Ameya... Dil Se...

Tired but still not retired

2012-01-03T12:27:00.004+05:30

After his rousing welcome on his way to the center of ‘TheOval’, the batsman mapped the field, took guard and lifted his head to sightthe bowler at the other end of the 22 yard. There, William Eric Hollies was gettingready for his glide to the popping crease. The mundane wrist-spinner was no aweinspiring, neither on verge of any record equaling scalps nor flaunting anyimpressive bowling stats. However he himself was oblivious that the following ‘rollof his arm over the shoulder’ would catapult him into cricketing history. For hewas to castle the person who was on verge to etch his name in cricketing ‘hallof fame’.

That batsman being ‘The Don’. Sir Donald George Bradman wasplaying his last innings, with just four runs needed for him to catapult him in‘100 runs average’ club. Thus he was almost destined to be the first and thusfar the only one to average above 100 with significant number of tests underhis belt. As destiny would have, it wasn’t to be. Bradman pushed forward to the second ball thathe faced, was deceived by a googly, and bowled between bat and pad for a duck.An England batting collapse resulted in an innings defeat, denying Bradman theopportunity to bat again and so his career average finished at 99.94.

That elusive 3-figure mark or not, Bradman is acknowledged tobe the greatest batsman to walk the earth. For his charisma would have heightenedno more, had he dispensed the piece of leather to the fence in his last innings.In fact I believe that ‘ghost of 99’ has just added to his laurel. He couldhave extended his career by another series if he wanted to and thus achievedthe coveted mark, but would he be respected as much then? My answer is a big ‘No’.Sometimes calling it a day on a high is much more remembered than dragging yourfeet to get past some psychological mark.

The genius of a person as per yours truly is certainly whatthat individual has achieved over his career span and not what milestone he hasstopped at. At times, one can achieve much more and hog more limelight by ‘intentionally’stopping short of something. Remember Mark Taylor? He made headlines in 1998when he declared while on 334 against Pakistan so that he wouldn’t usurp thegreat Don Bradman, thus paving his way in history. I doubt there would be evena handful who remembers Matthew Hayden’s record 380 against Zimbabwe over Taylor’sact of ‘respect’. Mark Taylor definitely could have rode past the Don’s scoreto become the highest individual scorer for Australia, but his legacy would havelasted only until some other mortal surpassed him.

Pardon me for sacrilege, but unfortunately we Indians havefailed to hang our shoes at the right time irrespective of field of work. Bethat grumpy octogenarian politician still wanting to be the prime-minister,those wannabes actor sons desperately hunting for that one box-office hit orthat ‘godly’ cricketer still hunting for the elusive century of centuries, allof them have stretched their luck a bit too far. In the process all they haveachieved is to just take some sheen off their illustrious career.

One might feel motivated to go on and on, but then you are no‘lifeless’ Duracell bunny and life isn’t a 100m dash. It isn’t where you zipoff at the sound of the gunshot just to halt on feeling the satin ribbon acrossyour chest. In fact it is like a relay race which boils down to swiftly andsmoothly passing on the baton to your compatriot, who would thus carry yourlegacy forward. You may have been a ‘torch-bearer’ of the team for long, afather figure to many, but when a child looks up to his father ‘his idol’, heexpects him to emulate him one day. And though one has been at the forefront spearheadinghis folks still believing he has the zest left in him to lead, it is for him tosidestep and let the urderling step into his shoes at the most opportune time. Withall the achievements in ones kitty there comes along most important responsibilityto make way for the generation next.

Goan dy'Nasty' Politics

2011-12-28T15:53:00.000+05:30

It’s that time of the year that every Goan must be looking forward to. After experiencing a tumultuous decade on the political arena in the 90's, the new millennium had dawned with relative stability. Baring a few unsuccessful attempts at toppling the government, the last five years had been uneventful; and I am saying this only in context to ‘the great political musical chair’ that we Goekars are used to. Blame it on the complex arithmetic of seats, incompatibilities of some of our political heavy-weights, the divine blessings of ‘Daam-baab’, or his turning nelson’s eye towards the misdemeanors of some cabinet colleagues, Digambar Kamat has been able to add his name to the Hall of fame of full-term chief Ministers of Goa. Quite an irony that he would find himself in the league of the visionary like Dayanand ‘Bhausaheb’ Bandodkar.

But with election dates declared, the Goans can enjoy what they have missed for past half a decade. The mad rush of the aspirants seeking tickets, their claims and counter-claims, the corner meetings and canvassing will be running thick and fast. Not to miss the ‘Chicken aani Soro’ parties and the life-size figurines of fat-bellied, gold encrusted candidates dressed in ‘political’ whites. The dangling banners off the electric poles and the giant billboards will soon be a commonplace.

But this election promises to be different. Not that the usual antics won’t be there, after all they have become an inseparable part, but the scale would be at unprecedented levels. Goa as I understand has historically always been a straight battle between two candidates (I deliberately didn’t say parties). During the period post liberation it had been dual between candidates claiming allegiance to the regional parties which were steadily replaced by the national heavy-weights. These elections promise to buck the trend and may turn out to be different, if not for any pre-poll alliance. With the other national party and the usual regional parties which mushroom only during the election times raising their heads, we can expect a multi-cornered battle. The deluge of aspirants powered by funds of their mining and construction business, often illegal, means these parties won’t be left wanting for nominees. What is most interesting to see though is that these elections may be less amongst the parties and more so an election amongst the political clans.

Not just son and daughter and brother and sister, veteran politicians are readying to field their friend, PA, son-in-law and wives (plurality intended ;)). With a single seat having the potential to turn you into a king-maker, it does harm noone to have ones kith and kin by their side when the political tug of war for the elusive CM’s chair begins. If not for the CM’s seat, they can surely land up with plump portfolios or/and the chairmanship of profiteering corporations, not to mention the power, perks and the much sought-after official white ambassadors (and often Camrys, Innovas and even Hummers too) with the red beacon.

To start with the gigantic leader and strongman (figurative too) who has been tirelessly canvassing for his daughter dear. As he likes to declare “not all of his children are interested in contesting elections”. Thankfully so, lest considering his not so small family there would have been hardly any seat left for others. Not to be left behind his brother, a sitting MLA himself, has been trying to secure his political lineage by demanding a nomination for his ‘social-worker’ son. His para-dropping his pilot son into the election fray might land him more leverage in the scheme of things post elections. And if all works in their favour, they would occupy an overtly significant 10 percent of the assembly.

Another over-ambitious first time MLA from the hinterland, who has inherited political genes from his long time politician father has been trying to up their tally in the assembly complex atop the Porvorim hillock. He has been rumoured to have been coaxing his wife to contest so as to increment their already sure-shot ‘father-son’ tally by another seat. Besides he has been getting ready his own army of toadies, some imported across parties, fuelling his juggernaut towards ‘Mahalaxmi’ at Altinho. For him, getting his foot-soldiers vindicated by the electorate might be a much less a herculean task than keeping his flock together post elections, when the poachers a.k.a horse-traders would have a field day. But until then his might emerge as the single largest ‘group’, thus propelling his chances of bringing the chief ministership back home once again.

From one former chief-minister onto other, but the game-plan doesn’t differ by much expect that this ‘patrao’ plans to field both his sons. Tainted or not, he thinks both of them have toiled enough under the 'sun' for the masses and its time for their ‘sun’ rise on the political horizon. His faith in the electorate and his confidence has prompted him to field one of the two against his bête-noire and the local strongman. Perhaps he wants to kill two birds with an arrow by adding to his number while getting rid of his nemesis.

That arch-rival is no political greenhorn though. While getting himself re-elected with a thumping margin, he has also secured another adjoining constituency for his brother to add to his political muscle. Both of them have successfully struck emotional chord with the constituent voters playing the regional party card and equating their win to the existence of their beloved party. The old guard and the party loyalists thus far have, unwittingly or no, played into their hands while trying to retain the existence and symbol of the old king of the Goa political jungle.

The other regional party, or rather its modern incarnation, hasn’t been as lucky in this regards. Virtually it has ceased to exist, but miraculously pops itself out of hibernation whenever the election commission rings its bell. Time and again, it has been used, reused, misused and abused by many mean politicians for their own good, trying to extract whatever two-bits of emotional calling it still has for a certain section of the society. It also acts as a watering hole for all those disgruntled candidates who or whose wife has been denied tickets by others. A la 'Ek Duje Ke Liye' scene at Dona-Paul, this 'smarter than fifth grader' hubby had denounced another sought after ticket at the eleventh hour, to take the plunge with his dear wife in the whirlpool of elections on this party ticket. Unfortunately for the duo while the husband was able to swim ashore, his wife wasnt able to stay afloat in the sea of ballots. Barring minor jugglery of seats I reckon this husband-wife duo are ready to sound their election bugle and also hoping this time to cross the finish line together.

Extremities do exist in life. While there are some who knock at the doors of some old party to get their ‘wedded’ wife a ticket, there are others who are floating new party entirely to provide a launch pad to his wife, wedded or not notwithstanding. This maverick has very grandiose plans to field candidates, many of them ‘wedded’ to him, throughout the length and breadth of the Goan paradise. It needs to be seen as to how many of them faithfully follow his footsteps on road to the state assembly.

With the fathers doing their bit for their wards, this matriarch wasn’t to be left too far behind in propping her son. This ‘Mummy’ of all like most of the mothers has depicted highest degree of sacrifice when she offered to bow out of her seat in love of her son. It needs to be seen whether this mother-son bonhomie would help pave way for son to become another ‘Goan protector’.

Though many have been able to field their blood relatives in the fray, the unlucky ones not bestowed with more ‘social-workers’ within the family have to look beyond. ‘Blood is thicker than water’ they say, but in politics it need not be always. While some ‘witty’ doctor who though in his sunset days of political career still seeks revival of his fortune through his son-in-law, there are also others who are willing to bet on their erstwhile personal assistant. And there are other ex-MLAs, ex-policemen, industrialists and mining barons who are all set to descend in the election ring with their kith and kin. It’s anybody’s guess how many of them will be able to walk out of it... 'triumphant'.

With the dynasties warring each other and the Alemaos, Dhavalikars, Ranes, Naiks, Pachecos and Monserrates entering the battle-field with their families en-mass, don’t get surprised if the elections results is reported by the election commission as below:

Alemaos : 4

Dhavalikars : 2

Naiks : 3

Monserrates : 2

Ranes+ : 5

Pachecos : 1

Brace Yourselves!

Why I don't support Anna?

2011-08-29T17:56:00.001+05:30

Before you read further, here are some assumptions I want you to discard:

1. I am anti-Anna.

2. I am pro-corruption.

3. I am pro-congress.

4. I am for the government version of Lokpal.

5. I am against the people right to protest peacefully.

At the onset, let me re-affirm that I am NOT anti Anna, anti Kejriwal, anti Kiran Bedi or against any soul that forms part of team Anna. I don’t doubt his character, intention or his noble thoughts. It’s an irony that the bunch of congress big-mouthed toadies aka congress spokespersons are trying to vilify his campaign.

I am also FOR corruption to end in this India at the earliest. After all, who faces the brunt of corruption more than common middle-class person like yours truly? If the beast of corruption is not tamed in time, I don’t see India prospering further. When I say I don’t support Anna’s Jan Lokpal movement, I would insist even with more ferocity that I condemn the version proposed by the government. It’s a toothless tiger to say the least.

It’s a very over-whelming site to see that vast majority of people coming out on roads in support of Anna's movement to fight corruption. It’s even more commendable that they have maintained the peace and decorum while resisting the tough hand of the government. This very gesture of the people, by the people, for the people indicates that democracy doesn’t just exists but is in fact thriving in our country.

So, what’s the point of contention?

Firstly, I don't believe the means that Anna is following are best suited in the democratic setup that we have in our country. People do compare it with the peaceful satyagrahas during the days of freedom struggle; but I don’t second that analogy. For back then, we were resisting the oppressive and tyrannical rule of an imperialist empire that had stifled the rights of the masses. We do have avenues for grievance redressal and what Anna is doing isn’t actual the right approach. Conceding to any such demand against parliamentary processes, would set a dangerous trend. The protestors' demand to "sidestep" the constitutional process can very well be a threat to democracy. In fact, the very fact that Team Anna is fighting the government means we are opposing the very own masses who have "voted" them to power in first place.

Furthermore, Creation of an all-powerful Jan Lokpal will be like unleashing a demon. We have had institutions in our constitutional setup viz. the CVC, CAC, CBI which were meant to be sacrosanct and should have been functioning without any malice. Its pains me to see their plight these days. It is very well known “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" and I would not be surprised that if the Jan Lokpal succumbs to the same plight.

Many people argue that the JLP will be driven by the masses, the so called "civil-society". But I question "who is the civil-society?” I don’t have an iota of doubt about the honesty of the people in the drafting committee of the JLP and I don't wish to raise any doubt regarding their character. But I question their authority and who has imparted that to them? Certainly, I haven’t and definitely neither has you or any of the billions of people dotting the expanse of this vast land. These days we are ready to lay our future in the hands of these people who were virtually unknown to us few days back.

One of the root causes of proliferation of corruption in India is the beauracratic red-tapism that exists and the tedious judicial procedure that exists. We need to streamline the processes rather than just add to the clutter. With JLP, we are going to give rise to yet another legislative white-elephant. It’s been claimed that the Supreme Court can take punitive action against the JLP in case of misdoings. With the provision of Jan Lokpal being able to be contested in the Supreme Court, most of the cases are definitely going to land up knocking at its door. The intention of speeding up would fail when the JLP becomes another halt in the current scheme of things. If you want to speed up justice delivery then we need overhaul the judiciary and not start a virtual court manned by the civilians (ala khaap panchayat).

We have enough of these institutions to keep a tab on the malpractices. These are not under the purview of the government in the sense that the government can’t interfere into its functioning. Yes, the government does nominate its chief; so what is needed is to make that process transparent. What we want is to make them accountable and efficient, rather than adding one more to it. By keeping them under legislative checks(and thus under the people) one can keep a tab on them.

Finally and most importantly, Crowds don't lend legitimacy to any cause. For the howsoever big pool of humanity might come out to support Anna's fight, it doesn’t need a rocket scientist to tell you that, it’s just a speck as compared to the number of people who comes out on the day of election to vote. This JLP movement may look big to us middle class, but I am sure it hasn't percolated to every stratum (esp. the deprived) of society. Thus, the right way to bring about the change is NOT by exercising the fundamental right to protest, but by exercising the FUNDAMENTAL DUTY of electing the right candidate. The cynics claim that elections are rigged and the votes are bought out. I don’t contest that thought, but then if a revolution and mobilization of people is needed, then it’s needed in this case. We need to elect the right candidate and the rest will follow suit.

It’s not unpractical for Anna's team to meet the ends that they are fighting for, via legislative means. I don’t see why the very person who has instigated the aggrieved masses to revolt against the single big enemy of corruption, cannot transform that support into votes. Probably our attitude of cynicism and apathy towards elections should be done away with. Some recent state election results are showing positive trends and what is needed it to up the ante during the forthcoming elections. The corrupt and the communal candidates are been shown the door while the development oriented candidates have been posting thumping victories. Together we can always elect good uncorrupt people to the seats of power. If team Anna and people of his caliber do follow the democratic ways (contest the elections) of bringing about the change, then I don’t see why "the people of India" won’t get enough to feed upon ... leave aside anyone "fasting" for such cause..

UPA Anthem

2011-06-29T15:11:00.012+05:30

{sing in the tune of 'My Name is Lakhan' from the movie 'Ram-Lakhan'}

dhina dhin dha...

ram pam pam ram pam pam rampa papam pam pam...

ram pam pam pam

{Man Mohan sings}

ae ji... o ji...

ae ji o ji ...3G ...CWG

main hu man mohanji

karta hu main to kuch bhi nahi ji

ministers sab chor, choron'ka no 1

my name man mohan, my name man mohan

soniaji ka trojan

mein hoon dummy PM --2

tak tunna, tak tunna - tidhin tidhin tidhin tidhin

sarkar chakori... paisa hai chandaa

sulipe latka naa koi banda

mantri ke jebo mein, mantri ke jebo mein

notonka ka gattha, notonka ka gattha

seekho o yaaron Raja'se yeh dhanda, Kalmadi'se yeh dhanda

{Advani sings}

koi purane rules bol ke, bandwidth becho kam tol ke

re Raja kam tol ke re Daya kam tol ke

tum apani khaali jeben bharo ji

karta hai PM kuch bhi nahi ji

minister sab chor, chor'on mein no 1

his name man mohan - 2

soniaji ka trojan

yeh hai lame-duck PM

{Sonya sings}

main tumse kahu yeh baat hardam

tu man mohan main teri madam

{Raul demands}

sarkar chalana hai kitna sadha

PM banaane ka karo mujhse vaada

{Sonya cajoles Raul}

baaki hai budhe, bachche ho tum

jaise bhi ho, future PM ho tum

lekin kachhe ho tum

abhi bachhe ho tum

{Sonya reprimands Man Mohan}

kehte ho sabse tum ho pradhan-mantri ji

PM ji ho toh kaam karo ji

minister sab chor, chor'on mein no 1

Tu hai man mohan - 2

tha tu mera trojan

tu hai badha dhakkhan

dhina dhin dha...

hmmm.........

{Group of Ministers sings}

paisa kha raha hai - 2

sara zamana - 2

jo bhukha pyasa hai woh dewana

hai woh dewana

{Ramdev sings }

kaale dhan ko swiss bank mein naa chupaana

mehnat se hardin yoga hai karna, roti kamana

{Ana sings}

oh~

kehna bado ka tum maan lo

anshan karte hai kaise yeh jaan lo, baba yeh jaan lo

karta hu anshan main, toh tum bhi karo ji

{Ramdev retorts}

muzhse huaa nahi,tum hi karo ji

{Ramdev and Ana chorus}

nahi number 2 paisa koi, karo sab number one

Lokpal ke under, hoga even PM...

{Chorus}

PM man mohan, tu hai ek dhakkan

P.S: All characters mentioned are purely fictitious and any resemblance to person dead or alive is purely coincidental.

