Beyond Binary

Trust me...

2011-06-09T13:02:00.008+05:30

I wish we were a more trusting species.

Disclaimer. This is not an idealist’s candy-floss wish of a world made of rainbows and unicorns. Lack of trust is not just a problem on moral grounds. It is a problem worth a mention because it is economically inefficient. My contention is that a deficit of trust is the single largest source of all wastage in business, in politics, in life. Wherever there is a lack of trust, costs go up. Effort goes up. And yet, despite all our efforts to fool-proof things, the net return comes down.

Think about it. Switch on the TV. Dozens of brands, vying for your wallet. Every toothpaste on the shelf is "recommended by dentists". Every shampoo bottle is the "dermatologists’ favorite". You know all (but one) of them are lying. You don’t trust them. Which makes them howl even louder and lie even better to woo you. Or to hire skinnier girls to do it for them.

Marketing exists because there is a lack of trust.

Lawyers thrive because people don’t trust people.

My mother wastes her otherwise productive time running after the housemaid because she does not trust that she will clean under the bed.

Relationships fail because one (or both) of the partners no longer trust the other.

You need an SEC and a SEBI because corporations cannot be trusted to not burn the world down to ashes if left on their own.

They have a lovely technical term for all of this. Its called "Transactional Cost of Trust Deficit".

Now imagine a world that operates on trust. I tell my subordinate to finish a report by evening, and I don’t have to follow up on him. A company promises a client to deliver on X things by Y time, and there is no further contract required. Think of the time, effort, competence, red tape headaches, phone calls, automobile fuel, paper and ink saved!

The government trusts us to fill in our taxes. Less money is laundered, less money is spent on catching the launderer. With lesser mud to sling, politicians are forced to think about doing something of actual consequence.

With demand and supply being the only two forces in play, with the externality of deceit out of the picture, markets become self-regulatory. When you read in the papers about Reliance not being successful in a business venture, you know it is because there is something fundamentally wrong there. And not wonder whether it is an Ambani-sponsored article so that he can hoard his own company’s shares before he lets you in on the good news he is hiding. Fewer bubbles. Fewer recessions.

Less watchdogs required. So much more time and brains freed up. So much more innovation.

Last but far from least, no more locks. Which means no more keys. One less lost item for me to locate.

Trust others, be honest, be trustworthy. It might have more than just karmic payoffs.

and yet...

2011-04-20T00:20:00.009+05:30

So many thoughts inside of me, so many I cannot think.

So many contradictions that, you know there is a Simple link.

I blunder my way around life; and live without regrets.

So many voices in my mind, the music of silence begets.

I am what they made me; I am more than my experience.

So many doubts mock me, everything makes perfect sense.

I am because I am, I am my Why and What.

So many stars in the sky, I must be less than a dot.

Life feels gone in a flash, as Time eternally crawls.

So many thoughts inside of me, it’s a miracle I function at all.

The Ordeal of Vacationing

2011-01-16T14:23:00.007+05:30

“Wow! You’re going to Europe? Again? That's so awesome!”, exclaims my hyper-excited friend from work when I tell her why she is rid of me for the next 15 days. Little does she know.

Before the criblogpost begins, the customary disclaimers. I am quite the travel-o-holic. Its an occupational hazard of being a traveling consult-woman (unrecognizably ripped off from the Traveling Salesman). Every morning when I wake up, I need a millisecond to acclimatize myself to the new hotel room I am in and to try and work out which city this hotel room might possibly be situated in. Living out of the suitcase is pretty much the only way I live now. The maid at home in Mumbai is used to washing clothes in a pipeline of bursts. As is the iron-man. (Yes, yes, my sense of humour primarily rests on the rock solid foundation of cheap rip-offs and puns.)

But planning a vacation for family – trust me, that’s a whole other ballgame. Many posts ago, I chronicled the, well, ‘economical’ ways of living we swore by in Europe. I went there as a student, with many partners in crime. The ‘student’ tag was largely restricted to the visa. And used extensively for hoarding student discounts. That apart, it was 3 unforgettable months of poor-hungry-Indian-travels. Between spending nights on city route buses, getting thrown out of railway platforms and using McDonald’s as a public restroom, our travel logs would give the Lonely Planet publishers some serious competition. (Oh, that reminds me. I need to download an e-book copy of ‘Europe on a Shoestring’. Any links in the audience?)

Sadly, when you travel with your family, you have to bid a somber farewell to those masterpiece tactics. When you travel with family, you have to be responsible. You have to look up places you want to show them. You have to figure out the best and most comfortable ways to get there. You have to ensure a roof over their heads and a bed under them, every night in every city on the itinerary. When you travel with family, you have to HAVE an itinerary!

And with the need of an itinerary, arises the need for that necessary evil – the TravelAgent-man. This is a superhero who, for all the money laundering talents he possesses, may well have spearheaded many a hawalas in his day. Keeping a watch on him soon becomes your full-time occupation. For, if left unattended, this man is quite capable of booking the Buckingham Palace for your overnight stopover in London. And then secretively telling you how he ‘had to pull many strings’ to get you a free buffet breakfast for just 150 euros a night. Note that he would say this in a manner that makes you feel obliged to get down on your knees and swear your eternal gratitude to him.

You dodge some bullets from the TravelAgent-man menace. And pray that the number he did manage to hit you with is a small one. Feeling like a blindfolded target in a shooting arena – certainly not the best start to that heavenly vacation.

The good thing about vacation planning is that it does not leave you with time to dwell on bullet wounds. So you brush the feeling aside and roll up your sleeves for Stage 2 – packing. Now, being the compulsive traveler that I am, packing is second nature to me. "So this should be easy", I tell myself, "right?" Wrong. When you pack for Europe, it’s nothing like packing for Nasik, Balugaon (don’t ask) or Delhi – the kind that you are used to. This is no domestic trip where you throw in some sets of your everyday clothes, an extra toothbrush and expect to be all set. This trip demands shopping. Shopping. My Achilles’ heel. Somehow, while he was assembling the perfect woman as part of my creation, my Maker left a slight manufacturing defect. He forgot to add the shopping gene he has blessed most women with. I musts confess that I quite enjoy the feeling of diversity this gives me, not to mention the favour with the gentlemen. But it’s at times like these that this defect leaves me in the cold. Winter gear, boots, backpacks – somehow all the stuff from the last EuroTrip has been devoured by the monster in the attic and I have to do it all over again. Screw you, Murphy.

You find a friend better equipped at this sort of stuff. You bribe him with a KFC burger (what can I say, my friends come just as cheap as I do). And you get him to do all the shopping while you trudge along behind him, holding the bags and the credit card.

The final lap – the documentation. With the family in Delhi and you in Mumbai, this is an act of utmost co-ordination. It involves ugly-ass photographs you hide immediately once the job is done, forms filled in the triplicate, passports being couriered back and forth several times, and, of course, TravelAgent-man manning the entire mission. This stage involves a Visa interview where the scary-moustache-uncle peers suspiciously at you with his X-ray vision from behind that 60-inch thick glass. Just for some added fun, he mumbles his questions in the most inaudible volume. You bite back the urge to request permission to go get your pet African Elephant, as you read somewhere that they can hear infrasonic frequencies. Something about this gentleman tells you that sarcasm might not go down very well with him. So you muster that last ounce of superhuman hearing you hope to subconsciously possess and try to answer his questions best. It all ends with a friendly I-will-take-your-fingerprints-now and duly complete the exercise of making you feel like a sentenced convict. Just 2 more hours of waiting in the room where no mobiles, no iPods and no magazines are allowed. Just 2 more hours of enduring and inflicting some very uncomfortable staring contests with fellow convicts and you are done.

With that Holy Grail stamp on your passport, you are now officially ready to embark upon the journey of a lifetime. As easy as that. Or so my friend from work would think. Little does she know.

"A vacation is where tired people go to get exhausted."

'Dislike'

2010-10-08T19:07:00.010+05:30

Most of us probably agree that Facebook is a much treasured abode of stupidity. A harmless, meaningless, time-killing stupidity for the larger part of it. On most days, I indulge in it when the firewall allows. Even relish it. Its fun, we have to grant Zuckerberg credit for that much.

But this, I had to speak up against.

Last year, around the same time, you may recall a spate of status messages put up by your lady friends (possibly, including you) with nothing but a color on it. We all know by now, what it was. This year too, men are understandably puzzled by “I like it on the…” status messages. ‘Likes’ galore. As do comments with question marks (from the males) and knowing winks (from the females). I received my share of emails with my girl friends letting me in on the latest secret. Its that time of the year again. Girls are basking in the glory of their new found furtive thread.

So far, so good. If you want to titillate your male friends, be my guest. Hell, be their guest too, I’ll bet. Flash the colors of your bras and where you like to keep your handbag at home on your status messages all you want. (Yes, I spilled the beans. Shoot me.) But don’t, please don’t, give it the name of Breast Cancer Awareness month to make yourselves feel better about it.

How many of us know the first thing about breast cancer? Do you know anyone who has lost a mother or a wife or a sister to breast cancer? Do you know how painful it is – for the patient and their family? Do you know if there is a cure? Do you even know the symptoms? Forget everything else – if you, God forbid, developed it someday, would you even be able to detect it in your own body in time?

My answer to some of those questions is a ‘no’. If yours is too, then lets celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness month. This October, Google breast cancer. Find out more about it. Ask your family doctor. Tell your friends. Look up some organization that works for it and donate a hundred rupees to them.

But, ladies, I beg of you, please don’t continue falling prey to such shameless marketing gimmicks. (I don’t even know who starts these things. And what they stand to gain by it!)

Those of you who had the honesty and courage to read this with an open mind may be thinking how you never looked at it this way. A number of friends on my facebook account are women whom I know to be intelligent, responsible, sensitive people. Many of them also participated in this as a harmless prank. I am sure none of them meant any disrespect or harm. If you participated in it too, I am sure you didn’t either. Which is exactly why I felt it necessary to share this alternate point of view.

For the record, I am no killjoy. Far from it. Ask my friends. They are all over facebook – just like me! I am just someone who believes that we should be ready to own responsibility for the fun we have. And its implications. Right?

Nasreet Khan: Being the Change

2010-08-22T03:30:00.007+05:30

This is something I have been meaning to share for a while now. Some six months, I guess. I work for a consulting firm and have been working for more than a year on a Project with a public sector bank in India. Over the course of my work, I have had to travel quite a bit over the length and breadth of the country. And have had the fortune to meet some truly remarkable people. This is the story of one of them.

Nasreet Khan. A single woman, aged somewhere in her late 20s or 30s - I couldn't really tell. A face bearing both the lines of experience, and the glowing energy of youth. A tall, well-built woman with long hair neatly tied in a plait, rustic features, and an air of unmistakable dignity about her. I had heard quite a bit about this lady from the current Branch Manager of the area her village fell in. A small village, by the name Bilkisganj, some 2 hours drive from the city of Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh.

I had gone there to study the concept of an SHG in closer detail. But I ended up witnessing an embodiment of the greatness of human spirit.

I had heard of this woman as the leader of an SHG. But I met one who had transformed the lives of more people than I could ever imagine making the slightest difference to.

For the benefit of those who do not know what an SHG is, let me spell it out. A Self Help Group, as the name suggests, is basically a group of people formed with the aim of 'self help'. It has to have 15 or more members. These members are to register themselves with the bank as an SHG and open a bank account. They also have to specify an economic activity they want to perform such as - some form of agriculture, or an allied activity, etc. For 6 months, thereafter, they have to keeping saving a specific amount in the account every week or so. This is usually a token amount designed to build economic discipline in the members. Also, they have to prove to the bank that they are serious about this venture of theirs. Which is done by holding regular meetings, making arrangements for tie-ups etc that the Bank can inspect and ascertain. At the end of this 6-month period, if they prove regular in their savings and serious about their plans, they are given a loan by the Bank.

Nasreet Khan, the eldest of four siblings, after her father's demise, was pretty much the head of her family at the tender age of 18-20. Her 2 brothers and one sister were still very young. With a small hut for a house and no fortunes to speak of, the family was going through difficult times to say the least. They had little land and agriculture was not the most lucrative venture in the area due to weather and soil conditions, let alone the fact that there was no able-bodied male in the household. The then Branch Manager (now transferred elsewhere) of my client bank approached the villagers around that time with the SHG idea.

Nasreet Khan, albeit poor, is a well educated woman. I was surprised to hear that she had done her MA from a nearby university. She was probably the village's most educated person in those days. And having at least one educated person in an SHG helps manage accounts, understand and complete the Bank's formalities, etc. The Branch Manager approached her and explained the scheme to her. She was quickly excited by the idea. With the help of the BM, she hit upon the idea of making garments. The plan was to use the loan money to get cloth and some basic raw material, make ladies garments from them, and sell them in the Bhopal market.

She collected 14 other girls from the village. Given that the villagers respected her for her educated background, and that there was little occupation for the womenfolk in the village, she managed after some amount of convincing required. And hence, was born the simply named Vastra Nirmaan Samooh (Garment Manufacturing SHG). This was some 10 years ago. Today, garments made by this SHG are sold not just to wholesalers in Bhopal, but put up in exhibitions at Bhopal Haat (where they can command better pricing by direct selling to customers), and sold through intermediaries to big cities such as Mumbai. Nasree visits these big markets often to stay abreast with the latest designs. She showed me the accounts she keeps on behalf of all the women. She even encourages the members of her SHG to get an education themselves. Come noon, and these women and girls start pouring into the house to start the work. She allows the use of her own backyard for work of the SHG. They now work with sewing machines rather than hand so the production has gone up. Recently, she participated in an exhibition in which their SHG was selected and she went to Dubai for an exhibition of Indian ladies wear. The awards were put on proud display for our benefit. But more importantly, I noticed, that the hut has evolved into a 2-storeyed building. The siblings are all grown up and married. And the mother's eyes beam with visible pride when she looks at her daughter.

You would think that is enough brilliance in a single human being to leave one dazzled. But Nasreen had much more in store to blind me with. She has encouraged many more women in the village to start similar SHGs. As if the salwaar kameez she got stitched for me miraculously within an hour was not enough, I was to be further subjected to free bangle offers. We visited one of the SHGs that had started after hers, under her guidance. A group of women who make bangles out of laakh and fashion it with dyes and small mirror designs. She maintains their account too, they told me. And then they proceeded to serve me with literally oven-fresh bangles. I had to beg them to accept money in exchange. Tip of the iceberg, though.

These women told me how this SHG concept has changed their lives. How there are many more that Nasreen and the Bank have inspired in the surrounding villages. And how they have changed lives of not just individuals, but entire villages. Many cemented houses have come up, people have televisions and phones in their houses. Electrification may still be an issue like it is in countless villages of India. But the standards of living, overall, have gone up significantly.

Nasreet also visits other villages and addresses their Panchayat gatherings which she attends with a representative from the Bank. She shares with them the success stories from her experience and encourages them, especially the womenfolk, to form SHGs and start such ventures of their own.

Some hours spent in the company of these people and I had to return to the branch. Laden with gifts from the villagers, touched by the generosity of their hearts and stupefied by the magnanimity of their spirit, I could not find words to express my respect for this extraordinary woman who had been no less than a second God to them. I think I managed something of a request for her to keep up the good work - my words were too insignificant to recall anymore. But as I rode in the back of my AC car through the muddy streets of Bilkisganj, I wondered if, for all my MBA is worth, I would ever be half as great a 'manager' as that BM whose work continued to touch lives long after he is gone. Or whether, for all my intellect, I could ever be one-tenth of a person as the astounding woman I had met today.

The New Plan

2010-08-20T14:54:00.008+05:30

Three long months, one writer’s block and many many discarded word docs later, another attempt at resurrection. Hoping that this one doesn’t bite the Recycle Bin dust. Articulation has something intricately to do with the clarity of thought. Trouble is, that can sometimes prove to be too much to ask of life.

There's one thing I am starting to get increasingly good at - making plans. Which, sadly, is a self defeating faculty. So here's the new plan. How about using the lack of clarity against itself? Articulation of absolute erratic randomness - now there's a winner. After all, the human brain has been widely acknowledged as the most complex structure known to mankind. May be second only to life itself.

Rain rain, go away. Or not.

2010-06-24T20:52:00.016+05:30

The flat is a suffocating hellhole with a gross absence of ventilation that you wish you’d noticed before signing the dotted line. The job keeps you tied beyond dinner time. Which is just as well, because you barely have an appetite by the time you get home anyway. The traffic is a constant adversary. The cabbies deserve being reported to the police. A word-cloud a geek friend made for your blog says that that is the Number One thing you blog about. That’s how exciting your life is.

