A hundred things-to-do before I die

This is an eternally incomplete post.

I know that the title of this particular post sounds like a regular rant, but it has more to do with a recent novelty if i can call it, i saw. While crawling on the world wide web I came across this nifty little list somebody had made. Some of you might be critical about the "earnestness" with which i came across such a list, or to the cliched nature of it but i think this would be a nice little way to put life in perspective. I guess this would be the ultimate, the end all of all agendas, or at least it ought to be.

One hundred things to do before i die, has almost an apocalyptic sound to it. But then again, i am going to be a bit avaricious and just let the list go on for as long as i can think of more things to do. Limiting just to a 100 sounds a bit too "in-the-box" for a remotely "out-of-the-box" idea as this.

Combine this list with the death clock (hopefully they can make one sometime which actually works), and you have the secret to living a fruitful life. :)

Without further ado - Things to do before I die

1. Get married to the one (all who think this is lame, eat my shorts).
2. Go bungee jumping.
3. Base-jump from Taipei 101 or which ever is the tallest building in the world.
4. Go Snorkeling.
   
5. Ride on a dolphin's back
6. Go skinny dipping with the one
7. Catch a snowflake on my tongue
8. Dive into the mariana trench.
9. Get a Brazilian wax.
10. Fly a glider.
11. Go to Everest Base camp.
12. Jam with Joe Satriani, Saul Hudson, Eric Johnson, Joe Perry together.
13. Go and live on an uninhabited island belonging to an Archipelago, preferably somewhere in the Pacific.
14. Make someone really really desolate and poor, some one I don't even know really REALLY happy.
15. See the look on that person's face.
16. Do a good deed, see its results and walk away, without waiting for any adulation.
    
17. Hear the call of a Hump backed whale...LIVE!
18. Change the status of a vertebrate from "Extinct in the wild" to "Least Concern".
19. Go and thank the makers of Google and Wikipedia.
    
20. Learn the art of wine tasting.
21. Taste at least all the good wines.
22. Make my own wine.
23. Make breakfast in bed for the one.
24. Learn to make the perfect biryani.
25. Finally make egg in the basket someday.
26. Make Calvinian snowmen.
27. Make my own comic strip.
28. Read all of Calvin and Hobbes. and Pearls before swine.
29. Learn to use a gun.
30. Be a Sharpshooter.
31. Rebut all the people, using all the rebuttals I came up with later. :)
32. Raise a "stub" to article status on Wikipedia.
33. Write a completely new article for Wikipedia.
34. Donate to Wikipedia.
35. Have my picture taken by Google Earth Satellites.
36. Ride a cruiser and a super car in a desert.
37. Find a meteorite in the desert.
38. Stay at a Naturist Resort.
39. Sleep under a starry sky.
40. Visit Austria, Bora Bora, Iceland and most importantly the Pitcairn Islands (also here).
    
41. Hear sights and see sounds.
42. Spend time in a Sensory Deprivation Tank.
43. Learn Hypnosis.
44. Create a phenomenal instrumental track.
45. Splurge money on somebody else.
46. Get a personal computer, with the fastest processor I can, with the highest RAM I can put in it, with the best graphics adapter and sound card, with a laser mouse, with a goliath hard disk and plasma screen for a monitor, not because I need it, but because I WANT it :), and play games on it online on a "T3 or higher" connection.
47. Possibly buy Bag end from Peter Jackson. (Jackson took it to his vacation home :( )
48. Read Lord of the Rings cover to cover.
49. Learn Elvish and Quenyan.
50. Get a Tattoo.
51. Get Cornrows. I didn't do this, just don't want to, my hair hurts when its pulled that tight, and I don't think it's that cool.
    
52. Learn Falconry.
53. Meet Keyra Augustina.
54. Start a free career counseling website for health professionals.
55. Buy a Shack at Arambol, and call it "Peace & Love".
56. Own an Island.
57. 
    

Pune...

Pune is a weird city, people have their principles and their discipline and yet the traffic sense is as common as common sense. I have been in Pune for 2 days, and in the those 2 days here i have seen more accidents here than I may have seen in a whole year in Mumbai, despite the higher number of vehicles in Mumbai, going at higher speeds.

