Get up at 530 am… not that we had slept well the night before… the time was mainly spent cramming some facts… and mostly studying the fin theory… it is time to move now… the huge waiting room is calling… it is a mad rush to beat the crowd at the common bathrooms… shaving hurriedly and finishing off the other chores… dressing up in the best possible clothes… deos, perfumes, moisturizers and hair gels and what not…
Reach the venue at 630 well a little later actually but in time to wait… we find that some of the comfy corners are already gone… taken by early risers and enterprising people who had the foresight to see what was coming… small sacrifice to beat the long waiting times… good thinking…
Somehow I find a place near a friend who does not normally say no and shamelessly sit in the chair next to him and plug into the network and power sockets… and begin the endless wait for my name to be called… it is not an unknown waiting time wait… I know that my turn will not come for some time… but it is agony waiting like this…
One by one my friends move out of the room when their name is called and come back smiling… they also have finished the race even before it even began for me… frustrating… I look at the watch… oh man it can’t be… just half an hour… I have been waiting for only half an hour… and already I find a battalion moving out of the race… so what if they are people who are not in the same league as you… so what if you knew that your turn will anyways come only later… but the subconscious frustration starts getting on your nerves… another 1 hour later the watch has only moved another 15 minutes…
Then one by one, your group’s turn comes… but still there is a guy called Murphy blocking your way… you are probably the last one… the queue moves painfully slow… this time you actually wait a real 2 hours before the name is called… and you meet your nemesis…
The formidable force meets the unprepared fear… the duel lasts for a torturous time… you don’t know whether you are at an advantage or not… no clear strategy no game plan… and nowhere to run and nowhere to hide… you just parry the blows as and when they are showered upon you… you make an occasional feeble attack but then mostly it is a defensive… then you are returned, an exhausted and tired warrior, breathlessly recounting the nightmarish experience to the next gladiator about to enter the circus…
Now the wait is even more agonizing… I don’t know whether there is another fight scheduled or when I would meet my doom… you don’t know how much longer… I just wait… a couple of more fights and I let caution to the winds… I don’t care what happens or how I fight, my only aim is to get out of the fight alive… no strategy seems to be working and I am just glad to walk out alive…
Then there is the long period of lull… you cannot move out of the race… and there are other warriors to give you company… but then you grow impatient at being unoccupied… there is still another half day to pass… and you know that you have signed up for no more encounters unlike many who just about are participating in all the jousts… but still you find the wait irritating… you cannot quit the race yet, unless the results are declared officially after the dope tests etc… but that is actually the work of Mr. Murphy again… he is holding up the declaration of independence for some silly reason like proof reading…
Finally, I can hear my name being called as the winner of some tournament… I cannot recall the events, so don’t ask me for the strategy I adopted… I don’t have any… and I am in the full mood to quit the race then and there… but then I want that one fight that would actually give me glory… you may call that committing suicide, but I would say that I am human too and want to have my shot at fame…
PS. But somehow better sense and Murphy prevailed and I did not waste my energy fighting another losing battle. I quit early the second day.
PPS. For those who did not understand what the above post means, I am sorry you have missed one of the greatest b-school life's experiences.
Lage rahoji…
Another +ve point about missing the train… a great movie… and what is to be appreciated is the originality of the script (it is claimed to be original and I have accepted it at face value).
