Weird Messages Dot Com

The old junk (snail) mail has got a sexier alternative delivered straight to your inbox or as a pop-up...half-baked or well done, not as per orders though. This is called a weird message. One that I recurrently get on my screen is 'TrueSuite has crashed'. Now I am not even aware what TrueSuite is. Is it a suit I used to wear? Not likely, because I don't wear suits...like a true blue desi. Also if I wore one, it may or may not be a True Suite as in an 'honest shirt' yaane ki Peter England!

Of course, apart from the usual entertaining solicits that urge you to enlarge certain body parts, I get head-hunting calls from complete strangers asking me to apply for programming jobs in TCS or wherever. Now, I call that idiotic programming..but then, who said there were only 3 idiots in the world?

Other interesting things I get are matrimonial ads in my mailbox, enticing me to look at Bharatmatrimony.com or some such. Sometimes I do, and find amusing stuff on the sites. On a related note, I asked one of our alumni who works for an international cosmetic company, whether they sell fairness creams..and turned out it is big business in India for all of them. Expected, when you see some of those ads..virtue is somehow equated with the colour of your skin, and therefore the whites have nothing to fear..we'll still treat them royally no matter what.

Weird Places- contd.

Chateau D' If, off Marseilles in France. Setting where The Count of Monte Cristo is based. Had an Indian style toilet on the island.

Greece- the whole country behaves like India does. Including the economy getting into trouble. We were already there in 1991. Only, the Mediterranean/Aegean waters are bluer. And Hindi is not Greek to me. They even have Gods who behave like ours. And have written epics about them.

Nandi Hills near Bangalore- apparently the only reason people go there is to drink beer. I guess people are weird, not the place.

Airports with aerobridges lying idle- as you can guess, I am sitting at one. Gotta go, or I'll miss the bus.

Weirdest Places I Have Been to

There's a website advertised that lets you advertise places that you have travelled to, I believe. Like the websites that tell you what colour your necklace should be, which celebrity you will be reborn as, or things of that sort, if you get the drift. So I thought I would join the movement by listing the weirdest -ok, unusual, if you don't like the word weird- places I have visited.

Gatlinburg in the U.S. is one of them, for sure. The only time we thought of it was when the Fall colours were in full bloom, that is, trees were orange and yellow instead of green. Gatlinburg was a mountain full of these multi-hued trees. One time, we drove 4 hours to get there from Clemson, and drove right back coz there were no rooms available in the whole town.

The four-Presidential-faces-carved-in-stone fame Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Had it not been for the man who carved those, South Dakota might have had a visitor population of zero. I am not even sure there is a population of any kind there, visiting or non-visiting.

Pisa in Italy, with its famous tower. It's the only tower (or building) I know which does a Hamlet, as in, 'To Fall or Not to Fall' is its existential dilemma. Shakespeare would have loved it!

The Old Faithful geyser that shoots a spray of hot water every 45 minutes in the Yellowstone National Park, USA. The question is, who is it faithful to, and why?

Kolkata today would take the cake, not because of the place itself, but the special person ruling over the state, who is, shall we say, a bit unusual? Why, Mr. Tughlaq suddenly looks cool.