Anti-nostalgic Theory of Relativity

Last night a wave of uhm… what is the opposite of nostalgia… let’s call it anti-nostalgia, swept over me. I am not sure what brought back the memories. May be a song that was playing ; May be something someone said; May be a whiff of some perfume in the air, or the distant bark of a dog. Anyways that is immaterial. Whatever it was it sent me reeling back to my ‘vacations’ from yester years

All through childhood and early teens, one of the most memorable and dreaded parts of the year was the mandatory trip to visit my paternal side of the extended family. It was an undertaking of olympic proportions, which begins with a preparatory two weeks. In these two weeks my mom would shop for gifts for everyone in the family. Before you start thinking of this as a child’s play let me give you some raw statistics. My dad has 7 brothers and one sister. On an average, each of them has one spouse and 2 off springs. Each of these off springs, on an average again, has 2 names of which at least one is a derivative of Leela or Chandu (paternal grandparents who set the trend of dual naming). As an annual homing ritual, all the said siblings, and their respective spouses and off springs, flock together at the ancestral home at, let’s say, Xanadu.

The two week long preparatory season is kicked off with my mother making a list of people who would make it to the get-together. This is then followed by size allotment; a complex process which involves a lot of speculation and complex mathematics. The (clothing) size is derived using a third order differentiation of the size of the person when we last saw them, this is then integrated over the time elapsed since then. A Laplace transform is applied to it to account for the growth spurt factor corresponding to age of the person. This is then extrapolated and reverse curve fitted with the socio-economic factors like child birth, new job, new school etc. How my mother managed to make clothes thus bought almost look like tailor made for them, I will never know. This is then followed by bank balance diminishing shopping. During these two weeks I, the loud mouthed prodigal daughter, would be coached on what to talk and what not to divulge in front of everyone. After a fortnight of preparation, we embark on our overnight journey laden with gifts.

You may wonder what monstrosity I was subjected to, to dread this very normal sounding trip. I must tell you about the peculiar family for you to be able to even begin comprehending my reservations. The family, as it shall henceforth be referred to, is a typical Indian family with its share of fights, politics and unruly kids. They are however one confused bunch, confused in a way only Mallus brought up in Xanadu can be. Calling it identity crisis would be putting it mildly. They speak a dialect of Malayalam (if I must call it that) heavily flavored with Xanad- the local language of Xanadu. I am not being judgmental here. To each one his own, I say. However making fun of my (relatively) pure Malayalam is taking it a bit too far by any standards. When the limited phonetics of Xanad (which works absolutely fine in Xanad) is applied to tongue twister Malayalam words, you get an unique mix. The shortcoming is often compensated by high decibel levels. Couple that with an obsession for the names Leela and Chandu, you get confusion of leviathan proportions.

Here is a list of you-know-you-are-with-family-in-Xanadu-when quick reckoners

• You spend at least three quarters of your waking hours in a ‘pattu saree’ shop
• You are surrounded by a bevy of well meaning cousins, aunts and ungles, who speak nineteen to the dozen in the Xanadu dialect of mallu, leaving you wondering what hit you.
• You , a person who nurses a phobia for dogs, are greeted by extremely friendly stray  canine kith , each time you step out of the house.
• Come night fall, you have a gaggle of drunk ungles who cannot keep down their liquor, speaking to you in Xanadu dialect.
• You visit the same famous monuments and tourist attractions every year and get rewarded with half a bottle of gold spot.
• Every year you have to listen to the same anecdotes and pretend to be amused (perfected with two weeks of training)
• The conversations start to sound like keynote address at international hypochondriac convention, with each person trying to outdo the last quoted disease.
• You have at least three people with PhD in boorishness lecturing you about lady-like behavior.
• You learn new forms of expressing chauvinism each year.
• At any given moment, you have atleast two arguments, frineldy or not, going on in the house
• For a family full of doctors they quote Indian penal code, more often and better than lawyers
• You are asked you class rank, marks/ GPA, co-curricular and extracurricular achievements by all and sundry, at least twice a day.

There are quite a few more that I could list here. However due to the family’s propensity for arguments and legal actions, I cease and desist. These visits reduced in number and finally stopped as years went by. I am more than happy to put these annual visits behind me. This is not to say that I did not have good times there. I enjoyed a handful of moments in a way one can in childhood. It played a non trivial role in shaping my perspective and wariness of people and tongues.

