Indian girls are LOUD!

Er…no offense to any of the ladies but I’m sorry, this is something that gets me annoyed every single time I get on the bus for groceries on my way home from work.

I guess its fair game to state that we as Indians are known for our ‘social’ nature; we chat with perfect strangers on trains and busses, play games and sing songs during fun college trips, even play games that involve singing songs and the like; but I think its only right that living in a foreign land means showing a bit of respect for the local culture.

In this case; the fact that the only things Germans are fond of on public transport are reading or staring out at the window with the earphones plugged in.

Anyway, every time I take the bus – the 72 towards Russelsheim – I almost feel like I’m back in India the moment I step in.
This bus is half full of girls (alright, women!) chatting away non-stop in Hindi, usually with a Bollywood song playing in the background from someone’s I-wanna-flaunt-it mobile phone. More often than not, there’s one member of the party stuck in the middle of the bus, but not that this stops these girls (women, okay!) from shouting out to them halfway across the bus, as if the rest of us were stone deaf or something.

And I’m no expert, but I'm guessing people think they can be loud just because apparently no one else understand a word of Hindi.
Well I’ve got news for them:
People know exactly what they mean because, though I didn’t wanna say it this way, the Hindi (or Tamil) we speak, is so far out from the original and has so many English words that anyone can get a fairly good idea of what’s going on.

I mean come on, when you point to someone and say,
“Dhek, uski eye color blue hai”,
…it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure what you’re talking about!

The height of this fiasco is reached when the bus gets to the stop of their hotel and some of them realize they’re already there only when the first half of the party is already outside, and then jumps back in to shout out to the rest to get off. Seriously, I’ve seen circus clowns less hilarious than this!

I think that just because we’re a social lot doesn’t give us the right to abuse upon those of others – and create a thoroughly negative impact on our culture in the process.

I’d also like to think of this as social service, so in case you know someone who’s loud, I please suggest that you print this out, and leave it on their desk or someplace they’d see it.

Particularly  if they happen to work in the Avionics Training Center in Kelsterbach and take the RMV 72 to Mercure Wings Hotel, Raunheim at 5:42PM everyday.

I’d really appreciate if they could read this.J

A phone through the spin cycle

In case you’ve ever wondered what it’d be like for a mobile phone to go around in a washing machine…
…I can tell you: they DO NOT like it.

And I found that out the hard way this evening after I stuffed my laundry into the washer, turned it on, and then three cycles later discovered that I forgot the phone in my jeans.

And needless to say; it died a sad, wet death under layers of suds and fabric softener; and I’m still mourning over the loss of my poor Nokia 6230i.
May she rest in peace.

Now moving on and getting to the realities of the situation; I still have another phone – a clammy old one from work; and I’m not missing a lot of phone numbers because the only people who call me are either from work or concerning work; and I already have their numbers on Outlook.

The biggest loss for me though, was all my data that it took along with it. I had a list of all passwords I use for pretty much everything online; I’ve marked important dates on the calendar; scribbled in a bunch of notes; even put in a little to-do list for the week.
All of which I don’t have anymore.

In a way it kinda freaks me out because it draws us to realize how so very much we are dependent on these little electronics which you can lose at any time.
I mean, when my laptop died last year (yeah, this evening wasn’t the first time I lost data to gadget hell) I was absolutely lost because that is where I had almost every aspect of my online life; from Email to documents, pictures, contacts, videos…pretty much everything.

And in a way it teaches you too; it was only after that mishap that I realized you should never stash data all in one place; and that it’s important to take regular backups. And that you should always keep written copies of passwords.

But I guess no matter how prepared you are, nothing prepares you for that one sudden moment when it all turns black; and you realize its all over.

Just like our own lives.

A New Beginning

Yes, we are finally back.
New blog, new template, on a fresh new domain. And boy am I excited.
So let’s get started right away.

Firstly, you’ll notice that this isn’t Random Thoughts anymore. To be honest, coming up with a new name and domain is the part that took the longest time because I was so comfortable with Random Thoughts.

But then I realized it wasn’t very original – there must be like a hundred sites out there with the exact same name; just try the words “random thoughts” (with the quotes) on Google, you’ll see what I mean. In fact, it took me over a week, after the design template was completed to finalize on the name to use.

Now why “The Square Circle”?
For the same reason Steve Jobs ended up with “Apple” – one week of domain hunting later I was so frustrated (did you know ALL the good domains are taken; most of which are just stupidly parked) that I started looking for something random, pretty much anything I could find and so, here we are.

Getting down to the technical side of things; my old blog (http://rahmannoor.blogspot.com/) still redirects to here. And I’m yet to import all my previous posts and setup my widgets, but I promise I’ll do this soon.

Coming to credits, this design is an adaptation of Blogy-illacrimo for BlogandWeb from DesignDisease, and I truly thank them for the wonderful template.
I say ‘adaptation’ because the original template had three columns which I didn’t like, so I changed it to just two and rewamped some of the original artwork.
There was also a whole mess of broken image links in the original template file which I had to find and upload to my own image-server; not to mention invalid xml and missing script references which I had to fix.


Btw, I’d prefer to think of this as “still in beta” (now don’t give me that look) because I tested this on a few browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and good old IE but I guess there are still a few glitches to it.

Oh, and in case this is the first time you’ve landed on this blog, here’s a snapshot of how my original blog looked like.
(I know, lame wasn’t it?)

Do let me know what you think, and how I can take this further. After all, in the end, it’s only the readers that count!
:D