The Phlip Side

MBA is a TLA

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:35:00 +0000

MBAs became masters of arbit jargon by years of constant practice, starting with their 2 years in b-school. These finely honed skills translate to pompous execubabble like 'leveraging technological synergies' later on in their career. The starting point, however, is a small set of terms that form the basis for a successful career in BS-ing.

These are terms that are used on a day-to-day basis and convey complex meanings. Take 'globe' for example. If somebody was making a presentation and it was full of obvious facts, truisms and globally acceptable generalizations, a normal human being would have found it difficult to convey this feeling to another . However a MBA backbencher would immediately whisper 'globe', loud enough for the last 2 rows to hear. This leads to much nodding of heads and smiling. Talk about efficient communication.

Another word which conveys complex meanings is 'god'. Somebody who is remarkably good at something is god, or said to be at god-level. This has led to offshoots like fin-god, mark-god, etc. However, not everybody who is called god is a god. If you find yourself being called god, then be careful. Either you really are a god (highly unlikely) or being made fun of. One false step and you have to live with the consequences for the rest of your life. God-level reputations are carefully protected, whether it's a fin god or a prof.

A peculiar aspect of b-schools which takes some getting used to is the phenomenon of class participation or CP. Most profs have a part of the final grades set aside for the student's participation in classes. This leads to class dynamics that are hard to describe. Even before a prof has completed a sentence, 10 hands go up to give examples/refute the prof/seek clarification. CP gods are extremely good at hogging the air time, masterfully leveraging globe when they have nothing much to say. (See how I used 3 of the jargon I described above in one sentence?)

CP too has offshoots, some of them being RCP, ACP, DCP. Suppose you fell asleep in class and woke up suddenly to realize that the class has almost ended and you have just a few minutes to achieve your daily CP quota. You pick up the last few words that the prof uttered and string together an elaborate speech (globe, of course). That is Random CP. What happens if you didn't wake up in time to do CP? Then your only option is After-class CP, which is when you run after the prof after the class and ask arbit questions about some topic. A related concept is the 'ACP tail' that each prof has after class. It starts out with half a dozen people behind the prof immediately after class. Only the most desperate survive by the time the prof reaches his room, as described by the Law of Diminishing ACP Tail. Of course, some people are not successful in both of these, they resort to Desperate CP (DCP). The difference between DCP and the other 2 types is subtle, but while ACP may be genuine, DCP is never genuine. RCP is marked by a degree of skill and subtlety which DCP never has.

Whatever the type of CP, most people in class view it as a form of RG-giri. To put it simply, it is the opposite of Gandhigiri (Gandhigiri would be showing your friend the other assignment when he copies one assignment from you). It is a phenomenon resulting from the relative grading (RG) system used in IIMs. Suppose you have an assignment to submit tomorrow. As per norms, everybody waits for someone to do it first and email it to them. So you get an email at 4 am with the assignment. You sit down to copy it (if it is a handwritten assignment) or 'customize' it (if it is a soft-copy or printed submission). You go to sleep at 5 am, satisfied with your work. When the graded assignments come back to you with a zero, you realize that the assignment emailed to you was 'Engel Curve for Bangalore' when in fact you had to submit 'Okun's Law for Australia'. Obviously, only one person in the class did the assignment properly and no points for guessing who. Thankfully, RG-giri of this proportion does not happen and has been mentioned only for the purpose of explanation of the concept.

If you wonder where your manager learnt to be a ~~lazy-ass~~ smart worker instead of a hard worker, the answer is b-school. By second term, all students become masters F-riders (also knows as FRs or Fracs). In the 5 or 6 projects that have to be done in a term, each person tries to attain F-rider position in at least 2. Some guys F-ride in all their projects - they are the perfect smart workers who know that somebody or the other in their group is desperate for grades and will end up doing the project before the deadline. Some guys are so poor at it that they end up contributing to every project. Obviously, the optimum level is somewhere in between if you want to survive b-school.

Back to School

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:41:00 +0000

The last week before end-term exams is the best time to sit back and reflect about the term gone by. After 2 straight sleepless nights, the body just refuses to go on any more. I need sleep. I need some diversion. The 2 quizzes and 2 project report presentations tomorrow can wait.

They call it b-school for a reason. It is practically like going back to the schools we went to as kids with a hundred times the work load. After the laissez-faire life of engineering college, you expect post-graduation to be even more so. Nothing could be farther from the truth:

School	Engineering College	B-school
You carry a 10 kg bag to class everyday	Bags? Notebooks? Textbooks?	You carry a 7 kg bag + 3 kg laptop to class everyday
You attend all classes. Bunking has not entered our vocabulary. Proxy is unheard of.	You can get through engineering without knowing where the classrooms are	You attend all classes. Bunking has disappeared from your vocabulary because of grade drops in case of attendance shortage. Proxies have been eliminated by fixed seating with name tags and attendance sheets with photographs.
You carry water bottles to class	You don't go to classes, remember?	You carry water bottles filled with Red Bull to keep awake
You fight tooth and nail over half a mark	Did I pass? Yes!	You fight tooth and nail over one quarter of a mark
You do homework every day. Teachers check your work	If you do homework or assignments, you are ostracized from student community for the rest of your life	You do homework every day. Teachers check your assignments.
You are desperate to gain the attention and approval of teachers	Oh! You mean that bald guy is our FluMech prof?	You are desperate to gain the attention and approval of teachers

In fact, the only way in which engineering college is similar to b-school is the ratio of males to females. As they say in Malayalam, paapi chellunidam paatalam (hell is wherever the sinner goes). Since most of the people getting into IIMs are engineers, it is only natural that ratios remain the same. If you are really lucky, you land up in a b-school which has more than 15% girls. Whatever the case, remember than girls in b-schools have the extra weapon of the knowledge of supply and demand and hence in a much better position to exploit the power that comes with such a position.

One good thing about MBA is that you get to learn a variety of subjects. My favourite subjects in this respect so far have been Microeconomics and Legal Aspects of Management. Having a god-level prof for Micro is a double edged sword, though - the classes are interesting (interspersed with Asterix, Sherlock Holmes and Maradona), but he asks questions that nobody can answer. But scarier and more interesting still is a god+1-level QAM prof with a penchant for surprise quizzes. Organizational Behavior turned out to be a more interesting subject than I thought. The subject is so different from what the HR types make it out to be when you are working (of course, my aversion to HR will return the moment I start working again). These subjects have opened my eyes to new ways of looking at life and business. These also happen to be the most scary subjects I have to negotiate in the coming few days.

Oh! I forgot about football under lights and insti parties. But it is 3 am now. Can't waste any more time. It's back to assignments and exams. Sigh.

Lucknow by Chance

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:27:00 +0000

There are two thoughts that catch the fancy of every adult Mallu male at least once in his life. The first is the idea of starting a bar - you even make plans for sourcing some good duty-free liquor through Gafoor ka dost in Dufai. That idea dies its natural death when the hangover wears off. The second is the thought of doing an MBA.

The latter thought is a more dangerous one, because once it catches hold of you it never goes away. Just when you think you've survived it, it comes back in the month of May like prickly heat. A normal Mallu will succumb to it, and 4 years ago, towards the end of 3rd year of engineering, I did too.

In May of 2005 in NIT Nagpur, aided by the searing white heat of Central India, certain changes started occuring in my brain. By the start of the final year in July, the transformation was complete and I started to understand what the others in my class were talking about - CAT, cutoffs, percentiles, etc. It was like the brotherhood of the insane. My vocabulary thus enhanced, it now made sense to me why Vikas was always reading Jeffrey Archer (to improve his English) or why Khoda started subscribing to Economic Times instead of One-Porn-Pic-a-Day Times (to understand bulls, bears and earnings per share).

And so, in November 2008, after many such itches had come and gone, I wrote CAT again. ~~Properly convinced~~ Convincing myself that I was doing the right thing (I now had work experience - 'workex' in b-school aspirant lingo), I had spent many many hours figuring out whether Chunnu or Munnu would reach point B faster and how much Jaikishen owed Ramkishen. Something seems to have clicked, because I got an obscene percentile and an admit in IIM Lucknow.

