God!

I had been debugging an elusive piece of code since morning, struggling to get a grip on its slimy appendages. Every time I made an advance, it would slip away between my fingers. Lousy piece of binary junk! Finally, at noon, as my tummy began to give up on me, I nailed it, bam! A simple reference gone haywire, and my boss was looking at it like it was Watergate in the making!

I shrieked out in relief "Holy Crap!!" .. One of the underwriters from the adjacent cube was probably offended. She came over and said "You don't curse your God like that. Haven't you been taught not to?" I could make out from the stern and hurt look on her face that she was a devout Catholic or somebody of that sort. I gave her some gyan - "Look, I'm an Indian. We have 330 million recognized Gods as of the last census. Nobody has a freakin clue as to how many illegal immigrant Gods are crossing the border every day. So, even if I swear, no God'll mind as I can switch from one to another if somebody's cross with me. You know, Customer is King!"

One of those days

Yesterday was like one of "those days". When everything goes the wrong way with laser precision. It all started the previous night when, instead of setting my alarm for 7 am, I accidentally set it to 7 pm. Now, that was the first night I was spending in my new apartment, so I could barely sleep till past midnight, when I surprisingly dozed off into deep slumber.

9:00
As it had to happen, my alarm didn't ring, and I didn't realize the reason when I jerked open my eyes into the glaring sun (Told you, first night, didn't know east from west). It was 9 and I was expected to be at work at 8:30. I ran into the shower with gusto and was scrubbing when I heard my cell ring. I grabbed it and regretted my doing so the moment I pressed the green button. It was from the rental office reminding me I hadn't given them the check. Dammit! I rushed out as fast as I could to the bank nearby, got a cashier's check and dropped it off on my way to work.

9:55
Well, the bad streak continued when I realized I was lost and didn't remember how to get onto 270 N. After a couple of miles, I decided to ask and pulled into a gas station. The lady there sounded a little peeved at my query for no reason (probably she was expecting I'd buy something) and reluctantly showed me the way. I drove off at top speed, only to realize the fuel indicator on my car was hovering below the
E-for-empty mark. I was in a gas station a minute ago dammit! Another exit and 10 minutes wasted in filling up my new baby - a sleek Saturn Coupe.

10:12
I drove the 25 miles to work at the top speed my car could make, thankfully all the cops were on the other side catching cars going in the rush hour traffic (I was going against traffic, the sole reason for living on this side of town rather than that!) ..

10:45
Sliding into the first spot available in the lot, I rushed towards the building, all the while thinking that I should take the entrance farther away from my boss' cube. But it was "the" day, and I had to be a dimwit. So, I took the wrong entrance, and there she was, coffee mug in hand talking to one of my teammates. She smiled. I smiled. She smiled again. And I muttered I got lost on the highway and it was my first day in my new house and there was no gas in my car and I had to drop off a check at my rental office - you know, all the standard reasons that anybody would have given to escape a late entry, except that I gave all of them in one go and that made it look all the more fishy.

10:55
Sweating, I slid into my seat thinking what else could go wrong in an already cracked-up morning, when this cup of coffee landed on my neighbor's table from his hand, spilling half of it on my laptop.

Home

We made a trip home recently. During Jan-Feb. It had been just 2 months since I visited India, but for my wife, it was a visit after 2 years, to the day.

I was bent upon telling my wife all the time that it would be a rocking-shocking experience. But the optimist that she is, she kept hoping that Mumbai would've been cleared of its slums and Bangalore of its dust. I was secretly hoping the same, but I am normally closer to reality that she is, so I was not disappointed. The slums thrived, the roads choked, the traffic had grown 5 times, and the cricket team had lost 2 matches. But the indomitable Indian spirit showed no sign of waning.

We displayed the usual symptoms upon arrival - scared to drive or cross roads, wary of water, and the like. And we did the usual NewYorkers-VadaPav-Frankie circuit, visited friends, ate at Tendulkar's, attended a party hosted by her mom and then headed to Agra to catch a glimpse of the Taj before someone bombed it.

