Day 12: Too Much Work

There was some movie that had this dialogue, when a road closes, 10 new roads open. Well for me, today, 10 roads closed... and made way for a new path, that I had kept as my last choice. Yup, time to spread my wings and fly away.

I am working from home today. Not that fun, guys! Every time I need to join a call, there is a hassle. Do I call from mobile or landline. If I call from mobile, I gotta hold it for an hour to my ear, which I hate! I am not really a phone person, everybody knows that.

So I need to call from landline, but then the headset is a little weird and I can't figure out for the life of me, if its on mute or not. Every time I think its on mute, somebody hears my voice. When I deliberately clap before the microphone, nobody hears nothing!

I could always use a headset for my mobile, but the original one is lost! I have two other, but they go with my laptop and not the mobile. Well, somehow I dug into my trunk and found an adapter to connect that headphone to my mobile, while I had already passed two conference calls wondering whether I can be heard!

Anyway, too much work talk makes me nauseous! So lets get into today's movie talk. By the way, I watched UniSol - Regeneration today. Felt it was a little better than the part 2... and realized Van-Damme is really old now. Stallone seems way fitter than him.

Today I can't really decide my mood, so I will go for my default romantic mood. And today I pick - The Truth About Cats & Dogs. This is your usual romantic movie - minus the predictability. I mean, if you think of it, all love stories are predictable, love crosses all obstacles at the end generally. Its the same for this one too. But the main game being played here is the male attraction quotient, do we go for the beautiful girl or the smart girl....?

Janeane Garofalo is perfect as the smart, strong, bright RJ who is insecured about her beauty and suffers from inferiority complex. Uma Thurman is as always beautiful, but the director has cleverly shown her in a non-attractive way. Telling more than this will be giving away the story...which is murder for love stories.

Well, that's all folks!

Day 11: Late Realizations

Yup, my life is full of them.

When I was promoted to my current Social Media Analyst job, from a call center job, I was happy as the job sounded more meaningful. I looked at it as a probable future growth line, maybe in the same organization, maybe in a different one.

But as I am passing each day working on the roles currently defined for me and looking at the future expansions of my job responsibility, I am realizing that I am not meant to do such a job. I am not meant to do a job with complicated managerial jargons, process optimizations, business objectives, project managements or framework synchronizations... they are just words that haunt me every second in office.

I am meant to write. Maybe, my writing isn't that good yet (which is kind of obvious from the blog's readership). But I still believe that I can reach people at some level by my writing. Writing is what liberates me... if I really try, I can express any feeling, any inconceivable emotion with my writing. And that is what I really want to do.

But, I guess it's a but late. Because every day I keep doing my current job, it takes me on a path far away from the one I want to take. I can't just start over from scratch either, since I don't consider myself an economically affluent person. And that's where I get stuck, because the only way left is a miracle... which doesn't happen in real life, at least not in mine.

Anyway, time for today's pick.

Today, I am going to recommend Accepted, a 2006 comedy drama with Justin Long in the lead. From the first look it seems to be just another teen comedy. But trust me, it is not.

Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) is apparently a bad student on industrial terms, and involved in educational crimes such as making fake ID-s. But inside, he is a dreamer, refusing to be measured by a rigid educational system, which fails to measure the hidden talents of so many students and forces them to walk on predefined career tracks. When he doesn't receive any acceptance letters from any of the universities he applied into, he sees that as an opportunity for freedom and makes up his own fake university.

But things go out of control when several similar unaccepted people come to know of his university and comes to join it. Its not long before the news hits the established universities, specially the one from which Bartleby "borrowed" the name of his university. What comes next is a hilarious but insightful story of a basic need of every human being, acceptance.

My guarantee, you will love the climax!

Day 10: A Little Nosy

Yup, it seems the fever is just playing with me, waiting under the shadows of Crocin and catching me off-guard... and its cousin brother is a terrible cold, as if my nose has some leak that no plumber can fix! F***ing irritated of cleaning the nose up every 2 minutes! And not to forget, the cough is on its way already!

And in such a dripping day, what do I watch? Sex and The City! Not that it's a terrible movie or I didn't like it... it's just a little shallow at some places and couldn't make me feel what it was supposed to. However, the ending was worth watching it for a long 2 and half hours.

