A suitable girl

6 comments Posted by vagabond dreamer at 1:28 AM

When you are an Indian male and rushing 30 at warp speed, mothers tend to go into a kind of apoplectic hyperactivity. Pictures of strange women start to surface all over the house, strategically placed to catch your eye so that you might pick them up and enquire as to the identity. I come from a pretty liberal family, liberal enough to introduce the girls I was dating to my parents as my girl friend. My parents always kept a distance from the way I ran my life and its affairs, while still keeping an eye as to how my life was carried out. But from the time I finished my education it always became a question of when and not if I would commit to the girl I was dating at the time. Sadly there have been no relationships worth mentioning to my mother, this has put her, my mother, in a spot. She has always maintained that as long as I finished my studies and had a strong career she would not interfere on who I married or when. But as one after the other my contemporaries and more importantly my friends fell to the charms of marriage. No she is in a tizzy, I refuse to commit to a girl and she refuses to let me force her hand and arrange a marriage.

So all my fast dwindling no. of single friends have come under the microscope, going as far as to propose a South African single mother, who I met on business, if I so choose. What is difficult for me to state is that I do not have any precondition as to who I want to marry. 28 for me is not a bad stage in life to be single, having just got out of college two years back I have got comfortable with life just recently, committing to a marriage and my life to a girl seems a scary thought. Second is having some girl's life tied to mine is scarier still as I really don't trust my own decision making skills. But ok, this is about what I would be looking at in a prospective partner.

The most important factor is it should be a person I can have a conversation with, see my biggest fear is I would end up marrying someone whose entire repertoire begins at makeup and ends with the neighbor's daughter. This thought gives me living nightmares. So it has to be someone who tries to at least understand what I am spouting, from F1 to global finance to dogs. More so she should be able to stimulate conversation, listen as well as talk. Oh and she has to agree to adopt a child. That is all I would ask a girl who agrees to marry me, now what she needs to know about me would fill an encyclopedia, in brief. How we would get around that, is something I dare not tackle here. May be it would be better if she were a lawyer or a doctor because then lawyer/client or a doctor/patient privilege would protect me.



P.S. when I came up with this blog it was much more funnier and interesting to read, but I was on a train with zero battery and no pen and paper, and half asleep. This is what remains. Ciao and happy hunting to all the singles out there.

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Blinging chrome

2 comments Posted by vagabond dreamer at 10:49 AM

we had a saying in University, "Google is God" when you had partied too hard and there was a last minute assignment, paper or project and we had only one night to complete then it was only Google that came to the rescue.no matter what the topic was, no matter how big the assignment it was always there. now we have Chrome beta, the newest and for some the most important factor, Google's  browser. 

well first the look it just looks like a very mature and grown up version of Google search page. Google has always kept the design simple be it the Google search page, mail or chat u can see the simplistic design philosophy there. I'm a FireFox fan, always have been. there are a bunch of browsers i have been using over the past six months. ranging from Firefox, Flock a browser based on the the FireFox platform, I've used apple's famed safari and then there is IE and now Chrome. now the big difference between all the others and the new kid on the block is again the minimalist user interface. it lets you make the best use of your screen size by removing all the other knick knacks from the interface unless you need them. then its got two modes. one where it keeps track of all the pages you use and displaying the most used every time you open a new page or tab and displaying the most viewed on the new page or tab. and then there is the incognito window with a suitably darkened window where "Pages you view (in this window) won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however."the best feature is that the address bar becomes one with a search window it uses predictive software trying to complete the phrases you input and coming up with the best combinations. Tabs which are the best innovation of the 'Fox and now have been included on all other browsers, have been integrated into the title bar of the page and shifted to the top of the page. basically its an innovative approach to the browser which as Google trademark approach to design. a friend of mine recently wrote some thing about the design philosophy of apple where there products have a  really clean  look and when it comes to other products stuff just gets complicated until you come down to individually designed products where the user simply drowns in a swamp of fields and check boxes. in the end all i will say is that Chrome is an ironic name, chrome, normally is bling, its all about attracting attention while Google has gone the other way and made it minimalist. My University moto said "Knowledge is Empowerment", by that standard Google has just reinvented itself as Internets New God. i cant wait for Google's phone, the i phone must be looking over its shoulder. 

Road Rage

5 comments Posted by vagabond dreamer at 9:05 AM



Every time there is a new car or a bike launch self righteous social defenders go up in arms protesting that we don't have the facilities or the infrastructure to support the amount of traffic that our country is starting to see. when big luxury cars and sports cars costing an arm and a leg come into the country there is another hue and cry. no one protests when fifty year old relics from the two world wars ply our roads daily. no one protests when people die in there tens when some pre historic bus first driven by the Flintstones family dives in a gorge with all aboard. neither does any one protest when a tractor with a trailer attached does a very good imitation of the titanic. sure when some good-for-nothing poor rich boy crashes his BMW all the social activists come out of the wood work like termites out of the wood work. 