Sometimes you wish you could run away and vanish in the woods. But then you think of the mosquitoes there and change your mind. You try your might to hate this city. Given your circumstances, that seems like it should be easy feat.

And just when you thought that hatred was finally one aspect of your wretched life you were in control of, come the rains of Mumbai. They may drench every last cell in your body, but they literally wash your pain away. They may be a nuisance for the commute, but the sound of the rains thrashing against your window pane when you get up in the morning makes them worth the trouble. The smell of wet earth when the first drop of heaven falls on it justifies the flood in the streets when the 2 zilliionth one does. A long drive on a rain soaked road with your windshields down beats the hell out of the world’s biggest air conditioned car any day. Most usefully, “Unfortunately, I cannot make it to work today because the Western Line is down due to rains”. The perfect crime.

I sit in office, at 6.30 pm on another day in the monsoon of Mumbai, overloaded with work, yet finding time to type this. How, you ask? When your work begins downstream from some marvels of management, a large part of your job description involves sitting around and daydreaming. Today, my subject of choice is to see whether, if I concentrate hard enough, I can set some chosen people on fire with my mind. For those interested in the results, I am still working on it.

Moving on from my spontaneous-combustion-ridden-daydreams, official work timings are over and my day has only just begun. A long day at that. Yet something is keeping me alive, keeping the sarcasm pumping in my veins. A raindrop lingers on a leaf on the tree outside my office-space window. The daylight fades from the canvas of the world before my eyes. A soaked sparrow lands on the branch, delivering the drop to its brethren on the sidewalk below. My eyes usually look across the street at SIES College, usually swarming with students constantly pre-occupied with everything besides academics. (Much intentional eavesdropping has led us to the conclusion that “her hair” is the most popular topic among girls. And "anything that gives me an excuse to touch the giggly girl's arm accidentally" is by far the favorite with our men.) Cars meant for the German autobahn occupy and unsurprisingly cause traffic jams in this suburban street. An infinite number of people expertly trace their way through the jam, the giggles, and one another to fill the bustling, noisy picture I so despise.

Today however, things are a little different. The kids are finding it difficult, albeit not impossible, to communicate across umbrellas. There is still a jam, but the flood has taken credit this time. The infinite passersby carefully navigate their tracks dodging the puddles and the slush. A woman heading home after work with two tiny raincoats trotting in her wake. A boy carrying a kettle of hot masala chai, presumably to deliver transitory caffeinated relief to under-utilized human resources like myself. Two pink umbrellas, trying hard to keep step, probably discussing “her wet hair”. People are not blurs to me today. I can actually follow the trajectory of one raincoat I pick long enough to imagine its story. The sadist in me finds this morbidly funny. Something has finally managed to slow down that famous pace of Mumbai. I realize, now, why people-gazing is the city's favorite sport.

The sight of the rain-washed landscape introduces me to these colours. I realize I never knew they lay concealed beneath the daily black and brown. I shake myself out of my rainy reverie and make a mental note to be more careful the next time I look out at the city of Mumbai and daydream. I could use not falling in love with it.

The Congos!

2010-06-02T21:08:00.007+05:30

Not all love stories survive reality. Here’s to an extraordinary one that did…

Wish you both the lifetime of happiness and togetherness that you so truly deserve. :)

It happens even in India - The Sequel

2010-05-26T15:01:00.006+05:30

Read the prequel here.

An email from the Joint Commissioner of Police to the Matunga ACP, in which I was CCed:

Dear Sir / Madam,

Attached herewith a complaint/suggestion no.1064 /2010 received on www.trafficpolicemumbai.org which is forwarded to you for taking necessary action.

Immediate action be taken at the earliest. Till the final disposal is underway, interim reply should be sent to complainant without fail with a copy to Joint Commissioner of Police, Traffic, Mumbai

Regards

(Sanjay Barve)

Joint Commissioner of Police

Traffic, Mumbai.

Following this, last week I even got a phone call from the ACP, asking me the exact location where I met one particular cabbie whose name featured twice in my complaint. He went on to thank me for bringing this to their notice and assured me of quick action. I could only mutter my admittedly surprised gratitude. Brilliant, I say. Hats off, Mumbai Police!

Review: 'Man's Search for Meaning'

2010-05-09T01:30:00.009+05:30

For want of a better genre description, lets call this a book review. Although I would certainly have preferred the word eulogy.

But first, a little drumroll: I would be the last person on Earth to fall in any sort of cult. Cults, the highest form of conformism known to mankind, depress me. I genuinely find it hard to hold much respect for someone who becomes a blind follower of a person, method of thought or school of practice. Not only does it close oneself to any other form of thought, it is also deeply demeaning to one's basic faith in oneself. Of course, that is if you don't count faith in oneself as a thought method in itself.

But the closest I have ever come to cultification is the book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Victor Frankl. It is a book based, largely, on Frankl's experiences as an inmate in Auswitz - probably the most notorious of concentration camps in Europe during the second war. Looking at human behavior in an experience as extreme as living through a concentration camp through the eyes of a psychiatrist holds an obvious attraction. It is easy to imagine how such an account would be a gold mine for anyone interested in observing and trying to make sense of human behavior. It was the primary reason why I picked the book up in the first place. However, as you read through, the richness of Frankl's experiential account slowly became incidental to the sheer brilliance that is the book itself.

Have you have ever found yourself asking questions to the tune of why we are all here? Who am I? Why do we all get up everyday and do whatever it is we do when everyone has but one inevitable end written? Have you have ever wondered whether there is a rationality behind all the chaos surrounding us? If so, this is a book you cannot afford to miss. It will not answer any of these questions. But what it will do is give you a way of looking at life that, finally, makes a little sense.

I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to assume that an account in my words would come remotely close to capturing the essence of this amazing book's message. So I would rather let the writer's words be their own brand ambassadors. It might not give you as many goosbumps as a standalone piece as it would in the rest of the book's context, but here is an excerpt:
"As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he must recognize it is he who is being asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy* sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence."

If you thought Ayn Rand was exciting, prepare to be bowled over by the genius that was this man. A word of friendly advice: Don't forget to wear your cult-protection helmets.

* Frankl's 'school of thought'

It happens even in India!

2010-05-05T22:17:00.008+05:30

This one’s for Consumer Awareness. A colleague recently changed my life when she told me about this. So thought I should share it here. If you are a Mumbaikar, tired sick of the tyranny of Mumbai’s cab drivers, have no fear. Long-awaited panaceas is here.

In Mumbai parlance, our cabbies ‘seem to want to go only to Dubai’. That should about sum up what I am talking about. Ever been late to work, for an important meeting, for receiving a loved one at the airport because there just are no cabs ready to take you there? Me too. Ever had to grudgingly pay them 10-20 bucks extra to just do their job? Me too. Well, not anymore.

So apparently, there is a Mumbai police website where you can report the license plate number of a cab driver who refused to take you somewhere. Anywhere. I have been using it for only a few days now, but my colleague apparently used it for a year before she decided it was too much trouble. Which is something I fail to understand given the miracles it’s been working for me this past week. She also tells me that they really take action against the cabs you report. You mention the license plate number, the date, time and place where the incident took place and the kind of hell the devil put you through. And they actually get back to you on the action taken in the reported case!

Reporting-rogue-cabbbies for dummies:

Go to the Mumbai Traffic Police website (http://www.trafficpolicemumbai.org/). On the left panel, click on the bottom-most link: “Traffic Complaint Form”.

Or just click here.

Fill in the required personal details. Write out your complaint letter. I used this format to report each rogue cabbie:

Taxi license number: MH 1 AM 7630

Date: 26 April 2010

Approximate Time: 7pm

Place: BKC

Refused to ply to: Sion Circle

The only rider here is you have to be 110% sure that you got all the details right. Even the time is important. The same cab is driven by different drivers during different parts of the day, remember? (Saving one innocent is worth letting hundreds of villains go. Or something Bollywoody to that effect.)

Click “Submit”.

Tada! Mumbai Police thanks you with a dancing canary for your feedback. And from what I hear from my colleague, they actually write back to you on the action taken. (Yes. In India!)

Ever since I’ve heard about this, trust me, I’ve struck gold.

Case study: I ask a cabbie to take me to BKC. He shakes his head in that omnipotent manner of theirs. Out comes my notepad and pen. “What’s your number”, I say just for the effect as I look pointedly at the license plate. I proceed to note down the number with much fanfare and flourish. Suddenly, our man is not so smug anymore. He half-jumps out of the window and asks me, “Which BKC? The one in Bandra?”

“Yes, the one in Bandra.” I can see how he was confused earlier, considering as BKC only stands for Bandra Kurla Complex.

“Oh. In that case, come come.”, he mumbles as he puts the damned dilapidated thing into gear.

The pen, indeed, is mightier than the sword. Try it next time. It really works!

So what are you reading?

2010-04-08T12:07:00.005+05:30

I was just reading Arnab Greatbong Ray’s latest blog entry about his take on the Maoist rebellion. I have to confess I do not know half the names thrown up in the entry. But I am aware of the core issues being contested here. The incentive structure that directs the show. The parties behind the scenes, creaming the bloodbath in eastern India. But given the purely conceptual understanding I have of the subject, I wouldn’t even dare assume I am entitled to putting forth my 20 cents on the issue. Well, not more than saying that Arnab seems to have done an excellent job of it. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Call me myopic, but the sentence in the blog that caught my eye the most was this:

…(the Maoist issue) rarely captures national attention, confined as it is to largely rural backward areas for which it is pushed to the rear of the news by other things more important to our national life—like IPL, Shoaib-Sania and Kites.

I am ashamed of admitting that I read the glorified tabloid that is The Times of India. In my defense, my mornings are a haze of toothbrushes, towels, clock cursing and religiously swearing myself off late nights ‘ever again’. Given such tight schedules, I get time to catch up with the outside world only during lunch and coffee breaks at work. That leaves me with little choice with respect to the paper I read.

I noticed yesterday’s front page article in the ToI was about the Maoist attack on CRPF jawaans. The headline was “It is WAR”, with the word ‘war’ written in bold red letters for the effect. The index on the front page did promise us a detailed outlook of how hostel girls in Jalandhar are burning Sania posters to register their agony, what Shoaib’s second cousin’s pet dog feels about the whole thing, et al on the ‘Times Nation’ page. But to me, there was one more testimony to the seriousness of the attack. If it managed to elbow the flurry of noserings to page 5, it must be big.

This morning, however, sanity was restored. Shoaib coughs up the alimony for his wife (the word wife still being written in quotes for some reason). The couple claims front page positioning again. The Maoist attack is a close second in terms of word count. Gossip conquers reality. My world makes sense again.

The point I am trying to make among all the distracting derision, is something similar to what Arnab was saying. Where do our sympathies lie, as a nation? Doordarshan told me when I was a kid that we were once a country of thinkers like Chanakya. My parents taught me that enlightened souls like Gautam Buddha came from this land. My textbooks assured me that we gave the world the decimal system that forms the basis of modern civilization as we know it. From a nation which was supposed to be the think-tank of the world, when exactly did we turn into an army of eyeballs?

If there was a cliché award, a strong contestant would be: “What is today’s media coming to?” I am quite guilty of having used it myself. But is blaming the media a good enough excuse to wash our hands off? If repositories of cattle excreta such as ToI and India TV exist, basic economics tells me there must be a demand sustaining it. Remember how ‘lite’ and ‘diet’ versions of our favorite snacks conveniently flooded the market the day we decided it was fashionable to be a faux-health-conscious society? Supply follows demand – basic economics. Something for all of us to think about.

Meanwhile, I have a bone to pick with our admin guy about the press we subscribe to.

The Karmic Koala: (Barely) a Study

2010-04-03T13:08:00.010+05:30

First things first. I am not a tech-blogger. I may be above the average in technical prowess, but that is just a testimony to how abysmally low our nation’s average is. I am only writing this blog because I was bribed by Prasad’s promise of some extra brownie readership points if I blogged on his favorite subject – you guessed it – technology.

So here is a semi-tech-literate person’s account on Ubuntu. For those who contribute to my high tech-prowess percentile, Ubuntu is, as far as I understand, a ‘manifestation’ of Linux. For those who do not know what Linux is, it is an operating system and I suggest you stop reading this right here.

We are a growing startup. And like all badte bacche, we face teething troubles. Recently, they reared their ugly head in the form of a company-wide virus attack. Which was not surprising, given our security levels were not much higher than most home PC’s. Even I understood that much. People who had little respect for anti-virus software plugged in virus-infested client pen drives left, right and center. The occasional virus scan typically led to 84,467 infected files on the average company laptop. We were welcoming viruses (virii?) with open arms. And then serving them paneer tikkas.

Small wonder then, that one fine day, our server crashed. Most of us, who were semi-tech-literate, had already recognized our server as a disaster waiting to happen. So we kept local copies of all important data. But there were many others innocent enough to trust it with all their work. And I mean all their work. Not a spell check was run on a word doc using a local copy. Needless to say, when the server did finally crash, much brouhaha ensued.

In line with IP-inspired apprehensions about security and safety, an IT-revamp followed. All data was to be backed up. Then all computers formatted. The scanned and OKed part of the data was finally to be replaced on it. It was in this setting that an opportunity presented itself. Our IT team (comprising anyone and everyone who fell in the certified tech-literate part of our population) encouraged us to be brave enough and, in the post-formatting universe, bid Windows adieu.

My friend Rucha and I, in a fit of adventure, decided to dive in. We’d heard that anti-virus scans are not required on Linux as there is no virus invented for Linux OS so far(!).Some genius had even figured out a way to overcome the hitherto biggest shortcoming of Linux from an office use point of view – running Microsoft Office on it. Plus, it was, most intriguingly, named ‘Ubuntu’. The ‘Karmic Koala’ version, at that. Most importantly, however, it is cute! (What do you expect? We are both girls.)

It’s been a month since I first grappled with the overly sensitive mouse pointer on my brand new OS. Having solved that and many other problems (whether by exploring the functionalities, or plain screaming murder at Prasad and Ankit – our IT-literate friends), I seem to have adjusted surprisingly well to it. Phantoms of Linux have turned out to be bigger than Linux itself. Its fast. Its intelligent (use it and you’ll see what I mean by that). It has multiple workspaces. Which means you can chat and browse on another workspace without those irritating colleagues, who have the habit of peering into your screen and shaking their judgmental heads, ever finding out! So far, so good!

The games are also great, and I am still in the process of discovering them. The chat messenger ‘Empathy’ is a reminder of the good old Yahoo messenger days. (Gtalk has become way too familiar looking – irritating-colleague-who-is-dangerously-friendly-with-the-boss alert!)

On the flip side, I had heard, among other sky high praises of Linux, the fact that it never hangs. It does. The only saving grace is that that happens only when you use Office on it. But then again, muttering swear words under your breath darkly does not bring that lost 23-page report back. Nor does downright bawling. Trust me.

There are also some other problems with using Powerpoint, especially when you try to insert images or shapes or (God forbid) graph charts on your slide. Above all flip sides, the day I volunteered to work on Ubuntu, Prasad suddenly shifted camps and became a worshipper of Windows 7. Damn you, geeks.

And yet, last night, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop back home. Why, you ask? Its the ‘cutest’ thing I have ever seen. And that pretty much clinches the deal, as far as I am concerned. As I said, I am definitely not a tech-blogger.

The Oath

2010-03-29T11:31:00.011+05:30

Back at school, when I was in the 3^rd standard (the pic is from my 7th, but most of the characters were common till then), we had this Social Science teacher. Carol Ma’am. One of those Taare Zameen Pe-ish teachers whom you remember till your dying day. Taught us some of the foundational lessons of life without letting us get wind of it. I still remember, when we were on the chapter of the Prehistoric Era in geography, she brought 2 flint stones to the classroom, switched off all the lights and struck them together. And there we were, a bunch of kids in our checked red shirts and khakhi skirts and knickers, staring open-mouthed as we relived early man’s discovery of fire. I’m writing about it today, so some of us evidently never forgot the lesson. I’ve forgotten whether it was the Mesozoic era or Metazoic Era. But the serendipitous discovery of fire is etched in my memory for life.

There was this other exercise she had us undergo that I remember clearer than yesterday. It was a Civics lesson. She was supposed to be teaching us a chapter on Social Evils. Whenever I think of any social evil (like Harish's child marriage, slated for later this year), my thoughts wander to that memorable lesson, 18 years ago.

She had us all stand up, right hand on our heart, left hand outstretched, and had us take an oath. There we were, our heads set atop our diminutive figures, religiously reciting our favorite teacher’s words after her. It makes me sad that I cannot recall the exact words anymore. But I do remember what the oath was. And it is only now that I am able to appreciate the full nature of the responsibility she entrusted us with that day.

