OBDURATE VIEW

Wh*re of the Year

2011-12-18T07:19:00.000-08:00

With year 2011 coming to an end it is good time to look back at the year and recognize people who achieved new lows across different facets of society. Since these are the people who redefined what nadir means, hence it would be an injustice to them if any word other "Wh*re of the year" is used to recognize their achievement. Without any delays I would start with the awards across different categories:-

Category 1: Politics
This category can have two winners, one would be critics choice, other would be popular choice:

Critics choice: A. Raja for his exemplary performance in 2G spectrum allocation
Close runners up: Suresh Kaldmadi - who made his mark at interntional stage through his stint in Common wealth games

However popular choice award will go to Mr. Kapil Sibbal - Nobody hogged more limelight then Mr.Sibbal who through his carefully crafted statements became the Wh*re of the year amongst politicians. This year number of jokes on Mr.Sibbal rivalled that of Santa/Banta and number of hate pages rivalled that of Ms. Rakhi Sawant, who incidently was disappointed for loosing her place of "most hated person" ,a feet achieved by featuring in multiple television shows.Mr. Sibbal surpassed her by only few of her statements, showing the caliber that he has.

Category 2: Sports
Category had many nominations from the pakistani cricket team, with Mohd. Asif leading the race for entire year, but last few weeks delt a big blow to Mr. Asif chances when out of nowhere Andrew Symonds swept everything away. Not only Symonds redefined what a new low for a cricketer can be but he also showed what a cricketer can be reduced to, if he fights with team management. Andrew Symonds not only played the role of Gabbar singh but also danced in artificial rain, on bollywood numbers in the show which is surely mother of all ridicules, Big Boss. Symonds surely has earned his position as Wh*re of the year in sports.

Category 3: Movies
In this category winner is King Khan, who achieved this feet while making his dream come true, dream being RA-One. Mr. Khan campaigned very hard all round the year and hence ensured through the promotion of Ra-One, that he is ridiculed in every household, across all ages (specially kids) and across all social classes. There has been rumours going round that Mr. Khan wants to retain his award for next year and hence is making a sequel to RA-One, which according to sources will reach new heights of agony. In his own words Mr.Khan claims that it will take indian cinema to another levels just like RA-One did this year.

Category 4: Business and Economics
Again the choice would unamious amongst everyone. Nobody did bigger harm to the position of IMF then Mr. Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK). Who through his sexual advances on a maid of a New York hotel, showed that even Economists are capable of achieving lows in the field which is commonplace for public figures of all fields

There can be other categories as well and surely I would post them as and when they come to my mind.

Mother of all entertainments

2011-06-14T10:06:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I was watching television and instantly came the thought, which show has been the biggest entertainer of Indian television. For answering this question I thought I should go genre by genre and identify the best in each class, and then make comparisons of the winners. So if I look at drama, then certainly the recognition will go to one of Ekta Kapoor production’s series, though I have never seen any of her masterpieces, but have read that Ms.Kapoor has the gift of creating tragedies and have perfected the art of elongating these creations.
I then moved to detective series, my personal favourite . Under this category, there was a tough call between Byomkesh bakshi and CID. While the former was Indian version of Sheralock holmes , solving cases by his brilliance, the latter had ACP Praduman solving every case literally by the swing of his fingers . Against my will I had to sideline with CID as it had been pulling out absurdity for years and hence should be the bigger entertainer .
Then came the third genre to my mind, mythological drama. If religion is opium of masses, then mythological series would be “opium joint”, as it was through these series only you get introduced to religion. The genre had a tough fight too, between Mahabharata and Ramayana, while the former was technically superior and had a more appealing script , thanks to Ved Vyas! But the latter was first of its kind and pioneering, and hence had its own charisma. Here I ruled in favour of my favourite Mahabharata.
While thinking all this, I was also swapping channels. During this surfing I stumbled upon the clear cut winner, to which none of the individual category winners could have competed on standalone basis. The biggest entertainer of Indian television is - Corruption of 2010-11, televised through Indian news channels.
News had always been the biggest entertainer, but presently the entertainment quotient has magnified, probably because for the first time, the recipe of each genre has been mixed into one and hence has produced the biggest episode, the Corruption 2010-11. It has every possible ingredient. If one is interested in emotions, we have Mr. Karunanidhi and one of his wives, publicly crying for their daughter Kanimozhi, who has allegedly been falsely imprisoned. The story is loosely influenced by Godfather, so we have an Italian leading the whole rig through a well established public face. Family emotions along with mafiaso and oppression is indeed a brilliant blend. However there is more. If one looks for excitement, then there exists the question of over 200 crs whose mystery is yet to be solved. There are brilliant investigators engaged in this case, along with multiple teams, led by Mr.Rajdeep Sardesai, Mr. Arnab Goswami Mr. Pravin Chourasiya etc . The whole bunch has repeatedly proven their acumen by raising issues which no one would have ever imagined, could be worth giving second thought.
If one is interested in court room and diplomatic drama, then we have the case of Mr. A Raja and guest appearance of our very own Denny Crane, Mr. Ram Jethmalani, who appears randomly on few television channels, calls everybody else stupid and pledges to support someone till the last drop of his blood. We also have Mr. Kapil Sibal who questions the legality of every issue raised by civil society. He also brings to the table the legal ploys. So signed affidavits to gain advantage in parleys along with few others tactics, were Mr. Sibal’s contributions to the whole entertainment package.
The only angle which was missing from the scene till last few weeks was spirituality, now thanks to Baba Ramdev, we have that too in place. He not only bought spirituality but also action and element of mayhem to the whole episode, thanks to his midnight run away from the shamiana in ramlila maidan and active cooperation from Delhi police . Motto of delhi police is , “in your service always”, they lived their reputation on Baba’s call and added the spice of action to the whole picture.
Since entertainment should not be discriminatory on sexual orientations, hence Baba Ramdev also introduced cross-dressing so that “differently” oriented too have something to look forward too. Thanks to him, now even Rohit Bal will have something to look in entire saga. But in the end how can any entertainment in India be complete without an item number. Feeling left out , this responsibility was taken by Ms. Sushma Swaraj, who gave a stunning performance at Jantar Mantar. Just as is the case with any other scintillating performance, it was mired with controversy. But in the end everybody silenced themselves, after all the act was done “for the team”.
The best thing about this whole package is, it is fast paced, has brilliant actors as actions are mostly live and is covered 24X7! Corruption 2010-11, indeed is the biggest entertainer of all times.

Religious Customs: Possible thinking behind them

2010-12-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

Religion, the opium of masses isn't more potent in any other place then in India. The country might be second most populated, but certainly boasts the highest population of Gods. In-fact I can safely say that each of the Upnishads (one of the religious scripture of Hinduism) will have mention of more gods then all the gods that Greeks could have thought of. (Greeks would be the second most populous deity community). Ubiquity of God is what every religion preaches, but influential mid-century Indian followers went a step ahead and created ubiquity of places of worship. They were thinkers of tomorrow, so they could see that in future there would be chronic shortage of land hence the people per unit place of worship might not be sustainable, so they came up with new ideas. Associate certain trees with a God, so if you do not have a temple around, you can have your god equivalent banyan tree, or maybe catch a snake and feed him, and God would reciprocate with blessings. If you have river or mountain around, they are worth worshipping, so save flat areas for housing construction and make temples in same caves of mountains.
The “custom” creators had also foreseen the food shortage, and hence devised a method to cut down upon consumption through ingenious concept of “fasting”. Some would say that it works well for the digestive system etc., but for medical effectiveness of fasts it should be done once every month and a recovery regime have to be followed after it. Certainly fasting twice a year or for 3 days in an auspicious week or only during daytimes in a month, would do no good particularly when it is followed by hefty food. If you think that PETA is something that originated in modern times than you are duped by a gimmick. There was an earlier avatar of PETA which was more secretive then priory of Scion, and infiltrated in the team which was designing the religious customs every time. Though unlike present PETA movement, these ancient infiltrated had some personal penchants for certain animals, so someone who loved Cows, made it a holy animal and got all future generation of cow protected from a large chunk of masses while someone else made some other animal listed as "dirty" and hence got it protected from even larger chunk of humans. These people could not be regarded as true originators of PETA rather the person who first thought about holistic animal welfare and fought hard to protect them by strongest mode, religion should be the deserving founder. Since he/she didn't had a very strong influence so could get the clause of “eating animals” as forbidden, for only certain communities. He/She might have been successful for getting it for entire follower section had it been any other day as the day of discussion was the day when the “Rajinder dhaba” equivalent of that times had started their centre and had made their inagural delivery as free to these guys. Tasting the delicacy they thought that it would be utterly immoral if they keep entire future population aloof of such great experience hence complete ban was ruled out. But still post this event, Neanderthal man who ate raw animals, had offspring who would categorize touching a well spiced meat, as sin. The PETA lobbyists were strong, so they could not seek a complete ban on eating of animals through "custom" changes, but they did include some confusing clauses. These clauses made many present day humans to be totally unclear on the correct custom and they end up being “purely human” by not eating animals, on a particular day of a week just to be safe. So by and large the objective of those earliest PETA activists was partially successful. Rejection of complete ban had fallout as well. Few of these early PETA lobbyists defected from the mainstream religion and helped in establishing new religions, which had “no-killing” as guiding principle. However they could not get much people to switch loyalties from the older religions as by the time these lobbyist had become totally active, Rajinder express equivalent had infiltrated in much larger parts and addiction to well cooked chicken/meat was difficult to get out of.
Whatever might the present state of customs and following be, one thing is clear that there were far sighted and thinking individuals who conspired to create customs and thereby have contributed in lessening the vagaries.

P.S: I would be dishonest if I would say that I deny existence of God. Neither I am well read in religious scriptures, so many assertions might be ignorant opinions. I have better knowledge of one religion (the one to which I belong) so could cite more examples from that only

Flight of Imagination

2010-09-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

For the past one year I had the opportunity or to put it in proper sense, the misery of travelling alone quite a number of times. Although invariably all such journeys ended up offering nothing which could be called good, but still you always hope to have something ,every time you are about to travel. The expectations are same whether you travel by train or flight and just like any other expectations, they are not devoid of build-ups.

If you are about to travel by air, there is a significant time of yours which goes in praying to God to make you sit next to an interesting (read hot) co-passenger. There are few things which are considered worth praying even by the atheists, and this tops the list. So you spend some time praying to god for such beautiful coincidence at the same time parallelly imagining things that would happen once God accepts your most cherished wish. The moment you reach the respective airline counter ,you start looking around, searching for the possible "gift" sent straight away by the master above, whom you had not bothered with any requests since your last travel. Presence of god’s gift would not fulfil your wish rather you have to work out a way to ensure that you get the gift. So you observe the gift’s movement and ensure that you stand behind her while she is getting her boarding pass processed. You have to keep your ear lobes fully functioning to hear out and if required (which will be in most cases) your eyes, to look for the most important numbers printed on her boarding pass. So when the airline executive asks for your seat preferences , you confidently mention your choice and quiet clearly- well my lucky number is 17 so I would prefer the row of same number and since my name has "E" in it (somewhere) so I would want to sit on the seat which has the same letter, so 17E would be good. The flummoxed executive would think that this guy is out of his mind, but on face he would pass a smile and will say, “Sure sir”; after all, these are the moments where their training of hypocritical hospitality is tested.

So finally you think it is your lucky day, god has colluded with you and finally you got what you had been dreaming of since the moment you left your home for the airport if not longer. From the moment you have secured a boarding pass to the moment boarding is announced, you start creating dummy conversations,that you would start with your cherished neighbour. Your imagination, charged with the power of positive thinking, would create numerous topics in your mind incidentally all of which would appear to be insanely interesting to the neighbour. You do not want to be disturbed in this critical exercise of scenario projections and hence would switch off your cell phone and cut yourself from every other distraction except the one for which you are planning. As in dreams of inception, you would have had endless conversations each lasting more than 2 hrs, multiple times for many scenarios, squeezed in a small time frame of 30 minutes, flat. If somehow IQ was measured at this time, you would have beaten Einstein by a margin which would have made him look like a lunatic. So finally boarding is announced, your moment of glory, the time when you would test all those hard worked scenario to put in place, has come. You would have butterflies in your stomach, nervousness which would be same as what Sir Edward Lutyen would have had when he would have laid down the foundation of Viceroy's house in New Delhi. You think that your scenarios are perfect but as always there is some scope of screw-up but today the person with the blue umbrella sitting above has been helping you a lot; so while you are standing in the line to board the aircraft, you start praying for each of your scenarios to go as they went in your projections.
You enter the aircraft, manically rush to reach your lucky seat 17E , only to find your neighbour totally turned towards the window and looking outside. You sit next to her and now start revising all the opening sentences, as by divine help you have got some extra time to prepare your master act, act which would be as important as the opening presidential debate of Mr. Obama. You keep rehearsing, meanwhile the flight has taken off, and she is still looking outside, totally ignoring your presence. You start getting impatient but can't do anything other than wait. Suddenly she turns and starts searching for something in her bag, you think that you would offer her your help for whatever she might be searching but then she finds it. It is the sleeping eye mask. She wore it and slept and with it your flight of the dreams, crashes. You console yourself by ogling at the airhostess, who would unfailingly pass fake smiles, which they would have learned at Frankfinn. So with it ends your journey which remains etched in your memory as it is amongst the only cases where you would have hated the situation when a hot girl slept next to you!

Operational analysis of a Puchka delivery (Gol Gappa)

2010-06-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

Just in case if you are wondering what puchka is, then for a larger good, it is gol-gappa or panipuri as it is called in north india and other parts. I do not have the statastics but I am very sure that kolkata's contribution to World's (Which will be quiet close to India's) consumption of puchkas would be sum of other top nine consuming cities put together. Delhi is famous for Chat and all the other fried stuffs but still even in chandni chowk you would not find a puchka-seller standing every 200 metres if not less, the site is possible only in kolkata. If you are a consumer, waiting for the delivery of the product (which in this case is puchka) and just by chance you happen to be an Industrial Engineer (just because you have a degree which says so) then you tend to ponder over the operations of the product development (which again is puchka). Earlier I critized the selle for the amount of time that the seller is taking in making the delivery and hence might be loosing customers which might be impatient and would walk away. I thought that there must be some flaw in his operation else you should not be having such a long waiting time. And hence came the idle brain in action and started analysing the whole value stream of the puchka preparation.
When you are analysing the problem in any system the first step is to look for the bottle-neck, which I quickly identified (even a 4th grader could have done that) and it was the process of making the mixture which he uses to put in the puchka, before stuffing it with the tangy water. I started thinking over what a similar seller in Delhi was doing and what the present puchka wala is doing, I was doing this to identify the best practise. I realised that a puchka seller in Salt lake (which is an area without any lakes in kolkata, just in case you do not know) makes fresh mixture virtually every time when a new set of customer are served, while I could weakly recollect from my experience in Delhi that a gol-gappa seller in chandni chowk always kept his mixture ready and hence his time to delivery was quicker. Identifying the problem led me jump directly to the conclusion that the puchka seller in salt lake is servicing lesser customers because he is not maintainig inventory and hence his constant stockouts may lead to reputational loss. Yes reputational loss! The puchka wala will have a reputation of a lazy and hence an impatient customer might not turn up to him and would not even refer others to the product and referral can be a big sales booster in this segment.
When the product delivery started, I realized the amount of customization that the consumer was looking for. So an old lady had eaten 10 pieces and she had different preferences for each one of them. For many of the preferences the seller had to customize a small segment of the mixture. And this old lady was not the only customer, which such varied preferences but I realized that it was only I who had not mentioned my preferences, rest all had their preferances changing with each piece. Since this extent of cutomization was alien to me, I was not even aware of what my 10 or even 5 preferences would be incase I want to excercise them.
I realised that customer here was entirely differnt from what it was in Delhi. The customer here values customized delivery of puchkas, something which a customer in Delhi do not even thinks. Since customization takes time hence waiting time is the tradeoff for this additional service. I tried to examine this mixture making part of the value chain even more closely and realised that the seller brings all the boiled masehed potatoes and it is the last stage of mixing the spices which he does on site at the time of delivery. So he has actually delayed the customization step till the very last stage and hence customer preferences could be taken into account. The system is very similar to the model which Dell computer sytems followed, they too have everything and assembles the hardware as per your preferences and hence just like the old lady you can have 10 computers with different configurations delivered at same time! Dell is considered a pioneer of this approach of customization but I am very sure that the practise of the puchka walas would have existed earlier than this. So if the founders of IBM or hewlett packard would have had puchkas in Kolkata in some poin to history and would have done similar analysis, they certainly would have encorporated this critical pratise of operations and hence Michal Dell would have had nothing new with him. Result he would have not made Dell Inc. the brand which it is today. The ultimate result, the PC market would have been highly monopolised and not oligopolistically competitive as it is today. In that case a computer would not have been of the price which they are today and people in india would have had suffered most.
So this is how owners of IBM not coming to Kolkata and having puchkas, prevented world from robbing of the IT revolution.

P.S. I am not being gender biased but I have not yet seen a female puchka seller hence all the references in the writeup are made accordingly.

