The day the music died

I kept dreading the little gesture that shouts out to me ‘You have overstayed’, and I think I got it. Here’s a post to commemorate my expiry date. I want to compose prose that captures all and reveals nothing. As I get over moaning and self-pitying and puncturing the voodoo doll with all the needles it can take, I realise that these few weeks will still remain the summer (the phirang’s metaphor for a good time, not the scorching Indian season). The memories are a solace while I grapple with a workload of a million questions per minute; 'Was I wronged by a higher truth, screwed by the sabziwalla or dragged by destiny?'. How can I be SO glad to be alone this moment but hate it the very next? I realise the futility of finding answers for these no-gooders, I know I'll be left with nothing but the sweet taste of the supreme compliment. My second favourite was 'I love the way you manually defog the windows'. Other worthy contenders for that spot were 'You are dumb', 'You are a phoney bastard' and 'Rip van Uncle'.

Background score for the moment – Thank You by Alanis Morisette

23rd

I was tagged by L*J (with the right fonts you can get a cool symmetry with thy blog-name) to do this

Delve into my blog archive
Find your 23rd post (or closest to)
Find the fifth sentence (or closest to)
Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions
Tag five people to do the same

Here goes:
"He puts his GRE vocabulary to active use. As a result you're likely to catch him using for instance,the word 'obviate' in informal conversations, and he is more likely to 'opine' than to just say!"

Jax and traaks, take the batons.

Boat

Hans is the self proclaimed master of oriental names. His claim to fame is that he can remember the names of all the members of some half dozen Japanese heavy metal bands. There is a story that he brought tears to the eyes of one of the band members when he recited all their names. I had to believe him when he pronounced correctly the 'Na' sound in Kannada (as in gaNesha). Even he had trouble pronouncing the name of my new Thai colleague, without getting his tongue into a double reef knot. I remembered that he had introduced himself with a most disarming smile "Hi I am Jabberwocky Ectoplasm Thingamajig***,” (What the…) ” but you can call me Boat" (Phew).
Boat; the most fidgety guy I have met. He is technically brilliant for his age, but to converse with him can be exasperating. For every word he utters, he shrugs his shoulder once, winks a couple of times, and moves his hand around in the most unpredictable ways. And in between words too his mouth is constantly moving; it’s like watching a badly dubbed Hong Kong movie. And to compound the problem, he is yet to master some very important consonants. The other day he told me "Lion is a bad man". Only 10 minutes, and a lot of clues later, I realised he was talking about Ryan. He is also the single biggest reason for many of our meetings getting delayed. This is how he told us that the system crashed on the fourth day (For reasons of brevity, the pauses and the fidgeting have been edited);
" first day....'tsok"
" second day ...'tsok"
" third day .... 'tsok"
"But....." longer pause, while he twitched all the muscles he could control, and the mood on his face changed from glad to sadness."...fourth day..." Oh the tension was killing us. "Not ok" !!!!!




*** Name changed to preserve anonymity. Real name available on request; well, as soon as the author learns it himself.

When in Rome, do the Romans

I’ve been a month here and I'm feeling at home now.
- I no longer stare at the orthodox Jews on Belgielei and wonder 'They still live like this???'.
- I sleep in the train without the fear of missing my station.
- The Bangladeshi surfing centre guy flashes me a big smile every time I walk past his shop. (Although the Tamilian lady next door starts scanning the ground when she senses my presence).
- I can differentiate between Dutch, German and French. I can speak a few sentences in Flemish too.
- I can strategically time to millisecond accuracy my visits to my desi friends here so that I get invited for meals.
- The Gujju guy at the night shop spits out his paan to talk to me. I find that very flattering.
- My biological clock seems to be already in tune with the seasons here. At least my scalp seems to be responding to the mysterious stimuli of the fall season, evident from post-shower analyses of the bathroom sieve.
- I like waffles.
- But I realised I was really blending in; when I realised I was subconsciously doing the 'Belgian pout'. A couple of weeks ago Fran asked me what I think is the most peculiar thing I noticed in Belgium. At that time I had no answer but if she asks me again I have to say it is the Belgian Pout. It’s the Belgian equivalent of the famous Ambiguous Indian Head Shake. This is how you do it; you purse your lips to form the smallest circle possible, lift your eyebrows, nod your head a couple of times and optionally let out an unsure 'yeah' (of course, it wont sound like a 'yeah' because you've rounded your lips!!). When done correctly it literally translates to 'I don’t see why not!’.

