Distanced from reality

“… its not only the war that’s disturbing, our freedom is curbed in that flea ridden place”, my uncle retorted when I asked him how his stay in Bangladesh had been. He had a far away look in his eyes when he thought back on his 6yrs tenure there. The stories he told shook me up, the two leading candidates contesting the election have criminal records to boast, and they are both ladies, the army has taken over from the government, the whole country is engulfed in a political turmoil, with fourtneen different heads of government and alteast four military coups. Woo! I sat spelbound listening to all this, the army has banned all private TV stations and the national media is under censorship, shucks!so much for freedom. A couple of days back Bharghav had written this blog, which gave us an insight into the terrible times we live in. India is sure trampling on troubled waters with nobody to steer us clear of all the hullabaloo happening around. For starters we have the whole nation fighting over the existence or non-existence of a blessed bridge, then we have the media and ahmm junta fighting over whether jail is the place to be for a guy who gave the world the term gandhigiri. Sheesh, our nation is a story of how far from reality we have truly come. We need to open our eyes wider, open it wider to take in the situation happening around us. So as a nation are we really screwed up? I don’t think so.

Nestled between the two mighty oceans we have a country which was once called ‘pearl of the indian ocean’, the pearl is tarnished beyond repair. After years of peace, Sri Lanka has again plunged into a conflict between the government and the Tamil tigers popularly known as the LTTE. Peace remains plagued in this war torn country which has witnessed ceasefire followed by killing without impunity and an economy which is still coming to terms with the upheaval.

Thousand of inocent monks in their orange robes were mercilessly shot to death. I watched with sympathy the horrors unraveling on the streets on Burma these last few weeks. When Aung Kyi (she is so breathtakingly beautiful!) won the last election there was much joy, but it was short lived cos the military took over entirely- the govt has been invisible since then. Half the population is in some kinda forced labour and reports say AIDS is ravishing the country ferociously. Denying human rights, killing, and using rape as a war against minorities is wht Burma/Myanmar fights everyday thanks to the military regime.

This place boasts of eight of the world’s ten highest peaks but at the apex of it all is a constitutional monarchy that is very close to becoming a Maoist state. The aristocratic king has lost all his power as head of state and army thanks to Maoist rebels and new political leaders who want to completely overthrow the monarchy.If the Maoist seize power then the kiling, kidnapping, torturnin and bombing happening now will look pale in comparison.God forbid something like this happens !

China is one of the worlds oldest civilization but its economic progress the last couple of years is almost scary! This rapid urbanization has resulted in over 50million farmers(yeah u read the figures right,no wonder they are the most populous in the world!) loosing their farmlands. We might be sharing their problems of population and corruption but here we atleast have the freedom of gathering up a group of like minded ppl and walking down the streets hurling abuses at the government !

This country is a piece of cake. Musharaff said “lets have a general election and elect our leader”, sure enough an election was held and a general was elected! Military dictatorship statred 10 yrs back, parlimant was disbanded, constitution was suspended and the country plunged into a monetary debt from which it has still not recovered. An ex-prime minister who was ousted in a coup detat and a woman ex-prime minister who is contesting the election have both been in exile. What pakistan needs is an end of the military regime for it to gain ground from the bombing and killings that has plagued it for over a decade.

We are not so screwed afterall. Am I happy? Oh hell yes!

lets put this on hold

I have been wanting to blog something for the past three weeks, futile attempts at finding a interesting topic and laziness coupled with procrastination resulted in my blog gathering heavy cobwebs. Last week i was in conversation with a friend who happens to be real sloth like me. He said "Ann, even procrastinators are useful citizens who can be effective, admired and appreciated", passing this as a otiose dialogue i continued sipping my coffee. That conversation introduced me to the concept of Structured Procrastination, its pretty neat. I went to google and typed in the topic and blessed lord i was shocked to see 740,000 hits. Lots of sloths in this world i must say. If you are another corpse who struggles with duties , have hope brother, for in this fast paced world there is space for you and me !

If u have put on hold the simple task of tying Structured Procrastination on google, heck here it is ! Maja Madu.

a mistake around the corner

India are the world champions, felicitous i must say. The men in blue(this phrase has become very cliched!) are finally exonerated from the debacle against Bangladesh that happened in the caribbean islands not so long ago. The most famous email fwd floating around these days is the "Misbah's biggest mistake" one, and by floating around i mean close to 23 fwd in your inbox with the same title. Adam is said to have comitted the biggest mistake recordable,so wht's Misbah's mistake anyway? "Misbah thought he was sending the ball where there was no one, wht he didnt know was that there is a mallu in every corner of the world". Snneer!
Now ignorant faggots i have a doubt, pardon my ignorance, i thought a cricket field was Oval Shaped so how could the mallu get to the corner.! Ha ha!
But a quick google and you can see hordes of mallu's right from Washington to Wadakancherri , giving their tips on how to make good vepalla-katti to how to make addapratham with soyabean milk. I shouldn't be suprised if that Nair chai-kada is functional on moon!

c'est la vie !

