Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Wassup Dude

** H.E.L.P M.E. **

There is this company called "Foster Wheeler" with its offices at Chennai and Calcutta . If you work here , or know anybody who does , please drop me a mail and I will be your slave . You say sit , I sit , you say run , I run , you say kill me , I will kill you . Please help me out guys .

PS - if your aunt knows a guy who works in an office a couple of blocks away from Foster Wheeler , thats not exactly a contact .

** EXIT H.E.L.P REQUEST **

So , I made the leap . I have quit my job .

Last week , I called my boss and said the words . I had actually practiced the entire thing , that fiddling with the words , saying it with the right emphasis on words and tones , pausing, the entire setting you know.

So , anyway , now that I am out of it , I have decided to follow my heart . In another month , I will be on my way to Kenya where I intend to be a part of a team and research if Gorillas can be trained to play cricket . Ok , don’t believe the last part .

I have heard the phare "Those who can't, give advices" so many times and it fits me perfectly. So I am going to try my hands at being a consultant now. I am planning to start a small company called Centriti Consulting that would advise educational institutes on marketing.

But the thing which excites me to the most right now, along with the prospect of eating Chinese tonight , and that is making my detour to Leh and Ladakh. Now, those places have been in my heart since the travel bug hit me about 5-6 yrs ago. I plan to make it a trip to clean my soul of vices contracted through living in the so called civilized world. This is going to be my haj to mecca.

I plan to carry my camping equipment including a camper's stove on my back. I ll be staying in the remotest corners of earth and I ll do it all alone. I plan to kill my time reading Henery D. Thoreau's 'Walden' and more importantly Jack Young's 'Guide to Survival in Snow'.

I would take a bus to Manali, stay there for two days and then take another bus to Ladakh the capital of Leh. Then I plan to hitch-hike my way to my desired camping ground. There I would admire the beauty of those snow capped mountains and quiteness of being in the middle of nowhere. But there is one problem, I am not quite used to doing my morning chores in the open, Huh....

Friday, May 1, 2009

A Week That Was

Its been a pretty weird week.


The first day, I was hard at work when as usual, Pepsy came over to have his little chat with me. He started telling me about his evening plans. He told me he was planning to meet up with an old friend of his, who was bringing along three hot girls. They were gonna catch a movie and then go to a pub after that.

"Cool" I said. "Have fun, dude."

He then asked me what were my plans. I told him that I had a little bit of work left and would try to complete as much of it as possible.

He shook his head and said "Loser."

Two other guys, a girl and a computer game called me a loser that day.


The third day, I wasnt in too much of a mood to work. I was arbitly visiting a lot of orkut scrapbooks. I visited the book of this particular friend of mine called Jappy. He had a profile snap of himself with the beach in the background. I left him the following scrap.

"In your profile snap, can you move the dickhead a little bit so that I can see the shore?"

He replied back with this scrap,

"I can see tht u r indeed jealous of the grace and charm of the person who keeps springing up in your orkut picture list, and understandably with a face similar to constipated redwood tree, you would but naturally want to rid the realization of your inadequacies by going on nudging me to remove the picture... cut it out, it aint working buddy... "

I didnt understand much, but I understood why people also call him 'Dickie'.


The fourth day, sometime in the evening, I got an SMS from some weird number which went like this "Hi Daljeet. How are you?"

For some inexplicable reason, I assumed that it was some hot girl, and with a smile I typed back the message "I am doing good. How are you baby?"

She replied back, "I am fine too. Have you had your lunch?"

Her message confused me for a second. I thought I am getting asked out for lunch. That would have been a first aint it. A second later I realized that the number belonged to my mother who had just discovered the art of text messaging.


The fifth day, Monty called me up and reminded me about the bet we had about a girl. We had agreed that we both will fight for a girl and whoever spends time with her or does something to gain her favor would get some number of points. He told me that in the last couple of days, he had talked to her 4 times, messaged her 14 times, played scrabble with her once and had talked her into a movie the following weekend.

"I think I am about 70 points ahead." he said gleefully.

After I was done talking to him, I thought maybe I should open my account and atleast meet up with her. I picked up my mobile and sent her a message "Hey there ! How about meeting up at Barista today... say around 9?"

Back she replies, "Umm... who is this?"


The sixth day, I was hard at work again. I would have opened orkut or my yahoo mail just about 4 times the whole day. Which means, I spent barely 10 minutes in about 9 hours doing something apart from my work.

Thanks to my luck, exactly on those four occasions my boss had walked over to tell me something.

After the 4th time this happened, I decided that I wouldnt let this happen again and I wouldnt do anything apart from working on the presentation for the rest of the day. In fact, I decided I wouldnt even turn my head. Maybe my boss would get impressed that I am so caught up in my work that I couldnt even hear him coming.

