an unfinished life

Caravan IIPM Article

2011-06-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

(As a tribute to IIPM's lawsuit against Caravan being filed in Silchar(Assam), I am creating a mirror for this site on a website hosted from China . I wonder if the Injunction Order passed by Hon’ble Civil Court of Silchar is of any relevance in Hong Kong. Please click on this link for the mirror. Clicking will also help improve the PageRank of the mirror page and let the article be online in case Google chickens out and asks me to take this page down. )

A PHENOMENALLY WEALTHY INDIAN who excites hostility and suspicion is an unusual creature, a fish that has managed to muddy the waters it swims in. The glow of admiration lighting up the rich and the successful disperses before it reaches him, hinting that things have gone wrong somewhere. It suggests that beneath the sleek coating of luxury, deepunder the sheen of power, there is a failure barely sensed by the man who owns that failure along with his expensive accoutrements. This was Arindam Chaudhuri’s situation when I first met him in 2007. He had achieved great wealth and prominence, partly by projecting an image of himself as wealthy and prominent. Yet somewhere along the way he had also created the opposite effect, which—in spite of his best efforts—had given him a reputation as a fraud, scamster and Johnny-come-lately.

Once I became aware of Arindam Chaudhuri’s existence, I began to find him everywhere: in the magazines his media division published, flashing their bright colours and inane headlines from little newsstands made of bricks and plastic sheets; in buildings fronted by dark glass, behind which earnest young men imbibed Arindam’s ideas of leadership; and on the tiny screen during a flight from Delhi to Chicago, when the film I chose for viewing turned out to have been produced by him. It was a low-budget Bombay gangster film with a cast of unknown, modestly paid actors and actresses: was it an accident that the film was called Mithya? The word means falsehood, appearances, a lie—things I would have much opportunity to contemplate in my study of Arindam.

Every newspaper I came across carried a full-page advertisement for Arindam’s private business school, the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), with Arindam’s photograph displayed prominently. It was the face of the new India, in closeup. His hair was swept back in a ponytail, dark and gleaming against a pale, smooth face, his designer glasses accentuating his youthfulness. He wore a blue suit, and his teeth were exposed in the kind of bright white smile I associate with American businessmen and evangelists. But instead of looking directly at the reader, as businessmen and evangelists do to assure people of their trustworthiness, Arindam gazed off at a distant horizon, as if pondering some elusive goal.

There were few details about the academic programme or admission requirements in these advertisements, but many small, inviting photographs of the Delhi campus: a swimming pool, a computer lab, a library, a snooker table, Indian men in suits, a blonde woman. A fireworks display of italics, exclamation marks and capital letters described the perks given to students: “free study tour to Europe etc. for twenty-one days,” “world placements,” “Free Laptops for all.” Stitching these disparate elements together was a slogan: “Dare to Think Beyond the IIMs”—referring to the elite, state-subsidised business schools, and managing to sound promising, admonishing and mysterious at the same time. The new India needed a new kind of university, and a new kind of attitude, and Arindam, said the ads, was the man who could teach you how to find it.

I'VE SPOKEN TO THE BOSS about you,” Sutanu said. “He said, ‘Why does he want to meet me?’”Sutanu ran the media division of Arindam’s company from a basement office where there was no cellphone reception, and it took many calls and text messages to get in touch with him. When I finally reached him, he sounded affable enough, suggesting that we have lunch in south Delhi. We met at Flames, an “Asian Resto-Bar” in Greater Kailash-II with a forlorn statue of the Buddha tucked away in the corner.

Sutanu was in his 40s, a dark man with a bushy moustache and glasses, his raffish 1960s air complemented by a bright blue shirt and a red tie patterned with elephants. He was accompanied by Rahul, a journalist who worked at one of the magazines published by Arindam. Although they couldn’t have been there long, their table held two packs of Navy Cut cigarettes, a partly empty bottle of Kingfisher, and a battered smartphone that thrummed insistently throughout our conversation.

“The boss is a great man, and sure, his story is interesting,” Sutanu said. “The question is whether he’ll talk to you.”

Chaudhuri poses with the stars of Faltu, the third film that he produced, at a press conference in 2006.

Arindam Chaudhuri had started out in 1996 as the proprietor of a lone business school. Founded by Arindam’s father, it had been—Sutanu said dismissively—a small, run-of-the-mill place located on the outskirts of Delhi. But Arindam expanded it to nine branches in major Indian metros, and now he was going international. He had an institute in Dubai and had allied with a Belgian management school with campuses in Brussels and Antwerp. He was about to open an institute in London, and was planning another in an old factory building in Pennsylvania. And that was just the management institute. Arindam’s company, Planman, had a media division that included a newsweekly, The Sunday Indian—“perhaps the only magazine in the world with 13 editions”—and three business magazines. He also owned a software company, a consulting division that managed the “HR component of multinationals,” and a new outsourcing company, which claimed to produce the entire content of The Guardian online, as well as proofreading and copyediting the Daily Mail. “There’s also a film division, and he’s produced a major Bollywood blockbuster,” Sutanu said.
“It was meant to be a blockbuster,” Rahul said quietly. “But it flopped.”

“Yeah, yeah, no big deal,” Sutanu said. “He’s on other blockbuster projects. He’s a man of ideas. So sometimes they flop.” He lit a cigarette and waved it around, the rings on his hand flashing. “What he’s doing, he’s using intellectual capital to make his money. But people don’t get that and because he’s been badmouthed so much, he’s become suspicious. He’s been burned by the media. You know, cynical hacks they are. They make up stories that he’s a fraud. A Johnny-come-lately. Everyone asks, ‘Yaar, but where does all that money come from?’”

There was a moment of silence as we contemplated this question.

“They don’t ask these things of other businessmen,” Sutanu said. “That’s because when the mainstream media does these negative stories on him, just hatchet jobs, you know, they’re serving the interests of the big industrialists. The industrialists don’t like him because our magazines have done critical stories on them. The government doesn’t like him and harasses him all the time. They say, ‘You can’t use the word “Indian” in the name of your management school because we don’t recognise your school.’ They send us a letter every six months about this. Then, the elite types are after him. The Doon School, St Stephen’s, Indian Institute of Management people. There were these bloggers writing silly stuff about him, saying that the institute doesn’t give every student a laptop as promised in the advertisements. You want to know how he makes money? It’s simple. There are 2,000 students who pay seven lakhs each. The operating costs are low. You know how much teachers get paid in India. So the money gets spun off into other businesses.”

We ate hot-and-sour soup and drank more beer, our conversation widening out to include our careers and lives, and the unforgiving city of Delhi. Rahul told us a story about covering the war in Iraq and being arrested by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard while crossing over the border from Jordan. When it was time to depart, I felt reluctant to break up the drunken afternoon bonhomie but nevertheless asked, “When do I get to meet Arindam Chaudhuri?”

“The good thing about the boss is that he’s a yes or no sort of person,” Sutanu said. “You’ll find out in a couple of days whether he wants to meet you.”

A COUPLE OF DAYS stretched to a week. I kept pestering Sutanu with calls and text messages. Then it was done, an appointment made, and I entered the wonderland to meet Arindam Chaudhuri, the management guru, the media magnate, the

business school entrepreneur, the film producer, the owner of IT and outsourcing companies, to which we should add his claims of being a noted economist and the author of two “all-time best sellers,” The Great Indian Dream and Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch.

The drive from Delhi to IIPM’s main campus, which is located on the city’s outskirts in an area called Satbari, is a fairly quick one. First come the temples of Chattarpur, modern structures with crenellated, fluted walls, where memories of old Hindu architecture have been transformed into a simple idea of excess. A gargantuan statue of Hanuman stands with a mace on his shoulder, looking down dismissively at the traffic.

The road is dusty, and the clusters of shops and houses soon give way to large stretches of land partitioned off for the very rich. A few boutique hotels crop up, looking empty, but the land is mostly colonised by the farmhouses of Delhi’s newly affluent. All I saw on my first drive were walls edged with broken glass, the occasional flash of green from a well-tended lawn, and a young peasant woman with a suitcase sitting in front of a farmhouse.

The high-walled Delhi campus of IIPM squatted amid these hotels and farmhouses. Compared to the sprawling campuses of the IIMs, it is tiny—five acres instead of a hundred— and thus seems more like a miniature, model school than a real one. The gates were kept shut, and the campus appeared sleepy until just before Arindam’s arrival. Then the security guards hovered around the guardhouse, looking at their watches and fingering their walkie-talkies. The scruffy management students, who, in their odd assortment of blazers and flashy shirts, had the air of men just coming off an all-night wedding party, tried not to look as if they were loitering.

The gates were hurriedly opened for Arindam’s metallic blue luxury car, a million-pound Bentley Continental, as it coasted down the driveway and parked in front of the building lobby. Arindam, dressed in blue, passed through a knot of sycophants and disappeared inside the building, leaving behind nothing but the frisson of his arrival and the Bentley gleaming in the fierce Delhi sun. The power and the glory! A million pounds! Custom-made in the mother country of England! A Bentley was the ultimate status symbol of the Indian rich, expensive and relatively uncommon. A business journalist had told me the probably apocryphal story that Arindam had ordered the special paint scraped off when his car arrived from England and then had it repainted to match the blue of one of his favourite shirts.

The campus building was split along two levels. Most of the classrooms were on the basement floor, and were filled with the chatter of students, some of them dressed in suits to attend a class in “Executive Communications.” The ground floor contained a computer lab, a tiny library and some classrooms, but it was dominated by a boardroom in the center. On the other side of this was an open-plan office. The employees sitting in front of computers and phones were mostly in their 20s and 30s, and although they looked busy, they didn’t give the impression that they were running a global megabusiness. Arindam referred to them as “managerial staff,” but when I introduced myself to one of the managers, a balding, middle-aged man, he seemed to be making cold calls, dialing numbers from a database and asking people if they were interested in taking management seminars.

Up close, Arindam was a few shades darker than his picture, though with the same glossy hair tied back in a ponytail. Beneath his blue pinstriped suit he wore a white shirt open to show his smooth, hairless chest. There were rings on his fingers and bright sparkling stones on the frame of his designer glasses, silver cufflinks on his sleeves and argyle socks and shiny pump shoes on his feet. All these harsh, glittering surfaces were accompanied by a youthfulness that softened the effect. He was in his late 30s, a year younger than me, with a boyish air that took over when he became sarcastic about his critics and rivals and said, “Wow!”

Our first meeting took place in the boardroom. There were about 50 chairs in the room, most of them pushed to one side, and Arindam and I sat at one end of a long table. The air-conditioning was fierce, and after a couple of hours, I began to feel cold in my summer garb of short-sleeved shirt and cotton trousers, but Arindam went on speaking, slowing slightly only when a worker brought us chicken sandwiches and cups of Coca-Cola.

Like most of the new rich in India, Arindam hadn’t started from scratch. He inherited the management institute from his father, Malay Chaudhuri, who began it in 1973. But the original institute had hardly been cutting-edge. The admissions and administrative office in a house in south Delhi doubled as a family bedroom at night. As for Gurgaon, where the institute’s students convened, “it was the least developed place on earth.” I understood why Arindam wanted to emphasise this: before the office parks, condominiums and shopping malls sprouted, Gurgaon was little more than an assortment of unpaved roads meandering through fields of wheat, with electricity and phone lines in short supply, a no-man’s-land between Delhi and the vast rural hinterland of India, where a management school must have seemed like just one more of those strange, minor cults that crop up in this country from time to time.

The Indian Institute of Planning and Management campus.

Arindam wanted to go to college in the United States, but his father convinced him to enroll in the family institute. Before he had even graduated, he was teaching a course. “I took advantage of being the director’s son,” Arindam said, laughing but making it clear that he had been perfectly qualified to teach his fellow students. Three years after finishing his degree, he started a recruitment consulting firm. By getting into a position where he was hiring people for other companies, he intended to find jobs for IIPM graduates. The placement of IIPM graduates was a pressing problem at the time, and although Arindam would disagree, it remains a problem now, even after all his success.
During those early years, Arindam’s ambitions were disproportionate to his abilities and experience. He started a magazine and a research division, but the magazine closed quickly and his recruitment firm failed to take off. He had nothing to sell except himself. “In 1997, I announced my first leadership workshop for senior executives under the banner, ‘Become a great leader.’ My thinking was that if they can take leadership lessons from me, they will give me business. So they came, not realising from the photos how young this guy was. And then it didn’t matter, because that first workshop was a rocking interactive super-success.” His voice rose, his chin lifted with pride, and he looked me in the eyes. “That is how we built a brand.”

AT THE IIPM CAMPUS, I had picked up a brochure that featured a two-page spread of the articles that appeared when Arindam first made his mark as “The Guru with a Ponytail.” Indistinguishable from press releases, these articles reproduced Arindam’s thoughts on everything from “how not to create more Osamas” (the key, apparently, was

“wholesome education”) to the negative influence of “the MBA mafia,” as he called the IIMs. But if Arindam was “Guru Cool” in these articles, he was also combative, attacking the IIMs and pushing his “Theory i Management” (the lower case “i” stood for “India”) as part of a compassionate form of capitalism that took into account the country’s overwhelming poverty. He talked about “trickle-down economics” and “survival of the weakest,” and although it was never clear from these extracts how such concepts could be put into practice, they showed Arindam’s desire to project himself as a thinker as well as an entrepreneur.

In June 2005, nearly a decade after his first failed attempt to start a magazine, Arindam began publishing a magazine called Business & Economy. This led to a newsweekly, The Sunday Indian, and a marketing magazine called 4Ps. Each was printed on glossy paper, heavy on graphics and syndicated material, thin on original content and, to judge by the misspelled names on Sunday Indian covers (“Pamela Andreson”), short of copy editors. In 2007, Arindam began bringing out an Indian edition of PC Magazine under licence from Ziff Davis Media. At the same time, he began discussions with Foreign Affairs in New York to bring out an Indian edition, and when that fell through, he began negotiations with Foreign Policy in Washington DC. “In the school, I have an audience of only 6,000 students,” he had said to me (the actual enrolment, according to Sutanu, was closer to 2,000). “Now, every week, I reach one lakh people.” The business schools also produced “academic” journals with names like Indian Economy Review, Human Factor, Strategical Innovators, and Need the Dough? But the most significant arena of influence seemed to be his film business, which had turned Arindam into something approaching a household name.

In 2002, Arindam decided to enter the movie business. A few days before his first Bollywood film was to be shot, he told me, the director walked out on him. Arindam, naturally, decided to direct the film himself. He admitted to me that he had not been entirely qualified. “But I hope, some day, when I have more experience, to make a truly revolutionary film.” With a plot lifted from the American comic strip Archie, that first film flopped commercially and was panned by critics. Even the DVD stores in the Palika Bazaar underground market were unable to procure a copy for me. But Arindam learnt quickly. Before long, he had developed a careful corporate approach to filmmaking that differed from the older Bollywood model of massive budgets, dubious financing (often from underworld sources) and a hit-or-miss approach to success. Arindam’s films, by contrast, focused on the bottom line, keeping the budget small and aiming not for huge audiences but for as much presence as possible in the multiplexes proliferating in the new India, places where a number of films ran simultaneously in theatres far smaller than their predecessors. He also sought out prestige; some more recent ventures of Arindam Chaudhuri Productions have been directed by the Kolkata-based Rituparno Ghosh, who has something of a reputation as an auteur.

Within IIPM, meanwhile, Arindam was surrounded by fierce loyalists. Former students and classmates became employees and continued to refer to him in the nice, middle-class Indian way as “Arindam sir.” They were so enamored of Arindam that when I visited him at the IIPM campus or stood too near him, some of them displayed a barely disguised hostility. Upset at the proximity I had stolen, sensing perhaps that I did not entirely share their faith in their guru, they seethed with the desire to protect Arindam from me.

Almost all of Planman’s employees—90 percent, according to Arindam—were former IIPM students. The same was true of the faculty members, who tended to morph from students to teachers as soon as they had finished their courses. Rohit Manchanda, a short, dapper man who would have been shorter without the unusually high heels of his shoes, taught advertising and headed Planman’s small advertising agency. The dean of IIPM, Prasoon Majumdar, was also economics editor for the magazines published by Planman. Other employees were family members as well as former students. Arindam’s wife, Rajita, a petite woman who drove a Porsche, had been a student of Arindam’s before they got married and now taught Executive Communications. Arindam’s sister’s husband, a young man with shoulder-length hair and a shirt left unbuttoned to reveal a generous expanse of chest, was a former student, a faculty member and the features and lifestyle editor of the magazines.

When Arindam met with his division heads, all of whom had been his classmates at IIPM, they joked and chatted for an hour before turning to their work. They seemed to derive immense pleasure from showing me just how closeknit they were. “We’re like the mafia,” Arindam said. It was a comparison that had occurred to me, although other metaphors also came to mind. They were like the mafia in their suspicion of outsiders, like a dot-com in their emphasis on collegiality, and like a cult in their belief in a mythology made up of Arindam’s personal history, management theories and the strange ways in which the company functioned. But perhaps this is simply another way of saying that they were a business, operating through an unquestioning adherence to what their owner said and believed.

During our first meeting, Arindam explained to me in a five-hour monologue that his business was built around the “brand” of Planman Consulting, the group that includes the business school and numerous other ventures from media and motion pictures to a charitable foundation. To an outsider, however, the brand is Arindam. Even if his role is disguised under the description of “honorary dean” of IIPM, the image of the business school and Planman is in most ways the image of Arindam Chaudhuri. With his quirky combination of energy, flamboyance, ambition, canniness and even vulnerability, he is the promise of the age, his traits gathering force from their expression at a time in India when all that is solid melts into air.

ONE EVENING IN SEPTEMBER, I went to the Grand Ballroom auditorium of the Park Royal Hotel to hear Arindam speak. I had heard him address a crowd before, but that had been a familiar audience, made up of graduating IIPM students herded into

a hotel auditorium near the Satbari campus. The students seemed awestruck but restless, their attention wandering whenever the talk veered away from the question of their future to trickle-down theory; no doubt they were more concerned with trickle-up. Arindam hectored them a little, and he had been worried enough about this to send me a text message a few hours later, asking me to “discount some of the harsh words i said to students.”

The event at the Grand Ballroom was different. It was the final performance of a daylong “leadership” seminar for which people had paid 4,000 rupees, the previous speakers having included Arindam’s wife and several IIPM professors. Over 100 people, quite a few women among them, sat under the chandeliers as a laptop was set up on stage. They looked like aspirational rather than polished corporate types, the men with red sacred threads around their wrists, the women in saris and salwar kameezes, a gathering of middle-class, middle-rung, white-collar individuals whose interest in leadership skills had a dutiful air. After a number of children—it was unclear to whom they belonged— clustered around Arindam to get copies of the all-time best-seller Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch signed, Arindam took the stage. He wore a shiny black corduroy suit, the jacket displaying embroidery on the shoulders, and loafers that appeared to be made of snake skin.

Chaudhuri and his wife, Rajita, a former student of his at IIPM who now teaches at the school.

Arindam wasn’t a natural speaker. In prolonged one-to-one conversations, he had the tendency to look away, not meeting the listener’s gaze. This was less of a problem in a public gathering, but he also had a high-pitched voice and a tendency to fumble his lines. He started by asking people what leadership meant to them. As his listeners spewed out answers, using phrases (“dream believer,” “reach the objective,” “making decisions,” “simplifying things”) that seemed to have been lifted from some ur-text of self-help and management, they seemed both eager and slightly combative, as if not entirely convinced of his ability to teach them about leadership. “Here’s the great Arindam Chaudhuri,” a man next to me muttered, using great in the Indian way to mean someone fraudulent. Arindam seemed aware of the hostility: his responses were hesitant, and his English was uncertain and pronouncedly Delhi middle-class in its inflection.
As the session went on, however, it became evident that these qualities weren’t drawbacks, not among the people he was addressing. The mannerisms gave Arindam an everyday appeal, and it was the juxtaposition of this homeliness with his wealth, success and glamour that created a hold over the leadership aspirants in the audience. By themselves, the Bentley Continental, the ponytail and the designer glasses, or the familiar way Arindam had of dropping names like Harvard, McKinsey and Lee Iacocca would have made him too remote. But the glamour was irresistible when combined with his middlebrow manner. He was one of the audience, even if he represented the final stage in the evolution of the petit bourgeoisie.

