There once was a time where a knight in shining armor would return to his castle after a hard days schooling, learning how to joust hard against the "anti -knights" in the treacherous land where they were made to learn numbers, methods to make them half or somehow , almost using black magic increase the volume. Learn what is inside a human body, learn how to speak, those really were the old gruesome days (days I wish I could go back to), anyways, tired, beaten, sweaty, bruised, tortured, would the soul return in hope for the sweet sweet nectar of the cocoa bean, a chocolate.
Thankfully for the lad, his cold storage compartment was always filled with the stuff, he had found a sweeter , more refined and AERY version of the so called "chocolate", AERO , the chocolate with AIR bubbles in em, and I kid you not, they would actually melt in your mouth.
The knight was always stuffing his gob with this beautiful creature of the Almighty and then one day, while he took his liberty too far, he was made to return to his homeland, where things were still getting a little better, bigger taller castles were coming up, roads were getting laid, the comfort of the cold home was missing not only from his castle but also from the hell that was his "education center", (again this was way back, love to go back to STB)
While adjusting to his new environment, things changed for the lad, he did not speak the Queen's english anymore, now it was only abuses and khisti to make sure he "fit" into the system, chocolate was also forgotten, especially the ones he used to get at his old stomping ground.
Cue 8 years of massive searching for his love, no luck found the poor sodden soul, tired, broken and certainly saddened, the hope for his nectar to be with him again was dying, the Lord taketh so easily what he wanted.
Cursing, how could I not get AERO in India? Someone did answer my prayers, going back to my homeland (Dubai), the knight finally got a chance to stuff his bags, he had carried a lot of shillings and gold coins to bargain and purchase for his love, THE AERO, lo and behold, his savings from the hard work he had done were all spent on acquiring the sweet sweet chocolate, happy days were here again and he returns triumphant from his conquest but there will come a time when the stock does run out and then the search will begin again, maybe some knight traveling to the far off land will get the chosen nectar for this knight, for now the AIR in the AERO is king, ALL HAIL THE AIR O THE CHOCOLATE THRONE!!!!
You guys would know I am an avid Hockey fan, Ice Hockey that is, from the early days of me catching glimpses of the Red Wings playing with Yzerman, Federov and Hasek on ESPN, I have always been intrigued by the sport and follow it more because of the massive hits dished out on a regular basis, its like Football with the hard tacking of Rugby.
Often I troll about the internet searching for various clips of hockey, best plays, best dekes, best saves etc. To my surprise I found this list with the title "TSN Sportscentre Top 10 Shootout goals", for a minute I thought, the spelling is incorrect, its "SportsCENTER" like the Indian version we get on ESPN, which again is not even close to the awesomeness of the few American editions I had seen ( a throw back to the 2000's, when between 2 -3 PM every weekday the American sportscenter would be on air, I got my daily fix of hockey, NBA etc from that). This Sportscentre in fact was the one which airs on TSN, a channel in Canada , its their flagship program so it basically is run around 10 hours a day , everyday , like CID for Sony in India.
Even before the countdown/top 10 started, they had the presenters make a few jokes on themselves and others, Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole, these two gentlemen have taken presentation to a whole new level, the madness and the quirkiness is expected from most Sportscenter's but this CenTRE was totally off the hook.
So for the past 4-5 days all I have done in my past time is watch their unlimited videos on youtube, they even have a top 10 Jay Dan segment where they poke fun at the Coyotes, Maple Leafs head coach, Thanksgiving, random Red Wing mascot who was holding up play, nothing is off hands for them, they have a go at it all, even Jay mailed Dan's wife to ask if she watched the show or not and the reply was broadcast on air, no one in the Indian media can even think of doing such crazy hilarious things on live TV. Unfortunately I may be one of the few thousand in India who tries to keep up with hockey, TSN is primarily a hockey channel with a few splurts of the NBA and the BPL.
Plus the guys at TSN seem to be decent enough to give people a chance, MrLogue was this guy who would post a lot of the top 10 videos on youtube but recently his account was blocked and removed since all the videos were "copyright infringements" so with all the backlash and anger online, TSN HIRED HIM!!!!, he is now part of the crew who uploads the Top 10 legally.
