A Horrorful Hallowe'en

Muahaha it's Hallowe'en again, and its time for me to unfurl my Bat wings, bare my fangs and let my pent up rage loose again. Or perhaps I can just put on a set of cheesy plastic fangs and scare little girls (my friends will tell me I don’t need the extra fangs).

I read somewhere that the most popular costume was that of a princess. A Princess?? What has Halloween come to? And of course the staple fare of vampires, Frankensteins, and ghosts has become way passé. How about these monsters ?

Creature - Culture

Hai-uru - African

Raktabija - Indian

Chindis - Navajo

Golem - Jewish

Chupacabra - Puerto Rican, Mexican

Jinn - Islamic

Banshees - Irish

Ghouls - Arabic

Windigo - Cree and Ojibwa

Read more abt them here

Well, I have another halloweeny tale, one which occurred quite some time before Halloween, which makes it all the more funny. Saujanya, Gaurav and I had taken a bus out to PCWorld to search for laptop cases (which we didn’t really find), and on the way back we popped into an Asda we had never visited before. Well this Asda had a Halloween section and we found a mask which was absolutely hilarious. We were literally rolling in the aisles, tears streaming down our faces. So we bought the masks, and Gaurav put it on, and stood by the road with his thumb out pretending to be trying to hitch a ride, while I and Sauji were in paroxysms of mirth. I’m sure that unsuspecting drivers felt thay had suddenly entered an episode of The Twilight Zone. We caught the bus back (it was a Double Decker) and Gaurav sat right in front with the mask on. People were staring and pointing, and I’m sure that Gaurav was especially pleased when a whole gaggle of girls exiting a nightclub started pointing at him and screaming and laughing.

An addendum to this is that a few days later Gaurav visited our friend Prashanth's house. Now Prashanth has a young daughter Nitika. Well Gaurav, decided it would be a blast if he wore his mask, and so he put it on and when the opened the door, he peeped in. Besides sending Prashant and his wife into hysterics, Nitika took one look at Gaurav and started crying. Gaurav told us later (a little proudly I feel) that Nitika kept crying for the next hour. To which our obvious response was, 'Thank god you wore the mask. If she saw your real face she would have cried the whole night!'.

Have a look at the mask below - (click on it to get the full view)

For my faithful readers, I have a few ghoulish pictures, most courtesy http://www.deviantart.com/ (which is a really excellent site for graphically minded people like me).

In Retrospect
I've been ignoring my blog again, since my life has been pretty exiting and hectic for the past few weeks. Just for example, I've been in three countries in the last two weeks (four if you count Vienna airport), lost my passport in one of them, and changed three offices in three weeks.

Well, am going to start posting and pre-dating my blogs again, so be sure to visit regularily to see what incredibly foolish things I do next.

Just for example visit http://www.bash.org/?689521 , where I've finally made it on Bash.org. In case you were guessing, I'm r34en, and yes, I AM a n00b.

A Big Bang

It's Deepawali, the Indian festival of lights, so I'd just like to wish all my avid readers a Subh Deepawali and loads of fun this holiday season. Have a look at some 'pataka' pics -

Swiss Pics Day 1

A Swiss Tale - Day 1

Well, I'm sitting at Vienna airport waiting for my connection to Delhi, and what better way to kill time than catching up with my blog. This has been a real eventful month, too eventful by half.

Let me start with my grand holiday to Switzerland... one I almost did'nt return from!

Day 1

It was a bright evening as Saujanya, Gaurav, Shweta, Shelly, Arthur and I set off from Norwich. A cheerful mood prevailed, except of course for Arthur, who was catching up on his hibernation, and Gaurav who was lost in a coma. As anticipated, Saujanya, Shelly and Shweta were at each other's throats from the get go. I of course spent my time making inane comments and playing both sides.

We reached Stanstead by around 4 pm, and our two resident steam engines hurried to raise the nicotine levels in their alcohol stream. Once that was concluded to everyone's (dis)satisfaction, and a few pictures snapped, we headed on to the check in. Everything was proceeding smoothly, till we reached the security, where I blame most of the confusion on Saujanya's hat. The headgear in question was supposed to make him look like Brad Pitt, but unfortunately made him look like a bandito out of an old western. Whereas I walked through without anyone giving a second glance, he was strip searched (well they made him remove his shoes) and scrutinised very thouroughly, and the same fate befell his partner in crime , Shweta. Apparently a single security check was insufficient for the Brits, as they had a second round of shoe removing activity, where all of us had to take of our shoes. The pong was so rank, I'm sure that if anyone lit a match the room would have exploded.

Well, these minor hiccups aside, we were finally seated in the plane (the correct plane!) were Saujanya and Shweta promptly proceeded to commence World War 3. After gratituous violence on Shweta's part, Saujanya finally rang for the stewardess to complain, while I did my best to squeeze out of the window and obtain a seat on the wing, where I would be less conspicuous. And thus we reached Geneva, where we were bombarded by an incredible array of billboards advertising wristwatches of every imaginable size, shape and colour.

The first challenge that night was to find our hotel, which our intrepid navigator, Arthur managed to guide us towards. The Phoenix Airport Hotel is a decent stay (mebbe if I plug it here I'll get a free stay next time). As usual, we guys were self sacrificing, and let the girls have the bigger luxurious room, while the two smokers spent the night in each other's arms (just to point out - they opted for a double bed), while I and Saujanya spent the night next door to a snorer who sounded as though he was taking a course in amatuer carpentry and sawing wood the whole night. Of course Gaurav managed to find the one channel on TV which was showing something 'interesting', so all in all it was a happening night.