So I fixed a frown on my face and stared non stop at the screen.

A little later, I heard someone coming over. I didnt turn around and stared purposefully at the screen. The footsteps stopped near me and someone tapped on my shoulder. Pretending as if I was completely oblivious to the happenings around me, I put on a dazed expression and turned my head.

Pepsy took one look at me, one look at the screen and shook his head.

"Loser", he said.


The seventh day, I was just about to go to leave office when I realized I havent switched off the lights of my room/cabin duh.... I rushed back to switch off the light and instead I bumped my finger and myself on the wall.

As I lay sprawled on the floor, with my index finger smoking as if I had just zapped someone into a frog, the door opened.

"Oh dude, you have started sleeping on office timings" my gulti boss said.


Its been a pretty weird week, I tell you.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Fiendish Operating System

I can now rest in peace. I have got my comeuppance.

Last night I finally managed to wrap up an installation of Ubuntu on my laptop. Minor hiccups aside, things like hardware drivers missing and wireless networking issues, I now actually have two operating system coexisting in peace on this laptop: Windows XP and Ubuntu.

This may seem insignificant to you. But in my little world that is worthy of a Nobel. Now I can use Ubuntu as a light and free operating system to take care of all day to day tasks while Windows can take care of the complicated stuff like downloading Backdoor Trojans and playing Dearth Vader.

This finally puts to rest a long, long war of attrition between Unix and your truly that stretches back almost five years.

One evening, during my last year in school, I suddenly got into a fit of career pangs. All my usual confidence disappeared. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not exactly what you would call a brilliant student.

Now these are the times, when every parent (mine included) wants his child to be an engineer, and I think the biggest mistake I made in my life was to take non-med after class 10th. I couldnt understand a single subject (maybe except English, which was also the only subject whose mark-sheet I would show at home, my parents still wonder, as to why I never got the mark-sheets to the 100's of exams I gave in school).


Everyone with serious job hopes were rushing to their homes after class and locking themselves away with the usual entrance examination preparation materials: Shakuntala Devi, Vedic Maths, Organic Chemistry, old question papers and the like. I had no idea what I wanted with life.

Back in my time if you had non-med, an engineering career was the only option you had in life. The cream got into IIT's or NIT and DCE's the rest into regional and private engineering colleges. But if you didn’t then the going was pretty tough.

Till the time I got out of school I had assured myself that engineering was not my cup of tea and I would save myself the trouble of giving those entrance exams, which caused a lot of uproar in the house and ultimately I went to exam centers only to sleep in the second half of the exam (the first half was reserved for looking at the chicks in the room and by the time I realized they were more interested in the paper than me, I was off to sleep).

And then one weekend morning I lay in bed and decided to quickly overview my career plans for a few minutes. But not for too long as the bread pakoda ran out after 9:30 or so.

Now I knew I couldn’t become a computer engineer to save my life. The Meta syllabus included a moderately difficult course on C and C++. I’d passed through with flying colours scoring one mark more than pass point. (The highlight of the course was watching the professor, a charming and young lady struggle with an early morning class on Objected Oriented Programming, break into a sweat and then finally faint into the arms of a vigilant fellow in the front row. I bunked that class unfortunately.)

I’ve often wondered over the years hence why someone would want a C program that printed out a pyramid of prime numbers. What essential human endeavour struggles for want of good pyramid prime programs?

“Houston we have a problem!”
“We know. Perhaps a particular problem pertaining to the pyramid prime processor?”
“We like the alliteration Houston!”
“Merely making the mundane mirthful mister!”
“Ok cut it…”

I sucked at most forms of programming. And particularly the fancy shmancy prime number, sorting, pyramid type programs.

I got selected for a few non-descriptive engineering colleges. But then what certainty was there that I could make it into one of those engineering firms? They seldom came every year and, even when they did, they picked up one, maybe two people at a go. Was I being foolhardy I wondered, as I lay in bed with an eye on the clock.

Then later that evening I decided that I must hedge my risk. I told my parents that Foreign is where I want to go and bought myself some thick books on SAT, which was also close-by.

So I asked my tution teacher, what I could do on a war footing. The threat loomed large that I would have to give SAT and then do an MS and PhD because I couldn’t get a job.

“Unix man. Unix is the way to go man. That and Networking. Just do a diploma on these from NIIT and you'll find yourself a decent job.”

For one whole month I sat hunched over a UNIX manual and a huge textbook on Networking, that I borrowed from my tution sir to get a hang of what I am about to do.

Who was that networking by? Ah yes. Tennenbaum. Andrew Tennenbaum I think.

After a month I thought I was ready to try out some of my newly learnt computing skills on my home computer, that was a bad day.