How about an Indian movie today, huh? Anyway, people aren't reading it...so there is no point in being afraid of losing out readership. In case, somebody has discovered this blog by some miracle...and he/she doesn't understand Hindi movies, you might consider watching this one with subtitles.

The movie I am going to recommend is Moksha. It was released in 2001 and was supposed to be Arjun Rampal's first movie. But somehow a multi-starrer crap Pyaar, Ishq Aur Mohabbat was released sooner.

The movie was a commercial ship-wreck and didn't take Rampal's career much ahead, but I still consider it to be his best movie till date. It is beautiful both in it's story telling and frames. Cinematographer Ashok Mehta turned into a director for this one and converted this movie into a moving painting.

Now about the story - what starts as a sweet love story between an idealistic law graduate and his fan, slowly turns into battle for ideologies. Vikram Saigal (Arjun Rampal), wants to fight for he poor and the rights, but couldn't go on because his boss-cum-father won't approve the fund for a free-for-poor service. Desperate to stand up for the right, he plans of robbing a bank and the only one he can trust with his plan is his girlfriend (Manisha Koirala). Though she loves him very much, the idea of a crime haunts her badly and she struggles to choose between her love and her instinct.

Vikram's plans get foiled when somebody gives an anonymous call to the bank on the planned day. Being an idealistic, he cannot let his girlfriend go unpunished and gives her a poetic death. What follows is a court-room drama, which would reveal truths darker than then night and blur the line between right and wrong.

It's a bit slow, but trust me guys, once finished you will love it, you will come back and even write it here!

So there goes, another day for the blog, with practically no readers.

I am on my way home, with a dripping nose. Ciao.

Day 9: Realistic Unreality

What an uneventful day!

Absolutely nothing interesting and unexpected happened today. Woke up when I thought I would, ate what I thought I would, didn’t go anywhere as I planned, nothing, absolutely nothing happened that I would want to remember or wish to forget!

Well, most of my days are like this, monochromic. That’s the difference between real life and movies. In a movie, two people could meet for the first time and fall in love madly, save an entire country from nuclear holocaust, steal everything from Federal bank and then kill an army of lethal aliens, before going back into time to reset everything, just in 24 hours. Ummm... I may have exaggerated a little, but if we try hard we can make such a movie, ignoring the risk of the movie failing badly with box office collection, of course!

That’s how movies are, larger than life, and they should be. (Maybe not all of the time though!) Because if movies were as dull as our real lives, who would come to watch it!

I know, some people will say, movies are always better when they are realistic. Well, they are realistic ...but still unreal, and that’s why we love them! Think of it! What if Indiana Jones had a heart attack when he was surrounded by millions of snakes in Raiders of Lost Ark, what if James Bond couldn’t catch the plane after jumping from the cliff and died in Golden Eye, what if a single bullet would hit Rambo on his forehead... who would watch that? There are already so many screw-ups in our real life, the smell of failure is already injected to our sweat, we don’t want our heroes to fail at least!

So, in that mood, let’s have the pick of today.

Of course, I am not going to recommend any Rambo, James Bond or Indiana Jones movie, which would be like teaching how to draw a circle to a mechanical engineer!

I am going to recommend one of my favourite Tim Burton movie, Big Fish. The movie beautifully illustrates the difference between lying and adding colour to the truth. The story is about a father and son. The father could do magic with his stories, a magic that had given an enjoyable childhood to his son. But the son is grown up now and doesn’t want to stay in his Dad’s imaginary world anymore, causing bitter clashes. The father doesn’t want to accept it to be imaginary, because what he sees is beyond regular people’s conception, because what he sees makes him different than everybody else, because the stories he tells are not lies, but the truth, with a little flavour.

This is one lovely emotional story with a larger than life expression of every possible metaphor... and not to miss.

By the way, my fever is finally gone!

Well, since my job for today is done, so am I!

Day 8: Pet Day

My rest is being a little too long now. The fever doesn’t come out, nor does it go away. I don’t know how long it will keep me hanging like this.

