Just the picture to stare at you from your comp screen on a Monday morning:

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I like to make everyone's day a little more surreal - Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes)

Surreal: Having the intense irrational reality of a dream

I don't think I fully understand the meaning of the word surreal, which is perhaps why I misuse it a lot. But, mostly near project deadlines, under pressure (applied or imagined), with n things calling for attention, and nothing going the way it should, I do feel my life approaching that critical state of uncontrol which I guess could be called surreality. Sometime ago, on a particularly hectic day, a colleague was standing in my cubicle explaining why a circuit was not meeting specification, and suddenly, I, not quite as interested as I aught to have been, suddenly burst into a song from Awaara: 'Hayya Teri Mazdhaar..., hoshiyaar, hoshiyaar.' If you have seen the picturization of that song, boatmen on the river, hanging by the mast, singing to the chorus, you will know how difficult it is to work with that song playing in the back of your mind. It was like Nawab Wajid Ali Shah distractedly holding court (in Shatranj Ke Khiladi) and un-willfully composing a song while some loyal subject of his was presenting his case.

And Fate too has a role to play. A year and half ago, towards the end of project, my bike got stolen. And then followed numerous trips to the police station, insurance people and what not. This year, it is my unwanted pets. What do you do if, after a tiring day, you come home and find a huge beehive suddenly sprung up in your balcony. And next morning when you go downstairs to see if someone will help you burn the beehive down, you see a dog and a bitch at it on the road, the bitch whining intermittently, the dog, nonchalant, as if he were a patient commuter waiting for the bus. And all the workers and the security guards watching the pair with undivided attention...

And to top it all the monsoons. Dark rains in the afternoons, and everything looking so irresistibly beautiful...