Tuesday, October 22, 2013

My Autobook Entry

As I unfold my memories, I am fascinated with the idea of a thing which we used to do in schools, filling up the fancy books of friends with stuffs which we called our favorite. It's so exciting to think that even when we are limited with knowledge and wisdom, we still had things to love and idolise. Auto book writing, as it used to be called then, was one fancy book where we would find someone's everything if we were to stalk.
Recollecting, I compiled my auto book entry.
Today recollecting back these things, I wondered whether all these things were genuine or not. I used to write most of the time to go through the photographs of the girls and read their auto entry. I am sure, many of you sure must have once or more entered these things in auto books of your friends. 

Sunday, October 20, 2013

My football team; Bhutanese Architects team

Football has now become a one of the most written topics here in my blog. And admittedly, football has become just more than a part of a life. Even though, I console my friends that football is just a part a part which comes under some part of a life and that there’s nothing to get serious about it. But deep down I know that I am more into it like many out there. I am happy when Real Madrid wins, more importantly when Ronaldo scores the winning goal. I am also happy to see Barcelona lose a match and anything couldn’t be better than Madrid beating Barcelona.
Real Madrid Team
Letting the best of football be, we have our own team built with ourselves. It’s been almost a year, BIA 11 (Bhutanese Institute of Architects 11) have been most of the time at the losing end of the game. There are many matches where we lost heavily, but there are also few matches where we really made a statement of a winning team. It’s bitter sweet memories and after my family, football is what I love most. I am quite sure we would have contributed to the Changlimithang more than 50k so far. Afterall, even when we won, we paid around Nu.150 and when we lost, it doubled.
BIA 11
In the cold wintry winds of Thimphu, we have often found ourselves thinning the pocket almost every match. There was no improvement at all. Once we lost a match by more than a dozen goals and that one of the opponent back out of the game. We lost heavily and that the game was discontinued made us feel so low. However, revenge was served to them when we won the next match against them, and it was around 8 to 3 goals. Since then, we always took it serious and now we have established ourselves as a decent team.

By the way, we are open to challenge any team out there, so if you have your team, we can have at least some sort of friendly match.  For the record, we lost our latest match and we are in 4 match losing streak.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Cristiano Ronaldo sends a letter to Miami Attorney asking to drop charges against the pitch invader


I have always admired Cristiano Ronaldo ever since I learnt to love football. He's been inspirational and a idol for me. He may be the cockiest footballer, save Ballotelli, and an arrogant footballer, but for a fan like me who's been following his football for over six years now, he's showed his better side more often. 
Ronald hugging his superstar idol Ronaldo
During his match against Chelsea, 2013 in Sun Life stadium, USA, a young man invaded the pitch and hugged Ronaldo which eventually led to the criminal charges levied against the intruder. However, the new twist to the incident is that Ronaldo writes a letter to the attorney requesting to drop the charges against the intruder. Read the following letter; 
My name is Cristiano Ronaldo and I play for Real Madrid. I was playing in Sun Life Stadium when a fan entered the field. His name is Ronald Gjoka, a young college student. We hugged, and we spoke for a while, until security arrived to escort him off the field. He was not aggressive or violent in ANY way. What's more, he did not put up any resistance when the security guards and police arrived.
As I understand it, he has admitted his mistake and understands the importance of security. He is a young man of twenty who grew up without a father and was raised by a single mother. He attends Palm Beach State Community College, Florida, with an international student grant.
I am concerned because I understand he may face problems with immigration and with his college if the criminal charges against him are not dropped. He was immediately taken to the Stadium's security area and then spent a day and a half in jail. It seems he appeared before a judge on Monday accompanied by his attorney who asked for the charges to be dropped, but you chose to ignore his appeal.
I understand your position and the importance of enforcing rules and laws. However, I respectfully request that you and your office reconsider this decision and dismiss the two criminal charges this young man faces. I would hate to see him face criminal charges for his mistake. By all accounts he has a bright future ahead of him and I'd hate to see this future ruined by an error of judgement. Thank you. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me directly at any time.
Sincerely, Cristiano Ronaldo".
Courtesy: Marca.com

