Canvas of Random Thoughts

Au Revoir mon Paris.....

2008-06-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

I am back to Bangalore after the onsite project manager's profit and loss projections showed that keeping me employed in Paris was more like rearing an elephant. So here I am back to saddi des after almost a year of fromage and bacon and petit fille. So after a year of sipping red wine and rushing away home from office as soon as the clock stuck 6:30 PM, I finally left the city of Paris behind me and on one fine Sunday I took the Lufthansa flight out of Charles de Gaulle Airport and flew back to the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Airport. So here is the story of my coming back. It all started one fine day, when after months of calculation and re-calculation, the project manager proclaimed that according to his calculations kicking me out of Paris was very very beneficial to the project. Unluckily for the guy who was giving me the news (read as my manager) came to know that even he was being kicked out of Paris because of the same reasons. My departure's decision taken, the next step was to book the flight. Not to be left in the bad books of miss lady luck since while flying to Paris I had only got a meagre 20kg baggage allowance on Air France, I booked my tickets early and explicitly mentioned the 30kg allowance at least 3 times in the travel request. Since destiny never made anything easy for me, the people who were assigned the task to book the tickets by the system happily forgot to book it for almost a week. Reminder mails and constant threatening finally got me a response and after calling up agents in 3 different cities I finally had my Lufthansa tickets to Kolkata and a connecting one to Bangalore after a week in my hometown.

The last few days in Paris just seemed to fly away. It was heavily invested in giving knowledge transfer to another guy in the project whom everyone calls Bappa. I guees no one even remembers his true name which incidentally is Basant. Well I guess the French as well as the Indians find it difficult to pronounce and hence they have stuck to the name Bappa for ages now. The KT as it is called in the IT terminology was the longest ever marathon KT that ever happened in the history of AL--as proclaimed by a few noble colleagues of mine. A farewell party at our veteran Indian restaurant called Namaste finally gave me the feeling that the 11 months in Paris were finally getting over. While I shopped a bit, I always wished that my dad was the customs official who would just let me pass by with the loot of perfumes and wines and chocolates. Alas nothing of that sort was going to happen and so I had to be contended with the few euros of shopping that I did.

Another notable thing that I did before coming back was that we went drinking to a pub that once upon a time Sayee and Aravind my two flatmates had once been to. Well actually we thought we were going but alas we never reached that place because both of them could not locate the place and finally after an hour of seeing every street and asking every suspicious police guy we gave up the futile search. The general consensus was that the pub could only be found when both were drunk. So after going through the futile exercise we decided to haunt our favourite pub on Latin quarter near Notre Dame. Alas when we went there, we found that the place had been converted a bit and ordering drinks alone was not on their cards anymore. So we necessarily had to order dinner which consisted mostly of cold duck meat and some herbs and bushes and a rice and curry thing (well seemed like curry). I still do not understand as to why the French love all their food so very cold and refrigerated. I guess it is something to do with their laziness that makes them go in for refrigerating and half cooking their cuisines. So along with the not so happening dinner me and Aravind gulped down at least a litre of long island iced tea. Well the others were happy mixing all kinds of beer together and waiting for a misadventure to happen. The bartender with whoom we were chitchatting with was saying all nice things about India and Indians. The guy seemed to have a nest on his head, if you remember Rudd Van Gulit from the world of soccer you might be able to relate. Finally the appreciations about India and Indians did not last long as Kostubh also known as Chota Chetan for his huge height got fully sloshed and emptied his entire stomach contents on the table. We cleaned it all up and bid adieu to that place with a fully sloshed Koustubh and caught the M4 and M1 back home. The ride was a total misadventure with people literally running away seeing Koustubh vomit over and over again. And after tripping twice in the platform of the metro station Koustubh proclaimed that he is not drunk at all. The night had some more adventures in store. After reaching home we gulped down a 2002 wine bought from Saint Emilion which had been lying around for such a special occassion. The night finally ended seeing Nilesh dance or rather jump to the tunes of marathi songs. Well considering his size it was more like watching an elephant shaking his body.

The last day in Paris was spent having lunch at a typical French restaurant and trying to order good wine and cheese. Last heard courtsey Abha Dawesar's book A summer in Paris, the ideal combination of wine and cheese on ones pallete might cause an orgasm. Alas did not happen to me. And considering the quality of wine and cheese and the price of it in India its not going to happen for a long long time. After the lunch filled with wine that left Basant talking all rubbish we walked all the way to Eiffel. From the Eiffel we took the river cruise on the Seine finally touching upon all those places and alleys on the river bank remembering every bit of time that I had spent photographing on the banks of that amazing river. The nostalgia of the last one year spent in that beautiful city came back to me. As the sun set to my last day in Paris, I did feel a tinge of sadness leaving this wonderful city with its Rues, its river banks and its structures and churches and colleagues who had become good friends in a span of one year. Night fell and John Denver again raised his score with All my bags are packed am ready to go.......am leaving on a jet plane....dont know when I will be back again......on my laptop. Its a song of leaving something dear and every year I have been singing this song over and over again leaving one city for another, one home for another. The ride to the airport in the dead of night in the taxi with its radio humming soft french numbers and known and unknown territories passing by was equally nostalgic. Even I was leaving on a jet plane and even I never knew when I would be back again to this wonderful city called Paris.

Since misadventures never seem to leave me, back in the aiport they were not able to print my connecting Frankfurt to Kolkata boarding pass. Moreover I was given a word of caution when my cabin baggage exceeded its requisite 7 kgs restriction (happens when you stuff it up with all kinds of cheap novels bought at second hand english book selling stores). Moreover I forgot to collect that very piece of luggage after the security check and realised it only after a good 10 minutes. Finally I managed to get the second boarding pass and found to my utter dismay that all my dreams of buying liqour were going to be thrashed away as the duty free shops were all closed. But luckily the shop opened up 5 minutes prior to boarding, and I finally managed to dash and rush and get a Bordeaux 2004 red wine. And if Deeghii is reading this I did bid farewell to Paris in the" Tata Bye Bye" way....As the Lufthansa flight taxied along the runway and the early rays of the sun painted the eastern sky with its vivid red, orange and purple colours I bid farewell to Paris for the last time. Then the flight gained altitude and passed above the cloud cover and the city of Paris was out of sight. 55 minutes later I was close to Frankfurt over a sea of clouds and the sun shining bright on my side of the plane and I saw another 3 on different sides circling around in invisible circles as we prepared to land. The sea of cloud beneath meant that Frankfurt would be very cloudy. It indeed is a great city to be in though the streets are as deserted as a public museum on weekdays. Frankfurt airport is the hub for Lufthansa, and if you ever saw a taxi stand full of cabs, the airport looks more like a taxi stand for Lufthansa. The logo of a bird on a blue and yellow background was everywhere to be sighted. The bus left us at a terminal from where I had to figure out which way to go for my connecting flight to Kolkata. A small gutten tag to an airport staff did the trick and I proceeded to see a whole set of guys sitting at the passport control eyeing everyone suspiciously. My French carte de sejour was enough for them to not even glance at me twice and soon I was officially out of the European Union. I headed straight for the duty free to buy another litre of alcohol, this time a whisky which my father had wished I would buy for him. I bought a litre of Jack Daniels and saw that my flight was a wee bit delayed. The two bottles of liquor had ensured that my hand luggage had gotten all the more bulky and hard to carry. With two bags of duty free stuff and a hand baggage and the laptop I was way too much loaded. Frankfurt airport at any point of time in the day especially the terminal 3 looks like an Indian airport. All major cities of India are connected by Lufthansa, well except for Bangalore on sundays which is operated by Air India, and as usual Air India known for its worser than Deccan record of flying on scheduled time was delayed by more than 15 hours. Imagine the plight of the people who were to travel in this god forbidden airline. Luckily for me our flight was just about 45 minutes late and as the time for departure I came, I proceeded towards security check, which was in every mood to strip me of my clothes to check for any signs of me being a terrorist. France never does indulge in so many checks. The passport control guys in Paris are more interested in chit chatting and once for a colleague of mine, they did not even stamp his passport. The excuse given was that, there was a huge queue and they did not want to waste much time checking up everyone. After the security check, the waiting area seemed to be straight out of the cafeteria of any Salt Lake sector V IT company. There were all kinds of IT people who had all descended from various parts of the world (well mostly US) to take the flight back to Kolkata. And just like in any cafeteria of any IT company everyone was busy voicing their opinion about everything, straight from the falling dollar affecting their way of living in the US, to who was getting married and who was trying for a shift and who belonged to IBM and who worked for TCS. This was the face of India, that was taking up all the possible jobs thanks to the world becoming more and more flatter (this is how we call offshoring in Infsoys). So after another half an hour of hearing all kinds of possible stuff like onsite allowance, the cold weather and the worsening market for Dot net professionals, there was a call for boarding. The flight was one of those huge airbuses, and I was allocated an aisle seat thanks to a very boaring Canadian man who seemed to be in his later 50s. The flight took off after another 20 mins, and as usual there was a huge thrust common for such huge airlines. One really feels the power of these rolls royce engines during such take offs and ladings. Once in the air above the cloud cover, and the captain having switched off the fasten your seat belt sign I ventured to the loo to freshen up a bit. Not sleeping for more than 24 hours now had taken its toll on my appearance. While coming back an old lady blurted out help-help and I realised that the lady's husband needed assistance. He wanted to go to the loo and could not stop talking all the way. In those 10 minutes he had told me why he was on the plane(he was visiting his younger daughter who was married off to some person in the US), that he had had two heart attacks and his older daughter was in Australia and she had a beautiful daughter who was a chartered accountant and almost my age, and that he carried a photograph of her which he wanted to show to me. Now this is where, I was shell shocked. The old man repeatedly called me his son and asked me for my parent's contacts. So the Paris tag had made me pretty much a marriageable element, I thought. The old man on his way back from the loo wanted me to fill up the immigration forms required for stepping into India. Seeing the alley was being blocked by the cabin crew distributing snacks, I told them that I would fill them later. After a snacks of peanut and wine I found old man selling the same concept of marrying off his grand daughter to a man seated on their side, well a bit older than me who was busy filling up old man and old lady's immigration form.

These nine hour flights are damn boring when you have sleeping men in their 50s sleeping on both sides of you. I tried watching friends on my laptop, flipped through the channels of Lufthansa, saw half of Nicholas Cage's National Treasure and felt very very bored. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying their afternoon siesta. Mr 50something Canadian had not even touched lunch for the love of snoring. Then it was again time for dinner as I saw the flight plan saying that we had entered India after crossing over from Pakistan. In 2 hours after a great meal of chicken fried with some rice and an aborted landing attempt at Kolkata thanks to a Spicejet flight not listening to ATC orders, we had reached the parking area of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International airport. After seeing the biggest of them like CDG, Heathrow, Schilpol, Frankfurt and Fumicino, the internation one 7 kms from my home looked so small in comparison. After the formalities with the passport control and getting a range of glances from the customs officials and saying repeated nos to the porters, I finally could retreive my luggage and was on my way out to see Ma and my sister waiting there. The first word they said was that I had grown lot fatter than the last time they had saw me. After all a year of cheese, wine, fries and burgers were showing its toll. A short ride back home through the streets of Kolkata, the streets that I had grown up on during my school days again welcomed me back to known settings and there in a wee bit small corner of my heart I missed the year long experience called Paris......

The naked dream.....

2008-04-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

Was a dream this one...for someone special.....

Always wanted to see u get naked while u wore spects and smoked that cigarette in tht stylish manner.....

Love you.....

I heard in Paris and around.....

2008-01-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

"Ca Va?"
"You know....the the the.....you know"
"Baith ke khaunga"
"What nansense"
"Just update"
"Sabji lane ja raha hai"
"Kaam to yaar tum kuch karte nahi ho"
"Bokhduuuuuuu" read this as Bordeaux
"Man-madrasa"
"Who is Suganya talking to?"
"Oh ji thand hai na woh haddiyon mein ghus jati hai.....badi kharab hai ji"
"Moniqueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.......Pascallllllllllllllllllllllllllll"
"Wolfgang"
"Sayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.......Swamiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii"
"Haan woh sab to thik hai but tell me one thing"

The inspiration comes from Saadibhasad (http://saadibhasad.blogspot.com/)

The new year as we welcomed it.......

2008-01-08T15:06:00.000-08:00

And if you thought that the end of 2007 was joyous and filled with mega and gala plans to set the dance floor on fire since I am in the city of romance and fashion, think again. As far as I remember 31st december 2007 was spent infront of the computer at office with most of my French clients on extended vacations, while I was handling the query of one Pierre fellow who was atrocious because of some stupid issue. He first asked, then ordered, then threatened and finally abused me as morning became afternoon and finally evening and his issue was still not solved. Not my fault buddy if someday the connection of the ERP system of the entire company decides to fail. So finally Pierre was a happy man when his issue was solved. I think he had some kind of self imposed targets of getting over all work headaches before the new year sets in maybe also because the year-ending is on the 31st of December in these parts of the world. But when you consider that 90% of the population is outside the office enjoying vacations, you just ask why?

So after a torturous day at office, I headed home asking one and all to call me when they would be ready to leave office. Since given an option I always leave office the first, I was out of office as the clock struck 6 P.M. Later on the office guys decided to drop in at our place for a mini alcohol session and then as they say, what happened is history. It is also youtubed and as I write it the video has been viewed 51 times. Have a look here

The one trying to fly is the one and only Aby Paul, and the one behind him in the monkey cap, dancing just like an overgrown monkey is Sabya (the French among us Indians). And considering the fact that someone was trying to fly when it was almost yet another 3 hours to midnight and 2008, things really were creepy. By 9:45 Aby was history, he was sprawled on the dance floor from which he was trying to fly 45 minutes ago. And picking him up and trying to get him to drink butter milk with litres of lemon juice was really a Dard-e-disco experience. When Aby did not revive even after litres of buttermilk and lime juice we decided to let him be senseless and we headed outside for Champs de Elysee. The sight at Champs de Elysee was just like a Brigade Road of Bangalore or Park Street of Kolkata or C G Road of Ahmedabad. Things were just the same. There were people everywhere waiting for the new year to come along. Those who have the money or the contacts go to the gala parties, while others crowd the best known road expecting something( I do not know what till now) as the clock approaches 12. Since Champs de Elysee was way too crowded we decided to walk towards Eiffel. The temperature was dripping all the time and the weatherman had not been able to ward off the rain with his voodoo power. And when we reached the bridge on Porta Alma, the Eiffel lights started twinkling brightly and it was new year. We had expected some kind of firework spectacle, but the only ones visible were a few tarabatis (sparkles) and a few rockets that would have been hopeless competition when compared to Diwali. Anyway people were very happy about 2008 coming into their life, as Anirban became more grumpy because he had to go home. 2007 became 2008 but grumpy Anirban was still the same. Though, we had no such intentions of going back home, we finally realised that staying on Champ de Elysee was out of the question. By the time we had came back there, the riot police was all ready to use the baton. People had broken every kind of bottle on the street and it was utter chaos. Risking that 1st January 2008 could well have seen us nursing beatings from the riot police, we also headed back home.

Happy new year to one and all.....

Old Monk et Old Memories.....sponsored by Mohan Meakin

2007-11-20T06:31:00.000-08:00

Finally after a long hiatus the login page of blogger suddenly did not turn into arcane french when I logged in to post this. But anyway, these days my french has improved drastically. Though I have no idea about what they pronounce and why on earth they eat up half the consonants while they speak but still if people write to me in French, I get a gist of what they are trying to communicate. The French's love for their language has a lot many times landed us lesser English speaking mortals into deep merde situations. So much so that my boss (happens to be an Australian) who learnt French the hard way by leaving Australia and settling in France for the sake of his French girlfriend fully empathised with us and made our signature in official emails read out that, All correspondance with us lesser mortal english speaking group should be in English (the template is in french and english). Ocassionally the mails are one line long but the signature is usally 5 lines long to accomodate all such instructions. Yet people prefer sending us a hell lot of communication in arcane french that I have finally managed to pick up helped by another spectacular tool from the house of google, their translation tool. I tell you one day in the near future, they will surely be the China of the virtual world. As in today's world any product that you pick out of a shelf in your nearby retail store has a tiny weeny microscopic "Made in China" label, in a similar way every tool that we use in the virtual world would soon have a Made by Google label. Now can anyone of you at Gartner or Forrester who ever manages to pass through my blog and read uptil this point please offer me a job of some kind for giving such a wonderful analysis on the prospects of Google? And yah hey if you guys out at google are reading this, VP HR types, senior manager HR, manager HR, trainee HR or for that matter even the admin guy or the guy who cleans the floor of Google.....anybody.....just inform me if there is some job for writing such wonderful things. Now starts the long wait for a flashy career ahead ;-)

Speaking of other inane and mundane things in life, that Saturday night/Sunday early morning post was under the effect of a deep intoxication caused by the burnt variant of malt whiskey, namely black rum. The person responsible for this deep source of intoxication was the one and only Chintu Parikh. The person had somehow procured maybe even smuggled a bottle of Old Monk from India to London and was bragging about the same by putting up a status message on his Gtalk (see I told you how Google is solowly ruling the virtual world) which read like "Khub jamega rang jab mil baithenge teen yaar....aap main aur old monk". Alas that aap could have been me had UK not been seperated from mainland Europe by the cold and wild English Channel and the very petulant immigration officers at the border. The last time they actually checked my schengen visa with all sorts of magnifying glasses that watch repairers wear to see the anatomy of watches. So Chintu Parikh sitting there in some remote part of London made me nostalgic about the precious black rum. The magic of black rum has never failed to smite any soul who has ever stayed in a hostel during the formative years of life. The advantages of black rum leaves its charm on every soul dying for some alcohol in their blood stream. Firstly it is one of the cheapest varities of alcohol available in the local daru ki dukaan. In terms of alcohol it has a high 40% content and hence you dont feel cheated to spend some penny on alcohol. It helps in getting the body warm in the cold and of course you never get a hangover the next day, so even if you have a presentation or an exam the next day, its not screwed at all. Before IMT, drinking used to be a one off incident in the dry state of Gujarat. Bootleggers never made it easy for us to procure it with their exhorbitant premium pricing models. So rum was not the thing that was ever favoured. The choice was more obvioulsy whisky. I still remember the one time in ahmedabad at a friend's place, someone got so drunk that he slept a considerable amount of the night on the bathroom floor. The charm of drinking black rum especially the one christened Old Monk started for me in Ghaziabad during the IMT days. Coupled with the fact that Mohan Meakin had its manufacturing base in Ghaziabad and that any other brand in the market not bottled in UP was exhorbitantly priced made Old Monk an obvious choice for us not so rich kids. I never was a regular smoker in college, but the once in a while factor made the crow of the college give me a new name called Page 3 smoker. A smoke in hand with a glass of old monk mixed with Coke in the other, singing away to glory on the terrace of the canteen block are the vivid memories that are left of the last few days at IMT. After the college days the next time black rum flowed like water was in Hyderabad during the induction programme of the company I got placed. Alas since the company thinks that drinking is almost equivalent to sin the scene was shifted to the hotel where we had been put up, a shady hotel with a faulty AC system that had not worked for almost decades. Incidentally Chintu Parikh was a part of this drinking group and as is his specialty, he had invited the whole world to drink. It was over here that I got acquainted with a guy Abhishek Deb. At first look he looked like a complete football but as time passed we became good friends. After that the black rum story in my life drew to a complete halt with more amount of disposable income at hand with thanks to a good package made the preference curve shift from the black to the white variety. It had more to do with Sumit Baheti's re-entry in my life. We had been friends since class 11 and had gone to the same physics tuition, the teacher was a bearded guy who was morbidly scared of his fat wife. The kid they had was a total brat. And last but not the least the bearded man had predicted that our future would be doomed had we not given him enough moolah to secure a seat in BIT Mesra where he apparently went to teach. So sharing the same doomed future over two years we had celebrated every such occasion in those olden long lost days by creating world records in gobbling up fuchkas. For the lesser informed its the same as gol gappa of Delhi and the pani puri of Mumbai sans the pudina minced water. We in Eastern India prefer the tamarind minced water. But all these records came with a lot of effort and our stomachs did have to go on an overdrive trying to digest some 40 fuchkas at one go. In Bangalore the fuchkas gave way to more dangerous things like white rum. And as predicted we were still celebrating a doomed career as was predicted by the wife fearing bearded guy. While Sumit had landed himself up in a competing IT services company as compared to mine, he was confused as to why on earth even his onsite location was Bangalore and why he slogged all weekends. While I was confused about what I was doing in an IT company. My only sojourn with IT was restricted to flunking a few basic papers way back in school followed by copying out of notes in the diploma exam and getting mass laddoos in assignments for the two IT subjects that we studied in our MBA course. Drinking was as regular a feature in Bangalore as washing clothes (once every weekend). The inclusion of Banner (oh boy he would surely kill me if he saw this) saw the per capita beer consumption of Bangalore reaching record highs. The presence of Banner in the pub hopping gang always ensured that me and Sumit set up self imposed curfews on our intake. Banner would reach new highs every time, and it is a known fact that a drunk Banner is more dangerous than an insane military dictator who has suddenly declared emergency. So whenever Banner was not there to accompany us to the usual hangout on Church Street called New Night Watchman(thanks to its cheaper prices) me and Sumit used to nurse a hangover over our doomed careers on the next day. Well it is a separate story that an intoxicated state coupled with some petulant neighbors had resulted in memories worth keeping for a lifetime. The outcome was that three souls had landed up in the lockup of the nearby police station for no apparent reason. Back now in the present day Paris, Chintu's status message had brought back memories of the charm of black rum and a dying need to get drunk with rum. Me and Aravind had to rush to the nearest store to see if we could get our hands on a bottle of the same. We apparently realised that the mini shop that we visit for emergencies (supplies) doesnt even store alcohol. It was quite a shocker and so we had to run to an almost shut down Monoprix and come out with a 10 euro bottle of exquisite black rum ( a brand that I have completely no idea of at the present moment) . What followed afterwards are mere figments of imagination and reality coupled and intertwined. After 5 drinks the old man of the house was no more singing, he was rather shouting songs. The guy who will any day give a competition to Dagwood of Blondies for being flat on the couch for 24 hours had opened the glass shutters and was romancing the nipping, below zero temperatures of Paris and I was busy writing the stupid blog below this and throwing up some words of emotional support to a friend on gtalk who had suddenly had a major breakup. Though it all sounded so bull and I was not even sure what I was doing, I guess I did a great advice session under alcohol. And then everything went black and as I drifted away to sleep I could just hear a voice saying arey bho..... ke....u r sleeping on the floor between the two sofas. Then everything turned into a kaleidoscope for a split second and it was all dark after that.

