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.

Yappy New Year

My dear blog readers,

The blogger is currently busy winding up his two and a quarter year stay in the Queens Kingdom to return to Apna Vatan on New Years Day.
So the next posts will have the distinctive smell of desh ki mitti. (Wonder when will Google come up with odour-enabled blogsites ??).

Till then Wishing all of you a Very Very Happy New Year.

And as they say it here
Cheerio!!!!

Onsite Binsight

Some Project Managers have an amazing ability to sense out potential resignations in a project.Probably its taught as a part of the syllabus of PMP (Project Management Programme).

Typical examples are as follows:
PM Vijay- I can sense it...Yes Yes its such a strong one........40 degree 30'N and 94 degree 24'E..Its from the second last cubicle..Ah its Ramesh..I should have known. Damn I should not have given him a poor rating this year!
PM Vijay to Ramesh ---So whats up Ramesh?
Ramesh - (quickly closing the Orkut,naukri.com,blogger,Messenger windows)-Hi Vijay...nothing much,usual work , you know .
PM Vijay (yeah you moron..I know)--Yes its a busy time of the year isn't it ?
Ramesh (As if you care)-- Yes indeed.
PM Vijay- So what are your future plans Ramesh,
Ramesh -(Visibly disturbed..Does this bugger know ?)-- Ahem well, ..ahem...aheeem..
PM Vijay - You wouldn't be interested in an onsite opportunity for 6 months,would you?
Ramesh - Whoa !! What?? Are you serious ? I mean really ...actually ..because ..then..yes...I have to ...plans..where...?

And most often than not, this discussion leads Ramesh to promptly hold back his resignation.

This lure in our industry is coined Onsite Deputation where you get a chance to rake in some extra moolah and of course simultaneously give that degenerating ad in Shaadi.com a much needed facelift.

Now this concept of travelling to foreign shores however has never traditionally been extended to the faculty members of the training department whose job, I feel, is one among the toughest in this industry.
They are periodically given fresh packs of over enthusiastic engineer pass outs, a motley group, who could any day do more honours to the local zoo than a corporate office.
The task of moulding these individuals into entities which would quietly gel into the corporate lifestyle, taking orders from superiors and holding their bottoms on to one chair for close to eight hours a day, is certainly not an easy task.

Some scenes from the classrooms,given below are indicative of the reason why many faculty members resort to stress therapy classes after office hours.

Classroom A-
Faculty Member - "Today we are going to discuss the concept of Universal data access using ActiveX Data Objects or ADO."
"Radio ?? Sir why would we need to learn about radios in these age? Do we still have clients who sell radios...Ha ha ...Such losers!!! opines a back bencher with a minute hearing disability
Faculty Member ---We are ....
Barely awake Back Bencher 2 -- Thats fine Sir, Don't listen to him ..Radio is just cool! I always wanted to be a Radio Jockey. They are so in with chics man !!
Faculty Member - Excuse me , we are actually discu....
Back Bencher 3 ---Sir I still have an old radio in my house.I last used it to bang the head of my neighbour's dog...some incident da !! Its gone numb since then. Does the company reimburse the cost of repairing Radios Sir?
Faculty Member - What the $%$**$$...No the company does not and we are not talking radios here for Chrissake!!
Back Bencher 4 to BackBencher 2 -- Huh much ADO about nothing man ..We were just trying to know more about the company policies.


Classroom B
Faculty member to young recruits - Today we are going to talk about the PL-SQL.

Female Student 1- Sir if it's like the story of Luv-Kush then please excuse me from the class. I found the concept of twins fighting with their Daddy so repulsive..eeks ya!!
Female Student 2- On yeah,Well what would you then say about a father striking off the head of his son and replacing it with that of an Elephant's eh ?
Female Student 1 - (Swoons).
Faculty member (clears his throat and continues) Well Ahem, PL-SQL stands for Procedural Language-Structured Query Language and resembles closely to Pascal.
Back Bencher again- Sir I take serious offence at the language that you are using in the class. We may be freshers but you have no right to abuse us in this manner.
Faculty member -But I only said Pascal.
Back bencher 1-- Hear hear friends ,there he goes at it again !! Is this what you call corporate ethics...abusing a poor physically handicapped person like me...Sniff Sniff..
Faculty member- Calm Down..calm down, You need to concentrate in this lecture as you would need it in your ABAP programming.
Back Bencher-- Sir, Baap pe kyon jaate ho ? Yeh thik nahi ho raha hai !!!
Whole class rising in unison and walking out--Yes yes.. Down with insensitivity !! Down with corporate high-handedness, as all make their way to the office canteen to douse their hurt feeling with some Masala Dosas.

Coming back to the topic of onsite travel, a few months back, these members of the training department decided that enough was enough and that they too deserved a better life.(Read : The matrimonial was not cutting much ice)
When their initial demands for onsite travel were not addressed, they quietly floated a few pamphlets with some minor modifications to the official Code of conducts..

Some of the pamphlets read as follows:

Do's & Don't's

* The company is responsible for the health and safety of all its employees.Spitting of Guthkha and Smoking will not be allowed anywhere except within the office premises.
* Drug abuse will not be tolerated under any conditions but some exceptions may be made for employees who offer a joint or two to the security personnel of their floor.
* Employees should always be formally dressed and anyone wearing his underwear like Superman will be considered for immediate mid-year promotions.
* Camera phones are not allowed within the office premises. Instead please bring proper digital cameras with at least 6X optical zoom to get a good shot at any client sensitive data.

The Management relented soon after and decided that faculty members too would henceforth travel to onsite locations and impart necessary trainings to the employees based there.

Now Onsite is the other word for Corporate Rehabilitation.
Employees who have been sucked dry of all enthusiasm in life after around 2 continuous years of milking (Gender irrespective) are usually sent here so that they spend the next few months calculating the conversion rate of Dollars and Pounds instead of conjuring up novel ideas to put into their resignation letters.
Much like the hill-station-after-a-long-illness funda that we have in Hindi movies.

Thus while the company buys some time, the employee too starts feeling a temporary high as he sees his bank balance gain back some respectability in the eyes of the Credit card agents who had completely shunned him after his first few salaries.

Reaction of Credit Card Agent on your first salary...Really ??
Reaction of Credit Card Agent on your second salary... Ha ha ha ..Are you sure Sir??
Reaction of Credit Card Agent on your sixth salary...Ho ho ho Ho Ho ...Can I lend you some money mate!!!
And then there were None.

Anyway so this group of people at onsite are the Been-there-Seen-that kind of people and the company usually does not bother them much to avoid situations as below :

One Ruffled Employee to colleague within Client earshot -- Psst..Psst...Dude this business logic is worth around 5 million dollars in the market..You aren't interested to earn some extra dough are you ?
or of the deadpan kind,
Hi Richard, my manager just emailed me and he thinks that you have a very large butt and that you should give us a project to bring it back to shape.

Thus, to keep things in control as well as to accommodate the demands of the harassed training dept guys, the management came up with brilliant ideas of holding sessions of the kind of Cultural Sensitization Programs and one such we had here a couple of weeks back.

It was fun from the word go. We were taken through different adaptation theories and given directions on how we should behave ourselves in the company of clients, that asking personal questions of the genre of "What is your good name?" were a strict no-no and that applying oil in our hair was also not acceptable while oil-laden food etc were best avoided.
(Oil and Indians have such a beautiful love story !!!)

But the programme surely gave the employees an opportunity to unwind a bit and most of us thoroughly participated with great enthusiasm and interest,particularly during the coffee breaks and the Pizza lunch. Did I forget to mention that the company bore the entire costs for the same?
It was a comfortable Saturday afternoon and with pizza-filled stomachs we enjoyed the session all the more.Infact some were so sensitised that they could hardly stay awake after that.

But hats off to the training department for reminding the nosy pack of us that we should not be picking our nose while in office and Three Cheers to them for having managed to win this round with the Management!!

An ode to Maggi

Some millions of years ago....
A scene from a typical evening in a bachelor cavehold .The language which was spoken in those days was Cavespeak

Cave Dweller Bachelor 1 - ool ..ool? (Food ..Food ?)
Cave Dweller Bachelor 2 - Maka keega kidneeee (Big dinosaur's kidney)

Cave Dweller Bachelor 1 - Maka neh zook !!!( Terrible !!!)
Cave Dweller Bachelor 2 - Yumma Morona !....Zazall v ave..(Eat you moron! That's all we have)

Cave Dweller Bachelor 1- Bolu...Gonna-maka-zook lom ni gu-tawa (Mate..Hot babe in next cave)
Cave Dweller Bachelor 2- Tooka-Tooka ? (Any Chance for sex ?)

Cave Dweller Bachelor 1- Neh...Neh ... (No way !!!)
Cave Dweller Bachelor 2 - Bolu, zez boondo de bincha ( Chill mate,lets drink Beer)
Cave Dweller Bachelor 1 - Yeh Yeh..Yeh Yeh !!! (Some expressions need no translations)

Nothing much has really changed over the eons, has it ?


