It’s a hot and sweaty Saturday morning and I'm standing at the gate of the institute, waiting for an important alumnus to arrive for a meeting. Being part of the alumni committee has lots of perks but this isn’t one of them. The alumnus had said he’d be here in ten minutes. That was over an hour back and I curse my luck as the full sleeve formal shirt complete with a tie gently cooks my body to medium rare. I don’t even like the tie. It isn’t mine and I'd been forced to borrow it. It’s bright red with garish yellow stripes and it makes me stand out like a beacon to passerby’s who need directions. With my broken Hindi, I try my best but I get the feeling they don’t have a clue as to what language I’m speaking.

The security guard is amused and he calls out from time to time, “ Not come yet has he?
I shake my head in remorse and he grins. I guess it’s nice for him to watch a student sweat in the sun like him instead of dozing in an air-conditioned classroom. As a drop of sweat runs down my nose, I spot a small thin man with a battered suitcase make his towards me. Another lost soul, I presume and I decide that I will talk to him only in Tamil.

“ Why are you standing at the gate?” he asks me in crisp English and for a moment I’m surprised. He looks like a man who lives on the street and the last thing I expected was faultless English.

“ Is the institute open today”, he asks his next question and before I can reply, he answers himself “Oh yes, you have students in the hostel who will be here on weekends too.”

“What is the fees they charge?” he asks the next question and I find myself getting a little annoyed. It’s not pleasant being assaulted with questions by a complete stranger. The fees is fairly steep and not something you feel comfortable disclosing to someone you don’t know.

“You may ask at the admission office.” I reply and look away. He smiles knowingly and shifts himself in front of my gaze.

“What is your educational qualification?”

I look into his eyes. They are large, bright and have a maniacal gleam in them. The security guard looks on with avid interest. I don’t want to answer him but don’t know how to avoid a direct question. I struggle inside and finally mutter, “ Engineer.”

“What specialization?”

“Electrical and Electronics.”

“What specialization have you chosen here?”

“ I will decide in my second year.”

I hate every moment of it. I don’t have the guts to ask him to stop bothering me and I hate the way he’s wringing answers out of me.

He senses my discomfort and smiles.

“Listen to me. In two years you will get a job that pays you a nice fat salary. Then you will get married. But remember this! Keep your wife close to you!”

I look at him in confusion. I don’t know how to react. He comes close to me and looks penetratingly into my eyes. His smile disappears and is replaced by a fearsome scowl.

“Only ten percent of your salary to your brothers and sisters. The remaining ninety percent goes to your wife. If you don’t do that, you’ll end up like this man, a divorcee, a pauper who walks on the road with no chappal.”

He turned around and began walking away rapidly. I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing but it bothered me. I looked at the receding figure and wondered. Did he have some place to go? Was he walking with a great sense of purpose towards a place, which did not exist? Was there anything at all in that broken suitcase? Did he have any food or clothes in it? I wish I’d asked him his story. What had gone wrong with his life? Could the same thing happen to me?

When you studying in a B school, you completely forget the world outside. You assume everyone will earn a six-figure salary, everyone will drive an expensive car and everyone will travel the world. You party, you get drunk, safe in your knowledge that in the near future that some well known company will scoop you up.

As I stood at the gate of my B school, I realized that I was standing at the line that divided two very different worlds. I turned to the security guard.

“Call me when the alumni comes, I’m going inside.”

The song that haunts the corridors of IMT and now my room...

tere bin main yun kaise jiya
kaise jiya tere bin
tere bin main yun kaise jiya
kaise jiya tere bin
lekar yaad teri raaten meri kati - 2
mujhse baaten teri karti hai chaandani
tanha hai tujh bin raaten meri
din mere din ke jaise nahi
tanha badan tanha hai ruh nam meri aankhen rahe
aaja mere ab rubaru
jeena nahi bin tere
tere bin main yun kaise jiya
kaise jiya tere bin
tere bin main yun kaise jiya
kaise jiya tere bin

kabse aankhen meri raah mein tere bichhi - 2
bhule se hi kahi tu mil jaaye kabhi
bhule na mujhse baaten teri
bheegi hai har pal aankhen meri
kyun saans loon kyun main jiyu
jeena bura sa lage
kyun ho gaya tu bewafaaa mujhko bata de wajah
tere bin main yun kaise jiya
kaise jiya tere bin ...
tere bin main yun kaise jiya
kaise jiya tere bin ...

I'm home!

However my biological clock is on IMT time. I slept through the entire day and woke up late in the evening.Its 12:30 AM now and I feel fresh and ready to take on any challenge...but I'm alone..everyone else is asleep.

Fresher's party at IMT....

I'll be going home for 4 days this friday, I cant wait!

As much as I crib about the life here, I've actually had a really good time. The pace of life and trying to be a 4 places at the same time does get to me, but its been a really nice experience.

Right now I look forward to filter coffee(Not Nescafe cat piss), rasam sadam, thair sadam, no phone calls at 2 in the morning("Can you come to my room for the OB project meeting?"), no falling asleep at peculiar hours, not waking up with my heart hammering("Shit, do I have a presentation to make today??").... I need peace...home made peace...

Being in a B school keeps you on your toes. I’m always running around and doing so many things I completely lose track of why I’m actually doing the thing I’m doing. I’m having trouble prioritizing things. Do I study for the quiz or head for the alcom room to make my calls? Do I attend the meeting for the OB project or attend the meeting for the marketing project? Do I figure out how to make a decent profit loss account or do I research the next company that’s coming to campus for summer placements? Everything seems important, I want to do them all but I find myself doing something while wondering if perhaps I should be elsewhere.

There are those who manage to do them all and still find time for a basketball match. Something inside them is driving is them….and I’ve realized I don’t have it yet. There’s a part of me, which rebels at all the hard work. I’m a type B personality caught in a type A environment and I feel guilty about it.

I realize I came to a B school not for the academic learning or the placements. I came to a B school because I felt there were a lot of things about me, which I needed to change. I felt a B school would drive the dreamer out of me and turn me into someone who was assertive and got the job done. Now as I actually try to accomplish a dozen tasks a day, I long for the day I can just loll on the bed without a care in the world. Will that day ever come? What is more important to me? Getting the job done or sitting back and reflecting on life? Can I do both? Only time will tell.

At the end of 3 weeks, we were a limp demoralized lot. The faculty had taken pity on us initially and hadn’t objected too much to our corpse impersonations in class. As the weeks went by however they became more and more irritable and took to prodding those of who drooled on the table, far away in their own sweet world where no senior would bang on the door at 4 in the morning.

Now we found it impossible to sleep during the nights. The 3 weeks had turned our biological clocks inside out. We were wide-awake at 2 PM and colder than stone at 9 in the morning.

The faculty soon started adding to our trouble. Quizzes, exams, assignments and projects began rain down on us. Only now apparently, was real life at a B School beginning.

I spent the first week of my life at IMT leading the life of a hunted animal. I wasn’t alone in my misery; every first year student at IMT will have the memory seared in his brain forever.

Every morning we would be woken up at 6 to attend yoga. We would bend, stretch and groan until 7:30. After which we’d be given an hour to bathe, have breakfast and attend class. For the first time in my life, I faced the problem of sharing a bathroom with 16 individuals fighting a frantic battle against time. I bathed in the loo for the first 3 days.

Breakfast would be eaten in a daze. It was the best meal of the day but we were too bombed to notice.

The first week was supposed to have introductory classes. I say supposed to because none of us were actually conscious to notice. Classes were followed by lunch followed by an alumni lecture. We’d be left alone for a couple of hours and then dinner. Dinner was followed by presentations made by the various committees in college. It would be 1 in the morning by the time it got over. That when the horror started.

We would assemble at the amphitheatre and the seniors would come roaring out of their rooms, fresh and charged up at the time half the world was in bed. We must salute them, they said, wish them, respect them, a senior was always right, don’t you dare forget that. And remember, it is not morning until the classes have started. Nobody cares if its 5 in the morning, you still say Good evening sir, all right?

We saluted, we roared Good evening sir over and over again but they were never satisfied. You can’t say Good evening, at least sing for us, cant sing? Dance then. Stop stop! You call that dancing? Run around the ground, waving your arms shouting, “ It’s raining, it’s raining! Oh I love the rain!”

A senior would come, scan the group and pick the guys and girls he wanted. We’d be led to different corners of the ground and made to do his bidding. We’d start of by introducing ourselves. In the first week, I introduced myself about a thousand times.

For my first PDP (they never called it ragging, it was a personality development programme), I was asked to market ‘Grassy Swipes’, nature’s all natural toilet paper.

When the senior finally got bored of us, he’d send us of to another eager senior and the whole thing would start again. I was asked to enact Rakhi Sawant yelling at Mika Singh, Kareena Kapoor caught by the press kissing Shahid Kapoor. After which I was supposed to throw myself at the feet of some unsuspecting senior and weep “ Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, what will become of our unborn child?” I don’t know why, but I always got the female roles.

Sometimes the senior would take pity on us and send us back to the room. The sympathy was wasted because just after we went back to bed, another senior would bang on the door and take us out.

The ragging would go on till 5 in the morning after which we would be bid good night. We’d stagger back and collapse on the bed. At 6 it was time for yoga. Another day had begun.

I went an entire week without sleep, bombed out my senses, not hungry, not thirsty, totally immune to the fact that the campus was actually filled with lovely women. The 7 days went by like a horror movie played in slow motion.

Updates will follow soon.