Moreover, I had to go out to close my 17 month old monthly savings to pay my credit card due which keeps increasing in a geometric progression. And obviously, I reached late, since I didn’t know which branch I had to go! So after being kind of kicked out from 3 different branches, when I reached mine, it was already 10 minutes past closing time. The security guys felt pity after looking at my face, which is born pitiful by the way, and let me stand outside while somebody came out of the office.

Well, I didn’t get the work done, but I at least got the form. Score!

Anyway, I didn’t have anything better to do or anything to do to get me better, so I started writing the blog. All I needed was a good movie in the background. And it couldn’t be better than Marley and Me.

I have seen a lot of movies on pet animals, affectionate wild animals. I have seen Duma, all the three Free Willy-s, Flipper, Born Free, Beethoven, Fly Away Home, Eight Below, Bolt and the list can go on all day. I have liked all of them, even if some of them were not that good. I liked them because the idea of a human being in love with an animal so selflessly ...just makes me get goose bumps, considering we don’t miss a spot when it comes to make our life more competitive than it already is. We don’t miss a chance to stab each other in the back, swear under our breath, quarrel with the guy who skipped a person in the queue, shout at the customer support guy since he can’t shout back, fight with the driver who merely even touched our car.

We don’t, which includes me too. But when it comes to our pet, somehow we lose all that me-ness.

I found a kitten once, roaming around our lawn looking for its mom, clueless. We kept him. But he died after 2-3 years. He vomited often in his last days, it was very painful. But we didn’t learn, we kept another cat after a couple years. This one was almost like a dog, he understood love and loved back. Only, he was a big time thief. Just not that, he used to catch big birds and leave the carcass in our drawing room. Mom would get frustrated cleaning up all that every time.

So one day he came in with dirt all over him, as if he had a mud-fight with other street cats. We were having guests and mom was not in a mood to clean up all his dirt again. So she took a broom and threw him out. He didn’t want to go out, so he kept coming in, but mom went angry and just didn’t let him in. He ran away.

That was the last we saw him. It was his time to be angry now, he never came back.

So when I see these movies, I feel the strange logic-less love for these God’s creations, who are incapable of expressing their love by speaking out like us, but still do everything else possible. Ironically, though we have the capacity to speak, we lack the intention of loving. So, can’t make a building on a base that weak, mister!

Anyway, enough of social healing and back to pet movies. Why do I recommend Marley & Me among all those touchy stories of all those brave heroic animals? Because, its more real.

Marley isn’t a heroic dog, he doesn’t save people from a fired up building, he doesn’t rescue innocent skiers from under 2 feet deep snow dump. He is a regular crazy dog, who just doesn’t agree with any kind of training. He is irritating, he is a menace, he is the reason for banning dogs from a few Florida beaches and there is absolutely nothing that he cannot chew and digest. The story isn’t about how to make the dog a well-behaved one. It’s about a family’s life who own the dog, it’s about all the daily laughters and tears they go through, it’s how Marley became a cannot-do-without part of their family, in spite of being, you know, Marley.

The movie is funny, sometimes crazy... and yet very emotional. I am not ashamed (well, slightly ashamed) to say that I cried my butt off in the climax of this movie. Made me go back to my pet cat days.

So, my invisible readers, enjoy the weekend, let your emotions go wild, if you want to, of course! I will be here, writing something, that apparently nobody wants to read.

Bye bye!

Day 7: A Day Off

It’s just grand to take a day off from office, and lie in the bed the whole day. Makes you feel like a peaceful turtle. I should do it more often, only, the cold and dormant fever shouldn’t be there.

Several people enquired suspiciously, “hey, you don’t look sick!” Well, it’s dormant, remember! Unless you are IN my body, you can’t feel it, pal!

Anyway, I took the leave.

So, the whole day went pretty smooth, except some distracting calls from my bank to pay the credit card dues. Wish, the phones could take a leave too!

Well, as I suggested in the blog yesterday, I did a course of 3 animation movies – Monster House and 2 Aladdin sequels…and am kind of fed up of exhausting my current collection. So, switching to the Portugal-Brazil match instead.

