mein, meri lappie aur woe

my laptop has to be in the geriatric hall of fame. This fossil was dug up by our ceo on his archaeological expedition cum vacation somewhere in the remote locations of the Antarctic… or it was maybe somewhere in the hot locales of the USA… but yeah somehow this artifact was unearthed… thus this piece of prehistoric paleolithic processor came to be in my company… and has stayed on in the company since then… actually we should say “thus the company stayed on since then…” but since we pride ourselves in being a modern IT company we will live in the bliss that the laptop came after the company was founded…

so when I joined this great organization, we were given a t-shirt that said “since 1852”… ok ok not 1852… but yeah we were given a t-shirt that was left over from last year and a laptop… for me it was “the laptop”…

it is a simple dell d600… maybe it is a cryptic clue for “direct from hell” or “the devil” himself… but it is the beginning of all my woes. First it has been handed down through generations – manhandled and each and every key has taken the beating of centuries. And the top right hand corner of the lid is actually worn thin with all the scraping aways of the old label of the previous owner and the track pad is so smooth that your finger just slides without actually moving the mouse pointer… the indicator leds have grown senile and continuously blink on and off in different colors with absolutely no meaning…

and then the internal organs have also eroded with age. The wireless adaptors keep searching for adaptors that are not available ultimately realizing that the adaptors were anyways disabled. But then like most senile beings the memory is short lived too and the search begins pretty soon again. But the normal wired network is always unplugged even with a full blast network… (of course the modem is working fine I checked it… I am not that dumb, ok…) my lotus notes always locks my mail account – come on boss, it is my official mail, I can read that during my office hours…

Funnily my laptop was the only one in which there is a dvd drive that does not have the combo of cd burning too… but of course now you understand why dell buried it in some excavation site to fossil away… so when I pointed it out to the helpdesk guy he promptly made another laptop as the one with the unique distinction of having the non-cd-burning-dvd-drive… aah the wonders of the ultra-bay technology… I was just awed by his dedication that I quickly took my laptop away to my cubicle to test it in privacy lest the owner of the combo drive were to trace it to me and demand it back…

and the helpdesk people have ingenuous and fool proof ways of finding out the fault in your laptop. They take it up and hold it near their ears. If it makes a “krr krr” sound then your harddisk has crashed. If it makes no sound, then they shake it till it rattles and then say that the screw is loose there and tighten it and give it back – and they wont forget to make you close the issue and mark it as satisfied!!! And why not? The laptop worked so well under their hands. Is this what is called artificial intelligence?

Speaking of intelligence, the laptop has a mind of its own… first it waits for me to do some very important work like being halfway through a blog post or better still, a very interesting blog post that I was so enthusiastically typing away that I even forgot to save it even at the title…

(wait that reminds me… aah ctrl + S 10 times…)

Ok… where were we? … yeah, when I am in the middle of something very important, like a blog post or a chat, it decides to hang… that is it… freeze… frozen… I have to force shut down and restart the system as the great “ctrl+alt+del” combination is rendered useless here. But the system is not finished with me yet.

So much for Mr.Gates’ panacea of shut-down-restart – it does not go all the way – stops at the blue screen(not the death wala) without the login prompt. Ok another force shut down restart.

Now it does not recognize my OS… the bios says that… what cheek!!! Force shut down restart no.3…

now slowly my login also happens and my personal settings come up one by one on the system tray… hey wait… are we done? That is it? Only 4 icons… there is something definitely missing… aah !!! where is the network icon that says unplugged with that huge red cross? That is it… no network adaptors loaded. Another restart – this time I do it the normal good way – start menu etc etc… but then, there are some programs that tired of being mistreated being called as and when the OS is restarted that they refuse to shut down…

ok, now that we are experts in force shutdown restart we can do it anytime… easy… but no network icon this time too… next time and the time after the next too till I lose count… finally the frustrated me turns to religion – there is no particular god for computers, but I generally invoke all of them – it is good to keep them all happy you know, you never know… and even then no network… one more time, this time with more bhakthi and shraddha… yaay… that is it… the network is up and running too…

I almost do a jig, but then since I don’t want to make an over enthusiastic noise and make Murphy angry again… so I go back to see what is left over of my blog post – haha gotcha… trick question… with friends like Murphy, you should not even think about the blog posts… and the friends who were patient enough to wait to hear my story of why I had just rudely logged off in the middle of listening to them bitch about their companies and bosses…