Shun The Media

2011-05-04T14:53:00.002+05:30

I remember as a kid we being taught in school that a vigilant media as a cornerstone of healthy democracy. As an impartial and vigilant watch-dog, the media is vital to maintain the accountability of the system, by reporting and highlighting the wrong-doings. As a true democracy, we had also pride ourselves on the fact of having an independent media setup which is ‘supposedly’ beyond the influence/control of the government.

I had also been very delighted the day, when the setup was opened for the private sector thus paving way for many ‘round-the-clock’ news-channels. For back then, I was craving for 24x7 feeds regarding the happening around the world rather than the bland 9-pm news bulletin. But retrospectively the voices of Ved Prakash, Sarla Maheshwari, Salma Sultan, Gazala Amin sounded honey over the current crop of ‘on top of the voice shouting’ journalist. At least presented in a plain-vanilla manner, we could rest assured that it was relatively authentic. There might have been no “breaking news” back then but one could trust the facts and figures.

This days, thanks to the competition or otherwise, there has been a mad rush to be first to break the news. And quiet often than none, in their pursuit for breaking news, we have been fed with faking news. Reporting exacerbated number of casualty in a tragic accident has been a common source of mis-reporting resorted by these channels. I fail to understand that whether they believe those numbers directly translate to TRP. Also the live feed of the ill famous terrorist attacks on Bombay made life worse for the NSGs who had staked their lives to save the lives of the hostages.

Another more absurd kind of journalism has been that of making news of nothing. I observe these being practiced especially by the Hindi News channel. Zee News and Aaj Tak have taken it to new levels. Such news items could be characterized by a big bold red banner which reads ‘Breaking News’ scrolling at the bottom. The naïve audience might be holding their breath only to read news like “Commisioner ki Billi Goom” or “Big B ko Bukhar chadaa”. Furthermore, it surprises me how can they stretch this topic into a full hour program. Such headlines being commonplace on these frequencies means that there must be some kind of audience existing which must been driving its TRP, however it puzzles me to predict their intellectual development.

Specifically, I haven’t been truly fond of Barkha Dutt. For me she is the most irritating, preposterous and to top it all most hyped up journalists. I despise her habit of only trying to hear from guests, what she wants to hear and then presenting it in total out-of-context manner. Especially her reporting during any sensational events is the epitome of nonsensical reporting, and I firmly believed the union should have at least gagged if not arrested her. Needless to say her involvement along with that of who’s who of the India media industry in the ‘Nira-Radia’ leaked tapes saga have cast serious aspersions over their tag of being the ‘watch-dogs’. It has clearly shown that they are much more than the newsreader that they are and their deeds are much more deep-rooted to the extent of influencing the power-centers in the government and the corporate alike. It doesn’t start or neither does it end with her. The list contains the familiar faces on TV viz: Sagarika Ghose, Prabhu Chawla etc. In fact the involvement of all the media barons irrespective of the logo they sport have helped them bury the whole issue without much malice.

Then there are other aspects of media with reports that news which isn’t reported by the majority or otherwise they cover it to the depth no other medium ever dared to wander unto. One notable example that pings my mind being ‘Tehelka’. It heralded onto the public domain with a bang thanks to the sting operation which literally caught many of the political honchos red-handed. Thanks to the alleged government apathy it soon fizzled out to a quarter of its original aura and in a totally different (read news weekly) form. They have a unique way of reporting in the sense that they touch upon previously unexplored levels of details. The extent is so widespread so as to itself raise doubts in my mind in regards to its authenticity. The minutely detailed articles almost seem to border on fiction and enough to cast aspersion in the mind of a rational reader/thinker.

Bottom-line, the unabated proliferation of media hadn’t served the actual purpose he is meant for. Their aim at putting a tab on the misdeeds of the government has been blatantly diluted for more selfish means. This so-called pillar has clearly overgrown the others which in turn has severely skewed our democratic setup. It’s high time that it’s trimmed back to its size. I don’t mean gagging of these new channels but it should be restricted till the extent of it being sensical and rational to the well-being of the society.

Cheers Bro!

2011-04-12T15:46:00.008+05:30

I had been eagerly anticipating the day wherein I will get my rightful claim to the ‘mortarboard’. Though on the said Saturday and after the early morning rehearsals, I was a bit disappointed to be wearing only the black robe and the hood with the academic square-cap missing. However the disappointment was short-lived and the joy of being part of an academic parade had enthralled each nerve in my body. The moment wherein I will be awarded a degree by an eminent academician in presence of other noted intellectuals with the throng of people (including my own proud parents and my dear wife) clapping in the backdrop was no less captivating.

Flashback half a decade, and it was my first chance at adorning such an academic robe, that I missed by a long shot. Among the hordes of engineering graduates passing out that year, my grades were too trivial to be awarded the gold medal and thus the distinction of being invited to the felicitated at the convocation ceremony eluded me. Cut to the present, I won’t let the history repeat itself. After three years of toiling and sacrificing the weekends over the same duration, I was determined to complete my education in management in timely manner. But it isn’t only my determination that helped me attain the distinction but much more than that, factors intrinsic as well as extrinsic. One of the major factor being Gaurish Ramesh Lotliker.

I just can’t imagine me persisting with the rigors without my bestest friend being there along with me. In fact I accredit the successful completion of my course to him. Be it waking me up from the Sunday siestas (thus being at the receiving end of my curses) to hitch-hiking me to and fro; from jointly working on the assignments to making presentations; and from proxies ;) to just hanging around doing nothing. Had he been not around, it wouldn’t have been half as interesting as it was. He in turn would be obliged to me because in a way I was responsible for him adding up to his qualification. You guys might get bamboozled to know that Gaurish had no plans to join the said course or wasn’t even remotely serious at getting a post graduate qualification and it was just my pestering to accompany me that got him into (and then eventually out of) it. With a tinge of modesty I would add (and he would acknowledge) that I even helped him to clear the hurdle of the aptitude test. All said and done, I think I owe him more than other way round.

But then getting enrolled for a weekend executive course was one thing and passing out successfully is another. More so if you have been recently committed, a criterion that applied to both of us. He did that jugglery with panache, sometimes directly zooming off to night shifts from college. Thus his actions were instrumental in motivating me to trudge our way to the beautiful riverside campus.

The very essence of management education, i.e presentations, case-studies and assignments, were hurled at us thick and fast. But together we successfully handled, quite often piggybacking onto others. And amidst these we always found time to dash to ‘Casa-de-cha’ for a quick tea or at times at Jaggu’s for a Aloo-paratha. It wasn’t that uncommon for us to bunk a lecture or two to head to the Ribandar ferry-wharf for the tasty and spicy ‘kalwaa tonaak’. Thus sped two-years in a jiffy.

Come the third year, it was a special year for either of us. We had our respective wedding dates scheduled separated from one another by 10 odd days. As luck would have it, it was also clashing with submission dates of our project which would decide the fate of our degree. So amongst the wedding preparation to the actual wedding and post wedding celebrations, we didn’t lose sight of our objective and came trumps up. Even in here, you deserve much more credit buddy for I know what grave personal crisis you underwent.

Notwithstanding the better grades I fetched over you, I think you deserve more of the accolades. For you has been the true manager amongst two of us. For you managed the situation in a better manner, made best use of the time and resources, faced crisis situation with tremendous self-belief and came out of it with élan, while not losing your calm and composure. And to top it all, you motivated others most importantly yours truly towards achieving a goal and drove me towards it. Hats off to you. Cheers Bro!

The MonsterRat Race

2011-03-12T19:52:00.008+05:30

Days and weeks of vilification of the Ruling panel is going to come to an end tomorrow, or at least I hope it to. I have been closely following the rat (Monster Rat should I say ;)) race to the coveted seats in the CCP hall (quiet ironically lots of SEQC members including yours truly have adorned these seats as part of our monthly quizzes being held here).

Off late, loads of forums and groups, many of whom having the so-called elite Panjimites, have come forward and openly criticised the sitting CCP corporators. They have alleged huge scams and large-scale wrongdoings and have attributed this to the actual god-father running the show from behind curtain. Couple that with the garbage management(or mismanagement) and the traffic woes.

From ‘Panaji First’ to ‘Friends of Good Governance’ (Is this the same old ‘Friends of BJP’ with a more politically correct title?), and from ‘Panjimites Initiatives for change (PINC)’ to the Forum of Doctors have been crying on top of their voice in the past few days. It seems though Panjim suddenly have been plagued with horde of civic issues ranging from Parking or the lack of it to garbage disposal. Pat would come a reply that these issues haven’t aroused just now, but have been persisting for quite some time. In other words, since past 5 years when the current council was garlanded victorious in the last elections. And precisely that is the point I want to drive home.

Where were all these ‘Panjimites’ when all these years Panjim was being ruined? I know an election is a good chance to show the door to the non-performers, but is waiting for 5 years a good choice? Why the forums that have been mushrooming off late were hibernating all these years? What were the Rebeiros and the Bhatikars doing and why didn’t they make their corporators (whom they themselves have elected, directly or indirectly by abstaining) act? The panel backed by the al-mighty minister whom they are crying foul, were awarded a thumping majority during the last CCP polls by none others. Why did that happen? Was he any lesser evil back then?

I feel that the Panjimites were being most opportunistic, even more so than the Minister who is been vilified. Quiet many of these Panjimites fancy their residential address reading as ‘The Kingdom of the Monster-Rat’. An adobe in his den is kinda a status-symbol for all and everyone vies for it. And those who have not been able to make it there probably wanted him to transform their own capital city into the towering concrete jungles like the one in the precincts of the city. Probably with these very intentions they had handed him the powers in the last CCP elections. However, to their utter disappointment the city went to the dumps and prosperity beckoned his kingdom at the expense of the capital city. Thus the citizens have risen now from their slumber and got onto the bandwagon of lambasting him.

Even the technocrat MLA who has been personally attacking his political rival should resort to some soul searching. For each one of us knows, ‘who has created the Monster Rat?’. Ironically the same rat has become a nemesis for him now, so far so as to even threatening to steal away the constituency in the upcoming legislative elections. Needless to re-iterate, it’s an open secret that in the last assembly elections, the technocrat was elected at the mercy of the same 'Bhasmasur' he had created back then (In fact its quiet a apt to co-relate the mythological story of ‘Bhramha-dev creating the Bhasmasur’ in this case. The technocrat invented the Rat to get even with his old foe, further found a loop-hole in the anti-defection law and taught him the ‘resign & re-elect’ trick, and finally found the same trick being used against him to topple the government). And now this rat has over-grown his size and more so his political ambition, it has made the technocrat go panicky. Infact the technocrat has gone berserk and quiet unlike to his shrewd personality has been levelling personal charges against him (Latest Google news tells me: Technocrat calls the Monster Rat a ‘goonda’...... Everyone knows that, so what? ;))

If you have managed to read until here, you must have likened me to one of his toadies from the CCP council. Let me tell you, I am not. The very fact that I am calling the Monster-Rat a ‘Bhasmasur’ should suffice my defence. It’s high time we tame this Bhasmasur who has been let loose and if not now, then it won’t be too long that everything will be turned to ashes. Tomorrow is the day of judgement wherein let’s make this Bhasmasur dance to our tunes and eventually let his own action precipitate into his own debacle.

I Hate Sourav Ganguly

2011-01-21T12:25:00.004+05:30

Dont jump your guns and make conclusions on my loyalty. I am and will die as a ardent Dada fan. This is a wonderful article I stumbled upon. The title is just a bit 'sarcastic' (may be its a good way to garner attention of all the Dada bashers) and for all the reasons enlisted in here, I love him and I love him even more...

Yes, I hate Ganguly, not just because he is arrogant, not because he is a loudmouth and for the fact that he walks an inch off the ground. My reasons are way above that, to begin with I hate him because he didn’t let the Indian cricketing world stay the way it was. He turned a mellow team into a monster, a team with a genius dependent complex into a halfway self assured team, a sporting loser into a raging tiger.

I hate Ganguly, because he virtually ran through the opposition on Canadian land and gave us the hope that there is someone beyond Sachin who can win matches for us, but reality being he became an anti hero for the people.

I hate Ganguly for the fact that he gave youngsters the belief that they could fill the big gaps that would be left by the seniors in Indian cricket, I hate him that he backed all the wrong players in the process, yes some turned to be good. But what the hell, I hate him for every experiment he dared and went wrong.

I hate Ganguly, because he earned the respect of players wide enough to call him Dada, but failed to gain the belief of a major chunk of his countrymen who compared his feats to that of a God and called him just a mortal. I hate him for not letting the folks know he didn’t give a damn about being called God. He should’ve told them I’m an ordinary guy with more guts than talent, just call me dada, which would do. I hate you, because you showed flashes of brilliance that made the team realize that yes,maybe even mortals can win a match.

I hate Ganguly because he tried to bring foreign imports into India and changed the way that Indian cricketers played. I hate the way that he insulted his coach, it doesn’t matter that the coach was driving a stake through the team. I hate him for speaking his mind out and took on the venerable administrators of the BCCI. I hate him for no more reason than the fact that he considered just winning matches and lashing out at the media would be sufficient.

I hate Ganguly for disrespecting the ground on which he scored a maiden century by taking his shirt off, how dare he do that? How can he pump his arms in the air for winning just a trophy when Kapil just grinned holding the World cup on the same corridor? He shamed us all Indians; maybe because he played out the vicarious aggression in us, something we just believe wasn’t right.

I hate Ganguly, because he scored 11k ODI runs, seemingly without talent or any “difference” from a guy on the street, I hate him for taking us to the world cup with utterly no effort from his side, I hate him because he told his lads “Don’t care about what I do, go out and do your thing, and do it damn well”.

I hate you, Sourav “Dada” Ganguly, coz you showed the fiery spark a few days back blasting your players, but didn’t realize that you were very much a talentless, flukish man yourself. I hate you for the fact that you expect a bunch of talent-challenged people to win you a trophy. I hate you for not realizing you are not a God who can work wonders, just a fallible and grizzled warrior who stubbornly stands up punch after punch, jab after jab.

Do something “different” or just roll over and die. Apparently you haven’t done enough, Prince of Kolkata

Trivial pursuit?

2010-10-03T12:42:00.001+05:30

(A wonderful article by Arul Mani in Himal Southasian. The original article can be found here)

There was a time when saying that you liked ‘to quiz’ – pitting one’s knowledge base against other quizzers – was dangerous. People would harangue you about finding a more desirable hobby, or yap about a little learning being a dangerous thing, or say something that ended with the dismissive phrase ‘Morons with memories’. I learnt, over many years, that the best defence was to laugh at such responses, and ask whether national hobbies such as obsessing over cricket, minority-hatred or trawling the Internet for BBWs (‘big, beautiful women’, for the uninitiated) struck anybody as particularly more mature.

I don’t find myself defending the pastime anymore. The ‘knowledge economy’ has resulted in a comical world in which quizzing is respectable. Nurturing a quiz team is one of the ways in which a business school can prove that their MBA packs muscle. Holding a quiz is the means by which folks in corporate employ can reassure themselves that they are knowledge-workers. And so on.
Neither way of looking at quizzing does it any justice. The second quiz I attended, while still in school, might say more. The first had ended in the inevitable headache that comes from making too many demands of one’s memory. The second was longer, and was conducted by a kindly old man. One of the questions was about Zen having derived its name from a word in another language. I decided it had to be an Indian language, and set about trying to find a word that sounded like Zen. I came up with dhyana, and that was the correct answer. A little later, we were shown a slide of boys stomping around a court and asked to identify the sport. I noticed that there were no rackets involved, and remembered that the characters in P G Wodehouse’s school novels played something called fives without rackets, and my guess was right again. I had never experienced anything similar before – random, half-forgotten details combining like this to offer a ‘Eureka!’ moment. I was hooked for life.
The old man who took us through 12 rounds of quizzing was G R Mulky, a retired Indian Air Force officer who founded the Karnataka Quiz Association (KQA). He ran the association singlehandedly for a decade and a half, and in that time the KQA’s quizzes were perhaps the first space in which convent schools and ordinary schools, general degree colleges and professional colleges, and Kannada-speakers and chattering Anglophiles all met in open competition – not an easy thing to achieve in a small but strictly divided city. His efforts resulted in Bangalore’s distinctive quizzing culture – small-scale, regularly held events, an emphasis on working answers out rather than on memory, and an easy, irreverent democracy among those who participate.

Several Indian cities can boast of an equally rich quizzing life. Chennai, where the Quiz Foundation continues to be active; Pune, well-known for its Boat Club Quiz Club; Hyderabad, where the K-Circle has organised quizzes since the 1970s; Guwahati, under the leadership of the redoubtable Dilip Barua; and Kolkata, once a hub of quizzing action and still a city that produces some of the best quizzers in India. Cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai were late starters but now also have organisations in place – Kutub Quizzers in the capital, and the Bombay Quiz Club of emphatic nomenclature. Smaller cities such as Bhubaneshwar, Coimbatore, Kochi and Panaji are quickest off the block when it comes to organising venues, publicity, prizes or participation for national events such as Mahaquizzer, KQA’s annual solo championship.

True test
My own private test for the health of a quizzing community is to ask whether they have acquired a resident asshole. This creature is generally male, a petulant complainer, a hand-raiser, and a source of such constant irritation that all the others band together to ensure some general sanity. What constitutes such asshole-like behaviour? I can recall one individual who was single-handedly responsible for the ‘no mobiles’ rule that is still in place at KQA quizzes, for having texted for answers and using his phone’s Internet capabilities. Another stole answers using his superb lip-reading skills, before going on to become an irritating quizmaster. Yet another was known to drive teams in the vicinity to self-destruction merely by maintaining a running post-mortem of the quiz in a voice of a metal-on-concrete timbre. Bangalore has dozens of such creatures, and so does Chennai. Hyderabad has maybe one or two, as does Kochi. Kolkata and Delhi, because of the way they are constituted as cities, are never likely to experience a shortage. These are the places where quizzing will survive willy-nilly. The real causes of worry are Mumbai and Panaji, because their quizzers seem to be uniformly nice people.