All said, I am not going back there if I can help it. Or may be I will. It is like a sore in your mouth. You just can’t help tonguing it no matter how uncomfortable or painful it is.

Monday Cynicism

I suffer from a case of chronic acute Monday blues. Unlike most people who develop the condition much later in life, I was an early bloomer. My Monday morning blues predates my Kindergarten years. Come the beginning of work week and I can rattle off a list of gazillion things I would rather be doing than engage in trivial pursuits of education and career. This Monday, I decided to list down my this week’s top five I’d-rather-be –doings. Here goes.

1. Prime Minister of France
Nicolas Sarkozy’s is one pair of shoes I would love to get into. This has nothing to do with Carla Bruni  or the prospect of living in Paris. It has very little to do with the purported €2 million in his personal coffers. It doesn’t hurt the prospects though. The primo motivo is the ability to give myself a hike whenever I find fit. How can you not wish to get into the pants shoes of a person who unapologetically, gives himself 150% hike?

2.  Major Nelson
Ok!  I’ve looked hard and deep to find something negative about having to play X-box games, filming one minute videos every once in a while and gaining a fan following. I am stumped. That is one flawlessly awesome job. Which other job lets you travel to highly sensitive areas like Iraq , fly in a military chopper without going through any of the hard ships and training associated with being in the army and all the while talk and think about nothing more serious than games? To top it all he got away with calling the country Ay-Rack (homophonic to ‘I rock’ when uttered by a certain member of faculty at my alma mater).

3.  Finance minister of India
Wanting to be the finance minister of a third world country steeped in debts may sound beyond reason and common sense. But think again. No matter how bad your decision or whim is, there is always enough diversity in India for it to benefit a major chunk of the ever burgeoning population. You can sit back, put up your feet and make decisions without giving it much thought. While you are at it you could also give yourself a leg up with a neat tax cut.

4.  Anthony Bourdain
You perverted being! I don’t mean that I’d rather be doing Anthony Bourdain. What I meant is I could never say no to a job where you get paid to travel, eat and write. Agreed, he sometimes has to gulp down hardly palatable and extremely gross stuff in the name of culinary adventure. All in a day’s work! It couldn’t be much worse than the work perils I face. (Don’t let me get started on it. Ever.)

5. The fifth place is tied between Raghu Ram (Executive Producer,MTV India) & Barkha Dutt (Group Editor, NDTV)
I  equally love telling off people and rambling non-sensically. And that makes it tough for me to break this tie between these two prominent figures of Indian media. On one hand I could swear with abandon when I feel like it or I could just talk whatever I want and bleep out everything but the propositions in my speech. I could make a living out of telling off young wannabes. On the other hand, I could create sensational news out of thin air. I could abbreviate hitherto unabbreviated phrases and names or expand every abbreviation and acronym I can think of till my camera person shuts off the camera in disgust. I could make slanderous remarks about just about anything standing within the safe premises  of journalistic freedom and yet hush up any one who dares to say anything unflattering about me. Tough choice indeed!

Mondays hurt! Is there any job where you can abolish Mondays?

Colliding Universes And Raving Madness

Help! My universes are colliding. I suppose that does not make much sense unless I give you some perspective and context (two execubabble words I love). So here goes. Every single software engineer in the world is in a constant state of ‘overworked’ment. The only differentiating factor is that some love it and start showing withdrawal symptoms the moment the work load or pressure is reduced to humane levels and others balk at the prospect of more work. I belong to the latter category. I’ve always believed in treating work and life as two separate universes; Each with its own set of mind sets, personas, problems and guilty pleasures. But, no matter how much I try, the boundaries blur and my universes coalesce into one big space time continuum of complications. And that takes me back to the original statement. My universes are colliding!

