Long time no blogpost da...

Yeah. the mans been busy. not like anyone cares. but anyway.

Seems like age is catching up with me. Or thats how i feel when I open up my inbox. Suddenly 50% of the unread emails have 'humbly requesting your presence at my marriage' at the subject line. And. most of them are from the guys in my class. I remember that I was young for my class - on an average, 8 months younger than the second youngest, which makes me think - does this mean I have to get hitched in a years time to avoid the 'oh you're not married yet?' 

Why is everyone in such a hurry to get married ? - an old classmate (OM) and I caught up on gtalk after a while. Heres how the conversation went:

OM: Machan howre u da ? been such a long time...

Me: Yeah, Yeah, I'm fine, sup with u ? hows life in whereever you are ?

OM: Great !! Im due for promotion next month ! and the wifeys loving it...

Me: The who ?

OM: I got married to my girlfriend last june da. shes working with infosys.

Me: Oh great congrats man ! (thanks for not inviting me. chutiya.)

OM: Yeah Yeah. I wudve called you, but I heard you were in the US.

Me: (Yeah right. and I have a pet grebe) Ah, thats ok man...

OM: So how about you ? Hows the kid doing ?

Me: (ZONK). The what da ??

OM: The kid da, You had a kid sometime recently right ?

Me: (Not unless I was made compulsory sperm donor while I slept. And someone actually picked my sperm -  A lesbian couple from prague, perhaps) Err, no, what gave you that idea da ??

OM: Man, I though you got married like ages ago... someone told me u have a kid n all...

Me: (WTF). Dude, u sure u know who you're talking to ?

OM: Yeah Yeah, maybe i got the whole ,marriage and kid thing confused with someone else.. so hows life ??

Me: (Still recovering) Yeah, blah, blah... and blah.

Scary. Maybe I should begin every conversation with my married friends like 'hows the old ball and chain ??'. That'd pre empt mistakes of this sort. and probably all future conversations too, but its worth it. :D

Lets go Clubbing da...

Ok, all city folk know that you aint no cool until you go clubbing.

When I landed in madras a while ago, some old friends of mine also flew down, and we really did not have much to do except meet up at the beach, eat someplace, talk for a while and and then go home. Thats when somebody came up with the 'lets go clubbing' idea.

Apparently, there are a large number of pubs and discos in madras, and clubbing is a major activity of the hip and cool. It usually involves payment of some kind of fee to enter the pub or disco, and inside theres some really loud music and other stuff going around.

Confession - I havent been to one of these places since my awesome experience in the second year of college. I wasnt blogging then, so heres the summary of that event - I went in, couldnt see much cos the lights were bad, couldnt hear much cos the music was loud, friends got completely sloshed and had a real bad headache after I got back home.

Realisation - nothings changed. The lights have gotten a bit worse, but apart from that, nothing. A friend i knew knew someone who knew someone else, so our entry was 'taken care of'. We went down some wierd looking catacomb like thing and entered a predominantly green looking room, with smoke and rays of light going thru the air. It was like something out of a bad LSD commercial, if they were allowed to make one.

So we got around to catching a place to sit, and ordered some snacks, but never got to talk. So much for catching up. We quit the joint asap, and headed straight down to the beach. My impression of the clubbing activity has sort of gone down this week. Doesn't appear as cool as it used to in college.

I went back home and hit the urban dictionary, and looked up clubbing :

1.	clubbing	380 up, 115 down
	A favourite activity of the moronic majority, this involves being shunted like cattle into a converted warehouse... sadly not to be slaughtered, but to wear ridiculous trendy clothes, listen to crap eardrum-shattering music, try to pick up brainless members of the opposite sex, and generally stand around aimlessly in a desperate but pointless attempt to show how cool you are. "Wanna go clubbing tonight?"

Looks like I'm not the only one.

I look good in that, Da ...

Great people have said that theres no love like self love. Anyone wishing to misconstrue that to suit their own nefarious purposes are free to, so long as its not on the comments section :D ..