All the girls pledged not to give dowry when we got married. All the boys swore not to take any.

I wonder how many of my classmates remember that promise today.

I wonder how many will be able to keep it.

The CLL Chronicles

2010-03-24T15:25:00.014+05:30

The CLL post was arguably my most-read blog post so far. A full 8 people complimented me on it. The fact that that includes my Mum who could not, for the life of her, recall what CLL stood for, is another matter. Such overwhelming response made me feel obligated to share the end of that story with you. I really wanted to upload a pic of her on this post. But even the hard disk on which it was stored crashed. Here is the closest alternative I have for it. I am sure my roomie would vouch for the many uncanny similarities:

So I did not, as it turned out, manage to find a place before New Year’s Eve. Actually, I did. But a certain prospective roommate decided to find herself a soulmate one day before the registration of the contract, leaving me homeless and backstabbed. It's amazing, and indeed, impressive how parents these days are able to conjure grooms up at such short notice.

And as I entered 2010 with a rapidly diminishing faith in humanity, my numero uno on the to-do list, predictably, was to find refuge. After fleeing to a friend’s place to ostensibly celebrate New Year’s and taking shelter in denial for a day or two, I returned back to CLL. Her beady eyes bored through my soul. They asked the question that her larynx quite vociferously articulated seconds later, “Tu mera ghar kab khali kar rahi hai?” (I realize that English translations just don’t do justice to the Sound of Music that are her words. The written word itself, admittedly, is a limitation. How I wish I had audio tracks to share…)

Anyway, between the devil and the deep sea, I chose the former’s incarnation. I shared my woes with her. For expecting any shred of sympathy from her, I blame my sheer credulousness. KKR winning the IPL would have been a more realistic dream. Thankfully, economics worked in my favour. Since there was no replacement brave enough (or ignorant enough) to take my place in the House of Horrors, letting me go would have meant an unnecessary plug on a source of steady income and morbid entertainment for her. The invisible hand worked its magic and Dharavi lost one potential occupant. For the moment.

Thus followed the second innings of CLL’s run in my life. You cannot fully appreciate just how few movies the combined forces of Bollywood and Hollywood manage to release in a week unless you are in a situation where going straight back home after work is as dreaded a proposition as it has been for me these past months. After the multiplexes failed to satisfy my ever growing appetite for post-work time-pass requirements, I turned to the option of prolonging work itself. It might just work in my favor that everyone at my workplace thinks that I am a raging workaholic. Even bumping headlong into the closed shutter one late night on my way out of the office door did not deter my spirit. Of course, that might also have been after-effects of the possible concussion thus suffered.

Thus followed the 3 longest months of my life, punctuated with the regular conspiracy theories. The latest in that infinite list was the accusation of me having stolen a spoon. I realized I had just hit a new low in my imaginary thieving career. I was almost tempted to steal something nice and expensive for real, if only to make my résumé look a little better. But the concussion hadn’t reached that deep just yet.

As I write this, I have just completed the process of registration of a Rent Agreement. (By the way, did you know that Rent Agreements were called Leave and License Agreement? I first thought they had mis-spelt the word ‘Lease’ quite consistently in my copy. Turns out it really is the word ‘Leave’ there. Interesting that they put that word in an agreement binding you to not do the exact thing.) Legal parlance aside, with great faith in the constitution of our noble country and a deeply unfounded and shaken faith in the nobility of its citizens, I am counting my chickens, hoping that I move into the new place, come April 1.

Meanwhile, as my just-exed-roommate and partner-in-suffering moved back to her hometown, I decided to give the solo showdowns with CLL a skip and am living ad-hoc in a guest house for now. (Yes, it isn’t just Atithis that can drive you out of your own house. It is also CLLs.)

Last I met CLL, she was watching over my back as I cleaned out my almirah lest I decide to clean out some of her hangers as parting thefts. By now, I shouldn’t have to spell out the words ‘true story’ to have you realize I’m not exaggerating here.

The claiming of our deposit checks will stand out as my last lingering memory of CLLisms. No less than 4k were charged to ‘Miscellaneous’ losses, including her 500 bucks-worth diamond-studded umbrella (there is no other explanation for the price tag), her 1000 bucks gold casserole and the slipper from heaven that cost 500. This was all stuff that a maid purportedly stole from her. Even the maid gets a benefit of doubt in this case, though. The underlying assumption, of course, being that we played the role of accomplices of the maid in conspiring to rob these crown jewels from her Collection of Coveted Crap. So, my boss in this alternative career path is a housemaid. My résumé was really heading downhill now. After a scene-creation that would put Ekta Kapoor to shame, we decided to cough up the amount as a price for peace. Not without being told, of course, that our protests against paying up would haunt us till our dying day. Which was proclaimed to be not as far as we might be inclined to hope.

A friend recently pointed out that the CLL chapter of my life would have, at least, given me good mom-in-law training. Indeed. It trained me that if a prospective mom-in-law seems remotely like CLL, run like hell from the son.

Back on the guest house sofa, I make it a point to put my feet up on the sofa as I marvel at what a luxury a television screen without the latest episode telecast of Agle Janam mohe paida na kario feels like. My ears, though still a little numb, are adjusting nicely to the absence of an ultrasonic shock wave hitting them every 5 seconds. Even as I live out of my considerable and disorderly luggage, I think to myself, “This must be what heaven feels like.”

You never appreciate the little things in life until they are taken away from you. Like forgetting to turn the phone charger off without being charged with attempted arson.

Blogorama

2010-03-07T23:05:00.003+05:30

Was just discussing with a friend the other day how we evidently seem one step too late with all our ideas. The day you feel you have landed on an idea for something you feel has never been done before, you realize someone did it last week. How is it that we are always a week, a month, an idea too late? Then it dawned on me that may be that is the way it is for idea generator. May be people rarely strike gold on their first try anyway. May be the ones that got there before us had had scores of ideas a breath too far behind others. Or may be it is just an indication that the gap is bridging. And we see it only now because its only now that we are close enough to see it. Which is definitely a good thing. And reason enough to thump the backs of the ones among us who got there first this time round, they must have had their fair share of setbacks and the fact that they still made it alone is big enough a feat.

So here’s congratulating the ones who got there ahead of me this time, bloggers turned newly-published-authors, Sidin Vadukut and Arnab ‘Greatbong’ Ray. I’ve enjoyed reading their blogs for a while now, have purchased one book already (and NOT from a traffic signal, which is saying something for an Indian’s mode of purchase!) and am looking forward to stealing my friend’s copy of the other. Well, I never said I have a halo or anything.

Dork and May I Hebb your Attention Pliss. Catch them.

That Whole Cricket Business

2010-02-25T19:15:00.005+05:30

I’m not a fan. My friends and family, in true Indian spirit, would disown me for this confession, but its true. Apart from finding some members of our (male) cricket team good eye-tonics, I couldn't really care much less. May be that’s why it struck me to add the word ‘male’. And no, I’m not writing to whine about how the female team, or the regional teams, or the under-14 teams, or the pre-natal cricketing teams of India are not given any attention, nor about how we turn a collective blind eye as a nation to all other forms of sporting activities unless they involve a damsel running around in a mini, happening to wield a tennis racquet. As a person deeply uninterested in pretty much any form of sport watching for the love of the sport, I really do not have any right to complain about these things.

The love of a sport, to me, would always manifest in actually playing it. If I were to ever sit in front of a television to watch a match, any match, it would be for the love of the sport of couch-potatoing. Incidentally, I am quite confident at my chances of becoming a world champion. But that will have to wait till the Olympics-organizer-guys wake up to the mass appeal of the sport.

The only reason I have ever seen matches in the past has been for the entertainment, the company and the fervor of the company. I remember this one match, probably the only cricket match I have ever seen without getting into fist-fights with Vaibhav, my brother, for the control of the remote. It was a World Cup match, a quarter-final, India vs Pakistan. And Ajay Jadeja kicked ass. This is pretty much the most information I can recollect about any cricket match so far. This, in stark contrast with Vaibhav, who rattles off cricket statistics like the talking encyclopedia every Indian man is.

Anywho, apart from that one match which gave me one of my first crushes in my own personalized version of recorded history, there are barely anymore I remember anything whatsoever about. Then why is it, that as a nation, we are all such maniacs about this sport? My profound take on the deep issue at hand, is that most of us enjoy it because most of us enjoy it. Which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don't get me wrong. As long as it is something that makes people happy, that leads to such elation, such celebration and such (albeit misplaced) sense of national integration, I don't mind whether it is cricket or Rakhi's swayamvar. What I don't understand is the insane nail biting, the GPRS usage that shoots up as cricinfo pages are refreshed every 30 seconds under the tables of high profile corporate conference rooms during matches, the celebrations over someone else’s achievement (Yes, Sachin may just be God. But what is that to you unless you are a priest?). The riots over matches with rival countries. The (seemingly pointless) statistical rattling – The fastest century. The highest score. The most wickets. The lowest run rate. The highest strike rate. Test match. One-day. 20-20. And don’t even get me started on the IPL melodrama! Somehow it never makes any sense when I think clearly (and I tend to do that for most part of the day. May be thats what I'm missing!).

Let the bashing begin.

L.B.D.N.

2010-02-17T12:54:00.008+05:30

Today is one of those days. After weeks of toil, there emerges this one oasis of joblessness, this glorious little miracle of a day when I have nothing to do at work. The first half of the day was well spent catching up on a week’s worth of Google Readering, thereby creating much noise on Buzz through my two-pence worth of sharings, and chatting with fellow friends basking in the free bird zone. They missed me, they say. Well, I’m back. For now. But, all the emergencies of the online social networking world taken care of, all status messages commented upon, all blogposts read, my mind turned to creation. As my fingers itch to type something outside of proposed (and subsequently disposed) business models, I become increasingly aware of the hunger to write throbbing in my veins. It’s been a while.

But I digress. I was talking about the no-man’s-land day at work, where you don’t really have much to do or say about anything at all. You sit on your chair, in front of your laptop, as life happens around you. And wonder if this is what they are paying you for. Sometimes you also privately snigger to yourself at what you are getting away with. That the employing firm is usually the one laughing its way to the bank at the end of the day is another thing. Everybody wins. Or at least they think they do. Such is (corporate) life. On every such day, my mind can’t help but wander to this oh-so-perfect representation of the psyche of a person in my state by the genius that is Scott Adams:

I’m a consultant. At least that’s what I like to call myself for lack of a better word for what I do. Much has been said about The Consultant and his / her ways with the world. (Think: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them”) BS and consulting, as a result, go hand in hand in the minds of many. To be honest, these perceptions are not all misplaced. We tend to have a way with words. It is a useful tool to have in one’s kitty.

That takes me to the day a colleague, Prasad, and I were walking back to office after one of our (now) traditional dosa breaks in the evening. A man was walking his dog a little distance ahead of us. As we helplessly (and admittedly lazily) watched on, the dog dropped his blessings in front of our office – at safe enough a distance to escape the watchman’s wrath, but close enough to make his point. Instinctively, I turned to Prasad and said, “Did he have to be so literal about it?”

Why I am building all this background, apart from impressing the sheer awesomeness of my wit upon the readers, is to bring the post to the fact that even this blind spot of corporate life is not untouched by our jargonizing abilities:

The other day, in a moment of soporific ingenuity, Prasad came up with a beautiful term encompassing the job description of the greater majority of humanity. He called it LBDN. Stands for ‘Looking Busy Doing Nothing’. It took off in such a big way that not only is it now a part of our everyday conversation in the company, but also accepted vocabulary with my other close friends and family. Sentences like “Ankit, let me know when you are done LBDNing so we can go out for a dosa”, “Nothing happened at work, Mom… yawn… I just LBDNed”, or, when I am in the more contributive phases of life, “I miss those LBDN days” are commonplace and indeed, accepted without as much as a raised eyebrow now. Such is the brilliant simplicity of the term.

So here’s to all fellow LBDNers out there. And here's to Prasad: We bow before thee, Oh LBDN Coiner. Its an honour working and LBDNing with you.

The Closet Adult

2010-01-21T16:43:00.008+05:30

This one is on the you’re-too-young phenomenon. You’d think that being the youngest post-graduate the Indian education system allows for, living alone in an unfamiliar city, earning a salary enough to feed more than one mouth and managing it all with grace would make you somewhat of an overachiever. You’d think it would make you eligible for some respect (if not downright awe). Externalist as it is on your part, you’d expect that the fact that you are managing a career and a life people ten years elder find difficult to pull off, the fact that friends and colleagues from other generations turn to you for personal and professional advice would hold some credit in the eyes of the world.

You’d be wrong.

Its funny – how they laud you and herald you as a boon to mankind when you ‘stand first’ at school, when you top your university or when you crack an entrance supposed to be the toughest known to education in your first attempt. But the moment it is job-seeking time, suddenly you are the lowest of the low. No more boon to mankind. No more young genius. Suddenly, with no years of experience on that sheet of paper that decides every human’s worth, you are the Scum of the Universe. Recruiters are not willing to touch you with a ten-foot pole. And this is just the beginning of the extravaganza heading you way.

There’s that first job. You’d think that starting working with a label bigger than half your organization stamped to your forehead would count for something.

Wrong again.

And the first day at work is enough to illustrate how wrong, exactly.

After the first round of introductions (of which “Where did you work before IIM?” is a surprisingly indispensable part), the cat is out of the bag. The difference between 5 measly months’ worth of typing code versus none makes more difference than you could have imagined. Mind numbingly, it is the difference between people treating you as an equal versus people all but pulling your cheeks.

Suddenly there are just 2 kinds of people walking the earth as far as you are concerned – the mother-figures and the father-figures. Its baby crèche all over again. Except, this time, there’s no ice cream. You have your senior female colleagues looking at your with welling eyes, seeing their rotten teenage kids in you and force feeding their leftover nutrition to you at the lunch table much against your will. And then you have the male part of the population showering you with their un-asked-for pearls of wisdom.

(At this point, you will notice that most guys come up with a stop-gap solution for this by growing a stubble. Its amazing how much weight a little vegetation on your face adds to other’s opinion of you. Alas, us girls do not have that option. Not that I am complaining. My suggestion to the ladies: Enjoy the food and pray someone younger comes along soon.)

The family and friends. These change stances in the blink of an eye, the day you get your job. As you step into the much-dreaded ‘real world’, they seem to take upon themselves, the crusade of protecting you from its evil clutches (which are, strangely enough, feeding you sprouts at the office lunch table).

From the intelligent, mature person who has made a mark for themselves through their sheer grit and toil, you overnight become the bumbling starry-eyed kid in the big city. Your ideals that they once loved and respected you for, suddenly become ‘a passing phase of idealism’. Or worse, that expression I have come to detest and hate with every fiber of my body – ‘the honeymoon period’.

Colleagues, clients, family and friends. These well meaning souls will do all that is in their power to get you to their Dark Side. And unless you display an equal capacity to crib about how unfair life is and how the world seems to be fast approaching a well deserved gruesome end, unless you shed that very last shred of optimism and faith in the goodness of man, they will not be convinced that you have ‘grown up’ (grrr…). Demonstrate a sense of disillusionment and frustration vying with theirs for the first place, and they will nod wisely and say something to the tune of “Welcome to the real world”. Now, they are finally convinced you have come on your own. Now, they can finally sleep at night.

And, of course, hold your breath all that time while you desperately pray for the next newbie to make an appearance soon – the junior from campus, the oven-fresh new joinee at work, the younger cousin – whoever. It’s a predative world out there. Lesson #1.

Epiphanies at Twilight

2010-01-18T19:03:00.004+05:30

What is it about sitting by your window at dusk, watching the daylights dim with the evening breeze in your face and old Hindi movie songs playing on your media player, that makes you get all philosophical? Today, for reasons heavily circumstantial, my thoughts drift to ‘change’. How I always hate it unconditionally. How the prospect of an utterly uncertain tomorrow always leaves me with a void in the pit of my stomach – the size of the void directly proportional to the first impact of the change on me. It is not a good feeling – never has been. And even though most changes have proved to have been for the better in the past, the stomach never learns.

I guess it is the feeling of powerlessness which makes me uncomfortable, well established control freak that I am. Once or twice, in my lifetime so far, I have experimented with what people call being wild – but only under an overall controlled environment. And I almost always made sure things came back to my world of planned normalcy. That seems to be preferred steady state. May be it is so for most of us.

