Notes

The grand festival of lights just passed us. After all the rush and enthusiasm, I now have the luxury to relax in the drawing room of my home in Ahmedabad. The time is almost 1am and I think I have the energy to pen down a few words before I fall asleep. I love Diwali the most, among the many festivals that we celebrate here. There was a time I liked Uttarayan (Makar Sankranti) more, a festival that is celebrated so grandiosely in Gujarat that it is difficult, that day, to spot the sky under a vast layer of kites. But the last time I was here for Uttarayan was when I was in class 11- I left home after that and it still remains a distant dream for me to be in town for Uttarayan. As far as Diwali is concerned, it is mandatory for me to be in Ahmedabad for at least a week and to help me keep this promise this year, my father booked my train ticket more than a couple of months ago and I, on my part, battled a (literally) huge storm of people at the Rajiv Chowk metro station and broke my right foot’s toenail in the process! ...

The name of the post makes the intent of this post pretty obvious. If you are actually interested in reading this, I’ll make this post a little less boring to you by just talking about things that happened differently from my previous experience! The best part of this year’s half-marathon was that the extra care I took to not repeat my last year’s blunders paid off and all my official timings were noted! Moreover, the precision of the net time (right till the seconds) and the fact that I finished ‘just’ (32 seconds) before the timeout gave a very international feel to the experience! ...

This Friday, I witnessed a discussion that happened on gravely self-centric grounds. It is true that the inebriated atmosphere didn’t look like an appropriate platform to begin a discussion of right and wrong, but I am compelled to do that today. I was with two close friends who talked passionately about the kind of pressure they are going through in their lives. One, call him X, earns a competitive package at one of the leading software firms in the world, owns a car and has an offer for Masters program from a top-ranked university in the States. X complained that a particular friend of his hadn’t given him a phone call even though the latter was in town. And although the two were supposedly close until recently. X didn’t care to find out if it was for some genuine reason the other didn’t call him. My other pal, Y, lived a miserable life in Chennai until sometime back. But he is now comfortably settled in Noida, is associated with a project in office at a time when (in his own words) the IT firm he works for is unabashedly firing people and has all the opportunities one requires to succeed in life. Y generalized that he is under tremendous pressure. It is true that he has some family issues and that his job pays less- but at an age of 25, I guess he is not the only one in such a situation. ...

That is the question I’ll try to answer in this post. I am no accomplished film critic and my thoughts might look to you, and probably to me too a year later, naive.. You don’t need an extraordinary, innovative or intelligent story to make your movie stand out. Now don’t get me wrong- if you have a good story, your job is already half-done; what I am saying is that it is not absolutely mandatory to have one. Take Kill Bill, for instance: it was made on just one word ‘revenge’ and carried a pretty lame story. A badass woman, who is almost murdered by the gangsters she works with, comes back to to kill everyone to take her revenge. The Ajay Devgn starrer Singham had a story better than that! And still, Kill Bill is rightly considered a Tarantino masterpiece. Even King’s Speech had an ordinary story, that of a King learning to deliver public speeches. ...

I have never met an unconventional Indian. By unconventionality, I don’t mean reckless; I am not talking about a person who does not take decisions by his mind but by his heart. What I mean is that Indians generally are really reluctant when it comes to thinking out of the box. Let me share with you two anecdotes before getting into the issue. I was returning from a trip to Jaisalmer a day after New Year ’11. We (which included my parents and my little sister) were in a taxi which was taking us to Jodhpur and the road was passing through the desert. That was when I saw an auto rickshaw (a usual one, like the ones you see on the roads in Delhi except that it was painted white) which had three foreigners inside. One of them was driving and the other two were in the back- their luggage was tied on the top of the auto. The sight aroused some curiosity in me and I enquired my taxi driver. He told me that these fellows (like a few others) had hired the auto in Jaisalmer and were driving it all the way to Kanyakumari (a quick search on Google maps puts the distance between the two endpoints to about 2700kms)! I was amazed. ...

I left Adobe a few months back and there is one aspect of their business model that I always wanted to write about. I’d rather get my thoughts out and ‘move on in life’, so to speak! Trust me, this is not an account of a frustrated ex-employee! And my thoughts are not about the product I worked on there- I’ll keep that for a later post. First of all, this is how I would rank the software companies in contemporary times: ...

I wrote this long ago for a friend’s blog, as a guest writer. Here’s the original post. Given an opportunity to write something for Sumit’s blog, there are many anecdotes that I can share. But there is this one incident that infuriated me more than any other prank or crime in stupidity that Periwal has committed till date. I will write about it and chances are high that this post might never see the light of day (on his blog) but if it does, well, I’ll feel as if a burden has been lifted from upon me! ...

I have already resigned from Adobe, the current being my last week in office. Because of this, I don’t have a lot on my plate and was heavily bored before I, in almost desperation for change, left for Kasauli last Thursday at about 4:30pm. Kasauli was there in a small ‘drive destinations around Delhi’ list that I maintain- I ‘picked’ Kasauli from that list, mainly, because driving there would be a 2-day trip which was all I was looking for in the crude summers. ...

A few days ago, for some reasons, I was reminded of a night-out that I had gone to when I was in fourth year in DCE. The night-out was so awesome that it really deserves a blog post! This is how the scene began. One fine night, just some time before the last day of our last semester, Arpit began talking to me about how many different places were there in Delhi that I, being a non-Delhiite, should’ve had visited before leaving college. Among the places he mentioned, I liked one called Chanakyapuri- there is a road there called Shanti Path which is home to many embassies in India. The road is flanked on both sides by trees and is (obviously) a posh and high-security area. Even though I had once passed through there, the idea of going there on a night-out excited me. I wasn’t really sure that Arpit was serious until the next day when he and Prashant called me up to discuss the plan for the night! We arranged two bikes- we didn’t have any of our own- and included another friend of ours called Ashutosh. ...

I spent an almost half hour day before yesterday, trying to come up with a good blog post topic; in the end, this is the best I could manage! I’ve been to Bangalore couple of times. I first went there for about fifteen days around the New Year which fell during my first year in college. I was just seventeen and I enjoyed that trip as any teenager would’ve. I visited various popular places (in and around Bangalore) such as Mysore, Lal Bagh, the three parallel roads (MG, Brigade and Commercial street) etc.: places that I would probably avoid going to at this age! I fell in love with the city and later in fourth year, when the placement season began, I was hoping to land a job in a firm based out of Bangalore. That didn’t happen and I was wondering when I would go back there. ...