A series of unfortunate events - 2

So we had this big plan for Saturday and I was supposed to meet these guys at some subway station which had a name ending with a 'Jima' prefixed by the whole of English alphabet arranged in random order with each of the vowels appearing thrice.
The major hitch though, was that the rendezvous was scheduled at 10 am. 10 am...For Chrissakes, 'outtathebed by 10ams on Saturdays' is something thats been banned since the first Geneva convention, but try telling that to the Japanese!

Forgetting the depressing thoughts of having to get up early next morning, I religiously spent the Friday night as they're supposed to be spent. Watched FRIENDS(must've finished half a season I guess) which went on till the wee hours in the morning. Didn't know when I fell asleep. Didn't know when the friggin alarm started ringing. All I remember is that I woke up with a start with an early morning gyaan that something which cant be accomplished by yelling a "f*** you" 20 times at a howling clock can be accomplished with a simple press of a button Christened "Stop".

Anyways, 9:15 am it was.Not a moment to lose. Got ready quickie and made it to the nearest subway station as fast as my legs could carry me. Was just in time for a train which was about to leave. Phew! Got in the train, got a cant-take-this-constipation-no-more ® look on my face, put my iPod on, and waited for my something-Jima station.
1 song, 2 songs, 3 songs, 4 songs...My destination was just 3 stations apart. Heck, the songs were short ones.
Got lost in melodious oblivion priding at the meticulousness that went into my Pod's song collection. Just when I thought I'd traveled long enough for a "Next stop:Siberia", I finally decided to look at the map in the train. Sure enough, holy horny hyenas, we were traveling in the wrong direction or more sensibly put, I'd caught the wrong train!!! Boohoohoo...Cursed myself, got down at the next station and traveled all the way back. Finally reached the meeting point at 10:10 and found my co-adventurers for the day already there waiting for me. Sometimes I just wonder what will it take these guys to slip the schedule by, say just 5 mins...for once atleast. Please. Being in time all the time is so damn boring!

Hayashi-san and Tanabe-san had come equipped with the plan for the day. The first question they asked me was whether I'd had my breakfast. I, eager to make up for the 10 minute delay, replied with a yes almost forgetting that 2 slices of bread and jam was all I'd had for dinner on friday. Realised the gravity of my mistake only when I was told that the plan for the next 3 hours was to go bowling!!!

"Houston, we have a situation. I can hear the Big Ben hammer the maximum hour of the day in my tummy and I've to go bowling"
"This is Mission Control. Give us ur co-ordinates"
"43 N 141 E"
"We have your image. The satellite shows your foot firmly lodged in your mouth. We cant help you out. You are on your own. Over n out!".

After the last hope of getting any food for the next 3 hours faded away, I quietly resigned myself to fate and went bowling.
Bowling was indescribably pathetic. Missing the gutter was becoming a big achievement after a while...C'mon, how better do you expect a hungry guy to bowl. Anyways, the perseverance in guttering paid off..The 3 hour bowling schedule was cut short to 2 and boy, was I elated...
"We go for lunch now?" were the words and I swear it was plain soothing sweet music to my ears!

So we finally headed for lunch. Whenever I or any of my Indian colleagues go out with our Japanese colleagues, we always go to Indian restaurants. But this time, my friends Hayashi-san and Tanabe-san, good lord bless their souls, had chalked up this grand plan to take me to a Japanese restaurant. The plan, despite their best intentions goddamnit, just couldn't have had a less opportune timing!

Finally went to the restaurant with the hope that I'll get something veggie to eat which I realised was a bit too much to hope for. One look at the menu card and I knew it was game over!
I let my friends decide the items for me. The food consisted of Udon(plain noodles) served with something. That 'something' was what we needed to decide.
"Squids OK?" asked Tanabe-san
"Sorry Tanabe-san. I don't eat sea food"(or anything that moves)
"Beef OK?"
(and that includes anything that moos too!)
Finally decided to have the noodles with Soya sauce since there was nothing else I could have it with. Its blasphemous, I tell ya, to have Udon with Soya sauce but thats the price you pay for being a vegetarian.

