My Dislike grows..

I know I have been blogging irregularly for the past month or so, but I shall explain the reasons for that in some other post. This post is about an incident I witnessed yesterday, which compelled me to write this one straightaway.

I came to my home place, Ahmedabad, yesterday. My parents had come to pick me up at the airport. We had just moved a mile or two when I saw some people crowded and a bike lying in the bushes of the divider on the road. We immediately stopped and went to see if there was any help required. What I saw was one of the most ghastly sites I have ever seen in real life. Sitting on the divider and crying in a muffed voice was a child (barely 7-8 years old), with blood all over his face. There was a big hole in his forehead and he could barely open his left eye. He had probably smashed his head on the street lamp post. The driver was his brother, who didn't look more than 15-16 years old. He had cuts here and there, but wasn't as seriously hurt. We immediately called for the ambulance and also called up the parents of the children. The ambulance arrived in 5 minutes and the children were attended to.

This is 3rd bike-related accident that I have seen/heard in the last 2 weeks. Just 4 days ago, one of my close friends, Ronak Tamra, met with an accident and had about 20 stitches in his left leg. Another friend of my friend died while driving on NH 8. A senior of mine died in a bike accident. I guess you would all acquiesce with the fact that you would have heard a lot more about injuries in bike accidents than the ones in car. Since my school days, I have detested bikes. I know that is weird for a 17-18 year old guy, but maybe I value my life a lot, and always found that the way my friends drove their bikes was extremely dangerous. No wonder, I never learnt to drive a bike and don't even intend to learn one.

It is a tautological thing to say, but I would request all of you to please minimize bike-driving. If you cannot stop it completely, please don't go past the 50 kmph speed limit. The main problem with bike-driving is that it might not be your fault at all, but still, if a car hits you while you are on a bike, you are one who is likely to suffer the maximum damage. You get to live only once, and you wouldn't want to lose it in an accident, would you?

Welcome to IITKGP

Any IITian's blog is incomplete without some posts from his college days. Though I should have written one long back, it's better late than never. I am sure that in due course of time I shall be writing multiple posts on the fascinating college days. However, let me start off with the very first day at IIT Kharagpur. 

Our train reached the KGP platform at 12.30 am. My father and I got out with the luggage and started walking towards the nearest stairs. After walking for, what seemed like eternity (thanks to the longest platform in the world), we finally reached the taxi stand. I was all excited to see the best engineering college in India, as India Today had rated IITKGP as the best college for the second year in a row (yeah... I believed in the India Today ratings then). Well the grand entrance gate didn't disappoint at all. The roads inside were very well built and since it was night, the infrastructure around looked great.

Soon we reached JCB Hall, the hostel which was allotted to me. There was no security guard and no person to assist us as it was 2 am in the night. I met a guy roaming about and asked, where could we park for the night. He pointed us towards the mess. It's been 2 years since I passed out of IIT, but the mere mention of the word "mess" makes me lose all my appetite (shall share the horror stories about mess later). Anyways, thanking that guy we went ahead and entered the mess. We were welcomed by the most nauseating stench of fish (despite the fact that I am a non-vegetarian). There were no sleeping arrangements made inside, and my father and I just lay on one of the mess tables with the disgusting stench all around. What a fantastic way to spend the first night at IIT!

Early morning, we went outside and found the guard sitting on the main exit. After seeing my identity proof, he gave the keys to my room. Having always stayed at home in big spacious rooms, the allotted room seemed kind of small to me. It started looking much smaller when moments later a guy entered my room with his parents and introduced himself as my roommate. We put one more bed in, and there was hardly any room left for us to walk. After exchanging the pleasantries, he told me that we need to go for the registration. The registration was all manual at that time. Also, the icing on the cake was that IITKGP gave admission to a whopping 650 students. When we reached the Hangar, we saw hundreds of students swarming like bees all over the place. Like good students, we also got into one of the lines and started the registration process.

