This project is beginning to suck.

Heat!

I'm sweating inside the office! Definitely the warmest I've ever experienced in Bangalore.

Holiday drought

Tomorrow, 2nd April, is a holiday for Good Friday. The next scheduled holiday is on the 2nd of September for Janmashtami ..... a straight 5 months without a single day's off from work!

IPL 2010 is go

Wake up at 6. This being a Friday is another initiative. Leave for office by 8:15 am. Swipe in at quarter to 9.

Rajesh has been dropped hints all week, courtesy Nilanjan, that no one's gonna be around by 6 on Friday evening. It's a light load day & passes quickly enough.

Shalini has her 'supplementary' driving test. She passes. Very happy.

I leave at 5:30 on the dot. Traffic is light on the way home. Buy a couple of 'Feast's to celebrate. And am in just before the inauguration.

Kick back. Relax. Shanu rues the upcoming 45 days of non stop T20. But I don't .... not one bit. Heh heh.

The opening ceremony is a damp squib. I mean, who wants to watch UB40, Abba Revival & Lionel Ritchie in this day & age? Lalit Modi might have managed a package deal on the cheap for them.

Kolkata take on Deccan in the opener. The last team of 2009 vs the champions. And Kolkata win! SRK is mercifully missing from the screen for the duration of the match. A good win for KKR nonetheless. I'm somehow inclined to back them for this year.

@ the office

Arun Balakrishnan is a dead ringer for Siju Thomas who was with me back in college. The way he talks, his gait, the physique .... everything matches. Maybe the one above instantiates every new individual from one of several basic templates.

Meanwhile, The dumb asses in charge of blocking 'unwanted' websites at the office have zealously managed to block every cricket related site on the web. But iplt20.com remains accessible in all it's glory, with just 3 days to go for the start of the 2010 season. Maybe they look for the word 'cricket' in the URL.

And finally, as one friend leaves, another fills in .... Div joins the company a few weeks after Sittu's departure.

The ODI Double Ton

24th Feb, 2010. India vs South Africa day-night ODI on at Gwalior. 2nd match of the series with India already 1 up. The Indians had started well & Sachin is playing like he used to in the early 90s, at a strike rate close to 130. Nilanjan keeps pinging updates from time to time over the communicator .... Sachin 50, Sachin 100, Sachin 150. I'm busy working on stored procedures for the Friday deadline.

Evening around 5:30ish. I glance at the score. India have crossed 300. In the 40th over. Sachin is on 184. I ask Nilanjan about the world record. He replies, "194, aaj mil jayega guru". That's it. I leave the cubicle & walk over to where Nilanjan, Vijendra, Cyril & Srini are bunched together. All cricket sites are blocked, they're following the score on ChannelW, which is slow in updates as usual.

By now, there's a buzz in the office. No one's working, everyone's following the score. Soon enough, Sachin crosses Saeed Anwar's 13 year old record .... it's like a load of every self-respecting Indian's chest. Complete strangers handshake congratulations across cubicles .... such is the power of cricket & stature of Tendulkar in India. The wait for the double ton begins.

The internet connections are choked. People get on the phone home. I call Daddy. Yes, he's watching. Dhoni is going ballistic, hogging the strike & dealing in boundaries .... the ball-by-ball reads something like this 644.46. The score is close to 380. Sachin is reportedly suffering from cramps. Only 7 balls to go. Dhoni takes a single of the last ball of the 49th over. There's a collective 'awwww' in the cubicle.

He finally gets strike after yet another Dhoni boundary & with 4 balls to go. Hits a single & gets it. Handshakes all around. Somebody asks his manager, "so where's the party?". Dhoni blasts another & takes the score to 401/3. Who wins the match is only academic now. Indians have got what they've been yearning for all this while.

And as the commentator says, "no one deserves this more than Sachin". The Indian, the cricketer, the legend.

Today

Raced a Dominos Pizza delivery boy today .... & won. Brought back a lot of memories from the ol' school days. It feels good to give up all that defensive driving & go wild once in a while.

Vinod got transferred out of OBS today. Good for him since the boy was desperate for billability, but I'll miss his company. This billability funda has taken all the fun out of IT, at least in this company.

At work on Diwali evening.

Working @ Ahmed Plaza

Having been placed on the 'free pool' in these now deadly dangerous recessionary times, while IT companies are laying people off using whichever excuse possible .... the opening (& subsequent call up) from Infotech came like a huge relief.

It meant that I'd have to work at Ahmed Plaza - a small company facility that I'd never paid much attention to on the way to the EC campus. Reported there on 6th July probably. Jayamohan came across as the professional boss .... somebody for whom work came first .... fair enough. I liked his introductory talk though.

Then there were the colleagues .... Mantuno, Prashant and Rahul. Though Rahul wasn't on our project, he would always accompany us on our tea/coffee breaks. These 3 were some of the nicest guys I've ever met. I won't forget the numerous chat sessions we had while having coffee outside the office and often under the Bangalore Elevated Tollway flyover between pillar nos 196 and 197!

The work was mostly forgettable ..... calling up Deepak who was in Delhi & forever reluctant to take our calls, alongside Puneet, whom I somehow never got around to liking. Apart from this there was work on the prototype and .... that was about it.

The memories that stand out are those of the food .... it was horrible. I lost a few kilos in the 2 months I was there. And of course, the announcement of the technology change .... 'the client has decided not to go ahead with xxx platform since they don't want to spend on the licenses' .... effectively placing those of us who had just transferred in from Technologies & didn't want to relocate to Gurgaon/Hyderabad exposed to the vagaries of the free pool once again.

