me,myself and my writings

Detouring

2009-10-25T17:17:00.002+05:30

Written on 14th october

I had been in Arupukottai for the last one week, if the name seems odd, the that is how it is. I recived a mail today, from one of my classmate in XL informing me about Williamson being awarded nobel prize.For a moment i was transported to a totally different space between four walls , where we , a batch of 14 for the class of Firms,Markets and Global Dynamics, and a batch of 20 odd for Industrial Economies, tried to deconstruct and reconstruct Williamson in different context and savoured the outcomes and the debates. At one time, asset specificity was used by me to explain every context in every discipline.

But what hit me the most was the fact that i couldn't remember the last time I really thought about Williamson since i have walked out of college. I have lazied at home for 2 months,and had the pleasure of staying at The Sonar for 10 days and finally toil hard in Tamilnadu heat for the last 4 months. And, i had been part and parcel of a model that Williamson had always tried to explain more accurately - The boundary of the firm, when does a firm outsource a part of its business and what are the trade offs. The Company-distributor relationship, The distributor-Salesman/hawker relation and the reasons and solutions for conflicts that arise between these parties. The basic arguments between these parties written down on a contract, might be the best of the live examples, I should admit that, over the last 4 months of work at ITC, though i had every opportunity probe Williamson, i never did so.

The point that MBAs are overrated might be reiterated here, as i couldnt apply, if not atleast remember the model. But i would like make it a point that the mistake mostly lies with student of MBA than the MBA course as such. I feel happy today to atleast be in a position to appreciate the applause that Williamson is recieving. So, MBA is definitely not overrated, may be the student is, and its alkways his responsibility to counter that opinion.

Apart from all this, i found myself blushing, as my friend reminded me of how interesting and fun were our economics classes. I was reminded of the period, where i flirted for a while with Economics, still the best of the times in whole of Education. Just puts me in a confusion, whether the touring i do now is a detour or was that a small detour when i fell in love with Economics.

Knowing the other half of truth

2009-08-10T02:12:00.002+05:30

I finally found a film society and rushed to it in the right time for the screening of the taiwan movie 'Yi Yi - A one and a two' by Edward Yang.To be honest , the movie was too long for an audience brought up on Indian cinema. In retrospect, we find out that the length was one of the key ingredient of what the movie portrays - Life.

So, where do i start to explain a movie about life, that too when the director tells it in the simplest of ways, if i try to retell it, it will be more complex and spoil the fun. I shall only to refer to the points where the director's ghost seems to be wandering around the characters and makes his presence felt subtly but so strongly, that the dialogues would only become proverbs in your life.The indispensible character in the director's endeavour turns out be the 8 year old kid, who drops words of wisdom with sweet innocence, be it asking his father "Why do we always know half the truth, we can only see whats in the front, we cant see whats behind at the same time". The best piece though, that had a loud applause from the audience is when the kid hands over a photogragh to his Uncle,picturing the back of his head and when asked why is he giving it to him, he replies in a saintly manner, wrapping himself in towel, "You cant see it yourself, i am trying to help you". Moments like this are sprinkled all over the movie, just when you start to yawn at the boring rituals of life intertwined with the inevitable complexes of the characters , the director makes you sit up with these subtle charges of dialogue.

It seems as if the director literally possessed the character of the Ting-Ting's boyfriend when he is discussing movies and says "My uncle says that , with movies , we live our life three times over". Thats when half the audience will be woken up to the fact that their life also would seem the same if presented through flickering frames. A Grandmother in coma as a sounding board for the characters is such an original experiment to pull the audience towards the characters.

The character development is so well done that the audience is set at the centre of a circle that the characters traverse only to come back to where they started and realise the futility of their internal struggles with guilt and mournful retrospections of lost opprtunities.Husband reliving his youth and realising that he is still restricted by the same fears and apprehensions.And its an experience to see his life intercut with his daughter's first date.

All in all, the movie is the directors signature on every frame, that for me is one of the most important thing in any movie,because in cinema, one man's command on his art becomes fountainhead of creative excellence of a larger number, i.e the cast and the crew.

Yi Yi is a movie which you shouldnt expect to entertain you or for that matter make you feel sad or make you laugh, you are not supposed to like it or hate it or judge it in any extent when you are watching it, you are only supposed to live it with the director and it will stay with your memory for a longer time.

Stop Read and Watch

2009-08-10T02:07:00.002+05:30

Watching Subramaniapuram is definitely a bloody good experience.Despite the language being my neighbours tongue, I had a consolatory detail to associate with, the heroine being from the coochy-coochy talk show that used to beam on the telugu channel.

Thats where i say that sometimes it really helps, when you stop and read about the movie and the creator and his accomplices who cast this spell on you.

The director, lets call him the creator, he earns that position with all justice, for he wrote, directed and produced the movie and ofcourse acted in it. This gesture often brings out a sympathy from the distributors and sometimes even the audience. Please keep your condolences to yourself. Such a gesture is nothing but a persons love for the art he dreamt about and his desperation to give it a shape in his OWN way.If you have a good sight, you can find that desperation in every frame.

The most important thing for me though is , Sasikumar quoting that he likes RGV. Now lets get that simple, when someone says that he likes RGV, dont try to ask him 'How Much', Because you either hate RGV to Death or love him for life. If you are one of the RGV fans like me, you will start hallucinating with the virtual umbilical cord that the movie has all over, most of which might just be unintended coincidences, but who told you so ;) . The simplest thing could be Sasikumar calling his banner - Company Productions- doesnt that seem to come out of the factory. And then you only find more when camera races after people being chased through narrow alleys.And when you a see a street fight starting for no reason - you cant help that 'gotcha' smile on your face.

So, you know the rule when you sit for a RGV like movie, - Dont fall in love with the characters, because they are going to die a ruthless death. It will seem as the ghost of RGV has sprung out of screen and killed them. If you think i am exaggarating, try watching Siva at the time when telugu cinema was accelarating to sink like Titanic, you wouldnt bother when Raghuvaran kidnaps nagarjuna's niece and threatens to kill. You would be telling yourself "Come on, who are you fooling, when did villians become so honest, that too about killing kids". And then you sit up in a seat. I know, some would say, hadnt he done too much of such things after that. Well, i would only say,its anyday better than, Sharukh dying for 2 hours in Kal ho na ho.

Anyway, you will have to break the rule yourself, because you will fall in love with the characters for their innocence in crime and haplessness in love. So, you only give up all hopes and sit there watching your characters falling in love and then betraying each other and getting hacked to death.

And, you see those drizzle of the new wave all over the screen, when the camera follows kasi steadily without cutting until he sits on milestone and reconcilliates what he has done. If you have forgotten how the old cinema or the so called Hi-Tech Cinema used to look, here it is, Flash on the screen-POV of Paraman : the sickle in hand rising high and coming down-Paraman screaming with blood oozing from a place where the sickle is least probable to strike-Flash again(with zzzzzzzzzzuk sound)-Kasi would be trying to pull out his hair- and then some infinite flashes with twice infinite sounds and the scene would have been benchmarked against the superhit daily serial.

Finally, there is something you will know when you only read about the flick that the lead protaganist and the creator are schoolmates, where the Music Director James Vasantham was Music teacher. Now there is one thing that teachers teach you very well, especially music teachers - How to say your prayers. Like a devotee touching the steps when entering a temple, like a dancer bowing to the stage before his performance, James Vasantham's first song that breaks out of the speakers is by Illayaraja and rest is bliss.

P.S: I have amazing fun when i read about these trivia regarding any movie i see.Subramaniapuram just turned out to be too much of it.

Poor Men

2009-07-10T01:30:00.002+05:30

When Hamlet draws his last breath,When Othello draws his sword on to himself,When Macbeth shivers seeing the woods move, when Satya wriggles in his own blood at the doorstep of his beloved and when Paruthiveeran bites dust oozing blood painlessly, All i can visualise is the sweet grin on the face of creators of these characters who could etch a character so strong on a page or book and so seamlessly tranfer the imprint the same on to the mind of the audience and finally make it a point to put them through an experience that they cannot excuse themselves for.

Women in cinema had been invariably been pushed to played rosy,coochy coochy second fiddle, and an abberation that occured once in a while had always made a strong impact. Infact every actress now tries to make sure that she plays a strong female role once in her career,which is so because unfortunately, still as a majority,women are treated as a dependent second fiddle(let us not get into the 'discussion of the rise of the corporate women' now. For my own good, I am not in TCS anymore, i am in coimbatore trying to sell soaps to people who form a majority of what India is).

Anyway, the point of the article is that, if women roles were appreciated for being strong, Men in cinema or literature have made stronger and longer impressions in the mind of audience not when they played obvious hero who is invincible, but it is when they played the weak- the weak which every knows but treats it as a huge taboo to acknowledge openly. And some master minds had taken the simplest route to bring this to the forefront. Like they say in cooking shows on TV, 'Boil it with women and garnish it with crime".(Before i go further, this article is not to start a masculine movement or some bullshit like that, it is just my observation from some of my favorite pieces of art).

Othello was a character starngled by the thoughts of being naked to himself about the fact that he has turned vulnerable to the charms of a women who seemed to be manipulating him all the more. But the irony of his fate lay in the falsity of his own imagination which only sprouted from his weakness, that questioned his control over himself that seems to be shared now.

Macbeth struggled to figure out if it was his decision to aim for the throne by putting the king to sleep, or was he just a pawn in the whole plot written and directed by his wife,If not for which he wouldnt have accrued all the guilt.It is astonishing that a man who returned winning a battle had to succumb to words of a woman, well the question remains that he succumbed to the greed for power. I would say you do not need to question that, at the cost of stereotyping men, isnt that what men always sought.

The final frames of Satya still comeback to my mind, as i ponder that how a person who could plot to kill a dozen goons in the most manipulated manner and still escape the police, would walk into a building which he knows will only lock him up to death in a brutal manner.

There really isnt any point that i am trying to make through this article, except that i wish i could sleep well, after this, because, the last time i lost my sleep like this after watching a movie was after 'Requiem for a Dream'. I could survive One flew over cuckoos nest,7/G,Omkara, but Paruthiveeran for its sheer rawness and honesty in its brutality in questioning the heroics and recklessness of men powered and possessed by crime only to be challenged by a woman's undaunted love had a disturbing impact on my mind. The climax justifies itself in amatter of 15 minutes of what all the film was trying to make sense of in an atmosphere alien to most of the people who would watch the movie, but its the characters and their idiosyncracies(as wierd as cutting off a policeman's ear, for the fun of it, only tells you that he will pay for it the way it has to be). The movie stands out as how strongly it justifies its characters, which may be even Satya fails at a few points.

I will stop this piece here, as i have already taken off tangentially. Hope it makes half the sense i wanted it to be.

P.S: I am sure that whoever watched the movie would trash this article for supporting the male character, who technically had to pay for his crimes, while th female's role goes through the brutality for nothing but love. I would still keep the title of this article the same, as the guilt of realising that your previous actions had been the sole reason for your beloved's fate and the helplessness that stays with the character thereby is the worst punishment that anyone can get. Thus, my sincere condolences go to Poor Men

Learning Thy Neighbours Language

2009-07-08T19:29:00.002+05:30

And so arrive in the Tamil Nadu, ok, excuse me here, its Thamilll nadu to pronounce, and as per norms some britisher or god knows who chose to pass the dictum "From now on , Z followed by a H will be spelt as-" he addressed a huge crowd and tried to pronounce the way it is supposed to be , by dragging his tip of the tongue to the roof of his mouth and shouted "Lla".

Forget the English, they are a queer crowd for sure. Thats my first learning on my way to learn Tamil.

During one of my days of travelling to the countryside for my sales training with the salesman in coimbatore, i had no sense of my whereabouts as the milestone read only in Tamil, which was unlike any other place in India so far. So, i thought i will start with the basics-Buy a Slate and learn to read and write.

And surprise, there are only 30 alphabets, unlike 56 in telugu. I realised why my handwriting in telugu sucked so badly(not that i write beautifully in other languages)there are actually enough twists in telugu words as well that would break your slate pencil.And for all the northindians who hate the Tam crowd, the script seemed similar to hindi(though they wouldnt sound the same, e.g : the mirror image or Hindi Ae is Tamil Ra)

So,the second surprise comes in the form of free will the language offers to pronounce it the way you want it to be. For example, same letter is used to spell Pa,Ba and similarly for Tha/Dha and Cha/Sa. You should empathize with me when in my first days of learning, the only exercises i have are the name boards on retail shops, Ads on buses and the milestones, so i spell Chennai Silks as Chennai Chilks and then give myself an extra option as Sennai Silks, and like a curious kid checking for the answers, i find out its Chennai silks at my own discretion.

With this frustration for a day, I launched onto my salesman to write and spell 'bombay' and when he wrote something which would also spell like pompay, i asked the obvious question. He did the obvious, Laughed me off as an FOB and carried on with his work.

Thats when you realise, how queer are the english and is English. Wouldnt a kid be justified if he spells Coconut as Sosonut. With many such questions and pitfalls, i am enjoying my new learning, especially travelling by the countryside and a sneak peek into the last triad of the sale - Consumer-retailer-salesman.

And after 2 weeks of concentrated learning of the language, i had a relieved and entertaining session of watching a Tamil Movie. More on that next time.

The Globe is Golden

2009-01-12T15:39:00.004+05:30

And so it is..

Rahaman wins the Golden Globe and he humbly thanks the billion people in India. Few months ago, my roomie woke me up and said India won a Gold at the Olympics, I turned around in my bed, pulled up my blanket and said "So What, its just too much noise about too little a thing and it wouldnt make any difference". He disappointedly walked away saying to himself "Well, it definitely feels good, when its someone from your own country". I believe thats true. It might just be my lesser interest towards sports , or anger towards Indian attitude towards sports or it might just be my sleep.

I feel, elated, excited and more than anything proud for Rahman, for where he stands now, in the same room where Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsecee stands. Its unbelieveable to see the nominations being announced on the side of Hans Zimmer, and then giving the award to Rahaman. And it would be a mistake to expect anything more from Rahman than what he read out from a visting card sized note he got with him. He had been a Man of action or rather music than words. And let him be so.I am almost done with watching the press meet and he still doesnt seem to be the one to speak. He keeps his smile through out though, as he keeps ours.

Anyway, thanks to my membership of FLIX at XLRI and my exclusive access to bittorrents , that i could see most of the GG and Oscar Favourites. Wrestler as expected has earned a well deserved award for Mickey Rourke. I am yet to watch Reader, Doubt and Revolutionary Road. (Just that i had an overload of heavy movies, especially european cinema). I would surely like to sit through Kate Winslet's acting.(Funny that she mentions that she has the habit of not winning and wins two awards after some amazing performances in Finding Neverland and Titanic). Just, if you hadnt heard about it, Frost/Nixon is a good watch, it fails to live up to the build up in the climax, but its insight into the minds and motivations of two individuals is worth a watch and a thought.(Those who flocked to the theatres over and over to watch the interview scene between Arjun and Amrish Puri in Shankar's Mudhalvan/Oke Okkadu , Frost/Nixon might seem subdued).

I am waiting to watch much raved about -Waltz with Bashir. And the other foriegn movie "I've Loved you so long" . Well it still startles me that something so Indian,but not 'by' an Indian, a Britisher (as it seems to be always , like it was with Richard Attenbourgh's Gandhi. I guess Tagore would scoff at me for my so called "Nationalism",the Gandhian way) , has gone on to beat movies like Curious Case and Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road. Funny that, Jai ho wouldnt feature in Rahman's top 100 songs of his career, but it goes on to win the Golden Globe. I also wondered why and how, you will understand, when you watch the movie, when the Titles appear with 'O Saya' in the background , with Slum Kids playing cricket in the backyard of the Airport , and the police chasing the kids through the narrow gullies of the slum and thats when you introduce Rahman. And the man gives his best. And then you give it away to the cameraman to take over the slums(Cameraman is Danish , talk of globalisation), and he cuts three shots into a zoom out aerial view of the Dharavi slums, and the kids keep running, with such an uninhibited smile through what represents the Third World, you are sure to get goose bumps and yes a few votes for sure from the (if i may say so) First World.

Well that was more of an aside, but the point stays that movie making is the best marriage that one would ever experience, pioneers of science and art had been pouring in their contributions and appreciating each other with so much warmth that it continues to be my favourite. :P

Of Curious Cases and Slumdogs

2009-01-04T04:29:00.003+05:30

I screened the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" at my college. It was nice to see a few friends turn up. It definitely ate up 6 hrs of my time in a day as i watched it twice. We were pulling each others leg that how about a "Curious case of Benjamin Felix Rajkumar", coincidentally one of my friends who was watching the film. So what would be "The Curious Case of Kartheek Kanumuru" be.

"My name is Kartheek Kanumuru, I live unusually in usual circumstances, I do not see the light of the day and i eat once in a day and sleep well, really well" So much for my mini auto-biography.

I had been reading up a lot on movies these days, as usual, not very focussed reading but hopping from one interview to the other, one review to the other. So, thought its high time i writre something.

Firstly, The curious case of the slumdog, while all of Bollywood is busy making films based out of Florida,Canada, New York, and all other places where streaks of sunlight lit up sky scrapers and women can just help being beautiful and tantalizing, and world is all a paradise untill an indian family sings and dances for 2hrs 45 mins and then realises that they need to have a climax, A british Film maker had to come to Indian Slums and direct an movie based on an Indian Book and so we now we have the whole of India looking forward to see an oscar nomination for the film.

A fortnight from now, when Oscar nominations are announced, Indian media will rave about the movie and the portrayal of Indian Poverty and its slums and applaud the ensemble cast of slum kids who are the spirit of the movie. Teenagers will discuss that its a great film and in hushed voice say, about/from India. As they try to mince words like Yudhishtar did in Mahabharat, India will continue to suffer from its strangled creativity and insipid cinema.

Well, the truth is , as Anurag Kashyap wrote in his blog, even UTV and Reliance rejected to produce the movie when it was independent(Though i still like UTV for the way its promoting good movies through Spotboy). And to take a note on the poverty portrayed in the movie, Danny Boyle in an interview said that, they put the slum kids in school and paid for their education till they are 16. They even paid the rickshaw puller to take them to school till 16. (It really doesnt seem to work out, does it ?). Well, one thing that will still be indian for now is A.R. Rahman's soundtrack for the movie might just go on to get the Oscar Nomination. Check out the interview with Darren Aronofsky and Danny Boyle on how they made Wrestler and Slumdog respectively.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button itself is a case of David Fincher, starting with Se7en (probably the movie which i have narrated the maximum number of times, i remember literally holding my friend to sit down and listen to the story), fight club, panic room, zodiac and this one is nowhere in that genre, but an amazing concept borrowed from fitzergald's short story of 1920s. One should appreciate the amount of work that had gone into the movie for all the digital mastering and make up. It will pretty much go down at the box office, because its like going to watch ManiRatnam's Amruta after he made Sakhi with Madhavan.Complete mismatch of expectations over an otherwise beautiful movie, actually one of his best.

I am yet to complete darren aronofsky's wrestler. I am half way through it. This time he resorts to following the actor with his camera. Its really interesting how a director visualises the scene, it is so irritating for the first 15 minutes that you dont see the actor at all and then you actually realise that you are following him yourself. These are people who will continue to be mavericks and the nourishers of creativity.I am still waiting to tie up the camera to one of the actors(if i ever make a short again) and do a scene similar to that of Requiem for a Dream.

So, cut back to the blog of Anurag Kashyap, he is coming out with this movie 'DevD' , which has the rib tickling song about heart break and which is obviously now the heart throb of all the guys. Emosanal Atyaachaar. I just hope this goes on to be AKs big one and its time for the box office to make way for Abhay Deol. Its amazing that an actor had had such a clean record of films, Socha Na Tha, Manorama(An absolute respect to Roman Polanski's Chinatown, but not at all a copy), Ek Chaalis, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye. People like him , Ranvir Shorey and Vinay Pathak are finally having their space in the midst of a lot of crass acting(Come on , whats Hard Core Anti Family man, who would write such a dialogue and shoot it in prague, venice and waste so much money, i hope it doesnt come under GDP or GNP).

I am trying to dig into world cinema, will have to buy a TB HD and download as many movies as possible. I still coudnt figure out a single foriegn movie of AKs blog. All that will have to wait :( . I have placements coming up(are they really?). I will have to get back to some studying and move my ass.

As for my movie plans, i have given up on making one more for now. I have sadly resigned to my laziness, (ok, this seems too sad, so let me rephrase). I think i am better at writing scripts than executing, though my anateur adventures on directing (if i could call it so, had been ok). But i still like my dialogues for sure. Ok, enough of the screeching trumpet sound.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaahoooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I finally posted on my blog :)

Quiz

2008-11-23T06:41:00.003+05:30

"These guys are probably the ones with the worst hand writing i have ever seen." Thats how My Team Mate and I were called onto the stage for the El Dorado, Quiz at Ensemble '08 , Conducted by Barry O'Brein. No prizes for guessing, whose writing was it on the paper.

I wish i had written this post some 7-8 years ago. While I watched atleast hundred episodes of BQC and always wished i was there , and watched some hundred other quizzes of different types, i never realised what actually will take me there.

Well, it seems to me now, i finally discovered the key to step into the arena from the audience. One- Persistence, Two-Reading.

Actually speaking, i am not really good at either of these. One thing that is churning its results almost after years after is my ability to sit through all the quizzes even after not getting through preliminary rounds.

Ok, wait, this really seems like an underdog story, i dont really mean it to be so, because i ended anyway 5th out of the 6 teams in the finals. (Excuse the dull tone - its 7 in the morning with no sleep)

Yeah, the second part, i am absolutely bad at reading, the amount of literature i have read is zilch. I have no idea of 99.9999% of the authors that exist on this planet. And my current affairs suck. Thanks to my peer group at XLRI and ofcourse lots of free time in the second year, i have finally started to read the sacred newspaper everyday. I have started to read Economist,TIME, Newsweek(makes one look sophisticated, but indian mags are equally good, Economist scores a bit high though). One of the reasons i never did this earlier is i always used to take the excuse that there is no big deal about it, how does it really help , etc, etc.