We all like to think that we know what tomorrow will pan out to be. “For the next 10 months, I am going to focus on this project.” “I will get married in a year’s time.” “The next 2 weeks are purely for you, my love.” How we like to fool ourselves with the illusion of certainty. Even though cliché says that the only thing constant is change. We all know that clichés seldom lie. Quite astonishingly, that does not seem to figure in our comfortable view of life.

Every now and then, though, God likes to remind us who’s boss. Just when the naïve thought of being the one in-charge crosses our mind. Just when we make the mistake of telling ourselves, “Nothing can go wrong now”. Just when we are happily zooming ahead on the freeway, patting our own backs for choosing the perfect track. He enjoys telling us who’s really steering, and the car takes an inexplicable turn into the thickets. We foolishly try to prevent it. In clear vain. Eventually (and this is only if we are lucky enough to realize it at some point of time), we see the lack of a point in it and watch with our mouth open in bewildered helplessness. At more than one such point in my life, I have looked up at the skies and said to Him aloud, “Boy, do I hate your sense of humor!”

Why then, comes the logical question to my mind, do we even try? If we are not in the driver’s seat, why care at all? May be its just the way we are designed –to make an effort, to take the next step irrespective. To hate, to love, to desire, to hope. To search for meaning. To care.

I write this at the threshold of another one of those points where the Boss is making His presence felt, with things whirling out of any semblance of control. Well, my control at least. It has kept me in a state of unrest for the past few days now. As the sun vanishes out of sight, it makes way for the city to come alive below my window in a blaze of street lights, house lights, traffic lights and that undying flame of the ONGC refinery at the horizon. As the car takes another unexpected turn, I toy with the idea of accepting my un-in-chargeness for once, sitting this one back and just enjoying the ride. Talk about wild!

To Free Speech...

2010-01-14T10:53:00.007+05:30

Here’s one to free speech. And I don’t mean in a downright-pointless-so-called-awareness-generating-FB-status-message-fad kind of way. This one is for real. Let me clarify at the outset that I am not another mindless Google worshipper. Nor a mindless critic. Though my friends of the geek-variety may be able to shed better light on it, I realize Google has had its own set of issues with individual privacy and stuff. The geeks warn me against Chrome everyday. But, I digress.

Back in 2003 when it entered China, the “Don’t Be Evil” company, it seemed to me, went a wee bit beyond its motto when it agreed to comply with Chinese government’s blatant and unabashed information black boxing in the name of ‘censorship’. Also known as the Golden Shield Project or, my personal favorite, The Great Firewall of China, it meant that on typing certain keywords in the Google.cn search bar, a user would see a censored list of search results with the following message:

“In accordance with local laws, regulations and policies, part of the search result is not shown.”

This was done to block, among others, news about government-sponsored brutality on the streets of China, thoughts of the Dalai Lama, results related to freedom of speech and democracy, all individual views expressed through blogging websites like Blogger and Wordpress etc.

Then there were the outright banned searches, which led one to the message:

"Search results may not comply with the relevant laws, regulations and policy, cannot be displayed"

Though censorship was not a new addition in the Google portfolio, in this particular case, by agreeing to these terms for entering the country, Google almost made itself party to the human rights violation of the People’s Republic of China regime. Many reasons were given by Google to justify this form of dictatorship through withholding of information. None worked for most of us.

Then came the welcome news this morning, when I came across this blog from Google. If a hack attack was what it would have taken for them to come around, then we should be almost thankful to the hackers. I realize this can be well explained as a mere corporate reaction to a threat, shrouded in a holier-than-thou cloak. But I like the happy side-effects of the cloak. Google.com still remains accessible to many Chinese people. And though the fate of google.cn remains to be seen, at least Google has put its foot down for something beyond numbers after a while. And at least the Chinese people know that the information they get is not filtered by self-appointed individual or governmental baby sitters.

Welcome back, un-evil Google (even if out of a strategic necessity)!

What is Good Design

2010-01-13T19:29:00.004+05:30

Just had an epiphany about design during a discussion with a friend at work. To make something that works excellently, in a brilliant package – that is great design. Making something work well is something an engineer can do. It doesn’t take a designer to do that. Making something good looking is something a make-up artist can do. That alone does not mean design either.

Its like a building. Making a building whose structure supports itself – its civil engineer can do all that. Having beautiful drop lights and chandeliers, wall hangings and wind chimes and all those tiny things that give it a wow-feel – the interior designer can do that. But having either of these alone is not enough. I want a house that won’t crumble. And I want to live in a house that makes me feel like the Queen. A truly great building is one which has both – the

sturdiness of structure and the aesthetic beauty of interiors. This happens when it has a great architect. And when the architect produces truly world class design, many more things fall in place perfectly. The building also gets ample sunlight and ventilation, a good view from the windows, placement of rooms that makes sense in everyday use, sensible yet artistic furniture – all of it.

Outer beauty and feel plus inner efficiency and effectiveness – when these two come together, that is when great design happens. And this doesn’t just apply to buildings. So far, in my head, it has applied to everything I can think of – businesses, people, institutions, everything.

My Big Fat Indian New Year Bash

2009-12-19T00:27:00.010+05:30

What do you answer when you are a fresh graduate with no responsibilities, living the single life on a fat paycheck in the (supposedly) most happening city in the nation, and your friend asks you your plans for new year’s eve? Party? Pub? Goa, ahoy?

Well, unless a miraculous divine intervention makes an appearance, as of 31 December 2009, I will be officially homeless. Come midnight, my landlady, not known to be the most kind-hearted of souls (more on that ahead), will be relishing the act of throwing my unpacked luggage out of the house, total Hindi filim ishtyle.

Lets flashback to see the maze of circumstances that will lead me to this happy turn-of-the-year experience.

11 May 2009.

I move into this lady’s house as a PG. Well, the land lady is a crazy 65-year old unmarried woman in desperate need of a silencer in the throat (There are actual cracks in the walls I attribute to the melody that is her voice). She even drags us to the Police Station to get our photos registered lest we ever decide to slit her throat and flee, throwing away our futures and aforementioned-paychecks-with-a-weight-problem for the many temptations of the life of a fugitive. But we looked at the bright sides. And there were plenty. A landlady moving to the US for 6 months within a week's time, a fully furnished 2BHK for 2 girls for the price of a room each. A five minute cab ride from work in the city of heinous commutes. Plus, no deposit. All the advantages of a rented in a PG. Voila, we had hit it big time.

Six peaceful months later

Enter landlady, fresh from a 10-hour flight, with a jetlag she refuses to acknowledge or sleep away. Crazy 65-year old spinster rears her ugly head.

Sample this for some of the usual dinner table conversations in the house.

Crazy Landlady: “Where is my coaster? Its missing, did the maid steal it? Did you steal it?”

CLL: “You said you will have one fruit for dinner every day. You ate 2 apples last night. Explain yourself.”

CLL: “Why should I help you find your keys? Do you pay me extra for it?”

CLL: “Here is your milk. Have it. Or don’t. I don’t care.”

CLL: “Go to work. I can’t open my almirah unless you leave.

Over my dead body shall you get to see the treasures that lie hidden in my cupboard – the cupboard that would win any Ugly Furniture Contest hands down and leave me rich like the Queen. And then you shall cry. And I shall laugh. Muhahaha.”

Okay, that last part is made up. But nothing else. We were quite seriously accused of stealing the biggest eyesore in the history of mankind – the ancient, grimy missing coaster which I was always careful never to touch with my bare hands, lest it carry the germs of some long-eradicated disease.

December 1, 2009

Exactly 12 days of enduring this living hell. (You think you have a bad life if you don’t feel like getting out of bed every morning to go to work? Try living the opposite way!) Having made substantial progress on the house hunting cum roommate hunting front in a matter of 3-4 days (which I can now, only attribute to sheer, dumb, beginners luck), I confidently went ahead and served good ol’ CLL the notice. She seemed to think that if I cannot manage to live with her, I will never be able to manage with anyone. I thought it would be cruel to burst her bubble at this age and nodded wisely at the heart warming farewell.

As I type this today, 20 days, 4 brokers, 5 failed roommate matches, innumerable unsuitably situated and /or astronomically beyond budget and / or obnoxiously hideous flat visits later, I am still officially homeless and roommate-less.

I started typing this on 18 December, 2009. The survival instincts are kicking in, the red alert buttons are pressed, my friends are making much noise for me on mass emails (may be you got one too) and, not to mention, calming down my erratic nerves by inviting me to camp with them for a while. Yet, as I see the clock on my computer screen reading 12.02 am, 19 December 2009, I fear one myself day closer to the street.

May be they still have some place left in Dharavi. As a colleague mercifully pointed out, I could be the Millionaire Slumdog. May be they’d give me an Academy Award for living my amazingly mayhem-phillic, accident-prone, sitcom of a life. And speaking of silver linings, for once I am glad Mumbai streets are not cold even on December nights.

Sigh…

Blame it on the Recession

Networking Diarrhoea

2009-12-13T18:23:00.011+05:30

Disclaimer: This post is not to understate, in any way, the power of social networks as a revolution in the world of marketing and advertizing. Social networks have truly transcended boundaries like no medium before and have taken the young world by storm. I, myself, am admittedly addicted. This is merely a thought to the pitfalls of a virtual existence. And whether we are pushing the limits thereof.

I am not technologically challenged. I don’t drink, eat, sleep and breathe technology either. So, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I take the liberty of calling this the common (wo)man’s take on technology. If anybody is listening.

It all began around four years ago, with an innocent Orkut invite from a friend. The days of awkward bumping into the proverbial walls soon gave way to trading ‘Fan’ship on the site to enhance one’s Fan score. You be my Fan, I’ll be yours in return. A barter of admiration. Then came the testimonial fever. From heartfelt accounts (treasured till date as one of the handful of reasons my profile is still out there) to the I’d-rather-live-in-a-friendless-world-than-accept-this variety of testimonials like one I received once. It looked a little like this, I’m sure you’ve seen it below:

THI

THIS

THIS I

THIS IS

THIS IS A TESTIMONIAL

Needless to say, a friend too lazy to sing personalized eulogies of what a boon to mankind I am is no friend of mine. These belonged to the unwelcome Corny Shaayari SMS genre, yet were doing the rounds on profiles, presumably out of social obligation despite their screaming lack of imagination.

Somewhere between the reckless horde for maximizing friend lists and (in many cases) the rush to ‘meet new people’ online, times of till-death-do-us-apart camaraderie with 2 or 3 friends who would die for you gave way to a generation of unimaginative, impersonalized virtual fraternities with 332 profiles, many of which had no existence beyond the virtual world. Let me explain what I mean with an example. I had a friend (in the real world) who would regularly chat with a classmate of ours online, yet when they would physically pass each other by on campus, there was barely a nod of acknowledgment. What is this to mean? That I like the words emanating from your keyboard but do not wish to know you in person? That we may share the deepest of our feelings facing our respective monitors but it is just too much trouble to as much as glance in your direction in the world outside?

Moving on.

Enter Facebook. The next big thing. Suddenly, we Indians realized that our Orkut presences are one generation behind the Western world. Needless to add, the bandwagon effect followed. Of course it helped that the network regulators of campus labs were a generation behind in blocking websites too. So leaving behind an aging and blocked Orkut, we migrated, as a nation, to the latest fad in town. We found the interface excessive, the friend lists wanting and the features downright confounding. Yet, in the true spirit of an assiduous race, we trudged along. We put ourselves through real struggle to grapple with this new technology until we got the hang of it – makes you wonder what we could have accomplished by now if only we had worked a hard on solving our problems of population, pollution, corruption et al. Anyway, with the new beast conquered, the application diarrhoea began. I just blocked all update feeds from Mafia Wars to my profile. Someone reading this 6 months down the timeline may have trouble recollecting what I am talking about. Long story short, armed with status updates through mobiles, FB has successfully made further progress on the road to ‘redundant’izing personal human experiences than anything ever before.

Meanwhile, there has been (and still is) an uncharted world of online portals to 'meet interesting people' (wonder where THAT certification goes on!). In this post, however, let me stay limited to the ones that made ripples. Big ones at that.

Which brings me to Twitter and Wave. I'd have said more here about them, but its pretty succinctly summarized in this music video:

Twitter Chick

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Extreme Humor | Funny Animations

It may, I confess, be too soon to comment on the impact they will have on human civilization as we know it. But I can safely say this as of this moment: for all the fervor behind getting Wave invites and adding celebrities to your Tweet follow lists (I just received an ‘RT’ from Nikhil Chinappa through a friend. One pearl of wisdom thanks to Twitter though – Indian celebs, like those from the rest of the globe, can be astonishingly uninsightful.), I am yet to figure out what specific purpose they serve that usual chat, group chat and Facebook updates don’t. But that’s just me. The common Indian (wo)man with a laptop. Not a Twitter Chick.

Credits: xkcd.com

Love-Hate Relationships

2009-11-19T16:55:00.007+05:30

A face-off between a programmer friend and his website designer set me thinking on entities in the managerial world that fight like old couples. Some quick brainstorming led us to the following list I have compiled here. Thanks to Prasad, Angad, Priya and others in the room. The list is limited to the management / IT / Consulting arenas though. Feel free to add your own ahead:

• Management and workforce / Strategy and Operations: I also like to call these Great Visionaries and their Unfortunate Teams. The ones with thought bubbles floating over their heads in their air conditioned offices, and the ones who sweat in the field to give life to these lofty dreams. The Generals strategizing on the paper maps, sipping coffee, and the soldier who takes the bullet in releasing this plan. No prizes for guessing which side I often find myself on.

• Consultant and the Client-side Team: Much has been covered about client vs consultant in the principle-agent theory. But here’s some more from the horse’s mouth. The client management may still have faith in the consultant. What I do not envy is the diaspora of mixed emotions the partner team from the client’s side working with the consultant goes through. Support system or watchdogs? Here to give an insider perspective to the consultants or to learn their own business from a ‘bunch of newbies’? Efficiency or effectiveness? Deadlines and budgets on one hand and visions on the other. And then the transfer, pat in the middle of the project. It’s a wonder these people break into half.

• Relationship Managers and Risk Managers: My internship in Risk Management last year gave me this insight. And so did the global meltdown that followed it. No connection.

So while the RMs ran helter skelter getting business (pretty much any business) for the bank in the hope of shiny P&L’s, the Risk Managers cry murder at the creditworthiness of the client they bring in. For reasons both personal and academic, I am a little biased towards the Risk Manager banks turn a deaf ear to. Or at least they did till we proved ‘em wrong, didn’t we boys? (Evil smile). No connection.

• Designers and Programmers: “I design all usabilities of the site. If it did nothing, why would people use it?” versus “I made what you see in front of you. No one wants to surf an eyesore.”

I guess Google speaks for itself in favor of the former here. And the new Orkut, in for the latter!

• Programmers and Project Managers: In the words of a programmer friend, “Project Managers are glorified postmen. All they do is pass on emails from the management to us and progress updates from us to them.” Another friend strongly suspects that the reason his PM looks into his laptop screen so hard is because he is trying to concentrate on beating his own AOE record.

• Sales & Marketing and Operations / Manufacturing: Another insider source shares some of his sales tales with me now and then. He never puts it in so many words but, as I see it not through his eyes, the Sales guys are like a couple of dominos. The boss sets the junior’s ass on fire so that he can pass the favor downstream. Little surprise, then, that, they go out in the world and, drowned in rivers of alcohol (whether in wine glasses or recycled kerosene canisters), make lofty promises to the client / customer / distributor / dealer / the next identity in the value chain. The burden of these promises, however, is borne by a baffled Operations team. “What? Next month? This is more than our quarterly inventory!!” The Sales guy is frustrated by the inefficiency.

And then begins the slogging with the cursing under breaths. Miraculously, in a nail biting finish, the targets are met JIT. And out goes the Sales guy to the next dinner party – head held high and mind without fear. He makes another promise (“They pulled it off easy last month, lets give them something to play with this time”). And so the cycle of life continues…

• Sales & Marketing and Legal: A little birdie tells us that, in the IT industry, the aforementioned problem has legal repercussions too. The S&M clan, apparently, goes ahead and makes promise flouting IP policies, leading to much hair-pulling in the Legal section.

• Sales & Marketing and well… pretty much everyone else in the organization.

Serendipity

2009-11-06T16:17:00.006+05:30

"..it's really the wand that chooses the wizard, of course.”, thus spake Mr Ollivander, of the Rowling books fame. A self-confessed Potter fanatic, I admittedly, once upon a time, force-fit Potter ideas to every aspect of life (more often than not, a perfect fit, mind you!). But then, I thought I overgrew it.

