An Ideal Day In Office !!

The last one week has been a dream come true. The AllgoRhythm activities were kick-started. It is not certainly the toughest thing I have got thro' in my life. But I really liked the concept of conducting interviews before getting people into this club. It definitely reflects on the quality of people who made it through (Me, mE, ME...) By the way, coming back to my awesome week, I was out of my cubicle for most part of the week under the AllGoRhythm banner organizing a treasure hunt for the entire vertical. Reminds me of my good old college days. In college it was some dry canals or benches where we used to have those short notice meetings, and here it is either in some board / conference room [ corporatieeesshhh ] and in the worst case, Canteen bhi chalega. Except that there are no buggin boring profs, who were so desperate to see me in their classes. No attendance proxy and On duty issues as well.

But looking back at it, I feel that, it was the best part of bunking classes. You always need some kinda challenge if you want to get a sense of achievement. However here, my manager is more than happy to let myself involve in such club activities. May be he thinks that me doing such stuffs in office is much better than me writing some amazing codes that nobody could comprehend why it fails every single time. Somehow he wants the project to survive. And I'm trying my level best to make him realize his dreams with a little bit of challenge by working with those codes at times. Just being a true team guy dudes!!

Today is very auspicious. I was praying that my onsite guy shouldn't have sent a response to my queries so that I need not proceed with my task. I opened my outlook. Tada!! There were 57 unread messages and I quickly glanced for that guy's mail.. No mails from him. I checked for other official mails and looked like nobody was interested in me. Adding on to this, today the Mainframe link was down and techie guys couldn't fix it. I quickly checked my internet connection and surprisingly it was working perfectly fine. No wonder everybody in my project was having a blast. So today I became someone who really wanted to work in the office but sadly and unfortunately the link was down. What could this poor guy do ;)? AllGoRhythm, Here I come !!

We were quickly done with our meeting and we dispersed to go ahead with our tasks. We got dressed up like Pirates [ The theme of the event was Pirates of the Caribbean ] , converted a store room into a pirate den [ Isla de Muerta, I had to copy - paste this from one of the mails ] lit only with candles, covered the room with chains, ropes and not to forget the Caribbean Rum [ Read as Coca Cola ]. We were all christened with special names[ I was called as Bloodiieee, I liked The Prince Of Dead Wives thou' ]. Now here comes the worst part. Facial Paints!! We painted ours and all the participants' faces with water paints just to give them the feel of real pirates. It was very embarrassing earlier when only the organizers were painted. But when it became more of being a roman in Rome, the real fun started. I personally liked the spirit shown by the Tech support guys. They really rocked. [ Am I saying all this? These were the same guys who caught me with Movies in my PC ;) ]

The chaos began after the painting session. People running and screaming at every possible direction. But my job was simple. Just kept clicking stills after stills. Was really happy to find out that I was not the only dumb looking guy on the floor. Hey by the way roomie, your mush idea was mine. This is the only possible way where you could have something black underneath your nostrils ;) !!! You looked more like a Kerala Smuggler than a Pirate from the Caribbean da !!

The show got over finally and there was only one eventual winner. But thatz fine. Ultimately the whole floor was set on fire. Nobody worked from 2 to 4. They were just wondering what these ugly looking badly painted guys were upto !!

Huh, why can't all the days be like this man? Mainframe link down, Internet working, some crazy show on the floor ? Man, I'm really missing my college days now. Chalo, I pity my CEO. Coz if this continues, I'll end up missing his as well !! ;) !! It will be very tuff to find another dumber to give me a job !!


Cheers,
Prad ( Datz me in Pic, Find me if u can ;) !! )

Lost In Time, Lost In Change ??

It has been a common saying that everything is this world changes. The only thing consistent in this world is the change. But does it all really mean that everything changes ? Hmm.. let me think !!

The person whom I was a year back is not the same person who I am now. My life style has changed completely. I have come across a lot of new people in my life. I have never ever felt so independent before. The lessons that I have learnt in the past one year have been more valuable than tons and tons of gold. My friends have changed. My city has changed. My house-maid has been changed more than once. Isn't there anything that doesn't change in our lives ?

I sat at the porch, gazing at the evening sun. The soft guitar solo of Mark Knopfler's Telegraph Road blended beautifully with the evening breeze. Suddenly I heard Waltz of the flower, my special mobile ring-tone for my family.I looked at the display screen and saw that it was my mom. I picked up the call and I heard her ever cheerful voice. We spoke for sometime about so many things that were happening at my side and her side. While on the phone, I didn't realize that it was almost dark and the CD that was being played in my system has reached the tenth track.

May be I don't feel such an excitement all the time I speak to my Mom, but it was very special on that day. I remembered one of the sentences that she spoke to me. "Kutta, You don't have to tell me that you are sad whenever you are sad. I can feel it here". How true it is !! I got the answer for the question. There is definitely one thing that will never change - Mother's Love.

May be I should stop with this. There are few things in this world which are best when unspoken.