However, if one were to choose one invention that has truly revolutionized the lives of bachelors, then that distinction would have to invariably go to Maggi noodles.
I would think that all bachelors here would agree that no other invention has brought more collective joy to them.
Well.......................??
.........
............
..................
Whats wrong with you people !!!! This is a 12A rated blog,for heaven's sake!!!

The noble person responsible for bringing these small packets of joy into the bachelor kitchens was a man named Julius Michael Johannes Maggi who founded the Maggi company in the year 1872 in Switzerland though of course the Maggi noodles came some time after.

For most bachelors with severely demented cooking abilities like yours truly, Maggi has always come as a saviour in moments of crisis.
It was there for us in those hostel days when the mess gave us zebra fodder in the name of dinner or when our initial attempts at cooking had left us with tar-like curries and even darker self esteems.

Some roles which Maggi Noodles has been shouldering for many many years now can be enumerated under the following heads:


Maggi -The Healer
Maggi is a true healer of lost faith. When the male ego is brutally shattered day after day at the altar of the cooking gas,when you can hear the utensils and jars in the kitchen sarcastically sniggering away behind your back, when even those tiny tiny peas keep running away from you in morbid fear, it is then that a small yellow packet in that corner of your shelf peeks out to you as a beacon of renewed hope.You reach out to it with outstretched hands and a weak and broken heart.You feel like crying and running back to the warmth of home where food means 'to eat' and not 'to cook'.
Like a true friend, the 2 minute logo in the packet gives you confidence and puts a comforting hand on your sagging shoulders. (Where else did you think ? Think straight...please think straight)
You put the water to boil and gently drop the noodles and the tastemaker masala. You can still see the spoons, the plates, the glasses and the knives all scrambling over each other's shoulders to get a view at their favourite clown
But today the circus is not to be.
It soon takes shape, the noodles smarten up and the tastemaker blends itself wonderfully with it giving it the perfect look.And before you know it, its done !
And then you taste it. Tears come rolling down your cheeks and you look upwards and just manage to whisper a choked 'Thank you'.
Resurrection can well come in small packets.


Maggi- The tower of Selflessness and Simplicity
Maggi noodles are true proponents of selfless service.They come with no starry airs and instead Nestle you within the warmth of their exceptional taste and ease of preparation.You may well give it the step-motherly treatment every now and then but it would always be there for you on a rainy day.
Nothing pompous, nothing too flashy, just a simple packet with no bombastic claims and yet so efficient.

Maggi- The Management Guru
We,in the software industry are taught to give an estimate to the client which should be at least twice or thrice the time we would actually need to do the work.
This is usually to buffer out emergencies like 3 hour lunch breaks, 12 stops to the coffee vending machines and all the time that goes to buy farewell gifts for the ever resigning people.Damn the attrition rate in this industry.
Maggi,in stark contrast, is a true professional in this sense . It sticks to its time of 2 minutes and in the process teaches us the true value of time.
Maggi also demonstrates with great efficiency how coiled things in life ease out when put in boiling water.
(Disclaimer -The blogger does not guarantee the results, should this be tried upon spouses.)

Though the page on Maggi noodles in Wikipedia lists around 28 flavours of Maggi noodles sold all around the world, my personal favourite has always been the Masala flavour. Some other unnecessary variations such as the Vegetable Atta Noodles and the Dal Sambhar ones have only scored a Saawariya with the masses.

Some things are best left original.

Though the impact of Maggi on a bachelor's life cannot certainly be measured, nor completely expressed in a single blog post, this is just a small tribute to something which has understood the bachelor psyche in a manner like very few others things have.

"Be not afraid of laziness"

Some are born lazy, Some achieve laziness and Some have laziness thrust upon them"
Some many years from now, when I would be retrospecting on the days gone by, I'd think that I belonged to all the three categories.

In a predominantly Bong locality where I grew up, almost every kid of my age was learning the Tabla, the choice of instrument being all the more obvious as his sister was invariably going through the motion of learning "Robindra Songeet". A Bengali bhadralok's daughter may well be devoid of the right lung and the left kidney but Rabindra Sangeet is something she must know.
"Age 24, Fair skin, very homely, very beautiful, very understand, 5'2'', know East Bengal cooking" are some other accolades that get added with age.
Thus every morning at around 6, these bunch of singerly-sisters started their Riyaz with sleepy eyes and hoarser throats and needless to say, there was no need for roosters to wake people up in our locality.
There was not much to differentiate between the two species anyway.

Of course I was the charcoal black sheep of my family as far these classical skills were concerned and thus I never learnt the Tabla or for that matter never acquired any skill which required patience and tenacity.I could, on the other hand, carry sacks of potatoes or rice with more ease and my mother was happy that way.
Not every Bengali need be an intellectual after all. Some should still remain idiots so that they are never able to comprehend what phrases like paying back in their own coin mean.

Coming back to laziness, I think that it is a grossly misrepresented term. Predominantly it would seem to imply to many as physical inactivity and the disinclination to work. But what these judgemental people seem to miss is that all this seeming inactivity may actually well be a part of a larger picture, a slice from a continuous process of which we all are unknowingly a part and where each of us has an assigned role to play and more importantly at a predestined time. You just can't hurry on to things always. It simply spoils the scheme of things which God has so intricately balanced. Such harakiri only unnecessarily adds on to the pile of work that we lazy people already have, of slowing down things to a pace that nature is comfortable with.

Recently CNN-IBN was airing an interview on Javed Akhtar, when the famous lyricist made some poignant remarks in response to the interviewee's question on whether he was lazy.He said that he indeed was but went on to define that laziness is not really as is popularly conceived to be. Laziness according to him gave him the time to think and ponder which people are so not doing in their mad wild rush these days.
One couldn't agree with him more.

Ultimately,it is only you who will have to carry out the tasks assigned to you.There is no escaping the fact.If your mother wants you to get a wife and settle down, then you will have to get one sooner or later and if that wife wants you to keep your own house clean then you will have to keep the house clean and if your kid wants you to help him out with his Maths homework while the Indian Ocean concert is in town then you will have to tell him that only Rats teach Maths and thus he should go to his mother and quickly avoid the knife that the wife throws at you. That is all in your Karmic cycle.

So guys don't rush on to things.
The concept of time is only a relative and man-made concept. Time is a continuum and how much ever we try, we cannot confine it within the narrow boundaries of today ,tomorrow or yesterday.Lets think bigger and plan to get things done but not attach any narrow time frames to it. It only questions your faith in God's scheme of things.You certainly don't want to be remembered as a blasphemous soul after you leave this world, do you ?

It is the job of Time to take you forward, so sit back and relax for you will go forward, no matter what. Do not be involved in acts which would make Time feel insecure about his job. For if He gets angry, God save your already receding hairline, your teeth, that glowing skin, those muscles.

So don't draw up schedules for projects, do not send reminders to your subordinates to get the work done, don't respond to emails from your manager enquiring you of the status of the tasks.
Burn the estimation template.
Throw the watch (But let me know where you throw them).
Severe all ties with any person who uses the word ASAP again and recommend a No-Smokingish Prayogshaala for him/her !!

Work in Peace my friends and let others around you stay peaceful as well.
It is no sin to be lazy....

Diya Jale....Jaan jale

What the fish....Three months since the last post in this blog ?? What is this ..a blog or a fog ???? Har har Har!!! (Such self deprecatory comments invariably draw the appreciation of intelligent critics...so I have heard....and also my ability to write humour, it seems, has died a premature death.)

In these three months a lot of water has flown down the Thames.(Man am I turning English in my expressions !! Claps claps!!)
The whole of last month was festival time in India and was I in India celebrating all the festivities with my family and devouring wonderfully delicious sweets and chasing prospective brides ??? Well Noooooo.....of course not ... Did I not pledge my whole life to the service of the suffering mankind the day I chose this life of struggle and hardships over those high paying management jobs (which nobody anyway gave me)?
Everyday I enter my office and see those expectant little faces and chirpy pleas clamouring for a little helping hand, it reminds me of the enormity of the task that I have undertaken. The IT industry is such a noble profession.

Naaaaah who am I kidding !!! These clients are fast learning the tricks of the trade and as soon as they realise that with a little effort, they can do it all by themselves will they outsource it entirely to China where I hear the government these days are doling out incentives to all couples who volunteer to procreate in an English medium school premise. But till then, thousands and thousands of desis like me will have to spend their festivals in foreign lands far far away from the warmth of their homes.( Whoa was strength of sentiment here !!! This would have made Nirupa Roy cry.)

