scare!

had a big scare today - made a nice lil silly mistake while filling up my CAT form - filled in B.Tech percentage as 7.07 instead of 70.7!! For a few minutes i was scared shitless - my application was going to be disallowed! Gathering my wits together, i mailed the webmaster for the site, but was not very hopeful about his being of any help. Lord was i relieved when he did intervene and set the thing right!! Gosh - i would have been quite shattered if it wouldnt have been rectified. Things are hardly going well career-wise, and this hammerblow would have been too painful. Lets see what the future portends now...

{and thus the blog is regressing(?) back to becoming an occasional diary, rather than a public site.}

ringed out! :D

ring out the old! ringing out the old!


and oh, say long, prolonged hellos to Everett Macgill,
he, the original dapper dan man
creative license (to kill and pain muhahahaha)

About me...u really have to know me to answer that, and u still wudnt know me fully!
Going through a bigtime remold right now...am entering a new phase, one that will hopefully give me direction and purpose!

outside:: lazy, cheerful, lover of novels/cars/music, wrongly wired zonk
also:: dreamer, dreamer, dreamer, ponderer!, ex-self-loather, aspirer, mood-swinger, eternally-trying-to-improve-myself-er

"We live as we dream, alone."

secularists, chakkas

SIMI is a fundamentalist islamic organization which was banned following its open support to Al-Qaeda post 9/11 ["May allah help them kill more of the infidels" etc], and which has been linked with multiple terrorist attacks since [Akshardham, Delhi, etc].
Now here are some news headlines about the attitude of the UP government towards SIMI...

"THE MULAYAM Singh Yadav government has withdrawn a treason case against banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) national president Shahid Badr Falahi."

And after Mumbai train blasts

"... Mulayam Singh Yadav, CM, Uttar Pradesh said: "We'll know as to who is responsible ... As far as we are concerned, SIMI has not been directly involved in attacks ... "

"SIMI not active in my State: Mulayam"

The simple fact is that the SP wants to protect its muslim votebank, and the central government too has not been strict on SIMI because of the same reason. Here is a news report excerpt which shows the priority of politicians - national security Vs votes::

SP seeks to defend SIMI
With the polls approaching and amid indications that BSP, helped by Mayawati's manoeuvre to win over sections of Brahmins, has gained an edge, SP must be feeling the need to hold on to its formidable constituency among Muslims. Even Mulayam's one-time loyalist, Yaqoob Qureshi, the minister who emerged as a sort of hero with his Rs 51 crore bounty offer for a Danish cartoonist's head, has put his weight behind the clerics' challenge to Muslims. Batting for SIMI, he has, besides seeking to save his voter base, also raised the stakes in general.

While similar politics may not be possible in the Congress's style of middle-ground politics, BSP may be amenable to match the wily chief minister with similar announcements.

Mayawati had come out with detailed statements on the communal census in the Army as also cartoons of the Prophet as she saw Mulayam running away with the community's sympathy in the backdrop of twin controversies to hit the nation.

It makes me sad to think that perhaps we could have avoided these blasts if the government [UP as well as Central] hadnt made Terrorism a minor issue which could be subdued under votebank pressures. And then the fucking hypocrites put out such statements...

We will wipe out Terrorism: India
The serial blasts in Mumbai and Srinagar figured in the Union Cabinet meeting on Thursday.

The Cabinet passed a resolution condemning the outrageous terror attacks and asserted that nothing would deter the government from its firm policy to fight the menace till it is wiped out.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chaired the meeting.

Security agencies are suspecting Pakistan-based Lashker-e-Tayiba and the banned Students Islamic Movement of India to be behind the terror attacks in Mumbai.

Meeting for the first time after Tuesday's deadly attacks, the Cabinet observed a two-minute silence and passed a resolution, affirming that terrorists and their acts 'will never be allowed' to check the country's march to economic growth and prosperity.

The meeting lauded the spirit of the people of Mumbai and Jammu and Kashmir, which 'demonstrated very emphatically that terrorism cannot succeed'.

The Cabinet expressed 'profound sense of shock and outrage at the series of blasts in Mumbai and Srinagar' which resulted in 'heavy loss of life and suffering', said the resolution passed at the meeting.

'[The Cabinet] condemns in the strongest terms the senseless, inhuman and dastardly attack by terrorists on tourists and the innocent people of this country,' it said. The resolution emphasised the government's 'strong commitment to combat terrorism in all its forms' and said 'nothing will deter us from our firm policy to fight this menace till it is wiped out.'