Cheers,

Pradeep

The Demon inside Me

Love is something that can enter into anyone’s heart as easy as a cool breeze enters into a beautiful garden. But expressing it to the concerned person is where the real battle lies. The psychic torment that a person goes thro’ when he really cannot express his love can be compared to any of the worst tortures in the world. If love is something that is very natural and common (I hope everyone agrees), then why do we have to suffer so much?

This has been the problem for so many people, across so many nations, for so many years. The obituary of our love will be written even before it is born. There are so many stories about break-ups. But I’m more than sure that there will be many more stories about Love, untold.

As far as guys are concerned, I believe most of us do not have the guts to express directly what we feel for a girl, mainly because we are bad in accepting defeats. The question “What happens if she doesn’t feel anything of that sort towards me and rejects my proposal” keeps ringing in our ears. The answers to this question are not very pleasant. While most of us are worried about losing an existing relationship [Most of the time, it will be under the banner of “Friendship”], there are cases when we feel attracted towards a girl, we don’t even have the courage to start a conversation with that girl. While the former reason is pretty common, the latter one is pre-dominant among persons having some high levels of ego [Prefer calling it self-respect]. The ego-clouded person tends to think that the girl will consider him low if he speaks to her as an act of pre-emption. This scenario is very dangerous as it leads everyone to think that there is some kind of an animosity. This may lead both of them to hate each other after sometime since most of the expectations are prone to go unfulfilled. There is not much scope for this case unless the girl takes an initiative to speak to the guy [May have sounded like a joke of the century].

I believe, most of the times, we are more worried about how bad our friends will tease if they come to know about the rejection than what the girl herself thinks about us. Whether we accept it or not, we are of course concerned about our image as well. Nobody wants to feel low or treated low in front of anyone. This is also a reason why guys don’t come forward in expressing their love.

As a conclusion to this, I wouldn’t say that guys are total losers. But some part of this trauma lies at the girls’ side as well. It all depends on how matured the girl is and how well she rejects a proposal without making a fuss about it. [I’m not concerned about Success stories here]. Some of them really wish their friends know that guys are drooling behind them. The number of proposals received is taken as a measure of how beautiful she is. Just like most of the guys want to be known for their smartness, most of the girls want to be known for their beauty. But unfortunately the guy who proposes to her becomes the bait.

I would suggest that the girl understands that a guy who has proposed to her has won over a lot of demons inside him and has finally taken the bravest decision of his life. But still at that moment, he is in the most fragile and vulnerable state. While rejection in itself is a great pain, doing it in an awful fussy way just adds on to the woe. At the same time, the guys should also understand that it’s not an easy thing for a girl as well.

I read in a book about two kinds of people as far as passion is concerned. The first type suppresses the passion, analyzes it by taking all the pros and cons of it into picture and tries not to fail by not trying to succeed. But they convince themselves that they have acted in the most intelligible way and have won over their fate.

The second type where as, tries not to suppress the passion and allows them to be taken over by the spur of the moment. They are not worried about the consequences as they consider them as a part of their path. If their decision works out, then they will attribute it to everyone involved, directly or indirectly, in it and when it doesn’t, they blame it on themselves for taken such a decision. But they still do not stop themselves from being taken over by their passion again.

In reality, while the first type of people will have a safe and secured life, the second one’s life will be more adventurous. I believe, as far as love is concerned, being in the second type helps a lot. [By the way, don’t try to be very smart by bringing in a Rang De Basanthi touch to it] I agree that there is a lot of important things at stake if we decide to express our love, but I believe that there are lot more important things at stake if we just decide to stay dumb-folded. If the love we have is genuine, then I believe that it is best if we let ourselves be taken over by the passion.

Relax and Enjoy

Cheers,
Prad

One Night @ The Call Center

If I have to describe my experience with this book in a single line, I would say,
ONE WEEKEND WASTED!!

May be that was too critical a comment about this book, but when it comes to writing (any art, for that matter), I can tolerate anything but plagiarism. It just pisses me off. Especially when we Indians just do some cheap copies of some Caucasian’s work.

If philosophy was the least expected twist from Chetan Bagat, so is the climax of his second book. I just can't stop myself from comparing it with the climax of The Life Of Pi. The whole thing about having an unrealistic story being told defying every natural possibility, and later on the story-teller gives a second legitimate version of the same story in order to increase the credibility of the story to the listener, was all written earlier itself. How much I enjoyed reading The Life Of Pi, I regret twice as much for reading this second book from Mr. IIM fart.

You may tell that the whole climax thing was a mere coincidence, but this book has character plagiarism as well. Esha’s character is just a photocopy of Paulo Coelho’s brainchild Maria, the prostitute girl in Eleven Minutes. It really hit me hard with a blow when I saw that one of the sentences is just a copy paste from that book. It’s when Esha says that, she had a choice, but she slept with some guy so that she can get a break into the modeling world. It is just the same dialogue said by Maria in Eleven Minutes.