Well Dussehra came and went by and so did Diwali and while Lord Rama may have returned home after a successful venture down South, we continue to struggle with our own self created demons some of which come packaged with horrendously polite messages such as this :


And come to think of it, running back to home was so much simpler just a few years back.
My only worthwhile achievement in college was the path breaking research work which I, along with some of my friends did in the field of Elasticity leading to some startling discoveries in this field of work.
We demonstrated that when around 15 Bengalies get together (and not discuss Communism) and the threat of suspension from hostels is not that severe, a one week Diwali break can safely be stretched back to an extent that it comfortably includes the days of Durga Puja in its scope.
(Durga Puja by the way occurs 3 weeks prior to Diwali.)
Some of our critics had claimed that our work was not authentic enough and that it borrowed much of its material from the proven theory of Mass-Bunk.

I tell you India is so not an ideal place for scientists.

The journey from Surat to my hometown took a mere 3 and half days by train and most often than not Indian Railways gave me a festival bonus by rounding off the days to a wholesome four. Reservations on these journeys was as unrealistic a concept as Tanushree Dutta winning the National Award for her acting skills and thus while we boarded the trains as humans, there was not much to distinguish us from dirty beddings when we finally disembarked from them.

Oh my home is not in Timbaktoo by the way. I in fact grew up in a smallish town, which till recently was not known by many to actually exist in India but all this changed when a lad with whom I once went to school thought of auditioning for Indian Idol.
While Amit Paul swayed the nation with his amazing crooning abilities, many people came to know that when one said 'Shillong me Khasis rehte hain', it did not mean that Shillong is inhabited by various kinds of Coughs.
Also I hear that the IIM Management has pulled a fast one this year by clandestinely opening a centre there. Cheers to my lovely city which for long has not got its due liimlight.

And while Diwalis come and Diwalis go, bugs too are resolved or camouflaged and left to be discovered by some innocent Chinese some twenty years from now.
Tigers are so much more smarter than Dragons ....Muhuahhaaa ..haaaa...MUhuhuaaha aaa!!!


Question of the Day- What are the thoughts of the pregnant lady as she goes into labour on Diwali night ?
Answer- Dard-e-Disco....Dard-e-Disco...Dard-e-Disco!!!

A Homeward Journey.....

The first passenger airplane I ever boarded was a Vayudoot Fokker.
I am not sure how many of you have heard of such a plane, but one such did exist.That it could fly and fly with people inside it, ranks very highly in the list of unsolved mysteries of the world.

The flight was quite an experience and I remember it vividly though I was hardly 7 or 8 then. The air staff had given us some cotton to plug our ears with, so that no matter what they should shout in case of an emergency, we should remain blissfully unaware of it and die a peaceful death.
Irrespective of a man's age, if he is told to do something by a well shaped pretty female in very tight skirts, then he would usually do it without questioning too much and I was certainly not an exception to this rule and duly plugged my ears.
However my ever enthusiastic sister whose constant chattering at that time was being considered by RAW as an alternate torture method, took the ear-plugging thing a bit too far herself and the poor thing had to be taken to a hospital to have the piece of cotton extracted.Later that day a group of very traumatised doctors and a vast number of nurses of that hospital were seen drafting a letter to the National Human Rights Commission with their demands for safer working conditions.
She still suffers from selective deafness though, which aggravates to serious proportions whenever I ask her for money or remind her of my wish lists for my birthday. At the same time however, I must acknowledge with immense humility that when during the days of my engineering, the debt situations turned to proportions of the genre of Those-Which-Must-Not-Be-Told-To-Dad and our canteen owner broke down inconsolably at our sight, she had many a time given the deafness a rest and thus made the future visa processing for her brother much simpler in the absence of any unpaid debt related court convictions.!! Cheers Didi !!

Anyway, aeroplanes and the airplane industry in India has surely come a long long way since those days of the Vayudoot.

I recently sold all my belongings here to buy a return ticket from London to Kolkata and I chose Air India as their baggage limits were allowing me to smuggle around 5 kgs more than the other airlines.
By the way, the advertisements of this company with pictures of those glamorous air hostesses with their 7 inch smile and perfect set of teeth stand testimony to the old adage "All that glitters is not gold".
Every school has a lady teacher or two, who are born under the Irritation Constellation and no matter how well you perform, the maximum appreciation that you can get from them is a smirk or if you are lucky enough, maybe even a throat clearance.
Air India has a policy of hiring precisely such individuals as their air hostesses after they retire from the schools.
And as luck would have had it, it seemed my flight was the chosen one for the Annual General Body Meeting of all these individuals.

As I entered the flight, two of them stood with hands folded to welcome us, but with an expression so forlorn that it seemed to convey that they would be much happier if I just turned away and went back home.
Unconvincingly I scrambled my way to the seat and while I made a desperate attempt to accommodate myself in the cramped space which was just about enough for a honeymooning rat couple, I also discovered that the flight had no personalised entertainment system.
An unwritten disclaimer seemed to be floating in the air conveying that if you are so eager to watch the movie which would play on the blurred wide screen a quarter of a mile away, then Air India will not take responsibility for any broken necks or twisted shoulders.
I compromised with my situation. I was flying economy class you see.
I at least had the window seat and could play Cloud-Cloud-Foosh-Foosh after so many days. (Details of this game in some later post)

The flight was scheduled for 9:30 pm and departed some time around 11 pm which was quite acceptable by international standards.
I had had a very hectic day and before long fell asleep, wondering if it was some new company policy to deprive economy class passengers from any sort of food or beverages during the flight.
As one can imagine, it is mighty difficult to sleep in an airplane seat in that crouched position and particularly when the person in front of you thought is wise to kick you viciously every time your sleepy feet intruded so much as half an inch into her territory. She was around 235 years old I think and the strength of her kick made me check out whether she was actually using a hammer or rock to hit at my feet. Satisfied that it was only her foot, we smiled at each other and I went along in my attempt to catch some sleep still wondering if it would be bad manners to ask the air hostess for some food as I was pretty hungry by then.
However the indifferent and extremely constipated look of the air hostess attending to our rows held me back from requesting anything, lest she come and beat me up.

The food did come eventually after some passengers started to queue up in front of the pantry cabin with their tiffin boxes in hand.
I was so sleepy by then that I hardly understood what I ate and it may well have been the leather of the seat that I actually ate, thinking it to be meat.
I could see Salman Khan gyrating away in a movie with a very silly looking dwarfish Anupam Kher and thus realising that everything was still normal in the world, finally went off to sleep in such a state of coil that I was on the threshold of being disqualified as a vertebrate.

But before long, I was all awake again and there were these sun rays dancing all over me in some mad mad glory ....Inspite of being in an extreme state of grogginess,I was pretty sure that it could not have been more than an hour since the lady in front had last kicked me and surely it could not be morning so soon.
It was then, that the faint corner of my brain, which still remembers that I have been a student of science at some point of time, started throbbing very hard and I realised that I was actually travelling east at around 1000 kilometers per hour.The sun had already risen where we were now.
Rarely has a truth dawned upon me with more ferocity.

The screen told me that it was Iraq that we were flying over and somehow from my seat up there, everything seemed so calm and picturesque down below with beautiful red mountains climbing up to kiss the skies and the tributaries of what may have been the mighty Tigris or Euphrates pirouetting with unbound gaiety and childlike curiosity, lending the whole picture a touch of pristine beauty.

The person who sat in the front seat (probably the son of the Foot-Killer Lady) also had trouble sleeping and thought that the best way to kill time would be to start a conversation with me at 3 am in the morning and initiated it by asking me if I was going to Kolkata !!!!!
With the help of some frantic sign language I made him understand that I could not speak in English or Hindi or Bengali and uttered some gibberish and shouted "Malliallum wonly".
He gave a very dejected look as he got up in his search of some other prey...
(Forgive me my Mallu friends, for I knew not what I was doing.)
I called for the air hostess and asked if I may have another blanket as the screen had just flashed the outside temperature to be -63 degrees centigrade.
"Certainly Sir, as long as the business class guests do not ask for one" was not what she said but must have meant when she uttered "Sure", for it took her around 3 hours more to bring me the extra blanket.
The sleepless man soon found out that no one was really interested in his friendly overtures and came back to his seat waking his mother instead, who cursed him so loud that he may well suffered a nervous breakdown.
He looked back at me for sympathy and I scowled back with tongue out and squinted eyes.

I usually avoid using a toilet while in a plane. Not because its a public one but primarily because of my fear of the flushing mechanism that they employ. It is one of the scariest man-made things and certainly not safe for thin people like me who run a grave risk of being sucked away into space under the sheer force of the mechanism, which actually seems more like a statement of protest made by the pot for our audacity to have peed on it.
"So you filthy man, you peed on me ..did you ?? .Relieved the stress of your bladder on me...eh ?? ...And how do you think I felt about it...you rotten human being..? Now take this and this and this ...as the gushing sound seemingly thrashes us thoroughly for all our effrontery.
However a 10 hour flight was too long a test for the bladders and no sooner did I use the flush that I ran for all my life only to find that they were re-running the Salman movie again !!!
I was left wondering if being sucked by a sanitary pot would have been the less painful way to die.

