Monday, March 24, 2008

To See or Not to See

My dear faithful readers,

I understand that your faithfulness to this blog has been put under severe pressure over the last three months in the absence of anything to keep your faith upon.

While expressing my genuine apologies for not being able to keep up with the intensely demanding nature of a blog, for this sorry state of affairs however,
I put the blame squarely ,rectangularly and rhombusly on the complete dictatorship that has been initiated by the admin department of my company in the same of secure web policies.

The "Access to the Requested page is Denied" message has been coming up with such a frequency that would put the population clock of China to shame.

While there were always some restrictions (albeit unnecessary) before I left for UK, it was never as worse. For e.g based on some weird logic they would not allow us to view pictures of female bodies without clothes on, or the one in which they would not allow the use of external mail sites for sending out our resumes to other companies.(You could use the internal server of course).

But along with our many other sacrifices that we made, we took these too in our stride.

Now great many changes have happened in India in the last couple of years while I was away.
Locally speaking, the traffic jam has shifted a quarter of a mile away from where it reigned earlier;

The local Bar has had a Merger and Acquisition and the prices of drinks have trebled;

Flats which were considered to be located on the outskirts are very much within city limits now and areas which were dwelled by hyenas and panthers are now hot spots for developing new properties.
They advertise..."Come live in paradise in the midst of nature" ( and be eaten alive by leopards and crocodiles is understood I guess )

The office timing has been increased by an hour owing to rupee appreciation against the dollar and rarely has ever any 'appreciation' been looked down upon with more distaste.

However, all of these fade in comparison to the the changes initiated by our admin team to block websites that supposedly do not tally with the company policies.

Some topics topping in this taboo list are as follows:

A) Cricket

Some innocent google searches comes up with the following results.

1.Mysore Sandal Soap - Access Denied. - Dhoni did a commercial for this brand and it melts too early anyway, Try searching Hamam instead.

2.Hamam- Access denied - He he ...Caught you, you were searching for Mysore Sandal Soap isn't it ?

3.ICL - Access Strongly Denied . Not recognised by the BCCI or the ICC. The matches look more like uncles playing beneficiary matches for their old age pensions, What do you want to know about them anyway huh ?

4.IPL - Access Denied - 19 days still to go ! Have patience mate !

5.Ganguly's One day records - Access denied. Data permanently deleted from public memory.

6.Shoaib Akhtar banned for 3 years - Access denied. Moron its 5 years not 3 !
and so on and so forth.

B) ****

I understand that Blog too is a four letter word but to not allow us even read-only access on them is nothing short of criminal for a person who has just returned back to India after spending 2 and a half years at onsite billed solely for reading and writing blogs in office.
Respect the employee's skill-set for revenue's sake.

C) Miss-ellaneous

Technical Discussion Forums (How is a person supposed to develop his code for chrissake?!! and then they complain of not delivering on time ...How just How !!!),

MagicBricks.com and all other real estate website.How is a person supposed to do his research before buying a house?
Well not that many in my company can afford to in Mumbai anyway..so i guess this one is ok.

NGOs in Mumbai !! (Justifiably blocked as the company may get in serious trouble with the Human Rights organisations if the figures of our salaries are somehow leaked)

Money Control Justified for the same reason mentioned above. "Jab Money hi nahi hain to Control kya karoge ..he he ..Signed Admin."

Thus in a nutshell , life has suddenly turned very boring in office with the only site that regularly opens coming up with reminders for your unfilled time sheet entries and unsanctioned leaves and pending trainings :-((((.
No fire or wall can block this damned site !!!!!

I am handicapped my friends in the absence of access to blogspot.com from office to write more often.

But there is so much more to being back home. So much more to write, so much more of Mumbai..so much more of life......so will be back very soon ...

Yours
Apologetic Access denied Blogger.