Ravings of a Nomadic Mind

Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company

This is simply speaking advertising at its best ..... im not a see-scarlet-foaming-at-the-mouth Ferrari fan but for some reason this ad reminds me why i watch formula 1. this just made my day.

Go to work,

Eh, what's up, doc? - Bugs Bunny
Jumpin' without a parachute? Kinda dangerous, ain't it? - Bugs Bunny
If it's the Captain's Mess, let him clean it up. - Bugs Bunny
Hey, I found Nemo! - Bugs Bunny
Shhhhhhhh! I'm about to defy you. - Bugs Bunny
And remember, 'mud' spelled backwards is 'dum'. - Bugs Bunny
Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive. - Bugs Bunny

Ah, your brother blows bubble gum! - Bugs Bunny
I'll be scared later. Right now I'm too mad. - Bugs Bunny
The way I run this thing you'd think I knew something about it. - Bugs Bunny
Well, it's 5 o'clock somewhere. - Bugs Bunny

OOH! Look at four-legged airplane! - Bugs Bunny
Carrots are devine... You get a dozen for a dime, It's maaaa-gic! - Bugs Bunny
Eeeeeeh, watch me paste that pathetic palooka with a powerful, pachydermous, percussion pitch. - Bugs Bunny
What an embezzle! What an ultramaroon! - Bugs Bunny
I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque! - Bugs Bunny
Don't think it hasn't been a little slice of heaven...'cause it hasn't! - Bugs Bunny
Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending? - Bugs Bunny
Do you happen to know what the penalty is for shooting a fricaseeing rabbit without a fricaseeing rabbit license? - Bugs Bunny
I wonder what the poor bunnies are doing this season? - Bugs Bunny
Oh, well, we almost had a romantic ending! - Bugs Bunny
My, I'll bet you monsters lead innnnteresting lives. - Bugs Bunny
Of course you realize this means war! - Bugs Bunny
Gee, ain't I a stinker? - Bugs Bunny
Here I go with the timid little woodland creature bit again. It's shameful, but...ehhh, it's a living. - Bugs Bunny
I bet you say that to all the wabbits. - Bugs Bunny
For shame, doc. Hunting rabbits with an elephant gun. Why don't you shoot yourself an elephant? - Bugs Bunny
I know this defies the law of gravity, but I never studied law! - Bugs Bunny

I found these rules to life by Avi sez, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, gadfly author of The Black Swan, I found the Rules pretty intersting and simple. So here are his "10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity."
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom (Thanks, Avi!)
Via Boing Boing

"Sanity is the last refuge of the unimaginative"

Picture By National Geographic.


I saw this image while trolling the net a few days back. I dont know about you but the image says a lot about the Ray and i believe it shows degrees of intelligence and the need to step out of the box, that most humans lack. the Sting ray is one of the most graceful creatures of the sea. but apparently this ray is not happy being the king of the domain it surveys. haven't you ever felt the urge to step out do some thing different break out of the rat race. I think i understand waht made this magestic creature do what it is doing. here is to dreams and their fullfillment. :D

Need One Night In Bangkok by Murray Head.
Its Desperate... any one please

I am Getting a new bike next week and to mark the occasion i got a new lid. oh and thats tubby next to it. :P ciao its a Cross GP X