Just from my quizzing experiences over the last 3 months, i kind of have an idea , how it helps.

I traced few of the answers that i knew or got right and how i gotto know them.

1)Identifying Mf.Hussain's Painting : Heard of the controversy around saraswati's painting on anews channel, while surfing channel.

2)Watson's Quote on Sherlock Holmes : Having done merchant of venice in 10th, i had to miss Hound of Bhaskarvilles, only to be bugged by the story in +2 hostel for 2 years, that finally made me read a bit of sherlock holmes.

3)Identifying D.V.Subbarao : Yeah, the gult connection of him following Y.V Reddy, but going through hazaar articles on subprime crisis and its effect on India, you cant help it. This part of reading up on subprime crisis helped me in atleast 5-6 questions.

4)Identifying Movie Alam Ara : Of all the long lectures from my father about being disciplined etc, he also discussed in some rare moments about one of the firsts of Indian Cinema.I should remember it for sure.

5)Identifying You Tube Founders : Setting a quiz in TCS quiz club, i made the same question.

6)Identifying Sound Track of My Best Friends Wedding : It was my direct question in a Movie Quiz which i couldnt answer, so better answer it now.This time , it was a pass question.

7)Identifying Singer of Jab We met Song as Mohit Chauhan: As I Scout for every damn interview of Rahman on the net, he mentioned in one of his interviews that he had been listening to 'Mohit Chauhan's song over and over. If its rahmans favourite, you shouldnt forget it.

8)Identifying but not recollecting the name: Sulljja Firodia Motwani : Read an inspiring article about 3-4 years back on how a lady turned around an ailing Kinetic Motors. But the name was too long to remember and she was too beautiful to go beyonsd the photo after that.

9)Identifying the couple who won the Raman Magasassay award, but forgetting their names : Reading the middle pages of The Hindu. Just starting, so should make the habit of recollecting names.

Ok, i really feel old, when i see how much time i have wasted without reading up a lot of stuff. I should be happy that i realised later than never. Well the point is, i had no clue that all these things i did, will come to help in this quizzing season.I believe there is more to come like this, if i keep up what i am doing.

The quiz part: We messed up in the buzzer round. It was the first time that i ever sat infront of the buzzer.

Our scoring went something like this:10,10,-5,-5,-5,-5,10,5,10,-5,5,10,5

One good experience : Answering 9/10 in a rapid fire round in a movie quiz , genre being Suspense/Thriller. I missed the name of Psycho :(

Thats it for now :)

Risk, Return and a Little Utility

2008-10-19T03:45:00.005+05:30

The title is a hangover of the financial crisis and the numerous articles woven around it in the papers over the last month. Due to un-imaginable reasons i had been regular on papers and magazines , though my itinerary to the library had been messed up in the last week. To add to that , i had been reading editorials in Hindu (OK, i think i should stop blushing) . Yeah, whatever it is, one component that never changes in my daily life is 9 hrs sleep. :)

Now, the exercise of reading papers had been very interesting, one i had an underlying saddistic pleasure to see the markets go down - not because i am anti-capitalist(which i am not) - may be a bit because the arrogance of (a few) I-bankers is reduced to zilch if not humility, and more importantly, it had been an amazing story of postponing the effects of mediocrity under the disguise of sophistication (which is only a worked up form of arrogance). Anyway, my knowledge of the subject is only limited by the spate of opinions in the news papers, so cant really give authentic comments. But the fuzzy calculations of Risk and Return has just undermined the basic thing of the real value anyone gets out of it , which is nothing but the utility (i guess) . Utility till date is one of the most difficult items to quantify and just the point that it is so specific and different for each person in each action makes it an important discussion point for all the economists.

For now, my return(immediate) from reading the papers had been to come 2nd in the DRAC quiz based around the current affairs. It had been ages since i was in that position, thanks to my team mate who has a good run at quizzes. Well, i realised the real value when my team mate waived off a question saying 'I dont know this pa, this is all Fin based question'. Given that premise , i should be equally ignorant about it, however, my knowledge of that specific information left me with a nice feeling that nothing is so incomprehensible. Yeah, it is for sure very embarrassing to know that there was an east asian crisis in the late 90's while all i knew was world cup and my crush in school. But , i kinda realise now its never too late to start reading .(however for people like me, no habit is too steady to call it so, except for sleeping).

Classes had been kind of wierd this term. They atleast are not helping in giving any direction to the Mediocre But Arrogants (except for a few). Why would anyone learn ethics now? My inopportune doubt in class seemed to have irked the prof to earn me a sub-optimal grade(how is that for social experiment in ethics class).

Scribbled a few lines in some class few days ago :

---------

One more moment of ignorance,

One more moment we delay;

One more moment of inaction,

is the moment of action.

---------

The dance of moonlight

from the nether world

seemed so still in water

until i touched it

and a shock rippled through

---------

It had been long since i got back to writing these pieces, may be the boring classes will help. The following blog had been a great inspiration though.

http://irrationalrationalities.blogspot.com/2008/09/for-blue.html

P.S: earned myself a small unpaid job :)

Economics and Ethics

2008-10-08T18:31:00.002+05:30

The only thing i didnt expect that i would be so interested in B-School is Economics. Now i regret that i might not specialise in it(doesnt make much difference though). Either way, i am still a long way to be a strong numbers guy, looking into projections of economy and interest rates. But what always interested me in economics is the way it accounts for all the interactions of man kind (loaded with their stupid idiosyncrasies) and how they all mess up into theories from an armchair economist. So, i am doing this subject called Strategic Game theory for managers and another one named Strategies of co-operation and one more - Managing Public Private Partnerships this term other than the marketing subjects and the compulsory course on Managerial Ethics(Many say that its an oxymoron).

Just in this context, there is a small anecdote, which i found very interesting , (its boring and predictable , but let me take the name of joker before i start ;) ) .

So, its like this, A well known economics prof from a premier B-School was forced to take up a course on ethics as the institute planned to introduce this course (To claim that they produce Valuable managers with values and blah blah blah) . Now the prof was absolutely not interested as he was strong on the principle that Ethics are more natural than learnt or taught. However the institute persisted. So he took the course the in all its spirit. At the end, he took an exam and he gave half the students a lot more than what they were expecting and the other half of students, extremely low compared to what they were expecting. As one would expect, all the students who scored low rushed to his office asking for explanation, while none from the higher half ever turned up. He documented the same and gave it to the Admin office to prove his point it seems.

Well, i remember one of my prof telling us, if you follow ethics, you will be in Tatanagar railway station. Though too harsh to believe it, i kind of started to believe in it. Sometime in childhood, a neighbour of mine used to practice astrology. he supposedly told my mother that, when i grow old, i will care for nothing but i want (want = materialistic needs) . I am yet to comply to that, but i see that happening slowly .

It happened , more than a few times that i expected a help in professional help based on a personal relationship or vice versa, however , it seems all that is just against the rules of the game. I think it also falls in place with the gyan of Shri krishna that when in a war, its a duty to fight anyone. Ok, i think its getting heavy i guess.

So, as i stick to my timeline of sleeping in the morning and staying awake in the night. There is nothing much happening. Yeah, had been reading some hazaar versions of Sub-prime crisis. And good movie for this week : Nouvo Cinema Paradiso

Social Experiment

2008-10-04T16:32:00.003+05:30

I should admit it , i was being a fool.

Let me explain the game. You need to choose between 1 and 2 , so is the case with 37 people in the room, with whom you don't get to talk with. So if '0' students mark 1 , all the students who marked 2 get 100 each, if 1 student marks 1 then, he gets 5 while all else get 105, so on till 37. By the time you reach 37, if all mark 1, all the students who marked 1 shall get 185.

There are 10 rounds. You are supposed to maximise your payoff. So if everyone thinks the same, , everyone puts 2, you end up with 100 each which is relatively ok but not the best possible, similarly, if all mark 1 , you get 185 each, but if one guy defaults then he would get 280. So there is a high chance to default.

So, lets start, first 3 rounds have no discussion among the group, so everyone is marking randomly, or rather too obviously that wasn't totally rational or irrational. So everyone was marking 2 , some poor souls kept trying marking 1 and getting meager 10s and 20s. They were trying to think ahead or may be just think random.

Now after 3 rounds there was a chance to go and discuss. So i come up with this strategy that , half the group marks 1 and half the group marks 2 and then we keep alternating, so that we average out and decrease the difference among the group. Now there was another proposal that why dont we all keep marking 1s, i felt and said that even one persons default will create chaos in the group (we are saying that 97% perfection is not good). But technically speaking that was the best strategy. The other person who suggested asked for a voting , i think i was too fed up holding and being in elections that i said, we will be together.

But No - Why?

1)Taking a decision among Peers(of presumably equal intellect) and expecting others to implement it without asking an acknowledgment is one stupid thing to do.

2)My logic itself as i said was a bit flawed. I was working out things in my Utopia rather than in everyone's utopia (which is an oxymoron).

3)People were not looking at the absolute maximum, so they was no incentive for junta to decrease their only advantage in the game, that is relative gain. And so, my scheme had no incentive for any of them, except for a few who were looking for an order.

4)The stupidest thing to do, I told first 2 rows to mark 1 and the next 2 rows to mark 2. I didntr even realise that i was in the second 2 rows that was going to get the maximum payoff in the first round, now i felt that its a rational calculation rather than a conspiracy. I didnt realise that someone in the crowd was smirking within himself and saying "Come on dude, stop kidding and stop making an ass out of others".

Anyway, we went in, before that, i said that if , there are around 17 people who mark 1s then we are sure that we are together, then we keep alternating. Well i forgot to introduce a character here. My favourite as it will stay on to be forever. I do not know if i should give the credit to John Nash for his game theory or Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson for the creation of this character, or Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and Heath Ledger for giving him a life - Joker. So, you can assume a Joker standing within us and laughing at us every time we had our strategies (This is in no way referring to the prof, though he played the part perfectly well as needed in the game).

So, in the 4th round, there were 11 1s against the expected 18 , which i still believe is a very good number (which would have made Frodo of LOTR happy and confident of some good in the world). Anyway, but it didn't make a lot of them happy. So there on it tumbled, everyone was back to normal. I should admit that there were some good souls who kept to their word irrespective of the deviation and alternated their choices, there were 8 1s in the next round. (I was one of them :P , i have to say this as i was accused of conspiring) . Anyway, the next round was a waste, it had no rationale at all. So we get another break to discuss. As usual, i gave up and stayed silent and people said, we will all go for 2.

I felt this is accepting mediocracy due to lack of co-operation. But i went with the group and we cam with all but a few 2's in the next 2 rounds and the prof started stressing on the point of reaching the maximum obtainable payoffs.

So, i kinda couldn't stick to the game. So, i said, "See, this isn't about getting marks, this is about proving that you can co-operate. So just do it." thats never the way to play a game, Anti trust parties would have put me in Jail :D . But by then, people were already on the extremes, they were planning to smoke out the rats out of the hole. They wanted to ask the prof who were the defaulters. The prof gave the choice of penalising the defaulters. (My argument was Utopian or rather Gandhian(though i never liked it), that why are we fighting and giving power to an external person, after all its just a game, play it our way).

Funny that, prof asked for a leader, i wasnt ready to raise my hand because i wasnt with the argument of penalising people. And the Joker went a step ahead and asked , who of dont approve them and their proposals. I woke up late to raise my hand which anyway wouldnt have made a difference. Few rejected their proposals but majority accepted. Anyway, the prof penalised the defaulters by a deduction in the payoff, the results were obvious.

The narration is open to discussion. But, there was something that kept running through my mind by the end of the game. It was this image of joker talking in "The Dark Knight" saying, "You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon's got plans. You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.... It's the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself.... You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all, part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds! ... I'm an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair. "

I believe there is a Joker in all of us.

So much for the gyan. Something atlast finally made me write a good blog. If you didnt understand the game , dont bother, if you want to bother, make a table of the payoffs and work it out.

P.S : Finally some good movies : Welcome to Sajjanpur, Mumbai Meri Jaan, 13 Tzamite, In Bruges. Drona is for the demented :D

Sum of parts

2008-09-25T01:11:00.002+05:30

Its not the first time i recollect this discussion with my friend, that can we actually behave the way we want to behave given the so called societal influences. It was very interesting how me and my friend behaved differently at different phases, say college, school, intermediate, work life. Though till 12 th or even engineering , i was mostly (say 90%) driven by(or controlled and puppeted) by my surroundings, but the % of influence of external factors decreased over time. Everytime I change a place, i started to behave differently. All these , when i look back are different parts (like pieces of a pie chart :P ).

Well, interesting thing is, i have started to change whenever there is a break also.. so.. itseems, the parts have become as small as a trimester. :)

RGV is updating his blog like crazy and he is writing some really good stuff about his venture into movies. I guess he has planned to write his auto biography.

Thats it for now :|

Where was/am I?

2008-09-18T00:28:00.002+05:30

First, the exams are over, but not the term as there are some benefits of procrastination. I have been reading some of my classmates claiming that 4th term has supposedly been the most hard working term for them. That kinda injected a moment of guilt into me. How did i feel the exact opposite, was it because of my Electives - but i chose them because i was interested in them(Leave MACR out of it). Something got into me. Should work it out before it gets worse in the 5th and the 6th terms.

I am back home for 3 long weeks. Good that i registered for the internship, i get to spend some time at hyderabad, but i should have as well planned for some trip along with college junta. Laziness has its side-effects in such activities too. Met all the relatives for the year, yet to meet a few friends. That reminds me of the wedding bells ringing in my class of engineering. Nice to see classmates marrying each other, not something you would expect to happen when you step into JNTU. Someone asked me , when are you getting married, I suddenly frowned at it and then joked 'Dont i look too young for marriage'.

Movies : Well, finally managed to cover more of them. Wall-e, Rock-on, Wednesday, Dark Knight (IMAX) :DD , Ashta-Chamma(Telugu). Regular visits to Mutiplexes let me finish all of it in one week.Dark Knight stays on to be the best, especially in IMAX format, you are left gaping at the screen. And couldnt ask for a betetr seat than the centre seat in the top-most row :P .

The third week of the vacation had been like the last stage of the product life cycle. I had been sleeping inhumanly for 12 hrs a day. Only thing thats interesting but sad is the news. It puts the MBA's on the history map for passing out at one of the worst times. Its ironical and shocking to see your dream company sinking like a Titanic and within minutes , you come to know that its in-existent. The whole equation is going to change for sure. Well, all i could say now is the same as i said above, It is going to be interesting and sad.

U the Marketing People : This was the way, one of my profs used to address us. I have grown obsessive of finding the company behind every brand. The other day i realised that, i was checking the marketer of a floor cleaner brand while i was in the bathroom. Its funny how you try to apply Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning Funda into everything. Movies for example play a lot by this funda. That is one of the reason, Movies like Rock on are such a hit, they are targeted at the superset of population (People who think they are losers in life).

Funny thing was, while i was watching this movie, there was an Ad for R.S.Brothers(Local Saree Showroom), there was no way that the target audience for that showroom would turn up for that movie. But they played 90 second long painful ad. Not that they would have done media planning and STP, but it kinda tells us about the distance between planning and implementation.

So much for now. hope to write longer articles on my assignments before i write the next post.

:) (: :( ): :| |: :O O:

2008-08-27T12:25:00.004+05:30

I accidentally happened to use this title as a status message to inform people about the play we were hosting under the name , Shadows Within. It so turned out that , that Gtalk recognises the first one of the pair as a smiley and turns it to blue color, while the others stayed grey and the title Shadows within came after that. That happened to be one of the most creative works , i claim of. Its funny how things move beyond our observation to colour things.

Its nice to come across such things once in a while. Its nice to be appreciated for my guesstimates in MR class and frax on some subjects simultaneously. Its nice to sleep 12 hrs a day and still manage to do well in an exam. Its nice to carry a smiling frown or a frowning smile. Its nice to be frank, or rather blatant i should say once in a while like you dont care and also make sure that no one would care about you after that.Its nice to stack up last 2.5 weeks of papers and sleep all over them ,expecting to read them all at once , but still manage to read Brand Equity on Wednesday, Hindu Friday Review on Friday and Hindu Magazine on Sunday. Its nice to appreciate some thing out of sheer interest in it rather than forcefully absorb everything out of insecurity. Its nice to listen to classic telugu songs , though it seems totally out of the place where i am.

So much for the ramblings, just another observation. I was sitting in mess and saw this random bhojpuri song playing on the TV, i could sense the rock bottom quality of the song both interms of music and visuals. I couldn't stop cursing it and instinctively attributing it to the taste of Jharkhand , Bihar and neighbouring states(Well, Jharkhand is where i am now) . So, as i was trying to slip into making more theories about Jharkhand and its population, the next song in the playlist came up. To my surprise, it was a telugu song, from the movie happy, by the name 'Ossa re Ossa Ossa re' , now to start with it doesnt actually mean anything.(I should confess that i have listened to this song at full volume, and for sometime , i actually enjoyed it.) Well but definitely not now, the song seemed like a scream by an actor who resembled a monkey with distorted face, (and god knows why) he was wearing goggles and multi-farious clothes, and his antics would resemble nothing but a donkey's mating call. the whole setup seemed Yuck. I could hear two of my friends talking to each other while they were watching it, 'What the fuck is he trying to do' 'How can someone direct such a sequence?' 'Shouldn't the cameraman be dead by now' 'Who on earth watched these things, what language is this'. I didnt know whether to laugh out loud or keep silence in disagreement. And within a minute, the next song came up, guess what was it, 'Adire' from Rajnikanth's Basha and i could already hear a few laughs around.

Well nothing more to discuss , its just the diversity of India and idiosyncracies of its people who continuously refuse to acknowledge them. Its still a wonder how everyone stays under one name of Indian. Something to be proud of.

Like Didier in Shantaram says "If it had been so many frenchman in one place, they would have killed each other by now and made themselves extinct".

-In the middle of exams, having an easy time.

-At home from 1st to 21st.

-thanks to inflation , i am taking a train, long journey.

Hanged to the Top

2008-08-22T09:18:00.003+05:30

'Hail, Hail, Hail '

Echoed the golden waters

dotted with icebergs of stone

shuttling streaks of light

the procession moved up the hill

as men marched in merry

and women sang in praise

He rose with carriage

One on each side, four in all

took him on their shoulders

the bugles were blown

and the drums were sounded

As he raised his hand,

It brought smiles with peace

and all the heads bowed

and the floated in joy

And then Darkness grew

like a monster under the waters

it crawled like a sand slide

it raced up the hill

Fear followed gloom

and chaos sprouted in the crowd

He stood up and raised his hand

the crowd looked up with hope

Like a cloud of insects

the darkness crawled upto his feet

to everyone's awe

his one half turned to a shadow

He stalled the darkness

as it couldn't take him all

He looked straight into it

holding light in his pupil

'It came for him, but its taking us'

shouted someone from the crowd

Prick came the words, like an icicle

and he blinked

The dark power took over

and razed the golden deserts

to the eye's horizon

It screeched through with a shrill

'Give him away , we shall be saved'

the crowd cried aloud

He raised his hand,

but all in vain

the crowd climbed up the carriage

tied his hands to the back

and someone asked

'what do we do now'

A reply came

'take him to where he was,

that is where he shall be consumed,

so, hang him by the top'

At It Dude

2008-08-13T14:02:00.002+05:30

-To the right, no , not that right, oh fuck,no, dont turn like that, 4 o clock, yeah , that one.

--oh,that one? bitch

---

-You know what is a freudian slip?

--Yes, But i don't know exactly.

---

-Every thing, i say, every thing is screwed up at this place.Tell me one thing that is right here, Tell me?

--Yeah, there is one - you- since you find a fault with everything else, the assumption should be that you are perfect.

---

-Reading, Studying, Learning, why does one have to create so many words?

--Good Question!! What do they mean ?

---

-Look Closely, what do you see, in the green lawns encircled with green tops.

--Oh, Shit, i am late for the class, i need to go. By the way, i see a dog shitting in the lawn.

---

-How many times will you blink in the next 5 minutes?

--zero, i am going to sleep.

---

-How dark is the night?

--Close your eyes and see.

Still Rain

2008-08-05T08:21:00.000+05:30

1
Still Rain
Sleepy Eyes
Funnels of Light
Stranded Thoughts
Coloured Emotions
Droplets in Vain
Oval Mirrors
Intervals of Darkness
Loose Ends
Puppet Muscles

2
Yes for a No
Cold in veins
Blood Rush
A Truth Unsaid
Lie Uncontested

3
Blush
Grace
Lure
Grin
Cheer
Dazzle

4
Tap on the Ground
Spread Wide
Rise as a feather
And Take off

5
Yet Another Night
I swap with Sun
It gets to Job
I am off the Shift

Ridiculously Wonderful

2008-08-03T08:47:00.002+05:30

I wanted to call this post "The Other Dark Knight" and put a photo with myself hanging upside down. Thats what my world looks like these days atleast in terms of time. I am in a fulfilling what my parents always wanted, to be awake by 6 Am. Unfortunately , i go to sleep at 8 or so and wake up at 2 , and there goes the day as i finish my lunch and check my mails and surf through the regular sites. As the day slips into a cozy evening, it feels like i woke up to sleep . And suddenly , like a true nocturne, i rejunevate myself by dinner time and thats when my actual day starts. So given that i am in a B-School, i need to do something , so i do that in this time, its funny how i look through my window at the campus lawn growing out of darkness, when i see students going to class, i pull the curtains, switch of the lights (if any) and push myself under the blanket.Yeah, i know, i attend the classes in day time, but every opportunity to sleep is utilised.

Few proceedings in the last one week,I didnt sleep the saturday night, (because i slept the whole of saturday), I went on this Bike Ride along 25 other friends to a nearby dam. Except that i miss my Pulsar, the trip was awesome , i just want to take a trip to that place all by myself and take time off (which i otherwise keep doing in my room). Best part of the trip i guess was when i got my hands on to a good cam and clicked some really good pictures. Driving in rain was one other experience.

