inert matter

My quarter life crisis…

2009-07-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

I turned 29 today… my orkut scrap book whose count accelerated up a few numbers today stand proof to the significance of 2 things – one that happened 29 years back and I had no control over and the other that happened maybe 5 years ago and in a moment of euphoric madness at being among the first to receive a privileged invite to join this social networking site… ever since I have not deleted any scraps on this site and have been trying my best to at least achieve a respectable scrap count… needless to say I have hopelessly failed due to many reasons (definitely not my vibrant social life) and which is not the reason I started this post so I stop the discussion right here right now…

Yeah I am 29… that is what I would say whenever anyone asked me for my age… well it is simple no… I just have to add up the number of years to 1980 and it is very easy to add something to a number that ends in zero… or subtract a number that ends in zero… whichever way you follow to calculate your age. Anyways, though I am proud of my arithmetic abilities, I am not going to give you a 101 ways to calculate your age – what I am merely trying to point out here is that I am 29 – and it is so easy to calculate that I have not made a mistake… so the next time you put your hand to your mouth and say “what… you are 29???”, I can at least understand that you are not doubting the accuracy of the number.

But yeah there is one person, or rather personified person, who lives inside me screaming at the top of his voice that my age is only 25… 25 – can you believe it? There are only two other persons in who achieved this not growing up thingee – Markandeya at sweet sixteen and probably Peter Pan – the boy who refused to grow up… though I lost the chance to achieve the world record of being the youngest to achieve this feat, maybe I could have tried for the oldest 25year old alive… had I not gotten jolted out of this a few days back…

Now don’t ask me why 25 in particular and why not 20 or 15 or even 30… maybe it was at 25 that I went back to school again or maybe 25 was the time I lost touch with reality or maybe just plain lost it… the point is the magic number was 25… or it could have just been an arbitrary number cloud around the number 25 which makes it into a hazy and maybe even an irrational number – but we all know that we cannot age irrationally – aren’t we all rational?

So there I was happily oblivious to my ageing process living a life without any major burdens, enjoying the in-between period from restrained childhood to a responsible adulthood… partying on weekends and partying on weekdays… spending without a worry whatever little I was paid at the end of the month… when there was no water available, we drank beer instead, taking a leaf out of the wise lady Marie Antoinette’s life… all my friends were quite like me living a life of reckless irresponsibility.

The group got constantly modified – people kept moving out and others came in to replace them. But I didn’t notice… they were all still 25 year olds like me. Until suddenly one day I sat up and took notice, I realized that others around me had been ageing all this while… suddenly my friends and cousins became uncles and aunts… the cute girls fresh from college or working in BPOs seemed like the ones to ogle at and I used to wonder that how women these days were getting pretty silly… while the ones I was used to ogling suddenly became the aunties with the constantly crying misbehaving kids… while the guys with whom I used to drink beer and hung out until pretty late into the night, were suddenly very serious about getting home early…

The telling blows came when these aunties and uncles introduced me to their kids as an uncle and the kids shamelessly called me uncle – far from the anna or bhaiyya which I was used to. And I started looking at the mirror more often to check whether I had any grays poking out of my head… but then after a couple of such false alarms, my brain kicked in dismissing the claims by the adults introducing me to their kids as “uncle” as a mere indication of the jealousy that comes up when older people see younger people having more fun… but by now i was confused on what to call them... i guess definitely not "aunties" as the "uncles" would insist on an explanation...

The final blows came from my mom – her favorite phrases being – “erumai/kazhudhai vayasu achu” (an old tam saying that compares you to a buffalo or donkey’s age - duh) whenever I am having fun… an admonishment which I never understood because I was acting my age… 25… the best part was when she used to say that I was irresponsible and that my dad was married (which is usually associated with being responsible – refer the example above where guys want to go home early) when he was 27… now though marriage seemed like a necessary evil, I was still ok with my present single state because I still had 2 more years to attain that maturity… no?

But, all good things must come to an end and so does my 25^th year… after running successfully for the last 4 years, I decided that I can accept the fact that I am actually older… though my alter ego who sits inside my head still might poke out and claim that I am only 25, I am slowly feeding him the shocking news of his age so that it does not come as a great shock to him...

PS. My luck seems to be changing on my 29^th birthday though. Something good happened – mclaren is back on top.

PPS. Throughout the post I was reminded of koundamani’s famous “take the 25” comedy… here it is on youtube…

The Chronicles of Varuna: The Line, The Ditch and The Downpour…

2009-07-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

It is that time of the year again – where the sun the gets blotted out by shades of grey, and smell of wet earth hits you into a knock out sense of euphoria, the cold air makes you want to curl up under a thick woolen blanket, with the noise of the water pouring in the backdrop sipping noisily on a cup of hot ginger tea… no wait I am dreaming… I don’t have the tea or the woolen blanket… cut to reality – this is the time of the year I get to play cat and mouse with the rain gods…

Today, after so many days of careful meteorological planning and evasion tactics and having upgraded my arsenal with a car, I was exposed vulnerably to the wrath of the rain gods… I had to travel some 10kms through the evening peak hour traffic to get back home without a mobile roof over my head (if you don’t count the helmet as one that is) after I picked up my trusty companion on such missions – my pulsar 150…

And of course Murphy was waiting for one such opportunity… with the patience of a hungry wolf (please note Mr. Murphy that I am using the comparison in a complimentary way). Of course no points for guessing whether I got drenched or not today… but the bone chilling dunking I got through reminded me of the events of last year and the different strategies we played against each other… and I hope I will find time to put them all down here so that maybe some day in the future, i would have gotten into a better mood to have a good laugh…

One particular day's strategy went something like this –

There is this route through the main roads that I used to take to get home – a pretty long route, almost an unbroken but not so straight line, about 20kms one way interspersed with traffic signals to slow you down to give you the time to stop and smell the flowers – only they will be dripping wet like me and I already had enough water in my nose… but then it was usually safer to go this way because this particular route had something that the other routes did not – a road.

As usual the game began as soon as I left office, and the rain started pouring consistently… whenever I tried to race against it, Murphy stepped on the pedal too increasing the quantity of the water pouring from the heavens above… and slowing down back to the old rhythm as my speed fell in tune with the slow moving traffic… following me throughout the path I took…

That day I suddenly decided to experiment – I broke off at a signal, took a detour through another road perpendicular to the direction I was traveling and lo behold – a totally dry patch of land lay in front of me… really – not even the smell of wet earth… it was as if some water tanker lorry was spilling its way along my usual path and it did not turn in this new direction…

I was astounded to say the least at the availability of a non slippery dry road… but at the same time I got a new found elation pumping up my adrenalin giving me hope that today I might end up at my home less wetter than the previous days… I revved the engine only to realize that I can’t make speedy progress because of the enormous number of ditches all along the way… still I tried my best to make it home as fast as possible before Murphy realized I was not getting the water any longer…

But my euphoria was short lived, and as I turned the next corner to catch the general direction to my house, Murphy had finally caught up… he had realized that I was not on my original path any longer and he definitely was not a novice to the streets of this city… in a fury at being outsmarted by a mere mortal he sent forth a gushing torrential cascade that started filling up the ditches on my road… the downpour was not only making my visibility poor, but was also filling up the depressions in the road, disguising them to merge into an evenly flat surface smooth road… in order to avoid causing damage to my trusty steed I had to leave the path less taken and get back on to the main roads as soon as possible…

I did just that, rejoining my older path a few kilometers from where I had taken the diversion, only to realize that I was not exaggerating when I said I was being singled out and chased by Murphy… the road was dry as a new huggies diaper… and since Murphy’s GPS was maybe guiding him along the other path, I had a few seconds of dry and good roads to make my escape.

But yeah the traffic signals who were the good old friends of my enemy simultaneously slowed down my progress and sort of seemed to send a signal to the rain clouds to change their direction. So a short distance from my home, the rain had caught up… and this time in all out fury seemingly to compensate for the short dry patches in my journey trying to get me as wet as possible before I made it to safety…

Of course, once I got under the roof of my house, the game ends and both of us retire for the day to restart a new game the next day… I guess by now Murphy must have realized that his adversary will not give up without a fight…

written sometime back… forgot to post... now i can't remember it well enough to think of a good title... sorry for the period post…

2009-07-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

(awesome... probably the first time anybody puts a disclaimer in the title)

For those who dinno yet – santro it is… the sunshine car reflecting pure white light…

Somewhere I read that a transaction happens when the buyer and seller feel that they got the best deal… to me it happened sometime in December, in the heart of the recession when heads of auto companies were trying to offload their stock and quickly bundle the cash into a clean white dhoti and run away to some obscure place before their line employees come back after their sudden pay-now-claim-later vacation that their usually tyrant boss had so benevolently insisted on them recharging their batteries…

Ok to cut a long story short… Hyundai offered a price cut and the government offered to reduce some of the tax burden… overall it seemed like a good deal to me… and for the dealer it seemed like a good deal too as apparently the discount was borne by the manufacturer (at least the papers said so) and he thanked god for sending in a dumb customer who was not bargaining for discounted accessories – not even the free ganesha idol he normally gave away in happier innocent times… the customer in turn thanked god for granting him the power to resist swiping the evil plastic to revel in some cheap thrills of pirated music and button press power windows…

So there it was, occupying the unused space I had being paying the rent and the maintenance for over 6 months… thanks to spiderman and yuppie-da for getting it home safely… yes I didn’t drive it home… in fact for the next few days I would be re-living those pre licecnse driving class days with a guy sitting to my left shouting instructions aloud to hide his panic, while I through clenched teeth and sweaty palms drove to office in the slowest speeds possible that tested the patience of my followers…

But yes… here I am… come a long way from that scared L-boarder to a scary L-boarder (yes I still retain the big red L – my dad, an ex law student, advised me against removing it so that I could have an upper hand in a situation if required) – 3123 kms to be exact… that too with a trip to Chennai (350kms one way) and one to Sivasamudram (about 150 kms from Bangalore) about which I hope to write some day too…

But, the new arrival in the family has not been accepted without friction. In fact barely had the one month deadline arrived for the first servicing, that I felt like a guy with two wives… after a month of aggressive driving around Bangalore and nearby, I just managed to cross the required run-in kilometers… a satisfied owner, I took it to the nearby service center for the regular servicing, again resisting offers of extended warranty which did not include parts I did not even know existed, got the “free service only” words out of my mouth and came back home to go to the office on my trusty bike…

Only he was not any more… yeah – the definitely male “HE”… but he did not hide his jealousy at being neglected all this while… refused to start till I kicked the s*** out of me… then within a few meters I felt a loss in the rear wheel stability… puncture… with that I felt my cheerfulness draining out with the air… had to please him with some new pretty expensive accessories to get him to behave…

But yeah… back to focus on the star of this post… after the first service, she was much more smoother… that is when we took her to Chennai… I was a bit apprehensive – all those nasty trucks and mean speeding vehicles on those highways… how would I cope with it all… in fact it was such an overwhelming fear, that I took a detour in between to visit a temple… haha gotcha… I did not go to the temple out of fear… I just wanted to ~~soothe my nerves~~ fill my tummy – heard their puliyogare and curd rice were very good… after this and a couple of drive arounds in chennai’s jammed roads (after which I patted myself on the back for living in the outskirts in Bangalore), I realized that I actually enjoyed the freedom of the wonderful highway from Chennai to Bangalore… so much so that I actually drove back in 4hrs straight… all those nfs trainings during the mba seems to have helped…

After this, there was no going back… huh… I mean… I love biking, but then I have to spend some time with the car too… a good amount of money has been invested… what is the point if I don’t use it… (s*** I have to now worry about diplomacy with my bike !!!)

Anyways, there are some side-effects of getting the car… the rain god thinks I played spoil sport… so he has roped in his friend the sun god to cook me inside the glorified solar cooker… But yeah… another way to show the finger to the autowallas in bangalore…

feelings on the valentine’s day

2009-02-15T04:06:00.001-08:00

It was a bright sunny morning… wait... it was not supposed to be so bright… oh no we were late already… so a few hurried phone calls to wake up the other eligible bachelors who were accompanying me, and another set of hurried morning procedures we were on our way to the great indian aeroshow… after all the hype generated by the press giving us photos of dazzling display of gravity defying and pure foolhardy stunts, who would not have their brain floating in adrenalin already.

When you set your heart to something the whole world conspires to help you achieve it is a popularized myth created by a equally hyped author and his mindless readers… the truth is generally just the opposite… when we set our heart and mind to buy those ridiculously overpriced tickets, the whole world was conspiring against us… first it was the alarm that didn’t go off loud enough, second it was the traffic police… looking up google maps I had charted out a nice course along the much touted superfast national highway to the airport when we found a few totally tacky banners which had an arrow pointing to a right much before the right shown on the google maps…

Anyways, despite our mind telling us not to follow that route, madness took over and we turned… we did realize the mistake immediately… traffic was crawling not because it was overcrowded, but it had to move ever so slowly for fear of hitting the people who had set up shops so close to the road, making it a drive-through market… and they had put in a lot of craters like any other major road for good measure… and of course the traffic police were conspicuously missing after that stupid sign that made us take that right turn.

A pretty bumpy ride followed during which we met a lot of people who were absolutely ignorant in geography, and finally we managed to catch a caravan of cars following a huge overloaded truck which was trundling along slowly negotiating the craters like a huge rolling ball. And since this was a Monaco grand prix track, overtaking was literally impossible. Somehow we managed to stumble into the elusive NH7, but the elation was short lived as we had to slip into another narrow service road to enter the parking lot… ok, not so fast… we had to drive through some long winding dirt road in a slow procession as people who had managed to wake up earlier than us tried to find their parking spots…

Finally we did too, passing the scrutinizing eyes of the tired sunburnt security guards and the indifferent nose of the sniffer dog. Ignoring the shade provided by the tents we eagerly made our way towards the fence to be as close to the jets as possible… and we waited for the show to begin hoping to witness the famed defense punctuality.

And begin it did I think on dot at 1000 hours, since there is no way to ascertain the exact time by our highly inaccurate personal times and the inaudible voice from the tents, let us assume the indian standard time effect has not yet affected them. The first jet was already parked a few minutes ago and it rolled on to accelerate for take off… the cheers of the crowd seemed to contest with the booming of the engines as the mighty metal machine took to the skies.

It came back, flipped over – once, twice, thrice… and then in the opposite direction… then a straight pull up and an apparent free fall… and a smoke trail drawing lines and circles in the sky… then it came straight at us and then did a few more back flips intertwining the smoke trails behind it… then proving that it could also do a slow motion fly past drawing audible gasps from the crowd at every pass, before coming back one last time to land, parachute extending and all that. Again the crowd cheered, despite the sun beating down upon us. And for a few minutes, the pride of being able to witness the amazing capabilities of the indian airforce swelled my heart, brought a shortness of breath, like when you watch a super patriotic movie of Sunny Deol, and a curse to my lips about why I could not have joined the defense forces.

Then a second jet went up in the air, a slightly different looking one but still the same grayish blue colored body which camouflaged perfectly with the clear gray sky behind it (pardon me for my illiteracy in identifying models from their looks). It came back, flipped over – once, twice, thrice… and then in the opposite direction… then a straight pull up and an apparent free fall… and a smoke trail drawing lines and circles in the sky… then it came straight at us and then did a few more back flips intertwining the smoke trails behind it… then proving that it could also do a slow motion fly past drawing audible gasps from the crowd at every pass, before coming back one last time to land, parachute extending and all that. Again the crowd cheered, despite the sun beating down upon us.

Then a third jet went up in the air, a slightly different looking one but still the same grayish blue colored body. It came back, flipped over – once, twice, thrice… and then in the opposite direction… then a straight pull up and an apparent free fall… and a smoke trail drawing lines and circles in the sky… then it came straight at us and then did a few more back flips intertwining the smoke trails behind it… then proving that it could also do a slow motion fly past drawing audible gasps from the crowd at every pass, before coming back one last time to land, parachute extending and all that. Again the crowd cheered, despite the sun beating down upon us.

No the last 2 paragraphs are not a copy-paste error… this is how the show went on. As each jet answered its roll call and did the same set of maneuvers, the sun beating down upon our heads seemed a little more relevant now. And with each passing model, it seemed to take away my patriotic pride that had sort of reached its peak at the second jet. After the third or so jet, I lost count, and my mind started wandering much like it does when you are attending the marriage of some distant relative at around the same age.

There were 2 changes from the normal routine, when a jet sported the indian tri-colors over the gray of its body came into the tarmac – of course there was no change in the routine, but seeing a difference in the colors and that too the tricolor seemed to send a short spike in the patriotism-vs-time graph. And then one jet seemed to send out a challenge to the anti-anti-indian-culture-upholders by drawing some hearts in the sky… maybe it was hearts, or maybe due to the hot sun and my muddled up brain it looked like hearts, some respite from the routine.

Then there was a huge plane which had the US Air Force painted on it, which drew gasps from the crowd mainly due to the fact that it was a US Air Force plane and in size it resembled a boeing passenger jet. The flight took off as the crowd waited with built-up expectations of the same routines. Then it came back, and passed us, took a turn, came back and passed us and took another turn much before than last time, and again came back and took a turn before finally landing. No flips and the maximum tilt achieved was when it took the turn. Being an engineer, I had not built up my expectations on the bulky plane doing acrobatics, but hope is such a wonderful thing…

Then came the helicopters and the crowd heaved a sigh of relief, as the press had put up nice pictures of the chopper formations. As the crowd expected some death and gravity defying feats from the helicopters, the helicopters surprised the onlookers by disappearing behind some trees in the distance. After some time, when the crowd was getting excited over contemplations of a pakistan planned abduction of the indigenous technologies, they reappeared in the horizon flying damn too slow for someone who was low on impatience and tolerance to the hot sun, with nothing else to distract the mind as by now the distractions with all their boyfriends and/or escorts had retired to the safety of the tent shades.

As they passed by each other in slow motion, this way and that way, letting out smoke to remind us of the unforgotten paths taken by them, the patriotic feelings were slowly entering into the regions of irritation. We moved on closer to where the aircrafts were parked, but were stopped by the fence a few kilometers away from them. Those (#%*% exorbitant tickets could not even buy us a closer view of the planes. Meanwhile some parachutists also emerged out of nowhere and appeared and disappeared in spots as the blue shaded fabrics merged with the sky in the background.

Now a totally new feeling had taken over – hunger. So we just moved on, found our car thanks to the remote locking mechanism, and after a few roundabout routines trying to diligently use the map printed behind the tickets to find the exit, gave up and exited through the entrance. Saturday afternoon did not seem to hinder the people taking to the roads and crawling through the signals of NH7, finally reached the restaurant for a decent meal and huge glass of spiced buttermilk.

Our hunger satiated and tired out of the drive in the sun, the new feeling that took over now was sleepiness. As I retired into the cooler confines of my bedroom, darkened by the curtains, I drifted off into a dreamless sleep, the forgettable aeroshow already forgotten.

“chocolate exhibition in bangalore”

2009-02-10T20:56:00.000-08:00

Today, like a well read and well informed local that I am, I got to know of a chocolate exhibition going on here, that was started some 5 days back, from a source in Delhi… so immediately I embarked upon a journey to gather as much information on the event as I could so that maybe over the weekend I could take a break and spend some time in the midst of my favorite food.

google google google…

Being highly ~~lazy~~ efficient, I just copy pasted the last part of the headline “Hundreds of enthusiasts throng a chocolate exhibition in Bangalore“ into the text box and voila… for a second I thought hundreds of journalists had thronged the exhibition and they had just floated the same article over to hundreds of papers… but no, it appears as if Mr.Jaipal Sharma had just sent a mass mail to all possible magazine/newspaper houses and crossed his fingers hoping that he would get lucky… much like an engineer’s dream of getting a paper published in some such journal which they can later claim to be on par with IEEE…

As luck would have it, Mr.Jaipal Sharma seemed to have overcrossed his fingers… almost every state’s journal has published his article. I will just put in a few prominent links to prove my point…

http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090210/824/tnl-hundreds-of-enthusiasts-throng-a-cho.html

http://www.topnews.in/hundreds-enthusiasts-throng-chocolate-exhibition-bangalore-2122747

http://www.andhranews.net/India/2009/February/10-Hundreds-enthusiasts-88882.asp

http://www.sindhtoday.net/south-asia/61555.htm

http://www.newkerala.com/topstory-fullnews-90230.html

http://story.chinanationalnews.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/b8de8e630faf3631/id/464559/cs/1/

http://videosfromindia.smashits.com/view/6238/hundreds-of-enthusiasts-throng-a-chocolate-exhibition

awesome!!!

