Hair cut - Again!?!

It was back in November when suddenly I got my almost-waist-long hair cut into a "Bob". To me, this drastic change is not new and this is surely not the first time I got my hair chopped. My first big hair cut was back in school when I had very long hair (little below my waist) and the next day I walked into the class room with a boy-cut! The hair dresser was in tears when she cut them. Well, I had to do that cos of the never ending "lice" in my hair. I am sure all of us in school have had those dreadful black color creatures running on the scalp (yuck!! :-(..) Since then, I completely lost patience of growing and maintaining long hair and cultivated a liking of chopping my hair when it is least expected :)

The longest I have resisted and kept my hair growing was from Sept 2008 to Nov 2009. My hair grew pretty long and I kept longing for a haircut. Every time I stood before the mirror, I would ask myself - "Should I get a haircut?" and my mind would say, "Do whatever your heart says" and my heart would reply, "Do whatever your mind says". I ditched both of them and asked hubby, he simbly said "Cut it if you want, I wouldn’t mind either ways" - hmph! “Neutral answer” I thought. Then went to the Mom-in-law and hinted that I badly wanted to cut my hair. She said "Your wish dear, I like it both ways"; again the same kind of answer. One fine day, I finally made up my mind and got over my long hair avatar!!! Yippeee :).. and this is how I looked ;)

Trust me, I was so glad and excited about the new look! Almost everybody at home liked it (May be they were just nice to me). But when I returned to work, I got surprised looks and funny comments. People saw me in shock and moaned for my loss of hair. In a few days I felt bad that I actually cut so much of my hair and all my excitement of the new fringe and bob had drained down :(
It is 6 months since that happened and guess what - my mind is already thinking about a hair cut! (I told ya!!)....so I went to my favorite parlor, sat before the mirror and ordered - "Cut it!" - She asked me a zillion questions on what cut do I want?? How short? How small? How straight? How "U"? How "V"??...phew! After 15 mins - I came out with a new hair ishtyle...Tadaaaaaa! :)

This is so called "Layer cut" - Not so long, not so short. Takes advantage of my wavy hair and makes it look like a step cut :)..Now waiting for the world to react ;)

My first IA Experience!

It was again one of those painful trips I had to take in order to satisfy the team needs and recruit more people into the forest! The office admin could not arrange for decent flights and we landed up with "Air India". I have personally never travelled in an Air India flight, I have of course heard a lot of people literally swearing on the service they provide but have never taken them seriously. I always thought, what can really go wrong in an airline? Even if it is government owned? It still needs customers and has to work for the customers in order to be in business right?? WRONG!
They don't give a damn, they have no "customer" obsession nor do they care about who fly with them and who don’t - they always get left over crowd and they are happy with that. We reached the airport 1.5 hours ahead of departure and stood in a long never-ending queue to check-in. We as a group gave 9 tickets to the lady at the counter. She kept staring at the screen for more than 10 mins. No response. She looked around went to the next door aunty, no expression on her face, when we asked what was going on. No response. She took all our tickets and walked off, don’t know where. After 10 mins she appeared and we still didn’t know what was going on and were losing patience. We had to board the flight by 4:00 and until 3:45 there was no sign of boarding passes! The lady then walks to another uncle at the counter and he tried to print the boarding pass. We were lucky to have gotten 1 out of 9 boarding pass and were relieved that we are finally checking-in. Guess what!? The printer got stuck!! We were moving from one counter to the other until uncle found a working printer. After he found, he issued boarding passes for everybody else in the queue except us!
This was getting highly irritating and we started bugging uncle and all he did was Nod and say "1 min" - he did that at least 10 times...We finally followed the lady to the back office and she said, 1 min. it was 4:10 (15 mins before take-off) and we were still standing there waiting to check in. She finally came out and handed over the tickets to the same lost uncle and disappeared. Uncle took print outs of our boarding passes at 4:20 and we rushed for security check! While we were standing in the queue the IA lady announced "This is the last call for all the passengers boarding the Bangalore flight on Indian Airlines". We broke the line and ran to the gates, the lady was pissed off and didn’t even smile (like we care, do hell with your smile).
We reached the flight to find out that my seat was already allocated to somebody else and the lady was kind enough to ask me to sit in Business class (somebody was finally kind I thought!). I was finally happy that we got compensated for the wait and got business class seats. I guess I got too carried away, the air hostess were no better. One lady - Who looked half pregnant, another one who looked deprived of food and the other who looked as if she hated being there! Totally 3 ladies to serve us "first class" and make us feel that we are the bad boys stealing away their life from them! There was no Smile on their face, no please in their vocabulary - you would simply wish they didn’t exist.
So much for a 45 mins flight to Bangalore - I would have rather taken the train!

The IPL disease

Well it’s that time of the year when everybody sees IPL, breathes IPL, eats IPL, sleeps IPL. Ever noticed the open mouths of people trying to eat and gaze at the TV at the same time? It’s a normal scene in Food court here these days. All of them (specifically men) care less about the flies on their plate and more about the sixer which was just hit by Sachin! What's in a Cricket? Or rather what’s in an IPL? There are 2 major things Indians are crazy about - Cricket and Movies! - What a good way to mix both of them and create money!! Shahrukh, Juhi, Shilpa and Preity had no other better work to do I guess - or maybe they just thought cricket would earn them more income than showing their skin! I used to follow cricket and would lose sleep when there was India-Pak match going on! I was crazy to the extent that I would keep offering 5 Rupee coins to the TV when I wanted Sachin to hit a four and if he did, the TV would get another 5! Those used to be fun and made me look as if the "Whole" of India was for the win! To me IPL looks like a civil war made popular! No? Then why does your blood pressure increase when Chennai Super Kings loses a match with 1 run? Or when Mumbai Indians win as if it was a practice session? I have hardly understood why would we split the states and fellow players, invite firangs to the teams and then play against each other so that all of the firangs whom you would play with later on will know about each Indian player in detail! Isn't it like "Aa bail mujhe maar"??
OK, may be I just don't understand it in the right way, but I also don't seem to understand the "hype" about it! First the media and the Ads- every radio station, every TV channel, every other hoarding is dedicated to the great IPL! Every product on earth is sold with a tag of IPL, from fairness cream to Digital TV subscription to chaddis! If thats not enough, they mix super singer competition with IPL and make them "IPL Rockstars". Aing? Where is this going? I wonder if this enthusiasm was ever shown during the hockey world cup! Actually, it was not!! People, there are more things in life than Just Cricket and IPL!