So for the next 2 years, the city of Nawabs and kebabs and Mayawati statues will be my home as I struggle to join the league of people who caught the itch and lived to see it through. Needless to say, blogging will be intermittent, if at all (ok, less frequent than my current infrequent posting). See you all somewhere along the way.

My New Obsession

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:45:00 +0000

I finally did it. Bought the camera that I promised all of you I would buy. Well, not exactly the DSLR I had hoped to buy, but something halfway there. So I have followed my heart, but only after paying heed to Rags' words of good old fashioned wisdom. It's a happy compromise in my opinion. Doesn't pinch my pocket too much and the camera is good enough to take very decent shots.

I bought the Cybershot H10. I can already see the purists go 'yuck'. But when you consider that it costs only half as much as an entry level DSLR, has full manual mode (which admittedly is not very user friendly, but full manual nevertheless), 10x zoom and adapter for lenses, it's not too bad a bargain. In the 2 days since I laid hands on it, I've drained the battery twice doing all sorts of experimentation. It looks pretty good so far and I hope to get some nice outdoor shots soon. The way things are going, I might get an extended break in Kerala around the time monsoon hits - a mouthwatering prospect.
So I thought I'd use my recently learnt skills in photography to take a picture to accompany this post. It's almost full moon outside, so I went up to the terrace and fiddled around with aperture, shutter speed and sensitivity. After 15 minutes of trying, I got a decent shot of the moon, one which showed up the craters and all. I ran down, excited like a kid who was given a birthday gift in advance, and showed the photo to Mono. He looked at it and said, 'OK'. Then he went back to doing what he was doing before I disturbed him. It was just 'OK'. It was just the moon. And the 'craters' were more like dark patches on white marble. So I guess you'll have to wait a bit more to see some respectable shots from my new camera :)

[Picture courtesy cnet]

Sleaze and Wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:07:00 +0000

He was certain that those were pretty much the raunchiest lines he had read in his 9 years of existence. It was confusing, because he had not expected those lines in a book that had been thrust into his hands much to his dislike, to be read and followed in life; and that too by his mother, of all the people.

As Mac, his trusted advisor in matters of sleaze, turned the pages and introduced him to the eroticism of Song of Songs, the confusion gave way to wonder.

“Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.”

Wow, he thought. Sunday school might not be as boring as he thought it would be. He started doubting the wisdom of having resisted his parents’ attempts to send him to Sunday school for 2 years. Duck Tales on Doordarshan suddenly looked less appealing than ‘breasts like a cluster of grapes’.

‘When are they going to teach us all this stuff?’

Mac gave him a smile of derision, like a man who had seen it all. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘You should explore and find all the stuff yourself.’

‘You mean there is more?’

‘Yeah! Even dirtier stuff.’

He dared not ask Mac to show him the rest of the stuff. Good kids, which he definitely was one, did not go around reading dirty stuff. But his look said it all. Mac felt elated at this elevation of stature – he was one of the big boys now.

‘Ok. But I don’t have much time. Note down the chapters and verses and read it at home,’ said Mac, quickly flicking through the pages to find the sections of interest.

He suddenly felt a deep sense of appreciation for the genius who had introduced numbering of verses in the bible.

While he was furiously jotting down Mac’s lecture notes, the teacher had noticed that 2 kids in the last bench weren’t paying attention.

‘So what gift would you have asked from God if you were given a chance like King Solomon?’ the teacher asked him in an attempt to get their attention back.

All eyes in class were on him. He was thinking furiously to figure out what was being discussed in class before his attention had wandered to more interesting things.

Oh yes, the story of the wise king Solomon and God’s offer to give him anything he wanted. He knew the ‘right’ answer, of course – wisdom. But then the teacher had been specific – what would he have asked from God. Even his 9 year old brain could figure out that what worked for Solomon need not work for him, the requirements were completely different, especially with the demands of the modern world. Besides he figured that he had tonnes of wisdom already.

‘I would ask for a helicopter,’ he replied with a sincere expression on his face.

*****

That evening he started an in-depth study of the Bible which would last several weeks, much to the surprise of his parents. The scholarship he had gained over the weeks made him confident about facing Sunday school exams. To his disappointment though, not a single question was asked from the sections he had meticulously researched. That year, he set a record of sorts in the exams, scoring an unprecedented 2 marks out of 100. He has not yet figured out how he got those 2 marks.

*****

He still maintains that a helicopter is a damn fine choice. Try commuting in Chennai if you are not convinced.

A Conversation With The Man With No Desires

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:46:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, it was that time of the year. Birthday. And I had this conversation my friend Rags, the Man with No Desires.

Me: So it's my birthday tomorrow, you know. I'm thinking of getting something I've really wanted for a long time.

Rags: What do you want?

M: A nice camera, something semi-DSLRish

R: And you want a camera because...

M: Always wanted one. I think there is a budding photographer in me. Some of the shots I took with Rahul's DSLR were awesome. Imagine what I could be doing with a little practice.

R: 3 things - First, there is something known as beginners luck. Secondly, any random shot with a DSLR looks good to a guy who has seen only point-and-shoot cameras in his life. Thirdly, those were awesome? Don't kid yourself.

M: Hey, that's mean!

R: Ok son, how much are we talking about for this 'little practice' sessions?

M: Around 25k. But it's totally worth it. I mean, you buy a camera like this only once, right? If I don't buy it now, imagine the number of photo ops I will be missing out on. And I'll be missing many years that I could have used to hone my photography skills.

R: So let me break this down - you want to take pictures, hence you want a camera. Good. But why do you want to buy a camera. You know I heard this kind of arguments from Raj before he bought his ultra expensive camera. He disregarded my advice and now it's gathering dust in his cupboard. Why don't you borrow it from him for a week or so? He will be more that willing to lend it to you. Keeps the moving parts in the camera working.

M: Hey, why do you have to be such a damp squib? I didn't ask you for objective analysis of the options available to me. I should have just talked to Badri. He wouldn't have spoiled my enthu with eminently well-reasoned arguments against buying a camera.

R: Son, haven't you heard of the recession sweeping across the globe? Trust me, you need the cash now. Buy whatever you want a year from now. Not now.

M: Hmm. You're right. I won't buy the camera. I think I'll buy an iPod. eBay has some great offers, plus they have given me some good vouchers.

R: Don't you see what's happening here? You've fallen into the consumerist trap prepared for people with disposable income like you. You really don't need anything. You just need to splurge on some gadget to feel good on your birthday. Go watch a good movie, go for a trek, have a good dinner, take a stroll on the beach. There are tonnes of stuff you can treat yourself with on your birthday.

M: Shit! I should have not talked to you at all.

So I ended up not buying anything for myself. Just like all the 24 birthdays before this one. I was seriously beginning to become one of them - people who think spending money on expensive and ~~useless~~ not very useful gadgets is justified just because it's your birthday. So next time you feel the itch to use your credit card at eBay, read this post.

PS: I just realized that if I applied this logic to all my purchases, I'd be living the life of an hermit. And Rags is going to B-school this fall. I wonder how he will encourage consumer spending as a future business leader.

Smell the Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:31:00 +0000

One of the things that I keep thinking on and off is how technology that is very familiar to us will be in the future. Consider movies for instance. Conventional thinking suggests that movies of today have all the ingredients in terms of technology that one would want in a cinema experience. But there are certain critical elements that are missing. This is similar to asking cinema viewers in mid 20th century what more they wanted in a movie and they’d have looked askance and wondered what more they’d want. Then came along cinemascope and Technicolor. For a long time, that was the final frontier. There were moving (colour) pictures on screen, there was sound and music. Everything seemed to be great. Until somebody noticed that normal human vision is not 2-D, it’s 3-D.

Most often, technologies in films aim at imitating life as much as possible. The closer one gets to life, the better. Therefore, computer graphics and animation is judged by how close to everyday experiences or ‘realistic’ it is. We’ve had 3-D films for a while now, although it has never really taken off. Everything’s perfect, right? I was thinking so until I realized that one critical element of what a person experiences in life is missing in films – the sense of smell. Imagine smelling gunpowder when the guns go off in period films; imagine smelling roses and lilac while watching mushy romantic scenes; imagine smelling blood and rotting flesh in horror movies and thrillers. The sense of smell will add a new dimension to movies the way sound and later visual effects did. It will give a filmmaker new tools to convey his ideas to the viewer. Very soon, we will have an ‘olfactory effects team’ in addition to the sound and visual effects team in films.

