I almost couldn’t believe it. Last night I was rummaging through my stuff when I found this little notebook from almost two years ago. Appar­ently, I did jot down many of the things said and done in class when I was at Cornell University.

Class notes always start with the best of inten­tions. Fresh clean notebooks. Crisp paper. Aahh!

Of course, one day later, the notebook is no longer fresh and clean. It has been written on, which could almost be slang for defiled. I have taken great pains to write neatly and clearly, without messing up anything, but…it isn’t the same.

Mistakes cannot be avoided. Eventu­ally, some words get messed up. In the begin­ning, I tear out the page and start over, but later I let it be. The notebook is no longer sacred.

And then there are those lectures. While my ears are listening and my brain is thinking, my hands are drawing cartoon charac­ters on the nearest piece of paper they can find. Did I just draw Bugs Bunny on the margin of my page? Uh…

So going back to the notebook I discov­ered: to fill up a notebook almost completely with no more than a few doodles and only the occasional change in handwriting is quite an accomplishment.…

Of all the different kinds of commer­cials you get to watch are forced to watch on televi­sion, the ones that adver­tise prescrip­tion drugs and medicines are the oddest. Here’s a typical break­down of a 45 second commercial:

1. 10 seconds announcing the product and explaining how wonderful it is. (“Chuchachuva gives you good night’s sleep!”)
2. 30 seconds describing the various side-effects of the drug. (“Possible side-effects include headaches, nausea, liver-damage, hallu­ci­na­tions, low IQ, kidneys shutting down, impotence and suicidal tenden­cies. And oh, your tongue could fall off.”)
3. 5 seconds telling you how wonderful the product is. (“Chuchachuva is the most awesomest thing ever! Ask your Doctor about Chuchachuva today!!”)

You’ll notice that the bad stuff is sandwiched between the good stuff, as if they’re hoping you’ll miss it. You can also see how they keep repeating the name of the product aloud again and again, and yet again, hoping to register it firmly in your brain.

The best part though, is how during the thirty seconds of hallu­ci­na­tions and headaches, everyone featured in the ad sticks around and gives you their best smiles, as soft soothing music plays in the background. Anyone who didn’t under­stand the language would think these guys thoroughly enjoyed their nausea and suicidal tendencies.

There was a young man who was a masta’
At making all kinds of great pasta
He cooked for the whole town
But gulped it all down
And wished he could eat it much fasta’.

Oh Capital One, how I missed you!

You used to be there for me. Every day, every season, I could count on you! I would come home from work in the evening, tired and sleepy, and when I opened my mailbox, I would see your credit card offer with 0% APR (* Terms and Condi­tions Apply) lying there happily, waiting for me. You used to greet me with your wonderful smile and cheerful words. Your humble spirit and never-say-die attitude inspired me more than you knew, oh Capital One! You were my hero, my idol!

And then things changed, I don’t know how or why. Sometimes you were there, sometimes you weren’t. Those days of uncer­tainty were the worst; as I reached out to the mailbox, those moments stretched out into ages and my hand trembled. Sometimes I couldn’t bear to open my eyes, lest you weren’t there.

I don’t know when you stopped caring about me, Capital One. After a while, you disap­peared from my life completely, and I gave up all hope. Life wasn’t the same anymore.

And then today, when I opened my mailbox like every other day, expecting the empti­ness to greet me with its mocking smile, you were there! At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes; I blinked in surprise for sometime before I could breathe again. You were there again, with your friendly loving promise of 0% APR (* Terms and Condi­tions Apply), and all of a sudden it struck me with full force how unhappy I had been without you, how unful­filling the world had been in your absence.

Oh Capital One, I don’t know why you left or what made you come back to me. Maybe you’ll leave me again someday, but for now you’re there by my side, and nothing else matters anymore.

My apple pie turned into a Rorschach Test when I tried cutting it with a knife. Some people see Princess Leia in that picture.…

I confess I am a fan of old Hindi music, the good ones at least. Even those in the audience who are indif­ferent to such music will find much to appre­ciate in the wonderful melodies that they present to us. Certainly, the fact that they have remained popular to this day is indica­tive of their quality.

EDIT: YouTube removed the video. How lame.…

The music is not all though; there is much that we can learn by watching the actors and actresses play out their parts in their signa­ture styles, and under­standing the dynamics of old-style courtship.

The video above is a classic case-study in romance. Notice the remote serenade — maintaining a comfort­able distance is the first step towards securing your loved one. The theory behind this is that close proximity exposes your loved one to your human imperfections…that are best hidden at the start of a relation­ship. Do you see how the actors are never close enough to be seen together?

The next useful technique is that effort­less trans­mis­sion of sound across the forest that the actor achieves, even when he’s barely moving his lips. This is a classic ninja technique, improved over the ages. The key to this technique is the (appar­ently) casual manner in which he strokes his guitar and the (appar­ently) out-of-sync foot movements. With practice, you can generate the right frequen­cies of vibra­tions to carry the slightest whisper across the forests and plains, across the oceans if need be.

