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Potter maniac

2011-01-09T21:44:00.000-08:00

I had never been a big Harry Potter fan, and I remember coming across Pottermania for the first time and mistaking the whole series as a classic which I had never heard of. This was probably just after the second book or so. Then the whole phenomenon started becoming quite big and I ended up starting with the first book when I was in my first or second year of college. I was completely impressed with how a book could be so interesting to so many people of so many ages, and such varied reading interests and experiences. I went on to read the next couple of books and hit my plateau with the Azkaban one. This was in one way a good thing as it turns out, that book was and still is my favorite. I remember watching the movies and coming off not too impressed initially.

I did not try to follow-up with the later books for several years, and the general opinion that the Goblet and Phoenix were in fact quite lengthy and boring did not help either. I was watching most of the movie versions coming out though (missed Goblet when it came out). Now that I think back on it, it was all for the good. When I did watch those movies when it came out, I never did appreciate them, nor would have even if I had read the books.

I watched the Half-blood prince and remember vaguely liking it. However, I could not pick up the thread a year later when I watched the 'Deathly Hallows Part I'. Since the 'Deathly Hallows' was so confusing, I went back to watching the movies (on my iPod on a long flight to India). Again watching the movies somehow did not satisfy my appetite and my appetite was indeed growing quite fast. Now that its been quite a while that I have gotten back into reading, especially since I need to justify the expensive Kindle, I have once again gotten stuck with the thought of where to go with my reading. I ended up picking up from where I left it earlier with the Goblet, and at the same time picking up from the first movie.

Re-reading the books and re-watching the movies have really made me a Potter-maniac. Of both the books and the movies my favorite would be The Prisoner of Azkaban. The movie was especially good in my opinion, with the most visually appealing and smooth story telling. The worst in my opinion would be The goblet, with the movie neither visually appealing, nor telling the story well. The Half Blood Prince came close, with both the movie and book being appealing. The best characters in the movies in my opinion are Snape and Loona Lovegood. Emma Watson is amazing in most films in the series. The last three movies were deep, slow and smooth, not rushing ahead with the story and giving time for us to understand the characters. I cannot wait for the last part to come out. I am now a potter maniac.

Harry Potter might not be the coolest of movies to be a big fan of, but thats practically the only one we've got.

2010-11-14T20:13:00.000-08:00

Its been a while since I bought my new camera, but this is the first worthwhile picture I have taken. I had a great time using my S3IS, but I guess I felt it was time to try something a little more challenging. I would have liked to get something with good video recording, but I guess this is good enough for now. I might have to get some good lenses for indoor photography, but thats all in the future, for another day, another post. Keep shooting(,) people (no pun intended!).

Kerala Me

2010-09-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

Idleness makes people do very different things, and gets people thinking (although rather more infrequently) of very different things. Growing up, I was never a politically aware person, thanks to my stubborn abstinence from newspapers and news shows during my school and college days. Nevertheless, there used to be those occasional moments of regret, during which I used to feel that I should indeed take a few minutes off of my busy days of goofing around doing nothing with friends, and read a few lines of the day's Hindu editorials, or check up a bit on the latest change of allegiance of Karunakaran's party members, or take a look at the finance budget presented the previous day. It wasn’t that my household lacked the air of political awareness, newspapers, or a television playing some India/Kerala vision News, twenty four hours a day. My dad was a hard core news junkie, watching the news on 4 to 5 different channels starting at 6:30 in the evening stretching well into the night. However, this glorious period of my dad's news-watching peak thankfully coincided with my eleventh and twelfth standard in school, meaning I did not have much time anyway, after all the tuitions possible cramped into a week (actually my situation was rather ‘light’ when compared to the next generation). Not that I would have watched it with him anyway.

Now that my years have rooted itself firmly into the later part of it's twenties, I have started to feel the void of not having all those wonderful opinions about the world, its makings, and its makers, which several of my rather interesting peers seem to possess and make a point to share across to the world at every opportunity. Added to all this, comes the hours I need to be in office, pretending to be productive in front of the computer, even though it is common knowledge in my office that we have not had any real work for months. So, I end up spending hours of my ‘productive’ time browsing through articles on subjects as varied as the iOS, to Methamphetamine, to ‘The Economic liberalisation in India’, which all has started making me ramble on about several of these topics in conversations that I have been having.

Lately I have been trying to particularly follow the development of our very own beloved capital city of Thiruvananthapuram. Not that there is a lot going on to ‘follow’. Even though I have been away from my home town for over four years now, I have been in the city enough to see that very little has improved in these past few years. In fact, the condition of the city seems to have gone backwards significantly in the last few years. When I did live in the city there were plans of road expansions and ring roads, and in fact the beautiful stretch of the Kowdiar road was widened and opened. The plans for the ring road made very little sense to me at the time of their announcement and partial implementation. But after a few years in the midst of the real 'India Shining' experience in Bangalore and Hyderabad, I've come to realize how far ahead to the future you need to set your sights to and plan, if you want to keep pace with some of the other states in India. I've not been to Gujarat, but I keep reading about how Narendra Modi has revitalized a dying state and has transformed a state into an investment heaven (It seems 'It is stupid if you are not in Gujarat'). I think I remember reading in ’98 that Gujarat was dead broke, or maybe I am just imagining things.

While none of the people I've talked with are experts on the subject, it looks like Kerala is going nowhere in terms of development. I tried to read up on the development initiatives of Kerala, and could not find much on the topic. The most useful, by far has been blogs by a senior from CET, Ajay Prasad, which gave very specific and on the ground commentary about the projects going on in the state, albeit with a slight inclination towards the left.

I wish someone would at least write a column, or a blog, to try and analyze the (bad) state of things in the city and in the state. Since it would be hypocritical of me to urge other people to show at least a passing interest in the plans for the city, I thought I would give my two cents worth about it. Since my experience in this field of social commentary is severely limited, I expect other folks (from the prestigious colleges, the IT companies, the expatriates, et al) to give it another serious shot.

So I have decided to use my rather abundant free time to write something and have my next post on this subject, just to make sure that I keep blogging and my poor blog here does not die. Maybe it will prompt some of my other friends to fish out their blogging pens and write something on this topic too (or in the very least write something).

P.S: Thanks to my friend Pitt from college for reminding me I haven’t blogged in a long time.

A Civic sense..

2010-02-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

I had started on this across the seven sea relocation, drooling over the thona kaykal this whole thing was supposed to offer me. Now after a month of doing almost next to nothing, I have found myself in a spot that is very familiar to me - the edge of being broke. I had had enough of being broke in Trivandrum, to shift to Bangalore to continue being broke and onto a continuation in Hyderabad of the same. I had expected a monastic existence in the US was what the doctor would prescribe and had gone ahead with the very difficult choice of moving here without C.

Now suddenly nothing makes much sense. I am stuck at home with no TV, no movies, no one to talk to and no car to go anywhere. To top it all off my bank balance is steadily dwindling. And if that weren't bad enough, I went to an ATM to get cash to buy lunch, the ATM refused to provide me any money and to add to the injury, refused to give me back my ATM. Then I realized that the check card was a temporary one and it was high time it would have expired. So now I have three dollars in my wallet. Not that I would need a lot many notes in my wallet to sit at home and watch infomercials on the basic channels which come free with Comcast.

In the morning, while my laundry was being done, I took out my ten dollar, goodwill secondhand roller blades and headed out to the tennis court (hah!) to try roller blading for a while. Well in case anyone is wondering why the tennis court - I do not yet know how to stop very well and you can imagine what would happen if I try something on the very sloping roads in front of my house. But the cold got to me, it got to my bones and I had to hang up my blading shoes and think of other things to do while my clothes were being done. So that sent me jogging to the gym and a few sets of heavy shoulder presses and lat pulls followed.

Now I am sitting here and thinking of how to get enough money to buy a car once my social security number comes. Again, it needs to be seen if the social security card actually gets here to my mailbox, considering that my name is not there anywhere on the lease (which might explain why I did not get my debit card which was sent weeks back). Keeping my fingers crossed that both the debit card and social security number comes soon, and hoping that someone sells me a Honda Civic for less than three thousand bucks...

Does anyone know anyone in Atlanta selling a car?

A jab in the face

2010-02-03T17:51:00.001-08:00

Its been a month that I've been in Atlanta and when I look back I am not so sure what I did this last month. My new year was wasted in the New Delhi International Airport with a Canadian settled Indian lady and her obese son sharing the dinner table with me at the New Delhi International terminal. I did not even notice the minute hand cross the 12 mark, and it was already 15 minutes past 12. What a way to welcome the new year into my life. Taking how my new year went, something tells me that life ain't going to be a lot of fun this coming year. I've had to leave my better half in Hyderabad and move to Atlanta on a long term assignment. Its going to be hard on both of us, with just two months together after getting married. We had not even gotten used to replying to people with 'Yes, I am married', or introducing the other as 'Husband/Wife' to friends.

Settling here in the US was a cakewalk compared to last time. There was no roaming around in downtown in the middle of the night with two suitcases and no idea where to go or not even the search for accommodation in places where drug dealers were quite conspicuously standing outside. This time around, I already had an apartment waiting for me thanks to my colleague who got here two weeks ahead of me. And how hard is it to settle into an empty life?

Finally after 4 weeks of inactivity I finally decided to go and do something. I had always wanted to take boxing classes. So after a fair bit of googling, I narrowed it down to a place which is walkable from a Marta (Atlanta's metro rail) station. I took a free sample class from the place and decided to go ahead with the place. They killed me the second day and I could not even lift my arms after an hour. The speed bag is as tricky as it looks. Same goes for the double end bag. I can't even jump rope properly! But the fun part was my first real spar. There is nothing like getting your face smashed up by a Chinese dude.. :-)

Everyone should try this!

So when do I learn Tango...?

My photography

2009-09-14T04:33:00.000-07:00

International commerce for dummies

2009-05-26T01:47:00.000-07:00

"How many countries have you been to, outside India?"
"One", I said.

"How about you man?"
"26"

How do you travel around the world without spending a lot of money?

I am sure a lot of adventurers around the world would have thought about this and come up with their own ingenious ideas. Shoestring budget travel and the lot. The one I like the most is the one which was explained to me by my new friend J.

J is from Switzerland and had shown early symptoms of being different from others. He put in what ever money he had and bought a second hand '96 volkswagen for an equivalent of 20k in Indian monies. He took this no frills workhorse all around Europe, driving through different countries and sleeping in the back with the seats taken out for the night. This was after his other costlier volkswagen was almost broken into in Romania at night. So when they'd be bored they'd hit the road and go to the beaches in France. Makes me wonder where I would go if I were bored. Vizag?

Then came the more difficult part. He developed a predeliction towards India. Now, you could drive all the way to India in a couple of weeks. IF. If it weren't for those looters in Baluchistan, says J. Two of his friends who attempted the same were left in the middle of the desert in their undies, just like in the movies.

So what do you do? Summer jobs pay well enough for the tickets. I can make upto the equivalent of a lakh INR by doing summer jobs says J. Good enough to come to India and splurge. And how do you make the trip more worthwhile with some intelligent commerce? Now what is Switzerland famous for? Banks ofcourse, but you can't pay for your Indian adventure with a Swiss bank. So you do the next best thing. You pay for it with a Swiss watch.

You buy a Swiss watch in Switzerland for say, INR 500. You come over to India with the money you made working summers and sell the watch for say INR 5000. Pays for a 3 day trip to Pondy it does. So what do you take from India that would help you get back a little more of your investment? We Indians would have certainly underestimated the value of a few of our very precious products.

J was kind enough to break it down for me. The Swiss were bad at bargaining and would prefer to throw out stuff which they don't need anymore rather than try to sell it second hand and make additional money like Indians. So they would throw out old bikes/mattress/all sort of junk (to them). This junk will be picked up by the junk truck and be taken off to be disposed. But, not if you are the ingenuious traveller trying to make most of what each culture has to offer. You get there first, making a round of all the neighbourhoods and checking out their driveways for junk. Say you see a few bikes (as in cycles) which were thrown off because they were old, or had minor problem like a bent wheel. You pick them all up and take them home.

So what do you get from India which would help you in Swiss commercial endeavors? You get the rubber mud guards with those bright tamil company logos (Murugan Cycles). Or you get the cover for your frame, which you see on all the local bicycles. Green, blue, red and what not. Who can forget those bells and peepees (don't know what else to call them!). Now you put in a little work and fix all of this onto the cycles you picked up and voila.. you have an Indian bike, which you can sell for say.. INR 8000. Your investment - a drive around the neighbourhood + 1 Re. for the mud guard + 10 Rs. for the cover + little effort in putting all this together. The swiss being very fond of cycling will buy it all up for the fashion statement he can make with his Indian bike while out for his morning cycling round. Now explain that to the puzzled customs officer in India with the raised eyebrow.

What else does India offer for the swiss. Who could forget ayurveda? You buy a bag full of Chandrika soap for Rs. 8 each and sell them for astronomical amounts. What? Its ayurveda. It can cure everything. If you have a problem in your stomach it will seep in through your skin and cure it. Never underestimate Chandrika ever again. I never would again.

Note: J has made about 8 trips to India selling stuff out of India to make up for a major share of his travel expenses. Then he went a step further. He took a job in India teaching French. I just wish J had a picture of himself selling Indian paraphernalia off the back for his VW golf which I could have put here.

Shapping..

2009-05-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

"Hello"
"Helleeeeeeeeeooooooowwwwwwwweeee"

"Where are you..? Libra bar"
"No .. we are sh'a'pping..."
"Oh so you are drunk now aye?"

"No we are sitting on the road, waiting for them to come. Then we will start."

It always amazes me, how all my buddies back home get drunk in anticipation of getting drunk.

Home sweet home.

2009-03-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

It has been about 9 months since I've set foot in Kerala and it would have been more if it had not been for Daisy Kutty*. Before going to bring Daisy Kutty, I had been there after recuperating from my Chicken pox bout in the hot April of '08. I still remember the sweat drenched nights and the buzz of those bloody mosquioes never letting me sleep while the power had gone off in the middle of the night. I had wowed never to return to Trivandrum in summer. Or never to return unless I had enough money to get my room back home airconditioned.

Daisy kutty has dashed all those hopes of going home after that June. She has caused me to stay back in Hyderabad longer, even after return from phoren land. Even though she is one hell of a sly lady when it comes to draining my pocket, I have to admit life is really much better since she has been around. Though lately she has been giving me continuous back pain.

Anyway, not digressing any longer, back to the point at hand. I had finally requested for leave, surprising my manager, who had made up his mind that I had run away from home after committing fraud of some kind and could never go back home. I had never asked for leave since he had taken office, while P had asked atleast 3-4 times in the same period. There is nothing happening in office anyway, with the team being overstaffed and no maintenance issues. Client is reasonably happy and our TM never wants anything more.

What I am going to really miss is the show which is coming up at Steps. We had been practicing quite fervently over that last few weeks on both the beginner and advanced salsa routines. There were too many hip-hop routines for me to follow, so I never gave much thought to that, and with so many people in hip-hop attention would anyway be on others. V and A would remember all the routines from the last century and I could always learn it from them later on. But suddenly the show was postponed and it clashed with my trip back home. I did not want to piss of P, but finally went and told him that I would not be there for the show. He took it surprisingly well, and went on business as usual. Later I came to understand why. I would again be digressing if I were to follow that story here.

People are surprised that I am leaving on a monday instead of Friday. But I cannot miss two weekends here. Last few weekends have been memorable, with Super Pondy trip and the drive to Basar. Holi was two days ago and it turned out to be one helluva Holi to start off my Holi playing days with. We 3 newbies ended up having a lot of fun with the other three experienced players. We then topped the day off with the worst movie ever - 13B.

Some pics to cover the whole story...

Silent Beach - Pondicherry

Me and Anuhya practising our pose!

As Sidharth was saying - This reminds us that our country needs a long way to go and money needs to trickle down to the lower levels. (From Basar trip)

Shows that even though I dont have a D60 (I have an S3IS), I can still take some kick ass photos if I am lucky enough. (From Basar trip)

Holi '09

*Daisy Kutty- My Esteem Di. High maintenance. So miss sunflower decided she is a girl and named her Daisy. Undakkanni came in one day and added a dash of malayalee'ness by attaching the kutty at the end.

Late night trysts..

2009-01-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

Being back from the US I would have expected to have some moolah atleast to keep my nerves steady, even if it were not enough to go out partying every weekend or so. But not too surprisingly what ever money I saved from the US has gone down the drain on my car which is giving me a string of unending problems, or again on the welcome back partying and new year partying. But have got to admit it though; the new year party was a party to remember. It was certainly the wildest party I have been too. Shiva was a newbie party boy and he sure was not at all disappointed with this tryst with the clubbing crowd. Unlimited drinks (considering that couples and stags had to shell out 6k, it was not a bargain) and an eager crowd along with seasoned party goers. Even I am getting quite good at enjoying myself at parties, getting drunk and holding a few drinks down. And ofcourse I love the lasers.