Just this weekend, I had a dream which I would like to call the signs of times. It was a lazy Saturday morning like any other. I dreamt that I was sleeping and being a restless sleeper, I was tossing and turning in bed. Now the bizarre part begins. For some inexplicable reason, there was a baby in the bed; A baby I had nothing to do with. Now don’t you tell me that it is an indication of me wanting to have one. I. Can. Not. Stand. Babies. Call it unnatural. Call me cruel. But that would be calling a spade a spade. The rest of the story should make it clear that I had no soft and cuddly emotions for the baby thing on the bed. In my sleep, I rolled over the baby. And voila! A tooltip appeared next to it’s head. At this point I should tell you that over the past two weeks I have been working extensively on tool tips and some installation stuff. I went ahead and set a debug break point on the baby and saw that the tool tip was being triggered by a mouse over event. (Sometimes I am a little slow in my dreams) However, when the debug break point was set, the “system” started barfing out errors. It was cribbing about being unable to register compdyn.dll for dynamic compression of the baby. I traced this error back to Octopus- an eight legged deployment application that has come to haunt my life. Cursing loudly, I opened Octopus console and (no points for guessing ) it was a real live octopus there instead of the tame UI I am used to seeing. To spare you some unnecessary drama, I will summarize it. The octopus then went ahead and swallowed the baby and collapsed into a pile on the desktop. Before the dream could get any more bizarre, I was woken up by my alarm clock.

The bottom-line: You know you got it bad , when babies with tooltips appear in your dreams. Dear manager please consider this as a leave application and grant me a month or two of paid holidays before I totally lose it.

This blog entry was brought to you by stark raving lunacy.             

                                                                 

 

Visibility Challenged

“You do not have enough visibility”, droned on my manager in the sacred weekly 1-1 meetings. Now where have I heard that before? I never imagined I would have any visibility issue. Just today morning, I was standing in front of the mirror after being defeated by the weighing scale yet again and thinking to myself that they couldn’t miss me from a mile. A mere 5 hours later my manager says otherwise. This just had to be one of the many things grossly wrong with the universe.
These days I am getting closer to 100% convinced that it was Amerigo Vespucci who discovered Americas and not the celebrated explorer, Christopher Columbus. I am tempted to believe that that Amerigo may have had a bad case of invisibility syndrome. His teleconference 1-1’s with the King of Spain, I bet, never ended on a happy note

King: Amerigo dude, how is it hanging? (King’s PR had asked him to work on the cool factor)
AV: Not bad your highness. I discovered a land mass and I am calling it Amerigo after someone I know. Though we’ve got some winds here, we seem to be on schedule unless some ship stopper issue comes up
King: Good job dude. But you know Columbus found a route to Asia. He is calling it Indios. Sounds cool-like a night club or something. Bee-tee-doubleyou, We should make sure stake holders know about your small contribution as well. We should work on your visibility.
AV: But I am at the sea all the time. How do I work on my visibility?

King shared words of wisdom which can not be reproduced here due to a non-disclosure agreement between AV and the King. All I can tell you is Amerigo started working on his visibility. He started hanging out on the ship deck till after everyone left to their sleeping quarters. He would pull an all nighter once in a while after making sure the entire ship and all the king’s men knew about it. He called meetings to discuss his finding that ocean water is salty. He also made sure that the meeting overran the schedule by 2 days. He made it a point to let everyone know that he missed lunch because he was working on determining sea water saltiness. He bragged shamelessly. He is quoted to have said “I am more skillful than all the shipmates of the whole world.” Status mails from him doubled in number and most of them were sent in the wee hours of the night. (which leads us to believe that he was the first one to use outlook’s scheduling feature extensively). He sent atleast 5 mails over the weekends to make it kown that he was working. He started replying to all mails threads disagreeing with the consensus reached in that thread and elsewhere. He later would paraphrase the same consensus and impose it on others as his opinion in the same mail thread. Not a single albatross flew over his ship without being opined upon.

Weeks rolled by and it was time for his annual review meeting with the King. King’s PR had by then decided that the King should work on his falling brutality rating.

King: Vespucci, how are you?
AV: Very well sir. Thank you. I have been very busy navigating, captaining, cleaning and running the ship, I haven’t had time to be not fine.
King: I know you are doing a good job with the ship there. Discovering new continent and all! Swell man! But you stick too closely to your role responsibilities. You have to go above and beyond. You have to think out of the box. I am not very happy with your impact and influence on others. You may want to stop taking your conflicts offline. Fight it out in public and drag everyone else into it. Off late you have been making good progress, but it still is not enough and it is too late in the game to make any big change. As your King, I have to make some decisions. You have to understand that it has not been easy on me. But Colombus has been around for longer and he is threatening to quit if I don’t give him a level hike now. So I have to ding your review Americus
AV: It’s Amerigo sir.
King: Yes of course I meant Amerigo. Can you work out a transition plan to transition discovery of America to Chris?
AV: It’s Amerigo sir. Not America
King: Don’t be silly. I can’t call a continent Amerigo. Can I?  Now get moving. Oh by the way we are laying you off. You can stop sending status mails

Customer? Who cares?

