Angry Birds make a Happy Jawaman

I purchased my first Android Phone – HTC Incredible S – on 22nd April 2011. This is not a review of the phone, because (a) I don’t know enough to write a review (b) There are way too many reviews available anyway and (c) The only person who would probably read this has given sufficient details about it and my review would, at best, only paraphrase what was told to me.


Amongst all the features that are packed in that device, what has caught my attention till date is the Mobile App that was listed as the most downloaded in 2010 – Angry Birds. It was practically the first or second app that I downloaded into my new phone. And in the last 15 days, I have been playing it at every available opportunity – while watching TV, while waiting for friends at the lunch/tea table, in audio conferences (and once, during a video conference too).

In fact, if it weren’t for my car pool

What to write?

There are so many things going on around me that I am actually having a writer’s block as to what I should write in my blog. Let’s look at each of them:

The global economic meltdown:
I am not an expert to go into the reasons behind this collapse. Nor am I well versed to summarise the reasons provided by the experts over the past so many months. And I definitely cannot say with any kind of conviction that the worst has come or is yet to come. So you are better off asking for acting tips from Vijayakanth than checking up my blog to learn about the current economic situation.

The mosquito menace at home:
For the past few weeks, there is a steep increase in the influx of mosquitoes at home. It is a well known fact that the popular repellants like All Out and Good Knight have lost their potency in being effective mosquito killers. So the only options left in front of us are to swat them with our hands or use the hand-held bug zapper. The latter contraption, popularly known as the “கொசு bat” costs around Rs.150 and is extremely efficient in providing மோக்ஷம் to the insect. I have been using it quite extensively over the weekend and at one time, noticed fumes coming from the bat after a particularly large mosquito hit the circuit.

Shifting of IPL out of India:
Nothing in the recent past pleases me more than this news that is breaking out this evening. When the wheels of the 2nd version of this tournament started getting into motion, I distinctly remember Lalit Modi saying that the Government cannot push the country to a standstill due to the General Elections. I felt it was a highly irresponsible statement and was clearly made by someone whose only purpose in life seemed to be chasing the moolaah. And to all the great citizens of this country who are saying that the terrorists have won because of the Government’s decision to not provide security, I have only one request – please remove your head out of the sand lest you start physically resembling the ostrich. I think when the drama surrounding this decision starts unfolding in the days to come, I will surely have something more to write here.

General Elections:
The General Elections are round the corner. There is a lot of political realignment going on, so it is too early for me to give my predictions. But I can definitely tell you what I want. I want the BJP to return to power. And for BJP to win (this may elicit a “Duh!” response from you) Congress and its allies need to lose. And my vote would very much be based on that policy.

Engae Brahmannan:
I have finally bitten the Tamizh Soap Opera (தொலைக்காட்சி நெடும் தொடர் ) bug. As long as I return home at a favorable hour, I make it a point to watch this serial. And it is not for the story, but more for the interesting interlude that Cho provides in the middle of each episode. I am a big fan of his and of late have started getting a strong desire to read the books he has published. Coming back to the serial, everyone says that the chap who comes as Ashok is doing a good job. But I beg to differ. I just don’t like his voice and modulation. And many times, I find his body language contradicting his mental make-up.

Freecell:
My latest addiction is to play this very traditional game that comes with Windows. I have now played around 275+ games and my winning percentage is 77%. Am trying to get it to the 80%+ mark, but it is getting very difficult!

Twitter:
I signed up to this service today. Don’t know how effective it is going to be considering that sending updates by SMS is going to cost at least 10 bucks every time, since it involves a special number. Their site doesn’t seem to be WAP enabled, so I may not find twitter that useful. Anyway, I will let time decide that.

Temple visits:
Believe it or not, I actually had 2 temple visits in a 15-day span this month. The first one was to the ஆறுபடையப்பன் Temple in Besant Nagar on the 8th and yesterday evening, I was goaded to visit the Tirupati Tirumala Devasthana Temple on Venkatnarayana Road. I really cannot remember me visiting temples at this frequency. I am probably getting old!

So as you can see, these are pretty much the type of things that I normally write a lot about. But due to some mental block accompanied by a return of the wrist pain, I am holding myself back a little. Hopefully, I should be able to write a proper post soon and as mentioned earlier, the IPL drama will give me enough ammunition to do so.

The real thing is different from the look-alike

I got a refresher course in this lesson on Saturday evening.

Saturday afternoon saw my parents come out with their guns blazing questioning my laziness, being waisty and spending a lot of time at the malls. Yet, I had to honor my commitment of going to City Center with Raghu and headed to his house. Once I reached his place, I suddenly remembered all the discussions the 2 of us had about setting up a basketball board/hoop in my house, so that we could play.

That discussion had then veered off towards playing basketball in the school where we studied because (1) it had a proper basketball court and (2) proximity to his house. And it has actually been sleeping at that stage for a few months now. But after the mini-tirade I received at home, I finally convinced him to proceed with our plan and so we bought a Spartan brand basketball, from a shop nearby. We came back home and after leaving behind all our valuables - wallet, keys and mobile - we walked up to the school and started playing basketball.

