Thank You

I want to thank my friends who keep me away from my biggest fear, loneliness & sometimes from myself when I get scared.

I want to thank my parents for being my touchstone and compass in the truest sense of the word.

I want to thank my teachers for teaching me humility even when I wasn't ready to learn.

Faith

A JUNOS clock on my table
tells stories I want to hear

The Raging Rhinos shirt drying on the cable
I can hear my mates cracking up - loud & clear

Dressed in blue I cheer
as the Men in Blue lift the Cup

Draped in scarlet I gasp, 'O dear!'
as Kumble's men tumble at the cusp.

A billion Indians rise, and so do I
when the anthem plays... Jai hey!

The shoulders seem broader, the head held high
when the world rises for... Jai ho!

The dash of vermilion on the foreheads at the temple
The women in burqas at the masjid

The splash of vibrant pagdis at the Gurudwara
He stands up on his tiny feet & bows his head before the Lord,
he' s but a li'l kid.

Cover her pretty face in a veil she needn't, its because she chooses
Tie his hair in a turban he needn't, it's because he belongs

I'm a Braveheart, I take the road less travelled
I'm a Star, I stand out in the crowd

Who am I kidding...
I take the trodden path, it takes me home
I don't stand out, I long to belong.

It makes me part of an identity
makes me feel good,
gives me strength,
makes me look beautiful,
makes me proud,
makes me belong.

Numerous are the ways of expressing it
Varied are the ways it is perceived

FAITH is a such a wondrous thing
It is but easy to be deceived.

And the winner is... The Swiss Army Knife!

Every year since I started working, the products that I was working on would get nominated for these awards and it was made out to be a big deal, but we never won. That is until now....

http://www.bestofinterop.com/2009/#infrastructure

And this is even more special since I got to do so much this time around.

It's a fine feeling!

Click!

So we went on this lil trip to my friend Suyog's grandmas' houses in their village near Udupi last weekend & what a weekend it turned out to be! I thought of many ways of capturing or describing this trip in words & then decided to just put down in words a few pictures in my mind which captured the essence & all the fun we had.

- The history: 1 month before the trip
- Close to 200 emails
- 1 weekend, Suyog will play host
- 15 people on board

- Day 0: Friday
- I rush back from office, pack my bags, gobble dinner & say goodbye to my folks at home
- Its drizzling in Majestic, Ravi's firefighting issues at work on the phone, the rest of us are sipping LMN, waiting for the rest.
- Manju's arrived but none of us realize she's Manju.
- Priya, Jag & Mesh make it just in time.
- Call from work telling me I haven't done a good enough job at work. I wanna kick myself. Will I ever be different?
- Snuggle under the blankets in the Volvo.

- Day 1:
- I wake up to find that we have reached NIT Suratkal.
- We get off at Dekkatte to get into our Red Bull TT which takes us through Neverland to lil Ajji's house
- Viggi is confused - should he stay back with the girls & miss out on all the fun with the guys? Or vice versa? Vik & Jag don't have a choice.
- We get off at Dodda's house. It takes my breath away, I've never seen anything like it. The huge shady courtyard, the wooden trunkfuls of rice, the plethora of vessels of different sizes for measuring rice, the antlers, the sautekaayi's hanging from the ceiling, the sun swept backyard with the well, the cats lazing around nonchalantly, Suyog's tales of his childhood antics, the attic... I can go on & on.
- Krishnan & me try to get to Kavi while he's .... Funny!
- We fret & fumble over the wooden locks/latches on the main door. That was really neat!
- A mountain of heavenly Idlis & Neer dosas vanish within moments as Granny gasps with surprise.
- Its DC all the way to Murudeshwara. Pati Fauj mein... being the highlight.
- The Shiva statue & the chariot of the Sun God are by far the most imposing structures I've seen besides Gomateshwara & South Block. They exude power of the kind I crave for.
- It's burning hot & we are all sweating in bucketfuls. We run to the Kamat hotel nearby where we find an AC room. God bless the inventors of the AC, I experienced relief of this kind only once later on this trip.
- The Someshwara beach(I think) looks really inviting, I wanna go & play ball all evening. We go crazy in the water & then play 3 games of some very competitive volleyball followed by some mindless giggling & running on the beach. Jayaraman is cramped & Raghuram goes "Koi veterinary padha hai kya yahan pe?".

