Half-a-Decade of The Den of Drums and Dreams

Managers, mails and metaphors - an overview of the overused

2011-09-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

Apologies for not writing for the last five months. There was a serious dearth of topics to write on. I had half-a-dozen unfinished articles conveniently hibernating in my laptop, waiting for some trojan/virus to devour them, for none of them qualified enough to see the light of the day. To add to the pack were two social issues that were to be sent to the papers. The government beat me to it, by resolving them!

This major hiatus was on, till the above thought struck. Three years of corporate life, beyond all learning, leaves you with assaulted words and/or phrases. By assault, I mean their overuse. I have handpicked the oft used and hence the top ten. The aim is to convey to my readers, that the overused phrases are but metaphors that mostly imply the opposite of their innocent, obvious selves.

1) Keeping you “in the loop” – “In the noose” would have been a more apt term, for all this phrase does is signal the arrival of a distant storm. Someone elsewhere blew the conch for the battle, and the battalion is fast approaching you. The noose will soon tighten around you. Choose to fight, flee or laugh...

2) Deep dive – In all probability, you are positioned to dive into a bottomless abyss. Whenever a new idea demands a deep-dive, “not doable” is the writing on the wall.

3) Process rationalization – The process is anything but useless, and your task is to convert it to “non-useless”, in the least. Your job description, though, will assume a rationalized process even before you sign your offer letter.

4) In the same page – Keep others in the “same page” at your own risk. Your supervisor’s being in the “same page” can only result in a “torn book”. This usage implies “monitoring you beyond what’s at tolerable levels”.

5) Sacrosanct – Adjective – Often confused with “too important or valuable to be interfered with”. Business intent – non-negotiable, beyond human possibility, non-achievable, "not in my hands"...

6) Huddle – Often ends up being a “muddle”, for there are ten people, ten suggestions, ten negative reactions to the same, and all attendees convincing themselves and others, that there was a lot of learning involved.

7) Innovate – Often follows the above muddle. The challenge here is to find out the acceptable eleventh idea, beyond the ten rejected above.

8) Out-of-the-box – Can someone tell me more about the box and what’s within it, so that I can figure out what’s without?!

9) Hygiene variable – The big brother of “sacrosanct”. The business intent resembles that of the latter, only higher in degree/severity.

10) Brainstorming – It almost always doesn’t need the brain, and the storm goes only thus far as to suggest the mood in the conference room. A successor of “chronic shortage of ideas”, this term is a disguise for “finding out the last straw to hang on”!

School was when...

2011-03-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

1. The time that mattered was between classes and during intervals. The rest of the day was but breaks between intervals.

2. Home was second home.

3. The ‘lunch break’ was an hour of play and a minute of lunch. For, dumping lunch never took time.

4. Matters of grave worry were to lose out on a game of wrestlers’ trump cards, or to have a ‘Games Hour’ washed out by rain.

5. If your neighbour scores more than you, change... the neighbour!

6. The topper in class was not quite extra-curricular. And the all-rounder of the class wasn’t as much studious. You placed yourself in a complacent, convenient and content mid-point. And then conveyed the message in its entirety to your parents.

7. Waiting for ‘other school buses’ to arrive was to take attendance of teachers before they took ours, so that the Class Leader may be prodded to place a request for an extra Games Hour.

8. There never was a greater hero than the Class Leader, when the above request was approved. Three-scores of students rushed out to the grounds in sheer joy, all praises for their Leader!

9. Rs. 10 (Canteen allowance - once in a term, thrice in a year, rather) could buy:

· A cream bun, with a more-than-generous filling of sweetened cream

· Ice-cream soda, chilled.

· A vegetable puff.

· A vintage Cadbury’s lollypop.

· One more of it.

· Rs. 1.50 (you would be chock full by now, to spend this on more food)

o This is when your classmate observed from the distance, and ran over to remind you as to how he saved your ass in the Science Class by sharing his textbook.

o And in another instance, by donating his set of sketch pens.

o Spent...

10. Stolen waters were sweet and bread eaten in secret was pleasant.

11. Facebook was then known as the "school bus". That's where we "added friends", "poked", "liked" and played better games than building virtual farms or fighting virtual mafia.

Cupid goes online...

2011-03-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

Just as I had written about love and its colleagues being butchered by grammar, Cupid rushed to establish himself online. My friend had sent a link to one of those dating sites on the Net, whose Home Page had a Live Feed on the latest one-liners posted by people asking for a partner. The point in his forwarding it and hence of this article, is to bring to spotlight the inventive, innovative and supposedly wacky introductory statements that people use to “break the i.”, if that’s the aim. Most of them are true ROTFL material, more so when they are read with a tinge of interpretation from the reader’s end. The best specimens have been isolated for the below analysis.

1) “Does writing her that you need a girl, ever work, i doubt it.”

Paradoxical, for if the person who wrote this meant it, he wouldn’t have wasted time posting it in a dating site. Second, he has answered himself that “he doubts it”, which made the purpose of the post all the more redundant. Realistically, the only reply our pal received was from an Online Merchandise store, which said “we accept Paypal too”!

2) “I am travelling to Kolkata and Bareilly next week. Will be in Bareilly in the second week of March. The place is new to me and I need company for two weeks”

He does Toyota proud, going about “Just-In-Time” with relationships. Hell with the partner in the fourth week of March, for the Bareilly precondition then stands violated.

3) This is mumbai (location noted, next?), all females and males are very busy taking care of their job or housework (Poor them!). At the same time, we need to have some friends (oh, the pitch) so that as and when we have little time to spare, we can chat, meet to discuss various issues (the politburo of every party sure is waiting for this to get over) or may like to have some advise, and to have good time outing for a short while (please note the time period, it’s for a while).

4) “Hai im 27yrs from mumbai...” – Hmmm, nice alphanumeric name you’ve got!

5) Now for the winner. The second is but second by a long, long way. Please, please note - what follows is long poetry, and hence requires running commentary. What’s written below in parentheses is mine own, and the rest belongs to him who wants to date.

“First of all let me tell you clear this is not any relationship issue or Just for Men or Just for Women and certainly not a Dating tip issue (To sum up, this is not an issue at all! The aim is to make it sound out of the ordinary. He assures you that what follows is anything but cliched). I just wanted to start something HutKe (kahaan ke?!) from regular topic. Second who feel themself as moderators and just brag and complain saying that this topic does not belong to this group please hold on (Yeah, moderators. Beware. The topic does not belong here, but act as if you weren’t aware). This just to have some thoughts and views of other people. (the point, please!). Now, coming to the issue (finally). If you make a MOVIE based on true story and that true story is YOUR LIFE what will be the title of the movie (huh?! Moderators, behold!). The movie can be in any language (people from all over India can apply). I would appreciate if it is not English please give the title in your language and also meaning of it (...but why?). I also appreciate if you keep some high level English words please give meaning. If I make a movie the title will be "WALKING ALONE...” Now there! The moderators, the would-be partners and readers are all stunned. This was a valiant attempt at dramatising the request for a partner! And the killer title for his autobiography demands an encore, applause, whistles, bells and more... And yeah, a partner!

More specimens were left out keeping in view the “greater good of mankind”...

The Woes and Ease of Facebook Chat

2011-01-23T10:14:00.000-08:00

The time on the Desktop clock when I start to type this article: 11:45pm

I was chatting with a friend on Facebook, when I got to reflect on just how difficult the interface for the same is, on Zuckerberg's Social Net(doesn't always)work. The defects, faced by all, is summarized as below:

1) Enter, the Dragon: Zucker's team might have forgotten to programme respect for the ENTER key. Worse still, they would have set a counter which recognizes the ENTER key only the seventh time somebody presses it.

2) The exclamations of life aren't given their place, on FB. For, this is how "what you mean" gets typed on FB chat:

Oh! - oh1

LOL! - lol1

Haha!!!! - haha111

The most required SHIFT is never given its due, hence...

3) Phase-book: This would have been a better name for the network, for it displays what you have typed in phases. It stops mid-way, hell with your speed and ability to type fast, and moves on to the next phase only after a couple of swears form your side, and a call and a message to the person at the other end if not a face-to-face meeting, to convey how FB chat sucks.

4) Space-jam: Self-explanatory, foryouwouldneverwantwhatyoutypetobeclusteredtogetherlikethis.

5) Loading the Chat option... sometimes takes forever.

6) Back to FB chat... Was taking a break when I had pressed Enter there.

Time on desktop clock now: 11:57pm - My fastest blog to-date. :) This is when the keyboard works the way you want it to!

Reflections of a past decade (1991-2000)

2011-01-02T23:50:00.000-08:00

Five years of blogging. Half my audience would never believe its eyes about this statistic, for I myself skipped a heart-beat or two when I realized that the Den of Drums and Dreams was half a decade old! Now, that’s a total of 27 posts, including the one I have been typing just as yet.

The blog started with an article that meant nothing to anyone, including me, whoever-read-it and Jerome K Jerome (who finds a mention in the first post). It was initially aimed at daily posts summarizing the day that flew by, but then I understood that my having a blocked nose is of no remote significance to any reader or to Jerome K Jerome, who is no more now and very much so then!

Humour has been at the core and crux of all blogs, though a couple of posts had a contemplative / opinionative shade to them. It always reigned, for more than three-quarters of the blog were about incidents involving me, or in the least had my playing the role of the prompter-behind-the-curtain. And plots where I was involved undoubtedly had “sympathetically resonant (yeah, I remember my physics. Alternatively, this was typed to make me look and sound so.) laughter” in them, not due to my ability to read, re-read and reproduce satire in writing, but because I always used to be stationed at the receiving end. The only reason then, that my blogs have less of “I” and “me” was because I generalized the anecdotes as applicable to the present world / generation per se, and wanted to consciously reduce the first-person element termed as ego. Which is why you would find more of the third person here, and the passive voice with the subject deleted, as taught by Wren and Martin!!

Five years saw me do 3 months of a B Tech, two years of work, another couple of years of an MBA, and seven months of the next job. This meant relocating through five cities in “three states” (that’s one more than Chetan Bhagat’s!)… As I retrospect, I wonder at how science and technology have first comforted and then intruded into our PESTEL (!!) fabric. Further, half-a-dozen classmates had summarized their past decade (2001-10) on Facebook, while ushering in a new set of 120 months. This is when I thought of life a decade further back (1991-00 (Y2K!)), and was surprised to see the change that has come through. Whether it is welcome or not is an endless abyss of a debate and best not ventured into, for we risk losing out on content due to high levels of subjectivity in thought and (in)action. The reflections, by the way, are based on the academic year (June to May), very much different from the “financial year” we have been forcefully made to understand.

Come April, and it was time to see the result of the FINAL exam of the previous class. I had written my first Standard exam then, and felt the triumph of having cleared the Civil Services, for I could spell G-O-O-D-S T-R-A-I-N and also knew what the vehicle did. A tense dad and a very, very, cool son marched past the school gates. Plenty of anxious parents had crowded around the one tiny notice board (of which my name was an even smaller speck), all equally anxious of the numeric equivalent out of 100 their sons had secured, which would prove whether their respective sons have mastered the “Zen of the Goods Train”.

My target (oh yeah, Sales started from birth. You made pitches to your parents, impromptu, without any PPT / infra-red remote controls. No blazers, no formals, but you were far more serious and meant more business than now with all accessories on!) was an 80%. It was a breeze, for:

The fact that “we should not spit on the road” took care of my Social Studies
10 + 21 = 31 ensured a centum in Maths
The Goods Train ensured that my General Knowledge marks chugged along
I knew the Malayalam equivalents of a cat, rat and a mat.
The sun was a huge ball of fire, and my science teacher was more than happy with that.
The Radiant Reader had to be read out loud in English, and I screamed so loud that it sounded like the Major’s order, and the marks were jotted down halfway through the third sentence. I had practised the lesson “Nancy’s picnic” a million times at home!