We soon entered into Indian airspace and one could feel a distinct change in the emotion on board.
While the pilot drew our attention to the far away Himalayas which seemed like a marble fortress guarding the frontiers of her kingdom with all her raw might, I was equally thrilled to see the Ganges traversing its long and magnificent journey towards its final destination of the Bay of Bengal.
Breakfast was on time. The movie had finally ended. The sleepless man seemed comatose. I had hidden one of his mother's sandals in her hand baggage and the air hostess twirled her upper lip while serving me tea which I took for a smile.
In Rowling's language ..All was well.

With no further incidents worth blogging about, the plane touched down at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport, Kolkata at 12:30 pm in the afternoon. It was right on time.
After the customary custom declarations where I did not declare 4 mobile phones, 2 digital cameras, a sony handycam, 3 ipod nanos, a diamond ring and a Sony home theatre, none of which I was carrying anyway, I came out and was soon mobbed by a dozen cab drivers each yelling and jostling at his best to catch hold of the
'phoren returned'.....

I had arrived in India after one and a half years and it felt good to be back home.

Will you kindly cover your face with a hanky when you bark !

There are no street dogs in England. Technically speaking every dog in this country has a comfortable house to live in with a caring owner to take care of all his worldly needs.
I see different species of dogs everyday while walking to my office.
(Yes I can't afford a car even in Britain and all donations are welcome and would be tax exempted under the Help-the-Extremely Poor-Desis Act of UK).

Anyway coming back to the subject in hand, the English take their pets very seriously and it clearly shows when they bring them out for their daily walks every morning. While all are invariably well groomed with shining hairs and pedicured toes, the more pampered ones would be decked up in ribbons, hair bands, bow ties and even bandanas. Often they make me feel grossly underclothed.

All this attention and care however seems to have domesticated this species more than their wolf forefathers would ever have imagined in their wolfest of dreams.
There is something so very serene and calm about the dogs here that I have started to believe that it may well be only the sinners in the dog community who actually are condemned to bark at people or other dogs.
Those who go on to bite a person surely belong to the lowest strata in their social hierarchy or so the attitude of dogs in England makes me feel.

The British politeness which at times is nothing short of genocidal has penetrated deep into the psychology of the dogs here as well.

In India when owners take their dogs out for a walk, their direction is usually at the mercy of the animal and his subject of interest on that day.
While some day, Tommy would think it wise to rush in search of that fascinating looking frog in those hideous bushes while of course nearly strangulating his master in the process, on some other days, it may well be his desire to chase all the auto rickshaws in town leaving his master in a state of severe distortion and unwanted elasticity.
So though the chain may well be on the dog, it is usually the owner who seems to be dancing to the tunes of the chained.
Also when two such enthusiastic individuals happen to meet each other, they would politely exchange a few harmless expletives seemingly questioning each others family credentials and go along in their task of finding the best car to urinate upon.

Thus while on one hand our Indian dogs have earned a repute for thier uncouthness and utter lack of manners, their British counterparts, on the other would resemble more like the convent educated, finishing school outputs with an air of that all pervading sophistication.

An example of a typical conversation between two English dogs on a sunny morning would go somewhat like this :

Mr.Nobarker- "Good Morning Ms.Lacie, it is a mighty pleasure to see you on this beautiful morning."
Miss Lacie - "Good Morning Mr.Nobarker...Oh how honoured am I to meet you.I hope you're doing well."
Mr.Nobarker- "Very well indeed thank you. Please allow me to pay my compliments to nature on that lampost near you."
Miss Lacie- "Oh you are so kind."(smiling coquettishly).
Mr.Nobarker - "Also may I just make an effort to admonish this very insolent fly who has been continuosly bothering your behind?"
Miss Lacie - "Oh you are so kind. Pray proceed."
Mr.Nobarker - "Miss Lacie, this fragrance is wonderful, is it Davidoff or Elizabeth Arden ?"
Miss Lacie- "Oh Mr.Nobarker, You always flatter me so. Why don't you join us for lunch today? Mother has dug out some vintage cat bones and would be so delighted to see you."
Mr.Nobarker- "Oh that wonderful old bitch...she always had such a knack for searching bones..didn't she? I'll be pleased to come.
After all its raining cats and bones for lunch isnt it ...Har Har Har !"
(Note : Such attempts at humour have landed many Englishmen in jail)

Khooni Sheena and Dada GullyRaja from Kurla East also happened to meet in the morning and their conversation went somewhat like this.
Disclaimer - The blogger takes no responsibility of the kind of language used below and has merely presented a transliteration of the actual dialouge.

Dada GullyRaja-- "Kameeni kahan thi raat bhar, bulaya tha peet khujane ko..aayee kyon nahi??"
Khooni Sheena -- "Aye chirkut, bhankas band kar re...subhe se waisich dimaag ka pech dhila hoyela hain"
Dada GullyRaja -- "Kayko fuljhari ban rakhi hain be???..Kisi Pandu ne laath maarke uthaya kya tereko ya subhe subhe Chatri Gang se panga le ke aa reli hain ??? "
Khooni Sheena -- "Are Nahi re ..Gayi thi Bandra Kurla ka chakkar lagane ko...Wohan Memsahab log morning vaak karne ko aata hain aur jaate jaate Biskoot bhi khilata hain aisa mereko woh Langda Tony bola..."
Dada GullyRaja -- "Phir ?"
Khooni Sheena -- "To apun jaake pahucha ...do teen aunty log baithele bhi the....Ek do baar paas jakar poonch hilakar Vyajantimala jaisa haseen bhi diya ..pan sala biskoot to kya ek mumphali tak nahi diya aur upar se Shooo Shooo Dirty Dog, Dirty Dog karge bhaga diya.....Khaali Peeli neend khoti kiya saala..
Aur dekh kismat apun ka ....Usi time me Moonicipalty wale bhi aakar sab Garbage lekar kalti...Kal woh Chopra ke wohan chicken bana tha ....Chamaila...ek haddi tak nahi mila...."
Dada GullyRaja --"Hmmm...bad day.....chal apun jaata hain abhi...Woh Kurla sewage ka Naala kiske territory me aata hain uska decision hain aaj.....apun ke favour me nahi gaya na to kutton ki maut marunga salon ko."
Khooni Sheena- "Chal phoot le."



While Miss Lacie would have a delightful lunch and look forward to a cozy siesta in her new Danish Design Snozeee bed, Khooni Sheena would consider it lucky if she managed to fight out a piece of rotten bread for herself and is not run over by a speeding truck by the end of the day.

The world is so diverse isn't it?

Freedom of Speech- Article 19

While casually roaming around in search of some Bong movies available in YouTube I chanced upon such a fascinating foreword to one of the old Bengali classics that I could not resist giving it a wider audience.

The movie is question is "Saat Pake Bandha" of 1963 starring Soumitra Chaterjee as the lead actor while the all-time beauty Suchitra Sen played the heroine's role. This movie was also remade in Hindi a few years later and named Kora Kagaz which starred Vijay Anand and Jaya Bhaduri in the lead roles.

The original Bengali movie directed by Mr.Ajay Kar brilliantly captured the angst and pain of two individuals in a failed marriage and their stoic acceptance of their destiny.
Suchitra Sen became the first Indian woman to win the best actress award at an international film festival when she was bestowed the honour in the Moscow International Film Festival for her performance in this movie.

The fantastical foreword to this movie which can be found here read as follows and I quote completely.

"The movie “Saat Pake Bandha” is one of good movie of 1963 in Bengali language that have ever made.The directors of this movie KAR and Ajoi had set the story that are related to our society. This movie starred with the popular bengali actress “Soumitra Chatterjee” also carries some real moral lessons to the society as well to the whole world.
The story is about Soumitra Chatterjee, the daughter of Subrata Chatterjee who performed her role like a real. In this movie she fell in love with a poor professor of the college eventhough she is from a rich family.But their love story is not acceptable to her mother and opposes their marriage.
But Soumitra who is crazy in the love of the professor, marriages the professor against her mother wishes.But at the end of the movie she eventually realises the value of her own marriage, and tries to repair relationships which is the main storyline of this movie.
This movie provides full entertainment to the audience with a message that love is the most valuable thing in the world than the money…and there wouldn’t be any status of rich and poor in the real love and cannot be break out easily"

Maybe the legendary and enigmatic Suchitra Sen who now lives a life, completely alienated from the public eye could be enticed to come out of her life of seclusion, should this charming article ever happen to reach her.
As for the 72 year old veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee, I am sure news of a gender change at this age would not be very beneficial for his health.

Hats off to the genius who wrote this article.

Rashtrapati ya Rashtrapatni ??

When I was in junior school, the school authorities bought a piece of land just adjacent to our school building to give young kids like us, more space to hone our sporting skills and that we surely did with full enthusiasm. We innovated on some very popular games like the farthest-spitter event and the tadpole-catching competition which however wasn't too well received by my mother when she saw her water-storage tank playing host to around eighteen well-caught-future-frogs. They all went down the drain and with them my ambitions to one day become the world's leading frog-breeder.

