Fresh Mynt Thought

Strong ties

2010-03-06T08:33:00.001+05:30

Two years into the MBA program, I still don't know how to tie my tie. My mom always used to do it for me in the morning handing a glass of milk. When I left India, I made her tie all my ties and I still haven't untied them. No wonder some knots are so strong!

Of Fashion, Passion and Obligation

2009-11-24T03:44:00.001+05:30

I was on a train with a colleague and we were having a long conversation on just about everything to beat the gloomy and boring Paris winter. He told me how passionate he was about cars and how has found his new passion for horse riding. We talked about watches, discussed Fashion, I told him how much I liked his new coat etc. He suddenly asked me what I am passionate about in my life. I frankly didn’t have an answer. You know, I told him, I come from a very modest family in India and frankly, there are a whole lot of things I haven’t done in life. I may like a lot of things but I cannot tell you something that I am passionate about.

We got out of the train and climbed down the stairs to transfer to another one. I saw a young mother trying to push her baby’s pram up the stairs, struggling with a bag on her shoulder. Cursing Paris for not having ramps, I offered her help. I helped her all the way to the top. Merci, she said, c’est gentil. I looked into her eyes and it seemed familiar. De rien, I said and I walked away. For a minute, it seemed as if I saw my own mother through her eyes. That’s just the emotional me, I thought.

This is my passion, I told my friend. To help people, to do something for the needy, to strive as much as possible to see that there is a change, and at the same time, not expect anything out of the experience. “Karmanye Vadhikarasthe, Ma Phaleshu Kadachana” is what I believe in and that’s what keeps me happy.

I don’t deny being attracted to worldly pleasures as passionate objects because finally I am a human being. But that being said and me being a student, I guess I have discovered my new definition of fashion. Fashion for me is to wear what I want to wear without having the fear of giving it up. I adore the watch that I wear but at the same time, I am not terribly worse off without it.

I was at a friend’s San Francisco apartment and she complained how her patio plants had paled off due to the summer heat. I volunteered to take a look. Wearing all the impeccably tailored clothing that I wore and the watch that I had on, I put my hands into the soil, made a small hole in the pot for the water and replanted the plant. My friend yelled, watch out, you may spoil your shirt. “Oh, don’t worry about it. After all it’s not worth so much.” I guess I had discovered a new sense of freedom. A freedom that topped my joy of buying things I like from the places I want to, at prices I want and not worrying about losing them.

I believe that I have an obligation to live for people around me. Vivekananda once said, “He alone lives who lives for others, the rest are more dead than alive”. I guess I discovered my inner Fashion mantra trying to fulfill this obligation.

Chutney Pudi

2009-05-09T23:39:00.003+05:30

America never ceases to amuse me. All the more as days go by and I think I fairly know what the culture is like here. I am amazed at how people make friends, how quickly people start associations like girlfriend-boyfriend, significant other etc. I had an exchange student coming to my university last quarter. Within two days, she was calling a classmate of ours as her boyfriend. Woah, isn't that light speed?

As I stand bedazzled by their speeds, I wonder why we are slow. Our lives are so different. I still remember the first few days of my life here. I was just bothered about whether mom's Chutney Pudi had reached safely, whether the Parachute coconut oil I brought along hadn't leaked and how I should plan on calling my distant cousin to come and get me some Anna-Sambaar! Long Transatlantic calls in the night to mom telling her how much I miss her, asking how my darling sister is doing at her studies and how dad's health is...

I am not sure!

2009-04-20T22:38:00.002+05:30

I have written about my dental ordeals in the past. I have problems with my gums and they coming back. So I went to the dentist. I hate the medical system here. What on earth do they mean when they say "This might be it but I am not sure". Idiots! What did they do in medical school? They are too scared because they are dead if they are sued!

According to me, a doctor-patient relationship is something that should not be constantly threatened by the fear of getting sued. It should be based on mutual trust and respect for each other. When my doctor says something, I trust him and go ahead with the medication. This allows the doctor to be confident with the patients and become an expert in accurate diagnosis and treatment.

I mean, whats such a big deal in figuring out what's going on in my teeth? Its not my intestine, pancreas or something. You look at my teeth and say you are not sure what's happening. Totally idiotic!

Food For Thought!

2009-04-09T04:52:00.004+05:30

I sometimes curse god for giving me such a high metabolism rate! I seem to get hungry often but cannot eat a lot at one go. My stomach is way too small. :(

This often leaves me in the question of what to eat the next time I am hungry which is almost always in the next two hours. Being a grad student here in the US makes my life all the more complicated. Not that I don't have choices here but I have very little time to drag my ass around in search of food.

The sheer association of food with home makes things not just complicated but emotional and nostalgic too. Bangalore probably has a food joint every 100 feet. You see all sorts of multicuisine restaurants to Udupi Upahars and Shanti Sagars who serve hot Rava Idlis.

Talking about Bangalore food, how can one ever forget the street vendors? The innumerable street vendors on Thindi Street, around Krishna Rao Park, Gandhi Bazaar and Malleswaram 18th Cross! Coming to think of it, street food according to me is not just food, it is a phenomenon. It is a way of life. It is a way of destressing yourself after a bumpy 2 hour ride from Electronics City. It is an occasion to meet friends and socialize.

I made Bhelpuri at home one day here in San Jose. It tasted just as perfect but there was something missing. I was wondering for long what was missing and it turned out that the only thing missing was the paper cone that it is usually served in. There is no fun eating Churmuri or Bhelpuri at home. It is a social concept! You have to eat it with a bunch of people, on a dirty sidewalk, in paper cones, giggling and gossiping! That's where all the taste comes from!

You realize you are in the United States when:

2009-03-11T09:56:00.001+05:30

1) You walk out of the airport and don’t see porters
2) Multiplication and Division by 50 seem to be easy but important tasks
3) You get up at all weird times during the first week
4) You realize that Comcast is the only Internet Service provider
5) You are made to sign on two year contracts on virtually any phone you buy
6) You start using the Internet for trivial tasks like looking up the weather that too on the Fahrenheit scale
7) You count in pounds and ounces forgetting your grams and kilograms
8) You are scared of getting hit on the road because you are used to seeing the opposite direction for traffic.
9) You go onto sit in the left seat in the front of your friend’s car to realizing the steering presence
10) You realize Malls are not vertical structures but spread out areas
11) Safeway or Albertsons are the only places where you can buy your grocery and you do it once in every 20 days
12) Virtually every restaurant is owned by a big company and offer the same menu across the country
13) You realize you are lost and there is no one to ask for directions
14) You carry your GPS everywhere you go, blindly following the left and right directions by a female voice.
15) You need a GPS or Google Maps to reach home from any X point
16) You hear people saying “You have a good one” not knowing what that one is
17) You start using your iCalendar or Outlook for trivial noting down trivial tasks like meeting your friend for coffee
18) You walk into a bar and realize you don’t know the names of any of the drinks they have
19) Caffeine seems like an inevitable tonic for day to day activities
20) You look at the backside of even Lays to find out Calories and Sodium content
21) You have to look carefully to choose between low fat, non-fat, high fat, half and half Milk!
22) You realize that coffee is not equal to a 3-hour conversation. It is a drive through or a To-Go affair.
23) You realize that there is something called Voicemail and everybody uses it
24) Electric switches, water handles and almost everything works in the opposite sense. Luckily the clock is still the same clockwise and anticlockwise.
25) You take flu shots to prevent flu
26) Rebecca is Becky, Katherine is Kathy, Gregory is Greg, Robert is Bob and James is Jim
27) Everybody thinks you speak Indian
28) You suddenly realize that Macy’s is where you buy all your clothes
29) You see everybody having a pickup truck
30) Honeywell makes your fan and you get GE cameras.
31) You have two bank accounts called Checking and Savings
32) You buy a shredder to shred all your credit card bills. Identity theft is right at your door step
33) You pay $6 every month for your trash
34) Everybody asks me whether I want to stay in the States or go back as if I have escaped some hardship in India
35) They make you set your clocks one hour behind and ahead calling it Day Light Saving

Tornado or a Tsunami!