When I mean "playing" I obviously don't mean playing in the true sense of the word, especially when you consider that we were "playing" basketball. We tried running around trying to steal the ball off one another but then our gasping lead us to stop that attempt after merely 2 minutes.

We then just decided to just shoot free throws. Raghu then refreshed his memory from schooldays and said that we could play "ZEROES". This is quite simply a case where the player has to go to 6 designated and marked spaces around the basket and shoot the ball.

I must advise the reader at this point at least, that I have never really played basketball before. Never in school and never in college. I am obviously excluding the one time I played it in Los Angeles at my client place, because that was for a total of say 5 minutes or so and when I tried defending a 6 footer, he reminded me that I was creating a record of committing the maximum number of fouls and violations in a single possession! And him a whole lot of others were actually laughing at the way I was playing, so I didn't make a second attempt there.

Anyways, coming back to Zeroes, the first two spots from where I had throw, were really close to the basket - practically at the "paint". I somehow managed to shoot those 2, though it did take me a few attempts. The 3rd spot was where it got tricky.

The third spot was right at the top of the 3 point line. I tried shooting the ball with the best of intent, but sadly that didn't help the ball go into the basket. Actually, for the first 10 or 15 attempts, I barely managed to hit the board, let alone touch the rim of the basket.

Seeing my plight, Raghu, who btw was miles ahead of me in the game by virtue of having played it in school, gave me tips about holding and releasing the ball. While I didn't follow it to a T, it at least helped me reach the board more consistently.

After many many attempts, I finally managed to shoot the trey and then went on to complete the set. He'd of course, finished much earlier and the second set we played was no different. I was again, stuck at the top of the trey and unable to shoot the ball into the hoop in the first couple of attempts. But I did manage to score after probably 6-7 attempts.

One thing I noticed was that while I didn't really score the treys, but whenever I scored, it was nothing but the net - no clanking of rim, no bounce back from the board, no lucky rolls etc. It was just plain net .Swoosh!

All along, I was comparing the way I was now shooting, with the way I shot the ball in the arcade at City Center. I used to dominate that game so much and found it so easy to play. Obviously having a net at 7 feet height and at a distance of 3 feet makes a BIG difference in getting the ball into the net! Probably, excessive playing time at the arcade has probably eroded my natural skills on a real basketball court.

Anyways, we wound up after an hour and then went on to do other stuff like going to an eatery for chaat items and then heading to a baby shop to buy a gift for Ramadurai's daughter, on the occasion of her ayush homam today (Sunday morning).

Today, I didn't have too much of body pain which in a way is actually unusual. Probably spending two successive Wednesdays on the cricket ground near the office returned some amount of sanity into my system. Of course, Raghu didn't seem to have that luck and till this evening, he said he was feeling like he had completed a heptathlon yesterday!

I hope we can sustain this momentum and continue to play basketball. As of now, the next "game" date is set for May 1st, but it will be in the morning time. Hope I am able to wake up Raghu, for the same.

I have not converted my Tamizh New Year and other points that don't really warrant separate posts

A couple of months ago, the "illustrious" (sic) Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, introduced this new bill,seeking to change the Tamizh New Year to the first date of the Thai month in stead of the ages old tradition of Chithirai month.

Ordinary folk can afford to make errors due to senility, but letting such individuals be a head of state is bound to cause such official jokes. While he may have his own linguistic chauvinistic reasons to make this change, he basically ignored the religious sentiments of the Tamizh speaking Hindu community.

I don't want to get into more details of this bill which will soon become a law, but to me, my Hindu New Year falls in the Chithirai month. I am least bit bothered about what the Government decides is the New Year. My religion, my tradition, my culture, my customs dictate that my New Year starts with the Chithirai month and I am not planning to deviate from it!

Anyways, this puthaandu started on a relatively low tone at home. The reason was just that with all the painting work going on, things are still not in place (quite literally). So in terms of the Vishu kanee, it was nowhere like usual and definitely not like last time.

And this must be one holiday that I have spent at home without watching much of TV. Once again, the blame is on the painting job and it was only in the late afternoon that I reconnected my Tata Sky to my TV.

Other than that, I have spent quite a lethargic Sunday. Of course, I washed two loads of clothes and still have some left over, but other than that, I didn't do much at home. I did help around in re-hooking many of the screens and putting them back in place. But in general, I guess I was probably I am a bit tired after my outstanding performances of scoring 56,51,64 and 64 in consecutive Hoops games at City Center. I now have around 350 tokens and from next week onwards, I can probably think of redeeming them. I bet its gonna be QUITE embarrassing having to exchange tokens in the midst of kids, but just because I am bigger than some of them, shouldn't make me feel out of place right?

Also, my newspaper agent came by to collect the first month's prepaid coupons for my Times of India subscription. He says it will start tomorrow. Eagerly waiting for it!