Any technologist can tell you that the ultimate dream, albeit geeky, is to have a connected world; A world where all systems can communicate with each other and work collectively and collaboratively in synchronized and other buzz-words-ively ways. I have a strong feeling that we have made more headway in that direction than we have dared to imagine or give ourselves credit for. Last week I witnessed it first hand when the Universe, credit card, mobile phone and all billing systems joined hands, conspired behind my back and pulled a big one on me.

It all started, quite innocently, with my credit card transaction being declined at a restaurant. In these tough economic times you get a sympathetic smile with the declined receipt. As I walked out of the restaurant, I put my hand in to my pocket to feel the reassuring weight of my Nokia N85. But it was not there. It was as if it was zapped out of existence right out of my pocket. The next day, while still nursing some hopes of my phone returning miraculously just as it had disappeared, I got my monthly death sentence aka bill from AT&T. As usual it was erroneous billing. At AT&T, they strongly believe in erring on the higher side. But this month it was exceptionally out of this world, with figures almost astronomical; Something in the league of distance between Betelgeuse and sun in miles. Then came an overdue notice for rent with an attached eviction notice. My rent cheque , just like my phone, was zapped out of existence by the dark forces. I was marvelling at the coincidence of bad news incidence when I got an overdue notice from NWP(utility company) and PSE (energy company)in a gap of 5 minutes. This was followed by multiple other minor casualtities like discontinuation of Netflix and xbox live gold membership. And thus I found myself in the vicious circle of “para español marque número dos.”

In the pursuit of master’s degree in customer care communication, I had many enriching and scintilating conversations. (mostly with automated voice response systems). Some of my favorite conversations are below

Friday 4:00 pm
Automated voice: For English press 1. para español marque número dos.
Me:<press 1>
Automated voice: For English press 1. para español marque número dos.
Me: < do nothing>
AV: Thank you for calling. Please wait while we try to connect your call. <sad music in a loop targeted at driving you insane>
<20 minutes later> I am sorry, our offices are closed at the moment. Our working hours are Monday to Friday 9:00 am to 5:00pm

Monday 9:00 am
<After the whole song and dance with automated voice>
Operator: Thank you for calling  Blah blah. Can I have your name?
Me: Kavya. K as in Kate, A-apple, v-…
Operator: <After million other verification questions including great great grand father’s name and current address> So Miss Kate, how can I help you?

Monday 9:10 am
Op: Can I put you on hold for a minute while I retrieve this information?
Me: Sure.
Me:<after 30 minutes of music> Hello? Hello?
 

Tuesday 10:00 am
Op at bank’s call center: Thank you for calling Blah bank. Our records show that this card was blocked by Visa fraud detection department. I will route your call to them
Op at visa Fraud detection: Thank you for contacting visa. Your account can be activated by credit protection department. Let me put you through to them
Op at Credit protection: Thank you….let me put your call to fraud detection
Me: But I already talked to them
Op: Ok how about me connecting your call to your bank?
Me: they re-routed my call to visa
<After exhausting the list of all Visa departments>
Op: I bet you haven’t spoken to the hot dog vendor across the stret, let me put your call through to him. <music>

After one whole week of arguing with para español marque número dos people, all my gone-haywire accounts and card issues are sorted out and eviction notices withdrawn. Everything but my phone is back to where and how it was. If any of your readers want to help out a poor blogger in need who leads a menial hand-to-mouth existence, please send me a Nokia N85 or N97. I also accept cash and/or checks but no credit cards please. I still break into cold sweat when I see one.

Complete Idiot’s Guide to Sci-Fi/Fantasy Movies

When I was about 5 years old, we used to live in a small village. It is debatable whether you can you still call it a village if a national highway cuts right across it and big towns flank it on either side. There were no huge open fields or three kilometer walks to nearest grocery. But it was still a village. The people had simple needs, simple minds and gossiped incessantly about their neighbors. The coolest hangout in this village was a rundown movie theater. My parents and I religiously went there every week to witness happy endings; the sort only movie industry can deliver. Reminiscence!

