tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88222325047711966772012-01-27T14:32:55.004+05:30Whoosh comes the willow! Its Gopi here welcoming you to travel alongside my rants, raves and tangential outlooks to what goes on all around me... All those private takes, uncountered slights, maddening obstacles in the course of living... straight from the trenches of wherever work takes me... Thanks for hoppin' in!The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.comBlogger81100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-67765085969399954782010-06-03T07:44:00.003+05:302010-06-03T14:11:58.495+05:30

WAYLAID ON EMPTY STREETS? TRY A DIFFERENT VERNACULAR! Of late, a new kind of menace is wreaking havoc in Bangalore – of extortionists in motorbikes. In an era of mail/twitter/facebook/blogosphere-driven mass paranoia, it's amazing that the EXACT SAME method has been adopted by gang after thuggish gang (possibly from the same coaching camps) with stunning success. They seem to be following all

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-76272923954805252842010-05-10T21:54:00.006+05:302010-05-10T22:32:16.656+05:30

I was alone (with two stranger-anxiety ridden cats for company) at my friend Liza's house in a town quaintly titled "Village at Nagog Woods" in the OUTskirts ("out" intentionally capitalized) of Boston wondering how to get a taxi for my 12pm lunch meeting for a retail client. Google maps kindly informed me that if I take the highway option its 35 minutes, so I decided to go to local.yahoo.com and

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-73211724546411000962007-05-16T23:52:00.019+05:302010-05-11T07:30:08.877+05:30

February 2002 American Idol- Season 9 Walking through the streets of Harajuku, from where the rest of Tokyo gets ideas on latest fashions and fads, I am face to face with an apparition of dyed blond hair, painted brown face and dark lipstick. The Yamambas of Japan take their time and carefully paint themselves at shades infinitely darker than their natural skin tones. So, dark is cool, eh? I

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-52704898313297767592007-05-15T22:53:00.000+05:302007-05-16T23:21:45.646+05:30

February 2002It was one of those events just waiting to happen, in spite of my stubborn persistence with the cat philosophy, which is summed up as, "Close your eyes and the world turns dark with you."Outside the Japan Railways Station (JR Eki, in local parlance) in Kawasaki, there are at any point in time around 50,000 bicycles. They are arranged in neat rows of three and in perfectly parallel

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-30111436756918771742007-05-14T23:33:00.000+05:302007-05-15T00:18:02.617+05:30

January 2002I confess to this, I have never been a fan of chewing gums. Personally, I could never take a fancy to something which gets itself rid of 99.97% of all taste and sweetness some 0.3 seconds after its inside the mouth, leaving the chewer to spend the next three hours vainly trying to extract the remaining 0.03% of the leftover sucrose. Sometimes this process goes on for hours until the

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-3699094781658925932007-05-13T10:28:00.000+05:302007-05-17T00:12:04.553+05:30

March, 2001"Writing on Japanese" language is any day a much more pleasant alternative to "writing Japanese language" or even humbly attempting to do it. Japanese is considered to be one of the toughest languages in the world, especially if one goes with the intention of learning to read and write it. For functional literacy level itself, its supposed to take years for native kids. This is because

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-30046609542446934832007-05-12T02:47:00.000+05:302007-05-17T00:11:42.878+05:30

(A Near-Death Experience late evening on FEBRUARY 18, 1999) I glanced at my watch. It was 8.50 PM. "Rohit, I better be going now." Dwarakesh (Daru for us), ever the practical gent, echoed my views, "Rush or it will be quite difficult for you to get your train". The next thirty seconds were spent on choices. My train to Hyderabad was to start from Bombay's (or should I say Mumbai’s) Victoria

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8822232504771196677.post-5054071273884698722007-05-11T10:11:00.000+05:302007-05-15T00:30:17.837+05:30

Well, i've decided to finally turn The Curious Onlooker mailing list into a blog form (rather than the restricted yahoogroups form). It sure is a leap of faith, so to start with, I plan to do what producers of most long running serials do when bereft of new ideas...start doing re-runs ;-)Having begun my yahoogroups mailing list in 2001 alongside my Japan sojourn, I'll begin by posting my (old)

The Curious Onlookerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04076193572343851992noreply@blogger.com1