Archive for the 'life' Category

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Are you settled?

Published on April 7, 2007 in Just for Jolly, life, people and provoking Perceptions. 6 Comments

In train, a conversation between two college students,

A : Man! What have you planned after studies?

B : My dream all my life is to land up in a company like Infy. Need to get settled soon man.

As a spectator in the conversation between two relatives,

He : Heard that you are planning your daughter’s marriage by this year end. How far is the groom search going on?

She : Yes! We are. The problem is, not all grooms are settled. We are looking for someone who is settled in life.

He : oh! Settled?

She : Like someone who works in companies such as infy, TCS, CTS and who has a good salary, bank balance, a car, etc.

He : oh I see! My wishes for your daughter to get a settled soon.

This time around, I asked my dear friend my alter-ego about getting settled,

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Me : What does it mean to be settled and how to tackle these questions?

My Alter-ego : Boy! It’s a good question which everyone in life has different notions and opinions. It can be answered in many ways. I am giving a sample here.

Emotionally (you may lose the person’s acquaintance if this way is approached) : Do you think getting a job in Infosys or TCS or any other company means that one is settled? If so half in the world are not settled. Stop preaching wrong notions and move away!

Philosophically (The person at the other end may think that you have gone nuts) : If I think that my life is settled, it is. If I think that I am not settled in life, then I am not settled. :-) It all depends on the individual. There’s not a benchmark or hard written rule in life which defines the word settled. A few of us have started to attach our lives to the materialistic world so much that one who has a good bank balance, big company, a own house, marriage at the right time etc makes one feel settled. For others this may not work out and it may seem ridiculous. The truth is, neither of the two is right nor wrong. Money, is both a beautiful and shabby tool to which we have attached our lives so well that it leads to the questions like getting settled and feeling happy etc; The fact is that we are all running a big marathon named life for which the end point is a big zero with few of us thinking that the way we chose to run is the correct one and the others have chosen the wrong path. People who are settled or not settled are defined on these terms. The othrs may feel it the opposite way.The irony is that when everyone is running towards a big zero in life, does it matter which path one chose? ;-)

So, got my point? Now answer me! Are you settled?

Me : Guruji! I am already running and I am not going to think about the paths. As far as I feel that I am happy, I will run.

My Alter-ego : Good my boy! How do you define happiness then?

Me : $#&^**$$ (started running)

My Alter-ego : (like Vadivelu) They call me nuts if I say this! :)

அய்யோ!அய்யோ! இத்த சொன்னா நம்மள பைத்தியம்னு சொல்றாங்க. :)

P.S. :- The person named My Alter-ego is not a reknowned pyschologist or philospher. He does not write any coumns on leading magazines. He is another nut like Mr. Karthick Raghavan and he is currently working on winning the gone case contest. :)

Feel the voice

Published on April 3, 2007 in life and people. 7 Comments

I don’t know what to call this. I don’t know whether this is happening to everyone. I don’t know if there is a medical tem for this. All I know is that I am feeling a person’s voice.

I read a number of blog posts, mails, text messages daily. I have a weird feeling of reading these in the other person’s voice. When I get acquainted with a person, I keenly watch how the person speaks and try to feel his voice. For example, when Umesh writes something new, I read it in his voice. I feel as if he is explaining in his own voice with his strong Mallu accent. Like….

Therrrrrrrrr is a Fundaaaaaaaaah in this.

The other day, I got a text message, a teaser, from a good friend. I really enjoyed it and laughed for minutes together. Thinking about it later, I found that I was feeling the voice of the sender and reading the message. So, it made such a difference to a normal teaser message. Was discussing the same with her, over chat, and found that this is the first time she is hearing of something called ” feeling the voice “. After a week or so, she told me that she also started feeling the voice.

This does not happen with people I have not spoken to in person. Is this something weird? Is this because I was doing a bit of mimicry earlier? Someone please explain.

