La Teral, very simple

A mother tells her son to fetch a pail of water. Jack says ok, catches the next flight to Tokyo and comes back with a true bred Japanese. The mother sees who is at the door and faints.

What could have been the reason for this tragedy?

The mother had told his son,"Beta, Japaani le aa!" <---Answer here

Killing the reading habit

After lugging around Lord of the Rings on luggage heavy trips, pleasure sojourns and short day travels, and not getting past the first 200 pages (readux), I conveniently left the Middle Earth back in India and came to Middle England. Not that it helped with my baggage problems - I was carrying 45 kgs instead of the stipulated 25 kgs, on the innocent hope that a contact behind the checkin counter will allow the assorted items like 5 kgs of rice, 2.5 kgs of wheat, 1 kg of rava, 1 kg of ghee, 500 gms of pickle, among other things to be passed unchallenged. In stead I encountered friendly fire.

"Are you freaking kidding me!! Did Mr Ocean not warn you not to carry Manisha Koirala's diet lunch with you? You will freaking make me lose my job."

Apart from the grub, lots of clothes and fancy dresses were discarded. It's extremely dull here in the UK.

Anyway, we were talking about LOTR. So, after insulting JRR Tolkien and his motley bunch of looney characters, I thought I should mend my ways and get into the reading habit. Instead I took 2 months to get through the 'Heart of Darkness'. It must be like a blunt Maasai spear through Joseph Conrad's skeleton buried somewhere in Canterbury.

Thus achieving unprecedented elephantine success in killing the reading habit, I am in a position to share my wisdom about to go about committing bibliocide.

1. Check mails (official and gmail) every 30 minutes - Only mails I get on official mail id when I am home is from System Administrator admonishing me about my huge size - of the mail box, I mean. In a way, I am comforted by the daily dose of identical automated messages from such a highly placed authority. I deliberately send myself spam, so my mailbox explodes and system administrator manifests himself

2. Buy TV - Waste money on TV license, Freeview (set top box) and develop slender toned thumbs through remote punching. Watch reruns of ranking programs like the Top 100 books of the last century.

3. Web Surf - read trashy and terrible blogs, similar to yours. Reread the good ones at home (the first 7 hours in office are spent sleep clicking on RSS feeds of these blogs).

4. Borrow more books from the library - You scan through the adopted books - a comic, an autobiography, a travelogue. Flipping through is interesting, so you read some more. And after two days, you are overcome with shame at ignoring your own books. You stop reading the borrowed books. And forgot why.

5. Download movies torrentially - With the immense back log of last year's acclaimed movies to be seen, its a race against time and bandwidth. Unlimited download on my ISP means that I have to pump it dry with download queues circling the globe 365 times over. BTW, Azureus is much better than ABC

6. Video chat - Discover the many pleasures of having a webcam and mic at your end and none at the other (folks). You do a video tour of the home for every guest visiting your folks and show where the washing machine and the clothes drying line is. Make silly jokes, the responses for which are a muted :-)

7. Marry

Bloody Hell!

I wished things were slightly better. I am it is ok, that it's still fucking cold most of the time. And it's June. Those women out there should be roasting. Themselves at this time of the year. The forecast is gloomy, so you don't plan for a proper outing. And voila the sun is out for about as long as you can see right up Britney's skirt while she gets off the car. And they're gone - the view of the sun and the moon. It will rain mostly this weekend. The wind that bringeth this weather should be shot or atleast covered in a largish towel, the towel sent for dry-cleaning, and lost forever in the dark hole of the laundromat.

I sometimes envy the guys - you know the types who topped whose camaraderie with their school pals is still intact, who won all the competitions on the way to topping in their classes, who got into IITs and then into IIMs and then quit a cushy ludricrously paying job to start a new venture and made even more moolah there. Meanwhile, ran through a thousand girl-friends, all just giggling and eye fluttering at these handsome hunks (yes, they found the time to body scuplt as well), and then got married to the most gorgeous babe in town. I don't just envy such guys, I hate them from the bottom of my gall bladder. You would think, that such guys form a miniscule portion of the populace like those who do the shirshana at 5.45 am every morning and simultaneously read 'Gravity Is Going To My Head' by Chutpati Vedamuttu, over and over again, and then under and above. Endlessly. No, these guys exist in ample. They prowl the streets of Goldville, and own the most popular blogs and have the most number of friends on Orkut. Oh, how I hate them.

Self doubt is a place where you had been earlier and demolished all the street signs. And you are there now. You don't know where to go or what to do.

Kya hua jo laari chooti

Travelling in Mumbai is as much a pain as watching the Indian team play cricket. In both cases you don't have a choice - if you were able to afford a place close to your work place, then most probably, you would be owner of that company. And watching cricket is in the Indian DNA.

To make the travel hassles a bit lighter, here is a Mumbai Nagivator - I had used its earlier version, which was good too. This one looks like an improvement. There is also Mumbai local train timetable - Especially useful during the late night early morning hours.

Link through Anand

Old post about Mumbai and Pune maps.

My current state is antsyous

The key to excelling in professional life is always to surround yourself with exceptionally smart people. Where can you find the exceptionally smart people? Not in the lower rungs of the organization (unless it is a small startup or consulting firm or a flat organization like Google). Smart folks will only be at the top. To become a great head honcho, you need to be in close vicinity of the head honcho. Not only do you imbibe a lot from the smart folks around, but it is precisely at this level that you can showcase any positive attributes that you have within you - positive qualities that can make a positive difference to 'many' others.

Let me try to explain. If you are in a menial, subordinate job, or lower rungs of the organization, sure you can display your skillful, honest, hardworking and helpful nature. But it makes a difference to a lowly few. Also, there are far less challenges at that level, for you to truly test your mettle; qualities like leadership, patience, decision making never come into play.

Only at a management level, will you have the opportunity to develop these aspect
s of your personality and put them to good use. Able leaders and bright colleagues will demonstrate ways of doing things well. Mediocrity at that level stands out and mediocre people are dumped (unlike at subordinate level where they just continue to thrive). It is trial by fire.

Only to differentiate yourself from that bunch, will set you on the path to professional nirvana.