I am glad that Mr.Jaipal Sharma has not only been able to spread the awareness of namma bangalore to other major states like Andhra, Kerala and Sindh, but also crossed international boundaries to China… and Indian boy little Karan is world famous now thanks to his creative and amazing witty wordplay while expressing his views on the chocolate exhibition’s importance in the world arena especially in the current economic downturn situation…

PS. While reading the article on kerala news, got to know that cute actress Kavya Madhavan is no longer single… sighhh…

the great indian olympic challenge

2009-01-26T06:32:00.000-08:00

Michael Phelps is my new role model and beacon of hope. The recent rekindled interest in the Olympic legend, by the papers, has brought a new ray of hope into my otherwise uneventful meaningless life. I have decided to train for the next Olympic swimming events and have an ambition and quantified objective to work forward to. A look at the ~~diet~~ work-out plan of Phelps has made me ~~drool~~ energized and given me enough ~~hunger~~ inspiration for success. And not to mention the by product that will put all those bollywood six packers to shame and send them packing (haha, good pun no? a little humor in such serious training hurt no one).

Michael Phelps displaying his 64 packs abs and the small mouth that caused it thereby proving size does not matter.

I have googled about Michael Phelps and here is what I found out about how he won the Olympic golds.

1) He ate eggs, cheese, fried onions, mayonnaise, pasta, chocolate cakes, pizza and lots of coffee.

2) And yeah he spent some time in the pool everyday, even on holidays.

It is not that difficult. I love all the stuff mentioned above… except the fried onions… but I find that he didn’t eat the fried onions alone. mmm maybe I could have them with fried potatoes… yeah, I guess that is ok. Potatoes are a source of carbohydrates... I think. Yes that is what I will do… just thinking about those huge sandwiches with melted cheese makes me super inspired to ~~dig~~ jump in into the pool and start off right away…

I just love eggs… and mayo and… and… of course swimming too… when our school gave me a chance to learn swimming I grabbed it with both my arms and legs too… so now if u threw me into the water I can survive for a few minutes till you threw me the lifebelt… no hurry, you have 3 minutes before I empty the swimming pool with my synchronized thrashing…

But I have taken care of that so that I can train independently (and hence protect my privacy). We have a pool in our apartment complex which is about 5 feet deep. And since I am a foot taller I won’t drown and hence I won’t need that life jacket. Though a nice inflated rubber raft (with an umbrella attached) will be a good idea… so that I don’t have to travel all the way into my house to eat all that food I need for my training. I can just lie on the raft and eat throughout the day – that saves me a lot of time and this way I can spend more time in the pool.

Wow man… I am so clever that I can optimize my time by multitasking… plus my sense of humor will get me the girls… Phelps watch out man… you have competition…

Phelps with no sense of humor says - "hey watch it lady... i just ate… am still digesting… so my swimming will not be as good as… huh… later on…” (which as we all know is a plagiarized dialog from the movie kung-fu panda)

Olympic golds, and of course lovely ladies, here I come!!!

why i didn't blog about the pink umbrella...

2009-01-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

Happy new year…

Better late than never goes the old proverb, heh heh…

I have been thinking why I actually don’t get time to blog any more – at least that is the excuse I have been dishing out to people who actually are so bored that they land up on my blog sometimes which true to its name has not changed much…

But much as I try to reason out, “NO TIME” is not the actual valid reason. If I look back at my archives and put an effort into bringing back my memories of the past, I realize that I have gotten most of my tasks done when I was the busiest – in terms of the number of tasks accomplished I mean. When I seem to have a lot of time on hand, and a to-do list to add to my guilt, things never progress beyond the to-do list I have created. Sometimes these to-do lists also disappear and I live in the constant fear that some day they will surface to embarrass me…

The more I think of it, time is not the issue I have with blogging or not blogging. I have come up with an interesting theory – information overload. Sometime back I had mentioned that I had wanted to blog about anything and everything I see/hear/feel/smell or taste. That is true… I believe every second in my life could be converted into a page long maybe longer and boring blog post. But then you may ask why I don’t blog more often and you don’t see a hundred posts a day.

Now the reason is something like aamir khan’s short term memory loss in Ghajini… whatever I decide to blog about I seem to forget within a few seconds… now before you start questioning me about why I am not having a close shaven head with an L shaped tramline cut or tell my parents and scare the shit out of them, let me clarify. I don’t suffer from retrograde amnesia. What I suffer from is limited storage capacity.

Now the brain apparently has small pockets where it stores different kinds of information. The space allocated to my “blogging inspirations” would also fall into one of these pockets and obviously it is limited unlike the terabytes of storage available for USB drives these days. So any new information tends to over write the existing ones. So effectively every second I am going around thinking “hey I should blog about that pink umbrella” and the next instant I am saying “hey I should blog about that lady holding the pink umbrella” and slowly with a couple of more inspirations like “hey I should blog about how sexy that lady with the pink umbrella is” and “hey I wonder if all ladies with pink umbrellas are so sexy” the focus entirely shifts away from the pink umbrella… got it?

Anyways, I don’t think I can tattoo myself to blog about everything like aamir khan does here. But then I tried using a small scribbling pad, but now I don’t remember to update it. Actually, I even thought of blogging about my scribbling pad…

And then when I was trying to explain this to srk the other day, he gave me another view of things – I am not blogging becos my parents live with me? Mmm actually that is a pretty valid reason. I can only blog when I have no one looking over my shoulder to see what I am doing. That is just not exactly the way it happens though, let me elaborate.

So when my mom comes into my room and sees me furiously typing on my laptop, she is first of the impression that I am wasting my time on my laptop… which is sometimes the case when I am working… but other times when I am watching a movie or playing some games it gets irritating when somebody brands that as wasting time when that time can be spent in a useful manner by either sleeping or exercising or just having a nice and relevant talk about current affairs with your parents. So assuming that I do manage to cross over all this minor distractions and convince my mom that I am not “wasting” my time chatting with friends or doing office work and that I am blogging, next question that pops out is “WHAT !!! what is that?”

So I explain how a blog is something like an online journal/diary or just a place where you put up your views and opinions, all I get is a blank stare… that is when my dad who had been disturbed by that loud noise from his game of solitaire, comes to my mom’s rescue – “is that like a letters to editors of papers like The Hindu?” displaying that he is a true descendent of my grandfather who used to read the hindu for 8hours a day from the first character to the last and fold it perfectly into an A4 sized bundle and store it away in a cool dark place for the guy who comes once in 2 months to collect the old paper…

“Huh”, I come back to the present, while automatically making a mental note to blog about my dad’s age old eccentricities, I try explaining that it is nothing like that, and I just put it up there, and I don’t think anyone even reads it except for some guys who are equally vella like me… “Oh” is the only word that comes out in reply from which I understand that my dad ha s just dismissed off one of the most popular and powerful medium of communication in our generation as a utter useless waste of time, and casually returning to his job of saving the world through winning the solitaire game.

My mom seeing that I have been wounded by my dad’s callous remarks tries to pacify my ego blissfully unaware that things are going in the other direction actually. “Hey what are you doing? Mmm you are writing something? Wait let me read what you have written so far… mmm why are you writing about ghajini and short term memory loss like a disease ridden person… why can’t you write something else… something nicer about say the old movies of Sivaji Ganesan who is a much better actor than your aamir khan… oh what offensive words you have used here… don’t do that… I hope you are not writing about that drinking habit of yours for everyone to see… I will have a tough time finding a girl for you who also boozes hahaha”.

As she laughs hysterically over that PJ of hers, I am trying all in vain to maintain my cool… how do I tell her that I am not playing Dr.Jekyll at home and a Mr.Hyde in cyberspace… that I am no longer the scared school-kid she left all alone in that wilderness called engineering college some time back…

I just do a ctrl+S and put it in one of the labyrinths of my “My Documents” folders only to forget the document totally and look at it after a few months have passed and totally forgetting what the lady with the pink umbrella looked like and I just do a shift + delete on that document. The details of the pink umbrella are now lost to the world forever…

PS. I would request the blogging community to kindly refrain from informing the authorities that I am a victim of parental abuse. I would like to diplomatically term it as a case of the generation gap. Or else somebody is going to get hurt real bad…

a street car named dzire

2008-11-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

warning: slightly long post… but hey, it is material of almost a month since my last post

no ! i haven't bought a swift-dzire... that is just clever wordplay… nor have i got anything else too... but yeah, i have been thinking... after a long thoughtful consideration i sort of started feeling that i might need a car... what with haggling with the auto drivers here (my bike does solve some part of the problem, but it is not always possible to go to places in twos...), mom complaining that i am not taking her around this #%#@%%@^&& up city and a sort of fear of hearing "what??? you don't even have a car?" after spiderman's warning, the need became real...

I had always wanted a car… a nice contemporary design like the swift… that is my definition of a small car… or the nice and majestic SUVs like the endeavour, pajero or even our own local boy the safari… in bright white with grey bumpers… or a nice sports sedan like a verna or civic… or a good big luxury car like a bmw or a merc – doesn’t matter which one, anything will do… all of their models fall into the same category for me – unaffordable… hah for that matter so do the Ferraris and Lamborghinis… btw, did I mention the swift should be in red with those sports stripes… and that sort of gives you my ambitions…

I actually wanted a car and the principle deciding factor is, well my affordability… and yeah it should comfortably seat at least 4 and maybe squeeze in a fifth… a small happy family car… and yeah sometimes I would take it to my office on rainy days and some important occasions… only… so I would not be using it everyday, but yes I would use it frequently… on most days I will conservatively drive my bike to save on fuel (indignantly denying the eventuality that I would start using the car more frequently once I have it). So these are my specs…

Looking at this, the nano came as a big boon… it was supposed to have more space than the small car I was hoping to buy – the alto… and it was at one-third the price… but I was a little skeptical… most tata cars start with a lot of problems, and problems irritate me… plus I figure that since nano is pretty cheap, it would definitely require care in the terms of proven sturdiness of the existing cars… plus thanks to a great people’s person the tatas are gonna delay its launch… I want the car now… you see I am also impatient…

So the next obvious choice is the alto… I eliminated the 800… only a second-hand 800 wud fall into the price range of the nano, but it wud give me a bigger headache than the nano which would probably come with the new-car-warranties… and a new 800… well the car seems to be finally getting old and getting phased out… plus alto seems to be a slightly better car at almost the same price… now this “slightly better car at almost the same price” is going to be the cause of my downfall, but I am blind to it…

So now I am looking at the alto… of course I will go for the highest end model… with power steering and the works… what… I don’t get a music system? That will cost me another 10k… then some more essential accessories will cost me another 15-20k… awesome… so ultimately I end up spending a lot more than the actual price I was initially looking at… and maruti being maruti wont bend over backwards to give me even a free toffee let alone the accessories… so at about 3.6lacs I will get 4 wheels and enuf space to squeeze in 4 people and stuff in one more with some more effort and tolerance from the earlier 4… mmm… what are my options?

The santro… yeah definitely it is slightly bigger… and 5 people can be squeezed in a little more comfortably than the alto… and the current offer price would work out to something that is just about 40-50k more than the alto… so here I was getting a slightly better car for just a little bit higher price… actually it is a pretty good deal considering that I am not just getting extra space, but the engine can deliver much higher power too… so in case the Schumacher in me just one day decides to poke his head out, I will be ready… plus their new petrol-lpg version is a slightly better car which is at almost the same price…

I also considered the seemingly matiz-converted-to-spark of GM… but I don’t think it is worth buying it… they don’t have enough service centers all over the country… so in case I break down in some place where there is no service center I would be screwed… unlike maruti which supposedly has a very good service network… the santro too would be okay because it is a much familiar car to the indian mechanic than a GM… and some wise know-it-all has said that alto is better than the spark because it has an electronic powersteering, while this is just hydraulic… and the resale value was also pretty low – so if, you know, I was hoping to upgrade… you know… (I know what you are thinking – this skinflint bugger definitely cannot go beyond a second hand 800… yeah maybe you are right, but there still exists that small probability called hope, that I can one day… you know… vroooooom!!! ) if only the old zen was still there… the new one seems so cramped for so much money…

Ok, so santro seems like a good choice… but then wait… the sales guy is saying something… the i10? Test drive… yeah why not… mmm a smoother and more powerful engine… electronic power steering over santro’s hydraulic… slightly seemingly bigger interiors… and beige interiors, like that babe in the ad says, it must be something worth aspiring for… how much extra? Oh that is a very small difference… plus there are so many guys out there who are encouraging me to be the guinea pig – if that is not positive response what is?

ok, so what do I get here… only standard fitment? How much more for the extra features? Adds up to around 5.5 lacs? For this car? Come on!!! for 5.5 I can get a swift, from the above dreamy ambitions paragraph, and since it is a maruti I would get better service too… but when I read the reviews the people in the back seat are supposed to find it uncomfortable over a long distance travel… with a hereditary backache problem running in the family, that is a risk that should not be taken when I am buying a happy family car… maybe a hedonistic purchase after that Harley I can think of it…

at 5.5 I can get that new wide bodied Renault… with 2 consecutive f1 championships their quality cannot come under question… but apparently the build quality seems slightly inferior… at least that is what the critics say… and it has almost come to the indica cab status, albeit a luxury cab, but a cab nevertheless. So no Renault. How about an accent or a ikon… naah… old models… I think I should consider a verna or a fiesta… or for that matter, the SX4 because it comes with the maruti service network… see I am still a very practical man… I won’t go for the Dzire – I don’t like its design… see I am still in my senses…

huh how much? 7.7 ex-showroom? And on road will surely cross 8.5 lacs. Come on!!! For that I can get a scorpio – what was the last ad – the price was some 6.7 lacs right? mmm at least it would suit my height… and I think the safari was around that price too… and I think I would go for at least the power steering and some addons, else I won’t get even a practical mileage… but a scorpio also had that modified open top model… that was around 10lacs – almost the same as the high end safari… but wait that negates the rainy day concept… this falls into the hedonistic category… so I will have to go for a safari only because it is closed…

but wait… if I am going for a 10lacs safari, why not spend a little more and go for a more reliable maruti SUV – the vitara? After all it comes with the maruti service network… it costs only around 14 lacs I think? While I am on the topic of SUVs, why not go for something like a pajero or a endeavour or for that matter why not a lexus or a hummer… ok, I think I am getting a bit sarcastic with myself… for this price I could buy myself a small house here… wait… I should not change the topic… back to cars… and reality…

Actually I could probably only comfortably afford an alto… and santro would be worth the budget stretch… a wagonR maybe too, but since I have personally witnessed its instability at high speeds, I am not too keen on it… plus I have a very valid reason – an unjustifiable prejudice… so santro it would be… but the dealers are not giving me any discounts… it would be great if they could save me the costs of the seat covers and a music system… cheapos… they won’t even give up a 10k on their margin… but discount or no discount, I think I will have to go for the santro…

Hey wait!!! What is that in today’s paper? Almost 58k off on the price of a spark??? That is cool!!! Didn’t the dealer say that it was only a hydraulic power steering on the santro too? So maybe I can get a santro like car for the price of an alto…

PS. Did I mention that I was also a little bit greedy???

a day in the life of a singapore steward…

2008-09-28T08:40:00.000-07:00

ok. It should be “a night in the life of a singapore steward”, but technically it is not night yet... just a little late in the evening… so maybe it is still within the rules to call it a day…

call it a day? You are kidding… the day has just begun… haha got you… but yes that is the job, and when I signed the job agreement I did not expect this. Maybe it is a fine print legalese, but then I don’t have time to go back and read the 5 pound agreement that I signed… I remember I signed every page… there were a million at least… maybe come to think of it, I don’t even remember whether I got a employee copy of the agreement…

ok, what am I talking about here? Yeah that particular clause where I am supposed to have sold my soul to the devil and that I have to leave my conscience at home or some other place safe so that it does not interfere in my decisions and that I could make a un-biased decision that would make my employers proud…

who are my employers? Oh I actually always wanted to be a top race driver. But as a thick spectacled non-athletic guy who definitely could never meet the rigours of the sport financially, I had to apply for something else. Did I mention I was not very well off academically too? So engineering or anything like that was also ruled out. And I was too slow to be a pit crew…

I always wanted a hot sports car. Hot sports car attracted hot babes and I always wanted a hot babe too. Somebody told me that if you worked for some auto majors they sometimes gave cars at very subsidized rates, sometimes even free. And hot sports cars usually came out of racing companies. Maybe I could get lucky. I became a race enthusiast. But my dream of working for an auto major was not to happen since I did not possess much talent that were desired. Or so I thought…

There was one more thing I was good at – finding fault. There never was enough cheese in my cheese burger, the traffic police always picked on me, the teachers were incompetent and the subjects were tough, the buses were always late, the cabbies overcharged, the metro was underground and the flights were too high above, I didn’t have a girlfriend and my parents were not rich. Ok, got it? So this talent of mine was noticed by someone who said I was just the right person for this job. Apparently there was a very heavy turnover of people in this position and they could not take the stress.

What was my job? I just had to find fault. Find as many faults as possible to make my client’s team win. It was easy. I was so cut out for this job. But yes the stress is pretty high. Like today for instance…

The day was hot and humid – a typical day near the equator. There were predictions of rain, and that caused greater panic in my client’s team as their most significant competitor had cars and drivers that were very good under rainy conditions. Yes, that is how they tried to win the last race, but my colleagues and I did a very good job. We even got a small bonus which we promptly spent in some stock purchase as the markets were down… so we were all the more keener to get more bonuses.

Today’s race was very important to my client because it was a new track and they had to win to prove that they were ready for any challenge and that their expertise was not just due to the excessive practicing they could easily afford. So we were all glued to the race through our window, doing what we did best – finding fault.

The race started ok. Our team’s cars were up in the front places and they did not lose their positions. But then our client felt that we cannot press the panic button so early even though our closest competitor was sandwiched between their 2 cars. They felt that the people would call it unfair. I did warn them that all is fair in love and war and this was war. But my bosses and clients’ sentiments were to be respected (I would have called it their whim, but they paid my stock market investments). So we had to cut them some slack before I started doing my the thing.

I went to get myself a cup of coffee when pandemonium broke out. Some idiot had crashed out and brought out the safety cars. Luckily it was not my client’s so that only eliminated some competition. Still the race was slowing down… but my coffee was doing a good job. I was wide awake and fully prepared to find the tiniest of mistakes. What is the situation now? Oh, some early riders are jumping into the pit lane and they will get an early mover advantage over my client who has not pitted yet… haha, gotcha… the lane is not open yet under the safety car – drive through penalty. My client smiled a half smile and gave me the thumbs up – that power company which is at an all time low… here I come with my bonus.

But then the unthinkable happened. My client’s car pitted in the next round and everything was going fine when suddenly the immature upstart hastily left dragging the fuel line with him. Disaster!!! And look at the other competitor cars driving so dangerously close to this car. I mentally made a note for the suggestion of the month – when my client is making a pit stop, the others will have to wait outside the pit lane, till my client leaves it.

Ok. The crazy upstart competitor will have to be punished. Where is the rule book… where is it… aah got it… can my client be excused? oh no… I am scr***d… my client will definitely be angry for punishing his driver… how do I do this without endangering my bonus… mmm I need time to think… send that message out “stewards investigating…” that buys me some time.

There is only one way. Relative grading. I have to give the client a drive through penalty, if I don’t the crowd will just mob the stands. The hell with it, of all the days they had to be in their highest numbers today. I will give the client a drive through, but for the other competitors a drive through plus a stop go… haha… the boss will be pleased. I am a genius.

But now my client’s driver is pushed really back. The hell with him. Why could that driver not just wait for them to pull out the fuel line? I am not a magician. How do I make this @$$ of a driver win? I could do a better job than him and all those pit babes will be fawning over me… focus focus back to reality… I will really have to keep my eyes peeled to make sure that all the others can get eliminated. Suddenly my bonus seems that bit unreachable…

Damage control is the need of the day. It is impossible for the client to finish on the podium, unless they start counting from the back. And that will happen when the sun rises in the west. But how do I explain this to my dumb client??? Let me try reasoning with him. Let us try to keep them in the championship race. There are 2 ways – eliminate the closest rival’s cars and move the client’s cars into the points range.

There I see that competitor… how do I eliminate him… he is not even driving his usual aggressive style. And the other car is unlikely to cause any problems to my client’s drivers who are totally having a good time driving at the end of the line without anybody at their tails. I think I should look in the pit lane. Aah I see that driver’s dad… what is he doing there? Is that illegal… no… now he is picking his nose… aha in singapore you will be fined, maybe even arrested – is that a reason enough to suspend the driver? Hmmph no… pit crew check… no they are also fine. Who is that guy with the giant circle at the end of the stick? All the other teams are using it too… my team does not have that… so can I eliminate them all together in one master stroke so that we can have more fun with our automated technology that replaced that guy… my client is a smart cost cutter…

Focus focus… the race is almost over… I need to find something. Night race, what can I do. Hah… that silver paint? It is actually reflecting the lights and giving additional illumination to the driver… that is an unfair advantage definitely… all other cars have other colors, only silver is a metallic shine… moreover that dazzle is causing a disturbance to other drivers when they try to overtake… but that guy is not trying to overtake too… I am tearing my hair. But that unfair advantage is definitely worth exploring. Maybe after the race we can again strip him of the title…

I can’t control my glee… the bonus seems back within reach again…

PS. Sometimes I feel my client’s drivers got their licenses by bribing the officials to pass the driving test… but then I would be out of a job.

f1 revisited…

2008-09-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

f1 formerly known as formula-1 requires a rechristening… no points for guessing what it will be – “ferrari-1” (yeah I am being sarcastic – no points for guessing this too)…

from now on Ferrari cars will be designed like this…

The other team cars will be designed like this…

The design of the cars is frozen at the beginning of every season and subject to approval of the management authorities. Any changes from last season’s design will be closely inspected and any intentions of an advantageous change will be removed failing which the team can be disqualified from the races in the season.

