Chp 427. Hello Gaddafi!

Say hello to Gaddafi, our new Persian doll-face kitten.



He is 8 weeks old. My flat-mate bought him from an exotic pet shop for 7 grand. He’s cute, furry, playful, and best of all, toilet-trained. This is where he goes to pee and poop…



I love cats, but at the same time, I’m not a cat person. I can pet a cat anytime, cuddle it, kiss it, baby-talk it and spoil it, but if the caterwaul of a cat in the middle of the night wakes me up, I swear to God I will throw anything I can find to shut the cat up.

That’s probably the difference between me and my sister who is a real cat person. She adopted a stray kitten abandoned by its mother, nursed it back to good health on her own, and recently her cat “Charger” was selected as “Cat Of The Day” at this cat community she joined.



As for me, I don’t think I have the time and energy to do the same… I once took in two adopted puppies, fed them, played with them, toilet trained them and it was such a heartbreak having to leave them when they got older (long story)… Maybe that’s why I am afraid of pet commitments now… Works the same as any relationship I guess.

We’ve been taking Gaddafi to work every day so far, and it really brightens up the office spirit. If you’re tired or stressed out, he’ll just walk towards you and give you that curious stare, as if trying to say “Take it easy boss, don’t worry, be happy”. And then he would so casually walk across our keyboards without giving a damn about our work, lolz.



Here is him entertaining himself…



See, he is content on his own too, unlike dogs who we have to give a lot of our attention to. To end this post, here’s another video I took this morning… Playful, naughty and mischievous little fucker he is (in a good way)… He ended up tearing my jeans too!



Cheers :-)

Chp 426. Return of the Mizohican!

It was way back in 2007 when I wrote my blog post - No longer a Mizohican where I mentioned about how a part of me died after I finally decided to “grow up” and “let go” of my signature Mohawk hairstyle. My Mohawk was the reason why my online nick became Mizohican (Mizo + Mohicans).

Now it’s back with a bang!

So this recent Halloween, I woke up perfectly fine, smiled, walked down to my regular salon, and instead of my regular cut, I asked for a Mohawk cut. My regular stylist understood right then, and without raising an eyebrow, got down to business immediately. After that he gave me my regular head massage.



Everything happened so fast.

One of the main reasons why I decided to go all Mohican again was probably because of what my dear friend Samir said to me last Saturday.

So last Saturday was MMA FCC (Mixed Martial Arts – Full Contact Championship) that I was really looking forward to going to. I even blogged about my experience when I went to a previous MMA FCC event. On that “fateful” day, I got ready, drank a couple of quick rum shots, since there was going to be only beer at the venue.

Since the venue was in “town” side of Mumbai, I had to take an auto till Bandra, and from there switch to a taxi since autos aren’t allowed in town. That was when it hit me – a minor high BP. Maybe it was because of the humidity and that I drank too much too fast, but I decided not to push it in case it aggravated, so from the taxi stand, I took another auto back to my house, cancelling my plans.

I called up Samir, with whom I was supposed to go to the fight with, and explained about my condition. I thought he was going to stay stuff like, “duuuudeeee come mannnn”. But instead, all he said was, “(laughter) I understand, you’re an old man now (laughter)”…

BASTARD :-)

And then he went to the fight and to rub salt into the wound, he sent me photos through whatsapp as it happened, right from there in front of the freaking ring!

 



So that was when I decided… F**k this shit, I gotta go all Mohawk again, just to prove that I still got young blood flowing through me! Screw age and screw “I’m too old for this shit” shit. I can do it!

I just had one concern - I’ve already booked my tickets for home on December, and our Mizo society is a bit conservative so if I go to Church for Christmas with a Mohawk, it could get quite scandalous. So I’m hoping it will grow back in a month… hopefully, lolz.

That day being Halloween and everyone’s gonna come to office dressed as zombies and vampires (so demanded the circular mail from the HR sent to the entire office the previous day), I realized it was the perfect time to go Mizohican again.

