Saturday, September 7, 2013

Picture Perfect

I remember being a small kid and going for a ton of holidays with my parents. Those days were simple, no mobile phones, no computers and certainly no invasive flashes where people tried to take random photographs. My dad would hand me that old Minolta/Kodak camera, check how many photos could be taken from the roll of film and tell me to be careful while taking the snap.

Looking back at the 10 or so albums which have been filled with photographs, each photograph actually had a story behind it, from the time I sat at the wheel of a bus (was 3 years old) to this beautiful glorious photo where my Grandma and I are enjoying some jam sandwiches sitting on some of brown autumn leaves. 

Taking a photograph had a meaning back then, unlike now where I feel like I have entered a crazy nightclub or am walking down the red carpet at the Oscar's with the number of flashes going off thanks to them damn mobile phones. I have a strict "No photograph " policy, I do not take photographs of the people I go with unless of course we meet up after a long time, like my college buddies who meet up once or twice in a year, that is a memorable time because well its only twice in a year that 5 freaks meet up for some real madness.

Of course the policy extends to no one taking my photo also, my dad loves this policy and he makes sure he takes a couple of photos wherever I go with him, sometimes I feel his only task in life (especially when I go out with my parents) is to troll me. His propensity for taking my photographs is directly proportional to how pissed my reaction is when he asks me if he can take my photo. The more I get pissed, more are the number of photos he takes. 

The other thing I always get lambasted on by my parents is when I decide to take a few snaps, especially during those holidays. Now I prefer taking photos of the scenic beauty around me, no , not the bikini clad women but the natural beauty around us. The sand dunes and the sunset after our desert safari in Dubai, or the beautiful monasteries in Bangkok or the huge Shiv Temple ( I could be wrong with the temple , sorry about that) in Malaysia. Great structures are the thing that I like capturing on my cell, so when we go back to the hotel my parents ask me to show the photos I clicked throughout the day. Then comes the barrage of why do I take such shitty pictures, why is it that the pictures don't have people in them, why is it always the structures etc which come in your photos?. Its like that because that's what a photograph should be, a picture is worth a thousand words and instead of having people in it , it should have something to talk about, sometimes this whole "pose in front of x" seems a ruse to prove to people that you actually have been to this place. 

If you can't accept that I have gone to x/z place, then you better not ask for me to show the holiday pictures. This again is one of the things which I dread. Especially if I ever go to relatives place who has just come back from the trip and they want to show the pictures. If I want to see the pictures I will ask about them, you do not have to show them to me in hope of winning the 10000$ prize on some game show. I don't show my holiday pics to people either, unless of course they ask for it and then they moan about how "people" are missing from the photos. Really?

 

Friday, August 23, 2013

Hack me baby one more time!

This is one of those classic stories that you would love to bring up at a party or just to remember the good old days.

This happened way back when we were in class 11. For reasons to save myself from getting a hammering I won't be posting the name of the friend who had to deal with what happens next.

It was a fine morning and I guess it was a day off from school. This was the era when we had just found what a great thing Orkut is/was. While we all joined with the notion of keeping in contact with each other post us leaving school, it ended up as a sad and sick way just to try and add "friends".

Those crummy, spine tingling, shuddering days of guys just trying to add random girls in hope of getting some action still freak me out. Basically any girls' profile on the site was up for grabs.
As long as they were within our age group and was single, even not in certain cases, they would get a friend request and well you know the rest. Maagibaazi FTW!.

So most of us actually had like 300 friends for no reason and most of them were females in hope of getting a girl, so this friend of mine was/is no different and he too had a ton of female friends on his list.

He calls me up and his tone is a little shaky to start with,

"Adeem, you know what has happened?"
"Nah , kya hua, tell me...."
"Arrey dude, My orkut profile has been hacked"
I immediately start laughing my ass off, thinking that hacking a profile is only done to get credit card details and trying to completely wipe out your finances.

