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

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 :) )

Guess I'm just a weekend blogger:-).

I've been attending a personality development class in office for the last 3 days, a welcome break from Servlets,JSP's and EJB's.

I cant say I learnt anything new but it was excellent time pass. One of the module's covered presentation skills. Each one of us were required to come up on stage and make a presentation on any topic. Easy enough huh? One important constraint though, we would be filmed on camera :P. So the 24 of us came one by one on stage. Some confident, some akward, some incoherent with fear.I think without the camera, we would have all done well. Just the knowledge every word we uttered, every gesture we made would be recorded caused some of us to become extremely self concious.

So after we'd all been taped came the fun part. Watching ourselves on TV. I'd been the first to go. I was fairly impressed with myself :P. I liked my voice, my glasses and I was quite natural :P :P. I kept grinning like an idiot though. People told me I had a smile on my face all the time, so it was a good thing. Personally I thought I grinned like a deranged orangutan.

Also I was struck my resemblance to actor Matt Damon.No I'm not trying to flatter myself nor am I comparing Matt Damon to a deranged orangutan. I just think I have quite a resemblance to him.

Last evening my mother and I attended a play by The Madras Players at the Egmore museum. It was a one man play, the artist being the famous PC Ramakrishna. The play was titled 'Mercy' and was about Euthanasia. It was about a man whose wife slips into coma. 1 month, 2 months, 8 months pass and she does not come out of it. The man does not know what to do. Should he prolong her life, never knowing if she will ever wake up or should he ease her pain and kill her? He remembers how his wife was always in favour of mercy killing. So after torturing himself for a long time, he decides to ease her pain. He wants to mix sleeping tablets in her feed at 9:00 PM. By 11:00 PM it should all be over. Just before he does it, he drives to a temple about 2 hours from the city to beg forgiveness from his wife's favourite diety. On the way home,it starts pouring heavily and his car breaks down. Its 2:30 in the morning by the time he comes home. He enters the house and finds everybody in his wife's room.Its a miracle, she's regaining conciousness!

The wife slowly regains her health but the man's guilt eats away at his heart. To think he almost killed her! Everyday becomes more burdensome than the one before. Finally he cant take it anymore and he kills himself.

I found myself quite affected by the play because it was uncomfortably close to what my family went through when my father was in hospital. The sheer frustration and

madness the actor depicted was exactly what we experienced.When well meaning relatives come and tell you to go pray at this temple, do a thousand pradharshanams at another temple, smear this holy ash on my fathers forehead, feed the poor at another temple, dissolve jaggery the shore of yet another temple...it drives you mad! What kind of God needs all this nonsense?

I really didnt like the ending though. I know that every play usually ends with a twist but I couldnt digest this one. Was he not being terribly unfair to his wife by killing himself?

So those have been the events in my life this week. I have an alumni meet in college today, guess the update will only come next weekend :-). So until then, goodbye.

A most memorable sunday.Went out with my classmates from the office to a resort called the Blue Lagoon in Neelankarai. Ate breakfast, played beach volleyball, went swimming, ate a bloody good lunch, chatted around , played more volleyball and finished off with a bit of cricket.

I came back home with every part of my body screaming bloody murder. Not to mention being tanned nut brown. Thanks to 2 days of heavy lifting at the gym and yesterday's excursion I was so damn sore.

I couldnt sleep at night due to a dull annoying pain in my left shoulder. I tossed and turned, went to the bathroom a few times but just couldnt go to sleep. I lay awake tired, confused and for some reason, feeling very sorry for myself.At around 1:30 I woke up my mother and complained about my shoulder. She immediately went and got some iodex and gave me a small massage.I went to sleep after that.

Woke up and had to leave for work. We were all sun burnt and sore and none of us listened to lecture on Servlets and JSP's.

Guess I'm going to have to avoid the gym for a couple of days.Should also go through the books.Dont want to go through 2 months of training and still emerge an ignoramus :P

I watched the 'Aviator' today.Decent movie, a lil different from what I expected. Not for the general Chennai crowd though.Most of the people in the theater found it too boring.Cell phone conversations were abundant during the movie.

Training goes on. I'm learning a lot of new stuff. The comp sci guys and IT guys do have quite an advantage. They are a lot more comfortable than the rest of us. For the EEE and ECE guys, its a bit of an uphill task to follow the instructor.

I had so much to say this morning, cant remember any of it now. Perhaps tommorow then.Gnite.

I've made up my mind. I have to become a Java Certified Professional by June 10th, ,my 22'nd birthday.

Its always bugged me a little that I havent had any intellectual accomplishments in my life. I was a pretty ordinary student in school and college. I've won prizes for debates, plays and my writing...but never for the more brainy stuff.

When I did my final year project in college, I played more of a supporting role. I took care of the documentation, preparation of slides for the presentation and stuff...the same in school..and it really annoys me now.

So I have my eyes set on the certification now. I really need something to tell me I can do more with my head than just write.

I worked out with a celebrity yesterday...none other than the O Podu! man Vikram....

I entered the gym, signed in, changed my clothes and walked into the basement where the weights are kept...and lo and behold, I see the back of a man with shoulder length hair tinged a dirty brown. He turned around and I recognized him.

So I immediately decided I would pretend to be unfazed by the mans presence. He was after all just another guy working out. Why would things have to be any different? Unlike the others who couldnt take their eyes off him, I would remain cool, calm and just get through my workout. Having decided this, I picked up a weight roughly double of what I normally use and began pumping with exaggerated gusto.

There's something about being near a celebrity that charges you up.I recklessly picked up the heaviest of weights and launched them into the air. Then I realised, so was everybody else...

In between, Vikram flicked a stool I was using. I would have objected normally but for some reason I tried smiling a gracious smile and let him have it.

But for the outrageous hair, he did seem to be a normal guy. He was pretty friendly with everybody and we even took turns using the Tricep Pushdown machine( I used about 40 pounds more than I normally would)

I ended up pushing myself like never before. I lifted much more than I thought possible.Its amazing what you can do when you want to impress people.