I havent got around to really writing about my experiences at IMT yet but my friend Kshitij has taken out the time to do so:

introduction-of-characters

Needless to say I'm pretty flattered with his description of me :-P

Its been a month at IMT. One month of consuming nothing but chappatis, panneer, rajma, daal and holy mother of god, about a billion kilos of potato. Right now I'd just kill for a plate of this...



A more detailed post on my life here in the last month will follow soon.

Many apologies for this very delayed update. My life has been a blur in the last couple of weeks. I havent slept since I entered the IMT campus. Will give more details once things slow down a bit.

At around 6 PM, Balaji, Arnab and I decided to take a break from work and headed for the pantry. Balaji and I munched on our egg puffs while Arnab sipped his tea. I normally avoided coffee and tea because even after two years, I still hadn’t mastered the art of holding a thin paper cup filled with scalding liquid. For the life of me, I couldn’t drink something that hot in less than two minutes. That by itself made me a pariah in the IT community. I’d already lost count of the number of times I had dropped the cup. Needless to say, my friends stood a few feet away from me each time I did decided to have a hot drink.

Balaji took a large bite out of his puff and looked thoughtfully at the tube light above us.

“You know, I think a kid from school could work in IT without any difficulty. Lets face it, what we do isn’t rocket science.”

I had finished my egg puff and I stared hungrily at his, not really paying attention to what he’d said. Arnab on the other hand choked on his tea.

“How could you say that? I work on multiple technologies at the same time to get my project running. Think of the long hours, the impossible deadlines and the terrible pressure! How could a school kid possibly handle all that?”

“ Bullshit multiple technologies. All we do is copy and paste code. It’s the same whether you are working in java, dot net or any other language. Anybody could do it. We sit in an air-conditioned room and do manual labor. Besides I think only Indians are willing to compromise on their personal life to sit and slave in the office.”

The argument went on and despite myself I was drawn into it. I couldn’t side with Balaji who just dismissed all the work I’d done in the last year as childishly easy. Nor could I side with Arnab who believed all he had done was holy. I was somewhere between the two of them. I liked to think I was using my head to do what I was doing but at the same time I realized that if google were to shut down, I could as well retire.

So what had my last couple of years in IT been like?

I can’t say much about the first place I worked at. I wasn’t there for very long. I made a few good friends but the only thing I’ll remember is the awful time the HR gave me when I tried to leave. That instilled in me the deep sense of mistrust that almost all techies have for HR. Perhaps I have a slightly warped view of them but to me all they seemed to do was dress smart and talk smart. Software engineers are mostly an unsophisticated lot and quite incapable of verbal jugglery. This however was what HR did with ease and more often than not, they confused or scared the poor techie and then showed him the door.

I then spent the next couple of months in my second company being completely ignored by everybody. I didn’t have any work, I didn’t have a computer, I didn’t have a cubicle and I didn’t have my own dustbin. It was fun at first. I loved to travel in the big airbus to office. I loved to flash my access card. I loved using the small hand shower at the loo. I loved to use tissue paper and liquid soap at the restroom. I loved to eat at all the different joints in the cafeteria. It felt great to use a shoe polishing machine and most of all whenever people asked me where I worked, I could say I worked at company C. I worked for a known brand and I loved it when people nodded knowingly.

Two months passed and the only thing I did with the team was eat lunch and dinner at places I could never even dream of entering before. The meals were lavish, the deserts made you drool and almost everybody got drunk. I was pitied because I was both a vegetarian and teetotaler.” Go have curd rice and drink milk” my teammates would jeer. I would ignore them as I ladled vast quantities of malai kofta, panneer butter masala, mushroom masala and kashmiri pulav onto my plate. We ate every joint on ECR. We frequented GRT Grand days, Radisson, The Residency, Benz Park and Le Meriden. In short, the two months were a gastronomic delight.



All this however paled quickly. As time went by, I began to get increasingly insecure. Why was I being ignored? Was I going to spend the rest of my life without a project? If by some chance I was shifted to another project, what skills could I say I had?

Having all the time in the world and having nothing to do, I decided to start preparing for the CAT. I figured I could just sit in the library the whole day and study. At least that way I would know where my life was heading. I paid the fees at IMS and collected the material. The next day I was chucked into a new project.

With that began the most trying period in my professional life. Everything seemed just too complicated. I figured I would just design the presentation layer and then the senior people would take care of the code at the back end. That didn’t happen. At each stage, I was pushed to take on a slightly higher responsibility. I was nervous all the time. I thought that at any moment they’d realize that I wasn’t smart enough to do the work they wanted me to do. That didn’t happen either and slowly I began to enjoy the responsibility.

Between June and September, the 5 of us in the team worked 7 days a week from 9 in the morning till 2 in the morning. We became pale and lost weight. Often we forgot to shave. We also had to get used to each other’s personal eccentricities. Raja would be in a coma the entire day and then suddenly come to life at around 11 PM. He would jiggle with delight in his chair as he played Telugu movie songs at full blast.

“Chiranjeevi movie man! It is a sooper doper hit!” he would yell over the music. Through Raja, I became familiar with the world of Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna, Venkatesh and Ballaya.

“Who is a better actor? Chiranjeevi or Nagarjuna?” I asked once at four in the morning.

Raja pondered over this briefly. “Surely Chiranjeevi! Nagarjuna has style but Chiranjeevi can dance man! He is over fifty but he can really dance!” Raja would get excited and do a vague bharatanatyam movement with his arms, wiggling his bottom while never getting up from the chair.

Whenever work became a little too much for Manish, he would open up Adobe Photoshop and morph photographs. Late one night he was struck by inspiration and proceeded to graft T.Rajendrans face onto a gorilla. The final masterpiece was to remain our desktop background for several months.





Behind me sat Uday. He wasn’t in my team but he worked extreme hours too. Uday’s sole reason for existence was the promised “Onsite opportunity”. To get it, he worked insane hours. As the months went by, everybody but Uday went abroad. This pushed him further into depression and he’s pass time checking out the maximum and minimum temperatures at California, Chicago and New Jersey. Then he would call up his friends who were already there and talk about the weather.

One evening as I sat at my computer, I felt that it was getting a little dark outside.

“Is it raining? ” I turned around and asked.

“Wait I’ll check.” I half expected him to get up and go outside but I should have known better. Uday checked the weather on google.

Uday had to endure 3 last minute project cancellations before he finally caught a plane to New Jersey. As luck would have it, he managed to lose a hundred dollars even before he got onto the plane.

Work meanwhile for me was intense and fast paced. Most of the time I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I would use the senior peoples code as a reference and then blindly copy paste most of it. “Code first, understand later” was the advice I was given. I was too confused to object.

Working late into the night was interesting at first. It made me feel I really belonged to IT. When I had lunch with my friends, I could look wearily at them and say, “ I was in the office till 4 in the morning!” They would nod in understanding and there would be a moment of respectful silence. “Here’s another guy slogging it out to meet deadlines” I imagined they would think. “He’s one of us all right.”

I enjoyed the new respect I was getting but I hated working nights. It left me totally disoriented. I was always nervous and subject to frequent bouts of depression. I didn’t have a personal life and I lost all hope of clearing the CAT.

The project went live in September and the first couple of weeks were used to fix bug after bug. This is when I began to really understand what we’d done over the last few months. I had to delve deep into the code to fix these issues and I ended up learning a lot. I began to take a more active part in the conference calls with the onsite coordinator and the client.
During the first couple of calls, I was awkward and nervous and I spoke too fast. I couldn’t understand what the clients were saying. Their speech was slow and measured and I found it hard to wait for them to finish a single sentence. With a little more experience I began to enjoy leaning towards the speakerphone and speaking in a deep loud voice.

“So would you like the data to be validated in the front end or the back end?”

“I think we need to code a daemon thread to for that requirement.”

“Ha Ha! It does not snow in Chennai!”

I loved to speak in jargon. Most of the time I didn’t understand what I was saying but it made me feel really good. I was a hardcore techie using hardcore computing terms.

After a rough first couple of weeks in September fixing bugs, suddenly I had no work. But for an occasional enhancement I was usually free. Having ignored the CAT all along I jumped back in right earnest. I sat in the library all day and worked out paper after paper. This was my revenge for being forced to work night and day and I was lucky to have a very understanding team leader.

“Get out of here as soon as you can.” He advised me. “ You’ll get stuck in a rut if you stay on. Software engineers are a dime a dozen. You’ll be just one among the thirty thousand people who work in this company.”

The CAT came and went and I did ok. I still didn’t have any work so I spent my time on google and wikipedia reading up on India’s history, geography and economy. There was so much I didn’t know but wikipedia had answers to everything. GDP, NDP, Fiscal deficit, globalization, capitalism, socialism, stock markets, banking, the WTO, cross border terrorism, China, Pakistan, Jack Welch, I learnt it all sitting at my cubicle.

By the time the next set of requirements came, I was the only experienced guy left in the team. Everybody else had either left the company, the country or the project. Now I had the privilege of being admired by the freshers. They had exactly the same fears and doubts I had when I entered and it made me feel really good when I answered all their questions and handled their code hiccups. I strutted about, gave orders and felt gratified when I was listened to.

Coming back to the original question. So what’s it like working in IT? Besides the money, are you doing any soul satisfying work? Is there intellectual stimulation or are you just doing quantity work?

With just under a couple of years of experience, I’d find it hard to give you yes no answers. I know the way I view whatever work I did now is very different from the way I looked at it when I first joined the industry. Whatever excited or challenged me in the beginning became routine in a couple of months. Unless you are trying something new all the time, work can be really frustrating. There is no fixed timetable. You could be jobless for months and then suddenly thrown into a high-pressure situation. Rarely will you have a perfect 8-hour day.