So , as you can expect, i slept off through the day. Similar was the case with Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday night being Freshers night, i was there through out the night holding my camera. I sometimes regret me asking my father to buy a Video Camera. I call it a joint idiosyncracy of me and my father that we spend so much on White Goods. He didnt hesitate to buy me a Sony HDD Handycam. Why did i buy it, i thought i will be the next spielberg who used to shoot on 8mm camera that his dad brought him, i didn't realise that one shud be less lazy to become so. So laziness is punished with more useless work. I end up recording every minute of event on campus. I should atleast get to some useful and artistic Photography and Cinematography, otherwise, i will end up covering marriages and thats all i will do.Good part is, after some hours of shooting videos, i am now learning how to focus on objects. Hope the learning curve gets steeper. [More on Juniors Night later].

So, after the juniors night, thats at 8:30 in the morning, i sleep and wake up at 5:30 in the evening. I had this Marketing Research Proposal to complete [These days, i presume myself to be good at this subject]. But, my brain refuses to start itself, it was still in its sleep hangover, so i sleep from 8-9:30 and finally get serious at the project at 12:30 in the night after a couple of meetings. So i work non-stop till 10 in the morning and submit right in time. I present in 12 Noon Class. Come back and sleep at 3 Pm. For some random reason, i woke up at 6 Pm, which counts to just 3 hrs sleep in the last 21 hrs. I had this exam next day at 8:30 in the morning, i dont start it, instead i screen two foriegn movies for which 10 discerning viewers turn up(I liked it that way actually) and i ended up watching 1.5 movies. By 3 in the night, i am yet to start studying the syllabus, i start and end right before the exam . Go to sleep at 11:30, wake up at 8:30 Pm. Finally i get to my senses by 11 Pm , i have a 3 and half hours meeting from 12 to 3:30. Should have slept off to throw myself out of the cycle. But, i sit to watch a movie from 5-630 and then go to regent for Breakfast, and i am here at 9 30 writing this blog before going to sleep.

Heard this line "Ridiculously Wonderful" from the movie Little Manhattan. It reminded me of these little pleasures we have when we go through some pain, especially when we do it for people we like. The other way of looking at it is my daily life cycle itself. There is nothing so wrong abt the whole thing, its just a little eccentric and it is good in some ways. And the final perspective struck me when i was working on the Juniors Nite, at some point , i messaged someone "There isnt enough Puke in this world, to beat some incidents i was witnessing" , but on the other side, there turns out to be a counterpart from the same set of people that one should appreciate. After that event , the first thing i did was come back to my room and opened IMDB and read these lines from American Beauty, I had to watch the same on you tube as well. I believe , that is how i am surviving everyday.

Ridiculously Wonderful Lines

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life."

Off to sleep.

The Darkest Knight

2008-07-24T17:11:00.002+05:30

Batman couldn't be better unless Christopher Nolan surprises himself. Here he is , yet again, with a power packed starcast, who strapped themselves in the back seat wearing the masks that their master provided them with , while he took his audience off to a thrilling ride.

It is difficult to stand out of the typical template of a superhero movie, but not for a Christopher Nolan, not for the one who redefined the rules of screenplay through Memento, challenged the intelligence of audience through Prestige , and turned Batman into what he is. (While i am yet to watch Insomnia, His first venture into film making 'Following' shot on a shoe-string budget on London Streets and at his friend's place is strikingly original for a thriller). One should appreciate the drive of this , who continues to guarantee what true cinema stands for and deserves - Artistic Intelligence.

What is it about Dark Knight?

Christian Bale plays the Caped Crusader, with his love interest being Rachel Dawes played by Maggie Gyllenhaal , a surprise and a wothy new entry , Aaron Eckhart(Remember the witty and canny lobbyist from Thank you for Smoking) plays Gotham's District Attorney Harvey Dent who fights against the mob crimes, Alfred the Butler , played by Michael Caine, Inspector Jim Gordon played by Gary Old man, and Lucious Fox by Morgan Freeman.

Even if i have a mental disorder or a pathetic memory, It is difficult to miss this, Dark Knight is about this one character -

The Joker

One of my friend commented , "A cheap make up and a crazy smear shall be remembered forever"Chris Nolan couldn't have left a better memorial for Heath Ledger.

Joker is Funny, he laughs on the face of every character, he makes a mockery of the shortcomings of human mind, he feeds on the weakness and makes it his strength. He is silly, he is arrogant, he is frightening, he is an idiot, or as he calls himself, he is a freak, he is a dog who chases chases cars but doesnt know what to do with them . He just does things.

He is called a clown, as he puts you to a tragic laugh, his antiques and make-up, a regular slurpy noise he makes, as he swipes his tongue across his cheek, his smirky grin, his voice thats Baritone, Squeaky and husky at the same time, his anecdotes of how he got to his victims,his rationality behind anarchy and philosophy of subconscious fear. In a huge starcast movie, where everyone is sharing a bit of screen space, he is everywhere, he is in the internal conflict of Batman, he is in the weakness of Harvey Dent, he is in the fear of Gotham.

Christopher Nolan needed a master on screen to run the show on his behalf, to move the characters, to make them run and Heath Ledger stood up to the job.

If i could borrow a blog from RGV's Blog, 'Any story is about Character Conflict' - The Dark Knight is the same, while Joker walks away with the credit of creating a conflict in Batman's character and turning him into The Dark Knight , Christian Bale as Batman walks away as the hero who outgrows the human shortcomings challenged by Joker and becomes the super hero that we would all fall in love with. Don't blink, while you watch the scene when these two meet in the Inspection Cell, you would hardly see a conversation so taut, where eyes shoot at eyes.(The last time i saw such a scene was from Drohi, between Kamal Hassan and Nasser)

Technically, I don't stand to evaluate Nolan(as i couldn't watch it in a theatre, which i surely will). He sticks to his trademark screenplay of continuously tricking the audience, though he saves us from time travel, one still needs to get his brains charged before watching it. The Nolan Brothers succeed to surpass themselves in the artistic quality after Prestige. The dialogues grow out of the best fit between the actors and the roles they donned, be it Michael Caine who says "Endure Master Wayne" and when he adds his pun saying "Will they take me in for being your accomplice" , while Bale replies "Accomplice? I would say you are the one who planned it all". Aaron Eckhart saying "You either die as a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villian" , "I make my own luck" and of course yet again the Joker - "If you are good at something, never do it for free" and the trademark phrase "Why So Serious?"

Watch it, Watch it ASAP, WATCH IT ONLY IN THEATRES, watch it for the adrenalin rush, watch it for the fear, watch it for the thrill, watch it for the chill down your spine,watch it for the amazing visuals, watch it for the scary sound track while Joker threatens his victims, watch it for the so called Subtle Gadgets and Accessories, ranging from Bat Suit , Bat Pod and the Lamborgini.

Watch it for Cinema at its best.

If you couldnt watch it or didnt watch it, dont worry,

The Joker will get to you.

Disclaimer : the above piece might be exaggarated due to my extreme respect and admiration towards Christopher Nolan :)

Write or Not Right

2008-07-23T10:37:00.003+05:30

My hesitance to express what i think or feel had as usual got me low returns. As i stared at the Industrial Economics Paper for 45 minutes and contemplated on the validity of my answers.In the inability to come to a conclusive decision about the same, I gave half the paper blank. As i sow, so i reap. I score 6/15. I should realize that this score kind of applies to a lot of other aspects of my daily life.

And the other side of it was reading too much before the exam and questioning the preparation during the exam resulted in nothing but a waste of time and effort.

Either way, it seems to be a regular phenomena with me.

The other day, watched the parliamentary proceedings for a while. I couldn't help laughing at it, not for the madness of it, but for my faint acquaintance with such situations.

Christopher Nolan continues to prove his class.(More on this soon)

Yet another good class of industrial economics.

"With great power comes great responsibility" - It is important to read this line the other way, because, not every one is a spiderman -> Full filling great responsibility gives you great power.

Off to sleep .. zzzzz

Geetanjali

2008-07-18T04:07:00.003+05:30

I do not remember the last time i saw this movie, it is one movie that stands for the simplicity of Cinema. The director was just having fun with the characters while the audience couldn't deny the pleasure. I wonder how cinema had deterioted so much after such classics. It seems as if everyone whose name rolled in the credits earned their place. Everytime a new beat runs behind the screen, you cant help appreciating Illayaraja, P.C.Sriram, Veturi and Maniratnam. The sensuality of such cinema seems to have been buried in a pile of crass.Let me not run down the usual cribbing, i better continue to appreciate the good part of it.

Around 2 days ago,(rather 44 hours ago), I was sitting in this class called Industrial Economics and was having a cliff hanger experience. It was like the prof was telling me to hang on , 'here comes the final step', and when the class was over, i was on the top of the world. It is like a revelation.I went to have breakfast in the mess(one of those rare occasions), and then there was the other side of reason, sharukh khan dancing to 'Kay-Ar-A-Zee-Zee-Y , Krazzy 4'. I came to my room and thought of dropping dead, but quickly read through RGVs Blog. There was an amazing piece on how he ended up making his Aag. One of the best confessions i have read, it still needs to get a bit close to reality. His sarcastic reactions to questions were fun. I was surprised to the extent that people observed his movies. Another piece on characterising for Satya was awesome.

So, after that i dropped dead, thought of studying for this exam MACR (Ok, behold, this is Mergers Acquistions and Corporate Restructuring). I gave up that my intelligence would not match up to the requirements of the subject, so i planned to bunk the class as well. But i get a message that there are only 3 people in the class, so i rush to the class and then there is this exam. Wow, the paper was one of a kind (let me not talk about it much).

The exam hardly lasted for 10 minutes. I came back to room and got to the blog again , then went to this so-called-SAC photo shoot, and then the consumer behaviour class. 9:00 Pm-Had dinner, came back to my room to read through Knowledge@Wharton. Lazy bugger i was, i put it on audio and slept off till 1:30. Woke up and thought of reading for Product and Brand Management exam(One of my favourite subjects of the term) , but couldn't start till 4 Am(thanks to the slow production process on the Maggi Assembly Line in Night Canteen). So with great determination, i set out to read 16 readings, i manage to complete 8 of them by 8:30 and go to breakfast (XL record, two days in a row breakfast). I sleep at 9Am, Wake up at 12 noon for PBM class. Slept in the lunch break again, attended Social Entrepreneurship class. Did average in PBM exam. I dont know what i did from 5-7:45 Pm (Oh, i downloaded gitanjali). Went to Consumer behaviour class at 7:45 Pm and then dinner outing with friends at 10. Got back to campus at 11. Talked to Sharma after a long time for a long time as usual and then got cynical about B-School.

Then talked to veena and got back to geetanjali.

As the day goes there had been too many Thanks today.

Thats it.

Why did i write all this?

So that i will read it some day and know what i used to do in a B-School.

Reason Vs Excuse

2008-07-12T03:31:00.006+05:30

I always believed in this theory of Butterfly Effect, irrespective of classical conditional learning and developing a personality over experience for a long time, there will be somethings that happen in life that will change things drastically.I should thank my Guide for being the Butterfly Flap.

Few things i learnt :

1)Listen : "We have two ears and one mouth , because , it is nature's way of hinting us that we need to listen twice the time we talk"(Lifted this from 7 Habits). Unfortunately, very few do this. I remember my guide saying to me before my final interview "Listen to the Question and Mull Over it and Then Answer". After the interview(which i messed up) , I asked for the feedback , he said "You didn't listen to the question, thats it". I thought to myself "Was i Deaf or what?" I think i was, every presentation i see, every class i sit in, there will be atleast one event where the student starts off on a totally different plane when the teacher is teaching something.

2)Every Question doesn't demand an answer or a counter question : I have observed this behaviour every time I do a presentation. This tendency is so evident, the moment someone asks a question, the first thing we do is jump to answer the question. Its like an instinct, there is very little thought process involved. It more often than not goes into a situation of an Ego-Defense, while the purpose of the question was to induce a thought process and clean it.

3)Reason vs Excuse : Finally, this is one of the most important thing I miss. There is difference between a reason and an excuse. When a party is arguing for an issue and the other against, you present arguments on your side first, you don't ask for an excuse from other's argument , you counter it with a Reason. Reason takes its root from strong logic backed up by facts, Excuse backs itself from the lack of concrete reason or data, its basically a personification of either parties' inability to substantiate something. And in any argument, excuse is used by a loser, thats why debaters do research. they don't speak out of their mind or their figments of imagination.

It has been such a great experience through the summer, that i am reliving it everyday and laugh at myself when i come across the stupidest mistakes, when i see my friends. That how we get back to the learning process.

One of the good quotes i read :

"Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought."- Jiddu Krishnamurthy.

Now i wish i studied Sociology.

Movies that wish to see :

Grahanam : Watched Twice already, doesn't matter to watch again.

Good Night and Good Luck

Short Snaps

2008-07-03T00:54:00.002+05:30

Landed on campus on 16th June.
Room No 213, The Saint Thomas Mens Residence.The Room with the view.
The day I landed in Calcutta , I didnt sleep, one can guess that i did it for no reason.
Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na and Aamir Songs on continuous play.
Watched Lions For Lambs - Awesome movie. Favourite Quote :
Prof :"Professors are not teachers , they are salesmen. "
Student: "what do they sell then?"
Prof: "You to You."

Mahatma Gandhi: "It has always been a mystery to me how men feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow men"

AGD stands for Attention Grabbing Disorder. [The Phrase is Trademarked]

An year Ago, My OB Prof wrote in Big Letters on board , not actually big, They were Huge Letters, and he wrote "PERCEPTION IS REALITY". Today, i feel, he should have increased the font size.

I am surprising myself everyday by the amount of notes i am taking. Funny that a single summers experience can change you so much.

I guess i am getting good at negotiating.

Is Ego a Driver or a Barrier? (I know the question isnt complete).

Few things i dread for now : Power, Politics, whats the other one, i forgot.

Zyada Maanga hain Kahan , Sarhaddein na hon jahaan , Duniya Mile Humko.

Thats it !!

To Teach

2008-06-21T12:20:00.003+05:30

Teaching is not as easy as it seems. It is not so simple as well. I remember gifting a diary to one of my lecturers in 12th class. He refused to take it saying " I do not Qualify as a Good Teacher, I still feel that pinch when a student gives a better answer than me ". To confess such a thing would be impossible for a lot of us. He deserved more than the diary, may be he deserved the right of rejection. Thats all we could give him.

There are some simple parameters that i look at in a teacher. Infact , cant figure out more than one for now. When someone is teaching, He/She takes you through a journey of reason, He works on your mind like someone who holds a kids hand and make him connect the dots. Slowly , showing way, one after the other, as the picture keeps materialising, you will be in that mystery zone thinking "Something is happening, where are we going?".

And you finish it, and a Big Picture is presented in front of you, the Teacher gives you a smile. The Smile which stands for the pristine joy of discovering the far end of reason and more importantly, acknowledging that you have reached the destination that you have reached a several times, but you have new companions with you. You would see the best smile from the teacher who enjoys this feeling the most. Thats the only thing that can keep a teacher keep teaching the same thing Section after Section, Year after Year. The best of the teachers I have met, invariably carried this expression with them. They enjoyed rediscovering the same thing with a new student.

I wish to be one someday.

Other Updates:
-Back to College.
-Back to Old Odd Sleep Timings.
-Back to Cancellation and Rescheduling.
-Back to Chilling.

Quote From Shantaram "A secret is not a secret , unless keeping it hurts".
Gtalk Status Message: "Ha,Ha" = Laugh,Mock,Smirk,Despair.
Anonymous: " Show me a writer who doesn't have a good vocabulary,i will prove that he/she is not a good writer"

Me

2008-05-17T00:31:00.000+05:30

Me, Beofre i wrote anything else, let me write this, I have been to Leopolds, the place from Shantaram. :D

Ok, now about me, i dont know where to start , but i somehow felt that i should write about myself, another consequence of Shantaram. One of the reasons that i almost closed down my blog was , i was almost writing such kinda things, But i think the its more of a matter of courage to write about yourself, atleast at times when you cannot be yourself.
The only reason i picked up Shantaram was this line on the first page, "The most important thing in this world is Freedom, Freedom to hate" Nothing with relation to this post.

Me and the Manager.

This is how i can put it, i used to sit on these Exams, one of the Hundreds i wrote in my life till now. I used to break my knuckles for the first hour, yawn at the paper, flip through the paper and see that i know the 5/8 questions and finally, i would have finished 15% of the paper in 50% of the time. And then there is Midterm revision and i get all hurried and i start writing nad thats when the real me comes out, there is so much content but no time, and thats when i invented a language that no spieces could understand. I used to literally make scratches on my answer sheet. I remember that i used draw circuit diagrams, while i am running to submit the paper, you get it right, i used to draw with paper in the air, the diagram seemed nothing like a diagram. The Best part i should say, with the worst ever possible handwriting that human kind could have ever seen and the handwriting that would have made doctors proud, i managed to do well in my academics. Surprisingly. I still do in a way.I always said this to myself when i could see people drwing margins with coloured pens all over the paper and writing as if they printed, "I have content, and i need to write it, not present it"
My parents held their breath while i survived being the topper(Ok!! 2nd ranker, or the silver medal that was never there :P) . they were surprised that i finally manged to be at the top. They thought thats it, now my kid will go on to be the best because , all he has to do from now is to type in a sophisticated but easy to use software called Word and easily present ion Powerpoint.

Like they say in strategy, you always need to get the problem right. My parents didnt do that. Problem wasnt in the Hand writing, it was with me, i have too many thoughts in my mind that i keep them away or keep them locked for some time and then let them out in a flurry, and thats when it all gets scrambled. This mixed with intelligence and arrogance is Me. Thats the manager i could be by presenting thoughts in non-linear manner , but speak out at length in discussions when you want gyan, i would never say, lets look at a structure here, i would start off saying, "you know what,these could be various ways how things could be done". Anyway, thats Me as a manager , Guy who is too lazy, arrogant and (assumed to be) smart. I think the wake up call was, when i was told to stop my presentation in between and redo it in a structured manner. Thats how people change i guess.

Ok, so, if i cannot present , what else can i do. I am sure of one thing, anywhere i work, i will bet on this, i will make 10 others around me happy and motivated to work. More about that later, but otherwise i think i should write more rather than present. Anyway, i will stop it here, hopefully, there will be more versions to this in a structure manner. If possible i will upload a PPT. :P

Coming Soon (Mostly) : Me and the Cool Guy
Me and The Man
Me and Just Me

To Write

2008-05-13T11:23:00.002+05:30

"Did you ever get high on something other than a drink?" asked Krishna. I wasnt very sure when i was answering that. I said " I get high when i watch a very good scene or read a great line or most of all write a great line and feel that pride of being the author or rather a creator of something original, running through my nervous system".

The very first lines that i wrote on this blog was that i am one of the laziest creatures on earth, i dont stand to argue with that. Once in a while somethings take me to a parellel world. Its like that thing i learnt in science, if you are thrown away from earth a velocity greater than a specific amount, you get out into the space. Thats what happens when one gets a high.

I should totally dedicate this post to Shantaram . I bothered to grab it while i am travelling , i had still been lazy enough to keep away my arousal that i experienced after reading the first page. I should thank Ramki for pushing me onto this book. Well, i will come to the point. I think , i got goose bumps a hundred times already within just 140 pages of what i have read. Some important things to really take a note of.

1) Shantaram mentions that writing had been his saviour in the most difficult of the times. He used to carry pices of paper and write prose and poetry wherever he wanted to. And if he hadnt done that he claims he would have gone mad. From my experience i would say that its so true. I remember writing on a tissue paper in a restaurant one day. Writing is the best vent for man's thoughts that couldnt be absorbed by any other man. Writing is fluent as the fluid that curls around from the pen and takes its shape into such effective words weaved together that when you look back at it , you will realise that with all the threads of our thoughts , we had actually woven an art piece. And believe me, writing gives anyone a high, you should see me as i scurry my fingers now on my laptop with battery meter ticking off and my mind racing against it with thousand thoughts.

2) I always used to write about my dream girl in one form or the other. I should not actually be calling her the dream girl, but its more the girl that i wanted to write, like an artiste wanted to draw an imaginary figure. Whenever i tried to write some part of it, i had a feeling that i am going over board, and i am doing some thing that doesnt look very - whats the word - practical (not the right word). But shantaram's description of Karla kind of reassured me that it takes a lot of art and skill to write about what you admire and desire and looking at what you created or put into words will give you a lot of pleasure. This is so because writing such things is always an attempt to create a replica of your best admirations, and you look for that quality and finesse in what you write , because this is not a plain dream,this is where you assume the powers to bring something from dream to reality , and that i believe is (if he exists ) is second to God's Job.

3)Thought is the frailest thing that man would ever experience, it would be fluttering like a dragon fly's wing in your mind and it would be there, it would be here, and it would be gone, but when it runs through your fingers in a well constructed sentence, it is the deepest thing and the strongest thing. I think Shantaram taught me that once again that all the philosophies that we, or I blabber off given the slightest of the opportunity would appeal more when written down. I was amazed by the skill with which Shantaram wrote about what seemed to be the simplest of the realisations that we go through everyday but never actually stand to acknowledge and appreciate . We have a long life of short moments that more or less define what we are, but when we feel very empty once in a while, thats when we grope for those moments when we were transformed and re-defined to new life, when we took a new step from surviving to living, All such things will come to life when we write.

I think i will close the post there atleast to win against the electronic machine.
But will soon elaborate in some form of the other,
hopefully i will be less of a sloth and more of a writer .

Silence and Sound

2008-05-06T02:03:00.002+05:30

Before i write anything about the title, let me first convey my sincere gratitude to my Professor who taught me Business Research Methods.

Ok, now over to the actual post.

Silence : I was just watching the movie Nishabd, what an artpiece it is. I know that not many would stand to appreciate it, one of the reason being, its made over a taboo and another reason might be , thats made by a guy who went nuts after making some of the most amazing movies that Indian Cinema had ever seen. , Ok, i would atleast say that they were best of those that i have ever seen. RGV would always be one of my favorite directors, even if he had murdered Shiva by remaking it as Shiva 2006 (Sounds like my e-mail id : Kartheek17). What was he thinking when he made that movie with that guy from James, I mean, Shiva was a rage among students at that time, people practiced pulling out chains from their cycles. I am sure it would have made gangsters out of a few students of those times, especially in Vijayawada. Ratri , before it was remade respectfully in Hindi, used to scare the shit out of many while they just watched it on TV. He had a knack of talking to people through silence, through terse dialogues,through Heroes who stared into your eyes for so long that you would sometimes lower your eye lids with fear, and ofcourse the heroines whom i believe were given the most respect in his movies. Never mind what others say, be it Revati, Amala, Sridevi, Urmila and few others.(ok, lets put nisha kothari as an exception).