2008-11-21T09:54:00.000+05:30

I haven’t got back to blogging since a while thanks to my hectic graduate student life. I am living in the United States since the past three months, a country I never thought I would inhabit even once. It seems to me that when destiny had it for me, a strong force pulled me out of where I was, uprooted me and planted me here in the bay. A Tornado! A Tsunami!

Now that I have recovered well enough, I am back to blogging!

Socially yours...

2008-05-04T22:53:00.000+05:30

“I am getting ready to go out. I am meeting a friend” I screamed out to my mother from my room. She had plans of dining out at a Thai restaurant which I had politely refused. I had just mentioned to her about the Thai restaurant where my friend was going to dine with his date and she wanted to dine there to. I had already made plans of meeting a junior from college.

I came out of my room dressed in Khaki shorts and a grey Reebok T shirt. I have always loved wearing old grey T shirts, washed and washed innumerable times, soft and skin friendly. My mom was little shocked for she had assumed that I am going on a date. “Don't you want to look presentable to your friend?” she asked smilingly. “I don't care”, I shrugged as I put on my footwear, “It is incredibly hot”. Bangalore has started to become excessively warm this summer, due to which I am mostly in shorts except the conferences and the customer meetings that I need to attend. “It is as much important to dress for the society as it is to dress for oneself, if not less” she said flipping through the magazine she was scanning.

I didn't react. I was getting late. I just ran out of the house, into the block to fetch myself an auto rickshaw. Managing to negotiate a decent price with an autowallah, I sat inside to remember my mother's words. I started wondering whether it was that necessary to be presentable even in this humid and killing weather. Are we that important that the society actually pays heed to what we wear? We anyway don't belong to the “Saif Ali Khan was as usual stunning in his brown leather jacket at the party” gang.

I have always believed in living for myself. I live for myself and hence I live for the society. This is my theory. While a part of me agrees that Indians live for the society, the other part hurtfully denies it. We are the same people who are as conscious of the society as to not kiss in the public and at the same time as indifferent as to pile up heaps of garbage unattended in places. Is this hypocrisy? I certainly think so.

All I believe is to be socially aware. When I say “socially aware”, I mean to say that one needs to know constantly how his actions are affecting the society. I was commuting on my scooter to Vijayanagar yesterday to attend a wedding reception. It nearly took me two long hours of commute while going and about the same on the return trip. While I was just moving inches on the chord road, I noticed that the agonizing traffic was all because of a religious festival organized by people on the road. Was this all necessary? It may be hundreds of years old as a festival and one may not prefer forgetting it, but imagine agonizing around five thousand commuters for around two hours hours each on a weekend! Sigh!

Thoughts "under" the sun!

2008-04-09T16:18:00.004+05:30

Off late, especially after I have become a manager, I feel very different all of a sudden at work. Though nothing much has changed, I feel important and more importantly, responsible. I am supposed to take care of the kids that report to me and I am supposed to review their work etc. Though the kids are as lazier as I am, they somehow seem to love me a lot when compared to other people at work.

Over one of our Baskin Robbins adventures that I take the kids out to, I asked them what motivates them to work and what is it they look forward to everyday at work. They started buttering me as usual with their “Oh you are nice.” “You are not authoritative”. “You don’t blast us”. kinda statements.

Heck, why would I if they do their work properly? Today, I had a heavy lunch at Dominos with an old friend and was climbing up stairs introspecting why the kids gave such a great feedback about me when I met an old colleague. After exchanging our ritualistic pleasantries, I asked him what’s new. He told me that he had been promoted to the post of a Project Leader and he has 5 people “under” him. First, I actually didn’t comprehend what he was saying. What he actually meant was that he was responsible for the crimes of 5 engineers who reported to him. I congratulated him on his success ritualistically and just climbed up to the 3rd floor quickly.

Now as I sit in my chair, I am asking myself whether this is what people expect from their work lives. Is becoming a Project Leader or a Project Manager such big a deal and why do people crave to have people “under” them? Yes, responsibility is a nice thing and the fact that you are being entrusted new responsibilities is great, but how can you feel somebody is under you?

I personally feel it very derogatory to use words like “under me” or “below me” to describe your reports. Why can’t people use more sophisticated and professional terms like, “I have so many reports” or “I manage so many people”. All of us are in the company to earn our living. Right from the chairman to the guy who cleans the pantry does it to earn his bread and why don’t people realize this? We should attribute due respect to everybody no matter who it is and whether he is a junior engineer or a high level manager. India has forgotten the archaic rule of the Queen since 1947 and despite the fact that it has been around 61 years, we still tend to accord archaic definitions to terms in management. I think the kids thoroughly like me because I am not patronizing or authoritative in an archaic way.

Is power only to boss around? Isn’t there a better way to look at it? Does being archaic serve the purpose? Can’t we use power to create a difference in somebody’s life; professional or personal? Can’t we use power to create a well being in the society that we live in? Instead of considering people to be under or below you, can’t you think them as young little ones in your nest that you need to nurture? I'm still thinking...

High Class

2008-04-08T14:38:00.002+05:30

Finally! I exclaimed seeing my email. She was right there in my room. She asked me what happened. I told her that I have finally got my much awaited MBA admission from the University I wanted to attend. She was so happy. She started asked me all sorts of questions. “Where is this exactly?”, “What exactly do you guys study?”, “How long do you have to be there?”, “Do you have good job prospects after your MBA?” She is one hell of an inquisitive woman. After I answered all her queries, she wished me great luck for my studies and carried on with her work.

She is none other than Saroja aunty, our beloved maid servant! Yes, you heard it right surely. She is somebody simply awesome and I have started liking her more. A woman in her mid 40s, she comes neatly dressed to work, always sports a cheerful smile on her face, always helps my mother an extra bit, is extremely cultured and professional. If I have one word to describe her I would say she is “classy”.

Yes that is right, she truly has class. She might not have money, something which most “high class” people call as class but she truly has elegance which is by no means is related to money. She might not be educated but she really has a thirst for knowledge. She might not be able to send her children to the United States but she wants to know what education is like there and why I am opting to study abroad to studying in India. She can watch anything from Travel and Living to National Geographic. She might not understand English but she truly understands the pulse of every culture that is portrayed on the idiot box. She may never own a car herself in her life but she sincerely opines that gold wouldn’t be a good color for a small car like Santro but goes well with bigger cars like Hyundai Accent or Ford Ikon.

This is what I define as truly being classy. I definitely look for this class in people when I make friends or try to be a little judgmental about somebody. :) In our short span of life, we tend to accord a lot of importance to a piece of paper called money forgetting everything else. When we do have a lot of parameters to opine about someone we generally look at the “wallet factor” more than anything else. For me, true class lies underneath your skin and can never be determined by the brand of clothes you wear or the car you drive.

Chennai Senthamizh

2008-04-06T23:16:00.003+05:30

My day started with a telephone call. Nish called. “I am so happy Praveen”. “What happened?" I asked. “The met department has predicted heavy rains”. I was stunned. “Why woman? What on earth are you trying to say?”. “Don't you know that whenever they predict something, it doesn't happen” came the reply. That is typical Nish, one character that never ceases to amaze me.

