The Economics of Iced Tea...

Location: Select City Walk, New Delhi

I had gone to Select City Walk (Saket) to do some shopping.
Since I love iced tea I thought I would treat myself to one from Barista. I went in and ordered the drink at the till. The guy replied '105 rupees sir'. My mouth dried up when I heard the cost!

Since I was on vacation I decided to shell out the money. But I went and stood near their counter as I wanted to observe what magical process they use to make a Rs. 105iced tea.

Well the process was dead easy:
- Take a cheap plastic 'glass'.
- Squeeze a bit of lemon juice from a plastic bottle.
- Squeeze a bit of sugar syrup from a plastic bottle.
- Fill the glass ALL the way up with ice (yeah! ice is cheap and takes up a lot of room!).
- Add some black tea.

I can bet the whole thing didn't cost Barista more than 10 rupees.

What I did end up paying for was the staff which didn't serve me all that much, the cool furniture which I didn't sit on, the air-conditioning which I did not take any advantage off and some board games which I had no one to play with! Oh and let us not forget: the Barista logo on that cheap plastic glass.

The Magic of Microsoft

I was scanning the 'world famous' duty-free at Heathrow Terminal 3 some time ago and I came across a rather strange advertisement (see the image below).

As I was trying to figure out what kind of an ad was this suddenly I realised I had seen this 'ad' before. I just needed to tilt my head a bit (see below!).
Yes! It was NOT an ad. It was a login screen for windows XP. Probably the OS in the contoller for that particular display had crashed and then automatically re-booted. Just that no one realised that once re-booted it would ask the 'user' to login before resuming the standard operation of displaying ads.

I thanked god for limiting Microsoft (MS) software to the airport duty free ad-displays. Imagine if the ticket booking system or the software on-board the plane used MS software!

:D

About Diya - The First Venus

Well now my old memories have been triggered.

The first girl I remember, in my life.
Her name was/is Diya. We used to sit together, I think in the 3rd or 4th class.

We used to sit on the first desk in the second row from the door (which was towards right). Our classroom in those days was on the ground floor.

She and me liked a toy in common. It was a pencil sharpener in shape of a telephone, with a plastic wire for the telephone cord and blue buttons.

She left school. I remember her standing up and facing the class as the teacher told us she was leaving. I remember I was a bit shocked to see her go. When she left, I guess I lost all touch with her.

I wonder where she is now and what is she up to?

Pain is a Privilege

I feel sharing pain is a privilege. When you share your pain with someone, then you are elevating them above other people around you. It is a privilege given with great difficulty. It carries heavy responsibility for the person it is given to. It is a privilege not to be accepted without a clear mind.

So if someone shares their pain with you, try and put yourself in their shoes and actually feel what they are feeling. Remember always, you are privileged to see it.

Next time you feel like saying 'I can feel your pain', make sure you actually mean it before you say it.

Next time someone tries to share their pain with you, take it seriously.

Remember also sometimes the sharing process may just bring the person back from the edge of collapse and give them a new lease of life.

A Post Dedicated to G.

She was with me when I was happy, those were the last days of happiness and childish innocence.
She was my partner till 5th class in school. After that I lost contact with her. We were 10 then.
Few months ago, she tracked me down through Orkut. We were 26 then.

We re-connected after 16 years. It felt as if the years just hadn't passed. That we were still the same. Somewhere within us we were still kids and still happy and still innocent.

Yet many things had changed. I had learnt the meaning of love, pain and death. She had gotten married.

She used to appreciate my air-plane drawings and I used to be curious about 'Misha' magazines which she used to read. We used to cheat at exams.

I think she will always remain my special friend. The first person I bonded with. The person who knows and shared a part of me which no amount of pain or problems can take away.

The part of me which I keep locked away deep inside me.

Thank you G. for making those memories special.

:)

Love, Hope, Hate and Faith

At one time, I used to be a great believer in Love and Hope. But then Life taught me a few good lessons.

Made me realise all these good emotions are not really good. They always make us more dependent on external factors and circumstances. The main reason is because we humanise these emotions. Pure Love becomes Conditional Love. Hope becomes Expectation.
Very few people are capable of Pure, Unconditional Love or Hope without Expectations. It takes a lot of experience to achieve this.

There is one emotion that we are very good at adapting in the purest form. That is Hate. We tend to keep Hate in our hearts and bring it out without reason or external influences. Hate gives us the warm feeling in our heart. When our insides start burning and we direct our thoughts in the purest form of hate towards ourselves and our surroundings. This emotion doesn't make us dependent on external factors. We can express hate in most situations easily.

