the seperation…

I found her in my new office… soft unassuming not so flashy and not so shabby either… very down to earth but being exploited by someone else… I saved her from that useless monster who just could not appreciate her worth... I just stole her from right under his nose.

We immediately hit it off… a sort of special bonding formed between us… everyday I went to work just to create the warmth with her… and she was always ready to tend to my tired and battered body after the bus rides… when she was with me I never felt the need to look around and this helped me to concentrate on the little work that I managed to do…

Of course there were better things to do with her around than just work… I could just close my eyes and savour in the bliss when her soft body enveloped me and massaged my muscles… or I could let it all be and just relax in her soft contours and dream on… especially on a warm days …

She was a little fat, but that was what made her all the more appealing to me… we were the envy of the whole office, each one wishing she was theirs… but we were quite oblivious to the feelings around us – she shielded me from all these negativities by keeping me happy and comfortable…

Aah those memorable days when we have had coffee and juices together… although I could have had coffee in the cafeteria, I would prefer bringing it over and having them in her company… and the many work related achievements she has helped me in… ummm on second thoughts lets not think about work now…

And then came the day of the management decision… she was made to leave… along with many others like her… they were moving older ones like her to make way for younger ones… slimmer and sexy looking… but the warmth was missing… I will never be comfortable with these new entrants… I might get used to them, but not comfy.

I tried to hold her back… went to the authorities pleading with them to release her… even made up stories to invoke pity in their cold eyes… but all in vain… I could not bear to see her made to stand in a corner with others like her for the final walk out of the doors… I walked back inside cursing my inability to do anything about it.

Damn it… I miss my old chair !!!

the rice of the fitness freak…

I recently joined the elite class of fitness fanatics… recently as in some 4mths back… so I am not a new yr junkie (just reiterating the fact I had pointed in one of the previous posts itself)… so when I enrolled it is all so impressively professionally managed… or so it seemed…

Meet the physio they say… “the” physio is actually a group of people with weird looking instruments and weirder ideas… they try to find some fault in your body when there is none… come on man, I am there not to reduce weight or make myself look like the Mr.Prefect… I am here to have a general level of fitness and stamina with a little bit of muscle toning that comes in with a light cardio workouts… which means “I suddenly have a lot of money and I feel that the corporate discount was good enough… and yeah I wont be visiting too often…” so a session of fat measurements using vernier callipers and making me stretch muscles I knew never could be stretched, they found that I had an alarming 6% body fat as against the norm of 5.5% or something like that… so now the nutritionist takes over…

And what a stunning nutritionist she was… I could hear “and here come nutri-marie at 5ft 2inches weighing 170 pounds she is one of the lightest WWE superstars around” in the background… she could stun with a flick of her little finger if she could bend it enough to flick that is… and she asks me what do I eat… and as soon as I start off she is alarmed… “what no solid breakfast?” “what 3 cups of coffee?” “what 3 spoons of sugar a day?” “what no fruits?” and “what – u eat rice? In all the meals?”

Hey!!! I have to survive…

Any south indian worth his rice would have nightmares going to a dietician/nutritionist at any fitness club… the reason – they are so anti-rice… we just can’t leave a tradition of rice hogging southie culture just so that we can try to get into that six pack ab-domain… and what is the guarantee that it will give me that… I mean unlike coffee, the wonder drug that keeps you awake as soon as you have it, wheat does not give you six packs immediately on eating it…

You go to any surd-ka-dabha and order meals… a typical one is with some 3 rotis and a bowl of rice… if you wanna substitute the rice with the roti, you get another measly 2 or if they are generous, 3 rotis… come on – don’t you know that rotis are appetizers… go to an andhra restaurant and order unlimited meals, they serve you some rotis in the start… then comes the unlimited rice… UNLIMITED – get it… if I were to shift to a roti-only-thali I would go hungry !!! for the same money I get nightmares where the rice is accusing me of baseless treachery…