Some people say that he made some of the shittiest movies people have ever seen, well, i dont want to answer that now because that will take a long time if i list down what i call shitty movies. Somehow, it just struck me hard to see the amazing skill with which he handled a movie like Nishabd, I just want to be on his sets and see what he tells to the actors, something like, what would he have told to Nagarjuna in Shiva, or Sridevi in Kshana Kshanam or Saurabh Shukla or Manoj Bajpai in Satya or Amitabh in Nishabdh and Sarkar.

And when he Produced movies, he gave some of the best directors to the industry whom the Big production houses like Yash Raj are exploiting now. God, Shimit Amin couldnt get better than Ab Tak Chappan. The good thing was, (I dont really know, but this is what i believe) , he made movies which he felt good about, he put his money on it, and he did it, he didnt care what happened after that, and he risked his money , ofcourse he learnt a bit of business later, but not like Yash Raj, who make small films because they get you the highest ROI and then put your money on movies which would even not be screened at Film Festival in Timbaktu but you can screen it for one week in all theatres over the world and get your money back before the audience realise they were cheated( God, a Kid wouldnt write a story like that of Tashan in his childhood, one should be an idiot to produce it). I believe RGV doesnt do that, even if the whole world says the movie is bad, he would say, i like it, thats why i made it, he wouldnt say, i know its bad, but i also know that i would get my money.

Ok, so much about Silence.

Sound : Sound here basically means noise or other random things.

- Some thing wrong happened in Surat sometime, i didnt visit many cities in india, but till now, what ever highways or roads i have seen, Surat has the widest roads out of no reason. I know it has all the textile market, but what the hell are they doing with 10 lane road, i am not joikng, i will bet on this, 5 lanes on each side. Today, i was catching an Auto standing, right in the middle of the road.
-Girls in Surat look good. Let me put it better, Girls in Surat also look good. No, not the exact one, Girls every where but down south look good. Whats the problem!! Did Aryans forget something while they travelled south and I wonder what did the dravidians do. This might seem a bit awkward , but this seems to be the first topic of any school/college (Guys)re-union in a Metro(Oops, Chennai is an exception) or in a city Up-North . One of us would go saying " Ooooh!!, why werent they in our school". Like one of my friends used to say "I will take my kids to some Northern Metro where girls and guys can hold hands peacefully (Ok, 10 years later , if i read this, i mite be reading it as a 'Hypocrite')
-I want to be a teacher some day. Dont know how good would I be, but i will make sure that my students will have a great learning.
-Watched Goodfellas for the second time, Joe Pesci is God. No wonder , people copy that movie.
- Grades are coming out one after the other, funny that my learning curve is going down (wait a minute, did i attribute learning to grades !!?? Shit!!)
-Oh yeah, i deleted F.R.I.E.N.D.S from my lappy so that i can go on with my internship, and so , i am blogging now :|
-I still write in NotePad, i dont feel like using MS Office.
-Ok, thats it, i cant get more random than this.
--End of Post--

Mumbai and Neverland

2008-05-02T00:13:00.003+05:30

Ok, Mumbai is not Neverland.

Mumbai is this awesome place, its like the place for everyone and a perfect place for guy like me to loearn some things. I am spending a fortune at this place, i cant figure out exactly on what i am spending it. But sometimes, there is a nice little sense of earning something, not actually earning , but virtually earning.
For example, the other day i took a Taxi from Chembur to Byculla, So as i was happily reading Brand Reporter in the back seat like a Brand Manager (Wannabe) , the mechanics worked on to move the taxi, so the system also had a sister concern called meter that moves along with it and it turned over to cost me 125 Rs. So, the next day i get to do the same thing, but i thought its time to move my butt a little more. So i catch a bus to the nearby railway station, that costed me 4 Rs and as i buy the ticket to Byculla, there is an announcement for the fast local. I run over the over bridge and just then the train stops and i thought i cant get this because , you cant actually catch a running train in Mumbai with "Used to catch Running Bus during college at Hyderabad" on your Resume. But, Hey wait up,the over bridge has a slide down instead of steps, so i run down and just as the train starts to move, i get in. And as i listen to a 4 min song from Godavari, I am there at Byculla. Now that train ticket costed me 5 Rs. With new found enthusiasm after saving 116 Rs, i thought i will walk to my place, which is kinda 1 Km away.

So is this like the Master Card Ad. Not exactly, the story is not over yet. As i walk down, i find this Pizza Place called Mama Mia and i walk into it, to celebrate my earning. After that blame it on the Great Indian Economy and the Consumer Confidence , i ate a Pizza worth 100 Rs with a cool drink worth 15 Rs. So thats it. I earned a Rupee.

Ok, even otherwise, Mumbai is an awesome place, might be too early for me to judge, but , as long as i can have 6 panipuri for 6 Rs on roadside, I love it.

Now to Neverland. Before i write this, if one is fired for bloggong about his job, this phenomena is called getting 'dooced' , i came to know this in just another quiz prelims which i didnt get thru.

I have been taking survey on 8-12 year kids on what they do and their daily activities. It has been awesome talking to them. There was this word about kids that my friend used , 'Unassuming' . i think thats it, thats one of the most beautiful attribute that humans are born with and only tend to lose it over time. There is this question that i ask "Do you worry about what your friends think about you? " . And i so loved it when they say a strong 'NO'. Seeing from where i come from - The B School and where i would go from there - I would call the kids world - Neverland.

Some really funny stats about Neverland, not actually stats as i didnt tabulate everything , actually nothing so far. God, so much work to do.

Ok, if anyone from Media Agencies are readingv this, if any of you want to put an ad for kids product, put it on this program called "Shing Chang" (i dont know if i am spelling it right, because with all curiosity, i could find out that he wears Red shorts and Yellow shirt, god i actually asked a kid if he can draw him). Kids love this program , they watch it what so ever.

They love those ads which i thought to be the stupidest Ads. There is nothing more than that i could reveal for now.

Ok, there is one final reference to Neverland i want to make. Not actually a Neverland. Anyway, let me explain.

Today kind of rounds off as a day where all of my good friends who wanted to be in a B-School, finally get to be in a B-school. Looking back, it was kinda stupid journey that we started , let me count , 1,2,3,4 years ago and got obsessed with . So, all said and done, we all looked at it as a Neverland which we wished to reach soime day. Oh, Oh!! that reminds me of something else thats common to us, as someone said, we are all this bunch of self-pitying, nostalgic graduates from JNTU Hyderabad.

And guess what, everyone is going to an IIM as just I go to XLRI. He he , howz that for differentiation. :P . Ok, very bad joke. Signing it off, just like some post long ago that i wrote, this day seems to be one more of those few days of absolute happiness.

So, if my humour seemed unoriginal, wannabe witty or plain simple bad, blame it on my obsession to watch 4 episodes of FRIENDS everyday.

As i signed off, i will have to leave a finishing joke.

P.S : I land in Mumbai Railway station from Hyderabad with all my luggage . Being an Engineer, i couldnt be smart enough than buying a Map of Mumbai in the railway station. Thinking back, i dont know what i was trying to do, what, buy a compass also and reach the place i wanted to. Anyway, so, i open this big map in the railway station and starting searching for the place i wanted to go. So, from another angle, i would be looking like holding a board saying " Come on you Taxi Guys , I am New to Mumbai and I am absolutely clueless and dumb, come take me for a ride". So one guy finally takes the offer and says, hey its just near by , and it costs just 150 bucks. So i think to myself " Oh!! ya, i have read about that in the papers, its called inflation, prices have have gone up." So i sit in the Taxi, and whoosh you are there in 5 mins. So, i get down , with gaping mouth and say "Come on, this is too much". That guy says "Buzz off, you weigh too much
- with your luggage " :D . It costs 30 bucks on Taxi from that place.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S

2008-04-26T19:37:00.003+05:30

This is no centi post!!

Ok, i know i woke up way too late. I just got addicted to sitcoms now. Hopefully not more to coime, but for now, i am watching too much of Friends. My laptop battery allows me 4 episodes at a time and i take all of it. I should say, i am enjoying it, Chandler remains my favourite for his one liners, while Ross would get the special jury award for being the All time good guy.Thats as much on friends.

Other than that, my summer internship seems no hot thing to talk about for now, except that i feel deprived of chocolates all of a sudden.

Thats it for now

The Other side of the consumer

2008-04-22T21:59:00.002+05:30

You walk into a shop, look at few items and pick up one and walk towards the counter. Freeze!!!

This is the moment, the moment that huge corporates work day and night for, the moment for which all research agencies drill your mind with hundreds of questionnaires, the moment for which sales man drag their feet to every shop in every nook and corner of the city, the moment for which merchandisers fight for display space in the shop.

My first glimpses into the other side of consumer. Will try to write more later.

I am alive and so is my blog

2008-04-19T00:29:00.003+05:30

Before i doze off, before i delete this post also rejecting it on the basis of low quality, i will write something and post it.
I and my Blog are alive. Just that i had been as lazy to write as a person in coma.
Was going thru a fellow interns blog , i could just feel the kind of feeling that one has after writing something.
So , where was I, what was i doing. Term 3 at XL had real been XL size, i didnt expect it to be so, i didnt expect me to be so. Not on basis of education , but on the basis of life style atleast, i am learning few ways to be a manager. Some hazaar events and hazaar conflicts to handle. Some real good tests for my communication and composure. For once , i could suddenly sit up in sleep and think to myself "this place means something to me". Its funny that i didnt sleep before 5 am for 2 weeks straight. And if best things happened so far in XL for me, it happened in Term 3, if shit happened , it happened in term 3.

Anyway, it was fun being the old man . Hope there is no more necessity for that role.

Had been to hyd twice during the term, two very short and quick trips. Sometimes, u will realise how much you can do in a day.

I had been in hyd for 8-9 days after term 3. Biking seemed scary for a while. But i still enjoy it. And somewhere for the first time, or rather not for the first time, but it was just that my thought it was very dominant that "My priorities were getting scrambled".

Fundae : Jugash and me used to have this discussion on how to live and behave as one wishes. I was struggling to behave as i want. For some people the above statement might seem funny because one is supposed to live how one wants. But its not so easy when it comes to execution. I think XL gave me that chance to live all by myself and still be good and answerable to myself. It was really interesting to see the coin flipping the other way. This was like a paradigm shift for me.But its good. If i had to take in terms of market share and percentages, i used to listen and rule myself by 15-20% an year or two ago. Now its as much as 65-70%. I think thats phenomenal.

So much for now.
P.S : Coming soon, Chorlie at the Chocolate factory.

Restart

2008-01-07T19:42:00.000+05:30

It seems that i cannot stay away from writing. It seems to be my best way to refresh besides roaming with a camera(though i am too lazy to do that as well)

Updates:
-Unlike the first term ,I had to slog a bit during the exams, though the results seem to be coming out bad.
-2 weeks of vacation added more to my sleep.
-Some sleepy idiot mistook one sandal of mine as his and left one sandal of his.
-Hyderabad is the only place where i can survive by overtaking from left side.
-Managed to reach XL safely breaking the record of adventurous journeys.
-One more term to go to graduate as seniors :)
- I shall mark January 7th as a great day , this is the day Room no 301, TFEMR looked spic and span. This might well be the only day
-Taare Zameen Par :)))))

MAXI and the Missing Middle Class

2007-11-25T19:19:00.000+05:30

Ok, i think i will take some time and write whatever i did over the last few days for the 29th edition of MAXI Fair. Though my writing style will be highly condemned and in fact ripped apart by Fr.Jesurajan.(if at all he comes across this blog, who knows, XL is like a tiny world)
This post will be very long(if i complete it) and hopefully informative.

One of the reason for me to be at the place i am is The MAXI Fair. So, after 5 months on campus, i become part of yet another editon of MAXI Fair. And guess what, i get to be in the Maxi Admin Group. Now, whats that? For that, i should explain first, what is not Admin. MAXI is a Marketing research fair where problems of various companies are researched , for example : to study the consumers before setting up a new retail chain in the city , or what is the brand recall for a brand. Now , i know its boring to hear it this way. I thought so as well.

So, what happens is this. Every problem is disguised in the form of a funny theme based game. It could be in the form of an angel that curses people for guessing her age wrong as 19 when she is actually 1999 years old(i know, thats foolish, sometimes marketing is making asses out of customers ), so she curses him and he has to go and find the most beautiful box for her out of 4 designs,(one of which might turn up on your neighborhood retail stall if its chosen by most number of people). So the customer chooses a box. So he advances to the new level where a Scary Devil Like Creature (couldnt believe it was harsha sodhani/soda-pani) would be shouting "Khoon , Khoon " so the customer is rushed by another betal to make his choice quickly and go out.And he goes on to the next level.

But there were some real good learnings out of the few minutes when i carried a camera - 1)A housewife making her choices on which shop to go as she had to solve aladdins problem problem of shopping for Jasmine along with Genie, she thought very carefully on factors like Quality, distance from house, Price,Organisation of the store. All those guys who are getting into marketing , go get your first lessons from your mother, housewives are the last persons that marketeers could fool.

A teenage girl explained which age group would pick which kind of snack. I should confess that i was equally fooled when my own batchmates started acting as wife and husband , the best part was when the subject of research told which snack is used by which group, these guys started to fight more saying "see, i have told her the same , but she doesnt accept, why dont you explain her why you are saying this and the subject went on to explain the reasons of how people choose snacks as well.

So, this is what all the Non-Admin part is. Here comes the Admin. I dont think Admin is an apt name to this , but yeah, it makes one feel good. What we do is, we go around jamshedpur and ask for sponsorships. We luckily gathered enuff to run the show. This is a respectful part i should say. Then comes the ticket selling part. Here comes the second part of the title- Middle class. We should be selling round about 2000 tickets in jamshedpur, now the catch is, we have to sell it to the right people, i.e. Most of them SEC A, Then comes SEC B and a very few SEC C. So, we went door by door to each flat (i guess i covered atleast 150 flats) and managed selling around 100 tickets. Anyway, by the day of fair, we almost reached our targets.
Btw, find a sketchy explanation of how Socio economic classes are classified here.

On the day of the fair, we do something called profiling, we put basic questions like Age, Income, Education, Job Type and two funny questions for which i had to learn hindi.
1) Kartheek says " Yeh Jho, snacks ho they hain na, haldirams, bhujiya, bingo, kurkure , waise, yeh aap ki faily hafte mein kitne baar karidthe/kaathe hain" - uff!!!
2) Kartheek says " Aap ghar mein machar bagaane keliye kya isthimaal karte hain , coils, mats ya, liquid repellent".

So, as i input the answers to these questions in an unreliable but well developed software, it tells me, which SEC the subject belongs to and which stalls they should visit(basically , which companies research they should participate in). Now i sat at that desk for almost 4 hrs and would have profiled atleast 300 people. So, it had a good effect on me to write such a long article.
The learnings:
1) Tier II cities has people who are filthily rich, i walked into some houses which had plasma TV and many just blindly speak about growing metros. I bet that Tier II city consumers are all geared up to to spend lots and lots . Infact , i knew this when crowd turned up in great numbers to Cafe Coffee day in guntur. Its not a joke, but they would happy to say that a burglar looted 50000 worth gold from their house, if thats the only opportunity to show off their wealth.

2) Bottom of the Pyramid seems to be under the pyramid, no one is actually caring about it i guess. I had a tough time not selling tickets to lower income people as they were not required for the research. It was a tough call, never had i discriminated people in my life in any aspect. Reminded me of the Corporate movie that Madhukar Shukla screened. At one point, i felt as if i was growing cruel(thats an exaggeration i guess) , but it seemed unavoidable, we needed the well educated and high earning people, then who is taking care of the Bottom of Pyramid.

3) This is the Big One. Middle Class is disappearing in India. I know this is too generic a statement to make, but i am sure that i am right. I was there at the profiling desk asking for income, education, job of the subjects . Leave behind all the classifications , i saw only two classes- Rich and Poor. I dont know if i can say this without concrete data, but i could sense something today sitting there, the middle class had been splitting and dispersing into these two classes. India, had been turning into a land of opportunities and those of middle class who did everything to grab them , moved upwards, others just drowned into the sea of poor. And opportunities seem to come to those who are opportune and affluent . So, the rich become richer and poor becomes poorer continues.

Since i was asking education and job type, i could find out that, one thing that carried the poor to rich was EDUCATION. I could visulise it as a bridge between two cliffs. Hope India gets Educated more.

I was surprised to see that people easily giving figures like 30000 and 40000 as monthly incomes. The manner in which they said the number gave me an idea of the percentage of their income they are ready to spend . I was guessing how many choclates they would be buying in a month :P .

Uff.. I wrote too much, I will end this, all in all , it is a great learning experience.
Thats me at the Profiling Desk. " Aap ke umar kitni hogi madam" Kartheek asks :)

Writers

2007-11-24T01:18:00.000+05:30

This piece of writing comes as an appreciation towards the lives of all the writers that i could have a glimpse into. It so happens that i buy a lot of books and all i could do was go through the first page that introduces the author. These are some inferences i could make.

Every writer would have a experienced a depression that questions their very existence. They could be in the form of poverty, bad marriage, love failure, social outcast , death of parents or lover - These create a vaccuum in the writer's life . It leaves them with a lot of questions unanswered and most of their stories are answers to those questions. Some writers actually recreate their life in a more tragic way in their stories, this seems to give them a peculiar pleasure that there are characters that suffer more than them. Writers are like stressed down spings , as they get wound by the vicissitudes of fate, they just spring open with all the creativity.

The thought process that a writer has , builds great connection with the readers. This is because the writer comes out with such a shameless description of a character's thought process that every reader will be assured that they are normal and their thought process is common. I believe writers get out of their hypocritic web that every common man is caught up in. They see themselves naked , and so are their characters. They do not hesitate to present a thought like wanting to kill owns own friend because he just laughed at his coat. They will be more than candid to say that a character's actual intention is to make love to his beloved female , rather than love her. They break the social idealism and put forward the radical views that are curbed in every common mans mind.

Writers are the biggest failures at writing at one point or the other. Like history is mostly about the people who won wars , not many times do we hear about all the writings that didnt get published or get the worst reviews. I was reading Gogol's failure as a writer intially and his desperation to write something good. It only gives me a boost that i continue to write some rubbish and hope some day that i turn out a masterpiece.

Arbit!!!!

2007-11-21T22:43:00.000+05:30

Bargaining for mediocrity...
Dreams: Reality = 20:1
Thoughts:Actions = 100:1
Live life XL size
Another CAT ~ The first CAT i didnt take since november 2004
So near.. So Far
Research a Business and account for the costs, manage the finances, communicate and market to the clients, analyse quantitatively and keep in track of the economy
High ROI can mean Very high returns on high investment or High Return on low investments.Which one would i prefer?
Step function vs Continuous Function
two minutes to go to a meeting..

P.S : No P.S :-P ..

Stop.. A CAT just passed by us

2007-11-18T01:28:00.000+05:30

Its funny that an Exam makes a person feel nostalgic. An exam that has the highest stakes and ofcourse most over valued by most of those who take the Exam. I wonder if i had the guts to take it again. Anyway, i think i will remember the three years of CAT prep through out my life. How would it be after 20 years if CAT continues to happen on the 3rd sunday of November. I think , Archies would come up with the concept of best wishes for CAT very soon(thats a good idea).

Its irony, that i am in XLRI now, may thats the sweet revenge i could take on CAT :) . But its that time of the year again. So i just wanted to acknowledge the event when 2 lakh pencils fill atleast 3 crore circles. May be if anyone who filled those circles and then comes across this blog. I will just leave a cliche here(cliches are cliches because they are true for a long time)

Whatever happens, happens for good.

Indifference and poetry

2007-11-08T22:27:00.000+05:30

In the fervour of everything
indifferent i am , i sing
every colour and every hue
turns to me to love and lure
every smile and every laugh
had been trying to take me off
all the silence and all that's loud
tried to push to the ninth cloud
In the fervour of everything
Indifferent I am , I sing

P.S: No particular reason why i wrote this one, its just as indifferent as it could get.

Nothing and Everything

2007-11-06T02:37:00.000+05:30

There is nothing i can write about everything that happened at this place. It is as if the whole place had come alive. When i say alive , its not about lively, its just that everyone here had seen a microcosm of life (from past to future). When i cleared CAT/XAT after 3 years, i thought thats it , i have seen the worst.
Haha.. Now i only laugh back at it. Anyway , this time, i would only say - i had a reminder , that there never should be an assumption of absolutes- its an oxymoron.
Some learning again.
I will keep this post very short.
PS1: Cadburys
PS2: I am one of the coolest persons :)

Kabhie.. Kabhie..

2007-10-27T23:00:00.000+05:30

i rolled over from my bed and tried to feel the floor. It seemed that i had to cover some more distance to touch the floor, i felt like i was just floating in air , i didnt bother to open my eyes and see what is happening around me. At some moment i felt like i was falling rather than floating, however it doesnt make any difference as long as there is nothing below me, so i assumed the free fall to be a float. There was a drizzle, it came from below me , droplets of water hit my back , they spread in the mesh of threads of my shirt , i rolled over to feel them on my face. I still didnt bother to wake up and see whats happening. Why would rain come from beneath, does that mean i was rising with my head turned towards the ground?