Sometimes these communities talk to each other – and the joy of eavesdropping on such conversations is not small. A recurring topic arises from what we can call a capital discontent – the continuing dispute over which city can describe itself as India’s Quizzing Capital. The slanging was originally between Kolkata and Bangalore, before it turned into a Bangalore-Chennai slugfest; either way, the field is now wide open. Inter-city sledging is also organised around the quality of the questions. The term kitchen question was once coined to describe the cooked-up questions of a certain quizmaster – nobody quite remembers how it became such a derisive term. A Bangalore bloke coined the term TCQ – or Typical Chennai Question – to describe questions that looked like they came off the recent-deaths page on Wikipedia. The uncharitable implication – that Chennai players prepare for quizzes while ‘artistic’ Bangaloreans do not – results in much brotherly love.
The arrival of the Internet has only given a fillip to all the fun stuff. Some years ago, I discovered that the Pune quizzers liked to discuss questions, such as what makes for a good quiz, with pages of analysis and graphs – I spent several months wading through the stuff in repulsed fascination. And then somebody in Bangalore announced to the world at large, with a very Charlton-Heston-as-Moses set of chin, that good quizzes uniformly revealed three Bs – breadth, beauty and balance. Another beauteous use of the Internet is in abusing quizmasters. For decades, quizzers had to sit quiet while men with microphones made jokes at their expense. Payback, therefore, was corrosive and sublime. At least one celebrity quizmaster has flipped the bird at a Bangalore audience after a scathing review of previous efforts from various anonymous bloggers.

Quizzers are at their entertaining best when they are overtaken by the need to write their own history. The Wikipedia page ‘Quizzing in India’ was initiated by a Pune-based quizzer as a bland list of quizzing activities in several Indian cities. It lived in this largely blameless fashion for the first couple of weeks. And then, the page became a sort of mosh pit where amateur historians, self-promoters and guardians of city pride would vandalise each other’s contributions – or have their chains yanked by cooler others, who would religiously delete every bit of PR. In time, it attracted its own Wiki Nazi, a roving editor named Ohnoitsjamie who went about deleting everything till that five-scroll article had shrunk to a svelte paragraph.

Despite Ohnoitsjamie’s efforts, there is one liberty with historical fact the page continues to offer. To wit:

Quizzing in India began when Neil O’Brien conducted the first well organized, formal quiz in 1967 at Christ the King Church Parish Hall in Calcutta (now Kolkata). O’Brien who had recently returned from England, and had been exposed to the Pub quiz culture there, started quizzing; it first became popular among the Anglo Indian community before it became popular among a wider audience.

While one’s inner curmudgeon may merely growl at bad punctuation and slovenly writing, he cannot but rise and offer an unparliamentary finger to this biblical beginning.

The Darwin who rises in opposition to such blatant creationism will probably ask for proof that this one little event eventually cascaded into active quizzing across the country – and find none. He will point instead to another fact. After Independence, achieving government employment meant having to take many exams, and required some ability to ride this bucking beast named ‘general knowledge’, or ‘G K’. In time, people began instituting G K prizes and competitions, contests that achieved something of the prestige of sporting contests. The oldest continuously held quiz in Bangalore goes back to 1958 – the Rotary Club’s Ramnarayan Chellaram Inter-collegiate Quiz, which began life as a G K contest. Several Indian cities have tales of similar antiquity to offer.

Our Darwin will persist to wonder about how these contests, which were no more than tests of memory, began to change character, acquire complexity and attract an audience outside school and college. Eventually, he will find investigating the history of the media in India. Quizzes went thus from written tests to interactive events, with rounds cherry-picked from BBC radio shows, foreign television, and from several local traditions rich in riddling, puzzle-making and wordplay.

Miss and curse
Which brings us to the other problem with the Wikipedia account: it implies that quizzing originated as the pastime of the English-speaking classes. The content of today’s quizzes would seem to suggest that the transition from memory test to mind sport happened through several moments of mixing and accommodation among the classes – between a large body of middle-class bilingual aspirants and a smaller Anglophile leisure-class. The Indian version of the sport differs significantly from the UK or US versions – where it is still largely about remembering trivia – because such a mixing occurred.

We will leave our Darwin wondering about how quizzing began to gently disengage itself from general knowledge. If you go by the drivel that quizzers like to believe, then one was for people who really, you know, ‘got’ things; the other for the competition-wallahs. One was beautiful because it served no purpose at all; the other was about getting ahead in life. Only one was about reading and living in a not-from-the-syllabus way. Our Darwin might yet find that this is not quite the truth.

To quiz, thus, is to be entertained occasionally by a goodly number of kooks. For its more reliable thrills – miss-and-curse more often than hit-and-giggle – we must return yet again to anecdote. Earlier this year, I sat for the Mahaquizzer as guinea pig – those who create the quiz like to see one victim before hundreds write the final product. I was somewhat miffed when the results came out to see that I might not have finished in the top ten. I was far more mortified by the fact that I had managed to miss the invitation for a good guess on this gem of a question:

Snell’s law of refraction and the law of reflection of light both can be derived from the ‘principle of least time’ which was stated in 1662 by a multi-faceted scientist whose ‘way of drawing tangents’ inspired Isaac Newton’s early ideas about calculus. Most of us probably know him for other marginal contributions. Name him.

The one word that I somehow did not take in – marginal – would have reminded me of a story, of Pierre Fermat scribbling his Last Theorem in the pages of a copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica. I have whacked my forehead more times than is healthy, and will remember this sad miss till the day of my demise.

~ Arul Mani is a volunteer with the Karnataka Quiz Association in Bangalore.

A high-scoring rule-breaking jamboree

2010-07-16T14:22:00.003+05:30

A report on the July 2010 monthly by Atharv Joshi. The quiz was 'QM'ed by yours truly and can be viewed here.

Version 3.2. of the SEQC Monthlies (that is, the 2nd Quiz of the 3rd Year) was held on the day of American Independence, July the 4th. The QM hosting duties went to Ameya (the man with the silent “A”) and boy! We quizzers, about 50 in number (mostly school children) witnessed one of the longest quizzes, having 78 questions in all. It was also one of the more innovative quizzes (in many factors), be it the Questions, the Theme, the Scoring Pattern and the Formal Rules which stated “The QM is no God, argue with him and if proven wrong, beat him up!” and other such unconventional suggestions.

The scoring pattern of the quiz was, as quoted by the “Man with the Silent “A”, “meant for high-scoring, and to overpower the master-quizzers (Read: Annie and Rajiv) and to create winning opportunities for all teams”. The theme of the quiz was “SEQC” with the rounds being dedicated to quizzers of SEQC; Rajiv, Annie, Anjali, Tallulah, V.G, Chirag, the Young Turks, the Kids, and last, but not the least, “The Man with the last silent “A”, Ameya himself.

Returning to the quiz, it had 13 rounds with 6 questions in each round. The last two rounds were the highest scoring ones as they were the ones having sitters and some easy school-level questions. At the end of it, it was a high scoring encounter as expected with Rajiv’s team taking it all with 254 points. Another record broken was that of the lowest margin of winning a quiz -- just 2 points!! Adish’s team scored 252 points, and were surely in the driver’s seat at one stage, only to receive a -10 and have Rajiv answer a F-1 related ‘Safety Car connect’ question to enforce the safety car and the victory, and it was no overtaking for Adish’s team from there on!

The Quiz had it all.

Third Time Lucky!

2010-07-16T12:33:00.001+05:30

One again, was blessed with an opportunity to QM the Monthly Quiz at SEQC. Thus, came up with the quiz published above.

Uparwaalah deta hai, toh chappar phaad ke

2010-03-26T23:25:00.003+05:30

For anyone who knows me even a little bit, must have known about my passion for quizzing. For others who haven’t known me in person, but who happen to stumble upon here must have guessed it from the number of quiz related posts that dominate this blog. And for those who actually follow me through this blog and have borne the trauma of reading through each of the posts must have also got aware about my infinitely numerous narrow misses at such big quizzing events.

With the regularity that I was missing qualifying for the finals, and needless to say the wafer-thin margin, it was becoming more of a rule than exception. It wasn’t any soothing experience when all those qualified teams would ‘pass’ some question whose answer I would know better than the back of my hand. It goes without saying that it earned me some lousy gifts as audience prizes. ‘What the hell was I doing sitting in the crowd?’ I kicked myself time and again.

All I could do was pen my feelings down and give vent to the pent up frustrations in me. And that is what I did through my article ‘Luck! No chance’ (http://ameyadilse.blogspot.com/2009/02/luck-no-chance.html). An innocent suggestion from my friend meant that I mail the link to the god of quizzers, Giri. And wholla! he actually commented back to it. He, in a manner fitting to his character, was very appreciative about me and was kind enough to email me back a few words of encouragement. Oh boy! That was the only silver lining to my debacles all this while.

It was not to be the last time that I had to experience such narrow miss, and suffered the same plight at BITS Pilani Quark Fest. As I tied on the same score with the last qualifying team, it was the tie-breaker question that did me in. ‘deja vu!’ I sighed. ‘Seen it, done it, been through it’ was what I was feeling then.

Thus in frustration I called up my good friend as I do quite often than none. Though himself a good quizzer in school days, he had been on some kind of quizzing sabbatical since. But as his good luck would have it, one casual attempt at Tata crucible-Pune and he ended up on stage thus earning his quiet some accolades. He was someone whom I often turn up to when in tizzy and boy! What a motivation he instilled into me with his one statement. He said and I quote “Sachin Tendulkar took 89 ODIs to score his first century”. That one statement and the barometer of my spirit had spiked from the deepest abyss to its summit. And with new zest I was anticipating to participate in the next quiz.

Like a vulture on rain-starved barren land eagerly awaiting the next rain, I had my eyes glued onto the quizzing calendar. And boy! what a treat it was for my eyes. Come 27^th February 2010, and there were not one, not two but three quizzes lined up that day. Along with its yearly corporate quiz Wiz-Biz, GIM were also organising a college quiz ‘Inquizzitive Minds’ for the first time. But the biggie of the day was the Tata crucible that was coming to town the same evening. The initial schedule suggested that GIM’s ‘Inquizzitive Minds’ clashing with the ‘Tata Crucible’, but a quick rejig by the GIM organisers meant all was settled. So thus I had my schedule packed for that Saturday and it read something like this:

9.00 AM – Inquizzitive Minds – International Centre Goa

2.00 PM – Tata Crucible Quiz – National Institute of Oceanography

6.00 PM – Wizbiz – International Centre Goa

Though a Saturday was something I used to look up to for an extended siesta, this one was certainly different. I had to break the jinx and I was hoping to do it that day. So seeking blessings from my parents and the all-mighty I left my home for the venue.

Not expecting the GIM organizers to start their quiz on time, I was yodelling my way to the venue when my cellphone blared to life. ‘Lisa calling...’ the screen flashed. Few keystrokes and a short conversation made me realise I was wrong in expecting the prospective managers from GIM not to be punctual. However I was able to convince Lisa in delaying the start by just a few more minutes as I made indicator needle to gobble a few more notches on the speedometer. Oh! You must be wondering, Lisa who? Well she was my partner for the opening quiz of a day. By her own admission she was a quizzing greenhorn though I really didn’t mind that.

Rushing to the venue still gasping for breath, I panted my way through the prelims. The prelims wasn’t very easy and thought I shall be eliminated yet another time. But surprised was I, when my team name ‘Don Quixote’ was called up as finalists. The finals were easier, and had not been for some goof-ups from my part I should have landed in a better position than the third spot that we both secured. The positive take away was not just being able to break the jinx; I had another reason to celebrate. One of the member of the winning team was my partner for the next quiz, the big one of the day Tata Crucible.

The Tata crucible venue was just a stone’s throw away, albeit by a rather strong man. A quick lunch and we landed up at the venue quiet in advance of the reporting time. The organisers further had decided to wait for an ‘on-the-way’ team, which transcended in our wait being longer. But who mind this extra few hours of waiting period when we wait for the entire year this event. Post-prelims, and after discussing the hits and misses over tea, we settled in our seats with our fingers crossed. The format was designed such to eliminate crowding of stage with teams from same institute and ensure at least 4 unique institutes make it. Thus the top teams from 4 unique institutes would directly qualify themselves (even if and quiet often when their scores are lower than the second best team from another college) with the rest slots to be battled out for amongst the rest top six teams. My anxiety had picked out as Giri emerged to declare the names of the six wild-card teams that would slug it out for the last two slots in the finals. And lady luck was totally shining on me, as mine was the first name to be announced, albeit the usual pronunciation goof-up ( http://ameyadilse.blogspot.com/2009/12/its-ameya-no-no-its-ameya.html ). So it was me and my partner Pratyush representing GIM along with another 3 GIM teams and 2 from BITS that would have to face 8 questions on the buzzer for the coveted spot in the finals. A couple of questions into the round and one of BITS team had already got itself qualified leaving 5 of us. Till question 7 it was all even-stevens among 4 of us as some overambitious attempts by one of the team got themselves a few negatives. Thus it was for the Q# 8 to decide who would continue to be on stage?

“The secret formula of Coca-Cola stored in the vaults of Sun-Trust Bank” was our ticket to the finals as we banged the buzzer before Giri could complete the question. That was it... finally... finally I had got myself qualified for TC finals. The feeling was totally ‘on-top-of-the-world’ as for me I had won the battle. Probably me and my partner were a bit too overhelmed, as our performance in the finals was nothing but mediocre. As teams raced ahead, it was a team of young doctors from GMC emerged as the Goa champions. Not winning, yet as happy as the winners I was already on the way to the venue for the next quiz.

GIM annual corporate quiz ‘WizBiz’ would be the grande finale of the day. Being a student of eMBA at GIM, I had got special concessions to participate in the same; and together with my long time quizzing partner Chirag, I was looking to maximise our gains. Chirag was a great partner to have at any quiz, and he had specially flown down from Bangalore for this one. For he wasn’t the only one who had covered some miles to attend this quiz, but so had many bigwigs from the world of quizzing. The pretty handsome prize booty meant it attracted quiet some teams from the expanse of the country, especially from KQA. Although stacked against some formidable teams, we did fancy our chances of qualifying for the finals. For I was having a lucky outing and secondly the quiz-master was kinda lucky for us. Back in 2008 when Ajay Anthony has hosted WizBiz we were able to clear the elims and we were hoping to repeat the feat once again in 2010. And so we did as we qualified for the on-stage finals. Likewise the prelims, the finals too were a really entertaining and informative affair with a great mix of some tough ones sprinkled with old chestnuts. Though absolutely fair and unbiased format adopted, we still found ourselves wanting to answer questions that we knew but unfortunately were grabbed by our opponents. But all given and said, it was really a fun-filled and exciting one.

Thus there was me with my hands full, quite literally with prizes, certificates and gift vouchers and even more so having my heart filled with joy of the experiences I had over the entire day. I had been asking god to just break the jinx and get me past one of the elims . And see, what he got for me? No wonder , somebody has said it right “Uparwaalah deta hai, toh chappar phaad ke” :)

Plight of a Software Engineer !

2010-01-07T15:32:00.005+05:30

(Inspired from a forwarded mail I received. This is not my original write-up but I wholely subscribe to what is mentioned in here. This happens to me more often then none)

After lots of meet ups with my mom-IT friends, relatives, strangers, rickshaw wallahs etc; I noticed that the moment you say that you are an IT guy, they have already made some assumptions about you.

_______________________________________________________
Myth #1: If you haven't been onsite ...u are a loser

Uncle: "Tum do saal se IT company mein kaam kar rahe ho na?"
Me: (tightening my collar..head high) "Haan uncle ......bas....."
Uncle: "Tum videsh nahi gaye?"
Me: "Nahi uncle project mein requirement nahi hai onsitekaa"
Uncle: "Lekin woh deepak ko toh maanna padegaa.... engg mein 2nd class milaa...fir bhi usne jamke mehnat ki aur usse company ne USA bheja!"

Aaaha! thats the problem. People think that only the smarty pants are sent on site while the loser ones are the people left behind in India. So the assumption is that if you haven't been on site then you don't work hard nor you have any sincerity and ... ok that's enough for now.

_______________________________________________________
Myth #2: If you are not in the biggies... u are a loser

Auntyji : "Beta, kaunsa tent?"
Me: "Persistent! Aunty I work in Persistent. "
Aunty: "Tumko Info*** mein nahi mila kya?" (in short: "tum second grade gadha lagte ho")

Then I have to make efforts to tell them how I actually work for a much
better company. In case the opposite person is technologically sane then I
give him some product development 'funda' (arrogance).

_______________________________________________________

Myth#3: You can fix any computer..and calculator and may be clocks too

Most of the computer engineers around must have at east once gone to a friend's place only to fix his /her comp. The task can be from installing a software (next..next.. finish) to fixing a computer which gives electric shocks when its metal areas are touched.

_______________________________________________________
Myth #4: You have lots of money

Once I met up with my friends from school ...from various fields. I just mentioned that it is such a pain to go to office nowadays and said that I wanted to buy a car.

Friend1: "what problem do u have man .. u are an IT waala"
Friend2: "Tu toh Honda CRV le saktaa hai"
Me: "CRV!! aabey CRV kyaa mere pass VCR lene ka paisa nahi hai"

Even after 5 minutes of convincing them weren't getting convinced.

_______________________________________________________
Myth #5: Coding means sitting in front of the computer

During my college days , my classmate had an encounter with a guy from mechanical dept:

Mech guy: "Your Computer engineering is a big nautanki.... four years
You learn the same grey dabba... and all you ppl do is sit nicely in front of that dabba and punch the keys"

Well I don't completely disagree

_______________________________________________________
Myth #6:

One more thing which oldies say : "Now you work in such a big company , you are settled , you should marry now !! "

OMG!! this salary is not enough for one poor soul.. how to handle two ???

_______________________________________________________
Myth #7:

In Diwali...u get questions like......"Are you gonna get a bonus this Diwali.....??" And when we reply in the negative.....they seem so surprised...!!!!!!!

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Myth #8: A common issue that I have seen:

When I tell anybody that I work with TCS, many times I get a reply "My son/daughter/relative Mr/Ms XXX also works with TCS. You must be knowing him/her" and if I answer in the negative, they feel disappointed (sometimes even angry with me).

How to explain to them that there are around 1,60,000 employees in my company (around 35,000 in Mumbai alone), and I cannot know everybody in my ODC, forget about knowing everybody in the company.

LoLzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

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Add ons:

#How many times do you face this question

"What does your company make...???"

It's Ameya. No, No... It's Ameya

2009-12-19T15:06:00.006+05:30

A few weeks back the Times Of India – Goa edition was flooded with ads from a car manufacturer. Right from the front page to every alternate page thereon it had bought out the newspaper space to advertise itself. Needless to say the marketing department must have shelled out more than a few million dollars to grab the place on the newspaper and thereon grab the attentions of more than millions of TOI readers, only a small fraction of which could turn out to be prospective buyers. The high end and top-notch technology laden cars that the manufacturer was selling, I wondered whether it was a right strategy that they had followed to showcase their plethora of products. My half-baked (if I may say so ;)) MBA knowledge inclusive of the interesting and truly involving “Integrated Marketing communication” lectures that I attended professed that when a product is from a niche segment involving state-of-art technology and coupled with a price tag which only the “most blessed” section of the society could afford, then one should resort to direct marketing. Direct Marketing is the term given to the practice of reaching out to individual prospective customer and then marketing him the product as per his taste and specification. This made pure sense to me as it was very rational to follow this approach and not go for a mass-marketing through newspapers especially when each square inch of the prized newsprint space cost a bomb and could potentially burn a hole in the pocket to the tune of millions.

When the rule of directed marketing is so crystal clear, which even I can recite without flipping back through my notes, what propelled the marketing team into such a major Gaffe? After all they aren’t richly paid only to commit such a costly mistake; leave aside the major PR blunder that come alone. “No ways! The marketing team at this automotive giant aren’t this big a fool” I unknowingly said to myself . This very inquizitive thought made rerun through the entire series of ads once again and there I found the purpose for them follow this means of advertisement.

The reason was there right on the front page, which inadvertently I had missed during my first run through these Volkswagen ads. The line in bold read “Its Volkswagen. No, No... Its Volkswagen”. The foundation level course in German language that I had cleared with flying colours had ensured that I wasn’t the intended target audience for this catch line. A second read along with the small assisting para beneath it cleared all aspertions that I had regarding this marketing strategy. Here was this Deutsche major taking to get a strong foothold into our nation with their quality products. But before all this, they were onto a campaign which would set their brand identity firm into the people’s psyche. And how could they achieve that without getting the people to pronounce their name right. I am unsure about the etymology of it, but blame it on the Germans who pronounce “V” as “F” ( फ as per Indian pronounciation). Reminds of the awesome shahid kapoor in his movie ‘Kaminey’ wherein he were mischievously proclaims “mein fha ko fha bolta hoon”. On second thoughts VW could have used his character to get their name right into the Indian Psyche. Who better than a bollywood actor to influence the Indian masses? Thus I was really pleased eventually by their attempt to make the people pronounce ‘volkswagen’ as ‘Folkswagen’ (as it is actually supposed to be) meaning “people’s car”.

After this rather very long prelude, let me get to the core topic of this blog which deals with my personal identity crisis. Very much as VW suffered with mispronounciation, so has been me right from the time of my birth. It was the difference in the way ‘V’ is pronounced in the different parts of the globe for Volkswagen that proved its nemesis; for me it was the extra ‘a’ (or is it?) that did me in. As it has been a very much prevelant practice in this part of the world, my parents named me “Ameya “ (अमेय in devnagari script) which is one of the numerously infinite names of the elephant headed god, Ganapati.

Needless to say I was way too young and worse still very much ignorant of these happenings in regards to my naming ceremony to fight with my parents then. But that only meant I had to fight with the majority of the people I encountered till date getting to make them pronounce my name right. My parents had very lovingly bestowed with this nice name (which I personally love too 8)) thinking that I would have showcase all the virtues of the original bearer of the name; and so I did to a great extent if not all (I would rather say that with a tinge of modesty ;)).

On face-value it doesn’t look too tough to pronounce, but in reality I had been struggling to cope up with the numerous variants that I encounter when interacting with fellow planet-mates. The most common variant being the ones over-stressing of suffixing ‘A’ in my name. The way they pronounce it, makes me feel as if I have a stream of never-ending ‘A’s tailing my spelling (i.e. AmeyAAAAA.... and it goes on... :( ). I do emphasise to them the trailing ‘A’ in my name doesn’t have the tilde over it and thus spared from the hard sound (i.e. AA अमेया in devnagari) but it doesn’t seem to be effective convincing tactic from my side. For me it gets doubly tough when I come across instances (read people) of AMEYA without the trailing ‘A’, and then it’s just like fighting a losing battle. And to my bad fortune, I have many such instances of AMEY (with the trailing A missing), one at college, two at office, and many more in routine life :( . Their existence meant I had to back off and accept that my name is a typo (since birth :() and only justification being the trailing ‘A’ is silent. But even for that there are a handful few who don’t let go the chance to pull my leg and call me with the extended version of my name “AMEY with the silent A”.

The irony of the extra ‘A’ (or otherwise) is a bit bearable and I could blame it upon the inconsistency/incompatibility of English alphabets in the devanagari script (Spare me for dragging my feet into the Devanagari v/s Roman scripts tussle). But my plight doesn’t end there. Still struggling with the mysterious instance of ‘A’ in my name, I was stunned when I came across a superior at my workplace. He seemingly had donned the shakespherean hat and had conveyed to our international clients his prophecy. He said to them and I quote “All Indian feminine names ends with a ‘A’”. I had a tough time before I cleared the doubts in their mind about my gender. Although I was damn sure what my manager has professed was blatant lie and a brainchild of his own; but the todays corporate world is such that whatever your manager says is the rule. So I consoled myself by self-proclaiming my name as just a one off exception to his rule without totally discarding his hypothesis. I don’t know whether this existence of exception to his rule put him off, but he never awarded me any extra brownie points during the appraisal cycle.

Then there exists the variant of my name like AMAY ( अमय in devnagari)। I don’t know where that came from. But I still have a handful of my friends calling that. I don’t know whether its the ease of calling by that name that acts as a motivation to them but surely they have slipped into a comfort zone calling me by that name and I don’t see them changing it soon. This is not all and the weirdest version is yet to come. Rewinding back to my kinder-garten days and I remember my teachers calling me ‘AMBEY’ (where the hell that 'B' came from?). I even have a certificate at some drawing competition featuring that name. Anybody would have doubted whether it was actually me who achieved that laurel at the drawing competition back then, if they are unaware of the moderate talent that I possess even now. I was probably too young, too timid, and too ignorant to fight with argue with my teachers and must have not gauged what lie ahead. Probably that was just precursor to lie in stores for me.

So here I am, with more than a quarter of my life on earth behind me and still struggling with the identity. I won’t say it’s a identity crisis but still it’s not a very pleasing experience if someone don’t pronounce your name right. So humble requests to all the readers of this, for you are the only people who are aware of my plight and surely you can help me a bit. Not by anything else, but just by calling me by my name, ‘the right way’.

Its simple. It's Ameya. No, No... It's Ameya

Yup, you got it right. Thanks :)

Enough of reality

2009-08-01T21:44:00.008+05:30

“Don’t watch the TV from so close,” my granny used to thunder “lest you will spoil your eyesight”. Though this was back in the days of adolescence, her words still echo in my ears. Not that I was a TV buff then, at least I don’t remember to be one. However, hectic schedule has meant that my TV viewership has reached to an abyss. But whenever I have nothing more significant to do, I somehow involuntarily find myself leaning on the couch. Lying next to me and giving me good company, is the graceful curves of the TV remote. And that’s for once I have given into the human instinct of being a couch potato, and aimless gazing at the inappropriately termed ‘idiot box’. The television, TV for most, is in fact one of the historical invention to have rocked the world. The reach and the influence of it could be used for larger public good. There have been instances in the past where TV has been also related to birth control; wonder how? ;) However like many other ‘historic inventions’ TV too has attained some bad name, thanks to the ‘abuse’ of it. And that gets me to theme of this post.

As I mentioned earlier I am not an avid TV buff. And whenever I find myself in control of this priced possession of any Indian household, I find myself flipping among some news channels and onto some sports frequencies. However, while hoping among these frequencies tuned at the extreme ends; I choose to browse those all the channels in between. The reason from this action of mine eludes me for I could have comfortably skipped all the in between ‘pain’ to tune the channel I desire. Well, if you too have scanned the channels on your TV you would definitely agree to my profanation of calling it a pain.

“Excessive use of anything is abuse”, I had heard Vijay Mallya shouting this on a debate. Though he had mentioned this in context of alcohol, it perfectly fits the bill for many other things. The current (and it has been going on for years now L) trend on the TV being ‘reality TV’. And it has been stretched and re-stretched in so many different variants, that it’s hardly anything but reality. For the starters, each of these series is aped from the western counterparts. There isn’t anything wrong in copy-pasting, but before getting on such expeditions there should be a thorough understanding about the relevance in Indian context and followed by some customization to suit the local audience. However, what is happening is a blind adaptation of the original series. From the “American Idol” to “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” onto “Are you smarter than the fifth grader?” , each of these western series have appeared in their desi avatar. Though initially the rich and educative content of “Koun Banega Crorepati?” and the novelity of “Indian Idol” did strike a chord with the local audience; reality TV soon lost its sheen as such series started hogging prime time by the dozen. And not surprisingly, with the bombardment of essentially same thing with some superficial changes to elude being stereotypical, it was bound to make the audience sick.

At any given moment there are so many singing talent shows going on, luring unsuspecting Indian youth to stardom, that one needs some super power to keep a track and further differentiate between them. More over it has become such run-of-the-mill affair, that a viewer might start with watching one programme and change to some other without realizing he has switched channels. In all things, he can rest assured about not missing on any of the benevolent comments made by the supposedly learned judges, or the overtly enthusiastic pleas for votes by the anchor, or the choreographed melodrama by the participants themselves. To top this unbearable content, there is the back-stage bitching, love affair on the side-lines and controversies offstage that just adds to the pain of viewing.

Singing talent show is just a part of it; and though I hate to say it makes much more bearable than many other variants of the reality shows. Take for example these dance reality shows wherein in these supposedly celebrity, though many of the names many me wonder who?, try gyrating to the beats. Many of them remind me of physical education class, wherein we used to perform the robotic moves and there was no scope for grace or élan. To add insult to injury, comes over the top remarks by plethora of judges, many of whom ironically don’t even have any connection with the field of evaluation. Next come the laughter challenges. Such has been its proliferation of these competition that every joke is been repeated in all possible combination and permutation. All those who end up laughing are a couple of jokers who are been assigned to adjudicate the contestants. It’s a different case that the judges start to giggle long before the actual joke is delivered.

To top this all talent search competition, comes the variant which might be dubbed the mother of all reality shows. These are the shows wherein the so-called celebrities are put together and all they have to do is bitch, fight and finally survive the elimination. No marks for guessing that even these shows are been aped from the westerner, where quiet controversially our very own desi siren came up trumps. All the contestants are mostly in their twilight days of career, and they indulge in loads of manipulative games to score one up on the fellow inmate. Inmate I call it, as the show itself proclaims a subtle tagline “Who will survive in the house?”. I wondered whom do they have to survive; are there any wild beasts looming large in the precincts? On second thoughts, it’s indeed an apt tagline because surviving the fellow inmate is no less a herculean tasks.

All and all, I truly miss those beautiful days of Door-darshan. Though starved for content, it used to telecast its shows with no intrusion for the advertising hawks. There were those kiddish and very rudimentary programmes, those mega-epics which used to take from the harsh world into the land of fantasy. May be for a short time but it was a enjoyable time in front of the TV, unlike now wherein I have only one thing to say. “Enough of reality!” L

P.S: I am intending to write yet another post of one of my TV viewing session. God willing, you will get to read it soon.

Swine Flu err!@#$ Flew :)

2009-07-31T23:59:00.005+05:30

1st prize winning entry at "Toon Typhoon" held at PSL Goa.
Theme: Swine Flu. The evaluation parameters were theme execution, cleaniless, artistic caliber and only things allowed to use being pencils. The cartoon basically has a funny take on SWINE FLEW err!@#$ FLU :)

A tribute to the legend

2009-07-08T17:32:00.001+05:30

Its the birthday of the legend today. As the south-paw celebrates his 37th birthday, I look back into the life of the great bengal tiger.

He has epitomized the trait of a true fighter. He was down on occasion more than one but never was he out. People criticized him and critics ridiculed him; but he was there all alone fighting his battle all on his own. Being destiny's favourite weeping child and having to face to the blunt end of the stick on multiple occasion he has always emerged vindicated and more more determined each time.

Style and elegance were always the ingredients of his batting DNA and the trait of leadership just added to his cricketing heroics. He led the bunch of players and turned them all into a force to reckon with. He daredevils meant that no one could ignore the Indian cricket team anymore, for he is the one who infused confidence into the psyche of each of the team-members and taught them how to stare into the eyes of the opponents. Not that the players were untalented but then they lacked the fighting instinct and he provided it. Like any other great human being, he too had his rough times and he weathered those with equal courage.

Such was this great sporting personality who has made place for himself in the Indian and World Cricket and a place in heart of zillions of cricket fans dotting the world. You will always be an epitome of determination and would be a guiding light for lesser mortals like myself. Dada, thanks to you for being the inspiration for me and many more.

Dada, Shuvo Jonmodin!
Aap jiyo hazaron saal; saal ke din ho pachaas hazaar! :)

Churning the grey matter

2009-05-21T10:24:00.004+05:30

This one a shortie! :)

“Shiii…. Quizzing? What a bore?” my friend grimaced. This was after I replied to her as to how I spent my last weekend. Not that her reaction was uncommon; I had witnessed similar response from quiet a few. Not surprisingly, a single trait binds them all. Ignorance to the pleasure one gets from the deriving the answer… Yes, I said ‘deriving’… because quizzing is not just gulping from a yearbook and puking it out at a later stage as many of the ignorant blokes seem to think. In fact this aint quizzing at all.

Yes, your memory cells do play a critical part in this activity, but its usage goes much beyond reclaiming stored bytes of data. One just cant explain the high one experiences when one boils down to an answer with help of all the info that one gathered in the past. And know whats the best part? Its instills a never ending thirst to garner more knowledge. Many of us dunno but quizzing can be loads of humour and sprinkled with bits of sarcasm too.

Imagine for once this question, “passing of which law made Dr. B R Ambedkar to resign from the assembly?”. Pat came the reply “Father in law” ;) . Now, definitely you cant say we are a bore… J

P.S: For those who want to experience first hand what I have written above, can join us for a monthly Sexy ;) (oops, it’s a typo) quiz. For more details log onto www.seqc.blogspot.com

Me

2009-04-25T11:58:00.001+05:30

Just as you have done now, I too do log into this blog. My intention being to catch up with the comments that my viewers might have posted. I do like to hear from my friends as to what they feel about what I have written. Most of them are very appreciative about the content on the blog, others commend me on my writing skills. Not many are critical of my writings though I would also like to face the rough end of the stick. Though the visitors count indicates around a quarter of a million hits, the comments enumerate to just less than hundred. This could be attributed to the fact that many of my viewers convey me their views over the chats rather than posting in the comments section.

One such incident happened when a long lost friend of mine pinged me. She was a junior at school and later at junior college. An intellect herself she wasn’t in contact off late, so a message from her was really welcome. Normal exchange of pleasentaries include ‘hows u’, ‘wheres u’ etc; as was expected since we hadn’t had any updates about the other for quiet some time now. As the conversation progressed she mentioned to me that she is a regular on my blog. That was a pleasant thing to hear but the question that followed wasn’t so.

“Why are your write-ups so negative?” she questioned. Well, frankly I was taken aback by this. May be I was attuned to hear only appreciative comments till now, so when the reality struck it struck me hard. I was able to convey to her that I am not a pessimist, not even anywhere closer and I will die an eternal optimistic. She had known me for quiet some while and I sincerely hoped she was convinced with what I told her was true.

But, in hindsight I guess she had a genuine query. An unbiased glance through the posts and one might not be entirely wrong if they sense a hint of pessimism in my writing. Thus, I owe it to my readers to put a true picture of mine. If one reads through the description of my blog, I think they will experience the “eureka” moment. For the ignorant lot, the description reads “the plight I find myself in and the things happening around me”. I use this blog as a vent for my frustrations about the wrongs happening in the vicinity and some awkward situations I don’t want to be in.

Not that it’s always something gloomy that happens to me but those are few and far in between, as sparse as the number of posts here. I associate myself with the most jolly bunch of people, be at office or otherwise and try to take pleasure from the smallest thing. And for the lesser pleasant things? Well you guessed it … I keep it for the blog.

Even in my posts, a little bit of pondering and one could see the real self of me. The real me, the light humored, witty, jolly me. Who else would you find making fun of oneself, be it loosing money or flunking in exams? I am someone who has taken everything in my stride and still have the nerve to let know it to others, albeit in a very phunny :) manner.

Now that we have got to dissecting, lets do a detailed postmortem. From the parodies of Bryan Adam hit numbers to describe the joy ;) of flunking to a descriptive narration of erosion of hard earned mullah at the markets. From describing the plight in the IT world at one hand and simultaneously the ordeal of being benched and onto the significance of Google in our life, I have penned it all. It isn’t unusual to find a grumbling IT professional but only a few have the ability to pen it down in a enjoyable manner; and I am saying this without a tinge of arrogance. In fact the positivity in me even prompted a haiku out of a faulty fire detector. From the title to the content and onto the presentation of each post, I try to project the humor and wit I embody. So much so that I put more effort in deciding the apt and often humorous title once I have hurried through writing the content.

Once my friend described me as a person who has views about everything, and often contrarian. I choose to second him on this especially the first half of the statement. And views I expressed about most of the things around me. Be it the Hindu Mythology or be it the economic crisis we are undergoing through. Be it blatant plagiarism or the ills plaguing Goa. From the electioneering tamasha to a single procession to file the nomination papers, nothing skipped to feature on my blog. The Quizzer in me make sure the audience are fed with some dose to churn their white matter while the sketches make tall and by far overstretched claims 8) to challenge Pablo Picasso. In the same vein that I cursed myself for my dormancy, I had even praised others for their entrepreneurship and vision. I described my failures but at the same time commended someone on the other side of the globe for their achievements. Yes, I have talked about the ills plaguing our country, but then its just depicts my concern and potrays the patriotic side of me. Isn’t it? From the need of a strong leader to the manner the electorates are being treated by the politicians, what I have written is plain hard truth. Even the hot topic of terrorism didn’t manage to skip my blog.

