The ultimate weekend bash

 Stop that. Don’t tell me. I have least interest in knowing how you spent your weekend. The movies that you watched, the delicious food that you had, the pubs where you spent your nights at, whatever it may be. I spent the whole weekend in my room, sulky and disheveled. I cooked, ate, and slept the rest of the time. I know you had a better time than me, but still, that wouldn’t give me the slightest temptation to go out, on weekends. All because of the one weekend celebration that me and my roomies had, couple of months back. 

It was during March, I think. Our training was still on. I stayed near to the training centre, with two roomies, S and V. A close friend of mine, A, who has already been mentioned in this blog before, would drop in, on all weekends. It was a time when all of us felt enticed with the mischievous and fun filled weekends that our friends used to have. So we too, planned one. We made a ‘to do’ list first, in which we listed out the different activities that we wanted to do during the coming weekend.

The list was very intelligently designed. We had plans A, B and C. And the first entry in the list was ‘Please remember that there is a ‘to-do’ list in place’ and that it is being kept between the 36^th  and 37^th pages of the playboy frontline magazine’. More entries resulted from our brain storming sessions together, and each entry was assigned a priority level.

And it was Friday. I went to office very early, so that I could finish my work and leave early, in a mood to enjoy the weekend. It was part of the plan.

I started my computer, and dug into work. Very few people were there on the floor, scattered here and there. After a few minutes, I heard an alarm sort of a sound. A beep sound, in high volume. I kept working, and just didn’t take my eyes off the monitor. After a while, when I looked around, nobody was there on the floor. Suddenly I started to panic and think that any hot female colleague in some other  floor might have come to office wearing a mini skirt. I got up and rushed to the elevator, and then, a watchman came running in, and started scolding me in Tamil. ‘Fire alarm’ was the only thing that I understood. 

Fire. God damn it. 

A thousand questions started to flood my mind. Why did I come to office early? Why the hell did I ignore the alarm? Will India ever win a cricket match against England? 

The last one being a deja vu for me now. 

What if I die now? I haven’t even married. Both are practically the same, but still I could have a life till that.

 

He pointed towards the fire exit and screamed something.  I galloped downstairs, in Usain Bolt-ish speed. And then, everything started to be in slow motion. Past moments of my life started to flash in my mind. In ultra slow motion. Perfect camera angles. Just like the scenes from Guy Ritchie movies. 

Hah! Not really. I ran and came out of the ground floor. A huge crowd was there. I stopped just when I was near to the compound wall, and looked back, at the building. I had already commenced to fantasize about the whole building collapsing under fire and the office being closed for an indefinite number of days, during which, all the employees get paid, as usual, and the Sodexho vouchers get couriered to the respective house addresses. 

I waited impatiently. But nothing happened. Couldn’t even see a wee bit of smoke.  Besides, none of the people gathered looked happy worried. All were relaxed, and talking to each other, as if nothing happened. Just then I overheard someone saying, fire exercise.

THIS WAS A DAMN FIRE EXERCISE!

And everybody except me seemed to know about it. And it happened right on that day when I went early to office. I walked back, with a depressed mind. 

A usual day at office passed by. I reached room late. And we had our weekend plans, waiting to be executed, the next day. 

Hopefully, this will continue in the next post.

Dosas and a couple of other things

The author of this blog currently lives in a rented house in Chennai, and cooks by himself. Insignificant.  Just saying.

Last week, I was talking to a friend of mine. She was telling me about her love, and the hurdles that she would have to cross, in order to manifest it. Things were hard for her, since she and her lover belonged to different castes. Not as hard as the dosas that I make, though. (Pointless reference. Sorry for that). But we just can’t love, taking all the other factors into consideration. Love just happens.

“What to do, I fell in love” -She said in a naive and funny way.

Her parents had already started the groom search for her. She didn’t show any sort of interest and her mother accused that something was wrong with this whole generation.

When I heard that, my immediate response was, “Every generation thinks that the previous one is outdated and the next one is immature”

After saying that, I felt highly overwhelmed by my own ability to say something like that, spontaneously. Or at least, I could pretend that way, till you find out the source from which I copied.

