Rainy Day

We Calcuttans need to wake up to a fact. The MET department is correct, on certain accounts.

I agree we have grown up at a time when the Calcutta weatherman had no equipments and most of his " forecasts" were pure guesses. I agree that on most accounts when the forecasts predicted a severe shower and our mothers would arm us with the "raintime attire" which would comprise of the following:

a) a yellow Duckback raincoat which smelt like the car tyre and the buttons of which would invariably fail during a quick shower

b) an umbrella which could conversely be used to hit out worst enemies at school

c) if the above to failed to do their needful service, a Coldarin

However on most of these occasions there was no scope of using these tools as there was no downpour as promised.

Maximum that did occur was a slight drizzle. That of course did not make us use any of the given array of equipment.

Funnily enough, the days when you did not take that umbrella would be that fateful day when the sky would decidce to tear down. Not having the umbrella would mean you could take a walk back home instead of taking the bus or the auto. Yes, there would be red noses and an immense amount of sneezes to take care of later, but who cares?

This Monday was one such day. No, its not one of those days when i was not carrying my umbrella. In fact i have a brand new one. But yes it was definitely one of those days when I passed some frivolous comments about how worthless our Calcutta weatherman is and why his prediction of a cyclone will not be anything more than a slight drizzle and breeze. Hence i braved all odds and went ahead.

While sitting in the cozy confines of office I could hear the occasional window pane breaking and tree breaking but the actual tumult was far from what my imagination could even begin to fathom.

It was late afternoon when most offices called it a day due to power cuts (trees had fallen on high tension wires) or water entering premises. There was no conveyance whatsoever. Buses and cabs refused to go even when paid at a premium simply out of fear that they might be hit by a chance tree or lamp post. The look of the city was essentially bare. Trees had fallen all over the place. A bus stand was smashed to bits. Hoardings stood naked as the advertisement sheets had been torn to shreds. And hundreds of people were walking on the roads, in that perfect zombie walk you find only in Holocaust movies. Shoes in one hand, trousers rolled up to the knee, an umbrella precariously dangling in the other hand, they were walking. They kept to the middle of the road avoiding the trees and other allied items which might endanger their lives. The few vehicles which were plying were being mobbed.

I myself stopped a few cabs asking for a lift. By this time my umbrella was broken, I was soaked, and I hated it. After long trudging through mud and muck, above broken branches and lamp posts I finally reached home to some hot coffee and noodles.

So, lesson learnt: Do not mistrust the weatherman

Half life

Maggi in the microwave

A sandwich bite’s allowed,

No spread out platter

No time for dessert

I am running; I am running,

Have to get up on that bus

Can’t let it go, Leading this half life

Yesterday, today and tomorrow

Disconnected..disturbed

Losing my temper

Losing my soul

So many special people

No time or words for them

Losing myself

Leading this half life

Yesterday, today and tomorrow

Gloom

My company eats my salary for breakfast, my happiness for lunch and my peace of mind for dinner.

Employers around the world are making life hell for employees. Suddenly the same " human resource" who were assets to the company have become their liabilities. As our Inbox is spammed by Boss/Company bashing messages and forwards the truth is that the employee is left at the end of the day like the donkey who toiled breaking his bones and still got water and peanuts for the day meal!

Okay lets not get into the economics of world finance, lets concentrate on our country. This was the year that some unfortunate people like me and my classmates graduated and went out into the big bad world looking for that elusive dream job. Thank God we were sane enough to expect that our first jobs would not be our dream jobs! However none of us had expected to be hit by such a nightmare.

Most companies went on a hiring freeze. People are throwing jargon at random, and the funny thing is that most people are believing in them. "you cannot expect a good job in this gloomy market"; "We are unlucky to have been hit by recession" etc. etc.

A report shows that in the past few months " recession" is the most popularly used word on the internet. Just goes to show the depressed environment that we are living in. But the fact of the matter is that India has not been hit by the recession at all. What exactly is the recession? A recession is a decline in a country's real gross domestic product for two or more consecutive quarters, according to http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/recession

Hence before our country even went from one quarter to another how exactly can you say that we are facing a recession? What we are facing is a slowdown, and not a recession. Anyway how does it matter, because our employers are using the R-word as the alibi to do almost anything to the employees. Cut pay, cost cutting, lay offs, and a million other fancy sounding things which basically leave us all screwed up at the end of the day. It is a smart ploy that these guiys have come up with but what they do not realize is that the wheel of fortune shall turn. The same employees who they treat like trash, are actually the asset, and if you do not value your own asset, you are in for trouble.