Down South, the sambar was sizzling and the new bahu was dazzling. My bro tied the knot and flew off to Goa to bask in the sun and spice up with mackarel curry and his new found love. While we kept saying - 3 weeks 2 short!

Before we knew, we were in the dry-cold-claustrophobic confines of a 747 en route to LAX, where an INS officer smiled at us and did not say "aliens", but said "Welcome". A welcome change!

It's amazing how we "aliens" (the INS thinks Air India flies from Mars) have seen the past two years fly by in an alien land. How we arrived here, how we went from the mundane to the more interesting things life had to offer, how we fell in love, how we said "i do" in chorus, how we greeted every morning with a radiant smile and every evening with a thank you. Is it the land? Is it the people? Or is it just us who cast this magic spell that makes time fly, winters warm and the water sweet? What it is is of no concern. We just feel happy that we have arrived.

Christmas Collage

 
 

Snowman on my XMas Tree!

 
 

X.M.A.S !

 
 

Questions

When it comes to understanding nature, man has been like a baby all through history. Just the way a baby constantly keeps looking around taking every bit of detail about every little thing around it with wide-eyed amazement, constantly grasping things and feeling them, hearing a multitude of sounds and trying to decipher what each one means, so has man been striving through the ages to comprehend the vastness and depths of nature. From making the wheel to growing paddy to the industrial revolution to the space age and information technology, man has been sitting around, arms stretched out, picking up pebbles and blades of grass with curiosity, understanding what they are and putting them to his use, making gadgets and processes that benefit his kind.

This is amazing, if one considers what a conscious mass of neurons can achieve - right from becoming self-sustaining to making strides in a natural progression towards survival and enhancement. Glitches are a normal part of this progression. Be it colonization, Hiroshima, Chernobyl or clones. But that should not, and believe me, will not, stop this consciousness from marching along a path never seen or imagined before. It is Iraq today, tomorrow when we exhaust the resources around us, it will Mars or beyond. There seems no end to it. This leads us to a number of questions .. From the simple 'Is this the way Life should be?' and 'Is there no end to this?' to a more interesting one - 'Was Life itself a bad idea in the first place?!' .. These are lines along which sages have thought and can think further. There can be arguments, philosophies and schools of thought surrounding these questions, but there will never be answers. Answers which are absolute, steadfast and uncompromisingly complete.

6 hrs

Hmm .. Finally she's coming. In 6 hours to be precise.

It's been a considerably long month. Newlyweds staying away for a month isn't good for a lot of things ;) ... The arid landscape and prickly cacti didn't help. But finally the wait seems to be over.

The moment I landed in Phx 4 weeks ago, I had this impression of being a bachelor again, in the wild and all on my own. It sounded and felt adventurous to once again be venturing out without any responsibilities and all the confidence of a teen. The feeling lasted for some time. And then it began to wane. On the work front, it was all good and I had begun to like it. Even enjoy it if I might say so. But I had started missing her. It started with sleepless nights initially, and soon took the form of a flight ticket back to her one weekend. Three days flew by unnoticed, and I was on my way back to the desert. But this time, I knew that she would be with me shortly. Having set up a new house and car and all the basic stuff that we would need, I looked forward to meeting her. I killed time working and working out. I watched late night Thai movies trying to keep my mind occupied with anything other than the thought of her not being around. My! It wasn't a good time. But that seems to be a thing of the past now. 6 hrs - nopes, less than that - and she'll be here, with me, and I guess I'll no longer notice the thorns on the cacti but gaze agape at their magnificent height before a red-riot sunset!

Safety

This country is paranoid to the core, and growing by the minute. It's all about safety. It's all about security. It's always value-for-life. Anything that'll put your life in danger, I, the government, will take you away from it. I'll protect you. I'll put straps and cushions and airbags - front, side, overhead, passenger, up your ass - into your SUV. Why? To save you from having your brains turn into sushi and bowels into spaghetti in case you turtle off a highway cruising at a hundred! But what do these suckers do? They drive to 6 flags round the corner and pay a stash of bills to just be thrown from a 10 storey roller coaster and they call it thrill! I mean, I fail to comprehend! Where's the safety talk gone? People lllike adventure! People know they'll die! People know that if you start strapping NASCAR with a zillion safety features, it'll cease to be NASCAR and become TRAFFIC!

