Use Your I-Maggi-nation

One of the fringe benefits of working where I do is that we get Maggi noodles in the canteen. So for those who don’t have the time (or storage capacity) for a full meal, its an excellent option. And it makes an excellent evening snack, for those working late (by regular people standards). Me? Well, I just enjoy the fact that I have the option to eat lazy.

To elaborate, I love Maggi for these reasons:
1. It tastes good.
2. It requires a minimum of ingredients.
3. It does not require a working knowledge of names of various spices, condiments and masalas to make.
4. It tastes good.
5. It quick to make and quick to eat.

So, I get to ask someone else to make a what is essentially a lazy man’s dish for me? Epic win. As a result, I’ve been consuming a lot of the awesome noodley goodness lately. But there is a problem.

The problem is that between having to serve ‘executive meals’ (will someone please explain that usage to me?) and make sandwiches for the other hungry hordes, the canteen boys find it hard to squeeze time into their schedule for taking the noodles out of the packet, putting it in a bowl, emptying the masala sachet, pouring water into the bowl and setting the darn thing in the microwave. To solve this problem, I’ve started eating at non-standard timings, quickly earning quizzical stares, and the title of ‘the weirdo who eats noodles at noon’. But its worth it as long as I get my Maggi, right?

Yeah, that doesn’t always work either.

Once, starving and with twenty minutes to go for a training session, I hurried into the canteen and made my order. The fellow in the canteen claims it takes them seven minutes to cook it, so I sat down to wait. Apparently, they were in the middle of a round of cleaning, so it took about seven minutes for the fellow to get around to opening the packet. Then he want off somewhere else and I had to go find him. It was about five minutes till session time, when finally the thing was put in the microwave.

I had to make it to this session on time, but I could not ignore the pleas of my grumbling stomach. So I went up to the guy, a mix of hunger and frustration, ready to hit him if he so gave me the wrong answer. The conversation went:

Jaskon: Arre bhai, where is the Maggi? Meeting ke liye late ho raha hoon.
Canteen Boy: Almost ready hai, sir. Please sit. Main aapko bulata hoon.
[Wrong answer. Time to unload on this poor cretin]
Jaskon: WTF? I’ve been waiting 20 minutes for a plate of 2-minute Maggi. What kind of-
Canteen Boy: Sir, woh to sirf advertisement mein hai. Asli mein yeh ‘2 more minute’ Maggi hai.
Jaskon: ?? LOL !!

His quick wit saved him from being beaned with a tray of grated vegetables. I got my precious Maggi in the promised two minutes. And the training session started ten minutes late. Everyone happy.

No, wait, I’m not happy. I’m hungry again. Gaah!

URL (UnRelated Link): Awesome Oatmeal. More awesome Oatmeal.

1 Idiot. 3 Times Over.

Did you like the movie ‘3 idiots’? Did you? Huh? DidYouHuh?

I liked it too, the first time I saw it, despite the recycled gags and all that. That was the only time I watched it voluntarily. After that, I was forced to see it (and not only it) again three days ago, as part of the bus operator’s effort to make a spine-lashing 16-hour bus-ride worse. And then I was forced to watch it again yesterday, on the ride back. And this time, as a bonus probably, I got to experience it in 3D (as in the image on the television was jumping around in three dimensions) Hi-Def (as in the girl in the seat in front of me was taking the trouble to explain it in detail to her non-hindi speaking friend seated next to her). And did I mention the air conditioner was working in overdrive, conditioning the air inside with the exotic smell of decomposing rat and fart gas?

Yes, I hate that movie now.

In general, I detest the idea of being forced to watch an in-flightbus movie. Especially while making the dreaded trip from Bangalore to Kerala, and back. Not because I don’t like malayalam movies. Quite the opposite. I’m pretty much the most indiscriminate movie-watcher there is. But I don’t like being held against my will to watch ‘Mohanlal/Mammootty good – villain bad – dishum dishum – everybody happy’ with poor sound, bad prints and indecipherable audio. At the very least, turn the volume down low for the benefit of those not interested in watching the movie. And please play something not totally devoid of entertainment value, then we might watch.

