Quo Vadis?

A year ago I had posted this: http://jollyrogerrocks.blogspot.com/2006/12/miracles-happen-miracle-happened-last.html Today I write about another miracle that happened on similar lines. Those of you living in TN or in the capital Chennai will know the effects of the depression off the coast the last two days. It was pouring cats, dogs, monkeys, donkeys, partridges… er I think you got the general idea. It was pouring so much that it looked like we would have a wet Christmas. Yesterday was the day when my gang planned to go Carol singing, despite the fact that a minority of us had to report to work today. Anyway the showers were so heavy that the roads were flooded and many houses had the electricity supply suspended to avoid electrocution mishaps. Things looked very bleak with a few parents pulling their kids out of the carol rounds citing the inclement weather. Gamely we went ahead with faith in God and the experiences of the years past. We were sufficiently shielded from the elements w...

Had been to a wedding last Friday. It was a mixed Hindu wedding with a Bengali groom and a Tamil bride. So with high expectations of good food, D and I went for the wedding. The auspicious time or muhurat was between 5PM and 7 PM a novelty by itself as it is customary that people get married in the early hours of the day after having a reception the previous evening. I have always found this puzzling, why have a reception when the couple are yet unwed? Whatever be the reason weddings here are so boring it ends up becoming a chore unless you are actually getting wedded when you have no escape. Here it is a simple meet, greet, eat, beat (it) process where the anxious guests sit on tenterhooks waiting for the usually delayed arrival of the couple. People growing up on a diet of weddings from the Rajshri stable or from the many never- ending “saas bahu” soaps may have different ideas of weddings. But the reality here is harsh. Weddings seem have a big disconnect and very often there is no ...

It’s been awhile since I last posted. Lately it’s been those days when life has been standardized to a robotic routine. Wake up late, hit the washroom, gobble your food and dash to work, run around town hopelessly looking for business, routine boss blasting and boss bashing, meals in between and back home rather late after squeezing in a few choir practices or some extracurricular activity before a late crash into bed. Days pass by with such monotony that weekends and weekdays have blurred into insignificance as on my last sat off my boss hauled me out of home and sent me to office simply because he was bored and had nothing else to do. With Christmas around the corner add more activities to the list a night mass and carol concert to be prepared for, (one big concert in Fort St. George was successfully completed last night to a tumultuous applause) carol rounds looming ahead (scary since we end our rounds late and work beckons the next day), shopping, more shopping, decoration etc etc....

“The pornography of politics gets a new variation as Deve Gowda looms over the ruins of a coalition experiment. The reckless patriarch with his dynastic impulses is not alone. There are a few others who excel in political harlotry in the name of social justice. They are united by the depravity of power.” The opening lines of an article by the India Today in its latest issue. Unfortunately I could not scan the accompanying image which was a delightful combination of the faces of Deve Gowda, M.Karunanidhi and Devi Lal (I think). There is nothing much to be said about the farce that is played out before us in the political scene. Every politician worth his salt wants his son / daughter to take up the family business. Frankly I think that is a normal paternal attitude and I fully support it. Why would I decline the directorship of a firm my dad runs or a kingdom he rules? (Pity he does neither!) Hereditary accession to the throne is historical and has been handed down from the early days. ...

Was tagged by Chriz , so here goes... 1. Name one person who made you laugh last night? Steve Martin in Pink Panther 2. What were you doing at 0800? I was pondering the meaning of life. (just shitting man) 3. What were you doing 30 minutes ago? Began browsing 4. What happened to you in 2006? Life 5. What was the last thing you said out loud? Lisa! (trying to find my dog) 6. How many beverages did you have today? 1, H2O 7. What color is your hairbrush? 1 blue,1 green. 8. What was the last thing you paid for? Petrol 9. Where were you last night? Home 10. What color is your front door? Brown 11. Where do you keep your change? In my wallet and often it becomes a pain in the butt. 12. What’s the weather like today? Cool. 13. What’s the best ice-cream flavor? Vanilla 14. What excites you? I aint telling u 15. Do you want to cut your hair? Yup, I was trying to find my face yesterday and failed. 16. Are you over the age of 25? Y...

