Fearless in Company... Individually Sissy.

Ever done something daring / attention gaining or different with a friend ? Most of us might have. Ever done something daring / attention gaining or different alone ? Hmmm... the percentage decreases drastically. Since weekends in this part of the world are on Friday's and Saturdays, so Halloween was somewhat celebrated in University today.

I decided I'd dress up no matter what. Who cares if anyone else bothers to look spooky enough, I'd do my bit. Then yesterday I started looking for someone who'd dress up along with me so I'd not be alone in my "daring" deed. Since I got no positive response from anyone, I decided to take my cape to university and see if anyone else in my class bothered to costumize. No one did, and I felt so relived for not having dressed up.

A little later into the day, I saw a bunch of boys wearing face make up, wigs and identical shirts. The effort was visible which made me think " Damn !! I could have dressed up too". They were so daring and didn't get intimidated with the turned heads.

They weren't bothered since they knew they were being judged together. Being judged as a group or with atleast one other person, is not as bad as being judged at alone. I observed when one of their group member got separated, he immediately took his wig off and looked very conscious of the attention he was getting.

So probably they weren't as daring as i thought. They did something together, and they knew it wouldn't be too bad on them than doing something individually. Having at least one other person in your "daring" deed makes it not so "daring" anymore.

The next 5 posts will be by guest bloggers whom i follow quite religiously. Should be fun.

Get Some Sleep ( IBDAA 2009 )

Pop my bubble - I have haters

Misconceptions seem to be a very intricately etched part of my adolescence and adulthood. With a view that I probably have no haters at all, and as much I provoke them on a friend's wall, they would see through the niceness in me. Okay took it a little too far there.

My Facebook ( yes another Facebook post ) got hacked, after which my MSN was attempted to be hacked. How fun is that for anyone? Which took me back to a list of people who could have done it. Shockingly, I don't have a list. I don't have a list of people who I think envy or hate me. Living in my own bubble? Very much indeed.

Internet is not a very secure place. Heard that from my mom the last time and ignored it. Clearly she's also right at something she's not so familiar with. I'm in absolute shock and thus I haven't picked a worldly issue to blog on.

Having haters is going to take a while to digest. Call me vain if you want to.

Click to Facebook ?

Standing from a distance I saw an argument. All triggered by Facebook. This is what exactly happened. Girl A takes a a few pics of Girl B and then Girl B takes the camera to see her pictures.

Girl B - Hey put this one and this one on Facebook.

Girl A - What? Why ? I don't facebook pictures.

Girl B - Why!! Then why did you click my pictures?

Girl A - because were friends and you were posing like forever.

Girl B - Your fucking lifeless. Randomly clicking pictures of people. Whats the point if you don't facebook them?

Girl A - I'm pretty sure camera's were invented before facebook.

Girl B Grumbles and walks away.

This is such a common notion though. Whenever some1 clicks a picture of me, I'd automatically assume that it's going to be on Facebook. And when it doesn't ( and if its a good picture ) I get worried.

Discussing this with another friend, he pointed out the fact that a lot of people in fact delete the pictures off their camera's and hard drives once they're on Facebook.

Damn you Facebook. You make introverts look like nerds now. ( And please don't deactivate my account )

The Nobility of Trying

Ever thought you'd be asleep, and then get a call that you've won the Nobel Peace Prize? Even Obama never thought that would happen. Or he just has a brilliant celeb management team. Anyhow, so this is what Obama exactly won the Nobel Peace Prize for :-

“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”

Hmmm. So he's getting this award for his efforts. How very interesting. Does that mean you could win a Nobel Peace Prize just for trying? Since when did the Nobel Foundation start taking their cues from afterschool sports activities where everyone is a winner just for participating?

So a shout out to all you lab rats trying to find a cure for AIDS, Swine flu etc. Prepare a speech... and be ready to go to sleep.

Culture Vulture (Part Deux)

Living in a suburban area where there are lots of buildings and loads of pollution, I spent my entire junior school traveling with a cycle I owned. Moving to Dubai, and looking at these cool kids with their school buses and cars made me feel like they were being super pampered. The feeling of having lived, what according to me is a majorly rural life compared to Dubai, gave me this sense of being bold and strong and manly (arrr).