I’m one year experienceed in the IT industry, doggonut , something to gloat about I must say! “Experience”, the much hyped term these days seem very abominable to me, partly cos im here for the lack of a better idea. A couple of days back ,one ennui filled afternoon ,I was immeresed in a g-conversation with a dude from college, the talk invariably turned into our hoo-hum vocation, with nothing of substance to talk, my teeny-weeny creative gland or rather the dork-shit-is-wht-i-blog gland started working overtime and that arbit chatter resulted in the character Slothy Moo. Hmm , as i write this i see Stalin's ghost looking up from above and sneering.

SlothyMoo(S&M) is a stupendous cow, like “stupendous man”. Any resemblance to Sam the anthropomorphic Dog and Max the hyperkinetic rabbity thing of Sam&Max or SadoMasochism is , well coincidental(so I believe). S&M spend four years in the farmlands of Basavangudi under the watchful eyes of a big black bull. The grass there was green and resplendent and the fellow cows around S&M were like her, grandualar freaks. All she did there was chew on some arbit shit and once every month spit the cud, in a nutshell she could say ‘life was bliss’. There were other farmlands around her which were occupied by other denizens of the green. This blissful life was shattered on one eventful day. What happened changed the course of her life forever.
There came a day when a lotta pigs descended on the grasslands, the pigs as you all know are highly intelligent creatures, with all the worlds knowledge inside their small smart-ass brain. They came in hordes from different parts of the city with lucrative-grazing offers. The braggart pigs said that after they finish their tenure in the basavangudi farmlands they would be taken to groovy farms enclosed in glass, with an AC to boast and what more they would be given extra green-notes to chew on at the end of every month. When the cows heard this they started pransing around in gay abandon but there was a glitch, they had to undergo a test. “Oh boy! What are they going to judge us on, what if we don’t pass the test!” , they quipped to one another, but the test was pretty simple, they had to cud out all the grass they chewed in the past three years. “Ahhh that’s pretty simple, no big deal” said some of the cows with thick inch glasses. So with great emanating force they puked out all the slime which was well appreciated by some of the pigs .The farmlands also sported some nice,opulent, glamorous chicks who gave new meaning to the term “bird-brain”, they didn’t care much about the pigs and their lucrative grazing offers, they walked around nonchalantly without a care in the world. Some cows decided to cross the oceans, for they blindly believed in the saying “grass is greener across the oceans”.
S&M was impressed by one such grassland and their tempting punchline “we are different”! They came singing this song :

All ya cows grazing in the farmlands,
Join us and u will not despair
The grass we offer is toothsome and not bland,
You will live a action-filled,joy-ful and truly imaginative life ,free of all dire.

Even though Sloth was her midlle name ,she did manage to impress the pigs with all her slime and thus she began her new life. The first few weeks were great fun, the cows who joined in with her were given sugar cubes to chew on. The farmlands were beautiful, wht with all the fountains and shrubs and manicured lawns and coffee beans to smell and see, but to get there the cows had to cross a mighty bridge. Little did SlothyMoo and the other cows know that all the sugar coasted grass they were fed initially would come back to bite them. Slowly the pigs turned into the king and tyrant, they started imposing absurd rules. It seemed like the pigs who ruled the grasslands were going 360, it was a perfect instance of democractic-to-communist rule.Sigh! The once, i-can-chew-when-i-wish farmland turned into a you-have-to-chew-for-9hrs one and what more they even monitored the cows and prepared an attendence bark.The cows started voicing their chafe ,but they were ignorant to the fact that a lot more was in store. SlothyMoo was in despair, “This is not coming out the way they promised!”, she cried to her fellow cows but inspite of all that they hung on and ‘that’s the way the cookie crumbles’.

P.S :( The stroy ends abruptly. The continuation is being worked on, all characters are ficitional and any resemblance to anybody living or dead is purely coincidental.)

Slacker or Striver !