I rolled the soya sauced noodles neatly on my chopsticks and swallowed it. It beat my worst expectations about how bad it could taste.
Its funny how sometimes even some jokes you've read long ago, help you in a situation. It was in one of such jokes that I'd read that the taste buds are at the tip of your tongue. I put that knowledge to good use and kept shoving the noodles halfway down my throat. It worked. The noodles avoided detection by the buds and I managed to clear my saucerful of noodles..Yippee!
Once out of the restaurant, the best part was that Hayashi-san told me this was only the first phase of the lunch. We then went to another restaurant known for its fruit juices and pastries.Yessssss.... Throwing all the table manners and its likes to the wind, I gulped a couple of pastries and some 3 glasses of orange juice and finally was at peace.

The interesting thing about this restaurant was that there were these girls dressed in pretty frocks who were serving orders(and yes, the place was a decent one). For 1500 yens, you could get a snap taken with them. My friends insisted that I do and so gave it a shot. The snap came out good albeit a total washout for my imagination that I'd look like a James Bond with the Bond babes on either side. I was looking more like a Sylvester Stallone stuck between Mickey Mouse and Bugs bunny!!!

Hayashi-san presented the snap to me in front of those 2 girls, as a memento and said
"Babu-san, please take their picture, bosom"
Excuse me...
"Please take their picture, bosom"

Before I could think of any scandalous interpretations of what he said, there was this waitress who knew a bit of English who told me what he meant was "Please consider their photograph to be precious"
It reminded me of something that had happened with me a couple of days back. There was a design issue in our project which needed to be clarified with our end client. So on the day of the client meeting, my Japanese boss comes to me and says "Babu-san, regarding the doubt that you had asked us, we will arouse the client today". I remember thinking "Dude, there are better ways of negotiating with the client than that. Anyways, if thats how you wanna go about it, keep me out of it!"

Coming back to the topic, we finished our second and final part of the lunch and went roaming around. Visited a beautiful Jinja(Japanese Shrine), shopped a bit and by the time it was over, it was late evening. So that was how the day went. I bid adieu to my friends, thanked them for spending time with me, took a taxi, went home and hit the sack!
That was some Saturday huh!

® : Registered expression of the Japanese Train Commuters Inc. All rights reserved. Copying by permission only.

A series of Unfortunate Events - I

This aint Lemony Snicket here. Its just that for the sheer number of forgettable incidents that've happened and the number of faux pas I've committed during this trip, I couldn't have named it anything better.

I'm on a solo trip to Japan with the legendary Sapporo winter gloriously yawning its way in. The mercury is heading down south from zero and staying put there most of the time and I'm beginning to feel that this is a trip I should've safely avoided in favor of a much more pleasant weather in Bangalore.

I've got a torn knee ligament and cant hop around much. Ice Skating followed by a reverse somersault followed by a fall-flat-on-the-back-in-the-middle-of-the-road was the the last stunt I wanted to pull, but ended up doing it anyways one harsh winter morning on my way to the office. Bloody hell, am I having a tough time here or what....
I didn't volunteer to be the savior of the world though. My PL had got recently married and there wasn't a choice left on who should be traveling, with just the 2 of us in this project.
There was however, a flip side too, to these otherwise dull proceedings. The fact that I was all alone with a problematic leg was gaining me a lot of attention and sympathy from lots of my colleagues here; With my boss and my super-boss in that sympathizers list, I had a 'customized for yours truly' relaxed project schedule; and with some of the babes in my office populating that list too, I finally had something spicy to write home about other than a daily report on how much minus degrees the temperature had reached!

Some colleagues of mine(guys in this case) even offered to take me on a guided tour to some places here, and with nothing much to do other than hibernate on weekends, I readily agreed.
So thats how the plan came into being. Myself and two of my colleagues, Hayashi-san and Tanabe-san were supposed to meet up on that Saturday at a subway station from where we were to set out on our weekend adventure.
The details of the outing to follow soon...

p.s. This blog was written a couple of months back but has been published unaltered to preserve the emotions(???) captured in the post.