I am a little ashamed that I got so carried away...but I did have a great workout...all because I wanted to impress a guy with dirty brown long hair....

As I write this blog entry, sounds of a violin playing carnatic music are wafting through my head. I do not recognize this piece of music. Perhaps I heard it somewhere or maybe I'm some kind of genius who composes scintillating Carnatic music in his head without being aware of it :P.

Why a post on carnatic music you might ask? Why would a culturally ignorant boor like me choose to write on what is considered a divine art form? Let me tell you why.

Throughout my formative years, I never really appreciated any Indian art forms.Bharatanatyam bored me and Carnatic music put me to sleep. Words like 'Raaga' and
"Thalam" were esoteric words limited to old pensioners and the occasional geeky teenager with thick glasses and lots of coconut oil in his hair(in all probability an IITian). Unlike western music, you need a tuned ear to appreciate Carnatic music and I never bothered tuning. Western music was easier to appreciate. The lyrics were simpler to understand. You dont need raaga and thalam to headbang to Metallica.It would be difficult to imagine Kurt Cobain stopping his concert and asking the audience " Can you identify the Sruti? " Pop, Rock and Roll, Disco,Jazz, Blues, Trance, country, folk etc..none of these are subtle forms of music. No special training is required to enjoy them.

Now at the age of 21 years, 7 months and 25 days...I realise I'm a total ignoramus when it comes to Indian culture.That kind of attitude was ok when I was a teenager trying to fit into the crowd but really not admissable now. I'm at a phase in my life now when I no longer appreciate rock and pop with the same enthusiasm as I did as a kid. Simply because after a while, they all sound the same to me. There's only so much you can do with themes like love and frustration.I dont want people like Eminem making money just by talking about their pent up anger. And I mean talking, not singing. I hate the whole 'attitude' thing.

I attended a carnatic concert last evening and I realised that it was sort of ok....not bad at all. A pretty famous old man played the violin and he would often stop and ask the audience to identify the raaga....and they got it dead right each time.Me? I had no idea what he was talking about...and it made me feel ashamed.

There was a Manipuri dance after that...and I found it sweet...very pleasing to the eye..quite strange considering I've never really appreciated dance...

I've made up my mind. I cant go on living as an ignoramus. I have to attend more concerts with my mother.Something tells me I'll be missing out on a lot unless I do so.

I havent blogged for the last couple of weeks, the chief reason being 2 weddings in the family.Not to mention that I only want to sleep once I get home from work.

Its 5PM on a saturday now, the first saturday off from training thank God. I slept through the afternoon properly today, unlike the uncomforable 2 minute naps in the chair at the training centre. The kind you just cant help taking after lunch. You've eaten well and the instructor is droning on about relational databases.....and your eyes just involuntarily close. You sleep for about a minute and then you suddenly jerk awake, afraid that the instructor might have spotted you. 5 minutes later, you doze off again. The process keeps repeating until its time for tea.

My mind is still fuzzy from sleep, I shall continue this later..

We had an 8 hour session on Software testing today and the class was striving valiantly to stay awake after lunch. The instructor decided to pep us up a bit and so he asked each one of us to introduce ourselves and also list the names and hobbies of those who spoke before us. I managed somewhat because I was the 5th person to speak but the information got distorted as it passed further and further. I had listed my hobbies as reading novels and writing humour. Thus I was slightly taken aback when bengali girl right at the end got up and hesitantly said " He is Dinesh. He enjoys drinking and washing TV's"

Training is kinda hectic. I have 4 tests and an assignement to submit tommorow. When I get back home, I only want to eat dinner and crash into bed. Guess I got used to the easy life at company P :-(

My first day of training and I'm already having some severe time management problems. It took us some time to settle down, understand the local computer network , figure out where all the study material was stored, login, access information etc. Then the schedule for the next 2 months comes out and we find we have a test on 6 subjects on wednesday! We open the material online immediately and also find that 3 assignements are due tommorow :-(. So how do I spend my day? Do assignements which must be submitted before the deadline, or study for the test where we must get more than 75%?

The assignements are partially done, will finish them today. How am I going to study for the test? I havent had time to even open my books :-(.

Other than the one post about my own experience with the tremor and the tsunami that followed, I havent written more on the subject unlike my fellow bloggers.
Bloggers like Kiruba (http://kiruba.com) have dedicated the last three weeks to gathering information and more importantly collecting aid to help those affected. Hats
off to them.

Why the silence then on my part you might ask. Curiously enough, I havent felt the urge to write about the suffering of the people in Tamil Nadu. One reason being
that its been more than adequately covered in other blogs. The more important reason being....I just didnt feel like.

At the moment, I am quite immune to other people's sufferings. I dont want information on how many thousands lost their lives or how many lost their homes and livelihoods. Somehow, I dont really care. My own life has been turned upside down in the last 6 months. I'm too tired from figuring out where I stand and towards where I'm heading to bother about the difficulties of other people.

7 months back, my house was alive with laughter. Weekends would be the time my dad would be home. My cousin Harita would have come home for physics tution. Prashant would have finally got a day off from work and would have hilarious Taj tales about eccentric guests and gargoyle staff. My mother would be multitasking, dividing her time evenly between cooking lunch and arguing with my father. I would wander from room to room, savouring the life in my house. My apartment looked gorgeous in the morning. The light streaming in through the large windows in the hall, the very pretty clock above them..it was picture perfect. My house was warm and comforting. Other than the occasionaly argument with my dad about my career and my education, I had nothing to crib about.

Now my house seems lifeless. I'm confused about my own life. A lot of responsibility has suddenly dropped on my unprepared shoulders. I'm in charge of my own
life, my father isint there to keep me in line. I could cross the boundaries he had set if I wanted to, I havent yet but I'm scared I might.

I think its going to take me some more time to figure out where I stand and where I'm heading to. Until then I'm not going to care if people die from tsunami's or earthquakes. I'm not going to feel outraged if Jayendra Saraswati is arrested or released. I'm going to be an apathetic citizen until I have my own life figured out. Until then, I ask the world not to share its problems with me. I'm not interested.

