I should have the power of No.

What not to do when you are avoiding trouble with the thesis supervisor

1. Hide under the table.

2. Hide in the fumigation cupboard.

3. Hide on the lab shelf and pretend to be a beaker.

4. Pretend you don't speak English. "No speakay inglieess"

5. Pretend you are deaf.

6. Pretend you are dumb.

7. Pretend you are deaf and dumb.

8. Start speaking in fake Chinese ( this one will really get you in to trouble if your supervisor is also Chinese).

9. Run around yelling the Huns are attacking , run for your life !!!

10. Pretend your dog ate your research, experiment or computer.

11. Pretend your pet T-Rex ate your research.

12. Pretend your pet T-Rex ate you up *Burp*

13. Say "What do you think ?" when he asks 'YOU' any question.

Conversations with Mr White

DISCLAIMER: All conversations and names are loosely based on facts. Any resemblance to person, place, event, animal or plant is purely intentional.

Culture shock is a very mild word for what I went through, when my feet first touched the land in the famed fatherland of my ancestors. England was all that they had promised and a lot more. For starters Heathrow airport had a population that 75% beige, 20% black and probably 5% (which might be pushing the numbers) white. Jet lagged and confused I thought I had reached Delhi airport and it took me a while to get oriented. Having spent a little over an year in the UK, I in all my wisdom made a few observations.

The weather as you all know.... sucks . If it weren't for those two glorious months of English summer, when the sun deigns to show its face, the aroma of barbecued burgers fills the air, topless rugby gods toss frisbees in the grass and the girls of summer in their short barely there clothes line up in the streets.. the English would have been quite possibly extinct. Ten months in a year the weather is grey and depressing. the problem is that the English don't seem to realize that 4 days of moderate cloudiness, 3 days of rain, 2 days of heavy rain and 1 day of weak watery sunshine does not a summer make. As someone rightly said," There are only two types of weather in England. When its raining or its going to rain ". With all these problems, it's no wonder they lost so many battles, the soldiers must have been clinically depressed.

The country side is another matter on the whole. Miles and miles of rolling fields, littered with black and white baa baas and the sound of cow bells. I had the fortune (good and bad) of being placed bang in the middle of Bedfordshire in the east of civilization and the west of crapsville. Cranfield village boasted of being the last civilized town before you reached the edge of habitation and towns which did not have electricity. And sometimes, because of its proximity to the sewage treatment plant, if the wind blew in the opposite direction... Cranfield literally became 'Crapfield'. Despite all this, upon arriving I could not help but be charmed by beautifully landscaped campus and the friendly people who insisted on asking me whether I was alright (more on that later) and called me love. I loved it, then hated it, then loved it again.

The English are an eccentric lot . You'll find sissies who insist on using tonnes of sunblock, enough to cause an oil crisis in the middle east. So, they use tonnes of this goop in the weakest sunshine one can imagine........... yet think nothing of stripping and running topless to play rugby or going all the way to Portugal to get a tan. And the English women have never failed to amaze me. In what world can someone walk around in a tank top and hot pants in freezing November.... with the only source of warmth being Uggs boots. One can only conclude that Uggs must be 'magic boots'. The women are as loopy as the roads in England.

And why oh why would the English roads be the way they are. If the Romans hadn't invaded, there probably would never have been a straight road on the whole island. I had the good fortune of being in a district that can boast of the highest number of traffic roundabouts. A fifteen minute drive from one town to another was enough to leave you battling with waves of nausea and dizziness. A small mishap on one of these roundabouts had the potential to choke traffic, so much so that traffic from Edinburgh to Birmingham could be brought to a standstill. And the English way of dealing with crisis is always to walk to the next pub (and believe there is one at every few meters... more than the number of subway outlets in the world) and have a pint. A pint of warm beer that is. This vile tasting brew can only be rivaled by the English cuisine. Don't get me wrong I do love a good piece of Cod and chips but when that and Balti cuisine is the only thing edible, you do get sick of it. I never did get the 'Balti' in the balti cuisine. A bastardized version of Indian cuisine with sag aloo and chicken tikka masala topping the list (yes, these are not really dishes that are popular with the real indians). But, balti is something I use to bathe when the shower doesn t work. But, the English do have a way of making the most unappetizing and bland food. Just add a dash of HP or Worchester, old boy !!!

Worchester, my old nemesis. Why is Worchester pronounced wooster ?? Bicester pronounced Bister, Leicester pronounced Lester but Rochester never pronounced Rooster ? They should bloody well know how to spell since they did invent the language.

I have been caught off guard countless times

Mr White : You alright ?
TT : Yeah, its just very cold in this country. I was thinking of getting another jacket. Also I feel a bit homesick, you know how it is..

Mr White < laughing> : luv, when someone asks you whether you alright ? a simple yes thanks or Cheers mate would do ?
TT : Oh . So Are YOU alright ?