I just wish I was in Canada to be able to witness this show regularly, for now I would just have to do with the clips on youtube, damn I could have actually worked at TSN if I did some copyright infringement myself.
Oh well, here is a glimpse of what I was talking about, Jay and Dan, funny on tv personified.
If you are watching TSN, you got love here in Calcutta, give me a chance as well to work with this awesome team!
Apologies to all the readers of my fantastic blog, that is for the 5 people I know who try to follow what I have to say, so thanks for that.
I haven't updated my blog in a while, call it the curse of work which literally destroys any so called work life balance, or lack of it, makes me go nuts just thinking of the ton of work we all or at least I end up doing but none of that for now, I need to put this out now.
Twas Valentines day 24 hours back and while half the world was trying to prove their love or show that they remembered it, I was here as usual forever alone, well not alone actually, I had my ps3 waiting for the glorious weekend to start but then again I had the same plan last week and baam all that went for a toss with a ton of work during the weekend, fair enough, I have football, right?
Not really, my following of football, well every sport has drastically been cut, thanks to work and well my own need for some r & r , gone are the days where I would be awake till 3 AM watching Osasuna Vs Espanyol, just for the heck of it. Those glorious days of me knowing and naming at least 15 players per Premier League club, gone. Champs league games to watch, to be fair I have not watched ONE champions league match in the last 14 months.
The emptyness of football is growing larger within me, I may never have been the go to guy for football knowledge but I knew about most new kids on the block and what clubs they play for , positions etc, all that is just a fading distant memory of what I used to be and what I am now, thinking half the time about what scheme to run and what promo can I use. True that is a requirement in the current capacity but certainly football should be in my mind, if a guy would think about sex every 20 seconds, well I would or at least used to think about why Torres was sucking so much post his major injury (2010 ) or how the hell can Etoo make so much douhg for Anzhi and how would they run the club at all , paying such huge wages.
Work was supposed to be freedom from the shackles of constant college and tension, studies, exams etc, where I would make dough and just live, away from all inhibitions and just enjoy life as it comes, who would have thought I would have to give up this much for something that is a trivial thing in more developed nations.
Someday, sometime in the future, I sure hope I can be with it again, this may not be the best time but we will have better days.
Football, thou are still there to make me smile during those awful days , may you never go away, I will be back. I know it.
A year of really hard work, not that people get appreciated most of the time in a crazy busy office, we all need time to relax and enjoy. That is what weekends are for, this according to my cousin sister who is all but 10 years old.
"Ding" goes my inbox , "You have received a new mail", "God damn it, must be more work, Fuck did I miss something", rings around in my head. Bloody hell , that too on a thursday,
"Time to rock and roll guys, our Marketing party is on Friday at xyz place" Its time to gangnam style , is all going on in my mind now.
Yes the annual marketing party was all set recently, a huge event with all the big honchos from our department were to com and have a crazy night of fun.
A night to relax, forget about the brand, work, sales and obviously owning people in the office because the office is not a place where people work, rather its a dog eat tiger world, where we are just trying to save our asses and pass the buck around but lets not dwell on that, not tonight.
The party was set for a friday evening, as pre parties go, everyone was given something to do, this was a marketing party so no other teams were involved, just the marketing guys and girls, which were just a handful of women, not too many of them sadly.
Not one soul was working that day, even my boss was taking it easy, too easy even for him (relatively cool guy, does not get flustered or freak out at the madness that occurs in the office), he and a few others were planning on the games that were to take place on that day, while me and manish (bro in office) weren't even asked about the party let alone given menial jobs, which were passed on to others.
So no one was working for the company but rather for the party, come evening everything gets into place,party was to start from 8:30, Manish ran home to feed his dogs and left me here to deal with a colleague who was going crazy as she needed a few large posters printed, she wakes up suddenly at 7 PM and asks me to get the prints, which normally does happen in our office but as fate would have it, the printer was fucking broke on this day, "Shit fuck" I think to myself, she goes ballistic and asks me to go to some random seedy cyber cafe, "I am so not doing that, fuck it"
So I don't go to the place, sit idle , hidden away from the look of most people, get a couple of color prints which are smaller than the required size, go up to her and say "No prints, no cafe's open, what can we do?", she looks up and is flustered, calls a couple of people up but to no avail,
TA-Fucking-DA, lady, I got a couple of color prints, not the correct size and she is so happy like she just got promoted "Thanks a ton", smile and I walk away like a champion, she runs off to the party since she has the posters and the music , yes Gangnam Style was in the playlist, of course I provided it and yes I did dance to it but that is coming up later.