Later on, when I gave it a thought, I felt that there are a couple of things that I don’t like about our older generation.

First one is that, they are, tech retards, mostly. Sending a text message from a mobile is a huge task for them. Just like making a circle shaped dosa is for me. But technically speaking, all the dosas that I make are all circles. They are circles with different radii in different directions, I would say.  And besides, in the Wikipedia definition of dosa, it has not been mentioned that dosas should always be perfect circles. So, I assume, the cook can have the liberty of choosing any shape that he or she wants. You people should have seen the one dosa that I made last week. In the shape of Africa. It was awesome!  

Am I deviating from the topic here? Considering the kind of a ridiculous heap of sentences that this post is, I presume there is no such thing as deviation, mainly because there is no topic as such, to this post.  

The second thing is that, the older generation is way too conservative. They stick to their principles, just like the dosas that I make stick to the pan, and refuse to come off in proper shape.

I don’t know if I have given you people a bad picture of my cooking. Whatever that I told you so far, are just minor glitches, that come along the way, during my usual routine of cooking dosas in the morning. I have done some fairly good work so far, and have received a decent amount of appreciation also. Last week, I uploaded a picture of the dosas that I cooked, in Facebook. After seeing that, my sister immediately sent me a text message. ‘hey, very nice Idlis you have cooked, there. Good effort. Even though the thickness is just perfect, the overall size should reduce. Take care’.

Not quite the kind of appreciation that I would have wanted. But still. Sigh.

So, that’s all about my life, at the moment. Adios.

Between, is any of the institutes offering a short term dosa making course or something? TIME, may be? No, not that I need it. It’s for a friend’s friend you know. It’s ok, if there isn’t any. I myself will give the poor chap a couple of lessons when time permits. That’ll do. That’ll do.

My detailed mobile bill

Folks, I had shifted to a post paid mobile connection, a few months back. The idea was to escape from the frequent recharges. And I did escape from that. But after a couple of months I realized that my per month mobile expenses were soaring like never before.  I had to do something.  I requested for a detailed bill from my service provider, so that I could identify the possible areas for cutting mobile costs. For the sake of not getting sued, I wouldn't tell you which my service provider is. It’s the one whose ads feature this round headed thing called boo boo, doo doo or something. Too tough a clue, I guess.

Detailed mobile bill for the month of April

Monthly rent : Rs 200.00

Standard call charges : Rs 169.50

Special tariff call charges : Rs 134.00

Actual call charges : Rs 223.00

SMS charges : Rs 63.00

Service charge for calls made to toll free numbers : Rs 31.50

Charge for changing your handset twice and making us send the GPRS and MMS settings twice : Rs 25.00

Charge for not using MMS : Rs 50.00

GPRS charges for browsing the – you don’t want us to disclose, do you? – websites : Rs 175.00

Charge for activating your ring back tone and setting it to the randomly chosen song “Oonche se ooncha banda potty pe baithe nanga” from the film Dum maro dum : Rs 35.00

Sudden termination of the above service upon your frantic request : Rs 250.00

Delivery charge for the confidential SMS from Microsoft lottery : Rs 15.00

(The above mentioned confidential message was ‘Congratulations!! Your number has been randomly chosen by Microsoft lottery and you will be given an amount of 20,000 USD. In order to transfer the money, send us your bank account details and credit card pin number in the following  e mail address microsoft123@gmail.com. Sent via ways2sms.com’)

Charge for talking to the customer care executive (female) :  Rs 344.50

Charge for talking to the customer care executive (male) :  Rs 1.50

Charge for delivering the paper bill to the wrong office address and then re delivering it to the right address : Rs 65.00

Activation of national roaming when you were within the circle and deactivation of it when you were outside : Rs 135.00

Some random charges that is not really worth knowing : Rs 16.00

Charges, which we forgot, why is being charged : Rs 44.00

Activation of all other unwanted services : Rs 90.00

Deactivation of wanted services and then, reactivation of them, upon your request : Rs 120.00

Addition mistake – Rs 47.00

Total – Rs 2234.00

P.S :-

This post is totally fake. The only purpose of this post is to support the author’s false claim that he is a creative person.  

