India... India... India

My heart was beating almost 140 beats per minute.. I was in office and sat crossing my fingers and pressing the F5 button of the computer atleast once in every two seconds… That too in two IE windows.. The crininfo.com and cricbuzz.com refreshes the live scorecard page automatically.. But I was not patient enough to wait for that .. Man,this is INDIA-PAK cricket match … Pakistan is just 13 runs away from victory and India is just 1 wicket away from the worldcup. Anything can happen .. A blasting Misbah to face a less experienced Joginder sharma in the last over… the anxiety was going down the nerves..

Wide ball… now pak needs 12 from 6.. Dot ball.. 12 from 5… A SIX… Now 6 from 4 ..

My heart started beating faster than ever… Pakistan just a shot away from victory. I keep on pressing F5 again and again till Hari screamed from the next cubicle saying "Out"!!.

19.3 Joginder Sharma to Misbah-ul-Haq, OUT, India! It's all over here! Full and on the stumps. Misbah goes for the scoop shot over short fine-leg. That is a risky shot to play with only 6 needed from 4 balls. Straight up in the air and Sreesanth takes the catch. India have won by 5 runs in the inaugural ICC World Twenty20 .

What a final that was!!. What more do you expect from an INDO-PAK final. 3 cheers to team PAKISTAN and an infinite "FOR LOOP" of cheers to team INDIA. It was a great comeback for both the teams after the shameless dismissal from the first rounds of worldcup earlier this year. The indian victory is sweeter when it comes after defeating cricket superpowers like South Africa and Australia. What else, our former President APJ Abdul Kalam's vision of making india a superpower by 2020 has finally come true!!! ;-)


Here is another joke being spread as email these days.. When Misbah hit that scoop shot towards the fine leg corner of the ground, he thought he was hitting the ball to a no mans land…
But he never knew that "there is a mallu in every corner of the world" - Misbah's great mistake.. :)

Twenty20. This should be the next "cricket" , as it is very exciting and saves lot of time for the viewers. Who would want to sit infront of the TV for the entire day to watch a cricket match.? I feel we should promote this shorter version of cricket, than the one-day'ers. After all, there are people in this world, who keep on refreshing those cricinfo pages even at work.! :)

American Beauty

“Have you ever watched the movie American Beauty?
“Yes”
“How did you feel about the movie?”
I asked my friend. In fact, his reply made me laugh.It goes like this - “A happy family- A middle aged husband, his wife and their teenage daughter. The daughter falls in love with the boy neighbor hood, who is a drug dealer, and they have sex!. Wife makes a relationship with her business rival and they have sex! . The Husband develops a crush towards his daughter’s best girl friend and he goes after her to have sex and finally what else, he gets Oscar for that. Wonderful story!!.”

This is one way to describe the 1999 Oscar winner movie “American beauty”. It depends on how you perceive it. Definitely this is not what I felt while watching the movie. I do not have any intention to write a movie review here. But a few words… The story revolves around three members of the family, our Hero played by Kevin Spacey, his wife and teenage daughter, who all hates each other. The movie takes you through these “unhappy” family members and their struggle to appear “normal”.. and the struggle of our hero to re-live the happy moments of his youth amidst of all the worries... the struggle to forget the bitter present …. the struggle to move on… The movie is narrated by Kevin Spacey himself. As the movie ends, he dies and the words he leaves behind as he leaves the screen sent out some touching pulses through my nerves and made me to keydown them in my blog which was in deep slumber for more than a year now.
Here it is

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday."

Like Spacey said, I don’t know how many of you can feel the meaning of those words. But one thing I know, I did. May be because I also feel “mad” at times, looking at the way things are going on in my “stupid little life”. May be, I don’t know…
If you haven’t watched this movie yet, I recommend you to watch it.You can comprehend it either the way I did or the way my friend did. It’s up to you. Both ways, its worth watching :)

Tail-piece (vaalkkashaNam) : “It's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world” .But what if that beauty makes you mad ? I donno… I am not that much into "philosophical" things.. My suggestion would be to consult a psychiatrist :) Thats why mental hospitals are here for. Ain't it ?

Attitude ...

by Charles Swindoll

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company ... a church ... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude ... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you ... we are in charge of our Attitudes."

Alchemist...

Some facts collected from Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist.

If a person is living out his destiny, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve moved toward that dream. That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, ‘one dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon’.
It is said that the darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn.

Very few follow the path laid out for them- the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.