Arindam was well aware of this. If he wasn’t a natural speaker, he nevertheless had a performer’s ability to gather strength the longer he stayed on stage. Thirty minutes into the leadership session, as I began to be drawn into his patter, I realised that Arindam was telling the Indian middle class a story about itself, offering his audience an answer to the question of who they were. “I am trying to be a mirror,” he said, a comment remarkably attuned to the way he represented a larger-than-life version of the people he addressed.

His listeners had come to the session with a rough sense of who they were supposed to be. They received instruction about this from the culture at large, especially the proliferating media outlets that obsessed about them as members of “India Shining.” The Western media characterised them in a similar manner. Arindam’s audience knew that as middleclass, well-to-do Indians, they were supposed to be modern and managerial. They were a people devoted to efficiency, given to the making of money and the enjoyment of consumer goods while retaining a touch of traditional spice, which meant, for instance, that they used the internet to arrange marriages along caste and class lines.

Still, they needed further affirmation of their role, and this is what Arindam provided, mixing that cocktail of spurious tradition and manufactured modernity, while adding his signature flavor to the combination. He told his listeners stories about traveling to America, Europe and Japan—the ultramodern places that middle-class India had been emulating and suddenly found within its reach. Yet few people in the audience had been to these countries, and if they did go, they would not encounter them with any degree of intimacy. The very places they were most drawn to—the business centres, the shopping plazas, the franchise restaurants— would remain slightly unreal in spite of the photographs taken, the souvenirs bought, the money spent.

In the Grand Ballroom, though, these places were conjured anecdotally and made to resemble the India the audience knew, or thought they knew. So there were jokes about national stereotypes, comments about the different strengths and weaknesses of the Americans, the Japanese, the French and the Indians. There were no individuals in these stories, only nameless businessmen met by Arindam in anonymous boardrooms, and the world itself seemed no more than a string of Grand Ballrooms, each dominated by a different ethnic group of capitalists.

After Arindam had given the audience this touch of the foreign, he returned to more familiar territory. He made fun of regional Indian identities, something done rather easily among a largely Hindi-speaking Delhi crowd that tends to see itself as national. He pandered to their middleclass prejudices, attacking the government as inefficient and corrupt, and then satisfied their nationalism by speaking of the Indian Army as the most efficient and disciplined wing of the state.

As Arindam became more comfortable, he slipped into Hindi, segueing into the story of the Mahabharata. This was his way of approaching the “Theory i Management” concept of leadership. Like many contemporary Hindus who have tried to cut from their sprawling beliefs the hard lines of a modern faith, Arindam wasn’t interested in the complex ethical questions or sophisticated narrative strategies of the Mahabharata. Instead, his focus was on the Bhagavad Gita.

The Gita emerged as a foundational religious text only in modern times, when Hindu revivalists reeling from colonialism sought something more definitive than the amorphous set of practices and ideas that had characterised Vedic religion until then. Then in the early 1990s, the Gita again received new life, when the Indian elites simultaneously embraced free-market economics and a hardened Hindu chauvinism. They discovered in the Gita an old, civilisational argument for maintaining the contemporary hierarchies of caste, wealth and power, while in the story of Arjuna throwing aside his moral dilemmas and entering wholeheartedly into the slaughter of the battlefield, they read an endorsement of a militant, aggressive Hinduism that did not shrink from violence, especially against minorities and the poor. Given this appeal of the Gita among the Indian middle and upper classes, Arindam’s use of it was a canny choice. He was extending into the realm of management theory a story that his audience would be both familiar with and respectful toward, so that to challenge Arindam’s ideas would be tantamount to questioning a sacred text.

Arindam began the elaboration of his Indian theories, naturally enough, by pulling a red Gita out of a pocket. A Planman photographer ran forward to capture the moment and, for the first time in the session, the audience began scribbling notes. Arindam turned to the laptop as if he were going to boot Krishna into existence, but the laptop refused to comply. As one, two, three, and then four people hurried to help, Arindam gave up, turned away from the computer, and faced the audience.

He began a performance that was part television soap and part stand-up comedy, hamming the roles of housewives, husbands returned from work, fathers and babies, management trainees and their bosses. The audience burst into laughter as each little cameo played out. The laptop was finally made to work, and on the screen appeared a matrix of character types Arindam had extracted from the Hindu scriptures. There was the tamas or pleasure-loving type, who could be led only by domination; the rajas, ambitious but greedy, who needed a combination of encouragement and control; and the sattva, who was brilliant and talented and needed to be left alone. “Leadership is about changing your colors like a chameleon to suit the situation,” Arindam said, citing Krishna, the androgynous, slippery god, as the role model for the ideal CEO. Laborers and blue-collar workers were tamasic, young management trainees rajasic, and highly skilled professionals like research scientists were sattvic. He had reinvented the caste system in two hours.

Arindam finished to all-round applause, and as he came down the stage, he was mobbed by his listeners. I went outside to the passageway, where tamasic workers in overalls were installing gates decorated with marigold garlands for a wedding reception that would take place later in the evening. I sat down beside a disheveled-looking man in a suit who was holding a plastic shopping bag that said “More Word Power.”

He had attended the entire day’s session, and when I asked him what he thought, he replied that it had been interesting. He had enjoyed some of the earlier speakers, especially A Sandip, the editor-in-chief of all of Planman’s magazines.

“And what did you think of Arindam Chaudhuri’s talk?” I asked. “Rubbish. It made no sense at all,” he said. He fell silent, avoiding my gaze, and when he looked at me again, it was with embarrassment. “You are a friend? You work for the company?” He cheered up as soon as he found out that I was writing about Arindam. “The man is a fraud,” he said, “but a very successful one.” He was a small publisher who churned out language education books. He would be publishing a management book during the World Book Fair in Delhi in February, a work written by a Canadian living in Beijing.

“It is mostly China-focused. You are aware that there is great interest in China these days? So I wanted to have an event like this for the Canadian during the book fair, and I decided to come and see this. You are writing about Arindam Chaudhuri?” He handed me his business card, leaned toward me, chuckled and said, “You must find out how he makes his money.”

I knew by now how Arindam made his money, or much of it—through IIPM’s tuition and (as in his movie business) by keeping costs low. But what was mysterious was the air of disrepute that clung to him; his wealth, oddly, had not bought him a free pass. People like this publisher seemed to see in Arindam a more successful version of themselves: far enough away to be envied, yet close enough to be resented.

ARINDAM HAD TOLD ME A STORY about his childhood that involved a strike at his father’s management school in Gurgaon. He described the strikers as “rowdy elements,” students who had failed their courses and objected to the academic demands made of them. The strike climaxed in a telephone call late one night to his father. An anonymous

man, speaking hurriedly, said that a student had been stabbed on campus. Arindam’s father took a taxi, accompanied by one of his employees, a canteen manager. Two hundred metres from the campus, he saw a group of students armed with iron rods waiting for him. He told the driver to turn around, went home and took his family to a hotel. The stabbing had been a ruse to bring him to the campus, and even the canteen manager had been part of the conspiracy.

The strike continued for four months. When the Chaudhuri family moved back home from the hotel, they were greeted by protesting students. “They were carrying horrible placards calling us thieves and murderers,” Arindam said. “The neighbours, who talked to the students, began calling my father ‘Bada Chor’ [Big Thief] and me ‘Chota Chor’ [Little Thief].” But what was most distressing, Arindam said, was that they eventually discovered that members of the faculty were behind the strike. “All the people we trusted were involved, and I decided that I would not let this happen ever again.”

Chaudhuri launched The Sunday Indian (“perhaps the only magazine in the world with 13 editions”) in 2006.

It was a touching story, a young boy seeing his father threatened by enemies and deciding to take them on. “My father named me Arindam,” the grown-up man in front of me said. “That means ‘destroyer of enemies.’” Since Arindam had been named a decade and a half before the incident, his father must have possessed either a remarkable ability to foresee the future or a pronounced sense of enemies lurking everywhere. But the rowdy students, the traitorous canteen manager, and the conspiratorial faculty members had no discernible motives in the story Arindam told me. They were there to provide Arindam a motive for his success, and to demonstrate that people couldn’t be trusted. It was as if Arindam were explaining to me why his business was so close-knit; why outsiders were viewed with suspicion; why his public relations person had demanded, unsuccessfully, that I show him everything I wrote; and why this same person refused to respond to the most elementary queries about the company’s business practices and revenues. There was more than the usual organisational secrecy at work here. Instead, a fundamental vision of life was involved, and underneath all the expansive theories of management, below all the chatter of a world brought closer by corporate globalisation, there was, ultimately, only this Manichean idea of people divided into the loyal and the disloyal, of Arindam at odds with the world.
Arindam started, he said, by competing for students with the “mafia” of management education in the country, but it was when he started a media division that his troubles began. “The elite now saw that I was challenging them directly, in the realm of ideas.” He was no longer operating merely within the confines of business schools; he was breaking down “the establishment hold on thought.” Arindam’s voice dropped low. “That is the reason why I am hated by a lot of people.”

He was referring in part to a harsh piece about IIPM by an alumna of the elite IIM Ahmedabad business school. “It was the world’s most stupid article,” Arindam said, adding that he couldn’t remember the name of the journalist. But the ensuing public imbroglio (“we had no clue what is the blogger world,” he told me ruefully) put a dent in Arindam’s reputation, even as it solidified, at least for a while, his tenuous alliance with his own student body.

The woman whose name Arindam couldn’t remember was Rashmi Bansal. Responding in part to an especially frenzied media blitz from IIPM (it was reported that they’d spent more than 1 million dollars to advertise in a number of prominent Indian newspapers and magazines), she wrote an article, ‘The Truth Behind IIPM’s Tall Claims,’ for JAM (Just Another Magazine—“India’s Most Loved Youth Magazine Since 1995”), a small periodical that she published herself for a young, English-speaking audience. Bansal’s article claimed that IIPM’s advertising was misleading: only the Delhi campus had the facilities prominently displayed in the pictures, from swimming pool to library, while campuses in other cities were housed in crowded office buildings; the scholars from institutions like Wharton, New York University, Columbia and Harvard claimed as “visiting faculty” were people who had merely passed through, delivering one-time lectures; the degrees IIPM awarded were not recognised by the Indian government; the company fudged data from media surveys to claim top rankings; and, contrary to its claims, it did not place its graduates in multinational corporations like McKinsey.

The story was linked to by a young blogger and IBM salesman in Mumbai named Gaurav Sabnis. His post, ‘The fraud that is IIPM,’ was vicious. IIPM responded immediately, and clumsily: it wrote to Sabnis, threatening to sue him, and obtained a court injunction against the original article in JAM, which was temporarily taken offline. It also contacted IBM, from whom it purchases the free laptops that it gives to students, asking them to pressure Sabnis to take down his post, and threatening that the students would march to the IBM headquarters in Delhi and burn their laptops in protest.

IBM claimed that it did not pressure Sabnis, but Sabnis resigned anyway to spare his employer’s embarrassment. This—in addition to abusive comments left by IIPM students on various blogs where criticisms of IIPM appeared— inflamed an already excited blogosphere, which decided that Sabnis was a martyr to truth and freedom of expression. They set about challenging IIPM’s claims with ever greater energy, discovering, among other things, that its “campuses” in Antwerp and Brussels consisted of a loose affiliation with a rather questionable institute not recognised by the Belgian government.

Soon the mainstream press took notice. The large weekly Businessworld—for which Bansal was a columnist—reported that it had accepted Arindam’s request to look into the case for and against his institute, but was fobbed off with generalities about IIPM and its “enemies” when it asked for specific information. The resulting article, ‘When the Chickens Come Home…,’ while more moderate in tone than Bansal’s, was skeptical of IIPM’s claims, especially regarding the placement of graduates and the consultancy work done by Planman. Most of the multinational corporations named in IIPM advertisements, when contacted by Businessworld, said that they had few if any dealings with Arindam’s organisation. It was unquestionably a public relations disaster for Arindam, though his students stood by him. If anything, their commitment to the school was redoubled.

In sifting through the long, labyrinthine posts on the anti-Arindam blogs, it is hard to avoid the impression of a virtual world being torn apart by virtual tools. Most often, the claims made by IIPM and Planman depended on a careful selection of pictures, comments and data, and the creation of numerous websites. This approach had worked well because it was part of a larger narrative of corporate success in India. Most mainstream journalists were too lazy and untrained, and too enamored of wealth, to subject these claims to the most basic scrutiny. But this was not true of the bloggers, who relentlessly probed the web, emailed people listed by IIPM as contacts, checked IP addresses, and conducted background research. The most interesting investigation the bloggers carried out involved IIPM’s history, focusing not merely on Arindam and his faculty but also on Arindam’s father, the man who had started it all by beginning a management school in Gurgaon.

In F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of Jazz Age America, The Great Gatsby, there are two questions asked of the mysteriously wealthy title character: Where did he get his money? And, where did he go to college? These are necessary questions in a time when money is being made too quickly and in too many ways for established social networks to keep track. In the gap between old networks and rapidly changing times lies opportunity. Gatsby hopes to make good the promise of capitalism that ambitious people can have second acts to their lives. So when he tells people in a voice laced with British affectations (“old sport”) that he went to Oxford, he is trying to transform his new money, procured by questionable means, into old money. And because assuming the persona of a blue-blooded heir leads naturally to questions about why he hasn’t attended one of the Ivy League colleges where wealthy young men like Tom Buchanan are sent for a final polish, he adopts Oxford as his alma mater, a place so far away that it is difficult for people to check up on him.

Arindam, unlike Gatsby, wasn’t a working-class upstart from the interior of the country. He was a middle-class man who grew up in Delhi, alert from the very beginning to the opportunities provided by the capital city, and who thus demonstrates that the mobility provided by the new India is significantly more limited than that of America at the turn of the 20^th century. As for the degrees claimed by Arindam, they came not from some exotic overseas institution but from the business school set up by his father. The question of pedigree, the bloggers realised, could be transferred back one generation to Arindam’s father, “Doctor” Malay Chaudhuri, and his claim to have a doctorate from the Berlin School of Economics.

The bloggers discovered that it was hard to pinpoint any such school with certainty. Dr. Chaudhuri had once contested elections to the Indian Parliament—he received so few votes that he lost his deposit—and in his application to the Election Commission, he credited his doctorate to an institute in the other Berlin, in the former East Germany. What records could one possibly locate when the country itself no longer existed? The bloggers concluded that there had never, in all likelihood, been a Berlin School of Economics, and that Malay Chaudhuri’s doctorate was simply the first of many fictitious degrees handed out by the Chaudhuri clan.

I COULD SEE THE RATIONALE of the bloggers, just as I saw how the Delhi publisher’s question about how Arindam made his money was important. In spite of the friendliness with which Arindam treated me, he was always on his guard. My questions about

revenues and the size of the company continued to go unanswered, which seemed even more interesting when I discovered that the Indian tax authorities were investigating the company. Although it spent roughly 8 million dollars on advertising in 2006, it paid no income tax that year or the previous. There was also the company’s social responsibility campaign, directed through its charitable Great Indian Dream Foundation. Arindam claimed that the foundation was building schools in slums and villages, setting up a hospital in a rural area of West Bengal, and giving “experimental” seeds to farmers. “We will have 52 schools in seven metros by the end of the year. Sixty thousand villages will be covered in the future. Eventually, I hope to fulfill my father’s dream of doing something for the downtrodden in Africa.” Within the glittering capitalist lived a closet radical, someone who admired Ché Guevara so much that he had named his only son Ché. But I found it impossible to verify any of these claims, and Arindam’s promise to take me to a school for the poor in a Delhi slum never materialised.

Other things remained beyond my scrutiny. I realised I had met Arindam only in hotels and at the main IIPM campus in Satbari, where he spoke, in expansive terms, of expanding to America. “Let Harvard fume, ‘We are 200 years old,’” Arindam had said, lopping two centuries off Harvard’s past. “Eventually they will recognise how good we are.” It was astonishing, this equation of America, through Harvard, with the old, while the India he represented was new, young and modern. And perhaps he was right. His institute was a fluid, virtual business school of the future, one that had done away with the arduous task of institution building.

Arindam had first moved the school from Gurgaon to the Qutab Institutional Area, on the southern fringe of Delhi, where it occupied a leased building that finally ran afoul of the city’s zoning laws. Now they were operating from Satbari, somewhere between Gurgaon and Qutab, but even this building, its bright colors and abstract designs done to Arindam’s specifications, its small gym and swimming pool throwing out a challenge to the well-funded IIMs, might not be the final stop. It was a leased space, and Arindam told me that negotiations were already in progress to set the campus up somewhere else.

If the school was mobile, Arindam was even more so. After our meeting at the campus, I had wanted to meet him in his office. “I don’t really operate from a fixed space,” he said. “I am so much on the move.” One day in September, after he’d missed an appointment with me, he sent me a text message at 7 am. “Good morning!” it said. “Totally totally forgot that day. However in the airport right now. And free. Can call. Do let me know if you ve woken up! Sorry about this early morning missive!” He was going on a long business trip to Toronto and London, and I called him back hurriedly, trying not to sound sleepy. He would be attending the Toronto Film Festival, where one of his films, the Rituparno Ghosh directed The Last Lear, was being screened. At London, he would be joined on the plane by the stars of his film, Preity Zinta and Amitabh Bachchan. After the festival, Arindam would stop by his London office for a couple of days.

I remembered an article in the Financial Times that said he would be opening his London institute at Chancery Lane, and so I asked him, “Where exactly is your London office?”

There was a pause. “That’s a good question,” he said. “Where is it?” He sounded boyish and vulnerable, and I found myself wanting to respond kindly, as if speaking to a child I didn’t want to embarrass about an insignificant lie.

“It’s hard for you to keep track of all the offices you have,” I suggested.

“That’s right,” he replied, seemingly relieved that I had offered him a way out.

One day at the Satbari campus I asked Arindam about the criticism that his institute didn’t really offer careers. It was undoubtedly successful in attracting students, but the students, on graduating, seemed to end up in the very organisation that had given them their expensive degrees, teaching at the institute and working for Planman. Arindam told me that his organisation was a “family,” one that offered a continuation of the camaraderie experienced by the students. He also pointed out that, unlike the IIMs, he was not using public money to produce a small number of MBAs who then received extravagant salaries from multinational corporations. “They’ve cornered 100-acre campuses in India. The six IIMs, taken together, teach 1,000 students. And because they have so few students, the average pay package [for graduates] is eight to nine lakhs. That is aura! Wow!”

He was right in pointing out how higher education for the Indian elite, from the engineering colleges to the IIM business schools, was funded by the state, producing technocrats and corporate executives who then went on to attack the state for being inefficient and wasteful. “Every American president should start by thanking the Indian taxpayer,” he said, noting that US multinationals benefited most from the training given to Indian Institute of Technology and IIM graduates. By contrast, he had privatised management education, applying to it the genuine rules of the marketplace. His graduates might get smaller starting salaries. They might be working, he said sarcastically, for distinctly unglamorous companies like ‘Raju Underwear’ and ‘Relaxo Hawaii Chappals.’ But they were not coasting on the taxpayer’s money. He was training people who would work in Indian organisations that needed their skills. “Our placements are improving. Foreign companies are also coming,” he added defensively.

The bulk of IIPM students still ended up working for Arindam. It was hard to find out how much they were paid, but I had a rough idea because Arindam had, in a different context, divided his organisation’s salary structure into three groups: those making up to 25,000 rupees a month; up to 75,000 rupees a month; and more than 75,000 rupees a month. It seemed reasonable to assume that a starting IIPM graduate fell into the first category; at 6,000 dollars a year, he or she earned a third of what an IIM graduate did, which doesn’t seem bad. On the other hand, this is only twice what a call centre worker with a basic—and cheap— college degree can earn, even if managerial work offers better hours and prospects for advancement.

