Jobless at job!

Some time back, Rat wrote a piece on few things to do when one sits jobless. But by jobless she meant having no job, by will or by force! In that case, there is no problem. There is nobody to boss you around and you have all the time in the world. You can do anything. But what if you have a job but are jobless at it. So many constraints are thrown in. You have a boss to whom you have to report to. You must at least act as if you are doing something. You have to do that acting inside a four walled office. You don't have a choice of timing. For instance, I have to be jobless from 9:30 to 6:30, no matter what! So, in order to help my fellow comrades who find themselves in more or less the same state, I decided to compile a list of things one could do (read as things I do) when one is jobless at job. Attention people who are passing out of college and joining some IT company this year, start taking notes :P

• Browse the internet. Yup, there lies a huge storehouse of information, both useful and useless, that is enough to keep you engaged for several lifetimes. But try to find out useless information. Its more fun that way :) How to find it? Of course, Google is your God. Warning: Highly addictive and interesting in the beginning but gets boring and dumb sometime later.
• Coffee time. One of the classic excuses to waste time. This works even if you are not jobless. In case you are jobless, make this exercise interesting. Make it a point to have every variety in your coffee machine once a day. When you are in office, coffee machine is your girl friend, visit her every hour. If you can extend every coffee break to half an hour, abracadabra, half a day is gone!
• Eat slowly. I mean the lunch. Take your time, enjoy your food, come back late. Go to the food court when it is most crowded, therby eliminating your chances of returning soon. Who knows, you might even get to meet that special someone! ;)
• Chat. Chat, chat and chat like a girl. Google is like a Hindu god, it has a family of smaller gods that are equally helpful and the world's favourite is GTalk (may be lord Ganesh :)) Use it to the maximum. Ping people whom you have not pinged in two lifetimes. Bug them until they block you. Comment on everybody's status message. Chat with your relative in the US, chat with the guy in the next cubicle. Chat until your keyboard breaks! Warning: This plays dangerously with other people's patience. Be ready to be beaten up!
• Talk, for free. Don't register your mobile number under 'do not disturb'. Let them call you. Have fun at their expense. Make the conversations as romantic as possible. If a girl calls you, ask her if she will marry you. And the best part is you don't have to worry about losing your callers this way. There are a whole bunch of people giving free credit cards or with new mobile schemes or offering pension plans or some crap for which they will always call you. Have fun :)
• Extracurricular activities. You can always indulge in extracurricular activities like playing games, watching movies etc. They say extracurricular activites lead to overall personality development. Don't ask me how, I have absolutely no clue! Warning: These stunts are performed by highly trained professionals in nonsupervised environments. Do not try these at your office! :P
• Sleep. What? Do you want me to explain how to do it? Come on. This is the by far the most gratifying timepass in the world. The best part is you don't even feel time passing by! Warning: Not required. I know you guys have been doing this from school. You must be experts at this.

This is all I could think of. I have implemented almost all of them to varying degrees of success. The effectiveness of each option is determined by so many localised factors and so I cannot guarantee anything. I would suggest, implement each of them on a pilot basis and go forward based on the pilot test results. Good god, seems I have already become a manager...! And yeah, imagination is the only limit to innovation. So imagine, innovate and don't forget to update it in the comments section. Lets spread the knowledge...

Cheers :)

A grown-up thing!

Here is the plot... I am currently stationed in Gurgaon, doing my summer internships, for a period of two months. I stay with a couple of batchmates. Corporate life is kind of the same. Office starts at 9.30, ends at 6.30 and life has become a lot more monotonous. And with me being the eternal hardworker, I generally reach home before 7 pm. From then on, waiting for the clock to show bedtime can be quite an ordeal. That too given the fact that I am neither committed nor married, killing time is tougher than killing myself! Actually I have put in a lot of effort to become either of those, but to say they have been futile is an understatement. All that cannot be described in a blog. I have to write a novel. Will write it after I actually get married. The novel 'My stepping stones of success' will be released as a commemoration of my success!  :)

Lets get back to the story now. As I was saying, passing time has become really really tough for me and it is being aggravated by the lack of internet. There are a few tools to help me though - the table top and the lap top. The first one is a TV and the second one is a computer. (With quite a number of dirty minds reading my blog, I have to make myself clear ;)) But a continuous dose of either of them for 4 hours is beyond the tolerance level of anyone. So we often take a stroll around our place.

I know what you are thinking. 'You are 24 years old and still going for late night strolls with guys?!?' All I can say is, lipe eej haad. One day one of my roommates said there is a Porsche parked close to the place we stay. We decided to check that out and directed our legs to stroll towards it. We saw it, admired it, dreamt of buying it etc etc. Then we discovered there was a children's park right behind it. Given the fact that only people who are either jobless or have girl friends are up at 11 pm, the park was completely empty.