In the end what you make of your job depends on perspective. As a software engineer I felt it was my God given right to look down at those who worked in the BPO industry. “Their lives must be so boring.” I would think “All they do is speak English to some dumb foreigners at 2 in the morning.”

When I got into IMT for my MBA, for a few moments I felt intensely superior to all the software engineers who surrounded me. I was moving onto something better while the rest of them would go on copy pasting code. Now I know I was being silly. I just somehow assumed that whatever I was doing now was far superior to what everybody else did.

At some level I always knew I would be leaving and so I didn’t worry too much about performance appraisals, salary hikes or onsite opportunities- the 3 things around which every techie’s life revolves. At the end of the day I can neither bash up the IT industry nor can I worship it but I’m grateful for what it gave me. I had a lot of fun; I met some wonderful people and also saved up some money on the side.

So that’s IT for me. I don’t know if I did mind boggling work but I had a good time.

I have indulged in extreme sloth in the last few days. I watch movies on my recently purchased laptop and when I'm exhausted with that, I topple off my chair and go to sleep.

Some warning bells are beginning to go off in my head. I havent picked up a textbook in two years. How am I supposed to just slip back into the routine of classes and exams? The subjects look alien to me : Managerial Economics, Financial Accounting, Quantitative techniques for Business Decisions....I'm clueless.

I'm in Bangalore for the weekend, celebrating my 23'rd birthday. I'll be back in Chennai on monday and then I have to get serious about the packing and the shopping.

More insipid posts later.

Today was my last day at work.I'm officially unemployed now.I cant think of anything poetic to say at the moment, more on this soon.

When we go out to meet friends or relatives, my uncle will put his arm around my shoulders and announce proudly "Dinesh is going to do his MBA!". The relatives will be suitably impressed and I will smile shyly. After which my uncle will ruin the whole thing by saying,

"He's got into IIM Ghaziabad!"

This is profoundly embarassing. The more ignorant relatives wil congratulate me for getting into an IIM while the more knowledgable ones will look at me like I'm some sort of fraud.

"Its IMT!" I'll hiss at my uncle.He will dismiss me with a wave of his hand.


"IMT, IIM its all the same..just changed a letter thats all."


While the IIM's are a powerful brand, known to everyone irrespective of whether they have prepared for the MBA exams or not, IMT is known only to those who have taken all the exams and know that it is among the top 10 schools in the country.

My mother fares no better than my uncle.After I got my admission letter from IMT, she called up all her friends and said that I had got into IMS.That was really irritating because IMS is a coaching center for entrance exams and not a B school by itself. Later that evening when we went to a relative's wedding, people shook hands with me for getting into IIFT, IIM Bangalore, TIME(another coaching center) and MDI.

"Ghaziabad is a very modern city" someone told me very gravely. "You wont believe that you are in India, its full of malls and sky scrapers!"

"Err..thats Gurgaon, not Ghaziabad.Ghaziabad is a small industrial town in Uttar Pradesh."

Its really annoying when there is not even a flicker of recognition when I say I'm going to IMT Ghaziabad.You are quickly robbed of your sense of achievment. At the end of it, you start hating the IIM's.

My only comfort comes in hobnobbing among people who have passed out of B schools and friends who have also given the exams and got into other colleges. Only when I'm with them do I feel a certain sense of satisfaction that comes from being associated with a well known brand.

Hilarious!

I'm eighteen again. I'm at a party. There's fast music playing and people around me move and gyrate in synch with the music. Janak rotates his hips clockwise, anticlockwise and then launches into a frantic backstroke. Nikhil is jumping from point to point doing what I think is a cross between Bharatanatyam and an orangutan in heat. Gitanjali is in her own world. Her eyes are closed and she snaps her fingers as she sways to the music. In the midst of a sea of people lost to the rhythm, I stand rigid, blinking and immobile.

I can’t breathe, I can’t move and I can’t think. I hesitantly try to move my feet to something resembling a dance step but my mind rebels in a flash. For a few seconds I hold the pose, painfully self conscious and then I give up. I make my way to a corner and slouch with exaggerated nonchalance.

Several thoughts run through my head. Part of me has already dismissed my friends as fluff brained rich spoilt brats who think 'partying is so cool'. My middle class morals are offended. Discos, pubs, 5 star hotels, fast bikes, Nike shoes, foreign vacations and outrageous pocket money seem to define the limits of their consciousness. What would my grandmother think if she saw this?

I know I'm lying to myself. Truth be told, I envy my friends for their ability to just let go. I can’t. They fear of making an ass of myself in public is just too great.

As I stand in the corner, I begin examining my own shortcomings. Why am I so afraid to dance? I gently probe my brain for memories and then slowly I remember.

I'm six again. My mother who is a biology teacher in my school is organizing an educational skit on the Food Chain. At the bottom come the plants, then the herbivores, the carnivores and then finally, mankind. Due to lack of volunteers, my mother is forced to use me as a plant. I don’t object, this is the only way I can bunk math class.

Trouble is, I underestimated my mother. I assumed that as a plant, all I had to do was stand and stare expressionlessly at the audience. She has other ideas. Apparently we don’t just stand there, each layer of the pyramid is supposed to sing and dance its way onto stage and into the audience’s hearts. Honestly, my mother can be painfully naive. I'm only six but I know I'll be singing and dancing my way to public ridicule and humiliation.

Along with a dance teacher, she finalizes the dance steps for the plants:

1) Sit on the floor with your arms wrapped around your knees and your head tucked in.
2) Raise your head and look around with wide-eyed wonderment.
3) Stand up and twirl while joyfully raising your arms towards the sun, thanking the lord for the light. (Photosynthesis rocks!)
4) Link arms with your partner and sway happily from side to side as the herbivores prance onto stage and start eating you.



The dance teacher is unhappy. The dance is not cute enough for some reason and she ponders over what moves we could use to entice the audience. She hums to herself as she moves experimentally. Seconds later she hits on the perfect move.

“I want all of you to this as you come up,” she says as she twirls upwards. She turns around wiggles her bottom.

There’s not much one can do when a forty year old woman with an iron will wiggles her bottom at you. I was only six, so in mute agony, we turn around and wiggle our bottoms at her. She’s thrilled.

Now they’ve discovered a technical snag. How exactly do the herbivores eat us? My mother answers almost immediately. She runs out and returns with a few plants stems. She removes a few of her hair clips and forcibly pins the stems onto my head.

Now the herbivore is asked to leap around me for a while and then pull the leaves out of my head with his teeth. I screech in agony as he tugs away with great determination. The clips are too tight.

I have no memories of the actual performance. My brain in all probability suppressed them in an effort to salvage my ego. I just remember they painted my face green and then strapped a potted plant to my head.

I’m going to be 23. I still can’t dance. Will I ever learn? Can I overcome that traumatic experience?

I’ve decided that in the three weeks I get before I leave for Ghaziabad, I’m going to attend a dance class. Will I have the guts to go for it? Only time will tell.

Its been a year since I received that fateful email.I cant believe time flies by so fast...

Its been a year that has been both rewarding and punishing.I've had a great time at work.Life at the office has been challenging in a fun, positive kind of way.I've been lucky to have some truly amazing people as my colleagues.

My career goals are also on track.I knew I wanted to get into one of the top B schools in the country and I did manage that.Yes,there have been times that I rued the fact that I didnt get an IIM call..but its ok.I'm sure IMT is going to be a great experience.

On the downside, its been a year where I've struggled with deep loneliness, anger and extreme confusion. I've asked myself what went wrong and relived and analyzed every mistake a thousand times.Its not easy to just let go of the past.Im not someone who can switch off my feelings and carry on when I know that what I had was beautiful.

But I'm putting my demons to rest today.I know I did my best.Sometimes things just dont work out.People change, but for better or for worse depends entirely on ones perspective.I gave it my best shot and thats enough.

I know I'm moving on to something better.

The weekend finds me in Calcutta, I'm travelling to Orissa tomorrow to attend a wedding.Whose wedding you might ask...so I might as well tell you.If what I heard was right, its my mothers-brothers-wives-uncles-grandaughter who is going to tie the knot.As you can see, we are all very close :P.

I dont feel very wordy at the moment.More updates soon.

LR and Kroopa,I deleted the post because I thought it was very badly written.Forgive me for deleting your comments in the process.

Well, my brief but lively career as a software engineer will come to an end soon. I've been offered admission to the MBA program at IMT Ghaziabad.

Just a lil dazed at the moment. More on this soon.

As I make my way down the stairs, I notice Mukund, my four year old neighbour standing at the door. His shoes are a shiny black, hair oiled and combed and holy ash smeared on his forehead and arms. With his school bag hanging from his shoulders, he’s just raring to go. Only one problem, he does not have a shirt on.

I look quizzically at this bare chested Tarzan.

“Dei, Where’s your shirt?”

He looks down and casually examines himself. He looks up and a beatific smile slowly spreads across his face.

“I put my pant zip today!”

I congratulate him heartily. Big mistake. Fired up with enthusiasm, he advances towards me to cross examine my own zippered condition. I beat a hasty retreat.

At the office, I spend the morning looking deep into the gory innards of my project . Another bug has been discovered and I know the rest of my week is ruined. This is one of those terrible bugs whose origins are unknown. It occurs under a certain conditions though what those conditions are, the on-site guy is not sure.

