75. DEAR NON-INDIANS..(and some Indians too..)

Over the past couple of years that I have been outside India, I have come across many people from different countries and cultures. It was great to find out how people across the globe know Shah Rukh Khan, and Modi and the 3 Idiots movie. All izz well…. It was indeed heartening to know that I come from a famous country, but it was also disheartening to find that there are a lot of preconceived (and mostly untrue)  notions about India and Indians.  Some of them are ‘harmless’, but some of them are quite annoying. So here goes the list of common myths about India.

#Dark skin doesn’t imply you are from the South, and fair skin doesn’t imply you are from the North. There are fair skinned people all over India, and the same goes for dark skinned people. 

I have had countless people ask me if I am from the South and if my roomie who is also a Mallu(Malayali), is from the North. But the worst came from a Gujju(Gujarati) friend who commented on my neighbor that she was way too good looking to be a Mallu! :-|

                           

#Not all Indian men are rapists. Yes, from the insane number of rape incidents that make headlines everyday, rape seems to be a favorite pastime for Indian men, but decent and respectable men still exist in the country. 

I have friends who have been asked how come they haven’t been raped after staying in India for so long!

#This one is especially to Singaporeans and Malaysians: Tamil is not the national language of India. I know that majority of the Indian population in Singapore is Tamil, but in India, Tamil is spoken by less than 6% of the population. We do not have a national language, probably because of the hundreds of native languages we have in different parts of the country.

                                

#Hindi is the language. Hindu(ism) is the religion.

Please don’t ask an Indian if he/she speaks Hindu.

#Speaking of Hinduism, not all Indians are Hindus. There are Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jews and Free Thinkers.

                                                        

#Not all Malayalis get drunk everyday. 

(Interestingly, one of the most disciplined and lengthy queuing systems in India can be found in front of liquour shops in Kerala:P)

                                 

69. Different people, and their totally different eating styles -Observations

The same kind of food; the same kind of mouth; the same kind of hands -but gosh! there are a hundred and one different ways of making the food reach the mouth!

This is one of the observations that I have made during the past few months in S'pore. Many gadgets have been discovered over the centuries to aid people in this 'laborious task' of making the food reach its destination. With varying latitudes and longitudes, the  permutation&combinations of different tools used varies -fork&spoon, knife&fork, fork,knife&spoon, chop-sticks&spoon and so on. However, from what I have observed, whatever be the kind of food they are dealing with, people generally prefer to eat it the way they have been taught at home by their mom, during their 'table manners' course. So that means, be it rice, noodles, yong tau foo, the Chinese can tackle anything that comes across their way with the help of two puny sticks. Likewise, the Europeans equip themselves with fork&knife. Singaporeans -fork and spoon and occasionally a pair of chopsticks too. And we Indians...well we don't usually require any eating aids. Why bother when God has given us awesome hands!! (But still most of the people, all over the world are taught that eating with bare hands is ill-mannered!! [sigh])

Rice and curry, I can eat with a pair of spoon and fork; noodles and the like, I can manage with a pair of chopsticks(my latest achievement :D ) but when it comes to chicken and other such dead animals which have bones, I need my hands desperately.

I realized this truth when I was lunching with some of my European and  Singaporean friends.
It was the Dutch guy's birthday, and the birthday co-ordinator selected this fancy Indonesian restaurant to celebrate his b'day. Browsing throug the menu card made me 'gulp'. The starting price for the main-course was10S$. I ordered roasted chicken rice for myself since it was the only comprehensible item in the menu that suited my budget. (My brain was calculating: 10S$ = Rs 400. I recollected those days in my UG college when one month's canteen fee was around Rs. 1200 = 30S$ . I gulped again.)

Our food arrived in no time,and all of us geared ourselves with fork and spoon to attack the food. 
'Uh Oh'... The chicken had bones, unlike the usual chicken rice. I so totally don't know how to tear the flesh out from the bones using fork and spoon. The Dutch guy was complaining too -he wanted a knife instead of the fork. I sat there wondering what in the world to do with the two metal pieces in my hand. My hands longed to reach out to the morsel.