I have never been a big drinker, and have started seriously drinking only recently in the last few months of partying. Here too I tend to stick to vodka based drinks or a long Island Ice Tea, trusting it to kick in fast and leave me fast enough to drive back afterwards. Vodka with redbull is perfect for me since it gets me drunk enough, without making me sleepy and giving a hell lot of energy to freak out for two hours straight and more if it weren't for the Hyderabad 12 midnight curfew. And I have found perfect partners for drinking and dancing too. I just wish A would be a little more free to come out dancing that would make two awesome dance partners.... lets see
Sutra in Atlanta.. fun place... different crowds different days. This particular day was for ABCDs. Explains why I had to get drunk alone (1 beer, 2 l-Iced teas, 2-vodka red bulls, 1 vodka brandy) and had to be practically carried out by the bouncers.

Salsa Havana, where I saw some pro Salsa dancing.

Take Hold Ballroom Academy.. some of the best Salsa I have seen yet. A guy there turned so fast that I heard the swishing sound. And I met a very cute girl too.. Danced with her a lot. :D

Tongue and Groove.. Wednesday Salsa night.. With Lourdes and Dee.

Now thats another wild party. 10 d the place to be!!!.. and look who joined in at the end!!!!

Firangi pani.. Now thats where I saw Hip Hop in India

The rest places were nothing great.. and we did not get great group pictures... shame..! I had really loved the chicks in the new year party!!!

Fly High

2008-11-13T03:25:00.000-08:00

Its been two years in the making and finally the day is here. I am quite tensed up. The flight to Atlanta is at 0400 tomorrow. I have to check in a couple of hour earlier meaning I have to leave home tonight.

Hopefully the travel will give ample oppurtunity for blogging.

1000 Turn adventure

2008-10-30T05:37:00.000-07:00

The thousand pillar temple turned out to be thousand u-turn temple, with us around in circles trying to find the way to the supposed kakatiya marvel. Finally after going back and forth on the same road a few times, we managed to get the right directions and turned into the lane leading to this architectural wonder. Wonder it might have been, if we actually saw a thousand pillars. Actually a few pillars would have been impressive, but we could identify only a couple from among all the scaffolding erected to restore the place. The whole structure was probably 20m X 20m, which was a massive let down after temples like Suchindra and Madurai Meenakshi. We ended up taking pictures of a few stray puppies and pondering over their lineage, imagining up german ancestors for them.

The 1000 pillar temple

The German Lineage

We decided to hit Ramappa temple next. This time around I had gotten a better hang of the place and all the poring over the google maps came to our aid. We found the Mulug highway with resonable east, which led to the Ramappa temple and started out on the well maintained road with all the gaiety we could muster. Munching on a packet of chips we drove about 50 kms through moderately interesting terrain, passing a few toddy workers, lots of fields and lots of cattle on the roads. By this time, a bullock cart minus the bullocks was spotted by my travel partner and she promptly expressed her interest in filling in for the absent animal. I obliged and we took a few pictures of the 'feeling in the bullocks shoes' (or heels or whatever) scene, and even joined in towards the end to get a taste of all the shoe feeling that was going around. Rumbling and murmuring from the nearby bushes from the not so amused owner of the cart send us back to the car and we again got back on the road.

A little while later we encountered a few bulls (docile ones if anyone's wondering) feeding lavishly on the side of the road. Again my ever enthusiastic travel partner wanted to be a part of the country 'naatinpuram' landscape and we ended up taking a few pics with them eyeing each other suspiciously. The bull thankfully did not act upon its suspicions and the story ended happily with us getting back to munching on our chips and the bull back to its hay and all the by standers laughing their asses off looking at the little white devil with the scared face posing with the bull as if for a facebook best friends display picture. Next stop was at a similar spot, when we felt the need to get in touch with nature on seeing the picteresque paddy fields glowing in the sun. So again a photosession ensued and we drew quizzical glances from passerbys which we neutralized by clicking away at them. That seemed to appease them all. Everybody wants to be a model.

The joyride was sadly cut short when I stupidly drove into a diversion and ended up scraping the bottom of my car. This led us back to Warangal, with a moaning car, leaking some unknown fluid, for rest of the uneventful ride back to Warangal, partly because I was worried about the car, and partly because of some random remarks from miss smarty pants. All the worrying turned out to be for nothing as the car was fixed for a hundred bucks at a maruti service center which was luckily open and we ended up hitting another temple and driving back home to Hyderabad in really high spirits..

The next trip ought to be much more fun since RTR is coming back soon and Naved has already booked tickets for the 19th..

Hiatus

2008-08-25T03:47:00.000-07:00

A year back if somebody had told me that I would prefer taking out the car instead of my bike, I never have agreed to it. Yet two months into having a car here (after bringing my car over from Kerala), here I am driving around everyday, to office, to classes, meeting friends in my Esteem (Di).

Its one of the worst engines to have been brought out in the last few years, I am sure (Heard its a Fiat engine producing 56 bhp). But leaving the engine out of it, the car is perfect for me. Especially since I did not pay for it! Its comfy, and it gives awsome mileage and come to think of its not much more to pay for the comfort than my bike. Might come to 10-20 bucks more a day, which my roomie Jayan swears is lesser than what he pays going by share autos here in hyderabad.

Once it starts moving above 20 kmph there nothing to complain about. It touches 140-150 if given enough time, and is resonably light with its power steering and shock absorbers. Not that I am an expert on cars and I have barely driven a few models of cars. I certainly know it is horrid to drive bumper to bumper. Quite impossible with the AC on, and in Hyderabad, the heat forces me to confront the impossible quite often, especially when out on the road with teammates at noon, off to lunch or a team member's wedding.

But now late nights in the office have become convienient and much more safer. The other day, giving in to nostalgia I came to office on my bike and that very day made me stay in office till 11 30 at night (that too after a whole day in training, then an hour of aerobics and then an hour in the gym), and I do not know how I made it back home at night through the dust, the glaring headlights, and worst the idiot pedestrians of Hyderabad. The bike is certainly looking at an early retirement.with maybe a few honorable rides just to get groceries.

Well I hope this blog will be an icebreaker after the long hiatus. I have been trying to get back to blogging, but with little success. I have not been doing much worth blogging about. Watched a few movies. Downloaded a few movies at home. Reread a few books. Thats about it..!!! (Dark Knight.. need to rewatch it.. Kung Fu panda.. cute.. Casablanca. worth the watch..Guards Guards.. pure Terry Pratchett.. Solitude.. reread nth time).

The dance classes have been going well, and I have started teaching the absolute beginners Salsa basics. The group has become stronger and shows promise of being a great gang to hang out with and go for some trip soon. Madurai is under discussion.

Now that I am planning to go home for onam, I am looking forward to taking a few snaps, and a little work with Photoshop. Kichu has inspired me. I mean, I think he even surprised himself with his knack with the camera and photoshop..! Same for Sujay. I would never have guessed that he had such an artistic streak hidden in him while we were growing up together in Trivandrum.

Hoping the trip back home will provide something interesting to blog about.

Stop, re-evaluate, continue...

2008-05-21T04:54:00.000-07:00

When I was scrambling about to write the previous blog a couple of days back, I was facing a severe lack of subjects to blog about. Maybe the problem was that I was so used to having those umpteen number of colorful friends resulting in a fairly high number of humorous incidents. But the last blog brought out a comment from 'yama dootan' which has resulted in a bulb going off on top of my head.

"TINGGGG!!!" (or something of the that sort. You get the picture).

The gist of what he asked was whether I was happy after all this. Something to the line of me being unhappy after all this and maybe he being happier after having a ton of cash in the bank.

Now I am not sure whether the question was a serious one, or a understandably misguided opinion after reading what I did write. It is in fact understandable if someone would have assumed that I am not quite happy with what I have right now. I usually tend to tone down the matter and try to twist it to sound maybe a little more humorous than it actually is.

Now, what I wanted to point out was, never did I actually mean that I do not lead a happy life right now. In fact people who know me or knew me from back in Trivandrum would agree strongly that I am one of the strongest candidate for living one's dreams after coming out of their college lives (in a purely social context, because I am still getting paid peanuts). While most of the people I know are bored with work and do not have much of weekend life outside their extensively enjoyable day of washing clothes, cooking and watching TV, I can indeed lay claim to a little over dramatic line of 'Oh, such a hectic weekend. Wish I had more time to do everything I had to do'. On a lighter note, I have indeed felt the need to find a companion to spend my Saturday mornings with, but I would say that the following continuous marathon weekend involved would justify the 3-4 hours of cleaning/washing/the aforementioned extensively enjoyable work I too engage in (though I try to put it off all the time and wish I never had to do).

Pause. Re-evaluation of the current stand.

Savings: 0

Well, I do know a hell lot of people who have indeed become technical lakhpathis in their own right in the last two years. I am deviating from my normal unconfrontational approach to my blog (I do not think of writing about girls and related admiration of their species as politically incorrect, especially at the ripe age of 23, which according to me too young to become too mature. You can bloody afford to be a little bloody light when you are young. The fact that I am continuing this blog after a meeting involving a heated argument with on site has absolutely nothing to do with the abrupt change in intensity/quality of words being used). Personally I do not agree with the philosophy of living like saints and saving up money in your bank accounts at this age. Well if you were a young Warren Buffet it would be different, which is anyway irrelevant since he probably made his million before this, and he definitely did not make his millions sitting in front of a computer screen and wasting away weekends only cooking and cleaning.

The only point I see for making money in my opinion are:

actual raw requirement of raw cash to buy the materialistic stuff that you need
the raw pleasure of knowing that you are good at making money (maybe a little Warren Buffet'ish)
some sort of predicament you find yourself in, infected by yourself (as in spending in the range of 20k a week in pubs on credit, which actually is a spin off of the first clause) or filmy style family need of pengalude kalyanam, or very understandable supporting retired parents.

Other than this, I feel the life that many of my friends/colleagues lead; working their asses of for something completely intangible and spiritually un-fullfilling, coming back home to a messy house being shared with similar minded individuals doing the same thing, lounging around at home in their lungis and still dreaming of a Dil Chahta Hai lifestyle; is completely pointless. True that a few of the are amassing wealth at an unnerving rate. But sometimes I feel many are forgetting the big picture. We might still be burdened with the same sense of urgency to settle down and dredge through life and save money which lingers from the gulf going, stone carrying malayali from the 1970s. In the last generation, almost all the chettans were having the time of their lives, going to the kayal varambu at night, stealing cocunuts (climbing involved), and drinking at such picteresque localities on a weekly to daily basis, or even stealing batteries from random cars/bikes and selling them to buy juice. All of them turned out fine in life by 30. Contrastingly 23 year old young men now are mellowed down enough to be sitting at the same point, only moving their fingers an inch to the left, right or down, and worrying about their managers shouting at them for not doing something which will (might, when come to think of it) accomplish something you certainly cannot see. I mean, I can understand if your manager shouted at you for forgetting to put in the fourth column before starting on building the roof. But what is it to me if I forget to put in a stored procedure into the production database (existence of which I now seriously doubt. I mean, I haven't seen it till now. Is it just an excuse to make up write all this bullshit) which is causing random error to popup at some Call center people sitting in Riverdale.

So when they spend their lives without point, dropping out of IT to go back to studies, or back to their core fields, or even a flashback to the 80s kind secure Govt jobs, I certainly feel I have something special. Does it really matter that I am not making my millions at 23/24, and am instead having quite contended life, spending all the money on myself (especially vainly spending money on looking good and feeling good without a morsel of remorse). Come to think of it my philosophy throughout life was always taking as little effort as possible and achieving as much as possible, having as much fun as possible en route to all that bullshit.

Another problem with making all this money, living on Kanji and payar, is that you never learn to spend money well, enough to have fun, but safe enough not to leave you out on the streets. Yet another problem; many of them do not know why they are making the money that they are in fact making. Is it to build hospitals? At least that would have given a sense of purpose to an otherwise pointless life. All this leads to another stage that I would detest to have to be in. Waiting to get married, just because you are bored, just waiting to be 25 so that society will at least accept that you are getting married. You are settled, you have a ton of money in the bank, and now you can just write away your life and freedom to get married just so that you do not have to spend your saturdays alone at home. Was'nt there a ton of promise ahead of you?

It does seem a far cry in my life. I personally have too many things left to do. When am I buying a bullet and going for ride to Tripura (I might have to take up a map to actually find where in northeast India it is. I hope its the eastern most point. See, I am trying to make a point here and I would prefer it to be as strong as possible)? When am I going to live in Finland for a year and a half? When am I going back-packing with a mamoth lens SLR canon through the dusty streets of old Madagascar?

Well some people would indeed find all these quite reasonable questions, relevance of which is quite high, maybe not specifically in those places and camera models, but they would get the picture. But many other people would not. Even if they think that they want to do many of these things, I feel they never will. And there will always be few other who never dream of these things or anything for that matter. And doing all these things take time and money (Of which I have very little, but that you'll already know if you reach this part of the blog, remember the saving 0 part). So my claim that I am not going to get hitched before 30 might not actually be as far fetched as it might seem at first look. Take a look at the IT guys who are getting married at 26. Did they ever learn horse riding ? Did they ever fire a high powered long bored magnum? Probably not.

I keep forgetting what the point to all this random babbling was. I just hated being politically correct all the time. I got off my ass and did something and I do not regret it. I see many people who will benefit from doing the same, but will not get around to doing it. All I want to say to those people is, get off your bloody asses and get going on the road to finding your dreams.

Out. P.E.A.C.E. (damn.. there I go being politically correct again. Go fuck yourselves!)

Last wind of change..

2008-05-19T05:37:00.000-07:00

As the years pass by (technically 2 years qualifies me to start using years as a reference of time to measure my life), we see various changes in us. Many of my last few blogs have somehow or the other dealt with these very changes. Anyway, since I have not been blogging for quite a while, I'll convert a mail into a blog. Well does it matter if its a lame one as long as the blog actually keeps going forward ?

There was a time when we used to skip a trip to the beach just because each one could not put in 5 bucks, and we could never in a million years comprehend how a single guy could possibly spend 20k a month. Right now I am at a point in my life where I could imagine how I could easily spend a lot more. Hell.. I had even made plans of investing and made detailed plans on what my imaginary portfolio was going to look like. Right now, forget savings, I am scrambling to keep my head afloat after my regular expenses. The only thing that seems to be a solution to my current situation is the next hike coming up, by which time I'll be wondering how in hell I made through this one year with so little money each month.

My circle of friends, may it be my biker friends, or my college friends, were never extravagant. Though there were exceptions to this rule in the form of Joji and Dasappan, the general rule was to eat from home as much as possible, walk as much as possible, take the bus as much as possible and put in as little money as possible for petrol when going for long rides and hope somebody else will pick up the tab for cigarettes, liquor and miscellaneous expenses and try to put up a face trying to show that you have put in your fare share of the ride. Gifts for friends were kept at the bare minimum, with people putting in an average of 25-30 bucks apiece, contributing to a grand total of 200-300 bucks. That bunny looks good.. but too costly.. lets get this shitty ass wind chime.

Then came the move to Bangalore where I started out living with 8 other roomies in a 2 BHK, happily paying 1.5k rent every month, even vetoing a bill to shift to a better place paying 500 bucks more. We all started frequenting Marathahalli and Brand factories skipping up a level from 100 buck Tees to the 250 buck ones and half price Branded Jeans to the envy of mates back home.

Now after 2 years, I find an irrestible urge to pick up any 38 sized shirts, whatever the prize( and what ever the bloody color). It never does matter, whether I have any money or not. The motto is, I can always make it up next month. My wardrobe, though not a designer haven yet, still sports all the popular international brands.

The 25-30 bucks gifts went upto 2-3 k gifts, as soon as Shinu's and Naomi's influence started creeping in. And it is not a bad thing at all. Who said being materialistic is bad. What the hell do we make all the money for ? Debasish, Anitha and Spoo did their part too. Birthday gifts ballooned up from 200-300 buck affairs to 4k affairs. Wedding gifts have stopped being cheap 6 piece dinner sets and have elevated themselves into the proper TV ad levels, with nakshatra.. Ash rai dancing around in all the flames ....and resulting in a diamond pendant/ring/...whatever.

Even though I never actually started drinking per se, I've begun to feel its a waste of time going to a pub and wasting all this money without having one of my Long Island Ice Teas just to blur the laser beams a little when I try to scare away all the people with the mix of Salsa and Hiphop I get to practice for the odd 8 hrs or so of dancing at the studio these days.

Music. Even that has changed. Rock to hip hop and now onto house, which I can't get enough of these days, especially while working... People must think I am mad looking intenty into the computer screen, typing my ass off and bobbing my head to a trance beat.

....... Enough of this.....