We decided to relive some of our childhood fantasies and went to the park. Boy oh boy, did we have so much fun? Yeah, we did. Swings, see-saws and slides. They just rock! Swings are stil the same going back and forth, but a lot more fun. Three 23 year olds swinging merrily into the depths of the night is quite a spectacle :D But the slide was a lot more scary. It was not even as high as me. But it gave butterflies in my stomach. It was that friendly old slide. The one I had conquered umpteen number of times when I was a kid. The one in which I disregarded the ladder and went both up and down on the slide. The one which was sooooo high but was scaled by the courageous me! I guess some of the friendly ones turn scary when you neglect them for so long. And not to forget the see-saw. The mere thought of being on it makes me smile. How happily did we go up and down without realising that was what life is all about! But there were only three of us. So one of us had to do see-sawing that Zoozoo style! That was great fun and we even took turns at it  :)

It was just a matter of 30 minutes or so. But it gave a memory for life time. We grown ups doing crazy things in a children's park, in the darkness of the night, oblivious to everybody and later blogging about it. Hmmm... Hey, do you think the title of the post doesn't match it's content? I don't think so. After all,

What is the point in growing up if you can't be childish when you want!

Cheers  :)

P.S: Pray to God that someday I get to write that novel. You know what I mean...

The flip side of it...!

Hi folks!

Long time, no blog. Now, time for blog! It has been more than 2 months since I wrote a piece. Life is actually funny. Taking into account all the nothing I was doing over the last two months, how come I couldn't write a blog!!! In fact, all the nothingness I was going through was the sole inspiration for my previous post, I just couldn't follow it up. But I do have my reasons. Laziness, bad internet, no internet etc etc. Even now, just as I had finished typing the first few sentences in this para, somebody had a problem with where I was sitting. So I had to move to a new place with all of my laptop ensemble causing an interim delay of 20 minutes. Yes, the same kind of delay caused in the M.I Vs C.S.K match. The only difference being that I cannot call this senior manager a dog! ;)

The happy thing is most of my bloggie friends remembered me. Some asked me to write a blog, some enquired why I was away from blogsville and some were even happy thinking that I had quit blogging! Not so soon, darling! :) As I was doing alomst nothing useful during the last few months, this time I am gonna write about the only time I was doing something, the third module exams.

Here is the background of the battle. This module had only 7 papers. But factoring into this the number of electives being offered ensured that there was a certain degree of mayhem in the timetable. This is where people we must realise the limitations of us being human beings and the profoundness of chaos theory. After all the fuss we created about the timetable, who had the final laugh? Neither of us! :P The insiders know what I am talking about!

Let us now forget the background and enter into the actual battle. Unfortunately this time I had to write 4 papers in the first 2 days. And that experience rendered me, well, almost dead! What else do you expect? Twelve hours of insane writing in two days! At this juncture I would like to confess that I had not even written 3 full pages over the previous 3 months! This was very similar to that Barney Stinson running NYC marathon and the result was also pretty much the same. I couldn't move my ring finer and my little finger was by itself not moving... :( Thanks to the amount of preparation I did, this task assumed himalayan proportions! I not only had to write insanely for 12 hours but also had to think on my feet (rather think on my seat). What to do, it is very tough to copy in our hall and so one is expected to come up with the answers on his own! One of my batchmates, G, solved this problem to some extent by an ingenious suggestion: 'when in doubt, write both the answers!!!' And G, I must say it did help us :) The remaining papers were not an issue as there was sufficient time available. But this time around I felt the exam week was a little bit less strenous than the last two. I don't know the reason, I just felt so.

How do you liven up boring times during the exams? Read along... I am notorious for playing crazy games in unaccomodating situations. And here is the game I play with Ashish during exam times, who will finish the exam first. The rules are simple, whoever finishes the most number of exams first wins. In this series I almost won by taking a 3-0 lead. But Ashish fought back well to level the series 3-3. Two of those three times, I crafted my own defeat. This is why they say, you must know a bare minumum before entering the exam hall. At least you will know when to stop answering a question and proceed to the next. I precisely didn't do that. Twice I wrote and wrote and wrote that I overshot the 3 hour limit! My first time in NITIE :O Well, it all came down to the wire in the decider. Fancy a guess as to who won? Yeah baby, thats right :) I survived the couple of hours thriller to a nail biting finish and a scintillating victory... My opponent put up a good fight though. Dude, there are two more series left and you definitely have the caliber to win. Seriously. Better luck next time.

