Attended a wedding in India after long time. The best part, of course, was the food.

One thing I love during my India trips is reading morning newspaper, especially the local section. It provides lot of topic fodder to discuss with my dad.

Alright India, here I come.

A small family Thanksgiving at our household. It was a vegetarian day due to Ekadashi 😃

I was anxious today morning and didn’t turn ON TV till my brother-in-law texted me that Kohli is closing in on his century. Of course, I didn’t want to miss that moment and from there, I saw the whole game. Pandya’s injury is the best thing which happened and gave us Mohammed Shami. Take a bow sir.

Angelo Mathews have been timed out without facing a ball Disgraceful behavior by Shakib in today’s match. I hope they don’t qualify for Champion’s trophy.

Dear Andrew, I hope you got the ‘close match’ you were looking for.

An election denier and extreme fundamentalist is the new speaker of house. The upcoming government shutdown is pretty much guaranteed now.

Saw heartbreaking images of kids in Gaza. How is any of this a okay with anyone supporting the ongoing invasion. 😢 Scary to imagine that India-Pakistan could have ended with something similar, if not for the strength of leaders we had after 1947. Damn you Britishers for creating this mess.

Good food. Great friends. Perfect Saturday evening.

Finished two seasons of Jamtara on Netflix. Pretty decent small town crime drama based on some true facts. Solid acting and Anurag Kashyap would be proud of language used in the show. Hope the show gets renewed for another season.

Woke up to see this terrible tragedy in local neighborhood. 😥

It’s fair to draw parallel between Dianne Feinstein’s decision to hang on with RBG’s decision when democrats had power to appoint someone younger. The difference is that I can somewhat understand RBG’s decision (Hillary was a lock for 2016) but Feinstein really overstayed her welcome.

Senator Dianne Feinstein Dies at 90

Hope she is in a pain free and a better place. I sincerely wish that Dems would have not propped her up for so long and let her spend her final days in comfort. To be real for a minute, this means that no more judge appointments till next session starts.

Winners of the 2023 Astronomy Photographer of the Year

The picture of Sun is just stunning. CC:@Parag

Dear GRRM, I appreciate your support for WGA but as far as ‘A Song Of Ice And Fire’ is concerned, you have been on strike since last 12 years. You know it and hence have comments disabled on this blog post of yours.

Glad that Writers Guild strike is over and they essentially got everything they wanted. I wish studios would focus on quality over quantity now. There is so much content out there and most of it is trash. Netflix produce so much junk but cancels good shows like “1899” and “Santa Clarita Diet”.

Dev Anand’s 100th birth anniversary-The man got best songs and made some great Hindi movies (my fav is Guide). Happy b’day Dev sahab. Below is my fav song of his.

बरबादियों का सोग मनाना फ़जूल था बरबादियों का जश्न मनाता चला गया

मैं ज़िन्दगी का साथ निभाता चला गया हर फ़िक्र को धुएँ में उड़ाता चला गया

Daughter got these Ritz crackers from grocery store and I really love the flavor. It sits next to my favorite “Miss Vickie’s Jalapeno Chips”.

The Mohalla-Ka-Ganapati-Event is going very well this year. Almost 400 people came over yesterday night for dinner and we had a nice cultural program. Third and final day today.

Sikhs are considered most patriotic Indians. Some rubble rousers in foreign land are not going to tarnish Sikh people’s standing in India. If this was indeed done by GOI, it was an unnecessary provocation.

Before hitting the ‘send’ button, I read and re-read my email to make sure everything looks correct. Later, when I open the email again from ‘Sent Items’, I catch the very obvious spelling or grammar mistake. Arghhhh…..

One of the social benefit of living in ‘heavily desi dominated Central NJ area’ is that we can have community Ganesh Chaturthi festival. Looking forward to 3 days of ceremonies starting tomorrow. We even have Laddu auction and I prepared the flyer for that. 😀

Today is ‘Tanha Pola’, a small festival celebrated in Vidarbha, Maharashtra. Farmers dress up their bulls, kids dress up in costumes & take small wooden bulls to houses in neighborhood and request money. Every year at Halloween, I get reminded of this cute local festival I used to participate in.

Dame.. iPhone Pro Max starts at $1200 (256 GB). One step up, a case and taxes, I am looking at $1400 phone. I sincerely hope, they give me at least $800 for my 12 Pro Max.

Listening to Delhi-6 album on Saturday evening while cooking chicken tacos. We are privileged man and thankful for it.

Moved from terrible AT&T plan (LTE with family usage limited to 5 GB) to T-Mobile. It costs about the same but no data limit, free iPhone (14 pro), free Netflix and free Apple TV+. Great network in my area too. Very happy with T-Mobile service so far.

What a beautiful weather today to walk outside. Not planning to go inside till late evening.

That Mitch McConnell video is hard to watch. I hate the guy for what he has done to supreme court but that video is damn scary. Shudder.