Well, I hope I can break off from all this 'change' blogs and actually start blogging about my real life.. Maybe I'll stay a loser a little more time aye!!

The river runs through it

2008-02-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

I've just got back from my lunch and its 12:02 AM.

So you get a good picture of how my life is playing out here at work.
The trance album I picked from Davinder is blaring out of the headphone lying on the desk. The various tea/coffee mugs of the day adorn my desk. My onsite manager is talking to some dumb american client over the VoIP put on perpetual speaker. He makes me put on the VoIP throughout the night to coax me to work a little more through the straight 15-17 hrs I do work right now.

Surprisingly I have found out that I am a workaholic, atleast in a minimalistic way. Pleasant. Just to put it to the test: I had come to office yesterday around mid morning and left office today morning (or yesterday morning.. as its already crossed midnight). Nobody from college would have guessed in those days that it would turn out this way, with people like me and Mad working our asses off, while the hard workers from college would be the ones who would find it difficult to find their place in this world, and still be searching meaning in life.

Life is pretty routine these days. Waking up late, coming to office, all three meals in office, going back in the middle of the night to a lonely house. Weekends are routine too: Classes and Naomi. I am glad for the break from the weekday monotony. I cannot say that its what I dreamt of, but I would say it is what is keeping me going on, and what makes my life somewhat different from the numerous others' I hear about. Mag is coping with work and preps. Divz is also becoming a workaholic. Neema is screaming her head off every chance she gets. Jonathan is still after that gal.. Everyone feels a little lost at this point, I feel..

Though it has not happened fully yet, but life is getting diluted, slowly. I can just see the bright colours of life just being washed away in the steady currents. Not just for me, but for everyone around me, everyone from school, from college...

As the months flow by and slowly start amalgamating to years, the friends we knew have started dispersing into the wind. It has still not yet kicked in, but it has started, and is very clear, and is there for anyone to see. Maybe the last generation never had to experience this feeling of dilution, and that too, so fast (what has it been .. one and half years?) . Atleast most people would have been back home in kerala where the maximum distance you can be away from a friend is dubai, which is just the 15th state in kerala, after the far away kasargod, right?

Friends have started getting married, and the ones who have not started are complaining about the same thing. Two years is too less to have lived free... how can I get married to that geek (pointing to a pazham cherukkan in a pic)?... how can I marry someone I do not know... what do I do with my life now..?

I can only imagine what it is going to be in a couple of years when the hangover of college and school has finally left us.. left us to be alone with ourselves... and our new lives....

Each one of us is trying our bests, I am sure, to find our place in this world, and carve a niche in it for ourselves....

Cheers to life..

will iTcrack.. or Will i? !!

2008-02-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

I've been working on the same, small, apparently simple issue for the past 50 or so hours over 4 days. When is it going to crack?

Debugging through the mess of postbacks, usercontrols, literals...
I might just get lost in it..

Maybe that is just what I need right now..

Technicality

2008-01-17T05:37:00.000-08:00

"How do we come out of silent mode in my phone?"

Well, this question asked to me by my Technical manager will throw enough light into the technical aptitude of the people running my project.

No wonder the client is more than ready to kick us out as soon as possible..

Kuttalam: Yea you heard me!!

2007-12-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

Kuttalam Waterfall, Old Kuttalam (Courtalam)

Beautiful landscape

Meter gauge railtrack over a colonial arch bridge

Sankar, Sankar Nair, 000

Road to the heavens

WilD domestic peacock..or hen or whatever ;)

Yippee, camp fire..

The background and the colors just did it!!

Scarecrows

Moi..

The gang, Jonathan behind the cam

Bleeding BackwArds

2007-12-23T10:41:00.000-08:00

Trivandrum has been my hometown for quite some time now and even though I was not born here, I do have a strong sense of belonging attached to this place. Each time I come here I feel that something very special inside my chest. The pride one feels about his own hometown.

But as a few hours pass by and I move through the roads, I am invariably disappointed. Nothing has changed. I can even see the same tea stalls and the same pot holes playing mentor to the upcoming young pot holes. None of the roads have improved (Mom enlightened me that Kerala did not have a decent minister for roads in quite a while), and I hear people cursing Japan Kudivella Pathadhi which I do not have any idea about, and no one knows much about it anyway to enlighten me.

The number of vehicles on the road has increased drastically over the last one year, with the roads teeming with the big fellas of the road like the Scorpio, Innova and Civic cluttering up the already breathless roads. The half done flyovers sport all new political banners and shabby writings. Vishnu enlightens me that these will stay untouched for a minimum of two years, before someone analyses the design and finds that the design is not at all sufficient and we'll have to start from scratch. So the contractors hired to restart the project can get more money smashing up the crores that already went into building those piers and eke out more money to build to even more rubbish designs (Gamon flyover in Hyderabad, even though crashed due to bad staging, really impressed me with the pace at which the lagging behind project progressed , with the pre-cast blocks assembled very fast).

Mom again enlightened me that the Peroorkada-Kudappanakunnu road was completely unusable until the public went on a protest and made the ground shake with their demands to repair the road ( they have done a quarter lane width tarring of the supposedly 2 lane road).

And I keep listening to the anti-entrepreneurship government dissuading foreign/domestic investment, may it be Reliance/Infosys/Patni/Vizhinjam etc (check out pending land requests at technopark here). I also read about the general disdain that Malayali investors have towards hiring malayali help in their ventures outside the state because of the lack of cooperation from kerala government/trade union tedtape (silverine's blog).

I also read a few very interesting articles on Kerala politics and development projects related to tvm at Vinod's blog.

But it got me thinking on what the underlying problem is. I am sincerely fed up of all the non kerala resident mallus pointing out the mistakes of all malayalis. Philipose was very very insistent of point out the lack of insight and incapability of mallus, which as far as I'm concerned, would fail to explain the success of mallus all over the country. Maybe the answer is like what some others say; mallus working for mallus inside kerala is bad, and as soon as they step out of the state they start making money. Here too, the out of state businessmen are reluctant to hire mallus in fear of the backfiring from mallu workers union backlash.

The cause of the problem has to be complicated and would probably be part reason of the success of our race, what ever it might be. It could be communism in the last generation or it could be a collection of too many small reasons to enumerate clearly. What ever the reasons for the growth/holding back now, it is definitely time for us to break free, change our views and look at everything with a new perspective.

Today talking to my friends here, especially Sankar gave me an insight into how mallus hold on to cliches that held good a good generation back, but have been blindly adopted in a generation when everything deserves a fresh approach. I do not have the vocabulary to try for a clear discussion on the modern/traditional mindset debate, hence am stopping this post here..

Will add on more later ..

BIS certified work

2007-12-17T04:17:00.001-08:00

Well, its not like I have been working my ass off for the last few weeks in office (smothered by the work load and the works) but still compared to these last few days I had been working quite a lot earlier. That is to say that quality of work that I do makes up for the quantity or rather the lack thereof for the period under consideration.

Thinking of going home, and that too for 10 days is enough to keep me from even starting on any of those pending things. And to top all that the weekend was awsome with a P200 ride through the city, all the salsa acrobatics with Anuhya, a birthday party at Soni's place, a fun filled coffee outing with Anuhya/Cho/Pritvi (or Prit as his american friends call him he says) and to give it that sense of completion, Beowolf on Imax 3D with a cute little monkey. Well I would say I am pretty justified in feeling completely off from the, working hard, frame of mind.

Well lets hope my onsite/offshore managers do not fly off the handle when they do find out about my quantity/quality of work...!!

Admirers UniTed !!

2007-12-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

All of us need a respite from our hectic schedules, to unwind, to relax and think about something else other than work which occupies every inch of disk space in our heads. Even though there are some people who never unwind, most people do something which would help them unwind (consciously or unconsciously).

Now most people in my office revert to the healthiest of such recreations: Admiring the beauty of nature (pachha malayalatthil paranjaal, vaayinottam). So during lunch hour our daily escape from an environment thick with code, scripts, deadlines and appraisal cycles begins at about 1...

It usually involves a tingly sensation in my body (the vibration of my mobile phone ringing in my pocket, Shinu calling). So after I do a "Right Click> Refresh" in my head a couple of times, my mind is clear of the cluttered thoughts of all the problem tickets, artifacts and other issues with which I would have been wrestling with till then. I make my way out of the ODC trying to irritate all my team mates on the way out with what ever jest available. That might involve a smile or a mocking face at the new chick in the team (and she IS hot, if you are wondering, as I know you are), asking how many problems a new team member created that day or just enlightening someone on how their module is the uravidam of all bugs in the system.

Shinu, would usually be waiting at ground floor, with hands in pocket scrutinizing everything around him. As soon as he spots me walking down the stairs, there would be a reaction on his face to what ever I am wearing, which is usually a look of horror thanks to my god given gift for fashion (I do wear a black party shirt with wide shiny green stripes, which glows like bright green laser beams in the light, to office).

The paradooshanam (finding fault) starts soon after, and we shift to top gear soon after. Now, when Shinu starts it is something on a different level. I mean I was always the forerunner everywhere I went in this direction till now, but he is definitely a bonafide, certified master Vaayinokki (admirer, for the poor uninitiated non-mallus). Comments flow from his mouth as smoothly as the fountain in front of infosys campus here(both are equally examples of a work of art). I found that malayalam is an excellent language to express a myriad of situations and feelings to a such a degree of precision which cannot be nearly matched by english. This continues throughout our small walk to the cafeteria, and through our wait in the queue to get the food coupons.

Absolutely every girl in the office campus worth a look at has a nick name which fits her to such a degree that we would never need worry about forgetting their nicks or getting confused about them. There is Seema, who comes along with Muscle'an and Kuthira. This is the gang, on whom the whole campus of atleast 5k employees concentrate. The guys wont take their eyes off Seema and the gals cant get enough of the almost 6 foot Muscle'an. Then there are our favorites Princy Jacob and Annamma Varghese. Now first time we saw Princy we were 110% sure that she was a mallu. Hence one day I went confidently and asked her whether she was a mallu, to which she replied with a dazzled look on her face that she definitely was'nt. Anyway the saga continued with us mutually waiting for them everyday and escorting each other across the corridors(with our eyes ofcourse). Annamma was just the side kick whom no one noticed, untill we decided that we would drop looking at Princy and concentrate on Annamma since "Princykku ippo marana jaada. Nee aaradi thilothamayo" (Princy was acting too pricey). Now Annamma was definitely taken aback by this. She underwent a sudden makeover from a butch boyish type with a soda kannadi to a contact lens sporting, feminine churidar wearing lady who just could not hide a smile each time she sees either one of us.

Then comes Shinu's personal choice, Maanpeda. "Maanpedayude Kannukul. Aaha. Pennungal aayal ingane venam. A kaanukalil maanpedaye pole aa pedi kandille!" Sure enough from the very next day we started sighting Maanpeda only with dudes, and sitting on the phone for hours. So Maanpeda was suddenly dropped as the personification of feminine timidity.

There are many other notables among our regulars. Face-off, for turning her head suddenly when caught looking at us; Model, which is self explanatory, Kingini, Thakkudu, Nettholi, Shakkeela, Shinu's Vedala Romancham, my Vedala Romancham (most names are self explanatory, and don't ask me the meaning of vedala) etc..

Now, if I have given an impression that we are the only one monopolizing this industry, you are gravely mistaken. During the one hour between 1 and 2 in the afternoon, hoards of Vaayinokkis (from either sides of the gender barrier) line the verandahs on either side of the corridor to the cafeteria engaging in code review of all the people walking across. So we join them and sit on the verandah, along with some leading women professionals in this field on the other side.

All in all, lunch hour is only for admiration of nature's beauty and not even one thought of coding or work enters ours minds.

Now this, my blogosphere friends, is our Happy hour!!!

Purple leaks...

2007-11-15T05:35:00.000-08:00

People might think that a sudden increase in expendable income, from a meagre 1.2k allowance for food and petrol, to something 10-15 times more would mean that I would be able to save money or spend money and be a party animal. But somehow this theory never quite came true, and after more than a year of being on the payroll (sounds so godfatherish), I am left with almost the same bank balance that I had started out with.

In retrospective, I never bought anything which was mind bogglingly costly, or never have I had to send money home. I did buy one teeny weenie 6 megapixel canon digi cam, which set me back by say a month's pay, but hey, a guy like me definitely needs to capture those moments and frame them for ever on film and all that stuff... I would not count this as an overtly undue expense.

But one thing I must say has been quite heavy on my pocket, and that sadly has been my purple machine. I have shelled out about 15k on it in the last one year to just keep it running (ok..not really running.. more of in reasonably good shape), including a paint job on the tank which was destroyed by the transfer to hyderabad, a change of electricals twice and a change of shocks to the new nitrox gas ones.

The last payout was the worst. I had taken my bike for a minor repair, i.e the headlights were not working properly. They kept the bike for 2 days and finally, fixed it and gave it me. I took out the bike for about 30 meters when I noticed that the indicators were not working, so I took the bike back to them, and as soon as I got off the bike, the whole bike started smoking. And it definitely was not Ashton Kutcher kind of weak and thin smoke. I really mean smoking, in thick plumes, like in the Arnold movies, after the Arnold has left the whole island burning kind of smoke.

So I was left with no options, but to leave it at their mercy to fix it (which was really bad since from past experience I knew they caused more trouble than they fixed) and give it by the next day, which later turned out to be a holiday for them. Three days later they were still giving explanations of inspite all their manouvering with all the required new spare parts they still were not able to get it back running.

To cut a long story short, I had to shell out close to 1k on the new wiring, battery recharge, wiring check up .. and to top it off a water service from their side (ofcourse not complimentary).
And the worst part is, now the rpm does not drop as fast as it should and this creates complete havok to my riding, since it makes a hell of a lot of noise because of the cut silencer.. :(

I could have easily bought another second hand RX100 for the amount I spent on it last year. And to think Philly's RX135 5-speed was sold for only 15k .....
Maybe my next bike is meant to be a Ducati..

Persuation

2007-10-31T22:12:00.000-07:00

When I went into the conference room, I knew that I would not come out unbattered. One has to expect atleast a fair level of badgering from any good meaning manager, in any sort of status meeting. Ofcourse we were never going to stick to our plans, or complete our work within our estimated time, which would have been practically cut in half through mild or severe persuation of the managerial kind.

So this week had been more than normal stressful. So what.

Its only that a few issues and a couple mega code changes were requested in a very mild manner to be analysed, documented, completed and tested within 3 days. It would have been a piece of cake for the people who came up with the plan because, these issue were open only for the last 8 months, with the same number of people working on them, with the same work load on them. And well it is little consequence how many issues were solved by my predecessors in the past few months.

Managerial skills are pretty difficult to come by. But it definitely is overflowing in my project. It definitely has convinced me to give my very best, in being a model of non-production for the next few months, as I enjoy looking into the future at my absolutely bright chances of making to absolutely nowhere on the chain.

Life is beautiful. Keep smiling. The world is ofcourse mine.

pointleSS

2007-10-26T06:37:00.001-07:00

I am at a point where I dont know what I want, but am so damn bloody sure that I want something...

Wonder when I'll figure it out..

Burdened Soul...

2007-10-12T02:04:00.000-07:00

Today the immensity of the task that has fallen upon me finally has begun to sink in. As I waved goodbye to V, along with the whole team in the hot searing Hyderbad SEZ sun, the feeling of doom for having lost my mentor in this project, and a friend finally hit me. Lots of lost feelings came flooding back. Leaving college, waving goodbye to those accacia forests, leaving home waving to my friends and Mag, leaving Bangalore, waving goodbye to my first grown-up experience and Meenu, waving goodbye to Spoorthy, the only thing keeping me sane in Hyderabad, deciding to stay in Hyderabad, inturn equivalent to waving goodbye to Meenu again... Waving to Mag and Malu in chennai was the same, bringing back all those old feelings to the fore.

Seeing his excitement to go back home was good, even though I envied his pure joy at the thought of going back to his home town and family. I never had that feeling about Trivandrum, maybe partly because my life there fragmented and drifted away in the wind, never to be a part of the whole that was my past, or maybe partly because I will always be searching for things which are new and exciting and I certainly am nowhere near ready to settle down.

When I had first stepped into this project, I could see only experienced guys, who did not look like they were going to gel with me and I had a feeling of doom about the whole thing. But anyway it was supposed to be for only a month. V had seemed to be the person in control, and Y had seemed to be a person who was to be reconed with on what ever track that he was on. As time progressed it was clear that V was the only person in the project who knew what was going on or knew anything about what ever track he was on. Everyone else was completely clueless about what was going on. But then things happened and I have commited myself to the project and will now be a part of it for atleast the next one year.