After a few pegs of rum......

2007-11-17T15:49:00.000-08:00

I havent done this for a long long time. The last time as far as I remember, it was the one and only famous party that we had at IMT after the disgusting financial services paper in the 4th semester that turned out to be the most disgraceful performance in my life. It was one of those papers which was an open book paper and we had no clues what we were supposed to reproduce in our papers. Apart from our lesser mortals who had the audacity of taking up finance as our majors in a college like IMT, there were others who thought that the financial services was one paper that could give them a well deserved placement in the financial services thanks to the boom in the banking and insurance sector. Alas they never expected that the whole end term exam would just consist of one question with a 100 twists and turns. Man it was worth a sight when we all came out of the exam hall with a big question mark written stark on their face. Though it was an open book exam people had this one question all over their worried face, was it a pass or fail? Alas we all knew the outcome, even if it was an open book exams which we long craved for. The toppers were obviously trying to find out the %age difference in their scores while us lesser mortals had headed towards Noida to celebrate the disgusting performance in the FS paper. And lo in the middle of these celebrations I did get some 5-6 calls from the topper of our claass threatening me to complete the strategy project. Poor thing she never had any idea that I wanted to get so very drunk that strategic management seemed as arcane as nuclear physics. Today I am as drunk as that day in the hostels of IMT, when we drank and Arti shopped to feel better. Today she is married and enjoying a life away from financial services and neither do I care about financial services in this world of Interface monitoring in the SAP world. It seems to be a far off world than where we wanted to land ourselves at. But still everyone has survived with a little bit of gloom here and there. But at the end we are what we are. MBA seems to be a far off dream that we managed to indulge in. Alas no more of it survives in real, it is what survives in our sweet nice dreams. But what really remains is this sense of intoxication that makes u ponder about the way your life is taking. After all that perspective changes with time. When u consider that Sumit Baheti was drinking vodka yesterday, I must say that life has chaned a lot. There were times when we had resolved never to drink vodka. And today things have changed. Even six moths is a long time. Today Baheti is indulging himself in litres of vodka. Alas there were days when even 250 ml of vodka would have made us puke. Alas things change, we change, preference change. Time changes every soul in us. If only we could have made time stand still....life might have been a better place to live.......alas never would happen.....

Much ado about cleaning

2007-08-31T07:22:00.000-07:00

I finally had the august opportunity to meet the person for whose welcome our house in Paris saw four well fed, pot bellied persons making war like arrangements for a whole of two days in an attempt to clean up all the mess that the flat in Courbevoie housed apart from the four people in question. It was the day of all days that usually comes once a month but for the last two months I had avoided the D-day by rushing away to neighbouring countries when the day came. Considering the fact, that the D-day beaches are very nearby when you consider my geographical location on the map of the world, I had every plans to rush off to the D-day beaches when these once in a month occassions came, but since it was clear that I would most probably be threatened with dire circumstances if I avoided it another time I finally decided to act and clean the house for the grand arrival of our landlord. It has been months since I shifted from the Indian hostel to this appartment with three of my colleagues, in a vain attempt to save some money. Alas I have spent everything on travelling Europe and presently my bank balance looks very much disbalanced. The day I moved into this appartment the smell of gross neglect welcomed me. A sight of the dining table was enough to give the landlord a massive heart attack. There was everything on the table and it looked like the sight of a mini explosion. Bottles and cans of used pickles and sauces were there. There was even a carboard case that was home to a shoe once upon a time. Now it was home to a whole host of masalas that were last used a decade ago. Though I do like my stuffs to be clean and my room to be tidy, cleaning up a community mess is not something which I am used to. The table was left the way it was lest it again decide to explode on me.

Historically I have been blessed with flatmates or hostel roommates who have had dubious records of being clean. Notable is the wonderful time that I had with the great Banner. Room number B-57 in IMT hostel was one of the smallest rooms that could accomodate two people. To meet the problem of space we had joined our two beds and hence were crowned as the undisputed presidents of some well known society of IMT which is best kept secret in a public forum like this. The space constraint problem saw clothes being heaped on the lonesome chair in the room. The chair seemed to be heaped in the same way as a donkey's back when being taken to the dhobi ghat. Books used to be lying here and there on the bed as were newspapers on which we sometimes slept too. These newspapers were hurriedly disposed under the cot to rest in peace with all the dirt of the world. And then once in a while came a frantic SOS call from the great Banner announcing the arrival of his parents. A call like this meant something much more graver than 9/11 for us because if his parents would have seen the condition of our room, the way we kept it, we would both have been shot dead at point blank for being so unclean. The SOS meant I had to run and push every item of clothing inside the big almirah and lock it up. If they would have opened the almirah once, they would have been buried under debries of fallin clothes of all kinds. The next step was to shove everything under the bed and if still unwanted things remained they would be pushed into the neigbours room. Equally unclean the duo of Bindra and Sohar never minded an intrusion into their room. Bindra's cleanliness record had the whole cleaning staff of IMT prying for his blood. He had happily forgot to clean a bucketfull of clothes that he had soaked in soap for more than a month. When he finally threw them all away, it was anybody's guess how many lesser mortals might have died of the stench. The next phase of room cleaning would be the jharu pocha wala stage with me struggling with the jharu and Banner doing the pocha. The speed at which we cleaned the room would definitely have put a high speed TGV at shame. The finishing touches were provided by lighting up a whole plethora of incensce sticks in an effort to shoo away the smell of stale cigarette smoke that lingered on in our room. The wallpapers of our PCs changed from a raunchy Monica Belluci staring at us to a picture of godess Saraswati in no time. And this is how I had saved my ass for a whole year and had managed reasonably well to portray myself to be a clean person to the outside world. Second year in IMT, was an individual affair, with people getting single rooms. I had managed to keep my room clean for the better part of that year and thanks to a lot of initatives taken at the begging of the year of putting up wall hangings and fancy lamp shades nobody ever raised eyebrows. Though in second year also a mount everest of old newspapers rested under my cot. In the latter part of the second year, we stuffed the mountain in Akshara's car and took it to the local kabadiwala and made a mini fortune of it. The money was enough to sposor a booze party for our group of friends. The next stop which became home for a few months was the guest house of Infosys during the training period at Hyderabad. All our combined efforts of keeping everything out of place proved futile by the constant monitoring of the housekeeping staff of the guest house. Bangalore also saw its share of dirtiness thanks to the laziness of us few souls who stayed in a house at BTM layout. The only saving grace was the cleaning woman who did not understand even one word we spoke and vice versa. It was easier to talk to an alien than the cleaning woman, but she did clean the premises and clothes of ours quite well. And now in Paris, cleaning the home is a ploy to keep the owner happy, lest he throws us out of the house into the cold streets of Paris in a winter month. The regularity of cleaning stays in sync with his regularity of coming to collect the rent. That means once in a month the house gets a full revamp with four hatta gatta naujawan becoming the opressed Cinderella taking up the mop and bucket and going around the house cleaning, mopping, strugling, falling and freeing everything of dust and stains including the table that looked like an explosion site. Finally after hours of fighting with the dust and stain and emptying a bottle of stain remover the house looked habitable and sophisticated including the table which no more looked like a blast site of age old curries. Expecting the owner to go ga-ga over our cleanliness initatives but when he came he talked about complex things his bank was doing in a french accented hindi. Later on he started talking about how he desperately wants to learn SAP, a skill that I havent been able to learn in so many years even after sitting infront of the SAP interface every single day. So if you want a clean up of ur house, u know whom not to invite. I am better at cleaning up entries from database these days.

Chocolate, cheese and a lot of beer....Belgium unlimited...

2007-08-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

I have never been a great fan of Himesh or his hat since the day the driver of the Volvo to Ernakulam decided it would be very funny to wake up the sleeping passengers by playing Himesh songs on full volume. Since that day I have gazed suspiciously at people who sport a Himesh beard or wear a Himesh cap lest it turns out to be Himesh himself. So moving thousands of kilometers away from the subcontinent of India, I never expected the spirit of Himesh or his cap to follow me in Europe. After I shifted to Paris, I heard the movie goers were swept out of thier feet by the commendable performance of Himesh in the wonderful movie called "Tera tera tera suroor". The fact that the movie was shot somewhere in Europe did give me creepy feelings, but still I was lucky enough to be quarantined from his disastrous songs till I landed up in the wonderful country of Belgium known for its chocolate, cheese and beer and of course glass. All deadly stuffs when you consider the fact that three of these can make your poor tummy inflate and blast away and the fourth thing can rip off ur belly at one go. So before my trip to Germany I went on this trip to Belgium where the spirit of Himesh and his cap managed to haunt me with a guy called Bhaskar from the hostel. Bhaskar is a been there and done that kind of a guy while I am progressing on his foot steps. So he acts as an inspiration for me coz he is almost bald and I am on the path of balding, majority of hair on his head is grey while mine are growing grey slowly, while he has embarked on the journey of marriage a long time back I am seeking motivation to get married sometimes in the future. So both of us set off on this weekend escape to Belgium thanks to the cheap first class ticket that we got on Thalys. So after much oohs and ouches and ifs and if nots from his side finally we did manage to find each other at the Gare de Nord station in Paris and set out for the land of Belgium. After a hearty breakfast on the Thalys where I was cautioned repeatedly for grabbing more than one of every item on the menu, we reached the city of Brussels. Taking one of those cheap intercity trains that runs every half hour to Bruges we set out again towards one of the bigges tourist destination of Belgium famous for its canals and beer. Passing the city, once you land up in the countryside the average Belgian looks like the cows he rears. He is as fat and as white as his cows. No doubt so much of beer, cheese and chocolate does take its toll on the average Belgian.

Once in Bruges, and after purchasing a city map which looked much more like an arcane treasure hunt map than a handy helpful city map we set off towards our hostel on one of the city buses. One small enquiry about the stop of the buses that we needed to get down at got a Belgian totally excited to help us out and then began a walk for 20 long minutes till we reached the hostel. The email from the hostel had promised a 5 minute walk from the city centre. Incidentally later did we realise that the man had taken us through all the wrong lanes and it was almost more than double the distance from the place we had started walking from, that he had taken us on. Once in the reception, the snob receptionist told us to come back at 2 in the afternoon to get our rooms and she gave us a map of the city that was much more readable than the arcane one we managed to get at the station. This map was hilarious in its own ways with suggestions about how one should not pee on the streets of Bruges as the fine amount would amount to some few hundred euros per litre of pee passed, that the best way to peev a Brugeian is to ask him/her where the nearest Mc Donald's is. So off we went with our huge bags exploring the lanes and canals of Bruges clutching the hilarious map which seemed to mock every place in its own way. The first place we entered made us pay 5 euros and it happened to be a church. Now I have never seen a church which charges entry fee since I came to Europe, but the person at the counter convinced us that it had a very beautiful museum and hence the entry fee. Alas the museum turned out to be a museum that had all kinds of lace attires and nothing more. The only good thing was that the church had a very clean and precious toilet that we made full utilisation of. The next stop was the chocolate factory that provided insights into how chocolate beans were used as currency in the olden days in some tribes and how 100 chocolate beans could buy you a strong and sturdy slave in the slave markets. I picked up a handful of chocolates from the complimentary counters irrespective of the muted protests of others and saw how they made chocolates. Overall the entire chocolatey experience in the museum of the chocolate fairy was quite a treat to the senses. Heading ahead we tried climbing the Belfry tower in the market square that has an epic 366 steps, the passage goes on getting narrower as one reaches the top. It was quite a harrowing experience carrying our bags to the top of the tower. Once we reached the top, the clock at the top started ringing horribly with its huge dongs that could have easily made a non susupecting soul go deaf. We came down from the Belfry tower after giving our whole hearted support to the Indian cricket team which was just across the English channel playing a test match against England(we met a British couple who were more interested in discussing cricket than climbing the stairs). After having a lunch of burgers and fattening fries we set off to claim our rightful rooms in the hostel and after struggling with the locks and the sophisticated security system we were finally able to get into our room. The room was cosy yet typically featureless and overlooked the kitchen of the restaurant underneath which had stacked up crates and crates of beer bottles which is yet another Belgian passion. To realise this passion we head next to the famous Bruggian Zot brewery that has guided tours that show how beer was made previously in the olden days. After buying a ticket for the tour that was supposed to culminate in a free glass of beer we realised that the smell of beer was enticing enough for us to buy a few more glasses till the tour started. The tour was conducted by a lady infected with the horrific Belgian sense of humor who took us around the old beer distillery sharing anecdotes with a face as serious as any of our politicians, but spiced with a very strong sense of humor. So the Belgian beer factory lady told us that packing Belgian beer into cans is an insult to the beer and that the Belgian beer should always be served in the right glass to make it taste all the more better. And finally that one should never complaint if the Belgian beer was served with a whole lot of froth. Pouring beer out of bottles or jars with the least amount of froth, was a game that we enjoyed and associated it with some kind of weired macho masculanity ideas, but in Belgium the beer lady proved it to be all wrong. According to her, the initial froth allows people to start up conversations while the froth settles down. She also said that people also start talking to their beer once in a while and it only becomes serious when the beer starts talking back to you. Then you know, that it is the last glass for the night. The customary beer followed the tour and with all the newly gained knowledge I analysed the contents of the beer- barley turned into malt, mixed with water and hoop for the customary smell and then cooled and fermented and bottled to make the golden yellow liquid that has long left me intriguied with its taste. The beer factory tour was followed by a 30 minute ride on a boat on the canals of Bruges. A sign on the boat at the end of the tour again proved the classiness of Belgian humor. The sign read that "Tipping is not a town in China". We followed the boat trip up with a trip to the old windmills on the outer fringes of the town and again wandered back along the canals to reach the city centre. There were roadside shows and a huge saturday night rock concert. By the time we realised that we were hungry, most of the restaurants had already shut down their kitchens. Finally we found this French continental restaurant that had kept its door open till late. As we sipped beer waiting for our fish and chips the music system started playing "Saiyan dil mein aana re". Sitting in a French restaurant on the northern fringes of Belgium and listening to a Bollywood song is nothing you would expect. But Europe seems to be filled with all these surprises and French guy from the restaurant said that his father in law is a big fan of Indian movies and hence he has a collection of Bollywood songs too. He even named Amitabh Bacchan though it did sound like Amitabh Bachpan. After a hearty meal and clicking pictures of the city canals illuminated at night by lights, we headed back to the hostel and slept like logs. The next day, the weather god was all angry and as we left Bruges for Brussels, the sky was pouring rain like cats and dogs. Brussels is a disaster when compared to Bruges. It looks like one of those post World War 2 towns, cold and damp and not so pretty. We took the city tour on top of those open air buses which could not be converted into open air ones thanks to the huge amount of rain that Brussels was subjected to on that very day. We were the only duo who seemed to be getting down at all the sight seeing stops, every one else seemed to be contended seeing Brussels from the bus. Finally at the end of the day, we landed up near the famous Mannekan piss. The small boy's statue that keeps on pissing all day and night in a narrow lane of Brussels. And finally we heard the much horrific music of the soul who had made my sleep on a bus en route to Kerela blaring from one of the shops near Mannekan's piss. No doubt he was a Pakistani who had set up a souvenior shop near the famous statue and Himesh was blaring full volume from the music system saying "Dil se pooch le, jaan se pooch le". Incidentally I did want to ask my dil and jaan that till what time I would have remained sane listening to naam tera tera Himesh. And thus ended our Brussels trip, on the way back the Thalys stopped at least 4 times on the track and was 20 minutes late to Paris. They said it is one of those for the record books. I said lets not talk about the Indian Railways record books.

Bidi on the streets of Nurnberg

2007-08-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

Being 25 and acting like a kid requires a lot of efforts. Specially when you are in a distant land where every word worth its money starts or ends with a Z and has Z in the middle to supplement the effect, it takes a lot of effort to throw out the composure of a mature person and do things that you always wanted to do as a kid(more about it later in the post). The scene was in Deustchland or more commonly Germany which I visited last weekend thanks to the fact that one of my project mates had been sent there much against his wishes of leaving Paris. So his double room in the hotel was the perfect abode that I required for planning such kind of a trip and ensuring that I need not pay much. Well it is a seperate story that the way I am draining out all the money from my BNP Paribas bank account, that I might soon have to sing on the streets and make people pay me money for shutting up the horrible cacaphony. I am pretty sure that if the darconian FERA was still in practice in India, these guys from the law enforcing bodies of India would surely have caught up with me to help me save some euros. So last friday at the holy hour of 1700 I escaped from office with tickets in hand for Germany. The holy hour of 1700 is just another holy hour including the holy hour of 1800 where leaving office is considered a henious crime. If only my manager would have seen me, he would have had a fit. I reassigned work here and there much against the protest of other lesser mortals and headed straight to Paris East to catch my train to Frankfurt with that big bulky bag that one of my roommates Sayee had given to me. It was a seperate story that the bag looked dead bulky if you put in just 3-4 T-shirts. So with the bag and the big fat 7th edition of Harry Potter in hand, I reached the Paris East station not before bumping my bag into some unsuspecting souls and getting to hear a mouthful of obscenities in French. I had a window seat and unlike others who appear real casual about not getting one, its an honest confession that I am really thrilled when I am given a window seat. Incidentally the person beside me, a German with a blonde moustache (man it was damn scary) also had the 7th Harry Potter in his hand. A father of two, he convinced his sons to solve the Sudoku while he glanced through pages of the Harry Potter. The German versions of the super fast trains unlike the Belgian versions or the French versions have a display that gives all kind of nasty informations in four languages and also shows the speed at which the train cruises. Soon we were cruising at close to 307 kmph. I mean imagine the shock of a poor guy who used to do a 12kmph on a standard blue and white bus of a specific company on the mother of all higways Hosur Road way back in Bangalore, being hurled forward towards Germany at 307kmph. The train journey on board the DB(DeustchBahn) ICE(Inter City Express) was worth every euro spent on it. And it did give me a chance to plan the acting like a kid stuff when I saw that the driver's cabin was only one glass partition away from the passenger seats.

An ICE

The next day after a sleep of less than 4 hours me and Anirban set off on yet another ICE journey (this time sitting in the cafe onboard the train sipping Bavarian beer) to the beautiful city of Nurnberg known for its castel, its famous Nazi parade grounds and the famous Nazi trials is a cute little city with a lot of things to see. The churches are old and really impressive with the typical gothic structures. They looked like the famous Notre Dame church of Paris. The insides of the church were serene and quite and the sunlight created amazing patterns when they passed through the tinted glasses. After going up the stairs and down the escalator and losing track close to 5 times we were finally able to land up at the tourist information centre of Nurnberg. The small old town with all its sceneic attractions finally of its fountains and the weekend markets, the churches and the museums, the town hall and the excise house finally lands you up at the foot of the castle which houses a museum too. It seemed to be a strange place with more museums than public lavatories on the street. The castle was small and typically German. The tour was of no help as it was also in German. There were hardly 5 people including us two who wanted the English version, rest all seem to have a fair idea of how german was spoken. The most impressive feature of the castle was the watch tower from which the whole city was visible and the well that ran down 305 metres deep into the ground. There were candles placed on a plate with the help of a pulley which were hoisted down to show the depth of the well. We had a Thai lunch in a Bavarian restaurant and sipped down Bavarian beer out of those huge glasses which store more than 500 ml of beer at one go. It gave me no doubts as to why Germans looked as big as boulders and had bellies as big as a 15 months pregnant cow. Post lunch we headed off towards the Nazi parade grounds on board a tram not before running into a store that was selling stuffs that looked very much Indian. And I was rather bemused to find the store selling packets of bidis at the exhorbitant price of 3 euros per packet. The guy from the store with his huge blonde eyebrows explained how bidis made in India were hot favourites in these parts of Germany. Considering the margin that one can gain on this kind of a business, I would have to look no further if I want to start a business. I would be happy enough to import crates of Dum Dum biri at around Rs.1 per packet and sell them at a whooping 3 euros per packet in Germany. The Nazi parade grounds were kind of scary and bore witness to the acts of Nazi. The guided tour of the rooms showed the story of the rise and fall of Nazism in Germany. It was a real pity that had ended in the trial and hanging of Nazi leaders in Nurnberg. After having another round of Bavarian beer and the famous sausages from Nurnberg we set sail again for Frankfurt on board another ICE. And this is where I turned into a complete kid much against the muted protests of Anirban. We had landed up seats in the front row right behind the drivers cabin and every bit of me was interested in landing up into the driver's cabin for once and seeing how they ran the ICE at that huge a speed. Suddenly out of nowhere there were two kids accompanied by their father, who had asked for permission from the train manager entering the drivers cabin. And seeing them go inside I felt the compelling need to go inside the cabin all the more taking grip of me. And finally I asked the ICE driver if I could make my way inside the small cabin and he readily agreed. And thus was fulfilled a dream to be inside the drivers cabin of a train, and since the train was running at around 250kmph, it was all the more exciting to be on board. The driver told us how the throttle was handled and which was the brake and the horns etc. It was 15 minutes of pure ecstacy at the end. Later on I realised that even the drivers feel bored and are happy to show people the tricks of their job rather than sit straight for more than 4 hours and gaze ahead on the tracks. After all even they need some entertainment which they get thanks to unsuspecitng souls like us. Sunday was spent in roaming Frankfurt which incidentally has nothing that interesting except for a boat ride on the river Maine and a metro that runs underground before suddenly appearing out of nowhere on the road and even following traffic signs. A metro on the streets is something that I have never encountered in any other city of the world. Monday morning saw me boarding another ICE and as a co passenger I got a very good looking German girl who seemed to know every language in the world. On the way she was seen reading an English fiction, which gave way to a German one before landing up on to a French guide about Paris. Talk about being multi linguistic!!