What embodies self love more than monuments to the self ?? Pharoahs built monuments to themselves. Roman dictator Caligula had 17 stone masons each carve out 3 statues a year depicting him neck up, and roman atheletes neck down. 

Anyhoo, most of us dont have the time or the money to comission odes our god given beauty. We do what we've been doing for 2 million years now - improvise.

A guy named Orkut Buyukkokten came up with the social networking idea with Orkut, and then Mark Zuckerberg came up with Facebook. Both these websites offer its members the freedom to upload photos. Unlimited number of photos. 

BANG. It was like the WalMART for compulsive narcissist. I was logging into Orkut sometime ago, when I noticed in the 'recent updates' section that one of my friends had uploaded 17 photos of himself, all different poses. I would like to emphasise 'poses'. The same clothes, same hairstyle, same everything except the 'pose'. You can equate 'pose' to stance, look on the face, whatever.

I could not resist a small q and a.

Me : Dude, why all the photos ? is that like On-Demand, or launching a new product ?

Compulsive Narcissist (CN) : WTF ? uve uploaded photos of urself too !!

DISCLAIMER : True. I did uploaded photos of myself. Photos that I thought brought out the best looking me. But hey, thats just 1 photo, among other non-me photos, and recommonded for upload by entitites other than myself.

CN : So what ? I have other photos too ! Hypocrite !

Me : Ok. Your album has 158 photos, 20 of which feature you standing in front of a wall, photographing yourself. And of the 158, 16 dont have you, but they are pictures of wallpapers hooked off some other websites. and 40 have you standing with other people....

CN : So?

Me : Nothing, im just surprised that you have a different photo for every way you can twitch your eyebrows, and add captions like 'you lookin at me?'  and 'im sad..' and 'watcha!' .... among others....

CN : The babes want that man !!

Me : No kidding... So whats the news on that front da ? Ive been hearing some stuff...

etc etc. The conversation went on.

My point here is simple - the internet is a very  very powerful tool. Now its almost as though everyone who has access to the internet can establish an indentity for themselves, which is in many ways much larger than they can ever hope to do without the internet. That leads to interesting results motivated by the psyche, as Ive just described. 

It would be very interesting to explore exactly how a persons activities online, read against his/her psychological profile ? or maybe someones already done that, I gotta get googling.

Machan, I cant talk to babies da....

Yeah, i just discovered that i need to work on baby talk.

Heres how:
A good friend of mine was in town a while ago, and i thought id drop in. I knew that she had a daughter who was around 10 months old, what i dint know was that this fact changed a lot of things...

I went to her place on a saturday afternoon, with some candy for the kid, which was grabbed from my hand and surreptiously smuggled into the kitchen, lest there be hue and cry for candy that very instant. We got around to discussing how things were/have been/should be/shouldnt be/going to be etc. Thats when the kid came into the picture.

She came to her mom, and said something unintellegible. Then the kid's grandmother enters and says 'that means she wants her doll' or something to that effect..

At this moment, her mother picks her up and says 'oogie poogie, doll veynuma?? enna maa? achuchuchucho... ' and more gobbledegook.

When people do this, they look very very stupid. I personally think this activity has no value-add in parent-child relationship cos im sure the kid shared my opinion. anyways, there i was watching all the fun, when the mother says -

mom - 'want to talk to anna ?' (want to talk to the elder bro ?)
kid- dosent seem to mind
mom - 'here, u talk for a while...'

me - 'what? me? no, no way'
mom - 'oh cmon, she wont bite !'
me(to myself) - thats not what im worried about !!

the lil kid gets shoved into my hands, and then a million thoughts ran thru my head...
1. maybe i shud imitate what the mom was doing ?
2. better, shud i just introduce myself?
3. how is that better? idiot, do something !!

thats when i remembered charlie waffle. Charlie Waffle is a character uncle charlie plays in an episode of Two and a half men, but his reasons were on a totally different level. i followed his modus operandi.

I looked at the baby, and started singing what i usually say to new people i meet... 'Hi!! how are you ?? ...' (more like speaking in a tune, with characteristically high noted starts and stops, with low noted mid-segments)

The kid loved it. She wouldnt get off me, and had the cutest laugh ive heard.

