1999, sometime in November, armed with a brand new 28.8 kbps dial-up internet connection, I began my first endeavour on the Internet. I uploaded my first webpage. I still remember how exciting it was back then; to see my HTMLs being served for the first time to people around the world. So here I present a ‘Rusty’ museum of sorts; with screenshots of how this website evolved into what you see now. It was a great nostalgic trip back; seeing all these sites again :)

Click on the images to zoom

November 1999

This was the first version; hosted at spaceports.com. I was still learning how things were working. Notice the awful choice of colours!

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November 2000

Even worse colour comibination; but now with more content and also the hottest retro thing on the web – Java! (the left nav bar)

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February 2001

Things are getting way better now; the colours don’t hurt the eyes much. Not too much improvement with the content though; except for the embaressing bio-data up front :D

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September 2001

The first ‘real’ design. Java is gone, CSS comes in. Design is still very teenage; with a goofy name for the site ‘SmileHouse’! But this really special; because this was when I started writing my blog :) I had also shifted to a much better host called DigitalRice.

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August 2002

CSS skills have improved beyond recognition! I really loved this design. The site has become more dynamic; as I had finally learned some PHP. The blogging system there was hand coded in PHP. And this time the site moved to paid hosting; even though I never really paid :) It was hosted for me by Vishnu and Vivek at sig9.com

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October 2003

And finally the base for the current design. I also dumped my buggy blog engine for WordPress. And around 1.5 years after this; I finally had registered a domain for myself. The hosting also slowly shifted to asmallorange.com; with the space provided by Anand bhai. It has remained there ever since.

You can also browse some of the sites from the Internet archive:

• 2001 – 2003
• 2003 – 2006
• 2006 – 2009

It was hardwork to get this done; I had to find my old hard disks; then get it working and so on.. but it was all worth it. Special thanks to Shyam for letting me plug-in my dusty 10 year old HDD on his PC!

My first memories of cricket was invariably watching Sachin play. He was the first cricketer I knew by name. At 6 or 7 years old, despite not knowing the difference between silly point and deep fine leg, I knew one thing – Sachin was a legend. He was my first hero. As years went by and my cricketing brain developed I found other heroes to worship, some of whom I liked more than Sachin. But then he had a special place. Maybe because he was my first hero, or maybe it was because his career coincided with my growing up days. Whatever it is, Sachin was, is and will be very very special.

I mean can you imagine (if you are Indian, that is) any other player in the whole wide world like Sachin, for whom your heart sinks into a bottomless abyss when he gets out? I don’t think so. And the genuine bliss you get watching him hit a four or a six you never get from anyone else. It’s not Lara’s flair, Sehwag’s flamboyance, Warne’s rock-stardom, Murali’s charm or Dhoni’s charisma. It’s something different – unique only to Sachin. I mean, for a second just forget what he is and then look at him for a while. It beats me, how a person can be so humble, calm and quiet despite being the most paid, most adored, most famous and arguably the best cricketer of all time. He is the perfect role model. This is how you should treat success according to me. I can’t remember one incident of arrogance in his entire career. That is just absolutely incredible for a person of his stature.

I cannot imagine the day he hangs up his boots. I’m sure I’ll be that emotional child again who weeps in his heart when he gets out. Oh how do we explain to the next generation that such a man walked the pitch one day. We were lucky, to be born in that generation to see a legend in all respects in action.

I was in fourth standard I believe. My teacher had just taught us about electricity and conductors. Metals are good conductors, wood is a bad conductor and so on and so forth. But I didn’t believe in many things (that was then with no youtube :D ) unless I do it and see it myself. So I made this amazing action plan to experiment with electricity. I ‘borrowed’ a voltage tester from that sacred brown box in which my dad kept all his tools. This brown box still lies around in my parents’ house with that old red pliers, this same old tester, lot of broken wires and other sorts of junk and metal. Anyway more about the brown box in some other post. I also found a pair of scissors that my mom used in the kitchen. The experiment was to find out whether the scissors could conduct electricity.