U got to bold what u have done
01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
02. Swam with dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula (Not a tarantula but a spider about an inch big )
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise(with friends Parathas and Thumbs Up)
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s diaper
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger (Two days back, she turned me down)
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb(helped deliver two- about two years back)
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and didn’t care who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment (Happiness walks right beside you)
39. Had two hard drives for your computer (four was the most )
40. Visited all 29 states
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had amazing friends (Have them even now - the best)
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country (danced with an Irish girl, and a British girl - 31st dec 2005, in Rajasthan though)
44. Watched whales
45. Stolen a sign (yeah, I have stolen teh sign of peace from many peoples heart ;) )
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Taken a midnight walk on the beach (11:30)
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs (MP3s and cassette tapes)
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke
59. Lounged around in bed all day (almost all teh day - had to get out for food)
60. Played touch football
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theatre
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight (not D&D, but NFS and Counter Strike )
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party (walked into the wrong wedding )
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days (two maggies, coffee water and a bannana)
77. Made cookies from scratch (was aiming for cup cakes, ended with cookies)
78. Won first prize in a costume contest (when i was three- for a rajput bridegroom costume- had to share it with the bride)
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo(temporary one, A Dragon on my chest)
81. Rafted the Snake River
82. Been on a television news program as an “expert” (does newspaper count? )
83. Gotten flowers for no reason (gave them too )
84. Performed on stage (Taming the Shrew, Midsummer nights dream, and a few other plays)
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music (LIVE!!! )
87. Eaten shark
88. Kissed on the first date
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in Rocky Horror
96. Raised children
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
98. Passed out cold
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking with the windows open (seven of us in a little santro)
103. Had plastic surgery (had reconstructive nasal surgery after a accident)
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived (Got hit by a bus while riding the bike )
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Touched a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth (a goat, the two kids i mentioned above)
112. Won money on a TV game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept for 30 hours in a 48 hour period (actually longer, except for bathroom breaks)
123. Visited more foreign countries than India (UK, Nepal, Sri Lanka)
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Touched a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad and The Odyssey
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read (not one, but many)
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts (love doing that)
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head

I'm tired. Tired of defending my self against people, I'm not a peace dove, and i hate all those people who snicker when i profess the inherent goodness of the human soul. War is not a solution, it never was. Its become difficult defending your view point when India's most beloved city is under attack. It wasn't a bomb blast and it wasn't a few hoodlums shooting it out, it was as if we had be all shifted to Beirut (Lebanon) or Jaffna (Sri Lanka) we were at war, all of a sudden and out of no where. We were struggling to keep our jobs, we were worried about the stock exchange falling and we were worried that the global recession might take chunks out of the Indian economy, we never thought that we would have a war at our doorsteps when we woke up in the morning.

What riles me even more is the sheer waste of human life. The victims as well as the terrorist, so much human potential lost down the drain. emotions boiled when the media broadcast the images it was horrifying.The entire nation jolted in our seats every time a blast went off. The attack was so bold and dramatic in conception that it went on and on and on. As we looked on in horrified silence and the world stared with its mouth agape, we kept repeating to our self that it was a dream, it shouldn't and cant happen to a tolerant and Democratic country like India. Now half the country is still in shock and the other half wants war.

The Question i cant find an answer to is war with whom, where is the proof and if we go and attack the said city or country what difference does it make, wont this just prompt another attack, let alone a debilitating and a crippling war. I don't want to or cant blame our leaders, we choose them so i presume they are doing exactly what we want them to do. I wont question the intelligence agencies and the security forces the NSG, MarCos and the Bombay Police did an exceptional job. No matter what any one else says i say they went beyond and over the call of duty to put an end to this attack. charging into a building when you know that on the other side are people armed with guns and ready to shoot using humans as shields and ready to die. It takes a lot of courage to shoot some one, it takes even more courage walking into a room with a maniac with a automatic rifle who doesn't care if he lives or dies.

When it comes to our intelligence agencies, they receive more than 1000+ threats a day for cities like Bombay and Delhi they have to wade through all the nut jobs who called in a bomb threat because they didn't want to go to work that day or didn't want to miss a flight to find the real threat. it some times becomes impossible and shit, unimaginable shit happens. The intelligence agencies have to be lucky every time, but the terrorist have to be lucky only once.

Some of the best memories of the darkest period of my life were spent on the road in front of the Taj heritage wing, sitting on the wall facing out to the sea spray with my best friend. I will never be able to walk that road with the same carefree attitude, the scars of the attack and the ghost of the dead will not let us rest as a country until we find a permanent solution to this. So many dead so many families broken. Life is never going to be the same.