She came zipping in a typical Chennai auto and took me to Saravana Bhavana a few yards away in the auto itself. That's typical her. The carefree girl! For some reason she walked out of Saravana Bhavana and wanted to have breakfast elsewhere. "You won't know" she said. She took me another small café in Pondy Bazar where she made me eat Vadai with black pepper, the totally Tamil style of preparing it. When we were busy sipping hot coffee it started pouring outside. I glanced at her with a “What is this now?” look. “It is all because of you. What did you do to this place? Why did you have to bring rain from Bangalore to Chennai? Blah Blah...” She rattled at a pace of 100 words per minute for about two minutes which kept me gazing at her more with amusement. By this time the rain stopped and she started her “See I told you! You never listen!” dialogues!

OK girl! Now take me somewhere. As usual she spoke to an auto driver to take us to a place called Citi Center for 100 bucks. 100 bucks, isn't that too much? When I was thinking about the terrible state of affairs back home at Bangalore, she just signaled me to get in. “This is Chennai” she said as she got in; “Things work totally differently here”. “What is a meter for?” I asked. “That just hangs on for itself”. “Wow, how nice a purpose!”

We just straightaway climbed up to the children's section at Citi Center to start playing fun games for kids! She just ordered me not to open my wallet. “You are in Chennai! You are my guest!”, she declared.

Two days seemed to pass like two minutes. She took me around to the beach, to shopping plazas, to flea markets, to small by-lanes to Baristas. She is a mix and match of everything just like the city she comes from. From the simple girl next door to the upwardly urban city dweller. A combination which makes her unique. She is a Chennaite! So is Chennai; very unique. It is a place that is as vibrant as any city can get. A place where many cultures meet but live in harmony.

Chennai is place famous for a lot of things as many as it is infamous for. People often crib that Chennaites are not friendly, they don't talk any other language than Tamil, they are aggressive etc. I feel it is just another overly hyped judgment about every human soul in Chennai, much the same way the IT crowd in Bangalore is perceived to be. “Oh IT na, bidi!” We are always thought to be some aliens earning loads of money, having a lavish lifestyle and visiting the United States every second day.

You are in Chennai! You are in their place and you expect them to talk your tongue? Fine, you expect but they might not deliver! Just like me and my boss at work. :D I never had any problems in moving around in Chennai considering the fact that I don't speak Tamil though I claim to. I don't know why, wherever I went, people accepted me and they spoke to me. They went an extra mile to help me out. I may not be a Chennaite but I surely followed the “Be a Roman when you are in Rome” principle. I always sported a “I am one of you” look and people seemed to take this well.

I thoroughly loved my stay in Chennai and I seem to like the city too. I have no qualms about how people live in that city because it is finally their city and they have every right to live the way they want to. I can't crib about people driving fast or autos tariffing exorbitantly. If they don't want to talk to strangers, that's perfectly fine too. It's finally not my backyard you see! :)

Very respectful

2008-02-24T10:50:00.004+05:30

I happened to read an article in today's Vijaya Karnataka about the ever increasing incidents of prostitution in the city and how the tempted techies are getting mugged by prostitutes. As usual, our media never ceases to describe in detail about how bothersome the issue is for the "techie" community. Why do we give so much of importance to people who code as if they have been downloaded straight from heaven? Anyway, the intention of this post is neither to detail how biased the Indian media is about the techies nor to debate why we are attributing so much of importance to the techie community. It is something else.

I certainly agree with the article that it is definitely bad on the part of the prostitutes to mug the "techies" (anyone for that matter). What irked me a lot in the artiicle is this particular line. "Gauravastha kutumbada hennu makkalu odaduvude kashtavaagi hogide". (Girls from respectable families cannot even think of roaming there.

Mr. Jounrnalist, how can you define what is respectful and what is disrespectful? Do you think you are respectable and why exactly should someone regard you as respectable? You have education, you have money, you have cars, you have food and shelter and is this why you consider you are respectable or you come from a respectable family? The prostitute who you and everyone in the society considers cheap might just be slogging her days off by selling herself to make someone else respectable. She might be saving every penny to fend for her brothers education so that he becomes respectable in the future. She might be doing this because she has to attend to an ailing father. She might have been considered somebody who need not be respected by the society and that is probably why she has jumped into this profession.

I dont think India is a place where women are pursuing such things as careers out of choice and for god's sake you are in India, Mr. Journo.

Why do we have such stereotypical notions of what should be respected and what shouldn't be. If you ask me, you should respect every form of life no matter in what small form. The very fact that we are born as homo-sapiens entitles us to certain respect, doesnt it? After all, we are the animals with brains that create and innovate. Sigh!

2008-01-11T23:02:00.000+05:30

It wasn't a dream.. You were actually there. You came from behind and hugged me tight. I couldn't believe my eyes that you had actually come. You just whispered in my ears that you felt like seeing me and you just landed. You also told me that you have just come to meet me for one day and we just have 24 hours. In all the excitement of meeting you, I didn't care much about it.

We were in a city where we had the Eiffel Tower. After having a heavy breakfast, we set out to see the Eiffel Tower. We admired its beauty, climbed the tower hand in hand and enjoyed the view of the city from the top. We then decided to go to the pyramids on a camel. Pyramids were right there in the same city. We reached there in a few minutes.. The whole view of the desert and the pyramids was breathtaking. We remembered the Pharaohs and Cleopatra before boarding a train back into the city. The train station was Victoria Terminus. The pigeons there gave us a roaring welcome. We boarded the train and reached the city. The Pizzeria offered us some nice and sumptuous pizzas. We had hot chocolate and coffee too. We decided to take a wake around the Sydney opera house. We walked hand in hand, clinging and leaning on each other. We attended the Opera in the evening before heading to eat Pani Puri. It was time to go back home and we took the gondolas. The evening had begun to fade into a charming night. I had an apartment next to the beach where we could hear the waves lashing the shores with resonating frequencies. I had a huge balcony from where we could see the moon. I held your hand and kissed it. You were red! We lay on the couch next to each other. You kissed my forehead gently and the wind from the beach blew into our hair. Quickly sleep dawned on me and you couldn't stay any longer. You slowly disappeared to the place from where you had come from. This real dream was not yet over when my mom reminded me of my boss and it was 10 in the morning.

Mynt Fresh Freedom!!

2007-12-30T00:27:00.000+05:30

It’s all over, finally!! I had been going through one of the toughest ordeals in my life since the past week. The dentist had announced that she would be removing the sutures in my mouth exactly a week after the surgery. I was waiting for this holy day to arrive like anything. Each minute to this Holy Friday was like an age passing by. This seemed to be the only thought in my mind.

The day finally arrived and I was on the dentist’s chair, not with a scare but with a smile on my face this time. “I can see the smile on your face” she said as she approached my mouth with a huge scissor, “It will pain a bit”. I was hardly bothered. I didn’t think of the pain. I was thinking of all the food I would once again be eating.

She cut, she drilled, she forced open, and she pulled the sutures out. It was pretty much a complicated affair to say. But I hardly experienced pain. I had a sense of freedom in my mind. In the anticipation of what was to come, I felt like a freed pigeon, I felt like a child running to the beach after school, I felt like a warrior returning back home after war and like a bonded labourer freed after years of labour.. I felt exactly like how a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela would have felt when their countries were liberated. A sense of a free being, a feeling of living in an obstacle less world…

Yours virtually...

2007-12-24T18:29:00.000+05:30

The last week saw all 4 of my wisdom teeth being plucked mercilessly. I had no choice but to sit back and watch it without pain. I was given around 10 anesthetic pricks in my mouth to numb my sensation and to reduce me to “I don’t have a mouth” condition. After the operation, I literally had to stand in front of a mirror to figure out where my mouth was to feed myself with some ice-cream.

The operation has left me dumb from the past few days. I hardly can open my mouth to say something. While this in a way has been a boon to my parents who are lucky enough to escape my wordy torture, it seems funny and funnier to many people around me.