After filling up a million forms and after a zillion obligations, we finally got the registration done. Tired from all this, I came back to my hall and decided to take a bath. Going into the bathroom, I realized that there was no water. I came out and saw that there was as water tanker outside and and a long queuee here as well. After standing in the queue for about 45 minutes, I finally managed to get the two buckets of water. Dad left for Ahmedabad soon afterwards and I started feeling homesick. Then it was dinner time and I had one of the worst meals ever in my entire life. Lying on the bed later that night, with all my body parts aching, I recounted all the events since yesterday night and how different I had expected IIT life to be.

I knew that I was in for a tough ride and things would get worse once the classes started. In hindsight however, I realize that it was probably IIT's weird way of making sure that our life at IITKGP could only get better, which it did.

 

Yadav Raj

The Samajwadi Party recently released its Election Manifesto. Some of the salient features of the manifesto are:

• The use of computers in offices is creating unemployment problems. Our party feels that if work can be done by a person using hands there is no need to deploy machines.
• A harvesting season brings employment for the labour class for at least six months but these harvesters will snatch their earnings. So no machinery use in agriculture as well.
• The salaries provided by private firms should be in sync with the minimum wages that have been set by the government. Essentially instead of increasing the standard of living of the poor, we should bring down the standard of living of the rich.
• Mulayam Singh Yadav has also vowed to abolish the 'expensive education in English'. So, we all should stop studying English and the entire country should converse in Hindi only. 

I have actually run out of adjectives to describe the ridiculousness of this manifesto. If it was upto these people they would get us back to the stone age. Warped priorities and self interest seem to dominate their character. They just don't seem to have the wherewithal to begin the process of reform on a war-footing. I feel really sick knowing that such idiots are actually being elected leaders by our people. What is more sickening is that sitting at my home in front of the computer, I am actually doing nothing to stop such bullshit.

I just hope that no one elects any leader from such a party, which has only its own selfish interests in mind. Sometimes I wonder - do they owe nothing to anyone? Not even to their progeny?

Frenzy Begins....

It's that time of the year again. IPL is starting tomorrow and for the next 45 days, my productivity is going to be reduced by 3 hours daily. It is impossible to resist the excitement and the frenzy surrounding this mega-event. With the event taking place in South Africa this year, I do agree that the following will be reduced compared to last year, but still, it shall easily surpass anything on the Indian Television this year. IPL a fitting response to all the football leagues in Europe and USA's NFL and NBA.

What I don't like about this year's version is that, the organizers have become more and more greedy. Apparently, now each match will last 3 hours and 15 minutes instead of 3 hours, so that they can rake in more money. There will be two 7.5 minutes breaks after 10 overs in each innings which has been labeled as 'Tactical Time Out'. WTF? Also, there will be more advertisements and so we are again likely to see a 5-ball over only.

But all said and done, I am really excited about IPL because of 3 hours of awesome fun and the Royal Challengers' Cheerleaders (Man they were hot!!). Since I don't have any team from my hometown, Ahmedabad, I shall be supporting Chennai Super Kings. With Flintoff, Dhoni, Hayden, Raina, Murali, Albie Morkel, Gony (and Jogi for bowling the last over), they are the team to beat this season. May the best team (Chennai) win!! 

The ballooning phenomenon

Now that my body is feeling revitalized after the long road trip to Punjab, I wanted to share with you a phenomenon which I have been observing for a long time now. For the uninitiated, my whole family, except for my parents stays in Punjab. I spent the first 10 years of my life there. Now, I do believe that all of us tend to like the opposite sex more if they are from the same state as we are.

So, obviously I have a soft corner for the Punjabi girls (PGs). But for PGs it is different. Almost all my single friends (and since most of my friends are IITians, they are all single) have the hots for the PGs. It's mainly because of their fair complexion and their curvy bodies (What more does a guy need huh?). Everything is fine till they get married. After marriage is when you start witnessing the "Ballooning Phenomenon". Its like literally somebody has started blowing air into their bodies.

I know that Punjabi's are easily the most overweight people in India. For crying out loud, that is a land where people call ME underweight. All of you who have seen me, can easily testify that by no standards am I underweight. So overeating is a common thing in Punjab and guys start doing this since their childhood itself. So, for them I can see why they become overweight as they grow older.