Living Life by Ticks

2010-06-07T11:14:00.001-07:00

When you are in a city with minimal people you know and that too not interested in the activities that you might be interested in, you tend to kill a majority of time in senseless quality thinking. You start thinking about your philosophy of life, and suddenly you realize that there is no such philosophy. You try to fix your behavioral patterns of the past on a big drawing board and try to relate it to any of the banal philosophies of life, which you have heard of (living life each day, planning for everything etc etc used frequently in movies). Once such day passes, you also become inquisitive about other's philosophies of life. The objective of search is three fold, first to confirm whether it was only you who had lived so long without any philosophy , second, is their any other philosophy which could actually be your philosophy (remember you figured out "your" philosophy by best fit method recently) as well it is just that I didn't knew it and the third objective could be more of a testing of your so called philosophy with the others and judge whose was better and in case other's was better, can it be adopted?
I was recently in a similar phase and hence was actively looking out for the "philosophies of life". Of all the philosophies which were quoted, most were highly subjective and you could hardly relate to any of those, particularly when you hardly understand what the catch phrase actually means or what will it mean in your life's setting. However the philosopny which appeared most interesting and I found it to be most easily adoptable and was in some loose sense lifted from one of the Hindi flicks, was "living life by tick". Concept is simple, make a list consisting of all the things that could be done (or Should be done, your choice) and start completing them (and ticking your virtual list) . With every tick you would know what type of tasks do you enjoy doing or hate doing and hence could elaborate your list within a category or eliminate some sections from your list accordingly. For example if "learning musical instrument" is something that would be on your list, once u learn one instrument, then probably your list will expand with listing of all the instruments within in, in case you liked the first instrument. In this way one would be able to explore a wide variety of things that are on offering and maybe could lead you to the task where your interests lies. Another good aspect of this philosophy is that it enriches your experiences in life and hence you could reach the famed position of "been there done all". However it is not advisable to count ticks on others' lists when you are adopting this philosophy as many would have ticked so much within a subsection, which appears very alluring to you, that you would either give up or would fully focus on that section, without realising how much hard work was required in each tick. Both of which are the stances that you don't want to start with in your philosophy of life. Another aspect of it is, in case you do not encounter your "natural interest" area early in the list, you might end up doing a lot of things without actually completing subsections within a section, something which would prevent you from becoming "specialised" in one area, something which might forced achievable if you are not living by this philosophy.
"Living life by tick" an operational form of philosophy which has a catch phrase of "one can't afford to miss anything". Although this philosophy would appear to be least philosophical but still is most straightforward and easily followable. So in case you do not have any philosophy of your own and want to adopt some philosophy to govern your life then it could be the one. If you are not adopting it then at least you have one extra option to choose while answering "what is your philosophy of life", and awkward question which if not someone else then your conscience would surely ask some day sooner or late.

P.S. This question regarding philosophy of life raises only when certain neurons of brain cross-connect, an event which has very high probability if you have had high intake of certain processed chemicals like alcohol or certain natural products like marijuana

Observer.............

2010-03-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

We are all part of commotion which is constantly going around us. Everyone is moving, saying, narrating, writing, yelling and doing every other action which is possible, but never thinking over their own action. Though at times the actions are pre-thought, with situational assumptions, but when it is being performed, what it is turning into is an entirely different thing. Had there been a time when you break out of this commotion and start analysing the dimension of which you were a part some time before, you become an observer. It is equivalent to watching a game of chess being played by two players, you have no stakes in the game but you always form an opinion about what a player is thinking and validate it with the set of moves that are followed by him/her. Mind against mind is most entertaining and prized competition. Now imagine if the two humans remove the pieces of chess and start playing the mind game without any objects, face to face. It is a game which you would really enjoy. Societies have woven rituals and ceremonies around it. US has presidential debate which is again a game of mind, with two humans using their wit and oratorical skills to outplay the other, the winner has a possible reward of running away with the title of being of the most powerful human on earth (contentious). This one is a pre-planned mind game while many such mind games keep occurring around us which are unplanned and even more entertaining not from the outcome perspective but from the action perspective, all we need to do is break away from commotion to observe it.

I recently had one such session when out of the blue and for no accountable reason I got withdrawn from the commotion and I suddenly became the spectator of the world of which I was a part of , seconds earlier. Now when you migrate to this realm you become supreme observer. Suddenly you get to grasp what every action or inaction of a person is targeted for or aimed at. At that moment you do not observe an event in isolation but rather you attach every thing and then observe it and surrounding with many non-acting characters change the whole story. A person who appear to be the busiest guy around, would appear to be a great actor who knows how to appear busy when it is needed to, the aim might be as simple as boosting image in front of people who would revere person more if he appears to be a busy bee.

A discussion topic which would be most alluring to indulge in endless discussion would start appearing to be moronic, if you are in an observer's position. Sample this, how would the happenings in someone else's life be of any importance to others, but when you are part of commotion, you tend to find this as the most interesting topic to discuss and speculate. We spend hours and hours discussing a great cricket innings but essentially that innings has not effect on any person's life who have been indulging into discussions. People may argue that such innings had bought name to nation etc etc but in reality I don't know how many times have we come across when we had needed to invoke our identity of being an Indian.

When in observer's position, you start realising what phase Lord Buddha or other gods/angels/avatars or their ghost writers were in, while they wrote the theories of non-materialism. For an observer money has no importance neither has fame or any thing which a non observer revers most. ( I would want to catch bill gates or Warren buffet in such a moment, and would want to take possession of all their "non-important" things. read money)But fortunately or unfortunately this break off from the commotion do not last very long and you are back again and maybe being observed by someone else who had broken the commotion and would have labelled you as moron as per his/her observation.

P.S. The phase that is described here was not reached through alcohol consumption or doing drugs. However all views are expressed are that of a different state and I would myself not agree to many of them when in real world that is being a part of commotion,

Networkers: Superior Humans

2010-02-02T08:03:00.000-08:00

Networking, the term was totally alien to me till I was in school. I got exposed to the word when I joined college and with every progressing year I started understanding its worth. No doubt people do understand its importance since very early stages and hence have build strong networks in all the networking sites in place (social networking, business networking, professional networking etc etc). Although networking in virtual form is pretty easy and doesn't call for much skills, but when presented in actual scenario, it does qualify to be an art and hence I would like to call a networker as a "Networking artist". Like all other art forms, it too comes naturally and not acquired artifically.You can learn the nuances of networking from an expert networking artist (interestingly there are no institutions to teach this art) but its hard to become yourself a networking artist even under the mentorship of best of networker. It is one of the few arts which is not taught anywhere in the world (as far as I know and correct me if I am wrong) but can be a single largest contributor to ones' success, if perfected. Hence it would be highly justified to dedicate an entire post to this art which has even been ignored by the psuedo social workers who have thronged every nook of career building industry.
Networkers are of different types; I would like to put them in two buckets, entirely on the basis of motive behind performing the art. In the first bucket falls those who do network for the purpose of networking and in the second bucket are those who become networkers because of few natural traits that they are blessed with. I would like to call the second category as that of "accidental networkers". Now elaborating over the two categories: the former type, lets call it type A, often have larger network than type B (the accidental networkers), but the key difference is that of people in each of their networks. People falling in the network of type A , are in the network because they are a type A networkers as well or wannabee Type A . So the web is large but with weak links (links for benefits). Anticipation of benefits in a situation ,which can't be visualized at the moment, is the key which maintains such a network alive. These networkers are easy to identify, they would be knowing a lot of people who have no relation with them. They are quick to gather important details even on a single meeting. Striking a conversation with anyone is a cakewalk for them, no matter if should be done through silliest of the topics. Each such meeting translates into an addition into the network and gets stored in the form of phone number. So these people would often have phone numbers of people, whom even they would not remember but still the number would never be deleted, no matter if it came to notice many times that you don't remember who he is and hence number is redundant. Type A could also be called the hardworking type as they work really hard to maintain this network and maintenance does not comes cheap either, so they have to invest a lot of time in visiting places where network could be enlarged or for servicing the ties with already existing network and not to mention the phone bills, which are proportional to the network size.
Type B, as I already mentioned are the accidental networkers, are blessed with certain traits that make them popular amongst people around them. Others enjoy the company of people belonging to type B and hence the network is grown from the other side. It is like everyone moving towards the centre to get into the circle. These are the populist networkers and are often unaware of the power of the tool that they have accidentally got. The network span is small in lenght as well as cross-section, but is formed of stronger links. The type B people often recognise everyone in their network and often do not have phone numbers or other connective links of the connections, which the type A people acquire on priority basis. Most of the times they are not able to utilize the full power of their network. They could be compared with a tribal artist, who possess a raw talent and trait but is not able to make much out of it as he/she do not visualise it as a talent but more as any other trait. Interestingly if a Type A has a Type B networker in his network than , it is the type A who is able to extract the advantage from the network of Type B ,which Type B could never have. So Type A people often like to keep Type B networkers close in the whole web, as they prove to be a valuable resource.
But be it Type A or Type B, both are exceptionally blessed people, one is blessed with the traits which lead to networking while other is blessed with skills which make networking, work. I had often thought that what is the reason behind the fact that there are too few networkers ,but recently I got the answer while reading Malcom Gladwell's Tipping point. It picked an old theory behind the development of human mind. The theory said that with increasing complexity in relationships, you require a better mind to maintain it. The theory projects that 150 is the number of the active relationship that the mind of humans can bear at present configurations. Obviously the theory presented a number basing the processing power of normal human brain and like in every other aspect, here too are the outliers. These networkers are the outliers, whose brains are blessed with processors to maintain the number of active relationships much larger than the number 150. Although we keep reading about the people who were outliers in various fields, but we keep ignoring the ones who are outliers on the basis of being a superior being.It feels good to know that you too came across few people who were outliers too , no matter if you know them because of their skill which makes them an outlier. (they knew you probably becasue they were networking)

Blasts of Social interaction

2010-01-15T10:28:00.000-08:00

There are few things in life which come in the form of blasts. The first thing that one can think of is obviously the emotions, which come as a blast. Emotional blasts have been well documented and since I have not experienced it personally, I would not be wasting words over it. However the other thing which comes in the form of blast are social interactions. There are three major phases of it which at least I can foresee ,standing at this point of time, there might be more which I would experience as and when I grow older.
The first one and probably a very critical one is when one enters the school premise. Before that a child had interacted with just 5-20 set of humans (the number depends upon your close family size and size of your close neighbourhood). However these people would have always interacted with a child in a way which hardly the child could have deciphered or would have come out with the rational behind such behaviours. Suddenly they enter school and 20-30 similar kind of people (height, weight, build wise) come in front. Suddenly there is an overload of traits which he/she can understand, like-dislike and assign favourites and identify rivals and friends. You are probably mocked for the first time. There are other explosions as well but that could not be documented because by the time one learns how to do it, he would have been too old to remember what feeling he had in the first place.
The second explosion and strategically the most important ones are the one which have when you enter college. The explosion is even bigger if you happen to enter hostel. It is similar to entering the school for the first time. Suddenly you are out of your nest, in open to be tested by everyone who had bought with him different skill, each capable of providing a fatal blow. Some would have skills which would make you question your academic acumen, they'll make you feel ridiculously stupid as far as understanding of course material is concerned. There might be other people who would slaughter you with their sarcasm, day in and day out. They would have perfected their butchery to such an extent that one would hesitate before making their vocal muscles move, when in front of them. There would be another breed who would be mixture of both the mastery mentioned earlier. On seeing them, you completely loose faith that god created everyone with equality. You start absorbing the traits, understand your limitations and come out prepared thinking that I have seen all the possibilities and I am prepared to bang the world and take everyone head on. At this time comes the third explosion.
The third explosion is when you enter the job. If you happen to be from a college which hoards people who had been busy in most part of their school life, working out for some entrance exam and college life towards justifying their school efforts by bagging a success trophy in the form of a job, (the trophy might remain elusive ) this explosion might come as a bigger shock. Suddenly you find people whose experience would make you feel that you have wasted your life as there are people who have done the things which you could have dreamt of in your wildest imagination. Even the 50th ranked adventure story of their's, would be better than your best and by miles. For a moment you think that maybe I would be more successful in life than him but at the second moment, you quickly realise, who is living life and who is wasting it, chasing something which he himself doesn't know. You would realise that adrenaline rush is something which you had never felt. You realise that traveling across 7 states in a year is no big deal but if was done in a month, it is something which could be considered worth mentioning. Spending a night on pavements is something which everyone has done, but spending a night in an unknown village, somewhere in madhya pradesh is courageous. Suddenly your definitions of extreme adventure goes for a toss and you realise that you do not have courage to do what is courageous for the outside people and not for the people in the shell you had lived in.
I am presently in the third explosion phase and as and when I am meeting more people,I am realising that I have not done even a single thing which is worth mentioning in my entire life till date. And the worst part is I am at a point standing at which it is very difficult for one to switch gears..........

3 Idiots - Most Idiotic aspect (This is not a movie review)

2010-01-07T08:39:00.000-08:00

3 Idiots, was the most hyped and talked about movie of the year, thanks to the faceoff between chetan bhagat and vidoo vinod chopra and co., regarding the ownership of script, and the publicity magnet amir khan . Though it was a good entertainer with a message, which most of were already aware of , but definitely a movie which exaggerated everything. Although I can make a list of it but would restrict myself to the one which caught my attention most as it was definitely the mother of all exaggerations. Let me remind it, in case you missed it while humming "all izz well" and reminiscieing your college days or cursing your choice of profession,it was regarding the number of patents that Phunsuk Wangdoo (or whatever he was called) held on his name. I can definitely say that who so ever was behind that idea of quoting 400 patents, certainly didn't knew the meaning of patent, or maybe it confused it with a scientific publication or worse, confused it with the number of gadgets that one has made or supervised (like the scooter powered grain huller, or manually powered shearer). For once I thought that maybe it was possible, after all he was portrayed as person with brain of Einstein and rebellious instincts of Bhagat singh, but than I thought of doing some research over the topic (this is what i have learned from engineering, always back your conclusion with maths else it becomes speculation, because speculations which maths present are always acceptable!). I thought that it would be interesting to present it here.
According to Data provided by department of commerce , government of India, in 2004 there were 6,406 active patents in India, If we assume that figure goes up dramatically to 10,000 in 2010, than out of it 400 are held by phunsuk wangdoo, i.e. 4% of all the active research is done by a single dude, who has his laboratories in ladakh and interestingly reads blogs and books! (I just hope he reads mine too and comments over it) Two conclusions could be drawn from this, first that Ladakh, the cold desert provides the best product development environment in the world and second that all the R&D labs and the spend on them is a waste as they are not even cumulatively able to do what phunsuk is doing with his Tibetan research assistants. The first conclusion results in another corollary, who so ever holds ladakh and surrounding areas, will be sitting over gold mine. Now I understand why Pakistan badly wants Kashmir even at the cost of their country's whole GDP, the would have known the strategic importance of the place.
Lets look at the documentation part of patents, generally a filling becomes a patent after a year of its filling. As per the time frame presented in the movie, Phunsuk did all this in 7 years. So on an average it turns out that he must have filed all the patents at least an year before. So 400 patents in 6 years, if we assume continuous rate, it turns out to be 66.6 patents each year. Over 12 patents each month or a patent every 3 day! I wonder how many researchers are capable of writing an original publishable material in 3 days flat, (the duration includes the experimentation, fabrication, testing etc ) and one has to maintain this pace for 6 years. Again if this is taken as true, than brightest of our researchers will appear to be blocked heads or researching at snail's pace, when phunsuk is on turbocharged 1000bhp bugati veyron.
Let as now take the cost aspect. According to estimates, the cost of patenting and maintaining it for a period of 10 years ,costs around 32,000 euros. So 400 such patents would have costed around 12,800,000 euros. That roughly translates into 83.2 crores rupees. To fit it into the time frame and making our estimates conservative lets consider just 30% of this value which is 24.9 crores rupees. Accumulated in 6 years, thus average earning per year becomes 4.15 crores! I think after seeing this, many of the wall street professionals would commit suicide as they could have hardly made money of this scale in just 6 years of their career, and this was Phunsuk's average annual spend in past years forget about his earnings.
I think instead of Chetan and Amir fighting over it, whole scientific community should sue whosoever came up with that idea, as by this portrayal they are indirectly proving each of them incompetent. Maybe they wanted to convey through this movie that all these scientists and engineers of the world or india at least are not in the profession which they wanted to be in, rather were forced into. What a message!!

PS: I do not have any rows with amir khan, rather definitely he is one the most sensible person in the industry, but one should always bash such idiotic ideas.

Bullshit Generation industry: How did it all start

2009-11-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

"extend vertical solutions"
"deploy cutting-edge e-business"
"matrix end-to-end networks"
"exploit proactive intermediaries"
"benchmark out-of-the-box models"

The above statements appear to be the strategies recommended for the growth of a particular company, after in-depth analysis. But if one looks closely, it appears that the statements could be fit in any kind of business, or to put it in this way, no matter what the business is, these recommendations would always hold. If it appears strange to you than you have completely missed the world of bullshit generation (BS), an industry that could be dated back to early 19th century, when creative writers were looking for an alternative profession, as writing business had already been saturated. So they created this industry of BS generation. They provided the base over which plethora of business consulting companies started and later many authors emerged, who were blessed with uncommon skills and could write whole books over bullshit and make it a bestsellers (I am referring to the management books that unfailingly have a tag of bestsellar).
In the later parts of 19th century, when much of the money had already been spend towards improving operational efficiencies (another phrase which occasionally makes it presence in bullshit list without deriving its origin from it), the companies were looking for other avenues to make more money. The bullshit sellers encashed the opportunities and sold the well articulated shits at exorbitantly high prices. Education sector catches the trend very quickly, at least the professional education does, hence Business schools were quick at catching this and they too started perfecting their students in this creative profession of BS generation. In mid 1990s Microsoft launched MS office, and hence a new dimension was added to the bullshit. Suddenly presenting BS was even more attractive. How well you can present your bullshit became as important as the creativity of bullshit. Grasping the nuances of this profession, many companies emerged. However the top realm of this bullshit Generation industry was occupied by the most creative shit generators, who had already made a big name in this business of bullshit generation, they identify themselves as Strategic consultants. The hierarchy continues and the base is now being occupied by the companies whose core competency is to customize the bullshits already produced by the companies who are above in hierarchy, and present them in a very attractive fashion (Customized solutions to business needs: - they use this phrase to describe their product, another of those bullshits!).
When the financial meltdown occurred and everyone was facing the liquidity crunch, companies started cutting down their spend on buying the bullshit, and hence the BS industry faced a downturn as well. Since no one was buying bullshits these days so they engaged themselves in perpetual bullshit generation and the result of it was a number of white papers and findings. This in a way also prevented these brilliant people's creative acumen from loosing its sheen. As the consuming industry was affected, the raw material's demand (people who generate bullshit) too came down, and thus the production facilities (B-schools) too saw lesser interested people and hence their output too is expected to go down. Economist ,the magazine whose statements may not be very true but are read seriously, hence quoted "Decline of MBA will cut down the supply of bullshit at its source". They finally said the unsayable. The word is now out in open, it would be interesting to see, what the future of this industry would be. Although I am very sure that they will leverage seamless relationship with the industry (bullshit could be used everywhere!!) and will go equally strong as it was two years back.

