Here I go, there I go,....everywhere I go

I picked up a pen yesterday, took a blank sheet of paper, and started scribbling on it. The sheet was filled up with jumbled words, figures, and strokes within no time. It was not as if i wanted to write down an auto-biography, it was just that i wanted to jot down the irony of how much screwed one can get. My two halves were quarreling on this very idea as I stand like a silent spectator in front of them. It was too difficult to convince them even though the idea was lucid.

I decided to ignore them & started with the pen ... Here I go-
"Leaving the house in the morning, dressed in clothes that's bought on a credit card , for work, driving through the traffic in a vehicle that you are still paying for, putting in petrol that you cannot afford, in order to get to the job that you hate but need so badly so that you can pay for the clothes, car, petrol and the house that you leave empty the whole day, in order to live in it.."

It felt like the ink froze and the pen denied to write a single word next. It felt like its the will of the nature that i don't write anymore. The more i tried to write the deeper went the wound. ..i felt a pricking pain in the corner of the eye as if caused by a chilling wind, a small drop of tear ran down an landed on the paper scattering the last words, washing it away... a sudden flash of light distracted me as i sat in a candle light, i realized that i have been holding a blank sheet of paper for a long time staring at it. The sheet was blank, with no words, figures, strokes in it, the pen just worked fine the tip glaring... The arguing duo was gone, leaving behind their unusual stance, the grin on their face...

Angle of "coincidence"

I thought of writing this post without a topic.... but then i suddenly realized "that would be an injustice".. well i try my best to link those with them.. hope you understand. I thought to write and thought again, but never did i managed, and yes here i am struggling with epilogues.

The bear and bull fight taking its toll over Indian economy, sudden changes in climatic conditions, inflation to its peak, hike in oil prices, ban on smoking, to name a few. It happened when the boom was half its way to the glorious big bang. Cash inflow stagnation to falling Indian currency value even if the State Capitol is facing huge economic blows. One bureaucracy gone wrong...

I still couldn't manage to figure out the relation between the post topic to its content, near or far... just another coincidence as usual.

Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and your O.K.
Money it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash

-Pink Floyd

Blaft phenomena of being sandwiched

"GOOD morning Ladies and gentlemen request your attention, We welcome you aboard Kingfisher. Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Kingfisher, your safety is our first priority.." the announcement gradually faded with her extra loud whispering (by her i mean my girlfriends), full of complaints as of why didn't i get the window and middle seats for both of us at check-in. Well, to say, the journey was neither much delightful as it was supposed to be nor it was as sad.

The intentions of getting a middle and window seat was not very much clear to me until half of the journey, but I could say that Mallaya did a great job by acquiring Deccan (at least now you wont find peanut shells in your seat when you board). Nevertheless this great feeling of mine regarding Kinfisher's Deccan acquisition is a collection of such small reasons such as cleaner aircraft to adorable air hostesses(NO PUN INTENDED). We didn't struggled much to venture our locations in-flight (as if it were the Ludhiana express). The lady over the window seat was an obvious indication that the lady accompanying me should be seated next to her (i.e. the middle seat) which means that the aisle seat was left for the poor me. To be very honest the arrangement seemed to be just appropriate.

My hunger made me order for an extremely overpriced cheese sandwich and she preferred diet coke. The movement of the crew ladies (during refreshment session) within the flight is usually too generous for passengers. Well it has a sufficiently valid reason of in-sufficient space. Their curves missed my shoulders several times as i avoided. It was time for me to realize the whole point of "seat selection". As i mentioned, the crew was generous to me, and i guess, to most of the aisle seaters.

The break-even point was when my overpriced sandwich arrived. My hunger killing intentions were distracted by a subtle push by one such pair of curve, which was not much pleasing to the lady sipping the "Diet Coke" beside me (my girlfriend). My aisle seat life-cycle was shortened by her immediately as i had to shift to the middle for some reason (hers). The lady over the window seemed air sick and i thought that she was about to puke, the imagination of which made my hunger run away. But i managed to finish my sandwich by time we reached.

I still regret ordering the overpriced cheese sandwich, because of its price not because of some other reasons...

In my name..

In my name
I urge the governments to
keep their promise
(www.inmyname.com)

Hallowed be thy Blog

It was that Sunday when I realized or I should say many of us present there realized our WWW presence, and how much it meant to us. If I am missing out on something.. Oh! yes it was the IndiBloggers meet here at Kolkata. It was like one of those nostalgic moment when we survive in a second life, the Internet, where each time opening up an internet explorer or a firefox page feels just just like starting a new day. A new day of creativity, a new day of curiosity, a new day of knowledge, a new day of refreshment...

The Indiblogger badge in my blog directed me to a page one such day. It was a bloggers meet that was going to be held at Kolkata for the first time. It said i need to confirm if i wish to be at the meet. I knew from that moment that i will be there. I was confirmed in a moment and all set to go.

Well.. Prior to going any further with my review on this Meet i should say i am a newbie here... and here goes my review.

The venue finding was not an issue and i reached there safe and sound. The number of turn ups were a bit less but people started pouring in within moments as the organizers had to arrange for extra chairs. It all started with a short video from Pune bloggers meet follwed by a short creative video composed out for Kolkata bolggers meet by Archit.

