CTRL+ALT+DEL !!!

When the going gets tough… sometimes a reboot could help!

I know this doesn’t apply everywhere, coz life is seldom about second chances… but of course, not always so! My last post was made on 19 Jan last year, one day after I moved to Mumbai with a lot of new things to start life with. And then, just like always, I got caught with so many things, I forgot one of my most favorite things to do… blabber out my thoughts and boring people 😛

As this new year has already reached us and the clock is ticking already, I plan to try and continue writing as much as I can.

There is no good output without proper feedback so I hope I find something to write that’s worth reading. Only time will tell…

For now, just… CTRL + ALT + DELETE…

System is now restarting…

Adieu à Vous

This note, is a lot of things.

Last Friday, I got a job offer for a company in Mumbai and then had to leave Pune – my previous city of residence – urgently, as I needed to join the new place this week. I didn’t get to see any of you guys, or tell you I was leaving… I just left as I had hardly any time to get my stuff together and move away. I owe you all a farewell and that is what this note is about…

It also is an apology to all you lovely people who always wish the best for me, for I didn’t even get to put even the ‘micro’est post on the micro blogs we are so active on, these days. Although, I wish to see you all as soon as possible and as much as possible so I will keep visiting Pune every now and then… I kinda miss the place, but then.. Mumbai – whoa! Never thought I would be a part of it… And now I am…! So, here I am, in a new place, with a new start… every new day brings new experiences, and I am here to live them… 🙂

Keep in touch!

 

Regards,

ashKool

The inevitable change

15 years ago

Son: Ma, can I go learn drums/guitar?

Mom: Hon, studies are important. There is time for all this later. 🙂

Son: Yeah, right! 😦

 

Son: Mom, can I go learn Karate? It’s good to stay fit.

Mom: There is time for this later, dear. Studies are important.

Son: Oh, really… 🙂

Today

Mom: Hon, keep yourself relaxed. Don’t let the workload take a toll on you…

Son: Mom, work is important. There is time for fun later… 😦

Mom: … 😦

 

Mom: Go for walks in the morning. Eat good food. Avoid junk

Son: There is still time later, mom. My job’s a hanging sword…

Mom: Do not ignore your health.

Son: Yeah, right 😦

—

Our parents always know what is best for us, and yet we never feel so.

Why does life has to be so freaking complicated?

 

– Ashutosh.

Ways to screw up your morning

Do you really wanna have a bad morning?? Plan travel on IRCTC and try to book a train ticket at 8 am.

So, the story goes like this…

My father is usually traveling and doesn’t have easy internet access and he asks me to book a ticket for him as he’s visiting home for Christmas holidays. A strict follower of the phrase “Early to bed, Early to rise…” that I am (NOT!), I set all 5 alarms that I have in my Ericsson handset and somehow manage to be up at 8 in the morning, when the bookings open for a train scheduled 3 days from now. And voila! Here is what happens once you are logged in…

Hosted on the slowest server you’ve ever seen, the site will be stuck at every page request for minutes together, and if by luck you do get past the planning part and type passenger info… you get this –

Online Reservation Error

This error has occurred for one of the following reasons :

You have used Back/Forward/Refresh button of your Browser.

You have double clicked on any options/buttons.

You have kept the browser window idle for a long time.

Click here to login.

Yeah, right! The government can’t afford to manage a decent server to host the Online National Railway Booking website, and when the outsourcing company can’t afford the server too, WE are the ones who “double click” a link “by mistake”…

Oh, and not to mention – this “you have kept browser window idle for long” crap… Of course we have to keep it idle coz your Jurassic servers can’t bear the load when booking start from all over the country…!

RETARDS !!!

Oh by the way, Good Morning!!

We, the people.

When I logged in to WordPress this morning, I got to read a host of totally distinct ideas from all over the world – that’s what I love the most about WP – the “Freshly Pressed” section! I have been thinking about making another post for over a week now (since I made my first post on my new-born WordPress blog) and wasn’t sure of what to use as fodder.