Walking back up to my floor, I see a couple of my colleagues waiting to go to the party, since a female Neha is present we decide to all go together, so while we are using the lift to leave the offce, Neha suddenly goes and walks towards a chinese stall, since her superior suddenly requires us to get like 20 plates of chicken momo's, while she already is carrying a ton of vege fried stuff , she now has to go and get this, while she did order this before hand when we did reach the eatery, they still are making it and are trying to pack it, 20 more minutes pass and its 9 PM.
Phones start ringing and people start shouting as to where the fuck am I, well only my friends from the office call but nevertheless you need the bonbon at the party, getting a cab from office at night is another issue with them bastards refusing to take you anywhere, we finally get a cab with the four of us stuffing inside and somehow reaching the destination, late and we enter the flat where the party is being held at 9:30 PM, as soon as I enter my super boss looks at me and goes
"Tu yahaan bhi time mein nahin pahuch sakta?"
Bloody hell, I was late for the food not because I did not want to be late, "Sir, I had to get this food, nahin toh main late nahin hota"
But no one cared that we were late, got the food just in time, Now I am hungry as fuck and I need to eat something, so I wander about and see one plate with a few chicken kababs, randomly I pick it up, stuff my face with it and then see whose plate it was
It was the CEO's, bloody hell, "I am so getting fired in the morning", I think but then maybe he did not see me, slowly I slip away and sneak into the kitchen where now I start stuffing myself with a lot of chicken products, (yay) drums of heaven , fucking owned the place and then the games started, hosted by my boss, get in!
We Indians are not the cleanest bunch of people in the world, we all have that one relative who will constantly cough right into your face and be unapologetic about it, a relative who will be literally inches from you and then decide to rip out this huge belch where we would get to know what he not only had for lunch but also for breakfast and last night's dinner, lets not get into the great leveller Uncle Fartolomew , the Frances Duke of Flatulence.
Yes we have a lot to work on, especially when we do meet up with people from other countries, there we stick out like sore thumbs with our fingers right up our nostrils trying to find that elusive gold coin or the lost city of Atlantis, coming back from a country where we had a fine of roughly 6500 Rs (500 AED) for a simple crime as littering, it is hard to see almost everyone blow away millions by just trashing the place about, of course we have no laws per se to catch these offenders and try them, hell we even defecate in the open and are fucking brazen about it.
"Commit no nuisance here", its a hard laugh for me to see such signs pasted on walls trying to make sure people do not piss about, which of course never works. People throw the trash right on the street where they live, the stench is unbearable still they have no issues with it, it is so pathetic to see people just throw rubbish on the road, wrappers, paper, etc and not wait for a dustbin which again we rarely have on the streets, we make corners of streets as our garbage disposal area.
One thing that really irks me is this habit of spitting about, spitting has got to be one of the worst possible things to do out in the open , apart from defecation of course, the reason for spitting ranges from eating the Paan or Gutka, red spit, then there is the colored spit, yellow or greenish because you have a cold and of course the impressive White spit showing that "Thou shalt spit for no reason whatsoever", we don't need saliva in our mouths at all, another useless bit of liquid in our mouths.
Grown men openly spit like its their land, which again they should not be allowed to do, they stop cars in the middle of the road, roll the window down and spit a brilliant hue of red. Of course we have to be careful while we pass beneath a bus, a lot of my friends have been spit upon and have even taken action by beating said offender up, again India, shine and shine.
I don't understand the need to spit at all, its a disgusting act and well half of the walls in buildings get a ting of red, course of spitting, grown men only do it? I was walking down a street today and saw a couple of 5 year old kids patting a goat (Eid) and all of a sudden one of the kid's spits on the road for no reason at all. The problem is we do not catch problems early enough and don't teach proper hygiene to our kids. Kids being kids will always copy what their "much wiser" elders do and hence we in India have this huge spit-army ready for the next battle against clean buildings and roads, bring it on.