After years today, I wonder if this one applies everywhere. Ever noticed how your creative side only rears its much awaited head when you can least afford it? Let me try to explain. I enjoy writing. Whether I am any good at it is a debate for another day. But I enjoy it, period. There are times when I have the time to pursue it and there are times when I don’t. Now, in the former times, I have tried sitting in front of my laptop, coffee mug in one hand, the other resting on the keyboard, sleeves rolled up to write the crap out of the English language, only to end up three hours later, admiring the rich cobweb growth in my head.

Then there are the latter times, times like right now. With two swords of grievous deadlines hanging on my neck on the work side and one unavoidable engagement this weekend on the personal front, I should be busy as can be. I am. But then comes this thought, buzzing in my head, like nobody’s business. And I have to open yet another window apart from the 47 ppts and the 63 word docs I’m in the middle of anyway (yeah, got to admire the comp’s processing prowess!) and write it down.

True, an idea to write about an idea to write about is a sort of a recursive loop. But it’s a beautiful one at that – one I could never have managed after days of brain torturing. Its like the idea chooses to come to me and it can never be the other way round. That ever happened to you?

Technical Difficulties

2009-10-26T19:04:00.014+05:30

{Spolier Alert: Read on only if you have already watched / do not intend to watch the movie Inglorious Basterds}

Driven by some heavyweight recommendation from a colleague, I went to see the movie Inglorious Basterds (not a typo – and my apologies to the people who’s English I wrinkled my nose at till this dawned on me) with a friend last night. While the movie was not too bad, this is more an account of an incident that occurred early in the show than a movie review.

So it is a movie set largely in Germany-occupied France during the times of World War 2. Twenty intense minutes into the movie, the projector went kaput. Amid vociferous groans from the crowd, the cited reason (projected after a suspiciously short delay of barely a second) was ‘Technical Difficulties’. But with some ruckus-creating burly men standing in the aisle, putting together the real reason was no rocket science. We were evidently in the divine presence of a ‘dignitary’ who considered punctuality beneath his / her holy stature. (There was also the possibility of it being a dignitary-offspring / wife / husband / sibling / relative / relative’s relative… but we chose to suppress that very depressing thought).

And we were made to revise the 20 minutes all over. More than the obvious waste of time and the break in the flow, we were irritated by the fact that our time and entertainment were much less important than our VIP’s. As some people took off to take a 20 minute walk, we felt an overpowering sense of indignation bubbling up. As we toyed with the idea of vandalizing the cinema hall seats, we suddenly realized that the National Anthem that precedes every show was not replayed.

Apparently, VIPs do not waste their time on paltry matters such as symbols of national pride.

That tomfoolery is reserved for the emotion-blinded common man, too thick in the head to tell a technical difficulty from a shameless display of aristocratic omnipotence.

In a gripping (not to mention utterly wishful) climax, Jewish rebels and American soldiers assassin Hitler (during a movie screening, ironically) and bring World War 2 to an end. Dictatorship, the movie seems to tacitly imply, can only live as long as the dictator. Sometimes, though, I can't help but wonder, what with the dignitaries we elect, if democracy, too, has run its course in India.

Everything’s Amazing. And nobody’s happy.

2009-10-22T17:47:00.005+05:30

I was just watching this video – an interview on The Tonight Show where this American comedian, Louis CK tells host Conan O’ Brien how the most wonderful age of all times, the present, has been wasted on, what he calls, the ‘crappiest’ generation ever.

Take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

Much as I hate to admit it, the guy has got a point. He really made me think of all the things I take for granted. How I sit in my 2 bedroom apartment on the 11^th floor of a high rise building donning my pricey Lee Cooper jeans, in the priciest city of the country, with an education people would kill for and a job I admittedly don’t hate and, yet, cry over droplets of spilt milk in life (figuratively, of course!).

The more I think about Happiness, that elusive commodity, the more it intrigues me. Its fascinating how we attribute and attach it to so many external factors beyond our control, yet how self-procurable it can be – if only we try.

Just the other day, I had lunch with a friend and, infamous as I am for my knack for losing things, managed to leave my handbag behind. When I realized later (a full hour, no less) that I was missing my voter’s id, my PAN card, a couple of ATM cards among other noticeable and forgotten belongings, we sprinted back to the restaurant, my heart pounding in my throat. Miraculously, found my handbag safe with the blessed security. The rush I got from the realization set me thinking, “How is it that I am merely returned to the same past state in terms of material belongings, yet I am much happier than before?” The bounties we enjoy, and never come to appreciate! Or, for that matter, even acknowledge.

I guess what I am trying to remind myself (and you) of is simply the need to appreciate the small things in life – the need to take time out, on the race track of everyday life, to smell the roses along the way.

And what a brick it is...

2009-09-18T14:40:00.001+05:30

I have seen the hero in him,
I behold the silent greatness within.
He’s just another member of the clan,
He’s your common Indian man.

I see the difference he can make,
The Herculean challenges he can face.
He’s just another face in the crowd,
His goodness never fails to leave me wowed.

His small acts everyday renew my faith,
In humanity and in its power great.
He’s just another drop in the vast ocean,
As he kickstarts his Bajaj and drives through life’s motions.

Infiniteness of the skies, Benevolence of the earth,
He holds them all behind his pinstriped shirt.
He’s just another speck of the heavenly stardust,
To him, he’s merely doing what he must.

He frets as he oils his thinning gray hair,
His name, yet features, in someone’s Thank-You prayers.
He’s just another brick in the wall,
His smallness leaves me feeling small.

(Aamchi?) Mumbai

2009-08-12T18:10:00.007+05:30

When they walk, they run; when it rains, it pours,
Here’s a contrarian account of the metro of lores.
Since forever heralded as the City of Dreams,
Though in my face, its sheer overrating screams.

Time and again, hailed by one and all,
Is what The City’s Great Spirit they call.
A blast, while, brings us all together,
Yet during the polls our bedrooms we prefer.

And, oh, that celebrated local rail,
Where we shove around old ladies frail.
If you’re not knocked cold by the elbow in the rib,
The pungent body odour ought to do the trick.

The streets turn to Venice, yet the taps run dry,
The city seems cursed by the albatross’s cry.
And while we wrinkle noses at that logged smelly gutter,
Still out there for public display, is the next star son’s diaper.

Emaciated bodies shiver, under the cold night’s shroud,
Thank God for Thackeray’s hoarding, watching over them proud.
And if an icon’s big car, must intoxicate itself out of way,
Well, rags don’t really count as people. Do they?

We may not hold a record, for the prosperity or the income,
So what? We’re famous too! We have the biggest ever slum!
And its not like we’re full of inequalities glaring,
What still binds us together, is our shared lack of clothing.

Though the wine glasses clink, late into the nights,
I’m sorry – all I see, is the scarred shore’s plight.
Though the glamour abounds and the red Ferraris gleam,
I’m sorry – in my face, Mumbai’s overrating screams…

Here's to working weekends

2009-05-23T15:42:00.009+05:30

This is my first love ballad - a dedication to my Compaq office laptop. The unabashed plagiarism may be attributed to the subject of the piece - my glaring work-life imbalance.

Here I am

This is me

I can think of a million places on Earth I’d rather be.

Oh, here I am.

Just me and you.

And now I make another report on you.

It’s the same world, it’s the same fart,

And it stinks of the decay of young hearts,

Yet another day, and the same sham,

I’m waiting for a weekend

Here I am

Here we are - we've just begun

And after all this time - our time has come

Yeah here we are – dying to go home

And a Saturday night was never so glum

Chorus (X1)

Here I am - this is me

There's a million places on earth I'd rather be

Here I am - just me and you

And tonight I make another PPT on you

Chorus (X2)

Here I am - next to you

And the ways to escape are precious few

Here I am - where I'm gonna stay

Now there's nothin left - no life and no Sundays

Here I am.

Oh, here I am.

Thanks, my darling, for being with me through thick and thicker. Your batteries overheat and you switch off in the middle of my work and I lose data. I often feel like flinging you across the room and, more often than that, I request them to change you for a better one. But that doesn't change the fact that I love you with all that is left of my heart.

The White Tiger

2009-04-29T18:11:00.008+05:30

Here’s to the first book I ever read that made me think enough to write about it. And I need help with this one. If you have read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, do let me know your opinion on this one:

If you are as blindly in love with our country as I am, you will hate Adiga’s guts at least halfway through his book. As did I. It challenges the defiant patriot in you to think again. The demographic dividend. India Shining. The next superpower. India and China, the biggest threats to the Western supremacy. And all the other heavily rose-tinted truth we are fed on in our classrooms, the generous helpings of blind optimism we have over stuffed ourselves with. This is a book that delivers to the reader a much needed healthy dose of reality.
It is the story of a boy born in ‘the Darkness’. The Ganges, which we all have been brought up to revere and worship as the holiest of holy rivers, is said to be the source of the Darkness – for all living on its banks. The fate of an honest man – an untimely death coughing blood on the dirty floor of a God forsaken government hospital, as contrasted with the fortunes of corrupt inhuman pot-bellied sections of the society that collectively oppress him.
The book speaks of two Indias – The Light and the Darkness. Contrary to the communist images that that might stir in one’s mind, the book is not what we ‘haves’ would term a socialist propaganda either. The reader discovers as (s)he goes along that it has more to do with what Adiga calls the 'Rooster Coop' – a metaphorical parallel between roosters cooped up in the butcher’s van, one over another, never daring to make even the slightest attempt to escape having accepted their fate for the cards dealt to them and the destitute, the people born in the India of Darkness. The highest point (and the lowest ebb) of the book comes when the protagonist, for creating his world the way it is ‘instead of all the other ways it could have been’, looks up at the heavens and spits at God.
However, despite the entirely well deserved applause (not to mention the Man Bookers) for being such a jolt of pragmatism I have one lingering issue with Adiga's story. The Darkness and a following taste of the Light turns an honest man into an unabashed killer, with one justification - when you are born in the Light, the most important thing you have that others unlike you don’t is the option to be a good person. The difference between a man born in the Light and one who lives his life in the Darkness is that of choice; the latter does not even have the choice to be a good person. From booth capturing to corrupt policemen, this sad status quo, according to the protagonist, is much beyond repair, which leaves him with his only way of escaping from the shackles of a lifetime of grateful boot licking traded for his dignity which would otherwise be his fate – theft and murder.
With the fortune of having lived my life as one of the luckier ones here, I may not have a right to say much in this regard. But there is one belief this optimist wants to cling on to till the very end and here is the part where I would like to know the views of others, whether fed on sugar coated reality like me or otherwise – isn’t there always a choice?

"It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
- Albus Dumbledore

How Facebook makes megalomaniacs of us.. a.k.a. 25 Things

2009-03-05T04:34:00.006+05:30

1. I am addicted to writing. My blog is one of my most prized possessions. For ages I lamented not having a ‘passion’. The day I discovered that this was it was one of the happiest days of my life. (That makes applications such as this one perfect for me!).

2. I LOVE dogs and I cannot stress it enough. I think I like them better than humans (and I am not talking about any individuals, I mean it as a species!) :P

3. I am and always will be in love with my engineering college and all the memories that go with it. Its been two years yet I sometimes catch myself spending hours reminiscing, looking at college yearbooks, photographs and my magazines from college.

4. I ride bikes, play computer games like Quake, Mortal Kombat and Unreal Tournament. A close friend thinks God was planning to make me a guy but changed his mind at the last moment. Smart decision, I say! :D

5. My friends say I have a good sense of humor but it’s the PJs (or 'zehers' as we called them in NITK) that can make me gag on my food.

6. … which reminds me I have sprayed water from my mouth on the face of the person standing in front of me twice so far. You should NEVER crack a joke (poor or otherwise) when I am eating or drinking something within earshot (particularly in projectile range)!

7. As you might have noticed by now, my writings are ALWAYS accompanied by crazy footnotes in brackets. (It’s a disease, really!)

8. My Life’s philosophies are so simple they surprise even me – ‘Its all for the best’, ‘Good things always happen to good people’. Its almost like a part of me is still in kindergarten. And I kinda like it that way.

9. And while we are at the age thing, I absolutely LOVE being the youngest person in the room! (One reason I adore my MBA batchmates – most of them are cute li’l oldies.) :D

10. I dream of starting a magazine of my own someday. Once I went really crazy thinking about it and even drew up a Business Plan. I have already signed up 3 friends to join me aboard this castle in the air. It’s a thought that keeps me going when I’m lost.

11. Water is my favorite element of nature (a request here to my fellow PJ Kings and Queens to not point out it is chemically a compound). Whenever I am disturbed, any form of contact with water soothes me. A bath is a compromise I can live with, a walk by a river or a beach is heaven.

12. I simply detest the ‘Tell me about yourself’ question posed in interviews. I have cleared many a life-altering interviews with various versions of answers to this, but it still scares the crap out of me. My answers to the Strengths-and-weaknesses question, meanwhile, change every half an hour.

13. I find it very embarrassing and have been even known to turn crimson when people praise me (even though I am secretly glowing!). But I can absolutely never do it on my own, and typically see myself as some shreds of positives floating in a sea of negatives – another reason why I suck at Interviews. :|
Apparently self-esteem is an area I need to work on. :P

14. I trip or slip or ‘almost fall’ everyday and on some days, I am lucky enough to drive the task to completion. My clumsiness is of an international scale. I have the proud distinction of having been hospitalized even during my briefest stint in Germany. (God bless insurance!)

15. Nothing gets me as excited as a real intellectual argument and I just never give up when in the middle of one. I am admittedly a real pain in the ass when I debate. Somehow the male species bears the larger brunt of this habit of mine and the more experienced ones have realized by now that challenging me to a debate is a pointless exercise (though that could also be because I am always right). :D

16. My room is forever a mess. I have had hostelmates shoot photographs of my room as memorabilia. (One friend actually used to come see my room periodically just to make herself feel better about hers!) But I am freakishly fussy about keeping the outside surroundings clean, I will carry a banana peel in my pocket for hours till I find a bin just to avoid throwing it on the road. It’s a contradiction friends have endlessly pulled my leg about. :P

17. I hate the word ‘networking’- I feel it insults the word friendship with its transactional connotation.

18. I am a surfing and chatting addict. (The ever-so-omnipresent smileys are an unintentional by product). 24 hours of net in the room is one of the things I blame for my academic downfall at IIMB!

19. Someone recently made me realize I am a control freak. My eyes have the vice of going directly to the mistake in a piece of work. I don’t know how I missed it all these years but delegation is definitely not one of my biggest strengths. (and sadly it just struck me that I could have used that answer for my interview!) :(

20. I hate getting out of my bed on winter mornings (who doesn’t, right?). I am sleepier just after I get up than just before I sleep. I am nocturnal and I have no idea how I am going to manage the normal human lifestyle ahead of me.

21. Though I really don’t see myself as vain, I thoroughly enjoy my own company. (The next best alternative so far has been my bro, though I concede that may again be because of the genetic similarity to me) I talk to myself a LOT. Sometimes you can catch me smiling to myself or even mumbling a bit – its downright creepy!

22. I think my Life is quite interesting and would make for a good sitcom - I see it as an eternal series of crisis situations. I am so accident-prone two friends have INDEPENDENTLY given me the name ‘Mayhema’ in the past.

23. I like the shadiest of songs with the most meaningless of lyrics. Random, wild imagination and lateral thinking are probably among the things that attract me the most. Small wonder then that ‘Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy’ is one of my favorite books – it is just so irresistibly pointless!

24. Though I never show it, it breaks my heart if nothing special happens on my birthday every year. I guess it’s the 8 year old thing all over again.

25. I ran into a wall after 16 points. The ones after that were forced just to reach this check point.. which probably negates my tall claims in #1. :P

No Time for Poetry

2009-02-02T00:49:00.010+05:30

The DJ downstairs at L square seems to be running a stress test,

On the hostel’s construction, particularly the room where I nest.

And as my furniture bounces, in sync with the rapper’s cacophony,

The monster of a speaker was never more a sworn enemy.

I narrow my eyes, and try to concentrate,

On the 8^th version of my Résumé, nervous and irate.

Big submission tomorrow, this may be the one I anoint,

But profound realities aside, I need to reduce one bullet point.

My life seems a mess because my one pager is a two,

Metrics of judgment day, were never so cleanly few.

Yes I live in the coveted world, that by a page decides,

The worth of a human (of course, interview aside).

The interview phenomenon, is a test of courting skills too,

Add to that this damned recession, and it gets harder to woo.

And after those fateful 20 minutes, you await the sentence-pale,

Oh, no one is a failure, except obviously, the ones who do fail!

And while I write these deep words here, all Holier than Thou,

I also struggle, in another window, with my submission vows.

‘cause with the 3 liners and white spaces, I’m but another war wager,

A wastage here, a shortage there – its all Life’s cruel realities in a one pager.