I'm not complaining about the activists or protecting the poor rich sods. my problem with the whole system of blame games is that no one really really tries to correct the real problem. the problem that no on in the country really wants to face that we Indian have road manners better suited to the bullock cart era. even then we might have the highest road fatalities in the country. the majority cant read road and highway signs, no one understands the different lines on the road. most of all people don't have common sense or observe common curtsies on the street. rage is more prevalent than than good Samaritans. part  of the problem is insignificant infrastructure, but i believe that that too is not that big a problem, at least for now. we are the Seventh largest nation on the planet so there is no shortage of space, its not efficiently managed but there is no shortage. we still have the largest and the fastest growing road net work so that too is not a problem. the quality is a little suspect, that will improve only with time and with creating solution for a lot of different problems like corruption and red tape. 
but again the biggest problem is still one no one really focuses on. people don't have Road Ethics. pedestrians walk on the road, jay walking is rampant, not just in the cities but on expressways. people jump the Aramco barriers with impunity and walk across high speed lanes with no regard to life or property. people hawk animals on city roads. slow moving vehicles hog the fast lane. well no one knows the concept of lanes so that is that. overtaking from the left, right and over other vehicles is accepted. driving down the wrong side of the road is also accepted instead of going the right way and traveling the extra distance. geriatric gentle men and women drive at 5 kph on busy street intersection on mopeds they were gifted when they were 20 years old. teenagers drive at high speeds and some times rashly to endanger there lives as well as others on the street. bus drivers and truck drivers are more ignorant of road ethics than any one else and majority women drivers drive as if they are about to fall off. and don't even get me started on drunk driving. 

now this rant is not against, senior citizens, women or teenagers nor is it against poorer sections of society from where most of our drivers come from. this is against the system. oh and on the whole i learnt driving and riding on my own too no one told me the road rules, and i learnt by hit and miss. i was one of those teenagers flying around on light weight moped and scoots as if i had wings. well the biggest problems as i said earlier is road ethics. 

here is my solution. 

1. reduce the minimum age for riding ungeared two wheelers to fourteen and make them off limits to the busy sections of the city. 

2. for geared two wheelers to 16 years 

3. for cars to 17.

4. make driving a subject compulsory for graduating in to the next section in the eight the tenth and the twelfth standard. which are the classes for boards in many state boards. the subject will have both theory and          practical. passing in both separately being mandatory for earning your license. this will have the advantage of exposing students to road rules at and early age and most of which is picked up in classes is never really forgotten. 

5. make a minimum IQ level or some other way of accessing intelligence a requirement for getting your license. 
the above two rules will have the added benefit of attracting people from lower levels of society to school as that is the only way they will gain access to a means of lively hood. 

6. there should be a maximum age limit for drivers. 

7. all drivers have periodic health especially eye sight and hearing checkup. 

8. better and more frequent public transport system. a system which is adequate for the population density of the country. the present system is generally inadequate and over crowded. 

9. stricter punishment and higher fines for rule breakers.

now this system is a slow process, and initially will bring more riders and drivers on the roads but they will be better behaved and more over better drivers both male and female. and again this system will not over come corruption and misappropriation of funds from infrastructure projects but that is another story for another time. 

Swift Dezires

1 comments Posted by vagabond dreamer at 6:37 AM

(The Present)*&&^^@*&#^(&*(*. &^%&$@^* its not until my lungs start to scream that i realise i am holding my breath. i let out my breath slowly, then i realise i'm parked 90 degrees to the residential lane i just came on to.

(roughly 45 seconds back) The Maruti Swift is a good looking car, i always thought it was what a modern Mini would have looked like and it was very new on the road then, Jaipur barely had a handful at the time. so it was fresh in and looked extremely cute and Handsome at the same time. OK so my friend had bought a new one in red and as i was visiting him he said he'd take me for a drive. as we were about to get into the car he threw me the keys to his day old car. I get in the car and move to start it as he walks towards the gate to open it. get in turn the ignition, "oh, nice throaty burble" i didn't know it was this loud. i found it a trifle too loud for a family hatch. shifting in to gear i think to myself be nice and gentle you don't want to trash a brand new car. i ease my foot of the clutch because the thing i feared more than trashing the car was stalling it, in front of my friend. i was a relative novice to cars at the time, and didn't want to show that. May be if i had been a little more concerned with the car than saving my face i wouldn't have done what i did then. looking back the clutch was a little heavy too. i ease the foot of the clutch the engine note rising as i ease onto the accelerator pedal the little red car jumps of its rockers, like a rottweiler leaving hell, i miss my friend and the gate to his house by inches as i hold onto the steering wheel for dear life.

(back to Present) i look at the rear view, and reach for the ignition and then change my mind. i get out of the car on wobbly legs, look at my friend who sees my face and doubles up laughing. i feel like murdering him, well if i hadn't almost run him over with his brand new car i would have killed him. what Had happened was with a subtle body kit and spoilers he had got the engine changed with a Baleno unit and the unit that was peppy in the heavy set Baleno was out right snarly in the lill car. the point of the little anecdote is that lill cars with peppy engines are way more fun than big burly cars which we don't have space to run around any way. secondly it would be a good idea for auto makers to introduce cars with souped up engines in limited quantities. there is no sporty choice in the affordable segment. so a flagship model in the range would be a nice idea. i think it would need less money and make more money than creating hedious little monstrosities like Swift Dezires and the logan, as i later found out a little later when i stopped shaking and got back in the car that even after the aftermarket job the ill car just soaked up all the power and reveled in the new freedom.
God Bless After market Tuners