Much water has flown under the bridge since the last post I made here, and much of my writing skills have flown along too, which is why I decided to start with plagiarising from Karram’s post.

I think I mite have changed things too… the life in Bangalore, family and friends, the fun times seem an almost distant memory now.  D would say “What life in Bangalore! you had no life in Bangalore, except your work life!”. D would be right, and so I guess change does bring in some niceties too.

Before any of the thousands of readers of this space (a one too many in that figure) start wondering where this rambling is going,  well I just moved to Newbury, Berkshire. For those of you who flunked regular on geography, tis a small hamlet about 50 miles from London, polishing itself up a bit these days and trying to pass for a town. Life here so far, is well, boring… the way D puts it, now that i’ve left my hectic schedules in Bangalore behind, I probably do no know what I should do with all the spare time.

Well, D isn’t here yet, and thats a shame, cos this place seems inviting for a nice walk or two, and we do love to walk. So I guess, for now, i’ll try and make a quick dive down that bridge, and check if there’s some splinters that can be retrieved…

Someone cursed me yesterday! The person who cursed me, had plenty of reason to do so, cos i’d done or said somethings that weren’t very kind. In my only defence, I was being pretty honest… not a very good defense though, since things were so muddled in my head, that everything that spilled out must have been vague.

Anyway, the curse had an immediate effect, and in the course of a couple of hours the foll. things happened:

1. On the volleyball court, one of the spikers, in the grip of a parallax error spiked my fingers instead of the ball, leaving two swollen fingers and a badly jarred elbow.

2. At work, one of our IBM servers crashed… under the influence of Murphy of course, just one day prior to a critical delivery.

3. On my way home, the rubber catch around my car’s stick shift broke off.

4. Got home pretty tired and beat, only to realise that I’d missed paying the electricity bill, and the electricity board had decided to snap my connection and plunge me into greater darkness.  

5. And to top it all, my cellphone’s display conked off.

Well, suffice to say that its been a day that I will not be singing epilogues about for any time to come.

ps. Actually, its pretty mean to think of all the above to be a result of C’s curses… xept, if it were really that, it would be very typical of C, in that, none of these things hurt me in any significant way. Almost like a few ant bites

Some superheroes i’ll always remain a big fan of:

Sabu – For those of you who remember Chacha Chowdhary’s sidekick, each time this goliath lost his temper, a volcano would erupt on Jupiter. How cool is that!

Cohen the Barbarian – As barbaric as his hollywood alter-ego, but also loaded with sarcasm, thanks to Prachett’s genius. Now, a barbarian who can kill with sarcasm is a true menace.

Jayan – What? Don’t agree that he was a superhero? All I can say is “pathu-iruvadu truck tyresum, oru valiya parambum, naalu pottu-kinarum kittiyurengil, carommmsss kalikyamayirunnu!”

Wonderwoman – drool :-p

Snoopy - Now he’s the real superhero. A sportstar, lawyer, poet, world war II ace pilot, all rolled into one.

And last, but certainly not the least, a superhero with a really great sense of humour – Captain Super Swift of the Boston Duck Tours… if you haven’t had the chance to run into him, definitely recommend that you do sometime.

At the corner of my eye, somewhere in the remote fringes of my existence, reside some promises and possibilities that mean nothing, and yet how I would love to have them come true! How I wish, that one day I wake up to find…

That I possess a six-pack not manufactured by United Breweries.

That Aru and Tingi have painted my car maroon.

That I could skate (roller-blade actually)!

 That I was back in school.

 That I lived in the Serengeti.

 Wait, this list could go on, and really no point rambling on, cos I guess what I would really love is to find all of the above and more to happen all at once… which is pretty stupid as wishes go. Heck, i’ll just go back to being happy about things the way they are

Sigh-ning out!

V day just went by of course… didn’t quite find the time to notice it go by, cos I guess my personal cupid was stuck in a traffic jam somewhere. Now, someone like me writing about V day is funny, cos the indubitable fact is that geeks DO NOT fall in love! Disagree? Well, the axioms as I see it, are as follows:

 1. The literary purists declare love a feeling in the pit of your stomach, that induces one to believe that among all variants of your species walking the planet, one particular specimen (usually of the opposite sex) is apparently a beautiful thing. This does not work with geeks – for a geek, an indescribable “feeling” in the pit of the stomach must have a logical cause (such as diarrhoea). And, anything that a geek finds beautiful is typically inanimate, and usually has some kind of a silicon component! (wonder if that explains the draw of bimbettes with implants??)

