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I must admit, I was hooked to Prison Break for a while. Though it ended badly, a few bits will always stick with me. One of the baddies of the series, Theodore Bagwell surely has his share of fans for both right and wrong reasons. There is one particular scene where he is trying to score a woman by telling her how no one enjoys a meal anymore. That how it's now a luxury to sit down with a bottle of wine, have a good conversation or some quiet time. Those initial few lines that I mentioned made a lot of sense the other day at a stationery store where I spotted lot of cheap ball pens and roller pens displayed prominently while the fountain pens were conveniently tucked away into some shelves. Since I had to hang around the store for a while, I initiated a conversation with the owner. Once done with the pleasantries, I eagerly popped up the question of why fountain pens were treated like third cousins. From what I remembered, teachers mandated them since ball pens and roller...

A couple of years ago, Blackberry was quite relevant in the world of technology. Boys in suits swore by it and flaunting BBM was cool. By then Apple had made a dent in the mobile world with the iPhone, but companies like Nokia and Blackberry soldiered on with a loyal fanbase. I'm not denying my love for Nokia here, but BB was never my thing. When Apple took the wraps off the iPad in 2010, no one believed it had any future, dismissing it as a blown up iPod Touch. Five years since and it's definitely not true. The compeition of course did not stand back doing nothing, instead tried to take the iPad head on with designs that were not appealing or operating systems that lacked the utility of a tablet. Despite all this, I bought myself a Blackberry Playbook during a fire sale and was very pleased with my decision. I immediately dismissed the iPad as an expensive piece of metal that Apple as usual wants me to burn all my savings on. Guess we all love hating Apple at some level ...

As a child, I was scared was monsters, dinosaurs, big teeth, big claws, the lot. To an extent, I still am and have no qualms in admitting it. Bloodshed scares me; heck I can't even get through 'Child's Play' or 'Omen' without getting scared, forget mature and established horror genre. By far, the most horrifying experience of Jurrasic Park for me was when the raptors were fed in their holding. The whole idea of a tangled cow being lowered as bait and then rising - all broken and covered in blood shook me up for weeks. Let's not even get to the T-Rex right now. A decade and some later, I decided to see how such a great piece of work could be bettered. Considering how CG has evolved over time, I expected to be scared to death, but strangely, there wasn't much of it. In fact, I appreciated the movie for it's storyline where a fair amount of emphsis has been laid on how business people can easily dismiss a living animal as an 'asset'. Charac...

I recently heard a song by John Mayer where he says he seems to have done everything, yet feels incomplete, the finishing phrase - 'Maybe it's just a quarter life crisis'. It got me thinking, is there something like this at all? Or in this world where everything seems to be hyped and discussed at length by those who seem to have ample amount of time, is this phrase too just a sham? Well, after some pondering, I'm still not convinced. Its a little wierd when you think that 45 is mid-life but 25 is quarter life. I mean, shouldn't 22-23 be quarter life in that case? Or, shouldn't 50 be mid-life? I'm no one to advocate or popularize beliefs, so let me follow the norm this time and say that 25 is quarter-life. Coming to the next question - is there a crisis at all? Well, the short answer is no. Let me try and explain. Quarter life flew by me a year and some ago, but it only seems like yesterday that I even graduated from college. Those memories are so f...

Ideally, I would want to drive a bespoke Ferrari around a race track designed to suit my needs, probably on the lines of what the Dutch billionaire Ascari has built. A combination of some of the best chicanes, corners and a long straight where I can take the car to it's absolute limit. After setting a blistering lap time, I would want to enjoy a nice Tiramisu (in keeping with the Italian theme) from a personal chef and consult my trainer to burn out the damage done by all the calories gained.  When I think about this, it appears extremely materialistic at first. That I am ignoring the world's problems and thinking about myself and myself alone. A racetrack would mean cutting down of trees and relocation of many of the less fortunate. Not to mention all the fuel, wasted food etc., However, this is exactly the kind of life that company's try to portray in one's mind. That the next purchase will ensure attention, exclusivity and announce your arrival to the world...

Someone once told that instead of going by hearsay, we must experience life to its fullest. That there is a certain joy in knowing things first hand than trying to put on our thinking caps to paint a picture of the narration. Sure, we probably will not get to do everything that we come by, but there are these innate desires that you simply want to achieve no matter what. You hear stories, life experiences saying that most of it is over rated and that a normal life is all we crave for, but there is something that pushes you to say 'I have to do this myself'. Let's say one of your friends drives a Ferrari some time or you see Jeremy Clarkson singing it's songs of praise; there is always proof in the pudding, isn't there? Wouldn't you want to get your hands on that Ferrari some time despite knowing you can't use it in the city, probably not afford the insurance or rob a bank to get a new set of tires, but defying all logic, you want one. While great minds...

When Steve Jobs said that there was room for a third device between a laptop and a smartphone, I was not in complete agreement. While I used my desktop for carrying out most of the important work and browsed the internet or watched some videos on my phone, there was no compelling reason to buy a tablet. After a while though, thanks to my employer's generosity and some impluse online shoppoing, I got hands on an iPad Mini. The moment I started using it, my reaction was that of convenience. I enjoyed the iPad with it's plethora of apps and games to an extent that I thought I could make do without a laptop for my college. Turns out, those days are still quite some time away. So, using a tablet as a standalone device for computing is fine in advertisements or when companies showcase perfect scenarios where you have ample connectivity. However, in the real world, we demand a lot more from our devices, especially once we term our personal computers. So far, despite pairin...