowing all this, and also realising that Dr. Abdul Kalam is not in the running for another tenure as the President, I can just hope this time too, we choose someone with a backbone and someone who dares to stand up for India, not just her government. Please, let it not be just any other old guy with white hair who can look the part.

Class X Board Exams may soon become optional?

WTF!

Why not just make all studies or education completely optional. Who needs school anyways when we can work as cheap labour for developed nations. A nation of a billion airheads, isn't that what we want to become?

A few unsolved mysteries

And a few unanswered questions that I have collected over time...they probably work only for me, but they're still unsolved mysteries! ;)1. How does Hrithik Roshan manage to look unbelievably hot for like 30 seconds in each of his movies once? 2. Why is India in love with Himesh Reshammiya and his baseball cap?3. Why do really awesome and expensive haircuts only look awesome for the first 24 hours?4. Why do Hindi songs need to have some ridiculous English phrases in them like 'feel the fire, my desire, you're my pleasure, only treasure '!!5. Why does it cost so little to call the US from anywhere but a lot to call anywhere from the US???6. How do people come up with pronunciations of your name that you thought weren't possible with the human mouth?7. What DO we do online when we're surfing the internet for hours ?8. What do you do when you're on the road and a cow decides that it likes ur car enough to peer into it through the window next to you?9. How did Adnan Sami get thinner?There are sooo more questions like these, I just can't remember all of them right now. In case you have any answers, or even questions, leave a comment!! ;)

So what's written in my future?

Please, I need to know this one.It's high time.I can't believe I'm going through this whole - I don't know what I really want to do - phase in life. That's just too filmy to be true, to be happening to real people. It sounds all very well in Lakshya, but that's a movie, with Hrithik Roshan in it. What movie am I in? The Tuna Show? Ok, so maybe I'm not that clueless. Atleast I know what I like, what I don't. I like maggi, I don't like muse. I like discussing politics(yep..:P) and I don't like psychology, and so on & so forth. But the question eating up my brain these days is, why am I such a walking contradiction regarding career interests? Why did I have to be a someone, who likes science as much as they like people? In other words, why can't people understand that its possible for a sciencie person to also have some amount of interpersonal + social skills. According to what I'm reading on a lecture slide, for my 'productive aging' USC course, there are 6 types of jobs, two of them being investigative and enterprising. The people who like investigative jobs like research supposedly don't like sales or persuasion related activities, they are seen as asocial. While the people in enterprising jobs 'avoid scientific topics'.I like both damnit! So what do I do? PhD. or an MBA? Can't do both, that'll make me 'overqualified'! Arrgh, this irrational world!! Ok, Rant Over. You can all now go back to whatever you were studying before this. I have more 'productive aging' to catch up on.[ Results of taking this course: 1. realising that I'm going to fossilise soon2. finding out that aging starts at 20(!) 3.knowing that two sources of market failure are liquid constraints and bound rationalities. Makes me feel so much more intelligent. :P ]