And here is another article, this one showing the attitude of the terrorists::

Al Qaeda announces presence in J&K

The spokesman told CNS that Al Qaeda Jammu and Kashmir chief Abu Abdur Rahman Ansari has "expressed happiness over the Mumbai serial blasts and appreciated those who carried out these attacks."

"The Mumbai attacks were a reaction to the oppression in India of minorities in general and Muslims in particular," Hadeed told CNS on phone.

book reviews, honest and partial! :D

i will my stick my neck out and say it...The God of Small Things is an AWEsome book! I havent finished it yet...am somewhere near the midway mark, but it has been too much so far. I cant say i like it - but i have to acknowledge its brilliance all the same! Succhh a fantastic way of chronicling thoughts and people. But it is way too negative...shockingly so. I wonder what must be in the author's mind when penning such a book - is a book always a reflection of the author's mentality, or can it easily digress into an imaginary philosophy? A Picture of Dorian Gray was classic in this sense - the perfect way Oscar Wilde constructed Sir Henry's materialistic p.o.v whereas he is infact firmly against materialism. It was toooo good, the way the ideology was torn apart: such simplicity in idea and such power in execution.

Oh well thats enough of mushing over those, now lets get to brass tacks. Ernest Hemingway. An author i was so looking forward to. A Farewell to Arms. What the fuck.
I dont get it, whats good about that book?? The title had me expecting a grand novel which would make a compelling case for peace. Pffft. Ok, it had a few war scenes which were just a wee bit poignant, nothing more. I found the protagonist to be a fucking bastard! Calmly accepting bravery awards for free, and later shooting off 2 officers in frustration. i donno, cultural differences or not, surely there isnt any justification for shooting a deserter in the time of retreat - especially when our hero himself aint a saint. i spose the romance angle was alright - it started off showcasing how ppl get crazy in war, a la Catch 22. But thereon it just progressively degrades into a stupid script [i felt]. Disappointing.
[btw i guess i would have been much happier with the novel if only the protagonist had been shown having some ethics]

Back to the small things. memory. it is such an important theme in roy's book. and indeed, i have long felt that our outlook towards life, our life itself, is defined by our memories of it. We are what we remember [choose to remember?]. I feel so bad that i have this rotten memory - i can hardly remember anything. Not childhood events, not watershed events, not happy moments, not sad moments. So i desperately cling on to whatever i do remember, and i desperately try to note down what has happened recently. what a life! why, i am pretty much an optimist...i would have been much more cheerful if i had a more reliable memory bank and a retrieval system which could be used if i were blue :D

through the looking glass

I dont know how it is so, but the smallest things can make my heart happy :)
Dogs, people, misunderstandings, situations, etc.
I guess i am what they would call the exact opposite of a morning person, so its not hard to guess my mood when i am forced to get up at 7 and go to office. Well that day, i had a fouler mood still coz i missed breakfast too, and there i was waiting for the 7:59 train [7:54 thane had just left]. Decided to get the ole boots a bit of a scrubbing, and thus there i was with my foot boarded up and a cobbler polishing it. Btw, felt mighty bad about the whole me standing over him with he polishing my shoes thing. Now the comedy of errors began - the train came in early, i had had only one shoe partly polished, so with the train steaming(volting?) in, i had him hastily put cream onto the other shoe. And then, in the customary 10 secs stoppage time, i gave him a tenner and rushed in without the change.
The whole nonsense made me smile for a loong time :D

Then today i was travelling with Sudheer, the electrician promoted to maintenance supervisor. There is such an endearing charm assosiated with simplicity and simple living. No strings attached.

I wish i had a dog. That image is still stuck in my head - of the black dog happily loping all around the person carrying a black mutton bag high over its reach :)

I wonder what causes mood swings. The other day i saw such a dramatic swing inside of me. Was travelling in the auto, tired day at work, all despondent, but by the time i got down, i was positively humming and feeling sunny!

job confusion

Ahh the first week of work.
Not smooth.
Full of downs and partial recoveries. Well it has got something to do with my own confused state. But then again, the place isnt top notch, really. First day was a shocked daze but i kept it to myself and sure enough had recovered by end of second day [saturday]. But then I talked to dad and he had me take a good hard look at what it is i wanted. Well that question still remains unanswered, but the logical basis for continuing this job sure got shaken.
I was under the impression that i will be on a efficiency-improvement and cost-reduction project. Monday and tuesday were yet spent in deep thoughts i guess, and i only made the decision to apply elsewhere on wednesday. I still harboured thoughts that this job wasnt so bad after all.
On friday i realised that sieving out a potential cost reduction process and then doing it might not exactly be a great thing - data analytics guys do the exact same kind of thing all the time. Big nadir.