The problem with Arindam’s approach lay deeper than the salaries his graduates made. Even in the world of closed Indian companies, Arindam’s organisation is unusual. It is not publicly traded, and was incorporated only very recently. The success and failure of IIPM students depends largely upon what happens to Planman, and what happens to Planman depends on what happens to Arindam. As for what happens to Arindam, that depends on whether the students keep coming. If the business school produces the greater part of the company’s revenues and employs most of the graduating students, this model can keep functioning only as long as a growing body of students remains willing to put up substantial sums of money for their degrees.

Chaudhuri launched The Sunday Indian (“perhaps the only magazine in the world with 13 editions”) in 2006.

Although the bloggers were right about many things, they seemed unable to comprehend that Arindam wasn’t so much a rogue management guru as a particularly blatant, though uncredentialed, manifestation of standard management principles. Arindam tended to invoke the elite IIM mafia as a way to evade questions, but it was true that the initial criticism had been levelled by Bansal, an IIM Ahmedabad graduate, and then picked up by Sabnis, who studied at IIM Lucknow. It was equally true that the bloggers were remarkable snobs. Alongside more substantive criticism of IIPM and Planman, they posted many comments about the way Arindam and his acolytes dressed and spoke, with an element of distaste and surprise that such pretenders could claim to belong to the corporate world from which most of the bloggers came.

None of the bloggers seemed willing to consider that their cherished corporate practices would necessarily spawn imitators. IIPM has the same relationship to IIM as knockoff goods do to branded products; there is always a market for the knockoff version among the aspirational crowd. In other ways too, the cult of Arindam—the bloggers were puzzled by the vehemence with which IIPM students, the people apparently being defrauded, defended him—is only part of the larger cult that is contemporary India.
Arindam’s management factory produces something less tangible, but more resonant than durables or consumer products. It takes people who have a fair bit of money but little cultural or intellectual capital and promises to turn them into fully fledged partners in the corporate globalised world. The students at IIPM are not from impoverished backgrounds. They can’t be because the courses are expensive. Many come from provincial towns, from small-business families that have accumulated wealth and now feel the need to upgrade themselves so they can compete in the realm of globalisation. Arindam gives youth from these backgrounds a chance to tap at IBM laptops, wear shiny suits and polished shoes, and go on foreign trips to Geneva or New York. All this involves a considerable degree of play-acting, and the students spend the most impressionable years of their lives in what is in essence a toy management school—mini golf course, mini gym, mini library. But play-acting is what the Indian middle and upper classes are doing anyway, wandering about the malls checking out the products purveyed by more established, easeful play-actors like Tommy Hilfiger and Louis Vuitton.

ARINDAM'S FORTUNE, ultimately, was built on the aspiration and ressentiment of the Indian petite bourgeoisie. Without the aspirers emulating, admiring, and parting with their cash, moguls like Arindam would not exist. He had made a business out of their aspirations, calibrating the brashness and insecurity that had come to them on the wings of the

market economy and its political partner, right-wing Hinduism. Arindam understood well how these aspirers had been given a language of assertion by the times in which they lived, and how they had also been handed a vocabulary of rage that is quite disproportionate to their perceived provocations. It is one of the triumphs of our age that aspirers can be made to feel both empowered and excluded; all over the world, one sees a new lumpenbourgeoisie quick to express a sense of victimisation, voicing their anger about being excluded from the elite while remaining callously indifferent to the truly impoverished.

I had begun feeling some of this aspiration myself. One afternoon, I ate lunch with a former IIPM student who was one of Arindam’s prized employees. His name was Siddharth Nambiar. Wearing a suit and designer sunglasses, his head shaven, he appeared in front of me with long strides, car keys dangling from his right hand. He was late because he had rammed his car into the back of a bus, but he was unfazed by this “fender bender,” as he put it.

We met at a shopping plaza just across the street from where I lived at the time, an odd mix of multinational franchises, rundown shops and a multiplex that often seemed to be showing one or the other of Arindam’s films. Nambiar led me up the stairs to an Italian restaurant called Azzurro. It was quite empty: the call centre workers preferred the kathi roll stand around the corner or the TGIF outlet across the square and it was too early for Western expats and upper-class Indians. The waitstaff knew Nambiar, as did the woman who ran the restaurant. He took off his sunglasses, ordered with a flourish, and began telling me about his career with Planman. He had been a student at IIPM Delhi, joined the company upon graduating, and had soon taken charge of the media division. He was 23 years old.

Arindam had put considerable thought into sending Nambiar to meet me. If his primary business was churning out management graduates, he had sent me his finest product, glistening and confident, someone who could compete effortlessly with the MBAs from IIM. Nambiar’s shaven head shone in the bright afternoon light as he spoke about how he had negotiated with Foreign Affairs about publishing an Indian edition (although the effort was unsuccessful, he impressed Foreign Affairs with his presentation, according to a friend of mine who worked there). He had travelled around the world with Arindam, and in a few weeks he would be leaving for Oxford, where he would earn an MBA. When he returned, he expected to work at Planman again.

I asked about Arindam’s conspicuous consumption, and he was delighted to give me the details. “The car?” he said. “It’s a Bentley Continental four-door. Actually, he got it because of me. We were in London, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and I saw a Bentley parked outside this restaurant where I was having lunch with friends. I had one of them take a picture of me leaning on the hood of the Bentley with a glass of champagne in my hand.” He laughed, waiting for the image to be fully processed in my brain. “It looked so cool, you know? Then, I went to see Arindam at the Ritz, where he was staying. I was showing someone else the picture on my laptop, and he grabbed the laptop from me, looked at the picture, and said, ‘What kind of car is that? I’m going to get one.’”

I asked him if he could describe Arindam’s Delhi office for me.

“Let me think,” he said. “I’d say it has a nightclub in the daytime look.”

We laughed at this. Nambiar’s laughter had a doubleness to it—it conveyed the knowledge that he himself was too sophisticated to make such a mistake but also revealed his admiration for a man who had the money to flaunt his taste, however questionable. He described the long, curved, red leather couch, the shelves filled with management books and magazines. An anteroom contained a treadmill, a television, and a pullout sofa where Arindam’s son Ché sometimes slept in the afternoon. The office floor had blue granite tiling, and the building’s exterior was of tinted blue glass. From the windows of Arindam’s office, Nambiar said, it was possible to see the Ernst & Young building.

What gave Nambiar’s description a touch of virtual reality was the fact that Arindam’s Delhi office no longer existed. It had been closed down for violating zoning laws and survived only in the images that Nambiar so expertly created.

When I asked for the bill, the waiter said that it had been taken care of by the manager. “She’s my girlfriend’s mother,” Nambiar said. “That’s really too bad, because I was hoping to treat you.” I insisted that the waiter bring me the bill. The waiter smiled and disappeared, while Nambiar looked surprised. I said something about journalistic ethics, but I could see that this made no sense to him. I was beginning to lose my temper, and I wondered why. Who would really care if I let Nambiar’s girlfriend’s mother pay for lunch? Who would think that my honesty as a writer had been compromised?

As I cornered the waiter again and forced him to bring the bill, I found myself wondering why I didn’t have a suit, designer sunglasses, and car keys. I wondered why I wasn’t making money at a time in India when moneymaking opportunities seemed everywhere for the asking. Like Arindam’s students, I was an aspirer, finally, oblivious to anything but my own inchoate desires, filled with a sense of anger that I had no wealth to flaunt, as well as a trembling awareness of opportunities that it was perhaps not too late to capitalise. “I don’t like an image of me that isn’t me,” Arindam had told me, anxious to clarify his essential self. And here was I, not liking the image of me that was me. I felt that I was beginning to lose myself in this world of appearances and aspirations, and that paying the bill was the only way to return to steady ground.

Adapted from The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, forthcoming from Viking Penguin in June.

____________

Disclaimer :

I don't claim to have authored this article. All writing and publishing credits go to Siddhartha Deb and Caravan(Link to the original article). However, the reportage in this article is in public interest and I intend to disseminate it to as many people as possible.
I am neither an IIPM nor IIM (god forbid !) alumni. I am just a guy pissed off with institutionalized fraud in public and private sectors of our country.
Update : 22nd June 2011 : www.caravanmagazine.in/IIPM_lawsuit.aspx .

I'll gladly take down this page if the original article is restored again or if I get a direct communication from Google(who own Blogger) or Caravan(who published the article in print and electronic media). However, in case this page is defaced/hacked into, I'll have the same content up and running under another site. Until then, Arindam & IIPM can sue my ass.

Long live google search ;-) .

two poems

2009-05-16T04:11:00.000-07:00

(1)

If today doesn't end with you by my side...
I wish fate would grant me one more
And culminate it with you I shall...
With it shall end my life, amour

(2)

Hair falls unflattering over your eyes
And mascara smears hide your fair facade
Lips dry and your gaze is unfocused
Still beautiful, does your beauty never fade?

limerick kicks (or the one where I am back!)

2009-03-04T14:07:00.000-08:00

[...Yeah, she didnt tell me that either. Iam a mallu for heaven sake! We have no saying which revolves around rugs and lemonade. Ours got tigers and coconuts. She told me that when life gives you a lemon, you make lime pickle; and if you are still depressed, find some toddy to go along with that - Tys-on-Ice (http://tysonice.blogspot.com/2009/01/lend-me-your-year.html) ...]

once there was this dufus
whom destiny's dark hand always chooses
to put him in a state
where it is his fate
that even while winning he always looses!

doesn't take a brilliant mind to see
that indeed, that's me
who was lolling down south
with tongue hanging outta his mouth
and suddenly found himself in delhieee!

replanted in a whole new place
navigating the bloody maze
found that it wasn't easy
and drove me a little crazy
to browse, connect, blog or interface!

but slowly i got the knack
of juggling forth and slack
work, life , play and party
along with my online repartee
and today got my groove back!

[...and yeah, a few words from your sponsor before you log off. this is a true post even though the tone maybe flippant and rhyming a bit strangled. I have moved yet again; this time to the capital. Wish I could say it was in saerch of truth or some other crappy higher calling but its due to the emergence of...ah darn! it's work..dat's all....

...working on a post with vignettes (funny of course) of life here for the last four months and hope to post it soon...bear you me with...I mean if there is any one out there still reading this or feeding on this...are there any? or is this blog just a pale echo reflecting in the chasms of a Web 2.0 graveyard in between broken links and unpinned feedlets? Must...resist...manic...depressive...state. O 'ell, its 4 in the AM and time for me to wind up what I believe is the most personal I have been in this blog for a long time...H]

Red, Blue and Purple

2008-11-04T22:48:00.001-08:00

[For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future - John Fitzgerald Kennedy]

Human spirit is a strange thing. Even in the face of the inevitable, when it actually happens, we experience the exhilaration and joy akin to the feeling we have at a surprising turn of events. That was what witnessed across US (and the world!) today.

Indeed, one of the most striking images that will stay with me as a mark of this election is the sight of hundreds of black people celebrating with chairs raised over their heads and screaming with joy. What is it that it is so striking, you may ask, as this image is splattered all across the US of A? The reason is that this was not anywhere in the US but in a remote village in Kenya.

In an unprecedented turn of events, we saw this US election turn into not just an American spectacle but a global event. You had tribes in Kenya supporting him, Democrats Abroad in Chennai having an all night vigil in front of the TV and the largest turnout for Obama, surprisingly turning out to be the 100,000 crowd in Berlin (I can’t emphasize enough on Berlin!)

A lot of euphoria may vanish over the days as the stark realities of recession hits home hard, A lot of grins may turn into scowls as the strict tax reforms are implemented by the man, and Democrats Abroad in Bangalore may start resenting him for the reduction in outsourcing but the fact that one of the most narrow minded (not to mention Paranoid)democracies in the world when it comes to its leaders has elected a African American with a last name that sounds similar to its most dreaded enemy and a middle name same as its erstwhile enemy , is definitely one of the greatest turning points in contemporary history.

As Oprah put it succinctly, "It’s no longer going to be about Red or Blue, It is going to be about Red, Blue or Purple" Away from detractors in the US and at home in India, I feel that finally when a US president says "Us, the United States of America" he means finally the UNITED states of America; Not just the white, but of the Black, Brown, Yellow and Red.

PS: Was it just me or did Bush's congratulatory speech for Obama sound a little condescending?

[This article was published by me first at Desicritics. You can view the original article here]

the day

2008-10-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

There are some days, when the weight of history presses on them so heavily that they stretch reality and distort the fabric of space and time. They stand out, among the other 365, because of events that happened, milestones planted on the roads of history, firmly and sometimes, brutally. It is the story of such a day, October 16th. Today.

1781

5:00 PM

"My Lord"

"Yes Sergeant McRowane"

"The Attack failed, The French Battery is still pounding us with their infernal shells. We couldn't over power those ungrateful allies of America"

"Thank You, You are dismissed"

Cornwallis shrugged to himself. It was expected, he thought, with the relief forces from New York held up and with a dwindling supply of Arms, Ammunition and Food, and he would be surprised if he would be able to hold Yorktown longer. There was only one way, he had to get part of his force north across the York River, to Banister Tarleton's position on Gloucester Point. They would be needed there to strengthen the defenses.

"Corporal!" He called out to the sentry outside his quarters.

"Yes, My Lord"

"Tell the Generals of 2nd & 3rd Light Infantry and 32 Cavalry that I want to meet them right now!"

"Yes, My Lord"

Maybe they would be able to hold on at Gloucester Point till Clinton's Forces arrived from New York.

2200 HRS

"Your Lordship, We have news from the forces that were moved to Gloucester Point. They met a torrential downpour and could not proceed. They are awaiting further orders and..."

"I know, Sergeant, You may leave"

Cornwallis felt weary and he knew that it had nothing to do with fatigue of no sleep for 3 days or the tiredness of his body. The weariness was a result of the crushing of his spirit and he knew that it was about to become worse. It always did, after surrender. And he had no
options left.

(The Siege of Yorktown or Battle of Yorktown in 1781 was a decisive victory by a combined assault of American forces led by General George Washington and French forces led by General Comte de Rochambeau over a British Army commanded by General Lord Cornwallis. It proved to be the last major land battle of the American Revolutionary War, as the surrender of Cornwallis’s army (the second major surrender of the war) prompted the British government to eventually negotiate an end to the conflict)

1793

On the morning of 16 October a guard arrived to cut her hair and bind her hands behind her back. She was forced into a common, slow-moving cart and paraded through the streets of Paris for over an hour before reaching the Place de la Révolution where the guillotine stood.

She stepped lightly down from the cart and stared up at the guillotine.

The priest who had accompanied her whispered, "This is the moment, Madame, to arm yourself with courage."

She turned to look at him and smiled, "Courage? The moment when my troubles are going to end is not the moment when my courage is going to fail me."

She climbed up the stairs to the Guillotine and inadvertently stepped on the executioner's foot, "Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose,"

(At 12:15 on Wednesday 16 October 1793, Marie Antoinette was executed. Her head was exhibited to a cheering crowd. Her body was then taken and dumped in an unmarked mass grave in the Rue d'Anjou)

1934

"Comrade Commander, we await your orders"

"I am no commander, comrade. Defeated, retreating armies do not need a Commander or a General", Mao replied.

The young captain thought it wise not to reply. He was perplexed by this show of weakness on Mao Zedong's part. Was he not the Scourge of the Kuomintang? The one man whose name invoked both terror and respect in not only the enemy's mind but it was said, even in the annals of the Red Army.

Mao was oblivious to his reaction. His heart dwelt on the herculean task ahead. He had to take his army a thousand miles away to save them from the eventual massacre from the forces of Chiang Kai-Shek. Staying in Jiangxi was not safe and not was surrender. Retreat was the only option.

But the shame! How could he save himself from that? How could he answer his forefather's on the day of reckoning that he engineered the shameful retreat. Where is the silver lining for this dark cloud!

The Communists, under the eventual command of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, escaped in a circling retreat to the west and north, which reportedly traversed some 12,500 kilometers over 370 days. The route passed through some of the most difficult terrain of western China by traveling west, then north, to Shaanxi. Only one tenth of the forces would eventually make it.

(While costly, the Long March gave the Communist Party of China (CPC) the isolation it needed, allowing its army to recuperate and rebuild in the north of China. It also was vital in helping the CPC to gain a positive reputation among the peasants due to the determination and dedication of the surviving participants of the Long March)

1981

Harish was born

(Though not in the same magnitude as the events before, this birth and the subsequent life till date proved that there is yet hope for the mankind if someone like me can survive purely based on Luck, Humor Sense and Total Goofiness!)

chacha chaudhary - sabu's revenge

2008-09-20T02:25:00.000-07:00

Avid readers of this blog would remember the post about Chacha Chaudhary, a frightening old man with a single set of clothes and a scary, warped sense of vigilante justice. He was "The Old Knight" akin Bruce Wayne for Gotham.

Now, I had ended the last post with this:

Yes, this story had everything... except Sabu. This world would be a better place if all stories had more Sabu in them. In fact, even Sholay could have been made better by simply including Sabu in it. Can't you just see it?

I’ll try to get a clip featuring Sabu. In case you don’t know him, hes from Jupiter, is 60 Feet Tall and every time he gets angry a volcano erupts somewhere in the universe. Do I hear you barfing??

Yes, now the time has come to fulfill my promise. No, No...put that paper bag down..I didn't mean the promise about barfing but to introduce you to one of most rocking sidekicks!

He's not gay like Robin, Dissaparate like Supergirl, irritating like Orko or...well you get the point!

Now, without too much ado, let me get straight to the comic:

(PS: The images are a little blurred, if you are not able to read them properly, click on it to open in a new window)

You might have this strange feeling of Deja Vu while reading the first panel of this story. Well, let's face it...That's because all Chacha Chaudhary stories are pretty much the same. They follow one of three patterns:

1) Chacha Chaudhary outsmarts people
2) Sabu whacks the shit out of people
3) Chacha Chaudhary and Sabu outsmart people by whacking the shit out of them

Moving on, we finally see a female presence in the comic. The angry woman on the right is Chacha Chaudhary's wife. She always has this huge rolling pin in her hand, which I think is supposed to hint at the fact that she beats Chacha Chaudhary into submission (or her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to make chappathis all day long!)

Now, the setup to this story is simple - Chacha Chaudhary and Sabu need to earn some money or they won't get to eat anything for dinner. It's really impressive the way Chacha Chaudhary manages to set up the plot right in the first page. Actually that's not so impressive when you figure that the stories are just three pages each.

Another thing you have to realize is that being able and efficient crimefighters (for a very generous description of crime and an even more liberal definition of crimefighters) these two have accumulated a horde of enemies who resemble the who's who of shitty comic book villians. One of them is Dagroo, who has a major grouse with Sabu (If I were him, I would have a major grouse with the artist who drew him like a constipated porcupine!)

Can't you feel the sense of impending doom? I could look at that bottom frame forever.

Hah! He didn't even feel it the first time. The stick just cracked and bounced off his shiny bald head. Weren't expecting that, were you, Mr. Shabroo? Undaunted, he picks up an iron box that happens to be full of money. Who the hell puts money in an iron box and then leaves it lying around town? Now you know why Chacha Chaudhary is supposed to be so smart: everybody else in the town is a complete retard.

There's something else very strange about the third frame on this page. Who is that calling "Yes, go ahead." from the left? We know there are only three characters present, two of whom are in the frame. That leaves just the photographer. And his schizophrenic alter ego.

These comics should come with warnings; I'm sure there are kids who've had seizures while reading this.

Did I tell you? Not satisfied with giving us mental diarrhea with such a character, the creator had actually the guts to introduce us to his twin brother?

OK...Calm down..and p-u-t t-h-e g-u-n d-o-w-n!

He he..we'll leave it for another day, shall we?

(You can read the older post here)

rhyme sans reason

2008-09-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

He was lying on the base of the mountain. His whole body was bruised and battered, the broken knee cap was sending searing shooters of pain across his whole leg, but his mind was elsewhere.

Thinking about her...he could hear the sounds from up the slope. She was falling too. Tumbling down the slope, like him, a few minutes ago. Her screams were dopplering down to him, in waves. That hurt him more than the leg.

What did they do wrong? They were kids, god-damn it!

