We, the flowers

I wake up by dawn
and see flowers all over
and their trees

trees, down to earth
close to their soils
see their flowers bloom

flowers carrying their seeds
seeds, that hold a tree each
and their color, shape and size

they're still, all flowers
waiting to harvest
so, I see a tree each in the flowers

the same color
the same shape
the same size!

God of Free* things

*After mail-in rebate. Conditions apply

One thing that's hard to miss in shopping in the U.S is the mighty 'mail in rebate'

People would buy stuff they don't even know how to use, just beacuse it's free. A bachelor would buy Maybelline lipsticks, much before meeting a girl. Well, who knows "May be she's not born with it?" you see..

Or young couples buying kids' toothbrush hoping they'll have a 'use for it' soon. It's things like this that make you want babies more. And one day the husband says "Honey, we've already stocked a year's supply of diapers and Disney-BandAids. I think its time we should plan for our first born"

You can't get away talking about 'deals' and not mentioning the 'day before thanksgiving' - or as they call it the 'Black Friday'. It's a holy day for our deal-hunters.

People live for this day. Strategies are made. Teams divided - one squeezes in the 'Circuit City' line to secure all the free web-cams and the memory-sticks, as the other hogs the 'Office Max' eyeing for free DVD-writers and blank media. People stand in lines as early as 12 midnight freezing their pants off just to get a pack of 100 free blank-DVDs.

Days (or as it says, 6-8 weeks, at least!) pass by and then comes the 'pay day'! You start getting all those $21.95 and $49.99 checks in your mail. Voila! Moments like this make you realize what the real purpose of the human life is. You've never been happier since the day you got your first job.

So now that you've got your money back (well not all of it - you still paid the taxes, remember?) your toothpaste is finally FREE! You go home and brush your teeth twice, afterall its celebration time, right?

As they say "the best things in life come free" (after mail in rebate, of course)

Long live the "Prescription Hunters"

It drives me crazy how some people remember the names of their medicines

I mean except for a couple like Aspirin and Tylenol (yes, just a couple), I don't know what use it is for us to remember names like Cyclobenzaprine and Hydrochlorothiazide (which by the way, is the 3,4-dihydro derivative of chlorothiazide!)

Now, I know consumer-awareness helps, but there's a difference between telling nylon apart from cottons and knowing the chemical formula of the synthetics used in your underwear.

I've had some of these *experts* ask what my doctor gave me for pain relief...I don't know! Its a bottle of white pills, and it says I need to take one after each meal; twice-a-day. Isn't that enough to get better?

It's not that knowing the name of the medicine gives you an upper hand when you're seeing the doctor - may be he can't fool you this time, huh? Remember last time when he tricked you by writing a pain-killer instead of cough-syrup?

Or may be I would just feel smarter if I knew that the analgesic pill I am gulping twice a day is actually acetylsalicylic acid. Come on, people, that's the stuff those doctors pay to learn in medical school

It's Chemistry, for Godssake.

Remember Chemistry? Remember those spiritless boring lectures that you'd rather sleep than to listen to those middle-aged pot-bellied teachers? Remember those border-line "pass" results, that used to come more as a relief of never having to open those Chemistry books, than an achievment?

It's not meant for us high-life technocrats. Oops! Did I just hurt some feelings here? Well, to all my Chemistry-student friends, I am just trying to highlight your achievements here. We all know and appreciate the effort you put toward the society, so that people like me can forget my medicine's name, hoping the guy at the drug-store knew what he's doing

So, next time someone asks you what medicine you're taking, you should ask him "what med-school did you go to?"

(wait a minute! I almost forgot the white pill today..)

Google's new ketchup: SketchUp

Google is ready with what at first seems like just another pass-time people will play around with for a few days. But SketchUp is cerrtainly more than that

Firstly, it's fabulous as a toy. You draw 3D models of pretty much anything you want (I just put together some quick examples as soon as I downloaded):



Clearly, you don't have to be a mechanical-drawing expert to draw the basic stuff, like buildings, simple objects around you etc.

But the real value lies beyond this. Artists at Google are busy putting together famous buildings around the world on 3D models and uploading them to Google Earth - another fabulous tool by Google. In essence, you can draw 3D imagery from around your home, office, or places you like and combine it with the real life sattelite-maps.

Look at this one from Google:

Hats off to Googi, again!

Indian engineer killed in Afghanistan; India outraged

And what good does that "outrage" do anyway? Almost always when it comes to an Indian stuck in a foreign land, the sequence of events seem to be:

>concerned
>starting to talk
>unsuccesful in talks
>concerned again
>outraged
>killed>
>sympaties
>the family of the killed 'compensated'

That's it! With its meek foreign policies being around for years, India is standing at a point that we can never use a word "pressure" on any foreign land. Oh, no I was missing the pressure we put on Nepal king the other day (note this was after 4 years of dissolvement of parliament that the king had enjoyed, and only after the commoners of Nepal had come to a street-revolt)

Remember that Afghani guy who was being tried for a death-sentence in Kabul for adopting Christianity? America, among several countries made the Afgani president work his ass-off to get the guy out of the trial and flee him out of country

I mean its understandable how america with all the power in hand is at a buying position almost in all negotiations in the world. But is India really bankrupt in such innternational dealing?

Think what would happen if it was an American stuck in Kabul? Of course there'd have been protests and all the non-violence speeches. But behind the scenes, there would have been one phone call to the Karzai man, and he would already be on his way to find the guy himself

Wasn't there a talk of "tri-lateral" relationships between India-Pakistan-Afghanistan just recently? I think such "relationships" flourish only as long as everything is good. I don't think we or any of our neigbors have what it takes to steer in case of a contention











Its like saying:

Love me tender love me long, till the end of time
But when I am hungry and you're around, you'll still be dinner of mine