Prog-nose

It was the International Progressive Rock Festival at Antwerp!

International?
yeah right! The only thing international about it was that there was an indian guy in the audience.

Progressive?
When we arrived there the show had begun and an amateur band was playing. There was nothing progressive about the hairy guy grunting and growling into the microphone. If anything, he had regressed a couple of rungs down the evolutionary ladder.

Festival?
A little too pompous a word to describe an event that had an audience of 150 people, I thought!

The first couple of bands that played were the typical wannabes. A guitarist so obsessed with growing his hair long, and moving his fingers as fast as he could on the fret board, that he forgot that music is supposed to sound nice. A lyricist who strung together profound sounding random phrases and a singer who was throating those words like he had a grudge against everybody in the world. After we had suffered the first couple of bands,though, things looked up. There was some really good music played. And the last band Riverside actually were good enough to do a fake exit!

The highlight of the evening, though, has to be meeting Christoph. Now I know both the King Crimson fans in the world. Beat that!

My last moult

Atlast I flew out of my nest. A little late, at 27 years, but it finally happened. I was going to taste freedom, expand my horizons and seek my fortunes as a citizen of the world. Now in the middle of the second weekend in MY own house I realised that all the exalted ideas of spreading your wings comes with a lot of fine print; washing, vacuuming, cleaning and cooking; and worse, eating the crap that you cooked too!

Naaaaah its not bad at all. I'm just a few books and an internet connection short of eden... and maybe a couple of friends, and a bicycle, and a pair of dancing eyes, and a few classic rock CDs, and....

Some photos from Antwerp. and my home

AC ducts on the floor?

We walked into the old dilapidated building that looked like a hideout for the mafia. Rudi with his shaven head, shades and the suitcase actually looked like a henchman here to fix an underworld deal. The first floor was completely empty. The walls did have some kind of ledge space where there were lots of motionless pigeons. When I strained my eyes I could see that most of them were dead. The others seemed to be in mourning. We had to get to the fourth floor. We reached the lift and there was something scrawled in Flemish. 'Lift is unreliable, take the stairs' Hans translated it for me. The staircase, in its glory days (sometime around the second world war) must have been a fire exit. The second floor was empty too. The third floor, I was told, had been a cigarette factory sometime back and it still reeked of tobacco. The fourth floor door opened to a long passageway with a huge AC duct right on the floor. There were rooms on either side and all of them had their doors ajar to let in the smaller ac ducts. All these little ductlets were blowing air into the rooms and were flaying about like tentacles, you know due to Newtons third law and all. The room that we had to go to was at the end of the passage. There the tentacle was subdued by two cans of water. We had to step over them and get into the place. We had entered the server room of Mobistar, Belgium's second largest mobile operator. I should have believed them when they told me Belgium is a weird place.

Mushy tales

"...one of the most important developments of our times" - New York times
"hahahahhah" - Washington tribune

I picked up the weapon of choice; a triple-blade Gilette mach-3 and stood in front of the mirror for a long long time. Fighting all the voices that kept telling me not to do it. I thought of Gaga; it was a much bigger deal for him-being a sardar- to shave off his hair and beard. What was stopping me? I then rememebered the kid who had laughed when I pecked her on the cheek because the bristles tickled her. That was enough; in six or seven swipes I had shaved off my moustache. Jax was right! It was a liberating feeling. I felt empowered. I had left orthodoxy behind. Felt like I had entered a new world. The man in the mirror hardly looked like a man but I knew this was one small step for a man but a ...I really should stop making a big deal out of these little things. Raskolnikov must have given less thought about chopping off a human being!!!!!