I know that some research has been going into recreating a smell, but I don’t know how successful researchers have been in their efforts to record and play back smells the same way that they are able to do with sight and sound. Essentially there should be
a) a device which produces a chemical or physical change when exposed to the smell,
b) a way of preserving that change in a form that is portable or which can be encoded into specific formats (digital/magnetic, etc.)
c) a way in which these encoded information can be read later on.

Although it sounds uncomplicated enough, I’m sure it’s not that easy – otherwise we’d already have that technology. A quick and lazy search on Google threw up only a couple of useful/working links. Here and here.

Part of the difficulty is that while light and sound have been quantified in terms of frequencies, wavelengths and amplitudes in such a way that it can be reproduced exactly at another location without any loss of information, smell has not yet been completely quantified in terms of two or three variables with which we can completely define it. Once we identify say, the 10 different variables that define what smell is, all one needs to do is to combine x parts of variable 1 with y parts of variable 3 and z parts of variable 8 to generate the smell of the exquisite fish curry that the chef is making on his cookery show.

What made me think about this now? It’s seeing Jamal Malik run towards Amitabh Bachchan covered in shit. How much more effect would it have had if the stench reached the nostrils of people watching in room freshenered Inox?

Kal, Aaj aur Kal

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:14:00 +0000

I was tagged by Silverine a long long time ago. This is one of the good tags going around and I'm glad I finally got down to doing it.

The Tag

Two questions from the past, present and future. Answer them and then tag your friends from the blogosphere. Leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been tagged and you are done.

Yesterday

Your oldest memories...

This is a tough one because of two reasons:

1. Although I have a lot of old memories, I can't place in chronological order my memories before I started school. Once I started school, I always had the girl who I had a crush on as a frame of reference.

2. Many of my early memories have been corrupted by old sepia-tinted photographs in family albums. In many cases, I don't know whether I actually remember those incidents or I just construct those events in my mind from the photos.

Having said that let me write about an incident that must have happened when I was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old which I remember very clearly.

At that time, my family was staying in our tharavad in Ernakulam. As with most Syrian Christian families, church was an integral part of the way of life and the achan in the local idavaka used to drop in fairly regularly. One day, as I woke from my forced afternoon siesta, I happened to notice that appa was in the middle of what looked like an interesting conversation with achan. One look at the two of them standing in the courtyard talking was enough to make me start bawling. To this day I don't know why I did that. I felt something wrong about the whole scene (probably a distrust of religion and men clad in fancy-dress which I felt at that small age?). All I know is that I wanted the conversation to stop immediately. So I kept bawling till appa came and lifted me off the mattress. I could see that appa was pretty irritated, especially because I was exceptionally well-behaved kid normally and never gave any trouble.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Feb 2009, I was in 9th standard. Feb-March was a good time of the year, in spite of the final exams lurking around the corner. School annual day function, lengthening days (which meant more time to play in the evenings), birthday - so many things to look forward to. 9th standard was probably the last year of my life when I didn't have to think about 'future' and 'career'. And Valentine's Day figured nowhere in my calender (some things never change).

Today

Went turtle egg hunting through the night. Almost the whole of Chennai was there when we started. 8 kilometres and 152 eggs later, only the craziest people were left. Slept on Elliot's Beach after the walk. Highly recommended, because it will remove all romantic notions associated with sleeping under the open sky on the beach sands - it was so friggin' cold. The mean land breeze made it impossible to sleep and by 5 O'clock I was shivering. In Chennai. In spite of my windcheater.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?

My laptop, old photographs and a letter to future generations from The Phlip Side.

Tomorrow

I'm off for some serious trekking (not the picnicy kind). If I make it through, I'll try posting some pics.

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?

Lots of meditation, I guess. I'm going to need all the peace and tranquility to survive in an even madder and crazier world.

How I Went to Goa

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:07:00 +0000

How did Philip manage to go to Goa when the rest of the team had to undergo The Review and that too barely 15 days after he got back from a 2 week vacation to Kerala?

a) He lied about the death of an imaginary uncle
b) He had the sweetest of bosses
c) His boss wanted to get some work done and getting rid of him was the only way to do it.
d) It was written

7pm. 38 hours to go for The Review. 3 hours left for me to catch my bus to Goa. I'm wondering - how did I get into this mess? It was never meant to be this messy. I'd planned the vacation to start a good 10 days after the review. But, as luck would have it, the review got postponed. Twice. Hence the mess.

The project team is tense in anticipation. 38 hours to go for the biggest review our project has had. The powerpoint presentations are done and we are brainstorming on what could go wrong during the review. Many disastrous scenarios are being contemplated (which only leads to further worry) and escape routes being finalized. My mind is in turmoil. I'm waiting for a lull in the discussion or a coffee break or a blackout - anything to get 2 minutes to 'pop the question' to Boss in private. How do I ask with so many of my teammates around?

If ever there was a wrong time to ask for a vacation in Goa, this was it. It meant ditching your team in its greatest hour of need.But not asking meant cancelling air tickets and hotel reservations. I had never been to Goa in my 24 years of existence, because of which I've had to endure much ridicule from friends who believed that you've never had a real vacation until you go to Goa. What if I don't get the opportunity to go to Goa again for a another couple of years? What if I never get to go to Goa as a bachelor?

7.15 pm. I've been carrying the burden of this question for the whole day. Now there seems to be no hope. What I couldn't do in 9 hours won't happen now. I sigh resignedly and message Badri and Mono to go ahead. I will not be able to make it.

They message me back - Dude, stop being an asshole and ask him. We are tired of waiting here. Remember we agreed to go to Goa only because you'd never been there. Otherwise we're all cancelling.

Oh shit. Now I have to carry the burden of having screwed my friends' plans too.

"Ok. I think we can wind up for today. Since most of the work is done, you guys are free to decide what to do tomorrow. Just be available on the phone to give some clarification if I require it," says Boss.

A relieved team mumbles an OK in unison as they reach for their bags to pack up.

"Philip, where are you planning to go tomorrow? Corporate or Tech Centre? I suggest you come to Corp tomorrow. We need to refine some cost and BOM slides".

*Gulp*. It is now or never.

"V, I think we need to have a chat about that," I reply.

"Oh. You want to take the day off tomorrow?"

"I think we need to have a really long chat." My heart is pounding in my chest.

"Hmm...why do I get the feeling that you want to bunk The Review and go home for 4 days?"

Damn. Bosses and their sixth sense.

"Actually, yes." I didn't want to correct him and tell him I was planning to go to Goa, not home. Wrong time to correct boss.

The whole team turns to me. My audacity has elicited emotions ranging from admiration to anger.

"OK. No problem. Since you are not actually presenting anything I think we can manage."

And that was it. I did it. It was so easy!

I run out of the conference room we're sitting. I high-five a couple of guys on the way. I call Badri while running and yell, "Dude, turns out we are going to Goa after all."

d) It was written.

The Love Tag

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:10:00 +0000

I was tagged by Cris a long long time ago. When I finished this a week back, I had actually sat down to write about the the Mumbai terrorist attack. But sense of weariness overcame me, and I was left asking myself, 'What's the point?' Ergo, this tag. However, love seemed like an inconsequential (even vulgar) thing to post about when the country was going through hell. Now seems to be a better time to post this one than yesterday, or the day before.

RULE #1 People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blogs and replace any question that they dislike with a new question formulated by themselves. (I'm not going to replace any, though)

RULE #2 Tag 6 people to do this quiz and those who are tagged cannot refuse. These people must state who they were tagged by and cannot tag the person whom they were tagged by. Continue this game by sending it to other people.

1. If your lover betrayed you what would your reaction be?

After the betrayal, would there be any point in reacting? Obviously I'll be hurt, and will want to convey that to her. But I'm not sure in what way. I'm also not sure whether I'll be able to forgive or trust her after that. I think it will depend on the exact nature of 'betrayal'. It's better to deal with each of those acts on a case-to-case basis rather than generalize. And I hope I won't have to deal with too many such cases.

2. What’s it that you see in an ideal partner?

An ideal partner would be sensible (probably because I'm scared of having to spend my life with an unreasonable person). She would also be a confident individual, not afraid to take her own decisions. But most importantly, an ideal partner would be a person with whom I'll feel confident of making everything work out together. In short, somebody like Penelope Cruz or Salma Hayek.