The One minute of fame started with all the bloggers turning up to the deck and introducing themselves and their piece of work on the www, works ranging from Blogs to Private domains. I thank the IndiBlogger team to select a comment from my blog in their "who knows their readers best??" session. We had also had Sandhya with us that evening who is a Student Partner of Microsoft. Windows Live Writer, a handy blogging tool, was the topic discussed by her.

Bloggers Ethics was the topic of discussion up next where people poured in with their ideas and concepts of T&C Violation, Plagiarism, & Internet security. The everwaited dinner was ready for us by then and we also got some cool IndiBlogger T-shirts.

The whole purpose of the meet to me was to Inspire Indian people who blog, provide a proper platform where their work can get recognised, get connected, and over all, to remove any man, un-manned, physical or logical boundaries between us.

i like the lonliness
In the crowd
i think about
a lot of things
i have a friend
in every foe
i know places
far and wide
i know
the good things in life
i do have
a kid in me
i want
to break free

- Vinni, IndiBlogger team
(watch full video By Vinni, vinni.co.in)

I Know
No boundaries
I Blog,
Therefore I Am..

Six Degrees of Luckiness

I lay on my bed panicking about the training I had to attend the next day, my feets cold. The panic was not about the subject matter that was to be covered, but about the painful eight hours I need to spend in the training. My room-mate lay on the other side of the room while explaining me the concept of "Six degrees of separation". Even though I couldn't relate six degrees of separation to my current situation of getting a chill due to the up-coming training session I was eager to know the fact.

And Here it goes -
In the late 1960's a person called Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment on the US of A wherein he requested for volunteers. Each volunteer was handed over a package which he/she has to deliver to a totally unknown (or may b known) person (lets say Todd). The volunteers were not provided with any further details such as address of Mr. Todd, the region/location was specified though. The volunteers were supposed to deliver the package to Mr. Todd through any of their first name acquaintances whom they think can help deliver the package to Mr. Todd.

After the experiment Milgram found amazingly that the Packages from the volunteers reached Mr. Todd on an average of six hops. Or to simplyfy, each package from the several volunteers took exaclty 6 intermideary person to get delivered. Eventually Milgram came up with the concept of Six degrees of separation wherein he stated that every person knows every other person(unknown) in the world with a maximum of 6 hops in between. Some people said that eventually in due course of time the number of hops would decrease leading the world to shrink.

Years later a similar experiment was conducted by Richard Wiseman along with a new objective of proving Luck. His experiment included similar volunteers from United Kingdom, who were supposed to deliver a package to some unknown(or... may b known) within the country. He found out a rather similar result but this time the number of hops were reduced to four !! He also observed that people claiming themselves to be unlucky didn't even bothered to pass on the package, when asked for the reason they stated that they couldn't find any person whom they thought would be of help to deliver the package. On the other hand people who claimed themselves as lucky seem to have delivered the package without fail. So does that mean that the social circle of the unlucky people are smaller than the luckier ones or rather they live in a much larger world than the lucky people who have acquaintances.

This anomaly proved that the world was really shrinking (with the help of science and technology ofcourse), and people are just lucky because they know other people or they live in a small world where they know most of the people or are better connected.

A useful piece of information shared by my room-mate, it was. The painful eight hours was suddenly of no pain anymore. I was busy analyzing my luckiness the whole time. Each time, again & again, i tried to answer the question of being lucky or did the fact that "i am really unlucky mean that i know less people? & why ain't the world shrinking for me??"... "do i really know Gorge W. Bush or Kareena Kapoor within six degrees or separation or its just a wishful thinking??"...

The velvet folder

"WHAT!!??!! why am I supposed to rehearse for it?" , the expression on my face was unpleasant. When I said rehearse I did not mean that I was going to rehearse for a play or a skit or any similar chore of that kind. The whole rehearsal concept was just to bring back civilization amongst the people during the University convocation. Though it was tough for me to understand the significance I attended the rehearsal on time not in the fear of repeating the mistake Chetan Bhagat might have committed but just to book my perimeter within the numerous row of plastic chairs. Wrote my name on a piece of paper and stick it to the chair, as instructed, everybody else did!! Some people managed to be there and receive their degree's some could not.

I stood there confused for a while, holding the velvet folder that encapsulated my degree and rank certificate. Suddenly I started to have a visual summary, framing every second, a flash and every thing ended abruptly on the velvet folder. The question was obvious - "is this what i have been working & slogging for, for four whole years?". Whatever might be the reason it somehow felt right and sweet. Not the slogging, working or getting the degree, but all the things i have done, i have learnt, i have experienced, all the ups and downs, all the sleepless nights, every cup of coffee at the college canteen, every fight, every hour before the examination and after it, every cigarette smoked, every song with the de-tuned guitar, every minute of struggle to convince the professor to cover up for the attendance, every bunked class, in short everything. The velvet folder appeared too small all of a sudden, just too small to encapsulate everything....