Grow up guys ..

Stockholm

The eerie silence creeps into me as I sit in the lounge staring at the vast expanse of pure white snow covering much of the landscape. The frigid layer extends as far as the eye can see, looking cold, dry and emotionless, criss-crossed by black tarmac. A couple of flights touchdown. A few take off.

I take in the scene in its entirety. And muse about how closely it mirrors what I'm feeling inside - peaceful, emotionless, strong on one side, while marred with doubts and misgivings about this venture on the other. Is this the right thing to do? Should I have waited a few more days so that I could have all the answers I'm looking for and then flown to the States? Well, that might've never been answered.

I'm in Stockholm, en route to Newark. It's three in the afternoon, but it's already getting dark outside. Too far up in the North this place is. Too silent. Too rich. Too inactive. Too eerie. Most of the off-city limits of Europe are like this. This seems no exception. For us people, who come from crowded, 2000 plus people per square km lands, these places no doubt seem scarily empty!

Why Blog?

Somebody asked me the other day - Why Blog? He was looking into these pages, and gave me a queer look and asked "Why Blog at all? What does it give you?"

Hmm .. Good question. A wise somebody once told me (was it my previous boss? i don't think so; can't be; he's not that type :) ) the meaning of "Good question" in meetings is an implicit "I don't know!" And he used to use it a whole freakin' lot. Always.

To me blogging provides a simple means of expression. I personally don't care who reads this or why, though I'd like somebody to read it. This kind of creative, dont-give-a-damn-for-anything freedom can be provided only by a medium as open and carefree as the Net, especially when big brother is watching your every move (keystroke?!). In here I sometimes write that I'm very happy I got married. And sometimes I groan about the apathetic attitude of people around, the government notwithstanding. Sometimes I pick wisecracks from other places - newspapers, websites - and paste them here, of course with due credits to the source :) .. At others, I write something that pops up in my mind just to please my wife. All in all, this place is a must visit every now-n-then for me.

Coming back to this somebody's question, it's not that I expect anything out of this. It's a vent to my feelings. It's more of a giving (get ridding?) than expecting, though historically (I mean the last couple of years .. how long has the Net been around anyways!) blogs have been a force to reckon with when it comes to forming and gathering public opinion. I remember reading an article, probably in The TIME Magazine, about how blogs were responsible for hurting President Bush's campaign, and how bloggers have amassed huge wealths by writing their minds out. All that's there, but not for me I suppose. I'm happy I'm writing. And that's pretty much it!

A Guy Thing

I feel one of my grand gender generalizations coming on, and I can't resist it, so here goes. Guys love to make lists. The assembling and codifying of useless information speaks to our inner math nerd, our rampant nostalgiast. Girls can play Little League baseball now, but the kid in the stands keeping the box score, and tallying individual achievements into season slugging percentages, is very likely to be a boy. Turning our pastimes into numbers is a way not only of quantifying but also of justifying them. They acquire an atomic weight; to rank them is to give them solidity, meaning.

~Richard Corliss, The TIME (www.time.com/time), justifying why they came up with the All TIME 100-Movies list last month. And why they didn't select Gone With The Wind.

Senses

I kept wondering the other day about my senses. Don't get me wrong, I haven't lost them. But, I kept wondering about them in the literal sense. How mine, and all our senses were created, and have developed and evolved over the ages to adapt to our surroundings. How life, experiencing the various forms of energy, chemicals and reactions around it, created "openings" in its body which were capable of receiving inputs of the chief and most "informative" forms of energy.

