Tuesday, October 23

Yet another Birthday post...

Twenty Three?? It has been four years since people called me a teenager. I have already completed a quarter of my life. Working since an year now. I remember last time when i had written this i was still a guy just out of college. freedom was all that had filled my mind. now that very brain is stuck in a 8x6 cubicle, glaring at the monitor for close to 10 hours a day. Then spend 4 to 5 hours traveling. And even my dreams are filled with talks to manager and the team lead. In short, Life has been slow, dull and off late stagnant.
         If i was told in advance that this would be my fate last year at the same time, i would have most certainly been disappointed. This past year has been the most awful experience. I Know i am just about starting my career, but this is not even close to what i had imagined in my worst nightmares. Esp. the past six months after i began working actually has been pathetic to say the least. A work-o-holic team ( So work o holic that they deserved an entire post in my blog, where i rarely write anything), insane amounts of traveling, and sleeps filled with nightmares. This describes my last 6 months. To add to that, days seem to be very long, every morning I look forward to the time I leave office and that seems a long way away (thanks to Einstien's theory of relativity).
         Looking back at the last year, I feel a li'l proud that i came through all this. But it hasn't helped me that the phase hasn't passed yet. It has been so turbulent and hectic that i rarely see my parents(only on weekends), and further resulting in me losing contacts of many many of my mates. My sincere apologies to all of them. Just one positive being, I met a great and a special person, and the friendship has been amazing. A heart felt thanks to her.
          Other than work, CAT had kept my brains busy... but with that finished off 2 days back, i have very less to look forward to other than work. And the fact that even CAT didn't go well, my future looks very very blur.
           But great people have said, A bad start leads to a good end. Hopes, even though very less, are still alive. Time has to pass and this time i hope it passes relatively fast.

Happy 23 buddy!!!

Monday, September 3

Another rant...

Disclaimer: This post is not suitable for everyone. If u think you are going to be offended, stop reading, then STFU and go sing rhymes.

if you are still reading, don't tell me i had not warned.

Ever imagined the feeling of a hot rod being thrust up the ass..?? can't remove it coz its hot and will burn the hands, cant keep it there for obvious reasons..
if u think that is gross, then imagine this...

Made to bend down.. hands and legs bound.. now a red hot rod is thrust up..
Now, this is somewhat similar to what i'm experiencing in the office. I dont really know where i found the analogy, but i sometimes end up comparing myself to a prostitute. inside office i imagine bending down, pants down and let the manager and then the TL have a hearty session... All this for the meager sum they pay me at the end of the month.
And the fun part is, i don't derive pleasure. so it can literally termed as RAPE...
From one project to another, it has been the same case. I travel close to a whopping 100 kms a day all for this shit. The people in the team make the feeling worse. Not a single person whom i can relate to.

1. Manager: 13 years of work experience, working with a team of highly effecient ppl,   he   is the most hard working manager i've come across. he must be wondering where did i find this douche bag?

2. My 4 TLs: Amazingly talented people. minimum of 5 years of experience. they come at 9 in the morning. have tea at 11. go to have lunch at 1:30 and be back exactly at 2. again a break at 3 and then nonstop marathon till 9 in the night. My manager's sweet darlings...... i sometimes wonder how would they make love.. exactly 3 minutes of foreplay.. 5 strokes... done and dusted... get ready for the next day... come on guys have a life...

3. People On site: There are probably 4 of them On site... there is one guy in london..  A certified asshole.. he wants people to make power point presentations for every single doubt we have. and there are others i don't know much about..

All these people mentioned above have one thing in common. they literally love their jobs.. and then there is the other group-

4. rest of the team: the frustrated lot. a group of 3 to 4 people... always talking about how pathetic the project is. Always discussing ways to destroy the project.. the manager's nightmares. I almost head this group. given a chance my manager would have us executed with out any trial. according to him a mistake is considered a cardinal sin. When a deadline is crossed its as if Sita crossing the lakshman rekha.. We are supposed to finish a module in generally 3 days which takes all of 2 weeks for us to complete, we are never short of work and never far away from missing a deadline.

 To top this all, most of my friends are on bench, some are on projects where they are asked not to work.. and others are always nearing a project release and wont have any work. And on top of all of this i travel from one end of the city to the other in peak hour traffic.

There are times when i have felt suicidal, i have planned to smash the monitor on the ground and run circles around the office, or just scream loudly and run away. and it has not changed from the past 7 months.
I fear i'm very close to depression. or the total opposite... turning wild and aggressive.

I have made many blunders in my life... and joining this company has to be the top of the charts.

PS. any suggestions to overcome this is welcome..
PPS: Dont tell time will heal everything... i've been waiting and it hasn't. 

