Got tagged by nenlos. So here is my list of twenty pet peeves. One thing that made me very happy is that I had a very tough time coming up with twenty of these. Which means that not too many things make me angry. I am on the path to Nirvana.

Here they are, neatly classified:

[A] Lack of civic sense and ethics

1. People talking loudly.

2. People damaging the environment.

3. People jumping queues.

4. People disfiguring national monuments and forts (“Raju loves Priya” in white chalk on black stone).

5. Loudspeakers and crackers – forget about 10pm deadlines, if I had my way, I would ban these outright.

6. Plagiarism in any form.

7. People spitting in public places.

8. Meaningless, forwarded emails (“FW: Date you were born on – what it means”. “Please try it. It worked for me!” I open the mail to find out that since my birth date is “2”, my animal is Monkey, my tree is Banyan, blah blah blah. Well shove it up. Why are you cluttering my inbox?).

9. People honking horns.

[B] Rape of the English language

10. Incorrect grammar.

11. Use of sms-speak in emails and instant messaging. This one is the most irritating. “i luv u. c u soon. tats gr8”. Come on. Learn to type. Even while sending an sms (which in itself is a peeve of sorts), use the T9. Form full words.

12. Use of the ellipsis as the only form of punctuation. I have seen articles, emails and blogs where there is only one punctuation used: the ellipsis. At least that seems to be the attempt, for the number of dots is variable as well, not the three dots that comprise an ellipsis. How can one be expected to read entire paragraphs where clauses are left dangling and uncompleted, with ellipses inserted where words were not found?

13. Use of all lowercase. The reader would like to know where a sentence starts. Similarly, there is a way to write proper nouns. My name is “Nishad”, and I would like it to be printed that way, not as “nishad”. Blogger.com has a great affinity for eating up uppercase letters. When I put a comment on somebody’s blog, I meticulously spell my name as “Nishad”, but when I save it, blogger.com always prints it as “nishad”.

14. Use of all uppercase. It amounts to shouting.

15. “American” English. I thoroughly agree with this hilarious article (don’t know about the original source) - there is no such thing as “American” English. There is only one English and that is English English.

(Now hang me and burn me if I have made any grammatical errors).

[C] Personal likes and dislikes

16. Rap music: I call it Crap music with the C silent. Also heavy metal, which I have amply analyzed. From the spectral analysis (using Winamp, or a real oscilloscope on one occasion) one can easily see that it is White Gaussian Noise.

17. Volleyball, Basketball, Hockey – no particular reason. Just don’t like these games at all. Baseball, American football – very poor and intellectually retarded rip-offs of Cricket and Rugby.

18. Denim. Can’t stand it. How can people wear jeans?

19. Coaching classes. The entire concept is flawed. Should be banned. I am proud that I didn't waste any of my parents' hard earned money on these.

20. Buggy software, poorly designed systems and ill-written code.

I got tagged twice in two days. In the next few days, I will seek to conjure up posts in response to these tags from nenlos and shy. Don’t worry you two, I will do it.

But two tags are all I can handle. One has to be very careful when entertaining such requests. One does not want people coming to the blog to tag one just like that, for lack of better things to do - “Oh this person has a blog, let me tag him.”
“You have been tagged. List down 10 things you would like to do when you are stuck in the middle of the Sahara with a fretful porpentine and two bottles of castor oil.”
Or,
“You have been tagged. List down 20 things you like about Salman Khan.”

Tricky situations. Better to stay away. So, no more tags! Down with tags, I say. I hereby declare my blog to be “Untaggable” – that which cannot be tagged. Tag-putters will be prosecuted.

Of course if it catches my fancy, I might just oblige…

People do the most stupid things early in the morning. Some people get up, for instance. Some people get into the wrong bus. And some people get up in the wrong bus.

This is mostly about Monday mornings. After spending the weekend in Mumbai, people like me catch early morning buses to Pune, to go directly to work.
At the Food-Mall on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, these buses take a 20 minute halt. Passengers get down and have tea, food and cigarettes, while the buses are taken to be brimmed up with fuel. Now there can be five or six buses of the same company at this halt. Most passengers do not care to see what bus they have alighted from. So when they are done, they have no clue which bus is theirs.