All they wanted was some water. In their parched land, it had to be drawn from the last remaining well at the top of the hill. He had tripped on his way up...and now this.

All for a pail of water...

His lasts thoughts were crazy as he was delirious with pain.

He imagined kids like them, millions of them, singing about their fates. Singing like mad demented idiots.

Jack smiled through his pain and lost consciousness. and did not hear Jill's final scream echoing off the hills...

[i was inspired by a random post in a blog which i sadly do not remember...the writer had done a better work (much much better work) than me on the "johnny johnny.." one. sadly, i do not remember who it was. damn, teaches me to fav a site as soon as i decide i like it!!]

black

2008-08-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

[this was a tag from pavi who wanted me to write a story based on my favorite color. black is what it is. i have borrowed heavily from myths and maybe twisted a few facts here and there due to ignorance or to fit the story, my apologies]

Shyama was his name.Literally meant black. And so was he.

Born of wealthy if vaishya traders who have been entrenched in their business of precious silks and diamonds since the time of King Raghu. His dad Rakhtahasa was a boisterous man who, legend has it, rode along with King Dasharatha in many of his wars. The king, and certainly lady luck, had heaped fortunes upon him. Only one worry nagged at his soul, of his son Shyama.

Shyama was black and not the fiery and subtle shade of a cloud like their Prince who was in exile ( as told by the bards who always referred to him as dark as a cloud) but literally black as an asura. In a society that measured virtue a lot by the appearance of the person, that meant that he was generally an outcast. Alienated, even though a eleven year old.

Just because he was black.

On that day of Ashadha, he was at the stables, grooming Markasha, his dad's favorite stallion. The horse was his only companion and his adoloescent mind often wondered why black was so prized in a horse while he was shunned for the same. Ah, the quirks of grown-ups!

Shunned would be harsh as the people around him, the dasis, the stable hands and usual coterie of clerks and servants could hardly be disrespectful the young master. Atleast not in an obvious way. But on and off, an ill placed snigger and snatches of conversation reminded him of his color.

"by Indra! is it true Durasta missed him while he was on his way to light the lamps?"
"our master, shines like lord Surya in the month of Phalguna but look at his son..."
"looks...a..Asura"

They called him an Asura or a demon. That's what irked him the most. More than the fact that his dad never used to act least bit bothered even though he was sure to be tuned to the sea of rumors. Not even during that ghastly episode during the Madira orgy where a rival trader openly questioned his mother's chastity. Rage had boiled inside Shyama but he was an unwelcome visitor feasting on savories from under the table. He was amazed at the self restraint shown by his father.

All because he was black.

He was tired of all this and he sought means to end it all. He had heard about the ill effects of Kartaraasa, the medicine for colic-ridden horses and which was kept in the apothecary's room.

A sudden roar like the ones never heard before interrupted his reverie. He was aware that it was coming from the main street of Ayodhya, which his house overlooked. He left his grooming tools in the stables and ran into the house. There was a generous amount of chaos inside the house and all along, a feverishbluster.

People were running to the front door or to any of the balconies over looking the streets as it seemed to be the cynosure of all activity.

"he's back"
"oh my lord, he has returned to be with us"
"...ruler of all.."
"Ravana is dead?"
"even Vanaras..."
"14 years...so long"

he could not make any sense of anything and he made his way to the main balcony. Surprisingly, it was crowded too, with an array of dasis waiting with thalis laden with flower petals and lamps. He tried in vain to push through the line blocking his view but settled for an audio commentary.

Soon, there was a hush among the crowd. More than a general sense of quiet, Shyama could feel the anticipation building in everyone around him and the air was heavy with it.

A loud collective cheer broke it like a thunder clap and shouts thronged the air.

"Jai ShriRam! Jai Jai ShriRam"

The dasis were showering flowers on the street and there were cries from the older ones in the balcony.

"It has been 14 years, oh god, I thought he would never come back", cried old Duvarya. One of the younger ones interjected,"but, he...he is so...I mean...------"

Shyama, who did not hear the uttered word, wondered what she could find incongruous in the prince.

"be careful about what you speak of, you young imbecile. he is the lord, reincarnate of the Lord Vishnu, heir to the Suryavamsha and true King of Ayodhya. You dare say that about him? So is our young master, isn't he?"

It was evident that they hadn't seen him yet. Else they would not be speaking about him. Still, he wondered what he had in common with the prince that drew that interjection from the dasis.

Curiosity welled up inside him as he resolutely pushed away at the line and finally got a glimpse of the road.

There were throngs of ministers, soldiers, generals, vassals, courtiers and noble men along with the Regent-King Bharata standing in front of the small party of three. The crowd all around them was chanting Rama's name and as in his balcony, all around the street, flower petals were being showered upon him. All the houses were lit up with millions of oil lamps and the whole seen shimmered like an unreal vision of Swarga.

All for Rama, the prince who came back.

Rama, who was as black as him.

He never thought about the Apothecary's room ever.

psychedelic ads from the past - parry's eclairs

2008-08-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

Kalia, Suppandi, Shikari Shambu, Kapish, Anwar…

Need I say more? If these names mean something to you than I am sure that you would be among the millions of after-youth’ers whose collective childhood were enriched by the wonderful monthly (later fortnightly and now weekly) Tinkle, has, believe it or not, comic book versions of folk tales from around the world (I realized that Cameroon is a country and not a dish after reading “Ngampa Goes to Market!”), nature documentaries, scientific experiments, do-it-yourself craft projects... and still have time to devote to regular features like the adventures of talking crows and flat-headed domestic servants.

It was edited by Anant Pai known to us only as "Uncle Pai", and he had the status of a demigod to us kids. Even when you grew a little older and it wasn't "cool" to read it anymore, you still had a stash hidden under your bed that you read when no-one was looking.

Now, as luck would have it, most of my stash was freely distributed to kids of relatives' (or they were just pawns in a major laundering operation and the books ultimately reached the different uncles and aunts!). It was fortunate that I happened to stumble upon some of them while attempting to ~~stash my cigarettes~~ clean the attic.

The characters and story lines haven't changed much from the past now but what has changed are the advertisements. Simple advertisements from a simpler time. A happier, more innocent decade. A happier, more innocent, and incredibly weird fucking decade.

I am starting this series to give you a glimpse of that decades because ~~I have no work to do~~ ~~I am too lazy to write a fully fledged blog and would rather copy-paste~~ what’s more wonderful than a crazy trip without LSD?

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

Starting with one of the trippiest ones ever; The Parry’s Éclairs! It was the poor cousin of the more famous Cadbury’s Éclairs, who had the cute girl from some movie or shit endorsing it. Much like Ashlee Simpson baring all to grab more attention than her better (WTF!) sounding sister, Parry’s decided to attack from the flank and produced this wonderful ad:

That is one stoned kid. Check out the amazing psychedelic vision you can experience by just dropping a couple of Parry's Éclairs. God damn I love the '80s. It was rumored that this one single ad managed to wean away all the future potheads and LSD fans from Cadbury's; who took a major hit in sales. Last seen, the Cadbury's girl was selling Vada-Pav in Churchgate and she still shudders on seeing anything remotely dark-brown.

dream fall

2008-08-18T10:19:00.001-07:00

in life sometimes, despair clouds eyes and chokes me in a silent hold
way ahead seems so foggy and lays upon me, a funeral wreathe
complaining seems easy and so is giving up, but what i do instead
i never let my dreams fall, i hold them up with all my strength

what transpires is a silent fight, with me as the only witness
one side is sorrow with the wings of fate and the bad dreams dreamt
and on the other side a still feeble resolve that has left its hearth
but i never let my dreams fall, i hold them up with all my strength

the opponents are crafty and have in their arsenal so numerous
of weapons, that makes my soul bleed and my eyes vent
the lance of parting and the sword of sorrow mightily clash down
but i never let my dreams fall, i hold them up with all my strength

triumph is a long way away and so is the clear blue sky of joy
so is a life that turns to normal and victories and joyful warmth
but i take pleasure in little things and battle on with the dark forces
and i never let my dreams fall, i hold them up with all my strength

[i reserve my poetry to the scratch of a waterman nib on paper, but this blog has been long neglected so decided to post one here, after permission from mr waterman, of course!]

the drifter chronicles - episode 2 - the fountains of youth

2008-08-15T06:07:00.000-07:00

Prologue

"who is this guy? jayaprakash....come here you idiot!"

JayaPrakash or JP, one of the few crossbreeds between a nerd and a drifter (yeah, they do exist) walks slowly up the dais to meet Zach Sir (fake name, of course!)

"you wrote this answer? what are you made of? poop?"

JP stands silent, ever mindful of the giggles and titters behind him. Rage slowly simmers in him but he knows he can't bait him anymore than necessary.

"you should be named parajay andhakar not Jayaprakash!!"

Zach sniggered and the frontbenchers duly joined in...Well, to be fair, so did some of us. It was not a bad effort by Zach sir as the funniest thing he ever did was flatulence!

Part I - The Plan

To say we hated him would have been an understatement. He was a jerk (to us adolescents) and always on the lookout for the slightest of vagrancy which he punished heavily. Girls alone escaped his wrath, though the price they had to pay was to see his slobbery girth planted on their desktops (the wooden one not PCs!) while he delivered sermons on mitochondria. Among the guys only Chandu was spared as his dad was an influential PWD Contractor and this slob had some underhand dealings with him (or so we heard)

I was a scapegoat to his mid-class heroics a lot and have come close to being his bete-noire after JP. Did not bother me much as being BN to all other teachers, it was a refreshing change not to be one. Like Dhoni sitting out at Colombo test.

Soon we decided that we had to deal a blow back to him. Not explicitly of course. The Gilt Attack fracas (or rumpus or whateva!) has actually made us lie low for a while.

We decided that our blow would be subtle, dark and blackly funny...like the horses head on your bed when you wake up in the morning. I had been recently struck by the lightning called God father and my brain usually worked in a very Sicilian way. I had gone so far as to respond to my moms questions about wasted dinner by saying "its not personal, is business"

Anyway, the horses head idea was wildly cheered upon but the problem was:

a. Zach did not own even a dog let alone a horse
b Who would cut whatsoever head and deposit it in his bed?

Finally, me and nub hit upon a brilliant idea...far more subtle...more jolt per drop (pun intended and you'll know why, later...) and classy!!

We will spray his shirt with something stinky and smelly so that he stinks the whole day. By the way, he had acute sinusitis and was stone smell blind. So our revenge would be a double blow to him. To anoint him with stink and also humiliate him by making him stink all day and not realizing it.

We had decided on the delivery medium to be a 15 ml syringe with a needle attached which would give us the precision surgical (pun!!) strike at our target viz; the lower left back of Zach's shirt. The problem was to decide on what to spray. There were no intense juvenile delinquents in history like us who could solve any problems of general mischief-mongery in a flash but this had us stumped. What to get? Where to get? How to get?

The solution was given by Sandy and unlike most of his other ideas this was simple and easy to acquire. Three simple words: "Use Your Pee"

Part II - The Preparation

[a minute of silence for you to let out that gasp of shock and also to assimilate the degree of evil that pre-pubescent are capable of]

To cut a long story short, the plan was approved and we proceeded to utilize the hour before his class to put it into action. It was a SUPW class and well, treated with mild disdain by us.

We three, long before Al Qaeda or Mossad we had perfected the idea of small independent cells working on a specific attack, so that's why there were only 3, went to implement the plan which was simplicity in itself. We had the syringe, the needle and a plastic bottle as the reactor cascade (ahem!) for the bio weapon (ahem!)

Barring the fact that it is a tough task to direct the discharge of the weapon from the reactor to the cascade is a tricky one (ahem, i prefer talking in terms of nuclear science rather than anatomy so that the modesty of my readers is not affronted) and that performance anxiety prevented the other two members in an effective transfer and I had to step in, all went well. We soon had the liquid in all its golden glow en consed in the syringe.

Part III - The Execution

We had already selected the suitable point of deployment and when Zach, his usual obnoxious self, was lecturing in full flow to the female side of the class, I released the liquid and saw it as it made a satisfying patch on the designated area. The team members gave me silent nods of appreciation as the target was unaware.

Words fail to explain the warmth that spread in our hearts seeing that warm yellow spread over his cotton off-white shirt. The sarcastic jokes, caustic comments and various forms of torture we had been subjected to disappeared like the yellow fluid from the syringe.

We were soon struck out of our reverie by this exclamation from D, one of the girls who was close to being labeled class enemy by us were it not for the fact that she was really cute and most of the drifters had crushes on her.

"Sirrrrr.....there is something on your shirt"

Zach was nonplussed and he touched and rubbed the spot to feel the change in texture. We waited with bated breath as the inevitable happened. Any member of human race have some distinguishing traits that mark them different from other mammals. I mean, a chimp would never, ever proceed to do what Zach proceeded to do. He slowly rubbed the insulting wetness between his fingers and smelled it in a long drag.

There are limits to sinusitis as there are limits to a mosquito coil in stopping a velociraptor attack. Same thing happened here as his the pungent ammoniac compound that forms a major part of urine attacked his nasal system. The first wave of casualties were the dense growth of Zach's nasal hair which either proceeded to do two things. The least brave of them were charred beyond recognition while the more robust ones curled in distaste into small furry balls into the roof. The next wave happened when his unsuspecting mucus membrane was exposed to it. Years of smoking and a penchant for snuff would have desensitized it to a point of indifference, you think? Well no, the flinch of his upper nose was evidence enough for that. Soon, his brain registered the inevitable and the 4 gene sequences, Messers. Shame, Embarrassment, Incredulity and to a small part, Rage swung to work and there were fleeting glimpses of their handiwork in his face.

The warm glow blazed into fire of retribution and slowly into dread. The gilt incident had kind of exhausted our already meager bank balance of repute and if this got out we would be doomed. What happened next is engraved in our collective minds.

Zach regains his composure in a flick, swats off his hands in a gesture of exaggerated nonchalance, flicks imaginary lint from his sleeves and says:

Part IV - The Escape

"it must be the sulphuric acid from the chemistry lab"

bangalore mudde update

2008-08-14T02:07:00.000-07:00

its a puzzle...
there has been an update to the status of the pack who made the pact....
answer these questions and you have the answer...
actually, answer any one and you have the answer...
oops...you already have the answer!!

1. The tragic and true story of a family dealing with AIDS is re-told in this heart-wrenching made-for-cable drama. Amy Madigan and Dennis Boutsikaris star as Roxy and Vinnie Ventola, a successful television screenwriting couple.

2. In some versions the seventeenth and eighteenth lines read Two little Soldier boys playing with a gun; / One shot the other and _____________

3. Organized into several chapters of two-column text and complemented by attractive full-page charcoal drawings, the book is similar in style and format to the author's recent volumes on hibernation and symbiosis. Facklam is adept at raising questions and providing clear, smoothly paced, interesting narrative. Her well-crafted blend of information and ideas makes for pleasant read-aloud material--a rare feat for nonfiction. Which book?

....finally!!!

xkcd

2008-08-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

Megha and I first met at a party at her friend's. We hit it off with a bang, right away, opened up to each other, shared secrets, and talked about everything. Around us, the party waxed, but we hid from sleep together, talking through the deepest hours of the night. The dawn found us curled up on a couch, asleep but still together.

That experience, connecting with a stranger and falling recklessly in love is one of life's greatest joys...And now that you're married, you'll never experience it again. It's the price you pay for everlasting love. It's a small one, but I hope it stings a little. Anyway, I wish you and Megha best. ...Hey, man, you ASKED me to do a toast!

bangalore mudde

2008-07-21T11:35:00.000-07:00

in remembrance of the pact...
sep 2004...

church street, bangalore

me, mush, guldu.....because:

One Bro makes a solo attack, A second Bro provides a crutch, A third Bro rounds out the pack, But a fourth Bro is one too much

droolevoltion

2008-07-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

[a drool is a wet curve that sets almost everything straight...er..maybe not - harish]

As a polished, suave individual, how many times have you been stuck at the keyboard while trying to convey that expression over to your attractive, hot and chic friend/coworker/girlfriend/random chick from orkut/facebook/myspace??

the expression of utmost dignity and the epitome of compliments...the drool!!

If the medium is AIM window, Walls, Scrapbooks or SMS...you're stumped! Coz none of the emoticons have anything for this expression of utmost flattery!

Fear not, Anymore, My friend...I have in front of you the ultimate solution: THE DROOL SMILEY

:)) ~ ~ ~

Notice the calculated smile of faint disinterest and the slight curve of the lips along with strategically placed droplets of the saliva on the chin...Enough to make any hot drool-worthy woman go wobbly kneed!!

Use at it will and give credit where its due!!

Happy drooling!!

Credits: Dee deserves partial credit for it as this was a bolt of innovation that came through while on chat with her.

iphonofilia

2008-06-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

[I wanna take you home, I wont do you no harm, no...You've got to be all mine, all mine...Ooh, foxy lady - Jimi Hendrix]

Yeah...She's MINE!!!!

migration

2008-06-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

temperature: 38-40 c
conditions: humid
smell: stinks!!

mood: commie ci commie ca

work: great
people: awesome
---------------------------------------
Balance Sheets got enough to hold me here for a while...lets have a closer look next quarter :-)
---------------------------------------

-
Posted from Chennai

Paranoia, Transformers, & the Free State

2008-06-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

[Thies was published before at Desi Critic which is also one of the places I write in]

Recently at the Heathrow airport, there was this incident of an airline traveler who was asked to change his t-shirt because it featured a Transformer robot carrying a gun — a robot with a gun that apparently posed a threat to flight safety.

So the long list that includes safety razors and toothpicks (“Stop! Take this plane to Libya or…er…we’ll shave your brains off!!”) has been updated to include items as innocuous as T-Shirts and (heaven forbid!) chequered lungis.

Now seriously, how exactly do they rationalize adding printed tees into the list of items banned during air travel? What to they think? That mid-air, Megatron would metamorphose from the T-Shirt, hijacking them away in search of the Cube or would he demand destruction of all hard detergents? I am sure some bloke with a wild imagination and an overdose of Transformers can be blamed for it.

The actions of the free world (read the U.S.) since 9/11 have been predicable, disturbing and laced generously with paranoia. Patriot Acts and War for Democracies, Aggressive Diplomacy and extensive Bipolarization…Above all; the transformation of even mundane tasks that transverse across borders into something that makes even the seasoned partisan shudder. Let it be airline travel, visa interviews, IRC, Blogging or Freedom to wear a T-Shirt.

The fat cats fail to realize that what their actions based on an overzealous protectiveness is fulfilling the terrorists’ agenda more than their own. What they achieve with one tiny blast is realized tenfold or hundred fold (depending on the location, Indians shrug it off and Americans respond with fixing the third shotgun in their cars gun rack) by the seismic waves of restrictions, gagging, acts that inevitably follow. What they need is not blanket bombing of these into the unsuspecting populace. Indeed, it would well serve them to remember that even the actual blanket bombing was a ridiculous failure. They need to craft precision surgical strikes based on the strong core of intelligence gathering and extensive cooperation among the countries of the free world. Alas, the power-hungry politicos across the globe know that these do not work as well as their scare tactics in filling up their ballot boxes and hence try to disregard them.

Only Israel, secure in its Jewish nationalism and having (almost) selfless democratic machinery managed to do this successfully. Spiriting away Nazi war criminals from Argentina and demolishing the whole terror apparatus behind the Munich attacks using kidon teams. This resoluteness and ruthlessness, which Goda Meier possessed, needs to be imbibed in our leaders for them to react constructively.

Till then let us keep our Batman underwear and Shaktimaan Parle G biscuit packs at home while travelling.

....and be damned!!

2008-06-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

published!!!

2008-05-30T13:45:00.001-07:00

Click on the pic for a larger view
Link: http://desicritics.org/2008/05/30/154057.php

the untold feminine

2008-05-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

[ah, women. they make the highs higher and the lows more frequent…- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]

It's an odd sensation, watching your feelings slowly change over time, seeing your strong positions erode as events batter down on them. My conversation with one of my aunts recently made me think parallel on something that’s been nibbling at my mind.