Chandrayaan 1 is going round the moon now, it set me thinking, its been more than 30 years since the last man stepped on the moon. lot of things have changed. i remember one of the moon astronauts saying that "It was a Bold and Dangerous move, it was a risky decision but then it was the time when bold decisions were made". I think he knew what he was talking about. we live in a meek world. We are so scared of even stepping out of the norm, doing some thing different.

We have more than doubled the population of the world, technologically the stuff that exists today makes the moon lander look like telephone booths with attached oxygen canisters. But compared to the fifties to seventies era, when all the technological advancements where giant leaps of human endeavour, today we are just moving forward at a pace even a snail would blush at.The Europeans came up with the Concord, Lockheed Martin with skunk works that produced technological marvels like the U2 and F14 the culmination of which was the SR71 Blackbird. We sent probes roving the solar system, the Voyager missions are still working and transmitting data far away from the solar system. We built submarines that could disappear into the sea for years and we landed on the moon. the Space Shuttle was a step back and costlier than the big Saturn rockets that took us to the moon, so was every other air liner built after the Concord. We still don't have any thing to even compare with the BlackBird let alone surpass it. socially to we were making big advances too, being a hippie was acceptable, people were getting involved in the main stream. we had visionaries like JFK, Martin Luther King, Indira Gandhi who changed the world with their vision, broke down barriers with the sheer force of their persona and leadership. When they said some thing the world listened. Today the political leadership takes credit for every small achievement. We forget that most of the times we are only trying to make up all the backsteps we took.

I'm not trying to downgrade or down play the advancements of the today's generation, but every time we celebrate any small improvement on the International Space Station, i cant help feeling that all those people who worked on the moon mission would feel cheated. Every time we talk about fifth generation aircraft and their super cruise abilities, Kelly Johnson and his SR 71 are still untouchable. Similarly the Concorde sits in a class of its own in toady's plethora of Airbus mammoths and Dream-liners. Where has the will to take steps over the edge of the known, to step into the dark and strive to create light gone. The ability to take bold decisions seems to be lacking in today's generation. James Quinn at Wharton called the baby boom generation as "Shallowest Generation" i would add the Least Imaginative generation epithet to that too. These people who created marvels did so with imaginative and one line briefs, and in Kelly Johnson's' and the moon teams case, with slide-rulers, most often than not they were called into an office of some one who did not care about waht conventional wisdom said, what challenges these people faced and told them to create some thing never seen before, most probably in one line. I can think of only two people today who would dare to do such a thing today, Mr Ratan Tata who called his team of engineers and asked them to create a Car with all the basic modern trappings in Rs. 100,000(Nano) and the former Volkswagen boss Mr. Ferdinand Peich who gave one set of engineers the challenge to make a car with 1000 bhp (Veyron) that could do 400 kph and a second set of people the challenge of creating 100mpl car(1 Litre Car). All three of these creations are a realty today, two in or nearing production the third a working prototype that formed the basis of VW's brilliant Blue Motion engines.

These two men weren't dreaming or smoking weird stuff they understood technology and they understood where those limitations lay. They also knew when pushed, envelops tends to tear, and everything beyond becomes achievable. They weren't scared to dream and more over were ready to back the dreams with their resources. Tata gobbled up Land Rover and Jaguar, and when the entire worlds auto industry is in trouble, tiny Porsche(headed by Ferdinand peich) is slowly but steadily gobbling VW who is also in the rudest of health. These two have had to keep up with famous ancestors too, Ratan Tata is the nephew of JRD Tata, visionary extraordinaire and the founding father of Indian Industry, Piech is the grandson for Ferdinand Prosche who had a hand in every great car to emerge from Pre WWII Germany, so may be its in the blood.It is said that during 400 hundred years of Dark Ages Europe produced geniuses like Rembrandt, Galileo, Michelangelo, and many others and Switzerland in the same period isolated from all the turmoil gave us the Cuckoo Clock. Times are bad and we need similar visionaries. We meed people who can step up and proclaim that "I have a dream..." and then follow it up. We need to go to the Moon again and beyond.

2008 Summer Paralympic Games - The Big Picture - Boston.com

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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.