Nair

Or as Shetty would have it "Naireyeyeyeyeyey......" Well... What can I say about this relation with Prashant which spans most of my happiest times with any of my friends. Ever. It was always about life's smallest things but gave us immense happiness. If there were ever an example for twin paradox then he would be one of the twins, the younger one.
Fresh with an extraordinary sense of levity. Very Breezy. Extremely Youthful & Optimistic. Its hard to recreate that aura with anyone else. Then it happened :
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Dhuaan chataa khula gagan mera
Nayi dagar naya safar mera

Jo ban sake tu hamsafar mera
Nazar mila zara
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Darsana ne nazar milaya aur khel katam.Dookan Band and Roobaru and all that good stuff! The guy's got hitched. So much so that M was asking me would his wedding be classified as a "Child Marriage".

We have small lake of memories on which we throw stones whenever we meet. If I wax about this guy from the bottom of my heart then there will be enough room for ample misinterpretation, so constraint would be the operative word here.

I cannot quite remember how we quite got to be this thick but we fairly remember "Jeet's Kitchen" had a role to play in it. I have seen him at his various hues. The serenity of his Banjara Nagar home, where we were served garma garam pakors from the kitchen while lazing around and talking nothing. His Olivetti machine on which countless games of "Prince (Of Persia)" were played. Exchanging books and learning the recipe for avial. When everyone in his group left he held on, trying to make something by staying close to home. Home is Hyderabad!

Then came Tambaram posting, outskirts of Madras. Where our "Street of India" never failed to surprise on our way to eating idli from a sea of sambar or katta pongal. His bored job where he was playin video games just to engage his mind and the plans we made while listening to "Sifar".
Then came crossing the Atlantic to Villanova. Some of the best times he can recollect in his school/personal adult life. I can see how this shy guy can be the most popular guy at the uni, the kind of adoration he commanded from the rest of the folks. The dinner and song serenade at the diner.Thanks for dropping by my graduation and it was fun to hang out with you in the best of your bachelor years.I still remember your farewell party with those never ending train of vodka shots..

The Phd paper where you made a world famous professor say "Please..". When it rains and I am having my coffee, I often stare into the rain thinking "what if..?" in regards to your temple days. It was nothing but fun the time I spent you. You, non judgemental, much like a buddhist monk, just choosing to speak when it was absolutely neccesary, the very incarnation of honesty going back to India only to make it there.

The way DSR wont leave you, the way you have one job an year and the way you easily get bored yet be nonchalant about the daily inanities. What can I say about you except that the peak of the iceberg that you potray is only 15% of whats your essence. I drink deep from within those deep personal artesian wells of yours and it makes me healthy.

No matter what happens prash, I wish nothing but the best for you and I hope you preserve that "exclamation!" of yours with all the child like wonder which accompanies it. I am grateful to be in your company and that our paths crossed. I definitely cannot calculate the probability of that..

I drink to thee's health,wealth and happiness in your future endeavors..

The Long Tail of India

Someone emailed me after my looking at my last post, saying is this all you got on your trip. Well there is more except that I cannot sum that experience in a single post. Ok, let me try atleast.

For starters, there is something called as "The Long Tail" used in math, economics and other allied fields where applications of this phenomenon are being discovered. For example, the recent popularity of the book "The Da Vinci Code" prompted a lot of folks to look around books the subject of early christian rituals, codes and other stuff surrounding the concept. The total sales of those books would far outweigh the sales of this book alone and whats more is that there is still roonm for a new entrant. This in short is an application of the long tail phenomenon. For those who are technically inclined, the cache hit ratios in a typical proxy cache like squid can be modeled using zipf's law and accounts for most of the complexity involved in cache design considerations. Enough on that digression.Lets see where am I...

The reason this applied to India is that you can take any nice subject on India and you'll find enough exceptions to the general theory you form that they overweigh what has been said in a single context you picked and hence I think Shashi Tharoor is right in claiming that you can never talk about India in a singular sense and India has always to be dealt in plural (E Plurubus Plurum). Anyways speaking of India, one general guideline I establish is to understand India in the context of Mahabharata. After all this epic "What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere". Find one example that isnt there and we can debunk that claim :)

I dont need to resort to that either I can simply take a text that was earlier than that: lets take Ramayana. Now if you carefully read the original, it states some nice things which dont get mentioned in the standard textbook editions. For example, Sugriva had a fat neck, Kaikeyi had such a slender waist that it was the first thing Dasratha amazed at, Manthara has a humpback and Hanuman was very old. Why do I say this? This tendency of physical features essaying the personality of the person has presumably improved upon by the rest of the folks. My folks around me have this tendency to rate prospective girls on the basis of color, the aqulinity of the nose, etc. (Hmm..Some things havent changed since 2000 years.) Speaking of which, lets take another digression, What are the names of the wives of Lakshmana, Bharata and Shatrugna? So little is told to us about Shatrugna (or for that matter Nakula and Sahadeva in the other epic) that we tend to discard them as inconsequential. (BTW for the record the names of the spouses happen to be Maandavya and SrutaKirti). We know a wee bit about Lakshmana's wife Urmila having slept for the entire time of exile in sleep (Rip Van Winkle must have been her descendant).The point here being that I get to hear a lot from/about from a few popular folks and I dont get enough information about some hardly communicative fellows be it relatives, friends or acquaintacnces.