This morning, on my way to work I got stuck in traffic, and for a mere 6 km (approx. 4 miles) it took me one hour to travel! And when I got to the other end through traffic, I had to find out that a Public Transport bus had broken down, diagonally standing on the road, blocking most of the traffic on that narrow-like-a-thread road. As usual, the Service Van obviously hadn’t made it there for over an hour, though the nearest depot is not very far. The irony is that our Service vans are sometimes in a worse condition than those broken down buses.

Anyway, this traffic jam reminded me of this television ad, made for Lead India, a reality show with a difference – as they called it. (Watch the video, you’ll know how I connect to the above incident).

Two years back in our country, the leading newsgroup The Times of India started this initiative to discover bold and honest leaders from among the people, who could essentially bring about the changes India needs very much for its progress; people who would at least put their nation in mind as much as they do their own selves.. (Come on, I know no one is that selfless anymore to put something before their own selfish selves…!)

I wished – No! Let’s not pull God into this! – I hoped to see the winners really get somewhere and do wonders to our political scene. I was suspicious of it though, because most of the good things in our country go into the closet almost immediately, never to see the daylight again. That’s what happened, ultimately. The show winner, who was a social activist who had selflessly undertaken various projects independently or with some NGOs, is nowhere to be seen now, probably also a standing joke among the corrupt politicians in the country. They must be saying to themselves – “Hah! And you thought you were gonna make this country a better place!”

In the ad, it shows an uprooted tree blocking the traffic in wee hours and all people stuck in the pouring rain. The politician stuck in the same crowd soon gets another car on the other side of the tree and goes ahead, the cops standing by and watching (and probably enjoying) all the misery people are in. All this goes on, people sitting under shelter, talking on phones saying – “I hate this country”, until this one kid starts pushing away the tree, with obviously no hope of moving it alone. But as people dig their shameful blackened faces out of their cars and buses, they suddenly know the right thing to do. By the time they are done clearing the tree off the street, the sun shines again and we see a new generation of heroes – the people who believe they can make a difference.

I was humming the song all day long, with thoughts in the back of my head.

Could I have stopped the people zooming past and asked them to help get the bus off the road for people to pass through faster? Would they really have helped me do it? Wasn’t coming to work more important than to stop there and make other people’s lives easier by helping them a little? Aren’t people a little bit too selfish to help me clear the road even after they were out of the hour long boredom?? I am no saint and I know I won’t quit my job and get to the streets, trying to fight the dirty politics in my country. But I try and do my bit wherever I can.

I love my country, and I am not ashamed to be a citizen here, unlike some hypocrites like to blame the class of people I come from. People like me, who look at other countries and feel bad about the people making our country a worse place to live, are always criticized by others who keep calling us traitors to the country, and say that we think settling down abroad is a good idea because “running away” is all we know, or we are ashamed of the country itself.

I wish I could just somehow tell them how much I love to be a part of this country. Although, it still breaks my heart to have grown up with pride for my country, and to find that all this country has now, is a generation that has gone blind, just rejoicing over the past glory it has witnessed in the previous generations… living in the blurry memories of the tremendous history it possesses… and yet totally incapable of doing something as spectacular as the previous generations…

I love my India, and hate the people who bring shame to its name. Sorrowfully, the country’s full of them! An appreciable effort is being put forth by our Ministry of Tourism, in the form of Atithi Devo Bhavah. I really wish people make India proud, not just by its past glory, but by giving their own share to make it a great nation it truly deserves to be…!

“Atithi Devo Bhava” means “Guest is God”

Life and its baggage… and growing up…

The baggage…

Quite many of you are probably familiar with the name – How I Met Your Mother. In a recent episode on the series, they explained in their own typical bizarre and appreciably funny way how every person in every relationship has a baggage. A baggage, something unique about everyone that they carry around, disclosed or undisclosed to people they meet, and trying to figure out what baggage the person they are with carries…

I sat back, thinking about this baggage and it struck me, our life is like a person we live with all our life, and that person – hypothetically – ought to have some baggage too! I kept thinking and stumbled upon something inevitable that life has with it. That inevitable baggage, that one fact we hate and admire almost equally in our existence, is what sometimes makes life almost as exciting as the thrill of a just-born relationship, all afresh!! Yes, I am talking about growing up, something we all have had to do no matter if we were up for it or not.. Every one of us has ‘been there’. Faced with the some or the other ‘issues’ of childhood, we all had our reasons to want to grow up fast and be able to make our own decisions… and to be able to tell the whole world to f*** off…!