Six subjects were all they had to it. Physical Training was never a subject, and “Games” was not compulsory.
The results almost always carried a bribe with them. I had promised dad an 80%, in lieu for an electric train (engine and one-and-a-half coaches) with plastic tracks, battery-operated. I had achieved an 85%, so that meant it would be a train plus an-extra-gift-for-over-achieving! That was about RESULTS and APPRAISALS.
Come the month of May, and Loyola School used to reopen a fortnight earlier than others in the city. Now, this meant:

Brand new bags
Squeaking new shoes, with lights, without them, with sounds, etc. (Action Rockers – do imagine the futility of having lights at the back of your shoe, and that too a red one.)
o Sub-bullet point – Action Silencer – Kapil Dev’s shoes that used to have Suction, Compression and Ventilation. I noticed three years later that the air-hole in the shoe was but a farce! ROTFL!
Uniforms – The tailor round the corner was tenser than I was, in having the uniforms stitched.
Books – The stationery-shop owner’s Chotu used to run around the neighbourhood, collecting the new books for school, to get them bound. The smell of Fevicol in newly bound books had an infinite nostalgia tagged to it!
o Book labels – Every children’s magazine used to have a centre-spread of adhesive book labels. We kids used to buy two additional magazines over and above the one we subscribed to, only for the labels. The rest of the magazine was scrap equivalent.

Pranks at school are quite another subject altogether, and will be pondered about in the subsequent post.

The "Road of Life" - Lessons from "Life on Road" - Part 1

2010-11-14T11:40:00.000-08:00

Three-and-a-half months since my last post. I look more like a firm nowadays, posting quarterly. Without much ado, here goes blog Q3 – unaudited (unedited?!)

This time, it’s about lessons learnt on the roads of Chennai. Traffic in this city has its unique share of humour. Not to forget / mention the larger chunk of irritation, anger and a host of emotions spewed through the exhaust of every vehicle. Narrations below, therefore, refer to anecdotes involving the self and the traffic system. Mostly dominated by the latter, the former is a helpless witness to the extent that he could but blog about it. The irony, though, is about how we could attempt to promote a Greener world when everyone on road (vehicle included) is Red in the face!

The Chennai auto-driver:

The Chennai auto-driver, to say the least, is the most powerful economic indicator that every above-average and over-gray-haired economist has failed to observe and track. He is powerful enough to usher in a sub-prime on a local basis. The ‘taxiing rate’ he quotes could create a bearish clone of the strongest bull any fund market has ever seen. Salaried professionals would incur a negative balance on their Salary a/c in a jiffy, and businessmen could file Chapter 11 (of any book!) within the bat of an eyelid. Bargaining, in such a situation, is hardly possible. Except when you use humour – precise and pointed, only to save a dozen and a half of INR.

I spend a total of twenty minutes daily, only talking to auto-drivers to convince them for lower ‘taxi quotes’. Excerpts from a couple of conversations are given below:

“AUTO! Mount Road??”

“Why not, sir? Where in Mount Road?”

“Spencer Plaza...?”

He then acts ignorant. Someone who has not heard of Spencers Plaza, being in Chennai for more than three months, is better not described any further. On second thoughts, he could, at best, be branded as ‘a blot on the landscape’, to borrow from Sir P G Wodehouse.

The acting reaches its Oscar zenith soon.

“Spencer Plaza?! In Mount Road?! You mean behind Cathedral Road?!”

“No, you just have to go straight-as-an-arrow from here. Cathedral Road doesn’t even come in the way!”

The guy then acts as if he just finished installing Google Maps in himself, by doing a vigorous headbang to denote cognizance (now understanding that you do have a sense of routes around here). “Ohhhh! OUR Spencer Plaza?! (Mark that usage. Spencer Plaza is OURS now!!!)) I was thinking about something else! Hop on!”

“Before I do, how much?”

“Hundred bucks, sir.”

“For four-kilometres-and-a-half?!!! Hope you in your senses?!!”

“Sir, it’s a one-way ahead. Petrol charges have increased. So has the price of food-grains. But only for you, sir, 60 bucks is what I shall charge, and no more.”

“Forty it is, a buck no more...”

And then I walk ahead, to attempt the same to the next sapien they call an auto-driver.

Phase II is callback. When the above Jack Nicholson screams at you, claps twice, and calls you back. “Clap-and-another! Sirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!”

“Now what?!”

“You can’t fathom the traffic going forward, sir. It’s too tough to drive... 50 bucks, sir. No less...”

“Oh, I suppose you didn’t know you would be part of this phenomenon called traffic, when you started three-wheeling?! FORTY!!!!”

“Sir, please sir, spare a tenner if you would, sir.”

“Who would give me an extra tenner, like I do now to you?”

“The Almighty will, sir. I will ask Him to do so.”

“O.k, here goes. I give you my 40 now; the other tenner that the Almighty owes me will be re-assigned to you in my morrow’s prayers. Now shall we do the honours?!”

Jack Nicholson now does a LOL, and says, “Must say you talk funny, sir! Give me 45!”

To which the reply was, “I talk funnier, if humour doth discount! Forty...”

And phew, the journey only starts...

Cupid meets Wren and Martin

2010-07-31T23:42:00.001-07:00

Wedlock of the God of Love with the Gods of Grammar. An affair between two diametrically opposite personae. One God is mythological and the other(s), real. One makes you fall in love that is blind, the other makes you gape at English Grammar with eyes wide open. The God of love uses his arrows to ensnare people into love, while “the key to Wren & Martin” is possibly the only way out of the others’ Grammar Puzzles.

Rewind to a week back. This was when I reestablished contact with some of my once close friends. Once close, for time and space prevented us from keeping in touch for quite a while. We met after long, and hence were trading lessons learnt, anecdotes experienced, organizations switched, qualifications obtained and habits formed. Not to forget love stories – the ones that had happened, had not, are happening and may happen. Which is when the above wedlock happened.

For, the striking commonality in all love stories (successful or otherwise), was the grammar involved during or around the time of “the proposal”. (“Successful or otherwise” is a phrase of caution inserted intentionally to prove that success in love is relative. ‘Walking out of an affair’ has suddenly become a measure of success!) The efforts of the male partner, in setting up an ambience conducive to proposing, simply gush down the drain the moment the heroine starts her grammatical extempore –verbal game-play where even the tense used may be a “turning point”. What follows is the best of such extempores. One-liner proposals that would force any guy to put pen to paper, underline the critical parts (like we did at school: “picking out” the main clause and the subordinate ones!), and try and make sense of the jugglery. A big thanks to all my friends who were co-operative enough to share the “grammatical rewards” they were bestowed with.

· I wanted to be in love with you. – This implies that you aren’t half as good as the new bargain she has recently acquried. Further, this is a tacit admission of the fact that only half your calls will be picked up, and your messages (unless already blocked) will be deemed as important as the ones that announce “For sale! Green rabbit at half the market price! Hurry!”

· I would have been in love with you – This is the inverse corollary of the first statement. The meaning is that you would have been the “new acquistion” had matters not been so settled with our anti-hero, her present boyfriend. The conclusion? She is committed. You don’t gain anything, save an experience certificate that may provide incremental confidence on your next venture.

· I might be in love with you – No instance or incident can be quoted as evidence of the girl’s love, for the matter is still under contemplation. It’s window-shopping at its peak! ;) After all, the market has a wide variety of options. All you can do is to wait. And, at the end of the waiting period, precedents suggest that you will most probably get to hear the first or the second proposals drafted above. At the end of the story, during the “happily ever after” part, you still wouldn’t have got a girl.

· I was in love with you – Idiot, you let it go. You didn’t sense it coming. She tried her best to convey it, but then you never did your Wren and Martin properly. Continue the relationship at your own peril. Iterations will only result in one of the above three scenarios.

· To conclude, the killer proposal. This would challenge any post-graduate in English Literature to think twice before uttering a single syllable in English. Craftily framed, well delivered, to the extent that Cupid himself ran for cover!

“In the event that I fall in love with you, I will give you a call tonight.”

Speechless! So was our dude. Was he to wait for the event?! Well, he did. The event never happened. The call never came. The moment I heard this from the victim (one of my friends), I ROTBAFOL (Rolled On The Bed And Fell Off Laughing, if you want to adapt it into your chat lingo!!). The proposal reminded me of exception messages that a C program threw up whenever a geek forgot to #include (people without a programming background can safely ignore this and move on); with the exception that the latter seemed a bit more subtle and diplomatic when it mattered.

Action plan? Guys, please work on your Grammar. To the extent that, for such “legally correct” proposals as the above, we could atleast give a befitting reply. Which, for the killer proposal, would have been (!!): “In the event that I answer the call, it would mean I mightn’t be as much in love!” Confused? Leave it to the gals to figure out. We have done too much thus far...

Reality shows... Or does it?

2010-06-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

There are few posts in this blog where the author decides to sacrifice humour, and opinionates, cribs rather, on the topic in question. This is one of them.

Habit has taught us people to use the idiot box as the first medium of exercising entertainment. Sadly though, content on television has degraded. Degraded to the extent of naming a reality show “Truth, Love, Cash”, where the first two words are far from virtues and the last sounds like a reward for arm-twisting the former.

This post is a look of remorse at the present generation. A feel of pity, at the rapid blind westernization that’s come into vogue. Of children loving to “move out” of home once they are in their teens. Of an India that has forgotten its roots. Of a country which once had, mark had, taken pride in its tradition and legacy. Such a country now gapes helplessly at the disturbing content being aired through televisions. Content which can be termed voluntary self-molestation at best, and corporal mortification at worst.

Children who are into their early adulthood are now inclined to a life of adventure. Leaping beyond wooden hindrances twice the height of a person does sound athletic. Driving into hinterlands on bikes in the sweltering heat does go a long way in establishing physical endurance and grit. This is the theme reality shows harped on. But, as competition gobbled up ideas, shows needed to raise the bar. TV Ratings dwindled as content looked and felt routine. Viewership got divided between the various channels that telecast reality shows. Programs needed to get back, and get back strong. The only way they could make this possible was to make adventurous acts look and feel gory. “Physical vulgarity” was the obvious solution.

Readers might wonder as to why my writing is a tad too acerbic. Take my word for this. Do read what follows, and what was written above will only seem inadequate and lacking in expression.
A particular episode of Truth Love Cash (TLC), a reality show aired on Channel [V], had six guys barely into adulthood crouching on their knees, a la dogs. Six heavily built men standing behind them were ready to spank their rears with thick sticks, the hitting end of which had spikes of some material, making it look like a mace. The host of the show demanded “the HIT” once in close to forty seconds, in what was a twenty minute exercise. The participants cried, some choked, others felt nauseated after bearing the pain of each hit through growls, screams, swears and grit-and-ground teeth.

Add to this, the opposite sex of the same age group. There was one male participant who couldn’t bear being spanked, and gave up at the twentieth minute, for he was choking and in want of air-to-breathe. His partner-girl in the competition had this to say: “I know it’s tough, but I was disappointed with him. He could have done better. I never thought he would give up so easily.”

Further, the censor board demands that objectionable words be censored (read BEEPED) out. Trust me; the show had only beeps for the entire half hour. To add to the gore, the channel promises more. UNCENSORED videos on the net.

If that was the physical extreme, reality shows have treaded to the emotional extreme too. Response to eroticism is now monitored in terms of change in the pace of heart-beat. The participant with the least change wins. The contestants, in this case, were made to watch a belly dance, alone and live.

Food for thought, now that the narration is past. What’s telecast in the name of entertainment and reality offers neither. What’s gory is never entertaining and voluntary self-molestation, by the farthest figment of imagination, comes nowhere near reality. Living daily life in front of the lens is not reality. Allowing one’s rear to be spanked by a mace is adventurous perversion, and measuring body reactions in response to stimuli of eroticism is best left unsaid.

Should this mean that song and dance competitions in the name of reality shows are healthy? Far from it. Tender six year olds are made to do multiple rounds of singing and dancing, to the extent of forgoing their primary education. Only to get eliminated mid-way. The poor things cry, sob and weep on stage. So do their parents, and the uncle and aunt who were also packaged into the show. Myriad displays of emotion get compensated by a grand prize. One measly DVD player.

Which brings us to the title of the post. Reality shows... Or does it?