No other expression conveys with so much feeling, the horror I had to go through with the HR from company P as "MACHHAN! ROD YETHITANGE!".

I actually dont want to write about it. Let me just say that I wanted to let the P HR know I was going officially. So I came up with this phony story and gave it to them........ and I got caught. I gassed for an hour and they asked one tricky question after the next until they forced me into a corner. It was so humiliating.

It smarted for a while. The HR made it seem like I was the liar, I was the bad guy..they made me feel guilty about lying...it hurt. Not that I ever admitted to them I was lying..

Now however, I've had time to reflect in all that happened and I realise...I dont give a shit. If they didnt have a bond, I would never have lied. Its completely wrong on their part to force me to stay. Given a choice between paying Rs 1 lakh plus interest and lying, I chose the latter. I have nothing to feel guilty about. I had a better opportunity in a better company and I took it. So screw them.

I've also completed my joining formalities with company C. I have a two day induction program and then I start training. A new start, a new beginning. Might as well forget about the past. Wish me luck.

My cousin's kids visited a couple of days back. The son was 4 years old and hell bent on destroying all my property. The daughter was 1 and would scream bloody murder if her mother put her down even for a second. Between the two of them I nearly went out of my mind. Most of the day was spent running behind the boy coaxing him to put the phone down, pleading for the safety of my cell phone, imploring him to stop banging on my keyboard, gently preventing from ascending my cupboard and most of all fighting my temptation to let him jump off the balcony. As background music we had the second kid wailing her misery all through the day. My sorrows doubled when they decided to spend the night. I cornered my mother right then and warned her that I would not be having any children of my own and she'd better not entertain any hopes of becoming a grandmother.

The next morning as I bade them goodbye, I could'nt help but sigh with relief. Turning to my mother, I asked her how I was as a kid.

" You never ate and would shit green pellets " came the terse reply.In those brief words, my mother described the beauty that was my childhood.

I'm so glad I'm 21.

2 major updates in my life:

1) I've quit my job in company P...and not in the most straightforward manner. I told my PM I wanted to leave as soon as possible.Told the HR I wanted to leave...and then I just left. I dont plan on going back to my office.... I feel terrible about the way I've gone about it but I just didnt have a choice. If not for the bond, I wouldnt have had to slink out..I could have left with my head held high.

2) My cousin Prashant who lived with us for 4 years left for his home in Calcutta. His mother wanted him back. Now its just my mom and I.

I've been sitting quite vetti at home for the past couple of days. I spent day 1 watching XXX (the Vin Diesel one in case you think otherwise). It was admittedly one of the most cliched, mind numbing action movies I had ever seen.Its all attitude and no stuff. There were times when the dialogue was so corny, I thought the movie was some sort of spoof. You sort of expect the film to build towards something better but it disappoints you right till the end.Vin Diesel looks like a beefed up Adam Sandler. I kept expecting him to trip and fall.

I havent done much on day 2 and it makes me wonder if I'm wasting away my youth.

That so called mild tremor I was talking about was worse than I thought!

http://www.ndtv.com/environment/Earthquake.asp?id=15959&callid=0

Well, I've had my share of excitement in the morning thanks to the mild tremor
which gently shook Chennai.I was lying in bed awake but too lazy to get up
when I felt someone try to tug the mattress from beneath me. I sat up and
looked around but my cousin Prashant was fast asleep.I then looked at the half
empty water bottle next to me and I saw the water in it sloshing about though
no one was touching it. Puzzled I got up and came to the hall. I asked my uncle
if he'd felt anything too. I then saw that all the bottles on the table had the water
shaking a bit. Quake, I decided. So I woke Prashant up and tried to bundle my
grandmothers and get them downstairs. Grandmother 1 was ready to come
down while grandmother 2 was too involved with her morning religious dose
from the TV to bother. " Its fine now! " she insisted. " All ok, we dont need to
move!". Prashant and I had to almost forcefully drag her out of the house.

" I have to go to the bathroom!" she announced and locked herself in much to
my irritation. I was getting pretty worried and as my cousin waited next to the
door,I got all our slippers out, took my wallet, cell phone and the cordless. My
grandmother finally emerged and we dragged the entire lot down insisting that
the lift shouldnt be used.

A few puzzled people were standing outside unsure of what had happened. Not
many people came down because they were fast asleep on a sunday morning I
guess. We stood on the road for a while not sure of what to do. Grandmother 2
was quite annoyed that she was missing out on her daily dose of spiritual
enlightenment and kept insisting that we go back up. Here I was, her noble
grandson who'd probably saved her from a wall crashing down on her head and
she was more interested in some pot bellied priest dispensing holy tit bits.

The initial excitement soon wore off and people began returning home. I waited
a little longer to see if my building would come crashing down but sadly it
did'nt.So much for a grateful grandmother I guess. We came back home, made
a few calls and checked if everyone was ok. I called up my mom who'd left for
Bangalore yesterday and asked if she'd felt anything there. Nope, only Chennai
seems to have been affected.

I've finally got my joining date from company C : Jan 7'th. A nice way to start the new year :-).

I'm bunking work at P today. I'm just wasting my time as well as my project manager's. My PM is a pretty nice guy, it makes me feel guilty that I'm going to have to lie my ass off to get out of P. I cant help it though, the bond I had to sign claims I have to pay Rs.1 lakh if I quit before 2 years. So I have to lie and squirm to avoid payment.

Wish me luck...

Well, 6 did become 12 and 12 equals 1 so everybody's happy :P

I decided a couple of days back that I have to go swimming on sunday. I used to love swimming as a kid but I never got around to visiting the pool often. The last time I went swimming was about 3 years back at the IIT pool.

So on friday I realise I dont have have a pair of trunks. I walked into a shop and asked for them. The chap looked at me and displayed some pretty bright looking stuff. Various shades of neon were displayed. I took my time and finally picked a turquoise blue shade. " This is the large size, could you give me the medium size please?" I asked. He looked me up and down and said " No sir, this will be perfect ". I was slightly insulted, I didnt have a big waist did I? I ended up buying the large size anyway. I came home and tried it on and it was so bloody tight :-( . My once 30 inch waist is now 32...have to get it down.