We couldn’t wait to get over with school and go to college… to experience this ‘youth’ they all spoke of… and there on ahead… it was  just gonna be our own way, with no spoon-feeding whatsoever. But then, we did grow up, only to find ourselves in a world that is a lot – maybe completely – different than what it promised to be. The lifelong ambition to buy every missing comic book from that proud DC Collection never seemed to finally be possible – though we promised ourselves that would be the first thing we’d do to utilize the first paycheck!! Anything and everything we always wanted that we made up our mind to achieve when we grew up, didn’t seem possible now… be it that 3200Watt Stereo he always wanted in his room/car, or that NVidia Graphics Card he told his precious DVD-games collection that he will buy within the first few months of his ‘next big change’… or maybe that huge, pink dollhouse Mom and Dad never bought for her even when she promised she’d be a good girl… We all wanted to grow up because we knew we could do it better than them.

Now that we are there, we just can’t manage to… well… manage all that anymore!!!

The only inevitable change in life – Growing up…

We all have those friends who just for the sake of “keeping in touch”, keep sending those texts they never wrote but bring a smile to one’s face… A day or two back, I received a similar text about growing up. (Voila!) Yeah, it had all those goody goody lines about how there are just more luxuries and less time to enjoy those.

Why there’s no one to fight over the new pair of jeans…

Nor are there 4-5 pairs of hands to get a grab of the largest piece of the birthday cake… or the pies of pizza…

Where are the road trips on the rusty bikes overloaded with friends, and why does the car look so empty now…

Why do we have to always grow up… why do things have to change just when you start to believe life couldn’t get any better…

Why do we miss the life of a student we once hated to live… and why will it never be the same again…

These and many more thoughts kept hammering every bit of the 1300 grams in my skull… and then I decided to take a stroll through what others have to say on similar lines… I kept looking and nothing caught my eye except Ioana’s Blog on Life, its importance, and our need to make sure we live to make it worth its while… I read the blog, and read it again – to convince myself that it’s only fair that life goes on, for that’s what makes it as intriguing as ever!!

You get to hear from people all the time that we must “live as if there is no tomorrow” and those very people who chant these cool lines are later seen running around in circles of “get up – go to work – sleep” routine… I don’t “live as if there is no tomorrow” but at least I sure live with almost no regrets. I have had my share of mistakes, and Lord help me – I already know I am not done yet! 😛 … Although, knowing that so many people end their lives for reasons as silly as failures, losses, and at times, love too… it is just appalling. Life is how we look at it. If for someone,  life means taking a leap off the tallest tower, fall down and be gone forever… then that’s what they’ll do. But then, one could probably just do the same as an attempt to fly, and only God knows, that might just happen too! What matters is if the leap has that faith behind it… The faith of support, the will to succeed, and the force deep down inside you, telling you that ‘everything’s gonna be alright – so keep going!’

We grow up, and then grow old, hand-in-hand with Life – the sole entity that walks with us no matter what – until the very end.. My existence is too futile to talk about afterlife and previous life et al. And honestly for all I care, if all that’s true and if we don’t make the most of this one time, I hardly see a point in being given the Gift of Life – again! It’s never too late to make a new beginning. I didn’t feel like making a post that didn’t even impress me, let alone my readers (yeah! Like there is a flock of people hitting F5 on https://tehsecretcloset.wordpress.com/ waiting eagerly to read the first post on the website… Come on – I am no William Shakespeare or Benjamin Franklin…! However, if  this article is to be believed, I am just next to them says Rix Quinn.) Anyway, the point is – Here it is! My work, for your scrutiny. Go nuts… Beat it…

I have tried writing before, but gave it up for lack of audience (or critics, if you will). I hope I get some serious ear-twisting for the loopholes in my writing and any of you reading this is welcome to comment. I hope I put down some good writing together in the days to come. Until then, BoiBoi™…!