The Crusoe life

Living the life of Robinson Crusoe is tough. Especially if you are not living on an island. And you can just walk out of the door and get a sealed pack of potato wafers.

The fact that I was going to be catapulted into such a scenario came to me as a divine sign a few days ago. My laptop started acting funny. This came at an inopportune time as I had still not recovered from the grief of the sad demise of my desktop computer a few months back. I saw a huge amount of lively music and wacky photographs in a heap of dump and I could do nothing about it.

No intravenous or intensive care could do anything about it. So we indulged in a painful (for me) euthanasia and my friend through school and college lay dead., reduced to a piece of furniture.

Now my laptop had managed to salvage a part of my music and photo collection (I have lost my complete Pink Floyd and a few birthday bash pics though). So when my laptop started acting funny I had the biggest butterflies doing all sorts of things in my tummy. The power wasn’t coming. The screen would not shine bright the moment I hit the power button like it used to. I was totally angry, frustrated and generally dissatisfied with life. I wanted to shout at someone, but it felt like I was simply filling in a lot of noise in a cocoon and all the outer world could see was a Brownian motion experiment in process.

I was doing all sorts of social activities but I felt like no one could understand what I was going through.

Anyway that issue got resolved after I plucked out the battery and wiped off a huge amount of dirt with the help of painting brushes (Tip # for all those facing similar laptop problems)!

Today morning the Crusoe syndrome came back to haunt me, in an all new avatar. This time my other favourite gadget was on the firing line. My phone has stopped working. But it is not the fault with my phone. Vodafone has suddenly decided that they do not want to earn revenue through a valued customer like me. So what do they do? They stop all kind of calling facilities on my phone. I cannot make calls, no one can call me, the works. And it is a trouble my entire office is facing! The entire bloody series tends to fall into the trap.

I cannot call anyone, or receive any calls. Just goes to show how dependent I am on the phone. I am cut off from all civilization. I mean I can very well walk out and talk to people but I cannot do it from the comfort of my space. So , yeah, Crusoe had one hell of a time. I wonder how he lived through it.

just wondering..

There is a land A. In land A there is a king. The king is old. He has ruled the land for many a long years. Now he is weak. His ministers who once swore by him now have the audacity to raise their voices against him.

But he was not this weak old wreck always. In his heyday he was vibrant and rebellious. He had overthrown the king who was ruling then. He did not like the myopic view that the then king took. He thought the then king had a myopic view and there was the need of change. So he did all he could, young blood was flowing in his veins, he was strong. He overthrew the powers that be.

But today he is old. His own eyesight has become weak. He does not enjoy the authority he once commanded on the others. Now there is a new kid on the block. He speaks up, he is violent, he is ready for a fight. The king coils back. All the others who did not know how to oppose this king side with the kid.

The king is old but he is wise, he has seen the world and he has learnt. There were things he had done when he was young which he knows are wrong. He goes back on them; he brings in fresh views, sometimes contrary to his views of the young age.

Is it fine to keep land A under the old king? In that case A remains stable, there is less violence, A improves from the state that it is in. Or should the new kid take on the reins. A is put through a whirlwind again, there is instability, uncertainty.

Will the question ever be answered?

Life: School

Moving from one phase of life to the other always involves some amount of pain. However I am by nature an optimistic person, hence whenever I have moved to different phases I have tried to look beyond the immediate pain that is being caused to me to look at the bigger picture. The bigger picture being the next phase.

However this does not mean that these painful moments have not been painful to me per se. They have always come back to haunt me at a later time.

I remember the school farewell. I don’t remember shedding tears though copious amounts were escaping from the eyes of everyone around me. I was too excited to get out of school, to be attending college. It is true that I had some precious friends there. Friends whose weddings excite me, who call me at midnight on my birthday till date, who I could still spend hours chatting and laughing with. I knew I would miss them. But the prospect of a new life was so adventurous that at that point it seemed utterly pointless to be crying.

I had had my share of fun in school. There was nothing more to it after that, and deep down inside I sort of knew that that life had reached its point of saturation. Perhaps the end of school was coming at a good time, optimum to my understanding. Perhaps stretching it beyond the point where it was would make the entire experience distasteful. I wonder…

I miss school, true. However I would not go to the extent of saying that “ I wish it would never end” or “ it was the best part of my life” etc.