I have been rejecting all calls sending back a “Thank you for your call. I have had a dental surgery due to which I cannot open my mouth. I will call you back once I am fine” message to everyone. Don’t know how those credit card callers would have felt. I pity them…

I have a friend who cracks the most funniest of the jokes you will get to hear on mother earth. Believe me, her jokes are the best. As usual, she cracked a PJ and I was about to say LOL. But what the heck, I can’t even open my mouth to laugh out loud. So she asked me to laugh virtually. I mean write LOL but don’t laugh literally. She’s like, you don’t have a voice, but you do have a voice. Blog it!!

I am left pondering into deep fresh mynt thoughts about how we are doing things virtually more and more. This is the age where we laugh, play, talk, cry and sympathize online. Though this way of laughing is comfortable for me as of now, when I come to think of it, it makes me laugh louder. Heck, I can’t even laugh. Poor me.

LOL, LOLER, LOLEST

2007-06-22T19:25:00.000+05:30

I guess I am going crazily insane about the word LOL. LOL in short means "laugh out loud" and is used in places where you start laughing your guts out at some nutty joke. Off late, I seem to be laughing a lot at work and I really don't know how my cubicle mates are tolerating me. I don't seem to care. I always used to LOL at all the LOL kinda jokes either on chat or on cellphone until I met this character who taught me what LOLER and LOLEST were. He seems to use LOL between every two sentences he speaks and apparently LOLER means more than LOL and LOLEST is heights. :D

Heights, isn't it? As of now my cubies haven't said kick. I hope they don't have a KICKER, KICKEST vocabulary inbuilt. LOL, I need to go now...

ParadoXodarap

2007-06-22T19:21:00.000+05:30

Again, some bhashan from me. Please bear..

Imagine a concept like "deadline". You sometimes wonder why your boss is pressuring you so much. You start thinking one level higher and go to the client. The client leads to his clients who buy his products, and those products lead to people who consume them. Wait a sec. Who are we finally? :) We are the same people who demand things quickly. Why do we do it? For the reason that we have deadlines at work and we don't have enough time. Such a paradoxical world.. :)

Relativity...

2007-02-07T12:57:00.000+05:30

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity" ~Einstein

The last weekend made me realize much more than this. As usual me and Suma were at thindi street on Thursday and had loads of junk at Aunty's stall. :) Both of us fell sick over the weekend. Saturday, I roamed around with Nikhil all around the town to get truckloads of pending work done and by the end of the day, I was way too tired to even think about anything. I just didn't have to think, I had all reasons to worry. I was running a temperature. Too lazy to search for Crocin, I somehow led myself to bed moaning all to myself. My moaning started gaining momentum by midnight and my god, I was literally boiling at one point in time. I don't think I even slept for a second. I was rolling left and right in the bed gasping for breath. Finally I gave in. I got up at around 3pm and sat simply on the sofa for a while. Nikhil was peacefully sleeping in the other room and I didn't want to disturb him. I started my treasure aka “Crocin” hunt. Damn, the Crocin was nowhere to be found in the entire house. I started getting weird ideas about medicine delivery chains in Bangalore and tried to call some of them on my Cellphone. But, what the heck? Why would someone want to come all the way to give me one Crocin pill? That was way too much to ask for. My brain was pulsing so much that I thought I would die in a while of a brain hemorrhage or something. Mourning about how people would mourn about my death the next day, I went back to bed, this time with a wet towel on my head. This luckily cooled the monster down a bit and finally Nidra Devi seemed to bless me with about 3 hours of sleep.

Getting up early in the morning, I had fresh mynt thought in mind. The thought of getting myself a shot done as early as possible to ease down the fever, seemed so blissful keeping in mind all that I had to tolerate the previous night. I am usually an “anti-medicine” person. If you have started to wonder what the heck on earth that is, let me give you some gyaan. I am a believer of nature care. I believe that the body has its own mechanism to cure itself and we need to give it enough time for it to do that. This is the essence of naturopathy aka nature care. But the fast paced world demands instant cure, doesn't it? Anyway, let's take the story ahead. The fever in “generally anti-medicinal and needle phobic Praveen” made him prepared for the shot. Getting sweet thoughts of getting a shot done and the fever vanishing away, I went to the doctor. Fortunately, the doctor declared that it was just a minor intestinal infection and a couple of pills would do good. I took the pills from the chemist and good back home.

Badly needing a hair cut and almost resembling Einstein, I had Einstein thoughts the whole day. The above quote by Einstein is so true to life, isn't it? Do you think otherwise? Well, that's precisely what relativity is all about. :)

"Shill", it's all over...

2007-01-20T23:40:00.000+05:30

So finally it is all over. Despite the fact that the baddie has turned "Goody" and apologized to Shilpa,the UK viewers have kicked her out. No matter whether there was racism at all in the whole episode, Channel 4 has made quite a big sum of money from all the viewer text messages and Shilpa has officially or practically announced that she is there to stay in Hollywood.

In my honest opinion, racism is not something that you encounter in a brainless third rated show on television. Racism is probably something you would encounter on the streets, in the villages, on the paddy fields where the "landlord" race has always bullied the "labourer" race. Someone once apparently hit my cousin when he was walking back home from a restaurant in Europe. Well, that's racism.

Shilpa claims to represent India in the show, I would like to ask her who gave the right to do so. She is earning money, fame (I don't know) or whatever it is only for herself and not for India. Let her speak for herself and not for India. You get paid 3 crores of rupees to get locked up somewhere to quarrel with people on TV. Hmmm, that's way too unreal and the civilized world calls it a reality show.. :o

Super finicky...

2007-01-08T16:34:00.000+05:30

I guess I am getting super finicky about being non judgmental. Over the weekend, we went to a restaurant and I ordered Rose Milk. Oh my god, that was one super pink drink which I had ever seen in my entire life and it seemed at one point of time that all the pink in this world was being made to exist in that beer mug.

I hated it to the core. But again, I didn't conclude that it was bad. I just told my friends that it was simply not my types. I guess that's a better expression for a super-finicky-non-judgmental person like me.

If you don't like something, don't conclude that it's bad. It's just you who's not liking it. Just say "It's not my types" and move on...

Got Zapped!!

2007-01-04T21:17:00.000+05:30

Read my next post (i mean the one below) and then read this one!!

Like I said in my post I was very particular about my mother being non judgmental about me. We have this person coming to all the houses twice in a week with his flute. He is a nice chap and he is quite fit as well. He just plays his flute and we are supposed to give him some money. He is never good at it but tries to give us the best of whatever he has learnt.

I was all furious about my early morning waking up one day. I was cribbing about how I have to drive all the way to learn French. I wasn't at all in the best of my spirits when this chap came in front of my house. I told my mom how well built he was and how easily he could earn a job as a security guard in front of some mall or a big mansion. I was all of this opinion that we should not give anything to such people.

My mom gave me a long stare. "Why are you trying to be judgmental about him? If you don't want to give him money, don't. But don't conclude about him. He might be liking what he is doing".

I was zzzzzzzzzzzaaaapppeddddddddd!!!

Right or wrong?

2006-12-24T23:39:00.000+05:30

I literally had to scream at my mom the other day when she was trying to advocate something to me as good and something else as bad. According to me, the definition of good or bad depends largely on the person. It's a personal preference and its perfectly fine as long as it doesn't harm the society. She was simply in no mood to listen. I finally reached a point where I gave her a "I will remain silent but that doesn't mean I agree to whatever you gotta say." look.. Huh, that was one helluva time...

Finally after a few days she seems to have understood what I mean. I have always tried to remain non-judgmental in my life. I don't have have anything against anybody's opinion as long as it doesn't affect me.