3. What, according to you, is the perfect date?

A perfect date is one which you hope will never end.

4. Would you like to have children soon enough? Or would you wait till your mid-thirties for the first child?

Frankly, I don't have a preference in this matter. I will leave it to my partner to decide on when to have kids. I'm ok with anything, except that I wouldn't want kids within the first 2 years of us getting together.

5. Will you fall in love with your best friend?

Assuming that my best friend is a girl, I don't see any reason why I shouldn't fall in love with my best friend.

6. Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?

Being loved by someone.

7. How long do you intend to wait for someone you love?

Until it becomes clear to me that the person I love doesn't love me and won't be able to love me.

8. If the person you secretly like is attached, what will you do?

Forget about it and move on.

9. If you could root for one social cause, what would it be?

Education for all.

10. Do you lie?

Yes. Duh!

11. Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?

In even deeper shit than I'm in now. But during these 10 years I'll learn to handle it better than I do now. That skill will help me a lot when my kid(s) accuse me of being a stupid jerk, my wife says I'm an insensitive bastard and my subordinates at work think I'm an asshole.

12. What’s your fear?

Dying.
Terrorist attacks (related to point #1).

13. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?

From what I understand through her blog, the following:

no pretenses
courageous, for choosing to do what she really wants to do.

14. Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?

In other words: What is more important to you? Money or a nagging wife with a couple of pesky kids to boot. Money can't be that important, right? I think I'll settle for the nagging wife and pesky kids.

15. If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who will you pick?

The one who has fallen in love with me.

16. Would you give all in a relationship?

Yes. There's no other way in a relationship. Not that I'd know for sure, though.

17. Would you forgive and forget someone no matter how horrible a thing he has done?

Refer Q.1. Case-by-case consideration. Obviously, some people I like very much will have to do a lot of horrible things to be not forgiven.

18. Do you prefer being single or in a relationship?

In the absence of experience in the latter, I can only guess. As of now, I'd prefer to be in a relationship - at least to know what that whole thing feels like. Maybe because the grass always looks greener on the other side.

19. Your all time favourite song. Only ONE. And why?

At the risk of repeating myself over and over (I don't know how many times I've mentioned this on this blog): Ambalapuzhe Unnikannanodu Nee. Do I even need to explain?

I now choose thee to carry on this onerous task:

Sid, because you are tag hunting

Badri, because you 'spilled the beans'

Raghav, ~~because~~ in spite of you wanting to sleep with Tendulkar (hence proving that you know nothing about love)

Anupama, because you blog about weighty and esoteric matters like love.

Add Another to the Third World List

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:24:00 +0000

In between all the chatter that the Aussie cricketers keep indulging in, both on and off the field, Hayden's comment about Australia's poor over rates being due to 'third world conditions' in India was most hilarious and decidedly WTF.

Now, I'm one of those guys who have lots of respect for Aussie cricketers. When an Aussie makes a statement I tend to believe it unless proved otherwise. Especially since they take it very personally if you doubt their honesty and integrity. That leads me to one question: Now that Aussies have been fined again for low over rates, this time in a test match in Australia against New Zealand, does Hayden still stand by his theory? There are only 2 ways about it - either Hayden accepts that his theory was wrong or he believes that Australia is a third world country.

From what I've seen of the arrogant, stubborn members of the current Australian team, I have a feeling they'd call their country a third world country before admitting they were wrong.

Vaaranam Aayiram - A Review

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:30:00 +0000

I will remember this movie for a long time - particularly the scene where the character Surya (played by Surya) breaks down while talking to his parents after [spoiler alert!!] his girlfriend Meghna (Sameera Reddy) dies. He tells his father, 'We made love, daddy' while sobbing inconsolably. I have a feeling the director meant this line to convey the pain and anguish of the hero. But I was left wondering - So?

The feeling you get while watching this movie is that Gautham Menon is one confused director. He wants to make an action movie, a drug junkie drama, a mushy love story, a lovey-dovey family movie, a retro movie and a Dasavatharam-like movie. Unable to choose among these options, he puts it all together in a single movie and ends up achieving nothing. Note to the director: Some things don't mix, like curd rice and fish curry. But you can always have curd rice for lunch and fish curry for dinner and everyone can have a nice satisfied burp at the end.

The movie is supposed to be about the bond between a father and son (both played by Surya). However it totally fails to connect at that level. The director's idea of depicting the father-son bond is to show them crying every 5 minutes and having them say 'I love you, daddy' or 'I love you, kiddo' every time they take a breath. If I had a dollar each time Surya said 'daddy', I'd have had enough money to bail out Wall Street and General Motors. On second thoughts, I'd have made that much money even if I got only a rupee for each time, in spite of the declining exchange rates. By the end of the movie all the main characters have said 'I love you, Surya' so many times that you half expect the rescued lady journalist to look deeply into his eyes and say, 'I think I have fallen in love with you, Surya'. But I'm jumping the gun. We'll come to all that in due course.

To be fair, the movie isn't all bad. There's Sameera Reddy. She was the one of the few reasons I could sit through the movie. She looks fresh and beautiful and does a decent job with the acting. It's a pity that the director killed her character off just before the interval. He could have kept her on for a few songs more - even as a ghost or something (it would have fit in with the director's strategy of including every possible genre). But while she's there as an MS student at Berkeley, the movie goes along in a comprehensible manner (if you choose to ignore the question of how a jobless Surya manages to get a visa to go to US).

But after she's gone, the director completely loses the plot. A desolate Surya comes back from US and immediately starts crying more and takes to drugs. I wouldn't blame him. I mean, he has sex with Sameera Reddy and upon returning to India finds out that the next girl he's supposed to fall in love with is Priya (Divya Spandana) - a huge fall in quality, if you ask me. The family's way of dealing with the drug problem is to lock him up in his room for two days and then send him packing to Kashmir, of all the places. Surya, on the banks of the Dal Lake, miraculously loses all craving for drugs and goes off to Delhi to fight kidnapping and child prostitution rackets. Phew! As if that wasn't enough, he then decides to join the Indian Army. And as per the stringent requirements of the Indian Army for new recruits, he builds six-pack abs which he goes around showing off for the rest of the movie (Om Shanti Om, anyone?). The quality of the abs is so good that he immediately gets promoted to the rank of Major. It is around this time that he leads a mission to rescue the journalist who, surprisingly, doesn't say those 3 dreaded words. And I'm eternally thankful to the director for sparing me that torture.

The music is the only highlight of the movie (apart from Sameera, of course). Some good songs by Harris Jayaraj really helps one sit through the movie. For once, you'll be thankful for a liberal peppering of songs which do not contribute to the story in any way.

If I were to look at the movie objectively, I'd have to say that it has something for everyone. A ravishing beauty for guys like me, rippling six-pack abs for girls who like such rippling six-pack possessing hunks, tearjerker scenes for the sentimental types, romance (3 of them!) for people so inclined and action for those whose movie experience is incomplete without exploding helicopter gunships and rocket launchers. However, a movie is not judged objectively. It is judged as a whole, by the effect it has on the viewer. In this case, the sum was lesser than the least of all the parts. And it makes me wonder if Kaaka Kaaka was nothing more than a fluke.

Laying to Rest the Ghosts of Dada

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:51:00 +0000

Sourav Ganguly will no longer step on to a cricket field donning the whites of a player of the Indian cricket team. Flowery tributes have been written and even his most fervent critics have given their spleen a rest and applauded his lasting contributions to Indian cricket. This is not an attempt to pay tribute, nor is it a fault-finding mission. This is an attempt to reconcile and put to rest the conflicting and enigmatic feelings that Ganguly evoked in me over the 12 years that he played active test cricket.

To be sure, I'm no fan of Ganguly. Never been, in fact. Even as he was making a majestic hundred on debut and showing the Englishmen gaps in the offside that they never knew existed , I sensed something amiss. As a 12 year old unaware of the controversy surrounding his selection at that point, I could only go by his cricket in forming that judgement and the feeling I had then hasn't changed appreciably in the last 12 years. During these years, Ganguly did what no other Test captain had done for India - redeem a side hovering around the brink, rebuild it with fresh talent and give it a killer spirit that has remained with it ever since. He also went about amassing runs in the most beautiful ways possible - caressing the ball through the covers and using nimble feet to step down the track against spinners and hitting handsome sixes over long-on.