A great wave of helplessness overcomes me. Just as I’m ready to weep, my TL taps me on the shoulder. “Video conference with the client, we have to stay back.”

A video conference sounds interesting; I’ve never been to one before. When I first joined the project, attending my first audio conference filled me with pride. I felt pretty important as my group sat in a circle around the speaker phone, leaning forward and straining our ears to make out the words among the static.

I remember waiting with bated breath as my TL leaned forward to utter his first words to the on-site chap.

“So have you been to a strip club yet?”

This time, it’s even bigger. The video conference is to be at the exalted sixth floor. That’s where all the top management sit. I can’t wait.

As the day goes by, I start getting a little worried. What if I get self conscious and start grinning into the camera? What if I giggle and titter as my project manager discusses matters of high importance? My stomach churns at the thought.

Finally its 7:30 PM and twenty five of us make our way to the sixth floor. The security guard lets us in and we stop to admire the interior decoration. It’s a far cry from the miles and miles of cubicles on my floor. I’m tempted to sink into one of the sofas and pick up a magazine but my TL nudges me ahead.

The conference room looks like a scene out of Star Trek. Two huge flat screen TV’s with a camera on top are positioned in front of a horse shoe shaped table. One TV to show us the client and the other to show us how we look to the client. The chairs are incredibly comfortable and I choose one right at the corner where I won’t be visible on camera. Seconds later my project manager politely nudges me and asks me to sit elsewhere. Now I’m bang in front of the cam and I know I’m going to end up humiliating the entire team.

We wait as the technicians hook things up and make the connection. There are a couple of freshers in my team who keep grinning at each other and I hope they crack up before I do.

Suddenly we see the image of our on-site coordinator smiling awkwardly at us.
We make some stilted conversation while he waits for the clients to arrive. I'm quite relieved though, the TV images are a little blurred. Even if I lost control and simpered at the camera, it wouldn't be very noticeable.

The clients arrive and some awkward small talk is made. They want know to in which part of India we are sitting in and when we say Chennai, they look at us blankly.

“Does it snow there?” they ask and some of us choke.

To them we seem like curiosities,Indians sitting in some vague part of India where for some reason it does not snow.

They gradually bring up the agenda for the meeting and we go through a power point presentation. They start talking among themselves and we gradually realise that we have absolutely no role to play in the meeting. Its 9 PM and most of us are starving. The clients show no signs of letting up and continue to engage in what seems like a pointless conversation. Suddenly one of them starts fumbling in his bag. We sit up and take notice. What exactly is he doing?

He takes something out of the bag and starts unwrapping it. Seconds later he takes a big bite out it and starts talking again as he chews. We cant believe it. He's actually eating in front of us.

I cant take it anymore. I mute the speaker so that we cant be heard and hiss at my PM.

“Whats he eating???”

“Its a bagel, it comes in different flavours. Cheese, garlic and so on....”.

I don't get it. Here we are,sitting so formally and trying to ignore our rumbling tummies. There they are, eating live on television.

The meeting stretches on and on. He finishes his bagel and sips coke. Most of us here are in an advanced stage of coma.

We suddenly lose the video. We can only hear them and it takes them some time to realise we cant see each other. Then they agree that we had an extremely informative meeting and that it was good to meet the offshore team. So much was discussed and a lot was learnt. I rouse my team mates and we gradually make our way out of the room.

I'm never attending another video conference.

I dedicate this post to the South African Team for the most thrilling match of all time!!!!!!!!!!!

Kroopa,I'm sorry you didnt like it, I guess I'll have to work on it a bit more.

Who art thou LR? Will you ever forgive me for deleting your comment? :-). I deleted the entire post on my English teacher, fixed every single spelling mistake and grammatical error I could find and put it back on. You were absolutely right,I should not have written a tribute to my english teacher with faulty grammar. Forgive me for deleting your comment in the process :-)

Forgive me my gentle readers, I've been bitten by the writing bug. For reasons unknown, I wish to write my first book. Written below is my first attempt at a beginning. Feel free to criticize :-). PS: The title is Indian Born Confused Desi :P

Three distinct wails were heard the night I was born.The first emanated from me as the doctor repeatedly spanked my newborn bottom to get me to cry.The second came courtesy my sister who wailed when she heard she wasnt exactly getting a baby sister. The third and final one came from my mother minutes after emerged from the influence of the anaesthetic.

"This is your baby boy!" gushed the nurse. My mother took one look at me and burst into tears. I was born into a world of sorrow.

Each one of us in our own way was quite justified. I had been flogged on arrival. My sisters dearest wish to have a younger sister had been rudely squashed after the doctor quickly examined my essentials.

My mother, heavily depressed by sedatives stared blearily at her latest offspring and then slowly turned right and looked at the healthy baby in the neighbouring bed.She turned back, took one final look at me and unleashed the tears.

For all you bloggers out there, there's a blogging competition being held at Saarang. You can get more details at
http://saarang.sulekha.com and
http://saarangtalk.sulekha.com

All the best :-)

How does one behave when one is in the presence of a celebrity? Do you dog his footsteps? Or do you ignore him completely and go about your business? I wish I could have neatly fallen into one these categories. Instead I walked about the gym with casual indifference and then when no one was looking, goggled at him with my mouth open.

I didn’t really think of asking for a photograph until it occured to me that by pure luck I had my digi cam with me. Earlier in the day I had taken a lot of snaps at the office. Our internal website needed each individuals photograph and profile and so my digi cam was in high demand. My cubicle had been converted into a mini studio. I took the photographs while my colleague beautified (and later mutilated with warts, pimples, buck teeth, drool, Veerappan moustaches and horns) them with Adobe photoshop.


When I realised I had my digi cam, I became simultaneously excited and nervous. The rewards were obvious. I could flaunt the photo at the office and be popular for a day. On the other hand there was a good possibilty that Vikram would give me a disgusted look and ignore me.


I circled him hesitantly several times and each time he looked questioningly at me, I’d pick up the nearest dumbell and exercise some randomly chosen body part. In the space of one hour, I lifted 2.5 pounds for my biceps, squatted 100 pounds for legs, performed over 15 sets of crunches for my abs and did endless sets of push ups and pull ups.

I gradually realised that while I was setting up myself for an early death at the gym, I still hadn't asked him for a snap. So I drank a litre of water, did another 5 sets of squats and tripped and stumbled my way towards him.


When I actually asked him, it felt like an out of body experience. I heard my voice say something like “Vikram, would you mind if I had a picture taken with you? Then the world stopped rotating.

He smiled back.” Shall I take it using my cell phone?” he asked, showing me his fantastically advanced mobile. I didn’t hear a word of what he said. My God, he’d actually replied!

“I’ll bring my camera!” I blurted and ran up to fetch it.

So then I got him to stand next to me and got the former Mr.Chennai who is one of the instructors to take the picture. Because Vikram is one of the biggest stars in the Tamil film industry, he can smile confidently at a camera. Because I am a software engineer with one-year experience in Java, I can look with supreme confidence into a camera and look like I have amoebic dysentery.


I guess Friday the 13’th was a pretty lucky day for me :-)

I'm back...

Well, sort of anyway.

I'm on vacation at the moment. I'd taken a weeks leave to prepare for the upcoming exams. Big mistake.

I've realised I've lost the ability to sit and study for long hours. Everyday I find myself casually wondering whats going on at the office. I long to get back. I miss my cubicle.
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The CAT zipped by. It stopped just long enough to bite a big chunk out of my ego.

Interestingly enough, its the verbal section thats left me a little puzzled. I did sort of decently in quants and DI but I found the verbal section impossible to evaluate. When I looked at the answer key at the IMS and TIME website I found that they didnt agree on practically anything. SO frankly I dont know how well I've done. I suppose I do feel like I've done a decent job overall. Much better than last time anyway.

Slew of exams coming up,this IBCD shall retreat behind his books now.

Thats Aparna and Niranjana, the lovely ladies who reside in the neighbouring flat(Click on the picture to get a bigger image). Due to some pretty heavy rains in Chennai, schools have been closed and the two of them have been running around.Yours truly has also been unable to go to work :P.

I suppose there are few things better in the world than getting up in the morning and hearing that school has been cancelled :-).

Seeing them, I simply had to take a snap. I'm really not one of those people who gush over kids but this time I had to make an exception.

Later, coaxed by her mother Aparna recited The story of the 5 fingers. She strode into my room, fixed a stern eye on me and bade me to listen. Once she was sure she had my attention, she assumed a wooden expression and recited the entire story in a single breath. Her eyes glazed over towards the end and just as I was getting worried she finished the story and ran out of the room.

For the first couple of months after I joined my present company, I had plenty of free time on my hands. While the more senior people in the team spent day and night slogging it out to meet deadlines, I would calmly pick up my bag at 6:00 PM and head out of the office. The fact that I was considered a working professional by outsiders was enough. Actually working was out of the question.

My views on work changed slowly. I started to hear horror stories from the guys who I trained with, about crazy deadlines, fanatical project managers and permanently jumpy onsite coordinators. I on the other hand could only narrate with great enthusiasam the menu's of the various restaurants I had dined at with the team.


The people in my apartment complex began to look at me funny each time I entered the building by 6:30 PM. "But my brother comes back only at 1:00 in the morning!" the neighbour would exclaim. To them an IT professional was one who bathed, shaved and ate at the office, coming home occasionally to take a nap and then head back . I proved to be the complete antithesis of a pukka IT professional....and it puzzled my neighbours a great deal.