My situation is that I am one of the youngest members of the project, but I have been given a whole module to handle from offshore, which I would say is a big risk they are taking, considering the large number of avenues available to me to screw up and end up costing the company millions. Vishwa was tried and tested in this track and even though he too was surprisingly young, he definitely was not just 4-5 months experienced like me. He was handling it perfectly, maintaining the trust of the managers and the client. Now I am supposed to step into those shoes and I know that it is definitely not going to be an easy task.

Another absolutely inherant problem with the project is that the management is one of the worst available with a steady string of screwed up projects under its belt. This is just the 4th project they screwed up in their eyes. And they have their list of valid reasons blaming others on why it failed ready, so they are not worried. But this fact impacts me heavily since, it means the client is so pissed off with our company that they are definitely pulling out of any future projects and is even contemplating on terminating our current project soon. That would mean the development project that I was eying for the future has almost certainly gone down the drain (even though not confirmed yet). That means it has opened up a flood of people taking release from the project and running for their lives. V has obtained release and has left, so has G who was holding the whole project together from onsite almost single handedly. I have replaced Y so he is also out. R and S are in the process of giving KT to other preparing to be released soon.

That just leaves me and Y.

I had decided that I am going to work my ass off and get to a position to demand this and and be in command. If no one comes into the project that could come true pretty soon, since there is no one else in the project up for it because the others are as inexperienced as me or simply do not have it in them. Well who says we have to take the stairs or the escalator, when a high speed elevator is available. I just hope the power stays on the whole time, and I am not boxed in for ever....

Release yourself

2007-09-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

I have not slept yesterday night. Well even though many of us in the IT Field are used to that, yesterday night is taking it toll of me. The day was hectic enough with me riding around town with roshan, covering atleast a total of 100 -120 kms. Coupled with the hectic hip-hop routine and absolute lack of sleep due to the project release I am feeling absolutely like crap in the morning now. I had to come to office at about 12 at night .. fix the issue.. go back.. be called back at 3.. go back after 4 .. not sleep.. come back at 7 am.. and feel all shitty..

God let the replications run so that portal can be up and I can do my final changes and go to sleep.. Please this is inhumane..!!! Torture..!!!!

Somebody help meeeee.... :(

Live to Ride(in peace), Ride to live(in peace)

2007-09-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

Well, for the last one year I have not been enjoy riding my bike in the two metro/semi metro cities that I have been living in...

Why?

I dont have Insurance , Road Tax, NOC or a license..

Insurance: I paid on time, they wanna see the bike in tvm.. while it is roaming about in Karnataka and AP and its in no mood to go back. Its in love with the pretty Scooty Peps here..

Road Tax: All these idiots have only life time taxes, for the one year or less we'll be here.. and that will set us back by about 5k, as opposed to 100 bucks or so for each encounter of the third kind with the cops.

NOC: Tedious process, which I never intended to undergo. My bike is basically a mallu at heart. I cant imagine my bike being a canadian (kannadiga) or telegana..

License: I do have a license. Not just on me. I managed to forget to get it back from a constable, when I was caught by police near charminar about 3 months back. I realized that I had lost it about a month back. Now a duplicate is in the works back in mallu land, and since nothing works there even with some bribes.. I am still waiting..

Summary
If I manage to lose my RC book, I can be 100% illegal. Yippeee..

Remedy.
Since I have been victimized by a company initiated transfer to Hyderabad from Bangalore, I will recieve those small perks associated with transfers of the forced kind. In short, I can pay my road tax and get it reimbursed. So what I need to do is get an NOC and then somehow manage to pay the road tax here. Easier said than done, as NOC would require me cum all the documents present back in mallu land. Now that does not seem that probable, hence I need to courier the papers and optimally myself there and get the work done. Then I can pay the tax here. And if and only if I manage to pull off that feat would I be able to get someone else to renew my insurance from here from last year even though I have actually paid for this year too.

Red Tape. And not the shoe kind..

Cyderabranded..

2007-09-04T23:18:00.000-07:00

Now that I've had a weekend to think over the options that are in front of me, I've made up my mind to stay in Hyderabad for the next assignment as well. This would come as an anticlimax to the hot blooded mail I had sent to my practice head urgin him to send me back to Bangalore.

The more I thought about it, the more I began to feel that going back to my known and already explored life in Bangalore might not be what I really want. I am sure that I would have been completely happy with my friends there, but again, I would be with the same set of people and would not experience anything new.

Hyderabad on the other hand might turn out to be better off for me, in terms of oppurtunity to meet more new people, with lots of new girls in my salsa batch and ofcourse orkut like ever. Professionally, even though I'd be stuck in a support project I'll be replacing a 10 year experienced guy and there are extensive oppurtunities to touch varied technologies like Biztalk for orchestration and Informatica for replication. So it might very well turn out good for me, especially since a large number of team members are either onsite, or have had enough onsite experience. And so the bait of onsite really did help me make up my mind even though there is a more than 50% chance that they might not send me at all..

Anyway, I've taken a decision, and a bold one from my point of view to go into the unknown in Hyderabad..

So many things to do....

Lock Down

2007-08-31T01:32:00.000-07:00

When the management is out to screw you, there is very little left for us to do, and what ever little is left for us to do would not make much of a difference anyway. After 6 months in Hyderabad, after the hundreds of promises of not forcing us into permanent transfer here, we are finding ourselves in the position where infact we are all getting screwed by the management. If they say straight out that we, the almost one year experienced associates, do not have any say in the matter of transfer, the matter would end there. But at the end of almost all the lines coming out of each manager's mouth, will be the suffix - " At the end of the day, the choice is yours".

So after putting all my acting skills to its ultimate field test, I came out of my Tech managers cubicle smiling after all sentimental acts I put on. It might not have mattered to much in the final outcome of things, but I was not going to leave any of my leaves unturned. Thus came about a long mail incorporating all the formal verbiage that I could cook up without being too obvious (hope those idiots need a dictionary to read it).

Even after all this, I sincerely doubt whether it would make even an iota of difference. The fact of the matter remains... If the management is out to screw you, you are screwed. Period.

Will know the outcome soon enough.. probably by end of day .. or latest by monday. Will update the status soon...

Ponmudi..

2007-08-26T23:18:00.000-07:00

Beautiful Ponmudi, the view was breathtaking.

The mist was covering most parts of the hills. The hills peeking through.

The winding roads were perfect for riding. The best part though was the ride up the hills at night.

The guest house was a 2 bed cottage, forced to accommodate 10 guys.

Everyone tried to keep their speeds down.

Tea anyone...?

The trip was always fun, especially since Sankar was at his best.

Kallar, No time to take a dip.

The guys..

Of course, the inevitable accident...

The Wheel Turned Once..

2007-08-22T05:44:00.000-07:00

The wheels of time have turned, and to be exact it has turned once and have brought me away from home and got me through two cities and through so many learning experiences on the way. This day last year I boarded my train to Bangalore on my way to join my first company. This day last year, I waved to my friends from the train while they ran along the platforms waving back at me, JJ and Joji even venturing to jump onto the train and hug me. This day last year I waved good bye to my family and friends, so many of them. Tear filled, Mag staring out after me. I knew I would miss her.

Life promised to be exciting for me and it indeed has been. Bangalore, Hyderabad. So many friends made, so many scattered in the winds. Rashmita came like a blizzard and left as quickly and shockingly. Bangalore roomies stood by me . Meenu stood by me every moment of the way in Bangalore, making my life there immensely better every single day. The hour glass turned and I slid down it inevitably, on to hyderabad, and it dragged Spoo in too, who gave me company for every second of the first 3 months in Hyd, before she was called back. I started out on my first project here. Found what it was to work in the industry. What disappointment was, what the joy of working well and everything turning out good, the hoop of victory.

Hyderabad gave me so much time. Time to think, time to pursue dreams, time to dream for more. Salsa, hiphop offering a mutlitude of new people to meet, and dance like no one is watching. And that I did.

Its been over six months since I set foot on my home soil, six months since I saw my parents or saw many of my friends. I can bearly contain the excitement of going home after this long peroid. I can barely sleep at night, thinking of the 4 days in tvm and kollam. Its sad that I will get only 4 days at home, but it can be well compensated in the months to come when I'll be safely back to the bustle of Bangalore. And this time back in Bangalore I plan to rock. Really rock. Savour it.

But for now...Trivandrum herrrrrrreeeeeeee I comeeeeeeeeeeeee.....
I've got my new camera ready... ;)

Nailed bY the TaiL...

2007-08-14T07:01:00.000-07:00

Today I had a meeting with one of my managers. It really surprised me, to what extents they would go, what cheap and dirty tricks they would pull out to get people to do what they want and keep their mouths shut.

The short version of the story is that we are 5 people (was 6.. spoo left) who have been brought to hyderabad on company's expense. Now when the expenses are being paid by the company, they expect something in return, therein lying whole logic of actually shelling out about 1.5 lakhs per person for a total of 6 months. All this money would have to be made back and more by making clients pay up good money for us. But this is were the glitch happened, in the fact that they actually failed to get any one of us satisfactorily billed for the enough amount of time so as to justify the company taking so much expenses on itself for our benefit. The time has almost come upon us when we are to be returned to our rightful masters, that is to the imperial lord of the office in Bangalore, without much to show for paying us so much dough. Heads have to roll. Heads have GOT to roll.

Now at this point it would have been nice, even amusing to see the managers take the fall for their mistakes or lack of foresight or pure lack of managerial skill which brought about this immense investment/return anomaly. But since two of us(which sadly didnt include me) flatly refused to stay back in hyderabad when asked directly, he resolved to the underhand method of a completely unexpected and intense battery of one's senses with pretty obvious(to me) psychological tricks. Thankfully he picked my teammate for the first round and I was more free to observe the tactics that were being adopted, and saw to my relief that this guy, how ever experienced he was in this, was leaving far too many openings to be classified as a completely unsurmountable obstacle on the steep road of career progress. But my colleague fell for it, and was dutifully mashed up into a pulp state somewhere in the vicinity of a mango milkshake. And when he turned to me, I was prepared mentally that I would reply reply professionally to what ever he asked and appear to be as competent as possible and not give him much of a leeway for him to do his bagdering my self esteem.

I could see that even though the meeting was held under the pretensions of being a discussion he was expecting more of a one sided monologue. But how could any self respecting professional who thinks he is any (or a lot) good in what ever he does keep his mouth shut when their skills were being blatantly played down. Underappreciation was not even in the same league as this. So what ever point he made, I made it a point too to somehow make him lose his flow by either agreeing with him at the wrong point or not agreeing with him at all when ever possible. Finally when the meeting was over, neither me nor my colleague could recollect what had been actually discussed even though it has lasted for a good 30-40 minutes. Anyway since this was not a proper HR manager (was a techie manager) he was also definitely not able to achieve his final objective. Actually if we are lucky enough we could both wring the situation a little more and collect the money that leaks out it, in the form of another extension to our relocation and personally I could do with a stub for the future in the form of a BizTalk resume entry.

Though staying in hyderabad without finding a real nice chick would certainly not be worth it... even with the money.
Somethings never change.. where ever a person might be .. or how much ever time has passed ;)

Hyderabad: FrAmeD!

2007-07-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

Well, I concede that my life in hyderabad has given me very little to blog about indeed, and I was forced to make some underhand moves and steal tags from Silverine and copy out mails to my manager. It did give me an incredible oppurtunity to go out and savour the city of pearls with Spoo's friends and meet some cute chicks in the process. Well finally I have gotten around to bringing my hard disk concealed in my pocket and plugging in the device hoping that the IT management group would not have any facility to come to know of a storage device attached to the system. Well here goes the photo story...

Even though it messes up the sequence of things completely, I wanted to put up my favorite shot at first. This snap was taken during the Golconda trip. Let me assure you it was the best sight in hyderabad.

Two shots of the Qutb-Shahi tombs near the Golconda fort, from where we started out our journey that day. The first one was taken by me with PG's cam and the second with my w700i camera phone. You can make out the difference, which makes me really want to buy a real cam.

One of those beautiful corners in the Qutb-Shahi tombs. There were many similar shots in and around the place, and since I was severly prohibited from putting the pics of any of the chicks, I have to stick to beauty of the archetectural kind in my blogs.

This is the shot while climbing up the golconda fort common way, which was used by the commoners to climb up to see the king.

Narrow passages through which visitors had to pass through, where they were checked by the guards.

Another shot of the top, from the kings path, where the kind was brought down on 'Dholi' by african slaves, wherein the slaves were selected that the heights would match up to the incline of the steps.

This beautiful wall is supposed to have been adorned with beautiful and precious stones. One can only imagine now.

A view from the top

View of the Golconda Fort at night.

Now that the Golconda pics are over, I thought I'd add a couple of snaps of the fun I had this weekend with some new friends that I made at Steps, where I have joined up for Salsa classes. Most of the people in the pics are expert dancers,who are good enough to participate in dance competitions and win them too..

The sardarji and the dude in the white t-shirt were the most noisy people I have ever met in my life. They made the trip the enjoyable experience that it was.

The cricket team which won the match, which according to the very strict umpire, was won by cheating, to which I completely agree because I was in the losing team.

A shot of the sky from my guest house, which is my phone wall paper now.

How can I not put up a picture of the charminar even though I could not take a good picture of it with my phone cam.....
It was a severe disappointment...

Mala Engane Marikkaam?

2007-07-02T05:38:00.000-07:00

The mad rush for the appraisals are gathering force and it has forced me to start thinking about my very own 'Mala Marikkal' (mountain moving) mail to my ex manager in the vague hope of 'gore and glory' in the form of a forwarded mail to the senior managers of my business unit. Well Anitha and Debasish had done it, and that has forced even poor Uzzal who is stuck in a bullshit project to look at the bright side of the mere copy paste work he is stuck with and write his own 'a** kissing' mail to the manager, which I gladly helped him edit into more of a corporate form.

Now, let me try my hand at it here .. and like my previous post i'll await valuable reviews from helpful arse kissing experts from blogosphere.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sir,

I am now working on a new release of a web application, for Energy and Utilities Vertical, for an US client(*name purged). The full project is immense and is handled by Infosys and Wipro. The rest of the team is working on the 1.6 release of the application, and I was brought in to help with 2-3 features of an added functionality. The main resource who is 3 and a half years experienced is stuck with her earlier tasks due to the complexity of the N-tier architecture of the application, and hence I am now in charge of all 9 features of my project. I have been able to complete the complete detailed design spec in two weeks, understanding the system and its architecture.

All this has been greatly facilitated by the design and architecture training and tips given to me during the DA Training by you and S (purged for my protection). It also helped me in easily picking up latest technologies like Web Client Software Factory within days, which without the understanding of the basics that you had imparted, would have never been possible for a non-IT rookie like me. It also helped me in easily designing the architecture for the POC for boeing, which was similar to designing the dummy projects given by you.

Thank you sir, for taking a initiative from your side in training us rookies and elevating our career prospects greatly inside the organisation. I also would like to acknowledge all the great help from S to us.

Thanks and Regards,
(Your truly Moi..)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whoaaaa.. that took some effort...
so people out there, with a knack at ass kissing, feel free to contribute additions/modifications/masalafications to my little endevour of self promotion...

Cheers.. PEACE OUT..
***************************************************************************
Note, Attatchment: Anitha's and Debasish's mail for those who are interested..

Hi sir,
How are you? How is DA?

I am into (*) project. It is a project in TMTS vertical. My client is (*).

This a new project starting right from the scratch. Designing was also involved. My tech lead asked me to create use case diagrams.

The tool used was Argo uml. I was able to do it all because of the training given by you and S.

The project is a fixed price project we don’t even have 1 min to spare. Even Saturday and Sunday we are working. Within 40 days our project should be over, that is the plan. Everyday the time we go is at 9:30 or 10 pm.

Today I had the task of doing a module. I had to implement the whole thing ie, BL, DAL and UI. He asked me to complete that then show to the team how to do it. He also told the team to follow the method I followed in handling the layered architecture.

I could do this easily because of the Dummy project and the trainings given by both of you.

Sincerely speaking I wouldn’t have done all these things if you wouldn’t have given me this training.

I sincerely thank both of you for giving such excellent trainings and grooming me up.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sir,
Good evening. How are you?

Yesterday I was having Microsoft Interview (3 Hrs of Interview) to work in Microsoft IDC HYD. I got selected in that.

Monday onwards I will be working in Microsoft IDC on (*) (They are going to ship (*)) as a resource from Wipro.

I do not know my exact work but I have to work from Monday.

Today I attended 2 hrs of KT session in MS.

Today I am getting release from the (*) project.

***************************************************************************

Appraisal

2007-07-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

Appraisal times are here, and I am inviting all creative minds out there to put all your creativity together and write me a good self appraisal ;).

Also would be appreciated, completely shameless, self promoting letters to my old manager Subbaih Anandan, telling him how big a job I am doing here, and that I would love to go back to Bangalore and work with him in the DA Team.

So do not lose this wonderful oppurtunity and rush in with your entries in my comments !!!

Cheers... :)

The ei8ht tag..

