Your Others

This is a circular (faithfully copied) provided to employees in a Government office in Dubai.

ATTENTION ALL THE FARAASH

Dear Secretary,

We would like to inform all of you and it has come to our notice from HR Department that many of you are queuing in Personnel Department for seeking a job for your others. This is not acceptable therefore please immediately and not repeat the same and if found any individual names not following the rules, Action will be taken as per policy & procedures.

THE ADMINISTRATIVE AFFAIRS DEPARTMENT

I couldn't care less

Apparently.....Dubai cares!!!!!

So...Sheikh Mohammed starts this campaign to raise funds through charity for the education of children globally. The most luxurious hotel, the tallest building, the biggest man-made islands, and now an attempt at the largest amount of money collected through charity. Dubai does care about records!

And everyone joins the bandwagon. People at iftaar parties are seen sporting the 'Dubai Cares' badge proudly on their chests. Whether they donated to the charity for a social cause or to further their business inetrests is questionable. And anyways...it is a moot point. At least they chose to donate their money on their own.

Schools, on the other hand, are a different matter altogether. Apparently, the highly esteemed Mr. Sunny Varkey and his GEMS foundation promised a sum of AED 100 million to the fund. Naturally, he wasn't going to shell that money from his account. Which is why you see school children running from door to door trying to sell AED 20 vouchers. Ironically, its parents who're already hard-pressed in paying for their own children's education at the GEMS schools who have to shell out money for this 'noble' gesture.

GEMS would have made a better effort at noble causes, had it reduced its school fees by a wee bit, or at least provided better salary to its teachers.

T20 Champs!!!!

What better fun than sitting down to watch a World Cup final cricket match between India and Pakistan with Indian and Pakistani friends. Yesterday's T20 final was in a single word....Amazing with a capital A. Every dot ball, every wicket, every boundary was cheered by someone of us or the other. And inspite of all the ups and downs in the match, and a definite feeling of India's loss looming, I did not even once feel like grabbing the remote and changing the channel. And believe me...that is new for me. Alone, in a similar situation, I would have changed to watching Discovery Science as soon as Imran Nazir gave Sreesanth the treatment.

Ok...so India won. Although I strongly believe that it was a helathy dose of luck that accomplished that. My mom must have loved watching the match. She always loved the nail biting finishes. I heard (and later saw pictures of) celebrations at Al Faheidi Street here in Dubai. I can't even begin to imagine how massive they must have been back in India. Meanwhile, we celebrated by throwing punches in the air and having biriyani.

On Emma, Dagny Taggart and Dominique Francon

Reading both Jane Austen's 'Emma' and Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged', at the same time, can be quite an experience. I don't know how I managed to land myself in this position, but here I am.

I know now, why Emma is more critically acclaimed than Pride and Prejudice. Here we have a heroine, who is flawed, and flawed not just in a minor way. Emma is not as lightly let off as Elizabeth with only her preconceived notions and her judgement amenable to criticism. Emma is everything you'd never expect to see in your heroine. She's spoilt, proud, jealous, interfering, and thinks no end of herself. She's an amazing heroine; more real than any of JA's other heroines have ever been.

Dagny Taggart, on the other hand, is a typical Rand heroine. (I sometimes wonder why, all of Rand's heroes and heroines, have to look the same. Lithe, strong, with angular lines on the face. Any bit of flab on the body, or absence of angles and lines on the face...and the character has to be relegated to the bad guys.) Dagny is as strong as any of Rand's earlier characters. But, I cannot point what I find wrong about her. I personally preferred Domique Francon, the woman who chose to destroy the man she admired, before the rest of the society could destroy him. Maybe this is what comes from reading two books, as dissimilar from each other as can be, simultaneously.

Simpsons-D' oh

Saw the Simpsons movie last week. It's a laugh riot from the begining to the end. Couldn't help but roar away right from the time Itchy and Scratchy made their appearance. Homer was as inconsiderate, Marge as sweet, Bart as bratty, Lisa as Hermione Granger, and Maggie as cute as ever. Even Mr. Burns, in his cameo role, was his sadistic and selfish best. Enough has been said about the show's wit, realism, and the satire employed. I will just say that I enjoyed the movie. I especially loved the scene where Marge tells Homer "In every marriage, you get only one chance to say this: I need you to do this together with me", and Homer, who had earlier used the same line to hook Marge into coming with him to Alaska, replies with a "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard". Frankly...that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard too.

What's in a name?

There are some (read Shakespeare and Co) who say "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". And then there are some who'd say that a name reflects a lot on one's personality. I personally belong to the secod category, and Boy, am I glad of that. For a long time now, I've been making a collection of funny Indian names. At least, they sound funny to me. Luckily, I've the good fortune to be associated with the District of Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, by marriage. And some of the treasures in my collection are from there.

Here's a partial list. Note that I am not even venturing into the realm of the traditional South Indian names like Murugavalli and Bommiraju Sitaramanjaneyula Rajasekhara Srinivasula Laxminarayana Siva Venkata Sai. At least they mean something.

Note: These are NOT cooked up names. I know most of these people personally. There are a couple of names here whose owners are known personally to people I know personally.

1. Renju----------------------My cousin
2. Ninini----------------------Renju's classmate
3. Ziggy
4. Pepa----------------------Ziggy's sister
5. Beutrus Muscarin--------One of the KK treasures
7. Gemma Galgani------------A fairly normal name for a Sindhi. But funny, when you take into consideration that she's a Mallu with no other Galgani in the family tree.
8. Bubble---------------------Try imagining him (yeah...it's a 'He') in a formal situation. "And Mr. Bubble...What do you have for the Board today?"
9. Sunny Deval----------------His mother used to work at our home. A big-time movie buff.
10. Bobby Krishna-------------Talk about communal harmony.

And the best of them all

11. Thankaprema@Aravind----- Futuristic parents. I lay awake at night thinking how they were able to predict the internet revolution and the e-mailing culture when they named their daughter in the early 1980's.

ps: No offence meant to anybody in the above list. How boring life would have been without the variety of names we have.

My Blog

Grey Matter...........I don't profess to have a lot of it, but I guess I do have enough to maintain a decent blog. Its funny how the very day I happened to have finally....finally decided to come out with my blog, I hear this RJ on radio doling out statistics on how the number of bloggers have declined in the past couple of years. Anybody would have thought that that would have discouraged me. Heck!!! I would have thought that would have discouraged me. But, here I am, taking my first little tottering steps in the BlogWorld. Sometimes, I think I don't understand myself.

Anyways...here's to a happy and joyous life of blogging.

ps: I understand that both 'happy' and 'joyous' mean the same. But, it sounded much better that way.