"Who the fuck wants to hack your profile?" I ask back, nevertheless me pal does come across to my place and logs into orkut.

While the page is loading he tells me 
"Dude, some one has hacked my profile and they have changed my profile picture, its disturbing and now all these friends are taking me off the friend list and .....shit look at the photo man .......looook."

I turn to the screen and I have this face of shock which is succeeded by a loud laugh, its a picture of a girl ( a teenager) is holding this ginormous cock. 

Pedo alert!

So his scraps are filled with "friends" (females) asking him to either delete the photo, change it and then warning him that he will be removed from their list. 
So while he is on the mend trying to find out who has hacked his profile,my dad walks in and asks me whats going on.

I am thinking to myself , "Please don't open your trap man, don't tell my dad about the picture"



My friend goes "Uncle, you have no idea, someone has hacked my profile and changed my picture to....."

Crap man, don't blurt it out.

Fortunately my friend had the presence of mind to avoid describing the picture and replaced it with "a dirty picture".
 While he could never recover his profile completely, the one lasting image (images) of this fiasco are those pesky profile viewers. Here are a couple of gems who "viewed" and added him on Orkut.
Cool Sexy Handsome Hunk
and amongst the plethora of sexually perverted people viewing his profile was the champion

"I AM HOMO, I LIKE TO EAT MOMO"

To this day, we have not been able to forget this one profile viewer and I believe the same profile tried to add my friend on Facebook as well.

Momo anyone?


  

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Hey Hey Mignolet!

"Oh bloody hell, not again". 

Another season, another false dawn. Leading yet again 1-0 but failing to capitalize on the possession and the number of chances we created. Sounds so familiar to every other season or at least the seasons post 2009.

The season had just started but it seemed to end so abruptly with the referee's whistle blowing. Stoke were always in the game and as usual we always let a team back into the game. Dominating possession, creating and squandering so many chances and our best friend Mr. "Hitting the goal post" was back again. This was going to be another long weekend.

"Penalty", the commentator said, "Oh fuck it" my mind went. 88th minute, we should have won this game. What a crappy start to the league. Our beloved Agger had just handled the ball in the penalty box and we could not make excuses for the poor decision because it was the correct one. No one to blame except us, so many chances to wrap the game up but to no avail.

On the other side of the pitch was a man standing tall. One of our targets for the goalkeeping spot this season. Asmir Begovic had double handedly kept his team in the game by making some tremendous saves, while his opposite number had quite a shaky start to the game and all the knives were out as to how could this man replace our Pepe?
The same who was shipped out so easily to Napoli for a year, a loan deal too. Up stepped Walters from Stoke to take the penalty, a player who has tormented us before and was sure to do it again.

"Oh well at least a point is better than what we did last season in the first game", shuddering to remember that calamitous start at the Hawthorns which finished with a 3-0 drubbing. 

The striker steps up to take the shot, an info graphic shows the last 5 penalties Walters has converted and where he has placed each shot. Certainly the keeper would miss it, he does not look confident at all.

"Thump" the kick goes, my heart sinks and then a loud cheer is heard. I open my eyes fearing the Stoke crowd going wild when its our supporters cheering wildly. Mignolet had just saved a penalty. That may not sound much but he had done something which I can't remember one of our keepers having done in a long time. 

He won us the game, no thanks to our finishing. Begovic was the man of the match but the man in our hearts is the Big Belgian. With a couple of saves he had just won over a gazillion Liverpool hearts , no more talk about "is he good enough?". This should say it all.



SAVED!
  