 2. The whole process of “finding someone” to fall in love with, usually involves a number of things that are entirely alien to geeks – good wardrobe, social instincts, patience for idle chit-chat (purists call it the art of romantic conversation), the list could go on…

 3. Sense of humour apparently is a good ingredient for love, and geeks should have a turf advantage there, cos a lot of them have plenty of it. Trouble is, it doesn’t help a great deal, if your sense of humour is not something that ordinary mortals (i.e. non-geeks) comprehend. Lets admit it, not many people outside the geek fraternity find fortune cookies such as this one funny – (http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Fortune_4_All_2/924.html)

 4. Could two geeks fall in love… with patterns of ones and zeroes, yes… with each other no, cos that would mean mixing business and pleasure!

 Now, this post is turning out to be really boring… almost fell asleep writing it. Can’t help it, unfamiliar turf and all that! But will try to end it well… once, in a moment of weakness, HJ succumbed to “idle chit-chat”, and found himself trying to butter up a PYT. Now, the PYT is reasonably impressed, and inflated, and quizzes HJ – “Close your eyes, and tell me who you see”. HJ complied, wrapped his eyelids, almost instantly saw a F16 falcon recovering from a controlled nose-dive, and found himself pondering about the gyro-stability. Literary purists may write that the PYT got her answer from the blissful smile that lit upon his face, but they would of course be wrong!

How do you fit three cars and two bikes into 78 sqft of space, especially when the space is distributed in the topology of a ‘T’, with about 48 ft in the longer stroke and 30 in the shorter one? Well, it is not just possible, but actually quite trivial… K and I, and our landlord have been doing this quite successfully for over an year now, never raising too much of a smirk about the entire business. If this doesn’t amaze you, trust me, only one of the five vehicles in question is bulimic. No, not one of the bikes… K’s bike and mine are beauties, but definitely not of the Kate Moss kind!

That 78sqft of space was until now as strangely Utopian maze of simple permutations and combinations. But alas! Paradise wasn’t to last for ever! Circumstances, Gods, Murphy, or all of the these have conspired, and our rather plaintive geometric equations have been thrown awry! New neighbours moved in recently, and brought with them such devastation as was hitherto unheard of in our uncomplicated lives. This devastating force came in the form of a petulant little red devil on four wheels, that has now planted itself in the company of a rather large and ungainly gargoyle all in about 50sqcm of space right adjacent to our utopia. The gargoyle – a large sedan, seated on a verisame number of circular appendages as the majority of the beasts above is not a new entrant into our universe. It had always been there, right next door, posing a threat, but never really intruding into our 78. A gargoyle by itself is a very docile creature, by the way, but throw in a red devil for company, and you’ve just opened up the gates to hell.

 And hell it is… K can’t move his car a few feet forward cos that would put two other vehicles under house arrest. Unfortunately, one of those vehicles is a bike that belongs to our landlord’s son, and he might not take lightly to the idea of people taking the zu(m) out of his Suzuki and leaving him with just a Suu Kyi. I can , btw, parallel park between K’s car and the red devil, and I don’t just mean the Steve-Martin-as-Inspector-Clouzeau kind of parallel parking. But then, parallel parking to start and end my day is not really one of those dreams I cherished back when I was dozing off in back-benches at school. And of course, there’s the minor discomfort associated with the fact that if I did parallel park, the only way K’s bike or mine would ever leave the premises, would be with the aid of a few Evil-Kneivelish stunts.

 Fact is, Murphy has spoken, and I have resigned to my fate! Fortunately, there’s plenty of parking space (albeit rodent infested parking space) at my office, eight km away. There is hope yet… and thus, I shall leave my car parked in office henceforth. And what pray, u ask, would I be inclined to do, when spinning one wheel sitting atop four is called for… well, there’s always the bike… office is just 8 km away… and from there on, it is after all a small world…!