Circuit and Lucky (arshad warsi and boman irani) two real good characters in the movie… impossible timing and till the end… VVC begins the movie well and ends it well and in between throughout it is in the same well… Amazing humor sustained throughout the movie and the senti scenes actually bring tears to your eyes… though a bit exaggerated as in the whole of Mumbai crying and all that stuff… Arshad warsi’s drunken expressions and the dry humor can never be replicated anywhere else… and Boman is the man – right from his punju ringtones to his photographic passion…
Vidya Balan is a gorgeous fresh face, brings in that homely and modern blend that most guys today crave for… funny she is not on many desktops and screensavers yet… but as she claims, maybe people do think she would be out of reach even on their screens. But credit given for the choice of the actress, though she does nothing much but form the main cause of the movie…
Sanjay Dutt is unbelievable in his role and it is quite difficult to replace him from that position… if this movie is gonna be repeated the prequel way and made into a multitude of indian languages with the regional actors, they may as well do justice by putting in a little effort in identifying the fit…
A full time time pass with a great message – don’t study too much and don’t put too much night outs… I don’t actually want some dead guy influencing my life… what happens if you are stuck like the guy with the beautiful mind but actually have lost it… anyways it was so convincing that Gandhi almost seemed to move into my good books… but that is another story…
On a scale of 1 to 5, I rate it a 7… it is too good and certainly worth the money… just can’t wait for the vcd/dvd release…
It is a full time lage raho with the movie…
Circuit and Lucky (arshad warsi and boman irani) two real good characters in the movie… impossible timing and till the end… VVC begins the movie well and ends it well and in between throughout it is in the same well… Amazing humor sustained throughout the movie and the senti scenes actually bring tears to your eyes… though a bit exaggerated as in the whole of Mumbai crying and all that stuff… Arshad warsi’s drunken expressions and the dry humor can never be replicated anywhere else… and Boman is the man – right from his punju ringtones to his photographic passion…
Vidya Balan is a gorgeous fresh face, brings in that homely and modern blend that most guys today crave for… funny she is not on many desktops and screensavers yet… but as she claims, maybe people do think she would be out of reach even on their screens. But credit given for the choice of the actress, though she does nothing much but form the main cause of the movie…
Sanjay Dutt is unbelievable in his role and it is quite difficult to replace him from that position… if this movie is gonna be repeated the prequel way and made into a multitude of indian languages with the regional actors, they may as well do justice by putting in a little effort in identifying the fit…
A full time time pass with a great message – don’t study too much and don’t put too much night outs… I don’t actually want some dead guy influencing my life… what happens if you are stuck like the guy with the beautiful mind but actually have lost it… anyways it was so convincing that Gandhi almost seemed to move into my good books… but that is another story…
On a scale of 1 to 5, I rate it a 7… it is too good and certainly worth the money… just can’t wait for the vcd/dvd release…
It is a full time lage raho with the movie…
Vettaiyadu…
Finally I guess tamil cinema moves into the shoes of bollywood shooting a major part of the movie in the US of A… but apart from this if at all a fault, the movie is an amazing amalgamation of music, songs and editing… throw in the right cast then you get a super duper block buster…
From the first scene the pace is extremely fast and you get to adjust your sitting posture only during the interval… even then you are cursing the break… kamal plays the role of the super cop with ease… the package is perfect… he is the right portrayal of an experienced confident intelligent super cool cop…
The plot is good, though could have been lifted from any bloody crime novel, and what actually helps it is the delivery… the shots are very fast and the camera does not delve on irrelevant details like the scenery and the buildings… even though it is New York I don’t remember seeing any important locales… even Jyotika somehow seems to blend in instead of acting as a separate mandatory but useless fixture…
The 2 villain boys are great too, playing the psychotic duo with casual panache… cold blood personified… but they are still kids… the precision with which they go about their revenges, even the minor ones, is spine chilling… and the best part is that no reason is given for this hobby of theirs… they just want to kill… scary thoughts…
Kaakka Kaakka and now Vettaiyadu Vilaiyadu makes me jealous of police officers… I want to become an IPS officer whenever I see this movie (funny I never wanted to be a superhero though I did watch krissh and superman…) they seem to have all the fun bashing gangsters and shooting them down… and the respect they generate from the people around them… the aura that surrounds them …
I think my sister made the right decision by watching it twice… a great positively silver lining in the grey cloud… really made us feel better for missing the train…
PS. When you want to say something nice about something the words are so less, whereas when there is something nasty, there is a flood of adjectives.
