XKCD on H2G2!

Awesome... Never thought this thing would come up! I had to post it on my blog, for all my love to H2G2! :)



So long, and thanks for the fish!

Not being loved?

Hehehehee... Awesome!! Sooo true!
I wish little girls really get this taught in school itself! :)

Partying???

Well.. this was exactly how I was... like an year or two ago!
I had started partying just then, and was not satisfied with any amount of it! I loved to go to pubs, dance to the music though it certainly would not be the best, and see all the pretty girls in the pub(well.. there is no decree which says U can't even look at girls!).. I loved the action, meeting friends in the pub, and loved calling one particular pub your home!
Yeah.. I used to say this a lot - B&C is like home, man! I am there all the time!

And when I picked up drinking, I felt like there is no point if I don't drink it in the pub. I would refuse to spend a Saturday not pubbing and drinking at home. I refused to wear those regular officey-T-shirts and insisted on wearing those tops which made me also look bimbettish! And insisted on telling friends how good friends I am with the owner of that pub.. or how well I know so and so of this pub.. You know, all that pseudo-Page-3 natak!

Husband gave up hope on me getting better, and I didnt mind. I never got to pub by myself, though we had planned a hundred girl's night outs, but never got to do any. But I didnt mind too. I had enough friends who would insist on meeting in a pub, which means, hubby dearest had to drag himself and walk into that place.
I even made statements like - I got into the partying scene too late, man! All you guys have done it all! But I have just started. So I am going to make the most of it!

Basically, I measured the success of a weekend on the amount of partying and madness shown on the roads, post partying!

But I changed too!

I should've recognized the first signs when I told hubby that I was somehow not in a mood to go party. I would rather have that Rum at home! Though he was happy at not having to spend yet another night in a crammed place full of smoke, he also did not realize that this was the beginning of something he always wanted - a wife who would not mind drinking at home and entertaining people at home.
This continued for quite a while. I reduced pubbing, started entertaining friends at home, started enjoyed real talking between people and not the cliched Oh-I-love-this-music talk and was okay to the fact that I was not acting funny on the roads!

And then this place opened! In the days when all the pubs in the city would close down by 12 AM, this place remained open till 5 AM. And it felt great!
Suddenly, the old me was up and active again, and wanted the piece of that action. In spite of his refusal to come with me, I dragged hubby and a couple of friends who were equally eager to this place. And it started... we loved the place. We loved the crowd, the music, the ambience and everything. We saw the bill and exclaimed that we would not go back there again!
But we went! We exclaimed that we should not waste this kind of money in recession!
Yet, we went! We came back thinking we are totally spoiling our weekends because of this partying, and that we should resume our holistic lives!
And again, we went there back!
Sometimes it would be friends who would force us to go, sometimes it would be the DJ there, sometimes it was the cool fact that we lived just a stone's throw away from there, and sometimes it was the boredom! The fact is, we spent a lot of money there!

And when we looked back at our monthly expenses which had surprisingly shot up considering that we had not even been having our Sunday Brunches, it struck us! We had begun it all again!
That started an introspective journey into our partying lives, and revealed that we were never eager to go there, but it was the circumstances that made us go there again and again.
But we went there again! :)
This time, we took a careful look around the place to see if it was really that enticing. Yes, it was! Is the crowd really that great? Yeah.. probably, but the quality dwindled!
Are we still as excited about grooving to the music(like they in those pubs)? And that gave us our answer .. No, we werent.

Hubby had already grown up after been-there-done-that in madcap partying, but I had also begun to be there. I had my fair share of funny stories related to partying, and I begun to not enjoy the loud music, the smoke, the skimpily dressed hookerr-looking-girls, and the shocking of all - the alcohol!
I had begun to get averse to it! I had even nursed thoughts of quitting it altogether!
And that was revelation for me too... I had finally started growing up!

My Partying journey started around 4 years back - a 24-something girl entering a pub for the first time with her fiance, who had nothing fit to wear for a pub, and so wore the only western dress she had then, a old pair of ill-fitting jeans with a long black kurta - to - a 28 year old woman who had a decent number of decent pubbing clothes and who had grown bored of it all..

