Summer of 69

Today was like any other day. Any other day apart from one small detail. An email on the IIT Yahoo group just reminded that seven years back, we stepped out of IIT Kharagpur. Yes, it's the seventh anniversary of our graduation.

Frankly speaking, I don't want to remember those days. Simply because it reminds of such good days, such optimism, such confidence and such passion to make our mark that remembering it seven years later inevitably raises questions of whether we have lived up to them. As Rekha croons in Umrao Jaan:

"Tamam umra ka hisaab, mangti hai zindagi...
yeh mera dil kahe to kya, yeh khud se sharmsaar hai..."

(The life asks for the account of all the time spent, my heart is speechless, for it is guilty deep within)

I do not know but I hope most of my batchmates don't feel the same way - but I am afraid that that's exactly what they feel.

I still remember the opening speech, the day we entered IIT. "There are two types of engineers in this world, those who are IITians and those who wish they were", our dean thundered from the welcome podium.

The sentence stuck. So did so many other experiences - each and every minute of the day, throughout those four years, the system injected a feeling of empowerment. I am special, I can do whatever I want, I can change the world, I can create my own world.

I still remember a couple of sentences spoken by our English teacher in the first semester, "IITians die hard", "IITians take the bull by the horns". We were naive to believe them and feel good about ourselves then. With years, the naivette gone, the honest optimism of adolescent became prey to our own lack of courage to stand out on our own. Many of us now feel we are betraying that potential - that we are not living upto it.

Make no mistake, we are not doing bad by any standards. Most of us are working in very interesting jobs, in very well known companies. Many of us are profs in big Ivy League Universities in the US, many of us handling senior positions in the corporate world globally. But where is the peace, satisfaction and mental calm. Where is self-actualization, where is the feeling that we are operating at the best of our capacity in the best direction suited individually for each one of us. Swanky cars, corner offices, US addresses etc. are ok to prove to the world that we are successful - but have we proved it to ourselves. At least I have not, at least not yet.

The trap is that many of us are actually fighting battles ordained for us by others. Since we are competent and can fight, we are doing well in even those battles - but where is the empowerment. Why should a very fine intellect, a strong urge to excel, an intense capability to persevere be unable to take control of its own life, pick its own battle and create its own universe.

There are a few of us who have taken the perpendicular path. A batchmate of mine, Rohit Gupta shunned the corporate sector within 6 months and went away to do his own thing - to become an author. Read somewhere that he survived through extremely hard days - sleeping on the benches and not having money for tea - but is now doing well - has won rewards and recognition finally.

Point is not winning awards and accolades that much - the point is charting out our own path. I know so many of us could have been great musicians, great writers, great photographers, great painters, great entrepreneurs but are currently doing coding for Microsoft, Intel, Texas Instruments in their offices from Santa Clara to Seattle to Bangalore simply because in their 10+2 they were extra good in Mathematics and Physics and Chemistry. That is sad. Why should one's goodness be the harness in his own neck.

I know many of us are still not at a stage where we can say enough is enough and break out of the rat race and become a tiger in their own right. I know many of us will do that in the near and distant future.

The sad part is, some of us won't ever.

Learning and Comfort Zones

Do you remember the first time you drove a car. From the nervous start to the fidgety gear shift to jumbled up clutch brake equation to sweat all over your brow. "Heavy traffic ? No, thank you. I am happy at my 15 kmph on the service road near Sector 29".

Cut to 15 days later, you'd be zooming around the bylanes of Delhi, thriving in the midst of all those foul mouth drivers and (ok, only the more enterprising types) even matching them twist for twist and word for word.

Or the first time you looked at your class twelfth mathematics books. "Ohh my God, trigonometric equations with unending streams of tan and cot and coordinate geometry of obscenely twisted figures and that weird symbol meaning integration". A year later, most of us are able to use those weird symbols and grapple with those undending streams of trigonometric ratios. In other words, we become comfortable.

Or the first time you went out to play cricket. "Bhaiyya, ball slow dena" (slow balls please!). You are extremely uncomfortable at the prospect of the red ball zooming in towards you at what you perceive as high pace. Three months and you start hitting the same bhaiyya over the top.

Or the first time you smoked a cigarette. Extreme discomfort at the smoke getting inside you while a couple more days and you look like your grand dad modelled for Marlboro lights 70 years back.

The idea is not that smoking is cool or all of us did finally learn to hit our friendly neighbourhood bhaiyya to huge sixes. Interesting is this transition from an extreme feeling of discomfort to being completely at ease, and in this process we ended up learning something new.

Now think of any instance where you learnt something new. It can be cooking a new dish, painting, singing, dancing, playing a sport, a new language, a new subject, anything. With each instance, you can clearly identify three distinct stages - a) the initial stage where you are extremely uncomfortable doing what you set out to learn, b) the transition and c) the final stage when it becomes second nature.

