Gaga over Pokemon go...

As the world goes all hoe and gaga (no I don't like Lady Gaga and am not talking about her) about this new Pokemon game app I am reminded of those days around 13 years ago when I became a big fan of these Japanese mythical creatures thanks to a friend named Darshan whose ambition in life was to make parodies of Hindi movie songs and watch Cartoon Network for a straight 12 hours a day, It was those days when I was in my second year of college in Ahmedabad and while my friends were only building up their catalogue of pornstar collection, I was the weird one collecting and saving pictures of Pokemon as well on to the hard drive of the first computer I had in life. Neither did the computer survive, nor did the pixels of pornstars but what survived and suddenly again began to thrive in a big way was Pokemon. A few months earlier I was busy shuffling up my old stuff and looking through the inane amount of weird collections I had amassed over a lifetime which included matchboxes, airline boarding passes etc., I found a Pokemon card collection which I had long forgotten about. Triven, Ankit and Rohit some friends from the past had given that to me as a birthday gift. It was a different story that some people in the institute we attended for our preparation for getting into the best of the MBA colleges and where this entire birthday gifting drama was unfolding were pretty much amused at the mental maturity of mine and were seriously questioning my intentions in life but nonetheless I loved amassing Pokemon memorabilia. The next such memorabilia was when during the MBA days when Akshara and Nishant and me, me being the Kabab mein haddi in their campus love story went to McDonalds where with a happy meal the gift was an amazing Pokeball. Needless to say I gave up my quest for taste for the Big McChicken and ordered a Happy meal. My stomach was not at all happy at the limited amount of food and the value proposition seemed such a rip off but nonetheless I was happy at the conquest of getting myself a Pokeball. So this Pokeball was operated by the same principles of potential energy converting into kinetic energy which wasn't really a big hit when taught in Class 8 physics chapters or complex Calculus formulae in engineering colleges. But in the hallowed corridors of IMT it was quite a sight to see everyone screwing the innards of the Pokeball and then leaving it to blast open and out came a small Pokemon walking for a feet or so before looking up cluelessly. The Pokeball got seriously abused one day with a lot of my classmates rolling on the floor laughing at the immense capabilities of the toy. There was a professor who saw the entire drama unfolding and threatened us to only do such nonsense in the hostel block and not the academic block. After getting into the corporate world I lost touch with the Pokemon world but somehow could relate to many of the concepts of the use of the right resources in the right circumstances. A Pokemon master collects Pokemons and tames them to use them in the right circumstances. Inspite of being such cute little creatures the likes of Bulbasour, Pikachu or Togapi have immense strength when used in the right circumstances. The idea of the whole cartoon was about analysing the whole stituation and using the right Pokemon to make the best out of the situation. If I had my way with training programs for the HR folks I would have made them watch hours of Pokemon to get a view of what getting the right resources in an organization means. So now Nintendo has come out with its first game for smartphones which would surely be a stiff competition to the nonsense called as Candy Crush and I am eagerly waiting for it to be released in the App Store for India. 

A long hiatus...

It has been exactly close to eight long years since I have not penned down anything on this blog of mine. I did come up with the idea of starting a lot of new blogs on passions that developed over time like a blog on aircrafts which even I forgot about completely, a blog on wines which never went beyond the first 2 posts and finally a new blog which just had one post which said something about me not being able to relate to the contents of this blog of mine and having moved my house to the other blog. If only creating a blog was as difficult as buying a house, I would have stayed on and decorated this house of mine (blog) where I had collected some rare artifacts to decorate it. Memories and a hell lot of them which now seem so alien sometimes that I sometimes feel surprised that I had written them. But today while reading through a lot of blogs and finishing off seasons of Orange is the New Black on a day that seems to have been all about clouds and rains and atrocious multiples of Uber and Ola fares, I was amused to figure out that this blog has had close to 5300 page views. That has been an inspirational insight to possibly start penning down once again. No doubt life has moved on and I have written more Linkedin blogs which sound like a lot of professional bullshit lets see how this resolution ends up being?