P.S. If you are new to this industry and is not as creative as some of your peers are, then links like dack's bullshit generator can come handy for you. The opening statements are directly taken from there. It really works!!

The Resignation

2009-11-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

Last week the day came for which I had been waiting for in the past three months, the day when I would be putting down my papers. I had a lot of things thought out in my mind about what I would be doing before marking my exit from the company. I had thought that I would be super honest and which in this case would have meant to be very rudely informing people about their incompetency and uselessness (as per my opinions, something which is open for debate). I had earlier thought that my notice letter would be plain and simple with few hard facts about the work and how it became the prime mover for the shift and not the other things. I had also thought that I would bring in number of inefficiency generating attributes ,which I had noticed in my past 3-4 months of stay in the company (something which strangely no one working here had noticed in their past 3 years or maybe they were there for a purpose). But when the day came, suddenly I ditched all of my pre-marinated plans and did a complete reversal.
In my letter I apparently thanked the people whose incompetency i was thinking of brining up, I gave the reason for leaving as different personal interests, and above all regarded the most gruelling and troublesome experience as the most thrilling and challenging (It was meant to be euphismistic but it changed whole sense). So why did I do this or in the first place why had I thought of taking the other course of action initially. The planned course of action was simply to satisfy egos. I had also thought that bringing these things into notice would probably help the company as I had isolated the prominent reasons which were affecting the company's operations (again my analysis and interpretations). But then why did I not do what I had planned, well fear of any complications in already smooth appearing transition process, had made me to ditch my plans which I had made for past 3 months, in just 3 minutes. So in the end I didn't ruin my relations with anyone but probably I didn't let the company know what it should be knowing, as it is highly unethical for an employee to do anything which could harm the company and I believe that in the want of an honest feedback, the company is going to loose (Again my opinion). So in the end i mitigated the risk by being politically correct!!
The courage required for honesty is too much.

P.S. the photo presented here is not mine and neither were mine expression similar to what are being depicted here!!

Celebrating Sachinism

2009-11-15T04:20:00.000-08:00

Sachin Tendulkar has now completed two decades of representing India. During these 20 years he had mercilessly massacred the bowling attack of every country which confronted him. Each of his hundreds were engraved in public memory and many people like me have a rough indicator of time woven around Sachin's innings. No doubt that he had been raised to a level to which any one had ever risen, be it historical, mythological,spiritual or for that matter any gods mentioned in scriptures. If there is a group of 1000 indians, I am very sure that not more than 40% would be a strong follower of any single god,leader etc, but I am very sure that more than 90% of them would definitely have strongly been following or had followed the curly haired genius. There have been numerous quotes and books written in his must deserved praise and these days newspapers as well as television channels have ensured that the little master gets the celebration of his two decades of shouldering billion hopes, which he deserves. Since a lot has already been written in much better allusions hence the act of reiterating those would be futile. But I have a totally different thing to point at, something which has a deep relation to Indian way of visualising things or it may be human way of visualising thing but in the paucity of knowledge I would not generalise it over to every country.
I was concerned about the short active memory that most of us tend to have and quickly forget the things, the moment we get something else to talk about. If you read newspapers coverages of past one month than it would give you an impression that today Indian team starts and ends at Sachin Tendulkar (something which was present in later half of 1990s). But if you pick up the newspapers or sports news coverage of just last year, you would find that Sachin was portrayed as an important stone in the wall but not the most important one or definitely not the only one. I was recently reading a book called Tipping point, which stressed that every incident is tipped by a single event and then converts into epidemic. I find a similar thing applicable here too. No marks for guessing that in this case it was the heroic knock of 175 at hyderabad by Sachin Tendulkar, which acted as the tipping point. Had it not been there, I am very sure that the present celebration of his two decades would not been as feverish as it is today. Before that knock, whenever tendulkar got out, people used to express their angst and raise question about his temperament , though in hush-hush voice, but now even such utterances have been classified as pure blasphemy , though not by the law but by the social accords which are more powerful than the legal one. Suddenly all those people have been silenced who used to raise their concerns over the match winning potentials of sachin, whether he is better than ponting/steve waugh and his retirement. Now their acumen for sports or whatever had abolished generation of such thoughts. Such were the ramifications of this single knock. I remember similar kind of coverage leveled after India's win against Pakistan in 2003 world cup, where again it was Sachin who made the mightiest trio of pace bowling attack(wasim, shoaib, waqar) repent for the day that they choose bowling as their profession. Then too it was sachin all around and every innings of sachin was bought back to public memory, be it sharjah or the match saving inings in perth when he was a teenager. But during these past 6 years, there were many things written and spoken which hinted that Sachin is no more the force that world reckoned with(as per public perception) . But again things have changed but I am not sure, how much this innings would last in the public memory or the media memory which is the one that essentially manipulates a lot of memories.
I want to end this by saying that though Sachin is the only god whose existence could not be denied but just because he was born as a mortal, he tend not to perform every time like god. So whenever he is having a bad patch it is essentially a test that the god has planned to test our believes in him, and once people start loosing their believe in god, a wonder like the one in hyderabad is produced to reinstate that God do exists and has initials SRT.

Imperialism Deja-vu

2009-10-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

It has been exactly three months for me in my job and I would say that past three months were literally spend only on discussing job scenarios. Such discussions often start with problems of our respective divisions of company, it then inadvertently moves towards company's business model and finally ends up at a divided vote with few considering it as a niche player which would grow to great sizes while others (the group of which I am always the part) consider it as a wrongly positioned company and think that it would stagnate if not fall. Since this discussion had been going on since the second week of my joining, hence subsequently the timelines for discussions have been cut down. So in initial days I remember we use to discuss it for whole day and continue it till 2 am in the morning, but now this discussion raps up within an hour but you need something else to cut down one disussion. This "thing" often is the citation of someone from our batch ,who is working in some other company, regarding his/her work. The fact that others are equally unhappy (and for all those who do say that they are happy, we assume that they are pretending to be happy or are plainly lying) comforts us. Already discussed our companies business model, we then discuss the business model of other service industry companies, how would have they started, how easy it would have been to start one (it is always easy to mark anything easy particualry when you know that you do not have to do it) and how lame the americans/Europeans are and what not. This kind of discussion is the only thing which is left in our lives but occassionally very intersting things are bought out of this which are larger than our jobs or even these discussions. Yesterday while having a similar kind of discussion one point which came up was that India is the backoffice of world and is doing all the low end jobs that the developed world has in offering.I thought I should probe this till the depth.
The service industry had in recent time became the backbone of India's growth story, bought employment to large section of youths and placed money in the pockets of earlier empty pocketed population. We Indians took pride in this and sait that we are the efficient bunch of people who charge less and that is the reason that every company is coming to india. But essentially the thing is that every company brings down its non-critical rigorous work , to india. They would not share anything which they consider even of minutest of the critacility, with their service provider, no matter even if they have ownership stakes in the company. So essentially what India is doing, produce the data/reports/software codes/analysis cheaply which is later plugged into a bigger thing and is sold/traded or simply valued at much higher price. Let us compare this with the scenario in 16-17th century when the era of colonialism started. What did these imperialist countries do, they essentially hunted for cheap raw materials like cotton (the commodity which attracted britishers and French to India), got them cheaply, send it out to their factories in Europe, produce textile or other product from it and sell it at high price. That time too it was a lucrative deal in the beginning as the farmers could sell their crops (the idea of cash crop was introduced) and have some cash in their hands. Later things moved to exploitative levels and in the end we knew what shape it finally turned into.
With few assumptions, I think everything fits in here very well with present service industry. The cotton is replaced by engineers and other professional, who initially started working for the backoffice jobs as some routine jobs but with the cut throat competition and price/turnaround time being the key performance attribute(quality has never been an attribute for KPO/BPO and other backoffices which do call them by many fancy names), the working hours have been lengthened and go well beyond the permissible hours. Earlier the imperialists were the countries but now it is the companies which acts like them, so they fight amongst themselves to gain the best talent (whose work/payout ratio is maximum). So 10-12 hours of working (its not on your will rather is mandatory) has become normal, something which appears alien to our earlier generations (to whome salaries also appear alien). So there are air-conditioned sweat-shops lined up across our country having its major centres in Banglore, Mumbai and Gurgoan and an emerging destination Chennai. I do not know where this all will lead to but one thing is for sure, the aggressive pricing of the services which the indian entrepreneurs have engaged in just for getting start, had raised the payout bars quiet low and this is plummeting every now and then when a new company is started to cater same services. So earlier if a BPO x was billing a client 50USD/hr, new BPO y would try to capture market by offering 40USD/hr to same client and it can do that because owner knows that in india the best of the educated people are ready to work at one-tenth of this cost so one can afford this.Although I am no socialist but believe that if some restrictions are not imposed on this aggressive price war, the days of slavery would be back and this time it would be through very own indian Entrepreneurs who service the imperialists (US and European giants)

Birthday Blues

2009-10-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

Birthdays have usually been the day of celebrations. Although I still do not know what the precise reason for celebration has been. Is it completion of one more year in life (the celebration of survival) or Celebrating just the day that you came to this world (the celebration of genesis), or simply you celebrate because you can associate a reason for it (celebration to break boredom) or it is the celebration to show that you can celebrate (celebration of power/money) or celebrate because other force you to (celebrating under others influence) the list can be further elaborated but I will halt with this only. I am not advocating that birthdays should not be celebrated, all I want to know is a strong reason, why it should be celebrated. Well how come suddenly its birthday celebration that I am exploring, well Its my birthday today and I know that I would be celebrating it too, what reason could be associated with it, I am still to decipher.
Past few months have been full of thinking, contemplation, self realization and what not. But above all these months have given a good glimpse of how in reality the cart of life moves. Many of the dreams which I had dreamed of since childhood have been shattered as it is now that I have started realizing that they would exist in dreams only. I had been living with a mind of an entrepreneur from the time when I did not knew how to spell it or what it meant. But it is now that the feeling is starting to sink in that thinking about anything without having the courage to take action, is totally useless and such a person can never end up owning in reality what his thoughts owned. Today 1 more year have been added to my life, though I am still very young but when compared to people whom I have been idolizing all my teenage, have considered this as the age which could be considered as the onset of "old age". Definitely I am down but not out. So what does all this pessimistic rant erupted on my birthday means, well it means that it is a good day to readjust your targets and goals of life. I would not be eliminating everything as that would not do justice to the amount of hours that I had put in thinking over them, but curtailing it, is what is definitely needed. It is always good to be ambitious but being pragmatic at the same time is equally important. Well pragmatism is something that is not meant for dreaming so I did not commit a crime in dreaming un-pragmatically, but when it comes to reality, it is wise to filter each of your dreams with this barometer. I had needed a barrier point from which I can re-adjust all the goals and this day will precisely act as one. It is always good to celebrate the occasion of identification of goal. So now I have found my reason too to celebrate. I am just hoping that I do not end up de-grading my goals every year, a positive adjustment is definitely something that will call for a big celebration.

The purpose of Life

2009-10-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

The age old question which had troubled the philosophers, spiritual leaders and enlightened souls for centuries or millennium. Sitting at this juncture same question is presented in front of me and few others who are just into their third or fourth month of job. This age old question is posed in different forms, what should I do, what will make me happy, what my interests are but in the essence it is what is the purpose of life. The difference between the question when it is presented by an enlightened person like a spiritual leader and an unenlightened person like me is, former tries to answer this question from the perspective of whole humanity while the later wants an answer that would he would settle for and it is immaterial if it fits in with broader set. Although after repetitive questioning and having many marathon sessions of brain storming (solitary as well as in group), I have come up with no answer which is understandable, because had I been capable enough for answering this ageless question, I would given Deepak Chopra run for his money. But after repetitive brainstorming, I have got some understanding of the genesis of the question.

I have realized that I have started asking this question for the first time. The question might have come in my mind in different avatars (mentioned above) but was never in its direct and most difficult to answer form. I tried to figure out the conditions which have changed over this period and realized that it is only the change in primary activity which has changed. Earlier the primary activity was studying (I need to mention that primary activity does not mean that it is the primary focus of a person, rather its only the perceived primary activity, i.e. on paper or in societal terms he/she is primarily focused towards the activity) and now it is working. So while one is studying, he/she can engage in lot of secondary activities like sports, singing, acting..... and the list is endless. The reasons for these engagements are justified as passion, fitness, personal development, career prospects etc. The justification is not seeked by conscious but rather by the unconscious mind and we do give this justification but never understand this. The demand for justification reaches a conscious mind when the performance in primary activity is hindered by these secondary activities. (once again performance is as per the perception of society or yourself). Until the justification arguments are strong, things go smoothly, once justification is not strong enough, one of the avatars pops in.

Now coming to the scenario when working is primary activity. Now there are two kind of people, those who have extensively pursued one of those secondary activities and have justified it as passion and the other who might have tried their hands at lot of things for other justifying reasons. When the former person starts working, he keeps wondering whether the purpose of his life was working and was not to engage in the secondary activity that he was pursuing earlier throughout his life, again it is a question moving towards the same old question but is not in direct form. When the second kind of person as described above, starts working he is not able to connect to any thing as strongly as the former was connecting to in the name of passion, result is the big question - what is the purpose of life. Had he aligned himself to any activity than the question would have been re framed as, - was not the purpose of my life was to do xyz activity through out. So this is the genesis of question. And all those whose primary activities had actually remained primary, would be spared from this question for some later time. Or people who have managed to find some other secondary activity(it can even be preparation for some competitive exam), would have also not faced this question.

Another million dollar question, why do philosophers have been intrigued by this question. Well I have to sit down with few of these preachers to give out a theory of mine which could be extended to them.

Well If you have any other reasons for raising this question than please do suggest or else if you have the answer to the question, - what is the purpose of my life, then had you let me know that earlier, I would have been spared from writing this blog

FRAGILE: Handle with Care

2009-09-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

Well I should have written down this incident after coming home, but that day it was a mixed feeling of shock, reprieve and what not that prevented me from indulging in any further exercises which could hurt by brain even remotely. But 12 days now into the incident, I think it would be pure injustice to Sony,blogger fraternity my two friends who pulled out a miracle, to not to write this blog.
Well the incident is of 1st Sept 2009, the day we got our bank accounts filled up thanks to the firm that I work for. Having seen so much amount in an account owned by us it was natural to want to go for some light shopping at least. We came out of office at 7:00 PM and were thinking what should be buy today, chair-table was something that others wanted, i who is already having hard time having been forced to sit on chair for close to 10 hrs, was totally against the suggestion. Speakers was something on which we all finally had a consensus as it has been high time that we listened to music at sound levels, which justifies the music. Moreover I had wanted to buy an ipod for a long time and so i thought maybe this is the time. So electronic store, the destination was decided, money was secured through our debit cards. We went to Ezone, the only hyper-electronic store that was available in the area. Our requirements were very clear, the speakers should produce loud sound should be 2.1 (as it gives a hint that we are listening to some quality speakers) and should be cheap. We also wanted a brand!!! Creative 2.1 speakers were the only thing made in this world that could fit in all these requirements but unfortunately Ezone didn't had that. I saw the Ipods, found the one that i wanted to buy, but still wanted to do a market research before spending even a single amount on it. So nothing was to be bought, so the best time pass was the super expensive electronic gadget segment, which would have entertained us and would have given some sense of satisfaction as we had put in some efforts to come there. I started looking at camera's as photography has always attracted me. I was looking at this camera, which had a price tag of 21000 INR and was a Sony, mounted on a tripod stand. I was looking at the price tag, and then trying to look through its eye piece, getting now view, i thought that its shutter was closed to i thought checking it out, but as soon as i touched it, it fell from the stand, took 2 bounces before becoming stationary. Immediately came one of the attendant from the store, picked up the camera and saw that its plastic casing is broken (that's external damage which was visible). He said that I have to pay for the damages. Suddenly I realized that if I had to pay for it, half of what i had earned for the whole month would be gone and that too for a broken camera, which might not even work!!! My mouth dried up and words were difficult to come out, thankfully I was not alone there and immediately Choubey and Labdhi came to rescue.
The moment he said that I have to pay for it, here came an argument from choubey that since it was loosely kept it fell down, had it been tightly kept it could have never fallen, so it was all store's fault. By the time store owner or manager whosoever he was, too joined the scene. He said that he won't let us leave without paying. And things need to be settled, once again came the explanation that how loosely it was kept and it was just about to fall, we had become the victim of circumstances. Two three rounds of similar arguments happened then the manager said that this would never end he is very generous thats why will be billing 50000rs to us as damages and we won't have to buy the whole camera and the reiteration that he won't let us leave without letting us pay. Then came from Labdhi, that we too want to settle things thats why we are standing else we could have said that we didn't touch. The manager said that there are video camera installed every where and our touching the camera could be proved so don't think of that. We looked at the camera angles and type became very sure that it won't be able to prove the extend to which I had touched the Camera (the one which was broken). Now from being defensive we became aggressive, bring on the camera footage and let it prove that it fell while manhandling the camera or it fell just by a touch. The manager went up, leaving us surrounded with all the attendants of store. Around 20 mins passed, and then it was the time to become super aggressive, so choubey asked the attendant, that call your manager immediately, if he wants to settle this thing settle it now, we are too busy to be kept waiting like this. Then we were called up and there a clip was being played on the cameras continuously, with me touching the camera at different angles. But since the quality was not very great, so whether i was touching the camera or grabbing it was not clear. The footage clearly disapproved many of our arguments that i just touched once the camera etc, thereby forcing us to become defensive again. So once again we said that it was your negligence and that's the reason it fell. Similar arguments continued for another 20 mins., but by this time we had realized that we will have to pay something and it can't be 5000 so now its the time to minimize the losses, but how to start the bargain when it would caught us on wrong footing as in that case in a way we would have accepted that it was our fault. Labdhi and Choubey were the aggressors and I was the poor guy and we had been playing our roles quite well for past 2 hours and it was the final hour which would decide how much the poor guy that is me will loose.
Then came the age old tactic which works on everyone from autorickshaw puller to garment vendor but might never have been tested in this scenario. We started pleading that we are students and living in hostels, and meeting our ends in great difficulty, paying 5000 was impossible for us if you could settle things in 1000 maybe we can think. The manager started calling people on phones i don't know for what, so we too started calling our co-workers at company so that he doesn't get the feeling that we are "not connected". After some time, he said that the repairs would take 3300 so pay that much and leave, again came the same sentences setting our limit of 1000 very clear. This time I even went on and said that for even 1000, i would need to borrow money and go to ATM for withdrawal as i don't have anything now. The manager said give your card, we would swipe for 2000 bucks, we can't go lesser than this. I took my SBI ATM card which I had cleaned only days earlier, and gave it to him and said that this is the card that I have and take whatever money you can swipe from it. He swiped for 2000, transaction was denied for the lack of funds, he than tried with 1000, still denied. Finally he swiped for 500, and now it finally accepted the transaction. Looking at us, he said pay another 500rs in cash. So finally deal was closed in Rs1000. But I must say it would have not happened had Labdhi and Choubey not been there and had I not had that SBI ATM card. I now feel that I should have asked for that video clip on his camera, after all you don't damage a 21000 worth Sony camera, everyday.