A week back all this sense of pride and honor of living the rural life was snatched away by none other than... White people! . Yes !! White People! So I was reciting my childhood to three friends - Arman, Mantas and Vadim. After finishing my story they all look at me and say " Whats so rural about that?".

So this is how a Lithuanian, Russian and Kazakhstani spent their childhood. They lived in villages, with hardly any electricity. It was one house with a huge field surrounding it. They went to the only school in their area, while I had 7 of them to choose from. After going to school they took cows out for grazing. I've never owned a cow. I never lived in a field. They had over 10 cows which they used to take out for grazing. They used to chop wood for lumber. They took a crap in big holes dug out in the ground surrounded by pitch darkness. I was silent. Silent for a little too long.

I was spell bound by their version of a rural life. So cycling to school was probably a luxury to them. I'm glad I never told them that I used to play counter strike in my rural life after school. Also I'm glad that they never read my blog.

Mr. Thumbs Up !

Book stores bring a smile to my face. I usually don't buy a book every time I enter a bookstore yet, it makes me happy. With all the talk about the new bookstore in town Kinokuniya at the Dubai Mall, I went to check out what the big deal was all about, also if anything could beat the awesomeness of Magrudy's at Festival City.

This book store or book world has probably all the books one could ask for, unless you need the parchments buried inside the Vatican. The shelf that caught my attention the most was the one with 5 rows, the shelf being the length of my bedroom ( which is quite lengthy ). Every book on this shelf had a person giving me a million dollar smile and the thumbs up signal. And I kid you not, they all looked related to me. Navy blue suits, non-existent wrinkles, spotless white teeth and the thumbs up. And each one of them seemed to have sold a million copies of their books.

Come to think of it, it could be the same million people buying their books that range from How to be a successfully businessman to How to avoid farting in public. So is it the "million copies sold", the navy blue formals or the Thumbs Up sign that's making people buy these self help books ? I will always wonder.

Were in the wonderland.

Life is like Alice in wonderland. Cute bunnies that are not so nice. Happy faces that have lots of evil behind them. And pretty things that bring about a lot of pain. Pain indeed.

Life is not about being happy and cheerful. Its about minimizing that sensation of pain. Going through every single day with the amount of pain carry forwarded from yesterday, coupling it with fresh stock and still being hopefully about a better future... now that, is being human.

And once in a while you might find an energy booster or a heart symbol that reduces this pain. The heart symbol reduces the pain and then vanishes away. Alice moves on to find more pain and more energy boosters and more heart symbols.

She moves on.

( Photograph courtesy Noura Y. )

Minority Dreams - Being Asian

The following is an excerpt of an article written by Khalisah Stevens, a student of the American University of Sharjah.

When I was 8 years old I watched my mom get pushed into a kitchen at an Arab wedding and ordered to serve drinks to the guests. The mother of the bride didn’t realize that my mom was a guest. She was, in fact, personally invited by the bride (a former student of my mom’s), who wanted her favorite teacher to be there on her special day. The reason my mom’s sequined scarf and make-up went ignored is because my mom is Malaysian. The same could not be said for my dad. At 6-foot-6-inches, blue eyes and as white bread as Iowa makes them, my dad was regarded as the big American hero who fought the Iraqis (which, as an instructor from Ugly Stones, he hadn’t). Kuwaitis didn’t trust any foreigners or other Arabs, but if you were American you were given rockstar treatment.

Please click on the title of this post to be linked to the entire article.

When do you stop ?

Is there any way to know that you have tried enough? Is there a method to measure the level of how much you can try to achieve what you want / need ? If the end result of trying as hard as you can is always success, does it mean the failure did not try enough ?

Only when I start to give up, do I think to myself that maybe I didn't try hard enough. And the harder you try, and still fail, the more you feel horrible. The theory about trying as hard as you can and not worrying about victory or defeat is plain rubbish.

According to a friend, the only reason you lose is because someone else is trying harder than you are. But then when you try harder and harder, possibilities are that you might loose sense of reality.

I want to be determined, I want to be positive.... But I do not want to lose my sense of reality.