TwixT The TweeT and The TainT

2010-04-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

To begin with, two-and-a-half weeks into officially being declared an MBA, I am now a “degree” older. Next, I know that I had, in the past, administered ministerial oaths to the effect that I would be henceforth regular in my blogs. But, lack of topics to write on caused my literary skills to strike their abysmal low, and indeed kept the oaths ministerial. They have bottomed out now (or so I hope). The so-called green shoots seem visible from the distance, but the erstwhile crispness of writing may not be yet evident. I guess it would take another ‘learning curve’ before I achieve scale in my blogs. (Management perspectives, yes.)

Two years in Mumbai blazed past at the same pace that the recent two weeks in Trivandrum did. Idleness and boredom are bullish in a city in Trivandrum, for they grow by the day. Hence, entertainment gets confined to business and news channels on TV.
Last month, news channels had an overload of words starting with the letter “T”. An indicative list? Of course. Here goes (in order of appearance):

Tharoor, Twitter, Twenty Twenty, Tunanda Tushkar (I wanted to force-fit this. The typo may be ignored), Thukral, and Tata Tea’s Tion (wildcard entry).

As reads the title of this post, there was many an incident “Twixt the Tweet and the Taint”. A flipside view of the entire episode would be the following:

1) “Right to Tweet” must become a fundamental right.

2) Years down the lane, the author of this blog predicts that “Twitter” and its associated words will find themselves etched in The Oxford and the Websters’ dictionaries (as part of regular English language usage), to indicate “public defamation” of varying nature and intensity. Examples follow:

1) Tweet – verb.
Etymology: 20-20 controversies of 2010. (Ref: Modi, Tharoor, et al.).
Meaning: Speak when not warranted to; defame people by making confidential discussions public, preferably online, mostly in the context of money and auctions.
Contextual usage: Anand wanted the matter to be a secret, but his boss tweeted it out in front of the office members.

2) Twitter – noun.
Etymology: Tharoor.
Meaning: A person who cannot keep a secret, to the extent that he blurts it out on a public platform, real or virtual.
Contextual usage: Please don’t divulge the details to Amit, for the man’s a twitter by birth.

3) Tweeticide – noun.
Etymology: Indian history – Year 2010.
Meaning: Killing one’s career by divulging confidential details on a public platform, either in the real or the virtual world.
Contextual usage: An unnecessary tweeticide it was for his career, the way he exposed his boss through a scrap on Orkut.

4) Tweetomania – noun.
Etymology: Excessive obsession to Twitter.
Meaning: The patient forgets to ask “how do you do?” Rather, immediately after greeting, the question would be “What are you doing now?”
Contextual usage: As the case may be...

Tweet’s all, folks! (P.S: An epilogue follows!)

Epilogue: Tata Tea’s Tion. One of the other words that began with the letter “T”, and did the news rounds this month. The product is Tata Tea’s pilot launch in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, in the non-carbonated beverages category. Taste-wise, I am yet to get a hang of it. The product has been doing its pilot since an year now. The sales for the brand have been one-fourth that of Nimbooz for its 250ml variant, but the 400ml variant has been dismal. Flavoured ice-tea is what Tata Tea claims the product is. But, what baffled me even more was the pronunciation of the word. A leading bakery in Trivandrum, which had its entire front elevation draped by posters of Tion, lured me in.

I asked for “Tea-ion” first.
The shopkeeper stared at me with a poker-face.
Wrong way to pronounce the name? Damn.

I tried Tion as in Sion (Read Tayan.)
Poker-face again.

Third, I tried the "Teon" way of saying "tion".

His stare grew stranger, as he raised an eyebrow.

Last, I wanted to try Tion as in superstiTION, or redempTION, but then I gave up!
I went out of the shop and pointed to the scores of TION posters, and exclaimed out loud: “This??!!”

The reply was: “That’s only the posters. The product is yet to reach us.”
“Slice?”
“Tweny five bucks…”
“Thank you…”

A day in the hostel life of an MBA... Part I

2010-03-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

5:30am: Good morning to the world, and good night to me.

5:45am: One of the mosquitoes sang part of Alizee’s “Moi Lolita”, in my ear. Five seconds later, it completed the rest of the song. It was one lone bloodsucker that managed to sneak in to the mosquito net I had so creatively tied around me (four ropes were made by tearing apart a pillow cover into four vertical strips – done out of pure frustration when a gang of them did a group rendition of “Emosional Attyachar” - looped half a dozen times, when I was asleep).

5:50am: Thirsty. I got up and out of bed, and reached out for a bottle of water. I heard the drone of a score of helicopters. Looking back, the mosquitoes were all neatly tucked inside the net, and I was outside. Quite not the intended configuration!

6:30am: Partly asleep. I managed to do a mass-murder, revenge to the above Spartan attack, and most of them were dead. There was peace all around. The mosquitoes had turned Sumo wrestlers and me, anaemic!

7:30am: CLASS AT NINE! CASE-STUDY TO BE READ! RANDOM COLD-CALLING IN CLASS! HAVE TO SPEAK FOR CLASS PARTICIPATION MARKS! NOT READ A WORD! I began searching for the case binder on my table. What came out was a crumpled version of the previous day’s Bombay Times (for everyone read it), and a neat stack of the Economic Times, seven of them, all untouched by hand! I finally found the binder, measured the case in terms of “number of pages of written material” and “number of exhibits”. 15 pages and 15 were the measures. Consensus measure worked out...

8:10am: Woke up again. The consensus measure was that I sleep more and read less of the case.

9:00am: In class: Sticky hands due to the breakfast eaten while travelling in an auto. Lost half of the sandwich in transit, and spilled the tea on to the Starbucks case material! Read 5 pages and 0 exhibits, out of the measures cited earlier. My point in class was nowhere related to what was read, but I saw the pen making a mark against my name in the “class register”, and was happy at the stimulus package having worked out for the better.

2:00pm: End of class for the day. Bakar followed. We had our share of swearing at faculty who made life miserable for us. Swears exhausted, we were hungry.

3:00pm: Lunchtime! Charlie and I were at the hostel mess, trying to sort out the confusion in eating. The thali was for Rs. 30. We paid up, and got the tokens. The guy behind the counter took our tokens, and said: “Aloo Ki Sabji khatam, Chana thoda bacha hai, Jeera rice das minute pehle khatam ho gaya, green salad aaj banaaya nahi...”

3:10pm: Our plates resembled the Thar desert – acres of emptiness with rare occurrences of scattered oases.

3:30pm: Back to our room, hunger half-satisfied. Four of us made a mad rush for the day’s Bombay Times. We fought. I got Priyanka Chopra’s face, Charlie got half-an-advertisement of Royal Cha... (Abhimanyu got the “...llenge” part of it!), and Bharadwaj gave up and decided to settle for the Economic Times. I had managed to kick the wall of Room. No 47, while fighting. Somebody at Room. No. 43 felt the seismic tremors, and asked us to tone it down. Talk about structural strength of buildings!

4:00pm: We had finished debating about why filmstars were upto what they were. Time to sleep...

Second composition...

2010-01-23T00:25:00.000-08:00

Some free time during Christmas vacations resulted in this second composition, based in Raga Hamsadwani. Apologies again, to music at large, for not having done a professional arranging and recording of this music piece. Lack of MIDI resources and MIDI interface resulted in a crude line-in recording again, on a Yamaha PSR-450. Criticisms, as mentioned before, are always welcome.

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For the want of a fitting title...

2009-12-20T12:47:00.000-08:00

It’s been a long time since I entered the Den of Drums and Dreams, but for occasional peeks to ensure that my blog counter kept ticking. But then, it seemed like it’s mine own visits which dragged forth the counter. It looks like the algorithm for the blog counter read something like asunder:

If(IP of machine is different from the IP captured on the blog)
{
Increase blog counter by one
}
If(IP is the same)
{
Dekh le yaar. Lag raha hai banda thoda feel ho raha hai. Kabhi kabhi increment kar de...
}

Algorithms apart, readership is not a variable I keep a tag on, for the fact remains that it is tough to read blogs. More so for my blog, for the extra parables placed per post!

As for the topic of this post, it’s the art of flirting. And no, it’s not that the author has turned candid enough to discuss ways and means of flooring gals, for he thinks that such a phase in life is either way ahead of him, or way behind. Neither paradigm suggests any better an alternative.

People often accuse me of the lack of “an ability to express myself”. Synonyms of this accusation would mean not being able to keep up the conversation with a girl, or not being able to exchange pleasantries with a girl for more than half an hour. (Thirty minutes, my!) Further blemishes include not being able to “show off” (‘Showing Off for Dummies’ is yet to hit the stands. I promise to buy a copy as soon as it does.) These allegations get hurled at me left, right and centre, day in and day out. Further, I always owed an explanation to those who advised me round the clock, on this topic. That’s exactly what this post does. It delves into details of selected, nay, hand-picked instances when I tried “expressing” or “communicating” to girls, and their reactions to the same. The latter would explain why I even stopped making attempts, thereafter.

Disclaimer: The dumb reactions given below are those of certain girls that I felt like “communicating to”. This is never an attack on the gender as a whole. I agree that guys could be equally dumb, if not more equally. Oh yes, go ahead and include me too...

Scenario I:
First-girl-to-whom-I-felt-like-communicating: “So, what are your hobbies?”
Me: “I am the drummer of our band, at college.”
Girl-to-her-dad: “Dad, you knew this? He plays the band!! I love it when people play the band for Ganpati and for weddings, in Mumbai!”
My instant reaction (non-verbally communicated), amidst a couple (and more) of clenched fists – Lady, I play the drums, and not ‘the band’! Second, it’s not what they do at Ganpati and/or weddings. It’s what they do as part of a ‘rock band’.
I corrected her, describing that my drum-kit ain’t the portable type, and about its being a five-piece kit assembled around the drummer. I went on a step further, wandering into the stretched limits of futility, to describe the amount of left-right brain co-ordination required to bring together all four limbs. The wannabe Avril that she was, she beamed: “Oh, so you play the jazz?!” There she went again, till I told her about jazz being a genre of music, and not the name of a percussion instrument.
Girl-trying-to-move-closer-to-being-Avril: “Oh! What songs do you drum for?! Boyzone?!”
Yeah, right. If there was an Oscar for “the best musical ear”, this would have been reason enough for my contacting them to stop giving the award annually. Such people are beyond awards, believe me. Imagine my drumming to Boyzone’s “Words”! Ain’t it too awesome?! And if this does not suffice, I drum for Altaf Raja too, damn it!

Scenario II:
Second-girl-to-be-communicated-to called me up. She wanted a couple of songs for which she supposedly searched the entire Internet, and even “Google Search” did not return any results (PageRanking presumes common-sense, yes). I had asked her for her search keywords, typed it on to Google, and it’s the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that gave me the required songs!! But the songs were in the Real Media format, and it used to be part of e-mail etiquette, to send an indirect apology, if a song was sent in Real format. I sent her this message:
“Hey. Sent you the song. It’s in Real format. I couldn’t get hold of any other.”
Quarter of a minute past, my mobile buzzed. Her reply read, “I am not particular about the song being real. I could give it a try even it were the duplicate version.”
I wondered about how she, and possibly the Flintstones, survived their era, if at all they did.

Scenario III
My granddad, being an astrologer, believes in selecting auspicious dates for routine tasks like leaving hometown for studies, etc. He had told me that the 19th of June would be a good date for me to leave hometown for the city I would do my MBA in. I messaged the girl in Scenario II, that 19th was the date suggested by granddad. Her reply, quarter of a minute later, read:
“Oh! Did he predict it??”
Yes, he did. Now the astrologer, by definition, is a travel agent plus a magician. An astrologer, who tells you that you will leave home by the 19th, while simultaneously using Godsend-ERP systems to block tickets for you on the same date. IRCTC would have done better then, to recruit astrologers!!

Quick conclusion – (case-study like!)
As Subramonia Sarma sat staring into his laptop, he could not but help noting that the clock on the taskbar read 2am. He had a couple of exams in line, a day later. Will he be able to finish the portions? Will he even collect the course material? The library had only limited copies of course material, and this was an added impediment. On the other hand, would he meet girls to write a “Scenario IV”? If so, when? If not, why? He sighed, before closing his laptop, post publishing his latest blog.