With a huge Bavarian beer in hand

Inside the driver's cabin of an ICE

The weired Metro of Frankfurt that runs on the road

Pottermania

2007-07-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

I realised I was a very insignificant creature in this big bad world of ours. If only you could spare and overlook my non vegetarian eating habits you would have realised that I am one of those guys who are contended staying deep down at the bottom of the food chain. So the thought that somebody would have dedicated a book to me came as a rather rude shock. But when the realisation set in I was ecstatic, enthralled and subjected to a whole lot of states of mind which presently I dont remember. The significant event in my life was that J K Rowling had finally decided to dedicate the last book of the Harry Potter series to all her readers who have followed Harry Potter religiously through the last few years in the battle against the dark lord Voldemort. Well it was an honour that I rightfully deserved when you consider that I was one of those 11 million guys who contributed to the record breaking sales on the very first day of the release of the book. But here are some other top reasons why the dedication of the book to readers like me made perfectly logical sense.

Deathly French hallows: I had prebooked the final copy of Harry Potter at the Virgin megastore near my office. Now considering the fact that the French love their book smeared with French (i.e. they always have a fascination for reading the translated version of English bestsellers) it was quite a difficult task to make the French speaking book store attendants understand the entire concept of pre booking the Harry Potter book. Considering the fact that they already had a big Harry Potter release countdown POP display it was a very horrendous experience.
Misorder of the phoneix: Prebooking of the Harry Potter book proved to be quite a misordering when you consider the fact that the book was as freely available as wine bottles in almost all the bookstores of Paris. Well finally I realised that prebooking is only necessary when you are sitting in some remote corner of Timbaktu (wherever that place is).
Goblet of Disaster-Barry Trotter: Incidentally apart from the 6 and half books of Harry Potter that I have had the auspicious opportunity to gobble down, I also have discredited myself by reading two books of the Barry Trotter series. It is a spoof showing the pornograhic side of Barry Trotter who has a strong resemblance with Harry Potter and whose life is a total disaster. I survived two Barry Trotters and according to some it was quite a credit that should be applauded.
Fool Blood cousins: My cousins have always been great fans of the Potter movies. I mean till the time somebody is a fan, it is ok with me but being a fanatic is quite something different. So when the kids channel POGO had this glorious idea of airing Harry Potter flicks 24*7, my cousin had tortured me by making me see the same old movies of Harry Potter over and over again and again. Think of any worser way to spend a weekend in Bangalore!! Had felt myself to be a fool blood bloody fool after that, subjecting myself to such torture.
Philosopher's groans: For more than half a decade now I have had the glorious opportunity of listening to Potter philosophy from humans in various forms shapes and sizes. The most outstanding among them was Darshan a pal from college days who had this immensly irritating habit of relating everything with the life and time of Potter. So the discussions included such hilarious complaints like "our college building does not look like Hogwarts","Wish I could do magic and sneak the question paper before the exam", "Will Voldemort die in the end?" I dont know whether he has finally got his answer with the seventh book because last heard he was honeymooning in God's own country Kerela blissful with his own marriage. Maybe Potter is passe infront as compared to a newly wed wife.
Chamber of Secrets: The little secret is that Bloomsbury would be very disappointed to hear that I bought the pirated version of the book till the 5th edition. That was the only option available to an unemployed guy like me who wanted to know the outcome of the good versus evil story. I hope hearing this bit of information, Bloomsbury does not classify me as a death eater. The other little secret is that Bloomsbury would be very proud to know that the pdf version of the 6th book was available in a matter of hours from the release of the book on the file server of IMT. So the 6th version was also gobbled down by me in a pirated form.
Prisoner's of Pottermania: Love him or hate him but you cant ignore him. I guess the Potter craze is something which is very much a reality and yes a lot of people like me have been prisoners of pottermania since a very long time. And finally the end is here and the series would be remembered as one of the best written series of all times that has appealed to children and youth and also elders (like my mother).

So it does make proper sense for Rowling to dedicate the book to me and the likes of me. This tribute to Harry Potter was all the more inspired by the fact that I saw at least 5 people balancing the huge book in their hands and trying to read it while waking to their offices. I have never tried that kind of insane stuff myself. But I guess everything related to Potter is as unexpected as the books are and one last thought does haunt me like crazy. Doesnt Voldemort tire of losing the duels over and over again. I mean he looks more like our very own Mahishashur who loses the battle against Ma Durga every year and again comes back the next year to lose again. This rare fact inspired a cartoon series which showed that Mahisashur was utterlly frustrated with the every year losing business and tried to outsource this little piece of non value adding work of dying every year to somebody else. I guess Voldemort also requires to think of such options to make the real Harry Potter more in sync with the Barry Trotter that I have come to love. Goodbye Potter, we would surely miss you.

Google your way to serendipitous Etretat

2007-07-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

It was much like any usual day at office with the irritable Kakkar complaining that I do not work and only he does and Anirban trying to convince me that I might be sent back to Bangalore when he came to know that I wanted to download Calvin & Hobbes pdf out of the net and enjoy it in office hours. So there I was sans work because everything seemed to be working perfectly in the huge labyrinth of systems set up in the place I work. A very rare feat indeed and it gave me a chance to explore the full potentials of the unique lifesaver at times created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page called Google. Now most lazy bums at office would not care to find out the lesser known tourist attractions in Europe and would settle for the much obvious choices. But in a backpacker's heavan like Europe, this kind of an attrocity is a crime. And as I had already been convicted by the irritable Kakkar of shying away from work I headed to google and tried to find out a place on the coast of the English Channel with which I had fallen in love while crossing on a ferry from Calais to Dover, one fine trip that is best kept a secret.

A lot of googling on the site of the french tourism department and google photos with a frequent trip to the thalys website for finding out train links to places on the coast finally brought out Fecamp and Etretat as the natural choices. It was supposed to be beautiful, an awesome place on the coast with the cliffs of white rock rising from the waters of the Channel. Just a three paragraph writeup on the place on the Lonely Planet book for touring France did give me doubts about the place. A few French words thrown into the google translator and navigating through a completely french site got me the bus links to the station from far off Etretat. Google has its own potentials provided you know what to search rightly. So off we were on a Saturday early morning to Fecamp and Etretat. The explorers included me, Anirban and the workaholic Kakkar. The inclusion of Kakkar was the glorious idea of Mr. Anirban as he wanted to gel with his soon to be hommie. By the way did I spell that correctly? The Corail Intercity trains were quite a treat to be travelling on. The pleasant Bonjour from the ticket inspector made me compare her with the grumpy faced TTE on Indian trains. Indian TTEs never seem to smile, as if the code of conduct of TTEs as specified by the Indian Railways does not allow them to smile or wish somebody good day or a thank you. The Corail dropped us at Breaute Bruzeville and from there a small train got us to Fecamp. The coast of Fecamp was a pebble beach with cliffs lining both the edges of the beach. The conditions overcast and the weather windy, thanks to the English Channel had made it chilly and enjoyable all the more. There were people on the beach engrossed in their activity of fishing for nothing because for the half an hour I was nearby, one had not even managed to catch one fish from the channel. There was a lighthouse in the distance jutting out into the sea and high up above the cliffs were windmills whirling about at huge speeds (grand vitesse--could not resist showing off my French knowledge :-D ). After a meal of delightful kababs and posing with a lot of rusting anchors on the road, we set off to visit the Benedictine factory of Fecamp. Acutally more of a palace in nature, it houses the only place in the world where the alcoholic drink Benedictine is made at. The history of Benedictine dates back to the time when a Venetian monk Dom Bernardo created an elixir with 27 plants and spices. The commercial production was started in 1863 by Alexander Le Grande in Fecamp. The exhibition of the palace was magnificient with the tour taking us to the production area with its huge barrels for fermentation of the drink and it finally ended with us getting to savour a taste of Benedictine.

We left Fecamp in a bus headed towards the town of Etretat through lush fields gazing at huge cows having football sized udders on the route. The trip that lasts for 16 kilometers takes about half an hour on the Keolis bus. Etretat welcomes you with its very old structured appearance. There are hotels that have stood for ages and look rustic en route to the coast. On coast the beach still seems rocky but one is welcomed by the pleasant sight of the cliffs jutting out into the sea and look like white elephants with their trunks out in the sea. The weather in France changes much in the same way as Zaheera Sheikh's statements in the famous court case. At one instance it is as cloudy as if it would rain and within half an hour the weather would have changed drastically, with the sun blazing down on you. And much faster than the change of weather, the clothes on the coast change for most French guys. So with the conditions overcast and wind fast, there was no one on the beach who could be seen wearing swimsuits. A moment later with the sun out and blazing literally every one on the beach was wearing nothing else apart from swimsuits. No doubt it was a royal treat to the eyes, but we three looked kind of the most overdressed persons on the beach with our jeans and T-shirts. The trek to the top of the cliff was awesome. The whole town could be seen in the distance, and there was a golf course on the other side of the cliff, lush green in appearance and ever appealing for an 18 hole match. Considering my knowledge of the lovely game, even Tiger Woods would have felt ashamed to see me in any golf course around the world. The scene from the top of the cliff was quite awesome with the English Channel infront of us with its deep blue appearance. The stupid asses that I went with were too tired to trek up the other cliffs and hence we settled for the huge caves on the bottom of the cliffs. Incidentally these caves get completely submerged in a high tide situation. Cursing the worn out sole of my shoe and slipping along the algae mass on the way, we finally made it to the weired looking caves. The trip finally ended with a siesta on the rocky beach. While coming back to the station, the bus had a total of 3 souls for the journey of 20 kms, incidentally we were the only 3 on board. Ever criticising and cribbing Kakkar also was contended with the trip which is a big acheivement in itself. Its easy to please a Paris Hilton than a Dinesh Kakkar as I have realised in the last few months.

The pics are here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ainindra/FecampAndEtretat

Illimtie movies....Illimite snores.....

2007-07-13T05:24:00.000-07:00

As compared to the fourth movie in the Harry Potter sequence, the fifth one was a major disappointment and all expectations came crashing through the roof with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix not being able to keep up to the standards of the other Potter movies. With a lacklustre screenplay and a horrible script and roles, the movie seems to be moving around in circles leaving the audience confused and dazed and made people like me doze off for a few minutes, which according to my moive watching mate was quite a depressing performance considering that in a movie called Hoax, I had fallen asleep when the commercials were being aired and woke up when the credits were being shown. It was accomapnied by a few snores of the utmost decible level according to him, though like every god fearing, soul searching human who snores, I vehemently denied that I had snored. The venue of such a fantastic snoring resort is the UGC Cine centre near my office which has 16 halls which incidentally shows the latest Hollywood movies. At 18 euros per month for an unlimited number of times UGC cine centre of La Defense has become like a second home for me and Anirban. There have been days when we have fitted in 3 movies back to back. The movie mania bug has bitten us so much that the security at the entrance of the multiplex seldom check our bags which they follow very religiously for the other viewers. Considering that we were spending so much of time in the movie hall, we became the prime victims of a office humor. The joke was that we two can save a lot of money, if we just buy a tent and set it up inside the UGC and stay there, considering that we spent half our free time in the multiplex. If you want a gross scale discount and watch movies without even shelling out a single cent from your pocket, you just have to catch hold of some unsuspecting souls, some fresh souls who would have arrived from India for the project and make him a patron of the 18 euro offer. You just have to introduce one new person to the concept of the 18 euros per month offer and you would get one month free of any liability and watch unlimited movies for free. Just that the competition to get new members into the foray of the 18 euros per mois offer. Going by this I am really tempted to make the much required comparison with wathcing a movie at Bangalore. The last city that I stayed made me shell out the maximum of amounts for accomodation, fooding, auto fare, kaam wali bai and finally going out for a movie. At Rs. 220 for a new movie at inox and Rs. 180 at PVR, Bangalore was a real killer. 18 euros per month for an unlimited set of movies is really cheap when compared to even Banglaore standards where tickets were a rarity on weekends and you had to push and shove and try by standing in lines, check online or the ticketing machine at the movie halls and pray that some seats were empty so that you had an option to buy the tickets. As compared to the PVRs and INOXs,at UGC there have been times where I have realised that there were 7 people watching a show of a movie. Though the only real sad part of it is that there are no Bollywood movies to cherish and enjoy. Going by the last set of jokes in the column of office humor people around have speculated that for me and Anirban, they would soon start showing Hindi movies. So lets see how far these predictions of the lesser mortals become correct coz I did once manage to see a poster of Govinda and Karishma Kapoor trying to say something in French to me. Incidentally with my knowledge of French being restricted to Sortie, Merci and Bonjour I understood nothing of it. So good or bad, humor or horror, cute or ugly we watch it all, as long as it is 18 euors per mois. And the latest office humor doing the rounds is that Anirban Mookherjee's smiling battisi dikhau photo will soon replace Marie Duval in the card below and he would soon be turned into the brand ambassador of UGC illimite. I guess I will watch more movies this weekend, to catch up with Mr. Mookherjee.

As London beckons....

2007-06-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

In dino dil mera, mujhse hai keh raha.....tuuuu khwab saja....tuuu jee le zara.....hai tujhe bhi ijazat kar le tu bhi mohabat....sings loud the music player of my laptop as I am penning down this blog entry. Berang si hai bari zindagi....kuch rang to bharun.....main apni tanhai ke vaaste....ab kuch to hai karun....And as I listen to this song from Life in a Metro I feel life is the best thing that has ever happened to me. The journey of life which we take up everyday, moving ahead experiencing things sometimes does leave you sometimes with situations that cant be analysed on the rule book of rationality. And I have fallen in love with life over and over again because of these reasons and situations that have made me feel so alive, so needed, so fulfilled and so loved. But most of the time we give reasons and justification to lose all these chances of picking up life and placing it on a roller coaster ride by citing n number of reasons. Maybe even I have done that a lot due to various reasons at one point of time finally seeing life moving away from my hand and leaving me deeply in grief. But somewhere it did teach me that these chances of living are very short lived, and so sometimes impulse should guide you on your journey of life at least when these opportunites of living are thrown up infront of you. In these ocassions you just have to get on the roller coaster and enjoy the thrill of the fast speed at which life goes over there and experience the significance of living altogether. And maybe that is what I have learned from the trip to Pune one fine day in April, suddenly impulsive to the core. And the roller coaster has not stopped moving since that day, bringing in it wake new experiences and making me feel all the more alive every day.

Pune happened one friday evening. With no plans to go, I was still enticed into the brashness of it by an impulse for doing something for somebody, who really expected it. There is a great sense of acheivement one does feel when one meets somebody's expectations. Pune was just like that. The mind was hazy about the details but I do remember today, the flight booking part and calling up somebody and saying "Can you do me a favour and book a hotel for me at Pune?". And as they say, rest is history. Barely 36 hours spent in the city of the ferguson college made me see life in a whole new way, made me feel that brashness and impulse need not be negative thoughts and feelings, and that someimes the eyes do speak more than the words uttered. And the same thing happened in Pune, Pune was about exploring, expressing, sharing, nurturing, caring and a whole lot of knowing. The games that we played till the dead of the night, in the form of sharing the secrets of our life was one game that I would remember for a lifetime. And when the time came to leave Pune, that Monday morning as the dawn was breaking, and it was early morning, and the taxi was waiting and blowing its horn, I really did hate to wake somebody up and say goodbye. The moment would always be there in my memory well inscribed with its intricate details. There was so much to be said, so much to be expressed and yet there in the airport we could not even speak more than a few words. There was so much to say but so little time and watching those last moments perish and the seconds ticking away was really painful. If John Denver's song ever seemed most appropriate to me, it was at these moments. Thanks Pallavi for making me listen to this song and Deeghii for making the meaning of it known on that monday morning at the Pune airport.

And when Pune, intense with its 36 hours of experiencing life happened, it was a matter of praying hard for the universe to conspire for just another chance to experience the life that 36 hours had offered us in Pune. And Paulo Cohelo in his famous book The Alchemist has said that if you want something really hard, the whole universe conspires to make it happen. And lo it did happen, in the city of Mumbai in the form of a visa stamping. Deeghii came down for me from Pune in search of the string of life, for the thrill of life, for experiencing it all in those few days of Mumbai before we both flew off in search of new places to the Europe and middle east. Mumbai as a city is synonymous to life, its fast pace, its local trains running by the seconds hand of a watch, its night life, its hurridness all make it one place where life cannot be missed. Its there to be grabbed with open hands right infront of you and making you feel that it is yours fully. You tend to blend in the liveliness of Mumbai and experience it in its own way. Mumbai would remain etched on the contours of memory for all the reasons it did have to offer. The night spent watching the light waves on the stairs of the gateway. The whole world infront of us was just the sea with its innumerable launches all shrouded in shades of black and so peaceful and the towering gateway in its gleam of orange behind us. The heart to heart talk we had there, which finally did break the ice and gazing at the stars made me realise that even the city of busy billions could have places that offer its own serenity. And Deeghii you made that night special with your voice against the serenity and calmness of the waves splashing against the rocks. The rythm of the waves clashing and the heart to heart chat that we had are to be cherishd for a lifetime. If one were to ever experience the wild adrenaline rush, my suggestion would be to go to Chowpatty and get on in one of those human operated giant wheels (not really giant-but it does seem like a giant). With every risk of toppling, which incidentally I did make it do once, a complete wobble, I was very scared to hop into one of those. But still on Deeghii's insistence I did try to enjoy the ride and keep my eyes open while it went up and down. Alas most of the time my eyes were shut close. The day ended with another brash incident in the form of a visit to the Hard Rock cafe in Parel. The entire feeling of hard rock being played in that great factory kind of a cafe with famous rockstar posters hanging from here and there, and all illuminated in the faint low light of the cafe, it was one heck of an awesome feeling getting completely sloshed in gallons of beer and tequila and we both partied for hours together till late at night. The other days were spent roaming around the entirity of Mumbai and finally culminated in watching the movie "life in a metro" while experiencing every bit of "life in a metro". I would remember the way you shouted when the monkey snatched away the black berries packet from your hands, the way we had tons of green mango, the launch ride to Elephanta in that special launch, the way you poured the beer, the way we saw the stars and the planes flying out of Mumbai sitting on the Juhu beach and telling ourselves that a few days hence we both would fly out of the country. And fly we did in search of our destinies, but Deeghii you made me experience life in its fullest form every moment we spent together in Pune and Mumbai. And now London beckons, inspite of a whole lot of problem including the visa and the recipisse and a whole gang's misinformation about leaving France for London. And all this is just to experience life with you and make it feel special. You are the alchemist chosen by destiny to give the golden touch to my life. Make it happen. Honestly, truly, deeply London here I come.....

Taxi No. 9211 in Paris

2007-06-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday and for the french, Dimanche I was out on an assignemnt. An assignment that cost me a healthy meal of chicken biriyani and raita by the famous chef of the fourth floor of Maison de L'Inde called Mr Mushtaq. I was supposed to go to the Charles de Gaulle aiport for the second time in more hospitable climatic conditions as compared to the first time and pick up a colleague cum friend who was coming from India for the same project. I say that climatic conditions were more hospitable because of the fact that the day I landed straight from a scorching 43 degrees Delhi heat, the temperature that welcomed me to Paris was a mere 8 degrees centigrade. Considering the fact that I had fully disregarded any ideas that had come into my mind of carrying a jacket along in the hand luggage instantly hit me in the form of a cold shock as I repented putting the lone jacket in the check in baggage. Nonetheless things were not that bad this time as the temperature was a comfortable something, but I surely was sad to miss the chance of not being made to cook combined with the joy of eating biriyani prepared by some non suspecting good soul. I also realised that no matter whatever way you try, and even if you have a 3 zone monthly pass it would still take u to some 8 euros to reach the airport from the place I stay which incidentally is the same even if you have not shelled out 70 euros for the Orange carte 3 zone monthly pass which by any estimates is very very unfair. The permutation and combination that I tried to do to save some money to reach the aiport with my much beloved monthly pass left me frustrated and made me reach late to the aiport even after spending the same 8 euros.

So finally the mission came to an end when I safely spotted the one and only Anirban Mookherjee at the CDG airport desperately searching for me as you would search for a public urinal when your bladder is seconds from bursting away. I was at the CDG on a Sunday afternoon trying to spot the one and only Anirban who was coming from India on one of those Air India flights that makes you realise why Kingfisher is a hit with its pretty beauties in red as compared to the dreadful aunties in sarees. Last hard on board an Air India flight, the pretty aunty who was serving drinks, when asked for a second helping by a young gentleman on board to fulfill his dollar dreams was flatly refused a second helping with a strict glance and a small lecture on the effect of alcohol on young livers. Must have been a cost cutting measure of the aviation minister I guess, which aims towards making people feel miserable by portraying horrifying thing so that they give up any notions of asking for a second something. So there he was at CDG, hard to miss because of the extra flabs that made him one of the boradest creatures roaming the terminals. After all the formalities and encashing of the travellers cheques which is like a regular feature that is entrusted on people's shoulders to make them feel all the more uncomfortable when they reach onsite finally we made our way to the taxi stand.

Well the story gets interesting henceforth as we both decided that if it is a taxi that we are going to hire it would be a Mercedes. Daimler Chrysler needs to be the preferred choice as we cruise down the roads and alleys of Paris. Well not that we were spoilt brat sons of big buck dads who own oil mines or Hilton hotels but still this was more to do with the fact that the first taxi fare from the aiport to the destination is always refundable from the coffers of the company provided you insist and not forget to take the bill. Later on it becomes a really miserable affair to book a taxi to take you from one destination to another on the streets of Paris when you consider that it takes the same amount of money for a to and fro bus trip to London from Paris as it takes to come from the aiport to the centre of Paris. So our Mercedes dreams were all the more justified under this kind of economic disequilibrium situations. Safely avoiding a Peugot we got into the Merc taxi parked behind and incidentally thanks to all the conspiracy that god plans out high high up above there much above the tropospheres and stratospheres the taxi driver knew english. The Queens language in the land of the Louvre and the Eiffel tower is as uncommon as finding Polar bears in the savanna grassland. So, intellignet is the human who does a course at the Alliance Francais centres spread across the cities of India before landing up at CDG so that the merci and the bonjour and the et and the le and the homme and the femme do not seem to be things that an alien is speaking to you. So the queen's language speaking cab driver was inquisitive about everything and more than the inquisitiveness he had an opinion about everything. So at the mention of the fact that we were from India, his inquisitiveness went on to which city we were from and form that to why we were there and which company and what postion and finally when this ended, the barge of opinions started. So he started off with an opinion of India followed it up with an opinion of the cities of India and finally reached a climax with the opinion about Shahrukh Khan and bollywood movies which he said his wife likes, his kids like and possibly his neighbours also like.