If you ever cared to notice, we don't have a sense organ to tell us that a tide is approaching, or that a particular place has high x-ray concentration. These simple examples seem to show two of the prime factors which have influenced the formation of sense organs - one, that senses have developed in response to the most "informative" energy forms and chemicals around us, and two, that they have developed in a very optimal manner, that is to say that there are just enough number of organs to help us understand 90% of our surroundings, thus avoiding an explosion of sensory inputs to an overtaxed brain. In order to get information from the remaining 10% of sources around us, we may have needed a hundred, or perhaps more, organs. But the need for these has been replaced by a more powerful structure - the rationally thinking brain. This brain more than makes up for the tidal, earthquake and x-ray sensors that would otherwise be sticking out of our beautiful bodies! How? By means of enabling animals, men in particular, develop artificial sensors for other forms of energy.

This line of thought leads us to believe that somewhere in the universe where there is life, if there is an abundance of say, gamma rays, than sound, the organisms there would be equipped with gamma ears. Do I believe in this theory? Yes. Have I seen any of those ears? No, obviously not :)

Perspective on life

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is
tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of
it? A death. What's that, a bonus?!? I think the life cycle is all
backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you go
live in an old age home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go
collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch
on your first day. You work forty years until you're young enough to
enjoy your retirement. You drink alcohol, you party, and you get ready
for High School. You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play,
you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back,
you spend your last 9 months floating with luxuries like central
heating, spa, room service on tap, then you finish off as an orgasm!!
Amen

The first (fort)night!

It's been a fortnight now. Two weeks gone like a whiff. Many more will go by this way. With the joys that they'll bring, like they have these past weeks. Bringing a smile onto my face every time I think of the day we met, the weeks we stayed together, the months of longing and belonging, and the years to come through which we'll be one soul.

We married this May 11th. Putting it all in perspective, it seems like a mixed bag. Some smooth rides - the main one being the absolute acceptance of our choice by our parents - and some strained blots, like the job-searches and the time we were settling down here in the US. But the one thing that stands out is the steadfast support we've shown each other during these times. You bet it'll be like this always!

The wedding itself wasn't too much of fanfare, like it is normally in India, with a horde of unknown relatives and friends who swarm the ceremonies, and the dulha-dulhan literally in tears in front of the Agni. Thank God for small mercies! Good sense prevailed and we married here. But the ceremonies and the party in the evening were hardly any different from how they'd be back home. Full scale, without the hundreds of people though. I'll post a link to the pictures sometime.

The aftermath has been quite interesting too. I've seen the transition of my bride from girl to woman and from daughter to dot-in-law. How she's smoothly slipped on the gown of familial responsibility and how her in-laws look upon her as the upholder of the family's traditions and values. At times it is fun to watch their discussions and at times it is interesting. Amidst all these, I sometimes feel I'm the only one yet to grow up. Not that I'm in any hurry!

A thought on Elections

Elections maintain the illusion of opposing parties exchanging ideas rather than political animals competing for power. Selling voting as the ultimate expression of citizenship serves two purposes: it legitimizes the process that keeps them in control and makes the public docile by enforcing the notion that we rule ourselves.

~Kara Hopkins (http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover5.html)

jalebi

my cube-mate at work returned from a long vacation in india .. he brought with him the customary sweets - burfis, jalebis and the like .. one of my colleagues, an american, ate a jalebi in the morning and liked it .. he came back a while ago asking for the "yellow-orange, gelatinous, pretzel-like thingie" :)

Google and April 1st!

Anybody keen enough to observe wouldn't have missed the interesting products that Google comes up with every year on Fool's day. Here's a peek at a few of those. Apologies for having missed out a couple of years in between ..


First they came up with MentalPlex^TM in 2000.

MentalPlex^TM

Then came the Pigeon Ranking Technology^TM which got quite a bit of limelight!

PigeonRank^TM

Opened their first offices on the Moon in 2004.

Lunar Office

And today, the all new Google Gulp^TM!

Google Gulp^TM

Watch out next year!

The woods

The woods are lovely dark and deep
But I have many promises to keep
And lines to code before I sleep ..
And lines to code before I sle ....
And lines to code bef .......