The other day at office, I sent out an article written by this gentleman about how the concepts of R&D and innovation are withering away from the Indian society with the customer dictated services industry. I read the article but I hardly bothered to voice out my opinion. It's finally another article by another author and I don't care. He has said all he's got to say and I have listened to it. To take it or not is upto me.

I sent this out to an internal mailer group and suddenly an angry gentleman replied back (to all) saying that it was bullshit and people should not waste their time reading it. He, I guess expected me to pick up an online quarrel. :) I didn't... I simply replied back saying that it was just another article and we cannot judge what the author could have felt within himselves while writing it.

Why are we trying to be judgmental? Why can't our society be based on acceptance and tolerance? I mean, look at the Dutch. They have embraced everything from drugs to mercy killing as legal. Just because I think doing drugs is bad for myself, I cannot be judgmental about someone else. Its a totally different body, a different brain, a different mentality and finally a different life altogether. I am no one to conclude what's right and what's wrong for him. I can only do it for myself.

I don't mind if you are judgmental about this blog. It's finally a murmur... :)

The "Bang" is back but not quite!!

2006-12-24T16:48:00.000+05:30

Yippie, the Bang is back.. Most people have left Bangalore for holidays and the city seems to have come back to its state ten years back. There are not many vehicles on the road and the shopping malls despite glittering from the christmas lamps don't have the maddenning crowd. There is not much pollution and the air seems fresh and sweet.. :)

I went out to my all time favourite tindi street (food street) to have food and the bang is quite not there. They have banned all the roadside tindi vendors :( and only the stalls remain. Its apparently a stupid rule to move hawkers out. A rule is a rule, I know, but when a rule is enforced care should be taken so that the place doesn't lose its identity just for the sake of the rule. Tindi street on Sajjan Rao circle has always stood there feeding people from 4pm to 1am in the night. It has served the moneyless, the rich, the students, the working class and just anyone who would simply not want to reserve a restaurant seat but would want to just walk in to grab a quick street snack.

Sadly our rulemakers don't seem to understand this. Yup, the bang is surely back but not quite.

What's in a name?

2006-11-09T22:51:00.000+05:30

When my parents named me Praveen little did I know what it meant and little did I bother to ask them to change it. :) After all, what's in a name? A name is just something that you need to identify something or someone.

Names can be weird, names can be anything to mean "a flower in the heaven" or "a tiny tail hair of a pony". :o) I guess the name attaches some kind of a crazy "branding" to anything. Corporations even shell out millions of dollars to get a catchy name, logo and a phrase.

My city is being rechristened from Bangalore to Bengaluru and I am witnessing it full time. :) Bangalore was once called Bendakaluru meaning the city of baked beans. From the city of baked beans to the city of baked IT professionals, Bangalore has witnessed it all and taken it all. Now it's all set to take in Bengaluru.

Well, personally I don't have anything against the new name. But as Mr. Narayana Murthy of Infosys has rightly put it across, it would have been better for this city if the same energy and enthusiasm would have been put to better the crumbling infrastructure. The way Bangalore has built its brand abroad as the IT capital of India and as the second Silicon Valley has been phenomenal. So I guess it makes some sense for all of us to protect the brand identity that it has carved out for itself.

But I guess shopkeepers will slowly but surely replace their rusty Bangalore boards with new crispy Bengaluru ones, children will write "Bengaluru" on top of their letters practiced at school and Oxford press might even consider replacing Bangalored by Bengalurued. :) Time makes you forget the past and move on with life, doesn't it?

Give Back!!

2006-10-27T20:14:00.000+05:30

A few months back (Hmm, the lazy bum is writing the blog now) I was called by a company to attend an interview for an opening in their marketing team. I have always believed that I am a communicative (over :D) and dynamic person and a job like marketing would really make sense to me.

Neatly dressed up, I went to take up the interview confidently. I was not even a bit nervous. I have been happy with my job. But somehow I have felt I need more dynamism in what I do on a day to day basis. Anyway, I guess all that is not in the scope of this blog. :)

The interview was supposed to have 4 rounds. My god!! Questions after questions like how it pours in Chickmangloor during rainy season. :D Luckily, I managed to answer most of them and they seemed to be happy.

The VP of Marketing came to me to take my final round of interview. He did that and finally he asked me whether I had some questions to ask. A big Smile and Praveen starts off.. Hmmm. :) Since I have always been into community care, corporate social responsibility etc, I asked them if they had such an initiative at their company. He was taken aback. I don't know what he felt. I guess he felt that I was talking something irrelevant. He said they just collect some money during distress from employees and send it out to funds and they don't have time to do all these things. I confidently went on to explain him how important it is to have a CSR team etc. Anyway, that's past. I didn't go and join there either. Let me share some feelings I have about the role of corporates in social responsibility.

I have always believed that it is important for one to give back something to the society that one lives in. It applies to both corporates and individuals equally. When I say "Come on, you are from somewhere, you are sucking something out of this land, isn't it your duty to give something back?", people feel strange about it. I am not talking about Firangs here. They are our own people employed in top positions in these MNCs. I appreciate the efforts of some foreign companies based out of here, to build a stronger, nicer and cleaner society but some don't even know what CSR is all about.

I guess it's high time for the students in colleges to question back the companies during recruitment about their role in the society. How many of us have actually asked questions like "Does your company have an active CSR department?", "Are you environmental friendly?", "Are you sensitized by ongoing issues in India?".. The job-greedy person inside us doesn't even think about all these things.. These questions i firmly believe can surely bring about a change in the way recruiters look at grads. We are not anymore scapegoats to be taken for granted. Just because we get some money out of our jobs, companies can't buy us like objects.

Believe me, if some company doesn't want to recruit you because you asked all these questions, it's definitely not worth joining.. :)

What about Science?

2006-10-16T20:10:00.000+05:30

This article cannot exist here because of various reasons. :) If you wanna read it, email me.. I will send it across.. :)

2006-10-06T18:27:00.000+05:30

I am back from a fabulous 5 day vacation in Mysore. Believe me, it was one of the best times I have had in the recent past. As they say, “Be a Roman when you are in Rome’, I tried to be a Mysorean when I was in Mysore. (Contrary to how most Bangaloreans are). I tried to put myself into the shoes of a Mysorean. I didn’t crib about the silent streets; I didn’t cry about the old and retired crowd and neither did I try to feel the lack of glittering malls. I took things as they were thrown at me and loved Mysore every bit I could. I would be murmuring something as usual… Read on if you have time..

I am in love… :)

2006-10-06T18:22:00.000+05:30

Yup!! I am in love.. Yet again.. This time around a different love story all together.. I have truly really fallen in love with Mysore. It’s not like its love at first sight or something. I have been to Mysore several times in the past but I don’t know why, this time around Mysore actually literally made me fall in love with it.

Its Dussera time and what other better time can you think of to visit Mysuru. As I took a ride in the evening, I noticed every building glittering with blue/green light and every place no matter how small or big decorated itself with lights and flowers for Dussera. I guess this is something which makes Mysore very special and distinct. Everybody shares the common spirit. The spirit of Navaratri. Navaratri is not bound by any religion. It is called Nada Habba or the festival of the land. Everyone celebrates it with equal interest. I was amazed to see the spirits of the people…

Ok OK!! Enough of Dussera description, let me come back to the point. I really loved the tranquility and the culture of the place.. I absolutely adored the grandeuse of the palace. Not to forget the ever smiling people. I told my cousin that I have started to absolutely love the city. She asked me to take a job and start living there. Then I really truly started introspecting whether I would be able to live at all in a city like Mysore. I actually felt I couldn’t. I just shrugged at her and I said I doubted whether I ever could live in a not-so-happening city like Mysore.