God, so many yellow cards in one match! Both teams are just looking for an opportunity to hit somebody… and not so much the ball. Brazil is missing like a zillion shots just when they are near Portugal’s goal. Crap!

As I might’ve said earlier, I am not a very sporty person. But, sometimes I feel the passion too. That’s why I always like the sports movies! Remember The Titans, The Greatest Game Ever Played,Chak De India, Varsity Blues, Invincible, Miracle… liked them all. The theme of an underdog cutting away all the criticism, underestimation and emerging as the winner just makes me all emotional.

They are kind of predictable in terms of the climax, but the journey is worth watching most of the time.
So, in that mood, let’s find out something that people may not have watched that much! You know, I am always after the underdog.

So, today I pick, Kicking & Screaming.

Not a classic, not an exceptional movie. But Will Ferrell is funny as hell and the idea of a father underestimating his son is touchy. Will Ferrell takes the role of an accidental coach for his son’s school soccer team and must face people ridiculing at his players, who obviously aren’t very strong sportsmen. But his major challenge is his father, who himself is a renowned ex soccer player and the coach of the strongest school team playing in the same championship, who always thought that his son was worthless, which is true to some extent!

A light-hearted but enjoyable children sports movie. And just because it’s a comedy, the sports part isn’t ignore in this movie.

Sadly, I don’t have it in my collection, because now that I have recalled the story, I badly want to re-watch the movie! Wish, it was at least coming in some movie channel!

Where is the freaking remote?

Day 6: Nostalgic

Well... when I am ill, I always get nostalgic.

There's nothing better to think over, than the good old days, while breathing the grim depressed air around me as I am slightly feverish today.

The good old days, when I had a lot of time to watch movies and nobody would poke me and say "what a waste of money!" and I had no responsibilities ... well, it was a very short time but was wonderful. I even had the leisure of grading the movies I watched in an Excel sheet, with color-coding them according to their quality and other similar sweet & stupid stuff. Well, I still do it, but with a little less heart... too much to escape from, too less time.

So, I was going through the Excel sheet and looking for my most favorite movies, coded in blue.

The list goes like this:

• Terminator 2: Judgement Day
• Jurassic Park
• E.T.
• Hollow Man
• The Matrix
• Armageddon
• Pleasantville
• What Dreams May Come
• Cast Away
• Equilibrium
• Ice Age
• The Game
• Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
• The Butterfly Effect
• Boys Don’t Cry
• The Incredibles
• Da Vinci Code
• Empire Of The Sun
• A Beautiful Mind
• Schindler's List
• No Man's Land (Ukraine)
• Avatar
• Changeling
• Everything Is Illuminated
• Little Miss Sunshine
• Memento
• Seven Pounds

If you are thinking where did Ben-Hur and Ten Commandments and similar stuff went, well there's a problem with me... I can't watch old movies for long. The moment I feel the print is old, I kind of lose interest. That's why I haven't watched much old classics, except Guns of Navarone, McKenna's Gold and a few others I can't remember.

Ignoring several probable disagreements among some of these names, if you ask me which one is my favorite among these... I will blindly say - Matrix! Because, I am a science-fiction fan and this one had blown me away like a twister. This one actually made me start imagining beyond limits, beyond what we can see. I haven't made much use of that though, other than writing a few lame stories, which is a completely different topic.

So if my invisible readers would just attack me saying "why the hell did you like Plesantville" or "what was good in What dreams may come", we could strike up a good conversion... but that's not gonna happen!

So I will just end the blog with today's suggestion.

Picture this, you're ill and all you want to do is to crawl under the comfort of your blanket. Sci-Fi movies won't go with you, because most of your neural nerves are lying lazily in your brain. War movies will make you fall asleep, action films will be too loud for our ears, horror films will just make you more sick.

My choice of genre - animation, preferable Disney. They are light hearted, descent, sensible and easy to sit or lie through. I bet you have already watched Ice Age, Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, Bee Movie, Monster & Aliens, Madagascar, Ant Bully...and all those box office reigning stuff. But there is one, I can assume, several of us may not have bothered to check out.

Flushed Away.
It's a funny and witty story of a British rodent world, where a city rat gets tangled with a small time crook rat for a journey to save their butts from a tyrant toad... and probably save all rats too! Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman are main star attraction of this one, added by Ian McKellen and Bill Nighy.

