Chief Vasily

When I was a kid, my mother used to get me these Russian children's books (which were books for children featuring Russian children, btw). At that point I think they were the Soviet Union; which is beside the point anyway. 'Chief Vasily' was one of my favorite books then. Me being jobless and all these days, I decided to track down this book and see if I can buy it. Sadly for me, the only reference I could find through the mighty Goog was this . (And no, its not available on Amazon too). There were also a few sponsored links when I included the word book. But unfortuantely, these are in Russian. Oh wait a second, I found it. Yipee ! I found it through a bookstore called Campusi . I don't recognize the author though- Tatyana Efimchenko-Evlakhova . I also used to love reading Nikolai Nosov's books - Rat-a-tat-tat! stories, Eleven Stories for Boys and Girls, Visiting grandpa, Mishka's porridge... Apparently, there is a series called Dunno and his adventures, which I seem to have totally missed then. There is a story (in 11 stories for boys and girls, i think) where these 2 boys incubate eggs using a home-made contraption. The reason I mention this story is because it really got me interested in science and experiments.

Coming back to Chief Vasily, its the story of two friends, one of whom is Vasily. Oher than friendship, I can't remember what else the story was about. Unless my memory is completely failing me, I remember reading this phrase/adage/whatever in this book - 'He who laughs last, laughs best' and it made a huge impression on me when i was a kid and it got rolled in to my philosophy of life then and along with 'every dog has its day', it had the impact of making me nicer to others, or so I would like to think. :-) .

Update: Found Dunno online. Lots of others here.

Helicopter crash in my canal

On sunday night, I was reading a book just before I went to bed. I shut the book and turned off the light and then closed my eyes. All of a sudden, there was a buzzing noise in my ear and before I knew it, this damned little fly went inside my ear! So I shook my head a couple of times and decided to sleep. Unfortuately for my sleep, the fly was still lodged in my ear. How do I know that? It started intermittently flapping its wings which sounded like a noisy helopter was tring to take off but was not succeeding. How does one sleep when there is a helicopter base next to your home? Tough, right. Now imagine that inside your ear.
It was like the tranlating babel fish (from Hitchhiker's... ) only that it could only translate in to an annoying "zzzzz...zzzzzzz.....zzzzzzzzzz". I tried to get it out - ear buds, tweezers and so on... I knew it didnt go too far inside my ear canal because i couldnt feel any pain. Nothing worked. By then, it was almost an hour past my bedtime and there was no way I could sleep with that sound. Lack of sleep always makes me mad and cranky. I went to the kitchen, took some hot water and I poured it inside my ear. I heard "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ...ZZZZZZ....Z...zzz...zz..z..."..then silence. YES, I drowned it !!!!! And then I went to sleep.

Its Tuesday morning now and I am still alive.

Nayakan

Sarkar, the new Ramgopal Verma movie based on Godfather was pretty decent. I did not get bored watching it and Amitabh and Abhishek, both have very impressive screen presence. But my favorite movie of this genre is undoubtedly Nayakan. I have so many favorite scenes from this movie -- Kamal's first meeting with Saranya, the children imitating velu nayakan, Nizhal Ravi's funeral, Karthika's confrontation with Kamal, Kamal meeting Karthika when he goes to meet Nasser....and many many more....The songs and BGM are simply excellent. Coming back to Sarkar, there is this track, "Govinda Govinda" which is begging to be remixed...Will someone please do it?

Perils of blogging?

I just read this article about how blogging can have a unpleasant impact on your professional and private lives if you are not careful. Yeah, its definitely a weird/undesirable thing to have complete strangers being privy to your inner-most feelings or details of your friends/family. Well, as far as this blog is concerned, though it is meant for my friends, I try not to write anything too personal; you never know who is reading, right?
And so far, this experiment is going quite well..