Infact, if your comfort level with something is the same before and after the learning process, it is safe to say that you haven't learnt anything.

Learning, in this sense, is always associated with moving from being uncomfortable to being comfortable, or expanding your comfort zone to include the earlier out of bounds areas. The direct corollary is that we only learn through stepping out of our comfort zones.

This is very interesting. We only learn through stepping out of our comfort zones. Still, so many of us go to extreme lengths to avoid having to step out. At times, yours truly too has been guilty of this offence.

While we are kids, we are systematically and even uncosnciously asked and required to step out of our comfort zones. The parents, education system, peer pressure, even our own instincts. We are still uncontaminated by the negative inputs the world incessantly gives us - the quagmire of limiting thoughts - it doesn't seem like a big deal. But ask us grown-ups (am not too sure if you can call 28 years all that "grown-up") - many a bright kid has lost the spark just due to hesitation to venture out of the comfort zones. At times, even I am afraid, if I will be able to preserve it.

Hesitation is the number one enemy of endeavor, comfort of comfort zones is the arch rival of learning. I want to believe that I never hesitate and never feel the trepidation in breaching my confort zone. If only, it was true always !!!

मेरी पहली हिन्दी इन्टर्नेट रचना

भाई लोगो, मज़ा आ गया। जीवन में पहली बार हिन्दी में कम्प्यूटर पर लिख रहा हूं। थोडा मेहनत का काम ज़रूर है पर इस मेहनत में भी अपना ही रस है।

धन्य है वो प्रोग्रामर जिसने ऐसा महान साफ़्टवेअर बनाया है।

Pretty Woman

She made my day.

And for the first time in my life, she almost forced me to sit writing about a beautiful woman. Never ever done that, not in any of the past relationships. Come to think of it, my relationship with her is only of four minutes.
I saw her today after lunch, infact was asked by a couple of friends to look at her, who too were doing the same, standing outside the office and ready for a post lunch stroll. She was there, on the balcony of the first floor of the neighbouring office, walking back and forth and talking on her cellphone.

The first glimpse of her was her reflection in the black glass facade of my office and I couldn't control myself from then on. I crossed over to the other side of the narrow pass from where I could see the actual her, and not a reflection.

She was taller than average. Hair neatly tied in a ponytail hanging loose upto some length beyond shoulders. The complexion was a resplendent shade of the Indian fair, very soothing and had an innate ability to attract. Her eyes darted just like a small money jumping from branch to branch with juvenile abandon. Her pretty lips were talking animatedly to someone on phone.

The age must be early twenties. I could not resist the temptation to give her silhoutte a quick scan. The body was perfect, a man's dream, something which takes effort to create - either by God or by the heiress to which it belongs. Her grace of movement had a certain captivating capacity which would not allow you to turn your eyes from her. She could easily have qualified for some of the umpteen modelling contests being held every where these days, from Sitapur to Siliguri and from Bangalore to Betia. But that's not the point. The point is that she can make any man go weak in his kness. There sure is a power much beyond the oft touted money and muscle - and women are the sole privy to that.

I climbed up a slightly lower balcony of another office nearby, where I could get a better view and took out my phone - a call on a cell was the perfect alibi to keep watching her for as long as she would allow. I didn't call my fiancee because that would somehow create a moral issue - how can I use talking to the love of my life as an excuse to ogle at another very beautiful woman. I called my dad.

So there were we, both of us on our cell phones, talking and walking and I watching her. Our eyes met and we held each others stare but kept on pretending to talk. I couldn't clearly see the color of her eyes but knew that they were the flag bearers of the exciting story that was her. Damn, why did I wear this old Tshirt to office today !!!

Even her clothes seemed to tell a story. Her washed denim jeans fitted nicely and comfortably on her - the good thing about a good body is that you don't need to go out of your way with your dresses to look sexy. And she topped it up with a brownish black top with a v-neck. Just the tantalising amount of skin beneath the fabric covering her exquisite proportions. An important characteristic of an extraordinarily attractive body is that it creates a separate identity of its own, very distinct from the prettiness of the face. In some sense, infact, a pretty face may actually be thought of as an antithesis to a pretty body simply because while the classical beauty worships delicate, sharp and even fragile facial features, for body, it has to be firm proportions. I mean a sexy waist to hip ratio is deifnitely not in the same fragility-league as a very delicate face cut - but think of what would happen when both a pretty face and a prettier body compete with each other to create what cannot really be described in words.

The color of her top blended very well with the yellowish brown walls and grey-black iron of the balcony. The slanting sun rays highlighting a part of that yellowish brown wall, while the remaining part displayed a darker, browner black seemed to create the perfect canvas for the live animated artwork that she was.