Its like one item checked off from my To-Do list for life - Go to a pub, party hard and get bored of it!
And I am glad I got there now! I have my own share of alcohol stories, mad-pub scenes, drunken fights, introductions with celebs - though all of them are diminutive in stature as compared to the ones my friends have, I am glad I am here now!
No more fights for not taking me pubbing on a weekday, no more meeting friends in a pub and no more begging the DJ to play one last song...
Over and out with it!

XKCD!

ROFL!
I like to call myself, The Geek, to this extent that I even have this Geek T-shirt that is sold in our company store, and I love wearing it, just that its so big that its more of a nightwear T-shirt rather than a statement-wear!
Fine.. I know its not polite to start a post with random statements and a acronym! I shall get to the details of the cause for these two!

First, its the insomnia , which I consider to be a gift, but the husband and doctors don't, and the latter tried to take it away from me by giving me one of those good-sleeping-pills, wonder what that is!
Husband was completely sold to the cause of a good sleeping pill, if it meant that his wife would sleep at nights instead of reading all kinds of books or playing Solitaire on his phone, and wake up with dark circles. Sigh.. little did he know that the last one was the main reason why I got into this habit of not-sleeping which has now developed into a chronic disease, again the Doc parlance, I say!
Well.. I know, the last statement obviously asks for a story, and like most heavy statements I make, this one also has one, but I shall save it for another day!

Oh.. what I did after taking one of those pills is something I will save for another day! But trust me, its the funniest I have ever behaved!

Now, even I am getting digressed, which I do not want to be, considering how excited I am, at the long night I planned for myself!

Now, before the dirty mind starts to work, let us get back to the topic of this post so far.. my insomnia.
Yep, because of me refusing to touch the pillow before 3AM every night, I get a lot of time for myself, which I try to use in constructive or destructive activities - it depends on who is the point of reference here - my career or my soul!

I try to squeeze in some work, not the boring one from which I run away, but the ones I love to code/design, late into the night, warding off all the ping messages by the PM who wants a pie in even this time of mine! And I cringe at what I have become - someone who logs into work at 11PM in the night! I was not this sad!

But on weekends, I save myself this cringing, and continue with my vow to not login to work. I generally plan how to spend the night by myself, and one of the To-Dos in this plan is to do blog-hopping.

From the girl who used to blog at work, to someone who used to read blogs but write at home, to someone whose browser seems to have forgotten any url with blogspot in it during the day, I have changed a lot.. I yearn for all that time I spent blogging, blog-hopping and commenting, and making friends. Sigh.. such good days. My soul was always happy, because I used to vent out on my blog, and keep all the positivity for humans around me!

Now, today is one of those much-awaited days where I get a complete chance to implement my plan.
Among today's finds are two great blogs! This kid has started writing again, and I bumped into this blog, whose cartoons I totally loved!
And from there, this one!



Isn't this the corniest, geekiest, funniest and most dramatic and the awesomest love-cartoon that has ever been? Atleast, its for me!

Now, off I go to implement the rest of the plan. Make Zoom channel shut up, and tune into the episodes of HIMYM!

Updated after 30 mins of writing the original post:

Ha! I knew if I were to be a cartoon character, I have to be Nemi!
Look at this - Nemi on Metro for May 22nd!

Paulo says...

This is a very old post, which I drafted and waited to pick up more quotes.
Considering how much work I did on this, its time I posted this! :)

Picked up these from the Flickr stream.

The Way I See it #204

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: The fear of failure. Never forget your Personal Legend. Never forget your dreams. Your silent heart will guide you. Be silet now. It is the possibility of a dream that makes life interesting. You can choose between a victim of destiny or an adventurer who is fighting for something important!

-Paulo Coelho

From Brida -

There are no risks in Love, as you'll find out for yourself. People have been searching for and finding each other for thousands of years.

Once again, she was putting her belief in love, trusting her feelings, but she'd been disappointed so often before that she was no longer sure of anything. Nevertheless, this was the great gamble of her life.

Magical places are always beautiful and deserve to be contemplated. Waterfalls, mountains and forests are all places where the spirits of Earth tend to play and laugh and speak to us.

Aha.. a poem!

Was browsing through some mails, and deleting the ones I dont need anymore. And bumped into this one. A poem I had written for S when he had flown to Mexico, and he had missed me being online by just a few hours !


Oh yes,I do miss you!
But that shan't stop me
From loving thee,
So here I say,I love u!

Funny, I even had a poetic brain in my body! :)

Some memories...

