Mails, Friends and Friend's Mails

For a long time now personal mails in my inbox are alarmingly low. Even the forwarded nonsense mails are hard to come by. The enthusiasm that friends had to forward mails as fresher in the IT industry (mostly 100% entertainment 0% brain) has dropped significantly. Numerous funny and trying to be funny forwards, the Good Morning mails, and in some extreme cases even good afternoon and good night mails were an after effect of sudden uninterrupted access to mail and mail clients like Outlook.

Now these forwards are a trickle, to make things worse the amount of official mails received and even worse official mails needing replies has gone higher. Probably this increase in official mails has lead to the decline in forwards.

The set of mails that I get now-a-days can be easily classified

Span: We really don’t know why we are getting this.

Official Junk: We know why we are getting this, but have no use of it. But cannot stop it because we fear some day it might bring us some news.

Sleeping pills: These boring mails come regularly. And we are paid to read this. These are mails we know are on their way to us. They mostly say what we already know, but still we read it carefully and try to find some news. All status updates/reports/etc are a part of this.

PIMA: Pain in my A**. These include all escalations, customer queries, bugs reported, explanations requested etc. These generally come from managers or are copied to managers. These require instant replies.

CC’ed mails: These are important mails we can ignore after a quick drill. Drill involves browsing for any remote mention of our name. If these mails have greater than 5 lines, we use the search option to look for any mention. Safely ignore the mail if our name is absent.

Tsunami: Now these are mails that we pray to god every night that we should not get. In fact there is a group of people in our life who are unpopular for sending these. You see a mail from this group and you know it can’t be good news. These are also examples of “Murphy’s Law”. “You are fired” mail in un-challenged entry to this list.

Payroll: Well this is a different category altogether (I wait 30 days for it. But not read it when I get it. Unless some unexpected number shows up in my bank statement) and yes we get understandably worried if this fails to come.

Marriage invitations: No comments!!!!!

But the ones that I would like to get more often are

Breezers: These give essential breaks from hectic work. These are extremely funny, entertaining, and informative but also brief. They come mostly from friends and occasionally from the HR or Admin department.

Time-Pass: Entertaining but long and tiring. But can be of great help when we have no work.

SuryaTV Hollywood special: These are like Hollywood movies shown in SuryaTV (English movie dubbed in Malayalam). The contents are interesting often. But reading Malayalam written in English can be pain (but at times funny too).

It was among all this “personal mail recession” that a gang of my college friends started planning a weekend tour. With this I thankfully noticed that there is an increased personal mail flow to and from my inbox. In the end not only did I enjoy the trip but also enjoyed the planning phase and all the related mails in my inbox.

I value all friend's mails so stand by the thought “One can never be too busy to not reply to a friend’s mail"

Back home

I am back in Bangalore after a longer than usual outside India travel. “Hell is full I am back” … I wish I had a t-shirt with this message, I could have worn that around (although the trip was good and I enjoyed a lot). Not much has changed anywhere. No one messed up with my office too. It looked the same as I had left it.

By around 6 pm jet lag was catching up with me. But some urgent work still kept me around till 8.30 pm. I ran to the bus yard to catch the 8.30 shuttle home. The first to start buses were already moving. Then I realized that I had forgotten something important in these three months period. The magic bus number N23, N6, N8, etc written on the busses no more made any sense to me. I was finding it difficult to find the bus route I needed. And the arrangement of busses had changed a lot since I last took 8.30 shuttles. Time was running out. The first two people I asked gave me the universal right answer - “Sorry, I don’t know.”
Now this sounded like trouble, the next shuttle was an hour away. Then looking around I saw her, one of those hard to forget beautiful nameless faces. It was the familiar face that reassured me every morning that I had not missed my office shuttle as I came running to my bus stop (Being late and running to catch the bus is of-course my idea of healthy living). Now things were easy I followed her into the bus. Took an empty seat, and put on my mobile’s ear phone and tuned into 104 FM. Everything went on smoothly till the bus took that unexpected turn. It was then that I realized that she has shifted her house. I stood up and shouted for an out of schedule stop. The driver murmured his disagreement and followed it up with a curse for all stupid engineers and stopped a few hundred meters ahead. That was his way of sweet revenge.

A lot has changed I thought as I got an autorickshaw back home.

Around the world in a week

Around the world is an exaggeration, but at-least I traveled to other side of the world (US of A) and back in a week. It was like 4 days on transit and 6 days in US.
When your time is counted …You make the most of it. We did try to prove that, we hired a car and tried to savor as much of San Diego and LA could in 36 hours. And I should say I loved “Apna desh” as US is called back in office (with love).