This is an old post actually, which I’d deleted in a flurry of emotion (and not just cos it sounds narcissistic)… reposting it, cos well, whats the point of a blog if I start deleting posts…  

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Early hours at office, and I’d started my day as usual looking at the latest stock tickers on my portfolio. A penny stock that earned me a lot of dough earlier, was making up for the impropriety of giving me profits, and was now digging away deep into my pockets. As “chotte haath” walked by, perhaps on her way to coffee, I was sporting, not surprisingly, an expression best described as a forlorn grimace.

You can imagine my astonishment when she looked up at me and said – “Whenever I pass this way, I see you smiling away looking at the monitor. Whats going on?”.

Well I’ve frankly had it and cannot explain this anymore… to all those people who apparently see a perpetual smile on my face and wonder what hidden secrets lead to the upturned lips, I apologize for the blasphemy. In spite of that rather well known (but perhaps incorrect) adage about how it takes just 17 muscles to smile as against 53 muscles to frown, I know we live in times where it is almost customary to frown, and smiling is perverse – the not done thing!

Am guilty of syntactical inaccuracy with my non-verbal communication… espc. my grimaces, smirks and such, as a result of which these emotives when displayed upon my aspect tend to resemble a smile. I also apologize for the numerous instances when the emotion painted across my frontispiece is an actual smile – I know it is very inconsiderate of me to sport such an expression in times like these, when each of us is trying to make the best of the stressful, ugly lives and worlds we live in. I apologize also for being the lazy bum that I am and trying to get away with exercising just 17 of my muscles most of the time, when I should be taking up my rightful share and exercising at least 53!

If you have read so far, just have two simple words to culminate my atonement…

Yeah, Right!

(Dan exits left stage, smiling sarcastically…)

This post goes out to everyone and everything that I’ve ever given up on… to SS and a few others at work, to some friends i’m no longer in touch with,  to the wannabe athelete in me, and to a birdie who might just fly by…

Am sorry I moved on when I did… a stronger man would have stuck on for better times, but guess courage deserts me beyond a point. Believe me when I say that I gave up because of lack of nerve, not because I did not care… hopefully you’ll be better off much after my flee. Guess there’s no shame in admitting, that when push comes to shove, and it gets to a point where I have run out of ideas to deal with worries, letting go is the only way I know of preserving my smile…

Driving in Europe or the US is fun, especially if you are used to driving around in India. Once you get accustomed to navigating your way through free-weaving cars, freer-weaving bikes, and pedestrians taking park-strolls right across roads, driving through an   organized road network with disciplined drivers and no pedestrians is almost a let down. Its like you’ve been trained in swordsmanship and then someone hands you a fine cutlass with which you are supposed to slice potatoes – actually wait, bad example because that could be tricky!
 
Anyway, disciplined driving is good – the safety associated with road discipline is worthwhile. However, it does get stretched sometimes, especially when driving around in suburban US, when the idea of discipline gets stretched to a level of paranoia. Driving into a suburban neighborhood is like being handed a bunch of restraining orders. Paraonia is overstretched, and pedestrians will run away screaming if your car going at 5 mph does not slow down to a halt when you are at least 500 meters away. Sometimes I’m forced to wonder what it would be like, if someone randomly switched a couple of roadies (one each of the wheeled and legged varieties), between say Marathahalli (Bangalore) and Moorestown (New Jersey)…
 
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Pedestrian Rustom Kaathe was an early riser. The disciplined man that he was, forced him to leave the comfort of his rot iron bed at half past six each morning. Having attended to the necessary ablutions, and rudimentary victuals, which whilst not enough to break his fast, at least had the affect of cracking it ajar, he would set forth onto the streets of Bangalore. The rest of his mornings were devoted to a noble cause –gripped by untainted altruism, he would set forth to improve the driving skills of bike and car uses in his city, by taking park-strolls right across the city’s roads.
 
Chauffeur Ghuman Dey was a pious man of many talents. While Rustom was strolling across roads and highways at leisure, Ghuman was earning his penny’s worth seated behind a steering wheel. His multiple talents enabled Ghuman to impart the sharp fourty five degree swings that the steering required every few seconds in order to keep the car running, and at the same time attend to his mobile phone, and take alternative swigs at his coffee and cigarette. A small picture of his favorite deity “Yama” sat upon the dashboard and smiled back at Ghuman appreciatively.
 