The Boar and the chopstick

Quite some times back i had a gut feeling that i should possess a pair of chopsticks. Why chopsticks? Why not BMW or iPhone?.. well the selection was biased towards my innate love towards food & the curiosity of "How can one have a plate of rice with two sticks?", and here i am a Proud owner of a pair of Chopsticks imported from Japan right away...

An achievement in Product categorization, assortment, and identification is what a Bar code might have achieved, but I find it painstakingly difficult to understand the significance of the picture. Yes it is a bar-code...just a bar-code ... and yes its obvious that its the identifier of my pair of chopsticks above.

I discovered lately that my birth year is "Boar" in decent words or "Pig" in indecent words. Well the picture above has no relationship, far or near, to my birth year being "Boar" or "Pig". But atleast i am sure of the fact that a BOARian is allowed to take absurd pictures to feed the Photographic persona withing himself. Its just a HANGING LAMP, no strings attached!!

SUE - kar mere man ko!!

Our bollywood hindi movies or we could say-- the cinema industry is renowned for its numerous marvels actors, actresses, glamour bags, controversies, hits, flops to name a few. Quiet often movies such as Rang De basanti or Taare Zamin Par act as a Decadron dosage to the dying number of cinema theatres all around India. Well, new multiplexes and Dolby DTS Theatres on the other hand are getting on high pockets with their shocking ticket rates. Nevermind, all thy lies in the monopoly. Our point of concern in this post is cinema ...yesss....only pure bollywood hindi cinema and not cinema theatres.

Bollywood now has all the flavours ranging from Action flicks, sci-fi, comedy to romantic & sentimental movies. But soon after the intermission u realise "i have seen this movie somewhere", which would be true in a sense that you are watching a hindi bollywood or i should say the desi version of a not so famous (or sometimes even famous) hollywood movie (the situation might be in full awareness or might not). A fair range of hindi movies are just a desi image of the hollywood version. And let me tell you people are pretty good at this.

Ok, thats enough of copying going on...we need to put some serious check on that, and lo that happened. Recently hollywood prduction houses such as Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox jumped opened up their offices at the magical city of Mumbai to keep track of the "COPY" issues and sue the right person. The Warner Brothers has sued a bollywood childrens film called "Hari Puttar- A comedy of terrors" stating that the name is too similar to Harry potter. The bollywood production house states that the similarity is purely coincidental... "Yeah, now tollywood might jump in with their version of Hori Poddar"soon enough...

The question is - why are people falling short of fresh concept, innovation, something new in this silver screen world that they need to copy stuff out of hollywood. And yeah if you do you might end up paying huge moolah for the copyright. Since the desi production mass is falling short of new stuff the holly production houses might come up with ideas of suing people, watching the copied version, and having coincidental resembalnce to characters in the movie.

Maddy: All's well that ends well.
Browny: but what to do about Sue ???
Maddy: Sue- kar mere man ko kiya tuney kya ishara!!
Browny: Not that Sue maddy!!.... i mean we're sued by the Tarner Bros. for copying their movie "Shitty Pants"
Maddy : What?? :( BUT THAT WAS JUST A COINCIDENCE!!

Sorry!! I am not interested

The modern times have given us various luxuries in several fields and one of the major attractions was the "Mobile phone". A necessary menace or rather an undesired necessity, till the endtimes it has become. Perhaps you can forget to have lunch, or to burp after you have one, or may be to take a shower, but you can't afford to spend a slightest of moment without your mobile phone expecting a call from your husband/wife if you are married, unfortunate official calls (official calls on holidays are unfortunate), near dear loved ones i.e. boy friends or girl friends, mom, dad, brother, sister, a very close friend, or may be a call from the Job consultancy if you are looking for a job change, or an SOS call from your neighbour in case a fire broke out at his place and to name a few. This feeling of mine regarding the whole technology is not by instinct but has grown up due to a series of continuous events that occured lately.

By events I mean to say when on a good sunny holiday.. which apparently was a sunday ... I recieved seven calls from four different banks all with the motive of selling their Zero rental CREDIT CARDS..yet another menace of its own kind , but I would rather stick to one menace in this post and shall not deviate.

The phone rings ritually, flashing an unknown number, and with the curiosity that "It might be a call from a bumper lottery house...where i just won a Crore...yippppeeeeee!!" , I proceed to recieve it. The person on the other side, highly professional, trained and having a terrible communication skill, start to demonstrate the product without even bothering to ask whether he/she has called the right person. My reaction on the other side is much more simplistic or may be i should say confused and is kind of "Errrr....ummmmm...what is this call all about???", and i realise that its the menace trying to propagate. Soon the call turns out to be cold or what people say a "Cold call".

The first call was not at all a botheration. But soon the count started to increase, and it was the second....third....fourth....fifth...sixth.....seventh.... as if the previous one triggered the happening of the next. But being an IT professional it is highly recommended to keep our calm all the times whether you are at work or not, and yes which i follow blindly, not always though. So as usual i assimilated all my calmness just to focus on not being rude to those people, alas its their work. I rather prepared a set of scripts for such situtions now, and yes i follow the script if the Skillful Representative is lucky enough to get my time. And let me tell you all the scripts end up having the same moral at the end "Sorry!! I am not interested right now".

peace.