Today, I was in my seat in the bus, contemplating the mountains in the background, existence and Laetitia Casta. One guy came over, looked around at the seat numbers and said to me:

Him: Boss, I think you are in my seat.
Me: [blank for a moment] Excuse me?
Him: See, number 9 – my ticket says number 9
Me: Even my ticket says number 9. You must be in the wrong bus.
Him: Boss, I asked the driver. This is Neeta Volvo, going to Pune, right? That’s my bus.
Me: Where did you catch the bus?
Him: Dadar!
Me: Boss, this is the Borivili bus.
Him: What? But this is Neeta Volvo, isn’t it?
Me: Yes, yes. But the Dadar bus is different. Your bus is probably that one [pointing out of the window].
Him: [not totally convinced] Can I see your ticket?
Me: Yes dude, see my ticket. Which movie was playing in your bus? See, in this bus, “Salaam Namaste” is playing [pointing to the TV, where movie is paused - Preity Zinta on screen with a pout.]
Him: [achieves enlightenment] Oh! Oh! I see. In my bus they were playing “Chocolate”. Sorry boss. Really sorry. They should tell us which bus is which. I could have missed my bus man. Ok. Ok.

Bless the guy. If only he had just noted down the license plate number while getting down. I have to admit that the bus colours and designs can be a tad confusing. Noting down the number is the best solution.

Of course this incident was a very minor misunderstanding. Some months back, there was a person who wanted to go to Nashik from Mumbai, but found himself at the Food-Mall on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway! Not only was he in the wrong bus, it wasn’t even a wrong bus going to his destination. Listening to him quarrelling with the driver and conductor, what had happened slowly dawned upon me. These buses have common designated halts. Buses to all destinations stop at the same place. The conductor rushes out, hollers out the destination and then people get into the bus. The Pune bus came to this person’s stop before the Nashik bus. The conductor got down and yelled out “Last seat, last seat”. This guy heard “Na – shik, Na – shik”, and dutifully got in. Coincidentally, and unfortunately for him, the seat number that was allotted to him for the Nashik bus was unoccupied in the Pune bus. So he settled in and dozed off. At the Food-Mall, he got down for a leak and got the shock of his life.
Don’t know what happened after that, my bus left (with me in it of course).

Moral of the story: Oh I don’t know, you can figure it out for yourself. But here is an awesome piece of advice, an unforgettable Javed Jaffrey dialogue from “Salaam Namaste” – When in Rome, do the Romans! Yes sir ;-)

Warning: This post contains graphic images of eggs and egg preparations. Viewer discretion recommended. Vegetarians beware.

The lunch menu for the B12 canteen listed "Egg Curry" as the main dish. I rubbed my hands in anticipation of a good lunch. It is not often that you get a good lunch in Infy. Little was I to know that I was counting chickens before the eggs had hatched.

I paid up the twenty four rupees, got the lunch coupon and stood in the queue with a plate in my hand. We have an unlimited buffet system. However, there is a sweet dish everyday, which is limited in quantity. This is served by a canteen person, and then we proceed towards the other food counters. When I came to this person, my eyes popped out. There was a huge bowl with the day's sweet dish in it. All is normal. Next to this, there was another huge bowl, containing plain boiled eggs, of which the person was putting two in each person's plate. This was the egg part of the egg curry. The curry was kept separately with other food-stuffs!!! You were supposed to take your two eggs, then go to the buffet, and take curry from there. Thus, you had your egg-curry ready. Bingo.

If you don't believe me, take a look at this photograph I took on my phone:

For a moment or two I was just stunned. After that I burst out laughing. What else could I do? Egg, Curry - eggs separate, curry separate. Thank goodness, the eggs were peeled.

After this experience, a few things are beginning to make sense to me now. For example I always wondered why I never got any paneer in Paneer Butter Masala. Now I know! They must be keeping the paneer pieces separately somewhere. I should have looked around; I was just taking the plain curry all along. I wouldn't be surprised if they have three different containers - for Paneer, Butter and Masala next time. You never know. What's next? Do-it-yourself kits probably.

These people really do screw up all egg dishes. My friend once ordered an Egg-Frankie. In Mumbai you get the most amazing frankies at Churchgate station. Seeing Egg-Frankie on the canteen menu, my friend couldn't resist the temptation. What these guys gave him was an omlette wrapped in a chapatti - in all likelihood, leftover from the day's lunch. As if for consolation, some cabbage shreds were strewn all over it. Here is a snap of this awesome dish:

We urgently require help here. The next thing you know, we'll be running around behind chicken to have Butter Chicken for lunch. Send us some decent cooks, please!

Facial hair is a big problem. Even for guys. For me, shaving is the single most boring thing in life. It is twenty minutes of life just wasting away. It is going to grow back any way, so what’s the point? But there’s the catch. Maintaining a beard is even more difficult and time consuming than shaving it off, so my friends who have been there, done that tell me. So I am stuck with having to shave periodically. But I have put my foot down. I have decided that I will not shave more than once a week. So every Sunday night, or Monday morning before leaving for office, I do the due.