I began to feel vaguely guilty that I was getting home so soon. I felt like I was letting down the entire IT community. I began to look for ways and means to stay back at work but I wasnt given any tasks to complete. The project was at a very critical stage and they could'nt trust a fresher with bare minimum knowledge of java.

I longed to complain of heavy workloads, crazy working hours and managers who belonged to an asylum. I wanted to be part of that exclusive inner circle, to be part of the guys who'd been to hell and back several times during a project. I wanted to carry two cell phones. One for personal use and the other to get calls from the onsite coordinator at 3:00 in the morning.

My prayers were never answered. I had no work, I left by six and my manager was a really nice guy who kept organising team dinners.


As the days went by, I started getting small tasks to complete. Sometimes testing, sometimes ensuring that quality standards were followed and sometimes looking after bug tracking. Nothing spectacular, I was just doing the work the senior guys referred to avoid. I once stayed back till 10:00 PM to compile a list of bugs. I was gloriously happy that night. I felt like I truly belonged now. The next day I was back home at six.

Things changed when one of the guys who had to code a module left to replace the onsite chap. I was summoned and asked to do his work.

I was pretty pleased. I was going to sink my teeth into some real work now. I opened Websphere Application Developer and double clicked on a java file. It immediately leapt out of the screen and bit me.

I had never seen anything so fearsomely complex in my entire life. Monstorous chunks of code all calling each other and sometimes even calling themselves doing God knows what. A carnal orgy of Mainframe calls, JDBC, MQ Series, Java Beans, Enterprise Java Beans, DB2 and SQL Server hits.

I made about a hundred visits a day to my Team Leader's cubicle. I read the architecture document about a zillion times before the code made any sense to me.

I took slow hesitant steps. The server complained all the time. I encountered warning messages written by come deeply cynical programmer." If you see this more than once,things are BAD". " Hi Buddy! stored procedure failed!" " Hurrah! The value returned by the database is: NULL".

I put my heart and soul into developing that module.As the weeks passed, my code morphed from an innocent collection of hard coded data to a large and clumsy Frankenstein. I looked with awe and not without fear at what I had brought to life. It was large,it was fearsome and it bristled with mainframe calls, stored procedures and Java beans transferring information like no mans business. I began to lose track of what did what. At times I would stop coding and scroll up and down seeing neither end nor beginning.

I started to lose track of time. Time just flew. Before I knew it, I was sitting wearily in front of the monitor at 2 in the morning trying to get the damn thing to work. If I was'nt in the office, I worried over possible defects and bugs. I wrote code in my dreams. I had nightmares of defects being found during the production phase.

I didnt know what was happening at home. I just slept there for a few hours before coming back in the morning to see my inbox full of mails from the onsite chap. The office became my life.

I have finally made that transition from being a jobless professional to a stressed out coding freak who comes home at odd hours. My neighbours are not even awake to see me come home at 2 in the morning.I have plenty of things to complain about and share war stories with the guys I trained with.

I have begun to feel guilty if I'm home on the weekends. My concience is wracked with remorse if I leave the office before 11 PM. Sometimes when I'm home, I dont quite know what to do with myself.

My official life as a software engineer has finally begun.

I guess I'm going to be a pretty infrequent blogger till the end of the year. I'm facing unreasonable deadlines at work and the CAT is only 3 months away. I worry about the CAT in the office and worry about work when I study for the CAT :P.

I'm taking a break of sorts from active gymming. Not only because of the lack of time but also because I want my shoulder and knee to heal from their respective injuries. I'll be keeping it pretty light for the next few months.

Nothing more to add. The next few months are going to be critical for me. Wish me luck :-).

I'd like all of you to join me in wishing my sister Mrs.Supriya Devarajan,B.Sc M.Sc,PHd a very happy birthday :-). Terribly sorry I didnt call you first thing in the morning sis.....I was just a little too stoned :-).

Have a great day!

Your beans are not in the session,
May I present you a null pointer exception?

True glory lies not in never falling but rising each time we fall,
ps:- The mainframe has not returned your call.

You make your request,
I choose not to respond,
Reflect, repent, and restart,
Uh-oh.. I guess your code is gone...

Code worked before tea
Code worked before coffee,
Application crashes after egg puff.
WebSphere Application Developer moves in mysterious ways.

I have been wrenched away from my cubicle and allotted a new one.I'm shattered.


When I first joined my project after training, I didnt have a comp assigned to me.I led a rather nomadic existence, moving from computer to computer as demanded of me. Naturally this was a bit of a pain because just I settled down and started to do something productive I'd be asked to move.

I had always had my eye on a particular cubicle. It was unoccupied but the computer was not on the network, making it impossible to use. I had repeatedly asked my project leader for that particular spot but she would give me the same reason each time. Then one day as I sat cramped between two people with a comp that acted as a server for the neighbouring project(painfully, painfully slow!) and the keyboard on my lap, my PL tapped on the shoulder, smiled and said "Its ready and its all yours!"


The next couple of months were sheer bliss.Only those who have experienced the torture of running Websphere Application Developer on a 256 MB RAM machine will know the happiness that comes from migrating to a 512. The cubicle was by itself perfect. Unlike the other one's where four people each got corner, I got a small cubicle all to myself. True it was the size of a cardboard box, but as a former nomad without a machine, I considered myself extremely lucky. I settled down between those 3 walls and spent many a happy afternoon dozing after lunch. I even had a blue dustbin all to myself. I felt truly at home.

But in the software industry, everything is ephemeral. Just as you settle down, things turn upside down and everything changes drastically. This holds true of both the customers requirements and the cubicle you use. One morning as I was just making myself comfortable after breakfast, I was curtly asked by my project manager to move 3 rows down as another team was moving in. I wasnt given a chance to argue. I had to pack up and leave. The only good news was that my machine would be moving with me.


My new location is not as good as the old one. I have only two walls instead of three. I share the cubicle with 3 others and there's a large pillar to my right. The teams on either side are a noisy enthusiastic bunch and make my afternoon nap a sheer impossibility. I think its going to take a while to settle down.

Much apologies for this delayed update. Hours at the office are at best unpredictable and the CAT is only 4 months away....besides I've lead a remarkably unremarkable life in the last couple of weeks. Will update soon.

No Anon, I did not remove your comment because it annoyed me.I removed it because you were right. If I was writing about my english teacher, the least I could do was to ensure that the spelling and grammar was right :-). I've removed all the mistakes I could find. Do let me know if I've overlooked something.

Mrs Rani Chandran, perhaps the best teacher I've ever had passed away last week. She was killed in a tragic road accident.

If I'm able to cobble my words together today and then twist the sentences into something interesting, I owe it all to her. She was the first person to really encourage my writing. Sure, I dont have any complaints against my other English teachers but I always worked extra hard to please Mrs RC. Her compliments made me feel on top of the world.

It’s a pity but our first impressions of each other left much to be desired. My english teacher in the 7th standard got frustrated with my stubborn refusal to do english homework and sent me off to meet Mrs RC who was the head of the english department. I'd never spoken to her before but I strode jauntily into the staff room fully confident of myself. No way was some pavum English teacher going to convince me to do homework. A lot of my confidence stemmed from the fact that my mom was also a teacher in my school. I was a lot more casual towards my teachers than the rest of the kids.

RC tore me apart.

I walked in expecting special treatment. I was after all a teacher's son. I knew my teachers personally and expected a couple of gentle rebukes before being let off the hook. Instead I was ripped to pieces.

She examined my class notes and my homework for the year, the grand total of which came to exactly two sheets. Then she got angry, very very angry. Who the hell did I think I was anyway? What kind of handwriting was this? Was I too good to take notes and do my homework? The lashing went on and on. I lost all track of time, space and motion.

I came out the staff room, knees shaking, heart palpitating and ears bleeding. I spent the next couple of night’s frantically compiling class notes and homework. My mother was thoroughly ashamed and gave me hell at home. It was a very trying week.

I lived in complete fear of RC for the next couple years. Then when I came to the 9th standard, she handled Shakespeare...and it was amazing. She was one of those few people who could really lift the level of your thinking. If you answered her questions correctly, you would feel so damn smart.

I still remember the first time I 'acted' on stage. It was a skit on road safety. Another english teacher was directing the play and after having paid special attention to my excellent theatrical skills and the wide range of emotions I could display, she made me part of the road. Yep, I had to wear black and lie down on the floor with some other unfortunate kids while more acomplished actors walked all over us. I felt pretty lousy about it until RC took over. She made every kid feel like he or she was vital to the success of the play. It didnt matter what role you played. Suddenly I was incredibly happy to lie down while other kids stepped on my face. I was PROUD to be part of the road

I got to know her very well over the next couple of years. I played more prominent roles in the plays she directed, took part in debates and edited the school newsletter that she was in charge of. When it came to extra-curricular activities, the last couple of years in school were the best.

I'll always remember RC as no nonsense woman who would encourage you when you were down and put you in your place when you got too cocky. She spoke the Queen’s English and carried herself with such dignity; you couldn’t help but be in awe of her. Now THAT was a TEACHER.

When I was in college, I had no idea what it meant to actually "work" in an IT company. In my infinite wisdom, I assumed I'd be paid gobs of money to go to office in a big air-bus, wear a tie, sit in an air-conditioned room and surf the net.

I began to like my own version of the job profile. While I was yet to master the intricacies of tying a tie and somewhat averse to learning, I was sure that I could take sitting in an AC room and browsing the net to a whole new level.

