Long time, no see.

It's been a painfully long time since I updated this blog (now, almost every blog post of mine begins with something similar). Have been quite stressed lately. At a time I am executing the best project ever of my career, some bureaucratic affairs are trying to throw me off balance. Of the most offensive has been my appraisal. It was quite shameful the way it was done and really exposed the process for what it was - devious, flawed and obscure. The idea that the appraisal can closed without the employee actually being informed is quite scandalous. I can only surmise that powers that be are not aware of this anamoly in the process. No inputs of the employee are captured on the discussion.

I wonder why I - the biggest fan of processes - am always at the receiving end of such screw ups. It always makes me yearn for Infosys. With Accenture, there was an excuse - there operations in India had not matured yet, and again, the major problems I faced were during the exit process. I don't know a single reason, why a company would want to make it easy and simple for an employee to quit. But my current employer can have no such excuses.

My expectation is that things would work as planned (without minimal intervention from me or my managers). But the reality is that, you have to keep parading yourself and get yourself in everyone's face to be noticed and considered. I am not good at it (its not a virtue, just a personality trait). I wait and wait for people to do the right thing, but they don't and THEN, when I act, they say, "Oh well!, why didn't you tell me before?". It's immensely frustating as it makes you the guilty person and a trouble maker.

Another hiccup - My MBA because of loan, visa (and also personal issues) will need to be postponed to next year. There was too much of chaos anyway, so made sense to take away one variable of the function. I will be old, old, old, but the time I complete it (probably, too senile to make sense of the acads). But que sera sera!

But otherwise, things have been great. Project's been good, am having fun with regular footer and baddy games.

Just hope the babus relent! My life would be peace!

Have I got news for you?

What the fuck is wrong with Google News. I have found it generally unsatisfactory in displaying the most popular news items. The grouping is a bit wishy washy. And 50% of the news on the main page are not really newsworthy.

Anyway, this takes the cake. An article from 2006 about Being Cyrus is unearthed and put up as a link on Google News. Why munna.

BTW, I know its not right to put unrelated stuff together, but its been some awesome couple of days. (label - personal extra curricular). Have been playing badminton almost 4 days a week now. Today, it was not on, but went playing footer. These English guys really know how to play the game, and its always fun learning (still) and playing the world's most favorite game. I hope the silver streak continues. Touch wood.

Two movies

Motorcycle diaries is a great road movie. The movie is less about the political education of Ernesto Guevera and more about the fun the two friends -Ernesto and Alberto have, during their South America trip. The movie is infused with loads of humor, while the grim problems faced by the people of South America are shown in palatable snapshots. That's what makes the movie less heavy. The camerawork is great and so is the acting. Loved the film.

Prestige reminds you why Christopher Nolan is a great director. He goes back to his distinctive style of film-making (quick cuts, non-linear story telling, shocking twists, portentous music) after Batman Begins. He puts the rehashed double role trick to magnificient use. The acting is top notch, though Scarlett Johansson is wasted. The casting of Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in their respective roles is inspired. They suits their roles perfectly. I love the way Bale uses his strong immobile jaw to sharpen his understatedness. May be not on purpose, but it works.

Mahatma vs Gandhi

Mahatma vs Gandhi released this week. Read the reviews (DNA, HT, TOI) and I am sure, for many of the Indians, it will provide a great insight the utter turmoil and sadness that prevailed in Gandhi's domestic life.

I saw the Marathi play - Gandhi Virudh Gandhi and got to see the real father of a dysfunctional family for the first time. Just like Gandhi's humor and eccentric traits, this one also seems to have been sweeped below the PC carpet.

Anyway, my main grouse is really that none of these high-brow reviews mention this Marathi play as the source for the dramatization. Feroz Khan just trasported the material onto the Hindi stage and now the film and thus made it available to a wider audience.

If there is any credit due, it should be first to Ajit Dalvi and Chandrakant Kulkarni.

Mace - She would have said

On the highway of my life, there is a big pile-up. The traffic is on a standstill. There is a mountain of metal. People are hurt.
Sometimes you just want to reach the destination fast. Hell, you even know journey-is-important blah blah, but sometimes, things just get stuck, like constipation or something.
Its a time when my employer is trying to build another Channel Tunnel through my ass. And my bank has not debited my salary almost 4 days after month end. And I have just enough money to book the sidewalk spot to beg for the weekend. Its been a literally ass to mouth existence. Fuck the bloody what!
And my wife. Well, she ran away to Bombay, because I had no money. Here, I am.. All alone, sleeping on the floor, drowning in self-pity, typing away on a borrowed laptop.
Fuck the bloody what!

P.S. Correction - Wife didn't run away, though you are sure to think otherwise.

...as Gults

Khi khi khi khi

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.

All out Animal Brawl In Kruger National Park

One of the most amazing nature videos I have seen. The buffaloes seemed to be next generation bovine species; I thought their behavior to retrieve the calf was highly evolved.
Tip from MitraUK (www.mitrauk.org)

Jaw jaw war war

Huge huge fan of the Guardian cartoonist, Steve Bell. Now Martin Rowson joins the list. This cartoon is amazing in detail, and hard-hitting in its message. Tony Blair, as usual, caricatured in the ugliest possible way.

Lake District

The vacation at Lake District was good. It rained heavily on Saturday, but Sunday and Monday was excellent. A woman we met near John Ruskin's home, went so wild with happiness, that she stopped random strangers on the street (us) and went "Isn't this just gorgeous. I stay at Bristol and it is so dirty. But this place... Oh..Just look at this. And the way they have maintained the gardens. Just wonderful!!"