She was the one who initiated me into the wonderful world of Malayalam literature populated with authors who seduces the reader into a world where they play around by shifting your preconceived ideas and notions. One of the best works I had ever read was Randamoozham by MT Vasudevan Nair. It showed the Mahabharata or some events from it from the eyes of Bheema. The title literally translates as “The Second Turn” and it explores the events from the angst ridden view point of Bhima who has to wait for the second turn always. Be it for the love of his parents, conjugation with Draupadi, the throne. He is sometimes literally reduced to a pawn in the hands of wily politicians like Krishna, Vidura and Shakuni.

Ah…I diverted and dwelled into what might be a separate post. So we ended up on the topic of Draupadi, who was forced to divide everything between her five husbands and slowly to the topic of strong women in literature, mythology, history, politics or even art.

What appeared as a lurking shadow at that moment at the back of my mind slowly crystallized into a solid realization: “where have all the strong women gone?”

Where have the Margaret Thatchers, Magdalene Marys, Anna Kareninas, Drupadis et al…

Is it because that there are no more devotees to put them in their pedestal? The strong feminine evolved and was envisaged by equally fervent admirers, mainly male. Tolstoys, Heaths, Vyasas…

Why don’t men project women in that light anymore? Why have women in print and media diminished in size or being constantly chipped at?

I believe that it has got to do nothing with women being smaller. The problem is that men have shrunk-withered by complexity-and men are so busy trying to grow up with women that they no longer have time to sing of them.

ephiphany

2008-05-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

"Cause all this time
I've just been too blind to understand
What should matter to me
My friend,
This life we live is not what we have
It's what we believe in "

-It's Not My Time, by 3 Doors Down

the one you feed

2008-05-24T00:55:00.000-07:00

One evening an old Cherokee Indian told his grandson about a "battle" that goes on inside people.
He said, "My son, the battle is between 2 "wolves" inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather:
"Which wolf wins?"
The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

Chacha Chaudhary and Gabbar Singh

2008-05-13T03:42:00.000-07:00

Dusting up my old book collection is one of my favorite past times when I’m home. For two reasons, One, Mom’s constant complaint that I don’t keep my stuff organized kinda tones down and most importantly..it throws up some of the gems and dregs that used to occupy my collective readingscape.

One such gem (?) that I stumbled upon today was an old issue of … (hold your breath) Chacha Chaudhary!!!

If you don’t know it by now, Chacha Chaudhary is the absolute king of shitty comics. But this is no regular, everyday shittyness... Chacha Chaudhary is so shitty that it is actually fun to read! How many other comics do you know that are the centre of their own cosmic paradox?

Its not easy to say what makes Chacha Chaudhary a classic: Bad Grammar, Plots with more holes than a slice of cheddar cheese, Crappiest drawings, illogical stories….the list goes on! I could try to explain more but it would make it much easier if you saw it for yourself.

The strip here is one of the classics and has none other than the quintessential villain of ~~bollywood~~ India, Gabbar Singh featuring in it. Yeah, the flights of fancy the comic took were unfathomable!

So if you've ever asked yourself, "Who would win in a fight - Chacha Chaudhary or Gabbar Singh?" you're about to find out. Come on; don't say you've never thought about it.

Chacha Chaudhary and Gabbar Singh

What strikes you immediately is the incredible amount of story they've compressed into one page. In five frames, they've gone from Chacha Chaudhary aimlessly leading a horse around town to Gabbar Singh sitting astride said horse, trying to get it to move. But that's short-lived, as he gets pissed off again because the horse doesn't move.

Whoa!!! Hasn't he heard of the SPCA? I guess he gets his kicks tying crackers to horses' tails! "Now it will run". Is that how he starts his horse up every morning? I don't know how many years after Sholay this story is set, but obviously Gabbar Singh is no longer the cunning murderous dacoit we know and love. Just look at how foolishly he sits there while Chacha Chaudhary ties crackers - crackers! - to the horse's butt.

Did you get it now? Did you? Did you?

The horse was trained by Chacha Chaudhary! Do you realize what that means?

The sick fuck actually trained the horse to gallop to the police station every time he set firecrackers to his tail. He could have trained him to do exactly the same thing after just a pat on the back. But no, the senile bastard has to go with the bloody firecrackers.

And in case you haven't figured out why Chacha Chaudhary was suddenly walking around with a horse, why he went though all the trouble orchestrating this weird twisted plan, it's spelled out for you right there:

For an old man with basically just one set of clothes, he's frighteningly greedy.

This story has everything you need to enjoy a Chacha Chaudhary comic - weird translations, screwed up drawings, and a form of logic that could fry any child's mental faculties. Plus... it has Gabbar Singh. Yes, this story had everything... except Sabu. This world would be a better place if all stories had more Sabu in them. In fact, even Sholay could have been made better by simply including Sabu in it. Can't you just see it?

I’ll try to get a clip featuring Sabu. In case you don’t know him, hes from Jupiter, is 60 Feet Tall and every time he gets angry a volcano erupts somewhere in the universe. Do I hear you barfing??

fever, heat, lazy, cold/rockin', trippin', partayy, bored

2008-05-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

[a vacation is like love - anticipated with pleasure, experienced with discomfort and remembered with nostalgia]

its been a month in gods own country and things have been peaceful so far. Unless you count the countless bandhs and hartals dotting the collective calends of an average mallu. Well, we have got used to it and online sites and local hallmark cards have started to come out with cards to wish people on the occassion.

See it went like this. Monday the BJP called a bandh because of inflation. Tuesday early morning one of the students got roughed up in a bus, so the Communist students wing went on immediate strike. Wednesday the private bus operators went on strike state-wide over rising petrol prices. Thursday was actually peaceful, but by 11 in the morning the govt staff went on strike over alleged retirement age changes. Friday “Kuruvi” was released at Priya Theatre, so noone turned up for work/study.

Have been tasting the wonderful cuisine back home for a month now so much that the novelty has kind of worn off. Nothing compared to the day when I landed bleary eyed at 9:00 AM at home and proceeded to demolish an entire casserole of Appams and a basin filled with stew like LokSabha MPs voting on the Women's Reservation Bill.

Thank god for providence (is that redundant?) which made sure Sujay and Ajay were here for the last whole month and I was never deprived of company (or beer, for that matter!) Also, Sandy, Dillon and Rohit dropped in and so did a slew of other school friends.

Got sick too. Last few days, what started of as a sore throat developed into a cold and fever. The upside? lot of my friends (mainly of the feminine gender) seem to think i sound a really sexy. Hmmm...researching on google to keep the voice and chase the cold away...

The heat has started to drive me crazy though. The mercury constantly touches 40 and the humidity is too much to bear. Have taken more cold showers than a prison inmate in for life.

My dreams of staying at home peacefully in the company of friends, beer, PSP and Internet were shattered by mom. She had planned a plethora of visits...grand mom's, relatives, temples...phew...along with that, managed quite a no: of trips with friends too. Keep watching this space for more updates.

To come to the last part...well...bored is what the general feeling is. I am not a workaholic but when your mind starts to think nostalgically about that period in 3rd semester when I was planning CIP, Getting the Forecast designed, Compeering for the Seminar and Creating the Grandmasters quiz at the same time (Ah! h ever so humble me!)...I seriously doubt if I am turning into one

Sum it up to Eight!

2008-05-02T11:35:00.000-07:00

Pavi! Tagged me with this….and well, like everything else with her, I didn’t have an option of refusing to do it. So, here it goes…

8 Things I’m Passionate About

Infusing fun in whatever I do!
Reading
Daydreaming
Food
Gaming
Cricket
Designing
The Net

8 Things I want to do before I die

Skydiving
Lick the Liberty Bell
Rafting at Mpumalanga, SA (Supposedly the toughest rapids in the world)
Work as a volunteer for Peace Corps (or WHO)
Write a bestseller
Have a space vacation
Direct a movie
Own a Ford Mustang

8 Words I say often

F**K
Seriously!
What the F***k
Whateva!
“Aliyo!!”
“Haan Bhai!”
One More ;-)

8 Songs I could listen to over n over again

Wake Me Up – Greenday
Wonderwall – Oasis
Paved Paradise – Counting Crows
Somewhere I Belong – Linkin Park
Clocks – Coldplay
Human Clay – Creed
Highway To Hell – ACDC
Hotel California - Eagles

8 Books I’ve Read recently

Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
World is Flat
Sacred Games
Shantaram
Thud!
The Night Watch
Sandman

8 Things that attract me to my Dear Friends

Ready to do the wildest things possible, drunk or sober
Stay by me like a rock
Laugh uproariously at the silliest of things
Be the brunt of my sarcasm and still love me
Supporting me with whatever I need at my darkest hour
Get caught for me and never give me up
The rib-tickling, brain-bombing fun we have
Loving me in spite of my unreliability

life...redux!

2008-04-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

[everyone has a george carlin moment in their life....everyone. i detail mine...]

most unfair thing in life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death! What's that, A Bonus?! I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you go live in an old age home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You drink alcohol, you party, and you get ready for High School. You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back, you spend your last months floating with luxuries like central heating, spa, room service on tap, then you finish off as an orgasm!! Amen.

revamp

2008-04-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

the last post and the revamp and upload of the new theme took the last vestiges of my energy...
just to say that the blog was up for a new look....

hope you liked it as much as i enjoyed making it..

cheers,

harish

the drifter chronicles - episode 1 - the gilt attack

2008-04-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

[The inspiration for this post came from two places. Me inadvertently stumbling on the ever funny SImpu Singh clips on You Tube. It used to feature the simple school teacher Simpu Singh Sodhi and his antics. The phonetically challenged guy had his way of shouting “Pankazzzzzz” to my eternal amusement. I still roll on the floor laughing watching them and find it more amusing the one track demented antics of Lola Kutty fare that they dish out in Channel [V]. Believe me, they have stretched the “zimbly” and “temble” more than a stressed mallu’s lungi!

[If you don’t remember any of the Simpu clips refresh your memory here]

Anyway, if you had noticed closely, you would realize that the school that featured as Simpu’s haunt was Kendriya Vidyalaya, my alma mater! Indeed, in this clip, they actually have the school song featuring in it. The translation goes like this “India’s golden honor will be lifted up further by us KVians…” I remember hearing this bleated out by the school choir while tasting my first cigarette and feeling a (slight) pang of guilt.

And the second inspiration was from Pavi, who would never say die till I became a regular blogger, as regular as her. So I dedicate this to you Pavi!

We learn the lessons late in life that nostalgia is woken up more by the dulcet tones of mundane stuff we did back more than the blaring beats of all the supposedly awesome stuff we did. Those clips and the subtle hints of KV life hit me harder than a two ton truck and the memories came flooding back.

Well, enough of nostalgia and tear stained sighs….let me get back to my groove and take you through some of my memories of those days.]

Episode 1 – The “Gilt” Attack!

It was one of those god send weeks at KV where all we had to do was make exhibits for the upcoming Natioanl Level Science Exhibition. Classes were going on at a lackluster pace and as usual, our class, VIIIB, was abuzz with activity. At these times, you see the caste system in full force there. No the one that makes Arjun Singh drool and dole out quotas like extras in a Sreesanth over, but the sects and subsects of the adolescent group dynamics (phew!). Briefly, you had:

Nerds – Wasting valuable time sitting and trying to find out the 17^th root of irrational numbers.Conversations with them usually turned out to be like this:

Me: Me: So what was your score in the Class test?
Nerd: … my marks are equal to the 4^th root of killers’ coefficient minus the irrational l part
Me: (Nervous Laugh) talk about being lucky!

Ass Kissers – The ones with the most displayed enthusiasm fighting it out in the classrooms to make the most profligate displays just to get a good word in with the teacher. They have their heads so far up the teachers backside that most of the do resemble colonoscopes

c. Jocks – For want of a better name, Jocks run of to the stadium at the drop of a hat to engage in their favorite sports all of them which involved hitting harder, running faster or stretching more with macho grunts at the closest proximity of any member of the female species. (Actually, the scientists have discovered that the shortest measured unit of time is the jock second or the amount of time lapsed between the teacher announcing recess and the jock reaching the tracks/stadium/gym)

d. Drifters – These were the dregs of the class. The members of ABBA (All BackBenchers Association) and various other entirely ineffective gangs who had one thing in common sheer abhorrence to any mental or physical activity and united by the cult motto having fun in the most wackiest way possible. Ah, I see you smirking and mouthing the word “LOSER”. Nay, usually, the toppers, athletes, school captains and the people who achieve the best in their life comes from this group. True Story!

Now, yours truly was a member of the drifters (obviously) and lingering around the class watching various groups battling it out. A sight that would put the building site of an Egyptian Pyramid to shame! Seats pouring over brows that are tightened while applying fevicol to cardboard, hands moving in unison to cut thermocol in the right possible shape (that of the roof of a garbage plant, what a waste!)

At that time, we were engaged in building the easiest of things to make in a science project, The Ecosystem! Cut thermocol, make shapes of mountains and rivers (go wild here!) and fix some figures of animals, PRESTO! Your ecosystem model is ready. You see, being a drifter did not mean shirking from work but trying to achieve maximum gain in the least possible amount of effort and with the major part of time left for trivial pursuits. The above mentioned thermocol pieces were juxtaposed between the wild raging bull figure and a 2 inch tall hyena (well, in our defense if the continents hadn’t drifted the world WOULD have been witness to such marvels in our ecosystem)

The effort had tired us and we were glancing around and commenting generously on our esteemed classmates work. I looked at what looked like the model of an Oil Rig and commented to the nerd – ass kisser hybrid (of the mutations in these species are too many) next to me,

“Nice Work, so you building an Oil Refinery?”

(Gnashing teeth) “No, it’s the Eiffel Tower”

“Oh, speaking of which, the Video Library guy asked me to remind you that you haven’t yet returned Rebecca in Paris cassette”

Loud guffaws from my partners in crime and giggles from the girls around made him look like the Pope at an IPL Cheerleader concert.

I was piling it on. He wanted to punch me. But how to with one hand! (His other holding one small card board strip precariously perched on a slice of thermocol)

While passing time like this, Sarun’s eyes fell on a shiny packet in the class store cupboard. The protagonist of this pots a nice thick packet of Gilt Powder

Gilt Powder (Scientific Name: Giltifera Nevagonnawashoff) One of the most sticky and potent material known to man available in different colors and luminescent in nature. It has been known to attach itself to the human body and nothing short of one of those laser hair removal treatments would take it of (The ones by Alana of New York…or is it Rebecca in Paris?)

Anyway, it used to be an unavoidable part of any science project in KV. In its various forms, it was gold in ornaments, metals in mines, sparkling sea, oil spills. In effect, it was the Aamir Khan of stationery; Versatile, Handles any kind of roles and Interferes too much!

The word he said after that to me still sends a shiver down my spine, even after 10 years:

“Ten bucks says I can throw this pack through the blades of the fan”

The scene after ten seconds of this statement was utterly chaotic. It was like the end of space and time and gilt was ll that had survived. Thank fully the fan had a slight tilt and the whole pack had been carpet bombed into one corner of the class and its occupants, the nerds where now looking like the entire cast of Ramanand Sagar’s Alif Laila.

Unfortunately, the perpetrators, us, where right in front of them (a grave deviation from our usual modus operandi wherein we are far away from the scene of crime when it happens and enjoying the view from a previously decided vantage point) and more so unfortunate was the fact that it wasn’t the only pack of gilt in the wardrobe!

(The author of this post would like to draw a curtain on the proceedings for the next 15 minutes so as not to offend the readers with a display of primal attack instincts and brutual violence)

The bedlam ended when the gilt was evenly distributed as per the laws of demand, supply and rage and everyone settled back into their seats. Like Sunil Joshi missing any catch higher than 3 feet, what missed our view was the sparkling state of affairs. Soon, the hour ended and the next one was Physics taken by Ms BM. This business like lady would never miss a class and rumor has it that she actually delivered her baby a week late so as not to miss the extra lectures for the clas XII board exams.

She breezed in and started to take attendance. Unmindful of the fact that the whole class was now covered evenly in a thin layer of guilt and thinking only of converting the potential energy of a trapped stone in a tower to kinetic energy. It would have entirely escaped her notice had it not been for SK (I cant take his real name here coz he is a well respected surgeon now!) or to be more exact his complexion.

He used to put Curtly Ambrose to shame with his dark toned skin and on him, the gilt was having a field day. It was like the international consumer exhibition of gilt and they were basking in the glory and sparkling away to glory on his ebony skin. The speechless expression in her face was one to behold and soon, like a patient detective ( Hercle Poirot with a touch of Isaac Newton, if you will) she unraveled this whole episode and needless to say, we 4 of the Drifters were found guilty as charged.

The punishment meted out (16 rounds across the athletic track in hot sun) was totally worth for the fact that we could see the “shining” visages of our class for the next whole month. More than 4 guys from our class could not walk together due to the blinding glare the synergy of gilt produced and even, it was said, ten of standing together for assembly prayer resulted in ruptured corneas for 6 of the senior staff.

(Next: Episode 2 – The Cracker Menace)

(PS: Apologies for the over use of cricket metaphors as I have been watching too many IPL matches)

The Class of 2008

2008-04-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

[ It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock 'n' roll / If you wanna be a star of stage and screen / Look out it's rough and mean ]

Summer of 2006: The young ,energetic lot of SITM 2006-2008 is ready to take on the world ....

Summer of 2008: We have been unleashed into the outside world...Battle scarred and hungry for success. We are ready to take on the world but it is a different thing whether we want to. Ruling it seems more easier.

We have, as a batch, had our struggles, sorrows, triumphs, victories, heartbreaks, joys and exhiliration. In the two years at SITM, we found much more than what we envisioned we would, we realized where we stand in the world, we gained new perspectives and regained focus.

How do you measure the success of any batch? Is it by the salaries that they are offered? The achievements they mete out or the benchmarks they set and reset for the future batches? It is not with pride but with humilty we say that we achieved all this, a 70% increase in Highest Salary, Focused media attention on events and achieved academic and extracurricular merits.

But, we do not believe that this is what measures our success. Our success lies in us...Each of us...THE CLASS OF 2008

[This is the snippet I wrote for the for our class's home page as an intro]

Almost an MBA

2008-04-04T07:56:00.001-07:00

(In the beginning, there was discovery, a confusion of elements, a first snowfall of impossible change. Old lives undone, left behind, strange faces made familiar, new nightmares to challenge sleep, new friends to feel safe with. Only then comes control, the need to impose order onto chaos through determination, through study, through struggle, all in defiance of a thundering truth. They're here, and the earth shudders underfoot)

What does it take for a man to find himself? Does he need Tragedy? Love? Triumph? Falls? Ups? Highs? Near-Death? Or Death?

None of these in my case. All I needed were 18 months in the sweet hell of a business school. The 18 months of all the experiences in the first passage…Well, almost all except death.

It seems lofty to pronounce that the 18 months at my school were life changing but hell, they were! I went in as a raw unpolished stone and came out after 18 months as…no, not a diamond, but a shiny cube which reflects and refracts the world around me. It made me aware of the world, helped me connect with the web of human activity (Human Activity systems, as Konher put itJ)

As my long ago previous post showed snippets of what my initiation into MBA was let me continue and dive straight into more incidents.

Almost an MBA (Part II)

1400 HRS, 23.11.06 – Dereliction of Duty

“Bloody, what do you first years think of yourself? Its bloody work that you are ignoring not some bloody assignment…”

“6…7….8…” Sharma counted under his breath. Audible only to me and Prashant “Jugadu” Anand

“If I hear more bloody complaints about your work or bloody non-work I’ll dissolve the junior editorial bloody team”

“9…10…11…” It was Jugadu’s turn to count now. I could detect the upsurge of bottled up laughter inside me and Saurabh “Cisco” Sharma next to me.

Anymore of the famous “bloody” word from the head and we would guffaw right there, right now. In spite of the fact that we were there for a serious dereliction of duty. We as members of the editorial tam from first year were supposed to be de facto correspondents of any major events. Like the National telecom Seminar 2006. This found us sleeping in the back rows of the Vishwabhavan while the senior committee was sweating it out, trying to capture every word of the delegates.