The minute I listen to the lines 'Jab tum haste ho din hojata hain', my lips part invariably to smile in the memory of my state of mind when I first heard this line...

Whenever I listen to 'Chura liya hain tumne jo dil ko', the only thing I can think of is my phone ringing when I would get that special call... And the display of my Yahoo status message...

The memory of 'Humein tumse pyaar hain kitna' reminds me of the day when I was in the train, straining my ears to listen to the full song sung by my drunk fiance at his most sentimental mood and controlling a giggle and a loving smile so that I dont disturb my co-passengers.. and I end up smiling to myself..

Kahaniyaan...

Before I decided to rant here under the name of Ms Taggart, I used to rant at couple of places, all of which I had left blogging at after I felt that I have outgrown the place and the blogger name.
Each of them was a symbol of what I was at that time, the blogger username depicting what I believed in at that point in time!
These were where I used to blog before.

1. Smiles n Smiles! - This was my first blog, the place where I blogged the most, and which has some of the best blogging moments I ever felt!
I had been honest, romantic, mushy, immature, naive enough to actually blog with my real name and childishly funny on this blog, and that was the real me then. I felt all my feelings on the blog and I grew up along with the blog. I had quite a few readers, couple of good DesiPundited posts, and an emotional attachment to this blog!
One fine day, after couple of years of posting here, I suddenly felt that the blog and its content was juvenile, everything right from the layout to the blogname irritated me, and I decided that even I would not read this blog! I also wanted to test myself if I could actually practice what I preach about detachment. I wanted to be detached from this first blog of mine. And I could! For years I did not even remember that I had this blog, and I had totally forgotten the password to this account! :)
Right now, I have restricted permission to this blog. But if you ever find yourselves bored and want something to read, please drop me a line, and I will give you permission to read this!

2. The Chocolate Cafe! - There is a nice cafe here in Hyderabad with the name - Le Cafe De Art. After I had closed my first blog, I started feeling an ennui and words started building up in my head. When I was eating a heavenly dark chocolate cake in this cafe, I realized how much I loved blogging, and dark chocolate. I was in love with dark chocolate, was having loads of it, and was going through a phase in my life where I thought chocolate had the answers to all my problems. That was the exact minute when this blog was born. So was my current email id.
Yet again, I could not sustain writing in this place for long. I hated the template, because it did not go with my blogger name, and I had no readers!
All my prior blogging life, I had maintained that I do not write for the sake of comments and readers, but it was now that I knew that I had been wrong all along. Though comments and brickbats made no difference as long as I felt that I was being read by, I realized I liked it. And with this blog I had lost all my earlier readership, without which I had no interest to blog.
Thus came my second break to blogging!

3. AynRants@WordPress - After joining this current workplace, life had become so hectic and busy that I had not thought of blogging for a long time. After I realized that there is a Bloggers DL at my workplace, I subscribed to it to find out what was new in the Blogging world, and also realized that the blogging these people did, was not my cup of tea. They were all technical blogs which was alien to me(not technical stuff, but technical blogging. I would like to call myself a geek, but not a nerd!:)) but it made me nostalgic about blogging.
Around the same time, I was in a conversation with one of my colleagues where we both bumped into a discussion on Ayn Rand. He went on to tell how and why he fell in love Ayn Rand and John Galt and thus reminded me of the then-me who loved them both equally. During a passionate exchange of emails about Ayn Rand, her books, John Galt and his philosophy, he reminded me of those lines which are now the tag line for my blog -
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
In those emails when I was writing about my love for Ayn Rand and her books, I also realized that I still had not lost that zeal to write, and that I was actually itching to write.
So I had to start a blog, this time on Wordpress, because my blogger friends had all moved to Wordpress and mentioned in passing that its an awesome place! I had to blog, and I wanted a new place and I wanted to try something new, and I was in love all over again with Ayn Rand! Thats the moment this blog was conceptualized!

The blog title, its description, my profile description - all these stood for what I had become. I grew up a bit more, saw life a bit more closely, became a bit more practical and had grew a bit more cynical too!