There are some women who can make you do anything - and I know its vain, illogical and probably unethical too. But had I not been so madly in love already, I'd have definitely done any and everything possible to have my chance with her.

They didn't include Kama along side four pillars of life (Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha) for nothing.

And she was hot, exquisitely and breathtakingly hot in a peerless beauty mode.

May God make her happy.

How long does a toy live ???

How long does a toy live ?

It seems like an innocuous, infact sufficiently vague a question - I mean what is the toy we are talking about, what does it do, who plays with it etc. etc.

But if we look closely, its sparks off a very interesting exploration of human nature.

I still remember, it was 1987, I was a typical grade six kid. Get up in the morning, get cajoled or scolded to study, get ready for school, come back, finish lunch, study or watch TV, go out to play and then come back by the time darkness falls. We had a group of 5-6 guys in our locality who would play together, anything ranging from cricket to hide and seek to flying kites to cops and robbers to just loitering around.

Those days, if God had come down and asked, "Son, ask for something and that is the only thing you can ask for", I'd have gone for a cricket bat. I had seen it only too often that the guy who has the bat in the locality, calls the shots. He gets to bat first, bosses around and can always throw the trump card, "If I am out, the game ends here" and then walk away with his bat.

Moreover, a bat that I used to see everyday in the show case while passing through "Sangam Sports", a sports goods shop on the way to school had exactly the same logo, "Power", as the bat, Kapil Dev held in one of the stickers I had. Kapil was my hero and if only I could have a bat which in some ways looked like the willow he weilded.

I would frequently dream of holding that bat and hitting all those bowlers in my locality for huge sixes in a true heroic fashion - dancing down the pitch and hoisting above the bowler's head.

As luck would have it, I stood first in my exams and mom asked me the same question, "Son, ask for something".

The bat had come. The "Power" sticker was very much there. The smell of the willow, the new rubber handle grip, the edges - it was intoxicating. The shopkeeper had told me that usually, bats break because their handles break and that happens if too big boys play with kids' bats - so do not allow big guys to play with your bat.

For the next week, I'd religiously go out, be extremely careful to see that no body hits any stone or gravel pieces with my bat, no big boys play and no body treats the bat with disrespect. I was the king and the bat was the sword - and the king was fiercely protective of his sword.

Two months down the line, kite flying season started. I started having dreams of the new charkhi (the spool on which thread is rolled), Monu Bhaiyya had - it was so smooth and fast and you did not even have to worry about the knots coming in the thread and it getting entangled. The kids who had a charkhi were always respected more than the ones who just rolled their threads on a stone in the form of a gulla or a thread-ball.

The bat, ohh, I shoved it beneath the huge trunk in my bed room because if I kept it behind the door in my room, it would fall every fifteen minutes and make irritating noise.

Cut to 2005. Having a good camcorder had always been my desire. I did an extensive research on semi-professional camcorders - wanted to have a camcorder as close to the real pro-ones as my pocket would allow and was willing to loosen my pocket strings much more generously.

Finally, after three months of research, I finalized on a model. The piece was ordered on the internet. The site said, "3-5 days for delivery". I waited for three days and started expecting a huge box with my nirvana in it - despite the fact that two out of those three days were Saturday and Sunday and hence only one business day had passed.

My impatience was surging. When the store guys called me on the third working day to confirm the order - I was heartbroken, "These buggers, taking three days to just confirm the order, when will they ship it and when will it reach me". Every day since then, I keept calling the store to enquire if they had shipped it, when were they going to do it and why were they taking so long. That stopped when after two days, I was told that it had been shipped.

Now, I stared looking at the parcel status provided by the carrier quite morbidly - how else would you describe checking the status every 70 minutes ? After three excruciating days, my parcel had landed up in California, just 59 miles way from me. The carrier said they'd deliver on the third day and I thought, "Well, these guys give a very conservative estimate, after all, it can never take 3 days to cover 59 miles, I am sure they'll deliver it before that".

For the next three days, I waited for the UPS van with increasingly baited breath every successive day, even intercepted the UPS guy in the next building to ask him if he had a parcel for me and bugged the lady, on the reception, by my hourly queries of whether she had received any parcel for me, so much, that after a while, she would not even wait for me to speak and would smilingly tell me that she hadn't yet received anything.

I had gone crazy and I had become a kid.

The day finally arrived. I received the parcel. Went home and started playing with it - read the manual cover to cover, plugged in the battery, shot videos, stills, picture in picture and what not. Explored all the functions and options it provided. Didn't even cook that night and didn't even call my girlfriend. I was possessed.

Two days, took out the camera, did some nature shooting.

Today, the 12th day, I haven't touched the camera in the last 9 days and don't exactly remember where I kept it.

A toy lives only as long as you don't have it.

Hum Intezar Karenge....