Auf Wiedersehn

It was my last day in the office and BigBoss hosted a special lunch. Lots of people were fascinated that I might have to go to Africa. Almost everyone made me promise to send them snaps, although I got the feeling that their expectations were a little unfair! Me in anything less than the traditional Masai clothes hunting wildebeest in Serengetti is bound to disappoint them! Shrek assured me with a wily twisted grin that my gopikas were in safe hands, his. The best part was when the buck passed around and people had to give their parting thoughts. Snake, Yotka, God ,the boss and even the Sub-woofer, all said some really sweet things about me but the sad part is that I'll remember the words of two guys who matter the least. The joker, in probably the longest sentence he has composed, said "Deepaka? he is also wokay". Now since I'm familiar with joker's legendary lack of communication skills, I'm used to his economy of words, but the 'Also' really intrigued me. I asked him who else he was talking about. In typical fashion he grinned wide but chose not to answer. And Thorn said something that brought me crashing so hard it still hurts; he said "I've not known him for long but I can tell he is a typical mallu". HUH???? How is that a compliment to ANYBODY??????

There's a golden rule about farewells. After an emotional goodbye, the fareweller and the farewellee should to stay out of sight for a while, otherwise it embarasses all parties involved and dilutes the whole experience. I violated this rule! Suddenly people stopped taking me seriously. I realised this when, the day before ACTUALLY leaving, I was there (again!!) at office and Banshee gave me the most casual 'See you tomorrow!'!

But, in the end it wasn't a bad stopover. Had the pleasure of working under the two best bosses I've had, made a few friends, some that I'll really really miss. Not a bad job in a year methinks!

The maul

Gopi is your average homophobic joe. He's never been the same confident male ever since bobbyhead violated his holy zone. You know the holy zone; the imaginary circle drawn with Gopi as the centre and x as the radius, where x is equal to the distance between the ATM and the yellow line that says "Await your turn here". Bobbyhead didn't just stop at that; he took Gopis hands one each in his own, held them for an eternity (about 1.5 seconds), and then tried to do the intertwined-fingers-clasp. Gopi who was shaking and blushing was preoccupied with finding out if anybody saw it. As soon as he recovered his senses, he snapped into action. In one swift move he took back his hands put them into his pockets and ran. We're guessing his interim appraisal is screwed. What's worse, the committee will never take this seriously.

It's too late

I've come far enough from those stormy months to now look back and say "Well!". The important thing is not that I said "Well" but that I can look BACK on it. No longer is the world divided into two halves; one half that atleast heard me out, and the other overwhelmingly bigger half that gave me funny tags to carry. Clarity has returned. I know I'm not guilty of every charge they threw at me. I now know exactly what crimes I'm guilty of and that's a liberating feeling. I no longer sit up at 3 AM to fight the moral dilemmas that a world fascinated by happy endings was throwing at me. And I no longer cringe at the thought of that dreadful one "It's too late". Nope, It wasn't. The handful of people for whom I wasn't just a social correctness crash test dummy, I owe a lot. I know a couple of you are going to read this and this is my Danke. Rasagullas will follow. :-)

Cheers in heaven

To one of the most underrated joys. To falling in love with a song. When listening to it makes you feel like everything else is irrelevant.
This morning I fell in love with the unpretentiousness of Janis Joplin's voice in Bobby McGee.

We must be the homesickest race!

The guy gives me a stare that I can understand. It’s a loaded stare; it is saying “You are Indian, I am Indian. We should socialize.” My response is to bury my head deeper into my laptop, put on a well rehearsed frown and respond with a look that says “There are a billion other Indians. Go find someone else”. The guy looks like he can solve a 4th order quadratic equation mentally, but obviously taking a hint is not one of his strong points. He approaches me and gives me the standard opener “Bangalore?”. Do you think so? Indian guy with a laptop- What are the odds? It’s time to check in and we stand in the queue together. So I begin reconciling with my destiny. I will be stuck with this guy for the rest of the flight discussing how Cisco’s IP strategy completely destroyed ATM technology. I reach the counter and the lady asks me “There’s just one seat left next to the emergency exit. Do you want it?”. I’ll take it ma’am. Emergency exit!!…ah There’s never a bad time for some humour.

Pulsar

I'm sure I'd be violating a few blogging etiquettes if I make fun of another blogger here. Then again, it really doesn't make sense to worry about social propriety when dealing with a guy who thinks all women should be confined to their respective homes. Check this out. It's good fun.

Spending any more words on this nut would be a huge waste of real estate on this site. So I'll stop here. Nevertheless, there are some very important questions that this prick's thoughts threw up. Like: Should he be given the 'Idiot of the year' award? The answer is NO! That award has already been pocketed by his kin in the govt. sponsored culture police force which banned smoking in all movies and TV programmes.