2007-06-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

So again I've swallowed the pride that is left in me after all those shameless acts of Blogosphere thefts, and yet again I steal a tag from Silverine, just because I cannot find anything in my hyderabad life worth blogging about, as of yet.

The tag is pretty simple, and it just involves writing 8 random things about yourself and tagging 8 people.

So here goes...

Even though its time that I left this habit, I still listen to heavy rock music and it still surprises me with the extent to which it helps me handle my moods.

I AM getting old, along with my bike, as my hands start shaking after a real fast ride through city traffic.

I love watching the same movies over and over again untill I know the dialogues by heart.

The only thing that I have ever stuck to in my life till now is gym, which I have never really dropped in the last 5-6 years, though people would still be surprised to hear that I work out pretty regularly.

Recently I have grown interested in dancing, and try my best to move my stiff body, any chance I get to, may it be a new year party, or my birthday bash at a chennai disco...

Even though it may come as a shock to many people who do not know me much, I do not drink or smoke.

I am not very creative, but I try my best to make what ever creative endeavour I undertake to come out good...

And even though a lot of people reading will find it funny, I have joined up for Salsa classes here in Hyderabad.. ;)

So cheers to any one who read this, and any 8 people who hopefully read this blog is welcome to take up this tag.

p.s: I really hope atleast 8 people come to read this...

Swatchamaya Video

2007-06-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

Life Rewinded Forward

2007-06-06T03:18:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the flow of events from the previous blog, the pretty lady that I was trying ever so desperately to impress did finally waltz into my life, along with 3 other equally adorable beings of the fairer sex into my life this weekend. The twist in the tale that made it happen was Spoo's birthday, for which all her cute female buddies decided to give her a visit here in Hyderabad. Her male buddies also joined in with the girls for the trip but they were also cool dudes, hence in all the weekend was a blast.

I have been in Hyderabad for quite sometime (more than 2 months) and we, even though a big enough group to actually go out and see places, have never ventured out much into the city and enjoy the delights it has to offer. The only claim that we can lay to the exploring we have done in Hyderabad seems to be the weekend we visited Prasad's Mall and the Hussein Sagar lake. Hyderabad unlike Bangalore had many places of historical and general tourist value including Golconda fort, Qutb-Shahi tombs, Birla temple, Snow world, Ramoji filmcity and of course the trademark Charminar. This in an ancient city with history of over a few centuries, hence if one were to look closely through the gap between those modern ugly buildings, one would find mosques, buildings and other structures which are obviously from an era long forgotten.

So our journey started with me and Spoo going to greet our new friends and take them to the guest house that we had searched out for them. Meeting them was amusing since I was so painstakingly trying to engage one of them through mail correspondence and been teasing another so badly that she wanted to shoot me at sight. Thankfully the first meeting went completely smoothly with us all being late for our first tourist outing; the Qutb-Shahi Tombs.

Now, these old king dudes were amazing fellows. They built tombs for themselves while they were alive so that they can die peacefully (or forcefully) and be buried in style. Hence we were able to see beautiful tombs constructed in intricate detail with a sense of innate beauty. I being desperate to capture all this Mogul architecture, cunningly stole a digital camera from one of my newly made cute girl buddies. The poor thing did not even know what hit her and she did not even lay eyes on that canon S410 for the whole day. So I started taking photos of each and every brick that I found interesting, and it being a Mogul architectural treasure had a lot of interesting 'bricks' which in turn resulted in quite a number of snaps being taken. Actually, there were more than quite a lot of interesting and moderately interesting things (other than the girls) which qualified for a snap in my books, but I showed a relative amount of self control in limiting myself to shots that had more than a good chance of being appreciated by owner of the camera. The sun was up and Hyderabad sun was unforgiving.

From the tombs we found our way onto the nearby Golconda fort. Now this a place I can relate to from the many number of novels I have read which told tales of fortress towns which could never be penetrated, even after months of siege by very determined foes. The outer walls were 7 km in diameter and let me tell you, it was an impregnable setting with its own hidden water supply and granaries which could easily outlast a siege. We scrambled up the gravelly steps up the hill while a guide explained the history of each part of the fort. The light and sound show in the night was amazing, even though it could not stop Debasish and Anitha from sleeping through the whole show. From there we went to Eat-Street which was an exclusive food court on the banks of the Hussein Sagar.

Next day everyone was promptly late by 45 minutes making the whole tourist bus wait for us to take us to Ramoji Film City. The bus ride was enjoyable enough, and after about an hour we landed at the gates of Ramoji. The place was no where as interesting as Golconda fort or the Qutb-Shahi Tombs, and the heat of the sun caught up with everyone in the group throughout the day. In the afternoon we went for a trip around the campus on a guided bus tour, and the guide chap got us all laughing with his very witty comments about the sets of the film city. One set would have 4 separate facades for 4 different situations; where else can you get married on one side(church) , go to honeymoon from the next (airport), deliver a baby on the next (hospital) and get a divorce from the last side (court). Another good one was houses one each for hero, heroine, villain and comedian on each side of a set building. The day ended off with a long walk through tank bund on the bank of the Hussien Sagar lake.

The last day was to be slow and no rush, when compared to the previous two days. We went to Birla Temple where the hot sun had made the stone steps so hot that everyone was performing tap dancing on their barefoots. From there we made a mad rush to snow world only to find out that the next show would be on only in 1 hour. This was a pleasant place to spend ones time if you have 5-6 people out with us in the city. We spent most of our time throwing snow balls at each other and catching everyone offgaurd in the face with well aimed shots. The show turned even cooler with snow fall and a dance floor where we danced our hearts out.

The last (but the least) place we visited was the Charminar which did not impress me as much as other ancient monuments of India have. But it was open to the public and we spent a few minutes on top of it looking out into the crowded streets of the old city and looking into the Mecca masjid where the recent bomb blasts had taken place.

The day came to an end for us on a deep note, with me and Spoo dropping off her best buddies and my new made buddies at the railway station. It surprised me that even though I had met them only 3 days back, I felt I were dropping of people that I had known for ever and had missed for long. I relished the moment when I felt a lump forming in my throat and drifted back to the times when I were with my various gangs back in home in Trivandrum.

It made me realise how I missed each gang's company, even though each was so different from the other.....
Thanks to Spoo and her sweet friends.... Hope they did not find me an intrusion in their group.

Book'd For Life

2007-05-28T03:31:00.000-07:00

Well, recently a very pretty friend of my friend's, whom I've been trying desperately to impress, asked me to list my favorite books stating reasons to it to go along with it. It was infact a wee bit of maneuvering on my part which brought her to this question, and I do suspect that this fair dame understood the mild drift I was trying to impose on the direction of our mail correspondences.

Anyway, since I'm back into 'Competency Area' (the bench, for the uninitiated) and my Hyderabad life has degenerated into a sleep-throughout-your-weekend story, I've decided to write about my favorite books and why them ..

First a bit of background...

So my reading started, not too early, not too late at around the time when I was in 7th standard. Mum was such a sweetheart till then, reading me books and getting me all those comics and Famous Five/ Secret Seven series. But in 7th I got to read my first book, which was a thriller/adventure of sorts named Shaitan. From then it was kind of slow untill I reached the stage where I got my hands on the regular Sidney Sheldon range when I was in 8th or 9th. The period was bliss for me, with mom bringing home 2 books every two weeks from the heaven for readers, Elloor lending library. So that period was pretty monotonous with me finishing almost the whole line of Sheldons within the year, and going on to pile up titles from all the major best seller authors. It was a bit slower during my 11th and 12th, with maybe a book in two months or even lesser. And my reading spree was finally cut off with a villian of all books; War and Peace, which officially ended my golden days of reading.

Now to back to the subject. Some of my favorite books as of now are:

1) Godfather: For justice, we must go to Don Corleone. And my chest fills up with pride and other emotions so strong that it cannot be penned down onto words. Each re-read brings up more emotions. This is the book I have gotta read atleast once a year, and each time I read it I feel good about being a man and generally about being myself. And don't begin to ask silly questions like why, cos Godfather is simply the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather answers all of life's questions. What to pack for a trip? "Leave the gun, take the cannolis." :D

2) Fountainhead: Who does'nt like Fountainhead?
Well it was a rhetorical question and you need not answer it if you don't like Fountainhead, because I am aware that there are hoards of people who tend to think that it is just boring and it never ends. But to me it is like philosophy for dummies or Beginner's guide to philosophy. Who would'nt identify with the lead characters? I've heard almost everyone who has read the book to have claimed that Howard Roark was nothing but an replica of their own selves.

3) One Hundred Years Of Solitude: This is a very personal choice of mine and I do not expect many people to side with me on this one. I've been reading it over and over and again, and still cannot explain what is the thing in the book that draws me back again and again to it. This is the book that leaves me feeling like I'm lying in air somehow being bouyed up from beneath. And do not mistake this as floating in the clouds kind of feeling, because it's just the opposite. I just feel so disturbed to the core about the whole deal. Maybe it is because of the time span of the work, or maybe because of the sudden changes in pattern from a completely serious line with a sudden short intrusion of fantasy as if it were a mere everyday event.

4) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: True that the idea for this book (radio show at first) came to Douglas Adams while he was drunk and reading "Hitch hiker's guide to Europe" and looking at the sky, but thank heavens that he was drunk, because I do not think that he could have pulled something this crazy off if he were anywhere near sober. This was something that came heavily recommended by everyone I knew, and correctly placed after Terry Pratchetts putting me in the receptive mood for modern humour. I have not read the fourth installation of the inaccurately termed Hitchhiker's Trilogy of five books.
There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

5) Wilbur Smith: Again one of my favorite books, even though I cannot say that I've gained something deep or worthwhile while reading his works. Its pure adrenaline rather than anything else and even though most of his works have the same general theme it ends up being a blast to read. His books are long and they have good language and more than enough excitement to keep you hooked on for the 700-1000 pages that they usually stretch on to.

6) Terry Pratchett: Shrutz had always been telling me about how she loved Terry Pratchett and how she thought he was the greatest author on earth. Of course this gave me more ammunition to avoid the guy for at least a year. Finally, with nothing else to read I stumbled upon Captain Carrot and the Disc World. This, I would consider as one of the best things that happened to my reading, because I found that, humour writing was one of the wonders of the world. I went on to read quite a few of them, though not the whole series, not to mention an inevitable move towards hitchhiker's series.

Well, I have decided to stop here, even though there are lot more books that I have quite liked. But these were the first that came to my mind and feel strongly about.

Now Reading (rereading) : The Source - James Michener

Dropped Ones

2007-04-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

Being from Trivandrum, heat is nothing new to me. But let me tell you, the heat in Hyderabad is another story. It would have been much more comfortable if we (Me and Spoorthy, my teammate), were to get up early and go to office by 8:30. Then we could have beat the rush hour traffic, which is even though better than Bangalore, is still pretty horrible, which when compounded with the searing heat of midmorning sun makes one hell of a hot furnace. Today, I had to go to office, and being Saturday I made the mistake of thinking that I would be better off going around 11 and coming back after lunch. Now, this turned out to be a very bad decision and I spent half the day waiting in the sun at traffic intersections and blocks, trying to blow out the flames bursting out of me due to spontaneous human combustion.

That's half the story. The reason why I was forced to leave my cozy little room and still cozier little bed was that me and Spoo made a very inconsequential little mistakes that we usually tend to make quite often, which in turn happens to wipe out what ever consequential work that we (including many unsuspecting teammates) had done over last few weeks. Anyway I went there and found out that there is infact no way to recover a dropped table from a database unless you had backed it up before. So now I've got to go back on Monday and hope there is a way to undo the damage what I've done or face the consequences.. :D

Hyderabad Blues

2007-04-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

Leaving Bangalore was not easy. It had been my home for 6 months, and my life had gripped it in its familiarity and comfort. The Electronics City Office was heaven as everyone working there will swear by. A luscious campus, the greenery, the chicks, the lawns, the amphitheatre, the 7 cafeterias, the centre of Wipro and 18000 employees in one campus. Nothing could beat that. My team, fellow CETians, everything was going to be left behind...even though it was only for 6 months, the prospect of leaving it brought a deep sadness in my heart. What I was leaving behind was...

The beautiful Electronics City campus....

The amphi, my cubicle for 4 months...

My lifeline, the basketball court and gym..

The bench in EC...

My team mates, Anitha missing ...

Reaching Hyderabad was almost movie like, with a snazzy telugu number playing on the radio, which just matched perfectly with the scenes just flicking by me out of the cab window, and I could almost feel the camera zoom in and out of the delights of the city, a well edited music video. The first impression I got of the city were very favorable and warm and in striking comparison to the first impressions I had got of Bangalore. As far as I could make out the city was as big as Bangalore in terms of area, but no where as crowded, dusty or noisy. The holiday roads were almost devoid of any other traffic and we easily made the trip to our guest house in under half an hour, which was pretty good time considering the fact that the guest house (and the wipro office) were about 25 kms from where we had started.

Enroute, the Hussain Sagar tank.

Now, the city might have been very beautiful, with a beautiful lake, but the same could not be said for the region in which our guest house was located in. It was pretty far away from normal civilisation to an extent that we would have to later travel on a total of 4 autos and 2 buses to go get a toothbrush and get back. The only building near us were th Microsoft development center and the Infosys center.

Microsoft Development Center

The way the Microsoft people work...

Another look at, Sleeping at work

Infosys , Hyderabad

Beautiful like everywhere, Infy

The guest house met all our expectations with almost 3 star facilities. But the very next day Me and Spoorthy were transferred to another office which was in Secunderabad, 25 kms away from our guesthouse. But now that is an interesting experience with my bike here in hyderabad, and the roads being like an imitation of a motoGP race track 6-lane with curves, gradients and all combinations in between.

Our Guest house room

What we have done so far in Hyderabad are...

Climb the corporate ladder...

Get stamped with a phoenix...

And go for a team outing....

Cyderabad

2007-04-12T23:25:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since I've been in hyderabad and I still havent blogged about it..
The late night work..
Dinner with colleagues
Some small talk..
And without knowing it, it is already 1 am.
To sleep to grudgingly drag myself off the bed, into the shower, getting ready for another day..

Will blog in detail maybe this weekend...

Uprooted

2007-03-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

Six months in a city can breed a feeling of belonging in you. And that is somewhat how I feel about Bangalore City now. But it seems life is taking me to new places, and Hyderabad seems like the next candidate in the list of 'Been there, Lived there' city list. Even though all the formalities have not been completed and the details all seem to be pretty vague, the team has already started preparations to leave to Hyderabad. What is going to come, we all have to wait and see.

We are waiting with our fingers crossed for the relocation letter.

P.s: good thing about relocation - lots of money in reimbursements, free food/accomodation and maximum duration of 6 months.

Height of globalisation

2007-03-12T05:49:00.000-07:00

Recently a very pretty friend of mine, who was just back from a spin around the world, got me absolutely astounded by the ease with which she used three languages in such a small line -"Tumhara Kanaku is Different".

Takes the meaning of hinglish and manglish to the next level, don't you think ?

Bloody ****ing Mosquitoes

2007-03-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

Suddenly I felt like I was being smothered from all sides by an invisible force, being compressed from all sides, finding it hard to breathe...

With a mixture of relief and nostalgia, along with a little trepidation added to boot, I found myself stepping out of an air conditioned coach into the searing heat of Trivandrum. I was finally where I belong, completely. Home. I headed straight home, thinking I could crash in my old room into the fluffy mattress and pillow and catch up on the sleep that I had missed. And...

This is how I found my bed....
Then I thought, hey leave the bed, its too hot anyway, lets curl up on the floor and sleep on the cold floor. And...

That was how I found my regular spot on my bedroom floor. And I had to be satisfied in the little spot between the drum kit and the two unit boxes on the sides.

Well, maybe that was ok. Let my bro take up my room and convert it into a rock band practise room. No harm done. I can curl up between those cubes, hug my pillow and hug my good old free landline and happily go to sleep.

It is at this point that I really got screwed, as when I got back from dinner with parents, I found the whole house and area in darkness. Now I have heard people say Chennai is hot and I cant comment on that. But let me borrow a saying from Silverine : Trivandrum (Kerala) heat aint sissy heat like Chennai heat. Well let me tell you, the night was bloody hot and ****ing humid. And those huge blood thirsty mosquitoes (I think my house had some mutated ones) almost ate off half my hand most of my back. That got me pretty sore about the whole deal of coming back home and finding Philipose recovering from plastic surgery and blocking Jonathan as bystander at the hospital.

Anyway the major tragedy was that being Attukal pongala we missed out our customary Shangumugham trip. And we were forced to just get drenched in the rain at kowdiar. But the story it seems is not all intended to end sadly. The very next day, that is today, we got ready for our customary long ride and we chose varkala this time. Turned out a good decision and even though we have all become old(along with our bikes) and have started riding slow and careful, the ride itself was soothing and entertaining (with Sankar the ride is never dull), and we headed straight to my aunt's place there in Varkala. After giving my Granny a visit, we turned our sights to Kappil, dug up from my nostalgic images of my final year project ( I had missed taking enough photos last time). And again after some interesting and funny riding we got there.

