I've been tagged!

OK guys, I’ve been tagged.
An old friend of mine with whom I happened to lose touch completely for years and incidentally managed to renew that recently through blogging. I love your posts Bullshee and I promise I’ll be faithful in commenting on them but why tag me??
Anyway now given the opportunity, I guess I’ll just shut up and start writing :)

Four cartoons strips I’d die for

Calvin and Hobbes: I can so relate to that guy!

Garfield: Again, someone I can pretty much relate to.

Dilbert: He’s my latest inspiration (don’t want anyone at work reading this!)

Lockhorns: The perfect couple indeed :D

Four things I sincerely do at work

Chat with a minimum of ten people per day. People in my cubicle call it “extended" project support.

Spend an hour on lunch with friends and a half hour dessert session in coffeday after that.

Google and filter out stuff I need and use even a smaller portion of what I get. Can’t deny it but I owe my job to google.

Coffee breaks at regular intervals to kill sleep and time.

Four desserts I love

Vanilla ice-cream, a brownie and loads of hot chocolate: a truly intoxicating combo. Ooh yum!


Plain cheese cake: You get the best of it at ‘cake walk’ in Chennai.

Palpayasam: A royal dessert after a heavy sadya (feast)

Yummy spongy rosogullas: ya maybe ten of them. Can’t seem to get enough of it ever!

Four Things I Still fail to understand

Topping the list would be the "inflated" male “macho” ego. It is so big that we women generally tend to lie a lot to satisfy it. Why can’t you guys just be normal like us girls :):D
I dunno from which all sides I’m gonna get beaten up for this one.

Why there are people in Tamil Nadu who’re ready to die for movie stars or even build a temple for a movie star. This time I’m dead for sure.

Why the society thinks unmarried girls in their mid twenties are old! The other day my mom was telling me that I’m getting old and I should get married soon. Well, I jus thought, “If I’m getting old, then what you think you are getting?”
(Pardon me for this ma. Down on my knees, kissing your feet)

Why we study so much in school and college to get into a job that has absolutely nothing to do with any of it. I think I’ll jus take Pink Floyd’s advice at least from now on.

Four places I’ve lived in
Bullshee has warned me against using any of the headings he's written on but right now
I cant help but use at least one of his copyrighted headings. Bullshee, hoping that B’lore is pretty far from Chennai and it’ll take you a while to come over here to kick ma ass :P

Trivandrum: Spent almost my entire life there. My first home. One of the most calm and serene places in Kerala (But take my word and don’t dare go near the secretariat building on the day of a strike. You might end up seeing a not so good version of the calmness and serenity!)

Mysore: Spent an amazing six months there for job training. The training sucked but I’m still in love with this place. Great climate, awesome place.

Palakkad: Again a calm and serene place in Kerala where I was born. Go and visit my grandparents there at times and that’s when I realize it is worth taking time to actually smell the flowers.

Chennai: Been here for 2 years now and I actually like this place now. It’s got some of the best eateries, nice people and great shopping:) The Tamils really don’t need a reason to celebrate so there’s always celebration everywhere!

Four of the biggest blunders I’ve committed till date

The first one would be my CTS (Cognizant Technologies) interview blunder. I was so charmed by the smart and young interviewer and I was smartly answering his questions until he asked me the most obvious question “So why do you wanna be in CTS?”
Well, that being a question I’d anticipated, I cleared my throat and started off with my made up reply “Oh well, that’s cos “TCS” is the ……. Blah blah…”
I dint realize my mistake and I kept blabbering about a lotta good stuff about the company and when I ended my speech, the hunk of an interviewer asked me “Did you say “TCS”??” Oh boy I had talked for a minute and it was like suddenly I forgot all what I’d spoken. I gave him a sheepish smile and asked him back “Did I say TCS??” I dunno but that guy was crazy enough to recruit me! Thanks man!

Recently, I was asked to meet a manager for a new project and I was informed that I’d be asked questions on my previous work experience. The manager started shooting out questions and one of them was “So Parvathy, how much would you rate yourself in Java programming on a scale of 10?” Now that was something I’d never though about. But somehow I answered without a doubt “a 9”. Oh boy! Thankfully he dint test my knowledge then but the moment I came out and told my friends about this they yelled at me saying, “James Gosling himself wouldn’t rate himself so high in Java. What kind of a creature are you!” I dint realize what they meant then but being in the project for 2 months, now I know. Any work that remotely uses Java comes to me. Damn yourself Par!

Bunking classes and going to a movie to see my entire family there to watch the same movie!


Once on my way back home, I saw a poor couple with a child. Initially I thought they were begging for alms but later I understood they spoke Hindi and they were lost in Chennai without a way to go back to Mumbai, where they said they’d come from. Now I’ve always wanted to speak Hindi cos whenever I did to my friends, they’d ask me to shut up saying that I have a terrible accent. Now these people wouldn’t tease me so I decided to show off saying “Haan bolo mujhe hindi maloom hai (Ya tell me, I know Hindi)” I talked for a while and finally they started demanding money from me. They asked me for a thousand bucks like they were asking for ten rupees. Finally after a long argument and losing hundred bucks, I got outta there. Man! I never wanna speak Hindi in my lifetime!

Four people I wanna tag would be

Amar: A tech genius who spends all his time chatting and in the end comes up with research papers on complex stuff I don’t even attempt to understand.

Lakshmi: My dear cousin sister who started blogging soon after she started staying with me to show the world what an animal I am.

Deepu: A good friend who recently started writing. Keep going man.