Yoo hoo hee...2 screws in my knee

Good to be back blogging. The last month or so has been quite languid, save for that darned surgery for my torn knee ligament which I underwent after a lot of dilly-dallying, and the major KLPD* on my birthday.
Recently, my knee ended up with 2 screws, the size of whose made me wonder whether it was a sadist carpenter doubling up as my surgeon; all this damage done one breezy December morning, courtesy a misjudged disc braking at 70kmph singing Cranberries' Zombie. Whats in your head, In your heeead.Zombie, zombie, zooombbb....scrreeeecchhh...bang!!! Bad landing with the result that the ligament was khichikofied!!
Someday, they should make these Bangalore roads more rock-humming-rider friendly!
It wasn't the surgery though, that tested my endurance.
a. "Dude, you are screwed. Dont that rhyme too? hahahahahaha"
b. "The next time you pass through an X-ray machine, its gonna go bzzzzzz. hehehehehe"
c. "You've become metal man dude...ppphuhaha"
I've got quite a lot of patience, yes. But with statistics of 235 for a, 429 for b, and 162 for c at last count, I cant help but be overwhelmed with awe at the sheer likemindedness in people on what is "funny" in such situations. The urge to use certain adjectives when people make such "funny" comments is sometimes too much to resist. Refraining from satisfying that urge was THE ultimate test of my endurance ;)

Coming to what the KLPD on my birthday was, its this. For a guy who has been on a staple diet of great tasting birthday cakes @ 0000 hours every July 7th, there wasn't any this time. In fact nobody wished at midnight too. Now having known these blokes for so long, I thought I knew the limits of their creativity and thought that all they're gonna do is surprise me once i slept off. So tried pretending to be asleep. No sir. No signs of any flurry of activity anywhere. And when at half past 2, the flickering light coming from the TV in the hall went off, I knew I'd under-estimated these $^@%$%%#. In fact nobody wished me till 4:42pm on 7th. Thats the time I was born it seems. Darned if I knew. Anyways, the gifts were worth the waiting. But for the "look at that cheap bugger coming all the way to the hotel on crutches for an OC treat" stares that met me at the hotel I took everybody for a treat to, the day went just perfect :)
So here I am, a 27 year old basking in the glory of , well at present, at just being a 27 year old!

* : Pray, let me use these terms till blogspot too comes up with its version of staying beautiful

Some final blogs from my Japan trip soon to follow. Had written them long back but had been lazy bumming all this while and just couldn't muster up the will to publish them till now. Will do that ASAP. Until then, Adios!

To put it in Arnold Shivajinagar's immortal words: "I'll be back"

Lost in translation

I LOVE Blogspot(Caps intended). You write a blog, check the number of profile visitors, the figures dont exactly send your spirits soaring, no problem. Just press F5 on your keypad and voila, count + 1. For best results, try it as many times as possible. For not too bad results, try only at home. Expecting your boss to know the importance of the number of profile visitors for a blogger, is like expecting George Bush to know the capital of the United States. Give him a 'W' and a 'N' for a clue and he'll say "Myke no mystyke. Its Wellington".

So, getting to the actual topic, I have a question here.
What would you do if a gorgeous babe you barely got to be friends with, sends you a mail saying "My body is very hot. How is your body?"
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm guessing 3 concurrent reactions here. Jaw drops, tongue pops out, eyes almost fall out of their sockets. As a direct consequence of the above actions, your face will look so stupid, Jim Carrey in an Ace Ventura movie will look like the most sober person on earth in comparison.
And of course, you dont need a hundred trillion grey cells to figure out what you'd be thinking. For all practical considerations based on everything thats been researched and re-researched by any university worth the concrete its built with, its a given that the typical babes-dont-put-any-ghaas-to-me male pysche manifests itelf in one universal reaction when encountered with such a situation and that reaction being a "WTF?"...Yes "WTF?", with the tempo gradually tapering down to account for the this-is-too-good-to-be-true factor; you know what i'm talking about right...Something like "Whaatttthhhhhaaaaaaaffffffffffff....."
Before you start thinking which noblest of the souls you are a reincarnation of, to be warranting such a good fortune, I'd like you to put your thoughts on hold just for little while and join me on a fantasy trip.
Boys and girls, young and old, Welcome to the land of the rising sun, the land where anything is possible(proverbially and literally), the land of perennial KLPDs. Welcome to Larry Page and Sergey Brin's unique gift to mankind; "Google language tools--->Japanese to English(beta)". And then, there was light!