This morning, I wake up early have some coffee and bannanas for breakfast, squeeze into my trunks and get onto my cycle ( incidentally, I was wearing a Tshirt and jeans in case you think I would cycle around Chennai clad in nothing but neon trunks). I get past the IIT gate and the watchman stops me and tells me the pool is no longer open to visitors :-(. All my efforts were a complete waste....

Are there any pools in and around Adyar? If you have any info, do let me know.

I envy those guys with smooth silky hair. Those whose hair bounce and shine with health all the time. Those whose hair through which you can pass your fingers smoothly and not encounter any road blocks.Well, I am NOT one of those guys.

My hair defies any attempts to model it. It remains flat when I try to make it stand up and stands to attention when I try to flatten it. Its thick and dry and believes in inertia. To pass a comb through it in the morning is pure torture. Every strand firmly refuses to bend itself into shape. My hairs interlock and cause immense pain when I pass a comb across my head.

As a child, my father taught me to comb it from right to left, like he did. Now for the past year or so,I have reversed directions. Now different parts have to be combed in different ways. The front can be coaxed into bending right while the back of my head just bristles at the touch of a comb. It stands erect and refuses to accept any change in direction. So I comb the back like I used to as a kid. The middle of my head wont bend either way so I just comb it towards the front and hope it will stay down (it rarely does). The all important 'vagidu' or line of parting is not a straight line but a meandering curve.Hair on either side of it always want to move to the other side.

I have discovered that applying water on the head is an admirable way of decreasing hair ressistance.My hair can then be shaped perfectly.This phenomenon though is temporary and as my hair becomes dry in an hour, my head resembles a battleground.

Oil by itself is not a shaping agent as I have found. You head can drip Parachute or Himalaya or Dabar Amla but in no way is the hair going to be subdued.

So what I usually do is wet my hair, add oil and then comb it. The theory is that the water can be used to shape the hair and the oil causes the hair to stick to its position.

Yesterday I purchased some Brylcream Extra Strong Hair gel and applied it vigorously this morning.The bottle claimed I could style my hair in any way I wanted it, be it a funky spiked look or a a casual tousled look. I chose the conventional parting of hair and what do you know, it works! My hair now feels like its been stuck into position with fevicol. Its quite plastic in places and I'm afraid that if I bend a single strand, it will snap like a twig.

I think the entire problem is because different parts of my head are accustomed to different inclinations. I was wondering if I could perhaps ask the barber to just cut straight instead of choosing a parting, my hair problem will be solved. Isint that what they do when they spike your hair? Should I spike my hair? Do let me know.

I walked home from office yesterday (ie) from Spencer Plaza to Adyar Grand sweets. Took me about an hour and a half. Why did I do it? Well you see I usually take an auto home from work every evening and it costs me Between 50 to 60 Rs ( I cant even get into the bus, its that crowded). Now thats about 300 a week and 1200 a month! So I thought I would walk a little further and perhaps get an auto at a cheaper rate. I walked and I walked and I walked and I thought to myself " perhaps I can walk the entire distance" and I did. Its not that tiring if you do it in the evening. I certainly wouldnt attempt it while going to office.

Perhaps I shall try it again today...

Well a weekend quite different from my usual weekends. I'm afraid I cant give you too many details. All I will say is that I went on a trip ;-). A very magical two days indeed.

Now that I'm back in Chennai, I ask myself "Did the weekend really happen? How did it get over so fast?" Everything seems so unreal.

Work at P continues to be what it was. I was tempted to tell my project manager that I'd quit by mid jan max but he was on leave.

I have a strong feeling my brain is wasting away. I honestly think the last time I used my head was for the CTS test.

Have to get ready for work now....goodbye until then. May the Pillayar of the Rockfort temple bless you :-).

Once again I am guilty of not tending to my blog. There have been quite a few things going on in my life but I just havent had the urge to chronicle them.Call it lethargy on my part. For those of you who are eager to know whats going on, here's a brief summary :

1) Company C said I would be called in Jan. When in Jan? That they didnt specify.

2) I told my Project Manager that I'd be leaving soon. So for now he's put me in a new project. There's no work for now. I'm jobless all day.

3) My cousin Prashant quit his job at the Taj Coromandel, Chennai. The job didnt suit him because he had a screaming banshee for a boss.

On a more positive note, I submitted my dentures article to Sulekha.com for the India Smiles Global Writers contest. Its an old one. In case you havent read it, do check it out at :

http://www.sulekha.com/weblogs/weblogdesc.asp?cid=21776

Do let me know what you think of it.

Also, you can read what the others have submitted at :

http://www.sulekha.com/penguin/readsubmit.asp

My friend Aparna is currently pursuing her MBA in a prestigious institution in Trichy. That basically sucks because BSNL's cellphone network coverage is terrible and I hardly get to have a decent conversation with her.

I pick up the phone and I dial her number. These are the responses I usually get.

1) beep beep beep beep beep beep beep (pause) different kind of beep beep beep
2) Dead silence

3) Loud engaged tone the milli second after I've dialed the number

4) ALL THE LINES IN THIS ROUTE ARE BUSY( and that lady's voice is just so damn rude!)

5) The subscriber you are calling is out of coverage area, please try after sometime.( If you wait patiently, the same message will be repeated in Tamil)

6) The subscriber you are calling has switched off. Please try after some time.

There are those rare days when I do manage to get through to her.....though trust BSNL to screw my happiness.

Myself : " Hey! I managed to get through! What are you upto? "

Aparna: " What? Cant hear.Hello?"

Myself :" Hey! I managed to get through! What are you upto? "

Aparna :" Hello? "

Myself :" Can you hear me?"

Aparna :" Now I hear you! What were you saying before? "

Myself : " I said I managed to get through! What are you upto? " "

Aparna : " Hello? "

Myself :" Grr. Hello??"