The famous Merc Taxi....

Unluckily even if he had an opinion about Indian actors and his knowledge seemed to be far and spread, he confessed sheepishly that he was not well aware of the roads of Paris and was completely unaware of the place that we wanted him to go to i.e. Gopi's house which was soon to be Gopi and Anirban's house. Now this place is too small to give anyboday any persepctive about the person called Gopi. His irritating nature has most of the Infosys staff and a lot of French citizens utterly delirious and prying for his blood. Anyway more updates about Gopi would follow in later posts as I get to know this person better (its a torture beleive me). So Gopi's abode which was somewhere in a god forsaken place was our destinantion. And I was at the helm of guiding the entire convoy i.e. the lonesome taxi to the destination of Becon les Buryeres where incidentally I had been only once. So being entrusted with such kind of jobs was quite a nightmare in its own way when you consider that in Paris a single wrong turn can land you up in circles as you would be sitting happily in the taxi seeing the meter go further north too many cents at a time.

The only way out was to consult the map. Unlike the streets of India where asking directions is as simple as peeing on the roadside. But in Paris just like the way you cannot pee in the open roads and lakes, in the same way the first thing you should set your hands on, not to get lost is the ubiquitous lanes, bylanes and the metro network of the Paris city is a map. Incidentally all the metro stations have such maps which are very much gratuit and hence you dont really have to think of shelling out some 10-15 odd euros for the map. So off we went on a wild goose search for Gopi's house with the help of a Paris tourism map which had safely disregarded most of the roads and only concentrated on the 14 metro lanes and 6 RER lines that have penetrated the city of Paris and now rest on layers and layers of tunnels. So with the map, I told the cab driver to go right, then left, then again right and so we went on traversing paths that the map showed till we reached what was the station of Becon from where Gopi's house was a stone's throw away. Alas the only problem was that the house was on the other side of the station and unlike India you were sure not to find any unmanned level crossing to cross over to the other side. So off we went on a detour of a further kilometer and finally reached Gopi's house who was err not waiting with open arms but more of a whole container full of sambhar and rice which we safely avoided by feigning overeating at Mc. Donalds at the airport. But more interesting is the fact that Mr Cabbie was hell bent on convincing me to the fact that I was quite a good choice when it came to Parisian taxi drivers and I should really think of becoming a taxi driver if I really had any kind of appreciation of the talent that god had bestowed on me. Inspite of repeated interruptions with me saying "I work over here for an IT company", Mr Cabbie made all efforts to convince me to take up the full time profession of a cab driver, which by any standards is worth considering as an average one way from the airport to the city usually costs some 50 euros which by any standard is more than the one way flight ticket to Amsterdam next weekend. It seems Paris is giving me the opportunity to explore a lot of these alternate professions if I am by chance kicked out of my job which I feel seems highly probable considering the last two weeks development where I have goofed up like anything. But in this case like in all other case where you goof up, the actual goofing up part could be attributed to someone else. So the latest dilemma is that of choosing between becoming a cook or a taxi driver of the taxi carrying a number plate of 9211. Still pondering.....

Slammed a Grand Slam...

2007-06-07T06:43:00.000-07:00

The lips relax, the hands lose grip, the whole world around turns into deep shades of black, something inside tells you dont lose it up but someone else says give in to me, life is beautiful on this side, and then there in that dilemma someone shouts out in the most unearthly voice possible a single phrase which sounds like "Endoneel" and I realise that I had drifted off to a place much more wonderful than Switzerland called Sleepland sitting right there in the client office with my boss infront of me and my onsite PM on the other side eyeing me with disgust. The look on his face would say it all that if ever this project goes out of our hand, this sleeping beauty is the one who would be thrashed and smashed and bashed up in the most beautiful manner on the streets of chic Paris. The French obsession of removing the R when it comes to pronunciation of words with R has made me Endoneel from Indranil.

So here is a post from chic Paris with me desperately stopping myself from falling asleep after a tummy full meal of pizzas that had cheese spread on it in similar plethora as makkhan is spread on alu parathas in the dhabas of Haryana and Punjab highways. The pizzas with its thing crust and Margarita cheese toppings made the entire office crowd hog like anything and what better way to celebrate a bon appetizing lunch than to drift off into a siesta and bring the Spanish influence to France. Yet am alive and awake and am trying to procure toothpicks from somewhere so that I can hold the upper lids in place and not fall asleep. This unique technique comes from a purely British soul called Mr. Bean and considering the immense love for the Britishers that the French posess I might be a dead soul walking the streets of Paris if I tried any of my pure British ideas. Colonialization has had its own disadvantages as I see it now.

Chic Paris, as I refer to this place because of its obsession with anything fashionable gave me the chance of a lifetime last weekend to do something that I had so desperately wanted to do. Well later about that part but firstly about the fashion brigade called Paris. Everyday from dawn to when the metros and the RERs finally stop for the day late at night (lifelines of Paris, I take one everyday and I realise how important it is to my existence) , the streets of Paris seem to be transformed into big fashion ramps. The old, the young and even the kids on the street seem to be fashion concious and seem to be wearing something so chic, so fashionable that you can compare it with any of the glossy Vogues or Elles. So here I was in Paris where smooching on the streets is as common a sight as people peeing on Indian roads acheiving one of the rare dreams that I never thought would ever be possible. I got to watch a grand slam match (the French Open) at the Roland Garros. Even if it involved standing in the line for 3 long hours and being subjected to a real PITA sardar for some 6 hours yet at the end it was all worth it. The website of French Open apart from hosting an obscene amount of Maria Sharapova photos and thanking the sun for showing its face finally also talked in fineprints about entree de soir. Now going by my knowledge of French which is of as high quality as Jayalalitha's knowledge of Hebrew, I was able to understand that soir in French was evening. This was more to do with the complimentary copies of Direct Soir that are handed out every evening on the entrance of the La Defense station. So finally it was so deciphered from the site that evening tickets would be available for sale from 5 p.m for the last match of the day for seats that had got empty since morning. The optimistic sardar of MDI who had an opinion about almost every thing on earth wanted to see the best match that was being held in the Chartier court (a Nadal match) finally realised after about 40 minutes of waiting that it was not supposed to come our way. So finally Mr. Opinion had to change his opinion and shift to the second best. Thus we bought tickets for the Court 1 match without even knowing who was playing whom. A mere enquiry from a 40 something tennis enthusiast standing ahead of us in the line to get in the stadium about who was playing whom bought a sarcastic answer which sounded like McEnroe. Mr Opinion beleived in him and tennis enthusiast 40 something had a good laugh about this. Then there was another war of opinions between surd and tennis entusiast about Paes and Bhupati parting ways which slowly drifted off to discussions like if they were gay or not?

Hewitt was playing Nienmen (a Finnish guy) on court 1. The clay court's brown effect, the BNP Paribas green ads, Lacoste ads on the stands, the sheer power of Hewitt's serves, the stamina and of course the gibberish of Sardar made it all the more memorable. The sun shining down, the mexican wave and the match which lasted for 3 hours and the sheer stamina associated with it, enticed me. All in all it was a great day watching a great match which Hewitt one with his sheer stamina but with a Finnish guy giving him a tough time.

Cook na Kaho.....

2007-06-05T02:44:00.000-07:00

And before Ekta Kapoor, if you ever watched television devoid of the Saas-Bahu sagas you might have come across a chef named Sanjeev Kapoor with a million dollar smile hosting a programme called Khana Khazana cooking delicacies and smiling away to glory. Seeing him host this show for years I had this weired notion that cooking is one of the most fun activities you can ever indulge your own self into. After spending 15 days away from the country in a different continent I can fully vouch that my notion about cooking was as much away from reality as New Delhi is from New York. So everyday on the 4th floor of the Indian hostel in Paris, you would see a cook with as disgusting a look on his face as a person subjected to hours of Sidhuism trying to make some delicate cuisine which finally looking nothing more than blobs of green and red and hating every bit of it.

The only solace is that everybody on the 4th floor except Mushtaq (a lawyer who looks 40 but claims to be 20) hates to cook. Considering the fact that it is easier to procure camel meat rather than proper Indian food at an affordable price in Paris there is no other option than to cook dinner and to pour out obscenities while doing the same. While the lunch always lasts of items like pizza, panini, pasta or burgers, items for which in Paris you spend a fortune when you convert the same into INR from euros. It just took me 3 days to convince my mind not to do the conversion and curse myself for spending a fortune on lunch. So its been poulet(chicken) cheddar or menu viaggio or a thon(tuna) and dinde(turkey) pizza on which I am surviving in Paris. The cooking misadventure started with the ingredient buying misadventure from La Chapelle which happens to be one place in Paris where you will see more saree shops than boutique shops, more hindi and tamil DVDs than French DVDs and more Indians and Sri Lankans than French in general. After the initial delght of finding stuffs that looked Indian the biggest decision that I had to take was what all things I could take to cook. Considering that my knowledge of any kind of recipes was no more than anything which you could count on one hand, it was too easy to make that choice. I bought the bare essentials that Air France had refused to carry with its horrendously low 20 kg restriction and then I set of cooking. And from then on I have cooked egg curry and forgot to put salt in it. I have cooked scrambeled egg and burnt the container in which I was cooking. I have cooked rice that required another round of microwaving after they were cooked to soak up all the water, and I have perfected the art of microwaving already cooked rotis. I guess the same plight is shared by every resident of the 4th floor of Maison De L'Inde well except Mushtaq that is who is ever ready to cook. So we have a Sarathi Da who tried to make a curry out of cucumbers and it turned out to be one of the most disgusting dishes I have ever had in a long time. Then there is Bhaskar Da who stays the life of a bachelor even while being married and curses his post doctoral research for this plight. He has perfected the art of making different kinds of chicken dishes and is one of the most resourceful guys on the floor in whose closet u will find every masala and even ginger garlic paste. Then there is the guy from IIT and the duo from MDI who beleive in nothing but ready to eat menus. I guess the topline of Kohinoor has increased drastically with these guys coming to Paris. And finally there is Prashant who stays with his wife in the hostel and calls me Indhra inspired by a Chiranjeevi movie (supposed to be a big hit) and cooks every night for his wife. Last Sunday he was seen wearing an apron covering him from tip to toe which his wife had bought for him so that his clothes dont get soiled cooking. Its such a nice feeling to see people love each other like this and get closer because of a common dislike for cooking. Evenings in the fourth floor are times when you will find everyone sharing the disgusting things that they have cooked and eating together as if competing for the title of the worst cook. But still its fun....Its the way of life and it is what life together in a hostel means. There are strong attachments that you build waiting for the pressure to build in the pressure cooker to cook your rice, which takes a great deal of time on the hot plates of the hostel. And I guess this one year which would be spent cooking makes me a better cook to share a kitchen and take up half the cooking responsibilities with the one whom I want to share the rest of my life with. Over the phone she has been teaching me a lot of new recipies and so have I been teaching her microwave cooking in which I have perfected myself over years. Aur isiliye mujhe ab se cook na kaho, chef keh lo yaar. Sanjeev Kapoor you better watch out, a competitor is on his way in the romantic city of Paris learning the tricks of the culinary trade.

When things turn French.....

2007-05-24T05:28:00.000-07:00

And it has been eons since I logged into blogger and certainly a lot of things have changed since then. Firstly I was welcomed by an unknown blogger.com interface when I suddenly realised that the default language of my blogger account had suddenly changed into French by some voodoo magic all of a sudden. While till the last time I posted in this blog it welcomed me with a happy "New Post" link, it now decided to welcome me with a "Nouveau Message" link. And this was one of the last things that could have changed because suddenly everything beside me has happily decided to change itself into French. And apart from the popup which says "Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically!" and the things that I have scribbled over here everything near me is horribly French, even the Diet Coke bottle that I am using as a water bottle these days has every information written in French. The worst is the keyboard which I am using presently, its one of those French keyboards wherein the @ button is where the " button should be and vice versa and suddenly learning French seems to be the priority of the minute because I have somehow landed up in France.

Its been long since I applied for the French work permit thanks to a project that I was working on for a French client. And finally I got a stamped visa, the very first one on the passport that took me some 5 months to get thanks to the capriciousness of the passport issuing authorities. So here I am in the land of fashion, the Eiffel tower, the Louvre, the Roland Garros and Fashion TV trying to adjust to 17 hours of sunligt and a sun that does not want to set till 10:30 at night. So after a irritating wait for more than 5 months to procure the work permit that seemed to take the Fench authorities as much time to process as an Atal Behari speech I landed up here after seeing most of India ( considering my visa interview was in Mumbai and my work place is Bangalore and my home is at Kolkata and my flight was from Delhi) I landed here last Sunday in an Air France that seemed to be so huge as to fit in an entire playground of people with temperatures that were 10-11 degrees centigrade.

I got my reservations done at the Indian hostel in the Cite Universitaire area of Paris and straight out of the airport I had to wait for some 2 hours before I finally could find someone to open the door for me for the hostel. Finally an old lady, a doctor by profession who had some very strong views about corruption in India and who was very usure if opening up the gate for me could land her up in serious trouble decided to chit chat with me finally giving me an entry to the hostel. The best part was the chance of being driven in a Mercedes at 120 kmps/hr from the airport to the hostel and loving every bit of the journey which cost a whooping 53 euros (close to INR 3500). And since then life has been about discovering the Paris way of life. It is about reading maps and getting used to the zone system of the local trains called RER. It is about sharing kitchens with a bunch of Indians and cooking together (includeds 3 more bengalis). It is about discovering different Indian things in the shops of a place called Gare du Nord. It is about paying 2.5 euros for a cup of tea and fretting about it. It is about being mesmerized by the serendipitous feeling of discovering a park with a big lake in it just next to the hostel. It is about getting complimentary newspapers in French and trying to solve the Sudoku on the way to office trying to avoid being crushed in the RER crowd. And it is also about being mesmerized working in La Defense area of Paris among high rises and the Grande Arche. And finally before I push off here are some pics of the place that I am working at....more to come...

Poyla Boishakh after 6 years......

2007-04-16T03:17:00.000-07:00

I do not deny the fact that I am a foodie of sorts and you can surely find a few extra pounds hanging here and there even after trying to slog for hours at the gym at my workplace. Nonetheless food attracts me with an attraction that can be compared to the fascination that Captain Haddock has for alcoholic things or Obelix has for wild roasted boars. And this weekend was all about falling in love with Bengali food over and over again and coming into touch with the Bengali roots of mine that has become a bit hazy since the last 5 years that I have stayed outside Bengal missing every possible festival and fanfare.

The ocassion was the Bengali New Year also known as Poila Boishakh which during my childhood I was content with calling Koyla Boishakh. The Bengali souls whom I have lunch with at my workplace, wanted me to treat them for an imminent onsite assignment that has stayed imminent for a very long time at 6, Ballygunge Place, a very upmarket Bengali food restaurant. So on the 14th of April which was supposed to be the last day of the year 1413 accroding to the Bengali calendar we landed up at the restaurant in the Indranagar area of Bangalore. I was literally starving thanks to an all night power cut on Friday which did not allow me to microwave my Maggi for dinner and finally I had also skipped my breakfast. Though we did not have any reservations we still could manage to get seats without much fanfare. Incidentally the only thing on the menu for the day was the buffet priced at a whooping Rs465+ taxes. Surely the rates were a bit too much if you were not that hungry on any given day. But since the three of us had been hungry enough on that day we decided to gulp down as much as we could to make the best out of the 465 that we were about to spend. It is a seperate story that if people were as like minded as us three, 6 Ballygunge place would have seen its P&L account for those two days in deep shades of red.

To make the lesser mortals jealous here is the list of things that we had in our unlimited buffet:

1. Aam Panna Shorbot

2. Bhat

3. Cholar Daal

4. Alur Dom

5. Alu Potol

6. Luchi

7. Begun Bhaja

8. Fish Fry

9. Chingri Macher Malai Curry

10. Bhapa Ilish

11. Doi Chicken

12. Mutton Kosha

13. Chatni

14. Papad

15. Lengcha

16. Shondesh

17. Roshogolla

18. Mishti Doi

19. Pan

and as in any Bengali menu card the 20th item was surely Abar Ashben (which translated into Bengali meant Please come again...), which after gulping down multiple quantities the abar ashben part was quite an improbable thing to do. And obviously after this kind of a gastronomic adventure my condition was similar to that of a Bengali film actor in a movie of yesteryears who in a film had eaten so much that he had to be carried home in a charpai. Realising that no charpai was coming my way, I was contended with the thought of going back to my home in an auto and drop off into a deep afternoon siesta in a typical Bengali ishtyle.

Sunday saw us continue with the insane idea that started off as a small conversation on the bulletin board of our organisation on Friday afternoon and make it a huge success. Friday afternoon events on the bulletin board saw some desperate soul suggesting the idea of a Poila Boishakh celebration in typical Bengali style. And then it started with people adding up names to the list of people interested in any kind of Poila Boishakh celebration. Soon the list was filled with names who were very much interested in the idea. Friday evening saw some 7-8 people assemble in the Cafe Coffee Day of the workplace and after a heartful round of adda of more than 2 hours, we finally came up with a plan to celebrate Poila Boishakh in a typical Bengali way. So it was Ranajoy's bari in BTM that became host to a celebration of the Bengali spirit.

A group of 20 people, had finally made it for the adda, which by any estimate was a good number. Barely knowing each other, the spirit of adda spread wide and fast and finally every one was affected by the adda virus. The topics ranged from outrageous teachers in classes, to Saurav Ganguly, going forward to Arsenal and Satyajit Ray's films and finally moving on to more mundane topics like work and coding. Discussed over sips of beer from the big Kingfisher cans bought for the occassion it was one heck of an adda session. Lunch consisted of Biriyani (finally the North Indian style) and chicken allong with mishti doi and sweets. Post lunch the mood turned creative with Kishore da songs being sung followed by the more contemporary Baranday Roddur of Bhoomi. A guy amongst us called Avra mesmerized us with his sarod playing skills and followed it up with a performance on the mouth organ. After 6 years of being out of touch with the spirit of Poila Boishakh, it was a beautiful feeling going back to the roots and bathing myself in the spirit of Bangalinaya. And before I sign off its a Shubho Noboborsho to one and all. Tomra shokole boro ebong choto ra amar shubho noboborsher priti o shubhechha niyo. Beche thakuk Bangaliyana spirit.

Weakness-e-pedia

2007-04-06T00:49:00.000-07:00

It took 277 tries to successfully clone clone the much famous sheep Dolly as one of my teachers had said in one of the famous Bio classes way back in school. And it took almost the same kind of effort to procure tickets for the newly released Mira Nair film called Namesake based on the book by the same name written by Jhumpa Lahiri. The sheer lack of quality theatres in Bangalore had ensured that Namesake was released in only one movie hall making the possibilty of getting tickets as remote as listening to Rabri Devi speak fluent english. So there I was enquiring about the tickets at Rex for the next day's show when the guy on the other side obviously bored with the mundane job of scratching off seats on the seating sheets and counting money and tearing away tickets from the colourful ticket books gave me a nasty look and suggested that I better read the fine prints that adorned the many sides of the window and hence I found that I was 45 minutes late and advance booking was again scheduled to start at 10A.M the next day. As an afterthought the guy who had just given me the nasty look told me to come back the next morning for the tickets. So there I was the next morning all decked up for Mission Ticket when a notice at the movie hall caught my eyes and making me feel as stupid and angry as possible. Apparently the 5-15 show of Namesake did not have any advance bookings and booking was to start at sharp 3-30 for the show. I landed up at a friend's place and promised her that I would cook only to fall asleep and considering the kind of lazy bum that I am we both landed up eating junk at Mc. Donalds rather than taking the pains to cook. At the much auspicious hour of 3-30, the shubh lagan, the shubh muhrat when Namesake bookings were to start I found myself standing in a line that had kind of snaked its way to look as big as a python. In flat 8 minutes the entire balcony tickets were sold out and when the shutters were downed as I stood awaiting my turn, third in the line feeling as sheepish and angry as possible. Finally it had become a matter of pride to get the tickets after being turned down three times on one pretext or the other. The Rear Stalls did have seats to spare for our group of 6 and the movie was much enjoyable though the seats were uncomfortable, the popcorn was sad and the security were all angry and shouting at the same time.

And finally I became aware of the Frankinstein in me when one of the select few people who read my blog (a number that is less than the number of Amur Leopards alive in the world) suggested that I should list down my weaknesses in one of the posts here. At first glance it looked like a typically MBA entrance or two years down the line from that an MBA placement kind of a question but on closer examination it seemed like she wanted to know what makes me feel vulnerable. Considering the fact that I have bugged her a lot, I am sure about this fact that if she meets me (ever that is) she would bring with her an entire army of well built, Akhada going, Hanuman worshipping pehalwans to beat me up. So here is a list of all the things that make me the Frankinstein that I am and by the time u reach to the end of this list you would be sure that I am the one whom your mom told you to stay away from!