I worked religiously towards my goal. To clear the written test and interviews, I pushed myself through a dozen aptitude books and tried my best to come to terms with fuzzy concepts like pointers and linked lists. Several times, I came close to including "Many years experience in sitting in bus" in my resume.

My hard work paid off. I cleared the written tests and blinked stupidly at the interviewer only occasionally. I was through.

My first few days of work were even better than I thought it would be. I took delight in dozing in my pushback seat in the bus. I persevered through the five-minute walk from the bus to my cubicle office, eagerly awaiting the cool embrace of the centrally air-conditioned office.

I took special pride in flashing my access card. In my first week at the office I flashed the card with gay abandon, often locking myself out. It took a lot of effort to not automatically fish the card out of my pocket while entering the restroom.

I discovered Kimberly Clarke tissue paper and liquid soap. I played with automatic taps and Nova Tech hand driers. I fell into the routine every IT professional goes through. Apply fragrant liquid soap, stick hands under automatic tap, take four times the number of tissue papers necessary to wipe your hands and face and then stick your hands under the hand drier.

I made frequent trips to the cafeteria. I sampled every food item available. I guzzled fruit juice and powered my way through veg puff and egg puff. I drank everything from lemon tea to soup at the dispensing machines and explored the variety of food each floor offered. I withdrew money from the in-house ATM's, yakked over the cell phone with my corporate connection and paid periodic visits to the shoe-polishing machine. In short, I was blissfully happy.

Then one day, when I least expected it, I was given some work.

My immediate reaction was that of horror. At some level I knew I was being paid to be productive but my conscious mind wanted nothing to do with it. I seriously considered retiring. After a fierce internal struggle and a lot of hemming and hawing, I agreed to do what was asked of me.

Now I gaze helplessly at the screen as the compiler objects to everything I write. I write and compile and gawk as my pretty code transforms into a seething mass of red, yellow and green lines. I struggle with "NullPointerException", "FileNotFoundException","JasperException" and "LeaveMeAloneIDontLikeYouAnyMoreException". My compiler and I are not on speaking terms at the moment.

My dreams are filled with EJB's, Struts, Beans, Servlets, JSP's and JDBC:ODBC drivers. I speak jargonese with my friends. I send and receive pointless forwards and do my best to avoid direct sunlight because I can’t take the heat anymore. I've installed an AC in my room. Now I find that on weekends I'd rather sit within the confines of my room than go out and get a social life. At home and public places, I stick my hand under the tap and wonder why the water does not gush out.

I have slowly come to realize that at the end of the day, you are here to work…and do lots of it. Having gotten over the initial fascination of all the luxuries an IT company can offer, I find that my happiness at the end of the day comes when my compiler and I both agree that the code is ok. I look to Google to guide me through the intricacies of programming and pray to Web Sphere Application Developer to put up with what I write.

God Forbid, I’ve actually started working.

I did something incredibly stupid this morning. I'm not going to go into the details of it....just that I feel really really bad about it.

I should be handling certain issues with grace and dignity and yet I'm throwing tantrums like a five year old child.

I know I'm acting this way because I'm hurt and something which means so much to me is gone. I'm trying to adjust to this new reality. I get along ok for a while and then suddenly I get really worked up and say and do things I would ordinarily never even dream of. Past injustices flare up and I have a new accusation to make everyday.

Am I confused? Yes.

Is my ego giving trouble? Yes.

Am I helping myself?No.

To accept that I'm powerless in certain matters is pretty hard. To let go and leave matters to fate not knowing if you'll ever get back what you had......words won't suffice to describe how painful that is.

The only option I have is to forgive and to forget. I just have to overcome whatever hungry need I feel and also tend to my bruised ego. How long that will take me, I dont know.

Its going to be a hard process but I know what lies on the other side is maturity, wisdom and better emotional control. and I'm bloody well going to get through it.

"New glasses Archa? " I asked.

"Yep, I lost the old ones".

"What happened?"

"I left them in my car."

"Ok....and?"

"My car was stolen."

Needless to say , I was taken aback.

Girl power has taken over my blog :-).

I must admit I never quite intended my blog to be a place where family and friends could interact. Still, I guess I have no real objections to it. Who wouldn't love to see 14 comments for a single post? :-).

And dear sister, the " I wont read your blog if you dont want me to" won't work out simply because you'll be twice as motivated if I said so.

Thank you very much for your wishes :-). I had a pretty good birthday. Recieved calls throughout the day.

We have a cake policy in my team. At the beginning of every month, every member of the team must contribute a certain sum of money so that funds are available to buy a nice big cake when a birthday comes along.We assemble at the conference room, sing and clap as the birthday boy/girl cuts the cake. Then most of the cake is smashed on their face. We then converge towards the remains of the cake like starving psychotic piranhas.I heartily approved of the practice till my own birthday came along.

Now I suffer the agony of a man who knows he forked out 150 bucks to have black forest cake applied to his face like make up. By the time I got the cream out of my glasses, the cake was gone.

I'm supposed to be treating the team next friday. The treats are horribly expensive affairs as we have about 23 people in the team. And we must eat at some place "decent". Decent directly translates to "Bring a credit card along...two wouldn't be such a bad idea actually". Sigh, I used to approve of the system, never thinking of the day I would become a victim of it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I must announce with mixed feelings that my sister has discovered my blog. While I have had no objections to complete strangers reading my blog, knowing my sister is reading it puts things in a whole new perspective. For this is a person who takes a personal interest in what I think and what I do. Perfectly natural.If my sister had a blog, I would read it to keep tabs on her.


Sigh. First I must dispel any ideas that you, dear sister might have gathered from reading my blog.

.I dont drink

.I dont smoke

.Try as I might, I can't convince attractive women that I'm boyfriend material. I am not seeing anyone. I am just another pavum software engineer leading a blameless life ;-).

There, I think I've got the fundemental things out of the way. But for this, I'm pretty much like any other guy out there. You are welcome to read my blog. You are not welcome to ask questions.

I'd prefer it if you kept what you read to yourself.

They say a lesson is repeated until it is learnt. I always assumed they meant lessons in life...vague philosophical stuff. I guess I never knew they never meant physical chemistry.

Physical chemistry? Why would an electrical engineer working as a software engineer want anything to do with it? Neither my under graduate education or my profession require intimate knowledge of the subject. Why then am I up at 4:30 in the morning trying to find the number of atoms in 4.5 grams of helium?

Answer: Mom.

My mother is a biology teacher. 17 years of it has made her a "Hardcore" biology teacher. No question in biology will ever faze her.


Now due a mild staff shortage, she's been asked to handle the first unit of
chemistry for the 9'th standard. I came home yesterday, mind numb from staring at the comp for 10 hours straight and found her in tears because she didnt understand what that bastard author of the chem textbook was saying. How was she supposed to teach something she didnt understand? The students would soon realise she didnt know what she was talking about. How could she face the class?

"You cant even help me!" she sobbed " I know how wonderfully you studied chemistry in the 9'th standard."

Aargh. The demons from the past have raised their ugly heads again. I thought chemistry was done with. I suffered with it from the 9th to the 12'th and caused plenty of heartache to my poor chemistry teachers. One of them even wanted my mother to have my thyroid levels checked.

But I couldn't let my mom walk into her class tommorow and falter when a student asked her a question. I would have to fight my revulsion for the subject,read it, understand it and somehow explain it to her.


So I sat down at the table and picked up the book. 5 minutes later I understood why I didn't understand chemistry in the 9'th standard. The textbook was crap.

There was no kind of logical flow. I didnt progress from page to page. I had to keep going back and forth between chapters before I could even make sense of what he was saying.

And consider this. He explains a concept for about a couple of lines and then immediately there's a problem to be solved. I work it out on a bit of paper and look at the answer. Its wrong.

Shit.

I look at what I've done. Its perfect. Just a matter of ratios. Why then is the textbook sniggering at me?

I look at the textbook again. Aah. Printing mistake.

I understood now why my mother was so distraught. You think you've understood something and then the text book tells you you are wrong.If its your first time with that dreaded book, you dont know what to believe in. The book or yourself ?

So now I've explained the first chapter to my mom. She can handle the theory. We have to sit with the problems over the weekend so that everything goes well on monday.


If this continues, I'll soon have to teach my my mom organic chemistry and calculus.Two subjects which made the last two years of my life in school miserable.God help me.

Its my father's Birthday today. He would have been 61.

We celebrated his 60'th birthday last year with a traditional ceremony called the "Sashtabyaburthi". Staunch traditionists are requested to forgive the spelling.

I had just finished college and the family had gone on a trip to Bangalore, Calcutta and Darjeeling. We came back and I gave the aptitude tests for company P and company Barry. I'd cleared both of them and was in a rather exultant mood on that particular day.

I wore a rather nice light blue checked shirt with a veshti . Not to mention, the traditional Iyengar "Sri Charanam", a vertical red line on the centre of the forehead. I revelled in my cultured brahmin look :-).

Every relative we had attended the function, either to bless or be blessed.
A small hall, packed with people and smoke from the traditional fire. I squeezed my way around, trying to play a gracious host. I must admit my cousin Prashant played a better host than I did.

My entire circle of friends attended. The only topic of discussion then was which companies were hiring, how the aptitude tests were and how the interviews were.My very orthodox friend Bharat took some out from the discussion to scowl at my forehead and comment " A Sri Charanam alone does not make you an Iyengar!"

"Poda Naye" I grinned back and stole a glance at the most beautiful girl in the hall. She looked stunning in her black Mangalagiri salwar.She smiled back and my heart leapt and burst with pride.