Thats it for now folks. Finally I broke the jinx that had kept me unblogged all these days. Sorry for the really long post. Long time pent up energy started to flow once the valve was opened. And I now promise to be more regular in blogging. So keep tuning in...

Cheers :)

Nothing... Seriously nothing!

Nothing... Of all the good words, not-so-good words and not-at-all-good words in English, I had to select nothing to title my blog? So, what am I gonna write here after titling it nothing? Is there anything left for me to say about nothing? Why are you still reading when you know this is about nothing? Why is the page full of text even though it is nothing? What exactly do I mean by nothing? What do you understand about nothing? Why am I talking so much about nothing? Am I obsessed with nothing? What the hell is happening to me? Ah, nothing!

When I searched dictionary for nothing, the first result that came was 'no thing'. Big deal, it just inserted a space in my search string! I tried asking some of my friends what does nothing mean. After some brain whacking thinking, few of them came up with an ingenious answer. They said '....nothing'. It is true that we use so many words in our daily life that we get used to them and they pop out more like an involuntary response than like an outcome of thought. We seldom contemplate what exactly these words mean or how deep that meaning goes. At times, we know these words so much that their profound meaning means to us, but nothing! Since I had nothing to do, I decided to do exactly this. I decided to think about one word, its meaning, how it is perceived, the way it is understood and all such things and... I chose nothing. To put it in a nutshell, I am going to dig deep into nothing and find out something about nothing.

Nothing, as I see it, is a sense of emptiness. It cannot be defined. It is just the absense of everything. Just as Albert Einstein said, cold is the absense of heat, dark is the absense of light, nothing is the absense of everything. It is a void. Though nothing is actually nothing, it may take everything to acheive it. Try filling a room with absolutely nothing. Try thinking about nothing except nothing. All day long, try doing nothing... It is so difficult to acheive, though it is nothing. But in our daily lives we choose to think nothing as the absense of not everything but something and that something is so commonplace that we regard it as nothing. Think of it, how many times do we use nothing when we actually mean nothing and how many times otherwise? We also try to use nothing as an excuse when information security is needed. I don't know how many thousands of times I've heard this conversation: What are you doing? Nothing! Many a times the answer given, nothing, itself is sufficient to convey to the person that you were doing something. The human brain, on an intuitive level itself, seems to know that we can't do nothing. Well, I end my odyssey into nothing here as I have nothing else to say. May be next time I will talk about something...

P.S: I made you read so much about nothing and I hope, for the first time in your life, you don't regret it!

P.P.S: Time could be usefully spent on nothing too, after all!

P.P.P.S: Hmmm... Nothing!

From Kalyan to Kanjurmarg in a 0615 local!

Preface:

Bombay, the maximum city... The city of innumerable dreams, immense possibilities, unlimited growth and an uncountable population! The same city that on one side gives space for numerous dreams to unfold, on the other side becomes more congested than ever. There is only one way left for Bombay to grow - skywards, that is! So what keeps this unimaginably huge city moving? It is its famed local trains. Here is a small episode from that never ending journey of wheels, a small dedication from me to the lifeline of Bombay...

Prologue:

This blog will strike a chord in a hearts of few and terror in the hearts of few others! Yup, traveling in Bombay by the local train (henceforth referred as local) is a very nighmarish nightmare. Discovery channel says the train coaches in India are designed to carry 1500 people at a time. Although, during peak hours Bombay locals carry more than 4000 in a single coach! Hold on, this is not some optimization concept or fail safe testing but a helpless situation. If you have to come to send off someone, you better stay as far away as possible from the tracks. Otherwise you will be ushered into the train by the enthusiastic(!) junta. If unfortunately two trains come simultaneouly on both sides of the platform, its a high probability that you will find yourself on one of those trains. We recommend carrying an extra minimum travel ticket. Just in case. You also have the option of standing on the foot bridge itself and waving to your dear ones. Just to be safe. But neither will you know where they are nor will they know who is waving to them! But that is a different issue altogether, and let us not get in to it. So much said, now get ready to take an exciting ride from Kalyan to Kanjurmarg in a 0615 local!

Logue:

The scene is set when I was returning to NITIE from home after vacations. My train had 3 stops in Mumbai - Kalyan, Dadar and CST, in that order. To reach NITIE from any of those stations I had 2 options. 1. Take  a local to the nearest station and travel by auto for the remaining part 2. Take an auto all the way. Part of my biography reads four glorious years at Chennai. So local trains are not at all novel to me and I decided to take option 1. Moreover only option 1 does justice to what I call myself, an explorer. Both my engineering and managerial brains agreed that I have to get down at Kalyan. Thats because Kalyan is a terminus I can easily get a seat on a train. Also I will have to come back along the same track if I go to Dadar. So I got down at Kalyan and waited for the train that will take me to Kanjurmarg, the nearest station to NITIE. FYI the time was 6.00 am.