I am scared, morbidly scared, scared to the levels of a phobia of getting bored. I dislile people, jobs, situations that make me strive to follow a routine. After all if life were so predictable what would have been the fun of living it? I am the one who would love to stay awake all night and sing his heart out or gaze at the stars rather than fall asleep just because it is the night. So if there is something that draws on to becoming mundane, I am not the one who would be dragging along a relationship like a committed boyfriend. And that makes me one who is always a misfit for relationships, a guy whom girls can never trust. But on the flipside I am the one who would love to drink and graduate to the Nile from the Ganges. The voice is shouting something while reading this.....err it sounds like "You are too self centred an asshole."
Am a non confrontationist of obscene standards, I am the one who would prefer just to walk away from an autowalla who is charging extra and asking someone else rather than indulge in a fist fight or verbal abuse with the first autowalla. That makes people beleive that I am coward who does not have the guts to fight. Maybe they are right but it is more of a feeling of being in peace with my ownself that kind of draws me back from falling for a fist fight or verbal abuse. I am not the modern genration Gandhiji who would give his other face for a slap when he has been slapped at the first instance. I would be the first person to move out of the situation and land up in greener pastures if you rub me in the wrong ways. Err what did you say Mr. Voice??"Banda c****** hai, fight nahi kar sakta!"
I am one of the laziest creatures to have walked the face of the planet. Much lazier than the overweight ball of fur called Garfield and would have surely had a pole position if I were to compete for being lazy. But alas why compete, because that would make me active in certain ways. This fact can be well proved from the pile of clothes that lie around in my house at any point of time awaiting to be washed. Awaaz aa rahi hai Mr. Voice ka "Chullu bhar pani mein doob mar, kalmuhe lazy bone"
I put on my MBA cap everywhere and in every aspect of life. That makes me go in for all kinds of practical approaches to face life and find out solutions for every problem. That makes me shun my ego, get my clothes dirty in the mud of unethical practices and finally accept the fact that not all can be acheived given the limited resources and situations and hence look for short cuts. I am way too non emotional at times making me seem like an apparent monster. The voice says "Unemotional ass, you should be hanged and stripped and flogged for being like this!"

For the rest of the worser qualities and much more of the weakness part of it get in touch. And yah before I finish off someone forwarded this and I found it cute enough a demonstration of lateral thinking. Check it out:

DJ comes back!

2007-03-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

Much more disastrous than India getting ousted from the Cricket World Cup 2007 without even getting to see a glimpse of the Super 8 was the fact that DJ returned to Bangalore from London after two whole months. For the lesser informed in life DJ is the psuedo name of one of my flatmates who was a batchmate at IMT during my MBA days. Alas during the whole of two years of the MBA drill I only remember talkin to him in numbers that could be happily counted in one finger. And mind it these talks were not heart to heart talks but more of talks that lasted as long as Robin Uthappa innings in the World Cup. DJ as he had been named for his innane ability of DJing and making us listen to songs that seemed to be played by Satan himself in college parties. By a sudden twist of fate, it so happened that we landed up jobs in the same city in companies that consolidated their balance sheet into one. And hence it was presumed that he was a brethren. After all we all were called infoscions collectively making him my brethren of sorts. Once I was transferred to Bangalore, the really frustrating job of finding an accomodation haunted me. At the same point of time DJ was also in a house hunting exercise and by another sudden turn of fate we became flatmates along with a third unsuspecting guy called Yadav. And thus started the eighth wonder of the world...me and DJ sharing flats. It was quite a news for our batchmates at IMT and last June my number saw quite a many inquisitve calls asking me if I had turned insane after I joined my job to share a flat with DJ. I guess he also got similar number of phone calls asking him about his insanity status considering that I was his flatmate. And thus the misadventures continued.

Living with DJ has its own unpredictabilities associated with it. So one has to be prepared to be woken up at the obscene hour of 3 o clock at night with his Creative speakers blaring out unfathomable music, or for that matter watching him sleep for 18 hours in a row once he gets high. Getting high is something that has kind of mutated his genes to such a drastic extent that if you convinced him that drinking saline water can numb his senses and get him high, he would be off to the nearest sea shore to drink down gallons of it. And thus anything that can make his sense numb for a while are on the top of his all time favourite list. Once high, it is best to feign that you are on the verge of dying so that he does not get motivated enough to start off long drawn conversations with you. If incidentally you show some interest at the onset you are in for some real doomsday. The deep rooted philosophy keeps flowing on and on with every second line being some kind of a narcissist comment about his own good self. At the 20th minute of such kind of a conversation you would feel bored, at the 40th minute you would feel depressed and by the 60th minute you would be happy contemplating committing suicide or better a homicide to get away from the torture.

So Mr. DJ (I always thought it meant Disastrous Jerk rather than Disk Jockey) after giving me immense bliss by deciding to shift bases to London came back to India this weekend. And immediately the decibel meter of the house could be seen overflowing and reaching disastrous levels. I drifted off to sleep sad over the fact that the 2 months of honeymoon period had drastically come to an end. I woke up on Sunday morning to find the great flatmate of mine had drifted off to sleep with the speakers blasting off to the music of a band called "Infected Mushrooms"and he had kept every possible light on in his room which included a tube, a bulb, a night lamp and even the bulb of the attached bathroom. No doubt we get electricity bills that run into thousands of rupees just because of this kind of insanities. This was nothing considering the fact that he has left the gyser and the microwave running in a number of ocassions often for hours thankfully not burning down the house. The next day it was the taps of his bathroom that he left open for the water to leak and god knows how many gallons of water he choked the drains with considering that parts of Bangalore have serious water problems. I have no idea how his ears dont seem to respond at the sound of flowing water. So life is moving fine with me having to hear to Infected Mushrooms and praying to god that the house does not blow up thanks to one of his insanities.

The 2Ws of this weekend: Washing & Water

2007-03-21T01:42:00.000-07:00

I dread weekends for a phobia that has still now not been documented by the etymologists of the modern day world but I guess the phobia that I am talking about is as wide spread across the world as Sardarjis in a jokes book. The phobia can be termed as Washophobia that can be defined as an irritational persistent fear of doing the laundry every weekend. I would be happy enough to do the mopping and cleaning and the utensil washing but washing clothes is the last torture that I can ever subject myself to. The laundry problem has haunted me since I left the confines of the sweet little heavan called home and landed up in a hostel of a B-school some 1500kms away from home. At IMT the dhobi became my best friend to get me out of the torture of washing clothes, a person who had almost single handedly taken up the entire responsibility of washing away the dirty linen of an enitre ecosystem of B-school hostel dwellers. No doubt his face features well in any kind of documentary the Alumni committee of IMT makes for the Alumni Meets to make us feel nostalgic about those two years at Ghaziabad. But even the dhobi of IMT had his own reservations when it came to washing up more UP, CLOSE to the body & PERSONAL stuffs (read undies and ganjees) and I had to really motivate myself to clean these items of daily usage often running into crisis with improper demand estimation for these stuffs. Though my cleaning phobia failed to vanish it was much of a solace for me to see that people shared the same phobia as me and paid a heavy price for it. To cite an example Mr. Manish Bindra previously menitioned 2 blog entries down was one such person who had almost forgotten the fact, I guess intentionally that he had once upon a time soaked his three shirts and two pants in soap water to wash them in the near future. Alas the near future came almost 14 days later when he finally realised that they had rotten away in their own glory emitting as stinky and disgusting a smell as a goat's pen.

The washing woes were accentuated when I landed up in Bangalore as I studied the economics of the washing scene in and around the place I stay. Unbeilivably the price for washing any piece of attire was almost double the amount our dear old dhobi at IMT charged. The first few experience of laundry proved to be disastrous. The shirts as well as trousers though well washed and well ironed seemed to be losing one button every time it went to the washerman's torturous hands. The buttons always seemed to be smittered into pieces and what remained were small pieces suspended from the strings used to fasten it to the piece of clothing. Considering the fact that the torture was becoming a bit too much for every piece of decent clothing I ever owned I decided to pass on the noble responsibility of washing my clothes to the bai who did not understand even a single word that I spoke. Thanks to her I became good in using all kinds of sign languages to make my thoughts be known. A person whose attendance record was much worser than the attendance record of MPs from Chhapra at the Parliament of India, she takes pleasure in bunking work almost half the month. But at least she did turn up on the weekends and she never did complain when I would put the heap of clothes which almost looked like a mini K2. But alas this weekend she decided to land me in a whole bucket of filthy tomato soup by again bunking on Saturday and Sunday. Monday being a holiday for a lesser known festival called Ugadi in Karnataka (imagine not giving even one single day off in Durga Puja even when so many Bengalis work in our office) I started praying that she shows up to wish me a Happy Ugadi and wash my clothes. I knew that if she ditched me that day I would surely have to endure the nightmare of washing a bucket full of clothes. And finally she did show up and I was as thrilled as Mr Ganguly and with great difficulty restrained myself from doing the jersey dance.

Weekend was also about catching up with Akshara and seeing her splurging money on girly stuffs. Books, clothes, electronics as well as pieces of make up which just looked the same color as a Cafe Coffee Day's Cool blue granita, she was buying it all. And finally it was also about getting a last minute ticket for the Oscar nominated Indian entry called Water which considering that it was Ugadi is as improbable a feat as seeing a capless Himesh or imagining Hitler without his toothbrush bristle moostache. So there was Akshara and me making a dash to get the last few seats left and by a stroke of luck we were able to get relatively decent seats and we did not have to twist and turn and fracture our necks by sitting in the front few rows. Water was about the evils society had created in the name of spirituality. And yah society has come a long way since the 1939 portrayed there with women competing in every field and often surpassing them to acheive rare distinctions. It was also about John Abraham looking cute in dhotis and kurtas and acheiving some much needed points on the acting index. It finally did not look that superficial. And finally it was about the Laddu, synonymous with fulfilling every dream and desire of heart before u die because kise pata Kal ho na Ho....

Me, myself, Kolkata & Irene

2007-03-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

And before I am publicly hanged for not acknowledging contributions to my blog from the selected few people who visit and read my blog and digest the insanities I write without even having second thoughts about suffering from literary indigestion (last heard this group consisted of as few people as hair on Anupam Kher's ever shining head), here is a sincere thank you to Akshara for providing me with the photo of Manish and me in the post Livin la Vida Loca. Considering the fact that me and Manish were sworn enemies at IMT and were in a habit of showing our immense love for each other by painting each other's doors with obscenities and locking each other up, the civilized photo is very hard to beleive.

Coming back to more mundane things happening in life, I have sworn not to take such long breaks from work and go back home because the work load that welcomes you back to office looks like a mini Mount Everst that has to be climbed in a record time without the necessary supply of oxygen. So for the last two days I have been tackling issue after issue at my workplace till late at night to get things back on track. Sadly, the Kolkata chromosomes have again been buried under the more dominant Bangalore chromosomes for the moment, but 10 days in the "City of Joy" was worth every bit of it. The crusade started with the cab driver honking his horn 20 minutes earlier than the scheduled time he had been asked to come at to drop me off at the airport somewhere in between the hours of 0430 and 0500 on the 1st of march. For a change Air Deccan's flight took off at the right time for Kolkata though it is a seperate story that their reservation systems software had failed and they were being forced to issue hand written boarding passes, and secondly they never seemed to have any cabin baggage tags of their own and were distributing Jet's and Kingfisher's baggage tags for the CISF to stamp its approval of not carrying a bomb on. I slept through the journey fretting about the fact that I had again been unlucky enough not to have a beauty queen sitting on the seat beside me, though it also gave me the opportunity to stretch myself onto the seat beside me which had remained empty and not crib about leg space. Kolkata was in its full glory welcoming me with the ever so predictable depression caused by some low pressure over Bay of Bengal which saw me and Kolkata both getting dranged but spirits still lighted up. But later on even the weather decided to become cheerful and leave me nothing to complaint about.

So there I was on an overdrive meeting up long lost and new friends over cups of coffee and granita at either of Barista and CCD shelling out money that I am sure is going to show up in the revenue-expense statements of these companies as an abberation for the first 15 days of March. It also saw me watching 4 movies in a matter of 10 days. The Bangalore way of living has somehow made me accustomed to the fact that any movie of any length on any day at any hall would make your pocket lighter by a minimum of Rs.150. It felt really odd shelling out only Rs.40 in the decent non-multiplex kind of cinema halls of Kolkata. And there was mom who was in every mood to triple my calorie intake on the pretext that I would not get good Bengali food once I land up in Paris in April. Taking cue from her other relatives also got into the overdrive thinking it to be their moral responsiblity to stuff my stomach with Ilish Mach, Kosha Mangsho, Polao and Roshogolla. Needless to say that my stomach was in every mood to revolt against the onslaught of food items the same way as the BSF reacts when it sees Bangladeshi's crossing the border. A lot of Pudin Haras and Diegenes saw me not falling prey to the hands of the stomach devil and survive.

And finally Kolkata was also about meeting Irene, a pretty woman who seemed to be in every mood to file a chargesheet against me in the Dum Dum police station when I forgot to wish her "Happy Women's Day". In reports coming straight from the horse's mouth meeting me was one of the craziest things she had done in a long long time because of the fact that we had been acquainted through the orkut platform. So I guess I must also be thankful to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and all the Silicon Valley VCs who invested in orkut and had faith about its potential of reaching out to people. And she wore earrings that looked much like the Olympic rings and were big enough for a mouse to leap through them but jokes apart it was a fun time that we had that evening discussing how the Eco Times gets its form (a magazine the sight of which at one point of time irritated me before the MBA days), about books and the significance of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nation in her life and coffee in general.

I guess my Kolkata chromosomes had mutated way too much and that is what had my mom and sister talking about bundling me back to Bangalore again considering the insanities I was showing. But I finally was able to get the computer fixed after repeated reminders from mom which finally had turned into threats. It was tough considering that the guy who was supposed to give a rebirth to the dead as a dodo PC seemed more busy than the PM of the country. And finally the 10 days of ecstacy drifted to an end with me feeling a bit low about getting back to Bangalore and start off the drill again, but guess what?? I got lucky this time through. Finally lady luck smiled on me as for the first time in my life I had a cute thing sitting down right beside me on the Air Deccan flight back to Bangalore. And as usual the Bangalore autowalas gave a warm welcome by ripping me off a lot of money for the journey back to the rented place which I call home.

Kolkata Chromosomes calling!!

2007-02-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

No, I am not an Akshay Khanna fighting the Pakistani regiments in the border town of Jaisalmer leaving behind a sweetheart in a field of yellow sarso and a visually impaired mom in some unknown village of Punjab, and hence my mom and sweetheart are never heard singing emotional songs of the Ghar kab Aaoge kind. The song is really touchy and it is hard to beleive that copycat Malik could have actually composed this song but hey miracles do happen once in a while, jaise kabhi kabhi Kaif bhi century bana leta hai. So even if I am not an Akshay Khanna whose mother in the form of Rakhi sheds tears that could fill up reservoirs and permanently solve the water crisis that India faces every summer, still once in a while I do get these jitters that drive me towards home. So after 5 months of being in Namma Bengaluru and fighting with a lot of autowallas, spending a night in a lockup, going on innumerable shopping excursions with lot many girls, washing clothes, cooking maggi in a microwave and haggling with the disastrous DJ I am off to Amar Kolkata. Back to the city of trams, humid weather, Maidan, Book Fair, Jhal Muri, Sandesh, Victoria Memorial, Park Street, my darling and home. And I am excited to indulge myself into such utter delicacies like Mach Bhaja, Alu Sheddo Bhat, Dal Bara, Posto Bata etc. that are so easy to prepare anywhere in the world but has a seperate taste associated with itself when Mom makes it for you. So even if it is a Deccan Airways that is flying me to Kolkata at the unearthly hour of 5:30 in the morning when I am usually in my REM sleep mode I do not mind. So here is wishing Namma Bengaluru and my readers the pleasure of not seeing my obnoxious posts for the next 11 days. So in a typical John Denver style "I am leaving on a jet plane, and I do know when I will be back again (everyone at office has raised quite a few eyebrows on hearing the number of days leave I am taking)".

Livin La Vida Loca

2007-02-22T17:50:00.000-08:00

Manish and Me

For a perenially hungry person like me, no other object has a strong lustful appeal on all my senses and emotions as food does. Actually not many objects have been entrusted on my capable hands since childhood because of the great trust my parents had on my handling skills. So the sheer pleasure and bliss of banging the family car into the ubiquitous cycle rickshaws on the streets of North Kolkata never came my way. I had to manage the same feat with the driving school car that I had finally been allowed to drive after quite a few disastrous performances with the cluth, brake, accelerator and gear combination. Well the huge hit on the back of the cycle rickshaw almost had the whole of the rickshaw puller community prying for my blood but still it was quite a blissful feat considering that I was at that point of time quite impressed with Ricky Martin's "Livin la vida loca" number. Much to my parents displeasure of spending a whooping amount for the driving lessons I never did manage to get my driving license made in the "City of Joy" as the RTO authorities did not want me to turn it to the "City of Disasters". Barring the fact that presently I do have a driving licence issued by the Gujarat government, nothing really has changed. I still am not entrusted with anything that resembles a four wheeler by any one, neither a three wheeler. And from the time I landed up in Bangalore, I have been at the mercy of autowalas who have been held prime accused for my ever bleeding pocket.

After all life has been the same as Ricky Martin's "Livin la vida loca" song in the last 10 months after Mr. Ratan Tata handed me a piece of paper that proclaimed the fact that I had finally been able to complete the degree called MBA, that was supposed to take me places without even indulging in anything as sacred as studying. And plus I had a job at hand at one of the largest software services company of India. Though I had not the slightest clue what I would be doing in a technology company considering the fact that my knowledge of technology was at the same level as Mayawati's knowledge of nuclear physics, but still who cared as long as I was being paid well for it. The first two months at Hyderabad, after joining the job was the so called honeymoon period with nothing more to worry than the ridiculous food that the food courts of the office served at night time and a test in which 95% of the batch flunked. The so called luxury of staying in a company managed guest house that had a TV, iron, electronic safe, tea maker, AC rooms and 24 hours running hot water soon came to an end with the imminent transfer after the two months of training.

That is when Bangalore happened. For a person who never did manage to have a bank balance that read anything more than 500 rupees at any given point of time had to manage with giving 40 thousand rupees as the 10 month advance. For a person who shrugged at the slightest mention of washing clothes in the MBA days and was always on the lookout for handing out his undies to the famous dhobi of IMT for cleaning (against the dhobi's washing policies) today washes bucket full of clothes on weekends. For a person who never had talked for more than a few miliseconds to a very interesting character called DJ (known for his obnoxious eating, sleeping, drinking and all kinds of ing behaviour) in the MBA days made him his flatmate and also got to know a lot of interesting things about this soul in this process. For a person who wanted to be a financial analyst during his MBA days has not even seen a balance sheet or P/L A/c in the last 10 months, leave apart any dreams of analysing it. And this happened to be the prime point of discussion when there was a mini IMT reunion at M.G Road last weekend thanks to my beloved next door neighbour at hostel called Bindra coming down from Chennai. The love hate relationship that we had developed in the 2 years of our stay at IMT had seen me writing out poems on his room's door that ridiculed his age (he was 27 and I was 21), fist fighting, locking up rooms and throwing away the keys, stealing pillows, pouring cold water on each other's sleeping face and a lot of shouting. Incidentally both of us had landed up in IT companies, me in Infosys and he in Satyam. And sitting at 20 feet high on Church Street we bunch of Bangalored souls and Chennaied souls pored our heart out about issues that ranged from the batch topper's marriage with the batch's 3rd topper called very rightly as the intellectual couple, the rishta of a guy from the Placement Committee with a girl from the Alumni Committee considering that both these committees looked like the USA and USSR of the 1980s always on the verge of a full fledged world war. The topics also constituted about people who had been almost on the verge of joining their fourth job in the 10 months since the convocation day, about failed relationships about all the fun that had literally come into non-existence after last April, about how we had stopped protesting and seemed to care the least if someone called us techies instead of managers. The pack having representation from all major IT companies like Wipro, Satyam, i2 and Infosys finally were able to solve a puzzle of why the IT tag on the forehead of an MBA was more difficult to wipe out than the "Mera Baap Chor hai" thappa on the forearms of Vijay in Deewar. The fact that spending a few years in the confines of cubicles for 9-10 hours without any kind of physical exertion and no work on the weekends makes MBA's in the IT sector less and less willing to hit the markets and haggle with the DSAs and distributor. Braving the rain and heat loses priority and the AC office appeals more to the senses and finally numbs it and one sticks on to IT with the same kind of passion as a leech on ones supple skin.

We were literally kicked out of 20 feet high after the waiters realised that we had no such plans of leaving after making us pay a whooping 4000 rupees for the damages on food and drinks. And "Livin La Vida Loca" it was again while coming back from M.G Road when the auto driver was doing a mini Schumacher on the streets of Bangalore which incidentally are narrower than the Monte Carlo race track. And before I sign off with this post I am still reminded of an incident where the Livin la vida loca concept was stretched a bit too far in this very land of Bangalore for a harmless soul like me that led to one night in a police station.....Guess I would post it some other day....till then keep guessing.

P.S. After what seemed like an eternity, I finally have a credit card...actually two considering that ICICI sent me an add on card. Pretty efficient supply chain I must say considering that the dispatch information of the same was sent almost a month ago.

Of a visit to God's own Country

2007-02-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

I have been absconding from the blogging scene for more than a week now and I feel really guilty of neglecting this alter ego of mine. Well to start off with it wasnt supposed to be like this but considering the crazy things that have been going on at my workplace which ensured that I work till 8:30 p.m on a friday evening, my blog may just forgive me for the cold shoulder that I have given to it for almost a week. Somewhere on thursday last week the realization crept in that monday being a bandh for the sake of the Cauvery water issue, we had what could be termed as a really long weekend at our disposal. It was anybody's guess that staying three days at home without office would have bored me more than any kind of boredoom that our class 10 history teacher subjected us to during our school days. On a lighter note the history teacher was called "ONIDA" considering that he looked just like the Onida devil without the two tiny devil horns jutting out of his head. And all of a sudden a colleague of mine who ironically once happened to be a teacher of mine during the MBA entrance preperations suggested god's own country as the ultimate destintion to make the weekend seem more meaningful. So Mr.Chintan Parikh often referred to as Chintu and a true spirited Gujarati at heart whose bargaining skills ensured that shopkeepers downed their shutters planned the logistics of the entire tour safely leaving out the option of seeing the Venice of East's backwaters and only leaving mountains and jungles in our itinerary. The entire trip to Kerela was marked with clashing motives including a clash about this itinerary that lacked the backwaters as a destination, which could be well explained in terms of astrology when you consider that two fire signs were out on a trip with two water signs. It is anybody's guess that how well we would have gelled throughout our trip.