Forwards and (the) future!

2009-11-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

“Here’s wishing you, your family, your neighbour, his family and the stranger across the street a Very Happy and Prosperous Diwali. May this new year bring the best of blessings from the Almighty.” - 195 characters

“Hr’s wshng u, ur fly, ur nghbr, hs fly n d strngr acrs d strt a Vry Hpy n Prsprs Dwli. My dis nw yr brng d bst of blssngs frm d Almghty” - 135 characters

I get the first of the above two messages. Then I get the second, from another source, two minutes later. The first message had 195 characters, whereas the second, devoid of vowels, added up to 135 characters. The analysis follows:

1) The world now survives on gadgets. It’s upto binary 0s and 1s to work through electronic circuits and remind someone about his / her duty to wish his near-and-dear-ones on their birthday or on auspicious occasions.

2) The number of characters was counted for a purpose. Anything above 160 characters becomes a second message, which increases the cost of sending the message. A wholehearted wish ain’t all that wholehearted, on further analysis. The vowels are mercilessly chopped to cut costs. And to then send an encrypted message that would have had John Conway rethink his Game of Life.

3) The ‘stranger across the street’ was not added to make the nonsensical message look more pathetic. It is to state the fact that people don’t bother to edit out irrelevant portions of the message when re-forwarding it. Which is why you get messages with the prefix “to all employees of Bharat Fertilisers”, even if you don’t have the slightest notion of what a plant looks like, or for that matter, how you spell the word LEAF!

4) People may note that even the Almighty wasn’t spared in the encrypted message!

All in all, we have a gadget which sends trimmed messages to a whole bunch of other gadgets, through radiations transmitted from one end and received at the other. And if you blame me of taking the emotions away from such a transaction, I will have to assert that there wasn’t any.

This provides further insights on two types of mobile users, and in fact, two kinds of people at large. The first consists of those who ‘wish to wish’ and bother not about the monetary spend involved. The second consists of those who ‘wish not to wish’, but compulsion and reasons-known-only-to-them force them to forward a digital representation. The latter category deserves a word of thanks, for it is they who stimulate our creative juices. They cause us to think. We put pen to paper, write down their message the encoded way, and call other friends to decrypt it. When someone wishes “your fly” a Happy Diwali, you do need a bit of analysis to set things right. And a word like wshng needs to be stared at for minutes together, pre-Eureka-moment. You could very well have five such friends / relatives texting you daily for a month, and get your IQ boosted to the level of joining the MNSA H-IQ SCTY (sorry, The Mensa High-IQ Society, I mean!).

An SMS may stand for a Short Messaging Service, but people make it so short that a few days hence, the Almighty may end up saying something to the effect of “Lt thr b lght!” And lght thr wl b!!

She...

2009-10-11T04:49:00.000-07:00

It started in 2004, and ended in 2009. In 2004, she sent a message per week. The time horizon reduced as the messages increased in number. Unaware as I was about this, she used to message others too. She then called. The calls were about things unconnected to me or what I did, and I used to hang up within a minute. I did not realize then, that she called others too. But, the calls never meant anything to me, any time.
Then I started getting the calls every day, not to mention the messages that kept coming at regular intervals (at the rate of one in every few hours). Some messages were informative, but the calls were never so. They were boring. I started hanging up within seconds.
I never replied to her messages, unless it was absolutely necessary. I never felt like it. But I used to read them, till late 2008. Post 2008, I started deleting them as and when I saw them. As for the calls, I stopped picking them up. This was when I realized that her being in touch with me bugged me.
There was no further thinking required. I had to stop being in touch. This I did, and did it real quick. All it took was typing in ‘DND’, and sending it to 121...
Such is the sustained trouble that recorded calls from mobile service providers offer us customers! :P

Someone's been drowning...

2009-08-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

“Man hopes for a lot of good, aims at the better, and dreams for the best.
Albeit, what he insists on is space – personal space, free and untrampled upon.”

Has this blogger become serious all of a sudden? Has the ‘humour element’ readers have been talking about, vanished? Is he looking for variety in writing, yearning for higher laurels? Or is he just whiling away time? No, definitely not, are you kidding me, and a partial ‘yes’ would be the answers, respectively. Which proves, at least in part, that the author has not chosen to send humour to the grave.

Now, if the above “couplet of wisdom” still looks frightening, it shalt aptly be modified thus:

“Man hopes for a lot of good, aims at the better, and dreams for the best.
Albeit, what he insists on is space – personal space, free and untrampled upon.
The swine may re-read this, and assimilate the facts (instead of the virus)”

If you talk about copyright issues, the first quote was mine and the second, more so! My cousin brother, elder to me by three long years, still expresses his dissatisfaction at having accepted, without a round of rhetoric renaissance, “fairy tales” with loose plots. There were instances when he wanted the story to go on and on, when his mom uttered the ultimatum that went “...happily ever after”. Thoughts oriented so, he blames the wolf for having spread swine flu, for its having failed to eat up the three little pugs (oops, pigs I mean. Apologies to Vodafone – This is between “You and I”!!!)

He went on to reflect on much more, linking ‘fairy tales’ with Darwin’s theories of evolution, in statements like “Had the witch in the ginger bread house eaten Hansel and Gretel, we would have had lesser kids.” I had to stop him there. That was a word of admiration for someone who is buried neck-deep in SAP, but still has the time to wring Aesop’s neck and scream at him for not getting his work reviewed prior to getting it published!

But my concerns lie elsewhere.

My worry is about the fact that someone would soon disappear. Disappear from sight. He/she would still be alive and audible, nevertheless - which is why I am voicing my concern only on my blog. Else, I would have done a clothed-Archimedes version - the “HELP!!!!!!!!” equivalent of a “EUREKA”.

The character that would soon disappear is the news-reader. I call them the
news-(d)readers, for all they bring in are “facts of dread, from around the world”. The job of an average newsreader has been to rattle off news starting right at the Centre, moving on to the states, followed by the States (repetition intended - note the 'S' in uppercase!), through the rest of the globe to a bit of markets, commodities and business, sports, a weather report that almost always predicts the diametrical opposite of what’s to happen and a final monotonous recap which makes it sound like the newsreaders themselves are sick, tired and in dire need of a better tomorrow! The radio, due to lack of a visual medium, makes it sound even more sinister.

As the concept of news evolved, (degenerated, if you ask me), all TV channels chose to be on their toes. The only way to retain comprehensiveness in news is to remain up-to-date, and keep repeating the headlines once in as-close-to-a-millisecond. Now the only way to do this is to maintain a scroll-bar at the bottom of the screen. Great idea, yes. Next, somebody wanted to display the date and time on the right-hand bottom of the screen. This had to be placed above the scroll-bar, for time and date may not interrupt the flow of news.

Further, no coverage was comprehensive, unless the markets were tracked. That was another row added. Sensationalism added yet another level to this wall, for any bit of news, irrespective of how irritating it turned out to be, had to be flashed as “Flash News”, “Breaking News” or an “exclusive sting operation". And since this ought to be much more visible than the other scroll-bars, an extra row with the title appeared above it, calling for the viewer’s attention.

Then came the task of sharing screen-space with the reporters onsite. But the scrollbars had to stay, and the screen space had to further convey the geographical location of the 'place of concern'. This meant that on top of all space shared, a bit of ‘virtual estate’ had to be set aside for the outline of a map too! The reader was now sidelined to a corner, and occupied the space statistically equivalent to one-eighth of the screen!

Perspectives from a couple of persons were barely enough, and panel discussions were the solution. CEOs from all four metros remotely attended conferences. Now, the channels decided that they would take the reader off screen! Her voice remained.

Alas, readers. The newsreader has been drowning in the very news she has been reading out. Comprehensiveness and timeliness, as virtues, have been laying rows of bricks to cement out the reader. She has been losing out on her space nowadays – shrunk, thrown around the screen like a pinball, taken off the screen, squeezed between numbers, angry ministers, mountains, maps, markets, clouds(!), SWINES, etc, etc. But she manages to peep out, to keep afloat – either through an insert, or merely through her voice. She makes her presence felt, and the news stands conveyed. The article is, then, an appeal to all television channels that broadcast news (and other information that they claim to be news - like the minister's dog that went missing. This was one news item. Then he got it back. This became the sequel).

SAVE THE DROWNING NEWSREADER!

Finally, an own composition...

2009-07-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

Twenty four years was what it took to come up with a track lasting 100 seconds! Several initial attempts found the drain, till this one came through. The details of the recording done are as given below.

Keyboard used: Yamaha - PSR-450e
Method of recording - Line-in
Duration - 96 seconds

Criticisms, specially technical ones, are always welcome.

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What’s (not) in a name!

2009-06-06T06:19:00.000-07:00

I was 6 years old then. The first standard it was, and I was ahead of the class for I knew “counting numbers” till 100, and I could write this essay titled “Myself” almost flawlessly. This is not to claim that my writing skills were as sharp then, as they are at present. For, never have I felt that I have done justice to the English language while penning down my thoughts. Rather, this is to reinforce the fact that I learnt the essay by rote. I could quote the entire essay from memory at any time of the day. My relatives wanted to hear it every time they visited my house, for it was the custom then, to make children perform “academic item numbers”. In return, I would get a lot of praise, whose artificiality I could make out even when I was a performer (of) ‘myself’!!

But, come the exams, most of the class got a 10/10. I got an 8. For the extent of hype society had built on 'marks’ as indicators of academic excellence, and of their role in a person’s “living happily ever after”, I thought my reward for having screwed up this exam would be being thrown back in time and into the Stone Age!

An evaluation done at home, of my first ever written exam, revealed two serious glitches:
1) I had this hobby of getting stuck at the dots. By this, I mean the dots of the letters “i” and “j”. I spent a minute, in decorating every dot, till it either emerged bigger than the letter itself, or the paper underneath gave in, whichever was earlier! For all the big dots made on paper, my answer sheet more resembled a road map of important cities, all denoted by big dots of graphite! On a macro level, all dots together cost me a mark out of 10.
2) I misspelt my name! Now this went against the established paradigm of “being yourself”! I had spelt my name “Subramania Sharma”, but the mark-list showed otherwise. It read “Subramonia Sarma”. I learnt up the latter spelling later, and thought it was the end of all trouble, but how wrong I was!!!

From “counting numbers”, through a “Science group” in the 11th and 12th, a B Tech in Production Engineering and an ongoing MBA in Marketing, a lot of things have changed. A ‘myself’ now would come to pages, and would be more indecisive than deciding one’s favourite colour and best friend!

But, all through, I have had this habit of being a show-stopper. Roll calls go on smoothly until they reach my name. This is when teachers stop, struggle with the phonetics of my name, and try five variants, before I correct them with the not-so-obvious sixth way of pronouncing it. I end up telling them it is pronounced as “Subramania Sharma”, but written Subramonia Sarma, for that’s my grandpa’s name, and the spelling stuck when my parents named me. I was not in a position to complain then, for little will a one-year old foresee the troubles that a name would bring him, years later in life!

Another instance is when my friend asked me my full name. People normally don’t think so much, for they are already loaded with information on how and why there is an “o” in Subramonia, and why the “h”, so much required in the name ‘Sarma’, is not present. Further, there are others who take the spelling for granted and end up calling me Subramonia, where the m-o-n is pronounced as in Pokemon! Further, the first syllable in Sarma gets pronounced as sa- in sarcasm. Back to my friend who badly wanted to know my full name.

I told him that my name has four parts, one of which is my name, the other my dad’s, a third which is the name of my ancestral home and finally, a family title. Our pal, being spontaneity personified, remarked, “Man! Ain’t this good! You mean to say that, in ancient days, all it took to reach the house of a Tam Brahm was to know his full name! You seem to carry the entire address in your name! Try and put in information like your blood group, academics, etc. Your name can then stand for a mini CV!” Very funny, I told him. But yes, he did have a point somewhere. Tangentially, though!