But as I type these two dichotomies, one takes over,

‘Does it really matter?’, about my Word woes, I wonder.

And so, with that brave cowardice, I decide to call it a day,

(Though the feeling of doom lingers, never at bay.)

“If you can’t beat em, join em”, wise men propound,

Whether it is the human trafficking for jobs, or the bouncing furniture around.

I join the crowd and dance to the DJ's tunes, not unlike placement day puppetry,

Busy trying to not be someone I’m not, I have no time for poetry.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

~Robert Frost

An evening in Paris (1/3): Prologue

2008-11-18T21:13:00.004+05:30

Inflation affects us all in different ways. Add to it the quintessential Indian psyche of a Savers’ Economy and the Rupee-Euro exchange rate, and you have three Indian backpackers on the streets of Paris, in their quest for covering what the Lonely Planet publishers befittingly term ‘Europe on a Shoestring’.

Flashback. Almost two months of living off sandwiches (tasteless ones at that in the case of the poor veggie) that cost as much as a candle-lit dinner for two would cost back home, we decided we had had it. So for the weekend in Paris, we decided to not book hostel rooms which typically provide us shelter on our trips. Pleased with ourselves at the prospect of saving a thousand or two Indian bucks, we boarded the overnight train to Paris (another tactic we use to avoid hostels: overnight journeys).
A Bengali friend loves Paris. The guys like to joke that he likes it so much since it is just like Calcutta. Nothing ever works. Delayed trains are the city’s hallmark. And the day we landed was, for some mysterious reason, decided upon as the day they will keep all tourist information counters shut. The only missing link was, we concluded, a huge billboard in the middle of the city reading ‘Cholbe Na’ (Sorry, I wouldn’t want to ruin the ingenuity of that by adding a translation!).
Thankfully we laid our hands on a city map and, with the blessings of Raj’s Lonely Planet, proceeded for a Paris-for-Dummies tour. A day of walking and underground travel ensued. Now, Calcutta is one of the few Indian capitals I have not visited, but I can safely vouch that the ripped cushions of the underground seats and the vandalism of the station walls were movingly reminiscent of my motherland. By nightfall we found ourselves standing under the mighty Eiffel Tower, complete in its resplendent neon-lit glory. But before we proceeded for what promised to be another clickety-click session of extravagant photography, it seemed I was destined to stumble upon another in the string of superbly ingenious and incredibly superfluous theories I formulate every time I find myself with nothing better to do.

An Evening in Paris (2/3): The Birth of my 6-1-Indian Theory®

2008-11-18T21:08:00.003+05:30

As we approached the tower for a closer shot, we managed to catch the attention of a ‘brother’, selling Eiffel Tower merchandise. Key chains, metal models, glass models, pin-ups.. you name it. Now, it so happened that I had an eye out for one of these long before reaching Paris. There is this transparent model of the Tower with dancing lights that I had seen with a friend recently, and had fallen in love with. Whats more, he had also flaunted the cheap bargain he had made on it by managing to procure it in merely 2 euros from the exact spot where I stood now. (Note here that a preceding theory of mine is that a cheap bargain is the hairline difference between a desirable object and an irresistible one, at least for the Indian lady.) So, obviously my eyes sparkled as I spotted my coveted trophy in ol’ brother’s hands.
“How much for the light thingie?”, I enquired, feigning a tone of careful carelessness. Like a good bargainer.
“6 euros”, he quoted the price at a 200% premium. Like a good salesman.
“1 euro.”
“You Indian?”
Eureka! Archimedes strikes gold again. The glorious birth of another legendary theory. I call it, admittedly unimaginatively, The 6-1-Indian Theory®. Here is the detailed paperwork that I followed with to lend the credibility to my theory that only hard research can yield:

Mental computation of the Indian buyer:

Market Price: 6.
Selling Price: 2.
By the axiom of efficient bargaining (courtesy Mother Nature),
Bargaining Bid <> (where Bargaining Bid Є Careless Sounding Integers)
Therefore, Bargaining Bid=1 euro.

Mental Computation of the enlightened seller:

Bargaining bid Є Ridiculously Low Integers
Therefore, Seller Є India, which, in other words, is the 6-1-Indian Theory®.
After I had my stroke of ingenuity and everyone around me had their fair share of laughs, we proceeded to exploit the digital cameras in our hands to the fullest. (The Indian idea of a fair Return on Investment is evidently another theory dying to be born. But, according to my The-world-does-not-have-the-brains-to-appreciate-my-genius theory, the ecosystem is barely big enough to sustain one stroke of ingenuity from me in one earth revolution so I decided to contain my thoughts there.) And yes, I managed a 3 euro bargain too. Not quite what I was aiming for, but the extra euro was a tip for kindling the dormant light of discovery in me. Or at least that is what I like to tell myself..

An Evening in Paris (3/3): Paris 'Night Life'

2008-11-18T21:01:00.006+05:30

As I had mentioned in the prologue, we did not have any hostel/hotel reservations for our night in Paris. So, after the photography extravaganza, the (literally) cold reality struck in the form of a 2°C wind in our faces. We patted our own backs at having displayed the smartness of finding out in advance the time of the last metro to Gare De L’Est, the Railway Station. The masterplan was to enter the waiting room flashing our mighty Eurail passes and spending the night in the benches, purportedly waiting for a train.

0000 hrs
So we took the said metro and landed in the station, only to be welcomed by a deserted platform, marked by a sole sweeper. Of course he spoke no English. Of course we had to resort to much animated Dumb Charades to communicate. Of course French waiting rooms Cholbe-Na at night. And of course people weren’t allowed to wait elsewhere in the station. “So how do people wait for morning trains at night in France?”, we blurted. But for all the answer we got from the gentleman, we might as well have asked his broom.
0030 hrs
I had been partying the last night through and desperately-drowsy-me had little regard for the laws of the land at the time and in the circumstances. “Nothing else works here. So why should the law?”, I reasoned. So I found us a nice and stealthy corner in the station premises, behind the statue of a guy relieving himself and I had dozed off before the protests of my unwilling accomplices reached my ears. It was the perfect crime. At least for the moment.
0100 hrs
Long story short, apparently the only working part of the French societal fiber is the policemen looking for people dozing behind statues of peeing men in the station. And as we were quite disgracefully escorted out in the cold to be with our other homeless compatriots, I sent up a silent prayer of gratitude to God. I thanked Him for giving me the good sense to not have told my mother about not having booked a room for the night, if not sense enough to book one. (Or sense enough to not blog about it and send her the link.)
We next sought shelter in the nearest fast food joint where Raj kindly ordered a Coke and we dozed off with our heads bent on the table to exercise our rights as theoretical customers to the fullest. But the restaurant, we knew, was open only till 2 am. Needless to say, we were fast running out of options.
0200 hrs
The dreaded unavoidablecame with a welcome unexpected. Guessing our true motive for ordering one measly Coke for three people was not exactly the stuff mystery novels are made of. Very luckily for us, one philanthrope I can never thank enough saw the obvious. He whispered to us about a certain bus route that runs round the city throughout the night.
Armed with our 48 hour Paris public transport passes, we were on the bus within minutes. And I was asleep within moments.

0315 hrs
My next memory is Lakshmi prodding me awake. It seemed life on the bus had come a full circle. As we got down from the bus to find ourselves in front of the same restaurant, the hands of my watch were the only indicators to me that any time had elapsed at all. While I was still coming to terms with the depths of my slumber, Raj was already walking purposefully ahead. With no better idea in my head and no strength for a discussion, I silently followed. And for good measure, as I saw him boarding another bus for the same route standing, voila, quite adjacent to the last one! Eager for more sleep, I happily boarded the bus. This time though, immediate stupor was not in my fate. I found myself seated next to not a very pleasant smelling lady. Hell, I thought I was in the Fashion Capital of the world. The least you would expect is deodorant. By the end of the 20th minute, I realized that olfactory adaptation was not an option here. So, at the risk of seeming rude, I moved to another seat. Here though, I found myself sitting right across one of those I-will-stare-at-you-like-you-are-a-talking-frog guy (and I hadn’t even opened my mouth yet!). Nonetheless, snooze mode thankfully took over soon and the next memory was again being prodded awake.
0430 hrs
As the metro doesn’t start until 5am, the same story had to follow. My memories from the last bus brought up interesting observations though. Stinking lady and staring guy were on this bus as well. Apparently we weren’t the only smart homelesses-with-passes in town!
0545 hrs
Exit bus no 3, enter metro no 1, which goes on a return journey after reaching its last stop. There would thankfully be no need for a prodding here. Enter dreamless, thoughtless, brainless snooze mode.
0800 hrs
The Louvre is one of the most outstanding places I have ever been to. And to bridge the gap between desirable and irresistible, it has a free entry on the first Sunday of every month, which was another masterplan we were very pleased with ourselves about. The gates open at 9, but the queuing begins early on. It would indeed be a pity if we missed out on a premium queue positioning for the sake of a slumber party in the dilapidated metro of Paris. And thus ends the great tale of the nocturnal adventures of the stingy Indians as they emerge—tired, totally unrelaxed, bleary-eyed—with cricks in their necks yet victory in their hearts, for they were Indians who had managed to save a buck. And that makes the juice worth the squeeze.
At least till Mommy dearest hears about it...

A Walk on the Sexist Side

2008-10-29T23:46:00.010+05:30

I once read somewhere that the reason dumb-blonde jokes are so short is so that men can remember them. They may whine endlessly about the many eccentricities of the fairer sex, but when men go sightseeing, it makes for some heavily amusing observation for any sane person (if I may take the liberty of calling myself that). Try to ignore the honesty of the title above and try to read this as just a set of observations. Then tell me if I’m wrong:

“Straaang. K-level, dude. Strength are there. Cup-max, da. Less, man. Put. Peace.” Drawing inspiration from a scene from the movie The Mating Habits of Earthly Beings, please do not check your eyes or doubt my sanity based on the above. This is the code language in which the human male (hence referred to as HM) speaks. It makes no sense to me, either. Having, in recent times, had the fortune to travel extensively with many such specimens, I got numerous chances to observe, with great interest (purely of anthropological nature), the behavioral patterns of the HM, both in his pack, and otherwise.

A) The HM and his mighty Cam: The first rule of HM sightseeing: the sight at hand—be it the world’s most significant historical monument or the most breathtaking natural beauty—will have to settle for playing second fiddle to its digital image. The invention of the digital camera to HM sightseeing is what the invention of the wheel was to human civilization as we know it.

Excerpts from a very consciously overheard real-life conversation:

A*: “Check out this one, maaann.”
B*: “Strong, dude. Which mode?"
A: “Manual.”
B: “I’m on night mode.”
A: “Naah. Use manual, da. Aperture setting , focal length , zoom <>. Turn the flash off and then focus with the right exposure and you will get it.” (And here I thought technology was supposed to make our life simpler. Duh me!)
B (who-I can personally testify-does not know zilch about photography) nods wisely and, armed with this new wisdom, proceeds to shoot pictures exactly as good or bad as ever.

*Names not disclosed to protect the privacy of the subjects. And my survival.

B) HM, the sailorman: The lesser said about the cartographic skills of our average HM, the better. Yet, he lives in an interesting fantasy world where he plays Captain Sparrow (if not Johnny Depp) saving the damsel(s) in the pack from the evil streets of Europe with the grand city map he won from the information counter at the railway station. It is downright educational to observe how, especially when accompanied by others of his kind, proving his mettle at map-reading seems to be of critical importance to the HM.

In the unfortunate, albeit common event of losing the way, the HMs, quite touchingly, tend to unite rather than isolating the one responsible for the blunder (though this may also be since all the cooks have spoilt the broth pretty much in unison). The most fascinating part of the damage control in such a scenario is how the HMs will also present a highly convincing case, arguing how the place they have landed up in is anyday better than the one they were aiming for in the first place. Whether, in Amsterdam for example, they have led the group to the Income Tax office instead of you-know-where is immaterial to this unfailing logic.

C) The HM’s socks: Aaah, here is the part the HFs will love. It is quite particular to the HMs hailing from the South Asian part of the planet (Sample space: India). HMs from this part of the world carry a potent weapon of mass destruction wherever they go. Socks. Sit in a train compartment wherein an HM has just removed his shoes to ‘air’ his feet after a day of ‘tourism’ and you will know what I mean. The Indian HF may beg them to wear the shoes back on and spare her lungs of the toxic fumes, but to little avail. Here is a true story where the sisterhood of HFs across borders comes to the fore in an unprecedented way:

Indian HM airing his feet in the train compartment. Indian HF sitting in the seat as far as possible, her face covered with a handkerchief, suffering in silent agony. Enter hot Dutch chick. HM drools (as expected). Tells Indian HF in Hindi how he wished chicky would sit next to him. The Dutch chick actually hovers around for a moment (HM ecstatic). Enter hot Dutch boy friend (HM crestfallen, HF’s rare turn to drool). Dutch HF says something to him in Dutch (everyone has their code) and moves on to look for more seats, not before the Indians catch the word ‘stink’ pretty clearly. Indian HF guffaws and points out that at least they learnt a new Dutch word today. Indian HM sulks (as intended).

Story’s not over though. Soon the empty seat is taken by an old Dutch lady (age evidently slows down one’s senses). But not quite enough. Within 5 minutes she says something to the Indian HM in Dutch (no Eengleesh: ref blog post ‘Love Thy Insurer’). Probably hopeful for a hot daughter’s hand in marriage, HM politely explains how he doesn’t follow her code. Enter Dumb-C: Old lady gestures HM’s foot. Crinkles nose. Gestures shoes.

Understandably, HM grudgingly abides. Indian HF almost chokes on her ‘kerchief.

D) 300: For those who have never had a chance to see one of the silliest (thereby most enjoyable) sitcoms of our times—the series Scrubs—the show hypothesizes that HMs tune out of a conversation as soon as HFs begin discussing shoe-shopping. Here’s the analogy from the other side of the camp: war movies! If you’re a sole HF in the midst of an HM-dominated pack and you make the mistake of visiting a war site with them and the reference to a war movie comes up.. well, God save your soul. Though you are pretty much doomed for at least half a day of an expert review of all war movies in the history of Hollywood, do not—I repeat—do not commit the fatal blasphemy of admitting to not having seen any of them. It is best to keep your relative ignorance to yourself else you run the risk of being told, in good faith I’m sure, how your life is a complete waste for not having witnessed some ‘epic’ with computer-generated armies of HMs slaughtering each other. Worse, they may take it upon themselves to save your soul. Issued in public (HF) interest. Based on real life experience. Sigh…

Acknowledgements: I would like to express heartfelt gratitude to (in random order) Rajat, Sid, Samyak, Raj, Roy, Doc, Somil , Hari, Avishesh, Joy, Yurek, JD and others who have been unsuspecting subjects of my observations. This blog entry would not have been possible without your unconscious participation, guys. I sincerely hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me for this one. If not, try reminding yourselves that I still am the only one who can cook!

"Behind every successful man... is a pretty surprised woman."

—Anon

Love thy Insurer.

2008-10-01T03:24:00.004+05:30

This one is dedicated to Lakshmi, for her bunks and back-massages. And to Raj, for his coffee and dishwashing. And to both for the postponed Paris trip due to the following incident..

“I was on my way to the campus on my bike. I saw some cars a little distance behind me. So, I reckoned I better get on the pavement at the next turn. But I misjudged the height of the pavement and couldn’t get my bike on it. The tyre scraped against the side of the pavement and the bike fell, throwing me off it. I guess I skid for some distance and stopped when my head hit a pole. A lady and a gentleman came to me and helped me up on my feet. But then I had a blackout and I sat on the road to avoid falling down again. Then they asked me if I needed a doctor. My mouth was filling with blood so I nodded as I thought I might have broken a tooth and needed to see a dentist. Then they called for an ambulance and your medics got me here.”

I recited the same tale (for the n^thtime) to the nurse nodding as she noted it all down on a clipboard for the Doc’s benefit. Before this it had been the medics and then Lakshmi (who had oh-so-thankfully answered my call for help immediately as the medics tortured me with form-filling and interrogation, apparently oblivious to the blood-stained tissue on my lips). And then there was the other medic. And then the secretary. And then the insurance guy… The recital, of course, was to go on for the next couple of days till the hobbling and limping persisted. And of course, I had to bunk the Cross-Cultural Communication class I was heading for, thanks to the whole episode. But what followed that day was more of a lesson in Cross-cultural communication than any class could possibly have taught me!

