Saturday, December 30, 2006

Gender Equality at CNN

"I don't believe this! Justice at last.", said the woman at the CNN Center here in Atlanta.

I broke into a grin and remarked, "So there is gender equality at last."

"Yeah", she said as she whizzed past me.

Every other woman who entered was similarly elated by what they saw.

Au contraire to what you might think, this incident did not happen at the hallowed halls of CNN where unparalleled and unbiased(?) journalism takes shape. It happened here...


...right outside the public restroom at the CNN center. :)

For the first time since I had landed here in the US, the queue for the men's restroom was far longer than the women's. :D

I have no idea what women do so long inside the restroom(and don't wish to either), but we men just get inside, do our thing and get out in 3 minutes flat.

I really pity women in this aspect, coz you really don't want to use the public restroom unless you are really under pressure and the last thing you want is a serpentine queue like a Government Ration shop in India. Especially in freakin' freezing cold places in the likes New York where the men were going in and coming out in truckloads while the women had to keep fidgeting their hands waiting in the queue. The only optimistic way to look at this kind of torture is that maybe "Anticipation/delay increases the pleasure" ;)

At the CNN Center though, there was a reason this reversal of fortunes. There is a big game tonight at Atlanta called the Chick-Fil-A Bowl between Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech (with lotsa the spectators visiting the Center which is near the stadium) and where there is sports, can beer be left far behind? :)

This incident gave me some thoughts...
So what are the things in which women, by virtue of their gender(?) are given the raw deal?

  • Public Restrooms - See Above
  • Dresses - I have a feeling that since time immemorial, dresses for women are created with the single sinister goal to make them as cumbersome as possible. I can't even imagine the the kind of torment one has to go through in order run in a full Sari attire to catch an MTC Bus (which by the way, never stops exactly on the bus stop as surely as Captain Vijaykant defeats the terrorists in the end of the movie). Secondly, the greatest unsolved mystery in the world is how women can fit into jeans that are two sizes small for them. Really, I swear that to this day I am stumped as to why women would want to wear those tight jeans, though it is not something that I disapprove of. :)
  • Driving - Women are pronounced guilty without trial when it comes driving. There is not a single soul of the male species that I have met who has not complained about women being bad drivers. This is not to say that women are entirely exonerated of this charge. Some women are as good a driver as Abbas is an actor.
Now comes the really interesting part of this post. As you can see my extremely limited brain cells have been able to come up with only three of the above items. Now I call upon two teams, the good guys and er... the bad girls to come on stage.

Girls, so what are the other things where women are given a wrong deal?

Dudes, you think men suffer from this type of bias too? If so, where?

Let the verbal war begin...

PS: I strictly don't want to know what women do inside the restrooms. :) If you write about it, I swear by the tonsured head of my thalaiver Rajni that I am going to delete your comment.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Brrr...

... its cold-d-d.

R-ring the l-l-liberty b-bell for I am-m in Phil-philadelphia. (shiver)

Monday, December 18, 2006

The watering hole...

These Americans sure know how to work...

Who the hell really needs a lake by the office to work, you would ask...
Sorry... we are Americans.

This sure is a far cry from the office building where I work (for the same company mind you)...

Here are a few clicks of the lake on the banks of which our head office is situated.


This place is much better than the pathetic way in which I have captured it.


That's my office building in the background.

Shot over a small bridge kinda thingy over the lake.
Err... my attempt at photography... :P

My colleague from the office.
He is Cambodian. America sure is multi ethnic.

What you see in the background is a kinda retreat meeting room in the banks of the lake where one can have meetings in the summer.

Friday, December 15, 2006

I am a bad blogger

To be precise I am lazy, pitiful blogger.

During the past several days, there are so many things that I could have/ should have / wanted to blog about, but here I am sitting in my hotel room in Atlanta writing an apologetic blog about nothing.

Yeah... Yeah, I am in Atlanta, Georgia right now. Traveled to Atlanta about a week back and I will be staying here for the rest of the month on work. Now coming back to the subject of this post, there are about a zillion I could have blogged about like...

  1. My very first flight ever, including (and mostly about) the beautiful air hostesses in Air France.
  2. The paranoid level of orderliness/cleanliness of the Americans that borders Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
  3. An obituary to Peter Boyle. (Oh, I so badly wanted to write this)
  4. And before my journey, I could have at least left a brief message on the blog about my traveling.
The list really is endless.

And what stopped me from blogging, you might ask...
I really have no excuse.
I have just five words to say.

I AM A LAZY ASS.

Just think about it, you work for a company which does not require you to work after six. Provides you with great accommodation that includes free WiFi internet in the hotel room, along with a great view outside the French Window of your hotel room to boot. After all this, what is Scipio's schedule everyday?

sleep - eat - work - eat - sleep - eat - work...

I am tiring myself with my own ranting. So I am going to end this post with one of my usual (countless) promises to be a better more disciplined blogger, but only this time I really mean it. Just to prove it to you I am gonna move my lazy rear off the bed and click a few pictures of my hotel room and post it on this blog...

Custom built for Scipio the couch potato.


If you notice closely, you will see this very same post on the laptop screen.

I am expected to cook here, but I don't foresee much of that happening here.

The view outside my room. I know it is not much of a view, but I am much of a photographer either.