Hinduism or Democracy: Choose only one!

Hinduism and democracy can't co-exist together. One of them has to go. The caste based politics will kill the meritocracy and with it the dreams of the thousands of meritorious people from so-called forward castes (wats so forward abt these castes? there are poor people in all castes. The talk about rural/urban divide has some substance but it would be foolish to assume that its what the politicians want to address) Its not just the logistics of the implementation of reservations which frighten any sane person but the scale of disillusionment and loss of hope among youth. Almost everyone who can has taken to the streets and one hopes that something comes out this struggle full of innocence. Innocence of the fact that thousands of such struggles against the rakshas called "government" never resulted in any positive outcomes. Instead, the polticians always gather a reason to escape free of dirt. The mass is as they say, illogical. The 60% of voting population is definetly OBC or other reservation-benifited caste. Otherwise, the politicians wouldnt have dared take such an unprogressive step.

India is going to the dogs. It was supposed to be a statement of/by people who don't have a life and enjoy cursing the government and the country for their incompetence. But, the dogs are real now and they are barking louder than ever. The sound is almost unbearable. And there won't be any life anymore for many from the forward castes.

How do i get my visa for US?

I support Reservations!

I fully support the reservations idea. All the seats in parliament need to be reserved for people with honest hearts and a clean conscious. The current lot needs to be brutally murdered.

All other kinds of reservations like that in higer education are sick. Am waiting for the day when a reserved category heart surgeon plucks out the heart of a minister who endorsed the reservations in higher education. Since, the entire parliament supports reservations, i would ask this. All of them should go to doctors/engineers/consultants/technicians/ of reserved category when they need them. The rest will soon emigrate anyway.

The ability to say NO!

There is one thing common among indians who work in the outsourcing industry. In the process of pleasing their clients (the clients are overpleased way too often!) the employees in the thousands of BPO's/KPO's/ITES don't use the word NO as much as they need to!

The problem has its roots in indian culture and has far greater manifestations than in Outsourcing industry. In india, the guests are the equivalents of gods according to popular culture. Hence, they need to be treated accordingly. The employees of back-office operations believe a lot in this and so, work like "horses". And also, i belive it is a case of lack of self confidence and the ability to assert one-self.

Its all good for job scene that India becomes a prima donna outsourcing hub but the very thoght that some/many of my own cousins may end up working for call-centres or other BPO/KPO outfits makes me freeze as if i reached northpole. But, thats off the point.

So, what's the point? This blog is just my knee-jerk reaction to something which has affected me. Lots of my friends work for outsourcing outfits and i myself have worked for a couple of such places. And the disease is widely spread. People work long hours
as if they are working on very important assignments which mean millions of dollars gained or lost. The truth is that much of the work in KPO industry is just second hand work. And the white skins in the US usually know what to outsource and what to not and never outsource "important" work. The indians in backoffices have a lot of perks but they lack the most important of all. Empowerment and a feeling of job satisfaction. The growth profiles stink and so does the food.

The last weekend saw me in one of the most awkward situations i have faced in a long time. A close friend of mine asked me a favour. A friend of a friend of his is coming to bombay with his friends and has no place to stay! So, he needs my place to stay. I could have easily said no as that would mean i would be dislocated 4m my own home. But i didnt. I said YES. And i know what i had to go through. Thats just one example of what the disability to say NO can do to you.

What's in a name?

Well, not much really or so i thought for long!

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Boston Analytics (BA) are two different companies. (Well, so? nothing is really wrong about being different! .........u too think so?)

Their offices in bombay are in neighbouring buidlings. This seems innocuous too.

I happen to work for the latter of the companies and know first hand that some thing is really not innocuous abt the names and locations of the two. The loads of visitors who land at my office hoping that they have reached boston consulting group will testify to the fact.

I have people barging into my door every day and asking if it's BCG. And i love their funny reactions when i tell them that they have landed at the wrong place. Earlier today in the morning a fat lady barged into my office (which actually caused this blog!). She was aghast at the small size of the office and might have thought for a moment that may be BCG has gone bankrupt. When i told her the inevitable truth, the fat lady seemed very disappointed. For one thing, she will have to walk all the way back and up now. (I once gleefully accepted a huge biscuits packet which was actually sent to BCG but accidentally reached BA. I persisted that it's the wrong place but the biscuit boy seemed more than happy to finish the matter there and then. But, sadly my better senses prevailed and i had to send him back)

The victims (read visitors) are a daily routine. The Postmen, pizzaboys, job-seekers, mobile guys, friends of employees, foreign visitors (:O), etc have all bitten the dust. Must surely have been a funny and at the same time, humbling experience to each one of them. The real fun is all mine, though! :)


Epilogue: This blog is dedicated to all those visitors (martyrs) who needed to go to BCG and ended up at my door!