So as you might have rightly guessed by now this was an sincere attempt of mine towards self redemption, an attempt to shed off any misconception about me that you might have formed in your mind. I am an eternal optimistic and will continue to be so, be what be. My motto in life has been “All for the best” and I have been dedicatedly living up to it. Things might look bad on face value but the long term repercussions of the same are always fruitful, that’s what I believe in. Takings things in my stride, I attune myself for anything and everything that’s comes my way, because……. That’s “ME”!

The P.D. Quiz

2009-04-24T10:37:00.020+05:30

(A report by Dr. Luis Dias on the quiz conducted by yours truly. This quiz was held at P.D's as part of the monthly SEQC event for the month of March 2009.)

A Wikipedia search for P.D. gives you, among other things, Peu difficile, a French grade for a moderately difficult mountaineering route.

This seemed to be the objective of our designated QM, Ameya Mardolkar.

And a Google of "A. M." gives you (4 hits down) City AM, a business paper (Business with Personality). Coincidence? :-)

The evening kicked off with a heated dispute, Seed vs Leaderboard, which seems to be still raging, although I can sense a con-sensus emerging.

(Incidentally, couldn't help wondering, at least from a purely botanical standpoint, do you have to be nuts to be seeds? I think perhaps every nut is a seed, but you don't have to be a nut to be a seed. You however have to be a seed to be a nut).

Anyway: back to the review:

Following the seedy start:

We had a maiden over from Niyati; her first foray into QMing, and a superlative effort. Knocked most of us for six. This is a QM to watch, for sure.

This quiz also featured for first time, the Double Your Money rule, which has a lot to do with the final tally. You can gather from this comment that yours truly didn't capitalise (such a decadent word) on this very much. Note to self: Pay more attention to rules, or get ruled out.

As if to underline this, A.M. pointedly familiarised us (Can one POINTedly underLINE something?) of QM rules 1 and 2, which required several repetitions as the evening unfolded.

The first round was the Pehchan Kaun round; this was followed by a whole series of brilliantly (craftily?) crafted rounds. A memorable one was the acronyms on the NYSE tickerboard, which surprisingly all teams seemed to have fared rather well. Not bad going, considering none of us has dealings with NYSE.

The break featured a steady stream of food and drink emanating from Suraiya/P.D's kitchen, and we had to tear ourselves away to get back to quizzing.

The winners, by a landslide, were the runaway TRAN team (Tallulah-Rajiv-Anjali-Niyati).

Post quiz,we had PD's birthday bash, which began with birthday bumps (oh to be sweet sixteen again!), a delectable fare, booze flowing like water, and conversation spilling late into the night.

I speak for us all when I say: A good time was had by all.

Here's to the good old Quizky, one more round, one more round...! "

Scoff the people, buy the people, forget the people

2009-04-07T18:21:00.000+05:30

The election fever is in the air and everyone is feeling the heat. The elections are one of the important cornerstones of democracy. The adult franchise or the universal ballot thus bestows us with the right to rule the affairs of the country, though not directly. The representative nature of our democracy enables us to send our representative to the legislative body who thus forms the rules and laws which in turn affects the public. Thus, in a way we ourselves are responsible for all the good and bad that happen to us. Virtually since the elected candidate is the nominee of the majority of the people from the constituency, he is considered to be representing the views and opinions of that majority. He or she is thus supposed to act in a manner that would be beneficial for the larger mass of the country. Thus our democracy was aptly labeled “of the people, buy the people, forget the people”.

However off late the candidate have been showing utter disregard for the human populace who has elected him or her to be their representative. They show no concern for the voters when it comes to formulating the policies and are least concern for the larger good of the constituents.

They are not to be entirely blamed either for this. For they spend huge amounts of money to see them getting elected. The electoral trend and results don’t exactly show the people’s choice and one could argue it’s the outcome of how much the candidate has spent. The election results should be the endorsement by the people in the abilities of the candidate. However, current trend shows the candidature overtures in spending money and enticing his electorate with his promises, false or otherwise, is the major attributes in deciding s/he is on the winning side or no. The votes are literally bought; or one could say people are selling themselves for short term gains.

On getting elected, there happens to be no connect between the candidate and the people. For s/he believes his seat in the echelons of power is been literally bought and there are no leaning left towards the people. The candidate gets more and more aloof for the ground reality and he comfortably forgets about the existence of those voted for him till the next such time when their votes would be needed.

Going by this trend, one can blame if we call this democracy “Scoff the people, buy the people, forget the people”

A "Guns and Roses" Affair

2009-04-05T21:35:00.001+05:30

One… two… the rose petals continued to drizzle. It reminded me of the scenes from a magnanimous epic Hindu mythological TV soaps, where the gods from the heaven blessed some holy incarnation on the face of the earth. This isn’t less an incarnation, I laughed within myself. Three… four… the Ray-bans covered their eyes but no one could skip their hawkish glares. These safari-clad and guns wielding army were dotting every square foot of the earth and were further mapping 360 degrees. Five… six… The lesser privileged khaki clad souls were busy hustling the bustling crowd. Cajoling the female folks and threatening the rowdy men, they had a task at hands of making way for the cavalcade. Seven… Eight… The bunch of toadies who had managed to hitchhike on some vehicle was having an experience of lifetime; as was evident form their expression on the faces. Nine… Ten… Ooph! I sighed, as I missed my count.

But determined that I was to enumerate the set of wheels, I started back for the vehicle leading the pack. As I counted on and on and on the number had reached 27, inclusive of couple of ambulances. Much more surprising was the site of hooter blaring police patrol cars. “What makes them the part of the cavalcade?” I wondered. Have these cops shed their political neutrality for larger personal gains or is it just duty calls? I chose to give them the benefit of doubt and believe that they were just performing their duty of protecting a VVIP who was out on his way to file his nomination for the upcoming General elections. Somehow I withheld myself from adding a few more Vs to the VVIP but guess I wouldn’t have been wrong if I had done so. Afterall he is been tauted the “Yuvraj of Bharatvarsh”.

The very mention of ‘the prince of Indian polity’ should make it clear as to whom I am talking about. After all for the zillions dotting the planes, mountains and deserts of my motherland have been overtly obsessed by the single clan a.k.a “Nehru-Gandhi family”. But just to take a leaf of from the congress policy of ‘minority appeasement’, and for the larger good of the ignorant minority who might be oblivious of the great Indian political tamasha, I am talking about the scion of the Gandhi family and if I may take the liberty of adding a few more adjectives as in the ‘messiah of India’, ‘the PM in waiting’, ‘Obama of India’, the one and only Rahul Rajiv Gandhi. So, the protagonist is identified and so is the situation.

The huge cavalcade is not something new, more so if you have been brought up in Goa. The Mickeys and Babushs of Goa are believed to directly relate the number of vehicles in their rally to their popularity. If it is to be believed, there is an unsaid competition amongst them, about the number and types of car that form the part of the rally. More the Pradas, CR-Vs, Mercs, Audis and BMWs behind you more the influential and powerful you are. Cutting long story short, these local leaders weren’t a match for Rahul neither was the parade.

Getting back to the more relevant incident, unlike the Goan version the cavalcade assumes more significance as this was not a victory march and was just the first step towards contesting the seat. However the die-hard congressmen would confidently argue that the congress tally is 1 the moment the congress candidate files his nomination from that constituency. And frankly even the most die-hard congress opponent should give in on this, the constituency in focus being a town in Sultanpur district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India a.k.a ‘Amethi’. It is known as the seat of power of the Indian Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty. And why not? Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, his grandsons Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi (the sons of Indira Gandhi), as well as Rajiv's widow Sonia Gandhi have all represented this constituency. Rahul Gandhi himself was easily elected to the seat in the 2004 general elections, making him the fifth member of the family. And if my memory has not betrayed me, it’s the only constituency to have sent the most numbers of PMs to the Indian Parliament.

And probably the history was on the verge of repeating itself. That was evident from the exuberance of the people who had lined up all along the road to catch a glimpse of their representative. They had dared the mid-day sun just to cheer their candidate and wish him luck. And as if that was not enough, the rear door of the sleepishly moving armored Tata Safari opened and emerged the whitest white kurta clad and somewhat blonde ‘Rahul’. With him moving out of the safety of the bullet-proof cocoon, the body guards sprung in action. Amongst the AK-47s and the raining rose petals, now much more than before, each gesture of his was applauded and cheered. The scorching sun seemed to fail to sap out even a bit of excitement from the crowd as they cheered, waived and shouted slogans. They had been fanatic of their hero and they made no attempt to hide it. Just then the other door of the Tata Safari opened and emerged the mother of the candidate (will I be wrong if I chose to say ‘mother of mother India’?). Her sight just took the adrenaline levels amongst the crowd to new peaks as they jostled. It was a perfect setup for a rock concert. Just could not withhold myself from the wondering what if Sonia Gandhi would have crooning “Sweet child of mine”. Wouldn’t it have been a perfect Guns and Roses affair?

Its Quiz Time, Yet Again!

2009-03-15T22:04:00.002+05:30

Come March, and I was the QM again at the monthly SEQC quiz. I researched and presented the quiz for the SEQC people at PD's. Here publishing for the unlucky ones ;) who missed the live fun.

Luck? No chance!

2009-02-24T21:49:00.007+05:30

"Luck favours the brave" said somebody and mind you this saying makes me feel timid. Not that I am one, but when luck just declines to side by you one can't help wondering.

Somebody else went on to say "Success is 99% persevearance and 1% chance", but in my case the lesser share seems to have much higher bearing than that 99%.

You must be wondering what am I talking about? Well, its about me missing to make it to the finals of quizzes by a whisker. Passionate that I am for quizzing and more so the dedication with which I quiz, I modestly beleive I deserve a much better deal.

Its not been just any ordinary event that I missed to make it to the big stage, and more so its not once or twice but third time. And adding insult to injury is the margin I have been missing out on. up, its been a single point, a half at times and worst zero point (this time missing on the starred question).

Its all started with the Brand Equity Quiz. After much coaxing our HR/admin to shell out the seemingly big amount from their cofers to sponsor us, we had travelled all the way to pune to participate in the regional round. Crazy that I am for the quiz, I surely didnt mind the bumpy overnight ride to the venue, more so when it was such a big ticket event on corporate quizzing circle in India. Reaching there, and decently attempting the written preliminaries to pick the final six; we realised we had to attend the rest of the quiz sitting in the audience and not rest our bumps on the dias. Guess what was the point difference between the coveted seat on the stage and the one in the audience? A single point had made all the difference. All we won that evening was an appreciation by the QM Derek O'Brien for reaching so near (yet so far...), a round of applause from the audience, and some crapy frying pan as consolation prizes. And ha, we had definitely won a sleepless night that evening, coz all we did that entire night was the post-mortem of what went wrong?

Next, came the TATA crucible-corporate edition. This time the organising people had chosen Goa as one of its venue and thus spared us the trouble of a bus-ride to the nearest destination. It was the first time TC was coming to Goa, and all I had to do is find someone to partner with. In absence of my usual partner who had shifted base out of goa, I met another of those brainy fella who I had came across at SEQC (FYI, SEQC is the quizzing club in goa. Do visit http://www.seqc.blogspot.com/ for more details). New Quiz, new venue and new partner, but still my bad luck didnt seem to have stopped chasing me wherever I went. Infact, this time round I seemed to be at the abyss. After another fair show at the prelims, came the time to evaluate the answers. I realised that my score was same as another team from SEQC and they were the first team to be called on stage. Almost certain of a berth on the stage, my hopes started fading as the places started get filled. In the end, all I realised was that I had tied on the score but was eliminated on the starred question (for those oblivious to quizzing, the starred question is one which is considered for resolution of a tie).I just could not fathom that, but it was the reality and the sooner I came to terms with it the better it was for me. Again the largesse of the QM Giri 'pickbrain' subramaniam won me a lousy T-shirt.

Well, turn of the year and there was another first in the history of quizzing in goa. Tata Crucible was back, this time it was the campus edition. And thanks to my part-time MBA program, I was eligible to participate in this too. Trying to find a partner for this one was a bit difficult though. Leave aside being interested, people in my batch were seemingly allergic to the very utterance of the word 'quiz'. In such scenario, my only hope was teaming up with some from the full-time batch. I did spread a word that I was on a look-out for a partner but finally what did the trick for me was a mail over the alias. Emerged a guy with a faintish quizzing halo. A series of mis-communication is all we had to go through before landing up at the venue for the quiz. This time round a much better showing at the prelims thanks to relative simple dossier of question. I guess the QM was testing the waters as this was the first campus edition of TC at Goa. First time it was for the quiz edition but wasnt so for my bad-run. It had been continuing since a while now. What came to haunt me this time round was a new format to see equitable representation for different colleges/ institutions and that the dias doesnt look like a classroom of any individual institution. But this format, pre-informed and unbiased that it was, saw teams scoring much lesser than ours ending on stage. And I did not have to face the hardship to change the audience seat that I was seated on. And once again it was a single point that made all the difference. Thankfully, this time round the QM didnt have any special words of appreciation for us though answering an audience question landed me another lousy T-shirt with "TC campus quiz 2009" embroideried onto it to remind me these bitter memoirs which as it is i wont have forgotten.

So here I am, feeling like a complete loser. Quizzing has been a field which I devour but such upsets do sometimes act as a dampener. But as the funda of my life says "All for the best", I choose to see something positive out of it and be as optimistic as I ever am. Hopefully I will break the jinx, sooner the better.

