Gifts etc

An article in today’s newspaper was something in the vein of “Least romantic gifts a man could give a woman” and it listed out five points, or five items.

1. Tools. This includes anything that involves her breaking a sweat. It doesn’t matter if she hates the vacuum or needs a new hand mixer for holiday cooking; they are still associated with work. Work is never romantic.

I wouldn’t mind being gifted tools. I like tools, they are helpful, especially for people like us who like doing things themselves and wouldn’t call an electrician or mechanic unless everything is completely disembowelled and there is no hope of putting it back together.


2. A stuffed animal. Unless your partner is in high school, or insane, a stuffed animal is tacky. Especially the kind that comes with sets of perfume, chocolates or any product that doesn’t need a stuffed monkey to make a sale. Flowers are incredibly romantic. Flowers held by a dog with a heart on his chest that says “I Ruff You” is a crime against common sense.

Completely agree with this one. I think stuffed animals should not be sold to people above the age of ten.

3. A pet. While a pet is an incredibly cute gift, it’s also a huge responsibility – which is why it’s one of the least romantic gifts, when you think about all the work a pet entails.

A pet as a gift would be wonderful – I've always liked animals. But our current housing situation does not allow us to keep pets so I'm not keeping any. If and when we move to an independent house I would think of getting one.

4. A self-help book. She doesn’t want the one she loves to present her with a book to solve all her problems. You are supposed to think she is perfect. Regardless of whatever personal issues she needs to walk through, she doesn’t need to be reminded of them on her birthday or on your anniversary.

Amen.

5. Gift Certificates. A gift certificate is a great way to say: “I know nothing about you, so here; go buy yourself something from a store I think girls like you would shop in.” Do you really want your girlfriend or wife thinking you spent three minutes on her gift?

A gift certificate is light years better than a gift you hate, eg clothes/jewellery you know you'd never wear but you have to smile happily and ooh-ah at the right places because it’s a gift after all and you don’t want to look ungrateful. Oh by the way, for all you gentlemen, if you're gifting jewellery, don’t give fakes. If you can’t afford the real mccoys, buy something else other than jewellery.

Don't worry, be happy

Haven’t we heard it all- pearls of wisdom, secrets to a long life, shortcuts to happiness etc etc. The other day I was listening to a radio show and the RJ was reading out from a list – 30 ways to be happy, or something like that, and what was in that list really made sense. I mean it was not some unachievably nonsensical things like “Think high quality thoughts” or Forgive and forget” or “Achieve inner harmony” etc etc. it was simple achievable things like “Read a comic book” “Look at your old photos” “Watch the sun rise” etc etc. I have my own list. It might not make you happy, but it works for me. You may have heard of them somewhere before, but well I never claimed to be original when it comes to this subject.

Get a good night’s sleep: If I don’t get my seven hours my whole day is spoiled, headaches and dizzy spells and general grouchiness envelops me all day. Get a sound sleep, wake up, take a refreshing bath; it’s one of the best feelings in the world, and you’ll feel ready to take on the most challenging things in the world.


Get in touch with your old friends: This is one thing you should do. I'm not saying go to every class reunion just because you sat with them in a classroom fifteen years ago, but track down your old buddies, make that phone call, send that email, I guarantee you it’s a nice feeling. Recently an old friend of mine emailed me out of the blue and it felt good being remembered.

Smile and the world smiles back: I'm quite a miser when it comes to smiles. People have asked me many times why I am so serious and so unsmiling; so I tried to be a bit more cheerful and a bit generous with the smiles and to my surprise I didn’t look like an empty headed fool - people actually smiled back.

Do something you love: This is a bit tricky. We’ve all heard the saying “Do something you love (for a living) and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” Finding something you truly love is very difficult, especially for someone as vague and oscillating as me. I'm still looking, still trying to figure out what makes me really happy, what kind of work I will never get bored doing for the next forty years.

Clean up: Inside out. Clean your house, clean your room, scrub that bathroom floor, and dust that shelf. Empty your thoughts, your feelings, tell it to someone or to your diary.