High on football

The serene little pub by the mill in a sleepy little corner of Reading was to change character. The Liverpool fans were going to ensure that. They came dressed in flashy reds and settled down with their drinks. I was there with a bunch of sales executives from my company. I had spent the day watching them sell a lot of crap to our hapless customers. Pictures of sophistication all, till the game began! By the end of the first half, with the scoreline reading 3-0 in favour of AC Milan, everybody had turned rowdy. There was a guy shouting into the television set "Get back to defence you b******”. Something must have told him that the message didn’t get across, so he tapped the TV on the side a couple of times. Yeah mate, That helped. NOW you got heard.
At half time, I could feel the taut air around me. These guys were really restless. Ten minutes into the second half, oh how the mood had changed. The score was 3-3. The guy next to the TV was now cuddling it, with the look on his face that told me that he was solely responsible for the incredible turnaround. Liverpool eventually won on penalties. Often I think about the days when I used to be a football fanatic, and I wonder if I was insane back then. But today everything made sense.

Aspirations

I’m ducking and hiding, because my HR Bobby-head is on the prowl. He wants me to fill up the ‘Aspirations’ form and I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t have any aspirations. Come to think of it I’ve never had any. Of course I did swear by the second-hand ambitions that I picked up from the standard school-boy prescriptions; ‘I want to be a pilot’ , ‘I want to be 6-feet tall’,etc, but never really went beyond that. The only exception to that was a little jihad I picked up for myself in school, to eliminate all ENT specialists of this world. As far as I was concerned, they were the only pests in the world, and I spent considerably amounts of time studying them and plotting their downfall; my own ENTomology if you will.

I’ll have to take you back in time. In school my nose used to act funny and Mom decided to do something about it. We visited the ENT specialist. She contorted my nostrils and veered in. If I thought that was uncomfortable nothing could have prepared me for what came next. She told me that I had an affliction that affected my mental and physical growth. I reacted like any self-respecting teenager, with a red face and complete silence. Before I knew what hit me, she said ‘It probably already has. Look at the blank look on his face.’ My face must have belied the furious pace at which my brain was working to draft a shortlist of dirty names I could call her, because she was now convinced with her hypothesis. She now pushed it in; she asked ‘How does he do in school?’. I knew for all she cared, it was just a rhetorical question. The-answer-my-friend-is blowin-in-the-wind types! My mom took the slight to heart and gave the doctor a piece of her mind. A couple of weeks after this incident, in a show of incredible insensitivity, my father chose to consult the same doctor for a problem he had been having with his ears. He learnt that the doctor had flown away to the UK. My crusade ended right there. Before I could teach her all the lessons I was planning to teach her. Before I could even figure out what hurt my mental development more, my adenoids or the doctor who I thought will cure me.

Meanwhile, I’m working hard on coming up with something phony to satisfy Mr Bobby-head.

I was going to write a poem

I was going to write a poem. I was going to write about a yacht that was moored too long at the quay. I was going to write about the limpets and the barnacles and the stagnation; about the apprehension of leaving the bay; about the fear of even the placid ocean let alone the tempest; about the parting memories of an inscrutable smile and a glintless eye. But…

The week

It’s been a crazy week. Program managers breathing their dirty blocks of bad breath down my neck and my mind whirring at 52x with thoughts which, for several reasons, I can’t publish here.

I’ll remember this week as the one in which I made my stage debut as a guitarist. I felt like Jimi Hendrix (incidentally he was dead by the time he was my age), especially this one time when I got too close to the microphone, the feedback noise sounded just like a riff from ‘Star Spangled banner’. The critics are still debating whether that fitted into ‘Neele Neele Ambar’ or not. Funnily, that is one of the few things that I remember about our performance. The three songs we played passed like a flash and the memory is just a blur. I faintly remember that we mysteriously hit some harmony while playing ‘Jaane Jaan’ and I didn’t want it to stop at all.

And German class is definitely as much fun as I imagined it to be.