“Bloody get out and finish the report now!!”

“12”, Finally... Out of the room in 12 Bloody Counts!!

2100 HRS, 08.02.06 – Work & Fulfillment

“….and that’s why I insisted that both the streams are a good bet for the kind of intern profile you are offering us.”

“Hmmm…” SK, Director, Project Management-Asia mused “I think I am ok with that then, Harish. I will expect the resumes in mail by tomorrow 9:00 AM then?”

Thoughts swirled in my mind, “College opens at 10, Need to finish TBM PPT by 10:30, need the latest sign up list”

“Yes Sir, Definitely” I replied.

Madhav’s message when I was voted into the Placement Team flashed in my mind. ‘Congrats, someone deserving made into the team. Sorry abt ur personal life though!’

It was epiphanical. Here I was, at 9 in the night on a con call with the director of one of the worlds leading telecom companies and trying to convince him to consider both streams in our for internships.

Although, looking back, I don’t have any regrets of joining the team. To the novice, Placement Team, in any business school is the group of 6-8 students who handles with varying degree of autonomy, the entire placement process of the current batch. Internships, final placements, process, recruitment days et al. I say varying degrees of autonomy because in some cases they are just glorified clerk and in some, like my school, they have a great degree of freedom.

Back breaking grueling work, managing the aspirations of the batch at one end, pressure from the management at another and at a third vicious end the corporate who expect nothing but the best! This is what makes the life of a Placement team member…worth living. We live for the day to erase the hundreds of inscriptions of no: s, action items, plans and names and just see “Shop Closed 100% Placed and Mission Accomplished” on the huge white board.

I had the feeling twice…both after Summers and Finals…and nothing in my 25 years on earth have come close to that euphoria!

101°C

2006-11-10T04:05:00.000-08:00

I am in Pune now. I left Bangalore 3 months back. No, I didn’t runaway, nor was I chased away or expelled or expatriated. I left because it was time for me to chase my dreams. I left because what I was doing there, going through there was mind numbing. The daily drivel sapped me not only of energy but also free-will. How much ever a city is attractive its like a gilded cage which cannot but hide the fact that it is, indeed, a cage, bereft of freedom.

16.06.06, 2000 HRS, Clear Skies, 24°C, Bangalore Cantonment

One of the cool Bangalore evenings you always dream about. This time it was different. The train was moving away. I could see the distance already. I am going away from my family, my friends, my Bangalore…chasing a dream…I could see the sight of Ashwin, Divya, Vinay and Musheer fading away as the train rounded the corner…just the sigt was fading not them…

17.06.06, 1836 HRS, Partially Cloudy, 28°C, Pune Central

I took my Pulsar on to the slick wet pavement. I could feel the pulse in my hand, the trembling and slight muffled roar of a crescendo waiting to be unleashed. He was impatient too, being shackled inside a railway compartment for 28 HRs can do that for anyone. I gave him life and he roared. We rode into the bustle, wind running its dew laden hands through my hair, the machine a part of me, unbridled, free, joy

18.06.06, 0900 HRS, Slight Drizzle, 19°C, Apartment B403

We woke up together and we knew it was for real. After eons of separation, the half smile and the hug in the morning was enough to tell me that the choice I made was right. For now, I need to make coffee…

19.06.06, 1100 HRS, Sunny/Cloudy, 28°C, Convention Hall

Induction day was supposed to be hectic, demanding, grueling and taxing. Assignments, Presentations, Verticals, ARPU…it was al that an also provided insights into the minds of the other 101 people around me who make up Batch XI in this prestigious institute…Like this?

“Ma’am…”

“Yeah??”

“On the induction form it says I have to enter any two identification marks, but I don’t have any!”

“What do you mean? There is a mole on your forehead…write that!”

20.06.06, 1030 HRS, Warm/A.C, 17°C, Convention Hall

“So…in 80s when we had to give a Scooter as dowry for our son in law we booked it when the daughter was born, can you imagine the state?” No, we couldn’t. This was Airtel VP talking to us as a part of our induction to Symbiosis. A dynamic exuberant persona not unlike the 12 others from the various walks of corporate life who addressed us during the weeklong program.

18.06.06, 1500 HRS, Heavy Drizzle, 6°C, 5600 FT ABOVE SEA-LEVEL, SINHAGARH

We sat watching the mist roll by the mountains as the cliffs themselves sat nonchalantly. We sat under a thatch roof, 6 of us who had separated from the rest of the class while trekking Sinhagarh. Hot piping tea, smoke and silence. The place seemed untouched by human hands since 19^th century where Marathas fought their guerrilla wars. Suddenly, burst of a Himesh Reshamiya song from the teashop owners mobile shook us out of our reverie. Well, something’s’ spoiled…

03.10.06, 1730 HRS, Sunny, 18°C, Convention Hall

“So, much as we would like to select all of you, I’m afraid that our requirement is for just two”, said HR Manager from HP, “So, we have the names with us here and we would leave the honor of announcing it to your Placement Team”

I was pacing in the library after this announcement. In two minds, whether to wish I get through HP for my Summer Internship, which would mean a prestigious start to my career or to stay in Pune where I could be closer to her. Suddenly, Mohit and Diggi rushed in and the enveloped me in a crushing hug. “Congratulations Dude!!!!, You got through”

Three months into college. First company that came in for summers. I was in!

fireheads!!

2006-05-18T21:44:00.000-07:00

the fireheads
(from l to r; vinay "headbanger" raj, musheer "miths" alam, harish "argus" menon)

connecting people

2006-05-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

[if you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. if you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends - jeff bezos]

Here’s my formula of customer bliss:

a faulty nokia 6670

complaint letter loaded with sarcasm and diatribe

hi,

i am writing this mail to explain in detail the trials and tribulations that i am facing with the nokia 6670 handset that i own. i bought the said handset on 30.05.05 and used it without any issues. on 23.03.06 when i was on a call the display suddenly went blank and it wouldn’t respond and nor was i able to restart it.

i took it to the nokia care center in infantry road, bangalore and gave the handset for repairs. i was asked to come after a week to collect my phone. after a week, i went there and collected the phone which they assured that will be working fine now. indeed it did, but only for a day. the next day, when i was out-station the issue resurfaced and i suffered for a week without a phone. as soon as i came back i went to the service center where i was again made to book a job sheet (for the second time) and was given another phone (a nokia 2650) while mine was being repaired.

a week later, i again went to the service center where i was told that the phone wasn’t ready. i wasn’t ready to continue using the stand-by phone and insisted on action. then, mr. rajesh nair provided me with a replacement handset which was a supposedly refurbished one from nokia. i want to bring to your notice that this said handset wouldn’t start when it was switched on and he had to give me a new battery for it. i used it fine for a day and after which, believe it or not, the phone faced the same issue. i brought it back and was convinced enough to do a re-flashing of the phone, thinking foolishly that it will resolve it. i went on a business trip again and after 2 days of functioning the phone died out on me in the middle of a conference call giving me a lot of mental anxiety.

that i was livid would be an understatement. i reached the service center again after only a week and upon faced with this dilemma; mr nair promised me a brand new handset. this was not presently available and he asked me to wait for a week. partly assured that my troubles were over, i agreed to one more week of limited connectivity and collected a new handset last week. my troubles were far from over! the handset was having the same issue again!!

in between all this visits to the service center, i had seen at least 15 (i am not exaggerating) nokia 6670 phones with the same issue and i am convinced this is something to do with the architecture of the phone. i gave the handset back to your service center yesterday and asked mr. nair to provide me with a replacement of a different model as my confidence in the handset was severely shaken! he said that it is not in his powers to replace it with another model and i was asked to write this mail. i am convinced that i am entitled for this considering the mental agony, loss of productivity, wastage of time and financial losses i have incurred due to the inability of your service center to correctly diagnose and rectify the problem associated with your handset. i request you to take my request into consideration and provide me with a solution asap.

sincerely,

harish menon

a brand new nokia 6680!!

road, rubber and rock n roll

2006-05-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

long stretch of 4 lane expressway...
burning rubber at 125 per hour...
group of people who you would give your life for...
drag race in the middle of the highway...
old monk, 100 pipers and talking till the wee hours...
pure bliss....

That was our trip to Yelagiri

tamasoma

2006-03-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

asathoma sadgamaya...

he could hear his mother shouting outside. her voice sounded tinny and eerily metallic bringing to mind one of the half-robot characters of the animation show he never missed. she was shouting at him because he was getting late for school. he had to get dressed soon in the crisp green and white uniform, have the buttery toast and tie his shoes. but before all that he had to take bath and be clean. clean? how could he? he was now rubbing the soap over his tiny body all over again. rubbing it hard and rough. the shards of water drops stinging his eyes and rolling down his cheeks with his tears, leaving eyes the misty red of an autumn sunset.

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

"...and the samosas! you wouldn't believe how big they are! much larger than the one in old sorabji's shop", extolled viraj. sorabji was hated, though quite unreasonably by the kids in st agnes, because according to them the way he treated the 12 year old customers was not in the strictest sense of good shop keeping and was mean in calling in debts too early.

amay listened to viraj's excited chatter languorously. the languor having come from a hard but fruitful day in the life of the 12 year old which included well aimed potshots with folded paper strips at the girls side during lunch and an entertaining football match which, much to the joy of the players involved, turned into a minor brawl and rumble.

they were walking down the road from the school gate. amay was a bit apprehensive about walking so far when the bus was about to leave in 15 minutes. but viraj was insistent."viru, if we miss the bus it will be your fault entirely. it’s getting late buddy!". viraj ignored his friend’s comments and entered the bakery with the large facade that said "fun 'n bake"

mrithyorma amithangamaya...

mother was banging at the door now. amay shuddered and picked up the soap again and started to rub it with more vigor. over his hands and the hard to reach back. lather was formed and washed away with the shower. still he wasn't feeling clean. not clean enough. he looked at his hand. wasn't there a film of sliming covering it? giving a dull glow? he was marked and he could see it. so could others! he rubbed the half dissolved bar on his hands, feeling the slight sting of soap touching the innards through raw skin.

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

he was amar. amar bhaiyya as he was called. he was funny, had a collection of amusing anecdote and was miles apart from the perpetually cross and sour sorabji. most important of al, he was a patient listener to the oft ill-treated (as they think) 12 year olds at the thresholds of teenage and puberty. it seemed to fascinate amay that there were grown ups in this world who did not smirk in a superior fashion when you talked to them about the meanness of teachers and the ache that they felt when a girl looked at them. the second was never uttered to any one.

he soon became a regular visitor there and always managed to sneak in time even during the lunch hour to pay a quick visit. it was on sports day that fate played spoilsport on him. the multitude of students, visitors, parents and guests were too much for the school transport to handle at one go and it was decided that they would run shuttles. amay was happy that he got an extra one hour in which he could show the football trophy he had won.

he sat on the edge of amar bhaiya's bed in the attic of the shop, which was closed for the sunday, showing him the trophy. amar bhaiya ran his hands over the trophy and remarked "it’s nice, congrats!". his hands traced a line from the top of the shield to the base nested on amay's thighs. his hands did not stop there as they slowly ran down his thighs, past the seams of his sports shorts. dirty sports shorts.

tamasoma jyothirgamaya...

his eyes fell on a small piece of marble that had broken off from the side of the tub. his hands and the whole flesh of his body were raw with the soap and constant rubbing. he didn’t feel clean. something seemed to be still stuck to him. an all pervading mist of slime, sin and dirt. try as he might, he wasn't able to remove it. maybe the rough jagged edge of the stone would help? his hands shuddered when he gasped the stone. like he had shuddered when he was bound helpless and with a rag in his mouth. gagged to fear while he was being violated.

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

his father found him sprawled on the floor, whimpering. the skin on his torso and hands torn. the blood mixed with the soap and the clogged water near the drain to form a pink and white ensemble that seemed painful. he was grasping the marble piece still in his hands.

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

[ as adults, we have some ways to oppose harassment. whether we do or not, is a different matter. but we can yell, scream, try to fight back physically and attempt to raise awareness about it. but what does a child do? their inherent trust in adults, their fear to question their motives and actions, and their own inability to distinguish between right and wrong often leaves them powerless ]

zarhat

2006-03-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

[i don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war -georges clemenceau]

i found this in amit varma's blog india uncut:

just off the corner of namak mandi, i get chatting with a gentleman named mohammad anwar, who makes and duplicates keys. as soon as mr anwar learns that i'm from india, he asks , "have you heard of sher shah suri?""er, yes," i reply."well then, you must know that he built the grand trunk road, which connects peshawar to calcutta. now, that grand trunk road, to me, is more of a truth than india and pakistan."he nods wisely here. i nod as well.

(the gt road actually goes beyond both peshawar and calcutta, but you get the point.)

googled!

2006-03-15T00:56:00.000-08:00

i got this idea from google. anyone who browses google would have seen the ever changing logos. the one that changes according to the occassion.
like these:

well, from now on thats what even i'm gonna do!! as a small first step (and a giant leap for my blog) today's logo would de inspired by holi, the festival of colors

suggestions? comments? well, the comments section is always open...

metamorphosis

2006-03-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

auto-mation?

2006-03-14T22:34:00.000-08:00

it happens only in bangalore

doppelganger

2006-01-24T00:54:00.000-08:00

there’s a nifty tool called msn polygamy which lets you run 2 instances of messenger on your computer. you can login with 2 different ids at the same time. i usually login with both my official and personal ids. what i have done is; i have added one id in the other’s list.

sometimes, i open a messenger window and chat to myself, from one id to another. the chat heats up so much that i have pretty intense conversations.

it freaks out the people around me…

sometimes, i don’t even remember typing some of the replies and feels like i am chatting with someone else…

that’s freaks me out…

do you have any weird stuff like this that you do? the comments section is open...

lazy friday chat

2006-01-20T03:13:00.000-08:00

1500 HRS (IST), Company IM
gary: had ur lunch?
olivia: yup
gary: i had just now
gary: what are u doing this weekend
olivia: hmm…nothing specific. might jus meet some frins..
gary: with paula?
olivia: gosh...we both have lotsa othr frinds other than each other…hehe
gary: :)
gary: if you want, we can watch a movie
olivia: if i want????
gary: yes, which one do you want to?
olivia: when did i say i wantd 2?
gary: ok, when is ur birthday
gary: mine is 26^th nov
gary: urs
gary: ?
olivia: 8^th march
gary: wow, my mom's b’day
olivia: sorry, 8^th july i mean
gary: hey, that’s my cousin's b’day
olivia: on which day are there no b’days?
gary: what?

(laughter)
well, this guy needs a serious shakedown on basic rules of hitting-on someone!!

decisions

2006-01-19T03:15:00.000-08:00

steve jobs once asked john sculley:
"do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water? or, do you want a chance to change the world?"

i think. contemplate. i imagine.
roar of the wind that blows from the frontiers unconquered.
the battle of "what i want" vs "what i got" rages in the arena of my mind.

apocalypse

2006-01-19T02:32:00.000-08:00

"ring a ring of uranium,
pocket full of plutonium,
fission, fusion,
we all fall down."

imagine...the countries of the world standing in a circle.
imagine...they are holding hands.
imagine...they are chanting this..

knowledge

2006-01-18T23:41:00.000-08:00

over a hundred years ago a university student found himself seated in a train by the side of a person who seemed to be well-to do peasant. he was praying the rosary and moving the beads in his fingers. "sir, do you still believe in such outdated things?" asked the student of the old man. "yes, i do. do you not?" asked the man. the student burst out into a laughter and said, "i do not believe in such silly things. take my advice. throw the rosary out through this window, and learn what science has to say about it". "science? i do not understand this science? perhaps you can explain it to me.", the man said humbly with some tears in his eyes. the student saw that the man was deeply moved. so to avoid further hurting the feelings of the man, he said: "please give me your address and i will send you some literature to help you on the matter." the man fumbled in the inside pocket of his coat and gave the boy his visiting card. on glancing at the card, the student, lowered his head in shame and became silent. on the card he read: "louis pasteur, director of the institute of scientific research, paris."

the force

2006-01-18T23:37:00.000-08:00

(drum roll) dum..dum..dum..dum-de-dum..dum-de-dum...
long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…

i was watching star wars yesterday. not one of the new fangled episodes i to iii which are choc a bloc with visual effects and cgi (i mean, george, i know you own ilm and probably don’t have to pay a penny for those server farms but there’s a line between visual eyecandy and visual diarrhea!) but the original star wars which is now episode iv: a new hope.

its one of my favorite movies ever. if you strip it down and examine it all you would find is a storyline that’s mediocre, visual effects that are asinine and a slew of confrontations. but add george lucas’s magical story telling approach, harrison ford’s charisma, james earl jones’ voice, stunning landscapes, plethora of weird and inimitable characters (chewbacca an all-time favorite!) and an ensemble cast you get pure unadulterated magic!!

if you haven’t watched it yet go to the nearest video store and grab a dvd of all the three classic star wars movies. get the digitally re-mastered version, they have better visual effects. may the force be with you!!

an unfinished life

2006-01-02T01:36:00.000-08:00

[new year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions - mark twain]

at last i am blogging. well, i feel like the guy who’s back in his wife’s arm after a long time. love is there but there a wall of aloofness that blocks intimacy. maybe its because there was a long hiatus between this and my last one. there has been a lot happening in my personal and professional life but i don’t want to bore anyone (least of all myself) i have been very unjustified towards my blog for the past few months and plan to make up for it this year.

i am starting the year by renaming my blog. good bye “the lone wolf” and welcome to “an unfinished life” well, if that’s not a spanking new start then maybe the resolution to blog more is? as my resolutions go, this is the most aesthetic one and lets see how successful i am in keeping it.

well, there i go!! i have fallen into the age old fallacy of the new year. isn’t the new year just hype? new year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. i wonder why? what’s the point when what happens every new year is the same? yesterday, we all smoke our last cigarettes, took our last drink and swore our last oath. today, we are a pious and exemplary community. thirty days from now, we shall have cast our resolutions to the winds and gone back to our vices and embrace them with a fresh vigor.

also, why should the resolutions begin on the first? i do think new year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on new year's day, don't you? since, because it's an extension of new year's eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. also dieting on new year's day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. i think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on january the second.

anyway, i think my brain is satiated by all the ramblings that i did now. these were inside my brain like cobwebs and were cluttering up valuable brainspace. mush needed. now without further ado, let me go on…living…and unfinished life…

dot in love part ii: conspiracy theories and car chases

2005-11-18T05:06:00.000-08:00

[this has been in pipeline for long and after a year, I decided to do it justice by posting it. Part one can be found at http://harishc.blogspot.com/2004/12/dot-in-love.html ]

may the groom's heart be filled with hope and the brides feet filled with lead."
allan kent (mr. trout) in runaway bride

“you want to know why i am like this.”
“you told me. family problems, right?” i said.
i couldn’t resist a tiny bit of sarcasm in this. of course, when a guy whom you have known for a year and more starts acting funny and hides things from you kind of get pissed off. he pretended not to notice the sarcasm and continued.
“you were right, it’s her” he said.
i couldn’t help but nod in acceptance. though i had doubts about this for a long time it was weird hearing the confirmation from dot’s mouth. i dragged on the dying cigarette and started thinking about it. the more i thought about it the more tangled it became…
“dude…” i blurted out, more to fill the silence than anything else.
“i know, i know, it’s complicated”
“complicated is not the word for it… the wedding has been fixed”
“don’t you think i don’t know about it? i want to go there and get her.”
suddenly i was scared. it is during times like this when i miss mush or josh. i mean, not because they are some kind of problem solvers but at least they could say something and fill the awkward silence. still, dot was really in love. i mean only love can make a guy who used to “fart bike” (don’t ask me what that is!) thru the mscc floor act like a chihuahua on sedatives. i talked to him a lot that day, trying to reason and change his mind. again, we decided to postpone the discussion from there to forum the next day. he said he will call josh also. i nodded in agreement thinking that two of us could convince him against this. this act of sheer madness. i couldn’t think of the alternative, of him going all the way to her house and telling her parents about it. i knew that i would have to go with him, maybe josh also or nattu even. sending him alone there would be sheer insanity.

the next day we agreed to meet at forum around 2. i was late and by the time i reached the food court josh and dot were sitting and chatting. josh was flabbergasted. i could tell it from the way he was acting hyper.
“did he tell you his plan?” he asked me.
“yeah”
“man, this is crazy. have you thought about what is going to happen? you guys going there and getting her in front of her parents. what if they complaint to police and they come chasing you? you’re going to get arrested and her parents will convince her to turn against you. you will be convicted of kidnapping…”
“whoa, whoa, hold it there mr. optimist” i stopped him before he could continue with this conspiracy theory story that would put any tabloid to shame. his thought train has a problem of accepting reality unless its something technical. but again i couldn’t make fun of him as i would have done on another occasion as
a the guy was dead serious and
b. i had to dissuade dot from this runaway bride idea.

what transpired that day was that we managed to convince him with a lot of arguments and conspiracy theories (one of which included us going at 120 km/hr in his ford ikon chased by a van load of her dad’s ruffians and two or three police jeeps, yeah, josh was on a high that day!) that he going there to whisk her off was a bad idea and a better one would be to take his dad with him and try to convince her parents. the chances were remote that her family would agree as the engagement was already over but this was better than us going there and whisking her off, car chase and all.