Ignorance is bliss. I enjoyed the bliss, but the very habit of dissecting the seemingly irrational couldnt put my mind to sleep. So i continued, if i was rising towards the sky , i would soon be into the clouds where all the rains come from, so i would go splash into the clouds where there would be tankers of water which let out rain like water out of porous hose. But wait , that is like a fairy tale, clouds are just a collection of water vapour and other gases, so where will i reach at the end. Will i go to the sun, how hot will it be- And just then , i went splash into water, i could feel everything around me though i still chose to be blind. It was a sky of water, i could feel it by the way water rushed into my ears and the way i gushed out bubbles from my nostrils, still nothing seemed to be wrong, no science seemed to applying here. This time, i was neither drowning , nor floating , i was travelling. I knew i carried a smile on my face, that the water couldnt wash away. I tried to move as if in sleep, i folded myself inwards, the speed of my travel doubled. It was as if someone was sucking an ocean from behind my back. I was racing against water. And suddenly, i was thrown out of it, I was like a pole vault athlete at the highest point of projectile, a dolphin that was trying to just go a wee bit above water but actually went so high and so fast that it reached escape velocity, i was whirled out and i could feel the warmth now, but it didnt seem like the sun. It was warm enough to keep my smile intact- And just then, Gravity took over. I started to free fall, and i felt that i was in closed doors, I slowed down as if i was landing somewhere, i started to dislike it , i thought of finding out this time-

And then , the phone rings -" Kabhie, Kabhie Mere dil mein" , before it went any further , i rushed my hand into the pocket and cut it off- "Nice tune by the way " said the prof.
I said to myself "shit".

P.S : My phone is silent for almost 90% of the time that i dont remember whats my ring tone. But few times when it actually rang , it had the attention of everyone- unfortunately, they were in , Dean's Office ,Library and Class room. The dream part was the other problem i am facing these days in classes- dozing off(ofcourse, thats because i dont sleep the night before)

Two sides of a coin

2007-10-21T15:10:00.000+05:30

Happy Days: Rewind and Review-2

2007-10-21T01:23:00.000+05:30

Review
First of all, Shekhar Kammula is one of the most sensible film makers we have around, even though he loses himself in trying to force some geeky stuff thats totally irrelevant.

Lot of moments in life are very sensitive and delicate , they are very difficult to reproduce on screen . Shekhar kammula is one of those who does it with perfection. Happy days comes around as one of those of his movies where the audience slip into their past and relate with the characters. Fitting in 4 years of time in 3 hrs is not at all easy , and to portray innumerable instances of college makes it much more complicated. Though i watched it online, i could figure out the execution in terms of cinematography was perfect. Music is outstanding and Lyrics are the best that i have heard in the recent past.

The scenes on lead pair are a treat to watch. Characters of Rajesh and Tyson have been scripted very interestingly.And needless to say , Shekhar somehow manages to walk through the complicated thought process of the fairer sex. May be this is the first time that i have sat down to criticise a film. Shekhar somehow got into the wrong idea of College days are all about love, he does talk about friendship, but its clear that the concept of love takes over in every alternate scene. Its difficult to depict other issues in college, but it seemed to be misfit when you show the protaganist talking about how he feels about his lady-love throughout the movie and suddenly realises that he has nothing to do in life and then the principal comes to rescue and says "You are a leader". And Wipro doesnt actually offer jobs just like that, i know that everybody gets placed on-campus, one doesnt need to rush it through as done in the movie. I mean , the way Rajesh gets a job is ridiculous,(atleast the screenplay is not comparable with the award winning Dollar Dreams).

The geeky stuff is an absolute misfit most of the times. There could have been more strength in the movie if at all it had some more story and an interesting screenplay. After three intelligent movies, shekhar some how couldnt associate with more factors than women and love. But i am happy that he had made his mark at last at the box-office. He struggled for a long time to come so far.

Happy Days :Rewind and Review

2007-10-21T00:47:00.000+05:30

Rewind:
Many told me that watching Happy Days would take one back to the college days and reminisce every thing. Yes it did do the same to me. So , i will let my fingers fly.
We did all of those , the great JNTU Salute, Pledge (there were times when i could recite it in sleep, and if it was to shown on screen , you will have a beep for 2 minutes) , propose to girls , collect biodata,dancing at the bus stops, Midnight Assemblies and some wierd games that i cant describe here. The claustrophobic hostels had more than anyone can think of. And then we had classes , and we had the long mass bunk , that made the admin wonder and send a letter to everyones home. It was the time when we learnt to read anything and everything in one night. It was very easy.There are many processes in college that had been there since years , those actually doesnt make much difference to anyone's life, Classes, Exams , Grades , Admin , Faculty etc , Its always those things that are very dynamic that make a lot of difference. And the most Dynamic one's are human beings. Ok, I will cut the jargon - Friends.

4 years is a long time , let's do some calculation : imagine that your memory started record things since you are of the age 5, so by the time you end your college, you would be 21 .So , a total of 16 years of memory, 4 years in that counts to 25% of the life till that point. These 4 years happen at a single place with a fixed set of population (except for th inflow of juniors and outflow of seniors). So whatever we do there has a strong impact on life. Everyone finds their group of friends from these fixed set of people. But the fun again is people never remain the same, they change. Just within those 4 years , one will see life as a sample . And everyone after coming out of college gets a shattering shock that they are all alone to face the reality.

My Room No in XLRI is 301, I was wondering the about the connection with the flat 6 of us shared in engineering , it was 301 Vijaya Raghava Resdency , Chandanagar, Hyderabad. We managed to find it for a meagre rent of 1600 per month. What i experienced there would be like a memory that has been bound in book. Its difficult to manage people , not in the managerial sense but on a personal note, everyone gets so connected or obsessed with something or someone and that forms a long chain of bonding that crisscrosses within itself. I managed to write about everyone i met in my college in a very inetersting way (cannot post it here) . But looking back , i would say that meeting everyone of them was a privilage and pleasure. Many people speak about having good friends , friends who are perfect and stuff. But that would be asking for an utopia, the difference is all what contributes to the drama. It has been 2 and half years since all of us walked out of that place called college and even though i still struggle to stay in touch with everyone, the news that someone of us is doing well in life spreads happiness across everyone.

I thought of writing so many things that i forgot most of them. But College is not actually about absolute happy days. Its like coming to know that when you jump high and land on the wrong foot, you will get hurt and you will bleed , and it will pain if you dont have someone with you. Yes, i will have to make it a point here as most of the movies make sure that their story revolves around this topic - girls . I would have rather called it love, but let it be so, i dont mind being MCP sometimes. This is where a lot of equations change , this is where the illusion of adoloscence comes in. I dont want to give any gyaan on it but i have been a biographer of many such stories, i know how people feel in it. They go mad with happiness and then they go mad.

As i lost track , i will end the post with some incidents i can remember that are just some things to cherish in college. I wish i could film these scenes . (Names have been changed )

"Rajesh hands over the letter, and says "Please read it " . (From a long shot) She walks away and kiran calls up sameer who is waiting at the gate and says "she is coming towards the gate, she is openeing the letter, for now the expression is ok, try to have good look". Sameer says " Ya , i got her , she is coming this way, she is almost done with later, just hold on " . Kiran :" Hello , you there? , what is she doing now, is she smiling ? hello , you there" Sameer: "She smiled"

Kondal bowled the last ball. Batsman manged to connect and pushed it down to long on, it was almost done. They hurried the first run , and then quickly to the second , sharath picked up the ball and threw it to the bowlers end. Sunil removed the bails and there were celebrations. Kondal was still confused about who won , it was tie and we won as we had less wickets. It was rematch , the previous match was also tied.

" Fuck you, no one is going to say sorry , go to hell "
Prasad walked on to the raj as he tried to pick up a brick and throw , prasad dodged and gave full thrust blow on his face.

Everyone assembled in the fields near our flat at midnight and he explained all that thought about her.

We turned the volume high and started singing all at a time "Woooooooh Lamheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee "

Everyone got on to the stage and did some insane dance honoring our shankardada. And we were on paper the next day.

X signals to Y , just by moving an eyeball, they both feel thirsty at the sametime and go to have a glass of water. There happens a transaction of atleast 20 marks.

Sunil was totally drunk, i was supposed to take care of him, he is not even peeing in the right direction. I left him in the other to sleep and as we were continuing with the party , he walked in and went straight to rahul and slapped him.

"Leave the seat"--"Why" -- "Idiot , dont you get it, see that she sits here"

"He is not here yet, he should catch the next bus" and then , the bus starts to move , he is seen at the far end of the road holding a bag in one hand and drafter in the other. Turns the bag around and straps it round his back, bus accelarates,and this where you can understand the newtons principles of relative frames. He pushes hard aginst the ground and cuts through the crowd at the bus stop and almost reaches the rear of the bus as the driver changes gear. He throws the drafter to his friend in the bus and reaches out to the railing and gets on to the bus as his friend pulls him up with one hand. He gasps for breath, smiles and asks "did we get the movie tickets".

P.S: Review in next Post.

Beauty

2007-10-19T03:10:00.000+05:30

Ok, this will be a quick one , but can be a long one. The post might turn a bit disturbing as you read through , so take ur call and click on the top right most button on your window if you cant handle reality.I know thats not the right thing to say to a person who had taken the effort to type thekartheek.blogspot.com and come to this window , but that works in Marketing :)

OK, this post is not about Marketing , its not about beauty that you would be thinking about.

I just finished watching American Beauty , Absolutely great film. I was one of those who dissected its poster when it won the Best Film award in 2000, but didnt bother to watch it as it didnt have any relation to gladiator.

The point is why dont we make such movies. Some one would say , "we are perfect , we have a strong tradition and culture that we have been abiding by since ages " . Well if i can borrow some thing from the British to answer that - i would say "Bollocks"

We are a bunch of hypocrites like any one in the world. The fact that we dont accept that, takes us to a different level . My perception of the USA was always through movies, the slightest temptation i had to go to the states, was to cross check my perceptions. To me , America was a Land of opportunities , where people rampantly carried guns (and had a great style in using), its a place where the people below poverty line own a car , a place of different cultures, out of which none can be claimed as thier own, a place where its wierd if you just married once in your life , its so wierd that you will be the most liked character in the movie , unfortunately 90% of the audience have been divorced atlest once.Its a place where all the business is , all the technology is , all the army is . Its where corporates are supposed to ruthlessley loot the third world countries , and they have a great number of ways of doing those , like they are sucking the countries through some pipes laid under the pacific and atlantic, Hollywood is fortunate
enough to have lot of stories to make movies about. And , Its a place where i think , one can find the most number of psycho-killers, drug addicts (this need not be true, this is just my perception based on the movies). And you can find people like Will Hunting too (Hope i find one person like that).

Oh ya, i forgot to mention , its a place where there are fair enough chances for anyone who had landed from even the jungles of africa or some god-forsaken place of the world - to get laid within a week.

Now, that is America . The movie American Beauty started off giving me an impression that it was portraying all the psychological dysfunctionalities that exist in their world. But the best part is , it daringly does all that and surprisingly manages to say "Chill dude ! This is reality".

Ok, now, just click and hold the left button on your mouse on the globe that google earth shows, move sideways from USA to India. When Mohan Bhargav dared to counter the village head's preposterous presumption that India is a great nation that has a tradition since ages, i said to myself "Wow". As i said , the worst thing with us is that we dont accept even the bad thing. Now , i am not suggesting anyone to keep whining about our problems and insecurities everyday, but we thwart anyone who comes out to say " We too do wierd things" . No one dares to mention the penchant that Gandhi had for sex even at the age of 13-14 . For every one person who tries to be a non-conformist , there are atleast ten faceless organisations who are ready to wash them away along with their footprints.Watch Parzania for some daring effort.

We have one of the stupidest notion of society absolutely obsessed with the notion of "relative grading". Its like saying "My individuality is defined on the basis of my neighbours individuality". "Excuse me, did i hear individuality". Parents do everything for their child so that they are better than our neighbhours . Some lakhs of students take competitive exams in india for whom the basic reason is "someone else is taking it" My friend mentioned this to me- Pavan Verma mentions in his book The great Indian middle class that India is the only country where the number of people taking an exam increases with the difficulty in passing that exam.I dont need to answer why. We think that there are no extra-marital affairs in our country , everyone loves everone , no drugs , nothing.

Imagine this , suddenly , you wake up one day and the whole society vanishes , you are all alone by yourself . Then you will feel as good as dead , because you dont have anyone above to whine about and no one below to brag about yourself. We have enough number of insecurities, we hide them within us and go through a torture that we hypocritically call patience. And this patience is irrationally linked to the traditions and so generations are tied together to follow the trend.
We have more number of cultures than America and we claim to be our own and still we end up hating each other. We seek identity by tring to eliminate diversity , but still we hold up the big bill board "Unity in Diversity" .We have the wierdest crimes and factions that are sensationalised in the media.

Well i have lost track of what i wanted to write.I will end it here.Let me bring down the intensity with P.S . These mite be long as well.
P.S 1: The post was not meant to say that we are screwed up, but the point we over dramatise and under-act on any of our troubles is because we refuse to acknowldge them.

P.S 2: When i have read such writings, first things that popped up in my mind were , "Whats this guys problem in life ? " . Well, I just got inspired by the movie, thats all.

P.S 3: Just as a diversion from serious things , Was awake for one whole night and then went to classes next day, God, TAS form took so long. One of my friend answered for the question "What is your short term goal" - "to earn lots of money", thats to prove that there is some honesty left in this place beyond all the gas.

P.S 4: We managed to get away with the least scoldings in MCN class. (Will blog about it later)P.S 5: There were some posts earlier on my blog which i realised later that it was a too daring an act for me to have it on my blog. I deleted one post by myself and my friend convinced me that the other post was worth to be there on the blog. In other words , he said "stop being a hypocrite".

P.S 6:I would like to end it with some quotes from American Beauty - Oh! Before that , Long Live Kevin Spacey.

P.S 7 :Quote1- "Its a great thing when you discover that you have the ability to surprise yourself , makes u wonder what else you could do that you have forgotten about."

P.S 8: This dialogue comes as a voice over after kevin spacey dies , oops! , i spilled out the plot, dont worry , he tells it in the first dialogue that he is going to die. Thats the beauty of screen play. Ok, the dialogue " I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time... For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars... And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined my street... Or my grandmother's hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper... And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird... And Janie... And Janie... And... Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty
in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday."

"P.S9 : Glossary : Janie- his daughter , carolyn - his wife . And if you dont know who Mohan Bhargav is , Go to hell , but watch Swadesh before going.

P.S10 : To those who have taken trouble to read this line - Thank You and thats all folks.

Superheroes, Guilt and Girlfriends

2007-10-13T16:09:00.000+05:30

I just finished watching Batman Begins. That completes the set of Christopher Nolan’s films(I don’t when did he make Insomnia, yet to see that) . First of all, Christopher Nolan is one of those guys who should have gone to science school and I am sure he would have invented Time-machine by now. He just can not make movies without going back and forth in time . If you have to watch his movies , better get some brains along with you.

Now, let me justify the title . Inspite of all the effort that Christopher Nolan had put in to make the movie different from what a conventional superhero story is, he couldn’t change two things – Guilt and Girlfriend.

Every super hero has guilt as his Achilles heel . Why is this so? Well the only reason I can come up with is this – Superhero is supposed to be invincible , he is immune to all the accidents , weapons and everything , in the worst cases he has ultra modern technology to save himself , so the only thing that can kill him or torture him should come from within him . And so , the answer is Guilt . As I generally generalize , “Guilt I believe is the most dangerous feeling that turns even the strongest human being into a very vulnerable one” . Well I am not talking about superheroes in that quote.

Now , what is it with the girl friends ? Yes , of course , Spiderman wouldn’t sell at the box-office without the upside-down kiss , nor would superman without the free ride in the clouds , with a bonus kiss. But its again how weak the super strong superhero’s character turns into as his dearest love leaves him. He always has problems with wooing his girl. He can swing across streets, save her on the verge of slipping down the precipices , take a point-blank shot into the eye , carry a boeing and place it in a baseball field , but if its romance time – they become duds . If I generalize that girlfriends turn people vulnerable , I know that my blog will be pulled down. But other wise , I think superheroes are loners in their disguised identity and so they become more susceptible to things like love and care. And as usual , girls are always the right thing to go for to have a longer script , as their minds are the mothers of pendulums. They come and go and come and go and so on – I mean come on – Its been 3 movies from spiderman, and mary jane had been in out of our hero’s life for more than 6 times. Anyway , I think one more assumption is , girls are much more difficult to woo than bringing down a Supervillian and for that , one’s superpowers also fall short. They just cant stop asking for better .

Ok, before I write anymore and get blacklisted , I will end with the traditional P.S .

P.S1 : More forms are coming in , and I slept for 10 hours today. (If anyone is reading this blog for the first time , I am in a B-School)
P.S2: Groupthink and creativity cannot co-exist, atleast for me.
P.S3: There has been a grade inflation.
P.S4:Question- “ Every leader has a sense of purpose, what is your statement of purpose” – First answer that strikes to mind – “Not Applicable”
P.S5: Its 5:00 am and the only light in my room is from my lappy , so a lot of green bugs are just hovering on the screen and some committed suicide by diving into the chasms of my keyboard before I tried to shoo them away, which means, I should turn it off and go to bed.
P.S6 : I just wrote a 650+ word blog , I would have finished the TAS form – that doesn’t happen because it has a deadline till 16^th.

Oktoberfest, SIP and Goddamn Sleep

2007-10-09T02:32:00.000+05:30

This might be my post after coming back here, and i realised that the holidays had made my life hell as i now cant handle a day with less than 7 hrs sleep. Thats Insane!! . Not for the present class schedule , but for all the events i get involved and the occasional random things i do , like checking videos on Youtube, ads on Adverbox and sometimes reading class books.

The second term actually seems very interesting , it has a lot of time for liesure in a day. The point is , i tend to screw up things when i am given a option to choose from choices , I know thats not what a gonna-be manager shud be saying. But thats how it is. I have started to sleep in class, not actually sleeping but i try my level best to not to fall asleep. But this so called 'try' from the eyes of a 3rd person looks like as if i am fighting between life and death. I wriggle my face every 5 minutes as if to cast away the looming shadow of sleep from my face, and then i rub my eyes for atleast a minute non-stop, until they go red and then the trade mark yawn - the other day , i felt so embarrassed that i was yawning big time infront of a prof who is supposed to be the coolest of the lot. I was sitting right under his nose and executing the afore mentioned gestures. I couldnt stand the self embarrasment and so bunked the next class. I guess that was my first voluntary bunk.

And i was doing almost the same thing, this time though , i was in the last bench, this was what one of my friends asked me " you seemed as if there was something extremely wrong with you, your eyes were red, you face was long and you were absolutely uncomfortable" . I was doing al l this when the marketing prof was shouting at the top of his voice.

Ya, the Oktoberfest, the last minute preparation and execution of the Dracula Event went on well. I somehow feel that there are so many areas of our brain that are asleep for a long time, when they came alive its a rejuvenating experience. I now regret my inability to keep up with quizzing after 10th class. God!! there was loads of knowledge that i went blind to. Anyway, i am enjoying being a learner again by being in the audience in every quiz . I guess , i shud start getting qualified sooner or later.Every other thing that happened in oktoberfest was a proper food for thought. Now , i feel that i shud have been more involved in than what i was. And i realised that there are a lot of good writers on campus. Need to learn from them too and catch up with them.

Now the big thing, The SIP , I think this where the whole batch is tested for everything it claims to be, not on the standards of their intellect , but on their ability to withstand the vicissitudes of fate . My supposedly Mar-Focus has also been diluted for now by the senior's suggestions as they say " When you are being picked arbitly, you can't pick them systematically" . So it seems that i will have to take every chance. I dont know how heavy is my CV . But the talk over a CV had already gone beyond normal or even abnormal.

Above all this, i am writing something which i think might turn out to be a very good original if executed well. But there will be a lot of push and pull in the next one month atleast till the SIP to keep thiongs in order. Whatever may happen, i am still worried about one very precious thing - SLEEP .

Its 3 am and i have a class at 8 30, in case i come back to this blog after a few years - Its Fr.Jesu's class tomorrow.

P.S1: I feel like studying Biomechanics to know whats happening to my teeth.
P.S2: P&G and TAS forms to fill.
P.S3: Prasanna says he sleeps for 2-3 hrs a day. WTF. Is he human.
P.S4:JAM is fun , though i did it only once and got swept out easily. As i said already there are many smart things to do.
P.S5: ID crisis is a clear outcome of one's own perception, but no one can help it.

Absolute Happiness :D

2007-10-04T17:48:00.000+05:30

God!! There are very few times when i blogged when i was absolutely happy. I have a class tomorrow at 8 30 in the morning , where i will break my back sitting straight for 90 mins. Whatever be tomorrow , I will blog today.
Everytime, i saw the phone ring with prasanna's name on it , i just prayed that i would hear "Mama , Job Vachindhi ra" . I dont know, how we live together with people and become a part of each others lives. I have seen good things happening to closest of my friends, and when those things are least expected but most anticipated , those would be the most memorable moments. Prasanna called me at 6 or so when i was going blind over arranging groups of Financial Management. I thought, this time i would definitely hear it , well i had to wait, he had one more interview to attend. But , i got the call that i wanted at 12 o clock and i heard exactly what i wanted to.Like the cliche -'I cant express my happiness in words' , but i somehow had a quick recap of all the 6 years we both spent together, it was like a walk back down the rose garden of memories. I felt for the first time that i was very far away from people , so far away that we couldnt meet each other in the happiest moments . One of the main reasons , i am writing this is to remember the moment. I couldnt document a similar moment when Sandeep's onsite was confirmed. May be, the reason that i was part of their lowest times of life makes me realise how happy they would be feeling about all this.

Well, i wont make the moment any more boring by writing more about it.
Would just say again, I am more than happy today.

P.S : I realise now , how happy people felt when i atlast got into a B-School . And i reacted so dumbly.

Logged in

2007-09-28T02:49:00.000+05:30

My status message on Gtalk was misunderstood by enough number of people to lead to this post. It might be difficult to get into XLRI, but its much more difficult to get to XLRI. Travelling is one thing that i wished to do , but i do not do things unless i am forced to. So i had to come back to XLRI from Hyderabad thats far far away. Well there was one single thing common between both the places , it was raining at the same intensity at both the places. But Calcutta walks with all the top prizes.

