When you come to think of it, time doesn’t flow very smoothly — it gushes out in fits and spurts like a leaking pipe that you try to keep under control even as you call the plumber with your free hand. It’s been a while — a long while — since my last post. Heck, it was so annoying to see the same front-page everyday that I stopped visiting my own website beyond a point.

I guess I have excuses. Many things have changed since November last year, and yet, life is the same as before. Most changes in life are like re-arrangements of pieces on a chess board. You move some here, you move some there, but overall things remain in balance except for the occasional loss of a piece. It’s only towards the end of the game that things become exciting, but ironi­cally, that’s the time when you have the least control over the board. Life is God playing chess with you; I suppose He likes to win.

The New Year came and went with a small burst of hope (purely my imagi­na­tion, I am sure) that ebbed quickly and receded into oblivion. But February was a month of many changes, with January franti­cally getting ready for it. I have seldom seen a month packed with so many punches, but the punches were super­fi­cial, almost playful to an extent. There was a wedding to navigate through, a vacation to deal with, castles to look at, a workplace to be moved, an apart­ment to get out of , an apart­ment to move into and impos­sible things to be taken care of at impos­sible schedules.

But the truth is, life isn’t a game of chess — you shouldn’t stop to think after every move, you just power through, no matter what. Never stop, never give up, just keep going. Just keep going, that’s all…

If you haven’t got it from the title, this isn’t a review. The subject of the rest of this post is to explain exactly why this isn’t a review, or more accurately, why this could have been a review but isn’t.

First, do you recall this scene from [enter your favorite soap opera here]? One of the charac­ters receives a parcel or a letter from the mailman. She signs for it with no haste whatso­ever, engages in some not-so-witty banter with the mailman and finally holds the letter (let’s just assume it’s a letter) in her hand.

No, she does not open it.

Instead, she thinks aloud, “Who could this be from? Hmmm…I wonder — could it be from my dear old aunt? Or my dear old nephew who lives in a distant country and never writes? …” She continues in this vein until you scream at her, “Dammit woman! Open the letter!!” (Well, actually that doesn’t have any effect on her because she can’t hear you, and she continues long after you’ve lost your cool.)

Funny, eh? Well, forget about it because it’s not really relevant to what I was trying to say.

Anyway, after having spent the whole weekend waiting in antic­i­pa­tion to pick up my copy of Towers of Midnight on Monday, when I finally went over to the mail-room to pick it up, it wasn’t there. After some inves­ti­ga­tion, it turns out that the package I had collected from the mail-room on Friday and had never bothered to open (under the assump­tion that it was a bunch of ink cartridges for my printer), was, in fact, the Towers of Midnight, deliv­ered one business day earlier than I had expected.

So there it was, sitting in my living room for two long days, while I waited for Monday to arrive.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out I never ordered the ink cartridges.

A couple of guys built a website that looked exactly like the website of a reputed bank, down to the last pixel. It was so good that not even experi­enced, tech-savvy users could tell the websites apart.

Normally, scamsters would build such websites in order to trick people into giving them their usernames and passwords (thereby allowing them to empty their bank accounts) but these guys did no such thing. Instead, they went around the town asking people what they thought of their wonderful achievement.

The police was sure this was a crime of some sort, but they didn’t know what to charge them with, because they hadn’t attempted to defraud anyone. Finally, they ended up being charged with “phishing for compliments”.

I don’t care much for Google Voice, because I’ve never had the oppor­tu­nity to use it. My cellphone provider has been kind enough to sign me up for a plan that gives me three times as many minutes as I need, for little over three times the cost I would’ve had to bear had they charged me exorbi­tantly for exactly the number of minutes I used. Better still, I get unlim­ited data usage on my phone. Well, as long as I use it reason­ably and don’t use it…er…too much, you know. Just because they said unlim­ited doesn’t mean it’s *unlim­ited* unlim­ited, of course. I am supposed to be smart enough to under­stand that.

So where was I? Ah, Google Voice. Like I said, I don’t care much for Google Voice, but Google transcripts are a different matter altogether. I love ‘em! They’re a constant source of enter­tain­ment for poor jaded souls like yours truly. That’s not to say yours is a truly jaded soul — that’s absolutely not what I meant, but sometimes I think I should get people to call me up simply to have them leave a voice­mail and get Google to transcript-ify it, and voilà! — there’s a constant fountain of creativity bubbling forth from the offices of Google. Here’s a teaser — read it quick before Google decides to copyright it^*!