However the above rule does not apply to Ferrari cars and they can continue extending their design advantage throughout the season also. They can tweak their engines and make other design modifications to their cars as and when they please. They are also allowed to take the design of competing companies if required. But then Ferrari will have to submit the report on which team’s design they have used so the FIA can disqualify the competing teams from the constructor championships but they can still run around the tracks as dummies so that Ferrari can benchmark and test their design changes and whether they have made perfect copies.

And yes coming to the race rules, safety is the utmost priority of all FIA sponsored races; safety of Ferrari cars an even higher priority. So if there is any hint that there could be a potential danger on the field, the safety car will be deployed and no cars will be allowed to overtake any other car in front of it. However, Ferrari cars are allowed to brake suddenly and hit the car behind them or hit the car in front so that they can eliminate those drivers who could be potential threats once the safety car is removed. However care should be taken so that the safety car is deployed at such a time as would seem advantageous to Ferrari car positions. To pacify the fans announcements will be made that the decision regarding the offending cars will be made after the race as there were other far more significant rule breaks the stewards will have to attend to – like dismissing the pilot of the airplane that went off course to hit a skyscraper – so that after the race when the champagne and other alcoholic beverages are consumed the fans would either forget the incident or their shouts for justice will fall on deaf inebriated ears.

In case of non-ferrari cars, so much as a slight chance that the driver could have hit a Ferrari car would entitle disqualification of that car from that race. But he may be handled with a certain amount of leniency if the affected team is not Ferrari.

When the race is on, no cars will be allowed to overtake Ferrari cars. But in case of a mistake on the part of the competing teams, they will be let off with un-appealable penalties like drive through penalties or stripping down of the finish positions. The rules will be accordingly modified to make the driver’s actions as illegitimate. Like for instance, upon overtaking a car by cutting corners or jumping chicanes, the position must be immediately ceded to the overtaken driver. If however the car that ceded its lead to the overtaken car, overtakes the car again after relinquishing its advantage, then the rule will be changed as the relinquished position should be maintained for at least one corner. However, if the car still manages to overtake again despite giving the lead away for one corner, another corner will be added to the rule. This will ensure that the total number of corners available will eventually get exhausted and the Ferrari cars will get the maximum advantage till the end of the race.

If however by some impossible chance a car overtakes a Ferrari car towards the end of the race and still manages to finish the race ahead, its position will be unceremoniously stripped and the prizes will be snatched away from the driver and the constructor and given to the bawling Ferrari and its drivers in an attempt to pacify them.

In all cases the Ferrari drivers will be treated on par when dealing with other team drivers. But within the team, the designated number 1 driver decided as the one who is tall, handsome with blue eyes, well built and popular among the female fans as compared to the number 2 driver who will be someone who is pot bellied and balding and almost gives a toothless smile that is repulsive to the female fans. In cases involving disputes between the Ferrari drivers, the number 2 driver would contest like any other non-ferrari driver.

Last but not the least, Ferrari will be allowed to add more manpower into its racing team with people who are the most important part of a winning team – lawyers. This is necessary to protect the rights of righteous companies like Ferrari which is hounded by its vicious competitors. The lawyers will be present everywhere trying to find anything remotely linking to a possible sabotage of the competing teams against Ferrari, and immediately presenting evidence or the lack of it in court so that the competition can be eliminated. An example of grave sabotage includes but not exhaustively, a situation where a Ferrari driver’s pit crew member’s aunt’s cousin’s grandmother’s friend’s granddaughter is present in same premises as a competing driver’s parent auto company’s finance department’s outsourced employee from india has come looking for discarded bills for his income tax submission. Thus we see that lawyers are very essential for a racing team’s success.

At all times and not just during the race FIA nominated authorities who will closely monitor the drivers so that non-ferrari teams can be penalized for any small foot-out-of-line rule breaks so that the high safety standards for the Ferrari drivers and the concept of fair play for can be ensured for them. May the spirit of motor racing be respected.

Smart Manager Case Study: group dynamics game theory in the context of rational individuals and behavioral economics

2008-08-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

A has n friends (A1, A2… An) where n is a finite integer. Now A is bored and decides to plan for a weekend outing with his friends but he finds it is not easy. Each of his n friends have some constraints which must be taken care of while planning for a common outing. First his n friends are divided into 2 groups – for the sake of simplicity lets assume (A1, A2,… A[n/2]) and (A[n/2 +1], …,An) form the two groups – let us call them group1 and group2 respectively.

For some reason some people in group1 have further split people in group2, for instance (A[n/2 +1],…,A[3n/4]) and (A[3n/4 + 1],…, An)… these members of group1 may go if the first half of group2 is on the trip, but they definitely cannot be made to go even if there is one person from the second half (remember the numbers are not exact but a highly simplified situation which is to be used only as an example for understanding the problem).

The members in group2 also have a similar classification, however they have the habit of reluctantly agreeing to do things that they don’t want to do for certain trivial favors like having the window seat which are easily achievable. But as a further complication some members of group2 from the second subset actually would go on the trip only if those particular members of group1 who would not come if they were on the trip, were on the trip.

One more constraint in the groups was that the requirement was that every An in the group had another An who should be in the trip otherwise they cannot come on the trip. For example let us say A1 wanted A2 to come on the trip, but A2 would come only if A3 also came, but then A3 would come only if A4 came. Even if there was a slight doubt that one of the link could be broken, then the whole group would have a cascading effect sort of.

A, who knew all this, made a very small subset made up of members of both groups – 1 and 2 who managed to tolerate each other. But the news being news and especially since A tried to keep it a secret spread like wildfire. In fact, even people who were outside the big set of all friends got to know of this planned trip. This had its own positive and negative aspects which we shall proceed to explain as constraints of the problem as follows.

Some members of group1 called in some people who were outside the initial set (A1,…,An)… let us call them An-m (A1-1, A1-2,A2-1,A2-2, A2-3 and so on…) where n denotes the nth friend from the original set and m denotes the mth friend of the nth individual who did not belong in the original set but belongs to the universal set. So what happens now is that An-m would come on the trip only if A and the rest of A’s set accepted An-m. In case they did not accept that An-m, then he would not come. Since none of An’s knew any of the An-m’s apart from that particular An, A assumed that no one would have any issues with that. But that was not to be. Some particular An’s who had An-m’s of their own, could not tolerate An-m’s of other An’s. But since the An-m’s were committed to on the trip because of A’s eagerness, the An’s now posed a new condition that those particular An’s would come on the trip only if the corresponding An-m’s also came on the trip.

Some members of group2, feeling that some other members of group2 would come only if their An-m’s would come and their An-m’s could come only if there were people – either An’s or An-m’s – with some special characteristics were on the trip. In fact this set of people with special characters can come only if there were some particular An with these special characters. So if this particular An with special characteristics did not come on the trip then the other special characteristic persons – An or An-m’s – will not come on the trip.

There were some developments also which caused the set (A1-An) to run around like a batch of scared sheep inside an enclosure.

Development1: Some rumor in the form of a news of an impending doom was given by a soothsayer. As all soothsayer predictions go, this one was also unverifiable, but caused major agitation among some superstitious members in the (A1-An) set. The An’s that were affected would come on the trip if the news was verified to be untrue. The others were unaffected and were classified as brash and adventurous by those affected (though this classification bears no relevance to the solution, it is given here to keep options open for a sequel).

Development2: The one particular An who had special characteristics was not able to go on the trip because another particular An was not able to make it on the trip for unquoted (but irrelevant to the problem) reasons. So this made sure that the others with the special characteristics also could not go on the trip.

Further complication:Now, one of the An’s thinking that the persons with special characteristics can still come if some random person with similar special characteristics was also in the trip. But unfortunately all that he had done was adding an An-m as his dependent causing a further knot in the already knotty constraints list.

Now A is faced with the dilemma of the decision. Of course going all alone on the trip is not a very exciting option. So he has to have some An along with him. So the possible solutions are:

a) A should pick An’s according to the formula

b) A should have a no-confidence motion at his house where he would give huge sums of money as bribes to members from group1 and group2 to defect from their groups into the other group and add to his bankruptcy.

c) A should go and train for the Olympics swimming and diving championships in the swimming pool that is directly below the balcony of his pool facing apartment and not worry about petty things in life, but focus on getting gold for his country.

d) A suddenly finds his job very interesting and his Boss to be an angel and starts working on a new initiative for his company’s plans for world domination

e) A should get married and add another dimension to his set (A1,...,An)

f) A should go to the Himalayas for the vacation

g) A should go to the Himalayas permanently

h) None of the above. I, like all other An’s, have a unique solution to the problem.

it can’t be that simple

2008-07-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

Today was just another day with its own complexities that just going by it makes me want to go back to those simplistic good old days of cavemen… you know the hunt-eat-sleep-shit while on the move-hunt again routine. In between maybe you find somebody of the opposite sex and end up having a few children who once they get into the group in the playground are as indistinguishable as the kids that were born to the other indistinguishable parents like yourselves… bloody hell your find of the opposite sex maybe forgotten the next time you find another…

Everybody would be called ugh… and everything would be ugh… we would not have the complexities of niceties where we can’t grunt in front of others… when your entire communication is a grunt, then it makes it impolite not communicate and remain silent… well ok I won’t go back the bad things of how the society and culture developed the concepts of courtesy…

One of the worst things that has evolved or maybe rather devolved due to the concept of professional courtesy is that of our communication skills… we would rather be misunderstood and misinterpreted than be loud and clear… or rather convey everything risking disrespecting the other person’s knowledge and understanding of whatever we are trying to confuse him with… or rather giving out a very simple answer rather than an ambiguous statement and putting the listener in a dilemma of asking questions and appearing even more stupid. But Combine that illiteracy in interpreting the mind of the conveyor with the more tangible and logical illiteracy of the concept itself, you end up proving what you were desperately hoping to disprove.

Some wiseguy said that the toughest problems apparently have the simplest solutions or something like that… or what I would want to interpret it as is that most things that life demands are pretty simple that are unnecessarily complexified by the millions of the complex neural networks leading to the world’s greatest complexicator – the brain… umm, I guess you must have understood the intent of the previous sentence. Oh well anyways what I am trying to convey here is that we have scr***d up a nice and simple world that was one a haven for nice things that money can no longer buy… but today money can buy many things and is one extremely simplified yet complex situation that man has gotten himself into… in his ever hungry pursuit for the nice things in life he simply forgets that money can’t get those for him and instead ends up destroying those very things he set out to acquire with the simply complex concept called money…

Oh ok, you maybe asking why I have dedicated a paragraph to money, and in this seemingly incoherent scheme of things does it find a part? Actually, half a paragraph. Here is the other half. The funny thing is that we are all in this together. The more money we try to make we are obliviously building an intricate web of complexities around ourselves, and the already existing web that we have created or were left behind by others. The web unlike a spider web is not a beautiful piece of engineering but is a clumsy disaster that is just waiting to pull you down with it under its own weight and your great networking skills.

Now all of a sudden you realize that the web has become one hell of a monster and is currently in a dangerous position to suck you in and immobilizing you, and you feel that it is time you started to tidy it up a bit. But where do you start? It is like a massively multi programmer operated reckless garble that is usually seen of those evil things called “code”… a point to be noted at this point is that man having destroyed mankind with the invention of a language manages to spread that disease of destruction to inanimate objects by inventing the computer language. And getting back to the sticky thing that is our web, it is something that god could not create for us, but we are more intelligent than him when we created something called – erase and start from scratch. You know we can always erase the existing code and start from scratch. But maybe god could do that and his creations are powerless just like we are currently assuming our creations sitting inside the computers cannot erase themselves.

But yes though we secretly hope that the matrix will not become a reality, we are also secretly hoping that it would. We do not want our creations to become creators themselves and create a more complex hierarchy of more complex entities. Maybe our creators felt that way too, and as is very wisely portrayed in intellectual movies like Jurassic park or anaconda or king kong, we can’t control nature – how much ever money that control can make for us because there will always be a $@#$% who can cause havoc because of the same pursuit you are in pursuit of. That is a complex butterfly effect in itself. Maybe we should all head for the Himalayas.

PS. Here is something far more simple.

movie hitlist (or) why i should not write movie reviews

2008-06-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

the recent slew of must watch movies I watched were a real lot of pathetically painful performers… highly disappointing and the plot has been diluted to the point of being so silly, that the only satisfaction that seems to be arising out of watching them is this blog post… at the great personal risk of a RGV-blaag kinda attack, I am writing this, although no one is paying me anything for it…

Narnia II – the sequel to the first one (the lion the witch and the wardrobe) seems to have lost all the magic… the only magic left is some set of weird creatures… sluggish screenplay and even more sluggish characters are better appreciated due to the total humanness of the movie’s leading roles… almost 90% of the movie is devoid of any real magical instance and eventually azlan the lion god finally turns up to end the movie and hence our boredom… prince Caspian turned out to be a real thespian effort and the movie’s title sounds most appropriate in tamil… Narnia, Narnia…

Kuruvi – “kuruvi thalaila panangaya vekkalam aana bomb vekka koodadhu”… this punch dialog in a way sums up the entire episode. Ilaya thalapathi’s stupidest role so far and apparently the movie has been a telugu remake. The hero is actually a superhero… a set of thoroughly disconnected screenplay seems to connect the amazing punch dialog comedy tracks of vivek… amazingly powerful, the hero takes a beating now and then just to prove that he is still human (or maybe that the director suddenly remembered that it was just too much to digest seeing people getting beaten up by a scrawny looking guy by the hundreds… and then the songs… they had crossed being awful and get beyond the point of being unbearable… in fact I could not digest wot I saw and I actually felt very full after the movie for a few minutes after it got over…

21 – can’t say much about this becos it is supposed to have heavy themes in it… Kevin Spacey, Lawrence Fishburne, MIT, Maths, Blackjack, LA etc etc… it is supposed to be so slick and aimed to amaze that they forgot what they set out to do – play blackjack… it turns out more as a thriller where Lawrence Fishburne in his huge menacing form and his rich set of studded huge gold rings terrorizes kids to give him their cash and plastic chips… it turned out to be a movie that seemed to have a lot of sign languages typically reminding me of the “news for the hearing impaired” which used to be shown on DD way back when people were really watching those for lack of better things to do.

Cloverfield – a monster movie shot with a handycam… ok sounds good… so wot wud a guy with a handycam, running around becos of a monster attack focus on? No, not the monster… it would be his stupid screaming friends… come on when people go to the zoo, and take pictures, they take pictures of other people completely ignoring the animals… no ? anyways, I don’t think the monster was worth the time… and considering that it was a handycam tape, there was not much time either…

Arasangam – never expected the thalaivar to make such a forgettable movie… I actually don’t remember much of it… captain takes a small detour from the normal plot of “his best friend did it” to something of a bigger twist… but the rest of it seems same… somebody who is conspicuous by his absence is “Wasim Khan”, but the usual losing of beloved ones goes on. Amazing use of technology though not required for captain, but as I told you, I have forgotten the plot. But the way he cracks the code from a seemingly unsolvable clue – the captain has not lost his touch… in fact he has gained a few… pounds that is… nowadays I can’t see the throat where those great punch dialogs and loads of advice comes from… and soon maybe in the next movie itself captain will abandon his reverse back kick style and just roll over all his enemies…

Dasavatharam – had to save the best for the last rite? A huge wait of over 2 years and kamal gives us this… of course there are a hundred hidden messages in the story (according to a floating forward) but this is what I saw… of the 10 avatars of kamal, 3-4 were good in terms of character strength and depth… others were maybe there just for the sake of being there… and the horrible graphics of the butterflies and the oceans… yugg… I have not even started on the make up yet… despite the 500 man hours that kamal is reported to have spent on the make up alone I see no worth in that. A total plastic mask affair which suited only the killer kamal because of his cold expressionless character… In fact given a chance maybe any tom dick and harry could have acted those parts… unfortunately the monkey was too small and mallika sherawat was too slim and sexy and maybe napoleon was an old family friend and the concept kamal married to a kamal made to look like asin would have gotten censored in a same sex marriage abhorring intolerant country (but dint Vishnu take on a mohini avatar?) else maybe we could have actually seen kamal in 15 avatars and an unbeatable entry to the guiness book… yeah the film is fast paced and you don’t get bored, but nothing goes in either… it is a crazy half baked script and even lesser baked special effects and graphics and it totally falls flat on the attempts at a crazy mohan type dialog exchange at the most serious moments in the movie… the amazing start of kamal’s entry as rangaraja nambi is not capitalized for the rest of the movie, and in fact seems totally unconnected. And the amazing musical scores are as relevant as skimpily clad heroines and bright multicolored heroes prancing around trees and fields… I fail to understand if kamal was really attempting some fancy dress ramp walk or trying to portray himself in the 10 different avatars of Vishnu… God only knows…

Indian Idly…

2008-05-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

For the last few months, I have been idling away… yeah that is my excuse for not visiting the blog… would you believe it? I didn’t visit my own blog all this while… this is what I realized when I saw the faithful weekly reports in my mails… almost 50% of the hits on my blog were narcissistic visits by me from various computer terminals across the globe – from my home internet, the office, the client location, my house in Chennai whenever I went on weekends and every chance I get on any internet connection… though I don’t know what I was looking for visiting my blog so many times…

and then there were the other faithfuls – my regular readers who used to in their daily surfing route would pass by my blog, see that nothing is written as usual, and file it away for chat discussions to ask me why I have not put anything there… then a further drop in hits made me realize the these faithfuls had given up and were now bypassing it… one faithful even went to the extent of subscribing to my mail feed so that she could be saved the trouble of visiting it in vain and at the same time not making me feel sad that she dint read my blogs…

but even all this is was not good enough to make me stage a comeback… frankly I was running out of inspiration… for lack of better reason let’s assume that that is the reason… because I was definitely not getting screwed at work nor did I have someone like my girlfriend or relatives visiting me… fact is I don’t even have a girlfriend, and since I live in a small pigeon hole also called PGs in Bangalore, no relatives can visit me either…

so what have I been doing all this while… well absolutely nothing… and when you do absolutely nothing you feel like doing absolutely nothing and end up doing absolutely nothing… that does sound like I have accomplished what I had set out to do thereby achieving 100% on the to-do list… but when you set out to do absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing is what gets done… that is what this paragraph has conveyed – absolutely nothing…

this idle mind has not even been a devil’s workshop… on many days I had just felt like sleeping the day off and many times I have done exactly that! And the chunks of time were in such quanta that they did not warrant the start or execution of a new found hobby which was the easiest advice everyone gave when I cribbed to them that I had absolutely nothing to do… ok that is the last time I am using the word, words - actually, here.

but yes, on hindsight I did seem to have been busy for the time I have been out of the blogosphere… it is definitely not that I have been trying to find a new chair that is as comfy as my old one(as one of the faithfuls had pointed out in the comment section before finally writing me off), though that was also part of some odd jobs I have been doing… it is excuses that are as tiny as the achievements that we try to remember during our appraisals or while filling the awards and achievements section in our resumes… but small things nevertheless, they definitely translate to an excuse that actually did eat up my time…at least i like to put the blame on something that is like an excuse.

so, I think I will put those in here as soon as I manage to recollect them… some are actually funny, though it may not seem so while reading it… some are not funny, but again, as I know my readers, it will definitely make you happy (bloody sadists!!!) and that was to some extent a decent excuse as I did not seem to conveying what I wanted to convey on my blogs… I was actually losing some amount of the originality as well… even this title was borrowed from someone’s gtalk status message, and by a sudden stroke of, I would say genius, removed the ‘e’ and put a ‘y’…

anyways, I hope I am back.