PS: My office has a no spitting policy basically it says as soon as you enter the gates and the garage
"Anybody found spitting on the premises will be dismissed IMMEDIATELY"
That is how it should be, anyone found spitting anywhere should be fined 5000 Rs on the spot or even better made to clean his own spit from the roadside, then only will people learn and try to keep the city clean. One spit at a time?
A few years back I was brought back into this city and the first day of school was a torrid affair as you all should know by now, yes the same school gave me a million stories to talk about in great detail and probably made my school life something which only a handful of people can imagine it to be. Crazy teachers, stories, students, fights, etc, it goes on and I like always am glad now that I was part of the history that is STB.
One thing still stands out more than anything else was the language of communication, while I was studying in the school, it was an absolute no no to communicate in English, not even abuse a bloke in English, while it was the norm to sing songs , scream , shout and abuse about in the vernacular language, hell I must admit, I picked up a ton of crazy abuses because of this and yeah to be fair abusing someone in Hindi or Bengali is way more fun than using a Mother fucker or Bitch in English.
I was heckled almost on a daily basis by the rest of the gang, not my best pals because they knew english back then but always communicated in the other languages, I was a constant target with nicknames like "Dubai" or "Saudi" not only because I mostly spoke in English but also because I came back to India after a few good years in Dubai and no , Dubai is NOT part of Saudi Arabia.
Now however it seems everyone has jumped on the English bandwagon and the same people who heckled the shit out of me for speaking something else , now only want to communicate in English, its not because they have had a sudden realization that without them knowing English they wont be able to communicate with a vast majority of people but rather to impress women so that they can come up with catchphrases like
"Cool man, wassup dude"
or
"Yo mama, you looking so hot tonite"
and then I am not a grammar nazi but Jesus some of the things I get to hear
"Definitely , I will come to your house yesterday" really?
Its at times like these that it pains me to point out some people are actually part of the same batch that passed out as I did. dont get me wrong, I am not embarrassed that some of my class mates still cannot speak english well, what does piss me off is this sudden realization that English has to be a part of life and that just speaking in Hindi anymore is not "cool" or wont help anyone be a "chick magnet", ruddy show offs.
So now when some of the others still do try to speak to us, we [ the gang of 5] always speak in Hindi or in Bengali, no need for English, we are what we are and you cant change that, so please FFS keep that "English realization" away from us, we are STB, we ruled English before it became cool, so get back to the Hindi convos online and off and we can all be happy and not make more grammar nazi errors.
Every so often a video is posted on youtube which gets a crazy number of hits, from Rebecca Black's "Friday" to watching a collection of celebrations from a first division Scandinavian football team, the videos don't have to be "amazing" in a good way, Rebecca can attest to that.
This time, well the video for this month and probably for the last month has got to be PSY's "Gangnam Style", a bizarre video from South Korea famous for kind of retarded dancing, riding a horse, lassoing and then the guy in lift, plus the dance off. "HEEEEEEYYYY SEXA LAAAYYYYYYDAAAAA", is what Psy says during one of the verses of the song, its a huge hit on youtube, people on India are going gaga over it and finally know what a real "viral" video is. To be fair its good for the rapper, a huge star in Korea (South) , he is getting the due credit he deserves with a few trips to America, he came on the Ellen Degeneres show and taught the dance move to Britney Spears and Elen, Simon Cowell was there as well and he actually was not a dick to Psy.
Psy is also going to perform in today's Korean GP, which again is a landmark for him to hit the international stage, sure we don't get the lyrics, logic and well anything from the video except that dance move and well that kid who dances like MJ at the start of the video and well hot Korean women, stick figures nevertheless, I like meat on a woman, personal taste.
Please do catch the video here is you have not seen it yet.
Coming back to the real point of the post, which has come 45 days since my last one, don't ask, work has been real tough, we all seem to love talent outside the subcontinent but we have just as great and talented folk on this China.
I found this video in the year 2011, before the cricket world cup, I hate cricket but loved this video, the sheer awesomeness of the lyrics, the music and well the singing and dancing made my day.
Do note, not one image of the Indian cricket team is portrayed in the song and well India did win that world cup, so there you go, you could not jinx us at all, especially for all my Pakistani friends, this is the real and original video which should have gone viral but did not.
