Wishing all my readers a very Happy New Year.. yippie its

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(Photo courtey : Priya Prakash @purplebeats)

[Runaway Groom - Prologue]

This real life story is set in the past, some 5-7 years ago. Well lets not leave any room for uncertainty, 6 years in the past.

George, a Delhi-ite who had a penchant for movies, good food and almost loved everything under the sun – almost! He hated two kinds of people. Pledging – all Indians are my brothers and sisters – never really included two kinds of people for him. A deep aversion for Malayali girls – they smell of sticky coconut-oil, burps and have no idea about a process called waxing . And finally Tamilians – for him they were dark people who cried for the Kauveri water and more water, though they never understood the idea of taking a shower.

Arathi Srinivasan was born to a well to do ‘gelf’ settled malayali parents. Hailing originally from Kuttanad, but brought up in Chennai by her maternal grandparents because her parents were busy milking the camel for gold and oil in ‘gelf’. A beauty in herself with stunning eyes, cascading hair, polyglot, smart witty and focused in life.

With the IT boom and the blooming job opportunities, both of them found themselves working for the same multinational in Bangalore. Though they had common friends, Arathi was like double-jeopardy for George. Deep down he hated her, though he would give a polished smile once in a while.

His nightmares started, when his best buddy Sundareshan Nair a.k.a Sundaran, started to fall for Arathi’s features. With Sundaran never having the courage to ask her out, George found himself being the ‘messenger’ of Sundaran, having to go up to Arathi in asking how she was and what she was up to. Every time he had to do that, his molars wore down by 100th of an inch.

Finally he decided to end this torture and fix things up between Sundaran and Arathi. He fixed a Saturday evening dinner with Arathi for his buddy Sundaran, who had almost turned into his foe. Sundaran spent the following days plucking flower petals against ‘Aru loves me, Aru loves me not’ and the nights telling George about what he thought would be the best place for him and Aru to settle down an have a few kids.

George reluctantly had to accompany Sundaran to the restaurant as Sundaran developed last minute cold-feet. They sat across the table waiting for Arathi to turn up. She arrived half and hour late with her friend. On seeing the guys seated ,she walked straight up to the table and sat next to Geroge.

To this day, George swears that this is what was exactly going through his mind – “Why is she sitting next to me? Why cant she sit with him? What the fuck is wrong with her? I can smell the coconut-oil on her hair… Sundaran fucker i’m gonna kill you for this”.

But Sundaran was all long faced by that time. Unwillingly, they ordered food and ate and left. All through out the dinner, George just listened to the conversation and only answered to questions directed at him.

That was the start of everything. Arathi took interest in Geroge and she finally seduced him. But still we have two conflicting versions of the story here. Arathi says that though the feelings were mutual towards each other, she wanted Geroge to confess it first. But George denied everything 3 years back. He said he was being tortured, and the only was out of it was to feed the wolves what they were looking for and get back home. So he said what Arathi wanted to her and left the place.

“Georgie, we will buy a house and covert one of the rooms into a reading room. We will have a big shelf and lots of books to read. Our kids will read and learn”

“But Aru, we shouldnt forget the shelf for the original-uncut-director’s edition DVDs i have collected over the years and the home theater that you promised to buy after the wedding”

They fight and Aru calls him, “Georgieeee” in a soft, stern and confident way and George just smiles and obliges.

George and i still meet for drink and he says, “Fuck man! If only that Sundaran had balls, i would have been still single!”

As George says these days, “Never hold prejudice against anyone, ever! You might end up marrying them”

“So what’s your New Year resolution…”

“Nothing much, I’m getting married..”

“Awwhhhh!!!”

Depending up on the tone, length and energy that takes for that ‘awwh’ to come out of the person, gives me a fair bit of idea about what the person wanted to say and then reduced it as an ‘awwhhh’. Nevertheless, i will be married in 2010. Why 2010? That’s because she said she wanted to get married in 2010. (She has already started dictating me around)

What gives me the at most confidence is seeing total misfits work out magic together. Misfits.. that might bee too naive, misleading and lessening of a word to use to describe the two main characters in the following narration.

This is the story of George and Arathi. To the reader who know me, this is not the story of Sandy(@2s) and Soumya(@soumyageorge). Ohh they fit very well. Every time i meet them i see The Batman and The Joker and the immortal dialog spoken between them (add the arrow bubbles above heir head) – “You complete me!”. Though i wont say who is who in that context.

But George and Arathi were different and it was causalities that lead to their union.

Disclaimer:

All characters in this short story has been conceptualized from real characters and bears absolute resemblance to living people (none of them are dead yet, not at least for the next 50 years). This is not my story and i’m not dumb ‘now’ to do that. If the characters happen to read this then they owe me a pint each!