Bizarre

Everything around is bizarre. I will run you through some kind of a list

1. A wanne-be-famous brother kills his own famous brother because he wasn't helping him make some quick money.

2. A driver drives the public bus rashly and kills 35 people because he had a bad argument with his wife in the morning!

3. Some guys cut the head off of a foreigner as he doesn't belong to their kind and they hate other kind of people living on their land! (I like this one)

4. The guy with no head has a hidden wife who demands a part of the sympathy money from the government/corporate.

5. The original wife comits suicide (this is not bizare, especially not after the turn of events)

6. My boss needs me to work overtime because he needs to impress his boss over a cup of coffee!

7. Sreesanth claims he wants to bowl at 150 kmph (the most bizarre of all!!!!)

8. Almost everybody i know seems to be on orkut. The biggest neighbourhood one could ever imagine!

9. I miss home

Are all these things connected? Is there something missing? Are you confused about what are you reading? Well, that was exactly the topic of this blog. "Bizarre". If this is not bizarre, what else is?

To Mittal, with Love :P

Saley Mittal,

This is not a blog. This is a public mail to you and i couldn't think of a better public forum than my own blog. The purpose is to inform the world or rather educate the world about you and your crude manners (sic...)!

So, where do i start? As you would have realised by now, this mail is an outcome of my deep rooted malice (read love) towards you :D.........I hated you for the first time when i saw your juice-less stick like body (and i hated you a lot of times after that). To start with, I just hoped you were not human. But, as luck (bad) would have it, you turned out to be one. I looked at it as an experience to adjust with aliens and looking back now, I actually had a lot of fun doing it. You........*&^%$@%%!

(The rest of the content has been held back as my lawyer just adviced me that the US law enables its citizens to sue any damn body for any damn thing. I would have tried anyway but am too tired to get sued today)

After a very bad day at office...,
May my soul rest in peace!

p.s: If u look down upon my blog and write (s)craps on it again in orkut, i will publish this mail in its complete version :).... I hope you wont do it. Even if you do, i can always delete the (s)crap! :D

Hail Ramanujan!

I was talking to a childhood batchmate of mine on YM, and the talks somehow lead to a discussion on "Srinivasa Ramanujan". Just out of curiosity, i researched a little bit on him and the following are a few excerpts from a gem of a life as his....

"...........he had independently discovered the Bernoulli numbers. At this time in his life, he was quite poor and was often near the point of starvation"

Hardy said of Ramanujan's formulae, some of which he could not initially understand, "a single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true, for if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them."

...the list of the anecdotes is too long and i cant quote them all here. The taxi number saga is a legend. If interested, You can read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

Fat pay packets = Real Indian MBA dream

Focus

I realised this today evening. I have no real focus. The only focal point in my life, if anything exists, is my bed. I make sure i make it to my bed post midnight everyday. Well, that's a sad focus! Kidding apart, lack of focus is what i have found that kills the spirit of many of my acquaintances/friends who are otherwise very keen on making it big. People are ambitious, confident, full of dreams but many of the dreams fall apart just due to one single reason. Lack of focus. The problem is much more serious than one tends to realise. Dreaming is one thing and living upto them is completely another. One needs to strike a balance and that is possible only if one has some "real" focus in life! ........Huh, blogging is so easy!

beach...

Where land meets water
Where earth meets air
Where body meets mind
Where space meets time
We like to be on one side, and look at the other!

-(The above lines have been copied from somewhere)

p.s: The just expired weekend saw me enjoy the sea music of murud&janjeera. Kashid beach is my new found love. Am sure that the place is going to see a lot more of me :D. For those interested, pics will be put up soon. Keep lurking! :)

Death and Consciousness!

"Death". What does it really mean? Does it all end with death? If it's obviously yes(or is it not?), what's the purpose of anything that i do? Are the day-to-day struggles to prove one's worth and the superficial things that i do in order to attain that so-called "pleasure", sum up to life? To understand death, i guess i need to understand life better. What is life? Emotions. Life is all about emotions, isn't it? You know you are living because you react when something happens. The reaction can be absolutely any feeling depending on what caused that reaction. Happy or Sad depends on where exactly you are on the time-space curve. A person who lacks emotions is as good as dead. You got to react when something happens to you. Reaction doesn't mean a loud one. It can be a very subtle one and intangible to others. But, it got to be there.


There is plenty of literature available on consciousness & death. So, I went to wikipedia to read some of it. The website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death

And there is something very striking that i found on the above site.

The website says, When death is imminent.....

Physical death is a progressive process, during which there are some signs that usually indicate that death is imminent. Not all of the following changes occur, nor do they necessarily occur in any particular order, as the body shuts down during the dying process.

* The dying individual may become increasingly tired and sleepy, and may be difficult to arouse (lethargy).

* The individual may become confused much of the time and may no longer recognize familiar persons, places, or objects.

* Hearing and vision may become impaired, and speech may be slurred, difficult to understand, or nonsensical.

* A few dying individuals become restless or very anxious and move about frequently in the bed, pull at the bed clothes or bedding (linen clutch), and reach out.

* The person may experience hallucinations.

* Less nourishment will be required, and the person’s intake of food and water will diminish. Difficulty in swallowing (dysphagia) may also occur.

* The person may sweat profusely.

