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I guess I judged it as spectacular just bit too early! Someone was looking at this web site in internet explorer and the links on the side and layout in screwed up. Apparently I didnt realize it since I use FireFox!

Should I blame Internet Explorer or WordPress or the popular Firefox. I would have blame the usual scape goat Microsoft I guess.

With the new tool and some combating armour to tear down comment spammers, I am unceremoniously reopening the comments for this blog! If you have something to shower me, please do. If you hate me, assume you never read this post!.

You might be wondering about the new look of this blog. Thats the new beauty of the latest version of the WordPress software I am using to run this blog.

I have only one thing to say about my upgrade from WordPress 1.2 to 1.5. – Awesome! It was a breeze and took me less than 5 minutes. It gives me much more features and control over what shows up in this blog and thats freedom and power to me!

WordPress Zindabad!!!

We are back from a culinary weekend ! ( meaning we had food, we went out to eat, we come back home for more good food! ). The only the other thing we did to spend our calories was to talk, talk and talk and laugh out as much.

Text messaging is something I have never used. I never had or used a cell phone when I lived in India and as far as I remember, text messaging was never mainstream in US for ‘cultural’ reason. Anything that strains more than a few cells of their body, Americans will whole heartedly reject it ‘culturally’. Text messaging is one of those victims. I bought into the American idea of our mouth being lot mightier than our fingers ! so I never bothered to try it.

All that changed after I got married to Harini, who is our family SMS queen. So I have been cajoled into using SMS in past few months and between us I sometimes find the patience to send text messages. But when I read the news about the fastest SMS champion in the world, I wonder if it is really true that ‘Nothing is Impossible’. Thats a daunting task to type a complex sentence as the following one in seconds:

The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human. – Try to type this message in your cell phone and if you could do it in 47 seconds on less, Boy! You are the new world champion buddy. [Craig Crosbie of UK fingered it 48 seconds. Karan Sachdev, who fingered it in 66 seconds is India’ SMS King ]

I am proud to hold the second best timing in our two-member family ‘world’ series championship!

We are off the windy city for next three days to meet Ramesh & Hinduja. Dan & lavanya will be joining us on friday night and we hope to have some good time before we return back on Sunday.

When I first went to Chicago years ago, the pilot of the flight, right about the time we were landing down, told us a fact that I still seem to remember for some reason : Ohaire airport is such a busy airport that airlines make bargains with air-traffic officials right on the air to get a slot for landing. So luxury airlines get to land faster by paying a higher premium while discount airlines go round and round above the airport, at times for more than an hour before getting a spot to land in Ohaire. Not sure how far it is true, but I remember it 🙂

Narain karthikeyan, who is also from Coimbatore (guess who else is?) and who was also hanging out in X-Cut-Road, KG Theater and ooty junction right around the same time when I used to, recently took a really great honor of being the first Indian to drive in Formula 1.

[Narain with his driving Jordan partner. Src:DancewithShadows]

Had not for that scintillating experience in Indianapolis GrandPrix in the July of 2002, I would have underappreciated this feat of Narain. Let me tell you this, Don’t judge F1 by what you see in Speed channel. Because it is all still believable until you witness it in person. It is spectacularly unbelievable. We witnessed on that hot summer afternoon something that was literally heart shattering. Yeah, thats the right word – Shattering, it wasnt for the faintest of the hearts. At the peak of the race, I couldnt believe my eyes when I saw cars zipping thru at over 250 miles per hour around the meticulously designed tracks. I guess thats faster than sound becoz I could feel it. The sound of screaming engines will hit our ears only a few seconds after we see the car around the corners. If you are brave enough, you could probably try to take the ear buds off of your ears for a few seconds, as the cars pass thru, but then get ready for your strings to be torn. There is a reason why they give those ear buds for free.

[Narain with a stamp of India all over his helmet. Src: F1racing.net, DancewithShadows]

When you think about the fact that a human being is actually controlling the cars at that speed, you just cannot comprehend it. Imagine, looking ahead and except for the black track ahead of you, everything else on either side of you moves past you at 250mph. When you are in that speed, even a tiniest of the mistakes will move out of the tracks!