We missed out an opportunity to get into the water there and went to Varkala beach, but by then everyone had lost their interest in getting into the water amid the crowds. But it did give us some good photos. :D

End to End

2007-02-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

Joining for my job in the company has had many positives as of late, and that has positively succeeded in overshadowing those dark days of sitting on the bench for more than a month. The overshadowing process included of some pretty rigorous training on various programming and design concepts. Now, maybe my manager(a really jolly chap), has got me brainwashed, yet I feel justified in inferring that design is something that usually is never taught to rookies such as ourselves (somewhat true in our industry, as a general rule). Yet, as say a twist of fate has had it, we have been put into the path of some serious and severe design and architecture know-how.

The company has had, as of late has a sudden enlightenment, that a really alarming proportion of the projects being undertaken by the company are under serious fire during their closing stages, identified during certification by our team and more specifically our manager(whose green light is needed for many a project to actually hit the market or the client or whatever/whoever it is supposed to hit) and that they were no where near a standard as to be called good or atleast passable code/application for the client from a non-functional point of view(say like performance, maintainability, coding standards etc). So after some brainstorming (probably meaning some heated words being exchanged) our management decided on an experiment wherein some rookies (namely us) will be trained on the finer aspects of software design and coding. These rookies were going to be a 'Vazhikaatti' to the senior architects and 7-10 year experienced Technical Leads who were, apparently not following the best practices and standards. Now don't get me wrong, but I think the senior members of our team (the whole team numbering all of 3 excluding us rookies, of which 2 we have met) are both nice guys. But somehow or the other the rest of the senior delivery managers or tech leads/project managers do not share our positive evaluation of our senior team members. Infact they just seem to think that they are complete *%&%&#!@!'s . Well, one cannot actually blame them, because after listening to some conference calls between a delivery manager and our second-in-command about our first-in -ommand while our first-in-command was infact in a very room, we could even begin to understand their consternation when they suddenly found themselves owner to red lights on all the 6-7 criteria for which they were being evaluated (non-functional aspects) and got 96 concern comments for problems with the code).

After listening to our trainer take us through the end to end of .NET and some very pheripheral concepts of UML and OOAD, all interspersed with frantic delivery managers practically begging to them over the phone for approval, we were nearing the end of our designed training. Now don't think that I am trying to blow my (our) own horn but I generally found that the 3 mallus in the 9 member team better coped up with the training. And when the manager found us a cosy practice assignment, I was not surprised to be assigned the task of dummy project manager(obviously me or Jose would have got it :D). I found to my dismay that trying to get people who have absolutely no intention of working to do what they absolutely have no idea about doing in the way which they absolutely could not imagine is much more difficult than it might seem to the casual outside observer. So you can imagine my struggle to make the Work Breakdown Structure(WBS) of the project, planning what all we were going to do for the next 12 odd days and what exactly each person was to achieve that particular day. Ofcourse the manager acting like a typical client, changing his requirements everyday and changing his specifications everyday added spice to the roles we were playing and basically everyone started getting mildly annoyed. My annoyance might have been a triffle above the general level because I had to suffer the additional annoyance of having my team members teasing me by calling me the project manager and asking me what they were supposed to do each day and each hour. We surprised the manager the third day with about 50 questions I painstakingly made that morning, we were finally able to pin down the whole intricate details of the project. This impressed our manager who usually was satified with his routine observation that team was not performing up to his expectation(but it was obvious that we were not actually faring badly). In the meantime I was making funny and silly mistakes like sending over mails forgetting to attach the required documents and the PM sending me mails in Malayalam saying what he was supposed to review.

Now half way through the project, and after some more minor "impressing" sessions he has sent mails to senior managers and head of various departments very very openly advertising our groups presence and in the process blatantly overstating our capabilities and knowledge. This has inturn lead us being assigned another "Bench" group to kind of mentor and bring upto our level. Our very own manager was all "Thallu Thallu" to the other group's manager, and we have sworn to follow in his footsteps trying to sweep the other group off their feet with our effieciency and ofcourse much better intellectual capacity :P.

P.S: And finally on a more postive note the author wishes to notify all the curious males that their concern regarding the new twist in the tale is indeed justified. The new group does include 3 quite pretty girls among the total 6 and the future is indeed bright.... The future is indeed promising.. ;)

Assorted of sorts

2007-02-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

This blog has been lifted shamelessly yet again from silverine's.
This poor blogger has finally run out of topics to blog about (not really tho.. ;)) and has confined himself to an occasional original blog but is usually content with stealing tags from random pages from across blogosphere.

This particular one is an mixture of sorts...

Three things that scare me

1. Heights
2. The sight of Karnataka traffic police standing on the roads picking up Kerala vehicles
3. Failure

Three people who make me laugh

1. Terry Pratchett
2. Salim Kumar
3. Jagadish (in 'In Harihar Nagar')

Three things I love

1. Women
2. Good Music
3. Working out

Three things I hate

1. Badly edited or directed movies
2. People going behind my back and turning them against me.
3. Pulsar 150 or worse Unicorn guys trying to irritate me into a race.

Three things I don't understand

1. How girls I like in office keep getting transferred.
2. Why some people in college really hated me.
3. How girls can be so possessive sometimes.

Three things on my desk

Since I don't have my own desk or even ODC as of now lets try our hand with the hypothetical.
1. My worn out and hated by many jacket.
2. My optimised by my standards PC.
3. Stacks of waste paper.

Three things I am doing right now

1. Working on the end to end cycle of a mock project we have been given and stuck on the design phase.
2. Searching for cute girls in orkut.
3. Trying to download Blood Diamond and finding that we don't have enough space in either Hari's PC or my laptop.

Three things I want to do before I die

1. Make atleast a couple of million dollars.
2. Live in a couple or more eastern or northern European country for more than years.
3. Make more than a few acquaintances from among various races of women in the world ;)

Three things I can do

1. Wheelie and stoppie with my bike
2. Play basketball in the evening and then workout for an hour and then play again ( ah my schedule!!)
3. Make any girl go to Chennai by developing an interest in her and talking to her or atleast planning to do so in the near future.

Three things you should listen to

1. Jonathan's songs
2. K S Chithra's voice
3. Your heart

Three things you should never listen to

1. Hindi movie songs
2. Girls
3. Guys getting senti after getting drunk

Three things I'd like to learn

1. Salsa
2. Flying a fighter jet
3. One foreign language

Three favourite books

1. Godfather
2. Hitch hiker's Guide to Galaxy
3. Fountainhead

Three favourite food

1. Chicken kalimirch from Khana Khazana
2. Oranges
3. Chicken Shawai from De Paris in Palayam

Three beverages I drink regularly

1. Juice from cake corner in office
2. Mirinda
3. Tea

Three TV shows/books I watched/read when I was kid

1. Boy meets world
2. Phantom
3. Knight Hawk

Anyone who is interested can take up this tag......:D

i wAnna be ZaPhod!!

2007-01-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

You know, continuous inactivity finally gets to you someday. You feel it is just eroding you away ever so slowly, without your knowledge, from within. I have been wasting away my days, doing nothing but read forwarded mails and ofcourse forwarding them to others who too are on the bench and contributing towards the erosion of their cores from within too. Today morning I got up and put on the TV and guess what greets me. My very own world of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy in its movie version. Even though sam rockwell would not be able to slip into the shoes of beeblebrox perfectly I did like his style playing the crazy president of the universe thing. Well anyway, back to the point, that has put me in a very good mood for the day. Sadly though, I do not find any avenue to put my good mood into good use. Like everyday the continuing absense of chocolate in the EC2 pantries has become a road block in the happy spending of my swimming in the resource pool day.

But the shining star on the horizon is my trip back home to good old trivandrum this weekend. Even though i'll be getting very little time to spend there, the long gap before going home has filled me with anticipation to the maxxx..

hmm.. I'll have to finish my current book (old man and the sea) soon....

HIV/AIDS::Explained/Unexplained?

2007-01-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

After undergoing training for one week, I am back in the pool, swimming about happily. By the pool, ofcourse I mean the resource pool. But bench has its positives. I get time to read forwards and go about orkutting, drinking badam milk (because the idiots have stopped chocolate) and reading blogs. This is when I came across this very interesting and informative blog. I have no means of validating or indepth research into the topic but it did give me a completely new view about the HIV/AIDS situation (or the non-existence of it).

http://www.haftamag.com/content/view/207/43/

Read through it and reach your own conclusions about whether HIV and AIDS are related and know what you are spending your money on when you donate towards HIV/AIDS research.

Knowledge is power. Go get the power.

Self Tagged

2007-01-15T02:49:00.000-08:00

Ok. Since I have been searching for a proper topic to blog about and none seems to be forthcoming I'll take up silverine's tag. Here goes nothing.

1. Yourself: I could do what I do always and copy paste my orkut profile (mostly because I dont want to start thinking about what to write about myself again). Anyway I would say I am usually friendly, helpful and usually logical in my approach to most things. Ofcourse..I go crazy for any pretty gal I see. :D

2. Your galfriend/spouse: None

3. Your hair: Usually kind of crew cut... reminds me I need a hair cut soon.. Maybe some gel and a new spike hair style..

4. Your mother: My role model. Everytime I look at her I see what living life the best way is all about. Success, family and overall happiness... the balance is so fragile.. but she manages.
5. Your father: Me and my father were never that close, but nowadays since he is stranded in Cochin he tends to call once in a while. I definitely have to call him each time I need to get something important done because he is the man with strings everywhere... may it be getting tickets for india-pak match to getting off without paying a 1000 Rs fine for over speeding.

6. Your favorite item: If it were my pocession I would have gone for my bike. But since it hardly qualifies as an item I would have to go for my Sony Ericsson W700i. Somehow this is the first phone I fell in love with.

7. Your dream last night: Hehe.. thats not for a public blog :P

8. Your favorite drink: Mirinda

9. Your dream car: Aston Martin Vanquish

10. The room you are in: A conference room

11. Your ex: No proper Exs... but do have some ex crushes....thats about it

12. Your fear: Failure

13. What do you want to be in 10 years? : Well travelled

14. Who you hung out with last night(Sunday) ? I was down with fever... was hanging on tight to my pillow and jacket and socks and every other piece of clothing trying my best to stay warm... how I missed the hot and humid Trivandrum and my home!!!

15. What you're not? Emotional. Even though it is not a good trait. This is what I am.

16. Muffins: Nooooo...

17. One of your wish list items: Ducati Monster Dark

18. Time: Is on my sideeeeeee

19. The last thing you did: Went upstairs to have chocolate and suddenly remembered the damn company has stopped having chocolate powder in the pantry.

20. What are you wearing? Formals for a change. Gals dig it aye???

21. Your favorite weather: Bangalore weather

22. Your favorite book: Godfather

23. The last thing you ate: Chicken Biryani

24. Your life: Is at a very decisive stage with each week turning out to be the points which decide where I will be ending up in some years.

25. Your mood: Relaxed or maybe even mildly frustrated with the inactivity

26. Your best friend: Jonathan Bruce...

27. What are you thinking about right now? About Anitha Valakuzhy and how I can get to know her better... :))

28. Your car: Nah... not yet... still holding on tight to my Pulsar 180 Dtsi (non alloy one!!!!)

29. What are you doing at the moment? Duh... what do you think?? (anyway on bench :((.. )

30. Your summer: Go to some falls, get into the water and have fun.

31. Your relationship status: Single

32. What is on your TV? One thing that wipro can work on is ... you guessed it .. a TV..

33. What is the weather like? Crisp and Cool

34. When is the last time you laughed? arghhhh... dont remember..

Forever, the word

2006-12-27T03:55:00.000-08:00

She was there beside him when he wept,
wept for his loss, unbearable, killing him from within.
Her calm words sooting his anguish, his pain.
He looked at her now, closely for the first time,
asking himself when he had found her in his life,
confused, he realised the truth, so obvious.
She had been there throughout.
But he never realised it, too immersed in his life,
the life that was crashing all around him,
and she was there, right next to him,
offering to be the pillar to a life, a new life
the life he would now be forced to build up from the ground.
Pillars they became supporting against each other,
balanced and stable, holding out against the storm.
Days passed, weeks passed,
hours became days, days became months, years,
yet she stayed with him, supporting him, loving him.
Now she found herself standing on a cliff,
facing the winds, facing the spray of the waters,
her hands holding his firmly, for warmth, outside and within.
He was looking down, distraught, fed up with the world.
The wind whirled around them, playing with them,
the droplets of water they carried causing goosebumps on their skin.
They looked at each other and they knew,
how futile it was to live, with the hurt, with the pain.
His eyes searched her and understood,
he silently pleaded with her eyes, trying to tell her it was all going to be fine,
that he will be with her always,
forever was the word, but they never needed to say it,
say it out loud, because the wind in their ears whispered to them,
and they took nature's word for it.
The time had come and her hand tightened around his.
Slowly as though caught in time they let themselves fall,
fall to be united, brought together for eternity.
Forever is the word, but they never said it out loud.

All Of Their Love

2006-10-27T06:29:00.000-07:00

People around our age must have had some experience or atleast some vague connection with the mysterious word called "Love". My trysts with the word have been extensively covered in my old post "All Of My Love". My friends too have, in their time, had their share of encounters of the third kind with the members of the opposite sex, to a fair or sometimes seemingly unfair extent. Ofcourse kicking it all off was K in 9th standard, all of 14 years, persuing his first fair dame (who happened to be not so fair .. and not much of a dame either) , with with him making the first move in the form of a suggestive phrase in her scrap book. The juvinile love story which lasted a whole of 8 months was one of the most passionate and turbid love stories that I have personally witnessed. It involved the regulation hours and hours on the phone, kisses behind scrubs near busy intersections, secret love letters being passed and ofcourse repercussions like being beat by the belt and a few attempts at suicide(failed ofcourse). In the end the gal has been happily married to a "Dufai machan" for the last few years. K has inturn had his (unfair) share of lovers through the years. Most of them were nothing spectacular or worth mentioning (except one who has become a compere on a local channel). Finally the dude is settled in Hyderabad with a steady girl friend he intends to marry and a steady job (more important) I hope he intends to keep.

J, too has an interesting story to tell. He was smitten too, way back though, in 10th and the gal was three years younger, but promising to become a beauty in her time. That affair, mostly quite and unspectacular lasted too a mere few months. The time factor must have been short, but the intensity of love and its impacts are better manifested in this episode. Jonathan apart from becoming quite wary of the opposite sex became something of a small "viraha kaamukan", which was sort of good for him, because that has given rise to one of the rock ballads by Damnage in the form of "Swatchamaya". The words are hard felt ones folks, so when the song is finally released, listen carefully to those lyrics. Here too the girl in question is on her way in life, happily married last month. Everyone else in my gang has had his share of love; S, Aj, V, D, P. And all of them have their share of melodrama and weird factor.

Now falling in love is something, but doing something about it is completely different. None of the above mentioned affairs have got anything to do with my college or college mates. And infact the only thing that can even be classified as even mildly romantic that ever happened on campus, in my opinion, was a senior gal in one of the epic affairs of her batch, caressed the cheek of her lover and ran away (movie style) in the bus bay in full view of about a 500 students waiting for the bus to leave. Back to the point. So in the matter of doing something about the feelings for a human being of the opposite sex, to the fore comes, Aneesh, one of distant members of our biker gang. Now Aneesh was a typical biker guy. He was rash(both riding and otherwise), quite stupid about the world and impractical (ofcourse). What he did was an "Alaypayuthe" remake in Malayalam, with them eloping to some distant, out of state temple and getting married. He was all of 21 (I think) when they went out and did this (I think that gal must have been younger). The status of the movie/serial now is something like the dude is jobless/futureless, but it might get sorted out in the end, since his dad is into a prosperous business and her family is as it turns out, is completely loaded.

Next in line comes the shocker, personally. Joji, mentioned in the previous posts (*refer "State bank of Kannamoola "), had been in love several times since I have met him 4 years back. But since his breakup with his american galfriend, he had gone back to his boyhood love from St Mary's. Now I was in no way in close association with the buildup of this affair, but was vaguely aware of it (since he was on the phone with her all the time on his 'neelapallu' headset and n70 handset). All was well and normal when I had left Joji and my friends under his financial care. But one fine day a hysterical J calls me up and gives me the news that Joji had now become Mr & Mrs Joji. He used the term "Filmy style", describing the event wherein Joji(a christian) went to the gals (a muslim) house, in an open Gypsy (in the rain if you were wondering) and called her out (i am definitely sure some juicy filmy lines were used, knowing joji), and she came out with her "petti and kidakka". The couple went into hiding for 20 odd days, while hired thugs and family thugs roamed the city searching for them. The story ends happily though (somewhat), with the families consenting to the holy matrimony and they living toghether in the wholly WiFi'ied three storeyed Baker house. This was the gist of things that have happened in our gang till now. So the strength of the gang has been diminished considerably , losing Joji's(*Mr&Mrs) patronage. What would happen to those ponmudi trips now, no one knows....

