Greek v/s Geek

Greek: Why hello there!

Geek: Hello is there so that humans can greet each other. It is usually the first word people say when they pick up the phone. Talking of phones, Graham bell was supposed to have invented the telephone. But some claims state that he had actually stolen the invention from one Elisha Grey.

By the way, you missed proposition ‘is’. You should have said ‘Why is hello there’. But this is a common mistake most non-native English speakers make. Talking of which where are you from?

Greek: I’m Kyra from Greece.

Geek: Kyra, an interesting name! In Greek, it means Lord or Lady. It is of Egyptian origin meaning ‘Like Ra’. Ra of course is the Egyptian sun God, the oldest of the Egyptian Gods. The myth of his journey through the 12 hours of the night is a fascinating one.

Kyra is also the name of a simple, fully featured, industrial strength Sprite engine written in C++. The Kyra engine is suited to 2D, isometric, and quasi-3D games. By the way gaming is a passion for me – both creating and playing them. What do you like to do?

Greek: I like to go outdoors to have fun in the sun, play some volley ball with my friends and relax with a nice cold drink

Geek:  Nice rhyme – fun and sun! Bun, dun, gun, pun and run are a few other words that rhyme with these words. Let us try to make a sentence with all these words. I was eating a bun in the sun and having fun, when a dun came after me with a gun and I had to run. There was no time for a pun though. Who can think of a pun or to have fun in the sun, when a dun is after you with a gun? All you can think of is to drop the bun and run in the sun.

But if I run in the sun, my pale skin will turn dun. So there is no escape from the dun either ways. Now that is a pun! In case you don’t know, dun can mean a debt collecting agent or a brownish color. If you keep playing volleyball in the sun, your skin should also have turned dark. How come it is so fair?

Greek: All thanks to Lakme Sun expert.

Geek: Sun expert? Who is he? Must be a hot shot scientist! And what is a Luckmy? A newly discovered solar system? So much research still remains to be done on our own sun and there are folks researching suns of other systems?

Greek: No, no. It has nothing to do with the sun. Lakme is a brand.

Geek: Ah! I get it. It is a brand of cold drink? Is that what you are relaxing with? Cold drinks do help you beat the heat, eh?

Greek: It is not a cool drink. It is a fairness cream.

Geek: Wow! They are now bottling fairness and selling it as creams? I am sure it must be selling like hot cakes. That is possibly the only place fairness can be found in today’s world.

Greek: I mean sunscreen. Stuff that protects my skin from the effects of the sun.

Geek: I get it. So what are your plans for the summer?

Greek: This summer, I’m going have fun in the sun on an exotic beach.

Geek: Exotic beach? That sounds interesting. I am interested in knowing how an exotic beach is different from a normal beach. Will the sand be green and the water pink? Will there be flying pigs, dancing monkeys and singing donkeys performing there?

Greek: Err… I don’t know all that. All I know is I am going to have fun thanks to Lakme skin expert.

Geek: What kind of fun, may I ask dear? I am having fun right here in front of my computer. What more fun can you have in the beach?

Greek: It can't be explained. It has to be experienced. I am fun loving, enjoy my music and love travelling. And I am going to live it up on the beach.

Geek: Leave it up? Leave what up? Only thing I can think of is hot air. So you are planning to sit in the hot beach drinking some cold aerated drink and leaving out hot air? Doesn’t exactly sound like my idea of fun.

Greek: (Putting on a pout) You are just impossible. No use talking to you! Can you even imagine the kind of fun I am having? Lakme Sun Expert has allowed me to be bitten by wanderlust and have all the outdoor fun I want whilst staying sun protected.

Geek: What is this wanderlust? Some kind of super bug? Whatever it is I don’t care to be bitten. Don’t these Lakme guys have a cream to protect you from being bitten by these bugs as well? I just have to leave the windows open in the night and I can also have indoor fun being bitten by mosquitoes while staying sun protected if that is what fun means.

Greek (Puffed up with earnesty): But staying indoors how can you enjoy sunshine like never before? See what you have done to yourself. What is the use reading so much about about technology, science, space travel, aliens and all that? You look so thin, wizened and pale. Combined with your large spectacles, you look like an alien yourself. Have you ever had a boy friend? Or for the matter has any dude passing by even given you a second look? What do you have to show at the end of the day for all your so called intellectual pursuits in the darkness of your room?

Geek (suddenly breaks down into tears): Yes. You are right. Sunshine has been lacking in my life all this while. Give me some sunshine. Give me some rain. Give me another chance to grow up once again.

Greek: Here take this tube of sun screen, apply it on your skin and go out and enjoy the sunshine without getting sun burnt. What more, the wax in the cream makes your skin waterproof too. So you can enjoy the rain as well  without getting wet. You will get another chance to grow up once again. 

Geek (Beaming): Thanks Kyra. Thanks Lakme for giving me one more chance. This time I will grow up once again and turn out to be a stunning beauty who will be every hunk’s dream.

Posted for Contest sponsored by Lakme. This is their facebook page. The picture has also been taken from there.

Cloud Black and the Seven Sardars

Once upon a time there was an evil witch. Now the time of magic is past its prime. So in the current times, the witch is just a socialite, a former model and an actress. An actress, who does dope, drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney. In short a complete vamp. The original witch was married to a king. This socialite instead is married to a liquor baron who also owns an airline and an IPL team. Is he any less than a king, eh? What if the socialite does not have a magic mirror to tell her if she was the fairest in the land? She could easily check if she was the most popular. What else were news websites and tabloids for, to say nothing of social networks?