Aparna " Hellooo"

Myself : " Hullo Hullo"

Aparna : " Hallo Hallo Hallo"

Myself : " Can you hear me or not! "

Aparna : " Now I do! Tell me!"

Myself : " Well, bugging day at the office, nothing went well, need someone to crib to and extract sympathy from :-( "

Aparna : "Hallo?"

and she accuses me of losing my temper...

One of the solutions I received for the sock problem was "To change my socks everyday". I'm quite insulted to think that my readers wont credit me with the intelligence to do that without suggestion.Ofcourse I change em everyday! and when I run out of socks, I steal my cousin Prashant's socks...so thats never really been a problem...

Nowadays I usually spray deo on my feet and socks before I leave for work...also I'm considering washing my feet in office every couple of hours....

Nothing smells more hideous at the end of the day than my feet. I get back home from work, remove my shoes and peel of my socks...lo and behold! USA has another reason for passing sanctions against us...the potent power of my smelly feet.

The moment I enter the house, I run to the bathroom and wash my feet with dettol soap...but its of practically no use, the smell just lingers around the house. I wake up in the morning to the smell of yesterdays smelly feet.

I dont remember facing this problem in college..does it have something to do with the air conditioning in the office? Solutions are welcome.

I havent blogged in a while..guess I've just been too lazy too :P.

I attended another bloggers meet at Besant Nagar beach on Sunday, Nov 14'th. About 11 of us turned up...all male, so fellow blogger Karthik Kannan was highly dissapointed. I enjoyed this bloggers meet a lot more than the previous one. It was a lot more casual.

There's a lot of stuff I havent written about. I blew my first and second salaries on rimless glasses and a very exclusive gym membership respectively. My bank balance is looking distinctly starved now, cant wait for this months sal.

C wont call me until December, so I'm stuck in P till then.Oh well, another month of ctrl C, ctrl V...

One more thing...who are you KS?

I recieved some pretty flattering comments for my previous post :-). Thank you guys, but I'm warning you, my ego is close to reaching critical mass. Any more compliments and it just might explode!

At the moment I'm still waiting for my call letter, I just hope it comes by this week. I dont know what to do with myself in my current job....time just drags.

Today marks the completion of an entire year of blogging...and I must say I've had a lot to write about : I met someone special, I prepared haphazardly for the CAT, I completed my engineering degree, I searched desperately for a job, my father passed away, I received two good job offers....well quite a lot to blog about indeed.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what the purpose of my blog was. Initially I just wanted to write something funny everyday so that people could tell me how witty I was :P. However as I began to blog more and more often, things changed. I felt the urge to chronicle every single thing that happened in my life. Perhaps being a blogger, the assimilation of experiences whether mundane or important obliged me to write about them. Blogging is a conceivably a way to put my thoughts down on paper and then ask myself " Is this how I feel about this experience?" or "do these words really echo my thoughts?". Very often I have this nagging feeling that I've written down something totally irrelavant to how I feel.

Then once again there is the question of " How much of myself do I wish to reveal to the world?". A lot of what I've written is in fact extremely personal...but yet I know that I have not met a large percentage of the people who read my blog. It does feel odd at times when a total stranger comes and tells me he's quite familiar with all the intimate details of my life. Sometimes its gratifying, sometimes I actually resent it.

There are times I blog because I saw something really hilarious and I want to share the joke with everyone. Sometimes I blog for the purely selfish reason that I think I write well and I want everyone to tell me so :P.Sometimes I find that I can deal with emotional issues better when I write about them. Perhaps this blog will serve a diary and remind me 50 years from now what it felt like to be 20 years old.

I think the real reason I blog is because I think it helps me learn more about myself. Writing down every thought, every feeling, every experience tells me how I think, how I react to situations both good and bad. It certainly is an educational experience, I do recommend it :-).

So exactly one year back I wrote the " Personal Computer Systems " exam...little did I know that life would change so much in 12 months....

All my relatives have finally left. Weekends are just so weird without my dad . I'm getting a little scared for my mother now. What will she do for the rest of he life? Will things ever come back to normal?

Blessed 3 day weekend, now I get to recover from all the hectic work which I'm not doing at the office. Much to the delight of all my readers, I have decided to update my blog.

Last week, my family was invited to dinner at my cousins place. My cousin is a model, and a fairly well known one. That makes her radically different from the engineers, managers and scientists who populate my family(God forbid, I'm an electrical engineer by qualification and a software engineer by profession...what went wrong?? I was supposed to become a truck driver and run over people with smaller vehicles...).

Thus while the rest of the young women in the family are either quietly studying or married, my cousin walks the ramp, her pictures are splashed across magazines and giant billboards across the city show her looking meditatively into the distance while wearing lots of jewellery.

Now comes the uncomfortable part.Magazines these days wont take your picture if you are swathed in cloth. Her profession requires her to show some skin in order to promote herself. Hence magazines often carry pictures of her in compromising attire. This tends to rub against the finer sensibilities of the senior members of the family.

Her pictures are decried by the senior citizens, her lifestyle criticized behind her back when they meet at family gatherings. "Cant believe she's doing this!" or " What is the youth coming to! " or " Kali Yuga started the moment women began revealing themselves in public! " are statements vehemently and often made.

My cousin however seems oblivious to the criticism generously heaped upon her choice of profession. She leads her life the way she wants to and makes a lot of money in the process. She makes no attempt to keep a low profile when aged relatives visit. She wears and does she wants. Not for her the salwar kameez and the docile manner, she is the master of her choices.

Thus Prashant and I found ourselves in a precarious position when we visited. She was wearing something which complimented her very fine figure and we found it rather difficult to take our eyes off her. With our mothers and grandmothers watching our every move, we had to tread a fine line. How to take in as much of her as we could while appearing entirely disinterested? It took a lot of effort on our parts to look at her and not let our eyes widen , jaws drop, drool onto the carpet and pretend this was just an ordinary family get together.

