Year 2k7 !

It’s been long since I’ve written anything. As a new year dawns I think it’s time to journal down the year 2k7.

• Started the year with family around (was ecstatic). Have heard people saying that whatever you feel on 1^st day of the year is most commonly felt emotion throughout the year. Well I hope it’s true.
• Attended college convocation. It felt nice to see most of my friends (sans few), looking at the golden college days in retrospect and tried to pack those four long years of college in 2 days.
• Became an eligible bachelor with sister getting married. I think it was the most beautiful February till date; made merry, felt emotional and the yearning to move close to family intensified.
• Back to work, the normalcy of life ensued, grew by one year, at least 1 inch around the waist region.
• Had an interview at Oracle. Cleared it, waited for an offer eagerly.
• Purchased a laptop with my own saved money; felt great not because of the laptop but because of the purchasing power.
• My roomie went on to pursue his career in management, which hit me with the brick that not everything is supposed to last. Still reminisce about 5 fantastic years with him.
• Finally got an offer from Oracle Corporation and I knew it’s time to move on and say goodbye bengalooru!
• Regained contact with some old school friends, not to the fullest but yes something is always better than nothing.
• Resigned and served my notice period (quite an action pact period), I’ve never been so calm and frustrated at the same time. But to my surprise I still have good memories about my first job.
• Came to Hyderabad overwhelmed with confusion, anxiety, self-search and confidence.
• Met different kinds of people, some too motivated, some too juvenile, again found some great roomies (feel that have great luck there) and these thoughts leave me with some questions bout myself.
• For the first time in my life had a Diwali without my family. I just hope it’s the last.
• Billi-ed out for another year, another screw up and again a veteran. Kept my fingers crossed for what was coming next. But the ordeal isn’t over it’s going to be carry forward next year.
• But the year isn’t over some of the things that I am looking forward to – going back home, spend some quality time with family and meet lots of friends and of course the new year !

ऐसे करोगे रिपोर्टिंग ?

Pardon me for such a futile attempt for sensationalising my post but the journalist within me was dying to come out. And this style is in line with some sabse tez news channels who feel that the TRP’s can be boosted only by using such statements.
Isn’t it amazing that only a day has passed since Hyderabad bomb blast which claimed 43 lives (or families) as per official count, but the matter of such gravity has been pushed to sidelines by some news channels and they rather prefer to focus on Salman Khan’s living conditions in Jodhpur jail down to the minutest details such as ‘his plea to change the light bulb’, ‘ Ms. kaif journey to meet Mr. khan’ and last but not least ‘ katreena’ s seat no. with an animation of the plane’ to give viewers an insight about where she’s going to be seated. Another importat news which they reported was how Chang got ousted from Indian Idol. I would say that this piece of news must be their USP as it was not even available on ‘Sony’ again but these channels again being extremely meticulous decided to show the fate of budding singer? (But how can they be so unfair to chang, only one hour of coverage)

I am dumbfounded and can’t help myself think that these people are amazing they are really lightning fast (as they claim to be) but how I wished that the fourth pillar of the nation rise from its slumber and do some serious reporting rather than focus on glamorization and sensationalisation of trivialities in order to rake in huge profits.

As an impulse I feel that regularization needs to be introduced for such channels but it’s a democratic land and everyone has a right to speech and express oneself, so I regain my senses and just decide to switch off the television.

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quITting ain’t easy !

Phew ! am writing after a long time. Last month was quite eventful. I always had a rosy picture of post-resignation period in my mind but my first quit have made me felt otherwise.

The moment I resigned and decided not to let my employers know the real reason for quitting, I started experiencing post-resignation-disorder. The major symptoms of the disorder were:

• A restless subconscious
• The ‘quittee’ gets stamped quarantined by the people higher in the hierarchy
• Every one around you seems to conspire against you.
• As the ‘leaving day’ draws closer the apprehension grows and makes you disoriented.

But the final blow comes when the employer realizes (actually comes to know via some jealous, g4n person having sadist tendencies) the real reason of quitting. The commotion that ensues is inexplicable. But the best part of the whole exercise are long meaningless discussions whose agenda is ‘why was so much time wasted, should have told the truth etc. etc.’

Sometimes when I reflect back on those discussions I ponder whether I should have told the truth or not? But all my confusions gets demystified as I see the plight of others who are grappling with similar situations even after taking the ‘Yudhishtrian’ road for quitting.

The basic maxims of any kind of quit are:

• The efficiency of the quitter comes to the fore not in an appraisal but definitely at the time of quit-time tête-à-tête.
• One of the common point invariably broached in the aforementioned discussion is ‘how the employer was delving on sending the quittee onsite’
• For the first time in a long time the employer actually starts caring for you. It’s like being in utopia, they try every possible means to retain you and all your pleas like shift of location or change of project etc. are actually considered.
• Once it’s realized that there is no holding back it is then the quitter becomes a liability and the sole purpose is to suck the maximum out of the person concerned. The industry has given a euphemism to the above process known as ‘knowledge transfer’ (KT)

What I fail to understand is that why is it difficult for a company to let go? I feel that the commonly given excuses such as client commitment, replacement etc. are just a weak line of defense created by the so-called managers to hide their trepidation. The whole quitting exercise has been aptly abridged by the aphorism

People don’t quit companies, they quit bosses

Fed doesn’t err .. lets hope !