Hey, I don't know a little bit always, it's me those times but I have everything. Conflict of the anything and if you could We're not break down. So, hey Festival of your clients. What Well.

* In the event of Google claiming owner­ship of copyright on the afore­men­tioned transcript, under no circum­stances shall the humorous text published herewith be construed as accep­tance of said owner­ship, or indicate a predilec­tion to accept said ownersip, notwith­standing a lack of claimed humor, perceived or otherwise.

I decided to make Potato Curry today. You know it means something impor­tant when it starts with a capital P and a capital C. “Personal Computer”. Important.

Now, potatoes can be cooked in different ways, but no matter how you do it, its core ingre­dient will always remain unchanged. You can’t cook potatoes “badly” — that’s a paradox. It’s a bit like saying your ketchup tastes different just because you put a different pizza under it. I mean, who notices such things?

Back to the story: it all began with me having a sudden desire to eat Potato Curry. The logical next step, which I deduced instantly, was to aggre­gate the ingre­di­ents and create it. With this inten­tion, I brought out my frying pan and poured some oil into it, heated it up -

Wait.

I had forgotten about the onions. Onions have a guarded noncha­lance in their outlook towards every­thing. They just sit there for days until you’re forced to ask, “Now what do I do with you?” Some would even classify this as passive-aggressive behavior, but that’s pushing off a lot of your paranoia to the onions. But the key point is this, potatoes don’t need onions — you can make it with or without them — but if you don’t use the onions with your potatoes, what they heck are you going to do with them? I once had a bunch of onions that sat around for many many months; I think they eventu­ally became a little softer than the average onion but looked no worse than before.

Now you could argue that this is simply because Potato Curry is the only thing I am remotely inter­ested in making, but since I’m the one narrating this story, I’m going to have to shut you up.

So there I was with the uncut onion. I turned off the stove and sliced up one half of it. By this time, the onion fumes had conve­niently made their way around the rim of my glasses, and my eyes had begun to water. Under­stand­ably, I was in a bit of a rush, and hastened to add mustard seeds to my nascent Potato-Curry-That-Wasn’t-Yet-Potato-Curry.

Okay, that was too much haste. My frying pan now had in it, a fistful of mustard seeds. In case you’re wondering what the big deal is, that’s a lot. Naturally, once you put mustard seeds in oil, it isn’t very practical to wipe off the oil and put the seeds back where they came from. At least, this isn’t consid­ered good form.

Believe me, I have nothing against mustard seeds, but to me they’re optional. The last time I made Potato Curry without mustard seeds, I hardly noticed. But when you have a fistful of them sitting in your frying pan, it leads you to look at things differ­ently, wonder about things you haven’t wondered before.

For starters, I assumed that the best option would be to chug along and cook it, my Potato Curry With Lots Of Mustard Seeds. No big deal. But then would I have to add an equiv­a­lent amount of urad dal (Vigna mungo)? My Potato Curry would then consist of equal volumes of potato, mustard seeds, urad dal and onion. No! — that was just crazy.

I eventu­ally decided in the next split-second that every­thing else should be added in the normal propor­tion. The mustard seeds was a problem that I hoped would go away if I stubbornly refused to acknowl­edge it. But problems that you ignore tend to have a way of gently reminding you of their presence by banging a frying pan over your head. Mustard seeds in oil are a problem even in small numbers, especially when they have a lighted stove under­neath. As a mob, they’re even more erratic.

So there I was, adding the onion to the mix when at least one kamikaze mustard seed shot out from the pan and attacked. My quick reflexes weren’t very helpful for the onions, which looked on sullenly as I tossed some all over the stove. Fortu­nately, the mustard seeds were quite cowed by that time, being fried in oil and all that.

Thirty minutes later, I ate my Potato Curry. I didn’t really notice the mustard seeds. I mean, who does?

I feel a sudden irrational urge to design and code a new website again.

The goal is to have a something “new” launched on the 1^st of November. Quoting J R R Tolkien, “It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.” So let’s begin.

And thinking about it, there’s a method to motiva­tion and a wee bit of madness to every creation. I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about, but trust me on this one.

That’s alright, Comcast — I trashed your August 14^th email after barely a glance. No apology necessary.