Happy Birthday

It was the october of 2001.

Our client, a small internet based startup, had already been hit hard by the late 20th century collective madness , the dot com boom ( and the subsequent bust ). 911 proved to be the killer blow for our project and we parted ways saying solemn good byes. Faced with nothing to do, our situation was something like that of soldier pulled out of a gruesome war and put in a budhist monastery. We just couldnt take the silence and lack of work.

After days of tea time terrorism discussions and idea generation sessions, we invented creative methods to spend time like network roadrash races and chatting.

Now ever since Internet was introduced in the late 90's by VSNL, I have been online. Those days, you had to fill a form, send to VSNL chennai office and then wait for a good amount of time before VSNL send you back the connection details. Over the last so many years I have done most of which can be done on the net except for one thing : Chatting.

Why ?

Right from my childhood days, I have been this shy silent guy whom you will more often find in a corner reading a book than in the centre of a crowd talking. This has changed considerably over the years but still in many ways I remain such a person.

So chatting was not something that came to me easily. But when it came to text chatting on a computer, I had a small advantage. It is my belief that I am a better writer than a talker. So armed with a keyboard I was a wee bit more confident than I would be otherwise. Using a combination of instant poetry and fancy icons, I managed to build huge friend list in my messenger within a short time.

It was during this period that I met the person for whom this post is being written. The first thing that stuck me is the unabashed joy of living seen in the person.

I need to digress again and detail a personal quirk. By the by, a complete listing of my personal quirks might take more space than my host provides :) Anyway this one details my friends. A long time back when I was an antisocial nerd ( I still am in a small way ), I had oh so serious friends, People who find it easier to quote Nietzsche than wear a smile on their face. Luckily this guy stepped in and more or less changed the way I used to go about life. Ever since, I have been fascinated by people who are genuinely happy. Pretty soon, my craze for chatting died a natural death but my friendship with my new friend endured.

Thus in the strangest of circumstances started this special friendship. Now I have a couple of friends who could perhaps one day start a new cult among them with the title, “The Joy of Living” :-)

Today is my little friend's birthday and so here comes the wish for which the whole post was written.

Happy birthday, my dear friend.

History

Tomorrow, I complete one year of blogging. It is only natural that I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia at this moment and look back at what led to the birth of this site.

Long back ago, during the time of the internet boom, there was a company by the name namezero which decided to give away domain names for free. Yes, you read that correct. Domain names for free. I must admit, a bit shamefacedly, that I took full advantage of this offer and ended up booking close to 50 domains :-) In addition to itismylife.com I had other interesting names like infosys.org and imaginati0n.com. But I never used them for anything other than vanity email ids. By the by, I used to get resumes from unknown people hoping to land a job at infosys !

This state of affairs continued for a long long time. At around this time last year, India was rocked by the Gujarat riots. In a mail to a classmate, I wrote up something which I thought needed a much wider audience. The idea of putting it on my website came to my mind and I searched for methods to do it. It was at this point that I came across the word blogging for the first time and immediately I was hooked. I signed up for a blogger account and published my article at blogspot.com.

The article was later on published at rediff.com.

Within a short time, I understood the deficiencies of the blogger system and jumped over to upsaid.com. I was with them for a long long time and it was a fruitfull association. Meanwhile, I was send to the united states for an assigment.

With a few dollars in my hand, I suddenly had an itch to move to a self hosted solution which is what I did, getting a new domain in the process. I also discovered the power of nucleus and ended up contributing quite a few plugins as can be seen at the forum.

Since then, Things havent changed much but for the entry of suresh.

So that in a few words was the history behind this site.

What lies ahead ?

I am planning to relaunch itismylife.com at some point in this month. The idea is to have a couple of niche blogs ie blogs targeted at a niche audience and highly specific to one topic. The pages here will continue to be the place holder for my general writings and link collections.

If all goes well, I will be writing a similar post one year from now :-)

Silence

The reason behind the lack of updates on this site can be summed up in two words : world cup. When all you do is to track the scorecard during the day and rush home in the evenings to catch whatever little action is left, you dont have much time left to do anything else least of all blog.