The fires in Kolkota have consigned two other news articles to the back pages. Two articles that caught my eye before the violence in Kolkota took over. The first article was about the wife of an NRI in the USA who was beaten up and thrown put of a running car due to the lack of dowry. The second was concerning the conviction of the accused in the Uphaar fire tragedy. If these articles have passed you by here’s a quick read. Article 1 Dowry or groom price for the unknowns is prevalent in some cultures. I know for a fact (courtesy my classmate from Uganda) that in Uganda the grooms pay a price for their prospective brides. Often this payment was made by giving X heads of cattle. If such a practice was present in India women would not have to suffer thus. From female infanticide to husband abuse the root cause tends to be dowry or rather the lack of it. Personally I think that a groom who demands dowry is like a prize stud bull. They do nothing and have to do nothing except reproduce and...

Was just bored sitting in my hotel room in Hyderabad, I had exhausted my call list and my next appointment was a couple of hours ahead, looking through a folder of snaps on my laptop taken last month and voila, I had a new post. Last month on Gandhi Jayanthi to be precise my gang of friends from church (we actually grew up together for the better part of a decade) decided to go on a picnic on the holiday. Picnics and timeouts are so rare that even a single day outing was a real godsend and so we decided on a single day trip to the Golden Sand resort outside Mahabalipuram. The van left late as usual and we had the medley of songs and loud jokes spicing up the journey and we hit the venue 2 hours behind schedule. I must digress to mention that D got up early in the morning and made yummy biriyani for us for the trip and we had a good quantity of junk food too. So when we landed there the first shock that awaited us was that the prices had gone up 50% since our telephone call two days ago...

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to hurt the religious sensibilities of anyone but just a social comment Driving down Chennai, I came across a hoarding about a religious discourse by a holy man. Though there are many such hoardings what caught my eye was the title of the holy man. He was addressed a Sri Sri Sri ........ (My attempt to catch a pic failed twice) How would it be if somebody calls me Mr. Mr.Mr. Jollyroger? I would probably die of laughter. You may have heard of his holiness Sri Sri .... so is this simply a "holier than he" stunt? I always believe a mark of holiness is humilty and I try to maintain a distance from those spiritual gurus who preach but apparently have a problem in practicing the same. On a different tangent when i was searching for cartoons on gurus, I came upon some absolutely hilarious ones. So just enjoy......

I was wondering what to shoot for my contri to the 3:11 event. I came out from my house (short break from work) looking around I spotted nothing remarkable till I saw the sky and a profound thought occured "Good, bad or ugly, we are all under the same sky" Nature is a great leveller.

Unfortunately, I could not find anyone to do my work, let alone blog so I have been out of blogosphere for nearly a fortnight now. Between extensive travellling, some work, large bouts of laziness, and family commitments my blogging was forgotten. But I'm back!!!!!!! Missed you all.

Driving down an Indian road, cool wind against your face, a song in your heart, your spirits floating high…… Ouch! You come down to earth after you dive into a pothole. Curses and bad mouthing the civic agencies and every other possible culprit dampens the spirits during the drive ahead. So what is a pothole and why does it cause such mood swings? Wiki to the rescue. Potholes (sometimes called kettle and known in parts of the Western United States as a chuckhole ) is a type of disruption in the surface of a roadway where a portion of the road material has broken away, leaving a hole. Most potholes are formed due to fatigue of the pavement surface. As fatigue cracks develop they typically interlock in a pattern known as "alligator cracking". The chunks of pavement between fatigue cracks are worked loose and may eventually be picked out of the surface by continued wheel loads, thus forming a pothole. The formation of potholes is exacerbated by cold temperatures, as w...