"Hum Intezar Karenge, Tera Qayamat Tak,
Khuda Kare Ki, Qayamat Ho, Aur Tu Aaye"


(I'll wait for you till the end of the world. May the dooms-day come soon and so do you)

No. I am not saying this to my girlfriend. Not even to the next raise. Not even to the next sleazy movie from Meghna "Hawas" Naidu or Yash Raj Films. Not even to the cab, or the next holiday season.

I am saying this to my UPS parcel, the status of which, I have been checking every half an hour for the last 3 days.

To be true, the date given by the carrier is still one day ahead. Most probably they'll deliver when they said they will. No cribs but the agony of wait.

To make matters worse, they told me that the parcel had landed up in San Pablo, about 59 miles away, two days back. Assuming they deliver the parcel tomorrow, I won't have any grounds to crib - they'd be delivering when they promised. But why on earth should 59 miles take 3 days to cover?

They say rattlesnake is the most dangerous serpent. Probably true, but let me assert that "WAIT-le snake" is no less. It bites, it chews, it munches and it eats. And it is heartless.

I mean, almost all of us have waited from something or the other. Infact, more than that, all of us are presently waiting for something or the other. Some for Friday, some for the next product release, some for the next meeting with the VC, some for Christmas, some for the next Indo-Pak war, some for peace and happiness, some for enough money so that they can actually start doing what they really love and so on.

Wait makes one anxious as well as creates anticipation for future - but the darkest part of wait is that it takes the focus away from the current moment in time and space. You start living in an imagined future while letting go of the present, forsaking the pleasures the present has to offer, refusing to learn the lessons present teaches and saying no to life in the here and now. Whereas, the only truth is that here and now is all you have got.

After all, no one in Hiroshima or WTC would have ever thought that the next Friday will never come for them.

The Great American Customer Service and UP Bhaiyyas

Back home in India, I was constantly bombarded by the stories of how customer service sucks in India and how, things are so professional and great in America. This continuos programming coupled with the usual tendency to blame anything bad on our Indian-ness made me really believe that the customer service would be great in the land of the free trade, a perfectly capitalistic economy where if you don't treat your customers well, there is always another guy to acquire them.

I believed in American customer service; but then, I also believed in genies, and Santa Clause and snow fairies once..

The experiences yours truly had in the last three odd months range from having to call the MD of the cab company to complain against rude drivers and customer service agents to cancelling my online order for electronics due to irresponsible order handling, intrusive hard sell and outright discourteous behavior.

In the beginning, I was dismissive, "Probably that's the exception, probably, they are the bad fish". However, when the experiences repeated with alarming consistency, I had to reset my views.

The point is not leftist anti-America rhetoric. The point is that level of professionalism, like so many other things, is also individual. A person in Chinchpokli may be more responsible and professional than a person in Cincinatti - its got to do with the person - not the country.

The parallel is discomforting:

a) When the seller says you will receive the delivery in 3-5 working days, it means nothing - you will receive it when you will - this 3-5 working days is just a place holder - something that just looks good without any meaning. For that matter, they would take 4 working days to just ship the order.

Similarly, in India too, if an online seller said they'll deliver in 3-5 days, I'll know that it means the delivery will happen only when the Gods want it. He is just being polite when he says 3-5 days.

b) When the cab company says the cab will reach in 5-15 minutes, it actually means 15-35 minutes.
I believe credibility of a cab guy in India would be slightly more than this.

c) When you call customer service, be prepared to tour through 10 minutes of audio menus, make 13 selections, listen to weird music for a good 15 minutes and then hung upon. Try again and if you are lucky, you'll get to talk to a live person in the third try.

I have certainly had much better experiences with call centers in India.

d) I will not be able to breath easy if I order something worth Rs 50,000 in India over the internet till the time I actually receive it in decent condition - the same is happening with me in the US - despite my efforts to not let it happen.

There is no difference. There are thieves in India, there are thieves in the US. Everybody is not a thief in India, everybody is not a thief in the US.

We North Indians (esp UP-ites) have an interesting instinct built in us - we are always on our guard - the basic assumption is that everybody around is after your money and your belongings. Some sort of battle readiness always exists and one is always ready to face some unscrupulous guy who'd run away with your bag or someone who'll try to sneak out your wallet.

I always thought there would be some place on the earth, where I will be able to completely shed this constant state of red alert. There could have been no place better than America - the land of the free, the home of the brave, open markets, professionalism, integrity and what not.

But it doesn't seem to be happening. Integrity and professionalism and bravery are individual virtues having nothing to do with country. If there are people after your money in the badlands of UP, there are people after your money in the vast lands of California. No difference.

As a true blue UP bhaiyya, these days I am again all set to face anybody who would even try to go after my hard earned money - be it Gupta Ji of Kumar General Stores in Sitapur or Michael of B&H Photo Video in New York.