Emparrassing moments....Oops!

There are days you go through without absolutely no idea on how proud you ought to be for not screwing up. If that were to be the way the world functioned, mothers after gossiping with next-door mother (about the next-to-next door mother), fathers after discussing earth-shattering politics about how their colleague Ramakrishnan Pandurangan panders to their boss with your best friend's father, brothers after bullying their younger siblings, sisters after giggling with their sisters, friends after laughing at their own jokes thinking how brilliant it turned out, etc. would all keep walking about like constipated English Lords. And of course, if they'd raise their chin any higher than proud peacocks and walk about, we would have lot of footage for 'Just for laughs' on Pogo.

Now, my case is different. I have been the master of all screw-ups and lord of all idiots ever since me was a baby. I would walk about as if I had achieved a Perfect 10. For instance, there is a picture of me (age 1x), my elder brother (age 4x) and my grandmother's elder sister (Very Grand-mother) (age 600x). It looks like this -



I had no shame whatsoever. I was heartily laughing in that pic, err...with the great sigh of relief.

And then, as I grew up, I have enquired about pregnancy to my mom in front of all relatives, asked my dad about the meaning of a word he used when he was having a heated argument with my mom, sung in high-pitched lilted voice when my dad, mom and her in-laws where cutting vegetables silently, bed-wetted till about age 9 until my mom yelled at me in front of couple of other aunties, cried at a barber shop mumbling sad invectives at the barber with my dad looking helplessly in his best possible way to show that he had nothing to do with that crying kid, misspelled my principal Shanmugham's name as 'Shunmonkey' (EPIC FAIL!) with absolute confidence in front of my social science teacher, rushed to the school lavatory holding my pee (literally), stared at cleavages realizing much later that I'm being stared at angrily, mispronounced 'popcorn' with the p's and c's interchanged, etc.

I have done quite well for myself and people around me to provide them with enough material to repent on why they were associated with me. Some people even light diyas to this date at temples praying that they are spared of the stigma due to the mark left (like a "well left" by Rahul Dravid in Indian cricket) by the embarrassing moments.

Today, I added a couple of more to my list. Do you ever blank out when you are in the process of making a point or reporting something very important. My voicemail went something like this "Hey Joe, I have been working on installing this bullshit in this fricking computer which is the 8810 model you had specified, and when doing so I saw that this process was not moving forward due to..S...tick tick 1..I...tick tick 2..L..tick tick 3..E..tick tick 4..N..tick tick 5..C..tick tick 6..E..tick tick 7...ahhh..ahhbb....the...RAM not getting detected by the blah blah blah". I got no call back for the rest of the day. "Damn, shit, sucks" are some of the words that went immediately through my wonder-brain. I went blank, abso-fucking-lute-lee-kicking-ass!

Next, to wash it off, I went to the restroom, for well...shall we say, just like that, for general cleanup. When you go with such a notion, you start to notice different things you need to do when all along it never caught your attention. It's like going into a shopping mall and ending up buying a pair of gym gloves, when it would have never crossed your mind otherwise, cos you don't realize that it's for people who lift weights like on a regular basis and build actual muscles that are the equivalent of Ds or probably DDs. Anyway, I went in and started noticing that there are particles hanging in the inside of my nose. Now don't go "Gross!!" or "EWWWWW...". Nose is a nose and it has particles. Fact of life. Deal with it. I started cleaning up the old attic, which is when John Doe walked in stopped, stared at me for like 2 seconds, and walked to do his job. I froze frame in the meanwhile, washed my hands and walked the hell out of there. I mean, what's so wrong with the world? It's a restroom! People embarrass themselves all the time there, talk about whistling to unsuccessfully cover-up the loud noise your body produced or when you laugh like a hyena over the phone with your buddy while taking the dump which is just when your silent partner in crime sitting next door, unknown to you till then clicks his tongue tschk in total disapproval.

There is only so much you can do for the society and yourself. I am pretty sure I will be a part of many more embarrassing incidents, both for 1. me and 2. the ones around me. If I can still laugh heartily like 'mini-me' (above), I can safely pass it all to category 2. One day my kid will be asked to spell his school's principal 'Hemprasad' and he will make me....'embarrassed', maybe? I see a hand going up...yes?

