S - O - R - R - Y

The entrance exam season for MBA courses kicked off in great style with the CAT 2007 on 18th Nov. I will write more on that in the next post but after that I gave IIFT, Delhi exam. This exam has a GK section in addition to the maths, logical and verbal sections and whoa! it was a lengthy paper. So I didn’t manage to reach the last page of my GK section, in time, on which the questions were as if drafted only for me :(. In one question I had to match the creator of Calvin & Hobbes cartoon characters (Yashita stop grinning)… yes the same characters which open all the posts on this blog. Another question asked the candidates to match Bond girls with their movies. I could match the names of the actresses with their faces in my mind but I have not seen a Bond movie yet. Yeah no need to revisit the earlier sentence.. I am yet to see a Bond movie. I know Pierce Brosnan was the previous Bond guy so when I saw The Thomas Crown Affair movie on television sometime back I was quite amused and confused seeing ‘James Bond’ stealing. Later a friend told me that it was not a Bond movie *ahem*… I hope Bond fans are not reading this post. A few other questions which I could have managed to answer just slipped out. Moral: Never read the unattempted questions after going home.

So I would like to tender heartfelt apologies to Mr. Bill Watterson and James Bond & his babes. As a punishment I have been reading my C&H books daily, for at least 1 hour before sleeping. Also I will be updating the Desktop Goddess series with a Bond girl and might watch a 007 movie in near future. Yes, I like to inflict nice punishments on myself ;-) This post is dedicated to Watterson :)

Jack and the beanstalk(er)

Hi! How are you dear?

Who is this?

I did not send you my new number? Now guess

This was the rough start of a chain messaging with an anonymous number who one fine afternoon messaged me. I don’t know how to frame this sentence correctly but... the person insists that he/she/it is a female and knows almost everything about me. Added advantage is that she is single *ahem*. Now I am quite sure that it is some friend who is playing a prank coz I don’t have my mobile number displayed anywhere in public and more so coz I changed my own number a few weeks back. My first suspect was Aditi coz I had played the ‘stalker-on-cell prank’ on her with help from her sister Pooja he he he… it was fun :P. But then now it seems she is not the culprit :D. So who might be the person on the other end? I don’t know and don’t want to know coz the person is really smart in her (let’s stick to one pronoun) replies and if her identity is revealed then I would lose fun in those replies. Now I am safely assuming here that she is someone I know but what if she is really a stalker? He he... now if that person is reading this space by some chance I am not calling you a stalker but just thought of this so chill! Why I am thinking this is not coz of the anonymous sender but recently the newspaper was swamped with stories of stalking. Cyber stalking is not a new phenomenon but with media coverage and public awareness more and more stories are coming forth. But a new trend has started that whenever a crime under this is reported everyone blames the social networking sites like orkut, facebook etc. for this. I mean it is right up to an extent that we meet and tend to get close with unknown people but turning these sites into a scapegoat is not the solution. In Mumbai, a rich man’s son was murdered after being kidnapped by his new found friends on orkut. So when the news reports were being widely publicized, my cousins were ‘scrapping’ on orkut. Dad was at home on a leave and he got curious from the news reports that what the hell is orkut all about. So he finally managed to convince my sis that he wanted to know about it. When he came to know that I was also a member of orkut he was like “Really?” Probably my dad still thinks that all I know is MS Word and Excel… he he he. I knew this day was gonna come and I had already spruced up my profile and mainly removed the link of this space. I don’t have any particular reason to keep this site away from parents and relatives but yeah I would like to keep it that way. Luckily there is so much in the profile there that he never managed to read it. I know we have digressed from the stalking issue. I was talking to a colleague last week and one of her ardent admirers (she might have many coz she is pretty) had created a fake profile of hers on orkut. Generally fake profiles contain objectionable matter but this profile was kept so clean that none of her friends had an idea that they were talking to her stalker and not her. Luckily she and her boyfriend managed to nail the person and a simple threat worked. But the need of the hour is strengthening of laws to curb this stalking menace. Some people are demanding banning of orkut in the wake of these cases but I don’t think banning a site is the solution. Remember the ban on blogspot by the government? It is quite a debatable issue and what we can pray is that everyone is safe among the stalkers roaming around in the virtual and real life.

I am going on a 2 week leave for preparing for the exam on 18th of this month. After that as well a couple of exams are lined up. So won’t be around for a while... all of you take good care of yourselves and keep smiling.

Walk away if you want to…

I got this sms today morning:

‘When you become too close to someone, you come across their imperfections and your future relationship depends on how you handle these imperfections’

Quite true, isn’t it? When we get close to people we tend to take them for granted. We think that we know them so well that they will react in such a way in a given situation and when they don’t it is like a whacking blow to the impression you had formed of them. Remember the movie Maya Memsaab? The lead actress is full of impressions and in her own fantasies of what her lover might do when he reaches home. But when the lover comes home and he doesn’t directly start making love to her like she expected she is buried deep in despair. We get so attached to people that when they walk away from our life we find ourselves looking for a friendly shoulder to rest our head on. Sadly one finds that there are no more shoulders around coz he/she was so attached to the person who left that he/she completely forgot about other people. Might be even in times when they needed his/her shoulder or a hug or just a simple smile. Why is detachment so difficult and why do some people have this brilliant knack of detaching themselves at the blink of an eye. I was attached to only a few people but I find that I have started clinging on to more people more and more in the last few years. I hate this coz when they get detached I find myself bumping into them and leaving me feeling like being stripped naked on a busy street. Aahhh the nonchalant lot! Might be I expected them to hug me and they just smiled, might be I expected them to talk to me when they just said a Hi and walked away, might be they were busy or in trouble which they didn’t want to share with me lest I get entangled in their problems. Yesterday night the clouds were thundering in the sky and my mind was bogged down by innumerable thoughts not letting me study for the exam coming up. Luckily it rained only on the earth. I have observed that I have started to think a lot more than I used to. Thinking is good but not when it makes your thoughts dominate and suppress your actions. I have observed that I have started to think before I speak. I am not that sarcastic anymore to people, to situations and to life in general. I am not anymore that Sudeep who used to speak out frankly what his mind used to convey the tongue. Now it is comes via the brain where it is filtered. Might be this is good but I hate this Sudeep. I don’t want people to like me for what I am pretending to be. I am fine even if they don’t like me for what I am but no not for the pretence please. I have started letting out my secrets to people. I have started giving them access in my life to such an extent that they question about it every morning. I think I might be his clone… I have to go and find that original Sudeep.