My chemistry teacher had his share of fun with my name. I won a ‘solo instrumental’ contest when I was in my 7th. The certificates were written by one of our Chemistry teachers. A word of praise for the latter. He was one who conducted the entire youth festival single-handedly. Every event finished dot on time, and no prize distribution ceremony had logistical issues. A person with such impeccable record faltered only once. And that was when he wrote my name on the certificate. He ended up inserting the name of a chemical in my name, with the result that it finally read:

Subr’AMMONIUM’ Sarma

Second last, the ‘o’ in Subramonia makes people think I am a Bengali. It takes a while before I tutor them with phonetics, and bring them from Bengal to Kerala!

Last, there were people who gave up altogether. This was when I was attending the GD/PI session for one of the better b-schools in the country. The process was conducted by seniors who were studying in that institute. There was this female who tried a dozen times to get my name right, but failed. She then struck off my name from the list, and wrote “difficult one”. For the rest of the process, that’s how my name was addressed.

(Un)like (what) they say, what’s (not) in a name?!

‘Local’ized pain, ‘local’ized pleasure

2009-05-18T04:28:00.000-07:00

Life is on the rails. A break is when the train stops at a crossing. Observe people rushing into a Mumbai Local train, and one of the following, in isolation or otherwise, is what you may come to think of.

• There is money being distributed for free inside.
• It’s heaven in there, with plush furniture, a couple of air-conditioners whizzing away to freezing point, and rail-hostesses to attend to you.
• A million angels (good-looking ones, of course) are at wait.

Go in, and you realise that ‘rushing in’ was not worth the effort.
• There ain’t any money (and this ain’t due to recession, mind you).
• It’s far from heaven inside. A concept called the rail hostess was never born. The furniture is limited to basic, bare, back-breaking woodwork.
• Did someone say angels?!

While you are busy pondering over why this city (or the train) is the way it is, a fist punched into your groin brings you back to reality. The moral: Guard thy essentials, before thou shalt guard others’.

As time progresses, the sound of the rails grows on you. You shed the act of philantropy for a reason called ‘reaching office on time’, and you learn to casually and (apparently unknowingly) bash up a couple of ruffians for the most coveted place on the train, the footboard. This is when you learn to go beyond the journey. My classmates may pause, read the last sentence, and realise as to why I have underlined a part of it. In case you haven’t been able to place it, just continue to think beyond.

That’s how we have been taught to solve a problem. Think beyond it. Bypass it. (I would have called it ignorance!) Others may forgive the temporary derailment.
Three weeks into daily to and fro journey in this ‘wonder machine’, this traveller has gathered enough anecdotes to narrate. What follows is humour that was once pain. Humour that was observed amidst the blows dealt, punches received, and tramples borne under clenched teeth.

1) There was this kid with a suitcase, and there was his dad with a bigger suitcase. The train halted at Dadar. For non-Mumbaiites, Dadar is one station that is crowded when normal and best-not-described otherwise. As soon as the train halted, ‘the dad’ gets out, leaving the kid to himself. The fact to be noted here is that busy Mumbai even causes ‘the dad’ to forget his kid, momentarily, though. Shouts of ‘papa’ then reminded him that he had a son. Try as he might, he could not even see his son amidst the crowd and din, forget going in and pulling him out. Now, passengers travelling by the Mumbai local trains have this one appreciable quality. Innovation - on the feet, on the go, and the willingness to help one another. Other states in the country ought to learn from them. The kid’s bag was lifted (above all passengers’ heads) and changed hands till it reached the dad. Next, the kid was lifted in the same manner. He was passed on till he emerged from the top, while the dad was busy looking through the door! I got reminded of those thrash metal concerts where the vocalist hurled himself on to the crowd, and was passed around like a plaything before the exhausted audience decided to put the thing back on stage!

2) I alighted at Kurla, waiting to board another train to either Wadala or Dadar. After a long wait (an unusual one), the train arrived. Crowded beyond imagination, yes, but there was this relatively empty coach. Proud of my observation skills, I rushed in, when somebody tugged hard at my collar. As was routine in Mumbai, I landed a folded elbow on his tummy. This time, though, the consequence was a bit different. The guy wouldn’t let go of my collar! He then dragged me out. I missed the train, and was about to land another elbow, when I understood he was a railway inspector. I produced my tickets even before he asked for them. He never bothered to even bat an eyelid, let alone check my tickets. Instead, he asked me to show the ‘evidence of injury’. The coach was for the handicapped! My observation skills need a slight tweak, but then I have another year of MBA to go, to bridge the deficit.

I then convinced the inspector that it was purely by accident that I got into he-knew-where, and that I was bad at acting hurt or injured. I then told him about my doing an MBA, and of how I could not even imagine faking a handicap/injury. He then let go of my collar for no fee at all, only because I was doing an MBA. The degree finally got its due, though from a railway inspector.

3) This one is different. More than an anecdote, this is praise. Unlimited praise for a city that lives life on the rails. And quite literally too. People postpone their morning prayers to when they travel by train. The snooze that people lose when waking early in the morning gets compensated for during the journey. Stocks get evaluated. Bhajans are sung. A group of officers find the time apt to take a dig at its boss’ ancestors. Some just stand and stare. Others are on the lookout to offer help. The ‘entertainment gang’ plays a round of cards amidst the entire din. Lovers stare into each others’ eyes. Silent either to not add to the noise, or to reserve the talk and quarrel to post-wedding (if at all they decide to ‘convert the call’).

As for me, I realise:
a. I am done with my morning prayers, but my snooze has been pending for over a week.
b. As an intern, I could possibly afford to not bad-mouth my superiors.
c. The stocks were never mine.
d. There is no one to offer help to.
e. The last time I played cards was when they released a pack of 100 on wrestlers of the WWF!
f. I am single, single yet. There aren’t eyes to stare into. No girl, to speak or not to speak. And I apologise for borrowing from the ‘Bard Dude’ (that’s how he would be known, were he graduating from one of South Mumbai’s colleges).

4) The multitasking I referred to above, though appealing in principle, did turn out to be annoying during execution. I tried reading a copy of the Business Standard, while listening to Metallica. And, I had this chunk of luggage called a Dell Laptop. Portability apart, this is one irritating piece of baggage that can turn your already constrained train journey into a perpetual tug-o-war. Once it so happened that I entered the train, but my laptop didn’t. I had no option but to drag the entire system in, i.e. the bag with the laptop and two people (somehow) glued to either side of it. They took a dig at my ancestors, but that’s something I was prepared for as a trainee interning in sales!

Detour done, it’s back to the newspaper and the MP3 player. Reading a newspaper in a second class coach is a physical impossibility. Laptop on one hand and newspaper on the other made me look like Michael Jackson when he did one of his head-torso-and-rest-of-the-body-along-three-different-dimensions steps!

Meanwhile, Metallica seemed to have understood the state of affairs of my journey. The playlist had so perfect a correlation with what was happening...
1) Just as I got into the train, my MP3 Player said ENTER SANDMAN.
2) When a couple of people pushed me to a side, the song was SAD BUT TRUE.
3) Five minutes later, when I got a seat, my player told me, “NOTHING ELSE MATTERS”.

Too many anecdotes spoil the blog, and hence I believe a sequel could narrate the rest.

26/11: Beyond the statistics...

2008-11-30T01:46:00.000-08:00

My mind is now nothing but a quagmire of emotions. Revenge tempered with a feeling of mercy, anger allayed by peace, sadness battling with a worn-out happiness that it is all over, growing insecurity versus a heave of relief for the moment named ‘now’. Contradictions galore. But, for the first time, an edition of the ‘Times of India’ set me thinking. For once, publicity seems not the choice of the paper, and the opinions and the comments within its folds have content, to the extent of spurring off a few thoughts within me, that I think deserve an echoing. This article is a spontaneous elaboration and hence a representation of the feeling of many an Indian. Hence, it is only proper that editing need not hinder the flow of thoughts.

This is for those politicians who tried to gain leverage by flaunting the regional flavour, till-date. It required people from the whole of INDIA, read INDIA (that’s our country’s name, just in case you forgot it while hyperventilating over issues of regionalism), to control the situation. The NSG commandos who rushed in were natives of states as distant and geographically spread out as Haryana, Bihar and Kerala. Now, these people might have been dumb enough to think beyond the states. They could have simply resisted, saying, “But we do not have permission from the local leader there, to set foot on Mumbai soil.” They didn’t. That could be because they have this virtue called patriotism (what does that mean to you, anyway?!) burning within them, full-throttle. I am not quoting your name here, sir (I am sceptical as to whether you deserve that title), but petty politicians like you will live counting votes, and die counting votes. It’s a waste of a life if you can’t feel for your country. It’s mere existence. Routine pumping of blood within your heart, coupled with synchronized functioning of all biological systems. You may have your men, money and muscle power. It takes only a bullet to murder, we know, but it takes a lot to think before pulling the trigger. Peace and a longing for it. There is nothing more shameful than having to eat one’s own words in front of a nation. My heart goes out to the gullible millions who will still pay heed to your parochial advice.

Arm the police personnel with better equipments. C K Prahalad’s “Bottom of the Pyramid” theory is not only for the FMCG sector and related industries. It is for everyone, to take a cue from. Ignore the basics at your own peril. Continue buying Sukhois, and do push to purchase even better fighter aircrafts. Purchase an aircraft-carrier more, yes, but please do spare a thought for the “bottom of the pyramid” officials. Arm them better. The days of the pistol are long gone...

This is for the people. Please stop blaming the police personnel, and the commandos. I overheard a group of friends cynically ridiculing the police personnel and the commandos shown on TV. Comments varied from their physical stature to their not taking guard right after getting out of the van. Please remember that they have had their share of training and previous experience, however small. They know better than you and I do. Give specialists the respect they deserve. It is not as part of leisure that they come armed with minimal equipment, barge into a warzone, and risk their lives to save ours. It’s all so plain and obvious when you sit in the cosy cocoons of comfort at home, and criticize people literally working their heads off at Ground Zero. Dare to at least imagine being one of them.

Coastguards... The country needs to work on that, for it now seems the easiest way anyone can intrude into the country.

Please stop praising the “resilience” and the people’s ability to “get back to business”. THIS IS NOT OUT OF ONE’S VOLITION, BUT RATHER OUT OF COMPULSION. COMPULSION TO EARN, SUSTAIN AND SURVIVE. The Mumbai floods did see people exhibiting resilience, but continuing to work amidst blasts and attacks is a necessity. It’s HELPLESSNESS. It’s LACK OF AN ALTERNATIVE.

To conclude, I salute the Personnel who have laid down Their lives for the country, fighting, killing and capturing terrorists. The united resolve to fight terror, if any, can manifest only through brave Officers like You, Sirs.

“Thanks a million, our lives are in your hands” is all we can say to the thousands of personnel involved in restoring peace in the city. We residents are but people of words. We are incapable of anything more than standing by you, Sirs.

The Tricolour will continue to fly high.

Unconquered dreams (the true and peaceful ones) shall reach their desired end.

The Taj will be rebuilt...

JAI HIND

IT, ITES and the Iron Man

2008-11-14T02:35:00.000-08:00

The "Iron Man" refers not to the relatively new Hollywood movie, or to Sardar Vallabhai Patel, or to Ozzy Osbourne's song. Rather, it speaks about 'The Man with the Iron'. The 'Iron' being the heavy cast-iron box of yesteryears with burning coal in it, used to press clothes, and the 'Iron Man' being its operator without whom life would never have been the same in residential colonies, for he is the first facilitator of every official meeting.

Come to think of it. If our shirt stays wrinkled, where then arises the question of going to work?!

Normally, society today doesn't pause to think of such people, for time doesn't allow it to, and if it does, thought doesn't allow it to. If both do, most of society consciously ignores such people, for interacting with them affects and reduces this quality called 'Social Status'.

To illustrate this further, let's sample a bit of a conversation I happened to hear. Let's name the customer a Socially Over-conscious Person (SOP), and the Iron Man as IM.

SOP: Marches towards IM, a dozen (markedly expensive) clothes in hand, and yells a standing instruction:
"I WANT THIS DONE WITHIN TWO HOURS. DON'T BE LATE, AND DON'T YOU LEAVE THIS PLACE EVEN FOR A MINUTE. THERE MAY BE MORE CLOTHES COMING! AND YOU GET PAID ONLY IF YOU DO YOUR JOB RIGHT, UNDERSTAND?!"
Description: The above words were purposely typed in block letters, for that's how offensive SOP sounded. Instructions in every sentence flavoured with impoliteness, restricting IM's right to move around, imposing conditions on paying him for his work, and always slamming an IMPOSSIBLE deadline. To top it all, inherent dissatisfaction with the quality of work he did.

