Fake diamonds do not help a guy

Last week, I found a really small sized screw on my desk at work and I had no idea where it came from. Since me sitting on the chair didn’t cause any harm to the chair or floor, I assured myself that it was one of life’s mysteries. Anyways, I found it a good object of distraction during a couple of telephonic discussions – I used to bounce it against the cubicle wall from my desk. At some point, I lost the screw and had a difficult time handling phone calls!

Much later in the day, in fact around 7 PM or so, I was walking along the corridor and spotted a partly shiny thingy on the floor. I don’t know what took over me, but I suddenly transformed myself to 1992 when I used to play soccer at school. I know, it was an irrational behaviour especially considering that the FIFA World Cup was more than a year old, but hey, I had to go with the crowd. Bringing back those memories, I kicked that shiny thingy, assuming that it was the screw that I had lost a couple of hours earlier.

Call it destiny or whatever, that object had rolled right into the cubicle where I sit. I was naturally surprised to see that object near my chair when I entered my cubicle and picked it up. Only then did I come to know that what I had kicked was not a screw. It was a piece of jewellery that looked like this:

I instantly assumed that it was a piece of small diamond that had fallen off someone’s earring, or perhaps, a nose-ring. My first thought was to hand it over to the Security in the building and then get one of my friends to post in the Company bulletin board that if anyone is missing a piece of diamond, they could contact the Security desk.

Considering the fact that this object had been noticed by me and also because a random kick still deposited it in my cubicle itself, the portion of my brain inundated with 30+ years of watching Indian movies, decided to take over my logical thinking portion. Then I told myself, that instead of giving it to the Security, I could keep it myself and get the “loser” to contact me directly. If the person who lost it was any one of the many good looking (or to be correct, one of the better looking) girls in that area, this would then give me an opportunity to initiate a conversation and maybe lead to better things. I even went to the extent of preparing dialogues that need to be said and how to react for whatever is said back. The exact sequence of thought process is quite foggy now but at some point in time in this mental video, there were some background dancers!

I took pictures of the diamond and mailed my friend with the relevant details to be posted. I even wrapped it in a piece of brown paper that I managed to dig up from my bag, lest any damage be caused to the stone. But till date, nobody has come forward to claim this piece of lost treasure. When I showed a couple of other friends, this piece of jewellery, they dismissed it as a piece of glass at best.

So, while the saying goes that diamonds are a girl’s best friend, fake ones are certainly not friendly with guys.

The mini pilgrimage in March 2010 – Summary

I have obviously not kept up my word of trying to blog more frequently. So, before time runs out, let me chronicle the remaining facets of the trip and move on to other topics soon.

From the previous post on this trip, you would have come to know that my mother just found out that her purse along with cash was missing.

After frantic searches of the various bags and even the car, we finally concluded that it was indeed lost. And the venue was most likely the temple in Tirumanacheri.

We reached the hotel and then called up the bank to get her ATM card blocked, since that was also there in the purse. We got the confirmation after multiple calls to them, that the card had indeed been blocked and also that no transactions had been done using that card. The monetary loss though was around 6K INR.

The rest of the evening was spent in taking rest, meeting up with a cousin and aunt who dropped by to the hotel. We then visited one of the local temples and called it a night.

The next day, we went to Kumbakonam. The main purpose was to visit Swami Malai where we hadnt been to in a long long time. And since we were going that far, we also had quick halts at Tirunageshwaram and Uppili Appan Kovil. These two temples are basically 2 gears on a car apart.

Swami Malai temple is quite different. It is on a small hillock kind of area, though it could very well be that the King who built it, basically just built it at an elevated level. After we climbed the two steeps sets of stairs, we bought special darshan tickets and waited in line. It was a perfect time to be there since the abhishekam was in progress. Afterwards, they did a complete alangaaram to Lord Subramanyam and believe you me, it was awesome. The one really different piece of decoration that I noticed was the headgear. It was not a crown nor was it the usual Indian style turban or mundaasu. The headgear looked exactly like what we have seen in pictures of George Washington or Robert Clive!

Anyways, we left the temple and had a 10 second drive-thru around the MahaMaham lake and then returned to the hotel. In the evening, we dropped in to my "mother's house" though due its very dilapitated state, we couldnt enter inside.

We left for Chennai that very night - the night of March 5th by Rathi Meena again. The guys once again, drove down to Chennai in a matter of 4.5 hours and I was able to continue my sleep on Saturday morning for some more time. I had to then go to Mylapore and pick up my car from Raghu before heading out to my project party, which incidentally also gave my first experience with paint ball. Paint ball is a game that looks quite easy to play, but like all games, is very difficult when you actually play it!

Anyways, it was a quite a hectic weekend for me and also for my parents. But one that we hope would yield the desired result soon.

New mobile

I got me a new Sony Ericsson K810i mobile phone (with 4GB M2 card) on Sunday. Blew up a 11.6K INR hole in my wallet.

You may think that I have a habit of buying mobile phones. But the problem this time around was that I lost my mobile phone last Tuesday (21st October).

I was at Hyderabad as part of my client visit (separate posts coming up) and on Tuesday evening, we had taken them out to see the Golkonda Fort. Somewhere between getting out of the car in front of the fort and entering the fort (a total time period of 10-15 minutes at the max.), I lost my phone.

The moment I realised that the phone was not with me, I used one of colleague's phone to call the cab driver and had him look around the Innova for my phone. He told me that he couldn't find it and asked me to call that number so that he could try locating it using the ringtone. I got another phone in parallel and called up my number.

That's when I heard the dreaded "the number you are trying to reach is currently switched off" message. It meant only one thing. Someone had taken my phone and had consciously switched it off.

I came out with one of my team members to help me look for the mobile outside the fort. We looked around the entrance area. Went to the shop where I bought ice-cream. Looked around the road. But to no avail. We just couldn't locate it. We went back to where our car was parked and looked again. Still no luck.

We had no choice but to give up the search after nearly an hour of running around. I then called up home and passed on this "happy news".

I loved the w810i phone a lot. I even bought a 4 GB card earlier this year, with the intent of sharing this card with my Sony digital camera as well. All gone now.

What has also gone is all my contact details, a bunch of pictures that I'd taken over the last couple of months and a whole lot of original songs. Not to mention, all my high scores in Quadrapop would now be illegally taken over by someone else!!!

So, I am still reconciling my contact details and adding them one by one. Luckily, yesterday was Deepavali and so many folks had sent out their wishes. And my response was invariably this:
"Thank you and wish you the same. BTW, I have lost my mobile contacts, so please let me who this is. :)"
People then responded with their names and I have stored them now. But the number of contacts I have at present would barely be 40-50% of what I had in my w810i.

It will take easily one more week for me to restore even 80% of the previous list of contacts. And only when that is done, would I be able to resume my SMS services! ;)