Not to mention the side effects when I am watching other people around me happily feasting on the rice and biryanis… years of rice hogging has given me a voracious appetite… and that nutritionist has the cheek to advice me to have a heavy breakfast – of 2-3 idlies –if I eat just 2-3 idlies I will die of starvation (and please don’t mention that idlies are made of rice and I wont be able to have that too… worse she might ask me to have wheat idlies yuck !!!) and a lunch of 2-3 chapatis, avoid rice – and ? I mean I have to eat a main course after an appetizer round right? And have a bowl of fruit in the late evening…fruit bowls actually make me hungrier – however big they are… that is why I avoid fruits in the first place… and then the best part – have a light dinner… according to her, the lunch was heavy!!!

And where is the coffee in the picture – I need it… it is the elixir of life… Now if only she had looked herself in the mirror, she might have felt a little guilty… what was she trying to achieve, saving the food ration for herself !!!

I am sorry lady… I am not the rich-anorexic-modeling-kids you normally get as clients… I am here on a fat company discount and I am dictating my terms… I am like this only and will be for time to come… I will hog like a pig, make me run like a horse…

customer is king kong…

India is a land of plenty… plenty of people that is… my cynical argument is that that is the reason for the current economic boom and prosperity of the nation despite there being millions of people who cannot affort a basic one meal per day or a roof over their heads or even a piece of cloth to cover themselves…

Businesses in India have woken up to the sudden cash inflow… in India they see many countries – just based on the economic divide… we have people with riches competing with the richest of the world to those competing with those that are starving for basic necessities as well and millions of people at different levels in between… result – we have a market for everything… if I were to launch a simple safety pin priced at a million dollars, I would probably find a buyer, no actually, I would find many bidders for it and I could possibly sell it at 10 million… maybe more.

No this is not due to inflation… too much money chasing too few goods is not the case… yes that is there too, but it is definitely not the problem because if it were it would affect the business men as well… it is a callous attitude typically contributed by the Indian consumer himself…

If we go back to the annals of Indian history we have always had someone categorized into “traitors”… these people typically used to sell off their fellow countrymen to invaders for no better deal than what maybe they would have all had gotten had their been a united effort at nation development… but no, Indians have always thought that they were always better than fellow Indians… not that they deserve better, that they can afford better…

If a fellow Indian is getting screwed at some service offered, the first sympathy of other Indians would go to the service provider… for example, if I am in a queue for a movie ticket, the guy behind me would grumble that I am taking too much time in buying tickets rather than that the guy issuing the tickets is taking too much time to give the tickets… and the businesses make the best of it… even if they fall short on their delivery promises they would always find a buyer for their crappy service…

The finest example is the pizza delivery 30 minute promise… I have never seen deliveries happening within 30minutes… but never have I seen people getting it free… why… because we know that the guys who are gonna go hungry are not the pizza delivery guys or the pizza makers… it is the guys who ordered it… because I definitely don’t think that pizza if it were ever returned would translate into a loss for the company… because in all probability, the pizza would find a buyer among the many people who want to flaunt their buying power and are still waiting their turn outside the restaurant…

Definitely we cannot boycott the goods and services because these are bare essentials… there was a recent fwd about the real estate boom which implored all peoples to stop buying houses for a couple of years so that the builders could actually feel the impact of a joint boycott… but that mail is getting forwarded like a hot cake but in a different sense… the psyche of the guy forwarding the mail is explained using the game theory… “if I forward it to some 10 people and they boycott the buying of the flat then I would end up getting the flat cheap…” the problem with this idea is that all the people reading the forward are Indians… and hence we think alike…

Businesses no longer look at customers… they look at target segments… because things average out in a bigger population… it is a statistical funda applicable to India definitely… gone are the days when the business people used to bend backwards to treat customers as kings and that the customer is always right… wait… I don’t remember those days at all… I have only seen an attitude of “the customer is right, so what? I will find somebody else…” according to them customers are just monkeys providing amusement with their rantings… but maybe king kong would get a better response because he is a big monkey – with due respect to racism…