And so here I am… :)







You have no idea how liberating it felt! It was then that I realized how much we had to bow down to societal pressures and the stigma of what people consider is right or wrong. I’ve never felt so free like this in a long long time. And there is always the advantage of saving money on shampoo! (though that is reciprocated by spending extra on facewash now, lolz)









BONUS – Yesterday, my dear friend Shweta from Crude Area launched her e-commerce portal finally and we had a little celebration over champagne and other stuff. Please do visit the website CRUDE AREA and check out all the amazing kickass artistic posters and images you can order. The art is really awesome.



Cheers :)

Chp 425. 10,000 misual fans & more to come

Last night, around 10pm, this website – misual.com, that a couple of friends and I run, just hit 10,000 fans on Facebook. It was indeed a momentous milestone for us, especially when you take into consideration that we do not profit from the site (ZERO monetization plan) while all of us have our respective jobs and manage the site part-time, and we do it purely out of good will and passion to indulge people in debates and healthy discussions.

10,000 is indeed a good number, as we have never done any promotional campaign for the site. 10,000 fans, or to be technically precise, 10,000 likes (initially, it used to be called “fans”) is not an easy achievement at all, because unlike Facebook groups, we cannot just add anybody from our Facebook friend-list to the page. The person himself/herself, will have to click the “LIKE” button on his/her own volition.



As of this very minute, misual.com has –

16,272 published posts
5,80,528 comments
16,857 registered users

Strong figures. Yes a lot of things have changed since Ben first made the site way back in 2005, shifting it from Drupal to WordPress in 2006, facing our first FIR case in 2008, and then Ben retiring from misual.com and leaving the responsibilities to us on August 6th 2009, one day after the site’s 4th anniversary. And now, we’re slowly moving into 2013, towards our 8th anniversary and the site is still growing strong.

But of course we know things do not last forever. I’ve been in the online world long enough to understand web portals and the dynamics of online platforms. Right from the days when threaded discussion forums were popular (remember those izawl.com, zoram.com days?), to the times when Drupal, WordPress and Joomla CMS forums came into being, I’ve seen many top Indian discussion forums like desipundit, blogbharti and mutiny.in rise to the top and crumble. I watched in great interest when Reddit and 4chan saw a mass exodus of members leaving their sites. Remember how popular Digg and StumbleUpon used to be at one point of time? The two sites are now more or less dead…

And then came the rise of social networking sites that had seen many hits and misses. Hi5 is now like a mediocre social gaming site after Tagged purchased it two years ago, MySpace just got relaunched recently (I love the soundtrack used) but it looks more like a music social network site planning to compete against last.fm, Grooveshark, Pandora, Spotify etc. rather than go directly up against big daddy Facebook itself, and we also saw how Orkut, which was once the reigning champ of Social Networking in India, went through a slow agonizing death and made way for the new king - Facebook.

Therefore, with the internet constantly evolving, even we have to constantly evolve if we want to survive. We have tried comment plugins like Disque, implemented Facebook “likes” on posts and comments, tried integrating the login with Twitter api and so on. But in most of the cases, since our traffic is so high, all these extra plugins utilize more resources at godaddy where we have hosted our server, leading them into taking down our site or giving us a stern warning for the umpteenth time. And like I mentioned initially, managing misual.com is purely a voluntary work, so we can’t afford to buy any server space as we are not gaining financially from this site.

Hence as of now, Facebook page is a way of coping with the technological change. I created this official Facebook fan page in 2010. Two years later, we are now 10,000 fans/likes strong. The irony of this is, when it comes to the actual work I am doing for a living, I am handling a lot of social media accounts for many of our esteemed clients (which I can’t name for the obvious reason) and many of them actually have fewer fans than misual.com, hihihi…

Apart from keeping up with technology and the trends and changes, from all my experiences so far, I think another very important factor to running a community site successfully is to make sure all the admins are on the same page with each other. I have seen my fair share of many popular discussion forums (that I was a member of) that broke up merely because the admins failed to see eye-to-eye with each other regarding a post deletion or site guidelines. And then one set of admins would leave the site, creating a similar (competing) website and so on, and both the members of those two sites would perpetually bitch about each other. I have seen this same story unfold too many times all over the interwebz.