Saturday, March 17

Rahul Dravid and the lost beauty of Slowness...

Like Dostoyevsky and Llosa, he demanded of you to get into the mood for the epic, and prepare for the alternating ebb and tide of runs. His craft portrayed the beauty of slowness, as if he had taken to heart Simon and Garfunkel’s famous song that began with those memorable words: “Slow down, you move too fast...”

The departure of Rahul Dravid from the grand stage of Indian cricket has brought the curtain down on a style of play we as a nation mastered, and then subsequently banished from our cricketing repertoire. In the conscious forfeiting of that style is the saga of the metamorphosis of India, particularly its middle class, from the time its economy was liberalised and its people effaced or suppressed certain attributes of their collective personality.

These were precisely the attributes you required to appreciate Dravid’s batting, the inherent slowness of it, and the ethereal beauty that suffused his craft. Not for him the flashy brilliance that so often defines the ephemeral, the cameo. He left as many balls as he defended dourly, bat and pad close together, taking his time to get his eye in, running singles and twos initially, and then judiciously choosing deliveries to lean into them for a drive, or standing on his toes to flick a four off his pad, as if he were brushing away a fly. His was rarely ever an explosive knock, it almost always mirrored the imperceptible movement of time, slow and steady but always ticking — eventually reaching the century-mark, which he did 36 times over 164 Tests. To relish Dravid’s style you were required to invest your time and patience, and possess a sensibility sensitive to the classical, in art as much as in cricket.

Some of Dravid’s batting essays are to cricket what, say, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Llosa’s The War of the End of the World are to the literary world. Like them, Dravid hoped to conceive his stay at the wicket on a mammoth scale, in terms of endeavour, intent and beauty. He succeeded mostly; at times he failed, as he disappointingly did at the fag end of his career. A typically successful Dravid innings did not have the spectators in raptures, on their feet, for every moment of his presence at the crease. His oeuvre wasn’t of the page-turner kind, those books you thumb through cover to cover on a flight or during the inordinate wait at a railway station for a train long delayed. Like Dostoyevsky and Llosa, he demanded of you to get into the mood for the epic, and prepare for the alternating ebb and tide of runs. His craft portrayed the beauty of slowness, as if he had taken to heart Simon and Garfunkel’s famous song that began with those memorable words: “Slow down, you move too fast...”

Yet his was the slowness that did not evoke a yawn. It was never tedious to watch Dravid. True, he did not have the frenetic pace of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, yet a true cricket-worm was more likely to ensure he did not miss out on a few minutes of Dravid’s innings than he was of his flashy contemporaries. To skip a few paragraphs in Dostoyevsky’s novel is to run the risk of missing out on a captivating dream sequence, or a peeling off yet another layer of the protagonist’s personality, or a subtle step in the progress to the denouement. Every ten runs in a Dravid epic knock were created differently, devoid of repetition other than his copybook defence. A straight bat to the ball that drops at the batsman’s feet is akin to a comma or colon — you can’t redefine its usage unless you wish to turn in a text riddled with errors. Dravid loved to build his innings, albeit without blemishes. It was to render his batting flawless he so often turned to stonewalling. His slowness was deliberate, and it captured the essence of time and its movement. And so you sat and watched Dravid’s slowness, in the expectation of glimpsing a glittering gem.

For a man who played international cricket for nearly 16 years, beginning 1996, averaged an impressive 52.31, and won more matches for India than any, he never received the top billing among the spectators or the advertisers, even though in one-day internationals he scored 10,899 runs in 344 matches. Dravid lacked the flamboyance of Sehwag and Tendulkar, even Dhoni. And he was perhaps always conscious of it.

In his famous Bradman Oration in Canberra, Australia, on Dec 14, 2011, he cavilled at Twenty20, in the self-effacing style he adopted to overpower bowlers: “Given that an acceptable strike rate in T20 these days is about 120, I should probably complain about it the most.” At his retirement, Tendulkar said about India’s arguably best number three batsman, “There can never be another Dravid.”

You agree with Tendulkar not because Dravid’s skills are nonpareil, but because the Indian milieu has changed too dramatically over the last two decades to produce yet another great exponent of slowness. Through his career Dravid was a reminder, a living memory, of an era in which the bat was a tool of art, not a weapon to bludgeon the opponent with. It laid emphasis on planning your innings, of building it run by run, digging in and choosing loose deliveries to dispatch to the boundary, of not lifting the ball in the air and, above all, unmindful of the passage of time. It was India’s predominant style of batting. It was the style coaches wanted to steep their pupils in.