And slowly came an empty train. But, how the hell? Before I could pick my luggage all the seats were occupied and by the time I got on to a compartment, it was full. I had to make myself comfortable(!) near the doors of the compartment. That was the only empty space available :(  It was an early morning train and it had to be free. So I asked a fellow passenger, 'is it always this crowded?' He replied, 'ya, this train will mostly be this free' OMG... :O All I could do was utter under my breath, WTF! Yeah, there I was standing in a train, at the starting station, at 6 am, so crowded that I couldn't even move properly! Can it get any better? Actually it did. I had already worked out when Kanjur will come(Thanks to Google!) and so I was a little bit happy. Some time later my fellow passenger asked me where I need to get down. When he heard Kanjur he said, 'Kanjur is just 2 stations away. You got luggage, you better start moving. Or you won't be able to get down.' Are you kidding me? I am 22 years old. How long is it going to take me to move from one end of the compartment to another, huh? Unfortunately he was right and fortunately I could get down at Kanjur with all my luggage intact and laptop in single piece. They say an experience is worth a hundred lessons. The lesson for me that day? Read epilogue  :)

Epilogue:

Traveling in Mumbai, especially by local trains, is neither a science nor an art. Its a war! And you, learn from my mistake!

Post epilogue:

Of all the 24 hours available in a day I chose to write this blog at 4 am. Yeah my biological clock has gone haywire. Nowadays it seldom shows sleep. I am not just another insomniac. I have become an insomaniac! More about insomania in the next post. Stay tuned... 

Its me signing off, ladies and gentlemen. Good night. Or should I say good morning? Whatever... :)

The Journey Home...

This post is dedicated to all those who live away from home...

"The journey home is never too long

Your heart arrives before the train

The journey home is never too long

Some yesterdays always remain"

Simple, but meaningful lines from A.R.Rahman's Bombay dreams. It is a strange feeling. I don't know how to express it in words. I am handicapped by the sheer incapacity of any human language to accurately describe complex feelings arising deep inside our hearts. All I can say is, it just happens as those lines say. The simple thought that you are going to be at home in some time make your heart feel that it actually is at home. The rushing memories, the forlorn feeling, the gushing happiness, the aimed-at-nowhere smiles, the ethereal sensation... Hmmm. I felt it most recently stronger than anytime before.

The stage was set 3.5 weeks (am an engineer :P) back! Though I had been home just about 2 months back, there began this strange desire to get home. And for things like these, obstacles on the way enhance the effect! We could not have had a better fuel for our fire... Yes, the bad old exams were back!! :) If you want to know how big an ordeal exams have become to me nowadays check out a blog article a few 'page-downs' away. Again the same old story, 5 days and a lot many exams! Add to this, absolutely no mood to study :D If you have 2 things to look forward, one so-good (read going home the coming weekend) and other not-so-bad (read exam next day), which one will you choose? For us the choice was so simple :) Oh yeah, it was us not just me!! The whole campus was feeling it the same way. Nobody was even bothered about exams. The questions asked in the corridors changed from 'Did you study this chapter?' to 'When are you leaving home?', mess conversations shifted from 'subject 1 or subject 2?' to 'bhai train or flight?'. They say, Do as Romans do in Rome. The whole NITIE was not studying, so didn't I! If I was half the reason for my not studying, my room mate was the other half. This is what happens when you get a roomie with a great frequency match. Your frequencies match and.... what else, resonate! (engineering brain, I can't help it!!) Adi, I don't know how many more modules we are going to end up screwing and still smiling! But not many left! We had fun alright. The useless chats in between study breaks, the long slide gazings that usually end up in 'mama nothing went inside', the screw-this-i-wanna-go-home outbursts, the nescafe coffee breaks which usually last longer than our single-stretch-study-time, the going home discussions regardless of what exam it was... dude, we had a great time at 422! Thanks for being with me and supporting me through the testing(!!) times :D We will face the next storm together!