Now my experiments had to be systematic and went through with well thought out steps. So I first inserted the tester on to the mains plug, then switched on the plug. Yup, the tester glowed and it was working. Good. Next step: I removed the tester, inserted the scissors in. whaaaa… FAIL!! If you were smart enough you would have noticed that I missed one step, I forgot to switch off the plug before inserting the scissors in. :( Boom! I don’t think it is easy to put into words what a 230 Volt shock direct through your hands would feel like. It was like two or three wrestlers hitting me on all parts of the body simultaneously with tremendous force. I went blank. Next thing I remembered was my cousin sister, who was baby-sitting me, calling me frantically asking what happened. As I opened my eyes I was lying flat on the floor, some 2 or 3 metres from the scene of the experiment. Well you can’t say the experiment was an utter failure. I did learn what a real power shock means!

Our chemistry lab periods during school was always fun. We all had a lot of fun mixing and matching various chemicals, trying to make a kaleidoscope of patterns and colours in our test-tubes and beakers. Once, we were busy engaged in this activity before the real experiment started and while our teacher was giving us instructions. The guy next to me – Vinod I think – already had the chemicals poured in his test-tube and kept near to the burner; but lost interest in the teacher’s talk and shifted attention to our alternate experiments. While doing so he suddenly turned and asked me what the teacher said last. I opened my mouth to start saying ‘Keep the test-tube away from the flame’, but before that we heard a small pop and the liquid from his test-tube shooting up like a rocket. The experiment created a nice elaborate pattern on the ceiling. There was moment of silence, we were sure this was the end of the world. But everybody else was going about their business, having not noticed anything. Relieved we put on our innocent angels’ masks and continued working. They did notice though, the next week our lab assistant, Madhu Uncle came and told us that these juniors are never careful, look at what they have done to the ceiling. We all nodded our heads struggling to keep the laughter from coming out.

This post is not about a review for the movie, so I’ll keep it short. The movie was just about ok. First half was excellent with some good humour (if you can excuse some really bad PJs in between). Second half was at best average, too much emo and twists and turns. But enjoyable anyway. Lal (the director and producer) however has realized the power of nostalgia. Solely due to this, the movie is going to make big bucks. It works on that feeling you get when you think of the golden age of Malayalam cinema that ‘In Harihar Nagar’ was part of.

I was probably 5 years old when the original was released and I remember going to the theatre with my parents and cousins for this. My mind was too young to really grasp the full crux of all that was happening on screen. But watching it again (and again) during adulthood, made me realize how ‘real’ this movie was. The basic plot was too outrageous to be real, but what I mean are the fine details. Every silly joke in that movie, I have seen played around me or I can imagine being played around me. That was the real brilliance behind the original and why it turned out to be a cult classic in Kerala. Every person who has some ‘malluness’ in him, would know those punchlines by heart.

I have heard loads of complaints from my non-Keralite friends, saying that Malayalam films are too real (won’t say that about the recent ones though), that there is no feeling of escapism in them. Well I love ‘real’, and I think most Malayalees do too. Maybe we didn’t need that escapism, maybe it’s already provided to us by all the ‘gelf’ money, lazyness and all the booze that we didn’t need them in the movies. But ‘real’ films owned the market in Malayalam and probably that was the major reason why the recent ‘superhero larger-than-life’ films fail. They should go back to making films like they used to! Those Mohanlal ‘unemployed’ flicks, Mamootty’s family movies, Mukesh’s ‘fraud’ movies, Jayaram’s ‘how-to-escape-from-a-big-mess’ flicks, Padmarajan’s classics, Sreenivasan’s satires… aww.. it was such a beautiful world!