Meteorite Bobbit’s Rock was a lonely being. Having been cut off from its parent planet by an inter-planetary collision, Rock was thrown outward from its home galaxy into the Milky way, where it soon found itself trapped in an elliptical orbit around an unusually unenthusiastic Sun. A few billion revolutions around this dreary track, and frequent implosions of an active onaclov upon its surface meant Rock was bored to the core. Not unexpectedly, as Rock raced past that big blue sphere, whose first sight had excited it, but was now just a repetitive uninteresting sight, it let out a feeble yawn. The yawn propagated to Earth in the form of complex electromagnetic flux waves that took the shape of an earthworm hole. Both Rustom and Ghuman were caught completely unawares as these waves hit them…
 
The philanthropist Rustom was standing on Marathahalli junction wondering which of the intersecting roads would be the least safe to stroll across, when Rock’s flux discharge hit him. In the flash of a second, he now found himself standing at a strangely desolate intersection with a street sign that said ” Moorestown Street”. Rustom was confused. He knew not what scheme of things had brought him to this strange land, or the strange land to him. Unable to process his surroundings, or extract coherent decisions from his brain, he fell back upon his instincts, and decided to continue with his one purpose in life – improving the motor skills of unskilled car drivers. He stepped off the sidewalk with great élan and resumed his stroll.
 
However, this was Moorestown and not Marathahalli – a haven of extremely disciplined (read paranoid) drivers. When Rustom stepped off the sidewalk, the nearest car was two miles away on a parallel road. The disciplined driver of this car caught a glimpse of Rustom and deciding not to take any chances slammed his brakes hard. Since the driver was unaccustomed to pulling a stunt like this, and since the road he was traveling on happened to be a national highway, a hundred cars behind him which were until then gliding comfortably in auto-cruise mode, slammed straight into him and more were following suit. It was while cars were piling up in this fashion, that Ghuman with four wheels in sync and one wheel slightly out of sync found himself driving along on the verisame highway.
 
Now, Ghuman on arrival was more flabbergasted than Rustom had ever been. Not only did he find himself in an alien land, but for some reason, all the cars in this land were piling up one on top of the other in an attempt to reach the moon. Well, Ghuman did not care too much about celestial quests, and at this moment his navigator’s instinct kicked in. He swerved his car right off the highway, cut through the grassy turf beside it, and quickly jumped into Moorestown Street which ran in parallel, shaving a few hairs off Rustom in the process. While Ghuman was smirking at his driving skills, and Rustom was swelling in pride at having nurtured expert drivers like Ghuman, the residents of Moorestown were not too impressed at the sight of a vehicle cutting across roads and shaving hairs off pedestrians. In a flash the entire township turned to chaos. People started running  helter-skelter screaming that Armageddon had arrived, and that satanic cars were mowing down pedestrians all over town. One bright fellow looked towards the highway, noticed the pile-up of cars building skyward and exclaimed that a stairway to heaven had opened up.

Just when the scene was about to turn catastrophic, an unexpected event occurred and restored sanity. Bobbit´s Rock, who was indifferently gliding away at this point in time, happened to look askance to catch one more glimpse of the blue planet.  To Rock´s amusement, the planet was rapidly growing what looked like a multi-colored metallic tail. This extracted a guffaw from Rock, which in turn caused the onaclov to implode, and let out a huge myriad of weird fluxes resulting in a huge earthworm hole, which encapsulated the entire blue planet and turned it back in time by a few minutes (whew!).

Anyway, suffice to say that Rustom and Ghuman found themselves back wherever they should have been and the incident described here did not happen. If you spent some of your valuable time reading this stupid story, pray that Rock guffaws again, and hopefully you will not have read it anymore.
 

Caught up with an old friend after quite a gap on IM yesterday, and she asked me if I’ve grown into someone important in the firm I work with… CEO or CTO for e.g. Now, since this is not the first time I’ve had this snide query thrown my way in recent times, let me set the record straight once and forever…

Friends, Indians and Countrywomen… I am a CEO … a Completely Expendable Organism.

Its taken me a few tough years to achieve this… first had to go through a disturbing phase a few years back when I decided to shed the habit of working odd hours and weekends, and then there was painful but slow progress with my resolution not to take my work too seriously. The toughest part was adapting to the idea that praise, criticism, accolades, brick-bats, nothing should really bother me at work, as long as i’m having my share of fun. But a few years in the industry, and think I’ve finally got there… I am a CEO, and very proud of it.

Papa kehte the bada naam karega…