But despite my best begging skills the helpdesk will not believe and give me a new laptop. It seems that the top management and the marketing people are looking at brand ambassadors for enhancing our company image and they need widescreen and faster processor speeds in their laptops to download all those pictures of prospective models… of course we are talking about images of great ceos and company heads and leaders here… not those cheap skimpily clad (clad?) ones out there… you pervert…

Till then I think I will have to live with collecting new spare parts… today I got a new hard disk… previously a new OS… next time a new motherboard maybe… then a new key pad… slowly I will have enough to make a new laptop within a realistic period of say 6 more months…

PS. ssh don’t mention the cd drive switch to anyone ok… thanks…

taare zameen par…

I can’t help envying ishaan… he is so lucky to be dyslexic… or am I abnormal to think of a feeling like envy when everybody else is shedding copious tears in sympathy of his abnormality… woe betide the heartless me…

How normal is a normal kid in the third standard… come on…

Teacher: class today we are going to study plants. Plants are the green things that you see on the roadside and parks… sometimes they look good with flowers and fruits then we call those places where these plants grow gardens… Can you name some plants…

Student 1: Rose plant

Teacher : very good

Student 2: Sunflower Plant

Teacher: mmm good

Student 3: tomato plant

Teacher: good good

Student 4: Brinjal plant

Teacher: mmm good

Student 5: white rose plant

Teacher: mmm ok, but somebody has already said a rose plant…

By this time there is a mad commotion in the class to name a different plant and show off and so by quite some time the class has exhausted almost all know plant names… and then there goes up an excited hand to name a plant that is not yet named…

Teacher: yes Anand…

Excited student: miss… steel plant…

Teacher: unh !!!

And with one casual sweep of her hand gesturing me to sit down, she killed one of the future, maybe the only, competition to mittal and the tatas… gone… nipped in the bud… (haha got that pun… I am a natural !!!)

Then by different episodes which I am too shy to expose here, my creativity was beaten out of me so that I could lead a normal life… occasionaly though it does try to surface, but then it is easily curbed due to the infinite yogic meditation techniques and tai-chi and feng shui I have been taught at school and also managed to research on the net…

No… I didn’t suffer from dyslexia… and I was a pretty good student academically too… that was until some other friends of mine decided to take over my responsibility and let me focus on er…other interests of greater consequence… so I definitely don’t envy ishaan for suffering from dyslexia and getting to act with aamir khan… and he actually shares the dubious dyslexion of his condition with aamir khan himself… (ok ok that word play didn’t look as good as the pun, but I am working on it…)

So why do I envy ishaan? At least he had a teacher who told him thinking of steel plants was ok and helped him to learn the difference.

Ishaan is lucky… the dreamy eyed kid that he is portrayed to be is the way that kids should be… let their creativity run wild… let their inquisitiveness be unhindered… and find more kids like ishaan act in such movies and make more such movies…

Yeah aamir khan’s directorial debut TZP is an awesome must watch movie. It got 4 stars in the TOI, but I am ready to give it millions of stars… it is impossible to quantify in terms of stars the intangible ROI from the movie… ok to cut the crap and put it in layman’s terms the individual performances are great… including the khadoos dad who seems to have no feeling for his son… and it would be an understatement to say that the kid and aamir khan have done justice to their roles… the whole performance is so natural that it is unnatural to believe that they are acting… even the crying scenes don’t make you cringe in emotionless boredom…

Of course the movie has its mistakes and some dumb scenes, which is probably the reason why the one star was penalized by the TOI critic… but the overall delivery more than makes up for the deficit… the way ishaan learns that he is abnormal and the way he is unable to understand that he is actually having a problem can’t be better portrayed… and there are so many subtle moments in the movie that help us appreciate the amount of perfection attempted…

And the best of all is the magic of the kids… the kids are made to behave in the most normal way even though they are extremely special ones acting in aamir khan’s special movie (at least the media says so)… unlike some movies where 8 year old kids are mature enough to arrange a wedding of their dad with his college best friend by just reading their mom’s letters, these kids are acting their age. Even the paintings done by ishaan despite his high IQ only portray his creativity, to which age has no significance and does not show him as a da Vinci or a Picasso… The songs are good too… especially the “tumhe sab hai pata hai na maa!!!” is so soulful, that ishaan’s silent acceptance is so perfectly balanced in it.

If I have to sum it up in one word – “too good”… ;)

I am alone !!!