Picnic @ Andheri
I have a new found hobby… watching local trains while eating burgers. I will tell u how to have a great picnic in pursuing this interesting past time… and it really helps as a stress reliever especially after a grueling placement session and you are in the mood to make a hurried rush home to get back that lost energy…
First choose the right city… it has to be a great city like Mumbai where you have a lot of narrow roads to convert into one ways for the light vehicles like autos and bikes, but you can let the buses pass through them… make sure that all these roads are generously sprinkled with potholes… ideal setting is heavy rains and all the potholes filled with slush and other yuck… but a post rain road will also do…
And the station should be miles away like Dadar for example and you should be catching the local at a place like the Andheri station… and since you are not willing to waste 4 hours traveling in the comfort of the cab, you leave enough time to catch the train to your home; say about 1 hour… hostel to local train station should take about 20minutes, and from their to the outbound trains station some 20 minutes… so we actually have a contingency planning for about 20minutes when you leave with the luxury of 1 hour ahead of the departure time…
Make sure you have some loose cash… this helps make some rash decisions… like jumping out of the rick hoping that your other ticket mates would be in a position to carry the luggage… it also helps to follow blind and stupid instructions like buying the dinner while waiting for the rest of the ticket’s shareholders to arrive… also helps to find a “very” helpful water conserving vada pav vendor to help wash the slush on the trousers…
Another helpful factor is to carry a lot of luggage… and also heavy ones at that… this helps in generating that appetite for the dinner bought in the previous paragraph, by lugging it up and down the foot over-bridges and dodging hurdles like mindless people who pop out of nowhere like in a video game… unfortunately you don’t have the laser ray gun to vaporize them… and they don’t just stop with an “ow”… a great speech follows…
Once you reach the platform on which you hope to board the train, stand at the place where there is the maximum probability of either first class coaches or the ladies only coaches come to a stop… actually this is not too much of a problem, because it is statistically proven by a great visionary called Murphy that it is going to happen that way wherever we stand… though I would like to assume that god loves me and wants me to travel either first class or with all those lovely ladies, I am not willing to take that risk and trust someone I have not seen all my life… to me Murphy is the known devil and god the unknown angel…
All said and done, you should find a place to sit… so wait until the crowd clears and empties itself into the local train… now you will find a good clean stone bench to sit on the platform… but the reaction should be fast and you must plonk onto it fast before the next batch of the crowd for the next train comes in…
So, now that you have got yourself a nice cozy location at the local station from where you can watch trains come in and go out, pile up the luggage in front of you and start eating the burgers (you have done the cost benefit analysis and found that by the time you reach Dadar, the train would have left anyway)… it is an amazing and exhilarating feeling – eating burgers with a lot of ketchup while the train towards your home is chugging along on its journey without you some 20 minutes away… you feel real light hearted because you are doing something really worthwhile instead of traveling home… and you actually observe the crowd thinning out in the subsequent trains (after your home train’s departure time).
PS. Some hypocrites may actually call this bad time management… but that is not true… we only say they don’t stop to appreciate the little pleasures of life…
First choose the right city… it has to be a great city like Mumbai where you have a lot of narrow roads to convert into one ways for the light vehicles like autos and bikes, but you can let the buses pass through them… make sure that all these roads are generously sprinkled with potholes… ideal setting is heavy rains and all the potholes filled with slush and other yuck… but a post rain road will also do…
And the station should be miles away like Dadar for example and you should be catching the local at a place like the Andheri station… and since you are not willing to waste 4 hours traveling in the comfort of the cab, you leave enough time to catch the train to your home; say about 1 hour… hostel to local train station should take about 20minutes, and from their to the outbound trains station some 20 minutes… so we actually have a contingency planning for about 20minutes when you leave with the luxury of 1 hour ahead of the departure time…
Make sure you have some loose cash… this helps make some rash decisions… like jumping out of the rick hoping that your other ticket mates would be in a position to carry the luggage… it also helps to follow blind and stupid instructions like buying the dinner while waiting for the rest of the ticket’s shareholders to arrive… also helps to find a “very” helpful water conserving vada pav vendor to help wash the slush on the trousers…
Another helpful factor is to carry a lot of luggage… and also heavy ones at that… this helps in generating that appetite for the dinner bought in the previous paragraph, by lugging it up and down the foot over-bridges and dodging hurdles like mindless people who pop out of nowhere like in a video game… unfortunately you don’t have the laser ray gun to vaporize them… and they don’t just stop with an “ow”… a great speech follows…
Once you reach the platform on which you hope to board the train, stand at the place where there is the maximum probability of either first class coaches or the ladies only coaches come to a stop… actually this is not too much of a problem, because it is statistically proven by a great visionary called Murphy that it is going to happen that way wherever we stand… though I would like to assume that god loves me and wants me to travel either first class or with all those lovely ladies, I am not willing to take that risk and trust someone I have not seen all my life… to me Murphy is the known devil and god the unknown angel…
All said and done, you should find a place to sit… so wait until the crowd clears and empties itself into the local train… now you will find a good clean stone bench to sit on the platform… but the reaction should be fast and you must plonk onto it fast before the next batch of the crowd for the next train comes in…
So, now that you have got yourself a nice cozy location at the local station from where you can watch trains come in and go out, pile up the luggage in front of you and start eating the burgers (you have done the cost benefit analysis and found that by the time you reach Dadar, the train would have left anyway)… it is an amazing and exhilarating feeling – eating burgers with a lot of ketchup while the train towards your home is chugging along on its journey without you some 20 minutes away… you feel real light hearted because you are doing something really worthwhile instead of traveling home… and you actually observe the crowd thinning out in the subsequent trains (after your home train’s departure time).