Two hours later I was back in my room pulling out my guide to the SAT under the bed and already mouthing words like apothecary and apothegm fighting back the tears.

It was the worst thulping by an open source operating system I have ever received in my life.

Why were there backslashes everywhere? Why was the program editor such a cold-hearted bitch? Why do I have to press seven keys simultaneously to scroll down one page? Why? Why? Why weren’t things like the way its said in the manual:

It was a futile struggle. I was seeing those asterix's and hashes even in my sleep.

I went on to do my bachelors degree in something called Mass Communication, that I had no idea what it was, but I took it anyway as a cousin doing it told me you dont have to study at all for this course. Those three years sailed smoothly with a few pleasant memories. Then I went on to become gainfully employed against the fears of my parent.

For close to half a decade I never crossed my path with Unix ever again.

Till last night. After much recommendation from a friend I decided to give this Ubuntu thing a shot. I followed the manual by the letter. I slipped in the DVD, booted from the disc, played around with my partitions a little bit, set up a root user and finally waited with bated breath while the installation happened.

As of now everything except the sound card and the PPPOE connection for the internet at home seems to be working fine.

I could try to get them to work too. I checked the online user forums and there was a wealth of information such as this response from an Ubuntu expert:

This is bug 2825 (http://https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?i d=2825) . The work around is to ~# ln -f /etc/pppd/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

To which someone replied:

I can confirm this bug. I am using a tap0 bridge to emulate PPPoE on a Globespan chipset-based USB aDSL bridge and the latests stable eciadsl-usermode drivers (which, btw are not in Universe). It would be nice to have an updated pppd perhaps backported from Dapper.
I know that Debian’s choice of using kernel-mode PPPoE makes rp-pppoe unnecessary, but I wonder if it would be possible to update rp-pppoe to 3.7 for those that still in using it.

I laughed heartily and decided I was ok without the sound.

So for now, between me and Unix, its even.


Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Why I bought five

At the Naga stall, at the Annual Shilp Mela, there was this girl assisting her mother ( I presume). Normally, friends and I refer to Nagas (and other North-East Indians) as “Chinks”, going by Dilli lingo. But I wont do that for her. No. This girl was pretty, petite, dainty, and what eyes! Not flashily dressed or anything; just a simple pair of jeans, and a no-show grey sweat shirt. But, the elegance...!Now, “Chinks” are normally pretty trendy (markedly fashion abreast), and smart; but there are only a limited minority who manage to find and hold the attention of the North Indian male (unless in males you want to count the “Girl is girl” lech). This one would be found very high on this minority list.

She and her mother had a hard-dried-and-painted-flowers stall at the Mela. The flowers were attractive as she, varnished in dry, shiny hues of gold, silver, and often a whole variety of shades. But there was one on them that stood out, just like she from the other Chinks. It was a dry-painted four-petalled crimson, with a deep red stalk and a gold lining at the edges of the (wafer-like) petals.“How much for this one?”, I asked.“Ten rupees.”, she replied smiling the most angelic smile any girl could smile.“Ten for one?!

That’s too expensive.” Smile or no smile, I care for my wallet!“You can have this one for five”, she said, mesmerisingly, pointing to a tender-looking off-white, papery flower, with a burnt-brown centre.“How long will that stay alright?”, I asked guided by the scepticism that the flowers’ apparent fragility filled me with.“That would depend upon you, how you can handle it.”, she said, in a statement more deep than I think she meant it to be. I took five of those from her. As I handed her the money, she gave me the balance, in no hurry, as though she was allowing me the time to ponder.

“Depends upon how you can handle…”.

“The Mela is on for another two weeks, isn’t it?”, I asked.

She smiled, and nodded.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

TO DE-PFAFF THE WORLD

faff: To keep speaking pompously and with a lot of jargon , when in fact you don't have a clue of the topic at hand. Often excercised by Business people (mostly MBAs), public speakers, HR guys, politicians etc.
1] The CEO got up late to prepare for the presentation and ended up faffing like mad on the podium.
2] In an interview , when you've said enough "I don't know"s , its time for faffing.
- From UrbanDictionary.com

If you're an MBA or deal with a lot of MBAs, faffing is second nature. No, seriously.

Now this post is not going to be pfaff-bashing, pfaff-eulogizing or telling people how to pfaff (the last one, though, I promise to write on soon). What this post will be all about is imagining a world without pfaff, and how much simpler life would be if we didn't beat about the bush.

Imagine, for instance, the mother of all pfaff situtations, placement interviews in BSchools. I have been visiting a few of them to hire and frankly most of them just put me to sleep. Let's take a dialogue between Prospective Employee (PE) and Recruiter (R). Let's call the institute Management Institute of India (MII).

R: So, tell me something about the subjects you have studied at MMI, PE.