..X. .X..

the seperation…

2008-02-06T03:57:00.000-08:00

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…

2008-02-05T01:07:00.001-08:00

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…

2008-02-03T02:05:00.000-08:00

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…

New years resolutions and stuff…

2008-01-10T22:48:00.000-08:00

mmm… actually I have nothing to write about… but I did not want to give up on my new year resolutions so soon… I want to blog often… more often than I am currently doing. This is definitely not going to be a list of resolutions that I want to keep and then fail to do so and later on somebody digs up the archives and sues me for not keeping my resolutions… as if I care…

well anyways, before i start boring you I have already broken one resolution (refer above)… another one is to not procrastinate… well for those who don’t do hindu crosswords and have not come across such stupid sounding bombastic words in english, I meant – putting off work for later… so here goes my first blog post for this new year – although a little late (thank whoever thot of that “better late…” proverb…)

I actually don’t know what to write… I cannot recap what happened the whole of last year… hell I can’t recap whatever happened yesterday… my memory is so short lived (thank god for that) and so a recap of 2007 would be so factually incorrect that I would get more brick bats than the… the… the er whoever is the recipient of the maximum criticism last year…

So, I look for inspiration within… nope much as I break my head, I wont write about my new year resolutions… no way… million other peoples have written it already… and have already started following it… just the other day, just like any other day I went to the gym only to find it extremely crowded… the other day was the 2^nd of jan and note that it is not my new found new year resolution about fitness… I went to the gym just like any other day – I am a regular!!! And there were so many people there at the machines that there was a queue even at the weights section – the maximum demand for the lightest dumbells… and what a sweat everyone was working out… but wait a minute… where is that hum of the ac…

And yes of course the treadmills are the worst hit… any body and everybody is so obsessed or should I say paranoid about cardio work outs… and the first thing that jumps into the head is the tread mill… so we have a whole bunch of waist size 40s panting and heaving at the belt at a godly speed of 3km per hour hanging onto the support bars for dear life… and they will put in all their will power to make people wait for the whole 20 mins… because 20 minutes of using a treadmill is more value for money than 1 minute at the weights…

What is so pissing about the increase in the crowd and the hence the waiting time is that there is no proportionate increase in the number of pretty faces and the sex ratio… so should we safely assume that more men are getting unhealthy and our women are already possessing that perfect body… too bad that there will be more eyes for that few tight tracks doing that routine on the steppers…

Well come to think of that the new year is a time when the male hormones are at their peak… it is something like the full moon for werewolves… so women who feel quite comfortable and safe generally walking half naked into a mob of drunk sex starved local people should actually abstain from it on new year eves… especially in cities that are considered safe like mumbai, delhi and bangalore… all these liquor manufacturers must be sued – haven’t we all heard that drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco makes you impotent… then why are all these men behaving like this…

It is not just the people, but even inanmate objects like wooden platforms behave strangely on new years… like the one in chennai that stubbornly refused to support the weight of all that people on it… it was the effect of the new year moon… the hotel authorities were so careless to have overlooked the effect of new year on wooden supports… the fact that there were about a million people precariously perched on the platform to welcome the zeroes on the clock had nothing to do with it… sue the greedy hotel authorities who brought in unaccomodating hostile timber…

And then there were so many more things that happened that I have forgotten them over the last few days at work… new year now looks like years ago… to me it is just another holiday hopefully spent at home in front of the TV switching between the 8 or so free to air tamil channels that show some movie simultaneously… so while superstar is romancing nagma in one channel I wont miss out on the punch dialogs of captain on another or a good comedy track on yet another… a very nice example of mix and match at work thouch totally out of context… maybe we can launch a make your own movie idea… or a remixed movie… hmmm that sounds like a nice business plan…

So on this note I close this post… it has been waiting for a nice ending and I have been like working on this here and there… lots of things have happened already and I will have to start writing about them too… and yeah better late than never… like so many of my orkut mates who are still wishing me…

HAPPY NEW YEAR…

mein, meri lappie aur woe

2007-12-28T07:03:00.000-08:00

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…

2007-12-24T01:19:00.001-08:00

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 !!!

2007-12-17T21:45:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

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.

enakkoru girl-friend venumada (loosely translates to "i want a girlfriend")

2007-11-29T11:27:00.000-08:00

dedicated to all those career oriented fine young men who are uncorrupted by the western cultures and are bent on upholding the indian culture of a traditional arranged marriage

disclaimer (because at this point in life I can’t take any chances)

All characters in this post are fictitious and are just a figment of my imagination. Any resemblance to anyone living is purely a coincidence and is welcome to make frand-sheep with the author; anyone dead can kindly ignore.

When I was in pre-school, I just wanted a friend to play with. And within the perimeter I was allowed I could only find her. We just about got along well, but we almost always ended up with her mom telling my mom what games we should be playing. Looks like she didn’t take kindly to my road safety games of running over her dolls with my cars.

When I was in primary school, I just wanted someone to talk to. And thanks to the alphabetical order in which we were seated, I found this girl who would talk to me. Not just that, she could talk non stop too. It did not serve much purpose though because me being the polite one could not ask her to shut up, and the gender biased teachers would always make me the outstanding student in their classes.

When I was in high school I wanted a girl who was smart and intelligent and may be even be a good study partner… that was a good way to start a relationship I thought. But then she turned out to be too smart and scored more marks than I did in all the exams. And finally she took up biology.

When I was beginning junior college I wanted to make frand-sheep with the new girl in our batch. She was beautiful and smartly dressed and looked good even in that stupid school uniform. But as it happens with all good looking girls, she was in the commerce stream, and that ended a possible love story.

When I was in the first year of engineering, I exchanged notes with a girl in my class. I was pretty studious at that time and was curious to know what that particular professor had told the class about the exams. Seriously! But little did I know that she was under radar of some seniors and that night they made me understand why I should rely on myself and not ask for help from other people – especially girls who have a potential boyfriend among the seniors.

When I became the senior, I scouted around for good looking juniors. But the management decided that they would go by merit for girls too from that year onwards. And I was left with just my all boys gang for company.

When I got my first job and was posted to a city that was famous for beautiful girls, I hoped I would accidentally bump into a hot chick and that it would be love at first sight. But despite all the loves at first sights there was a high probability that you could get accidentally bumped by those jealous boyfriends who were busy pumping iron while these chicks applied make-up.

When I had made some significant career progression I wanted a career oriented girl, preferably in my same company. She was so career oriented that she became the VP of our department and started playing with our careers.

When I got bored of my job and wanted a break, I wanted a girl who was a bit tomboyish and had a spirit of adventure in her blood. She was pretty tomboyish and even smoked cigars and rode a macho bike and had lots of spirits in her blood. So much that I started to feel womanly in front of her.

Now, I am tired of looking for a girl. I just want a girl who my mummy wants me to want.

Format adapted. Original source available on request.

bitter medicine

2007-11-28T03:12:00.000-08:00

I had the privilege of experiencing a cold night out in bangalore recently. And to top it off I had such spicy food that caused a running nose and a glass of mausambi juice that effectively sealed my fate. The next day I woke up with a sore throat and a body ache feeling all warm – that I immediately guessed that I had the FCC – fever cough and cold.

Well this is such a common phenomenon and that is why it is has been rightly named the common cold. It is so common that the average person would not know that there is no cure for it – it comes and it goes whenever it pleases (you see I am very well read). So the average person would say – “nonsense, for the fever take crocin and for the cough take a cough syrup – I recommend TusQ… and for the nose I recommend vicks”.

Personally, I prefer phensedyl… it was so sweet and tasty… and it felt good inside you… and it used to take at least 2 bottles for satisfying my thirst… er… cough. No I am not alcoholic… hic… stop getting ideas… hic hic… I get hiccups when I cough hic hic!!! Cough cough !!! see…

But the government saw to it that all good things must come to an end and they promptly stopped selling of liquor through medicine stores… oops… I mean phensedyl was banned from being an OTC drug (mba mba – OTC => over the counter). So it was only TusQ.

It was easy to prescribe medicines for this kind of situation. “Oh, you got fever – where is the crocin left over from the last person’s fever dose…” it was so common that any other form of the antipyretic drug (yeah another well read knowledge) was called crocin… it was much easier to pronounce crocin than say pa-ra-cet-a-mol… sounds like some mountain peak in karnataka… well the point is that crocin has been in the family since time immemorial that nobody knows how it came into being…

However the story of TusQ entering the family was much different. I was coughing my lungs out in a particularly desperate bid to get my mom to buy some alcohol… er… phensedyl when my extremely friendly neighbor dropped in and said “I have TusQ – the most tried and tested cugh syrup ever” with a plastic smile that looked as if she would have landed a part in the commercial, if only the TusQ people were there to witness it. So my mom got the medicine and forced it down my throat… wot a disgusting taste that was… especially for someone who was expecting a better one… yuck !!! it was green coloured too – somehow green always associates a bitter taste with me after that…

After that I have seen many changes in the color – yellow, pink, orange… And everytime I go sniff-sniff-cough-cough on the phone while talking to home, I would get the standard advice – “have some TusQ and pop a crocin and take rest.” And that has been so ingrained that I always had a inventory of the two in my kit.

So, on this particular day when I woke up and found that I could not answer the phone that woke me up, I decided that this time I would go to the doc. Somewhere my well read self had read that OTC drugs should not be taken indsicrminately without medical advice. I marched off to the nearby hospital to meet the general physician. I was not going to take the usual stuff no more. I will not jeopardise my health for a measly 100 rupees on the consultation fee. No way… then what is the use of my education… an mba at that… moreover there were newer and better medicines these days that helped you get well faster…

I wait in the line to get my token. I marvel at the sophistication of the hospital. They have an id card for every new patient and a records file that they will maintain. What customer service yaar… amazing. My number is 24. that meant there were 23 people before me. Ok… so that meant that the doc was good, else why would so many people want to see him?

But he was not in yet. Blame the stupid bangalore traffic. And yeah it was the peak time as well. So what if he is some 10-15mins late. I found a a chair and started looking around and after every full revolution looked at my watch… it was very painful – one thing even the prettiest young things don’t look good sick in a hospital and it takes only about 30seconds for a full round view… it is tough to see the face of the watch twice every minute… especially when you are longing for that warm blanket.

The doc arrives a full hour late and starts seeing his patients by the FIFO rule… I wait patiently (haha good pun isn’t it… so cool of me to think of humor even in the saddest of times). The crowd of patients doesn’t seem to be reducing at all even after a long time. I look at my receipt (yeah they take the consulting fee in advance) – it says 10:32… I look at my watch – 12:45… man this is too much… I have been here more than two hours… how much longer !!! something inside me tells me “another 1 hour…” . I murmur a sarcastic thanks and go back to my seat to my old routine of looking around and looking at the watch.

Finally I hear my name being called. I look triumphant at the little voice that told me 1 hour – it has been only 45 minutes – buhahaha!!! But then there is a guy who is very very sick and needs to the doc immediately… the great kindhearted soul lets him go in. He was out in 10 minutes… and then a desperate mother with her 15year old child barged in to make sure that the medicines she had bought were the same as the ones that the doctor had prescribed. By the time I went in, my inner voice was rolling on the dirty hospital floor laughing… “I told you one hour more”. One thing I hate is a wise-ass-inner-voice…

Anyways, what matters was that I finally met the doc. He asks me a couple of simple questions. Asks me to take a couple of deep breaths and starts scribbling in his notepad. What the hell??? Dude I have fever – take my temperature at least… nope – no sticking of the thermometer into your mouth or anywhere else… and I was out in less than a minute… I felt like I had just been in and out of tirupathi… sans laddu…

But at least I am triumphant – I felt like I had a prescription for ambrosia. Clutching the scribbled paper on which the doc has given me the greatest relief from my fcc, I march towards the medicine shop as fast as my tired body could carry me and put the prescription on the counter.

The chemist brings out the medicines the doctor ordered in his illegible scrawl – Crocin and TusQ.

The key to all happiness – part 2

2007-11-14T11:31:00.000-08:00

This is not a sequel(like jurassic part or harry potter) and has almost nothing in common to the previous post except for the damn !^(#!%@ key…

It was a normal day, bright blue and cloudless skies, cool sunny day. Work was the normal non-existential affair and I had a breeze of a day. In the evening some of us had agreed to meet up for dinner at a chettinad restaurant – one of my favorite cuisines. So there was excitement in the air in anticipation of the good food that lay ahead of me later in the day.

And hence I decided to leave a little earlier than usual, caught the bus that was home bound and reached home a nominal travel time later. But since the winter was setting in, it had grown dark already. That was where I should have donned my paranoid hat and looked occasionally at the skies, but I didn’t. If I had I would have noticed the stealthy accumulation of rain clouds that had added to the drop in temperature and a nice cool breeze that was blowing was actually the result of a local shower at some other area in the city.

I briskly walked home from my bus stop with a spring in my step and a song on my lips (it is good when you cant hear what you are singing – the loud clear sound of the ipod takes care of it) and bounded up the stairs and opened the main hall door. I put my hand into my pocket for my room key and voila – it was not there.

I did not have to think too much – I knew exactly where it was – in my drawer in the office. And I also knew where my office was – some 20kms away. The song in my lips changed into a loud groan that even my ipod could not eclipse.

But I was an mba, so I was getting into the solver mode even as the groan was dying out. I had 3 choices in front of me

plan A - go back to the office and get my key

plan B - stay with my dinner mate

plan C - wait for my roommate

The first one was the most uninviting. Come on said my brain – you just traveled 20 !^(#!%@ kilometers and you want to do it again? Twice ? no way !!! and I can’t feel un-guilty looking at the smiling faces of the late leavers in my team (I left early remember).

So lets move on to plan B. Only problem, I will have to sleep in my formals. Pretty uncomfortable. I want my comfort sleep. And I will have to wake up early to get back to my room for my fresh clothes. I want to sleep those 10mins I will spend traveling from my friend’s place to my room. I can’t sacrifice that.

So plan C. Wait for my roommate. But then that would mean that I would be in the cold till he got back… which would be around 2am… that is if at all he decided to come home… which is a difficult situation altogether.

Wait!!! that exhausted all my plans. I don’t have any more plans. Of course I cant break the lock etc because that would mean breaking the door itself. This plan was dropped even before I had the three choices.

That was when a savior came in. Well not actually a very enthusiastic savior, but more of the reluctant Rambo types(Well at that moment I would call anyone a Stallone if they could help). And there was this guy who could but didn’t want to and all he wanted was to help build that Buddhist temple in Cambodia. Ok ok, not Cambodia. Ok… ok... no temple either. This bugger had just driven back on his bike from his office and was not interested in being a driver to a desperate madman. And I was in no mood to take a no for an answer. At the end of some 15 minutes of haggling he decided to humor me. For what? Yeah I forgot. By some weird twist of fate, I had my roommate’s phone number. I called him and decided to make that great trip to his office to collect the key. So what if his office was 10kms away. It was at least only half the distance to mine. Well, this rambo was not very impressed with this argument, but thankfully he moved.

But all was not well that ended well. We were just approaching the 2kms mark on the trip-meter and there was a splat on my face… ummm... the optimistic me thought it was some stray water vapor that I managed to pass through. But it was not to be and obviously my negative self was proudly surfacing that it had been right all the time – it was raining (remember the seemingly unnecessary mentioning of local showers somewhere up there). But we kept at it. Hardly had we moved some 500mts when the little big drops got bigger and became big big drops. And they were coming down faster.

Of course, I hate rains. So there was a frantic turnaround and back to the place of accommodation. And then I made that decision to revert back to plan C. Or was it plan B? Ok. Whatever alphabet it was, it was basically to wait – to wait for him to come back. And btw, the rain had stopped (%#%@$$#%#^%&@#).

But then, I had to have my dinner as well. So putting all my trust in my angelic roommate (who by another weird twist of fate was planning to come home earlier) and in the unknown god (who was enjoying all this on his sim-city console), I decided to go on to dinner. And my what a dinner that was, but then this is not the time for that description. Maybe some other time.

And when I came home, my roommate had already come back and the door was open for me. So that was it, all was well that ended well and I got to sleep in my pyjamas.

The end.

PS. Thanks srk, for finally unclogging my pipeline with your Murphy post.

PPS. I must stop this PS-ing. It is getting too regular. Somebody once said they directly jumped to my postscripts in my mails – that saved them a lot time. Any suggestions?

life in a metro's volvo

2007-11-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

Pre-script: This post is jinxed… this has been a long pending post. Whenever I start it during the time I have wait for something to happen, that thing happens very fast… when I am not waiting for something, something else comes up… or else if there is no something coming up, then there is this thing called nothing… I have almost written and re-written it a million times in my head, but putting in print has always been outta reach

Post-pre-script: No claims that its gonna be a great read just because its been in the grill for so long. Anyways, thanks for reading it.

First love:

I am always fascinated by foreign models... automobiles I mean… they always seem so superior in technology... I have always gaped open mouthed they are paraded on the motorshows on tv even if they sounded stupid when they say “yeh Yamaha rd 6 tho bahut bemisaal hai”… pardon my hindi – am so busy looking at them models that I didn’t pay attention to the exact words… but yeah it is nice watching all those auto shows and dreaming how nice it would be if I could be that reporter or camera guy, and getting paid for looking at all those beautiful models…

The first time I saw this bus I didn’t believe it… was it actually a Volvo… what has happened to the Indian government? How could they turn a blind eye to such a good thing on the Indian roads… that too in the potholed roads of Bangalore… it is a sacrilege to allow good things to happen to the people of India… then I assumed it would be damn expensive like all good things… and I even assumed that it would be totally useless one on the roads probably doing a very small route and asking for an exorbitantly huge fares for the stupid air-conditioning and the suspension… and of course the Volvo safety that is a fallacy on the Indian roads… hah… I am not falling for the looks - can’t we see that it is predominantly empty because of the fares… I catch the local BMTC bus that is looking like a fevicol ad bus and manage to squeeze myself in and hoping that in the long journey that is going to take me about an hour to clear through the traffics of MG road, Richmond Road, and Majestic I would get some more space to put my other foot down on the flat floor of the bus… and all the while I keep watching the Volvo to find out where it is gonna turn off in some different direction... that day I found that kempegowda bus terminus is the same as majestic aka city railway station when the Volvo followed my overcrowded bus the whole damn way…

I know what you ate last night:

This bus is not one I would recommend for claustrophobics or people with highly sensitive noses (u know those noses that are usually blocked when a nice smell like a sweet perfume or aroma of great cooking, but perks up when you are passing by some open drain or railway track settlements). Especially during peak hours. Well since this Volvo is a completely closed container, with the air being circulated mostly within the bus itself, you are normally breathing some 50% (eupho-optimistic estimate) stale air… and it smells stale because it is a mix of body odor (after a hard day’s work and lunch) plus the engine’s diesel fumes odor and the smell that you get when sunlight falls on a seat through the glass windows… well this greenhouse effect (wot else will you call a mix of green house gases and a glass container) is what I hate about the Volvo… at least if you are in a car you can roll down the windows for a while and be happy that you are breathing the pure pollution rather than the refined ones that pass through the Volvian filters which helps me identify what the guy seated next to me had for lunch or dinner… good luck if you find a good cook and you can maybe get invited for dinner…

The woman in red:

It is one thing that we are in a Volvo – a sophisticated looking means to travel that puts us in the league of the developed nations of the world in terms of the modern public transport systems that have arrived in India… but the similarity ends there… people still want that 50% reservation for women in the buses… too bad there are no hooks in the back of the center seats where we can hang a chain and block out the women’s section from the men’s (and the men can travel ticketless as the conductor is usually trapped on the other side…). But the people have found an invisible chain by which they are bound to the culture of India that says all men who travel in buses are out there to “eve-tease” women and the women who travel in buses are poor things who are so beautiful and helpless that every hormone driven male wants to propose to her to make her his n^th wife (except of course the driver and the conductor who are gentlemen).

So there is this 4 seater section in the front half of the Volvo that is with the seats facing each other (which any engineer would point out that it gives the maximum leg space)… and since I am blessed with long legs, obviously that is my fav area to get seated… so there is this invisible chain that is the great gender divide stops women from taking the empty next to a guy in the men’s side of the four-seater-section even if that is the last seat in the bus… in some ways it is good for thick-skinned-long-legged person like me because I get to extend our legs well and have a comfy ride without having to knock the knees of the person opposite to you…

So this day I find myself in a pretty decently crowded bus and the seat in front of me is empty… I look around and can’t believe my luck when I find all the standees are women… so I happily get adjusted to slouch into my seat and start extending my legs deep into the recess under the opposite seat at the same time feeling unhappy that the Indian society has such a bad impression about males… and I am now settled comfortably and looking forward to a comfortable ride, when suddenly this dark-fat-ugly woman in a gaudy red colored saree makes me get back to my uncomfortable upright position and takes the seat opposite… the #^(#!%@ 8!+(#

The girl in white:

There are many good reasons to travel in the Volvo and most of them are the good looking girls who are regulars… (what to do, at this age all you can think of is getting a good life partner who matches your like and dislikes, for example love for foreign vehicles). So there I am in a particularly crowded one ogling at the regulars hoping that at least one of them might hit it off…

Getting jostled and pushed in the bus built for even standing comfortably (but it fails here too because of the great Indian crowd) I manage to reach a seat that was getting empty… and then I saw her. She was bright intelligent looking and dressed in a simple crisp white shirt and black trousers; looking specially cute with those rimless glasses and short loose curly hair. Well I tell myself what is the point day dreaming man – what is the probability that she is going to come over and sit next to me (remember the Indian culture thingee above) and even if she did what is the probability of having a conversation with her?

I immerse myself into the product manuals so that I can prove myself at least at work when I see some movement from the corner of my eye… the guy seated next to me gets off and then the impossible happens – she is there waiting to occupy the vacated spot… wonder of wonders – she is seated in the seat beside me… so what? That is probably the end of the story and I get back to my reading…

Then, a small voice asks – “does company X (the one I am working) have a branch in location Y (where the bus is headed)?” (she had noticed the huge logo in the printout). I am surprised as this is probably the first time that somebody has shown some cognizance about my company, and that too a girl, and a pretty one at that and on top of it she started it. So I say proudly (because I am billable) that I am at a client location and as I am still recovering from my shock at her knowledge and intelligence, I ask her how do you know about this company?