PS. Some hypocrites may actually call this bad time management… but that is not true… we only say they don’t stop to appreciate the little pleasures of life…
The Art of Laziness
What the hell happened to me over the last few days that I never even logged into blogger? I will attribute it to blogger block… or the fact that I could find excuses to not write… I just wanted to do nothing… just lie around in bed and watch movies… when hungry order food… then continue watching movies… you understand that you don’t even have to move the fingers to type…
I would not call myself lazy… I will just call it extremely optimized mobility… I won’t move unless absolutely necessary… I will not move any part of my body unless absolutely necessary… for example if I am in a position where my eyes are watching my laptop, I would not move my head to talk to my neighbor sitting about a foot away from me… no I will chat… because I use only those muscles in my body that are already in the inertia of motion… the rest are in the inertia of rest… why expend energy unnecessarily…
Laziness as everyone calls it and EOM (Extremely Optimized Motion) as I call it, is a virtue… everyone should adopt it… it saves a lot of time and brings in great efficiency… Let me try to make some points here so that everyone can understand…
I don’t do more work than absolutely necessary… breeds mediocrity is the general verdict… no it does not according to the theory of EOM, you don’t want to do more than absolutely necessary… that includes avoiding rework… now any smart EOM guy would do the cost benefit analysis and realize that a little bit of extra effort today in doing that small piece of extra work saves a mighty huge load of effort in terms of harder rework… got it – a defect free delivery and great initiative in going beyond the specs (actually the specs were written by a lazy bum who left out this part where my initiative came in)
Sometimes I don’t speak out/up/to/beyond/on/etc just because I don’t want to open my mouth muscles and exercise my tongue muscles… I just listen… and man do people appreciate a good listener…
I go to classes early in the morning only because I have breakfast… you see the clever way in which I try to achieve optimized motion techniques to get 2-3 things done with one action… the prof is happy to see a sincere guy attending his classes… I am happy that I get to have my breakfast… a win-win situation for all.
I very rarely go out of my house… “great outdoors enjoy the fresh air”, everyone says… “you can’t even run this errand for me on your bike?” , says my mom… but don’t they realize all that petrol I am saving by not running my bike for simple errands…
Well coming back to the bloggers block, I attribute it to my EOM… I found a trigger on Friday… until then I thought a great thought leader needs to rest his most overused muscles sometimes…
I would not call myself lazy… I will just call it extremely optimized mobility… I won’t move unless absolutely necessary… I will not move any part of my body unless absolutely necessary… for example if I am in a position where my eyes are watching my laptop, I would not move my head to talk to my neighbor sitting about a foot away from me… no I will chat… because I use only those muscles in my body that are already in the inertia of motion… the rest are in the inertia of rest… why expend energy unnecessarily…
Laziness as everyone calls it and EOM (Extremely Optimized Motion) as I call it, is a virtue… everyone should adopt it… it saves a lot of time and brings in great efficiency… Let me try to make some points here so that everyone can understand…
I don’t do more work than absolutely necessary… breeds mediocrity is the general verdict… no it does not according to the theory of EOM, you don’t want to do more than absolutely necessary… that includes avoiding rework… now any smart EOM guy would do the cost benefit analysis and realize that a little bit of extra effort today in doing that small piece of extra work saves a mighty huge load of effort in terms of harder rework… got it – a defect free delivery and great initiative in going beyond the specs (actually the specs were written by a lazy bum who left out this part where my initiative came in)
Sometimes I don’t speak out/up/to/beyond/on/etc just because I don’t want to open my mouth muscles and exercise my tongue muscles… I just listen… and man do people appreciate a good listener…
I go to classes early in the morning only because I have breakfast… you see the clever way in which I try to achieve optimized motion techniques to get 2-3 things done with one action… the prof is happy to see a sincere guy attending his classes… I am happy that I get to have my breakfast… a win-win situation for all.
I very rarely go out of my house… “great outdoors enjoy the fresh air”, everyone says… “you can’t even run this errand for me on your bike?” , says my mom… but don’t they realize all that petrol I am saving by not running my bike for simple errands…
Well coming back to the bloggers block, I attribute it to my EOM… I found a trigger on Friday… until then I thought a great thought leader needs to rest his most overused muscles sometimes…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