On a wave of nostalgia (but mainly because of some relentless persuasion by PsycheRam) I went to watch Transformers last week. Movie watching anywhere in the US is so vegetarian(for lack of a better word) when compared to the scrumptious Hyderabadi biriyani counterpart in India. Very rarely do you see serpentine lines at the box office. You never get caught in an unruly mob. You never get to push and shove with all your might. Here you stand in civil lines, get $10 tickets and go in to find that you don’t have a seat number printed on your ticket. You now have to sit through half an hour of ads and trailers to watch the movie without craning or spraining your neck. . Damn the marketing dude who pitched this idea because of whom last week I found myself watching gazillion trailers before subjecting myself to watching robots fighting it out for over two hours aka transformers 2. I saw more world-coming-to-ends in that half an hour of trailers, than in all those years spent in the dark interiors of the theater smelling of cigarettes and dirty shoes. The movies in those days were almost always straight up love stories or love triangles or at the most a suspense thriller. It was never a fear mongering doomsday prophecy like most movies these days. Ah reminiscence yet again!

The optimistic view of it all is that ,it gave me a crash course in rules of sci-fi/fantasy movie making.
Rule 1: Doomsday is just around the corner
Whether you like it or not, the world is coming to an end; a violent, spectacular , complete with fireworks and confetti end. The reason or cause is immaterial. The nemesis can be anything ranging from badly programmed robots (All engineers should be given at least 2 months of vacation to prevent such catastrophe) to virus released when an alien sneezed while cruising over Earth. The world, occasionally the whole universe and for sure the human race is doomed unless the hero rises up, struts around in his underwear, flies, almost dies and then saves the world.
Rule 2: Thou shalt fly
It is mandatory for the hero to take flight minimum of three times in the movie of which at least one is prominently featured in the trailer and/or poster. Thankfully flying is often a super power possessed by the hero. Even our average Joe flightless hero has to be air-borne for the minimum stipulated time, else the movie would be classified a black sheep of the genre. This is often achieved by launching the poor flightless hero into stratosphere from an explosion site. Owing to his herogeneous nature, he always lands back safely by flailing his hands and legs in continuous circular motion. Hero on broom sticks, dragons and other flying objects not recommended by aviation association are also accepted as viable substitute to unaided flying.

Rule 3: Eyes are mirrors of the soul
All preferences, leanings and orientations including but not limited to moral, political, sartorial, sexual and dietary , of an entity shall be reflected in the said entity’s eyes. The good and the evil and not just morally and often genetically different, there are chromatic differences too. The rule of thumb is red = bad; blue= good;. A red eyed robot is bad. Blue eyed ones are good. An experimental sci-fi/fantasy movie is when the director dares to replace the blue with green. They are often box office failures.

Rule 4: Redundancies? Backups? What the heck?
There shall be single points of failures, with no backups or redundancies whatsoever, for both the parties locking horns or tentacles or whatever applicable part. This makes it easy for the good to claim victory by disabling or destroying this single point of failure usually a mother ship or a central computer. It also simplifies the directive for both the factions, which is “Protect this single point of failure at any cost”. The central computer has many noteworthy features such as it’s user interface. It is either a black screen with green text scrolling at supersonic speeds or it is graphical to the hilt and resembles a game more than the main GUI. Another noteworthy thing is power supply is connected to and controlled by the central computer. A computer failure would hence be accompanied by a black out. The good part is now you can distinguish the blue LED lit good guys from the red bad ones, with ease.
Rule 5: Let’s play dead
No entity of prominence shall die without drama. Just when you think the entity is dead, it springs you a surprise. Playing dead always gives them a new lease of energy and becomes nearly impossible to defeat. Playing dead has other advantages. For instance you get to hear what others really think of you especially the heroine
Rule 6: The queen of hearts
The female lead (to be politically correct) shall not veer from preset role responsibilities. She has to fly with the hero at least once, look good dirty or grimy, solve a conundrum by insightful thinking or by fluke(elective responsibility), call the hero’s bluff when he plays dead and lip lock with the hero just before the credits roll.
Rule 7: The Holy Grail
There exists a Holy Grail which is the sole thing that can save the world. The hero has to race the antagonist to the grail. For variety, the grail is sometimes replaced with the anti-grail or kryptonite in the movie. This reverses the objective. The hero has to keep himself and the antagonist away from the kryptonite.
Rule 8: Procrastination rocks
Anything that has to be done, be it saving the world or just making friends will be done only at the last possible nanosecond.
Rule 9: Monuments and landmarks first. Ladies and children please wait your turn
In the event of commencement of mass destruction, famous monuments and easily identifiable landmarks will be destroyed first. These monuments are geographically dispersed. Golden gate bridge, the pyramids and Eiffel tower tops the list of vulnerable landmarks
Rule 10: Sidekicks rule of extremes
The sidekick in the movie shall either be an extreme nerd with advanced degree in hacking or shall be a aggregate doltish dolt (politically correct speak for total dumb ass).