The modus operandi at all the places we visited was to approach the help desk, give them the map and ask them to chalk out the best plan for us with the limitation of time and preference for action packed rides. And the helpdesk did a fabulous job of planning it out, something that the friendly helpdesk at Wonder-la in Bangalore cannot even dream of. One of the places we visited was Sea World in San Diego. It was interesting how they involved the visitors in all the action around the place. Here was the famous Dolphin show which I had till then seen only on TV (my favorite “Travel and Living”). In the show a small kid (6-7 years old probably and sorry kid I forgot your name) and his father were invited to be a part of the performance. Brave he was I should agree, at his age I would not stand in front of a fried fish in my dinner plate and he was standing among a couple of dolphins. The trainer asked him to touch the Dolphin and explain how it felt. The kid gave one of the most original comments I have ever heard, he said “It felt like a Sausage”। Even the trainer agreed it was one of the best answers she ever got.

As they say “setting the world on fire” …wild fires almost crippled whole of San Diego day after we left (more on this here). Luckily all my friends there managed without much loss

"Kambakth Ishq"

Every time we wish one of our friends a happy Journey we add a little wish “hope you get a beautiful girl for company” (aptly changed as “handsome boy for company” for girls). When traveling in train the first thing to do on reaching the railway station is to check the railway reservation chart for those magic lines.

XXXXXX YYY F 24 12 TVM CHE

But of-course it always happens that there are no girls around in my compartment. It is probably a case of “Murphy’s Law”. And even if there are few, I appear to be invisible to them. But by now I have become mature enough not to expect much. But that optimism never dies off. But this week-end traveling from Chennai to Bangalore by VOLVO bus things were different. I was getting on the bus from the midway and not from the starting point. As I entered, the bus was almost full already. People were at different stages of sleeping. I walked in looking for seat number 20 and it was near a girl. Now this is very rare in bus and often means trouble. The girl will insist that it is a ladies seat and I will be send off further back in the bus to enjoy the bumpy ride home. But today is a different day I thought as the girl gave a minimal smile minus the eye contact as she moved her hand bag to clear my aisle seat. I remembered a lady’s comment “Girls hate strangers infiltrating to their comfort zone, especially in the bus”. “Ok lady you have your comfort zone and thanks for not pushing me into that stupid last seat” I thought. What if I got a chance to break the Ice, although unlikely at 11pm? What if this story does not end with this journey? What if she gave me her mobile number and we became great friends? What if …?

“Excuse me” … some guy had interrupted me from the seat behind. I turned back
“yes”
“Do you mind, exchanging places? so that I could sit with my friend (he said pointing to young girl sitting a few row behind us).”
“ok, I don’t mind (hmmm…) ”
“Thank a lot” … you are not welcome I thought in mind.

What followed was bit complex permutation and combination which involved four people. Making into my new seat and settling into a comfortable posture, I thought with a smile, in my case there are no exceptions to Murphy’s Law. I put on my ear-phones and my k750i played a romantic number from Malayalam film “Akale”. I turned back for a quick glance, the couple where cuddled together sharing ear-phone from some mp3 player. I thought silently “Kambakth Ishq …”

Jalsa, Junoon Restaurant

I am not a critic but good food and different atmosphere is something that I should appreciate without fail.
This weekend we tried out this new Mughal cuisine restaurant in Outer Ring road near Marathahalli. I was impressed by the ambience, good service and good food. Food was served in this “Durbar” in a Mughal style and reasonable Mughal period settings while pre-1980 Bollywood music played in the background. A big screen played music videos from the same period, setting the ambience to perfection. Overall it was “An entertaining fancy-dress and good food if you can spend around 500 Rs. per person” For more serious reads you can see here or here.

Check out the interiors

The hospitality team

From outside

To the CENTER OF THE WORLD and back

I cherish this trip as it is not common that you get to visit ISRAEL. It is place that was visited by most number of invaders than any place on earth. English ruled India for spices and gold, US invaded Iraq for oil, and many other places were ravaged for its riches or military advantage, fertile land etc. But what brought all these invaders to Jerusalem which had no fertile land, no gold or oil was the first question our guide to Jerusalem asked. My answer was the obvious one that “it was the sacred place of three religions”, but then it could not explain the interest shown by impious like Alexander the great and others.

Thus explains the Traditional Theory:
As it was considered to be a flat world, Israel was considered the center of the world and ruling it was important to rule the world, and to rule the world was one desire that all the invaders had in common.

Just 7.1 million strong Israel has seen many more wars than India. It has left India far behind in development in the same 60 years of independence. It presents visitors a great amalgam of Historic and Modern structures. The extensive use of Jerusalem stone (or limestone like stones) gives most of it cities specially Jerusalem a golden yellow hue. It does look like a place out of history books. I thought India was the most religiously confused place before I saw Jerusalem. Like here the same building contains Tomb of David on ground floor (sacred to Jews), the last supper hall on first floor (sacred to Christianity) and the building itself is a Mosque. Courtesy its conflict stained history and present, security at all places is quite strict often to dismay of tourist but they do compensate by recruiting all beautiful girls :-) . The well timed rains(irony ofcourse ...!) did stop me from enjoying beauties of/on the beaches to full :-(. Definitely the Mall culture has caught up too much with Israel. Food probably due to Arab influence does looks similar to India at places. I tried a different place or a different dish everyday and that most people understood English made it easier to place the order :-) .

And I did find MALLUS even there.

Ref : Internet and wikipedia and "word of mouth" info from friends in Israel