PJ

When I was coming back from the office to Dadar today, the cabbie charged me ninteen rupees. I immediately thought of my friend Unny. When Unny returns to his home town, he'll start his own business. And he'll call it Unny's.

What business? Obviously, manufacture of honey. And the enterprise will be blessed with the moniker - Unny's Bees.

But in today's world, simply the product is not good enough. It needs to be marketed with a little... flourish. And Unny will use, as his trademark, Love as the USP of the honey, and his business will come to be known as - Unny's Bees + Ek Kiss.

Then, as the business flourishes, Unny will realize that he needs to diversify and branch out. So he will also open a domestic help referral agency as a division of the main business.

Thus will end the story of how there will be, one day in a town in India, a company called...

Unny's Bees + Ek Kiss, and Bais.

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Update: Soon after, Unny's parents, who stay with him, encourage him to accept into the family an aged friend of theirs. Unny, the essential entrepreneur, goes a step further and opens for her, an old-age home for ladies that she can manage, called Tai's.
With the money now flowing in like crazy, a professional finance manager is needed. Unny hires his childhood friend, Mr. V. Choubey, who combines his investment-advice firm with Unny's business, a company called Choubey's.
Thanks Praveen for the contribution!

Unny now is the master of Unny's Bees + Ek Kiss and Bais, Tai's, and Choubey's. The name is too big to fit on his visiting card, so he combines the five things into a single group called Paanch Cheez.

His success inspires his neighbor, a Korean gentleman, Mr. James Cha, to go into business himself. Unfortunately, he chooses a field which brings him into direct competition with Unny, when he puts up a board bearing the legend - Cha Bees.

Imagini

Who are you?
What do you want?
What do you like?
Where do you belong?
What do you live for?

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

living discretely

Walking through a bookstore, picking random books. A page here, a line there, an entire chapter elsewhere. Fragmented scenes. Shattered stories. Broken plots. Kaliedoscopic melange.

A jigsaw with a million pieces. Impossible to see what it makes. But a sense of expectation, the fun of finding out.

One day, I feel, it's all going to fit together. Somehow, someway, impossibly... it's all going to fit. It's all going to make sense.

These days. These hours. These minutes.

Sometime, they'll fit together, too.

sudden

cobweb strand, floating in the current
single sliver of sun suspended
heartstopping heartbreak
remembered childhood
dusty summer days
this is here, now
dry hum of ac
receptionist
cold lobby
waiting
years
run
by
..

system crash

Evil carries the seeds of it's own destruction, they say. Well, so does Organization.
If I hadn't wanted a cleaner, neater, faster PC, I wouldn't have tried to format my HD. If I hadn't done that, the wrong disk wouldn't have been wiped. If the wrong disk wouldn't have been wiped, my entire picture collection would still be there. Sorted by place & date. Cleaned, unduplicated. All the right way up.
Don't panic - I had backups. But now I have to sort the whole collection out all over again.
Ultimate Timepass.
Sigh.

Upgrade!

Finally, after much trepidation, I migrated my blog to the new Google templates. Surprisingly easy. I was terrified that all the special widgets I'd built in over time - sitemeters, polls, badges, blogrolls - would somehow just disappear in a puff of logic, but I managed to keep all of them.

Also found an unexpected benefit; catharsis. The act of seeing all the junk you've accumulated, putting all those code chunks into a notepad, and then sorting, organizing, and throwing away the unnecessary stuff - I feel cleansed.
In fact, it's been a good day for cleansing. I jogged, I (semi) cleaned my room, serviced my bike, formatted my HDD, washed my clothes, and sorted out my blog. My psyche feels lighter.
Maybe I should get a haircut as well.

But it's interesting, isn't it - I don't know how many of you out there are packrats like me, but I have a pathological aversion to throwing out anything. And I mean anything.
Plastic packet? Will be useful for throwing rubbish.
Beer can? Use it as an ashtray.
Paper napkin? Keep it for when you have a runny nose.
Torn T-shirt? Can make a decent duster.
Bit of wire? Computer cable organizer.
I swear, I accumulate so much junk, I'm surprised I can still get into my room. So this - clearing - is all the more dramatic.

But I can't even make a habit of it - to be effective, I guess it needs to be really massive. Event of the season.
Once I'm all done, I'll take a pic. Frame it and hang it - See? I lived like this once too!

At least, until the next cleaning.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came

Found a nice quiz where you get to find out what character you are. And no, I'm not Roland. Though I'd have liked to be.

On Writing

Why do I blog?

Is it narcissism? Loneliness? A sense of wanting to be heard in a world where, as an individual, I'm increasingly irrelevant, crowded, pushed aside? A desire to belong to something, a clique I look up to?
Answer: None Of The Above.

More than anything, the act of writing - especially blogging - reminds me of nothing else as much as lying in the shade on a summer afternoon, building rock castles among the trees. Constructing Lego leviathans on the carpet in cool hum of the AC. Sketching portraits from magazines, the thrill when someone recognizes the person. Putting together a do-it-yourself circuit for a light-powered alarm in the middle of the night. Organizing the 42-GB MP3 collection, the photos collected over 27 years, the 500+ divx movies.

It's absorption. Self-realization. Excellence.
It's a craft.

I do it because when I do it, there's nothing else. The story starts as a vague, amorphous shape in your head and dreams, and slowly comes out through your fingers, through your mind's eye, where you see it taking shape, life. It's like watching memory in reverse, when a remembrance becomes the experience. Suddenly you can't stop, because stopping will be like slamming on the handbrake when you're crossing 60 in neutral on a downhill slope.
Or, more usually, you suddenly... wake up, with a finished story before you, several minutes - or hours - gone, and your head ringing with the aftermath of an intense trip.

And that's just the art.
As much fun - if not more - is from crafting it into something that's good. There's discipline. fonts to be standardized, justified. Pictures. Code. Widgets. Usability. Labels. Tags. Links. Captions. Infotips. Consistency. Cutting out the loose threads and ends. The spit and the polish.

And it's never a feeling that I'm making this for someone. I'm making it perfect because it has to be perfect.
It cannot be anything less than perfect because if it is, it's not what I thought it to be. It's not what it was meant to be. I can feel it, sometimes, as nearly alive, and every misplaced punctuation, misaligned table, mismatched font, misrepresentative image and mistaken link is a nagging ache, a fishhook in your mind. You can't rest until it's fixed. The story won't let you.

You can feel that it's alive.
Sometimes, there's a sense of... duality. Being outside yourself. Being someone, something else. Especially when you're in the flow; you're not you, but what you're making. And what you're making is not necessarily the same as you; it has it's own desires, wants, concepts of what it wants to be, and it won't let you rest until you make it what it wants to be. At the time, you are nothing more than a tool for it to self-create.

Coming back is a shock.
Going out... is the ultimate rush.

There's a ghost in the loo

It's late night, and the office is nearly empty and deathly quiet except for a faraway clickety-clack of the keyboard and faint Dire Straits. Half the lights have been switched off. There's generally a dark, gloomy feel, and because there's no warm bodies, the air is icy cold.
No warm bodies. Damn. Why did I put that thought in my head?

I'm standing in front of the cold porcelain of the urinal, doing my thing, when a drift of cold air sweeps across the back of my neck.
Silence
The stall next to me, which was empty all this while, suddenly flushes in a shocking explosion of hisses and gurgles.
Nobody was there. Nobody's in the toilet. Nobody's in the frickin' office but me!