However what was remarkable about all these games was the manner in which they spread and caught on with the fancy of the entire school.
So while a few weeks would see numerous squatting huddles engaged in very serious games of marbles, the next weeks would see the entire school divided in groups with each banging their Hot-Wheel cars head-on to see whose wouldn't overturn.
Often the head banging could not be restrained to the toy cars alone and after around five or six hospitalisations, a new game such as Fart-Jumping would crop up from nowhere and all would be friends again.
(**--Many such wierd things happen in all boys schools most of which are kept under wraps to leave us happily with the illusion that we are still civilised.)

The whimsical and fairly ridiculous manner in which we came up with our games however fades in comparison to the fascinating selection process adopted by our politicians over the last few weeks to choose a candidate, competent enough to be our country's next President.

I hereby briefly touch upon the profiles of some of the candidates whose names have cropped up in this presidential race.
Guest appearances in this race by stalwarts such as Amitabh Bachchan and Narayan Murthy did not qualify them to merit a mention in this list.

Somnath Chatterjee
This angry old man of Indian politics who started his political career in the early seventies has a kind of ever-frowning face that would make you think that either his favourite underwear is being stolen every morning or that he suffers for chronic piles.
In his position as the speaker of the Lok Sabha, he holds the record for having staged more walk-outs than all the other MPs put together.
A cartoonist's delight, this man's desire to be the next President of India has been chosen as India's official entry in this year's list of 10 most hilarious comments made by a politician.

Dr.Karan Singh
This scholarly gentleman's existence in the Congress party is acknowledged every 5 years whenever there is a question of shortlisting candidates for the presidential post and he too very well knows that he will never be really chosen and instead spends his time authoring autobiographical books with extremely relevant titles such as 'Brief Sojourn' and 'A Tryst with History'.
This periodic media attention seems to be the only candy offered to him for his unquestionable alleigance to the Gandhi family which goes to such extents that he is rumoured to have undergone surgery to stitch the Nehru cap to his skull.
Of course he has also been appointed the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Cell of the Congress Party and his personal website summarises his position as follows:
"In this capacity he is present whenever a visiting Head of Government calls upon the Chairperson of UPA, Shrimati Sonia Gandhi, or when she calls upon visiting Heads of Government."
Rarely has a former king been bestowed with more gracious a post.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Mr Vajpayee, the poet-politician was the choice of the Trinamool Congress, a party whose only contribution towards social welfare till date has been in the field of calling statewide bandhs thus giving the people of West Bengal a well deserved mid-week paid holiday every now and then.
Their dimunitive leader Ms.Mamata Banerjee whose histrionics in the public arena is the basis of many a Bollywood movie script however could not pull this one off for though she had been advised that bachelors invariably suffer from senile dementia after 75, Mr.Vaypayee held on to his wits and politely declined the offer. The party is considering on a West Bengal Bandh on this issue soon.

Sushil Kumar Shinde
Elementary geometry books often use his face to describe a perfect circle.This man who sports a goatee in his head however was never a serious contender and his name was proposed primarily to fill the OBC quota in the presidential nominee list.

Shivraj Patil
Our Home minsiter was actually out in the market to choose the right design for his new name plate to be used in the Rashtrapati Bhawan when he received a call from Dr.Manmohan Singh's PA who said " Non sarete il presidente Sig.Patil" (Italian is the lingua franca of the Indian Cabinet these days) which translated to "You will not be the president Mr.Patil".
This soft spoken, former Lok Sabha Speaker who often uses the powerful weapon of his stern looks and stony silence to counter Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Al-Jaish terrorist threats, reacted to this message in his typical fashion and has dutifully gone back to his daily routine of political inaction and professional inefficiency.
After the bomb blasts in Delhi on the eve of Diwali, this man who aspired to be the Supreme Commander of the Indian armed forces was quoted to have said
"I appeal to the people to please go back to their families immediately. They will feel secure when they see their relatives."
Although retirement for Indian politicians is considered unconstitutional, this man if he ever thinks of quitting active politics, would be best advised to not take on a career as a motivational speaker.

Pranab Mukherjee
He has been the country's Finance Minister,Defence Minister,External Affairs minister and is currently the Foreign Affairs minister.With no other top ministry in sight, and the Prime Ministership not on offer, he thought of becomming the President of India and got all his Bengali comrade friends to support his candidature. Soniaji who is rumoured to have a memory stronger than that of many elephants put together, sweetly reminded him of two things. First he had opposed the Congress's choice of Mr.Rajiv Gandhi as the next Prime Minister of India after Indira Gandhi's death in 1984. Second his experience in governance is so highly indispensable and so very invaluable to the UPA government that it would be quite impossible to let him go.
Soon after he was seem roaming in the corridors of the Parliament House listening to Mukesh's all time hit song "Jaoon Kahan bata aye dil...Sonia badi hain Sangdil... Gaandhee aayee ghar jalane....Sujhe na koi manzil....""

Bhairon Singh Shekhawat
He is 84 years old and has 17 election victories and two open heart surgeries in his rather impressive resume. While most other people in the above list have been sidelined in this fascinating race, this man continues to run the marathon 'independantly' claiming to have some secret winning formula which goes beyond plain airthmetic. Maybe he is banking on the conscience vote factor but he would surely be aware of the loose sand he is building his hopes upon, for conscience is something which tops in the list of Ineligibilty Criteria to be an Indian politician.

Pratibha Patil
When people grow old in politics, they usually become Governors and lead the next 5 years of their life inaugurating everything that opens new in the state. Pratibha Patil was no exception to this rule and was leading a fairly ordinary politician's life with only one murder accused brother and a loan default of only Rs.17.5 crores. Once Mr.Shivraj Patil's candidature was rejected by the Left parties, the UPA government did a quick search in their database of other available Patils who would not mind naming any child born in their families after Soniaji. When the search results showed that all Patils in the Congress party were willing to do so, they thought of conducting a quick survey on some other fundamental aspects of Indian presidency. The questions were as follows :

a) Do you have the strength of character to take the firm decision that everything needs to be decided at the 10 Janpath residence?
b) Are you adept at changing nappies and willing to baby-sit Priyanka's children during the 2009 elections?
c) Do you know the difference between Oregano and Orangutan.

Though the last question filtered out most of the contenders, yet when no clear choice emerged out of the survey, Soniaji decided to take matters in her own hands and she came up with that one defining criterion which she felt must be their in any individual who was aspiring to be the head of the largest democracy in the world which was
He/She should have seen and communicated with an actual ghost!!


(Hasn't surrealism always been an integral factor in Indian politics ?)
And it is here that Mrs.Pratibha Patil Shekhawat beat all other contenders and raced ahead to be the official UPA nominee for India's next President.
With her exhaustive and entensive knowledge on both Indian and Italian culture and history, she indeed seems to be the most eligible candidate to replace the Padma Bhushan, Padma Vibhushan and Bharat Ratna awardee and current president Dr.Abdul Kalam.
Her husband who in all likelihood is going to have the rather dubious distinction of being the first male 'First-Lady' of our country was quoted as saying "We are in a state of shock" and for once, I think we can completely empathise with this gentleman.

This completes my humble effort to touch upon the profiles of these luminaries and any hint of sarcasm anywhere in this post is purely speculative on the part of the reader and absolutely unintentional.

Jai Hind .

O for Orkut

Google has a company policy which allows its engineers "20 percent time" in which they're free to pursue personal projects which aren't necessarily related to their official assignments.
This according to Google creates a healthy environment for creativity to prosper.
Of course our Indian companies need not come up with such policies as we already spend around 35% of our time in office on our personal interests and an additional 45% on that of our colleagues'.

Anyway one of the employees of Google made use of this time to create a networking site which he not very modestly named after himself Orkut.
Thankfully he chose to leave out his surname Büyükkökten from the address of the site as having to type in the text www.orkutBüyükkökten.com each time to log into a socialising and networking site would have soon led many to severe demophobia and chronic depression.

Soon after the public release of the site, it was alleged by his previous employer, Affinity Engines, that he had created something similar while he was working in their company and they filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that the code of Orkut was infact theirs.
Rumours have it that Google pulled a few strings here and there, bribed a few judges, kidnapped a handful of relatives of the CEO of Affinity Engines and thus amicably settled the lawsuit out of court.
It is such gentlemanly behaviour of these large companies that must truly be appreciated.

Orkut surely has come a long way since then.
In early April 2007, the number of users having an Orkut profile was over 49 million, majority of whom hail from Brazil and India- two visionary countries who are contemplating laws which would soon make it a criminal offence for its citizens to not have an orkut account.

Nowadays in our Hindi film industry, they do not anymore make movies of the type of "Yaadon ki Baarat" (The Bridegroom's party of Memories) where 3 brothers, separated at childhood recognise each other and finally reunite after around 20 years by singing that common song which their composer and lyricist mother had so affectionately taught them just minutes before she was shot dead by masked dacoits. So ecstatically did they come running to embrace each other after thorough mutual verification of the lyrics from a distance that one would have to be a true stone-hearted demon or an employee of my company to not shed a tear at this emotional reunion.
(While true stone-hearted demons do not cry, we in our company exhaust all our tears on the days we get our salary.)