Nevertheless, I dug in. With all my might and skill, I managed to finish off the first piece fairly decently. Hmmm...Unlike most of the other times when the chicken was half cooked that made me gag, this one was especially tasty. Yumm...I was into my second piece trying to do the flesh-bone-separating act, when, the spoon slipped and the chicken and the fork went flying away in opposite directions. I sat there stupefied, while the others burst into laughter. Needless to say, I was embarassed to the core:| And I was sad, and guilty too -sad for the chicken who sacrificed its life for nothing, and guilty for wasting money...that chicken piece would have cost atleast 2 S$. Sigh!

My so polite friends(Europeans are always nice) bent down to take the spoon for me, and I deftly used the time to grab the next chicken piece and have a bite ;)
..
..

Weeks later, I was lunching again with my international friends. This time, I played safe by sticking to  vegetarian food.

Our random conversations reached the Indian boundaries, and the Singaporean friend suddenly remarked: "The way Indians eat their food is so cool. They have special skills to eat their food. They not only eat rice with hands but can even tear dosa and pratas with one hand easily. The way they maneuver their fingers dexterously to take food and push it inside the mouth is amazing."

Well what can I say? I beamed at my 'awesome dexterous skillful hands' and ever since I have a special regard for my hand whenever they 'maneuver their way to get food into my mouth'. ;)

65. Do you like often like like saying 'like'?

Click on the pic and read

Like the plethora of the uninvited things that had entered into our lives and have taken roots, like those large ugly pimples, 'like' has become a part and parcel of our lingo. It has now got stuck to our tongues like leeches. Though it proves to be a convenient filler to the speaker, it is just like an irrrrritant gad fly to the listeners. Some of the other common fillers are 'means', 'mathlab' and 'you know'. You know....they just like spoil the beauty of the language....means they just destroy it!!

61. It takes all kinds to make this world-III

New guy on the net:
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New guy: Hey Nee, I think my flirting skills are getting better and better day by day!
Me: Oh really?! How do you know? :P
New guy: Abhay am serious. Gals out there are crazy about me!!
Me: really? :P :P
New guy: Yeah! they not only like me, but even keep expressing their fondness towards me!!!
Me: really? how?:P :P :P
New  guy: whenever i say something over the chat, they keep saying Lots Of Love....they even use have short form for that -'LOL' !!!!
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Yup! welcome to the club ;)

59. It takes all kinds to make this world-I

During the tech round of PI(personal interview) by a leading software company... hmmm....lets call it \/\/||?%@

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Interviewer: So Mr X, what all languages do you know?

Mr X(ComSci student): Sir. English, Malayalam, Hindi.

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The guy got the job!

Well what can I say...it definitely takes all kinds to make this world!

48. The Chicken?...or The Egg?...

This infinite-loop question was brought once again to the surface by Bro during one of our casual chit-chatters.(Well…Umm…er…not a casual talk exactly –Bro was actually trying to ‘train’ me for GD(group discussion), which I’ll be inevitably facing in the very near future…as hopefully companies might soon start plying the campus).

That got me into thinking…(yea I do think at times)… and imagining…and googling…

I wonder if the chickens would be as interested in tracing their family trees as we humans are! :P

If you are a staunch believer of the Bible, then you can easily conclude that chickens came first –It was on the Fifth Day of Creation Week that He created every winged creature (Genesis 1:21) complete with the DNA to reproduce that kind. Then He blessed them, saying,” Be fruitful, and multiply" (using that DNA). For the chickens, this meant lay chicken eggs. Problem solved! :)

However big shots like Stephen Hawking and Christopher Langan along with Darwin argue that the egg came before the chicken.

While ol’ Aristotle seemed to be unable to come up with a definite solution and played it safe. He was quite puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed.