As the pain diminished during the wait in the hospital room after the nurse left, I felt a little embarrassed by the tad overreaction. Hell, I was being wheeled around in a wheelchair for falling off my ruddy bicycle! And the nurse just told me that I may have to be kept ‘under observation’ for two days in the hospital! I mean, if it had been India, I would probably had got up 5 minutes after the whole thing and hobbled in the dentist’s myself! (Oh, in case the reader didn’t know, this true story is based in a little village in Germany by the name Rüdersheim, which is where the hospital was-which is some distance from smaller village called Oestrich-Winkel, which is where I live. And where I study. And where I fall off bikes.)

After an hour long excruciating wait, with Lakshmi making valiant attempts at cracking Scrubs jokes to keep me from passing out again, the Doc finally made an appearance. It seemed she was most concerned about my head-banging (so to say) and repeated the nurse’s dire warnings about getting admitted. I realized right then that I was grossly hospitalophobic (whatever they call it in their Greek-Latin-mangled terminology). Indeed, I would rather have taken the accident again than 2 days in the hospi.

So as the Doc, poked my head and shook my face in all possible places and asked if it hurt, I winced as she knocked her knuckles right where I had hit the pole, but replied in the negative for most part of it. Finally, after some more cross-questioning, she said she would send me for an X-Ray of my head to look for fractures or possible internal bleeding. Horrified by the proportion to which the whole thing was blowing, I asked if it was very necessary. “Ja, Ja”, she replied, “We must check! It ees because you had this turn-around.”

“Sorry?”

“This turn-around you had. After you fall down.”

As the blankness of my look persisted, Lakshmi helpfully interjected, “I think she means the fact that you felt dizzy after the accident.”

“Ooooh.. I see.”, in my attempts to suppress a smile (both because of its inappropriateness and the fact that smiling made me feel like all my teeth would drop out of my mouth) I forgot all about protesting against the X-Ray. My Doc apparently wasn’t quite as adept at English as her nurse. As Lakshmi later noted, English knowledge seemed to bear no correlation with academic qualifications in Germany.

“We want to check if you have umm.. err… .”

“Sorry?”

“If you have that.. err… what do you say…” She then made some wild animated gestures on her head.

“Concussion?”, I guessed, my Dumb-C skills kicking in.

“Umm… I don’t know the Eenglish of eet.”, she shrugged.

“Con-cu-shun?”, I tried again.

“Ja, ja. Kan-koo-syon.”

“Okay. Kankoosyon.”, I resigned. The relief at getting it right superseded the fear I should probably have felt at the prospect of having had a concussion. She further asked if I had lost consciousness after the accident.

“No, I could not see or hear for a couple of seconds. But I was conscious.”, I insisted.

“But you said earlier that you were unconscious.”, the nurse interjected.

“I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. But I said I blacked out. Not that I was unconscious.”

“So you were biconscious?”

“Sorry?”

“You were not unconscious.”

“Yes.”

“So you were biconscious.”

“What does that mean?” (Damn Freud for adulterating the English language!)

“What is the opposite of unconscious?”

“Conscious.”

“Then what is biconscious?”

“I don’t know. I have never heard the word.”

The nurse then turned to the Doc and said something in German. Loosely translated by my pathetic German, she reckoned biconscious was probably not a word after all. I congratulated myself for her trust in my English knowledge.

“Ooooh!”, it was now the Doc’s turn to jump into the etymological exercise, “How do you spell conscious?”

We tried a couple of times to spell it out for her, but the German alphabet is a bit different from the English version. So Lakshmi had to finally write it down for her as I sat back in my wheelchair, wondering how many people were bleeding through their teeth outside, waiting for the Doc to take this opportunity to enhance her vocabulary.

“Excuse me.”, I decided to interrupt the Doctor’s the moment of glee, “When can I see the dentist? My tooth hurts.”

“Oh we have no dentist ‘ere.”

“No dentist? In the entire hospital?” (For reference, it was a 6-storeyed building.)

“Nein. You will have to go to the next village-Geisenheim-for that.”

“So can I go there now?” (Please don’t remember the X-Ray. Please. Please!)

“After we see your X-Ray and monitor your BP some time. Eet was very low when you came.”

(Crap.)

“Please feel this form.”

(Double crap.)

And so we embarked the grievous task of filling yet another form, this one, most unhelpfully, entirely in German.

“What does this mean?”, I said, pointing at one of the many questions written in the gibberish that German is to me.

“It means do you have any breaknessy?”, my Doc intelligently explained.

“Oh! Won’t the X-Ray tell if there are any broken bones sort of a thing?”, I asked, smiling inwardly at the silly question.

“Nein, nein. It means if you have breaknessy. Breaknenssy!” This time though, she made a gesture which means the same thing in all languages.

“NO!”, I replied as I realized the question wasn’t that silly after all and that ‘breaknessy’ was in fact ‘pregnancy’ (Bless the German society).

“Are you sure?”

“YES!!” (If there’s ONE thing I’m sure of!)

As the four of us wasted another 5 minutes of the next patient’s time laughing at the vehemence of my response, I wondered why they never asked such questions before taking X-Rays back in India. Probably, a kid sitting in a hospital for having fallen off her bike on her way to school was assumed to not be pregnant in India. German medicine, however, was apparently not as presumptuous as its Indian counterpart.

After a minute of invasive X-Rays passing through my face at all angles and two hours of waiting for them to do so, we were back with the Doc seeking her blessing with me fervently praying for a farewell to go with it.

“Hmm.. “, she said, studying the arbit symbols drawn by the X-Ray guy on a piece of paper (while making small talk to us about how he had spent 2 months in Soo-rat and how much he liked India). “Your head is OK.” (Well I’d be damned.) “There is no fracture.” (I’m guessing I would have known if my skull had cracked open. But thanks anyway for the info.) “But, just to be sure, we will have to keep you under observation for 6 hours.” (Triple crap.)

Another attempt at escape- “But we have already been here 4 hours. They are included, right?”

“Ja.” (Phew!)

“Oh, but the nurse does not spik Engleesh. Do you spik Deutsche?”, she asked me as she introduced us to nurse no. ∞.

“Ich sprechen kein Deutcsche.”, I recited the most useful sentence I learnt in my waste-of-a-German-class a month ago.

“I will get Indian nurse. She spik Indish. You spik Indish?”, the obviously non-English speaking nurse asked me.

“Umm.. ja.”, I could only manage, wondering which of the scores of ‘Indishes’ nurse no (∞+1) spoke.

Miraculously though, ‘Indish’ turned out to be a Malyali (as is Lakshmi). The nurse was overjoyed at meeting her and both happily chatted rapidly in a language that I understood, if possible, even worse than German. But at least someone in the room could translate well! And apart from me having had to point out my about to burst forearm as she, engrossed in the Mallu reunion, pumped endless air into the BP thingie wrapped around it, all went reasonably well from there and I soon fell asleep to the background score of Mallu Rap playing in the room.

After what felt like a wink to me but was 2 hours to the world around me, Lakshmi woke me saying we had to rush as Raj was here with a cab to take to the dentist and the driver (of Pakistani origins, the only culture left so far-my own!) said he can’t wait long. I fumbled with my shoe laces even as the Mallu sister was back to check my BP one last time. Strangely enough, despite having had my BP checked 4 times in the day in all, I never got to know what the machine said after that first time. Anyway, shrugging away that thought, I hobbled behind Lakshmi to the cab after getting the permission to leave from my Doc who seemed finally convinced my head wasn’t about to burst open (though she did tell me to come again the next day. “Yeah, over my dead body”. I checked myself for that thankless impulse thought.)

And so, seven hours after the accident, I was finally on my way to see the doctor I had asked for in the first place!

More notably, I was on my way to the dentist’s seven years after my last encounter with one. (Oh, how I despise that species of docs!). I still vividly remember the last time I had been to one for getting a cavity filling. She had told me to come back after a month by when the filling would probably come out, for a Root Canal Treatment. And then visit a dentist every 6 months thereafter. “Yeah, over my dead body” has been my impulse thought to that sort of suggestions for a long time now. Yet, it seemed my face-forward skidding body on a German road had done the trick. (Oh, and whether because of some medical miracle or the force of my will or sheer luck, the filling is still very much in place. And I still very much fear the day it will come off its socket and i will have to head for the gallows, ahem, dentist drill again.)

What transpired at this dentist’s is another tale for another day (My sole English-speaking nurse during the day asked me not to look at screens for the next couple of days. I don’t think typing 5 word pages was what she exactly had in mind for me.). By the end of it though, I did end up fleeing yet again after finding out that invasive electromagnetic rays were not done with me for the day yet as they scanned my jaw this time. Another hour (and several hard-earned Euros) down the drain and the dentist gave me the good news that no jaw bones/teeth were broken. For the pain he gave me the no-brainer choice of either getting a denture made for my teeth to help me eat or living on a liquid diet for 3 weeks. I was out of there in no time after that.

As I lay in my bed at home that night, I reflected on how eventful the presumably normal day had turned out to be. I thought of how it had left me knowing all these new people I had met, how I had improved my dumb-C skills (if not my German-speaking skills). How poor Lakshmi had had to bunk all those classes and bear all those hours of endless waiting for me. How Raj had to run around shopping for my renewed limitations on diet (as if my vegetarianism wasn’t problem enough!). Anyway though, I told myself, a day that ends up with a tub of ice-cream with your name on it, couldn’t have been all bad either!

PS: Almost forgot to eulogize the subject of the title! As me and Lakshmi tried to measure up the possible costs of all the expensive treatment I was undergoing- the X-Rays, the room in the Hospi, the Doc’s time and everything, and found our imaginations incapable of the task; we cautiously asked the Doc about it.

“You were going to school?”

“Yes. I mean, ja.”

“Was there rain on the road?”

“Nein.”

“Was there any other car?”

“Nein. It was entirely my fault.” (All that remains now is for me to get down on my wounded knee and beg forgiveness.)

“Seence you fell on your way to school and not when you were going for your privaat work, and there was no one else involved in the accident, German laws say that the school’s insurance will pay. We weel send them the bill.”

Bless those Germans!! Bless their laws. And their Strawberry ice-creams.

Let the buck stop here

2008-08-20T19:44:00.009+05:30

Are Business and Social Responsibility really as dichotomous as they are made out to be?

I have much to thank the business education classroom for. For not just the new things it has taught me, but also for my many views that it has either corroborated or refuted. One item on the latter list is what I am writing about here. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman once famously said, ‘The Business of Business is Business’. There was a time I detested the man for this. To my do-gooder psyche, the thought of justifying single-minded money minting while turning a blind eye to the starving millions was preposterous at best. And so when a Professor of mine once asked me last year if I felt education should be made a free market, I found my blood boiling yet again. To me, the word free market was synonymous with heartless and cold-logic-driven monetary gluttony! Free markets were the places where the self-absorbed, sinfully rich battle it out for profits while a vast majority writhes in the agony of poverty and misery. My versions of social heroes, on the other hand, were altruistic Robin Hoods, far distanced from the arenas of the market.

A year of part-consciousness in my B school classroom has converted me on this front. While there is still a long way to go (if any) before I claim omniscience of most factors at play here, the realization that has managed to dawn on me is that my perceived contradiction was but a lack of understanding. Free markets, much like the Beast (of the Beauty and the Beast fame) ain’t really that monstrous once you start to really get to know them. I read somewhere once that Power in the world has shifted over the centuries: from the militaries to the churches to the monarchs, governments and today-the corporations. So, the writer deduced, businesses can’t shy away from their moral responsibility towards the Society.

The beauty here though lies in the fact that even if we, for a ‘cold-logic-driven’ moment, forget humanitarian arguments like these, as the greatest business leaders over the ages seem to have discovered, it actually makes sense for businesses to act in a ethical and socially responsible way. For the sake of Business! And what is known as Reputational Capital (which is nothing but general public goodwill) in managerial jargon-which most companies seek through their CSR initiatives-is just one of the reasons for this. Today’s free markets have managed to, in many ways, marshal an environment where, all other factors being the same, a company that does not sidestep its social, moral, environmental and ethical obligations is better off than one that does. Not just in the abstract and subjective sense of reputation, but also in a monetary sense.

While customer preference for green products and aversion for asocial and unethical brand names is definitely the most persuasive (if not the strongest) market force in this respect, the other stakeholders are not too far behind either. The carbon credit market presents tangible rewards for environment friendly means of production. Not-for-profit may not for long be the fashion statement it is today with self-sustaining business models for NGOs becoming the order of the day. Some mutual funds are even screening companies for social and environmental responsibility before investing. Government regulations form the eternal arm-twist that mandates responsibility. Mass media, especially the Internet, have made the ways and means of companies more transparent than ever before thereby intensifying their answerability. In some drastic cases, even stock market, to an extent, may reward or punish a company for issues like the treatment of its employees, relations with suppliers etc.

The above factors might still be bubbling under the surface, but it doesn’t seem long before they become a potent force in influencing organizational strategy. While today, as I mentioned above, for the case of two otherwise comparable companies, the one with the more benevolent image has an advantage; it may not be long before corporations discover that they can no longer afford to ignore this front. Suddenly, it does not seem far-fetched an idea to use the expressions ‘business sense’, ‘profit motive’ and ‘social responsibility’ in the same breath as it once did. Suddenly, free markets do not seem the slaughterhouses they once did. Suddenly, Mr Friedman doesn’t seem like the big bad wolf he once did!

"Corporate social responsibility is a hard-edged business decision. Not because it is a nice thing to do or because people are forcing us to do it... because it is good for our business"

- Niall Fitzerald, Former CEO, Unilever

I Came. I Saw. I Scampered.

2008-06-14T02:44:00.005+05:30

Having spent a better part of the past two days and nights typing out a 30 page summary of how I have been spending the last two months at ICICI Bank UK PLC, I must be crazy to not be able to sleep tonight. Even crazier to willingly undertake yet another typing task. But then, on my last night in London, a session of reflection seems only fitting. As if on cue, my shuffled playlist digs up, from some long forgotten ghost folder on my hard disk, that celebrated retro song glorifying Rangoon. And as the estranged lover admits, "Hum chhod ke Hindustan bahut pachtaye", I wonder if I feel the same way. Friends from my chat list have been commenting on my highly distressed status messages the past week (though I must admit I am secretly proud of my creativity even on the destructive side, my personal favorite being ‘yU.cK.’).
Yes, the last days were crazy, not made any easier by the ‘work pressure’ finally being felt as that familiar last-moment syndrome settled in. Yes, as the time to return got closer and yet not here, it felt like chasing my own shadow. Yes, living alone in a foreign land has been challenging. And yes, all said and done, home surely is where the heart is. But as I skim through the 4 Gigabytes of snaps, videos and memories I have managed to gather over this time, and I see my 10 pence smile flashed back at me from them all, I feel it would be pretty thankless of me to let the above invalidate the fact that with what I like to call a paid vacation, I could hardly have asked for a better first job!
One word doc is hardly enough to cover the clichéd roller coaster ride that this has been. Whenever I think back to the night before that fateful interview that got me here, it seems more and more like a prologue to the story I only wish I had the words to describe here. When I pause to think about it, I have to marvel at how often we perceive ‘now’ as the all important while the present may just be a small piece fitting in the jigsaw of the proverbial bigger picture.
It has been a journey of firsts. The first step on a foreign land. The first time I met the two guys I was supposed to serve this time with, so full of apprehension (much thankfully they turned out to be complete dunderheads, so our wavelengths matched completely!). The first day at work. The first trip to the mall (from which we came out quite sure we would have to starve ourselves if we were to save anything at all in this country). The first self-cooked dinner as elaborated in painful detail earlier. Even the first encounter with the racist side of Great Britain. Good and bad, its been a learning experience through and through. And it would be grossly unfair to not add that it echoes much more resoundingly of laughter than of groans.
Wow, this sure ended up sounding like a volley of wandering, sleep-deprived thoughts, but I guess that’s because that is exactly what this was. And as I now see the past as an aggregation of seemingly random pieces fitting in beautifully to complete the picture of this latest incredible experience, I wonder what jigsaw I am in the process of assembling now. Whatever it is, God’s screenplay writing skills sure deserve a standing ovation!!

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

—Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencement Address 2005)

LONeDON

2008-04-28T16:27:00.010+05:30

If you thought groceries were dull and boring, read on. If you find them interesting… well… get a life :P

I guess as someone who has stepped out of their country the first time I am expected to blog about the wonders of the mystical foreign land I am in. Of the majestic Big Ben or the legendary (rather nursery rhyme-ary) London Bridge or even a brag about having seen the Queen’s left hand’s little finger’s nail through a window of the Buckingham Palace. Or so I would have thought. But once you get past the 2-day incubation period that it takes an average person to become a part of mainstream life in London, you come to terms with the fact that the Brits are quite incapable of building as much as a ruddy coffee shop without making it look like a World Heritage site. Indeed I have no idea what the subjects of some of the pictures I have myself shot here are. But I am quite sure I can easily get away with proclaiming them as ‘Britain’s oldest church’ or even ‘King George XCI’s palace’ to my unsuspecting audience back home. And so, as the architectural beauty of the place soon ceased to amaze me, began the quest for another creative inspiration (or so I like to think of the inconsequential stuff I scribble about).