If you're a Disney 2D film lover then there is probably a lot of direct-to-video sequels such as Tarzan 2, Hercule: Zero to hero, Aladdin 2 and 3 etc, which are not classics, but wouldn't disappoint you as you don't have to leave the comfort of your bed for a movie theater.

So... go on. Get your well-deserved bed-rest, with a little childish fun.

I am going to, at least!

Sayonara!

Day 5: A Little Demotivated

Acceptance - one of the basic needs of life.

All our life we look forward to be accepted by the people we deal with everyday. That's why we try to dress cool in High School, that's why we try to make frequent jokes with friends, that's why we participate in all kinds of team building games in Office...

I guess, I am trying the same with my blog here. I know it's just been 5 days and probably it would at least take like a month to get comments from people that I don't know... but I still feel slightly low.

What if nobody likes my idea... what if I keep pouring my heart out in this blog and nobody replies... what if I am not accepted!

Actually, I have been going through several other highly harsh realistic problems since a few months... the blog is just adding up to that. Ironically, it was meant to be a means of escaping the reality!

But... anyway...

Today I wanted to write about certain genre of movies. The bloody/gory/horror types.

What's with all that blood and guts, guys? Do you really love watching it?

Yesterday, I was scanning my laptop for a good horror movie before I go to sleep. I picked Wrong Turn 2: Dead End! Horrible choice!

Now, it might be a good movie in that genre... but I couldn't think of any reason other than neurological imbalance or an extreme amount of booze, to plan for watching this movie. I mean why would I want to see an ugly semi-zombie cutting a man's guts out and serving in a plate to her family! That's not horrifying! That's just disgusting! I picked the wrong genre!

Meanwhile, if you are thinking I am just a wuss who can't man up to watch such movies... sorry to disappoint guys, I don't even turn away for a second while watching these movies - be it the gruesome SAW hexalogy, or Hostel twins or Cabin Fever or The Ruins, I watched them with exceptional ease and an occasional smile on my face. It's just disturbing and doesn't let you think normally for at least an hour.

The only scene that made me almost puke in yesterday's movie, was a scene where I thought the devil family was trying to feed the heroine some kind of shit, literally! That's the only thing I can't stand!

So, why did I watch the whole movie? Well, that's like one of my secret oaths, I generally don't stop before finishing a movie, however pathetic it might be.

The gore feels good on certain situations, where the good guy avenges of all the ill-doings of the villain by cutting him into parts. Our bloods are so boiled by then, we badly expect such wild justice, as in the Tarantino movies.

But, watching a family of mutated cannibals hunting on random tourists and making a dinner out of them, literally, didn't make much sense to me. Maybe that's why I never liked Jason either... he is like a robot programmed to kill!

Maybe, Hollywood has now overdone this genre.

Well, that's just me. Nobody needs to feel the same or do something about it. After all, watching bad movies once in a while keeps your brain in balance. Too much good movies will just sweeten you up!

So if you have guts to watch others' guts... go do what your gut feeling says! Watch the bloody movie!

Don't worry about me, I will keep writing the same shit!

Day 4: Spread The Joy

The blog is 4 days old now and I still am not concrete on what the blog should be about. It obviously CANNOT be based only on my daily life trash.

At this point of confession, I am going to come out with the fact that this blog is an inspiration from a movie Julie & Julia. This is based on a real-life story about Julie Powell (played by Amy Smart), whose life is a mess amongst her trashy job, terrible apartment location. Her only saving grace is her love for cooking, which inspires her to write a daily blog on Julia Child’s (played like a dream by Meryl Streep) cookbook, who changed the way American’s cooked in 1940-s. The movie shows the two women found joy in not just cooking but sharing the bliss they felt with hundreds of viewers/readers.

I know, it doesn't make any sense. I can't cook anything but MAGGI! (Don't laugh! There are so many people who can't cook MAGGI properly either!)

Anyway, the point is not about cooking. It's about sharing what we enjoy the most with others. In my case, it's the movies.

What are movies? Just a way to pass time, when you have 100 bucks to spare? A little light on thought, don't you think? What else?

