Thanksgiving II

What would you call Con Air, if it was shot in Illinois?
Corn Air.

What would you call American Idol, if it had a Tam-Brahm participating in it?
American Idli.

Ha ha. Very funny.

I had an interesting Friday. Usually, my floor is bustling with activity fairly late into the evening. This time around, there were exactly 4 people on my side of the floor. It was nice, because no one was actually hoping to get any stuff done. Mostly holiday banter and exchanging of plans for the weekend.

Its quite the experience to play softball soccer on the 37th floor. You kick the ball. It flies towards the lake, towards millenium park, just to the right of the AON center, bounces off the glass and comes right back. Sometimes, you don't really feel like playing soccer, but would rather just push your face up againt the glass. You are suspended up in the air. You see cars snaking their way through the streets 40 floors down, through myriad lanes, through the highway going out into the horizon. Light glinting off the lake in the distance. A lazy boat bobbing in the water. Clouds. White, fluffy and free. Thousands upon thousands of buildings, filled with people, eating, sleeping, living; caught up in the infinite detail of their lives. Each with family, friends, an education, anecdotes and scars; worried, happy, anxious and relaxed. You then step back and see the synthetic carpet beneath your feet. Its time to head to the cooler for a can of coke, back to the desk, back to work.

I head out early, at about 5. I need to buy a suit. There is a cocktail party next week. I have little experience buying suits, or attending cocktail parties. However, its the day after thanksgiving, and an ideal time to pick up discounts. I head down to Michigan Avenue, and in the maddening holiday crowd, I bump into my boss and his partner. I find it shocking how often I meet people from work outside of work. It is almost as if, people who work in the same company, have almost identical preferences in general as well. However, they don't have the same purchasing power! Life in many ways remains a rat race. As you grow older, the tracks change, but the race remains the same. Should I earn more, just so that I can afford a suit at Nordstorm? Or a Tag Heuer watch? Anyway, I head over to Macy's and buy almost the same suit, at a far more reasonable price.

Its 7:15PM. I have a train to catch at 8PM. I don't have enough time to head home and pack. Its the day after Thanksgiving. Almost every car in Chicago seems to be out on the streets. Wisely, I decide to head directly to Union Station. I pick up my tickets at the counter and board the train to Champaign.

Thanksgiving

Well, its the eve of Thanksgiving. Its 5:45. I am sitting at my office writing this post. Which makes me wonder, why am I sitting at my office writing this post? To add injury, to this insult, I am coming in on Friday as well. See, Thursday is Thanksgiving. Saturday and Sunday are holidays (duh!). So, most people with a functioning brain take Friday off, and fly to the Bahamas. However, I took last Thursday and Friday off, on a trip to Vancouver to get my H1B Visa stamped. (Its one of those stupid semi-humiliating things you need to do to work in the US of A.) Given the fact that I have guilt issues, I have been unable to bring myself to taking this Friday off as well. I shall be coming into work, starting up emacs, and running crap through gdb, while the rest of the universe basks in the Bahamian sun. (If you didn't know what the first part meant, its just some technocrap.) Bah! Life is unfair!

To make things a little better, though not all that much, I shall be setting off to good old mid-western praire desert freezing cold and very windy dwelling place, Champaign-Urbana, in the Land of Lincoln, Illinois. This is like a fairly loser thing to do, but who am I to disagree.

Che

No more of this crap. I want to go to Madras. Madras nalla madras.

A nice apartment, a fun interesting job, and nothing really to complain about. However, there is no place like home :).

Besant Nagar Beach. Mount Road. Gangotree. They have the best Bhelpuri I have ever had. Its sad to see the prices being hiked over the last few years.

I want to sit around at home. Have my mom make tea for me in the afternoon. Nice food , nothing to do. Take a walk down the beach in the evening.

Kalakshetra has become so crowded. Why does everyone have to come there?

I miss my grandfather. What would he say if he saw me today? I can't even seem to remember him that clearly. He just seems to come in my dreams.

I want to meet my grandmother. I want to go to Tata house and just sit with all my grandfather's books.

I want to go to IIT. Go around the hostels. Pity I am likely to know little to no one. But, thats ok.

Its December. I have been to the Chennai Open ever since it opened. I probably won't be around this year.