2005-08-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

Jammin'

winds of change

2005-06-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

[ the wind of change blows straight into the face of time like a stormwind that will ring the freedom bell – winds of change, scorpions ]

there are some phases in our life when we are overwhelmed and blown away by the turn of events. sometimes, things seem to be happening so fast that you feel like a snail in the midst of an express highway. the last three month, march to may, were like that for me. words cannot express the turmoil my life went through. change is acceptable in life and it’s an unrealist who complains about it and i will never. but i believe its my prerogative to be out-of-breath by the sea of changes, paradigm shift that has befallen me. some times its better to be objective in describing things as its takes up lesser space and needs less mental strength. i am, in the same way, detailing with it. i am sure josh would love me for this clinical analysis.

01-03-2005 – final call letter from sitm for mba (telecom)

10-03-2005 – winds of change from the bearer of light.

21-03-2005 – informed that i might be put as an l1 on a temporary basis as there is a surplus of tech leads. put down my papers. disgusted with the manager. the scum didn’t even object.

16-04-2005 – last day. feeling empty. feeling homeless. may hate the place but never the people (except some).

17-04-2005 – job offer from concerto software. chance to work with some cutting edge technology.

28-04-2005 – should i join sitm or not?

03-05-2005 – career beckons. mba may happen anytime but some opportunities should not be wasted.but to do a course in asia'a best institute for telecom management? decided to make the final choice after going home.

07-05-2005 – went home.predictable advise from mom. she trusts me to make my own decision.

14-05-2005 – lots of brainstorming. decided to take up the job.

23-05-2005 – joined concerto software

21-06-2005 – so far, so good!

distances

2005-06-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

It may not be the same,
But some things never change.
I feel it and I trust it,
I still believe in forever
Because that's what my heart knows.

Memories are the dew drops on our petals
That re-open the buds that have closed.
Flowers wilt as seasons change,
Though they grow a little more with rain.

the return of the cup

2005-03-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

[never forget where you’ve come here from, never pretend that it’s all real, someday soon this will be someone else’s dream – from “never forget" take that ]

there are some objects which, even though are lost, come back to haunt us as memories. little did i know when i wrote the final chapter of the cup that the story was far from over.

one day, i was coursing through the drudgery of reports, analyses, feedbacks and monitors, which i call work. mush was online and i was chatting with him intermittently. i got a ping from him. “dude, nishant was asking for my blog address”, he said.” wants to read my poems” nishant was our operations manager in windows xp. he was the guy responsible for making the project what it was and someone who was there from the day of its inception. above all, he was someone who we all looked up to. even though mush had left the company months ago he still chats with him regularly. i said that was cool and thought nothing of it.

later i saw him standing near andy’s cube. he, dee and andy where talking. i went over there and we were just chatting when he said that he read my blog. he then went on to give me insights about the previous post and was generally pulling my leg, which he does often, about me being the tree etc… in between the conversation he asked,” where is the cup?” “oops” i thought to myself, “will that thing never leave me?” out loud i said, “its still there. where motu took it” “hmm ok, i am taking it” that was his style, that made us name him tiger. i took the cup and gave it to him and he took it home. kind of was relieved. at least it’s away from me now.

prudence stops me from saying that this is the end. nishant was saying something about the cup looking the right size for sandy to punch him. maybe that would make another interesting chapter in the story. till the next one……..

bangalored!!!

2005-03-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

PROLOGUE

[a house of dreams untold, it looks out over the whispering treetops, and faces the setting sun - edward alexander macdowell]

we were driving back from the long trip. me and dot in the maruti zen. the trip had left us exhausted, physically and mentally. 1000 miles in 2 days was no joke! we had exhausted all topics of conversation. the last 2 hours spent in messaging all the mavericks cryptic messages like “we are far away from bangalore, don’t know when we will be back” it drove most of them up the wall. especially div, vidi and mush.

“how many miles more?” i asked dot.
“we are somewhere outside hosur, should be in bangalore within an hour”
“put on the radio”

he switched on the radio and all i heard was the same static. he was going to turn it off when something made me say, “don’t. let it run” the hour slowly passed, i was slowly drifting off to another nap when suddenly the radio sprang to life.
“radio city….what’s up bangalore!” and the sweet melody of ar’s “e ajnabi” wafted through the kenwood speakers. suddenly our spirits were lifted. the exhaustion gave way to anticipation which turned to elation as we saw a milestone that read: “bangalore 0” we were back. back to the good old city, which i loved.

CHAPTER ONE – EXODUS

[ along a way he knows not, having crossed, a place of drear extent, before him sees, a river rushing swiftly toward the deep, and all its tossing current white with foam, and stops and turns, and measures back his way - the iliad (bk. v, l. 749)]

i still remember the day i set foot in the city. it was november 30th, 2002. rags, nub and me had almost nothing to do back home after the cat exams. we had exhausted all possible means of recreation and entertainment our place could offer us. i don’t remember who came up with the idea but there we were. cold or freezing cold, smoking furiously on gold flake kings and savoring the sights and sounds of early morning bangalore. we had been to bangalore lot of times before but this time it was different. we had freedom to do what we wanted, freedom to go pub hopping and drink to death. earlier visits were marred by chaperoning uncles or cousins. who were cool but you can’t really get stone drunk and start head banging in styx with your cousin, at least with some one who is 8 years elder to you.

our initial plan was to stay here and enjoy the freedom of being in a strange exciting place for a month, enjoy the pleasures and passions that a big city provides and go back after a month or two, in time for our cat results. our families reluctantly agreed to the idea because they had seen us slogging our backsides off for 8 months in the name of cat. but the plan was not to be, as we later found out.

what transpired was that we never went back. at least not when we planned to go back. the heady mixture of freedom, hedonism, urban-life and profligacy intoxicated us and we decided to stay. i got a job in itc infotech, nub in citibank and rags, the lazy bum he is, chose to remain unemployed and later went back after a month.

the new plan was to stay in bangalore till the mba classes start. nub and rags had decided to do their masters in international business fro psg and i still had my eyes set on mica. this gave us 4 more months of enjoyment. later those two joined for their masters and me…me? well, i am still here.

[to be continued...]

leaf's departure is because of wind's pursuit or because the tree did not ask her to stay

2005-02-23T04:47:00.000-08:00

[ what is love? it's when you shed tears and still you care for them, it's when they ignore you and still you long for them. it's when they begin to love another and yet you smile and say, "i'm happy for you." if love fails, set yourself free, let your heart spread its wings and fly again. remember you may find love and lose it, but when love dies, you never have to die with it ]

tree

people call me "tree".

i had dated so many girls in college. there is one girl who i love a lot but never dared to go after. she didn't have a pretty face, good figure or an outstanding charm. she was just a very ordinary girl. i liked her. i really liked her. i liked her innocence, her frankness, her intelligence and her fragility. reason for not going after her was that i felt somebody so ordinary like her was not a good match for me. i was also afraid that after we were together all the feelings would vanish. i was also afraid other's gossip would hurt her. i was also afraid to lose what we had. we had something precious, friendship beyond boundaries. also, stupid as i was, i thought that if our destinies were intertwined, she would be mine without any sacrifices. she was with me for 3 years. she was my soulmate for 3 years. she watched me chase other girls, and i have made her heart cry for 3 years.she was a good actor, and me a demanding director. she once bumped into us when me and my second girlfriend were making out. she was embarrassed but smiled & said, "go on!" before running off. the next day, her eyes were swollen like a walnut. i did not want to know what caused her to cry. later that day, i saw her sitting in a classroom and crying her heart out. i wanted to go there and hold her tight, but i did not, i could not. my fourth girlfriend did not like her. i could see that the feeling was mutual. they had a blazing row once and i knew that it was not her fault. she was never a person who would pick up a fight. still, i shouted at her, ignored her feelings and walked off with my girlfriend. the next day, she was laughing and joking with me like nothing happened. i know she was hurt but she did not know deep down inside i was hurt too. hurt because i hurt her. does not make sense, does it?when i broke up with my fifth girlfriend, i asked her out. later that day, i told her i had something to tell her. i told her about my break up and about my feelings for her. coincidentally, she has something to tell me too, about her getting together. i knew who the person was. his pursuit for her had been the talk of the college. i did not show her my heartache, just smiles & best wishes. once i reached home, i could not breathe. tears rolled and i, the man made of ice, broke down. how many times have i seen her cry for the man who did not acknowledge her presence? how many times have i made her heart ache with the agonies of hell? now i knew how it felt. now i knew how it was when each cell in your body yearns for something and you don’t get it. i had no right on what was mine.

leaf

people call me leaf.

i was close with a guy during three years of my college. i was thinking it to be a purely platonic relationship. however, when he had his first girlfriend, i learnt a feeling i never should have learnt – jealousy. jealousy to the extreme. they were only together for 2 months. when they broke up, i was happy. happy so much that words could not begin to describe it.

but after a month, he got together with another girl.i liked him and i knew he liked me. but why doesn’t he say anything? we talk for hours together. know each other inside out. why doesn't he make the first move? whenever he had a new girlfriend, my heart would break. i would experience realms of pain which i thought was never possible. after a while, i began to suspect that this was one-sided love. he did not feel the same way for me the way i felt for him. but my mind couldn’t accept it. it searched for reasons. if he didn't like me, why did he treat me so well? it's beyond what you will normally do for a friend. i know his likes, his habits. but his feelings towards me i can never figure out. you can't expect me a girl, to ask him. despite everything, i wanted to be with him. share his sorrows, enjoy his passions, watch the wind ruffle through his hair; see the twinkle in his eyes when he was pleased. i loved the way he made me laugh, made me cry, made me think, and made me helpless in his love.

at the end final year, another guy, from different department asked me out. everyday he talked to me. he wanted to be with me. he was like a cool and gentle wind, trying to blow off a leaf from a tree. in the end, i realized that i wanted to give this wind a small footing in my heart. i know the wind will bring the leaf to a better land. finally, leaf left the tree, but the tree only smiled and didn't ask me to stay.

wind

i liked a girl called leaf. i hated the fact that she was dependent on a tree. too much dependent. i wanted to be a gentle gust of wind that would carry her off away from the cruel tree. caress her, hold her and gently put her in a safe ground.

when i first met her, it was 1 month after i joined college. i saw a petite person watching a group of guys playing cricket. during breaks, she will always be sitting there. sometimes alone, sometimes with her friends, always looking at him. when he talks with girls, there's jealousy in her eyes. when he talks to her and hugs her i can see her come alive with passion and energy. i hated him for the power he had on her. hate? no, jealousy would be a better word. i also wanted her to be free of the chains of love which she had bound her self in.

i used to sit there too. daily, watching her from the distance. watching the golden slanting rays of the sun caressing her before they disappeared. they were like me. wanting to hold her but unable to do so.

one day, she didn't appear. i felt something amiss. i can't explain the feeling except it's a kind of uneasiness. the senior was also not there as well. i went to their classroom, hid outside and saw him arguing with her. tears were in her eyes while he left. the next day, i saw her at her usual place, looking at him. i walked over and smiled to her and gave her a note. she was surprised. she looked at me, smiled and accepted the note. the next day, when she came to the stadium, she approached me and passed me a note before she assumed her usual place. it read, "leaf's heart is too heavy and wind couldn't blow her away."

"it's not that leaf heart is too heavy. it because leaf never wants to leave tree." i replied with this statement and slowly she started talking to me. she started accepting my presence and my phone calls. i knew that she did not love me. she loved someone else. but i had this hope that someday she would be mine. within four months of knowing her i had declared my ove for her no less than 20 times. every time, she would gently move away from the topic. i promised myself that i would never give up.

one day, i asked her the same question over the phone. she did not avoid the topic but strangely i was met with silence “what happened?” i asked her “why aren’t you saying anything?” she said, "i'm nodding my head". “what?” i couldn’t believe my ears. "i'm nodding my head" she replied loudly. i hung up the phone, changed and rode my bike like a madman and reached her place.i rang the bell and she opened the door. words were not necessary. i hugged her tightly…for ever….

[this is purely a work of fiction and not in anyway connected to me. any resemblance to people or incidents is purely coincidental.any attempt to pass this off as incidents from my life will be construed as an act of aggression and severely dealt with. it is taken from a haiku couplet which i have used as the title]

hell hath no fury and heaven hath no rage…..

2005-01-03T01:48:00.000-08:00

THE author was talking about the woman scorned in the aforesaid lines. I mean it the same way too. Only that, here, the woman is Mother Nature. The often violated and abused, venerable Mother Earth. As we go hurtling down the cliffs off progress we seem to be realizing the words of Agent Smith in “The Matrix”

“…but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A Virus…..”

Heart goes out to the countless lives lost. What makes it more tragic is that the fraction of children among the casualties seems to be more. I always feel at a loss for words when I try to, you know, say something meaningful and apt. I am failing at that here too. I think its better that I leave it here….Hoping that their souls are in peace…Hoping that we the survivors realise before its too late to respect nature.

What is heartwarming is the spirit of humanity that has been awakened in people all around the globe. The spirit that fills us with hope. Hope for a better tomorrow. Words are not enough to describe the courage of the countless Men and Women battling against Red-Tape, Nature, Transportation hurdles, Sickness et al and working day and night to bring a little relief to the stricken souls. All is not lost when hope springs eternal.

In finale I would like here to quote a particularly apt passage of Milton's Paradise Lost:

Like a dark Ceeling stood; down rush'd the Rain

Impetuous, and continu'd till the Earth

No more was seen; the floating Vessel swum

Uplifted; and secure with beaked prow

Rode tilting o're the Waves, all dwellings else

Flood overwhelmd, and them with all thir pomp

Deep under water rould; Sea cover'd Sea,

Sea without shore; and in thir Palaces

Where luxurie late reign'd, Sea-monsters whelp'd

And stabl'd; of Mankind, so numerous late,

All left, in one small bottom swum imbark't.

How didst thou grieve then, Adam, to behold

The end of all thy Ofspring, end so sad,

Depopulation; thee another Floud,

Of tears and sorrow a Floud thee also drown'd,

And sunk thee as thy Sons

little bit of you

2004-12-20T18:32:00.000-08:00

Can I have a little bit of you?
A little bit of you in my life.
Promise you I won’t ask for more
Only just a little bit of you…

All I want is the smell of your hair,
And maybe the space behind your ear
Is that too much to ask?
Coz without them this life I cannot bear…

Sometimes things seem so simple,
When it’s just you and me
And then the complications appear coz’,
In this world what we have is hard to believe

The world that slots and labels everything
Where there are always matching pegs and holes
The world that doesn’t understand emotions
No wonder is unable to fathom what we own

I believed always it was you and me
Weathering this storm together
So when did these doubts start creeping in?
Doubts that moved us apart further?

Doubts that are creeping into my heart now
Wondering what you really wanted
Was I blinded by my emotions?
Blinded not to see what you seeked...

I know not what lies beneath this,
Beneath the deep calm sea so blue
But I hope you realize, darling
That all I ever wanted was just a little bit of you…

dot in love

2004-12-10T04:39:00.000-08:00

[All our young lives we search for someone to love. We choose partners, change partners... all the while wondering if there's someone, somewhere, searching for us - Bertrand Russel]

I promised you that I would be writing about this. Do didn’t seem to mind too, but now I am having second thoughts about it as the situation is still precarious. The clear day that was supposed to come never did. But it would be unappreciative not to say that things are better. Still its been 3 months and I guess it would be okay to write about it.

Am I not making sense? Well, I suppose not. For this to make sense I have to go a long way back. The days when Dot used to be preoccupied. Not to mention that he was losing wait like a bucket with a large hole at the bottom. After one of the Coffee Day meets when he seemed to be tensed more than the usual amount and when Mush also asked me what was wrong with him I confronted him. I mean, a guy whom you know to be a certified workaholic and hates to get up to pee for 2 minutes takes leave for 3-4 days you gotta assume something’s wrong. The gang was slowly walking down from the Bombay Store to Church Street and I managed to get him in private.

I asked him, “So, Whats up?” Needless to say I am not much of conversationalist when it comes to prying. Dot said, “Nothing”. “You sure?”, I asked, “You seem upset these days, Dude. You are losing weight and can’t see you in office like it used to be”. He said, “I am fine”. That “I am fine” would have convinced me if he hadn’t sounded like he wanted to put hands through his throat and rip his heart off. I had a hunch, a pretty good one as hunches go and decided to play it, “Is it her?”. He asked, “Who?” When I said the name he blurted “ What?? Noooo Way Dude!! I have some family problems, that’s all!!”

It would have ended there, if he had not called me to the rooftop cafeteria at work. But that’s the second part…Right??

zen and the life of 23 years

2004-11-08T13:59:00.000-08:00

[ There was a star danced, and under that was I born -William Shakespeare ]

THE calendar says October 14. Two more days and I would have completed 23 years on this planet. Whew…hmmm… (Tongue tied)

I think this is the time to look back or am I too young to reminisce, don’t know! Its been a good life. Not that it couldn’t have been better but then it could have been a lot worse too. That’s the problem with being a Libran; you think both sides of anything. I bet that if a Libran were asked to jump into a pool of lava he would be considering the merits and demerits of a back-flip and kick-drop. Had a lot of losses and a lot of gains and still more losses and even bigger gains. Kinda like a mixed up bag, but then, I suppose everyone’s life is the same. Remembered something I read somewhere – “You are unique, just like everyone else”

...................Today the calendar says November 11th. Almost a month later I am completing this...............

I can’t believe how much my life has changed in this one month. Not changed, but it has been a quite an eventful month.

The birthday I had, made so special by my special friends, Musheer; who was there with me all the time, Div; who was away but felt close, Pavi; my official secretary of the day, Bidisha; who came all the way from Pune, Nirupesh; The tech net, Dot; who gave me the most cherished gift, Krits; who couldn’t stay for long, Vinnae, Vidya, Naveen, Sweet Karma…………

I am so late in updating the blog. Well, what to do? Did not have much time to sit, contemplate and type coz I was running around. What was I running around for? Hmm…tricky.. Well why don’t I leave that for other posts?? Coz, journeying a 1000 miles in search of a friend's true love, trying to quit the job and failing, Your best friend and partner leaving the company, speaking out things that were hidden in the depths of my heart, finding something that was not quite what you wanted or what you expected…..all these are things that take a lot of time, space and leisurely disposition. Wait……

..and then there were none

2004-10-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

[ Hitherto shalt thou go and no further - Job 40 : 5 ]

I guess this is the final chapter to the story of the cup. In case you missed it you can read about it here. I am sorry if the blog reminded some juvenile delinquent of their inane school days. Hmm…wonder when those people will understand that the matter that constitutes us is what makes everything in the world and its their conformist attitude that prevents them from seeing the soul in everything.

Anyway, as I was saying before this mundane affair caught my attention, at last I said goodbye to the cup that was a permanent fixture on my desk. Motu was the lucky (?) guy. When I returned from my weekend, I found that it was resting on his desk instead of the corner of my document tray. Bad riddance to good rubbish?