In one of the other masterpieces, the elder brother takes a very difficult vow to never have anything to do with water again as he had been separated from his kid brother while he had gone to fetch some drinking water for him !!
No wonder that they named that movie Haath ki Safai or Cleanliness of the Hands.
(See, tissues never really caught the fancy of the Indian public.)

Anyway Orkut addresses such potential hardships brilliantly.

No longer do you have to rely on songs and fortune to find your long lost loved ones. A simple search in Orkut is all that you need, for there is rarely anyone who does not have a profile page in Orkut today.
What accounts for its huge popularity is probably the concept of open profiles where anyone and everyone can browse and read your personal messages, take a peek at your photo albums and drop in their own messages as well.
(No Ma, they cannot wash my dishes and do the cooking for me.)

This unique opportunity to discreetly invade the privacy of other people under the pretension of socializing was too good to let go. Quite naturally you would come across many known faces while carelessly wandering around here and there.

There are many kinds of characters that you would meet in this wonderfully interesting forum some of which are discussed below:

The Evolutionary kind:
Do you faintly remember that fat kid from junior school who used to fervently dig his nose with all his ten fingers as if in anticipation of excavating some gold from there? He is there in orkut and has pictures with a lady so beautiful that you would want to go back to those days and dig his nose for him, for maybe just an introduction with her.

The Missed-the-boat kind:
The doe-eyed girl who gave you those coyish and inviting looks in your tuition class but whom you could never manage to ask out is also there. You look at her album and there is a wonderful photograph where she is seen hugging a cute chimpanzee in a beach in Pattaya.
While you are admiring her love for wildlife, a small caption below the photograph saying 'Me and my cho chweet husband' would affect your attention momentarily.

The Friends:
This extremely interesting creed is in abundance in orkut. Frustration is given a new dimension by this junta. All you need is a name resembling a female and if you have a picture as well then you are done for.
The brigade would march up in full force to pay their respects.
Some actual extracts are jotted below.

First Stage:
Scrap - "hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii girl king wanna ur freind"

Scrap - "I know I m stranger 4 u.may b u have some problem to b my friend.
I think friendship is the word which introduce two strangers and bond them in a lovely relation called “FRIENDSHIP”."
(Wow did anyone know this about friendship???)

Scrap - "hi.how are you ya.i am dude from Kurnool no.i want to be your friend ya.
if you agree than
........plzzz reply me
else if dont agree than
........also plzz reply me ya
else I sorry no.
(Syntax Error: Endif statement Missing !!! And is this guy from Kurnool or not ?)

Intermediate Stage
Scrap - "Why no reply...am I not coal?
(No,you are bitumin and tar my friend... why restrict yourself to just coal!)

Scrap - "I think I have wastting my time,by disturbing you.........
anyways,if you can`t reply......delete your self."
(Just how exactly does one delete oneself ????)

Final stage
My personal favourite in this category is this one

Scrap - "wat a person u r guess i pitty.................to the guy...........................anways wats up ........................???"
(Last ditch efforts by attacking the ego I guess)

And did I read somewhere that Orkut is an old Turkish word that means city of happiness, pleasure, joy and luck ?????

There is then this concept of communities where a group of people with some common interests get together to share and discuss views on a common platform.
So we have varied communities like Funny incidents in Dentistry (2,559 members), I hate Greg Chappel (2,885 members), Down with Apostrophe Abus'e! (721 members), A Glass of water (5,653 members), Alcohol improves my english (4,059 members), George Bush´s Penis (853 members !!!!), Men are big pigs! (109 members ), Why are girls so dumb? (1,855 members), This Is Not A Community (65,938 members) and so on.

Indeed this is a motley and colourful congregation here and for people like me who are reluctantly social,this site is just the answer to our prayers.
No more do you have to go through lengthly telephone calls or emails to get to the point.
Scrapping is the new Mantra !!!
"Hi wanna frenship ?"

Felis Silvestris Catus -II

The IIMs are always in the national news.
If its not about a 22 year old fresher plucking out all the nostril hairs of the 42 year old bum who got the Rs.38 lacs/annum job offer while he could only manage a Rs.8 lac one, it has to be about some over-enthusiastic house-fly which managed to land itself in some soup or the other there.

Recently ofcourse the OBC quota issue has hogged most of the liimlight.
With the government of India being made to pull their ears and do sit-ups by the Supreme Court on this issue, the IIM administration is at a loss again.
Though the institutes have complete autonomy on most issues of the college like deciding on who the milkman will be in the hostels ; for some insignificant policy decisions like student admissions they are bound to follow what Mrs Phulki Debi, the 89 year old deaf mother-in law of the minister of state for Tribal affairs, hallucinates on Saturday evenings.

The journey of the management-aspirants till this stage is briefly touched upon here.

The two of you who read my blogs may remember that I left my discussion on this exam process here when this crowd of MBA aspirants gets demarkated into two categories.
One who would sleep peacefully for the next 4 months and the other who would not.

For this group of Jawans, once the euphoria of the written results has passed away and Chunnu ki Ma has been to his house 4 times reminding his mother of how fortunate she was to have borne a magnificent child like him, the reality of the task ahead would slowly dawn upon him.
There is still a group discussion and personal interview in a months time where a panel of usually three nutty professors play chinese checkers and the one who loses gets to bang the heads of the other two. After 3 hours of this activity, they come to take the interviews.

Pagalguy.com, an online mental institution camouflaged as a web portal provides just the kind of platform that the Jawans need to prepare for this stage of the admission process.

Stage 1- Preparation
Forums have topics as below :
First timers :
1. Can I wear my favourite Orange and Yellow shirt to the interview ....please ? (26 replies)
2. Are we allowed to pull the hairs of and claw at other candidates in a Group discussion ? (454 replies)
Veterans:
3. Hey Rocker, is Prof Jagadish Murthy in the panel for Mumbai this time ? (8 replies)
Moderators:
4. IIM Calcutta has not issued any directive that all interview takers will need to take a bath with Margo soap only before coming for the interview. As last year it was Margo and Hamaan so we have no reason to think that this has changed this time.
(Members spreading such wrong information will be banned permanently. Ha ha !)
5. Pschyometric tests if any, will not test whether you are insane. So you're safe.
6. There would be invigilators from the HRD ministry in the interview halls to see that there is no discrimination being done on the basis of your nose-picking habits and belching disorders or even the length of your footnails.

Stage 2 - GD and Interviews
New thread added at 3 a.m. in the morning some hours before the first interview :
Veterans
Prof. Mule , Prof Mukherjee alongwith Prof Khandelwal's pet dog were seen in the airport today evening.Man we are done for this time !! Please post your GD and interview experiences asap.
New thread added at 5.14 a.m. in the morning some hours before the first interview :
First Timers
Urgent. Hello Please post your GD and interview experiences asap.My bowels are jamming.
New thread added at 6.03 a.m. in the morning some hours before the first interview :
First Timers
Very urgent.Hello Please post your GD and interview experiences asap.I think I will faint.

This goes on till we have some frustrated software engineer sitting in his client location in Japan jotting down 'his' GD and personal interview experiences.

Hi,
My interview and GD went quite well I think.
The GD topic was " When will Arjun Sing ?"

There were a lot of civilized discussions and when the the third sonofabitch and the F-word was heard , Prof Mule (the shorter one) let loose Prof Khandelwal's dog amongst us and sanity prevailed.

My interview was even better infact:
Prof Mukherjee - Surname ?
I- Mishra.
Prof Mule: Are there any places where we can take Prof Khandelwal's dog for his potty ?
I - Yes sir there is the Gateway of India which was built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary and was built between 1911 -1924.
Prof Mule - ok ok...how far is it ?
I- Sir would you need it in foot, meters,yard or furlongs ?
Prof Khandelwal's dog (clearly under pressure) - Gnarl Gnarl !!!
I- 10 mins walk Sir.
Prof Mule - Say something about Terrain Contour Matching Navigation system and Digital Scene-Mapping Area Correlator used in cruise missiles .
I- Can I take the dog out for the walk instead sir ?
Prof Mule-Yes you may and that will be all. you may go now. Thank you.

