Friends

I liked A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini quite a bit, at time a bit less than Kite Runner but at times even more. Although the book is more about hypocrisy of men, their MCP and treacherous ways, some thing sweet about men too did catch my eye.

“Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this(friendship) regard. They didn’t make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need for(show of) ……. Boys Laila came to see treated friendship the way they treated the sun. Its existence undisputed, its radiance best enjoyed not beheld directly.”

This is definitely a tribute to all those sun like friends around who bring about all the light in our life and are really unobtrusive about it. They play along celebrating our success, laughing at failures, showing us the lighter side of even the most terrible events and often adding a new colorful perspective to life. When they are far and out of sight they may remain out of mind too. But when we meet, we find to our own pleasure that there is no love lost.

We need no miss-you card
Nor we need any sweet word
For all the decades since we met
Just a big warm bear hug
And a kick on the butt is all we need
To gets life started from where it left.

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"

Driving on Indian Roads

Browsing through some random Blogs I ran into this Blog by Adhiraj Joglekar. He has come up with a blog to educate at least the net browsing Indian population. Now this is something that I appreciate a lot.

Please Visit this blog and also try to follow some of it. Driving-India

Even before I had visited any foreign country I had seen better driving etiquettes in one area with in India. Early part of my life was in various Air-force stations. Inside the camps it was absolute order and outside I always noticed the conspicuous absence of traffic order. After traveling outside India I notice the sorry state of affairs in India even more (and the worse part is I enjoy it to some extend).

Terms like blind spot, defensive driving etc were an essential part of driving lessens that I got from my father. From him I heard how the driving instructors in Army/Air force stressed on driving etiquettes. And for sure educating the drivers and some strongly enforced rules can make even Indians drive sanely (Definitely proved inside the Air Force Camps). Probably that is what we need through out India. For sure it can make Indian road a slightly better and safer place for us.

Happy and safe driving to all

Achieving Childhood Dreams - Part 2

This is in continuation of this post. (Note: It is not mandatory to have read previous post to read this post).

After 9 years of aging was approximately the time I started having more serious dreams (Or rather started claiming that I have serious dreams). Looking back there are a few I did not achieve and a few I achieved and many that I may achieve in future. Few dreams that I failed to achieve made me achieve a few other dreams. But I would not be writing in detail about those here. Those are for my autobiography which I would write if I become famous and successful enough and feel that my story can motivate a few (and on a lighter note this is called positive attitude).

My problem with the dreams after 9 years is that I doubt its originality.

I never felt the need to think what I would do when I grow up. Some overzealous people did ask me what I would be when I grow up. It was probably this that got me thinking. At times on seeing the nice car the doctor had I wanted to be a doctor, seeing pilots fly I wanted to be a pilot, watching Sholay I want to be a thief like Amitabh Bachan. But all this asking had some effect on me by the time I reached high school. The constant questions on “Your Ambition/Dream” made me come up with some presentable dreams.
Now how much do I own these dreams? -- I am not sure.
The dreams are so gelled into my mind that I cannot differentiate the ones that are genuinely mine and the once that got in due to environmental factors.

Probably this is also true about great people like Professor Randy Pausch (Professor in Carnegie Mellon University) who talk about their childhood dreams and importance of achieving it (and empowering others to achieve it). Link here (Note: it is not mandatory to have seen this video to go ahead and reading this blog).

When we grow up and are successful and interested in telling out story to the world we have already forgotten a lot of our genuine dreams. What we remember are the dreams we had as a child which are at least remotely related to the field we got successful in. And then of course few others are just cooked up dreams. As a child we have so diverse set of dreams that often it is impossible to be truthful and claim that we have achieved all.
But yes we should agree it is important to talk about the dreams that we strove hard to achieve. Who knows we may be motivating another Sachin Tendulkar or Abdul Kalam.

Achieving Childhood Dreams - Part 1

Due to internet the world has become a highly interconnected place. One of the examples of this is the forwarded mails that we get. When ever there is some good forwarded mail doing its rounds in internet savvy generation of ours we get multiple copies of the same mail. I get a copy of the same mail from my family group, school friends group, college friends group, room-mates group and office group of friends.

Recently I was forwarded a speech by Professor Randy Pausch (Professor in Carnegie Mellon University). This was a nice one on achieving our childhood dreams and empowering others to achieve theirs.

Link here (Note it is not mandatory to have seen this video to go ahead and reading this blog)

This made me look back on my childhood dreams. The first confusion was what is defined as childhood dream. So I decided on below 18years. Now again I had to split this period to below 9 years and above 9 years. This post is about my dreams below 9 years of age
Below 9 years all my dreams were very small and genuinely mine. Some I still remember are
1. To get the window seat in train while going to Kerala for summer vacation.
2. To buy half kg jilebi and half kg chocolate and eat it.
3. To buy a piano and tape recorder with my first salary.
4. To read every issue of champak, chacha chaudhary and Tinkle.
5. To sleep till noon.
6. To watch all Mohanlal and Amitabh’s action movies.

