Weekend of House hunting and a gorgeous movie

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!!

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

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

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!

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

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

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!

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!!

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

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?