Then comes Faith. Faith is the one thing that doesn't need dependence on anything external. You can have Faith in yourself, in God or in Luck. These things don't have an external manifestation. They do not depend on thoughts or actions of others.

What is the resultant of this post? Are we never to Love or Hope and only to Hate and Keep the Faith?
In my opinion, Love and Hope in their humanised forms are VERY dangerous. Conditional Love and Expectations make us do so many things. Then one day when the Condition is gone and Expectations have been shattered we feel as if Life has taken a Left turn. But since most people would find it difficult to have unconditional love and hope, I guess hurt and pain is the price we must always be prepared to pay to be able to love and hope. Therefore love and hope hide a negative aspect under their positive shell.

Hate is one of my favourite emotions to study. There is something powerful about it. Hate can motivate people in ways that Love cannot. Hate hides a positive aspect in its negative shell. Hate is good as long as it is harnessed. The same way burning fuel is good if its energy is harnessed.
A side effect of hate is purification. When you emerge from the flames of hate many unnecessary things have been burnt away making you feel lighter. Hate always starts with an external source. You hate someone, you hate something. But then if it is allowed to grow. It quickly takes over everything. Slowly, hate is the one thing that you feel.

At its purest there is perfect Hate for yourself. Where no external source or target is needed. You just hate yourself. That is when the true emergence takes place. IF and ONLY IF, you think at that point of time 'why do I hate myself'. In the light of hate are your smallest flaws revealed. Once revealed they can be removed.

Faith is something one should always have. It is one thing that the person has control on. Faith comes from within. It doesn't need an external source. God doesn't advertise, yet people have faith in God. Whatever comes from within you, you can control.

I am sure many people will not like me posting such a post, but this is what life has taught me. If you were lucky enough to get a different lesson, then please do share with me.
:)

The Year of Death

The year was 2002.

The one year of my life when I lost four people I really respected. Four people I really liked.

1 Friend
1 Grandmother
2 Uncles

Someone once told me that I am a very cold person. I think in 2002 I hit absolute zero.
In theoretical physics at absolute zero temperature a system neither emits nor absorbs energy.
My emotional temperature was just that. I was neither absorbing nor emitting emotions within me.

That was, I feel the completion of my education in Death.
But , then again, when your doing a degree in Death, you only graduate when you die. You always keep learning. See it in new forms around you.

Why did I write this post? Well because today I was struck with a thought: why do we worry so much when we are all going to die one day? What is the source of continuous human progress when human themselves are not permanent.

I remember having this discussion with a friend few months ago. I think it is because we spend so little time alive, we want to leave our mark. Then some people are too intoxicated with life that they don't see death.

Plus there are the social rules that one has to follow which makes us live. From the moment we are born, we don't comprehend the shortness of life. Normally by the time we reach that level of maturity our childhood is over (if you are lucky) and we are caught up in the day to day struggles of adult life. That is what keeps us surging ahead. I wonder do we ever live for ourselves? Especially when we reach adulthood? Or is it always about other people?

I think most of us live because we were born.

Its like we are serving out a prison sentence. The same way prisoners don't have a choice about their daily routine; they get up, shower, eat and sleep at fixed times. Similarly life seems to have a routine. Grow up, prepare for life, get a job, get married, produce kids, take care of kids, prepare them for life, get them settled, grow old and die.


A cynical view but then it is just that, a point of view. One of many that I have on this subject.

:)

Subzero00

I was talking to someone a few days ago about chatting on the net. They happened to mention Internet Relay Chat (IRC). IRC is the grand-daddy of modern-day internet chat systems.

It was the only service accessible from the 'VSNL Non-graphical Student internet account'. Services like Yahoo Messenger and ICQ were only accessible from the 'VSNL Graphical internet accounts' which were quite expensive in those days.

I still remember my first IRC chat. That was my first on-line chat. First time I chatted for about 4-5 hours. It got me hooked! I met many good people there. Out of that long list of people there is only one person that I am still in touch with.

But what I remember most clearly is my first on-line nickname: Subzero00
The double zeros at the end because the nick Subzero was already taken.

I got the nick from the video game: Mortal Kombat (TM) which has a character named Subzero. The speciality of the character was a 'freeze' attack. My friend, who was a Mortal Kombat (TM) fan, was able to complete the game with this character only. Obviously used to be my character of choice when playing the game.

Those IRC days were fun.

There is just one thing I miss from those days. Melissa Smalley living in the state of Georgia, USA. I never actually met her but we did exchange a whole lot of emails and a few letters. She was a very special friend. Hope where-ever she is now, she is happy and content with life.

Chatting / Chat rooms are the way-stations (i.e. - a stopping place on a journey) of the present.
We go and share our thoughts with other people. Make them friends for some time. Then we loose touch. All this happening in the slip-stream of life.

