Monthly Archives: June 2003
95972594
Got this link from The Alternative perspective newsletter I get 
It’s an article by Shashi Tharoor (the author of The Great Indian Novel and The Mammaries of a Welfare State) who is also a civil servant and UN employee on what does being Indian and India mean for him. I think it captures the ethos of India beautifully !
Well, this is India of our day-to-day experience – full of anomalies, inequalities, confusion or diversity (depending on how one tries to understand it)… Contemporary India, perhaps more than any other time, is Many Indias. To quote from this article by Shashi Tharoor, India is: “snow peaks and tropical jungles, with seventeen major languages and 22,000 distinct “dialects”… 51% illiterate but which has educated the world’s second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers… birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five political parties and 300 ways of cooking the potato”…
95972489
Three British icons are hogging the media headlines these days:
1. David Beckham
2. Harry Potter and
3. Prince of Wales, William
ET compared Beckham and Potter, beginning with the games they play and said that Harry won hands down as Quidditch is an infinitely superior game than football (just one ball, and that too without broomsticks !)
Beckham and Harry Potter match almost the same in popularity in Asia, but Potter beats him hands down in the US where Beckham’s popularity is not so much (except Gurinder Chadha’s film with his name coming in at number 10) …which is why as a brand Harry Potter is much more valuable than David Beckham and probably longer lasting. Beckham is a mere Muggle after all !
95972188
I took this test on Quizzilla…I don’t agree with the results !!
But decided to post this anyway…!
You are Lust.
Every part of you screams “Do me now!”
You exude sexuality and while others sometimes
view you as a slut, you see yourself as only
giving into your base desires.
What Emotion Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
People who know me would surely disagree !!
95972102
I got this in a forward from a friend…
I usually don’t like posting forwards on my Blogs…but I am making this an exception (its the first time…so sue me!!)
Excerpt from an account about a traveling experience in india:
To the uninitiated, driving in India is bedlam. It is like amusement park
“bumper cars” with horns, except we have yet to see an accident.
India is a country of many languages, and I think horn honking is a
language that drivers must master before they get a driver’s license. In
fact, it seems to be one of the more important requirements. I paid careful
attention in one of our cab rides (20 honks in 4 km), and here is a starting
glossary of horn honk meanings:
* “I am passing you!”;
* “Hey, you’re passing me!”;
* “I’m just going to drive about 1 cm from your back bumper for a while, OK?”
* “Can you please move just a little bit to the side so I can pass you by squeezing into this impossibly narrow space between your car and the oncoming motorcycles/ bicycles/ ox carts/ cows/ goats/ food vendor carts/ pedestrians/ cars/ trucks”;
* “Its a nice day and I’m just tooting for the heck of it”.
Car horns also answer other car horns with “yes” or “no” signals, although
to my untrained ear, I cannot tell the difference. Unlike North American
horns, car horns here never seem to be impolite or rude – they never say
“MOVE” or “hurry up”.
Of course, the horns could just be used out of courtesy to truck drivers.
Every truck has a hand painted sign on the back bumper saying “Horn OK
Please”, so honking at trucks may just be the polite thing to do.
My favourite thing in India traffic has to be the tunes that cars play
while they’re backing up. In North America and Europe, trucks sometimes
sound a high pitched “beep…. beep… beep” when they go in reverse. India
has turned this to an art form and applied it to cars. I am now compiling a
top 10 list of car reversing tunes. Candidates so far include “Jingle
Bells”, “Happy Birthday to you”, and some Frank Sinatra tune whose title I
don’t know because it is not “do be do be dooo”.
