Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

After several years of putting it off and/or being unable to do so for a variety of reasons, I've finally taken up learning an instrument - or, more specifically, the drums. Guitar seemed a little too common an instrument and keyboard was never really my thing, so drums seemed the best choice. Which is why now I sit pondering my next sentence whilst whacking my drumsticks on my bed rather than thoughtfully scratching my chin. Most of my friends have learned to play some instrument at some point or the other, and most of them stuck with it for long enough to still remember how to play at least something on it even now. I, however, spent my younger years coding or cooking or... well, something that was quite patently not music, anyway. Oh, my parents spent more than their fair share of money on music classes. I just never really had an interest in them growing up. I have spent countless hours, at ages seven and below, at music classes attempting to learn to play the keyboard or the...

Hello, all! I'm back after another nice, long, refreshing hiatus because for the nth time, my parents have put their feet down and insisted I compose a blog post. I MAY HAVE TO DO IT, BUT YOU'LL NEVER MAKE ME DO IT WITH GOOD GRACE, MOM! I was thinking about my school computer science class (I wasn't really, I just need a way to introduce the topic) and about the kind of programs we have to write. They're not very complex programs, they do pretty simple things like adding up numbers or sorting things. They also aren't very long. A program that I'm asked to write in class will scarcely take me ten minutes to finish, and be around fifteen lines long. The Google home page  has more lines of code than that, for crying out loud! Now, there's nothing wrong with short programs. A lot of the most efficient programs are quite short, and I'm always thrilled to be able to write one line instead of two. However, the problem with writing only 15-line programs is t...

Six years ago I received an email from my mother. The subject of the email was " Growing up w/out a CELL PHONE ". The gist of the email was that my generation - Gen Y, the pancake generation, the most awesome generation ever, the culmination of all mankind has achieved so far - has it too easy. It detailed various things that gen X didn't have that we do. I have spent the past several minutes (the things I do for my readers...) digging through my emails to find this piece of literary glory to share with you. If you are 30, or older, you might think this is hilarious!  When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious  diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what  with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways. yadda, yadda, yadda  And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in  hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that ...

Here's a tale I find quite amusing: a few years ago, I read a joke about a dog. The dog goes to a store and purchases some goods. The shopkeeper is quite amazed to see this, and he follows the dog to see where it goes. The dog takes the goods and gets on a bus. It goes into the suburbs and walks up to a house. Dropping the bag, the dog starts throwing itself at the door of the house. A man opens the door and starts yelling at the dog. The shopkeeper rushes in and stops the man, asking him why he is yelling at such an intelligent animal. The man responds, "That's the third time this week he's forgotten his keys!" Now, while this may be quite funny in itself, this isn't the whole story. The bit I found really amusing was that a few weeks ago, I received this joke in a text on WhatsApp (that's right, folks, even we teenagers aren't spared the torment of chain WhatsApp messages.). At the end of the joke, one of the many geniuses who mass-produce these mess...

It's been ten days since my last post now. Naturally, that means my parents have been pestering me to warm up my typing fingers and put out a new blog post. Firstly, we've crossed 20,000 views on the blog! Yaaaay! A huge thank you to everyone who read and shared the blog. Anyway, on to the blog. A few weeks ago, a once-famous, now largely forgotten company called Nintendo came out with a game called Pokemon GO. It teamed up with Niantic, a company which made a huge splash a few years ago with an augmented reality game called Ingress. Pokemon, for all you poor, deprived folk who never played on a GameBoy Advanced or DS, is a game where you capture various creatures, train them into terrifying monsters and use them to beat other creatures up until they faint. No, it didn't make me violent! And I'll punch you until you pass out if you say it did! Since 1996, Nintendo has been picking up the same series and rehashing it over and over, adding new pokemon and new riv...

A few days ago, we had a presentation at school by our principal and a representative of CollegeBoard in India, Ms. Lisa Jain. CollegeBoard, for those of you who haven't heard of it (until recently, I myself had no idea who they were), is the organization that sets the SAT exams. Ms. Jain was there to elucidate the advantages of the SAT exams and how we ought to prepare for them. The principal was there to tell us about why we chose the AS-level syllabus. Now, as much as I wish I could tell you that I was listening to both presentations with rapt attention, I can't. There's no way I could sit for an hour while all my classmates are sitting around making comments sotto voce . However, there were a few moments where I was paying attention. During one of those moments, I happened to hear my principal say something about negotiable and non-negotiable rules in terms of discipline. The reason this caught my attention was because the concept of a negotiable in discipline is no...

Ah, school. The smell of chalk dust in the air and of poorly aimed urine streams in the toilet. The reek of sulphur from the chemistry lab and the stench of the stuff someone dissected last year and forgot to clean up from the biology lab. And above all, the general undercurrent of missed opportunities to learn. For those of you who haven't yet managed to guess, I'm writing about school today. Not the education system, about which I have expressed my... ah... not-so-positive opinions at regular intervals on both my blogs, but about school itself, the temple of learning that it is, and what I like and dislike about it. For the past two months, I have been on summer vacation, doing absolutely nothing  and being pleasantly surprised whenever I remembered that I had (62-x) days left before I had to return my nose to the grindstone of old. However, this week, school landed upon me in a crash of homework, incredibly voluminous textbooks and a fervent desire to put as much distanc...