But for wives, I don't understand that why this is a conjugal thing. In about 10 years after marriage, most wives overtake their husbands as well. It is a mysetery which has perplexed me for a few years now. Hope I can solve it sooner than later. Man, if I ever marry a PG (and the chances are high), hope I have the wherewithal to prevent this phenomenon from striking my family !!

This too shall pass

Read this beautiful blog on thoughtcourt's blog. Thought would share it with you all. It's a really nice read. Came back from a long road trip today. Really tired. Also, Liverpool lost to Chelsea in the Champions League QFs. Upset. Don't feel much like writing today.   

The joy of beach !!

This post is a continuation of my last post on the event that is "Beach". After cribbing about not getting work in the last entry, I have realized that the beach is not bad at all. After 19 months of working your ass off for the company it actually feels good to have some personal time. The Grass definitely looks greener on this side atleast for the time being. I have been keeping myself busy all this while:

• Getting my 3 lazy left fingers to work: I have always typed while looking at the keyboard because I have never used all my 10 fingers for typing. I have been working on my typing speed nowadays by competing with others here. Being in a profession where you need to type a lot, I think speed does matter. 
• Towards Jimi Hendrix: Have completely fallen in love with guitar. Also, since my new guitar is really sexy, I just can't seem to have enough of it. I think I shall be able to play as well as Jimi in about 6 months or so.
• Blogophilic: I have been following blogs for 6 years now. Presently I follow about 40 blogs. Don't matter if a blog is good or bad. I just love 'em. It is great fun to know other people's thoughts and their day to day activities. I have been wanted to start a blog since 2 years now, but was just too poor in time-management. I now want to write daily (don't know how long will that continue). Hope I can continue writing even after I am staffed.

By the way My Baby has arrived and its the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. This post is really special as it is the first post from my Baby :).

Yeh dilli hai mere yaar....

No...this blog is not about the song and its beauty (yet another amazing song by the God). This blog is about Delhi.

I stay in Gurgaon. Though I agree that there are no places here to hangout on the weekends except the malls and there is a lot of dust in the city but still I find Gurgaon a great place to stay. Well the reason for this (according to me) is the wide roads. There is no traffic congestion anywhere and even in the city I can easily get to top speeds of 80-90 kmph. Yeah I know its weird but I judge a city by its traffic.

Hoshing and I (the budding Joe Satriani and Jimi Hendrix respectively) wanted to buy a guitar. We inquired about some guitars in Gurgaon and seeing the exhorbitant prices we decided to buy it from Daryaganj (an area in New Delhi). I have been living in Gurgaon for over 20 months now and if I ever have to go to Delhi I get lost as soon as I cross Dhaula Kuan (Delhi-Gurgaon border). Hoshing said that he knows the way around Delhi and we can go ahead without a prinout of the Google Maps (Gullible me :( ). Okay, so we started our journey from Gurgaon to Delhi on the beautiful NH-8. As expected, we lost our way after Dhaula Kuan (DK). We kept asking our way to Daryaganj from every Tom, Dick and Harry on the road and it took us 1 hour and 45 minutes from DK to Daryaganj.

I thought Sheila Dikshit had done a wonderful job on the infrastructure in Delhi. Alas, I was mistaken. There are very few direction boards in the city. There is no way that a newbie can move around the city without getting lost atleast a dozen times. The quality of roads continues to be pathetic. There were bumps and ditches everywhere. Also, at some places (near the Red Fort) the roads were so narrow that it took me freaking 30 minutes to complete a 200m stretch of road. People say they love the small houses and narrow roads in Delhi. I ask them - do you love staying under-developed? I think Delhi has to come up by leaps and bounds if it is to come even close to being a world-class city.