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

2009-02-10T16:04:00.007+05:30

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

~~~~~

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked
myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Pablo Picasso, Who? ;)

2009-01-23T17:09:00.003+05:30

Pencil sketches by yours truly

2009-01-23T17:01:00.002+05:30

Against all odds

2009-01-20T17:56:00.003+05:30

Few weeks back two personalities were crowned king. Not quiet literally but then not much objection will be raised if I choose to call them the King. And if you look at them closely, you might find more similarity amongst them than differences. So, before you could get to compare the likes and dislikes amongst the two, let me first introduce the protagonists to you people.

Well, the two main-acts of my write-up here are Barack Hussein Obama and Lewis Hamilton. Am sure I won’t have to introduce either to you. Both have achieved enough of fame and have hogged more than enough media space so as to be amongst the top of mind recall.

I personally found loads of similarity amongst the two. To start with their physical characteristics, keep their mug shots by sides, and you won’t escape noticing the striking similarities. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone likened them to brothers. Look at their entry to the global arena. They arrived here with a bang. Their skin tone has made them more of a discussion topic, because the area of the world and the field of sports they have shone, there hasn’t been many achievers from the non-white section of the population.

Does this signify something significant? Or has this more implication in the future? Who knows? Only time will tell.

The fourth season

2009-01-20T17:47:00.003+05:30

I remember us being taught in the kinder-garden that there are 3 seasons viz: summer, winter and rainy… But of late I have realized there are four, at least as far as Goa is concerned. And no, it’s not about the climatic vagaries that the globe is subjected to. It’s more to do with the political juggernaut in the state. Yes, you guessed it right… the fourth season is the election season which has virtually become an annual or at best biannual phenomenon in this tiny state.

Just like the rainy season which is eagerly awaited by the population of Goa; the election season too is keenly looked up to by the masses of the Goa. And more of analogy with the rainy season wherein the rain pours and rivulets small and big flow, in the election months, it’s the money that pours and beer that flows. And for that matter I can’t restrict myself in noting many more similarities that season of ballots has with the rainy season.

As in the rains, wherein with the silver drops falling from the heaven bring about a welcome change in the landscape of the earth, so do the elections. With the first showers as the new leaves shoot up from every tree, just like that one could see the plastic flags in different colours dotting the scenery once the elections are announced. Just like the moss that grows on the walls and the trees, so do the banners and the posters with more often some ugly faces of some snobbish politician line to grab their share.

Just like the frogs who come out of hibernation to their most active selves when the rains pounds the mother earth, the politicians too come out of the self imposed dormancy and get seen amongst the public or the “Aam Aadmi” as they prefer to call it. And throughout the season they are always on the toes; right from the time the election-notifications are out when they hob-knob from one party-office to the other seeking the pass to howl, yell or shout in the legislative den on the hilltop across Mandovi. And finally, those who succeed in getting the proverbial go-ahead from the party office and the others who don’t, get on the electioneering bandwagon, tirelessly canvassing for them. They hop from every to the other nook campaigning. They cover every other tiny hutment to the biggest bungalow in their constituency highlighting what they have accomplished, if at all they have. They can be seen running from pillar to post usually accompanied by an army of toadies. For the more affluent ones choose to move in a procession on top on their convertibles, the majority prefer to follow the Gandhian way (may be just to strike a chord with the lesser privileged). This game of hopping just takes a innings break after the ballots only to begin with new vigor once the results are out. Here though the scale is low but the stakes are high, as the loosing tadpoles makes way for the winner frogs to move on to the next level of hopping viz: party-hopping. For that time the winning contestants quiet literally weigh their weight in gold for switching their loyalties; it’s an irony that they aren’t loyal in first place. More so, if a winning candidate is not affiliated to any party then s/he can quote any number that comes to their mouth and I doubt whether they won’t be paid that.

And there are others who seek to benefit from the electioneering indirectly. For the good-old farmer who look up to the skies only to get happy with the slightest glimpse of the dark clouds at the horizon; there are people (usually the idle jobless sloth) who desperately wait for the ballots just to hitch-hike on the campaign trail and fill their pockets with some green bills in the process. In fact the campaign time is the most early awaited times for such lazy asses as it proves to be a virtually all-expenses paid holidays for them. All that is expected of them is either crowd around the candidate or lest scream their vocal chords out sitting on top campaign wagon. It’s a money-spinner for most of them as they pocket dissent amount that might make a daily-wager go green of envy. Top it up with the “CHICKEN” and “SORO” (beer in Konkani). Even, the campaigner slightly up and above in the hierarchy tend to make hay as the campaigning moves on; needless to say the higher you are in the campaign team, the more is your takeaway. These people who tag themselves as “campaign manager” and move about with clutter of papers (slowly the laptops are replacing the files) and they being in charge of dispensing of the funds do make it sure they are the biggest beneficiaries needless of the outcome of the results.

With rains, start the season of the migration of flocks of birds. And how can the election season defy this analogy. For the electioneering is not complete without the influx of migrants who off late have turned into kingmakers election after election. They have been the faithful vote-banks for these netas and virtually the passport to the assembly. No wonder if you miss your name in the election rolls amongst tons of these migrant flocks.

Such is the vibrant fourth season…

Will anything change?

2009-01-20T17:32:00.000+05:30

Few months back there was a news item in the local dairy. A youth was caught with some explosives in Ponda.... hold on... not RDX neither any other high impact chemical mixture. It was much lower impact explosives, something to the extent of what we blow off during festivities. But never the less it hogged much media coverage for days and weeks together; more so because of the purpose the explosives were supposed to be used. Naah, once again you are wrong. It wasn’t to be blown in crowded places and cause substantial loss of life and property neither was it to cause panic or create communal tensions. It was actually to kill wild boars.

Well, however the hype created by the wild life activists made it sure that the protagonists did hog limelight for quiet few days to come.

However, is that so with human life in India? Bombs have been exploding in the expanse of this country with such a frequency that long back we have lost the count of the number, leave alone the number of victims. Has human life become so cheap that bomb explosion and resulting casualties have not been creating any impact on the common man? People have started to skip reading such news in the newspaper; now that there have aroused some kind of regularity and similarity in such news.

From the mails to claim responsibility to the warnings sent out from the Home ministry. From the blame-game of the intelligence agencies to the blaming of our neighbours. The convening of cabinet ministry to assess the situation and the opposition party going gung-ho on a new anti-terror law. The same claims by the police to have identified the perpetrators and the same top-of-the voice and “masala”fied reporting of the so called “eye witness” in the glare of the video-cameras and the TV reporters. Same routine press conference by the DGP of the area and the same old pleas by the defendants. Will any thing change?

Desi Subprime

2008-12-02T07:15:00.004+05:30

“Subprime” will arguably be the most googled word of the year 2008. Any sane human being having access to internet or lesser still to any newspaper must have surely come across this word. Many might have ignored it and other might have even created some sorts of notion about it in their minds. Without going into technicalities of it, one can safely assume that it ranks fairly high on the list of causes of the financial meltdown. Doling out loans to relatively less worthy customer with proven track record of defaults in repayment doesn’t seem to indicate any sorts of prudence from the financial bigwigs. Their only leverage of a probable appreciation in value of mortgaged realty went bust and the giants came down under its own weight. And the tightly coupled economies that we are in the globe, the tremors would be felt across every latitude and longitude.

Although each passing day sees a new financial institution claiming bankruptcy while other proposing lay-offs as a cost-cutting measure, the incident per se is passé. Right, the chips are down but no point in wailing over it. The need of the hour is for us to put the chips back in a way that such crisis doesn’t strike us a second time.

Frankly, looking at the current market conditions and the prevailing lending scenario that has been in existent in India, it doesn’t seem to be much different from the ‘Subprime’ lines. Rewind a few months, and the nasty calls from the ICICIs and the HDFCs offering loans without any surety aren’t something unheard off. These banks have been ready to disburse loans virtually at the tilt of the hat. As in case of subprime, many of these beneficiaries have been known defaulters. It won't be surprising if you find a Tom, Dick or Harry zooming past you in a sedan entirely hypothecated to a bank… worse still the gas driving it too would be on credit… courtesy the lending institutions.

The response of any financial turmoil by the central bank in India could be simply described as one right from the text-books. The easing and freezing of liquidity by altering the CRR, Repo Rate has been a prescribed one, but the irony that it isn’t as linear. The economy is booming but that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t exist any tabs on it. On face value it might look like that we are hampering the growth; but these prohibitions are required for sustained all inclusive growth of our emerging economy. An apt analogy that I find here is that of a kite. What keeps a kite flying high is that string attached to it the other end of which is in our hand. Snap the string and the result is evident.

Bottom-line is that there is an urgent need to get the acts together, be it the RBI, the SEBI or the Planning commission. All of them have to don their thinking caps as well their action caps to prevent the Indian economy going the US of A way. Lest it won’t be long that the subprime devil will come knocking our doors.

Wanted

2008-12-01T22:34:00.002+05:30

“Everything can be manipulated” thundered my friend as we were sitting leisurely under the sky discussing about the plight of the nation. These words came as a bolt from the blue from this usually clownish friend of mine. But uncharacteristic to him, he was serious to the core and deeply aggrieved by the recent happenings around him, around me and in fact around every one of us.

As we grazed past the various ills plaguing the country, trying our bit to zero in on what needs to be done to cure the same; he chillingly narrated incidents how politician try and manipulate the public for their own betterment. And it wasn’t just plain baseless allegations against the Gandhi topi and khadi kurta clad individuals; for me I believed his talk made sense. From the Amar Singhs, Raj Thakareys, and Narendra Modis who divide people to rule over them, to the local MLAs luring voters with money and thereof, he seemed to have un-puzzled everything. But, had he? How I wish I affirmatively responded to it.

Like any other rational citizen we had unraveled the never-ending list of what’s wrong with us, but alas we haven’t had laid our hands on the answer key to all these problems. And as I questioned him on what got to be done, I saw nothing but question mark on his face. As thoughts wandered, satisfying monetary need of the humankind popped up as a probable solution. But it was shot down with equal blitzkrieg by Maslow and his theory of hierarchy of needs. For if Maslow had his way, satisfaction of some level of needs would induce craving for achievement of the next level.
Educating the masses was option B. But would education eradicate the cynicism that has sipped into the Indian psyche. One can see from the current times, the ones who avoid the polling booths on election days are the ones whom I choose to call the educated illiterates.

Although nothing concrete emerged from our tete-e-tete, what we certainly concluded that there is a need of a movement, a revolution. There was a need of a mobiliser of the masses; and what better example to give other than the father of our nation. Though we agreed that Gandhism per se is passé and few of his actions might arguably be the root cause of the mess we see us in; we nevertheless acknowledged his skill of uniting people for a single cause. Probably, there is a need of a persona who is the culmination of mobilization skill of Gandhi and the organizing/ planning skill of Netaji. We both had consensus that this person definitely got to be from a non-political background but still having a tremendous following amongst the Indians. He might be a filmstar, a cricketer, a businessman or anyone else but surely someone should rise above petty politics towards this goal. We are on a lookout for one, hoping that our search will end soon. It might be even you. Do you have it in you?

Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon!

2008-12-01T21:47:00.005+05:30

Aye mere vatan ke logon
tum Khoob Laga Lo Naara
ye Shubh Din Hai Ham Sab Ka
lahara Lo Tiranga Pyaara
par Mat Bhoolo Seema Par
veeron Ne Hai Praan Ganvaaye
kuch Yaad Unhein Bhi Kar Lo -2
jo Laut Ke Ghar Na Aaye -2

aye Mere Vatan Ke Logon
zara Aankh Mein Bhar Lo Paani
jo Shaheed Hue Hain Unki
zara Yaad Karo Qurbaani
jab Ghayal Hua Himaalay
khatre Mein Padi Aazadi
jab Tak Thi Saans Lade Vo
phir Apni Laash Bichha Di
sangeen Pe Dhar Kar Maatha
so Gaye Amar Balidaani
jo Shaheed...

jab Desh Mein Thi Diwali
vo Khel Rahe The Holi
jab Ham Baithe The Gharon Mein
vo Jhel Rahe The Goli
the Dhanya Javaan Vo Aapane
thi Dhanya Vo Unaki Javaani
jo Shaheed ...

koi Sikh Koi Jaat Maraatha
koi Gurakha Koi Madaraasi
sarahad Pe Maranevaala
har Veer Tha Bhaaratavaasi
jo Khoon Gira Parvat Par
vo Khoon Tha Hindustaani
jo Shaheed...

thi Khoon Se Lath-Path Kaaya
phir Bhi Bandook Uthaake
das-Das Ko Ek Ne Maara
phir Gir Gaye Hosh Ganva Ke
jab Ant-Samay Aaya To
kah Gaye Ke Ab Marate Hain
khush Rahana Desh Ke Pyaaron
ab Ham To Safar Karate Hain
kya Log The Vo Deewane
kya Log The Vo Abhimaani
jo Shaheed...

tum Bhool Na Jaao Unko
is Liye Kahi Ye Kahaani
jo Shaheed...
jay Hind Jay Hind Ki Sena -2
jay Hind, Jay Hind, Jay Hind

(A tribute from this lesser mortal to the great sons of this motherland)

Jaago India Jaago

2008-11-28T12:29:00.003+05:30

“Is desh ka kuch nahi ho sakta!” mulls the quartet in ‘Rang De Basanti’ before being countered by the young IAF fighter. He depicts one who still has faith in the country and more so has the courage and zeal to take on the zillions of cynics who dot the expanse of the country. I would choose to alienate myself from the cynic chunk and relate myself to the other lot. Even as the doomsday sayers have outnumbered me by much, that doesn’t deter me in the vision I see for my motherland. I say “My Motherland” and not “Our Motherland” for I believe this country doesn’t belong to the losers who have resigned their fate in the hands of few jokers whom we choose to call “politicians”.

Any kind of catastrophe striking my country and I find people around me going gung-ho blaming the politicians. I order (not request, because these people allow themselves to be dominated by others) don’t blame the politician, blame me for this mess. Blame me for I am the one, who failed in choosing the right law-maker. Blame me because I have failed in mobilizing people to choose their representative with a rational mind. Having said this, I have another thing to add to it “I might have failed, but I am not a failure”. If I have the power to bestow them as law-makers, I can very well show them their rightful place.

My inaction has got this country to this stage and I can’t afford it to deteriorate further and let the country go to dogs. I have had enough and it’s high time I put my foot down and say “Enough is enough”! I am the change I want to see and it’s going to dawn very soon. For if you want to see the change sooner all you got to do is, share my vision for the country, join my mission for the country. The transformation of the country into a better place is inevitable and I am here to see that it happens. Just that it’s going so be much sooner if all the ‘I’s turn into ‘We’.

Lastly have just one thing to say,

Ab bhi jiska khoon na khoula khoon nahi wo paani hai,
jo des ke kaam na aaye woh bekaar jawani hai

AlviDa da

2008-11-20T15:23:00.004+05:30

Because when you announced your retirement, you said "Hopefully we will end up on a winning note". We did.
Because you were the only guy referred to as the royal Prince and the high-street bully "Dada" at the same time.
Because when you scored that classic debut century at Lord's, some thought you will be a one-knock wonder. At Trent Bridge, you stunned them all again with a double barrel.
Because when you played those heavenly cover drives, Rahul Dravid said, "There is only God and then Sourav Ganguly on the off-side". Maybe even the Almighty would have just moved to mid-on.
Because you took over as captain when match-fixing clouds hung over, but you made the right bets for the team.
Because with Sachin Tendulkar, you made ODI opening a treat for Indians, and a nightmare for the opposition. It was left right, left right, alright.
Because when Andrew Flintoff ran naked chest on national display at Wankhede, you lost your shirt.
Because when the Oz threatened you with chin music, you played hip-hop with them at Brisbane hitting a majestic hundred.
Because you never quite understood the logic and rationale behind being dropped even after scoring 10,000 runs plus in ODIs and in good nick. You are not good at reading whodunits.
Because they burnt your effigies and hurled stones at your team in 2003, and then you led India to the finals of the World Cup in South Africa.
Because you discovered youngsters, groomed, encouraged and inspired Yuvraj, Harbhajan, Zaheer, Irfan and MSD to become our future heroes.
Because you suffered the humiliation from Greg Chappell and several critics with humility, dignity and grace.
Because you proved that the word "age" is not a four-letter word.
Because when axed, you concealed your hurt and disappointment, went and played local tournaments and sneaked back into the team. Then Johannesburg happened. Your fairy-tale return had happened.
Because you have redefined the word comeback. And grit. And determination. And fighting spirit. And leadership. And many unmentioned superlatives.
Because MSD seems to have taken the leadership baton from you, for the good of Indian cricket.
Because you never traded your self-respect, and when they dropped you for the Irani Cup, you said---Enough!
Because you taught Indians to fight back, not turn around in defeat.
Because even 7,000 Test runs and 10,000 ODI runs is sometimes insufficient to measure your heroics for Indian cricket.
Because the 2001 series win against Australia marked a historic victory in one of the greatest series ever. You were India's captain.
Because if it exasperated Steve Waugh, you let him wait for the toss.
Because hopefully, we will still see you in black shining armour, Prince, for the KKR in IPL next year.
Because on the Lord's balcony, we discovered that you were not six-abs-pack.
Because at Nagpur this time, you had the last laugh, and India, the last hurrah. The final frontier is recaptured.
Because you did a Pepsi ad for your team, even as you stood silently alone in Kolkota.
Because you will not be ever seen in whites again. Scoring runs, bowling those deceptive medium pacers. And perhaps, even misfielding.
Because your fans will borrow from a new TV ad, and say "We miss you so much, it hurts".
Because it is time to let you go home to your family, and friends.
Because now you can watch colleagues like Sachin and VVS and Ishant on the television like all of us.
Because tomorrow morning you will join Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Bedi and Srikanth as a "former" player. An ex.
Because you can now perhaps play football as well at Eden Gardens.
Because it's time to say good-bye.
Because you did us proud.
Because you never gave up.
Because if you don't deserve the salutations from us all Indians, who do.

(Original Article by Sanjay Jha on IBNLive.com)

Your Time Starts Now!

2008-11-20T12:22:00.002+05:30

I had researched and organised the content for the quiz. This quiz was hosted as part of the monthly quizzing activity for the SEQC people. The QuizMaster???? Yours Truly. :)

For further details, do visit www.seqc.blogspot.com

The Simian Way

2008-11-13T12:07:00.001+05:30

My self-imposed sabbatical had given me good time off from the hectic grilling of the professional life. I had been seeking a break from the usual nitty-gritty of my office to devote time to seemingly more important tasks in my life. And thanks to my large-hearted manager I was able in getting a long leave sanctioned for myself.

So I spent or rather invested large pie of my time studying for some upcoming competitive exams; and a lesser share of time towards other stuff like instilling some life in my blog with new posts as you might have observed by now. So my routine had been more like study, study, study with short breaks sprinkled in between. These breaks ranged from grabbing a quick bite to quench my appetite to grabbing some news bite mostly to check whether the stock market bears have found the abyss (unfortunately I got disappointed each time to see the bears reigning). And there are times when I just shut slam and stacked my books and off I went outdoor to loosen myself. One such time I was just swinging on the swing in our veranda wherein I got to observe something that drove me to the next post of mine.

As I was swinging like a child, I happen to see a pack of monkeys who had just arrived in our yard/garden and were reigning mayhem. Not that it was the first time the apes had come calling on us; just that this time I seem to strike a rare analogy between them and something more ghastly that has been plaguing our country. As I observed they moved in packs from tree to tree, eating less destroying much more. As they hopped from one branch to another they didn’t seem to spare any of the trees especially fruit-bearing; relishing on the spread of the nature. This destruction is very much visible to us and so much more painful. Not that they can’t be tackled but for the self-professed protectors of the apian clan in form of the animal activists they do escape the wrath time and again. The reason they put forth is that these apes are very much like us. Indeed, these monkeys are very much like humans but alas they aren’t humans;

