A Tail of Three Patils

While the National Security Guards, the Armymen, Home Guards, Navy and Mumbai police were all fighting tooth and nail with the terrorists in Mumbai,  Mrs. Pratibha Patil , our President and the Supreme Commander of our Armed Forces sent her moist condolences from her holiday trip in Hanoi. It would have got over at some point or the other of course so why bother to be back and be with the countrymen in moments of such crisis. 

Mr. Shivraj Patil, perhaps the greatest Union Home Minister, the country has ever seen was utterly frustrated that the terrorists had left without even saying goodbye to him. He could have taught them a lesson or two in probably changing nappies, a job he is doing so well for this country.

Mr. R.R. Patil, the Deputy Chief Minister of the state of Maharashtra is ecstatic that only 200 people managed to die at the hands of the terrorists when they had actually come to take down 5000. Wow...And in true Bollywood style he summed up the whole episode  saying  'Bade Bade desho me aise chote chote batein hoti rehte hain'....

If humanity was up for sale somewhere, I would give up all my savings to buy these people some of it.

Can I borrow a spine for my country ?

As I sit and watch the horror being enacted in Mumbai, I just cringe at the fact that our lives have become a matter of chance now and we might as well add death due to terrorism as a natural cause of death in India.
People have died with no reason to die and predictably all my Prime Minister says is that he strongly condemns the attacks. There is again no conviction in his voice, there is no sense of direction or semblance of leadership in such an hour of crisis when people are frantically searching for some ray of hope.

The visuals seem to have been lifted from some commando video game but the only difference is that the blood is real.

Will we ever strike back or should we follow Gandhian principles of holding up the other cheek to be slapped ?
Unfortunately, there remain no cheeks even to be slapped, we have been slapped again and again and again and we have condemned again and again and again.
The impotence and spinelessness of our reactions makes me boil with rage, but hey we should act with restraint and maintain calm for we are Indians and are renowned for our level of tolerance.

Is this the same country where people shook off the clutches of a 200 year old foreign rule? I just sit back and wonder what has happened to that grit and resolve of this country where people are being butchered at will and random and we just resume our lives the next day with a hackneyed reference to the 'undying spirit' !!

When do we think it would be enough ? How many more need to die for us to realise that we have reached the dead end of tolerance? These attacks are not just taking innocent lives, they are sucking away the self respect of a nation and I as a citizen of this once great nation hope that the powers-that-be for once take some steps which would instill a fear among such perpetrators, a fear so strong that should chill the marrow of these inhumans at the very thought of raising a finger against the nation.

I hope and just hope .....
I pray for the families of all those killed in this gruesome act of terror and salute those brave individuals who are risking and many losing their lives in their continuing efforts to cleanse the scum which has maligned our self esteem like never before.

The Elusive Degree

Engineering introduces a grave many bugs in one's system and I had no vaccinations that would have saved me from my share. While some of these are of the type which sit on your head for a short time, fiddle around with your un-shampooed matted hair, realize the hopelessness of what lies underneath and then move on for more fertile pastures, some on the other hand, merrily outlive their stay and keep gnawing away till they hit the soft spot.

One of the most potent and destructive of all bugs and one which has often found mention in this under-nourished blog is the viral thought of pursuing a post graduate degree in business management. With a heavy heart today, I confess that I am suffering from the dreaded disease of MAIDS or "MBA Aspiration Immuno Deficiency Syndrome".

(Please note that sympathies would only be accepted in cash or online transfers)

I had the first attack around the final year of engineering, a time which is normal for this virus to strike engineering colleges and thus I did not take it seriously enough. Little did I know that this virus was as destructive as diabetes and you need to continuously monitor your pee.

This reminds me of one very stinky anecdote from my childhood. Excuse me for this slight digress but I have to share this. When I was a kid of around 6 or 7, there were some very bright young individuals in my neighborhood who had brilliant ideas about everything in life and regularly used to catch up on their intellectual discourses over borrowed cigarettes and udhar-ka-chai. Somehow most of these discussions were related to 'female upliftment'. Such visionary people they were and they were never reluctant to share and spread their knowledge. I came to know from them that a person suffering from diabetes pees multicoloured. Red, Green, Blue, Violet...you name it and a diabetic can pee that colour for you. This was fascinating information for me. To my luck there was a cranky old fella living just next door to us who had diabetes and for quite some time thereafter, as soon as I would hear his bathroom door opening, I would rush to the nearby open drain to catch the colour of this leak. I would sometimes shout "Gimme Red" or "Gimme Magenta" under his bathroom window and man did the Oldy go bonkers hearing it!! Heee hee hee ...still makes me howl with laughter.
Its a pathetic and an utterly gross story isn't it ? I know..I know....