Catch up

An internal survey among the members of the UVCE tronics gang revealed that there are more consumers of the water from the river Thames than of any other water body in the world. No, that was a lie, but my point here is that the UVCE tronix diaspora is really spreading its wings and making it's presence felt on all the continents of the world, save 4 or 5. And the couple of us who are stuck in Bangalore find that exclusivity is thrust upon us. *WE* are suddenly the ones in the exotic place.

Growing up in the Indian middle class, I'm hardwired to stay in the herd. My first urge is to play catch up. The idea is to ensure that your resume of life looks as identical to your peers' as possible. Right now, I realise, mine looks too koopamandookish. I watch all these guys fly off to distant places and I begin to question my own inadequacies. I want to do all the cool things that everybody else is doing. I want to be able to start sentences with the words "When I was in the bay area...". But most of all, I want to dirty the waters of the proverbial Thames.

Zip it

Last week Tee turned into a skin head. And yesterday he wore a T-shirt that had the words 'Nazi Punk'. (Avinash also pointed out that he sat on the RIGHT wing of our building, but we'll ignore that suggestion for its contrivedness.) This was definitely cause for concern. Since I had recruited this chap I felt a moral responsibility to straighten out things. I prepared a sermon that began with the images of Treblinka and ended with a celebration of racial equality and tolerance. I confronted Tee at the pantry and pointed one finger at his bald head and the other at his shirt and asked "What's the meaning of this?". He said he had been to Tirupathi last weekend. And the Swastika was a holy hindu symbol he said. Fair enough but what the hell are the words 'Nazi Punk' supposed to mean, I asked. "adha theriyaadh saar" he said. My speech (like so many of mine before this) died a premature death.

When the laugh track went awry

The project manager foresaw bad times for our project and was bracing us for fire-fighting times ahead. Amidst all the frowning faces Kandwal was convulsed with laughter. The guy laughs for just about anything. There was another time when there was a theft in his house, and he was narrating us the story, and he was laughing like a whole pack of hyenas. I must admit it’s uplifting sometimes to have someone see the lighter side of things, but for the most part I usually feel sorry, and sometimes scared, for him. We always wondered if there was ever a cure to his laughing sickness. The answer came at Gaga’s party. Kandwal chose to shine the spotlight on himself by being the only person not to drink. JP, who had downed gallons of alcohol by now, took offense to this and began a weird interrogation. One thing led to another and …
JP: …it’s like an orgasm. Have you had an orgasm?
Kandwal: What do you mean?
JP: Oh don’t act coy! You’re 26.
Kandwal: (snigger)
JP : Don’t you jerk off?
Kandwal : (soliloquoy – Oh god of teleportation, take me away from here. And do it real quick.)
JP : Come’on I’m married and I still jerk off.
Kandwal : (pissed with the gods for not taking timely action)

JP stayed a little longer to ensure that the conversation got as uncomfortable as it possibly could. Even after he left, Kandwal’s face was flushed like he just saw Frankenstein's monster, and for a change we were on the floor laughing our guts out.

The Road Trip

I'll start this off thanking Ashtle for letting us use her car for the weekend's amazing road trip.

Bandipur, the choice of place, was purely incidental. The drive was definitely fun. Pacchi was the DJ, and in a display of incredible professionalism, he even got his own equipment! Jax was the target of a lot of ribbing about the unfortunately skewed polarity of his million-weber magnetism. As for me, I was churning out pedantic fundaes about birds. My gyaan is limited only to the feathered kind, so Pacchi wasn’t interested, but Jax, my ever-keen-protégé can now identify nearly THREE species of birds. We also played what has become the official game when the three of us meet. I don’t know what it’s called, so I’ll just call it Nonsense-building; it always seems to involve names of some well known human organs, some lingerie terminology, and for some bizarre reason, Shekar Suman. We stopped after the game took a sudden ugly turn.

After reaching our destination, the only "tourist" thing that we did there was to go on a 40-minute safari that we unanimously hated. The unexpected rain was the only positive. We lodged in a place called ‘Mountainia’. It had a brilliant view of the Nilgiris and gave us the illusion of being far away from civilization. Just perfect!. Dinner was at a place that was, judging by the quantities of each of the dishes they served us, expecting King King for supper. A combined intake of 240ml of Old Monk and 30 ml of Romanov definitely opened us all up to the dinner-table conversations. Even Pacchi, who rigorously follows the European standards of non-disclosure, was extremely candid. After this trip we now know nearly as much about his love life as we know about the shroud of Turin. There are still a couple of other mysteries, though, that still remain.
1. How come road trips with these two weirdos (One wears a woollen cap in April, the other likes to hang upside down from trees) always turn out so great?
2. Why are there so many Mynas on the road?