The political drift…

Ok so here we are, stuck with what this guy has to crib about again…
In a way, there are a lot of things I keep feeling bad for. For instance, I never feel right about the way our society keeps bringing up n fighting over communal issues… Me being a Maharashtrian, despite of what I choose to, I am closely attached to current issue of kicking out Non-marathi people from the state. And many Marathi people I know are rather surprised to know that I am against the movement. I just understand one thing. The people I don’t wanna support are just going against what they learnt in their childhood. Or what I learnt in mine.
Everyone learns Geography, History and Civics. We learnt that our country is the symbolisation of "Unity in Diversity". We learnt in History that our country has evolved over a couple of hundred years with amazing unity against our Rulers. We learnt in Civics that when the Indian Constitution was coined, its makers insisted on supporting all religions, as well as Democracy. One can always choose which part of his/her homeland to stay in and to go to. It doesn’t amuse me that these people who are supporting these communal leaders blindly, don’t understand the simple things I just mentioned. Because, if you look at their educational background, or how they took their schooling.. You will easily understand why they have nothing to do in life but to follow them. This blind n deaf mob consists of most of youth that is totally worthless because of their inability to do well in life. They are the ‘Bhaai’s n ‘Goonda’s of their respective ‘galli’s… Eventually they become the Leaders of the parties that are currently behind the whole Kick-em-out scene.
One may wonder why would I bring up all this History Geography crap. It bothers me because reasons more than one. But mainly, because I am a foreigner to them despite being a Marathi. No matter how proud I am to be a Marathi, I can’t help myself thinking laterally. It makes me laugh when people don’t even know where my place exactly is. When I tell them where I come from, (it is east-most part of Maharashtra) they ask me if that place is North of the state. When your own countrymen don’t recognise your existence, how can you expect them to understand something that is so far ahead of this level. Their little minds can’t think above their local leader who also as blindly follows the leaders one level above him. And their Grand-daddy is sitting back home, smiling happily about the chaos that he managed to create with few igniting speeches and a little one-day trip to police custody. I got so many forwarded mails in my inbox about "how Marathi manoos must wake up" and "why Maharashtra needs one more Shivaji". The times when those Kings happened to Maharashtra demanded the bad guys be killed. But today the times have changed. The attention and position this political person is getting is something he doesn’t deserve at all. Come on, There is not a SINGLE person alive in today’s Maharashtra that can be given the place of "Shivaji Maharaj". At least spare the Late King the pride he deserves. If you are reading this and are not a Maharashtrian or are someone who doesn’t know who Shivaji was… I am sorry to leave you clueless about what I am blabbering.
It has been rotting in my mind since so many days, I had to spit it out some day. It is so ridiculous how people can’t see such bare truth. Can one man or his thoughts blind them so much??  For some reason, people in my land have closed their minds. They just see what their little vision can and just keep running behind what runs a bit ahead of them.
They say anything in excess is too much, which is true in case of the rush of non-marathi people that had gathered in Mumbai, the Marathi capital. But then being a metro includes all this, ain’t it? I am not against the drive against over-crowding of Mumbai with people outside it. But the way they are opposing… Isn’t it wrong? Can’t anyone THINK these days? When I say this to people I know, they tell me.. You should really see how ‘they’ have occupied Mumbai. But does this mean, we stone them? Should we be so mad at them, we actually go spoil a national Railway exam being conducted in Mumbai? And should we beat the exam candidates with whatever available? Make them so scared with our curses and shouting, they haphazardly run around and get hit by a speeding train eventually to lose their limbs and sense??
How do you justify kicking someone out of his own land?? Can you ban your kid whose bedroom is on second floor of your bungalow, to never use the ground floor? Since when these people became the law-makers? Or the Indian Law is always going to be bent n broken, later being justified as "Rules are meant to be broken"…! We have such awesome slogans burnt into our heads as we start growing up… "Rules are meant to be broken", "Indian Standard Time = always reach 5 minutes later than committed", "Govt job = Lifetime of rest", "Govt work = something that never completes"…
It just keeps coming to my head when I start to talk or think about these things. And it’s not diversion from the topic but these are so closely related to each other that you just can’t tell the difference. I think I should stop just because it’s too much for one single reading.
Stay tuned for next if this really was worth reading. Many of my friends find my posts or writing boring n lengthy. So I don’t mind any harsh comments.
Please go ahead and spit ’em out. Thanks for visiting anyway 🙂
See you again in next post!!