Another popular theory holds that genetic material does not alter during an animal's life. It does however change in the egg. Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in the era when dinosaurs roamed around at large, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg. Confused??? To put it in simple terms, two non-chickens mated, they may have been the same species of another bird, but some mutation happens. It mutates in the cells that created the egg. Thus, the egg hatches the first chicken.Voila! :D

In this light, both the egg and the chicken evolved simultaneously from birds who weren't chickens and didn't lay chicken eggs but gradually became more and more like chickens over time. Hmmm…..

But if the dinosaurs came first, who laid the dinosaur egg?... And again, it is no easy path from dinosaur to bird either, as legs must become wings, scales must become feathers, solid bones should turn hollow, cold-blooded should heat up to warm-blooded. :O

"The origin of birds is still up in the air.";)

So the question now becomes: Is a "chicken egg" an egg laid by chicken or an egg that will hatch into a chicken? Any "eggsperts" out there who can explain??

Wiki says, an equivalent situation arise in engineering and science known as circular reference, in which a parameter is required to calculate that parameter itself(van der Walls equation, Colebrook equation). To fella civil engineers, another example is calculation of thickness of roof of a tank or structure. To calculate the thickness requirement, we need to know the self weight of the roof, which is possible only by already knowing the thickness. This situation is solved by initailly assuming the parameter and by repeated iterations converging towards finer values…Alright that’s too much of tech!!!

I come up excitedly with all these facts and findings and blabber them to Bro, only to hear from him, “Whichever was ordered first, came first” .…(Argh! Talk about IIT level PJs! :)

Disclaimer: the post contains a lot of stuff from the web and a lot of my bullshitting too. So if anyone feels like suing me, go ahead :P

44. Life’s like that! –A few snippets from the campus

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They say that the best way to keep oneself awake in the class is to keep a watch on the rest of the lot who are sleeping –might be true. I tried to experiment this and see for myself! Couldn’t help take a pic, when this guy dozed off and finally banged his head on the table

Spotted the ‘red head’?

When they said that the mess menu was gonna be upgraded, I never thought they’d go this far...

New item in the mess menu?

Don’t mistake this for a haunted house…it’s one of the rooms in the LH…good thing that our mothers seldom pay a visit to our hostels!

Haunted house?

. Gee..dats ma room(the day when I cleaned it;))…

Yea I know… I should grow up!

This is the instruction sheet that one of our sirs gave us, the day b4 the exam! No wonder I ended up getting an A in the exam

All that matters!

When animals and humans share the same seat…(notice how the feline family have carefully chosen the best chair for themselves..)

Feline Recline!

Ah! This is the view that we get from our LH top floor…I always love to gaze at the evening sky. It’s so amazingly beautiful…Each day, at dusk, the sky turns itself into a new canvas, playing with different hues and shades!! I bet the morning sky would be equally beautiful (sheesh! only if I had the habit of waking up early)

Nature’s treat!

Classes needn't necessarily be restricted to the classroom alone...

And there’s more!

Oh yea…you will get to see such sights too! No need to rub your eyes; it’s Mr. Chettan Bhagat himself! Thanks to the various clubs which try to out-do each other, such people set foot on our campus.

One night @ NITC!

Uncanny things seem to find their way into the trash box…

Out here, Lilies grow out of the trash box …

More things find their way to the dump place…

That’s all trash!

PS: Courtsey images:k750i

41. A Tribute to BLAH!

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Do you know what tops the list of the world's ten most overrated things? Do you know what’s the world’s longest book/novel(which apparently contains the world’s longest word, sentence, poem and drama!Woah!!!)? Do you know the next gen name for ‘BLOG’, which is likely to replace the term ‘BLOG’ in the near future? Do you know, what is the most searched topic for a book, in the Amazon.com?

.....Well….It’s all Blah! Won’t believe me? There you go!(click the link)

PS: Lachoo, that was an appetizing treat to me! Would make up for your never-ending leg-pulling