And then is the point of selective interest. I get terribly interested in some person's life but wouldnt care to hear more about some others. What does this lead to? Some acute knowledge of how a person has come to shape by and some understanding behind that persons' actions versus being clueless about some things about these fellas whom I havent followed. Sticking to the theme of mythological analogue here most people would know Jatayu as the bird whose purpose seems to be the communication of the abduction news of Sita after its wings got cut by Ravana.(Apparently tried in vain to fight him). But Jatayu has a elder brother called Sampati who burnt his wings trying to protect Jatayu from some kind of Solar Flare when Jatayu was young.Of course, Jatayu also happens to be like Jyoti Basu in that it has supposedly ruled the avian kingdom for about 60,000 years.

Finally there is this other key thing in the senseless beauty of relativity. While the Mosaic Decalogue says "Thou Shall Not Kill" or the Quereshi folks who are inclined to say "Thou Shalt Kill a infidel" ( which are both kinda absolute and global), India seems to be believe in micorpersuasion and a special kind of truth before which a personal pronoun can be attested.

Anyways I have dumped what I got,so this my friend, is the whole enchilada of my recent trip. Hope this whets your appetite :)

India Shining

After my recent vist back to des, the most common question I had to answer was "How was India?" . Lets start with the economy ( as they say its a gamble in the monsoon rain )

The Sensex was at an all time high when I was around. The institutional investors all are loaded up on stocks like SBI, ICICI and many other financial institutions which tells me that the credit cycle in india really did catch up. The fellows with black money are making hay on the real estate boom all across the hot metros. If you look at Infosys' balance sheet you'll see that they have a nice bunch of land holdings (wonder why?) . Forex flows are great (albeit in the short term they look negative thanks to the capital account convertibility). If I have to invest, I would in infrastructure.
In short we are just like Japan in the 1980s.

Good for everyone :)

Home Sweet Home

Just came back after a grueling 42 hour trip to home. Lost my luggage and I come home to see that someone vandalised my car in a vain attempt to steal stuff. Not exactly an exiciting way to come home. More chronicles of "Swades" follow soon. Funny moment was that when my flight was accelerating to leaving the runway in Bombay, I was reading Shashi Tharoor's "Bookless in Baghdad" where he quotes Rushdie (The Ground Beneath her Feet)

India, my terra infirma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia, my crowd. India, my too-muchness, my everything at once, my Hug-me, my fable, my mother, my father and my first great truth. It may be that I am not worthy of you, for I have been imperfect, I confess. I may not comprehend what you are becoming, what perhaps you already are, but I am old enough to say that this new self of yours is an entity I no longer want, or need, to understand.

India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart.

Goodbye

Strong-Strong

Thats literally the translation of the name of a fish called "Mahi Mahi". Finally after some aeons, I had finished my lunch plate. While by no means striking to an outside observer, I have never enjoyed lunch dishes very much and simply try these dishes while making conversations. The end result is always the same. I never will finish my complete plate whereas the the folks around me usually lap it up pretty nicely.I kinda wished my lunch would be that way but never had that satisfaction. I usually found it convenient to categorise myself as a 'thair-saadam' boy( google thair saadam (a space between r and s is required) and see what comes up first, just like googling pwlah gives another blogger a similar rank). So for me today's lunch is an achievement of sorts : finishing the plate and that too made of fish. God save the species of mahi mahi now.

I finally have 36 hours to go before I catch a flight back home to India. Though not as excited as I should be ( I can attribute that to my burning out these days.) a vacation is of dire neccessity to me now. Its gonna be a fun trip with mumbai, bangalore and hyderabad in the circuit. In the midst of the excitement popped a lurking fear that I might be lost in a city like mumbai. Suddenly imagining myself in that 'maximum city', I kinda twitched and thank goodness for friends like Murali, who is close enough to host me till I get the work done. So strange that I get to become like this. A proper week of touring around the country should cure me. A lot of volleys on subjects like career, marriage, etc. need to be fielded with assorted folks.Hmm..The humdrum..Speaking of career, here's a little advice from the sage of omaha himself:

Q: What is your career advice?

A: If you want to make a lot of money go to Wall Street. More importantly though, do what you would do for free, having passion for what you do is the most important thing. I love what I do; I'm not even that busy. I got a total of five phone calls all day yesterday and one of them was a wrong number. Ms. B from NFM had passion, that's why she was successful. A few months ago I was talking to another MBA student, a very talented man, about 30 years old from a great school with a great resume. I asked him what he wanted to do for his career, and he replied that he wanted to go into a particular field, but thought he should work for McKinsey for a few years first to add to his resume. To me that's like saving sex for your old age. It makes no sense.

