Friday, October 31, 2008

Bare essentials

A gas stove and utensils to cook, a mattress to sleep in, clothes, soap and water and...

... a laptop with internet access ;)

Thursday, October 16, 2008

To and fro

The four hour journey to work and back and our system performance issues at work are becoming a pain now. I started working on the facebook plugin last weekend and it's just stuck at that. Hopefully there will be some respite next week.

Or probably not...

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Consulting

Consulting is when four people are assigned to "Meet, Collaborate and Execute a Challenge Efficiently and Effectively" in a month; basically a job that can be mopped up by one person in two days.

Monday, August 11, 2008

The Untold Gandhi...

Smriti Irani (Bahu of Saas bhi kabhi bahu...) is all set to launch a TV serial depicting the untold story of Gandhi. So we will finally get to see:
  • A good looking, uncannily fashionable Gandhi
  • Evil British officers with devillish looking smiles
  • British officers' wives with garish make-up and long bindis
  • Gandhi having a car accident and losing his memory... to become Nehru for a while?
  • Gandhi's Ba outliving him by several generations out of public demand
Yup, it's an untold story alright...

Thursday, August 07, 2008

So much to live for...

* A career, which depends as much on whims of others as on my skills...
* A marriage, in which my wife lives far away from me and I can see her only once a month...
* A fat paycheck, which vanishes the moment the next month arrives...
* Wonderful mornings, which are either gone by the time I wake up or arrive after I've reached the perennial morning of my workplace
* A Wonderful city, which is burning itself to cinders over who is Marathi, Bhaiyya, Hindu, Muslim....
* A great country, which is pulling itself into the mud, under the pretext of going back to its roots....
* Children, who will grow under the influence of the malls, cartoon network and video games, for whom freedom means pocket money and going to malls alone, instead of playing in the open spaces and maidans...

So much to live for...

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Cleopatra

I was having a discussion with one of my colleagues at work about Egypt and I don't recollect how but we got into this talk about Cleopatra.
He (my colleague) got into story telling mode and he told me that Cleopatra had married her younger brother to stay in power and she also killed her sister some time later in her life time so as to usurp the kingdom from her.

History and its weird tales !!!!!

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Question of Loyalty

I joined the company I currently work for almost two years ago. When I joined I heard everyone around me talk about 'bearing up with' the two years and then switching jobs for a more lucrative offer. Me? No. I wanted to stay, I believed in what the company spoke of as its philosophy. I wanted to stay, be part of the family.

Almost two years now and much has changed. I'm married. I have a family. I want to give them my best as well as save for my children when they arrive. I want something for myself as well -- a job that I will always want to excel in. A challenge that I would be raring to face everyday. There's so much I want that I wonder if I'm being too demanding. I have so much as well right?

Four hours of traveling in a day, people packed like sardines in the train; every single day. A work schedule that demands more and more all the time, while I feel myself giving less and less. I can see people cheering with me, swearing at me, loving me, hating me, resenting me. It is great contribution if you work your ass off on weekends or for twenty hours a day. But at the same time it's blasphemy if you ask for compensation for it. You should not be drinking too much coffee, not even when you're trying to keep yourself awake through the night so that you can meet some of those challenging (read unrealistic) deadlines.

It's a hard question, the question of loyalty. especially hard when you're really not sure if you're being loyal to the company who's values you believe in, or to those individuals who seem to work overtime to circumvent them.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

cat random_ramblings_and_frustrations > randomgod

... better than polluting my tech journal with them.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Outsourcing, Bhaiyya style

The Marathi-Bhaiyya issue from my own metropolitan, middle-class viewpoint looked like a complete farce, a means to polarize Marathi votes away from the Sena and towards the MNS. Today, I had the luck to look at it from the viewpoint of a grassroots worker, a rickshawalla in Mira Road. He was far away from the "they don't learn our culture" talk that Raj Thakarey flaunts and was much closer to the issue that hit him most -- employment. Here's what he had to say (So that the comments don't sound out of context, they were made as a reaction to the State Government appealing to the fleeing workers in Nashik to come back. Also, Mira Road rickshaws follow the pre-paid fare system; no meters):
"Those bhaiyyas, they herd into the city by the dozens, stay like dogs, 7-8 in a room and earn money at our cost. One comes here and then gets 10 other relatives to dirty our state. They sell their pride for chump change, steal our jobs by agreeing to work for half the salary. A Marathi manoos would never sell his pride, he will never work in such conditions. A Marathi manoos, with his family, will never live in conditions that they do. We have our pride as well. We won't simply bear anything for work. I'm not saying we should shoo away all the bhaiyyas, just stop more from coming over."

"Among all the rickshawallas in Mira-Bhayander, most are bhaiyyas, but we make sure none of them pick up fare at our stand. They pollute our business area by taking fare from our stand for less. Wherever we charge for Rs. 20, they willingly take fare for Rs. 10. Commuters then fight with us for the fare, which is just not right".
"But, why are they able to afford taking fare for half the cost?", I asked.
"Because they're like nomads. They don't stick to a single stand like we do, and simply wander all over the place. We have stands, we belong to a place, not like them. Passengers know us. Whenever they forget anything in the rickshaw, we make sure that we return it to them the next time. Thay is why we make sure only our Marathi brothers do business from our stand, not those unreliable bhaiyyas".
So to conclude, North Indians should be shooed out of Maharashtra since they are creating competition for the locals. In other words, Raj Thakareys Marathi manoos doesn't have the spine to compete with the hard working UPites and Biharis.

Shame on us.