Our very own Grand Prix !

     Aah,it’s crazy how numbers just add up when I decide to blog! Today being the 8^th day, it did not come as a surprise to me that I had to work in office till 8 PM :-( What I dread about working till 8 is that I will have to board the 8 PM bus ! Nothing peculiar about our bus…What’s very peculiar is the driver who brings us home in the 8 PM bus…Oh boy! Let me begin his introduction with the fact that he is a big time fan of Rajanikanth (Which rascal is not a fan of Rajni, tell me?) , owns a mobile loaded with all of his songs and keeps playing ‘Kilimanjaro, Yaro,Yaro’ in a loop !  What’s even more endearing ( or is it endangering) is that our driver hums along and goes “Aha Aha” when the chorus of the song begins , making it sound like a horny grunt :-p  

     For the uninitiated, here’s a link to the video of the song! Hit here.

   Now considering my high tolerance limits for eccentricities, all this is "jujubi" ! :-p What is NOT jujubi though, is the driving skills of our dearest driver! He must have been a royal war charioteer is his previous birth. He is a Michael Schumacher’s elder brother in this life. He is the Father of Rash Indian Driving. He does not hit the speed breakers, he flies over them. Our mini-bus roars like a Ferrari in his hands. It’s no use sitting at the window seat when he is driving because you will not be treated to any enchanting visions of Bangalore’s nightlife. What you will see instead is a blurred boundary of objects that whizz past your window.       Now, had this guy been on the Buddh International Circuit, it would have been perfect. Unfortunately for us, we have to traverse the pot-hole infested roads of Bangalore to reach home from work. One hour in the 8 PM bus is equivalent to 2 hours at the gym. All parts of your body will vibrate in rhythm with the frequency of the potholes. The number of vibrations per second is directly proportional to the depth of the pothole which we land into. But the beauty of the whole thing is that before our poor brains can receive the signals for sensing a vibration in the body, our driver would have taken us out of one pothole and into the next. So to make a short story shorter, the whole 1 hour in the bus is like an intense session of Power Yoga, Pilates and Baba Ramdev Twistology put together!

     If our guy were to drive any faster, I have no doubt that our kidneys would detach themselves from the insides and launch into our mouths! :-p If you do not hold on to the seat handle, chances are, you will be given a free swimming lesson too…Just that you would be swimming on the waterless, hard floor of our mini-bus :-| Now, if you make the mistake of leaving the windows open, you will run a risk of having your eyeballs uprooted from your eyes, your hairline will recede into your collar and your teeth will be plastered into your throat. Such is the intensity of the wind that blows through the window when he zips past on the flyover ! I once had my glasses flung across the seat and onto the floor. Today, while I was sitting in the bus, I saw a lady settling down into the opposite seat, with a book in her hands, all set to READ :P Yeah rightttt! Sure, why not ! Once we had hit the main road,she realized she was in a freaking time machine, not a bus :-p And then she tried to fall asleep. Only to be rudely reminded of the fact that before she could catch two winks, her head would get legs of its own and go bang itself hard against the seat rod…Oh, I know EXACTLY where it hurts ! It’s all déjà vu for me :-D

      When I look at people like our driver and myself, I feel sad for Mother India. Such a waste of precious talent. Our man should have been a Formula One racer. And me ?  Oh, I should have been the Prime Minister of India,don’t you think ? :-D I would have upgraded all the Bangalore Roads to six lane expressways and converted the whole of India into one big Formula One circuit. Sadly for us, are our politicians are into this only For-Moolah :-| Anyway, moving on, if you missed being a part of the F1 tamaasha at Noida, let me know. I will reserve a seat for you in our 8 PM bus  :P For free….You know why ? YOU will pay me once you have enjoyed the ride….It’s THAT good ;)

Let me go rest my rattled body now. Good night ! :)