Anyway, all that's over now ..... Sarjapur is a far better place - food-wise; traffic-wise; facility-wise and 'greenery'-wise.

But there's one thing about A.P. that I'll miss .... the fantastic views just across the boundary walls. After all, how often does one get to see stuff like this ....



.... yup, a yard full of spanking new Beemers belonging to the adjacent BMW dealer.

6 days

This is officially gonna be a 6 day work week.

Vendor change

The cafeteria gets a new vendor from today. I liked the old guys with their East Indian touch & ease with Hindi (they were all Bengali Muslims).

The change has been very sudden. I wonder if it's got something to do with the ongoing recession and plans to shift this facility elsewhere.

Note to self: Avoid fiddling with the VOIP phone even if the manager keeps droning on half an hour beyond the lunch hour.

I See ....

Akhila is back to the old wing after she joined another project associated with ours last week. She's put on some weight after marriage, but remains the cute dumbo she used to be.

And talking of the office, it's spring time and the 2 trees located on the parking lot have burst into blossoms. This picture ....

.... doesn't bring out the color well enough, but it's a nice sight every morning on the way to the cubicle.

Meanwhile, back at #77, Sid's stack ....

.... of used Marlboro packs keeps growing taller. Wonder what he plans to do with these?

Also, the house has received a new coat of paint before Ugadi & the smell of freshly applied distemper & thinner assaults the senses every morning on opening the front door.

Double damn

1 - tea is the only beverage available at the pantry now. The cost cutters have stopped coffee!

2 - all cricket sites are blocked from now on.

Changes

Karthik moved out of HRA today after almost a year and a half. Won't really miss him, but it feels like my last link with that project has snapped. Oh wait, there's Thiru still ......

And thanks to "buddy boy" Manish, there's a new addition to the wallet. Hope it gets used soon.

While I was away .........

A trip home always takes time to recover from, especially if it's your only one in the year. But this time it was different.

For starters, I spent Christmas sleeping on the train while passing through Andhra Pradesh. Even Jesus seems to have had enough of me & my shenanigans.

Second, things haven't been this bad on the personal front for a long, long time .... maybe ever. And stuff seems to be on a steep downward spiral. Mummy's facing health issues she never had before. Jolly's facing frustrations of his own and took major convincing to make the trip home. Dad's sense of loss over all that has happened in the last few years grows more acute by the day. Yet he soldiers on like he always has, saying little & expecting even lesser. And to top it all, we are in the midst of this. 2008 has been one forgettable year.

Chhotu though, brings the sense of relief that is so greatly desired at times like these. Looking at her best I've ever seen her in winter, it was great to see that advancing age has not affected her spunk. Thank God for small mercies.

Arrived back in B'lore on a chilly morning on the 3rd. Strangely, it felt good to be back from home. Sid's whole family was put up at our place & the experience was surreal to say the least, especially since this had never happened before at #77. I mean, there were people to talk to before leaving for & after coming back from office. There was tea being served in cups. The kitchen was actually looking, and smelling, like a kitchen ought to & yes, there was hot home-cooked food for dinner. Alas, it lasted but a week.

2009 hasn't quite got off to a rocking start either. The very 1st week saw this all over the news. Makes you wonder what lies next. Combine this with reports of layoffs in the tech industry getting shriller everyday & the sense of insecurity seems complete. Indeed, every new day on the job seems equal to a blessing.

Watched a few movies after coming back, including the year's most hyped - Ghajini - and found it to be exactly that - hyped. Slumdog Millionaire was interesting.

There were a few car launches around the new year too - Hyundai's i20; Mahindra's Xylo and Fiat's very elegant Linea. Tata's Nano is rumoured to be breaking cover on Republic Day. But I'm in the market for a bike & right now it's the Hunk that's caught my fancy.

Bye prasvi

It was Prashanth's farewell party today. He had replaced Kishore in March this year & we had got along really well sitting next to each other.

He moves back home to Kochi to join TCS. There aren't many like him whose wavelengths have matched mine so closely on topics ranging from nationalism & geo-politics on one hand to girls & cars on the other. I'll miss you bro.

All the best. As for the header, that was his Active Directory ID.

wimmen

Over the course of the last few days, we'd been having this discussion about women & their always opting for the wealthiest men over lunch. Pavan & me for the motion, while Akhila & Rajalakshmi opposed it (for obvious reasons).

The whole thing had begun when Akhila brought up this clip of Steffi Graf's. It was mentioned that this instinct was so strong among women that even somebody as rich as Steffi couldn't help but mention it instinctively in response to someone's proposal. The girls insisted it was a joke & should be taken as such. But we guys had made our point.

Then during lunch today, the topic of debate was dowry & how it was the guys being money-minded. We countered saying it was a social custom & not necessarily an indicator of a guy's thinking, but the girls knew that this round was theirs & they had got their own back.

This was till Chandan sent along this forward in the evening ......

Quote of the day:

'The financial situation at the moment is so bad that women are now marrying for love'

.... and yours truly lost no time in forwarding it to the two girls ..... who just read it & smiled back. The debate shall continue.

By the way, Akhila leaves for her marriage tomorrow. All the best girl!

Chair travails

People are fighting for chairs at the office. It's a crime to leave your place unattended it would seem - if your meeting lasts more than half an hour, chances are that your chair will have been taken when you're back. Pathetic!

Office today

- Commute time ~5 minutes.

- Half the seats empty since all the Southies were away at their 'native' for Diwali.

- Cafeteria only 70% full at 1 PM.

- Super calm inside the ODC. Volume 10 on the Walkman sounds like 16. I can even pick up some bass lines I never could before.

- Vacant parking slots at 3 in the afternoon. No parallel parking.

- Our team at 50% strength.