And of course loyalty among the users build up and people start picking their sides during an online battle that includes mass spamming and DDoS attacks on each other. Take for instance the recent 9gag – 4chan /b/ war, or 4chan’s “Operation Overlord” against Tumblr. Another good example of a relationship gone sour would be LulzSec’s attack on 4chan, the infamous /b/ Civil War due to Boxxy, and the war between Backtrace Security and Anonymous group. Backtrace was once a part of Anonymous.

If the admins don’t have a high level of tolerance and cannot stand each other, or vehemently disagree with each other on various issues, then one can only expect a storm brewing up. Luckily, for misual.com, it’s as if all of us (the admins) share a single brain :P

So, this is just a quick update to announce misual.com crossing the 10,000 threshold, and in spite of us losing traffic due to the popularity of Facebook, we still have a very significant and sizeable amount of loyalists who visit the site every day.

Yes, be ready to accept the fact that one day, misual.com will go defunct. This is the online world we’re talking about. Everybody keeps moving on. Nothing stays permanent in this world. Every day I wake up with the thought that misual.com will no longer see any activities. In fact, 7 years is an EXTREMELY long life for a website considering how many sites have died till now. But as long as it is still active, I along with the other admins will try our best to keep the site alive and kicking. Of course one of these days, it will go down, afterall, this is the online world. But I promise you this - if we’re going down, we’re going to go down fighting :)

Cheers!

Chp 424. Networking dinner III: Spanish Surprise

So last Friday I took part in my third Coral Networking Dinner event. The theme was “Spanish Surprise”.

I have blogged about Coral Dinner before, you can check the detailed post here: Networking dinner II: Mediterranean Cuisine, guaranteed to make your mouth water, especially if you are a Foodie.

So as I have mentioned before, Coral Dinner is an exclusive networking dinner event, held at Prahlad Kakkar’s bungalow. Mint even described it as a Snooty Foodie’s Club, as it is held just once or twice a month, and we have to confirm our reservation days before. There are only around 10 seats. Once the limit is reached, the others get on a waiting list, in the hope that one of the participants cancels. When a participant cancels without a valid excuse in the last minute, he or she gets blacklisted and cannot take part in further Coral dinners again.

It’s aptly called Networking Dinner because we all go alone and meet other participants for the first time and we start talking about different things, and then as you keep talking about this and that, more often than not, you’ll end up finding a link, like you have a common friend or you have worked on the same client before etc etc… while at the same time enjoying the delicious food the hosts are serving. The cost of the dinner is 1200 per head.

The participants this time were:

Murtuza –  Angel Investor
Kumar Jhuremalani – Founder of pet pujaris and professional Game Tester
Shubada Lele – Owner of Shubh Yog Kendra, yoga specialist for special disease
Shivram – Director for a leading financial company
Neetu Prasad – Analyst at a telecom company
Sarang Kulkarni – Works at Lacadives, the dive shop
Pawan Deokule – Managing Director at Digicat Digital Marketing Pvt Ltd
Megha Goyal – Founder of i2Cook and Head Chef at Coral Networks
Kima – Lover of Old Monk, Creative Trailblazer at Webchutney Pvt Ltd

Yes, as you can see from the array of different professions, it was indeed a very interesting night as we all shared our experiences and stories.

The theme this time was “Spanish Surprise”, which means everything was going to be Spanish.

The moment I reached and met the others, I was served Sangria, which is red wine punch with chopped fruits. Meg used Shiraz Sula for the wine, and both golden & red apples for the fruit. It was very refreshing and stronger than I expected as it hit my head on my third drink. The non-alcoholics had guava juice natural from Auroville.



So as the conversation got going, I found out Shivram was an alumnus of IIM-Bangalore and I told him I dropped out from that institution and we immediately bonded, talking about L-Square parties, placement, professors, pranks etc…

Meg served the appetizers soon, and for vegetarians there was freshly baked organic bread with romesco sauce… I love the sauce… I asked if the bread is also called Spanish bread, and she said no because Spanish bread is actually a Filipino sweet bread… Ahhh my knowledge about food just got a little bigger. Romesco sauce by the way, is quite controversial, so I’ll just put it here before anybody argues with me – It is a Catalan pepper sauce. Catalans take it as an offence when people call it a Spanish sauce, because of the whole Catalonian nationalism issue in Spain…



For non vegetarians, there was Tortilla De Patatas (which basically means Spanish style omelette and potato pancakes), which tasted like no eggs I had ever tasted before. It was really smooth and easy to swallow, as it melted in our mouths quickly. I tried my best to find and identify the savoury of any distinct spice in my mouth, but failed to do so, so I just took another sip of my Sangria and enjoyed the food without trying to analyze it.