But this style of batting reflecting the endearing charm of slowness diminished in importance and influence because of two important developments. One, post-World Cup victory in 1983, the Indian spectator discovered the one-day format, and the Indian cricket board adopted the format as its principal revenue model. A nationwide TV community of cricket-consumers brought in millions through the selling of television rights to games. A spate of One-day Internationals devalued the importance of Test cricket and its inherent slowness. Two, India opened up its economy, bringing about a sweeping change in the ethos of its people who began to accord primacy to money and profit to the complete exclusion of endeavours impossible to measure monetarily. This gradually spawned a new culture of instant-ness. Its expressions were, and are, instant profit, instant gratification, instant communication, instant food, and, quite naturally, instant cricket, best exemplified by the Twenty20 IPL tournament and its contrived fun. Speed, not slowness, is the essence of this new culture, immediate results its defining principle.

Really, in this milieu, where could Dravid and his art of slowness have fitted in? Dravid was aware of the change in Indian society. To a journalist in Delhi, in a private conversation, he confessed last year, “It is a blessing to have played Test cricket at the time this format still has some meaning.” He echoed this sentiment in his Bradman oration: “We will often get told that Test matches don’t make financial sense, but no one ever fell in love with Test cricket because they wanted to be a businessman. Not everything of value comes at a price.” He went on to add, “As much as cricket’s revenues are important to its growth, its traditions and its vibrancy are a necessary part of its progress in the future.” As he wound up his speech in Canberra, he advocated, “I know it is utterly fanciful to expect professional cricketers to play the game like amateurs; but the trick, I believe, is taking the spirit of the amateur — of discovery, of learning, of pure joy, of playing by the rules — into our profession.”

Yet his retirement, announced before the scrum of national media, had an irony — Dravid will continue to play in the IPL. This fine exponent of slowness, some would argue, should have chosen not to participate in tamasha (showman) cricket. Perhaps there is a contractual obligation to meet, perhaps the lure of money is irresistible to the best of us. Perhaps it is wrong of us to expect him to play the activist even as we ignore injustices around us to make our money. For Dravid, though, you hope he will eventually initiate a course on the beauty of slowness, a beauty our modern existence has shrivelled beyond recognition
                       
                                                         -Ajaz ashraf (A journalist for A Pakistan Daily)

Wednesday, February 29

A rant

As I sit here, in the Gec balcony, listening to the most wonderful songs, I want to sleep on my loved one's lap.. pour out my heart to her... How I miss a person with whom I can have a shoulder to cry, a hand to pat my back, one who can scold me when I make mistakes... I know I have friends... But not someone who can love me no end... And a few more days i'll be all alone... Alone in the place to be for everyone else..... Infy mys... is it the place to be? Oh fuck no...

Sunday, February 12

When Cupid Strikes...

Sitting in a bus by the window, stuck in a jam, frustrated with the Bangalore traffic, swearing i plug in my phone for some music.. Light breeze picks up and the clouds gather. The weather turns Romantic. My phone as though in cue plays a lovely romantic song. i calm down, open the window as lovely cool breeze hits my face. I drift off into a dream.....

The first time i met you, i patiently waited for you. But without even seeing, i had fallen for you, for your voice,for the care, your attitude, the love you showered, everything. And  Seeing you that day made sure that the feelings i had for you made a permanent residence in me.
It was as if GOD had customized you to my requirements..
The grace in your walk, the silky hair that bounced up and down every time you took a step, life was all in slow motion for a split second...your eyes coal black, wandering here and there as if searching for someone , your lips trembling,the nose puckering, the eyelids batting. nothing else mattered for me at that moment. I had decided that you would be the love of my life. My soul-mate i was searching for.
And when you finally saw me, i saw the happiness in your eyes, which i had never seen in anybody. Your little hands shivering from fear, the words flowed hesitantly. Even then the voice felt as if the vocal cords were dipped in a sea of honey.
I never was able to speak properly then as i was lost admiring the Almighty's creation.
how could somebody be so beautiful, so very perfect, so sweet?

And what better way could the journey have started, having an ice cream in Corner house. It was Bliss as i had my 2 loves together. A Death by chocolate, and you sharing it with me.
It was just a week later I proposed my love . From then on life was a joy to live. Every new day had more life in it, and it was a joy to live it and spend it with you.
I relive every date we were on, the fights we had for every small issue, the movie we went, the endless calls, all the lovely texts, the gifts exchanged, those endless walks we had, those insane conversations, those bike rides, the first hug, the first kiss... and now i know why people say Time flies when you are having a great time.. 

It has been exactly 3 years since then and now. I'm sure that i will experience the same feeling i had the first day we met and every single time i saw you from then on...  the same grace, the same trembling lips, same searching eyes, the same batting eyelids and the same honey coated voice to greet me.

I look up to the heavens, one hi-five to god for sending me one of the angels.

                                                                                -to be continued....