The exam timetable actually added icing to the cake. The exam on the last day 'Procurement and Materials management' was the ultimate paper. Nobody knew what to study and nobody seemed to do anything about it. NITIEians can vouch for it. It just got over. Somehow. And suddenly it was time to go home! I was smiling all the way from Mumbai to my home. The reactions of my fellow passengers made me smile more :) No dear world, MBA has not yet driven me mad... Hmmm, I went home. But what did I do? Eat, sleep, pick up and drop mom from and at office, watch movie and occasionally tv, do some grocery shopping, scold my sister, travel a little and WTF!! They said it was over. Those 15 days had just flown by even though I had nothing to do and was bored like hell. I was at home doing nothing useful and I am back here doing nothing useful again. Why did I even have to come? Can't I do that 'nothing useful' from there itself? Crazy world, just doesn't understand my profound thoughts! Hmmm... Its just more than 24 hours since I arrived here. I don't know when the next official holidays are. But I have started to think about my next trip home now itself! The journey home is never too long, your heart arrives before the train. But this time my heart chose to stay behind instead of travelling back and forth!! :)

And yeah, I have added a new feature called 'reactions' to my blog. You can find it right below the post. Use it!

The DREAM code

Dreams, a rather abstruse but fascinating dimension of the power of human brain, is a difficult topic to write upon. On any average day, I would say writing on dreams is not my cup of tea. But today I had a dream that has prompted me to do this piece of writing. I don't know if a person who reads through this can identify with the fascination that dream left me with. Nevertheless read through. This is an interesting journey into my brain. Everyone of us have wondered what causes those little movies to run through our mind when it is suppossed to be resting. It is another big surprise that we are not able to remember all of it. A colleague of mine gave an explanation to this. Dreams are a result of the subconcious brain. When we sleep only the conscious brain goes to sleep but subconcious keeps awake. This subsoncious fellow, a rather dumb one, tries to make sense of whatever info concious brain had processed. Since he is dumb he uses improper logic and creates senseless videos that get screened inside our skull theatre as dreams. Till yesterday I thought this could be true, but today I say this could be the most plausible explanation for dreams. Here is the dream I had and its signifance.

I am roaming in some place in Bombay where I meet Adi and Sambit. They are buying shoes. It is afternoon time and we decide to lunch together. But they both dump me and run away in a bike. I am worried about eating alone and lo there comes Sankara. We both go to lunch together but he chooses to have just a black currant ice cream. We then decide to take a walk. We keep on walking and suddenly reach a small pond. By now Sankara has disappeared and I have a group of friends with me. After exploring a bit, we find out the pond is an extension of huge lake and there is also a dam on the other side of the lake. My friends decide to get to the other side of the dam. But I don't go with them as the width of the dam is so small and I fear I may trip into the water. After some time I start walking alone. At the middle of the lake, I find the dam to be transferred into a railway track and a train is coming towards me. I cramp myself below the tracks to let the train pass. Suddenly I find Joey's leg is caught in some barbed wire and I help him out of it. Then everything goes black and soon after I woke up.

I got this dream at around 12 noon when I was both hungry and sleepy and not sure which one to handle first. All characters featured in this dream are real and I interact with them on a day to day basis. All the words in bold above are a direct reference to what is going on in my life now.

• Adi & Sambit - Two of my best friends at NITIE and with whom I interact the most. Adi is my roommate and Sambit is my neighbour + team mate
  
• Lunch - It was 12 noon and I was really hungry when I got this dream
  
• Bike - I miss my bike so much and I think everyday of how to bring it in here
  
• Sankara - He is coming to India on Jan 1st and I am drawing plans to meet him
  
• Black currant ice cream - They gave us black currant ice cream in the mess instead of the traditional vanilla
  
• Small pond - Obvious reference to the NITIE pond
  
• Group of friends - I remember everyons's face. It is the same group with whom I play MAFIA every night
  
• Joey - Nowadays I have started watching a lot of FRIENDS
  

This is too much to be true. Direct references to all that is happening in my life right now! Yes there are some bits that don't fit into the jigsaw puzzle. But they could be a deja vu. OMG! Are our brains recording all that we do? Some sort of a log file! If so how big is it and is there a way to find what all is recorded in that till now? I used to advice people I know to develop thinking capability. But people, think twice before you decide what to think. Your brain is recording all of it. I am absolutely enthralled after this experience! Dear Sigmund Freud, I have really started to feel the power of human brain. It now seems, after all, those super computers are no match for the human brain. But there is a obvious question that crops up in my mind. Why us? Oh god, why did you make the human brain so powerful? Is it because humans would achieve unprecedented levels of advancement in science  and technology or is it because at some point of time these so called advancements would wipe out human race from the face of earth? Was it given as a means for unravelling all the mysteries around us or a means for effecting self destruction? If I ever get a chance to meet god and ask him this question, he would perhaps say, "BOTH!!".