On one hand...

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain


I have an increasing feeling of loneliness nowadays. I have a feeling no one can rightly understand things around me the way I look at them. I say this not out of arrogance. I say this out of helplessness. I've begin to love life more than ever before, and I feel I should be telling the world about it. I don't fear death. I feel helpless. I feel life is slipping away every moment. I can't seem to capture everything. My passion to blog stems from this underlying feeling. I'm not depressed or anything. I feel these things. I've developed an eye for photography these days. People call it creativity, or by other names. I know from where it comes. It comes from a genuine feeling to capture the true beauty of life. I'm loving life. I want to accomplish certain things before anything happens:

1) Learn to dance the tango and salsa
2) Shoot great pictures with the Cannon SLR 30D with lenses
3) Hitchhike. Be among the mountains
4) Learn to play the saxophone
5) Tell a woman how beautiful she is
6) Bury my face in her hair
7) Write a script
8) Write a beautiful short story
9) Learn Spanish
10) Enter the Ad world
11) Get an MPhil in Sanskrit
12) Visit New York
13) Ride a convertible Merc SL250/BMW 3 series by the Pacific
14) Visit Fort Hancock, Texas
15) Visit Bath, England
16) Euro Trip
17) Drink beer with "zee" Germans
18) Go to Caltech. Study.
19) Princeton - Meet Dr. John Nash
20) Learn to sketch
21) Startup a brilliant idea
22) Be by the Pacific

Testing Times

A long, long time ago in the computer age, people thronged to know the body and mind of a computer - feeling the mouse, typing junk with the keyboard, connecting it with the internet, with hopes of spying into the next door neighbhour Pankajam's bedroom and henceforth seeing the entire world. Instead, we slowly learned that we could create email addresses, and consider ourselves important by including it in our visiting cards, and substituting it instead of our postal address in application forms. This forced others to include a separate field for email address in forms...anyway it got too technical.

Now people needed to do something with computers. Since there was already a thing called 'hardware', coming up with 'software' struck some people as a brilliant idea.

Now they couldn't develop software just like that. They needed people to also to test it, whether or not there existed a customer base. And so, it came to be that the entire bunch of people who were recruited, now had to be given something to do. The managers thought and came up with a brilliant idea - split them into 2 groups - 'developers' and 'testers'. I think they were made to stand in a line and were asked to call out numbers, and like even numbers were made developers and odd numbers were made testers or something like that.

Developers were at the heart of a software. I can give you a fair definition of a developer - n. /~develop-er(rors)~/ - 1. One who develops errors, and in turn develops a particular contempt (expressed with a constipated look) for people who find them. 2. One who often comes up with something less surprising as "This is a known issue!" to the tester.

So now that we have a fair idea of what a developer is, the definition of a 'tester' is obvious to the reader and further ambiguity about the term can be clarified by having an animated discussion with your 2nd standard/grade English teacher.

Anyway, in the battle that ensued between these two sexes, testers decided to 'develop' a test plan called 'Time Tested Techniques' :

1. Ask for the device.
2. Get the device.
3. Make sure you have the device. This is called 'unit testing'.
4. Check mail.
5. You must be hungry by now. Start thinking about lunch.
6. Repeat step 3.
7. Its high time you think more about lunch.
8. Repeat step 4.
9. You better go for lunch now!
10. Its only human to feel sleepy.
11. Further your ambitions, by looking at the device with head bent about 47 degrees downwards, with your hand bolstering the head. You know what to do next!
12. You're now in the 'evening' of the software life cycle. Wake up when you realize this.
13. Are you bored?
14. Repeat step 8.
15. You're now on a mission to find the bugs. Its natural to think about the bed bugs that bit you last night. Whatever!
16. So what if you found the same bug?
17. Do yourself and others a favour. Leave for home now!

And that is how, testers went through such testing times and became more and more indispensable to the software industry, and started reserving their brain cells for thinking about finer aspects of life such as lunch, email and sleep.

Alright, I hope a new generation of 'odd numbers' are inspired now!