The sports classes were fun. The clash between the four houses was fun. I remember how completely vicious we would become when it came to defending the name of our house! No wonder Harry Potter was such a hot favorite with us back then. Our school organized several competitions among the houses. It could be sports, debate, drama almost anything. And the best of friends became worst of enemies during these. But even that was a lot of fun . I miss that.

I miss trying to hide our tiffin from that perpetually hungry girl, or telling the teacher that I forgot to get the Atlas so that she would turn us out of the class and we could chat undisturbed there, or drawing the cartoon of the teacher right under her nose or doing a million other things you do only in school.

I miss doing all sort of crazy things that I have done in school.

I remember our school had to get the classroom walls repainted because of all the unparliamentary stuff we had written on them with permanent markers. I remember slapping a junior because she panicked during a fire drill and would not run down the staircase. One of my teachers thought I would never get admission in any college. I remember going back and telling her she was right, I got into a university instead. I remember walking out of the morning assembly, bunking classes because we felt like it, experimenting with random chemicals in the lab, thinking we were saving the planet while we made recycled paper for nature club, cheating at toss to our advantage in a Throwball match, hiding Archie’s comics behind History books in class, mimicking each and every teacher and school staff.

There were a few teachers who were a complete pain to be with. Then again there were others I respect till date and would still touch their feet on the road if I ever meet them.

One thing which was there in school which was quite a unique experience was the “I don’t care” attitude we could afford to live with. We did not have any worries on our minds. We did not think of deadlines, and bosses and career progression. We just lived life for the moment. I sometimes wonder how dangerously we lived. Who knows.. I could be rusticated for being caught bunking class and playing in the field. How silly we were to expect not being caught in the first place!

Then again there are loads of things that I half remember. Like there was this girl who smoked cigarettes in the washroom. Then gain there was a girl who had fallen in love with Akbar ( yeah the Mughal emperor). Teachers were bothered about the hemlines of our skirts! (why? Oh why?) There was a club which had only three members among the entire school population. There was a teacher we nicknamed Medusa because her hair looked like a million snakes and a hundred other odd things.

And like all things it came to an end. I am still in touch with my friends. We regularly meet up and spend time, and I know for sure this is for life. I have a few vey special friends who are from school and I know we will always be so. And these memories are with me. So why should I be pained because it’s over? I’m happy I went to the school I went to, and made friends with the people who are my friends. I guess that is all that matters.

New lingo..

Why have we become so driven by acronyms? Everything we talk about, we see, we use, places we go to needs to have a shorter name. It is sort of like giving a nickname, only it really is not so.

If you are not part of the acronym churning crowd you are not “in”. You must Lol and not laugh out loud. When we have a chat window open at work, and suddenly there is some high priority work which needs to get completed we inform our friends that we’ll “brb” and not be right back or better still they would say “ttyl” which is short for talk to you later. I must confess the first time I got that reply I was stumped! I had no clue what that meant. When I asked my friend he was aghast at my lack of knowledge.

This immense shortening of expressions is not only restricted to informal modes of communication. It has percolated into formal modes of communication too. In an extremely formal letter sent via e-mail you find “KFA” or “FYI” which are actually respective acronyms for “Kindly find attached” and “For your Information”.

We swear by the ATM, it is our life line; but very few of us really know that ATM is not Any Time Money or All Time Money but it actually is Automatic Teller Machine.

When you are out in a fab (which itself is a shorter version of fabulous) place hanging you do not check out nice looking people but you indulge in “NSP” which is nayan sukh prapti (Hindi for feasting your eyes). Things are LS (low standard) and btw (by the way) we are SC (super cool). Then of course there is "toldja" (told you) and "wassup" (what's up, which itself is pretty short!)

Hanging out with friends reminds me of this conversation I was having with a friend the other day. We had not met in a long time so she wanted to meet up. I asked her to suggest a place and she said” why don’t we meet at SCM?” Now my knowledge leads me to believe that SCM is Supply Chain Management which is a very painful paper and I would rather not get back to it. So I looked at her with a bewildered-this-totally-beats-me expression and she rolls her eyes to inform me that she meant “South City Mall”! Seriously?

Why do we have to make LSD( life so difficult ) ?