Image credits: Unknown photographers indexed on Bing Search

Deep Fried Golden Brown Knowledge Nuggets

Every single day in life is an opportunity to learn something new; to expand your horizons. It is a gift to us from God. We should cherish it and …

It is indeed fun to talk like that. No wonder the nun who taught me in high school could never stop. When you have such cute li’l cloistered life, it should be easy to really believe that God intended good and the world is a happy place. You can set your limits and all that stuff. For crying out loud, we had a nun, who knew zilch about the universe outside the convent and church, teaching us General Knowledge. If the irony of “teaching” G.K is lost on you, let us try once more. She was not aware of the existence of a certain Mr.Sachin Tendulkar. This was back in 1998 when you needed infinite improbability drive to escape Sachin-mania. That is unless you lived under a rock or, I guess, in a convent. Nunnery/Nunism is a nice career option to consider

Anyways this ain’t about nuns and convents. It is about how I grabbed the oportunity and learned something astonishing and new. It is about the  knowledge nuggets I had for lunch today

I was window shopping for lunch at the multitude of counters in the cafeteria., when Kerala Chick Peas at the Indian counter caught my eye. So I zoomed in for a closer look. The dish looked angry and red and the tag read Karela Chick Pees. I smirked at the typos and was about to move on to something more appealing. But fate had something else in store for me in the form of an American, who was feeling adventurous at that very moment. He decided to indulge his whim for adventure by consuming some of that angry red curry. He did not notice the spelling error or was not bothered by it. I strongly suspect that the spell check feature lowered the spelling ability of the average person. Anthony Bourdain  wannabe then proceeded to get a recipe synopsis from the caterer

Anthony: Is karela a dairy product?

Caterer: (Who, I then noticed, looked angrier than the chick peas) I don’t know sir

Anthony: Could you find out? See I can not have dairy products. I’ve got this acid reflux of oesophagus of the kidney and the butterflies in the pathology of the…

Caterer: Yes Sir! I will be back in a moment sir. (He went to the back room to probably goo bing and decide)

Meanwhile, I was pretending to be interested in the plate arrangement nearby and surreptitiously eavesdropping on this interesting conversation. After about five minutes the caterer came back (Must have been a slow connection)

Caterer: Sir, it contain no dairy. Very good. Local preparation style of a state in India, called Karela. It contains chick peas and curry powder and herbs.

Anthony: Ok I will have a full order of that with naan bread and rasam soup

While I was admiring the plate arrangment, people jumped to the conclusion that I was standing in line for Indian(?) food. These people and the things they assume!  I ended up being at the head of a line which I never stood in , in the first place. But since I was there, I decided to sample the Karela food. Just as I was leaving, I asked him, “By the way, where is this state Karela?”. And there I got my first knowledge nugget

Nugget 1: Karela is a state in Northern part of India, right next to Pakistan.

In the heady mix of astonishment and confusion, I almost forgot to pay.  It is an alarming possibility that there is a state in India I am unaware of. Thats when I remembered my aforementioned G.K teacher from high school.

I got two more knowledge nuggets while eating lunch.

Nugget 2: Never risk eating anything with pee  in its name. The Karela chick pees really tasted like some chick from Karela peed in the rasam soup

 Nugget 3: Nothing good ever comes out of eavesdropping on a conversation about Indian food between an Asian(caterer) and an American 

Literally Speaking

Almost a year and a half ago, he came in to my life, clad in a hot pink shirt. Something about him screamed danger. May be it was the raspy voice that just said hello. May be it was the mixed stench of some strong perfume and stale tobacco. May be it was the shifty eyes. May be it was the shirt. Something about him was very unpleasant. And then he started talking. The ominous air and the tension in the room dissipated. The primary task at hand became stifling the laughter than was threatening to be unleashed. It was like watching a comedian dressed as a villain. When that happens, you can’t help but laugh and at the same time wonder about the standard of your humor sense. He was funny. Not humorous, but funny- funny in a dysfunctional and pathetic way. He gave everyone a reason or twenty to despise him or laugh at him. Of all the things he was, he said and he did, what really played a string quartet with my nerves was the way he used the word literally. No, seriously!