At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fates. That’s the world’s greatest lie. Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.

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"If I am really part of your dream, you will come back one day"
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“Why don’t politicians…”

When I was in my home town in Kerala last time, elections for the legislative assembly were going on there. Being an avid observer of politics even from my teenage days, I could easily sense most of the political dramas going on there. After seeing all those shameless games, what came into my mind then was something I read in a book recently, which goes somewhat like this…

“Why don’t politicians ever commit suicide?. All kinds of people – Students, housewives, businessmen, employees and even film stars commit suicide. But politicians never do. That tells you something. Suicide is a horrible thing and people do it only because they are hurt. This means they feel something. But politicians don’t. So, basically, this country is run by people who don’t feel anything.”

Sounds interesting. Isn’t it?. We hear news like politicians are shot dead even by their brothers. But we haven’t heard anything like ‘politician commits suicide’.Thinking in that way, elections are for electing the people with lesser feelings. And those with no feelings at all win the game.

Dear Reader, if you are a politician, I didn’t mean any offence. You can state that this theory is completely wrong. Go and get yourself hang, and prove that you too have feelings.(A better way to serve this country). Hope your fellow politicians will follow what you did there by making this country God’s own land.

Statutory Warning: I am not against politics. There are some politicians I admire. So in this post, when I refer ‘Politician’, please read it as ‘Corrupt politician’.

Hari Shree...

“Hey Praveen, what man? What are you doing here at office on a Sunday morning? Too much of work? Eh ?” I asked in a natural mallu accent.
“No man, I came in just to write something in my blog” .Praveen replied.
“Blogggg?? What’s that” I wanted to ask this question, but my voice didn’t come out. Because, with in some nanoseconds my dump brain was clever enough to guess blog is something related with internet and being a show-off s/w engineer (as most of them are ) I didn’t want to get a ‘software_engineer_who_doesn’t_even_know_what_a_blog_is’ image from Praveen. So I kept quiet with a facial expression saying ‘even my grand father was having 100 blogs ten years ago’. It all happened almost one year back.

If my memory is not cheating me, that was the first time I ever heard about a blog . And his was the first blog I ever read. Then itself, I was impressed by the concept of blogs. Recently my room mate Arun has also started “blogging”, which triggered me to reach here.

Now, I also have a blog. But , what to write in this? No idea. I have gone through many blogs since last year. Many are writing about the places they visit, their adventurous trips, etc twice and thrice in each blog. But most of them were so boring that I couldn’t complete reading even a single one. Based on that experience, I have decided not to write any travel expeditions here. I don’t want to slain anyone. You may not feel anything adventurous in my adventurous trips either. In some blogs, people are trying to praise themselves. Indirectly saying “I am god’s gift to the entire universe.” Or “I am completely different from others” etc etc… If blogs are supposed to be for self boasting, I can be a good candidate. But in reality, I am no different from others in the world, except that my imaginations go bit crazy and wild at times. I am like everyone else, who wants to see the world as they expect to be, and forced to accept what the world gives to me, at times with pain.

See, still I haven’t decided what to write in this blog. (What the heck? Why this damn MSWord is always giving me a red line under the word blog, which is accepted even by Oxford Dictionary. Oh no.. I should not curse MSWord. Nowadays I am so used to MSWord that I can’t write even a single sentence with out its SpellCheck feature. Mr. Gates, my apologies for using the damn words. Anyway, by any chance if you are reading this blog, please add the word “Blog” in your Microsoft Word Database). Dear Reader, I know I have taken you out of the track for the last 2 seconds. Let’s rewind to the beginning of this paragraph.

-See, still I haven’t decided what to write in this blog-. What I said is what not to write in a blog. Finding fault in others is the easiest job in the world, but finding what I should do is a tough task :). People are always like that. Well, I will write whatever thing that comes on my finger tips, like this. But, what I am thinking now is when can I find time to scribble something here? 21 hours a day is already not enough for a person like me. [No no.. its not 24 hrs, to hell with the damn traffic jams in Bangalore which eats up minimum of 3 hours a day] . Also I am too lazy to throw myself in front of a computer and key down something. Let’s wait and See.

Oh.. wait wait…. One more thing .. When it comes to “Writing” , I am still like a kid learning to walk with broken knees. And if it is in this ‘alien’ language, it will be like tying his legs together and locking him inside a dark room.

Guys, I think I am done with my “disclaimers”. So its time for me to mark the “Hari Shree” (beginning) in blogs. "Hari Shree......"