It is most interesting to see where these threads meet and where the separate and where they meet again!

:)

The Newsreader and The Student

There was once a student. Not of a particular subject but let us say of life in general. This being a short story, age and location of characters is of no consequence.

The student liked listening to a newsreader on the radio. Everyday the voice of the newsreader would strike out across time and space and reach the student through the radio. The student in turn would, like one of the 'faithful' always take out time to listen. To make out the subtle nuances in the newsreaders voice. Trying to pick-out signs of emotion, stress, happiness and anger in the carefully controlled tones of the newsreader. The voice streaming through the speaker was all that the student had to discover the person behind it.

They couldn't meet. They wouldn't meet. Or would they? The student did not care. As long as the voice came through every night the student would know that the newsreader was alive and doing well. The student cared for nothing except the well being and the happiness of the person behind the voice. The one voice which called out across the night. Never failing. Always faithful.

One day the student came to know that the radio station the newsreader worked in was closing down due to financial problems. It would cease broadcasting from midnight of the 19th of February said the news.
The voice of the newsreader, pronouncing its own fate, did not betray the slightest hint of emotion to the untrained ear. But the student knew better. The student could feel the pain and the sense of loss right through the words. The tone of fear is quite clear and distinct to the trained ear.

It was a time of mourning for the student. All was lost. Hope was not easy to come by. The future looked bleak and black. Then one day the student realised that the newsreader would definitely get a job in some other radio station. The newsreader would be back! Maybe this time not reading out the news but giving the weather or the round-up of the newspaper headlines or the sports update! Anxiously the student scanned radio channels for few weeks. Often listening to two or three stations at once. Listening for that familiar voice.

But the newsreader's voice did not appear on any of the local radio stations. This broke the student. The student went into a fit of anger. Cursing everything around. Cursing the newsreader for creating the dependency and then taking away the support. Blind rage coloured with frustration surged through the student. It burned through the body and the brain like a fire through dry wood. The student couldn't eat or sleep. Sometimes the student couldn't even breath.

Weeks turned into months and the student regained some sort of peace. The fire of anger had eaten all there was to eat and then died down. Then one day as the student was walking down the street there came a familiar voice. The voice was bit different but the student knew it was the newsreader! It had to be. Wild desperation seized both the mind and the soul of the student as the search for the source of the voice began. The newsreader had to be found!

The student looked around trying to locate the source and realised that the voice was coming from one of the houses along the street. Once that was known the house itself was easy to locate.
The student stood at the door of the house. Now confused what to do! You can't just knock on the door of a strange house and ask who the voice belongs to. Before the student could decide how to proceed the voice stopped. Steps were heard approaching the door and the door flew open in the face of the student surprising both the person opening the door and the person standing outside it.

As the student tried to piece together an explanation for standing outside the door like this, the person who had opened the door, recovered and asked in an even voice: 'Can I help you?'. Everything froze around the student as the newsreader spoke again, this time asking with a faint note of annoyance: 'Can I help you? Are you lost?'

The student could just reply 'You are the newsreader!'. The face of the newsreader clouded over with suspicion and the door started closing. The student cried 'Wait! 8th of July!'. The suspicion on the newsreaders faced changed into confusion and then curiosity. The door stopped closing but did not start opening again.

The student knew, the next words had to be the RIGHT WORDS at the RIGHT TIME. Nothing less would do. 'What happened on the 8th of July last year?'. Now the newsreader's face registered shock. The door started closing again. 'Wait!' cried the student as the door slammed shut. Minutes passed as the shock of the meeting passed through the body of the student. Then the door opened again. This time the newsreader looked a lot more relaxed. The voice spoke once again to the student. It asked: 'Where did you get that date from?'. The student replied with the truth: 'Your voice had a raw edge to it, the only time it had such a painful note in it, in the two years I have been listening to your broadcast'.

'You got that from my voice?' asked the newsreader now intrigued.
'I feel the connection between us, sometimes words are just what we have, one has to make do with them' replied the student, now both calm and excited, the heart hammering away.

'That was the day....' the newsreader began and then stopped. Surprised with the response. Then began again: 'Why am I telling you this!'.

'I prayed to God for your happiness every time I heard the sadness in your voice' said the student in reply. Suddenly the student felt drained. The strain of past few months and of the sudden meeting came crashing down. Facing the newsreader felt like facing the Sun in a desert. Darkness settled around.

As the student's heart froze in its cage, words came out of the half closed mouth: 'Why do you cry?'

The newsreader replied 'Why do you study my pain?'

The student answered 'I never got used to the bland taste of happiness, pain has so many different flavours'