For sake of his anonymity, I will refer to him as X.  X had this irksome habit of using literally way too liberally. It was like the space bar of speech for him.  

Day 1

Me: Hi, I’m Kavya

X: Hi <a mispronounced version that sounded nothing like my name>. I’m X. I am literally happy to meet you

Me: Uh-huh. Me too. Literally!

And thus began my misadventure. He would come literally late for an appointment.  He would rush into someone’s office and gush “I saw your mail and literally died”. He literally died a gazillion times during the few months he was around. I am sure I wasn’t the only one who wished it were true. About a month into his joining the team, he picked up the cool phrase “pardon my French”. (Somebody teleport him back to the era when that phrase was even a wee bit cool!). That cool phrase then became his license to swear with reckless abandon. That took the literal torture to new heights. I still cannot shake off some of the imagery this generated. He would convey hopelessness of a situation with a raspy “I am literally f***ked”. Good for you. I really do not wish to know. Imagine the reluctance I had in reading a document which he claimed, he literally pulled out of his rear extremity. He used the word in ways you literally would not even have dreamed of.

As you might have noticed I’ve mostly employed the past tense in referring to X. But that is just wishful thinking. He is very much alive and literally kicking. I should give first impressions a benefit of doubt at the least. X was indeed a villian; albeit a villian dressed as a comedian, dressed as a villian.(which mathematically can be represented as villian(comedian(villian(X)))=villian) It should be illegal to be so irritating. It should be dealt with at the same level of severity as encouraging or being an accomplice to homicide- probably his own. I was more than overjoyed when the time came for us to literally part ways. I was literally losing my mind. I thought I had heard the last of the screams of poor victimized literally as it was being raped. Fortune favors the fortunate. Unfortunately it seems like that sometime in the past I might have pissed off Lady Luck badly. She landed me in a job where there are not one but two literal rapists. This time it is even more depressing because one of the rapists is a native English speaker and the other one is an Asian.

Pop quiz:

Question:How can the literal rape get any  more gruesome and gorier?

Answer: The rapist lapist is flom Democlatic Lepuric of China. It is just regend-wait for it-daly to hear someone say ritelarry. (I suggest practicing this tongue twister word in front of the mirror for 10 minutes every day)

May be it is time I hang up the literal hang-up and join them in literally using literally till literally I cannot speak even one sentence without literally using literally multiple times. Literally! Ugh! Barf!

Techno-ramblings

Last week is the stuff a technophile’s wet dreams are made of. Big bang opening sentence and loud claims aside, it was still a happening bunch of days for technology and sports fans. Bing was released; E3 happened;  Apple unveiled new iPhony iPhone 3GS and new mac books; Nadal lost; Federer won. The last one,I agree, is not much of a news anymore. But I can’t help thinking for the millionth time that it must be fun to have a name in the comparative form. If I was Federer, I would be mad at the media for shortening it to Fedex. Even his first name Roger is comparative. If anyone ever bestows on me, the honor of christening their offspring or even their dog, I am gonna pick a superlative for a name after making sure that it doesn’t rhyme with anything objectionable. It is an urban legend of sorts in Kerala, that some poor unlucky girl in Calicut was named Fakmi.  My name doesnt pass the test either. Kavya, which is as poetic as it comes in vernacular, rhymes too closely to caveat in the queen’s language.