Well, some will say, on certain cases, a movie is a medium to educate people on several topics. Of course, the triumph of truth, women liberation, educational revolution etc etc etc. But that's not all!

Movie can be much more beyond that, if you let it be!

Everyday we go through so many different struggles! Job problems - can't make the deadline, can't get rid of the old job, can't get a new job; household stuff - need to refill gas cylinder, milk can is empty, curtain is tearing up, wall's got a new stain; relation crisis - no quality time with family, didn't call college buddy last weekend, all you do is watch TV, come on! And then the love-life problems - don't know if she loves me back, how the hell do I bring up the breaking up topic, want to marry him but Dad says no...

...oh, just think about it!!! So many different emotions, so many different moods! And most of the time you just face it alone, because knowing what you feel and feeling what you feel are two completely different things! Sometimes, don't you wish, if somebody helped you get through this - no big advice, no heavy dialogues, just realizing, that what he/she feels is almost like you do, is enough... don't you?

I do... and that's why movies are like a source of energy to me. I am not saying that watch a lot of movies... no! But sometimes, movies do light your faces up even from a very terrible mood! They are like, medicines... only... you need to take the right pill.

For example, you are a guy who isn't that comfortable or popular with girls. Though you have a strong feeling for somebody, you still feel rejected from her. It's like she is the world to you, you can wait under the hot Tuscan sun for hours just to see a smile in her face, watching her cry makes you feel like peeling your skin up... but still, you know your existence has little significance in her life.

Well, I can't tell you what to do to make things right... I couldn't do it for myself either!

But I can give you a friend... I can give you hope... I can give you a smile for at least one whole day... I can tell you what to watch....


...watch Hitch (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386588/)! A 2005 Will Smith film where Will Smith almost successfully tries to help guys who are not conventionally smart, to get the lady of their dreams... and almost fails, hilariously.

... that's what I want this blog to be about. That's what I want my relationship to be with my readers (if any)... that's how I want to spread the joy....

God bless us... everyone!

Day 3: Numbed Out

All is well.

Well, either that, or I am just numbed out to the max.

Because, nothing could really bother me today. Woke up like a zombie, watched two episodes of FRIENDS like a resident evil corpse, swallowed lunch like a brain-dead...

My life is generally like this... full of different phases. 50% of it are the lazy hammock days, where I just lie in every position and place I move to, waiting for the day to over. Next 30% of the days are emergencies, mostly pushed to the edge by my lazy self.... and then there are the numb philosopher days.

No, I never have the repenting period in this ongoing cycle. Maybe that's why the cycle goes on!

So anyway, if anybody is slightly curious, my laptop is formatted now and working like a dream. All my data was deleted, but I got backups of some critical data from my manager. So... day was saved there.

My movie collection was obliterated. But hey, I did it once, I can do it again!

So, I was sitting on my workstation and listening to this sudden shouts of cheers and disappointments as most of my colleagues were checking out the updates of the Portugal and Korea DPR match. Terrible match... 7-0.

I am not much of a football fanatic, not any sports fanatic for that matter. So it feels little weird when the guy next to me jumps all of a sudden saying "Oh shit!", as if an Iguano just crawled into his pants. But when I get back home and notice my Mom watching the live matches with elevated eyebrows...I understand. Its a passion that takes over the world for 3 months, even if you like football or not.

Actually, if I think clearly, I like this time much much more than when the IPL runs. I know people are going to start swearing when they read this line, but I really think cricket is extremely overrated in India. Especially since the 20/20-s have hit us.

Every single day there will be some live match running on and on... its almost as over-exposed as Amitabh and ShahRukh a couple of years back, when they started doing all kinds of endorsements, from a cold drink to an Ayurvedic hair oil, from a cold cream to a biscuit, from a brand of apparels to a pen... every freaking advertisement had their faces. It was too much even for die-hard fans like me. (By the way, I love you Amitabh sir and ShahRukh sir, for all the magic you have done in Bollywood, in case you come across this blog a decade later when Google decides to push this up to their search)

Anyway, fans are fans and they can't change just because some cynic on a blog doesn't like it. Just like I can't stop watching movie because my future wife doesn't like it... (Hope, I am not crossing the line here). And till the time demand is there, supply will continue to pour in.