IM: "Sir, it is Sunday today, and I already have many clothes marked URGENT. It may take three hours, sir."

SOP: "WHAT?! THREE HOURS, FOR PRESSING TWELVE CLOTHES?! YOU KNOW THE GUY AT THE NEXT STREET?! HE DOES IT IN ONE HOUR FLAT, AND AT A RUPEE LESS. I WILL GIVE IT TO HIM."
A rude stamp of the foot, and a ruder last-glance at IM, which meant to say, "A person so low in the society speaking to me like that, and I am supposed to tolerate it!! I will show him who I am."

SOP was a Project Manager in the IT sector. The purpose of explicitly quoting the designation and the sector is not to belittle either. It's for a purpose which will gain clarity as the story progresses.

I was a silent witness to the above incident, for I was at the nearby tea-shack. I went home and the same evening, my roommate and I marched to IM's shop with our clothes. We told him we would collect one pair that night (while returning from dinner), and the rest later. We had dinner, and realising that we did not have drinking water in store, bought a couple of Bisleri bottles. We were soon back at IM's shop, where we were told to wait, for he was not yet done. My friend went back to our house, and I took a seat on one of those cement sacks filled with rags, placed by the side of the shop.

The first pair of formal pants had a glossy surface, was manufactured by one of the leading brands in the country and WAS expensive, MRP-wise. I had purchased it at a 50% discount, though, for it was bought during stock-taking season, and moreover, I was to attend a string of Group Discussions and Interviews, to secure admission for an MBA.

IM spoke to me in a gruff voice, and looked at me with scorn written all over his face. I was quite conscious of this, but decided that mum's the word, till he spoke. He did, though, and flung more of scorn at me. The entire conversation has been written in English, for universality's sake.

IM: "Expensive pair of trousers, aint it?"
Me: "Not really, I bought it at half the price, from a discount sale. I wouldn't have dreamt of buying it at MRP."
IM: "And what's that in your hand? You people drink only bottled water? Won't you people use tap water that the municipality provides?"
Me: "We usually buy 20 litre water bottles from the nearby Kirana (Hindi for a departmental store). The Kirana was closed today, and our work schedule does not allow us to boil tap water and wait for it to cool, hence the mineral water!"
IM: "Aha!! So you work in software too, don't you?"

I now understood him. Anyone who wore seemingly expensive trousers and drank mineral water was an SOP, for IM! I had to clear this misconception, and though I didn't usually pick up arguments with people, I was adamant on debating out this one.

I continued the conversation. I said, "I saw what happened today morning. But not everyone who drinks mineral water ought to behave like an SOP. Moreover, drinking from a Bisleri bottle once never means that our motor pumps mineral water to the overhead tank!"

"I know and understand that there exist people within this very colony, who feel that earning money is the be all and end all of life. For them, you may connect glossy pants and mineral water to sheer arrogance, and ignorance of everything simple and cheap. By including us in the same category, you are only inviting more of the customer's wrath. This neighbourhood has around fifty people of our age group, and if your aim is to test the level of arrogance of every software employee, I am afraid you are digging your own grave. All I can assure you is that not EVERYONE is as angry and arrogant as that lone customer you met this morning."

Our pal realised his mistake, but the crux of the matter lies elsewhere. "Spending power" is a boon that the IT & ITES sector has bestowed on this age group of people. Fat paychecks unheard of in the past suddenly became a reality, for a generation that had barely completed its graduation. This sudden spurt of income caused a macroeconomic upward shift of purchasing power that enabled people to indulge more in luxuries. On the flip side, it ushered in arrogance. The I-have-money-means-I-am-lord-of-the-world attitude. The Associate Software Engineer quarrels with the Team Lead, because of his arrogance. His thought reads, "I graduated from this reputed institute, and this company has recruited me for what I am. With so high an IQ, I can't possibly let someone boss over me, even if he is the Team Lead." The latter being as arrogant, if not more, thinks, "Yesterday's kid, now a toddler, with all of half-an-year of work experience, dares to point a finger at me!" This arrogance reaches permanence, and is exhibited as and when the opportunity arises, or the need to create one does. The waiter at the hotel, the IM, the watchman at the office gate, etc. are but victims of such behaviour.

The consequence is this: the common man scoffs at any person who is dressed in glossy pants, and/or carries bottled water with him. The common man has started ignoring and/or hating the IT employee. When I talk to auto drivers, they look surprised that someone working in the IT sector actually talked to them! We people in the IT sector are now looked down upon as people who "know the price of everything and the value of nothing", to borrow Oscar Wilde's quote, though he used it in a slightly different context.

Someone recently expanded IT-ITES as:
Inconsiderate Techies - Immensely Talented at Exhibiting Surliness!!

Yesteryears' Sunday, truly a DD day...

2008-10-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

The television has dieted a lot over the years, and become a lot slimmer. Anorexic, rather. Subjected to a zero-fat diet, it looks frighteningly slimmer than the Bollywood heroine who dieted so much that even her dietician lost weight! A TV does not require space now, in that it has almost lost its third dimension.
Now that the context is set, this article is a tribute to yesterday's obese television, the one idiot box which could keep us greater idiots within its grip.

Reminescences from childhood, both remembered and reminded (and constant orders from other bloggers, that I continue blogging - thanks due to the person/s who compelled me to continue writing), forced me to write this article.

The television was most exploited on a Sunday, for there was "Dada ka, Dadi ka, Papa ka, Mummy ka favourites, aur Duck Tales mera!!!!" For those who recollected the Ajanta Toothbrush ad, commendable, read on. Others, please realize that the above line was adapted from the toothbrush's ad, and read on, too!

My Sunday used to start at 7:00 am, with toothbrush-in-mouth, and Rangoli-on-Doordarshan. Sunday was the one day mom could afford to wage a war with cobwebs at home. And, since this was a repetitive chore, she preferred to do it with Rangoli in the background. I would manage to seat myself among the remains, amidst the spiders' dwellings being demolished like buildings were in Delhi. Almost always, mom had a double chore of cleaning our house first, and then cleaning me of all the debris that I so laboriously gathered upon myself. A wash, a rinse and a couple of spins later, I used to emerge clean, all prepared for the two most awaited (and the only) cartoons on DD, Duck Tales and Tale Spin.

DETOUR: Readers, I put the next few sentences in Uppercase, for I want to emphasize the 'peace and quiet' of yesteryears. Jargon added, it is just a glimpse of the extent of the then trivial tranquility we have managed to sacrifice, for as bugging a concept as infra-red radiations carrying packets of 'voice and data' through the air, under the ground, and beyond the skies!!! Rewind, readers![<<]

1) NO 'TV REMOTE' FOR SOMEONE TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL.
2) NO OTHER CHANNELS TO CHANGE OVER TO.
3) NO LANDLINE FOR SOMEONE TO INTERRUPT THE VIEWING.
4) NO MOBILE PHONES! (THIS IS A BLESSING THAT WE HAVE LOST. THE 'SMS' IS ONE CONCEPT THAT IS FAR MORE LETHAL THAN IT LOOKS, AND MAY BE AVOIDED. YEAH, I AM SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE. SILENCE! NO MORE QUESTIONS, PLEASE! ;) )
5) A STREET SILENT ALL DAY, MORE SILENT ON A SUNDAY.
6) CLOUDY WEATHER, CHANCES OF A RAIN.
7) HOT CHAPATHIS IN THE MAKING, IN THE KITCHEN (Sunday was the 'chapathi day' at home.)
8) LOVELY BHAJI TO ACCOMPANY IT. MY UNCLE DIDN'T LIKE POTATOES, I DID, AND OTHERS PREFERRED TOMATO CURRY. THE WOMEN IN THE HOUSE ACTUALLY MADE THREE BHAJIS FOR ALL OF SIX PEOPLE, ACCORDING TO THEIR PREFERENCES! HATS OFF TO MOM AND GRANNY!
9) AN UNINTERRUPTED SUPPLY OF TEA AND SNACKS THROUGH THE DAY!!
10) COUSINS, WHO STAYED AT HOME FOR UPTO AN ENTIRE MONTH, DURING VACATIONS.

I dream to go back into such an era, where getting bugged took a backseat, and you needed to be one of those niche people to get irritated, by purchasing appropriate equipment like the telephone.

Flying back to Duck Tales, it was the one cartoon I longed to be a part of. I even wondered whether my one forceful entry into the picture tube would enable me become part of all the action!

9:00 am was Nirja Guleri ki peshkash - CHANDRAKANTHA. Believe me, I used to like Kroor Singh for his leadership qualities. OOPS!!! Did I say LEADERSHIP?! Little knowledge: part of an MBA course. Forgive me, dudes and dudettes (if any)!

Come 10:00 am, and I was shooed away with a menacing stick, the one tool which could enable me run to the North Pole, fast enough to actually beat Amundsen's flight!

12:00pm, and out came little Sarma from his study room, frustrated at the number of apples they had printed in his Maths book to depict the number 27!!

Meanwhile, the older generation sat glued, for their share of the News, and News was what DD gave, without worrying about whether an actress managed to chargesheet her ex-boyfriend for having... oh, leave it!

And if ever there was a sense of national integration, it was when DD showed regional films on Sunday afternoons, with subtitles, which enabled people to comprehend the essence of the film, irrespective of the region they hailed from. For a bit of trivia, they followed the alphabetical order in telecasting regional films. The order ran from Assamese to Tamil.

This was followed by a delink to the regional DD channels, to give regional programs their due.

An hour of news, in both Hindi and English, followed.

As a member of the Orkut DD Community pointed out, the 'good night' uttered at the end of the English News actually meant the end of the day for us kids (barring a Sunday, for there was Surabhi)! We were instructed to sleep, or dumped into bed if need be, but 10:00pm was the limit.

9:30pm: The one-of-its-kind travel program called Surabhi - the name says it all.

As I zip forward to the moment called NOW, it's already 10:30pm, but feels like evening, with a couple of glasses of tea in waiting, and sleep far from sight. This is a quote I have oft quoted, to many a person, in speech and in writing. BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT. DD had time-slices for every "kind" of program telecast and so, had its brevity intact. The brevity is no more now, for we have an excess of every "kind" of program, manifesting itself as a "television channel". Barring a few quality programmes spaced far apart and strewn among various channels, we have but junk to fill the space.

The fragmented remains of DD's marvels can be found in YouTube. The small screen just turned smaller...

Creativity choke!

2008-03-02T06:12:00.000-08:00

First-hand advice to bloggers who plan to write long stories, especially ones which are wound around themselves, and portray their emerging victorious at the end of a struggle-so-straining! Please don't embark on such a mission on your primary blog. You may as well create a second account and continue writing it at your own pace.
Else, creativity chokes you. A brilliant idea flashes only to die out in the next second, for your conscience does not allow you to stop your novel mid-way. After all, who would want self-praise to abruptly terminate?!

Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard are sweeter. - John Keats.
Heard blogs are sweet. Those unheard are the sweetest. - Me!