Speaking of bad rhyming scheme (or alliteration or whatever you call it), I was slightly annoyed to see a status message ‘Natal won and Nadal lost’.  Banal  rhyming/aliteration and bad puns in status message is my jurisdiction. The impossible happened- Nadal lost, Microsoft ,for real ,stole the show at E3 and somebody beat my worst status message. At E3, Microsoft announced the partnering of Xbox live with facebook, twitter and last.fm.I am indeed overjoyed to hear that now I can get spammed with quiz results on X box too while listening to music which last.fm thinks I would like. But the cherry on the cake of awesomeness with wow factor frosting is project natal. I love anything automatic and automation in turn loves me. I just love getting strangled by automatic elevator doors that close just as I get in or get out. How can I not become a fan-facebook ishtyle- of the automatic faucets and soap dispenser?  It calls for  a delicate maneuver, that takes months of practice to perfect, to get the soap dispenser to not soap your already washed hands. But the effort is worth the elation you experience when you successfully wash your hand. The first time I succeeded I almost expected  a green and black elongated oval to appear just above my line of sight with the words “Achievement unlocked- Unsoapy hands- 20G”. Automatic flush- now that is something else. All I can tell you is that I now have stronger thigh muscles; The kind you get from repeatedly sitting and standing up. Don’t even get me started on IVRS. I never realised that an Indian accented  ‘no’ sounds like a ‘yes’ to an American accent trained IVRS system.I just can’t get enough of automation. Now with natal, I can probably shut down my xbox by yawning. I am going to practice sitting absolutely still so that I don’t unintentionally cause damage by moving about in front of my x box. I have always been a fan of Douglas Adams but never until now have I considered his writing prophetic. He saw it coming when he wrote about Zaphod trying to change TV channels by squinting at it. But maybe he was talking of this

While indulging in some serious bing binge, I saw the news about the new iPhone. Natal is child’s play when compared to iPhone 3GS. It has cutting edge features like cut and paste.  As brilliant as it is, iPhone fan boys are going to miss squinting at the screen and repeatedly typing the same word on the predictive touch keyboard. The 3 MP camera more than compensates for the minor inconvenience. It is almost too good to be true. It can even capture video!!! Now that is a real first time ever on phone. When Apple says 3MP is the right resolution for a camera phone, it makes all those other manufactures sporting 5,6 and even 8 MPs look like retarded fools. No technology is cool until Apple validates it by introducing it in one of their products 10 years after it became obsolete.  iPhone can even make absent-mindedness cool. Now it can locate your misplaced iPhone or your parked car at an additonal cost of $99 per year. If you hear a small voice in your head screaming wave secure by any chance, please shut it up or lose your cool score. The only fun part of yet another iPhone release is watching people ODing on their own excitement and going crazy trying to be the first one to own the latest gizmo. Please note, yours truly is using the word iPhone and gizmo in the same sentence with a lot of reluctance.After all Apple is not Pomegranate.

I am not trying to pooh-pooh away the technology marvel project natal is. I am really excited about it and can’t wait for it to release. At the same time, I am really unimpressed by iPhone except for the sleekness of the hardware. I am a loyal fan of Symbian OS. I can occasionally tolerate a windows mobile, though I still want to hunt down the person who  introduced PC like start button on WiMo and convince him/her to suicide.

Sporty hit the nail on the head when she said that the biggest problem in the world are sci-fi movies. We refuse to be wowed by any technology after having already seen it in a Bond movie ages before it was realized. We don’t think digital watches and cars that can outrun/outfly a chopper are cool anymore. They are everyday banalities. Bond’s wrinkle resistant, blood and grime resistant, tear proof Reid and Taylor suits- now that is WOW.

Mental Jetsam

It has been a while since one of those blog entries billowing with frustration and seething with pent up anger. I‘ve started showing withdrawal symptoms – plasticity of forced smile, an increased tendency to blabber philosophically and a strong affinity to caffeine despite the trembling fingers.

It is difficult to sustain the joie de vivre or Joey de vivaram (news about Joey) as my very mallu English teacher of yesteryears would say. She would ridicule our foney accents if we refused to gossip about Mon-si-our Joey. I digress. As I was saying, it is difficult to sustain Joey de vivaram and pretend that the world is a happy place for long. It is like dal cooking in the Hawkins Futura pressure cooker. (Futura! The confluence of sci fi like naming and cooking. I like it). Eventually the pressure builds up and you have to let it out. You let it out too quick in an inappropriate place, time or manner, it could send a few pulses soaring.  (Note to self: next time, avoid bad puns).
Life got a million times better since I changed my job. But a job is a job and the world is the same world. You have bad days and then you have worse days. But it isn’t always that easy. You also have I-shot-myself-in-the-foot days. Today is one such day. I need rejuvenation. Resurrection. Therapy. I am gonna give the sleeping economy a shot in the arm, that it badly needs.I am going to indulge in some hardcore, sinful, decadent,bank balance decimating retail therapy. I am going to shop like a woman possessed. No. I am just gonna shop like a woman. Possessed or unpossessed a woman is at the heart of the success of consumerism.
It will work. The smile is already returning.