Saturday [today], i get to know the actual work planned out for me. 'Go out there and learn [i]everything[/i]'. Do the job of despatch supervisor for a while, the live birds supervisor for some more, deboning yet another while etc. The idea is good - to expose me to operations/production in a way that will build me into a pointman for the job. Just like Soni said, become the expert in your field. Great idea, but I did well to express my reservations then and there:: i enquired about value addition and also told him about general trouble in commuting. Just to make communication smoother incase i do leave.

I thought long and hard while coming back in the train. Indeed that is the only way to learn about operations, from the grassroots. I need to be like Mr. Suryakant, not Mr. Shere. But then do i need to be here at all? Should i go through all this grind at all? The only justification is that i sense that i have a liking for operations. Now, that maybe true, but i cant see myself standing upto the physical and mental exertion! The repetitive work which will be the only way to learn. The totally altered lifestyle - wholly work oriented. [already i need to go put in 3 days night shift from monday].

The other side of the fence is full of opportunities, convenient jobs. People everywhere ask me, what the hell are your priorities? Do i want to clear the CAT this time or not? If yes, then i shudnt give much thought to the job profile, should just choose a temporary kind of a job. Makes sense to me presently. Lets see if this is the end of the topic.

A Thing of Beauty

so many beautiful memories...they will all fade away.
All the brightness of the world to fade away, and expose the darkness below

damn it sounds so good to be melancholy! :D
well memories are too faint...gotta catch hold of them and hold on to them tight. so much has happened over these last 2-3 weeks and i have already forgotten most of it.
Sunny got the great job at Octane :)
Met Arpit, Ashish, Sandeep, Abhishek, Sudarshan, Arun, Sarika, Vinayak, Mahim, Soni, Mallu.
Bonded with so many new friends and old

Wrote a small poem, and managed to make it trash by trying to make it rhyme. Well i have tried to salvage it even as i reproduced it here, and i guess it has turned out alright in the end ::


'A Thing of Beauty'

A Thing of Beauty
At once endearing,
but oh! wicked and cunning

She sets out, to win hearts
To be pawned off, when the moments pas't

Sparkling, glittering, Radiant, in the icy cold night
Queen Bee, Queen of the drones,
They all flock to her, mesmerised - A Thing of Beauty

Thing of Beauty
Eyes Glittering, jaw set,
She is out, to win their hearts.
She shall have her way, and her hearts,
win those hearts, for the day.

tales from the dark recesses of the mind

ahh well theres no point to the title - just thought it would be rad :D

todays lunch menu is pizza and chilled wine [mug instead of icebox :D]

i think i have a streak of simplicity inside me - which is great news! i get happy with all the small wonders of the world...lets see how... the last 3 days have been spent doing the sales beat for the wadala distributors of GCPL. sales is a thankless job, btw. i got pretty disillusioned with what i saw because there is hardly any impact u can have on overall sales from the grassroots level that i was exposed to. i guess it will be quite different at higher levels. anyways, i dont know whats the motivation that keeps ppl like varunraj (fo) and sandeep (isr) going...

anyways, back to the beginning, i just liked the whole roaming the city bit immensely. no agendas, no complexities, just being in touch with stark reality. particularly endearing was the image of the dog bouncing alongside a man holding his meat high above its reach :)
no pretensions of good literature now, will just write what i feel like, in as many/few words as i want to. case in point.

pele

pele left iit today.
i will no longer see his ever-smiling face daily subeh 'pele pele'
The companion of 4 years, the man-friday for any support i needed, a friend through thick and thin. Now life sends us apart, each on our separate paths. Why does it have to be so?!
Ahh - to think of how it will be over the years::
As two old friends we may meet, once every few years, to catch up with our lives over a hurried meal, where we used to catch up with each other daily!


His room - emptied of all articles. Our haunt of so many years, now stripped of all. I cant bear to look at it in that state just yet. Empty room, full of memories.

[Its dawn now, and i am just back from the terrace. Where we probed the depths of our hearts and minds to understand the world around us. Our terrace, no more]

The final moment is here - the taxi is loaded. Its getting late - gullu is drumming his fingers impatiently. Ahh damn you.
Pele's eyes tell the whole story. I will always remember you pele! You are the best!