So India, keep watching cricket!

I am back to my movies. Adios.

Day 2: Nothing Can Make It Worse

Yesterday was heaven compared to today.

Most of yesterday went on research... before my brain settled down a bit and told me to try an USB to SATA cable. Let's not go into the technical details to spoil this more than it already is.

Well, it calmed me down a little. I looked around for the cable, which incidentally is the rarest thing in Bangalore and can only be found in Science Museums. Only one guy had it, but used, opened and broken.

The next thing to try was to look for stores which were far away from my locality. Since it was 8pm, my friend convinced me to abort the expedition and to resume it tomorrow morning. So I did.

I have always liked Sundays. Not anymore, friends, not anymore.

Because, apparently, most of the stores get closed on Sundays since they need a holiday too. Hey, that's only fair, considering normal people stop having needs and emergencies on Sundays and it's really absurd for a mess-up like me to even come with a need just on Sunday.

So, me, and my friend, walked around in the roads of IndiraNagar (Bangloreans will recognize the place) in a 'pleasantly' sunny noon, with a very disturbing and forever-ongoing construction of a Metro railline making our journey slightly more irritating.

After we had covered 75% of the area, my brilliant mind suggested me to look in a different area, which is guaranteed to be open even on Sundays - MG Road.

So I dragged my unlucky friend along back to where we had parked the bike and headed for our new search area.

All the electronic stores were open in MG Road. God bless posh people!

There were actually four electronic stores there! My joy had no bounds. After a little cross-reference, I found out that USB to SATA cable was practically extinct and they only keep casings now. I bought it without any hesitation.

I was relaxed, finally I got my stuff. My friend was relaxed, he doesn't have to go anywhere else!

So, we returned home, equally happy. Now to the harder part.

I borrowed his screw drivers and took my piece of crap hard drive out of the laptop. Now, I just had to put it into the casing and connect it to my other laptop. But wait a minute! The casing is locked from all sides, neither did it slide in any direction, neither did it pop open.

Okay, check the freaking manual, idiot! Oh no, there is no manual! There are guides to connect it to the laptop, catalog of other devices it sold, but no manual! Great!

15 minutes more of internet research leaded to a manual of a similar model. Exactly what I suspected, I will have to unscrew the damn casing both ways and then slide it in. So I did.

Now its time to put the hard drive in it, finally. But hold on, it doesn't go in! Maybe because, it is not supposed to go in! It had one more layer of casing on it already.

Again, some more unscrewing with a shaky hand, since we have always been brain-washed not to open a laptop by ourselves, ever! Now it went in, after a little struggle with the ports.

Phew! I connected it to my laptop dreaming of backing up all data that my other laptop could take in. But, hey, since when did I get things right?

The dreaded hard drive was detected but wouldn't open, since it wasn't formatted. I couldn't format it, which would eliminate the soul purpose of backing up.

Back to where it all started!

So, tell me, how to make the day even worse!

May be God knows, maybe He will tomorrow. I am slowly stopping to care.

Signing off...

Day 1: A Terrible Terrible Day!!!

Boy, what a day!

Just when I thought I have started a blog and now I can at least do a part of what I have always wanted and started to celebrate by watching a movie, the movie file asked me for a special codec.

I know, you NEVER download codecs other than k-lite!! Never! But, I don't know why I felt like trying it.

It was some stupid codec with a Mozilla icon. I scanned the item with McAfee to confirm it wasn't a virus! Of course, it wasn't a virus, it was a portal to other viruses. Lame.

As soon as I clicked it to start installation.... whoah!!! It vanished! I freaked out and rapidly unplugged the network cable! It didn't help, though. I looked around in my C: drive for symptoms of a virus. I didn't see any, which freaked me out even more.

I ran a McAfee scan to be safe. Within 15 minutes it detected 112 abnormalities, but it didn't show any signs of finishing the scan within an hour while I had to leave office within 20 minutes. I know, you must be wondering how am I watching a movie in my office. Please, it's a trade secret!