Disclaimer :- The mentioning of the words Mallu accent does not mean that I have grudge towards people of any region in particular. Remember that my english accent is tamilish.

Trivia

Published on February 19, 2007 in information, life and people. 6 Comments

Last night, on my way to home in office cab, had a chance to interact with my Office’s telephone operator. He is a nice guy who I have spoken with much on phones and did not meet him till last night. Our conversation centered around how EPABX system works, hunting lines etc; I was the one to ask him many questions as I always wanted to know the nuances of a telephone operator’s job. We stopped at a local tea shop for a cuppa and continued the conversation. Suddenly, he asked me the significance of the dot in the number five key on my phone’s keypad. I replied in the negative and he helped me understand that the dot in the keypad on any phone is to help the blind. It can be touched and felt so that the other numbers surrounding it can be easily punched. I was surprised and thanked him for the good information he lent. The journey continued and I tried punching the numbers with my eyes closed and Bingo! I was successful.

I really appreciate the goodwill of the guy who invented this tactic keeping the blind in mind. After all it is usability everyone yearns for without their knowledge.

P.S.:- Am I the only to know this little but important thing too late?

Consult Sabaree

Published on February 13, 2007 in blog, Internet, life and people. 3 Comments

Sabaree, my colleague, is a good pal to me from the day I joined my current job. He is elder than I and has expertise in counseling. His favorite area is HR counseling although he does concentrate in other domains. Sabaree After seeing my blog, he always asked me to set one up for him. We used to discuss about the same for quite sometime with great fervor and forget it. Today something triggered me to do it for him and at last I did it. Balaji was the one who set things up for my blog. Today, I stole the tricks from his bags to set the site up and running with in a few hours. Consultsabaree.com is setup as a blog and it will be customized as a online counseling portal. I will rather have Sabaree write about his idea behind setting this portal as he is going to be the owner for consultsabaree.com’s content.

Thanks to Balaji, Yahoo domains, Dreamhost,WordPress consultsabaree.com is ready to rock.

Hope all your support will be extended to Sabaree as well.

After a ton typos and million full stops

Published on February 7, 2007 in blog, life and people. 5 Comments

Hurray! it’s going to be a year since I started blogging and this post is an attempt to see what has happened in my life, after I started to blog, in this good year’s time.

Why did I start blogging?

Umesh and Balaji were early into the blogosphere and I did not want to be too far behind them. All my life, I have quit a lot of things without pursuing them with the same fervor I started with. When I started blogging, I feared of quitting from this one fine day. Fear mounted when Balaji informed me that he spent dollars for hosting and domain registration. The fear kept me going and here I am boasting about a year in the blogosphere.

The initial days of blogging

In the initial days or months of blogging I changed the themes frequently, put in all the ads available ( thinking of becoming a millionaire someday ), without bothering about the content much. To be precise, I was into gimmicks and graphics instead of concentrating on content. A day never passed by without me checking the ad vendor for the dollars accumulated in my account. The thing never happened and I stopped checking it. Still, I login and see how well I have done on ad space.

Goof ups

When I started writing about things of public interest, got a few human visitors apart from the regular bots. Till date, my posts on Satyam has attracted the maximum number of visitors to my blog when compared to other posts. A few of my posts instigated anger and my blog became a place for people to vent their anger.
People and my blog

Shikha inspired me to start the music quiz section with her own section on song lyrics creating waves. Umesh inspired me to write humorous posts. Badri got introduced in my life. Balaji encouraged and supported me all the time. Deepak pestered me with IMs on the idleness of my blog. Gayu stood by me and commented on almost all posts. Sarayu, one of my early and regular commenters encouraged me to write more. Priya was always a silent visitor and she pitched in with her advice offline. Sabaree, Magesh, Ananth spread the word about my blog at office. Thank you all!

I learned a lot this one year and found that I ain’t a quitter at least in blogging.

