Gender Confusion

I was registering at digg.com today. Since I joined the blogging world, digg.com came under my attention many times so I decided to find out more. It is a website where anyone can submit any article, blog, image etc that might have interested them and other "diggers" can read about it. The more the submission is digged, the higher the submission is rated. Cool....I thought. So I decided on trying it out and the first step to try it out, is to register.

Fair enough, I clicked on 'Join Digg', filled up some bare minimum info and clicked on "I agree" to move forward. The Next page said that they have sent me an email to my subscribed email address and that I should open the email and click on the link for further registration steps. So I signed in into my email, opened the email and clicked on the link in it, so far so good. Since the info on the new page that opened was optional, I just entered my full name and moved to the Gender drop-down box. I usually prefer to make my selection for gender even if its optional. When the drop-down box really dropped, I was stunned to see so many options to select from.



Poor me, since I have started filling forms I have always got Male, Female as two options to select from and here I was with this nice little list of options to select from. Nice and confusing....Girl, Lady, Bird, grrrl, Damsel, Belle, Female.....the choice was enormous!

It felt nice to have this list of gender selection for the first time rather than the mundane male and female. They even included transgender, a nice touch of recognition for transgenders I would say. But then the "None of the above" option got me. If I am none of the above, then who could I be. Even if I am an animal, I sure have to be a male or a female type, right?......wrong. That is when my scientific side of the brain kicked in and I remembered of EARTHWORMS!

I bow down to whoever prepared the list. The person (now I am not sure about that) took care of every gender group however small and unimportant it be. A beautiful example of gender non-discrimination.

Celebrating Pessimism

I am a Pessimist.

And if you are too, then you will very well understand what I am talking about. Since pessimism is not considered a great quality to have instead; I would categorize myself as not so optimistic. An optimist would accept and be proud of his/her optimism but it is not the same with a pessimist and I would wonder why. I still have to meet a person who is pure optimist, based on judgements of scenario, the same person can be optimist and pessimist.

I recently stumbled upon this very beautiful saying which completely changed my perspective towards my pessimism. I don't really know who wrote /said that, but whoever did, I am sure has /had a great depth and understanding of life.

"Pessimists are the best planners", that’s the saying and it has so much meaning hidden in just few words. Would any of you reading this blog not agree to this statement?

Being a pessimist, I would have a backup plan most of the time to any activity that I am planning. While working, if I decide on changing some part of code a bit I would always zip the old code and save it in a different folder. Heck! When I write a document my left hand fingers keep going on Alt-F-S (saving the file) after each sentence completion (or may be its just a habit). If I am shopping and I like something, I would always buy it right then and not wait for a holiday sale. What if that item is not available by the sale season and believe me, there have been some heart breaks few times when I tried to have some optimism there. When I started writing this blog, I also started writing a technical blog, just in case, and the same goes for my technical blog. I guess, cautiousness is built-in in me and I am sure it is built-in in every pessimist. Being cautious does not mean I don't take my chances, I do, but just that I have a fall back.

Ok that said, I think the soon to be famous saying above is quite true. Pessimism to the extent of living a depressed life might not be acceptable but just being plain pessimist, what's the downside. I don't think that I or anyone who is pessimist should hide or feel bad about it. If optimism is something to be proud about, pessimism brings in its own great qualities to the table. I also feel that it makes success more sweeter.

Oh! And for the record, I am not a complete pessimist (whatever that means). Honestly, in doing anything I would always decrease the probability of a successful outcome but then it's never zero...

The "What The" manner

I had a habit or bad habit I was trying to get rid of, the habit of saying "What the ????". Depending on the situation and the seriouness of the screw up, the last word would vary from "Hell", "Heck" to anything else you can think of. But I decided on giving up the habit sometime back so that my little one does not carry on the knowledge. But still there were times when I just could not avoid it. But being a good mom, I would never say the last word. So I would always end at "What the!". I thought it was safe and there was nothing wrong for my little one to learn these two very harmless words, "what" and "the".

Its been two weeks now since I am dreading to the day I thought it was harmless to say those two words. I never realised my 2.5 year old will be able to use these two words such beautifully, always in the right context. I admire the smartness of my baby and my stupidity at the same time. Here's few of our recent conversation.

ME: "Did you see the birdie. there was a birdie on that tree".
"where mama?"
ME: "its gone away now".
"Gone away. What the!.