Mr White : Cheers mate !!!
TT : Huh ?? but, where's your drink ... how can you say cheers..

Mr White < exasperated now > thinks Stupid Immigrant !!
Mr White: Oh forget it !! So you at Cranfield University, innit ??
TT: In what ???

Mr White shot himself. His funeral is this Friday.

Signs that your life is painfully uncool..........

You have to physically restrain yourself from shouting, " Run Forest run !!" , every time you see someone sprinting.

You have no idea what Justin is going to get when he says he is getting sexy back.

You thought Salsbury was a cookie, Sainsbury was where the stonehenge was and Shrewsbury was a grocery store.....

You don't know what nude or taupe looks like, even though it's the 'in' colour of the season

You decide what to wear by looking at the weather forecast instead of Vogue and still manage to get it wrong.

Your exotic travels include you, a national express train and a blue ikea bag with an ice box full of samples to test.

You trade nights out with nights spent watching Queer as Folk on youtube while your samples misbehave in the GPC.

Your Friday night entertainment involves staring at an ecg monitor in the ICU

You are happiest when the results of your research are coherent.

What's in a name??

Mummy , the first word i ever uttered and the only name i associated with my mom for the first four years of my life.. at the tender age of four and a half ,reality shattered through my bubble when i found out mommy wasn t her name .... it was falguni.I remember telling my grandma she was mistaken and chastised her for not knowing better. For two days i was in denial and then came the stage of acceptance.. followed by a few more shocks when i found out papa was actually surinder and nani was not naani... oh the horrors a four year old s tender feelings endured ....who would ve thought ???

QWERTY the first six letters on the keyboard....... i remember using a typing program in high school called qwerty, for me, it was just an odd name .. i never did realise its significane till 8 months ago, and then my world changed...Nowadays, i feel we often think too much about names and their meanings... the significance atttached to them rather than about the person being addressed... I ve heard names dating back to the ancient times of mahabharata and the ramayana... krishna , arjuna, ram , most of them are very poppular today.... My own name for instance, Tanvi, was at the height of its poppularity in 1985, the year of my birth, when the actress tanvi azmi had just made her mark on the indian cinema..i guess my parents were not very original, either that or as my grandmother puts it they lacked imagination... a few months ago when i asked them, “why tanvi???”, my dad told me, “ it was either that or saraswati???” i mean, no offense to anyone, but,I dfinitely don t look like a sarawati?? and from then on i decided i liked my name , but it also fuelled an obsession in me to find the most different and exotic names, i guess i too had became a slave to the norms and mores of society.

For most of us names are an identity, a dimension of our personality, that defines us and gives our character a strength.. who would take a teacher called chaman or a super hero called fish seriously....?
from chat id s on the internet to names of babies ... evryone is on a quest to find the best and .the most striking names ever. Online, you are overwhelmed by a barrage of requests from vampire_slayer 49
and hercules246 only to find out that their real names are actually gopal and raju...
parents are calling their babies, Barbie and romeo .... and yes i too fully intend to name my children something exotic ... but all the near normal names i could think of are taken
and as of now my top choices for a boy would be Ischial tuberosity and Patella and for a baby girl scapula and acromion... limited as my choices are, i feel these anatomical terms would figure perfectly in todays world .... where kids are named Rain,brooklyn (bridge) , london, paris, apple , sky and even ryce ( thats pronounced rice as in the white stuff you eat with rasam). So, i don t think scapula and patella would be ridiculed in 6th period biology where everyone would be discussing bone markings...
Even dogs these days have human sounding names , an uncle of mine kept complainin about Saiba not being toilet trained.... Saiba as it turned out was a 4 month old labrador pup.
Sadly,Till now the most exotic near normal name , my overactive but little used imagination could muster up was Raina, and even that is not striking , just less common than geeta, vinita and rita.

Since all the celibrities are naming their kids cool sounding names like maddox and pelican i don t think i d be considered crazy to name my child after bones, for i fear that day is not far when we would have people called table and chair for the lack of more creative names.
Do you think I would get away with calling my kids Udupi and endpoint?? coming to think about it i remember my sisters birth, i remember a barrage of aunties claiming to have the perfect name for her, and i also remember how i added my two cents also to their discussion....... seeing how people were called sita and ram... i had decided to champion the cause of the underdogs, to my mothers horror i had chosen the name hanuman for my baby sister, for the first few months i called her hanuman, hanu for short and would happily inform any visitor with a smile to call her justthat. Eventually i conceded to call her alisha after my mom reasoned that hanuman was a boy name not a girley one. But nowadays names transcend even gender... there are girls called mike and boys called mike.. just by adding an e or a y ...robin can become a feminine robyn, and daniel can be danielle.. could it get any more confusing???