We payed 1200 rs from Calcutta airport to Howrah railway station. We were actually supposed to pay 1000 , but after seeing the streets through which we passed through, i felt it was worth paying him an extra 200. I will not write much , but i will leave the post with these pics . The one where one can see my feet is where the water flowed into the taxi.

Change is Good

2007-09-23T01:28:00.000+05:30

Well, this is not that philosophical cliche that i am restating, but its what everyone would be seeing along with the cute dog that was called hutch dog . And O&M is trying its best to rename it as Vodafone dog (that has too many syllables , i guess). Hutch and O&M had provided some of the finest advertisements that has been a treat to watch. Many say that the ads actually didnt translate to sales . I kind of agree with that, i never felt that a network followed me, instead there were many times when i had to follow the network. I guess today, even if vodafone bought Hutch, it still has to stick with the dog(inspite of claiming that Change is Good) , so it seems that the only change that occured is that , the dog sold off Hutch and bought vodafone, in other words, its not Dog's Hutch , its Dog's Vodafone.

Ok, i actually wanted to talk of something else. Infact , i want to see the philosophical side of the phrase 'Change is good' . I referred to this many times even in my previous posts. Vodafone was trying to do a very interesting thing in rebranding hutch , it gave no scope to the speculation on the issue of change. Instead of answering the question 'Is Change Good?' with reason, it came up with a statement 'Change is Good'. (yeah they did give some reasons in the footnote). And so , you wake up one day and see that Hutch Shop is now Vodafone Store , and before you start to worry about whats happening , you see letters in big font reading 'Change is Good'. And you would blindly reason to yourself that everythings OK.

How many times does change occur in our day-to-day life and how many times do we hear this line 'Change is Good'. Excuse me for delving deep into the spirals of flashback . Every thing i guess, which had been remarkable in my life had been an event of change (i know that its a silly statement to make, i mean its the same for everyone) . There are many new things we wake up to everyday, and not every thing is as rosy as the huge hoarding of Hutch with a cute little dog.Any thing more on this would make this piece boring, so rest is left to the imagination of readers.

Other Updates : 1/6th of my MBA is done with and it so seems that i am landing up without fail in B+, i know its too early to make a statement like that. I do not know what people in other B-schools do during exams, but if i can take an actual count, i can prove that i slept for more hours during my MBA term exams than my Engineering exams. But Exams went well, i mean, after a long time i had to keep my brain ticking continuosly for 2 - 3 hours .

And then two weeks at home, i managed to go to a cinema today. T20 world cup couldnt be at a better time, but it seems that i would be missing the final. Its a wierd feeling that i am called a student after two years in IT . My mom is worried about my sleep timings , 2 am to 11 am - the other day she was saying " i thought you would learn some discipline in B-school, but what happened to you". What a misconception!!

But , its actually been a tough task for me to be organised, i am atleast getting used to writing down things that i should be doing (dont ask me, if i am doing them on time) . B-school taught me that . I had to meet my friends only on lunches. Everyone in this world seems to be so busy.And , I still cant figure out what happened to hyderabad within three months, it might be some huge immigration of people and vehicles , traffic here has gone crazy.

So, thats it for now. Yup.. P.S follows

P.S1 : Movies watched - Zodiac , Elephant, greatest game ever played , Fountain and Manorama.
P.S2: I will excuse Darren Aronofsky for Fountain and will continue to be his fan, but any movie like that again, its a requiem for him.
P.S3: If i have a time machine, i would go back in time and congratulate Mr.Parkinson for such a beautiful law, and then i would would just go back a little bit in time and would frame the law by myself. I mean thats so obvious "WORK STRETCHES TO TIME AVAILABLE" atleast for me, there had been no exception.
P.S4:I saw bumper sticker on a car that read www.earnextraincomeindia.com , now just hold there and check how you read it - this is how i read it - ear next rain come india .com , ok , i know thats very dumb , its also called creativity in some places ;) . If you read it the same way i did , click on the link to find the answer.
P.S5: there had been interesting events in last 1 month , which i would like to call short stories, even till the moment before i started this writing. I tried to pen some , but cant post every thing.
P.S6: I should thank srinivasan for showing it to me that you can write more than one P.S for a piece. P.Ss are fun.
P.S7: 2 days from now, i will wake up in XLRI to 2nd term , i hope my roomie holds the hoarding 'Change is Good'. I wonder how i will manage to make it to 8 30 classes in winter. :)
P.S8: Yup, forgot to mention, i have got braces and they are a pain :(

All said and done.. its done..

2007-08-26T05:12:00.000+05:30

I have this habit of worrying too much that things wouldnt be done. But somehow they seem to get done. We are at last done with the talent nite, supposedly conducted by the junior Dracula. I could only put some effort by the end, funny to realise that i have shaked a leg on the stage (cant actually call it dance).

Not much to write while going to sleep at this time of the day. Like the saying goes, every ending gives rise to a beginning, i have 3 submissions to complete tomorrow. So every other thing, hope this also gets done.

Quote : We may not be rational, we may not be collective , but we are collectively rational.

PS1: screwed up QT for the 2nd time. Didnt feel good about it at all.
PS2: For a change BFA went well.
PS3: Just to mention once again, i something thats similar to dance.
PS4: My low profile doesnt seem to help.
PS5: Grades seem to taking over my mind and just then i was bit by dracula.
PS6: Hope i survive the next 2 weeks.If i have to talk business here , next two weeks translate to 50% of the marks.

So much to write...

2007-08-11T21:46:00.000+05:30

Its almost 2 months in XL, and 1 more month to go for the 1st term to end, technically 1/6 th of MBA. I was in a way tongue tied on all the events that happen in this place, and at the same time i indulged in minimum analysis on all the events. However , something that i cant resist is to be amazed by the variety of people here. In a way , even after 2 months, the place still seems new. At the same time it seems to be having a lot in store to offer.

As Organisational behaviour says, "Perception is Reality". Perception drives everything. The way i see things is the way i look at them. Interesting part is how perception had been changing since i came here. Its changing for the better.

And to speak about myself. I am trying new waters, its the last experiment i can do being a student. Some good results i hope out of this experiment are, i make a movie that shall stay for years and i pass out as a good person from this place (need not be the best outgoing student). And of course have some decent grades.

Ok, this seems to be the most boring article i wrote, but thought that i would write something to keep the habit going.
Other updates: Got into Dracula(Dramatics and Cultural activities association),
CR isnt an easy post, but my indifference seems to help me,
I am still in a way doing well with the subject , but not the same with marks,
I discovered that teaching is a very tiring job, but i still love it,
feel like going home.

News as on 28/07/07

2007-07-28T10:46:00.000+05:30

Headlines
-Our class lost 2.5% marks in a subject.
-I got 30/30 in QT test and subsequently , i failed in BFA (supposedly).
-I became a member of the Student Affairs Council.(SAC)
-Old Monks have come down to deliver their Signature.

Details and opinions

-our class lost 2.5 % of the total marks for the term in a subject as we couldn't do a sum given by a prof. This as it seems is a very tragic moment for the whole class, or rather for majority of the class. Looking at the very concept of marks and exams, an individual of 23-24 years would have taken 70-75 tests per year on an average(starting from an age of 12 years). And we havent still grown immune to them. When i say immune , i do not recommend negligence , but i guess we are mature enough to balance our life on various things along with marks. But marks seems to the be all and end all even at an age where people are old enough to reproduce.
(I also belong to the marks fearing club)

-Its all in your mind. I know that i am saying this in hindsight.The first two tests i took on campus had been a learning in a way that you do what you think you can do. Its not as easy to implement as it is said. QT and BFA tests are just a measure of my mindset before the exam rather the content and understanding of the subject.And i see the same trend throughout our class.

-The first time ever in my life that i stood for an election and it showed me all facets of it. The most important facet - Moral flexibility (thanks to 'Thankyou for Smoking' for the word ). Fortunately or Unfortunately, i didnt have it a bit . The best thing to cherish is to come through the elections with clean hands, which i did.And ofcourse, i cant forget the words of Uncle Ben.

-Culture shock is the most talked about thing in a B-School. I had enough shielding to save myself from the shock, but i realised that its inevitable. Its as inevitable as change.So much for i can say now. But just to add to the headline of Old Monks, the dry days will henceforth dry off.

P.S1: Adventure trip was an experience, especially for the way i will hate the words strategy and motivation.
PS2:Quote- "B-schools are nothing but placement agencies" Unquote
PS3:Counterquote "What else are B-schools supposed to be?" (quotes and counterquotes are not my words)
PS4:A bike called Swever runs on urine.
PS5: I attended a Quiz and a Fin event given an exam the next day. I rarely did it in my life.
PS6:from the documentary Drowned Out - Arundhati Roy says in the international conference on water utilistaion "I came here to know what power smells like, i found out that it stinks". I was surprised to see her in tears on the issue of narmada bachao . I thought people like her had iron hearts to take on this world.
PS7: Word of the week :BAKCHODHI

muddy waters

2007-07-28T10:28:00.000+05:30

So much for the rain
that tried another stain
as it came in a deluge,
to the eye it wasnt huge

for it rose from underneath
and traveled to the zenith
the air turned foul and hazy
as the waters that splashed -
were all muddy

P.S: the poem as usual seems very artificial, but i had to write it because of 2 reasons. 1)One of my friend appreciated the usage of the phrase muddy waters in my mail to her. 2)The waters i was talking about turned out be more muddy.

Tower of Babel and other PS..

2007-07-15T14:43:00.000+05:30

I am back from a village trip. We were a group of 7 people who visited around 6 villages around jamshedpur in 2 days. One of the key points of the trip makes me refer to the Tower of Babel. The explanation from wikipedia is as follows..

The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 as follows:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel (confusion); because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Now back to our tour, in our group, we had a bengali, bihari, mumbaikar, two tams and two gults. I need not specify what language each of them spoke . Our guide prefers to communicate in bengali and so does the villagers (in fact, we didnt have a choice with them). So our bengali friend was made the official interviewer, interpreter and spokesperson of our group. If you have assumed that he communicated everything to the group in the great national language, you are mistaken. Not everyone of us could follow hindi.

Some would comment "This is India". I would say "This is the world we live in". Its just not in India that we have such problem. Language is an identity for many people which is being strongly questioned by globalisation. One of the villager on the borders of jharkand and west bengal says "We belong to jharkand but everyone here can speak only bengali, so its difficult to earn livelihood in both the places". On the flip side , communication and understanding had been so chaotic on the first day within our group that we almost had a translation of everything spoken in 2 languages atleast. By second day, everyone started to appreciate the similarities among languages and tried to understand things based on the context. This is what is frequently referred as The Tower of Babel.
------

The Restart
-All systems alert, space shuttle ready for take off, countdown begins 10,9,8,7,6,5-
-Hey, who is this guy counting numbers, we had been launched into the orbit long ago.
-never bother, he would have woke up just now.

-------
PS1:Topic for Group discussion "Iron fillings need a magnet to stay together"
PS2:When you want to do a survey, interacting is way better compared to interviewing or interrogating, because both the parties are mutually new.
PS3:One of the story ends , i should apply for copyrights :p
PS4:Trivia thats not trivial : In one village there is a couple with 19 children.

Probability....

2007-07-12T02:18:00.000+05:30

Probability is one subject that has a very interesting relationship with our day to day activities. The paradox of probability is , it has a validity period. If you say that an event is going to happen at a probability of 'x' , when the time actually comes to the occurence of that event, Probability takes only two values '1' or '0'. In fact , its not probability at that time, its a fact that a certain event has occured or not.

But do we stop calculating probability for a similar event that might occur tomorrow? No, we dont .

Probaility in a way is hope or the degree of hope, in other way its the degree of hopelessness also.We hope something good would happen tomorrow or we fear that something might go wrong day after. I dont want to get into conditional probability and bayes theorom , as i already realise that not many are reading my blog :P.

But , just that i mentioned it. Many events in life take this form, what is the probability that you might reach the college at right time if you take a bus instead of an auto and probability of availability of bus is so and so (this i guess is conditional probability)
Reading it the other way, if you reached the college at right time, what is the probability that you had taken a bus .(this follows bayes theorom). Half the time, people are lost in retrospection of what actually is the cause behind an effect.

Above all, probability is about simplicity and demand for visualisation. I guess many of my batchmates would be having hallucinations of black and white balls revolving around their heads and suddenly disappearing into n urns.

And probability brings down the whole mathematics to just that little distance between 1 and 0. Mind you, there is an abyss between those numbers.

PS1:I have an exam tomorrow, no prizes for guesses - its on probability.
PS2:Had some real good discussions on the value of mathematics.
PS3: I am getting goosebumps seeing some people, they chose to be what they are, beyond what everyone else says.
PS4:Mind you, you have a Political Theatre column in Economic Times.
PS5: Whats the competition for a dishwasher? It could be a TV or your servant maid. First steps in marketing.
PS6:Quote - May the right balls go into right urns and dont forget to count the last ball - Unquote.

This is It...

2007-07-10T16:42:00.000+05:30

Its happening, i am sleeping , i know its contradictory to say that i am sleeping and at the same time writing this piece. But that is the point. I am sleep writing(in a way learning too, i can interpret some part of the lecture). Well in one way, i am better off. Some of my classmates are into deep sleep and some had taken off into their dream world . They have no idea whats going on around them.

There are a lot of ways to sleep. You take positions like wax statues in Madam Tussad's . You look like a shakespeare holding his pen and scripting the sequel of Julius Ceasar. But the truth is , you are sleeping.

Now, i am always midway on anything. My eye lids are in such romantic mood that they just glide down the eyes and kiss there lower counterparts. So you can see me blink every 2 seconds , rubbing my eyes and yawning every 30 seconds.

Now i start to curse the cause. This might be head spinning.
Why am i sleeping-->I am feeling sleepy, why?--> I am feeling weak-->my stomach is absolutely empty -->skipped breakfast(been the case for 2 weeks)-->was in bathroom till 8:27-->woke up at 8:16(minimal time for necessary tasks, class starts at 8:30, I did brush my teeth, though Nupur doesnt believe it)-->Slept at 3:50 or 4:00-->too much of junk talk with roomie-->night canteen at 2:15--> arbit discussion on placements on campus at 1:00-->won online quiz by SPJain (Thanks to krishna and 'the world at our finger tips')-->Gyaan session on QT--> and so on........

I turn back and see the clock on the wall, if my interpretation is right , i am just 15 minutes through the class and that means, 75 more minutes to go..

PS1: there are many posts i am postponing, not that i am busy, but only too lazy.
PS2: only thing i have completed reading is Brand reporter.
PS3: I have QT test on thursday, i dont know where from did i get this gut feeling. I feel i can do well, or atleast i am confident i wont screw it up.(due to this, i am not studying)
PS4:Peer pressure counts, everyone is on their toes for the exam, so i also refer to the book once in a while.
PS5: two back to back contradictory statements- thats what MBA is, atleast for many i know.
PS6: This style of writing PS is inspired from srinivasans blog. You can call it copying his idea as well.
PS7: There is story everywhere, and i see them.(like the boy in sixth sense).
PS8: coming sooner or later 'Subjected to subjectivity'

Chalks and Duster

2007-07-04T14:59:00.000+05:30

It has been more than 2 weeks since I set foot at this place. Yesterday, I was day-dreaming sitting in the first row and the prof asked “Yes , can you tell us how many events are there in this sample space” and I woke up. Its like you see in the movies, the camera shifts from behind your head, 180 degrees and goes behind the prof, and you have a blank face in the frame with a chalk pointed to your face, and then, you stutter.

That’s when I said to myself “ I am back to school”.

I guess if there is anything better than learning. Even if there is , I wouldn’t like to know about it now.Its been two years since I saw something written with a chalk on a board. Add to it , the multilevel class rooms , all the stupid doubts that students ask, the cut throat competition that’s just finding its roots(i am kind of scared/irritated about this), the diverse diversity of all sorts, be it geographical, professional, attitudinal, all these take you to the next level of being a student.

P.S : I wasn't allowed into a class because i was late.I guess this is the first time ever that such a thing happened for me. I feel different.

the delicate dragon

2007-06-25T01:37:00.000+05:30

This post is just a thought that struck me from nowhere. I would have a lot to write about it soon. For now, its just this paradox.

One of the frailest things in this world is the DRAGONfly's wing.

Will try to elaborate on it sooner or later.

The Depth of Dreams

2007-06-25T01:23:00.001+05:30

Darkness was chasing light
and then lightning struck
a pool of clouds twirled
and opened up a shower

The sun shrunk in the chaos
when he tried to peep
the earth spit the rainbow
I asked myself 'Is this a Nightmare'

There were mirrors with ripples
and fragrance was all over
rain soaked everyone in life
and then,there she was

Beyond the beauty of blossoms
Beyond the rain dripping from boughs
Beyond the silly and shy sun
She was there

Everything dissolved into a moment of eternity
slowly, like sugar in water
to make her sweet enough
I asked 'Is this paradise'

'yes' I heard,
I wish , she said that
this is where, you dont touch ground
and sky doesnt seal you

I felt like a feather
curling round the air
flying, diving , fluttering
and feeling her all over me

And suddenly darkness chased light
It rose and engulfed her
I shivered with fear
as i turned blind

I screamed " What are these"
"they are dreams" I heard
"they are just eye deep,
leave them in sleep"

P.S: I guess , the poem didnt turn out to be a poem. But the last lines tempted to me to fill something over them. It is majorly arbit.

Distances Dissolving Distances

2007-06-20T01:54:00.000+05:30

The winds had their way
As I stood looking down
the rails crawled underneath
as they led the train ahead
and misled me into the past

At the turn of every wheel,
i realised the change
the blows that deformed me
the people that reformed me
all those that took me ahead

In the middle of this journey
i was dragged into dilemma
that, will I lose the past
while making a future,
as i see underneath
distances dissolving distances

the un-updated part

2007-06-14T22:34:00.000+05:30

I guess, i would be writing for myself now. I have driven off or rather shooed off all those lazy internet addicts who check one blog after the other, (i am the topper in this category, as i do the same, but never update my own).

I think, i might have a lot of work in the coming days, which might actually drag me out of the schedule to write something(i found that people blog only when they have no time to do)So i thought i will just fill the un-updated part (i know , that word doesnt exist).

After the frustrated post of "me vs myself", i got through CAT, and XAT too. Atlast i had the returns on my spending on applications, i got calls from around 8 colleges. Unfortunately, i went bankrupt as i took 12 flights in 45 days (no, you cant call me high flier)

I also found out why Brad Pitt blows up all the credit card buildings in Fight Club.They are mankinds greatest enemy.I have 25k debt to clear and i am not earning anymore.

Ok, the turn of tables after cat results had good consequences. Irrespective of the coaching centres key granting me 2/100 in english, i got through, i got 23/100. Calls :I,K,XL,MDI(PGPM and HR),MICA,NITIE,NMIMS,SPJAIN.
Converts : I,XL,MDI(PGPM and HR),NITIE.
Between these two lines, i had some real tough time. Other than 3 flights i took in 24 hours, i would remember the horrifying interview experiences. It was like a boxing match with 10 different opponents. You dont know where they are going to hit you. Some were kind enough to give me the trophy.

Parellel to this were some pleasant things that came my way in the most unexpected way.It took sometime to realise that too many good things were happening around me. Unfortunately or fortunately, i slowly grew indifferent to it, thats how I enjoyed it. I will stop all this gyan.

And then there was this real lazy peiod for 2 months, i can say, i graduated from the devils workshop, especially with that poem. All i used to do is stare at gtalk, check for updates on blogs, sleep, eat, treat someone or the other, meet friends, obvious consequence : wieght gain.

The final part : this was fun, it was back to basics, atlast i sat down to write a script and finished it. I seriously need someone chasing me with a stick. I only regret that i should have been a better director. Best experience however was the casting, i wonder how would it be if i have a larger cast, reading the script to girls will definitely help me for something or the other.

Shooting for the movie was more hectic than the earlier.Especially the over night shoots in the college.And ofcourse there are a lot of people i should thank for all their help. Me and jugash are figuring out some better way to thank everyone.

PS: I guess the PS actually is a PS to all that happened in the un-updated part, I lived the last day of my life as if it was the last day of my life. However i still missed some people i guess. Its a wierd feeling that you have a feeling that you are missing something, but never know what that is.Like i always miss my cell charger while packing. Before signing off, i should say thank you to hyderabad, and when i say hyderabad, its not abt the place, its about the people.

Prologue : By the way,(though it didnt happen by the way), i am at XLRI, i had a head ache for 5 days convincing my parents abt leaving IIM Indore(I should increase the font of IIM).So,its a new life.

They..

2007-05-24T01:32:00.000+05:30

Taking the wings of fire did I fly
And looked down upon the sky
They saw my fame
But I was the same

Woozing blood from every wound
Did I hit the ground
They saw my shame
But I was the same

P.S : This is my first translation ever, i wonder how i dared to do it on a writing from sri sri. I know its softer than what sri sri meant. i hope i come out with better things soon

The Devil's Workshop

2007-05-07T20:28:00.000+05:30

I passed a ticket through the hole
and saw the lips of a dark soul
that said " welcome to devil's workshop
idle brain's last stop"

my heart pushed my legs back
my head felt as if it hit a sack
"Welcome" the voice held me still
i turned around and saw the devil

"For the next hour, i would be your guide
dont let any of your questions hide
for we know what they are
and we believe here , everybody is at par"

it was the devil himself
with horns of ram and ears of elf
he had a long red tail
so strong, that it could be a flail

he led me into a long hall
where every devil had a crystal ball
they leaned over them and chanted spells
i could see humans trapped in those shells

"before you could ask" said the devil
"I shall answer that those are people idle
those who rest their brain
and let time fly in vain"

"we work on them and make them work
and turn them as clumsy as an orc
and lead them into more sin
then the master from hell says 'you are in'"

into some of the balls did i peep
some i saw were in love deep
some i heard, talked no sense
and some had thier own ways of indulgence

then i wondered , before the devil could know
i asked, is there a ball for me, that you could show
the devil smirked and said "you are all at your will
in your ball, talking to the devil"

To know the Secret or to be Fooled .

2007-03-25T04:22:00.000+05:30

Are you watching closely?