The disasters started off very early in the trip with us paying almost 200 rupees extra to get a Volvo to Kochi. Incidentally the bus that was supposed to carry us to Kochi had its air condition burned down and we had to spend 140 rupees extra on auto to go and collect the new tickets. Later on did we realise that we had got 2 tickets in the bus that left at 8:30 p.m and 2 tickets in the bus that left at 9 p.m on friday evening. Finally after a lot of requesting and begging we were able to get all our tickets on the same bus. Shama Travels had every mood to spoil our holiday spirit when it started off by playing a Malayali movie on the Volvo with almost 70% of the population of the bus crying foul play as the majority of them did not understand the language. Another round of begging and pleading got the helper of the bus playing "Phir Hera Pheri" the CD of which seemed to be as scratched as the "Phati Eriyan" they show on any Crack cream commercial. After every five seconds of playing it froze for a happy ten seconds. The night was pretty uneventful though the stars on the sky on one side of the bus and a glowing moon on the other side seemed really romantic and I drifted off to sleep only to be woken up by the weight of the huge frame of Chintu Parikh's body that had overflowed into my seat not being able to fit in the seat that had been allocated to him. I pushed him back into his seat only to be woken up early in the morning with nothing worser than Nasal Reshmiya shreiking "Tera tera tera suroor". Normally at any other point of time in the day Nasal Reshmiya is still hearable but being woken up to the tunes of him is very very nauseating. So finally after the repeating and re-repeating of the Himesh CD we reached Kochi only to find ourselves in even more trouble with a cab search. After spending close to one and half hours in the search of a cab we were finally able to convince Jolly Bhai(the driver) and his ambassador to carry us to our destination and back to Kochi at Rs 6.25 per kilometer. Compared to Bangalore standards it was way too costly. So we headed off to Munnar on the roads of Kerela which reminded me and Sumit (both Kolkatans) of Bengal. Me and Sumit could not stop comparing the similarity between Bengal and Kerela that included the lungi, the lal jhanda rule, the papaya trees, the mango trees etc. The road to Munnar was dotted with mini waterfalls that had decided to dry up and pictursque landscape. Jolly Bhai's CD collection just had one hindi CD, the one of Kal Ho Na Ho which he had kept on repeat mode. The monotone made us buy another CD on the way which featured the pop hits of 2005. Slowly the weather got cold as we reached Munnar and finally the newly bought sweatshirt of Adidas did feel comfortable. At Munnar Chintu Baba again resorted to barganing which slowly turned into haggling and a lot of hotel hopping which made me feel as irritated as possible. Finally we checked in into a beautiful hotel which literally had rooms that never knew what the concept of cross ventilation was. The room apparently had no window that looked out into the outside world. The rooms seemed to be an acoustic disaster as they all seemed to echo. So we could very well hear the next door couple pouring out sweet nothings. But we did not have time to waste so we rushed out after pouring a few drops of water on our bodies considering the fact that the water was way too cold and we rushed off to the Malankara reservoir. It was simply breathtaking with the moutains on both sides of the reservoir. After taking in the breath taking sceneries at the reservoir and seeing couples on honeymoon escapades enjoying the delight of boating in the huge reservoir we rushed on to a place called Echo Point. The problem with Echo Point was that there was no echo but a lot of people selling a lot of things. The adventurous Chintu Baba tried out a thing called passion fruit. To give a honest feedback it did not really induce any kind of passion but it was worth a try. The next stop was a small dam that had not been used for years together. The place sported a small joint where we hogged on omlettes like crazy and finally moved towards the place called Top Station situated 1170 metres above sea level. The road to Top Station was a narrow stretch snaking up the mountains and eneveloped in a thick layer of fog that made Jolly Bhai switch on the fog lights. Standing at Top Station seeing Tamil Nadu to our left and Kerela to our right enveloped in a thick coating of fog and the light fading away into darkness was simply fabulous. Incidentally the mobile networks of Tamil Nadu looked to be in full force on Top Station and I was finally able to make some phone calls from the 1170 metres above sea level area as Munnar had a serious shortage of mobile networks. By the time we descended back to Munnar the weather had turned really chilly inducing us to buy a Mansion House brandy on our way back to the hotel. Dinner consisted of a lot of chicken dishes well cooked with rich spices along with rice at a hotel opened by a Dubai returned guy who kept the door to the loo of the hotel under lock and keys. The lavish way in which they had used ginger and cardamom to prepare the dishes finally proved the point as to why Vasco Da Gama had been so fond of this part of the country. After the customary brandy shots we dropped dead on our beds only to be woken up later by the grunt like snores of a guy who did not want his name to be mentioned in this public space.

The next day we got up early in the morning and again heard next door couple deliberating on what all things needed to be packed from the echo effect. The hotel had finally decided to circulate some hot water that made us have a comfortable bath and finally after settling the bills we moved on towards Thekkady. The scenic beauty of the road that went from Munnar to Thekkady was breathtaking. The tea plantations spread across both sides of the road. Entire mountains had been made into tea estates and the road snaked its way through these mountains. We had a flat tyre on the way and while we stopped to get that repaired few kids from the nearby tea gardens came and we started chatting. One was known as Tenzing Beckham and incidentally he had no love for the legendary David Beckham but was much inspired by the batting skills of Mahendra Dhoni as India was bashing up Sri Lanka on the same day. The road to Thekkady was lined with cardamom plantations. Finally close to noon we reached Thekkady which houses the huge Periyar reserve that was known for its tiger population as we had heard. The boat safari on the Periyar lake was supposed to be one of the most adventurous forest safari but when we asked the same to the guard who was checking the tickets the look on his face said it all. The honest feedback provided by him consisted of mono syllables like 40 tigers, huge forest, less chance of sighting etc. On the boat we were accompanied by a group from TCS Trivandrum and it became less of a sighting adventure and more of a picnic with jokes running here and there and song sessions. What we finally did manage to see were a few storks and other water birds, a whole lot of deers, wild boars and a pack of elephants out of sheer luck, crossing the lake. The adventure continued but not having eaten anything since morning barring a few idlis our stomach was desperate for some fuel. We stopped at a town hotel which took a whole lot of time to prepare every dish but the dishes were with such huge portions that nobody ever complained about the delay in bringing the food. We started from there and landed up in Kottayam late at night barely managing to find a lodge and paying an advance when Jolly Bhai had pangs about not staying over there as they did not have a proper parking for his ambassador. And hence we had to negotiate and get back the advance and again make way towards Kumarakom some 30kms away from Kottayam and right in the middle of backwater land. The humidity factor had crept in and the easing and soothing cold weather of Munnar had been replaced by sweat and heat. Jolly Bhai led us to a resort called Tharavadu Heritage Home set up 120 years ago. The sheer elegance of the place was spellbinding. The rooms were laid out as mini cottages having cozy balconies and was a visual delight. Again Chintu Baba came into action with his barganing skills and finally convinced the person incharge to provide us rooms at off-season rates when it was the season rates which should have been applied. A lot of barganing made it possible for us to have an abode in a very luxurious cottage. Sleepy eyed we crashed into the bed and slept like logs till morning came. Me and Sumit had a glorious idea of going photo clicking early in the morning of the backwaters. It was very spell binding to see how the people had made the backwaters a perennial part of their lives with people selling vegetables out of boats or carrying constuction equipments on these long boats. We struck a good deal and hired a boat to take us to Allepy also called as the Venice of East for its breathtaking backwaters. After a quick bath followed by an equally speedy breakfast we set sail for Allepy on a boat that had seats for at least 10 people. We passed through the hustle bustle of Kumarakom to land up in the backwater highways that went all the way to Cochin. On both sides were paddy fields, lush green in appearance and we cruised through the calm waters of the place and finally landed up at a eating joint on the backwaters that served the local liquor called Todi made from coconut water and many varities of fishes. We packed the stuff and had a gala time feasting in the boat eating and drinking till we reached Allepy. On the way the breathtaking house boats that had all the amenities of any five star hotel caught our fancy. Shelling out 5000 bucks for a day on a houseboat was way too much for us poor souls and hence this bit of adventure was left for later years to come.

At Allepy we visited the beach, which was one of the cleanest beach I had ever seen in my life. The golden yellow sand glistened under the rays of the sun. Though the beach was a beauty but the waves showed how violent the sea was on those shores. After walking along the beack and getting our jeans wet by the huge waves we rushed back to the boat that had given us clear instructions to come back in an hour. Back on our way to Kumarakom, three of us drifted off to sleep while one sat on the top of the boat as it cruised along the Vembanad Lake lurching and splashing water, sometimes violently till we reached Kumarakom again to find a very furious Jolly Bhai cursing us for coming in late that had ensured that he had missed a golden opportunity of taking some people on a 5 day trip of Kerela on his ambassador. We were driven back to Cochin by a cribbing Jolly Bhai who left us near a restaurant on Cochin's M.G Road. The starving four souls had all the food that the hotel could have offered and set out to the bus stand to catch the Volvo that was supposed to bring us back to the hell of traffic jams, dacoit like autowalas called Bangalore. A very non eventful bus ride to Bangalore followed and we realised that God's own Country was history when the autowala asked for 30 rupees for a distance of less than 2 kms. The pocket had grown lighter by 4500 rupees, it grew 30 rupees lighter withing 2 kms.

Cauvery Tribunal Judgement and the water crisis...

2007-02-05T05:23:00.000-08:00

For a guy like me whose life entirely revolves around really important things of everyday existence like the following:
1.Hunting for the mobile early in the morning to switch of the monotonous hum hum of the alarm;
2.Making a frantic attempt to grab a window seat in the most non-chivalrous manner on the right hand side of the company bus so that the early morning sun rays does not wake me up from the morning slumber;
3.Fretting over the regular dosage of curry patta during the breakfast;
4.Ordering some dish that resembles biriyani in every food court of my workplace at lunch;
5.Making every possible excuse to bunk the gym in the evening etc, a small petty issue like the judgement of the Cauvery tribunal did not hold much of a charm for a man on work on a Monday morning. Now, I know u guys who do manage to read the gibberish that I write over here must be thinking that what kind of a pathetic human being this ass is who does not seem to be fazed with such a major decision regarding a dispute that has run for more than 300 years and the court cases of which have stretched for more than 16 long years culminating in a final order that runs into 1000 pages in 5 volumes which when hard bound and hurled at anybody's head could have well killed him/her, inspite of being a resident of Karnataka at present. But once you consider that the guy in question braved a horrible hangover to land up in office only to find his official mailbox being migrated to some other server, his virus definition being unable to protect his PC from new virus threats, transactions he required which he did not have access to at the most auspicious moment and a whole bunch of errors that need resolution waiting for his dizzy brain to act on; you would realise how Cauvery would be the last thing that you would lay your thoughts on. Its ironic how the god of IT and networking collude and conspire against you and make you land up in a deep shit situation on the very first day of the week.

So there I was braving issues that threatened to make my existence on the project network a thing of past till I heard that the mother of all verdicts about the two part of hydrogen and one part of oxygen was out and that Karnataka was in a very bad mood about losing out to Tamil Nadu. The tribunal had ordered Karnataka to share its scoop of ice cream with Tamil Nadu and naturally like a young kid whose passion lies in licking up every bit of the icecream's existence being told to share was too much of a sacrifice that he could take in his stride. And of course the grapevine of my workplace populary called as the BB (Bulletin Board) began flooding with news trickling in about how there law and order problems were being detected in the city and some frantic mails from the HR department pleading not to spread rumors. And I got calls from friends whom I hadnt talked for months telling me to quit office as soon as possible because they had heard from some friend that riots had broken up in certain parts of the city. So the entire office made a frantic rush to the gates at 3 in the evening to get back home safe and sound. Sadly only 2 buses leave at that auspicious hour for people having to quit work for varied reasons like a sick child needing attention, a parent teacher meeting or an appointment with the dentist. Unluckily the transport department did not have the resources to accomodate a thousand people in 2 buses and the service got scrapped for the day. People who had made desperate attempts to quit office on a monday at 3 in the evening to enjoy a leisurely evening had their plans going awry. And there I was still getting calls from people I did not even remember as to how threatened my life was as I was in Electronics City which happened to be just 20kms away from the Tamil Nadu border. My life was seriously threatened, not by the law and order though but by the amount of work that had accumulated since morning thanks to a not so well done mailbox migration. A rough estimate revealed that I could only think of leaving office as early as 8 in the evening which so as to say is a very unfortunate event for a monday at work.

The situation got really out of control when the HR shot a mail saying that all buses were supposed to leave only in 2 slots at 5p.m and 7p.m and the regular schedule of every hour buses in the evening stood cancelled. The final set of approvals came from the PM when he came and convinced us to leave by 5 so that we could reach safe and sound. I made a frantic attempt to finish off the important work at hand so that I could also vanish from the scene and land up being 32kms away from the TN border as compared to 20kms. Finally bang at 4:45 p.m the office wore a deserted look as cubicles lay empty and we finally made our way to the gate for the security check threatening a project mate called Chandru who happened to be a localite. We told Chandru that if something happened to us his life lay in grave risk the next day. The lines for the security check were breathtaking. Total chaos prevailed at the bus terminal and you could see thousands of heads looking here and there for a bus they could push themselves into. Every one of the bus seemed to be packed with people like sardines. It looked like a mini Kumbh Mela which has seen itself being immortalised in the scripts of so many Hindi movies. The utter chaos at the bus stand did make it seem very much possible to lose your twin brother/sister in a typical Hindi filmish way.

Me and my flatmate were finally able to push and shove and get ourselves into an already overcrowded bus. It was quite a new feeling acting so very unsophisticated in the company bus and pushing and standing on people's feet. Normally the bus journey from office to home is the most boring of things with about 75% of the junta passing on to a deep coma kind of sleep only to wake up near the Silk Board flyover some 11kms from the office and the rest trying to struggle to keep awake by reading some novel or simply cootchie cooing with their respective lovers on the phones. For a human like me who has been used to literally playing gang wars by throwing bottles and bags and even bricks if one was fortunate enough to get it, and hitting up people to get a seat in the school bus for some 14 long years this journey seemed to be a relatively non risky affair. But Monday at work was different from the other days. It was a back to school days experience with bags being thrown here and there, 4 people sitting in seats meant for three and a hell lot of noise and jokes being cracked here and there. The jam packed bus finally left with me being the third person sitting on a two seater barely managing to get my ass to not fall off the seat. Once on the Hosur Road life seemed to be as normal as possible with all shops having their full shutters up and no visible signs of any disutrbances. So it was definitely a false alarm that had made me leave job to be done early on Tuesday morning to save myself the agony of getting abused by the client. The rest of the journey back home was pretty much chaotic with me slapping the bus wall in the typical style in which a Kolkata conductor would stop the blue and yellow painted tin cages that play on the roads of the City of Joy, in a frantic attempt to stop it for people to get down. I got complimented by a girl for the valiant attempt of stopping the bus in the typical Kolkata way. The compliment sounded something like "He just does it the conductor way at Kolkata". Not going into the intricacies of how higly she regarded my skills of being a conductor of a bus, it was a compliment and I basked in the glory of the same.

Finally home came and unlike Hosur Road which was much closer to TN than BTM and still had shops with shutters open, the shops of BTM had merrily downed shutters and had merrily gone off to sleep. Well finally the water issue did land me in trouble not for the riots that never happened but because of the fact that we had completely run out of drinking water at home and the shop that gave supplies had merrily called it a day off. The drinking water crisis at home did make me feel concious about the 270 TMCFT that Karnataka was getting as compared to the 419 TMCFT that Tamil Nadu was getting. Maybe if I was in Chennai I wouldnt have had to face a drinking water crisis as Bangalore offered me one yesterday. Its time to stock up Bangalore junta for the bandh on Thursday. Is the IT city going the Kolkata way now?

Shop till you drop...oops bore!

2007-02-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

The wardrobe section of the room I stay in, yah exactly the same one where a mouse had taken shelter for a happy one month before I finally was able to find out the mystery behind the "rat-a-tat" sounds the wardrobe made and was able to drive it out of the house needed a desperate revamp. Well not that I am one of those shoppers who would love to splurge a mini fortune of their hard earned salary on buying clothes keeping up with the latest fashion trends and stuffs that Vogue magazine portrayed as the latest collection but still considering the fact that for the last 4 months I was actually surviving on just two formal trousers, when my office wanted me to wear formal clothes for 4 days in a week it was quite necessary that I do something to put me out of this poverty of clothes. Even the security guards who wore the same uniform everyday seemed to have a better assortment of black trousers as compared to the only one that I had. If the black trouser was a human with real feelings and emotions it was sure to come out in an open rebel for overuse and overexploitation. Considering the fact that all the stores had their year end sales running and all stores shreiking of offering 50% off with a miniscule "Conditions Apply" print that needs a magnifying glass to view, it was an auspicious time to go and eliminate the poverty stricken condition of my wardrobe.

So after office on Monday, I rushed to Forum and in a shopping effort that resembled winning the hot seat in the fastest finger fast, I was done with shopping for a whooping amout of close to 3500 rupees in a matter of less than 40 minutes and I had 3 T-shirts one which had a beer mug all over it, 3 formal shirts and 2 formal trousers to flaunt. The entire swiftness of the shopping episode reminded me of a disaster that happened just after the end of the mid term exams of the 4th trimester during my MBA days. An episode as much disastrous as being forced to see a movie with Jayalalitha as the female lead gave me a rude shock and petrified of shopping. The disastrous event was accompanying Gundu Patas a.k.a Aarti on one of her shopping sessions. A bunch of 2nd year MBA students who had all intentions of getting wild after a torturous mid term that had taken all its toll on us we landed up at Centrestage mall Noida. The journey part of it is also worth mentioning when you consider that Nishant's dilapidated Maruti 800 did not give up with the likes of Madhavi, Nami, Aarti, Anupama, Akshara, Nishant and me packed like sardines in the red 800. I was precariously seated somewhere in between Aarti and Nami's lap and I could not stop my head banging into the ceiling of the car every 3 minutes. Once in the mall, while every one of the other girls went to shop in Westside I was hijacked off the group by Aarti to go shopping with her. I thought it would be a regular thing which would max stretch to hopping around 3 or 4 shops and would result in a purchase decision. It started off with Westside where Aarti spent some half an hour giving me logical explanation about shaded, hues, cuts and styling. Though it really did not make any sense I just hoped she would like something. And she did like two tops on display and I felt the same as Dada would have felt on striking a century on debut and was rejoiced at the prospects of having a half hour shopping spree. But alas it was like getting bowled at 99 when she uttered in Tamil laced Hindi "Haan thik hi hai! Par utna khas nahi...Aur kahin chalkar dekhte hain.." I did not realise what I was getting into. It started from the ground floor of CSM(Centrestage mall) and went up to the 5th floor. Any store that seemed to have anything like clothes behind the glass veiled doors was Aarti's destination. We went to every branded, unbranded, semi-branded, in-house branded store. Pepe, Levis, Lee, Scullers, SF and a lot more of them just came and went on path for that one perfect top. Finally after 2 whole hours of running up and down the entire mall and visiting every store that it housed Aarti finally declared that enough was enough and she was going back to Westside to buy the same top that we had seen at the onset of our shopping excursion. I was speechless, dumbfounded, angry, tired and was bored as anyone who had had the luxury of listening to Vajpayee's ramblings for more than an hour. Finally Westside sold one more of its tops and I wasted close to two and half hours of my time running around the mall.

Aarti was full of praises about how I had not complained and how I was not the typical male who hated the favourite recreation of girls i.e. shopping though deep down I had this strong desire of choking her with the same top that she had bought. Now it is true that mom had well prepared me for all this kind of shopping excursions that females usually undertook by taking me shopping when I was just a child and finally treating me to an icecream, but still wasting so many precious hours of life over a top and that too without the regular treat of icecream was quite a painful torture. From then on I was the proverbial messiah who would go on any kind of shopping trip with any female species provided the female species did not force me to buy anything for them or for that matter me. Going shopping with Anu would involve a lot of approving and disapproving. Usually it only lasts one or two shops but she tries out a lot of things and always asks for approval. She took me once to a jewellery shop to get the upper cartilaginous part of her ear pierced. I was pretty much psyched out by the entire exercise and at one point of time I was assuring her and her dad on the phone that things would be ok though I was not at all comfortable seeing the rather horrific sight of seeing the cartilage being pierced through. Last time she came to Bangalore she was contemplating on getting a tatoo done and I was contemplating a sudden heart attack to avoid the torture of seeing a shreiking Anu and pacifying her. Then there is Akshara who shops more like a guy, never spending more than a few mintues finalizaing any purchase. I was overwhelmed when she was done with her shopping in less than half an hour. Then there is Sree who would give me a frantic call at all desperate moments to accompany her shopping. Last time was some 2 days before the new year eve when she desperately needed party clothes. Now my social standing is such that no body really bothers calling this rather abominable creature to anything that looks like a party. So hunting for party clothes was quite a disaster with me and her going down and up Commercial Street and Brigade road finding that ideal party dress that could bowl any guy out on new year's eve.

So finally I am most grateful to these women in my life starting from my mother who have made me immune to the shopping virus. A special thanks to Aarti who tested my patience to such great extremes that every other shopping excursion seems to be a cakewalk after CSM. I do not know if the patience of accompanying a female species would still persist post the very horrifying event of marriage when I would have to swipe my credit card out of a feeling of chivalry. Oh by the way forgot to add, even the ICICI credit card I applied for has not reached my hands though they shipped it ages back. As usual its stuck between Chennai and Bangalore...And I am still credit card less...anyone listening out there??

Weekend of House hunting and a gorgeous movie

2007-01-29T21:55:00.000-08:00

The utter irony of life much ironic than being head butted twice like Materazzi is to be awakened again bang at 8 in the morning by the maid again on Saturday. This time I could not resist myself from shreiking a few obscenities which I guess she never did understand becuase of the communication barriers. Couple it up with the mission that I had on Sunday and I finally realised that the entire weekend was spent in waking up early after sleeping late thus missing out on cruical sleeping time. The only time I remember myself getting up early on a Sunday was in Class 11 and 12 when I had to go to this chemistry tution coz my parents and near relatives and the neighbours and their relatives and anyone in the ecosystem in which I survived and thrived never gave up on convincing me about how much an engineering degree would help me acheive a plush job, a good looking wife and much more. What they never told me was what being Bangalored was, about the ten month rent advance which is never negotiable or about what damages one's taste buds undertakes when it is subjected to a regular dose of Idli and Sambhar. Much to my parents and relatives and neighbours and their relatives displeasure I never did become an engineer of any kind but I still landed up in this southern part of Bangalore in a company that has more than 90% engineers.