On a sad note, the father of one of my superiors in office (in the same unit, but not my line manager) passed away yesterday - may his soul rest in peace. I didn't see the message he sent me and only when a friend of mine called me later, I came to know about it. We couldn't visit him yesterday and today being the festival day, we couldn't go today either. We planned to go tomorrow, but my mother says that the "Dhukkam" rules allow me to visit him only on Thursday. I will decide on the course of action after consulting with my friends at work tomorrow.

Expectation and Recognition

The unit I belong to in my company, has its annual celebrations around Dec-Jan. There are a lot of activities that happen around these celebrations and all of us in the unit get a common gift too. Last year it was a super cool backpack and this time around it is a watch.

Other than this, every city where we have a presence, we arrange for lot of fun activities, competitions etc. Last year, I was very much involved with many events that took place at both our centers at Chennai. I was organising all these events, participating in few, co-ordinating between the various groups involved in overall running of the show etc.

What really bothered me was that on the days when the big bosses were present, some of the people in my immediate next level, started making their presence felt a lot. The picture that got created was as if they were the brains behind the show, whereas neither were they the brains nor were they the brawns.

What also peeved me was that people who were getting clearly demarcated areas to arrange, still used to come to me for queries/suggestions etc. And many a time, I did some co-ordination for them as well.

But at the end of the events, I somehow felt that I didn't really get the kind of appreciation I deserved. I know for sure that there were no major hiccups. And the overall feedback was that it went well.

So bearing all this in mind, I made a very conscious decision not to involve myself at any organisational capacity in this year's events. I didn't volunteer to be part of the organising group and quite interestingly other than a a couple of my good friends, no one else even asked why I was not joining the group.

Probably because I think I did a good job and because I wasn't involved this year, I felt that the events this year weren't that good. There were interesting activities, but nothing really in terms of team building.

And there was heavy political undercurrents between the managers and the HR in terms of taking ownership of the activities. There was a plan to arrange for a dance competition between the various units in the offices at Chennai. But due to some late cancellations, this didn't happen. The organising group went into 'salvaging pride' mode and decided to repeat few events held earlier and also arrange for a game of housie.

Since I conducted that game last year, the group decided that I would be the one doing it this time too. While I didn't want to host any event, I thought I will support the organisers in their bid to salvage some pride and keep the unit folks happy.

The minute I accepted, I started getting instructions and suggestions from so many quarters that I started wondering why I had to do it. Some of the organisers even wanted me to send out mailers.

I stoutly refused and limited my role/responsibility to arrange for the event (we had very few printed tickets and had to generate lots more) and host it. And when the time for running the show came up, I didn't do it with the same enthusiasm I had last year.

I was privy to a conversation the next day with some organisers and the topic under discussion was that since there was excess money, the organisers would gift themselves something. Volunteers would also be included. And when I checked, my name didn't come up at first and I had to justify my inclusion! In any case, we had some excess funds last year too, but the consensus was that the organisers wouldn't reward themselves. I strongly feel that its a wrong precedent.

The events on the last day were very flat too. At the end of the events, the vote of thanks was being delivered as a mere formality and the list of organisers were announced. Yet again, my name was omitted.

While I don't look forward to receiving a special plaque for my contribution, I definitely don't think I deserved to be neglected either. And the event I held was only because the committee was looking to salvage some reputation and I was given the responsibility of running the show with a lead time of like 3 hours. It does leave me wondering whether the organisers used me and another guy (who looked after the repeat events I mentioned earlier) just to prove a point in their political battles.

But the lingering thought in my head this whole week has been this: Were the events really that bad or was it simply a case of me thinking that I would have done a better job? If it was indeed the latter, then it bothers me more because I have this perception of taking a higher moral ground on such things. Perhaps I am not that saintly after all!

Hoops Fever at City Center

Swish.
Swish.
Clang.
Around the ring and inside.
.
.
.
Around the ring and outside.
.
.
.
Three.
Clutter.
Clutter.
Three.
Three.
Three.
Three.
Game over.

I was in prime form at the Hoops Fever machine at City Center yesterday evening. I had gone there with Raghu as usual and we went up to the play zone on cue.

We played 3 games and my scores were 35, 47 and 45 in that order. The 47 marks my highest score till date on these machines. At any rate, I think I have set a new benchmark for myself!

This morning Raghu sent me a message that he felt that our time at City Center was perfect because:
1. We snacked up well
2. Waltzed through Landmark for quite some time without buying anything
3. Shot hoops and got quite a good number of tickets
4. We got free parking since we signed up the coupon as requested by the holiday resort group

But I felt that the "vasool" factor was not that great (especially compared to last week) and so, I feel it was only almost perfect. Hope the next trip sets things right.

I either inspired someone or created peer pressure

From the minute I boarded the Office bus to return home yesterday evening, I was playing games on my mobile. Since its a new one, it was my first time with those games and I was playing it quite seriously. Then a guy sat next to me and he naturally observed the intensity with which I was playing.

Some 10-15 minutes after the bus started from the Office, I noticed that he too took out his mobile and started playing games on it.

So basically, I either inspired him to play games on mobile phone or at least I created enough peer pressure for him.

Whatever it may be, I am happy.