It felt weird to stand in front of the Taj hotel near the Gateway of India over the weekend - knowing that 26th December was right around the corner. I still cannot forget the initial sense of disbelief, turning to anger and then sadness as I had watched the event unfold over the TV.

The anger returned manyfold yesterday when I read in the Marathi newspaper (Loksatta) about a person in the police force who, 4 years before the incident, had come across the vulnerability in the wireless communication that was exploited by the terrorists to carry out the attack. When he and some of his seniors brought this to the notice of the people concerned, he was suspended under false charges of taking bribes. He has been recently re-instated but has only 1.5 years of his
service left. The ones responsible for suspending him have been charged but not prosecuted yet.

I would really like to know the names of these people and the reason why they are still in service. They should be brought to justice as soon as possible, put behind bars and fined so that twice the salary that the policeman lost for 10 years can be handed over to him.

Will this happen in India?

Pakistan's stand that they are ready to talk to India but that India should make the first move took me right back to my childhood days - when two friends would fight and each would insist that he/she is willing to talk only if the other party comes forward. Of course, the two countries cannot be called friends even if the word's definition were to be stretched from earth to moon and back.

Modi did the right thing by giving them a cold shoulder. They are used to being mollycoddled by the Indian government and think that it is their moral right to be forever sulking. Well, they don't. And the sooner they are made to realize this, the better it will be for all of us. I couldn't help but smirk at the words 'internal processes' that they used to scuttle India's three proposals at the SAARC meet. Looking at the state of affairs of that country (since 1947!), the only 'internal processes' that they might be having could be for sending more and more terrorists to India.

I totally agree with the Quick Edit section of The Mint - India should just bypass Pakistan and proceed to ink pacts with the rest of the SAARC members. If Pakistan wants to cut off its nose just to spite India, let's let them go right ahead with it.

Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor - by John C. Bogle

Character Counts - by John C. Bogle

Interstellar

If there is one thing that can be said about these space movies, it is this - if they explain the technical jargon satisfactorily, they are a delight to watch and understand but if they just throw around terms like wormholes, blackholes & singularity (which mere mortals like us don't have much exposure to), the audience is left wondering about the key points of the plot.

Interstellar belongs to this second set of movies. e.g. they tell us that what "gravitational time dilation" means is that each hour on the surface of a planet having such a dilation corresponds to more time elapsing on earth. But since most of us don't have a clue as to how it works, it remains just an abstract concept - something to be taken at its face value - and we fail to grasp its full significance as far as the movie goes (if everyone on Earth shifts to the new planet, who cares
whether it is 7 years on earth per an hour on Miller or 10?). Same goes for the concept of Singularity. Why is it necessary to get the data from the wormhole to figure out how to lift the space-stations by defying the gravity?

It's equally difficult to stomach the plot that Dr. Brand was the only scientist to have worked on the equation and realized its impossibility. Was NASA having an attrition issue?

Even Wiki couldn't tell me how Cooper stumbles across a solution to Murph's equation and communicates the same to her using gravitational waves. Come to think of it - the whole movie was about that :-(

I think they spent a lot of time depicting Cooper's life before he started on his space voyage and also on Mann's antics. A duration of 169 minutes is okay for a Hindi movie, but not for a Hollywood flick!

The only saving grace was Matthew McConaughey who perfectly essays the father torn between his love for his kids and his duty to do everything that he can to save them.

But as the movie dragged on, I wished a wormhole would open up right next to my seat and help me pass the time quickly. ;-)

Spanish - Class XIV

More revision. More exercises from the book. And in the process, we learnt some new expressions like Estas de acuerdo (do you agree?), Estoy Sola - I am alone and Estoy Bien - I am okay.

We are about 6 classes away from the end of the program. And I am worried about 2 things - one, how to remember which words have the dreaded tildes and two, are we going to learn 'tenses' in this program.

Soy no tiene informacion! :-)

Spanish - Class XIII

I wonder if we will ever see the full quorum of 35 again. The attendance these days is mostly 25-28. I myself sometimes wish the teacher would increase the class duration to 3 hours instead of the normal 2 hours and wrap up the program. :-(

Okay, so the first half was spent in revising things learnt in the past class. The class was divided into groups of 4 and each group asked to describe a personality of its choice to the rest of the class so that they could guess who was being described. I was part of a group where the rest of the members were college girls. We zeroed in on poor Leonardo Da Vinci. A lively discussion ensued on whether he was an Italiano or a Frances. One of the girls said he was French. I was of the opinion that he was Italian. Hell, it has been more than 2 decades since I read about him and his art. But wasn't the plot of the Da Vinci Code set in Vatican? Finally, we consulted the teacher, who, after a second's contemplation, gave the verdict that he was an Italiano. The next hurdle was the word 'Pintor'. Does it mean someone who might use Asian Paints colors to paint the walls or someone who draws paintings which rarely make sense to mere mortals? 'Both' the teacher assured us. I am doubtful about that but for the moment decided not to pursue it further.