“Oh that, my husband works in the same company… his name is …”

“Murpheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee !!! what were you thinking when you wrote that law.”

Btw, looks like by the sheer sample size TCS has a lot of good looking girls, but there is no safe statistical way we can find out their marital status.

PS. Nowadays I have switched to the bus that is run by my tech park… saves me a lot of heartbreaks and I even get to sleep all during the way.

crazy kiya re

2007-10-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

I donno what came over me today… and I probably did one of the craziest things – I almost hiked my way to my office… well the almost here is in the context of attitude and thoughts and not exactly in terms of distance…

I was just about some 50meters from the bus stop when I spotted my shuttle (office bus) speed past the stopping point. Somehow just a couple of minutes before I felt that I was going to miss the bus that narrowly and it happened… as usual I was not greatly surprised – I was used to this kind of things happening…

I looked around and saw at a distance a great congregation of vehicles in what appeared to be a traffic jam (I was on one of the most trafficky roads in Bangalore called the airport road… ) and that was when a crazy idea struck me… actually it did not strike me and all that… I just continued… I mean I sort of did not make any conscious decision, but just you know continued following the bus as if hypnotized…

Thus began a great game of catch me if you can with the bus… I could always see its distinct white body from a distance and the moment I reached within some sprinting distance of it, it would move a little more ahead… like the evading butterfly that keeps moving from flower to flower, always within your site, but always out of reach…

Only there was nothing romantic about today… the day was kind of sultry with the sun just peeping out from the exhausted rain clouds; thankfully it was not raining but the sun was contributing to my wetness. And I was walking up an incline. And with a heavy laptop on my shoulders and it did not even occur to take out my ipod with its outdated song collection.

As I told you, I was not thinking. But slowly I made my way, ignoring the voluntary advances by the autowallas and desire to just stop and wait for the next shuttle that was expected in maybe an hour or so. But my brain would not listen. It just made me trudge up the hill… and the bus moved ahead a little bit more… and so on it continued – I would reach close and it would move a little further… and then on a little further through the gaps in the traffic – so close yet so far.

And so on it went till the bus was the first one at the signal. And I started cursing my fate – anytime now, the signal will turn green, and I would lose the bus forever. And just because I need to get in so badly, it would be the shortest wait at the signal today. And if I miss the bus, where would I stop? Would I follow it for another 3 kms to the next signal. Curse the weather - why was it so sultry today? And curse my kanjoosi – I should have taken an auto in the first mile itself; then I would not have missed the bus, nor would I have had to wait for too long.

And then I looked up, there it was waiting… waiting as if beckoning me to make that final plunge… like a beautiful mermaid beckoning to the prince in the ship to jump into the sea and forever be hers… oh sorry, different story… it is the humid heat, makes me dream off…

But I took the bait… I sprinted across the last 10 meters or so and just put my foot in as the lights turned green. People looked at a sweaty dusty dirty and tired being walk in to their cool mobile abode, just long enough to register a pitiful gaze and went back to their respective neverlands…

Did this little episode change my mind about the traffic and accept it with quiet reluctant respect ? Was traffic good that it stopped the bus from getting away from me ?

naaaaaaaaaah…

Would I do it again?

I hope not !!!

bloody blogger’s block…

2007-10-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

I don’t have to apologize to my regular blog readers about not blogging regularly like many people who come out of long hibernations. I simply reply to them whenever they catch me on chat… it is easy because there is so few of them…

I have many reasons… lack of inspiration … lack of a conducive environment… lack of a supportive infrastructure… too little work… laptop crashing… clock moving too fast… tiring traffic on the roads… US interest rates rising…

Frankly I feel that I have so much to write that I am beginning to get scared… I start thinking that I must blog every single event in my life even as mundane as brushing my teeth and having a haircut… I don’t actually get to put them all online thanks to the millions of muddled topics that I don’t actually get to prioritize them…

And then there is this concept of putting personal stuff on an open forum… I do agree that everybody brushes their teeth and has a haircut, but then there are some real personal stuff which everyone does but might prove hazardous to others and ight even require parental guidance (that is if they dont put a child block on it…)

There are also many blogs that are persistently un-updated and forgotten by their owners. I won’t chide you guys for not writing regularly – I understand. Someday you will get back, and till then I will keep watch. ..X. .X..

There are many bloggers who have struck fame and riches with their persistence in writing their blogs – though I would not recommend plain persistence, however when combined with talent and a little bit of luck, opportunity will meet preparedness and you never know what will happen…

I am not sure I can sustain my adrenalin rush for writing till I become famous… but I am gonna just let my ink run loose till it dries up… and blog just about everything… I don’t care about whether I put humor in it or sorrow… I don’t care if it is a soliloquy or a symphony… I am just gonna attack it with a vengeance…

So don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Formula 1 for success: United we stand, divided we fall

2007-10-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Ferrari won… I mean kimi won… I don’t believe it… is that what they call law of averages??? After almost 2 whole seasons of different failures which included even parts that could not normally fail, this is the ultimate clincher… when it rains it pours… literally when it forced silly-rookie-with-big-dreams Hamilton to make that mistake of holding on to the old tires and defending-champ Alonso to slip and slide and get scared. Was it just that lady luck decided to smile on kimi on that fateful day or was it that lady bad luck was for once careless… or was it the famous Ferrari team work at play?

Ferrari have definitely come a long way, learning from their mistakes of the past. From the obvious barichello braking to the sneaky massa pit stop, Ferrari have definitely learnt their lesson and learnt it well. Not only that they have taught their drivers well too… massa didn’t even flinch on the podium… unlike barichello who murmured something about team-orders and screw-driver… sometimes it makes me feel that the main qualification for the Ferrari drivers is the absence of a vertebral column. Something that seems to be too rigid and inflexible in the mclaren drivers…

Seriously it was a case of insecurity for Alonso when there was no second driver spot in his team… the boss said both of you are just my drivers and I am not bothered which car as long as it is a merc. But on the final day the spite ran high as there were 3 guys against Hamilton one of whom was his own team-mate… well you don’t expect the dedication like the Ferrari team, but at least make it a fair fight… flanked on 3 sides, the poor fresher had nowhere to go but back and back he did… and mclaren had to have that electrical misfiring on the same day… kimi could not get luckier and try as he did, Hamilton died fighting and Alonso stayed put – his enemy vanquished but goal forgotten.

Anyways, it is again the cats, cheese and the monkey story where the monkey ran away with the cheese the 2 cats were fighting over. Hope Alonso moves on to Renault and then we would have some good racing next year. 3 drivers and 3 different cars… but Ferrari seems to be coming up with a new strategy.

Looks like they are hiring lots more lawyers who are definitely cheaper than the drivers. This way they would force all other teams out of the races by disqualifying them, and finally win the championships by default. And yes they would get the 3^rd bottle of champagne free.

confessions of a guilty consultant

2007-10-02T22:42:00.000-07:00

i feel guilty...

i am a consultant like most post mba people and am working onsite at a client location... but before you start feeling jealous that i am in the bustling neighbourhoods of london or the orderly locales of germany and some exotic location of the swiss alps holidaying in the weekends, let me tell u i have not left the locales of india, in fact i am very much within the locales of the city i am in... ok i won't bitch about this city now... i reserve it for dinner discussions with friends...

but the fact remains that i am wallowing in a low cost center in india itself... actually it makes sense for them to cut costs because they are not the world leaders in their industry... they are only second with revenues of less than $10 billion... poor people... that is why they have their office in one of the low cost neighborhoods of bangalore which is actually a neighbour to the city itself just some 20km out of it... it is an adventure in itself going there waking up as early as 6am to begin the journey which is a nice long one with fellow workers and consultants to give you company... and with all that excited honking in that packed roads keeps you awake for the entire 2 hour journey... well simple math will tell u that we are doing just 10km/h but then slow and steady wins the race and speed thrills but kills - our bus drivers are strict followers of that even though they are eternally playing musical chair variations like catch-that-gap-before-the-honking-stops etc...

then of course after that nice journey when we reach the office location we are greeted by strict security officers who make you feel at home with their concentrated scowls when they check all the guys for the id cards. yeah they know that only the guys have the brains enough to blow up the IT offices in that tech park with bombs... girls don't... don’t think that we are male chauvinists, it is a scientifically proven fact; and it boosts your self confidence every day when you hear "sir id card id card... ok sir, thank you sir"... and the attendance register that we have to sign is a clear method of cutting costs... no elaborate silly access control systems...

even the software that the employees use makes me feel guilty... when i get the latest windows Vista and XP professional edition for all my home computers and laptops, all for free, we use some of the outdated operating systems that are no longer even supported even by die hard open source fanatics... and yes the hardware that supports it is outdated too so that there are no compatibility issues - think of all the problems we would have if we put faster hardware with slow OSes... while we consultants are given laptops with the latest hardware configurations so what if they are handed down through the generations of consultants and are prone to crash for each hand they pass into, they are still sleek laptops weighing only 5 kgs as sompareed to the 15kg monitor + 10 kg cpu that we get at onsite...

their employees seem to be a bunch of people who seem to be paid very less that they cannot even afford their basic roti-kapda-makan... while we consultants strut around in business casuals and formals complete with expensive italian leather shoes (heven't you heard of the michaelanjelo brand - these shoes are available only in exclusive stores along the back alleys near andheri railway station in mumbai) with each set of our clothings costing at least a 500 bucks we see people moving around in dirty and tattered jeans and sandals... even though they say that the jeans (we can clearly see that it is some chinese brand named after bruce lee) are new and the sandals are for comfort and cost about 2500 bucks... how can brands like reebok and nike compare against michaelanjelo? and the other day i saw this girl in a very short skirt and a sleeveless t-shirt that looked like it was something that was bought when she was in primary school... i was even planning to start a small collection fund from our consulting team where each of us contributed some money so that she could buy some clothes... but she seemed happy - isn't there a saying that money can't buy happiness and I envy her for finding happiness despite her poverty...

we also get some good perks like that wonderful mirror in the restroom... it shows people distorted into longer and fatter shapes like those funny mirrors in amusement parks - only this mirror has all the mirrors clubbed into one and at different points you can see yourself in different shapes... and it even has a spot in the middle where the person in front of it just disappears... it is an amazing stress buster... but there is always a big queue in that rest room - the employees are all extremely stressed out;(don't misunderstand that the restroom is under-equipped) while we are pretty chilled out working only for some 12 hours a day, their employees are so stressed out that they have to come late to the office and leave early as well...

and what a pathetic recreation system they have for employees (apart from that funny mirror) - just one small cafeteria with a coffee machine and a fridge with some soft drinks, and carrom board and a partitioned room for a tt table... and they don't even have a tv with a good DTH connection... how long can we keep pressing F5 every 5 minutes on cricinfo... don't we have other mails and scrapbooks to check... it is too bad that we had to leave work half a day early cramming our whole team into a small car and go home just to watch a cricket match... and those expensive restaurants we go to when we feel like having a better lunch than the cafeteria food, they normally take at least 2-3 times the normal duration of our lunch hours... and this despite the fact that we go to these places only 3 or 4 times a week while all the poor employees of the client eat at the cheaper cafeteria - though the quality of the food is the same...

that is what makes me feel guilty... when the client is so poor we consultants seem to be leeching out the money from them... even though we are not as good as rajnikanth who in sivaji could make some 250 crores at the young age of 25 just writing some software code, we do make a few thousands; and if we cut down on some of our daily meals, we can even save some money every month in those plastic piggy banks... provided our government does not levy piggy-bank-taxes, these little savings will be useful during the rainy days or maybe we can even donate a part of it to that poor girl...

tondee tondee !!!

2007-09-12T04:41:00.000-07:00

the new format of cricket has hit the screens since yesterday and all the players are clamouring for a spot in the team and all advertisers are clamouring for a spot in the breaks... though what made them go for the shorter version of the game is anybody's guess; according to a PnP theory the higher the urgency in a task, the better your results turns out. ok sorry no more gas, but at least in this current raw format i don't like it...

it reminded me of our limited overs cricket matches we used to have during our school days in our apartment complex... we had a small open space abt 50m by 40m area covered with thick bushes and weeds among the neglected coconut tree saplings planted by our colony welfare association during some emotional independence day or republic day event... anyways wot matters was we had a decent open space to play cricket... and we had a small pitch where we could play throw-matches - as in there was no run-up-bowling, but just stand at the bowler's end and throw (as in no complete arc bowling action) to the batsmen... of course we had variety bowlers under-arm over-arm leg-spin off-spin off-break leg-break hand-break jaw-break anything... and depending on the condition of the pitch - where the gardner had suddenly decided to irrigate the coconut saplings and on which area on the pitch the excess water had accumulated we used to have the runs allocation - if you hit on the leg-side you get normal runs and on the on-side you get "Gs" meaning you dint have to run for the run but instead it was just granted... and ofcourse if and when you hit a nearby window you could be declared out depending on the time that had elapsedd since the last time the tenant in that house had shouted curses and threatened to put a fullstop to our play by escalating it in the association meetings... so we batsmen could weild our willows and play within the constraints of space and place the ball cunningly so that we got the maximum "gage" (meaning maximum batting time at the crease) without getting out...

however, beyond all this what never changed were the boundaries... the locations could change depending on whether that day's puddle patch favoured a leg-side or on-side scoring, but a boundary was always the compound wall surrounding the "cricket ground"... you just needed to be lucky to hit them through the narrow trajectories through the network of saplings and grinning faces of the fielders peering in between from some of the gaps. and lucky to hit the boundary wall without the ball going out of the compound because apart from the probability that the ball could be written off due to inaccessible ditches and cranky neighbors you also got out... "6+out" was the rule and you would feel like that sure century had been cheated out of you... and since we are all lazy indians hitting boundaries without getting out was a skill that made you the most wanted player on the team... but it was largely a bowler's game as the bowlers could exploit the unevenness of the pitch and the control in the arm to suffocate the batsmen and finally getting them to make a mistake and get out...

and this was a game where seniority played a very important factor - not because of being the most experienced players on the team, but because you could easily bully the kids into giving them the bat afer getting "hurt-retired" (which was actually pronunciation corrupted and called “attetailed” and actually meant that you could get hurt if you didn’t retire); usually this bullying was not required either as we kids are usually pretty scared of the "annas" (big brothers) who used to tower over us and usually come home to let out the steam generated at their work or college on the poor little tennis ball, swearing away over even the simplest of things...

every evening after school one of us would start the process going around calling people shouting from the groundfloor to their balconies much to the irritation of the moms who would want us to study and finish our homework etc... then we would assemble and usually the most senior players would start building the teams carefully choosing the right mix so that the team would win in the designated number of overs (usually 8-10-15-20) and at the same time there would be the least resistance to the senior players playing the maximum gage... first to be picked up would be the senior players with whom the captains were comfy with (when u grow older some prejudices tend to grow with you)... second would be some special kids... the generally accepted norm was that the kids are less dependable to score runs, but then sometimes they would click and it is just impossible to get them out on "their days"... so such kind of "kids" were the second most prefered in the hierarchy... and then would come the last preferred pawns who would be blamed if the match went down while the captain got the praise for keeping faith on these players if they won...

i don't crib as i soon outgrew my status of being a new kid to that of a most wanted player to a senior player within about 6 years, and 6 yrs is quite a short time if you look at it as 6years and not convert it into number of days or hours which definitely makes it appear quite big... it was one of the most memorable times of my childhood where sometimes during the hols we used to even play some 5-6 hours non-stop till our moms came and dragged us away for lunch and other things; and then we would be back at the ground to play until nightfall and the batsmen could not even see the arm of the bowler, in a vain attempt to disprove haisenberg’s uncertainty principle trying guess momentum and position of the ball simultaneously... this kind of play within the constraints to a very large extent did give me a confidence to play on the school team and even impress my coach with my defense strokes (learnt mainly to survive the one-pitch-catch funda)... and then of course the cross between the full power driven pull and the timed sweep shots that we used to play to land the boundary hits helped us to hit out to unexpecting fielders where it would fall just short or just beyond them and score those extra runs... and best of all it gave us a good do-your-best-and-dont-care-about-the-result attitude when we used to swing away at the ball with eyes closed putting all responsibility on god to keep our stumps safe...

which does bring me back to the T-20 that i happened to witness between SA and WI... for a moment it looked like the windies have shaken the ghosts of their past and were once again coming out to be the first to excel in the new format of the game like they did in tests and one-dayers... gayle seemed to be working out a gale and was just sending every damn ball to the fence - tearing through the ground or the air depending on what level of respect he had for the bowler... and for a time it looked as if the windies had definitely perfected the technique for winning this game and that their strategies had made an optimal consideration of the rules and had stretched and pulled them so that within these boundaries they could score as many boundaries as possible... for a moment i thought i was wrong in assuming that it resembled the cricked we used to play during those younger days and that it was a largely bowler dependant game where the batsmen were only intent on swinging away, praying with their eyes closed hoping that wood would connect with leather and send it rolling to the ropes...

but then i was right (as usual)... with gayle's strength running out he finally succumbed to fatigue and gave the ball to the fielder instead of the spectators... then the rest of the gang followed soon spending as little time as the bowlers would take to bowl a good ball to send them packing... gayle had just clicked before he finally croaked and the rest of the windies (who are not underdogs without a reason) followed suit. and then the SA's, obviously a set of better rated batsmen, proved more trustworthy and the underperforming windie bowlers failed to capitalize on a bowler friendly strategy for the game... i am not commenting on the indian team as yet, but then the "annas" of the team are not there to bully the youngsters, so i hope they at least have unconstrained fun...

i don't say i hate the format... i am not a cricketing expert to comment on the performance of the players too... in fact i wont even say that i could have scored at a better rate at my old cricket ground... the game is in it infancy and the players need to understand the spirit of the game before entering the ground with a "wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am" attitude... cricket is a gentleman's game and the game can be played that way even in the new format... just lofting the bowlers high up and praying that the ball finds the hands of the spectator rather than a fielder's can be interesting for a short time, but in the long run you want to watch the elegant strokes of timing the ball to the fence...

probably this is how the ardent supporters of test cricket felt when one-dayers were introduced... and when the number of balls in an over was reduced from 8 to 6... probably they felt that the new format was totally against the spirit of the game... but with time things changed... now i cannot sit and watch a 5 day test match... i simply don't have the patience... maybe soon i would lose my patience with the one-dayers too... i think i just need a little more time to adjust to their shorter time durations... till then I will accept the cheerleaders…

branded for life

2007-08-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

what is in a brand... mbas would say that brands are an intangible entity that help you relate to a particular product in a particular sort of way and that it is the top of mind recall of a particular company's product over similar products of other companies... in short a brand is a product's identity creating the first among equals relationship in the market...

there are brands that are in fact products now - people now don't photocopy, they xerox... all low floored a/c buses are volvos... all packaged waters are bisleries... all general internet searching is googling... all mahindra type 4-wheel drive off-roaders/open top vehicles are jeeps... an mp3 player is an ipod... a piece of quality A4 paper is a bond paper... a scooterette is a scooty... any cola drink is a coke... all chocolates are cadburys... baby foods were all cerelacs and baby powders were johnson and johnson... prickly heat powders were nycils... portable cassette players were walkmans... emails were until recently hotmails... and a b-school was an IIM...

well so as a line extension on the same brand the great indian government decided to open 7 more IIMs as part of a national welfare program... this might appear to be a great idea to provide an opportunity for the millions of youngsters who don't get into the top b-schools each year... but to me it is more of lazy ploy by the indian government to fool students and their recruiters and a long term strategy to dilute the IIM brand... it is more of a ruse to fool the people into making them forget the lack of infrastructure for quality educational institutions in india... the only reason why iim students are in such great demand is because they are in such short supply... how would it be if we could convert all b-schools to iims and all engineering colleges to iits - then will we have a standardized indian population of mbas and engineers... and what is the next target - all medical colleges will henceforth be called aiims ?

i just can't accept the thought of creating a new college or taking over some old college and calling it an iim or an iit... take the example of roorkee... it was a cult brand by itself before it became an iit... now people feel cheated when they crack the iit-jee and are offered an admission into roorkee... if it is an existing college, it is a grave dishonor to its existing name.

of course starting a world class educational institution is not easy and bringing it on par with the existing competition is no joke... but then it is not a case of "if you can't beat them, join them uninvited" philosophy. how can you possibly claim that a college say opened in some remote location like the northeast, (no offense meant to the northeasterners, but then those states have been isolated due to inaccessibility) why would any non-northeasterner agree to go there and settle down there to teach? and if we argue that we will get local teachers doesn't that defeat the purpose of an iim - the brand being a global one we should at least have exposure to different regions of this country at least... or is it a plot by the indian government to release a spurious iim just to keep the people in this region happy and garner their votes?

many people in favor of the brand extension argued it costs a lot of money to setup a new world class college equivalent to the iims and in the initial years you will probably operate at a loss since not many would apply to these colleges without a brand... well i can only say that it costs a lot more than just money to build a brand like that of the iims...

what does the indian government know about education at a level that the iims and iits have achieved... just because they were initially created by the indian government they are not still the children of the indian goverment that they can decide whatever they want to do with them. just because they have a ministry it does not mean that it is qualified to make decisions affecting educational freedom... in fact it just means the opposite - just because they have a ministry, they are the least qualified. it is more of a lazy shortcut method to increase india's only currently abundant natural resource - intellectual capital. i do not wish to quote specific examples beyond the generic iims because that might explicitly portray this post to be sort of biased (which it is anyways)... but then you do have success stories of colleges extending their brand name across the world; but my counter argument is that these colleges have borrowed brand names only, and they have created a better offering compared to the existing brands - it is not an attempt to just ride on the wave of the existing brand image and cheat people...

how would it look if Reynolds called themselves parker or mont blanc… how would it be if the local udupi hotels called themselves taj or radissons… how would it be if maruti called its cars Suzuki… how would it be if hmt or titan called themselves rado or tag huer… it is not to bring out that one is a lower quality brand, this is just to highlight that each brand has its own niche in the market… that cannot be denied or taken away from them…

after all, a brand is a brand is a brand…

rain rain go away

2007-08-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

I hate rains...

