*emerges out of her rabbit hole and looks around nervously* That last blog got mucho too seriouso, eh? Methinks me scared off half my readers. So enough with the highfalutin soapbox-climbing. Instead we return to the pointless drivel that is traditionally expected of us. But first — a Happy Holi to all my readers! Hope your day was colorful and full of joy!

Aao sikhaauun tumhein ande kaa fundaa
Yeh nahiin pyaare koii maamuulii bandaa — Jodi No 1 (2001)

(Translated: Come, let me teach you the basics of the egg. This, my love, is no ordinary dude.)

“Easter eggs are specially decorated eggs given out to celebrate the Easter holiday. The oldest tradition is to use dyed and painted chickens eggs, but the general modern custom is to substitute eggs made from chocolate. In computing, Easter eggs are messages, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behaviour, that occur in a program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, keystrokes or other similar stimuli intended as a joke or to display program credits” — says the Wikipedia. Oh well, I’m too lazy to say it myself anyway.

So why am I giving you ande ka fundas? Several reasons actually.

• Easter is here so it seems like the right time to share some knowledge about eggs. Main nahin kehta Wikipedia mein likha hai yaaron said Amitabh in Laawaris (1981). Um, something like that.
• I love eggs. Scrambled, fried, boiled and as an omelette, they’re worth all that they’re cracked up to be.
• I was watching the Hindi movie Eggs Our Our (1994) starring Aamir, Salman, Raveena and Karishma, earlier today. *ducks to avoid the rotten eggs thrown at her*

You’re probably wondering if there’s a point to this blog? Yes, there is, and we’re coming right to it. Patience is a lost virtue, I tell ya. So .. I have an Easter egg hidden in my blog, and you’ve been looking at it for almost two months, and yet not a single soul has acknowledged its existence! *sniffle* Of course, nice person that I am, I shall conveniently assume that the sparkling wit and charm in my writing has kept you so engrossed that you never had a chance to look around for eggs. No worries, here’s your chance. It’s got something to do with reading the blog without being bothered by the goodies in the sidebar. C’mon, you don’t have to be a eccentric genius to figure it out. Enough hinting. Now start hunting.

Ah yesh, the prize. Hmm, lets see. How about a dozen farm-fresh jumbo-sized eggs? Not just any ordinary eggs. Eggs laid by hens on an organic high-protein vegetarian diet. Time for a tangent here. Don’t know if this is true in desh too or if it is a US-specific thing but I don’t understand this. Nor do I get why chicken in the grocery store is marked as being from hens raised on an all-veggie organic diet. So you first eat the eggs and then the hen as well, but the poor hen who lays the egg and is then turned into tikka masala has to remain a pure vegetarian through it all? Doesn’t get to have a last supper of its choice even? Bah! That’s a ‘fowl’ sense of justice, I tell ya! And I thought we lived in an egg-alitarian society and all. Tsk tsk.

Okie, I promise. No more nasty puns on eggs, chicken, ducks or any distant relative thereof. But have you ever wondered what is Bruce Lee’s favorite breakfast food? Egg-jacket-lee!

Happy egg hunting and a Happy Easter to all!

Target audience for this post:

• People who wonder if I have a life
• People who want to know if there are any real people in the aforementioned life
• People who are not sure if this blog is real
• Fans of The Matrix (1999)

I don’t usually rant on my blog. Every now and then a Tusshar Kapoor movie might come along and change that, but for the most part, I don’t. This post however, is a departure from tradition. So what’s bugging me? Several different things .. resulting in the longest blog known to mankind. Or so it feels. Proceed with caution.

• Very recently when asked in a comment on this blog why I don’t write often enough, I responded cheekily with ‘I was too busy getting a life, so I didn’t have time to blog‘. In retrospect, this is not true. My blogging frequency and my getting myself a life have very little to do with each other. I’ve written a lot when I’ve been busy, and gone through dry spells despite having lots of time to kill. Also, I rarely write about what I did in my day or week, so life or the lack of it shouldn’t affect my writing. The inspiration (if I can be so pompous as to call it that) for my writing comes from things I think about, not from things I do. At least, most of the time.

  Also, I think ‘getting a life’ is highly overrated. It’s mostly an idea propagated by the 5.67% of the population who actually have a life, to make the rest of us feel left out. About a month ago the blog world was filled with rants and ballyhoo about the commercial monstrosity that is called Valentine’s Day. A holiday created to make singletons miserable, people cried. This is much like that. Getting a life is a concept created to make most people who live regular lives feel like they’re missing out on a lot of excitement, thus making them wallow in dissatisfaction.

• I am lazy. There are topics that every self-respecting blogger ought to write about, and while I am a blogger and I can claim to possess oodles of that thing called self-respect, I’m also an extremely lazy blogger. A mere seventy posts over a span of one year and two months should be an indication of that. I write when I feel like it, not ‘cos it’s high time I did. Also, I often don’t write about things that have been written about on other blogs. If what I feel has already been expressed, that too in far more effective words, there is no reason to be redundundundant. That should address the question Sriram raised about why I did not say anything on the Mediaah! controversy.