I achieved the 1st one every train journey without fail. The 5th one I achieved first when I was in school hostel and then on multiple times and still do that once in a while. But it never gave me a sense on accomplishment; it feels just like another day.
2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th were the dreams that just got too old as I grew. All these were dreams that I no longer wanted to achieve when I was in a position to achieve them. As I grew up I lost my dominant love for sweet. Hot and sour food took over my dominant sweet tooth or at least matched up to it. By the time I reached high school I lost my interest in piano probably lost interest in learning or owning any musical instrument (Except for a brief time after watching Desperados when I wanted to learn Guitar). To read probably I did a lot but definitely by high school I was really intolerant to the kind of books I wanted to read before. The Sheldon, Archer, Blyton etc really caught on to me. On the 6th one, I started hating action movies. The Mohanlal or Amitabh kind of action movies were villains fly as the hero swings his hands were promoted to “pay me to watch” movies list. Movies with some good theme/story and comedy started to fill my favorite lists.

I believe Dreams too have a shelf life. It is not just important to have dreams but it is even more important to achieve those then and there. Probably everyone has some small dreams which they think they can achieve some other day. We always think “let this get completed then I will do that”, “Once I take care of things there I will do things here” etc. But when we are ready to achieve these small things we may no more want to do that small thing. As an example (although slightly unrelated), I have a lot of blogs noted down at different places as and when I feel. I always think I will post it once I have completed doing some other work and by the time I complete the work I would have lost the drive to complete and post what I had started.

Picture: from rediff movie review.

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.

The Past, Present and Future

Probably you love your country more when you are away from it. I am writing this post from US. I am writing because I saw this video from YouTube on a dear friends Orkut account, who again happens to be doing MS in US.

Link to the Video

Back home I met a retired gulf returnee, who was into social work and petty local politics. He said "I had some of my most spirited thoughts for India at your age. I used to dream about a better India, better education, equality and stuff, but then I never acted. Then family responsibilities caught on with me and now age".

It made me sad to think that this cycle will continue. As I grow old I may tell a young stranger the same lines. And that stranger may put a similar post and sleep for the day.

Mind-Wander Marks

At school hostel we had two hour study time daily. Talking, discussion and all other extra-curricular activities were bared during this time. Teachers were entrusted with the “Mission Impossible” read as: make students use this time to study.
One of my beloved teachers on “Mission Impossible” was perturbed by the fact that people day dreaming were the hardest to detect and correct. I also noticed, what makes things worse is that there is no bookmark during dreaming, i.e. daydreams always starts from the beginning instead of starting from where we stopped. From school to college then to work the show has changed but the show stopper has remained the same.

Day dreams often are like the “Mirror of Erised” mentioned in “Harry potter and philosophers stone”. Dumbledore explains to Harry “It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts........ Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible"

Our teacher too gave us a “funda” about wasting time. He felt a lot of useful time is spent in day dreaming. As a remedy every time our mind drifted from studies we were to draw small vertical line/mark (like tally mark) on the paper and get back to study. I call it mind-wander marks. It is noticed that the frequency of lines drawn goes down exponentially. It is quite an innovative idea for ones like me, who have nomadic mind. Actually it is wrong to call it lack of concentration, but rather call it excess of concentration on activities other than what we are doing. As the situation changed from controlled environment of school to less controlled environment of home and work, theory was extended by me for external interferences too.

Once again day before yesterday, it was a day when I could not afford to waste time and the “mind-wander marks” reappeared at my desk and it was september 5th “Teachers day”

I Miss You

It is said Boys grow to become Big Boys. This blog is dedicated to one author who brought me from boys gang to big boys in reading.

For avid readers the genre of book one reads marks that period of life. Life started with color nursery story books, then to Champak, Chaca Choudhari and Tinkle (Courtesy my fathers Air force job which kept me away form kerala, Balarama and poompata took a late entry into my life). This was the kids section. Then came the days of secret seven, famous five and hardy boys.

But one author who brought me to the Big Boys gang in reading was sidney sheldon. He caught me with his book “Master of the Game” (but Jamie McGregor and not kate was my favorite in it…). Strong protagonist and equally competent adversaries, fast pace, good, simple narration, sense of direction and enough of Masala ( :-) :-) has any of his book ever missed it..!!!). This was the beginning of my tryst with all different categories of books from history, to science fiction. As life passes by I may still wander about trying more flavours (Bhagavath geetha, and Ramaya after sometime... ;-) ). But still I can never get a Sidney Sheldon to pass by me unread. He has definitely made an indispensable position in my “I READ list”.

As the golden era of his came to an end on 30 January (Author Sidney Sheldon dead), it has left a huge gap in my favourite list.