Basket Case

.. and dude too ! While somebody calling me a "dude" is merely annoying, somebody calling me "dear" (like in "How are you dear?" and not "Dear Abhaya, how are you?") feels downright cheesy to me. Of course the previous statement needs to be qualified with the assertion that both the addresses might be ok in some contexts or when used as part of the rhetoric. What I am complaining about is the stock version. It is hard to pinpoint the root of these annoyances. Dude perhaps has to do with the mental images of dudes from college days and the slight negative connotation it carried in college lingo. With dear , things are not so simple. One visual image associated with dear is of nuns or teachers from convent schools or governances calling the children dear . Another one is of Jitender calling his better half as dear as in "tum abhi tak tayaar nahi huin dear? hum party ke liye late ho jaayenge !". It is hard to blame either of them for my b...

The hostel messes in IITK are lately being refurnished and they have got this new self service system in place now. Also the old row based sitting system is gone and there are many smaller tables. So u are free to sit wherever u want and with ur friends. I find it a welcome change from the regular sit-in-the-order-eat-in-quantums style. During summers, students from other hostels (Hall 5) are also eating in hall 2 mess. Now there is a strange thing I have seen. Some of them just leave their plates on the tables after eating and since I have heard this myself, it is not that they forget to do it. For some of them, it is an unacceptable idea that they are supposed to pick up their plates and put them to sink/trolly. I am quite amazed since I have always felt that the old practice of leaving ur plates on the tables in the mess was actually pretty bad. Since my childhood I have learned to go and put my plate in the sink. In fact letting somebody else pick up my plate (read my mom or my sis...