It was the last night of my trip in Mysore. There I lay on my bed with cynical thoughts in my mind about my new love. I thought it was like this feeling of falling in love with someone but not being ready to marry that person. But it wasn’t really that feeling inside me. I was just trying to give myself that feeling, that’s all.

I am a person who has always thought that there’s no life beyond the high rise malls and the maddening crowd. I felt I was rejecting Mysore but frankly I don’t deserve to live there...

The air is pure.. The people are warm.. The streets are empty… :)

2006-10-06T18:19:00.000+05:30

I got down from my bus to feel that I suddenly had got something that I didn’t have all these days. I didn’t know what it was but all of a sudden it appeared to me that someone had gifted me something or probably showered a blessing on me. Here I was, in an auto to granny’s place feeling as if someone had gifted Mysore to me.  (Hmmm, not a dream of course of the Wodeyar, Hyder Ali world where cities were gifted.)

As the caption says it all, this is how Mysore is.. Very much unlike notre Bangalore. The air is really pure and cool breeze lingers even the busiest of the streets. The people treat you as if you are one among them and you are welcome at their place without a telephone call.

One strange thing I noticed about Mysore is that there are no beggars at all. It’s really hard to see someone begging in the traffic signals unlike here in Bangalore. Even though Bangalore is called the city of opportunities, I would like to say that Mysore is more of it because even though it’s a small city, there’s something or the other for everyone to do to earn a living with dignity.

This is a place where streets are literally empty all throughout the day. This is a place where you get milk from cows milked at your doorstep, where people get up really early not because they are hurrying to work, where IT is still a speculated thing, where music is loved by young and where cops still smile at you. This is a place where you are not respected for the money you have or the car your drive around but for your wide heart you have and the cultural richness you show…

Those twenty minutes...

2006-09-12T23:47:00.000+05:30

I work for an NGO where we do considerable work on HIV/AIDS prevention. We advise people to get themselves tested so that they know where they stand and also so that they don’t spread the disease to others. I have myself gone to many sessions, roadshows and spoken about the importance of getting tested. Have I ever got tested myself? The answer was no all this time.

Somehow all this while, I never had the courage to go and get an HIV test done. I don’t know why, I was really, very genuinely scared. I have always known that I have been “safe”. But still, when I look back, those were days when there weren’t any dispovans. There was hardly any sterilization done on the needles and blood was actually transfused without stringent tests. There could have very well been a contraction in my case. Who knew?

I always feared this virus. I don’t know why. What if I myself am positive? Though I courageously speak to the public that HIV positive people don’t have to remain in the closet and they can lead a normal like us, I never could imagine leading a “positive” life myself. I could never put myself into that situation and think. My head would spin dreading the stigma that is associated with the virus and the disease.

Today, I just decided that it was time to cut all the hypocrisy. I decided to go and get myself Elisa tested. I went to a diagnostic center after work, all shivering to tell the lady at the reception that I wanted to get an HIV test done. She asked me to fill up a little form. Even there, I wouldn’t simply write my address. Imagine an NGO worker who talks day in and day out about the topic, being so stigmatized about the entire procedure. Well, my mind simply didn’t think straight. I went in; the guy looked at me and gave me a small, good enough stare to scare me more. I tried being friendly with him. I asked him what the procedure was and how they actually tested people. He was friendly enough to tell me how it was all done and the kind of reagents they use etc and even asked me whether it was for the company’s sake. I just nodded my head indicating a yes.

Suddenly, I realized that I had overcome my needle fever. The same person who has a hyper needle-fever when he goes to take small tetanus injections didn’t fear the prick at all. That was phenomenal. This fear was bigger. The fear was as big as my entire life. It was the question of my life. My life in its entirety. I gave the blood sample and sat outside. I don’t know whether the A/C was cold or it was the fear factor inside me that was making me shiver; there I was, sitting on the couch crossing my fingers. The lady said “20 minutes sir” as she went on and on over her mobile phone talking to her husband. Will I ever have a spouse? What if I turn out positive? No one would love me then; no one would even talk to me the way the receptionist conversed with her husband.

I couldn’t wait there. Twenty minutes seemed donkey ages to me. I decided to barge into the lab and shout at the lab technician. But, I didn’t. I just went in and sat like a small kid near the table where he was testing my sample. I started asking him questions about the cases they get and the number of people who finally turn out to be positive etc. Even though he was informative, I didn’t care. It was a cheap trick to overcome the fear I was having inside me. All the statistics about which I spoke in the street plays were gone for a toss. All I wanted to know was the result. He stood up, took a deep breath looking at the sample. It was almost a spot death for me. He gently turned to me and said “Sir, it’s negative, don’t worry”. My god, I almost felt as if he was Jesus Christ and I should kiss his forehand. I didn’t do that though. I thanked him for the test he had done and walked out to the reception to collect the report.

The lady was still talking to her husband over the phone and gave me a wide smile. She charged me for the test and let me go. I had my breath back in me. I checked for my heartbeat and it was fine too. So there I was, walking out of the lab in joy with the romantic conversation in the backdrop.

I laughed at myself. Why do we fear life so much? Why can’t we be practical? A tout-à-fait practical guy like me could go crazy over a small clarifying test. Those 20 minutes really freaked the guy out of me.. Believe me you don’t need to eat cockroaches on AXN Fear Factor to know what real fear is all about. Go and get yourself HIV tested. :)

A meter worth having!!

2006-09-01T17:45:00.000+05:30

As usual, me and a friend of mine were sulking about being broke, not having money, about buying gadgets etc. He was of the opinion that money shouldn't be there at all in this world. I kinda agreed to him like an innocent kid very well knowing that it was impractical. Imagine what a noble world it would be without this paper thingie which complicates our lives, day in and day out.

No money would mean, no salary!!! Hmm, are you ready to work without getting paid? Chill, you would then have some way to measure your worth. This friend of mine told me that each one of us should be judged based on how good we are. The noble deeds we do, the changes we bring about around us and the selfless life we lead. The things we need in life should be given to us depending on our worth..

I guess there should be a meter on each of our foreheads to tell how good or bad we are on a scale. Say you are going to buy an Apple iPod. If your meter says you are great you get an iPod Video, if it reads good you get an iPod Audio, if its fair you get a shuffle and if its bad you don't get one at all...

Airing my moneyless thoughts,
Prav

I am, what I am...

2006-08-29T10:47:00.000+05:30

Last Saturday saw me shaving off my facial hair. Something I had thought I would never do. Well, I don't look all that bad actually.. :)

The experiment was followed by some sharp criticism and comments which I savoured over the entire weekend. While my mom said, it looked absolutely fine, one of my friends said I look weird, scary and funny. The other said I looked old. Another old lady said I actually looked "not-bad" without my facial hair. One of my colleagues gave me a "oh my god" kind of look.

While it was absolute fun taking in these comments, the myself inside me was put to serious thought as to why people were commenting about my face. It's just a face, a face sans facial hair. Well, people do say that "Face is the index of the mind". But what the heck, these people know me for ages and they know my mind so very well that they don't need my face as an index to my mind.

Why do people judge us? Why don't they take us as how we are? My interiors wouldn't change, my values wouldn't change and the person inside wouldn't change a slight bit at all. I still wonder and ask myselves why I am not accepted as how I am.. After all, no matter whether I have facial hair or not, it's the same me, who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, goes to learn French and rushes to work. I am what I am, no matter where I am and how I am....

Fresh mynt thoughts yet again!!