PE: Well, I majored in marketing, and learnt a variety of subjects such as branding, general marketing, advertising, media, consumer behaviour, etc.

R: Hmm, I see. And do you think these will help you at our company? For instance, you say you studied branding. How do you think that will help you?

PE: Undoubtedly, sir. In today's marketplace, it is imperative to look from the consumer's point of view. The brand essence that he carries forward in his mind is of utmost importance, it can make or break his decision to invest in your product or not. Hence building a brand, maintaining it, etc, are vital, and I believe the skills that I have imbibed during my study at MII will help me greatly, and help the brand grow as well.

R: Impressive. You were an engineer before this, according to your CV? A mechanical engineer?

PE: (oh-oh) Yes, sir, I was...

R: And after that you went and did a software job, and after 10 months you decided to do an MBA in marketing...? How do you justify that?

PE: Well sir, it's like this. When I started out to do my Engineering, there were a wide variety of options in front of me and I decided that this would be a safe career path, after which I could choose anything I wanted. At the end of engineering, I decided to go for a software job because it was a lucrative field. Of course, it is not as if all of my four years went to waste. My stay at college was invaluable to help me inbibe analytical skills, which I carry forward even today.

R: Impressive, PE. I think you will be an asset to our company. We would like to make you an offer, do you have any questions?

PE: Sir, what would my salary be like?

R: Your cost to company will be 9.7 lakhs per annum

PE: (kickass!) Sir, how much will that translate to per month?

R: Well, it depends on your performance and the company's performance, but I assure you, our in-hand is on-par with what the best in industry offers.

PE: It's been a pleasure, sir. Thank you so much.

R: Good luck!

==

Now, cut to the same conversation happening without all the gas.

==

R: Dude, what did you do out here at MII for two years?

PE: Laid a few people, learnt how to make better Powerpoints and speeches, a bit of guitar, Stanley Kubrik movies, Deep Purple's music, and stuff like that.

R: Why on earth should we hire you?

PE: Dude, listen, I may not have the greatest CGP thingummy, but you can bet your corporate ass that I can sell.

R: You sound pretty sure and confident. I like that. What did you do in your internship?

PE: Flirted with the other temps, and gassed out a few models and impressed higher management.

R: Hehe, buttkickin, dude! We're hiring you.

PE: Sweet. How much are you gonna pay me?

R: You'll get 45,000 in hand per month. Plus some money when you get really old and all - some PF crap.

PE/R: (laughs)

R: Though, I'll take up your offer only if --- is offering me less. No hard feelings, eh?

PE: Haha, sure dude! I understand! I wouldn't be in this shitpot interviewing nutters like you too if I had my way! Chal, man, it's been great. See ya!

See how simple and transparent it is? No need to build up a corporate facade, no need to use words that are over 6 letters, and no need to pretend to be a genius. Everything is truthful, in-your-face and real. And it's all over about in about 120 seconds.


Another good exercise is to read interviews with CEOs of companies that have recently undergone a logo change. They spew out so much bovine feces, it's not remotely funny and you'd want to drown under the repugnant puke of corporate pfaff. Youthful identity? Energy? Symbiosis? Who the heck are you kidding? The true reason people change logos is just to create a bit of noise and to remind people that they're still around. Youthfulness? Give me a break!

Another brilliant paper I read: After 6 pages of pfaff, graphs and figures, the earth-shattering conclusion: "Young children in India like watching television". Oh, no! Really! And I thought they spent all their time solving nuclear physics equations. Oh, you've really opened my eyes now!

Imagine if all rhetoric and gas were wiped out from the world.

After every terror strike, Manmohan Singh would just say, "We have no clue who did this, and we're not likely to find out, really. Just insure yourselves!"

After a controversial Ind-Aus test match, Dhoni would say, "See, Ricky really is a bastard, and I hate the stench of him when we get onto the field. That Clarke catch was not really a catch, and he effin' knows it as well as I do that we deserved to win!"

During the inauguration ceremony for new MBA students, the director would say, "Hey there, guys. You've paid a good sum to learn a lot of gas, which you might as well have done from Wikipedia for free. All we are is really a placement facilitation organization with a few frills. Join a few committees, have a girlfriend, have fun, mate!"

During the convocation ceremony, "I told you so!"

Hard Disk vendors on Lamington Road, "Yeah, will last for about a year, and then you can come back and buy another one from us."

So there we are. How we would love the world to be a gas-free, pfaff-free place. Now excuse me while I go and write a mail to my boss explaining why I couldn't finish the project because I was involved in an "intellectual literary activity which would lead to eyeballs and appreciation by SEC A category graduates and post-graduates which would inturn lead to networking possibilities" (viz, wrote this blogpost).