So we wrote our 4 lines about him and his painting of a mysterious smiling lady. The class duly guessed it to be the Monalisa and by association the name of our famous personality. We did the same for the rest of the groups. One group had chosen Enrique Iglesias (doesn't Iglesia mean Church in Spanish?) which none of us could guess.

Then we read and made sense of a passage where a person introduces his friends to another. The teacher told us that the exam to be held in first or second week of December would be worth 20 marks and we would be asked to describe a photo. So need to brush up on the vocabulary. Hell,I hope the use of a dictionary is not allowed. I don't have one and don't intend to purchase it anytime soon.

In the second half, we learnt the masculine/feminine and singular/plural form of this, that, that (far distance). Till now, we had done 1 to 20 numbers. Now I know (or think I know!) 21 to 100.

Hmmm.....what is a zero called in Spanish though? Hope I don't find that out when the result of the exam is handed over ;-)

Life is like a camera.
Capture good things.
Develop the negatives.
Give it another shot.

- Seen on a board outside a church

On Death and Dying - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Baskin & Robbins - Rose and Cream

When I walked into the Baskin & Robbins outlet after a disappointing lunch, I had made up my mind to go for one of their chocolate flavors just because I have never tried one. And then I noticed a new flavor - Rose and Cream. Why not? Let's try it. I did and am glad for it. Put simply, this is an American version of a Gulkand ice-cream. But it is so tasty that I am going to end up eating it at least 2-3 more times.

Highly recommended!

Bungalow 9, Bandra

I know I had recommended Bandra's Bungalow 9 a couple of months back. But I stand corrected. We had been there last weekend. I cannot be sure but I suspect that they have changed the menu. Last time we were there, we had had hard time choosing what to order because there were so many new dishes to choose from. This time, we had hard time choosing what to order - because there was hardly anything different to choose from (same old pasta, same old phad thai). I say 'hardly' because there were a few dishes at the end of every section which had exotic sounding names but they were steeply priced and hence prone to giving you heartburn if the price didn't end up justifying the quality.

Since we didn't want to get up and leave in search of some other place to eat late on a Sunday afternoon, we decided to brave it out. When I asked the waiter about some 'taco' preparation from the appetizers section, he said that it will consist of only 2 pieces so I dropped the plan. By now we had lost all our appetite and ended up ordering only a Pizza with smoked chicken.

When the pizza failed to arrive within the next 15 minutes, I stopped looking at the watch. So I suspect, rather than know for sure, that it must have taken more than 30 minutes for us to be served. When the pizza was finally brought to our tables, My heart sank at the sight of it - it looked woefully inadequate even for 2 adults, 8 tiny slices with pieces of chicken thrown in as an afterthought. The taste was good but I cannot still fathom why it took them so long to serve it. We didn't want to order anything else and cool our heels for further 30 minutes.

Needless to say, when we left we had decided that we will never come back.

Supernatural - Season 10, Episode 6

We have seen shape-shifters before. But this time at least the setting was different - a stately mansion, (fake!) silver cutlery, a real buttler and a dead rich heiress. While Dean's aggresion towards the end does give some inkling of the things to come (or not!) I wonder what happened to the dude who showed up towards the end of the last episode.

And it is a bit hard to stomach the premise that shape-shifting is hereditary ;-)

P.S. Love their Impala though.

Are humans supposed to be on sea? While some are clearly meant to be, others aren't. I have a lifelong membership to the latter group - as was made amply clear during my maiden voyage aboard a yacht yesterday. While the rest of the party was busy frolicking about all over the place, enjoying the evening sea breeze, looking at the rolling waves, I was sitting as still as I possibly could - trying to make sure my lunch and tea didn't spill out. Spill out they did, but within the confines of a sink. And I wasn't my own self for the rest of the evening.

But I did manage to take a few snaps before the sea-sickness took over.

Unfortunately, this sea-sickness also means that I will have to wait for my next life to go on board a cruise-liner :-(