What a huge achievement. Sincere congratulations to all team members of ISRO. Feeling very proud today.

Can’t wait for school session to start so that the high school kids can go back to school and leave the gym to us dads/moms during lunch break. Kids, enjoy your youth by running around and playing sports. Leave the gym to us middle agers who try to justify their weekend binges. 😫

There were few Twitter users I was following using RSS feed generated through French version of Nitter. It’s dead as of now. Fucking man-child.

Hi MB, Need to buy a Mac for my kid(uses Google Classroom but don’t want Chromebook). I have never used Mac so need some guidance. Is 13" Air a good option? If yes, what combination would be decent (8/16 GB_RAM, 256/512 GB_HDD)? I know more is better but cost goes up substantially with each upgrade.

I was gone for a long weekend and Muskya did a ‘Teja main hoon, mark idhar hai’ on Twitter.

In addition to MB, I follow @pratik on Goodreads and my ‘Want to Read’ list keeps growing based on his reading journey. As always, thanks for the great recommendations. 🤗

First TopGun and now MissionImpossible, Tom Cruise certainly knows how to deliver blockbusters. I don’t know what kind of cult rituals Tom Cruise follows but do keep such movies coming man.

Disney is looking to get out from India Once Disney lost HBO and IPL from their catalog, not much was left for them to sell. Bollywood might be cringe but Indians love it more than any Hollywood franchise.

Why there isn’t a consensus on the spelling of अग्रवाल. I see Agarwal, Agrawal, Aggarwal.

Dad used my mom’s phone to take picture of email and sent the image to me via Whatsapp. I love how parents use tech. 😀

“India vs Pakistan in Narendra Modi Stadium” during upcoming World Cup.

I am worried about how crowd will behave and God forbid, if we lose.

Was reading an email about a junior resource being trained and someone used the word ‘grooming’ for it. This word has really got a negative connotation to it now a days, doesn’t it?

Best Ramayan content coming out of Bollywood is the song from ‘Swades’ movie.

My eyes get moist sometimes listening to this song. What’s ironic is that it came from three Muslims Javed Akhtar, AR Rahman & Shahrukh Khan. I have huge respect for India’s diversity and hope it survives.

As someone who comes from central India, I am thankful to Qatar Airways for flying internationally from Nagpur to USA (via Doha). It really helps not dealing with domestic transfers in Mumbai/Delhi.

I had to go to Philadelphia airport today to pick up family members coming from India. I passed through the burned gown I-95 portion of highway. The traffic jam was f**cked but to be fair, it wasn’t worse than the usual. Kudos to highway authorities, I guess 😃

As expected, a very cowardly AMA from Reddit CEO. ~25K comments and just dozen of roundabout non-answers from him. The AMA post got downvoted so hard that it’s not even on front page of Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/

BTW, Reddit’s CEO is doing AMA soon https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ceo_tomorrow_to_discuss_the_api/ It’s gonna be ugly.

Sad to see Reddit taking the same route as Twitter. How do these companies not understand that ‘power users’ needs customized third party apps to provide the thing they sell i.e. content.

MKBHD’s VisionPro video already has ~4 Million views in 8 hours or so. The reach this guy has is pretty amazing.

With the onslaught of GOP presidential nominees, who would be the Connor Roy of primaries? My money is on Doug Burgum. Who is Doug, you ask? Exactly….

My favorite character throughout was Logan and his F**k offs. 😀 The other performance where I loved Brian Cox was in “DeadWood”.

It’s absolutely amazing that Succession made us feel sympathy for billionaire wretched characters. I will miss the show.

My prediction is that cousin Greg is going to be next CEO of ‘Waystar Royco’ #Succession

Republicans like DeSantis, Tucker, Shapiro are slowly moving away from Fox News and towards Twitter. Reality is stranger than fiction and yes, Twitter is now full blown right wing social media. Who would have thought this couple of years back.

A-List bloggers/podcasters complaining about Un-skippable YouTube ads, while they themselves have ads in their content is hypocrisy at its best. Not saying there is no corporate greed on YouTube side, but content creators need to be paid.

The trailer for “Killers of the Flower Moon” looks really good. That last shot in trailer is so captivating.

Good to see Brendan Fraser and Jesse Plemons with bigwigs.

I will nope of out any website which shows an ad with 20 second countdown before displaying the requested page.

I never had my firstname as username on any social platform. It was always taken before I could claim it. I just checked and @vaibhav was available. Changed username from @vaibhav_patle to just @vaibhav.

Seems like CBSE results recently came out for X and XII boards. Whole Facebook is full of parents giving out their kids score in open. Man… must be so stressful for kids who didn’t do well. I am so glad I am out of that rat race.

I recently learned (on a podcast) that we should not rinse after brushing our teeth as it takes away the fluoride. Not sure if I would like the feeling of toothpaste but going to give it a try.

I still dip into Twitter every now and then just to see the trends and political news but that place seems to become worse and worse with each passing day.