Puzzle of connectivity

2009-08-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

There had been a lot of first for me in Chennai, be it my first job, first yet to be received salary, first boss, first paid project etc etc. but the most interesting amongst all the firsts had been the first prepaid connection. In Delhi I had enjoyed the luxury of having an airtel post paid connection which provided me with seamless connectivity throughout. (I am not paid for writing this rather I am just a satisfied customer) Well the phone was more of a luxury to the people around me then it was to me as they could always get a phone from which they can make a call when their own balance runs out. I am not accusing anyone of misusing my phone but certainly many would agree that it acted as luxury. My monthly bill was around 300-350 which being a constant phenomena was always counted in my mind while forecasting the monthly expenditure. But when I got hold of prepaid connection, this estimation went for a toss!
While writing this, I am a month old in Chennai and well had been using prepaid services for a month now. The total expenditure so far including sim card price had been just 90 rupees!!! And it is not the case that I have someone with a post-paid connection whose luxuries I am enjoying, neither do I have got an access to some landline which I can use without paying. In-fact the expense would have been around 30 bucks lesser had it been a normal month and not the first month in Chennai, when you need to inform everyone for the first two weeks that you are safe and have started enjoying in Chennai (at least one can pretend to ). Though this is a good thing but it has made me think more deeply about it (which is the work that I enjoy). I realized that my entire talking time on phone in whole month is lesser than what the people around me do in a single day. And mind you I am not talking about the telecallers or some other voice processing professional but is talking about the my friends who work along with me at the same office. When one of my friends recently called me, I also realized that after initial few common sentences whose answer I know even before asking, I had nothing else to talk about. It it not the case that I am the silent type, rather I belong that category of people who are difficult to stop once they start talking, but still I had nothing to talk, and let me be clear that the friend was not a female, else I would have taken the refuge under some other obscure reasoning, but still I couldn't talk not longer than a couple of minutes. I had always been inquisitive about telecommunication and it was not the technical aspect of its functioning rather the other aspect which had remained a flummox to me. I am talking about the whole purpose of calling and the content the people talk about. I personally have called anyone when there has been a need. There has been calls to people whom you had not been in touch for long, but that is once in a year. I do not understand what to talk to anyone, if I would have met the person say a week ago or had talked within a week or maybe month, depends upon who the person is. But when I see people spending hours talking to same person virtually everyday as if it is a prescribed ritual which should be done unfailingly else one would have to bear severe consequences. Though I am a highly talkative person but still I can't even imagine to generate such a high volume of content on daily basis and still not to bore the other person. There must be a strong mechanics which work behind this content generation that I am not aware off but definitely want to have a glimpse. But alas no one shares the content, had there been someone who would have documented such hourly sessions for whole month, believe me I would have read the whole log maybe for tips as well as for quenching my inquisitiveness.
I have written this post for few purposes, first is that I want to communicate to all the people who know me that if I don't call you or talk for not more than two minutes ,when you call then please understand my inability.I want to talk but I am not able to talk. Secondly I request all the people who are reading this post to type down the content of one of their such talks and mail it to me or if you have speaker phone, please record it and upload it somewhere, with all the references to names beeped out. It would help me a lot to understand this whole thing and why do I care to understand this, well that's a question to which even I don't have an answer.

Illegal boon

2009-08-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

We always figure foreigners (white in particular, no racist slur intended) as some lame people who are meant to be duped when they visit India, and in particular by the transporters like taxi operators and autorickshaw operators. I recently realized that it is not the lameness rather the language barrier which makes them to pay more, and this realization was from first hand experience. No I didn't visit some African country recently, rather has just completed my first two weeks in Chennai and here every local vendor as well as autorickshaw operator takes the advantage of this language barrier and we end up paying much more than what we thought should be the right fare. Being forced to overpay in past 2 weeks, when I landed in Delhi yesterday and had to go around 35 km to reach home that too after 11 pm, i thought i would end up being a lot lighter. But on the contrary I ended up reaching home spending only 20 bucks. And I covered this distance in a royal way, in an air-conditioned Cab with me sitting on the backseat (alone for most part of the journey).
While sitting in the Cab, I realized the importance of growing prowess of Indian service industry and the things which are connected to our lives because of it. Large number of people who have their offices in Gurgoan or in Noida, depend upon this mode of transport. I am not talking about the legitimate travellers rather the one who are being illegally ferried by the drivers of these Cabs. This has become such a bigger transport medium, that if the BPOs are forced to shift to some other location, there would be severe transport crisis. I don't think our planners would ever look into these boons of service industry, which though illegal but are doing a lot of good for the community. Infact I can safely say that this practise has bought the cheapest cab transport probably in whole world. I tried to think of other such illegal practise which eventually does a good for community as a whole but couldn't think of any which comes even closer to this. If you come across any do share it.

ART OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

2009-07-20T08:17:00.001-07:00

An addict knows where the other addicts live and is also grossly familiar with the behavioural pattern of others, when he/she is in trance. So one who smokes a lot understands when the fellow smoker will feel the urge for smoking. I have based this interpretation of mine, through various visuals and instances when one of the smokers pulls out a cigarette to offer to his fellow smoker right at the time when the second person thinks that he needed it most and hence never refuses. I being an addict of internet feel that I know a bit or two things about the present addicts and about the person who are on the threshold of being classified as addicts. Of all of my browsing time, I spend close to 60% on various social networking sites, and since I hardly have any updates on regular basis so I spend this time in catching trends and giving an interpretation from them. (After you read every day so many results published in various newspapers on sociological behaviours, you tend to form your interpretations too). Social Networking users show largely similar trends and on the basis of that they could be well classified in few categories, but that would be done later.

THE USERS

I think that there are very few people, who use these social networking sites for keeping in touch. Those who do are not the frequent users. The most frequent users are the one that live by this image of techie, and use the latest site. So they switch on with the switching popularity. So if yesterday, orkut was the place where they could be found, today they are found on facebook, as it's the "in" thing, and they are building there base on twitter, so that this time they are not caught unaware when the next transition arises. These techies also want to portray themselves as witty intellects, who could give you in your face if situation arises. How do they do this, well these sites ask them to fill something about themselves or fill in what you are thinking/or what's on your mind. There had been many times when I had read people's "about me" and wondered, is it the same person whom I know, or is it is alter ego of his, which get alive not by flip of coin as in case of batman but by logging in his account. Many people don't fill up this section rather; write a single statement which portrays them as king of sarcasm. Sample this – "get lost" or "Do something useful to yourself instead of killing time in reading someone else's profile".

FANS

Then there is mad rush for joining in the communities or becoming fan of something or someone. People become fan of virtually everything which is new. So if there is some character which is presently hot, people becomes its fan quickly, to show - Hey dude, I am with time, and I am following him too.

NETWORK STATUS

With facebook's "comment" and "like" options give great opportunity to people to network themselves with the people who have slightly stronger standing at present. So a link, picture or video posted by someone who is slightly high up, bags a lot of comments and "likes". No matter the comments are as lame as "simply awssum" (awesome), which are made to say – hello, I follow you. And people do show they are abreast with latest trends, by using the catch phrases, while commenting, to consolidate hey I read things. All though I have already written a lot about Gtalk status messages in one of my earlier posts, and all those trends follow here too. There are few additions though, there are people who gives in a sneak peek into their daily schedule and do that either to show that they are super busy and no-one can be busier than them (something which can't be true as you change your status message twice or thrice a day shows you have plenty of time to kill or in rare cases you are really super busy and it is the addiction which is pulling you there), or people do give sneak peek into their daily schedule to show that they are super vella (idle) or super cool. Super vella is understandable but cool, well it's a subjective thing and I should not be commenting over it. I am amazed to see people's status message as "good morning everyone", which can be either to show that – hey everyone I had a night-out and hence could change my status message in early hours of the day, or I woke up early today (for changing my status message to wish "good morning", isn't it hilarious)

THE STARTING PHASE

Another reason which actually makes people to start using these sites in the first place is finding someone specific, which in many cases is a particular girl (This interpretation is for boys only as I hardly know anything about how things start amongst girls). So the first few days of making account goes in mad search of people whom you are actually "interested in ". Once you find, you become a cool guy and talk in a way which would put the other person amazed, oh boy, is he the same person whom I knew! And this cool techie dude thing is born. So this is the genesis of everything. As this coolness gets so deep rooted that now you don't care who the recipient is, you behave in same way.

Well I can go on and on but looking at the word count, I think I should stop here. I should say that many of these things are direct interpretation of online behaviours of people whom I know, or who are connected to me or the people about whom I get to hear from my friends.

Revisiting the unvisited

2009-07-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

These vacations which probably would be the last one in coming years has been the most constructive one, as far I am concerned. I learned how to cope with challenge, roamed around, wrote things, read a lot and definitely one of the best one was I visited the place I was born. I belong to a family in which my generation is the first one which has fully lived in cities and hence just like the rest of the urban population, I had become totally immune to what village life is what the problems are. Though things were often discussed at home about the rural life, and newspapers as well as magazines put in a lot of writing over it but still you don't get the real feel until you get there and experience it first hand. I had visited my village last year too but that was just for 2 days and you don't get to know anything in two days. I had been there for a longer period when I was 10 years old, now with my brain grown up along with me, I could see,experience and conclude things over everything that I saw and comparisons with city life is obvious.
First of all, to reach my village you need to walk for about 3 km from the nearest town, and guess what I didn't knew the path (something which didn't amuse anyone in my family). There were just three turns in the middle and I who had received precise instructions on phone still got lost and reached some other village. Then I decided to ask someone and prayed that the people here know the way to my village. I was lucky that the first person I asked knew the village, after telling the path, he asked me to whose house do i want to go in the village. When I told about my family I as astonished to know that he knew everyone in my family and above all did tell the passerby to whose house I belong too. I was just looking in bewilderment, just wondering what a strong human network operates in villages, where everyone in a village knows about people who are in villages farther than 2 km from their own. Here in cities, I don't think there would be people who knows even 20 other families completely apart from their own. Thankful to the courteous people I finally was on the right path. Once I was just a 1 km away i saw a cycle stopping in front of me and he asked me to ride behind him. I did and finally I reached my home. At home I came to know that the person who gave me a lift was distinctly related to me and is a brother, in fact most people in village are somehow your relatives. I was told that when he came to know that I had probably lost the way, he rushed to get me, again something that I wouldn't expected from such a distinct relative who had lived in a city like Delhi for long. As I told that since everyone in village is your relative, so whenever you see someone new, there would be touching of feet, either by him/her or by you all depending upon the age. The most difficult scenario is when you encounter someone of your age, you don't know whether you have to give the blessings or have to receive as you hardly know how you are actually related but you do know that you are related. So on an average you end up taking blessings from 20-30 people for first couple of days, depending upon how frequently you move out of your house, and well giving blessings to some 4-5 people.
The best part of you staying in village is the food. Everything that you eat of drink is freshly made and contains no chemicals. So vegetables are freshly plucked from the farm that puts limit on the choice of vegetables though but you can just smell the freshness, the spices are all freshly grounded, milk product is from the cow/Buffalo at your home which has been milked without any injections, even the ghee that you take is fresh and free from chemicals. During evening time you can always take a stroll at the place where fruit trees are planted and pluck some of them by either climbing or by showing your skills of sharp shooting (of stones). But one thing is for sure, you would end being obese if you stay there for long because even light jogging wouldn't suffice for the amount of food that you would intake on daily basis. So if you want to stay fit, eating such a food you need to adapt to the way of living the local people have which involves heavy physical work of working of fields starting as early as 5 am in season.
As I started meeting people, everybody already knew that I was an engineer. Everybody felt proud that someone as young as me from their village was an engineer. There were some informed people who asked me about my stream of engineering and of whole production and industrial, they could just catch production and feel that it is a great thing. Next thing always comes about job, the best thing about this enquiry related to job was that none of them asked my package rather were interested in knowing what the company does. This is another thing which was totally different in city. Here whenever I am probed over the placement, the order of questions are - have you been placed? then which company? package? work only few people uptill now have cared to ask. Coming back to the village scenario, it would have been much easier to answer the question about the package but what the company does, it was the most difficult thing to explain. Word "consultancy" is alien for everyone and moreover everything that you say would be viewed under the purview of word "production". I don't think I could satisfy many people over my work in the company but yes made the work a lot easier for future engineers of the place as from now on I don't think anyone would be so interested in knowing what the company does. Distinction of private or public would end everything. I think the post had already gone a bit too long, so I'll shut here but will type down the things as and when I feel like because a lot is left to be told

All Engineers are same

2009-06-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

It is often quoted that Indian education system is lot different from what the western countries in particular USA have in offering. Many people do say that latter one is definitely better as USA 's few universities combined produce more researches than whole of India. Such comments make students like me to think that conditions would be a lot better in every respect, had you done your engineering from some American university. But on seeing Howard of Big bang series , you'll definitely end up concluding that there are few things which can never change and are definitely attached with Engineering degree itself. I remember in one of the episodes, one of the competitor of howards says about engineer fraternity - "we all are creepy and can't get girls that's why we fight robots". Well I can say that many in Indian engineering fraternity won't agree with the creepy part (which might be hypocritical in some cases) but would definitely agree with the latter. And this is not restricted to one college but to all.
My views might be biased as I have interacted with students of very few engineering college, when compared to the total number that India has, but I believe that if their traits could be assumed to be representative of their college mates, than I could safely generalize this thing over a sizable number and can say that most engineering students in our country are the lesser aggressive version of howard wolowitz. Well the lack of aggression too is bought upon by the cultural setup of India, and once these dudes go in a no string attached places i.e. some western country then they become equally aggressive. When someone comes back from a foreign internship, this question definitely creeps in - Wahan kya kya kiya (what all things did you do), and certainly no one is interested in what you did on internship or project rather what you did on the other front. And most of these foreign returned dudes have accomplished a lot of things on "other" front, the first front is irrelevant for the listening masses. Only those who are left behind, were either too cautious of the money that goes into such entertainments or had some distant fear that their activity report can reach somehow back at their homes as digital gadgets have made it a lot easier these days. Morality being the reason is very rare to come across. So given the American settings, if not all most would have been like howard wolowitz.