A couple of things that caught my attention included the first person I met in London who couldn’t speak English. But then I owe a certain age-old allegiance to the Gujju community that held me back on that one. Another thing that inadvertently caught my eye was the amazing fact that I see at least one PDA every day here while I barely ever saw one in India. (For sake of clarity I feel obliged to specify here that I am not referring to a Personal Digital Assistant but a Public Display of Affection. Broaden your horizons, ye engineers!). In this case I realized however that as the word ‘affection’ was a gross understatement, not much has been left to imagination here to write about anyway! Desperate to stop myself from turning into yet another Monday-phobic, Friday-phyllic, Excel sheet manufacturing machine, I even gave a thought to the adverse effects of a complete absence of pollution and dust on a pair of Indian lungs. But that was a weak moment in my literary life and on hindsight, I am not proud of it.
And then my prayers were finally answered. If you ever wondered how long an able-bodied Indian could survive on the Brit version of food before deciding they’ve had enough, (a) The answer is 18 days, (b) It is subject to variation with the cooking skills, prior experience in the kitchen, the age and of course the sex of the Indian in question and (c) Again, get a life, get something better to wonder about!! And so on Day 19, I rolled up my sleeves and went grocery shopping. While running errands for Mummy by fetching her shopping list was a close simulation, when combined with the task of coming up with that list, I realized that Mission Grocery had looked deceptively greener from the comfy side of the fence. I have never respected Mummy more.
Except when a couple of hours later, as I admired my precious grocery sitting pretty in the refrigerator, I realized I am supposed cook it all before the veggies, the hour I spent buying them, the day I spent earning the money I spent in that hour and the frantic turning of wheels in my head all this time went down the drain. I have never appreciated the concept of a ticking time bomb more. And so I embarked on yet another leg of living alone-cooking for myself. I would rather not bore thou kind and patient reader-who has survived thus far-with the trials and tribulations of that exercise. Let me just say that whoever said that the fruit of labor always tastes good has evidently not tasted my cooking. And as a new-found friend here was kind enough to point out, given that I have been blessed with this angel of a maid who tidies up the God-forsaken mess that is my room every day, this was barely the tip of the iceberg of living alone.
To be fair, this was not the first time I had stepped into the kitchen. I have cooked in the past. But without the unconditional ‘its wonderful’ from Dad, the unconditional ‘it sucks’ from my bro and the much flourish and fuss that went with the whole exercise making it more of a family affair with complete participation than a simple meal, it felt nothing like the past times. And while I have prided myself much for having lived outside home for 5 years now, its not until you cook an entire meal without a massive upheaval around you, until you cut and burn your fingers knowing that the nearest person who really cares is five thousand miles away, until you experience the amount of effort that goes into preparing the bowl of dal eaten unnoticed at home; that you fully begin to value the very word home. And its not until you go through the loneliness of a place like London, in the midst of all the wonders of the world, that you truly realize how much you love it..

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

–Harriet Van Horne

Ain't no Sunshine

2008-02-19T20:33:00.000+05:30

So here goes nothing. In a particularly disturbed mood, after yet another encounter with the ugly side of life at a ‘premier management institute’ housing the ‘best minds of the country’ and a pep talk from a major source of inspiration in my life, here I am, writing (for the first time I confess) about something that really matters to me.

As I was walking to class today, I passed a congregate of youngsters wearing that unmistakable trademark formal attire and that even more distinctive ashen-faced doomed expression. “GDPI”, came the reflex thought. And as we walked by, I could feel their eyes on our backs, looking up to every person on the other side of the river as some sort of Demi God. And even as my friends and I giggled at the thought, I couldn’t help marveling at the extent of misplacement of this perception. If I am any sample to go by, many (if not most) of us are pretty clueless as to which lucky gust of wind blew us across and how we landed atop these ivory towers. I, for one, find myself increasingly bewildered every time I realize what these credulous aspirants’ version of me is. Unsolicited Orkut scraps from strangers galore, asking for guidance(!). While I get away every once in a while with obvious wisecracks about ‘body language in a GD’ or ‘honesty in a PI’; the truth, I have to confess, is that I would usually do this more to wash my hands off an unwelcome stranger than to render any real help. And I guess it is nothing but the much celebrated brand value of the institute that lets me get away with these antics and makes my unsuspecting correspondents buy this crap I offer them on the silver IIM platter.

Harsh reality is… let alone them, I can barely help myself in the place I have somehow landed myself. Which brings me to the catharsis. I have always been a staunch believer in the concept of Its all for the best. But the heavens above really seem to be testing my faith long and hard this time round. Call me a bitter if you will, but finding a foothold in the foreseen moss of competition and the much unforeseen muck of politics of an IIM has proven to be way harder than I would’ve reckoned a year back. They say a B-School teaches you a lot. I am beginning to wonder if there is more to that statement than meets the eye. When they say B-School, do they mean just the lectures and the case studies and the field projects? Or does the word also encompass the parallel universe of ruthless and endless struggle for survival? A world of the proverbial Indian crabs, pulling each other down, blindfolded by ambition, thereby ignorant to the larger good?

Not long back, I recall, the media was having a field day covering students of more such ‘premier’ institutions forming human chains, staging protests out on the roads, braving the Indian summer.. the Nation admired with glowing eyes, the commitment of Young India to the virtues of social justice and of equality. I find myself in the unenviable position, however, of having seen both the masquerades of ‘young India’.

As yet another MBA aspirant, I cheered with the nation as I saw these students fight for justice. I dreamt of the meritocracy they talked about and wondered how the infamous politician in question failed to see the beauty in the simplicity of the solution they had to offer. Start from the grass root level. Bring every child of the country at an equal pedestal. And then let the OMR sheet decide who lands where. I idolized my warriors of righteousness as I saw video clippings of them facing tear gas and water cannons play over and over again.

As an MBA student today, I find myself a hapless witness to people belonging to the set I once venerated, lobbying for petty gains, battling it out to the hilt to push themselves that extra incremental notch ahead and leaving no stone unturned to suppress the merit they once so vehemently advocated. Though let down by her heroes by the look of things, the optimist in me tries to seek solace in Darwinism. This is Natural Selection in action—Survival of the Fittest. The only catch, however, is that the definition of ‘fitness’ seems mutilated beyond all morally plausible recognition.

One may question the point of this post. Am I daring to present an argument against progress? Am I trying to be the voice of rebellion against Adam Smith’s age old theory of self interest as a source of social justice? Or am I just a bitter loser unable to cope with the pace of a competitive world, venting my frustration on the only space I have access to? Quite honestly, your guess is as good as mine. At some level, I worry that there is something wrong with the new world I find myself a part of. At another, the wide-eyed optimist in me continues to wait.. for the best to come!!

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

—Lily Tomlin

How I met your Paperback Writer..

2008-02-07T22:03:00.000+05:30

The stray visitor to my blog here and there has been complaining of the lack of updation. Two posts in two months, so can’t really blame him (or the rarer her). My standard excuse is a lack of inspiration to write. So here I am, in response to the latest complain by a concerned soul, typing gibberish on my screen, with no idea whatsoever of what the next sentence is going to be. Indeed, the title I shall eventually place above will be an afterthought and I have no idea what it will be as I type these words. Reminds me of the many Creative writing competitions I took part in (Yes, there lies the genesis of this malignant (mis)conception of mine about my literary abilities).

The winding path of Life sure has an increasing number of potholes as you walk on. I remember how easy things were in the aforementioned competitions back at NITK. The board typically carried the names of a couple of firang songs passed down generations of literary veterans as topics, the favorite ones being Comfortably Numb, Stairway to Heaven, Candle in the Wind, Coming back to Life and the like. Now, this is not to hint at any sort of lack of imagination on the part of the event organizers.. indeed I met some of the greatest writers I know in that elite group. But who is to rebel against tradition. And as the baton was passed on to me eventually, I made sure I lived up to the standards just as well. In fact, I even extended the concept to include names of movies, sitcoms, soaps and my personal favorite- a jumbled version of ‘em all (Trust me.. to the unsuspecting eye, it really looks like a work of art). I guess When angels deserve to Scrub doesn’t sound very attractive right now, but I’m sure a little more thought and one can do better than that!

Which brings my wandering thoughts to the issue, or should I say, the Art of Plagiarism. I remember the first time I heard the word was during a JAM (Just-a-Minute.. an adrenaline-rush-inducing race of oral spamming) session in my first year at undergrad. It was supposedly one of the punishable offences in the game. And that is what it remained to me for the next four years until my ‘Orientation Week’ at IIMB where we were introduced to plagiarism as one of the oh-so-many ways of getting expelled from the institute. Not to mention the fat handbook we were given that elaborated on:
(a) The 1001 things that could be considered plagiarism
(b) A 2x2 for degree of acceptability of the Project Report as a function of amount of Referencing (high or low) on the horizontal axis vs number of Footnotes (high or pain-in-the-ass high) on the vertical axis. Sometimes I wonder what B-Schools would have taught or how they would even have survived but for Mr. Michael Porter and his monumental contribution, the 2x2.

For those still awake, the handout also contained another list of 10001 more ways of getting kicked out of the insti. Yours truly, of course, lost patience by the last line of the first para and decided to extrapolate (to a reasonable degree of accuracy, I’m sure) what lay ahead. Considering my experiences in that first week, possibilities off the top of my head would be coming late to class, borrowing a pen from a peer on running out of refill (for the very idea of not carrying one to class seemed laughable at the time), using font size 14 or 1.5 line spacing to cover space in project reports, and basically indulging in any activity that can potentially have roots in an intention of disturbing the decorum of the class such as ‘breathing loudly’ or any other such unimaginably gory crime. By the Grace of the Almighty, I have so far succeeded in not committing/not getting caught committing any of the above. Although as I was to discover the hard way later that term, oversleeping was a crucial offence that I had missed out on. More on that sometime later.. Wouldn’t want to drain my limited pool of creativity in one go.

My screen tells me I have already exceeded a page (Font size 12, Times New Roman, para spacing 1 line). Having successfully crossed the threshold of the average reader’s patience, I think I can safely publish the post without running any risk of criticism, even from the stray jobless readers. Only thing remaining now- to give a suitable footnote that captures the true spirit of this post!

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."

- Kingsley Amis (whoever this alter-ego of mine is!)

The Website Story – Solidarity Eulogized

2007-12-19T22:29:00.000+05:30

This post is an account I penned essentially to fill webspace on a website a group of us nutheads designed as a part of the annual Inter-Section Website Designing Competition. To bring the non-WIPs up to speed on this, we, the products, are divided into 4 sections at IIMB to give the impression of quality assurance to the untrained eye (though my theory is that this is to facilitate equitable and more efficient torture among us 249 WIPs). And around the end of Term 2, by which time we know one another well enough to have a well-established inter-section rivalry, the institute’s resident evil genius capitalizes on this by means of Inter-Section events such as the Sports Tournament, Website Design Competition and so on. So there I was, having landed myself in the content team behind the site, collating student profiles, gossip and the like to fill the webpages. Inundated by all the profound literary juices flowing around me, I felt my long-dormant arcane creative instincts surfacing. What followed follows:

IIMB is a Universe of contradictions. The people here who burn the midnight oil more often than not use the darkness of the night for stealthy trips to the much romanticized Athicas (for the benefit of my NITK friends, that’s like a Khokha, except one that femmes too can frequent) and watching sitcoms and movies on the pretext of case studies and project reports. Then there is the other species, the 'early to bed, early to rise' types, whom we (for the sake of political correctness) refer to as ‘muggus’. Unless he/she is one of the latter, I would expect the reader to totally relate to my concept of a fumbling last-minute excuse for studying that an overwhelmingly elite minority here likes to call preparation.

As a part of the God-forsaken team behind the website, in continuum with the same tradition of my eleventh hour escapades, my version of the story of any real work in this case too would span over three full days of genius (!), toil and action at mind-boggling lightning speeds (notwithstanding the quizzes and submissions in the way)! But more than anything, the reason why I chose to subject my unsuspecting victims (my readers, by definition) to yet another addition to my spate of torturous writings is the mystic and logic-defying solidarity that a group of 64 strangers developed over a mere five months of companionship. I call it ‘The Website Story’ not because it is a narcissist ode to the Website Team, but because in many ways, the completion of this website is but another testimony to this amazing solidarity that seems to bind this unlikely group of, for lack of a better word, friends.

2nd of July 2007. The first time that approximately three scores of students (lets call them ‘subjects’ hence) were brought under the same roof to which they were destined for the following two years (discounting a change of Lecture Hall as too unromantic to be mentioned here of course.. oops, I just did it, didn’t I?). I may here spend sometime dwelling on the vast variety of dreams, aspirations and expectations our subjects held as they walked into that overwhelming lecture theatre and seated themselves behind those shiny nameplates bearing their names and greeted the other subjects on either side. However, having none myself, I seek solace in opining that these ‘aspirations’ and ‘ambitions’ are heavily overrated. My memory of that first BGS lecture is rather different. I recall wondering if the Overhead Projector really worked (pardon me, but I hail from a rather infrastructurally challenged background… my NITK compatriots would empathize here), where the much publicized ACs were hidden, how long it would take me to find my way back to the hostel in this maze of a campus, what on Earth did BGS stand for etcetera etcetera. But most of all, I wondered if everyone else was as floored by the Prof’s knowledge as I was (Man! The guy is a human encyclopedia! What have I been doing these past 21 years?).
Everyone else. I guess these two words summarized the very axis of our thought those early days. And so, unconsciously though, our trysts with one another began that first day itself.

Term 1 came and went by in a flash of quizzes, mid and end terms, marked by the realization, that there is more.. much more to a resumé than they ever thought possible, dawned on the wretched subjects! And as the term rolled by, misery bound them to one another at some level. Signs of this malignant bonding were visible right from the nascent stages of our very dear ‘Peace Club’ (of which the author happens to be a proud member).

However, it wasn’t until Term 2, with the Summer Placement that brought with them an exotic mix of elation and trauma, and that memorable trip to Goa with the beaches and the sunsets, the pukes and the bedbugs, that the subjects really discovered one another. I could go on for pages on both of these. However, my creative juices are constrained by the Technical Team’s banterings for space and your tolerance. So I would do better to let the pictures in the ‘gallery’ on the site speak the thousand words for themselves!

Right now, even as I pen this account, I am sitting in a roomful of my classmates, changing shifts to stay up the night, (this time notwithstanding the deluge of Project Submissions in the coming week). The number is so overwhelming that I am strongly contemplating taking my musings to another room!

There are a number of reasons cited on the site to answer the question ‘Why does Sec A rock?’. But I believe that the smallest thing like the fact that they are willing to sit through a Saturday night in a roomful of nerds wielding laptops, hailing cuss words at one another for missing pics and testimonials speaks volumes about the bond that is Sec A. There are a million possible examples (and you’d notice that we’ve covered them quite extensively on the site) of the SecAites’, for lack of a more apt word, friendship.

And the Website Story is just one of them.

Ref: http://spidi2.iimb.ernet.in/content/section/2007/seca/index.html

Veni

2007-12-19T20:43:00.000+05:30

Before launching my blitzkrieg on blogosphere, I offer my apologies to those misled by the arbit blogname into believing that there is anything of (technical) substance to be found here. For others who find the chivalry of Quixote in their hearts (more importantly his kind of time to kill on their hands), let me return your valor of reading on with an attempt to briefly (or not!) explain my presence here. I may give a shot at my love for literature as an excuse. But my miniscule claim to anything that can remotely be called literary talent barely wields the power to combat the resilient laziness inbred in the infrastructure of my anatomy. I may also try saying that I am here to break-free off the shackles of monotony or boredom like some of my (more fortunate) friends. That, however, would be even further from reality. Indeed, as a Work-In-Progress on a B-School assembly line, monotony and boredom in any variety are bounties I am prepared to kill for.

Hell! Who am I kidding? Here’s yet another jump on the bandwagon by yet another jobless (momentarily so) freak (perennially so) who knows how to type stuff using MSWord and then paste their divine musings on a webpage to torment the world around them! I’m here simply ‘coz I had nothing better to do today!! Fuzzy, did you say?