Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with travel. I love the idea of going to new places, meeting new people, seeing new cultures and all that fun stuff. What I don't like about travelling is the actual getting-from-place-to-place part of it. The countless hours spent sitting in trains and buses and planes and cars, the mindless tedium of endless highway zipping by, that's the part of travelling I don't like. I had this driven home to me last week when we were coming back from Chennai. We had spent a couple of days there and Mom had booked us on a train at half past five in the evening. The ride from Chennai to Bangalore takes around five hours by train. Let me repeat that: five long, boring hours of sitting on a train. Normally, I'd be completely OK with this - I'd have my phone and my headphones with me. I'd plug my ears as soon as we were on board the train and ignore the existence of everyone else for most of the trip. This time, though,...

I was rewatching the second Matrix movie a while ago and got to that really pumped-up car chase - you know, the one with the truck that smashes into all the cars and all the Michael Bay-esque explosions? I remember watching and wondering why the car looked like it had recently been attacked by chainsaw-wielding lunatics while the truck barely had a scratched-up paintjob. A couple of years later - because I'm really not that big of a fan of the Matrix series, the last time I watched it, I was around 12 - I learned about the forces that occur in a car crash. It turns out that both the car and the truck experience the same amount of force, but the car is lighter, so it moves further. The force exerted by a vehicle in a car crash is influenced by two things - the mass of the vehicle and its speed at the time of the crash. The car weighs around 1300 kg while the truck weighs nearer 13,000 kg, but they both experience the same amount of force - doesn't make much sense, does it? We...

I have a confession to make: I don't read the newspapers. I know you are all silently - or, if you know me personally, not so silently - judging me, but here's the thing: I find reading through 30 pages of 3-by-one-half-foot pages boring, cumbersome and ecologically damaging. On those grounds, I no longer rely on newspapers to find out what's going on in the world around me. I can say now, with great pride, that I get the entirety of my news from Twitter. I'm kidding, of course - I don't think the 140 characters allowed on a microblogging site are anywhere near enough to provide a clear picture of any event of moment - though, if the Times of India editors haven't changed since I last read it, there are many who could do with aid in the clarity department when writing even a thousand words. There are, of course, many who disagree with that notion - an app called Inshorts  claims that it delivers the news in a mere sixty words. However, while I may not derive...

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...