(From now on I will try to keep my posts small so that it is not discarded merely on the basis of its length by the reader)

Religion and Believes: A food for thought

2009-06-18T08:41:00.000-07:00

Since time immemorial humans have been a mystery to humans itself. Even today scientists know much more about moon and distant planets than their own bodies. Amongst all the mysteries that all the scientific community is busy solving across the world, it is the powers of brain that is considered as most mysterious (this is my own interpretation based on limited news stories that I have read so far). I being nowhere distinctly related to any profession which engages in such quest, was pondering over the mysteries surrounding humans. Since I am illiterate as far as human anatomy is considered, so was quick to move towards non-materialistic aspects (No this post is not about morality etc). I was thinking lately of the things that energizes humans to produce results that are uncommon in many cases. All though I could not think of many things but from my limited experience of different people and places that I have met and seen, I could safely say that it is the "believe" which empowers humans to do things which are normally not possible.
When we are talking of believe than there are two major kinds of believes which are talked about most oftenly. The believe in self and believe in supernatural powers which can be God or satanic powers. I don't know what the actual mechanism of this energy release is but I definitely "believe" that believe is the strongest performance enhancing product that humans can have. It was one of the blog and my most recent trip whose potent mixture generated this thought. I am not a religious person but still am not an atheist either, so I do visit the places of worship that I get an opportunity to. Though most of such visits are more for the purpose of experiencing rather than deep devotion. In one of my recent trips I visited one such temple which needed you to trek for some 6 odd kilometres in almost 40 degree of slope on a mountain. I along with my friends took it as a trekking assignment and did reach the top, thinking that only trekkers would be reaching there. But instead was surprised to see people from villages including children and old women successfully accomplishing the "religious trekking" as I call it from there villages to the temple, a path which was slightly more difficult than what we did. It was the believe of people in the powers that can do everything good for them which pushed to accomplish this feet which according to me is extraordinary for people of that age. Although I don't intend to disrespect god in any way but the thing which they and even I bend in front of, on reaching the top, was some kind of mountainous stones believed to be god. Whenever I visit such ancient temples, I am always left wondering of the thought about the first person who would have discovered such place. In the first place, how or rather most important why would someone go on the top of mountain centuries ago when the present settlements would have been virtually non existent. And what would have been the state of mind of such ancient mountaineer who would have discovered the presence of god on such heights. Was it a hallucination bought out of fatigue which made him see god in some stone or in some cave and he without realising that his hallucination could culminate into a strong believe of people which would probably never last rather would only expand,communicated it to everyone. Or the ancient mountaineer did witness some kind of actual event which had powered his believes. The best answer is known to him/her only , I can just speculate.
I would have loved to probe this subject but unfortunately religious history is amongst those career options which no one is ready to even think of and hence there are not many things available to form base for your research. Moreover in India it is a sinful to probe anything which has anti-religious implications and such attempts are quickly curbed if not peacefully then violently. I would love to know what you think over it.

LUNGI

2009-06-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

My destiny took me to Chennai in search for job. Since as a student I had already gone bankrupt courtesy the job treat that I gave for a job that didn't left me with any dignity, I had to go by train. The journey spanned 36 hrs either way, so I had a lot of time to think over cultures and contrasts that exist in the two parts of the country. I found people to be really helpful even if they didn't understand a single word that I was speaking. Autorickshaw people just like in Delhi wanted to extract all the money that you had but here they had an additional advantage of language, a luxury not available with Delhi auto drivers. They had their own cuisine, though everything is available in Delhi and I myself is a fan of south Indian food but most of the dishes I considered as snacks are taken there as full meal. (I mean who stuffs himself here by just eating idlis). But the most catching feature for me was the ease with which people lived there.
I am not talking about mental ease as I couldn't have judged that by seeing the people but I am talking about physical ease. There people preferred comfort over looks. So they would apply sandal coating on their foreheads to keep it cool and don't care whether it counts in fashion or not. They would eat with their hand and don't go for sophistication of spoons and forks. And the best part is they wear the most comfortable clothing on earth made for men LUNGI. Women did had skirts which I think was a perfect design for keeping yourself covered without compromising comfort. Somehow over the centuries there might have been a revolution to identify sexuality with clothing and there must be some very wise women at that time who would have convinced the male leaders of that time to switch to other clothing and leave skirts for them. And I think from there were born trousers, the uncomfortable cloth that we had to wear for all social outings. This whole saga definitely would have come up in western country as trousers are given by them only. When this whole world was swiped by this trousers led transition, there must be some wise men in southern India who invented Lungi and gave new level to comfort. They further invented the second folding on it to increase the comfort level. So while world over males were feeling proud for having invented new attire for themselves without knowing that they had been duped by their female counterparts. I think after people of southern India it were Scottish who too knew this whole gimmick and retained the skirts , though now it is restricted to bagpiper bands only but the thing is it still exists.
I can just imagine how comfortable it would be, wearing a lungi but would probably never give it a try just because of the rude deal that ancestors made, trading comfort for style. Please do not judge this blog as racist and I am extremely sorry If I sound like one.

Feeling of being unlucky

2009-05-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

Today while randomly searching i stumbled upon a quote "People are lucky and unlucky...according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect." I found it very interesting and hence was quick to share my discovery with others through the obvious path, Gtalk status message. Since these are not the good times for me as far as mental peace is concerned hence it was not uncommon to think a bit extra over it. Most people and me in particular always crib over the things that we don't get and in most cases we blame it on luck. Luck being the unlucky savior bears the brunt of everyones failure. I once saw a animated series in which luck was portrayed as some kind of living character and it gave the justification over the things, that were blamed over him, I had found that amusing as well as revealing a truth. I often consider myself to be highly unlucky and that too to the extend that if someone has to choose 9 out of 10 people standing, I am sure i won't be the one chosen. This feeling of bad-luck has held me in the captivity of negativity (I just love this phrase, thanks Cole phifer aka T-Bag). After reading this quote (the earlier one and not the one by T-bag) I think this gives a better picture of what luck is. In most of the cases we consider ourselves unlucky when we have a case in consideration to whom we consider "lucky". The whole comparison thing brings in the good luck or the bad luck. However in those situations if we see everyone, than definitely we will come across someone, in whose comparison the person in question is lucky. Sounds a bit confusing but it is the truth. I am not advocating that whenever one feels down one should compare ourselves with someone in a miserable consideration and than feel happy about it that I am not in that condition (I utterly disagree with Mahatma Gandhi in viewing everything in this manner to infuse happiness in life) Rather I am saying that instead of comparisons one should see the things in absolute terms. The burden of expectation from self is the major cause of the feeling of failure which when happens repetitively leads to the feeling of being unlucky.
So the thing is if I don't expect so much from myself, the feeling of bad luck will disappear. So for the case of deferred joining in which case i consider myself highly unlucky, if I wouldn't have expected myself to be working by July/august, I wouldn't have considered myself unlucky! But this argument further digs into the negativity. To curtail this feeling of luck (or bad luck) one shouldn't expect anything from self. This lack of non-expectation will kill away the motivation that is generated from the raw desires fueling self performance. This would further lead to under performance and thereby underachievement but possible mental peace and happiness as you won't feel that you have been deprived of luck. I think this would be more dangerous proposition than the one in which I am presently in. As in present scenario I always think that this time I was "unlucky", maybe next time I will make up to the lost opportunity. It may sound to be idiosyncratic but it is not, think over it and definitely you will realise that its better to consider yourself unlucky than being potentially happy by eliminating this luck factor in the above mentioned way. So Mr. Luck, this quote won't do any good to you and as always you will be blamed for every failure that I undergo in future.
Do you agree with me or consider this whole argument not strong enough and the quote to be much stronger? If you disagree than I think you must be one of those lucky chaps and thereby the ones who have undermined their potentials in their own thinking, hey dude wake up.

Ctr+C + Ctrl+V =Report

2009-05-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

In the heights of pessimism begun the usual pondering that I do quite regularly. This time I was thinking about the skills that I had gained at IIT, rather was trying to think of any skill that I gained at IIT. After draining all the energy that my brain head, I came down to one thing - Report making. If I rephrase than I would say that the only skill that I had gained here is that of a very efficient plagiarising. So irrespective of the fact that I know anything about the topic or not or I have done any work in the concerned area or not,I am capable of making a decent account of the knowledge gained or work done in the area. Windows have provided many shortcuts but the only ones that I had used quite frequently are Ctrl C, Ctrl V and off course if the pasting has not been correct than Ctrl Z. An exhaustive number of presentations and reports had been made by me over these four years which if not directly then definitely were inspired by someone Else's presentation who in some other part of the world (this thing I always make sure that I don't copy anything from the content produced in India) had uploaded it for others use and boy I am the one making optimum use of it. A researcher sitting in US would have never thought that his research work that had earned him accolades and his PhD. is being modified slightly and shown by someone here in one of the colleges in India in one of the humanities course for a term paper of as small weightage as 10%. Definitely had he known this he would have burned his thesis to ashes or the google servers which would have stored the link that could crawl to the concerned page.
This habit of copying things from some other source has become so deep rooted that when I started thinking of any original content that I wrote, I could think only of my blog entries (believe me, all content posted here is original). I questioned myself whether I am capable of writing any original content, straight came the answer - No. This thing is not restricted to me only, rather whole campus is plagued my it. The so called best brains are efficiently using it to create plagiarised material. If someone says that I have finished with writing the report immediately comes the question - "kahan se teepi (from where have you copied), can you please send it to me too". Though all material is available in books too and if searched can be a better source for making a report but unfortunately the luxury of Ctrl C , Ctrl V is not available in this option. It is always said that google had simplified everyones life, I don't know about others but it has definitely done it for us at least. You just need to know few searching tricks and have good searching skills and these are enough to produce a report of highest quality in a time frame as short as your reading speed (If you bother to read). I was just wondering how difficult it would have been to make so many reports, before larry page and sergey brin invented google. Or it is after google that the number of reports demanded from students increased. Whatever the case may be, originality is totally lost in this whole report making saga. I am glad that my blogs might be biased but are not plagiarised so can boast of one original content. But I was never admitted to IIT for writing blogs rather was admitted for gaining technical skills and I can't think of any original content written in any technical field. It is time which will tell whether the act that I have quoted qualify as a skill or will lead me to some problems. Till than cut copy paste rules.
So when was the last time you created an original content......................................

Pink slipped!!!!!

2009-04-13T14:16:00.000-07:00

I had heard that recession has gripped every part of the world and I too saw that placement season at the campus was quite disappointing for most of us. I had been reading in newspapers about people loosing job and the domino effect, and the keynes theory and blah blah everything indicating that if you don't have a job at this point you are totally screwed. I always thanked god that at least I have one in my hand. I had been wondering that I knew just a couple of people who had been fired from their jobs in recent time, and that wasn't indifferent as many time you hear about one or two isolated case of employee being fired. So I started thinking that maybe the situation is not that bad and it is the media which has created such a hype around it that the recession magnifies by few scales in our perception. Than came the day 31st march, I was informed that my joining to the company had been deferred till December. I knew what it meant. Deferring has become an effective replacement of pink slip for fresh recruits. Suddenly I realized what recession was and people are definitely loosing job, at least I have lost mine for the time being. Although company says that by Jan they would definitely absorb us, but at the time of recruitment the same people said that it would be July when they would be absorbing us. A mis-calculation of theirs about man power requirement screwed the career of around of 40 odd people that the company recruited from various IITs. Although I am by nature a hardcore pessimist but most of the time I do find something good about even the worst situation but here my mind is not able to think of even a single good thing. Steve Jobs always talks of connecting the dots of past to visualise the reasons for present success. But in my case I can clearly connect the dots to visualise the reasons for my present state of helpless disarrayed condition. I can just hope that anything is positive is in stored and the coming dots would lead to the one that improves my condition.

Dance of Democracy

2009-03-29T09:50:00.001-07:00

These days when I pick up newspaper for reading the happenings of the day, I always end up reading one or more of the stories covering elections, which I think, occupy 60% of the newspaper, these days. By the time I reach the sections that I had actually picked the paper for, I had lost my patience to continue further. After reading so much about elections I thought it would be highly unjustified if I don't type down something over it. I thought this was the best time to do that because IIT too had just concluded its annual elections, and this time I had no stakes involved in any sense probably for the first time.
I was trying to figure out a correlation between general elections and these internal elections (internal of IIT and which includes EXTERNALS of hostel as well as hostel elections). I think the essence is the same, off course the third front is missing in the internal elections as there are only two pre-pole alliances, constituents of which keep on switching sides. There is one major difference, while in general elections, the leaders negotiating within these alliances are the prominent political icons of their own parties who themselves are in the fray (and have the highest stakes amongst all of his party members), here the negotiators are the power players/power brokers of the parties (which can be a hostel or fraction within a hostel), who themselves are about to move out of the constituencies (as they would be passing out) but want to establish the will of their near and dear ones who have more year/years to live in it. This phenomena comes close to dynasty rule or maybe to nepotism with few caveats.
Coming to methods of campaign. I was recently handed over a pamphlet of a candidate of one of the political parties. In whole pamphlet, the person had mentioned about his caste, the glory of that caste, the absence of politicians belonging to it in the region and the pride that would be gained if voters send him to lok sabha. Apart from this, there was nothing else reasoned out by him for voting for him. We all would agree that the contestant should have mentioned about the development plans, the governance vision, policies and the agenda that he would pursue once elected. But if we come to our hostel elections, then the same thing is not seeked, the agenda etc are only to be spoken in Statement of purpose speeches that too has statements which had been repeating since years if not decades. There are only few things on the basis of which candidates seek vote, either friendship of the voter with the candidate or with someone who has already been persuaded to support the candidate, or the enmity with the other candidate or the people associated with him. This might not be true in every elections but for majority it is. The bait offered to the supporting parties in general elections is the cabinet berth in post victory scenario, here it is different posts or benefits in some other clubs which is on offering. Then there are lame voters who cast their votes for direct benefit as small as money (remember mulayam singh yadav's recent note distribution act). Though lame is derogatory word but the act makes them to qualify for it. Most of them belong to lower strata of society who think that they are too small to be affected by the coming and going of government and so it is best to grab the benefit that is right in front of them. Here in hostels, this category of voters consists of those people from final year who do not belong to the earlier class of power players or are not very closely associated with them. Belonging to this category, my vote too was for sale, but knowing how lame the action is, was too ashamed to quote my price in front of any candidate.
The aftermath of hostel elections is the winning party getting some very minor advantages over things as small as room distribution. The other party always is not able to digest its defeat and do resurfaces in some form or other in the next elections, with sole motive of hampering the prospects of last years victors. So most things remaining the same, there is one big difference, while here the elections are more of clash of egos, while in general elections it is the clash of power. It is debatable whether one leads to other. What do you say.....................

Goa: Exoticism within india-part 2 (the three Bs)

2009-03-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

As time passes the potency of things decrease but there are few things who are potent enough to retain their magic much longer than a normal lifespan of an experience. I believe Goa belongs to the latter category. A lot of thoughts have come in my mind in past few weeks, which deserves to be typed down, but it is always important to finish the mess that you started with, so here comes Goa part 2.
So after that amazing train journey (please refer to earlier post) that skyrocketed our hopes, we finally reached madgoan station. It was a unique moment at the station, while at one hand we were happy that finally our body wont be under vibrations as they were for past 36 hrs of train journey but at the same time had some hard feelings for the fact that we might never get an opportunity to meet with our co passengers, whome we had so closely observed for past one and half days. But certainly the glam quotient in the train itself had made it clear that most of our "agendas" for the trip will be comprehensively met (a certainity which got crushed miserably). We had already encountered with one of the Bs of the Goa, rather the most important one for some, the other two were yet to be seen. Reaching station was as happy moment as shocking was the first price quote that we got from the taxi wala for carrying us to the guest house that was booked for us. The quote was Rs 600 for a drive of 30 kms. This made one thing sure that after this trip surely we will be bankrupted and probably it will be the last one in our IIT life untill we land with somekind of jackpot or a lottery. The drive to guest house was smooth across the deserted roads,it was humid and we were already getting the feel of Goa. The thought of preserving the energy for next day, tiredness of the day and regulation in guesthouse (which we flouted everyday) to lock the main entrance at 10, made us to retire for bed without any night adventures.
The next day we hired "bikes" and zoomed away for the refuge of hippies the "anjuna beach". Since I was not riding hence not even a single "check point" went un-noticed, few of the checkpoints were so strong that they made the riders swing and the backseaters pray for their safety, particularly when your bike has just rear wheel brakes that too half functional and totally non functional horn. During our journey from panaji to beach a trend was quite evident. As you move towards the beach from the city, the amount of textile requirements for making apparels decrease linearly, becoming close to zero at the beach and exactly zero if you are lucky! we were half lucky. In the circumference of 5 km from the beach I believe gaon government had some strict regulations regarding clothing which everyone was obliging. So throughout our stay we found just two offenders of this regulation who were wearing pair of jeans !!!!!! and not super short shorts. As far as beach is concerned it was a mesmerizing experience for me, because in the name of beach I had just seen juhu beach of mumbai before. And I can surely say that though Anjuna is not the best beach of goa but certainly juhu appears to be a drainage when compared to it. Beach was thronged with three kind of tourists, one were the foreigners who had came to India to experience sun and beach at a budget cost and maybe do narcotics too (hippies too will come under this), then there were Indians who had come to have a romantic holiday with their spouses or loved ones and then there were us, who had come to make maximum in these days. (I should not be elaborating on what all things are included in that maximum) Any single girl particularly foreigner was deemed to be "available" rather "seeking". I believe this was the general perception of most of the people who belonged to our category. This appeared to be true too in some cases as we once spotted an Indian who was eyeing on one of us (and I need not mention who he was) and the stares and giggles lasted for a long time. The target too gave many poses of playing pool bare chested to the spotters but the whole ordeal ended with none of the sides blinking. Finally the hunters were hunted by someone else who made a move. There was a brief discussion amongst us about whether the stares were "availability" signals, or it were stares to compare the option in front with the option that you had already sidelined with. It was inconclusive as are most of the discussions. We played with the waves a lot and then moved on for our next stop, the wagah beach. So here we enjoyed the second B of Goa, since I do not consume alcohol so I was spared of the Booze, the third B but seeing banners saying "family bar", I could imagine what importance the third B holds. It would be hard for me to judge that out of the three Bs which one was the most exciting, I would though sideline with the second one, as I had a full experience of that one only and the rest were just distantly seen and imagined what they would have meant in full fervor. I think the post had already crossed the limits of testing the readers patience so I should halt now. I'll keep posting but for all those who had been to goa or are thinking of going, than for you which B was the most exciting or appears to be most exciting, if you still did not get what the three Bs were, let me be explicit: Babe, Beach, Booze.Please do add your comment too

Goa: Exoticism within India- part 1: the journey

2009-03-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

After two minor trips we finally decided to start for the mother of all inland trips - Goa. Though as expected, trip met many initial hiccups with assignment submissions carefully aligned with our tentative dates for the trip and credit crunch within hostel reaching its peak, aggravating the liquidity situation, but still the six of us started for the trip. The train journey was supposed to be 30 hours long and to begin with, the train arrived at station around an hour late. We all were thinking what the hell in this world will we do within that moving sheet metal box for 30 hours to prevent ourselves from smashing our own heads out of boredom. But as it is said that God always plans out things for happiness of its disciples, something good was planned for us too. As soon as we entered our boogie and checked our seats, we realized that we were sandwiched between two college groups which had extremely good looking girls as its part and all of them going to goa. Suddenly the hopes were raised withing the island of hopelessness.
With the change of neighbours changed our behavioral characteristics, so now instead of window seat, the other corner seat was the one most fought for as it was giving a glimpse of intra-boogie beauty . Suddenly the middle berth was most sought after again for the same reasons. And every now and then each of us was ready to move in within the train for throwing garbage in dustbins (as if railways provide any in sleeper compartments) or look for some vendor in the pathways. More than 50% of the talks that we had amongst ourselves, was over our neighbours. Suddenly we occupied the roles of judges of some beauty contest and started rating the contestants who themselves were unaware that every action of thiers is spotted, debated and rated through out, even most finest of their postures were observed and analysed. Then we did pick up our favourites. But all in all 30 hours ended in pure observation and not even a single sentence of communication (I am hoping that our vulturish looks didn't communicate anything to them). So this was how our journey from Delhi to Madgaon ended and with it, lost was the attraction which was build over 30 long hours of observation and discussions........................................