So I was partly surprised while on this trip to see ‘3 idiots’ being played (not a Kerala trip). Although not really, since the movie seems to be such a success. But of course, the good bus operators went on to redeem themselves by playing the mind-bending bizarre-ery of ‘Wanted’ next. And on the return trip, I got to see the idiot-manchild coming-of-age movie ‘Wake Up Sid’. And now I think I hate all movies.

I know, I should start taking the train.

Epilogue: This morning, as the bus crawled through the Monday-morning Bangalore traffic, two hours late, and us silently suffering passengers were wondering when the driver would just stop the vehicle and tell us, ‘Get out. It’s faster if you walk’, one gentleman was keeping his spirits up by reminding himself, and not very silently, ‘Aal Is Well’. It took Aal my restraint to not smack the Well-ness out of him with my bare fists.

Give me some sunshine, give me some rain,
Make me watch this flick again and I’ll bash out your brain.

URL (UnRelated Link): All your meme are belong to… oh, whatever.

PS: Posting this from office, seated right across from manager. [Sneaky grin]

Rock Off

Gaah! Help! Oxygen! Water! Something! I just watched Rock On on MTV!

As a non-fan of MTV’s current programming, I have conditioned my reflexes to switch channels quickly while channel-surfing to avoid hurling due to unintended exposure to Roadies or Splitsvilla or whatever other crap they have on nowadays. However, I do admit to having some morbid curiosity in the possibility of a TV talent hunt being some good, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. Besides, its rock. Could it be all that bad?

I do not remember who, but it was a very wise person who said, “there’s a sucker born every minute.”

So, I watch a full thirty minutes of some folks doing a training/practice montage, doing a decent (and I stress that word) rock rendition of a Bollywood number on stage, and then getting verbally assaulted by the judges. And, it may be because I’m stupid to have expected one, but I fail to see the point of it all.

My favourite part was the judges, each of whom genuinely seems to wish they were elsewhere. Ram Sampath, who I used to adore as part of Colourblind, seems to have turned into a snobbier-than-thou prick who can’t appreciate anything. Kailash Kher seems positively fruity when he tries to diplomatically tell people they suck. As such, he’s the only bearable one. The real surprise, for me, was erstwhile cool dude Nikhil Chinappa who, for some reason, seems to be growing more and more bitter with age, losing no chance to savage any performance for cosmetic reasons.

So, if I don’t like it, why don’t I just switch channels, you might ask. Well, I did, once I heard this intriguing quote from Nikhil (to perhaps the crappiest band that I saw) while expressing disappointment at their performance: ‘You guys are among the fifty best musicians in India, give or take’. Really? Really?

Anyway, to recover, I have some rock that’s both good and untouched by MTV: I finally got my hand’s on Avial’s album. Yaay.

My Name Is… What?

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate to see a missing month in the archive list. So, I’m recylcling an oldie that old friend, ex-colleague and long-time roommate Akru and myself came up with a couple of years ago. The current surplus of free time brought back this till-then repressed memory of a less-complicated time.

Back when we were working, and work we did, we’d find our ways to ‘productively utilize’ downtime by finding creative ways to goof around (he was the creative one, I was the goof). This was one of them. We started compiling a list of names that would be interesting for someone of a mixed religious heritage. We got the idea, of course, from Malayalam cinema which has given us such gems as Cherian Nair, Mary Thampuratty, Simon Nadar and Bilal John Kurisinkal.