I couldnt sit down and talk to her though, my friends wouldnt stop pulling my leg each time I came close to her.

Life seemed perfect at that moment. I wish I could freeze it and live it everyday. We were so incredibly happy as a family then and I thought it would last forever.

Now I only have memories to relive. So much has changed in the last year. I've been buffetted by the winds of time and change.

Still, life goes on. I have a job in hand and a chance to have a great career. My sense of humour seems reasonably intact. I just have to be thankful for what I have now and move on.

Happy Birthday Appa.

While cleaning out my cupboard today, I discovered a folded, dirty and torn set of papers held together weakly by a single staple. I unfolded it, dusted it and squinted at the title:

"Diaper Dilemma"

Ah memories :-)

It was the first play I ever wrote, my first attempt at humour. I think I wrote it in the 11'th standard. It was about an Indian company unable to penentrate the diaper market due to heavy competition from Multinationals. How the management of the company attempt to promote their product formed the basis of the play.


While the jokes seem a little childish to me now, I remember how it made the audience roar with laughter. The six of us who enacted the play had zero acting experience. I for one had no directing experience. On the day of the play, we were yet to memorize our lines. Yet we pulled it off. I think it was one of the proudest moments of my life in school. I got a little more recognition after that. I was no longer DD, son of PD(My mom is a teacher in my school and a rather popular one) but a recognizable entity by myself.

So excuse me now while I go find a suitable file to hold my virgin attempt at humour .

We got ourselves a couple of AC's a few weeks back. While I'm still gloating over the reality of cool afternoons in May, my mother has mixed feelings over this particular purchase.

For one thing, we survived 19 years of blazing heat and dripping sweat without really bothering too much about it. We lived in Chennai and we stoicly accepted the fact that that there was nothing we could do about the weather. Also we led a very middle class existence and an air conditioner was thought of as a needless luxury. Rich people had em. Rich people were weak creatures who couldn't endure the weather.

I dont remember being acutely aware of the heat as I was growing up as a kid. I've lost count of the number of cricket matches which started at 11:00 AM and ended at 3:00 PM. I thought nothing of running up to the crease barefoot and hurling the ball over and over again ,shouting, screaming, swearing and laughing in temperatures in excess of 40'C.

I sweated contentedly through school and college, never realising that one day I would have such a big problem with the weather. I guess I never knew employment would weaken me.

For starters, working in an IT company ensures that you are completely cutoff from the real world. Your environment consists of cubicles, computers, artificial lighting, artificial plants and most important :air conditioning.

Air conditioning has led to my downfall. Now I dislike the five minute walk from the bus to the office in the morning and absolutely dread the two minute walk from my cubicle to the canteen during the lunch break. I walk out of the office and the heat engulfs me. I feel like I'm walking in an oven.

I spend five days out of the seven hiding inside my office.So now I'm extra sensitive to the heat. Thus the weekends are extra hard to bear at home.

I lodged several firm complaints against the temperature at home and goaded my mother into buying Air conditioners. She grudgingly accepted and we had a 1 ton AC installed in my room and a 1.5 ton AC in the TV room.

Now I find I've become a prisoner of my own room. I cant open the door and walk out into the real world. I'd rather spend the weekend within the four walls of my room than go out and get a social life.

My mom's not entirely sure of how to adjust to our new comfort. If I close the door to my room, she'll complain that I'm ignoring her and living in my own world. If I leave the door open with the AC on, she'll accuse me of wasting power.

"We got along ok before " she rues.


With the AC on, I can do the one thing I never did before : Cover myself with a bedsheet and sleep.Nothing can be more blissful than that. If I attempted the same in Chennai without the AC, it would be a sure shot way of commiting suicide.

I dont know if I can survive the summer without air conditioning anymore. But I'm willing to pay the price to snuggle in my blanket and snore blissfully through the night.

We all have roles to play in our lives. We play the role of a son, a spouse, an employee, a friend ,a cousin...so on and so forth.

I entered into a new role about a year and a half back. It was new, it was exciting and not to mention, very scary. As time went on, I got more and more used to that particular role. It became part of who I was, it helped me define myself. I threw myself into it and enjoyed every bit of it.

Now suddenly, I've been requested not to play that role. Came as a bit of shock to me. Things change apparently and there's no need for it anymore.

Now I'm left asking myself who I really am and what I'm supposed to do with my life. I've spent the last year and a half looking at everything from my role's point of view. It served as a kind of reference. Now that its no longer needed, I find myself panicing at times.

I do know that I'll get my nerves in order soon. I'll start looking at life from a fresh perspective and things will be ok again. I guess I just need some time.

Have you ever had two opppsing thoughts running simultaneously in your head?

Thought one says " You cant let things drift! Unless you do something, everything you've ever known will vanish and you'll be a sorry spectator!"

Thought two says " Relax dude, you wont get anywhere by forcing things, stuff like this takes time...so just be patient. You just have to accept the fact that you cant change certain things."

Its like having a mad man's conviction and a voice of sanity at the same time. I dont know which is which.

I've been strongly influenced by each thought at different times, thrusting forward, withdrawing, thrusting forward, withdrawing over and over again for the last two weeks. Its exhausting.

Thinking is a bad thing to do.

I decided to mourn today. After careful thought and considerable planning, I decided upon the following plan of action.

12:30 AM to 6:00 AM :- Toss and turn restlessly in bed.

6:30 AM to 8:30 AM :- Stare gloomily at the Java certification book.

9:00 AM to 10: AM :- Drown in self pity as I work out my Biceps and Triceps

11:00 AM :- Consume paltry lunch to indicate my loss of interest in food.

1:00 PM :- Sit in the corner of the room and ponder on the ups and downs of life.

1:30 PM :- Attempt an afternoon nap to make up for last nights lack of sleep. Should dream haunting dreams.

4:00 PM :- Drag myself to my friends house and demand a sympathetic ear.

7:00 PM :- Get kicked out of friends house for excessive weeping and for sudden uncalled for emotional outbursts.

8:00 PM :- Paltry dinner again. Should go for the worn and emaciated look.

9:00 PM:- Go online, find chat rooms so that people from Latvia, Peru and Angola can enlighten themselves of my current state of depression.

10 PM :- Fall into an exhausted sleep and dream haunting dreams again.

But there's life for you. For in my meticulously planned out schedule I forgot to include the sudden intrusion of my cousin's bratty children. Aged 4 and 1, they pretty much trampled all over my carefully laid out plans.

My afternoon nap was difficult because I'd pretty much snored through the night and my brain didnt see the point in lying down. As I screwed my eyes shut in at attempt to fool my brain, I became aware that something very heavy was sitting on my chest. My eyes fluttered open and lo and behold, there it was, the painful nephew sitting majestically on my chest.

"Anna.Computer game Anna..please " he leaned forward and whispered desperately into my ear.

I pushed him off and dusted myself. If its one thing I learnt, its that all demands have to met immediately OR ELSE.....

I really dont have too many games on my comp but the nephew dosent care. He'll play Need for Speed just to ram into the cops and get arrested.

" I want the grey car this time" he'll say. Ok, grey it is then.

" No blue" Blue then.

" I like red "

" The car's not moving"

" I want ice cream "

" Oooh cell phone"

As I struggle to meet his demands, the 1 year old calls piteously for me over and over again. I run over to her. She looks up and smiles angelically.

"Aai poiten"....... Kiddy talk for "I dropped a load in my diaper".

I lift her and appraise the situation from arms length. Yep, its aai alright. Not my problem. I call her mother and escape.

I hunt desperately for a room where I can sit alone, examine my wounds and suffer deeply. No luck, the 1 year old is back, this time swinging a badminton racket in either hand. We spend about 10 minutes mechanically exchanging rackets, a game which fills her with wonderous delight.

The 4 year old finds the shuttle cock by this time.

" ANNA COCK COCK COCK " he screams. I blush and turn scarlet with embarrassment.

He hands his sister over the cock and sits back to watch us play.

"BOWL " yells the sister. She flings the shuttle cock up and swings powerfully with the racket carefully missing the target and neatly demolishing my crotch. I keel over and gasp much to the amusement of the 4 year old.

How can I mourn in peace if I am constantly being terrorised by my nephew and niece? The afternoon was pretty much ruined. I've lost all motivation after that.

I guess I just have to take it up again at work tommorow.

Its been a bit of a roller coaster emotionally this week. I finally got my engineering degree. The University of Madras claims I'm a BE First Class Engineer. Honest, I even have a bit of paper which says so.

The ceremony as such was a bit of a drag. We were supposed to have a minister to hand us our degrees but he couldnt make it in the last minute. Instead we had a bishop who got carried away at the pulpit and started preaching vehemently. I cringed inwardly with every cliched statement. It was the first time my mother was visiting my college and she had to see this spectacle.

To top it of we had to wear canary yellow robes. There's nothing worse than sitting in a hall with four hundred other people at 11:00 AM in the morning sweating and steaming under synthetic ceremonial wear. The music they played was hilarious, it sounded like the background music from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. 10 minutes into the ceremony I became convinced I was sitting in a circus.

So I'm finally an engineer. Its what my father always wanted. Its such shame he wasnt there to see me get my degree.

There have been tumultous events occuring in my personal life. Something deeply significant to me has been wiped out in a flash. I'm not sure how to cope. I oscillate wildly between love, hate, anger, sadness, relief and confusion. There are so many questions clamouring for an explanation but the answers bewilder me. I either cant believe them or accept them. I've been fighting desperately to get back what I had but the harder I try, the further it slips away.Its exhausting.