My earliest memories of rain disrupting my normal life have never been memorable... And i hate any deviations from a normal life that i want to lead... That i lead it abnormally is a different story, but i dont want anything disrupting it... I don't mind the rain... As long as it is behind a glass-sunroof, preferably slanted, above my living room while i sit in the living room totally dry with a hot cup of coffee and a louder home theater system...

I vividly remember rain disrupting my cricket-match schedules, my weekly school library book-issue schedules (i was a book-aholic then) and then the usual going home schedules... Yuck !!! Wading through all that floating garbage and diluted knee deep sewer water - something you get when you mix the two extremes of purity...

It is not that rain is always bad... I do remember once when our school announced free 5 marks per subject - that is a whopping 25 marks in your aggregate for all the dedicated souls that came to school on that rainy day. Probably that was the only time i was in the top 3 of my class much to the chagrin of the usual class topper who failed to turn up from his flooded home some 20kms away... Long live our vice-principal who had to take that decision (and risk getting a beating for giving away free marks which she did get obviously) since our principal too was stuck in the discomforts of her warm home... And then there was this continuous set of holidays for almost a week because of heavy rains and we school kids could stay at home and watch tv during the day and play carrom and sleep late snuggled under warm blankets and anytime we wanted we got hot mom-cooked food... My most delicious bread and jam was the free one on one of the rainy days when we were stranded at school and our management was contemplating if we should continue staying in the safety of the school cold and hungry or we shud make the arduous journey to our homes where hot food and concerned moms awaited us... And who can forget those amazing schumi drivings in the rain soaked f1 races or the million-zillion times where india must have been bailed out of a sure shot no-longer-embarassing defeats in the cricket grounds... Or those amazing floods in mumbai that saved me escaping my birthday bashes...

Coming to the trigger of the post - it rained yesterday; and yesterday was the day i decided to take the pleasure of driving to work on my bike... After a not-so-harrowing-but-in-fact-slightly-pleasurable ride to work i was looking forward to a similar ride back home... All the while no one had noticed the ominous black cloud creeping up above us... So there was the black cloud hovering above me like the alien space ship in “independence day” getting ready to fire the primary weapon at the precisely pre-decided time when i would be out in the open... And i oblivious to all this plannings decided to beat time and reach home before the rain could catch up with me... How naive !!!

So i get out of the building as it was not even drizzling when i was getting into the lift at the 5th floor... And at the ground floor it starts a heavy drizzle... News travels real fast... And so i decided to go back to the safety and dryness of my otherwise cold office... I take refuge in the library and 2 newspapers later i see the rain having let up slightly... I go for a coffee at my cafeteria and i watch the parking lot for sometime at something weird but unable to understand what it was... Then it struck me - a dry patch was not getting wet... That meant the rain had stopped and the rain gods have heard my prayer... So trusting of me... So i rushed out wearing my rain jacket just in case. But by the time i reached the ground floor the rain clouds were firing on all guns...

I waited for about half an hour hoping it would accept my acknowledgement of defeat, but then looked like rain had declared war... So i decided to brave my way through on my trusty bike... So i walk to the parking lot dripping wet already, so that i did not feel the tingling sensation once i sat on the wet seat... And off we went into the rainsoaked night...

Thick rain had made it impossible to see through my helmet visor and i lifted it to expose my face to the fury of nature... (i wont call it mother nature becos mothers are supposed to be benevolent and understanding... And always ready with a hot cup of coffee). So i make it some distance after which i had to remove my specs too as they were made of the same material as my helmet visor (though costing many times more per square inch) to enable relatively increased visibility... After passing lots of blurry signboards i somehow managed to trust my instinct - i was sopping wet anyways, another load of water for some more time is not going to make any difference... And my rain jacket was all bloated up with the water it had so meticulously soaked up and my arms were like two pipes pouring water like a chennai metro water tanker all the way...

Somehow i managed to reach home and parked my bike with some difficulty in the cramped and waterlogged slush... I trudge up the steps to my room-with-a-view... And it all stopped... The absolute silence was like paying its respects to the ordeal i have been through or maybe the martyrdom of my laptop, mobile and any other remotely screwable high value electronics...

I hate rains...

free-wheely in bangalore

2007-07-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

this weekend was as hectic as any other... it was the usual slow_starter_build_up_to_a_peak_just_b4_hitting_the_bed type of a weekend... notice the underscores instead of the hyphens and the unnecessarily sudden abbreviation in a stupidly long word... i didn't intend it, but am too lazy to englishify it... and it is just an indication of the training on the software i went through last week (more on this later)...

anyways coming back to the status report of this weekend, there is a significant milestone reached that should help me cover many more miles... yup my wheels finally touched down (or should it be touch-downed) on bangalore roads... nearly a month and a significant portion of my bank balance later i finally got my NOC stamped on my bike's documents and got it booked on road cargo to bangalore from chennai...

ideally it should have taken just a couple of days and i should have received the documents at my office desk without any trouble and i should have comfortably travelled to the cargo office in a local bus for some 5 bucks and taken possession of my bike, but then my planets and numbers would not let me live an easy life (and this is another topic for my pending blog posts and i wont dwell on this now... i have to complete my short and sweet post for today and hit the sack for gruelling work starting tomorrow...)

and yes so finally i am the proud owner of the roads of bangalore... and i felt on top of the world riding my pulsar... the flyover might have contributed a little to the feeling, but who cares... i have my bike now and screw those autos and buses... now i dont need them no more... and that thought in itself was cause for celebration...

and wot better way to celebrate than catch a movie at one of the only malls in bangalore (ok... i wont bitch about bangalore here, maybe some other post some other day... i am too happy to do that now.) my friends had booked tickets for die hard 4.0 (notice the intended pun for the software type numbering)... anyways, we had to travel to koramangala to the forum mall to watch the movie... i have been there couple of times and this time i had decided enough is enough... i have my bike and i wont pay through my nose to the autowallas nor will i take a stupid bus and walk some 2kms from the nearest stop...

so me and another friend, who i had to convince real hard to come with me promising that i would drive slow (as if i could drive fast in the roads of bangalore... ok ok not now!)... we were off, and traffic was pretty light and we made good time reaching the place in some 20 mins flat... and i was happy that my bike has still not lost its punch and we still made a good team though a bit rusty after inaction for nearly 2 years... and slowly we inch our way to the entrance to the parking lot for the mall...

my happiness was shortlived as the arrogant guard there would not let us in... well since that was the case with everyone, cars and bikes alike, i decided to forgive them with the understanding that it was a genuine lack_of_infrastructure problem; we moved on to the new parking lot we were directed to some half a kilometer away... and there the #*(#!^@ imbecile of guards were not letting any two wheelers in because the parking lot was full...

i felt like getting off the bike and blowing my top at these guys, but then today was a super_good_day even though i had not seen 5 red cars in a row, i had gotten my bike today... and i wont let anything spoil my good mood... so i took a u-turn and decided to park my bike at some spot at some other building nearby... luckily there was a footpath converted to a parking lot right opposite to the forum mall... i appreciate the initiative of the citizens in times of crises like today, screw the pedestrians... they can walk on the other side of the road anyways...

well that was it... i made sure that i parked my bike well deep inside the cluster so that at least it wont be the first to be towed away and went in to watch the movie... of course whenever there was a break in the action in the movie i chanted a prayer under my breath to tell god to play security and watch over my bike and make sure it was there till i returned...

well when i finally left the mall 4hrs later, i could see my distinctive number plates from a distance and thanked god for the good job he had done... and yes the icing on the cake was the "NO" i said to the #*(#!^@ autowallas... the ride home was brilliant with almost zero traffic on the roads and we rode back nonstop... and we also managed to take a detour to hunt for some icecream and coffee which we would have sacrificed if we should have walked all the way...

"FUN CAME !!!"

a hair raising tale

2007-06-02T04:32:00.000-07:00

for some people it is the electric chair, for some it is the dentist's; for me it is the barber's chair... my nemesis for life forever gives me a tough time in society's acceptability list... one that causes my near and dear to join in the fray of shunning me...

i like having short hair... i had always wanted to join the army/navy or the airforce... i was fascinated by their haircut... but since IT needed me, i decided to make that supreme sacrifice, and settled for the local barber to gimme a feel of the army every month or so that my modest compensation package would allow...

but then to my parents it is a sin to cut my hair before it is at least 6 inches long or the time since the last cut was 6 months - whichever is later and that is when it will appear to them as if i might need a haircut... and even if it is longer than that it is a sin anyways... i have tried to argue with them that it is not actually as short as it looks to them and also vaguely hinted at getting their spectacles changed, but no use. a sin is a sin is a sin...

and it is not just my parents... somehow people have this fascination to comment on freshly cut hair... the society is against losing hair... probably it is the inherent fear of baldness that makes people happy that there is voluntary bald cut that they can make fun of...

i am also rarely satisfied with my haircut... very rarely do i get out feeling ok after that last snip after which everything went wrong... right from the point i decide to go for a haircut, my unruly hair seems to behave as if it is a naughty kid frightened to submission by the doctor's needle or the bogey man... i really begin to have second thoughts as to whether i really need a haircut now... but then i tell myself, that once i decide not to go, my hair will grow doubly unruly... so i go on... and the barber goes snip snip snip and i am happy that things are going on fine... and actually my hairstyle is looking much better, though he has not yet done upto my specifications... i even consider asking him to stop right there and jumping out of the chair... then there comes that deadly SNIP... after that there is no turning back... it is a classic case of the 2 cats and the monkey story... then depending on whehter the place has an airconditioner, the damage control happens making u look like you have just visited tirupati or like a football star with that small tuft above the forehead in an otherwise bald pate or just accepting to preserve whatever is left over and maybe next time will come faster...

there was a long standing joke about boys and girls take a fresh haircut... while it is just a polite "haircut?" type confirmation that gets a nod as a response from a guy to the girls gossiping about their neighbor's infidelity for an hour starting with a similar innocent question... but that is not actually true... though the timelines might be, guys can be as nasty as girls in telling you off that the haircut is not good... but then the guys dont realise that they are throwing stones from a glass house and to girls you cant say anything...

i dont claim that my haircut is a perfect one making me look handsome and ready to be cast instead of brad pitt in troy or that ash would fall for me instead of AB... just that it is hair today which will start growing from tomorrow... if it doesn't, there is always the tirupati cut to drastically reduce your sins...

it happened to me !!!

2007-05-21T05:21:00.000-07:00

the key to all happiness

2007-05-16T02:19:00.000-07:00

it was a very normal day... i got up at the usual 7am (yes that has become usual now...) and caught the bus to work... stayed there from 9am to 615pm during which i did everything possible - wondering why gtalk was not working only for me, trying to understand whether the user manual was stupid or trivial, drank tea, ate a heavy breakfast and an even heavier lunch, refreshed my mail folder a hundred and fifty times etc, not necessarily in that chronological order...

so in a very normal way i reached my drop point feeling all tired after a hard day at work choosing to ignore the make-you-fly-for-sometime kinda bumpy speed breakers on the way back... while walking back that 200 meters to my abode, i slipped my hand into my pocket and frantically searched that 4inch deep cloth bag in disbelief... my key was missing... the only key to the only lock on my only door was missing... the key to my hopes of catching a short nap before dinner was gone... i did vaguely remember a distinctly rattling thud as if something had fallen out of someone's pocket after a particularly nasty bump, but i was preoccupied with my plans for the snooze that i chose to ignore that... now i could not forgive myself for that fleeting moment of weakness...

well, anyways the MBA in me did not let me brood over the spilt milk or in this case the dropped key for too long, and i promptly called up my landlord and told him of my predicament... but then my great overlord Murphy decided to have some fun...

the call got disconnected due to his inability to hear me properly over the traffic he was driving through... but i thought he said something like he would check if the key had a duplicate and would call me in about 15 minutes... so in order to kill time i decided to call up some long overdue friends... the first number was switched off... the second was no longer in use... the third was busy... i got tired... looking around for someone to kill... oops, someone to help me kill time...

there was this poor neighbor who had bunked office as he was unwell... we had a long chat where we exchanged each other's bio-data... then again murphy wanted me isolated perhaps and this guy got a call from his long lost sweetheart to whom he started explaining what insurance was and how he sold it to poor unsuspecting people... anyways i looked at my watch and my cell phone's call register and calculated that there was still some 10 minutes pending for my owner to call back in his promised 20minutes... so i decided to try my luck again with other friends and i dialed... one of them did pick up the call and said he was on his way to a conference call with his clients in the USA... curse the indian economy that is so dependent on the USA that it does not even allow a guy in distress to call his friend...

so then i tried another and then another and then another and managed to squeeze some five five minutes of their time... that is when you realize that everyone is busy either going home or some other work related work... when you have your key the world goes home with you, but when you lose the key, you lose it alone... so i have managed to excruciatingly complete some 15 minutes of my existence... and i decide that my landlord's grace period is over and i dial his number... that is when i get the rudest shock - "the number you are trying to reach is not reachable"... even after 15 trials that guy is still in some unreachable location... was he unreachable by chance or was that his ploy and had gone into hiding hoping that i wud leave my stuff inside the room and return to my hometown so that he can rent it out to somebody else...

i then try the other number, a relative of my landlord, but that is another recorded beep this time - not even the mechanical monotonous voice... the number is busy... finally after frantically alternating between the unreachable landlord and the busy landlord's relative, i finally manage to get through to the relative... who is at an undisclosed location more secret than Area51 some many many miles away and it was impossible for him to come over... and he promises me that he would get in touch with my landlord... but before i could warn him that he was untouchable, the phone was hung up...

that was the last straw... i prepare myself for the worst situation... i anyway live on the terrace, so i can sleep there in the open air... in the early morning it would get a bit cold, so maybe i can wake up and exercise... only it would be a bit uncomfortable but that is alright... i would have to take the next day off and maybe around 10am go hunting for a lock breaker... as in a key maker... i would get him to come to the house and make him make a duplicate, i would pay him some 200 bucks... my friend spent 250 on a similar occasion but i will bargain... shit this 200 bucks is causing a dent in my budget... and i will have to eat at less expensive places... and worse i may not be able to save enough to buy a new bike if i keep repeating this... oh if i cannot even buy a bike i cannot even think of buying a nice apartment on the 4th floor on the outer ring road... the real estate prices are soaring... oh man !!!

while i was just bordering on the edge of hysteria, i see a dark bulky figure moving up the stairs... when the face became visible in the moonlight i let out the biggest phew that i have in my whole life... it was the landlord... my SAVIOR !!! but the suspense was still not broken, and i half expected the door would be... but luckily murphy decided to focus elsewhere and we did manage to find the duplicate...

maybe that dream house on outer ring road is not just a castle in the air... maybe there is some hope yet... and I will make a few extra duplicates of the keys, just in case…

babes bulbs bells booms barsaat breaking mirrors and other bajaofying musical instruments

2007-04-16T02:12:00.000-07:00

I recently saw a few movies – no central common theme except that the characters in it find “true love”… what is disturbing is the modus operandi of Mr.Cupid who announces that they have found their destinies… people seem to know the “ringtone” of Mr.Cupid… precisely put, people have set the ringtone of Mr.Cupid themselves…

In some cases it is people playing the violins behind them… then in some cases it is a guitar or the piano or the bagpipes (some arbit musical instrument of their choice)… then in some cases it is a combination of 2 or more senses… like bulbs lighting up around you and bells ringing… and if u are in love and you throw a walnut at a mirror on the wall and if it does not rebound to you broken into 2 neat halves and instead breaks the mirror… or else it might even rain whenever your love is near you, and/or something equally disastrous can happen… and in some cases it is just a boom… a boom as in a bomb blast boom… only this time it signifies the birth of a new relationship and hence it is good. And I think it is imaginary as it happens to only those people who are struck by cupid’s arrow, but I can’t be sure.

And that brings me to the big Q… how do they know it? Almost all the above scenarios have happened to me sometime in my life… like the other day I was at the temple at around the evening aarti time… and then all of a sudden the lights were switched on and the bells began ringing… there was no mistaking… but when I looked around, I realized that I would be better off accepting my mom’s minimum quality standards for the arranged marriage… ok, the setting might have been wrong, but my experience at the shopping mall setup was also not positive… there were just too many girls…

And then the other day I was in a music store on a sudden impulse to buy a guitar… and I had taken a friend along who played the most wonderful piece of music on the guitars he was testing out… sadly the shop had only male customers at that time… and trust me, I am not gay.

The case of the cracked mirror is absolutely a tale of woe – I can be assured of at least 7 days of hard time with my mom if not 7 years of bad luck… let alone me finding myself a bride by saying “mirror mirror on the wall, sorry for cracking you up with a walnut, but use the part of you that is not yet broken and show me who is the fairest maiden of them all…”

If it were to rain everytime you are with your true love, maybe it is better to stay away from marrying him/her… how would it feel if you had 365 days of rain in your city… people would just curse you (unless of course you live in Chennai). And for the disasters there is no place where people would welcome you with open arms… not even Chennai, unless it is rain.

And the boomtime… not a very happy tale either… so how do total non-believing ignoramuses like me get to know when the cupid’s arrow finds its mark… I don’t think the arrow hit will cause a stinging pain or like in many poetic compositions, does it cause a major pain in the chest region? Is it a sign after you see a girl or a sign to see the girl? And is the feeling simultaneous – probably not, because Mr.Cupid can use only the same arrow and if would take him time to aim and shoot… (I would not hurry him, lest he shoots way off target.) if it is gonna be delayed, can we know what is the maximum time lag…

A very depressing situation indeed…

But there seems to be a silver lining… a light showing the path in these very same movies… people who are together (like friends), tend to get the same kind of signs – as in a guy whose friend had a violin ringtone, would get the same violin-wala ringtone when he is struck too… and as in the case of bulbs burning and bells ringing, the only criterion is to find some place that always has these kinds of accessories hanging around like some Christmas shopping area… and of course, a friend who has found his love in the same way…

So, guys anyone who has had a good ringtone assigned to Mr.Cupid (and has got the call preferably) kindly leave me your orkut ID in the comments… I will add you as my “best friend”… and girls can leave any id – maybe we can discover a new ringtone together… or should I ask Rahman to compose one for me… ?

Aa ante arangettram*

2007-03-22T23:50:00.000-07:00

For the uninitiated, I danced. Yup, you read it right… anyways just for confirmation – “I D-A-N-C-E-D”… for those who cannot believe it, I am sorry to let you down, but that is the truth. Let me tell you how I got myself into this mess… yes, I chased it and caught it. I take full responsibility for the mishap.

The occasion was our farewell and people were all wired up to do something to leave a lasting impression on others… so that everyone will remember them in a different light than what they have been projected over the last 2 years… and I got to know that the easiest way to do this was to dance… wait… before you decide that my post ends here, I did not jump at this point waving my arms shouting “pick me pick me me me”… that is still a long way off…

I come back from this back-breaking trek from harishchandragad and the next evening I learn that one of the guys is dancing in the world famous telugu song “aa ante amalapuram”… since I am a little well informed, I assumed that it is a fun song (and also the way it was sung out to me seemed to convey the same), I decided to watch the practice session and have a good laugh and go to sleep (I was still tired after the trek remember).

So I hungrily follow this bugger to the emba 4 classroom (primarily designed to serve as a lunch room for the emba gang, ideal for dance practices as this room has no furniture). Then there was a signal from above – the lift did not work that day. I should have known that it was an omen for my impending doom. But did I care? My sadistic hormones were on a high and I wanted to derive the maximum pleasure of watching people practice for some stupid gult song. So I walked up all the way – can you believe it – 3 floors on my tired legs…

Then I am sitting there urging people to start on that dance, when they started the reverse psychology technique on me… and the worst part is they hit me with logic… now no engineer or a sane person can argue with logic… logic so profound that it beats all arguments… the logic was “it is all in the mind da… if you think you can do it, you can… you can even climb mount everest without oxygen if you want to… when people who are less athletic than you (omitted part: but have lived all their life doing nothing else but climbing mount everest) can do it, why can’t you?”