Happy Reading.

[Link to Story]

I’m no film critic, but i sure can realize if a movie is worth the 3hrs in the theater. 2009 had seen its share of good and worse Hindi movies (the ones that i know about).

The year started of with Chandni Chowk To China, the movie that took slapstick comedy to even lower depths. It made me realize that the torture that i had to endure came close to the torture of watching a movie by a great South Indian Movie Hero 4 years ago.

But i have reasons to rejoice. The year is ending with 3 Idiots.

10 Worst Hindi movies of 2009

10. Chandni Chowk To China

9. 8 x 10 Tasveer

8. Aa Dekhen Zara

7. What’s Your Raashee?

6. London Dreams

5. Kambakkht Ishq

4. Jashnn

3. De Dana Dan

2. Luck

1. Dil Bole Hadippa!

View Photo Album

10 Best Hindi Entertainers of 2009

Now these are the ones that i was happy about spending 3hrs watching the movie. They had some twist in them.

10. Quick Gun Murugun

9. Aloo Chaat

8. Delhi-6

7. Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year

6. New York

5. Love Aaj kal

4. Dev.D

3. Wake Up Sid

2. Kaminey

1. 3 Idiots

View Photo Album

Looking back at 2009, i’m a firm believer that the years to come we will see better hindi movies and some very great entertainers.

A special mention about the movie Wanted. I haven’t seen the movie. But the tamil version of that movie, Pokkiri, is one of my favorite. I will put it at zeroth position in the worst list if Wanted doesn’t do justice to Pokkiri.

During the last year i expanded my plugin usage in Firefox. Some of them being really useful and some of them… well… was not even worth the time spent on installing them.

Here is my hot pick from 2009

Poster

This one is for those people who cant get their head around the classic cURL. The fact remains that there are still people who are into development/testing and doesn’t know about cURL and i’m not talking about newbies. So here is one tool that can save your day. Do any HTTP related work with this and i bet you will fall in love with this.

Tamper Data

This lets you mess with the HTTP headers and parameters. But the best use of this i have found so far was that it can display the headers in a very neat way, that can be understood easily

Lazarus

This is a form recovery tool. I bet everyone of us has that frustrating moment after filling a form and submitting it, the data is all lost due to some insane wizardry behind the scene that we didn’t know about. Well not anymore. Lazarus helps to recover the form data that was entered and saves the frustration.

SQL Injection

Well do i need to describe what this is? In short this can run selected SQL Injection attacks on the fields on a webpage. Great tool identify similar vulnerabilities.

and last but one of my favorite -

Regular Expression Tester

Anyone who has worked on regex knows that, it would be great if they could see the regex in action on the test data, on the fly, as they are building it. This plugin is a dream come true.

Trust me you need this plugin.

For the layman, you dont need any of these plugins. But i assure you that the following is a must have for both geeks and non-geeks alike.

1. Password Exporter
2. ScrapBook
3. Firefox Extension Backup Extension
4. DeepestSender (for bloggers)

For the geeks and the web-developers here is my list –

• Web Developer
• FireBug

• FireFTP

• HackBar

It began with the forging of the great rings. Three were given to the Elves – Immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven to the dwarf lords – Great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the race of men who, above all else, desire power. For within these rings was bound the strength and the will to govern each race.

But they were, all of them, deceived… and we all know the story of how Sauron got his but kicked coz of The One Ring that he had made

This story has a different plot… 2 rings were made in the fires of the workshop of Joyalukkas Jewelers, Cochin. Within these rings they carved the names, that gave one the bearer (the female) absolute power over the other bearer (the male).

Now i remain bound for eternity, and my love Bhavna became The Lady of the Rings …

Couple of pics taken by my cousins using their mobile, during the ceremony

View Photo Album

News sites have to be a bit more reliable. Especially if you are one of the most watched news channels.

Asianet India should realize that death of a leading political leader is not one to be played with. Its not there daily Idea Star Singer show.

Before – Congress leader K Karunakaran passes away

After – Karunakaran put on ventilator; condition improves

Totally WTF!

Since the accident i had and my right-hand was confined to a cast, i was totally at home. During that time my entertainment providers were Star Movies and HBO. Now that the cast has come off the first thing to do is to take a list of movies that i saw during that last two weeks.

A special mention about the movie Death Proof. I saw the movie end to end and i had a feeling like, the sort of moving angles and shots looked very familiar. Well i wasn’t surprised to find that the movie was one by Quentin Tarantino. His signature takes were there all along the movie and its a great watch.

I agree that these are all English movies. Of all the movies in other languages, that was aired, only a few was really worth watching. The best of the lot was these two -

Malayalam
Kilukkam	Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha
	(couldn’t get a better poster for this movie)

[pic courtesy : wikipedia]