Monthly Archives: September 2010

I Finished it to Win these ;)

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Like I wrote here, I had also participated in CB‘s story-finishing contest – Finish it to win it. I finished it to win…these following awards. Well, my story was so lame, but I had fun participating, writing, commenting and then commenting again on the first prize winner’s post 😀

Here’s the link to the first half of the story. And here’s what I wrote, the second half 😀 Bear with me (and the story).

And here are what CB gave!!! Yey!

For participating...and writing a story 😉

...and for guessing who wrote which one 😉

Contest, stories, comments and character

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Chatterbox, lovingly referred to as “CB”, ran a contest at her blog. Named Finish it to Win it!! (yes, you see the badge on my right panel here?), she gave us one half of a story…and asked us to complete it the way we liked, in less than 1200 words. Check out the contest, the rules, the first half of the story CB wrote, and the entries by a bunch of enthusiasts at the Finish it to Win it!! page of her blog 😉

It was a load of fun. Or, should I say it is a load of fun, since the entries are still being posted as per the order she got them in…

What’s most amazing about this contest is the fact that ONE STORY — of a husband, wife, daughter, an ex-girlfriend and a particular situation — could end in 19 different ways! The husband, Will, now has 19 personalities; Rose (the wife) has over 10 (‘coz she came out as a loving, innocent wife in more than one entry) and Mary (the not-so-virgin ex-girlfriend) has over 15! 😀 Betty, sadly has only two: one of a sleep-a-holic and one where she’s a naughty poet! 😉 Isn’t it stunning, that the same people and the same situaton, can end in uniquely different endings when different people look at it?

Some of the entries are so transparent of its authors’ characters: you read them and you know who wrote them :D, while others have tried to portray a scenario which so does not portray them. Some of them made it humourous, some went for unexpectedly awesome twists, some tried the romantic route, some the whacky! And one, the utmost nonsensical ROFL-material: indeed shows his/her “Will Power” !!!! 😀

Now, I guess the only sad outcome would be that I went mad when it came to comments and was highly critical. I’m sure I’m gonna lose ALL my blog readers for the comments I’ve put up on their stories. Sigh! 😦

If I’m allowed to defend myself, let me tell you: I was only being nuts. The past few days saw my most jobless and crazy days in office. Though not entirely jobless, I made more friends there, and became close to quite a few crazy ones 😀 Which effected in us having internal chats on the most craziest, LOL topics ever. And in between all those chats would come up one of the new stories. Well, crazy chats can be contagious over to WordPress too!

And when Gyanban commented, I think provoked by my looong comment, in one of the stories about how people turned subjective about these things and said “we cannot not like this story because some of our personal belief system disagrees with the concept. “, I realised maybe I went overboard! :DFor an argument’s sake, I can certainly say “I can not like something because it’s against my personal beliefs”, but well, it’s not a point to be arguing about in this context.

I apologise if I’ve been rude and have hurt any of you authors (no, no one gave me a hint that they’ve been hurt; I’m saying this because I felt I may owe it to some people).

Again, let me tell you, I’m not against any of you personally…or your thoughts, for that matter. It being a contest, and it being about having fun, I was just conducting postmortems on the different characters portrayed by Rose and Will and Mary and the rest. I reread some of my comments and felt I sounded awful — well, at least to the authors, I must’ve sounded awful! 😀 Those authors — whose story I criticised too much — must think “And she’s so good to me when she comments on my blog: because she knows it’s me. Here, when she doesn’t know, she’s being honest and herself. Hypocrite”

No, am not a hypocrite 😀 If I don’t like a story, I’ve been honest about it. If I’ve liked it, I’ve been honest about it 😀 Just like I do when I comment on your posts on your blogs too 😉 If I’ve said “I don’t like this story”, that’s all I’ve meant: that I don’t like the story; it does not mean I don’t like you or your character. In one particular story, which was against my ideals and principles, I’ve been vocal about it. Again, that does not mean I dislike the author; it only means I don’t necessarily agree with his/her idea. Again, maybe that was just a twist the person came up with, irrelevant of his/her ideals. Except for one or two stories, I have no clue who wrote which 😀 So, there’s NOTHING PERSONAL about any of my comments.

If I’ve inadvertently hurt any of you, I seek your apology!

P.S.: I’m honestly not as bad as I sound in my comments 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
And pPlease vote for me, for I wrote the best one 😛 😀 😉

Finish it to Win it!!

Protected: Wayanad: clean, friendly and breathtakingly beautiful (Travellogue Part 4)

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Protected: Wayanad: clean, friendly and breathtakingly beautiful (Travellogue Part 3)

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Protected: Wayanad: clean, friendly and breathtakingly beautiful (Travellogue Part 2)

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Onam @ IBM

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Yea yea… i know you’re all fed up of my pookkalams 😀 But couldn’t resist this one 😀

We celebrated Onam @ IBM on 25 August, the day before I left to Wayanad (yes, I had gone to Wayanad on vacation…and that’s the next post coming up 😀 ;)).

Having had done this for 10 days at home, and then after going down in the dumps with a fever, I was not very keen on this one: especially because I was the only Malayali in the participating team and no one else really knew anything about the spirit of Onam.

The competition was to begin at 12.30 and had seven participating teams (and all of them had at least a few Malayalis in them :D), with 10 people in each team. There are 3 shifts working there: 7-4, 11-8 and 2-11pm. Since out team’s office timing is 2-11, we’d requested for a change in the timing–to begin at 2.30 or 3.00. Now, this was taken as a withdrawal of our participating team by the organising committee!

We reached the spot at 12.00, only to figure out that 3 people had ditched already! That left just 7 of us (6 girls and a guy), very little flowers (the ones who went to buy had no clue how much to get) and no space allotted to start on (yea, the Organising Committee assumed we weren’t participating, and decided not to allot space for us). After much haggling and everything, we got space allotted  for us, and began the process at 12.50 — 20 minutes later than the rest!

We sent two from the 7 to get more flowers, and managed with the remaining 5. Though we’d initially asked for 20 extra minutes, we finished along with the others. AND.

We got the 2nd place! 😀 Yeyyyy.

Our 'creative' design which got us the prize (inspite of obvious lack of flowers, less time and lesser teammates). That's (L-R) Munmun, Neela, Me, Vijay, Shruti, Kavya and Radhika 🙂

Yea, it may look very bleak, but well, ours was the only one with any concept in it. And honestly, there were other better ones 😉 😉 But we got it for the ‘teamwork’ and ‘productivity’ too 😀 😀 The rest were all the normal ‘designs’, like better versions of the 10 designs I bugged you all with. Hence, the prize 😉

Just us girls and the pookkalam 😉

Yea...that teeny weeny chocolate pack in Kavya's hand was our "prize"; the first prize winners got 2 such packs 😀 😀

Edited to add (with due apologies to Vimmuuu): For the uninitiated, the centre portion of the pookkalam depics half the face of a Kathakali and half of a shankh 🙂

Vimmuuu, I’d actually added this along with the caption to the first pic 😀 Wonder where it went off. My apologies!