I still have to perfect my technique, and still maintain that adults sound amazingly stupid when the talk that way. (There was another instant when the grandmother tried something similar and the kid started crying, which was even more hilarious :D)

Au revoir, IIM Indore..We come to it at last, Da ...

2 years. Thats how long they say it is. It certainly didn't feel as long; yet, i cant ignore the degree of change in everything that defines me - Ideology, beliefs, knowledge, character and personality.

Ive never stayed out of home, having been a day-scholar(day sci) all my life. So the first few weeks here at Planet I was something radically different for me. Be it the classes, the CP (class participation), the food, the language - everything.

I spent the first day running around the hostel premises in circles not knowing where my room was - it was a confusing maze, comprising of 5 blocks, A through E. I was initially put up at C 318, top floor, C block. I couldn't sleep at all for the first 2 days that i spent here; the excitement just did not die down. On the third day, my parents saw me off and returned home to Madras. It felt very strange, as though it would be the last time they would see me as the man they knew. It was. In my time away from home, Ive changed a lot.

The first few days were spent in getting to know people; both seniors and those in my batch. The language problem was very apparent now, and i felt the need to learn it. Thus began my active role in trying to understand spoken Hindi. I made good progress, and am proud of it. The next few weeks were spent trying get the hang of the academic system here- credits, DCPs, quizzes, End-terms, Midterms, Projects, Group Work, and the likes. I met my study group the first time during a microeconomics assignment, and got to know them better during subsequent meetings.

After that, I began making friends outside the confines of both my section and my study group. With that, came the ubiquitous trips to Indore city. The institute was roughly 20km away, and hanging out involved booking a cab and hurrying back before 11pm. With that, i was acquainted with Hindi film music. There was a lot that i had missed living in Madras, and this was my chance to catch up.

Then came 'positions of responsibility', serious stuff here in B schools, and i was eager to take it on and prove myself. I saw my first student body election, and contested. Later, Came summer placements; a testing time for the batch, arguably one of the foremost catalysts in cementing our unity. I was down when the first day went by with no news of success, I felt elated when my efforts paid off the second day, which quickly vanished, replaced by sympathy for the people i knew who were still in the process of getting placed. The whole process ended soon, bringing color back to peoples faces after days of restlessness.

Post summers, the academic workload increased, and so did plans for the career. My stand(s) on career choices (Fin Vs Marketing) was something of a running gag (explained in a soon to come post). Then we went around India on our summer internships, learning a considerable lot about corporate life. (No, its no where near the rocket science i thought it to be).

We came back, only to be torn asunder under the rule of electives. The finance and marketing students rarely saw each other in the same class, excepting common subjects and compulsory courses. The second year saw a lot of extra curricular activity, and some bearing fruits (Asia Moot Corp 2008) and some not. I learn't more than what i learn't in the entirety of the first year working on those projects.

Finally, its placement time. Things are beginning to heat up, with placement dates nearing. The last week on campus brings back fond memories of the place i called home for almost 2 years.

Here, at the end of all things, I cannot but help but wonder where the 2 most awesome years of my life went. I cannot imagine going to work, or coming back home and not have someone call me and say, 'Dude, lets hit the night canteen' or 'Dude, two and a half men season 2 episode 8 rocks!! download and watch it now!!' or 'Dude, u gotta this assignment man...'(refer this for more info on this statement)

Au revoir, IIM Indore, Im proud to be one of the myriad whom you've nurtured over the past decade.

Whats with the tubelights, Da ??

The minority always suffers. Opinions and standards are for the exclusive use of the majority. Only a set of very influential, small number of people can disprove this conjecture. Unfortunately, Fans of star trek and star wars hardly qualify as influential. We've seen and heard jokes about 'trekkies', as the fans of Star Trek are called in the US. This is a first hand account of the crap a ardent star wars aficionado gets from imbecile peers.

I dont call myself 'Jedi' or call my religion that, but have some admiration for the series as a whole and have followed both the movies and spin offs in other media diligently. There are a species of boring morons(BM) only found on Planet I (IIM Indore).