Vis-a-Vis with Visa

It was the summer of '93, in Chennai - a town where everything was late and lazy. A enlightening instance would be when I'd wake up to the heat of the noon and would hold my abdomen in a certain position and with certain grip - a grip of determination in not letting my emotions of watching TV hinder with my first calls of nature to the loo. I'd remain seated in that cushiony old couch an hour atleast, before I'd finally attend the call. Thats how late and lazy, the city was.

Anyways, my point of such a thrilling start on one such day saw me shout, spit and despise....myself standing on the other side of the mirror, patiently bearing the insult. Everything seemed hazy, maybe because I was both brushing and doing the spitting and despising on myself on the other side all at the same time. It was too much to handle. And so, I finally decided to clean the mirror and let go of myself for one last time.

There was a pivotal reason hanging in the air for why I did all that. It was because my visa interview was just an hour later. It was not unreasonable to be angry with myself. I expected some kind of reasonable discipline from myself. I mean, who would sleep at 5 in the morning on the day of one's visa interview, after say, 4 attempts (or was it 5?) at the interview and as a result not being able to confirm the air ticket.

My second reason for limping, was that I had claws (nails) on my toes, the first reason being I tried to kick the table in a futile attempt to show frustration for my iron box not having that gift of heating up quickly. The iron box was now fuming, and I was fretting on the other side. It was as if both of us were going to grapple each other's neck and wrestle until one of us would feel the satisfaction of tom getting jerry. Before anything, I took down the iron box by its handle and pressed him hard against my Rs. 450/-, sparkling white, full-sleeves, unlucky shirt. The steam released, upon polarizing with the water-laden sleeve. I maintained my pressure and strictness in movement of the iron, until it finally gave up with all the steam gone and the light switching off due to the thermostat. My shirt was crisp on the crease, and I felt victorious. I had championed the fight that had been ensuing through time.

Rajalakshmi, a 26-year old female, had given birth to the man who'd always follow up on his only child, right from his brushing of teeth to tying shoelaces after a mirror-shine polish. Anyways, she was now standing all wrinkled beside me, watching my battle with the iron. After the win, I turned and beamed at her. She was trying to hand me something. It was a glass of milk. My beaming reduced to a frown in under 1 second. She turned slowly about, and proceeded to make the coffee.

With things proceeding smoothly, I ran quick thoughts on my head, as to how to roll my Rs and make a good I'll-fit-in-there-perfectly impression. I had my coffee, took my grandma's blessings, and went out.

Out was hot. Out was not where I wanted to be. In under 45 minutes, I'd be going face-to-face with some visa officer whose main job was to relish to see you standing there nervous, answering and tossing a coin in his mind on whether he/she wanted to let you through or not. The thought of them getting paid for their sadistic expertise and the sweltering sun beating its rays of glory on me, made me feel both frustrated and uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because the girls sitting on the bus, were giggling and whispering trivialities of how the shape of undergarments made a Nostradamus-like revelation of the shape of my butt. I immediately also noticed the famous circular patch of my ever-scentful sweat on my armpit area. Their giggles didn't stop for no reason.

It struck me that my battle with my iron box was a colossal waste of time and effort. Had I known that two fat men would have that ironing effect on my shirt in the standing area, I would have worked on holding my creases. The bearded man with his childbearing potbelly - the cushion-board, was working in conjunction with the massive, bald man on the other side - the iron showing his massivity with his back pressed against my ribs. One was providing heat with his open mouth, and the other...well, with his back. Odor was the word of the day. Before I was gassed out in the holocaust, my stop came by and saved me. I struggled myself out of the caravan of heat producing exhausts and breathed fresh air after years of choking; I felt so.

The sight of the visa office, now made some connection with my bowel movement. It brought me the unsavory memories of how I missed out on the interviews as I overslept. Now I said to myself, "Well, Vivek, now all that matters is that you're here. So go ahead and step up your accent!"

I went to the watchman and stepped up my accent, rolled my Rs, swallowed syllables as much as possible and came up with, "I'm hezhe fozh the visa intezhview..." and was wondezhing, I mean wondering to myself about how I was the first person there to go through the queue. The watchman gathered what I was saying in like 3 seconds and succinctly summed it up with a "Sunday, Sir!"

Dark Matter

Sex is a very important part of life.