All along, I used to wonder how a player who I had a bad feeling about could be so successful. Having yourself proved wrong is painful at the best of times. During the worst of times it got so bad that I almost wanted him to fail when he stepped out on to the field. It could have been the fact that Ganguly was no great athlete; or his awkward prod at balls that bounced to waist height; or his tardy fielding and running between wickets. Yes, it should be these reasons, for I greatly admire cricketers who are good all-round sportsmen - Tendulkar, Symonds, Yuvraj Singh, Rohit Sharma and I have an instant distrust of cricketers who don't show such abilities. I fear now that I equated athleticism and skill alone with cricketing success.

Maybe the fact that I didn't like Ganguly owes itself to the fact that he proved my presumptions wrong every single time. I used to think that his poor technique and over-reliance on the off-side for scoring runs would make him a disaster as a batsman in the long run. But he went on to make many thousand runs and formed a legendary partnership with Tendulkar at the top of the ODI batting line-up. Somehow, bowlers never 'figured him out' the way I thought they would. Was Ganguly too smart to be figured out that way? I used to think that his attitude and personality would not make him suitable for captaincy. He went on to break every captaincy record in Indian cricket. Could it be true that the very thing I didn't like about his personality was what enabled him to become a good captain? I used to think what I construed as his arrogance would inhibit the youngsters in the team. I couldn't have been more wrong on that front.

My dad used to tell me that he could never understand what I had against Ganguly. "Look at the way he's playing now. I can't believe you can hate a guy who plays like this," he used to say. I used to respond by cyincally saying that this would be his only good innings for another 20-30 innings. Many a times the batsman obliged, giving me more fuel for dislike.

Ganguly may not have been a great batsmen and he many not have lived up to my standards of what a good cricketer should be. But now, it doesn't matter. He's done with his game and his complete works are in front of us, to revere or hate. For every person like me who didn't like him, there are two more people who will vouch for his greatness. I've based my judgement on hunches and inferences which have been proved wrong many times. The near-unanimous opinion now is that he has left a legacy which India will do well to follow. No cricketer could ask for more.

Sourav Ganguly left Test cricket a happy man. I'm happy that things have transpired in such a manner. My observations were right, but my inferences were wrong. Looking back now, I'm glad that my predictions about Ganguly never came true fully. All of us go through our lives hoping that what we do will make a postive contribution to something big. From where Indian cricket was in 1996 to where it has now reached, Ganguly definitely has had a part to play in the progress. Ultimately, in the balance sheet of life, that's all that matters.

Map Mania

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:06:00 +0000

If you walked into the bedroom that my brother and I used to share more than a decade ago, you'd have been surprised by the sheer number of maps stuck on the walls. Other kids had Sportstar posters, we had maps. There were maps of the world, India, Kerala, Trivandrum in addition to a globe. One of our favourite games was one in which each of us would take turns to ask the other to find a particular place on the map. One of those days, appa brought home a wonder device - a Magellan GPS receiver. We didn't lose time in marking the latitude, longitude and altitude of our house on the maps. We were thrilled by the possession of secret knowledge - after all, how many people knew their exact location on this earth with such accuracy?

As we grew up, we stopped playing that game, and the maps came off one by one. But our love for maps continued. My brother makes maps for wikipedia as a hobby nowadays. Not to be left behind I too ventured into the area of internet maps - I downloaded Google Maps on my phone (hey, downloading it was pretty tough and it took me 3 days to get it to install; so don't laugh at the comparison).

Seriously folks, this is one of coolest applications that you can ever have on your phone. Haven't you always wished you knew how to get to some strange address in the city while travelling? Haven't you often wanted to know where the hell in the goddamn city you were? Haven't you gone to a new city and wondered whether the auto driver was taking you for a ride (metaphorically)? Haven't you wished you had some device in your pocket that would answer all the above questions?

Ever since I got this app, I haven't been able to stop myself from showing it off to everyone who happens to be near me. This is better than google maps on your computer for 2 reasons - firstly because you can view it on the go and secondly, it communicates with your phone to find out your current location which it shows using a nice blinking blue dot on the phone screen. I frequently open this application while travelling and see the blinking dot move around the city. You can also do a conventional search for any place and get directions to any location from your current location. All this is with a plain GPRS connection. I can imagine how good a 3G phone with touch screen and Android is going to be - nothing short of pure bliss.

There are many of you reading this and thinking that I could just ask for directions. But I'm one of those people who firmly believe that asking for directions is the most uncool thing anybody without google maps on their phone could do.

While you think about that, I'm off now, to show off this app to the kids in my flat who've come out to burst some crackers. If I can just catch them before they run away on seeing me with my phone...

Happy Diwali, folks.

Desperate Times

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:04:00 +0000

As a blogger/blog reader, you know that it's not the best of times when:

The unread items in Google Reader consistently shows over 200 unread items, in spite of your best efforts in hitting the 'mark all as read' button every few days.
You are reluctant to go to the original articles (when they provide only partial feeds) to read the full thing and/or comment for want of time.
Your only chance to catch up on the blogs is on your phone when you're travelling to and from work (and that gives me a bad headache).
The only time you think about your blog (crying for attention and post-less for more than a month) is when you're making things-to-do lists for your imaginary long vacation.
For the first time since college, your pile of unwashed clothes contains every single item in your wardrobe. This is in spite of the fact that I have not one, but two washing machines in the house compared to zero in college. [In case you are interested in buying a rarely used, good as new Haier washing machine, please email me asap. I promise you a great deal. Special offer only for my blogger pals. Please put 'Washing machine - Special Blogger Discount' in the subject line and pray that gmail doesn't send it to my spam mail.]

You guessed right, I have the the usual suspects to blame for lack of any blog activity in the last month - work (I'm talking 13-14 hours per day without the luxury of a holiday on Sundays). What makes me sadder is that things are only going to get madder from now on leading up to the big showdown around the end of this month. After that, I hope to get away from all this madness for 3-4 days with a bit of travelling. Then it's back to work again till my big break (fingers crossed!) around Christmas time.

As I type this, it sounds scary to me - what I'm looking at is 3 full months without a single post. That would be like a death knell for my blog, and I'm determined to not let that happen. Let's see how things pan out in the coming days. Meanwhile I've got a pending tag from Cris which I hope to do some time soon. Till then...

Phlipside's Speshaal Scrambled Yeggs

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:05:00 +0000

I make the best scrambled eggs in the world. Many people have asked me what makes my scrambled eggs special. I always reply that the most important part of making good scrambled eggs is to not think about making good scrambled eggs. People don't believe me and dismiss this advice as evasive philosophical bullshit. Doing a deed without expecting favourble results doesn't come naturally to most people and hence my scrambled eggs are easier for them to digest than the plain truths of life. But people, believe me when I say that I have no secret ingredient that goes into the frying pan. In fact, I don't have most of ingredients.

To prove my point, I've decided to open up my gastronomical skills to scrutiny. Here is the recipe of Phlipside's Speshaal Scrambled Yeggs:

Mix eggs, chopped onions, chillies, salt and beat the mixture. If you've run out of onions, chillies and/or salt (as is always the case with me) you can still make it. But you definitely require eggs. No, boiled eggs don't work.

Heat ~~coconut~~ mustard oil in a frying pan and pour the above mixture into the pan.

Now try to make an omelette. If you're as good at this as I am, at the point where you try to flip over the omelette, it will disintegrate into many different pieces as if by its own will and voila - you will be left with the finest scrambled eggs.

Don't fret if you're unsuccessful in your first few attempts and actually end up making an omelette. Although this failure has never happened to me, I'm told that ordinary mortals like yourself will take a little bit of time to understand the difference between flipping and Phlipping. If you are unsuccessful beyond the first few attempts, you should quit wasting your time.

I don't mean to be boastful and all, but what all this means is that I'm close to the culinary perfection that I started out to achieve a couple of years ago. Suddenly, the money I spent on the Cartini knife set (which could have fed 4 families in Sub-Saharan Africa for a week), non-stick cookware, pressure cookers and wine glasses looks like money well spent. Just like my BabolaT racquet, Yonex tennis shoes, Speedo swimsuit and goggles and membership fees in all these clubs. OK, I'm lying. My swimsuit is not Speedo.

