Saturday I went to the Hyderabad zoo. The last time I had been there was five years ago, just before I had joined my Hallowed College, and I had visited the gate and come away. This time, it was because it was Chandru’s son’s birthday, and he had this idea of organising the party at the zoo. I was, as Chandru put it, “one of the volunteering non-parent males”. Which sounds like a very appropriately zoological description of yours truly.

I enjoyed it as much as I could with this splitting headache. Waking up before eight on Saturday morning, especially after very late-Castle Wolfenstein excursions ( or early-morning, depending on how you look at it) is unhealthy. The kids were full of energy and in the early part of it, the enthu was contagious. After an hour, I just fagged out. “Trailed along” would be a better description. Just watching the kids run around made my bones ache. Gosh! It has been so long since I ran around just for the heck of it. It’s true, isn’t it? After a certain age, we just stop running.( physically, that is) Well, sometimes I do run up the stairs but that’s just not what I mean, so we can ignore that.

Funniest part: There was a toy train, and there was us sitting on the toy train. Normally people have this tendency of making a lot of noise when the train passes through a tunnel. We decided to use this noise-making very constructively, and decided that instead of screaming, we would just say “Mine Mine Mine”, like those seagulls in Finding Nemo very loud. It was an absolute RIOT!! Everybody in the train took it up, voices of various tones and hues and frequency levels. I bet we scared the fishies! *grin*

Slept the evening. Woke up sometime at night, and by reflex, clicked on the Return to Castle Wolfenstein shortcut. Switched off the light. Lemme tell you, the game looks abso-freakin-lutely wonderful with the light switched off. Played and played and played and all of a sudden, the game was over. Yippeee!!! Then I had eight oranges to celebrate, and passed out.

I hurt my butt bad on Sunday. Slipped on a puddle of water in the kitchen. Aforementioned puddle came from this wacky idea of mine to leave the drinking-water tap on in the night. Woke up early, heard water splashing real loud and bounded to turn off the tap. Ker-whammo! Ditched plans for breakfast out of sympathy.

AR Rahman double bill in the afternoon – Bombay and Roja back-to-back, to a packed audience. And then my eighth viewing of Kill BIll. Then when everybody left, I played some Syberia, and started reading Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card ( which was a reco from contentedbloke, you were right, dude, it’s magnifique ) and wrote cds for serioussam.

Some random stuff:

• Reading the first couple of pages of a sci-fi book is like being put in a zero-gravity room.
• Reading William Buck’s Ramayana makes me want to learn Sanskrit, just to savour the descriptive passages.
• Links accidentally stumbled upon over the weekend:

  An interview with Neil Gaiman about his book on H2G2.

  Way back in the 80’s, Eclipse comics published a comic-book featuring a character called Miracleman, with stories by Alan Moore and later, Neil Gaiman. The history of the Miracleman character here, and the archives of the comic-book here.

• I have read three and one-sixth of these. Not good at all!