Having said that, I am done with my mission of meandering around managing meetings, money, music and musicians. That attempt stalled my blogging, for an year and a half. Somehow, the shame of leaving a story incomplete for a couple of years made me publish the last two acts. What I lost in the process was a truckload of creative ideas. So, no more new novels in this blog. Short and sweet posts shall reign.
Playing music for the audience and penning words for the reader alone is a crime, and goes against the very purpose of art and its glory. I am borrowing this story from my dad, to illustrate how a sincere artist thinks and feels.
Ammannur Madhava Chakyar, an expert in Kootiyaattam and Chaakyaar koothu (both traditional art-forms of Kerala, earlier performed in temple precincts), used to render the Chaakyaar Koothu at the temple. Some days attracted a large audience, for he was a thorough master at what he did. There was a rare occasion when no one was present to lend an ear. The Melshanthi(the prime person who performs all Pooja at a temple) had retired for a bath, too. The sincere artist that Ammannur was, he continued his recital in its most elaborate and sublime form, only to attract the Melshanti's attention when he returned. The latter advised him to cut his recital short, for there was not an ear that paid attention. Ammannur's reply was quick and pointed:
"This divine lamp lit in front of me is both audience and inspiration. Art is divine, and transcends the earthly listener's presence, or absence."
Likewise, this blog of mine has been targeted at a blind audience to-date. What keeps it going is a pure passion for writing, independent of the presence (or absence) of a reader. I wish to extend my special thanks to Rohon Kuddus, my batchmate at NITC, for having taken time to read my blogs and for having considered to publish it in his webmag(www.sristi.co.in).
Though I have not been able to gain access to the URL from this cafe, I promise to contribute to the webmag in every possible manner, for art is divine.

Act VII: The end...

2008-01-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

Thus ended a musical journey. A journey of trouble. Trouble everywhere, every minute, for twenty long hours! Crimson Chords packed up, with Bearded Schumi back at the wheels to take us back to Cct. The band was tired; the cash meant nothing to us, for it was after fights of sorts that we got it.
An “n-star hotel”; a term of luxury it normally is. Greater the value of "n", greater the luxury. Or so goes the normal perception. Inside, though, it’s empty. Get ready for a bout of special treatment, if you visit an n-star as a performing band. The following, in part or in whole, is what you will face:
1) Cash flows, but never reaches you.
2) Quality suffers, and no effort from your part to better it is welcome.
3) Event managers rob. Some rob even more.
4) Hotel managers criticize. But, they never know you. They never called you to perform. The Event Manager is the bridge, and a loose one at that.
5) As for idlis, they are but left-overs!

Act VI: Music, musicians and money

2008-01-17T23:27:00.000-08:00

It’s more than a couple of years since we played at Kkm, and it’s really bad on my part to keep this story going unfinished for beyond two years. This drama, for the information of its readers (if any!), is declared completed as on 19th January, 2008.
We arranged for an urgent meeting with the katcheri group, wherein we were instructed to support the flow of the song, rather than try our own adventure. They roped in our drummer (that’s me!) and our keyboardist (let’s call him TJ). We set our instruments on the stage.
The stage was made of planks, and was set above a lake. It shook all the while, and the last thing I wanted was to drown while drumming! The sound was as bad as it could get. This was when I concluded: money is what makes an n-star worth its “n”! Money flowed all around us, be it beneath the plank, or above it. Quality never did. They never allowed it to flow, but rather kicked it out through the back-door.
Crimson Chords finally began its performance, forgetting all bygones, putting up with all torture they were subjected to. We began with a couple of western songs as the katcheri group wasn’t ready by then, and time wasn’t to be wasted. Crimson chords did err, in that it chose the wrong genre of songs to be played. But, no one ever told us. The only sensible guy was the hotel manager who came running to us, and reminded us that our songs were a tad too heavy to welcome a new-year. We agreed, but this was like telling a person halfway through his journey that he had boarded the wrong ship. What would he do with water all around?! We agreed to play the ‘lighter’ songs and then wind it up. By then, the manager had over-ridden the play list we had so skillfully re-scheduled. He wanted a dance program in between. Dance with acrobatics, which meant a great danger to our instruments. We pushed the instruments on to one side of the plank. The people in charge of sounds removed all the microphones we had so laboriously placed. Now, that called for a re-sound-check! I was getting tired of this and for a moment, I even hated performing.
When you undertake a task, your mind always tells you where it’s heading to. My mind always warned me of something fishy, though I tried to push it off as part of empty fear. Every fear of mine materialized. We played with the katcheri group, and that went on well. We gave room for a couple of other performances, and then played again. The audience was worth a mention, though. Never an applause, never a reaction. They just stared at us, as if in a trance. It was a pathetic crowd we were playing to. There weren’t many Indians in there, and the very few that were there had come for non-musical trivialities.
We covered three-fourths of our play list, before it began drizzling, and we made up our minds to call it quits. So disorganized the entire event was, that I longed to get back to Cct, without having any more devils crossing our path. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any dearth of devils, as everyone we came across was one. The instruments took shelter. Soon, it was 12, and Kkm welcomed 2006 with an assortment of fire-crackers costing beyond a lakh. We gazed at the spectacle and wished everyone including EM, a very happy new year.
Superstition so says, that what you do at the dawn of a new year will be what you would be hooked up on, for most of that year. To make it crisp, let us say that I spent all of 2006 arguing!! The “first hour-new year theory”!
The simmering fear I always had surfaced. I could see it coming, and it came at the very nasty moment it had to. On a very nasty topic called money. Oh! The country does but little justice to the poor Mahatma’s face printed on our currency! He is placed as a still, silent, sorrowful witness to the umpteen scams and scandals that happen in his name. Crimson Chords was not spared too, to say the least.
EM, inebriated to celebrate, came across to settle our cash. Clauses were changed, words were swallowed, and our WAGE read “Rs. 8000 including transport” instead of “Rs. 8000 plus transport”! The seemingly innocent replacement of a word meant a difference of Rs. 6000, to a group of poor church-mice like us! EM refused to budge, alcohol reinforcing his obstinacy, and kleptomania cementing it. The crackers in the background symbolically seemed to fizzle out. So did the spirit of the New Year. The time was 00:05, and Crimson Chords was all thumbs down.
The whole team was about to accept the muffled alcoholic verdict given by EM. I almost did the same, before I saw light at the end of the tunnel. The light of truth. Crimson Chords had committed the initial blunder of performing at such a low rate. But the option was a “take it or leave it” one. We thought that Rs. 8000 is better than no bread at all. The time was right to intrude, flare up, and do anything just and true, to get the money we deserved. Gathering all my courage, and borrowing more of it (I am not used to getting angry, and I had to ACT as if I was flaring up!!), I marched up to EM.
People reading the next couple of sentences would do well to accuse me of plagiarism! This wasn’t inspired, but blindly lifted from any regional action-film made to-date, to save the situation, to get the precious cash we deserved! “You have seen just one face of ours, the happy and smiling one, the one without any vengeance and vice towards anyone. The other, the more dangerous one, is one you wouldn’t want to see, for you would never tolerate it. It would do you better to give us the cash we deserve. Not a penny less, not a penny more. Learn to be true to your words. Else, it is the rage of a band of fifteen that you will face.”
I then turned back, only to hide my laughter! That should work, I thought, and it did. EM stood still for a minute, talked to his companion, shook his head again, muttered philosophy of sorts but this time, he paid up. “Rs. 8000 plus transport” is what we got, finally. Truth was, after all, with us.

Act V: All's well that begins... well??

2006-08-06T22:05:00.000-07:00

Google is known for its "define:" keyword, whereby a user can get the definition of oft-used and relevant terms. It didn't turn out so lucky for me, for this is what I got on querying a definition for "event management": services that provide basic capabilities for the management of events, including asynchronous events, event "fan-in", "fan-out" and reliable event delivery! I've given up, for this narration can then be about what event management shouldn't be...

Let's name this guy EM. Now repeat it aloud, after me: EM for... Event Mis-Manager! That's better! He presented himself at 2pm, when we were at our wit's end, feeling and looking like fish taken out of water, and put on a footpath in hot Chennai!! We gave him a piece of our mind as soon as we shook hands with him.

Mankind has committed many a folly, all through what he's been calling technical advancement, a fatal mistake being the coinage of the word "sorry". This mean, unfeeling word is solution to all blunders done and all crimes committed. It's the easiest way to wash off one's sins, though it doesn't put the victim in any better a situation. By habit, he spat out the word: "sorry"...

EM never had the aggression that an event manager usually has, neither did he show any professionalism. That's when I realised it's more a game of money and contacts, than involvement in work or skill in execution. He made a mess of the schedule, told us to alter our playlist, was confused about which event to begin with, where our event should be placed, unable to answer half our doubts, and kept changing the topic when we asked about our wages (The usage is quite intentional, as that's the way everyone looked at it! Wages for the Gaanamela Troupe!). Descriptions help little in portraying the attitude of such a person, and all that needs be said about EM is he wasn't worth his salt.

The sylvan surroundings of Kkm were real good, and the hotel was very well maintained. A walk to the farther side of the hotel led us to a splendid view of the backwaters. The place is surely worth a stay, but it's quite another tale to be here as performers. You are grilled, ill-treated and trampled upon. It's insult upon injury, when you are expected to rise up, like the WWE superstars do on TV, and perform!

KK and I tailed EM like dogs, and we did much more than just performing a few English numbers on stage. We put on the coat of acting Event Managers. The programme for the day included a katcheri by a Carnatic troupe. The schedule placed Heavy Metal before Himagiri Thanaye! I was dumb-struck! We snatched the paper from the compere, and altered the schedule to make it look good. Chrimson chords was to blast out, playing heavy metal songs for two hours, but the schedule gave us half-an-hour! The next thing that struck me was:
Our new wage = (Our old wage / 4)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's a simple argument that would come up at the end! You played less, so you deserve less!

We got our performance duration extended. EM never reacted, and he nodded to whatever we said, concluding every recovery operation of ours with a monotonous, annoying philosophical dialogue. East met West when the carnatic troupe wanted to play fusion, and approached us to do an impromptu on stage! I shivered at the very thought! Details follow in the next Act, the penultimate one...

Act IV: Bearded Schumi and the outcastes' refuge!

2006-08-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not starting with a reminder note this time, for it's obvious that an Act IV will be preceded by three other Acts!

PR's Pearl had to be side-lined. The college drum-kit took its place instead! That brought back the smile on my face, for the most crucial factor worrying a drummer should be the tone of his kit! A Swaraj Mazda took us to Kkm, a bearded man at the wheels. Quite a character he was. Just the kind of person you would associate the careful-with-this-guy tag. The introvert that he was, one never knew if he responded to your query, be it a request to turn the music player on, or an offer to share our snacks. A cold stare was all we got as reply!
The music system on-board sounded more like a buzzing bee! Another new proverb for music lovers: All treble and no bass makes any listener turn violent!!! Smoke On the Water droned(!) through the speakers, and it sounded like Ian Gillan was singing, holding his nose closed tight!
And then, our chauffeur brought the vehicle to a grinding halt. Key words would suffice to describe what went on:
1) A call on his... mobile?!!! A cell-phone, by definition, is an organ external to the human body, but one that is essential for the survival of the human species. Or atleast, that's the level of prominence people have bestowed upon the gadget!!
2) A Lajjaavathiye ring-tone: For clarity's sake, that's a song(?) which hurled South India off its feet. A mega-hit to the extent of cars hooting this tune while going in reverse!
3) The driver acted like he was Bill Gates, but for a second, though! He received the call, blurted out his name, and when he heard the word "Muscat", he said: "Muscat?! No, this is Cct! Wrong number!!" Situational comedy it was, and we laughed our heart out! Muscat!!

At 4 am in the morning, bearded Schumi was busy enquiring the route to Kkm. An hour later, we reached our hotel, at Kkm, where Schumi found solace on the nearest bench. He resembled the protagonist in any Adoor Gopalakrishnan film, face pointed upwards, eyes fixed at infinity, reaching eternal bliss at having discovered the route to Kkm!
We weren't assigned rooms! We were stranded at the reception, and there we waited, from 5 am to 10 am!!! No one attended to us, save the receptionist, trying in vain to use the word "sorry" and calm us down! The apology was more a result of training, than one of sympathy, blunt in delivery and blank in attitude!
The hotel manager denied having known us! We were referred to as the "gaanamela" people! That was annoying! It was akin to racial discrimination against coloured people. Late at the breakfast table, we were told: "The food's over. But we have idlis left-over! Care to have some?!" My heart was in my mouth. Hailing from one of the best technical institutes in the country, we were being served food claimed to be "left-over"... OUR food was always different from THEIRS. THEY, the residents of the hotel, had a buffet, where they could choose from an ocean of items! We had our food arranged with the staff!