The worst part about playing in the sea is the phase after you get out of it. Sand gets lodged in places it shouldnt & the salt & the dampness make sure its just the right amount of stickiness to get to your nerves.

- I run for a quick bath the minute we touch base. The relief after getting rid of the salt & the sand is what I was talking about earlier in this post. All the mattresses are laid out on the floor & its sooo warm n cozy! We then lay out all the food, finish dinner & then off we go on a late night hike through the village. It's fun to see even Krishnan a bit petrified of the darkness & the wilderness. Suyog cooks up this wonderful Koggiraja story & the Human-shaped tree. Ooooo I just love it! Just the feeling of being up with friends all night & sharing stories, experiences. esp scary ones is so much fun! Krishnan & I try to watch at leat 5 movies one after the another but we just cant seem to get though even one for more than 10 minutes, so we decide to go to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. He's changed a bit now, in a good way. Life's funny that way, eventually gets to you.

-Day 2:

- I wake up to find some awake, most still fast asleep & Mesh prancing around feeling very proud of something only she knows. I've seen her getting into this mood a few times before, so I know that asking her would be spoiling it, so I just let her be, watch her & smile to myself. She seems almost oblivious of us, like in a trance or something. Something tells me its gonna stay this way all day.

- After lazing around on the bed, many glasses of tea, a lot of chatting & many photos, we head for breakfast to the other house. Ive never believed in ice-breakers. I mean how can just a line, a remark or a question break the ice bet'n 2 strangers? It takes time & effort for that to happen. But I'm proved wrong here. Just the one remark from Vikesh made Pi a part of the group in a way that nothing else could have. I'm very grateful... for all this.. everything. Touchwood.

- After Udupi, we head out to St Mary's island. Pleasant, serene, peaceful.

- On the way back home in the bus. I wanna chat all night again but this time sleep gets the better of me & I just can't keep my eyes open after some time. Mesh goes "Esh..... Esh.... Utho Esh" but in vain.

Thanks Suyog! I don't think Im gonna forget this for a while.

What if...

... the TV was never invented?

I started thinking on these lines when I was reading this book titled 'Cosmos'. It's a wonderful book about the history of astronomy, & it's packed with these fantastic lil stories & anecdotes about how someone discovered something in the sky one day & things like that. It seemed so exciting, & I started wondering about how many times I have looked at the sky. I wondered why I never got any of these simple questions about the sky, stars & planets.

This thought stuck in my mind & then over a period of about a couple of weeks morphed into 'why don't I ever find out the answers to the questions in my mind?'. If I think about it, almost all the stuff I know today, I've learnt because either someone taught me that, or told me about it or I just happened to come across it while reading a book, or watching TV or during a conversation - basically I was never looking to find out the answer to a question; either I had to, or just happened to find out.

And then over the next couple of weeks, that thought morphed again into 'would I do that if there was no TV?'. Sounded a bit silly to me, but the fact remains that I do watch a LOT of TV. I mean I wouldn't even be writing this right now. I would've been watching it.

So here's a lil experiment. Every time I'm about to go watch TV, I'll ask myself 'what if there was no such thing as TV?' & then lets see what happens. I'll probably write about the outcome after a month or so.

Chatter

You know it's been a while since I chatted away with someone for hours together. So let me do it now!

So I've been here in California since the past 3 weeks or so, & it's been a bit different this time around. First of all I came here with so much of stuff to do I felt my brain was gonna explode. Travel, explore, trek, drive, stay up all night, gorge on Pizza, cheesecake, ice-cream, subs, chips & soda & watch movies, shop, meet up with people, O & yes some exams & work too. Needless to say there's been very li'l time for anything else(donno what that is though).

But at the end of it all I guess I managed to get it all covered, well almost. I messed up one exam, got blocked at work a li'l bit, didn't really explore, but nothing serious that the Pizzas couldn't make up for!

And then, this time it wasn't new, it didn't feel like I was 'away', just felt like I was coming back to something.

Another difference was that this time I bumped into so many people I knew! I mean I just loved it. At some store, restaurant or at the movies, you know you just run into 'em. I don't think I've bumped into so many people even back home! O well, I guess I stay really far away from the city.

Met my sis, the one I'd met 2 years back the day she landed here, & boy has her life changed. Met this other friend, an ex-colleague whose life's changed in a pretty dramatic way too, but he so hasn't & in each of the above cases, it's good to see 'em both where they are now.

