Personal Reflections – Page 79

Crash and burn

My phone crashed yesterday. That event, by itself, is stunning since this is a dumbphone. ‘Twas just lying on the table, switched itself off – and when I powered back on, ALL of my stored data was gone. No contacts, no messages, no settings – even the phone memory and my SD card had been formatted! When I tried to re-sync contacts from a backup on my computer, I kept getting a ‘USB device not recognised’ error. Eventually I did get it to work though. This whole incident really pissed me off. And now, GPRS doesn’t work no matter how much I try the correct settings. Try calling Airtel customer care and all you get is a recorded message asking you to SMS any query to their toll-free number. When you do that, you just get an SMS back asking whether you want to know your balance. I think they’ve been playing Bureaucracy lately.

BTW, Pony is off to UK now. Back to UK, that is. On 17th. He’s planning to impress some teacher by show her Pradeep’s Fundamental Physics for Class 12. I don’t exactly have all the details on how that will work out.

‘Convent-educated’ guy

Convent educated terrorust — Now which convent did HE go to?

Not sure whether there’s a Razzie equivalent of the Pulitzer, but one thing that definitely seems to be true is that media organizations are fighting a fierce battle to outdo each other in terms of stupidity. No other rational explanation seems to available why today’s Hindustan Times had a front page story saying that the mastermind of the Delhi (and earlier bomb blasts which happened this year in India) is a ‘…convent-educated, computer-savvy bombmaker…’. That doesn’t seem right, does it? Can’t say whether they got way too enthusiastic about writing in an English newspaper and translated madrassa into ‘convent‘. Maybe this will provide fodder for matrimonial ads – “Match wanted for psychotic convent-educated groom. Knowledge of bombshells bombmaking vitally necessary”. After all, HT’s caption for the photo says that he is ‘…currently the most wanted man in the country’. Read this whole paragraph again. Full of bad puns which had me cackling for a long time.

It could only be a staggering coincidence by which the same page of the same newspaper on the same day also had the magic number on the front page, albeit in a less-than-humorous context.

In other news, Prateek Vijayavargia was the runner-up this year at Siddhartha Basu’s HT InQuizitive 2008. School administrators didn’t believe me when I said buzzer systems could break down. One broke down during the inter-DPS quiz; thankfully, we had a spare. Even with a tree of knowledge to lean on, Mr Basu couldn’t conduct the buzzer round since one of them wasn’t working. Vir Sanghvi found it difficult to lift his arse up from his toilet seat (probably), so this year’s chief guest was Suneet Tandon. Promotion, ‘cuz that fellow is generally the emcee. I hear that it was a very close fight though, with the top two positions being decided by a tie-breaker. Surprisingly, DPS VK didn’t send its top team; instead sent some rookies to gain experience. Weird choice to make for the very biggest quiz of the year (now that Time of India Fun-da-Mental won’t be happening this year).