A heroine is a heroine by any other name. So it does not matter if we call her Elena, Kyra or Layla. What matters is she is the heroine. And since sponsors wish it so let us call her Kyra. And probably the original Snow White story was also written for a contest where heroine’s name kept changing. So the clever writer must have given her a generic name 'Snow White' so that there won’t be too many changes in case the heroine’s name was to suddenly change. But nowadays a name such as Snow White would be considered to reek of racism and proclaiming the superiority of white skin. So let us call her Cloud Black instead. And obviously a girl called Cloud Black has to be dark, right?

Now this socialite one day discovers that this Cloud Black who happens to be her step daughter as well by an interesting coincidence that usually happens only in stories, has suddenly become more popular than her. This could have been due to any of the many reasons. A lithe figure, generosity of nature, sporting accomplishments and academic prowess to name a few! But it does not matter to the story which of these it was. The bottom line was she was more popular and her socialite step mom was goddamn badly pissed. So she called up the D-company guys and asked them to finish her off. These guys take her and throw her into the sea. Why only drowning and why not some other means of death one may ask. Why not drowning I ask back. After all so many cool folks died of drowning and one of the most popular movies was about folks who died of drowning.

As luck would have it she gets washed ashore on an exotic beach complete with a year’s supply of Lakme sun screen. And who would be on the beach at that moment but seven sardars: seven total pagal mundas on the roll. That’s the exotic part. It will be cool to say there were seven of them because there are seven notes in music or seven days in a week. But honestly, seven is just a random number just as likely to occur as six or eight. If we start explaining all this, this would be a novel and not a blog post. Coming back to the point, these dudes are rocking the beach when the sea suddenly throws up this hot babe. They just can’t stop their eyes popping and tongue lolling involuntarily. So they all hustle each other to give her a cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It is only in England, we have such a complicated name for this thing. In France, it is called just a kiss. One more example of Victorian hypocrisy!

Well, in the original story, Snow White cooks for them, washes for them, scrubs for them and does all kind of bum work in return for a few morsels of food and the so called protection. But let us be realistic. This is the twenty first century. There ain’t no such things as hot chicks working as maid servants for free. She does sleep over at their place. But they have to do their own grub work and run their beach side dhaba in the night. In the day all eight of them rock the beach in the hot sun. The melanin in her naturally dark complexion protects her while the Sardars have turbans and beards to protect them. But she still uses Lakme sun screen because that is the purpose of life, the universe and everything in this story, isn’t it? For without Lakme, would this story have ever been written?

Now it will be nice to write how all the eight of them live it up in the hot sun. But then what is the point? As I mentioned earlier, this is part of a competition and so many others have already written how Kyra rocks the scene on the beach. So if you are interested in reading about all that, click this link to check out the posts of the other contestants. And when you are about it you may as well click here for the sponsor’s link as well. After all I am writing all this for their sake only.

All good things come to an end. And as luck would have it, the paparazzi are all over again and her step mom learns of her survival. She makes one last ditch attempt to bounce her off. She comes in guise of a sauve face cream saleswoman and palms of poisoned face cream to her. Cloud Black makes a rare exception and uses this other cream instead of the usual Lakme cream, gets poisoned and drops dead. The Sardars are unable to revive her. Now is the time for an ole shole hulk with six pack abs to step in complete with a cool Thunderbird or Karizma bike. He comes over and gently applies Lakme cream on her face to magically revive her. Once again Lakme saves the day and all of them live happily ever after. And if Lakme give me a prize for this entry, I will also live happily ever after.

Picture Credit : Snow White

The Devotion of Suspect X - Review

Japan is a country with scarce natural resources. So they can  hardly afford any waste. Their cuisine tries to find use for almost every part of the plant or animal that is being cooked. Toyota gave the world the lean principles whose main focus is elimination of waste. The book ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ embodies this Japanese ethos. There is not a portion of the book that goes waste. Even seemingly insignificant portions contribute to the overall story. In the end I got a wow feeling how everything tied in so neatly.

Usually literature and science are considered two different worlds. This book kind of bridges the gap between the two. The two protagonists are men of science – one, Ishigami a mathematician and the other Yukawa a physicist. The story is a murder mystery skillfully woven around mathematical concepts. Somehow the entire story revolves in some way or the other around two problems of mathematical logic. Whether or not it is as easy to determine the accuracy of another person’s result as it is to solve the problem yourself? Which is harder: devising an unsolvable problem or solving that problem?

For those tired of stories set in US and Britain, a story set in Japan comes as a breath of fresh air. Sake, Sushi, bento boxes and karaoke build up the typical Japanese environment. The people, their emotions, their motive are all so typically Japanese. For those who are not much associated with Japanese culture, these things might appear strange. But they add an element of unpredictability to a story that makes it more interesting.

In most detective stories, we know what the problem is and the mystery is typically around the solution. And usually the options are clear. But it becomes more interesting when you don’t know what the problem is. That is the strongest element of the story. All along the book, it looks like an open and shut case that is going to be resolved in the next few pages and you wonder what is going to happen in the rest of the book. But it is like an optical illusion. Every time you seem to have come near it, you find it is still a little way ahead. And then a totally unexpected end comes right out of the blue.

Compared to traditional novels, one may not be able to relate so closely with the characters in this story. The characters remain closed and distant. Also the final fate of the characters might not be satisfying to all readers. But somebody well acquainted with Japanese culture can kind of relate.

In the final analysis, I totally love this book. But it is a book that appeals more to the head than the heart. And you need some love for theoretical mathematics or logic to be able to fully enjoy this book. However what will appeal to every reader is the quick pace and the easy flow which makes it an effortless read. Touchy feely folks who are sure they hate logic and mathematics can definitely give this book a miss. I would recommend all others to definitely give this book a try.

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