The Strait Times - April 13

This side of the Bermuda Triangle, the one mystery which has befuddled the best of mankind across the ages has obviously been :The art of Ironing - The art of ironing an office shirt, to be more precise.

Its a task fraught with dangers, one designed to test the very limits of human fortitude, ability and survival skill sets. Newton and Steve Irwin figured this out way before the others which is why they took easier routes to fame and glory - like Classical Physics and Crocodile Wrestling.

As with most other types of unheralded perils, this one too seems deceptively harmless from a distance.

Get down to it though, and by the time you've gotten out of it, it dawns on you that you just spent the better part of an hour in performing the perfectly wasteful task of disfiguring what was once a good, expensive, new (repeat - New) shirt. That you actually spent sweat, blood and tears over something for an hour while that time could have been used so much more productively... like, for smoking about 14 cigarettes.

And then you just get mad at yourself and get back to it with renewed anger because its an ego issue now.

Sooooooo by the time this exercise had ended, I had lost exactly 2 hours, 2 and a half shirts, much of my self-respect and all of my ego. Half of a Blue shirt is still alive - by which i mean that still seems blue and still looks like a shirt... sort of.

In the end though, I remember Darwin's principal of 'Survival of the Fittest' reaffirming itself - The Iron definitely proves far fitter and the shirt does not survive.

Anyway, thats that. Sympathetic junta, dont bother to pour in those concerned calls now - it took me 3 cans of cheap, korean beer but I'm over that sorrow now.

I'm also over the first week of internship at Singapore now. Its been a fair bit off from the campus times at IIM Calcutta and its definitely been a steep curve. Learnt a lot of new things : 2 of which were - 'Choi Chee Bai' and 'Kan Ni Ban Choi Che Bai'- which in Malayan stand for "Smelly vagina" and "Your mother has a smelly vagina". Respectively. Friend of mine who's been studying here for a year now assures me that those two are pretty much the bee's knees in the Malayan cuss world.

Btw, clay court season starts soon and with Djoko firing on all cylinders, it should get pretty interesting for Nadal, Fed and the gang. Here's looking forward to that - Adios for now.

(For the uninformed,The Strait Times is Singapore's cheapest daily - which explains why its the only newspaper we've gotten our hand on - which explains the title. And also highlights a severe lack of imagination)

The Strait Times - April 5

Here s your 'did u know ?' fact for the day :- Did you know that you could be fined upto 1000 Singapore dollars for smoking in the MRT !!

To make that clearer for our mathematically challenged friends, that means you could be docked a cool INR 30,000 for roasting your lungs near an MRT station.

That apart, Singapore looks like a pretty decent place to me. Its roads, though are really clean... and its pathways are really clean... and its bus stops are really clean... and its bylanes are... yea, you get the drift....

Say, whats with these Chinese people having the most age-defying skin complexions ever. For instance, that pretty woman you were gaping at near the restaurant, the one for whom you mustered all your courage to ask the time (yes, the one who replied with a finger pointing at your wristwatch which you tactlessly forgot to hide) was actually a mother of 3.

Though you ve got to say these guys have a pretty good sense of humour - So we went to this authentic Chinese restaurant and the menu card is essentially this elaborate 12 page enlistment of every organ of every animal you've ever heard of, cooked in every imaginable way known to mankind... with about 1/4th of a page dedicated to 'Vegetables'. Whose contents were - i kid you not - Mixed Vegetables with Chicken, Mixed Vegetables with Fish, Mixed Vegetables with Pork and Mixed Vegetables with Prawn. I thought it was pretty funny. Somehow Jignanshu, my pure veg Gujju co-intern here (who btw, was fricking hungry at that point) couldnt exactly see the humour in it.

Anyway, thats all for now - Rest assured, boredom, laziness and time crunch not withstanding, I will spam this blog with more of such useful trivia on Singapore over the coming weeks. Adios for now.


(For the uninformed,The Strait Times is Singapore's cheapest daily - which explains why its the only newspaper we've gotten our hand on - which explains the title. And also highlights a severe lack of imagination)