To be continued.................................

Another Trip............

2009-02-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

Today when I checked my orkut account I realized that it still shows my status as - "blog updated and happy republic day", I thought how about typing a new post so that status is justified. (off course the later part need to eliminated) It is also very good time to write something as I had just been freed from minors, BTP mid term presentation and had just returned from another trip. I have nothing to share about minors and BTP mid term presentation was a fiasco and certainly I don't want to keep it in my memory for any more day. So it leaves me with the trip and trip does have ample masala to be told. This time the trip was planned on the pretext of attending Nitesh's brother's marriage and we wrapped up Amritsar and Wagah border in it too.
Visiting border is something that raises the sense of nationality in you but when I attended the evening retreat ceremony, I realized that in this sense of nationality and patriotism, even trivial things take immense importance. So when a BSF jawan gives out a command and parallel command is given on Pakistani side, then the length of shout too gets associated with national pride. So If Indian soldier maintains his voice for longer period, India scores a victory over pakistan and vice verse. When the slogans are cheered, "vande matram" from our side and "jiye pakistan " from their side, once again its a contest between nations and when Pakistan side's chants were louder, I felt as if our people led the country down. Parade of opposite side's soldier is scrutinised and even minor mistakes are cheered very loudly and same mistake gets associated with a feeling of shame from jawan's own countrymen. I can't imagine the amount of pressure on the soldiers who parade, in fact I believe that their performance becomes equally crucial to an Indian cricket team's players in a world cup match against Pakistan. I think there is hardly a pair of countries who contest each other so closely. I had once read a joke which had two people talking, one says - Do you know India stands 54 on global soccer ranking, the second one asks where does Pakistan stands, the first one replies 58, the second one feels contended and says , than its fine. That is the kind of rivalry and I think it will sustain forever as it gets fueled frequently by tragedies like the one in mumbai.
This trip also had a very high entertainment quotient thanks to the ITALIAN garnish on the wedding celebrations!!!

Obama-mania: the change rhetoric and its misinterpratation

2009-01-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

"Obama mania in US ahead of swearing in": The article by this title flashed on indiatimes, the web arm of the newspaper Times of India(TOI), on reading the article something struck to me. I tried to think over the headlines that I could recall and there were just two things - Obama and Slumdog, from the newspapers of previous one week if not more. I started to think that its not just US but my own country is gripped too by this mania called Obama. Then a thought came to mind that maybe because US is big daddy of world its elections do have a hangover, so for a moment I thought that there is not abnormality. I decided to do a test by myself to check whether mania had got hold of the country or not. I searched the string "Obama" on indiatimes internal search, it gave 261000 results, than I searched "Barack Obama" the results narrowed down to 94100, which was still a very high number. Then I searched for his indian counterpart (as far as power is concerned and not the titular counterpart), and I received just 74200 results for the string "manmohan singh". So our very own PM in spite of being in his position for almost 5 years and featuring in news making events like vote of confidence, nuclear deal, and off course the bypass surgery, was convincingly beaten by Obama who is just 3 days old in office and as far as I can recall had been in Indian news for not more than 18 months. Now if that is not mania than what else will it be called.
My assumption being that media publishes things that people want to read (not necessarily concerns them though), India is in obama mania (though we are officially still not in recession mind you). This is not all, we have Obama's swearing in ceremony as a featured item at various video sharing sites and our very own Indians are watching it too. Few days back I saw various Indian movie stars praising Obama, saying we too want a leader like obama. Suddenly being on Obama's side had become the hottest thing and if you are not on that side, you don't support "change". Suddenly there had been debates, propelling Rahul Gandhi as the ideal candidate for prime ministership (he has not been propelled by the Congress up till now but it is the newspapers that carry this message as the voice of Indian youth). The first question that is asked to Mr.L.K.Advani, the prime ministerial candidate from the side of NDA, during a recent online chat interview is - Don't you think that we need a younger leader like Obama in US. Omar Abdullah's becoming the chief minister is considered as the beginning of the change. Newspapers place Rahul gandhi, Navin Jindal, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora, Priya Dutt etc as the right people to lead the country(calling them second generation of indian political families will be more appropriate rather than face of young india).
I think we have grossly misunderstood the "change", that the Americans are talking about. Let us remember that Mr.Obama is not the youngest President of America, so it is not the change distinctly related to the "age", rather it is the social change, where a black man won the elections and thereby falsified the believers of Bradley effect (Mr. Shashi tharoor too in one of his articles predicted Mr.Obama's loss on the basis of this effect). Some people believe that we can say that we have achieved the change similar to what US presently has, if some Dalit becomes a PM. I think the believers of this thought are the ones who had taken Ms Mayawati's dream of becoming PM too seriously. We should remember that Dr.K.R.Narayana was a dalit too and had held the highest office of the country for full term. Mr.Obama in his address said - ".....I whose grandfather was denied travel in train, is taking the most revered oath......." (forgive me If it was food at the resturent which his forefather was denied and not the train travel, as I remember the essence and not the exact wordings) If we see presently than it is the people of poor India, the section which forms half of the population who have become socially outcast, not because of their actual cast or religion rather because of their economic limitations. There are millions of people living on pavements, whose daily diet is less nutritious than our one time meal. They don't know about Obama nor do they hope for change. The day when someone amongst them will become the primeminister than I think we should have said that a similar change has occurred. Although I am not a pessimist but still I think that none of us will see this change in our lifetimes so till than we should be just satisfied by understanding Obama change as the change of age, so Lucknow people can now elect Sanjay Dutt to replace Atal Vihari Vajpayee. I guess the Delhi voters must be wondering that they missed the opportunity of "change" as had put back the grand old lady of Delhi back in CM office in spite of she being slightly older than V.K.Malhotra (or is she younger !!!!)

Ideally Idle

2009-01-20T11:33:00.000-08:00

This happens to be my first post in 2009 and luckily I do not intend to quibble over anything. (though I do consider the matters worthy enough for complaining but as always opinions do differ). This year bought with it lack of objectivity. Though it is not that I have achieved all the objectives that one could have at this point of time, on the contrary if I think seriously than I feel that there has been not a single activity in which I would consider my performance even distinctly regarded as successful. This boredom had made me to start watching series that had gripped other people from the time they had got their hands on the computers in the hostel. Though I considered it to be foolishness to be watching back to back episodes for all day but when I indulged in it, it happened that I came very close to the record of maximum number of back to back episodes, devoting around 8-9 hrs on a single day for it. Now I have understood the meaning of the word IDLE and how in ancient time people would have been forced by boredom to try out things which they themselves considered forbidden and thereby few things once considered in appropriate by a community became a dominant part of it.
We all keep on thinking that had we been blessed with infinite gold deposits than life would have been awesome as in that case working was not one of the activities that one would have been forced into. But looking at the present state I feel that maintaining this kind of idle status for over few months would be killing. But this Idleness had done one good thing, I have started playing again I don't remember after how many years. So now I am back in the field, showing my skills with the bat and the ball (while bowling my skills help batting side or bowling side that is contentious). I am trying out with new games and there are lots of trips on the itinerary too. I had never felt this kind of idleness in my life up till now, not even at any point in the school days. Lets see how constructive or destructive this idleness turns out to be.

Memories of 2008

2008-12-27T11:36:00.000-08:00

Today when I was watching TV, a news channel was trying to capture the events that had taken place in past 1 year and since these days i had been thinking of finding new ways of passing time, so I thought how about me too taking a look at the year in my perspective.
I am summarizing the major events that I could recall from this year

1.SGPA of 8.67 : It began with January and with this month I had no more Baja responsibilities (the All terrain vehicle project that I had been involved with for the past 2-3 yrs) Although it marked up a big void in the schedule and daily thinking process but I had another thing to do, for the first time in past 3 yrs, academics had taken topmost priority for me as my first under 7 sggpa could have severe consequences on my placements. So meeting numbers being the only priority it was the time to show interest in rural development an act which didn't helped me much in the end.But still I ended up meeting the numbers and could safely finish above 8.5 mark taking my CGPA above 7.5 mark, the target that I had for the semester

Elections : Its not the general elections that I am talking about rather the elections inside the campus in which I got slightly involved. I had to face quandary in few of the instances but thankfully could come out of it without any harms. The topic is too inflammatory to be talked and have been debated over and over again my times hence I'll not elaborate.

Internship: It was the first time that I entered a professional environment and it turned out that whatever professionalism and work ethics that are talked about are merely restricted to books and none of it is actually in practice. For me too it was more comfortable to sit idle most of the times and find fraudulent ways of completing the task ,so instead of learning professionalism, i learned how to show that you are doing a lot of things when actually you are hardly doing anything. Also it was the internship that consolidated my resolve of not making a career in core manufacturing sector or to be more precise, I decided to make career in a field which is totally unrelated to manufacturing or if possible even to mechanical engineering.

CAT: My first attempt at taming the exam abbreviated in the name of beast. Although I never wanted to pursue MBA right after my B.Tech, but the internship and fears of not bagging a good placement, I put myself into it but started off too late to catch up, particularly with the level that I had in one of the major testing areas of the test

Placement: After screwing up in CAT and then not managing to get shortlisted or clearing the test, my worst fear was appearing to be turning into reality. In the end I somehow could get placed. Like many of the fellow students I too still think that I could have got something better but It would be wrong to attribute the present state to bad luck only, as I got shot at most of the things its just that I others were smarter if not better.

I should say that FEAR was one word that was always occupying my mind for most parts of the last year. "Fear" of failing to meet the GPA, "fear" of not clearing CAT, "fear" of not getting placed, "fear" of physical harm when the bombs were exploding everywhere (this fear was only in my find for few fleeting moments only but still is worth recalling). I would say that in the end it was one of the defining years of my life with me getting my first job and subsequently raising my self confidence, getting knocked down by an entrance exam and making me to take things more seriously and above all with 3 trips and lots of parties towards the end of year, strengthed bonds with many of the friends that I had.
Its time to say goodbye to 2008 and make way for 2009. I just hope that next year be the best one that I had seen so far and I have lesser things to complain about.

First JOB

2008-12-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

So finally I got "hired" and guess what, the people who have hired me are called "Headstrong".This is how it all happened. I gave the company's test and didn't expected anything out of it. Came back to hostel and was starting to watch a movie, suddenly I get a SMS - You have been shortlisted, come down immediately for the interview. As usual I was unshaven so had to shave,get printout of my CV and also think of the answers of the questions that might be asked in the interview .I had to do all this when I had been asked to be down there immediately. Like last time, this time too while shaving I got a Cut and this time some of it dripped on the collar of my white shirt that I was wearing for the interview. So I was ready for the interview with MY BLOOD ON. I runned to the IBM building where they conduct interviews but there was no excitement this time as I wasn't expecting anything. The interview lasted for 15-20 min, with me narrating incidents while answering virtually every question.It was a general HR interview with the difference being that the interviewer was the most humble person that you can get in an interview. Particularly when you have seen the interviewers of PWC, the person appears to be too humble to be an interviewer.
This interview was immediately followed by another interview which again was a HR but it became more informal as far as content was concerned. In this interview I told them what do I do on weekends, I publicised my blog too and gave my critical reviews over "Rab ne bana di jodi". Another good thing happened was that one of the interviewer had seen the picture of BAJA vehicle in newspaper, last year and so build brownie points because of it and explained him what its features were and that it took many nightouts in making it.With this interview lasting for another 10-15 min with me speaking 99% of the time, I got slight feel that may be I am very close to my first job. The verdict was out in another 1hr that I had been selected along with 7 other guys.
So I was finally employed. Though I was happy but didn't feel the burst that I had felt at the wait-list of PWC. I am still wondering what is the reason for this paradox. Is it because of the status of the two companies or is it because of something else I still don't know.
Once this feeling fully sunk inside me that I will be working at Headstrong, I realized that this is the end of the student phase of my life but I am still not able to figure out whether I am fully prepared for it or not. There would be no more prescribed syllabus and exams for which you can slog and prove your competency by cooperative efforts a night before. There will be a constant pressure to perform when the scope of performance is limited. These are the problems that I can think of at this stage, maybe more will surface as the joining date approaches but one thing is for sure that I am not that much prepared for the transition as I believed I was. Lets see how things turn out and what else is stored in this coming days

Entrepreneur: Do I have it in me ???

2008-12-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

"Unemployed IITian", phrase which is oxymoron for people and in-fact was for me too, but I realized its existence once I became a part of it and the hard part is that we are in majority. Although it would be very wrong if I would say that I or the others would remain unemployed by the time they get their degree but one thing is for sure that like me many of them would be thinking that they are not in the place that they deserved, this thought may seem arrogant but come on it’s a personal thought and as long as one does not verbalize such thoughts, I believe its fine. Well I intended to write over something else but this placement disappointment resurfaces every time I write or speak. I have almost believed now that nothing good is going to happen out of this
placement rigmarole and I should now be thinking of better options. Experience of my four years of study crosses out the option of higher studies moreover I don't have credentials to get through any of those good schools that my inflated ego considers as the place that I should be part of. Other option is taking the forbidden route of entrepreneurship. I believe that I have the calibre of running a successful venture, a thought which is deeply embedded in me but is not strong enough to convince me to take actions. Realizing this I decided to convince myself over this thought, so past two days were the days of search for idea as well as for success story of a kind that I fantasize. I came across different startups and read the profile of the entrepreneurs, on reading that one thing I was assured, that you have to devote full time to it, if want to run a venture for money and not for satisfying your hobby of being entrepreneur or for boosting your social esteem. Another thing that I found out was that many of these entrepreneurs were from IIMs and IITs. I don’t know much about the mindset at IIM but being a part of IIT, I went on to probe further the background of these whiz kids who took the path. I realized one astonishing thing that most of them had been recruited by the companies that are considered second rung in IIT placements and these are the same where I would probably be placed too provided the situation do not deteriorates further. I believe that people take outrageous steps when they are highly frustrated and are provoked to extremity. Equating Entrepreneurship with outrageous might not appear correct but if we see just the step and not the outcome than I think the comparison is quite apt. When an ambitious person is taken to the extremity of boredom he breaks away and instead of landing into another job, creates one for him. The urge of being independent, ego and blended with lots of confidence makes an entrepreneur but like any recipe it too requires energy for making and this is provided by the dissatisfaction from or failure in something. For Steve jobs it was the dissatisfaction of curriculum taught in college, for Bill Gates it was the dissatisfaction from not being in front of computer, for Sabeer Bhatia it was the failure of job and for the fellows who were running a successful startup, that I mentioned earlier, it might be the failure to bag good placements that might have provided the required spark. This reminds me of an old saying "failure is the stepping stone of success" and I think it perfectly fits into the proposition.
Now once I figured out the ingredients of an entrepreneur, I thought how about checking out where I stand.

