melting pot?

In my earlier post I'd spoken about the global family. I was reminded, again, of the melting pot that the world is becoming, by someone I met today. This person is of Chinese origin, is French by nationality and works for an Indian software company!
Again, nothing unusual I'm sure... but I still found it interesting

Barin damage of a different kind

Unexplicably, I have spent the last 45 minutes reading brain numbing bollywood gossip from some random tabloid-like website. Its similar to the experience I had when, again inexplicably, I ended up reading a mills & boon. I could almost feel my limited quantity of grey cells gasping for breath and eventually some of them did fizzle out.
From all these little snippets about almost every aspect of celebrity life, I conclude that there must be people employed in the task of just collecting these from whatever fleeting source they can. This essentially would involve continuously stalking celebrities, hanging around places where you can possibly hear some news about them, hunting down their friends-relatives-neighbours-doodhwaala-dog-whatever. Ming boggling.

is it true...

That the people with the guiltiest conscience feel the need to claim their innocence the loudest?
http://www.barbaraknott.net/Ravihome.html

But why....

In spite of growing up in a city that was plagued by communal riots I never really felt the effects of it or saw the horrors of it, let's just call it being fortunate enough to live in an area where the riots didn't cause the havoc they did in the main city. They were always stories you heard or saw in news.

Today terrorism has the same 'distant' effect but that I guess is because of luck or good chance. But today it struck a little closer home to shake me up a bit - I was reading where all the Delhi blasts occurred and one of the areas was the McDonald's and Prince Pan corner in GK market, where I happened to hang out numerous times while studying in Delhi. Just like how today there must have been a regular crowd of college students just out enjoying a weekend. Only I was lucky enough to be not one of them. But what about the ones that weren't? People like me, unaware and happy go lucky, just out with friends for a good weekend. It gives me goosebumps to think of it.

But that starts another train of thought....
Have we become so indifferent that only when something affects us directly do we realize the seriousness of it? And do we do anything about it except shake our heads and 'strongly condemn' such actions like our politician do? Will it take something worse than this to stir us out of our stupor? And more frighteningly, is it just a matter of time before that 'something worse' happens?

Globalization...

Working in the IT industry that's one word I get to hear as many times as I breathe in a day. But right now I refer to the fact that everyone in my family is in a different part of the world - Meerut, Pune, Connecticut, Geneva - yet emails, phones, chats have really rendered the distance redundant. Of course it will be true globalization when teleportation becomes a reality!
But for now the globally spread family, I'm sure, will also become as common a trend as Globalization has become in the IT world, if it hasn't already.

O Canada

Is it ironic or just pure chance that on a day when most people are wallowing in patriotic fervour I've decided to blog about some good ol' Canada days?
Well, c'est la vie I guess. I decided to write this because I was chatting with Bidisha about some of the crazy times we've had in University and that set me thinking. I don't intend to make this post a very nostalgic, sappy one but if it does turn out to be one.. my apologies!

University: (Starring - Pooja, Juvi, Josh, Bidisha, Tara, 'The network')
- Cody Hall and the quad: life in windsor began here. Landed up in Cody Hall residence at 1 am, one week after classes had begun! 2nd Floor lounge, Juvi's room and the quad were the scenes of the collective crimes of Josh, Juvi and Pooja. We did pay for all the ruckus we created when the head Resident Assistant made us create 'silence in the halls' posters. What a terrible punishment :D. Cody was inhabited by a bunch of colourful characters, at least that's what it seemed like to me. I'm sure they also found the strange foreign student equally weird.
- CAW student centre: the place to stay awake the whole night just before midterms or exams. Most of the time was of course spent socializing with other (strangely enough mostly Indian) students, going over to 7 Eleven every two hours to fuel up, sleeping at odd angles on artfully arranged seats and at odd mad moments having food fights.
- Riverside: outside class and outside the CAW I was mostly to be found at the riverside rollerblading, biking, hanging out (literally) at the monkey bars. Met Bidisha here the first time the day after I landed. There was an awesome fireworks display every last wednesday of June to commemorate the Windsor-Detroit international freedom festival.
- Shwarma joints: open till 5 am, suited my insomniac ways perfectly. The amazing baklava was a big incentive too.
- Partington avenue: offcampus life began here. Met BD here the second time , she lived in the apartment below ours, and thus began our partington adventures with Tara as the third star. Partington was the scene of "sun, moon, water, land", backyard bbqs, 2003 Cricket World Cup matches (collectively bought by Indians & Pakistanis @ $35 per match), network dramas, watching pirated Hindi movies rented from the "Indian store' run by the Bangladeshi aunty.
- coffee counter at Marche: work started at 7 am. I can't believe I used to make it there early enough to grab a coffee and croissant before my shift started - having a monster for a manager might have had something to do with it though. I guess all the cookies and nescafe's newly introduced chai-tea I scarfed made up for the early start.
- the crocodile grill: on campus grill, open till 11pm and thus the food source for my unlearned Indian stomach that never got used to the idea of getting done with dinner by 7 pm. I survived on grilled cheese sandwiches from here for the first few months and when I could eat larger portions of meat - spicy chicken burgers washed down with lots of coke. Needless to say, after one year of Croc dinners, I never regained the thin frame I'd brought to Canada.
...
so that was about university life. Oh and there were classes too - the best part of those being that you could eat and drink in them, call the prof by name, sneak out of class, blatantly walk out of them sometimes, and that almost all midterms were multiple choice.

When it rains... it pours.

It has to be the mother of all traffic jams when it takes 2 and a half hours to cover the 7 km stretch from my house to office.