Remote Control Snap
Other snaps

Good Friday

I begin most of my weekends resolving to make every minute count. After all, like the motivation gurus tell me, this is the first day of the rest of my life. I had a long weekend in front of me and a whole bunch of ideas on how to spend it.

A couple of years ago, an India-Pakistan cricket match would have been a great reason to stay home all day. Who am I kidding, I could have stayed home to watch a kabbaddi match between Channagiri and Agumbe districts. I can’t tell when the change happened but the sports channels woo me no more.

I tried to interest myself in the book I’m reading just now, ‘The Story of San Michele’. Its a nice book, except when the author takes you into a Lord-Of-The-Rings kind of world infested with goblins and elves, and where the moon is a ghost. A world where no physical laws exist, and so the author can sell any crap. And this is an Autobiography for god’s sake. Even his real life experiences have characters that cheese me off. There is a bear for instance which attacks men but reserves it’s best behaviour for women. I’m guessing its scientific name is Ursus Chivalrous!

I thought of picking up the guitar, but the eco-friendly guy that I am, I didn’t have the heart to displace all those spiders that had built those beautiful cobwebs inside the box and between the strings. There were no arthropods in the harmonica so I played that for a while. As it happens with most things I try, my expectations from myself far exceed my talents, so I put the harmonica away in frustration.

As it turned out I just lay in front of the TV all day without venturing more than a couple of meters from where I woke up this morning. I don’t recollect watching any programmes, I just changed channels several million times. It was a day spent in completely shameful lethargy. I must be getting old, because I really liked it!

Rapture

The kestrel played with the wind. It rose hundreds of feet and swooped down hundreds, but during the half hour that I watched it not once did it flap its wings. Did it feel proud about its adroitness? Did it have Jonathan Livingstone's pretensions? Did it feel special about being able to survey the rain forests from so high above? Well, even without extending human traits to it, watching it ride the drafts, and hearing it's shrieks scattered in the wind, was trance-inducing. I remembered that scene from American Beauty in which the drug-peddling kid shoots the video of a feather dancing in the wind. I remembered the words too 'Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world that I feel I can't take it anymore'.

My Cousin Vicky

Vicky got married last week. And for a couple of weeks before that, my family had been in a frenzied shopping marathon. "Vicky gets married but once" my mom tried to justify. Poor argument! No, I don't doubt Vicky's fidelity, but it's stupid, I explained to her, to go ransacking malls everytime a cousin of mine gets married. It's like declaring a public holiday for every chinese guy who dies; because, thanks to virile, much-married granddads and their undying faith in the undivided hindu family, I have enough cousins to populate a medium sized Indian town. Among family trees mine is a sequioa!

As for me, I decide to exercise thrift. And I didn't feel out of place in my 114Rs Kurta, because the wedding was as unassuming as my costume. No priests, no shlokas, no rites! It shocked a few elders but it turned out to be a huge hit overall.

The second chapter, the reception party, was in Mumbai. It was great fun. After the party, we decided to hit the dance floors of Mumbai (ah! I always wanted to sound like a true-blue socialite!). My spartan dressing sense got me embarassed this time. We were thrown out of the first place that we went to because I was wearing "open footwear". I wanted to stand my ground and and deliver that classic line that I once heard from Nitesh, "These are not chappals, they're floaters", but the bouncer measured a couple of heads taller than me and talked like he had more testosterone than blood flowing in his plumbing. Besides, I wasn't getting too much support from my buddies, most of them had already disowned me. We eventually got into another place that tolerated the likes of me. There I ran out of my wide array of dance steps by the middle of the first song. I laboured through the rest of the song using an impromptu chimp-with-cerebral-palsy style of dancing. But very soon I got bored. I found myself a nice corner to sip my beer and watch the others make fools of themselves.

The next day was for sight-seeing, vagabonding and bowling. Check out this snap of the sunset at Juhu.