Now that I have your attention I guess I can delve into the psyche of the stock broker, which is the actual material of this post. Was just kidding...Anyways, I was thinking yesterday morning during shower about how the youth of India survive despite the absence of strip clubs, nude beaches and women in bikinis.

During the mid '70s vintage porn began to do its rounds amongst the circle of gangsters (who'd wear bell-bottoms, have long hair (on head, oiled up) and look somewhat closer to telugu heroes), for it was the big bad guys that could satisfy their need for women through videos in the form of projector-on-canvas types or black-rectangular-2 kilo-cassettes. However, the sense of pleasure that people derived in voyeur prior to this must have been by peeping through keyholes, watching women take bath through bathroom windows from a nearby terrace or by plainly having memories of certain key aspects of the opposite sex and working industriously on the imagination. Whatever it was people needed a way to break out with their pent up sexual energy. Here in the US, people could have an intercourse with one another like middle-aged women gossiping about their in-laws in India. With beginning of the '80s, the bollywood saw the plight of the sex-starved Indian youth and started a new wave of films known to be 'blue' for some blue reason. The phrase 'blue film' caught up so well among the youth circles, so much so that I myself have watched one during the '90s, when I couldn't handle much of the tension. Anyways, I didn't blow up or anything, just for your curiosity. Bollywood began to come up with more tasty rape scenes, so much so that people used to watch reruns of 'Maine uske taange dekha..aur phir..', and still used to go home and work wildly on their fantasies.

Finally, during the late '90s the US scientists, decided to release the CD technology. With the Internet boom, 'sex' was only a click away, and with the CD-Writer coming up, the copying, distribution, broadcasting, and all other copyright violations began to be exploited. Since college girls were still all covered up and no match to fulfill the appetite of the now-weakened guys, coining a word for the much tabooed word 'sex', had to be done immediately. Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, Muthu, a young, aspiring, lingually-talented tutorial student, came up with the word when he secretly asked his friend Selva in hush-hush over the phone - "Matter CDaa?" Selva picked up the idea immediately, and started loving the word 'Matter' for its easiness of pronunciation, clarity in exposition of intent, the coolness of its sounding and the fun of saying it for the heck of it.

Bollywood by now started making more of matter movies or normal movies with Mallika Sherawat in it. Every now and then Emran Hashmi, with his kisser-instinct would show up on screen and chew the lips of the hot female co-star like rabbits, regardless of whether she was on the villain's side or the good people's side or one of the passerbys in the scene. Indian youth started taking so much interest in such kind of movies, and it looked like it matter-ed more to them than the non-linearity in the story. I know of an incident wherein girls in the adjacent, I heard, congregated at one of their girl-friend's place and watched Murder - the movie in which Mallika took off to stardom, besides her clothes, and where Emran Hashmi proved he could act naturally only while doing stuff with his mouth. Some elite Indian youth, however, started seeing such movies-in-theatres with their girlfriends as an opportunity to repeat the performance given by Emran Kissme, off the screen. Conservatives would resort to controlling their feelings in theatres, go home, fantasize, and come out well in the end (depends where).

With Airtel slashing the rates of broadband, most college-goers, and I presume even some school-goers, convinced their parents, by showing them ads of Intel-pentium processors, that they could see their sons/daughters become engineers and doctors that matter the most. Online matter, was then the trend. Multiple tabs in Mozilla Firefox (and later on IE 7), only eased the shift between Wikipedia Homepage to show parents that they were gaining more online than on the other tab of an innocuous looking name of Masalaboard, Indianceleb or Debonairblog. The Indian youth wafted and waded through the heroines of the yesteryears from the bulky cabaret dancers like Jayamalini to the more bulkier character artists like Shakila. Flesh and passion, were all that were required to light up the youth of our nation. Our fathers remembered their youth only too well, to tell their sons not to do their undercover operation. Mothers, on the other hand, hoped everyday their sons would gain more knowledge than Grandmaster on Vijay TV, to be the US Rajesh Krishnamurthy, amongst the neighbhours or second cousins they idolized. The problem is Indian kids are smart, only that they don't know where to show it, when and how.