And this brings me to the analogy that I see in them with the serious acts of terrorism that has been plaguing our country throughout its expanse. And the name that takes centre-stage in such terrorist activities is that of SIMI. The human-like non-humans have been busy decimating the face of our motherland with their destructive acts. What ends they intend to achieve through the destructive means has remained oblivious to me till date. These destructive organizations had been carrying out attacks on the innocent population time and again. And the regularity with which they have been striking seems to me that their appetite is showing no signs of quenching. Rather they aren’t interested in satisfying gastro-intestinal craving or any other craving they might be harboring deep within themselves. All they want and desire is destruction of the normal flow of human life. Just like the apes, they are interested in causing harm and destruction all throughout the expanse. As the general public try to find rationale behinds these terrorism; still exists there defendants of these terrorists who like to portray the compassionate angle of viewing at them. Their arguments doesn’t differ much from the animal activists in that they want to see at these destructive forces are someone amongst us and someone like us. But, alas they aren’t.

Yes, I can’t and won’t like to deny that we evolved from the apes. But the similarity ends there for we have evolved and they haven’t. And this is good enough a reason as per me to use different yardstick for either. For these the terrorist outfits should be dealt with tougher manners, something befitting the tag of ‘the law of the jungle’ for they shall understand only that. For a simple reason that, they don’t differ from the apes in much way… so much so that their collective pronoun too sounds so very identical… SIMIan way.

The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector!

2008-09-22T14:47:00.005+05:30

The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector!
(Inspired by the numerous and regular false alarms followed by the broadcast from suzie)

Shuru hua yeh tab, jab implement hui policy for prevention of fire;
Taaki alert rahe sab, subah-shaam aur charo preher!
The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector!

Hue bahut mock evacuation drills, bhagayaa humko idhar udhar;
Taaki hamesha safe rahe hum from calamity and fire!
The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector!

Aur ab jo Kisi wing mein, kisine jalaayi maachis ya cigarrate agar;
Utt jaata hai dhuaa, aur phir bajtaa hai hooter!
The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector!

Siren ki awaaz sunte hi, hota hai aatank, chaa jaata hai keher;
Bhaagta hai koi, koi karta hai prayer!
The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector!

Bhagte hai fire co-ordinator, charo taraf, baahar aur andar;
Actual site pe pahuche toh jaana ke...
The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector!

Socho agar ek din, sach mein lagti hai aag premises ke bhitar;
Intejaar me baite hai hum, ki koi bole!
The hooters were activated due to a faulty detector.

Comedy of Melody

2008-07-04T15:15:00.000+05:30

Thanks to the largesse of my US based client I had this unrestricted access to yet another cool app from Google … the “You Tube”. And as I was clicking randomly through the video uploaded by numerously infinite Netizens who have chosen to broadcast them… I ended up clicking on the link which was childishly named Peterpan-Tak Bisakah. As my curiosity spiraled, I found myself already clicking the link. The video took no time to stream in, once again thanks to the bandwidth that my esteemed organization provides me with, though not for the purpose I am using it for now ;).

As the video started rolling, the crooning by the slit-eyed lead vocalist didn’t hit me as much thanks to the language that was entirely foreign to me; what was familiar was the soundtrack that the guitarist and the drummer were weaving. As the prelude and later the track pleasantly started hitting my ear drums; I realized this isn’t entirely alien but I was equally sure that this was my first hit to this video. The wheels in my brain started rolling; the grey cells began churning trying to wonder whether I was the member of the group in my earlier incarnation, but Alas! It wasn’t to be.

Just then my memory cells pinged, and I realized the music was sounding very similar to a track “Kya Muzhe Pyaar Hai” from a recent Hindi movie “Woh Lamhe”. Wait! did do I say ‘similar’? It was indeed ditto. In a flash, I knew it was a perfect copy-paste work by some music composer from Bollywood. Though some patriotic feelings did ooze out in me, which hinted at the Hindi track being the original and the guys from the east might have picked it up; but my mind wasn’t ready to comply with my heart. So I set out to clear my doubts, though logically I didn’t have any doubts as to which version was the elder amongst the two.

Few queries in Google and a couple of wiki pages confirmed the assumption I had made. It was an original track by some band called “Peterpan” from Indonesia. As the case of plagiarism of established, my mind had made another assumption as to who the Bollywood composer could be. So, as I Googled once more. This time I was shocked (I wonder pleasantly shocked or otherwise) to see my assumption was way off the mark. Like me you might have guessed it to be the one and only ‘Anu Mallik’ but it wasn’t to be… It was a comparatively a new kid on the block… Pritam.

I was compelled to hit the Google/you tube one more time. This time the search was on ‘Pritam Copy cat acts’. As it dawned to me the search results stretched beyond a single page. In fact all his major hits were picked up or ‘inspired’ (as they choose to describe their act) from somewhere or the other, majority from Asia. “Plagiarism at its best!”, I sighed.

I remember once Mr. Anu Mallik, the original copy master had famously said and I quote “Even copying is an art”. After four years of engineering and infinite number of backs I should agree with him and I do. Its quiet an art to sew words for a totally different dialect onto the original piece of music. I acknowledge that it’s not anyone’s cup of tea to liven up the string of word with some melodious music. But having said that, I strongly feel against blatant plagiarism and claiming someone else’s work as one’s own. Copying by itself is not as big an offense as doing it without giving credit to the original artists themselves is. In today’s world where all content produced is distributed to the most remote part of the globe, one can’t escape being caught red-handed. More so, it even hampers the original work of art by these masters of Ctrl+C Ctrl+V. The master of copying Anu Mallik, who had even gone a step forward with applying same tune to two different songs, did come out with some really melodious tunes in movies like Border and Refugee. But general mindset is such that public tend to remember the wrong doings more than rest of the things.

The business of copying can be seen through a noble angle too. Look it in a way of offering tribute to the original artists or spreading his work to even a larger set of audience. But this could be done, when one gracefully accepts the source of the work. In such a way, one could achieve fame and skip being called a plagiarist too.

Googled

2008-06-18T17:38:00.001+05:30

Somewhere midway through a routine and needless to say boring day at the office; As I was aimlessly glaring at the code on the screen, something popped at the bottom right corner of the screen. As I shifted my sight from the IDE to checkout as to who felt like spamming my mailbox, it was yet another forward from an OB friend of mine who had religiously taken up the task of filling my inbox to the bream. I had even contemplated setting a outlook-rule to re-direct her mails into the thrash bin but then held myself from it because they were the only good things that happened to me in the long and strenoous day at office. So as I involuntarily clicked on the pop-up to glance(not read) at it before moving it to its final resting place, I was pleasantly surprised to see a nice pic of a person performing pooja. Pooja of God. No, you got it wrong, I didn't mean to indicate any deity worship but GOD stands for Google Oriented Development. "Yet another forward"? naah, it wasn't just another forward anymore and how it could be? After all, it had to do with Google and more importantly it was about glorification of google.

Google, has been the MAAI-BAAP of vast humanity of IT geeks. Well, I wont be very wrong if I go a step further and say the entire Indian IT industry is based on two pillars. One being 'google' and the other being "copy-paste". Googling the keyword, and copy-pasting the code has been the mantra for the IT nerds across companies and hierarchies. It shouldn't be surprising to see parody of the motto of an India IT giant read as "Powered by Google, Driven by copy-paste".

Take a second off and ask yourself "When was the last time you use the word 'Web-Search' in your life?". Chances are there that even rewinding through years wont fetch you the answer. So much so that Google has been the synonym for web-search, it has been a synonym for source-code for us. Needless to say, it has created a own brand for itself in this pursuit.

Google has been an integral part of the lives of Software Engineers. So much has been the impact, that the day (god forbid) Google site is down, many among us will have to leave for a vacation. I openly acknowledge the value of Google in my life and even further add to it that my survival in this world of IT depends on my access to it. For that matter, even the companies that recruit us involuntarily acknowledges this fact. Otherwise, wonder why Google site is never blocked in the most stringent of the workplaces? What else can justify the fact that 'Google' is the site which is set as browser homepage by majority who access the "mayagaal" of web?

Google, as a company too has been worthy of accolades. What started as a university level project venture and transformed into a name to reckon with in matter of not many years. Their business model has been reaping huge gains for Google and with its innovative and more so free software, it has been giving the other big-wigs a run for their money. Not only it has been hawking for more share of IT pie, it has promoted itself up the ladder of 'best-employer' list.

So, everybody say "Om jai google hare, swami jai google hare!" ...

P.S: I reccomend you use www.blackle.com. This site is a Google custom search and claims to save on energy usage. The claims on energy saving need to be cross-verified though the search-results are the same as that google.

With great powers come great responsibilities

2008-06-15T22:46:00.005+05:30

Was flipping through channels on a laidback Sunday evening, just when the familiar Peter Parker caught my eye and I paused to watch it for yet another time. The friendly neighbourhood Spiderman was just evolving in his heroic self when Uncle Ben advises him, which just like any other teen, Peter shrugs off. The words of wisdom being “With great powers come great responsibilities”.

As these words echoed in my mind, came to my mind the thought and probable title of my next post. And, here it is.

Not very far back in the past and a friend of mine just happen to casually quote one thing. He said and I quote “To test a man’s character, give him power”. (There happen to be a second half to this quote but I choose to ignore it at this juncture). This quote by him seems to strike me like a bolt from the blue. ‘How true?’ I asked myself. Because the only common thing that one can relate all the famous and notorious men the world has seen till date is the five lettered word called POWER. I consciously and deliberately mentioned about the fame and notoriety part of these powerful leaders because it was the use or sometimes abuse that tilted the scale of popularity in their favour or against them. Those who used it for larger good of the masses climbed the scale of popularity, while those who abused their power must have been certainly hovering in the negative regions on this scale.

Power to many is brute force, but in reality it’s not just that. The father of our nation was seemingly a very powerful leader who played an instrumental role in setting the sun over the British Empire. He neither had the muscle power in his arms nor was backed up with heavy armoury. His power came from his way of thinking and probably his concept of Non-violence. He was able to create and mobilise an enormous pool of humanity who seemed to follow his way of living and these unified mass in turn proved to his power.

On the other hand there are others who have abused power. I know these leaders whom I call notorious might be considered as gods in certain pockets of the globe but my branding them so is based more wide accepted norm of popularity. Take for e.g. the biggest fugitive of our times, Osama Bin Laden. He too undoubtedly is a powerful leader, otherwise how would he have been able to elude the might of the US marines till date. But, the million dollar question is, ‘Is he a popular leader’? I am quiet confident the nays will outweigh the yeas by zillions. No wonder such a verdict reveals that he abused the powers he had, to ruin the demography of the world. His powers were mainly because the Kalashnikov he wielded and the fortress of brainwashed fundamentalist maniacs he had build around him by misguiding them in the garb of religion.

Not just these big names, even you and me can be powerful leaders fuelled by the power of strong will. If you have the fire in the belly, then that can very well serve as the powerhouse for you. A notable personality and someone we could relate ourselves with is that of RTI activist. His power was empowerment of the general public with the tool of “Right to Information”. His struggle was undoubtedly not restricted to his self interest, but stretched beyond for serving the mankind. These examples speak for themselves, for the power we might carry should serve the larger interest of the public. Only then one could be identified as a truly powerful being.

In our pursuit of raw power we seem to forget the true essence of it. A powerful leader need not be a popular leader; but a popular leader is definitely a powerful leader because he will be having a might of his fans and followers backing him up. Thus the golden verses of Uncle Ben should never be forgotten.

An untitled poem of my life

2008-06-15T22:43:00.003+05:30

Tell me, what I am? A creature with a name plate?
My designation eludes me beyond the company gate.

Techie nerd? Naah, I am an average joe;
How, where, why? I just don’t know.

Feels like an obnoxious dog, looking at the neck strap;
Money is myth, that’s holding me in this career trap.

What I am is not what I wanted to be;
I gonna make it to the top, for others to see.

All my heart craves for, is a long sabbatical;
No worries, professional nor economical.

Things are gonna get better, Life is gonna change;
Shots are gonna hit target, only at the firing range.

The need of the hour is to make the move;
Somehow get going, get over the glue.

The other perspective...

2008-06-13T23:04:00.002+05:30

“Every coin has two faces” they say and indeed it does. A couple of days rewind, and I got to see a positive side of the 2 inches long tobacco stuffed stick a.k.a cigarette. The statuary warning that come along had kept me away from it till date and will continue to do so; but I was pleased to see what a bonding a cig can enforce between two individuals. These two puff buddies seemed to have entwined their lives into one another’s; and their bonhomie pushed me to this next blog of mine, if not pushing me into joining them to smoke my life out.

As a child we have always been chanted to look at things in a positive way and as we clock more miles on our age track the chanting haven’t ceased.

But often do I think, do all things that look good are indeed noble? And for those matters are all things that are projected to us in negatives shades equally evil? For the things we take on face value need not be the same that they depict they are. A right hand as seen in the mirror is the left one; and equally true is the other way round.

What better example to take then our own epics. Thanks to the evangelism of Mr. Ramanand sagar and latter Mr. Sanjay Khan; and even more thanks to the non-advent of remote control and cable television that prevented me from flipping between frequencies, my adolescence years were sprayed with constant and daily doses of the mythological sagas. Be it the “Maryada-purshottam”ism of Lord Rama in the Ramayana or be the “Kaurav-Pandav” duel in the Mahabharat. Ofcourse, then there were “The sword of Tipu-Sultan”, “Prithviraj Chauvan”, “Jesus”, “Jai Hanuman”, “Gautam Buddha” and finitely numerous many.

I might be charged of blasphemy but still I prefer to stick to the Hindu mythics involving the Rama, the Kauravs and the pandavas.

So, one could briefly summarize the Ramayan as the story of lord Rama, an incarnation of the lord Vishnu, known for his portrayal of a idealistic man and his victory over the ten headed devil Ravana. No one will challenge my brief summary above, but as it’s said the devil lies in the details. Let’s start with the villain in the story, the devil as it might be doubly reinforced by the possession of 10 heads. But this devil Ravana, a son of a sage, was a devout Shiv worshipper and had performed ages of worship and the very not so human trait of possession of ten heads was a result of his offering of head that many number of times to please the almighty lord Shiva. Finally blessed by Shiva, he was gifted by the eternal source of power the “Lingam” which was snatched from Ravana in not so very fair manner by the rest of the gods anticipating abuse of it by him. Moving from the villain to the hero of the mythological saga, The lord Rama. Was it right on his part to seek “agni-pariksha” to verify the sanctity of his better half; the very lady who readily boarded on a 15 years exile in wilderness resigning to all the cosy comforts of the flourishing kingdom? Was this act befitting to the tag of Maryada-purshottam?

Moving from the one epic to even a more voluminous epic. The epic whose theme was set around the battle of Kurukshetra. Draupadi was mentioned to have taunted Duryodhan about his father’s blindness which angered him and led to her “vastraharan” and the entire Mahabharat followed suit. The shade of grey that characterized the skin tone of Lord Krishna, also seem to have seeped into his character too; for that throughout the entire length of the epic he was involved in some sleight or the other. Even though Pandavas being depicted as the positive characters, didn’t hold them from playing the sleight and tricks that Lord Krishna suggested. Though Kauravas, or the supposedly the evil force, did play the game strictly by the rules; the Pandavas seem to bending the rules time and again. Be it the eclipsing of Sun by Krishna, or be it the Ashwathama incident. Be it the foul Killing of Karn when he was down of his chariot, to the tactful and equally foul killing of duryodhan.

By all this, I don’t intend to malign any of the holy lords neither do I want to indulge into profanation of the holy sages that were scripted by Vyas and others. The whole point of this blog is to inculcate in oneself a viewpoint of looking at things in a totally unpartisan and in an unbiased manner devoid of any sorts of prejudice.

Disclaimer: I am a devout Hindu and proud to be one. I have full faith and belief in the scriptures and the epics that have transcended down through generation. Through my write-up above, I do not intend to malign or belittle in any way the hindu mythological figures as depicted in the mythic. For that matter, I could have picked any other religion/epic to drive my point across. Be it the “Jehad” in Islam or the “Divinity of Jesus” in Christianity; but I choose to cite examples from my very own religion for the sake of not being labelled “communal” by the self-proclaimed “seculars”.

A Man of No Action

2008-06-12T17:03:00.010+05:30

Yours truly, is the one I am pointing to. I should be ashamed to say that and very much so I am. But at the same time, I am proud that I realize it and more so am able to ridicule myself. If you have been reading till here, you might have made an opinion about me by now; needless to say it won’t be impressive for a self-proclaimed lazy bump. But No! that’s not what I want to portray me as for the simple fact that I am not lazy, not even anywhere close to it.

Then why do I call myself the way I have? Well, there are reasons for me to be self critical and even more importantly I wonder whether this will serve as enough of impetus for me to ward off my inertia and spring me into action in pursuit of my destination? If it does, then this attempt of self-degradation will do me a ton of good; and I pinning my hopes that it indeed will help in my pursuit. I hope you must have wandered through my previous blog “Ek Akela Is Shehar Mein” and after reading that you must be very much acquainted by the plight I find myself in. Continuing on that, I have planned to break out of the jinx known as "job". Its with no less shame, I have to say that these plans haven't materialized as yet. I guess its gonna take time for these paper giants to transform into actual flesh and blood. Breaking out of these self-imposed restrictions that job (I choose to call it "Slavery") brings alone has ranked very high on my priority list and rightly so. Its a irony though that I choose to execute the tasks in my priority list with a totally screwed up sequence.

I have never been bereft of business plans. Infact, my disliking for my current job profile have been sprouting many plans in my mind. I have been churning my gray matter and coming up with some brilliant ideas (and I say this without the slighest tinge of boasting). I had been looking forward to others whose could identify themselves with me and crank me into motion. My tete-a-tete with the friends sprinkled across the globe help me locate thinkers at same frequencies but they, like me(unfortunately :-( ) seemed to be overpowered by the Newton's first law. Additionally, thanks to my non-dislike to reading, I had read quiet a handful of inspirational books/write-ups which feeds motivational fuel to the fire within. Guess, when these volcano gonna erupt?

But, as slapstick reality beckons me and I still find myself in equally deep(if not deeper) mess, the good old proverb "Action speaks louder than Words" makes its larger than life presence felt. On a positive note, one thing for sure and I seek solace from it for the time being; if at all I don’t know what I want, atleast I know what I don’t want. As a final quote of self assurance, I would like to say... I am just like that little bird who has got enough strength in its wings to set on the flight alone; the apprehension and the fear of fall can hold me back for a while but the flight is inevitable. Ameen!

The Man of the Match…

2008-05-01T13:09:00.000+05:30

The man behind the success of IPL is Subhash Chandra. No, it’s not a typo. I indeed mean the IPL or the BCCI backed Indian Premier League. By now you might be wondering whether I am in my senses when I made this statement; but believe me there is a rational mind resting over my shoulders.

Had I said the zee group patriarch was the reason for the failure of IPL; few of you might even have subscribed to my views, now that execution of the entire ICL clubbed together with the exciting and the close-finish matches played had seriously given IPL run for its money. But it is bound to get some raised eye-brows when I name the man-of-the-match of IPL as the Mr. Chandra, whose brain-child is the ICL. And when I name him so, I have reasons to believe that. For me, IPL would not have existed; had not Mr. Chandra conceptualized and successfully executed the so-called rebel league or the ICL.