As time progressed I realised that the two of us were not behaving normally. Usually we would slouch, talk as loudly as we could, laugh noisily, mix hindi, english and tamil slang to suit our conversation and basically behave as boors. In front of my cousin, we sat with our backs straight, spoke the queens english and tried to appear as refined as possible. Nonchalant charm was frequently attempted. Each word was articulated and pronounced perfectly. What made us behave so peculiarly? Why couldnt we just be ourselves?

My cousin then casually dropped a magazine into my lap and said " Dinesh, here are the pics from my latest photo shoot. What do you think of them?". In front of me were pictures of cousin scantily clad in diaphanous material and on either side sat a mother and a grandmother. Difficult indeed. I smiled guiltily at my mother and tried to casually flip through the pages, repressing the urge to tear the pages and stuff them into my pocket for later perusal. My mother and grandmother stared stonily at the pictures and then glared at me. What could I do?

Inspite of the flak that she draws from the more conservative memebers of the family, there's no denying that everyone is fascinated by the life she leads. Her life has that glamour element which is missing from our own lives. Nobody wants to take a picture of me in my underwear, I'm only a software engineer. TV channels dont want to know what I think of the most happening places in the city. Magazines dont want me to give relationship advice and I am certainly not consulted on the latest fashion accessories.

Thus we pretend to dislike her lifestyle but secretly wish we could have a little bit of glamour in our own lives. When we are with her, we pretend to be fully acquainted with aspects out of our reach. Discos, pubs, movie stars..oh been there, done that..nothing special there.

Then we come back home and say " That girl is going the wrong way! " but I dont think we mean it. Perhaps we say it out of compulsion, fearing that the other person might think we actually approve of my cousin.

I wonder how things will be 10 years from now when perhaps my cousin would be a little too old to model. What then? Will the galmour and the attention go away? or will she continue to be the darling of the local press? How will our impression of her change then? Only time will tell.

I'm feeling slightly directionless at the moment. I dont know when C will give me the joining date and there's no real work for me as yet at P. I seem to have a lot of free time on my hands. I really dont know what to do with myself.

The bodybuilder said that he'd written a poem on me and how the 4 of us had bonded so well in the last 2 weeks. However he'd forgotten to bring it and he didnt remember the lines.Nevertheless, he assured me it was a fantastic poem. I believed him.

My project mates are pretty eccentric but they are really nice guys at heart. I'm going to miss them.

My apologies for this much delayed update. I have discovered working for a living is bloody tiring, even if it only means staring at a computer for 10 hours at a stretch. When I get back home,I only want to crash into bed.

I suppose I havent gotten used to the idea of working for long hours, I keep wanting to go home when I'm at work :P.

My project members are just as wierd as the ones I had when I was in college. One is a perennial optimist, its actually quite annoying . The whole positive outlook seems quite put on at times.

The other is a professional bodybuilder, he's bloody huge!At 104 kilos he's one massive hulk! He's pretty good natured though and we have plenty of fun pulling his leg.(perhaps I should say quadriceps)

The 3'rd is best described as a hysterical chicken when upset. I cant think of a more fitting term (term given by the bodybuilder).

Inspite of each ones eccentricities (God knows what they think of me), we have a LOT of fun.We do a teeny weeny bit of learning and a lot of squabbling :P.

Now comes the surprise, I got into C!!!!!! I attended the interview on the 5'th. I had to take leave from work. I said something about a function at home (paid leave, so technically P paid me to go to C).

The C building was well...perhaps the most modern and intimidating construction I have ever come across in my life. It was HUGE! I felt so insignificant there. Just the lobby was like a football field. This coupled with superb interior designing and fabulous lighting..well who
wouldnt want to show everyone where he worked?

My interview was good, I knew I'd get through. I suppose that extra bit of confidence I was able to project was because I already had a job in hand. I knew I'd made a good impression on the interviewer 5 minutes into the interview. It was a pretty long interview, slightly more than an hour. I came out quite pleased with myself. I got the confirmation email on friday.

I'm happy because everything went according to reason. I did the interview well and got the job. Not so for my previous interviews. For Barry, I did it pretty well but didnt get through. For P I thought I had done horribly but they gave me the job! I didnt even feel I deserved the job in P. If I was the interviewer, I wouldnt have hired myself.

So I'm pretty pleased with myself now, just wish my father was here. He would have been bloody happy.

Now comes the tricky part, leaving P. The damn bond is going to cause some problems! Have to tread carefully.

Here's a rather funny forward that's been going around for a while. Read it, it makes sense