If you are reading this sitting on a plush chair in an AC room and the time on ur watch is anywhere between 9AM-6PM , then you are part of the 50million odd people (yeah that figure was got from a survery) who slack away precious time in the corporate world. Today i got this funny forward "How to look busy" and boy i was laughin my head out( ahem! i had to hold back that chuckle lest ppl around me think im dangerously insane), and you guys are thinkin right, even i'm a humble comtributor to that 50million no.
Being busy at work and looking like it are two different sides of a coin, and some of the tricks of the trade to look busy are (cliches consumeth the me!) :

-->Never walk without a document in hand, those with nothing in their hands look like they going to the cafeteria.
-->Messy Desk,build huge piles of documents around your desk, only top management can get away with messy desk.
-->Look impatient and annoyed, this gives an impression that you are unde stress.
-->Send important mails at unearthly hours (i.e 2AM or 7:24AM) and public holidays.
-->Sigh ! and make sure there are lotta ppl sround you while you are doign that.
-->Apart from books put lotta thick computer manuals all around you.
-->Read a lot of computer magazies and memorise the all important jargons and use it in daily conversation.

Well apart from acting busy there is another thing in the corporate world i have to battle ,Team Meeting! Phew the sound of it makes my skin crawl. It might be useful to compare the corporate meetings of today to a Basketball game(im a great fan,Tony i loveth thee) , in which people participating are a "team" attempting to "play" a quarter in which each player "blocks" the "defenders" from scoring, which will result in everybody in the team exchanging "high-fives" and the leaders gettin a "pat-on-the-butt" which inturn results in the "managers of the team" walking happily to the bank. Hmmm, i think we can't really compare it to a basketball game but you can sure comapre it to a funeral gathering, where everybody are wearing uncomfortable clothing, with the i'd-rather-be-someplace-else look on their faces. The idea which ought to be buried is never really buried, they stagger up the coffins to slap us and eat our brains every other week.
Team meetings are held for the same reason Hanukkah is observed, for tradition and most of the meetings are held on a Monday cos , its a Monday no other special reasons! Most of my Team meetings invole a white book and a colorful pen(courtsey our company stationary) and i start the ordeal by writing down the date and underling it twice, rest of the twenty odd minutes is spent looking at the person talkin ,who most probably is your PM with enraptured interest like he is revealing the secrets of the great black universe , i also take the trouble of drawing doodles once in a while just to show that i do understand the secrets of the great black universe.
Things can get dicey if your PM looks at you and says "we need your INPUTS for blah blah blah", now this word INPUT should be enough to bolt you back to position. This is serious cos what he really means is, if i manage to fuck up then you are to be blamed. A sensible thing would be to escape by setting your dupatta on fire or picking up ur cell and declaring "bin-laden is at the other end". If none of it works you could start talking in Hebrew or Latin.

Slacking off, as i see it is not really difficult, what with all the team-meetings, coffee breaks, newspaprer breaks, "lets-go-fill-our-bottles" break and "i-just-need-a-break" break.
The next time you hear that "no, i'm busy" phrase you should be smart enough to understand that the scum is actually sitting and blogging!

screech, shiver, silent prayer !

Early morning breeze, moisture laden clouds, sun playin peekaboo, vehicles ripped off the roads.
Resplendent!
Wind ruffling on top, mind free of all thoughts, music to fill the soul.
Trance!
A wrong turn, missed signal, flashing headlights, shocked eyes, absolute darkness.
Screech!
Battered body, beaten and dented up vehicle, blood, immobile hand but farely unscathed.
Shiver!
Voices all around, curses, water coming down in sprinkles, sound of soft breathing.
Prayer!

And the thing that makes me go (y)hmm..

"wake upp..! we need to get there before the others do",sittin on my bed half asleep i could sense the urgency in her voice! I was to perform a duty thats sort of a cult for my mom and a dozen or so mallu aunty's she's accquinted with. Flies swarming all around the place, cries of sweat soaked proles trying to get the attention of buyers, and a nauseating smell, welcome to the Fish Markets of Bangalore. Being from the coastal region we strive hard to keep the Atlantic fish under check, lest they start spilling out into the fields and highways. Last week when i went with my mom for our weekly fish-purchase obligation , i was humoured by this conversation between Meen Chetan (literally translated as Fish Brother) and my mom.

Mom (eyening the prawns) :: Cheta are these prawns fresh ?
Meen Chetan :: They are first class prawns chechi.
Mom :: Are these mathhi (Sardines) fresh ??
Meen Chetan (harassed look on his face) :: All these are fresh, any fresher they would answer your questions themselves .!!

Solemn silence!