And then my favourite – parsley prawns sautéed in oil, garlic and parsely with a squeeze of lime. Murtuza and I quickly became close friends as he and I were the only ones eating prawns that night. And boy, the two of us alone gorged through the entire serving, lolz.



Shubada Lele, the yoga specialist shared very interesting stories about her line of work, and how she even spent many months in Burma, learning about a specialized form of yoga. We even discussed about the Mizos, the Chin people and how there are many people from “Zohnahthlak” living in Burma.

Kumar Jhuremalani shared a lot of his travel experiences in South America, and as it turned out, he used to work at Resultrix, where I know a lot of people. Apart from being a foodie and the founder of Pet Pujaris, a popular foodie group, he is also a game tester and avid gamer. I told him I’m also working on a game project right now, so we activated our Geek Mode and spent the rest of the evening discussing all types of games and the gaming market in India.

The main course was soon served, and there were two options - Seafood Paella and Vegetarian Paella. Paella is a traditional Valencian rice dish with vegetables, saffron, olive oil and other seasonings. Seafood Paella is very popular, especially in the East coast of Spain.



We finally ended the night with Sponge cake, topped with cinnamon spiked cream. It was absolutely yummmm. Your mouth is watering right now, right? :)



As the night ended, around 2 in the morning, we all bid each other good night and Meg told me to take the remaining seafood paella home as I loved it so much. So I happily did that, and the next day, I had the same food again, along with omelette, fried in my own style though, not Spanish.



This was the last Coral event of this year, so I can’t wait for next year when it resumes again. What new cuisine will I get to taste? Which new people will I get to meet? Only time will tell, I guess.

Cheers everyone :)

All Photos courtesy Megha Goyal, except of course the last pic :P

Chp 423. Those good ol cassette days

My dear blog friend John Ruolngul’s latest post update [Thank God for Cassettes!! (and Music)] inspired me to update my blog with this post.

Yes, I miss the good ol days when our lives revolved around tape cassettes. And how we always used to carry a Reynold’s pen with us, to rewind or fast forward the cassette as we didn’t want to waste our walkman battery’s life. Was Reynold’s pen popular back then because it was actually a good pen, or was it purely accidental that the pen happened to fit inside a cassette perfectly? A little case study needs to be done here.

Much has been said about cassettes. You can read John’s blog above, or you can move over to my ex-roomie’s post about cassettes which is funny and nostalgic.

Over here, I’ll just update this post with a few pictures I took today.

After reading John’s blog post, I immediately scavenged through my old junk, and dug out my cassette collection! Yes my current flat mate says I’m a hoarder, and unfortunately that is true. I have A LOT of things I carry around with me all the time because I cannot throw them away due to too many sentimental attachments and sweet memories. So imagine me who move from one city to the other many times carrying my entire past with me wherever I go… hehehe… yeah, the “movers and packers” bill is always quite a lot.

So here it is, a soon to be extinct species of the music industry…

 

Though I was brought up on glam-rock and glam-metal, like most Mizos who’re born in the late 70’s and early 80’s who were crazy about Guns n’ Roses, Def Leppard, Warrant, Firehouse, Cinderella, Nazareth etc., there was a rebel side of me that was really into heavy metal too. Slayer, Testament, Helloween, Dio, Danzig etc. were some of my favorite bands.





Ozzy was my idol back then, not because of his onstage gimmicks as it wasn’t that easy getting access to music videos back then (remember Headbangers Ball on MTv?), but rather because I fell in love with his voice. And I’m probably one of the few people who prefer Megadeth over Iron Maiden.