Stepping into the cubicle

The infrequency of updates in this blog has crept up to the standards of Aamir Khan movies. There is a lot to write about, but the busy routine of idling around and sleeping takes away all the time. There is a blogging spree around the corner, but before that, let me just write one about the recent turnarounds. 

So, after the highly enlightening engineering course, (ie, B tech in er.. what was it? Fashion designing? Whatever. Oh, electronics, it was. Anyways, both are highly inter related no?) I prepared and wrote CAT. Quite unfortunately, I couldn't attend my IIM L and IIM K interviews, only because I didn't get an interview call from both of those institutes, very much like the rest of the IIMs also. Almost joined Mudra Institute of communications Ahmedabad, but it didn't work out in the end. I would say, the whole MBA thing got a little too much 'the greatest football player in the world' in the end. Now when I say that all I meant was it got a liitle messy, you would probably want to strangle me, or smack your own head on the wall. I strongly suggest the second option. The unexpected series of events forced me to join for a job. And yea, after my highly commendable efforts in engineering, my parents thought that it was no more a good idea to invest money in my education. Fair enough. So I landed up in the office where I am working now. But not as simple as that.

Getting employed as a software engineer is not easy. First, you have to clear an objective type exam which is, specially designed to check whether you can stare into a computer screen for a fair amount of time, and click on random options, without starting to play solitaire, or browsing the web. That is a little tough, but if you have attended atleast 50% of your engineering lectures, you probably are capable of even watching a race between tortoises, without getting bored. Once you clear that test, you get to attend technical and HR interviews. Now, that's a complicated process. But let me simplify it for you, with an example. Have you seen any of the mutual fund TV advertises? The interview process is very much similar to that. In the advertise, they try to convince you that the best possible way to invest money is their mutual funds. After the ad, they read a statement, as fast as a human being can possibly read. Nobody understands a single word. Not even Rajnikanth. But still, everybody knows what it was all about. If you invest in their mutual funds and lose money, they will not be responsible. Even though totally pointless, it's not possible to avoid that statement in the end of the ad. In the interview, the panel asks you programming questions. You are supposed to answer, or in some cases, write down, the programs that you have learned byheart, the previous night. They might also ask you questions like, 'Why you want to work for this particular company' etc. and you are supposed to praise the company as much as you can. If you are as over promising and under delivering as me, you might also have read the wikipedia page of your company, and might have plenty of facts and figures to state. The whole process is pointless, you know that, the panel knows that. But that's the way things are. It just can't be avoided. 

Getting through the whole process was a wonderful experience. Employed with a software MNC. Looks good on my profile. Marriage profile, of course. I felt that I have also got into this elite group of Information Technology people. But soon enough, I started to realize that nine out of ten people I see in Chennai are working in IT companies. Take a stone and throw it in a random direction, it will surely hit a software engineer. There were even rumors that IT companies have started to recruit stray dogs and cattle, after running out of people. I heard this very, very scary story, last week. A software engineer threw a stone at a stray dog, and that dog, later turned out to be his project manager. Shudder.                        

After I got selected, I had to undergo an online training process. It's objectives were like, to prepare us for the highly competitive work environment and equip ourselves with the essential software technologies. In my case, it served the purpose. After the training, I found myself being well versed with java. I had this profound insight that 'Marjawa' and 'Mitjawa' have actually nothing to do with Java, and the song writer wasn't actually describing his software coding experience, unlike as I thought earlier. I used to be a gifted one, with a natural flair for writing bugs. But things got better, later on. My coding skills improved a whole lot, and I learned two languages. Java and Tamil. Tamil, I can understand while java I can read and speak. That's good enough, I guess.

The only complaint that I have about the office is that I am not allowed to use any browser other than internet explorer. I used to think that IE was only for downloading Firefox.

Jokes apart, office life is so far, so good. Not that I am contented. But still, I am happy with the numerous possibilies that life is offering, at the moment. I have made some good friends and have had a few fun moments. Financial independence feels really nice. Wanderlust is taking over, so some weekend travelling will happen, soon. Looking forward to that. ;-)