US foreign policy for dummies . . .Q: Daddy, why did we have to attack Iraq?A: Because they had weapons of mass destruction, honey.Q: But the inspectors didn't find any weapons of mass destruction. A:That's because the Iraqis were hiding them.Q: And that's why we invaded Iraq?A: Yep. Invasions always work better than inspections.Q: But after we invaded them, we STILL didn't find any weapons of massdestruction, did we?A: That's because the weapons are so well hidden. Don't worry, we'llfind something, probably right before the 2004 election.Q: Why did Iraq want all those weapons of mass destruction?A: To use them in a war, silly.Q: I'm confused. If they had all those weapons that they planned to usein a war, then why didn't they use any of those weapons when we went towar with them?A: Well, obviously they didn't want anyone to know they had thoseweapons, so they chose to die by the thousands rather than defendthemselves and let others know.Q: That doesn't make sense Daddy. Why would they choose to die if theyhad all those big weapons to fight us back with?A: It's a different culture. It's not supposed to make sense.Q: I don't know about you, but I don't think they had any of thoseweapons our government said they did.A: Well, you know, it doesn't matter whether or not they had thoseweapons. We had another good reason to invade them anyway.Q: And what was that?A: Even if Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Husseinwas a cruel dictator, which is another good reason to invade anothercountry.Q: Why? What does a cruel dictator do that makes it OK to invade hiscountry?A: Well, for one thing, he tortured his own people.Q: Kind of like what they do in China?A: Don't go comparing China to Iraq. China is a good economiccompetitor, where millions of people work for slave wages in sweatshopsto make U.S. corporations richer.Q: So if a country lets its people be exploited for American corporategain, it's a good country, .even if that country tortures people?A: Right.Q: Why were people in Iraq being tortured?A: For political crimes, mostly, like criticizing the government. Peoplewho criticized the government in Iraq were sent to prison and tortured.Q: Isn't that exactly what happens in China?A: I told you, China is different.Q: What's the difference between China and Iraq?A: Well, for one thing, Iraq was ruled by the Ba'ath party, while Chinais Communist.Q: Didn't you once tell me Communists were bad?A: No, just Cuban Communists are bad.Q: How are the Cuban Communists bad?A: Well, for one thing, people who criticize the government in Cuba aresent to prison and tortured.Q: Like in Iraq?A: Exactly.Q: And like in China, too?A: I told you, China's a good economic competitor. Cuba, on the otherhand, is not.Q: How come Cuba isn't a good economic competitor?A: Well, you see, back in the early 1960s, our government passed somelaws that made it illegal for Americans to trade or do any business withCuba until they stopped being Communists and started being capitalistslike us.Q: But if we got rid of those laws, opened up trade with Cuba, andstarted doing business with them, wouldn't that help the Cubans becomecapitalists?A: Don't be a smart-ass.Q: I didn't think I was being one.A: Well, anyway, they also don't have freedom of religion in Cuba. Q:Kind of like China and the @!#$ movement?A: I told you, stop saying bad things about China. Anyway, SaddamHussein came to power through a military coup, so he's not really alegitimate leader anyway.Q: What's a military coup?A: That's when a military general takes over the government of a countryby force, instead of holding free elections like we do in the UnitedStates.Q: Didn't the ruler of Pakistan come to power by a military coup?A: You mean General Pervez Musharraf? Uh, yeah, he did, but Pakistan isour friend.Q: Why is Pakistan our friend if their leader is illegitimate?A: I never said Pervez Musharraf was illegitimate.Q: Didn't you just say a military general who comes to power by forciblyoverthrowing the legitimate government of a nation is an illegitimateleader?A: Only Saddam Hussein. Pervez Musharraf is our friend, because hehelped us invade Afghanistan.Q: Why did we invade Afghanistan?A: Because of what they did to us on September 11th.Q: What did Afghanistan do to us on September 11th?A: Well, on September 11th, nineteen men, fifteen of them SaudiArabians, hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into buildings,killing over 3,000 Americans.Q: So how did Afghanistan figure into all that?A: Afghanistan was where those bad men trained, under the oppressiverule of the Taliban.Q: Aren't the Taliban those bad radical Islamics who chopped offpeople's heads and hands?A: Yes, that's exactly who they were. Not only did they chop offpeople's heads and hands, but they oppressed women, too.Q: Didn't the Bush administration give the Taliban 43 million dollarsback in May of 2001?A: Yes, but that money was a reward because they did such a good jobfighting drugs.Q: Fighting drugs?A: Yes, the Taliban were very helpful in stopping people from growingopium poppies.Q: How did they do such a good job?A: Simple. If people were caught growing opium poppies, the Talibanwould have their hands and heads cut off.Q: So, when the Taliban cut off people's heads and hands for growingflowers, that was OK, but not if they cut people's heads and hands offfor other reasons?A: Yes. It's OK with us if radical Islamic fundamentalists cut offpeople's hands for growing flowers, but it's cruel if they cut offpeople's hands for stealing bread.Q: Don't they also cut off people's hands and heads in Saudi Arabia? A:That's different. Afghanistan was ruled by a tyrannical patriarchy thatoppressed women and forced them to wear burqas whenever they were inpublic, with death by stoning as the penalty for women who did not,comply.Q: Don't Saudi women have to wear burqas in public, too?A: No, Saudi women merely wear a traditional Islamic body covering. Q:What's the difference?A: The traditional Islamic covering worn by Saudi women is a modest yetfashionable garment that covers all of a woman's body except for hereyes and fingers. The burqa, on the other hand, is an evil tool ofpatriarchal oppression that covers all of a woman's body except for hereyes and fingers.Q: It sounds like the same thing with a different name.A: Now, don't go comparing Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis areour friends.Q: But I thought you said 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th werefrom Saudi Arabia.A: Yes, but they trained in Afghanistan.Q: Who trained them?A: A very bad man named Osama bin Laden.Q: Was he from Afghanistan?A: Uh, no, he was from Saudi Arabia too. But he was a bad man, a verybad man.Q: I seem to recall he was our friend once.A: Only when we helped him and the mujahadeen repel the Soviet invasionof Afghanistan back in the 1980s.Q: Who are the Soviets? Was that the Evil Communist Empire Ronald Reagantalked about?A: There are no more Soviets. The Soviet Union broke up in 1990 orthereabouts, and now they have elections and capitalism like us. We callthem Russians now.Q: So the Soviets, I mean, the Russians, are now our friends?A: Well, not really. You see, they were our friends for many years afterthey stopped being Soviets, but then they decided not to support ourinvasion of Iraq, so we're mad at them now.We're also mad at the French and the Germans because they didn't help usinvade Iraq either.Q: So the French and Germans are evil, too?A: Not exactly evil, but just bad enough that we had to rename Frenchfries and French toast to Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast.Q: Do we always rename foods whenever another country doesn't do what wewant them to do?A: No, we just do that to our friends. Our enemies, we invade.Q: But wasn't Iraq one of our friends back in the 1980s?A: Well, yeah. For a while.Q: Was Saddam Hussein ruler of Iraq back then?A: Yes, but at the time he was fighting against Iran, which made him ourfriend, temporarily.Q: Why did that make him our friend?A: Because at that time, Iran was our enemy.Q: Isn't that when he gassed the Kurds?A: Yeah, but since he was fighting against Iran at the time, we lookedthe other way, to show him we were his friend.Q: So anyone who fights against one of our enemies automatically becomesour friend?A: Most of the time, yes.Q: And anyone who fights against one of our friends is automatically anenemy?A: Sometimes that's true, too. However, if American corporations canprofit by selling weapons to both sides at the same time, all thebetter.Q: Why?A: Because war is good for the economy, which means war is good forAmerica. Also, since God is on America's side, anyone who opposes war isa godless run-American Communist. Do you understand now why we attackedIraq?Q: I think so. We attacked them because God wanted us to, right?A: Yes.Q: But how did we know God wanted us to attack Iraq?A: Well, you see, God personally speaks to George W.Bush and tells himwhat to do.Q: So basically, what you're saying is that we attacked Iraq becauseGeorge W. Bush hears voices in his head?A. Yes! You finally understand how the world works. Now close your eyes,make yourself comfortable, and go to sleep. Good night.Good night, Daddy.