I need a little flashback here to explain better.
"Okie Mr.Flashbacker, T minus 2 days please"
...rrrreeeeeeoooooooowwwwwwwww...
"Maa, meli chaddi kahaan hai?" TANG! Wha..where..how...
"Hey there, didn't I tell you no boozing during work-time?"
"Oopsh, shorry shir...here you go"
He gets it right this time.

T-2 days
Well, this babe i was talking about, looks kinda sick. What a co-incidence.So am I.
T-1 day
We dash into each other at coffee time and i ask her whats wrong. She says she has fever and I tell her that I'm having fever too.
T-0
I send her a mail which says "How are you feeling today?". All she typed in Japanese was an innocent "I'm feeling very feverish. How about you?". As you must have guessed, Google translation did the rest and made fodder for letters to Penthouse off a courteous health enquiry.
Anyways, this is one of the (mis)translations i could decode before any damage was done...There are more which i have hopelessly given up on. Sample these:
"When you press the simulate button, I appear on screen" (WOW! Just in case you didn't know how advanced these Japs are!)
"This point is designated uselessness" (Very very in-your-faceish)
"Pour the divided tea cup into boiling water" (Yeah, that tea-making doubles up as a kung-fu session where u get to break the cup with your bare hands)
And the list goes on....
Life in a foreign country, i figured, is very easy if you care to have a conversational knowledge of their language. But for a quintessential lazy bum like me, realisations hit in late.My Japanese definitely doesn't figure in the list of the top ten linguistic achievements of the century, but if your vocabulary gets exhausted in a 2 minute conversation with a taxi-driver, being bad isn't enough. You need to be pathetic. Yours truly is truly just that.

But hey, just to cheer myself up, i can throw in a little bit of every language. Like for example, this cousin of mine, who has a vacation plan in Spain..I told her she wont be having too much of a trouble managing over there. After all, Spanish is bread,butter,jam..Just pick an English sentence, add a ~ or a ` to every vowel in the sentence and there you have your Spanish Senõr/Senõrita, ready to be served.
Of course, you gotta remember nothing is pronounced as its spelt, "Ja" becomes "ya", "Jo dud" may actually be a "Yo dude" ..You know, stuff like that!
I picked up some French too, don't remember from where though..
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ?
Thank you thank you :)

Anyways, there are 2 immediate morals for me from all this:

1. Get your Japanese right before you land in Japan again. You see, when you end up calling a girl "honest" when you actually wanted to call her "beautiful", there's precious little dame luck can do for you.
2. Remember, Google translation sucks!

So long then. Its weekend. I need to hibernate.

Grey shaded memories : the sequel

Prelude: This blog was due to be completed on Wednesday coz it was a holiday here in Japan. Don't ask me for what. Me doth not know.My boss here tried explaining me about it being something related to Spring. Didn't get it. Didn't bother to. I'm not one of those "get to know the reason behind everything" people. As long as its an off, i don't care if its for spring, for summer, or because some lousy old long-lost comet has finally has finally found its way to ram into their favorite place earth, or atleast as Hollywood has me believe, The New York City!
Wednesday came and Wednesday passed and what did i do? Well, to sum it up in a line plagiarized from The Eagles and disgustingly mutilated: "For the record, I never hibernated. I just took a 1 day sleep vacation!" (Contact me in private and under oath of secrecy I'll tell you what the original is)
End of prelude