The idea was that in the unlikely event that we or anyone we know would ever make a movie, we’d never be at a loss for unique names. Also, these email ids will pretty much always be available. So, without further ado, I present to you:

Unique names for children/movie characters  aka doing our part to ensure communal integration

Latheef Namboothiri
Mohammad Aravindan
Habeeb Nair
Madhavan Chacko
Shafeeque Unni
James Moideen
Kunjamina Fernandez
Pathumma George
Scaria Nair
Zulfath Warrier
Alex Potty
Alamelu Xavier
Joseph S Vaidyanathan
Shajahan Nambiar
Jason Hameed
Zubeida Samuel
Melvin Kumar
Krishnan Mathai
Palathingal Madhu Paulose
Shahid Eapen
Fathima Iyer
Sajid Pappachan
Mary Keshavan
Beeran Philip
Sufiyan Panicker
Majeed Alexander
Abhilash Koya
Ashraf Thomas
Shukkoor Thankachan
Zaheer Perumal
Imran Thomas
Raman Chandy
Avirachan Pillai
Eldho Marar
Laila Nambeesan
Steve Raghavan
Nixon Mahadevan
Tinku Namboothiri
Joji Namboothiri
Sunny Rasheed
Kareem Gopalan
Marimuthu Kochouseph
Mujeeb Pithambaran
Imran Das
Shaguftha Peter
Mandira Beevi (the Mandira Bedi of Koyilandi)
Cherian Pillai
Padmapriya Jaleel
Moosa Bhadran

This list is pretty Kerala-specific and therefore may not be very funny to non-malayalees. Unfortunately, most malayalees don’t find it very funny either. Am I really that sophomoric? Whatever. I’d love to see a pan-Indian version of this list.

Please feel free to send in any interesting ideas you may have, if you feel particularly silly today.

PS: We stopped doing this list when we found out that there was a person in our company named (and I kid you not) Hamsa Ananthapadmanabhan [last name modified]. Truth stranger than fiction? Not yet. The best part: it turned out this Hamsa was a woman. Entamme!

Life’s A Game. Have Cheats Handy.

I like videogames. Not so much as to be one of those hardcore gamers who spend every waking hour playing World of Warcraft, but just enough so that, when I like a game, I spend a few (sometimes in double digits) hours a day obsessing about it till it ceases to interest me. Sometimes, some of these games are so interesting that I spend weeks on them. This is when they invade my subconscious.

No, that doesn’t mean I hunt down people with chicken wire and plastic bags Manhunt-style in my sleep, just that sometimes, when I sleep, I see images of crowbars, Doom imps and Minesweeper squares. I also sometimes see them when I’m awake but just about to fall asleep (a condition known as daydreamus procrastinous).

The purpose of me weirding you out with this revelation is to warn you that its finally happened. I think this affliction has moved to the next stage and has started taking over my conscious as well. Let me explain. I am a big fan of the Grand Theft Auto series of games. I like to spend hours playing, exploring and generally creating mayhem in the fictional, yet quite lifelike, game environment. And I think its affected my real world activities as well. The other day, when I was driving (in real life), I accidentally scraped the car against an oncoming autorickshaw (I don’t remember if I was imagining myself playing GTA at the time, though that would be both totally awesome and totally creepy). There wasn’t much damage, just a little give and take of paint on both sides.

Later on, while inspecting the damage, I actually caught myself thinking, ‘No problem. Just reload an earlier save game and…’ Oh dear me, I guess the chicken wire is going to come out sooner or later. So I thought it fair to warn everyone right now. If you see me walking down the street, just wave from a distance. Unless I happen to be carrying a sniper rifle or something.

PS: I realise that my condition is really not that bad yet. I remember The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtKrack, who once, after a long session of playing Counter-Strike, sat up in his sleep, held out his hands as if wielding an AK-47 and cried, ‘Kill the Russian M***erf***ers’, to the consternation of roommate Ice-Tee, who, till then, was sleeping soundly. I don’t think he slept very soundly after that. Ever.

URL (UnRelated Link): Oldie but goldie. Crazy Turk goes on talk show claiming he can fly. They don’t believe him. He flies. Sort of.