After a ton typos and million full stops, I am blogging because I want to express my life and feelings to this world. After all, I am a man and not a super man or What a man.

Why I don’t have a girlfriend?

Published on February 6, 2007 in life and people. 9 Comments

After college, I joined a call center and there was a trainer who had good brains. She used to train us on the English necessities for a call center job. Apart from that, we used to have out-of-the-subject-discussions with her at the near by tea shop. One day, she told me that I will never have a girl friend in my life or rather it was really difficult for me to find one and sustain it. Years passed and here I am trying to find the answers.

I asked two of my good old friends who are girls and here are their responses.

Girl 1 : You lack that extra little personal care which differentiates friendship and love. Hence you have girls who are friends and not a girlfriend.

Girl 2 : May be you never tried or expressed your love to anyone. Try to find the answers within you. Yopu have the answers. What’s your problem now? Is life so boring without a girlfriend? If you think so, go ahead and find one.

Analyzing these two responses, a lot of questions arise within me.

1. Are my relationships lacking emotions?

2. Am I too brash?

3. Am I too shy when it comes to proposing a girl?

4. Am I trying to be too rational?

As always, questions remain unanswered.

Dog’s world

Published on January 28, 2007 in humanity, Just for Jolly and life. 3 Comments

Yesterday morning, on my way to home from office after a good week of night shift, I hit a dog while riding my bicycle and fell down. I took the cycle from the cycle stand and after a couple of turns there was a dog who was ferociously barking after something and did not notice me. I did all my best to apply the brakes but my cycle did not halt and hit him in the stomach. He was thrown a few yards away. And there he stood up barking ferociously again. This time his subject of attraction was I. All this long, I was there down with my hands filled with mud and my jeans drenched up a bit with the stagnated water in the near by pot-hole. My butterfly type handle bar in the cycle changed to a new figure which I cannot comprehend with my little knowledge in geometry. Whatever the dog thought, he went away barking for a few seconds and did not bite me. There is a Ayyappan temple near by and an adjacent flower shop.The lady and the man, I assume them to be the owners of the flower shop, helped me wash the pant and my hands with the hand pump. The man went ahead to say that I was lucky enough that the dog did not bite me and also I might have escaped a big accident. He showed the temple and went on saying that Ayyappan saved me. I did not disappoint him saying that I don’t believe in God or religion and instead thanked him for the gratitude and expressed how I felt bad for the dog.

On normal circumstances, I would have cursed the dog, pelted stones or cursed the government for the poor road conditions. But this time, I really felt bad for the dog . The first thing I asked mom when I reached home was “Does it pain for dogs when they are hit by vehicles? I have seen them whining away and not showing any pains after a while.” She gave me a glare and might have thought that I got a few screws loosened after this small accident withstanding the cycle.

Me : What happened in me that makes me to feel for the dog?

My Alter-ego : singing the Padayappa song,

நேற்று வரைக்கும் மனிதனப்பா , இன்று முதல் நீ புனிதனப்பா

Translation

You were a human being till yesterday

Today on, you are What a man!

Me : grrrrrrhh!

P.S. :- Umesh writing about dog and I quoting the song and line from the movie Padayappa consecutively for the second time in a week is all co-incidence.

Proud to be a Chemical Engineer

Published on January 21, 2007 in Just for Jolly, life and people. 9 Comments

Going down the memory lane to see what I did at college makes me laugh, smile and cry. I started our journey with dreams of becoming a Chemical engineer and make it big in the Gulf. There seemed to seven other guys with similar dreams joining the journey with me. As every journey has its own twists and turns, ours too had many. Did we complete the journey? What happened after the journey?

Here it is…..

1. I was proud to be a part of a gang of chemical engineers (8 of us) and we called the gang the Royal Chemical Ruffians . I still don’t remember who coined up this name. But in a way, it was really fun and cool. (Looking back at the words cool and uncool now, makes me laugh ).