Sunset at Juhu
After this we visited the chaat places and indulged in the most vulgar spree of binge-eating ever! It was my favourite part of the trip :-)

It's funny...

...that every person I meet these days claims to have been a 'back-bencher' in college.

Almost everyone had a lecturer who said "Please open the windows and let the atmosphere/airforce/environment in" in class.

And every mother has a kid who stands first in class.

And every software engineer likes to trek.

Appraisal time

It's time for that annual ritual called appraisal, a time when the boss and I get together for a heart-to-heart talk and use words like 'Initiative' and 'Pro-activeness'. It usually happens in four stages.

1.Positive feedback: This is when the boss displays how concise he can be. And on the rare occasion when he decides to be liberal with his praise, you end up understanding not a single word. This time I got shot with this one "Your intellectual horsepower is commendable".

2.Negative feedback: I don't know if this is an example of a-few-seconds-on-the-stove-seem-like-an-hour theory that that Einstein guy proposed, but this part seems very very long drawn. This is also when the boss puts on a wooden face to hide all the glee he's experiencing. But atleast the language is lucid ("You are a piece of stinking horse-shit")

3.Task for next year: They call it fancy names like 'Key result areas' and 'Crucial undertakings' but they all mean the same. They are a bunch of tasks carefully worded such that they bear no resemblance to what you actually do for the rest of the year. The idea is to make next year's negative feedback session longer than this year's.

4.360 degree feedback: This is when the boss demonstrates his faith in democracy. He lets YOU give HIM feedback. Before you can start you have to allow him a few seconds to adjust his posture so that his body language screams out 'I'm not interested!'. But this year, I was determined to pull one back. So after he folded his hands, leaned back and half-closed his eyes, I told him 'You don't do enough to improve team-dynamics'. He's still trying to work that one out!

Insomnia

I toss and turn for a really long time. The sheets are too warm, and it's too cold without them. I don't want to see the time, because that always increases the anxiety. I try to distract myself from the repetitive thought patterns, but it's not easy. Try not to think of a mango, you'll know what I mean. After I have exhausted myself, I always turn my attention to the world, and I can see only the bad things about it. Capitalism, Martha Stewart, Chinese medicine, Al-Qaeda, SUVs, reality shows, global warming, Bihar, "Thank you Bangalore", dams, Mills and Boon, plastic surgery, plastic, greeting card verses... And I get drawn into a species-level masochism. I want everything to start afresh. I wish for an apocalypse, a great flood, an ice-age that will freeze the pee in people's bladders. I swear never to drink coffee again.

Profiling my little American nieces

Medha: The original style icon. She is credited with popularising the sign-off line 'See you later, have fun' among the gang. Not all of her words are that sweet though. She once told me 'You're so stupid you should die'. She was five!

Sadhika: Her most important contribution is to the field of rhetoric. Her revolutionary use of the word 'because' in sentences consisting only of the word 'because' was a mind blowing innovation! You ask her a question, say 'Why did you do that?' and the reply comes 'because.'. Yes, just that one word followed by the full stop. Terse, enigmatic and emphatically final.

Esha: She landed here only yesterday, and I haven't gotten to know her yet. She is definitely not old enough to coin catch-phrases. At present her language has a very limited consonant-set of guttural noises. But she is one cute kid!

Doomed resolutions

"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws"
"There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon" - Oscar Wilde

I meet this guy who irritates the hell out of me for the following silly reasons
* He plays table tennis like he is a gladiator avenging his father's death
* He puts his GRE vocabulary to active use. As a result you're likely to catch him using for instance,the word 'obviate' in informal conversations, and he is more likely to 'opine' than to just say!
* He's under an illusion that he is a mimic artist. Pretending to like his performances builds up a lot of stress.
* He has a blog that is dedicated to Kerberos authentication protocol.
* Some of his most intellectually stimulating moments happened when he was reading 'Who moved my cheese?'

As I dissect my reaction to this bloke, I realise I've turned into a crusty bundle of preconceptions and prejudices and unreasonable expectations from the people around me. My jerk-quotient is at a lifetime high. Which brings me to my resolution.I took up a difficult resolution this year, an extremely phony one. To make new friends. It's turning out to be more impossible than I imagined.

"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account". Guess who said that? No Oscars for any wilde guesses that happen to be right. (And the puns are rotten too!)