So Sunday was mission day for the sake of a tortured soul who was sick and tired of staying in a rat hole sophsitcatedly called a PG and eating blobs of red and green mass which was called food. She wanted an accomodation in a rented appartment in which she could sleep, cook and call her parents to stay and invite us without getting the customary stares and comments which are so common in a PG. The first phase of the house hunt was to find the broker who had successfully made us walk across almost all lanes and bylanes of Indiranagar in a kind of a wild goose chase. Finally he showed up at the designated place close to one and half hours later than the designated time without even an apology for the late arrival. Then started a round of house hunting which took us into narrow alleys that led to dark and shady houses without cupboards and horrible sanitation facilites. And the charges for these prized accomodations never seemed to reach anywhere below 5k per month accompanied with a statutory 10 month advance. So we saw small house with no cupboards, large house with lots of cupboards but disgraceful toilets, shady house with no light, house with a big bore well in the vicinity to fall into and the exploaration continued. Even the broker gave up after some time handing us onto some other broker guy who was supposed to show us his assortment of appartments to be rented. Now this guy no doubt had his marketing fundas in place. He tried using phrases like safety, security, affordable, good neighbourhood etc which did impress us and finally he showed some really good and affordable places at Domlur. And finally one was selected alas the bliss of finding a "mahal ho sapno ka" was cut short when the broker called in the evening to give us the bad news that the stuff had already been taken. So an entire day of running around, auto hopping, visiting all sorts of shady places didnt do any kind of good.

The best part of the day was the lunch we had at the rather special Bengali restaurant called 6 Ballygunge Place at Indiranagar. Being a Sunday afternoon every one of those pampered Bengali wives who do not like to waste their Sunday in the confines of the kitchen had decided to throng the place. The place was teeming with all sorts of happy Bengali faces and Bengali music and lots of bulky looking pretty females mostly married in their best of attires. Me and house hunter looked in our horrific worst with all the running around that we had subjected ourselves to on that day. No doubt the Bengaliness (if there is any such term as outrageous as this) of the place made me a fan of the restaurant. Even the unfriendly "Excuse Me" at the entrance of the restaurant by a pretty and loaded with attitude thing nor the bulky body of a self righteous female draped in a jeans that could have fitted two like me gave me the jitters and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience. The feeling of being a Bengali at heart and specifically a Bangal overwhelmed me when I saw that they also surved a dish called shutki. It is usually a preperation of dried up Bombayduck in lots of spice and the pungent smell is definitely not for the faint hearted. If in Japan Sushi rocks then in Bangladesh Shutki is very near to that. Food that day consisted of Pabda mach and Mutton which I dug into with my hands. After all it was not one of the etiqutte training courses in my organisation. After all Bengali food was best enjoyed with hands and there was no need to feign any of the table sophistication I was so unused to. The family on the next table to us was seen throwing ugly glances at us as they struggled to have Bengali food with a fork and spoon.

And finally because of a very decent caress of lady luck on me I found myself sitting in a movie hall watching the Leonardo Di Caprio starrer Blood Diamond with a bunch of very talkative Delhites, the house hunter and a lady who was very badly bitten by the shopping bug. Actually another guy who was supposed to come had incidentally dropped out after he got too many calls from mother nature. The movie was really worthwhile for the 200 bucks I spent on it and I was not seeing cribbing about the price that I had paid for the same. The movie was one of the very best that I had seen and for the very first time Leonardo seemed to have left his kiddo looks and acting style to really do a great job as a diamond smuggler. The movie was about man's greed, the effect that capitalism does, about lives that were lost in the unknown, about how precariously the balance of life and death exists in some countries torn apart by civil war and finally about the love for a family that can make a person do anything, even change the way the world things and take a stand against what is wrong. And finally the movie is about starry eyed people who dream of diamond rings who know nothing about the immense amount of innocent blood that is lost to give the pure crystallized carbon its sparkle. Please do not buy Conflict Diamonds is my earnest request to everyone after seeing this movie.

Sleepless for her!!

2007-01-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

After years of trying to inculcate the values of patriotism I am sorry to inform that I have not been able to get anywhere near to that feeling. I mean you can very well make it out if I say that I am desperately waiting for my french work permit to get processed soon so that I can fly off to Paris. Well the trait of patriotism does run through the genetic constitution of my family a live example being my grandfather who was a social worker and fought an election and also his brother who joined the army and fought wars, but I guess it has happily decided to remain unexpressed in me. My idea of patriotism has not crossed its stage of infancy till date, it could be best termed as superficial. I mean I do respect the people who are there out on the borders guarding us from our hostile neighbours and I do stand in an attention position whenever the 52 second song celebrating the spirit of our country is played but beyond that I am not the one to wake up early in the morning of a red lettered day on the calendar to go to the parade ground and bath in the full glory of patriotism. It is a seperate fact that no one has actually invited me to see one in its full glory in the last 24 years of my existence. So it has been Doordarshan which has come in handy to such spectacles like the Republic Day parade.

So coming back to the topic of me being not so patriotic, post the honeymoon stage of life of school and college days of mine the national holidays have been days to sleep like a log till the sun reached midway on the firmament and possibly even extend it a bit more further. Well considering the fact that I have to wake up dot at 7 every morning to reach office by 9 to start the daily drill I guess people would be kind enough to offer me the luxury of sleeping some extra hours on such holidays. But alas fate had something else stored for me today. Dot at the unearthly hour of 8 in the morning the door bell rang. I just thought it to be some figments of my imagination of a dream where some friends were supposed to drop in for a drink and I could see myself opening the door for them. But the tung-tang drone of the doorbell still persisted and finally it got so loud and restless that I had to wake up and go and see which inhuman was asking for access waking me out of a deep REM sleep. I opened the door and there she was out of all human beings you could have expected on planet earth. Inspite of telling her not to come before the clock struck 11 on any kind of holiday she was there dot at 8 to finish off with her daily dose of cleaning the utensils (the few that we have been able to amass in the last 8 months of our existence in Bangalore), the cleaning of the rooms and the clothes. Well it is a seperate story that she bunks her daily activities with greater efficiency than my graduation day classes where attendance was never a criteria to earn grades. So there she was with a smiling face trying to gain access to the dark dingy 3 bhk that we called home for the last 8 months, so that she could make a disaster of the sleep that I was in with the innumrable clanging of the utensils and ensure that I wake up in a grumpy and sleepy mood to waste all the day. Inspite of using the four languages that I knew I was unable to make her understand about coming later in the day. And it was imminent that if I dint allow her in the house at this moment she would bunk the entire house cleaning exercise for another day. Considering the fact that the entire mass of unwashed clothes that looked like a mini mountain now would remain unclean for yet another day I decided to let her go on with her cleaning exercise after wishing any chances of an extended sleep goodbye. So here is a hitchiker's guide to managing with the obnoxious behaviour of the bai in a place like Bangalore if she does not know anything apart from the local Kannada and bunks like the one at our place.

1.Be prepared for threats at odd hours: Just like today she announced merrily that the washing powder had extinguised its stocks and she needed a refill or else I could still be sitting on the mountain of unwashed clothes. Today was not the first time for such a request which does sound like a threat. So one day I would be running around for a Rin ki Tikiya and the second day for a Jharu. So today also I had to rush out to the nearest store to get a refill of the washing powder.

2.Learn Kannada or go on speaking like aliens: Considering that the Dravidian set of languages is alien to people who have stayed all their lives in the northern part of the country it is of little surprise that communication is a big big problem. The only way out would be to learn Kannada which is a very impossible proposition if you were working in an IT company like me. So unless you are a line manager at the TVS plant in Bangalore and have mastered the language well (one of my punjabi friend actually did learn it) make sure to use all sorts of sign language to affirm and reaffirm the things that you would have stated in hindi to the bai. Well sometimes I have had this weired feeling that if I meet aliens I would be able to interact well considering the effort that I have to put in to make her understand anything.

3.Learn to live with half: Dont even expect to see all the activities being completed. So do not feel sad if the bai does not sweep or clean your room. Whenever I am not around watching like a watchdog she is bound to forget sweeping my room's floor. So either become a watchdog and keep her in close scrutiny or else learn to live with half the rooms sweeped and the other half not.

4.Turn heartless to the plight of your clothes: Seeing her wash my clothes I have really felt pity for the torture they undertake in her hands. It seems that all the fibres of the cloth rebel against the torture desperately trying to tear apart and in turn make my favourite blue shade shirt worthless. So its better to turn heartless at the inhuman torture that she inflicts on anything in the form of a cloth and only pray that they survive the torture.

5. Third Party Interference: Always seek third party interference whenever you have crucial issues to discuss like wages, the fraction that has to be cut from the wage for constantly bunking work for 20 days etc. The third party should be an interpreter who is supposed to reduce misunderstandings if any. Such a kind of misunderstanding in laying down the rules cost a lot of money to me.

I guess I can lay down 17 more points to make the work simpler for you folks but I am feeling very sleepy and it is close to 2 at night and in case she just shows up at 8 in the morning like today I would be in very bad shape to get up. So I guess I should be hitting the bed now with a prayer to lady luck to not start tomorrow with the same stroke of ill luck as I had today. And I do not want to be sleepless for her anymore.

Penned in a hurry

2007-01-25T02:00:00.000-08:00

This is what I could pen down in a hurry for the project newsletter:

The Road Less Travelled

There is yet another path,
The one which has been less travelled;
The one that now lays hidden,
The one whose peaks have been less scaled.

Pushed into the shadows by humans
The path seems to be unknown and wild.
Though once you travels the path
You can feel your inner innocent child.

As you moves ahead in life every day,
Chasing the big goals and material dreams;
The less travelled path of smaller joys
Remains neglected, sorrowed and weeps.

The joy of feeling the first rays of light,
The morning breeze and the dew on the grass,
Seeing the sun go down with your beloved,
All this vanishes under the wealth you amass.

And finally at the sunset of your life,
You remain joyless, weak and frailed.
You think how life would have been different,
If you journeyed the road less travelled.

Moment of Nostalgia

2007-01-23T21:43:00.000-08:00

I am not an aethist by choice but more out of chance. The problem with being or not being an aethist is that there is no middle path like lets say no one can proclaim that he is moderately aethist and moderately not. I was branded an aethist because of the way in which I portrayed my god. As you would have noticed that people would have said that the way I spelt god is not the right way to spell it. It should have been spelt as God with a capital G to portray the divine power. Now I have problems with this kind of rules that man has created. Why cant my god be spelt with a small g rather than a capital G? I do beleive in the divine power but I am not quite accustomed to the stringent rules that have been put in place as qualifiers for worshipping my god. Things like fasting before a puja or for that matter not touching anything related to the puja without taking a bath first or for that matter the fact that you need a priest to connect to the god does not really make any sense to me.

So I connect to my own god, the one who does not complain if I spell his name with a lower case 'g'. One who does not care if I take a bath or not before going for an appointment with him and he is not one of the sadist type who loves to keep me hungry by fasting. So pujas for me have always been an entertainment of sorts. Be it Durga Puja or Kali puja or Saraswati Puja or for that matter any of the 66 crore gods that we worship, the main essence of a puja for me is to enjoy it to the fullest by unwinding with friends, meeting up new people, having fun and enjoying the spirit of the city of Kolkata at its full glory. After all I really do not need a special day to connect to god, he is there somewhere inside me and I can take an appointment any time I want.

So it was that time of the year again when I was brooding over the fact that I was not in Kolkata to enjoy the Saraswati Puja. Though I havent been in Kolkata for over six years now missing one festival after another yet I feel nostalgic and homesick at these points of time. The earliest memory of Saraswati Puja that I have are those at my Dida's (maternal grandmother's) place. The night before me and my then unmarried aunts used to cut paper in various shapes and decorate the place of worship with various designs. The adhesive that we used to paste the papers was made out of maida (flour). There was this typical fashion in which it stuck to the hand and hardened up over there. After the place got beautified the biggest challenge was to stripe away the adhesives that had hardened on the hands. It was an awesome experience doing that kind of silly things.

As my aunts got married the spot of action shifted to my place and the entire episode became quite interesting. The way ma and me did all the purchasing for the occassion. The way the appointment was fixed up with the preist to ensure that he actually arrived at our place. The way me and my sister were woken up so very early in the morning to take a bath and they way baba (dad) smeared turmeric on our bodies more as a custom than anything. The cold water that splashed the body in that January cold (I had not experienced the cold of Delhi till then and hence cold water in an early January morning felt horrible even if the location was Kolkata). Another interesting memory associated with it is the way baba got tensed up as soon as the designated hour of the arrival of purohit passed by. In these situations his words sounded like the purohit might have been kidnapped on his way, that he might have forgotten about the obligation that he had in our house. And finally after a lot of running around the puja would have been completed to make way for the prasad which usally consisted of the khichuri, labra, chatni and payesh. As I write this my mouth has started watering thinking about it.

Now as one grows up in a place like Kolkata the para (neigbourhood) concept dawns on him/her. One graduates to a club or a rock (a typical Kolkata slang for a place to sit and waste away time doing nothing but gossiping the male way) based on the company his para has to be provide. We 4 or 5 neighbourhood guys of our age group came together to form a club called the evergreen club christened as evergreen by some DevAnand fan. The club hosted its first Saraswati Puja somewhere in 1995 with a platry budget of close to 1500 rupees collecting the platry sum of rupees 10 or 20 that the neighbourhood folks chose to offer. It was quite a task to manage the finances and meet up the costs and balance the balance sheet at the end of the event. Anything in excess went to our hungry tummies in the form of an egg roll or a chicken chow. We envisioned ourselves as young CEOs and CFOs in the making.

As the years went by the budget increased, sometimes drastically over the last year making it all the more difficult to justify the increase in the contribution (chanda) that we sought from the people in the neighbourhood. Moreover Saraswati puja taught me how to multitask. Managing the club puja and the puja at home was quite a hectic affair after all. My ma took full liberty of the situation to yell at me whenever I forgot to bring something which she had asked for or came home late but I survived and thrived on multitasking. The preperation for the pujas started months before the actual thing and it commenced with all sorts of meetings, a whole lot of delegation, a plethora of budgeting and a whole lot of timelines to be met. It meant doing a whole lot of MBA stuffs without being an MBA. So we would be off to Kumartuli on one weekend to order for an idol. The next few sundays would be spent collecting the chanda and listening to abuses of people about how it was not justified to ask for more than Rs. 10 becuase it was merely a Saraswati puja. I still have happy memories of the night before the puja every year, the day we never could sleep because of the immense amount of work that would always be left. The way a guy called Bublu in the group had thought of testing the mikes and blowed it up by playing "Ke Sara Sara" at around 2 in the night waking up people all around the colony and got them shouting obscenities at us. The fight we had with the other clubs in the vicinity and the way they came to beat us up one night. The booze session that we had after the puja and the way I had been awake for more than 24 hours at a stretch which was quite a record before the MBA days set in. The way Manka had us all laughing with his jokes and how we had both started laughing only to be kicked by others to make us stop. The packets of Chilly Chicken and Chowmein that Kota Kaku had provided to all of us in the club for putting up his catering business banner at the puja. And finally I remember a girl who had come like a princess in one such puja to leave an impact on my then baccha sa heart. The few moments of togetherness where we discussed weired stuffs from maths to songs was a thing I would cherish for ever.

Today as I pen down this bit of thoughts sitting in a plush Bangalore office, the thoughts of those happy moments of my childhood and adoloscent days comes back to me. Off course a lot has changed since then. From a paltry budget of Rs.1500 the puja has crossed budgets of Rs. 3 lakhs this year as last heard. Apart from the puja, regular functions are now the new kind of attraction to draw the crowd to our puja. Last year it was a Bengali band called Lakkhichara. This time it is the famous bengali band called Chandrabindu which is going to perform today. The footage of the puja and the functions are shown on the various bengali news channels thanks to Manka who has left cracking stupid jokes and is now a news reader for a famous bengali news channel. The princess who is now committed to some guy and is now a chef in a 5 star hotel in Chennai. And finally I miss home and everybit of it. The puja, the prasad, the khichdi and every small and big thing. Ma's food, baba's tensed expression when the priest came late, my sister who never wanted to get up that early in the morning and kept sleeping, I miss every bit of all this and finally think is everything that I have right now worth it? The only place I could get a glimpse of an idol of Saraswati yesterday was the TV of the gymnasium of my workplace!!

Of marriage and chicken!

2007-01-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

For a person like me who takes solace in eating up every bit of a dead chicken including the bones just to let the departed souls rest in peace, the social institution of marriage has not had much of an appeal apart from the food part of it. Post passing out with an MBA degree I have had to change my stance on both these issues (chicken- the important issue and marriage- the not so important issue).

To deal with the important issue at hand, for me eating a chicken is a bit of a spiritual feeling. Though the Dalai Lama would have fainted if he heard such a thing but generally I go into a trance when a chicken is up there on the menu for my gastronomical misadventures. The dish attracts me the same way as a drunk Mika getting attracted towards a revealing Rakhi Sawant for a unsolicited smooch. And after the delightful trance is over you realise that nothing is left of the chicken for the forensic department to carry out any kind of DNA analysis if the Chicken Right's commission ever decides to file a case of a missing chicken whom they beleive to be dead. The horrendous acts have often left people on close by tables during lunch time at my worplace in a state of shock.

Now my workplace has this weired way of torturing already work burdened souls with a number of certifications and training programmes spread out all across the year which apparently are mandatory for the sake of a better performance appraisal. Not that it does help you in anyway apart from the fact that after the training is over you have to burn the midnight oil and return back in the late night shuttles after finishing off with the work for that day. So there I was attending one such training programme on Cross Cultural Sensitivities in which the pretty instructor was supposed to teach us about table ettiquttes. Now for a person like me who had such rustic chicken eating habits, the entire episode was a big disaster. I struggled with the 7 course meal dropping spoons and forks. I was about to cut up somebody's hands when the knife in my hand just decided to jettison away into somebody else's plate failing to cut a loaf of bread. Luckily nothing that disastrous happened though it made me make a mental note of eating in a bit more sophisticated manner....not necessarily with a spoon and a fork but in a more human manner. After all I was in a big multinational and was supposed to be having lunch with well mannered clients and I did not want to scare them with my highly sophisticated table etiquttes. Not that I have become a complete Nirmalya Banerjee who has the unique distinction of having the famous Rajasthani Dal-Bati with a spoon and a fork but still I have decided to imporve my manners so as not to look that cannibalish. So these days I have been resisting myself from murdering the already murdered chicken over and over again and I am yet to get any information from the poultry union about their thoughts on the matter. Though these days an acceptability factor has crept in from the nearby table occupants which till now had been one of disgust.

Now coming on to the not so important issue of marriage. I mean it is not that it is not important otherwise I would have the soon to be married brigade pass me on to the hangman though I guess the married people would think otherwise and try to congratulate me on the due importance that I have given to marriage on my priority list. So marriage has been a typically unimportant issue till now for me. Though I am just 24 (the abhi to main baccha hoon age) yet the realities of it dawned on me thanks to a sequence of events that happened last week. One of my graduation class mates called up to announce in the most inhuman way that the girl I had this huge crush on in college finally got married to somone whose family had been settled in the greener pastures of the United States for quite a few generations. Dil mein jo bache kuche arman they woh bhi sale sab dard bankar beh gaye!! And to top it all he went on announcing the name of girls I knew and the ones I didnt even remember who were all tied by the common thread of marriage. Incidentally some had even borne kids and that somehow made me feel pretty odd about my own age. Is 24 that old that all ur batchmates from college get married? After all that was Gujarat, something about the place makes it pretty common for parents to burden their children with the responsibility of marriage at an early age.

Secondly Ash and Abhishek decided to tie the knot and got engaged. TV channels got into some kind of an overdrive making it seem to be the most important thing in the history of India after India's independence. The newschannel crew having no other phenomenal things to show had started interviewing Junior B's washerman, Ash's bungalow's watchman, the neighbourhood chaiwala etc etc asking them about their opinion about the soon to be held marriage. As if they had been cruical in ensuring the smooth ride of the love affair that is going to culminate in a marriage which is going to break a lot of hearts both male and female. And the ones who have hogged the limelight as a result of this are the many astrologers who seem to be putting in all sorts of equations predicting the match of a Mangli and a non-Mangli and putting across their views on the ideal honeymoon destinations to how many kids are they going to have with so much of conviction as if it was their own marriage. Seeing the way things were working out between the mangli and non mangli jodi my roommate flied back to Delhi to see if he could do anything about his love affair which has turned to be as filmish as the Ash-Abhishek one.

And lastly one of my flatmates left to marry his not so childhood gilfriend whom he had hit on and proposed in the last few days of our MBA days. The poor guy seemed to be all tense about the upcoming imminent disaster in his life. He seemed to have accepted fate the same way as a soon to be sacrificed animal does in the last few days of his at Bangalore as a bachelor. He did not even laugh when Raju Shrivastav was uttering his Gajodhar Bhaiya jokes on TV. The kind of sadist that I am, I made him watch "Pyaar ke side effects" as a parting gift for his bachelorhood and as a revenge for not throwing a bachelor's party.

So finally I have realised that marriage is an imminent disaster that happens in every person's life. Though the ones which are termed as love marriages have their own adventures attached to them which makes them all the more spicy. And considering my inexplicably handsome Tom Cruise looks, I missed the glorious opportunity of a lifetime to find myself a girl in the biggest matrimonial fare ( MBA days). Wonder why these MBA institutes dont publish the number of successful post MBA marriage figures for every batch along with such strategic figures as the average salary and median salary etc. Guess that would be a very good value proposition to make all the more MBA aspirants to buy the exhorbitantly priced forms. At this juncture I have somehow changed my stance on marriage thanks to a girl whom I have been chatting with for the last two months. I hardly know anything about her but I have had these moments of truth with her about how much of magic there is to marriage. So from black magic my perception of marriage has changed to that of a goody good magic. Lets see how reality is, some 3-4 years from now. And lastly all the curses and abuses to my innumerable cousins who have all decided to fall in love and marry. Now for a perenially single guy like me who is not endowed with good looks or a Richard Branson legacy it really has its own misadvantages. After all where am I supposed to look for a girl to fall in love with at this old age when I am losing my hair at an alarming rate. I guess I will break the trend and marry the arranged way.....