Deepak: A junior from school who loves to write and the first person to comment on my post. Deepak, your turn.


Phew! I had to get this post up before Bullshee wrote his next one. Now that was really “confessed under torture” Bullshee...

Kids are unbelievable!

Kids these days are too smart. Probably cos they’re born into a hi-tech world unlike us. The first thing my cousin did when her first child was born was to create her e-mail id! Kinda weird but true.

I remember I used play with rattles and dolls as a kid. Probably even get a balloon or an awfully noisy blow-horn thingy if there was a festival happening nearby. That thing makes the most irritating noise; I’m sure my parents would never have bought it for me a second time. Recently, I noticed that my niece got an “electronic math puzzle solver” for her birthday. I hadn’t even heard of a thing like that. I spent a whole day reading the instructions booklet alone.

I notice that kids these days are brought up quite differently from how we were or maybe I shouldn’t generalize. Let me just share with you some of the interesting things I noticed about my cousin’s two kids: 5 year old Amu and 3 year old Krishna.

Amu already knows how to use a computer and a cell phone! She plays all kinds of games in it. Fun with math, making words, catch the worm and what not. I remember it was very recently that I taught my mom how to switch on the computer. When did we ourselves start using computers full fledged??? When we were 15-18??

Amu’s math skills amaze me. Once we asked her “what is 97 minus 23?” She came with the right answer in a jiffy. I would need all my fingers and toes to calculate that; at her age…. Ok… even now!
The truth is I took even more time to validate her answer!
I was thinking of hiring her as my tutor to help me out with my CAT exam.

Talking about smartness, I’d say the three year old amazes me even more. The other day, his mom tried on her new dress and was showing it to us. Suddenly out of nowhere, we heard the best comment ever. Krishna said “Mommy you look like a princess”. All of us including his mom were shocked at this comment of his. After all it came from a three year old. Well, all I thought was, ‘Oh my! This teeny tiny young boy already knows how to appreciate women. He’s gonna be a winner!’ ;)

The height of it all, one day Krish was telling us, “I’m gonna marry Meghna”. Now, who ever thought a three year old would think of marriage. I was dumbstruck by his confidence. Twenty four long years in this world and I’m not decided yet!

Amu has this Barbie doll whose dresses you can change for whatever occasion you wanna dress her up for and once I was about to change her dress when Krishna yelled, “Don’t! She doesn’t have her underpants on”. Now, how the hell did that naughty fellow know that!

Kids never seize to amaze and interest me. But seeing the likes of it, I just hope I can manage them when I have my own!

A messy 'Morning Clean up'

I had this impression of myself as a tidy and organized person until I opened my refrigerator today morning. Bachelors who stay alone are often compared to animals without a master. I must admit I too have adapted to that kind of a life pretty sooner than I started staying alone and the pleasures of it are unbelievable. But I got a shock when I opened my fridge to get milk for my tea today.

Usually I’ll jus get my milk and close it without even bothering to check what else I have in it. But today I noticed that there were too many vessels in there, all covered with a lid which aroused my curiosity to know what I had in them.

To satiate my curiosity, I stared at the bowls and randomly chose one and picked it up. I opened the lid to find a ‘dal’ curry which I thought hard for a minute and recognized was from a nearby canteen. I had bought it a week back and it had gone bad for sure. It hadn’t started stinking yet. Thanking all the Gods I knew, I forced the goop of slop into a plastic cover and flung the bowl into the kitchen sink. Phew! That wasn’t so bad.

Continuing my exercise, I picked up the next bowl and carefully opened the lid. I quickly realized it was the stir fried vegetables I had made myself when my brother was here for a week. Now which week exactly was he here???? Last?? The one before that?? I think yes, he was here two weeks ago!!… hmmmm this task was not getting better. I tried to slowly scrape off the veggies stuck to the bottom of the bowl with a fork; all the while remembering how badly I had tortured my poor little bro with this crazy experiment of mine. Anyway I managed to empty all my hard work into the same old plastic bag.

The next bowl I took was pretty interesting and different from the first two for the mere fact that I couldn’t recognize what was in it even after staring at the ceiling and thinking hard for five long minutes. There was this soft, uniform and web-like white layer of fungus growing on whatever the bowl contained. Admiring the white cottony layer, I poked into it with a fork to know what it actually was. To my surprise it was the chapati dough that was kneaded, I don’t remember when but seeing the looks of it, probably a month back! And it had stuck to the bowl so hard that I even bent my fork trying to get it out.

The next bowl I took out had rice in it. Now who would’ve known rice could go bad. The rice which was white when I’d made it had turned yellow now and I dint bother to remember when I’d made it. I overturned it into the bag and noticed that there was a yellow slime too at the bottom. Now, let me tell you that stank real bad. ! I said to myself… “Endurance dear .. Endurance”.

Finally, I decided I had had enough and decided not to open any more mysterious bowls today. I checked the fruits cabin and found 2 dead bananas which were yellow when I’d bought them, turned from brown to black over the course of the week. I sadly picked it up and threw it away. There was a mango in it which was still in the process of rotting. So I let it stay until it fully goes bad. I don’t intend to change, people… :D

After this heartbreaking exercise of emptying the fridge, I thought to myself, this is why I need my clean-freak mom to visit me once in a while. But if she had seen the refrigerator today, I’m sure she would’ve freaked out and probably sued me for the kitchen-crime I had committed. She keeps telling me what an animal I am but I never used to agree with her.
But today, Amma, you’re right.
You always have been!!