[sighh...we realised the fullness of friendship at the moment of parting]

All i can think of right now is Floyd's High Hopes::

Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river

I hate going away from ppl just bcoz of circumstances - u meet so few ppl whom u love, and then life makes u go through these farewells.

the dolphin and the 150 km long beach :D

alibag
We were out there only for 30 hours, but it felt like much more :)
i have now covered all of the beaches in that circuit :D [well, akshi beach is still left]. We left at dawn, and went to Nagaon beach first, and had breakfast in the village shack before moving to the Murud area. Skipped kashid, murud and janjira, went to the very end of the region, and i had a blissful afternoon nap in the white sand of the small nameless beach near 'Aagardanda'
Spent the evening playing football, cricket, and generally fooling around [read sandcastles and samundar-bathing] in Kashid beach :D
Oh, and the fish thali in patel lunch home rocks :))



As night fell, we drove on back to Nagaon and Alibag, and i love roadtrips :)
I so wanted to grab the steering and drive, but alas! Fine, i will work out a roadtrip soon for sure! We had a great veggie meal in Alibag, and then it was back to the beaches with lotsa beer and tonnes of chips :D
Learnt how to make bonfires out of coconuts, slept on this beach too, woke up in time to see the moon set over the sea, and it beats any of the sunsets i have ever seen! It is so - magical!



Having fooled on the beach all night, we packed up our camp at dawn, and were back in bbay by 9:30! BTW the bbay goa highway, with all its traffic, was more exciting than today's Spanish Grand Prix! I am gonna drive out on that road someday.

ED:: A few more pics are up on my orkut album, and also here: http://harsha-vardhan.livejournal.com/

generalities

so today there is nothing much to post about
lets talk about generalities, shall we?

hmmm...so why did i reopen the blog?! why did i close it in the first place? i guess i wanted In, in on the plethora of career options that i was missing out, while stumbling about in my maze of confusion.

For a day or two, the mists cleared, the temporary short-term thing to do [job to take] was apparent, and i am glad to say, i am on it now! But along with the career focus came the knee-jerk reaction:: shut the blog, create a new average-joe blog. whatever that is. and not that i have any liking for being one of 'them'.

It may just have been that i wanted to give off a different impression of myself, maybe i felt that uncomfy that people coming to my site see this avatar of mine, inner thoughts, insecurities, ravings, frank expressions, outporings and whatnot.
[btw that is still unresolved...how do i go about keeping this an open blog, and yet not putting my foot in my mouth, socially speaking? :-? ]
What i dint realise is that this is how my blogs are always going to be - a kind of semi-diary! [i hope that this goes on to prove that i am an open book - QED etc, u know :P]

Confessional section now:: [:D] [damn why dont the sideways v brackets work in html!]

Yes i am an aspirer. All i want to be professionally is like Mr.So&So. [Ego wins in the battle against transparency :D ... not that lots of people would have heard of him, but still...]
He is my role model. I want to be like him. Whenever i am confused, I think of what he would have done in a similar situation. It helps a lot. I have role models for personal life too - i want to be as free and friendly as x, as communicative as y, as deep as z, etc.

All that is fine, i still am totally for the idea of learning from So&So and being a good manager [in all senses of the word] but i lost it slightly during the initial phases of this [for Temporary future goals!!] clarity that i have. [more on the progress later]
I ask myself, so do i want one of those oh-so-popular blogs that these IITians and IIMians keep, where they write about their campuses, day in, day out, and the eager juntax just LAPS it up! Heck No! Me having one of those light hearted humorous exploits-for-the-day blogs which are just that and nothing more - shallow to the core! Heck No! Well, gotta admit it, a lil viewership wudnt hurt my ego [:D], but the heck i am not gonna write crap in the name of pandering to the masses.

So Boing2 rises from the ashes! long live Boing2! :)

Hmmm...that wasnt quite generalities, was it! :D
So lets talk more, then. I can talk about the Obsessive-Cleanliness-Syndrome that i seem to be having [noticed it recently].

[that was space for laughing your disbelief out, now get back to reading :P]
Yea, it sounds incongrous, me and cleanliness! Well it is more abt personal hygiene, and somehow, personal hygiene for my brain doesnt seem to include state of room, state of body, state of teeth etc! All my brain is obsessed with, is clean hands. Bloody damn Convenient :D :D

And now to the succès d’estime
The off-campus applying is coming along well. The pace aint too good, but thats just me. I hope to up it a few notches, so Bestos to me with that :)
Lots of leads, i will try and follow up on all of them. I do get drained with this, hopefully will get used to it. Have this long list of companies to apply to. Thank God for the clarity on where to apply! WHERE ARE THE CALLS FOR THE INTERVIEWS???

hehehe i aint that freaked out just yet, but i will be soon enough. thank god i have that trip to hyd planned for just when i would have begun to freak out :D
Adieu!

more QC mention

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=11

this was one of the first strips
over the years, the cartoons rock just as much, and the cartoon-art gets cooler