I pity will smith… I can’t spend a short weekend alone despite having a television filled with millions of live programs involving live people and he spends 3 years in a world that has no other fellow human being. It is a real scary movie. No I am not talking about the stupid screaming zombies who are always asleep during the day… the whole idea that you are the last man on earth is what is extremely scary…

If I had been him in that world, I would not have lasted 3 minutes, let alone 3 years. I would not have wasted so many bullets trying to kill all those virus infected zombies. Just one bullet would have been enough. (Here I have a small question, when people bite the bullet, do they get time to chew? Probably I should write a letter to that organization in switzerland. But what is the point when I am the last human on earth… nobody would be there to answer back.

Scary thought. When almost 30% of your batchmates are in the same city you are living in and quite a few of them are in the same area, you should say “how can you say that you are feeling lonely ?”… yeah rite… it actually goes like this.

Me: hey dude1… wanna go to that movie “abc”?

Dude1: hey why do you want to go to abc da? And it is a stupid movie. The actors in it are all commercial stars. Lets go to some slow boring play where we will have lots of time to appreciate the individual performances.

Me: er… actually at that reminds me. There is a K-serial I want to watch. Maybe we will catch up for dinner sometime after u finish the play eh?

Dude1: ummm… ok… but then I will actually be some 200kms away in another city because the play is running only there. Bangalore is too fast paced a city for that kind of plays.

Me: huh ok, how abt lunch at a place near your house tomorrow?

Dude1: you mean I have to move 10 meters away from my place… how could you be so cruel?

Me: ok ok… fine… chalo… enjoy your play… maybe we will catch up some other time.

After sometime:

Me: hey dude2… wanna go to that movie “abc”?

Dude2: hey, no man… actually I have some work at office today. Hey lets do one thing… why don’t we wake up around say 4am in the morning go for a short jog for about 10kms, play football with a few guys and jog back home. And all this on an empty stomach. And once you reach home you will get one nice juicy tiny cute orange!!! Exciting no ?

Me: huh… yeah… actually I was planning to get sloshed tonite, so I won’t be able to wake up that early tomorrow morning.

Dude2: Hey no probs man… I will wake you up…

Me: er… actually I would be too disoriented after that party… moreover my physio has said that running after drinking alcohol causes cramps in the muscles due to the anaerobic respiration cycle…

Dude2: How about next weekend?

Me: yes man!!! That sounds good… chalo will call u next Friday.

Dude2: ok ciao bbye!!!

Me: bbye (phew!!!)

After some more time

Me: Hey dude3… wotsup da… wotcha doing ? (see I learn fast… no “want to go to that movie abc” line)

Dude3: nothing da… am feeling damn bored. Just donno wot the hell to do… am so vella and I don’t feel like watching a movie on my laptop… or tv… or even sleeping…

Me: same here da… hey say how about we catch a movie… heard that there is a cool movie abc running in a nearby theater…

Dude3: yeah I know… but will you get tickets for this weekend? There is no point going to all the trouble and finding that there are no tickets. Bangalore is a very crowded place man… tickets are sold off even before the movie is released…

Me: yeah, but no harm trying rite… I will chk on the fone booking… or the internet…

Dude3: they never pick up the phone da… or else it is always engaged… and the net never has more than 2 or 3 tickets at a time…

Me: ok, then how about going to that arcade and play some pool and bowling and some video games…

Dude3: I don’t play video games da… they never interest me… and the bowling ball is so heavy and you have to do all sorts of gymnastics to play pool… sounds like too much work…

Me: yeah da… there is nothing to do… this is one useless city… we are so bored to death…

Dude3: yeah… we can do nothing but crib about it…

You know it is very difficult being the bored one in a group of bored ones. And it gets so boring that I get hungry and I have to order some food – I hate eating out alone. Thanks to these friends I know who to blame when I get that bulge in my midsection – I don’t get any exercise yaar!!!

So what do we do about it? We blog !!!

Here and here !!!

PS. “I am legend” made me really appreciate the crowded Ranganathan Street of chennai.

scary story

scary story

claimer: this is a true story

Our boss announced that we were in dire need of a team outing. We were working too hard to meet the deadline and we were close to losing our marbles. Tempers were flying and mistakes were becoming pretty common. We needed a break. So we decided to hit it.

A picnic in the wooded area behind our tech park was suggested. It was not actually a wooded area. It was actually an abandoned construction site. People said it was cursed. The land was bought by a leading construction company and they were building huge office complexes to house the ever-growing software population of the city. But some misfortune fell and the great entrepreneur died in that very area. The place was deemed jinxed and the company lost all its money and was another riches to rags story. Effectively it was an abandoned building site with half finished walls and floors and ceilings and overgrown with trees and bushes. It was abandoned for quiet sometime that it actually started looking like a forest. Rumor had it that it did have some wildlife too – snakes and stuff.