P.S: I have just recieved word that JJ's Spectacular story is too in the making with the gals veetukar now in on the story and turning villians. At the latest report, JJ was cutting up his hand with a blade and her name.....

Off Road

2006-10-21T21:05:00.000-07:00

So my training has gone onto the specialised phases with C# and next ADO.NET. But the classes have turned interesting with the addition of the LAN aspect of the whole thing, as in the introduction of Counter-Strike onto it. Well actually the gaming can't be classified as nail bitingly exciting, but it helps to pass time while the others play solitaire (which i discovered to be pretty good), or make passes at the sir's teaching(the north indians are unbelievably noisy and nasty towards the trainers).

Training for the last two days of the week were scheduled at Electronics city and this was the first chance for me to sample the Hosur road traffic and i jumped at it..

We started out at 7:30, early, to beat the traffic on the 12 km stretch from our house to EC. The first part was normal city heavy traffic with stops at the couple of traffic intersections stretching onto 5 minutes each. Finally we took the right turn onto hosur road and it went good for a little while, and suddenly it was all over. There just was'nt any road in front of us. Just miles and miles of vehicles filling every inch of the 4 lane roads ahead of us reaching upto to the horizon. Then we saw the daredevil riders on their daredevil rides (ranging from luna mopeds, through boxers and discovers to the kzmas jump off the road and go off road style, and I could not resist the temptation and I followed suit. Now, I was in full riding gear, with a jacket and helmet, and I did not give a damn about the thick cloud of dust we were entering. But poor Maakri who was sitting behind me had to bear the full brunt of it without a helmet. We were racing through mud road, jumping over rough bumps, scraping in between metal screens and just managing to stay upright on two tyres. We came pretty close a few times and maakri was obviously a bit shaken. Then we had to climb a almost vertical cut onto the main road since we found that the off road path had taken us onto a big gap where a culvert was being built. But it was somehow managed.

We finally reached EC uninjured and I understood why Wipro enforced a strict helmet rule. Its said hosur road sees above 25 accidents a day.....

No wonder most people opt the 2 hour bus ride to this..
But hard riders dont mind aye??? ..
lets see which one i turn out to be...

Thripparap

2006-10-07T02:12:00.000-07:00

Due to demand from Sankar and others I have decided to upload the pics from the thripparap trip,( sitting in training class now :(.. )

Getting back on my bike after a month was unbelievable.
Getting back to friends was too.....

Here goes

left to right > Vaal, Suni, Me, Sankar, Jonathan, Ajmal, Podiyan, Nganaseelan

The falls... the force was mind and body blowing :D

Jonathan with the belt buckle behind him and sunglasses behind his head
Sankar as straight as ever.

Life Part II

2006-08-30T03:55:00.000-07:00

So my life has moved on from a the depths of a small town like trivandrum and reached a metropolitian one, as in the case now, Bangalore.
So new life implies new everything (which looks bad on paper I know), and the new players as of now are us 8 guys from my company crashing into our apartment, freshly painted and immaculately leased out to us. Finding the corporate office was not that easy, with us drawing blank stares on each enquiry about the provided address of the office, which said Doddakennelli, Sarjapur road. We ended up in the vicinity of Sarjapur road with the help of certain mallu induviduals on the road and a lot of manipulation with google earth (registered trademark). Luckily for us a passing mini bus decided to take us on and drop us off right in front of the office. The office turned out to be in the middle of nowhere with a classy mess outside, with people in ties eating out of banana leaves (real classy) and sitting on upturned buckets on the road side.

Inside was another story, with guards inspecting under each car entering the compound with mirrors and the whole campus protected with electrified fences. Perhaps all the precaution are due to the fact that Premji has his personal office in that campus. The initiation/joining formalities went smoothly, except for the slight bumps in the road around midday due to a completely vegetarian lunch menu. Atleast it was free.

Next run saw us on the search for a new home to house us 8 guys, with minimum conditions of 4 per bathroom and Rs 1500 per month. The search lead us through various dark alleys of the madiwala/koramangala region with both our tongues and legs tiring. In the end luck foudn its way into our search and we were presented with a proposal of a house for rent with 2 bedrooms/bathrooms and hall. It turned out to be a kind of deluxe mini apartment setup with meticulously clean compound and corridors and tiled rooms. The lease agreement when finally signed by 4 of us stated what all we were supposed/not supposed to do, the number of geysers/cupboards/tube lights/curtain rods (he did not include the hangers, I wonder why).

The next few weeks were spent at an external training center with the trainers there trying to teach us, imbeciles, the basics of programming and us trying our bests to frag each other to hell in counterstrike. And ofcourse it all paid of for me with me failing to clear either of the two tests given after the first phase training. Training continues onto the next phase with much more complex programming and database concepts. (I have very little hope of clearing any of the upcoming tests)

This weekend saw me taking a break from bangalore life and heading back to the cocoon of comfort, i.e Trivandrum. Coming back brought back waves of nostalgia, seeing the red KSRTC buses and the KL registration vehicles plying the roads ever so meekly (after blore road devils, kerala riders seem like timid rabbits). I got back on my purple machine as soon as possibe, and the response surprised me after the one month break. Another thing that surprised was the power of my sound system at home, which I had never given much credit and which now seemed to be heaven after listening to music on laptop speakers for a month. Tradition was continued with us riders going to Triparapp Falls and getting beat up water and jonathan injuring his next under the impact of the falling water. Dhwani was good, but we missed out on the Bombay Vikings concert, which was a little disappointing.

Now I am filled with despair, thinking about going back to Bangalore, leaving the life I knew, the friends I love. I did not realise how much i missed everything untill I came back :( . Anyways... maybe it might get better once we get our first salaries. Any shopping partners ready...??

Days of Our Lives... XPLOCIVZ

2006-08-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

Life goes on...

2006-08-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

It was four years back that I had the same feeling as I am having now, getting ready for the new life that awaits me. Back then I had almost all postive things to look forward to, with a great college promising lots of fun and almost all my friends right here in tvm. This time life is taking me to a new city, a new life, new almost everything.

Bangalore is where everything is gonna be going down from. Wipro is going to be my second home, replacing the comforting CET. And as I am going through the preparations for this shift everything is unsure.

All the goodbyes are over. A booze party at jojy's house, lunch at mag's place with the rest of the college gang and both gangs have been pacified and all the goodbyes over. Now I cant help but be insecure about my position. Who are going to be my new friends. I have no one to take care of me like mag did for me till now. :D

Rest will be put up as soon as everything else happens.
Sad to leave everything I know and love.

Friendship day

2006-08-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Part 1 : 0100 - 1530 hrs

So we had planned on going to padmanabhapuram palace this friendship day and even though it seemed that the attendence of this program was looking a bit weak, we decided to go forward as planned what ever happened. That decision left us with 4 people to make the trip since most of the others were held up due to various reasons (vishnu and nganaseelan were not back from ekm interview; jojy and jonathan were drunk in bed, JJ was drunk and asleep in the bathroom and such other regular occurances). Hence we started out on our little TN registration outing. We reached the palace wih only the normal misdirection by a bystander malayalee and reached there in time (late only by about 1-2 hrs as expected). The palace in itself was magnificent, and we were all spellbound. The furniture and most of the roof and various decorations were done in teak/mahogany/other valuable timber, and most of the flower designs were of different patterns( 64 flowers on a roof each of a different design and so on). We also came across a couple of attractive female co-tourists which lightened up our visit a little more. We were almost as impressed with the natural air-conditioning as with these intrusions of the female kind. Vaal (deepu) and me were finding everything interesting and we found a civil engineering side to each of the things being examined. Sankar being an electronics graduate found everything interesting and found a "manichithrathazhu" side to it and suceeded in getting us bored with his dilapated renditions of the songs from the movie and some very boring dance steps from the same, which garnered us some fleeting attention from the guides present there. After seeing about a fourth of the entire complex( as the remaining three fourths were no entry zones) we came out completely disoriented and from the direction we least expected us to come out from. Then we moved on to the archeological museum adjoining the palace and found ourselves faced with statues of deities ranging from the 10 A.D to 18 A.D. We decided that we were too young to remember them back in those times anyway and decided to move on to the armoury section, since as Sankar stated, vaal was eager to meet those of his kind. The swords, guns, spears were interesting, and so was the body cast which we pondered upon on getting Sankar one. After getting out the ride back was completely normal and we headed back exchanging rides and bikes among all four of us.

Part 2 : 1530 - 2000 hrs

As we were pulling up into Ajmals place to rest after the long ride we got a call from Jojy asking us to join him immediately at his house. This completely dashed our hopes of getting in a short rest between the long ride and the routine shangumugham ride and we headed out to Jojy's house. But we had to catch them later on their way to the beach after we found the house empty. So Jojy had fixed up his gypsy with a new look and new retracting DVD player( fast and furious style). JJ was in his new Esteem bought with the money selling the NSR Honda. The beach ride too was pretty routine with jojy parking after a couple of 180 degree spins in his gypsy and leaving all the people there with open jaws. That meant a lot of open jaws, especially jaws which did not drop so easily. This was because the beach was the venue for a bike modification contest and the area was filled with guys who are used to seeing stunts performed, but always on bikes. Later a modified lancer challenged jojy's ride with a couple of 180 spins and 360 scrambles and a very impressive sideways drift on a curve. Jojy kept his pride with more of his 180 spins and power slides. We were later particularly impressed by rojan chettan performing the same spin on a Maruthi 800. The rest of the 5 hours we spent on the beach were utterly boring, tiring, scorchting and dehydrating, leaving us with little option but a ride to buhari to fill ourselves with parota and mutton curry, ofcourse on Jojy's tab.

Part 3 : 2000- 0030 hrs

Everyone of us were stretched to the limits of endurance and all this was showing, me and vaal the long ride, JJ and jojy the drunken sleep in the bedroom/bathroom, the long stay on the hot beach. So we decided to cool off and take it slow back to jojy's house. And we almost pulled it off. Almost.

Half a kilometer away from jojy's house a 100 cc bike over took us and I knew it at that instant that Jojy wouldnt let it go. And he paid the price. As he did a 90 degree handbrake slide into his sidelane from the main road, the 100 cc guy was pasted onto the sides of the gypsy and cleanly scooped up into the sidelane. Luckily the guy was not too hurt, with only a few cuts and bruises. Here is where everything went wrong. Gates were flug open and the neighbours started rushing out screaming and swearing everyone. They siezed everyone and the situation suddenly turned bad. To cut a long and exciting story short, me and shanavas escaped capture by the police and 3 of us were taken to the station along with both the cars and the bike which starred in the stupid accident. And luckily the day ended at last with the 3 being released and only the vehicles held for the night, on the last report over a very busy cellphone of mine for the last 3 hrs....

Part 4 : 0500- to be seen

This is after a 3 hour sleep as it is 1:15 am already and I have to go to kottayam tomorrow to drop Sankar off for his admission there at a college in Pala for his MSc.... Thats another story .. thats another day .. adios.

Ponmudi Trip

2006-07-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

So, it had been almost a week since we had our makki trip and we were weary of a sunday to be just spent on a trip to shanghumugham at night. And after a little confusion over whether to go or not because of the lack of LPG to fill Jojy's car, we finally decided to go for it, with or without the gas. The decision was tested early with the gas running out and we having to pop the hood in the middle of the road and get the car into running condition.

Anyway, we filled petrol, since no gas was available on sunday and started out our trip with only 4 guys, which has now become rare in our gang. Once we got there we were greeted with a wonderful day and absolutely beautiful scenery. We decided to try and climb the next hill the hard way, finding our way through the overgrown steep side, even though we had santhosh ichayan, who wasnt so confident. The climb was exciting, hike style, with us having to make our own paths through the grass and rocks. We were trying to psyche each other out with stories of snakes and pointing to "potta kenars". And after upteen rest breaks we finally made it to the top of the mountain, only to be met by extremely "chorry appooppans" gang at top. So we had to cut down our stay at the top and climb back down, the easy way.

Next since we had no water, we decided to quench our thirst with what ever liquid we could get our hands on. And we were not dissapointed that, the particular liquid that we got our hands on happened to be a couple of bottles of chilled beer. So after a thoroughly enjoyable session at the table with a round of beer and couple of plates of green peas later, we were ready to come back down the hill roads in our gypsy. On route, plumbing problems forced us to take a few stops ( beer obviously made us all a little too hydrated!!) , followed by some very theatrical performances by both jonathan and jojy on the roads with both of them threatening suicides in one form or the other.

The rest of the ride was standard issue kind. Ofcourse the cops were conducting routine checks on the roads, and we ofcourse found ourselves not in the mood for wasting time with them, hence ran through the road block. We finally reached back, just in time before the darkness really set in, because the gypsy lacked head lights along with its horn (which was solved by everyone screaming at the top of their lungs before taking any hairpin turns).

The picture oddessy follows..

The ponmudi gang.. Jojy, Me, Jonathan, Santhosh Ichayan

My view

2006-07-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

The hill we climbed.. its bigger that it looks!!

The proof... me completely winded..

Jonathan upto his usual stuff...

2006-07-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

Jonathan jumping off a rock.

Holding the rock up

Me and Santhosh Ichayan

The Gypsy..

State Bank Of Kannamoola : Pictures

2006-07-24T01:57:00.000-07:00

Rajan and his Karizma

Lower part of makki

Me on my beautiful bike :D

2006-07-24T01:54:00.000-07:00

Vallam Kali..

Me, Joji (RG), Sankar

The bikes...

Through the forest...

2006-07-24T01:35:00.000-07:00

The whole gang at Makki

The whole gang at Kowdiar

The fun...

State bank of Kannamoola

2006-07-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

So officially everything is over for me and hence I should start the hibernation period till the actual date of joining for wipro arrives. That would have normally meant sitting at home trying to fix up as many self imposed tasks/programming classes (java is the fave) like most others. But that would have completely spoiled the chances I would have had to blog about any of the recent events.

After the Blore/Mumbai trip, I delved straight into the world of Joji (RG) and his 'spend money and get a gang going' routine. What the statement meant is roughly this : My gang usually has many and more members ready for any kind of adventure/sleep over/biking trips/ boozing that can (reasonably) possibly be arranged. So RG, who had shipped off to the US a couple of years back and came back recently a bored soul, has come to our rescue with solutions to all of those incomplete dreams. The solution came mainly in the form of plain cash. Hence the title "State Bank of Kannamoola". He provides the means (cash, a car and the place to crash in) for all of those endeavours. So we are now accustomed to tearing through traffic in a military edition powered up gypsy at 90 kmph at rush hour, tires screaming on tight corners and where there is enough sand on the track a complete 180 degree spin using the hand brake.

So the trips are fairly normal, with daily Shanghumugham rides, either in his jeep or on our bikes with petrol partially RG sponsored. Ofcourse the smokes are completely sponsored by RG with his choice varying from scissors to 555 and marlboros (smoking is the pretext we use for any ride may it be ponmudi, kovalam, veli, akkulam or shanghumugham ; but a couple of us like me dont smoke). The rides starts or ends at RG's house, which in itself deserves a bit of commentry.

The house in itself is a work of art (I think), being the first Baker desgined home. It is by far the most complicated design that I have ever seen and it is also one of the most spacious ones. The beauty of it lies in the fact that it has all been construct in a mere 4-5 cents of land. Without getting into detailed explanations, the house is built aroung a single spiral stair case at various levels, with 5 bedrooms, two huge halls, and many bathrooms and other rooms. What makes the house more interesting is in infact the hardware sprewn all around. You cant take a step without the fear of threading over infinite number of wires of the 4-5 mac systems and a couple of Intel-D windows ones, several external hdds of capacities varying from 128 MB sticks to 350 GB external ones, and the various devices needed for complete bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity ( I dont know the details, and I am not mentioning the couple of laptops lying around with 80 GB external hdds). So this is the setting for night out booze parties, which I can only give mostly second hand descriptions since I slept quite early at about 2 am and I dont drink. But the gist of things is like : full volume swearing, mock fights, lots of banging around stuff and running about the house a lot. The external events which I missed included being chased by the police who followed them home, JB skidding the bike to a stand and taking off on foot into the compound and jumping over wall and hiding. Much more interesting was the reported customary drunk outing into the neighbouring cemetary late at night ( maybe early morning), and talking to each other and begging forgiveness of the dead dudes for realising too late they were standing on their graves. The scene alledgely involved JJ crying and hugging the cross and wailing to the dead dude for his forgiveness.