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Prison Pit

The comic book collection continues with weekly downloads of all them Marvel and DC reboots, Deadpool (the new series) is a sure shot winner with him being one of the funniest comic characters ever. Plus the writers make sure he breaks the fourth wall repeatedly to add some more humor into the series. In his latest issue he even remarks " There's no way Marvel would ever let such a lame villain come back from obscurity. Right?". Marvel did but that is beside the point. Deadpool is one character not to mess with, almost a Wolverine except he wisecracks and he is mentally unstable. That was not his own undoing. The Weapon X program fudged him up a lot trying to cure his cancer but the regenerative cells couldn't actually stop his cancer so it grows and then he cures himself and it goes on and on and on, horribly disfigured he may be but still one of the best characters to follow in a galaxy filled with Superheroes.

The Cover art for the 1st book


While Deadpool or a Cyclops would be there in your minds regarding comics, there was this little gem I came across on a list of top comic books in 2012-2013. Prison Pit from Johnny Ryan is sometimes the anti comic book that we all need. I remember growing up reading Chacha Chaudhury and them brilliant Tinkle digests but Prison Pit decides to destroy every notion that you have for a comic book. This book is strictly for adults as a lot of X rated violence and sex occurs in this black and white comic.

Very few lines are spoken in the series (4 books so far). Its just madness, carnage and violence laced with a bit of humor. The characters are all based on some alien planet and they are mega bad ass and by bad ass I mean disemboweling your adversary , beating them to a pulp, defecating on them and then eating the corpse up. Each issue is crazier than the next and you just wonder how the main character (whatever his name may be) survives for the next assault. One such arc is he is given a mega penis strapped to his groin. He then has to find a flying Pterodactyl with boobs and has to have sex with it while its vagina has teeth around its lips. That my friends is the crazy world of Prison Pit. I thought it would be too grotesque for me but I can't wait for the next issue to roll out.

Oh and the part of the Pterodactyl sex? That isn't even in the top 20 crazy, violent and graphics moments in the series.
And a bit more news, an animated youtube series is under production currently with Blake Anderson of Workaholics providing voice over. Win!

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

What to do with a Suarez?

Another transfer window, another long drawn saga which could have been taken care off a month back had someone just iterated that wants to leave England and move to another country. However Mr. Suarez cannot keep his mouth shut so instead of vilifying the media for their constant attacks on him, he goes up to one of the papers to tell them about his sad story of how Liverpool have held him captive like a POW and not letting him make his dream move (again) to a Club in the Champions League. No disrespect to Arsenal but going to a Madrid, Barca or even a PSG makes more sense than staying in England where the fans had hurled so much abuse at Suarez and his family that he was contemplating moving to another country.

FYI Suarez, London is still a part of England and people will still target you there. He seems to have forgotten the tough times he gave all Liverpool fans and the club with his "racism" and "biting" incident, oh well that is a lesson we all have already learned in football. No loyalty left, so what do you do with a Suarez in your club wanting to move to a Champions League team?

Here we go

1: Sell him to PSG or Monaco

2: Loan him to Agent Rafa and his Napoli team (UCL and a pretty decent outfit)

3: Loan him to a club which is in the Champs league but willsurely get knocked out inthe group stage and bring him back to Liverpool for the 2nd half of the season.

4: Sell him to Celtic, hey he is out of England and in a CLub in the Champs League

5: Let him rot in the reserves and let him play only reserve fixtures

6: Make him leader of the Chewbaccas

7 : Lock him in the Big Brother house with Patrice Evra

8: Tell Daniel Agger what a Judas he is to become and watch the Dane elbow Suarez into obscurity

9 : Send him to an I League club (Indian league, just for the fun of it and so that he understands how much better he has it currently)

10: Take him back to the enchanted forest where he came from and find the witch that made him look like an elf.

Of course he hasn't left the club yet but it does seem he is about to go. Thanks for nothing Luis and hope you find a club big enough for your ego.

Good Riddance

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Adventure Time!

It's been quite a while since I have gotten this excited over a cartoon, especially one that is currently airing on Cartoon Network or "CN" as it is called now. The good old days of the brilliant toons are long gone. What we have now are those crummy little Japanese cartoons (which probably are good in their own language) dubbed in Hindi. It just does not contain the fun and mystery that most of the original Cartoon Cartoons had. The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack, I am Weasel, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, The Cramp Twins, oh the list is endless.

