Days of my life!!

Five years back, as I was trying to make a quick transition from the highly organized surroundings of Melbourne to the rather dis-oriented Bengaluru, I did notice quite a few potholes that had stemmed the progress of this otherwise beautiful city. One of the them was the obvious lack of an efficient public transport. There were no yellow and black taxis (like you would find them in Mumbai), the auto rickshaw wallas were basically running a business my looting and cheating the passenger who sat on the back seat and while the buses were quite effective, the fact that the destination was displayed in Kannadda, virtually ensured that an outsider like me would end up boarding the wrong bus on more than one ocassions. What Bengaluru needed was good rail connectivity. It didn't take long, after that, for someone in the Government to get a similar revelation and within no time, by pulling a few strings - project plans were charted, funds were raised and grand announcement was made t...

It was a quiet and serious atmosphere in the HR's cabin of my company. On one side of the desk sat the almighty and powerful HR of Magma with his neatly combed hair and his reading glasses tilted on his nose. On the his desk were a bunch of resumes and in front of him stood a group of people, who I assume were the recruitment consultants who had brought in these resumes. He examined each resume one by one with intricate details. He ran his magnifying glass over the resume and after a while, placed the first resume in his suitcase, on his left hand side. "Perfect experience level, good knowledge of ASIC design, right attitude. He'll be a Bournville one day.", the HR said. (Ahem Ahem....."Bournville" is a code we use for a Star Performer in Magma!!) Moving on .......he examined the next resume with the same level of precision and placed this one to the right. "He's nothing..."  As he moved on to the third, there was s...

If I mention the word addiction, the first words that obviously comes to mind are smoking, drinking, coffee, snoring and what not....but I wanted to highlight a different kind of an addiction that we all probably have, but are not ready to admit - our favorite newspaper! Reading the newspaper, especially the 'Times of India', runs in my family. I still remember my grandfather's face hidden behind the newspaper for hours and hours, as he held it fully stretched out, using both his arms. Ofcourse, there was no satellite TV during those days, but I seriously doubt if that would have deterred him from changing his daily routine. A similar tradition is still being religiously followed by my mom and whenever I am in Mumbai, I can still find her falling fast asleep in the afternoon, with the newspaper next to her, after she is done reading the editorial and 'Speaking Tree' sections. She rarely bothers about the front few and last few pages though, and despite of being an e...

Yet another fine Saturday morning in the city of Bengaluru and like a very good husband, I spent the day lazing on the sofa with my legs stretched out on the coffee table, watching CNN IBN's telecast of Bollywood Divas' which was featuring the life and times of yesteryear heart-throb - Madhubala. Thanks to my laziness, Prachi too got busy with her laptop, on the chair next to the sofa, to complete her office work or 'verbatims' as she refers to it. Soon, the host, Rajeev Masand, spoke about her steamy affair with Dilip Kumar which eventually broke up on the sets of Naya Daur . Being totally unaware of this new piece of data in my life, I excalimed, "Aila, I didn't know she had an affair with Dilip Kumar, I only knew about her marriage with Kishore Kumar!!" Prachi, however, was probably too busy with her work and I thought she had hardly noticed what I had said or what was running on the tube. A couple of minutes later, Rajeev Masand excused himself to take...

The first time I came across the word 'Pressure' was in my Physics text book, which defined the term as force per unit area. Simply put, 'Pressure' was nothing but the amount of force applied on a surface. As I grew older, I came across a few more scenarios where the word 'Pressure' was used along with a suitable prefix. Social Pressure, Academic Pressure, Financial Pressure, Family Pressure and many more. In each case, the source and magnitude of force applied changed, but the surface remained the same - me!! Yesterday, as I sat and thought about it, I realized that all this while, it was just 'Life', grooming me for something bigger. Let's go back to Physics for an example. If you take a stone and throw it on a piece of glass, it will break. But if you take the same stone and try to throw it on a diamond, chances are that the stone will break, but the diamond will definitely not. Your ability to handle pressure, will determine if you are a piece of...

A guy decides to buy a new black car and, as always, his friends' chip in with invaluable pieces of advice. Mr. Pessimist : "Don't go for black one da . Black is the colour of evil." Mr. Rockstar : "What rubbish....black rocks man....like Street Hawk!!" Guy : "You mean Knight Rider?" Mr. Rockstar : "Yeah man....same difference.....black rocks!!" Mr. Gentleman : "Black is actually a royal colour. I think it will look really great on a car." All this changes when the Guy has a wife or a girlfriend. If his better half does not like the colour, she simply says, "If you love me, don't buy a black car!!" If, however, she likes the colour she will first try and convince him of how beautiful and sexy black looks on a car. She will then explain to him that there aren't many black cars, of that make, on the road. If nothing else works, she'll simply say, "If you love me, get me a black car!!" In the end, wh...

The other day I was watching a movie titled ‘Arthur’s Hallowed Ground’, a classic British movie from the early 80’s, on the ‘World Movies’ channel. The main protagonist of this movie, as you may have guessed from the title, is an old gentleman by the name of Arthur, who has been shown to be working as a curator on a cricket ground somewhere in London. The astonishing thing, though, is that he has been doing this job all on his own for, believe it or not, the past 45 years!! As the years pass, things change and the committee members who run the club, bring on-board a businessman to change the dwindling fortunes of the club and help them make some money. This businessman wants to invest a large sum of money into spectator welfare, but faces stiff opposition from Arthur, who insists that he needs the money to buy a new grass cutter for the ground. Every effort from the business man to raise some money is resisted by Arthur. He even sets up a tent next to the pitch and spends the entir...