Plus, the whole thing about having sex in confined places was all forced into the story just to add a Chetan Bagat touch to it. May be he thinks that he can become a sell out author, by including some soft porn stuff in all his books.

I thought that the counter-attacks by Vroom and Shyam against their boss were the most childish acts anybody could think off in the corporate world. For the benefit of someone who has not read the book – Vroom sends an e-mail from Bakshi’s (The Boss) comp to Esha calling her to sleep with him if he had to consider not firing her. He then asks everyone in the call center to call their American customers up under the banner of their client and spread a virus attack rumour. This was all done to increase the call rate in their center. Man, please do let me know which client is as dumb as the ones mentioned in the book. I would rather quit my job right away. Also if a boss is calling someone to bed, will he be doing it using Microsoft Outlook? Knowing very well that it’s a hard copy proof and that he can be blackmailed later on.
Doesn’t anyone use Desktop Lock before leaving the place? Don’t tell me that it happens only in my company and elsewhere it is so easy for any Tom, Dick and Harry to access the boss’ computer at his will. I have just two words for this . BULL SHIT !!!



The only consolation I can take from this is that I did not buy this book. Just borrowed it for a couple of days to read, from my friend in Pune. I could have rather used the money notes as a tissue paper rather than buying such shit novels.

I apologize for the profanity of this article.

Anyways,

Cheers,
Prad

I'm Tagged

I have been tagged by my roomie.. Anoop..

Four jobs I have had :

I'm still surprised how I made it into this job on the first place !! Four Jobs is a good joke !! My Mom will be bawling if she comes to know about this !!

Four movies I would watch over and over again:

I'm not really a movie Buff. But there are quite a few movies that I have enjoyed to the max.

1. Rang De Basanthi - The last one which I have seen, Awesome Movie..
2. Thillu Mullu - I still believe that this is the best movie from RajiniKanth
3. Mr. Bean - The Movie - Makes me forget everything else happening around - Any resemblence seen between me and dat guy is purely coincidental.. !! One of my Nick Names in college is Mr. Bean !! FYI ;)
4. Gladiator - Russel Crowe at his best.


Four places I have lived:

I suppose it would span across four states..

1. Coimbatore - My Place of birth
2. Mysore - My mom's native - The best place I have ever seen !!
3. Palakkad - My dad's native
4. Pune - Rocking City - Having some of the best days of my life here..

Four TV shows I love to watch:

Apart from sports, I have spent major part of my life watching Cartoons in TV.

1. Mr. Bean Show in POGO - Still remains my all time favourite
2. F.R.I.E.N.D.S - Very close to my heart, reminds me of my club - mates in college.
3. Tom N Jerry - I have laff'd my head over heals to glory so many times, Actually My dad's favourite show !! So started watching it as a kid sitting along with him and fell in love with it.
4. WWF oops.. its WWE now.. - John Cena Rocks !!! So does Trish Stratus - Oh WHat a Babe !!

Since I can write only four, I couldn't mention about Full House .. Itz such a cute Show, Have watched countless re-runs of it.

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. Mangalore - My Aunt's native.. , Had been to Hemambika Temple.
2. Bangalore - Both as a kid and a grown up. I loved Malleshwaram and Lal Bagh as a kid, and I love MG Road and Lal Bagh( Now for a different reason thou' ;) ) as a grown up.
3. Mysore - Later on in my life, Mysore became only a vacation spot rather than a domicile for me. Really miss those Hassan Buses, Chamundeshwari Temple, Mysore Maharaja Palace, Mysore Dusherra and those 27 hair pin bends in the ghat section.
4. Mathur Agraharam - My native village in Palakkad, the place where I learnt how to read malayalam, how to swim, and how to celebrate festivals to the fullest..Still remember the Rama Navamis and Shastha Preethiz which I have blasted there..


Four of my favourite foods:

1. Off-Late, I have got addicted to anything and everything in Chicken.. Chicken Lollypop is still my favourite
2. Pav Bhaji at Iyer n Co. in Coimbatore - the best I have ever had
3. Dahi Puri from Shiv Bhel, Pune... God knows what Magic she does to make such delicious dahi puris.
4. Ofcourse, My mom's Palak Rice and Molaghutal ( Not sure which language it is, should be either of kannada, malayalam or tamil ). Itz the primary reason why I look as fat as my Dad in my company Id Card.

Four places I'd rather be now:

1. St.Petersberg and Moscow - Heard that culturally and architecturally, these two cities are two extremes in Russia. Would love to check them out myself.

2. Monaco - Do I need to say why ? Awesome place, Preferrably, see a F1 Grand Prix.

3. Manchester - Dying to check out MANU play at Old Trafford

4. Vienna - Got interested in checking out that place after reading Mein Kampf..


Four sites I visit daily:

1. Fantasy Premier League - Can't live without Football
2. ESPN STAR - Can't live without sports news either
3. Google - General Searches
4. Off-late - Blogger.com..

Four bloggers I am tagging:

Deepa
Smyta
Balaji
Aruna

Happy Blogging,

Cheers,
Prad