My Lost World…

Something I wanted to mention today…

This page goes out as a dedication to all my gamer friends who have been there with me through the most beautiful times I lived, as a gamer.

This afternoon I was just checking my scraps n messages on ‘orkut’, another hangout most popular among most youth today. An old friend from college days had posted a scrap about how my Gaming scene was going. I and my friends from college days used to play this incredibly amazing and huge game, righteously classified as an MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) named Ragnarok.
It used to span over most of our time in the day back then. We would forget to call home, forget studies, forget to eat… and to sleep of course! I lived a parallel life as they said. It was a life one would desire for. In real life there is this hectic rat-race of every other guy wanting to have a 5 figure salary, a bike, a girlfriend and stuff like that. This, however was a totally different world I lived in. A world where there WAS competition, but in the end when you were victorious.. you ACTUALLY felt happy! Not like the real world, where you have every luxury you always desired and still go on craving for more..
No matter how far I go in life and how much more there is, to come forth in life… What one expects and achieves, should satisfy him/her and you wonder why it doesn’t, in the end. As I said some days back, we may not be really happy with what we are and what we have… But certainly, there was a time I felt I needed nothing more from life. Because I was sure what I was doing then, was just a passing phase. I ignored social life and took up to gaming like a no-lifer.. I have spent sleepless nights killing animated sprites of the virtual people I had taken enmity with, and celebrated it all with friends who were equally sleepless, sitting with me on the neighboring computers…

Been there, done that!
But, now I am this guy who is supposed to get a job and work for a bright future and stuff like that, never mind if this guy likes what he does or not. For the sake of this society, that is a fraternity no one swears by, but still is stuck to every other Tom, Dick n Harry since the birth… For the sake of this fake gung-ho about being "social", you have to be a successful person.
You have to be a successful person in life, not because your parents would be proud of you.. But, because their neighbors won’t point to them n say – "their son didn’t enlighten the family name".

You are what you choose to be – but only in sayings… or maybe for yourself.
In real, probably you are pretty much made up by people on their own, with their own freaking opinions and assumptions about you…
I am not saying I am gonna run away trying to get rid of all the things expected out of me. But when I look back at my life a year ago – or for that matter, all the gaming moments I have been through – I feel that days we had back then, are never gonna be the same ever. One can’t expect to live that royally and one can’t, to be practical.
And so when I take a stroll down the memory lane, I wish I could just spend one more night in the cybercafe with those friends having great time showing those bad guys out there where they belonged… to our feet…!

Man I miss My Lost World…!
I miss Ragnarok.

Another brick in the wall…

That’s what we are… aren’t we? Another brick in the wall…

After completing my college years, I moved in with my Best Friend since childhood. I have been staying with him for a year and we have been having so much fun with all the oldest n the best pals all along… We work, we meet every weekend, we hang out in group wherever, whenever possible… We live life to the fullest! Or so it seems…
’cause when you sit down n talk about How’s life? No one seems to have a positive reaction… They say, ‘Man, this is not what we were planning…’ Agreed, all the things aren’t exactly the way you asked them to be. Sometimes, you are not even close to what you desire. But, everyone has dreams n things they care about. Are we here, living this life, knowing that what we want… is what we will never be able to do? Or achieve??
The other day, I met one of my best friends from Junior College, and she said she didn’t know where life was taking her? All the things in life are turning out as we imagined in our childhood, or early college years.. Get a job, work and get exhausted but still be happy coz when u get back.. someone you love is waiting for you to relax in the arms of… If everything is that good, isn’t it the best we could have at the moment? But NO, coz the things never seem to turn out so well we imagined.
You have everything, the good job.. and the too-much-work-to-blow-ur-heads-up situations… But when you get back, the post-work life is not that pleasing either. They have all the luxuries… but not the relaxation. They have the couch, but not the sleep..
It’s all gone.. somewhere difficult to be able to find out…

No matter how many of my frenz I talk to about it.. there is simply no answer to the question…
Where is our Happiness gone??
And why are we not happy…!

Sahil’s Page
Sorry Sahil, I can’t seem to find the answer…!