4. AynRants@Blogger - Well... after a couple of posts on Wordpress, I realized how much I hated that place, and how tough it was getting for me to make a collage of my fave photos as the blogger header layout on WordPress, which was the first reason why I moved there. I thought I had to move back to good old Blogger, and here I am.
5. Amidst all this blogging, I realized that I had made couple of friends in blog-world. None of my real life friends ever read my blogs, but I suddenly felt a need for a place where none of blog friends ever went to, too. No one, including my best friend, my husband knows the url to this blog. No one, including me read this blog. The feelings there are as-is, unfiltered, and not ready for the world to read them! I post on this blog when I want to vent away from the prying eyes of this world, and thankfully, I do it very rarely!

6. During all these years of blogging and blog-hopping I realized that there are obviously much better bloggers out there, who have a great potential of publishing their own books someday. But like everyone, well almost everyone, who ever gets to blogging, I also had a dream to write. And writing, however good or bad it has been, had come to me effortlessly whenever I sat to write down some. Since the dream to publish a book is still as far as my dream to backpack Europe, I resorted to writing skits for office meetings, providing inputs to office newsletters and the likes to satisfy the itch to write.

7. After all these years in this company, I had grown to know that most of the people who are serious about technology and writing have their own blogs on the company network. And so I started mine there too.. That's where I write about technology, be diplomatic and write about the artificial world with my real name, this is where I think, feel and speak what's on my head, with a name which could as well be my real one!

Yes, I was the girl who thought smiles would cure everything once, then I was a chocolate addict, and now I am or rather, I want to be as practical, mentally strong and socially respected for that as Dagny Taggart is!

Dementor's Kiss...

Its like this big demon coming to eat one of your people, and its like all the people you know are fighting to not face it, and you don’t even know who is going to face it next.
After a while you know who was the next one to fall, and you shed a few tears, waiting for your turn. Its like taking stock of the ones alive after a natural calamity. You know its going to hit, and you are helpless...
Its like a Dementor’s life.. you know you have lived life before and will live life later also, but you just cant endure that one moment.

When I saw him approach me, I got the feeling of Death approaching me.. and I went chill in my spine.. I could feel my heart beating, and it didn’t stop for a lot of time after he left...
Its literally like Death – end of a living way, lifestyle, and an era in your life... yet not the end of life. Lot of things that you take for granted in this life are not actually given for granted...

I haven’t felt this bad the first time it happened in my life. Now I am in a better position in my life in all respects, but still it feels horrible.. when I see the best wickets fall for no fault of their’s in spite of all the years they have put in here... Its just horrible!
This is the worst I felt ever! Ever!

Being helpless and seeing your friends fall, knowing it could be you next! Guessing if it is you next ! Wishing for your friends to not be the next! Yet wishing its not you the next!
God... give me the strength to live through this! With dignity! With grace and with respect!

Dark again!

Oh yes.. this is what I want to eat right now! Ferrero Rondnoir! Totally!



And read this... The Review!

Shantaram-1

Wow.. what a book! What an awesomely beautiful book! What a man! Man, the things he talks about when he describes each incident in India, and when he perceives each Indian nuance, made me respect this guy all the more!
What an effortlessly beautiful book to read!
And such beautiful words and sentences to describe his love for freedom, Karla, Prabhaker's smile, for KhaderBhai's power, RukhmaBai christening him, Abdullah's appearance... beautiful.
I am not done with reading the book yet, I have reached just the Part Two, and I am already in love.
In love with the author for all that he wrote about Bombay, and for all that he perceived about us, Indians.

Now, the lines on the back of the book take more significance.. if the prison guards have torn off two copies of Shantaram, and it still is so beautiful, wonder how the first two books were.. as a micro-mini-writer myself(with the only writing experience being blogging) I can understand that words once written cannot be written again... You just cannot reproduce the same feelings with the same words.. the feeling gets diluted. So considering this is true, I can only imagine how wonderful this book would've been had the first draft seen the face of the world!

And now to the best part of last night's reading experience.. when I was reading the last page of a chapter in Part 1, where Lin has walked Karla to her apartment, and describes how much he loves her silently.. I could actually feel a tingling sensation in the back of my neck.. that's how real the words felt to my soul! And then I decided I have to watch the movie Shantaram.
Considering that I would never watch movies of books I love, I would still want to watch Shantaram as the movie... I wanna love this guy more! Awesome book!

I am sure there are going to be many more posts with the same title... hence numbering them! I am going to be totally in love with this book... How foolish of me to judge the book by its fat appearance and think it would take me ages to finish it.. Right now, I can take a week off if that's how long it will take me to finish this book!