Anyway coming back to my own illness, I wished to share with you all that I got a severe bout of the attack around June this year and under the severe influence of the virus, I took the GMAT examination.

One would have thought that the worse was over.
Lessons in underestimation were given a new chapter following the ordeal that I went through in the months to follow.
Slowly and steadily, the will of the virus began to take a firm grip on my intellect as I saw myself helplessly applying for the one year MBA courses at IIM Calcutta, IIM Ahmedabad and ISB Hyderabad.

The application process is a devil in disguise and while you write the essays and keep iterating them, you can feel the devil making inroads through your brain as answers to questions like "Why do you want to do an MBA from this college?" which a healthy person would have easily answered "Obviously for the hot moolah your passouts rake in" are now answered as...."I am looking forward to this course to get an overall picture of the various aspects involved in senior management levels and the course structure of the executive degree in your college has just the right diversity that could impart me knowledge on the crucial aspects of business management. This I believe would equip me with the expertise and edge required to succeed in my chosen career." ..Blah ..blah ...and then some more blah......Can you beat this ?

But I did not have the bodily strength to fight back as I patiently sat and wrote all the essays. ISB had one particularly interesting essay which needed me to write an election speech for the post of the president of their student body. While I was actually thinking of proposing Free Beer and Lowering the number of required credits to pass the year,I ended up writing about the need of social entrepreneurship.

IIM Ahmedabad was the most benevolent of the trio as it let me off without even bothering to shortlist me for the interviews and thus saving me from wasting a lot of productive man-hours. Not so in the case of IIM Calcutta and ISB who even after reading my essays did not get a clear picture of the immense pain that I was going through and shortlisted me for their interview process.

The suffering was soon to scale new heights. But I will not make you dear readers go through the Ram Kahani. To cut a long story short, I have been rejected by both the institutions.

This last prolonged attack has left me exhausted but I am sure that the bug will not lie down for long enough. It will soon strike back with renewed enthusiasm and this time it will go global for the Round II applications for National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University are still open and I am yet to find an antidote for this yearning to be a manager.

Failures are the stepping stones to success...so they say. I have a strong suspicion that the engineer who is designing my steps had spent a considerable time studying when in college.
The resuls are for all to see.....

A piece of advice to him....."Mate, Please unlearn fast and get your act right"......

Till then Cheersa !!

Stale news for a lease of life

I was woken by a call at around 3 am yesterday... The caller did not identify herself. All she said was "Either we read a new entry in your blog tomorrow or we attend your funeral.In case you foresee circumstances leading to the latter, please choose from one of the following options....Beep...Press 1 for Rampuri Jhatka...press 2 for Painless Pillow ..press 3 for Tied Tickling (Authentic Mongolian Feathers used. Not China made)...press 4 for Skin Peeling...Press 5 for......"
I think I got the hint and cancelled the call...

So with no subject matter in mind, I will give you a quick update on our current affairs.
This is just to save my life and I promise to get back to regular writing very soon.. Mystery Caller please take note.... I am not even married for mercy's sake but wait ...is that the reason I am still alive..hehee? (This evil grin should please be forgiven by married men and forward thinking women )

To get to work...The Maharashtra Chief Minister recently announced a reward of Rs.1000 for every pothole that is brought to the notice of the Municipal corporation. I gleefully calculated that I could easily retire as a multi millionaire if I actually reported even a quarter of the potholes that I see on my way to office.
But no, as always someone had to play the spoilsport to progressive ideas and this time it was the municipal corporation. Their argument was that the number of potholes were actually increasing after the chief ministers statement as people all over were found digging up roads to create new potholes where there were none.
Absolutely distressing to see such entrepreneurship tendencies of the common man being strangulated.

The imbroglio over the Tata's small car plant in Shingur continues. Mamata Banerjee, the teddy bear sized progressive leader of the state is of the opinion that the factory should be destroyed immediately and the land returned to the farmers as the factory murders the poor farmer's aspirations to continue living a life of povery and deprivation. Can there be any substitute to the charm of continuing to repay generation old debts...debts which have been consecrated by the deaths of starved ancestors...huh? No No Na No....Na No No No...shout her supporters in unison.

Chiranjeevi the pot bellied super star of Telegu movies has launched his own political party and named it Praja Rajyam. One person gave up his life and 13 others fractured their ribs and limbs as token of respect for their leader who entertained them with dance shows.