Where's My Mojo?

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:16:00 +0000

Have I lost my mojo? More importantly, has my blog lost its mojo? The posting has not been up to the mark in the last month or so. There is no dearth of ideas or lack of inspiration for blogging. Neither is work eating into my personal time. So what's wrong, you ask. Something(s) very unexpected and v. bad has happened which has stifled my creative energies.

Firstly, people keep saying "I reserve my rights to blog about this" every time they screw up or do something very LOL-worthy. This effectively puts wonderful blog-ops beyond my (and consequently, your) reach. Its a typical dog-in-the-manger story. They are obviously not going to blog about it and advertise their bloopers to the world. And by reserving their rights to blog about it, they are preventing me from doing so. Even blooper-prone people who don't blog extract promises from me not to blog about bloopers as their first order of business after committing one. Such is the selfishness of the people around me.

Secondly, more than expected number of people in office read my blog nowadays. This is not a very safe situation if you want to indulge in some office humour. Boss bashing is definitely out of the question and one of these days some person who has found mention in this blog (and for some unknown reason is unhappy about it) is going to pass on the link to the Hot Marketing Babe.

Its not as if I get great amounts of pleasure in doing this - I'm doing it only for the benefit of mankind, the whole laughter-medicine business. So you guys stop thinking about just yourselves and imagine the good you can do for the world through my blog. This whole situation makes me think that these days you can't even do a good deed without people objecting to it.

So what exacty are you guys missing out on? The following is only a sample:

1. Sree's SMS story. Involving Boss, COO, me, Hot Marketing Babe, Hot New Engineering Grad Babes and of course, Sree himself. A tale of epic proportions, it's a story of how messed up things can get if you send a message to persons above or below the intended person in the contacts list.

2. Badri's visa story. If ever there was an international mess up, this is it. Spanning 8 cities in 6 countries and 3 continents, this one was outrageous even by Badri's own standards. This goof-up has become the new benchmark in our circles. The only way it's not going to appear on my blog is if he bribes me with Drambuie and Czech beer.

Now the inevitable will happen - you will demand to know the story. But whatever I'm not, I certainly am a person who keeps his promises (and I also fear for my life, but that's really a minor point). So does that mean I'll never tell these stories? Certainly not! For I'm not so heartless as to deny blogosphere of these magnificent stories. So here's the deal: One year from the date of occurence of a blooper, all copyrights cease to exist and I'm free to blog about it. People not agreeing to this condition should stop goofing up in a ROTFLy way from now on.

The Tag That Boomeranged

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:30:00 +0000

I got an easy tag one day in June and cheerfully finished it off, noting that my post count had gone up by one without putting in much effort (unlike many people who write posts in 15-20 minutes, I take a really long time to write something....even this one is taking me nearly an hour and a half and counting).

So when a tag that you had thrown at unsuspecting blog pals boomerangs on you, you can either blame your bad luck for having to do a similar tag again or thank your lucky stars for getting an opportunity to increase the number of posts by one more. I chose to do the latter. But I must say that this one is a bit more involved than the one I passed along. I also had to spend a lot of time googling for some of the quotes I vaguely remember from somewhere (I'm not much of a quotes person) and at the end of it couldn't find most of the quotes I was looking for.

Here are the rules of the tag, as set down by apostle Tom, the dangerous Confused Mortar:

Jot down 5 of your favorite quotes from the various books you’ve read. If you don’t have the books with you now, googling (Wikiquotes and the like) can be used to find them. Tag five people and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

I've bent the rules a little by including TV shows and movies (hey, they have screenplays and scripts which are in the form of books; so I'm technically not breaking any rule).

Starting off with the paragon of incompetence - Michael Scott in 'The Office':

I don't want somebody sucking up to me because they think I'm going to help their career. I want them sucking up to me because they genuinely love me.

Next up is a quote from one of my favourite books of all time, 'Midnight's Children' by Salman Rushdie:

No people whose word for "yesterday" is the same as their word for "tomorrow" can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

From the classic British TV series, 'Yes, Minister' (there are so many of them I love that I just went to wikiquotes and picked one at random):

Sir Humphrey: Didn't you read the Financial Times this morning?
Sir Desmond Glazebrook: Never do.
Sir Humphrey: Well, you're a banker, surely you read the Financial Times?
Sir Desmond: Can't understand it. Full of economic theory.
Sir Humphrey: Why do you buy it?
Sir Desmond: Oh, you know, it's part of the uniform.

I consider Anna Karenina to be one of the greatest accomplishments of my life (reading it, that is). When that Leo dude writes something, he doesn't bother about keeping it short. I lost count of the number of times I had to get the epic (both the volumes) reissued from my college library. This led to the following words from the Librarian which deserves a mention as one of my favourite quotes (but does not count since it's not to be found on wikiquotes):

You shouldn't be wasting your time reading these silly story books. You should be reading some engineering books.

Battling the verbosity was tough (mostly because my hands ached after a few minutes from holding up the book to read), but battling the Librarian (yes, one with the capital L) was tougher still. However, the book was full of gems like this:

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

If there is any book on earth that is quote-worthy from beginning to end, it has to be 'To Kill a Mockingbird':

Tom Robinson: Looks like she didn't have nobody to help her. I felt right sorry for her. She seemed...
Prosecutor: You felt sorry for her? A white woman? You felt sorry for her?

Now to tag 5 people:

I tag Peter, Paul, James, John, Judas and any other apostle who is feeling left out ;-)

PS: Kunz had been looking around for stuff to use against Mallus in general and me in particular. Look what he found - Hotel Keralafornia by The Yeagles. He thought I'd be angry, but I was laughing louder than him. Last seen, he was muttering, "Somebody makes fun of you and what you do is laugh along with him?"

God Save Me From the Olaampik

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:50:00 +0000

Hurray! The Olympics have started. The ultimate sporting extravaganza; the greatest test for any athlete around the world, and a period of frustration and disappointment for any sports lover trying to get a peek at all this through Doordarshan's exclusive coverage in India.

Some dumb bimbette, whose greatest accomplishment till date has been flawless skin and above average bust size kept smiling through the mandatory DD studio act before any sporting event - a hangover from its 6th umpire programmes during breaks in cricket matches. If they meant it to be an introduction to the greatest sporting event in the world it was a miserable failure.

When DD's live telecast started, a military band was playing and our very own Hindi commentator was practicing his opening lines live on TV, completely oblivious to the fact that his voice was being heard on national TV. He said something along the lines of "it's sunset time in India, lekin China ke is mahanagari Beijing mein raat prajjwalit hain" not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times - each time messing up his line and floundering somewhere among those esoteric Hindi words.

But most obnoxious was his pronunciation of 'Olympics' - he insisted on calling it the 'Olaampik'. I can understand his reluctance to use the plural, by why, oh why does he have to say 'Olaa' instead of 'Oly'? The least I'd have expected from DD is to send a guy who knows how to pronounce 'Olympics' to do the commentary. My mistake. After so many years, I've still not leant that DD is not just any other TV broadcaster.

This commentator also insisted on using the words sabhyata and sanskriti every time they showed something multi-coloured on the screen (which was all the time). When they showed Chinese introduction of paper making, he reminded us that like India, China too has contributed a lot to the world and also has a 5000 year old sabhyata and sanskriti. When they showed the contribution of Chinese to gunpowder, the dude again reminded us that China had prachin sabhyata aur sanskriti going back 5000 years, like India. When they showed the Chinese invention of the kite, this guy had the following enlightening comment to make : "In India too, we fly kites." I swear he said that.

If he had just stuck to sabhyata and sanskriti, it would have been bearable. But he insisted on giving us profound insights into geopolitics in Asia. As the Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong contingents marched by, he observed that these two countries are to China what Pakistan and Bhutan are to India. Hmm...that must be news for our folks at the Ministry of External Affairs.

When the Commonwealth Games come to India in 2010, DD will have the same crack team of commentators ready to assault us with erudite and scholarly insights. I just hope that in the 2 years they have, they work on memorising their lines better. Also, a little bit of imagination and some knowledge of sports would do wonders. Am I expecting too much?