He must have done it for reasons other than mere upliftment of cricket in the nook and corner of the vast expanse of our motherland as been projected to us; he must have had his vested economic interests in the success of the ICL, but it goes without saying that the true beneficiaries of it have been the virtually unknown or at best not-so-known cricketer who has been slogging day-in and day-out at the Ranji circuit hoping for the India blue-cap which most of the time eludes them. It’s an open secret that denial of lucrative broadcasting rights by BCCI (on technical grounds even when Zee group bided the highest) forced the Zee group to start its own league. They might have started it to cash-in on the enormous moolah that Cricket broadcastings in India comes with but nevertheless the sundry domestic cricketers as well international players in their twilight years are also going to gain from it. Be it Paul Harris of New-Zealand who retired from International Cricket or be in Swapnil Asnodkar (a talented Ranji player from Goa who quiet didn’t make it to the national scene), its just a win-win situation for all regardless to which league they belong to.

Even as, on face-value the IPL seems too be more glamorous with celebrity from different fields owning the teams and the players been virtually sold to them for exorbitant prices; ICL does deserve the credit for it dared to swim in the uncharted waters. They entered the arena where in they didn’t even had the slightest clue of what was there in the offing for them; and needless to say they came up trumps. Not just they conceptualized, organized and executed the tournament to perfection but even scared the richest cricket body in the world to get defensive or at best counter-offensive mode. The very fact that BCCI denied ICL any access to ground and stadium facilities affiliated to them not just showcases how threatened they were feeling; how also exposes their commitment towards development of cricket in India.

As ICL bandwagon kicked and started rolling steadily, sponsors started pouring in huge sums of money considering the value for money their getting in addition to the air time. The economic behemoth that BCCI is, saw this as yet another money-spinning business and jumped to grab yet another chance to fill in their already overflowing coffers. What else does explain the sudden change of mind of the BCCI office-bearers to start a league with T20 matches, when they were very much reluctant to imbibe the 20-20 format in the domestic calendar and even were reluctant to send a full fledged national team for the world T20 world cup? Even the formidable Mr. Lalit Modi, who lately has bestowed himself with the title “Commissioner of IPL” was so much influenced by the ICL that he mistakenly welcomed the guests at the launch of IPL by saying “Welcome to the ‘Indian Cricket League’”.

Such is dynamism of this man, who when denied a rightful place; went on to create his own powerhouse. Indeed, a true man of the match…

Benched!

2008-04-15T17:12:00.002+05:30

The most memorable phase in my short but eventful stint in the IT world came by in the last month when I was been tagged the proverbial ‘OB’… The “On-Bench” phase which attract a variety of reactions from the techies around you; depending on subset they belong to. The not-so-average Joe won’t mind being an OB lifelong; while the alpha-geek looks down towards the OB as a NPA.

Being OB was something I always longed for since ages. Although I was apprised by the other experienced OB about boredom that creeps in while in the phase; I somehow tend to enjoy my days quiet literally on the bench. After all, it was a much needed and much sought for sabbatical from the grueling project which like a vampire seemed to suck the last drop of blood from almost lifeless body of mine.

The rule “birds of same feather flock together” quiet rightly epitomizes in here, as you could see the gang of OBs hoping from the pantry to the gym and into the cafeteria quiet like the bee squatting from flower to flower taking essence of each and everything. The idle phase oozed out the artist in me and I penciled quiet a few cartoons/sketches. So much so, that I had demands flooding in from my colleagues to sketch out something for them which I readily agreed to. I even substantially added to literally prowess in the free time I got by scribbling a few articles. No wonder my blog was suddenly sparkling with the new write-ups and was no longer web-space hogger cobweb site that it was till very recent past. I also spruced up my TT skills; not that I got transformed into a giant-killer TT ace but nevertheless I would not be a cake-walk any longer. Thankfully my non-affiliation to computer-games spared me from the Tetris elbows that others in the clan did suffer from. Virtually, I had jotted some alternative professions for me.

And as the liveware in the clan tend to accumulate the extra fat, so does the system. With system usage generally dropping to significantly low levels and in most cases limited to the World Wide Wait(read surfing), the peripherals too slip into some kind of ailments. I could witness bad case keyboard plaque; while the rest system screams for some percussive maintenance.

But like every other thing, the OB phase too comes with its ills. Being idle when the general industry sentiment is poor and when news of lay-offs and bankruptcy line up to grab the share of the print and the electronic media; it goes without saying that the OBs tend to become the sitting ducks. In times of recession, the tag OB promotes oneself up the hit-list and you are always amongst the first to be uninstalled. Even during boom time, it might spell doom to those who are benched during the appraisal time. Its just going to be a salmon day for the OB even when you have been the stress-puppy for the better part of the year and ends up being a CLM (Career-Limiting Move).

All in all, I enjoyed my limited time on bench and it was indeed much needed to charge up my fully drained batteries before I could take up some other assignments. And I personally believe a limited experience in OBism might quiet augment one’s resume too; though one should see to it that one don’t become ‘OB’solete or ‘OB’noxious.

Scarred beyond healing

2008-03-24T16:07:00.002+05:30

I remember the days, when I used to wonder why Goa never figured on the daily bulletin. Each state or even smaller cities used to hog limelight day-in and day-out. Probably, the only time Goa used to make news was the year end when all the party revelers used to head for Goan shores for the New Year bash. And occasionally the pack of jokers sitting in the assembly playing the toppling game used to do their bit to attract publicity.

But off late the scenario has been totally contrast. Goa have been the making the headlines on all the leading newspapers and gulping huge amount of air-time on every other media channel. The sad part is that, it’s in news for all the wrong reasons. Be in the RP 2011, or the instability in the government. Be it the law-makers turned law-breakers episode or the SEZ muddle. To top it all, the molestations of foreigners that has created unprecedented hype off late.

Thanks to all this, Goa has been loosing its reputation of being calm and serene that it always has been; and I strongly believe it still is to a large extent. So, why all these issue have become nemesis for Goans and projecting it in a bad light to the world media? For I believe (and I don’t even remotely want to be politically correct) the root cause is the influx. Not just the population influx; but even the cultural, social or ideological influx that Goa is been targeted with.

I wonder whether there exists a single soul on the planet who has seen the audience to the breathtaking scenery of Goa, and still escaped without getting captivated, fascinated by the nature’s bounties that it had to offer. But the very USP is proving to be the nemesis for the Goekars. The pleasant climate, add to it the fascinating countryside and pristine sea-shores, top it with the warmth that Goans are blessed with has made each tourists feel like making their short experience into a lifelong one. And for me this is the root-cause of all the ills that has been plaguing the fairyland of earth. One should realize one is subjected to warmth, courtesy when he acts like a guests; but when the same guests stays put then he no longer can expect the same treatment till eternity.

I fear sounding regionalist but Goa is Goa because of the Goans (I mean the natives “Goekars” and not the aliens who have immigrated and proud themselves in calling so); and it is bound to loose its sheen when the natives are outnumbered by the aliens. The few ills that I mentioned earlier are somehow or other related to the immigration muddle. Take the case of RP2011. Those involved were all game to chop the greens of Goa to make way for sprawling residential villas and malls. A very prominent example of such exploitation of mother earth has been the one on the Betim hill looking over the scenic view of the river Mandovi and ancient Portuguese architecture that dot the city of Panaji. Worse still it has been the project by a very famous industrial house which claims to do business by ethics. Just makes me wonder where they had shelved their ethics who committing such brutalities on this forest belt? All these apartments and facilities as everyone knows were exorbitantly priced and its left to no ones guess that there were targeted for clientele not within the subset of the world named Goa. It just amazes me as to how the parties involved in this project are up to kill to the golden egg laying hen for a one time gain.

The scarlet keeling (the name inspired the title of this blog) incident was yet another wound on the already beautiful but now bleeding face of Goa. The incident and the plight of the tourists are certainly condemnable but it has been hyped up way out of proportion. A couple of Goan names involved seem to have been marring the entire Goan population. The ones who are involved surely should be dealt with the tough arm of the law but they should not be allowed to spoil the Goan reputation. The Dutts, Roys and the Sardessais of the Indian media who have been hell bent of tarnishing us just to add up to their TRPs shouldn’t be let to do so. When they screamed in the over-inflated voice in some publicity-seeking chat shows regarding the unsafe nature of the Goan beaches or the rave parties; they should be asked as to how many Goans (and again I mean the native Goekars) would you find at this venues. I can safely bet my head on the fact that not even a tenth of the people found at the rave parties would be Goekars and those who are must be actually peddlers (and not party revelers) who should be given the short end of the stick. Same is true with the beaches too. The silver shores have been such an everyday thing for the locals that I wonder as to how many of them actually get indulged in getting themselves tanned, sun-baked on the sands (spare the local fisherman for their tryst with the sea and the shore will be on till eternity).

Goans are notorious for their laid-back attitude and the tag “sushegaad” does get prefixed to our names at birth. But each of us have proven it that when it comes to assaulting our motherland, we shall spring into action at the blink of the eye. The government was brought to their heels the last time the Goekars upped their ante against the land sharks involved in the regional plan. It wasn’t a one time wonder as people had done it in the past during the Nylon 66 issue and more recently the SEZ saga; and we won’t be showing any qualms in repeating many more times if some perils try to strike our motherland. A little warning to end this… Mess with Goans, and you will end in a mess.

Back it up

2008-03-24T16:05:00.000+05:30

35 til’ I fly…(Sing in the tune of 18 til I die)

I didn't wanna fail in my college life
whenever I did - answered twice and thrice
still the results were out screaming to retry
Its gotta be 35 til I fly - 35 til I fly

can't fail forever that's wishful thinkin'
I always knew that when I was flunkin'
don't wanna cram up; cheats! I don't wanna try
I just score less as marks fly by

35 til I fly - gotta get 35 til I fly
it never feels good, I just feel shy
someday I'll be 35 goin' on 55! - 35 til I fly

anyway - I just wanna say
why bother about the backs of yesterday
it's not my fault, I studied every minute
if ya wanna clear, go get cheats in it - 35 til I fly

a 'lil cheats of this - a 'lil cheats of that
'lil cheats of everything - gotta get on track
it's not wat ya gulped, it's what ya pucked outside
just don't care when - don't need to know why

35 til I pass - gonna be 35 til I fly
ya it sure feels good to be alive
someday I'll be 35 goin' on 55! - 35 til I fly
ya there's one thing for sure - I'm sure gonna try

don't worry 'bout the future - forget about the past

gonna have a back - ya we're gonna have a blast
gonna make it fast - 35 til I fly

Ameya Ajinkya Mardolkar
(compiled after being bombarded with backs in 4th sem)

D-day at the D-street

2008-03-20T15:47:00.002+05:30

“Hammered” is what they call a scrip which had been beaten down at the bourses. And hammered I am for I am holding such fallen angels by the dozen.

I had the intent to get my hands dirty in the equity market since quiet long. But somehow I was just procrastinating over that thought for ages; may be it was the dearth of liquid in my purse that was delaying my grand entry. And finally one fine day the day dawned when I said to myself “come what may, I am going to invest in the markets and I am going to invest it now”. So after juggling between many brokerages firms and after being receiving end of numerous seemingly tantalizing marketing calls, I zeroed on a broker. Wasn’t the cheapest of the lot but then I being a novice in here, I wanted someone to hold my hand and teach me to how to walk. So, I thought of shelling out the extra buck to pick the friendly neighborhood guy over the rest of the pack.

After the arduous procedure of filling the form and millions of signatures (which should not differ much from the others), there I was; ready for it. Though at his moment I don’t seem to remember my feelings then. Was I feeling like a knight in the silver armor all set for the conquest or was it a feeling of a scapegoat who is shortly going to get butchered?

Having let my impatience rein over prudence and entering the markets when it was soaring at previously unseen and unrealistic levels; the plight I find myself in today (after the market crash) was not entirely unexpected. You don’t require to have knowledge of rocket science to foresee the imminent correction was in the offing. Probably my greed for instant appreciation of my investments had blinded me to a point when I could not see the crystal clear writing on the walls.

Its not that the markets let only the pain come my way. I had my share of sunny days before that inevitable happened. I had very decent ROI and was quiet content with the picks I took. And the way the bulls were running berserk, I like many other fellow equity-investors were laughing my way to the bank; unfortunately not literally (How I wish now, I should have actually liquidated my positions and stayed in cash L). Like a pig in the farmyard that overindulges in feed, I held onto my investment even after a substantial movement in the hope that the investment will provide even greater gains. The bull-run was on and the investors were minting money as if there was no tomorrow. All this euphoria let the human trait of greed ooze out of me, and I started dabbling into intraday day trades on margin funding by the broker (It means I use the money from the broker to buy equities and get to keep the profits on selling the same within the stipulated day). I had made huge positions in virtual nondescripts, worst so on borrowed money. To add to it, I also had my interest placed in the big “R” scrips which I knew didn’t exist in flesh and blood. The aura or should I say the angelic halo that the “R” scrips had in the market was too big to ignore. As luck would have it, even it didn’t elude me and I too fell for these paper demons. By the time it was on, Indian markets were gone (pun intended).

And finally the D-day dawned… and as Murphy would like to have it, it struck me in the worst manner. The inevitable had just happened but more so it happened in the most ruthless manner. The markets had crashed in such a drastic manner that it broke all the circuits set; the trades had to be called off and the investors could not sell their holdings. When markets reopened the scene was not much different, the herd instinct was prevailing and panic selling had set in. And as all this happened I was enjoying my day on a tour which I had set out on totally oblivious of the fact that my fortunes were dwindling at an alarming rate.

The phone rang and a beautiful voice from the other end just added to the already merry time I was having. But that wasn’t to last long as she dropped a bombshell onto me about the impending payment I am to make. I committed to her on the payment date still far fetched from the reality about the blood bath at the D-street. Hurriedly I called my broker and a bolt from blue struck me. I wish somebody should have recorded the transition in my facial expression then, it surely must have been a sight to watch. All my scrips had taken a pounding, the least were those for whom the circuit limits were set but even in those it meant I was stuck as I could not sell them off. Needless to say my fun-time at the tour had come to an end.

The very angelic broker who till very recently was nonchalantly tipping me on some never before heard of companies was suddenly turned into a recovery demon hell bent on getting his due recovered. I don’t blame it on them for that he is doing the job he is being paid for, but it was my decision and rather a stupid one to indulge into markets in such a way. The final result was that I had to wash my hands of few blue-chips that I was holding so I to pay off for the rest. With the beers still persisting, all I can do is seat and watch my portfolio slide into darker shades of red.

Bruised and battered after all this meltdown, I still seem to come out smiling for I am learned a lot many things, and learned them the hard way. I remembered I had read somewhere “Never invest something over which you will loose you sleep” and I am glad I did follow that religiously. I had leveraged my position in some seemingly more stable investments instruments and thanks to that am not feeling insomniac as yet. More so, I still believe in the India growth story and know for sure that someday I will recover all the money I invested for that it’s not any ill-gotten wealth that I had staked at the bourses.

There are tons of rags-to-riches stories that were drafted at the D-street and there exists equal probability of finding bankruptcy cases there. What probably differentiates both is a very thin line of prudence+ greed+ fear. “Every cloud has a silver lining” they say, and for me this silver lining is a too much a compelling reason to stay put. So here I am, here for a long haul and I am not running away from this mystical place. For that the Indian equivalent of Warren buffet hasn’t yet emerged on stage and who knows it may very well be ……… yes, you guessed it right!

- The Oracle of Goa. :)

Ek Akela Is Sheher Mein.....

2008-03-05T22:57:00.003+05:30

I know one thing for sure. I am certainly an alien in this industry. Somehow the industry doesn’t belong to me and equally true is the other way round. But, still I am here, knee deep in this shit… motionless, unaware of the fact that I am sinking more and more in much deeper mess.

With each passing day, I am sure it is not going to get any easier for me to get out of it; but there I am totally 404 as to what do I do?

Tete-a-tete with my close pals convinced me that, I am not the only one who find oneself in such a plight. There might be many more like me who might choose to tag themselves "destiny's favourite weeping child". I just wonder as to how the others have still managed to be away from the feeling of being “dilberted” by our seagull manager. And I then take solace that it might just be a matter of time before each of us start showing signs of Dorito Syndrome.

But whats this all about? It was started with the fairly decent scored I secured in my HSSC exam. The quiet a decent student I was; I had almost lived up to my personal expectations. And after 4 long years of bearing the bull that was thrown at us, I ended up or rather I somehow stumbled at the doorstep of this hynotisizing IT world.

But now that I am here, at this place which I once sought; I feel lost. I get the experience of being in no man’s land; when I find myself stuck between the two species; neither of which can associate myself with; On one side the “Alpha geeks” coding their way to mortality and the on the other “Masters of Assmosis” decoding the way to immortality.

“Make hay when the sun shines” they say and so did all of us; but now that the clouds of burgeoning rupee tend to eclipse the sun; it’s just matter of time the chainsaw consultant comes knocking to our doors. The Elvis years of the IT boom are long over; its to everyone’s wonder as to when they will get a additional feminine slip along with their monthly one.

Even if we manage to skip being rewarded with a pink slip; still there seemingly exists no pathway which would lead us out of the cube-farm into that elusive corner office; A place that has eluded me till now from where you can look down to other fellow techies prarie-dogging most of the time in their day; or at best ego-surfing their way into mortality.

Somehow, I have resigned to the fact that, there exists no ladder for me in here. Only way I might possibly rise in here is by standing on someone else (read sub-ordinates) shoulders; but even human pyramid too have serious limitations. All and all I foresee myself rotting at echelons closer to ground.

More often than once, I hear a voice call me out "Seek what your heart desires. Go for it!"; I turn around to see a vaccum. Is this what they say "the inner voice"?
Well, may be and I choose to believe that it indeed is my "inner calling".
So, what is holding me back? How I wish I had a definitive answer to it. But I believe I am being a bit more paranoiac than one in my place should afford to be.

Just hoping for the day when my brew of aspirations, vision, self belief will score over my apprehensions. Hope that day dawns very soon. Ameen!

Sinhagad Conquered

2006-11-20T20:57:00.001+05:30

Back Bencher Rhyme

2006-03-06T17:50:00.003+05:30

(Sing in the tune of Summer of ‘69)

I got my first back in the secon’ sem
Got it in third’ n fourth
Answered al’ in an attempt
Ll I get any hence forth?

Me and some mates from school
Had many Backs and we tried real hard
Some cheated and others had copied
I shualda known we still wont pass

Oh if I took backs now
These backs will last forever
And if I had the choice
Ya - I always wanna blast them

Those were the worst days of my life(CHORUS)

Ain't no use in studyin'
When gotta crape job to do
Spent my evenin's down at the canteen
And that's where I fagged one or two.

Standin on the canteen’s porch
Prof told us that you'd fail forever
Oh and when he told me that
I knew no’one can flunk for ever

Those were the worst days of my life(Chorus)

Mate, profs are wastin' our time
They are nerds and useless
We needed to unwind
I guess no-one' can fail us forever, no

And now the rules are changin'
Look at I.Ts as come and gone
Sometimes when I scrol’ those crape pages
I think about n’ wonder what went wrong

Squattin' at the Leo's croach
She told me she wud love me ever
Oh the way you held my hand
I knew that it was now or never

Those were the best days of my life

- Ameya A. Mardolkar (P.C.C.E Comp. Sc.)
(Compiled during the boring 5th sem lectures)

Welcome

2006-03-06T17:44:00.003+05:30

WELCOME EVERY1
This is my blog and I mean it. This is like a whiteboard to me where-in I can scribble out what my mind thinks and what my heart feels... This blog may very well give a insight about me. So guys, watch out for this space if you wanna know about who I am and what I am.