Finally, notice the effect that the serenade has on the lady, and her orgasmic convul­sions. This technique was invented by our ances­tors who travelled distant places with no good means of commu­ni­ca­tion, and were forced to come up with something to keep their wives happy remotely. Unfor­tu­nately, with the passage of time and the devel­op­ment of modern means of commu­ni­ca­tion and trans­port, this technique has become an extinct, forgotten art.

From a Reuters article related to the national elections in India:

Throwing a shoe at someone is consid­ered an insult in India.

Isn’t that strange? In other parts of the world, it is consid­ered a great honor to be showered with footwear.

Oh wait.

Once upon a time, there lived a man in the outskirts of Quantum Village. Schrödinger was his name, and he had a cat called Schrödinger­scat. Schrödinger loved his cat, and he had lived in the village for many years in peace and contentment.

Now Schrödinger was a smart man, and he liked to perform many scien­tific exper­i­ments in his lab. One such exper­i­ment consisted of a little box with a piece of radioac­tive material in it. Who knows what he was planning to do with it? Schrödinger was a smart man.

One cold winter day, Schrödinger­scat went missing. Smart man that he was, Schrödinger realized that his cat must have wandered into his lab, and must have shut himself inside his little box filled with radioac­tivity. Now, Schrödinger faced a dilemma — should he open the box to free his cat?

People like you and I might wonder what the fuss was all about, but Schrödinger was a smart man. He realized that as long as he didn’t look into the box, his cat was both dead and alive, thanks to the wonderful and myste­rious laws of Quantum Village. But if he ventured to look inside the box, the cat could either be alive or dead, but not both. Schrödinger was perplexed; what was he to do? Dare he risk opening the box? After several hours of indeci­sion, Schrödinger finally decided to look. “I might as well open the box and learn the fate of my dear cat,” he thought aloud.

Alas! When he opened the box, poor Schrödinger­scat was lying there, dead. Schrödinger was stricken with grief, and it is said that he was never quite the same again.

Moral of the story: Curiosity killed the cat.

I watched the season finale of Heroes last week. Needless to say, they’ve upheld our glorious tradi­tion of disap­pointing endings. It wasn’t any more disap­pointing than the rest of the season, though…but it still quali­fies, right?

Another great tradi­tion that is followed by televi­sion and cinema is that every­thing must be explained by science. Genes being today’s fashion, every­thing in Heroes used to be explained by those little bits and pieces in our cells. Instant healing, reading thoughts, creating illusions, flying, traveling through time, painting the future and every­thing else used to be manifes­ta­tions of the amazing poten­tial of the human genome. The laws of physics are so ‘yesterday’ after all.

This time though, they invoked the mighty Einstein. You see, there’s this girl who can travel really fast, and this guy who can super­charge other people’s abili­ties. Guess what happens when they come in contact? She travels faster than light of course! That’s where Einstein comes into the picture — by travel­ling faster than the speed of light, she actually travels backwards in time, that is, into the past. With this super-ability, she travels into the past, rescues one of the good guys and gets back. Cute, huh?

But wait — the writers pulled a fast one on us: it’s all very well that she went back in time, but how on earth did she get back? Oh, whatever.

I also ended up watching old episodes from the first season during the last couple of weeks, and with all that wisdom, I feel obliged to share a bunch of dialogues that would summa­rize those twenty-three episodes -

Noah Bennet: I’ll do anything to protect my family!

Claire Bennet: I want to be normal. Boo hoo!

Peter Petrelli: I have everyone’s powers, but I’m still afraid and need my brother to hold my hand. I love him (sob, sob).

Nathan Petrelli: Don’t worry Peter, I love you and will help you just as soon as this election is over. Oh, and by the way, can you get this knife sharp­ened for me? I want it ready so that I can stab you in the back.

Matt Parkman: I’m a loser.

Hiro Nakamura: Don’t worry Parkman, I’m a loser too.

The Haitian:

(blanks out)

(…and now, a preview of the next season!)

Maya Herrera: I’m the reason why all those people died…waaaah! waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! (Somebody please shut her up.)

When I navigated to Google’s search page today, instead of their familiar inter­face, I was greeted by the company’s expanded “add-all-your-widgets-here” webpage called iGoogle.

To tell you the truth, I am not a big fan of iGoogle, My Yahoo! or any such “person­al­ized” sites. First they want me to bookmark them, then they want me to change my homepage, next, they want me to install some toolbar that they claim would work wonders for me. No, thank you.

I can almost imagine Google arguing with me about this.

[2005]
Google: Look, we’ve intro­duced this brand new thing called Google Person­al­ized Homepage.
Me: Oh cool…lemme check…yeah, it’s ok. [Goes back to watching a movie.]
Google: No, look! It’s awesome!
Me: Um, okay.
[2006]
Google: Seriously! Look, we’ve added a lot of cool stuff. Now you can come here and search Wikipedia instead of going to their website. Isn’t that really awesome!?
Me: (Yawn!) …um…yeah, okay.
[2008]
Me: [Opens www.google.com] WTH?
Google: Isn’t that really cool!? We didn’t want you to miss out on all the fun, so we’ve made things even easier by redirecting our old homepage to the iGoogle homepage. Isn’t that really awesome!?
Me: If I tell you it’s awesome, will you stop bothering me and go away?