And then came the transition to “Nu-metal” like RATM and Limp Bizkit in the late 90’s. “Significant Other” was the first Limp Bizkit album I bought, though I have no freaking idea where it is now… I even bought a cool Korn tee-shirt, which was probably the second musical band tee-shirt I owned, after a GnR tee-shirt I bought in the late 80’s.



OSTs were another category I also collected back then. I swear I had at least more than 50 movie soundtrack cassettes at one time, now all gone due to assholes who never return borrowed cassettes. Whenever I watch a new movie (those were the days we actually used to go to movie theatres to watch new releases as internet access was either unavailable or expensive), I always paid attention to the background track numbers while the movie was playing, and then decide whether I should buy the OST cassette or not.



Here’s my Mizo cassette collection. My first Mizo band album was “Tribal Power”, which apparently is now lost in oblivion. Love that band… I bought a Nunui cassette from Nunui herself when I met her in Bangalore during a dinner party at a friend’s place. I’m sure she won’t even remember me or that incident anymore, lolz.



Here’s some of my mushy love song collection… it has songs like “Cherish” by Kool and the gang, “Donna” by Ritchie Valens, “Drive” by The Cars, “Rise to the occasion” by Climie Fisher etc… I miss those days when every house party always used to end with a slow jam session, with every couple holding each other and swaying slowly to songs like Lady in red, I wanna know what love is, Sailing, True colours, Listen to your heart etc etc…



And what would a cassette collection be without the Christmas albums? :) They complete the collection… they’re the most sought after albums during December and then remain untouched for the other 11 months of a year, lolz.



And here are a few other albums from my collection. I remember buying the Evanescence album, but by then, it was already the era of mp3s, and having a lot of Theatre of Tragedy songs and other symphonic gothic bands with female frontman like Lacuna Coil, Nightwish, Sirenia, Within Temptation etc, I clearly failed to understand the hype Evanescence made.



And oh, yes, there was a phase when I was really into gangsta hiphop too, lolz. But by that I don’t mean the rappers of today who think rapping is only about disrespecting women and calling them ho’s and acting like a thug while wearing pants up to their knees… My generation of rappers were actually talented, with the likes of 2Pac, Bone thugz n’ harmony, Dr. Dre, DMX etc… and lolz, apparently I used to call myself “Kill Boyband” Kima back then, haha.



So why do I still have this “junk” with me? Like I said, I guess it’s because of the emotional attachments I have with them. Each cassette tells a story… Like for example, one of the more recent cassettes I bought had this scribbled inside…

Daddy – Curzon Court B’lore, Quaterly Hols ’98 – ’99



I always write things like this on all my cassettes, just to remember when I bought them or with whom. When I read the one above, it filled me with warm memories immediately. Back in 1998, my dad flew down from Mizoram to spend my school’s quarterly holidays with me in Bangalore, instead of me going home. As most of you may know, I’ve always been in a hostel away from home and family most of my life, so that particular holiday, I really bonded with my dad.

The two of us stayed in this suite at Curzon Court, which is a prominent hotel right on Brigade Road. And then one evening, our family friends Pu Rinsanga (now retired IAS) and his wife came over to our room to play cards with dad, while I went out with their son Hminga, who was also my friend and classmate. That night, we pub-hopped all over Brigade Road, and finally we tried this street drugs called laddoo, which was pretty popular back then. It’s apparently sweetened bhaang. After that, his friends came along and we went to visit a haunted temple at a very deserted forest outside the city, as there’s a rumor that a spirit would chase those who came to ring the temple bells at midnight. Our aim was to ring and run away as fast as we could.

Hehe, I was so bloody drunk and stoned at the same time that when we reached the venue and rang the temple bells, everybody ran as fast as they could while I just sat down on the steps not giving a f*ck about anything. Lolz. That morning, around 2-3’ish, Hminga and his friends carried me all the way up to my hotel room, made me stand up against the door, rang the bell and ran away because they were afraid my dad would scold them. That night was the first time dad ever saw me wasted, and I was trying my BEST to act sober and walk straight and speak without a slur, lolz. The next morning, when I woke up, dad gave me a full bottle of ice cold water and it felt SO good downing it. After that, we went shopping.

See, I remembered all that just by looking inside the cover of all my cassettes. Each one has a tale to tell.