Can’t forget? Try forgiving: Don’t hold grudges, it will only fester inside you without the other person ever knowing and in the end it is you who suffer. You don’t have to go and tell the other party how you’ve forgiven him/her and make a spectacle of yourself, forgiving is inside the heart. Once you’ve decided to forgive, that wound which was unhealed automatically gets itself healed, making space in you for more wonderful feelings and emotions.

Laugh: Read a funny book, watch a funny video, laugh at something funny your friend has posted online, talk to someone who makes you laugh. Do it in the morning before you leave for work/college. It will be with you all day and will help you get through a difficult day. This has always worked for me, but the side effect is that you will remember that funny thing at the most inappropriate times, so self control is very much required. But laugh inside.

And last but not the least - go shopping.

Another one bites the dust

I was eating lunch today in the cafeteria when I first heard about Prabhakaran’s death. It was on TV, “Prabhakaran Dead”, written in big bold letters. I returned to my desk and immediately logged on to BBC, and there it was – Prabhakaran shot dead. I was not surprised, but I kind of felt sorry for the man and his lost cause. He fought long and hard for 37 years for a cause he truly believed in, and all he got in the end was a gruesome death, “His body was badly burnt when his armour-plated van was hit by a rocket and burst into flames.” – times.co.uk. Died like a true hero, or rather, a true villain. If it was the movies, after making his escape on foot /by car/train/plane he would be pursued by the hero who would eventually catch him and they would fight ferociously and recklessly, and since he was the villain he would die the most horrible and nausea-inducing death, he would fall off a cliff and bounce on the rocks a hundred times/would get his head blown off by a rocket or bomb/would be impaled on a sharp rock/fence/wood that would conveniently be found at the fight scene/ would get crushed by some heavy machinery / or get sucked into a huge rotating fan or wheel and blood would splatter out .... you get the picture.

When we think of LTTE the first thing that might come to our minds is Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination on 21 May 1991. I remember that day, or rather one thing about that day. A neighbor (who at that time was a politician’s wife) came running into our house blabbering “They've killed him, they've killed him.” The whole country mourned, and Rahul Gandhi so young and lighting his father’s funeral pyre must have evoked many tears. Those images and memories came back to me when I first heard of Prabhakaran’s death.

I don’t know if it is an indication of abnormality or strangeness, but dead rebels and captured terrorists/criminals always bring out the sympathizer in me. I hated Saddam Hussein like everyone else did when he was in power and he was the big bad guy, but the guy got captured and photos of him with his unkempt white beard came out, and he looked so pitiful and so like somebody’s father/grandfather. I felt a bit sad the day he was hanged, and the videos made everything somewhat sadder. Kasab, one of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai, got captured, and he looked so young and so vulnerable. He no longer looked like the machine-gun-toting bullets-spraying maniac. He looked like somebody’s son.

A few days ago some photos of Prabhakaran were published in the newspaper; in the swimming pool with his son, with his parents and wife and children. He looked very normal, like any regular family man, and if you’d seen that photo anywhere else you'd probably have thought “Oh just another South Indian family.”

In the end, we all die - no matter how good or bad we are.

Sing-along Saturday

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” we used to write in our handwriting class in school. Miss Lucy was our handwriting teacher, and she was very particular about it. I remember one day she taught us which alphabets have loops and which do not have (b, f, h, k, l were the looped ones, d, p, t the unlooped ones). We used to have that work book aptly called Cursive Foster, the beginning pages would have sentences whose words were dotted and we had to trace the dots, thus in a way learn cursive writing. As the class progressed and as we went deeper into the work book, the dots slowly disappeared so that by the time we reached the end of the book the dots were completely absent and we were supposed to be able to write perfectly in our own nice cursive handwriting. No wonder everyone had the same handwriting back then.

Then we went on to class 5, and Miss Sangte-liani was our Games teacher. We never actually played any games; she used to teach us old songs. Well, nowadays you can find almost everything on the internet, and I looked for two of those songs, the only two I can still remember, as of now. One of them was The Old Folks at Home, which I discovered is the official state song of Florida; you can read more about it here. And then there was Polly Wolly Doodle - here’s Shirley Temple singing it in the movie The Littlest Rebel.



Don’t have any money, you’ll still be bright and sunny, sing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day.