Tennis at Nungambakkam Stadium. 50 bucks an hour. A little expensive but not all that bad.

I want to laze around at Landmark. Go to Satyam with my old school friends. Walk around Khader Nawaz Khan road. Nothing that complicated. None of the fancy bullshit. Just cheap nice pure fun.

Can I have that? I think not. That is life I guess.

On Ballerness

A couple of years back, a Professor from Princeton wrote a book called "On Bullshit", a fine commentary on the chronic human tendency to mis-represent information i.e. lie. That prompted me to name my piece "On Ballerness". It deeply investigates and explores the subject of ballerness.

Historically, balls have always been linked to strength and capacity, though some theorists assert that no real statistically significant link exists between the size of balls and the ability to swing from tree to tree (an obvious manifestation of strength and capacity). There are a number of problems that prevent an establishment of this link, reliable data points being one. However, as we have seen time and again, scientific accuracy has scarcely held back the establishment of beliefs, and this is no exception (Creationism for example).

With the passage of time, the variety of usage of this (spurious?) connection grew. There came to be many word forms.

"Balls to you!" - Which means, you don't possess the article.

"Balls!" - Which means, I posses the article. The article is big and strong, and is a noun, and not a verb. I can swing from tree to tree. If you bullshit me, I will wring your neck and chuck you down from the nearest Banyan.

Soon, this word transmogrified into a verb.

"Ballin" - It is an assertion of the ability to swing from tree to tree. It no longer refers to the possesion of the article that enables the act, but an actual reference to the act that results from the possesion of the article.

"Baller/Ballerz" - It refers to the person who posses large and copious amounts of balls.

The word that greatly interests us right now is the word "Baller". We have all agreed that it refers to this supersonic person who has the ability to swing from tree to tree with reckless abandon. However, as swinging from tree to tree is a dangerous activity, alternate forms of expression of the same primeval ability emerged. Also, the introduction of clothing could be interpreted as necissitating a proxy for the size, stregth and luminosty of the aforementioned article. Thus, different ballers are characterized by the kind of proxy they use. A natural heirarcy surfaces.

In ancient Nubia, your ballerosity was mentioned by the number of random people you could slaughter every day and get away with. The non-baller was the person who got slaughtered.

In ancient Arabia, your ballerosity was measured by the size of your harem. The uber baller had an harem, where each member of the harem had their own harem. Ballerosity was also measured by the number of humps on your camel.

In 1600's England ballerosity was measured by the tightness of the clothes you could get your companion to wear. The super-ballers got their wives to wear corsets. The non-ballers wore looser (and more comfortable clothes). It was also measured by the number of extra-marital affairs that could be had whilst escaping the guillotine.

Moving on to more modern times, the traditional homie homeboy type of mega baller, is measured by the amount bling, ka-ching, cribs, bi-syllabic vocabulary and hoes possessed. The lack of blink or ka-ching or cribs or hoes or a bi-syllabic vocabulary leads to lower ballerosity.

The ph d. toting research megaballer has a research area that is completely un-decipherable. For example, "Strings in AdS(3) and the SL(2,R) WZW model. Part 3. Correlation functions." is more baller than "A study of monkeys doing strange things in the jungle".

The high tech megaballer knows "XML and CORBA/RMI/XML-RPC based MOM (message oriented middleware) for Java/C/C++/Perl/Tcl/Python" while the not so baller can "Code a bit in Java".

In the investment banking industry, ballerosity is measured by the number of monitors the individual sits in front of. Information Techology (IT) slaves sit with 1. Analyst crum sit with 2. IT slave drivers sit with 4. Trader megaballers sit with 8. Relative ratio of money accumulated (quantified ballerosity) is given by 2^(# of monitors).

Thus, through this study we learn about the classical conservational property of balls. Balls cannot be created or destroyed, but can only go from one form to another.

PS: As you might have guessed it is random crap. No intent to offend anyone! It started of with an obervation of how people in my firm (especially the junior ones) measured their importance by the number of monitors they sat in front of. That kind of led into how people like to display how successful they are. Then, I couldn't make it a pedantic monologue. Hence, some dubious analogies. There!

Some people are attributing this fine piece of prose to insanity caused by excessive work. That would be open to interpretation. What is the definition of sanity?