And eventually, the guy was dropped of one of the charges on Ronaldo's request.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Fifa World Cup in Bhutan

Football, the global religion, like any other country, has taken our country completely to another level of global excitement and celebration. Today, we have every kids wearing jersey of famous footballers, idolizing the football gods, and enjoying the every bit of game not just in television but also in a playing ground. The artificial turf, which is the only above standard football ground for us at the moment is always occupied with the football matches from morning 8 AM to 12AM midnight. And the heavy fee which ranges from Nu.2500-Nu. 5000 per match doesn’t deter people to come all the way from Trongsa to come and play a one and half hour match. It just shows how much Bhutanese are into the football.
Even with such craze, Bhutan participating in the FIFA world cup remains the most dreaded dream of ours. Bhutan’s only international tournament is SAFF championship, where Bhutan remains an undisputed underdog of the tournament. The tournament of course helps our players give the exposure, however, whether Bhutan have the capacity to host the tournament or not, we have not been able to get the nods from the governing body to organize it in our country.
FIFA world cup trophy which will be landing here in Bhutan. Photo courtesy; www.kuenselonline.com
TheFifa world cup trophy, as a part of its world tour would be brought to Bhutan in December. Fifa with more members than the UNO, kind of deserves a big applaud for promoting the event and in a way, bringing the globe together for the common cause of leisure and oneness. For Bhutanese aspiring footballers, this prestigious trophy landing in our soil would surely serve to instill the new enthusiasm. And it would surely inspire our Football Federation to promote and help the football education receive enough attention and instigation.  Of course, BFF is already up with another artificial turf at Changjiji which translates into more facility, more football, more enjoyment and more financial outcome. 
The other final trophy

Well, for the record, we are past that 2002 event where FIFA organised the football match called ''the other final", when Bhutan took on Montserrat, then the two lowest ranking countries in FIFA ranking, coinciding with the FIFA world cup final 2002. Today we are 207th out of 209 countries. However, Montserrat has moved on to 193rd. 

Monday, October 7, 2013

Painting of Bhutanese building

Thimphu has seen so much changes in recent years. And much changes predominately at a glance is brought about the number of buildings our city has come up with to accommodate much growing people. The architecture has always been an indication of the change for most part of our civilization. From a cave to a glass building, the architecture has played the part of bearing the change.
The change in building design in most of the places in the world have been either politically inspired or economic showdown. However, our buildings have always been cultural symbol than just a bearer of change. The small landlocked country with a need to project a strong sense of uniqueness and identity, it was always mandatory for a building to project a sense of cultural significance. Anyways, letting the building architecture mantra be, my observation is more focused on the building painting that our new buildings proudly wear. It is needless to say that the painting of a building at a glance would project the aforementioned changes.
Our building painting like our building style has always been inspired by the religious significance and belief. Lately, with the various shades easily available in the market, our building seems have to really gone too much into the in-depth religious belief that the aesthetic sense is lost somehow down the way. People paint the building with pink, dark red, deep blue, green, brown, yellow, you name any color, our buildings have one. The coloring, as it do not deserve to be called painting, of the building has gone from crazy to lunatic. When one's kham is red, one goes all out to paint the house red, and own red car. There are some buildings with a good facade design, but the coloring has killed it. And sadly, our concerned authorities do not care to intervene also.
Forget about the private buildings, some of the school buildings lately have such a bad blue color in their front facade. Who is smoking what, God knows? As one of the my senior colleagues points out, the painting of the building in such a awful fancy style is a visual pollution. It harms the environment, and yet no one cares to talk about it than just casually pointing their address as near the red building in Changzamtog, or green building near this or that.