It is still very frustrating. I often wonder what possible evolutionary advantage a moustache and beard offer a man. It definitely does not enhance sex appeal. In my college days I sported a lush moustache – it was a really fine one – and yet never did the chicks look at me twice.

I have always been a skeptic when it comes to shaving technology. The concept of twin-blade razors just does not appeal to me. Why not improve the quality of the single blade? It is like saying, “We have this razor, but we are not too convinced about the quality of the steel and the sharpness of the blade. We cannot guarantee that one blade will get the job done, so we are putting this second blade just to make sure.” Now they even have razors with three blades. Overkill!

In a bid to overcome this great hatred for shaving, I decided to go for a technological upgrade. I thought that maybe if I got one of these new flashy razors, I would probably not detest the lawn-mowing as much. So I got myself a Gillette Vector-Plus. The head-piece of this “technical marvel” is not fixed. It moves on a hinge, adjusting to the contours of your face. The twin blades have a plastic strip in between, which can be pushed forward to get rid of the bits of beard that are stuck in between the two blades. There is also a lubricating strip at the top. Quite impressive specs! The first shave I had with it felt very smooth. I was overjoyed. Was this the solution?

It wasn’t. After two shaves with the blade, the euphoria was gone. There is a serious design flaw in the Gillette Vector-Plus. They made that fancy cleaning mechanism for the gap in the blades. But they completely forgot about the gap between the lower blade and the plastic frame. Hair accumulates in that, and even after jerking the razor vigorously, it doesn’t fall out. After two shaves, the lower blade curves up like a rainbow, and the razor becomes useless. I wish they had put in some more work on the Vectors of the blade.

I am not yet rich enough to use a new blade every time. With regret I have to admit that this experiment with “cutting edge” technology is a dismal failure.

We finally got a washing machine! It is a green, twin-tub TVS semi-automatic, for eight hundred rupees.

I was meandering home from Parihar Chowk last week when I saw this shop with a few washing machines lying around outside. I casually walked in and asked the shopkeeper whether they had any second-hand pieces. They did. They had three semi-automatic machines, out of which I selected the one that looked most likely to work. I got it “tested”, which in electronic-goods-shopkeeper parlance means, that when it was plugged into an electric socket, it made noises and the motor spun. Both motors spun actually. I was happy, and after a quick consultation with my flat-mates made the deal. The shopkeeper provided me with a 3-wheeler Tempo (seventy rupees) to take the thing home. The pipe to connect tap to machine was not available, so I got the shopkeeper to extract one out of another machine. So equipped, I took it home.

At home, the builder has provided a special corner for washing machines – with a tap, a water drain outlet and an electric socket. The machine was quickly parked there, connected to water and electricity and switched on. As water filled into the drum, a layer of dead leaves and twigs rose. No problems. In Rs. 800 I wouldn’t exactly have cried foul even if I had found a dead rat or two. After three rounds of cleaning, all seemed well.

Then somebody noticed that the drum was not filling up as quickly as water was flowing into it. Water was directly flowing out of the outlet! There was this switch that you could set to “Wash” or “Drain”, and even after pushing it to “Wash”, the water continued to drain. The tap was shut and the power cut off. The machine was not yet twenty minutes old and like true engineers, we had the back panel open. I examined the waterways in detail. The problem was promptly discovered. The wash-drain switch was connected to a rubber valve, which ideally should have cut off the water. But on opening this valve, we found that the rubber was old, hard and shrunken, and unable to plug the pipe. A brilliant solution entered my mind. I called up one of my flat-mates who was still in office, and asked him to bring rubber contraceptives. He was too stunned to reply and hung up immediately. In the end I had to go out and get some myself – the idea was to wrap the rubber valve in multiple sheaths, so that it became thicker, and blocked the hole. It almost worked. The problem was that it in between all this tinkering, the stiff wire that connected the switch to the valve got disturbed. The valve would no longer go up, so that now we had the opposite problem: the water wouldn’t drain. This was most frustrating.

This condition persisted for another day, while I wracked my brains for a solution. In the end, the remedy that worked was as simple as it was brilliant. Out went all the rubber sheaths. The only thing to do was to keep the outlet pipe upright, hanging by the machine – actually they have provided a hook at the top, it is meant to be kept that way when not in use. (Picture a petrol pump with the pipe propped up vertically by the side). This is the position when the clothes are being washed. Water can rise up in the pipe only as much as it rises in the main tub. It simply cannot flow out. Elementary Physics – water levels in connected vessels. When water is to be drained, we just lift the pipe off the hook, and put it into the drain. With a bit of practice, we can now do it without spilling water. It is as easy as that.

The machine is a great boon. It is no longer necessary to ferry clothes to and from Mumbai. There is no need to lug a big bag around to office on Fridays and from office on Mondays.

Dho daala!