Getting back to my grey-shaded memories saga, as i said, once out of college, i neither had blackboards nor the audience. So it was a temporary hiatus from graffiti, the instincts being intact though. Life went on. I got married and once again in life, I had it all; a pretty wife, a wonderful kid and a decent job. Fairy-tailish stuff.
Trouble began when i got a new boss at work. He was the sort of a guy you'd like to use all the beep words and their derivatives that you know, to qualify. For god knows what reason, i was his pick of the lot. What followed was pure, simple, sadistic torture. I couldn't take it any more. My life was definitely not heading in the right direction. While on one hand i had this boss of mine making me feel what hell is all about, on the other hand, my kid wasn't exactly putting his inherited creativity to constructive use.
Finally, it struck! I got fired the next day, the reason for which I'll never come to know. My only remote guess is that they didn't find the "flush well after use" that I'd written on my boss' chamber, too funny. More was to follow though. I come home and see my kid back from school way early than usual. An almost-ready-to-burst look on my wife's face told me something wasn't too right. Then the facts came out. My kid got kicked out of school for leaving a note in his book to his teacher saying "Your teaching sucks but that ain't no reflection on you bybe". There you go. Double whammy!
Anyways, my wife blamed me and and my penchant for disaster-invitingly funny writing for our kid's behavior, for me losing my job, for everything. She left with the kid never to be back again...sob sob...hankies please. Nope, the clean ones if you don't mind....
Well, that's how it all ended. I swore to be normal and never to get into such writing stuff again, come what may...So ladies and gentlemen, now you see why it was difficult for me to convince myself to take up blogging.
But then again, some people, you see, are just incorrigible...

p.s. There's a typo way up there..Its a "comet has finally has finally found its way".. Rather than correcting this, i'll leave the 2 'finally's in consideration of those comets who, before beginning their journey, went to a buddy comet's "I made that planet pee in its pants" party, had more shots of bitti vodka than usual, are now seeing a couple of more earths than what actually are, and are really really confused about which one to hic! errr... i mean hit!.

Grey shaded memories: part 1

I remember my first "professional" attempts(if it ain't blasphemous calling them that) at writing anything dangerously close to that fine line between sanity and the other, darker side was when i was in college. Back then, I had it all; a personal collection of all the blackboard graffitiing essentials. A quantity of chalk pieces that can run the primary education in India for half a decade, two and a half dusters(would have had 3, had the dumb thing not got stuck in a door), and a near impeccable sense of timing required to finish a board-full of graffiti between the time everybody has left after the last lecture of the day and the time the security person comes to lock the classroom. I've had lots of justmadeits i tell ya!
I used to leave a signature for my graffiti too, like all lunatics, criminals and superheroes(not that they write graffiti;i meant the signature here). Well, that leaves us with the obvious question of which category do i belong to, the discussion of which we will leave for lazy Monday morning 9ams.
Coming back to the graffiti thing, boy, it was real fun...Not just the writing part, but also the part where i saw people's feelings metamorphosize from "Hey, who wrote that? that's funny!" to "Hmmm OK, its kinda good.Now if only he cares to clean up the next day morning..." to "This is getting irritating...Who does he think he is, P.G.Wodehouse?" to "Man, this is too much. This guy sucks. He needs to get a life, some sense and without doubt, a few kicks on his rear!". Sure. First thing in the morning if i were the person asked by my Prof to clean a blackboard full of what is some jerk's bad idea of a supposedly "creative" orgy, i wouldn't have had too many affectionate feelings myself. And i didn't even get started about what I'd be feeling for that Proffie here!
Anyways, that was my college life.....4 years of vulgar fun and a handful of people who wanted my blood on their hands. It was good while it lasted, i swear!
Once out of college, there were no blackboards and not much of an audience either. So the urge for such moronic writings gradually weaned off...

p.s: This blogger is known for over-dramatising situations. The reason why this point is mentioned only as a post-script is obvious!

Kennedy assassination - the real story

Agreed. Guilty as charged! Yes, that was just a run-of-the-mill attempt at trying to draw your attention. But it had to be either that or "Hot pics of Hollywood stars inside". I figured that there's no way in a million years that i could possibly get somebody to read my blog with a title that's anything other than that.
I've got no mean task on my hands folks. I need to churn out a popular first blog here. If not for anything else, at least for some PR disaster management in the eventuality of my subsequent blog attempts becoming forgettable. And of course it'll be nice to be remembered as "Hey, its that Kennedy assassination blog guy". hehehehe..A wee bit over-optimistic, that's what i am but hey, I'm still alive and it proves a point! ;)
So ladies and gentlemen, that explains why i custom-engineered the title for my foray into the blogarena.
Actually, it hasn't been easy convincing myself to take up blogging because when it comes to writing, I have memories and memories in all shades of grey......

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Blogger "nostalgia"fied for the day.To be continued shortly....