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

Bangalore is well, HOT!!!. No I'm not referring to the social life, I really do mean the weather. For the first time in my life, I long for my good ol Chennai climate.

Now what kind of lunatic would prefer Chennai's weather to Bangalore's? Well,let me explain.

Chennai is hot indisputably. But its sticky hot. It saps the energy out of you, it makes you dull and listless..but it still is not the same as the heat in Bangalore. Bangalore heat makes your lips crack and your eyes burn. Your skin becomes so damn dry. I had a horrible time walking on the road,even after 7 PM.

Well, I shall blog more when I get back on Monday. I cant risk my sister reading my blog now ;-)

Very much in Chennai, very much a Java Project :-). So I guess I'm lucky. I've been asked to learn JSP tags for my project. I'm not very comfortable with JSP by itself :P.

So my official life as a software professional has begun. Lets see where it takes me.

My project's over, God bless. It worked beautifully and all the documents were in place. No issues when it came to the final presentation in front of the evaluators.

All of us were quite literally forced to slog it out towards the end. If I had to work weekends to complete such a tiny project, I can imagine how much effort real life projects will require :-)


So today I get to know which project to which I'll be allotted. I'm just hoping its a java project. There's no hard and fast rule here that says that if you are trained in a certain technology, you will be placed in a project using it.

3 day weekend coming up thanks to Good Friday. I'm off to Bangalore . Will blog later.

When I didnt get into a college of my choice for an MBA, I decided that I'd work for a year or two and then try again.

However, the fundemental question remains " Why do I want to do an MBA? ". To tell you the truth, I've never been able to answer it convincingly. I can only think of the prestige of an IIM degree, the fantastic salaries, the whole hype surrounding an MBA degree, the excitement of the CAT, the GD's and the PI's. So why an MBA? I dont know :P.

Funnily enough, I want to write the exams, take part in GD's and PI's just to prove to myself that I can beat the competition and clear the selection process. I havent given any thought to what lies beyond that. Pretty shallow reason for an MBA right?

I'm hoping that over a year or so, I'll realise the benefit of a management degree (or alternatively realise its all just hype). Thoughts and suggestions on the subject will be welcome :-)

I feel.....overwhelmed. There's so much to do, so little I understand. I dont know where to begin and where to end. I'm talking about the bloody documentation!

There are just so many documents that have to be prepared for my project. I really dont know where to start. Do I do the Customer Requirements Analysis or the Functional Specification Document or prepare the test cases and the test logs? Or should I fill in every quality document that is available? Do I draw the Entity Relationship diagram or the Data Flow diagram or the Sequence diagram? I'm clueless :-(

The quality people are crazy. It really does not matter if the project works or not, it just has to follow company C quality principles.. Know what that means? No matter what you do, there should be a piece of paper( in a pre-defined format) saying that you did it.

It looks like I wont have any time to go near the actual code. I'm just going to be very busy preparing documents. It seems like just an awful waste of time :-(

Well, for those who did wish to see my picture, here it is :P. Dont know about the Matt Damon resemblance in this one though. This picture was taken when my family went to Darjeeling in May 2004. This was just after I'd completed college and just before I began my job hunt :-).

My training will come to an end soon. All the instructor led courses are over. We are to start working on the projects allocated to the various groups. My group is to develop a life insurance advice system and yours truly has been made team leader.

My team members are already complaining about my fanatical methods of project management. Thats absolutely ridiculous. All I've done is promise my quality reviewer Shanmugapriya a 70% hike in her salary if things went well and promise my designer Balaji bodily harm if anything went wrong. If anybody complains, I snarl and twist their arm. Going to the gym has surely improved my people management skills.

You might wonder why I get so worked up when I'm put in charge of something. Let me tell you why. When I was in my third year in college, I was asked to organise a state level symposium. Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. The computer used for presentations died. When finally brought to life, it completely deleted the chief guest's power point presentation.

My wonderful juniors gave the memento to everybody onstage but the chief guest, there was a power cut, I asked the principal to release the magazine instead of the college secretary(well, the secretary wasnt there when he was supposed to release it. He however entered precisely 1 second after I asked the principal to release it. Princi got worked up and thought I had insulted the secy......crazy halfwits). I recieved a severe tounge lashing from the staff in charge at the end of the day. I had a minor nervous breakdown after that and didnt go anywhere near a mike for about 6 months.

When I organised a State Level Technical symposium in my fourth year, I sat on everybody's head until they got it right. The symposium went of flawlessly. It was however stupefyingly boring. My friend Tushar who was supposed to handle the computer fell into a deep coma right in front of the chief guest. The juniors kept trying to go home and the size of the audience shrunk miraculously over the course of the day. But still, everything went according to plan, so I feel
good about it.


So the lessons I learnt? Dont trust anybody. Given a chance, people will screw up. Sit on their heads until they get it right. Abuse is motivation(Reverse psychology). Worry, Worry, Worry. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. You can trust the girls to the job perfectly. Guys will offer to take responsibilty and then at that critical moment when you need them the most, will
be found in the movie theatre.

So you see why I get worked up? Trust me, I know what can wrong and what will go wrong. Thats what makes me a good team leader :P.

Some of you might be interested to know what exactly I do in company C. Well, I am currently a Programmer Analyst Trainee. I'm being trained mainly on Java and J2EE.

When I was in school, I never thought that one day I would earn my living writing code. I was not a great fan of C++, the programming language taught to us in the 11'th and 12'th. I got along ok until the teacher got into the Data Structures bit. I got lost after that. I never understood Stacks, Linked Lists, Queue's and Binary Trees. Pointer's baffled me. I pretty much lost confidence in my programming skills after that.

Now as a trainee in a big MNC, I have learnt to write code in a much simpler manner (ie) the Cut Copy Paste method. Say I'm given a particular problem to work on.For example I have to write code to collect data from a user, query a database, process the collected data and return some meaningful information.

Given the fact that I have to learn a lot of stuff in a very short period of time, I really dont have the time to deeply understand each concept. Our trainers assured us that we'd learn everything on the job. For now just a passing familiarity is all that is needed. So how do I write my code?

Here's what I do : Open up an example given by the instructor where data is collected from a web page. Open up another example where a database is queried. Copy and paste sections of the second piece of code into the first. Adjust the brackets, make some minor adjustments to suit my needs and Voila! I have a perfectly functional piece of code. Please keep in mind though that I have absolutely no idea how it actually works. I keep adding or removing stuff until the code compiles and executes. Once it works, there is momentary feeling of accomplishment and then I move onto the next problem.

I must say though that I feel terribly guilty doing this. I'm merely manipulating what has already been created, not creating anything from scratch. This kind of work hardly brings any intellectual kind of satisfaction.

I've been told that no one writes code from scratch these days. Templates exist for practically every kind of problem. If your company has a done a number of projects for an insurance company and it gets new projects for another company, it merely adjusts the original code and gives it to the new client. No heavy thinking is required.

I must say what I learnt busted some myths about the software profession I had in mind. I always thought you needed highly intelligent people to write code. Now I have discovered that you just adjust the existing templates and get along. Templates exist so that it takes less time to develop the project and also so that testing the code becomes simpler.

I really dont know how I feel about that. I'm relieved that I wont be required to do any heavy thinking...also slightly dissapointed. I always thought software engineers were highly intellectual people :P.

Oh well, I guess I cant really pass comments now. I havent done any real work yet as I'm still a trainee. Another 20 days of training and then I'll be placed in a project (or put on bench, one never knows :P ). I'm looking forward to it. But for now, I'm just a JCCPP ( Java Certified Cut Paste Programmer :) )