I no longer have a graceful figure :-( . Heads shall not turn, oomphs and aaahs have died away, I'm longer a babe magnet :P......so basically I have a tummy.

I havent been to the gym in 2 months for reasons known to all.

I tried some cardio yesterday morning. Lots of cycling, lots of running. All gone to pot because I stuffed myself at dinner when a friend leaving for the UK decided to treat us.

Well, back to the gym tommorow. Have to go from 1 sack to 6 pack :P

Hey guys, when you leave comments, please leave a name, an email id or a link to your site/blog. It would help me get back to you. If it stays as Anonymous, I have no idea who you are.

Went back to work after 2 weeks leave, such a huge relief. I havent missed much in these two weeks, the real work starts on the 20th I guess, when I'm put into my
project.

I'm going to be working on Siebel which I'm told has an excellent market. So basically having worked with Siebel will really help my career as Siebel professionals
will be in great demand.( C or P? I'm stuck again)

Not done anything productive at work as yet. In fact all we've done till now is celebrate birthdays with great pomp and style :P. The HR people take pains to assure
us that all fun ceases the moment you are put into the project, so have fun when you can :-D.

My mother, sis and a large number of my relatives visited Pondicherry University yesterday to institute an award for physics students in my fathers name. They also
went around the campus and spent some time in my dad's office.

I feel really really bad that I never got to know that side of my father's life. I never really knew what his working life was like. Who his colleagues were, what kind of a
teacher he was, the life he lead there.....I dont have a clue. 17 years he stayed in Pondicherry coming home only on weekends. I just got so used to it. I never really
got to know my father. I was really looking forward to the time when I would start working, become independent and self reliant. Thats the time when I thought that
he and I would get along a lot better. My dad and I would keep arguing over career decisions. He believed strongly in Physics and Engineering, no other career
option met his approval. I never really thought I was good at both so there were a lot of disagreements. I seriously thought me getting a job would end all those mini
fights. Now look at whats happened. I have a job but my father never got to know.

My father taught quantum mechanics in Pondicherry, a subject no one else could. He would sometimes try to explain it to me but I never really got the hang of it. He
would sit in his room and if I happened to be passing by, he'd call me, ask me to sit down and start talking about physics. Most of the time I would never be able to
follow what he was saying and I'd get bored quickly. Pretty soon, I began avoiding going into the room because I was afraid he would lecture me ( On physics or
education. We never really talked about anything else ). Actually I developed a mild fear when I was a kid :P. When I was about 4 or 5 years old, my father and I
were alone at home one afternoon. In an attempt to build me intellect, my father tried to teach me 2 digit multiplication. No matter how hard I tried, I never did get the
idea behind that zero we put while multiplying by the ten's digit. My father made me work out problem after problem but I never got it. Ever since then I began to fear
being left alone with him :P. I spent my entire life avoiding him whenever possible because he would ask me uncomfortable questions about what I wished to do with
my life. I really thought that stupid behaviour of mine would cease once I got a job :-(
I suppose I should start looking forward now. I'm glad that I'm going to be able to support myself but I really miss the security of having my father around.

Life changes far too suddenly for comfort.

For the past 16 years, certain aspects of my life had remained constant. My mother worked as a teacher in my school and my dad was a physics professor in Pondicherry University. He'd come home on friday nights between 8:30 and 9:00 PM , spend the weekend with us and then leave on monday morning. So for all these years, I've been used to seeing my dad only on the weekends. In fact, when he did spend his vacations at home, it felt wierd to me because I was so used to seeing him only for short periods of time.

Its hard to believe my father wont be ringing the doorbell on friday nights with his traditional "Ta da tut tut, tut tut!" knock. Its not sunk into any of us yet. We keep thinking he's in Pondicherry and that he'll be back this weekend. I keep telling myself it wont happen anymore but its not sinking in at all.

Right now the house is full of relatives, so there are always people to talk to and things arent that bad. But what happens when everyone leaves? They all have their own busy lives to attend to. The house will fall silent soon and how will my mother and grandmother cope? I have my own work to attend to, my sister has her Phd to attend to. My mom will go back to school but how will she spend her weekends and vacations? I dont have any answers and its scary. How will my grandmother cope?She's a strong lady though and she lost her husband around the same time my mother lost my father. Maybe she can help my mom but what will she do alone all day?

I keep myself calm during the day knowing I cant afford to get upset in front of my mom, but my mind wont keep quiet at night. I dont really understand death.

I know that eventually my mother and my grandmother will learn to cope. Life will go back to normal....but its an uneasy few months ahead.

My cousin Prashant who works in the Taj is having a real tough time with his job.His working hours are crazy and he's afraid he's going to be fired. In fact his almost sure he's going to be asked to leave tommorow. I didnt know what to tell him. I just listened and tried to offer a few suggestions but it looks bleak. God its a bad time!

Just cant wait to go back to work and get away from it all.

My father passed away on the 2'nd at 9:30 PM. We were all with him when it happened. I hope he is at peace.

Its the end of a very brutal 42 days. Atleast its over now.

Life is going to change dramatically after this. Suddenly I have a lot of responsibility. Its the start of a very new, very different life. I suppose this is the time I become an adult.

I would like to thank all my readers for their support. Thank you guys for all the support rendered.

I dont know what else to say.

Things are looking very bleak. Even the neuros who were so positive till now have said there's no hope. My father has suffered enough. Let him go in peace.