Hmm…Have I told you about the document tray I cant seem to get rid of? Whoa! I can see the look of horror on your face. Ok, I am not putting that story up here.

how much is enough?

2004-10-09T15:27:00.000-07:00

[ wanted to write on the breakpoint of human endurance, don't have any idea how it turned out to be a poem. Anyway, thanks Mush, for the genuine positive feedback (It was genuine coz I didn't say I wrote it the first time) ]

How Much Is Enough?

When things are going from bad to worse,
When trails that ran smooth turn rough,
and each breath feels like a stab in chest.
You ask yourself, how much is enough?

Life feels like pushing against a wall,
Days have made you forget to laugh
rolling on in a dreary endless roll
You cannot help asking, how much is enough?

Gods playing mad dice with your life,
Devil making your mind a psychedelic canvas
painting them with colors of lunacy and strife.
You feel at last, this is enough

Searching for that elusive thing called peace,
wandering lost in the world devoid of senses,
you finally find it, all this time within your reach.
within your reach, when you finally realized what was enough

- Harish

why you go away

2004-10-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

baby won't you tell me why there is sadness in your eyes
I don't wanna say goodbye to you
Love is one big illusion I should try to forget
but there is something left in my head

You're the one who set it up now you're the one to make it stop
I'm the one who's feeling lost right now
Now you want me to forget every little thing you said
but there is something left in my head

I won't forget the way you're kissing T
he feeling's so strong were lasting for so long
But I'm not the man your heart is missing
That's why you go away I know

You were never satisfied no matter how I tried
Now you wanna say goodbye to me
Love is one big illusion I should try to forget
but there is something left in my head

I won't forget the way you're kissing
The feeling's so strong were lasting for so long
But I'm not the man your heart is missing
That's why you go away I know

- with apologies to mltr

why doesn't anyone want the cup?

2004-09-29T19:56:00.001-07:00

[ that’s the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it’s real - salman rushdie (as blabbermouth, in haroun and the sea of stories) ]

i see it sitting at the corner of my desk, on an empty document tray. The white china mug that I got from Whizz when I developed the pics I took while on the 5 day drive (Now that’s another story, isn’t it?) I don’t know why it’s bothering me. Is it that my mind cannot accept the pointless existence of the empty cup?

i remember Josh grabbing it from me the moment I took it out. I had bought the picture books in my backpack and while taking them out, I inadvertently took the cup out and he pounced on it, “Hey, I want this!” I could not think of doing anything with it so I let him have it. He used to use it as a penholder in his desk, diligently locking it up with its contents inside, in his locker. Then the day he was packing all his stuff he said, “Hey, can’t think of doing anything with it. You can have it back” Then I realized that probably he had just borrowed it, to give it back later. I said “Fine, I’ll take it probably use it as a penholder”. However, I never took it. There it would have ended and I would have never seen this porcelain thing but for Sai.

one fine day, about a week after Josh left, Sai came down from his new “dwelling”, which was now at the edge of the floor (he was banished there due to his non-interactivity with the team). He had the cup in his hands and said, “Duuude” Sai has a funny way of saying that word, elongating the “u” to a squeaky level, “Josh, asked me to give you this” .I said nothing and just took it. He was saying something about the resolved ratio but my mind was somewhere else, looking at a white shiny round cylinder. The Cup.

that is how it came to its current residing place. I usually do not trust anyone with my pens, having lost quite a few of good (and expensive) ones to friends and hence didn’t have any to keep in the mug. Many people expressed interest in it. Poo (That is Poornima, one of the Managers) once came and said, “That’s Nice, Where did you get it from?” I offered the cup to her and she said “Sure”. However, it transpired that the cup was to remain there; maybe she forgot about it. Even Girish said he wanted a penholder and I promptly offered it to him. As always, the offer was accepted and forgotten.

its still there, standing forlorn. Unbelievably, right now Arvind (Argan, one of the new STs) came over and asked me about it. I just said, “That’s a gift”. Yes, I guess that is what it is. What else do you call something that comes back to you however hard you try to shrug it off? Maybe, it is not empty. Not after passing through so many hands and minds.

(Hmm….Notes to self: 1. Try to use time productively rather than writing irrelevant crap!
2. Get rid of the cup! )

advantages of being single

2004-09-26T17:21:00.000-07:00

[ i really want to love somebody. I do. I just don't know if it's possible forever and ever - jim carrey ]

well, before staring this let me give a disclaimer, this is no justification for the life I lead, this is no rant against the oh-so-happy couples (never seen one of those) and neither are these words of resentment. I am writing this, as always, to tell what I feel. Because I always don’t get time to talk to myself in any form and writing the views I have, however radical or obtuse they maybe relaxes me like I had a long chat with the me.

the debatable point is that once the relationship is over the gut-wrenching pain that follows is unimaginable. When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you've created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed-over Indian Railway sandwich?

that was debatable because you never disregard something because of the suffering at the end of it. Do we hate life because of the scepter of death that we know is looming at the end of it? Well, I believe it’s not just the suffering at the end. Its also the suffering that is present each and every moment in love. The jealousies, the partings, the responsibilities, the oh-so-silly commitments, oh-so-even-more-silly arguments. With due apologies to all the poets and philosophers, I have never seen love that has set us free or kept us alive. For me, love is something that transcends all emotions, which exceeds explanations and understanding the other person completely.

being single is easier I guess. With friends like the ones I have its fun too. Everyday I wake up, not thinking about what nuances of my partners whim and fancy I am going to hate today or what constricting obligation my girlfriend is going to slap on me. Instead, I am filled with a sense of freedom, freedom to think about myself, freedom to feel what I want to feel without feeling guilty, freedom walk and get wet in the rain, freedom of not looking at the watch all the time so that I don’t miss a second, freedom of not being enslaved to the mobile phone checking it every second for that elusive missed call or message and above all freedom to be myself with each soul I meet.

i think that’s one of the most obnoxious factors about a relationship. The way people pretend and shadow dance. Come on; is it so arduous to be yourself? Isn’t that why you fell in love, in first place. If not stop this shadow boxing. The mental agony and stress of pretending is going to get you after sometime and destroy any semblance of a relationship. Being a lone wolf, I count myself blessed because I can be myself. No pretending (like someone I know of) that you love cats because your girlfriend has 3 of them and when she is not around kick them hard just for the pleasure of it or fervently swearing that you hate beauty pageants because they commercialize feminity and be glued to FTV midnight everyday. By the way, both these guys are happily cat-kicking FTV-watching single and their ex’s have found other wimps.

don’t get me wrong, people. In the end, I am like all other guys. I obviously don’t plan to remain single for the rest of my life. I want someone too, but not so desperately that I’d settle with the next entry in who’s-who of Human Crap. I’ll wait for the right one, one with whom I can be unadulterated-untainted-dirty minded-crazy guy I am. I know it takes a lot of time to get someone like that, if they exist, in the first place. Till then I’ll enjoy with the wrong ones, my friends, dog and Smirnoff. Because in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

The Night of November 7th, 1997

2004-09-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

[ life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, - but it returneth- percy bysshe shelley ]

growing up is never easy. You hold on to things that were. You wonder what's to come. But that night, I think we knew it was time to let go of what had been, and look ahead to what would be. Other days. New days. Days to come. The thing is, we didn't have to hate each other for getting older. We just had to forgive ourselves... for growing up. The fault was within us. Maybe we grew up faster since we found each other, found that elusive thing called love. Or did I think the fault was within us because that’s what the people around us made us believe? We were kids, but we were not fools.

we knew it was not puppy love, not a whim of adolescence, nor was it in anyway momentary. I would have been derided (as I was at that time) if I had voiced these thoughts then. When I look back now, the feelings, the discernment I felt then have remained unchanged. This is the first time I am putting these things to words or even voicing out to people. I know it’s confusing to the reader but that’s the way I feel, even now. How can something that has remained unchanged for 7 years labeled as flippant? Oh, how I wish I had talked to this “me”, who understands what happened then so clearly, at that time. How I wish I had someone who had the perception that went beyond the small-town Puritanism to explain it to me. Then that night would not have haunted me for all these years.

that night, when it all ended. When we decided that we will never think of each other, never meet, never talk…Just because the people around us where obscure in understanding. I don’t know if its just me who feels the same way. Has she forgotten all about the time when we were together? Sharing everything, where words where not necessary to convey thoughts. Maybe she has, then again, maybe she hasn’t.

the road not taken

2004-09-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

[ two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference - robert frost ]

one of the greatest advantages of being a part of the human race is that you have a sense of consciousness. I mean, we do not live a hand to mouth existence; we don’t live for just the basic necessities of life. Our sole objective is not to worry the where the next meal is gonna come from or who is waiting for us to come by to be their next meal.

as we live, breathe and eat, we also think, dream and imagine. We think of our past, dream of tomorrow and imagine about the infinity. Infinity, I don’t mean the inverted 8 that we are so used to in our Math and Physics classes. It means the unknown, the could-haves, the endless existences which we live in a different time and space patterns. We constantly think of what our life would have been if we had chosen differently. Did I take the right decision? Where would we be if we had taken the right decision? Much like the protagonist in “The Road Not Taken” by Frost.

one thing we got to remember that in life there is no right or wrong decisions. At one point of time, when we are faced with choices we do think that one is the right one and the other(s) wrong. We think so because we look at the choices through a fabric of moral, social and psychological fabric woven into our perception due to our experience, education and upbringing. In life there are only choices, which are varying shades of gray. And like shades of gray, they alter their color in different lights. Also, decisions are such that once taken its tough to go back to. We have to accept what we did and move on. There is no going back in life. Only moving forward…On, on and on….

read the poem : "The Road Not Taken" - Robert Frost

drunken musings

2004-09-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

[ beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy - benjamin franklin ]

my apologies if my blog starts to look like an alcoholic’s diary. Well, that’s all there is left to do in this city now. Who would have imagined that the crazy movie makers here would come up with an even crazier embargo on all non-kannada movies!! What next people? Convert Casa Piccolos and Jukeboxes into “Casa Sagars” or “Juke Darshans” and serve idlis and ragi muddes? Gimme a break! Anyway, I’m positive about this. Oppression of masses with crazy ideas didn’t start today or yesterday, it has been happening for ages and they were soon shown the door. Fingers crossed!

now where was I? Yeah, drunken binges!! Thursday was good. I would say half of Brigade Rd and Residency is missing because I drank it! My apologies to people who I called and talked to, after that. Its just that alcohol takes me to a level where I have more than the usual amount of love and friendship to share with people and I want to share it before I’m sober. Also, in case you are wondering if those were the words of a drunkard, hold it! I meant every word of it!!

ok, I sense some disapproval here. “Control your drinking” “Its bad for you” Yeah, yeah, let me tell you two things; First, I don’t drink too much. Period. Second, do you know that Alcohol actually makes you smarter? Don’t believe me? Read on….

well you see, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This is natural selection and is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of alcohol eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That's why you always feel smarter after a few drinks.

supreme sacrifice of drinking vodka

2004-09-13T16:47:00.000-07:00

[ I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day - Frank Sinatra]

SOMETIMES when I reflect back on all the vodka I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about workers in the distillary in Russia and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this vodka, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, "It is better that I drink vodka and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver."

the picture of words

2004-09-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

[ still can't the blasted Hello to work so that I can upload the pics. As they say, A song is worth a million pictures. Heres the picture I wanted to upload, in words of none other than Bob Dylan ]

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
Ev'rybody knows
That Baby's got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

Queen Mary, she's my friend
Yes, I believe I'll go see her again
Nobody has to guess
That Baby can't be blessed
Till she sees finally that she's like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls.
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what's worse
Is this pain in here
I can't stay in here
Ain't it clear that--

I just can't fit
Yes, I believe it's time for us to quit
When we meet again
Introduced as friends
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world.
Ah, you fake just like a woman, yes, you do
You make love just like a woman, yes, you do
Then you ache just like a womanBut you break just like a little girl

existential angst

2004-09-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

WHAT is it? Something that epitomizes the agony of the non-elante life. The torment of day-to-day existence which is like an endless vista spread across the horizon as far as you can see. A life less extraordinary, a life that’s become normal or (shudder) boring. I know this sounds forlorn, for people who are accustomed to see me as a buoyant person, for people who read my blogs to ease the tension of their life (Yeah, that’s just you Bidisha and sorry couldn’t upload the image today too as the tool I use is down)

When I think about it, it seems more like powerlessness than angst. Powerless to change things, Powerless to accept the change in me, Powerless to stop changes. I know I have changed, somewhere inside. I, who believed in control, am losing it like the proverbial rolling stone. Complications that are not needed are arising from the depths of psyche, like monsters of hell.

Why is it that I wish I was someplace else? Why is it that I wish I was I in a different set of time and space continums where things that I want changed are not there and everything I cherish is there. Wish things were different, people were different, and choices to make were different. Put me in a black and white world where there are no excruciatingly maddening shades of grey. Where things are simple, where I can make the decisions I want to make without the infuriating circumstances…..

Till then I am here, in a world painted by a schizophrenic on a canvas of psychosis, waiting for a clearer sky, waiting for a sign……or just plain waiting.

good bye, josh?

2004-09-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

ican see you sitting across me in your cubicle typing your farewell letter to all. Which I hope you are not gonna send to me. Dude, will kick your nuts if you utter that word. Say bye to this place but not to me, not to Mavericks, not to this friendship we had. Who the hell will I make fun of about their overly technical outlook? Will miss you a lot, Josh, AT WORK! Otherwise, you gonna be there, just a call away. Good Luck Mate!

He is there at http://nirupesh.blogspot.com

only tech. leads can handle windows

2004-09-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

[ any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - clarke's third law ]

people often say to me: "Harish, as a Microsoft Tech Lead, you have a job That requires you to process large quantities of information on a timely basis. How do you manage?"

(I am kidding, what they really ask is," Why don't you get a real haircut?")

I tell them (as the answer to the first question, of course!), "Get Windows XP!"
It was invented by Bill Gates. He is now one of the wealthiest individuals on Earth - wealthier than Queen Elizabeth; and do you want to know why? Because he is the only person in the world who can understand Windows.

Every day he gets frantic phone calls like this:

BUSINESS EXECUTIVE: Our entire worldwide corporate accounting system is paralyzed, and no matter what we type into the computer, it replies, "WHO WANTS TO KNOW? (Signed) 'Windows'

BILL GATES: Ha-ha! I mean, sounds pretty serious.

BUSINESS EXECUTIVE: We'll give you $17 million to tell us how to fix it.

BILL GATES: OK. Press the "NUM LOCK" key.

BUSINESS EXECUTIVE: So THAT'S what that thing does! Thanks! The cheque is on the way!

I have spent countless hours trying to get my computer to perform even the most basic data-processing functions, such as letting me filter data in MS Excel so that the stats for the team appears in a month wise with agents performance in Pivot Table. I have personally, with my bare hands, changed my "normal.dot" and "CONFIG.SYS" settings. This may not mean much to you, but trust me; it is a major data-processing accomplishment. Albert Einstein died without ever doing it.

("WAIT a minute!" were his last words. "It erased my equation! It was "E' equals something!")

I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with MS Excel. There are hundreds of others. I know this, because I encounter them at work and in Messenger, they are called Tech Leads (or STs) which is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts responsible for the overall technical health of Windows XP Techs, by which I mean, "PEOPLE WITHOUT LIVES"

While you are destroying your mind watching worthless brain-rotting drivel on TV, we at work (and in MSN) are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibited, intimate and (yes) shocking details about our "setupapi.log" and "MSInfo32" and ripping "Winsock" apart. In War rooms, Flash meetings...et al

This debate has been raging, soap-opera-like, for months now, and I have become addicted to it. I tune in every day to see what the leading characters are saying. You probably think this is weird, but I don't care.

another day in paradise

2004-09-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been caught in a time warp?? I was, yesterday, when I went back to my Schooll. The corridors, the rooms, the labs, the teachers....It was nostalgic.

I knew was that the school had left indelible mark on me but one thing I did not realize that I had lft some marks or scartches on the school. The place where we timed a cracker to burst during the 1 minute silence after prayer, The Music Room for our romancing, The Tennis Court where we used to hide and steal smokes.....

Guess this is what they call nostalgia, maybe??

2004-09-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

this is our hangout place. The river Nila, the life source of Palghat. Our very own Thames (but the bridge looks like Queen Elizabeth than its London counterpart), Nile (No pyramids on the shore,though you may find some huts) and Ganges (A lottt cleaner!!!)

postcards from heaven

2004-08-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

at last I'm on a long sought vacation. Home is amazing. Its exactly the same as left it (Well, what did I expect to change in 3 months???)

the weather, the river, the people. since it’s the festive season, most, if not all, of my school mates are here.

went to the Fort here (The Old Fort, incidentally was built by Tipu Sultan and now is a major tourist attraction. There is a grass walk, joggers trail and lawns around it and the moat has been turned into a boating area) and believe it or not...half my batch was there!! It was amazing!! Like, I was talking to a guy and he suddenly he points to another guy in the same group and asks, "Do you know him?" and he bloody turns out to be another classmate...He didn't even recognize me!!

another hangout place was the river, where it was just the water, sand and sunset (Not to mention beer!!) It was nostalgic, sitting there and recounting the stories from school. The fights, the romances, the escapades (Yours truly starred in quite a few of them)

well, I have got a week more....so it’s just started......

if i don't have time for you....dont blame me, blame sp2

2004-08-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

[ if anything can go wrong it will - murphy's law ]

well, did not understand a word of the title? This is the new single thats topping the charts at the office. SP2 a.k.a Service Pack 2 for Windows XP has not only become what we feared it would, but also in a scale which we the unsuspecting Tech Leads never imagined. I can understand the frustration of the guy who screamed "Oh, Why on #@@** earth should a Service Pack cause more problems than the OS????" My feelings exactly, pal!

have you noticed that I ramble more about work than me these days? Thats what working in an environment with the air so heavy with tension that you can cut it, does to you! One advice to people, especially out-of-college techies (Maaaan, I use the word like I am a veteran whereas I was one of those species hardly a year and half ago!!) guys, go to the mountains and become a hermit or beter still start your own firm!

the only sources of inspiration and laughter has been Dilbert and Forwarded mails (Thanks, Scott Adams for the first and Pavi and Argan for the second, Dunno what I would do without you guys!!)

2004-08-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, I swear this pic was put after a long bout of pleading from Div.....I swear!!!

hot dog

2004-08-23T17:52:00.000-07:00

ladies and gentlement! Introducing the Chocolate Starfish!
and the Hotdog Flavored Water Bring it on!
get the fuck up!
yeah! check, one, two Listen up, listen up! Here we go
It's a fucked world We're a fucked up place
Everybody's judged by their fucked up face
Fucked up dreams Fucked up life
A fucked up kid With a fucked up knife
Fucked up moms And fucked dads
It's a fucked up a cop With a fucked up badge
Fucked up job With fucked up pay
And a fucked up boss Is a fucked up pain
Fucked up press And fucked up lies
Well, Lethal's in the back With the fact of the fires
Hey, it's on Everybody knows this song Hey, it's on Everybody knows this song

work is a four letter word

2004-08-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

i don't know if this is what you call work! Sitting at your workstation and staring at the monitor for hours! Why has the spirit gone out of me? Why don't I feel like working? Why do I feel de-motivated? and Why am I having these thoughts?

maybe complaining is not my forte. Never has been.I am one of those perpetual optimists. One of those guys who, if they fall accidentally in a well ask for a soap!

maybe its all these problems I am facing right now thats causing me to write this. Not just mine, but my friends' too. My problem is purely infrastructural (Ooops, big word huh? Josh would hate me for it) I need to move out of my current house and don't feel like it. My friends' problems? I wish they were simpler.

hey, look at the silver lining......
going home this week, after a long time.......Well, its gotta be fun, except for the fact that the pressure mounts from my family. The expectations they have set on me are not a part of my current life. Yes, I want to pursue an MBA, in Advertising. But right now, there are things that i need to set in place...What things? Well, theres always another log..ill leave it for now....