Honeymoon in Singapore

I was in Singapore this weekend. As KU said, it was a weekend honeymoon that I had been to :). The trip started off with a 2:45 mins travel time to the airport (as opposed to the normal 45 mins. Thanx to the Olympic torch going through Delhi) leaving me just in time to check in (the flight eventually had to be delayed because a majority of the passengers, turns out, got delayed for the same reason).

I reach Singapore, go to office via the Metro (Our Delhi metro really compares well with theirs) take a cab to the office (Cabs are very affordable, unlike US). By the way, I was utterly surprised to see announcements made in Tamil in the Metro. Turns out that there are so many Indians (Tamilians to be more precise) that Tamil is one of the four official languages!!. After work (by which time I am totally sleepy even after a Coke and 2 coffees), LK & AP take me out for a dinner to Boatquay, a line of eateries with all kind of food (Mostly sea-food), alongside the Singapore river. This was a totally enjoyable and unique experience and would have been much better had the weather been a little more pleasant. I ended up ordering some shrimp whose eyes were staring at me and some huge fish which I could not bring myself to eat [If it were not for the rich source of protein that fish is, I think I can stick to pure vegetarian food which tastier and more guiltfree >:)]. While we were talking I happened to mention the most disgusting food I have had, which was Sushi for breakfast (at 6 in the morning) when I was in Japan, this totally caught the attention of LK who took it as his responsibility as a Singaporean to prove that anything Japan can do, Singapore can do better. With this motive I was ordered a dessert, Durian with sticky rice. Now, Durian is a fruit which stinks so bad that it is an offense to carry it around in public!! (Which brings me to the most interesting thing about Singapore. The place, as NB puts it, is a BIG Hogward, very heavily regulated, it is an offense to chew gum in public!!!! I am sure you cant beat that!!) So I decide to eat the "fruit" (on the positive side, it is claimed to be a very nutritious food), AP warned me that the first time he ate it, he had to run to find a place to puke, so I better be ready >:). And prepared as I was (I sat right next to the river so that I could puke in that), I guess it was mainly because of the sticky rice that I didnt throw up and managed to eat it all :).


Sunday morning was at Sentosa Island, a nice place to hang around and the evening was at the airport back to India. There was a wonderful cable-car journey to the Island, Dolphin show, Underwater world where you walk through a tunnel and all kinds of fish HUGE & tiny swim by you..

It would be a gross injustice to the blog if I did not mention that I misread my flight departure time as 2:30 in the day (actually 2:30 AM) and missed it and very luckily got an evening flight at a very nominal charge. I guess my trips are never fun without at least one goofup to make it look fuzzy enough..

Of Maatra Bhuumi, Motherland

This weekend I saw Munich, I was really touched to see these people fighting for land, a never ending futile war. Below is a particular dialog that really made me stop and think, it is between Avner, an Israeli-born Mossad agent of German descent and Ali, an Arab who is fighting to get back Gaza from Israel, which he thinks of as his mother

Avner: You'll never get the land back.

Ali: You'll all die old men in refugee camps waiting for Palestine. We have a lot of children. They'll have children. So we can wait forever. And if we need to, we can make the whole planet unsafe for Jews.

Avner: You kill Jews and the world feels bad for them... and thinks you are animals.

Ali: But then the world will see how they've made us into animals. They'll start to ask questions about the conditions in our cages.

Avner: You are Arabs. There are lots of places for Arabs. Tell me something, Ali. Do you really miss your father's olive trees? Do you honestly think you have to get back all that...that nothing? That chalky soil and stone huts. Is that what you really want for your children?

Ali: It absolutely is. It will take a hundred years, but we'll win. We want to be nations. Home is everything.



I really found it weird, it is not a melodramatic speech, people all over fight for land, closer home, Kashmiris want to get away from India, there are fights from completely barren useless piece of land all because it is what they call "home". The way we are born and brought up, we really look at this piece of land as ours, and I am sure if there is a need tomorrow most of us would be ready to kill or die for this. Weird, but true. And while I was thinking about this, I see this video, believe me, I could actually feel the emotions within, goosebumps is too mild to express. Watch it, its a 2 min clip really worth watching if you are an Indian.

My First recording

To strive to seek and not to yield....

Some things we do might not be very valuable from most of the point of views, in fact it might be totally worthless or sometimes plain simple wastage of time, yet there are things which makes me happy. It keeps re-inforcing the adage that my Maths teacher once said... "A Man can do what a man has done... ".. Running a marathon or learning guitar (without enrolling for a guitar class >:))

Anyways, so this is my first recording, definitely not very good and dumb windoze would not allow me to record more than 60 secs worth of data (on the brighter side, you can claim to have sat through my entire performance without getting very bored >:)).

Enjoy...
Please feel free to comment :)

[Special thanks to my roommates PK & G for bearing up with me as I did my nightly riyaaz] >:)

And yes.. .my voice sucks >:)