And obviously, when you meet people, & you find out all that they've been through, you tend to think about yourself & try to recall what the hell you've been up to during the same time. So I got down to it too and it wasn't too bad after all. Also read this stupid book, which I loved btw, but what was annoying was that I didn't wanna like it! Something somewhere touched a chord or a nerve or something.

And today, you know how it feels? I don't feel I've done or seen or been or known anything great, but it's been good, good enough really, & I can keep the smile on, a little longer.

It's like what Gump said,

"Bubba: Have you ever been on a real shrimp boat?
Forrest Gump: No, but I've been on a real big boat. "


And I guess that's all I have to say about that ;)


Thanks for listening. So how've you been?

How's it out there?

A novel concept I came across recently was an internet forum where you could talk about, rate, rant, rave & review your workplace. Criticat & Glassdoor are trying to reveal the truth behind companies where anyone can talk about their experience with a certain company.

I've come across user-review sites for electronic gadgets, cars, bikes, books, so why not your workplace?

What is questionable though is the accuracy of the information on these sites. But then, as with any other site which is dependent on its users for content, the quality & the utility of the information on these sites will improve as the user base grows over time.

Full marks for the idea though.

Blogging on the move

I tried this new Firefox 3 add-on called ScribeFire, which is a blog editor that integrates completely with my Firefox browser. I just need hit F8, type out my blog & hit 'Publish', & that's it! The editor has all the options for adding pictures, videos, links, the works.

O and hey, it's exactly 3 years since I started working! Hi-5s to Girish & Vikesh who did the same, 3 years back.

Cheers to everyone!

Dial F for Food

As I lay on my bed with a cheerful book in my hand on Ugadi, with a cool gentle wind lapping at my feet, the proverbial mind wandered & I found myself in my Granny's house during my class 6 summer vacations.

It was an average middle class south Indian household. We did not normally have breakfast and managed with two cups of coffee. This was because lunch was eaten very early, around 10 am, and it was a substantial meal. Rice and sambar, rice and rasam, rice and curds, vegetables, appalam, sandigay, mor mozhaga and pickles.

On the days when it was a holiday and the folks remained at home, there was a second lunch around 1 pm which consisted of rice, curds and pickles. We joined the elders for tiffin served at 3 pm and had the appetite to wolf down dosas, idlis, adais, vadas and similar delicacies. Dinner was again rice-based and similar to lunch. In between, there were snacks to be had.

My granny used to say that I was a growing boy, used to fret a lot, and therefore the snacks had a special significance. These were mostly crisp murukkus, thengol, thattai, manoharam and so on. You could conveniently pop them into your shorts' pockets and run out to play, distributing them to your friends or exchanging them with the goodies that they had brought from their homes.

This procedure of constant eating was called poha vara which, roughly translated, meant 'going and coming' - we were eating all the time, whether going or coming.

Despite eating so much all day, I never fell ill, lost my appetite or put on weight(even if I did, I'm sure I didn't notice).

This was also the time when my obsessive addiction to all kinds of pickles began. My granny had.... I donno how many varieties of pickles all stacked up in pingani (porcelain) jars on top of the kitchen closet. But I was allowed to taste just 1 variety of pickle with each meal, & that too only with curds. So after she had served me the curds, she would ask me to select which pickle I wanted & would then serve me exactly one spoon of that variety. And those decisions... to decide which pickle to select, were probably the toughest decisions I had made during my entire childhood life.

I can never understand how pickle could be anything but just GREAT for anybody's health.

More on food... next time.

Raj Pari

वो है इक अनोखी, परी जो है उतरी
अपने ही हाथों से, जादू है करती
उसके ख़यालों में, इक प्यारी सी दुनिया
जहाँ चमकीले रंगों में, सौंधी सी खुशबू हो कोई

मछलियों से है वो बातें करती
मीठी झपकियों में सपनों में टहलती
और उन सपनों में मिलती फरिश्तों से कोई

प्यार की थपकियों से मुझसे बतियाती
भीड़ों में खामोशी है दिखलाती
मेरे सन्नाटों में
खुशियों की जैसे हो झड़ी

ये तो धुन है सरगम की
है ये सरगम बूंदों की
ये तो बूँदें है खुशियों की

भिगो दें अगर...
तेरी किस्मत हो बड़ी

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Wiki

Well I guess I have done all that I can do, said all that I can say, and given as much as I could give. I've played my part as best as I could with the very little bit I knew then & now.