This species has the following peculiar behavioural characteristics; their responses to certain stimuli presented within quotes.("") (note : thoughts to self made within brackets)

1. (When im watching the movie/episode in my room) "Hey!! Tubelight Fight!!! go back, i wanna see it from the beginning.... dont these guys get an electric shock??" (Dude, go watch prison break... hath saale )

2. (With facebook's nominate ur friend application; most like to) "swing green tubelights at people thinking he's darth bader" (Its red lightsabre, moron, and its Vader, as in Vladivostok)

3. (on gtalk) dude, share that Star trek episode 6 on the LAN. (may god have mercy on your soul)

4. (on watching the movie...)"Dude!! this is amazing..." (Great!! another fan in the making - perhaps he realises that buddhism is the inspiration for lucas' 'jedi code' ). "the tubelights can get switched ON super fast, Da!!!".(oh crap..)

5. (Star Trek 11 trailer had been released) "Wont that idiot george lucas stop with 6 already...??"

Its amazing how we know nothing about the sci fi genre of books and movies in India (My apologies to the hard-core sci-fanatic reading this, im only trying to make a point). Is it just that the cultural disposition toward 'unearthly' themes is that of ridicule, or has it just not taken off owing to not-so-widespread literacy ??

Im now starting on the Illuminatus Trilogy; not sci fi at all, but good reading nonetheless.

Next Post : First Ever Movie/Book review !!! (a treat to my whopping 8 rss subscribers and 10 average daily unique visitors) (:D)

Dont correct me when im talking, Da !!

Im bad at conversations. Especially when im explaining why im not to blame, when i am. sometimes, the angry other tends to make mistakes - grammatical or otherwise - and i always end up correcting them, only to worsen my already precarious diplomatic mission.

When on the phone with mom :

mom - "Did u look up that relative living in Indore??"
me - "no, shud i have??"
mom - "whaaaat did i tell u before leaving... blah blah .... old lady, have some consideration for others.... blah ... poor padma paati..." (tamil for grandmother, also used for old women when referenced)
me - "isnt she shanta paati ??"
mom - "* blank* yes, BUT U DONT GET MY POINT. STOP CORRECTING ME WHEN IM TALKING"

Talking to a good friend, generally :

Fr - "Ive got an admit from AIM manila !!(pronouncing it like an acronym)"
me - "i think its just A I M, not aim .. "
Fr "Dei baadu (u pimp) ... ur supposed to congratulate me, watha (id rather not translate) "

Sometimes i do it just for the fun of it :D. Something tells karma has it's sights on me...

Whats in a Name, Da ??

One of my friends is now a father!! (kudos Avi!!). We caught up after a long time and he shared his experience with selecting a suitable name for his child...

Avi had always been fond of 'Lavanya'. (:D) (an old college crush, whose name he liked a lot). Anyways, his wife wanted that the name begin with the same letter as her name does. (Kavita)
A small argument snowballed into a lot more, with no amicable solution in sight. He got thinking about names like 'river' and 'leaf' taking after Joaquin Phoenix, one of his favorite actors. Again, Kavi shrugged this idea off; indian names only.

Avi changed lines, what if its a boy?? he wanted Avi jr. This wasnt very attractive to the counter party, who wanted a 'distinct yet subtle' name for her son. Putting his managerial skills to the task, he came with some data, akin to what we see in Freakonomics - custom made for Hindu names.

He predicted that 5 hindu names would be most popular in India by 2011 :
Boys:
1. Anand
2. Vikram
3. Mohan
4. Aditya
5. Sanjeev

and girls:

1. Kanchana
2. Lavanya - (we all suspect foul play here :D)
3. Ambika
4. Radhika
5. Gayatri

All with his own logic for it. (Income levels of the various SECs, and associated blah). Ultimately, this list didn't get past his wife. A long and arduous battle ensued, until finally 2 names were agreed upon :

Kanchana for the girl, Avinash (no junior appended) for the boy. And, finally, after all the waiting, a big and warm welcome to Avinash Chatterjee !! (jr ??)