Every magic trick consists of three parts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’ , the magician shows his audience something ordinary , a deck of cards, a bird or a man.

The second part is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes his ordinary something and turns it into something extraordinary.

Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it because you're not really looking. You don't really want to know the secret... You want to be fooled.

But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough, you have to bring it back.

That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the most difficult part , the part we call ‘The Prestige’.

The above lines are from the movie “The prestige”. Watch it to test if your brain cells are still working and good enough to work non-stop for 2 hours.
I am getting back to my habit of finding analogy for everything , universal language as Paul Coelho calls it. This might get a bit complicated from here.

The pledge: You meet a person or go to a new place. Only knowledge you have about it is what others say about it or what you assume about it . Its just in the first blink of your eye. It’s the first snapshot of your brain.

The Turn : Your idea shatters , you see white instead of black , you don’t see what you saw earlier. Every thing you assumed or expected goes wrong. You would be too surprised and shocked to react. You will be struck by either awe or grief.

The Prestige: Everything comes back, like a full circle. Like they say, history repeats itself. But how do you see it, do u see it the same way as you saw it during the pledge or do you learn the trick behind the turn.

The point is , are you looking for the secret or do you just want to be fooled?

What is the magic here? It’s the change in life.

Are you watching closely?

From The Devil's Workshop- "Practicing Practicality"

2007-03-22T19:26:00.000+05:30

One phrase that had been coming to my mind very frequently. I wonder if that’s grammatically correct or not, but it’s practically true.

Imagine this. You wake up on a Sunday and you feel like sleeping again. Reason: you know that it’s Sunday. You might feel the same on Monday, but you actually wake up and go to work. This is where you practice practicality. Every Monday you wake up, you try to tell yourself that you have to go and work and it will soon be a habit. But this is not as easy as it is said.

I somehow discovered that it takes a lot of strength. Every part of us has a tendency to challenge a direct truth; we try to make our own rules. It’s an innate art that everyone is born with. Everyone is an iconoclast at birth. We state it loud with a cry. A cry so loud and shriek that rings a bell to everyone that you have arrived and that’s the first change. But then, you start to practice practicality. You walk into a crowd which offers you varied opinions and at the end of it asks you to choose and adopt an opinion. But you don’t have an option to make your own opinion.

This I believe is a very subtle process that you will not even be conscious of. This process has very interesting consequences, at one or the other point of your life, by extrapolating your past into future you figure out that some things are going to occur in a specific way or pattern. This is where you practice practicality again. You design your present based on facts from past and assumptions of future. There is something very logically funny about this, just check it out again, you have a concrete past and you try to build a present to make an assumed future, so what you would obviously end up with is the realization of the assumed future and thus you continue Practicing Practicality.

IPod Vs Radio (the softer side of Me vs Myself)

2006-12-25T16:04:00.000+05:30

My previous post 'Me vs Myself' , seems to have scared many of the few people who read it. Some felt it was gruesome, too gory, some felt that the idea was excellent and some said its nonsense. This post is like the "behind the post" part.

I believe , one of the easiest way of classifying our school of thought or i should say our orientation towards life is by dividing it into two ways, by choice and by chance.This thought took form while i was travelling from hyderabad to guntur and was listening to songs in my Ipod. I have two or three favourite playlists which i listen to, for most of the time.I somehow felt bored of hearing the same thing, so i thought to put a shuffle on all the songs on Ipod(that was about 1500+) and listen to any song in random. I was already feeling asleep, so i thought i would as well fall asleep in half an hour or so. I was expecting a very bad string of songs. To my own surprise, i kept listening to those songs for almost 2 hrs. Whats the point?

IPod here stands for choice, we choose what we want to hear, though i left it to choice by putting it on shuffle. This is what typically happens on a radio, you do not have a choice, you listen to what ever the radio station plays. Using these two and my little experience, i would like to go forward on the topic.

what happened to me that night...

I was bored with my choices--Many times in life, we are so excited with new things, first day in college, seeing a movie on the first day etc. But slowly we get bored of them. And sometimes it so happens that , our choices lead to failures leaving uf feeling that we are ineligible to make a choice. So we give way for chance.

I came across new things-- While listening to songs in random, i came across a lot of new songs which also seemed very good. These are like opportunities that we rule out without any information about them. We typecast ourselves to a certain category and we go blind to anything other than those. Chance gives us a chance to explore such new avenues.

I was compromising-- While listening, there were bad songs too, i mean songs which you would hear for the first 10 secs and say "forward". But sometimes, you comnpromise with that, you look at the good part of it (when you dont want to go back to Choice mode). You will try to listen to one instrument in the song that is being played well etc.

A more clear analogy to this is the funda of marriage : You meet a person , get to know each other for a few days under the condition that you are going to get married(you dont have much choice). So we obviously tend to like the other person. We get married and now its like a one way, so we compromise and fall in love again. So we would be happy for life. There is a funny question here (from a movie Missamma), the whole process that happens here is not dependent on either of the persons involved, i mean it is like X1 marries Y1, the process works fine even if its X1 marries Y2 or X2 marries Y1.There is nothing like the "Someone somewhere is made for you" or " Neo is the one" type funda.

This shows that everything in life runs on a track with two rails, one is choice , one is chance and may be, what connects these two is compromise.

PS: I would like to be clear that , i am not for or against any of the schools of thought or the marraige system.I only wanted to tell that these schools of thought are embedded in our lifes right from our birth and they keep fighting and compromising through out the life.

Running for...

2006-12-02T12:36:00.000+05:30

I dreamt that I would only be running in dreams at this time of the night. To shatter my dreams, I am running in reality. There was darkness all around me. There were only two or three souls on the road that managed to open their eyes and notice me. However they didn’t find me worth caring for. In fact I didn’t care for their care. Any person on the verge of losing everything he has, or had, would feel the same way. Oh! God What if-.

I didn’t dare to think. But I couldn’t help. My destination seemed miles ahead, it was something that I would never like to reach. But tonight , I have no option. Even if I scream and shout at my legs or even tie them up, they wouldn’t stop. They were running as fast as my heart was pumping blood into them. Heart, bloody thing, one thing that could never mind its own business. I could never even figure out what its business was. It hadn’t been a week , since I was supposed to forget everything. I know , I am not making sense, how could I , I almost drowned myself in alcohol, the other day.

I was seeing, what ‘night is young’ meant. I hoped for the night to die young and bring light. Bloody Hell, how could it happen now, is it to prove something? I mean, something like , I can never forget her, whatever happens. I mean, I know, I didn’t dream of her when I was in mother’s womb. Then why the hell am I running like this. I didn’t know that someone like her existed when I started to exist. It’s just been 2 years since I met her, I mean two years in the whole 25 years of my life. And now-

I never ran like this in the darkest of the darkest nights for anyone in my life. Now, I cannot even dare to confess to myself that I am bloody crying. Why am I doing this? What does she mean to me? She’s almost a part of me. Not a single vehicle could be found on the road. My shorts just don’t seem to stick to my waist. How far is it? God- I don’t want to go there. I just couldn’t stop.

I spent 6000 bucks yesterday to forget her. That seems enough to forget her for just yesterday. She used to say “You forget everything so easily, you don’t remember my birthday, you don’t remember what I like, and you don’t remember when we first met”. Bloody, I remember, we met 2 years ago on this day. And now, I would never ever forget it.

I wonder who is to blame for all this. May be its just fate. But how do I deal with it. The perpetual presence of her absence would just kill me. We were so together, I remember the last time I kissed her, before things just started tumble. Things change, and they change so drastically that you could do nothing but stare at them as helpless chap. Or at the best , you can run, but you cannot change them to normal. I wiped off sweat and tears from my face.

I was there. Bloody, I don’t like this place; this makes you hear the inevitable. It doesn’t give you a choice to do something, even if it gives you, its like choosing between bad, worse, worst. I hoped that I would drop dead right at its steps. Last time we saw each other , She said “ this is reality, we need to get used to it”. I didn’t accept it, I argued “Reality is not what happens, reality is what we do”. “ I am sorry, I love you”. She kissed me on my eyes, the way she used to do it always and left. That’s how I saw her last time, that’s how, I see her every time.

My legs ran to the reception and then climbed up. I don’t like long corridors. They are like obvious destinations. You see everything, yet you won’t stop. You almost become a masochist in that little walk, enjoy every painful moment as you get used it. But you cant turn back. You see people looking into your eyes, eyes so blank that you cannot find your own images in that. God , I wanted to scream “ Someday Talk”. I know they couldn’t, they are as dead as I am. I dragged my legs to the obvious end of the corridor.

--
At two o clock in the night, my cell had 99 missed calls and a message “You Drunk Bastard, wake up, she met with an accident”.

PS: I don’t know why I wrote this, just because I got an idea or had a clear vision of it. I empathize with my characters more than the people around me. So its been really difficult to write this. Just trying to be Shakespeare with Tragic stories.

Me vs Myself.

2006-11-23T20:46:00.000+05:30

'Me' spit blood and laughed at 'Myself' showing all his teeth but one. He just spit the 'but one' tooth along with theblood. "Ha, Ha" Me laughed loudly and brought his fist back into position, right in front of his face. They started again. Myself threw his arm at Me's face. Me ducked and dug his punch into Myself's abdomen.The punch pushed him back by a few steps. He got up straight and came back at Me with a fierce hard blow on the right cheek bone. 'click' came a sound from within. There is no more a full right cheek bone for Me, there will be two half bones. Blood woozed out of the cut as water leaked out of a pored hose. Myself watered himself in the fountain.

Me didnt stop laughing , the 'but one' tooth's place was compensated by enough blood in his mouth. Infact one couldnt differentiate his jaws from his teeth.Everything was bloody red.This time he didnt miss his shot, he moved backwards as if in retreat and went forward with one wide arm swing and all his power packed in one blow took Myself on his nose.Me crashed his hand fully into the area between Myself's eyes and lips.Myself's nose was no longer nose. It was almost almost falling apart, he was sneezing blood through his cut. Me stood there in the ring, while Myself was struggling to keep his feet straight.Me's face started to swell on the right side, blood was sliding down on his face as sauce slides down through gaps in a burger.

"Come on, its you or me today" said Me " only one thing should exist after this, my way of living by choice or your way of living by chance". Me ran into Myself and gave a hard blow from under his chin. Blood spilled like milk from a dropped glass, two of his teeth accounted for glass pieces.

Myself was still trying to find his ground, he leaned on to the railing and took some support and finally stood up.
"I am not going to fall today" said Myself clearing his mouth with his tongue "You cannot fight against what you cannot control". Myself stepped forward, throwing the whole weight of his body on each feet for every step.Me moved forward for the final knock out, Myself stepped aside and put his across Me's path. Me tumbled and fell with his face to the floor.

"I told you, it takes just one mistake to fuck you up for life" said myself and banged Me's head to the floor. Me had one last vision of the white floor while his head was dragged away from the floor and before it came fiercely down back on to it, after that he only saw the floor red.

They didn't stop after that,infact they wouldnt.They werent fighting their strenths , they were fighting their weaknesses.Their power did not come from courage but from fear, not from strenth from weakness, not from joy but from despair, not from satisfaction but from frustration.They never stopped, Myself was looking through one eye and Me was breathing through cuts and they never stopped.

Its another day

2006-11-20T16:12:00.000+05:30

the rain bowed to the sun
the sun rose to the rain
they just said, "its another day
to be happy and gay"

Touch

2006-07-02T15:30:00.000+05:30

I thought I will be open to a movie like Brokeback Mountain. I was already bowled over by the simplicity and the undeniable truth in tag line “Love is a Force of Nature”. Though I did not see the whole movie due to some reasons, but there are some things from the movie that touched me.

The setting in which the movie starts with green meadows of the Brokeback Mountain leaving the two lead actors all alone with a large flock of sheep. And the move just stays there with this background for a while and lets nature show its force. That very slow pace at which the movie was set in the early part was just to make the audience feel the inevitability.

The rapport the lead actors share was a beautiful presentation of the vacillating but sensible and sensitive side of human emotions. As the movie moves ahead and the actors get separated and start to lead their own lives, it left me waiting for the moment at which both of them would get back together. In fact I was waiting for the eruption of long suppressed emotions within their own waiting to tapped open by each other and how all this would be presented.

At last , the characters meet , as one of them runs down the steps and embraces the other with in his arms. They hold each other tightly for a few seconds and I don’t know why for those few seconds, I felt the emotions were not communicated in detail. Just then, one of them drags the other aside catching him by his collar and they both start to kiss each other as is they wanted to gulp all the love emanating from them. I felt satisfied.

On one hand my satisfaction could be attributed to my own standards of filmmaking and raw presentation of human emotion. And on the other hand , I loved the way the director could actually dare to deny the so called taboos of the society and put things as honest as they were. In this process, I could not help acknowledging the fact that Touch is a very important and integral part of human life and it is The most significant thing while expressing emotions.

But at the same time, I believe it is the least used form of expression in countries like India. I don’t think conventions in a society would ever help in creating an environment where ones mind could follow his heart. By setting some rules, the conventions rule out half of human’s honest instincts as taboos.

There a lot of instances when a boy feels like touching a girl to show his concern for her or vice versa, but it might just be curbed for the sake of virtual society. The fact many of us prefer to Touch each other only when we are private proves that our instincts are succumbing to an external force. It seems we are programmed to emote in such a way. But in such a way we seem to be bypassing paradise.

From the Devil's Workshop-II "A&P"

2006-06-22T16:00:00.000+05:30

Sometimes, there seems to be some words in English which seem to be used very rarely and doesn’t seem to be very important to have a place in our vocabulary. There are two such simple words that i discovered recently.
1)Priority.
For the sin I have made that I fell in love in with a subject called Operational research in my engineering, though I could only remember the greek letter ‘mew’ of the long formula from queuing theory, whenever I used to stand in a queue in a railway station , I used to think of the service rates and the demand rates and the 'n' number of queues and how each queue is getting serviced and which queue is the best to stand in.

Now the last idea “which queue to stand in” would have been easily solved if it carried 16 marks in my final exam and I had all the data to solve it. But it’s a totally different thing here. Any way I feel taking a decision about which queue to stand in is a lot easier than to choosing among people.

This is where the word Priority comes in. And before I go further into Priority, there is a very good logic in set theory about how many subsets are there for a set, it says we should count the null set also. Now there is something, which one forgets a lot of times while Prioritizing is the person himself. I feel that’s the unseen null set.

Now I can't even imagine the number of factors that influence a persons Priority. But I wonder at the frequency of the rate of change of Priorities. Let us assume two sets , where both the sets contain all the people in the world. Now if we are mapping both the sets and for each mapping we give a number based on his or her priority (I mean explicit priority). There is a minimum probability that a person is mapped to his own self in the other set.(This is my belief, however there is another side to it.)

To be clear on the word Priority in terms of people, I would like to refer to 7 habits of highly effective people where it is said every thing is created twice, once in mind and the other in material or physical. So if you are deciding between two persons, the degree of thinking about them in mind is what I would call Implicit Priority and the conversion of thought into practice by doing something or spending sometime is what I would call Explicit Priority. Its not for sure that both the lists would match.

Now to move ahead, I would like to bring in the next word,

2)Acknowledge

I some times feel Acknowledge is a very young brother to the word empathize. Its very funny that we don’t acknowledge the word Acknowledge itself until we receive an acknowledgement card.

So moving ahead Acknowledge is what acts as a bridge between Implicit Priority and Explicit Priority .There are many things we feel in ourselves but never acknowledge the very feeling that exists in ourselves. For instance , selfishness exists everywhere , infact in every person. The fact that we feel happy after doing a so-called selfless act is a proof of our selfishness. One would not have done a selfless act if he or she doesn’t feel happy. There is this wonderful line (or a rather cynical line as some would call it) “Buddha wanted all his followers to be devoid of desires, which in itself is a desire”. May be He just didn’t acknowledge it.

There is an interesting Phenomena of Acknowledgement while prioritizing. At every step of explicit prioritizing , we put ourselves on the top of list of Implicit Priority. That is, if we are spending time with some person, it is only the happiness that we gain through that meeting that makes us to put that person on the top.

In that case there might be a statement or rather an argument that a person himself will always be at the top of the Implicit Priority list. There are a lot of things which we do even if we are not interested in it , but we do it for someone’s sake and which is absolutely by force. We will not be on the top of Implicit Priority list as long as we are thinking of someone else’s happiness and not even acknowledging our happiness and how many other people we are ruling out and whether we are ruling them out with or without a reason.

There is one more interesting proposition where the person himself is on top of the priority list. This would happen when we are in control of every decision we take and every priority. In fact I skipped a significant case where your priority number towards a person is not matching with the other persons priority number towards you. To analyse that case, I think one can refer to the Law of Demand and Supply. I don’t think there is a better way than that law to explain it.

One last case-When there is no one to prioritize, even in this there are two cases, that the person may still be not on top of the priority list as he is still thinking of someone else whose priority relation is not at all mapped to him. They can be called fools.(and people like them write articles like these).Only way out of this case can be derived from age old process of formatting our computers. We use a reboot floppy which supports to install a new operating system. The only reboot floppy we have is we ourselves. All we can do is put ourselves on top of the list and reboot.

P.S : It seems the devil had gone more devilish. I could not cover the word Acknowledge as much as I wanted to. I have strayed from my usual style of writing where I do not make statements regarding personal issues. And I think , the usage of the pronoun of the word “we” would have change the essence of what I wanted to say. It could be replaced by “one”.But as usual , it seems I have been successful in negating myself a number of times.

To the youth

2006-05-18T22:00:00.000+05:30

How great we are at spirit,
that rocks would break to bear it
Neither do we care for the logistics
nor for the power it takes

But how tender we are at heart
that we ourselves melt
not to the heat of the moment
but to the emotions we underwent

My Friend's friend is not my friend-I

2006-04-18T17:17:00.000+05:30

"Can you represent the statement My Friend's friend is not my friend in Functions" he asked. I took the pen out of my pocket and just when i started to put my mind to work on the socio-mathematical puzzle, my mind started to get into a bipolar disorder or to speak in english -a split personality.

Somehow i was still in control, i could do it , i wrote down the answer FoFoF is not equal to FoF where FoF stood for relation or function "friend" and so the whole thing stood for My friend's friend is not my friend.

"Oh! Good!" he said and asked "how would you represent the same in Set Theory?" I was going numb already, "Hah Pardon" I said and he repeated the question. It was the last thought that my intelligent mind could generate before it succumbed to the outburst of the past memories.I drew a figure with three circle.

And i explained that one circle represented me, the next one to me is my friend and -i stopped for a second and recollected the energy to say that the third which is not interesecting with me is my friends friend and is not my friend.

"Good, can you represnt the same in Matrices" he asked.

I dont know if i heard that or not , i only shook my head sideways and luckily that was the last question of the interview which was supposed to get me into a reputed business school, but more than any thing else ,it brought me back to the harsh reality of life that i have been trying to evade.

"Ok.. Thats fine , thank you Mr.Vinod" he said.

I stood up and walked out of the room. The sun was signing off for the day. I still felt lost; I walked to the nearby railway station to catch the local train. I took a ticket to the terminal, though that was not where I wanted to reach, I just wanted to sit and think for myself. Sometimes memory is such a good thing that it has the power to bring past to present, but when you get to know that the present is totally disconnected with the past, the memories start to haunt.

** Three months ago**

.....To Be Continued

From The Devil's Workshop-1 THE "1" - THE "0"

2006-03-24T16:20:00.000+05:30

Two things that rule our life. They are the root of every software program that runs in this world and every semiconductor that is moving the world and simultaneously making its way to the much debated (especially in the movies) artificial intelligence.
Other than that i strongly believe that every new technology is only a new version of our real life in a technical world. It is like the Nueral Networks and genetic algorithms which are extensively used for Optimisation are a product of study of human evolution and the interaction of nuerons in our brain.
Now coming to the inter-relationships between real life systems and the technologies, 1s and 0s also have their origins in the human mind and many of our activities which take only two answers yes or no.When i say "many" , these are the "many" which we acknowledge as affirmations where only yes or no are used.But actually, every activity of ours is a result of yes or no or rather 1 or 0.

Now what is special about this 1 and 0, these are objectivity personified, i will not try to define objectivity as I might end up manipulating Ayn Rands definition. When we say 1- it does only one thing, when u say 0 it will do nothing at all. Whatever happens with these two, they have a reason which is Absolute and thus they work by it. To be simple it is like the Dialog popping up with the message that says "Do You Want To Save -Yes or No".Where "Yes" means yes and "No" means no. I know there will be people who will be saying what does the cancel button in Microsoft Word or Excel.That is where i will be getting to.

Every thing we do actually starts from 1 and 0 , which in turn generates a lot of binary operations which also works by the 1s and 0s and the end result is what we call a thought sometimes and sometimes feeling and sometimes emotion.The first one i.e thought is the one that we acknowledge is a product of the 1s and 0s, while the other two are apparently a product of the same 1s and 0s, but the difference is we do not acknowledge it and thus drive away the reason behind it and thus give birth to subjectivity.

This can be demonstrated from many examples that are related to science, we will start with the assumption anything that can be reasoned by science is a product of 1s and os.If a boy sees a good looking girl, the end result (depending upon the boy ) will be a nice feeling, what is behind this feeling is a million binary operations , of which some are, see the girl -yes or no, image loaded yes or no, image processed-yes or no, is she good -yes or no, if yes-( is she very good-yes or no(if yes generate adrenalin-yes or no)if yes(generate the thought to move towards her-yes or no)if yes (move towards her yes or no))else (is she very bad yes or no)... so on

i have used some terms like good and bad which are supposed to be subjective, but at the lowest level they are driven by a reason, they only move across levels like good, very good, excellent etc.There is a better example which i picked up from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy- Place one hand in hot water and place other hand in cold water. After sometime place both the hands in normal water, now what we experience is what we term as a confused feeling, but which is actually a result of the previous experience of hot and cold water. It is like the result of one process is 10 and the other is 01. Any decision or emotion we face is only a result of a prior experience , so as the experiences are different for different people, we tend to call many opinions subjective but it is not so, it is an outcome of the undesignated objectivity.