The Amarnath issue continues to boil.Hundreds are dead.The protesters have proposed changing the name of our northernmost state from "Jammu and Kashmir" to "Jammu or Kashmir" but our shy and soft spoken Prime Minister does not want to intervene in silly matters of English Grammar as he has a DPhil in Economics you see and that too from the University of Oxford.
Oye paape ...And aur Aur me ki fadak penda ??? Bolo Singh is King....Singh is King ..Singh is King ....Balle Balle Democracy.

If you remember, we also have a president in this country Mrs.Pratibha Patil...no no she is not Shivraj Patil's wife. Anyway we were reminded of this fact when we finally got to see her in the news again posing for pictures with the Olympic winners. When asked of her reactions to these achievements..she said with tearful eyes that she was ever so thankful to Sonia Gandhi and that she hopes that Rahul Gandhi becomes the prime minister soon....Mrs Patil...control ur Yomotions

Ram Gopal Verma had announced a prize of Rs 5 lakh to anyone who could watch his latest movie Phoonk alone. No one won it....They belived in his abilities to scare the shit out of people..To this day they thank their lucky stars that they were able to come out alive of halls screening RGV ki Aag. Rarely since the holocaust have such gruesome and scary torture chambers been created.
But guys please go and watch Mumbai Meri Jaan. It is an awesome movie with terrific performances.

This sums it up for the day....will be back soon...honestly ...no life threatening calls please....
P.S...If any of you know the Mystery Caller...please please ...tell her that the task is now done.

The Not-so-Stupid Box

Sometimes a post, by dint of its length can give the world new creative expletives,or cause temporary posterior paralysis. This is one of those.


Some many moons back, Mrs.Indira Gandhi, the then soft spoken Prime Minister of India, was convicted for election fraud by a court in Allahabad which while annulling her MP status also banned her from contesting any elections till the time I was to be a cute one year old.

In reaction to this,I have read that the lady calmly declared a State of Emergency in the country that imposed some very serious restrictions on civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. For e.g.

You were expected to reach office on time.
You were expected to restrain the external manifestation of certain hormonal outbursts to two head counts only and then run and register yourself for a not-very-male-friendly surgery.
You were fined if you were caught peeing in public !!
Political opposition was most welcome but only inside jails.

However the point that I wish to touch upon today in this post is the censorship on media that the Emergency had brought about.
The government had complete control on what was being printed or aired over radio and this kind of censorship was considered by all to be a complete murder of democracy.

As television was an alien concept for most Indians those days (only some seven unlucky cities had access to Doordarshan), there wasn't much need for gagging this media I guess and the effect of this leniency during the formative years of Doordarshan is for all to see.
Mothers now warn truant kids with consequences like 'Beta padhai karlo nahi to Doordarshan laga dungi'

People tend to be at their miserly best when on an onsite deputation, behaving more like Walking Currency Calculators than software professionals and when in UK, multiplying everything by 80 before taking any decision.

Under these circumstances when I learnt that to own a television there meant spending some 1200 rupees as license fee every month to watch 4 stunningly boring BBC channels, I chose not to bow down before the demands of the stupid box and devoted my entire life to the noble cause of surfing the internet, typing rediff.com and orkut.com and re-doing the same exercise again and again till I fell asleep.

Then one day a friend of mine sent me the link of CNN-IBN which had live streaming enabled in its website. And since that day onwards, I devoted my entire life to the noble cause of theinternet typing rediff.com , orkut.com and ibnlive.com, redoing the same exercise again and again till I fell asleep.

CNN-IBN proved to be a true stress reliever for us there and soon got us hooked to such a degree that we were thrilled to watch the same piece of news in the mornings when we left for work, in the afternoons when we came home for lunch, in the evenings when we returned from work, during dinners and finally concluded the day by seeing the day's headlines and what was surprising in this entire exercise was our interest level that just would not subside. At times we even replayed the videos of the same news the following day.

Staying away from home for long periods numbs one's senses, so I have heard.

Having come back home, where the cable bill still stands at Rs 300 per month for 150 odd channels I realised that the medium of television was notthaaaaat stupid after all.
I just cannot put in words the joy that I experience every time I press the button of remote and a new channel comes up!
Cmon what is this...Magic ??

Now television media has been in a boom mode for quite sometime now in India.
Anybody who owns a Sony Handycam got by his uncle from Singapore considers himself a struggling director and with new channels coming up every other fortnight, the need for these artistic individuals has risen all the more.

A particular community in this country has drawn up a dictum that unless you prove some mettle in some arena of the creative world(sometimes interpreted as communism) during your lifetime, neither heaven nor hell would give you a berth.