He-He-He-He-mails

   I sit here yawning at the end of yet another weekend...This week did drag along, and I am glad that it’s over! But man, its December already! Has this year been flying or WHAT! :-| I don’t even remember living through all those months...If you ask me, I am kinda stuck somewhere between April and June. April , because a lot happened in that month this year...I hit 25, changed my job etc. Reminds of this bald astrologer who happened to look at the lines on my palm in a family gathering a decade back. He smiled, rubbed his chin and declared...” You have a government job waiting for you..You will get one at 25..Your second job”. I giggled as I pictured myself in the avatar of a loyal IAS officer, complete with a starched cotton sari etc...I giggle now, as I look at my present avatar, sitting cross legged on a chair and typing like a mad woman into the computer screen :D I give the astrologer half the brownie points though...at least he did foresee a job change at 25 ;) In his defence, I must say, his predictions were quite accurate...Especially the one where he said I was a budding genius, a prodigy, an enigma waiting to be cracked and a treasure of true talent waiting to be unearthed..LOL..Can we even question that NOW? ;)
    Astrologer aside, let’s talk about my job change. When I was switching companies in April, I intended to take a backup of all the blogs that I had written on my first company’s internal blog site. And since there is a lot of intellectual property blah blah, I just let it be and walked out of the campus without a backup of ANY kind. Not even my official mails. Can you imagine that? I can be quite a dumb blonde when I want to! I have no idea why I did that...I just forwarded few mails from my archives to my personal email id and left it at that. And to think I had created a zillion personal folders on outlook, carefully segregating mails into weird classifications! I don’t give a rat’s ass about ANY of those mails :D But, but, but, I swear at myself when I think what the hell was I doing when I missed taking a backup of the ‘FUNNY’ folder on my outlook. By ‘FUNNY’, I do not mean giggle-and-forget forwards..Nope..These were ‘actual’ official emails. ‘Real’ funny ones! Ones which were sent out or received during times of utter crisis, production go-lives etc. Ones which were not meant to be funny in ANY way, but turned out to be so, thanks to all the insanity induced by the nervous wrecks who were working on the god-damn ‘Priority-1’ issues.
   Without taking any names, I will treat you to some samples, some timeless gems that refuse to leave my mind even now.
   Sample this.
   The client worked with multiple vendors and my previous employer was one of them. Another software firm from India was also a vendor for the same client. We managed their sales software and the other firm managed the client’s database and servers.
   A P1 issue struck us on one fateful day and there was a long chain of back and forth emails being exchanged between us and the DBA from the other firm. And the whole world was copied in those mails, The ‘CC’ section looked like a novel :) It was ‘THAT’ big!
   We did some kinda fix at our end and wrote back to the DBA, asking for a server restart. The guy doesn’t respond for 20 minutes. Now, when you have people sitting on your neck, 20 minutes is a LOT of time! Finally, when my team mates and I were busy raining the choicest of cuss words on this guy, a mail pops up. He had written back. I quote him EXACTLY. This is what he wrote.
“Hi,
I am in the process of getting this done. This will take some time. Could you please bare with me for some time?
Thanks.
Mr.DBA”
    I have a keen eye for grammatical mistakes. Not that I don’t make any. But when there is one, I can sniff it from a mile. When I read this mail, I was guffawing like a mad cow, cackling like a hyena and thanks to all the jittery nerves, this mail seemed funnier that it actually was. The guy wanted us to “bare” with him while he got it done.
    Before we could even recover from this mail, another one came by. It was a jackass from the ‘CC’ list. He said one word. “Sure”. And that cracked us up too..The DBA and the CC guy “baring” was not a pretty picture! :D
    This mail chain went out for some more time and as long as it lasted, every reply that followed the DBA’s “bare with me” mail seemed funnier than the previous one in our gutter heads and helped in easing out the tension that was gripping us until then :)
    Ok, in the second sample, “I” am the jackass. I wrote this mail and sent it out to a senior client guy, whose experience in the industry was equal to my age. Thankfully for me, there was no one in ‘CC’ or ‘BCC’ and for all I know, if I don’t spill it out now, I can die with this secret..But, what’s the fun in NOT sharing a funny thing? We need to laugh at ourselves sometimes ;)
    Now the client guy was an old man, who was around when Mainframes were ‘THE’ thing and was around even when I started my first job. So you can imagine the kind of experience he comes with. This old man was no bossy fellow, but instead, was a very sweet guy. We hit it off really well and once we had that rapport between us, our mails were very casual, albeit official :)
    One evening, some user ran into some issue and immediately shot a mail asking for a quick resolution. Now that meant staying back and winding this up. I did that. Finally, at around 10-ish everything was back in place. All the while, there was a regular email chain happening between the old guy and me.Next morning, when I opened my mailbox, there is a chain mail happening between some colleagues, discussing how I owe them a treat for some reason and how I must keep aside 10K from my salary to treat these lazy bums to some awesome lunch. I giggle and was about to type a reply when the next mail arrives. From the old guy, the client. It said “Thanks for all the help. Everything works fine now. Can we have a call with the user at 11 AM your time?” I was relieved to see that everything was fine now and went back to my previous mail to type a reply to the chain mail.
    I sent a reply to the group of colleagues. And then started typing the reply to the client. ...
Wait. No. This is not happening. Dint I just reply to this mail? OMG. I then click on SENT ITEMS.
    I am done..totally! How do I recall this mail..frantic search for that option ensues. And before I could figure it out, I get a reply from the old guy.
“Oh! Is someone having a bad morning?”. I cringe.
    Guess what. Instead of replying to the chain mail, I had typed my reply on the client’s mail and sent it across to him! And it read “ In your dreams ! Not happening...No chance!”
    This certainly was meant for the “keeping aside 10K for the lunch treat” gig :-| And like my luck might have it, it sounded like a perfectly rude reply to the client’s email :P
    I dialled the client’s number frantically and spent the next five minutes explaining my situation, while he went ‘Ho Ho Ho Ho...Ha Ha Ha Ha” like Santa Claus at the other end of the line...Luckily for me, he was a jolly good fellow :D
    My “funny” folder in Outlook was home to some more of those “real” goofy emails, gathered during my three years at my first job :) Thankfully, I was the recipient of the rest of the emails and not the jackass who wrote it :P Out of the zillion mails, these deserved a place on my pendrive on the last day! I still wonder how I missed them out :)
    Dear Funny Folder, I miss you! In your loving memory , I am considering creating your sister folder on my present Outlook and hopefully I will never WRITE any email that will bring your sister to existence :P I just hope there are enough people out there who would be generous enough to contribute to make her a reality ;) :D
   