But we were an adventurous lot. So we packed a huge picnic basket and some cricket gear and some more games with big balls and started off. We found a clearing and fixed our cricket pitch there. A game of limited overs was followed by another and then another and then another till we were tired and hungry at the border of collapsing.

We attacked the picnic basket. Slowly our energies returned and our bodies were hydrated again. And we were just relaxing in the cool winter sun chatting up on each one’s old times and laughing at the goofs of our client.

And then it happened. The ground shook. A steady thump-thump as if some distant pile driver was boring into the earth. Only it grew slightly louder with every thump. The trees in front of me parted and out peeked the head of a tyrannosaurus rex – looking directly at us.

There was no need to tell us that it was hungry. And we did not care to find out if it really was. The guy next to me screamed and that set off the t-rex’s roar and then everybody screamed. The t-rex started towards us. A split second later all of us started too… in different directions. We headed for the trees hoping to get a good cover.

But I was the wise one aka smart-ass. I looked around for a second, analyzing my situation. The stone buildings were a little further away from the closest cover of the trees. And it was not running away from the hungry dinosaur but would actually mean running a slant path that was closer to the monster than the others. But I had always prided myself in not following the crowd and I would live up to it today as well – if I lived that is … Gulp !!!

Much as I try to make others believe that I actually stopped and thought out my options for a second, I was actually not thinking at that time. I just ran and since I hated crowds I just ran towards the half finished buildings. The predator followed its instincts it is easier to catch the odd man out – I mean the odd dumb animal in the herd as it usually makes a mistake that causes it to go slower than the herd. I watch a lot of discovery and animal planet. And today I like the chosen one.

I could visualize the animal behind me – snarling and madly hungry… it would only be a matter of time before I lost track of time. I did not have time to think if it would be painless or how would it feel inside the stomach of the beast if it were possible… yeah I know – it is gross, but how else can I fill more words here?

I hit the trees before I was caught. The animal hit it a moment later, panting heavily too. The new medium had momentarily slowed its pace. But it was used to it – after this was its playground and we were the visitors, and was gaining its lost momentum. I could suddenly see the white stones of the unfinished walls just up ahead and I put on a new burst of speed with renewed hope.

The t-rex sensing my new hope roared out and as expected increased its speed too. Then as its hot breath almost hit the back of neck I took a sideways plunge into the nearest opening I could find. I skidded through the gravel and sand in the half laid floor watching the surprised t-rex skid in its momentum outside. I turned just in time to see the other side of the wall coming in to hug me but I could do nothing about it. My head hit it with a sickening thud and I lost consciousness.

I don’t know how long I was out cold but when I woke up it was still sunny outside. I looked at my watch and it showed some time close to 4 pm. I was unconscious for nearly 2 hours. I looked around the place I was in. It was a small room with a part of the wall crumbling away on one side. And that is when I found that it was not over yet.

The t-rex was still nearby patrolling the area – waiting for me to surface so that it could well u know what. I held my breath and stayed silent and unmoving till it crossed. Even though I had read that t-rex can only see moving objects my lying motionless was because I was petrified. Slowly the t-rex went farther and farther away and slowly the air in my lungs went out as I exhaled noiselessly.

And then it happened.

Beeeeeeeep!

The t-rex paused, listening. I quickly saw my watch that was lying a little away, probably came off when I collided with the wall. I grabbed it and pressed some button to stop it from beeping more. But the keys themselves beeped when pressed and moreover the sound was not coming from the watch. It was my cell phone alarm.

BEEP BEEP BEEP !!!

I frantically searched for my cell phone, but the damage was already done. The t-rex had seen me move for the watch and now I was jumping around like a monkey to find my phone. It turned and started running towards me. BEEP BEEP thump … thump … thuMP… thUMP… BEEP BEEP it was getting closer and closer and there was a roar. I could hear the ground vibrating now and the thumps went THUMP THUMP… my body was shaken roughly…

The t-rex opened its mouth to roar again as it closed in on me; I watched in horror unable to move…

“DUDE… YOU ARE LYING ON TOP OF YOUR CELL PHONE… SWITCH IT OFF AND LET ME SLEEP IN PEACE”… roared the voice of my roomie.