2006-08-24T17:19:00.000+05:30

I am just back at my desk from my favourite Belgian Café, De Lekkerbek. I met this wonderful, charming, talkative, peppy jewish man there. This person is just awesome. He is a PhD in education and english, has been here in India since 20 years, loves the place, knows most foreign languages, is witty and sharp. :)

He asked me the same million dollar question whether I like working in the high-tech industry. Well, I gave him this analogy. According to me, working for high-tech in India is like being a surrogate mother. You are mothering someone else's baby. While you are happy that you are mothering in the first place, there's always this unhappiness that it's not your baby finally. It's gonna call someone else its mother.

Why is India not producing Bill Gates or Steve Jobs right here in India? Why is that emphasis is laid more on implementation than on ideas themselves? Aren't we capable of thinking and creating on our own? When the Americans, the Japanese, the French and the Israelis can create things we don't we?

Is it because we are not ready to face the global market Are we trying to play safe with services? Aren't we capable of creating a global brand? Why don't we simply innovate? Innovating all these thoughts in my mind, I am off from office to buy a new LG washing machine for myself. :)

Yelling babies are fed!!

2006-08-04T14:44:00.000+05:30

Inquiry into the nature is human tendency.. We constantly inquire, explore, debate, raise concerns into just everything we find in our daily life. We ask questions like why? how? what-for? This has been a very typical nature of the homo-sapien.

I have been working in the IT industry since the past one year and I see that the industry seems to be functioning on this aspect of human nature. Wait, I don't mean we are asking questions about the innovations that we create, the technology that goes into whatever we deliver to our customers or the kind of business that we are running. Here is an industry where questioning ourselves is of some importance but not as important as questioning our higher-ups.

There has been a constant lack of good work, good pay, good recognition, good opportunities and probably everything that is coupled with the good word "good" :) People take us for granted and assume we can do just anything that is being told. I would certainly attribute this to "anyone=engineer" and "trespassers are recruited" phenomena. Just anyone and everyone is hired here and people don't get what they want to get, may it be salary, work satisfaction or just anything.

I have observed varied tendencies here. While some people are contented about what they get, many are not. Among the many that are not contented, very few are bold enough to go and tell their supervisors that they are not happy. The silent chunk remains un-noticed and it is bound to be taken for granted..

It's always true that only crying babies are fed. :) Now is the time, where crying doesn't help. Here is an industry where only yelling babies are fed..

You shouldn't be reading this line. You should been at your supervisor's desk by now.. Go speak your freedom or rather yell your freedom.. :)

Your cubicle? Think twice

2006-07-28T12:42:00.000+05:30

If you ever thought that it's your cubicle and you could use it the way you want, think twice. If you pinned your girlfriend's photo, or your maami's recipe or stuck a cute teddy bear on the billboard beside your computer, you need to think twice.

Dwindling office spaces and crammed up cubicles are leading to flexi work hours for employees. This simply means that there's gonna be another person sitting at your desk the moment you leave your office. IT hubs in India like Bangalore and Hyderabad are suffering from lack of quality office space.

In densely populated IT forests like Electronics city, now there are almost 6 people sitting in a cubicle where 4 are supposed to sit. 6 people means six cell phones with Nokia to dhoom machale as ringtones and six extensions on which most calls are like "are you looking for a job change" or "we have introduced a gold credit card". There can be five other irking people with whom you need to get through the entire day or five heavenly human beings with whom you can have conversations on topics like "who's the best at quaralling with their athai" to "should we support Israel or not?".

I was walking back to my seat after a sumptous meal at Dominos when I saw almost 50+ people on the lawn next to the amphitheatre. Voilà, the freshers. I instantly could sense that they were freshers by hearing their crisp "just out of college" language. Hang on, what is that black thing that most of them are carrying.. Ohmagod, a laptop.. That too for a fresher.. I forced myself to digest this fact while my stomach was busy digesting mozzarella. :)

This was the talk in the entire cubicle that afternoon. Hey, EC campus is Wi-Fied da.. Freshers are given laptops to work from the lawns. Can someone really work on the lawns? I can't really call my client and say "I was out of my desk, uhh sorry my lawn", The freshers on the other hand seem to be enjoying it :)

I have been here, I have seen it all. This is one more phase of IT that India had to see. A phase, where "junk" is called "work" and a workstation is actually a laptop and a cubicle where you sit and work (or rather chat :o) ) is sans a billboard where you stick something..

How Kaavya can change, get a life and move on...

2006-06-08T09:54:00.000+05:30

What's happiness? Are we happy, and is this happiness? These are some questions that we ask ourselves in the process of self-appraisal. :) I actually never ever bothered about being happy for the sake of it till I started working. I started constantly asking myself why I was doing what I was doing. Is it for money, is it for satisfaction, is it because it is our duty to give back something to our country? I cribb when I am assigned no work and I also cribb when I have lots of work. I finally realized that no matter what it is, it’s indeed very essential to be happy. So what exactly qualifies as happiness?

Opal Mehta is this girl who desperately wants to get into Harward. She is prepared to do just anything to get an admit there. She puts in tons of efforts to get the best grades, the best awards and she strives hard to top up her résumé with whole lot of extra curricular stuff like in a cream topped latté style. But she is stumped when she is asked what she does for fun at the interview. She then realizes how important it is to be a social creature, a Haute Bitch to be precise… She transforms herself into a HB, puts loads of lipstick and tries to be ultrasocial, boy-driven and carelessly hip. But does it really take her to Harward? Does it make her happy? Does she realize that it’s all about being happy in the end? Does she understand that no matter whether you are in Harward, Yale or Stanford, it’s important to be happy in life?

Kaavya Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta got kissed, got wild and got a life” portrays very tenderly and very carefully, the character of a confused teenager who doesn’t know what happiness is all about. The fighting emotions in a teenage life and the continuous conflict that goes into an everyday teenager’s mind is beautifully painted by Kaavya. “Should I do this or do that?” itself is a big question for many sailing through the 13-19 life.

Kaavya who herself is a Harward sophomore was very much in news recently for her alleged plagiarism of Megan McCafferty’s two novels, Sloppy firsts and Second Helpings. Kaavya however in a wishy-washy language admitted that she had borrowed passages from McCafferty’s books very unintentionally. How funny?? Someone cannot borrow passages “as unintentionally” as Kaavya has done. Below is an example.

McCafferty's book, page 7: "Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget's braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh grade Honors classes."

Viswanathan's novel, page 14: "Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla's glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on."

The funniest part is that, the sales of McCafferty’s book have touched an all time high due to this scandal. :) Are people finding happiness in reading a novel just because it was plagiarised? Like Opal, are they confused about what they want to read? Do they get a life after reading McCafferty’s books just because Kaavya threw light on them?

Has Kaavya really understood what happiness is all about? Is she trying to make people feel nice, no matter from where on earth she borrows her passages from? Is happiness got by making tons of money from something which is not at all yours? Is it all about finding happiness in saying that you are from Harward and you were in news for plagiarism?

Kaavya, if you are reading this, please write what makes you feel happy… Write what you can write and portray yourself as you are. Go, get a life and move on.

Social!

2006-03-21T11:09:00.000+05:30

Last week, I went home one day at 8 from work. I changed, freshened up a bit and was sitting on the sofa messaging non stop to my friends. My dad saw this and said “I don’t understand you messaging all the time!!”

I got annoyed. I yelled back, “Don’t you know that man is a social animal??”
“Well, that’s exactly what I am trying to say”, came the reply!!!

Me and gloomy Bangalore afternoons

2006-03-17T14:58:00.000+05:30

I have always in some way or the other associated myself with gloomy Bangalore afternoons. Bangalore way back then seemed such a calm and composed city and everything was felt as if it was rightly put into place by some divine force.

One thing that always amuses me is, no matter what the season is, Bangalore generally turns non-sunny in the afternoons. It becomes as quiet as a charming princess sleeping in her palace courtyard. The sun gives up and says bye, in a way much similar to the “much more paid” software engineer who packs up after finishing his work.. :) There’s hardly any traffic on the roads and everything seems so sleepy.