So these are my tape cassettes. What about you? Still have yours? Hit me back.

Cheers.

Chp 422. Warriors Of The Rainbow

When I told my friend I was going to watch this movie called “Warriors Of The Rainbow”, his first reaction was, “Dude, haha, the name sounds a bit gay, don’t ya think? Rainbow warrior? Seriously?”

Lolz, well, I never thought of it that way. I don’t have anything against gay pride, but that doesn’t mean I must watch gay movies just to show my support to the rainbow movement.

“Noooo idiot, this movie was recommended to me by a friend with whom I share similar taste in movies. He told me to watch it definitely... He’s the same guy who recently told us to watch “The Flowers of War” which you initially thought was gay too because of the FLOWERS but it was an awesome movie, remember?”

He nodded.

Ahh… The Flowers Of War.  Such a tear-jerker. One of the best movies I have seen this year.

Whenever I’m about to watch a foreign language film, I always do a quick research online first. The director of TFOW was Yimou Zhang, who directed three of my all-time favorite Chinese language movies - Hero, House Of Flying Daggers and Curse Of The Golden Flower. But I was a bit skeptical as all those movies were during ancient China, whereas TFOW was during Japan’s invasion of Nanking in 1937. Will he be equally good in making a post-modern era movie? Christian Bale was in the movie and it had a good rating on IMDB so we decided to watch it. Oh, what an awesome movie it was!

 

The conflicts between the convent girls and the prostitutes were captured and portrayed beautifully. The movie depicted humanity at its finest, about how some of us are like savages in the worst of times while others sacrifice themselves for a noble cause.  I highly recommend you watch it too.

Now, coming to the topic of this post – Warriors Of The Rainbow.



When we watch something extremely touching, even if we are the most testosterone pumped up male, sometimes a tear involuntarily rolls down our cheek (unless of course you’re some sociopath devoid of any human emotions and feelings). For me, while I was watching WOTR, there were at least more than ten occasions when I had to wipe the tears off my cheeks. The last time something like that happened to me was when I watched Hotel Rwanda many years ago.

WOTR really really touched me because, being a Mizo, I found so many similarities between our Mizo tribe and the Seediq Bales. We’re both head-hunters, collecting heads of the people we killed in battle to display our feat, and at the same time we’re not like the headhunters of Africa where headhunting is more related to cannibalism over there. We both fought against other clans of our tribe regularly, living separately at our respective villages headed by a chief. We have our own territories or “hunting ground”, and we love to celebrate by sitting around a fireplace and getting drunk while dancing with the womenfolk in rhythm to the music beat. The men do the fighting and hunting while the women do the cooking and weaving. We were animists, and the Seediqs believed in something like an afterlife beyond the rainbow.

I know, I know, that is pretty much a common tribal trait across the world, especially a warrior tribe. But watching the movie gave me goosebumps and I had this really strong feeling of kinship with the Seediqs.

The Japanese took a long time to conquer them, wherein they lost thousands of troops against a few Seediq warriors because of their jungle warfare tactic and unconditional courage and love for their homeland. Similarly, the British army took a while to conquer our tribe even though they had far superior weapons and artillery.

The movie is based on a true event called the “Wushe incident”. Well, there’s this recent Mizo movie released in Mizoram about the historical massacre of Khawnglung Run village, which is also based on a true story. Below is a trailer of that movie –



Yes you’ll see so many similarities between the Mizos and Seediqs, though the two film scripts are very different (one is about a struggle to rescue the love of his life, while the other is a struggle to lead the people he loves to freedom from the invading Japanese forces)



Of course there is a huge difference in the production quality of the two trailers displayed above due to the amount of money and talent invested in the projects (plus, the executive producer of WOTR is John-fucking-awesome-Woo). But it really feels good to know the Mizo film industry is coming up this fast.

At Warriors Of The Rainbow, you will see how clans perceive each other, and how people will do anything to protect their land and family. There are awesome fight scenes, and very moving scenes too that will guarantee a tear to fall down.

Do watch it when you can, you will not regret it. I’m ending this short post with a few more pictures of Warriors Of The Rainbow.

Pic source: Rotten Tomatoes