So there I am intimidated by a belligerent group of southies who have also bought the logic of the mind thing and I have no choice but to accept. Then I realize that it wud have been easier getting beaten up.

3 pearls of wisdom:
1) never trust your dance teachers if they say that the steps are sooooooo easy
2) never get into contracts/agreements without understanding why there are no other contenders
3) do unto others as you would have them do unto you

We had 2 really patient dance teachers… yup that was on the first day… the second day we were the patients… the amount of learning that went into it is tremendous… in a span of 4 days I would have learnt more dance steps than I had probably learnt in my entire lifetime… it is not easy when you have to move as fast as 2 steps per second… that was when I realized why there were no other competitors to this song… and each of those steps had a zillion other body parts moving in tandem… it was easy doing them all individually… but when it came to integration testing, none of them resembled the original…

Feedback is a very important thing when you are doing anything for the first time and also racing against time to master it. Pinpointed specific feedback is absolutely essential and a solution for course correction is mandatory from the experts. We got a lot of those. An example is – “you are learning fast da (this is P&P funda – give the good news first). But sometimes somewhere some step you are not doing properly. Do them properly.” If you stupidly ask which step and how I should do it, pat comes the reply “I am not sure, somewhere some step…”

Anyways, there was no time for diplomacies, nor was there for proper education. And of course the drop out of the best dancer in the group of 4 helped… as the hotchpotch the rest of us were doing was barely noticeable in relativity. So our teachers stopped complaining too – threatened that they may have more casualties they in fact started praising us. We somehow plodded through more practice sessions, all of us never being in sync at all tries – sleepy and slow, or forgotten steps, or just plain clumsiness… even the dry runs on the stage turned out to be disastrous…

Anyways the d-day arrived and the choreographers had their own dance to worry about and so we were temporarily forgotten… we (the 3 of us) ran through the steps in our minds at all times, as stupidly flailing our arms and legs and occasionally the rest of the body in the middle of the road or in the mess would spoil the element of surprise (don’t even think that we were embarrassed at being the laughed at). And yes we had a short disturbed sleep before leaving for a warm up session before the event – snacks were served.

The event started and happened… nothing much as a rotten tomato found its way to the stage, and we were euphoric hearing the crowd cheer and bliss of ignorance of having goofed up our steps on stage. We just swept the stage like a hurricane – we were on the stage when it was dark and before people could get accustomed to the lights when they came on we were off.

And anyways it was our farewell and people were forgiving – I realized this when I saw the videos. Pray that nobody else realizes it, else my testimonials go for a toss.

PS. Anyone who wants to watch my great performance can ping me and fix up an appointment. I will point out in the video my exact position and time. Of course there will be a contract signed and will be taken to court if the confidentiality is breached.

*Arangetram is a graduation performance that is the part of the traditional format – the Margam ( path) . It reflects the different stages of the dancer’s consciousness. In Tamil Aranga means a raised stage and etram means climbing. It is also called as Rangaprevesha in Kannada where Ranga means stage and prevesha means enter. Arangetram is test for the Sishya ( student) as well as the Guru (teacher) as the Guru’s knowledge and the Sishya’s talent are judged by the Public. So the Arangetram is done only when the Guru feels that the Sishya is capable and talented enough to perform the Arangetram.

Adios amigos

2007-03-19T23:43:00.000-07:00

It is time to say good bye to all those people with whom I have had the chance to be with over the last 2 years… but I really don’t want to. I want this to continue… I mean I did hate the acads part and all those war over the grades and things, but I actually don’t mind doing it now. I am not usually sentimental… in fact I never am sentimental… well even if I do get senti at times it is often mistaken for humor… so well this post might actually be unsentimentalistic but I hope I do manage to convey what I feel irrespective of whether it makes you laugh or wanna belt me with rotten tomatoes…

Well since the first para sets the tone of my emotional state, let me confess the condition I am in for those who cannot read beyond the lines… I am confused… I really don’t know what I want to do… my last 3 months of useless existence (or so it seemed) without the hectic pace of the MBA up to trim 4 has me really wanting to get out of this place… friends turn backstabbers when you want them around… they go home or go into hibernation… just when you need them the most. Revenge was the first thing on the agenda. I should leave too… my family is waiting (ah-ummm on second thought they must have really forgotten their eldest child as it has been 9 long years… but still I got a place to go… )

But wait on second thoughts, do I really want to leave? Yeah of course the point of progress and call of duty and last but not the least the concept of having a regular money supply is enticing. But then we would all become money making zombies… no personal life… no time with friends… not much socializing… no chill out… or worse still our friends would become money making zombies and have no time for you… again that begins the vicious cycle of revenge as explained in the previous para. On hindsight, the reason I quit my job to do an MBA was because I was losing my marbles thanks to the latter situation. But with an MBA our responsibilities are expected to increase and so time spent with friends is gonna rapidly decrease… so if you can’t beat them, join them – become a zombie yourself.

I cannot imagine a life outside of the protected enclosure I have been through the last 2 years. Of course this was how I felt during my engineering graduation, but then at that time I did not run into this place seeking protection from the hostile world. Then it was like a warm place called paradise giving you the power of money to give you the freedom to live a life you wanted. But now I am going back, totally unsure if I am actually equipped for the war as I am portrayed to be. At least during my engineering my lack of experience helped me to be motivated for the adventure that lay outside. But now that I know what lies outside, I am not sure I want to go there again…

But then the last 2 years have taught me to be confident and face things as they come. So ideally I am better equipped than the people I would meet out there for they don’t know that beneath the exterior armor of the MBA, there is actually no protection, but I am stronger because I know that fact. Or maybe I am wrong in my self evaluation, but you know information is wealth, and wrong information is better preparedness and when preparedness meets opportunity it is converted into luck… you get the equation right?

Over the last 3 months that have been tantalizingly devoid of any work and have given me a lot of time to recuperate and reflect (read: sleep and day dream), I have actually begun to hate it… the long periods of dormancy is actually killing me… and having had a taste of the work life, I am not sure why I should expect otherwise here too… at least here I knew that there were others like me who would readily ping for movies and at work I am all alone. Well at least everybody else is cocooned into their own lives to respond to a movie request… and how can we watch a movie in as formal a setting as a workplace… a classroom is fine… in fact the excuse could even be that we are using the movie as a case study.

But I also hated the hectic MBA schedule of so many assignments quizzes and worst of all boring profs and classes… but actually what really makes me want to go back to those torture chambers again is the fact that I want to see the others too in the same boat. I cannot imagine life without IP messages… all those mindless MCs and chatting with your neighbors… well I don’t know if I would even have a neighbor who would know to use a good messenger let alone exploit the features of IP messenger… yeah of course I might get a good internet connection and be able to download unlimited movies and software from some remote person’s hard disk some million miles away, but I might not get the movie that my friends have seen last nite over the small grey window… how will I ever get those warnings and death threats for simple harmless movies like K3G and salaam-e-ishq and Jaaneman…

But actually there is no reason ever for even those friends of yours to actually keep you updated on trivial things in life as the movie they watched last nite… there is no reason for the not so close friends to even remember you even. The few seconds we get to meet on the streets would be lost in the exchange of pleasantries that are common while here… before signing off with a “keep in touch da” without actually exchanging details on how to and moving on… yeah of course, we have the mailing groups which would probably have a grand revival now… but then considering our busy schedules we have to show to our masters, how often would we do a check on those places…

It is all in the mind you might say again… it is just a mental block and you can keep in touch if you want to… and then that argument brings us to the beginning of the post, why all these elaborate good byes… why sign on the t-shirts all those lovey dovey messages… why write all those “god bless you and may you have a great future ahead” in the year book if you are going share my future anyways by keeping in constant touch…

Of course it may not be completely possible to eliminate the cyclic redundancies out here but then life will have to move on… there is no point in living in the past and we got the future to watch out for… but then the past is what we are… now again the confusion begins… I am back to paragraph 1…

water

2007-02-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

we indians use water for everything - right from cooking our food to washing our butts and even until recently fighting... recently there was a fwd of a presentation that said something as unbelievable as world wars being fought over water and armed personnel guarding small water reservoirs... at that time it seemed unbelievable and too imaginative... but today it seemed quite real and scary...

everybody knows what the verdict is going to be - release some xx% of water to TN and keep (100-xx)% of water for KN. people are so imaginative that they wait till the verdict to start the protests. and yes coming to the imagination and the ignorance that drives it, i can't believe what i was reading on the posts on the different discussion boards... some were inspired from Mary Antoinette of the french revolution - "let them buy bisleri"... some said Cauvery originates in KN and hence all the water belongs to KN... why should we even share even a bit of that water... if this is going to cause further trouble to kannadigas, we will form our own country out of our state...

ok, i might actually be writing only anti KN comments here, but i never said i am being fair... i am not hearing both sides because the tamils have nothing to say other than "please give us water" in a more authoritative tone as if it is their birthright... well come to think of it, how many birthrights have we already neglected and desecrated to consider this on a seperate plane?

the tamilnadu government to my knowledge is a game of tennis played between the 2 prominent political parties or rather their leaders... there is always the habit of throwing the blame-ball into the other's court... never have they focussed on anything of use to the people of TN, but only on bashing each other when they have the upper hand. this water issue has also been handled in the same way - the focus of the governemnt over the years has been only on cauvery... TN pleads everytime, KN refuses, the tribunal forces KN to release water, the people of KN are agitated by the sympathy created by the KN government, TN people are happy over the victory achieved by the TN government and all the attention focussed away from the apathy every year on and on and on and on... the water problem surprisingly is a comment that i remember being mentioned in a 1952 tamil movie...

a few months or even years back there were talks of distilling the water from the sea, rainwater harvesting, closing out the borewells, and many more schemes aimed at saving water in TN. but all have been just a drain for the money siphoned out by the government. nothing usful has come out of it. a simple request like RWH which is to be ensure the colective well being of the people when implemented well, does not bring any cooperation from anyone. the people dont want to invest that 500 rupees into this simple procedure, the authorities don't care if it done properly or whether it is just a pipe leading nowhere, the neighbours and other people of the state support the intelligence of the owner and copy his ingenuity... there are other rivers in tamilnadu that have either been polluted beyond use or exploited for their sands and rocks during the dry seasons when they should be could be cleaned and deepened, cachement areas created or expanded in such a way so as to minimise losses and use the water that gets drained to the seas during the monsoons as sewage... the bores have touched depths as much as 500 feet and to think that earlier wells were hardly 10-15 feet deep, not even 15 years ago, because i myself have seen such wells and i wont hesitate to say it in a court of law... and on a thought, maybe this water table erosion was the reason that farmers are not getting enough water and cauvery is taking the whole blame...

a google result yielded some more distressing news: there were 4-5 other rivers too facing similar charges... a sad state for the country... considering that the northern lands have a perennial supply of water, even they are not spared of the water problem. the shocker was when i read that cherapunji. one of the wettest places receiving very heavy rainfall is facing water shortages... brahmaputra sends huge quantities of water into the ocean every year, and this amount is aprroximately 3 times the maximum requirement of the 4 southern states... the plan to connect the major rivers of india has suffered the usual lethargy in understanding the importance... it might come up soon, but when the context is so expensive to even think about...

this water issue has been nothing short of been exploited at the cost of all the citizens by the politicians of india to maintain their places. scores of demonstrations and fasts, proposals, meetings all achieving no purpose but to give the right amount of media exposure to the politicians who never have the necessity for river water when they can get the mineral water free-for-life as bribes... the media too has been having a field day passing judgements; winner: TN, first runner up: Kerala, losers: KN and pondicherry... this is going to fuel the ego between the states and result in more violence... and this is crazy as i cannot even have a friendly jibe fearing diplomacy and racial harassment...

however though, not everything is lost... this time the goverments have also learnt some lessons. they have been shrewd enough in anticipating a probability of violence (which is almost as high as the probability of the sun rising in the east) and have posted police force to the tune of about 16000 personnel in bangalore alone... this could be because bangalore being the most IT savvy city of KN has people glued to their computer screens and so once the verdict is out they can immediately post remarks on the net and order weapons on e-bay and rush out of office to burn buses... so all the terrorist IT folks have been sent home before they can cause harm, and the other workers have been sent home too lest they demand overtime for working on a national holiday. yeah i forgot to mention, they removed the expensive volvos out of the roads first.

i am not in a position to suggest anything new to the people or their servants - the government and the political parties. however, it is time something long term was arrived at considering that india is made of indians and that we are taught to be proud of the unity in diversity since the time of our school textbooks... however it is not as easy as blocking the wind by closing the door... whatever is done needs to be done at a higher big picture level... as for example in the cauvery issue, it is not enough if the water is released now... the states have to arrive at better policies and regulations to manage the water and other natural resources effectively instead of having a team of consultants or a tribunal advising them to start using toilet paper.

for this, the people of india need to stop dreaming and wake up... and also think on their own, not just for their own.

Da(m)n Brown

2007-01-27T05:07:00.000-08:00

I have no personal vendetta against him, nor am I prejudiced. I am just a kid who grew up reading “The Hardy Boys” and “The Three Investigators” kind of novels. The kind of fascination and awe I had for those novels are not the same as those that I have for the 4 Dan Brown novels… might be because I was a school kid teenager then and now I am a mature adult… but then Dan Brown’s books were meant for adults right?

But let us get into the fundamental question… is he really the great author that everyone portrays him as? Unputtdownable !!! awesome plots !!! stupendous narration !!! fast paced thriller !!! "I love Dan Brown" !!!

Is it so?

Let me tell you how to become a Dan Brown…

Watch a lot of movies… English action ones preferably those on the lines of extreme action Mission Impossible series and Bond movies… here you can get the fast paced narration. The high speed car chases on the English mountains to the amazing navy seal rescue operations can be copy pasted into one of the chapters… you don’t even have to mention the source or fear copyright problems…

Also watch a lot National Geographic and Discovery. Here you will get a lot of information on the most pressing issues of the world right from the historical paintings in Paris from the 800BC to the abnormal rock formation at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Just pay attention to the detail, google up the jargons and you have more text for your descriptive passages. It does not matter if the “facts” are technically correct or if the words actually connect. Just put them in with amazing words just cooked up from around the world like massively multiprocessor data diagnostics for software encryption and decryption to chrondules and vortices and Bernoulli principles used for skydiving (implying actually it is enough if you have studied a little bit of high school physics for jumping off an aircraft without a parachute).

Next, cook up a plot, does not matter if it is half cooked, but it should be really bizarre and location should be even more bizarrely exotic… like the polar ice-caps or the internal storage vault of NSA’s information system or the most religious area of the Vaticans. The plot should be as terrific a president attempting to prove that spaceships actually landed on the earth and that we are aliens, just to preserve his tenure and get re-elected. Only the president himself is only a puppet in the whole drama of deception and deceit and all the mass murders… it was his limousine driver, who is actually a CIA-KGB double agent working to preserve world peace by preserving the secrets that would otherwise be instrumental in creating a nuclear catastrophe.

And mix all of them together to form a khichdi of events from movies, “substantiated” with factual jargons from technology and pull in nature’s help from national geographic and discovery and just follow the plot as the central backbone – and VOILA… you are Dan Brown… oops sorry… not yet, the central character should be a man, and of course he should have a initially fragile lady who changes into a fighting tigress over the course of the story…

If you are still not pissed off and if you still want to read about what I think of each of his 4 books read on. This torture would have been spared if I had had the patience to finish all the 4 books of his in one go unlike now, where I actually found time to finish the last of it after I learnt blogging. I sincerely apologise. (I am also trying to get over my addiction to tea, these outbursts can also be called withdrawal symptoms when I try to do something else to get my mind out of thinking about tea.)

The Da Vinci Code – the book that shot him to fame is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. His other books were not as controversial as this one attacking the celibacy of the world’s most celebrated bachelor. The silly puzzles of anagrams and crazy killings are an insight into the author’s level of imagination – a worthy Hardy Boys plot or some other teenager book. Put in a lot of adult characters and a mention of a sexual orgy, it becomes a novel worthy of the mature adult mind. Thank god, it was not based on Islam, otherwise it would have been war instead of demonstrations.

Angels and Demons – a really forgettable book, though the plot appeared better than da Vinci code… the imagination is bizarre where a man of god can actually murder the pope for the sake of religion… amazing imagination. And the man of god is well versed with flying army choppers and parachuting, which is quite common these days.

Digital Fortress – an amazing tale of software security, but told at the wrong time. In today’s world which is practically running on the assumption that everyone understands IT, the author himself does not; the naiveté of the author to trust the world on non-piracy oriented software sharing…

Deception Point – amazing how simply assumptions are made with respect to tasks… a 8 ton massive rock is just very easily insert up a huge glacial ice land in the arctic… and how a small software bug can actually cost the president his political strength… the icing in the cake… the fish that are so central to the book’s story… absolutely comical end. If you ever read it, don’t miss the epilogue.

15 minutes of fame

2007-01-24T10:18:00.000-08:00

He was tired and hungry… or hungry and tired… or maybe tired because he was hungry… the 4 cups of thin cutting-chai he had at various roadside shops didn’t help. He had not had a single passenger since morning. And he was not lazing around. He had woken up at 5am and left the house, if he could call it that, at 5:30. He lived in Gandhinagar, which is what is normally called the outskirts of the city, but at least it had a good sounding name. The house was a small brick enclosure, actually very cheap brick just held together by plain cement and white paint and a tin roof. It cost him 1000 rupees per month just for rent. Apart from that the landlord would take 200 rupees for things like water and electricity that were supposed to be available at the turn of a tap and the flick of a switch; things that happened only in the landlord’s words.

He thought about the golden days when he as a kid lived in the now congested area in the center of the city. His father was not a great businessman and did not earn a handsome income. But he was at least not in poverty, getting a decent earning by selling vegetables on the handcart in the nearby residential areas. They had rented a good house, unlike the one in which he lived now. It even had the red cement flooring. And once in 3-4 years they did whitewash the house. It was in his early 20s when he could no longer find a job for his eighth-class-school-dropout qualification, that he decided to take up driving the auto rickshaw. He had used up all his homes savings to give the deposit to the rickshaw owner, and he had not gotten it without a fight. Luckily he had no sisters.

Then he got married and the wife seemed lucky. Business started booming for him as there were more and more passengers in the city of Bangalore. The government, his dad told him having heard from his customers on his regular rounds, was letting a lot of foreign companies come into Bangalore. And also there was some Bangalore guy who had even started his own company and was competing with them. All of a sudden the neighborhood had a lot of new faces and new kinds of people came in, all in their costumes of crispy full-sleeve cotton shirts and crazy colored ties, typing away in front of big black screens of what was called the computer. His over-worn khakhi shirt seemed real bad in front of those passengers and he started wearing a t-shirt and a shirt on top of it if the cold became unbearable.

And then it happened. The landlord hiked up his rents. What was once a house for 300-400 rupees was now hot property going at 3000-4000 rupees per month in rent. And his dad was no longer healthy enough to work harder to satisfy the gap, and anyways it was too big a gap. And slowly they moved into the outskirts, and as the city started gobbling up the outskirts, they were pushed farther and farther away. Finally it now took him at least 10km of travel to get to his earlier business area. And that distance was hell in the peak hour traffic.

Jolted back to reality at the sound of a blaring horn, he slowed down. He wanted money that day, if not for anything else at least to feed himself a decent meal. And it was late in the night, and he wanted to get home. It was at the beginning of airport road that he saw him waving down an autorickshaw ahead in vain. He was well dressed and wore a tie, carried a leather like black bag which contained a thin computer; technology had improved so much. In the slow pace that he reached he studied the guy’s face as it showed a temporary relief on seeing another autorickshaw. As he neared him, he heard “Marthahalli”… and he did not stop… he was not keen on it. Marthahalli was just 4-5 kms from that place and would hardly fetch him 20-30 bucks… hardly enough for the trouble he had been through the entire morning. Why do people want to travel just short distances? Don’t they realize that he has to travel from very far away to come to the business area? Moreover he had to travel further on after dropping him off to his home… what is the guarantee he would get another passenger at the place he drops of this guy? He felt it was not value for the effort, even though the guy wanted to get off en-route to where he was actually headed… How many people did he have to say no to for short distances? The government should pass a rule that short distance travelers should not hail autorickshaws and waste time and pay a fine if they did. This money should then be shared amongst the auto drivers in the city.

But he stopped hardly 5 meters away from the executive for a small drink of tea. At least something to satiate his growling stomach. The executive thought he had stopped for him… naïve guy… a sarcastic smile spread across his unshaven face. He shook his head vigorously at the harried executive and made his way towards the petty shop. He shook his head again as the executive pleaded with him arguing that he wanted to travel in the same direction as he was headed and he would even pay some 10 bucks above the metered amount. Hmmph… what did these guys think? Just because they earn a lot they can buy off anyone? Of course, there are some extra charges that are charged by rickshaw drivers, but justified by the hardships faced by the drivers depending on the time of the day and the area they had to travel to…

He cribbed to the chaiwala about the condition of Bangalore, those good old days and even the thin watery chai he was being given. The harried executive looked at him with another pleading look which made him look away. This time he chuckled to himself looking in the other direction. Those few minutes that he had over the high earning high flying executives; money can’t buy you everything guys. Probably he would be able to negotiate a three times fare, it is already late, and he could see no other autorickshaw in any direction.