I love the Monsoons!

       Waking up in the mornings these days is tougher than it has ever been! When my alarm goes off and I realize its morning already, I see the glass window misty with all the dew and listen to sound of the rain drops from the night’s rain dripping down into a puddle from the trees in the empty site next to my bedroom window and the mental war begins. Curled up under my green wonder blanket, life seems perfect the way it is on early weekday mornings and I am tempted to keep it that way, without having to wake up and rush into the day against my will! But ho-hum, we all know how it is :( Bread and butter people! I better get my lazy ass off the bed and into the office bus. It’s not easy...not easy at all!

        And the bus ride to office in my cosy office bus takes this mental battle to the next level. We take a route that does not touch any of the main city roads. We take the highway! Not much traffic, very few traffic signals and a driver who seems to be a Schumacher incarnate, it can’t get any better. Bangalore is just stirring into action at that time of the morning, the school kids are waiting for their yellow bus to arrive, the smell of fresh jasmine flowers wafts in through the open windows at the traffic signal where the flower vendors try to sell a fresh garland of stringed jasmine flowers for decorating the Ganesha idol that sits demurely on the dashboard of our bus...The roadside dosa-cart is in full action already and the labourers are digging into their breakfast, a steaming hot dosa, before they rush off to the construction site on the other side of the road.

                                               

       A few kilometres on the highway, watching the city wake up to life and we reach the place where we take a right turn into heaven. Heaven it is! Every morning, we pass through the woods that are a part of the Bangalore University, lush green in all their glory and freshly washed from the night’s rain, sparkling in the early sunlight. It’s oooh-so-amazing! I try not to doze off on the 45-minute bus ride to office. I just do not want to miss this stretch of road that passes through the woods :) Once we reach office, the morning breakfast session on the 6th floor cafeteria, with an amazing view of the faraway hills around Bangalore is another part of my day that I would hate to miss! The rest of the morning passes away in work, conference calls and a million other chores at work. During the lunch break, we venture out to the food court outside our campus and usually find a seat at the edge of the building which looks out into an endless stretch of empty land, bare, except for the green bed of grass. Our lunch break is filled with lots of girly talk, giggling and laughing and discussing matters of “utmost importance” ;). And nowadays, at least for the past week, it has been raining during the lunch breaks and we totally love it! Rains during lunch breaks calls for something that is hot, spicy and tasty. What better than a plate of juicy chicken? ;) A stray black dog that lives on the campus wanders to the edge of the food court in the afternoons and we give him a treat of leftover bones, which he happily bites into, wagging his tail :)

                                  

        All through this weekend, it has either been cloudy, drizzling or pouring. And I am totally loving it ! Nothing is more blissful than a lazy weekend at home, sitting by the window with a coffee, reading a novel and breathing in the damp air, heavy with the moisture from the rains..Aaah, Heaven! :D I morph into a total couch potato during the Indian monsoons...But yeah, I have to admit, the monsoons here are not all about happiness..There are people who have to put up with leaking roofs, flooded streets, overflowing drains and what not! You would definitely want to curse the rains, if you were stuck outside in the streets, with the waters swirling around your knees. But when you are sitting cross legged on your favourite chair at home, typing away to glory, you have the licence to romanticise the Indian rains and wax eloquence about its beauty ;) The more I write about how much I enjoy the monsoons, the guiltier I feel about not going off on a vacation :( I would so love to trudge through the dense jungles of Karnataka right now. It is at times like these that I wish I had what it takes to be a vagabond....Truck loads of money and nothing better to do ;) :D But then, we all know how it is! What is this life if, full of care! Remember this poem from school? :)

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.