After 5 hours (out of which only 45 minutes were spent on purchasing the guitars) Joe and Jimi returned home. The thing that made it even more awesome was the Delhi two-wheelers. They have an amazing traffic sense and will overtake car your car from every which way. Another thing that is great is the precision with which they drive their bikes. Mostly they were just a few centimetres from my car. Who cares if you occassionaly touch a car and put a small scratch right? At one point midway, my lossy body had almost given up, but I still decided to labour on. I was so tired that I could not even post this blog yesterday!! However the trip was not a total waste. I learnt some valuable lessons:

• Never go to the interior Delhi in your own car
• Only go to Delhi if you are going to get a discount of 25% or more (we both got cool guitars at prices 25% less than those in Gurgaon :) ), otherwise it is not worth it
• Never trust Hoshing and his sense of direction

The death of all humanity

Saw this video about a girl being barbarically flogged by the Taliban. Her crime - she came out of the house with a man who was not her husband. The punishment meted out to her - she was pinned to the ground face down, with two men holding her arms and legs and a third guy who lashed her 34 times. What's more - as a symbolic gesture, one of the guys who were holding her arms and legs was her brother!! This is the Taliban justice at its best: a rapt crowd, a female victim crying out in pain, and a world stunned into silence.

It was all carried out in the Swat Valley in Pakistan where Pakistan's North West Frontier Province government ceded authority to the Taliban under a peace deal, giving them almost a free hand to impose their puritan Islamic rule on the around 600,000 people of Swat and its seven neighboring districts. I am shocked at the ability of the Taliban to carry out such public punishments with impunity. During a time when even mass murderers like Saddam Hussain are given a fair trial, it is really gross to punish such a petty crime (if it was a crime at all in the first place) in such an inhumane way.

This is not just a one-off incident. Almost daily we can hear about some terror attack or learn about a heinous crime in Pakistan. The saddest part is that they do this in the name of Islam. They seem to think that the more visibly different from the epithets of modernity that the Taliban can be, the more automatically Islamic it becomes. How people survive in a society with enshrouding of women and forcible bearding of men is beyond me. How lucky I am to have been born in India!

Having born and brought up in a peace loving society, I cannot imagine myself witnessing such an event ever. But I feel really strongly against atrocities on women. All the rapists and all the people showing their manhood by beating up helpless women should be publicly castrated. You guys might say - this means that there is no difference between my thinking and that of Taliban, but I think that beating up an unarmed, helpless women is one of the worst crimes in the world.

My baby is Coming....

Having studied at IIT for 5 years and now working in a consulting firm where I have to spend a lot of time in front of the laptop, I have become a computer buff. I now like doing everything in front of the computer - be it any news item (I prefer timesofindia.com to the actual Times of India) or even a movie (I prefer watching movies on my computer compared to the crappy PVR). The only thing that I probably like to do offline is read a paperback novel. All this means that I like to keep my laptop updated with the latest softwares (like codecs, games etc).

The laptop which the company has given to me is like an antique piece. It weighs a ton and is extremely slow. In fact it is so slow that I have become "Chacha Chowdhary" now(Chacha chowdhary ka dimaag computer se bhi tez chalta hai). Until recently I had all the administrator right for my laptop, so I was able to install whatever software I wanted to install. I thought that I could make do with it as long as it was solving my purpose. However, due to a mishap (which is too painful to elaborate here) at the client side I was stripped of all admin rights and my comp was formatted. That proved to be the last straw.

I started searching for a new lappy and after - rigorous research for 2 days and 2 nights and listening to the dell-is-the-best-value-for-money banter, I decided to go for Lenovo Y650. It has received some rave reviews for its looks and performance. It's a real piece of art and has a pretty neat configuration (2.53 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB HD, 256 MB graphics card - What else can you ask for!!). What makes me more happy is that it is now priced at $1250 and I purchased it at $1100 :). A friend of mine is bringing my baby from US this weekend.

Hope the problems between my baby and I are limited to the bedroom and never go out (read Repair Shop) :P !!