It feels great when sachin is in such fine form, isnt it ? I read a while back a stock broker proclaiming that the BSE sensex shoots up whenever sachin scores a century. Just the other day, I was reading an article saying the viewership on setmax goes down by 20 percent when sachin gets out. It is amazing how much power one man holds over the collective psyche of a nation. Is he the most popular man to have walked on the surface of the earth since Jesus ? If you go by just the sheer numbers of his fan following, I would say yes :-)

Masala gets a new url : netlife.tamizhan.com. From my referrer logs, I can see that people tend to make the mistake of thinking that the name masala implies content, the sort of which is found on sites like these ;-).

Last week, something interesting happenned on my site which even I failed to notice till yesterday. For some time now, I have given the option to advertise on my site. Never thought somebody would actually do so. So imagine my surprise when I found out that somebody has done just that. There is indeed an advertisement there now. So if you are not doing anything in particular, do go there and click on the ad. Since it is a CPC ad, I need to get another 25 odd clicks before I get money from my advertiser.

Thanks goes to my sponsor. I hope, you got something out of this and even better, keep doing this again and again :-)

Before I wrap up this entry, there is one surprise news. We had an impromptu indian blogger's meet yesterday at koramangala, bangalore :-). Shyam was in town. So was nilesh. Vignesh is always around. So we decided to meet up and the conversation went on expected lines atleast for me :-)

Shyam was the observer. He is a lot similar to apna vignesh, though to be fair to him, a lot quieter :-) Nilesh was the thinker and he reminds me of sreekanth. Both have a serious air to them though the smile is never far away. Suresh as always kept all of us smiling.

A major portion of the conversation was around my still to be released article titled Thrill Vs Peace. I have been teasing vignesh about this for a while now since he plays the main role of the thrill seeker. I get the author backed role of Peace Lover. This article is going to unleash the flame war to end all wars ;-) The moment I decide how to end this article, I will be publishing it. So stay tuned.

Vijay Chegu

It must be one of God's greatest gifts. To be able to smile always.

Suresh has it. Now meet another who has the gift : Vijay Chegu.

Chegu is my anti-depressant. Whenever I feel lousy, I just go and sit beside him. Within minutes, I would catch myself smiling and soon some of his happiness would have rubbed off on me.

In a world where being a cynic has aquired fashionable proportions, It is indeed great to see someone who is genuinely happy. In a world where lines like enjoy life to the fullest are freely tossed around, it feels great to see someone who actually practises it.

Someone who is technically proficient, Chegu is a big lover of films and music. Psst... Rumour has it that Chegu is searching for a life partner. So if you are a girl and looking, you know where to go to find a sensitive young man wih brains ;-)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Join me in welcoming Chegu into the blogging community.

Exams

Two of my best friends are having exams. Must say I am enjoying being able to watch TV while suresh is studying in the next room. Personally, I cannot see myself going for higher studies any time in the future.

Now coming to India's test loss. Australians have different One Day and Test teams. I guess, We need to have different teams based on the playing conditions. No point in making a ganguly or a sehwag play on seaming tracks. Pick them when there is a flat batting track. Else pick people like Shiv Sundar Das who have a decent technique and can survive on such pitches.

Will be going to TVM this weekend :-) Will be there for the whole of next week. Been a while now. So looking forward to it.

Did a small re-design of tamizhan.com. Just played around with the colors a little bit. I am trying hard to do an orange design but it aint easy for a person like me who prefers dark colors :-)

I am planning to enter the stock market again since it seems to be in a bullish mood. I have decided to pick either pharma or banking stocks this time around. If any of you have any good tips for me, please share them with me :-)

The Bangalore Blogger's Meet.

It all started with a mistake.

Me and suresh went to the Prestige Meridien Coffee Day instead of the bombay store one :(. After carefully scrutinizing the crowd there, we came to the conclusion that the big fat guy smoking a cigarette and watching us intently was not Sathish :-)

It turned out that we were right for Sathish was patiently waiting for us on the steps of the Bombay store, with a warm smile on his lips. It is another fact that I ended up scanning him from top to bottom in the hope of finding a camera (which was what Arun was supposed to have in his hands) :-) Fortunately, Sathish indentified me correctly and so we got started on what was going to be a long night.