I got bit by the nostalgia bug again! Back to those old cds (.avi’s rather)… ;)

I lived around 20 kilometres away from my school and it goes without saying that I spent a lot of time in Three Bus. My best friends in school, the funniest incidents, the time of my life – I owe it to that old cheerful yellow vehicle. We had two rows of seats reserved for our gang. Shankar “Chubby”, Pranav “Paandi”, Aswin & I, being the first to get in, held fort and clung on to these two seats not letting any chirpy young kids or intimidating seniors to enter our restricted area – till our troop was fortified with the arrival of Sandeep, Arun, Vinod “Sticky”, Akshay “Chuksy” and occasionally Vishnu to complete the elite 3 bus gang.

“Three Bus”, now Bus no 8 :)

And as any young kid would do, our main job was to obviously look out of the window and watch the city around us. And yeah we did see the entire city en route to school, for our three bus was the worker horse for Loyola – it traveled to distant suburbs many of my other classmates didn’t even know about. Our major past time was to spot vehicle number plates and find out which is the newest registration number we saw on the street. And the guy who spotted it first was our superhero hehe.

Then one day there was a huge fight. Pranav finally had learned of the ubiquitous 4 letter word and found an opportunity to use it against Akshay. Major pandemonium broke out, with Akshay calling Paandi back “goy”. Well I don’t know how he came up with that, but instantly people started taking sides on what was the bigger insult – the F word or “goy”. We searched dictionaries, referred library books (sadly no Internet at that time) – finally someone decided “goy” was the worst insult in the history of mankind. To this date, I have not changed my opinion. :D Then there was this other fight I remember vividly, this time again Paandi, but on the other side it was Sandeep. And poor guy Paandi, already reeling at the trauma for being called a “goy”, got his ear bitten by Sandeep! Yup he really bit his ear. And the amateur doctors in us were shocked – Paandi is going to loose all his hearing skills in 2 years. 10-12 years passed since the incident, I saw him last week with full auditory powers, helping him hear worser insults than “goy”!

By eighth standard we had become grown ups. Hormones were raging and it played an important part in us trying a major (failed) attempt to shift our seats to the other side of the bus. We all developed a crush on this girl who used to wait for the bus in a common bus stop. Someone told us her name was Praveena, I don’t know till now whether that is really her true name. Poor thing, I don’t think she ever knew so many prying eyes were on her all that time! :D Hmmm.. I wonder what she is doing now… ;)

Time has gone on, things happened, life’s changed… We have gone our different ways, I became an engineer, Paandi is doing his MBA, Chubby became a lawyer… Yet those days don’t seem so long gone. They are so vivid in my mind as if everything happened yesterday… the golden days in Bus No 3 :)

I was in Bangalore for a week and in Trivandrum for another. Bangalore, every where I turn, there is something new. Trivandrum has a few things changed here and there, but overall it is just that same old city! Everybody was also apprehensive of me driving, to say the truth even I was, a bit. But it was not the least difficult. Ok, first few minutes I tried to do things “right” but very soon my Indian instincts took over and lo I was honking, not stopping at pedestrian crossings, not following lanes.. hehe.. it was smooth from then on! One thing that changed regarding driving in Trivandrum is the number of FM stations available. When I left, there was just one.. now I turn the radio on and there seems to be a channel every other frequency – Big FM, SFM, Club FM .. what not! Then I see that there *are* traffic symbols posted neatly in India, just that before I never noticed them before and even if I did, never knew what they meant. Enough of blaming the government, our road culture is the first problem, nothings gonna change without improving that!

Most of the week in Trivandrum was spent visiting & being visited by friends and family. I even cooked for them. The shock on my mother’s face when she saw me cooking (‘Chicken Trivandrum’ ;) ) was a priceless moment. Nobody thought I had it in me to cook :D Well, not any more dear ones.. Even I can cook! Many evenings were spent idling away in the city.. brought back many flashes of nostalgia. I even managed to go to a cultural show organized by some department of my old college in the amazingly beautiful Kanakakunnu palace grounds. Sat there for hours with my college buddies… it was the best feeling ever! :D

It was a not a totally smooth transition, but not as difficult as I expected. Things seem changed, and I look at things differently than before.. But I am so happy being back :)