I need some time off.

Dear Miss Anonymous, I do believe we've got off on the wrong foot :-).

You have taken the pains to point out my callous behaviour by posting comments for each and every paragraph. No one's ever done that before :-).


I read your comment last afternoon in the office, just after I'd finished lunch. I'd just come back from the canteen and was settling into my seat, readying myself for one of those open eyed naps (The kind where everybody thinks you are working, but all you are doing is staring intelligently at the screen saver) when your comment jumped out of the screen and buried itself into my eyeballs.

Was a bit of a nasty shock I must say. No one's accused me of being a non-objective,immature,narrow-minded, ill-tempered and self-centered person who tries to impress people at a different level.

So what can I say?

Perhaps it would be better if I were to convey what I meant in that particular post.

So here goes : When someone half your age tries telling you right from wrong, it will get your goat no matter how right he or she is. Being correct does not give you the authority to tell people what to do in their own homes.(Wife beating and related stuff excluded ofcourse). Cant you see how I was highlighting my own dilema initially? To know someone is right, but still getting bugged with being told what to do. Thats exactly what I wanted to write about. It was the human aspect of it I wanted people to consider, not who was right and who was wrong.

Another thing that distresses me is the fact that you gave an abridged, made easy version of each and every paragraph. A lot of what I've written is obvious. It certainly does not need to be taken apart and have some deep inner meaning(mostly incorrect) culled from it. Please dont try reading between the lines when the lines themselves are pretty obvious.

So let me summarize. I dont intend to preach morals from this blog. I attempt to showcase my own human failings in a humorous manner. If it amuses readers, then well and good. If not, there's nothing I can do about it.

If the contents of the post had instead read " A girl of 14 came home and asked me not to waste electricity and switch off the lights and fan. I did so immediately because wasting electricity is a sin and I'm glad someone much younger to me had much more common sense than I did. I dont harbour any ill feelings towards her because I'm a mature adult who knows when he's made a mistake and is willing to admit it."


Not only is the above post incredibly boring, its an outrageous lie! I wrote about how I felt about the whole issue. Not only that, I was honest about it.

Please dont undermine Kroopa's intelligence either. She is a deeply honest person and she certainly isn't biased towards me. If I were to write something that she didnt agree with, she wouldn't have any qualms about ripping me to pieces :-).

I hope I've made myself clear.

I shall narrate an incident that took place last week. A family well known to us visited with their 14 year old daughter. Let me tell you a little about them. The wife used to teach at my school and is a very good friend of my mother's. The husband is well.....one of those dynamic types. He preaches what he practices and practices what he preaches. He is one of the most intense people I've ever met. He also harbours some very strong opinions and is permanantly on the lookout for someone to debate his ideas with. Dont get me wrong, I'm not trying to be negative about him. He is an idealistic man....but he tends to put his ideas across rather forcefully.This usually does not go down so well with those at the receiving end of his lectures.

Anyway, when the doorbell rang that evening, I left my room to open the door. I welcomed them in, asked them to make themselves comfortable on the sofa and tried making some polite conversation as I waited for my mother to come and join us. The daughter had just written her 10'th board exams and I was asking her how she'd done. The girl looked at me, smiled sweetly and said "Dinesh, if you dont mind, could you switch off the light and fan in your room? While you are here, there's no reason they should be kept on..."

I like to think of myself as a principled person. When someone points out a rather blatant error I've made, I do my best to rectify it. I try not to get annoyed with the person who pointed the mistake out. However the moment the words left her mouth, I could only feel indignation build up inside me. To have an outsider, a teenager, a precocious girl telling me what to do in MY house! She had some balls!

Undoubtedly the kid was right. I had left the lights and fan on when I should have switched them off. But I just couldnt hide my irritation. I grunted and asked her switch them off. She smiled and complied. When she came back, no further reference to the lights were made but I stewed inwardly. I labled her as headstrong, just like her father. She'd have a tough time making friends, she'd be a person who got results but someone who failed miserably with people.....these were the only thoughts going through my head during their visit.

Later I had to endure another lecture by the father. He feels that the Dravidian parties who have governed in the last few decades are a disgrace to the state. He wants to start a youth movement, spread awareness and ultimately form a more responsible government. He wants to spread his message using yahoo groups. He's been after me to register with his site...and I've always avoided doing it.

So why do I feel this way about them? The girl was right about the lights and the fan. The father is certainly right about the current state of TN politics. I should be admiring both of them for trying to make the world a better place.

Except I dont. No matter how hard I try to listen to the voice of reason, I can only feel irritation when I think about the two of them. I dont like to be told right from wrong by a kid and I dont like to be forced into doing something I'm not very clear about.

So I let the matter rest. I've not troubled myself like I usually do..a battle between ideals and desires. I've let the desires win this time...I must be growing up.

I've written about this before. We have a water shortage problem where I live and we get water for about half an hour everyday. In this half hour, I need to fill buckets of water in the two bathrooms, the kitchen and the service veranda. To keep an eye on all four places is a little tricky and involves a bit of running around.


What really bugs me though, is my eighty year old grandmothers insistence that she carry heavy buckets of water. While I'm keeping an eye on the bathroom, she lugs about heavy buckets in the service veranda. Then I'll run to the service veranda and chide her for lifting such loads and ask her to watch the bathroom where its relatively easier(Once the buckets have been filled, one only needs to wait for the tank to fill up). Instead she'll go to the kitchen and start doing the same stuff there. She wont stop until every bucket and vessel in the house is brimming with water. " You never know, we might not get water one day. What will we do then? " she'll ask when I express my annoyance.

We get water at exactly 7:00 AM. While it takes me a couple of minutes to realise that its time to start filling, my grandmother is taut with tension and waiting to explode into action from 6:50 AM. So by the time I get to the service veranda, she's already filled half the buckets.

Her determination to fill water borders on the fanatical. Why wont she understand that if she slips and falls, the recovery will be extremely painful? Sometimes I think she's trying to prove a point. That she might be eighty but still capable of immense feats of strength.

Now I've just resigned myself to the fact that my grandmother will continue lifting no matter what I tell her. Given a chance she'll lift me when I'm filling the buckets. I only hope she never falls.

I've been feeling rather uninspired for the last couple of days. I didnt feel like lifting in the gym, my mind wandered when I tried to read the Java certification book...I'm just feeling rather dull.

Maybe its because of the weather. I certainly feel a lot more alert in the office.The weekends at home are oppressive.

Dont really feel like blogging, not in the mood to.

I'm using the other phone to write this blog. Cant persist with it though, or the bill will shoot up :-).

After 2 months of thought, I've finally got myself a digital camera.Its a
Canon Power Shot A400(http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/a400.html) Cost me 11K.....thats kind of eaten into my bank balance...

Anyway, it seems to be a pretty decent choice. I took a couple of snaps and a few videos and checked them on the comp. They have come pretty well.

Have to go now. Will write more on Saturday.

My phone's down again, so that explains the missing post last weekend. I hope to have it working by this saturday :-). More to follow, I promise. Also Mr Anonymous, I have decided to remove the infy pic.

I've had to go through quite some trouble to write this post. You see, we are having the apartment complex painted and one of the painters unwittingly snapped my phone connection. This is the one I use to connect to the internet( I'm still a dial-up guy. Dont see the point in using broadband when I'm hardly at home.)

So I spent saturday morning perched precariously upon the ground floor sunshade, trying to splice the snapped wires back together. It took me about an hour, chiefly because each time I recieved a tiny shock, I would drop the wires. Seizing the opportunity my neighbour's son Mukund, the 3 year old whirlwind would run away with them. So after a lot of sweating, cursing and chasing I finally got my phone to work.

I spent last weekend at Bangalore as I mentioned before. My sister and her husband have bought a new apartment and my mom was going to help them pick out tiles for the kitchen and bathroom. I just sort of tagged along.

I had a terrible time at the tile shop. I got very bored in about 10 minutes. Being surrounded by nothing but artistic looking tiles and glamourous toilets, I suddenly felt the urge to relieve myself. I made some discrete enquiries and was taken aback when the shop owner said he didnt have a bathroom. Of all the people, you expect a man selling toilets for a living to have a functional loo!

Instead I was lead to a shady looking bar nearby and allowed to do my thing. When I came back, they still hadnt decided on the tiles. It took them about 3 hours I think by which time I'd gone half crazy with hunger. I didnt like the weather either so I was cranky for the entire weekend.

So now I'm back in Singara Chennai. The weather here is well.....something I'm used to atleast. The Air Conditioning in the office conked out, so it was really tough for a couple of days.


I realise that I have a bit of free time now. Being an early morning guy, I have about 3 hours to myself in the morning to myself and also the weekends. I'm thinking of a good way to use that time. I keep wavering between preparing for the Java Exam and the CAT.

I thought I'd solve some quant problems yesterday. I opened my book and immediately my brain revolted. I was wondering why I felt such a strong apathy for the problems when I realised I've been doing the same crap for the last two and half years. I joined CAT class in November 2002. Due to the paper leak, I wrote the same CAT twice, not to mention another dozen entrance exams. After all that, I prepared again for each company's aptitude test. No wonder my mind froze each time I looked at the book.

Still, I cant get over that guilty feeling that I'm wasting my time.

On other matters, I'm strongly considering getting a digital camera so that I may post pictures on the blog. I have a budget of Rs.8000 max. What would you guys suggest?

I'm back!

Really, I am!

I mean it...

Really do...

Gotta go