These smart kids then got married and revised all-night before the marriage on how to make a successful and matterialistic conversation to the bride. Nightfall came, the young, coy, fair-and-lovely, bathed-in-scent, newly wed wife, Rajakumari enters with a glass of milk. She sits gently like a dove on the bed besides young and ever-expectant Arvind. He begins to deliver the first lines of his 4-and-half page essay on life. Somewhere in the middle he melows his tone and comes up with a simple question on life that seems very complex like the multiple database queries that Arvind comes up with at CompuSys Inc., "How do you think we can spice up our lives?" Shy-faced, with eyes fluttering up and down, she manages to come up with "Amma said, only on weekends."

Arvind switches off the light, closes his eyes and confines himself to the fantasy-world of Dark Matter!

"Imagined experience is superior to reality." - John Keats

LOSER

Dear Diary,

I got a C in Random Processes, slated to be one of the toughest in my core subjects. I haven't told mom as yet. I have to repeat the course this summer. Things are looking really bad. No intern as yet. After all, I want to see my parents happy. I just wish 2 years sped by. Wouldn't. Have to live through all this. Wrecks my confidence. I have to stand still through the storm. I pray I come through this.

Yours,

Me.

On a beautiful morning...

The alarm bell in my cute little 'ORPAT' clock, the one with a sticker saying - "Rs.120/-", kept ringing for quite some time; it seemed. I woke up, bleary eyed, after a 3 hour sleep slowly noticing that something is ringing. I kept looking. Then 2 minutes later I realized it was my clock. Then a minute later I switched it off. Syed Masthan and Kurrinchi were both staring at me. I looked at Syed and told him "I'm really sorry!", realizing that it had woken him up some time back, and that he was there in the hall, looking at me, with a hope-against-all-hopes mindset that I'd turn it off. We exchanged a few words and laughed, as with most of our conversations. I set the alarm to "7:00" and started to sleep. Only that I couldn't.

The thought "slave of sleep" kept running in my mind. It was because I woke up yesterday at 7:15 P.M. for a class that started 15 minutes earlier. I was really dejected (yes, dejected!) on my way to the class. So this morning, that thought crossed my mind and I didn't feel the pleasure of covering head-to-toe with the lovely bedsheet and going back to business.

I got up, and went slowly into my toilet and started brushing my teeth really slowly. I was reminded of one of dad's "piece on life". As a young boy, (the type of young when I used to be at school and when I used to fuss a lot for waking up) my dad used to tell me to wake up and do things slowly. He'd tell me that in a way that there is no hurry or a reason why you should be doing it, but just that you do it slowly and leisurely at your own pace, just like that. I never understood the beauty of what he meant till today.

I made a beautiful coffee, switched on my slow desktop, folded my bedsheet, and went into the veranda for a sight of a beautiful, priceless, lightly foggy morning. It was not cold, and I sat there in the veranda on a chair and sipped my hot coffee, admiring the beauty of this moment - birds chirping, lightly foggy, not cold and the wonderful onset of spring. You got to see Spring right in front of your eyes, only here. The trees come back to life, when I first wondered during November, as to how the hell that barren, naked tree would ever look beautiful again. Magic. It did. I very clearly remember that thought running in my head that day. Anyways, easily the most beautiful morning.

The sound of the huge air cnditioner machines outside the apartments made me nostalgic, of my first morning here in Dallas, in Waterview Apartments, in Tanay's place. I woke up early the same way and found the sound odd. It was not loud, but just that you never got used to it being from a place that was so simple, though crawling towards modernity.

And here I am writing.

Anyways some things have changed since the last post. Craig never returned the call. Maybe he was there out somewhere with his kids for the Spring break, or probably he rejected his candidate upon hearing a pathetic voice message. It so happened that last monday, I got a call from Caroline, the kitchen manager of THE PUB saying that they would be pleased to hire me if I was still interested. I took up the job. Finally, I got an on-campus job to take care of my living. Rather, to save my face. I immediately called up my dad; I hadn't spoken to him for about 2-3 months now, saying that I got this at least. I had made a vow in my mind that I wouldn't call him up until I started at least taking care of my living. Now, after about 7 months, God gave me an opportunity to call up dad. It gave me a great feeling to tell him that "I wanted to tell you about this, first!". He was thrilled. $7.5/ hour the pay. I made it, maybe, but not quite.