2. The first thing we did in the first day of every academic year was to carve this beautiful gang name in the benches we occupied. We thought that we were always privileged to occupy the last benches and as no one dared to question us. But the truth was that no one in the class never bothered about the last bench.

3. We used to pee on all the walls we found in and around college campus. There was a silly Atlas competition while peeing. The competition was to draw maps of all continents and countries on the walls (while peeing) and rating whose map was the best.

4. We used to love the same girl and there was a unsaid agreement that the others will leave if any one of us gets going with the girl. The second thing never happened (I thought Cupid loved Chemistry and chemical engineers) and we vowed to concentrate hard in studies.

5. All our study holidays were filled with sessions of playing The Rummy , the most popular card game of our times. On the day of the exam, one among us who had studied for couple of hours straight together (!@$#%%) became the hero and made the rest believe that exams can be cleared if we studied what he said.

6. On the day of results, one who cleared all the subjects becomes the villain of the gang. He becomes friends with others after spending Rs.20 for Tea, Bajji, Samosa, Cigarettes in the adjacent tea shop in the name of Treat .

7. Unsaid rules
a. Bunk the class as a bunch.
b. No one does the assignment or submits the lab records in time.
c. No one clears a paper which others have failed to clear.
d. Everyone watches the movie together.

If someone evades these rules, he becomes a traitor and needs to buy others a Treat to become friends again.

8. We laughed for all little gestures and cracked jokes to disturb the class. If someone outside the group cracked a joke, we looked at each other and decided whether to laugh or not.

9. All our economics classes were filled with last bench sessions on how to go to Dubai and become a millionaire. We thought every chemical engineer in the planet will land up in Dubai by default. No one ever told us about the grades though.

10. The lab sessions were filled with Dumbcharades and Antaksharis. We used to mingle around with others in the class as these games needed more people. We were always the winners as we were up to date with all the old and new movies, songs etc; The fruits or the pazhams (the ones who study well in the class) used to wonder on the knowledge we possessed on the movies and songs. !!@#$!!

11. We made a point to be present on all college Annual days with balloons tied in heads, playing drums, whistle etc; All in our gang were good at Dappankuththu and one was really good at playing oththai adi with drums. None of us took liquor during Annual day as the college management used to take strict actions agains students who did that. Instead, we enjoyed much by dancing in front of all the lecturers and cornering them on the labs and respective departments. We always knew that this will have a great impact on our lab and project work grades. But we never bothered to care much about those as bothering much was uncool.

12. Never cared about exams till they arrived and never had exam fears as one needs to go through a dozen exams per semester to get a engineering degree. All our weekly cycle test notebooks were empty all the time as we thought it was uncool to take up those weekly tests. At times, bunked those tests and went to movies.

13. The lecturers and Heads who asked questions seemed lunatics to us and were our first enemies. When questioned about the number of arrears we had, we lamented that theoritical knowledge is never gonna land us up in good jobs and only learning the concepts mattered more. We never were good in concepts. No one knew this because we never wrote any tests or absconded from question and answer sessions.

14. The adjacent tea shop owner bacame our instant friend when he agreed to give us tea, eateries and stuff on credit. We used to settle accounts at the end of every semester and we spent a lot of bunked days in tea shop reading the local dailies. Politics and Cinema news were the only topics that divided us.

15. Our post lunch session games in class were duet singing, Raja – Raani (all Chennai college and school students will know this game) etc;

After all these things for four years I never believed that everyone from our gang completed the journey on time and passed out as a chemical engineer. It is difficult now to get in touch again with everyone and only the memories like these bind us together. All these trivial and silly things taught me more about life and people. Now looking back on those mistakes, I feel that I never learnt anything related to chemical engineering.

Then why is this post titled Proud to be a Chemical Engineer . Beacuse it is uncool to degrade the degree one studied.

P.S. :- One of our friends from the gang is in Gulf now and we hope he will make it big as a chemical engineer.