About

I am a living cliché; like thousands of my compatriots. I have been through the usual routine: became a computer engineer; almost started my career as one; chucked my plum IT job to do an MBA; became a banker instead.

I am a closet-environmentalist. I exhibit shades of socialism, but I am mostly a capitalist. I am a fatalist. I am a minimalist; ironically, I am also verbose, which should be evident by now.

I am a photographer because I can take cool photos with my point-and-click. Or so other people tell me. I am a writer because I write “good stuff” on my blog. (My mother thinks they are valiant attempts at writing. Disappointingly, I am inclined to agree.) I also tend to exaggerate.

Often, I tell stories to make a point, and change my mind half-way and decide not to. This, understandably, irritates my friends. A lot.

I have been accused of being a good public speaker, because I write well. The logic overwhelms me, and gives me stage-fright off stages. I love to play football. I love to run.

I am a has-been quizzer, pretending to be otherwise, the kind I especially hate. I cling on, especially because I could have been an is-now.

I still haven’t gotten used to my long limbs, or my large head or for that matter, my receding hairline. I don’t think I ever will. I find people who call me handsome, funny, and at times, weird. (Weird ranks among one of my favourite words. Cute, on the other hand, is the worst euphemism I have come across.)

I also like laughing at myself. It reminds me that fate has been kind to me; which gives me a huge inferiority complex and makes me feel guilty as hell when I see street-urchins. I use clichés a lot, and I love being repetitive.

~

This blog exists, for no apparent reason. It is not a record of my life. Maybe it is. But it certainly isn’t intended to be. Maybe there is a reason: the same reason why a ~ has to appear between all paragraphs I write.

It has been named City Lights, because, I forgot to mention (I do that often, forgetting that is), I am also a romantic. But that is not a logical reason. Somebody suggested it to me, and it stuck on. I have always been fascinated by street architecture, and jigsaw puzzles.

I was also fascinated by random events. Was. My fascination was brutally killed when I was told a random number is “…neither a number nor random. It is a bijection between events …” The corpse has only burrowed deeper since.

Speaking of random, ωηωεκ doesn’t mean anything. Under duress once, I had to expand it to What No-one Will Ever Know. Luckily, my single-digit IQ terrorists were satisfied with that, and I lived to tell this tale.

I have also been fascinated at different points of time, by airplanes, pens, computers, software code, digital circuits, statistics and writing. I had this terrible fascination for footnotes once, till I heard about Lee Iacocca’s legendary 80-page footnote.

~

That, to cut a long story short, is about me.

Header photo by me: A few nights ago in a cab on the Bandra-Worli sealink, approaching the toll plaza.