An Apple a Day Will Make You Bankrupt in Two Days

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:51:00 +0000

If it were just the products, on their merit alone, I might have considered buying an iPod or an iPhone - if had sufficient cash to throw away. I mean, it would have just meant substituting the DSLR camera I'd been eyeing for some time with the iPhone 3G. It's good looking and has all the jazz. But what riles me about Apple is what those products stand for; in particular, the following:

1. Snobbishness is cool - The first word that comes to my mind when I think about Apple is snobbish. Sorry to disappoint Apple fans, snobbishness is not cool. Being snobbish would be justified if Apple were Chopard or Bentley. But Apple is a company which aims to sell millions of their products worldwide and such an attitude is not very endearing. When I think of Apple, I can almost hear Mr. Jobs telling me to take it or leave it - 'you want to copy-paste text? Too bad, sucker! Now get the hell out.'

2. You can get away with just looking cool and trendy - By now everybody knows just about everything there is to know about what the iPhone can't do. Any half-decent company would be running helter-skelter to add those features - after all, most of your customers are demanding it - but Apple is one company which doesn't look like it's in a hurry to fix things. You are expected to ignore its drawbacks just because it (a) is stylish, (b) is what everybody is talking about now and (c) has made your wallet lighter by a few kilos. Don't even bother to wonder whether some Bluetooth capability in the iPod would have make things a little easier.

3. Apple is the only innovative company around and the others are just crap - Sorry to disappoint the deluded souls at Apple, but developing low-cost technologies and providing affordable solutions to customers calls for innovation too, maybe more than what Apple is doing. Steve Jobs picked Dell as an example of a innovation-less company which just survives on reducing cost. But I can't imagine how Jobs could ignore the fact that Dell uses some of the most innovative logistics and supply chain management strategies to cut cost. I think Jobs confuses innovation with what happens in a styling studio. A product is about something much more - choice of materials, product design, selection of features, manufacturing, supply chain management, each of which calls for innovation. Different companies choose to innovate in different areas.

Having mentioned these 3 points, let me also tell you that I have no problem in accepting the iPhone as a gift from generous friends. My birthday is still a few months away and if you all start saving up from now and pool in money...

[Forrest Gump referring to Apple Computer]

Dan got me invested in some kind of fruit company. So then I got a call from him, saying we don't have to worry about money no more. And I said, that's good! One less thing.

Tag

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:02:00 +0000

I realize that I have been not posting much of late. Blame it all on the hot babe who has recently joined marketing. I spend way too much time trying to catch her eye by walking back and forth from my seat to the cafeteria and water cooler when I should be posting something on my blog, or working if I get too bored. I've realized in the last one week that a) she is too intimidated by the work environment which pits 150 ogling men across all age groups against one lonely (and hot) female fresh out of B-school, and b) she is aware that she is hot and is too self-conscious about it. I feel sorry for the situation she's in. I really do. So I'll give her a week to get around to noticing me, another week to go for lunch together. And if all goes well, in a year we could be taking a stroll on Elliot's beach with the kid in our arms. However, I have a suspicion that all bachelors (and some married men as well) are harbouring similar thoughts as well.

So while thinking up strategies to beat the competition and waiting for her to start looking at some other place other than her feet all the time, I got tagged by Mathew. So here goes:

8 things I am passionate about

Enjoying life
Critically analyzing everything I hear, see or read.
Postulating a hypothesis for everything. If a hypothesis is not feasible, at least an opinion on everything.
Respect for people's rights
Quizzing
Knowledge
That's not eight yet
But readers of this blog will know that I'm not really passionate about a huge number of things - I merely love most of the stuff.

8 things I want to do before I die

Ride a Harley in Ladakh
Write a book
Become the Prime Minister of India
Travel a lot. Visit every country on earth, swim in every sea, scuba dive in Antarctica, and of course, travel to the Moon.
Drive on pothole-free roads in Kerala
Scarlett Johansson (although technically she doesn't qualify as a 'thing')
Kill all the participants in MTV Roadies and Splitsvilla or at least maim them. Alternatively, I could just ask my Information and Broadcasting minister to shut down the channel after I become the Prime Minister.
Do some serious gardening.

8 things i say often:

'Ayyo!'
'Yeah'
'WTF!'
'Intha bus Nandanam poguma?'
'Oru fish curry meals, oru ayala fry'
'The risk in doing this is that...'
'I'm not interested in your offer of pre-approved loan.'
A lot of Thiruvanthoram slang, but my fav -'Thalle, muttan Kalip!'

8 books I last read

Love in the Time of Cholera (G G Marquez)
Maximum City - Love and Longing in Bombay (Suketu Mehta)
The Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
The Catcher in the Rye (J D Salinger)
Critical Chain (Eliyahu Goldratt)
Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk)
The Inheritence of Loss (Kiran Desai)

8 songs i could listen to over and over again

Ambalapuzhe Unnikkannanodu Nee (M G Radhakrishnan, ONV; Advaitham)
Vellai Pookkal (A R Rahman, Vairamuthu; Kannathil Muthamittal)
Sundari Neeyum Sundaran Njaanum (Ilayaraja; Michael Madan Kamarajan)
Aaro Viral Neetti (Vidyasagar, Gireesh Puthenchery; Pranayavarnangal)
Sundari Kannaal (Ilayaraja; Thalapathi)
Raree Rareeram Raaro (Mohan Sitara, ONV; Onnu Muthal Poojyam Vare)
He's a Pirate (Klaus Badelt; OST Pirates of the Caribbean)
People are Strange (The Doors)

8 people i think should do this tag

Don't have the energy to tag people after all the walking and strategizing in office. So I'll be happy if somebody chooses to take it up from here.

Can't stop humming this song from Subramaniapuram.

Grass Trouble

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:30:00 +0000

We are sitting in a poorly lit bar somewhere in the thronging metropolis of Chennai. The bar has a musty smell which the waiter, on enquiry, tells us is actually from the room freshener. However, the prices give no indication of the general seediness of the place – they are as high as their electricity bills are low (from the poor lighting and non-existent air conditioning). But they have draught, which is good enough for X, Y and Me. We were getting together after many months and any place with draught and chairs to sit on would have sufficed.

Conversation ranges from (as always) escapades in college to girlfriends (or more precisely the lack of it) to work. We are halfway through our second pitcher and there is a nice buzzing in our heads. This is the point when the silent-when-drunk guys go silent and the loquacious-when-drunk guys start making speeches in Swahili. But for us conversation continues as usual. The only change in us is that we are talking more serious issues now, mostly personal and family related ones.

X: Shit man! My brother has screwed up big time and I don't know what to do. [His hands leave the beer mug and slowly start massaging his forehead]

Me: What happened?

X: The thing is...see...he started doing weed in college a year back. I knew about it, but I thought that it's one of those things that guys do in engineering college, so I didn't bother much about it. But a few months back, he started acting crazy...I mean...you have seen 'A Beautiful Mind', right? He started acting like a schizophrenic...finding crazy connection between things and talking about the universe and stuff.

Y: Really?

X: Yeah. So we took him to a doctor who diagnosed him with cannabis psychosis. My parents didn't even know that he was a smoker, so cannabis psychosis was a shock to them. Whenever my mother calls me, she ends up crying and I have to console her saying it'll be all right and stuff. Whoever thought smoking grass would lead to such fuck-ups?

Y: Come on, yaar. Everybody does grass in college. But I've not heard of anybody who got this. It's hard to believe!

[Y used to be a ganja master while in college. He is a legend in his college for growing the finest marijuana inside his vast college campus when he started suspecting that the quality of grass supplied to him was not up to his standards. I, never having got high on anything other than alcohol, remain silent and commiserate with X]

X: I know, even I tried it while I was in college. The only reason I didn't continue doing it was because I didn't like the high it gave. The doctor told us that a very small percentage of people have a chance of getting cannabis psychosis and as luck would have it, my bro is one of those.

We all go silent for a while and wordlessly sip our beer. I was thinking about the mess my friend was in and many thoughts came to mind – most shocking was the discovery that 90% of the people of my age I knew had tried grass at least once in their life. In fact, soft drug usage in most of the engineering colleges in south India is pretty rampant. In other parts of the country it is fairly common in the Mallu and North-East groups, but is limited by the availability of good 'stuff'.