• I think a lot, at times. At other times I don’t think at all. And so I write about things that are on my mind. A random thought that came to me while watching a passerby at the train station. A conversation with a friend. Something on TV. A song I listen to that I love. Lyrics that I find beauty in. A sunset. Things like that. This blog is titled ‘A walk in the clouds’. For the linguistically inclined, megha in Hindi/Sanskrit translates to cloud. Multiple clouds are also megha, which conveniently explains my multiple personalities. So this blog is a walk in my thoughts. A very long walk at times, given my verbosity, but a walk nonetheless.

• Do I have a life beyond my blog? Do I have real people in my life? — asked someone recently on my doodleboard. I think my blog sufficiently answers that question, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the discerning reader. However the question I have — Why the burning interest in how real or imaginary my life is? I could be living in a pod in outer space and writing about the human social life I once had. I could be a researcher in Minsk, buried under a glacier, whose only connection to civilization is the supplies truck that arrives once every three months with frozen tinned sardines. My blog and Viktor. Yes, that could well be my life. By the way, Viktor is hurt at the implication that he’s not a real person. Supply truck drivers have feelings too.

• I lead a moderately interesting life but I assume nobody would be interested in knowing about the contents of my breakfast or for that matter, my backpack. I could romanticize my life, giving the impression of a Bohemian existence, but honestly, it’s too much work. And so I don’t usually write about what I did, where I ate, who I met, my family, my friends, their lives and so on. If I do write about them, it is in terms of what I’m thinking about rather than a direct account of something they did. Thus you’ll find the ‘My life is divided into phases with respect to my mom ..‘ post, but you won’t find the ‘Woke up this morning with a phone call from my mom at 6am, ate some pickled peaches, puked, now here’s a blog about it ..‘ post. The only notable exception to the rule I follow about mentioning people in my life, is Kyle. It was a long time ago, Viktor, don’t be jealous.

• Everything I write could just as easily be make-believe. But does it really matter? If I enjoy writing it (which I do) and you like reading it (which I hope you do) then the purpose has been served, and the rest is irrelevant. A close friend once said that a story should be told the way it *should* have happened, not the way it *had* happened. I agree. After all, what’s writing without li’l flights of fancy? A little real, a little imaginary, together makes one’s writing nice and complex, no? (For those of you who are not math geniuses, that was a complex numbers pun.)

• My blog is my toy, my playground. I try out new features on my template ‘cos renewing things and not letting them stagnate is very important to me. I thrive on change. It inspires me, and I’ve been told on occasion, that it inspires others too. My blog does not look the way it does by chance. It looks like this by choice, because I have spent time to make it look like this. I’m a designer by profession (there, the token bit of personal info that was expected from this post) and while I spend most of my design time on relatively fruitful enterprises (resulting in relatively fruitful paychecks) I like wasting some of it on my blog.

• So how do I find the time to write silly eight verse poems about pointless things while actually trying to live a life, you ask? Inspiration. I write when I am inspired, else I don’t write at all. I don’t waste a lot of time *trying* to write. I either write, or I just close shop and find myself something else to do. I, however, do take my writing somewhat seriously, which I think I should, considering there are people other than me who take time out of their day to read it.

Bottomline — If you are looking for straight answers to questions like who I am and what I do, you won’t find them on this blog. However, I do volunteer information about myself. I just disguise it in the midst of a lot of words, trusting my reader to find what they are looking for. As I often say — My life is an open book. You just have to read between the lines.

As we all know, Blogger doesn’t allow post categories and I for one, got tired of waiting for them to change their minds. So I created my own with some hard-coded links. That turned out to be too easy, and as we all know, I love to complicate things. So I proceeded to waste huge gobs of time making cutesy icons that symbolically captured the essence of the category. Yeah, gobbledygook like that. Finally, considering the amount of effort wasted on this seemingly small project, it was only fair that I wrote a poem about it.

At this point you are probably hoping that the length of the poem will be similar to Vivek Mushran’s career, but .. hee haw! It is not. So here you go — some rhyme to waste your time.

Oh and another thing. I got myself listed on some four hundred thirty two different blog directory services — Blogarama, Blogwise, Blogshares, Globe of Blogs, Bloggy Bonk Bonk, Bog of Blogs, We-will-give-you-naming-rights-to-our-first-born-if-you-list-your-blog-with-us.com and so on. So if the Blah section of my blog sidebar looks like Rajesh Khanna’s psychedelic red, green and gold velvet suit from Apna Desh (1972) when he’s singing duniya mein logon ko dhokha kabhi ho jaata hai, please don’t be frightened. I promise to be kinder in the future.

Snippet of a conversation with a friend. For the sake of my safety and future well-being as well as in her defense, let me add that she’s quite a smart gal and usually not this linguistically .. confused :) We were doing some frank and candid talking about relationships and other such high-funda stuff.

She: You know, I really like your candidacy.
Me: Oh .. ? *bulb lighting up in my head* Ah! You mean candor?
She: No baba! That’s like .. a really big bird!

Suffice it to say, I can’t be candid ever again without grinning :)

Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive … It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIIIVE!

screamed a delirious Frankenstein in the 1931 cult classic movie by the same name. Seventy four years later, the sentiment remains the same. In this case, my doodleboard. The old one died, but another one has resurrected in its place. So feel free to scribble, doodle, be funny, kooky, silly .. whatever. Just have fun! And one hopes the new toy will not remind us of another quote from the same movie —

You have created a monster, and it will destroy you!

Hmm ..