During the first year of my course, we were put up in this cozy 3rd floor classroom of ours. There were two huge bay windows at the rear from where I could see most high rise buildings and zooming cars and trucks passing by. Whenever there was no teacher in the class I used to grab the opportunity to go to the window and see what was happening. Life moved on to times where I started hardly attending these boring afternoon lectures. I was better off at home, lying on my couch and savouring my favourite pakodas or bondas. Yumm…

Then came the nightmarish afternoon that I never thought would come. I was in the microprocessor lab exam and never got any result, the entire afternoon. The conditions outside were still non-sunny and pleasant but I was so much so in a mess that it looked gloomy, dark and unpleasant to me. I walked all the way back thinking that I would fail the exam and very surely later on, I did.

It wasn’t anything really serious though, to flunk off in a lab exam. But that semester was really crucial to me for the reason that the recruitment tests were scheduled next semester. I went into a state of disappointment so much so that I started visualizing these afternoons as devilish and hopeless.

There were so many afternoons which came, where I was pretty much up at the window, seeing or expecting rain, wondering about my future and contemplating on courses I did, the decisions I took etc. There were occasions where I smiled to myself saying that darkness is always followed by light and life moves on.

The semester following, I could retake the exam and it was a cakewalk for me. Again, it was another Bangalore afternoon. I felt like a tree which turned green with new leaves after a dry season of baldness. I was happy.

There was another afternoon where my joy knew no bounds. I was selected to be in the hardware team of Wipro Technologies. I was atop a Mysore Dussera elephant. I jumped; I shouted and called million people on my cell phone. The afternoons which I had lost cribbing, cursing myself, were thrown away eternally.

Man is an animal with so much of embedded complexities and intricacies. He thinks and ponders so much about small things in such blown out a proportion that he forgets to enjoy these little, small, chweet moments. After all, why should I write a blog on afternoons of all.. :)

Now when I sit at my seat with a hot café coffee day latté in my hand, looking out of the window admiring the “as-usual Bangalore” fabulous weather, I wonder why I have to worry so much only about afternoons more than any other time of the day. Is it the time of the day where you feel complacent, contented after having a heavy meal? Or is it the time to relax, rethink and reinvent your senses to face the evening or may be the next day? May be a tough challenge or a pleasant surprise..

Attitudes in Engineering and Management

2005-08-26T14:40:00.000+05:30

The last month saw me reading two books, two personal stories, which told me a lot of things about management in engineering and technology. I would like to share some of the excerpts from the two books and some of my personal views.

The first one is called “Made in Japan” and is by Akio Morita, Sony Corporation’s founder. The second one is by Bill Gates and it is called “The road ahead”. Both the books when read in succession gave me a clear picture of the contradiction between the American and the Japanese way of looking at things.

Once, a programmer from IBM was sent to Japan on a project. When he was typing away code for his mainframe in his quiet Tokyo office, somebody actually asked him to repair an IBM PC in the office. The Japanese expect a lot. I guess they want you to know anything and everything about the technology you are working on. Akio Morita, even though doesn’t really advocate this policy, he is quite proud of the staff at Sony who get into the basics of what exactly is being manufactured and marketed. An American on the other hand, would rather be quite happy to know what he is working on and in most cases would only know what he is expected to do at his office to earn his bread. He wouldn’t go into the depths of what’s happening around him or neither would he bother to know who is doing what.

At Sony Japan, they expect the products to be well within 5% of the tolerance. But the Japanese engineers are so proud of their flawless technology that they actually sometimes spend hours in reducing the errors to a near zero with every single product. Sony also has a manufacturing plant in San Diego in the US. When the instructions were given to the American employees about the same 5% tolerance, the testing experts found out that most of the products came somewhere close to this limit. That’s how their culture is…

I remember this joke once told to me by someone. An American and a Japanese man were lost in a jungle. They saw a roaring lion approaching them. The Japanese was quick enough to tie his shoes and seemed all set for a run. The American laughed “Do you think you can outrun the lion?” Quickly came the reply, “I don’t have to outrun the lion. I only have to outrun you…” Such is their perseverance in their strive towards excellence.

I am sometimes amazed how Japanese are so good at doing things. Who researches things for them and who designs? The Japanese don’t have much of core research in anything for that matter. All they do is license the technologies from the research labs in Europe and the US, miniaturize things, fabricate products without any flaws and market them in an unbeatable manner. The transistor was invented by the Bell Labs. The Japanese were quick in obtaining a license from them. They went through the basic structure of the PNP prototype licensed to them. They were so quick and practical in realizing that an NPN structure would suit most needs much better, that they were holding a miniaturized NPN transistor in less than a year’s time and they started licensing it worldwide.

A quarrel between two colleagues generally ends their relationship in Japan. They stop talking to each other ignoring each other’s existence. But the Americans are a great example of how two people should co-exist under a management. They know that even if two people have differences of opinion on technology or for that matter anything, they still could be friends and could go out for dinner.

Once there was a quarrel between Akio Morita and one of his colleagues at Sony. The colleague was so frustrated by this entire episode that he expressed his desire to resign. Akio Morita said calmly, “If I and you had the same viewpoint on all things and all issues pertaining to all matters, why would you think, we both are hired by the company and we both are paid our salaries every month?”

I think it is very important for a management in any company to value the views expressed by employees and if someone has a sheer opposition to something, the management should be quick enough to find out why there is a difference of opinion. This employee’s ideas could very well be the client’s idea or something what the end user thinks. The American companies are the best at this. At Microsoft each employee is given full freedom of speech to say what he wants to, on the products being developed or anything for that matter. The European companies on the other hand are conservative, less open to new ideas and focused only on ideas that flow from the top management. Philips, I guess has been an exception to this. This quite company that started its operations from a calm village in the Netherlands couldn’t have become a worldwide name, if they only had focused on a European clientele based on European ideologies and research carried out in Europe. Each company should therefore give importance to localization of products to suit the needs of the end user.

Even though the Americans and Japanese ideologies have their own goods and bads, it is wise for us to take the best of both in making India a leader in engineering technology. When it comes to adaptability, Indians stand out. We can adapt ourselves to any working environment, may it be the competitive Japanese or the liberal American…

Love

2005-08-26T10:59:00.000+05:30

What's LOVE? I guess it's the umpteenth time I am asking myself this question. Has love happened to me, or is it happening or is it something that is going to happen sometime later in my life?
Is love all about having someone in your life or is it when you start missing someone that you feel like you are in love? Is it all about sipping hot coffee with this special one in a coffee shop? Is it walking hand in hand in rain or is it simply cuddling up with someone special in bed? Is it all of these? I am confused…

When does love start? Is it when you make the first eye contact? Is it when you get your first kiss or is it when your inner self tells you that you should meet this person more often than you ever did?
I don’t know whether I have really ever fallen in love but sometimes I feel I have. But when there is a new person in my life and I feel its love what about the previous one? Has love gone? Is it this illusion that the present one is actual love and the previous one was just attraction?

Love according to me is like this hot cup of coffee that you so desperately wanted to have when you were in rain. You sit with the coffee mug in your hand beside your window pane watching the rain drops fall by. You start feeling so nice and romantic about the whole episode, to only realize a little later that somebody has forgotten to put in the sugar cubes. You can’t help it. Not too keen to go and get the sugar all by yourself, you somehow manage to drink the entire mug, only to discover tiny undissolved sugar crystals at the bottom. By then it’s too late…

It’s really getting too late for me to go to bed. Do I really need to dream about the person I want to dream about? Hey wait, is it too late to message this special one? Come on; is love worth bothering so much about?

Bang me back…