I remember the time I was in NIT Trichy for a couple of days. This was in my final year and I was standing in the corridor of the hostel, eyes wandering aimlessly. An NITTian joined me with what resembled a crude cigarette in his hand.

NITTian: Want a puff?

Me: No, thanks. I don't smoke.

NITTian: Quit?

Me: No, never even started.

NITTian: Oh, ok. If you don't smoke weed I've got cigarettes. Navy Cut?

Me: Thanks macha, but I don't smoke anything.

NITTian: !!??

Another thought also comes to mind as we sit around the table silently staring at our beer mugs – that no amount of momentary pleasure is worth the pain and suffering that the whole family would have to endure in a situation like this. My heart goes out to the mother for whom the world came crashing down when she heard of the condition of her younger son; to the father who was left wondering whether it was some mistake on the parents' part in bringing up the child that resulted in this; to the brother who for a lifetime will feel guilty about not doing something when he could have.

While each of us are doing all this thinking, the silence is becoming too stifling. So we go ahead and do the most rational thing we could – order a third pitcher to drown the silence.

My Name is Fish Curry

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:15:00 +0000

Psst..come closer, let me tell you my story. Closer, so that nobody can overhear.
I am Fish Curry. Before I begin my story, let me tell you that I am Master Philip's favourite. I occupy the pride of the place on his dinner table. Not surprisingly, Thoran and Avial - descendants of disgusting vegetables - have gone green with jealousy because of this. They ought to be thankful that they get to share space with me inside Master Philip's stomach. Instead, they rant and complain about 'injustice' and 'inequality' like the rest of the low-life. What disgraceful creatures, Thoran and Avial.

You'd think that being Master Philip's favourite would make me overjoyed. Yes, I'm happy; for who doesn't want approval from Master Philip? But I'm worried too about the future. Master Philip likes to think very highly of his own (supposedly) healthy food habits and - in spite of his ahhmm...intelligence - tends to get carried away by propagandist reports claiming health benefits of vegetables. And guess who'd ensure that he gets routinely assaulted with such reports? The jerks at PETA. Don't get me wrong, animals like to be treated ethically. So if you humans decide to heat the oceans during winter, we would welcome it wholeheartedly. After all, who doesn't like a heated swimming pool?

But, pray, what has ethical treatment of animals got to do with vegetarianism? Are you treating the tiger ethically if you feed it soya-meat instead of real meat? Do the PETA people think that lions should act ethically and not kill for food? Are you treating humans ethically if you deny them fish? But most importantly, are you treating the fish ethically if you campaign for vegetarianism?

Yes, dear human, fishes like to be eaten. The path to nirvana for a fish is through a human's stomach. If a fish dies a natural death, it goes straight to hell. When God Almighty put animals on earth, he meant them to be used by humans as food, recreation or inspiration for Hollywood movies. We like to think of ourselves as a special creation because we serve all three purposes. We swim together in shoals so that we are easy to spot and to ensure that maximum numbers are caught. When we roam around the sea, apparently directionless, we are searching for fishing nets, and in the process, enlightenment and moksha.

Let me ask you, dear listener - What do these PETA guys know about fish, or any animal for that matter? Have they even bothered to ask us before protesting on our behalf? Just see this obnoxious ad (NSFW, unless your boss likes Pam Anderson and/or PETA a lot). Notice the lettuce leaf bikini? It just proves my point that leaves and other green stuff serve only one purpose - they cover up all the really nice things.

I am now a Curry and about to be eaten by Master Philip. I will attain the greatest spiritual heights that a fish can ever hope for, but what about my brothers and sisters who spend their days and nights thinking, 'Mera number kab aayega?'. As a responsible fish, I have decided to do my bit by protesting against the slander.

I have decided to reciprocate in kind by posing nude - with strategically placed leaves for added effect. The photo that follows is NSFW if your boss is a member of PETA.

(With due respect to Master Philip, his idea of posing nude himself - who does he think he is? Pam Anderson? - with me all over his you-know-what really sucked. I somehow managed to convince him that such a photo would actually defeat the purpose.)

My story ends here. But if you, dear human, felt a tinge of sadness for my species or drooled uncontrollably on seeing the photo, go ahead and do something about it.

Photo courtesy Mishmash!

The Truthiness about Santa and Banta

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:38:00 +0000

According to Captain Nanu and Prabhu, this story actually happened. Since both of them are not the kind of guys who say just about anything when drunk, I am inclined to believe the 'truthiness' of the story. And as Stephen Colbert never tires of saying, truthiness is more important than truth.

All the people who joined our company through campus recruitment had a common training programme for 4 months. During this time, we used to stay at our company's training centre in, let's say, Bangalore. Life in college hostel had set our bar for 'pretty nice places' quite low. Still, it was a pretty nice place - with landscaped gardens, good food, basketball courts and fantastic weather. The only problem was that they didn't provide internet in our rooms. So to access internet, we needed to go to the computer lab.

Our batch included two sardars - let's just call them Santa Singh and Banta Singh. They are true blue Surds, hailing from Bhatinda and Jalandhar (two of the biggest cities in Canada). Come Diwali and the Surds were feeling quite homesick. With the limited number of leaves available during training, they didn't want to waste time in trains which would have taken them close to 6 days in travel alone. So they decided to travel by air.

However, there was one small problem - all flights to Delhi during Diwali were prohibitively expensive. It was in such a situation that Santa's roomie Prabhu told him that early morning flights were much cheaper than the rest. Santa's face lit up on hearing this and he hurried away to give this info to Banta.

That night, Prabhu had a troubled sleep. He was woken up by Banta knocking on his door at 3 am. This was followed by Santa and Banta loudly discussing how to go about executing their strategy of procuring cheap tickets. Having come to a conclusion by 3.30 am, they both proceeded to the computer lab to book their flight tickets. Poor Prabhu, little did he know that Santa and Banta would confuse 'early morning flights' with 'flights booked early in the morning'.

Of course, Prabhu came to know about this only when a tired and frustrated Santa returned to the room at 6 am and shouted angrily, "Oye! I tried all night, but the flights were all the same price as before."

The Lost and Dusty Mughal

noreply@blogger.com (Philip) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:47:00 +0000

There is a certain book that has been lying around on my table for a few months now, gathering dust and refusing to shift to make room for other stuff. It goes by the name of ‘The Last Mughal’ and it’s one of the best history books I’ve laid hands on (the other history books in the list being my CBSE History textbooks from class 6 to 10).

I’ve read only about three-fourths of the book and I don’t know when I’ll complete it. It’s very hard to go back to a book that you left halfway through – every passing day makes it a wee bit harder to get back. But let me assure you that the neglect is not due to lack of interest on my part or lack of interest-worthiness on the book’s part. It’s just plain lack of time.

However, the book did come handy to complete Rada’s tag. Thanks to him, I got to dust the book and put it in back on the cupboard where it deserves the space it currently occupies between two great books which I’ve not read (yet) Joseph Shigley’s ‘Machine Design’ and Richard Dawkins’ ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’. I know, even I’m surprised that I was allowed to design vehicles without reading Shigley ;)

So here are the rules of the tag:
Pick up the nearest book.
Open to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

Page 123 takes me to the Chapter named ‘The Near Approach of the Storm’ which outlines the conditions in northern India before the outbreak of the 1857 Mutiny/Rebellion/War of Independence. The fifth sentence is an excerpt from a letter which Lord Canning (the Governor General) sent to Simon Fraser (the Resident at the Mughal court) dismissing Fraser’s suggestion that the Mughals were still popularly perceived as the rulers of the land although real power had shifted to the British.

“The presents which were at one time offered to the King by the Governor General and the Commander in Chief have been discontinued; the privilege of a coinage bearing his mark is now denied to him; the Governor General’s seal no longer bears a device of vassalage; and even the native chiefs have been prohibited from using one. It has been determined that these appearances of subordination and deference could not be kept up consistently with a due respect for the real and solid power of the British Government. This may also be said of the title of the King of Dehlie (sic), with the fiction of paramount sovereignty which attaches to it.”

Who do I tag now? In confusion I turn to my secret Random Tag Recipient Generator (RTRG) and it throws up the following names: Mathew (Spark), Zahra, Karthik, Thomas and Sid