Today was more sane with a ride to the beach all on bikes. The ride was slow due to popular demand of the public and the beach was full. What was interesting was an array of modified and high end bikes parked on the beachfront which usually restricted to maximum 10, today totalled to about 50-70 with over a 100 bike freaks gathered around in various groups in the vicinity. (sadly not even one chick was sighted in a mile radius) . Leaving the beach was expected to be exciting since the abundance of bikers of various calibres hightened the posibilities of race taking place. And we were not disappointed for even a minute and as soon as the crowds were passed, a pulsar 180 with blinking flourenscent lights fitted to the bottom raced pass us almost sneering. I saw the Karizma of GJ and Rx100 of bipu come together in front of my p180 and confer for a second, give a slight movie style nod. This perpetrated a quick shifting down of gears from the front two bikes, followed by the same action by me and the sudden burst of pure acceleration and the accompanying booming sound. All three of us easily touched 100 and took the first 90 degree curve slipping and sliding about, already dissipating the challenger on the curve. The straight stretch was pure drag style with me gaining on the kzma. GJ slowed but the challeger x, was still trying to catch up. So me and bipu never let go of our throttle for a second after that. The next 90 turn was taken on full slide of the back tyre after each down shift and during the sudden acceleration afterwards. The next one was excitingly similar to the Rossi-Melandri rivalry we had seen on MotoGP the same evening with the curve taken extreme angle and between two cars taking the same curve all at atleast 70 and accelerating. After a 120 kmph straight stretch and full speed taking of the next curve there was not even a sign of x and we slowed down as soon as we reached the chaka stretch. Everyone was pumped, adrenaline rushing through our viens and everyone was screaming. Though JJ missed his CBZ and NSR400, everyone was satified. Next week the plan is the muster up all the bikes including the NSR and the gypsy.

Next ride> tuesday trip to makki > distance about 55 kms > route ponmudi.. fun/thrill factor=10/10!!!

Life Lessons

2006-07-05T19:19:00.000-07:00

A few days back I was reading Silverine's post about a self proclaimed embarassing confession of hers. The confession turned out to be that she was indeed a Himesh Reshammiya (HR) fan. I for one had never given the dude any attention and hindi songs were never a favorite in my circles, with only an occasional piece of art like 'bulla ki' or 'woh lamhe' breaking into our circle. All this changed last weekend with my little trip to Bangalore and Mumbai. The consequences were indeed dramatical.

So, me being selected by Wipro Technologies, had been presented with a red two paged medical checkup card along with some other documents sent by the company to our CGPU. No one had given it much of a thought, automatically assuming that we need not move a finger in that direction unless the company were to instruct us specifically about the process to be adopted to complete that dangerous looking card. Luckily some of our off-campus fresher colleagues knew better and took it upon themselves to enquire about the case, and after according to what they say 20-30 tries they got through to the concerned person and found out that the medical test indeed had a last date which was infact dangerously close. The word was spread and in turn evoked a spur of interest from fellow CETians resulting in an extension of the dates thankfully for another week. That brought me to the decision to club my medical test with a visit to Mumbai that my cousin Dina has been inviting me and another of my cousins Hari to.

The volvo ride to Bangalore was fairly uneventful, with me locking eyes intermittently with a brown eyed chick sitting across me being the only timepass that I could find. The ride also signalled the beginning of the movie fest that I was to be exposed to for the rest of the trip (here it was a funny malayalam flick starring Mukesh). Getting to Bangalore, I got the first taste of what was in store for me from an innocent looking auto driver. Since my cousin was not going to be free untill afternoon he talked with this auto driver dude and set me up for a 'Malayali' lodge about Rs 150 and his auto charge Rs 10. He also assured me that the Ranbaxy institute, where I was to have my medical test was just walking distance from there. As you can all imagine everything changed when we actually got there, with the rent turning out to be Rs 350 (and I needed the room for only a few hours) and the auto driver being very generous in asking "maybe 150-200 thannal mathi" for taking me there- about 200 mts from where we started. But I got over this initial jerk to the ride, thinking I should have known better than to trust my cousin in setting things up. After freshening up I started out on the "Walkable" distance to the Ranbaxy institute. So after certain instances involving a mixture of broken syllabels and sentences in malayalam, hindi and english, I got a general drift and confidently walked myself to the City Market. Here the bus conductors and other officials completely succeed in not helping me by producing non-commital sounds or shrugs or both. My luck got a break with a by stander explaining to me in surprisingly good english that I was to take the 111 bus. So I hopefully asked him whether the bus ride was necessary or whether I could make the "Walkable" distance by foot if I had enough time. He laughed and urged me on to a coming bus. The ride, as you can all guess took about half an hour, with my luck showing again with me finding malayali co-passengers showing me the remaining way to the institute.

After this it was a taxing effort on my navigational skills to get back to the point where I boarded the bus, because unlike Trivandrum, Kollam or Calicut etc, where one could quite easily find ones way, Bangalore was, like we learned in Town Planning classes, was roughly in the form of concentric circles. Anyway surprisingly without much effort I got back to the market, picked up my cousin and got back to my room unscathed. There ended the Bangalore story because the very same day at 3 pm we boarded a bus to Mumbai.

It is here that the major change in me took place. Like I have mentioned earlier I barely knew the guy named Himesh Reshammiya and just barely could recognise his hit songs. But the bus management I think took it upon themselves to change anyone who boarded their buses into a fan of HR by continously bombarding us with his songs every second that a movie was not playing. Understandably the tunes were etched into my newly found mushy conciousness. Another notable change was the one concerning my opinion of hindi movies, especially comedies. I could never stand hindi comedies and I had always stayed promptly away from them. But alas this time I could not run away and was forced to watch Salman Khan in "Maine Pyar Kyo Kiya". But I got over my initial skeptisism and found myself enjoying the obviously lame "challu" jokes and found the whole experience very much to my liking. They also showed flicks like Taxi 9211 and Rang De Basanti (which I never liked inspite of all the hype). The Mumbai stay was in itself unmemorable with us catching the peak of the rain action there, confining us to either a apartment room or to the confines of a rickety maruti800, except for a couple of visits to a Vashi Mall (Chicks were cool and they returned stares!!.. that was for the guys reading this)

The return trip was continous travel, with just one hour gap between connecting buses from Mumbai to Bangalore and Bangalore to Trivandrum. So the movie and HR fest continued with the same HR vcd playing or flicks like "Gangster" (beautifully taken, and lovely heroine), "36 China town" (which I enjoyed immensely) and completely forgettable "Pyare Mohan". In the end I stepped out onto homeground soil a changed man. Now hindi movies have a chance to be good ( my list includes now > Kaante, Dil chahta hai, 36 china and gangster), inspite of completely stupid movies like "Krishh" . AND I can stop myself from humming "Jhalak Dikhlajaaaaaaaaaaa, aaajja ajjja ajjja aaaaajaaa" all the time !!!!!

Geared up

2006-06-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

After three months. Even though the exams are not over yet, this has started to creep into everyone's mind, and beginning to take hold as the key phrase in every conversation in the days to come. Between those boring battles with estimations and quantity surveying and what not, the dreams about the future find its way into the combined psyche and conversation of the group during the group study scene. The books moved aside, neatly stacked to one side, the players lay down on their elbows and begin their journey, into the near future.

So where does this future take them?

Almost always it involves the C word : Chennai. That is because in every group there happens to be atleast one of the 200 odd students placed into CTS. They are apprehensive about the heat of chennai, but still excited about the relaxed alledgely relaxed environment of CTS. Who is going to stay with whom, who are incompatible, who are certainly compatible, starting on the right foot, avoiding a bad situation, deciding how your future days are going to be spent, no angle left unanalysed and or seriously debated upon. So the dreams come true > Mid August.

Then comes the not so populated yet significant M; Mysore. Thats probably where the Infy guys are going to be placed. There too similar, but simpler discussions and dreaming take place. The doubts and trepidations are simpler here due to the diminished population and somewhat lack of any choice in the matter of future colleagues and flatmates. And dreams come true > Mid July

Then comes the others like me and anjana in Wipro > with the least idea where our futures are going to take us. Bangalore is the dream, and a 3 month certainity. But Cochin might be where we might get stuck at. Even so, the 3 month training in Bangalore is exciting enough a prospect to keep us on our toes. Choice of room mates severely restricted with Nistelrooy being the only known compatriot for me as of now. Dreams come true > Definitely after Oct :(

The remaining guys, sprewn out in companies like Accenture ( dates in july i think), IBM ( after oct :)) ), MBT, USTech, Suntech , begin their journey with similar doubts and uncertainities about people, places and the dates. Then comes the Tech guys; the L&T , Shobha, Simplex, Condor and Truine. Exciting jobs, exciting field work. God I might miss out a lot. Dreams come true > From july

So what all do you buy, what all do you stock. None of us day schis have an idea. What do we do with all the money. That, I dont think will be a problem!!

Backlog

2006-05-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

Everyone around me is reeling in the anti climax of the end of college life. Project presentation had everyone at the end of their nerves, but most of us came out of it strong and moderately satisfied. Punjabi's and Anugeetha's batches now have their work cut out for them, but the rest of us can breathe easy for a while.

That brings me to the problem that I am now facing. The problem of filling in the vacuum, for the next few days, before the final (hopefully) university exams of my college life. It is actually good now. Everyone has kept apart thier differences and are trying to get along with everyone as best as they can. Everyone has realised it is finally over, after three farewells and a tear filled civil nite. Everyone is suddenly feeling the need to break into tears at every occasion that presents itself.

Discussions about the life we are getting into is commonplace. Long talks, short thoughts, it's all there. I feel the need to shed all the worries that adhered to me during my college life and present a clean slate to the life that awaits me now. I have almost a sure feeling that I'd love my life, and fit in well into a workaholic environment. That reminds me I have to find something to keep me completely occupied for a few days and I might as well give Avid a try, and come out with some well edited video for a change.

Hmm.. maybe I should take one day at a time till the universities are over...

The Complete Circle

2006-04-08T11:47:00.000-07:00

Life has a way of coming back to the point where it all started. My life is at one of those points, where when I look I see everything I knew for a life to be over and a new world ahead of me. A world where nothing is certain and the possibilities are unending.

The time has come finally to review my life as I know it today. My college life. It is not an easy task, and everyone facing the same situation knows that. We have been dreading this point in our lives when we would have to say goodbye to our college lives. Maybe most of us have started realising this; that the end has finally come. There are no more climaxes left. The time has come for quite comtemplation, if we are ready for it and if we really want it.

I came into college with a friend, a close one for that matter and it was not as tough as it could have been. I did not have a new city to deal with, no new languages to master and not many adjustments to make to deal with almost the same kind of people I had been dealing with for the entire span of my school life. College started off as well as I could have hoped for, cool guys, cool gals and everything was right. But then life could not be that perfect for long and it definitely did not stay perfect. Infact it came crashing down on me and my memories of first year are not that fond either. The good points that I do remember is that I used to have a friend back then that I could tell everything and I could almost completely understand.

The next semester ushered in waves of new hope as I was starting to adjust to my condition of solitude and seemingly unending misery. The scenes that flood my mind are only of those lonely third hours that I used to cut everyday to have my lunch early before that rush to save me the dread of having lunch alone during the peak hour. It also left me my lunch hours mostly free to socialise :). Nothing worthwhile actually happened during that sem in college except for me getting my first supplis.

S4 was brighter and it was what I consider as the point of my recovery of sorts into what ever I am today. It was almost mid way into my college life but it never seemed to be so. Then came one of the most important events of my college life. Dhwani in CET always brings bad memories when it comes to personal emotions. The first one was during the initial crash and it did not help that I had to spend 3 complete days in college alone. The second one was right in the middle of my slowly deteriorating friendship with Devika, and actually helped the situation by bringing the friendship to a decisive point; the end. So I managed to spend my college life without much emotional inflow into my system, other than a little from Ashwina. She was quite supportive as I recall and I was completely grateful to her. So in short I only had my biker gang friends outside college.

S5 and further, is another chapter in my life, and the current one. Mag and me became the best of pals after the S5 IV and that us helped us both deal with our college lives better. I'd have to say I am happy with my life. We had an S5 and S7 tour. It was both fun and both of them had their share of after tour drama. 5 saw the fight between me and Nasib. 7 brought the split in civil to the surface. My life has been balanced in the last few sems. I've got two good friends I trust and treasure. Mag, who has stuck with me through everything and understands me perfectly. And Meenu who does not need much effort to understand me. My group is strong and we have a strong urge to have fun on what ever situations possible. There has been a constant line of movies and trips nearby.

There is still some more college life left in us. I hope to see them to the end and emerge out of the ashes strong, and a new man. Its been a pleasure.

School Day

2006-04-02T06:54:00.000-07:00

It was the last day of the demo week. We civilians did not think it was time to quit. And we did not. Even though it was sports day we did our demo and even got invited to the march past by the princi .. and we got to salute him .. ( and see the flag fail to open )..

2006-04-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

Ikru - I B
Kid of the day
He knew all his Rhymes..

2006-04-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

Mag, Angjana (thats the uniform of her Italian school of germany), Nisha (kintergarten), Lechmi, Malu and Nithu..

2006-04-02T06:39:00.000-07:00

Muthapa... So kiddy..

2006-04-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Me, Mag, Hari and Malu..

2006-04-02T06:36:00.001-07:00

Having a drink from the water bottle..

2006-04-02T06:36:00.000-07:00

Mutha, Lekshmi and Anjana..

2006-04-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

School pillerru..

2006-04-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

The school gals..

Gunda Day

2006-03-30T06:56:00.000-08:00

It was a calm and quite afternoon at College of Engineering Trivandrum. The wind was blowing and the leaves were floating about in the beautiful spring atmosphere. The pristine environment and the sweet smell of nature was forgotten instantly, and fear struck every mind there suddenly with the onset of a single cry, a war cry, terrible, from the depths of the civil department. Out came bursting onto the battleground the gundas of the day, fearsome with their headbands, 'Veethuli' sideburns, firearms and knifes.

It was Gunda day of the Demo Week of CET. And it was beginning it a much better way than everyone had expected. The pics speak for themselves.

2006-03-30T06:53:00.000-08:00

Civil Gunda gals

The tele gundas..

Aana chariyunnilla..

2006-03-30T06:52:00.000-08:00

Me and Madz fighting gunda style..

2006-03-30T06:49:00.000-08:00

MHites..

Dasan and Meenu

The whole civil gundas

Malu with her gulam thingy..

2006-03-30T06:47:00.000-08:00

Crude Madhavan

Muthappa..

The MH gundas

Me and Roshan Trying to Gunda'ise Madz

Cross Dressing Day

2006-03-29T06:09:00.000-08:00

It was the third day of the demo week and things were in sombre mood because two final years were in an accident today and many branches were showing their support by not demo'ing.. anyway .. we did have a little fun.. ( the dudes broke their legs up a lot.. so we thought it was ok)

2006-03-29T06:07:00.000-08:00

Thats Kitu of mech .. the ladies were in awe of his perfect structure and belly..

2006-03-29T06:03:00.000-08:00

Thats AP .. leading the way .. Always on the forefront.. what would we do without him!!

Muthappa wasnt much behind.. There he is .. banged up .. and the culprit with him.. Kashmalan kulu..

The wannabe Dudes of the day... Bugs, Mag, Malu, chala and nisha..

Sam of Mech.. Such A Mandan S.A.M .. lookin gorgeous..

2006-03-29T05:58:00.000-08:00

Starting off the Cross Dressing Day .. Sreeju, Manmohan, Roshan, Hari, Lekshmi..

That was Dasappan.. but really.. he really knew how to wear a saree.. and more importantly run when the HOD came while wearing the saree...

The Ladies and Gents of the day leading the way..

The whole gang...
Me on the left most.. but .. I have to say i did not get time to dress up .. soo sad..

Pandi Day

2006-03-28T09:10:00.000-08:00

Today was the pandi day of Demo week..
The pics speak for themselves..

2006-03-28T09:09:00.000-08:00

The pandi ladies of civil..

2006-03-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

The Three greats of the day
AP muthappa and Vishnu pandi

2006-03-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

Well thats gotta be the pandiest you can get..
Anjana and Suneetha chechi

2006-03-28T09:05:00.000-08:00

Thats sanish.. the official pandi deadbody..
He would be placed on the front bench of every class we went and they the mass mourning would start..

2006-03-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

Enroute the first year classes...

2006-03-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

The uproar in the junior classes..

2006-03-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

The girl ducked just in time.. Ap was harrassing her..

2006-03-28T08:58:00.001-08:00

100 % original... The genuine 1970 model ambassador vandi..
Even the underwear is genuine..

2006-03-28T08:58:00.000-08:00

Simply Pandis...!!

2006-03-28T08:57:00.000-08:00

Well thats me..
Couldnt do better.

2006-03-28T08:56:00.000-08:00

MHites.. atleast they remembered the meesha part..!