Would you...?

This is a story from a time long gone. A time when I wasn't bothered by the possible effects a recession could have on me - I guess I couldn't have spelt recession. Neither was I worried about how long an ISR took to execute. Tim was yet to invent the Internet as we know it or it probably was still command-line. I used to happily hum Mere Sapanon Ki Rani instead of the usual Creeping Death or Master of Puppets that keeps playing on inside my head today. I was four-ish back then, I think.

At the age of four, I had this crazy idea that I could convince people to belive in whatever I wanted them to. It was probably the earliest (and maybe, the only) signs that my folks had that I would probably become a consultant with an MBA. Thankfully, today, I am not. Atleast...not yet.

There was this phase (which lasted quite a while) where I wanted everything to be either strawberry flavored or colored. I still maintain that back then Kwality's strawberry ice-cream tasted different from what strawberry ice-cream does today. I have memories of eating half-raw strawberries from bushes that grew in my uncle's garden in Ooty. So much so, that I colored all the mountains in my 'scenery' pink and spent a lot of time trying to convince my teacher that it wasn't unheard of - in fact, I gave a very reasonable explanation. Someone had taken loads of pink paint and gone to the very top and tipped the container over. The result was what I had drawn. She was a little impressed.

We had a grapefruit tree in the school playground and after months of resisting temptation, one fine day during lunch I went and tried to examine what these big things were. Needless to say, thirty seconds later I was holding the fruit, completely detached from the tree in my hands. And then, the enormity of the situation sunk in - punishment and a note in the diary. Not the one to give up so easily, I hailed a classmated and asked him to hold the fruit up so that it was in contact with the spot where it hung from previously - if not, I warned him, that it would start rotting. I promised to return with a tube of glue so that we could stick the grapefruit back and then no one would ever know. I ran back to class and sat down - the epitome of innocence. It wasn't till much later that a teacher saw the poor chap holding the fruit to the tree looking very silly. Oh, and yes, there was a note in the diary that day.

The one thing that kept confounding me in school and sometime even now is that question - " Would you do this at your home?". If I were scribbling on the walls of my class with crayons and I answered no, then the automatic response was a lecture about how school was like a second home and ya-da ya-da. If I said yes, then the cold reply was, "Well...this is not your house!" How is a four-year old supposed to handle a question like that without having to resort to crying (which is what most of the girls in my class did)?

So would you...?

Shotgun

Have you ever had the feeling that some of your closest friends think you are some kind of a freak... some kind of a monster maybe?

Something is wrong, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I am me, except that I have lost 4 kilos. Off my butt, not my brain. Yeah and the paunch, too.

Illusions

Bangalore has a lot of people who have illusions about what they are. Take for instance, the auto drivers, who, think they are pilots flying the Eurofighter Typhoon at Aero India or in a dogfight(which is more likely given the number of stray dogs). The Typhoon has this awesome ability to level out, and then kind of free fall slowly while turning at the same time. The trick that the pilots usually do is go into a steep climb, level out at the top, almost stop moving forward, float down gently turning left and then all of a sudden turn right and blast off at breakneck speed. The auto-driver does this on all the steep roads while looking for savari or trying to escape a mama's maamool-hungry sights.

And then there are the bus drivers who, almost fanatically, believe that buses are in reality intergalactic transporters that have the ability to pass through any solid object. This, of course, gets turned on by incessantly honking. They subscribe to the theory that JK Rowling's Knight Bus from the Harry Potter, with it's fantastic power to make whole buildings and lamposts jump out of it's way, was infact inspired when she visited Bangalore and took the 201 from HAL airport to Banashankari. The beds and the chocolate were nothing but frivolous additions to a perfectly practical way of transportation.

Have you ever wondered why the white Sumos and the Indicas honk constantly even on an empty road, overtake other drivers on the left and jump signals? If you have, then very obviously you haven't ever undertaken the task of ferrying people while suffering from a constant case of dysentery. And most definitely, you have not done it while wearing a white (well...once-upon-a-time white) uniform.

Two idiots, a consultant and a B-School

For all those of you(if any) who have me on your RSS feed, "Hello!!!Again!!!".

I haven't posted in a long time. So long, that the last two comments on my last post are random bot comments that are absolutely junk.

So, yes, it's been a really long while and surprisingly enough much has really changed, except that the economy has apparently gone down and the my annual ransom payment to the IT department has gone up terribly.

I still get a kick out of writing code, I am as lazy as ever, I get depressed over my lousy job post AeroIndia, I fantasize about my almost family-pack ab being six-pack instead and getting into this habit of spending Valentine's washing the car - alone.

All that apart, the whole point of this blog is something that happened a couple of weeks ago. Now my friend sheep who is a consultant in Gurgaon and an alumnus of IIM-B was here in town a couple of weeks ago. So Mr.Sheep is this tallish thin lanky nerdy looking guy who would probably fly away if you sneezed hard enough in a 1-metre radius around him. He was back at his alma-mater looking for potential consults[sic!] and I went over to meet him and down a couple of cold ones. Which by the way did not really happen. But what happened was this.

I happened to be loitering around near the mess talking to batchmates from my year when I spotted the actors R.Madhavan and Sharman Joshi walk in. My sister has been after me to get auto-graphs from one or more of the Idiots in the '3 Idiots' currently being shot at IIM-B. So I went up, talked like a total philistine in an attempt to make them feel good so I could get the autographs without sounding like I wanted a free lunch off them. Reel life is not real life and interviews on Aaj Tak, etc. are scripted.