A small futuristic interview :
Gatekeeper at Hell - So dude what creativity have you shown in this horrible life of yours ??
Me- --Well ahem ..I wrote a blog and attempted some humour in it.
Gatekeeper at Hell -- Damn another of these bloggers !! Why aren't you guys allowed in Heaven damn it.... Anyway.. so humour me ..make me laugh and you will gain an entry.
Me -- The ant raping a tigress joke..
Gatekeeper at Hell ---Hideous joke...Not good enough ...try again
Me -- The tiger taking revenge and raping the ant back joke..
Gatekeeper at Hell ---Pathetic...one last try else you are dead !!
Me -- I spent a lot of effort coding and following quality processes in a reputed software company !
Gatekeeper at Hell -- Ha ha ha ha ..(demonic Guffaws)...Come in..Come on in.... hurry up...you rock big time ..ha ha ha ...This was just too good ..ha ha ha (uncontrollable demonic guffaws) ..
Me -- #%#%#$^!!!

For information's sake, I was once given a camcorder to record a birthday event. I ended up making a short documentary on the autobiography of my shoe and that of all other shoes in the vicinity.
Well they need to be heard too and no one told me that a camcorder needed to held up too and just why can't Japanese people make smart devices which require less of human interaction !!!

Now with the tough competition in the television media arena, the quality of programmes too is bound to have an upward graph.

Below mentioned are a few of the ground breaking channels that are doing stellar work in the field on TV journalism. This list is in no way comprehensive and only represents a few of my favourites.


India TV -- A few years back,I was glued to this channel for a whole day when a sting operation found Shakti Kapoor in a slightly embarrassing situation. He he .. It must have stung him real bad !! A channel with social responsibility, it has only grown in stature over the years.
With a prime time slot dedicated to Rakhi Sawant and her family, the channel sends a strong message on the rise of the downtrodden.
Recently a whole day was dedicated to the divinity of an American person who could fly making us aware of what we can achieve only if we make an effort.


Rajya Sabha- This channel ,I have come to understand, teaches philosophy. A display of 12-13 coloured vertical lines and a soothing shrill siren kind of music in the background for a continuos 24 hours of the day must surely have a metaphysical interpretation of entertainment conveying some deeper meaning of life.

India News - This is one of the newer channels I guess, which specialises in showing programs of the kind where a few Adivasis hunt down a deer with an arrow and how the animal writhes in pain. The writhing is shown in graphic details and repeated till the point the viewer vomits at least once. Such amazing concern for animal protection !
There was another programme where a 'witch' in Bihar was tied to a pole and kicked and slapped repeatedly till she fell unconscious. The slaps came with special effects of course and surely Rowling must have been very happy with the highlights on the plights of wizards and witches so responsibly being taken up by the Indian media.

I have also come to realise that the concept of 'BREAKING NEWS' is something quite different from what I had imagined. A news can only qualify to be one of this category if it successfully manages to actually break something when screened....Patience, forehead, intelligence barriers, right ventricular blood flow, humanity constraints ...anything will do.

And with extremely relevant issues like kids falling inside ditches being given a live telecast, we are constantly kept aware of the pitfalls afflicting the society today.
Such a vibrant and awake media is so very necessary in India's progress towards a better tomorrow.

Miracle Net - This channel is a show stopper. You have to watch it to believe it where the true meaning of Faith is exemplified through various first hand experiences and discourses. A particular person narrated his experience as follows :

"I had a son who did not work."
(Audience ...oooh...aaah ...sharing the pain, I believe)

"I had a son who did not work."
(Audience ...More ooohs...aaahs ...the pain intensifying)

"I had a son who did not work."
(Audience ...A few start crying and clapping..Some have their eyes closed with tears rolling )

"Then I woke up one day and prayed to God."
(Audience - Yes Yes Yes...some are visibly choked with a welling up emotion ..Some are lying on the floor trying perhaps to wriggle out the pain)

"God please send my son to work"
(Audience - Yes Yes Yes...some have fallen into a trance while others are swaying to some tune with kids on their shoulders.The ipod wire hangs loosely behind)

"That very day my son went to work and has not returned since !!!"
(Audience --Absolute pandemonium breaks loose...Some jumping to the stage to kiss the man, some fainting in their seats, some just crying and laughing)

The man crumbles down and falls unconscious and so did I and as I was falling, I could hear a thought banging inside my head........Keep the faith my friends...keep the faith ...

Long live democracy and the freedom of the press. Just at times, I wished Mrs.Gandhi was still alive.


(P.S.-Today's fortune in Orkut: You have an unusual equipment for success, use it properly.)
Unusual ....eh ???

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.