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So I take it that he is simply saying "Live Life King Size". Amen.

The Gift by Hafiz

Even After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth
"You owe me."

Look What happens
With a love like that,
It lights up the
Whole Sky.

-(Khwaja Shams ud-Din Hafiz-i Shirazi, 1326-1390)
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The author is popularly known as Hafiz and supposedly was the master of Ghazal and his sufi based poetry is supposedly far surpassing Rumi. Just discovered this guy in an office chat with a co-worker. So far so good.

Some Things That Fly - Part 1

* Keeping it Real
* Learning & Finding What You Think Is Cool (Hard thing is holding on to it)
* Exploring, Alone
* The Ocean, and How Long Since I've Seen It
* Not Opening Your Mouth and Responding with Silence
* Deserving my Fate
* Taking it to the Limit
* Swimming in the Rain and Eating Ice Cream later

Recos

Just finished watching "Coffee and Cigarettes". Left me thinking the same pattern that I thought after reading "Waiting for Godot". Someone wrote to me in an email about "Existential Angst", guess that person should go watch this movie.(Under my breath much like someone says "Useless Fellow" : Damn those Existentalists)

On the other hand I have seen an exactly polar opposite of this film is "Monsieur Ibrahim" which had some sufi stuff in it apart from some neat concepts.Though it had some parallels to a "Scent of a Woman", doesnt quite it make it to that scale nor the punch of it.Nevertheless this movie made me think(I still have it on my to-do list) of doing a dervish for an hour or so atleast.

On a different note, I had to drop a couple of priests to the airport during this week and man, it was ugly. I tried to poke them around theological grounds and all they wanted to talk was of immigration status,citizenship,home ownership, desperate housewives and the sort. Anyways wonder on what ground they claim the west to be materialistic when they themselves encourage nothing but materials in terms of asking for wishes.So much for Salvation.

Happy Thanksgiving to those residing in the U.S.

Lesson

Learnt to understand some things that I dont respect and by converse respect things that I dont understand.

Ruminations

Remember the first days in a new school? My pop used to get transferred every 3 years or so and hence became used to it. A New school and a New place. The last time I ever cried saying farewell to friends and got bitter for leaving a comfort zone was in Madras (Yeah! It used to be called that instead of Chennapatnam as in my grandpa's time or Chennai as in these days) circa 1987. I guess after that I got de-sensitized to those kind of issues.(some call that growing up and I call that loss of childhood). First thing you need to fight for (or rather wrestle out of people) ,is acceptance. Just like the fraternities having an initiation rite, there always exists an unwritten one. At the new residence you need to prove that to your neighbors and in school you gotta do something else that would be called kick-ass or "cool" as they say these days. (I love the way the flick "Anjali" depicts this situation of acceptance among an apartment community)

Switching Gears a bit, there exists a similar rite of initiation into a new job when you get in one. First off, its a bit more subtle because no one says it on your face about it but word gets around.ALl the screw-ups or anything that makes a good story instantly spread like a fire. Slowly, as people get some clarity of your charter at the workplace and everyone (well, not every one but most folks that work directly with you ) makes sure that you make it to their list of "approved" folks for the job. Yes. I think I can safely make the claim that now I have arrived at this new firm.

Ruminating about childhood seems very instructive these days (atleast for me). Given a new situation where you had to solve a problem never seen before, the very first thing I recollect is that when I was a kid there was nothing like "fear" but only "curiosity".Luckily when you are a new kid on the block there is no fear of making a fool of yourself and your curiosity (though irritating at times) helps people see some things in a fresh perspective. All you need to do is preserve your child like curiosity about the things the way there and play. The only difference here is that people play hard, work hard and the consequences also come down hard on you just in case you slip.So far I have never been this productively occupied and having fun at the same time.I'll drink to that.Just like music is something of a state between tension and release of strings, my life seems to flow in different tunes between a tense and relaxed situations.Its pure harmony in between.

When I was a kid, I liked to paint but couldnt do it properly. My solution to that was to draw something and instead of coloring it, I took a toothbrush, dip it into the water color and then do a spray paint. This has the defect that I couldt control the colors at the borders but the result was much better than me doing the colors the conventional way.

I am looking forward to my upcoming trip home. I have committed to buying a house back in hometown. I think that marks a clear transition of a boy to man.Hmmm...Not sure about that but feels great hearing some elated voices from home. It will be quite a trip that I will be looking forward to. Somehow things are just like the way Bob Dylan sings in

"Come gather round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
Then you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone
For the times, they are a changing"

Bob Dylan always leads me t think of Dylan Thomas.( I am told he was named after the welsh poet).Here's a nice excerpt from "And Death Shall have no Dominion"

"No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion."

I think I can utilize this "copious" free time in some other way as well. Adios!