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.

Dig Dig Diggie Dog!!!!

Its my nature or you can say my instinct to hate people or rather i should say hate looking at people (or other living beings) "DIGGING". Even though the intention won't be wrong every time, its always been a mystery to me when i see someone digging, with questions rising in mind such as - "What's he/she/or the thing is trying to find out there?" or "Is there any treasure hidden out there?", "God damn!! is he digging his/her own grave?"...

Well it ain't that the construction workers near my aptt. building started breaking the building (as they say a new extension is gonna be prepared..) attracted my hatred for them, until i found a chap digging the ground one glorious morning.

"is there a treasure out there?", "r they gonna bury some dead corpse out there?" were the questions that were in the air those days. And one good day we found that t'was nothing but merely a septic tank burial hole.. "May thy rest in peace!!" ...

Well the TOI flashed a news this morning with a picturesque zombie or rather Mummy in the international section, man!! wat a scene it was for the good morning that certainly became as BAD as POSSIBLE.. i was eager to dig..errr!! i mean find out the details, which came as a shock and then again a question aroused "what sort of morons would do such thing?". It was Tutankhamuns 3000 yrs old dead (obviously) corpse, which is supposed to be cursed, and a lad stood by it as proud as possible. As experts suggested, they dug him out just to know how he looked????....w.t.f. ... "CUT the CRAP" i said to maself n moved my way to office where yet another splendid shock waited for me. The street dogs have dug impeccable potholes allover the parking space, that would definitely be a challenge while we try to park our motorbikes back in the evening...................................

Damn i hate digging..................

Last resort !!

I spent a whole week with a chill on my spine.. I was quiet not sure that whether these are my last days where I am. Yes!! my last days in Kolkata where i am now.. working in the corporate industry. After spending about more than a year, i am not closely attached to the work i do here, but what matters to me are the people around me. The people who were strangers back when i first came in here, to whom i was the same stranger as they were to me...& my friends with whom i planned as of "how to spend the first salary?" ......

The whole situation made me bound to think about the time when i was leaving college... the last month in college.. even it was a painful moment for us but somewhere inside there was a joy of freedom ..a joy of becoming a graduate .. and countless more!! But times have changed now I guess, & there isn't any faint remains of any kind of joy about the whole thing.

As of to this whole discussion, i am supposed to move to Bangalore to join a new project. It would be wrong to say that it came as a shock.. but rather its a hard and true fact that every body living wit me here holds the same fear in their mind. Fear of the struggle to create an identity all over again!! To be honest, Bangalore would not be a new place to me, but i don't want to keep the memories of those days. So somewhere in my mind i made a rather absurd decision that for me Bangalore would be a new place.

The only one thing that keeps me happy about he whole thing are my friends who have made their corporate presence noticeable out here at Bangalore.. And yes, lemme tell u, those are the dearest of my pals from school and from college times!!! Time has come to see how good i am now to create this identity all over again!!