Ab le bhi jao....I wanna be Taken

2007-01-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

The space and the stars had always fascinated me as a child. I was very happy reciting "Twinkle twinkle little stars" till I realised somewhere in Class 10 that the nursery poem was nothing more than a big cover up for something that was absolutely horrendous for my brain. My IQ level just did not permit me to appreciate the difference between a white dwarf and a pulsar and such similar comparisons between a supernova and a black hole. Seeing the question paper of physics in the final exams, the one which seemed to be some kind of a script written in some alien language I had actually contemplated writing down my favourite poem that I had memorised so hard during my nursery days but thanks to a kind hearted fellow who sat right beside me and did not have the heart to complain, I passed with flying colours finally being able to write something about what the Doppler Effect actually was.

After that disastrous rendezvous with a subject like astronomy, I came face to face with it when I bought a book seeing Akshara buy one called "Taken". It was a scientific fiction about something related to outer space and our cozy little planet earth. Normally, my book reading habits rise and fall the same way as an economy springs between boom and depression. For the last 3 years or so it has been steadily hanging on to the recessionary phase with me not even finishing even a half a dozen of them. The sole motivation for buying the book was that it seemed to be a new copy with a flashy cover page and I was only getting it for Rs.90. At one point of time a capital expenditure of Rs.9 also would have made me think three times. But after getting a job, shelling out Rs.90 doesnt seem that difficult. No doubt am not one of the persons whose name Dhirubhai or for that matter Gurubhai wrote on his will but still sometimes its good to splurge. After all according to Keynesian theory spending means doing good to the economy.

So there I was trying to struggle through the pages of Taken all through the week and the more I read it the more it seemed that aliens had actually found our planet and that finally the likes of me whose genetic constitution was more like that of an alien than human could be united with our brethren. So there I was doing all sorts of things to find out if I could see some signs that they were interested in me being Taken by them.

I got the first sign when I realized that people at my office were looking at me with an alien look. For a split second my happiness knew no bounds till I realized that it was more of a sign of disgust seeing the terribly torn shoes that I was wearing to office one fine Monday morning. Alas the looks forced my room mate to drag me to the nearest Bata and there was where I gave divorce to my two and a half yr old shoes with a heavy heart.

The second and the biggest sign that I got was something related to electricity. The other day I was happily moving down the stairs of my office at breathtaking speed as if to catch a plane that was taxing down the runway leaving me behind, I tripped and I had to hold on to the railing to avoid a fall that would have given me all the more reason to make my medical insurance company pay. The moment I held the railing I felt a sudden shock as if I had touched a live wire. Now there was no chance of any electricity leakages happening from a railing and it seemed that I had developed some kind of an electric field around me thanks to the aliens that induced shocks the same way that Gods in mythological series are shown developing some kind of a halo behind their gold clad helmets of yesteryears called mukuts. When I told one of my colleagues about this incident and the way I was getting signs that the aliens were trying to contact me, he lauged it out saying that it was merely a case of a build up of static electricity in my body that had given me the rude shock. The colleague of mine happened to be an electrical engineer and from then on I have decided not to talk about my dreams of being taken to any electrical engineer.

The last of the clues came in the form of a boon today. Friday is always the last day when anyone would like to put in extra hours at their workplace. After all arent friday's meant to be partied away? So there I was in the morning balming and cribbing the whole world on my way to office desperately trying to connect with the aliens to make sure that there was no work when I reached office today. Sure enough my wishes came true when the mailbox stopped working. The system error was that of some server errors caused due to an ALIEN exception. The word alien in the error message finally made me realise that they were surely here trying to help me out and take me and accept me as a brethren and lead me to a better life that was free of curry pattas, one and half meter rates, Hosur Road jams and much more.

Lets see if I am Taken, I have my high doubts because the last time I volunteered to be taken somewhere I landed up in the police station for playing loud music. After that even the police does not want to take me again. That is why my hope has traversed from the humans to the aliens.

Hassles of an uncommon surname

2007-01-16T22:15:00.000-08:00

I was born one fine day right in the middle of the year on the 30th of June when Calcutta was sweating profusely thanks to a power cut that had continued to linger and plunge the city into perennial darkness for some obnoxious hours at a row. As if to commemorate that auspicious ocassion of a baby who was so fair that you could not notice its existence in a powercut, my maternal grandpa christened me as "Alas". And from then on I have been christened over and over again the way proxies to access orkut get blocked over and over again at my workplace.

After a lot of factional civil wars at home that saw allies turning into enemies, I finally got a twin set of name. One was Tukai which obviously meant to have found someone (which further made me beleive that I was definitely swapped with some other kid of some other parents in the power cut that haunted Calcutta on the auspicious ocassion of my birth) and the second was Indranil. Though there were factions in the family who wanted to name me Subhojit which reminds me of a professor of the same name who taught us things as distant and horrendous as parallel shift of IS-LM curves and deficit financing. After attending the first class of his in the second trimester of my PGDBM I thanked God that I was not named Subhojit.

As a legacy I got the surname attached to me the same way Himesh has his cap attached to his head. For a successful marketing company like Pidilite known to produce enticing advertisements, Himesh can work wonders being the brand personality of Pidilite. I mean have you ever seen him without his signature cap since his heydays. So it does stick on to his head the way any of Pidilite's adhesives stick on to stuffs of everyday use. So there I was branded as an Ain, carrying the legacy of a surname that was as common as eskimos in the South Pole.

The disasters of having an uncommon surname started soon in life. The first time I went to a drawing class the teacher thought and interpreted the Ain as a misspelt Ayan and went on calling me the same till my mom heard of it and gave me a serious thrashing about the same. Actually the hassles of making her understand the intricacies of my surname was too much of a pain for a feeble soul like me and hence I was Ayan for a year or so.

At school teachers and students alike came up with innovative ways of spelling Ain and I saw the brand name getting diluted and felt sad the same way the Levers and the Palmolives feel when they see cheap alternatives of their products with names like "Kolgate instead of Colgate". So there I was being misspelt as "ANN, INN, IN, AIR" etc. Whenever I complained, they said it was a proper noun and they had every right to spell it they way they wanted. Beyond a certain point I gave up protesting, the way Mamta Banerjee gave up on her hunger strike for Shingur and accepted fate. I realised the best way to tackle this kind of a situation was to just leave my name and dare not mention the surname. So from then on I have used only my name and only given out my surname whenever prodded for it. At IMT people went one step ahead and named me Ainstein. Incidentally I had nothing in common with the great man except for the unmanageable hair. I guess the departed soul must have felt very insulted with me being christened Ainstein considering my scientific capabilites. I flunked in physics in my pre boards and almost was on the verge of flunking chemistry thanks to a very well set question paper by a man who looked and acted more mean than Professor Snape in any Harry Potter book. Then there was the great MPD who tried to prove in one of his brain numbing finance classes that I came from a family of law breakers thanks to an assignment I hadnt done.( For the lesser informed Ain means LAW in bengali). I gave solace to my hurt soul by assuring myself that Stuart Law(the Australian Cricketer) had immigrated to Australia from Bengal and anglicized his surname and was actually related to me.

The common thing about an uncommon name like Indranil Ain is that you beleive you are the only one in the world with that name. You feel like a rare specied red panda walking on the face of the planet till you realise that you have been drastically wrong in your presumptions and find someone with the same name exists and is very much walking around on the face of the planet the way you have been doing. So the uniqueness associated with the name disappears in a smoke. So one fine day I got this mail on my Gmail account from another Indranil Ain who had done some kind of a wildcard search and found me out. Initially he thought that it was a prank that his girlfriend was playing on him and caught me online and started coochie cooing with me. Later on realising his follies Mr. Indranil Ain(not my alter ego or split personality) asked for due apologies and revealed his part of the story. Having saved myself from the irreristible temptations of turning gay I was a bit sad realising that I was not the unique that I thought myself to be. Last heard about Mr. Indranil Ain, he had got married to the girl friend he thought me to be on the net one day and is leading a happy life.

Last week another Ain having found a channel in Orkut to connect to his long lost brethren who shared common ancestry, scrapped me giving me full details about his father, uncles and long list of relatives and asked me to identify any one of them. As usual I was completely clueless and I doubted his intentions. The guy seemed gay from the very look on his face. His profile pic showed him wearing a bright red shirt and black pants that made him look like a freshly painted post box. And he was standing right in the middle of a nursery with dalia flowers all around him. I guess another bout of coochie cooing is coming my way pretty soon. And I hope against hope that the next Ain who scraps me be a female so that the coochie cooing that seems so nauseating at present feels better with the female touch. Finally I have realised that life is not that smooth for an Ain. Would I have been better off being a Chatterjee or a Mukherjee, a Sengupta or a Dasgupta, a Dutta or a Guha?

Marketing Alliance- Phuchkawala and VLCC!

2007-01-10T05:18:00.000-08:00

You need not be a Al Ries or a Jack Trout to market successfully!!

The other day I came face to face with this reality while moving along the streets of Kormangla trying to reach Forum (the mall) which is usually more packed than a peek time Virar - Churchgate fast local on any weekend. So as I was seeing a sea of human population ambling away aimlessly along the streets of Kormangla in a desperate effort to make their weekend a bit more interesting my eyes set sight on a phuckawala alias a panipuriwala (for the mumbaikars) alias a golgappewala (for the delhities).

Normally you woudnt have given a second glance to any phuchkawala standing on a street corner with a bulging plastic bag filled with phuchka that could easily accomodate me and you in its expanse, but this person was differnet. He seemed to be in the spotlight (both in meaning as well as literally). So Mr. Phuchkawala was spotted attracting a huge crowd right in front of a newly opened VLCC (For the lesser informed its a beauty and slimming centre which has branches all across India) centre that had used a lot of halogen lights to make weight concious people aware of its existence. The effect of the light seemed to make Mr. Phuchkawala look more attractive selling his huge load of phuchkas and attracting a crowd to taste whatever he had to offer.

The sight also made me fall prey to try out his phuchkas. After all the Calcutta Chromosomes (not the book) have a strong attachment to roadside unhygeinic delicacies like phuchka. A simple query about the price of the same using the rustic "Kitne ka diya" revealed 10 ka 6 aur ek sukha". A puzzled look on my face made the phuchka wala start off with the inflationary pressure that Bangalore had been subjected to. After all I had come a long way since my school days when you could get 4 phuchkas for a rupee. No doubt his prices were too exhorbitant as compared to the prices 3kms away in Bangalore where you could get "10 ka 10 aur ek sukha".

Without further complaints about his exhorbitant price I told him to prepare a plate. His apt hands started working on mashing the potatoes and mixing it with all the varities of masala stored infront of him making a thick mass. While his hands worked on the same his mouth did not close for even a split second. He revealed that he was from UP and that potatoes were dearer in Kormangla than BTM and that he could make 5 varities of things with his stuffs and that he was selling phuchkas for the last 6 years and he went blah blah all the while finally revealing his marketing alliance.

So Mr. Phuchkawala apparently had a reason behind standing in the spotlight of VLCC! He described that if it was anyone else he would have been readily kicked out of the place for blocking the way to the beauty and slimming centre but incidentally he had stuck up a marketing alliance with the owner of VLCC. He said that initially he used to stand infront of a park a few blocks away from the place where he was right now selling his stuffs when one fine day he was approaced by the owner of VLCC who wanted him to sell his stuffs standing infront of the newly opened centre. The marketing alliance had paid off well for both of them as he explained. These days he was following a premim pricing model charging more for the phuchkas because of the location factor. And moreover he was drawing a crowd infront of the VLCC centre thus making it more prominent. He also told about how the entire alliance was a success and told us instances of how bulky women who had come to his phuchka centre had felt self concious and had landed up in VLCC for a weight reduction programme.

I was spellbound by his knowledge of marketing. A query about his educational qualifications revealed that he hadnt even passed the 10th standard and incidentally in a matter of few minutes he had taught me more of marketing than any of the profs of the B-School I went to could in the two years. Mr. Smart talker can anyday take a class of marketing alliance the way the dabbawalas took a class on 6 sigma concepts at IIM. So next time when in doubt do not look into Kotler for examples....look around you, you would get a lot of live examples in ur own ecosystem.

Much ado about a Credit Card!!

2007-01-09T01:05:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the two years ordeal called the MBA course one of the profs of finance had lectured on the risk propensity of individuals. Clearly the formulas of finance hadnt been able to accomodate this human factor and hence came in concepts of credit scoring that showed your credit worthiness. And finally I have realised that my credit worthiness is a big zero coz no credit card issuer is willing to give me one. The irony is that in a day I get about 5 to 6 calls from companies but alas no one has delivered me with a card till now. In credit card sales terminology post the cold calls and the hot calls and the collection of documents stage the sales process never reaches the delivery or after sales service stage. Though in this era of money and near money instruments a debit card just serves fine, but alas the aviation industry never seems to be contended reducing your bank balance. They never trust debiting your bank balance when you are busy searching for the best deal to go back home. Moreover there is also the paranoid PVR where you would never be able to get tickets standing in a queue for even the worst of movies which have been rated one star by TOI on any weekend. And hence the credit card serves as the alternative which can buy a ticket without a queue to manage though they charge for the luxury of not making you stand in a queue.

So with these ends in mind I finally applied for a SBI Credit Card. The person who was making the cold call sounded desperate to acheive his monthly target and he said that there would be no hassles and he sent a person to fetch the numerous documents from me showing the greatest of efficiency. After the initial few calls that populated their customer details with all sorts of inane details about my existence, I finally got an assurance that I would be gettin my brand new lifetime free credit card in a week. Two weeks later I was yet to see my baby. An uncerimonious SMS message coveyed the bad news. It ran something like my application was rejected because of certain issues which were completely internal to the company and could not be shared with lesser mortals like me though they ended it with a positive looking statement which stated that the rejection was no way related to my credit stading.

Heartbroken at the rejection, I began searching for other options. After all the best way to forget a rejection (girl or otherwise) is to search for other alternatives. So there I was on the lookout again for some better options than SBI when I finally got a call out of the blue saying that the SBI application had been processed and they have dispatched the same.

Days turned into weeks and weeks into months but there was no sign of any credit card. Then came a volley of hilarious calls from SBI giving me a DD of Rs. 30k that I had never asked for to be used for a month. Somone called up to ask if I had got my credit card. When I answered in the non-affirmative the person on the other side said that the credit card had been dispatched and was somewhere between Bangalore and Chennai. And then came the most hilarious part, a credit card statement when I was yet to receive my credit card. It was coupled with an insurance policy of a whooping Rs. 6 lakhs which the person selling had tried to cross sell with the credit card sighting IRDA regulations. Alas I knew more of insurance than him and hence his justifications did not get him enough moolah!!

But under the present circumstance am left with a credit card statement telling me how much to pay for a credit card that never came to me. I guess I was the lucky one whose case was in the exception region of the dumbell curve popularly called the Six Sigma concept that GE so well follows.

Finally I have realised that it is the hardest to get the first credit card, the latter simply keep flowing. So as I still hope to lay my hand on the SBI card that is somewhere in transit between Bangalore and Chennai for the last two months, do I have any volunteers who can pay my bill of Rs. 49 for the month of December 2006???

The Stone Surprise: Hampi & Kishkinda

2007-01-03T02:22:00.000-08:00

The other day Sumit, Nirmalya and me decided to make a trip to some place over a pitcher of beer in a Bangalore pub. The prime motive was not to let the extended weekend off get wasted over more beer. The place was never decided that night as we returned in quite an inebriated condition paying the proverbial one and half times auto fare though the auto wallah had all the mood to shell out a few extra moolah out of us IT people. After all its perfectly legal for Bangalore auto wallas to be a bit corrupt and charge exhorbitantly.

So next day morning the venue was decided upon. It wasnt that easy as Sumit surfed the net and found out places that we could visit which I was sure didnt have human population 100 sq kms in its vicinity. Thus we dropped our options one after the other and finally zeroed in on Hampi and Kishkinda. Without any of the planning that is entailed in any of my travels I decided to let fate take its own course and got ready, packed and called the cab all in a matter of 2 hours for a 2 day getaway from the IT city to a ruined city.

The ride was awesome with the Tata Indica cab zooming at speeds close to 100-110 kmph on the Tumkur road and the NH-4 that connects Bangalore to Pune. The 6 lane national highway was quite a delight for any driver to go full blast on the accelrator. We stopped over for a late lunch at a dhaba and enjoyed every bit of the Punjabi food served there. It was quite a treat to finally get an egg bhurji without the helpful serving of curry leaves that was so common to South Indian food.

The 6 lane higway abruptly ended some 200 kms from Bangalore leaving us with a two lane highway for the rest of the 150kms. Apparently it had been left incomplete as the Golden Quadrilateral project ran into trouble when India embraced one coalition government for the other. We reached Hospet (a major town some 30 kms from Hampi) at around 11 at nite and were driven to the verge of insanity as we could not find even one room empty in any of the hotels. Apparently the whole world had decided to land up at Hampi to spend their Christmas. Finally we did get an air conditioned room in one of the hotels with a statutory warning of checking out before 11 A.M next day. Having found a place to crash ourselves after a long journey of 350kms we slept like logs.

Next day morning post breakfast we went hotel hunting again and finally found a room in a palatial hotel called Shanbagh which could have been mistaken for a palace. It seemed that the owner had decided to build a palace for himself only to realise that a hotel would have been more profitable a venture and hence came up the hotel. Luckily after getting the hotel room we started out towards Hampi and landed up at a place which was straight out of the history books. The hillocks covering the entire area were a treat to the eye. Rocks seemed to precariously hang from everywhere as if nature had decided to delicatly balance them in a weired game. It reminded me of the sight from the hostel of Infosys Hyderabad that overlook hillocks with the same kind of sights though on a much smaller scale than Hampi.

The sights and colours of the place were mindblowing. It was a canvas that had been coloured with the browns of the mountains in the distance, the colourful shops of Hampi bazar, the black stoned idols in the temples of the place, the red uniform of scores of school students who had come on a vacation, the ever inquisitive faces of foreigners who had come to Hampi. It was a sight that made every penny spent on the trip worthwhile.

It is well beleived that "If dreams would have been made out of stone, it would be Hampi". The truth of the statement struck me as we saw the archaeological wonders in front of me. Hampi was the seat of the Vijaynagar kingdom that reached its zenith under the rule of Krishna Deva Raya. The first destination that we visited was the Virupaksha Temple which rises majestically in the Hampi Bazar. The only temple which was not touched by the Mughals still has idols of Shiva, Pampa and Bhuvaneshwari which are worshipped. The tower of the temple casts an inverted image using the same concepts of a pin hole camera at a specific location. At 500 rupees we got a guide to drive us on his auto from one place to another in Hampi. The monolithic statues of Ganesha and Narsimha were awe inspiring in their elegance and magnanimity.

We visited the twin rocks, the Lotus Mahal, the elephant stable and finally landed up to the world famous Vithala temple. The Vithala temple has 56 pillars which when struck in specific manner produce muscial sounds. The sounds varied from those of the tabla, dholak to the harmonium. There was also the world famous Stone Chariot that portrayed exquisite stone work. After all the dreams of a wonderful empire dating 500 yrs back could be well visualised seeing the exquisite stone work.

After a lunch of roti, egg bhurji and paneer we set sail towards Kishkinda crossing the Tungabhadra river which looked no more than a little stream seldom realising that I would be in for a big shock the next day regarding the magnanimity of the same river. The motor boat followed a differential pricing strategy. A concept which is very unfair on a specific class of society but so broadly used in marketing terminology. While it took Indians 5 rupees to cross the river on the motor boat, it tookthe foreigner 10 rupees for the same comfort. But nobody really seemed to care as 10 rupees turns out to be 1/5th of a dollar considering the exchange rate. I guess nobody would seem to care till the rupee starts appreciating dramatically. Kishkinda was a delight to the eyes. There were more foreigners than Indians in this little piece of historic land which one served as the capital for King Sugriv (the king of the apes). It was like a mini cultural hot pot in which people of different countries straight from Australia, Canada, the US to European countries blended together. After renting a moped and a cycle we started exploring Kishkinda. There was a festival in progress some 4 kms from the place we started from. We finally made a fool of ourselves travelling the entire stretch and finding out nothing but a small village mela in progress.

After a delightful coconut water refreshment we again set out exloring the place and finally landed up at a place filled with gigantic rocks that tempted us to rock climb. There were a couple of pretty looking foreigner females (yet another motivation for the rock climbing adventure).

It was quite an experience sitting on top of gigantic rocks and seeing the sun set in the horizon. Kishkinda proved mind blowing.

The night was spent at Hospet sipping beer and eating chicken dishes. Early next morning we set out for the Tungabhadra dam, Chitradurga and our return journey back to Bangalore. The Tunghabhadra which had looked like a little stream the day before on our way to Kishkinda stood before us spreading itself out like a huge sea at the dam. It was so big that the other coast was not at all visible in the morning light. The scene was captivating. The huge lock gates and turbines seemed to covey the enourmosness of the river in front. En route we passed a place that had a windmill park for genrating power. The gigantic windmills seemed to loom over the mountains as they cast huge shadows on the highway beneath. The blades were much larger than 16 wheeled trucks. A small stopover for a picture of the breathtaking windmills got us curious enough to proceed on a trek for reaching the base of the windmills. After a rather tiresome trek stretch of close to a kilometer and half we finally were at the base of these magnanimous mills. It was worth the effort put in to reach them. Beyond the hills which housed the wind mills were vast stretches of land completely devoid of any human population. The highway snaked through the hills and looked like a black winding piece of string from the top of the hills. It was worth every effort we put in to reach the place.

We saw the fort at Chitradurga that has 7 layers of protection from the enemies and finally proceeded towards Bangalore stopping at the same dhaba where we had landed on our way to Hampi. One word of advice that the dhaba owner gave us after posing some rather uncomfortable questions about our salary figures was that "If you earn less than 40000 rupees in a month, its better to open a dhaba." Any comments on the same?