Saturday, April 28, 2007

The VT murders - revenge or insanity?

About 30 odd students and teachers were massacred at Virginia Tech university a couple of weeks back when a deranged student decided to take out his anger on the system. Using a hand gun and a semi automatic, he pumped bullets into 33 civilians before turning the gun on him self, as is the hall mark of campus killers. Remember the Columbine school incident in ‘99? Michael Moore directed a moving documentary based on this event examining US gun culture (this is a must see documentary. It won an Oscar for best dock feature in 2003 and Moore’s infamous speech attacking Bush for the Iraq war was drowned out by ceremonial music (on purpose).

Two Indians died in last week’s incident, one an immigrant Prof Loganathan and Minal, an architecture student from Bombay. Blogdom is flooded with condolence posts and there are also the trashy ones that spew racial hatred.

The media is having a field day restructuring events and arranging video cons between Indian students in VT and their parents in India(NDTV did that) besides covering the awful circus that is the Aiswarya-Abishek wedding (Wedding of the year, my foot).

The VT murders have been classified as the bloodiest campus massacre ever, not to forget manic serial killers on the romp dismembering bodies and doing the most vile acts ever imaginable.

So the question now is, what makes people snap? Is it bad upbringing? The idiot box? Or depressed people who have been at the receiving end of all that nonsense from society? Is that a chance to get back at something you feel will never change? By murdering people?

PS: If any of our fellow loggers has relatives or friends studying in VT, I am with you, in mind and spirit.

Godspeed.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

All talk and no play

The PMK seems to be on a roll now a days. All they do is talk and protest. I found this poster in Anna Nagar. This is about the party's opposition to big retailer's like Reliance Fresh doing business in Madras.

Over booking and passenger travel

Why can't local airlines get their act togethers? This after the over-booking scam that was exposed by news channels across the country and popular blogger Kribs posting his experiences with Jet Airways titled "The Airlines Scam and How I Experienced it First Hand."

An epiphany

I normally suck when I write fiction/non fiction (truth be told, I suck at writing long posts) and try to lace them with humor. This is an attempt since I plan to start working on longer posts. So plissé read on without yawning/fainting.

Grunt, grunt, here I am at the gym trying at 7.00 in the morning to curl two 5 kg dumbbells in the hope all that grunting and panting and lifting will help me put on some muscle on my biceps, not as bad as a rotten grape but slightly better, like a date maybe. Today’s workout went fine. Gritting my teeth and doing a lot of repetitions to get that pump only to be told by the trainer I was doing it all wrong. Splat - that was me hitting my forehead with my palm.
Working out and ogling at the women who were exercising nearby, mostly more of the former but sometimes the latter especially if there’s a really good looking one , I managed to complete my workout at last, phew.

After completing the chore of taking a bath, not a record breaking 5 seconds mind you but at a relaxed pace, I was getting ready, thinking about my project deliverable and the locker key with the humongous key chain, trying to drag my bottom out of the gym. I hit the road at last. It was an un-eventful ride through Madhya Kailash (I thought the Kailash mountain range was way up north) Kottupuram, Chamiers Road till I landed near the Gemini flyover enroute to the client’s office.

Once particular incident shook me out of my reverie. As I approached the bottom of the bridge following a car, I decided to take a left unmindful of the fact that an auto was coming on the left. These autowallah’s, you have to stay at least 10 feet behind them because you never know if they will take a left or a right. As I moved to the left, I almost missed bumping into the auto, and instead of the usual pachai Madras bashai, the dude said

Saar, leftla varadhuna pathu vaanga, meerrar edukku vechirkeenga?” translated it means - Boss, look to your left when you drive, use a left view mirror when you have one.

I normally like to make autos pay for what they do to the other motorists like cutting in front of them, confusing them and so on, but this one set me thinking. Me, the great, I-will-abide-by-the-rules-even-if-a-truck-runs-over-me Rules Ramanujam had an epiphany, and what a nice one that was…