Even naming our magazine was a herculean task , all the good names were taken and the rest were well... not good enough. There had to be an easier way i thought....And these were the times i wishes we were all Red indians, who named the babies due to their qualities (red face , white dove) not expected their children to grow into the names. There had to be someway of finding a name that was different yet not bizzarre enough to draw snickers from the sidelines.. i even came across a website called namesforall.com which advertised four guaranteed good names for any category you chose ( baby girl, boy, softwares, events dogs ,.....) all at only rs.599... Now, why would i want to waste 600 rs on an unborn child or an unpublished magazine????
and after all this madnes and rut I think it was much better when i did not care about names and when i was too young to notice mommy was falguni and falguni means spring ( the season Spring..... not the coiled metal wire ) As shakespeare said ... whats in a name?
But i am still looking... any suggestions??

Why I hate my Delhi sometimes.....

It's very often said that its not buildings and gardens that make a place what it is but the people who reside there...... I second that.
Being born and brought up in the same hood, I ve had good times and bad. Even though I had been away 5 years, I had no problem settling right back in Delhi because it was as if I never left the urban jungle. Those 5 years in Manipal disappeared like free booze on a Friday night .... and I realised I had never left even though I had tried.
I ve loved Delhi, missed it , forgotten it, hated it, left it.................... but, it had never left me.
There are times when the people here smother me with so much love and concern and there are times when their fatalistic attitude infuriates me to no end.
The hypocrisy, the dirty streets,people who would con you out your underwear if they had a chance, the corrupt cops but, i guess its no different from any other city in India... or the world.

A couple of months ago, around August, I remember very vividly being woken up in the middle of the night by my mom's screams and my dog barking.
It was about 3 and i guess i was in middle of my REM sleep cycle cause I just couldn't beleieve I was in real life.
There had been a fire in our garden because the electrical circuit board had blown, and there was smoke everywhere.
We ran in our nightwear and barefeet.... all the while trying to rememeber our physics classes to decide the best way to put an electrical fire... was it sand or mud???
I was trying to call the fire station, but no one was picking up and that frustrated me further..
Within minutes the whole street was awake and around us ... not out of concern as my cynical mind suggested but out of curiosity. As we stood there in the light drizzle each man there had his own two bits to add as to how to control the fire but no one stood up to help. And all the while I was trying to call the fire station..
Finally after half hour someone picked up and this was the most passive voice I ve heard..
Here I am calling up an emergency number at 3 30 in the morning , I sure as hell dont enjoy doing it... and I am defintely doing it cause there is an 'emergency'.
This bugger picks up the phone and in a monotonous bored voice first wastes 10 second saying namaste you have reached the fire station....( somehow this panicked me.... and I have always been the calm, in control one in the family).... So, anyway he starts asking me where, when, why are you calling so late, whats my name, my dad's name .... After about 7 minutes of this inane chatter he finally conceded that I was a genuine caller and not some schizo/drunk who enjoyed wasting the taxpayer's money.
It took another 20 minutes for the fire engine to arrive...... and another 15 minutes for it to circle the colony because all the gates were closed... I felt like I was in some Jewish ghetto in Russia.. ''nothing gets out after dark, nothing gets in either''.
The watchman and his keys were missing, so we had to break the lock on the gate and by the time we got home ............... the fire had burnt itself out. imagine that
much ado about nothing
i thank god now that the fire wasn t serious and no one got hurt.
But. this incident only served to remind me how much we still had to learn.
Today, we step into 21st century, trying to match upto the superpowers in the world
we have the resources and we definitely have the intelligence and ability, however what we do lack is the will and attitude to be winners.
whenever I compare the world to one major race I always pictue delhi falling behind in the race cause it stopped to have a chat and a chai and then discuss the other player's running styles and team colours..

Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more fools than wise.

So this post should explain the name SWAN SONG for my blog.
I am not some young chick trying to save mankind in a post apocalyptic word...
I defintely aint an ageing actor who has realised that this will be his final curtain call.
However, what i do know is that I ve wanted to be a writer my whole life. I'd love to have my work published and receive critical acclaim. Yet, here I am, conforming to the rigid norms of the typical Indian middle class family.
This blog is my way of thumbing my nose at all those people who said I can't. They can t break my spirit.
A swan song is the fabled last accomplishment or a dramatic appearance, carrying with it the connotation, that the performer is aware of this and he is expending all his energy in this one last magnificent effort..... or as some yuppy i know puts it ... 'the last flame before the rain'.
The silver Swan, who living had no Note,
when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
thus sang her first and last, and sang no more.

And before I become a slave to the conventions and don the mantle of a good Indian wife, the ubiquitous cook, soccer mom, dutiful daughter in law and the responsible doctor............ I shall live it out and sing my Swan Song. The writer in me shall go out with a bang ............. its gonna be one long bang cause I aint giving up that easy...........................