Suresh Chandrasekaran's Blog, page 44

Another New Year

Here that dratted thing comes over again, setting off that itch. 2016 is kicked out unceremoniously and 2017 walks insouciantly in. "You may call yourself new, laddie, but so did dear old 2016 some time back", I say and try to laugh off that itch. As though anyone has ever managed to laugh off an itch...any itch. What is that itch, you ask? As though you have not just been scratching it. The

A Christmas rant

Ho! Ho! Ho! And a bottle of rum... Err...maybe some wires got crossed. It is unlikely that Santa Claus comes roaring down chimneys, singing 'Ho! Ho! Ho! And a bottle of rum'. Fat chance he would have of locating stockings to put his toys in. if he did. Especially, if that bottle of rum had already watered his innards. Not that he actually has any stockings to put things into these days. I

Free!

If I move around in a permanent state of confusion, it is not my fault. Most of it is thanks to the fact that people are so complicated. Just see what happens when someone writes a book. Everyone and his uncle starts screaming, “Where is my free copy?” By which, of course, you understand that they would all love to read his writing; it is just the price that is keeping them off reading it.

Words maketh a man

By now, I am sure, you are all convinced that the only mantra for success is to check out what I am doing and do the exact opposite. It is practically a social service for me to let you people know what I really do. Maybe time to write my autobiography...don't run away just yet. I have not started on it. I have been mulling this thing of why people seldom get impressed by my contributions to

Outdated lessons

When, like me, you learn anything at all under protest and with much grief at being put through the torture, it is heartbreaking to find that you have spent all that effort in learning the wrong lessons. It is not even as if it was all because of this irritating technological advances - like the way it rendered my learning of how to use the log tables irrelevant. THESE lessons I could have

Choice confusion

Everyone seems to love the idea of having choices. I, though, have always been frightened of them. I mean, it is alright to have a choice between going to school and playing all day - it is a no-brainer there, you would elect to play. Or, say, between having to write an exam or not as a prerequisite to pass on to the next grade. Unfortunately, those are not the choices that you generally get

Justifications

I have always wished that I had this ability to think on my feet. It comes in rather handy, you know, especially when, say, you have just broken Mommy's favorite china cup. If only I could say, "But, when my brother broke my toy, you said I should not get angry because he did it by accident. So why are you picking up that stick and eyeing my bottom like that?" Unfortunately for me, I can only

The Demonetization Derby

It is tough on us bloggers. If you ignore current happenings, especially when they are on top of everyone's mind, you are being not being socially conscious. If you do write on them, you are hungry to ride the current fad. Hitherto I have done the former and been the chap who is utterly self-centered. This once, maybe, I should try the other one and ride my horse into the demonetization derby,

No means NO

When I found my Facebook page awash in Pink and found that there was this entire movie made only to teach that 'No' means 'NO', I was aghast. Whatever are teachers doing in Kindergarten, these days? Teaching emojis? Then, I realized it was more of a translation movie - the Martian-Venusian kind. THAT sort of put it in perspective. When two species speak the same language but the words mean

Phobias

There is this anecdote by Jerome K Jerome right at the beginning of "Three men in a boat" about the protagonist reading a medical encyclopedia for light reading. (Where is the damn straitjacket when you need it?). He gets more and more engrossed in the reading when he finds that he has every single disease listed in it, to varying degrees - the book almost seemed like his autobiography. At the