I- Sir can we do this one more time please ?
Prof Mukherjee - Surname ?
I- Lumbeechu
Prof Mule- Hello my son . How are you today ?
I- Not too bad...kind of hot in here ..
Prof Mukherjee - Would you like some tea or coffee, my son ?
I- Beer would be good !
Prof Mule to Prof Khandelwal's dog - Go get Beer !!
Prof Mule - So what does your father do, my son...?
I- He is the Additional District Collector of Hingoli district.
Prof Mukherjee - Oh how unfair !! Such discrimination in this 21st century. Unthinkable.
Prof Mule - You must have had a very oppressed childhood isn't it with no proper schooling and means of expressing your natural self ?
I- Yes indeed so, The dean of the Doon school in Dehradun was a real pain in the ass at times you know. He didn't allow us to stage the play titled "Say of the Gay".
Prof Mukherjee - Ahem...Indeed such disbalance and disparity in the society must be done away with immediately.
Prof Mule- Son , can you name 2 of your subjects from class 12 ?
I- Yeah sure Physics and Sociology
Prof Mukherjee - Excellent Excellent.
Prof Mule- Its really an honour to have you in our institute. If you wish, you can join the campus placements right away. We have forced the Lehman Brothers to reserve their offers for such exceptionally talented people like you, who have been so unjustly held back in their march to progress by unscrupulous meritorious candidates.
Prof Mukherjee- Yes yes Down with merit.
Prof Khandelwal's dog - Woof Woof !!

Stage 3 - The Wait
This is the most familiar phase for the Jawans. Anyone who has been to an engineering college would know how to react when he hears "Semester results are to be declared this evening".
If its the first time he hears it, it usually means that the professor has just received the answer sheets and is waiting for the inevitable annual visit of his wife's now 9-year old nephew to whom he will give them to be corrected.
Aakhir Sale ke bachche hote kisliye hain .

Around the 34th time when an engineer hears that results are to be declared that day, does he walk upto the administrative building and gets to see his results. I remember mine in the 4th semester which came with some additional inputs from my professors:

Subject 1 - Marks 41 ---"A half-eaten Parle-G buscuit is not considered as bribe to the examiner these days."
Subject 2 - Marks 36 ---"Beta nikal gaye haath se isbaar."
Subject 3 - Marks 38 --- "Sexual intercourse is not the answer I was looking at to the question 'Give a few examples of Heat and Mass transfer reactions .' "
Subject 4 - Marks 45 --- "Illustrate Carnot cycle does not mean drawing a Carrot plant and a Tobu cycle beside it."
Subject 5 - Marks 54 --- "Shit, Pee and Fart" are not examples of solid, liquid and gaseous micronutrient fertilizers."
Subject 6 - Marks 48 -- "Expecto Patronum ,Expelliarmus and Crucio are still not the steps in a Acid/base Oxidation-Reduction titration."
Ah those were the days when the professors really cared for you !

Anyway coming back to the subject at hand, our group of Jawans now expectantly wait for April 21st, the date announced by the IIMs when Mrs.Phulki Debi is expected to have her next set of hallucinations.

Wishing them all the best in this endeavour to be a manager.

World Cup --- Chapter !

My highest score in cricket during my 20 years of glittering playing career is a remarkable 12 which I scored against a very strong bowling opposition of three girls, two of whom bowled underarm while the third attempted to bowl over arm with an action and expressions similar to that of a drowning project manager who apart from not knowing how to swim, suddenly remembers during those last frantic moments that he has not yet applied for the reimbursement of the canteen bill for yesterday's dinner and has also forgotten to disapprove the leave plans of Mahesh and Aniruddha and approve that of Ragini and Jyothika.

As far as my bowling is concerned, although I may not have taken wickets that regularly (a lifespan being a unit of my regularity), but I assure you that I am quite a terror with a cricket ball in my hand.
Strangely, after a pretty decent runup for a person with my degree of lankiness, once out of my hand, the ball attains a brain of its own with an uncanny desire to epitomise Camus' abstruse philosophy of The Rebel. If I aim the ball at the stumps, it usually reaches the second slip (full toss) and if direction is not a cause for rebellion on a day, then the ball usually soars just 5 feet above the stumps....Barely missing them, a cynical reporter would say but we sportsmen do not usually react to media reports as it affects our performance.
During one such flight of one of my deliveries, the late nature poet William Wordswoth appeared and parting the clouds, sonorously recited the following lines dedicating them to my ball.***

"Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?"
***(I mean the cricket ones...you naughty one)

Anyway without sounding too pompous (psst..I have held 3 catches also ....okay 2), I would delve on the news piece which caught my attention today.

The Board of Cricket Control of India is truly a master when it comes to understanding the game of cricket and the concerns of our often run-parched, performance-dry and advertisement-hungry national cricketers.

It was announced today that a team of National Security Commandoes who provide Z-category security to our politicians (to avoid being lynched by the common man) , alongwith a Bomb Disposal squad would accompany the cricketers during their month long all-expenses paid vacation to the Carribeans which some senior members have been told also coincides with the World Cup dates !!!!
Some players have of course voiced their displeasure at this odd coincidence and while squarely blaming Jagmohan Dalmiya for this fiasco are suggesting having a relook at their contracts once they come back from their vacation. Their argument is plain and simple : No one works during vacations apart from Indian software engineers.

The Ministry of External Affairs have said that the commandoes will accompany the players everywhere they go.
I mean, isn't this streching it a bit too far? Was this really necessary ?
We understand that the BCCI is aware of the level and kind of performance that this team will dish out and thus is naturally bent on taking all necessary precautions for the safety of the players.
For if they are harmed, who will wear those Nike T-Shirts and on whose underwear will Sahara print its logo and pay an additional Rs.10 cr for that must-display clause in the contract.
We completely understand and empathise with the BCCI's cause and concerns but commandoes and Bomb Disposal squads?
When Salman Khan can live without fear in India after genocidal performances in movies like Hello Brother,Lucky and Maine Pyar Kyon Kiya to name a few, what fear should Indian cricketers have ?
We Indians have accepted failure and mediocrity as a way of our lives isn't it so why bother.

This is a complete waste of money I think, just like the Rs.4,680 crore provision allocated for the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water commission and the Rs.720 crore allocated for the Rural Sanitation Campaign in the Union Budget of 2007-2008.
While the money in the first Drinking Water scheme would attempt to quench the undying thirst of a few party workers of the late Prime Minsiter whose name adorns the scheme, the second would of course be used in such a manner that the Finance Minister will have to allocate more funds under the same head of Sanitation next year to clean the filth resulting from the misuse of the funds in this year.This is cyclical and we Indians accept this.
Similarly I am sure sending out Black Cat commandoes with the cricket team too is unnecessary and a sheer wastage of the taxpayer's money.

On seeking the opinion of a few members of the side on this latest development their reaction were as follows :

Rahul Dravid : "Ya ,the boys are performing well now and we are confident that we will beat Bermuda.......The commandoes can come back during the Super 8 stage. Great to have Ganguly back in the side."

Sachin Tendulkar : "Ya, I mean its fine you know. Well ah yes....I can use one commando as my runner you know. Ha ha..."
"He can open fire when I am given out. Sharad Pawar has told me so. Great to have Ganguly back in the side."

Anil Kumble: "No comments" ....(Thinking )...."If I bribe 3 of them and get them to frighten Chappel, then maybe I can get to play the Bermuda game. ...Do they tap thoughts too these days? "

Virendra Sehwag : "Mere pass Ma hain ............"

Greg Chappel :(Shouting) "Well it'll be tough to beat the Australians with just bats and balls and 4 pairs of 33+ year old legs. Why don't you try to coach such a team without black cat commandoes..Huh"
Just as the cameraman raised his right hand to adjust the lens Chappel toned down taking him to be another Oriya slapper and added,
"We are open to ideas from all quarters which positively impact Indian cricket. Please don't get emotional.Great to have Ganguly back in the side."

Irfan Pathan: "Are you kidding me ? Do I have an option ? Vengsarkar Sahib has asked 4 of them to particularly point their guns at me when I am on the field."

Sourav Ganguly : "Ha ha ha ha ha .....Ha ha ha ha"...(Dancing like Mamta Kulkarni did in Karan Arjun and singing.......)........"Jai Ma Kali"
Sreesanth, Uthappa and Dinesh Karthik forming the rest of the dancing troupe.

Wishing the Indian team with all the best of luck for the World Cup.
They would need loads of it, to live upto even half the expectation of the Pakistanis.

An English fHairy Tale

I have never really been much of a haircut-friendly person.Infact I loathed them when I was a kid.
It was always a Sunday when I was virtually dragged out of the house and placed in charge of Tultulda, an otherwise very friendly acquaintance, who used to coax and cajole me to the dreaded saloon, often with grossly unfair means such as Amul Milk Chocolates.

All this, to make me sit on a queer chair with a curious looking Y shaped stick behind it which gently rested your head in its cusp while a heartless and shameless barber would meticulously gnaw away any remnants of a human look which you might have acquired since the last visit to his place.
Haircuts always left me very bruised mentally and an uncanny sensation of being without clothes in the street, lingered on for at least a week after the cut.

We usually had mutton as Sunday lunch which partially drowned my grief while Didi came up with sympathetic consolations of the kind that I should actually rejoice, knowing that the relatively less frontal tapering of my face clearly still distinguished me from porcupines and skunks.
After all what are elder sisters for!

The hair butchers charged Rs.5 for each such unwanted service then.
The last hair cut I had, cost me a whopping Rs.860.