Journey to pune is always surreal, accompanied by a huge excitement and "i-cant-wait-to-get-there" syndrome for obvious reasons. But this time around, for the first time, i didn't realize how the time went by because before i knew it we were off the expressway. i found myself looking at the watch and commenting on how it was typical that the one time i am not coming here just to meet Aditi, i come here in 2.5 hrs flat. Lady luck it seems has a cruel sense of humor because about 10 minutes after this incident my bus happened to knock out a cyclist. I dint really have the courage to get up... these kinda incidents and sights in real life scare me (Anybody who has seen me play a video game, specifically the action/RPG/FPS genre will disagree). Finally, after picking my balls off the floor i did go and check out the "victim". Looked like he had minor injuries- a concussion or two, but man was he dazed. I mean, being hit by a bus and surviving is a big deal, but being hit by a Volvo B7R and surviving is nothing short of a miracle.

For the uninformed, the Volvo B7R is a behemoth when it comes to buses. These beasts average around ~100 Kph on the expressway ( i have my own, more or less accurate method of clocking them :) ). The ease with which these buses accelerate just shows efficiency of the monsters they have in their bellies. I have seen BEST drivers give way to these buses, and THAT i know is a sign, a clear augury of sorts, that these are not machines to be trifled with. And yet the "victim" actually walks up into the ambulance.

The irony of the whole situation was that as bad as his luck (or the degenerating neurons in his cranium) may have been, to be hit by B7R; there was no way under the sun would he have survived the accident had it been any other bus. Swedish engineering saved his life.

Another thing which impressed me was the lack of time between the accident and the transfer of the "victim" to the hospital, and the overall management of the situation on the whole. All this while i have put victim in quotations, because I really cant decide who's victim he was. The old man was at fault, a national highway is no place to be going across the traffic on a bicycle. So was the government for not really barricading a national highway. Needless to say at that moment the driver and the cleaner fled the scene, and were untraceable when after much deliberation we decided to hitch a ride into Pune city.

Frankly, i think that (=entering pune city) was the scariest part of the whole journey. I would take my chances going against the direction riding a bicycle on a runway while an Airbus A380 is taking off or landing, than expose myself in the chaos which has a name - Pune. I would have liked to enlist the problems with the traffic in Pune, but that would be too taxing a task. But among the first things Pune needs to do is get all those two wheelers off the roads, and get a public transport mode which is more convenient than the junk heap which is affectionately called the PMT or the PCMT. The roads really aren't bad, they just need more traffic cops, even corrupt ones will do, in fact preferably corrupt ones. The kind who will have enough incentive to pull over even the most trivial offense.

Anyhow, I just got my hands on a bag of pop-corn, and some guava nectar, and policy making and improving a city are things that come in the way of hedonism :).

Un-f***ing-titled

For a post which comes after what seems like eternity, this is not really starting out pretty. Actually, I don't have anything in particular to be pissed about, nor am I especially unhappy about anything in my life; but this is my rant and I damn well intend to use it.

I know what you (or anybody who is reading) is thinking. That I am a perpetually dissatisfied type of a soul and cribbing about the wrongs in my life is my passion. In my defense I would like to say this - BITE ME !!!

Recently I read an anecdote if you will, about how life finds meaning in the most unlikely places, and about the mysterious ways god works in. Made me ponder upon certain things about people, the need to dramatize trivial events. May be its not people, may be its my generation, well mine and my antecedents, we belong to this "chicken soup" generation. It's like there is this longing for "life changing" events and every one wants to have their's. Everyone wants to feel the rush, the adrenaline... the hair standing on end, everybody wants their "oprah moment" with a nod from the audience, the oohs and the aahs.

This almost makes the why to my cribbing rhetorical. I crib, because I like things when they are simple, uncomplicated. Accept that such is life and deal with it. Sudden realizations about god's mysterious ways just illustrates the sedated state in which the herd leads its life. God is omnipotent, has mysterious ways and by the time I finish typing this sentence, a thousand movies being watched by a billion people, a thousand books being read by an equal number of people, a thousand books being authored by obscure and the not so obscure writers will have blared that same message a very large number of times. SO WHY THE F*** DOESN'T ANYBODY GET IT?? what necessitates the need for these "moments"?

I could go on ranting about this forever, but I have calls to make, and add to that...there is one other fact which needs mentioning at this point- Mine is also a generation of the Page 3 and of being "with it"