Saturday went to the Bowness Lake. Then came back home to watch the FA cup final. What a disappointment! Didn't watch the final goal in the dying minutes of extra time. We set out by bus to Ambelside and then walked to Grasmere. We started our walk around 5.45 pm, but this being summer, dusk doesn't settle in till about 9 pm. We stopped at a number of places - Rydal Caves, along the Grasmere Lake, Wordsworth's grave, and finally reached Grasmere at around 8.30 pm. Were fortunate to catch the last bus back to Windermere immediately.

Sunday, we decided to cycle to Crook and back. It was a great ride, though in the end, missed a turn and reached Kendal. Kendal Castle is ruins, but the view of the town and nearby hills is spectacular. The ride was a slightly difficult and so decided to take the train back. But repair works were on, and again were fortunate to have a replacement bus with plenty of storage, so we could put our cycles in.

Still the day was not over, so walked around Windermere town - Adelaide Hill, then to the lake and back to Orrest View Point. Unfortunately, we tried to take the shortcut to the hill top and missed the road completely. Reached some private hill-top (where we saw a deer), which has quite a amazing views. Made our way back from a different route.

On Monday, we decided to take it easy. Took a explorer day ticket. First stop - Brockhole Visitor Information Center. Then to Coniston. Walked to Coniston Pier and took a ferry to Brantwood. Saw John Ruskin's home, learnt a bit about his contribution (social, arts, philosohy), and had a great cup of coffee. Back to Coniston. Came to Ambelside, saw the Waterwheel (not working), the Bridge House. Collected the luggage from the B&B and then back to York by train.

Spideman 3

Unfortunately, I got the impression from the few reviews that I read that, Spiderman 3 was an excellent movie - the best in the series. How wrong.
Its bloated, disjointed, and plain boring. Sandman part was interesting in bits, but other guys - black widowed spiderman and Green Goblin Junior were a big let down. The attempt to add depth to the plot by going back to Uncle Ben's murder doesn't work out. It is a clean copy from Batman, where the murder of Batman's parents is not longer just a petty mugging. I wish Sam Raimi, would leave behind Aunt May and Uncle Ben behind, and just concentrate on the story of the now.
Disappointing, overall.

Hoarding menace

I thought all hoardings in Mumbai were obscene. The way the trees were pruned, poisoned, pillaged to make way for big, bold, blaring advertisements blasting full force on Mumbaikars.

Ban them all, I say

Ayaz Bush

Writting all the complex essays for almost a year now, has made me into a nitpicking English Grammar custodian. I feel as if the whole existence of English is dependent on me.
But even if you excuse that fact, I think Ayaz Memon's last paragraph here is just plain wrong.

Had he flopped in the final, Gilchrist would have seriously thought about retiring, as indeed would have the selectors. Now he wants to play for some more time; and so do the selectors and fans.

Find no mistakes? Read it again. I will fill in how the sentence should obviously complete itself.

Had he flopped in the final, Gilchrist would have seriously thought about retiring, as indeed would have the selectors (thought about retiring). Now he wants to play for some more time; and so do the selectors and fans (want to play).

Now, sure, Ayaz Miyan didn't mean it that way. What he meant was

Had he flopped in the final, Gilchrist would have seriously thought about retiring, as indeed would have the selectors (thought about retiring him). Now he wants to play for some more time; and so do the selectors and fans (want him to play).

But, the para just contorts the meaning altogther. Wenyhay.

Don't look for grammatical errors here. I ain't proof-reading. It reminded me of that famous Bushism

Our enemies are looking for ways to harm us. And so do we.

We do the London

Was again back in London showing my wife around. This time, I was armed with the Lonely Planet, so I think, we were able to get much more out of the sight-seeing. Just relying on the signs and the tube map can be mis-leading. For example, the tube map doesn't show that Charing Cross, Leicester Square and Westminister are in walking distances of each other. The time it takes to walk underground to the tube stations is much more than if you just walk to these stations above ground. And then there is the advantage of actually experiencing the sights and sounds of the city.

Since, I was tour-guiding for the wife, had to stick to the same routine - Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Cruise, Greenwich, Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace. Wished I had done at least a museum probably, didn't happen. Also, wanted to go around, some out of way spots - probabaly only thing we managed was Neasden's Swami Narayan Mandir (awesome- probably, the best temple I have seen). Next time, (provided I am around), will time my journey around some event (Noting Hill carnival etc) and make sure I check out the museums - Tate Modern, Nat History, or British Museum (atleast). Also go to Brick Lane and do the Wapping Dockyards walk.

York diary

Its been a long long time, since I wrote anything on this wall. Well, lots of water has flown down the Ouse. Yes, I am in York now. The historic city of York.
Just a few highlights of the last month.
1. Bought a cycle on a Saturday. Boom! Stolen on Sunday. So, that's a downward trend, over Norwich theft. Lots more cycle tracks and far more cycle friendly in York, than Norwich, but then, will I be able to enjoy it.
2. York is more expensive than Norwich. Don't know the reason really. It's not much better than Norwich or anything. Just dearer.
3. The way this project is going, not sure, how long my work will last here. Already have put in a word with my managers, to find other available work.
4. Council tax is cheaper here, but then, expenditure on public facilities is less. Not so good swimming pool, really really sparse library.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Indian cricket is no more. Why won't I be happy?