A few words about Sathish. An extremely warm and easy going guy, He is a pleasure to talk to. A genuine nice guy which is indeed the rarest of things in this kaliyug :-) We went about the first few minutes chattering about our jobs, blogs and what not. Soon it dawned on us that the others have not come yet. It is indeed frustrating to stand waiting for someone without knowing how the person whom you are waiting for looks like :( Anyway, at this moment, indra chose to make his entry. Since we know each other well, There was no problem in identification.

We continued our chat for well over twenty odd minutes only to notice that the time was around 6:40 and none of the others were in sight. At this point, by mere chance, I happened to notice a canon camera in the hands of a tall bearded guy. I must admit that at this point, overjoyed at finally seeing arun, I ran towards him and shouting his name. I dont know what went inside his head but he took a step backwards :-) Soon though, we shook hands with him and harris and found out to our great dismay that arun and harris were standing at the other side of the store from 6:00 PM onwards. A quick phone call to ayesha confirmed the fact that she was on her way. Soon she made her entry with a beige colored bag, the color of which was fiercely debated upon during the whole night :-)

So started the Bangalore Blogger's meet.

The next few minutes were spend on top floor of the bombay store discussing varied stuff like the color of ayesha's bag and the interesting birth date of harris ( Dec 25th ). Unfortunately, Sathish had to leave early lest sooraj throws a tantrum at not seeing his favourite person in the whole world :-)

We continued a few moments there and then decided to move to a place where we can get something to eat. After a lot of thought, we settled upon the ICH. The waiters were not exactly pleased when they saw a bunch of people walking in towards closing time and made their displeasure known by scaring ayesha :-)

At this point, I must digress and say a few things about the others. I have already talked about Sathish and chose not to talk about Suresh and Indra ( good friends :-) ).

Arun is a tall, well built, bearded guy with a serious air to him. He exudes a quiet confidence and a serious manner. A measured talk, a deep voice and a silent yet strong presence marks him out. He was ofcourse the photographer for the night. With his skills, We are all bound to look like bollywood heroes :-)

Harris is someone who reminds me very much of vignesh. I am sure they will become best buddies if and when they meet up. The best word to describe him will be cool. A genuinely funny person, he was making us all laugh with his interesting comments and funny one liners :-) I must say that he was a tad pre-occupied with all those pretty girls walking past us but hey so was I :-) Towards the end of the day or should I say the night, We even had a decent technical discussion. All in all, A really cool guy, just like his blog :-)

And finally, a bit about Ayesha, the oldest member of the group at 27. She is a librarian which incidentally is something that I wanted to be during my childhood days :-) She comes as a intelligent person with a learned background and a lot of reading behind her. Unfortunately, Since we were at opposite ends of the table, we couldn't get much time to talk during the whole meet.

During the course of the dinner at MCH Arun, Ayesha and Harris expressed an interest in starting a community blog centred around indians. I expressed doubts at whether this will take off since I already had a failed community blog behind me :-) What do you guys think ? Is it worth starting one ? Any ideas on that ?

So after finishing a small dinner at ICH, we parted ways in front of the foodworld with solemn promises of keeping in touch and meeting again.

All in all, A night to remember and hopefully the first of many to come.

Suresh Pallavur Hariharan.

At some time in our life, Every one of us must have taken a look at the mirror, hated what we saw and wished we were someone else. Sadly, I have had this occur to me on numerous occasions. I would always end up wishing I was more like one of the following two.

The first was my father.

The second is someone who goes by the name Suresh Pallavur Hariharan.

You must have heard me refer to him here as my bestest friend. On rare occasions, he has even commented on my site under the name God ( Dont even ask why he uses that name :-) ).

To say that we are different is to put things mildly. If I like something, it is more or less guarenteed that he will not like it and vice versa :-) Just a look at the colors used on respectives our sites is a good hint about our personalities. I prefer black. He prefers White. We are that different :-).

If I were to write an entry about the bad qualities in me, I am sure it is going to take more space than what my webhost provides me :-) It is easier to point at suresh and say that all the bad qualities that are missing in him is in me :-)

There are few recorded seconds in the history of Time when there has not been a smile on his face. Rarely ever have i seen him angry or say no when someone asks something or some help from him. All in all a truly nice guy.

After months of cajoling, I have finally persuaded him to start a blog. I am sure you will find him to be different from all other bloggers you have seen till now.

Hop over to suresh.tamizhan.com and start smiling.