He saw the executive pull out his mobile phone and flip it open with an irate expression on his face. Another display of opulence; where else can these guys spend their wealth? Why can’t they take a simple reliance phone like him? They don’t need that much money. The government should actually tax these people more and give the excess funds to the needy like himself. He heard him chatter away something on the phone in English. The executive must have been a call center guy for he could speak English so well. He himself could have been a call center guy, employed and being ordered around. Instead he had chosen like many of his heroes to drop out of school and be an entrepreneur. He was his own master, and a proud one at that. So what if he were hungry for some time; he had his pride.

The chai was almost over and he thought, he would give the executive a slow hint that he would not mind dropping him off for a fare that is nominal at this time of the night, around three times the metered fare. Then he would watch him hungrily lap up the offer, though it might hit his budget. But then these executives are paid in thousands; so why don’t they pay money which is luxury for them anyways. And he would enjoy the discomfort of his passenger as he would reluctantly agree to his savior, even if he proves to be a bit costly. At that point he would be like god to the executive, who would realize that money cannot buy everything, and the auto-driver, a poorer man, wields the actual power.

He dropped the cup near the card board box provided for it and turned around loudly cursing the guy who had placed the box at the wrong distance. A bike screeched to a halt in front of the executive and another similarly dressed guy takes off the helmet. They exchanged pleasantries and spoke a language that he did not know and hence could not hear them cursing him. Then the two of them looked at their watches and the waiting executive gets on the back of the bike and before zooming away makes a close fisted hand and shakes it at him. He realized it was not actually close fisted and there was one long finger pointing upwards.

The government should fine people for making rude signs at innocent people, he thought.

perils of education

2007-01-23T05:00:00.001-08:00

I was reading an article today about supply chain management and I came across a statement that was actually very meaningful… it said “the number of people that aspire to be truck drivers or warehouse workers is shrinking. Our children are better educated than previous generations and want to pursue other kinds of careers”…

Now we are generally made to believe throughout our upbringing that education is the single biggest wealth that cannot be taken away from us… now is that causing problems? A long time back I remember my dad telling me, people used to take up jobs after many days and even months of searching… I have also seen movies related to those eras to prove the general mindset of the people in those times… in these days of campus placements that seems funny and illogical. But really, is it? My brain is still echoing with the words of the student from some remote village who had said “education is the only escape from my poverty”.

Another article in a leading business magazine had two pictures – one a smartly dressed sparkling young man, maybe his late 20s or early 30s and the other a poor looking not-so-well dressed (even to the point of dirty/grimy clothes) with a sad expression on his face, the age unfathomable because he looked tired and old, but at the same time he did not seem to be too old. It said something like are there enough jobs in India? Is India really shining? Not for the second guy…

But then what I felt at that time was there are a lot of people like the tired man… he was not as educated (in terms of the level) as the other guy who was probably a software guy… the poor guy might be having the qualification suiting that of a line worker – more requirements from a physical labor than an intellectually straining job. What was stopping him from investing in a good education and moving above the poverty line…? I personally know of a few people who were initially in the physical labor category and moved on to become software engineers thanks to the boom that happened… sometimes bugs are good, especially the y2k ones…

The question here is the investment… but then today there are a lot of options available to fund education… also the education investment is like a sure shot return category where the centers of knowledge tend to arrange for getting you a job. So what is stopping them…?

But is education going to cause problems to progress…? This is an angle that we had never thought of. What if everyone aspires to become software engineers or management consultants? All the elite jobs are the only aspirations… people don’t even want to consider joining some jobs that would under-employ their education/capabilities? So let us focus the discussion on truck driving (as in as an example… people are not to assume that this is the only profession).

So would a truck driving job sound lucrative to a guy who has say done his MBA and is looking at the Mckinseys and BCGs… now I am not going to reiterate on the skills that an MBA can teach you, but what are the skills a truck driver would want apart from truck driving? Look at the various possibilities that the MBA jargon can throw at you – supply chain management, logistics, taxation, warehouse management, resource management, negotiation skills, hard selling, bargaining, economies of scale, strategic cost management, activity based costing, impact of the crude oil prices on the inflation of the Indian economy, the cascading effect on the interest rates, the stock price of your company, the market capitalisation of the companies you are the logistics partner of, their effect on the indexes, long term market share, share of the customer’s mindspace, 3Ps, 4Cs, porter’s framework for competitor analysis, SWOT analysis, portfolio management, new services offering, services management, sustaining customer value, entry barriers, exit barriers, telecom and IT in truck driving management… and so on… the list is endless…

And let us look at the job description… the role would involve extensive traveling and opportunity to work with the customers, a more functional kind of outlook and the opportunity to gain domain expertise. Networking skills and communication skills are tremendously important when you meet the authorities at the different borders. And then the perks… for a complete auto junkie, you cannot ask for more – absolute power at arms length… what can those SUVs or good looking sports cars compete where it really matters. For travel junkies you get to travel throughout the country, the roads are yours… you visit different cities from Srinagar to Kanyakumari, Mumbai to Meghalaya the choice is yours.

So what is stopping people from taking it up? Well the pay could be one such issue… that is a sadly neglected area in the Indian industry. Compensation has to be in commensurate with the economy and companies should benchmark themselves with the competition. However the competition in this case is not the other truck companies, but any other company. What will happen if all the truck drivers decide to do a course in J2EE… they would be the most sought after guys for the ever booming software sector. Well J2EE is not tough you know, any truck driver with enough money can learn it.

So what is the gain for companies? They can look at hiring part-time employees like McDonalds… students during their vacations… the visibility it will give them amongst their logistics partners… the truck companies will also have to do some hard selling… maybe even come to campus… provide lucrative working conditions, global standards in truck designs and cabin facilities… world recognition in terms of quality trucks leading to future export markets…

What a butterfly effect it can produce with just one small decision to become a truck driver…

guru @ times of indiapoised . now

2007-01-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

There are 2 kinds of movies that give you a cramped feeling and want to yawn and stretch out at the end of it. The first one is the kind where u tend to fall asleep in the limited space available in the “rocking” chair and unable to actually stretch the legs and snooze off comfortably. The other ones that actually make u sit up cramped and take no notice of comfort, where you want to hang on to every single word that is being said, every single muscle that acts and every single character that comes by on the screen…

Guru falls into the second category. Mani Ratnam has done a splendid job of abhishek bachan, changing his persona from a dumb cop/husband roles to one of real essence that actually makes the blood tingle in the veins whenever you see his “expressionless” face. When the simple villager seems to be pushed back by everyone who is conservative and has no faith in the future, in their own son, you are reminded of big B’s rendition of the India poised -
“ There are 2 Indias in this country – one India is straining at the leash… eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The other India is the leash.”

Starting with his dad who does not believe that he can do well in his endeavor so on up to the government and the press who are bent on slandering him just because he is successful through the normal ways of the system – bribery and corruption, the movie showcases hypocrites who are generally scared of big things in life. They are happy leading their mundane useless existence, but would not want to change for the better; which is absolutely fine, but then why pull down somebody who wants to break out of the mold. Like where was the government when gurubhai was building up the tax evasions little by little? They were the ones who were accepting the fact and the money and turning a blind eye to it all. (I have people who vouch for those practices being sanctioned by the government itself for tax “benefits” as they are called in this case even today.) But the individual is indispensable to the government and can be called into an inquiry and bullied into bankruptcy and anonymity...

And the best part is when the public “awareness” builds up and they realize that bachan is actually screwing them by resorting to unlawful means of cost reduction and business building. A guy who has made people wealthy by making them shareholders of his empire in return for a measly sum of money from them, that has given them many times the returns, certainly deserves something more than the accusations of the masses. That is why the really intelligent people don’t do anything for the masses… what is the point? Screw them…

There is no obvious fault in the movie except for a few redundant songs and there could have been somebody who could act for the role of sujatha, abhishek bachan’s wife… probably mallika sherawat could have been used throughout the movie.

The dialogues are very strong and supporting the delivery were the background scores… especially when in the split second the mood changes and bachan transitions from hero to villain within the same scene and for the same household. The whole combo just makes you feel kinda proud of the guy on the screen. The movie could not be better timed especially when the India poised campaign of big B is on the screens today. It really makes you feel proud that you are Indian. Or does it?

the law of averages

2006-12-26T09:18:00.000-08:00

disclaimer: this post is based on true facts that have been unimaginably exaggerated to resemble the truth and at the same time appear fictitious to protect the legal rights of the author. any resemblance to any person living or dead should not be used to sue the author for slander of reputation.

School was ordinarily a blissful state of mind until of course the report cards were send home. My dad would ask me “who is the topper in that subject?”, “and this one?”, “and this…?”, “ why can’t u even score 90% while the topper can score 95…”… I don’t know what happened to that poor guy (let us call him X to preserve anonymity) who was at the bottom of the class… what would his dad have told him?

He normally used to be around the 50-70 range (when normally the topper would be in the 90-100 range). It would have been difficult for him to have that quantum leap to catch up with the topper, unless he did some Business Process Reengineering… (but I guess he was too young for that kind of complex and abstract thoughts). So our X plods on through school barely managing to scrape into the next level, having developed a rhino hide from his dad’s charades rendering him impervious to the empty threats of his school teachers… while let us say I manage to put in that little extra effort (also called sacrifice) by squeezing time from my leisure activities into that bottomless pit called study time and somehow manage to close in on the topper by the time I finish school…

Now that hardwork really seemed to have paid off because I finished my engineering and am now a zombie software engineer earning enough money to give back to the government through the other routes of paying tax (after exhausting my income tax limit), with movie halls, restaurants, bike shops, music systems, cablewallas, booze and so on… the guy called X on the other hand, went to study in some college that not many had heard of and into a course that even fewer had heard of… he comes out and starts a creative agency, handling advertising and media planning for big corporates… intellectually challenged everyday as he has to have a plan to earn everyday, he is not a zombie, has better ways of staying energized and motivated than by just paying tax… and his paycheck is normally proportional to the amount of work he does. Now, there are a few zombies that are not completely zombified and so they tend to look at people like X and have mixed feelings – ranging from raving jealousy to unconditional sympathy depending if you are in the early stages of zombiehood or really advanced into it.

It is not just the money I am cribbing about here… it is something more. Let us say that there are people who enjoy what they are doing and people who don’t. It is not just about the money making part… it is something that they feel good that they are doing what they want to do, just because they want to do it.

It is a general observation that everyone is born with some sort of differentiating factor that is slightly more intangible than the finger-print-pattern or the dna. For a lack of better word let us call it “talent”… most people have the privilege of discovering it during their short lifetime, but a vast majority in this category tend to ignore it or play-down these urges to exhibit their natural skills… (now skills is a different meaning in which it can be acquired through years of practice, hence the word natural here). The tendency normally arises from what is normally the peer pressure or even sheer pressure… blame it on parents, teachers, society, friends, media, money, Gandhi, Hitler, tobacco, alcohol, GOD, destiny, Disney… wotever… the fact remains that playing it down has helped it become a vestigial organ like the appendix, which when can take it no longer causes the greatest pain when leaving you…

Sometime back I saw an ad with the caption “the doctor who killed the photographer”… just because the guy went on to become a doc by giving up on his passion for photography, it does not mean that he is a bad doc or a quack. He is a good one, but he probably lacks the zeal in his work… maybe he comes home irritated at having to do something that he does not want to do… or maybe he feels that he is not able to do something that he wants to do… or maybe just a little nagging thought that he keeps feeling that he would have been happier as a photographer…

There are a lot of success stories that I have seen among my friends… almost all that have come about with a great deal of sacrifice, with just a handful that took the path shown by their heart… there was this passionate cricket captain who could score centuries and bowl faster than anyone with deadly aim with dreams of making it to the Indian team… but he had to give it all up for a traditional parents wished engineering and MS abroad… then there is this athlete who wanted to make it to the Olympics, but was made to sit in the same year twice because his teacher felt he was not ready to move yet unless he focused on his studies too… then there was this guitar player who would call himself a rock-star… now everyone else calls him a doctor… then this singer, who is now a highly paid banker, just because her dad was one… then there was this guy amazing at dramatics, but who cares… he now sells soap and the only dramatics he can ever practice is to tell the ugly housewife, how much she would glow like aishwarya rai with a straight and honest face… not even the son of the engineering college director was spared of the software bug – he who could actually make ARR awe at the ability with which he could reproduce his magical music… and I can just go on… most of them in the software business as that is the booming sector for the Indian economy right now… maybe they are all true Indians, putting the nation before the self…

Not that all are sob stories… many of them are happy… though maybe it is an illusion created by their heartless brain that puts a monetary value to it all… quantifying the benefits… and then there were those that followed their brainless hearts (or were forced into following it because they didn’t have the necessary scores), into teaching, into movies, into some computer assembly business, creative art, starting an NGO, research (now this guy really had a talent for studying and he did it because he was passionate about it), law, sports commentary etc… and it can go on, but the list is very short… I don’t want to embarrass myself by letting it end abruptly…

Maybe I should have worked myself in the opposite direction to catch up with the guy at the bottom of the class… maybe I should have ignored my parent’s ambitions for me… maybe I should have stubbornly refused the amazing salary offered to me upon my graduation… but maybe I am not in a bad situation after all… the world probably needs my skills more than my talent… maybe my skills would give me a better standard of living that my talent can only give in my dreams… maybe my brain is right and my heart is being stupid…

The generalization here is not that mediocre performers normally end up being the greatest achievers… statistics do tend to prove that, and more and more such kind of misfits are proving the society wrong…if it hadn’t been for them we would not be having stuff from windows to relativity theories… there are some high achievers who do make it big… the point here is how many of these high achievers tend to fall prey to social pressures to do what others expect them to do or just follow the herd… they should realize that it pays to unbelong and these mavericks are the actual change makers…

To all who have missed the train of opportunity and are lost in the own quagmire of disappointment at what they have become… there maybe justifiable reasons to what has happened and probably have no regrets… maybe just that small itch that we can scratch away… or hire some one to scratch it away…

the sixth day

2006-12-17T02:02:00.000-08:00

When I began my odyssey 6 days back, people told me I had lost it… “me of all the peoples wants to go on this regime??? that was crazy!!!”… I was asked not to take an emotional decision and urged to use my sense of reasoning – commonly called the sixth sense which is a USP of the humans… (it is because of this that we are so intellectually superior to animals… much ahead of our closest competitors with dolphins and chimps at positions 2 and 3. Have you ever seen a dolphin play NFS underground with even half the dexterity I display?)

And frankly after the first session I really did feel that way… never guessed I would survive to see this day. But I am alive and taking each day at the pre-dawn time.

Ok, to break the great suspense… I am off into a self generated fitness plan to build up my stamina… so am jogging early in the morning (thanks for the applause and I am deaf to sneers)… for this I have entered into strategic partnerships to make this plan a success. I have found a couple of guys who are more dedicated to the cause than I am, and would passionately wake up at 6 am everyday and go for it; so passionate that despite my early morning reluctance to leave my bed, they would still come back the next day… that is the secret of successful partnerships.

The coaxing out of bed was the toughest to start with. My heart with its stupid conscience telling me “you promised” and my evil mind talking me out of it “it is just verbal”… finally I did make the move and man was it cold. You cannot expect much warmth from the pre-dawn haze just on the horizon (never seen it for a long time, in fact I don’t remember seeing it). On the first day it was a modest beginning – just 3 rounds, almost breathless at the end, just about to drop dead. But pure grit brought me back to my room.

My body initially didn’t take it seriously (as most others). It probably assumed that I was trying to spend some excess steam or maybe just a one day misadventure. The next day when I managed to land at the jogging track again, the truth hit it bad and it didn’t take it well. My body used to being pampered with a diet that is filthy rich in cholesterol and the luxury of just lazing around at any time of the day without having to expend too much of the energy just could not accept this change of plan. Rebellion was in the air and in my calf muscles – I could not walk for the entire day without using my facial muscles every time a shockwave went up. But I managed to pull on and the next day I was back… though this time I really needed to be kicked out. I could hear my partners contemplating a cold water shower right above my head… and that sounded an alarm in my head to open my eyes.

Day 4 and day 5 went on just as the others, and things were settling into the normal routine – my jogging partner would come to my room and wake me up, I would reluctantly trudge along to the track, do about 5 rounds and be back in the room in 20 mins.

Day 6, was when I realized the pact that my body and mind had signed up for the betterment of both. I was up at 630 and realized that my partners in crime had not yet come. So I waited and decided to spring a surprise on them and got into my running shoes and waited… and it was a long wait…

For about 15 minutes I kept my excitement contained and waited… but still no sign of the others. So I trotted upstairs, half expecting that they have gone off earlier and I had not been able to hear their threats of cold water too… the dreadful thought seemed proved rite when I opened the door of their room and found only one bed occupied… I decided to sprint to the track, just to keep the routine unbroken… the sun was already spraying its hue on the horizon and I was getting paranoid and I felt heartbroken that it is already over… then I realized I was in the wrong room…

I went over to my partner’s and knocked… out comes my groggy partner and with a surprised look… REVENGE is SWEET…

PS. I can’t take too much happiness as my heart is beating too fast already. I am back to the old regime of my partner waking me up.

D:2

2006-11-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

dhoom2

starring suzuki GSK-R1000K6, GSX-R600K6 and GSR600K6, great locales, great babes, putting-latest-bond-to-shame gadgetry, stupid police, muscular men, and of course abhishek, ash, bips, hrithik and that chopra dude whose dad made the movie...

movie tkt - 180 bucks
auto - 30 bucks
coffee - 36 bucks
bunking class and bird watching before and during the movie - priceless...

yup i am excited... it is that way when u expect something and the movie actually lives upto your expectations, however low they might be. this movie is probably the return of the adulthood for hrithik... he really looks as good as a sexy hunk should... damn sexy and smart... ash (if u watch closely) actually drools for him in a couple of scenes (it might be mistaken for wet look lipstick). he is that smart sophisticated intelligent muscular athletic thief who steals for the challenge of it and not for the money... yeah yeah so wot is different from D1's John Abraham... well nothing actually hrithik has great abs too... but then i don't like the john abraham... and hrithik dances well too...

abhishek bacchan is his usual grumpy exterior soft interior self... and his nagging wife is comfortably pregnant at home so that he can romance bips... even if it means only for half the movie... adn in the second half he tries to bash ash, but hrithik does not allow it coming to the defense of his girl... wait i am day-dreaming... sorry...

the chopra guy is his usual funny stuff... but this time he has a pistol in his hand... man that is dangerous... there was once a joke about what is dangerous and swings from tree to tree... it was a chimp with a machine gun... this guy handling pistols is not safe... he was shooting aimlessly... now bips was shooting too... and that is what i call a touch-a-woman-can-only-give kind... she shoots a design into the practice bullseye...that is sharpshooting...

coming to the girls, they both like dolls and think like it too... bips is reduced from a sexy looking police officer with a special talent for shooting great designs in dummies, to a bikini totting beach babe who falls for the chimp, oops sorry the chopra dude... and ash plays the negative role, where she doublecrosses and triplecrosses hrithik and finally succumbs in the end to love...

now the music score is awesome too... the screeeeeeeeeeeeeeamm of the bikes and the banging of the drums (seems like they copied from southie gana-song) is just too good... what with hrithik and ash and bips and the chimp dancing away - truly their hips don't lie... and man can hrithik dance - his solo parts are truly mind blowing...

starting from namibia deserts and shot in different scenic spots across the world like brazil and mumbai, the pic is a treat for the eyes... but the way they use these truly blows your mind off... the sands are used for surfing and the mountains for bungee jumping... and the last scene when hrithik's bike jumps to its watery grave (oops, but i hate tragedies and don't want people to see them too). There are amazing stunts here that would put bond to shame... and the disguises that they come in are also truly magnificent - i dint know that adults could disguise themselves as kids... now that calls form some serious make-up...

some of the bloopers i wish to turn a blind eye to are the silly looking stunts that are attempted hollywood style, but remain bollywood isshhtyil... and the absurd stupidity of the policemen... those are like really irritating... i do agree hrithik's disguises were too good, but his gadgets are there for everyone to see... and people don't even notice that whatever they were guarding is missing... the star studded cast had to have that many songs and they are all there complete with all the disco music adnd lights and dancing girls in shorty shorts and guys with sparkling hairgels... in fact the whole movie gave an impression of a 2 and half hour item number.

overall i just loved this movie... though it is a tragic end, it has a neat twist at the end... no, the bike is not saved sorry (what else do you think could be a bigger tragedy than a hayabusa plunging to its watery grave... there is no justice in this world)...

warning:
this is only a personal prejudiced opinion. for the true picture, i advice you watch the movie. i do recommend the red lounge. my friend complains of a stiff neck in the economy class because of the uncomfortable position in which he slept.

DHOOM MACHALE (once again, if possible at a cheaper rate)