No, Shilpa Shetty has not yet adopted me (inspite of me being able to pronounce her name correctly) nor was I under any vow for the past 13 years which disallowed any creature of the barber species to lay hands on my precious locks and thus my hair were not really celebrating any kind of Jata Sammelan which should have necessitated such an atrocious sum of money to have them dispersed.

It just happens that I am still in the United Kingdom where the creatively deranged are usually rehabilitated by the government and made barbers, who thus naturally charge such exhorbitant rates to showcase their art on our heads.

A haircutting session is usually a big occasion for us desi folks here.
A lot of planning goes into the event.Phone calls are made,discount deals are fished, appointments are taken. On D-Day which usually still is a weekend, we book cabs, often forsake lunch and sleep and all this, to again sit on another queer looking chair with another forky Y protruding behind it with all its devilry intact....
"Come child , if not be a son of Satan ,atleast look like one" written all over it.

The barbers here are much meaner than their counterparts back in India, to the extent that they have categorised inhuman looks into simple Roman numerals. 1,2,3,4 ...You just gotta pick your number and lo behold in less than 3 minutes you can look at yourself in the mirror and guffaw away at the creature in front of you.....so agonisingly trying to look human.

Human beings try to demarkate themselves from other animals in a lot of curious ways.
Not only are humans one of a kind in their ability to convert every season into a mating season by simple mental titillations but they are also the only in the animal kingdom with an uncanny fetish to cut their hair.
For the majority of the male kind, no sooner do the poor hairlings(*) get anywhere near the soft terrain of the neck after spending months attached to that hard bony cranium shell, will a scissor appear out of nowhere and have their dreams cut short.
* -- (Freedom of Blogger Speech Act)

And the curiosity does not end here.When after years of such suppression, the hair community voice their protest by suicide uprootings, men start crying foul.
While some spend a fortune in having a whole new generation of hair replanted on their scalps, the less fortunate have to do with wigs which most often than not originates from hair gathered from numerous horse tails !!!!
Can you beat that ? While you have your own, pay to get them cut and when all is gone, get some from a creature who used them for swatting flies and covering his excreta orifice all his life.
We humans are truly unique.

I so wish people spent more time,being smart than trying to look smart.
The world would surely be a more beautiful place that way.

Felis silvestris catus

A week back, the CAT results were announced.

For those of you fortunate enough to not have had a brush with this monstrosity, CAT stands for Common Aptitude Test,something that these Indian Institute of Management blokes hold once every year to have a good laugh with the complete expense borne by the participating jokers.This time round there were nearly quarter of a million of these jokers who usually come from all walks of life for their 2 (now 2 and a half) hours of tryst with destiny.
CAT is something like the Daddy-promise to get the He-Man toy on your birthday if you stay good for the next six months and do your homework everyday and help your mother out in the kitchen and.....and .....(Parents always have their camouflaged win-win conditions. don't they ?). Anyway quite similarly, this bunch of jokers slog for their He-Mans to come and make life simpler for them or so they believe.

These jokers,and I'd restrain the discussions to the ones originating from the engineering sector, hereby referred to as Jawans, usually start talking about CAT during their first years in college with the firm decision that they'd specialize only in finance and nothing else when in all probability,their extent of knowledge about the financial world is comparable to Mallika Sherawat's affinity for clothes.

Gradually once the ragging period is over though and no one anymore feeds them with information of the type that Balubhai who sells eggs in the First hostel is also an electrical engineering passout from the same college, the Jawans usually ease out and dedicate the next three years in search of pornography in the internet.

Then comes June of final year ...its 5 months to CAT and many rediscover their long subdued passion for feenance.This time round the Jawans come armed with loads of Business world magazines and months of Economic Times which all of course goes to Balubhai who uses it to demarcate his omlettes from the half-frys. Red paper-Omlette, White Paper-Half Fry.
Simple rule of finance.

The poor souls lead a non engineer's life during the next few months trying to figure out things like who was Ramu's father if his second cousin was married to Sheela who had three daughters, all females one of whom was a school teacher and neither of her cousins Jatin and Rani were doctors. The lawyers in the family were not vegetarians and Deepika was the only ShahRukh Khan fan. Their pet dog Jimmy was allergic to vodka without any lime cordial and Ramesh and Jiten were not brothers!!!
They compare and analyse the sugarcane production, wool generation and alluminium output of 12 South American countries with bar diagrams, histograms, Chi-Square tests, normality tests and remaining sanity.
The hapless souls burn many a candle to try and figure out what Carl Gustav Jung meant to say when he spoke of integrating spirituality and appreciation of the unconscious realm and then deciding whether the tone of the author in the paragraph was fuzzy,pedantic,obstreperous or regressionist.Four unknown words as choices are all that he had till last year! This year they added the choice Confucian and so now Jawan has 5 choices to direct his destiny.

Jawan takes simulated exams named after all available species of Cats and by the time he reaches the actual exam hall on a nice November Sunday morning, he can barely remember his name and it is for this purpose that such cases are provided an Admit card with a name, photograph and address so that people can help these poor souls find their way back home.

What happens during the next three odd hours will certainly need another post so I am skipping that portion here.

A month or so from that Sunday ,the results are announced in a website and if you wished to see your score on the same day that the results are released, then you might as well type the website's address, press enter and accompany your mother to her long awaited trip to Amarnath and on the way back maybe make the visit to Rishikesh and Haridwar and then if you've washed away some of your sins of this life and the one previous to it,then you may be blessed with the home page of the IIM on your return.

Now you may click the link which says CAT 2006 results and doesn't Dad always talk about the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and the serenity there? So why not make that visit with family and the Rameswaram temple is something to be seen to be believed !!

While some Jawans come back from their trips, type in their CAT registration number, ask their mothers their date of birth, type that in and wait for their results to appear.................................some just wink and go on with their lives.
There are dogs too you know !

Miles to go before you sleep.....seriously dude!!

I am completely exhausted.
Times of India,Garfield comics 1981 strips,the complete analysis of India-SA tour on howzzat.com and a few hundred harmless scraps in orkut. How much more work can an average software engineer be expected to do in a single day anyway? I am no software geek and get tired very soon.

There are moments,albeit rare,when I sit back and try to plan out a future for myself.Every bachelor has the ability to do so but few exercise it and mostly all end up marrying ,in the process losing all control over their cognitive abilities.
Well this depletion of intelligence quotient in the world is God's way of maintaining His Supremacy upon humans and so be it.

Recently during one of those days when I am saddled with work in office with tough deadlines to meet (Read as :www.jigzone.com) I thought of taking a break and searching something cool in wikipedia and lo behold I came up with Chaos Theory. Extremely sexy name for a theory ..what say ?
This is what it had to say in wikipedia and I quote :

(Note: Please read slowly as it took me close to 3 hours 18 minutes to untangle the knot my poor little diminished brain had got itself in after reading the below paragraph at normal reading speed)

"In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under certain conditions exhibit a phenomenon known as chaos. Among the characteristics of chaotic systems, described below, is the sensitivity to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of systems that exhibit chaos appears to be random, exhibiting an exponential error dispersion, even though the system is deterministic in the sense that it is well defined and contains no random parameters."

In simpler terms, we call it marriage !

Now you may re-read the definition above with the help of the following appendix :

Chaos - Ask any husband.
Nonlinear dynamical systems - Wives.
Butterfly effect - Their hysteria at the supposed nosie you make while eating with your mouth open.
Contains no random parameters -Do not have any external claws or visible fangs
Exponential error dispersion -Read on.

He : "Hi Darling I'm back"
She : "Did you get the laundry?"
He : "Well...ahem...you know ..lets see...I got this chorlmint for you"
She : "So you been smoking all day"
He : "Oh no no...so whats for dinner today dear.Shall we eat out today..something with a candlelight maybe"
She : "Your mother called"
He : "Oh what did she say?"
She : "She was worried that I am starving her son to death"
He : "Ha ha ..did she say that ?"
She : "No she said that your sister cooked Chicken Do Pyaza for Jijaji"
He : "Well..so"
She : "Sniff ...sniff..sob"
He : "What ??"
She : "Sniff..Sob Sobb..."
He : "Oh cmon now darling ..dont cry..lets go out for dinner "
She : "So you really can't eat the food I cook isn't it? You think its junk"
He : "Hey cmon I never said that"
She : "Sob sob....sniff sniff ..I wish my mother was here for me...Can we get her for a month or two?"
He :"Well..ahem..you know.... a month..aa...yah why not" (Below belt attack ...not defended)
She :"Excellent.I called her up today afternoon and she is reaching by tomorrow morning's flight at 6:30 am.Please go get her from the airport.Now lets go out for dinner.Cmon hurry up darling!"

Game, Set, Match .............

I dedicate this post to a friend of mine , a particularly lively fellow with a good sense of humour about life.
He is getting married next week.
May his lively spirit rest in peace thereafter.
Amen.