I always find it easier to mingle with a crowd of ordinary people, and in fact, prefer to eat with them, but the wording and manner of the invitation doth tell a lot on how keen the host is, to play host. The invitation for lunch looked like they were rendering social service to us refugees! The whole band decided to boycott the lunch. We ate at a hotel nearby. My bill alone, was pegged at Rs.100, but I felt great paying from my pocket. It helped in shedding the refugee cloak!!

More of refugee treatment was in store, when instead of a room, we were given a house-boat! That was magnanimity on part of the manager, and negligience on the event (mis)manager's side. (We had never heard of the latter!) We freshened up, ready for the day's show. Just after lunch, we met the mystery-man, the event (mis)manager...

Act III... Pearl from PR!

2006-03-03T10:26:00.001-08:00

To the reader: This post is the third in a series of narratives. Hence, it's binding on the reader to read the previous two posts (I mean, Acts!)... Sorry if I sound too text-bookish!!

Act III:

All Pearl drum-kits that glitter won't give out a good tone... For people not having much of a knowledge about drum-kits, Pearl is the leader in drum-kits and percussion accessories the world over. But, what about a Pearl drum-kit that has stood the test of time for 16 years? KK and I went to a drummer named PR, who rents out glittering Pearl drum-kits @ Rs.500 per day. A detour of considerable distance from the main road took us through three sides of a pond, a couple of hay-stacks, cow-sheds, a line of huts and last, PR's house. The colony was so silent that one could indulge in drumming or counterfeit note-printing without a soul knowing it! It resembled a villain's residence as portayed in many a Malayalam film! PR praised his kit sky-high. We believed him, and I had already started dreaming about the tone that would emanate from the drum-kit. Pearl, the two of us, the driver and the jeep made it back to college!
The other band members wanted me to practise on the rented drums. I set up the kit and started playing, only to see the three others in the music room place their hands on the appropriate sense organs to convey: "See no Pearl; hear no Pearl; speak no Pearl"! The bass drum looked like it was just out of a mob-fight, torn and bruised. It sounded eerie when played, and therefore, it was pointless to speak anything more about it! Being amateurs ourselves, we didn't quite have a sound knowledge about what tone a kit should have, though. Nevertheless, none of us liked the sound it gave. We reverted to the college drum-kit, which then sounded divine with a pleasing thud filling the whole room! CRIMSON CHORDS was beyond angry, and soon, expletives echoed from all corners!

Soon it was night-time, time to leave. CRIMSON CHORDS packed its bags, ready to perform for its first show outside college. A Swaraj-Mazda was arranged, and twelve of us (ten members and a drum-kit!) headed towards FSH, Kkm. The driver of the Swaraj-Mazda looked weirdly comical! More about him in the next Act...

Act II: A band... without a name?

2006-03-01T20:11:00.000-08:00

(N B: Please read the previous post titled Act I, as every post from then is inextricably linked with it!)

...named... Goodness Gracious! We didn't have one! All the competitions we took part in got rid for us the troublesome job of naming the band, as we were called WEOK008 or MAE005, enough to communicate to the judges our identity! And the only place where we did shows was our college OAT (Open-Air-Theatre), where we were known as "students of NITC"! This being our debut forage into the vast, ever-expanding world of music, we had to give our band a name. A day and more of arguments finally gave rise to the name "CRIMSON CHORDS". Our band finally had a name!
The next day, KK's cousin called on us to meet the middle-man, someone suspended somewhere between Cct and Kkm (understand them as a couple of places, that's it!) and one of the event managers... a weirdo named FK (name abbreivated too!!!). KK and I went to his house, only to be met by horror of sorts. FK removed his cap to reveal copper-coloured hair, cut short using some equipment as powerful and efficient as a lawn-mover. A hunter's gun adorned one of his walls. Five computers, three phones and two mobiles filled his room. He handled two totally unconnected jobs: he was both seller of rice(!) and event manager of shows!! Excerpts from the exchange of dialogues between "us and him(!)":
FK: What is your band's name?
Us: Blinked tight, swallowed, sighed and then blurted out in chorus: "CRIMSON CHORDS."
FK: OK. Crimson Chords is spelt as C-H-R-I-M-S-A-N K-O-D-S. Am I right?
Us: We put him back on track!!
FK: How many songs can you play?
Us: Sir, as promised, we can play for one hour, which may come to twelve songs.
FK: What about making it 24?
Us: !?!##@%... Sir, we aren't a professional band! We just play a couple of songs as part of college shows! We just can't do a song more than twelve. It's OUR LIMIT!
FK: OK. Cool down! I understand! Do just twelve! You will get 8k as your band's payment plus conveyance allowances...
Us: Took a very humble bow. I almost fell down doing it, while KK asked: Sir, any restrictions on the type of songs? What will be the type of audience present?
FK: Shrugged, shook his head sideways, then nodded and finally said: Play whatever you want. You needn't bother about all that.
End of a seemingly fruitful conversation. Fred dropped us at the main bus stop, and we were back in the music room, content that the deal had finally been settled. He called us again to know if a Matador would be sufficient to get us across to Kkm, which was when I got the impression that they meted out the same treatment to us as they did to any drama troupe out there: I fancied a maroon banner at the back of our van. titled: CRIMSON CHORDS. Musical Orchestra Team, Cct! Oh! My! That's hard on us, ain't it?
By the by, our college drumset wasn't sounding all that good. That was when CRIMSON CHORDS thought of hiring a kit. A drum-kit called Pearl, from a drummer named PR. Pearl from PR?!

Crimson chords in five-star soup...

2006-01-12T20:41:00.000-08:00

A good day to everyone reading this post! I never can fathom how long this is gonna turn out to be. If it runs to a number of chapters, I might as well consider publishing it... on paper. Nevertheless, experiences need to be shared to allow people to learn from our mistakes. And if you are prepared to learn, I vow a four-credit subject is to follow! It's more apt to title this post as Act I, as it does promise to be one hell of a drama as the plot unfolds. Do read on...

Act I: To go or not to go?
Nokia's 1108 woke me up, partially successful in its attempt. Companies of today know for sure that man is, by the day, becoming lazier: the reason why they invented remote controls, robots and e-whatevers as agents promoting this avoidable quality. Add to these the Snooze option in a mobile phone! It lets you squeeze the pleasure of lazing in bed for an extra five minutes!
After snoozing to my mind's content, I woke up, had my breakfast (?!), and rushed to the class. Alarms don't work here, but the vibrator of your mobile does wake you up. Nokia's bee buzzed in my ear, and I saw such a message: prgrm t fsh... ply fr csh... 8k grntd. Vowels put in and phrases reconstructed with a dash of readability, the message read: "Program at FSH (abbrev. for Five Star Hotel)...play for cash... 8k guaranteed!"
Do allow me a small detour... I first mistook it for the ubiquitous AIRTEL offers, claims like: "STD to any number in India at Re.1 for 30 sec pulses. Offer valid till the 5th of January! Hurry!" And when does an innocent customer like me receive this message? 4th January, 18:52!
The fourth hour was supposed to begin at 11:15. My friend KK (the sender of the above encrypted message!!) and I were near the coffee shop, deciding whether to go or not. I was in two minds, tilted more towards not going! His cousin was instumental in suggesting our band's name(more about that later!) for the show. KK told me we were to play heavy numbers and welcome the NewYear by carrying on the show past midnight. I just visualized the whole scene. It didn't seem very pleasing to welcome the dawn of a new year with heavy metal. And, the repertoire of songs we had was ready to drive away the new year with ease! KK's cousin said: "Don't worry a bit about all that: just play your numbers, and blast it out." Yes, we were prepared to blast it out, but little did we realize the crackers had every chance of fizzling out!
We decided to go, and then I took out my notebook, the one meagre stack of papers that has stood the wear and tear of two semesters(read 12 subjects)! I jotted down the songs we were prepared with, and somewhere along the line I felt we were playing stuff a tad too heavy for New-Year's eve! Songs had names like Suicide Messiah, Foxy Lady, Tornado of Souls, Paranoid, etc!!! KK's cousin's advice rang like a bell and reinforced our playlist: New Year had to be welcomed by a heavy metal band named.....

Mis-management, me and IRMA...

2005-12-26T09:54:00.000-08:00

Management: The art of getting things done.
This broad definition leaves out many important clauses, giving me a strong foundation to erect castles of excuses on! I usually do get things done. But, they lack in artistic finesse. They look more like modern art! A bit of this merging into lots of that. The picture gets completed (somehow's the word!), nevertheless. My confession sort of done with, it's time I started with what happened on the 18th of December, Sunday morning!
A lot of desire to serve my country (instead of editing software code thereby improving the national income of some other nation!) mixed with a bit of enthusiasm to tackle puzzles led me to write the management entrance exam conducted by the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), for admission to its rural mgmt. course. The centre looked deserted, and I had my own doubts of whether it was prepared, at all, to conduct an exam! A small board then indicated the number of people who were to attend the exam. 21. Yes, twenty-one people alone took the exam from Calicut. Count two more applicants for a fellowship program in rural mgmt. I learnt from the applicants that not many were keen on giving an earnest attempt. People who painted incomplete pictures, I must say! I found my seat and settled down, spreading my brushes (oops, pencils, I mean! Let's put an end to this. No more reference to paintings on this post!) on the table.
The question papers were distributed. The first round of what seemed like an earthquake in the offering: 200 questions to be solved in 120 minutes! Negative marking for wrong answers! And then, the second round of tremors, much more powerful on the Richter: 60 out of 200 questions on "Issues of Social Concern"!
I leave aside the other sections, as they were ordinary questions any management institute would like to test its applicants on, except for the number of "None of these (N.O.T)" answers that came out! Now, this was maddening. It's psychologically a bit tough to shade the N.O.T bubble with confidence! Add to it choices like: 13000, 13000000, 1300000, 130000000 and N.O.T when the worked-out answer turned out to be 130000. Problems with counting the number of zeroes? Remember, 200 questions in 120 minutes. Read twenty questions of such kind in the 110 I managed to attempt!
I should say that everything about the question paper was rural. The presentation was bad. Grammatical errors were present throughout the paper! Comprehension passages were followed by incomprehensible questions! The institute doesn't seem to have taken care of finer aspects like these. This is ample data for generalisation. Institutes tend to their brochure sincerely, but that's all. IRMA's brochure looks just fine, but it ends there.
More about questions on social concern... I thought it was going to be tough, with the result that it was... TOUGHER! This was when my interest to join such an institute faded, and the next instant saw me before a computer, coding my way to glory, keeping an online watch on the national income of "SOMEOTHERNATION"! The questions demanded numerical answers: percentage of subsidies, per capita consumptions and what not! The exact statement made by the FM in his 2002 budget regarding a particular sector of the industry... Now, wait! Who are we? Waste-bins that memorise chunks of statistics? I wish to drive home a very important point here. It's the passion a person shows towards joining such an institute that serves as a better gauge. A couple of articles by P Sainath in The Hindu cry out more about poverty and the rural sector than mere histograms. I do very well agree that general awareness is one area where I'm weak in, for my criticism is never to camouflage my lack of awareness (as concerns statistics...). But, I do know that the rural industries in India are struggling to survive. Emphatic articles on such themes are a regular occurence in The Hindu. It's such newspapers that nurture an interest in people to serve the country by graduating from B-schools like IRMA. On the other hand, it's such question papers that murder the former. It's better that such institutes amend their approach towards exams, if they "FEEL" for the rural sector at all, and "CHANGE FOR THE BETTER" is their aim in the long run. Else, they would, like any other institute of a lesser calibre, nurture graduates with good scores and negligible content...

At last, a blog of my own...

2005-12-13T21:00:00.001-08:00

Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet, must be stolen.
-Jerome K Jerome

I confess. I have stolen a few fleeting moments of time to post my first blog. Today's class (?) began with "Industrial Economics". Adam Smith might have regretted opening his mouth, and I think I spotted Lionel Robbins' ghost taking a walk outside the classroom! And if I was seeing things, it was because I was hungry! Two hours of freedom saw me in the canteen, my project guide's room, the ATM, the bank, the administration block, my room and the computer centre. It's "quality managment" in another five minutes, and it does require a lot of patience to wait through one hour before I can jubiliantly blurt out my roll number for attendance's sake. Hope I stay awake!