Tid Bit from My Diary

One day, a few years back  I had an strange urge to pinch on a photograph  on a construction magazine while reading an article. I wanted to expand a picture to find out more about a detail and almost did it. It would have been perfectly normal if I was reading the same article in the iPad, but unfortunately it a conventional paper version of the weekly magazine. Yesterday we wanted to read the details of an address written in in very small fonts on a bottle wrapper and this time we wished we could pinch to clarity. Pinch here describes a gesture used with two fingers used on a touch screen interface to zoom in and out. We pinch inwards to zoom in on a picture and outwards to zoom out of a picture or object. As the line between our digital and non-digital life gets blurred, can this be then considered to be a "zooming in" disorder! I am quite confident that with the dominance of touch screen steadily increasing in our lives, others are suffering from this disorder ...

I was prepared for a call at two in the morning. This was to let me know that they have landed in the Doha airport. I had planned it well and slept early. I would have little time to sleep after picking them up in the middle of the night. But my wife woke me up at 11:30 with a call from an unknown number. This was to let me know that she had lost her phone at the Dubai airport and I was not to expect any call when the plane landed in Doha.  My immediate grief was that I will no longer have the luxury of sleeping till they landed, but have to go early and wait in the arrival lounge.  The loss of the Samsung galaxy made us sad. The realization of losing those pictures of our last vacation made us sadder.  Early in the morning I went to Vodafone store and blocked the number temporarily, stopping any misuse of the phone number. We had heard and read a lot of stories of people getting back stuff from various parts of Dubai during our stay there. These were firstha...

We visited Ranthambhore National Park on our trip to Jaipur during the Winter of 2011. We were lucky then to meet a tiger in the wild. http://sumandebray.blogspot.com/2010/12/save-tiger.html In the Summer of 2012 we went to Goa. On our way from the Airport to the city we stopped our car curious to find out why a crowd has gathered. What we discovered is by far a once in a life time experience. A snake have dropped down from the tree losing its balance after it started to swallow a full grown monkey. Some villagers gathered around it trying to tame it with a rope and stick, while the snake is busy gobbling up the remaining legs and tail of the monkey. I wonder what lies ahead for our next visit to another city ........ we look forward to that in anticipation!

The 2022 FIFA fever is heating up in Qatar. More and more new and shiny cars are hitting the roads each day. I see hundreds of those around me while driving up to work but there are only a few that have more than one passenger inside. The streets are not being able to cope up with the influx. But streets are not the only impacted, so is the housing sector. You find an apartment to rent in the morning, it is almost certain that it will not be available if you comeback for it in the afternoon.   People who lived in Dubai in the first decade of this century may term this as the “Dubai Syndrome”. I take the cornice street to go to work every morning except Saturdays. It’s not because there are less traffic on that street, but because all the intersections along this road are manned by traffic cops. It’s got a very a scenic view too as it has got some of the greatest skyscrapers on one side and Gulf sea with paved cornice on the other busy with morning joggers. The road ...

Being a collector of stamps, calling cards and phone cards et al, I ended up collecting to a lot of plastics over the past years.The ones in the picture above have lived their natural life and are now sitting idle waiting for a new lease of life. But the question is What do I do with all these dead plastics?

Earlier this year I received a letter from my Insurance company wishing me on the birthday. This was a great gesture and there can be no debate about that. They had their reasons to be happy as one more year have passed without them having to part with the money that I rightfully think is mine. After all I am the pessimist here and they the optimists. I opened the envelope and read through the contents inside. The first thought that crossed my mind was it would have been nicer had they have used my name instead of "Customer". However I was pleased that they just did not refer to me by a number .... well the policy number. It was only later that I realized that there was a separate wish for each policy. At that point there was little doubt I was in the good hands of machines. Machines operated by more machines. For my next birthday, I wished there will be a little more Human Touch in this world!

Few of my roller ball head pens ran out of ink last week. As I tossed those into the bin, I paused to reflect on the past years. So much had changed over the past 4 decades that our entire lifestyle went for an overhaul. During our school days nothing was disposable, not even a syringe or the needle. Everything was meant to last a life time. We used to get refills for our ball pens when we got promoted from pencil to pen. As a matter of fact we were advised to use an ink pen rather than a ball point pen as it threatened to spoil our handwriting. Today we neither see a refill nor an inkpot! You either throw away the pen or change a cartridge...... Often we used to visit the stationery shop to buy one pencil while an eraser used to last for years and a pencil sharpener used to be a lifetime’s asset. But today I wonder if anyone sold or more importantly buy a single pencil. People buy erasers in dozens and box full of sharpeners. But those concerns our children and they do...