And the Cancel button also means just Cancel, it has an objective,a purpose as Agent smith says in "Matrix Reloaded". We just need to recognise that purpose and reason behind whatever we do rather than disregarding it.

P.S: I have just written the most confusing and futile article, but thats what i do in the devils workshop, when i am absolutely idle. It is actually open to one's own interpretation. So nothing much to say about that.

Coming soon in Devils Workshop-Heart and the Hypocrite .

The Butterfly and the Big Bang .

My First Story

2006-03-13T20:58:00.000+05:30

He was restless, he brushed his hand through his hair for 99th time and made sure that he was looking good. He pulled out a small paper from his pocket and read something that was written, he closed his eyes and recited it. He was sure this time. He can tell that even in the middle of night. He looked at the black board in front of him, he was sitting in the bench in which he sat four years, four years ago.

He felt as if he was taking his final exam, but he had a lot of training for this, his friends worked hard on it. Everything was planned, the venue, the dressed, the phone calls, the date and the dialogues too. He is here to deliver it. He looked at his watch it was five to five. She would come in five minutes.

She was his friend, something more than that, they were in the same class for four long and memorable years. They knew each other well, their relationship was not remarkable in the early years, until he started to take lenience and tease her now and then. Together, they shared their feelings and emotions, they had some unending conversations, but he feels now that some thing was missing in those conversations, he wants to fill it up now. He was waiting. He had a medley of dreams last night, a hug, a slap, a ridicule, a rejection, and a kiss.

Only one would come out to be true this time. He had experienced many of those from her. The one he cherishes most is that one tight slap. Once in his college days, he told her that he would accompany here to a book exhibition, but he went to a movie with his friends, the next day she was furious and she was like a beautiful beast with that frowning face and semi closed eyes. At that moment he tried to explain her, he managed to smile, she could not manage, and she just slapped him. As he was thinking the sound of slap still rings loud in his ears. She was still furious, she couldn’t tolerate that, suddenly tears flowed down her cheeks like waterfall, and she hugged him tightly and cried. It was hard for him to adjust to the high paced transition of emotion. But he cherishes it to this moment. That is why he is here, he cannot forget her.

He had his chances after discovering that he admired her, but he just missed them. Once after a lot of training and rehearsals, she couldn’t come. They left their college and the farewell day was planned as the final chance, but he couldn’t attend as he had his visa interview. After that he flew off to the US for his masters, but he believed that he would comeback and someone would be waiting for him. His belief was proved true, she was not married. He called her this morning and told her to come to the place where they came to know each other. He was waiting in the classroom. It was 4:59, as the seconds were ticking, he brushed his hair for the 122nd time and for the last moment, he closed his eyes and thought of her.

The smile, that made her look like divine goddess. Those eyes that always used to say something enigmatic. The cheeks were hard to find grip and had the real thing of beauty in them, those dimples, he used to tease her saying that he could cook food in those dimples. She was fair enough to show him way in the darkest nights. But more than anything, he loved one thing he could not see, he could only feel, he loved her conscience, her heart, her mind, her soul-- He loved her.
He heard something. He heard the ring of the anklets slowly approaching him. He looked at the door. She was there, he had not expected her to be the way she was, she was – he had no words, she was wearing a saree, red colored, a crape, it was dazzling, more than anything she was beautiful. She wore a necklace, the bangles, they were also red, the glittering silver watch, that was his gift. She knew, he loved that colour. He didn’t get a chance to observe all this, the cherubic smile and those cute, cute dimples arrested him. She was smiling at him. He was gaping at her.

“Hai, There you are!, you have changed a lot” said she.
“Ah!” he fumbled, he came back to his senses and said, “that’s nothing when compared to you”

She came nearer and took her seat in her bench, the bench next to him. He still couldn’t believe the way she looked. He was mesmerized.

“What is this you have changed the whole outfit” he said.

“Why!? Don’t I look good?”

‘Great!! This would be the dress for their marriage’, he thought and said “not bad, I think you overshadowed the beauty of the dress.”

“I know, you wouldn’t change, the same teasing, Come on, this is specially for you, you like red sarees, Don’t you?”

He was afraid that he would die out of happiness, he still couldn’t believe, this is not a dream.

He said “Thank you, Madam, Now tell me, How are you? How did you spend these four years, how many bakras did you make out of people like me, How many people went head over heals for you?”

“Will you stop” she put a break closing her ears “that should be my question, I know, you would have roamed about all the beaches in US, running after those bikinis that you dreamt of, all through our college”

“Hey, you are insulting me”

“Sorry, you have nothing special to be insulted”

“Ok, now! We are not here to fight OK”

“Aha! Then what are we here for” she asked nodding head to all sides like a cute girl.

The question was there, he had the answer, but he is to wait for at least 15 minutes after the start of discussion.
“We are here to talk all that we missed to talk for these four years. Lets keep walking around the college. I think we should leave before 6:30, they will shut the gates by then, lets move.”

“OK” she said, as she stood “as you said there were many guys after me, but I was not interested, you know that guy in our class, smart, tall and handsome, who used to come first all the time.”

His heart skipped a beat, ‘nothing like that’, he thought ‘for god’s sake!! Not before me’.

He managed to say ‘ya’.

“He proposed to me, it was really great, in a posh restaurant. He was good, in fact-- Hey! Are you listening?” she shouted, as his face was almost ashen pale.

“Ya, Ya, I am, so you did it ha! Congrats”

“What!?, what for congrats, I rejected ra , I was not interested”

“I know, I know” he smiled, blood returned to his face “ I know you love adding names to your bakra list, thank god I am not there “, he didn’t want to say that. But he did.

She gave a queer look and a sarcastic smile.

“I know you are really out of discipline these days, that’s why you are speaking like this, you are missing something.”

“Is it? What do I miss madam?, would you please give me that?” he asked, unaware of what was going to come.

“With pleasure sir” she said and she gave one tight slap. “ Ha, ha, you got it, you asked for it “, she was laughing in his face.

He was having some big surprises, his hand to his cheek with his mouth open “You!!” he shouted, she started to run, and he was after her.

She was still laughing and running, it was difficult for her to run with that saree, she turns back at every few steps and laughs at him, the sun was setting, he couldn’t run, the beauty hypnotized him, it overtook him, the smiles struck him like cupids arrows. He stood there watching his all-time sweet girl smiling at him, she too stopped. She came back and held his shoulders and shook him and asked, “ what happened, you don’t need so much of discipline, OK!”

He smiled and thought ‘God Help me’ “I will take revenge and I know when I should do that. Anyway, thanks for that sweet slap” he said rubbing his cheek.

“Ok then, how is your job? You know that I am also working here, but it is pretty boring ra. It is not as good as our college days. You know….”

They went on like that for an hour and they recalled many moments of their time, laughed, teased and ran after each other, he told about his job and the bikinis and the beaches. He forgot the 15 minutes constraint, it was 6:20, and it was getting darker. They talked as if they had no idea of parting today, they stopped under a light, and he looked at her. He never saw her in a saree before this. His friends said that she was beautiful. She wore it for their farewell, he was not there that night. But he didn’t miss the train this time. He forgot everything, he forgot the paper in his pocket, his training, his rehearsals, he has no mood in telling her now, she was the same he saw her for four years ago, the same friend, he thought ‘she wouldn’t accept the change’.

“So, I think we should leave now, I might be flying away next week, I never knew , time would move at such a pace, hope we had some more time” he said , his face was almost dull, he had no more chances, its now or never , he decided never would be better.

“Ya that’s right “ she said “it was like hell when you were away, time used to go so slow and now! – Funny! Isn’t it? So when are we going to meet again?” even her face was gloomy like the moon behind the clouds.

“I don’t know” he said, he felt ashamed of himself for his fear, he cursed himself, ‘say it, say it, say it and run from here’ he thought- he couldn’t “ I will be out of station for the next week, I do not know when I would come back, I would meet you then, if you are free”. He was afraid of losing her, he was shivering within himself, he was crying within. He took her hand and left it” I will miss you a lot”. He headed towards the exit.

He was stopped, she held his hand.

“I too will miss you a lot, but I do not want to miss you. I was waiting for you for four long years, in fact for longest years in my life, now I do not want this to end just like that, I had dreams, I had sleepless nights, I had thoughts, I had tears, smiles everything for you, I longed to see you, you know this dress, today its for you, if I am like this here, its for you, I was going mad taking proposals and rejecting them, I believed in you, you would come back for me, I cannot wait any more” her head was down as she said this, her voice was shaking, she was crying “please do not say no”, she lifted her head , tears were rolling down like golden pearls as the eyes opened like oysters, he couldn’t see into those eyes, he got his biggest shock of the day.

He couldn’t believe his eyes, he is seeing the girl of his dreams standing in front of him and saying what he wanted to. The love of his life is here.

She fell over him and hugged him tightly. There were emotions everywhere, words had no place to get through them. He loved the moment, words turned into tears, his eyes were filled with them to the brim, he closed his eyes as he closed his arms around her, giving her the warmth of love that they both were longing for.
At last, he spoke “ I am sorry, I was late, I would never ever leave you, even if you give me those tight slaps for hundred more times”

They both smiled resting their heads on each other’s shoulder with emotions overflowing. Thus their conversation ended, which was still devoid of something, they forgot to say,

I Love You.

-K.Kartheek

P.S. It took almost three hours to write this, it was almost 1:30 when I completed this. I do not think, I ended it as well as I started it due to fatigue. But I hope my first attempt in writing a dialogue is good. It is my friends and my dream to convert this into a short film, which was almost fulfilled in college if we had found the girl to act.

To Sir Isaac Newton...

2006-03-07T17:09:00.000+05:30

I was still in my sleep. I have already caused the chaos i could by pulling my sisters blanket and pushing her down the bad and stretching myself from one corner to the other. It was a routine for me. I do this every day. There were days when my sister used to sleep on floor to avoid my invasion. It was fun. It was one of the moments that still keeps me as a kid even after the girl I am at the age of 22.

I do not know why ,but this word "routine" keeps coming into my mind every now and then. I never used it in my college life, though literally speaking, it was a routine too. Going to the college at 11 o clock(supposed to start at 10),bunking half the classes, being in the canteen, roaming and chatting with friends and being with 'him’. It was everyday schedule, but everything was so new everyday. I thought over it for a long time, why I didn’t use the word routine, there was one reason i could drill down to, it was ,whatever happened , "I did something”. Nowadays whatever happened "Something was done by me" or "Something was done upon me".

I know those lines bring back those haunting memories of English grammar classes on active and Passive voice. The voices speak for themselves "Active" and "Passive". I woke up and sat in front of the mirror, I was rubbing my eyes and my image started to get clear, the clearer it was, the hazier was my mind. For a moment I started to get scared, there was something wrong with me, that makes me detest myself. I tried to open my eyes wide and look into them and find out what were they seeing. I saw it and I closed my eyes.

I am getting married next week. I know it is a big event for the whole world ,it is the biggest event for my parents and logically speaking(logic as in society's sense) it should THE event for me. But for me, it is just the routine because I am not marrying, I am getting married. Some times all those images just run in front of minds eye, how easy it was just to sit their crying in the sofa while my father had a stubborn "NO" for anything i said about 'him', My mother was also there crying, I did not know for whom she was crying. For sometime my sister could not choose what to do, after sometime time she had nothing to choose but cry.

"Crying is the best form of escapism", i read this somewhere, I did not know what was escapism at that time. Now it seems i am escapism personified. Today i realize that i was not doing anything even then i was just crying 'Passively’. I did not raise my voice against the obsolete caste system and the reasons that my father gave which themselves killed rationality and the emotional blackmail that had no bounds. The only result of all this absurdity is the routine of everyday. I know, I know, though i could not take the guts to write it, I am the culprit and 'he' is the victim and the society was just a spectator with its irrational reasons acting as a catalyst.

I had to open my eyes because i had to. I saw me again, I was not looking beautiful. "Beautiful"- 'He' once asked me in the morning "Does the sun rise with you or Do you rise with the Sun". His thought leaves me vacuous; there is one thing that I could remember in that lifeless vacuum. A quote that many people like me live by just to bring up that artificial smile "Life Goes on".

I stood up and walked to the door when one of my niece came running into me and dropped her book on the floor, I smiled at her and picked up the book. Returning the book, my eyes caught the snap shot of these two lines

Newton’s First Law:

Every object continues to be in a state of rest or uniform motion unless an external force is applied to it.

It is so true, I do not know what was that external force, but it was me who was in a state of rest or uniform motion without applying any force on my life when i could. The simplicity of the law took the strength out of my legs. I could hardly stand. I do not know what was it that moved me from rest; i just walked up to the wardrobe. I opened it and reached out for a photo and somehow i dared to look at it.

Right behind my view of the photo was a certificate laminated and hanged to wall, which read "Awarded First Prize for Excellent Academic Performance in Science."

There was a sudden roar of whispers in my house. My would-be has come.

P.S: Inspired from the innumerable love stories that I listened to and that had ended in this way and the book "Alchemist" which speaks of the Universal language and Soul of the world that i strongly believe in.

-K.Kartheek

Sometimes there are moments, that take a lifetime to recall, because,You never forget them

2006-03-01T13:59:00.000+05:30

Sometimes there are moments, that take a lifetime to recall, because,You never forget them ************************************************************************
I was there in a saree,I can not say to myself that I was beautiful, though I was feeling to myself that I was so stunningly beautiful that I could lock everyones eyes on me. And god weren’t the girls jealous,I felt I was cursed for every glance of a boy that turned to me that eventually changed to a stare, well! to be modest, I accepted the compliments with a smile.

But there was someone in the corner of the long hall, sitting with his legs crossed and his back straight and for a change,was not looking at me or should I say was trying not to look at me or was dying to look at me but wasn’t. He was looking at the glass in his hand and occasionally looked up and smiled at his friends who were my victims. Well I knew what the smile meant, it meant “she is mine”.

Deep in my heart I loved the feeling of his ignoring me,as I felt in that one way he could be different from the lot and I said to myself “he is mine”.

I always thought ,boys wooed for girls and it followed the process of proposal and acceptance. But it was not the case between us, there was a harmony between us that led us both together to the inevitable romantic insanity—love. Sometimes I feel ,we acknowledged that insanity when we ignored each other consciously.

Well, that’s a long and memorable story..from we both meeting each other for the first time, ignoring each other and then giving up as we succumbed to the insanity, me sneaking out to meet him, long drives when the sun shone like a fire ball right on our head ,but could come between each other, the long talks on phone when we killed the last obstacle between us-time, the birthday gifts that were the tokens of our insanity, the days we fought to my tears and the hours that were years when we didn’t talk to each other…and to the moment.

He stood up and started walking towards me. I thought he would fool me by turning away, but he could understand that I couldn’t take it any more.

“Hi”, he said looking at me, straight into my eyes.

“Hi”, I replied, with all the elegance I could, though I was burning inside as I thought there could be better things to say than the inappreciable and clichéd “Hi”.

“you seem to be late”

“yes, took a bit more time than expected to get ready”, I knew I would do this, I blurted ,I wanted to get noticed by the last person in the room who was not noticing me. Even as a consolation to my irresistibility to get noticed, he didn’t give up easily. I said to myself “let the joy in the wait last for some more time”

He was about to say something and most uncalled for announcement popped up
“Dear seniors, Please be seated”

I stood there with the desperate expression that asked him what were you saying.

Somehow he read me, well that was the beauty of our relationship, he said “I will get myself a drink,you go and sit”

I thought this was a limit for things, I couldn’t wait any more, I turned around to see my victims who were no longer so, they were rushing to find a seat, though some gave an occasional look at me, but that didn’t make any difference to me, the person who could was still not considering me.

I walked down the row of chairs with dropped shoulders and I had no knowledge that I walked up to the dais, may be a subconscious effort to get noticed. I had to take a seat in the first row to avoid walking back. The microphone started to speak something or someone started to speak in the microphone, I didn’t care.

I was sitting there with my head down, where my mind was strained between the fight between my conscience and sub conscience where the former said “don’t care about him” and the latter screamed “how much more time”.

Well … to sum it up, couldn’t help being a girl.

Someone sat beside me, I didn’t turn my head. He offered a drink, for a moment I thought I will throw it onto the floor, but from a corner of my eye, I could make out it was he. With all smiles, I took the glass.

He smiled back. Things were changing for the better, I thought. It was like a circus on stage, people were playing some game…truth or dare, where people need to either say a truth of their lifetime, this is where the dumbest of the lot got their chance to speak up and say “I have a crush on her” or one can choose dare where u are supposed to perform a daring act.

I was supposed to dance with someone other than him, I looked at him, he didn’t make a move, neither in his eyes, nor in his smile. I thought it was my time for revenge, I did my best, but it was as if I was supposed to lose for the day. He didn’t mind my best performance with someone who wasn’t him or should I say he didn’t care.

It was his turn, he was given a dare, he was asked to kiss any girl he wished to.
For a moment, the hall was abuzz with everyone whispering as loud as it couldn’t be called a whisper, I didn’t turn my head, but I could sense some girls blushing already, god, I am jealous now. He was still sitting there beside me. At last, he started to move, he was as firm as he was, there were some innumerable thoughts in my mind at that moment ,that I couldn’t even pen down, I would have gone mad if the moment had lasted more than the second it lasted.

He stood up, faced me, took my hand in his hand, bowed down with his face to my ear and whispered

“You look like a princess, why do you want me to say that, idiot ,anyway I lose”

He looked into my eyes with a smile, and

He kissed me.

Sometimes there are moments that take a lifetime to recall, because….
…You never forget them. This was the moment. For a moment he made me a lady and he was the man for me. For a moment the insanity was given a form. For a moment we owned each other so much that we had to lose ourselves. For a moment we had the whole world with us and his had only me and my world has only him. For a moment, He numbed my senses one after the other. I couldn’t hear any thing, all the loud whispers sank into oblivion, my eyes, I think they had tears, my mind had no space to think about them and I could feel nothing but him. For a moment I lost to him, making me realize that that the last word he spoke wasn’t true, or it could never be or I thought it should never be. The moment was larger then life.

He sat beside me smiling.

For sometime, the microphone didn’t speak or nobody spoke in the microphone, I didn’t care.

(P.S: Written on Feb 14th 2006. The story took 2 hrs (9 pm to 11 pm) to finish. As usual I am not satisfied with my work at the climax, but it was a pleasure being the boy I am, experimenting to write a girls mind. And thanks to some girls whose honesty in their emotions helped me in writing this.
Kartheek.K )

2006-02-28T21:14:00.000+05:30

Hi,this is kartheek,the laziest creature ever born on earth. If i start anything,i have stop it before it is finished,that had been the trend through out my life.

However somethings i tried to do completely were to write a diary,which i would have continued if my mother hadn't read it. well that diary was full of my dreams about the girl i had a crush on or should i say the girl who crushed my heart..dreams were only dreams.

My diary gave rise to a by-product ,which was my skill to write crap about the crappiest thing possible.Though half my writings go back to the theme of adolscent love and romance (as i am still haunted by my dreams),i am trying to write something different. One more species that had fascinated me other than myself is the Fairer Sex. So my stories also have their fascination for the fairer sex. and with this species..i believe "Truth is stranger than Fiction".So most of my stories are inspired from true life.

other than writings,there are some borinng things about me--I am a big movie freak,i saw some good movies,thought of seeing many such good movies,and dreamt of making some good movies,made one at last-Cocktail-(some call it good movie)..so that makes me smile half the time..

My reading habit havent been regular,but i was lucky enough to come across some good books like Fountain Head,Lord of the Rings(I am not the Harry Potter maniac),Alchemist....

Since i was lazy enough to postpone reading hundreds of pages, i found one good thing which had equal effect-Movies.My favorite movies include--Schindlers List,Forrest Gump,Shawshank Redemption,Goodwill Hunting....

Something which was more interesting than the above two is reading people,there are hundreds of interesting people i have come across in my life till now.Of these some were kind enough to let me read them.These were the people who made my boring life interesting.

and one last and interesting thing about me is , i am the Swiss Bank of love stories (True love stories).I feel i have an affinity to listen to others stories ,though i hade none to my name till date(Fairer Sex..Are u listening).

Ok,thats it for now..Feel free to criticise my crap :)

me,myself and my writings

Detouring

Knowing the other half of truth

Stop Read and Watch

Poor Men

Learning Thy Neighbours Language

The Globe is Golden

Of Curious Cases and Slumdogs

Quiz

Risk, Return and a Little Utility

Economics and Ethics

Social Experiment

Sum of parts

Where was/am I?

:) (: :( ): :| |: :O O:

Hanged to the Top

At It Dude

Still Rain

Ridiculously Wonderful

The Darkest Knight

Write or Not Right

Geetanjali

Reason Vs Excuse

Short Snaps

To Teach

Me

To Write

Silence and Sound

Mumbai and Neverland

F.R.I.E.N.D.S

The Other side of the consumer

I am alive and so is my blog

Restart

MAXI and the Missing Middle Class

Writers

Arbit!!!!

Stop.. A CAT just passed by us

Indifference and poetry

Nothing and Everything

Kabhie.. Kabhie..

Two sides of a coin

Happy Days: Rewind and Review-2

Happy Days :Rewind and Review

Beauty

Superheroes, Guilt and Girlfriends

Oktoberfest, SIP and Goddamn Sleep

Absolute Happiness :D

Logged in

Change is Good

All said and done.. its done..

So much to write...

News as on 28/07/07

muddy waters

Tower of Babel and other PS..

Probability....

This is It...

Chalks and Duster

the delicate dragon

The Depth of Dreams

Distances Dissolving Distances

the un-updated part

They..

The Devil's Workshop

To know the Secret or to be Fooled .

From The Devil's Workshop- "Practicing Practicality"

IPod Vs Radio (the softer side of Me vs Myself)

Running for...

Me vs Myself.

Its another day

Touch

From the Devil's Workshop-II "A&P"

To the youth

My Friend's friend is not my friend-I

From The Devil's Workshop-1 *THE "1" - THE "0"*

My First Story

To Sir Isaac Newton...

Sometimes there are moments, that take a lifetime to recall, because,You never forget them

From The Devil's Workshop-1 THE "1" - THE "0"