Summer!

Lately, I haven’t been able to post much here. A lot of things to write but not finding the leisure to write.

Cuckoo has tagged me to write about eight things I enjoyed during the summer. Thanks very much Cuckoo, for the tag. However, doing this tag is a little difficult for someone like me. See, you don’t expect a lazy bum to do a lot of things and besides, most leisure activities are season-independent! I mean when your favourite pastime is being a couch potato, what difference a season makes? I am not sure I will be able to list eight! I will try earnestly though!

Summers are most significant to us during student life. Once you start working, summer gets reduced to may be a little vacation to a hill-station or to the seasonal fruits. So, I think this post mostly will be about my summers when I was in school/college:

1. Visiting relatives:

It was pretty much a ritual to spend most of April-May out of home. We are from Gujarat and my family moved to Mumbai while I was 10 so summer gave me a chance to go to Gujarat and catch up with my cousins. I don’t recollect summers where I have completely stayed at home. Never!

2. Mangoes:

If I have ever eagerly awaited summer, it is for mangoes. Most times, they were a vital part of my food and sometimes, they were the food. There are plenty of ways one can enjoy this fruit and I must have explored most ways. Of course, the best way is to eat them raw with bare hands!
Though my all-time favourite is Pineapple, there is something very captivating about Mangoes!

3. Sleeping:

Afternoon naps, I mean! I wouldn’t call them siestas since Siestas shouldn’t be lasting for 4 hours!

4. Ice-creams and the like:

We Indians are big-time ice-cream eaters and because Gujarat is home to Amul, we feel patrons to ice-creams so, well, we just have to indulge! There is another variety of ice-cream, where ice is crushed, formed into a shape and various ‘sherbats’ are sprinkled on it to give it flavour. You would eat it as you would eat a Kulfi. It is called ‘Gola’ and is hugely popular in Gujarat.

5. Sports

Typical evening activity, and this could be anything; Cricket/Chess/Badminton/Hide-n-Seek; any thing. Dad is a part of a large family and we cousines would all gather at Grandfather’s place (in western Gujarat), occupy the terrace in the evening and played till calls for dinner were made. Sadly, as we grew up, I haven’t been able to be in regular touch with a lot of my cousines. But whenever I think about my childhood, the image of all of us playing at the terrace comes to me vividly.

6. Bed-time story:

One my aunts is an expert at mimicking. When we were young, she was still unmarried and hence stayed with my grand-parents. At night, we all cousines would lie down on the terrace and she would tell us a story mimicking everyone in the family. In fact, she was so good at it that she would improvise daily and we would get a new version daily of the story. We all have grown up now and she is happily married but we still beg her for the story whenever we meet. For most of us, her story was the best we ever heard!


Well, that’s about it really! 6 points is as far as I can get. Btw, Cuckoo, I don’t have many regulars so won’t be able to continue the tag! Again falling short when numbers are concerned!

Page 123, Para 5!

Hood drummed the back of the chair. “What you’re saying then is that we may have a mole.”
“Conceivably.”
“How long would it have taken for someone to write a program to bring down the whole system?”
“Anywhere from hours to days, depending on how good they were. But that doesn’t mean the program was written on-premises. It could have been created anywhere and piggybacked in on the software.”
“But we check for that—“
“We check for sore thumbs. That’s basically what I’m doing now.”

That’s from page 123 of the book I am reading now. Actually the entire page contains nothing but the conversation. Depending upon the way I defined a ‘para’, most of the above were qualifying for ‘para’ 5, so rather then taking the trouble of analyzing further, I put the entire section.

Sigma tagged me to write the 5th para of page 123 of the book I was reading and hence the text above!

Many thanks, Sigma for the tag! Btw, the book is ‘Op-Centre’ by Tom Clancy.

It is about an intelligence outfit and not about software or programs as the above excerpt might suggest. Isn’t it strange that you are tagged to write Para 5 of page 123 of the book that you’re reading (all random variables), and the para turns out to be related to your profession! What would be the probability of that!

In that,I think lies the beauty of this tag!