It’s only hours to go now and what reverberates in my head are the great words of Andy Dufresne – “Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
So here I am hoping that Federer is able to cast his magic spell today against the ‘baap of clay’ (even after how Na-daal milked Djokovic) .
Whatever way might the pendulum swing I am up for this one helluva match.

Whom to hate!

Well I try to recall all the people I’ve come across in my life …. I just have an extremely hard time in pinning down the ‘unrivalled champion’ amongst all those obnoxious people I have met till date. Some of them claim to be friends; others are just people I know. Now I have to let go my acquaintances as they are what they are. But I have a tough time in acquitting those friends who don’t even have the guts to speak about me on my face. I just hate those seemingly friendly backbiters and the irony is that almost everyone (including me) belongs to the same lot ….. I am at an utter loss of words to explain further!

Moving Out …

Last year of my life has been quite eventful. After a luxurious company sponsored training, we landed up in the “IT City of India” and began our quest for roti, kapdaa and makaan. As a common gesture the company did provide us with an accommodation for a week in some hotel located in some posh colony. Being incorrigible procrastinators and engineers we decided to go out on ‘makaan-hunt‘ after appropriate amount of rest. There were plethora of options available BTM, Koramangala, HSR etc but we all were fascinated by Apple Inc. philosophy and went for east bumblefuck (read as Electronic City).

We looked around half a dozen flats available for rent. Some were extremely dingy; the only source of air in some of them was a fan held up by ceiling somehow. Finally the dark clouds cleared up and we manage to crack a deal in “Celebrity Paradise, EC”. Now just don’t get carried away by the name of the society, the only celebrities which one can get to see around here are our ‘bhalu-dhobi 1’ (I know he’s a ‘bhalu’ coz of his ever protruding bunch of hairs from his shirt), ‘paperwala’ (Now he’s a real celeb as one can expect to see him only once a fortnight or twice if lucky) and sometimes the ever beautiful fairy-maids.

But the real fun was ‘the dark-weekends’ (which I rarely got as was busy working my ass off in the company). Little did we know while moving in that the area suffered a huge power cuts during weekends. A stage had reached when instead of looking up for a weekend we were actually afraid that it is just around the corner and hoped against hope. Also while moving in, ‘daddu‘(read as landlord) bloated a lot about his house that how he made it for his own daughter and was now letting it up. But I somewhere think that he forgot to mention that he has also made arrangement an in-house swimming pool for her daughter in shape of our apartment. The real wake up call for us was when my kumbhakaran roomie who was snoring sound asleep and got startled by water all around him (in fact the whole flat) as it was raining Cats and Dogs at night.

Though we had made up our mind to leave “the – heaven” but daddu being extremely considerate offered us pets for free in the form of ‘colony of ants’. First we were reluctant to share our apartment, food with them but finally their love and affection won over our ignorance and finally we decided to “live and let live”.

As I move out of my dream house , heaven or hell whatever one may call it. I am sure that I would remember living here, enjoying some precious moments like taking ‘lee’ to our home when he puked and lost control at bengalooru clubu,getting robbed, hosting beer party for lee and cute_nagi, discussing in length about “thou shall not be named”. I am sure there are many more anecdotes that will bring smile to my face whenever I am going to reminisce about House No. 162 Celebrity Paradise (The address is longer with some swarnu words which I can’t recall).

 

He had a dream !

Here is a puzzle. The solution is so obvious that one has ponder over it for an hour to believe that how anyone could not see the solution instantaneously. Well, here’s the problem (with apologies to those of you who have heard/read it before).

Recently a friend told me the following story about the death of his grandfather: “My grandparents used to go to church on Sundays. One day during the sermon, which was long and dry, my grandfather fell asleep. That week he had been reading a novel about the French Revolution and began to dream that he was a rich aristocrat living in a beautiful chateau in France.

Suddenly there was a commotion outside. A mob of peasants appeared, stormed the house, grabbed him and tied him up, dragged him to the market square, where there was a platform with a guillotine set up. My grandfather was led up the stairs, a priest muttered a few words to him and then his head was placed in the cradle of the guillotine. A hooded executioner approached and reached up for the lever that releases the blade. At that moment my grandfather was snoring quite loudly, so my grandmother reached out and pinched him on the back of his neck to wake him up. This was such a shock to my grandfather that he suffered a heart attack and died on the spot.”

My reaction to the story of my friend: “I don’t believe a word of that. You made it up.” Why did I react in this way, how did I know the story is not true?
If you have solved this one … you will be amazed to know that this puzzle was given to a grandmaster during a Japanese lunch, and he mulled over it all through the Miso and Sushi. We discussed the history of the French Revolution and the mechanics of the guillotine and in particular the height of the lever. At one stage he made us repeat the puzzle in order to cleverly identify minor deviations from the original version (“That way I know that those details are irrelevant!”). As the meal came to an end he was becoming unpleasant and rude, so we had to tell him the solution. The Elo of our Super-GM was well above 2700.