This is a long but true story of the rogue cops of Chennai. Read on only if you are interested… Yesterday was a day of great lows! It was a good day to start the week and as usual I dropped D off at the university and proceeded to office. On the Gandhi Mandapam road (just a thought, the name is a misnomer since the mandapam is a couple of kilometers away on another road) a cab way ahead in the traffic pulled up suddenly. This caused a sudden application of brakes of the cars following it including me in my third love. In a split second I felt a huge thump and the shattering of glass. As I was securely belted up I got away with no damage but my poor car was damaged very badly. I rushed out to see a sea of confusion; 1) A girl, ostensibly the pillion rider of the bike (A Bajaj Pulsar) that rammed into my car 2) A flustered guy who rushed to the aid of the girl who was by now bleeding and appeared hurt 3) A crowd of irate motorists who found this delay very irritating and 4) The usual goo...

Hi, As you can see QuoVadis has taken yet another avatar. Actually every time I try to get a third party template for my blog it somehow contrives to end up doing a lot of damage. Blame it on my lack of html knowledge or just simple bungling. I managed to get some absolutely wonderful templates and finally I end up with a compromise. A few problems I face: 1) I am not able to back up the widgets from my current template and move them to the proposed one. 2) The proposed template though good still has some scope for improvements and I don't know how to do them 3) I get run time errors when I try to paste third party code and I'm simply clueless to debug. So all you whizkids out there who can do something about this, lease take your cue from the image at the start of the post..... P.S. I think this template is good and it brings to mind a great management technique. KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid!!!!

I tend to watch the news channels in the morning after my daily reading of the Hindu. Actually it is more of hearing the news while I go about my daily chores in the process of getting ready for work. Initially it was NDTV 24/7 for want of choice but when CNN IBN was launched I found it a little more appealing and so I switched royalty. However my liking for the channel stops whenever their cricket programme LOC comes on simply because of my aversion for Kris Shrikanth who is affectionately (sic) called Cheeka (a la the Hutch pug). Shrikanth is simply abominable but I will save that for another story. Anyway of late I started watching TV Today as they tend to have at least two pleasant looking well dressed hostesses dishing out the news. Some of you may have seen TV today and may recollect a third woman who looks like Scary Spice and whose histrionics are a serious turn off for any serious news viewer. These news bulletins tend to structure their programme into the headlines, then busi...

I had a 60K limit on my Visa Silver credit card from the second largest bank in India and very recently de to bad financial planning and a lot of stupidity I had an available cash limit of under a couple of thousands and the interest servicing alone was draining me. So I decided to pay the amount in full from my savings and get rid of this debt trap and based on the bill I did so right down to last paisa. My problems with the card then commenced! When I call up their 24/7 customer care number for some unknown reason every time the officer understood that I wanted to close my card my line invariably gets disconnected. So after several frustrating disconnected calls I finally managed to get through them from the hotline in their branch. Finally I got an assurance that my card will be closed. Happy and flushed with the success of my mission I rested in peace at home. This peace lasted only for a week when my next statement read that I had a couple of hundreds to pay as interest for the in...

SMS laughs Knock! Knock! Who is it? Misbah… Misbah who? Mis bah 5 runs! Misbah thought he was sending the ball into no man’s land. Little did he know that there is a Mallu in every corner of the world. PS: Misbah played very well and thanks to him we won both matches.

Hey ppl!!!! Quo Vadis is 1 today!!!!!!! When I started blogging I called this page Quo Vadis because I wasn't too sure where this blog would go. But over the past one year you have seen it and have been a part of it and have helped it grow to what it is today. Thank you. Now for the rest of the post..... 100 (number) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 100 ( one hundred ) (the Roman numeral is C for centum ) is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101 . ← 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 → List of numbers — Integers ← 100 110 120 130 140 150 160 170 180 190 → Cardinal 100 one hundred Ordinal 100th one hundredth Factorization Divisors 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100 Roman numeral C Roman numeral (Unicode) C, c prefixes hecto- / h...