Desire to be independent: Well I have quiet strong desire to be totally independent
Ego: Although I don't believe that I am egoistic but the extremity of my self-respect do touches the boundaries of ego
Confidence: Well it’s never short in supply

Well with these and the placement scene being totally uninspiring and the subsequent frustration puts me in a very advantageous position, as far as entrepreneurship is concerned. So backed with this thought I am now looking for partners and an Angel investor and off course an idea too. Lets see when does the union occurs. By the way if you are interested do show your intend thorugh the comment section

the interview drama

2008-12-09T10:28:00.000-08:00

It was yesterday, the 8th day of placements and it started with a big disappointment, me failing to clear the test of Dunhumby, inspite of me doing good in the test. I had lost all the hopes with it. I came to hostel and went on for lunch, suddenly got a call from bansal who informed that I had cleared the test of PWC and have to appear for the interview and should come immediately. This news bought a ray of hope for me and I didn't wanted to screw it up but as usual everything can't go right with me, now this is how events unfolded.
I rushed to my room, took out my suit and then someone pointed out - hey dude you should shave before appearing for the interview. Fortunately I had a new razer at that moment but the first contact of razer with my face skin resulted in a deep cut. The blood was not stopping and I got a call that you should come for the interview immediately. I tried everything in desparation, used 2 different after shave lotions, thinking that the other one might me successful in clotting the blood. I used antiseptic cream but finally it was alum that stopped the blood. Now once blood stopped i started dressing, i realized that I had already lend my necktie to someone else, but fortunately I could find one necktie in the wing, so finally I was dressed up but once again my folder was missing so i had to carry my resume in a notebook. I reached the IBM building, the centre where all the placement activities occur at IITD, right in time. But there the volunteers told me that it will take some time before interview will start, so i got some time to look at my resume and think of few HR questions. A cursory glance at the printed copy of reume made me realise that somehow there was a blank bullet inserted in between lines in the resume and I had send the same resume to the PWC people, I realized that it was not my day and I shouldn't expect anything from it. (Well there are only very few days in a year rather years that I could call as my day, rest all are OTHERS days) I rushed to get another printout of my CV and finally was able to get one. Now I thought to relax a bit in the waiting room, right in front of the interivew room. As soon as reached that room, the volunteer said, sir you are vivek singh, I said yes, he said, you are next for the interview. Now I was nervous for the first time, and looking at the other candidates and knowing that company prefers Postgrads aur Undergrads with good academic record, I had lost hope of any outcomes from the interview and was thinking what other options do I have after this, suddenly door opened and I was asked to get in. I walked in and saw three people sitting for interviewing me, i was hardly prepared for one on one and PWC had arranged a three on one combat for me and one of them was in no mood to have any mercy on the pitty creature like me who was just one interview old. This is how it went..........

Interviewer 1: So vivek tell me something about yourself

me: I am vivek singh I was born in bihar, did my shooling in three different cities of utter pradesh before landing here at delhi. I..... (interupted)

Interviewer 1: What were the 3 cities

me: Kanpur, shaharanpur and ghaziabad

Interviewer 2 (with stern face expressions) : You faired very badly in the aptitude test, what were the reasons for it?

me: I did the questions sequencially and it might be the case that I had not attempted the questions, which were easy but were present at the end, so I might not have faired well on the relative scale.

Interviewer 2: (Angrily) the worst part is that you performed badly in logical reasoning part, was it beacuse the questions were too tough for you or you were nervous or was it because of lack of time?

me: you didn't provide any rough papers so it resulted in me using the space of qusetion paper which was not enough, so the case may be that I had jotted down an information and while solving, had interpreted that messed up thing as something else, and just a single mistake would have resulted in whole question going wrong. I still believe that I did all the questions right as I hardly commit any mistakes but if there was a mistake than the reason that I explained earlier is the only one that I can think off. (While answering this question I realized that they have already decided not to take me, so now lets just play on)

interviewer 1: Ok. i'll give you a chance to show that you have good analytical skills, tell me the conusmtion of paper cups in a single day in your campus

I worked out this one and came with an answer of 3750

Interviewer 1: Thats on very high side

me: (I too thoght that he was right, its exorbitantly high but I had to defend myself): Sir the number of cups of coffee in paper cups that I drink in a day and the people around me drink and the number of cups I see lying here and there I can say that the figure I have quoted is if not exact than is definately very close to the excat figure.

Interviewer 2: (looking at my CV) How much time have you spend on your CV?

me: around a week

Interviewer 2: Do you know what is inside it?

me: yes offcourse, I think you are saying so beacuse of the blank line that is present, that was a a formatting error because of version conflict that occured while I took the printout. I had realized this later thatswhy have bought another one without any glitches, for your review

Interviewer 2: Its fine, as far as all the information is complete, i dont care much

Interviewer 2: Now tell me, why should I take you?

me: I am hardworking and I . ......(interupted)

Interviewer 2: everybody is hardworking

me: I am academically inclined while..........(interupted)

Interviewer 2: Everybody here at IIT is academically inclined rather is supposed to be academically inclined. Dont give generic answers. If you have anything unique to say about you than say else its not required

me: I had done marketing for one of my project and was able to bring corporate sponsorship of Rs 10 lacs, this exposure had developed strong convincing skills in me apart from this......... (interupted )

Interviewer 2: Is it? Take this pen and If you have to sell it to me in Rs 1 lac, how will you do it?

me: (taking the pen offered by him) Sir, this pen was used by Mr.Ratan Tata for signing the Corus deal and thaswhy it was a success, he however didnt use it for signing the agreement with orissa government for the nano project (what a geographical blunder as I replaced west bengal by orissa but it remained unnoticed) so it failed miserably..........(interupted)

Interviewer 2: Did you steal it from him?

me: No, actually mr.Tata didn't realized its power hence he passed this pen on to me. I traced whole of its history and realized that all the pathbreaking deals were made thorugh it only so the power of making successful deal lies in the pen only. So taking this into account I have kept its price at modest Rs 1 lac, you can pay and get this pen and then you can go on and sign those path breaking deals

Then there was further grilling over my CV, but i came out unscathed with most of them as fortunately none of them in the panel was technically very sound as far as mechanical engieering is concerned. Then came the final question

Interviewer 2: Are you prepared for travelling?

me: I love travelling

Interviewer 2: everbody says the same sentence but when it comes to travelling than it becomes a different story

me: I really do. Infact, in one of my projects I scanned whole of delhi in each of the single day

Interviewer 2: Doing that for one or two days is not difficult

me: I did that for atleast 15 days straight.

Interviewer 2: there is lot of difference between 15 days and 1 year

me: It might be, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of those 15 days and on that basis I can say that I would love that even if made to do for whole year.

Interviewer 2: Fine. It was nice meeting you, have a good day

I left the room, having a clear feeling that I screwed the interview and there is no scope of any hope. I described this incident to atleast 15 other people and they told me that It was a stress interview and I had fared quite well in it. But I still had doubts over their interpretations so I went to hostel and hoped that what others said,be the case. Finally at 9 I got a call that PWC people want to meet me. I rushed once again from the hostel (second time in a day) and reached there (fully suited). The 2nd interviewer told me that he had kept me on first waitlist. He said that he was impressed with me particularly the way I sold him the pen, but they had come to recruit just 2 people and the 2 that they have selected slightly better suit the profile that was being offered.
So this was how my second interview of life ended and I could say that It was a partially successful one but still I went back remaining unemployed, just hoping that I get placed in coming week.

Bell the CAT

2008-11-15T07:09:00.000-08:00

When I logged into my gmail account I suddenly saw it to be filled with around 6-8 mails all asking me to relax today and don't do anything distantly related to CAT preparation, one of them even suggested me to watch the movies like chak de and Aashayen and listen to motivational songs. Well I am a proactive person and hence had been doing this only for past couple of weeks, it is just that earlier I always had a regret for not devoting time to CATing but today with such suggestions that regret element is missing. So feeling totally relaxed I decided to mark an entry into my blogpage, which probably will be one of the first one which i am writing without the flavor of frustration in it. I thought this is the best time for doing that as tomorrow I'll be back to that frustration thing again. And here comes another one, a SMS - "Relax! Take a refreshing long sleep tonight.Tomorrow is your day. Crack CAT. Kar ke dikhayenge". I still wonder how much people are able to relax and have a good night sleep a night before a big day. For people like me who aren't hoping much from the approaching day, even a full night sleep wont be of much of a help and for a person who is ready to take the test with full preparation definately is going to get a sleepless night (At least I had that before my JEE when I was fully prepared for it). I think I should keep this post small as I dont have content to write, i'll be back with post CAT tirade.........

Cover letter and shortlists...................

2008-10-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

Past week gripped the campus with Placement buzz once again, with Bain's cover letter submission on 22nd Oct, everyone was using his/her creative writing skills (which most discovered only hours back) or was using skill of adaptation (of someone else's cover letter on an individual). Incidently everyone discovered that he/she is a leader who has solved every problem taking the initiative and have shown analytical skills of highest order. Bain asked us to adress three questions in the cover letter:-
1. Why Consulting: With the bank going bankrupted it is the obvious choice as there are hardly any other option available which matches the payout that consulting firms are offering moreover from the past years it has been a tradition that the best go to Consulting.
2.Why Bain: well it hardly matters whether it is bain, had any other company asked for a cover letter everthing would had remained same with Bain being replaced by the XYZ company. But since at present bain has asked for the cover letter hence it has to be bain
3.Why Me: Well truly speaking beacuse I want to be part of the company apart from it rest all arguments will be cliches slightly modified in terms of sentence presentation.

Finally the cover letters were submitted and everyone was free bee again but last day of the week ruined the festive season for many as BCG and Mckinsey bought out there shortlists. With this first shortlist the benchmarking has been done. The people who are shortlisted, every activity listed in their resume will from now on become the hottest thing in the college at least for one complete year and the people who were expecting their names on the shortlist and finally not making to it will rethink for few weeks whether what went wrong.
Well I dont belong to either of the categories (Neither I was shortlisted and for me it would have have been too optimistic to even think of getting shortlisted) but for me too, this shortlist has some implications. For me it has marked the beginning of placements (and subsequent rejections and accompanied dejection). Although I dont have a strong profile (as far as placements is concerned for rest of the things I have a different view) but still I was very complacent about it. Desires are high but inputs nowhere to be seen. Moreover targeting two things at a same time is not serving any good either. I have thought of focussing on single thing from now on but doubt my will to remain single focussed for long. Lets see what happens .....................

RESUME MAKING

2008-09-19T10:04:00.001-07:00

Its placement time and tensions are mounting, with the result of 4 years of slogging or hardworking or hardly-working or liasioning whatever the case may be, destined to be out in coming 4 months, everybody is on its toes (though many wont admit it). Everyone is cutting time of traipsing and those purposeless talks (if some are not doing it than are at least thinking of it). Everyone is digging deep into newspapers and suddenly eveyone seems to be aware of every other thing thats happening in the surroundings (the domain of surrounding reaches as far as USA). Apart from all these things the lastest one which invariably gets mentioned in almost all the discussion and presently the cause of my frustration is "Resume". I have spend over a week thinking about what I have done worth mentioning in past 3 years (A question whose answers hightened my tensions), and how best can these things be portrayed. Incidently the activity in which I devoted my most time in past 3 years when written on paper didn't looked as great as the other things in which i hardly did anything. I worked my mind to think of sentences which without being blatant lies would convert a minute work into a magnum opus and me into someone who only deals in big things. Feeling a bit confident I though about scanning CVs of my seniors and suddenly many thing which though seemed big uptill yesterday, suddenly looked something equivalent to my own magnum opuses. There were people who had done everything that could be done in IIT. There were some whose core competency as judged from their CV was "acquiring Position of Responsibilities" and not only this, they in their capacity of every responsibilty the concerned club/event/board had reached new heights. Critics of IIT who say that it is not contributing much to the development of technology, better take a look at few of the resumes as every other person has "developed" something or the other and most of the projects occur for the "first time", and when developed will revolutionize one sector or the other. Above all, these "researches" are produced by the people who have displayed their skills not only on the playing field but also at various Dramatics events apart from successfully managing various fests which invariably attracts all the colleges of country. Even in the internship, eveyone has done wonders to the company that they went too, be it productivity increase, solving some decade old problem or giving them a new methodology, they have turned out to be a blessing to the company to which they went to.
Although I had thought to write over "resume" when my own resume gets into proportion but after seeing others resumes, I thought that my own writeup would never reach proper proportions, so waiting any longer would be futile.

Note: All the things mentioned here are a result of a fit of anger and I dont take responsibility of the views just mentioned.

STATUS OF STATUS MESSAGES

2008-09-06T04:55:00.000-07:00

With 24 hours of internet accessibility most people are reluctant to go offline, and I too belong to this group ,enjoying that round the clock connectivity and like all the others I too have GTalk as my best companion. (Skype is struggling hard to make its presence felt though). Whenever you log-in into your gtalk account, the first thing that you notice is other people's status messages. Gtalk in itself had provided with three kinds of options --"Available", "Busy" and "Custom message" but now the existence of the former two in itself has been threatened by the latter. I conducted a Random sampling (minutes ago) and found that out of 40 people connected with me through it, just 10 had the status of Busy or Available while rest have their own customized messages. The messages and their creators are of different types. I tried to classify them and came out with following categories:-
1. News keepers: These people have taken the responsibility of keeping everyone updated with the happenings of the world, so instead of checking "rediff" for the latest news just log-in and check the status messages of these dudes.Only problem with it is that most of the times they all give importance to same flashy news, i remember the news of 3 eggs costing 1 billion dollars in zimbabwe which was flashed by so many people at the same time.
2.Thought of the day: These people circulate the latest thought which they encounter and have not "thought" by themselves, through this space. The thoughts that get picked are generally "high on attitude quotient". So you can encounter powerful statements like - To you I am an atheist but to god I am a Loyal oppostition. (If you had seen my recent status messages than you could have guessed to which classification do I belong), or banal statement like - "Success is ..............", which even a school teacher would have dared to speak in front of just his/her students (who are forced to hear everything that the wise guy/gal has to say)
3.Autobiographers: These are the people who use this platform to give an insight of their personal life in which hardly anyone is interested. No offense intended but I find these status messages most annoying (though I do often switch to this category too). So you tend to find statements like - "It was a bad day" and its sequel "it was a bad day again!!!!!!!!!"
4.Critics : These are the people apart from their normal roles double up as a critic, so they dare to voice their "unbiased"opinion on movies, people, football clubs, matches, politics, institutions and so on. So you find messages like - "Rock on Rocks!!!!!!", "IIT Sucks" , "Sing is king", "Obama Rocks" (Rocks is the most frequently used word amongst them)
5.Geniuses: It is the most unique amongst all the previously mentioned categories. These are the people who would put some meaningless statement as their message and expect others to ask what it is about and believe me when you do ask, their reply will make you curse yourself for taking the pain of asking.
6.Marketer: They use this space for publicising something which can be a website or a link to their own blog (that is what i do regularly). This slightly rare specie though.
7.Extincting Specie: These are the people that have "busy" or "available" as their status message.

I feel that further categorization could be done but could not think of any more right now. Most of the people switch across categories as and when they feel like. Another thing which I keep pondering upon is the "busyness" of people (i hope that this word exists).Most of the people's status messages flashes red dot indicating that they are busy but once you write something to them many of them would enter into the world of purposeless talks.
I simultaneously belong to many of the aforementioned categories to which do you belong to and which one do you hate most??

Independence day

2008-08-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

Today is 15th August 2008 , 61st independence day of our country, a day which fills every heart with the patriotic fervor, and considering myself to be quiet patriotic (though I am a strong critique of India as a nation too) I expected myself to be overwhelmed by this feeling too. But when I got freedom from the shackles of sleep quiet early today (effect of independence day I guess) no such sentiments were present. In fact ,It was the newspaper on seeing which I recalled what was the occasion for which I had got an off on friday. (Last friday was an off too, though it was due to oversleep) There was no urge to watch the flag hoisting ceremony's telecast from Red fort. Even when i picked the newspaper and was glancing through "delhi times", the pic printed on the first page of it with girls from some college boasting tricolor painted on their hands, appeared hypocritical to me. Instead of checking out what it symboloises I was more interested in checking out those who were trying to symbolise something, though I had to face a double disappointment--as the girls were not good enough to deserve a front page shot and my patriotic sentiments were not strong enough to overcome attraction of opposite sex. The day passed with me gripped by the old captor, sleep, couple of times while I tried unsuccessfully to fight for my own freedom on both the occassions. Then came evening and while swaping channels I suddenly came across some doordarshan channel which was airing live telecast of indian boxer Akhil kumar's olympic fixture. (for me stucking to doordarshan and giving it even a look for more than 30 sec has the probability of 1 in million i guess, but who knows i had already changed channels 999,999 times without landing on doordarshan and it was the millionth change). Though i give damn about boxing (which is expected when your violent apetite had been met by ,much more entertaining, no holds bar matches of WWE ,since childhood) but the partiotic vivek woke up inside me and I watched the whole match (no matter if it just lasted for 10-15 min only) and even cheered for akhil and was overjoyed when he clinched the match from the world champion russian ,who was so disgraced at the loss that he could not control his tears (it was terrible to see that they considered indian opponents in such a way), with it the indian boxer and the hopes of second medal reached the quarter finals. Few hours later I started watching the opening ceremony of beijing olympics, while seeing it the only thought which was running through my mind was, what can be done to make the opening ceremony of commonwealth games scheduled in delhi next yera to be more spectacular than the one in front of my eyes. A thought which was mocked by me a day back, had become a deep desire. I think I had gone banana for few hours as I had forgot about the utility of my engineering skills (or the absense of it) and was thinking of becoming a contributor to the growth of india's prowsess. (Its not that , that i dont want to rather the question is, with practically absent research acumen it was impossible for me to contribute much). Now with the sunset the nationalist me subsided and the real "me" gained conscious,I was able to figure out the whole sceanrio. I thought that such a day deserves to be typed down, when events sparked by random channel surfing woke up the patriot inside me and took him to the highest flight of imagination (srry for lifting the slogan but it appeared apt). But in the end I still feel that I will be slightly more patriotic than what I was yesterday.
I think it has extended a bit longer and particularly with clock striking 12 the whole point of using the words like"today" has changed, any ways JAI HIND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PICS: Plenty of Imbecile Clicks

2008-07-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was a daring one for all of the interns at JCB India, there were two parts which gave it an adventures flavour, the first and the more audacious part was that we started our weekend from thrusday without informing anyone in the company (this was the first step towards facilitating early end of our intern). The second part was a trip to manali and rohtang pass (yet again). Just a one day back few amongst us made a plan and there we were all set for it. Before the trip began what everyone was most concerned was the number of cameras we can have on the trip, what is the memory available for photo storage, whether we have ample backup given by the battery of the camera. This is not the first time that this concern had occupied the prime position in any trip, rather many time trips are weilded around camera. Take this, "wahan ja kar kya karenge, that is not the best place for excursion", here comes the reply--"arre mast scenry hai wahan ki, 500-1000 photo khichenge aur kya karenge", and this argument often becomes strong enough to convince others to go for a trip. So with it began our trip and the reckless work of camera which had to prepare itself for reaching its thereshold clicking potential. While we were travelling, we did only two things in the cab apart from sleeping, mocking each other (unfortunately I happened to be the receiver of the brunt on maximum occassions.) and clicking photos (here too I tried to take an active participation). Wherever we stopped or stayed everyone did had his photograph clicked in virtually every possible pose (be it a cool dude looks photo aur be it peeing in public photo). Once we were fed up with ourselves than came the turn of crowd. Mind you everyone in the crowd is not worth being clicked I need not mention further for whome was our camera searching for. No matter how difficult it is still, we did figure out the ways to take the pic without the person even knowing it. (At least we satisfy ourselves by believeing this) In this regard the trip was slighlty unsuccessful as our camera could discover just one beauty in the ravines of Manali. But it this still did not ease out the work of camera, We clicked and clicked and clicked............ and finally ended up with a collection of 1072 photographs, a feat achieved in just 3 working days (of our camera). We got a lot of photos clicked while we were on the banks of river beas. The water was as cold as it could , still we did take plunge into it and fought our body's desires to come out of water untill the shivering body was captured by the camera, in all the views. Enthusiasm for getting the photo clicked was even higher than that for river rafting and remorse even more grave than the one we had when we found no ice in rohtang pass.
When we reached Delhi back and I was seeing the product of our great photographical skills, I was forced to think that what is the reason that few good photos ,which often happens to represent one smarter, more daring aur cool than actual reality, makes ourselves feel that the trip was successful. I thought deeper into it and tried to relate it with other things. I figured out following reasons that could have been the dominant ones for this intense desire of ours to get clicked:-

Since this is a period of social networking site, so a good photo which could be uploaded at such a site coupled with a thoughtful caption, which in combination portrays one as superman, is what most people, who are hooked to such sites, desire.
A good photo can always boost your capability of making stronger mark on the oppostie sex.
One always want to keep memories of all the actions that we had done, and best depiction of action is what one would always desire.