And, then with my brownie points with sis safely in butt-pocket, I walked off, opened a can and observed the following.

Two fairly-big, popular Bollywood stars who earn shitloads and have hajaar-screen presence (though they have apparently been doing this nightly walk shit for about a month or so now and people generally ignore them) drew a crowd of five people with three of the said five being females of the cute-cuppax-philistinemax types.

Mr.Sheep in a weirdly purple shirt who has probably had few mentions in news papers, one 2x1.5 inch photo in Page 1 of Times of India Bangalore edition ( and he was the only one who was not looking at the camera when the photo was taken) and is from NITK, Surathkal had a long line of 30 wannabe-consults and wannabe-fin-people waiting for him to proof-read and spout tips for improving their one-page resumes.

Talk about popularity!!! Bah...!


Me: "Macha...check it out da. Some five people are talking to those two 'Idiots' there, and here some n-hajaar junta have put line to meet you"

Sheep: "They are not doling out jobs, da!"

Touche!

P.S: Mr. Madhavan I thought 'Kannathil Muthamittal' and 'Alaipayude' were really nice movies. Mr. Joshi you are a funny guy. Both of you, I guess acting is a difficult job and all that, but with all due respect ( I have nothing against you guys) you got your keesters kicked that night.

Quickie!

No...this is not what you think!

I've been meaning to write and somehow it just did not happen. There are four auto-saved drafts and I can't seem to remember why and where I stopped and what I meant to write. I just hope that this does not become the fifth!

There are a couple of tags, one old and one really old, to which I was put up by Macadamiathenut and Silverine respectively, that I will sometime in the near future complete.

In the meanwhile, here's a bunch of reviews of books that I read over the past couple of months.

First off, Chowringhee. I picked this up at the Crossword outlet-let(meaning small outlet) at Shopper's stop after having been dragged there by a friend. I was and still am in this weird phase of reading books by Indian authors. The blurb to this one by Shankar seemed fairly interesting. And honestly, it was an awesome read. I later found out that, this book was originally written much before Haley wrote 'Hotel'. Having read 'Hotel', I couldn't help but imagine that Haley probably pinched the basic idea of the plot. The English one, is of course a translation, but a very good translation. I'd definitely recommend it.




I'd heard a lot about Amitav Ghosh, especially about his 'Calcutta Chromosome' that a friend had once read. I couldn't find that one, but I found the 'Glass Palace' instead. I was a little apprehensive about finishing this one considering that the copy of 'One hundred years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I purchased some eight months ago, I have yet to start. And, the 'Glass Palace' is quite a fat book. It started off nicely enough and is descriptive throughout. Somewhere in the middle it get a little a slowly, but you assume that it will become better and it does. It starts in the pre-independence days and then ends not long ago - in our times. At the end of it all, there is a slight nagging doubt - something does not seem to have fallen into place. Surely worth a read though.


The last one is the 'Silent Raga' - Ameen Merchant's first. I generally find most of the book reviews in 'The Hindu' pretentious and boring - stuff that I read when I have finished reading everything else that is worth a glance. It so happened that I chance upon this one, the same day I read a review in the Hindu. The review was not so great, but it wasn't bad either, so I decided to pick up the book despite the lousy blurb (What do Tamil Brahmin girls do when the turn eighteen...? or something like that) which I thought was damn silly. The story follows the life of a girl brought up in a conservative Tam-Bram family in a small town when her mother dies in an accident . The story jumps back and forth from the past into the present. The story is a little too slow and becomes boring, but when you do finish it and then think about it, is when you begin to see what the author was trying to get at. If you can understand Tamil, then there's a lot of Tam lingo that you will find in the book. All in all - above average - maybe worth a read.

And that bring us all to a very arbit and possibly (no...definitely) lousy bunch of reviews by a sleep-deprived 'saaftwear yenginyer'. Have a nice weekend, folks!

P.S : I swear I've been a good boy!

The Lament of the Laptop

I happened to ask Ra about whether his laptop had a single core processor and whether the Centrino Core 2 Duo was a 64-bit processor. This is what happened. At least, the interesting part.

[17:40] Ra: This laptop is ok.
[17:40] Ra: Serves the purpose.
[17:40] Ra: I'll get one when this gives up and dies.
[17:42] Me: when the processor's ghost exits through the cooling vents...
[17:42] Ra: Yes then.
[17:43] Me: ...and its tormented cries rent the fabric of your display into a complicated networks of tears...
[17:43] Ra: Haha.
[17:43] Me: ...when the keys become so weary that they no longer produce a click, not even the cheap sound that compaq is famous for...
[17:44] Me: ...when your battery will leak critical life blood lithium ions...
[17:44] Me: ...and when there is no nirvana playing in the backfground to make the whole thing ironic as hell...
[17:45] Ra: Ah, my suicidal laptop.
[17:45] Me: ...simply because the magnets in the speakers have long demagnetized to scrap iron.
[17:45] Me: I am sounding bleak aren't I?
[17:45] Ra: You are sounding rather funny.



P.S : I just wanted to rub in the fact that I was getting a new laptop. Fully loaded. Well, almost.

Red pill or blue pill?

Another one. Dead baadi ?