ME: "You have to finish your food, otherwise no Mickey Mouse"
"{Sad}What the!"

ME: "That's a snail. see a big snail and a small snail."
"{pointing at them} mama snail, baby snail". "mama, where papa snail"
ME: "papa snail is at office"
"office....What the!"

ME: "Can you go play in the other room. mama is working right now"
"Working...You working mama.....What the!"

{Sad in the morning coz I am leaving for work}
"You naki {no} go mamma"
ME: "mama has to go to work sweetie, but mamma will come pick you up early"
"Work....What the!"

{and just yesterday in the car, I thought I was teaching her language by repeating myself}
ME: "You want to go to the park"
"{excited} Yes"
ME: "You would like to go to the park"
"yes mama"
ME: "yeah, we will all go to the park"
"yes"
ME: "mama will go to the park"
"yaay"
ME: "papa will go to the park"
"yeeeessss"
ME: "you will go to the park"
"yeaaah"
ME: "We will all go to the park"
"ok mama"
ME: "You want to go to the park"
"What the!"

I cannot stop laughing at those moments but I really need to get rid of this "what the" manner. At first I thought ignoring it would do the trick, but that seems to have failed. Any suggestions...

The Beauty in Slumdog Millionaire

During one of our few casual interactions, one of my colleague who hails from China declared that he was planning on watching Slumdog Millionaire over the weekend, which triggered my curiosity to learn his reaction to the movie. Not that I feel it is the best movie (even though it bagged quite a lot of awards) nor does the movie represent any of the bright or good side of the India, but somehow the fact that it is gaining so much popularity makes me happy.

The discussion of the movie started with few common questions about India and the “Who wants to be the Millionaire” show aired in the movie. I believe he was trying to learn about life in India. After some discussion on the movie came his puzzling question. A bit surprised at first, I quickly gathered the question to be very obvious coming from a bachelor. The answer to his question was a very simple Yes/No, but have you been in a situation when a simple yes/ no demands a lot of evaluation before you can take your stand. Well, that was my situation when he asked, "Do you think the girl in the movie was beautiful per Indian standard?"

If I answer yes, I thought I would not be able to introduce the famous beauties of India, Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra alike to this bachelor friend of mine. Part of my heart wanted to boast about the Indian beauties, the fact that they have been winning so many beauty pageants lately sure was something to be showcased here. But my mind didn't agree with me. Why should I categorize the actress as not beautiful when she was representing the common Indian girl and I believe that is what was in the mind of the movie director. In my opinion, Frieda Pinto (the actress in the movie) is one of many intelligent looking girls who might not be categorized as beautiful by technical standards but are quite appealing and easy on eyes to many!

So how did I answer to his question, I said "No". Yeah I wanted to show off the famous Indian beauties and I quickly did an image search for few popular Indian actresses to change his perspective towards Indian beauty. We talked on this topic for few more minutes and then he kind of concluded that, because the actress was representing the slum area of India the director did not choose a beautiful girl to play the part.

Honestly, I was not planning on giving him that idea, nor did I put it that way in words. And yes I was a bit thrown away by the conclusion myself. But for him the average women are not beautiful was the point to take away.

I kept re-evaluating our discussion for quite some time to figure out how I could have changed the conclusion only to realize that may be he hoped or already knew that No was the answer to his question.

Life without APPLE

Sometimes I wonder if it's a sin to not own any Apple product and this feeling got stronger since I started taking public transportation to work.

I sit there with my newspaper, worried about where the world is going. All I get out of it is more depression. When I pull my head out of the newspaper and look around, I find everyone around me (well most, there still are few depressed souls with newspaper in their hand in this world.....and my train) lost in the music from their iphones and ipods, shaking their head in rhythm with a look of complete ZEN. No worries of the economy downturn, job market, political tug-of-war, or who shot who.

Listening to music for me is a distraction, unlike most; I cannot work while listening to songs, so I never thought of owning an ipod. But this zen-ness is quite tempting. The feeling of having sinned by subjecting my mind to such torture from reading everyday news has surrounded me these days. Being aloof from the world and its miseries sure sounds The Right Way to live the rest of my life.

So here I am, writing this blog, especially addressing all you ipod and iphone owners, how has owning such zen-ning product affected your life?....Should I go for it too?

Sincerely,
living asis