The truth is it is an extraordinary task to drive a F1, let alone win, let alone win it consistently like Schumacher. I read this scary fact : Karthikeyan lost three and a half kg during the 310-km race but coped well with the heat and physical demands of driving there.. Narain lost close to 7 pounds in that span of 2 hours or so that he was inside the car with inside temperatures 50 degrees C in his recent drive in Malaysian Grandprix.

That narain is also a son of my soil (!) is yet another reason we are planning to be in Indianapolis this summer with him.

This weekend will go on my records as one of the happiest – I cleared GMAT with 91 percentile(690)! As you could have seen from my lack of presence in this blog, I was busy with studies for the past three months. The efforts paid off and hard to believe my dream has come true. There is still more to do until I secure my admissions but then this one is a major hurdle and I am extremely gratified to have crossed it with good score.

This success has even more significance to me personally, because I had given this test exactly one year ago and failed miserably! I realized what it means to take an exam when you have lost touch with your ‘academic” instincts in so many years after school. I had written this note in April of 2004, but decided not to post it then for some reason.

I had a pathetic day at the test center. I couldnt stand the pressue of the situation and gave up. I could justify my failure with several reasons, but in the end nothing matters. I did really bad and gave up on it. May be I had way too high expectations of myself, only to fall. But, I aint giving it up and will challenge it again. – 04/10/2004

Today, I take extreme pride in having tried again and won over it. Thanks to Harini, without her I would have given up on this ambition altogether. Thanks to everyone else who was supporting, the most significant of them is Lord Ganesha who must have given that 20% luck factor for those answers I gave in a hunch!

Will be back with more spirit.

Yesterday was one of the beautiful days in Jersey, I was driving with windows down. Positively don’t remember the last time we drove windows down. That pleasure didn’t last long though since we are treated with some rain this morning. Little mountains of dirty snow still is piled all around the streets and here comes more of it today after noon.

Its real amazing to watch people drive (and see yourself drive!) here in falling snow and in heavy rain. This is probably the only time I have seen cars moving around the posted speed limit. On a normal day, if a car is driving slow, (meaning on speed limit or little under), 9 out of 10 drivers would ditch it as some poor old double-lensed grandma (Naturally, she sees two cars for every car on the road!). So on this rainy day, as I witness the cars move slowly, my strange mind wonders why the hell all the grandmas and grandpas are out so early in the day. But I failed to realize that I am myself acting like a petrified grandpa grappling the steering wheel with both hands, fixing my eyes on the every lane ahead, eyeing the speedometer every 10 seconds and turning the wipers up and down repeatedly after a truck splashes a chunk of the dirty rain on to my windshield!

I understand grandmas are adorable, but…try not to get mad when she is driving at 35 mph (on a 60 mph zone) and holding you and an entire fleet of cars behind, at her mercy? Its tough.

I just learnt today that kriuba cycles 8 miles each way to work! In Chennai? Yes. First, let me say, Hats off Man! You deserve a pat from every other Indian citizen.

[kriuba leaving to work from his chennai home. That really looks like a saturday morning jolly ride to local park!. Source:Kriba.com. More pictures there]

Knowing he works in a high-paying IT job in chennai and is also a popular speaker around the town, you would imagine he drives a Ford or Hyundai, or at the very least, a Maruthi 800( which he does own, apparently, but contrary to what I thought, he cycles to work saving the 800 from the maniacal chennai traffic). I have to agree that he could give a lot of professional cyclers a run for their money if he really gets a bicycle with gears.

The timing of this post from Kriuba has a little significance in my life. Come March 13, I am completing my full 6 years of life in America as “Alien Worker” ( Anyone not American is a Alien! OK, Let me not get started! ). Consequence of a stupid but still idealistic goal of returning to India in 6 years, we dont have a “green card” today and will have to go on a yearly renewals of our status from now onwards. (Did you say “enough”?) . My beloved home state in America, New Jersey didnt give me a driving license past March 13 and we havent received our legal documents yet for me to extend my license. So I was wondering yesterday that the only way I can legally get out of my house is walk, run or cycle! A bicycle seemed a sensible idea considering its about 6 miles each way and that the cold winter hasnt seen it way out yet. That was yesterday and Kriuba hit the chord with my thoughts today!

So stay tuned for pictures of a drenched cyclist on a cold winter morning.