Gobsmacked!

It is said that everyday you learn something new, I don't know if it's true but what I learnt today blew my mind away! Invisible Nail Polish! Yes, you read that right, there is such a thing! It makes your unpolished nails look like, well, unpolished nails.

This is extra special! I mean the male equivalent of this would be drinking tap water and calling it an extra mild beer! I know talking about something like this could end up sounding very sexist but trust me ladies I never written a word about the electrodes during a facial or logic of stilettos, hell I have even bravely ignored waxing and phenomenal underarm products but this, is SPECIAL!

Nail polish isn't a big deal really, some form of cellulose and a solvent is all it takes but the kicker is the colour, that elevates the very basic (and dirt cheap ingredients) into something women pay a lot of money for.  If you take that element of colour away from the whole thing then it's basically worthless, UNLESS you can put it in an extra small bottle and price it something obscene then apparently people will buy it.  A M A Z I N G!

I've truly wondered if there ever was a 'widget' (in it's true meaning) sold and boy now I know it's been right in my medicine cabinet! I'm hoping to start a line of invisible mascara...wait... don't tell me there is such a thing too!

My Father to my daughter- Random Ramblings

Earlier this evening I was sitting in my living room with my 3 year old daughter in my lap and both of us were watching a cartoon streaming on my cellphone. My wife was sitting next to us and feeding my daughter and those 30 minutes or so were by far the best moments of my day.

As we were sitting there, I couldn't help but remember the time when my Father was a teenager, living in Madurai, his whole world view came from sitting next to an old radio in the middle of the night, tuning on to the scratchy radio channels from across the globe. I have a vision of him lying down in the middle of the night, on his bed on the floor next to the two foot long valve radio, with a faint green light of the radio helping him navigate the vast oceans he was crossing with each twist of the radio knob. I'm sure he still has that radio stashed away in his attic. I think, most of the things he likes to do were shaped during those idle hours, like his love of rock and roll or his keen interest in world politics, his fascination for any scientific thought and writing. Even today my Father doesn't throw away newspapers or magazines till he re-reads them (which is usually months later) and cuts out interesting articles for his library.

During this weekend, I had the opportunity of taking a road trip with my parents. And like in all our trips we ended up discussing many things under the sun. The topic veered on to education and my father was categorical that the quality of education now across the world was very poor compared to that which was available to his generation. As such he believes that children today are mislead with vocational based education that makes them specialists in one area or another in a quest for being a 'success in life' but he doubted if these kids got a well rounded education.

Honestly, I don't know the answer to that one. in a way I know that my daughter would have access to a form of technology and probably the best of what the educational system had to offer, things that my father could not have even conceptualized in his teenage years yet, it also could be that she would take them for granted and not use them to their fullest potential. I think it's drilled into everyone's head that they need to succeed, though they have a very faint idea of what that success means. I guess 10 years ago, I would have thought that success in my banking career meant a country level role but now that I've reached that I don't see what the fuss was all about.

I realize that whichever period of life you belong to, you are what you make yourself out to be. The benchmarks of success and failure are very personal, they need to be and as for me off-late being a father, a husband and a son seems much more important than any other role that I play in life & as such, my life is full.

I've been around...

It's been a long hiatus from writing and this isn't even a tentative attempt at being back, just a random rant that has very little chance of being published. Anytime within the next five minutes, I prolly will delete this draft and move on in life. It's not that I've lost the appetite to write, I do have it but when I sit in front of the computer, I'd rather be on facebook or be reading random stuff...

I've had an interesting time the last month or so, hectic travel, lots of meetings, a quiet holiday and a light bulb moment. I'm not going to write about the first two but really about the last two. (This post is about the holiday since the lightbulb moment needs a bit more time to write about)

A week before Christmas we headed off to sunny Goa for a few days. The trip in itself was uneventful, we drove. We reached Goa just before the bulk of the tourists from Europe landed on the beaches (thanks to the weather caused flight delays out there). I soon realized that I'm so hooked onto work that it took me about 3-4 days to shake off all work related stress out of the system and start to relax. Once you detox all the work out of your system and give the blackberry a break, hanging around and doing nothing is quite fun! Anyway, these are some random thoughts on that trip,

a) Goa isn't really for the Indian tourist- In the sense that you aren't the first choice customer any hotel or restaurant or shop prefers. Maybe it's racism, maybe it's commerce but Goa creates a lot of opportunities for you to whip up righteous indignation if you are a brown skinned person. Like the time we (self, wife and the lil 2 1/2 yr old munchkin) were turned away from resort after resort when we were looking to use a swimming pool, after being looked up and down or even being told that the guests would be sunbathing and they might not like us around. This wasn't just an isolated issue, over the last five years we've been there 4 times and pretty much every day we run into some casual form of racism thrown our way by our fellow countrymen (and women). Yet the reason why we love Goa is that it is spectacular place, for every douchebag you meet you generally wind up meeting someone genuinely nice as well and plus the food is quite something else.

b) Indian women have spectacular legs! - They honestly do and you notice this only in Goa. The reason why I single them out is simply because, they are the most well kept secret in our country and our women go out of they way, often going to extreme lengths to avoid getting tanned (my favourite is the bicep high gloves that is worn in Chennai's heat). In Goa though they seem to have come to some kind of a truce with the Sun. So one seldom gets to see so many women wearing shorts in the rest of the country. It's nice to see people loose their inhibitions and leave their complexes at the Goa state border. In a country where getting two shades darker means a whole different life, this is quite a refreshing change.

c) Vacationing doesn't mean relaxing- When my cousin's found out that we were headed to Goa for a week, they had a lot of ideas on what we could be doing there, the many places to see etc. Thankfully, we did nothing of the kind. We woke up late each morning, had a long meal times, spent most of the time on the beach and had a whale of a time doing it! At the end of our trip, my thoughts were clearer and I felt that my body really needed the break that it got! Of course, my cousins think we've wasted our time but hey, it was worth the waste!

d) A Norwegian Rebuke- At our guesthouse there was this other family from Norway and we got to know each other during breakfast times. One of our conversations was about the poor in India and how they could not imagine how people cannot be moved by children begging on the streets. As we were talking about it, the lady suddenly burst out that if this was in Norway they would make sure that everyone was taken care of (and made a kind of a hugging sign with her hands, yes, language was a bit of a barrier). The way she said it and the look of reproach that she gave stuck in my mind. While I know that poverty eradication is a long term vision and not something that we can achieve so easily, yet it is also clear that not all of us (and I firmly include myself) are doing our bit. We talk about it, we have some arguments that we use to rationalize our inertia yet we know deep down that it's all bullshit. To be honest, a lot of folks prefer poor people to be exactly where they are. What would we do without our cheap labour, our maids, cooks, gardeners, drivers, right?