Witty Scribble

Aaaaaaa-chiiiii.....came another sneeze, fourth on a trot. Sitting alone in the corner of a bed, in my hostel room, I had been sneezing for quite some time now. It was a hot, harsh and dry afternoon (May end) but I was aloof from the sweltering heat. Even with a blanket on, I was shivering from cold. Luckily, the semester had ended and with practicals remaining, we were on the verge of completing the first year of engineering. I was down with fever, viral to be precise. With a sore throat and a running nose, I secluded myself and held a handkerchief to cover my nose for an important reason: 'contain the spread of infection'. Another day, working on the newly installed machine, the computer , in our house, I seem to download an innocuous looking game file from the Internet. Appearances are deceptive and so was the case with 'the file'. No sooner did the computer scan it for virus than it raised an alarm. The safe looking file was infected and the anti-virus gav...

It was my birthday earlier this month and I received a lot of phone calls from my well-wishers. The phone flashed the names for most of them, thanks to google contacts that we don’t lose the contacts on switching or losing a phone set. Few of my well-wishers though, called from a new cell number and liked playing the old school game of ‘Pehchaan Kaun’. I succeeded in a few attempts, failed miserably for some people(these people need to call me more often) in attempt to identify them by the only input I had : their voice. voice modulation Human voice is generated by action of three body parts: the lungs, the voice box, and the articulators. Let us take a minute to understand their individual functions. The lungs: There role in voice generation is to generate the right amount of air flow and air pressure required to vibrate the vocal cords(also called vocal folds). The Voice Box:  Also called Larynx or vocal cords or vocal folds, it vibrates using the air flow fro...

Yeh jo desh hai tera, swades hai tera, tujhe hai pukara ...The song and the movie are one of my all time favourites. The connection shown between the protagonist and the motherland India is truly very heartwarming. I am overwhelmed and flooded with emotions every time I see the movie (which I do quite often). I can go on writing about it, but I am not a movie critic. Here today, I am writing on a topic that has to do with Swades. It is about the NRIs and the PIOs and the OCIs. What is the difference between NRI, OCI and PIO? It is said that one will find Indians in every country on planet. Almost every middle class family has someone staying abroad, be it Australia, Middle East, the UK or the USA. NRIs are Indians who have been staying abroad for more than 183 days in a financial year or 365 days during a span of 4 consecutive years. NRIs are not subjugated to taxes in India, provided they are taxed in the nation they reside in. NRIs are eligible for voting, can own land a...

For people in finance or a normal taxpayer, 1 st of February, that was a normal day until 2016, has become a day of much more importance for a very basic and impactful reason. The union budget of India, which used to be presented on last working day of February until 2016, is now presented on 1 st of February from 2017. This week, our Finance Minister, Mr Arun, Jaitley, presented the union budget, which is the last full term budget for current tenure of government. Important in many aspects like being first budget after GST implementation and last full term budget for the tenure, the budget got all the eyeballs glued to the television screens for the budget speech by our FM. The budget speech, as it was delivered, was scrutinized word by word by the finance pundits, not just in India but globally. But they are called pundits for a reason. They understand all the fancy terms and jargons of finance. But what about us, the common people: the regular salaried employee or a small bu...

One of the daily chores assigned to me by wife is 'watering the plants'. Quite fond of plants, I have happily taken up the task and do it religiously, every morning. My mom too has a penchant for gardening. We even had a 'kitchen garden' at our home in Agra, boasting of vegetables such as Cauliflower, Spinach, Radish, Beans, Tomato. I along with my younger brothers, Kushagra & Mayank, were given the onus of watering our organically produced veggies & at times, scare away the monkeys from destroying or rather savouring our prized cultivation. Prized it was, as to every guest who came to our house, it was sort of mandatory to showcase them our vegetable garden. The green chutni made from home grown coriander really had a distinct flavour and aroma, much to our delight and guests envy 😋. Good old days. I'm getting nostalgic! Cutting back to the present day, on a pleasant and cool morning in Bangalore, I was watering the two beans climbers, which are clos...

It was a hot Hyderabad summer day and we ran out of cold water in the fridge. My wife, in an attempt to get water cooled rapidly, kept a water bottle in the freezer section. And then we forgot. She opened the freezer next day and this is what she found. Broken bottle Yes, that is a real picture clicked from my cellphone camera. Excuse for the not so impressive background of the picture. My wife was clearly disappointed with the condition of the bottle (she chose these bottles to match the color theme of rest of the kitchen stuff, and now her set of 6 bottles was short of one) but I was a little amused. It was a moment for me to travel back in time. I had a video playing in my head. It was of the science lecture in school, 6 th or 7 th standard perhaps, where my science teacher was teaching about the properties of water. So why did the bottle break actually? Usually, any substance reduces in volume when cooled and the density increases. Water follows the same tr...

' Having rice with hands adds a unique taste to the food ' says my aunt. Though I don’t really second the opinion, majority of the Indians definitely will buy it. It’s a part of our Indian culture, something which is not considered to be uncouth or gross. Sometimes I feel, how had we been eating, without the cutlery that we have at our disposal today. Eating with finesse or 'Fine Dining' would really be a recently coined term. But, when did the cutlery come in to our lives? When did the likes of Spoon, Knives and Forks were first used?  The origin of Knives, Spoons : Shells, Animal tusks and horns, as historians predict, were used as spoons to gulp in any liquid. Predominantly, knives, made out of stones were used for eating (& not spoon shaped different items). Stone, later gave way to bronze and finally to iron in around 1000 B.C. During the same period, different variety of pottery like Bone China, Fine China and Porcelain was gaining shape and acceptance ...