Bucket List

Was really inspired to compose a list of my own after seeing the wonderful movie (Nicholson is GOD!!). I have started preparing a list and I have decided to give the final touches to it by the end of this year. I think I shall die a happy man if I am able to finish the below:

• Watch Gerrard in action at the Anfield
  
• Watch Federer live at the Wimbledon
  
• Complete a marathon
• Go on a eurotrip with friends with the bare minimum money with us
• Watch a live concert of Nickelback
• Vegas!!

I know all these seem far-fetched at the moment, but again why hold oneself back from wishful thinking :P.

Yeah, Yeah I know Liverpool lost to Chelsea today, but as someone has rightly said... "It isn't over till it's over"

Be an Informed Voter

Champions League match between ManU and Porto is about to start. Saw this link as Munny's status message, so thought about writing something. Google has again come out with a fantastic site which is sure to become a big thing as the Lok Sabha Elections 2009 approach. Ever since I have started using the net, google has continued to amaze me with its out-of-the-box thinking and its uncanny ability to strike the right chord with almost every new product. Anyways, lets not digress from the topic; I can go on and on about google. This post is about Elections and Voting.

Three years ago I got my voter-ID card from my hometown Ahmedabad. I didn't vote in the last State Assembly elections because I was in Gurgaon. Come to think of it, I have been eligible to vote for the last 5.5 years and I haven't even voted once. Despite the fact that I belong to the so-called "Highly Educated Class", I am one of those who are contributing to the low voter turnout in India. Well not anymore!! I went to Jaago Re and registered myself for a new Voter ID. The Election Commission will cancel my previous ID and issue me a new card from Gurgaon.

I asked many of my colleagues and you can't imagine the dismal percentage of people who have voted or are planning to vote in these elections. We always mock at the appallingly low voter turnout in India, but we need to correct ourselves first. It's not too late yet. Lets decide to vote this time.... for BJP :) (All you staunch Congress supporters, we can have the debate later!!)

Just Another Day

Woke up at 9.00 a.m. today. The gym is closed for some renovation work, so was feeling really lazy in the morning. Was expecting a free day but unexpectedly found 2 mails from my manager. I know you all must be thinking that I would have been glad to get some work, but trust me it doesn't feel good to get work when you don't expect it. Anyways, it seemed like a 3-4 hour job, but my co-worker was pulled in for some other stuff. Poor me had to do the work all alone. Still the work finished on time and I was relieved.

Hoshing and I are going to learn how to play guitar starting tomorrow. I am really excited about it. The last time I started learning an instrument, I quit midway and didn't really learn much. Hope this time it goes well! Also, we have the Champions League QF leg 1 tomorrow. Just wishing for ManU to lose :).

Eagerly looking forward to tomorrow

Liverpool Forever !!

It was 25th of May, 2005. Like a Couch-Potato I was browsing through the TV channels, but couldn't find anything to watch. I landed on a sports channel showing a football match between AC Milan and Liverpool. I had watched the football world cup, but club level football had never really occupied me before. But that serendipitous incident has changed my life forever - for I have been an avid follower of the English Premier League (EPL) since.

The game I witnessed is according to me, one of the best football games ever. The way Liverpool fought back in the second half (after being 0-3 down) was exhilarating to watch. I didn't know about Steven Gerrard before the match, but the way Gerrard marshaled his troops - he became my favorite footballer immediately (and has remained so). I often wonder how people start supporting the clubs they support. For some its because of the club's reputation, some just start by backing their friend's favorite club - for me it was a moment of sheer magic.

You shall never walk alone.

The Beach

I have been staffed continuously for the past 19 months - working for a Credit Card giant. It would have gone on and on, but thanks to the Economic Recession the division that we were working for actually shut down. God (and I think everyone else as well) knows how glad I am that it came to an end. It doesn't mean that I am out of my job (though you never know in these times), it just means that I shall not be working on a project for some time. It is very popularly referred to as the "BEACH" in our company - which I think is a very nice euphemism for "Out of Work".

I have been cribbing about always working and not having enough "Beach" period to my colleagues since forever; but now that it has finally come true, the thought scares me. I still cannot imagine myself waking up in the morning and not having any project related work to do. As they say - "Be Careful What You Wish For". I really hope this doesn't last long !!