So, anyway, I aborted the scan and ran another anti-malware which was always much faster. It found one threat and removed it perfectly. I was slightly relaxed and started another movie. 

First symptom! The movie didn't open with the media player I normally used. I tried another, same result. I tried a third, didn't budge! Time was running out, so I just turned the system off, hoping for it to recover automatically as if some magical miracle was granted to me by God! Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!!

So when I got up on my cab, I couldn't shake the worry off my head. I started it up again, only it didn't start!

Ignoring the "I knew it" from all the Microsoft-haters (Stop thinking out loud guys!), I tried all kinds of troubleshooting possible, knowing they wouldn't work! And they didn't. They didn't and they so didn't that it made me nauseate. All my data, my office data, my collected movies, my wallpapers...all are going to be lost!

Mom started asking how, why and what-now so many times, I got irritated, because a series of WH questions were not going to fix my laptop! I went to sleep thinking that there might be another way to fix it and I can search it in my friend's computer, who lives in the same building.

But my luck is so fabulous!

I came down to open his computer in the morning. I actually woke up early for this (yes, 9 am is too early for me!). Now... his system didn't start up. Yes, God, I am rolling on the floor laughing my guts out, right now.

Anyway, my friend's system was a desktop and it took me 15 minutes to fix that. But sadly, I couldnt find anything to fix my laptop.

Only solution: Format everything and lose all data, when I reach office on Monday.

Current Workaround: Watch another movie on my second laptop, to keep me distracted!

Perfect!

Start of a Journey

Not everyday do we wake up and tell ourselves that I have to write a blog today! At least, I don't. So, when it happened today, I knew I had to at least create one...

I am quite new to the concept of blogging as I have always considered myself a bit old-traditioned. So now that I suddenly wake up, its hard for me to understand what people crave for in such unguaranteed internet blogs. Well, its so hard, I am just not wasting my efforts on that portion anymore. You will always have the option to click the little Red X on the top right corner, if you don't like what you are reading, anyway!

Escapist! What a fancy name to label social losers, don't you think? Well, I am one, I have no hesitation to come out with that little piece of truth (not that everyone is dying to know it)! For readers who are still blurry with the concept of escapism, people like me are so disagreeing with the daily realities we have to face, we just pretend we don't live in this world. Our virtual world is full of recreations that keep our brains fooled long enough, until its time to pay a bill or get the groceries or such other interesting activities. Everybody has their own ways to escape, mine is movie.

Now you might say, wait a second! Everybody watches movies! Well, yeah, they do! But I am slightly more than that. Watching movies is not my hobby, its more like a life-source! I need a regular dosage of movies to make me keep going. The movie doesn't have to be a classic, it won't even have to be a well-known movie, its okay if I have even never heard of the movie... I would just need something which has a video and audio in sync and doesn't say Documentary! If it's a documentary, its not exactly escaping, is it!

So, on my first day, lets start with some guarantees that I cannot give on this blog.

1. My blog will never provide information or advices to help people with work, dating, lifestyle, shopping like robbers or anything typically useful. Sorry guys, I am not good with those!!


2. Since I am an irregular person, there may be days I wont write anything. I guess, that wasn't even required to mention!


3. People replying to my blog, I am sincerely sorry if I take time to reply to them, which might happen frequently! But I do appreciate those people who would take out their time to respond to my gibberish articles, because I can imagine that headcount won't be a big number.

Now that the rules are established, I can go back to my blabbering.

Right now, I feel like the picture above. Too many me-s trying to take over my current acting self.

One me wants to work and pay the due back to people who transfer couple of grants to my account every 30th. Another me mocks the first one and asks not to overwork and convinces me to believe I am underpaid.

One me tries to make me believe that I got everything I need. Another one pokes in my eyes and notifies, I still don't have a permanent gas connection.

One me catches hold of my ear and tells me to keep pretending that I love my job. Another one whispers into my ear and keeps my daydreams alive.

The current me, ignores all of them and focusses on the blog. If you have watched "Identity", you can imagine my dilemma slightly!

So, today, starts a journey of venting out, in a polished way, hoping to catch a few net-crazy eyes... trying to share the psychology of escaping!

Diary ... of an escapist.

- Sharit