Since I am a click seeking person too so I do need to clarify my take on these. While getting clicked I think it is the first point that always runs in sub-conscious mind, and thus people always tend to make more unrealistic poses for getting clicked. However when some time had passed by we tend to realize that it is the third point which is most relevant. I can't have my take on second point because I am totally amateur to comment upon that, the point just came to my mind and I just wrote it. I would be interested in knowing your take on this, do leave a comment ..

LOSING MY MOBILITY

2008-06-10T09:41:00.001-07:00

My intern begin on an unfortunate note with me loosing my cellphone on just the third working day. It was after exactly 4 weeks later I finally got my SIM card activated, so I thought it was the best time to recall the past weeks when I had been stripped with the priviledge of being always connected. I am a big fan of Mr. Branson, so the title of the blog is a tribute to him. (So the title is not plagirised rather inspired). I had been using Nokia 2300 for past 2 years, but few months back I exchanged my phone with my brother, a motorazer V3i for some time and it was this phone which was destined to be lost by my hands.
People loose their phones in buses, on railway stations etc but I lost it somewhere in JCB plant, and that too as it fell from my pocket. Then came the massive search operation, executed by all the 10 fellow interns at JCB, we upturned virtually every cushion in the office or reception or the cafetaria or whatever place I thought that I had sat in those doom hours. Then It was the time for broadcasting, so within few hours each of the employee of JCB who had come across had known that I had lost my motorazar. It took me few days to get-over this jolt but the recovery was not smooth, thanks to fellow buddies who would always turn to you for asking any of the phone numbers and than when I give them those killing looks (I could have given competition to Andre Nel in it), then they would say--"oh heck, sorry I forgot that you had lost your phone". This was the painful story of how I lost my MOBILITY. But every cloud has a silver lining and so had this, suddenly I realized that I was now UNTRACEABLE, hence no one could call me at the place where I didn't want to, no one could call me in the middle of something for doing some less important but more relevant tasks. Moreover I did save some money too, the phone bill, and rediscovered the ancient practice of writing down other's phone numbers on a piece of paper. All In all it gave me a lesson that NOKIA 2300 is the best thing to go mobile. (Even If it gets picked, the picker must end up cursing his own fate more than what the owner would have done). Even If you loose your phone you can compensate by delaying the purchase of new phone by few weeks. (As by that time the savings of the phone bill will equalise the handsets cost.) So thats were my experiences with the grave loss of loosing my phone.

JINXED TRIP

2007-12-27T10:21:00.000-08:00

This october finally it got confirmed that we are going to south africa for the BAJA South Africa 2007, but the trip turned out to be full of unexpected events, which though had an adventure quotient in it but left us all aghast.

We had our flight to from bombay airport to addis ababa on 10th october 5 am and we were to leave for bombay on the night of 9th from new delhi. Since the event was to clash with the minor 2 exams hence permission needed to be seeked for it beforehand. Since the matter was to involve UG section hence we needed to take permission from the Dean UGS Dr. Kale. We started chasing him for few weeks to seek permission but each meeting ended with small lecture on professional approach, project plannning and management. Finally we got a permission from HOD mechanical Engg. deptt. that too at 1p.m. on the day we were supposed to leave delhi. The next task was forex required for the trip. By this time we had learned some professional approach so we divided the work and the work of forex came to me along with one of my team member. Finally we got hold of required amount of forex at about 6pm and after that neither me nor my friend had the luggage we were supposed to carry for the trip. Had we tried to go to our homes for collecting the luggage than we would have missed our flights, so here we took the advantage of telecommunication , and troubled everyone ranging from close friends to family members for sending our luggage to airport.

Finally we did reach the airport well in time and thankfully our luggage too reached on time but when we were boarding for the flight here came another blow, the main strenght of our team Nehra got a call from his course advisor to came back immediately our face dire consequences. So even before leaving delhi we had half of our strength lost.

Things went fine for some time untill we catched the Ehtiopian airlines flight from Mumbai airport. The flight was late and there were fair chances of ours missing our connecting flight from Jo Bole airport addis ababa, for Joburg. But we did reached there in time and boarded the flight by running through the runway. (That would remind someone of catching a DTC bus ahead of your bus at red light). After sitting into it, for the first time we could believe that we will reach Joburg in time.

Finally we did reach Joburg airport on time and at the airport was waiting a good looking lady (though she was much healthier than any of us) with the name plate having our team member's name. Actually she was send by the backpacker where we had booked our rooms through internet. This was one of the only good thing that had happened to us. Finally we struck the road with her on har ford candor. The lady was driving at the speed in excess of 120kmph. We were so astonished at seeing the speedometer that we had to ask her whether it was working fine or was simply making fool out of us. Though the speed at which she was driving was faster than an average express train that runs on indian railway tracks, but at no point of time i found her driving rash or careless. What i noticed was a great sence of understanding between commuters while driving. There was hustle between vehicles to overtake the other vehicle simply because the other one has been moving with it for some time, or one should speed up because other was speeding. There I understood the meaning of lonely yellow lights blinking in numerous places, indicating that one should slow down as there was merging traffic. Even a single board saying STOP was a reason enough for the driver to stop for a while look around and give way to the other vehicle if it is passing at the adjacant road and than move.

After at about an hour of drive we reached the 1322 backpacker, the place where whe had made the bookings. The manager Tim was traveller by himself and was a britisher by origin. He gave us the keys and lots of advices. He made us aware about the dangers in south africa. He used the word "mugging" which i was unaware of so i thought that he was referring to "murdering", this scared a shit out of us. He terrified us so much that every black seemed to be a criminal to us. Even on the road we changed path seeing a black coming from front and so on. But about two days later we realized what the actual condition was, and how these white afrikans were making a lot of fuss about the high crime rate and linking all the crime to blacks. I'll continue this one in one of later blogs

INDIAN LEGISLATURES-ELECTED DESPOTS

2007-07-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

"India is the largest democracy of world", this phrase always echos whenever I listen to some speech given by an Indian leader at international arena. Democracy is system of government in which the power is held directly by the people or their representative, but in recent time I feel that Indian case has been nothing more than a travesty to this definition. Does the power really reside in our hands?? I guess the answer is no. These people once elected become invincible and become nothing more than dictators. These political parties defines themselves with differing ideologies at the time of election but unite to pass any bill which favours politicians , even if the bill make them above law. Recently one of the minister who was asked to undergo mandatory security check at airport refused to do so, just because he was a VIP. Security officials clearly mentioned that they wont allow him to board the plane without the security check as even prime minister has to undergo it if travelling in public airline. Instead of taking a lesson the minister decided to teach one. And what happened he lobbied the political circles and the parliament unanimously passed a law which made all the union ministers and ministers of state to be free of all kind of security checks at airport. Yes parliament passed this law and we thought that they only do walk overs in the parliament. The reality is that they do pass bills and unanimously but only those which benefits politicians and not the public and the bills of public concern like RTI took eight years to get cleared. Then there was a bill which forbade any person who has been charge sheeted in criminal offence to contest in election , result it was rejected by the parliament. Another example of these peoples despotic activity is the presidential election. There was Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam whom most of indian looked as an inspiration and 80% of the country wanted him to continue but presently he is not even in the foray for the post, why because the oligarchy in UPA and NDA want there woman and man respectively to be at the post as President has the job to call the party for making the government in the forthcoming elections for the lok sabha. Reason given by the parties for not going for Dr. Kalam are far stranger than being justifiable. Left does not want kalam because they are against second term for any president or vice president as they are opposed to continuation of same person in power for long time. Isn't it comical stand for a party which whose Dr. Jyoti Basu was West bengal's chief minister for astonishingly 32 years. Congress wont support Kalam because they want to make history by getting a woman elected for the coveted post for the first time, no matter what the credentials are. As an average Indian I was familiar with the name of Dr. Kalam even before when he became president for the first time because he had contributed a lot to the country through his works in nuclear science. But I had not known the name of Pratibha Patel and I am sure that even those who had known her name cant look forward towards her as an inspiration as one looks at Dr. Kalam. Since President is so called non political post why cant they make a provision where general public gets to vote for the post. I know that the model will have many flaws but still i feel that something could be worked out which can prevent the embarrassing situation that is at hand.

I don't have the kind of intellect that the framers of constitution had but still i feel that there are few flaws and that has to be got rid off , if India wants to be a democracy not only in name but practise too, but for this to happen people like Dr. B.R Ambedkar, Dr. Rajender Prasad, Vijyalaxmi pandit and Dr. Abdul Kalam Azad etc. will have to take a rebirth .

ACTING AGAINST NATURE

2007-06-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

Delhi burns in the month June so to get solace out of it we all 12th classmates decided to take refuge in lower himalyan regions for few days. The destination was finalized as Dharamshala (it was my decision though) a small hill station in HP at an altitude of 1500mtrs above sea level.
The journey begin on unhappy note with traffic jam at delhi border and chaotic temperature in the morning and the uncomfortable bus made the matter worse, but still the excitement of reaching dharamshala kept our tempo going. We received a major setback when we saw that dharamshala was 50km and at that moment we were sweating like anything. Suddenly all the coverage on Global warming and all those issues raised by professors and various sci-fi movies started flashing in front of my eyes. News of kullu which is another hill station at slightly higher altitude , being under the spell of heat waves was even more shocking. So the trip which was supposed to be a leisure activity turned out to be an eye opener for me. Another thing which i had noticed was the construction that was done on the mountain and most of them seemed to be quiet recent one. People have been converting these beautiful and once frequent snow bearing mountains into a cradle of holiday resorts and motels. Who should be blamed for it, are they local people who have build the resort or the travellers whose increasing inflow have made resorts a necessity or is it the tourism department whose aggressive campaign has attracted more tourists but this was done to raise revenues which can feed the local people. So the cause ends in a cycle which simply means that solution is hard to discover or hard to achieve untill and unless one uses iron fist. We kept moving upwards till Rohtang pass where we could finally see natural ice, something which was abundant in many parts of himachal ,few years back but now is found only in very high altitudes. I enjoyed my day there but later on one thing that poked me was that did i unknowingly contribute in ruining the environment. Was i amongst last few people who will say that we saw ice at rohtang pass. By appreciating the beauty of that place will i start the chain which tourism department did. But these thought dont last long because we always measure the events in the scope of our lifetimes and sometime in even smaller span of time. If something doesn't bound to affect me in my lifetime or say worse in another ten years than why to bother about it. This is the prime reason for all the threats that the earth is facing at this moment. And no one can run away from his/her role in it. We need to learn from Swiss people who are ready to change their lifestyles just to maintain their environment, while we are ready to destroy everything to enhance our comfort. I dont know when i will visit rohtang , i will see snow there or not but i certainly will do everything to save mother earth. The action may be as subtle as keeping lights, fans and taps closed when not in use.

PARADOX OF CHOICES

2007-05-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

More the available choices, better the environment is said to be. We all try to place ourselves in the position where all the "options are open" for us i.e we always prefer a decision which makes us richer at least in the availability of choices. But presently i am discovering a paradox in this nature that we knowingly or unknowingly exihibit. With another year passing by and the day when the doors of college will close for me (as i'll pass out-hopefully), nearing up , i am forced to think about what my next move will be. I have many alternatives available- go for a job (not as rewarding as the myth about iit placements is) , give a shot at CAT, brush up vocabulary for GRE, our exile from everything and start preparing for Civil Services (an option which once a dream i lived for). The options are so diverse that u got to make a decision now , particularly if you are thinking about any of the options apart from the first one. Choices are many and decision is crucial and will shape the rest of the life. Take a bad decision and with it have a repentance for life. Many times i feel that is it me only who is troubled by this decision dilemma or are others too caught in same turmoil. Am i over reacting to the problem at hand or problem is actually that big but others have thought about it.
Recently i met one of my friend, who was in NDA and asked what choices do they have, straight came the reply, we don't have any choices, according to our performance in the four years we will be send to air force, navy or army and one will be commisisoned one year after the specialized training. Even promotions are mostly time based so and work to be centrally assigned so no choices in that too. Leaving forces is out of question. So what i concluded is that as soon as he opted for NDA he was relieved from this pain of making choices that i have right now. This means that he can enjoy his vacations better with no tension of any decision to be made and he can concentrate harder on what he does rather than thinking reviewing every step and analysing that towards which path the action will take us.
I follow the legendary CEO and co-founder of Apple inc. Mr.Steve Jobs and he in one of his addresses said that whenever you are confronted with such a situation always think that if u knew that u were to die tomorrow and before dying still you have to make the decision , the decision made in such scenario is the best for every individual. But in mine case this trick is of least help because using such high end philosophical tricks one needs to be as philosophical as Mr. Jobs. I wonder that how do people inculcate such skills in them or more importantly how do they zero out to single choice before making a decision. I keep wondering and then surrender as there is no single reason which i can account for it. For the first time i am understanding the importance of philosophical knowledge , something which i had been ridiculing for past few years. I now realise that how weak and indecisive i am. I don't really know myself and neither i know any means at present ,by which i can discover my true self. Introspection is on but in unguided manner and will lead me to no where. I can just hope that before my vacations end , i reach a decision and the decision should be such that i never have to repend for it in the future.

Hoping against hope

2007-05-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

With results of this semester out one more year of my prescribed four year's stay at IITD ends. This was the end of second year so that means what is left are 2 more years. Half of the journey (a punitive one) over or as pessimist side of my conscience will say half still remains. Standing in the middle path now i am in position to analyse many things.Their were lots of regrets of what i did in these years and consequently what i lost due to it. But there was a single question which always kept on pondering for quiet some time now and it was-was iit the right place for me ?or phrased in better manner -am i doing what i was supposed to ?
My guilty conscience gave a negative answer for this question. But when i look around my batchmates i realise that most of them are also in same state as i am,( it's immaterial if they admit or not). But if i look at the bigger picture than the question which is even more difficult to answer and haunting is that why is that supposedly one of the brightest students of their generation (I doubt this notion but the outside world still considers this myth a reality) waste the most formative years of their life studying what probably was never of their interest. It is just a stereotype that if u are smart (academically) than you should opt for science stream and burn midnight oil so that it may lead you to the enlightment in the form of selection in one of IITs. There is a media created hype about these institutes which makes people to believe that it is a one time pass key which will make one not just well paid professional but a filthy rich person. The expectations from such a fresh entrant sore to meteoric heights but after coming here he realises that he have to fight even harder here for bagging those talked about placements. This task is even more difficult because there is no prescribed syllabus or guide books on reading which they can take commanding positons in the race. Whats hot and whats not changes with the analysis that is done regarding every major placement that come to notice. Many feel that that the passer key to wealth has suddenly dissappeared. Things become even more difficult to digest when newspaper and telivisions carry news that there was some odd guy who was offered say $100,000 as compensation and this news reaches the parents and relatives of the student. They assume that money is raining for students of these campuses and their ward will be making hay out there. Suddenly for the social circle (which excludes iitians) of the student the amount which once looked lucrative becomes meagre. As soon as such a student reaches home , straight comes the question --will u be getting amount equivalent to this?
Say yes and you lie to yourself and if say no then you are dening the high hopes that rests upon you.
There is no end to this story and it is a narration of feeling that many of us here feel.
This issue is closest to my heart and i thought that it is worth mentioning in my first blog.