But the meeting halfway never happened.

I guess some people just lack taste.

So I sit down to decide

I'm faced with a decision: I could manage my time better by applying any number of techniques I've used in the past, though frankly I don't really want to do it. I'm tired. Or I could shut out the world and pour all my attention into the tasks that I want to get done.

• The advantage of managing my time is that it's more sustainable---if I accept that what I get done every day is going to be incremental and feel very small. I personally have little patience for incremental change, which is why I probably suck at it. The one exception to this is when I am actually observing incremental change in PEOPLE...that fascinates me, because each small change in a person's behavior can indicate something much larger. I guess I am naturally curious about what makes people tick, not the number of ticks I can count.

• The advantage of shutting out the world is that it is a more exciting commitment to action; kind of an adventure, really. I like getting ready for adventures, strategically planning my moves, getting everything ready for the big push. The problem is that it is an expensive contextual switch, on the order of planning a vacation without the relaxation, and it always burns me out at the end. This may, however, be the natural way I work by myself. It is a recurring pattern.

My gut reaction is that I should avoid going into hermit mode, but instead triage what I am focusing on.

Whoosh!

An absolutely fantastic day Karting @ Race Pace!

She's here!

Her name is Anandya Anushree Sampath & she's my niece, the first one too!

My school in Pune

Found a picture of my school in Pune. So many memories. :(

Party time

A party 'twas.

<--- In his honor.

The Deathly Hallows

July 2000. A pile of new books in the school library. I picked up a fat one from the pile with an interesting title - The Goblet of Fire. It left me gasping for breath & words when I finished it a few days later.

July 2007. Whoa. 7 years hence, and I feel exactly the same way I did then.

It's been 10 years since she wrote the first book, and she did not let me down. A BIG thanks to you Jo!

Extremely fast paced, packed, dark, desperate, heroic, old-fashioned, it was everything I asked for & more from the last book. Like many of us around the world I grew up with Harry Potter, & even though I feel exactly how I did 7 years back, after reading the last book, it's amusing to see that the things that touched me, that affected me, moved me, that I completely identified with while reading this book are so different from the ones back then.

The doubting hero, loyalties being tested, fears faced, the battle of battles, secrets revealed, grief, love & hope. It had it all. And it was absolutely DELICIOUS.

It was an old tale, an old plot, the characters-old archetypes. But I guess it's the kind of story I would always want to hear, again & again. And she told it well.

A few lines that "pricked"

"Severus?
Snape's lips twisted in a smile when she said his name"

"Seeing them together that way made him feel lonely"

God bless you Jo.

The Opportunist

They say 'Anybody can achieve anything'. I don't really believe in that. I believe that everybody can achieve something. Something that means more to them than anybody else, & that 'something' always gives you a shot at it.

But there is a caveat that must be made. Winners walk through the door of opportunity when it swings open. But what is the secret to getting through the door?

Being outside the door when it swings open.

I've read that Frank Sinatra got his big break while working as a waiter. One day, as he was waiting tables, he spotted one of the biggest names in the music industry. And what did Sinatra do? He cleared off a table next to the gentleman and got up on it and sang! He knew he was done at the restaurant for doing so, but how many times would he get this chance? Needless to say, the rest is history.

We never know when we are gonna get that break, the shot at that one thing that will define us. I don't even know what I'm looking for! But for all of those who become successful, there is one key similarity: They were ready. And for every one of those who were ready, there were thousands more who weren’t.

Am I ready?

Do I have enough ammo so that when my shot comes I can perform?

Am I working hard to position myself in the best possible ways near that door now?

It will happen someday. It opens for everyone. It may only open once or it may open many times. It is different for everyone and life just isn’t fair that way. But everybody gets a shot. Will I be ready?

Enough of this, I hear hinges creaking ;)

The King's here!

My pal

It is cold today.
Thoughts
meaningless to anyone but myself.
I am alone.

Loneliness, not a burden nor a sorrow,
but a time of solace, of deepness
never to be shared, never to be understood.
True happiness is here, unmisted.
Unmisted by smiles or laughter,
unmisted by the joys of company.

To find true happiness,
to know if one is truly happy,
he must be happy alone.

I hope I can be.