So I came across this cartoon "Adventure Time" by a freak accident. I was searching for a ton of new comics to read online, like the Uncanny X Force etc and came across a site which listed "Adventure time 10" as a must read comic. I downloaded the comic (from number 1) and then fell in love with it, downloaded the TV series and its freaking fantastic.

A ton of crazy characters from the Land of Ooo


This is probably the best cartoon I have come across since Foster's home for imaginary friends. The two main protagonists are Jake and Finn, a mr fantastic version of a dog and his friend Finn the human. They live in a world called "The Land of Oooo" which is set in a post apocalyptic era where the Mushroom bombs have already been set off.

The short episodes are both hilarious and dark to an extent dealing with death , magic , love and craziness. The character design is exceptional as well since each and every character is different having a completely different personality, I am only a few episodes into season one and have been hooked onto it. The every bubbly Princes Bubblegum, the Vampiress , The  notorious Ice King, there is too much god damn goodness in just one cartoon.

I thoroughly recommend everyone to watch at least a few episodes to get a feel of what a real cartoon should be like. It's like we are back in the golden era of cartoons from the 90's. This is one adventure that you surely should not miss. 

Thursday, July 11, 2013

The chase for the elusive Magnum

Every once in a while there comes a trial which every mortal must pass. Taste what success feels like and then have it cruelly taken away even though you are just inches from the prize that you seek.

Thanking the Lord above, I have been blessed. Traveling to a lot of destinations means only one thing, stuffing yourself with what you don't get in India. Dubai, Bangkok, London etc, I have been able to taste some of their delicacies and some of their "street" food. "Street" food for me does not necessarily mean the roadside shanty outlets but often them ice cream karts.

On a trip to Phuket, I walked into a small 7 - 11 store and decided to try out an ice cream. A Magnum bar was placed right at the top of the pile in the freezer and not thinking twice I picked it up. At the check out counter the price listed was 25 Bahts, that is a lot of money for a chocbar. 

One bite into the bar and heaven was found on earth. The bar is made of the best damn chocolate coating I have ever tasted and the vanilla ice cream inside is to die for. When I visited Dubai a few months back, the only ice cream I stuffed myself was with em Magnums. They had even come out with an Almond coated variant and a dark chocolate one.

Unfortunately this ice cream is not available in India or so I thought. Outside my complex I found this rare ice cream kart of "Cream Bell". Normally a Walls kart is parked right outside the complex but seeing this kart a few days in a row I decided to try out a Cream Bell. I always take one of them Feast bars so I tried to find the substitute for the same in the Cream Bell chart.

My eyes could not believe it when I saw an ice cream bar named "Maxxum". I thought aloud, it can't be a Magnum, it can't. Priced at 40 bucks, it was a Magnum , well close to it actually but it was friggin awesome. I was chuffed to bits as I walked home after a day in office , ice cream bar in hand and a smile as wide as the grand canyon.

I told my parents about the Maxxum and made it a habit to eat as many Maxxums as I could. Unfortunately since that Maxxum I have not been able to get even close to a damn Cream Bell kart. The kart which used to come in front of my house has stopped coming, even though its the summer and its the perfect time for an ice cream. This may be irritating and frustrating but what really gets my goat is the strategically positioned karts which are littered all across the city.

When I travel back home, I cross no less than 3 karts which are all placed in such a place where the car cannot be parked and I can hop off for an ice cream. Its like I am being taunted and teased into thinking that the ice cream is there but its not for me. Its been 4 days in a row where I have found a damn Cream Bell kart only for the signal to turn green or the kart taking a left while I have to take a right.

Its one thing to not give a man what he wants but its another thing to ensure its right there and still far from one's grasp.

Well played fate, well played.