The fact is, I keep doing some of these many-a-times. Does it mean i keep dying? Then may be am being reborn everyday. Each day starts with my birth and ends with my death. And my performance on each day decides my fate on the next day. And someday, i will retire. After that day, there will be no rebirth.



p.s: On a serious note, I am not sure if i am alive. I don't react to many things anymore. I just duck and hide. The news of the death of someone i know but don't really know, confuses me to no end. I don't know how should i react. The feeling of guilt is the only reaction that i feel. And the guilt is because i never had any reaction in the first place.

Then, i got here...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness. Am still reading it!

So much to read and so little time..............

Idea!

I had a strange but good idea today morning! A brief description of the kind of dog work that i do for a living will help you better understand the genesis of the idea. The company that i work for earns lots of it's revenues by using Microsoft's Office and Google's Search engine. That implies that i use a lot of MS Office (Excel mostly) or Google engine most of the time. I also worked for an investment banking support team earlier which involved mulling over lots of financial reports (PDF's).

If you are smart (technologically speaking), you would have by now guessed what am i trying to get to. If not, don't worry. May be you are just having a bad day! The idea that i had this beautiful morning was that the Acrobat PDF's can be embedded with the Microsoft Office. i.e If the table in the PDF was actually an excel object earlier, the table can be edited at ease. And, the text in the PDF can be editable too! Will it save any time or add any value? I guess yes. I wonder if there any such opensource applications already available. Any linux geeks reading this blog may kindly reply to this.

So, what's all the fuss about? Nothing much really. One of my friends asked me to write something on the blog. And this is all i could manage for the boring tuesday afternoon at office. It also feels good to talk about technology ideas and especially so, if you are a dumb ass with technology!

I wish i had the ability to write long and interesting blogs and that's my only wish in life right now. I feel like such a dumb idiot when i lack topics for blogs. Am i really that dumb? I guess no. I think am just plain simple and don't believe in writing complicated blogs which confuse the readers to no end. I too have my share of opinions on all kinds of so called "important" issues of my profession, my country, my favourite sport and the likes but i prefer to keep them to my own. I like being involved in an informal dialouge with a friend about the government's new sick idea of extending reservations but am not really the kind of a person who would write a blog on it. May be am just too lazy. That ends the matter and today's blog. Have a nice day!

You are not alone!

Another day has gone
I'm still all alone
How could this be
You're not here with me
You never said goodbye
Someone tell me why
Did you have to go
And leave my world so cold

Everyday I sit and ask myself
How did love slip away
Something whispers in my ear and says
That you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though you're far away
I am here to stay

But you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though we're far apart
You're always in my heart
But you are not alone

'Lone, 'lone
Why, 'lone

Just the other night
I thought I heard you cry
Asking me to come
And hold you in my arms
I can hear your prayers
Your burdens I will bear
But first I need your hand
Then forever can begin

Everyday I sit and ask myself
How did love slip away
Something whispers in my ear and says
That you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though you're far away
I am here to stay

For you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though we're far apart
You're always in my heart
For you are not alone

Whisper three words and I'll come runnin'
And girl you know that I'll be there
I'll be there

You are not alone
For I am here with you
Though you're far away
I am here to stay
For you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though we're far apart
You're always in my heart

For you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though you're far away
I am here to stay

For you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though we're far apart
You're always in my heart

For you are not alone...


-Lyrics from Michael Jackson song "You are not alone"!!

Holi!

It's holi today. I just got up from my bed and for the first time ever had this strange urge of writing my blog. I actually created this blog long time back. But, that was out of peer pressure!
Here i am back again with some original inspiration. Straight from the heart!

So what do i write now? I have read blogs of all kinds with all kinds of themes. Did i really like any? I guess i liked blogs with lots of pictures. Pictures tend to speak a lot more than words!
But, i don't want to create just a photoblog! I want words too. Lot of them. Words sometimes cause a lot of confusion. But, i guess i like confusion. If you are confused, you atleast know you are thinking! Anyways, am not a photography enthusiast to create a photoblog. Atleast not until now.

Life after passing out of college has been strange. The initial months were traumatic! Getting up early to reach office on time has been a struggle! I tried changing companies just to avoid the mad rush. But, i realised the rush is mad everywhere. There is just no escape! But things have settled now, atleast for sometime. My new office is right on seashore and that makes life more pleasant! I walk up to the sea anytime i want. I guess it's the best perk any company can offer me! How can i not write about the bombay local trains! It's an experience i love. You get to see the human emotions in their crudest form in a jampacked local train! A bombay local train is a snapshot of real world! Limited resources and unlimited want of the inhabitants! All it results in is a tiresome journey! Reaching destination is important but journey is as important. And not everybody reaches their destination. Do they?

Spontaneous work is often better than well-thought out scripts! It's long time since i tasted my creative juices and they r just pouring right now! My guitar is broke and dusty and is looking at me with a sad face.....I just can't leave it alone like that! Am off the PC now and i won't get back here until i fix it. Don't assume that am a guitarist. Let's just say am still in the process.

Time

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clock is ticking..............................
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......................clock is still ticking..................
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...........time is running away.......................
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.............darkness is awake...................................
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........................................................am thirsty.........
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.......................................................am i still................here?
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.......................................................r u still reading?!!!!